Re:Wonderful news! What's next?
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Open Source Science
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· Score: 3, Interesting
But I'm not sure I agree there are "excessive profits" at journals, especially since some of them have recently spent big $$ to digitize and archive old articles--in many cases dating back over a hundred years.
I'm sure my librarians would disagree with you $10,000 or more for a 12 issues of a journal is only possible because libraries buy these things for demanding faculty. There is a huge difference in price between the $50-$100 for a IEEE/ACM journal and one of the commercial journals. I draw the line at reviewing for a journal at $500/yr. The last publisher of $20-30 math books, Springer-Verlag, just got sold to a publisher that wants to maximize profit with no regard for the academic process they are serving. I think it may be time to abandon these old school publishers, I'm sure you could collect enough pre-orders with an electronic edition to get Dover or Eldritch Press to make a print run and mail them out. No one writes these books that sell 200-1000 copies worldwide for profit, it's merely a nicer form than pdf files.
I would totally buy the arguement of not allowing patents on government funded research. But government funding doesn't really compensate graduate students for the work they do and unless they plan on giving the NSF 10x more money and forcing schools to pay their grad students well this just won't fly. I've been on a grad student salary I was $200 in the hole per month before paying for food and clothing, plus there were gaps in the pay, you didn't get paid over winter break, when you were furiously working on a paper, and you didn't get payed for the last month of each school year. You were two months into summer before you got your first paycheck from the internship... The government won't even give you student loans for the shortfall or for health insurance or registration fees. The only blessing is that credit card companies don't seem to have a problem lending a PhD student thousands at 20% (probably a good bet for them...) Doctors & Dentists also give you pretty good repayment terms, but I digress. Considering the economic hit that the students are taking it seems only fair that they keep at least copyright on their work.
I also think people will find ways around this, say you accept government money for two years and accept corporate money for non-exclusive use rights in the last two years.. Well what do you know, you made a lot of progress in that last year...
As someone with a firm grounding in economics, I must admit that I just don't get it. ISPs and other groups have high fixed costs, and low variable costs
The answer is right there. Their highest fixed cost is the DSL circuit they rent from one of two surly companies in direct competition with them, the ILEC or Covad. If they can get you to do the advertising and on site support for your service that eliminates their largest variable cost and much of the risk. Since the fixed cost becomes lower per customer they can charge a larger premium on the bandwidth costs and make a bundle.
There was some discussion of this last year in the NYCWireless mailing list. Basically at the time most DSL providers were starting to bless WiFi and Time Warner cable and the Verizon ILEC were banning them. The reason seems to be pure economics, the WiFi friendly companies rent the fixed lines and pay monopoly prices, while the monopolies own the lines and have little or no incremental costs on the lines. The WiFi friendly companies can offer WiFi as a competitive incentive with little cost, while the monopolies see this as one less potential customer on the line they already have to the your house. They are each acting in their percieved medium-term interest. Long term the independent DSL providers see that if each neighborhood had a community built network they could sell bandwidth and more importantly services without much dealing with the old monopolies, there is plenty of competition (at least in NYC) in commercial scale bandwidth. You can even lay fiber yourself in New York without a right of way if you do it at a certain depth in the roadway. The independent DSL providers know they can crush the old monopolies when it comes to customer service. The old monopolies see the independent DSL providers as gnats that will go away because they always have to pay the ILEC for the DSL circuit so they can't be lower cost. They don't want users to get into the habit of treating their "net connections" as internet connections (i.e. that can be further routed.) Plus, soon independent DSL providers won't be able to rent just the copper so even the nominal competition of Covad will be gone. (Covad is just praying a Democrat, any Democrat, gets elected and installed next time around.)
Except that the 8088 wasn't 16-bit.. The 8088 is 16 bits, it's just a low cost version of the 8086. The difference being the memory bus is 8 bits, but the core is still 16 bits. Both chips have 20 memory address lines and 16 i/o address lines. You shift a 16 bit segment register up 4 bits and add it to a general purpose register to get the twenty lines for memory addresses (1MB).
The 80286 was a better chip, but it was still 16 bits and had 24 address lines. Still segmented. I think BillG maybe meant they bet on 32 bit processors?
US fair use is actually more liberal than a lot of places btw
De-Jure yes. I wish Europe was as enlightened in this respect.
De-Facto no. You have fair use, until you use it.
One university I attended, New York University, is under a very strict settlement with the major book publishers because they were sued agreesively by them. After many of the professors named died of heart attacks, presumably from the stress, NYU settled out of court. They now have an office that licenses excerpts of texts for use in the classroom and prevents professors from using outside copying services. Some professors do use Kinkos for their own unpublished books, but this is seen as an act of civil disobedience. A friend of mine has worked in licensing at MTV(Viacom) and Rolling Stone and EVERYTHING goes there, the concept of free use is ignored in part because even a frivalous lawsuit is costly. Remember this is the country where the guy who designed someone's garden sued the makers of the Batman movies because they only got the owners permission to use the garden. The reason they blur people's T-Shirts on the "Reality TV" shows and all the furnature looks bland in the USA is not because they don't want to give anyone free advertising, but because they couldn't get the permissions. Even their Tech "News" segments on have to get the manufacturers permission.
You're freedom of fair use ends when you are first sued, either because you have money or because you are a thorn in someone's side. If the company that owns over a third of the broadcasters in the USA can't can't practice fair use, the teacher in the classroom can't copy an essay, and campers need to license campfire songs there isn't much left to the doctrine of fair use.
That's also absurd. Who is this straw-man Christian that doesn't realize Lutherans are Christians? And what Christians believe in genocide? Maybe scripture-twisting non-Christians.
