You're failing to learn from history, so you're doomed to repeat it. The discovery of the New World caused massive inflation in hard currencies, which pretty much esplains why Spain isn't a world super power any more.
A fiat currency with an actual fixed supply, if that weren't a contradiction in terms, would be the only type of currency intrinsically not subject to loss in value. In fact, assuming increasing productivity, its value could only go up. You can argue about whether this is a good thing or not (it still gives the wealthy a big advantage, but I don't see an ethical way out of that for any reasonable definition of the word "wealthy").
Using anything as money is subject to discovery or creation of more of it. Trying to make that hard is the best that we can do... which is why gold is a *decent* form of fiat currency. The biggest problem with it is that it's also a massively useful industrial resource, and there's a lot more of it that remains undiscovered than there is currently in circulation.
It's still on the right path, even if LiIon batteries are 99.9% efficient... A 10 hour charge time for 900MJ is 100A at 250V, which is at least theoretically possible...
However, economical AC/DC power converters are *nowhere* near that efficient, and *would* definitely melt. And even the economical converters are *nowhere* near cheap enough at this power level to have in everyone's homes. So unless you're going to wire high voltage DC power to everyone's home (a very challenging proposition from a distribution standpoint, BTW, not to mention the cost), forget home recharging the whole battery in any reasonable time.
The notion that service stations will just install "fat pipes" to recharge cars is even more ludicrous. In order to be even close to competitive with gasoline, they'd have to recharge a car fully in 10 minutes or less (preferably 5). The problem isn't necessarily getting the power, though that *is* a problem (it's 1.5 megawatts, preferably 3MW, and you'd need to be able to charge at least 5 cars in parallel to be practical). It's the safety considerations. Normal humans simply can't interact with megawatts of power no matter what we do to try to make it safer. Even just switching that much power is a gargantuan problem.
That doesn't necessarily doom the idea of electric cars, but what it does mean is that that *only* practical method for refilling your electric car is battery pack exchange at refueling stations (presumably robotic since you'd need a forklift).
A plugin series hybrid that or a limited range vehicle you only ever recharge to recoup the power for a relatively short commute is feasible as well, and probably a lot more likely.
Did the submitter actually read the article? Did anyone? It says "IBM wants treble damages or US$1 million per counterfeit mark per type of item sold.". Not $1 million per battery. Explicitly not. Painfully clearly not.
While it's technically true that calories *absorbed* by your body minus calories *expended* by your body is the "only" thing that matters, it's a pretty useless statement.
For one thing, the "calories" you see in diet books attributed to various foods have only a passing relationship to the actual number of calories absorbed by *your* body from those foods. Various bodies process different foods differently (well there's a "duh" for you).
Additionally, your "weight" isn't nearly so important as your BMI and fat distribution when it comes to health, and different foods definitely *do* end up in different *places* on your body depending on what you eat and how you exercise.
Additionally, different foods require different amounts of *input* energy to break down and absorb. Celery, for example, is widely believed to take more calories to digest than you absorb (I'm not going to comment on the truth of that, other than to say it's trivially obvious that there will be a difference for different foods, and this would just be an extreme example).
Additionally, different foods have different satiety values that are pretty independent of their caloric intake, and which vary from person to person (I can eat a pound of mushrooms and be stuffed for hours and hours and only take in around 50 calories, YMMV). While this doesn't have anything to do, directly, with the input-output=gain equation, it does have a strong impact with how *happy* I will be doing it, and how *likely* I will be to do it. Protein vs. carbs vs. fats have similarly varying effects.
But, all that said, at the end of the day, if you absorb 3000 calories, and you expend only 2500, you're going to gain weight and that pretty much is physics. But if you ate 3000 "calories" of celery and did literally nothing else, you'd burn > 3000 calories just digesting it (I expect that's above the toxic level for celery, or even just the water in it, though:-). And you'd lose weight... purely by physics.
*That's* why Iraq has been so easy to pacify. How blind could I be?
Only damn reason I can think of for this stupid war: proving once and for all that the people who say random jerks with guns can't fight off an oppressive government with modern weapons and gazillions of dollars are completely full of shit.
