Actually, the story is somewhat longer and started with Star Division, a Hamburg (Germany) based company, who offered a wordprocessor in the 1980ies for 150 DM in Germany, when the comparable Microsoft Word was about 800 DM or more. StarWriter was build into a whole office suite until 1995, when it got renamed in StarOffice. In 1999, Sun Microsystems bought Star Division, and in 2002 opened the code and created OpenOffice. Completed with some non-open licensed parts (like an RDBMS; if I remember correctly, StarOffice was using ADABAS from Software AG, later the derivate SAP DB), OpenOffice was sold as StarOffice by Sun Microsoft until 2010.
"In return, Kansas City got a fiber network it couldn’t possibly afford to build on its own — or maintain. Municipalities like Provo, Utah that thought they could afford to build their own public fiber network found they couldn’t afford to run it. That’s why Provo, Utah sold their fiber network to Google for just $1."
I wonder why Provo UT couldn't afford to build their own public fiber network. The town of Innsbruck (Austria), which has about the same number of inhabitants (121,000 vs. 117,000) and covers the same area (~40 mi), could build it and maintain it, and now you can get 10 mbit/sec fiber to the home for €20 (currently about $26.50) unlimited bandwith.
This reminds me of a phone call an Austrian comedian made to the U.S. embassy when the Snowden papers started to appear. He told them that the pictures he took from the brother's wedding two years ago got lost when the hard drive died, and he asked if the NSA can just provide him with their backup.
Every money is fiat money. Even a Gold standard. The value of Gold exists only in the mutual agreement that Gold should be valuable, because it looks nice if used for decoration. Compare the (market perceived) value of Gold with that of Platinum -- both are metals, both are of comparable availability in the Earth's crust, and both are used for the same applications (mainly jewelry, some electronics and a little bit as chemical catalyst), but their values are highly volatile against each other and against every main currency, with the volatility much higher than that of main currencies compared to each other.
One could argue further that money itself has to be fiat money to actually work as money (e.g. as a medium to compare prices).
Donald Knuth once mentioned that there are maybe 500 really fundamental algorithms out there (and he mentioned the Bresenham algorithm as one example of a non-trivial one), and everything else is just derivative and nothing new. So this means that there should about 500 softwarepatents at a maximum (and most of them expired), and everything else is just invalid.
TFA's claim is pretty much that Syd Field's work differs in some way from the work of Blake Snyder.
Field and McKee offered the screenwriter’s equivalent of cooking tips from your grandmother—general tips and tricks to guide your process. Snyder, on the other hand, offers a detailed recipe with step-by-step instructions.
So either you didn't read TFA, or you wanted to deliberately miss its message to post your own rant.
It's not Modern Society counteracting evolution. There is no Darwin Price for individuals who are nearly perfect. Protecting and helping the weak and the stupid does nothing to counteract any evolution. There is only one price available in evolution, and that's survival. If Modern Society increases your chances of survival, you are evolutionary better fitted than those nearly-perfect, intelligent people who died in an outbreak of a disease.
The normal distribution is just a mathematically very easy handable distribution, thus about everyone tries to morph and recalculate scales until the data set somehow follows a normal distribution. It does in no way mean that the observed phenomenon follows a normal distribution. IQ for instance seems to have had two local maxima, one slightly below the median and one around 125, but recalculating the scores of the IQ questions levelled those two maxima.
Or to make it more explicit: IQ is especially scaled and scored to ensure the distribution of the scores is gaussian.
I remember about 30 years ago, when the local university's mathematical department wanted to interest us into studying mathematics, they had climate science and climate modelling as one of the big themes for applied mathematics. So yes, I guess, that 35 years ago, climate scientist was already a job.
(And where do you think comes the weather report from, if not from climate scientists collecting weather data, calculating moving averages, creating models of the atmosphere and predicting the future?)
Sorry, it might be look silly to you, but in Germany, it is actually illegal to collect data about persons in a database, if the persons can be identified by the data in the database, without prior consent by the persons in question. As I never agreed to the NSA to collect data about me, any database the NSA has that contains data which is sufficient to identify me, is illegal. That's German law, and each person within the NSA or one of its service provider that has helped to create the databases containing information about is a criminal according to German law.
Where do you get the idea that "spying" is illegal?
