Imagine a telephone or email directory with a shrinkwrap license prohibiting the use of the information contained therein for SPAM, marketing calls, or other actions that would infringe on people's privacy.
The license probably would not stop determined spammers, but could possibly provide firmer legal basis for suing those who abuse the privacy of those in the directory.
... the assumption that synthetic diamonds should be considered a "threat".
The people worrying about the "threat" on the show were mostly representatives of De Beers, to whom the significance of "threat" is obvious. The show as a whole was quite positive about the progress of synthetics and concluded with the same question you do: Why would anyone buy a natural diamond if a synthetic of comparable quality and several times the carat weight were available for the same price?
Progress in large gem-quality synthetic diamonds is proceeding so fast that DeBeers is developing quite sophisticated techniques (ultraviolet phosphorescence) to allow jewelers to tell synthetic from natural stones. Perhaps it will not be too long before the "conflict diamond" problem disappears because synthetics displace natural diamonds for most of the market.
When you send one of our diamonds to De Beers, right, the only way they can detect that this is not a natural diamond is really through phosphorescence. They take this, and they put in, they hit it with a UV light, and after the UV light goes off, this thing will phosphoresce for about three to five seconds. That is typical of a synthetic diamond versus a natural diamond.
...
NARRATOR:Faced with the future threat of synthetic diamonds being imperceptible to the trade, De Beers is already preparing its bottom line - one low-tech way to guarantee detection. They are putting minute logos on their diamonds.
STEPHEN LUSSIER: If we can give the consumer a little bit more help in telling him what's a good diamond, that regardless of what they know or what their jeweler knows, De Beers has told them that this diamond is natural from - as it came out of the ground, created by nature billions of years ago and not one that popped out of a machine last Wednesday in Kansas City.
All joking about Win98 stability aside, its just not an OS that is designed to be run in any embedded enviornment.
Well, Hewlett Packard, who has plenty of resources for making the best choice, somehow chose a customized version of Win95 as the embedded OS for their Infiniium line of oscilloscopes (that division has now spun off as Agilent). The newer ones use Win98.
True to form, one of my Win95 scopes now spontaneously reboots every four or five hours, often right in the middle of a measurement. It's not a car, so nobody dies, but if I catch an Agilent developer alone after dark, that may change.
Once by taxation for the reasearch to create a resource and again for that same resource at retail
Sorry, but the government elected by your fellow citizens believes differently. The Bayh-Dole act, which has been law for many years now, actively encourages those receiving government research grants (universities as well as corporations) to patent, copyright, and profit from the fruits of their research.
In the past few years, the New York Times has done a good job or reporting on the number of drugs developed in university labs with government money that have gone on to become billion-dollar products protected by patents and enriching both private pharma companies, the endowment of the universities that discovered them, and the professors in whose labs they were discovered (grad students and postdocs have generally not shared in the windfalls).
I really don't understand all the whingeing about software, when the problems with intellectual property go so much deeper! The question of GPL vs. BSD may be really exciting to people living in the west, but even Bill Gates understands that the role of non-computer-related intellectual property relating to poverty in sub-Saharan Africa dwarfs anything having to do with computers.
Let's see, "reporter tells FBI that terrorists are using multiple credit cards to fraudulently order weapons illegally and FBI does not follow up within half a year." No. No, you're right. It's not news. No citizens would be interested in knowing about this. Might make them feel badly about their government. Let's just tell them happy stories about how effectively we're fighting the "war on terror."
Also, speaking for myself, I'd take a pay cut to work on free software. (I think I could get by on $100K.)
Aside from the question of overhead (loaded vs. takehome), which others have addressed articulately, I would point out that according to Larry, the TOTAL revenue BitKeeper could expect under a GPL business model would be around $150K per year. Given 25 programmer years going into Bitkeeper, this would mean that your $100K per year would be paid out over the next 17 years at a rate of about $6K per year for every year you had worked at BitKeeper (first year, you get $5K, second $10K, third year, $15K, etc., ramping up to a steady rate of $100K per year after 17 years).
It seems that this is conceptually similar to what my telephone company is trying with dial tones and telephone service. They want you to get on the service and pay a fee per month. This way you are subscribed and you don't own the product. You are only "licensed to use it."
