Remember that a patent is just a license to sue someone. Back in the 70's somebody had a patent on a crt using a cursor (or something similar - it was over 20 years ago - I don't remember the exact patent.) He sent it to our company demanding royalties. Basically we just ignored him - so did everybody else in the computer industry.
Just because somebody gets a ridiculous patent doesn't mean he is able to enforce it. Mostly these kind of patents die when the lawyers inform the patent holder that the patent would likely be overturned in the courts if a case ever gets to trial.
In other words, people like this are running a bluff - seeing if they can get the gullible to give them some money without a fight.
Get concerned, when and if, he starts winning law suits against companies with good lawyers and lots of money. Until then, a patent like this is just a boogie man.
By far the most important part of this is the ability of the producing company to turn off your ability to read the book.
This means that whoever produces the 'books' will have a lifetime ability to extort money from you: "Pay the yearly 'licensing fee' or we won't give you this year's encryption key."
Of course this year's encryption fee is just the 4 digit year (i.e. 2000, 2001) etc. but the DMCA forbids you to figure that fact out - since that is 'breaking a digital protection method'. The DMCA even forbids you to set the wrong date in the computer's clock to spoof a time when you had a good password - since that is 'bypassing a protection means', and subjects you to the draconian penalties of the DMCA.
Part of the reasons that women fear the outlawing of abortion is that it gives the police the right and the obligation to investigate every miscarriage. Part of the reason that geeks need to fear the DMCA is that it gives the police the right and the obligation to investigate everything that you do on your computer; "The CMOS clock on your machine is wrong, how do we know that you aren't trying to circumvent digital protection means on your computer? "
I can't wait until some lawyer figures out that all reading is covered by the DMCA since when you learn something you are making a copy into an electronic computer (your brain).
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The law, 100's of millions of lines of code, not one line of which has ever been checked to see if it works.
By the way, I see a way to stop these sorts of attacks against open source.
Suppose that each individual author who has contributed open source code files a civil lawsuit against this attorney for slander. These are not frivolous suits; he HAS slandered us. Fighting one law suit is difficult and expensive enough; fighting a few thousand is a practical impossibility.
What we have in our favor is numbers - this is a way to use those numbers to fight the big money on the other side.
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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
[
Slander n 1. law: The utterance of defamatory statements injurious to the reputation or well-being of a person. 2 A malicious statement or report...
It appears to me that by issuing a false legal brief about the open source movement that this lawyer has left himself wide open to being sued for slander.
Of course I am also sure that lawyers have exempted themselves from that sort of thing; after all prosecutors do it all the time.
Comments?
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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
Re:If you can clone an extinct animal...
on
TigerCloning
·
· Score: 2
I believe that I've read that all the cheetahs in the wild are genetically identical.
Nature appears to have run the experiment of having a genetically identical species with some success. Having identical animals is not necessarily a situation doomed from the start.
If you had asked Forbes in 1990 what the computer of 2000 would look like they wouldn't have been very close. They might have gotten the processor speed and memory size correct - but that would have been about all.
There would have been no way that they would have predicted the importance of the Internet - or something like Slashdot. In 1990 the communications capability of computers was only known and appreciated by a very few geeks; most people had local call modem access to bulletin boardsif they had anything. (Please don't post how you had access to the Internet in 1983 - that just proves YOU are a geek and nothing else. Who could an average person have used as an ISP in 1990?)
In 1990 very few prognosticators would have predicted anything like a noticeable percentage of people running a Unix style operating system. Nor would they have predicted anything like Windows 2000 or an iMac.
One of the most interesting things about this article is that they had almost nothing to say about the - external to your house - communication capability of the machine. I suspect this will be one of the most important aspects of that machine.
One of the reasons that I bought OS/2 Warp 4 was the voice recognition capability built into the OS. I wound up using it very little. Not because it didn't work, it did. The reason I didn't use it much was that in order to activate it I had to say the word 'desktop'. For me at least 'desktop' is a VERY difficult word to pronounce properly. The 'k' sound at the end of one syllable followed by the 't' sound at the start of the next is just tough to say. When I thought about it I realized that I pronounced it 'destop' as do many of the people who say it in normal speech. The computer didn't know what a 'destop' was.
