Shouldn't I be concerned about the efficiency of a reasonable-sized corner reflector at these frequencies? I agree, though, not having to aim would be great.
"Oh, no! I told them once, I told them a hundred times: put 'Spinal Tap' first and 'Puppet show' last!"
Re:Funny things about those libraries
on
Reining in Google
·
· Score: 1
"There is a funny thing about those libraries - They actually had to buy or have all of those books donated. That is one of the things the Carnegie institute does. It helps libraries purchase and keep there books up to date."
And what, you think Google can't afford to buy all the books they're indexing? They probably won't choose to unless a court tells them they have to, but it can't represent a huge financial barrier to a company Google's size.
"Another thing about libraries - Only ONE person can take a book out at a time or even use it to do the research. Now if a library has multiple copies of a book because it is popular then multiple people can do that."
Here's another thing about Google's books. NO ONE can check out the books or even use them to do research. The library service comparable to Google's is arguably the card catalog. As far as I know, anyone can take as much of that home as they care to make copies of.
"Also as for copying, the libraries I have gone to always have those nice little signs that say photocopying a book is wrong and should not be done. Hmmmm I wonder why, maybe because they are protecthing themself from copyright lawsuits."
Gee, sure would be difficult for Google to put such a notice on its web site. Assuming that there's some legal or ethical requirement for propagandizing your patrons about US Copyright law, which isn't true last I checked. (Maybe you'd also like to see little anti-counterfeiting signs in art-supply stores, "to protect themself from copyright lawsuits"?)
Friend, according to sources I have read WMIis the mob doing business under another name, which makes your story kind of confusing. (One way to tell is that they managed to get a two-letter domain name. How many legitimate enterprises have that kind of access?)
The principal problem I had with Wicked was that it seemed to be written entirely from the movie version of the Wizard of Oz. I find that authorial choice somewhat insulting to L Frank Baum, who after all crafted his much-beloved world of Oz in a series of 14 "juvenile" novels that in my opinion explored many of the same issues, but with much more taste and interest. If you liked Wicked, or even if you did not, I would highly recommend giving a chance to the books the movie that inspired the novel were based upon.
L Frank Baum's universe is quite ethically and morally complicated; a fact that is made full use of in the recent novel Wicked.
(Not one of my favorites, but that's neither here nor there.) In taking a story from Baum's long-running series out of context and transforming it into a screenplay, a great deal gets lost. It seems to me that Baum wanted us, at least as adults, to think about the kinds of things that concern you.
That said, the Wicked Witch of the West is clearly not a nice person, nor a mentally stable one. She spends a lot of time trying to kill a child for the high crime of happening to be inside the house that fell on her sister. The rightful ownership of the ruby slippers is an interesting question, but I think we can safely guess that the Witch would not have used the magic power of the slippers to send Dorothy home and restore all Oz to peace, joy, and prosperity. The Witch died, after all, as an inadvertent result of setting Dorothy's highly flammable friend on fire. I'm OK with that.
"Like the X Prize (and the Orteig prize won by Lindbergh), the Centennial Challenges are quite consciously aimed at that kind of leverage -- enlisting a total volunteer investment greater than the value of the prize. As a taxpayer, I approve."
Quite aside from the potential ethical considerations, note that the space elevator challenge contest was deemed essentially a failure. Our government spent some amount of money and energy organizing the contest, consumed a bunch of money and energy of entrants, and produced a result considered so bad they didn't even find it worth $50K in prize money. As a taxpayer, I'm not so sanguine about this.
Open hardware is like open source; it's about designs, schematics, PCB layouts, FPGA codes, etc. There are several existing open hardware projects at Portland State, notably Portland State Aerospace Society's rockets and a Software-Defined Radio project built on the open-hardware Universal Software Radio Peripheral. More are expected.
Heh. My undergrad degree is in Physics. Trust me, the situation for undergraduate researchers is better in CS.
Come join us at Portland State. I promise we will find many cool things for you to do; no promises, but some of them might even pay. Our strong undergrads usually find pretty nice jobs when they get out, and many of them work in the tech business while they're in.
See my previous responses in this thread. Also, check out the notion of opportunity cost, especially the notion that it might be non-monetary (benefit to society etc).
See my previous post. I donate my time for the benefit of my students in great huge wads all the time. I just have to choose which projects I do it for carefully: both for my own sanity, and to make sure the students themselves receive maximum benefit. My students involved in PSAS and XCB have reaped serious benefits from their free work---IMHO much more than if they'd put the same effort into the space elevator contest.
