While the power of the micro wave radiation emitted by a mobile phone is small - the energy involved in brain functions is also very small - it doesn't take much to trigger electrical activity in neurons.
If direct experiments on tissue involving microwaves are difficult to perform because the microwaves interfere with the delicate measuring devices used in the experiments, why would anyone think that the same microwaves would have no effect on neurons - which are themselves delicate electrical measuring devices?
Most slashdotters are not old enough to remember this, but when I was growing up back in the 50's many shoe stores had these 'magic boxes' - about half the size of a refrigerator that a shoe salesman could use to check to see if your new shoes fit properly. The way the boxes worked was the child put his feet into an opening in them and the shoe salesman looked into a visor and he could see how the shoes fit by actually looking inside of them as though he had X-ray vision like Superman!
That was because he DID have X-ray vision; the 'magic boxes' were fluoroscopes driven by a powerful X-ray generator. Unlike a dental X-ray, the fluoroscopes did not use a brief burst of radiation which exposed a sensitive piece of film - they used a continuous beam of X-rays which were strong enough to light up a fluorescent screen with an image of the child's foot!. The poor salesman's head was in line with the X-ray emissions. When a bunch of 50's versions of Al Bundy started 'glowing in the dark' (yes I know biological tissue doesn't glow in the dark when exposed to X-rays) the machines were pulled out of service. My dad - who was a physics major in college - wouldn't let us get near those machines.
We may someday view mobile phones with the same horror that we view those shoe store 'magic boxes' today. As an electrical engineer I am quite happy to let the rest of you run the safety experiments on your own brains; that is an experiment I decline to participate in.
Re:BUGFIX: add Result IS Intention
on
Lawsuits Suck
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· Score: 2
Your proposed solution is not what people use - if it were they wouldn't complain about legal rulings. They would see that Judge 'A' was putting forth psychopathic judgments and remove him. They never do. Judges get voted out - but never for those reasons. People blissfully expect the legal system to do good work - when it doesn't 'Well it can't be malice, it must be stupidity.'
Oh, by the way, since you said that I was merely pointing out a well recognized failure in the malice algorithm - would you be kind enough to point out a reference where that failure is discussed, and solutions proposed?
Well, I gave it a good try. Sadly there was just no way to sugar coat what I had to say. People don't want to see unpleasant truths.
It is so much easier to patch up the GUI so that it looks good than it is to fix the algorithmic problem at the heart of the program.
I should have anticipated the responses:
Majority response: "That can't be right - the world can't work that way. If it did I'd have to rethink my entire life. That would mean that all the people who came before us got fooled also. What horrible things to say - He must be crazy - I'd better go on to the next post."
Second most common response: "I don't want to hear that LA LA LA LA LA LA"
Third most common response "Look, you just don't get the way the world works. Everything is OK, all algorithms have bugs, that is just life, we work around it by... Well I don't know how we work around it, but its not a problem. I'm sure somebody took care of it."
Fourth most common response: "What's an algorithm?"
Years ago I figured out that trying to change the world won't work because the world doesn't want to change. As Eric Hoffer pointed out: "Given freedom of choice, most people choose to be like everyone else."
I guess Ignorance truly IS bliss.
--
Move along, nothing to see here: just some old man talking to himself.
Evidently there is one other lesson for you to learn. You have to stand up to bullies. You can't just give in and learn to play by their rules.
Might does not make right - right makes might; a subtle distinction to be sure, but an important one.
You owe it to humanity not to give in - not to allow the outside world to dictate things.
The outside world is coming to the Internet because they can see the happiness that it brings to geeks. There are people who can't stand seeing that anyone is happy, they work to destroy happiness when ever they see it, and that is why they want to change things here - to make us as miserable as they are.
The choice is yours - but the battle is for much more than you think - the battle is for your soul. If that isn't worth fighting for, how could anything, anywhere ever be worth a fight?
Sorry, the correct quote is ' Evil lawyers rule the world'. If you aren't qualified to work for Wolfram and Hart you don't get anything; you're just one of the cattle for the slaughter.
And if you wish to see evil at work you need look no farther than the person who moderated my root post as -1 flame bait.
Evil desperately doesn't want you to be aware of what is going on. Exactly who would I be looking for a flame from here? The clueless people with a broken algorithm for life? Does anyone believe they would flame me? If they don't believe what I have to say they would just dismiss me - rather than reply with a flame. Perhaps he thinks I was searching for flames from a psychopath.
I was a little surprised by the category of the moderation down. Flame bait is not sustainable, but I suppose it stands a better chance of staying there than -1 Off topic would have. I personally think you could have done a better job of fooling people with -1 Troll; you might have gotten people to believe -1 Troll. Except of course, you would have had the problem of trying to explain how I intended to say "Ha Ha, I fooled you." at the end of the troll.