100%. That's the law. Only inventors can file patent applications.
Oh, did you mean "What percentage of patents rights were *assigned* to individual inventors?" Probably a lot less. How many individual inventors received compensation for this patent right assignment beyond their salaries? Somewhat more.
Actually, while we can't *travel* into the past, we routinely *see* into the past due to the charming fact that the speed of light is less than infinity. And all the evidence that we've seen with our (collective) own eyes points to the universe having come into existence in a particular manner.
Can we know for certain what caused the universe to come into existence? Probably not (though I wouldn't rule it out depending on how accurately LISA ends up seeing gravity waves). However, we *can* *see* *how* it evolved over the course of billions of years, starting briefly after whatever event started it all. The exact same way we see anything, by receiving photons that have traveled some distance from the past to interact with us.
In fact, you *never* see *anything* but the past.
Of course, phenomenology says that we can't necessarily trust our senses, and we could all be in the Matrix. But it also says that we might as well trust our senses because it's all we have. I choose to define "reality" that way, so for me it counts as formal proof.
Likewise, we can't necessarily see that evolution created species in the past, and anything's possible. But we damn well *can* see that it's continually creating new species *now*, starting with bacteria of course, where we can actually observe the whole event play out, but even in the macroscopic.
Horses and donkeys are just barely separate species (always producing sterile offspring, but producing them reliably), and lions and tigers are just barely the same species biologically (interbreeding fertilely, but just barely). If you can't accept seeing both sides of an event, and observing many fundamentally biologically identical events as proof that something has happened, then you can't accept the proof of anything, and you might as well just kill yourself because the universe is useless.
No, being functional (and therefore in the realm of patents rather than copyright) they almost certainly don't have any rights regarding the design of the room, only its physical instantiation.
Still, look at it this way: the record company has the government-granted privilege to require payment of (say) $1 for the privilege of copying that song. If you copy that song, you owe them (legally) $1. It's not the song you're stealing, its the $1.
If a license to download something for free were the same as a license to redistribute the material, the internet wouldn't be what it is today.
Try downloading all of cnn.com and hosting it somewhere else with your own ads and see whether your legal theory holds up.
It's most definitely infringement of copyright (unless they *also* specifically gave a license to distribute... I haven't checked).
I don't particularly care if people call this theft or not (hanging out in a room in a non-fully-booked hotel without paying, and leaving it in the same state it was in is *still* theft of services, even if no one was deprived of anything), but whatever.
A) The patent office suck at finding publications other than patents.
B) The existence of prior art mostly only helps you in litigation, which people prefer to avoid for a number of reasons.
C) Publishing is harder than you might think. They can't just put it on their website and say "See, it's published". Even prior art publishing houses like IP.com have yet to be tested in court. Peer reviewed journals and conference papers (for big enough conferences) are pretty safe... It has to be published in a place that can be expected to persist and which people skilled in the art would be reasonably expected to be able to find it, or it mostly doesn't count.
D) When you're a big fish, competitors will go to some trouble to patent some necessary but trivial enhancement of your idea that you forgot to mention in your application/publication and harrass you. If they're truly competitors, it's helpful that they can't do it either without coming to a cross-licensing agreement.
Patenting it is really the best protection. (IANALADEPOOTV)
I don't know if that post was serious or not, but NNTP and RSS are entirely different beasts. RSS doesn't scale to the usages for which NNTP was designed, but it's equally as true that NNTP doesn't scale to the usages for which RSS was designed.
NNTP is a many-poster-small-number-of-groups architecture, and is designed to index and deliver those few groups to large numbers of people, and distribute responses from large numbers of people, hopefully saving bandwidth by aggregating all the users of a single massively multi-user machine. It still does that pretty well, but it really needs to have a fair amount of control on what groups are created. Also, it's up to sysadmins of the NNTP server that you use what feeds to carry. It really can't handle the idea of there being millions of groups, and it would be massively inefficient at delivering those to the small number of users that would typically want to see one of them, nor would it's approval mechanism work at all.
