The trick is, no commission can determine the truth.
Certainly some (amazingly rare) statements can be determined to be false. But it's not always as easy as you might like. What about a corporation that stated "our products can reach speeds greater the speed of light". According to current scientific understanding, this is impossible. I believe such a statement to be false, personally. Prove it.
That's the whole point of the First Amendment in the U.S. It's not up the government to decide what is true.
You are incorrect. You do have the right to make false or deceptive claims, just not with the intent to defraud. There's a subtle but very important difference.
Your statement to the effect that you are a "Right Reverend", for example, could be ruled to be deceptive, given the nature of your "church".
However, you have the right to make that statement, unless you attempt to use that statement to specifically defraud some specific person or persons.
I'm starting to think that the Founding Fathers made a serious mistake when drafting the Bill of Rights.
The rights enumerated therein should have been explicitly protected from intrusion by private parties in addition to intrusion by the government.
At the time, I think they felt that government was by far the biggest threat, and multinational and other powerful corporations didn't exist to any significant degree.
But now it's starting to seem like we need an amendment extending our protections to include such organizations.
Anyone have any thoughts on an appropriate wording?
I'm thinking something like "The rights enumerated in the Constitution are inalienable and shall not be infringed by any state or private party."
The "inalienable" part is intended prevent EULAs from making us "voluntarily" give up our rights.
Personally, I'm all in favor of license agreements that are simple and non-restrictive.
However, the reason for contracts like this is all the lawsuits over the years that consumers and other people that have brought that set picyune precedents like "they didn't say that the contract was severable, so I assumed that since one part was obviously invalid the whole thing was invalid".
These lawsuits are how we end up with contracts and EULA's like this.
Whether this is the lawyers' fault or the consumers, or the politically motivated consumer protection groups, or the stupid juries that agree with this kind of crap, I couldn't tell you. Probably a bit of each.
The only way to avoid stuff like this is to stop being a litigious society.
Frankly, I think the idea of stripped down Windows is a terrible one.
As a developer, I already have huge problems writing code that uses various functions that are only supported on particular versions of Windows.
E.g. InterlockedCompareExchange is a function that is useful for performing low-level synchronization in situations where standard Mutex's, etc. don't really cut it for one reason or another.
Looking at the documentation, though, I find that it's only available on Win98 or later. If I want to write an app or driver that will work on Win95 too, I can't use this function.
Now, apparently the states want to attach the following addendum to practically every major component in the system: "Might or might not work on any particular machine, depending on what the OEM decided to strip out."
So much for trying to use HTML help. The web browsing services might be removed.
Ack! Please don't do this. There must be better ways to punish Microsoft and encourage competition.
The key to when a satellite deorbits is when the atmospheric drag causes it to. The atmosphere expands and contracts based on a variety of factors including solar flux, which is very hard to predict. This isn't physics, it's astro-meteorology (multiple puns intended).
By comparison, figuring out when an asteroid will hit the earth is a simple matter of determining it's path and speed and doing a simple calculation.
Before people get too wacky with their snake-oil comments, you might want to actually go check out the patent.
I find claim 10 rather amusing, though:
10. A linear accelerator, comprising:
a support rail;
a capacitor module comprising a first conductive element having a cylindrical geometry and a first sliding electrical contact; a second conductive element axially spaced from said first conductive element and of a geometry of smaller axial extent than the first conductive element and having a second sliding electrical contact; and a dielectric element disposed between said first conductive element and said second conductive element so as to form the capacitor module;
a frictionless connection for connecting said capacitor module to said support rail for movement therealong; and a high voltage source, having first and second terminals connected respectively to said first and second sliding electrical contacts, for applying a high voltage to said conductive elements of sufficient value to create a thrust force on said module inducing movement thereof along the support rail.
Before you bother looking... no, they don't disclose how to create a frictionless connection.:-)
Well, seeing as how it's been reported that it's distributed under a GNU license, you could always just edit it yourself and mail the patches back to O'Rielly.
