That's assuming that countries invested in MS don't tell the EC to piss off and let MS come back in
No. The EC is an executive body with the power to issue decisions in competition law. The local courts in all member states will enforce its decisions.
When they became members each EU state passed enabling legislation which, amongst much else, instructs local courts that European law takes precedence over national laws. The only way for a member state to avoid their own judges enforcing an EU ruling is to repeal that enabling legislation (i.e. withdraw from the EU.)
* There is a gap in scientific knowledge.
* Therefore, the things in this gap are best explained as acts of God.
This is not based in logic. It is simply a statement of pessimism about the future progress of science.
Down through the centuries, science has eliminated a great many of its gaps. People who had used the Gap argument were embarrassed, since their God shrank in power with each new scientific advance. For example, after the work of Galileo and Newton, it was no longer thought that angels pushed the planets across the heavens.
It doesn't work like that. The member states have already agreed to the directive in the Council of Ministers and are now legally obliged to implement it within a reasonable time frame. If they don't they can be fined by the European Court of Justice or sued for damages. The likes of Nokia and Microsoft will be able to start legal action.
Preventing the directive going ahead now is probably impossible.
I disagree. The European Parliament is a relatively young institution that has recently begun flexing it's muscles against the Commission. Last October all the different nations and all the different political parties came together and successfully blocked Rocco Buttiglione's nomination as Justice Commissioner, even though the Parliament technically doesn't have that power.
The Parliament as an institution is showing an interest in extending it's authority, and has so far had it's views on this directive ignored. It's possible that the Parliament could shoot it down out of pure bloody-minded, turf-war politics.
Democracy and free markets seem to be better, in the long run, at fostering growth than totalitarian regimes, IMHO
Unfortunately, much as a I want to agree with you, there is no strong correlation between democracy and economic growth.
For example, 40 out of 48 African nations have held multiparty elections since 1990. At election time, they mostly swap one corrupt bunch for a different one. There is little sign of any democracy-dividend there.
At the other extreme, there are prosperous, sort-of-free-market, definately authoritarian places like Singapore, Malaysia, and Hong Kong. In Europe in the 1930s, the fascist countries delivered much more impressive growth than the democracies.
The real drivers seem to be low levels of corruption and proper law enforcement. It isn't particularly related to how often people go to the polls.
Now if *I* were an astroturfer, what kind of post would I make to this discussion? I would probably claim to be an ex-employee, and say: don't worry everybody the patents are purely defensive.
I'm not saying you are an astroturfer, I'm just saying what I would do if I were one.
The fact is that the Roman Empire is now almost completely irrelevant
Well apart from plumbing, concrete, roads, law and order, and the modern day calendar, the Roman alphabet is still the most widely used writing system in the world.
Your suggestion involves breaking up the protocol layers. Both Ethernet and TCP/IP owe their success to Keeping It Simple Stupid. If you start overlapping them, introducing MAC addresses into IP headers, you are merging them into a kind of TCP/IP/Ethernet super-protocol. It's no longer Simple, and you can no longer patch, upgrade, change them independently of each other. Different implementations of Ethernet on disconnected networks will now start interfering with each other in unexpected ways, depending exactly on what you plan to do the MAC address when you see it. Privacy advocates will have a fit.
And besides that it's easily defeated, just override your TCP/IP settings to lie about your MAC address. In principle it could even be done for your whole LAN at the firewall, a sort of MAC-NAT.
Chemical process patents, for example, are structurally and functionally indistinguishable and very obviously map into the same space as "software algorithms" and yet those are not considered controversial.
You can't copyright chemical processes, that's the difference. Software is legally a "literary work", and protected by copyright. I don't see how something can be both a patentable machine *and* a copyrightable literary work. If the proposal was to drop software copyrights and instead implement a patent system, then I might be prepared to consider supporting it. But that's not what's on offer.
