Ah...but it's STILL interpreted. And, if you're thinking it isn't...
No, it isn't.
.you might want to learn a little bit about what a JIT really is.
You might want to read about computer science from somewhere other than wikipedia, from which you quoted.
The difficulty here is that modern VMs blur the distinction between compilers and interpreters. Even the IBM Java VM released in 1999 had "selective compilation" where it would compile frequently-used methods and interpret others:
The IBM Jit compiler and JVM allow efficient mixed-mode execution of interpreted and JIT-generated code by sharing... The notion of mixed execution of interpretation and compiled code was considered as a continuous compier or smart JIT approach in Plezbert and Cytron.
Nevertheless, the original comment was quite incorrect to refer to it as just an "interpreted system."
A JIT does a final compilation of select pieces, just in time, but NOT all of the codebase at once- and if you asked an "old-school" computer scientist, they'd tell you it was a hybrid interpreter.
Whether or not you compile the codebase all at once or separately in pieces is not what determines whether you're interpreting or compiling.
without considering GC loading and similar issues. In short, it's still interpreted, it still has GC related performance issues.. Might not get enough of one or too much of one depending on when GC kicked in.
I don't know why you're bringing up GC, since that has nothing to do with it. Many compiled languages have GCs available as libraries.
. This runtime is where the source code of an application is compiled into an intermediate language called CIL , originally known as MSIL (Microsoft Intermediate Language)... the CIL code is [then] translated into the native code of the operating system using a... compiler.
From your post:
You've been writing.net for how long and you didn't know it was interpreted bytecode?
Don't worry, just hide behind your newspaper. That will be all you need to stop alpha particle radiation.
The Americium in smoke detectors is already shielded which prevents any meaningful amount of radiation from escaping. Even if radiation did escape, alpha particles are blocked by a few inches of air.
Now after the Americium-241 degrades into Cm or plutonium, that is another matter. For the neutron radiation a good thick wall of lead should do it.
Am-241 degrades into Neptunium 237, which is also an alpha emitter, and which is much less radioactive than the Am-241 it replaces.
IANAL, but I don't think he has a leg to stand on. His claim appears baseless to me.
Everyplace I've worked has an employment agreement which all coders must sign, and which cedes all rights to all software they develop during the term of their employment. Such agreements usually contain a way for new hires to declare pre-existing projects they were working on beforehand, but I'm presuming that he never declared this project. In which case, the software belongs to the company entirely and they can do whatever they want with it.
The code author may have been a contractor rather than an employee (it's hard to tell because he omits important details on his blog). If he was a contractor, then he still signed an agreement with the company, and whatever he did is still their property.
It even seems possible that they can revoke the GPL license if they wish. He says on his blog: "We had always used open source, so it was high time we became a contributor!" which suggests that he made the decision to attach a GPL license by himself, on his own authority, even though he was not the copyright holder. In which case, the GPL license document was invalid, and the software was never really licensed under GPL. Especially if he was a contractor, in which case no employee of the company has ever released the software as GPL, or attached a GPL license document to it.
Of course I'm not a lawyer and he should hire one if he wishes to pursue this, but if I were him I'd just drop it.
You didn't read the article, did you? Author was contracted, not employed;
I read the article, and it said nothing of the sort. It said: "I was terminated from a company that I worked day and night for..." which seems to imply that he was an employee there, because he was terminated, and you can't terminate someone who isn't an employee. If he was a contractor then he was never terminated because he never worked there; it's not possible to terminate a contractor; you just stop using them.
The article says nothing whatsoever about whether he was an employee or contractor, or exactly what his relationship was to that company, or whether the project was done on his own time.
I'm not meaning to sound argumentative, but I just can't make any sense out of what you're saying at all.
To me, it seems very reasonable to increase gas taxes rather than impose efficiency standards.
Not everyone buys that gas guzzler because they don't care about the environment...a LOT of people buy whatever they can afford.
Gas guzzlers are cheaper to own? Poor people buy them because that's all they can afford? You're saying that poor people wanted to buy used hyundai elantras, but the cost of ownership was so much higher than for an enormous SUV?
We need all the poor people that can't afford a decent car to get raped on gas prices.
But it's better to "rape" them on the upfront cost?
I bought my aunt's old SUV because she sold it to me cheap and I could pay her directly without interest. Did I WANT an SUV? Fuck no, but you know what, I needed a car NOW that I knew worked and I didn't have tons of money to do it
You bought an SUV because you thought that was the cheapest option? Why didn't you buy a used subcompact for $1500?
The amount of money you'll spend for the extra gasoline for that SUV might buy you a good used subcompact 5 times over, depending on how long you keep it and what kind of SUV it is.
Yeah, cars might get more expensive, but I think you paying more for a new car is considerably better than being immediately screwed by gas prices doubling.
Why? If you're poor, why is it so much better to have to pay an entire additional cost upfront?
Besides, if gas prices double, you're not "immediately screwed". You're only immediately screwed by CAFE standards which require you to buy expensive equipment upfront, all at once.
If they raised the price to 6 dollars today, you know what I'd do? I'd have to pay 6 dollars a gallon.
Yes, but if we increased gas taxes so it costed $6, then we could either: 1) reduce the deficit with the additional revenues, which lowers the long-term income tax bill of everyone in the long run, or 2) lower taxes elsewhere immediately, like sales taxes, while keeping the deficit the same, so poor people are neither better off, nor worse off.
