The fact of the matter is that the Supreme Court has ruled on many occasions that mere funding by the government does not cause an individual to lose his rights to free speech. Gulliani is getting his but sued over this, and he is going to lose big time.
The problem with this stuff going on with the Brooklyn Museum is that it is exactly censorship and violates both freedom of religion and freedom of speech. The Mayor of New York has threatened to close a museum for displaying a certain piece of art. There is nothing more direct and obvious as this. This is not a matter of paying for a piece of art that is offensive. It is a matter of closing cultural resource for displaying something the mayor does not agree with. It is ALSO a matter of a mayor trying to make political hay with an upcoming election by trampling all over the constitution.
As far as I am concerned this is a gross abuse of power on the part of the mayor, indistinguishable from any other attempt to repress free speach. What is even worse is that the only reason it is being done is to pander to a certain segment of the voters in anticipation of running for the senate.
Dammit my family has been in North America since 1626. My forefathers names are on the Declaration of Independence at the bottom next to John Hancock and Thomas Jefferson. Thet did not go to war to defend the constitution 23 times to put some tinhorn idiot like Gulliani in power to tell me what is offensive or not. I THINK I CAN MAKE UP MY OWN MIND ABOUT THAT, Thank You.
If you think this is about paying or not paying for a painting, you are WRONG. This is about government interfering with a cultural institution (the Brooklyn Museum) which has a long and respected history IN ORDER TO DO ONE THING, get your name in the paper.
Don't forget that while it is true that SCIENTISTS use the metric system in R&D, NASA is NOT a scientific/R&D organization, they are primarily an engineering and development organization that supplies services for a lot of R&D. The fact is that most engineers working in the US (especially those over 40) have been trained primarily in the ENGLISH system of units. Most of the engineering fields are now a mess because the science half of the picture is in metric, but when the engineers have to translate their work to the 'real world' a conversion to english units must be made so the shop floor guy or assembly tech or manufacturing plant will understand what is going on.
Unfortunately government mandated conversion to the metric system has flopped at least twice partly because of inertia, and partly because Americans don't like to do what the government tells them to. There have also been riots and protests against adopting something the 'Godless French' invented (see Martin Gardner for some interesting histories here).
It would be nice to have a mass conversion to metric, and it would solve a lot of problems (but not all - ever try to use Japanese metric bolts on a French bicycle????) but I don't see it happen until we get teh schools teaching only metric. And we can't even get them to teach evolution.
It seems to me that eBay has to do this. They are in the biz of publishing content on the web, and as most dead trees publishers they get a large part of their revenue from adverts on their site.
They also get some revenue by subscribers - people who buy and sell on their site.
What NO conventional publisher would tolerate would be publisher B taking their content ($$$ to develop) and publishing it with their own advertising. Imagine how the NY Times would react to The Daily News publishing their articles to attract readers? Surely their would by lawyers all over the place.
I am afraid that the private investment in space that you are describing could only be done by mega-consortia of multinational companies. What we would end up with in your scenario is Tennaco-Exxon strip mining the moon. There have been plenty of sci-fi extrapolations of this concept, and they generally end up with colonies of indentured workers or otherwise exploited peoples of third world companies working in extra-terrestrial salt mines. No thanks.
In the US anyway there is such a thing as patent fraud which includes naughty activity like not disclosing all you know about the prior art to the patent office during the patent application. Perhaps Bellboy could be brought up on the European equivalent.
UK patents have no effect in the US. Ditto visa-versa. There is some sort of reciprocity through Europe with the EP system, but I am not sure exactly what the details are.
Didn't ecommerce exist via Minitel long before the Internet? Unfortunately I can't read German, and the bitmap format of the patent images precludes pasting into Babelfish, so it's difficult to say how much this article has been distorted by reading the patent claims.
All of the economic analysis of hemp as a paper substitute that I have seen assume that the political problems associated with industrial hemp agriculture are solved. In fact, N. Dakota recently passed a law legalizing this, and I believe Wisconson may also do so soon.
The problem is that most of the fiber is low quality. Hemp contains two types of fiber, bast and hurd. The bast is good, and can be made into high quality paper. The problem is that the hurd is crap, and accounts for 75% of the plant. For hemp to be competitive must be seperated from the bast. This both costs big bucks in the processing, but also generates a humungous waste stream. By comparison, groundwood softwood process fiber has an efficiency of 90+%. This means if you try to use hemp you are going to be stuck with a waste stream 7x larger than if you use softwoods.
