The 'Happy Birthday' song is still protected... found this out when I
wanted to add it to an app I wrote... Patents are similarly absurd.
The only thing protected is the lyrics. The tune is the same as
"Good Morning to All" which was written in the 1800's i.e. public domain. There
should be no problem including the tune in your app, except to be extra safe you should make
the first note split ("Hap-py") into a single note ("Good").
See this
discussion.
This has been on slashdot before, where it got terribly trashed with all
kinds of greed and DRM conspiracy theories (I don't think anyone really
understood what it is about), but nonetheless I bit the bullet and
signed up for an i-name (yes, I actually
plunked down real money, $25, for a 50-year i-name and 2 years of broker
service). So far after almost 2 months, I've had zero spam from it
(i.e. no spam whatsoever) even though I have it posted publicly.
I decided I'm tired of wasting time training spam filters and now
pretty much just ignore everything not on my whitelist, to which
I add people automatically when they make it through the i-name
service. Life is so much simpler, especially after returning from
a week's vacation away from email. I know there are some free
alternatives but they tend to have annoying, ad-ridden sites unlike
the simple, clean i-name service.
...releasing full specs for these devices could enable them to transmit in unwanted frequencies, which means they would have problems with organisms like the FCC.
I can make a device that transmits in unwanted frequencies with
a $1 transistor from Radio Shack. There are many books that show
you how to make such a device. Should we ban all of those books
as well?
Ah,
yet another Calendar Reform Proposal (TM).
I don't think people are going to buy into
the "Newton month". Plus unlike leap years
that are usually a multiple of 4 (and
exceptions are rather simple to learn,
and quite rare), no one will remember the
algorithm for determining if the next
Newton month will occur 5 or 6 years from
now.
There have been
other
perpetual calendar proposals, but to
me the most logical one is
Willard
Edwards', that's been around
since the late 60's at least, but of course like all the
others never caught on.
The article doesn't seem to mention this,
unless I missed it in a quick reading.
To prevent fading, you need to use printer that uses inks based on
pigments, such as
the Epson
2200:
"I printed a test pattern on a piece of plain paper, and taped it to
the outside of my south-facing window, so it would be subject to the
full measure of California sun and the elements. A month later, the
test pattern is still there. In particular, the cyan+magenta+yellow
patches show no sign of color shift. Believe me, neither commercial
offset printing nor ordinary color prints wouldn hold up nearly so well
under these conditions. In fact, the paper is starting to show some
signs of degrading, including a slight yellowing and a more
brittle-feeling texture."
"So, it's not exactly a scientific test, but I think you can make prints
on the 2200 with confidence that your grandchildren will still be able
to enjoy them. Highly recommended."
As I understand it, the key concern is that an interface to the 911
service costs money, and someone has to pay for it. (And for "universal
access"; someone please clue me in as to what that is and why it costs
so much.) But...
The City of Seattle in 2003 collected $30 million from telephone utility
taxes, its fourth largest source of revenue after property, B&O, and
sales taxes.
For a VoIP connection to 911, aren't we talking the cost of a DSL line
and some specialized software? It seems to me these are minor costs
that would add very little to the basic police/fire system without the
911 service.
I'm sure this $30 million (in the
case of Seattle alone) is almost certainly used mostly for other
purposes, and now it's just another buried tax in our lives that the
bureaucracy is terrified of losing. But I'd just like to get past the
b.s. to the bottom line, and find out what's really involved in the
basic, minimal system needed to provide this service. It kind of
irritates me when a tax is claimed to be for one purpose and
ends up getting used for another.
I wrote a
letter
to my senator.
May I suggest others do the same.
People ought to be asking themselves, seriously, a much
broader question: Should
Congress to be passing laws that the majority of people don't want?
A case can be made for such laws in the case of
individual rights of minorities. But I don't see that
a corporation merits any consideration whatsoever with respect to any
law that restricts our freedom.
However, under the proposed language, viewers would not be allowed to
use software or devices to skip commericals or promotional announcements
"that would otherwise be performed or displayed before, during or after
the performance of the motion picture," like the previews on a DVD.
