As long as you're talking about your own money, when I don't have a problem with it. It a problem when hoi polloi dictate how *other* people's money gets spent.
I suppose one can argue about how much of "his" money *is* other
people's money. Certainly some of it is mine, in the form of the
"Windows tax" I have paid on multiple machines over the years in order to
get the hardware I wanted, only to scrap the unused Microsoft OS and install
Linux. I consider that still to be my money that happens to be in
his possession, since I've received no
benefit in return. Of course there's not much I can do about it.
This article's translation seemed relatively good compared
to what I've seen, and I was starting to think they've finally
been able to improve the translation process by at least ensuring
complete sentences. Then I clicked on the linked story
about the
Black hole against collider:
Eight babies mastered statistics on the neutron estrelles found
mountains, Russian scientists fired newspaper for scientists, black
holes and opened a few of its secrets, and probably pozhalev that, once
again gathered to destroy the Earth.. The first four news - the truth,
whether fifth - the court will decide.
Now I'm wondering whether the original article's translation was just a fluke
of good luck, or if actually
the errors are
coincidentally all adding in the same direction to produce
a nearly grammatically correct article about something completely
different than what we think it is about. For all we non-Russians know,
"orbital construction plant" could be a mistranslation of
"crop circle maker".
I don't understand how you can say things like that when HUGE sites like Flickr are MySQL based...and Google uses MySQL code for their DB...
Both of these applications involve non-critical data. Google doesn't care
if two separate searches for the same thing, one immediately
after the other, give different results
(which is often the case, probably due to different servers not being
sync'ed to each other, not saying it's a MySQL problem; the point is
that the data is loosey-goosey and non-critical).
And, you forgot/. itself, which uses MySQL. They definitely don't
care about the precision of the data; heck, they still can't even get
"page 1 of 2" and "page 2 of 2" not to have overlapping results after
10 years or whatever in business.
I think your case would be better made if you showed a HUGE
user of MySQL for financial applications. Does Google use
MySQL to handle their general ledger and billing?
The 3-D printing I've heard about builds up the model layer by layer.
One thing I don't understand is how they "print" the legs, antennae,
etc., since these (if pointing downwards) would have to be suspended in
mid-air until the layers that attach them are printed, i.e. they would
fall off. So do they print these separately then glue them on?
One thing I would like to see is the following. Even though I've
never heard of it, it is possible that this has been thought of and/or patented. But
if not, this post documents the idea here first as prior art, which I
contribute to the public domain. Or if it has been thought of, kudos to
the inventor.
The printer would start with a solid block of a mostly transparent,
wax-like or plastic-like substance with a low melting point. When a
focused laser beam or other focused source of energy is applied to a
point (voxel) inside the block, the plastic in that voxel will "cure"
i.e. harden. Perhaps it is the temperature that causes the hardening,
or perhaps it is the action of a UV light like they do to cure fillings
at the dentist. After all voxels constituting the model are scanned,
the whole block is heated up (to below the curing point but higher than
the melting point), and the uncured substance will melt away from the
model for reuse in the next model.
With this method, you could even have hollow models by
curing the voxels in a shell at the surface of the model, then
leaving a hole at the bottom for the uncured substance to melt out of.
This would save money if the strength of a solid model isn't needed.
This shell could even be paper-thin if you just want a quick
if fragile visual idea of what's going to be "printed", then
strengthen it for the final version.
I'm sure there would be many technical hurdles to overcome,
not the least of which is finding a suitable substance with the
properties I described.
To establish prior art you need to publish. The problem is that
magazines and journals are fairly selective about content because they
have to pay or the content has to fit their market or be interesting in
some way. Then there is credibility, if you write an article about
recommendations or motor control methodology, something you've done as a
hobby project, a magazine or journal may not choose to publish because
it can not properly verify the content.
This is highly dependent on the journal. In the case of trade
journals, a lot of them are actually dying for "real" articles
buried in their mass of ads, and ads thinly disguised as articles, to
attract readership. In the past I have submitted many "test cases"
to a trade rag on electronics test and all of them were published
without question. In some cases they were patentable ideas I
specifically wanted to make public domain, because it wasn't worth it
to me to go through the patent expense but I also didn't want to
be prevented from using them in the future. As a side effect I became
well-known in the field, very helpful for my consulting work.
