The whole point of TFA is that this may well not be the case. It may well be the case that language is not the product of hard wired wetware, sometimes known as "the Language Instinct," but is rather the product of:
1. general symbolic intelligence, i.e., thought, coupled with:
2. the ability to make more complex sounds, due to a vocal tract modified from anthropoid ape ancestors by the shift of the relative positions of neck and head brought on by bipedalism, and:
3. cultural transmission, i.e., the ability to pass language on to the next generation due to the long childhood dependency of humans which, in turn, came about because our large heads won't fit through the birth canal at full size, so we are all effectively born premature - unable to walk, or even effectively grasp our mother's hair and cling to her.
Therefore, it is quite possible that once our ancestors developed sufficiently large and complex brains to think with more logical sophistication than, for example chimpanzees, we slowly over time dveloped more and more complex languages until we reached a plateau, specifically, the limit of children under the age of 6 or 7 to understand and learn the basic grammar and vocabulary of the language.
Any increased grammatical complexity beyond this point would immediately die out since the next generation could not learn it during childhood. Once this plateau was reached, presumably in southern Africa ca. 200,000 years ago, our ancestors had the cognitive "killer app," i.e., modern human language, that allowed them to successfully radiate across the planet.
I'm a whole generation older than you, so I started watching Tom Baker as the Doctor when I was a teen in the 70s. I have a friend the same age as me who lived in the UK as a child and watched the original series live as a small child. He remembers thinking it was craptastic even as a 5 year old (but he watched it anyway - not a lot of good options back then). I saw the shows from the 60s in my teens in the mid 70s and really couldn't get past the lack of production values. Revisiting them later on in my 30s, I still didn't find them really worth watching.
For me, the best Doctors were Tom Baker, David Tennant, Peter Davison, and Christopher Eccelston. I like Matt Smith, the current doctor as well.
I agree with your overall advice to the OP:
1. If you have have limited time, just start watching from the "reboot" of 2005. 2. If you have more time, start with Tom Baker, then continue on with his successors from the original series as long as your interest holds up.
It probably doesn't matter anyway, because header files aren't eligible for copyright. They are too simple, and have no artistic value. They are simply machine readable definitions of a standard.
Not a settled matter of law. The fact that an individual part is not copyrightable does not determine whether the whole work is copyrightable.
It is perfectly true that an individual function prototype may not be copyrightable, but the whole header file may be, because, taken as a whole, the court could easily determine that it represents an expressive description of how a whole system works.
Individual function prototypes may not be copyrightable, but whole header files may well be copyrightable. In copyright law one cannot generalize from "this bit is not copyrightable" to "the whole work is just a collection of bits, each of which is not copyrightable, so the whole work is not copyrightable."
It is simply not a settled matter of law whether header files are copyrightable, so Google and Android developers may be in a bit of hot water here.
This argument was not held up in court, because it was never made. IBM argued correctly, and the court agreed, that the specfic headers in question were not copyrightable because the were in the public domain. IBM did not argue, nor has any court ruled AFAIK that headers in general are not copyrightable. Hence the potential legal problems for android developers.
IBM's claim in their case v SCO, was that those specific headers were not copyrightable because they were in the public domain. IBM did not claim that header files in general are not copyrightable.
IBM's claim, which was upheld, what that those specific headers were not copyrightable because they were in the public domain. IBM did not claim that header files in general are not copyrightable.
Header files implement an interface. That interface is a fact, not subject to copyright.
The fact "strcpy takes as arguments two character pointers, and returns a character pointer", is not copyrightable. This does not change if I express it in C as "char *strcpy(char *d, const char *s);"
A minimal C or C++ header file is just a collection of such facts.
The point Nimmer, an acknowledged authority on IP law, makes is that when you aggregate such "facts" the resultant text, essentially becomes an expressive description of how a whole system works, and therefore is copyrightable. Otherwise one could argue that each individual word in a book is such a "fact," and that copying a book is just copying a series of facts and therefore not a copyright violation.
