It is a common idea that buying a commercial product should give you "someone to sue" if something goes wrong. Indeed this is true for most classes of products, especially if there was provable negligence. It is not true for any software that I am aware of, and certainly not for Windows. If you read the Windows EULA (or GPL for that matter) you'll see that they deny any liability or warranty. So there is, in fact, no one to sue in either case.
There have been some questions raised about the legality of such "shrink-wrap" licences, but I don't know of any case in which they have been overturned. In any case the UCITA, which will soon by passed by the states, barring divine intervention, will put these licences on unassailable footing.
The way big companies protect their truly expensive hardware and software is with on-site support contracts with guaranteed uptime. These contracts tend to limit liability as well, and are available for open source as well as proprietary offerings (including Microsoft).
In short, if you want assurance about a software product, you need to spend a lot of money on a support contract or trust your staff to build reliable systems and support them well, no matter who made the software.
--
Re:Ah the joys of multi-user systems...
on
Copyright!
·
· Score: 2
I take it your ISP doesn't accept identd requests. --
The original idea behind 28 years as a copyright was that was a reasonable estimate of the remaining life expectancy of an artist. It was not intended to be extended beyond the artist's death and certainly not in perpetuity. --
Copyrights are a good idea that has been twisted
on
Copyright!
·
· Score: 2
I would have no argument with copyrights if they protected the people that you describe. The reality is very different. Since the first copyright law, copyrights have gone from 28 years (which was essentially the mean remaining lifespan for artists at the time) to the artist's death + 70 years. In the last 50 years copyrights have been continually and retroactively extended so that works like the original Mickey Mouse movies won't ever enter the public domain.
Copyright is a compact. It balances my natural right to express myself however I please and to do anything I want with what is in my possession, including copying it, with the need to provide an incentive for art. Copyright is a good idea, but the lengths of time in use now, and the unnerving idea that copyrights may be extended indefinitely are completely beyond the original intent of what is in the Constitution.
Furthermore, artists benefit very little from extending copyrights, since the vast majority of work is popular for only a short time, so the present value of royalties is hardly effected by changes beyond a few years. The only ones who benefit are the copyright holders of older material which still happens to be profitable. Clearly, protecting this older material has no bearing on promoting creativity, in fact it stifles it, since no one else can use that material as a basis of new art.
I strongly hope that the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (The Sonny Bono Copyright Act) will be declared unconstitutional and that some sense will be returned to copyright law. --
8 MB GIFs might get your sysadmins a wee bit suspicious, anyway a competent evil admin would use file(1) or the equivalent to look at the header and determing the file type. --
Thanks for the clarification. I remember reading docs that said otherwise. I suppose I was being optimistic. Javascript truly is as sick and twisted as they say. --
The fact of the matter is none of science can be proven. It can only be disproven. In fact a pretty good definition of science is the minimal spanning set of theories that explain observable phenomena, and which make predictions that allow the theories to be disproven. Of course in the real world of which you are so fond, science is neither minimal, nor completely spanning, nor completely non-dogmatic (disprovable).
In any case, evolutionary theory is a good theory that succintly explains a vast amount of complexity, makes useful predictions and fits the available data very well. I would argue that it is one of the most important watershed ideas in all of science, on par with Relativity.
Creation theory has many logical flaws and is not useful at making predictions but the most critical flaw is that it is not disprovable. Since it is the only alternative to evolutionary theory that has any explanatory value in biology, anyone that opposes evolutionary theory wants either deny any way of organizing biological science, or offer a non-scientific substitute in the guise of science. This makes their intelligence questionable IMHO, since they miss the point of science.
Intelligence and faith are not exclusive, but the proper place of faith does not include interference with the proper persuit of science. --
There's some excerpts of the discussion in this morning's Morning Edition report. He seemed fairly noncommital but expressed concerned that competition be preserved. --
I was concerned until I saw that you signed your post "Loser", which seems appropriate. My opinion is that if you have read Slashdot long enough to form a general opinion and post as an AC then you are indeed a Coward.