The kid who led the arguement also wrote a "science" paper on how the world is really five thousand years old and carbon dating is bunk. He was actually a nice kid. I'd be glad to have him as a friend. But he was very steeped in the fundamentalist culture of the community. The whole point of Socratic irony is to bring someone's underlying absurd absumptions, the absurdity was not that they didn't know Lutherans were christians, at least some of them did. The point is they thought this was the reason not to go to war with Sweden. Though perhaps it was also an example of herd mentality, when many argue with few, their arguements tend to devolve to the arguements of the lowest amoung them. An example might be the guy who pointed out a missplaced comma in my original post:)
except, iirc, she publicly stated that the irony of the song is that none of the examples of irony are actually irony
I saw an interview on television where she said this, but I just don't know if I should believe her. She said this after the whole world said the title of the song was the only thing ironic about it. But she is a clever gal, and I know how frustrating it can be when no one gets your irony, so I chose to accept her statement despite my doubts.
BTW Never try an ironic arguement in a room full of christian's whose parents are in the military. They will believe you are serious when you say we should wipe out the Swedes because they are just too blond. There is no one there to see the absurdity of their arguement that they shouldn't be wiped out because while they are not Baptists or Presbiterians they are Lutherans and Lutherans are still Christians. (My father was Lutheran, my name is Lutheran, I'm Scandinavian, and I was wearing a "Make Love Not War" pin. High school just made me want to beat my head against blunt objects, at least it was only the intro courses in college where people thought Brave New World was a good prescription for how we should live our lives.)
We laugh, knowing that US law will never become world law.
Ummm, yeah, only the 150 and growing signatories to the WTO will be subject to TRIPS, plus what 20 pending applicants. Hell the TRIPS treaty even mentions countries may be as liberal as the USA by 'allowing' american style "fair-use" exceptions to 'intelectual property' (The single quotes are mine, the double quotes theirs.)
Unless you plan to live in Cuba you ignore your rulers in the American congress at your own peril.
Really? Any links for us, or are we to just take your word for this?
Do you live in a cave? Which one are you objecting too?
Not that this is relevant to the vacation time. The chinese have little vacation time and don't kill or commit suicide at anything like the rate that we do. We have different cultural priorities than much of the rest of the world.
Americans are poor, when we are as rich as Western Europens we'll have the same vacation times. We don't compare badly to South America or Africa. Europeans see us as a rich nation, but if you look at people's take home pay and purchasing power we're closer to the undeveloped world (average income is no guide, income is much more concentrated here.) It's not a bad thing, we reflect the world at large, Europe got much of it's wealth from plundering the rest of the world and have until very recently had refused to grant official citizenship with full property and voting rights to their citizens. We didn't invent the concept of "illegal immigrants."
Well, I don't see why we need to #define everything. But a good interval arithmetic library would be nice. Now that boost have one for C++ (haven't tried it myself), maybe people will even start using it.
The reason for the #define is so that you can turn the use of this library off and on without changing any code. I usually call my floats Real with a typedef so that I can change their underlying representation without a define, but you can't count on this in everyone's code.
This makes no sense. If you think you can do #define double interval_double in C/C++, I see no reason why it should be harder to do in lisp. In fact, as everything else, it should be much easier in lisp, and it has most likely also been done by lispers since at least the 1950's.
That part is easy to do in LISP, I meant that as a jibe against Java lacking operator oveloading. Are exceptions part of LISP now though? I guess you don't need them, you can wrap your expressions in a function that takes an interval_double and deals with error conditions like a catch statement in C++ would. So I guess LISP wins the "you can do it in LISP!" arguement, but at least not the "That's been in LISP since 1832" arguement;)
Second, we need no just maintain this calculated precision value. We also need to monitor it all the time. This adds a lot of if-tests, slowing down the calculation even more.
Finally, if precision is too bad, we need to be able to rollback the current calculation. Because, if we do a calculation, and find that precision is lost beyond what is acceptable, then we need to redo the whole calculation, not just the last step. I have no idea what this will cost, but it will most likely be very expensive, and certainly complex.
Rolling back the current calculation won't give you much, the problem isn't underflow on the current operation. That is pretty easy to handle even in plain old C. The problem is when you calculate A & B and then do a C=A-B. Now you may have lost all your bits of precision. In order to get them back you need to recalculate A & B and you'll know when you have enough bits, but how you go about it is a combinatorial problem. Usually the N is pretty small so you could automate trying all the combinations and adding more precision until it works. But usually a couple minutes of looking at the formula along with your knowledge of the inputs and you can figure out a good way to rearrange the algebra. I don't know if I really would want this to be automatic, especially on a compilation level. A tool that looked at your code and provided alternatives and was interactive so you could grow how far up the tree the tool looked would be nice.
My guess is that these three factors combine to make the proposed scheme rather unattractive combined with simpler solutions such as just using more bits in the first place.
But you might not know where the problem is, or worse that there is a problem at all. Sometimes things look reasonable even when the math is all wrong. But now when I think about it you could create a compiler flag that converted all your doubles to doubles with max error. The number formatting routines could be modified to add error, then at least you would know when you were getting bad numbers. You could implement this as a C++ class as a proof of concept, just do a "#define double interval_double" then you could have this class throw some error when the error grew too large. This would make it much easier to implement rollback specific to your application, and it would be easy to at least know you were getting an error and narrowing it down...
AND You could hold this over all the LISP, Java, TCL, etc. peoples talking about their big integer implementations. (INF precision int's are easy to implement, but this would be cleverer, and prolly impossible to do nicely in those languages. Either because they don't have exceptions or don't have overloading.)
I know of at least one geometric library written in the 80's that used interval arithmatic when needed. I think it it fairly common to run a calculation with floating point until your error bounds get too big, then you roll back and do the math in infinite precision, or at least with as many bits as needed for your error bounds. This way 99% of the calculations use fast hardware floating point, and the 1% that needs more gets it. (You end up spending most of your time on that 1% since it's all in software, but you gotta do what you gotta do.)