People often think that because you are not cutting down trees hemp makes a better choice for papermaking ecologically. Well, the fact of the matter is that there are other ecological costs in the papermaking process that are at least as important - paper is a very energy, water and waste intensive business. The use of hemp instead of softwood in this picture would be an ecological disaster because of the overall life cycle efficiency.
Speaking as a paper scientist who has kept up with the research on alternative fibers, the sad fact of the matter is that hemp makes a LOUSY sheet of paper for the buck! It is very difficult to beat softwood tree fiber for phyical properties, especially fiber strength, economical processing and overall life cycle cost for papermaking. If it were an economically attractive fiber source you can bet your bottom dollar the paper industry would be using it; they are EXTREMELY cost sensitive.
If you are interested in this topic I would suggest the misc.industry.pulp-and-paper newsgroup.
Nonsense. Interface transfer speed is the least important specification on a drive. You STILL can't get 10,000 RPM IDE drives, which is what you need for real performance.
What is the point of being a great nation unless you can do things like this? Is all America is about just accumulation of $$$ and driving SUV's up and down the highway? Why shouldn't we be trying for something better than just establishing the biggest consumer society in the history of the planet? What happened to the idea of trying to better yourself? What do you want history to remember our nation as? The nation that invented the fast food hamburger joint, the gas guzzler and television shows like Myt Mother The Car? Or do you want to remembered as the first nation to land on the moon, establish a L5 colony, and solve the problem of escaping the earth's gravity economically.
The fact is that a nation should stand for something, and NASA is one of the few things that the government spends money on that is not just a transfer of wealth from high income to low income people.
The history of telecommunications in France is truly bizarre, For example, for many years the French govenrment banned the installation of a telephone system, favoring instead the use of semaphore towers(!). France was the last western european country to set up a telephone system.
What is the fair share? Is it the cost of the system, or the cost of the system minus the cost of pollution, roads, traffic accidents, and the urban blight caused highway sprawl???
How about the indirecct cost of a large military to defend those middle eastern oil wells needed to keep your SUV gas tank full (last I saw, that was nearly $1.00 per gallon all on it's own).
The fact is that the highway system is HEAVILY subsidized in any number of subtle ways.
The concept of a good public education system was adopted on the founding of the US because of disgust with the English private education system and the class structure that it promulgates. If you do not have a good publically funded educational system the sad fact of the matter is (and history has proven this many times over the past 2500 years) that you end up with a society where people do NOT have an equal opportunity to advance themselves. One of the most amazing characteristics of American society is that children of sharecroppers can go to Yale Law School and become President of the US. Elimination of publicfunding of an educational system would be the end of the US as the land of opportunity.
It may not be the most efficient way, but the inefficiencies are far outweighed by the benefits of having equal opportunity to get an education.
Surely there is a question of how fast the chip yields will ramp up to the point where economics are good, and there is also the question of which chip will be more profitable to make. The G4 has to much lower cost per CPU to manufacture.
Still, it's kind of interesting to think about a fab that is making two different CPU designs K7 & G4) that intel can't match.
The people buying a G4 know. Remember that this is a machine aimed at Apple's professional user base, which is mostly graphics and publishing types that throw around very large files all the time.
1. SCSI _is_ a factory option. You just didn't look carefully. For example, they list a Ultra2 dual channel card with 3x 36 gig 10,000 rpm drives in the build to order section.
2. Macintouch.com reports some interesting test comparisons between IDE drives and LVD SCSI drives. It appears that for many users their is no performance difference between SCSI and IDE. After all, we know that the interfaces are generally faster than the hardware. There are also 3rd party add-in IDE controllers that support RAID on the Mac too, so I am sure that high-end SCSI is not a huge part of Apple's market.
Publishing results (often anonymously) to exclude the possibility of future patents is a valid and frequently practiced methodology. There are even anonymous journals in some scientific areas established for exactly this purpose. The reason for anonymity is that you often do not want to tip off your competition as to what areas you are working in, or what technologies you might be using. Another technique is to file the patent, pay to have it issue, then don't pay the maintenance fees - then the patent will lapse into the public domain.