It's true. There are two things that look particularly strange to my (non-American) eyes watching Americans debate is firstly the focus on precise legal definitions, rather than "is this fair?" that you would see in a British debate on the same subject. Arguing that something is legal when it's clearly unfair would be seen as an implied argument for changing the law to British eyes. It would never be accepted as a justification.
A good example is the actions of the US Supreme Court vs. the British High Court when overturning a law. The Americans look to the constitution (a law), the British judge will block laws for being "against natural justice" (i.e. unfair) without reference to any other document. Neither body has ever been explicitly given those powers, and the different approaches they have adopted is instructive in comparing British and American culture.
The second strange-looking thing is the frequent references and long discussions about What The Founders Thought. I've never seen any other nationality refer to a group of long-dead 18th politicians as a supporting point in an modern day debate.
That's all very well, but how far do want to take this "understand the foundation" thing? Do you need to study the Legend of Gilgamesh to understand the story of Noah? Of course not. Do you need to understand the Zoroastrian concepts of dualism and monotheism before you can grasp the Judeo-Christian interpretation? Obviously not.
No, in that you are wrong. Bertrand Russell spent several years and actually proved, in the real and rigorous sense of the word, that 1+1 = 2.
That's a mathematical proof, not a scientific proof, an example of the same word with two different meanings, like confusing free speech and free beer. Mathematical proofs are easy, and everywhere. High school students are taught them.
The scientific model, on the other hand, does not except absolute truth: everything is contingent and can it all be overturned tomorrow if the right evidence is found.
In the scientific view of the world, there is no such thing as absolute truth, the closest you can ever get is a "theory", and you can't prove theories, only observe that they match the evidence.
An idea that hasn't yet made it to the dizzy heights of "theory", that lacks supporting evidence is called a "hypothesis". In the scientific model the furthest point away from truth is "faith". Faith is the absence of evidence.
If all you do is copy existing commercial software, you'll ALWAYS be behind.
Firstly, all Microsoft have ever done is copy other people's software, and you can't accuse them of being behind.
Secondly, you are only half right about open source software. It is good at reimplementing existing commercial software, eventually. Linux, the BSDs, the GNU tools, Open Office are all evidence of that. But it's not bad at innovating new stuff, either. Perl, Tk/Tcl, BIND, sendmail, Apache. It's fair to say that without open source software there wouldn't have been an Internet.
And this is not just historically true. Right now, Mozilla publish the most innovative browser on the planet. By comparison, IE is just a rectangle. BitTorrent has taken over the P2P world, and new variants are coming.
Let me ask you this: where do think the next big idea is going to come from? The one below the radar that none of us have seen, yet? Is it more likely to come from Redmond or Sourceforge? My money is on the latter.
Both of them, along with supporting sports teams, are modern tribalism. By far the biggest predictor in each case is which "tribe" your parents belonged to.
I'm inclined to agree. Various alternative quality of life calculations have been proposed, they do tend to suffer from the subjectivity problems that you mentioned in an earlier post, but they generally come in at around 5-10% advantage to the Americans.
My original point was in an argument on US vs EU living standards per capita GDP is an unreliable methodology, because it is skewed in favour of the Americans. It is entirely possible that compared to Europeans they work longer hours, have more expenses, less free time, and less spending money, and still appear to be 23% ahead. Although, I think we agree that probably isn't the case today.
Physics dictate that the transportation of people will require the expense of energy either way As well as the advantages of widespread public transport, Europeans also live in more compact cities than the sprawling American suburbs. So the energy expended to get around is much lower.
People living in prison are not productive, therefore, how are they producing anything and thereby adding to the GDP of the U.S.? Prisoners don't, prison populations do. Prison guards get paid, as do food and other suppliers, and those who make bars or build high walls.
Remember GDP doesn't measure net gain, only overall paid-for work. Google for the parable of the broken window.