Whats wrong with government spending money to create jobs?
It doesn't work under any circumstances. To create a job, the government must increase taxes, so consumers have less money to spend on consumer goods, so consumers then buy less, and the result is a job is destroyed somewhere else. Government taxation moves jobs from one sector to another (consumer goods to government-provided services). If the service provided by taxation wouldn't have been provided by the market, then it might be worthwhile, but only for the sake of what is gained by it (i.e. research, etc) and not for the sake of jobs.
The only way the government can create jobs is during a downturn, by running a deficit, and this is only if you believe in the Keynesian argument of sticky wages and inadequate aggregate demand. Running a deficit need not be used to create jobs directly; the money can be given to consumers to buy things.
The federal reserve doesn't require assets to make loans. It can create dollars out of thin air, then deposit or loan those dollars. Whereas private banks must take money from elsewhere when making a deposit or loan, the fed can write a check for any amount, and that check draws upon nothing and doesn't deduct money from any other account when it's deposited.
What I don't understand is going from 7 to 8 billion people increases food requirements by 50%?
The world population is getting wealthier rapidly. Wealthier people consume more meat, which requires us to feed animals, which requires higher food production to feed the same number of people. Let me explain.
Meat production is not calorically efficient. It takes 5+ calories of grain (fed to an animal) to produce 1 calorie of meat. Beef is particularly bad; a cow must eat 10 calories of corn to yield one calorie of beef. Therefore, if we all ate nothing but beef, we would have to produce 10x the amount of grains per day for the same number of beef calories.
As people get wealthier, they eat more meat, which causes a greater caloric loss, which requires much more grain production to feed the same number of people.
Storage is built in, works 24 hours a day 365 days a year
CSP doesn't store enough energy for consistent baseload power for 365 days per year.
CSP stores energy in the form of molten salt. That's enough energy for the coming night time, but not enough to last even a few days. Even if you built enormous molten salt containers, they would be useless beyond a week or two because they are always leaking heat and energy.
The problem is cloud clover. Sometimes there's a succession of cloudy days lasting weeks at a time. Energy production drops to almost zero with CSP when it's overcast, and can remain zero for weeks. This problem would be very difficult to overcome using molten salt storage, because the duration of outage is very inconsistent.
About 3% of the Sahara will power all of western Europe easily.
That claim is based upon the theoretical maximum potential of CSP, which is not the relevant statistic. There is clearly enough sunlight falling on the deserts of planet earth, to greatly exceed our energy demands, but the problem is cost. CSP is several times more expensive than other forms of energy generation. Furthermore, we can't expect drastic reductions in cost because it's already a mature technology involving things like steam turbines and mirrors which have already been produced for more than a century. It's quite possible that greater mechanization in the deployment of solar troughs or things like that, would lead to considerable reductions in cost, but even matching the price of nuclear is a long way away.
Of course it's possible to generate almost all our electricity using CSP and various forms of storage. We could use CSP for energy generation, plus molten salt for nighttime storage, plus pumped storage for successions of several cloudy days, plus peaker natural gas turbines for the rare circumstances where you have long periods of continuous cloudy days and all storage runs out. That combination would be sufficient to provide reliable baseload power. However the cost of electricty (according to a back-of-the-envelope calculation I'm doing in my head) would be more than $0.30/KwH busbar. That is several times higher than the price we pay now.
I'm going to assume you're not just trolling or joking here.
The U.S. economy has absolutely collapsed...
A large part of the problem with lefty-oriented rhetoric is that it so often employs absurd exaggerations, when the speaker knows full well that what he is saying is false, and he knows he will be immediately refuted by anyone with two eyes. An earlier post on this thread (to which I responded) claimed that people in the deep south could barely afford shoes and that the situation was worsening. This will lead to a credibility problem if we don't see vast numbers of barefoot people in Mississippi in 2 years' time.
Where have you been for the past four years?
Where have you been for the past four years? Apparently living in your imagination. In the real world, the economy has not collapsed and essential services are still all delivered. We are undergoing a recession.
They did have a lot of manufacturing, but that has since been shipped off to Asian nations or Mexico.
The deep south continues to gain manufacturing.
Many poor in the Deep South only have a refrigerator because their parents or even grandparents bought it in the 1970s, when Americans still had jobs, and Americans still produced appliances that lasted more than a couple of years.
The average wage in Mississippi is about $35,000/yr, whereas a refrigerator costs about $1,000.
Newer refrigerators use less than half the electricity of ones from the 1970s for an equivalent volume. As a result it would be cheaper, by far, to buy a newer refrigerator than to operate an old one. Anyone who could pay for a refrigerator from 1970, could more easily pay for a recent one.
It's much the same situation when it comes to vehicles. Many of them are driving cars that were manufactured in the 1970s and 1980s, when vehicles were still made in America, and when they were far more reliable than they are today.
I assume that you're a young person or don't remember how unreliable American cars from the 1970s were.
They have shoes merely because shoes are an item that can be produced extremely cheaply in third-world countries, and even cost only $2 to $5 in the US.
Are you joking? People in the deep south can easily afford shoes. Since the average wage in Mississippi is about $35,000/yr, as I said above, they could afford shoes which cost $120 and are manufactured in the U.S.
The near-antiques being used by so many in the Deep South will break down soon... They won't be able to afford new items, either, and likely won't even be able to afford heavily-used items being sold second-, third- or even fourth-hand.