The thing is that this is a proven profitable model. Telephone companies make even more money than Ultima and Everquest.
It's even more improper for him to make a blanket ruling that games are not protected speech based on these games
He didn't make a blanket ruling that games are not protected speech. Rather, he ruled that based on the arguments presented to the court, the plaintiff failed to demonstrate that they are protected speech. This leaves room for the court to revisit the issue in another trial, but if the plaintiff wants to argue that video games are speech, and thus different from games such as BINGO, it needs to demonstrate this to the judge.
It's also worth remembering that the question at issue here was whether the games were so clearly protected speech as to justify summary judgment. There was nothing in the appellate ruling to prevent the trial court from ruling that the games were protected speech, based on the details of the specific games at issue.
The problem was that IDA simply failed to put a good argument together. As the Salon article notes, IDA failed to present any real case, neglected to present the judge with games that demonstrate expression of ideas (and hence constitute protected speech), etc.
The four games were on a tape of excerpts submitted by the county of St. Louis(which passed the law). So it's likely all redeeming elements were excised so as to make the games appear as horrible as possible.
Actually, if you read the ruling, the four games were submitted by the plaintiff, Interactive Digital Arts. Theses were the games chosen by IDA as the best examples to prove that video games are protected speech. The problem is that the folks at IDA rotted their brains playing too many video games and forgot how to make a persuasive argument.
It's the plaintiff and the respondant who choose what evidence to present in court. Presumably IDA could have chosen examples such as those mentioned in the Salon article, but chose not to.
It's easy to blame the judge, but he can only rule on the evidence presented in court. From the opinion:
The only
video games given to the Court were those presented by defendants, and the Court simply did not
find the "extensive plot and character development" referred to by the plaintiffs in the games it
viewed. For all of these reasons, the Court finds that plaintiffs failed to meet their burden of
showing that video games are a protected form of speech under the First Amendment.
It would simply be improper for an appellate judge to go out and introduce on his own initiative evidence not submitted by the parties to the original trial (and thus not subjected to review and rebuttal by those parties.)
Another interesting way to look at it is that 2**64 is about 3 millimoles. If you figure one transistor per bit, that's 24 millimoles of transistors.
If you assume a limiting transistor size of about 1000 cubic nanometers (about 50 silicon atoms on a side), this number of transitors would occupy a volume of about 140 liters, not counting interconnects, substrates, and packaging. Not exactly a desktop unit...
On the other hand, if you blindly believe in Moore's law, it would only take a mere 48 years to shrink transistors by a factor of 2**32 to fit 2**64 bytes into your desktop computer.
There are more important things than Windows vs. Linux.
It's not relevant to clustering, do but recall the story in Open Magazine (also discused on/.) a couple of weeks ago reporting that on a single machine, numerically intense code ran about 10% faster on Windows XP than on Linux (compiled with the Intel compiler in both cases).
This speedup is probably irrelevant next to questions of efficient distribution of processing power, but is worth knowing about.
More significant is the finding in the same story that numerically intense code compiled with Intel's compiler ran 47% faster than when compiled with gcc, so you should be looking at getting your hands on some funding to buy the Intel compiler rather than worrying about MS and Windows.
Better compiler optimizations could be worth the price of many nodes in your cluster!
This is the CRIMINAL anti-trust case, not the civil anti-trust case that MS tried to get dismissed by having the education market handed to it.
How do the states have standing to bring a criminal complaint in federal court?
Isn't the U.S. Attorney's office (DOJ) the only source of criminal complaints at the Federal level? The states' attorneys could file criminal complaints in their own states or could file civil complaints in Federal court, but how could the states' attorneys bring a federal criminal charge?
The big problem with using this for LinuxBIOS is that, being write-once, every time a new kernel comes out you have to burn and install a new chip.
Moreover, if you want the whole system on the chip, as you suggest here, then you need to buy, burn, and install a new chip each time you upgrade any piece of the system.
For this reason, flash has many advantages in terms of convenience for BIOSes unless you really want to lock the system down and upgrade only rarely if at all.