Whether a work is copyrightable is a matter of examining the whole work in the context of its use, not just determining that individual lines are not copyrightable and concluding that the whole work is therefore not copyrightable.
So no, it is not yet a settled matter of law that header files are not copyrightable.
That quote is actually misattributed. It was the person writing to Steve Jobs who wrote that, not Jobs.
Here's what the site in question says: "UPDATE: The last line in the email exchange was actually not said by Mr. Jobs; rather it was by “Tom.” We corrected it as soon as we were made aware."
Jobs closed his half of the email exchange with "You may be working from bad data. Not your fault. Stay tuned. We are working on it."
BTW, I'm not in any way condoning Apple's de facto classification of home screen web apps as second class iOS citizens.
How much of the science we do today is based on experiments that are so ill specified that no other researcher can even attempt to repeat them, much less actually repeat them?
That's right - none.
These guys aren't just claiming a novel observation - they're claiming a novel observation and they're not telling anyone else what they're doing. This failure to provide a clear, repeatable description of their experimental work makes their "discovery" scientifically meaningless.
Not so. Unexplained phenomena are the evidentiary basis of science.
What science abhors are unrepeatable phenomena.
It is not required that an experiment have a complete theoretical explanation for it to be worthy of publication. It is required that an experiment be repeatable for it to be worthy of publication.
False dichotomy. They could publish a paper detailing everything and simultaneously file a patent for it. Other researchers could verify the phenomenon (if there is one) and they would still hold the patent.
Remember, the word "patent" means "public." There is no contradiction between a money making patent and scientific publication.
The author of the linked study appears not to have considered that a universe more dense with galaxies would be a universe with many more planet-sterilizing gamma ray bursts, which would not be terribly conducive to life.
You were not running a modern Mac OS X desktop with millions of colors @ 1200 x 800 (or larger) resolution and antialiasing, doing animated GUI transitions over a 14.4 kbps modem in the 90s.
My question is always this: "What does Apple have to win by locking down OS X the way they locked down iOS?". Even a single good argument would surprise me. The only thing people can come up with is 'make more money by selling applications through the Apps store'. Meanwhile Apple barely breaks even on the iOS app store, while they make billions selling hardware and selling music (DRM free, by the way). Somehow it doesn't really make sense introducing reasons for people not to buy Apple hardware, such as restricting what they can install on it.
People made the same argument you're making about dumping Classic (i.e., dumping Classic effectively restricts what can be installed on a Mac OS X machine), but Apple did it anyway. They did it to force user base migration to the new technology (i.e., Mac OS X).
Apple wants to move most or all of its user base to a unified OS that is more like iOS than Mac OS X. We know this because of what Apple themselves have called "Back to the Mac," i.e., bringing features of iOS, such as full screen apps, a home screen like the iOS home screen with app buttons, and an App Store to the next version of Mac OS X (a.k.a. Lion).
Why do they want to do this?
Because over the past decade, Mac OS X product revenue has gone from 90+% of Apple's revenue to less than 30%, and Apple sees this trend continuing. Like it or not, iOS is now the dominant Apple platform, not Mac OS X, and Apple would like to move as many customers as possible to iOS. They'll transition them by making Mac OS X more like iOS, then they'll unify iOS and Mac OS X. Most customers will buy iPads or variations thereof; others will buy iBooks running iOS not Mac OS X; only a few dinosaurs and developers will continue to run Mac OS X.
The Mac App Store is not a plot to take over the Mac software market, though it will be a small profit center for Apple. The Mac App Store is part of a long term plan to accustom Mac OS X users to using iOS, because in the future, they will mostly be iOS users, not Mac OS X users.
I know someone who use photoshop for resizing and cropping pictures, yes literally just resizing pictures, nothing fancy whatsoever... He won't even consider using any of the many free programs that would do the job, and his reason was "they're not professional", so instead he uses a pirated photoshop.