'Desktop' is a minor stumbling block, but it is the sort of thing that keeps voice recognition from being utilized as much as it could be. One of the keys to a useful voice command computer is to use words in the command structure that people can pronounce.
There is also a slight misconception in the article; the good thing about optical communication between computer subsections is not the speed of light vs the speed of electrical pulses - the good thing is that optical communications can switch on and off faster; you can obtain higher frequencies.
The article also gets it a little wrong when it blames the electrical interconnect for causing delays in main memory fetching. The problem is that dram speeds have only grown about 10 times faster since the days of the Z80 while processor clock speeds are up by a factor of 250 or so. Unless there is a real breakthrough in memory speeds that trend will continue.
Good suggestion, but the legal system has long had the ability to put gag orders on the press. Remember, it can't be obviously evil - you have to sell it to the general populace; it has to create the appearance of fairness.
I agree that this case extends the legal systems' ability to silence critics - but that is part of the actual - as designed - legal system - not part of a new - hypothetically evil system that I asked for.
This may look off topic, but since the subject is a bad legal ruling it is really not.
I would like to challenge slashdoters to do design a legal system to do the following:
Favor evil as much as possible.
Create the appearance of fairness.
Allow some people to behave as tyrants.
Frustrate good.
Punish the innocent as much as possible.
Do everything possible to let the guilty off.
Be constructed in such a way that 'the public' accepts it as legitimate.
Spend some time thinking about this. At the end of that time see if there is ANYTHING you would change in the current system that would better meet the above criteria. I have been thinking about it for a long time, I haven't been able to come up with anything, how about you?
We have to give the MPAA points for picking its straw man to knock over. By going after a site that it knew would stand no chance in court, the MPAA has established a legal precedent to use as a club against everyone else.
As I have pointed out in another post the way bad case law is caused to exist is for the rich and powerful to pick first opponents that stand no chance in court. Then once an absurd, lopsided, decision is on the books everyone accepts that absurdity as the 'law' from that point forward. The legal system makes no note of the fact that you beat up somebody with ALS in a wheel chair in your judicial fist fight - all that gets recorded is the big 'W' in your column.
The law, 100's of millions of lines of code, not one line of which has ever been tested to see if it works.
Microsoft is in a difficult legal position with IE. If they don't port to Linux the DOJ can point out that it is business as usual at Microsoft; time to crush Linux. If they do port to Linux the DOJ can point out that Microsoft was lying when they said that IE was an integral part of Windows.
The only way out of this dilemma is to do exactly what they are going to do: make a very poor quality port - which is full of bugs and crashes X at every opportunity. Microsoft can then argue: "Look, we Tried, we Really, Really Tried, but Linux Is Such A Poor Platform (R) that this pile of rotting dingo's kidneys is the best that even a Great Innovative Company (R) like Microsoft can do."
Any questions as to how well the Linux port of IE is going to work? Oh yes, also expect the port to mysteriously affect the stability of the core operating system - surely you'll have to be root to install it. Of course that is so obviously sabotage that even Microsoft might not do it, but legally I don't think they have any choice; IE HAS to be part of the core OS - just like they argued in court.
Anyone who doesn't think Microsoft would do such bad faith things - has never studied the history of the company; ask the people who wrote DR DOS. The difference is that instead of leaving an email evidence trail of their bad faith they will be smarter this time. Expect the port to be done by the closest thing to a thousand monkeys with typewriters that Microsoft can find. Nothing like being able to point to the incompetence of Mainsoft to protect yourself, is there Microsoft?
"Why, if we Use Plausible Lies (R) this time we'll be OK; then all the people who throw around the quote about 'never attributing to malice what stupidity can explain' will buy what we are doing. Oh, THAT'S how to be evil - why didn't we think of that before; make it look like incompetence and the morons who look no deeper than the surface won't suspect a thing."
While DSL does guarantee bandwidth from the central office to the subscriber, bandwidth beyond that point is shared by everyone who uses the telco as their ISP.
It is possible to use the SBC DSL link and use another ISP as the link to the internet. Often this will result in higher effective bandwidth.
Most likely the email rate the complainant measured was the result of server load - rather than a bandwidth limitation. (It also makes a difference what time of day speeds are measured; the heavier the traffic the slower the shared connection runs.
I guess the line between 'Troll' and 'insightful' is a thin one - which is in the eye of the
beholder.