As for you point, all you need to get a +2 karma is to post a lot of halfway decent messages and not get into stupid flame wars like this one. So call me overactive, but don't call me a suck-up. --
var year = today.getYear(); if (year < 100){ year += 1900; } return(this_month[month]+" "+day+", "+year); } // rev03.29.1999 -- DO NOT MODIFY! -- End date display function with y2k compatibility
Which will clearly display the year as 100 in 2000. I emailed the webmaster some months ago but they never changed it. Oh well, it won't bring any airplanes out of the sky, but it does make one wonder about the efficacy of Y2K remediation. --
Obviously the amount of error correction is inversely related to data density and latency. I think you are correct that a CD as we know it would be out of the question, for reasons of dust as well as surface flatness. --
Re:Data storage density is going up and up...
on
Penny-Sized CDs
·
· Score: 2
The potential is there, but I wouldn't expect to be buying MGM's film library on disk anytime soon. While the media costs will be much less, the intellectual property is still there and they'll still want to charge you for it. This is the same reason you don't see many albums released that are longer than 70 minutes even though the marginal cost of distributing an extra CD is almost negligible. You may soon have access to all the world's movies, but you are either going to have to pay per view (a la Divx) or pay per view for video on demand through a high speed network connection. No other pricing scheme makes much practical sense. --
1998 + (5 to 10) + (MS marketing version addition) = 2010 at least. Actually, I suspect that OS version numbers will very soon go the way of chip version numbers. We'll have Windows Easium or Microsoft Fenestrium I, II, and III. Heck, we already have RedHat 6.1 (Cartman). --
An extra-terrestrial origin of life is not entirely implausible (although the way they espouse it is). If life evolved first on Mars or elsewhere, bacteria might have hitched a ride to Earth on a meteorite. If we ever find life on Mars this will be one of the more interesting questions to try to answer. Of course it could have happened the other way or not at all.
That is not to say that intelligent manipulation of life on earth is impossible, just that we have no good evidence of it. It is somewhat interesting to imagine acts of God documented in the Bible in terms of alien manipulation into human affairs, particularily the Old Testament. Burning bush, Jacob's ladder etc. In some ways it is more appealing than a spiritual view, since it doesn't require the violation of any laws of physics. But it is obviously less spiritually satisfying, or terrifying, or unnecessary explanation, depending on tyour point of view. --
With proper error correction codes, any amount of expected dust and scratches can be accounted for. In fact, with the CD audio standard, one should be able to make a perfect reconstruction of the data on the CD even if it has a 1 mm diameter hole in it. The fact that your player skips is more a problem of the playback hardware not taking full advantage of the redundant information than of the CD itself.
That being said, I would imagine that these "CD's" would be hermetically sealed and sold with the reading hardware. It would be more like a read only hard drive than a CD. Dust wouldn't cause obstruction, but catastrophic abrasion in an unsealed system because the contacts are so close. A surface coating can't be used since the atomic force microscope needs almost direct contact with the surface, like a head on a hard drive, not like the laser and optics on a CD or DVD.
The byline for the story said "Posted 7/27/98" so this is apparently fairly old news. It was the subject of a Slashdot article in July http://slashdot.org/articles/99/07/30/1612205.shtm l. At any rate the commercial realization of this work will be some time off since it requires dramatic retooling and the development of a viable atomic force microscope on a chip. The article says 5-10 years, which I interpret as technospeak for not in the forseeable future.
What is more interesting to me is not how well this process will enable the encoding of a ROM since static data has limited applications which will be increasingly displaced by wide band network connections, but whether the atomic force microscope on a chip being developed by IBM will enable the manipulation of a miniature hard disk or particularily dense large hard disk. --
What I don't understand is how people challenging the scientific establishment are so quick to ignore major inconsistencies in their own work. This is particularily true in para-psychology. Admittedly, all scientific theories have flaws. Many of them even have known flaws. But if you are challenging a known flaw in an established theory, such as the inability of Newtonian gravitation to explain the retrograde motion of Mercury then the theory you espouse which corrects the error must have even fewer flaws, as does General Relativity.