The price of a car in inflation-adjusted terms has risen about 40% since the 1950s, but a recent car lasts about twice as long as a car from that era. As a result the per-mile cost of a car has fallen slightly in real terms in past decades. If they could afford a car back then, they can afford one now, since the mean wage increased in that in the mean time, especially during the 1970s.
What's starting in the Deep South will spread to the rest of the US. It may take a while, but it will eventually reach the more civilized parts of the nation.
The deep south has gotten richer, not poorer, over time.
Solar scientists have raised the prospect of a new maunder minimum before, and they were mistaken. But they could easily be correct this time. What happens in the sun is apparently still theoretical.
Yes, there is intellectual knowledge to be obtained exclusively from college and nowhere else.
I went to college, and I got several different undergraduate degrees (comp sci, philosophy, psychology). I didn't learn anything during college that I couldn't have learned elsewhere. To be more specific, I could've learned everything I learned in college, by visiting college bookstores, buying textbooks, reading them, and doing all the exercises. That and a few hours of tutoring would have conveyed as much knowledge to me, at far lesser cost, than going to college did.
Outside of it, you're pretty much on your own. Nobody will be willing to explain a paper (and trust me, math papers, especially the good ones, are pretty fucking obscure)... The other part is the contacts and networking aspect, which you readily dismiss without a second thought. The ones who've done good work outside of academia have only been able to do so because they've had the necessary background, training, and *contacts* within the academia to help them out
I grant that there is a social network within the university setting, which will place you in contact with experts in various fields. However that becomes important only when you've reached a very high level already. Most undergraduates (in fact almost all of them) are not on the "bleeding edge" of some complex discipline. They would never need to contact some important mathematician directly. That kind of social contact isn't necessary if you're taking a calculus 2 course. (If we ever reached the point that undergraduates were contacting important mathematicians directly then the whole system would break down).
However, it's still probably helpful to go to college, for several reasons. You can discuss things with other intellectual people. You can talk to people knowledgeable in a field even if you don't have bleeding-edge questions. You can participate in various kinds of debates, if only by listening.
That said, these benefits of college are not in any way commensurate with the amount of money you spend. All that's necessary for such social interaction is for smart people with different intellectual backgrounds to have an environment in which they can study and interact, and in which professors can make enough money to support themselves. I believe that that could be provided for about 1/4th the amount of money that colleges typically charge now. Nobody should go to the outrageously expensive colleges out there.
The cost of many colleges today is outrageous and unjustified. Undergraduates are indenturing themselves for the rest of their lives, by taking out horrendously large loans. Most of those undergraduates are un-intellectual and are going to college only to improve their career prospects. They're being badly misled if they believe that spending a lot of money on college will mean they'll make a lot of money in the future. And they won't get the kind of education you spoke of. That can't just be bought.
HOWEVER, if you get a reputation for paying off, you attract MORE trolls. This would be known as a 'second order effect'. IE if you don't have a rep for settling, you might get sued once a year. Get a rep for settling, and you might get 100.
Your claim is that paying trolls will encourage them and so will lose more money in the long run. This opinion is what basically everyone here says. The subsequent comments basically all agree with you on this point.
I'm faily certain this claim is mistaken. Bear in mind that if you don't pay trolls and say "we'll never pay trolls," then you'll be taken to court and will lose some fraction of the time, say 10%. (I know this because I've recently reviewed patent troll lawsuits when settlement is refused, and the troll lawsuits are successful about 10% of the time). Now assume two companies, one which routinely pays trolls 10% of the settlement amount, and another which never pays them and loses 10% of the time, and must pay 10x the settlement amount once every 10 times. In both cases the patent troll makes the same amount of money and couldn't care less what the CEO says.
The only way trolls would have an incentive to sue you, is if you settle for too much; i.e., more than the average of what they would recover through lawsuits minus legal costs. However, if you offer too little as a settlement (or nothing at all) then you get sued and lose more on average, because you must pay the rational settlement amount (which is average amount that the lawsuit would recover) plus legal fees. The trick is to know how likely a particular patent lawsuit is to succeed. Just saying "we'll never settle" won't discourage anyone, because they can always sue you and try to get money, whether you settle or not.
This is nothing like a schoolyard bully who will be incentivized to attack you, if you pay. In that case, paying the bully (settling) is the only way the bully can get any money, so he will go after only those who settle. In this case, however, the bully can get your money anyway, through a court system, even if you don't settle.
If the court system never paid out on frivolous claims (not even 10% of the time), then you should never settle. In that case, nobody would settle because everyone would have figured that out by now.
The patent troll will assume that all companies will pay when doing so is less expensive than going to court, because the trolls correctly assume that it's rational behavior.
There is also another claim made in various comments here, as follows. By making public comments, the CEO will "draw attention" from trolls. This claim also seems incorrect. Trolls do research on which products could possibly violate their patent portfolio. Trolls will sue all companies when the payout will likely exceed the legal costs, regardless of what the CEO has said. In no way will CEO comments "draw attention" of patent trolls. Again, this is not like a schoolyard bully. Whereas the schoolyard bully might not see you if you remain silent, these companies have $100bn in revenues and cannot remain unnoticed. Patent trolls pay researchers to look into all public companies. Patent trolls have heard of companies like Microsoft or Red Hat, even if their CEOs remain silent.
Are you a shill for the nuclear industry? An astroturfer?
I hope you're joking... Your ad hominem is not even correct or plausible...