Anyway, that was enough to prompt me to send off this letter:
Dear Senator xxx:
I am writing to express great concern about Bill HR2391 (Intellectual
Property Protection Act).
One of the provisions of this bill will make it illegal to skip over
commercials or promotional material, for example on a DVD. This is
simply outrageous. I am shocked, in disbelief that there even exists a
bill with such an absurdity. What I choose to do in the privacy of my
own home is nobody else's business.
Do honestly believe that if you were to ask people you represent whether they want a law
making it illegal for them to skip commercials, that any less than 99%
of them would say NO?
There are other provisions of this bill that are also troubling, in the
sense of more government and industry intrusions into our private lives.
Who do you represent, the people who elected you, or the industry
lobbyists that are trying to buy your vote? The invasion of big
corporations into our private homes is getting totally out of control.
PLEASE DO NOT FORGET THAT YOU REPRESENT THE PEOPLE. PLEASE VOTE AGAINST
BILL HR2391.
For searching file names I gave up waiting for Microsoft's
animated dog long ago. (I haven't tried the Google thing.)
I use 'locate' under Cygwin, and it's essentially instant.
4. Wildcard searches - oftentimes I just can't remember how I've saved
the file. Was my presentation called group4project.ppt or group4.ppt or
G4.ppt? A simple search of *4*.ppt should find the file, where * is a
wildcard. Currently I can't do that.
Cygwin: locate -i *g*4*.ppt
5. No automatic unindexing. I just moved 3000 files from my desktop to
another folder. Now whenever I search for any of those files I get two
results, one of them pointing to a non-existing location. There's no
way in hell I'm removing 3000 files from the index manually, ten at a
time.
Cygwin: updatedb --localpaths="/cygdrive/c/cygdrive/d"
(I have this in an alias. Of course this doesn't
index content like what you are talking about, it
updates the 'locate' database. I'm just talking
efficient search of filenames here.
It would be nice, though, to have a simple, fast
CLI like 'locate' that does content. Although
grep can be reasonable unless you're doing the
whole disk.)
My life is so much more efficient since I discovered
Cygwin. It's not for Grandma, but for anyone
with an inkling of a technical bent it's heaven
and 10-100x faster than going thru all the
pointy-clicky stuff.
To prevent fading, you need to use printer that uses inks based on
pigments, not dyes, such as the Epson
2200:
"I printed a test pattern on a piece of plain paper, and taped it to
the outside of my south-facing window, so it would be subject to the
full measure of California sun and the elements. A month later, the
test pattern is still there. In particular, the cyan+magenta+yellow
patches show no sign of color shift. Believe me, neither commercial
offset printing nor ordinary color prints wouldn hold up nearly so well
under these conditions. In fact, the paper is starting to show some
signs of degrading, including a slight yellowing and a more
brittle-feeling texture."
"So, it's not exactly a scientific test, but I think you can make prints
on the 2200 with confidence that your grandchildren will still be able
to enjoy them. Highly recommended."
As I mentioned in another post above, I was mistaken not to qualify
my statement as "essentially all of mathematics" instead of the
rhetorical "all of mathematics" (which I in my haste to post I figured
would be simpler for nonmathematicians to understand, but in retrospect
it was a judgmental error).
But you are mistaken about the power of the ZF language. Please read
the bottom half of page xiv (14 of 192) in the Preface of the "Metamath"
book. This will explain how ZFC, with the addition of just one more
axiom to result in Tarski-Grothendieck set theory, can do category
theory. That this axiom isn't typically included with ZF has nothing to
do with it being a hack - it is actually quite beautiful - but has more
to do with tradition and the historical definition of what axioms ZF set
theory happens to include. Mathematically there's nothing to prevent
having the additional axiom all the time as part of the "standard" axiom
set, and the mizar.org project does just this. From what I can tell
there is nothing that Tarski-Grothendieck set theory can't do that
category theory can do.
