The kernal itself forks every time somebody recompiles it for their machine. The OS (with all the trimmings) forks just about as quickly. This is not a problem.
Because Linux has a bunch of different uses, there is a forking tendancy. I don't want palmtop Linux to be the same as mainframe Linux. If you're good at one, you can't be good at the other.
The important thing is to have a common ABI. If the same software runs on two boxes, I don't care whether they are two different flavors of Linux, or even if they are both Linux!
The value of an OS is proportional to the size of its user base, since that defines the developer base. The size of the user base depends on ABI level compatibility--the ability to use the same program on different machines. Thus, the tendancy here is for the ABI to stay similar, because changing your own ABI cuts you off from the pack. Tendancies towards forking the ABI will come from two ends: those wishing to sabotage Linux (that is, other OS vendors), and those who extend the ABI to showcase some feature that only they have. The former can be recognized and fought; the latter will eventually extend the ABI, but allow for non-compliant software in the short term.
If ABI forking becomes a problem, the solution may be to have a centralized ABI authority. Such a group would define several ABIs (such as Linux Embedded, Linux Desktop, Linux Server), and define what services are available and how to access them. The group would then define a reference platform that provided those ABI services and only those ABI services. Any app that could run on a given reference platform gains a "logo" approval, and any platform that supports the reference ABI gets the same (whether it's Linux or not).
Dumpster dive. Actually, I knew of one company as of 1997 that was buying them out of warehouses.
That's not the trick. The trick is retarding your computer so that it will run. Race conditions render Xenix unstable past 486/75. I can't laugh too hard, though...it runs on a 286!
The assumption here is that the difference is in Linux math versus Solaris math. Considering that floating-point math is often (usually?) done in hardware, I wonder if the question is more Intel math versus Sparc math.
My suggestion is possible, but likely a bit of work. Try installing Solaris/x86 on your Linux box, or Linux/Sparc on your Solaris machine. See how the math goes there.
For more documentation, see "Cray instability" in the Jargon File.
God can make a rock so big that He cannot move it. But then, He could turn around and move it.
The above defies all logic. But why should God be hemmed in by logic? Scripture says that God's ways are beyond our ways; I interpret that to mean that God can blow our minds whenever He wants to.
AFAIK (and yes, I do some thinking on these sorts of things), there is a spectrum of sentience. We humans roughly divide it into three areas: non-sentient, semi-sentient, and sentient.
We normally consider non-sentient things are unworthy of inherent respect; usually, this includes the plant kingdom. We don't complain about logging because the trees are in pain, but only because it ruins the environment and produces other effects.
Semi-sentient things are usually higher animals. We certainly don't consider them our equals, but we consider them worthy of some inherant respect. Nobody looks twice if I go after a tree with a chainsaw, but taking a kitchen knife to a dog could land me in jail. We treat these semi-sentients as "enlightened tools"; we often use them as cheap (slave?) labor and even meat, but we give them some semblance of dignity (however small that may be).
Sentients, of course, we are supposed to treat with full respect. This group includes humans; some might add other primates and dolphins to the mix.
As it is with carbon, so it is with silicon. While I can postulate, I have yet to see any software I could consider even semi-sentient. If I did find such a program, I would still use it without asking permission, but would treat it well (and think hard as to what "treating well" means). I don't suspect that we will achieve fully sentient software without passing through the semi-sentient stage--dogbrains, if you will.
They said "phlegmatic", they meant "phlegmatic". The article is stressing that Bill Joy doesn't fly off the handle easily. Things that scare him are more impressive than things that scare, say, RMS (who is sometimes considered a zealot).
Yes, I agree that the Mir design was stupid. The point of hatches is compartmentalization, and the wire mazes defeat that.
The solution is to route the wires externally, then to put covers over the wiring for protection. This may not be crucial to the ISS, since it may well have a lifeboat. However, if you're making a ship for a mission that places you six months away from anything else, these lines become a crucial component and must be protected!
Exposed fuel lines on a manned mars mission should get the engineers' licenses revoked, and possibly jail time. But even if the ISS doesn't have maze covers, anyone who engineers external lines without maze covers on a
The biggest contradiction I saw is that, in Dune: House Atreides, the fact that melange is used for navigation is public knowledge. While it was in the movie, I don't believe it was in the book. Indeed, one of Paul's trump cards was understanding that you used melange for navigation, because he threatened the Guild with revealing the secret.