In graphics you can sometimes just look for error conditions and then go back and perturb your data with some small random values and try again. I don't know if this is done in other fields.
Back when I took CS there was a class in numerical computing sophomore year, is that no longer a requirement?
Oh it's been around a long time. People still believe FDR knew the Japanese were going to attack at Pearl Harbor and did nothing because he wanted us into the war.
I think most historians don't believe that. The general view is that he wanted Japan to attack our colonies in East Asia. They did, but only after the diversionary tactic of attacking Hawaii and Alaska. Not that it matters, most Americans aren't even aware that we started the war with Japan with a Steel embargo.
According to Title 35 (Patents) of the US Code, not just anything is patentable. In fact, only inventions and processes defined here are patentable. Further, there are specific instances when an invention or process is not patentable.
The problem is none of these are enforced. It's easy cheesy to patent something that has been in the public domain for hundreds of years. Perhaps those patents aren't valid, but defending against an invalid patent claim takes millions. You independently "invent" thousands upon thousands of patented ideas every time you write a program. If there weren't a general truce and distain for patents in the field we would in an even bigger mess. The business world will be in a similar morass in a few years now that business practice patents have been validated, except I imagine 90% of MBA's would kill the goose that lays the golden eggs if hungry for some poultry.
God help anyone starting a business now in the developed world, well unless it is a legal firm with patents on the partner system for IP cross licensing.
I was just reading the reviews of other sites at Start Raving Normal and the sad thing is, most of these services will dissapear now. I'm pretty sure that's not what the patent system is designed to accomplish.
The patent system is designed to crush innovation and retart economic growth, this is exactly what it was designed to accomplish. The Supremes have nullified the 'for progress' provision that the constitutional committee added to the concept so we're back to the old system where kings granted monopolies to those that funded his wars. Except now anyone immoral enought to apply for a patent can patent anything without even as flawed a concept as a king to keep the economy from being completely destroyed.
Hopefully the plutocrats will soon see that any gain they see from their monopolies will be lost in their constants warring amoungst themselves in the courtrooms. Then they will either tell their governments to fix it or collude to only sue newcomers; if there are few enough of them left by the time they realize the mess they are in that a cartel can be maintained.
For starters, give up the "not-built-here" dogma that has kept some software makers from working with new, easy-to-use programming building blocks made by Microsoft, Sun Microsystems, and IBM. That reluctance also has made some companies slow to adopt standardized programming technologies like the Extensible Markup Language, which makes it easier for different kinds of software to work together.
It amazes me when I work with software 'solutions' that have cost millions of dollars that have no interface in or out of them other than the specific stuff provided by the vendor. I'd kill for direct access to the underlying DB or a nice clear way of moving data in and out, or a great way to make custom GUI... but the company is more concerned with ensuring that we are locked in FOREVER than with providing the tools we could use to make their software more friendly to our over all IT enviroment.
One of the reasons developers don't always use the components available from Microsoft, Sun Microsystems, and IBM is because they fear vendor lockin themselves. Of course, most custom apps do depend on compontents from all or some of those vendors, locking you into all of them and lending lie this aspect of the article in a not so heartening way.
Not that your point on the vendor API is invalid, generally you only get a halfway useful API if you specify it in the contract. Though you might get lucky if they used a clean CORBA API (or equivalent ORB) internally. Something like Maya's MEL might be nicer though, you wouldn't even have to write the shell bindings.
I never hear of anyone having their CPR number misused. Try to remember that it's just a easier way of identification and NOT a tracking device inserted up your ass. Your more like to be tracked when you use your VISA card than by having a SSN. I'm sure Wal-Mart knows more about most Americans than the US government does.
The problem is that in the USA anyone can get all your medical and financial information, change the PIN numbers on your bank cards and have cards sent to their PO box, they can have the deed to your house transfered to themselves and even have your paycheck transfered to themselves with your SS number. Plus, they can get your SS number for $20 or for free by sitting down at a computer terminal at nearly any institution that has a subscription with one of the credit reporting agencies. The SS even used to be available for free at public libraries through Lexis-Nexis. The SS number is public, yet is treated as a password nearly everywhere. A friend of mine lost thousands and had the police after her because some 20 year old had stolen her identity and committed all manner of fraud.
I personally wish someone would publish the reps full SS number along with their medical and financial records and a how-to for the ignorant who keep voting for Republicans and Democrats. BTW Not voting is a much more potent political act than voting for either of the major parties; voting for them is a statement of your belief that the system is working just fine.
They are still actively enforced, and the Supreme Court has consistently held in modern times that a search warrant is not needed to break into your house if it is suspected that you are in the act of sex without the possibility of pregnancy.
What we really need is a hard and fast limit on the number of words of law allowed, maybe 100,000 words, otherwise there will just be an omnibus bill every year where all the laws are renewed. Then this bill would be held hostage just like the spending bills are now, except instead of just suspending law enforcement, it would actually be perfectly ok to rape and murder until the Republicrats learned which "side" had done more favors for the media moguls lately and folded accordingly.
I think if old law expired in a FIFO or explicit manner specified in the bill this could be abused equaly, since they could scheme ahead of time. Instead I think they should determine which sentences should be deleted randomly when the bill came up for a vote so that the deleted stuff would be debated then and there whatever it was. It would make for a more exciting C-SPAN.. The number of words could even be keyed to some real goals, like they get a free word for every independent newspaper with over 100,000 dayly readers, and one for every hundred thousand college graduates, and one for every thousand PhD's... gain one word for each 1% over inflation raise in the median income, lose a word for each 0.5% under inflation loss to the median income... So all in all the book would grow, but you could carry around a paperback with all the laws of the land. You could read the tricked out version with interpretations in a month, it could even be a Jr. High requirement to explain a random chapter in the law book. Maybe a high school requirement to watch an hour of the new improved C-SPAN live and name six factual errors and six opinions you didn't agree with and why before a jury of citizens in a fifteen minute response.
