While reading through the posts on this topic,
I noticed the same patterns I always do, how
patents for the most part seem to get granted
at the drop of the hat, and both big and
little players can use them to very carefully
target and cripple the opposition.
But then I had a thought... We should FULLY,
ABSOLUTELY support the granting of
insanely over-broad patents for every trivial
little thing any company can think to sue
over.
Why, you might ask, would I suggest such a
seemingly abhorrent idea?
Simple: Because, in 20 years, it means that
we'll all have the current batch of insanity
to point to and excuse our "infringement" of
then-current patents with "see? I implemented
that, now out of patent."
"Why yes, it would appear that I violated
your patent on 3rd-harmonic quantum
eigenreplication, but as you can see from this
now-expired-and-thus-fair-game 2002 Microsoft
patent, I did nothing more than implement their
3rd claim, which covers ''the use of numbers to
do stuff''. So, if we can dispense with the
debate over such highly-technical language, I'd
like to move for dismissal."
If you actually need Oracle database, there is no FOSS alternative.
True enough... But if you actually need Oracle, the price basically
doesn't even matter, regardless of whether it goes per CPU, core, per
connection, or per solar flare.
If picture quality is your main concern, stay
AWAY from any card that compresses it into mpeg2
for you.
Like people fanatically concerned about picture
quality would feel even remotely happy with capturing
broadcast (or even analogue CTV) NTSC?
These chips spit out raw, uncompressed video.
For all of us with RAIDs capable of writing 37MB/s sustained?
And what, exactly, does "raw" mean, anyway, when
talking about converting what amounts to analog pulse intensities
for an electron gun that happens to spray across three different
colors of pixels (in a very irregular and poorly-reproduceable
manner, varying not only from TV to TV but also from scanline to
scanline on the exact same TV)?
I will agree with you on principal, but I have to suspect
you just posted this for the sake of posting something,
rather than to actually address a peeve of yours.
it doesn't make sense to review a low profile card next to 2
full-profile card.
It matters because the other two don't come in a low profile
version... So if you plan to build a PVR using a microATX case (or
even standard ATX in a pizza-box style case), you need to
pick a card that comes in a low profile version.
Does something about this situation sound at
all strange to anyone but me? Small start-up,
taking strong security measures to lock down
the developers' machines so they can't steal
(presumeably) code they write while at work?
"Small start-up" means a group of up to perhaps
a dozen college friends getting together to
realize a shared idea. Although somewhere
down the road some betrayal may occur and lead
to a messy legal situation, it simply doesn't
apply until the company no longer counts as
a start-up.
Perhaps I just have a problem with the chosen
wording, but this sounds like a deeper (and
unspoken, as asked) issue than "how can I
lock down my PCs to block removeable media".
Linus (and others) wrote Linux to conform to
the POSIX specifications. They didn't reverse
engineer any form of Unix
I have to wonder how you interpret the idea of
clean-room reverse engineering...
Team A examines how the target works. They
document its interaction with the outside world
in great detail, creating what amounts to a
functional spec.
Team B, having no overlap with Team A, writes
their own implementation of that spec.
Done correctly, you have a final product with
the same external behavior as the target, but
with no possibility of IP contamination.
Now, Linus wrote Linux to the POSIX spec. The
same spec every other major UNIX-variant obeyed
(well, not really, but they all claimed
to). This just eliminates the need for Team-A,
because he already had a sufficiently
detailed description of the target's externally
visible behavior.
So, on a technicality, Linus did not reverse
engineer anything. But calling this different
on moral grounds? No. He wanted a
particular behavior in an OS, and wanted it
on his terms, not those of the few
commercial vendors providing similar
software. So, effectively no different than
wanting, for example, SMB compatibility
or BK compatibility
As someone who has ran dual-cpu workstations for years, I can
personally attest to the fact that 99% of CPU heavy tasks do not
make use of SMP.
As soneone else who has run dual-CPU for the past 5+ years and
would never even consider going back, I would point out
that unless you still run DOS, more than one CPU means you can
run more than one CPU-hungry app at a time.
Even when only performing a single task, overall system
responsiveness goes way up. And when actually pushing
both/all CPUs to their limit, responsiveness goes from "none"
to "still acceptible".
isn't going to run any better on Dual-Core, because these
games are not designed to run multiple threads simultaneously
But actually, they will run better, because all the little
things going on in the background will no longer compete with them
for CPU time - Or perhaps more importantly, for L1 cache.
SevenZip
Actually, 7zip does support multithreading, you just need
to set it as an option (or use "-mmt" for the command line version).
But no, most individual software packages, considered in isolation,
won't gain all that much from multiple cores, I agree with you on that.
But the overall user experience will improve drastically.
Don't worry, they just need a head-start to prepare for the
massive recall (and possible liability suits, depending on
how many houses burn down) when the world discoveres what it
means to have 250W worth of CPU packed into a square inch of
silicon.
Where the heck were the Africans, the Indians,
the Chinese, the Middle Easterns, the Egyptians,
the Brazilians, the Mexicans, and of course, the
Australians in the Trek shows after TOS??
At the risk of sounding a tad racist, "Not in the
target demographic".