You need to divide your numbers by four to get quarterly instead of annually. That leaves you at about $125K (although I question most of your numbers), which is about 3x what my students cost---2x if you pay me like I deserve instead of some pittance like I allowed myself.
As to the SBIR being pork, in this case you're nuts. Paying myself and my colleague like academics rather than engineers, my company ended up losing about $5,000 on this contract, while doing great work for NASA (they wrote us a commendation letter). The only thing that made it worth doing was---you guessed it---a contest; we applied for SBIR 2 money but didn't receive it.
Let me make myself clear. I won't be doing the space elevator contest or the corresponding SBIR. I have way more productive interests to work on SBIR applications for. What would change my mind? Offer $200K for the winning project, and $50K for each entrant meeting some minimal qualification. That would probably be enough to divert me from my other work for a bit, and help build the space elevator.
It's great for research students to work for free on projects. I just want them to be my projects, not someone else's. See my PSAS and SDR stuff for examples of where I've successfully deployed students to learn, have fun, gain experience, and pad their CVs. See my Summer of Code site for an example of where they've actually gotten paid to do it.
Sadly, changing the prize from $50K to $100K doesn't change the economics much. In my previous post I was estimating (perhaps wildly wrongly) that this year's prize had an expected worth of $5K; that would make the expected value of next year's prize $10K if the larger money didn't attract a larger, stronger field of contestants.
"$50K for a design and prototype isn't a lot, but since student labor is basically free most of the money can go towards building the prototype."
As a research professor with students who could have tried to build this thing, take my word for it that it's not enough money. I refuse to have my students doing someone else's research for free; I want to be able to pay them at least $10/hour + tuition remission. For an undergraduate at my fairly inexpensive institution, that's about $7K per quarter, and I'd need three of these. Add a $20K equipment budget and $5K for my time and we are at $46K.
So the budget is $50K. What's the problem? Just the obvious one that my chance of winning is quite difficult to estimate, but certainly way less than 100%. I'd put my expected return at around $5K. There may be institutions and individuals who can afford to expect to lose $41K for the prestige of doing good research and the prospect of future funding. I'm not one, so I'm out.
It doesn't appear that I am unique in these calculations.
By contrast, I just finished a NASA Phase I SBIR. $68,000 over 6 months, guaranteed. If I wanted to do space elevator research, I'd be way better off submitting an SBIR proposal than entering the contest: small up-front risk, higher expected return, better prospects of future funding.
Contests are run because there are often folks who overvalue them, so they are sometimes a cheap way to get things done at the expense of others.
Cheriton's V System didn't suck. I used it in a commercial project in the late 1980s and loved it; it met all of your criteria. If Cheriton had open-sourced it, I think it would have had a huge impact. But he didn't, and for whatever reason it hasn't.
The deep philosophical meaning of Libet's experiment, especially for an AI researcher like myself, is complicated. But undeniably, a light coming on just before you've realized you're going to press a button is creeeepyyy.
I did some more investigation, but can't find anyone who actually got the experiment to work as a real-time deal yet. I think I need to bug a cognitive neuroscientist for more detail to find out how to build an online Libet machine.
"If you investigate paranormal events with the mindset that it's all fake, then you're just as bad as the `true believers' you're trying to discredit. Scientific exploration of anything requires an open mind."
Oops! Mind the deep philosophical waters there. Now you've splashed truth all over yourself; let's try to dry you out a bit.
The history of the philosophy of science (a mouthful were there ever one) is complicated, and I think that it's fair to say that there's no widespread agreement on the exact details of what science is. A popular view, however, is that it proceeds in three parts. First, a hypothesis is developed. The hypothesis should be precise, predictive, useful, and falsifiable. Second, the most rigorous possible attempts are made to falsify the hypothesis. Third, as attempts at refutation fail, the hypothesis gradually becomes an accepted theory, meaning that others will build new hypotheses atop it. Of course, the theory could still be falsified at any time; if so, a new hypothesis is created by adjusting or discarding current theory, consequences of the change upon other hypotheses and theories are evaluated, and the process begins again.
A variant of this process particularly popular in modern science is known as "statistical hypothesis testing". The basic idea is to reject the "null hypothesis" that no effect of some action exists by statistically testing the data. "Failure to reject the null hypothesis" triggers rejection of the contrary hypothesis that an effect exists.
