Here is the survey that he is referring to. It wasn't 56 Americans, it was 3000 people from 9 countries. In the US 800 people were interviewed.
I do agree that most of the things mentioned in the article was politicial crap, though, but the people responsible for localisation should know well enough to check things like maps and language usage throughout products, as it gets extremely sensitive many places.
It wasn't just that the US youth scored badly, but in a group of 9 countries, only the Mexican youth scored worse. The test isn't particularly hard either - it's multiple choice.
Other interesting tidbits: Swedish youth were more than twice as likely to select the right choice for the size of the US population, where the options were "between 10 and 50 million", "between 150 and 350 million", "between 500 and 750 million", "between 1 billion and 2 billion" or "I don't know".... Hardly a difficult question. Even so, only 55% of the Swedish youth (who did best on this question) got it right.
11% of the US youth tested couldn't even pick out the US on a world map when the other choices available were Canada, China, Colombia and "I don't know"...
That said, the US and Mexico were not alone in answering shockingly badly on many questions. Canada and the UK also got pretty close...
True. But that's a great thing. It shows that Linux is reintroducing competition into the IT marketspace. Once more governments catch on, they'll all be running Linux pilots in the hope of forcing Microsoft to drop their prices. If anything it will hurt Microsofts bottom line, and some are bound to decide to jump ship anyway.
Someone posted in some other forum on this very issue that this is also great for another reason: It proves to everyone looking that Linux is a serious contended worth considering - why else would Microsoft see a need to fund an "independent" study AND massively drop their prices to prevent a move?
So see this as free marketing: Microsoft is telling the world that Linux is good enough for large government deployments.
You're assuming a closed system. Since when did a lake become a closed system? As many others have pointed out: Consider colder seasons, rain, cold water entering from rivers etc. Now, look at the other side: Consider the consistent heat added by sunlight and warm air over the entire surfae of the lake. Want to bet that this project is going to be lost in statistical noise if measuring the total energy input and output of Lake Ontario?
Except the cost of something large enough to be worthwhile would likely be in the hundreds or thousands of dollars, not fifty.
Adding "just" 10 GB of RAM based storage to the machine would require extra circuit boards that would eat at least the space of one of your PCI cards, well above a thousand dollars based of DIMM's, a built in UPS to last at least long enough for a sustained write of 10GB to disk, a 10GB disk, a controller to handle access and backup to the disk.
If you were lucky, you'd manage to get it in the 1500-2000 USD range with present RAM prices. The problem is that the cost is entirely dictated by RAM prices, not the rest of the components, and RAM is not cheap even though it already IS manufactured in large quantities.
The other issue is that this kind of storage is really only suitable for situation with frequent writes - otherwise you could just have lots of RAM and let your VM subsystem page the data in for you. After an initial period of occasional slow access, your entire dataset will be in RAM. If you need it paged in as quickly as possible, all you'd need would be to read through the full data set and discard the read blocks, and you'd force it to be paged in.
This means that for most people it's simply not particularly useful. Just buying more RAM would be a better investment.
The areas it IS really useful in is for accelerating systems that hold critical data that MUST be written to "disk" and MUST be retained after a power failure or crash and that has a consistent high write load, like frequently updated databases, mail queues etc. For those kind of applications, battery backed RAM with drive backup functionality is increasingly used for at least part of the storage (journals and logs for DB applications for instance) and can have dramatic effects. There prices is less of an issue, as the alternative (lots more expensive servers) can justify quite high storage prices.
Which is meaningless. You don't need to show identification before entering your car, or doing a thousand things that is many times more likely to turn you into a burned out unidentifiable corpse.
Also, can you point us to the openly available documentation of government policies that statet that this is the case?
Part of the reasons for Gilmore's lawsuit is that the government refuses to aknowledge whether or not there is a government requirement requiring the presentation of id. If the requirement is there, and it's purpose is only to identify the corpse, then why isn't it stated openly by the government?
As to your silly idea that you can't change seats after boarding an airplane - all that does is tell me that you don't fly very often.
The issue isn't that ID can be faked, but that the single largest, but public terrorist attack in recent times was conducted by people who DID show ID, and who was till not stopped.
Can you point us to ANY data that indicate that the id requirement reduce terrorism? Can you point us to any hijackings from before the id requirement was added that were carried out by people who would have been stopped if they'd have to present id?
In short, is there ANY proof, or even circumstantial evidence that indicate that this policy makes a difference on terrorism?