Isn't that what's supposed to be great about free X (where X = literature in this case)?
Certainly the first version of a lot of free software doesn't seem to wait on thorough editorial review before going out the door.:-)
These things would be perfect for those of us who walk around reading books and newspapers and running into people (and stepping into traffic).
Now we'd get a big red popup saying: "Watch where you're going, DUFUS!!!" accompanied by a helpful airhorn blast since we wouldn't see a big red flashing warning sign if it bit us in the eyeball.
I will start by saying that I really liked B5 (a lot... I think it's probably the most amazing science-fiction epic ever attempted).
Yeah, there were a lot of embarrassing moments in it, and quite a bit of trite dialog.
What was great about it was the it so devoutly tried to be good. There's so much crap on TV these days, that I just have to give JMS credit for sticking to his guns and telling a story.
Even if it was a bit of a cheesy space opera when all is said and done.
I guess what I'm waiting to hear is whether this series also is going to try to be good. I'm skeptical that the Showtime management will allow that.
But then I was skeptical when it was announced that Bruce Boxleitner was going to be the new lead on B5 too.
That's really just as scary as Luke Perry being in this one...
I think a key question to ask yourself is what purpose are you truly attempting to accomplish.
Theoretical models are an interesting thing, and if your goal is some kind of experiment into human perception, then I can't really help you.
However, having been a software engineer a long time, I've learned the hard way that you have to ask the right question first.
For example, if your goal is to produce only colors that have sufficient contrast to be readable (for example), that's a very different problem than if your goal is to exclude the fewest possible color combinations as unreadable.
A trivial solution to the first problem is to allow only black on white (or some other suitable selection), but it's probably a very unsatisfactory solution. However, thinking of it in these terms, it would be possible, for example, to generate a hash table of a very large set of possible color combinations, or even of ranges of reasonable color combinations.
This would be a very unsatisfactory solution to the latter problem though (BTW, I don't know of a really good solution to the latter problem in general... in fact I doubt there is one that would work at all unless you constrain the possible set of people that might try to view your images (due to various forms of color blindness up to and including total color blindness)).
I think you misapprehend what Jefferson was saying. The Founding Fathers of the US were unanimous in their hatred of trade guilds. This was because of this quote that you posted here. Since information wants to be free, there is a very strong incentive not to release the information into "nature", where it would stop being of benefit to you.
The patent system was designed to work around this obvious deficiency in reality.:-)
The point of the patent system is to give people a monopoly for a limited time on their inventions so as to encourage them to release them into nature (which would tend to destroy their value).
Obviously, there's no value in a system which does this with "obvious" information, which is why the patent system is supposed to disallow patents on "obvious" inventions.
But if there's one thing this article has shown us, it's that people's whining about obvious patents is full of hot air. If only 4 of the many bounties offered by BountyQuest for these supposedly "obvious" patents were paid out, that implies (not ensures, but strongly implies) that these patents were not on obvious ideas, otherwise genuine published prior art would have been found by someone motivated by the $10,000 typical award.
It occurs to me that the biggest contributor to this problem, at least on the computer side, is the fact that the vast majority of people use computers running 1 operating system.
Monocultures like this in the biolgical world are known to be extrememly vulnerable to attacks from (biological) viruses and parasites, and it's no less true with computers.
On the other hand, I'm not sure that anything can be done about this problem. It's inherently more efficient for lots of people to use the same computing platform (it certainly doesn't have to be a hack like Windows, but a monoculture of Java or C# or whatever platform independent system you like is just as vulnerable).
Linux, with it's many distro's is something of a move in the right direction, but there are portability problems between Linii (not to mention their various windowing systems) as well as advantages.
But there are all sorts of dangerous monocultures (or near monocultures) out there that are really hard nuts to crack: sendmail, web browsers, instant messaging clients, and peer-to-peer systems. I mention these because they are also examples of systems where you really want a monoculture for the compatibility advantages, and because they are largely independent of OS.
