Hmm. I thought the reason you could walk on hot coals was (and I know I'm going to totally blow the spelling of this one) "the Liedenfost Effect," that some of the perspiration on your feet flashes to steam when you come into contact with the coals. The steam then insulates your feet from the direct conduction of the very hot coals. Again, I know I blew the spelling, but this is the same effect that makes water bead up and skitter around a hot skillet. If it didn't happen, that much water would boil away in a second or two.
Can anyone more than a decade closer to their physics/chemistry/engineering education remind me of the right name for this?
Photovoltaic cells would be an excellent source of energy for this process. A great deal of research has been/is being done on the feasibility of a "hydrogen economy." See eren.doe.gov. It sure looks feasible. But this still misses the point. You don't have to have it all worked out before you start. We didn't have a network of filling stations when the autmobile was first produced. These things feed on one another. The PV economy actually exists today, it is just ridculously small. The PV/Hydrogen economy doesn't exist today, but it may soon. When it does, it may not be competetive with the present system. But as fossil fuels get harder to extract (and note, we are not running out of oil, we are running out of oil at current prices. The price of oil will then rise to where more expensive methods of extraction become economical.), the price rises and at some point the PV/hydrogen system will be cheaper.
"It'll never fly, Orville" is a common reaction. Don't be fooled by the difficulty or the poor initial economy. All things being equal, this may be a non-starter, but a look at history shows that nothing stays equal. Ever.
The amount of hydrogen you get from a volume of water is staggering. Very little water would be taken. The use of the energy in the fuel cell turns the the hydrogen back into water. Net water loss: zero.
It seems to me that both of you are thinking on the right track. What you must bear in mind is that (in the United States at least) both of these points of view were perfectly understood by the founders of the government. Intellectual Property is entirely an artifact of law -- a creation of government. This creation is in law to encourage the production of such works. The Constitution specifically states that all such grants of monopoly over created works be for a limited time. They also well understood the value of a commons of ideas from which all may freely pull.
What has been happening is the the definition of "limited time" has been expanding and expanding to ridculous lengths. The original copyright law protected a work for a mere 17 years. Until (I think it was legislation sponsored by Sonny Bono) the recent extension, it was life of the author plus sixty years. This is already a ridculous length of time. I believe the extension passed (someone who knows, help me with this, please!) and it will be life of the author plus yet some more years.
There is a half-joke that copyright is extended every time Mickey Mouse is about to enter the public domain.
I have heard the "gift culture" argument before. While I can't dismiss the possibility, I must say I doubt the success of the model. The model for creative production before copyright was NOT a gift culture model. It was patronage model. Perhaps that could work again, but I doubt very much that you could find any patron to support the production of something like the Lord of the Rings trilogy of movies merely for the prestige he or she would gain from its existence due to his or her patronage. Not even Bill Gates and five of his richest friends could afford to do that a few times.
No, I think IP law is a good thing. Artists are free(er) to produce what they will (under a patronage system, you get the art the patrons want made, not the art the artist wants to make). Sure, the dictatorship of the marketplace exists, but better that than the dictatorship of the patrons. The passing of works into the public domain serves the commonweal. The real problems are the emergence of the technologies that allow practically free reproduction and distribution, and the extension of property rights such that intellectual property is practically real property.
What the copying enthusiasts seem to fail to realize is that wholesale illegal copying is the reason DRM is coming. The copiers' belief that they can have what they want because they want it is the strongest possible argument for making the copying technology illegal.
I think there is a material difference as well between (let's keep using the same example here) the cost J.R.R. Tolkien paid to write his book and the cost that was paid by the filmmaker and performers of the films.
But less so than you might think. To realize your ideal gift culture, you must not only eliminate want, you must eliminate death. J.R.R. Tolkien spent an significant fraction of his time on the planet writing that book. By what right can you copy it and give him nothing? Is technical ability equivalent to moral sanction?