1. The plural of "anecdote" is not "data."
2. The core of Adobe's professional market is not composed of people as dopey as your friend. It is composed of people who make a living using Adobe's software. For these people, the many free/low-cost image editors just don't cut it - most likely because the vast majority of them do image manipulation significantly more complex than simply cropping images (who'd have thought?!).
3. If there existed a professional quality image editing suite fully feature equivalent with Photoshop but half or a quarter the price, don't you think professionals who do this sort of thing 8 hours a day, 200+ days a year for a living might have heard about it and already be using it?
Apple sells premium products to the premium market. By definition, the third world is not a premium mass market.
A premium vendor can ABSOLUTELY be a game changer, as Apple have been for decades. They change the game by redefining what is cutting edge, then the economy vendors imitate that and it eventually becomes mass market.
Just the opposite. Human children believe everything they are told - it's the only way they can get up to speed on 200000 or more years of accumulated culture. The fact that children will believe whatever they're told accounts for silly childhood beliefs like the tooth fairy, santa claus and the easter bunny.
Only mature adult humans scrutinize what they are told and test it against observable evidence. Science is the adult cognitive activity par excellence.
Fundamentalists and others who believe goofy shit without evidence are, in fact, still cognitively children.
Science could not possibly be a neotenous trait since it is children who believe whatever goofy crap they're told and adults who put their knowledge to empirical test.
No, he was not. This change will actually *slow* tasks of lower priority so it is *not* a speedup. In the example given by your parent and the videos from TFA, the compile will actually take *longer* because more cpu resources are being given to the video playback. A compile job taking *longer* is not a speedup.
However, from the user perspective, the video will play more smoothly and since you were watching Big Buck Bunny to kill time while the compile was happening, you likely won't notice or care that the compile took x% longer than it would have under the existing kernel.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, just like the Watergate burglars "solved" Nixon's 1972 re-election problem. Oh, wait...
Hackers get caught. The repercussions are ususally worse than never having done the hack in the first place.
The whole point of TFA is that this may well not be the case. It may well be the case that language is not the product of hard wired wetware, sometimes known as "the Language Instinct," but is rather the product of:
1. general symbolic intelligence, i.e., thought, coupled with:
2. the ability to make more complex sounds, due to a vocal tract modified from anthropoid ape ancestors by the shift of the relative positions of neck and head brought on by bipedalism, and:
3. cultural transmission, i.e., the ability to pass language on to the next generation due to the long childhood dependency of humans which, in turn, came about because our large heads won't fit through the birth canal at full size, so we are all effectively born premature - unable to walk, or even effectively grasp our mother's hair and cling to her.
Therefore, it is quite possible that once our ancestors developed sufficiently large and complex brains to think with more logical sophistication than, for example chimpanzees, we slowly over time dveloped more and more complex languages until we reached a plateau, specifically, the limit of children under the age of 6 or 7 to understand and learn the basic grammar and vocabulary of the language.
Any increased grammatical complexity beyond this point would immediately die out since the next generation could not learn it during childhood. Once this plateau was reached, presumably in southern Africa ca. 200,000 years ago, our ancestors had the cognitive "killer app," i.e., modern human language, that allowed them to successfully radiate across the planet.
Except Google was not caught lying. We have Microsoft claiming that Google lied, nothing more.
I'm a whole generation older than you, so I started watching Tom Baker as the Doctor when I was a teen in the 70s. I have a friend the same age as me who lived in the UK as a child and watched the original series live as a small child. He remembers thinking it was craptastic even as a 5 year old (but he watched it anyway - not a lot of good options back then). I saw the shows from the 60s in my teens in the mid 70s and really couldn't get past the lack of production values. Revisiting them later on in my 30s, I still didn't find them really worth watching.
For me, the best Doctors were Tom Baker, David Tennant, Peter Davison, and Christopher Eccelston. I like Matt Smith, the current doctor as well.
I agree with your overall advice to the OP:
1. If you have have limited time, just start watching from the "reboot" of 2005.
2. If you have more time, start with Tom Baker, then continue on with his successors from the original series as long as your interest holds up.