Obviously, the use of protocol standards with many different implementations is a good idea. But all examples of this being done in the past have still resulted in the vast majority of people using 1 implementation (or one of a small branch of implementations).
The more I think about it, the more I think that my alma mater (Caltech) had the right idea about these weird specialized degree areas. They have 1 major called "Engineering and Applied Science" that covers essentially everything from CS to CE to EE (though there's a separate EE program too) to aeronautical engineering, to mechanical engineering, etc. If you want to take specialized classes go for it (in fact, you almost have to choose some specialty in order to meet the degree requirements).
Not too many schools seem to take that approach, and it's really sad, because universities shouldn't be trade schools. The goal of getting a bachelor's degree should be broad learning, mostly learning how to learn, actually.
If you're concerned about exactly what you're learning, I strongly suggest that you re-examine your priorities. Sure, you'll probably want to focus some of your energy on learning methodologies that are helpful in your intended field. But what you really want to do is learn how to learn.
It's a sad reality, though, that specialists are more highly regarded and paid than generalists.
I'm a hiring manager for software developers. As such, My favorite degree for someone to have is a generalist engineering/science degree with a focus/minor in CS. Second would be a CS degree, followed by CS/EE and EE alone. My experience is that people who chose specifically to learn the science of programming while in school are more likely to be good programmers than those who chose to focus solely on EE, Physics, etc.
Generally speaking though, I doubt that this is because they learned about CS in school. I think it's just that good programmers are more likely to seek out such degrees than they are to seek out degrees in Physics, etc.
I don't mean this as an insult to those people. Many of them are "brilliant" programmers. They can hack with the best of us. But, frankly, programming is almost the smallest part of being a software engineer. Design and debugging will take up much more of your time in real life (the more of the former you do, the less of the latter you will have to do in general).
Hell, some places, meetings will take up more of your time, which just goes to show that people skills are important even for geeks.
I suppose I'd have to say that for the high tech computer industry, CS/EE would be the degree that's most likely to be offered by your school that is the most flexible and most transferrable to other areas. At least, it's probably the most likely to get you interviews.
What you do at that interview is really what will determine whether you get hired, though. Learn to be witty and urbane. Learn to think outside the box. Learn how to read documentation and find obscure solutions in it. Learn to be arrogant about your ability to learn anything anywhere (just be sure not to be "arrogant without cause":-). Those things will help you a lot more than learning to program or design circuits.
Come on, folks, the article strongly implied, if not stating it expressly, that the reason they are considering stopping producing Asian language versions is that they don't make any money on them due to piracy.
It doesn't hurt them at all to have English language versions pirated in Asia, in fact they probably prefer that to having their competitor's products pirated.
But if it costs $650,000 to produce an Asian languages version of their products (a number I can easily believe, having done localizations of much smaller products), and they don't recoup that cost, there's no point in doing it.
Unfortunately, this is already being done. There are significant numbers of "patent predators" out there in the world that do in fact do this.
It doesn't serve to convince companies that too many stupid patents are being granted. In my personal experience, it only convinces companies that they need to get there first, which only results in more stupid patents.
Probably, this is because it's much easier to get there first with a stupid patent than to fundamentally change a system with such intrenched interests.
Whose interest is it in that all these stupid patents are granted?
The patent office, which is primarily funded from patent fees, and thus wants to grant patents as often as they can.
Patent examiners being graded on how many patents they examine (think about it... the more they argue and do actual research, the longer each patent takes).
Big corporate interests trying to keep out the little guys that can't afford legal trouble, and don't have a big patent portfolio of their own to fight back with.
And last, but most, patent lawyers, who a) write most patents, and b) are the ones who get paid when stupid patents are litigated. Solid legitimate patents are much less likely to get to the litigation stage, because they are more likely to hold up.
Is anyone really surprised that we're in this situation?