We cannot make our moral (or practical) decisions on the basis of conditions that might exist at some unknown point in the future. For me, I do not illegally copy anything. I use software (well, 95%+ of my software) that is Free Software (which is protected IP, by the way). I give money to the Electronic Frontier Foundation to express my political will that IP law be changed back to a form that favors the commons. I discuss the issue (in fourms [fora?] like this) hoping to persuade and be persuaded of the right way to balance vital social interests in this question (and no, "I want it and I don't want to pay for it" is not a vital social interest).
I guess what I'm saying is that I don't think IP is wrong. I do think what has happened to IP lay over the last thirty years is wrong. The solution is to speak and become politcally active. Copying things illegally could be regarded as civil disobedience, but if you engage in it, you should be prepared to go to jail for it. Protesters are numerous until this little detail about what civil disobedience means is explained. Then they tend to dwindle in number. I'm not so opposed (or persuaded of the impossibility of change through the political process) to IP that I'm ready to copy things illegally.
But copying a movie without paying is stealing. And I don't see how legally or morally it can be anything but stealing right now.
This is not meant to be flaming or contemptuous, but I did notice that you suggest things may be different in a 30-year time horizon at the start of your post, but this had expanded to a 100-year time horizon by the time you reached the end. Was it Yogi Berra (baseball player and surprisingly deep philosoper) who said, "Making predictions is hard, especially about the future?";-)
You know, for once I agree with an AC who seems (based on scant evidence) to be an MS believer. Gates leaving/dying/becoming catatonic would not end Microsoft. But don't underestimate the celebrity factor in market pricing. The stock would be hurt badly for quite some time until the company persuades The Street (Wall, not Sesame, for those who are just joining us) that their new top management has got what it takes.
In one form or another, no matter what happens, Microsoft will be around for a good long time. But as one of the "Linux Zealots," I have to say that this doesn't bother me in the slightest. I've never hated Microsoft for existing. I have hated it for its unwarranted and unprecedented market power and for its ruthless destruction of any innovator who threatens that market power. Even in this, where Microsoft deserves blame, they are not wholly responsible for the fall of the companies whose air supply they choose to cut off. The management at Netscape for example certainly deserves much of the blame. But giving away IE helped.
I'm going to drop this now, because it really is off topic, but I just wanted to let the Microsoft-defensive ACs out there who constantly complain about the "*nix zealots" (I'm a Linux/BSD/Unix zealot, really) that we're not all raving psychotics. Some of us are really quiet, fun-loving psychotics, who just want the freedom to decide what we will do with our computers.
Well, I'll be. I'll never again say I never learned anything on slashdot.:-) But somehow I suspect that having the "joystick" in the "cockpit" has some... Even if cockpit really comes from cockfighting...
If you worked in programming or engineering in the 1980's, you are conditioned to fear for your job. There was a long drought in these fields in the 1980's because massive downsizing by the "big, stable" companies threw thousands of competent professionals on the market at one time. If you are younger than this, you are used to a job market so hot that you can just walk into another job. With the economic slowdown of the last two years or so (the dot com bust, followed by the post 9/11 uncertainty) I'm not sure what the market is like. Clearly, if employers are feeling willing to demand this, they must think the market is tighter than it has been.
If I were in a more cynical mood, I would suggest that you contact a lawyer and see if "balls to the wall" was evidence of a sexually hostile workplace.
Personally, I think software development management is of generally poor quality. This is due to a combination of management ignorance, poor engineering practice, the intangible nature of the product (its much easier to explain sensibly why designing, tooling up for, and manufacturing a widget takes a long time), and underestimation by the rank and file developer. If I had the magic bullet for this problem, I would not still be a mortgage-holding software developer, I would be a very highly paid consultant and regular pundit quoted in the trade rags.
I'd walk out the door too, if I knew I could.
Tip for the youngsters: Buy less house than you want. Have six months salary in the bank at all times. Then you can storm out in high dudgeon like antis0c suggests...
I had to look twice. I cannot believe this is not an article by JonKatz. The medium is not speech. The content may be. The content may not be. It absurd to argue that all computer games are protected speech. Some may be, although I haven't seen anything the rises to that level.
As for things we should be getting hot and bothered about, I don't think (here in the USA) that the worry is about government limiting speech. Rather we should be worried about the increasing consolidation of handful of media companies controlling the production and distribution of "speech."