RSS is designed for an unlimited number of diverse and widespread feeds, typically with a single (or very small number of) relatively reliable poster(s) and relatively limited numbers of users. It's not particularly efficient at doing that, but generally it doesn't need to be. It's become the dominant model because it's less centralized and more aligned with the current massively distributed web architecture.
Now, *Slashdot* being an RSS feed rather than an NNTP feed is possibly quite silly, but they do it (I'm guessing) because a) not many people actually know how to deal with NNTP any more, b) the tools for RSS these days are frankly just better, and c) it's completely under their control, without worries about what some sysadmin somewhere might decide to do with its feed (modulo government sysadmins, of course:-).
Well, that's all fine and good, but you're defining evidence in two entirely different ways, which is not logically sound.
If you search for something specifically where you expect to find it due to a theory, and it is not there, that *is* evidence, not absence of evidence. You ran a (hopefully controlled) experiment, you got experimental results. Every observation in that set of experimental results is a piece of evidence. An observation that something is not present is still an observation, and therefore still evidence.
Absence of evidence is when you haven't even done the experiment, nor made the observation (in the technical sense), but are just basing your invalid conclusion merely on not personally having encountered the phenomenon.
And that is *not* evidence of absence.
Almost always, this phrase is used in the context of trying to prove universal statements with anecdotal evidence and generally speaking, absent a carefully designed statistical sampling, you don't really have *any* scientifically useful evidence if you just wander about looking at stuff, even if that stuff or its absence supports your universal statement. Note that I didn't say you don't have "much" evidence... I mean it when I say you have absolutely none. "Scientists" that pretend otherwise are a menace.
I think the thing that is hard to understand is that the law in this case is almost perversely refusing to say what it is that they *actually* want Microsoft to do, and continually just telling Microsoft: "That's not good enough".
Guys, you're failing to notice the most fundamental point about this issue: the identity of the plaintiffs. We're talking news *agencies* here (think AP and Reuters). They don't have control over how their content is shown on other newspapers' websites (they could, contractually, but they have existing contracts and I bet it would be hard to renegotiate them).
So, the suggestions that people just use noarchive meta-tags or robots.txt files is as infeasible as suggesting that Google block them from indexing.
Amusingly, the Belgian courts answer of "you have to honor takedown requests" is just the right backhanded slap to them.
Complaining about the ridiculousness of a pending patent *application* is about as useful as complaining about people spending time thinking of what they'd wish for if they found a bottle with a genie in it.
So someone thought they had a cool new idea because they hadn't ever seen anything like it and they were wrong... so what? If the patent *issues* then there's something to complain about (though pointing the patent office at the prior art would be a useful public service, unlike whining on Slashdot).
Ok, would you be happy if in order to use DRM on a commercial product and retain the copyright, the company was required to deposit the keys with the Library of Congress, which would be responsibile for releasing them when the copyright expires?
Very few drivers can be user mode drivers in the new driver framework. About the only thing that supported fully right now is USB. The long term goal is to support a vastly larger set of possible user-mode drivers, but your jubilation is premature.
Did anyone else actually *check* the assertions of this article? This guy is so full of it I can't even begin to describe it.
But that never stopped a Slashdotter before, so...
Half a dozen of those search terms do *not*, in fact, have Google AdWords, and at least 2 of them have Google AdWords, but Google isn't in the top spot.
Because infrared radiation is not heat, it's infrared radiation. It can be produced by hot things, and it can make other things hot, but it is not, itself, "heat".
Heat is the energy contained in random motion of particles. The key here is *random". If you extract energy from pure heat that's just sitting somewhere, you're reducing the entropy of the hot thing, practically by definition. In order for this to not be a violation of the Laws of Thermodynamics, you would have to create even more entropy somewhere else. The easiest way to do this would be to generate more heat than you removed, but then you're up against conservation of energy. There are other ways to create entropy, though, so it's not technically impossible.
The reason you can grab energy out of heat moving from a hot location to a cooler location is that that net motion is not random, so you can increase the entropy of the system by randomizing the non-random element.
Note: yes, all the above is a dramatic over-simplification.
In truth, if he really believes this, he is either schizophrenic or hypocritical (or both, if you want the opinion of someone who has met him socially on a number of occasions).