On the other hand, I have submitted a couple of ideas to the
"Design Ideas" section of EDN magazine. Both were rejected, even though
I thought they were reasonable. I think the problem there is simply that
the column is very popular and they have more submissions than they
can publish, so it depends on the whim of the editor that day.
Anyway it depends on the journal. I guess my point is that if you're
going to write it up anyway, might as well submit it and see what
happens, doesn't cost anything. If it does get published, you'll
make a name for yourself and have something for your CV, as well as establishing prior art.
For best results find a little
known or start-up trade rag in the field that's 90% ads. And if it doesn't get published,
you'll still have your write-up for some on-line thing as you
suggested.
1. Entanglement is a fact. 2. Heisenberg's uncertainly principle is intrinsic
and has nothing to do with the kinds of particles you use. Both of these
things are very non-intuitive as presented by standard QM, to the point where
you can't really "understand" them but just have to accept them
as facts about the world that experiments confirm.
You may be interested in Bohm's interpretation of quantum mechanics,
which is much more intuitive because it deals with realistic particles
travelling in a "quantum field," very analogous to classical particles in
say an electromagnetic field, and there is none of this mysterious
"collapse" or things not existing until you observe them. Standard
nonrelativistic
QM falls out as the statistics of Bohm's theory. The two are mathematically
equivalent. The problems with Bohm's theory are (1) there are
faster than light influences (that you can't signal with, though), but I don't
see that as philosophically different from the nonlocal correlations of standard QM; (2)
while very intuitive, it is somewhat impractical to compute with since you
have to work out the statistics of many particle trajectories whereas
standard QM essentially already is the statistics; and (3) (probably the most
serious) no one has figured out how to incorporate relativity in a clean
way. Google:
Bohm quantum mechanics.
First, I believe the "yellow-tinged" ones are low-pressure sodium lamps
(although "tinged" is a kind of ambiguous word, so I'm not sure exactly
what is meant).
High-pressure ones put out more or less white light. Second, it is true
that the Luxim bulbs put out about as many lumens/watt as HPS (which put
out 100-150 l/w), but LPS are more efficient, at 200 lumens/watt.
The
problem with LPS is that a lot of people don't like the color, which is
almost monochromatic, and a lot of colors look strange under the lighting
(blues become black etc.). But I don't know of anything that is more
efficient, and for street lighting the color seems a small price to pay
for saving up to half the energy. Nonetheless a lot of
communities have voted down
LPS in favor of HPS for aesthetic reasons.
Yes, it sucks that backup copies are collateral damage in this
battle.
So why don't you at least offer to replace
scratched CDs/DVDs for a nominal fee, instead of demanding the
full price for a replacement copy? Sorry, until you do that
at least and guarantee that such a replacement will be
available for x number of years even after the game is out of
print (ideally where x = the length of its copyright term), then even if I buy the legit copy
I'll also go for the cracked
pirated version that I can backup, keep forever, and move to any
new PC I buy. And since you've motivated me to get a pirated version anyway,
it's natural for me to wonder,
what's the point of my buying a legit copy?
Or you can put a prefix to your gmail address with a '+'. ie. "temp+john38@gmail.com" the mail still gets delivered to john38@gmail, but with 'temp+john38@gmail.com' in the 'to:' field, allowing you to filter it easily.
Spammer's note to self: (1) duplicate all gmail addresses with dummy
"+" fields purged. (2) duplicate all gmail addresses with the most
common non-filtered dummy fields, such as "family" and "work".
Now each gmail address will be hit with a dozen or a hundred
variations, in hopes that one will get through the filter.
Do all five year olds who act out become criminals?
There are five-year-olds who don't act out?
I know you're just following the current trend,
but ever since my son was small, it's annoyed me when teachers, school
psychologists, pc moms, etc. use "acting out" to describe "acting up",
in other words just plain bad behavior that needs to be corrected.
"Acting out" means (Wikipedia) "to perform an action to express (often
unconscious) emotional conflicts," and carries the subtle connotation
that due to bad "parenting", the child has
"issues" that the child expresses by "acting out" and needs to
"resolve".