No free speech law prevents any private party from refusing to publish, print, or broadcast anything they don;t want to publish, print, or broadcast. Censorship is legal provided it is a private party doing it. Now what are we worried about, again?
Several parties to the case have settled, including, IIRC, the Department of Justice. Several states attorneys have refused to settle, so the case is going forward. My home state (Minnesota) is one of those which have refused to settle. This pleases me. Microsoft has always had the market dominance approach. As a shareholder (which I doubtless am through my 401k), I applaud this. But as an allegedly free citizen, and as an author of code, I think they need to be slapped back into the world of competetive commerce.
I do think Linux gives them some competition (more than they care to admit at times), but it took software that was FREE (in the beer sense, not just the speech sense) to get a foothold.
Allright, I've already said I was a being sloppy. Of course they are not perfectly parallel, but they are close enough to it and the energy output of the sun is great enough that they can be usefully focused by convex lenses and concave mirrors to concentrate their energy. This was my only point. I was never trying to say that they were a perfect substitute for laser light; just that they were distinct enough from "common" light sources (read: light bulbs) that you could not substitute the one for the other.
The real reason the sun is useful for this stuff is not so much its distance (giving us nearly parallel rays), but its prodigious energy output, which gives us about 1kW/m^2 at the earth's surface. Now if you had a 1000W light bulb handy and a convex lens, this would not be useful for surgery becuase the light is scattered all over the place, not basically in line from a source that is close enough to a point to be directed with a lens or mirror. A 1kW laser light source would be useful, but that's becuase it has properties similar to the sunlight.
As for "soft shadows," try making shadow animals with the light from a flourescent bulb. Now try it with sunlight. Which one works? Now tell me which one is "not even close to parallel?"
Patents and copyrights serve different purposes. Defense of a patent is the responsbility of the patent holder. Copyright is a presumed protection. Patent infringment is a basis (IANAL, so please correct me if I am arong) for civil action, not criminal sanction. Violation of copyright (which is what underpins the GPL) has criminal consequences.
If you violate a patent, you must either cease or pay a royalty. That's different from facing a criminal sanction. The comparison you make is unfair.
That's not say that I think ignoring patents until they are a problem is the right approach...
Re:Coherent != parallel, and sunlight isn't parall
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You're right of course. Parallel rays and phase coherence are not the same thing. I was sloppy. Coherence and parallelism are properties of laser light, but coherence isn't a property of sunlight.
A half a degree of arc is significant for some of the precision applications of lasers, like holography and laser guidance and navigation, but they are close enough to parallel to be concentrated by a lens or a concave mirror and the light from a flourescent or incandescent bulb cannot be so concentrated. This is more than adequate for a solar substitute for laser surgery.
My high school physics teacher became a bit of a laughing stock when he left a concave mirror in the back seat of his car and left his sunroof open. The focal length of the mirror was pretty close to the height of his car roof. The burned line from the front to the rear of his car roof is fairly ample proof of this property of sunlight.
Cool. So have "They Might Be Giants" covered every dopey science filmstrip song from the 60's and 70's? I'm an old guy -- They Might Be Giants are kinda after my music years...
Re:Bad idea
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I'm afraid there are several special things about sunlight. One of them is that, like laser light, it is a coherent beam (all the rays are parallel). Actually, it isn't really, but we are so far from the sun, its rays are effectively parallel; the divergence is so small as to not matter. This allows the light to be concentrated and thus the power effectively amplified. You can't do this with light from other sources. That light scatters in all directions and thus a lens or mirror will deflect the light at various angles. You can't concentrate it at a point. That's the whole reason the laser was such an important invention.
On a totally different (but slightly relevant) subject: Does anyone else remember being subjected to a dopey little song in elementary school that began:
"The sun is a mass/of incandescent gas/a giant nuclear furnace..."
If you do remember a dopey little song like that, how does the rest of it go? (In case you are frightened of violating the DMCA, this would fall under fair use. If not, well, we could become a wonderful test case for the EFF or ACLU!).
