Well, why didn't BT just kill the web in 1991, then, if they had the patent that had any validity whatsoever? TimBL makes it perfectly clear that the web wouldn't have made it without CERN putting in public domain.
Besides, Xanadu is certainly prior art, so why don't these people just go and get lost?
OK, this is a flame, if you don't like flames, don't read it.
If it hadn't been for basic research in astronomy, you wouldn't have had a computer to write on. What you are saying is like shutting yourself into a building and think that you are able to do come up with bright ideas without any input from outside. History has shown over and over again, that astronomy is the branch of science that causes the most fundamental changes in our world view.
This is extremely good news for science! Electromagnetic pollution is the most serious threat to astronomy today, both in the optical and at other wavelenghts. Then, there is all the garbage out there. For more information about this issue, please visit International Dark-Sky Association.
Now, it is not protected primarily for SETI. Submm is an extremely important branch of astronomy, and gaining. The page of the largest submm telescope in the world the JCMT is a good place to start if you want to find out more about submm astronomy.
As for SETI funding, there are not huge amounts of resources going into it. There are small amounts of resources. IMHO, that is the way it should be, but piggyback projects should be conducted. Computing is best done through distributed projects, like the SETI@Home project. I have stopped running the client, though, I think they're not managing the project right.
Well, yes, something has happened. I wouldn't be talking like this if it hadn't. Yet, I think many of the really good ideas go unnoticed, because it is hard to market what people don't feel the need for. Take a look at the web. It was intended to be much more than the fancy, electronic newspaper that it is today. Take something as simple as content negotation. How many multi-lingual sites are actually using the language negotation features built in most browsers and at least Apache? debian.org is among the very few I'm aware of.
That's just a minor thing. If it hadn't been for the tag soup people are coding instead of good HTML, we would allready have had full web (and probably lots of other common internet stuff) on our cell phones. And speech browsers, and, we would be a lot closer to the Semantic Web. Now, if that had happened allready, it would have been a revolution.
Now, that means, we're all part of it, we all influence the future with the choices we make. OK, I really don't need to tell a/.er that...:-)
Not really...:-) However, the reality as that governments allready are using things like this to justify cutting down spending for basic research. So, how do we address this? I'll admit that I'm strongly biased in favour of basic research, there are allready enough people out there who would like to see no spending for basic research at all, so making it just a bit worse can make things really bad.
Well, yeah, but what happens is that when the governments see corps sponsoring some research projects, they will say that "see, you don't need governmental sponsorship, you can get corporate sponsors for your research project, it is only a question of marketing your mission." Well, yeah, I'd like to see a corp sponsoring research into the clouds of the Broad Emission Line Region of remote Quasars. Sure. Yeah.
Don't think it'll work this way? It allready does, believe me.
OK, it's better, but not good. Hierarchal systems on the web is a serious pain in the ass. I've been trying to get some sense out of Dmoz hierarchies, and I'm now totally convinced hierarchal systems simply doesn't work. And, from my perspective, Yahoo isn't much better than Dmoz (in most respects, they are far worse).
I'm not going to write a longish rant about hierarchal systems, I could, but I would just like to point out that the problem of hierarchal systems was one of the reasons why TimBL invented the web as you can see from his original proposal. In his book, he also says that the DNS is one of the weakest parts of the Internet. Now, I'm not saying that hierarchal systems are flawed in general, but they're not good for this purpose.
Good point. Even better, the guy is really suggesting that one must use old technology because new technology is illegal to use for this purpose. Speaking of technological advancement. These guys would rather put us back to the stone age than giving up their profits. And, they obviously doesn't realize that going back to the stone age would not give them any profits...:-)
Ah, this reminds me of the poetry generator we had as a final assignment in my first CS class.
And if you want something more sophisticated I would highly recommend the http://www.elsewhere.org/cgi-bin/postmodern/the Postmodernism Generator, that generates a post-modernistic paper randomly. It makes as much sense as true papers written by post-modernists....
Of course DeCSS lets you evade region codes -- it doesn't pay any attention to it and will decrypt DVD's from all regions. Schumann was clearly trying to pull the wool over their eyes.
Yeah, I was curious about this. Why he said that... I mean, one should think that the MPAA would be hammering on this as well, that DeCSS takes away region codes, but their expert witness says it is irrelevant... I wonder how to best use this, perhaps act stupid, the MPAA should return to the question some time, and perhaps the best would be to say "but your expert witness testified that it was irrelevant...".
OK, I agree with you here, it seems to be a lot about having the best lawyers. However, I think Garbus seems to be a good one, he just hasn't got all this stuff right, besides, it is not easy to say if he did get it wrong, or if something was lost in the transcription.
It's just a matter of hacking a simple perl script, all the stuff is so regular it shouldn't be problem getting good HTML from it. I just haven't got the time.
If I understand this correctly, it is mostly about Martin Garbus representing 2600 questioning Robert W. Schumann, who appearing as a technical person kind of for the MPAA. Don't flame me if I haven't got this right, it isn't really clear what's going on here....