In short, the harder you probe a new theory the more solid it must be, otherwise it deserves laughter. This does not suggest that one shouldn't have an open mind, but it means that a new idea or discovery needs to be exposed in the harshest possible light, not contrived demonstrations. --
As it turns out Columbus was wrong. He just got lucky. Intellectuals had known that the world was round ever since the Greeks. They even had a good estimate of the circumference. Columbus thought the circumference was much smaller. It wasn't, he just was lucky that there was another continent in the middle. --
Slashdot Mirror
I suppose that my children aren't free because they are not free to sell their children into slavery?
--
It is a common idea that buying a commercial product should give you "someone to sue" if something goes wrong. Indeed this is true for most classes of products, especially if there was provable negligence. It is not true for any software that I am aware of, and certainly not for Windows. If you read the Windows EULA (or GPL for that matter) you'll see that they deny any liability or warranty. So there is, in fact, no one to sue in either case.
There have been some questions raised about the legality of such "shrink-wrap" licences, but I don't know of any case in which they have been overturned. In any case the UCITA, which will soon by passed by the states, barring divine intervention, will put these licences on unassailable footing.
The way big companies protect their truly expensive hardware and software is with on-site support contracts with guaranteed uptime. These contracts tend to limit liability as well, and are available for open source as well as proprietary offerings (including Microsoft).
In short, if you want assurance about a software product, you need to spend a lot of money on a support contract or trust your staff to build reliable systems and support them well, no matter who made the software.
--
I take it your ISP doesn't accept identd requests.
--
The original idea behind 28 years as a copyright was that was a reasonable estimate of the remaining life expectancy of an artist. It was not intended to be extended beyond the artist's death and certainly not in perpetuity.
--
I would have no argument with copyrights if they protected the people that you describe. The reality is very different. Since the first copyright law, copyrights have gone from 28 years (which was essentially the mean remaining lifespan for artists at the time) to the artist's death + 70 years. In the last 50 years copyrights have been continually and retroactively extended so that works like the original Mickey Mouse movies won't ever enter the public domain.
Copyright is a compact. It balances my natural right to express myself however I please and to do anything I want with what is in my possession, including copying it, with the need to provide an incentive for art. Copyright is a good idea, but the lengths of time in use now, and the unnerving idea that copyrights may be extended indefinitely are completely beyond the original intent of what is in the Constitution.
Furthermore, artists benefit very little from extending copyrights, since the vast majority of work is popular for only a short time, so the present value of royalties is hardly effected by changes beyond a few years. The only ones who benefit are the copyright holders of older material which still happens to be profitable. Clearly, protecting this older material has no bearing on promoting creativity, in fact it stifles it, since no one else can use that material as a basis of new art.
I strongly hope that the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (The Sonny Bono Copyright Act) will be declared unconstitutional and that some sense will be returned to copyright law.
--
8 MB GIFs might get your sysadmins a wee bit suspicious, anyway a competent evil admin would use file(1) or the equivalent to look at the header and determing the file type.
--
This sounds a lot like how our backup scripts run. The AOL angle is a little scary though.
--
Thanks for the clarification. I remember reading docs that said otherwise. I suppose I was being optimistic. Javascript truly is as sick and twisted as they say.
--
The fact of the matter is none of science can be proven. It can only be disproven. In fact a pretty good definition of science is the minimal spanning set of theories that explain observable phenomena, and which make predictions that allow the theories to be disproven. Of course in the real world of which you are so fond, science is neither minimal, nor completely spanning, nor completely non-dogmatic (disprovable).
In any case, evolutionary theory is a good theory that succintly explains a vast amount of complexity, makes useful predictions and fits the available data very well. I would argue that it is one of the most important watershed ideas in all of science, on par with Relativity.
Creation theory has many logical flaws and is not useful at making predictions but the most critical flaw is that it is not disprovable. Since it is the only alternative to evolutionary theory that has any explanatory value in biology, anyone that opposes evolutionary theory wants either deny any way of organizing biological science, or offer a non-scientific substitute in the guise of science. This makes their intelligence questionable IMHO, since they miss the point of science.
Intelligence and faith are not exclusive, but the proper place of faith does not include interference with the proper persuit of science.
--
There's some excerpts of the discussion in this morning's Morning Edition report. He seemed fairly noncommital but expressed concerned that competition be preserved.