It is without a doubt that Americans earn more than Europeans. Per head, about 23% more. But if they are working longer hours (and they do) just blow it all that on extra expenses, they aren't any better off. Are they?
Oh? Is that why per-capita GDP is higher in the U.S. than it is in the various "market-socialist" European nations?
GDP comparisons overstate American living standards.
There are differences in methodology, like software, Europeans count it as an expense and deduct it, while Americans count it as an investment and add it.
Europeans have a milder climate, so Americans spend more on heating and air conditioning, pushing up American GDP without enhancing living standards.
Europeans have less crime, so Americans spend more on home and business security, again pushing up American GDP, but not living standards.
Many Europeans use public transport, but few Americans have any alternative to their cars. Again American GDP goes higher.
Americans keep 2 million people in prison, a far higher proportion than in Europe, and even that makes American GDP higher.
Don't have too much faith in the GDP figures as a measure of personal welfare.
Capitalism works every time it's tried, thank you very much.
If by "works" you mean "by grasping naked, unrestrained capitalism Russia's economy has imploded to roughly the size of Belgium whilst creating record numbers of multi-billionaire asset-strippers"[1], then yes, you are right.
You know the thing that most made me laugh about that wav was how it settled nothing in the "correct" way to pronounce Linux debate. I first fired it up with bated breath, expecting something definitive from Linus himself, but all we heard was the correct way to pronounce it if you happen to have a Swedish-Finnish accent. I proceeded to ROFLMAO.
Slashdot Mirror
That's assuming that countries invested in MS don't tell the EC to piss off and let MS come back in
No. The EC is an executive body with the power to issue decisions in competition law. The local courts in all member states will enforce its decisions.
When they became members each EU state passed enabling legislation which, amongst much else, instructs local courts that European law takes precedence over national laws. The only way for a member state to avoid their own judges enforcing an EU ruling is to repeal that enabling legislation (i.e. withdraw from the EU.)
You post is inaccurate because:
* It invokes The "God of the Gaps" Argument.
This argument has the form:
* There is a gap in scientific knowledge.
* Therefore, the things in this gap are best explained as acts of God.
This is not based in logic. It is simply a statement of pessimism about the future progress of science.
Down through the centuries, science has eliminated a great many of its gaps. People who had used the Gap argument were embarrassed, since their God shrank in power with each new scientific advance. For example, after the work of Galileo and Newton, it was no longer thought that angels pushed the planets across the heavens.
It doesn't work like that. The member states have already agreed to the directive in the Council of Ministers and are now legally obliged to implement it within a reasonable time frame. If they don't they can be fined by the European Court of Justice or sued for damages. The likes of Nokia and Microsoft will be able to start legal action.
Preventing the directive going ahead now is probably impossible.
I disagree. The European Parliament is a relatively young institution that has recently begun flexing it's muscles against the Commission. Last October all the different nations and all the different political parties came together and successfully blocked Rocco Buttiglione's nomination as Justice Commissioner, even though the Parliament technically doesn't have that power.
The Parliament as an institution is showing an interest in extending it's authority, and has so far had it's views on this directive ignored. It's possible that the Parliament could shoot it down out of pure bloody-minded, turf-war politics.
Democracy and free markets seem to be better, in the long run, at fostering growth than totalitarian regimes, IMHO
Unfortunately, much as a I want to agree with you, there is no strong correlation between democracy and economic growth.
For example, 40 out of 48 African nations have held multiparty elections since 1990. At election time, they mostly swap one corrupt bunch for a different one. There is little sign of any democracy-dividend there.
At the other extreme, there are prosperous, sort-of-free-market, definately authoritarian places like Singapore, Malaysia, and Hong Kong. In Europe in the 1930s, the fascist countries delivered much more impressive growth than the democracies.
The real drivers seem to be low levels of corruption and proper law enforcement. It isn't particularly related to how often people go to the polls.