You assume Television, at its core, involves
story-telling. Wrong. Television involves
nothing beyond "find a target demographic,
figure out what they buy, and sell that to them,
oh yeah and provide visual stimulii of what they
like to keep control of their eyes". What group
forms the vast majority of Trekkies? Young white
American males. What do you see on ANY
show targetted at young white American males?
White American-like males in charge (not always
young due to the whole alpha-male thing), with
plenty of white scantily-clad female eye-candy (or
occasionally non-white females for an "exotic"
flavor, but as a quick reality-check, how often
do you see non-white females romantically involved
with a member of her own ethnic group unless he
treats her like crap?).
TOS, while not fitting with what we might consider
mainstream American values of its time period, did
(perhaps unintentionally) score a bulls-eye on its
demographic - Young white American males who, at that
time, considered it "cool" to hang out with minorities
to boost their apparent open-mindedness (a phenomenon
we still have, with "wiggers" - middle-class white
kids who flock to their three-out-of-2400 black or hispanic
classmates to give themselves more "street cred".
And no, I do not mean one word of this as a troll - You
either "get" it, or you don't.
I imagine the gamma rays would have
problems going through several layers of
iron and concrete
Believe it or not, we have 3/4ths of our planet
literally covered in one of the simplest ways
known to block high-energy photons - Water.
The GRB in question killed sea life.
living deep inside a skyscraper won't save
you. Living on the far side of the planet
would, at least on the short-term, but
the longer-term consequences of a GRB
sterilizing one side of the planet would
not leave the Earth a very health place.
The 50 cent piece hasn't been made in years, it has been phased out
Funny, I have a few from 2005, one from 2004... No 2003s (not that
they don't exist, I just don't happen to have any)... a few 2002,
and dozens from years before that.
The US also issued a large batch of $2 bills in 2003 (not sure if they
did so since then).
Personally, I enjoy paying for things in bizarre currency...
a $2, a Sacajawea, and a Kennedy half, for a $3.50 tip. Things like
that. It usually makes cashiers laugh, and I have yet to get
arrested for it. Then again, I know better than to shop at Best Buy
for anything... I think we can draw some pretty solid negative
conclusions about the fellow involved from that fact alone.
I have learned not to try to use SBA dollars anywhere but
banks, however... Cashiers simply assume them as quarters without a
second glance (which, AFAIK, caused their demise in the first place...
What a dumb size, shape (milled edges), and color to make a dollar
coin!)
Well, as a scam, no. Legitimately buying a
single unit to evaluate, yes.
Of course, they actually did image the
drive (I suspect it would cost take most
major OEMs more than the price of a single copy
of XP to change their standard McDonald's-like
assembly line of PC creation for one machine),
but waved a whopping $100 off the $3500 price
tag.
And no, I don't refer to Dell specifically...
Though from my experience with them, I strongly
suspect they'd throw in a free blow-job from
Michael Dell's own mother if I made a large
enough sale conditional on it.
The problem here centers around you wanting to
buy a laptop on which you plan to put Linux.
While I agree you absolutely, unquestioningly
should have that option, and the law even
somewhat agrees with our opinion on the matter,
Dell can laugh off a lawsuit that would cost you
3x the price of the laptop, just to get a $199
refund.
So the secret here, to get your way - Shop as
a "large business" customer. When you call,
you want to buy 20 units, with a single unit
initially to evaluate for suitability for your
particular needs, the nature of which you of
course can't disclose due to an NDA.
Naturally, your department already has a
500-license VLK version of XP Pro, and anyway,
you need to throw Datacenter Server 2003 on it
(for which you already have 37 licenses with
three spares) so don't need XP in the first
place, so would the kindly send it to you
unimaged.
At this point some companies will flat out
refuse, but most will put greed ahead of common
sense and play along.
It will help to make up a PO number (that just
appears on your invoice, it doesn't actually
"mean" anything if you pay by credit card) and
some bogus company name at your address
(again, doesn't mean anything, you'll still
get it as long as you have your name on the
shipping address).
Re:Weren't they aware of this during implementatio
on
VLC & European Patents
·
· Score: 1
Whether we care or not, we have been a
target, and we are much weaker than big
companies to defend ourselves. We'd be
fools not to care.
Okay, fine, you "care", I agree that you need to use
extreme caution to protect yourself from the mess
of legal BS inherent in the type of code you produce
(ie, anything that lessens the corporate hegemony
over content and the distribution thereof). But
from your own description, you do exactly
as much as it takes to avoid legal trouble, and
go out of your way to make adding on to the core
project very, very easy.
You don't "care" about the law or the patents,
beyond the danger they pose to your personal
freedom and finances. I may give a mugger my
wallet, but only because he has a gun, not
because I consider him in the right.
You use phrases such as "official and liable
structure" and "official VLC releases", knowing
perfectly well that, although you have a damn
fine core app, 90% of its actual usefulness
comes from third-party developers supporting
various patented formats and that no one
actually runs just your official builds, but
rather, ones that support things like DTS,
MPEG4, and the like.
Don't get me wrong, I greatly respect what you
do, and thank you from the bottom of my heart
for helping the rest of us make use of the
so-called "right" of interoperability that
the corporate world would deny us be exploiting
technicalities. I fully understand the need
to CYA, and don't hold your need to denounce
what you "really" do in public forums against
you.