The point of trolling is to be able to say 'HAW HAW I FOOLED YOU'. Exactly how
would I do that based on my original post? All trolling is based on the illusion of power
that the troll gets from fooling people. I realize that the troll is getting an illusion of power. People only chase illusions when they don't know they are chasing illusions.
The comments about 'us vs. them' came from my observation of personal acquaintances
who became police officers. They were backed up by comments of retired and active
duty police officers who noted the same phenomenon.
Bonding in any social group is a well known phenomenon - it is a primary force in the
military, fraternities, scout troops, and sports teams, as well as law enforcement
agencies.
The reason it takes on 'us vs. them' in police agencies is that mostly, the police see
humanity AT ITS ABSOLUTE WORST - and interactions with people outside of law
enforcement while on duty are almost always negative in nature. It does not take
many of these interactions before a new officer begins to see everybody as a potential
'suspect'.
Also remember that to those who work inside the legal - everyone who doesn't is not 'working inside the legal system'. While the conscious mind sees the difference between 'working outside the legal system' and 'not working inside the legal system' the primitive subconscious mind does not. This causes law enforcement people to be subconsciously suspicious of people.
In addition, because officers have hazardous duty, they must necessarily be very
skeptical and view anyone they talk to as a potential threat to them.
The 'us vs. them' mentality is an almost inevitable outcome of the nature of police work.
The only way for police officers to combat it is for them to be aware of it and take training to combat it.
In any police force, the officers soon develop an 'us against them' mentality - where 'us' is the members of the police force, and 'them' is everyone else.
To the police at any level everyone else is either a 'suspect' or a potential 'suspect'. In order to do law enforcement work people have to be dehumanized; they can't be your friends. Can you imagine how difficult it would be to slap hand cuffs on a good friend and throw them into a cage? People to whom this is NOT difficult are psychopaths, is that who you want policing you?
Once you understand that the FBI sees all of us as their enemies their requests for surveillance
begin to make sense. All that is necessary is for you to attract their attention to be watched.
For example this posting is enough for me to get their attention and be a target for surveillance - after all I am speaking against them - so I must be their enemy - which means I must be one of the bad guys.
However, it is not necessary to speak out against a law enforcement agency to draw attention. It is enough to be one of those 'hacker types' who post to a known rabble rousing site like Slashdot to draw attention. Remember, despite your politics or views if you are not part of a law enforcement agency you are their enemy and a criminal who just hasn't been caught yet.
That is why you need to be afraid of surveillance capabilities. It also why law enforcement never apologizes when it breaks down the wrong door on a drug bust; the attitude is "Well we just didn't get you this time - but your turn is coming."
Average American male loses 4 socks per year. Call it 125,000,000 million males in US. That is about a billion socks every 2 years. This has been going on for at least 50 years.
Do you think you could hide 25,000,000,000 socks without the odd one showing up every once in a while? With that many socks missing you would think we'd be tripping over them regularly.
English has many characteristics that are useful in programming. English spans the spectrum from the technical precision of German to the emotional expressiveness of the romance languages.
This means that English is capable of easily expressing a wide range of thoughts - some of which are difficult to express in other languages. For example: What is the German word for 'compassion'? (Its a trick question; as far as i know, there is no German word for compassion.)
The longer I live, the more that I realize that the ambiguity and imprecision of English is actually a good 'map' of the real world - which has an element of imprecision and ambiguity to it.
While the French may hate the idea, the fact that most programming is done in English is a good thing; it reduces the 'Tower of Babel' effect in the world. This results in an increase in communication.
I have noticed that people who are not native English thinkers have some certain common characteristics to their programming. For example most of the programs that I have seen from German programmers have interfaces that seem to require the user to do some clumsy things. I attribute that to the German concept of 'VERBOTEN' which is much more than the English concept of 'Forbidden'. The German concept appears to be closer to: 'That is absolutely Forbidden by the laws of God and Physics; to even consider it is unthinkable.'
It appears to me that once a German programmer has decided to do something a certain way that he follows that path - even if it leads him into a ridiculous human interface for his program. After all, to do it any other way seems to be 'VERBOTEN'. The idea that people aren't interested in the internals of a program - but want an interface that does a lot with little action on their part never seems to enter the equation.
Of course I am speaking in generalities here, and I might not be able to defend my observations very well. Since I am talking about the 'feel' of a program - what seems awkward to me might 'feel' precise and rich to another observer. YMMV.