By these definitions of what science is, it really only "requires an open mind" in the hypothesis formation stage. In the hypothesis testing stage, it requires the exact opposite: intense efforts to falsify ("debunk") the hypothesis. In this view, Randi is quite credibly a scientist, and real scientists debunk things all the time.
There. Looks like that was dry enough to do for you. March on!
Endlessly rising or descending tones using Shepard tones can be pretty creepy when done slowly and coupled with a distraction.
One of the creepiest effects I know of is Libet's Experiment. It turns out that you can measure a brain signal called the "Readiness Potential" on an EEG that appears about 0.5-1.5 seconds before you consciously decide to push a button! Hook the EEG up to a light, and the light will come on when you're about to push the button; you can't fool it. It's possible these days to rig an audio card EEG; a skilled geek should be able to build a Libet machine to leave lying around for folks to play with. Let us know if you achieve OpenLibet, as we will all want to build our own.
In the history of the world, no medium has been killed because folks couldn't afford to produce for it. Do you know how much it costs to run a symphony orchestra for a year? Yet much new symphonic music is written every year, and performed by the hundreds of symphony orchestras all over the world. This for a medium in which only a tiny fraction of the population is willing to listen at all. Note that ticket prices pay for only a fraction of the cost; the rest is made up in other ways.
If we can keep producing symphonies, I say movies aren't going anywhere, regardless of shifts in their profit model.
For some steps toward 802.11b SDR, check out my student's Summer of Codeproject. Volunteers gratefully accepted!
An issue we didn't recognize when starting out is that 802.11b actually wants 120MHz or more of bandwidth for a single low-speed channel; it really does spread a lot. Our current hardware really only gives us 60MHz, which will capture the main lobe, which should be enough. Eventually, we might have to go to a hybrid "soft" radio where the despreading is done with some kind of front-end magic, although obviously this is a last-resort solution.
Wow, it's almost like in that Star Trek movie! You can take your transparent aluminum and go back in time to either 2004 or even 2002! It's funny how time travel always makes that "dupdupdup" sound.
Actually, though IANAL, I don't believe you are correct about reverse engineered software automatically being a "derivative work" under copyright law. This is why "clean room" reverse engineering is done; if the team that writes the new version provably hasn't seen any of the code of the old version, they almost by definition cannot have infringed the old copyright with their new version. Patents are still a problem for the clean room team, though.
In any case, reverse engineering is not the real issue. If I cut the recipe for KFC out of a magazine, I am "free as the wind to publish that recipe, sell it to others or even set up my own chicken selling franchise." The same is by default not true for the recipe file program I find on a CD in that same magazine. <sarcasm>I hope it's clear how the result has been way more creativity in recipe filing programs than in the recipes themselves, widely-watched television broadcasts have sprung up around programming, etc. Indeed, there's hardly creativity expended or money made on recipes at all, since their creators cannot profit by licensing them.</sarcasm>
Also, as an earlier poster pointed out, the time-to-fix for Firefox is significantly better. In addition, the severity of the bugs tends to be much lower. Because I'm dumb enough to occasionally run Flash stuff, I experience Firefox hangs and crashes all the time. It's annoying, but ultimately livable. Of the small number of functionality or security vulnerabilities that have been found in recent Firefox, very few are serious enough to merit my real concern.
Actually, a lot of recipes are protected. When was the last time you cooked up some KFC or made some Coca Cola?
There are a great many ways of making "southern-fried chicken", and you're welcome to follow any recipe you like. You can't make Kentucky Fried Chicken(tm) unless you're KFC. The situation is just the same for software - you're free to write your own word processor, you just can't write Microsoft Word.
Actually, you are confusing not two, not three, but four distinct kinds of "Intellectual Property" law. (One can see from this example why Stallman hates the term so much. Disclaimer: IANAL.)
A copyright would prevent folks from reproducing and selling the recipe without a license, but would still allow folks who had the recipe to cook with it. Recipes are not copyrightable under current US law, though collections of recipes (recipe books) are. If you have the KFC recipe, you may give or sell it to anyone you want.
A patent would require that the recipe be disclosed, but would prevent anyone from legally cooking from the recipe without a license. Recipes are not patentable under current US law. If you have the KFC recipe, you may make KFC all you like.
A trademark would prevent folks from calling the recipe or the food produced from it by its commercial name without a license. Recipes are no more entitled to use trademarked names than anything else under current US law. If you have the KFC recipe, you may not publicly call it "the KFC recipe" nor the chicken you cook "KFC" or "Kentucky Fried Chicken".