As others have said, a big benefit of patents in the TechBiz is cross-licensing.
The problem with Oracle's stance is that for a patent to be worth anything, it has to be enforced, too. If you don't enforce it it becomes worthless. Slashdot readers might be familiar with Xerox's lawsuit against Apple where they claimed infringement on several software patents having to do with GUIs, laser printing on networks, etc. The suit was thrown out of court because Xerox had waited too long (the Lisa went on the market in 1982, and the suit was brought in 1989).
Personally I am not against software patents per se, but I think that the patent office has not been properly applying the law (novelty, unobviousness, etc.) to most software patent applications. If somebody comes up with something really worthwhile, say a debugging method that can reliably find and fix program logic errors he deserves to get a patent. This crap about business models, XOR screen hiding etc. is not what the basic idea of promoting technological advancement by encouraging R&D and the publication of results is all about.
The problem that the former patent examiner here cited is quite true. Patent examiners do not have the resources needed to really examine patents in depth. If you are smart you can get almost any invention issued as a patent - but the value of the patent is nill because it will never hold up in court. Part of the reson for the lack of resources in the Patent Office is a severe political mistake made by the Clinton regime. A few years ago the patent office raised it's fees to become self-sufficient. A good move IMHO. The problem is that it's been so succesful that the government is now draining funds from the patent office to pay for other programs. Very bad; these funds should be used to improve the patent system in the US.
Linux has a vast array of GUIs, and if you don't like it you can make your own.
Nobody in their right mind can claim that any one of the Linux GUIs is as good and MacOS 8. I would like to see any individual match the quality of the Mac GUI with a homebrew system.
Slashdot Mirror
The fact of the matter is that the Supreme Court has ruled on many occasions that mere funding by the government does not cause an individual to lose his rights to free speech. Gulliani is getting his but sued over this, and he is going to lose big time.
The problem with this stuff going on with the Brooklyn Museum is that it is exactly censorship and violates both freedom of religion and freedom of speech. The Mayor of New York has threatened to close a museum for displaying a certain piece of art. There is nothing more direct and obvious as this. This is not a matter of paying for a piece of art that is offensive. It is a matter of closing cultural resource for displaying something the mayor does not agree with. It is ALSO a matter of a mayor trying to make political hay with an upcoming election by trampling all over the constitution.
As far as I am concerned this is a gross abuse of power on the part of the mayor, indistinguishable from any other attempt to repress free speach. What is even worse is that the only reason it is being done is to pander to a certain segment of the voters in anticipation of running for the senate.
Dammit my family has been in North America since 1626. My forefathers names are on the Declaration of Independence at the bottom next to John Hancock and Thomas Jefferson. Thet did not go to war to defend the constitution 23 times to put some tinhorn idiot like Gulliani in power to tell me what is offensive or not. I THINK I CAN MAKE UP MY OWN MIND ABOUT THAT, Thank You.
If you think this is about paying or not paying for a painting, you are WRONG. This is about government interfering with a cultural institution (the Brooklyn Museum) which has a long and respected history IN ORDER TO DO ONE THING, get your name in the paper.
Anyone who votes for Gulliani after this.....
This is pure evil! Slick ASP web pages! Just Unzip into Windows directory! How can can this be!!
Danger Danger Will Robinson
Does anyone know who these guys are? Is this a case of a hidden dagger from Microsoft? What is this register your software crap on the web page!
Why do they have nonsense like:
Linux, a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds, has been released to the public domain.
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
I don't see any source code, either.
Don't forget that while it is true that SCIENTISTS use the metric system in R&D, NASA is NOT a scientific/R&D organization, they are primarily an engineering and development organization that supplies services for a lot of R&D. The fact is that most engineers working in the US (especially those over 40) have been trained primarily in the ENGLISH system of units. Most of the engineering fields are now a mess because the science half of the picture is in metric, but when the engineers have to translate their work to the 'real world' a conversion to english units must be made so the shop floor guy or assembly tech or manufacturing plant will understand what is going on.
Unfortunately government mandated conversion to the metric system has flopped at least twice partly because of inertia, and partly because Americans don't like to do what the government tells them to. There have also been riots and protests against adopting something the 'Godless French' invented (see Martin Gardner for some interesting histories here).