--
I was concerned until I saw that you signed your post "Loser", which seems appropriate. My opinion is that if you have read Slashdot long enough to form a general opinion and post as an AC then you are indeed a Coward.
As for you point, all you need to get a +2 karma is to post a lot of halfway decent messages and not get into stupid flame wars like this one. So call me overactive, but don't call me a suck-up.
--
Which will clearly display the year as 100 in 2000. I emailed the webmaster some months ago but they never changed it. Oh well, it won't bring any airplanes out of the sky, but it does make one wonder about the efficacy of Y2K remediation.
--
Obviously the amount of error correction is inversely related to data density and latency. I think you are correct that a CD as we know it would be out of the question, for reasons of dust as well as surface flatness.
--
The potential is there, but I wouldn't expect to be buying MGM's film library on disk anytime soon. While the media costs will be much less, the intellectual property is still there and they'll still want to charge you for it. This is the same reason you don't see many albums released that are longer than 70 minutes even though the marginal cost of distributing an extra CD is almost negligible. You may soon have access to all the world's movies, but you are either going to have to pay per view (a la Divx) or pay per view for video on demand through a high speed network connection. No other pricing scheme makes much practical sense.
--
1998 + (5 to 10) + (MS marketing version addition) = 2010 at least. Actually, I suspect that OS version numbers will very soon go the way of chip version numbers. We'll have Windows Easium or Microsoft Fenestrium I, II, and III. Heck, we already have RedHat 6.1 (Cartman).
--
An extra-terrestrial origin of life is not entirely implausible (although the way they espouse it is). If life evolved first on Mars or elsewhere, bacteria might have hitched a ride to Earth on a meteorite. If we ever find life on Mars this will be one of the more interesting questions to try to answer. Of course it could have happened the other way or not at all.
That is not to say that intelligent manipulation of life on earth is impossible, just that we have no good evidence of it. It is somewhat interesting to imagine acts of God documented in the Bible in terms of alien manipulation into human affairs, particularily the Old Testament. Burning bush, Jacob's ladder etc. In some ways it is more appealing than a spiritual view, since it doesn't require the violation of any laws of physics. But it is obviously less spiritually satisfying, or terrifying, or unnecessary explanation, depending on tyour point of view.
--
Make that Windows 2010. This technology is 5-10 years down the road. That's 15-30 Internet Years (tm).
--
With proper error correction codes, any amount of expected dust and scratches can be accounted for. In fact, with the CD audio standard, one should be able to make a perfect reconstruction of the data on the CD even if it has a 1 mm diameter hole in it. The fact that your player skips is more a problem of the playback hardware not taking full advantage of the redundant information than of the CD itself.
That being said, I would imagine that these "CD's" would be hermetically sealed and sold with the reading hardware. It would be more like a read only hard drive than a CD. Dust wouldn't cause obstruction, but catastrophic abrasion in an unsealed system because the contacts are so close. A surface coating can't be used since the atomic force microscope needs almost direct contact with the surface, like a head on a hard drive, not like the laser and optics on a CD or DVD.
--
The byline for the story said "Posted 7/27/98" so this is apparently fairly old news. It was the subject of a Slashdot article in July http://slashdot.org/articles/99/07/30/1612205.shtm l. At any rate the commercial realization of this work will be some time off since it requires dramatic retooling and the development of a viable atomic force microscope on a chip. The article says 5-10 years, which I interpret as technospeak for not in the forseeable future.
What is more interesting to me is not how well this process will enable the encoding of a ROM since static data has limited applications which will be increasingly displaced by wide band network connections, but whether the atomic force microscope on a chip being developed by IBM will enable the manipulation of a miniature hard disk or particularily dense large hard disk.
--
Not only is their an alien readingh /. but he has a karma of 32
That's a simple transliteration of 23 for those keeping score at home.
--
What I don't understand is how people challenging the scientific establishment are so quick to ignore major inconsistencies in their own work. This is particularily true in para-psychology. Admittedly, all scientific theories have flaws. Many of them even have known flaws. But if you are challenging a known flaw in an established theory, such as the inability of Newtonian gravitation to explain the retrograde motion of Mercury then the theory you espouse which corrects the error must have even fewer flaws, as does General Relativity.
