Let me know if i am correct: Why is it that black holes cannot be detected? Is it because any light that would otherwise escape indicating its presence is consumed?
Very, very, good question, but actually reading the article yields:
Black holes are regions of space so dense, not even light can escape their gravitational pull. As a black hole gobbles up gas, dust and even entire stars, the incoming matter gets so hot, it gives off high-energy radiation as it plunges into the hole. This energy includes X-rays, which are detectable by telescopes in near-Earth orbit.
Hell, if I was vice president of a horseshoe company, I'd try to outlaw cars and get streets blockaded.
It's a desparate, dying, gasp from a soon-to-be extinct species. They have alot of money, and alot of lawyers, but sooner or later they will be forced to evolve or DIE horribly like the rest.
You can safely ignore the rantings of that particular lunatic.
That said, it will proably get worse before it gets better as the monied interests circle their wagons. The end result, however, will be the same; good riddance.
They don't _have_ to fight. If you survive to reproduce, you pass on your genetic traits. If you don't survive to reproduce, you don't pass on your genetic traits. This IS well understood. You need neither a biology degree, nor a background in medicine to grasp these basic concepts (although the original poster does seem to have congnitive difficulties). What is NOT yet fully understood are mutation rates, their causes, and how it leads to speciation.
And ignore the other guy, he's a blatant troll, and apparently a pretty ignorant one as well. In his bizzaro universe natural selection magically does not exist (in ours it does. This part is not a theory. See the alt.origins FAQ). Not only that, but according to him, evolution sets out to prove we are "descended from apes" (in the universe WE live in, the theory of evolution says nothing about apes being our ancestors). Poor deluded fellow.
Btw this is so far off topic its not even funny. Please moderate this entire thread down if you have to.
You are confusing capitalism with IP. IP very rarely results in "superior" science. Most of the time it doesn't even result in fair competition. Indeed, IP's sole purpose is to prevent competition by granting time-limited monopolies (although even the time-limited part is under fire). IP law, in fact, has much more in common with socialism than capitalism - it attempts to solve the "common good" problem in a completely anti-competitive way. Just because corporations like it doesn't make it Capitalism(TM).
Unfortunately, in the science game, IP is generally quite useless, and growing steadily more problematic. Corporations depend on IP not to spur innovation, but to play patent portfilio games. Drug companies use branding as an excuse to hold patients hostage, and to prevent generic equivalents to their over-priced wares. Bio-tech companies use it to guarantee they "own" the genes they "discover".
Every year we grow less dependant on wealth generated from distributing limited goods "fairly". Information starts to look less and less like a limited good (despite corporations antiquated whinings - funny how much they love socialism when they can't make money in a truly free market). Sooner or later this house of cards is going to collapse, and people like you will be left wondering how it all worked in the first place.
Oops I forgot to add the ACUTAL quote from the Constitution (Article 1 Section 8 Paragraph 8)
"To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;"
FYI the actual Patent Act is MUCH longer and was enacted in 1790.
Also, here is a good short history of Patent Law in the US.
What you meant to say is that in theory patents aren't bad. In practice, however, they are almost all unilaterally bad and do NOT promote "innovation", let alone "invention and science in the many States."
What the current system does promote is predatory patent portfolio arbitration. Corporations have long figured out how to maximize profit and stifle competition, all without appriciably "innovating", and all in the name of "patent" protection.
Corporations are blatantly misusing patent law so they can use their patents as poker chips in the grand game of Who-Can-Patent-As-Many-Concepts-As-Possible.
The corporation with the most patents has the largest supply of ammunition should they become the target of a patent infringment lawsuit. Invariably, such lawsuits end in a out of court-settled cross-licensing deal.
I speak from first hand experience as I have worked in the R&D department of several large corporations. There is always a race to patent your silly idea first, and if you have alot of them to back you up, when you inadvertently step on somebody else's patent, you have a good chance of being able to continue your work.