And if you replaced all of the coal-fired power plants around the world with nuclear, how many accidents do you think we would be having annually?
Try using Arithmetic. There have been ~400 Western nuclear reactors operating for ~40 years and there have been two meltdowns, one in TMI and another at Fukushima (this doesn't include research reactors or Chernobyl, since those are not under consideration here and we obviously wouldn't replace coal burning plants with those). The 400 reactors generate about 20% of worldwide electricity, whereas coal generates 60%, so we would need ~4x as many nuclear plants, to replace all the coal burning plants with nuclear in addition to our current nuclear capacity. How many meltdowns would there be, per year...
Of course that's leaving out the fact that newer reactors have a large number of safety features to prevent what happened at Fukushima and TMI.
Fucking moron.
You are by far the biggest idiot who has posted here, which is saying a lot.
If your father happend to become a multi billonair, ofc you are "payed" from the interest his fortune generates.
You can still do this if your father was a multimillionaire based upon artistic recordings (ie The Beatles) and passed the money on to you. If we extend copyright too far then the heirs get their monetary inheritance and interest plus current income based upon the sale of work. It is the latter which I'm arguing against here.
While your post has a lot of sense: a hugh amount of/. posters who are opposing copyright (or any similar thing) are only apposing it to be able to freely copy/download shit.
I'm definitely not suggesting that we should get rid of copyright or that IP works should all be free. I realize some people think that, but I definitely don't. Artistic producers and intellectual producers must also be able to sell their wares and make a living from their work. It's only the term of copyright I'm objecting to.
You know that perhaps 90% of all creators never get payed for anything they do because they are not "discovered" by a publisher who has an idea how to make money from it?
This is true, but it wouldn't be any different if the term of copyright were longer than 30 years.
If you say 30 years is enough then I only archive everything that I can find and after 30 years I decide on my own terms how to mak money form it.
You wouldn't be able to make much money from it, because it would be in the public domain at that point and everyone could download a copy for free. It would be hard to charge money for things which are freely available.
My hieres don't care if their father worked 45 years on a ship, house, lumping wood and the family is as poor as mice in the church or if he worked on a great opera that unfortunately only got "popular" after his death... In your idea my hieres deserve nothing. I find that wrong.
I don't think very many artists are discovered 45 years after they produced their work. Usually, if 45 years have passed then the work has been forgotten.
Honestly I don't see why the children or grandchildren of some artist should continue to be paid for labor that was performed over 30 years ago. I am not paid for my father's labor in the 1970s. It would be one thing if the artist made a lot of money and passed along some of his money. But here, the heirs would continue to draw income for something they had no hand in producing, in addition to whatever inheritance they received. Bear in mind that consumers must pay to support the heirs' income, so your example of "a family as poor as mice" might be the family of consumers who listen to music and must pay for it.
I grant that perhaps there should be some exception for artistic productions which have extremely meager sales initially or are obscure, and then suddenly are "discovered" decades later. In that case perhaps the date of discovery should mark the beginning of the 30 year period.
30 years is sufficient, for two reasons. First, 30 years is sufficient time for an artist to receive payment, for most of his working career, as a result of some artistic production he created. Second, 30 years is long enough that the "net present discounted value" (at a 5% discount rate) of anything after 30 years is negligible. As a result, record companies will not make investments or produce anything or change their investment behavior now because of payments to be received after 30 years in the future.
Remember that intellectual property is not "property" in the normal sense. It cannot be stolen, for example, but only copied. Intellectual property is a construct, whereby the producers of intellectual content can be compensated for their labor. 30 years is enough time for people to be compensated for their labor, and is longer than the investment horizon of companies.
The latest planning games show that all nuclear plants can be replaced by renewables till 2020.
Even if this optimistic goal were met, it would mean retaining the coal-burning capacity which Germany has at present. It would mean spending alot of money over a decade to keep Germany's massive c02 emissions for electricity the same.
Of course we get the majourity of energy from coal burning. What did you think?
Angelosphere, you're talking in favor of nuclear power and saying that renewables could fill in the gap completely, then you say that "of course" Germany gets the majority of its energy from coal burning.
What did I think? I thought you were claiming that renewables were successful and adequate. Wind power gets enormous economic incentives and subsidies in Germany (including feed-in tariffs and other things). If renewables are sufficient, then why does Germany "of course" generate most of its energy using coal burning, after all this time.
Regarding the phasing out and the greeness... germany never as green... That is a misconception. Now we have for the first time that a green party member "won" an election. That happened yesterday!!
I'm certainly hesitant to disagree with you about the politics of your own country. I only read about it, whereas you live it. However, according to the english wikipedia article on the German green party, the greens have 11% of the seats in the Bundestag. Also, my friends from Germany who were studying at the university near me all claimed that environmentalism was much more prominent in Germany than elsewhere, particularly more prominent than in the USA. Also, according to news sources Germany has tremendous economic incentives and subsidies for wind power. This raises the question of why coal burning is still so prominent there.
That does not fit with the explanations in the news.
The news claimed that AC power lines were disabled during the earthquake, then the generators turned on, then the generators were disabled by the Tsunami. This is consistent with what I wrote.
And to the east is the sea anyway, so I wonder to which power line you refer.
I meant to say to the west; I typed the wrong thing on accident.