But the original poster was talking about the DATA "idiot". Who the hell cares that the key remains unknown if I can steal the data? The MPAA and RIAA don't give a damn about keys, they don't want you listening or watching without paying. P.S., I am all for AC posting, but if you are going to be abusive, have the courage to use your name.
As the poster pointed out, at some point it goes to your eyes and ears. This is the so-called "analog hole." You can capture the output at this point and re-digitize it. Sure, there is some tiny loss of quality, but you now have an unencrypted data stream you can reproduce indefinitely.
I'm just waiting for the day when someone tries to pass legislation that require chips in our heads where every time we think about a movie, our debit card is automatically charged.
Perfect control, protection of intellectual property rights. Surely economic interests are more important than the commons of ideas?
Read Lawrence Lessig: "Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace" and "The Future of Ideas: The Fate of the Commons in a Connected World." Be concerned.
The answer to the question "is Linux or Windows easier to install?" is, of course, YES. Logic is a harsh taskmaster. "Which is easier to install, Linux or Windows?" That question might lead to naming one of the systems. Sorry, I'm just feeling nitpicky tonight...
You are forgetting about OEM "rescue" CD-ROMs. A lot of these do not do a typical Windows install. They throw a filesystem image on the harddrive that is preconfigured and has a bunch of software packages included. Sometimes this includes Office, Quicken, MSWorks, whatever.
It's wrong to blame Microsoft for such a setup, however. These choices are up to the OEM.
You are talking about the principle of state action. Well, we are not talking about lawsuits here. We are talking about violation of a criminal statute, the DMCA. The DMCA is state action.
Many organizations, from the EFF to the ACLU are working on striking down the DMCA. It is (IMHO) bad law.
Consider supporting the EFF and/or the ACLU. Whatever your politics, we need to support the people pushing back against these laws. For good or for ill, the Supreme Court has sent mized messages about the role of money in politics -- explicitly allowing limits on contributions, wile explicitly disallowing limits on party contributions (IANAL, IIRC, and other apprpriate disclaimers) in diecisions like Nixon v. Missouri PAC, Buckley v. Valeo, and Colorado v. Fed. Election Comission.
The political deck is stacked for corporate interests and against individual interests. I'm not anti-corporate: the fault is ours (individuals), not the corporations'. The EFF and the ACLU (and if you are inclined, the FSF) are a place where an individual can use the same tools the corporate interests use to push back the other way.
The days when technologists could innovate without paying any attention to politics and law are over.
Those numbers also cannot be represented in BCD or in integers. By definition, any irrational number cannot be perfectly represented by a finite number of bits. BCD is great for currency because you are only interested in one more decimal place than you display, and this number of places is always the same. You don't get the rounding error you get with mantissa/exponent representations.
I never ever claimed using floating point was the best idea, merely that it wasn't an inherently bad idea. Not sure how that makes me a troll (as my first response was modded).
Depending on the processor and library, there can be distinct advantages to using floating point, like overflow and underflow exceptions, support for infinities and not-a-number values, and so on.
I also specifically disclaimed special knowledge of this area in my original post, where I specifically stated that my work has me working mostly with OPM, not with scientific and engineering applications.
The post that suggested my post whould be modded "+1, Funny" seemed to be asserting (and the link he offered also supported this) that it was unreasonable to use floating point in currency applications. It might not be the best design decision, but it is certainly not unreasonable. That was my sole and entire point.
I think we are in violent agreement. Except for your claim that it is "funny" to use floating point for currency. There's no reason (except speed) not to. You have to do it right. You also have to do it right if you use integers. BCD is my choice (read my earlier reply) because it strikes a nice balance between performance and convenience.
Your original post seemed to assert that one would be foolish to use floating point. I think that was wrong. That said, I think you were absolutely right about what works better and why.
Oh, and your also wrong about aomething else. Everyone else does think I'm cool. Overwieght 35 year olds who program for a living are the the stuff of all of next year's Hollywood thrillers...;-)
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah. I get all my science from Star Wars.
"Great movie, by the way. Very scientific."