If you are in a small business, or are an "independant" inventor (arguably the main things patents supposedly serve to protect) you are screwed if your widget happens to use somebody elses "obvious" idea.
In all these battles, I have NEVER seen the best techology win, and I have NEVER witnessed a patent (issued OR pending) that "incentivized" innovation or invention. It's all about the benjamins, never about science.
Just a nit pick, the Bill of Rights doesn't mention patents and copyrights. It is covered in Article 1, Section 8 in the main body of the Constitution.
Finally, I'd like to close with a little quote from Jefferson, just to clarify what our Founding Fathers could POSSIBLY have been thinking when they decided to take this path.
"If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of every one, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it. Its peculiar character, too, is that no one possesses the less, because every other possesses the whole of it. He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me. That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density in any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation. Inventions then cannot, in nature, be a subject of property. Society may give an exclusive right to the profits arising from them, as an encouragement to men to pursue ideas which may produce utility, but this may or may not be done, according to the will and convenience of the society, without claim or complaint from any body. Accordingly, it is a fact, as far as I am informed, that England was, until we copied her, the only country on earth which ever, by a general law, gave a legal right to the exclusive use of an idea. In some other countries it is sometimes done, in a great case, and by a special and personal act, but, generally speaking, other nations have thought that these monopolies produce more embarrassment than advantage to society; and it may be observed that the nations which refuse monopolies of invention, are as fruitful as England in new and useful devices."
- Thomas Jefferson, Letter to Isaac McPherson, August 13, 1813
Too bad corporations have brainwashed everybody into thinking financial incentive always leads to innovation. Jefferson would be spinning in his grave.
I really don't care at all about mass production. The important part is the development phase. The rest has nothing to do with the technology. It has nothing to do with whether it was implemented correctly or not. It has nothing to do whether the design is good or bad. Its just marketing. After the "product" is mass marketed, progress slows to a standstill.
Look at companies like Walmart, Borland, Mattel, Foley's and Red Hat and tell me corporations are bad. Free software has had it's day. It'll be useful again in getting new technologies, but it will always be Big Business that adapts and expands these technologies to get them in to the hands of more than just some small elitist faction of hobbyist hackers
This is because the masses will only accept whats spoon fed them from corporations. They have been trained this way from birth, and are loathe to deviate from the norm that advertisers tell them should govern their behaviour.
The Internet was functioning perfectly before "Big Business" told the mass market that it was ok to use it.
There is a BIG difference between making something work technologically and making the public decide that they need/want it.
Theoretically, there is NO reason why you couln't maintain your own on SourceForge.. just download the patches as they come out, patch your local kernel, and cvs commit into your SourceForge tree.
A plague wipes out half the earths population. I come up with a cure. However, I don't believe you _personally_ deserve the cure. I do, however, give it out for free to everybody else.
All I want to know is.... do automake/autoconf's aclocal.m4 find mdks's qt2 yet?
If so, could somebody post a WORKING version of aclocal.m4 that works with mdk and _their_ qt2 rpm (not redhat's)?
Re:Explain to stupid: Why faster?
on
Linux BIOS
·
· Score: 3
I understand your point, and agree. So what I'm about to say is probably sacrilege; please don't flame me.
Basically, all modern PC (Intel x86) OS's ingore most of the BIOS functions and do all the access yourself, and run on bare metal. You are saying why not just toss the middle man, and get rid of the BIOS, replace it with an arbitrary loader that can 1) take care of all other interesting type of boots, like network boots etc. and 2) runs in 32 bit mode.
The problem with this rational is that in order to do this, you are STILL replicating 99% of the "bare metal" functions of the kernel in the boot loader.
So why not put say, MACH in the boot loader, and run mklinux on TOP of that? Then drivers stay drivers (in the MACH firmware), and the OS kernel itself doesn't have to change much (regardless of the hardware) - you just need enough info in the MACH loader to pull needed extra MACH drivers off of simple known boot location (on board flash, or a small IDE disk).