If you look at the satellite images of Fukushima from before the accident, you will see 3 sets of high-voltage power lines coming from the west. They were disabled by the earthquake. That is why the Japanese authorities have had to lay new power cables across more than 1 kilometer to Fukushima, to replace the ones which fell down in the earthquake.
All nuclear reactors in OECD countries have redundant high-voltage power lines coming in from the outside, because nuclear reactors require outside power to continue cooling operations during shutdown, at least nuclear reactors of the kind currently in operation. This outside power is normally taken from the grid during shutdown. However if the grid is unavailable, then they use the backup generators. They have many backup generators, because a total loss of station power (called "station blackout") is considered a very serious problem by itself in this kind of reactor. As we know, all the backup generators in Fukushima were in the same place and were submerged by the Tsunami.
Anyway my point is that people repeat the myth the plant had survived a 9.0 quake, while it in fact was hit perhaps by 6.0 or even less.
The earthquake was sufficient to cause severe shaking in Tokyo which is much further away. Bear in mind that when a city is destroyed by a large earthquake, it's very rare that the epicenter was actually right below the city.
Gatkinso, breeder reactors allow us to get 100x more energy out of uranium than we are getting at present. Furthermore, they would allow us to burn the U-238 which is a component of our nuclear waste, and that by itself would provide enough Uranium for over 1000 years. Furthermore, breeder reactors would allow us to mine economically the sparse uranium deposits in Granite which would provide enough Uranium for millions of years.
With slow neutron reactors, we will eventually run out of Uranium, but with fast neutron reactors we have enough practically forever.
I mean... do you think Uranium or Thorium grow in trees?
cowboy, there is a big difference in scale between coal mining and uranium mining. Uranium contains more than 1 million times as much energy for a given unit of volume, as coal. As a result, all the uranium in the world is mined out of a very small number of mines, all of which are physically quite small and many of which are surface mines. Obviously the number of deaths from Uranium mining is not zero (and certainly wasn't in the 1950s before they realized that we need to vent radon gas from underground mines), but we must keep in mind the scale of it.
A single event, the tsunami, caused 3 reactors to fail so badly they nearly melted down. One is still at the edge of melting down.
No, a single event did not cause the reactors to fail. First there was an earthquake which, despite being 150 miles away, destroyed all of 3 high-voltage lines supplying Fukushima with backup power. Then the earthquake damaged equipment in the reactors. Then there was a tsunami which submerged all of the 13 backup generators.
If there were only a tsunami, then the high-voltage lines going into Fukushima from the east would not have fallen down and the station would not have lost power.
Slashdot Mirror
No, it isn't.
You might want to read about computer science from somewhere other than wikipedia, from which you quoted.
The difficulty here is that modern VMs blur the distinction between compilers and interpreters. Even the IBM Java VM released in 1999 had "selective compilation" where it would compile frequently-used methods and interpret others:
Nevertheless, the original comment was quite incorrect to refer to it as just an "interpreted system."
Whether or not you compile the codebase all at once or separately in pieces is not what determines whether you're interpreting or compiling.
I don't know why you're bringing up GC, since that has nothing to do with it. Many compiled languages have GCs available as libraries.
Did you read the wikipedia article you cited?
From the wikipedia article:
From your post:
You have no idea what you're talking about.
I assume you're kidding, but no.
The Americium in smoke detectors is already shielded which prevents any meaningful amount of radiation from escaping. Even if radiation did escape, alpha particles are blocked by a few inches of air.
Am-241 degrades into Neptunium 237, which is also an alpha emitter, and which is much less radioactive than the Am-241 it replaces.
IANAL, but I don't think he has a leg to stand on. His claim appears baseless to me.
Everyplace I've worked has an employment agreement which all coders must sign, and which cedes all rights to all software they develop during the term of their employment. Such agreements usually contain a way for new hires to declare pre-existing projects they were working on beforehand, but I'm presuming that he never declared this project. In which case, the software belongs to the company entirely and they can do whatever they want with it.
The code author may have been a contractor rather than an employee (it's hard to tell because he omits important details on his blog). If he was a contractor, then he still signed an agreement with the company, and whatever he did is still their property.
It even seems possible that they can revoke the GPL license if they wish. He says on his blog: "We had always used open source, so it was high time we became a contributor!" which suggests that he made the decision to attach a GPL license by himself, on his own authority, even though he was not the copyright holder. In which case, the GPL license document was invalid, and the software was never really licensed under GPL. Especially if he was a contractor, in which case no employee of the company has ever released the software as GPL, or attached a GPL license document to it.
Of course I'm not a lawyer and he should hire one if he wishes to pursue this, but if I were him I'd just drop it.
I read the article, and it said nothing of the sort. It said: "I was terminated from a company that I worked day and night for..." which seems to imply that he was an employee there, because he was terminated, and you can't terminate someone who isn't an employee. If he was a contractor then he was never terminated because he never worked there; it's not possible to terminate a contractor; you just stop using them.
The article says nothing whatsoever about whether he was an employee or contractor, or exactly what his relationship was to that company, or whether the project was done on his own time.
I'm not meaning to sound argumentative, but I just can't make any sense out of what you're saying at all.
To me, it seems very reasonable to increase gas taxes rather than impose efficiency standards.
Gas guzzlers are cheaper to own? Poor people buy them because that's all they can afford? You're saying that poor people wanted to buy used hyundai elantras, but the cost of ownership was so much higher than for an enormous SUV?
But it's better to "rape" them on the upfront cost?