Sometimes 5-year-old kids just have too much energy and need
to be disciplined or otherwise taught to control or focus their
bad, disruptive, silly, destructive, or otherwise inappropriate behavior,
and taught to understand when a certain behavior is acceptable and
when it isn't.
It's that simple and doesn't need weekly
psychotherapy sessions. When I was a kid, I never even heard of
"acting out". It was "stop acting up and behave yourself."
Except "these people" haven't done anything to directly harm me or my
family or friends.
You've heard it before:
"First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out -
because I was not a Socialist...."
I'm more concerned about the fundamentalist Christians and Islamists
(yes, in that order, at least here in the U.S.).
And these should be protested and exposed just
as vigorously. Especially the first, since they have voted into
office the current leaders who are destroying our economy and
our country's future with this inane war, if they haven't already
done so. Oh, and our privacy and freedom too, while we're at it.
One other thing I wonder about is the
following. Suppose a manufacturer makes an improvement to the design. This
could be anything from a way to lighten the frame with the same strength
to a cheaper-to-build design for a joint. Normally such incremental
improvements would either be internal trade secrets or would be
patented. Would the GPLed nature of the design prevent either of these from
happening, so that any such incremental improvement to the design would
be have to be made public and available
to all other competiting manufacturers as well?
I hope it has some protection against cheap knockoffs. Most people aren't going to want to build this themselves, and will want to buy a factory-made version.
I would think the whole purpose of a GPL'ed design is to
encourage "cheap knockoffs" i.e. competitition, so
it will be less expensive for any of us to purchase.
Now, it is certainly possible for one "knockoff" to be a lower quality
than another, and even fraudulently
claim to be one of these antennas but
actually be something else, but in the end product reviews and trusted
brand names should sort it out. And the fact that the
design is open should make identifying a fraudulent product
claim a little easier.
For those who want to get an
entertaining but substantial overview of chemistry rather
than 5-minute gee-whiz demonstrations or
music videos, I recommend the
learner.org's
The World of Chemistry 1/2 hour
videos. These are very well done. I
particularly find the simulations in the "The Genetic Code" amazing,
even mesmerizing; it is mind-boggling how an arrangement of mere
atoms
can perform such extremely complex and organized behavior that we call "life".
Makes the Linux kernel seem like kindergarten stuff.:)
None of the responses to the parent have
brought up the following point.
A library serves as a filter in a very important way:
the material there was "good enough", in some way, to
get published. It has filtered out untold volumes of manuscripts
that weren't accepted by a publisher
(other than self-published material, which is rare
in a library). In addition, the library itself has filtered
yet again by selecting the material (recommended by professors
etc.) that it holds.
The web OTOH has the garbage as well as the
"good stuff", and many cases only the garbage since the
good stuff (book contents) is usually copyrighted and not
placed on the web. (Yes, Google Books can help you find
some things, but you can't browse through the book.)
The web has its place - a very important place - but it
serves a different kind of need. Like Wikipedia, the web
as a whole can be good for getting an idea of the subject matter
of interest, but once you get in-depth and serious, the
library becomes almost indispensable, for me at least.
For specialized scientific and mathematical
work, virtually everything I do is based on peer-reviewed
publications, and I don't have expensive access to
the online versions. Sometimes I can find preprints on
arxiv.org, but I need the real thing for referencing in
my own work, and much of it is from the 70s/80s before
arxiv.org existed. And even arxiv.org is a dangerous
place with crackpot theories unless you know exactly
what authors/articles to look for. So yes, I spend many hours in the
university library to get authoritative and reliable material
that I can trust.
I wish people would stop posting crappy science articles from ScienceDaily and related sites.
I've found a better site to be http://www.eurekalert.org/ which is run
by the AAAS (American Association for the Advancement of Science) and
has less annoying ads. A
very high percentage of ScienceDaily stories - although oddly not this
one - are the same as those on Eurakalert, but Eurakalert seems to have
them first (at least based on RSS feed). I think
Eurakalert also provides the
original press release from the university/organization - not a
watered-down, clueless-journalist-rewritten "adapted from materials
provided by [university/organization]" - and also gives the link to
the actual "materials", usually not provided by
ScienceDaily.