But most people wouldn't find it very difficult to bludgeon someone with the larger models of D-cell maglites. They are heavy, hard and large. A step or two down from a baseball bat perhapse, but more sufficient to hurt you badly unless the prospective hijacker is an 80 year old woman with arthritis.
If someone is going to die aboard the plane anyway, why would they care if they were anonymous? The 9/11 hijackers didn't seem to have a problem with having to present their ID's.
The only thing flash is good for is making it easier for me to selectively turn off ads and annoying useless content in a quick and painless way (obviously by making sure NOT to have the player)
You do "have that now". A number of companies manufacture systems like that, but the cost is extremely high. It's not like you can just slot together a system like that of off the shelf parts, and volumes are small. Additionally, to get full advantage of it you need something faster than most standard disk controllers. Some companies doing this, like Platypus, have custom PCI cards to connect to their cache boxes to get as much speed from them as possible.
If you're going to use those annoying "GiB"/"MiB" units at least use them correctly, will you? If the harddisk was marketed as 200GB, it likely is 200GB according to your use of the units, not 200GiB.
Re:How can the average person protect his/her doma
on
The Saga of Katie.com
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· Score: 1
On the contrary. You DO get trademark through use. Registering a trademark still requires you to use it to get protection. You get copyright production by just publishing.
I can't agree with you. SF has ALWAYS been about social commentary, fantasy, science, crime stories, space opera, rehashing old themes and more.
Look at Asimov. Few of his books are about "unabashed love of science and technology". His robot stories cover classical literature subjects such as what it means to be human, crime stories, space opera, etc. Very few of them use science as anything but a prop.
The entire Foundation series is for the most part one big epic space opera.
Of old classics, the Time Machine uses technology purely as a deus-ex-machina. Frankenstein is yet another Golem story about what it means to be human, with some horror thrown in. First and last men and Starmaker is about humanity and the immenseness of time and space, not technology. Yes, there are examples of old hard SF - Jules Verne was perhaps one of the most marked exponents for it, but also less known names like Edwin A. Abbot (Flatland - a book entirely about geometry... Someone who manages to make that entertaining can't be considered anything but a genius...).
Throughout all of the last century there were large numbers of well known, well respected SF authors that churned out well received books in all the categories you seem to dislike.
Apart from the obvious example of Asimov, books such as Solaris or the Cyberiad (Stanislaw Lem; allthough the latter may seem to focus a lot on the "science" you might notice that it's all science in the Star Trek tradition - absolutely no substance or relevance to science as such, and all about creating props to tell a morality tale or similar), the War with the newts (Karel Capek), almost everything by Philip K. Dick, A Lathe of Heaven (Ursula LeGuin), This perfect day (Ira Levin), Brave New World (Aldous Huxley) are all examples of highly regarded books written over a wide period of the last century where the science is for the most part completely without relevance - the stories could just as well have been told without it, but the settings serve to define the stories and make it easier to pick up.
Perhaps the reason why you think this is a new phenomenon is that it's much easier to separate out the part of the genre you want among books that already have well defined fan bases and where the authors to look for are "obvious" and perhaps because the hard SF have in periods often dominated the mainstream public view of what SF is and so is more ingrained in popular culture.
I jut can't agree with your list at the end. While I'm sure many good SF writers fit, many of the finest SF writers of our time completely fail to meet your criteria.
Olaf Stapledon (Starmaker, Last and first men) and Edwin A. Abbott (Flatland) didn't even really care about SF at all, or consider their work SF. William Gibson have long been successfull because his knowledge of many of the subjects he wrote about was superficial and caused him to stay clear of technical details - books like Neuromancer are technologically naive, but that is their strength - technology is just a backdrop and facilitator.
Even of authors that do or did fit your list, many of the greatest SF writers often do great work despite NOT making use of much scientific knowledge or approaching cutting edge topics. Asimov is a prime example. While he's written hundreds of books about science, and many of his SF books ARE great examples of good use of science in SF, a large number of his SF books use science only as a backdrop and facilitator for short explorations of morality and what it means to be human.
His robot stories, for instance have very little science in them, and even less science that is actually relevant to the purpose of the story. Look at stories like "Bicentennial man". You can ignore any mention of technology - the only thing that is important is the question of what it means to be human.