A trade secret would not allow you to obtain the recipe from its corporate author without a license. US law (and US state law) is currently somewhat confused on this issue. Suffice it to say that unless and until the KFC recipe became widely known, if it was taken from the KFC corporation illegally you would probably be liable for posessing and/or sharing it under trade secret law.
Incidentally, according to William Poundstone's book Big Secrets, the "secret" recipe for KFC is salt, flour, pepper, and MSG: cook in a pressure baster. By telling you this, I have as far as I know violated no US laws. Go cook up some chicken that tastes "Southern Fried" and contemplate the complicated world of the simple recipe.
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Shouldn't I be concerned about the efficiency of a reasonable-sized corner reflector at these frequencies? I agree, though, not having to aim would be great.
Add a nice big parabolic dish of your own, and see how good the originator's ear protection is.
"Oh, no! I told them once, I told them a hundred times: put 'Spinal Tap' first and 'Puppet show' last!"
"There is a funny thing about those libraries - They actually had to buy or have all of those books donated. That is one of the things the Carnegie institute does. It helps libraries purchase and keep there books up to date."
And what, you think Google can't afford to buy all the books they're indexing? They probably won't choose to unless a court tells them they have to, but it can't represent a huge financial barrier to a company Google's size.
"Another thing about libraries - Only ONE person can take a book out at a time or even use it to do the research. Now if a library has multiple copies of a book because it is popular then multiple people can do that."
Here's another thing about Google's books. NO ONE can check out the books or even use them to do research. The library service comparable to Google's is arguably the card catalog. As far as I know, anyone can take as much of that home as they care to make copies of.
"Also as for copying, the libraries I have gone to always have those nice little signs that say photocopying a book is wrong and should not be done. Hmmmm I wonder why, maybe because they are protecthing themself from copyright lawsuits."
Gee, sure would be difficult for Google to put such a notice on its web site. Assuming that there's some legal or ethical requirement for propagandizing your patrons about US Copyright law, which isn't true last I checked. (Maybe you'd also like to see little anti-counterfeiting signs in art-supply stores, "to protect themself from copyright lawsuits"?)
Friend, according to sources I have read WMI is the mob doing business under another name, which makes your story kind of confusing. (One way to tell is that they managed to get a two-letter domain name. How many legitimate enterprises have that kind of access?)
The principal problem I had with Wicked was that it seemed to be written entirely from the movie version of the Wizard of Oz. I find that authorial choice somewhat insulting to L Frank Baum, who after all crafted his much-beloved world of Oz in a series of 14 "juvenile" novels that in my opinion explored many of the same issues, but with much more taste and interest. If you liked Wicked, or even if you did not, I would highly recommend giving a chance to the books the movie that inspired the novel were based upon.
L Frank Baum's universe is quite ethically and morally complicated; a fact that is made full use of in the recent novel Wicked. (Not one of my favorites, but that's neither here nor there.) In taking a story from Baum's long-running series out of context and transforming it into a screenplay, a great deal gets lost. It seems to me that Baum wanted us, at least as adults, to think about the kinds of things that concern you.
That said, the Wicked Witch of the West is clearly not a nice person, nor a mentally stable one. She spends a lot of time trying to kill a child for the high crime of happening to be inside the house that fell on her sister. The rightful ownership of the ruby slippers is an interesting question, but I think we can safely guess that the Witch would not have used the magic power of the slippers to send Dorothy home and restore all Oz to peace, joy, and prosperity. The Witch died, after all, as an inadvertent result of setting Dorothy's highly flammable friend on fire. I'm OK with that.
"Like the X Prize (and the Orteig prize won by Lindbergh), the Centennial Challenges are quite consciously aimed at that kind of leverage -- enlisting a total volunteer investment greater than the value of the prize. As a taxpayer, I approve."
Quite aside from the potential ethical considerations, note that the space elevator challenge contest was deemed essentially a failure. Our government spent some amount of money and energy organizing the contest, consumed a bunch of money and energy of entrants, and produced a result considered so bad they didn't even find it worth $50K in prize money. As a taxpayer, I'm not so sanguine about this.
Open hardware is like open source; it's about designs, schematics, PCB layouts, FPGA codes, etc. There are several existing open hardware projects at Portland State, notably Portland State Aerospace Society's rockets and a Software-Defined Radio project built on the open-hardware Universal Software Radio Peripheral. More are expected.
Heh. My undergrad degree is in Physics. Trust me, the situation for undergraduate researchers is better in CS.