On the other hand no one, to my knowledge, has come up with a
foundational set of category theory axioms that are anywhere near as
convenient to work with as ZF-type axioms. In fact even finding them
explicitly, precisely, and plainly displayed as a simple axiom system to
plonk on top of first-order logic is something I have never seen. (I
have seen a couple of systems claimed as such, but they were riddled
with problems such as ambiguous rules and implicit definitions that
weren't made clear if you actually wanted to start working with them
mechanically.) So if category theorists want to have a myth "stomped
out of existence" they'll have to do better in terms of making it simply
accessible in the same way ZF-type axioms are.
In that case, I believe it consists of:
{} = 0
{{}} = 1
As pure mathematicians like to claim, all of mathematics is
derived from the empty set.
That is cute. However you can't get very far with these two axioms.
You need some more axioms that will let you build more complex
structures starting from the empty set, such
as combining them to form pairs, unions, powersets,
and so on. You also need
to postulate the existence of an infinite set.
A quick overview of some of
the history behind the axioms, and why they are needed,
is given on the Russell paradox page.
But are axioms equations ? Or some axioms are equations ?
Well, strictly speaking the axioms are represented as well-formed formulas (wffs) that aren't
displayed in the form of equations on
the pages I linked to. But using what is
called "class notation" in set theory it is always possible to
rewrite a wff with an equivalent expression
that has form of an equation. For example: "P(x) imples
Q(x)" can be expressed as "{x:P(x)} union {x:Q(x)} = {x:Q(x)}" where
"{x:P(x)}" means "the class of sets x such that P(x) is true".
Or more generally, any statement P(x) that is true of all sets x (such as any of the axioms)
can be rewritten "{x:P(x)} = V" where V stands
for {x:x=x} i.e. the universe of all sets.
Class notation is an extremely powerful device.
Classes need not exist as sets, by the way; the
class V above is not a set but is called a
"proper class".
Does this answer your question?
The answer is simple. The most beautiful equations, hands down,
are those from which all of mathematics
can be derived.
These are the axioms of ZFC set theory.
What could possibly be more beautiful or more important
than that? And it's a shame so few people know
about them.
See
Zermelo-Fraenkel Axioms and Metamath Proof
Explorer.
- FPGA-based graphics engine so it's reprogrammable
- instructions on how to reprogram the FPGA, so it's hackable
- if we discontinue a product, we may release the Verilog code for the FPGA
From this, it sounds like the Verilog code is going to be considered
protected IP and closed off to the open source community.
Probably most of the development cost will go into designing the Verilog
code. This increases risk, since there will be a greater investment
that won't be recouped should the product not be successful.
My suggestion: why not slash the development cost dramatically
by letting the open source community develop it (or continue to
refine it from a simplest starting point
that provides only a basic video display, so
that you can at least sell a working product)?
In other words: just provide a hardware shell, period. Sure,
without any proprietary IP, at some point it will become a commodity
item that competitors can reproduce at will. But that will take some
time, and no competitor will be interested anyway until the volume
becomes significant. Until that happens, the hardware shell can be sold
at a premium, but probably for a lesser premium than if the cost of
developing the Verilog code had to be recouped.
And even if it is cloned, by being first you will
still have the advantage of the trust that goes
along with brand-name recognition.
Albert Einstein never said, "Make everything as simple as possible, but
not simpler." Even though it is attributed to him zillions of times
on the Internet (and sometimes even in print), there is never a source
provided for this attribution.
It is one of those myths that never seems to die, like Bill Gates'
supposedly saying "640K ought to be enough for anybody."
OK, I can't stand it anymore. Most of the article was a rehash of what
we already know (with some inaccuracies that the readers here have
dutifully pointed out), but there was one thing that glared out at me,
that no one has discussed here. (I'm probably making a mistake posting
this so late at top-level, no one will ever see it, but at least
I'll have done my duty for the record.)
Of course, you could use MSI repackaging tools for easier deployment
through SMS, Group Policy or some other tool, but it's a shame that
these vendors haven't realized the market potential and made their
products more accessible to corporate IT departments.
Now, to be honest I have no idea what an "MSI repackaging tool" is.
Like an RPM packager or something? Maybe someone can explain. Anyway, it
sounds like it might be relatively easy for someone who has this tool to
do, and (if they're feeling in the spirit) make the package available. Or
heck, maybe even sell and support it! It sounds like this might have a
major appeal to corporate IT departments, who usually have some money to
toss around.