So after MS sold the government its product, the goverment will go back to MS asking for money until they comply to something that they did not promise?
No, you simply charge the government unit that bought the harmful product an extra few % when they file their purchase order, then you apply that money to do some good in the same field.
It's akin to a government charging a sin tax on alcohol and then using that money to provide treatment centers for alcoholics and to pay for the funeral arrangements for people killed by drunk drivers. Except in this case they are only applying it to government departments. As long as it's not insanely high like the cigarette taxes have become in some states it's a liberterian and pro-market use tax. You use other people's time converting those closed formats into open ones, so you pay a small fee for it on a per application basis.
IBM *has* a copy of the offending code. IBM has had a copy of the System V source code for years now. Anyone with a copy of both Linux and System V can easily find which lines they have in common.
It's more complicated than that, most of System V is probably public domain, out there long before UNIX, or incorporated from the public during the 70's & 80's. Much of the rest is available under the BSD license which is GPL compatable. The rest is owned by one or more of a string of companies that have handled the code, perhaps including SCO. Figuring out what is what would require not just a diff, but publishing the common bits and putting out a call to locate their origin, I guess one would want also to ignore anything under a couple hundred lines too since that would probably not qualify for copyright. It could take years to track down everyone still alive, and it seems completely unneeded since there is no reason to think the tiny amount of code IBM has contributed is in any way proprietery. And from prior experience with the BSD case it is likely that SCO will turn out to be the infringer, hopefully we call all sue Microsoft for contributory infringement once SCO is goes under.
Open Source programmers are a lot more careful when it comes to copyright than their Closed Source cousins, we're actually publishing evidence against us if we're not careful. The SCO dork is right, there are two worlds when it comes to "IP", he's just got his roles reversed.
Wild Speculation: My hope is that the Xenix code will come out in discovery with BSD bits...but if any of the SCO executives crack, and it turns out Microsoft had a meeting with them anything like the infamous Netscape meeting, we won't need Xenix for grounds to sue.
Re:"Regular" 100-volt?
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42-Volt Autos
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· Score: 1
Edison's Pearl Street station is considered to be the first electric utility - supplied voltage was +/- 110VDC (hence the US single phase standard of 110 VAC). Wait! It's 110AC RMS that doesn't convert to +/= 110VDC with just a regulator, was it just the same for marketing reasons?
I think we have some good numbers on whales, in some species they all have names. But dolphins we don't really know, we know we're seeing much fewer than we used to but they may just be avoiding us. With some species we actually know there are much fewer, like "pink dolphins" or river dolphins, there you can actually just go out and count how many cross your path in a clear part of the river. I had a marine biologist roommate one summer and she would talk about so and so whale being missing this year.
The populations are probably falling more do to the lack of food than our actually catching the ocean mammals. We're pretty much killing our oceans with overfishing. Some countries, like Iceland have done well with resellable quotas (so you don't end up with a quota that lets you fish one day of the year with your super efficient new boat.) But that doesn't help migrating species that just get devistated somewhere else. We really need international agreement on fishing quotas, but that's not going to happen until more coutries try to manage their own fisheries. The New England cod economy completely collapsed yet the US hasn't even tried to save the still economic west coast fisheries. Totally irresponsible. Then there are the Japanese and Russians that go out and completely destroy whole swaths of ocean in international waters, destroying the market value of their catch with the rought treatment as well. They scrape up the ocean bottom so it takes decades for fish to return to the area in fishable numbers.
Sometimes one factory can devastate a whole country's ocean front. Peru has a single fish meal factory near Pisco that in the last decade has consumed so many anchovies that not only are they having problems getting anchovies, but all the regular fish are gone since there aren't enough anchovies for them to eat. They've now put some quotas on anchovy fishing, but it's not at a level that will let the population grow back. That would lose current jobs and most of the fishing jobs are already long gone... Here the problem is that if you target the bottom of the food chain for overexploitation you're just screewed.
We're really seeing this tragedy of the commons in the oceans because most countries haven't had the political incentive to put real quotas on there own fishermen when the fishermen rightly say the neighbors will just catch them instead, and no one seems to have any interest in a global solution. That is seen as an environmental thing and most governments have a knee jerk reaction against that. Economically it's just stupid to treat fish as a non-renewable resource to be consumed before your competitors do, they restore their populations pretty darn quickly if you just let them.
Re:Some basic EE facts
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42-Volt Autos
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· Score: 1
Higher voltage system allows lighter gauge wire to carry the same amount of current (weight savings).
This isn't really about weight savings. Compared to the weight of the car the power cables weigh practically nothing. But it is cheaper, you want to have high purity copper for wires and that isn't free. You could afford a stranded wire if it's smaller which means increased reliability. Right now there are still usually seperate wires for each light and device throughout the car, but we're moving to having just one substancial wire delivering power and (small wire) data network telling things like lights what to do. This is easier to maintain (you can even make the power wire a loop and test it before a start so you can cut the wire one and still have power + have a little light turn on telling you to service the wire) and it is cheaper even without changing the voltage, but changing the voltage is easy and makes that one wire cheaper to make. You won't really lose 12v, DC-DC converters are cheap in our world of integrated circuits, someone will sell a $10 plug in converter in the Rite-Aid auto section if they stop building it into the dashboard.
PS How is this "Stuff that matters?" The guy who hacked Al-Jezerra plead guilty a couple days ago for a slap on the wrist no jail-time sentence and that didn't make it to./ but this does?