I would imagine that what they have is a square wave with some of the highest harmonics greatly attenuated. An actual sine wave is very difficult to produce with a digital chip.
Of course if you are trying to push the technology to its limits, and the rise and fall times of the transistors is a substantial part of the cycle time then the wave form starts to look trapezoidal or maybe even triangular. Lop off the higher harmonics and you would wind up with something vaguely sinusoidal.
That would explain a lot of the problems - switching jitter is a bad enough problem with good square waves - with sine waves it becomes really bad.
It won't be much longer until PC boards become 'untouchable'. The salt and oil from a finger print could screw up the impedance of an ultrahigh frequency trace. Dust deposits could be a problem; even one extra pf can make a difference with fast enough signals.
One of the reasons that Intel has had such difficulty in producing working motherboards with Rambus technology is the 400 Mhz clock which is used (double pumped) on the PC800 version of Rambus memory.
400 Mhz is a really big jump from the industry standard 100 - 133 Mhz. Minor impedance variations from board to board in production can cause significant phase and wave form changes in such fast signals.
To accurately transmit 400 Mhz square waves it is necessary for the board traces to handle 4 Ghz sine wave signals. That is more of an Analog micro wave transmission problem than it is any kind of digital design problem. Evidently the board designers have had a great deal of trouble doing this.
The bottom line is that Rambus motherboards will need to be produced with tighter tolerance on both trace and board substrate thickness than current motherboards. Result: even more expense for a Rambus system compared to a DDR based system.
What your original post looked like to me was that you were ridiculing his solution by showing that it has a downside. Of course it has a downside; the question in any solution is do the costs outweigh the benefits?
The reason I concluded you were ridiculing his post was the sarcastic tone of the language in your post.
Here would be a way to phrase such points without sarcasm:
"There is a downside to the solution you have given. We may be exhausting the natural resources of the planet at such a high rate that future generations may be left with no way to even live. Have you fully considered that downside to your solution?"
If you are critical of someone's solution to a problem when you have no alternative to offer you ARE pulling a power game; you are trying to make yourself look good by making someone else look bad.
You hope to leave the reader with the implied idea that "Of course, being far superior I could easily come up with a better answer", and THAT is a power game. That is the point of my 'Put up or shut up' paragraph.
Asking questions without having the answers is appropriate if you are trying to learn something. Asking questions without having the answers in the hope of making someone else look bad, because you know they don't have the answers either, is a cheap and sleazy trick. Do you now understand the If you don't have the answers, don't ask the question mentality?
As a programmer for hire, you don't get royalties on your code - recording artists do. If recording artists were doing work for hire they would get paid a salary. They don't get paid a salary, and so they aren't employees doing work for hire.
In any case employees and employers are not in equal bargaining positions. If they were the employees would have an equal input on their employment contracts. They don't. The companies have the money, you either do what they say or you don't work.
The question is how did companies get that sort of power over you? The answer is that many years ago they took a weak employee to court and got a legal precedent set in their favor. Today, everybody accepts the status quo as being fair and correct; it is neither.
Creators and manufacturers are not in equal bargaining positions: in business the golden rule applies: "He who has the gold, Rules".
If creators and manufacturers were in equal bargaining positions the creators would write about half of the contracts of which you speak, They don't write any. Their choice is turn over their work for what ever wages they can pry out of their employer, or starve. That is not much of a choice.
I can write on the subject of IP for hundreds of pages, I chose to shorten what I had to say about theft.
All arguments are circular if you take them far enough. As long as we are on the subject of logic, here is a little puzzle for you.
X/X = 1
0/X = 0
if X = 0 these two equations become identical and contradict each other.
Aristotle said "No thing can be both A and non A at the same time and in the same way". That is the postulate of identity which keeps contradictions from happening. I have presented an example of a contradiction. The ONLY conclusion you can reach is that Aristotle was WRONG.
Postulates are not logically defensible, they either stand or fall on their own. All that is necessary to invalidate a postulate is to show a counter example. I have done so.
By the way, don't try arguing that division by zero is not an allowed operation: that doesn't make the contradiction go away, it just sweeps it underneath the intellectual rug.
The correct postulate of identity is: "Accept in so far as something refers to itself, no thing can be both A and non A at the same time and in the same way."