It has increased relevance the better we get at building robots and the better we get at putting mechanical parts in humans, but neither needs to happen for the story to make sence or be important. Would a human that lived forever still be human? Is everything that looks, acts, sounds like a living being actually alive? Before you rebut claiming it was a groundbreaking cutting edge theme: No it wasn't. It's a theme found countless times in older literature, including Pygmalion (or the play based on it, My fair lady) and Frankenstein, many of which borrow from various adaptations of the Jewish Golem legends.
A significant number of Asimovs other root stories are based on a very simple recipe: We have a robot. The robot has to follow rules. Robot is put in a situation where following the rules have unexpected and unintended results. The end.
Their success isn't that they're relying on groundbreaking science (they were not) or that the rules were particularly earth shattering (which I asume is why Asimov didn't explicitly formulate them himself) - both of it is just setting for an exploration of themes like what assumptions we make, how quick we are to ascribe human emotions or concepts to behaviour that have simple logical explanations, human rationality (or lack thereof)
Other of his robot stories, such as Naked Sun, while retaining some of the "robot has to follow rules - leads to unexpected results" bit, are essentially crime stories using robots as props.
Asimov isn't alone in this. "Hard SF" that focus on the science is just a very small part of the SF spectrum. Large parts of successfull SF is successful because it doesn't make the science the story, but use the science to tell stories they couldn't as easily tell otherwise. Star Trek fit into this latter category - If you look at the original series and TNG they are almost all short morality plays using the setting in the future to make Roddenberry's particular idea of morality and ethics palatable to the studios.
Another vein is the SF as modern day magic tradition, which is perhaps best exemplified with Stanislaw Lem. Look at the Cyberiad for the clearest example of what I mean - where technology is both ridiculed by combinding a medieval setting with robots and bizarre contraptions, and celebrated, creating what often looks more like fantasy than SF, but replacing spells and dragons with computers and robots.
This argument is pure bullshit. Evolution is the counter example. Since intelligence can increase through natural selection, it follows that given an entity of a specific level of intelligence you can "design" a more intelligent entity by "simply" copying evolution - apply pressures to ensure that the most intelligent are a lot more likely of breeding.
The same holds for robots. If we manage to engineer robots that are just as intelligent as us, all it takes to design robots that are MORE intelligent than us is to allow random variations in the design specs, and use methods such as crossover to promote the design variations that are evaluated as most successful. Yes, it will result in a lot of failures, but many could be discarded by validation and simulation, and would eventually be successfull.
They wouldn't need to. If the ability to dramatically increase your productivity is available to anyone, then all employers need to do is to keep looking for employees with the best evidence for high productivity in their past career. Competition will take care of the rest. After all it won't matter to your employer WHY you are highly productive as long as it's not a risk to them, only HOW productive you are.
It's not that simple. This slander of title suit requires the following for SCO to win it: a) They need to prove malice. That is they need to prove that Novell knew they didn't own the copyrights and acted with ill will with the statements they made. b) They need to plead "special damages" as a result of Novell's statements, that is they need to be able to point to specific and likely non-monetary losses.
To make SCO lose the suit, Novell can attack either or all of these. An obvious way to win the suit would be for Novell to get the issue of copyright decided. If Novell can prove that they own the copyright (by getting the judge to consider whether the APA with amendments satisfy the federal rules for a copyright transfer or not) then SCO has lost (and Novell might have a case for a counter suit...).
So while you're right that they aren't sued for copyright infringement, that is irrelevant - the ownership of the copyright can still potentially decide the case.
However deciding the ownership of the copyright could potentially drag out - it would likely require discovery, and we know from SCO vs IBM that SCO are good at dragging out discovery.
What Novell has chosen instead is to try the quick option, while still leaving the more painfull option open for later. They try for the dismissal now, arguing that regardless of who owns the copyright, the ownership isn't clear (pointing out that the judge too said it wasn't clear) which would in itself mean that SCO can't win the case because they can't prove malice. They also argue that informing about the dispute is priviledged communication (meaning you can't sue for slander over it, amongst other things) and as such the statements they made can't be slander.
They then claim that this can be decided as a matter of law based on filings so far, and their references to public statement, without need for discovery.
The worst thing that can happen to Novell is that the judge decides that the matter isn't quite so clear cut, and Novell can try for a summary judgement again later in the process after some discovery.