Now if *I* were an astroturfer, what kind of post would I make to this discussion? I would probably claim to be an ex-employee, and say: don't worry everybody the patents are purely defensive.
I'm not saying you are an astroturfer, I'm just saying what I would do if I were one.
Americans out number the rest of the English speaking world.
There are more Chinese English-speakers than there are American ones. And don't forget India is part of the English-speaking world.
What an arse.
Is this really a solution or just another to prolong?
In human medicine there is no such thing as a real solution, they are all "just prolongs".
Frankly, 99% of the /. community lacks the scientific background to really understand and refute the claims of Creationists.
You're right it's poor, but it's 1 percentage point more than the Creationists have.
The fact is that the Roman Empire is now almost completely irrelevant
Well apart from plumbing, concrete, roads, law and order, and the modern day calendar, the Roman alphabet is still the most widely used writing system in the world.
So what is his beef with people making decisions for themselves?
No beef. He wants your decision to be fully informed.
Your suggestion involves breaking up the protocol layers. Both Ethernet and TCP/IP owe their success to Keeping It Simple Stupid. If you start overlapping them, introducing MAC addresses into IP headers, you are merging them into a kind of TCP/IP/Ethernet super-protocol. It's no longer Simple, and you can no longer patch, upgrade, change them independently of each other. Different implementations of Ethernet on disconnected networks will now start interfering with each other in unexpected ways, depending exactly on what you plan to do the MAC address when you see it. Privacy advocates will have a fit.
And besides that it's easily defeated, just override your TCP/IP settings to lie about your MAC address. In principle it could even be done for your whole LAN at the firewall, a sort of MAC-NAT.
Nothing solved, whole raft of problems intoduced.
Chemical process patents, for example, are structurally and functionally indistinguishable and very obviously map into the same space as "software algorithms" and yet those are not considered controversial.
You can't copyright chemical processes, that's the difference. Software is legally a "literary work", and protected by copyright. I don't see how something can be both a patentable machine *and* a copyrightable literary work. If the proposal was to drop software copyrights and instead implement a patent system, then I might be prepared to consider supporting it. But that's not what's on offer.
I don't know what this "American" bit is about.
It's true. There are two things that look particularly strange to my (non-American) eyes watching Americans debate is firstly the focus on precise legal definitions, rather than "is this fair?" that you would see in a British debate on the same subject. Arguing that something is legal when it's clearly unfair would be seen as an implied argument for changing the law to British eyes. It would never be accepted as a justification.
A good example is the actions of the US Supreme Court vs. the British High Court when overturning a law. The Americans look to the constitution (a law), the British judge will block laws for being "against natural justice" (i.e. unfair) without reference to any other document. Neither body has ever been explicitly given those powers, and the different approaches they have adopted is instructive in comparing British and American culture.
The second strange-looking thing is the frequent references and long discussions about What The Founders Thought. I've never seen any other nationality refer to a group of long-dead 18th politicians as a supporting point in an modern day debate.
ABC News: Famous Atheist Now Believes in God
You mean: Famous 81 year old Now Believes in God.
That's all very well, but how far do want to take this "understand the foundation" thing? Do you need to study the Legend of Gilgamesh to understand the story of Noah? Of course not. Do you need to understand the Zoroastrian concepts of dualism and monotheism before you can grasp the Judeo-Christian interpretation? Obviously not.
No, in that you are wrong. Bertrand Russell spent several years and actually proved, in the real and rigorous sense of the word, that 1+1 = 2.
That's a mathematical proof, not a scientific proof, an example of the same word with two different meanings, like confusing free speech and free beer. Mathematical proofs are easy, and everywhere. High school students are taught them.
The scientific model, on the other hand, does not except absolute truth: everything is contingent and can it all be overturned tomorrow if the right evidence is found.
In the scientific view of the world, there is no such thing as absolute truth, the closest you can ever get is a "theory", and you can't prove theories, only observe that they match the evidence.