Because for instance in Germany, there is Paragraph 99 StGB:
Paragraph 99
Geheimdienstliche Agententätigkeit
(1) Wer
für den Geheimdienst einer fremden Macht eine geheimdienstliche Tätigkeit gegen die Bundesrepublik Deutschland ausübt, die auf die Mitteilung oder Lieferung von Tatsachen, Gegenständen oder Erkenntnissen gerichtet ist, oder
gegenüber dem Geheimdienst einer fremden Macht oder einem seiner Mittelsmänner sich zu einer solchen Tätigkeit bereit erklärt,
wird mit Freiheitsstrafe bis zu fünf Jahren oder mit Geldstrafe bestraft, wenn die Tat nicht in Paragraph 94 oder Paragraph 96 Abs. 1, in Paragraph 97a oder in Paragraph 97b in Verbindung mit Paragraph 94 oder Paragraph 96 Abs. 1 mit Strafe bedroht ist.
(2) In besonders schweren Fällen ist die Strafe Freiheitsstrafe von einem Jahr bis zu zehn Jahren. Ein besonders schwerer Fall liegt in der Regel vor, wenn der Täter Tatsachen, Gegenstände oder Erkenntnisse, die von einer amtlichen Stelle oder auf deren Veranlassung geheimgehalten werden, mitteilt oder liefert und wenn er
eine verantwortliche Stellung mißbraucht, die ihn zur Wahrung solcher Geheimnisse besonders verpflichtet, oder
durch die Tat die Gefahr eines schweren Nachteils für die Bundesrepublik Deutschland herbeiführt.
(3) Paragraph 98 Abs. 2 gilt entsprechend.
Translation:
Intelligence agents activity
(1) Who
exercises an intelligence gathering operation against the Federal Republic of Germany for the secret service of a foreign power directed to the communication or delivery of facts, objects or knowledge, or
agrees to such activity with the intelligence of a foreign power or its intermediaries, shall be punished with imprisonment up to five years
or a fine, if the act is not described in paragraph 94 or paragraph 96, Section 1, Paragraph 97a or in paragraph 97b in conjunction with Section 94 or Section 96, paragraph 1.
(2) In especially serious cases the punishment shall be imprisonment from one year to ten years. A particularly serious case is usually when the offender delivers facts, objects or knowledge which are kept secret by an official agency or at the instigation of, or notifies and delivers them while
abusing a position of responsibility, particularly obliged him to maintain such secrets, or
the act brings about the risk of serious detriment to the Federal Republic of Germany.
The U.S. and the Brits were violating the 11th commandment: "Don't get caught!" So far, it's only an unproven allegation that for instance the Germans are spying on the U.S.. The U.S., by urgently trying to get hold of Edward Snowden, were publically admitting to violate the law in most other countries ("most other", because I can't rule out that there is a country that officially allows spying on its own citizens by foreign powers).
On the other hand, the name France comes from the german tribe of the Frankonians... so the Normans and the French are related, the Normans just being 500 years late.
There are older countries which still exist under their original name in Europe. San Marino (1712 years old, republic since 301 AD) comes to mind. And Spain got its name 3000 years ago, when the Phoenicians called the country "Ishapan"...)
The beginning of the Iran is here defined as the time when the empire of the Timurids (the descendents of Timur Lenk/Tamerlan) dissolved. Since then, there is indeed some continuity of a self governed Iran. The name "Iran" itself is much older, it means "(country of the) Aryans". (If you tell a member of the Aryan Nation, that there indeed is an Aryan Nation, and it's called Iran...)
The Roman Empire indeed existed until 1453. What went bust in 476 AD was the Western part of the Roman Empire. But the Byzantinians called themselves "Romanoi" (Romans) for a reason, and they indeed had an unbroken legal and state line from the Roman Empire of the likes of Caesar and Augustus.
Sorry, correction of the correction. In 146 BC, Macedonia was conquered by the Roman Empire. So I was not talking about the macedonian conquest of the Greek municipalities, which happened about 170 years earlier.
Both Italy and Germany didn't form from randomly collected smaller states. All states that joined Germany in 1871 were either member states of the Holy Roman Empire until 1806 or at least had predecessors that were. Similarly with Italy. All states that joined Italy in 1861 were on the territory of the Kingdom of Italy as founded by Odoacer in 476 AD.
It is true, because the Poland of the Rzeczpospolita until 1795 was a completely different state than the Poland today - even on partly different territory. There is for instance no continious tradition of laws and political institutions. Yes, the parliament of the Rzeczpospolita was called Sejm like the one today, but there is no continious political tradition of political parties between the old Sejm and the new one. There are for instance no remainings of the old Union of Lublin and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth.