Lets see, its not a Troll, its not Flame bait, its not Off topic, perhaps/. needs to come up with another -1 category:
-1 Unpleasant Truth that makes me question what I am doing in life.
What we are seeing here is the battle of good vs evil. Evil is attractively packaged in plausible lies. It always has been - it always will be. IF EVIL WERE NOT PACKAGED ATTRACTIVELY NO ONE WOULD EVER BUY INTO IT. Evil is aided in its actions by those who believe in the 'conventional' point of view.
You know who you are. You believe in the phrase 'NEVER ASCRIBE TO MALICE THAT WHICH MAY BE EXPLAINED BY STUPIDITY'. You think that point of view makes you wise and sophisticated. Your air of smug pseudo sophistication is stifling.
Well guess what: YOUR ALGORITHM HAS A BUG IN IT!!!! The bug is that evil need only mask its malice is a thin veil of apparent stupidity in order for you to never detect it. In addition you are totally unaware of the implied corollary to your algorithm: "One MAY ascribe to malice that which stupidity CAN'T explain."
You go through life THINKING you understand what is going on; but the truth is YOU HAVEN'T GOT A CLUE! Do you think the evil people in the world don't know how you think? If you were evil wouldn't you exploit that bug in your algorithm? Do you think that evil people are too stupid to see that the key to getting away with what they do is to make sure that no one suspects?
The fact is that it is people like you who are responsible for the success of evil in the world; you wouldn't know evil if spat in your face - you would think it was just someone clearing their throat.
Did it ever occur to you that the perfect hiding place for a psychopathic serial killer is as a judge or a prosecutor? I can assure it occurs to the psychopathic serial killers. Why do you think that Ted Bundy was studying the law? He wanted to be a prosecutor and a judge. Can you picture what kind of prosecutor Ted Bundy would have made? Do you think he would have loved prosecuting somebody like you? About 10% of all judges and prosecutors ARE psychopaths; the only thing distinguishing them from Ted Bundy is that they were able to delay their gratification until they got into a position of power. Do you know that the judge who sentenced Bundy to death was sad that Bundy had thrown away a promising legal career? Bundy was a psychopath ; who but another psychopath would be sad that Bundy had thrown away his career in the legal system?
Perhaps now you can begin to grasp the true meaning of my signature, and get some idea of what I mean by it.
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The law, 100's of millions of lines of code, not one line of which has ever been tested to see if it works.
If you look at an advertisement for an IT job and it has the phrase "Must be eligible to work in the US" that is pretty much a code phrase for "We're looking for someone born outside the US who will work for whatever scraps fall off the table. For some reason we aren't able to find any native US workers who HAVE 20 years experience in Java programming - so we have to hire this immigrant to fill the position."
From the US corporate point of view foreign workers are ideal; many come from countries where corruption is common place, so they are not likely to report it to the authorities if they see it. Even if they do report it - they can be deported before they could testify. A lot of US employers yearn for the days when it was legal to own slaves, and an emigrant on a work visa is as close as they can get; they'll work long hours without complaining - they're so afraid of losing their job they'll put up with anything the company does to them.
The proposed taxes could be a reasonable solution to the problem of how do you compensate people for enriching society when the traditional distribution methods are breaking down? In the past artists got their compensation by selling records and CD's through a company - which paid them royalties on the sales.
With the advent of the Internet that system is breaking down. The problem is that the royalties ought to go directly to the artists, not to companies. In the Internet distribution system 'record companies' are less and less of a part of the system.
In exchange for the taxation you would gain the legal right to copy whatever you want. This does not cause a breakdown in the law; the law has changed to account for differing technology - in effect you now become a part of the manufacturing system.
Of course what the companies want is a hybrid system: where they get to sell records, it is still illegal to copy a song over the internet, the companies get compensation for that illegal copying, and the people who create the actual music get as little as possible. Everything for the companies, nothing for the artists is their goal. And THAT, my friends, is what sucks.
People troll because it gives them an illusion of power. What the troll says to themselves is "See, I am more powerful than all of these people, because I can get them to jump around in response to me; I caused all of this."
Here is the same illusion in a different setting. You are in a class listening to Professor Einstein talking about his theory of relativity. You notice everyone is listening to him, and no one is paying attention to you. You feel jealous. So you decide to fart loudly so that everyone will pay attention to you. You say to yourself: "See I am just as powerful as Einstein because I made everyone pay attention to me - just like they were paying attention to him." Hopefully even an idiot can see the fallacy in that; anyone can attract attention to themselves that way. It takes only jealousy and a lack of self control to do that.
People who seek attention of that sort are very insecure people who have very low self esteem - their entire self worth is second hand: "I only exist in what others think of me."
Real power feels like nothing - you do something and things change. One of the most important things I have learned in martial arts is that the more I feel - the less the other guy feels. The less I feel - the more the other guy feels. This is because in a properly done technique all of the power goes into the target, and none of it stays with the person performing the technique.