- over 10 DEC PDP-11/45s running the RSTS time-sharing system
The maximum memory on these things was 28K words (16-bit)
without memory extension hardware. In the 70s we had 8 users on
a system with 28K of memory sorting lists, printing reports,
data entry, editing with TECO,
batch runs in the background at low priority, with relatively few swap thrashing
problems. I implemented an ultra-low priority batch mode that
waited until there was nothing else running for 5 minutes before
activating a u.l.p job, then swapped it
out instantly as soon as someone pressed
a key - amazing what you could do with its sys calls.
I did all sorts of hobby computing in this mode (with employer's
permission) -
looking for Fermat number factors, analyzing stock market timing data
for patterns, you name it - I was like a kid in a candy store.
In retrospect, it was simply
amazing how they shrunk it into that amount of memory and
amazing how much I could do with it. 640K was simply
unimaginable at that time.
On my (older) 1GHz computer, this takes 65 sec in Firefox 2, but only
16 sec in IE. (The whole metamath site is annoying in Firefox because
of its slowness.)
Also, it would be nice if the page width adjusted to the browser width
instead of forcing you to use full screen on a 1280x1024 monitor. Since
I don't normally browse in full-screen mode, for me it's endless
horizontal scrolling. I can't imagine using this on a regular basis.
Maybe they should just copy Wikipedia's template - which has been fine-tuned
over time for user experience - instead of trying to re-invent
the wheel.
Mods: while the parent's point is rather strong, it is not "Flamebait".
It is, apparently, the parent's true opinion, which he/she is
entitled to have. Moreover, discussing such an extreme view on
the matter is a good way to shake out logic flaws in more moderate
viewpoints.
To the parent: I believe you are wrong that good photography of a
cityscape doesn't require skill, but even so that isn't what is
relevant. The issue is whether it involves creativity. There are
many things involving skills that don't necessarily involve
creativity, such as plumbing.
And even a plumbing repair can involve creativity to work around
unforeseen problems, possibly even more so than the photography of
a cityscape. Yet the plumber doesn't "own" the repair in any sense
and certainly doesn't collect royalties for each day the repair
continues to work.
A valid point of discussion, I believe, is whether the a photograph
of something that already exists is simply recording a "fact"
(which is not copyrightable) or involves creativity (and the "skill"
part is irrelevant). For example, a faithful
photographic reproduction of a
public-domain painting can require a lot of skill but has been
ruled not to be copyrightable. So where should the line be
drawn in a hypothetical "fair" copyright law, and how do you
determine that line? Would a skilled but uncreative portrait photographer
be able to produce an acceptable family portrait, and if so, should that
portrait by copyrightable? What if a computer were programmed to handle
all of those skills - framing, lighting, etc. - and the portrait production
was completely automated? Should it be copyrightable then?
Here is the solution, if none of your local photographers
are apparently willing to assign the copyright to you.
Accept that you may
have to pay something more than their
standard fee.
Remember the old joke where a guy asks a woman,
"Would you have sex with me for a million dollars?" The woman
says yes. Then the guy says, "How about for five dollars?" and
she says, "What kind girl do you think I am?" The man says, "We've
already established that, we're just haggling over the price."
Now, go to each photographer and
ask how much they would charge to assign the copyright to you.
If they say they would never do that as a matter of principle,
ask them if they would do it for a million dollars. Of course
they'll say yes. So from there it is a matter of negotiating
how much their "principle" is worth. Since they have competition,
they can be pitted off against each other.
One of them may even give in and just let you have the
copyright for their standard fee if they need the business
badly enough.
On the contrary, posters regularly make heroes out of Pirate Bay and bittorrent sites which are making profits off of the traffic generated by their hosting of links to pirated files which, I would argue, is not much different than profiting directly from the sale of the files.
What part of "copy" in "copyright" do you not understand?
There is all the difference in the world between a copy of a file and
a hyperlink. At least Sweden has had the common sense to understand that,
although who knows when they'll buckle to the *AAs.