You bought an SUV because you thought that was the cheapest option? Why didn't you buy a used subcompact for $1500?
The amount of money you'll spend for the extra gasoline for that SUV might buy you a good used subcompact 5 times over, depending on how long you keep it and what kind of SUV it is.
Why? If you're poor, why is it so much better to have to pay an entire additional cost upfront?
Besides, if gas prices double, you're not "immediately screwed". You're only immediately screwed by CAFE standards which require you to buy expensive equipment upfront, all at once.
Yes, but if we increased gas taxes so it costed $6, then we could either: 1) reduce the deficit with the additional revenues, which lowers the long-term income tax bill of everyone in the long run, or 2) lower taxes elsewhere immediately, like sales taxes, while keeping the deficit the same, so poor people are neither better off, nor worse off.
It doesn't work under any circumstances. To create a job, the government must increase taxes, so consumers have less money to spend on consumer goods, so consumers then buy less, and the result is a job is destroyed somewhere else. Government taxation moves jobs from one sector to another (consumer goods to government-provided services). If the service provided by taxation wouldn't have been provided by the market, then it might be worthwhile, but only for the sake of what is gained by it (i.e. research, etc) and not for the sake of jobs.
The only way the government can create jobs is during a downturn, by running a deficit, and this is only if you believe in the Keynesian argument of sticky wages and inadequate aggregate demand. Running a deficit need not be used to create jobs directly; the money can be given to consumers to buy things.
The federal reserve doesn't require assets to make loans. It can create dollars out of thin air, then deposit or loan those dollars. Whereas private banks must take money from elsewhere when making a deposit or loan, the fed can write a check for any amount, and that check draws upon nothing and doesn't deduct money from any other account when it's deposited.
The world population is getting wealthier rapidly. Wealthier people consume more meat, which requires us to feed animals, which requires higher food production to feed the same number of people. Let me explain.
Meat production is not calorically efficient. It takes 5+ calories of grain (fed to an animal) to produce 1 calorie of meat. Beef is particularly bad; a cow must eat 10 calories of corn to yield one calorie of beef. Therefore, if we all ate nothing but beef, we would have to produce 10x the amount of grains per day for the same number of beef calories.
As people get wealthier, they eat more meat, which causes a greater caloric loss, which requires much more grain production to feed the same number of people.
CSP doesn't store enough energy for consistent baseload power for 365 days per year.
CSP stores energy in the form of molten salt. That's enough energy for the coming night time, but not enough to last even a few days. Even if you built enormous molten salt containers, they would be useless beyond a week or two because they are always leaking heat and energy.
The problem is cloud clover. Sometimes there's a succession of cloudy days lasting weeks at a time. Energy production drops to almost zero with CSP when it's overcast, and can remain zero for weeks. This problem would be very difficult to overcome using molten salt storage, because the duration of outage is very inconsistent.
That claim is based upon the theoretical maximum potential of CSP, which is not the relevant statistic. There is clearly enough sunlight falling on the deserts of planet earth, to greatly exceed our energy demands, but the problem is cost. CSP is several times more expensive than other forms of energy generation. Furthermore, we can't expect drastic reductions in cost because it's already a mature technology involving things like steam turbines and mirrors which have already been produced for more than a century. It's quite possible that greater mechanization in the deployment of solar troughs or things like that, would lead to considerable reductions in cost, but even matching the price of nuclear is a long way away.
Of course it's possible to generate almost all our electricity using CSP and various forms of storage. We could use CSP for energy generation, plus molten salt for nighttime storage, plus pumped storage for successions of several cloudy days, plus peaker natural gas turbines for the rare circumstances where you have long periods of continuous cloudy days and all storage runs out. That combination would be sufficient to provide reliable baseload power. However the cost of electricty (according to a back-of-the-envelope calculation I'm doing in my head) would be more than $0.30/KwH busbar. That is several times higher than the price we pay now.
I'm going to assume you're not just trolling or joking here.
A large part of the problem with lefty-oriented rhetoric is that it so often employs absurd exaggerations, when the speaker knows full well that what he is saying is false, and he knows he will be immediately refuted by anyone with two eyes. An earlier post on this thread (to which I responded) claimed that people in the deep south could barely afford shoes and that the situation was worsening. This will lead to a credibility problem if we don't see vast numbers of barefoot people in Mississippi in 2 years' time.
Where have you been for the past four years? Apparently living in your imagination. In the real world, the economy has not collapsed and essential services are still all delivered. We are undergoing a recession.
You must made all that stuff up.
The deep south continues to gain manufacturing.
The average wage in Mississippi is about $35,000/yr, whereas a refrigerator costs about $1,000.
Newer refrigerators use less than half the electricity of ones from the 1970s for an equivalent volume. As a result it would be cheaper, by far, to buy a newer refrigerator than to operate an old one. Anyone who could pay for a refrigerator from 1970, could more easily pay for a recent one.
I assume that you're a young person or don't remember how unreliable American cars from the 1970s were.
Are you joking? People in the deep south can easily afford shoes. Since the average wage in Mississippi is about $35,000/yr, as I said above, they could afford shoes which cost $120 and are manufactured in the U.S.
The price of a car in inflation-adjusted terms has risen about 40% since the 1950s, but a recent car lasts about twice as long as a car from that era. As a result the per-mile cost of a car has fallen slightly in real terms in past decades. If they could afford a car back then, they can afford one now, since the mean wage increased in that in the mean time, especially during the 1970s.