(we use some banking software and it notifies you with a text box to
click "OK" and then "File, Update" but I still get called on it every
time).
You should actually be thanking your lucky stars your users are smart
enough to call you about any such thing they're uncertain of.
(Especially with banking software!) One way trojans get installed is
when people blindly click "OK" to every box that pops up. If it is
irrelevant that they understand what the "OK" box means, then what is
the point of popping it up in the first place?
Jeeves people, read this if you want be distinguished.
One of the most infuriating things about Google is that when there
is a match to a Wikipedia page, there may be dozens of Wikipedia spam
clones that show up first. Besides barraging you with unwanted ads, these spam clones
are often outdated, and special symbols such as in math formulas tend to be
corrupted. Once you suspect your match is in Wikipedia, you often have
to do a site-specific search for Wikipedia
even to show up on the
list.
Wikipedia is important enough that it deserves a special exception to
whatever algorithm picks these spam clones first,
if that's what it takes to do it.
Google
ignores this problem
in spite of repeated complaints. Fix it, Jeeves, and I'll become a regular
visitor.
This bit almost certainly doesn't matter. If he was hired to write
software, he doesn't get the copyright in the first place. It's
automatically held by the hiring company (at least in most places).
I wonder why programmers get such a raw deal. When I hire
a photographer to take pictures of my wedding, the photographer
keeps the copyright, and legally I'm not allowed to make
copies of my own picture without paying him/her royalties.
Excellent suggestion. And think hybrid - use voice when voice is
fastest. After saying "if-block", the cursor could be positioned at
"[condition]" which is highlighted for replacement, either by typing at
the keyboard or another voice command. Combine the best of both worlds. The best use might be to
start off with a few common macros that you would
ordinarily bind
to function keys, and voice would allow you to
use them without interrupting your normal typing
flow to hunt and peck for an awkward meta key
combination.
With the current voting system we are effectively stuck with two
parties. Someone else mentioned runoff voting. However, much better
than simple runoff voting is a related method called Condorcet voting:
electionmethods.org.
This link should be read by everyone and I think it is what we need to bring into law.
Urgently.
I can work my butt off, day and night, week after week, on an open
source project that excites me. I love to
show it off and have the world admire it. I thrive on it. I feel like I'm producing something
useful that will live on after me and that I'll be remembered for. Yes,
it's a big ego trip, so what. Even though I may be bleary eyed for lack
of sleep, I will feel very little stress but instead will have a deep
sense of satisfaction. I'll go to bed gloating over my accomplishments,
thinking of new things to try, and can hardly wait to wake up in few
hours to continue. The excitement can be incredible.
On the other hand when I have to work extended hours on a closed
source project for hire, I practically have to flog myself into
submission to get it done. I have to force myself to get up in the
morning. It eats away at my soul that I'm wasting my creativity on
something for which I'll receive no (public) credit, no copyright
interest and which will forever be hidden away from the world. I'll do
a good job because I'm that kind of person, but I know deep down I'm
basically doing it for the money, and the stress level can be very, very
high.
Of course that is just me. Other people do of course find
fulfillment working on closed source projects. Perhaps the recognition
from their immediate peers is sufficient. But whatever, the bottom line
is that if you're truly passionate about what you're doing you'll never
get stressed out.
From an earlier
post by me: "...as an employee of said [government] contractor, who
wouldn't have any copyright interest in whatever I produce anyway, I
think I might be more motivated to produce better work if I knew it
would ultimately be subject to public scrutiny and benefit the public
good. Compare that to dedicating your life to writing code that will be
secreted away in some closed-source product with no acknowledgment
whatsoever to you other than a paycheck that lets you survive. The
thought of such a dismal and pointless existence is kind of depressing."
Slashdot Mirror
The only thing protected is the lyrics. The tune is the same as "Good Morning to All" which was written in the 1800's i.e. public domain. There should be no problem including the tune in your app, except to be extra safe you should make the first note split ("Hap-py") into a single note ("Good"). See this discussion.