That secret is the only reason that the Guild monopoly existed. If it was known, the Corrinos would start hording Melange and experimenting with it, and break the Guild monopoly.
. Where it gets worse is in future standards. Probably even the RIAA can't stamp out MP3 at this point - but when the next major audio format (DVD audio maybe? Or those "copy proof" CDs they started running in Europe?) comes out, they'll be able to prevent legitimate archival and other fair use. When the next great codec comes along to replace MP3, they can outlaw it or limit it to proprietary products and enforce inclusion of copy-protection systems. Distribution channels are already under pressure.
I guess that all depends on who makes the next codec.
So far, the music biz has been coming up with these formats, and then going through technological and political high hurdles to make them inaccessable, in order to protect their own interests. Would they be able to do the same if the Open Source community created and promulgated their own music standard?
Remember, this is a culture that created an operating system almost from scratch. Surely an audio compression scheme would not be beyond the abilities of a small musically-inclined cabal of geeks.
MP3 showed us two things. First, that an audio standard without hardware is marketable. Second, that smaller bands love such electronic standards because it allows them to market themselves for Web costs.
Create a standard, copyleft it, and publish it to make it unpatentable. Start talking to the indie bands. Show how to make "Rio"-style players--again, post it to the Web and make the plans unpatentable. Create drivers for popular computers--again, copylefted.
Get that far, and then start talking to the Indies. Show them how to set up a Web page with their tracks plus links to the player software.
Then why do 75-80% of stock funds underperform the S&P 500? Why does dartboard stock picking work so well compared to many mutual funds?
IMHO, the stock market is counterintuitive. Here's what I mean. If it was intuitive, professional money managers would understand it and regularly beat the S&P equation. This doesn't happen. If it was non-intuitive, then money managers would do about as well as dartboards. This doesn't happen either.
However, the market is nonintuitive--the pros, by the act of thinking about it, do worse than randomly.
You (and everybody else) are right and I am wrong regarding Windows shortcut.lnk files.
I believe we are in violent agreement, however, about Unix hardlinks. That is why I described hardlinks as two filenames pointing to the same inode (or substitute "starting FAT sector").
Actually, in Unix, all normal files are hardlinked. The vast majority of them simply show one directory entry link per inode. We usually reserve the term "hard link" for an inode with multiple directory entries, like/usr/bin/vi and/usr/bin/ex.
Slashdot has it wrong today. Microsoft has had the equivalent to Unix symlinks for a long time--they're called "shortcuts". Like a Unix symlink, a Windows shortcut is a small file that does nothing but point to another path where the real file is.
The behavior described in the article is neither a Unix symlink, nor a Unix hardlink. It is something I have never heard of in Unix, an automated symlink. Frankly (and I am a Unix weenie), this looks like a true innovation.
In Unix filesystems, each file has an "inode" number unique to the filesystem. The directory entries all point to inodes. Thus, two different directory entries can have the same inode, and thus the same bits are accessible from multiple places. Note, for example, that the vi and ex programs are hardlinks to the same executable--the editor simply reads the name it was called with to determine whether it should behave as vi or as ex.
Hardlinks do not really exist to save space, they exist to link two directory entries at the hip. If one file (inode) has two links (filenames), then grabbing it by one filename and editing it will cause changes which will be visible when you pick it up by the other filename. Note that, because of this, Unix hardlinks are manual. The filesystem doesn't spontaneously create hardlinks; it takes a user process to do this.
Microsoft's scheme is implicitly handled by the filesystem code.
The Single Instance Store recognizes that there's duplication, coalesces the extra copies and stores the bits once instead of several times
This implies that this is happening automagically, without user interferance. At worst, this means that the SIS is creating hardlinks on the fly. I doubt this because it would create Mothra-sized bugs as two files get "married" as links and never "divorced". Think about it: users often copy a file byte for byte (causing SIS to link them together), and then edit one and use the other as an unchanging backup.