-- Dr. Science (on John Carpenter's "The Thing")
Hmm. I thought the reason you could walk on hot coals was (and I know I'm going to totally blow the spelling of this one) "the Liedenfost Effect," that some of the perspiration on your feet flashes to steam when you come into contact with the coals. The steam then insulates your feet from the direct conduction of the very hot coals. Again, I know I blew the spelling, but this is the same effect that makes water bead up and skitter around a hot skillet. If it didn't happen, that much water would boil away in a second or two.
Can anyone more than a decade closer to their physics/chemistry/engineering education remind me of the right name for this?
You are right, of course. But this happens anyways through electrolysis and radiolysis in nature. I also agree with you that this loss would be tiny.
Photovoltaic cells would be an excellent source of energy for this process. A great deal of research has been/is being done on the feasibility of a "hydrogen economy." See eren.doe.gov. It sure looks feasible. But this still misses the point. You don't have to have it all worked out before you start. We didn't have a network of filling stations when the autmobile was first produced. These things feed on one another. The PV economy actually exists today, it is just ridculously small. The PV/Hydrogen economy doesn't exist today, but it may soon. When it does, it may not be competetive with the present system. But as fossil fuels get harder to extract (and note, we are not running out of oil, we are running out of oil at current prices. The price of oil will then rise to where more expensive methods of extraction become economical.), the price rises and at some point the PV/hydrogen system will be cheaper.
"It'll never fly, Orville" is a common reaction. Don't be fooled by the difficulty or the poor initial economy. All things being equal, this may be a non-starter, but a look at history shows that nothing stays equal. Ever.
The amount of hydrogen you get from a volume of water is staggering. Very little water would be taken. The use of the energy in the fuel cell turns the the hydrogen back into water. Net water loss: zero.
There is no issue here.
Not that it is terribly important, but Jack Valenti is with the MPAA, not the RIAA.
It seems to me that both of you are thinking on the right track. What you must bear in mind is that (in the United States at least) both of these points of view were perfectly understood by the founders of the government. Intellectual Property is entirely an artifact of law -- a creation of government. This creation is in law to encourage the production of such works. The Constitution specifically states that all such grants of monopoly over created works be for a limited time. They also well understood the value of a commons of ideas from which all may freely pull.
;-)
What has been happening is the the definition of "limited time" has been expanding and expanding to ridculous lengths. The original copyright law protected a work for a mere 17 years. Until (I think it was legislation sponsored by Sonny Bono) the recent extension, it was life of the author plus sixty years. This is already a ridculous length of time. I believe the extension passed (someone who knows, help me with this, please!) and it will be life of the author plus yet some more years.
There is a half-joke that copyright is extended every time Mickey Mouse is about to enter the public domain.
I have heard the "gift culture" argument before. While I can't dismiss the possibility, I must say I doubt the success of the model. The model for creative production before copyright was NOT a gift culture model. It was patronage model. Perhaps that could work again, but I doubt very much that you could find any patron to support the production of something like the Lord of the Rings trilogy of movies merely for the prestige he or she would gain from its existence due to his or her patronage. Not even Bill Gates and five of his richest friends could afford to do that a few times.
No, I think IP law is a good thing. Artists are free(er) to produce what they will (under a patronage system, you get the art the patrons want made, not the art the artist wants to make). Sure, the dictatorship of the marketplace exists, but better that than the dictatorship of the patrons. The passing of works into the public domain serves the commonweal. The real problems are the emergence of the technologies that allow practically free reproduction and distribution, and the extension of property rights such that intellectual property is practically real property.
What the copying enthusiasts seem to fail to realize is that wholesale illegal copying is the reason DRM is coming. The copiers' belief that they can have what they want because they want it is the strongest possible argument for making the copying technology illegal.
I think there is a material difference as well between (let's keep using the same example here) the cost J.R.R. Tolkien paid to write his book and the cost that was paid by the filmmaker and performers of the films.
But less so than you might think. To realize your ideal gift culture, you must not only eliminate want, you must eliminate death. J.R.R. Tolkien spent an significant fraction of his time on the planet writing that book. By what right can you copy it and give him nothing? Is technical ability equivalent to moral sanction?