This has been on slashdot before, where it got terribly trashed with all kinds of greed and DRM conspiracy theories (I don't think anyone really understood what it is about), but nonetheless I bit the bullet and signed up for an i-name (yes, I actually plunked down real money, $25, for a 50-year i-name and 2 years of broker service). So far after almost 2 months, I've had zero spam from it (i.e. no spam whatsoever) even though I have it posted publicly. I decided I'm tired of wasting time training spam filters and now pretty much just ignore everything not on my whitelist, to which I add people automatically when they make it through the i-name service. Life is so much simpler, especially after returning from a week's vacation away from email. I know there are some free alternatives but they tend to have annoying, ad-ridden sites unlike the simple, clean i-name service.
I can make a device that transmits in unwanted frequencies with a $1 transistor from Radio Shack. There are many books that show you how to make such a device. Should we ban all of those books as well?
There have been other perpetual calendar proposals, but to me the most logical one is Willard Edwards', that's been around since the late 60's at least, but of course like all the others never caught on.
"I printed a test pattern on a piece of plain paper, and taped it to the outside of my south-facing window, so it would be subject to the full measure of California sun and the elements. A month later, the test pattern is still there. In particular, the cyan+magenta+yellow patches show no sign of color shift. Believe me, neither commercial offset printing nor ordinary color prints wouldn hold up nearly so well under these conditions. In fact, the paper is starting to show some signs of degrading, including a slight yellowing and a more brittle-feeling texture."
"So, it's not exactly a scientific test, but I think you can make prints on the 2200 with confidence that your grandchildren will still be able to enjoy them. Highly recommended."
I'm sure this $30 million (in the case of Seattle alone) is almost certainly used mostly for other purposes, and now it's just another buried tax in our lives that the bureaucracy is terrified of losing. But I'd just like to get past the b.s. to the bottom line, and find out what's really involved in the basic, minimal system needed to provide this service. It kind of irritates me when a tax is claimed to be for one purpose and ends up getting used for another.
People ought to be asking themselves, seriously, a much broader question: Should Congress to be passing laws that the majority of people don't want? A case can be made for such laws in the case of individual rights of minorities. But I don't see that a corporation merits any consideration whatsoever with respect to any law that restricts our freedom.
Well, I suppose it depends on who's doing the interpreting. The MPAA can afford a powerful legal battle.
According to the Wired article:
Anyway, that was enough to prompt me to send off this letter:Dear Senator xxx:
I am writing to express great concern about Bill HR2391 (Intellectual Property Protection Act).
One of the provisions of this bill will make it illegal to skip over commercials or promotional material, for example on a DVD. This is simply outrageous. I am shocked, in disbelief that there even exists a bill with such an absurdity. What I choose to do in the privacy of my own home is nobody else's business.
Do honestly believe that if you were to ask people you represent whether they want a law making it illegal for them to skip commercials, that any less than 99% of them would say NO?
There are other provisions of this bill that are also troubling, in the sense of more government and industry intrusions into our private lives.
Who do you represent, the people who elected you, or the industry lobbyists that are trying to buy your vote? The invasion of big corporations into our private homes is getting totally out of control.
PLEASE DO NOT FORGET THAT YOU REPRESENT THE PEOPLE. PLEASE VOTE AGAINST BILL HR2391.
Thank you.
Sincerely, (me)
4. Wildcard searches - oftentimes I just can't remember how I've saved the file. Was my presentation called group4project.ppt or group4.ppt or G4.ppt? A simple search of *4*.ppt should find the file, where * is a wildcard. Currently I can't do that.
Cygwin: locate -i *g*4*.ppt
5. No automatic unindexing. I just moved 3000 files from my desktop to another folder. Now whenever I search for any of those files I get two results, one of them pointing to a non-existing location. There's no way in hell I'm removing 3000 files from the index manually, ten at a time.
Cygwin: updatedb --localpaths="/cygdrive/c /cygdrive/d"
(I have this in an alias. Of course this doesn't index content like what you are talking about, it updates the 'locate' database. I'm just talking efficient search of filenames here. It would be nice, though, to have a simple, fast CLI like 'locate' that does content. Although grep can be reasonable unless you're doing the whole disk.)