The deep south has gotten richer, not poorer, over time.
Solar scientists have raised the prospect of a new maunder minimum before, and they were mistaken. But they could easily be correct this time. What happens in the sun is apparently still theoretical.
I went to college, and I got several different undergraduate degrees (comp sci, philosophy, psychology). I didn't learn anything during college that I couldn't have learned elsewhere. To be more specific, I could've learned everything I learned in college, by visiting college bookstores, buying textbooks, reading them, and doing all the exercises. That and a few hours of tutoring would have conveyed as much knowledge to me, at far lesser cost, than going to college did.
I grant that there is a social network within the university setting, which will place you in contact with experts in various fields. However that becomes important only when you've reached a very high level already. Most undergraduates (in fact almost all of them) are not on the "bleeding edge" of some complex discipline. They would never need to contact some important mathematician directly. That kind of social contact isn't necessary if you're taking a calculus 2 course. (If we ever reached the point that undergraduates were contacting important mathematicians directly then the whole system would break down).
However, it's still probably helpful to go to college, for several reasons. You can discuss things with other intellectual people. You can talk to people knowledgeable in a field even if you don't have bleeding-edge questions. You can participate in various kinds of debates, if only by listening.
That said, these benefits of college are not in any way commensurate with the amount of money you spend. All that's necessary for such social interaction is for smart people with different intellectual backgrounds to have an environment in which they can study and interact, and in which professors can make enough money to support themselves. I believe that that could be provided for about 1/4th the amount of money that colleges typically charge now. Nobody should go to the outrageously expensive colleges out there.
The cost of many colleges today is outrageous and unjustified. Undergraduates are indenturing themselves for the rest of their lives, by taking out horrendously large loans. Most of those undergraduates are un-intellectual and are going to college only to improve their career prospects. They're being badly misled if they believe that spending a lot of money on college will mean they'll make a lot of money in the future. And they won't get the kind of education you spoke of. That can't just be bought.
Your claim is that paying trolls will encourage them and so will lose more money in the long run. This opinion is what basically everyone here says. The subsequent comments basically all agree with you on this point.
I'm faily certain this claim is mistaken. Bear in mind that if you don't pay trolls and say "we'll never pay trolls," then you'll be taken to court and will lose some fraction of the time, say 10%. (I know this because I've recently reviewed patent troll lawsuits when settlement is refused, and the troll lawsuits are successful about 10% of the time). Now assume two companies, one which routinely pays trolls 10% of the settlement amount, and another which never pays them and loses 10% of the time, and must pay 10x the settlement amount once every 10 times. In both cases the patent troll makes the same amount of money and couldn't care less what the CEO says.
The only way trolls would have an incentive to sue you, is if you settle for too much; i.e., more than the average of what they would recover through lawsuits minus legal costs. However, if you offer too little as a settlement (or nothing at all) then you get sued and lose more on average, because you must pay the rational settlement amount (which is average amount that the lawsuit would recover) plus legal fees. The trick is to know how likely a particular patent lawsuit is to succeed. Just saying "we'll never settle" won't discourage anyone, because they can always sue you and try to get money, whether you settle or not.
This is nothing like a schoolyard bully who will be incentivized to attack you, if you pay. In that case, paying the bully (settling) is the only way the bully can get any money, so he will go after only those who settle. In this case, however, the bully can get your money anyway, through a court system, even if you don't settle.
If the court system never paid out on frivolous claims (not even 10% of the time), then you should never settle. In that case, nobody would settle because everyone would have figured that out by now.
The patent troll will assume that all companies will pay when doing so is less expensive than going to court, because the trolls correctly assume that it's rational behavior.
There is also another claim made in various comments here, as follows. By making public comments, the CEO will "draw attention" from trolls. This claim also seems incorrect. Trolls do research on which products could possibly violate their patent portfolio. Trolls will sue all companies when the payout will likely exceed the legal costs, regardless of what the CEO has said. In no way will CEO comments "draw attention" of patent trolls. Again, this is not like a schoolyard bully. Whereas the schoolyard bully might not see you if you remain silent, these companies have $100bn in revenues and cannot remain unnoticed. Patent trolls pay researchers to look into all public companies. Patent trolls have heard of companies like Microsoft or Red Hat, even if their CEOs remain silent.
The NYTimes article on this topic had a quotation from an intel researcher, who claimed they're almost certain they can reach 10nm, probably by 2015.
It appears that Moore's law has at least a few years left to it.
I hope you're joking... Your ad hominem is not even correct or plausible...
Try using Arithmetic. There have been ~400 Western nuclear reactors operating for ~40 years and there have been two meltdowns, one in TMI and another at Fukushima (this doesn't include research reactors or Chernobyl, since those are not under consideration here and we obviously wouldn't replace coal burning plants with those). The 400 reactors generate about 20% of worldwide electricity, whereas coal generates 60%, so we would need ~4x as many nuclear plants, to replace all the coal burning plants with nuclear in addition to our current nuclear capacity. How many meltdowns would there be, per year...
Of course that's leaving out the fact that newer reactors have a large number of safety features to prevent what happened at Fukushima and TMI.
You are by far the biggest idiot who has posted here, which is saying a lot.
You can still do this if your father was a multimillionaire based upon artistic recordings (ie The Beatles) and passed the money on to you. If we extend copyright too far then the heirs get their monetary inheritance and interest plus current income based upon the sale of work. It is the latter which I'm arguing against here.