Thank you.
Of course, I would hate to put words in your
mouth, and perhaps you really do vehemently
disagree with all of what I've written above.
In which case, why bother continuing? As you
say yourself, if you wanted to stay strictly
legal rather than skirting the edges and hoping
no one (with a legal team) notices, you would
basically just have another Vorbis and Theora
player.
Re:Weren't they aware of this during implementatio
on
VLC & European Patents
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
I recognize that there aren't a great deal of
resources available to the average Free Software
programmer, but surely after the deal with GIF a
little more dilligence has been put into patent
research?
Um... Why?
Some will take this as a troll, but I mean it in
all seriousness when I ask "So what?"
The current patent minefield leaves NO
room for independant implementations of
any software concept any of us have
ever heard of that that didn't originate
either with-or-before Turing, or directly from
the Open Source world. And even for those,
it wouldn't surprise me to hear about some
astoundingly trivial and ancient technique
suddenly under patent, by companies that have
adopted "extortion racket" as their business
model (small enough fish can't afford to fight
back).
Software like VLC and MPlayer know perfectly
well that they violate a countless number of
patents, and the authors just don't care (and
if you really think they all live in Europe,
I'd like you to show me "Connecticut" on a map
of Europe). Any legit project that makes use
of their source code needs their head checked,
but projects like VLC don't care about
infringement. And users thereof don't,
either.
The corporate world, and the governments
that pander to it, needs to realize that
a growing number of people simply don't care
about copyright or intellectual property in
general (or to extend this a bit, about drug
laws, speed limits, Terri Schivo, the outcome
of our quadrennial tweedledum-vs-tweedledee
popularity contest, and so on). The more
they buy laws that result in serious
congnitive dissonance when compared with
physical reality, the less people take
all laws seriously.
Software patents in Europe will have absolutely
no effect on "our" world. The CEOs can all fret
about the impending end to their current business
models, the congresses/parliaments can all pass
laws as fast as they like, but we will win.
This particular "setback" just means that we'll
start seeing a LOT more projects coming out
of the Vanuatu's newest territory, Michigan.
And in a decade, we might well have a large volume
of software written on Saturn's newest moon, California,
despite not even having a lunar colony by then.
But remember that no matter how "good" an
electrical impulse can make you feel, I have
a hard time believing computers will EVER be
able to simulate the effects of love and what
its like to be physical with someone you love.
Imagine that... The internet actually getting
used for one of its single most useful
potentials - Preserving true and absolute
freedom of speech.
Guess what? Canadian gag-orders don't apply in
the US (and vice-versa). US cryptography export
restrictions don't apply from Norway. Just about
any of the BS Sharia laws don't apply outside
the Middle East. Pretty much nothing
applies in Vanuatu.
Welcome to the dawn of a new era. Wake up,
world leaders, and smell the coffee - Doesn't
it smell so deliciously like your
obsolescence? Your petty little regional
fiefdoms no longer exist. If the entire
planet doesn't agree with you, you lose.
If the processors that big how the heck will
I fit it on my motherboard?!
Well, the processor itself only takes a few square inches - The rest of the box held the liquid nitrogen cooling system needed to keep the thing slightly cooler than the surface of the sun.
Legally, absolutely nothing. MGM can tell us we have a
moon made of green cheese, God wants us to kill gay
baby whales, and that we can copy CDs, and none of it
means anything at all in court.
Also, we need to skip over the fact that Phillips has
denounced these broken CDs as not actually CDs. So
let's reduce the question to referring to more-or-less
CD-like audio discs.
So... Ignoring all of the above... The answer still
depends. CD copy protection refers to quite a few
different technologies, ranging from the "copyright"
bit, to broken TOCs, to unrecoverable C2 errors, to
trying to install what amounts to a virus on your
computer, to (haven't seen these come out yet, but
I fully expect it eventually) data-only discs that
will never ever play on a normal audio CD player.
In the first case (copyright bit), this does nothing
more than the "Copyright 2005" already on the outside
of the CD packaging. Fair use wins.
In the second and third cases, if your player can
still read the disc, you probably don't even know the
disc has any form of structural damage, so
you don't need to circumvent any protections. Fair
use wins.
In the fifth case, this would pretty much match the
current internally-inconsistant legal situation with
DVDs... You have the "right" to copy it, but you
would have to break the law (DMCA) to do so, by
breaking whatever access control mechanisms (however
weak) the disc has.
The fourth case gets really interesting, though...
These discs usually have two sections, an audio
section and a data section containing something like
WMA files. Once you get infected with the "driver"
for these discs, you cannot access the audio tracks,
only the digital ones. So post-infection, the situation
reduces to #5 (thus my elaboration on that one
out-of-order). Before infection, we get into
a whole world of nasty tangled legal problems that I
do not have the qualifications (IANAL, obviously) to
comment on beyond mere speculation. For example, do
you have the "right" to not install unwanted software
on your computer? If so, press the shift key and have a
ball. And what if you run Linux? Does the non-availability
of a virus/driver for the protected content exempt you
from having to worry about its existance (in that case,
you would simply access the otherwise-unprotected audio
tracks, you couldn't access the data track)? What
if you have autoplay disabled by default, for security
reasons (as EVERYONE should!)? Could that still count
as circumvention, even though it doesn't require you to
"do" anything? Tricky.
