Now, I don't know much about copyright law, but it seems like the intent of the product name is important here. The name Lindows is obviously intended to suggest "Similar to Microsoft Windows but better because it's based on Linux". All the other product names were either developed independently, such as X Windows, or meant to suggest "works with MS Windows". It might be obvious to us that Lindows doesn't create confusion with MS Windows but it's somewhat plausible argument that it might confuse the clueless.
Why don't they just rename the product and save some trouble. Lindows is a dumb name anyway.
Come on, nobody, even 13-year-old girls, will see SW#2 just because N'Sync is in it. The fact is that everybody in the country is going to see it because it's an Event. You have to see the movie even if you know it will suck because you know that everybody else will be talking about how much it sucked and you don't want to miss out.
Look at it this way. You already know Jar Jar is going to be in it. If you're still planning to see it, N'Sync isn't going to deter you.
The real question is, how hard is it to make a replicating machine. It's extremely hard. That is what evolution is - replicating machines trying to get better and out-replicate other machines. Even the simplest cell is far more complex than any machine we have created (with the possible exception of Windows XP:-) The biological model for replication - basically grow and then split in two - seems to me like the only feasible way to do it. At atomic scales you can't have little robot arms that pick up atoms and put them in place, for one thing because the atoms will tend to stick to the arm tighter than to where you are trying to put them. (There was an article about that somewhere recently - I forget where.)
And consider how we make nanotech now. With silicon fab lines. It takes a huge billion dollar factory to create one tiny machine. Imagine shrinking down all that power into the machine itself so it can reproduce. I have never seen any plausible proposals on how this might be done.
If you look at the chemistry, the best basis for self-replication (i.e. life) is carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, and nitrogen. If that weren't the case some other basis would have evolved. This means proteins, lipids, carbohydrates, etc - the building blocks of organic life. Nanotech already exists and it works pretty well.
To us, jets aren't some kind of exotic rarely-seen technology. They may be hi-tech but they are familiar hi-tech, and that familarity is what makes them dangerous. Rather than nanobots, what if somebody developed a virus that made pigeons become homocidal. That would be the equivalent.
And I think most of us had thought at some point "gee, a suicidal person could crash a plane into something and cause a lot of damage. I wonder why it doesn't happen". Just idle speculation...
All these worries about nanites, self-replicating microscopic robots, etc are missing a big point. Nature has had billions of years to evolve self-replicating machines, and the ones we have now are extremely complex and powerful. There is *no way* that silicon-based nanobots will be even close to biological systems in terms of effectiveness. A super-powerful nanobot, reproducing endlessly and filling the world with gray ooze? Give me a break. Viruses and other microbes are very good at replicating and we live with them just fine.
In the beginning, there was nothing. Then it exploded
I like that...
In the latest Scientific American (which is unfortunately becoming a clone of Discover or Omni these days) there was an article about membranes floating around in higher dimensional space. Two of these membranes happened to collide, and that was the big bang. It impressed me as being total off-the-cuff speculation, though.
You'd think that Memento would have given them a shot in the arm. For all the people with that 15-minute-short-term-memory problem, digital doesn't work because you have to lug around a PC and by the time you've downloaded the picture you forgot what it was you needed to remember.
You may be thinking about the missles they have in the Honor Harrington books by David Weber. FTL missles that have fusion bombs which pump lasers - pretty powerful. (Then they also have something called "grasers" - gravity lasers?)
At a USENIX in 1993 or some year like that (it was in San Diego) they had a professional stand-up comic who was trying to entertain the crowd. He had actually wandered around beforehand and picked up some jargon and tried to make his jokes relevant but it was pretty lame (something about RMS never taking a bath is all I remember). Eventually he got really annoyed with all the people shining laser pointers at him. Just goes to show... not sure what...
It looks to me that there is a big gap between the idealized graph above, which shows clearly the different nucleotides, and the actual data they have gotten which shows blocks of 30 purines and 70 pyrimidines. Can they really distinguish between adjacent nucleotides or are they so close physically they will just crowd through and blur together?