If Aristotle had been correct Rand would have been correct. If Rand had been correct, you would be correct. He wasn't, neither was she, and neither are you.
The revised postulate of identity is compatible with the Yin and Yang nature of reality, Aristotle's original one is not. It is just as wrong as his belief that heavy object fall faster than light ones.
I believe you HAVE described a closed system. An open system would be if natural resources were not being used up, but were being constantly furnished from outside the system.
This is a Yin and Yang world: any good solution has an element of bad that goes along with it, any bad solution has an element of good that goes with it. There are no perfect solutions.
You don't seem to recognize that.
Criticism is easy; talk is cheap. If you have a better way, show everyone. Don't talk, DO. Kick everybody's asses with your better way. Create a better life for more people. Like the Japanese after WWII everyone will recognize your way is better and change to it. Until then you are just spouting 'eco slogans' in the hope of being able to seize political power you don't deserve.
It is not power which corrupts, it is UNDESERVED power which ATTRACTS the corrupt. Those who seek power they don't deserve are corrupt to begin with.
Slashdot Mirror
Just because somebody gets a ridiculous patent doesn't mean he is able to enforce it. Mostly these kind of patents die when the lawyers inform the patent holder that the patent would likely be overturned in the courts if a case ever gets to trial.
In other words, people like this are running a bluff - seeing if they can get the gullible to give them some money without a fight.
Get concerned, when and if, he starts winning law suits against companies with good lawyers and lots of money. Until then, a patent like this is just a boogie man.
Sorry, typo; in paragraph 3 make that "this year's encryption key " Spell checkers don't get everything.
This means that whoever produces the 'books' will have a lifetime ability to extort money from you: "Pay the yearly 'licensing fee' or we won't give you this year's encryption key."
Of course this year's encryption fee is just the 4 digit year (i.e. 2000, 2001) etc. but the DMCA forbids you to figure that fact out - since that is 'breaking a digital protection method'. The DMCA even forbids you to set the wrong date in the computer's clock to spoof a time when you had a good password - since that is 'bypassing a protection means', and subjects you to the draconian penalties of the DMCA.
Part of the reasons that women fear the outlawing of abortion is that it gives the police the right and the obligation to investigate every miscarriage. Part of the reason that geeks need to fear the DMCA is that it gives the police the right and the obligation to investigate everything that you do on your computer; "The CMOS clock on your machine is wrong, how do we know that you aren't trying to circumvent digital protection means on your computer? "
I can't wait until some lawyer figures out that all reading is covered by the DMCA since when you learn something you are making a copy into an electronic computer (your brain).
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The law, 100's of millions of lines of code, not one line of which has ever been checked to see if it works.
Suppose that each individual author who has contributed open source code files a civil lawsuit against this attorney for slander. These are not frivolous suits; he HAS slandered us. Fighting one law suit is difficult and expensive enough; fighting a few thousand is a practical impossibility.
What we have in our favor is numbers - this is a way to use those numbers to fight the big money on the other side.
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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 [
Slander n 1. law: The utterance of defamatory statements injurious to the reputation or well-being of a person. 2 A malicious statement or report...
It appears to me that by issuing a false legal brief about the open source movement that this lawyer has left himself wide open to being sued for slander.
Of course I am also sure that lawyers have exempted themselves from that sort of thing; after all prosecutors do it all the time.
Comments?
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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
Nature appears to have run the experiment of having a genetically identical species with some success. Having identical animals is not necessarily a situation doomed from the start.
There would have been no way that they would have predicted the importance of the Internet - or something like Slashdot. In 1990 the communications capability of computers was only known and appreciated by a very few geeks; most people had local call modem access to bulletin boardsif they had anything. (Please don't post how you had access to the Internet in 1983 - that just proves YOU are a geek and nothing else. Who could an average person have used as an ISP in 1990?)
In 1990 very few prognosticators would have predicted anything like a noticeable percentage of people running a Unix style operating system. Nor would they have predicted anything like Windows 2000 or an iMac.
One of the most interesting things about this article is that they had almost nothing to say about the - external to your house - communication capability of the machine. I suspect this will be one of the most important aspects of that machine.