Overall, it will take either a new law like the DMCA, or a
massive shift in public opinion on this matter, before you'll
see any media companies try to take someone to court simply
for ripping their own CDs or even DVDs. They would have an
exceedingly difficult time proving you broke the law, they
would risk the courts declaring sections of laws such as the
DMCA invalid, and the cost of losing would set a precedent
that, in their current mindset, would completely destroy their
current business model. Not to mention, if they win, they
would risk enormous public backlash, along with the possibility
of huge lawsuits in some cases (Sony, for example, producing
CDs, CD copy protection, and MP3 players, can only get away
with that level of corporate psychosis because the law remains
somewhat unclear on the entire issue).
I for one cannot think of why it would be
ok to rip cds but not rip dvds.
Er... Read the subject line of the post to
which you responded - "What about DeCSS?"
Although I would tend to agree with you, on
any and all lines of reasoning short of "US
Law" (which has very little "reason"
involved), the DMCA (sort-of) says you can
rip CDs but not DVDs. Why? CDs have no access
control mechanism, while DVDs do (however
weak and pathetic we may consider it),
namely, CSS. Thus, you cannot rip a DVD
without circumventing that access control
mechanism, thereby breaking the law.
Now, does that stop me, or just about anyone,
from making backups of their DVDs? Nope.
The legality of it doesn't even drift across
my thoughts in a vague indistinct uneasy sort
of way (which, incidentally, I believe relates
well to the entire problem of kids pirating
massive amounts of media content online - The
law has gotten so absurd in this area that people
can't care, they just do it without
thinking twice about what Officer Friendly
might have to say about it). But it still
breaks the law, technically.
Plus the ecological effects of converting vast
tracts of land to fuel crops.
While I would otherwise agree with you, in this
case, we've already done it - We call them
"lawns".
It really surprises me that burning grass hasn't
already become popular (I'll admit, I never
thought of it before, though I certainly plan to
look into it now). How many millions of
tons of yard waste do developed nations produce
each year, that we could leech for minerals then
compress into fuel pellets, basically for free
(better than free, in fact, because we can use
something we would otherwise pay to have
hauled away, to lower our winter heating costs).
Sadly, TFA has a rather dissapointing lack of
information. It says grass pellets have 96% of
the energy value of wood pellets, okay, good to
know - But how about info for DIY'ers? Where can
I buy a home pellet-mill? Anything special I
would need to do to retrofit a wood pellet stove?
Certain types of organic yard debris we shouldn't
use due to increasing the pollution from burning
it? Things of that nature.
Overall, a useless front-page article, but I thank
the author anyway, for exposing me to an idea I
simply never thought of myself.
Kudos on a great post... Had I not already
posted to this topic, I'd mod you up.
Seven standard deviations--wow! As far as I
know, there are not any tests that could measure
that high.
Almost certainly not, at least none that (as
you pointed out) we can ascribe any statistical
significance to their outcome. Usually,
such high IQs come from people who, as children,
scored well above the ceiling on the Stanford
Binet or WISC (160 for both, but by ignoring
the score-limiting rules, rules you can
calculate less-meaningful scores above that).
Then, giving much harder tests to that 160+
group, you can rank them among themselves...
Such rankings may not have much external
validity, however - From the perspective of
someone right at the mean, 1SD down (an 85)
seems dumb as a sack of stones, while someone
with a 115 seems pretty bright. Would that
same apparent difference hold from the POV of
someone with an IQ of 160? Tough to say, even
if you did have that, because you would
have an extremely skewed baseline idea of
"dumb as a sack of stones", ie, very nearly
everyone.
After a certain point though (with IQ), it
becomes impossible to get a large enough sample
to validate the test for individuals with a very
high IQ.
I agree completely. For the 150-180 range, you
can probably get enough people to make a significant
ranking, but above 180? Such scores strike me as
more like asking about the world's top 10 richest
people - The actual ranking changes from day to day
(though one or two people might consistantly come out
way ahead of the rest, such as Ingvar Kamprad and
Bill Gates), and depends heavily on the testing method
(Kamprad passed gates not because of a shift in their
actual local-currency-net-worth, but because the
Kroner gained heavily on the Dollar over the past few
years).
How then do you test IQ for that population?
Internal ranking, and by including people under
that class but close enough to at least get a few
questions right, you can try to extrapolate those
rankings down to include we mere normals... If someone
with a 190IQ would correctly answer 75% of the questions
on a given test (I've ignored time limits for most of
this, which as you point out makes a good way to get a
finer-grained score, but ever so complicates describing
the situation for casual conversation such as this),
and a 145IQ would correcly answer only 10% of the questions,
you can then use that to scale results back to a test
where a 145IQ scores 75% and a normal person scores 10%,
even though the normal person might not have the capacity
to answer a single question on the harder test.
Testing very high IQ children takes a similar approach - You
just have the kid take the SAT, where you can very accurately
compare them to much older children with a well-known distribution
of scores. This of course has the problem wherein the child might
not have exposure to certain concept on the SAT, but you can
compensate for that on a sub-test basis (if they get a very high
score on the basic algebra section but completely blow the trig
section, you can omit the latter from consideration as a simple
lack of exposure).