Ah yes, Italy. Italy was not a sovereign state until the unification of the Dukedom of Milan with the Kingdom of Naples, Sicilia and large parts of the Holy See, which happened in 1861.
The actual Poland is really 95 years old, after the Polish Rzeczpospolita was dissolved in 1791 and the parts were distributed between Prussia, Russia and Austria. They only rejoined in 1918. Same with Germany. The first ever state which had "Germany" (or Deutschland) in its name was founded in 1949. There was always some idea about a unified Germany, but never an actual state, until 1871 the German Reich was founded (which still wasn't officially called Germany). Greece was not a sovereign state since the conquest of Macedonia in 146 BC until it broke away from the Osman Empire in 1830.
The only complaint one could have was that the term "sovereignity" is used pretty loosely.
Most people support what he was doing. In fact at least 6.8 billion people (e.g. all people outside the U.S.) support him. Only a small but vocal minority (the one caught in the cookie jar) complains.
Slashdot Mirror
Args. Freudian Flip.
Sorry, my bad. I just checked their website again, and it's 30 mbit/sec for €19.90, or 100 mbit/sec for €49,90.
Actually, the story is somewhat longer and started with Star Division, a Hamburg (Germany) based company, who offered a wordprocessor in the 1980ies for 150 DM in Germany, when the comparable Microsoft Word was about 800 DM or more. StarWriter was build into a whole office suite until 1995, when it got renamed in StarOffice. In 1999, Sun Microsystems bought Star Division, and in 2002 opened the code and created OpenOffice. Completed with some non-open licensed parts (like an RDBMS; if I remember correctly, StarOffice was using ADABAS from Software AG, later the derivate SAP DB), OpenOffice was sold as StarOffice by Sun Microsoft until 2010.
"In return, Kansas City got a fiber network it couldn’t possibly afford to build on its own — or maintain. Municipalities like Provo, Utah that thought they could afford to build their own public fiber network found they couldn’t afford to run it. That’s why Provo, Utah sold their fiber network to Google for just $1."
I wonder why Provo UT couldn't afford to build their own public fiber network. The town of Innsbruck (Austria), which has about the same number of inhabitants (121,000 vs. 117,000) and covers the same area (~40 mi), could build it and maintain it, and now you can get 10 mbit/sec fiber to the home for €20 (currently about $26.50) unlimited bandwith.
This reminds me of a phone call an Austrian comedian made to the U.S. embassy when the Snowden papers started to appear. He told them that the pictures he took from the brother's wedding two years ago got lost when the hard drive died, and he asked if the NSA can just provide him with their backup.
One could argue further that money itself has to be fiat money to actually work as money (e.g. as a medium to compare prices).
Donald Knuth once mentioned that there are maybe 500 really fundamental algorithms out there (and he mentioned the Bresenham algorithm as one example of a non-trivial one), and everything else is just derivative and nothing new. So this means that there should about 500 softwarepatents at a maximum (and most of them expired), and everything else is just invalid.
Field and McKee offered the screenwriter’s equivalent of cooking tips from your grandmother—general tips and tricks to guide your process. Snyder, on the other hand, offers a detailed recipe with step-by-step instructions.
So either you didn't read TFA, or you wanted to deliberately miss its message to post your own rant.
It's not Modern Society counteracting evolution. There is no Darwin Price for individuals who are nearly perfect. Protecting and helping the weak and the stupid does nothing to counteract any evolution. There is only one price available in evolution, and that's survival. If Modern Society increases your chances of survival, you are evolutionary better fitted than those nearly-perfect, intelligent people who died in an outbreak of a disease.
Or to make it more explicit: IQ is especially scaled and scored to ensure the distribution of the scores is gaussian.
(And where do you think comes the weather report from, if not from climate scientists collecting weather data, calculating moving averages, creating models of the atmosphere and predicting the future?)
Because Newsweek and Time are wellknown peer reviewed scientific journals?
Sorry, it might be look silly to you, but in Germany, it is actually illegal to collect data about persons in a database, if the persons can be identified by the data in the database, without prior consent by the persons in question. As I never agreed to the NSA to collect data about me, any database the NSA has that contains data which is sufficient to identify me, is illegal. That's German law, and each person within the NSA or one of its service provider that has helped to create the databases containing information about is a criminal according to German law.