For years, we kept hearing about gallium arsenide being the semiconductor of the future but seeing precious few devices that use it extensively (it's great for microwave transistors and you all have it in your cell phones, but who'se seen a GaAs microprocessor?). This led to the standing joke in the condensed-matter physics community that "Gallium arsenide is the material of the future and always will be."
My guess is that the same is true of nanocrystals.
Since the argument above is pure rhetoric and low on substance, I thought I would see how it applied in the hands of an anarchist:
All of this trouble goes back to a more fundamental problem. As Proudhon wrote, property is theft. Think about it:
Start with a plausible point:
People have the right to own property
Second step: government steps in and implements a police state to enforce these so-called "property rights" instead of letting the market provide a solution (mercenaries, private security guards, etc.).
Shortcomings of the laws become obvious: Wealth in the United States is concentrated among a few fortunate people, many of whom did not "earn" it, but inherited from their parents, while many suffer in poverty. The government reacts by saying that it will be OK because the next generation will become wealthy as entrepreneurs in the new economy, and tightens the restrictions on freedom to take things we want, just because they happen to be "someone else's property."
The article does not discusss quantum encryption via satellite. The quantum encryption is via laser at surface level in the desert.
The encryption via satellite that they mention is just the Zong-Rabin hyperencryption system and has nothing to do with quantum encryption. It's just the streaming one-time-pad with the assumption that no one can store the bit stream for long enough to retrospectively break an arbitrary message.
For the last six years or so, almost every major periodical publisher has had boilerplate in their contracts with freelancers providing for digital redistribution. The lawsuit addresses the copyright status for older (pre-1995) contracts, which date from before this matter was considered.
Presumably we will see similar things to Napster, where people can scan in printed articles and share them without paying for them. That is, assuming metallica fans like to read.
You cannot distribute the SDK, or any of its components/examples with Open Source projects
But you can't compile any code without #including headers from the SDK and linking with object libraries from the SDK. This means that anything you do with the SDK cannot be redistributed without redistributing the SDK in part (i.e., with object code from their libraries and code compiled from SDK headers).
Thus, it seems that even if all you do is use CVS to manage your source code, you can't redistribute anything that includes SDK headers or links with SDK object libraries. Tell me what you can redistribute?
Scalia stated in a concurring opinion to Minnesota v. Carter that the fourth amendment protection against unreasonable search and seizure applies only in your own house, or at most in one in which you are an "overnight guest." If you are merely visiting, or worse still, conducting business, then, Scalia claims, the Constitutional "right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures" does not apply to you.
This kind of tortured reasoning has led to an incoherent patchwork of privacy rulings, which provide no clear guidance to law enforcement agents, nor to citizens.
Mr. Goundry, while critiquing Anglo-centricity in thinking about the Web and the Internet as an "unfortunate flaw in Western attitudes" seems to have made the mistake of confusing glyph and character -- an unfortunate flaw in Eastern attitudes that often attends those focussing exclusively on Han characters.
Please pardon me if this is a stupid question, and I would appreciate anyone who can set me straight in my erroneous thinking, but I have always been under the impression that Unicode as it exists had fundamental confusion beteen glyphs and characters even with European languages such as Spanish.
In Castillian Spanish, 'ch' and 'll' are characters that require two glyphs to print. However, for alphabetization purposes, 'ch' and 'll' are distinct characters (A Castillian dictionary has sections 'A' 'B' 'C' 'CH' 'D'... 'K' 'L' 'LL' 'M'...). This makes it a pain to sort Castillian words encoded in ASCII or UNICODE---simple-minded comparison routines that compare character codes report erroneous comparison values because they doesn't realize that 'cg' < 'cj' <... < 'cz' < 'ch'. Of course, the proper way to have done this would have been for Unicode to allocate a 'ch' character code between 'c' and 'd' and an 'll' code between 'l' and 'm', but Unicode seems more preoccupied with glyphs than with characters.
If I am wrong here, I would love to be set straight by someone better informed.
Slashdot Mirror
The license probably would not stop determined spammers, but could possibly provide firmer legal basis for suing those who abuse the privacy of those in the directory.
The people worrying about the "threat" on the show were mostly representatives of De Beers, to whom the significance of "threat" is obvious. The show as a whole was quite positive about the progress of synthetics and concluded with the same question you do: Why would anyone buy a natural diamond if a synthetic of comparable quality and several times the carat weight were available for the same price?