My guess is that SIS is linking files on the fly when it recognizes them as equal, and then unlinking them (copy-on-edit) as a file is edited to be different from its linkmates.
This is simply Microsoft eliminating redundancy in its filesystem. Compression algorithms eliminate redundancy all the time--that's how they save bytes.
Some Unix flavors do a similar thing in core. When loading up a program, the bits of the binary can be stored once in memory no matter how many invocations the program currently has. If eight people are running Emacs, memory is storing eight Emacs data segments, but only one copy of the Emacs binary.
This is something one could implement in Linux filesystem code. Each inode would need its own checksum, and there would have to be a one-or-more-to-one relationship between inodes and hardware representations--that is, two different inodes would be able to share the same sectors.
When a file got edited, the FS would determine whether the sectors were shared with one or more other inodes--if so, you have to "divorce" by copying the sectors elsewhere and pointing the inode to the new sectors.
When the edit finished, the FS would recalculate the checksum, then look for all other inodes with the same checksum. For any matches, do a byte-for-byte diff to make sure--if so, then point the inode at the same sectors as the old inode and mark the new inode's sectors for reaping.
The tradeoff is between filesystem space and write performance (read performance is probably unchanged). It takes better minds than mine to determine under what circumstances the tradeoff is worth it.
Wrongo! Mainframe = "Serious Business Machine". Nothing will get an MIS director's attention like saying "See, Linux can run both on your PC and on that million dollar IBM mainframe that runs your core business. Windows can't."
Evangelists, please remember this the next time Microsoft gets its panties twisted about "scalability".
Microsoft: "Our OS scales from a hatchback to an SUV"
Linux: "Our OS scales from a motorcycle to a freight train"
Hmmm...fat pipes...sounds useful, these days of streaming media.
Professionally doing the e-commerce thing, I am constantly running into the same problems: bandwidth and performance. It's not enough that the program does X, but that it has to do so much X in so little time on our hardware.
This may be an interesting development. A lot of these new outfits can get capital for the asking but not developers. Thus, mainframes are easy to pick up, but mainframe developers are almost impossible to hire. An S/390 Linux port allows you to use your existing Unix staff, with some mainframe sysadmins and minimal retraining, to use high-bandwidth hardware.
obSlashdot: What happens if you make a Beowulf cluster of mainframes?;^>
The problem with a mainframe-specific Unix is that, since the demand is low, so is the R&D budget. Nobody is going to pay to make an {insert favorite mainframe} Unix as good as a Solaris; Solaris has many more development hours because Sun can sell mucho boxen. There's just no money in mainframe Unix.
By the same token, Linux will blow a mainframe also-ran Unix out of the water.
Guaranteed profit is not a right. But patents were never about rights anyhow. They are about research.
The point of a patent system is to give a potential inventor a carrot to reach for. Indeed, that is how patents are described in the constitution--not as a natural right, but as a way to "promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries" (article 1, section 8). There are a lot of inventions that take a lot of work to produce, and nobody is going to do that work when somebody else can go and use their work immediately.
In software, this doesn't happen as much. Most stuff in the computer field is a relatively small amount of research for a large amount of benefit. Such protection is not needed, and actually counterproductive.
But take, for example, medicines. A good medication can take millions of dollars to research and create, and millions more to test so that we're sure that it's safe and effective. But often the manufacture is fairly inexpensive.
Unless I have money to burn and a generous streak, I am not going to spend multiple millions of dollars to produce a cancer-fighting drug that somebody else can copy next month. I have costs to amortize--big costs. The patent is the promise of a temporary monopoly that gives me a good financial reason to invest all of that R&D money.
The only reason that a patent approaches being a right is that it is a promise by the government, and one that a researcher bets ones farm on. The government does not extend this promise as a natural right of the inventor, but as a way to coerce inventors to work harder.
I have a few books out there that are full of stuff I already know. The nice thing about such books is that they index it, something my head isn't so good at (my mind is less of an information library and more of an information landfill).
Such a book can remind you of what you already know so that you actually use that knowledge.
I can't flame Roblimo's actions here because I can't think of a better alternative. If he posts, your complaint gets raised. If he doesn't post, the complaint that this news is being "suppressed" is raised. In such a circumstance, I would post, especially in an interactive forum such as Slashdot.