Stallman's vision of Free Software is inherently *impossible* without copyright. Without copyrights, anyone could take any code, copy it, modify it, distribute/sell the modifications, and refuse to release the modified source code.
Unless you can restrict what people can do with your source code (i.e. restrict their freedom), there's no way to keep software Free. Ironic, neh?
Wow, I shouldn't be surprised to see Slashdot blithering on about something it knows nothing about, but every time I see it I still am... almost makes me think I might be an optimist.
Try reading the fine manual on Sideshow.
Anyway, yes, the laptop is off when this thing is running (at least in the most classic implementation). They have their own ARM9 processor and memory. They work a bit like a PDA stuck to your laptop that syncs with the laptop when it's on and then can show information when it's off.
So... 64 bit Vista isn't going to run anything other than signed drivers *anyway*. That has nothing (or at least very little) to do with DRM or the media companies, and everything to do with Microsoft *finally* trying to do something real about security.
Step away from the podium.
Slashdot Mirror
A fiat currency with an actual fixed supply, if that weren't a contradiction in terms, would be the only type of currency intrinsically not subject to loss in value. In fact, assuming increasing productivity, its value could only go up. You can argue about whether this is a good thing or not (it still gives the wealthy a big advantage, but I don't see an ethical way out of that for any reasonable definition of the word "wealthy").
Using anything as money is subject to discovery or creation of more of it. Trying to make that hard is the best that we can do... which is why gold is a *decent* form of fiat currency. The biggest problem with it is that it's also a massively useful industrial resource, and there's a lot more of it that remains undiscovered than there is currently in circulation.
However, economical AC/DC power converters are *nowhere* near that efficient, and *would* definitely melt. And even the economical converters are *nowhere* near cheap enough at this power level to have in everyone's homes. So unless you're going to wire high voltage DC power to everyone's home (a very challenging proposition from a distribution standpoint, BTW, not to mention the cost), forget home recharging the whole battery in any reasonable time.
The notion that service stations will just install "fat pipes" to recharge cars is even more ludicrous. In order to be even close to competitive with gasoline, they'd have to recharge a car fully in 10 minutes or less (preferably 5). The problem isn't necessarily getting the power, though that *is* a problem (it's 1.5 megawatts, preferably 3MW, and you'd need to be able to charge at least 5 cars in parallel to be practical). It's the safety considerations. Normal humans simply can't interact with megawatts of power no matter what we do to try to make it safer. Even just switching that much power is a gargantuan problem.
That doesn't necessarily doom the idea of electric cars, but what it does mean is that that *only* practical method for refilling your electric car is battery pack exchange at refueling stations (presumably robotic since you'd need a forklift).
A plugin series hybrid that or a limited range vehicle you only ever recharge to recoup the power for a relatively short commute is feasible as well, and probably a lot more likely.
Geez.
For one thing, the "calories" you see in diet books attributed to various foods have only a passing relationship to the actual number of calories absorbed by *your* body from those foods. Various bodies process different foods differently (well there's a "duh" for you).
Additionally, your "weight" isn't nearly so important as your BMI and fat distribution when it comes to health, and different foods definitely *do* end up in different *places* on your body depending on what you eat and how you exercise.
Additionally, different foods require different amounts of *input* energy to break down and absorb. Celery, for example, is widely believed to take more calories to digest than you absorb (I'm not going to comment on the truth of that, other than to say it's trivially obvious that there will be a difference for different foods, and this would just be an extreme example).
Additionally, different foods have different satiety values that are pretty independent of their caloric intake, and which vary from person to person (I can eat a pound of mushrooms and be stuffed for hours and hours and only take in around 50 calories, YMMV). While this doesn't have anything to do, directly, with the input-output=gain equation, it does have a strong impact with how *happy* I will be doing it, and how *likely* I will be to do it. Protein vs. carbs vs. fats have similarly varying effects.
But, all that said, at the end of the day, if you absorb 3000 calories, and you expend only 2500, you're going to gain weight and that pretty much is physics. But if you ate 3000 "calories" of celery and did literally nothing else, you'd burn > 3000 calories just digesting it (I expect that's above the toxic level for celery, or even just the water in it, though :-). And you'd lose weight... purely by physics.