Opals are very fragile, so they're not practical to weak around every day, as diamonds are --- they tend to chip and fall apart.
A good account of the state of the art two years ago can be found in the transcript of a NOVA show on diamond synthesis: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/transcripts/2703diamo nd.html
Well, Hewlett Packard, who has plenty of resources for making the best choice, somehow chose a customized version of Win95 as the embedded OS for their Infiniium line of oscilloscopes (that division has now spun off as Agilent). The newer ones use Win98.
True to form, one of my Win95 scopes now spontaneously reboots every four or five hours, often right in the middle of a measurement. It's not a car, so nobody dies, but if I catch an Agilent developer alone after dark, that may change.
So look at cvsnt. It meets your requirements:
Sorry, but the government elected by your fellow citizens believes differently. The Bayh-Dole act, which has been law for many years now, actively encourages those receiving government research grants (universities as well as corporations) to patent, copyright, and profit from the fruits of their research.
In the past few years, the New York Times has done a good job or reporting on the number of drugs developed in university labs with government money that have gone on to become billion-dollar products protected by patents and enriching both private pharma companies, the endowment of the universities that discovered them, and the professors in whose labs they were discovered (grad students and postdocs have generally not shared in the windfalls).
I really don't understand all the whingeing about software, when the problems with intellectual property go so much deeper! The question of GPL vs. BSD may be really exciting to people living in the west, but even Bill Gates understands that the role of non-computer-related intellectual property relating to poverty in sub-Saharan Africa dwarfs anything having to do with computers.
Let's see, "reporter tells FBI that terrorists are using multiple credit cards to fraudulently order weapons illegally and FBI does not follow up within half a year." No. No, you're right. It's not news. No citizens would be interested in knowing about this. Might make them feel badly about their government. Let's just tell them happy stories about how effectively we're fighting the "war on terror."
Aside from the question of overhead (loaded vs. takehome), which others have addressed articulately, I would point out that according to Larry, the TOTAL revenue BitKeeper could expect under a GPL business model would be around $150K per year. Given 25 programmer years going into Bitkeeper, this would mean that your $100K per year would be paid out over the next 17 years at a rate of about $6K per year for every year you had worked at BitKeeper (first year, you get $5K, second $10K, third year, $15K, etc., ramping up to a steady rate of $100K per year after 17 years).
Would you still make this choice?
It seems that this is conceptually similar to what my telephone company is trying with dial tones and telephone service. They want you to get on the service and pay a fee per month. This way you are subscribed and you don't own the product. You are only "licensed to use it."
The thing is that this is a proven profitable model. Telephone companies make even more money than Ultima and Everquest.
He didn't make a blanket ruling that games are not protected speech. Rather, he ruled that based on the arguments presented to the court, the plaintiff failed to demonstrate that they are protected speech. This leaves room for the court to revisit the issue in another trial, but if the plaintiff wants to argue that video games are speech, and thus different from games such as BINGO, it needs to demonstrate this to the judge.
It's also worth remembering that the question at issue here was whether the games were so clearly protected speech as to justify summary judgment. There was nothing in the appellate ruling to prevent the trial court from ruling that the games were protected speech, based on the details of the specific games at issue.
The problem was that IDA simply failed to put a good argument together. As the Salon article notes, IDA failed to present any real case, neglected to present the judge with games that demonstrate expression of ideas (and hence constitute protected speech), etc.
Actually, if you read the ruling, the four games were submitted by the plaintiff, Interactive Digital Arts. Theses were the games chosen by IDA as the best examples to prove that video games are protected speech. The problem is that the folks at IDA rotted their brains playing too many video games and forgot how to make a persuasive argument.
It's easy to blame the judge, but he can only rule on the evidence presented in court. From the opinion:
It would simply be improper for an appellate judge to go out and introduce on his own initiative evidence not submitted by the parties to the original trial (and thus not subjected to review and rebuttal by those parties.)If you assume a limiting transistor size of about 1000 cubic nanometers (about 50 silicon atoms on a side), this number of transitors would occupy a volume of about 140 liters, not counting interconnects, substrates, and packaging. Not exactly a desktop unit...