I'm definitely not suggesting that we should get rid of copyright or that IP works should all be free. I realize some people think that, but I definitely don't. Artistic producers and intellectual producers must also be able to sell their wares and make a living from their work. It's only the term of copyright I'm objecting to.
This is true, but it wouldn't be any different if the term of copyright were longer than 30 years.
You wouldn't be able to make much money from it, because it would be in the public domain at that point and everyone could download a copy for free. It would be hard to charge money for things which are freely available.
I don't think very many artists are discovered 45 years after they produced their work. Usually, if 45 years have passed then the work has been forgotten.
Honestly I don't see why the children or grandchildren of some artist should continue to be paid for labor that was performed over 30 years ago. I am not paid for my father's labor in the 1970s. It would be one thing if the artist made a lot of money and passed along some of his money. But here, the heirs would continue to draw income for something they had no hand in producing, in addition to whatever inheritance they received. Bear in mind that consumers must pay to support the heirs' income, so your example of "a family as poor as mice" might be the family of consumers who listen to music and must pay for it.
I grant that perhaps there should be some exception for artistic productions which have extremely meager sales initially or are obscure, and then suddenly are "discovered" decades later. In that case perhaps the date of discovery should mark the beginning of the 30 year period.
30 years is sufficient, for two reasons. First, 30 years is sufficient time for an artist to receive payment, for most of his working career, as a result of some artistic production he created. Second, 30 years is long enough that the "net present discounted value" (at a 5% discount rate) of anything after 30 years is negligible. As a result, record companies will not make investments or produce anything or change their investment behavior now because of payments to be received after 30 years in the future.
Remember that intellectual property is not "property" in the normal sense. It cannot be stolen, for example, but only copied. Intellectual property is a construct, whereby the producers of intellectual content can be compensated for their labor. 30 years is enough time for people to be compensated for their labor, and is longer than the investment horizon of companies.
Even if this optimistic goal were met, it would mean retaining the coal-burning capacity which Germany has at present. It would mean spending alot of money over a decade to keep Germany's massive c02 emissions for electricity the same.
Angelosphere, you're talking in favor of nuclear power and saying that renewables could fill in the gap completely, then you say that "of course" Germany gets the majority of its energy from coal burning.
What did I think? I thought you were claiming that renewables were successful and adequate. Wind power gets enormous economic incentives and subsidies in Germany (including feed-in tariffs and other things). If renewables are sufficient, then why does Germany "of course" generate most of its energy using coal burning, after all this time.
I'm certainly hesitant to disagree with you about the politics of your own country. I only read about it, whereas you live it. However, according to the english wikipedia article on the German green party, the greens have 11% of the seats in the Bundestag. Also, my friends from Germany who were studying at the university near me all claimed that environmentalism was much more prominent in Germany than elsewhere, particularly more prominent than in the USA. Also, according to news sources Germany has tremendous economic incentives and subsidies for wind power. This raises the question of why coal burning is still so prominent there.
The news claimed that AC power lines were disabled during the earthquake, then the generators turned on, then the generators were disabled by the Tsunami. This is consistent with what I wrote.
I meant to say to the west; I typed the wrong thing on accident.
If you look at the satellite images of Fukushima from before the accident, you will see 3 sets of high-voltage power lines coming from the west. They were disabled by the earthquake. That is why the Japanese authorities have had to lay new power cables across more than 1 kilometer to Fukushima, to replace the ones which fell down in the earthquake.
All nuclear reactors in OECD countries have redundant high-voltage power lines coming in from the outside, because nuclear reactors require outside power to continue cooling operations during shutdown, at least nuclear reactors of the kind currently in operation. This outside power is normally taken from the grid during shutdown. However if the grid is unavailable, then they use the backup generators. They have many backup generators, because a total loss of station power (called "station blackout") is considered a very serious problem by itself in this kind of reactor. As we know, all the backup generators in Fukushima were in the same place and were submerged by the Tsunami.
The earthquake was sufficient to cause severe shaking in Tokyo which is much further away. Bear in mind that when a city is destroyed by a large earthquake, it's very rare that the epicenter was actually right below the city.
Gatkinso, breeder reactors allow us to get 100x more energy out of uranium than we are getting at present. Furthermore, they would allow us to burn the U-238 which is a component of our nuclear waste, and that by itself would provide enough Uranium for over 1000 years. Furthermore, breeder reactors would allow us to mine economically the sparse uranium deposits in Granite which would provide enough Uranium for millions of years.
With slow neutron reactors, we will eventually run out of Uranium, but with fast neutron reactors we have enough practically forever.
cowboy, there is a big difference in scale between coal mining and uranium mining. Uranium contains more than 1 million times as much energy for a given unit of volume, as coal. As a result, all the uranium in the world is mined out of a very small number of mines, all of which are physically quite small and many of which are surface mines. Obviously the number of deaths from Uranium mining is not zero (and certainly wasn't in the 1950s before they realized that we need to vent radon gas from underground mines), but we must keep in mind the scale of it.
No, a single event did not cause the reactors to fail. First there was an earthquake which, despite being 150 miles away, destroyed all of 3 high-voltage lines supplying Fukushima with backup power. Then the earthquake damaged equipment in the reactors. Then there was a tsunami which submerged all of the 13 backup generators.
If there were only a tsunami, then the high-voltage lines going into Fukushima from the east would not have fallen down and the station would not have lost power.