My life is so much more efficient since I discovered Cygwin. It's not for Grandma, but for anyone with an inkling of a technical bent it's heaven and 10-100x faster than going thru all the pointy-clicky stuff.
"I printed a test pattern on a piece of plain paper, and taped it to the outside of my south-facing window, so it would be subject to the full measure of California sun and the elements. A month later, the test pattern is still there. In particular, the cyan+magenta+yellow patches show no sign of color shift. Believe me, neither commercial offset printing nor ordinary color prints wouldn hold up nearly so well under these conditions. In fact, the paper is starting to show some signs of degrading, including a slight yellowing and a more brittle-feeling texture."
"So, it's not exactly a scientific test, but I think you can make prints on the 2200 with confidence that your grandchildren will still be able to enjoy them. Highly recommended."
As I mentioned in another post above, I was mistaken not to qualify my statement as "essentially all of mathematics" instead of the rhetorical "all of mathematics" (which I in my haste to post I figured would be simpler for nonmathematicians to understand, but in retrospect it was a judgmental error).
But you are mistaken about the power of the ZF language. Please read the bottom half of page xiv (14 of 192) in the Preface of the "Metamath" book. This will explain how ZFC, with the addition of just one more axiom to result in Tarski-Grothendieck set theory, can do category theory. That this axiom isn't typically included with ZF has nothing to do with it being a hack - it is actually quite beautiful - but has more to do with tradition and the historical definition of what axioms ZF set theory happens to include. Mathematically there's nothing to prevent having the additional axiom all the time as part of the "standard" axiom set, and the mizar.org project does just this. From what I can tell there is nothing that Tarski-Grothendieck set theory can't do that category theory can do.
On the other hand no one, to my knowledge, has come up with a foundational set of category theory axioms that are anywhere near as convenient to work with as ZF-type axioms. In fact even finding them explicitly, precisely, and plainly displayed as a simple axiom system to plonk on top of first-order logic is something I have never seen. (I have seen a couple of systems claimed as such, but they were riddled with problems such as ambiguous rules and implicit definitions that weren't made clear if you actually wanted to start working with them mechanically.) So if category theorists want to have a myth "stomped out of existence" they'll have to do better in terms of making it simply accessible in the same way ZF-type axioms are.
In that case, I believe it consists of :
{} = 0
{{}} = 1
As pure mathematicians like to claim, all of mathematics is derived from the empty set.
That is cute. However you can't get very far with these two axioms. You need some more axioms that will let you build more complex structures starting from the empty set, such as combining them to form pairs, unions, powersets, and so on. You also need to postulate the existence of an infinite set. A quick overview of some of the history behind the axioms, and why they are needed, is given on the Russell paradox page.
Well, strictly speaking the axioms are represented as well-formed formulas (wffs) that aren't displayed in the form of equations on the pages I linked to. But using what is called "class notation" in set theory it is always possible to rewrite a wff with an equivalent expression that has form of an equation. For example: "P(x) imples Q(x)" can be expressed as "{x:P(x)} union {x:Q(x)} = {x:Q(x)}" where "{x:P(x)}" means "the class of sets x such that P(x) is true". Or more generally, any statement P(x) that is true of all sets x (such as any of the axioms) can be rewritten "{x:P(x)} = V" where V stands for {x:x=x} i.e. the universe of all sets. Class notation is an extremely powerful device. Classes need not exist as sets, by the way; the class V above is not a set but is called a "proper class". Does this answer your question?
You are right, I should have said "the axioms of ZFC set theory are generally held to encompass essentially all of mathematics".
The answer is simple. The most beautiful equations, hands down, are those from which all of mathematics can be derived. These are the axioms of ZFC set theory. What could possibly be more beautiful or more important than that? And it's a shame so few people know about them. See Zermelo-Fraenkel Axioms and Metamath Proof Explorer.
My suggestion: why not slash the development cost dramatically by letting the open source community develop it (or continue to refine it from a simplest starting point that provides only a basic video display, so that you can at least sell a working product)?