One of the reasons that I bought OS/2 Warp 4 was the voice recognition capability built into the OS. I wound up using it very little. Not because it didn't work, it did. The reason I didn't use it much was that in order to activate it I had to say the word 'desktop'. For me at least 'desktop' is a VERY difficult word to pronounce properly. The 'k' sound at the end of one syllable followed by the 't' sound at the start of the next is just tough to say. When I thought about it I realized that I pronounced it 'destop' as do many of the people who say it in normal speech. The computer didn't know what a 'destop' was.
'Desktop' is a minor stumbling block, but it is the sort of thing that keeps voice recognition from being utilized as much as it could be. One of the keys to a useful voice command computer is to use words in the command structure that people can pronounce.
There is also a slight misconception in the article; the good thing about optical communication between computer subsections is not the speed of light vs the speed of electrical pulses - the good thing is that optical communications can switch on and off faster; you can obtain higher frequencies.
The article also gets it a little wrong when it blames the electrical interconnect for causing delays in main memory fetching. The problem is that dram speeds have only grown about 10 times faster since the days of the Z80 while processor clock speeds are up by a factor of 250 or so. Unless there is a real breakthrough in memory speeds that trend will continue.
I agree that this case extends the legal systems' ability to silence critics - but that is part of the actual - as designed - legal system - not part of a new - hypothetically evil system that I asked for.
I would like to challenge slashdoters to do design a legal system to do the following:
Favor evil as much as possible.
Create the appearance of fairness.
Allow some people to behave as tyrants.
Frustrate good.
Punish the innocent as much as possible.
Do everything possible to let the guilty off.
Be constructed in such a way that 'the public' accepts it as legitimate.
Spend some time thinking about this. At the end of that time see if there is ANYTHING you would change in the current system that would better meet the above criteria. I have been thinking about it for a long time, I haven't been able to come up with anything, how about you?
As I have pointed out in another post the way bad case law is caused to exist is for the rich and powerful to pick first opponents that stand no chance in court. Then once an absurd, lopsided, decision is on the books everyone accepts that absurdity as the 'law' from that point forward. The legal system makes no note of the fact that you beat up somebody with ALS in a wheel chair in your judicial fist fight - all that gets recorded is the big 'W' in your column.
The law, 100's of millions of lines of code, not one line of which has ever been tested to see if it works.
The only way out of this dilemma is to do exactly what they are going to do: make a very poor quality port - which is full of bugs and crashes X at every opportunity. Microsoft can then argue: "Look, we Tried, we Really, Really Tried, but Linux Is Such A Poor Platform (R) that this pile of rotting dingo's kidneys is the best that even a Great Innovative Company (R) like Microsoft can do."
Any questions as to how well the Linux port of IE is going to work? Oh yes, also expect the port to mysteriously affect the stability of the core operating system - surely you'll have to be root to install it. Of course that is so obviously sabotage that even Microsoft might not do it, but legally I don't think they have any choice; IE HAS to be part of the core OS - just like they argued in court.
Anyone who doesn't think Microsoft would do such bad faith things - has never studied the history of the company; ask the people who wrote DR DOS. The difference is that instead of leaving an email evidence trail of their bad faith they will be smarter this time. Expect the port to be done by the closest thing to a thousand monkeys with typewriters that Microsoft can find. Nothing like being able to point to the incompetence of Mainsoft to protect yourself, is there Microsoft?
"Why, if we Use Plausible Lies (R) this time we'll be OK; then all the people who throw around the quote about 'never attributing to malice what stupidity can explain' will buy what we are doing. Oh, THAT'S how to be evil - why didn't we think of that before; make it look like incompetence and the morons who look no deeper than the surface won't suspect a thing."
Lawyers love class action suit: million plantiffs each getting $10. Total to lawyer: one third of the TOTAL $10,000,000. Sweet deal for the lawyer!
It is one thing for them to be capped by equipment limitations - it is something entirely else for them to put an arbitrary announced cap on speeds.
Can you provide a better link to what they said?
It is possible to use the SBC DSL link and use another ISP as the link to the internet. Often this will result in higher effective bandwidth.
Most likely the email rate the complainant measured was the result of server load - rather than a bandwidth limitation. (It also makes a difference what time of day speeds are measured; the heavier the traffic the slower the shared connection runs.
The point of trolling is to be able to say 'HAW HAW I FOOLED YOU'. Exactly how would I do that based on my original post? All trolling is based on the illusion of power that the troll gets from fooling people. I realize that the troll is getting an illusion of power. People only chase illusions when they don't know they are chasing illusions.