Actually, I didn't see them really entering the topic of links in any depth. That's what this particular case is about, isn't it?
Now, the only point that was made that was a bit interesting, is this: Infoseek is a Disney search engine. Disney is among the plaintiffs. Has Infoseek linked any of the code? Of course they have!
Other than that, Leon P. Gold, representing the plaintiffs did appear pretty arrogant. When trying to stop Garbus mouth from asking difficult questions about what the witness was doing there, we read
MR. GOLD: He is not here as a legal expert and so I am going to put an end to this. If you want legal advice, see your colleagues. They will be happy to help you.
It is worth noting that the UNDP actively promotes Linux in 3rd world countries.
That's right, the Sustainable Development Networking Programme (a UNDP Programme) has a category for Open Source News, and it's almost like reading/.:-)
I agree that a International Agency is needed in these disputes, but I imidiately get a little anxious when the agency that now exists has a "best viewed with" on their homepage. That's bad.
Also, if you check out their primer on electronic commerce, it has a bias towards protecting the rights of distributors:
If rightsholders are secure in their ability to sell and license their property over the Internet, they will exploit this market fully and make more and more valuable works available through this medium.
(This exactly BSA rhetoric.) They acknowledge that both the public's interest and the interests of rightholders must be taken into account:
[...] providing appropriate balance for the public interest, particularly education, research and access to information;
But then goes on in to describe the problems arising for rightholders in detail, but fail completely to even outline the problems faced by the public.
How the hell are you gonna conduct a conversation with someone on a watch?
I don't know what it is like in the US, but around here (Norway, Sweden, Finland), you know you're old when you find yourself unable to type fast enough to have a conversation on SMS. The kids do, and they do it fast. So, the watch is smaller allright, but not that much smaller, so I wouldn't be surprised if people will learn to type fast enough to have a conversation through a watch. You remember the tiny keyboards you had on wristwatch calculators...?
It sounds kind of strange, yes. However, they didn't say they found I-129, just that they found some I isotopes and lots of Xe-129. Now, I guess it might be possible to make some a priori assumption on the relative abundance of isotopes of I and deduce it from there. A ADS search for Whitby says that he has been using I-Xe dating a lot lately. I failed to find a reference to the cited work, however. But of course, it is wise to remain skeptical, we will see if this will be accepted eventually.
Cosmic Constant, you mean Einstein's Cosmological Constant.
Of course, I just don't want to put too much stress on my keyboard....:-)
And if current speculations about the value of the Constant are correct, it would be essentially a repulsive gravitational force, or at least the closest analogue to it that we know of.
There are different schools of thought here, that very few are aware of, probably because one school is far more vocal than the other (and they've got coloumns in Scientific American:-) ). Now, this is getting so OT, I'm not going into details, but one school says basically that anything that contributes to the curvature of space should be named "gravity", and then, the negative pressure induced by may well be interpreted as repulsive gravity. The other school, which I happen to agree with, thinks that this is not good, that gravity is fundamentally connected to matter. In which case not only gravity is contributing to the curvature of space.
Now, you bet this could be a loooooong discussion.:-)
Antigravity is a awfully abused word. Doing something that requires a force directed against gravity is something we do all the time, standing up for instance. Climbing walls has nothing to do with antigravity. Antigravity would be a sensible word for something like a repulsive gravitational force, if something like that where to exist. And, no, I don't think it is a good word for the force of a "cosmic constant" either.
Slashdot Mirror
Besides, Xanadu is certainly prior art, so why don't these people just go and get lost?
Wow! I need that sentence in my quotes file, did you come up with it yourself, or did somebody else say it...? Who should I site...?
If it hadn't been for basic research in astronomy, you wouldn't have had a computer to write on. What you are saying is like shutting yourself into a building and think that you are able to do come up with bright ideas without any input from outside. History has shown over and over again, that astronomy is the branch of science that causes the most fundamental changes in our world view.
Now, it is not protected primarily for SETI. Submm is an extremely important branch of astronomy, and gaining. The page of the largest submm telescope in the world the JCMT is a good place to start if you want to find out more about submm astronomy.
As for SETI funding, there are not huge amounts of resources going into it. There are small amounts of resources. IMHO, that is the way it should be, but piggyback projects should be conducted. Computing is best done through distributed projects, like the SETI@Home project. I have stopped running the client, though, I think they're not managing the project right.
Anyway, according to Whois, it's Tucows that registered it.
That's just a minor thing. If it hadn't been for the tag soup people are coding instead of good HTML, we would allready have had full web (and probably lots of other common internet stuff) on our cell phones. And speech browsers, and, we would be a lot closer to the Semantic Web. Now, if that had happened allready, it would have been a revolution.
Now, that means, we're all part of it, we all influence the future with the choices we make. OK, I really don't need to tell a /.er that... :-)
Not really... :-) However, the reality as that governments allready are using things like this to justify cutting down spending for basic research. So, how do we address this? I'll admit that I'm strongly biased in favour of basic research, there are allready enough people out there who would like to see no spending for basic research at all, so making it just a bit worse can make things really bad.