Only damn reason I can think of for this stupid war: proving once and for all that the people who say random jerks with guns can't fight off an oppressive government with modern weapons and gazillions of dollars are completely full of shit.
Oh, did you mean "What percentage of patents rights were *assigned* to individual inventors?" Probably a lot less. How many individual inventors received compensation for this patent right assignment beyond their salaries? Somewhat more.
What, exactly, is your point?
Can we know for certain what caused the universe to come into existence? Probably not (though I wouldn't rule it out depending on how accurately LISA ends up seeing gravity waves). However, we *can* *see* *how* it evolved over the course of billions of years, starting briefly after whatever event started it all. The exact same way we see anything, by receiving photons that have traveled some distance from the past to interact with us.
In fact, you *never* see *anything* but the past.
Of course, phenomenology says that we can't necessarily trust our senses, and we could all be in the Matrix. But it also says that we might as well trust our senses because it's all we have. I choose to define "reality" that way, so for me it counts as formal proof.
Likewise, we can't necessarily see that evolution created species in the past, and anything's possible. But we damn well *can* see that it's continually creating new species *now*, starting with bacteria of course, where we can actually observe the whole event play out, but even in the macroscopic.
Horses and donkeys are just barely separate species (always producing sterile offspring, but producing them reliably), and lions and tigers are just barely the same species biologically (interbreeding fertilely, but just barely). If you can't accept seeing both sides of an event, and observing many fundamentally biologically identical events as proof that something has happened, then you can't accept the proof of anything, and you might as well just kill yourself because the universe is useless.
Still, look at it this way: the record company has the government-granted privilege to require payment of (say) $1 for the privilege of copying that song. If you copy that song, you owe them (legally) $1. It's not the song you're stealing, its the $1.
Even worse, it's more likely to be something like a microamp at 200 microvolts. Sure, that might only have to drive into 200 ohms, but still...
Try downloading all of cnn.com and hosting it somewhere else with your own ads and see whether your legal theory holds up.
It's most definitely infringement of copyright (unless they *also* specifically gave a license to distribute... I haven't checked).
I don't particularly care if people call this theft or not (hanging out in a room in a non-fully-booked hotel without paying, and leaving it in the same state it was in is *still* theft of services, even if no one was deprived of anything), but whatever.
A) The patent office suck at finding publications other than patents. B) The existence of prior art mostly only helps you in litigation, which people prefer to avoid for a number of reasons. C) Publishing is harder than you might think. They can't just put it on their website and say "See, it's published". Even prior art publishing houses like IP.com have yet to be tested in court. Peer reviewed journals and conference papers (for big enough conferences) are pretty safe... It has to be published in a place that can be expected to persist and which people skilled in the art would be reasonably expected to be able to find it, or it mostly doesn't count. D) When you're a big fish, competitors will go to some trouble to patent some necessary but trivial enhancement of your idea that you forgot to mention in your application/publication and harrass you. If they're truly competitors, it's helpful that they can't do it either without coming to a cross-licensing agreement. Patenting it is really the best protection. (IANALADEPOOTV)
You're just a natural resource.
Google *does*, in fact, have a strong network effect with respect to their actual customers. It's just an indirect one.
And lest you say that you don't care what happens to advertisers... justice doesn't change just because you're not the one being screwed.
NNTP is a many-poster-small-number-of-groups architecture, and is designed to index and deliver those few groups to large numbers of people, and distribute responses from large numbers of people, hopefully saving bandwidth by aggregating all the users of a single massively multi-user machine. It still does that pretty well, but it really needs to have a fair amount of control on what groups are created. Also, it's up to sysadmins of the NNTP server that you use what feeds to carry. It really can't handle the idea of there being millions of groups, and it would be massively inefficient at delivering those to the small number of users that would typically want to see one of them, nor would it's approval mechanism work at all.