OTOH you're in good company with the plaintiffs in
the 2600
DeCSS case, which I still find to be one of the most disappointing
court decisions of modern times. "In particular the Second Circuit ruled that linking on the Internet...could be restrained in ways that might not be constitutional for traditional media" which is why it was perfectly fine for the NYT to
print the hyperlink (which it did). So if thepiratebay printed a monthly
magazine of torrent hyperlinks, that apparently would be legal even in
the U.S. And possibly even if they displayed the links on their website
with no "HREF" around them - would that make you happier? Or are you for
censorship of non-copyrighted information as well?
I fail to see the difference. What's so special about the money part? Isn't personal enjoyment a sort of profit? What if I take the picture, turn it into desktop wallpaper, and post it on my web site to drive up hits?
-- This sentence is false.
I had a perfect rebuttal of your point, but your sig overflowed my
logic buffer. Congrats, you win by default.
Slashdot Mirror
Now I'm wondering whether the original article's translation was just a fluke of good luck, or if actually the errors are coincidentally all adding in the same direction to produce a nearly grammatically correct article about something completely different than what we think it is about. For all we non-Russians know, "orbital construction plant" could be a mistranslation of "crop circle maker".
I think your case would be better made if you showed a HUGE user of MySQL for financial applications. Does Google use MySQL to handle their general ledger and billing?
So the 3-D "printing" idea I just published on slashdot won't count?
One thing I would like to see is the following. Even though I've never heard of it, it is possible that this has been thought of and/or patented. But if not, this post documents the idea here first as prior art, which I contribute to the public domain. Or if it has been thought of, kudos to the inventor.
The printer would start with a solid block of a mostly transparent, wax-like or plastic-like substance with a low melting point. When a focused laser beam or other focused source of energy is applied to a point (voxel) inside the block, the plastic in that voxel will "cure" i.e. harden. Perhaps it is the temperature that causes the hardening, or perhaps it is the action of a UV light like they do to cure fillings at the dentist. After all voxels constituting the model are scanned, the whole block is heated up (to below the curing point but higher than the melting point), and the uncured substance will melt away from the model for reuse in the next model.
With this method, you could even have hollow models by curing the voxels in a shell at the surface of the model, then leaving a hole at the bottom for the uncured substance to melt out of. This would save money if the strength of a solid model isn't needed. This shell could even be paper-thin if you just want a quick if fragile visual idea of what's going to be "printed", then strengthen it for the final version.
I'm sure there would be many technical hurdles to overcome, not the least of which is finding a suitable substance with the properties I described.
This is highly dependent on the journal. In the case of trade journals, a lot of them are actually dying for "real" articles buried in their mass of ads, and ads thinly disguised as articles, to attract readership. In the past I have submitted many "test cases" to a trade rag on electronics test and all of them were published without question. In some cases they were patentable ideas I specifically wanted to make public domain, because it wasn't worth it to me to go through the patent expense but I also didn't want to be prevented from using them in the future. As a side effect I became well-known in the field, very helpful for my consulting work.
On the other hand, I have submitted a couple of ideas to the "Design Ideas" section of EDN magazine. Both were rejected, even though I thought they were reasonable. I think the problem there is simply that the column is very popular and they have more submissions than they can publish, so it depends on the whim of the editor that day.
Anyway it depends on the journal. I guess my point is that if you're going to write it up anyway, might as well submit it and see what happens, doesn't cost anything. If it does get published, you'll make a name for yourself and have something for your CV, as well as establishing prior art. For best results find a little known or start-up trade rag in the field that's 90% ads. And if it doesn't get published, you'll still have your write-up for some on-line thing as you suggested.
You may be interested in Bohm's interpretation of quantum mechanics, which is much more intuitive because it deals with realistic particles travelling in a "quantum field," very analogous to classical particles in say an electromagnetic field, and there is none of this mysterious "collapse" or things not existing until you observe them. Standard nonrelativistic QM falls out as the statistics of Bohm's theory. The two are mathematically equivalent. The problems with Bohm's theory are (1) there are faster than light influences (that you can't signal with, though), but I don't see that as philosophically different from the nonlocal correlations of standard QM; (2) while very intuitive, it is somewhat impractical to compute with since you have to work out the statistics of many particle trajectories whereas standard QM essentially already is the statistics; and (3) (probably the most serious) no one has figured out how to incorporate relativity in a clean way. Google: Bohm quantum mechanics.