Were you in Roblimo's shoes, what would you have done?
A lot of things use coolants, fluids good at carrying thermal energy (heat) from one spot to another. This is a good way to dump heat from something especially hot to a cooler area; this is what auto and home radiators do.
Actual refrigeration is another matter. Refrigeration units (from dorm fridges to air conditioners) play some tricks with the pressure of the coolant, sending it from liquid to gas and back (you may be able to do this with Prestone, but it isn't easy...). What this allows you do to is to make heat "flow uphill", from a cooler spot to a warmer spot.
No radiator technology alone will make a room cooler than 95 Farenheit when it is 95 Farenheit outdoors; it takes refrigeration to do that. In contrast, you only need radiators to handle engines, because the internal temperature of an engine is several hundred degrees, warmer than any ambient weather.
Engines don't use refrigeration. They use radiators, an age-old cooling/heating technology. That's why almost all cars have heaters (that heat is waste engine heat--the passenger compartment becomes an auxiliary heater), and some don't have air conditioning. You use things like fans and radiators to bring hot items (engines or Pentiums) down to the ambient temperature, and refrigeration to bring things down below the ambient temperature. And for that matter, the "wrong end" of an air conditioner is nothing more than a radiator itself.
Per that article, the Chinese government has two overriding needs: to keep their tight control over China and to embrace the Internet for economic gain. IMHO, these goals are mutually exclusive.
Sometimes, you can walk a fine line between two opposing needs. There is a happy medium where each need is satisfied. I believe that there is an "unhappy medium" where neither need is satisfied, and the government is actually at risk of losing the Internet opportunity as well as their own control over their people.
The Internet is not about technology. It's been around since the sixties, and the Web could have been invented in the seventies. The Web is about community; the technology only gives us an opportunity to meet, and that's where the magic starts. Strict control over a portion of the Internet immediately renders that portion useless.
I think that the only chance for the Chinese government to survive in its present form (and, frankly, I'd rather it didn't) would be for it to close off the Internet entirely to its people, and to ignore it as an economic opportunity. I feel that anything less would destablize the Chinese government. The nation would not collapse, China would still exist, but it would have a new form of government.
If the Chinese government allows access but try to control it, they will destroy their own power structure and lose an economic opportunity simultaneously.
I'll step up to the plate, not as a theologian but as a practicing Roman Catholic.
Dumping your brain pattern onto a computer, Edison Carter/Max Headroom style, wouldn't transfer your soul to the computer. It couldn't, unless it ripped the soul out of you (the meat person) as it did so. The term "transfer" implies that whatever is being transferred is no longer in its old home. If it is in its old home as well as a new one, it is a "copy".
I see three possibilities.
Souls are not quantized, like apples, but are fluid, like water.
The computer-you has no soul (doubly so if your name is Simmons;^> )
The computer-you has a brand new soul
I couldn't believe the first possiblity, simply because I can't really wrap my head around it. I'd put my money on either the second or the third.
While I wouldn't put money on it, I think the computer-you would be granted a new soul by God. Face it, we humans have been creating soul-repositories for God for a long time. We used to have exactly one way to do it for thousands of years; in the past hundred we have broken out the Petri dish and sperm banks. New ways of making people, yet we believe that they have souls just like those of us conceived the old-fashioned way.
If we can copy a mind into a computer in such a way that it has displays free will, I think that God would bless such a program with a soul. Of course, that's His call; I stand a good chance of being wrong.
Slashdot Mirror
Because Linux has a bunch of different uses, there is a forking tendancy. I don't want palmtop Linux to be the same as mainframe Linux. If you're good at one, you can't be good at the other.
The important thing is to have a common ABI. If the same software runs on two boxes, I don't care whether they are two different flavors of Linux, or even if they are both Linux!
The value of an OS is proportional to the size of its user base, since that defines the developer base. The size of the user base depends on ABI level compatibility--the ability to use the same program on different machines. Thus, the tendancy here is for the ABI to stay similar, because changing your own ABI cuts you off from the pack. Tendancies towards forking the ABI will come from two ends: those wishing to sabotage Linux (that is, other OS vendors), and those who extend the ABI to showcase some feature that only they have. The former can be recognized and fought; the latter will eventually extend the ABI, but allow for non-compliant software in the short term.