RSS is designed for an unlimited number of diverse and widespread feeds, typically with a single (or very small number of) relatively reliable poster(s) and relatively limited numbers of users. It's not particularly efficient at doing that, but generally it doesn't need to be. It's become the dominant model because it's less centralized and more aligned with the current massively distributed web architecture.
Now, *Slashdot* being an RSS feed rather than an NNTP feed is possibly quite silly, but they do it (I'm guessing) because a) not many people actually know how to deal with NNTP any more, b) the tools for RSS these days are frankly just better, and c) it's completely under their control, without worries about what some sysadmin somewhere might decide to do with its feed (modulo government sysadmins, of course :-).
If you search for something specifically where you expect to find it due to a theory, and it is not there, that *is* evidence, not absence of evidence. You ran a (hopefully controlled) experiment, you got experimental results. Every observation in that set of experimental results is a piece of evidence. An observation that something is not present is still an observation, and therefore still evidence.
Absence of evidence is when you haven't even done the experiment, nor made the observation (in the technical sense), but are just basing your invalid conclusion merely on not personally having encountered the phenomenon.
And that is *not* evidence of absence.
Almost always, this phrase is used in the context of trying to prove universal statements with anecdotal evidence and generally speaking, absent a carefully designed statistical sampling, you don't really have *any* scientifically useful evidence if you just wander about looking at stuff, even if that stuff or its absence supports your universal statement. Note that I didn't say you don't have "much" evidence... I mean it when I say you have absolutely none. "Scientists" that pretend otherwise are a menace.
I think the thing that is hard to understand is that the law in this case is almost perversely refusing to say what it is that they *actually* want Microsoft to do, and continually just telling Microsoft: "That's not good enough".
So, the suggestions that people just use noarchive meta-tags or robots.txt files is as infeasible as suggesting that Google block them from indexing.
Amusingly, the Belgian courts answer of "you have to honor takedown requests" is just the right backhanded slap to them.
So someone thought they had a cool new idea because they hadn't ever seen anything like it and they were wrong... so what? If the patent *issues* then there's something to complain about (though pointing the patent office at the prior art would be a useful public service, unlike whining on Slashdot).
Ok, would you be happy if in order to use DRM on a commercial product and retain the copyright, the company was required to deposit the keys with the Library of Congress, which would be responsibile for releasing them when the copyright expires?
If this is news for geeks, shouldn't that be "Sense of Human Smell Underestimated"?
Very few drivers can be user mode drivers in the new driver framework. About the only thing that supported fully right now is USB. The long term goal is to support a vastly larger set of possible user-mode drivers, but your jubilation is premature.
But that never stopped a Slashdotter before, so...
Half a dozen of those search terms do *not*, in fact, have Google AdWords, and at least 2 of them have Google AdWords, but Google isn't in the top spot.
What again, is the complaint?
Heat is the energy contained in random motion of particles. The key here is *random". If you extract energy from pure heat that's just sitting somewhere, you're reducing the entropy of the hot thing, practically by definition. In order for this to not be a violation of the Laws of Thermodynamics, you would have to create even more entropy somewhere else. The easiest way to do this would be to generate more heat than you removed, but then you're up against conservation of energy. There are other ways to create entropy, though, so it's not technically impossible.
The reason you can grab energy out of heat moving from a hot location to a cooler location is that that net motion is not random, so you can increase the entropy of the system by randomizing the non-random element.
Note: yes, all the above is a dramatic over-simplification.
Stallman's vision of Free Software is inherently *impossible* without copyright. Without copyrights, anyone could take any code, copy it, modify it, distribute/sell the modifications, and refuse to release the modified source code.
Unless you can restrict what people can do with your source code (i.e. restrict their freedom), there's no way to keep software Free. Ironic, neh?
Try reading the fine manual on Sideshow.
Anyway, yes, the laptop is off when this thing is running (at least in the most classic implementation). They have their own ARM9 processor and memory. They work a bit like a PDA stuck to your laptop that syncs with the laptop when it's on and then can show information when it's off.
So... 64 bit Vista isn't going to run anything other than signed drivers *anyway*. That has nothing (or at least very little) to do with DRM or the media companies, and everything to do with Microsoft *finally* trying to do something real about security. Step away from the podium.