But overall, no, I agree that approach lacks significance when
dealing with a sample of 6 people in the entire world, but until
we come up with an AI having a nice smoothly-adjustable "IQ"
parameter, we can't do much better.;-)
Slashdot Mirror
While reading through the posts on this topic, I noticed the same patterns I always do, how patents for the most part seem to get granted at the drop of the hat, and both big and little players can use them to very carefully target and cripple the opposition.
But then I had a thought... We should FULLY, ABSOLUTELY support the granting of insanely over-broad patents for every trivial little thing any company can think to sue over.
Why, you might ask, would I suggest such a seemingly abhorrent idea?
Simple: Because, in 20 years, it means that we'll all have the current batch of insanity to point to and excuse our "infringement" of then-current patents with "see? I implemented that, now out of patent."
"Why yes, it would appear that I violated your patent on 3rd-harmonic quantum eigenreplication, but as you can see from this now-expired-and-thus-fair-game 2002 Microsoft patent, I did nothing more than implement their 3rd claim, which covers ''the use of numbers to do stuff''. So, if we can dispense with the debate over such highly-technical language, I'd like to move for dismissal."
If you actually need Oracle database, there is no FOSS alternative.
True enough... But if you actually need Oracle, the price basically doesn't even matter, regardless of whether it goes per CPU, core, per connection, or per solar flare.
If picture quality is your main concern, stay AWAY from any card that compresses it into mpeg2 for you.
Like people fanatically concerned about picture quality would feel even remotely happy with capturing broadcast (or even analogue CTV) NTSC?
These chips spit out raw, uncompressed video.
For all of us with RAIDs capable of writing 37MB/s sustained?
And what, exactly, does "raw" mean, anyway, when talking about converting what amounts to analog pulse intensities for an electron gun that happens to spray across three different colors of pixels (in a very irregular and poorly-reproduceable manner, varying not only from TV to TV but also from scanline to scanline on the exact same TV)?
I will agree with you on principal, but I have to suspect you just posted this for the sake of posting something, rather than to actually address a peeve of yours.
it doesn't make sense to review a low profile card next to 2 full-profile card.
It matters because the other two don't come in a low profile version... So if you plan to build a PVR using a microATX case (or even standard ATX in a pizza-box style case), you need to pick a card that comes in a low profile version.
This is true if your camcorder is a digital one and has firewire ports.
...As opposed to all those analogue
Digital Video
camcorders?
We are a small software startup based in India.
Does something about this situation sound at all strange to anyone but me? Small start-up, taking strong security measures to lock down the developers' machines so they can't steal (presumeably) code they write while at work?
"Small start-up" means a group of up to perhaps a dozen college friends getting together to realize a shared idea. Although somewhere down the road some betrayal may occur and lead to a messy legal situation, it simply doesn't apply until the company no longer counts as a start-up.
Perhaps I just have a problem with the chosen wording, but this sounds like a deeper (and unspoken, as asked) issue than "how can I lock down my PCs to block removeable media".
Linus (and others) wrote Linux to conform to the POSIX specifications. They didn't reverse engineer any form of Unix
I have to wonder how you interpret the idea of clean-room reverse engineering...
Team A examines how the target works. They document its interaction with the outside world in great detail, creating what amounts to a functional spec.
Team B, having no overlap with Team A, writes their own implementation of that spec.
Done correctly, you have a final product with the same external behavior as the target, but with no possibility of IP contamination.
Now, Linus wrote Linux to the POSIX spec. The same spec every other major UNIX-variant obeyed (well, not really, but they all claimed to). This just eliminates the need for Team-A, because he already had a sufficiently detailed description of the target's externally visible behavior.
So, on a technicality, Linus did not reverse engineer anything. But calling this different on moral grounds? No. He wanted a particular behavior in an OS, and wanted it on his terms, not those of the few commercial vendors providing similar software. So, effectively no different than wanting, for example, SMB compatibility or BK compatibility
As someone who has ran dual-cpu workstations for years, I can personally attest to the fact that 99% of CPU heavy tasks do not make use of SMP.
As soneone else who has run dual-CPU for the past 5+ years and would never even consider going back, I would point out that unless you still run DOS, more than one CPU means you can run more than one CPU-hungry app at a time.
Even when only performing a single task, overall system responsiveness goes way up. And when actually pushing both/all CPUs to their limit, responsiveness goes from "none" to "still acceptible".
isn't going to run any better on Dual-Core, because these games are not designed to run multiple threads simultaneously
But actually, they will run better, because all the little things going on in the background will no longer compete with them for CPU time - Or perhaps more importantly, for L1 cache.
SevenZip
Actually, 7zip does support multithreading, you just need to set it as an option (or use "-mmt" for the command line version).
But no, most individual software packages, considered in isolation, won't gain all that much from multiple cores, I agree with you on that. But the overall user experience will improve drastically.
We should be worried about manufacturers charging per-core licenses for their software.
Why? Double nothing still equals nothing.
Let Larry E and the like go ahead and try to gouge his loyal cusomers even more - All the more motivation to switch to FOSS alternatives.
Is this Intel rushing something to maket?