So when you do something which makes you feel power you have NOT DONE anything powerful. You can spend the rest of your life chasing illusions of power - or you can go out and try to develop some real power. The choice is yours - but chasing illusions of power will bring you nothing but grief; the only person who thinks a troll is powerful is the troll.
So why am I bothering to write this response? For the same reason that I bother to swat a fly; both trolls and flies eat shit and bother people.
The proof of my assertion is pretty simple. Take a copy of W2k which is freshly installed. Note its speed. Then install CA's Unicenter TNG and Visual basic 6.0 professional. Do full installs of each. Don't run either program. Notice how much the system has slowed down.
Databases are not magical - a large database takes longer to search than a small one. Granted, a well designed database is faster than a linear search - but they do slow down as they increase in size. A full install of Visual basic 6.0 pro added one megabyte to the registry on my NT 4.0 box.
Considering how often a MS OS does registry operations even a small increase in search time can be a significant overhead. In any case Microsoft has admitted that registry bloat does slow down system operation. Sorry, I don't have the URL.
Registry bloat slowdown problems are not due to bad coding - they are an inevitable result of the basic DESIGN of the system.
UNIX style systems only access the files in/etc when a process requests the access. If program A has large file in/etc it doesn't affect the speed of the rest of the system.
The main difference between any Microsoft OS and UNIX style OS's is one of philosophy.
The Microsoft philosophy toward application installation is to allow the new ap to modify core operating system files: The registry. On a UNIX style OS each program can have its own file which it gets modify - but they don't get to modify a core OS file.
This means that installing a program on a MS OS is like performing minor surgery on the system.
While installing a program in a UNIX style system is more like buying a new suit of clothes.
This means that program installation under a MS OS is a riskier proposition than it is under a UNIX style OS. Mostly minor surgery goes well - but occasionally complications occur.
In essence, under the Microsoft philosophy, each program becomes an integrated part of the operating system, under the UNIX philosophy there is a much greater distinction between the OS and the application.
Because of the integration that the registry creates under a Microsoft OS, a Microsoft system tends to slow down and lose stability over time as more and more applications are installed. (The MS way of doing things means that the registry soon becomes both the largest and the most changed files on the system. The largest and the most changed files on the system are naturally the most likely ones to become corrupted.)
The only effect on system speed that adding applications has on UNIX style systems is that they cause directories to grow in size - meaning that they take longer to scan looking for a file. (This also happens under Microsoft style operating systems.)
Under the Microsoft philosophy, installing a new program will slow down every other program on the system (sometimes dramatically) - even if the new program is never run. This is because adding a new program increases the size of the registry. Because so many operations on a Microsoft OS require a registry operation - and a larger registry means a slower registry scan time the Microsoft philosophy results in a system which slows down with each addition to the system.
If both systems start out with the same speed and reliability, the UNIX philosophy will result in a system which is faster and more stable after extensive use.
10E10 Joules is the energy released by 1 Kilo Ton atom bomb. The 10E17 Joules listed in the article for the conversion of one KG of mass to energy would be the equivalent of a 10 Gigaton H bomb. Such a weapon would produce a fire ball about 21 miles in diameter, and the circle of total destruction from its detonation would have a radius of about 210 miles.
Assuming you were running Windows 2200 on the machine, a blue screen of death could be a rather traumatic event. In any case, Gates law tells us that this ultimate machine wouldn't be any faster than our current computers; after all, software slows down by a factor of two every 18 months also - nicely canceling out any increase in speed from the hardware.
One of the most interesting things about this story is that the asteroid was only seen last weekend.
If it had been on a collision course we wouldn't have had enough time to do anything about it.
Asteroids on a true collision course don't appear to move in the sky; they just get larger. This makes them harder to detect than one which moves relative to the background of stars. An asteroid on a true collision course might not even be recognized as a threat until it was way too late to do anything. It is the punch you don't see that gets you.
Please remember that the real reason for patents is to get the Inventor to divulge his/her invention to the public. The 20 year 'monopoly' is nothing but the 'carrot' handed to the inventor in reward for telling everybody how to do what they are doing. The patent office serves as a long term depository of ideas: here is how you do this, and here is how you do this better.
The anti patent can serve as the same depository. What will happen with anti patents is that they will be treated the same way that public domain software is - rather than the way GPL code is. In other words anti patentened material will be seized for use by any corporation that feels like taking it for use - without so much as a 'screw you' to the inventor.
It is doubtful that anything of great value would be anti patented excepting of course the mythical 'super carburetor' that various 'interests' don't want to see on the market. If somebody did come up with something like real anti gravity (for example) submitting an anti patent might be better for your health than submitting to the government patent office - who would mark it "Top Secret Defense Department Property" and keep anyone from ever hearing about it.