We cannot make our moral (or practical) decisions on the basis of conditions that might exist at some unknown point in the future. For me, I do not illegally copy anything. I use software (well, 95%+ of my software) that is Free Software (which is protected IP, by the way). I give money to the Electronic Frontier Foundation to express my political will that IP law be changed back to a form that favors the commons. I discuss the issue (in fourms [fora?] like this) hoping to persuade and be persuaded of the right way to balance vital social interests in this question (and no, "I want it and I don't want to pay for it" is not a vital social interest).
I guess what I'm saying is that I don't think IP is wrong. I do think what has happened to IP lay over the last thirty years is wrong. The solution is to speak and become politcally active. Copying things illegally could be regarded as civil disobedience, but if you engage in it, you should be prepared to go to jail for it. Protesters are numerous until this little detail about what civil disobedience means is explained. Then they tend to dwindle in number. I'm not so opposed (or persuaded of the impossibility of change through the political process) to IP that I'm ready to copy things illegally.
But copying a movie without paying is stealing. And I don't see how legally or morally it can be anything but stealing right now.
This is not meant to be flaming or contemptuous, but I did notice that you suggest things may be different in a 30-year time horizon at the start of your post, but this had expanded to a 100-year time horizon by the time you reached the end. Was it Yogi Berra (baseball player and surprisingly deep philosoper) who said, "Making predictions is hard, especially about the future?"
You know, for once I agree with an AC who seems (based on scant evidence) to be an MS believer. Gates leaving/dying/becoming catatonic would not end Microsoft. But don't underestimate the celebrity factor in market pricing. The stock would be hurt badly for quite some time until the company persuades The Street (Wall, not Sesame, for those who are just joining us) that their new top management has got what it takes.
In one form or another, no matter what happens, Microsoft will be around for a good long time. But as one of the "Linux Zealots," I have to say that this doesn't bother me in the slightest. I've never hated Microsoft for existing. I have hated it for its unwarranted and unprecedented market power and for its ruthless destruction of any innovator who threatens that market power. Even in this, where Microsoft deserves blame, they are not wholly responsible for the fall of the companies whose air supply they choose to cut off. The management at Netscape for example certainly deserves much of the blame. But giving away IE helped.
I'm going to drop this now, because it really is off topic, but I just wanted to let the Microsoft-defensive ACs out there who constantly complain about the "*nix zealots" (I'm a Linux/BSD/Unix zealot, really) that we're not all raving psychotics. Some of us are really quiet, fun-loving psychotics, who just want the freedom to decide what we will do with our computers.
Well, I'll be. I'll never again say I never learned anything on slashdot. :-) But somehow I suspect that having the "joystick" in the "cockpit" has some... Even if cockpit really comes from cockfighting...
If you worked in programming or engineering in the 1980's, you are conditioned to fear for your job. There was a long drought in these fields in the 1980's because massive downsizing by the "big, stable" companies threw thousands of competent professionals on the market at one time. If you are younger than this, you are used to a job market so hot that you can just walk into another job. With the economic slowdown of the last two years or so (the dot com bust, followed by the post 9/11 uncertainty) I'm not sure what the market is like. Clearly, if employers are feeling willing to demand this, they must think the market is tighter than it has been.
If I were in a more cynical mood, I would suggest that you contact a lawyer and see if "balls to the wall" was evidence of a sexually hostile workplace.
Personally, I think software development management is of generally poor quality. This is due to a combination of management ignorance, poor engineering practice, the intangible nature of the product (its much easier to explain sensibly why designing, tooling up for, and manufacturing a widget takes a long time), and underestimation by the rank and file developer. If I had the magic bullet for this problem, I would not still be a mortgage-holding software developer, I would be a very highly paid consultant and regular pundit quoted in the trade rags.
I'd walk out the door too, if I knew I could.
Tip for the youngsters: Buy less house than you want. Have six months salary in the bank at all times. Then you can storm out in high dudgeon like antis0c suggests...
I had to look twice. I cannot believe this is not an article by JonKatz. The medium is not speech. The content may be. The content may not be. It absurd to argue that all computer games are protected speech. Some may be, although I haven't seen anything the rises to that level.