And will they be able to tell A from G (both purines) and C from T (both pyrimidines)? I don't have the charges handy but I think C and T are pretty close.
Also, DNA breaks very easily. No way are you going to be able to pull a whole chromosome through at once. If they get just 100 bases at a time, will that be useful?
There is a reason that viruses like Ebola which kill very quickly and spectacularly are not as widespread as something like AIDS which is quiet and slow - they kill off their carriers too quickly to spread very far. It takes the virus a while to build up enough copies to transmit to other individuals, and if it kills the carrier before that, or makes him foam at the mouth and fall down, others will probably avoid coming too close...
To reply to the first post: if somebody wants to sell or give me a movie or piece of music, with the provision that I can only view or copy it a certain way, I'm free not to accept it, right? If the video stores have DVD's that I can only view if I have a Windows machine and not a Linux machine, nobody is forcing me to rent them. Until there is a law prohibiting discrimination based on race, gender, *and* operating system, I guess I'm stuck.
As for the other reply: I can understand why disk manufacturers would want to help media companies "protect their property". After all Sony and TimeWarner have a lot of clout. If you prevent people from pirating movies and music, somebody is going to make more money (they assume). So there is a motivation there. But who wins if they make disks where you can't back up *anything*, or for that matter, can't even *read* files written by random 3rd party apps without some decryption key from somewhere. There is nobody who will argue that you could sell even one of those disks to anybody in the world. The protection has to be optional.
And the whole issue of winmodems and winprinters is a bit of a red herring. So, somebody came out with hardware that worked only with Windows. How come nobody wrote drivers for Linux? Because nobody cared enough to take the time and effort - there were perfectly good modems and printers out there that worked with Linux.
(I admit I'm playing devils advocate a bit here. But I'd like to see answers to these questions...)
So, disks will in the future have some way to store data on them that won't be readable if the data is copied to another disk. Obviously this won't apply to all the data on the disk. It will only be applied when the software specifically says "make this file non-portable".
I don't see why this bothers free software people. Just because it gives the media companies a way to prevent people from copying their content? So what? It's their music and video - if they don't want me to copy it then maybe I won't view it at all. Or maybe I will - depends on whether I like their terms. But how does that affect my running linux and other free software?
For any life form, flesh or machine, to be viable in the long run it has to have a way to reproduce.
On Earth, we all know how biological life reproduces. It works pretty well and has for billions of years. But how could silicon life reproduce? To make a new computer or robot, now we need a huge amount of infrastructure - clean rooms, photolithography equipment, etc. To create new electronic equipment requires a complete industrialized society. This will not travel well.
On the other hand, by using silicon technology in the past few decades we have been able to bootstrap our technology to the point where we can start to modify biological life via genetic engineering. The next step is biological computing and organic/inorganic hybrids. What if we could make genes that would encode proteins that could assemble superconducting nanotubes (a bit of pie in the sky there) to create a super-fast nervous system for an advanced space-going creature? The best thing is that it would be self-replicating.
I think if we meet alien life it will be of this type - a hybrid of meat and machine but not the way most people assume (i.e. terminator).
It should be obvious to anybody who's tried both C++ (I used to use Motif but nothing in C, C++, or Java is much better) and a scripting language like Tcl or Perl or Python or Scheme, that the scripting language is the way to go. In programming GUI's, things are far less cumbersome if (1) typing is loose, and (2) programs are data. I have used Tcl/Tk for a long time and would hate to go back to a C++-based toolkit no matter how spiffy it is.
How long is "hello world" in your favorite C++ toolkit? 50, 100 lines? In Tcl it's
In my bag (don't know what to call it - if I were female I'd call it a purse) I carry (1) a palm, (2) a cellphone with headset, (3) a radio, and (4) an MP3 player. There is no technical reason whatsoever that these things can't be combined to produce (1) a box with a touch screen and antenna, and (2) stereo headphones with a mic. For sure I'd buy the first version of one of these that came out and I think a million other people would do it too. So when will it be available????