Come join us at Portland State. I promise we will find many cool things for you to do; no promises, but some of them might even pay. Our strong undergrads usually find pretty nice jobs when they get out, and many of them work in the tech business while they're in.
See my previous responses in this thread. Also, check out the notion of opportunity cost, especially the notion that it might be non-monetary (benefit to society etc).
See my previous post. I donate my time for the benefit of my students in great huge wads all the time. I just have to choose which projects I do it for carefully: both for my own sanity, and to make sure the students themselves receive maximum benefit. My students involved in PSAS and XCB have reaped serious benefits from their free work---IMHO much more than if they'd put the same effort into the space elevator contest.
You need to divide your numbers by four to get quarterly instead of annually. That leaves you at about $125K (although I question most of your numbers), which is about 3x what my students cost---2x if you pay me like I deserve instead of some pittance like I allowed myself.
As to the SBIR being pork, in this case you're nuts. Paying myself and my colleague like academics rather than engineers, my company ended up losing about $5,000 on this contract, while doing great work for NASA (they wrote us a commendation letter). The only thing that made it worth doing was---you guessed it---a contest; we applied for SBIR 2 money but didn't receive it.
Let me make myself clear. I won't be doing the space elevator contest or the corresponding SBIR. I have way more productive interests to work on SBIR applications for. What would change my mind? Offer $200K for the winning project, and $50K for each entrant meeting some minimal qualification. That would probably be enough to divert me from my other work for a bit, and help build the space elevator.
It's great for research students to work for free on projects. I just want them to be my projects, not someone else's. See my PSAS and SDR stuff for examples of where I've successfully deployed students to learn, have fun, gain experience, and pad their CVs. See my Summer of Code site for an example of where they've actually gotten paid to do it.
Sadly, changing the prize from $50K to $100K doesn't change the economics much. In my previous post I was estimating (perhaps wildly wrongly) that this year's prize had an expected worth of $5K; that would make the expected value of next year's prize $10K if the larger money didn't attract a larger, stronger field of contestants.
"$50K for a design and prototype isn't a lot, but since student labor is basically free most of the money can go towards building the prototype."
As a research professor with students who could have tried to build this thing, take my word for it that it's not enough money. I refuse to have my students doing someone else's research for free; I want to be able to pay them at least $10/hour + tuition remission. For an undergraduate at my fairly inexpensive institution, that's about $7K per quarter, and I'd need three of these. Add a $20K equipment budget and $5K for my time and we are at $46K.
So the budget is $50K. What's the problem? Just the obvious one that my chance of winning is quite difficult to estimate, but certainly way less than 100%. I'd put my expected return at around $5K. There may be institutions and individuals who can afford to expect to lose $41K for the prestige of doing good research and the prospect of future funding. I'm not one, so I'm out.
It doesn't appear that I am unique in these calculations.
By contrast, I just finished a NASA Phase I SBIR. $68,000 over 6 months, guaranteed. If I wanted to do space elevator research, I'd be way better off submitting an SBIR proposal than entering the contest: small up-front risk, higher expected return, better prospects of future funding.
Contests are run because there are often folks who overvalue them, so they are sometimes a cheap way to get things done at the expense of others.
Cheriton's V System didn't suck. I used it in a commercial project in the late 1980s and loved it; it met all of your criteria. If Cheriton had open-sourced it, I think it would have had a huge impact. But he didn't, and for whatever reason it hasn't.
The deep philosophical meaning of Libet's experiment, especially for an AI researcher like myself, is complicated. But undeniably, a light coming on just before you've realized you're going to press a button is creeeepyyy.
I did some more investigation, but can't find anyone who actually got the experiment to work as a real-time deal yet. I think I need to bug a cognitive neuroscientist for more detail to find out how to build an online Libet machine.
"If you investigate paranormal events with the mindset that it's all fake, then you're just as bad as the `true believers' you're trying to discredit. Scientific exploration of anything requires an open mind."
Oops! Mind the deep philosophical waters there. Now you've splashed truth all over yourself; let's try to dry you out a bit.
The history of the philosophy of science (a mouthful were there ever one) is complicated, and I think that it's fair to say that there's no widespread agreement on the exact details of what science is. A popular view, however, is that it proceeds in three parts. First, a hypothesis is developed. The hypothesis should be precise, predictive, useful, and falsifiable. Second, the most rigorous possible attempts are made to falsify the hypothesis. Third, as attempts at refutation fail, the hypothesis gradually becomes an accepted theory, meaning that others will build new hypotheses atop it. Of course, the theory could still be falsified at any time; if so, a new hypothesis is created by adjusting or discarding current theory, consequences of the change upon other hypotheses and theories are evaluated, and the process begins again.