As I see it anti-patents would fall into 2 main classes: simple obvious things of marginal commercial value and a few things of too much value to risk trying for a patent. What do you think would happen to someone who invented a real Star Trek style replicator? My guess is industry would have him fitted for concrete jogging shoes in short order.
It would have one further effect, it would eliminate the retroactive cries of "That's obvious". If it isn't in the anti patent database either, it ain't obvious. In other words, as an unintended side effect, it could make patent defense much easier.
OK, most of the replies in this chain have been directed toward my 'great man' comment.
Great men in history are as rare as are great players in a sport. What would the Chicago Bulls have been without Michael Jordan? Well, we ran that experiment - the answer was a good solid above average professional basketball team. Jordan elevated them to the level of world beater. You don't replace a Michael Jordan. Sure there are plenty of others attempting to do the same things - THAT DOESN'T MEAN THEY CAN.
It infuriates mediocre thinkers that they can't think as well as great thinker can. Sorry about that, it infuriates mediocre athletes that they can't play in the NBA.
I'll state it again: great men are rare singularities - their achievements are not reproducible by others.
I particularly found the comments about Newton amusing. John Maynard Keynes denigrating Isaac Newton is like a modern day 6' NBA bench warming guard denigrating Wilt Chamberlain. Keynes must have been feeling particularly bitter and envious the day he said that.
By the way, people denigrate others in an attempt to tear those others down to their level; it is an attempt to look good by making others look bad. Isaac Newton would not have denigrated John Maynard Keynes; he would no more have said anything about him than Wilt Chamberlain would have found it necessary to comment on a six foot bench warmer.
I think all people are equal - but they are not all identical. People who are outstanding intellectually accomplish things that others can't. Sorry about that, but the world works that way.
Let me reply to your point 3. We do have data on that point. On this planet an omnivorous ape is the only life form to have developed a high degree of intelligence. If other forms could why haven't they? Free hands are very important to technological development, can you imagine trying to build a radio with hooves or a flipper? How do you come up with electronics under water where everything is shorted; static electric phenomena don't exist under water.
There aren't any other creatures on the planet even close to our intelligence. I know that Koko has been taught sign language, but does Koko have anything to say? Mostly it is "Koko good - give me a banana". If intelligence wasn't a rare mutation we would expect to see another instance of it in the 4 billion year record of this planet - we don't.
Point 4: The great man theory of progress. Eliminate Edison and tell me about MP3's. Edison's patent for the phonograph didn't have even a single prior art reference of any type that anyone could find. To claim that someone else would have invented it is specious at best. Why are they called Maxwell's equations? By your, and other people's line of reasoning the correct name would be 'electromagnetic equations which anyone could have come up with but chance gave it to this guy'.
The attack on the great men of history was created by a bunch of mediocre thinkers who can't imagine any other method of thought than their own. It is designed to denigrate and deny the existence of greatness and to exalt mediocrity. The idea is "If I'd been around then I could have come up with XYZ" Yeah, BULLSHIT, if you aren't a great thinker now -if you can't come up with great accomplishments now - what makes you think you could have then?
The other people who were working on a given 'idea' (if there are any others) all FAILED. There is no reason to believe that they would have eventually succeeded. We remember the ones we do BECAUSE THEY SUCCEEDED.
While the 'anyone would have done it' theory is all nice and Politically Correct it is not provable.
We study the great thinkers of history because they taught us different ways of thought - they had an influence on the way modern man thinks. They weren't a bunch of Cliff Clavins sitting in some bar spouting random made up BS. The supply of great men is very small.
There are several accidents which are responsible for our technological civilization.
The first is the existence of moon of sufficient size to help create tides and provide a just the right amount of long term stability to the earth to allow life to evolve. Back in the sixties I read a book on the probabilities of life in the universe that pointed out the importance of the moon to life on earth. If current theories about the formation of the moon are correct the moon was formed by the collision of a mars size planetoid with the proto earth. That is a rare event.
Rare event two: the extinction of the dinosaurs by an asteroid impact.
Rare event three: birth and procreation of mutated ape of sufficient intelligence to create civilization. This ape was an omnivore: hunter killer explorer and able to exist on plants as well - a land animal; a social animal but not a herd dweller. Imagine for a second that the creature that sprouted first intelligence was a dolphin like creature or a cape buffalo type animal. In that case the course of intelligent life on this planet might have been very different.
The black death in europe. It has been pointed out that the decimation of europe's population allowed both the freedom to develop technology and the need for labor saving devices.
The existence of a very few brilliant individuals; remove 20 or so people from history and we never develop technology. Remove the printing press and everything changes, remove Isaac Newton and everything changes dramatically. Who knows what things we have failed to learn for want of a person to show us the way?
A long period of time without a life killing catastrophe of natural origin. A mild nuclear flare up from the sun - a major impact from a large asteroid - a 'nuclear winter' from a volcanic event, an ice age at the wrong time.