It probably doesn't matter anyway, because header files aren't eligible for copyright. They are too simple, and have no artistic value. They are simply machine readable definitions of a standard.
Not a settled matter of law. The fact that an individual part is not copyrightable does not determine whether the whole work is copyrightable.
It is perfectly true that an individual function prototype may not be copyrightable, but the whole header file may be, because, taken as a whole, the court could easily determine that it represents an expressive description of how a whole system works.
Individual function prototypes may not be copyrightable, but whole header files may well be copyrightable. In copyright law one cannot generalize from "this bit is not copyrightable" to "the whole work is just a collection of bits, each of which is not copyrightable, so the whole work is not copyrightable."
It is simply not a settled matter of law whether header files are copyrightable, so Google and Android developers may be in a bit of hot water here.
This argument was not held up in court, because it was never made. IBM argued correctly, and the court agreed, that the specfic headers in question were not copyrightable because the were in the public domain. IBM did not argue, nor has any court ruled AFAIK that headers in general are not copyrightable. Hence the potential legal problems for android developers.
IBM's claim in their case v SCO, was that those specific headers were not copyrightable because they were in the public domain. IBM did not claim that header files in general are not copyrightable.
IBM's claim, which was upheld, what that those specific headers were not copyrightable because they were in the public domain. IBM did not claim that header files in general are not copyrightable.
Header files implement an interface. That interface is a fact, not subject to copyright.
The fact "strcpy takes as arguments two character pointers, and returns a character pointer", is not copyrightable. This does not change if I express it in C as "char *strcpy(char *d, const char *s);"
A minimal C or C++ header file is just a collection of such facts.
The point Nimmer, an acknowledged authority on IP law, makes is that when you aggregate such "facts" the resultant text, essentially becomes an expressive description of how a whole system works, and therefore is copyrightable. Otherwise one could argue that each individual word in a book is such a "fact," and that copying a book is just copying a series of facts and therefore not a copyright violation.
Whether a work is copyrightable is a matter of examining the whole work in the context of its use, not just determining that individual lines are not copyrightable and concluding that the whole work is therefore not copyrightable.
So no, it is not yet a settled matter of law that header files are not copyrightable.
That quote is actually misattributed. It was the person writing to Steve Jobs who wrote that, not Jobs.
Here's what the site in question says: "UPDATE: The last line in the email exchange was actually not said by Mr. Jobs; rather it was by “Tom.” We corrected it as soon as we were made aware."
Jobs closed his half of the email exchange with "You may be working from bad data. Not your fault. Stay tuned. We are working on it."
BTW, I'm not in any way condoning Apple's de facto classification of home screen web apps as second class iOS citizens.
The Wikipedia page is still in google's cache.
Maybe someone would like to mirror it?
You can't imagine your way out of a paper bag.
...
a tablet isn't going to be your only computer.
Wow! The contradiction is mind boggling!
Can't you imagine a future where tablets are powerful enough to be many people's only computer?
TFA mentions an accusation of tax fraud.
How much of the science we do today is based on experiments that are so ill specified that no other researcher can even attempt to repeat them, much less actually repeat them?
That's right - none.
These guys aren't just claiming a novel observation - they're claiming a novel observation and they're not telling anyone else what they're doing. This failure to provide a clear, repeatable description of their experimental work makes their "discovery" scientifically meaningless.
Not so. Unexplained phenomena are the evidentiary basis of science.
What science abhors are unrepeatable phenomena.
It is not required that an experiment have a complete theoretical explanation for it to be worthy of publication. It is required that an experiment be repeatable for it to be worthy of publication.
False dichotomy. They could publish a paper detailing everything and simultaneously file a patent for it. Other researchers could verify the phenomenon (if there is one) and they would still hold the patent.
Remember, the word "patent" means "public." There is no contradiction between a money making patent and scientific publication.
The hypothetical Indian accountant would need to hold a US certification as a CPA, not an Indian one. This could be problematic.
The author of the linked study appears not to have considered that a universe more dense with galaxies would be a universe with many more planet-sterilizing gamma ray bursts, which would not be terribly conducive to life.