That's not true, they've had a few excellent science missions, but that's basic research, so obviously nobody's interested. E.g. Chandra.
Don't think it'll work this way? It allready does, believe me.
I'm not going to write a longish rant about hierarchal systems, I could, but I would just like to point out that the problem of hierarchal systems was one of the reasons why TimBL invented the web as you can see from his original proposal. In his book, he also says that the DNS is one of the weakest parts of the Internet. Now, I'm not saying that hierarchal systems are flawed in general, but they're not good for this purpose.
Good point. Even better, the guy is really suggesting that one must use old technology because new technology is illegal to use for this purpose. Speaking of technological advancement. These guys would rather put us back to the stone age than giving up their profits. And, they obviously doesn't realize that going back to the stone age would not give them any profits... :-)
Hm, no I would rather think it is M$ Valenti... :-)
I'm just wondering if anybody knows what happened to Generic Top Level Domain Memorandum of Understanding?
And if you want something more sophisticated I would highly recommend the http://www.elsewhere.org/cgi-bin/postmodern/the Postmodernism Generator, that generates a post-modernistic paper randomly. It makes as much sense as true papers written by post-modernists....
Yeah, I was curious about this. Why he said that... I mean, one should think that the MPAA would be hammering on this as well, that DeCSS takes away region codes, but their expert witness says it is irrelevant... I wonder how to best use this, perhaps act stupid, the MPAA should return to the question some time, and perhaps the best would be to say "but your expert witness testified that it was irrelevant...".
OK, I agree with you here, it seems to be a lot about having the best lawyers. However, I think Garbus seems to be a good one, he just hasn't got all this stuff right, besides, it is not easy to say if he did get it wrong, or if something was lost in the transcription.
It's just a matter of hacking a simple perl script, all the stuff is so regular it shouldn't be problem getting good HTML from it. I just haven't got the time.
If I understand this correctly, it is mostly about Martin Garbus representing 2600 questioning Robert W. Schumann, who appearing as a technical person kind of for the MPAA. Don't flame me if I haven't got this right, it isn't really clear what's going on here....
Actually, I didn't see them really entering the topic of links in any depth. That's what this particular case is about, isn't it?
Now, the only point that was made that was a bit interesting, is this: Infoseek is a Disney search engine. Disney is among the plaintiffs. Has Infoseek linked any of the code? Of course they have!
Other than that, Leon P. Gold, representing the plaintiffs did appear pretty arrogant. When trying to stop Garbus mouth from asking difficult questions about what the witness was doing there, we read
Well, it seems you have missed a point, Garbus is our man.... :-) Yeah, he mixes up things badly at the start, but it improves as you go down.
That's right, the Sustainable Development Networking Programme (a UNDP Programme) has a category for Open Source News, and it's almost like reading /. :-)
I agree that a International Agency is needed in these disputes, but I imidiately get a little anxious when the agency that now exists has a "best viewed with" on their homepage. That's bad.
Also, if you check out their primer on electronic commerce, it has a bias towards protecting the rights of distributors:
(This exactly BSA rhetoric.) They acknowledge that both the public's interest and the interests of rightholders must be taken into account:
But then goes on in to describe the problems arising for rightholders in detail, but fail completely to even outline the problems faced by the public.
So, we need to educate this agency.
I don't know what it is like in the US, but around here (Norway, Sweden, Finland), you know you're old when you find yourself unable to type fast enough to have a conversation on SMS. The kids do, and they do it fast. So, the watch is smaller allright, but not that much smaller, so I wouldn't be surprised if people will learn to type fast enough to have a conversation through a watch. You remember the tiny keyboards you had on wristwatch calculators...?
It sounds kind of strange, yes. However, they didn't say they found I-129, just that they found some I isotopes and lots of Xe-129. Now, I guess it might be possible to make some a priori assumption on the relative abundance of isotopes of I and deduce it from there. A ADS search for Whitby says that he has been using I-Xe dating a lot lately. I failed to find a reference to the cited work, however. But of course, it is wise to remain skeptical, we will see if this will be accepted eventually.
Of course, I just don't want to put too much stress on my keyboard.... :-)
There are different schools of thought here, that very few are aware of, probably because one school is far more vocal than the other (and they've got coloumns in Scientific American :-) ). Now, this is getting so OT, I'm not going into details, but one school says basically that anything that contributes to the curvature of space should be named "gravity", and then, the negative pressure induced by may well be interpreted as repulsive gravity. The other school, which I happen to agree with, thinks that this is not good, that gravity is fundamentally connected to matter. In which case not only gravity is contributing to the curvature of space.
Now, you bet this could be a loooooong discussion. :-)
Antigravity is a awfully abused word. Doing something that requires a force directed against gravity is something we do all the time, standing up for instance. Climbing walls has nothing to do with antigravity. Antigravity would be a sensible word for something like a repulsive gravitational force, if something like that where to exist. And, no, I don't think it is a good word for the force of a "cosmic constant" either.
Yep, there is hope, when someone asks the question...