I've long wanted to quit my job and start up the "Journal of Unpatentable Ideas" as a repository for all these things. It's just that it won't help the situation. All that it will do is make it easier to fight patents in court, not make it less likely that stupid patents will be granted, because of all the above motivations.
Slashdot Mirror
Certainly some (amazingly rare) statements can be determined to be false. But it's not always as easy as you might like. What about a corporation that stated "our products can reach speeds greater the speed of light". According to current scientific understanding, this is impossible. I believe such a statement to be false, personally. Prove it.
That's the whole point of the First Amendment in the U.S. It's not up the government to decide what is true.
Your statement to the effect that you are a "Right Reverend", for example, could be ruled to be deceptive, given the nature of your "church".
However, you have the right to make that statement, unless you attempt to use that statement to specifically defraud some specific person or persons.
It's an interesting marketing exercise if nothing else.
But for example, the prohibition on slavery seems to carry over into contract law.
You're simply not allowed to sign away your rights to be a free human, because it's degrading to all humans for any human to be owned.
I'm merely suggesting that other rights besides not being owned deserve this level of protection.
The rights enumerated therein should have been explicitly protected from intrusion by private parties in addition to intrusion by the government.
At the time, I think they felt that government was by far the biggest threat, and multinational and other powerful corporations didn't exist to any significant degree.
But now it's starting to seem like we need an amendment extending our protections to include such organizations.
Anyone have any thoughts on an appropriate wording?
I'm thinking something like "The rights enumerated in the Constitution are inalienable and shall not be infringed by any state or private party."
The "inalienable" part is intended prevent EULAs from making us "voluntarily" give up our rights.
However, the reason for contracts like this is all the lawsuits over the years that consumers and other people that have brought that set picyune precedents like "they didn't say that the contract was severable, so I assumed that since one part was obviously invalid the whole thing was invalid".
These lawsuits are how we end up with contracts and EULA's like this.
Whether this is the lawyers' fault or the consumers, or the politically motivated consumer protection groups, or the stupid juries that agree with this kind of crap, I couldn't tell you. Probably a bit of each.
The only way to avoid stuff like this is to stop being a litigious society.
Good luck...
As a developer, I already have huge problems writing code that uses various functions that are only supported on particular versions of Windows.
E.g. InterlockedCompareExchange is a function that is useful for performing low-level synchronization in situations where standard Mutex's, etc. don't really cut it for one reason or another.
Looking at the documentation, though, I find that it's only available on Win98 or later. If I want to write an app or driver that will work on Win95 too, I can't use this function.
Now, apparently the states want to attach the following addendum to practically every major component in the system: "Might or might not work on any particular machine, depending on what the OEM decided to strip out."
So much for trying to use HTML help. The web browsing services might be removed.
Ack! Please don't do this. There must be better ways to punish Microsoft and encourage competition.
In related news, a group of scientists working at the University of Whoople have discovered a collapsed star composed entirely of magnetic monopoles.
Their data is soon to be published in the Journal of Irreproducable Results.
By comparison, figuring out when an asteroid will hit the earth is a simple matter of determining it's path and speed and doing a simple calculation.
1) We have a fragile ecosystem that is being decimated by interloping humans^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hrats.
2) This is a protected environment for rare seabirds.
3) The very first ecological disaster that led to the banning of a pesticide was due to it's negative effect on the indiginous bird population (DDT).
Conclusion: we should drop a ton of poison pellets in this National Park in order to save the birds.
And I thought some of Microsoft's arguments in their anti-trust case were wacky...
I find claim 10 rather amusing, though:
10. A linear accelerator, comprising:
a support rail;
a capacitor module comprising a first conductive element having a cylindrical geometry and a first sliding electrical contact; a second conductive element axially spaced from said first conductive element and of a geometry of smaller axial extent than the first conductive element and having a second sliding electrical contact; and a dielectric element disposed between said first conductive element and said second conductive element so as to form the capacitor module;
a frictionless connection for connecting said capacitor module to said support rail for movement therealong; and a high voltage source, having first and second terminals connected respectively to said first and second sliding electrical contacts, for applying a high voltage to said conductive elements of sufficient value to create a thrust force on said module inducing movement thereof along the support rail.