As for things we should be getting hot and bothered about, I don't think (here in the USA) that the worry is about government limiting speech. Rather we should be worried about the increasing consolidation of handful of media companies controlling the production and distribution of "speech."
No free speech law prevents any private party from refusing to publish, print, or broadcast anything they don;t want to publish, print, or broadcast. Censorship is legal provided it is a private party doing it. Now what are we worried about, again?
Several parties to the case have settled, including, IIRC, the Department of Justice. Several states attorneys have refused to settle, so the case is going forward. My home state (Minnesota) is one of those which have refused to settle. This pleases me. Microsoft has always had the market dominance approach. As a shareholder (which I doubtless am through my 401k), I applaud this. But as an allegedly free citizen, and as an author of code, I think they need to be slapped back into the world of competetive commerce.
I do think Linux gives them some competition (more than they care to admit at times), but it took software that was FREE (in the beer sense, not just the speech sense) to get a foothold.
Allright, I've already said I was a being sloppy. Of course they are not perfectly parallel, but they are close enough to it and the energy output of the sun is great enough that they can be usefully focused by convex lenses and concave mirrors to concentrate their energy. This was my only point. I was never trying to say that they were a perfect substitute for laser light; just that they were distinct enough from "common" light sources (read: light bulbs) that you could not substitute the one for the other.
The real reason the sun is useful for this stuff is not so much its distance (giving us nearly parallel rays), but its prodigious energy output, which gives us about 1kW/m^2 at the earth's surface. Now if you had a 1000W light bulb handy and a convex lens, this would not be useful for surgery becuase the light is scattered all over the place, not basically in line from a source that is close enough to a point to be directed with a lens or mirror. A 1kW laser light source would be useful, but that's becuase it has properties similar to the sunlight.
As for "soft shadows," try making shadow animals with the light from a flourescent bulb. Now try it with sunlight. Which one works? Now tell me which one is "not even close to parallel?"
Patents and copyrights serve different purposes. Defense of a patent is the responsbility of the patent holder. Copyright is a presumed protection. Patent infringment is a basis (IANAL, so please correct me if I am arong) for civil action, not criminal sanction. Violation of copyright (which is what underpins the GPL) has criminal consequences.
If you violate a patent, you must either cease or pay a royalty. That's different from facing a criminal sanction. The comparison you make is unfair.
That's not say that I think ignoring patents until they are a problem is the right approach...
You're right of course. Parallel rays and phase coherence are not the same thing. I was sloppy. Coherence and parallelism are properties of laser light, but coherence isn't a property of sunlight.
A half a degree of arc is significant for some of the precision applications of lasers, like holography and laser guidance and navigation, but they are close enough to parallel to be concentrated by a lens or a concave mirror and the light from a flourescent or incandescent bulb cannot be so concentrated. This is more than adequate for a solar substitute for laser surgery.
My high school physics teacher became a bit of a laughing stock when he left a concave mirror in the back seat of his car and left his sunroof open. The focal length of the mirror was pretty close to the height of his car roof. The burned line from the front to the rear of his car roof is fairly ample proof of this property of sunlight.
Cool. So have "They Might Be Giants" covered every dopey science filmstrip song from the 60's and 70's? I'm an old guy -- They Might Be Giants are kinda after my music years...
I'm afraid there are several special things about sunlight. One of them is that, like laser light, it is a coherent beam (all the rays are parallel). Actually, it isn't really, but we are so far from the sun, its rays are effectively parallel; the divergence is so small as to not matter. This allows the light to be concentrated and thus the power effectively amplified. You can't do this with light from other sources. That light scatters in all directions and thus a lens or mirror will deflect the light at various angles. You can't concentrate it at a point. That's the whole reason the laser was such an important invention.
On a totally different (but slightly relevant) subject: Does anyone else remember being subjected to a dopey little song in elementary school that began:
"The sun is a mass/of incandescent gas/a giant nuclear furnace..."
If you do remember a dopey little song like that, how does the rest of it go? (In case you are frightened of violating the DMCA, this would fall under fair use. If not, well, we could become a wonderful test case for the EFF or ACLU!).