Slashdot Mirror
But I'm not sure I agree there are "excessive profits" at journals, especially since some of them have recently spent big $$ to digitize and archive old articles--in many cases dating back over a hundred years.
I'm sure my librarians would disagree with you $10,000 or more for a 12 issues of a journal is only possible because libraries buy these things for demanding faculty. There is a huge difference in price between the $50-$100 for a IEEE/ACM journal and one of the commercial journals. I draw the line at reviewing for a journal at $500/yr. The last publisher of $20-30 math books, Springer-Verlag, just got sold to a publisher that wants to maximize profit with no regard for the academic process they are serving. I think it may be time to abandon these old school publishers, I'm sure you could collect enough pre-orders with an electronic edition to get Dover or Eldritch Press to make a print run and mail them out. No one writes these books that sell 200-1000 copies worldwide for profit, it's merely a nicer form than pdf files.
I would totally buy the arguement of not allowing patents on government funded research. But government funding doesn't really compensate graduate students for the work they do and unless they plan on giving the NSF 10x more money and forcing schools to pay their grad students well this just won't fly. I've been on a grad student salary I was $200 in the hole per month before paying for food and clothing, plus there were gaps in the pay, you didn't get paid over winter break, when you were furiously working on a paper, and you didn't get payed for the last month of each school year. You were two months into summer before you got your first paycheck from the internship... The government won't even give you student loans for the shortfall or for health insurance or registration fees. The only blessing is that credit card companies don't seem to have a problem lending a PhD student thousands at 20% (probably a good bet for them...) Doctors & Dentists also give you pretty good repayment terms, but I digress. Considering the economic hit that the students are taking it seems only fair that they keep at least copyright on their work.
I also think people will find ways around this, say you accept government money for two years and accept corporate money for non-exclusive use rights in the last two years.. Well what do you know, you made a lot of progress in that last year...
As someone with a firm grounding in economics, I must admit that I just don't get it. ISPs and other groups have high fixed costs, and low variable costs
The answer is right there. Their highest fixed cost is the DSL circuit they rent from one of two surly companies in direct competition with them, the ILEC or Covad. If they can get you to do the advertising and on site support for your service that eliminates their largest variable cost and much of the risk. Since the fixed cost becomes lower per customer they can charge a larger premium on the bandwidth costs and make a bundle.
There was some discussion of this last year in the NYCWireless mailing list. Basically at the time most DSL providers were starting to bless WiFi and Time Warner cable and the Verizon ILEC were banning them. The reason seems to be pure economics, the WiFi friendly companies rent the fixed lines and pay monopoly prices, while the monopolies own the lines and have little or no incremental costs on the lines. The WiFi friendly companies can offer WiFi as a competitive incentive with little cost, while the monopolies see this as one less potential customer on the line they already have to the your house. They are each acting in their percieved medium-term interest. Long term the independent DSL providers see that if each neighborhood had a community built network they could sell bandwidth and more importantly services without much dealing with the old monopolies, there is plenty of competition (at least in NYC) in commercial scale bandwidth. You can even lay fiber yourself in New York without a right of way if you do it at a certain depth in the roadway. The independent DSL providers know they can crush the old monopolies when it comes to customer service. The old monopolies see the independent DSL providers as gnats that will go away because they always have to pay the ILEC for the DSL circuit so they can't be lower cost. They don't want users to get into the habit of treating their "net connections" as internet connections (i.e. that can be further routed.) Plus, soon independent DSL providers won't be able to rent just the copper so even the nominal competition of Covad will be gone. (Covad is just praying a Democrat, any Democrat, gets elected and installed next time around.)
hehe
:P
Well my god says the earth is round. nja nja nja nja nja nja!
Really, if you object to all reality there is really no point in trying to bring you to reason, if you objected to some...
Just google if you want links my boy.
Except that the 8088 wasn't 16-bit..
The 8088 is 16 bits, it's just a low cost version of the 8086. The difference being the memory bus is 8 bits, but the core is still 16 bits. Both chips have 20 memory address lines and 16 i/o address lines. You shift a 16 bit segment register up 4 bits and add it to a general purpose register to get the twenty lines for memory addresses (1MB).
The 80286 was a better chip, but it was still 16 bits and had 24 address lines. Still segmented. I think BillG maybe meant they bet on 32 bit processors?
US fair use is actually more liberal than a lot of places btw
De-Jure yes. I wish Europe was as enlightened in this respect.
De-Facto no. You have fair use, until you use it.
One university I attended, New York University, is under a very strict settlement with the major book publishers because they were sued agreesively by them. After many of the professors named died of heart attacks, presumably from the stress, NYU settled out of court. They now have an office that licenses excerpts of texts for use in the classroom and prevents professors from using outside copying services. Some professors do use Kinkos for their own unpublished books, but this is seen as an act of civil disobedience. A friend of mine has worked in licensing at MTV(Viacom) and Rolling Stone and EVERYTHING goes there, the concept of free use is ignored in part because even a frivalous lawsuit is costly. Remember this is the country where the guy who designed someone's garden sued the makers of the Batman movies because they only got the owners permission to use the garden. The reason they blur people's T-Shirts on the "Reality TV" shows and all the furnature looks bland in the USA is not because they don't want to give anyone free advertising, but because they couldn't get the permissions. Even their Tech "News" segments on have to get the manufacturers permission.
You're freedom of fair use ends when you are first sued, either because you have money or because you are a thorn in someone's side. If the company that owns over a third of the broadcasters in the USA can't can't practice fair use, the teacher in the classroom can't copy an essay, and campers need to license campfire songs there isn't much left to the doctrine of fair use.
That's also absurd. Who is this straw-man Christian that doesn't realize Lutherans are Christians? And what Christians believe in genocide? Maybe scripture-twisting non-Christians.