Before you bother looking... no, they don't disclose how to create a frictionless connection. :-)
Especially interesting tidbit from that page: Payload: 118,000 kg. to: 185 km Orbit. at: 28.0 degrees. Payload: 47,000 kg. to a: Translunar trajectory
Isn't that what's supposed to be great about free X (where X = literature in this case)?
Certainly the first version of a lot of free software doesn't seem to wait on thorough editorial review before going out the door. :-)
His CON must be really low by now :-).
These things would be perfect for those of us who walk around reading books and newspapers and running into people (and stepping into traffic).
Now we'd get a big red popup saying: "Watch where you're going, DUFUS!!!" accompanied by a helpful airhorn blast since we wouldn't see a big red flashing warning sign if it bit us in the eyeball.
I'm willing to stack up the best 6 episodes of B5 against the Dune mini-series, and I think there's a reasonable argument that they are comparable.
That leaves the other ~114 episodes of B5. Take off 2 each for the ~20 real losers, and we're still talking ~74 hours of epic story.
But I'm willing to admit that perhaps I'm easily amazed.
Yeah, there were a lot of embarrassing moments in it, and quite a bit of trite dialog.
What was great about it was the it so devoutly tried to be good. There's so much crap on TV these days, that I just have to give JMS credit for sticking to his guns and telling a story.
Even if it was a bit of a cheesy space opera when all is said and done.
I guess what I'm waiting to hear is whether this series also is going to try to be good. I'm skeptical that the Showtime management will allow that.
But then I was skeptical when it was announced that Bruce Boxleitner was going to be the new lead on B5 too.
That's really just as scary as Luke Perry being in this one...
I found it very interesting that the large banner ad next to this article when I read it was one from Gateway.
Theoretical models are an interesting thing, and if your goal is some kind of experiment into human perception, then I can't really help you.
However, having been a software engineer a long time, I've learned the hard way that you have to ask the right question first.
For example, if your goal is to produce only colors that have sufficient contrast to be readable (for example), that's a very different problem than if your goal is to exclude the fewest possible color combinations as unreadable.
A trivial solution to the first problem is to allow only black on white (or some other suitable selection), but it's probably a very unsatisfactory solution. However, thinking of it in these terms, it would be possible, for example, to generate a hash table of a very large set of possible color combinations, or even of ranges of reasonable color combinations.
This would be a very unsatisfactory solution to the latter problem though (BTW, I don't know of a really good solution to the latter problem in general... in fact I doubt there is one that would work at all unless you constrain the possible set of people that might try to view your images (due to various forms of color blindness up to and including total color blindness)).
But perhaps that's a useful hint anyway...
The patent system was designed to work around this obvious deficiency in reality.
The point of the patent system is to give people a monopoly for a limited time on their inventions so as to encourage them to release them into nature (which would tend to destroy their value).
Obviously, there's no value in a system which does this with "obvious" information, which is why the patent system is supposed to disallow patents on "obvious" inventions.
But if there's one thing this article has shown us, it's that people's whining about obvious patents is full of hot air. If only 4 of the many bounties offered by BountyQuest for these supposedly "obvious" patents were paid out, that implies (not ensures, but strongly implies) that these patents were not on obvious ideas, otherwise genuine published prior art would have been found by someone motivated by the $10,000 typical award.
Monocultures like this in the biolgical world are known to be extrememly vulnerable to attacks from (biological) viruses and parasites, and it's no less true with computers.
On the other hand, I'm not sure that anything can be done about this problem. It's inherently more efficient for lots of people to use the same computing platform (it certainly doesn't have to be a hack like Windows, but a monoculture of Java or C# or whatever platform independent system you like is just as vulnerable).