The comments about 'us vs. them' came from my observation of personal acquaintances who became police officers. They were backed up by comments of retired and active duty police officers who noted the same phenomenon.
Bonding in any social group is a well known phenomenon - it is a primary force in the military, fraternities, scout troops, and sports teams, as well as law enforcement agencies.
The reason it takes on 'us vs. them' in police agencies is that mostly, the police see humanity AT ITS ABSOLUTE WORST - and interactions with people outside of law enforcement while on duty are almost always negative in nature. It does not take many of these interactions before a new officer begins to see everybody as a potential 'suspect'.
Also remember that to those who work inside the legal - everyone who doesn't is not 'working inside the legal system'. While the conscious mind sees the difference between 'working outside the legal system' and 'not working inside the legal system' the primitive subconscious mind does not. This causes law enforcement people to be subconsciously suspicious of people.
In addition, because officers have hazardous duty, they must necessarily be very skeptical and view anyone they talk to as a potential threat to them.
The 'us vs. them' mentality is an almost inevitable outcome of the nature of police work. The only way for police officers to combat it is for them to be aware of it and take training to combat it.
To the police at any level everyone else is either a 'suspect' or a potential 'suspect'. In order to do law enforcement work people have to be dehumanized; they can't be your friends. Can you imagine how difficult it would be to slap hand cuffs on a good friend and throw them into a cage? People to whom this is NOT difficult are psychopaths, is that who you want policing you?
Once you understand that the FBI sees all of us as their enemies their requests for surveillance begin to make sense. All that is necessary is for you to attract their attention to be watched.
For example this posting is enough for me to get their attention and be a target for surveillance - after all I am speaking against them - so I must be their enemy - which means I must be one of the bad guys.
However, it is not necessary to speak out against a law enforcement agency to draw attention. It is enough to be one of those 'hacker types' who post to a known rabble rousing site like Slashdot to draw attention. Remember, despite your politics or views if you are not part of a law enforcement agency you are their enemy and a criminal who just hasn't been caught yet.
That is why you need to be afraid of surveillance capabilities. It also why law enforcement never apologizes when it breaks down the wrong door on a drug bust; the attitude is "Well we just didn't get you this time - but your turn is coming."
Average American male loses 4 socks per year. Call it 125,000,000 million males in US. That is about a billion socks every 2 years. This has been going on for at least 50 years.
Do you think you could hide 25,000,000,000 socks without the odd one showing up every once in a while? With that many socks missing you would think we'd be tripping over them regularly.
This means that English is capable of easily expressing a wide range of thoughts - some of which are difficult to express in other languages. For example: What is the German word for 'compassion'? (Its a trick question; as far as i know, there is no German word for compassion.)
The longer I live, the more that I realize that the ambiguity and imprecision of English is actually a good 'map' of the real world - which has an element of imprecision and ambiguity to it.
While the French may hate the idea, the fact that most programming is done in English is a good thing; it reduces the 'Tower of Babel' effect in the world. This results in an increase in communication.
I have noticed that people who are not native English thinkers have some certain common characteristics to their programming. For example most of the programs that I have seen from German programmers have interfaces that seem to require the user to do some clumsy things. I attribute that to the German concept of 'VERBOTEN' which is much more than the English concept of 'Forbidden'. The German concept appears to be closer to: 'That is absolutely Forbidden by the laws of God and Physics; to even consider it is unthinkable.'
It appears to me that once a German programmer has decided to do something a certain way that he follows that path - even if it leads him into a ridiculous human interface for his program. After all, to do it any other way seems to be 'VERBOTEN'. The idea that people aren't interested in the internals of a program - but want an interface that does a lot with little action on their part never seems to enter the equation.
Of course I am speaking in generalities here, and I might not be able to defend my observations very well. Since I am talking about the 'feel' of a program - what seems awkward to me might 'feel' precise and rich to another observer. YMMV.
Of course if you are trying to push the technology to its limits, and the rise and fall times of the transistors is a substantial part of the cycle time then the wave form starts to look trapezoidal or maybe even triangular. Lop off the higher harmonics and you would wind up with something vaguely sinusoidal.
That would explain a lot of the problems - switching jitter is a bad enough problem with good square waves - with sine waves it becomes really bad.