We may well be the only technological civilization in the galaxy - or even the universe. How sad, how terribly sad.
It is obvious to anyone familiar with the art of the Internet, and computer communications in general that a computer can be used to communicate ANY TYPE of data to another computer.
ANY computer patent based upon unique data being communicated between machines is obvious and invalid - since that unique data is a subset of 'ANY TYPE' and is therefore obvious to an average practitioner familiar with the art. Any business patent based on specific types of data being transferred from one machine to another is also invalid for the same reasons.
The Internet is a medium like the air. Utterances, whether verbal in the air or digital on the Internet are not subject to patents - at the most they may be copyrighted.
First of all, everything is obvious in retrospect: after someone tells you how to do something it is obvious.
However true obviousness in an invention requires that it be something which an average practitioner 'familiar with the art' would figure out to do.
Question: did people start doing international e-commerce because they heard about what this patent applicant was doing and then copy his actions - or did everybody reinvent his process independently because it was obvious? Clearly the answer is the latter: his invention IS OBVIOUS therefore, and his patent is invalid.
As far as publication goes: you don't write about the obvious - you only write about the non - obvious. That is why the patent office requires publication to invalidate for prior art. Obvious cases like this patent don't require pre publication to invalidate them.
Slashdot Mirror
If direct experiments on tissue involving microwaves are difficult to perform because the microwaves interfere with the delicate measuring devices used in the experiments, why would anyone think that the same microwaves would have no effect on neurons - which are themselves delicate electrical measuring devices?
Most slashdotters are not old enough to remember this, but when I was growing up back in the 50's many shoe stores had these 'magic boxes' - about half the size of a refrigerator that a shoe salesman could use to check to see if your new shoes fit properly. The way the boxes worked was the child put his feet into an opening in them and the shoe salesman looked into a visor and he could see how the shoes fit by actually looking inside of them as though he had X-ray vision like Superman!
That was because he DID have X-ray vision; the 'magic boxes' were fluoroscopes driven by a powerful X-ray generator. Unlike a dental X-ray, the fluoroscopes did not use a brief burst of radiation which exposed a sensitive piece of film - they used a continuous beam of X-rays which were strong enough to light up a fluorescent screen with an image of the child's foot!. The poor salesman's head was in line with the X-ray emissions. When a bunch of 50's versions of Al Bundy started 'glowing in the dark' (yes I know biological tissue doesn't glow in the dark when exposed to X-rays) the machines were pulled out of service. My dad - who was a physics major in college - wouldn't let us get near those machines.
We may someday view mobile phones with the same horror that we view those shoe store 'magic boxes' today. As an electrical engineer I am quite happy to let the rest of you run the safety experiments on your own brains; that is an experiment I decline to participate in.
Your proposed solution is not what people use - if it were they wouldn't complain about legal rulings. They would see that Judge 'A' was putting forth psychopathic judgments and remove him. They never do. Judges get voted out - but never for those reasons. People blissfully expect the legal system to do good work - when it doesn't 'Well it can't be malice, it must be stupidity.'
Oh, by the way, since you said that I was merely pointing out a well recognized failure in the malice algorithm - would you be kind enough to point out a reference where that failure is discussed, and solutions proposed?
It is so much easier to patch up the GUI so that it looks good than it is to fix the algorithmic problem at the heart of the program.
I should have anticipated the responses:
Majority response: "That can't be right - the world can't work that way. If it did I'd have to rethink my entire life. That would mean that all the people who came before us got fooled also. What horrible things to say - He must be crazy - I'd better go on to the next post."
Second most common response: "I don't want to hear that LA LA LA LA LA LA"
Third most common response "Look, you just don't get the way the world works. Everything is OK, all algorithms have bugs, that is just life, we work around it by ... Well I don't know how we work around it, but its not a problem. I'm sure somebody took care of it."
Fourth most common response: "What's an algorithm?"
Years ago I figured out that trying to change the world won't work because the world doesn't want to change. As Eric Hoffer pointed out: "Given freedom of choice, most people choose to be like everyone else."
I guess Ignorance truly IS bliss.
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Move along, nothing to see here: just some old man talking to himself.
Might does not make right - right makes might; a subtle distinction to be sure, but an important one.
You owe it to humanity not to give in - not to allow the outside world to dictate things.
The outside world is coming to the Internet because they can see the happiness that it brings to geeks. There are people who can't stand seeing that anyone is happy, they work to destroy happiness when ever they see it, and that is why they want to change things here - to make us as miserable as they are.
The choice is yours - but the battle is for much more than you think - the battle is for your soul. If that isn't worth fighting for, how could anything, anywhere ever be worth a fight?
Sorry, the correct quote is ' Evil lawyers rule the world'. If you aren't qualified to work for Wolfram and Hart you don't get anything; you're just one of the cattle for the slaughter.