Linux, with it's many distro's is something of a move in the right direction, but there are portability problems between Linii (not to mention their various windowing systems) as well as advantages.
But there are all sorts of dangerous monocultures (or near monocultures) out there that are really hard nuts to crack: sendmail, web browsers, instant messaging clients, and peer-to-peer systems. I mention these because they are also examples of systems where you really want a monoculture for the compatibility advantages, and because they are largely independent of OS.
Obviously, the use of protocol standards with many different implementations is a good idea. But all examples of this being done in the past have still resulted in the vast majority of people using 1 implementation (or one of a small branch of implementations).
That has the advantage of still being protected by all current laws.
Not too many schools seem to take that approach, and it's really sad, because universities shouldn't be trade schools. The goal of getting a bachelor's degree should be broad learning, mostly learning how to learn, actually.
If you're concerned about exactly what you're learning, I strongly suggest that you re-examine your priorities. Sure, you'll probably want to focus some of your energy on learning methodologies that are helpful in your intended field. But what you really want to do is learn how to learn.
It's a sad reality, though, that specialists are more highly regarded and paid than generalists.
I'm a hiring manager for software developers. As such, My favorite degree for someone to have is a generalist engineering/science degree with a focus/minor in CS. Second would be a CS degree, followed by CS/EE and EE alone. My experience is that people who chose specifically to learn the science of programming while in school are more likely to be good programmers than those who chose to focus solely on EE, Physics, etc.
Generally speaking though, I doubt that this is because they learned about CS in school. I think it's just that good programmers are more likely to seek out such degrees than they are to seek out degrees in Physics, etc.
I don't mean this as an insult to those people. Many of them are "brilliant" programmers. They can hack with the best of us. But, frankly, programming is almost the smallest part of being a software engineer. Design and debugging will take up much more of your time in real life (the more of the former you do, the less of the latter you will have to do in general).
Hell, some places, meetings will take up more of your time, which just goes to show that people skills are important even for geeks.
I suppose I'd have to say that for the high tech computer industry, CS/EE would be the degree that's most likely to be offered by your school that is the most flexible and most transferrable to other areas. At least, it's probably the most likely to get you interviews.
What you do at that interview is really what will determine whether you get hired, though. Learn to be witty and urbane. Learn to think outside the box. Learn how to read documentation and find obscure solutions in it. Learn to be arrogant about your ability to learn anything anywhere (just be sure not to be "arrogant without cause" :-). Those things will help you a lot more than learning to program or design circuits.
It doesn't hurt them at all to have English language versions pirated in Asia, in fact they probably prefer that to having their competitor's products pirated.
But if it costs $650,000 to produce an Asian languages version of their products (a number I can easily believe, having done localizations of much smaller products), and they don't recoup that cost, there's no point in doing it.
This is news?
It doesn't serve to convince companies that too many stupid patents are being granted. In my personal experience, it only convinces companies that they need to get there first, which only results in more stupid patents.
Probably, this is because it's much easier to get there first with a stupid patent than to fundamentally change a system with such intrenched interests.
Whose interest is it in that all these stupid patents are granted?
The patent office, which is primarily funded from patent fees, and thus wants to grant patents as often as they can.
Patent examiners being graded on how many patents they examine (think about it... the more they argue and do actual research, the longer each patent takes).
Big corporate interests trying to keep out the little guys that can't afford legal trouble, and don't have a big patent portfolio of their own to fight back with.
And last, but most, patent lawyers, who a) write most patents, and b) are the ones who get paid when stupid patents are litigated. Solid legitimate patents are much less likely to get to the litigation stage, because they are more likely to hold up.
Is anyone really surprised that we're in this situation?
I've long wanted to quit my job and start up the "Journal of Unpatentable Ideas" as a repository for all these things. It's just that it won't help the situation. All that it will do is make it easier to fight patents in court, not make it less likely that stupid patents will be granted, because of all the above motivations.