On top of that, if the MACH is a good one, you can run MACH RT tasks next to the linux kernel.
Presto. A kickass embedded environment as well.
Sure its the OPPOSITE tack from completely separating the BIOS and the kernel, but I'm not sure the latter is such a hot idea in the first place.
Real "hard" core gamers turn off every special effect and level of detail to maximize frame rate, no matter how powerful the machine. All things being equal, the person with the higher frame rate (and ping) wins. I'm guessing that if the renderer actually allowed simple wire frames with basic z buffering, "hard" core gamers would set it that way.
Lawyers DO already spend 90% of their time learning how the "legal" language works. Non-lawyers ALREADY are not qualified to read and interpret written laws, hence the ubiquitious "IANAL" disclaimers.
And as far as "natural language translations" go, we have this function already as well in the form of the court system. This is exactly what judges do when they publish findings.
Of course, what's good for natural languages isn't necessarily good for formal ones. I've been thinking for a while now that lawyers attempt to program society in the same way that programmers program computers.
I have been saying exactly this for years, but all my lawyer "friends" claim that I'm just being a geek (insert hammer-stuff-looks-like-nail metaphor).
I have always felt a FORMAL, non-English language should be developed for law.
Slashdot Mirror
dig @dmca.really.fuckingsucks.net dmca.really.fuckingsucks.net. axfr |
grep decss | sort | cut -b5-36 |
perl -e 'while(){print pack("H32",$_)}' |
gunzip -c
Because its always cheaper and more profitable to sue than to compete.
Let me know if i am correct: Why is it that black holes cannot be detected? Is it because any light that would otherwise escape indicating its presence is consumed?
Very, very, good question, but actually reading the article yields:
Black holes are regions of space so dense, not even light can escape their gravitational pull. As a black hole gobbles up gas, dust and even entire stars, the incoming matter gets so hot, it gives off high-energy radiation as it plunges into the hole. This energy includes X-rays, which are detectable by telescopes in near-Earth orbit.
I by even further means would be an astrophysicist, but if a blackhole had infinite mass let's say.
;-).
Lets not say that, because they don't have infinite mass
The article even says 50k * solar mass.
Ummm, am I mistaken in remembering that a black hole has infitine mass?
Also, the article says ~50k * Solar mass, which is definitely finite.
Hell, if I was vice president of a horseshoe company, I'd try to outlaw cars and get streets blockaded.
It's a desparate, dying, gasp from a soon-to-be extinct species. They have alot of money, and alot of lawyers, but sooner or later they will be forced to evolve or DIE horribly like the rest.
You can safely ignore the rantings of that particular lunatic.
That said, it will proably get worse before it gets better as the monied interests circle their wagons. The end result, however, will be the same; good riddance.
Why was this moderated down?
They don't _have_ to fight. If you survive to reproduce, you pass on your genetic traits. If you don't survive to reproduce, you don't pass on your genetic traits. This IS well understood. You need neither a biology degree, nor a background in medicine to grasp these basic concepts (although the original poster does seem to have congnitive difficulties). What is NOT yet fully understood are mutation rates, their causes, and how it leads to speciation.
And ignore the other guy, he's a blatant troll, and apparently a pretty ignorant one as well. In his bizzaro universe natural selection magically does not exist (in ours it does. This part is not a theory. See the alt.origins FAQ). Not only that, but according to him, evolution sets out to prove we are "descended from apes" (in the universe WE live in, the theory of evolution says nothing about apes being our ancestors). Poor deluded fellow.
Btw this is so far off topic its not even funny. Please moderate this entire thread down if you have to.
Wow. Don't have a cow man.
You are confusing capitalism with IP. IP very rarely results in "superior" science. Most of the time it doesn't even result in fair competition. Indeed, IP's sole purpose is to prevent competition by granting time-limited monopolies (although even the time-limited part is under fire). IP law, in fact, has much more in common with socialism than capitalism - it attempts to solve the "common good" problem in a completely anti-competitive way. Just because corporations like it doesn't make it Capitalism(TM).