You don't stop a meat grinder by throwing yourself into it. The key is to figure out how to pull the cord.
Evil desperately doesn't want you to be aware of what is going on. Exactly who would I be looking for a flame from here? The clueless people with a broken algorithm for life? Does anyone believe they would flame me? If they don't believe what I have to say they would just dismiss me - rather than reply with a flame. Perhaps he thinks I was searching for flames from a psychopath.
I was a little surprised by the category of the moderation down. Flame bait is not sustainable, but I suppose it stands a better chance of staying there than -1 Off topic would have. I personally think you could have done a better job of fooling people with -1 Troll; you might have gotten people to believe -1 Troll. Except of course, you would have had the problem of trying to explain how I intended to say "Ha Ha, I fooled you." at the end of the troll.
Lets see, its not a Troll, its not Flame bait, its not Off topic, perhaps /. needs to come up with another -1 category:
-1 Unpleasant Truth that makes me question what I am doing in life.
You know who you are. You believe in the phrase 'NEVER ASCRIBE TO MALICE THAT WHICH MAY BE EXPLAINED BY STUPIDITY'. You think that point of view makes you wise and sophisticated. Your air of smug pseudo sophistication is stifling.
Well guess what: YOUR ALGORITHM HAS A BUG IN IT!!!! The bug is that evil need only mask its malice is a thin veil of apparent stupidity in order for you to never detect it. In addition you are totally unaware of the implied corollary to your algorithm: "One MAY ascribe to malice that which stupidity CAN'T explain."
You go through life THINKING you understand what is going on; but the truth is YOU HAVEN'T GOT A CLUE! Do you think the evil people in the world don't know how you think? If you were evil wouldn't you exploit that bug in your algorithm? Do you think that evil people are too stupid to see that the key to getting away with what they do is to make sure that no one suspects?
The fact is that it is people like you who are responsible for the success of evil in the world; you wouldn't know evil if spat in your face - you would think it was just someone clearing their throat.
Did it ever occur to you that the perfect hiding place for a psychopathic serial killer is as a judge or a prosecutor? I can assure it occurs to the psychopathic serial killers. Why do you think that Ted Bundy was studying the law? He wanted to be a prosecutor and a judge. Can you picture what kind of prosecutor Ted Bundy would have made? Do you think he would have loved prosecuting somebody like you? About 10% of all judges and prosecutors ARE psychopaths; the only thing distinguishing them from Ted Bundy is that they were able to delay their gratification until they got into a position of power. Do you know that the judge who sentenced Bundy to death was sad that Bundy had thrown away a promising legal career? Bundy was a psychopath ; who but another psychopath would be sad that Bundy had thrown away his career in the legal system?
Perhaps now you can begin to grasp the true meaning of my signature, and get some idea of what I mean by it.
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The law, 100's of millions of lines of code, not one line of which has ever been tested to see if it works.
People quite naturally are dismissive of anything they can't do; "If I'm not good at it, it must not be important."
Jocks are well thought of by society because they are able to function under intense pressure.
The lessons I have learned in athletics throughout my life have been very useful to me in intellectual pursuits.
No, I wasn't kidding, I was just wrong. I have misinterpreted what that phrase means. Thanks, I learned something.
From the US corporate point of view foreign workers are ideal; many come from countries where corruption is common place, so they are not likely to report it to the authorities if they see it. Even if they do report it - they can be deported before they could testify. A lot of US employers yearn for the days when it was legal to own slaves, and an emigrant on a work visa is as close as they can get; they'll work long hours without complaining - they're so afraid of losing their job they'll put up with anything the company does to them.
With the advent of the Internet that system is breaking down. The problem is that the royalties ought to go directly to the artists, not to companies. In the Internet distribution system 'record companies' are less and less of a part of the system.
In exchange for the taxation you would gain the legal right to copy whatever you want. This does not cause a breakdown in the law; the law has changed to account for differing technology - in effect you now become a part of the manufacturing system.
Of course what the companies want is a hybrid system: where they get to sell records, it is still illegal to copy a song over the internet, the companies get compensation for that illegal copying, and the people who create the actual music get as little as possible. Everything for the companies, nothing for the artists is their goal. And THAT, my friends, is what sucks.
Here is the same illusion in a different setting. You are in a class listening to Professor Einstein talking about his theory of relativity. You notice everyone is listening to him, and no one is paying attention to you. You feel jealous. So you decide to fart loudly so that everyone will pay attention to you. You say to yourself: "See I am just as powerful as Einstein because I made everyone pay attention to me - just like they were paying attention to him." Hopefully even an idiot can see the fallacy in that; anyone can attract attention to themselves that way. It takes only jealousy and a lack of self control to do that.
People who seek attention of that sort are very insecure people who have very low self esteem - their entire self worth is second hand: "I only exist in what others think of me."