An idea that hasn't yet made it to the dizzy heights of "theory", that lacks supporting evidence is called a "hypothesis". In the scientific model the furthest point away from truth is "faith". Faith is the absence of evidence.
If all you do is copy existing commercial software, you'll ALWAYS be behind.
Firstly, all Microsoft have ever done is copy other people's software, and you can't accuse them of being behind.
Secondly, you are only half right about open source software. It is good at reimplementing existing commercial software, eventually. Linux, the BSDs, the GNU tools, Open Office are all evidence of that. But it's not bad at innovating new stuff, either. Perl, Tk/Tcl, BIND, sendmail, Apache. It's fair to say that without open source software there wouldn't have been an Internet.
And this is not just historically true. Right now, Mozilla publish the most innovative browser on the planet. By comparison, IE is just a rectangle. BitTorrent has taken over the P2P world, and new variants are coming.
Let me ask you this: where do think the next big idea is going to come from? The one below the radar that none of us have seen, yet? Is it more likely to come from Redmond or Sourceforge? My money is on the latter.
Not everyone blames the US, for example *you* are blaming the British.
Or perhaps, politics is the modern religion?
Both of them, along with supporting sports teams, are modern tribalism. By far the biggest predictor in each case is which "tribe" your parents belonged to.
That's a rather nebulous assumption, I would say.
I'm inclined to agree. Various alternative quality of life calculations have been proposed, they do tend to suffer from the subjectivity problems that you mentioned in an earlier post, but they generally come in at around 5-10% advantage to the Americans.
My original point was in an argument on US vs EU living standards per capita GDP is an unreliable methodology, because it is skewed in favour of the Americans. It is entirely possible that compared to Europeans they work longer hours, have more expenses, less free time, and less spending money, and still appear to be 23% ahead. Although, I think we agree that probably isn't the case today.
Physics dictate that the transportation of people will require the expense of energy either way
As well as the advantages of widespread public transport, Europeans also live in more compact cities than the sprawling American suburbs. So the energy expended to get around is much lower.
People living in prison are not productive, therefore, how are they producing anything and thereby adding to the GDP of the U.S.?
Prisoners don't, prison populations do. Prison guards get paid, as do food and other suppliers, and those who make bars or build high walls.
Remember GDP doesn't measure net gain, only overall paid-for work. Google for the parable of the broken window.
It is without a doubt that Americans earn more than Europeans. Per head, about 23% more. But if they are working longer hours (and they do) just blow it all that on extra expenses, they aren't any better off. Are they?
Oh? Is that why per-capita GDP is higher in the U.S. than it is in the various "market-socialist" European nations?
GDP comparisons overstate American living standards.
There are differences in methodology, like software, Europeans count it as an expense and deduct it, while Americans count it as an investment and add it.
Europeans have a milder climate, so Americans spend more on heating and air conditioning, pushing up American GDP without enhancing living standards.
Europeans have less crime, so Americans spend more on home and business security, again pushing up American GDP, but not living standards.
Many Europeans use public transport, but few Americans have any alternative to their cars. Again American GDP goes higher.
Americans keep 2 million people in prison, a far higher proportion than in Europe, and even that makes American GDP higher.
Don't have too much faith in the GDP figures as a measure of personal welfare.
Capitalism works every time it's tried, thank you very much.
If by "works" you mean "by grasping naked, unrestrained capitalism Russia's economy has imploded to roughly the size of Belgium whilst creating record numbers of multi-billionaire asset-strippers"[1], then yes, you are right.
[1] Contrast that with China.
Thanks, I'm glad you like the sig :-)
You know the thing that most made me laugh about that wav was how it settled nothing in the "correct" way to pronounce Linux debate. I first fired it up with bated breath, expecting something definitive from Linus himself, but all we heard was the correct way to pronounce it if you happen to have a Swedish-Finnish accent. I proceeded to ROFLMAO.