Don't worry, they just need a head-start to prepare for the massive recall (and possible liability suits, depending on how many houses burn down) when the world discoveres what it means to have 250W worth of CPU packed into a square inch of silicon.
Where the heck were the Africans, the Indians, the Chinese, the Middle Easterns, the Egyptians, the Brazilians, the Mexicans, and of course, the Australians in the Trek shows after TOS??
At the risk of sounding a tad racist, "Not in the target demographic".
You assume Television, at its core, involves story-telling. Wrong. Television involves nothing beyond "find a target demographic, figure out what they buy, and sell that to them, oh yeah and provide visual stimulii of what they like to keep control of their eyes". What group forms the vast majority of Trekkies? Young white American males. What do you see on ANY show targetted at young white American males? White American-like males in charge (not always young due to the whole alpha-male thing), with plenty of white scantily-clad female eye-candy (or occasionally non-white females for an "exotic" flavor, but as a quick reality-check, how often do you see non-white females romantically involved with a member of her own ethnic group unless he treats her like crap?).
TOS, while not fitting with what we might consider mainstream American values of its time period, did (perhaps unintentionally) score a bulls-eye on its demographic - Young white American males who, at that time, considered it "cool" to hang out with minorities to boost their apparent open-mindedness (a phenomenon we still have, with "wiggers" - middle-class white kids who flock to their three-out-of-2400 black or hispanic classmates to give themselves more "street cred".
And no, I do not mean one word of this as a troll - You either "get" it, or you don't.
The recent "change in ownership" of LexisNexis, for an "undisclosed sum"...
They plan to pull a "but Bhopal happened before we owned them, boo-hoo, leave us alone you bullies".
I imagine the gamma rays would have problems going through several layers of iron and concrete
Believe it or not, we have 3/4ths of our planet literally covered in one of the simplest ways known to block high-energy photons - Water.
The GRB in question killed sea life.
living deep inside a skyscraper won't save you. Living on the far side of the planet would, at least on the short-term, but the longer-term consequences of a GRB sterilizing one side of the planet would not leave the Earth a very health place.
The 50 cent piece hasn't been made in years, it has been phased out
Funny, I have a few from 2005, one from 2004... No 2003s (not that they don't exist, I just don't happen to have any)... a few 2002, and dozens from years before that.
The US also issued a large batch of $2 bills in 2003 (not sure if they did so since then).
Personally, I enjoy paying for things in bizarre currency... a $2, a Sacajawea, and a Kennedy half, for a $3.50 tip. Things like that. It usually makes cashiers laugh, and I have yet to get arrested for it. Then again, I know better than to shop at Best Buy for anything... I think we can draw some pretty solid negative conclusions about the fellow involved from that fact alone.
I have learned not to try to use SBA dollars anywhere but banks, however... Cashiers simply assume them as quarters without a second glance (which, AFAIK, caused their demise in the first place... What a dumb size, shape (milled edges), and color to make a dollar coin!)
Have you actually successfully done this?
Well, as a scam, no. Legitimately buying a single unit to evaluate, yes.
Of course, they actually did image the drive (I suspect it would cost take most major OEMs more than the price of a single copy of XP to change their standard McDonald's-like assembly line of PC creation for one machine), but waved a whopping $100 off the $3500 price tag.
And no, I don't refer to Dell specifically... Though from my experience with them, I strongly suspect they'd throw in a free blow-job from Michael Dell's own mother if I made a large enough sale conditional on it.
...Lie.
The problem here centers around you wanting to buy a laptop on which you plan to put Linux. While I agree you absolutely, unquestioningly should have that option, and the law even somewhat agrees with our opinion on the matter, Dell can laugh off a lawsuit that would cost you 3x the price of the laptop, just to get a $199 refund.
So the secret here, to get your way - Shop as a "large business" customer. When you call, you want to buy 20 units, with a single unit initially to evaluate for suitability for your particular needs, the nature of which you of course can't disclose due to an NDA.
Naturally, your department already has a 500-license VLK version of XP Pro, and anyway, you need to throw Datacenter Server 2003 on it (for which you already have 37 licenses with three spares) so don't need XP in the first place, so would the kindly send it to you unimaged.
At this point some companies will flat out refuse, but most will put greed ahead of common sense and play along.
It will help to make up a PO number (that just appears on your invoice, it doesn't actually "mean" anything if you pay by credit card) and some bogus company name at your address (again, doesn't mean anything, you'll still get it as long as you have your name on the shipping address).
Whether we care or not, we have been a target, and we are much weaker than big companies to defend ourselves. We'd be fools not to care.
Okay, fine, you "care", I agree that you need to use extreme caution to protect yourself from the mess of legal BS inherent in the type of code you produce (ie, anything that lessens the corporate hegemony over content and the distribution thereof). But from your own description, you do exactly as much as it takes to avoid legal trouble, and go out of your way to make adding on to the core project very, very easy.
You don't "care" about the law or the patents, beyond the danger they pose to your personal freedom and finances. I may give a mugger my wallet, but only because he has a gun, not because I consider him in the right.
You use phrases such as "official and liable structure" and "official VLC releases", knowing perfectly well that, although you have a damn fine core app, 90% of its actual usefulness comes from third-party developers supporting various patented formats and that no one actually runs just your official builds, but rather, ones that support things like DTS, MPEG4, and the like.