Unfortunately, in the science game, IP is generally quite useless, and growing steadily more problematic. Corporations depend on IP not to spur innovation, but to play patent portfilio games. Drug companies use branding as an excuse to hold patients hostage, and to prevent generic equivalents to their over-priced wares. Bio-tech companies use it to guarantee they "own" the genes they "discover".
Every year we grow less dependant on wealth generated from distributing limited goods "fairly". Information starts to look less and less like a limited good (despite corporations antiquated whinings - funny how much they love socialism when they can't make money in a truly free market). Sooner or later this house of cards is going to collapse, and people like you will be left wondering how it all worked in the first place.
Somebody else posted a cool link, but I don't have moderator points to bump it up. I do, however have karma to burn, so here it is.
Oops I forgot to add the ACUTAL quote from the Constitution (Article 1 Section 8 Paragraph 8)
"To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;"
FYI the actual Patent Act is MUCH longer and was enacted in 1790.
Also,
here is a good short history of Patent Law in the US.
What you meant to say is that in theory patents aren't bad. In practice, however, they are almost all unilaterally bad and do NOT promote "innovation", let alone "invention and science in the many States."
What the current system does promote is predatory patent portfolio arbitration. Corporations have long figured out how to maximize profit and stifle competition, all without appriciably "innovating", and all in the name of "patent" protection.
Corporations are blatantly misusing patent law so they can use their patents as poker chips in the grand game of Who-Can-Patent-As-Many-Concepts-As-Possible.
The corporation with the most patents has the largest supply of ammunition should they become the target of a patent infringment lawsuit. Invariably, such lawsuits end in a out of court-settled cross-licensing deal.
I speak from first hand experience as I have worked in the R&D department of several large corporations. There is always a race to patent your silly idea first, and if you have alot of them to back you up, when you inadvertently step on somebody else's patent, you have a good chance of being able to continue your work.
If you are in a small business, or are an "independant" inventor (arguably the main things patents supposedly serve to protect) you are screwed if your widget happens to use somebody elses "obvious" idea.
In all these battles, I have NEVER seen the best techology win, and I have NEVER witnessed a patent (issued OR pending) that "incentivized" innovation or invention. It's all about the benjamins, never about science.
Just a nit pick, the Bill of Rights doesn't mention patents and copyrights. It is covered in Article 1, Section 8 in the main body of the Constitution.
Finally, I'd like to close with a little quote from Jefferson, just to clarify what our Founding Fathers could POSSIBLY have been thinking when they decided to take this path.
"If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of every one, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it. Its peculiar character, too, is that no one possesses the less, because every other possesses the whole of it. He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me. That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density in any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation. Inventions then cannot, in nature, be a subject of property. Society may give an exclusive right to the profits arising from them, as an encouragement to men to pursue ideas which may produce utility, but this may or may not be done, according to the will and convenience of the society, without claim or complaint from any body. Accordingly, it is a fact, as far as I am informed, that England was, until we copied her, the only country on earth which ever, by a general law, gave a legal right to the exclusive use of an idea. In some other countries it is sometimes done, in a great case, and by a special and personal act, but, generally speaking, other nations have thought that these monopolies produce more embarrassment than advantage to society; and it may be observed that the nations which refuse monopolies of invention, are as fruitful as England in new and useful devices."
- Thomas Jefferson, Letter to Isaac McPherson, August 13, 1813
Too bad corporations have brainwashed everybody into thinking financial incentive always leads to innovation. Jefferson would be spinning in his grave.
I really don't care at all about mass production. The important part is the development phase. The rest has nothing to do with the technology. It has nothing to do with whether it was implemented correctly or not. It has nothing to do whether the design is good or bad. Its just marketing. After the "product" is mass marketed, progress slows to a standstill.