The worst thing that can happen to SCO is that their case is dead, dismissed with predjudice, preventing them from refiling the same or similar claims against Novell. This would essentially permanently cast doubt on whether they actually own any copyrights at all, making it near impossible for them to try to enforce copyright claims against anyone else, meaning that Novell gets almost the same benefits with much less risk (each unused opportunity to kill SCO's claims increases the chance that Novell might get screwed over by a mistake later, so why take the risk)
There is absolutely no basis for your idea that Linus "added functionality to" Minix or that Linux was "baed" on Minix. Linus ran Minix, he didn't use it as a base for the Linux code. Given the massive structural differences between the two (Linux is a monolithic kernel, Minix is a micro kernel system) that should be quite apparent.
The main problem I have with using biometric security everywhere is one of personal safety. A password I can give up, but my fingerprint and retinal scans would require an attacker to either bring me along or bring along pieces of me (depending on type of system and ruthlessness of attacker) which is something I'd rather not risk for anything where unauthorised access isn't worth extensive damage or death.
I can certainly see applications for biometric security where giving up access credentials means the death of other people or similar horrific results, but
not for protection of assets that would already be insured, that can be replaced, but that are still valuable enough for someone to be willing to injure me or take my life over.
Most of the time separating the authentication from you as a person is a benefit, even though it does allow abuse.
And then the judge would tell you that it was inadmissable as evidence because you hadn't complied with discovery requests or motions granted by the judge before the trial, and grant summary judgement in favor of the other side....
Unless the lawyers for the other side are incompetent, they will know more or less everything you might have to use against them well before trial. Either because it will be documents you are required to present to them, or because they'll have carefully crafted discovery requests and motions to figure out what you've got.
In this particular case, you'll find that IBM for instance have asked for summary judgement on some of SCO's claims because IBM claim they haven't produced any evidence. If successfull, those claims will never even reach trial.
SCO's only way around that is to point out with specificity to the judge any shred of evidence they might have regarding those particular claims.
Which means that either IBM gets rid of the claims, or they get a detailed overview of what evidence SCO will be using to justify those claims during trial, allowing them to target the specific evidence in their further discovery and other preparations.
"become null and void"? That is making the assumption they meant anything in the first place, which is rather presumptious.
Re:similar scenario in Antarctica
on
Lawyers In Space...
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· Score: 4, Insightful
The problem with this is that:
a) there is a strong presence of governments on earth that have signed on to the Antarctic treaty, while in outer space there is not. As a consequence, someone colonising a small part of a planet would likely be able to maintain effective possession of a land area there, and the longer they hold it the less likely it would be that it would be tolerable for many countries to try to remove them by force.
b) Most of Antarctica has been claimed by one ore more states. If one were to ignore the antarctic treaty, there would be minimal basis for anyone else but some subset/intersection of the countries who have claims and the countries who maintain current scientific missions to Antarctica. As a result there is little possibility for a claim to have any shred of legal backing unless they get the support of one of the stronger claimaints. This could very well happen, but still presents an obstacle that's not present for outer space.
I think you'll see property claims for outer space upheld eventually, but only once they can be defended by actual possession over a period of time.
The current treaties aren't signed by nearly all nations, and they're furthermore written from a standpoint of the signatories and/or UN representing all of mankind and mankind having rights to pass laws for the entire universe. This again breaks down the moment there are practical means for someone to colonise outer space but not practical means to mount military operations to stop them. (Not to mention if there turns out to be life on other planets)
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I do agree that most of the things mentioned in the article was politicial crap, though, but the people responsible for localisation should know well enough to check things like maps and language usage throughout products, as it gets extremely sensitive many places.
It wasn't just that the US youth scored badly, but in a group of 9 countries, only the Mexican youth scored worse. The test isn't particularly hard either - it's multiple choice.
Other interesting tidbits: Swedish youth were more than twice as likely to select the right choice for the size of the US population, where the options were "between 10 and 50 million", "between 150 and 350 million", "between 500 and 750 million", "between 1 billion and 2 billion" or "I don't know".... Hardly a difficult question. Even so, only 55% of the Swedish youth (who did best on this question) got it right.
11% of the US youth tested couldn't even pick out the US on a world map when the other choices available were Canada, China, Colombia and "I don't know"...
That said, the US and Mexico were not alone in answering shockingly badly on many questions. Canada and the UK also got pretty close...
Someone posted in some other forum on this very issue that this is also great for another reason: It proves to everyone looking that Linux is a serious contended worth considering - why else would Microsoft see a need to fund an "independent" study AND massively drop their prices to prevent a move?