Don't get me wrong, I greatly respect what you do, and thank you from the bottom of my heart for helping the rest of us make use of the so-called "right" of interoperability that the corporate world would deny us be exploiting technicalities. I fully understand the need to CYA, and don't hold your need to denounce what you "really" do in public forums against you.
Thank you.
Of course, I would hate to put words in your mouth, and perhaps you really do vehemently disagree with all of what I've written above. In which case, why bother continuing? As you say yourself, if you wanted to stay strictly legal rather than skirting the edges and hoping no one (with a legal team) notices, you would basically just have another Vorbis and Theora player.
I recognize that there aren't a great deal of resources available to the average Free Software programmer, but surely after the deal with GIF a little more dilligence has been put into patent research?
Um... Why?
Some will take this as a troll, but I mean it in all seriousness when I ask "So what?"
The current patent minefield leaves NO room for independant implementations of any software concept any of us have ever heard of that that didn't originate either with-or-before Turing, or directly from the Open Source world. And even for those, it wouldn't surprise me to hear about some astoundingly trivial and ancient technique suddenly under patent, by companies that have adopted "extortion racket" as their business model (small enough fish can't afford to fight back).
Software like VLC and MPlayer know perfectly well that they violate a countless number of patents, and the authors just don't care (and if you really think they all live in Europe, I'd like you to show me "Connecticut" on a map of Europe). Any legit project that makes use of their source code needs their head checked, but projects like VLC don't care about infringement. And users thereof don't, either.
The corporate world, and the governments that pander to it, needs to realize that a growing number of people simply don't care about copyright or intellectual property in general (or to extend this a bit, about drug laws, speed limits, Terri Schivo, the outcome of our quadrennial tweedledum-vs-tweedledee popularity contest, and so on). The more they buy laws that result in serious congnitive dissonance when compared with physical reality, the less people take all laws seriously.
Software patents in Europe will have absolutely no effect on "our" world. The CEOs can all fret about the impending end to their current business models, the congresses/parliaments can all pass laws as fast as they like, but we will win. This particular "setback" just means that we'll start seeing a LOT more projects coming out of the Vanuatu's newest territory, Michigan. And in a decade, we might well have a large volume of software written on Saturn's newest moon, California, despite not even having a lunar colony by then.
But remember that no matter how "good" an electrical impulse can make you feel, I have a hard time believing computers will EVER be able to simulate the effects of love and what its like to be physical with someone you love.
Did you cry when Aeris died?
Imagine that... The internet actually getting used for one of its single most useful potentials - Preserving true and absolute freedom of speech.
Guess what? Canadian gag-orders don't apply in the US (and vice-versa). US cryptography export restrictions don't apply from Norway. Just about any of the BS Sharia laws don't apply outside the Middle East. Pretty much nothing applies in Vanuatu.
Welcome to the dawn of a new era. Wake up, world leaders, and smell the coffee - Doesn't it smell so deliciously like your obsolescence? Your petty little regional fiefdoms no longer exist. If the entire planet doesn't agree with you, you lose.
If the processors that big how the heck will I fit it on my motherboard?!
Well, the processor itself only takes a few square inches - The rest of the box held the liquid nitrogen cooling system needed to keep the thing slightly cooler than the surface of the sun.
What does this mean for copy protected CDs?
Legally, absolutely nothing. MGM can tell us we have a moon made of green cheese, God wants us to kill gay baby whales, and that we can copy CDs, and none of it means anything at all in court.
Also, we need to skip over the fact that Phillips has denounced these broken CDs as not actually CDs. So let's reduce the question to referring to more-or-less CD-like audio discs.
So... Ignoring all of the above... The answer still depends. CD copy protection refers to quite a few different technologies, ranging from the "copyright" bit, to broken TOCs, to unrecoverable C2 errors, to trying to install what amounts to a virus on your computer, to (haven't seen these come out yet, but I fully expect it eventually) data-only discs that will never ever play on a normal audio CD player.
In the first case (copyright bit), this does nothing more than the "Copyright 2005" already on the outside of the CD packaging. Fair use wins.
In the second and third cases, if your player can still read the disc, you probably don't even know the disc has any form of structural damage, so you don't need to circumvent any protections. Fair use wins.
In the fifth case, this would pretty much match the current internally-inconsistant legal situation with DVDs... You have the "right" to copy it, but you would have to break the law (DMCA) to do so, by breaking whatever access control mechanisms (however weak) the disc has.
The fourth case gets really interesting, though... These discs usually have two sections, an audio section and a data section containing something like WMA files. Once you get infected with the "driver" for these discs, you cannot access the audio tracks, only the digital ones. So post-infection, the situation reduces to #5 (thus my elaboration on that one out-of-order). Before infection, we get into a whole world of nasty tangled legal problems that I do not have the qualifications (IANAL, obviously) to comment on beyond mere speculation. For example, do you have the "right" to not install unwanted software on your computer? If so, press the shift key and have a ball. And what if you run Linux? Does the non-availability of a virus/driver for the protected content exempt you from having to worry about its existance (in that case, you would simply access the otherwise-unprotected audio tracks, you couldn't access the data track)? What if you have autoplay disabled by default, for security reasons (as EVERYONE should!)? Could that still count as circumvention, even though it doesn't require you to "do" anything? Tricky.