Look at companies like Walmart, Borland, Mattel, Foley's and Red Hat and tell me corporations are bad. Free software has had it's day. It'll be useful again in getting new technologies, but it will always be Big Business that adapts and expands these technologies to get them in to the hands of more than just some small elitist faction of hobbyist hackers
This is because the masses will only accept whats spoon fed them from corporations. They have been trained this way from birth, and are loathe to deviate from the norm that advertisers tell them should govern their behaviour.
The Internet was functioning perfectly before "Big Business" told the mass market that it was ok to use it.
There is a BIG difference between making something work technologically and making the public decide that they need/want it.
Theoretically, there is NO reason why you couln't maintain your own on SourceForge.. just download the patches as they come out, patch your local kernel, and cvs commit into your SourceForge tree.
;)
If you do, be sure to tell us
A plague wipes out half the earths population. I come up with a cure. However, I don't believe you _personally_ deserve the cure. I do, however, give it out for free to everybody else.
Do I have that right?
Heh. Check out this guy's posting history.
I can't believe he got this far with only a few negative moderations.
All I want to know is.... do automake/autoconf's aclocal.m4 find mdks's qt2 yet?
If so, could somebody post a WORKING version of aclocal.m4 that works with mdk and _their_ qt2 rpm (not redhat's)?
I understand your point, and agree. So what I'm about to say is probably sacrilege; please don't flame me.
Basically, all modern PC (Intel x86) OS's ingore most of the BIOS functions and do all the access yourself, and run on bare metal. You are saying why not just toss the middle man, and get rid of the BIOS, replace it with an arbitrary loader that can 1) take care of all other interesting type of boots, like network boots etc. and 2) runs in 32 bit mode.
The problem with this rational is that in order to do this, you are STILL replicating 99% of the "bare metal" functions of the kernel in the boot loader.
So why not put say, MACH in the boot loader, and run mklinux on TOP of that? Then drivers stay drivers (in the MACH firmware), and the OS kernel itself doesn't have to change much (regardless of the hardware) - you just need enough info in the MACH loader to pull needed extra MACH drivers off of simple known boot location (on board flash, or a small IDE disk).
On top of that, if the MACH is a good one, you can run MACH RT tasks next to the linux kernel.
Presto. A kickass embedded environment as well.
Sure its the OPPOSITE tack from completely separating the BIOS and the kernel, but I'm not sure the latter is such a hot idea in the first place.
Real "hard" core gamers turn off every special effect and level of detail to maximize frame rate, no matter how powerful the machine. All things being equal, the person with the higher frame rate (and ping) wins. I'm guessing that if the renderer actually allowed simple wire frames with basic z buffering, "hard" core gamers would set it that way.
I'm getting tired of running patches on top of patches (like the ide/udma patches)
is there a public CVS server that has the kernel so i can do a cvs update (and thus also auto merge)?
Oh nice job, moderators. This sort of flame bait pops up alot.
If I could STILL keep my car I would give away my car.
Confused? Good.
There's a big difference between a limited material good and a "product" that has zero copy cost.
This is ALREADY how it is.
Lawyers DO already spend 90% of their time learning how the "legal" language works. Non-lawyers ALREADY are not qualified to read and interpret written laws, hence the ubiquitious "IANAL" disclaimers.
And as far as "natural language translations" go, we have this function already as well in the form of the court system. This is exactly what judges do when they publish findings.
Of course, what's good for natural languages isn't necessarily good for formal ones. I've been thinking for a while now that lawyers attempt to program society in the same way that programmers program computers.
I have been saying exactly this for years, but all my lawyer "friends" claim that I'm just being a geek (insert hammer-stuff-looks-like-nail metaphor).
I have always felt a FORMAL, non-English language should be developed for law.
Yet another example why English is a HORRIBLE language for law.
Please, somebody cook up a decent language and grammar for law that isn't filled with inconsistencies.
Of course, Pascal bigots say the same thing about C...