Real power feels like nothing - you do something and things change. One of the most important things I have learned in martial arts is that the more I feel - the less the other guy feels. The less I feel - the more the other guy feels. This is because in a properly done technique all of the power goes into the target, and none of it stays with the person performing the technique.
So when you do something which makes you feel power you have NOT DONE anything powerful. You can spend the rest of your life chasing illusions of power - or you can go out and try to develop some real power. The choice is yours - but chasing illusions of power will bring you nothing but grief; the only person who thinks a troll is powerful is the troll.
So why am I bothering to write this response? For the same reason that I bother to swat a fly; both trolls and flies eat shit and bother people.
Databases are not magical - a large database takes longer to search than a small one. Granted, a well designed database is faster than a linear search - but they do slow down as they increase in size. A full install of Visual basic 6.0 pro added one megabyte to the registry on my NT 4.0 box.
Considering how often a MS OS does registry operations even a small increase in search time can be a significant overhead. In any case Microsoft has admitted that registry bloat does slow down system operation. Sorry, I don't have the URL.
Registry bloat slowdown problems are not due to bad coding - they are an inevitable result of the basic DESIGN of the system.
UNIX style systems only access the files in /etc when a process requests the access. If program A has large file in /etc it doesn't affect the speed of the rest of the system.
The Microsoft philosophy toward application installation is to allow the new ap to modify core operating system files: The registry. On a UNIX style OS each program can have its own file which it gets modify - but they don't get to modify a core OS file.
This means that installing a program on a MS OS is like performing minor surgery on the system. While installing a program in a UNIX style system is more like buying a new suit of clothes.
This means that program installation under a MS OS is a riskier proposition than it is under a UNIX style OS. Mostly minor surgery goes well - but occasionally complications occur.
In essence, under the Microsoft philosophy, each program becomes an integrated part of the operating system, under the UNIX philosophy there is a much greater distinction between the OS and the application.
Because of the integration that the registry creates under a Microsoft OS, a Microsoft system tends to slow down and lose stability over time as more and more applications are installed. (The MS way of doing things means that the registry soon becomes both the largest and the most changed files on the system. The largest and the most changed files on the system are naturally the most likely ones to become corrupted.)
The only effect on system speed that adding applications has on UNIX style systems is that they cause directories to grow in size - meaning that they take longer to scan looking for a file. (This also happens under Microsoft style operating systems.)
Under the Microsoft philosophy, installing a new program will slow down every other program on the system (sometimes dramatically) - even if the new program is never run. This is because adding a new program increases the size of the registry. Because so many operations on a Microsoft OS require a registry operation - and a larger registry means a slower registry scan time the Microsoft philosophy results in a system which slows down with each addition to the system.
If both systems start out with the same speed and reliability, the UNIX philosophy will result in a system which is faster and more stable after extensive use.
Assuming you were running Windows 2200 on the machine, a blue screen of death could be a rather traumatic event. In any case, Gates law tells us that this ultimate machine wouldn't be any faster than our current computers; after all, software slows down by a factor of two every 18 months also - nicely canceling out any increase in speed from the hardware.
I believe the software was described in an early issue of the Linux Journal.
If it had been on a collision course we wouldn't have had enough time to do anything about it.
Asteroids on a true collision course don't appear to move in the sky; they just get larger. This makes them harder to detect than one which moves relative to the background of stars. An asteroid on a true collision course might not even be recognized as a threat until it was way too late to do anything. It is the punch you don't see that gets you.
The anti patent can serve as the same depository. What will happen with anti patents is that they will be treated the same way that public domain software is - rather than the way GPL code is. In other words anti patentened material will be seized for use by any corporation that feels like taking it for use - without so much as a 'screw you' to the inventor.
It is doubtful that anything of great value would be anti patented excepting of course the mythical 'super carburetor' that various 'interests' don't want to see on the market. If somebody did come up with something like real anti gravity (for example) submitting an anti patent might be better for your health than submitting to the government patent office - who would mark it "Top Secret Defense Department Property" and keep anyone from ever hearing about it.
As I see it anti-patents would fall into 2 main classes: simple obvious things of marginal commercial value and a few things of too much value to risk trying for a patent. What do you think would happen to someone who invented a real Star Trek style replicator? My guess is industry would have him fitted for concrete jogging shoes in short order.
It would have one further effect, it would eliminate the retroactive cries of "That's obvious". If it isn't in the anti patent database either, it ain't obvious. In other words, as an unintended side effect, it could make patent defense much easier.
Great men in history are as rare as are great players in a sport. What would the Chicago Bulls have been without Michael Jordan? Well, we ran that experiment - the answer was a good solid above average professional basketball team. Jordan elevated them to the level of world beater. You don't replace a Michael Jordan. Sure there are plenty of others attempting to do the same things - THAT DOESN'T MEAN THEY CAN.