On the other hand, if you blindly believe in Moore's law, it would only take a mere 48 years to shrink transistors by a factor of 2**32 to fit 2**64 bytes into your desktop computer.
There are more important things than Windows vs. Linux.
/.) a couple of weeks ago reporting that on a single machine, numerically intense code ran about 10% faster on Windows XP than on Linux (compiled with the Intel compiler in both cases).
It's not relevant to clustering, do but recall the story in Open Magazine (also discused on
This speedup is probably irrelevant next to questions of efficient distribution of processing power, but is worth knowing about.
More significant is the finding in the same story that numerically intense code compiled with Intel's compiler ran 47% faster than when compiled with gcc, so you should be looking at getting your hands on some funding to buy the Intel compiler rather than worrying about MS and Windows.
Better compiler optimizations could be worth the price of many nodes in your cluster!
This is the CRIMINAL anti-trust case, not the civil anti-trust case that MS tried to get dismissed by having the education market handed to it.
How do the states have standing to bring a criminal complaint in federal court?
Isn't the U.S. Attorney's office (DOJ) the only source of criminal complaints at the Federal level? The states' attorneys could file criminal complaints in their own states or could file civil complaints in Federal court, but how could the states' attorneys bring a federal criminal charge?
The big problem with using this for LinuxBIOS is that, being write-once, every time a new kernel comes out you have to burn and install a new chip.
Moreover, if you want the whole system on the chip, as you suggest here, then you need to buy, burn, and install a new chip each time you upgrade any piece of the system.
For this reason, flash has many advantages in terms of convenience for BIOSes unless you really want to lock the system down and upgrade only rarely if at all.
My guess is that the same is true of nanocrystals.
All of this trouble goes back to a more fundamental problem. As Proudhon wrote, property is theft. Think about it:
Start with a plausible point:
People have the right to own property
Second step: government steps in and implements a police state to enforce these so-called "property rights" instead of letting the market provide a solution (mercenaries, private security guards, etc.).
Shortcomings of the laws become obvious: Wealth in the United States is concentrated among a few fortunate people, many of whom did not "earn" it, but inherited from their parents, while many suffer in poverty. The government reacts by saying that it will be OK because the next generation will become wealthy as entrepreneurs in the new economy, and tightens the restrictions on freedom to take things we want, just because they happen to be "someone else's property."
The encryption via satellite that they mention is just the Zong-Rabin hyperencryption system and has nothing to do with quantum encryption. It's just the streaming one-time-pad with the assumption that no one can store the bit stream for long enough to retrospectively break an arbitrary message.
Presumably we will see similar things to Napster, where people can scan in printed articles and share them without paying for them. That is, assuming metallica fans like to read.
But you can't compile any code without #including headers from the SDK and linking with object libraries from the SDK. This means that anything you do with the SDK cannot be redistributed without redistributing the SDK in part (i.e., with object code from their libraries and code compiled from SDK headers).
Thus, it seems that even if all you do is use CVS to manage your source code, you can't redistribute anything that includes SDK headers or links with SDK object libraries. Tell me what you can redistribute?
This kind of tortured reasoning has led to an incoherent patchwork of privacy rulings, which provide no clear guidance to law enforcement agents, nor to citizens.
Please pardon me if this is a stupid question, and I would appreciate anyone who can set me straight in my erroneous thinking, but I have always been under the impression that Unicode as it exists had fundamental confusion beteen glyphs and characters even with European languages such as Spanish.
In Castillian Spanish, 'ch' and 'll' are characters that require two glyphs to print. However, for alphabetization purposes, 'ch' and 'll' are distinct characters (A Castillian dictionary has sections 'A' 'B' 'C' 'CH' 'D' ... 'K' 'L' 'LL' 'M' ...). This makes it a pain to sort Castillian words encoded in ASCII or UNICODE---simple-minded comparison routines that compare character codes report erroneous comparison values because they doesn't realize that 'cg' < 'cj' < ... < 'cz' < 'ch'. Of course, the proper way to have done this would have been for Unicode to allocate a 'ch' character code between 'c' and 'd' and an 'll' code between 'l' and 'm', but Unicode seems more preoccupied with glyphs than with characters.
If I am wrong here, I would love to be set straight by someone better informed.