So see this as free marketing: Microsoft is telling the world that Linux is good enough for large government deployments.
You're assuming a closed system. Since when did a lake become a closed system? As many others have pointed out: Consider colder seasons, rain, cold water entering from rivers etc. Now, look at the other side: Consider the consistent heat added by sunlight and warm air over the entire surfae of the lake. Want to bet that this project is going to be lost in statistical noise if measuring the total energy input and output of Lake Ontario?
Adding "just" 10 GB of RAM based storage to the machine would require extra circuit boards that would eat at least the space of one of your PCI cards, well above a thousand dollars based of DIMM's, a built in UPS to last at least long enough for a sustained write of 10GB to disk, a 10GB disk, a controller to handle access and backup to the disk.
If you were lucky, you'd manage to get it in the 1500-2000 USD range with present RAM prices. The problem is that the cost is entirely dictated by RAM prices, not the rest of the components, and RAM is not cheap even though it already IS manufactured in large quantities.
The other issue is that this kind of storage is really only suitable for situation with frequent writes - otherwise you could just have lots of RAM and let your VM subsystem page the data in for you. After an initial period of occasional slow access, your entire dataset will be in RAM. If you need it paged in as quickly as possible, all you'd need would be to read through the full data set and discard the read blocks, and you'd force it to be paged in.
This means that for most people it's simply not particularly useful. Just buying more RAM would be a better investment.
The areas it IS really useful in is for accelerating systems that hold critical data that MUST be written to "disk" and MUST be retained after a power failure or crash and that has a consistent high write load, like frequently updated databases, mail queues etc. For those kind of applications, battery backed RAM with drive backup functionality is increasingly used for at least part of the storage (journals and logs for DB applications for instance) and can have dramatic effects. There prices is less of an issue, as the alternative (lots more expensive servers) can justify quite high storage prices.
And having to carry identification is fundamentally different from having to show it and prove who you are before you are suspected of anything.
Also, can you point us to the openly available documentation of government policies that statet that this is the case?
Part of the reasons for Gilmore's lawsuit is that the government refuses to aknowledge whether or not there is a government requirement requiring the presentation of id. If the requirement is there, and it's purpose is only to identify the corpse, then why isn't it stated openly by the government?
As to your silly idea that you can't change seats after boarding an airplane - all that does is tell me that you don't fly very often.
Can you point us to ANY data that indicate that the id requirement reduce terrorism? Can you point us to any hijackings from before the id requirement was added that were carried out by people who would have been stopped if they'd have to present id?
In short, is there ANY proof, or even circumstantial evidence that indicate that this policy makes a difference on terrorism?
But most people wouldn't find it very difficult to bludgeon someone with the larger models of D-cell maglites. They are heavy, hard and large. A step or two down from a baseball bat perhapse, but more sufficient to hurt you badly unless the prospective hijacker is an 80 year old woman with arthritis.
If someone is going to die aboard the plane anyway, why would they care if they were anonymous? The 9/11 hijackers didn't seem to have a problem with having to present their ID's.
The only thing flash is good for is making it easier for me to selectively turn off ads and annoying useless content in a quick and painless way (obviously by making sure NOT to have the player)
You do "have that now". A number of companies manufacture systems like that, but the cost is extremely high. It's not like you can just slot together a system like that of off the shelf parts, and volumes are small. Additionally, to get full advantage of it you need something faster than most standard disk controllers. Some companies doing this, like Platypus, have custom PCI cards to connect to their cache boxes to get as much speed from them as possible.
If you're going to use those annoying "GiB"/"MiB" units at least use them correctly, will you? If the harddisk was marketed as 200GB, it likely is 200GB according to your use of the units, not 200GiB.
On the contrary. You DO get trademark through use. Registering a trademark still requires you to use it to get protection. You get copyright production by just publishing.
Look at Asimov. Few of his books are about "unabashed love of science and technology". His robot stories cover classical literature subjects such as what it means to be human, crime stories, space opera, etc. Very few of them use science as anything but a prop.
The entire Foundation series is for the most part one big epic space opera.
Of old classics, the Time Machine uses technology purely as a deus-ex-machina. Frankenstein is yet another Golem story about what it means to be human, with some horror thrown in. First and last men and Starmaker is about humanity and the immenseness of time and space, not technology. Yes, there are examples of old hard SF - Jules Verne was perhaps one of the most marked exponents for it, but also less known names like Edwin A. Abbot (Flatland - a book entirely about geometry... Someone who manages to make that entertaining can't be considered anything but a genius...).