You were not running a modern Mac OS X desktop with millions of colors @ 1200 x 800 (or larger) resolution and antialiasing, doing animated GUI transitions over a 14.4 kbps modem in the 90s.
My question is always this: "What does Apple have to win by locking down OS X the way they locked down iOS?". Even a single good argument would surprise me. The only thing people can come up with is 'make more money by selling applications through the Apps store'. Meanwhile Apple barely breaks even on the iOS app store, while they make billions selling hardware and selling music (DRM free, by the way). Somehow it doesn't really make sense introducing reasons for people not to buy Apple hardware, such as restricting what they can install on it.
People made the same argument you're making about dumping Classic (i.e., dumping Classic effectively restricts what can be installed on a Mac OS X machine), but Apple did it anyway. They did it to force user base migration to the new technology (i.e., Mac OS X).
Apple wants to move most or all of its user base to a unified OS that is more like iOS than Mac OS X. We know this because of what Apple themselves have called "Back to the Mac," i.e., bringing features of iOS, such as full screen apps, a home screen like the iOS home screen with app buttons, and an App Store to the next version of Mac OS X (a.k.a. Lion).
Why do they want to do this?
Because over the past decade, Mac OS X product revenue has gone from 90+% of Apple's revenue to less than 30%, and Apple sees this trend continuing. Like it or not, iOS is now the dominant Apple platform, not Mac OS X, and Apple would like to move as many customers as possible to iOS. They'll transition them by making Mac OS X more like iOS, then they'll unify iOS and Mac OS X. Most customers will buy iPads or variations thereof; others will buy iBooks running iOS not Mac OS X; only a few dinosaurs and developers will continue to run Mac OS X.
The Mac App Store is not a plot to take over the Mac software market, though it will be a small profit center for Apple. The Mac App Store is part of a long term plan to accustom Mac OS X users to using iOS, because in the future, they will mostly be iOS users, not Mac OS X users.
I know someone who use photoshop for resizing and cropping pictures, yes literally just resizing pictures, nothing fancy whatsoever... He won't even consider using any of the many free programs that would do the job, and his reason was "they're not professional", so instead he uses a pirated photoshop.
1. The plural of "anecdote" is not "data."
2. The core of Adobe's professional market is not composed of people as dopey as your friend. It is composed of people who make a living using Adobe's software. For these people, the many free/low-cost image editors just don't cut it - most likely because the vast majority of them do image manipulation significantly more complex than simply cropping images (who'd have thought?!).
3. If there existed a professional quality image editing suite fully feature equivalent with Photoshop but half or a quarter the price, don't you think professionals who do this sort of thing 8 hours a day, 200+ days a year for a living might have heard about it and already be using it?
Apple sells premium products to the premium market. By definition, the third world is not a premium mass market.
A premium vendor can ABSOLUTELY be a game changer, as Apple have been for decades. They change the game by redefining what is cutting edge, then the economy vendors imitate that and it eventually becomes mass market.
Just the opposite. Human children believe everything they are told - it's the only way they can get up to speed on 200000 or more years of accumulated culture. The fact that children will believe whatever they're told accounts for silly childhood beliefs like the tooth fairy, santa claus and the easter bunny.
Only mature adult humans scrutinize what they are told and test it against observable evidence. Science is the adult cognitive activity par excellence.
Fundamentalists and others who believe goofy shit without evidence are, in fact, still cognitively children.
Science could not possibly be a neotenous trait since it is children who believe whatever goofy crap they're told and adults who put their knowledge to empirical test.
No, he was not. This change will actually *slow* tasks of lower priority so it is *not* a speedup. In the example given by your parent and the videos from TFA, the compile will actually take *longer* because more cpu resources are being given to the video playback. A compile job taking *longer* is not a speedup.
However, from the user perspective, the video will play more smoothly and since you were watching Big Buck Bunny to kill time while the compile was happening, you likely won't notice or care that the compile took x% longer than it would have under the existing kernel.