:)
The kid who led the arguement also wrote a "science" paper on how the world is really five thousand years old and carbon dating is bunk. He was actually a nice kid. I'd be glad to have him as a friend. But he was very steeped in the fundamentalist culture of the community. The whole point of Socratic irony is to bring someone's underlying absurd absumptions, the absurdity was not that they didn't know Lutherans were christians, at least some of them did. The point is they thought this was the reason not to go to war with Sweden. Though perhaps it was also an example of herd mentality, when many argue with few, their arguements tend to devolve to the arguements of the lowest amoung them. An example might be the guy who pointed out a missplaced comma in my original post
except, iirc, she publicly stated that the irony of the song is that none of the examples of irony are actually irony
I saw an interview on television where she said this, but I just don't know if I should believe her. She said this after the whole world said the title of the song was the only thing ironic about it. But she is a clever gal, and I know how frustrating it can be when no one gets your irony, so I chose to accept her statement despite my doubts.
BTW Never try an ironic arguement in a room full of christian's whose parents are in the military. They will believe you are serious when you say we should wipe out the Swedes because they are just too blond. There is no one there to see the absurdity of their arguement that they shouldn't be wiped out because while they are not Baptists or Presbiterians they are Lutherans and Lutherans are still Christians. (My father was Lutheran, my name is Lutheran, I'm Scandinavian, and I was wearing a "Make Love Not War" pin. High school just made me want to beat my head against blunt objects, at least it was only the intro courses in college where people thought Brave New World was a good prescription for how we should live our lives.)
We laugh, knowing that US law will never become world law.
Ummm, yeah, only the 150 and growing signatories to the WTO will be subject to TRIPS, plus what 20 pending applicants. Hell the TRIPS treaty even mentions countries may be as liberal as the USA by 'allowing' american style "fair-use" exceptions to 'intelectual property' (The single quotes are mine, the double quotes theirs.)
Unless you plan to live in Cuba you ignore your rulers in the American congress at your own peril.
Really? Any links for us, or are we to just take your word for this?
Do you live in a cave? Which one are you objecting too?
Not that this is relevant to the vacation time. The chinese have little vacation time and don't kill or commit suicide at anything like the rate that we do. We have different cultural priorities than much of the rest of the world.
Americans are poor, when we are as rich as Western Europens we'll have the same vacation times. We don't compare badly to South America or Africa. Europeans see us as a rich nation, but if you look at people's take home pay and purchasing power we're closer to the undeveloped world (average income is no guide, income is much more concentrated here.) It's not a bad thing, we reflect the world at large, Europe got much of it's wealth from plundering the rest of the world and have until very recently had refused to grant official citizenship with full property and voting rights to their citizens. We didn't invent the concept of "illegal immigrants."
Well, I don't see why we need to #define everything. But a good interval arithmetic library would be nice. Now that boost have one for C++ (haven't tried it myself), maybe people will even start using it.
;)
The reason for the #define is so that you can turn the use of this library off and on without changing any code. I usually call my floats Real with a typedef so that I can change their underlying representation without a define, but you can't count on this in everyone's code.
This makes no sense. If you think you can do #define double interval_double in C/C++, I see no reason why it should be harder to do in lisp. In fact, as everything else, it should be much easier in lisp, and it has most likely also been done by lispers since at least the 1950's.
That part is easy to do in LISP, I meant that as a jibe against Java lacking operator oveloading. Are exceptions part of LISP now though? I guess you don't need them, you can wrap your expressions in a function that takes an interval_double and deals with error conditions like a catch statement in C++ would. So I guess LISP wins the "you can do it in LISP!" arguement, but at least not the "That's been in LISP since 1832" arguement
I'll have to check out this boost interval arithmetic library, I didn't know about it.
Second, we need no just maintain this calculated precision value. We also need to monitor it all the time. This adds a lot of if-tests, slowing down the calculation even more.
Finally, if precision is too bad, we need to be able to rollback the current calculation. Because, if we do a calculation, and find that precision is lost beyond what is acceptable, then we need to redo the whole calculation, not just the last step. I have no idea what this will cost, but it will most likely be very expensive, and certainly complex.
Rolling back the current calculation won't give you much, the problem isn't underflow on the current operation. That is pretty easy to handle even in plain old C. The problem is when you calculate A & B and then do a C=A-B. Now you may have lost all your bits of precision. In order to get them back you need to recalculate A & B and you'll know when you have enough bits, but how you go about it is a combinatorial problem. Usually the N is pretty small so you could automate trying all the combinations and adding more precision until it works. But usually a couple minutes of looking at the formula along with your knowledge of the inputs and you can figure out a good way to rearrange the algebra. I don't know if I really would want this to be automatic, especially on a compilation level. A tool that looked at your code and provided alternatives and was interactive so you could grow how far up the tree the tool looked would be nice.
My guess is that these three factors combine to make the proposed scheme rather unattractive combined with simpler solutions such as just using more bits in the first place.
But you might not know where the problem is, or worse that there is a problem at all. Sometimes things look reasonable even when the math is all wrong. But now when I think about it you could create a compiler flag that converted all your doubles to doubles with max error. The number formatting routines could be modified to add error, then at least you would know when you were getting bad numbers. You could implement this as a C++ class as a proof of concept, just do a "#define double interval_double" then you could have this class throw some error when the error grew too large. This would make it much easier to implement rollback specific to your application, and it would be easy to at least know you were getting an error and narrowing it down...
AND You could hold this over all the LISP, Java, TCL, etc. peoples talking about their big integer implementations. (INF precision int's are easy to implement, but this would be cleverer, and prolly impossible to do nicely in those languages. Either because they don't have exceptions or don't have overloading.)