It infuriates mediocre thinkers that they can't think as well as great thinker can. Sorry about that, it infuriates mediocre athletes that they can't play in the NBA.
I'll state it again: great men are rare singularities - their achievements are not reproducible by others.
I particularly found the comments about Newton amusing. John Maynard Keynes denigrating Isaac Newton is like a modern day 6' NBA bench warming guard denigrating Wilt Chamberlain. Keynes must have been feeling particularly bitter and envious the day he said that.
By the way, people denigrate others in an attempt to tear those others down to their level; it is an attempt to look good by making others look bad. Isaac Newton would not have denigrated John Maynard Keynes; he would no more have said anything about him than Wilt Chamberlain would have found it necessary to comment on a six foot bench warmer.
I think all people are equal - but they are not all identical. People who are outstanding intellectually accomplish things that others can't. Sorry about that, but the world works that way.
There aren't any other creatures on the planet even close to our intelligence. I know that Koko has been taught sign language, but does Koko have anything to say? Mostly it is "Koko good - give me a banana". If intelligence wasn't a rare mutation we would expect to see another instance of it in the 4 billion year record of this planet - we don't.
Point 4: The great man theory of progress. Eliminate Edison and tell me about MP3's. Edison's patent for the phonograph didn't have even a single prior art reference of any type that anyone could find. To claim that someone else would have invented it is specious at best. Why are they called Maxwell's equations? By your, and other people's line of reasoning the correct name would be 'electromagnetic equations which anyone could have come up with but chance gave it to this guy'.
The attack on the great men of history was created by a bunch of mediocre thinkers who can't imagine any other method of thought than their own. It is designed to denigrate and deny the existence of greatness and to exalt mediocrity. The idea is "If I'd been around then I could have come up with XYZ" Yeah, BULLSHIT, if you aren't a great thinker now -if you can't come up with great accomplishments now - what makes you think you could have then?
The other people who were working on a given 'idea' (if there are any others) all FAILED. There is no reason to believe that they would have eventually succeeded. We remember the ones we do BECAUSE THEY SUCCEEDED.
While the 'anyone would have done it' theory is all nice and Politically Correct it is not provable.
We study the great thinkers of history because they taught us different ways of thought - they had an influence on the way modern man thinks. They weren't a bunch of Cliff Clavins sitting in some bar spouting random made up BS. The supply of great men is very small.
The first is the existence of moon of sufficient size to help create tides and provide a just the right amount of long term stability to the earth to allow life to evolve. Back in the sixties I read a book on the probabilities of life in the universe that pointed out the importance of the moon to life on earth. If current theories about the formation of the moon are correct the moon was formed by the collision of a mars size planetoid with the proto earth. That is a rare event.
Rare event two: the extinction of the dinosaurs by an asteroid impact.
Rare event three: birth and procreation of mutated ape of sufficient intelligence to create civilization. This ape was an omnivore: hunter killer explorer and able to exist on plants as well - a land animal; a social animal but not a herd dweller. Imagine for a second that the creature that sprouted first intelligence was a dolphin like creature or a cape buffalo type animal. In that case the course of intelligent life on this planet might have been very different.
The black death in europe. It has been pointed out that the decimation of europe's population allowed both the freedom to develop technology and the need for labor saving devices.
The existence of a very few brilliant individuals; remove 20 or so people from history and we never develop technology. Remove the printing press and everything changes, remove Isaac Newton and everything changes dramatically. Who knows what things we have failed to learn for want of a person to show us the way?
A long period of time without a life killing catastrophe of natural origin. A mild nuclear flare up from the sun - a major impact from a large asteroid - a 'nuclear winter' from a volcanic event, an ice age at the wrong time.
We may well be the only technological civilization in the galaxy - or even the universe. How sad, how terribly sad.
It looks as though Microsoft has, at a minimum, set up the initial contact point on both to at least look as though the site uses W2k throughout.
Attempting to query internal sites on hotmail returned a 'no DNS' error.
ANY computer patent based upon unique data being communicated between machines is obvious and invalid - since that unique data is a subset of 'ANY TYPE' and is therefore obvious to an average practitioner familiar with the art. Any business patent based on specific types of data being transferred from one machine to another is also invalid for the same reasons.
The Internet is a medium like the air. Utterances, whether verbal in the air or digital on the Internet are not subject to patents - at the most they may be copyrighted.
However true obviousness in an invention requires that it be something which an average practitioner 'familiar with the art' would figure out to do.
Question: did people start doing international e-commerce because they heard about what this patent applicant was doing and then copy his actions - or did everybody reinvent his process independently because it was obvious? Clearly the answer is the latter: his invention IS OBVIOUS therefore, and his patent is invalid.
As far as publication goes: you don't write about the obvious - you only write about the non - obvious. That is why the patent office requires publication to invalidate for prior art. Obvious cases like this patent don't require pre publication to invalidate them.