The problem with LPS is that a lot of people don't like the color, which is almost monochromatic, and a lot of colors look strange under the lighting (blues become black etc.). But I don't know of anything that is more efficient, and for street lighting the color seems a small price to pay for saving up to half the energy. Nonetheless a lot of communities have voted down LPS in favor of HPS for aesthetic reasons.
So why don't you at least offer to replace scratched CDs/DVDs for a nominal fee, instead of demanding the full price for a replacement copy? Sorry, until you do that at least and guarantee that such a replacement will be available for x number of years even after the game is out of print (ideally where x = the length of its copyright term), then even if I buy the legit copy I'll also go for the cracked pirated version that I can backup, keep forever, and move to any new PC I buy. And since you've motivated me to get a pirated version anyway, it's natural for me to wonder, what's the point of my buying a legit copy?
But couldn't that also mean that fewer mooses (meese?*) make people happier? I mean, having a pesky moose tear up your yard sounds like a real bummer.
*Obviously I'm not Canadian.
**Does anyone know the immigration requirements?
Spammer's note to self: (1) duplicate all gmail addresses with dummy "+" fields purged. (2) duplicate all gmail addresses with the most common non-filtered dummy fields, such as "family" and "work". Now each gmail address will be hit with a dozen or a hundred variations, in hopes that one will get through the filter.
I know you're just following the current trend, but ever since my son was small, it's annoyed me when teachers, school psychologists, pc moms, etc. use "acting out" to describe "acting up", in other words just plain bad behavior that needs to be corrected. "Acting out" means (Wikipedia) "to perform an action to express (often unconscious) emotional conflicts," and carries the subtle connotation that due to bad "parenting", the child has "issues" that the child expresses by "acting out" and needs to "resolve".
Sometimes 5-year-old kids just have too much energy and need to be disciplined or otherwise taught to control or focus their bad, disruptive, silly, destructive, or otherwise inappropriate behavior, and taught to understand when a certain behavior is acceptable and when it isn't. It's that simple and doesn't need weekly psychotherapy sessions. When I was a kid, I never even heard of "acting out". It was "stop acting up and behave yourself."
You've heard it before: "First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out - because I was not a Socialist. ..."
And these should be protested and exposed just as vigorously. Especially the first, since they have voted into office the current leaders who are destroying our economy and our country's future with this inane war, if they haven't already done so. Oh, and our privacy and freedom too, while we're at it.
One other thing I wonder about is the following. Suppose a manufacturer makes an improvement to the design. This could be anything from a way to lighten the frame with the same strength to a cheaper-to-build design for a joint. Normally such incremental improvements would either be internal trade secrets or would be patented. Would the GPLed nature of the design prevent either of these from happening, so that any such incremental improvement to the design would be have to be made public and available to all other competiting manufacturers as well?
I would think the whole purpose of a GPL'ed design is to encourage "cheap knockoffs" i.e. competitition, so it will be less expensive for any of us to purchase. Now, it is certainly possible for one "knockoff" to be a lower quality than another, and even fraudulently claim to be one of these antennas but actually be something else, but in the end product reviews and trusted brand names should sort it out. And the fact that the design is open should make identifying a fraudulent product claim a little easier.
For those who want to get an entertaining but substantial overview of chemistry rather than 5-minute gee-whiz demonstrations or music videos, I recommend the learner.org's The World of Chemistry 1/2 hour videos. These are very well done. I particularly find the simulations in the "The Genetic Code" amazing, even mesmerizing; it is mind-boggling how an arrangement of mere atoms can perform such extremely complex and organized behavior that we call "life". Makes the Linux kernel seem like kindergarten stuff. :)
The web OTOH has the garbage as well as the "good stuff", and many cases only the garbage since the good stuff (book contents) is usually copyrighted and not placed on the web. (Yes, Google Books can help you find some things, but you can't browse through the book.) The web has its place - a very important place - but it serves a different kind of need. Like Wikipedia, the web as a whole can be good for getting an idea of the subject matter of interest, but once you get in-depth and serious, the library becomes almost indispensable, for me at least.