Throughout all of the last century there were large numbers of well known, well respected SF authors that churned out well received books in all the categories you seem to dislike.
Apart from the obvious example of Asimov, books such as Solaris or the Cyberiad (Stanislaw Lem; allthough the latter may seem to focus a lot on the "science" you might notice that it's all science in the Star Trek tradition - absolutely no substance or relevance to science as such, and all about creating props to tell a morality tale or similar), the War with the newts (Karel Capek), almost everything by Philip K. Dick, A Lathe of Heaven (Ursula LeGuin), This perfect day (Ira Levin), Brave New World (Aldous Huxley) are all examples of highly regarded books written over a wide period of the last century where the science is for the most part completely without relevance - the stories could just as well have been told without it, but the settings serve to define the stories and make it easier to pick up.
Perhaps the reason why you think this is a new phenomenon is that it's much easier to separate out the part of the genre you want among books that already have well defined fan bases and where the authors to look for are "obvious" and perhaps because the hard SF have in periods often dominated the mainstream public view of what SF is and so is more ingrained in popular culture.
Olaf Stapledon (Starmaker, Last and first men) and Edwin A. Abbott (Flatland) didn't even really care about SF at all, or consider their work SF. William Gibson have long been successfull because his knowledge of many of the subjects he wrote about was superficial and caused him to stay clear of technical details - books like Neuromancer are technologically naive, but that is their strength - technology is just a backdrop and facilitator.
Even of authors that do or did fit your list, many of the greatest SF writers often do great work despite NOT making use of much scientific knowledge or approaching cutting edge topics. Asimov is a prime example. While he's written hundreds of books about science, and many of his SF books ARE great examples of good use of science in SF, a large number of his SF books use science only as a backdrop and facilitator for short explorations of morality and what it means to be human.
His robot stories, for instance have very little science in them, and even less science that is actually relevant to the purpose of the story. Look at stories like "Bicentennial man". You can ignore any mention of technology - the only thing that is important is the question of what it means to be human. It has increased relevance the better we get at building robots and the better we get at putting mechanical parts in humans, but neither needs to happen for the story to make sence or be important. Would a human that lived forever still be human? Is everything that looks, acts, sounds like a living being actually alive? Before you rebut claiming it was a groundbreaking cutting edge theme: No it wasn't. It's a theme found countless times in older literature, including Pygmalion (or the play based on it, My fair lady) and Frankenstein, many of which borrow from various adaptations of the Jewish Golem legends.
A significant number of Asimovs other root stories are based on a very simple recipe: We have a robot. The robot has to follow rules. Robot is put in a situation where following the rules have unexpected and unintended results. The end.
Their success isn't that they're relying on groundbreaking science (they were not) or that the rules were particularly earth shattering (which I asume is why Asimov didn't explicitly formulate them himself) - both of it is just setting for an exploration of themes like what assumptions we make, how quick we are to ascribe human emotions or concepts to behaviour that have simple logical explanations, human rationality (or lack thereof)
Other of his robot stories, such as Naked Sun, while retaining some of the "robot has to follow rules - leads to unexpected results" bit, are essentially crime stories using robots as props.
Asimov isn't alone in this. "Hard SF" that focus on the science is just a very small part of the SF spectrum. Large parts of successfull SF is successful because it doesn't make the science the story, but use the science to tell stories they couldn't as easily tell otherwise. Star Trek fit into this latter category - If you look at the original series and TNG they are almost all short morality plays using the setting in the future to make Roddenberry's particular idea of morality and ethics palatable to the studios.
Another vein is the SF as modern day magic tradition, which is perhaps best exemplified with Stanislaw Lem. Look at the Cyberiad for the clearest example of what I mean - where technology is both ridiculed by combinding a medieval setting with robots and bizarre contraptions, and celebrated, creating what often looks more like fantasy than SF, but replacing spells and dragons with computers and robots.
The same holds for robots. If we manage to engineer robots that are just as intelligent as us, all it takes to design robots that are MORE intelligent than us is to allow random variations in the design specs, and use methods such as crossover to promote the design variations that are evaluated as most successful. Yes, it will result in a lot of failures, but many could be discarded by validation and simulation, and would eventually be successfull.