If ABI forking becomes a problem, the solution may be to have a centralized ABI authority. Such a group would define several ABIs (such as Linux Embedded, Linux Desktop, Linux Server), and define what services are available and how to access them. The group would then define a reference platform that provided those ABI services and only those ABI services. Any app that could run on a given reference platform gains a "logo" approval, and any platform that supports the reference ABI gets the same (whether it's Linux or not).
That's not the trick. The trick is retarding your computer so that it will run. Race conditions render Xenix unstable past 486/75. I can't laugh too hard, though...it runs on a 286!
My suggestion is possible, but likely a bit of work. Try installing Solaris/x86 on your Linux box, or Linux/Sparc on your Solaris machine. See how the math goes there.
For more documentation, see "Cray instability" in the Jargon File.
The above defies all logic. But why should God be hemmed in by logic? Scripture says that God's ways are beyond our ways; I interpret that to mean that God can blow our minds whenever He wants to.
We normally consider non-sentient things are unworthy of inherent respect; usually, this includes the plant kingdom. We don't complain about logging because the trees are in pain, but only because it ruins the environment and produces other effects.
Semi-sentient things are usually higher animals. We certainly don't consider them our equals, but we consider them worthy of some inherant respect. Nobody looks twice if I go after a tree with a chainsaw, but taking a kitchen knife to a dog could land me in jail. We treat these semi-sentients as "enlightened tools"; we often use them as cheap (slave?) labor and even meat, but we give them some semblance of dignity (however small that may be).
Sentients, of course, we are supposed to treat with full respect. This group includes humans; some might add other primates and dolphins to the mix.
As it is with carbon, so it is with silicon. While I can postulate, I have yet to see any software I could consider even semi-sentient. If I did find such a program, I would still use it without asking permission, but would treat it well (and think hard as to what "treating well" means). I don't suspect that we will achieve fully sentient software without passing through the semi-sentient stage--dogbrains, if you will.
They said "phlegmatic", they meant "phlegmatic". The article is stressing that Bill Joy doesn't fly off the handle easily. Things that scare him are more impressive than things that scare, say, RMS (who is sometimes considered a zealot).
The solution is to route the wires externally, then to put covers over the wiring for protection. This may not be crucial to the ISS, since it may well have a lifeboat. However, if you're making a ship for a mission that places you six months away from anything else, these lines become a crucial component and must be protected!
Exposed fuel lines on a manned mars mission should get the engineers' licenses revoked, and possibly jail time. But even if the ISS doesn't have maze covers, anyone who engineers external lines without maze covers on a
That secret is the only reason that the Guild monopoly existed. If it was known, the Corrinos would start hording Melange and experimenting with it, and break the Guild monopoly.
I guess that all depends on who makes the next codec.
So far, the music biz has been coming up with these formats, and then going through technological and political high hurdles to make them inaccessable, in order to protect their own interests. Would they be able to do the same if the Open Source community created and promulgated their own music standard?
Remember, this is a culture that created an operating system almost from scratch. Surely an audio compression scheme would not be beyond the abilities of a small musically-inclined cabal of geeks.
MP3 showed us two things. First, that an audio standard without hardware is marketable. Second, that smaller bands love such electronic standards because it allows them to market themselves for Web costs.
Create a standard, copyleft it, and publish it to make it unpatentable. Start talking to the indie bands. Show how to make "Rio"-style players--again, post it to the Web and make the plans unpatentable. Create drivers for popular computers--again, copylefted.
Get that far, and then start talking to the Indies. Show them how to set up a Web page with their tracks plus links to the player software.
IMHO, the stock market is counterintuitive. Here's what I mean. If it was intuitive, professional money managers would understand it and regularly beat the S&P equation. This doesn't happen. If it was non-intuitive, then money managers would do about as well as dartboards. This doesn't happen either.
However, the market is nonintuitive--the pros, by the act of thinking about it, do worse than randomly.
At a Comp USA, I've seen a fan that fits into an ISA slot. Any clue if it's any good? If so, it beats coming up with your own fan setup.