Wayne
Slashdot Mirror
Now, I don't know much about copyright law, but it seems like the intent of the product name is important here. The name Lindows is obviously intended to suggest "Similar to Microsoft Windows but better because it's based on Linux". All the other product names were either developed independently, such as X Windows, or meant to suggest "works with MS Windows". It might be obvious to us that Lindows doesn't create confusion with MS Windows but it's somewhat plausible argument that it might confuse the clueless.
Why don't they just rename the product and save some trouble. Lindows is a dumb name anyway.
Come on, nobody, even 13-year-old girls, will see SW#2 just because N'Sync is in it. The fact is that everybody in the country is going to see it because it's an Event. You have to see the movie even if you know it will suck because you know that everybody else will be talking about how much it sucked and you don't want to miss out.
Look at it this way. You already know Jar Jar is going to be in it. If you're still planning to see it, N'Sync isn't going to deter you.
The real question is, how hard is it to make a replicating machine. It's extremely hard. That is what evolution is - replicating machines trying to get better and out-replicate other machines. Even the simplest cell is far more complex than any machine we have created (with the possible exception of Windows XP :-) The biological model for replication - basically grow and then split in two - seems to me like the only feasible way to do it. At atomic scales you can't have little robot arms that pick up atoms and put them in place, for one thing because the atoms will tend to stick to the arm tighter than to where you are trying to put them. (There was an article about that somewhere recently - I forget where.)
And consider how we make nanotech now. With silicon fab lines. It takes a huge billion dollar factory to create one tiny machine. Imagine shrinking down all that power into the machine itself so it can reproduce. I have never seen any plausible proposals on how this might be done.
If you look at the chemistry, the best basis for self-replication (i.e. life) is carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, and nitrogen. If that weren't the case some other basis would have evolved. This means proteins, lipids, carbohydrates, etc - the building blocks of organic life. Nanotech already exists and it works pretty well.
To us, jets aren't some kind of exotic rarely-seen technology. They may be hi-tech but they are familiar hi-tech, and that familarity is what makes them dangerous. Rather than nanobots, what if somebody developed a virus that made pigeons become homocidal. That would be the equivalent.
...
And I think most of us had thought at some point "gee, a suicidal person could crash a plane into something and cause a lot of damage. I wonder why it doesn't happen". Just idle speculation
All these worries about nanites, self-replicating microscopic robots, etc are missing a big point. Nature has had billions of years to evolve self-replicating machines, and the ones we have now are extremely complex and powerful. There is *no way* that silicon-based nanobots will be even close to biological systems in terms of effectiveness. A super-powerful nanobot, reproducing endlessly and filling the world with gray ooze? Give me a break. Viruses and other microbes are very good at replicating and we live with them just fine.
I like that
In the latest Scientific American (which is unfortunately becoming a clone of Discover or Omni these days) there was an article about membranes floating around in higher dimensional space. Two of these membranes happened to collide, and that was the big bang. It impressed me as being total off-the-cuff speculation, though.
You'd think that Memento would have given them a shot in the arm. For all the people with that 15-minute-short-term-memory problem, digital doesn't work because you have to lug around a PC and by the time you've downloaded the picture you forgot what it was you needed to remember.
If we're going to be picky, red blood cells don't have nuclei, and thus no DNA, in humans.
You may be thinking about the missles they have in the Honor Harrington books by David Weber. FTL missles that have fusion bombs which pump lasers - pretty powerful. (Then they also have something called "grasers" - gravity lasers?)
Obviously the one where everybody is half white and half black and the different versions were fighting each other was a metaphor for this.
At a USENIX in 1993 or some year like that (it was in San Diego) they had a professional stand-up comic who was trying to entertain the crowd. He had actually wandered around beforehand and picked up some jargon and tried to make his jokes relevant but it was pretty lame (something about RMS never taking a bath is all I remember). Eventually he got really annoyed with all the people shining laser pointers at him. Just goes to show ... not sure what ...
It looks to me that there is a big gap between the idealized graph above, which shows clearly the different nucleotides, and the actual data they have gotten which shows blocks of 30 purines and 70 pyrimidines. Can they really distinguish between adjacent nucleotides or are they so close physically they will just crowd through and blur together?