It would be nice to have a mass conversion to metric, and it would solve a lot of problems (but not all - ever try to use Japanese metric bolts on a French bicycle????) but I don't see it happen until we get teh schools teaching only metric. And we can't even get them to teach evolution.
Sherlock is really just a limited function scriptable web client. I don't think eBay is really going to care about it.
It seems to me that eBay has to do this. They are in the biz of publishing content on the web, and as most dead trees publishers they get a large part of their revenue from adverts on their site.
They also get some revenue by subscribers - people who buy and sell on their site.
What NO conventional publisher would tolerate would be publisher B taking their content ($$$ to develop) and publishing it with their own advertising. Imagine how the NY Times would react to The Daily News publishing their articles to attract readers? Surely their would by lawyers all over the place.
I am afraid that the private investment in space that you are describing could only be done by mega-consortia of multinational companies. What we would end up with in your scenario is Tennaco-Exxon strip mining the moon. There have been plenty of sci-fi extrapolations of this concept, and they generally end up with colonies of indentured workers or otherwise exploited peoples of third world companies working in extra-terrestrial salt mines. No thanks.
In the US anyway there is such a thing as patent fraud which includes naughty activity like not disclosing all you know about the prior art to the patent office during the patent application. Perhaps Bellboy could be brought up on the European equivalent.
Sorry, but this patent was issued by idiots in Europe, not the US.
UK patents have no effect in the US. Ditto visa-versa. There is some sort of reciprocity through Europe with the EP system, but I am not sure exactly what the details are.
Didn't ecommerce exist via Minitel long before the Internet? Unfortunately I can't read German, and the bitmap format of the patent images precludes pasting into Babelfish, so it's difficult to say how much this article has been distorted by reading the patent claims.
All of the economic analysis of hemp as a paper substitute that I have seen assume that the political problems associated with industrial hemp agriculture are solved. In fact, N. Dakota recently passed a law legalizing this, and I believe Wisconson may also do so soon.
The problem is that most of the fiber is low quality. Hemp contains two types of fiber, bast and hurd. The bast is good, and can be made into high quality paper. The problem is that the hurd is crap, and accounts for 75% of the plant. For hemp to be competitive must be seperated from the bast. This both costs big bucks in the processing, but also generates a humungous waste stream. By comparison, groundwood softwood process fiber has an efficiency of 90+%. This means if you try to use hemp you are going to be stuck with a waste stream 7x larger than if you use softwoods.
People often think that because you are not cutting down trees hemp makes a better choice for papermaking ecologically. Well, the fact of the matter is that there are other ecological costs in the papermaking process that are at least as important - paper is a very energy, water and waste intensive business. The use of hemp instead of softwood in this picture would be an ecological disaster because of the overall life cycle efficiency.
Any computer with an Intel CPU and handwriting recognition.
Speaking as a paper scientist who has kept up with the research on alternative fibers, the sad fact of the matter is that hemp makes a LOUSY sheet of paper for the buck! It is very difficult to beat softwood tree fiber for phyical properties, especially fiber strength, economical processing and overall life cycle cost for papermaking. If it were an economically attractive fiber source you can bet your bottom dollar the paper industry would be using it; they are EXTREMELY cost sensitive.
If you are interested in this topic I would suggest the misc.industry.pulp-and-paper newsgroup.
Nonsense. Interface transfer speed is the least important specification on a drive. You STILL can't get 10,000 RPM IDE drives, which is what you need for real performance.
What is the point of being a great nation unless you can do things like this? Is all America is about just accumulation of $$$ and driving SUV's up and down the highway? Why shouldn't we be trying for something better than just establishing the biggest consumer society in the history of the planet? What happened to the idea of trying to better yourself? What do you want history to remember our nation as? The nation that invented the fast food hamburger joint, the gas guzzler and television shows like Myt Mother The Car? Or do you want to remembered as the first nation to land on the moon, establish a L5 colony, and solve the problem of escaping the earth's gravity economically.
The fact is that a nation should stand for something, and NASA is one of the few things that the government spends money on that is not just a transfer of wealth from high income to low income people.
Thank god.
The history of telecommunications in France is truly bizarre, For example, for many years the French govenrment banned the installation of a telephone system, favoring instead the use of semaphore towers(!). France was the last western european country to set up a telephone system.
While it don't think it would affect tissues directly since it's not ionizing radiation, aren't some pacemakers really sensitive to microwaves?