If they are doing this on a routine basis (implying millions of acts a week), $2500 adds up damn quick.
Unfortunately, these programs go by names like Super Mario Bros., Legend of Zelda, Mega Man...
The stars system is a great video game, but a lousy productivity UI.
I believe we are in violent agreement, however, about Unix hardlinks. That is why I described hardlinks as two filenames pointing to the same inode (or substitute "starting FAT sector").
Actually, in Unix, all normal files are hardlinked. The vast majority of them simply show one directory entry link per inode. We usually reserve the term "hard link" for an inode with multiple directory entries, like /usr/bin/vi and /usr/bin/ex.
The behavior described in the article is neither a Unix symlink, nor a Unix hardlink. It is something I have never heard of in Unix, an automated symlink. Frankly (and I am a Unix weenie), this looks like a true innovation.
In Unix filesystems, each file has an "inode" number unique to the filesystem. The directory entries all point to inodes. Thus, two different directory entries can have the same inode, and thus the same bits are accessible from multiple places. Note, for example, that the vi and ex programs are hardlinks to the same executable--the editor simply reads the name it was called with to determine whether it should behave as vi or as ex.
Hardlinks do not really exist to save space, they exist to link two directory entries at the hip. If one file (inode) has two links (filenames), then grabbing it by one filename and editing it will cause changes which will be visible when you pick it up by the other filename. Note that, because of this, Unix hardlinks are manual. The filesystem doesn't spontaneously create hardlinks; it takes a user process to do this.
Microsoft's scheme is implicitly handled by the filesystem code.
This implies that this is happening automagically, without user interferance. At worst, this means that the SIS is creating hardlinks on the fly. I doubt this because it would create Mothra-sized bugs as two files get "married" as links and never "divorced". Think about it: users often copy a file byte for byte (causing SIS to link them together), and then edit one and use the other as an unchanging backup.
My guess is that SIS is linking files on the fly when it recognizes them as equal, and then unlinking them (copy-on-edit) as a file is edited to be different from its linkmates.
This is simply Microsoft eliminating redundancy in its filesystem. Compression algorithms eliminate redundancy all the time--that's how they save bytes.
Some Unix flavors do a similar thing in core. When loading up a program, the bits of the binary can be stored once in memory no matter how many invocations the program currently has. If eight people are running Emacs, memory is storing eight Emacs data segments, but only one copy of the Emacs binary.
This is something one could implement in Linux filesystem code. Each inode would need its own checksum, and there would have to be a one-or-more-to-one relationship between inodes and hardware representations--that is, two different inodes would be able to share the same sectors.
When a file got edited, the FS would determine whether the sectors were shared with one or more other inodes--if so, you have to "divorce" by copying the sectors elsewhere and pointing the inode to the new sectors.
When the edit finished, the FS would recalculate the checksum, then look for all other inodes with the same checksum. For any matches, do a byte-for-byte diff to make sure--if so, then point the inode at the same sectors as the old inode and mark the new inode's sectors for reaping.
The tradeoff is between filesystem space and write performance (read performance is probably unchanged). It takes better minds than mine to determine under what circumstances the tradeoff is worth it.
Evangelists, please remember this the next time Microsoft gets its panties twisted about "scalability".
Microsoft: "Our OS scales from a hatchback to an SUV"
Linux: "Our OS scales from a motorcycle to a freight train"
Professionally doing the e-commerce thing, I am constantly running into the same problems: bandwidth and performance. It's not enough that the program does X, but that it has to do so much X in so little time on our hardware.
This may be an interesting development. A lot of these new outfits can get capital for the asking but not developers. Thus, mainframes are easy to pick up, but mainframe developers are almost impossible to hire. An S/390 Linux port allows you to use your existing Unix staff, with some mainframe sysadmins and minimal retraining, to use high-bandwidth hardware.
obSlashdot: What happens if you make a Beowulf cluster of mainframes? ;^>
By the same token, Linux will blow a mainframe also-ran Unix out of the water.
The point of a patent system is to give a potential inventor a carrot to reach for. Indeed, that is how patents are described in the constitution--not as a natural right, but as a way to "promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries" (article 1, section 8). There are a lot of inventions that take a lot of work to produce, and nobody is going to do that work when somebody else can go and use their work immediately.