And will they be able to tell A from G (both purines) and C from T (both pyrimidines)? I don't have the charges handy but I think C and T are pretty close.
Also, DNA breaks very easily. No way are you going to be able to pull a whole chromosome through at once. If they get just 100 bases at a time, will that be useful?
There is a reason that viruses like Ebola which kill very quickly and spectacularly are not as widespread as something like AIDS which is quiet and slow - they kill off their carriers too quickly to spread very far. It takes the virus a while to build up enough copies to transmit to other individuals, and if it kills the carrier before that, or makes him foam at the mouth and fall down, others will probably avoid coming too close...
To reply to the first post: if somebody wants to sell or give me a movie or piece of music, with the provision that I can only view or copy it a certain way, I'm free not to accept it, right? If the video stores have DVD's that I can only view if I have a Windows machine and not a Linux machine, nobody is forcing me to rent them. Until there is a law prohibiting discrimination based on race, gender, *and* operating system, I guess I'm stuck.
As for the other reply: I can understand why disk manufacturers would want to help media companies "protect their property". After all Sony and TimeWarner have a lot of clout. If you prevent people from pirating movies and music, somebody is going to make more money (they assume). So there is a motivation there. But who wins if they make disks where you can't back up *anything*, or for that matter, can't even *read* files written by random 3rd party apps without some decryption key from somewhere. There is nobody who will argue that you could sell even one of those disks to anybody in the world. The protection has to be optional.
And the whole issue of winmodems and winprinters is a bit of a red herring. So, somebody came out with hardware that worked only with Windows. How come nobody wrote drivers for Linux? Because nobody cared enough to take the time and effort - there were perfectly good modems and printers out there that worked with Linux.
(I admit I'm playing devils advocate a bit here. But I'd like to see answers to these questions...)
So, disks will in the future have some way to store data on them that won't be readable if the data is copied to another disk. Obviously this won't apply to all the data on the disk. It will only be applied when the software specifically says "make this file non-portable". I don't see why this bothers free software people. Just because it gives the media companies a way to prevent people from copying their content? So what? It's their music and video - if they don't want me to copy it then maybe I won't view it at all. Or maybe I will - depends on whether I like their terms. But how does that affect my running linux and other free software?
For any life form, flesh or machine, to be viable in the long run it has to have a way to reproduce.
On Earth, we all know how biological life reproduces. It works pretty well and has for billions of years. But how could silicon life reproduce? To make a new computer or robot, now we need a huge amount of infrastructure - clean rooms, photolithography equipment, etc. To create new electronic equipment requires a complete industrialized society. This will not travel well.
On the other hand, by using silicon technology in the past few decades we have been able to bootstrap our technology to the point where we can start to modify biological life via genetic engineering. The next step is biological computing and organic/inorganic hybrids. What if we could make genes that would encode proteins that could assemble superconducting nanotubes (a bit of pie in the sky there) to create a super-fast nervous system for an advanced space-going creature? The best thing is that it would be self-replicating.
I think if we meet alien life it will be of this type - a hybrid of meat and machine but not the way most people assume (i.e. terminator).
It should be obvious to anybody who's tried both C++ (I used to use Motif but nothing in C, C++, or Java is much better) and a scripting language like Tcl or Perl or Python or Scheme, that the scripting language is the way to go. In programming GUI's, things are far less cumbersome if (1) typing is loose, and (2) programs are data. I have used Tcl/Tk for a long time and would hate to go back to a C++-based toolkit no matter how spiffy it is.
.l -text "hello world"; pack .l
...
How long is "hello world" in your favorite C++ toolkit? 50, 100 lines? In Tcl it's
label
and it scales
In my bag (don't know what to call it - if I were female I'd call it a purse) I carry (1) a palm, (2) a cellphone with headset, (3) a radio, and (4) an MP3 player. There is no technical reason whatsoever that these things can't be combined to produce (1) a box with a touch screen and antenna, and (2) stereo headphones with a mic. For sure I'd buy the first version of one of these that came out and I think a million other people would do it too. So when will it be available???? Wayne