Nope! Let the riders pay their fair share.
What is the fair share? Is it the cost of the system, or the cost of the system minus the cost of pollution, roads, traffic accidents, and the urban blight caused highway sprawl???
How about the indirecct cost of a large military to defend those middle eastern oil wells needed to keep your SUV gas tank full (last I saw, that was nearly $1.00 per gallon all on it's own).
The fact is that the highway system is HEAVILY subsidized in any number of subtle ways.
The concept of a good public education system was adopted on the founding of the US because of disgust with the English private education system and the class structure that it promulgates. If you do not have a good publically funded educational system the sad fact of the matter is (and history has proven this many times over the past 2500 years) that you end up with a society where people do NOT have an equal opportunity to advance themselves. One of the most amazing characteristics of American society is that children of sharecroppers can go to Yale Law School and become President of the US. Elimination of publicfunding of an educational system would be the end of the US as the land of opportunity.
It may not be the most efficient way, but the inefficiencies are far outweighed by the benefits of having equal opportunity to get an education.
Surely there is a question of how fast the chip yields will ramp up to the point where economics are good, and there is also the question of which chip will be more profitable to make. The G4 has to much lower cost per CPU to manufacture.
Still, it's kind of interesting to think about a fab that is making two different CPU designs K7 & G4) that intel can't match.
The people buying a G4 know. Remember that this is a machine aimed at Apple's professional user base, which is mostly graphics and publishing types that throw around very large files all the time.
No, you want silver interconnects. The specific conductivity of gold isn't that great.
1. SCSI _is_ a factory option. You just didn't look carefully. For example, they list a Ultra2 dual channel card with 3x 36 gig 10,000 rpm drives in the build to order section.
s /AppleStore.woa/78270421302394873710983390 02215577/ProductLinePage.wo/13376424028677/1.12.0. 2.7.3.1.1.0/2/order4.apple.com?47,15
http://store.apple.com/1-800-795-1000/WebObject
2. Macintouch.com reports some interesting test comparisons between IDE drives and LVD SCSI drives. It appears that for many users their is no performance difference between SCSI and IDE. After all, we know that the interfaces are generally faster than the hardware. There are also 3rd party add-in IDE controllers that support RAID on the Mac too, so I am sure that high-end SCSI is not a huge part of Apple's market.
Publishing results (often anonymously) to exclude the possibility of future patents is a valid and frequently practiced methodology. There are even anonymous journals in some scientific areas established for exactly this purpose. The reason for anonymity is that you often do not want to tip off your competition as to what areas you are working in, or what technologies you might be using. Another technique is to file the patent, pay to have it issue, then don't pay the maintenance fees - then the patent will lapse into the public domain.
As others have said, a big benefit of patents in the TechBiz is cross-licensing.
The problem with Oracle's stance is that for a patent to be worth anything, it has to be enforced, too. If you don't enforce it it becomes worthless. Slashdot readers might be familiar with Xerox's lawsuit against Apple where they claimed infringement on several software patents having to do with GUIs, laser printing on networks, etc. The suit was thrown out of court because Xerox had waited too long (the Lisa went on the market in 1982, and the suit was brought in 1989).
Personally I am not against software patents per se, but I think that the patent office has not been properly applying the law (novelty, unobviousness, etc.) to most software patent applications. If somebody comes up with something really worthwhile, say a debugging method that can reliably find and fix program logic errors he deserves to get a patent. This crap about business models, XOR screen hiding etc. is not what the basic idea of promoting technological advancement by encouraging R&D and the publication of results is all about.
The problem that the former patent examiner here cited is quite true. Patent examiners do not have the resources needed to really examine patents in depth. If you are smart you can get almost any invention issued as a patent - but the value of the patent is nill because it will never hold up in court. Part of the reson for the lack of resources in the Patent Office is a severe political mistake made by the Clinton regime. A few years ago the patent office raised it's fees to become self-sufficient. A good move IMHO. The problem is that it's been so succesful that the government is now draining funds from the patent office to pay for other programs. Very bad; these funds should be used to improve the patent system in the US.
Linux has a vast array of GUIs, and if you don't like it you can make your own.
Nobody in their right mind can claim that any one of the Linux GUIs is as good and MacOS 8. I would like to see any individual match the quality of the Mac GUI with a homebrew system.