In software, this doesn't happen as much. Most stuff in the computer field is a relatively small amount of research for a large amount of benefit. Such protection is not needed, and actually counterproductive.
But take, for example, medicines. A good medication can take millions of dollars to research and create, and millions more to test so that we're sure that it's safe and effective. But often the manufacture is fairly inexpensive.
Unless I have money to burn and a generous streak, I am not going to spend multiple millions of dollars to produce a cancer-fighting drug that somebody else can copy next month. I have costs to amortize--big costs. The patent is the promise of a temporary monopoly that gives me a good financial reason to invest all of that R&D money.
The only reason that a patent approaches being a right is that it is a promise by the government, and one that a researcher bets ones farm on. The government does not extend this promise as a natural right of the inventor, but as a way to coerce inventors to work harder.
Such a book can remind you of what you already know so that you actually use that knowledge.
I can't flame Roblimo's actions here because I can't think of a better alternative. If he posts, your complaint gets raised. If he doesn't post, the complaint that this news is being "suppressed" is raised. In such a circumstance, I would post, especially in an interactive forum such as Slashdot.
Were you in Roblimo's shoes, what would you have done?
<ADVOCATE>
Actual refrigeration is another matter. Refrigeration units (from dorm fridges to air conditioners) play some tricks with the pressure of the coolant, sending it from liquid to gas and back (you may be able to do this with Prestone, but it isn't easy...). What this allows you do to is to make heat "flow uphill", from a cooler spot to a warmer spot.
No radiator technology alone will make a room cooler than 95 Farenheit when it is 95 Farenheit outdoors; it takes refrigeration to do that. In contrast, you only need radiators to handle engines, because the internal temperature of an engine is several hundred degrees, warmer than any ambient weather.
Engines don't use refrigeration. They use radiators, an age-old cooling/heating technology. That's why almost all cars have heaters (that heat is waste engine heat--the passenger compartment becomes an auxiliary heater), and some don't have air conditioning. You use things like fans and radiators to bring hot items (engines or Pentiums) down to the ambient temperature, and refrigeration to bring things down below the ambient temperature. And for that matter, the "wrong end" of an air conditioner is nothing more than a radiator itself.
Sometimes, you can walk a fine line between two opposing needs. There is a happy medium where each need is satisfied. I believe that there is an "unhappy medium" where neither need is satisfied, and the government is actually at risk of losing the Internet opportunity as well as their own control over their people.
The Internet is not about technology. It's been around since the sixties, and the Web could have been invented in the seventies. The Web is about community; the technology only gives us an opportunity to meet, and that's where the magic starts. Strict control over a portion of the Internet immediately renders that portion useless.
I think that the only chance for the Chinese government to survive in its present form (and, frankly, I'd rather it didn't) would be for it to close off the Internet entirely to its people, and to ignore it as an economic opportunity. I feel that anything less would destablize the Chinese government. The nation would not collapse, China would still exist, but it would have a new form of government.
If the Chinese government allows access but try to control it, they will destroy their own power structure and lose an economic opportunity simultaneously.
Dumping your brain pattern onto a computer, Edison Carter/Max Headroom style, wouldn't transfer your soul to the computer. It couldn't, unless it ripped the soul out of you (the meat person) as it did so. The term "transfer" implies that whatever is being transferred is no longer in its old home. If it is in its old home as well as a new one, it is a "copy".
I see three possibilities.
- Souls are not quantized, like apples, but are fluid, like water.
- The computer-you has no soul (doubly so if your name is Simmons
;^> ) - The computer-you has a brand new soul
I couldn't believe the first possiblity, simply because I can't really wrap my head around it. I'd put my money on either the second or the third.While I wouldn't put money on it, I think the computer-you would be granted a new soul by God. Face it, we humans have been creating soul-repositories for God for a long time. We used to have exactly one way to do it for thousands of years; in the past hundred we have broken out the Petri dish and sperm banks. New ways of making people, yet we believe that they have souls just like those of us conceived the old-fashioned way.
If we can copy a mind into a computer in such a way that it has displays free will, I think that God would bless such a program with a soul. Of course, that's His call; I stand a good chance of being wrong.