I know of at least one geometric library written in the 80's that used interval arithmatic when needed. I think it it fairly common to run a calculation with floating point until your error bounds get too big, then you roll back and do the math in infinite precision, or at least with as many bits as needed for your error bounds. This way 99% of the calculations use fast hardware floating point, and the 1% that needs more gets it. (You end up spending most of your time on that 1% since it's all in software, but you gotta do what you gotta do.)
In graphics you can sometimes just look for error conditions and then go back and perturb your data with some small random values and try again. I don't know if this is done in other fields.
Back when I took CS there was a class in numerical computing sophomore year, is that no longer a requirement?
Oh it's been around a long time. People still believe FDR knew the Japanese were going to attack at Pearl Harbor and did nothing because he wanted us into the war.
I think most historians don't believe that. The general view is that he wanted Japan to attack our colonies in East Asia. They did, but only after the diversionary tactic of attacking Hawaii and Alaska. Not that it matters, most Americans aren't even aware that we started the war with Japan with a Steel embargo.
According to Title 35 (Patents) of the US Code, not just anything is patentable. In fact, only inventions and processes defined here are patentable. Further, there are specific instances when an invention or process is not patentable.
The problem is none of these are enforced. It's easy cheesy to patent something that has been in the public domain for hundreds of years. Perhaps those patents aren't valid, but defending against an invalid patent claim takes millions. You independently "invent" thousands upon thousands of patented ideas every time you write a program. If there weren't a general truce and distain for patents in the field we would in an even bigger mess. The business world will be in a similar morass in a few years now that business practice patents have been validated, except I imagine 90% of MBA's would kill the goose that lays the golden eggs if hungry for some poultry.
God help anyone starting a business now in the developed world, well unless it is a legal firm with patents on the partner system for IP cross licensing.
I was just reading the reviews of other sites at Start Raving Normal and the sad thing is, most of these services will dissapear now. I'm pretty sure that's not what the patent system is designed to accomplish.
The patent system is designed to crush innovation and retart economic growth, this is exactly what it was designed to accomplish. The Supremes have nullified the 'for progress' provision that the constitutional committee added to the concept so we're back to the old system where kings granted monopolies to those that funded his wars. Except now anyone immoral enought to apply for a patent can patent anything without even as flawed a concept as a king to keep the economy from being completely destroyed.
Hopefully the plutocrats will soon see that any gain they see from their monopolies will be lost in their constants warring amoungst themselves in the courtrooms. Then they will either tell their governments to fix it or collude to only sue newcomers; if there are few enough of them left by the time they realize the mess they are in that a cartel can be maintained.
It amazes me when I work with software 'solutions' that have cost millions of dollars that have no interface in or out of them other than the specific stuff provided by the vendor. I'd kill for direct access to the underlying DB or a nice clear way of moving data in and out, or a great way to make custom GUI... but the company is more concerned with ensuring that we are locked in FOREVER than with providing the tools we could use to make their software more friendly to our over all IT enviroment.
One of the reasons developers don't always use the components available from Microsoft, Sun Microsystems, and IBM is because they fear vendor lockin themselves. Of course, most custom apps do depend on compontents from all or some of those vendors, locking you into all of them and lending lie this aspect of the article in a not so heartening way.
Not that your point on the vendor API is invalid, generally you only get a halfway useful API if you specify it in the contract. Though you might get lucky if they used a clean CORBA API (or equivalent ORB) internally. Something like Maya's MEL might be nicer though, you wouldn't even have to write the shell bindings.
I never hear of anyone having their CPR number misused. Try to remember that it's just a easier way of identification and NOT a tracking device inserted up your ass. Your more like to be tracked when you use your VISA card than by having a SSN. I'm sure Wal-Mart knows more about most Americans than the US government does.
The problem is that in the USA anyone can get all your medical and financial information, change the PIN numbers on your bank cards and have cards sent to their PO box, they can have the deed to your house transfered to themselves and even have your paycheck transfered to themselves with your SS number. Plus, they can get your SS number for $20 or for free by sitting down at a computer terminal at nearly any institution that has a subscription with one of the credit reporting agencies. The SS even used to be available for free at public libraries through Lexis-Nexis. The SS number is public, yet is treated as a password nearly everywhere. A friend of mine lost thousands and had the police after her because some 20 year old had stolen her identity and committed all manner of fraud.
I personally wish someone would publish the reps full SS number along with their medical and financial records and a how-to for the ignorant who keep voting for Republicans and Democrats. BTW Not voting is a much more potent political act than voting for either of the major parties; voting for them is a statement of your belief that the system is working just fine.
They are still actively enforced, and the Supreme Court has consistently held in modern times that a search warrant is not needed to break into your house if it is suspected that you are in the act of sex without the possibility of pregnancy.
What we really need is a hard and fast limit on the number of words of law allowed, maybe 100,000 words, otherwise there will just be an omnibus bill every year where all the laws are renewed. Then this bill would be held hostage just like the spending bills are now, except instead of just suspending law enforcement, it would actually be perfectly ok to rape and murder until the Republicrats learned which "side" had done more favors for the media moguls lately and folded accordingly.
I think if old law expired in a FIFO or explicit manner specified in the bill this could be abused equaly, since they could scheme ahead of time. Instead I think they should determine which sentences should be deleted randomly when the bill came up for a vote so that the deleted stuff would be debated then and there whatever it was. It would make for a more exciting C-SPAN.. The number of words could even be keyed to some real goals, like they get a free word for every independent newspaper with over 100,000 dayly readers, and one for every hundred thousand college graduates, and one for every thousand PhD's... gain one word for each 1% over inflation raise in the median income, lose a word for each 0.5% under inflation loss to the median income... So all in all the book would grow, but you could carry around a paperback with all the laws of the land. You could read the tricked out version with interpretations in a month, it could even be a Jr. High requirement to explain a random chapter in the law book. Maybe a high school requirement to watch an hour of the new improved C-SPAN live and name six factual errors and six opinions you didn't agree with and why before a jury of citizens in a fifteen minute response.