For specialized scientific and mathematical work, virtually everything I do is based on peer-reviewed publications, and I don't have expensive access to the online versions. Sometimes I can find preprints on arxiv.org, but I need the real thing for referencing in my own work, and much of it is from the 70s/80s before arxiv.org existed. And even arxiv.org is a dangerous place with crackpot theories unless you know exactly what authors/articles to look for. So yes, I spend many hours in the university library to get authoritative and reliable material that I can trust.
- over 10 DEC PDP-11/45s running the RSTS time-sharing system
The maximum memory on these things was 28K words (16-bit) without memory extension hardware. In the 70s we had 8 users on a system with 28K of memory sorting lists, printing reports, data entry, editing with TECO, batch runs in the background at low priority, with relatively few swap thrashing problems. I implemented an ultra-low priority batch mode that waited until there was nothing else running for 5 minutes before activating a u.l.p job, then swapped it out instantly as soon as someone pressed a key - amazing what you could do with its sys calls. I did all sorts of hobby computing in this mode (with employer's permission) - looking for Fermat number factors, analyzing stock market timing data for patterns, you name it - I was like a kid in a candy store.
In retrospect, it was simply amazing how they shrunk it into that amount of memory and amazing how much I could do with it. 640K was simply unimaginable at that time.
http://us.metamath.org/mpegif/projlem7.html
On my (older) 1GHz computer, this takes 65 sec in Firefox 2, but only 16 sec in IE. (The whole metamath site is annoying in Firefox because of its slowness.)
Also, it would be nice if the page width adjusted to the browser width instead of forcing you to use full screen on a 1280x1024 monitor. Since I don't normally browse in full-screen mode, for me it's endless horizontal scrolling. I can't imagine using this on a regular basis. Maybe they should just copy Wikipedia's template - which has been fine-tuned over time for user experience - instead of trying to re-invent the wheel.
To the parent: I believe you are wrong that good photography of a cityscape doesn't require skill, but even so that isn't what is relevant. The issue is whether it involves creativity. There are many things involving skills that don't necessarily involve creativity, such as plumbing.
And even a plumbing repair can involve creativity to work around unforeseen problems, possibly even more so than the photography of a cityscape. Yet the plumber doesn't "own" the repair in any sense and certainly doesn't collect royalties for each day the repair continues to work.
A valid point of discussion, I believe, is whether the a photograph of something that already exists is simply recording a "fact" (which is not copyrightable) or involves creativity (and the "skill" part is irrelevant). For example, a faithful photographic reproduction of a public-domain painting can require a lot of skill but has been ruled not to be copyrightable. So where should the line be drawn in a hypothetical "fair" copyright law, and how do you determine that line? Would a skilled but uncreative portrait photographer be able to produce an acceptable family portrait, and if so, should that portrait by copyrightable? What if a computer were programmed to handle all of those skills - framing, lighting, etc. - and the portrait production was completely automated? Should it be copyrightable then?
Remember the old joke where a guy asks a woman, "Would you have sex with me for a million dollars?" The woman says yes. Then the guy says, "How about for five dollars?" and she says, "What kind girl do you think I am?" The man says, "We've already established that, we're just haggling over the price."
Now, go to each photographer and ask how much they would charge to assign the copyright to you. If they say they would never do that as a matter of principle, ask them if they would do it for a million dollars. Of course they'll say yes. So from there it is a matter of negotiating how much their "principle" is worth. Since they have competition, they can be pitted off against each other. One of them may even give in and just let you have the copyright for their standard fee if they need the business badly enough.
What part of "copy" in "copyright" do you not understand? There is all the difference in the world between a copy of a file and a hyperlink. At least Sweden has had the common sense to understand that, although who knows when they'll buckle to the *AAs.
OTOH you're in good company with the plaintiffs in the 2600 DeCSS case, which I still find to be one of the most disappointing court decisions of modern times. "In particular the Second Circuit ruled that linking on the Internet...could be restrained in ways that might not be constitutional for traditional media" which is why it was perfectly fine for the NYT to print the hyperlink (which it did). So if thepiratebay printed a monthly magazine of torrent hyperlinks, that apparently would be legal even in the U.S. And possibly even if they displayed the links on their website with no "HREF" around them - would that make you happier? Or are you for censorship of non-copyrighted information as well?
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This sentence is false.
I had a perfect rebuttal of your point, but your sig overflowed my logic buffer. Congrats, you win by default.