They wouldn't need to. If the ability to dramatically increase your productivity is available to anyone, then all employers need to do is to keep looking for employees with the best evidence for high productivity in their past career. Competition will take care of the rest. After all it won't matter to your employer WHY you are highly productive as long as it's not a risk to them, only HOW productive you are.
To make SCO lose the suit, Novell can attack either or all of these. An obvious way to win the suit would be for Novell to get the issue of copyright decided. If Novell can prove that they own the copyright (by getting the judge to consider whether the APA with amendments satisfy the federal rules for a copyright transfer or not) then SCO has lost (and Novell might have a case for a counter suit...).
So while you're right that they aren't sued for copyright infringement, that is irrelevant - the ownership of the copyright can still potentially decide the case.
However deciding the ownership of the copyright could potentially drag out - it would likely require discovery, and we know from SCO vs IBM that SCO are good at dragging out discovery.
What Novell has chosen instead is to try the quick option, while still leaving the more painfull option open for later. They try for the dismissal now, arguing that regardless of who owns the copyright, the ownership isn't clear (pointing out that the judge too said it wasn't clear) which would in itself mean that SCO can't win the case because they can't prove malice. They also argue that informing about the dispute is priviledged communication (meaning you can't sue for slander over it, amongst other things) and as such the statements they made can't be slander.
They then claim that this can be decided as a matter of law based on filings so far, and their references to public statement, without need for discovery.
The worst thing that can happen to Novell is that the judge decides that the matter isn't quite so clear cut, and Novell can try for a summary judgement again later in the process after some discovery.
The worst thing that can happen to SCO is that their case is dead, dismissed with predjudice, preventing them from refiling the same or similar claims against Novell. This would essentially permanently cast doubt on whether they actually own any copyrights at all, making it near impossible for them to try to enforce copyright claims against anyone else, meaning that Novell gets almost the same benefits with much less risk (each unused opportunity to kill SCO's claims increases the chance that Novell might get screwed over by a mistake later, so why take the risk)
(ObDisclaimer: IANAL)
There is absolutely no basis for your idea that Linus "added functionality to" Minix or that Linux was "baed" on Minix. Linus ran Minix, he didn't use it as a base for the Linux code. Given the massive structural differences between the two (Linux is a monolithic kernel, Minix is a micro kernel system) that should be quite apparent.
I can certainly see applications for biometric security where giving up access credentials means the death of other people or similar horrific results, but not for protection of assets that would already be insured, that can be replaced, but that are still valuable enough for someone to be willing to injure me or take my life over.
Most of the time separating the authentication from you as a person is a benefit, even though it does allow abuse.
So how do you account for the articles referring to statements from Google that at least two people have already refused to accept the offer?
Unless the lawyers for the other side are incompetent, they will know more or less everything you might have to use against them well before trial. Either because it will be documents you are required to present to them, or because they'll have carefully crafted discovery requests and motions to figure out what you've got.
In this particular case, you'll find that IBM for instance have asked for summary judgement on some of SCO's claims because IBM claim they haven't produced any evidence. If successfull, those claims will never even reach trial. SCO's only way around that is to point out with specificity to the judge any shred of evidence they might have regarding those particular claims.
Which means that either IBM gets rid of the claims, or they get a detailed overview of what evidence SCO will be using to justify those claims during trial, allowing them to target the specific evidence in their further discovery and other preparations.
"become null and void"? That is making the assumption they meant anything in the first place, which is rather presumptious.
a) there is a strong presence of governments on earth that have signed on to the Antarctic treaty, while in outer space there is not. As a consequence, someone colonising a small part of a planet would likely be able to maintain effective possession of a land area there, and the longer they hold it the less likely it would be that it would be tolerable for many countries to try to remove them by force.
b) Most of Antarctica has been claimed by one ore more states. If one were to ignore the antarctic treaty, there would be minimal basis for anyone else but some subset/intersection of the countries who have claims and the countries who maintain current scientific missions to Antarctica. As a result there is little possibility for a claim to have any shred of legal backing unless they get the support of one of the stronger claimaints. This could very well happen, but still presents an obstacle that's not present for outer space.
I think you'll see property claims for outer space upheld eventually, but only once they can be defended by actual possession over a period of time.
The current treaties aren't signed by nearly all nations, and they're furthermore written from a standpoint of the signatories and/or UN representing all of mankind and mankind having rights to pass laws for the entire universe. This again breaks down the moment there are practical means for someone to colonise outer space but not practical means to mount military operations to stop them. (Not to mention if there turns out to be life on other planets)