Overall, it will take either a new law like the DMCA, or a massive shift in public opinion on this matter, before you'll see any media companies try to take someone to court simply for ripping their own CDs or even DVDs. They would have an exceedingly difficult time proving you broke the law, they would risk the courts declaring sections of laws such as the DMCA invalid, and the cost of losing would set a precedent that, in their current mindset, would completely destroy their current business model. Not to mention, if they win, they would risk enormous public backlash, along with the possibility of huge lawsuits in some cases (Sony, for example, producing CDs, CD copy protection, and MP3 players, can only get away with that level of corporate psychosis because the law remains somewhat unclear on the entire issue).
I for one cannot think of why it would be ok to rip cds but not rip dvds.
Er... Read the subject line of the post to which you responded - "What about DeCSS?"
Although I would tend to agree with you, on any and all lines of reasoning short of "US Law" (which has very little "reason" involved), the DMCA (sort-of) says you can rip CDs but not DVDs. Why? CDs have no access control mechanism, while DVDs do (however weak and pathetic we may consider it), namely, CSS. Thus, you cannot rip a DVD without circumventing that access control mechanism, thereby breaking the law.
Now, does that stop me, or just about anyone, from making backups of their DVDs? Nope. The legality of it doesn't even drift across my thoughts in a vague indistinct uneasy sort of way (which, incidentally, I believe relates well to the entire problem of kids pirating massive amounts of media content online - The law has gotten so absurd in this area that people can't care, they just do it without thinking twice about what Officer Friendly might have to say about it). But it still breaks the law, technically.
Plus the ecological effects of converting vast tracts of land to fuel crops.
While I would otherwise agree with you, in this case, we've already done it - We call them "lawns".
It really surprises me that burning grass hasn't already become popular (I'll admit, I never thought of it before, though I certainly plan to look into it now). How many millions of tons of yard waste do developed nations produce each year, that we could leech for minerals then compress into fuel pellets, basically for free (better than free, in fact, because we can use something we would otherwise pay to have hauled away, to lower our winter heating costs).
Sadly, TFA has a rather dissapointing lack of information. It says grass pellets have 96% of the energy value of wood pellets, okay, good to know - But how about info for DIY'ers? Where can I buy a home pellet-mill? Anything special I would need to do to retrofit a wood pellet stove? Certain types of organic yard debris we shouldn't use due to increasing the pollution from burning it? Things of that nature.
Overall, a useless front-page article, but I thank the author anyway, for exposing me to an idea I simply never thought of myself.
Kudos on a great post... Had I not already posted to this topic, I'd mod you up.
;-)
Seven standard deviations--wow! As far as I know, there are not any tests that could measure that high.
Almost certainly not, at least none that (as you pointed out) we can ascribe any statistical significance to their outcome. Usually, such high IQs come from people who, as children, scored well above the ceiling on the Stanford Binet or WISC (160 for both, but by ignoring the score-limiting rules, rules you can calculate less-meaningful scores above that).
Then, giving much harder tests to that 160+ group, you can rank them among themselves... Such rankings may not have much external validity, however - From the perspective of someone right at the mean, 1SD down (an 85) seems dumb as a sack of stones, while someone with a 115 seems pretty bright. Would that same apparent difference hold from the POV of someone with an IQ of 160? Tough to say, even if you did have that, because you would have an extremely skewed baseline idea of "dumb as a sack of stones", ie, very nearly everyone.
After a certain point though (with IQ), it becomes impossible to get a large enough sample to validate the test for individuals with a very high IQ.
I agree completely. For the 150-180 range, you can probably get enough people to make a significant ranking, but above 180? Such scores strike me as more like asking about the world's top 10 richest people - The actual ranking changes from day to day (though one or two people might consistantly come out way ahead of the rest, such as Ingvar Kamprad and Bill Gates), and depends heavily on the testing method (Kamprad passed gates not because of a shift in their actual local-currency-net-worth, but because the Kroner gained heavily on the Dollar over the past few years).
How then do you test IQ for that population?
Internal ranking, and by including people under that class but close enough to at least get a few questions right, you can try to extrapolate those rankings down to include we mere normals... If someone with a 190IQ would correctly answer 75% of the questions on a given test (I've ignored time limits for most of this, which as you point out makes a good way to get a finer-grained score, but ever so complicates describing the situation for casual conversation such as this), and a 145IQ would correcly answer only 10% of the questions, you can then use that to scale results back to a test where a 145IQ scores 75% and a normal person scores 10%, even though the normal person might not have the capacity to answer a single question on the harder test.
Testing very high IQ children takes a similar approach - You just have the kid take the SAT, where you can very accurately compare them to much older children with a well-known distribution of scores. This of course has the problem wherein the child might not have exposure to certain concept on the SAT, but you can compensate for that on a sub-test basis (if they get a very high score on the basic algebra section but completely blow the trig section, you can omit the latter from consideration as a simple lack of exposure).
But overall, no, I agree that approach lacks significance when dealing with a sample of 6 people in the entire world, but until we come up with an AI having a nice smoothly-adjustable "IQ" parameter, we can't do much better.