In other words: just provide a hardware shell, period. Sure, without any proprietary IP, at some point it will become a commodity item that competitors can reproduce at will. But that will take some time, and no competitor will be interested anyway until the volume becomes significant. Until that happens, the hardware shell can be sold at a premium, but probably for a lesser premium than if the cost of developing the Verilog code had to be recouped. And even if it is cloned, by being first you will still have the advantage of the trust that goes along with brand-name recognition.
Albert Einstein never said, "Make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler." Even though it is attributed to him zillions of times on the Internet (and sometimes even in print), there is never a source provided for this attribution. It is one of those myths that never seems to die, like Bill Gates' supposedly saying "640K ought to be enough for anybody."
Of course, you could use MSI repackaging tools for easier deployment through SMS, Group Policy or some other tool, but it's a shame that these vendors haven't realized the market potential and made their products more accessible to corporate IT departments.
Now, to be honest I have no idea what an "MSI repackaging tool" is. Like an RPM packager or something? Maybe someone can explain. Anyway, it sounds like it might be relatively easy for someone who has this tool to do, and (if they're feeling in the spirit) make the package available. Or heck, maybe even sell and support it! It sounds like this might have a major appeal to corporate IT departments, who usually have some money to toss around.
Finally, a search engine that correctly bubbles wikipedia above the spam clones (and read the reply to this post too). Google doesn't even show wikipedia at all on the first page, even if expanded. Kudos, you've won your first (?) customer!
You should actually be thanking your lucky stars your users are smart enough to call you about any such thing they're uncertain of. (Especially with banking software!) One way trojans get installed is when people blindly click "OK" to every box that pops up. If it is irrelevant that they understand what the "OK" box means, then what is the point of popping it up in the first place?
One of the most infuriating things about Google is that when there is a match to a Wikipedia page, there may be dozens of Wikipedia spam clones that show up first. Besides barraging you with unwanted ads, these spam clones are often outdated, and special symbols such as in math formulas tend to be corrupted. Once you suspect your match is in Wikipedia, you often have to do a site-specific search for Wikipedia even to show up on the list.
Wikipedia is important enough that it deserves a special exception to whatever algorithm picks these spam clones first, if that's what it takes to do it. Google ignores this problem in spite of repeated complaints. Fix it, Jeeves, and I'll become a regular visitor.
I wonder why programmers get such a raw deal. When I hire a photographer to take pictures of my wedding, the photographer keeps the copyright, and legally I'm not allowed to make copies of my own picture without paying him/her royalties.
Excellent suggestion. And think hybrid - use voice when voice is fastest. After saying "if-block", the cursor could be positioned at "[condition]" which is highlighted for replacement, either by typing at the keyboard or another voice command. Combine the best of both worlds. The best use might be to start off with a few common macros that you would ordinarily bind to function keys, and voice would allow you to use them without interrupting your normal typing flow to hunt and peck for an awkward meta key combination.
With the current voting system we are effectively stuck with two parties. Someone else mentioned runoff voting. However, much better than simple runoff voting is a related method called Condorcet voting: electionmethods.org. This link should be read by everyone and I think it is what we need to bring into law. Urgently.
On the other hand when I have to work extended hours on a closed source project for hire, I practically have to flog myself into submission to get it done. I have to force myself to get up in the morning. It eats away at my soul that I'm wasting my creativity on something for which I'll receive no (public) credit, no copyright interest and which will forever be hidden away from the world. I'll do a good job because I'm that kind of person, but I know deep down I'm basically doing it for the money, and the stress level can be very, very high.
Of course that is just me. Other people do of course find fulfillment working on closed source projects. Perhaps the recognition from their immediate peers is sufficient. But whatever, the bottom line is that if you're truly passionate about what you're doing you'll never get stressed out.
From an earlier post by me: "...as an employee of said [government] contractor, who wouldn't have any copyright interest in whatever I produce anyway, I think I might be more motivated to produce better work if I knew it would ultimately be subject to public scrutiny and benefit the public good. Compare that to dedicating your life to writing code that will be secreted away in some closed-source product with no acknowledgment whatsoever to you other than a paycheck that lets you survive. The thought of such a dismal and pointless existence is kind of depressing."