But the original poster was talking about the DATA "idiot". Who the hell cares that the key remains unknown if I can steal the data? The MPAA and RIAA don't give a damn about keys, they don't want you listening or watching without paying. P.S., I am all for AC posting, but if you are going to be abusive, have the courage to use your name.
As the poster pointed out, at some point it goes to your eyes and ears. This is the so-called "analog hole." You can capture the output at this point and re-digitize it. Sure, there is some tiny loss of quality, but you now have an unencrypted data stream you can reproduce indefinitely.
I'm just waiting for the day when someone tries to pass legislation that require chips in our heads where every time we think about a movie, our debit card is automatically charged.
Perfect control, protection of intellectual property rights. Surely economic interests are more important than the commons of ideas?
Read Lawrence Lessig: "Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace" and "The Future of Ideas: The Fate of the Commons in a Connected World." Be concerned.
The answer to the question "is Linux or Windows easier to install?" is, of course, YES. Logic is a harsh taskmaster. "Which is easier to install, Linux or Windows?" That question might lead to naming one of the systems. Sorry, I'm just feeling nitpicky tonight...
You are forgetting about OEM "rescue" CD-ROMs. A lot of these do not do a typical Windows install. They throw a filesystem image on the harddrive that is preconfigured and has a bunch of software packages included. Sometimes this includes Office, Quicken, MSWorks, whatever.
It's wrong to blame Microsoft for such a setup, however. These choices are up to the OEM.
You are talking about the principle of state action. Well, we are not talking about lawsuits here. We are talking about violation of a criminal statute, the DMCA. The DMCA is state action.
Many organizations, from the EFF to the ACLU are working on striking down the DMCA. It is (IMHO) bad law.
Consider supporting the EFF and/or the ACLU. Whatever your politics, we need to support the people pushing back against these laws. For good or for ill, the Supreme Court has sent mized messages about the role of money in politics -- explicitly allowing limits on contributions, wile explicitly disallowing limits on party contributions (IANAL, IIRC, and other apprpriate disclaimers) in diecisions like Nixon v. Missouri PAC, Buckley v. Valeo, and Colorado v. Fed. Election Comission.
The political deck is stacked for corporate interests and against individual interests. I'm not anti-corporate: the fault is ours (individuals), not the corporations'. The EFF and the ACLU (and if you are inclined, the FSF) are a place where an individual can use the same tools the corporate interests use to push back the other way.
The days when technologists could innovate without paying any attention to politics and law are over.
We are merely disagreeing by degrees. Can we move on?
Those numbers also cannot be represented in BCD or in integers. By definition, any irrational number cannot be perfectly represented by a finite number of bits. BCD is great for currency because you are only interested in one more decimal place than you display, and this number of places is always the same. You don't get the rounding error you get with mantissa/exponent representations.
I never ever claimed using floating point was the best idea, merely that it wasn't an inherently bad idea. Not sure how that makes me a troll (as my first response was modded).
Depending on the processor and library, there can be distinct advantages to using floating point, like overflow and underflow exceptions, support for infinities and not-a-number values, and so on.
I also specifically disclaimed special knowledge of this area in my original post, where I specifically stated that my work has me working mostly with OPM, not with scientific and engineering applications.
The post that suggested my post whould be modded "+1, Funny" seemed to be asserting (and the link he offered also supported this) that it was unreasonable to use floating point in currency applications. It might not be the best design decision, but it is certainly not unreasonable. That was my sole and entire point.
I think we are in violent agreement. Except for your claim that it is "funny" to use floating point for currency. There's no reason (except speed) not to. You have to do it right. You also have to do it right if you use integers. BCD is my choice (read my earlier reply) because it strikes a nice balance between performance and convenience.
;-)
Your original post seemed to assert that one would be foolish to use floating point. I think that was wrong. That said, I think you were absolutely right about what works better and why.
Oh, and your also wrong about aomething else. Everyone else does think I'm cool. Overwieght 35 year olds who program for a living are the the stuff of all of next year's Hollywood thrillers...