It won't be much longer until PC boards become 'untouchable'. The salt and oil from a finger print could screw up the impedance of an ultrahigh frequency trace. Dust deposits could be a problem; even one extra pf can make a difference with fast enough signals.
400 Mhz is a really big jump from the industry standard 100 - 133 Mhz. Minor impedance variations from board to board in production can cause significant phase and wave form changes in such fast signals.
To accurately transmit 400 Mhz square waves it is necessary for the board traces to handle 4 Ghz sine wave signals. That is more of an Analog micro wave transmission problem than it is any kind of digital design problem. Evidently the board designers have had a great deal of trouble doing this.
The bottom line is that Rambus motherboards will need to be produced with tighter tolerance on both trace and board substrate thickness than current motherboards. Result: even more expense for a Rambus system compared to a DDR based system.
The reason I concluded you were ridiculing his post was the sarcastic tone of the language in your post.
Here would be a way to phrase such points without sarcasm:
"There is a downside to the solution you have given. We may be exhausting the natural resources of the planet at such a high rate that future generations may be left with no way to even live. Have you fully considered that downside to your solution?"
If you are critical of someone's solution to a problem when you have no alternative to offer you ARE pulling a power game; you are trying to make yourself look good by making someone else look bad.
You hope to leave the reader with the implied idea that "Of course, being far superior I could easily come up with a better answer", and THAT is a power game. That is the point of my 'Put up or shut up' paragraph.
Asking questions without having the answers is appropriate if you are trying to learn something. Asking questions without having the answers in the hope of making someone else look bad, because you know they don't have the answers either, is a cheap and sleazy trick. Do you now understand the If you don't have the answers, don't ask the question mentality?
In any case employees and employers are not in equal bargaining positions. If they were the employees would have an equal input on their employment contracts. They don't. The companies have the money, you either do what they say or you don't work.
The question is how did companies get that sort of power over you? The answer is that many years ago they took a weak employee to court and got a legal precedent set in their favor. Today, everybody accepts the status quo as being fair and correct; it is neither.
Creators and manufacturers are not in equal bargaining positions: in business the golden rule applies: "He who has the gold, Rules".
If creators and manufacturers were in equal bargaining positions the creators would write about half of the contracts of which you speak, They don't write any. Their choice is turn over their work for what ever wages they can pry out of their employer, or starve. That is not much of a choice.
I can write on the subject of IP for hundreds of pages, I chose to shorten what I had to say about theft.
All arguments are circular if you take them far enough. As long as we are on the subject of logic, here is a little puzzle for you.
X/X = 1
0/X = 0
if X = 0 these two equations become identical and contradict each other.
Aristotle said "No thing can be both A and non A at the same time and in the same way". That is the postulate of identity which keeps contradictions from happening. I have presented an example of a contradiction. The ONLY conclusion you can reach is that Aristotle was WRONG.
Postulates are not logically defensible, they either stand or fall on their own. All that is necessary to invalidate a postulate is to show a counter example. I have done so.
By the way, don't try arguing that division by zero is not an allowed operation: that doesn't make the contradiction go away, it just sweeps it underneath the intellectual rug.
The correct postulate of identity is: "Accept in so far as something refers to itself, no thing can be both A and non A at the same time and in the same way."
If Aristotle had been correct Rand would have been correct. If Rand had been correct, you would be correct. He wasn't, neither was she, and neither are you.
The revised postulate of identity is compatible with the Yin and Yang nature of reality, Aristotle's original one is not. It is just as wrong as his belief that heavy object fall faster than light ones.
Microsoft is lying about their R&D budget, haven't you figured out that Microsoft lies about everything they can?
This is a Yin and Yang world: any good solution has an element of bad that goes along with it, any bad solution has an element of good that goes with it. There are no perfect solutions. You don't seem to recognize that.
Criticism is easy; talk is cheap. If you have a better way, show everyone. Don't talk, DO. Kick everybody's asses with your better way. Create a better life for more people. Like the Japanese after WWII everyone will recognize your way is better and change to it. Until then you are just spouting 'eco slogans' in the hope of being able to seize political power you don't deserve.
It is not power which corrupts, it is UNDESERVED power which ATTRACTS the corrupt. Those who seek power they don't deserve are corrupt to begin with.