You know I used to think GATT was pretty cool.
Then I thought WTO was ok, if it just weren't for TRIPS.
Now I think the WTO might make sense if killed TRIPS excluded the USA and Europe from the club.
Yeah, what was the point of all this free trade talk?
Vietnam subsidising Catfish?? Sure...
So after MS sold the government its product, the goverment will go back to MS asking for money until they comply to something that they did not promise?
No, you simply charge the government unit that bought the harmful product an extra few % when they file their purchase order, then you apply that money to do some good in the same field.
It's akin to a government charging a sin tax on alcohol and then using that money to provide treatment centers for alcoholics and to pay for the funeral arrangements for people killed by drunk drivers. Except in this case they are only applying it to government departments. As long as it's not insanely high like the cigarette taxes have become in some states it's a liberterian and pro-market use tax. You use other people's time converting those closed formats into open ones, so you pay a small fee for it on a per application basis.
IBM *has* a copy of the offending code. IBM has had a copy of the System V source code for years now. Anyone with a copy of both Linux and System V can easily find which lines they have in common.
It's more complicated than that, most of System V is probably public domain, out there long before UNIX, or incorporated from the public during the 70's & 80's. Much of the rest is available under the BSD license which is GPL compatable. The rest is owned by one or more of a string of companies that have handled the code, perhaps including SCO. Figuring out what is what would require not just a diff, but publishing the common bits and putting out a call to locate their origin, I guess one would want also to ignore anything under a couple hundred lines too since that would probably not qualify for copyright. It could take years to track down everyone still alive, and it seems completely unneeded since there is no reason to think the tiny amount of code IBM has contributed is in any way proprietery. And from prior experience with the BSD case it is likely that SCO will turn out to be the infringer, hopefully we call all sue Microsoft for contributory infringement once SCO is goes under.
Open Source programmers are a lot more careful when it comes to copyright than their Closed Source cousins, we're actually publishing evidence against us if we're not careful. The SCO dork is right, there are two worlds when it comes to "IP", he's just got his roles reversed.
Wild Speculation: My hope is that the Xenix code will come out in discovery with BSD bits...but if any of the SCO executives crack, and it turns out Microsoft had a meeting with them anything like the infamous Netscape meeting, we won't need Xenix for grounds to sue.
Edison's Pearl Street station is considered to be the first electric utility - supplied voltage was +/- 110VDC (hence the US single phase standard of 110 VAC).
Wait! It's 110AC RMS that doesn't convert to +/= 110VDC with just a regulator, was it just the same for marketing reasons?
Do we have ANY FRIGGIN CLUE how many there are?
I think we have some good numbers on whales, in some species they all have names. But dolphins we don't really know, we know we're seeing much fewer than we used to but they may just be avoiding us. With some species we actually know there are much fewer, like "pink dolphins" or river dolphins, there you can actually just go out and count how many cross your path in a clear part of the river. I had a marine biologist roommate one summer and she would talk about so and so whale being missing this year.
The populations are probably falling more do to the lack of food than our actually catching the ocean mammals. We're pretty much killing our oceans with overfishing. Some countries, like Iceland have done well with resellable quotas (so you don't end up with a quota that lets you fish one day of the year with your super efficient new boat.) But that doesn't help migrating species that just get devistated somewhere else. We really need international agreement on fishing quotas, but that's not going to happen until more coutries try to manage their own fisheries. The New England cod economy completely collapsed yet the US hasn't even tried to save the still economic west coast fisheries. Totally irresponsible. Then there are the Japanese and Russians that go out and completely destroy whole swaths of ocean in international waters, destroying the market value of their catch with the rought treatment as well. They scrape up the ocean bottom so it takes decades for fish to return to the area in fishable numbers.
Sometimes one factory can devastate a whole country's ocean front. Peru has a single fish meal factory near Pisco that in the last decade has consumed so many anchovies that not only are they having problems getting anchovies, but all the regular fish are gone since there aren't enough anchovies for them to eat. They've now put some quotas on anchovy fishing, but it's not at a level that will let the population grow back. That would lose current jobs and most of the fishing jobs are already long gone... Here the problem is that if you target the bottom of the food chain for overexploitation you're just screewed.
We're really seeing this tragedy of the commons in the oceans because most countries haven't had the political incentive to put real quotas on there own fishermen when the fishermen rightly say the neighbors will just catch them instead, and no one seems to have any interest in a global solution. That is seen as an environmental thing and most governments have a knee jerk reaction against that. Economically it's just stupid to treat fish as a non-renewable resource to be consumed before your competitors do, they restore their populations pretty darn quickly if you just let them.
Higher voltage system allows lighter gauge wire to carry the same amount of current (weight savings).
./ but this does?
This isn't really about weight savings. Compared to the weight of the car the power cables weigh practically nothing. But it is cheaper, you want to have high purity copper for wires and that isn't free. You could afford a stranded wire if it's smaller which means increased reliability. Right now there are still usually seperate wires for each light and device throughout the car, but we're moving to having just one substancial wire delivering power and (small wire) data network telling things like lights what to do. This is easier to maintain (you can even make the power wire a loop and test it before a start so you can cut the wire one and still have power + have a little light turn on telling you to service the wire) and it is cheaper even without changing the voltage, but changing the voltage is easy and makes that one wire cheaper to make. You won't really lose 12v, DC-DC converters are cheap in our world of integrated circuits, someone will sell a $10 plug in converter in the Rite-Aid auto section if they stop building it into the dashboard.
PS How is this "Stuff that matters?" The guy who hacked Al-Jezerra plead guilty a couple days ago for a slap on the wrist no jail-time sentence and that didn't make it to