Where do you get the idea that "spying" is illegal?
Because for instance in Germany, there is Paragraph 99 StGB:
Paragraph 99
Geheimdienstliche Agententätigkeit
(1) Wer
(2) In besonders schweren Fällen ist die Strafe Freiheitsstrafe von einem Jahr bis zu zehn Jahren. Ein besonders schwerer Fall liegt in der Regel vor, wenn der Täter Tatsachen, Gegenstände oder Erkenntnisse, die von einer amtlichen Stelle oder auf deren Veranlassung geheimgehalten werden, mitteilt oder liefert und wenn er
(3) Paragraph 98 Abs. 2 gilt entsprechend.
Translation:
Intelligence agents activity
(1) Who
or a fine, if the act is not described in paragraph 94 or paragraph 96, Section 1, Paragraph 97a or in paragraph 97b in conjunction with Section 94 or Section 96, paragraph 1.
(2) In especially serious cases the punishment shall be imprisonment from one year to ten years. A particularly serious case is usually when the offender delivers facts, objects or knowledge which are kept secret by an official agency or at the instigation of, or notifies and delivers them while
(3) Section 98 para 2 shall apply accordingly.
The U.S. and the Brits were violating the 11th commandment: "Don't get caught!" So far, it's only an unproven allegation that for instance the Germans are spying on the U.S.. The U.S., by urgently trying to get hold of Edward Snowden, were publically admitting to violate the law in most other countries ("most other", because I can't rule out that there is a country that officially allows spying on its own citizens by foreign powers).
On the other hand, the name France comes from the german tribe of the Frankonians... so the Normans and the French are related, the Normans just being 500 years late.
There are older countries which still exist under their original name in Europe. San Marino (1712 years old, republic since 301 AD) comes to mind. And Spain got its name 3000 years ago, when the Phoenicians called the country "Ishapan"...)
The beginning of the Iran is here defined as the time when the empire of the Timurids (the descendents of Timur Lenk/Tamerlan) dissolved. Since then, there is indeed some continuity of a self governed Iran. The name "Iran" itself is much older, it means "(country of the) Aryans". (If you tell a member of the Aryan Nation, that there indeed is an Aryan Nation, and it's called Iran...)
The Roman Empire indeed existed until 1453. What went bust in 476 AD was the Western part of the Roman Empire. But the Byzantinians called themselves "Romanoi" (Romans) for a reason, and they indeed had an unbroken legal and state line from the Roman Empire of the likes of Caesar and Augustus.
Sorry, correction of the correction. In 146 BC, Macedonia was conquered by the Roman Empire. So I was not talking about the macedonian conquest of the Greek municipalities, which happened about 170 years earlier.
Both Italy and Germany didn't form from randomly collected smaller states. All states that joined Germany in 1871 were either member states of the Holy Roman Empire until 1806 or at least had predecessors that were. Similarly with Italy. All states that joined Italy in 1861 were on the territory of the Kingdom of Italy as founded by Odoacer in 476 AD.
It is true, because the Poland of the Rzeczpospolita until 1795 was a completely different state than the Poland today - even on partly different territory. There is for instance no continious tradition of laws and political institutions. Yes, the parliament of the Rzeczpospolita was called Sejm like the one today, but there is no continious political tradition of political parties between the old Sejm and the new one. There are for instance no remainings of the old Union of Lublin and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth.
Ah yes, Italy. Italy was not a sovereign state until the unification of the Dukedom of Milan with the Kingdom of Naples, Sicilia and large parts of the Holy See, which happened in 1861.
The actual Poland is really 95 years old, after the Polish Rzeczpospolita was dissolved in 1791 and the parts were distributed between Prussia, Russia and Austria. They only rejoined in 1918. Same with Germany. The first ever state which had "Germany" (or Deutschland) in its name was founded in 1949. There was always some idea about a unified Germany, but never an actual state, until 1871 the German Reich was founded (which still wasn't officially called Germany). Greece was not a sovereign state since the conquest of Macedonia in 146 BC until it broke away from the Osman Empire in 1830. The only complaint one could have was that the term "sovereignity" is used pretty loosely.
Most people support what he was doing. In fact at least 6.8 billion people (e.g. all people outside the U.S.) support him. Only a small but vocal minority (the one caught in the cookie jar) complains.