In short, the harder you probe a new theory the more solid it must be, otherwise it deserves laughter. This does not suggest that one shouldn't have an open mind, but it means that a new idea or discovery needs to be exposed in the harshest possible light, not contrived demonstrations.
--
As it turns out Columbus was wrong. He just got lucky. Intellectuals had known that the world was round ever since the Greeks. They even had a good estimate of the circumference. Columbus thought the circumference was much smaller. It wasn't, he just was lucky that there was another continent in the middle.
--
Ishtar (1 flop)
Kevin Costner (1 megaflop/year)
--
from the almighty Jargon file
The ANSI/CCITT standard is surrounded by suck/blows and the INTERCAL substandard is surrounded by U turn/U turn backs
^ Common: hat; control; uparrow; caret; <circumflex>. Rare: chevron; [shark (or shark-fin)]; to the (`to the power of'); fang; pointer (in Pascal).
& Common: <ampersand>; amper; and. Rare: address (from C); reference (from C++); andpersand; bitand; background (from sh(1)); pretzel; amp. [INTERCAL called this `ampersand'; what could be sillier?]
| Common: bar; or; or-bar; v-bar; pipe; vertical bar. Rare: <vertical line>; gozinta; thru; pipesinta (last three from UNIX); [spike].
. Common: dot; point; <period>; <decimal point>. Rare: radix point; full stop; [spot].
() Common: l/r paren; l/r parenthesis; left/right; open/close; paren/thesis; o/c paren; o/c parenthesis; l/r parenthesis; l/r banana. Rare: so/already; lparen/rparen; <opening/closing parenthesis>; o/c round bracket, l/r round bracket, [wax/wane]; parenthisey/unparenthisey; l/r ear.
{} Common: o/c brace; l/r brace; l/r squiggly; l/r squiggly bracket/brace; l/r curly bracket/brace; <opening/closing brace>. Rare: brace/unbrace; curly/uncurly; leftit/rytit; l/r squirrelly; [embrace/bracelet].
[] Common: l/r square bracket; l/r bracket; <opening/closing bracket>; bracket/unbracket. Rare: square/unsquare; [U turn/U turn back].
< > Common: <less/greater than>; bra/ket; l/r angle; l/r angle bracket; l/r broket. Rare: from/{into, towards}; read from/write to; suck/blow; comes-from/gozinta; in/out; crunch/zap (all from UNIX); [angle/right angle].
--
from the almighty Jargon file
The ANSI/CCITT standard is surrounded by suck/blows and the INTERCAL substandard is surrounded by U turn/U turn backs
^ Common: hat; control; uparrow; caret; . Rare: chevron; [shark (or shark-fin)]; to the (`to the power of'); fang; pointer (in Pascal).
& Common: ; amper; and. Rare: address (from C); reference (from C++); andpersand; bitand; background (from sh(1)); pretzel; amp. [INTERCAL called this `ampersand'; what could be sillier?]
| Common: bar; or; or-bar; v-bar; pipe; vertical bar. Rare: ; gozinta; thru; pipesinta (last three from UNIX); [spike].
. Common: dot; point; ; . Rare: radix point; full stop; [spot].
() Common: l/r paren; l/r parenthesis; left/right; open/close; paren/thesis; o/c paren; o/c parenthesis; l/r parenthesis; l/r banana. Rare: so/already; lparen/rparen; ; o/c round bracket, l/r round bracket, [wax/wane]; parenthisey/unparenthisey; l/r ear.
{} Common: o/c brace; l/r brace; l/r squiggly; l/r squiggly bracket/brace; l/r curly bracket/brace; . Rare: brace/unbrace; curly/uncurly; leftit/rytit; l/r squirrelly; [embrace/bracelet].
[] Common: l/r square bracket; l/r bracket; ; bracket/unbracket. Rare: square/unsquare; [U turn/U turn back].
Common: ; bra/ket; l/r angle; l/r angle bracket; l/r broket. Rare: from/{into, towards}; read from/write to; suck/blow; comes-from/gozinta; in/out; crunch/zap (all from UNIX); [angle/right angle].
--