A variant of this process particularly popular in modern science is known as "statistical hypothesis testing". The basic idea is to reject the "null hypothesis" that no effect of some action exists by statistically testing the data. "Failure to reject the null hypothesis" triggers rejection of the contrary hypothesis that an effect exists.
By these definitions of what science is, it really only "requires an open mind" in the hypothesis formation stage. In the hypothesis testing stage, it requires the exact opposite: intense efforts to falsify ("debunk") the hypothesis. In this view, Randi is quite credibly a scientist, and real scientists debunk things all the time.
There. Looks like that was dry enough to do for you. March on!
Endlessly rising or descending tones using Shepard tones can be pretty creepy when done slowly and coupled with a distraction.
One of the creepiest effects I know of is Libet's Experiment. It turns out that you can measure a brain signal called the "Readiness Potential" on an EEG that appears about 0.5-1.5 seconds before you consciously decide to push a button! Hook the EEG up to a light, and the light will come on when you're about to push the button; you can't fool it. It's possible these days to rig an audio card EEG; a skilled geek should be able to build a Libet machine to leave lying around for folks to play with. Let us know if you achieve OpenLibet, as we will all want to build our own.
In the history of the world, no medium has been killed because folks couldn't afford to produce for it. Do you know how much it costs to run a symphony orchestra for a year? Yet much new symphonic music is written every year, and performed by the hundreds of symphony orchestras all over the world. This for a medium in which only a tiny fraction of the population is willing to listen at all. Note that ticket prices pay for only a fraction of the cost; the rest is made up in other ways.
If we can keep producing symphonies, I say movies aren't going anywhere, regardless of shifts in their profit model.
For some steps toward 802.11b SDR, check out my student's Summer of Code project. Volunteers gratefully accepted!
An issue we didn't recognize when starting out is that 802.11b actually wants 120MHz or more of bandwidth for a single low-speed channel; it really does spread a lot. Our current hardware really only gives us 60MHz, which will capture the main lobe, which should be enough. Eventually, we might have to go to a hybrid "soft" radio where the despreading is done with some kind of front-end magic, although obviously this is a last-resort solution.
Wow, it's almost like in that Star Trek movie! You can take your transparent aluminum and go back in time to either 2004 or even 2002! It's funny how time travel always makes that "dupdupdup" sound.
Actually, though IANAL, I don't believe you are correct about reverse engineered software automatically being a "derivative work" under copyright law. This is why "clean room" reverse engineering is done; if the team that writes the new version provably hasn't seen any of the code of the old version, they almost by definition cannot have infringed the old copyright with their new version. Patents are still a problem for the clean room team, though.
In any case, reverse engineering is not the real issue. If I cut the recipe for KFC out of a magazine, I am "free as the wind to publish that recipe, sell it to others or even set up my own chicken selling franchise." The same is by default not true for the recipe file program I find on a CD in that same magazine. <sarcasm>I hope it's clear how the result has been way more creativity in recipe filing programs than in the recipes themselves, widely-watched television broadcasts have sprung up around programming, etc. Indeed, there's hardly creativity expended or money made on recipes at all, since their creators cannot profit by licensing them.</sarcasm>
Also, as an earlier poster pointed out, the time-to-fix for Firefox is significantly better. In addition, the severity of the bugs tends to be much lower. Because I'm dumb enough to occasionally run Flash stuff, I experience Firefox hangs and crashes all the time. It's annoying, but ultimately livable. Of the small number of functionality or security vulnerabilities that have been found in recent Firefox, very few are serious enough to merit my real concern.
Actually, a lot of recipes are protected. When was the last time you cooked up some KFC or made some Coca Cola?
There are a great many ways of making "southern-fried chicken", and you're welcome to follow any recipe you like. You can't make Kentucky Fried Chicken(tm) unless you're KFC. The situation is just the same for software - you're free to write your own word processor, you just can't write Microsoft Word.
Actually, you are confusing not two, not three, but four distinct kinds of "Intellectual Property" law. (One can see from this example why Stallman hates the term so much. Disclaimer: IANAL.)
Incidentally, according to William Poundstone's book Big Secrets, the "secret" recipe for KFC is salt, flour, pepper, and MSG: cook in a pressure baster. By telling you this, I have as far as I know violated no US laws. Go cook up some chicken that tastes "Southern Fried" and contemplate the complicated world of the simple recipe.