Or is it as easy as releasing a "new version" with a new version number and including an "updated license"?
If they have required copyright assignment for outside contributions, which OO has, it's that easy. For projects without copyright assignment it's much more difficult, as you have to have the agreement of all contributors (excepting automatic update clauses like the GPLs GPL version X or later).
Of course, you cannot retroactively change the license, so previously released code would remain viable to use for a fork.
How do they get the lasers only to burn the cancer cells and not burn tissue on the way to the cancer cells?
It's not an external laser, it's a probe emits the laser beam from one side. So you still need to stick the probe into the brain until you get to the parts you want to light up.
I got email delivered over a modem in the early 90's. The fact that it's now delivered over a GSM modem is hardly 'innovation', no matter what company tries to claim it as such.
I used to vote along the 'realistic' least evil lines, but over the last decade I've come to regard voters in democracies as complicit in, and responsible for the policies of the ones we vote for. And so I cannot vote for any party whose actions I find unconscionable; I'd carry the stain of responsibility, no matter how small a part, for their actions on my conscience.
I might not get a candidate that wins these days, but at least I'm not getting betrayed by mine or made part of their crimes.
The original Class A allocations were not made under the same terms that modern allocations are made under
How long and in to which range? It's not merely the original allocations, there are a lot of companies using public addresses for what are effectively not public networks.
And in the case of IP addresses, I'm not sure I'd trust any such 'ownership' in a crunch; the ownership of an address is dependent on everyone elses willingness to route (or fail to route, in the case of unavailable allocated networks) those packets.
Migrating them off of those addresses would be expensive.
Who cares? Reusing their IP addresses for the real internet basically doesn't affect them if their network is blocked off anyway. Sure they wouldn't be able to access anything on the outside with those IP addresses (unless they modify their gateway infrastructure), but considering any new owner of the address would otherwise be just as unreachable to them on IPv6 space, they have little to complain about. If they eventually want to migrate, that's up to them, their problem, their cost.
Plus, as time goes on, those addresses are going to be valuable.
Mmm, about as valuable as my collection of 5 1/4 inch floppies. IPv6 ain't exactly rocket science, and there really isn't much but sheer inertia and the lack of abject necessity that's slowing adoption. Once the tipping point is reached and we get v6 only services and/or customers, then we'll get the whole 'why didn't anyone plan for this!' whines and five years of emergency implementation projects run by a whole lot of consultants with no experience at all.
To be fair, if corporations using 'real' IP addresses without allowing connectivity to them from the internet were forced to return them (ie, everyone using non-local addresses for office networks behind firewalls), we might stretch it out a bit longer. You wouldn't even have to actually schedule any migration; if the addresses do all their accesses through proxies anyway it would be possible, if slightly nasty, to simply appropriate the address ranges and let the companies deal (via protocol gateway infrastructure or by switching to local addresses instead). The actual breakage would be limited.
Of course, it would probably be less painful for them to switch to ipv6, which would also solve integration issues during mergers and simplify things internally when ip shortage creates problems there as well.
Still, with the level of organizational head-in-sand behaviour I've noticed, I expect that's what it's going to take. A call from ARIN to corporate network departments saying 'gee, we can't ping anything in your assigned range; obviously you're not using it so next Monday someone else is getting it, kthx.' might actually kick some momentum into some places where it's sorely needed.
Assuming the situation is such that there is time enough for everyone in the car to notice it. In which case it's probably not that dangerous a situation. More likely, if they're lucky they've shut up because they got shocked by the emergency hard breaking or other indication of the already resolved dangerous situation, or, if less lucky, they've shut up because they're unconscious or have a steel bar through their chest.
someone at the other end of a phone line keeps talking(and distracting).
Personally I can easily tune out talking, but passenger interaction often extends to more physical or interactive requests like 'Look at that! Quick! You're gonna miss it!' that are harder to tune out.
Dictating a text messege would not have that problem
Agreed, good speech input and speech output systems would probably make 'texting' a whole lot safer.
Does it all go out the window because you're being fed by someone who matches your politics?
In the case of TLA agencies, their proven track record means they've got a reversed burden of proof. It doesn't matter whose politics it matches; such actions by these agencies would merely be a continuation of an established pattern of behaviour, and to assume any significant change without proof would be naive. Of course, should they allow enough transparency to establish any such reasonably reliable proof, there probably wouldn't be any reason for a site like Wikileaks to exist...
Every nightclub and restaurant would have to hire musicians
It's doubtful that the economy could carry such an increase in musicians at any decent wage (even without the dead weight of the recording industry); more likely many restaurants would do without to keep prices down and turn to other ambient sounds (think wind/waterdriven random bells and such) if needed for atmosphere, and we'd all be 'poorer' as a measure of value perceived.
As monopoly pricing is set in relation to what the market can bear, not how cheaply something can be produced, it's likely that the aggregate spent on audiovisual entertainment is limited and at a maximum related to disposable income of the consumers in the economy. In such an economic system there are basically no changes the industry as a whole will gain from; they'll just cannibalize themselves, redirecting money from recording to live artists or back again, from music to film, from independents to majors and back again, etc. That also means that money the industry spends on things like lawyers, lobbyists, marketing, etc, is taken directly out of the money available for creators as a whole, leading to a whole lot more starving within the industry than there would otherwise be.
Partitioning is a pipe dream; any network with a significant number of users will have uncontrolled exchanges with the internet.
The only way to have reasonable security is to keep certain subsystems separate and accessible only via specific gateways; no user is ever logically placed on those segments, and they are only ever accessed over very few very specific interfaces.
Or it's a part of living in a society with too many unethical laws.
it is fair to circumvent arrangements that clearly punish the wrong people
As the judicial system and legislature has long since detached from common ethics, it's a moral imperative to ignore such arrangements and help anyone who needs help to circumvent them.
The goal is the same, just the process is a bit different.
Indeed; corruption is far more efficient and you can often get away with the other guy having no vote. Especially if the other guy/the enemy is the public in general.
It's much easier for sales if you give it a fancy name, and preferably one that doesn't trigger comparisons with other solutions.
Of course, as deduplication is mainly a solution for enterprises that have been tricked into buying obscenely expensive storage, and who lack any coherent data storage policy and tiering strategy, the fancy name might be superfluous; they're spread wide and lubed up already.
stated that there was no difference in the danger level if you were holding the phone or using a hands free device.
Trouble is, if you open up that can of worms you'll get studies noting there's no difference between hands free phone chatting and talking to passengers, and that kids in the car are much more dangerous than even using a chat client on a smart phone while driving and eventually you'll get the conclusion that drivers should be isolated and on uppers, while passengers should be in a separate compartment.
And that just won't be politically manageable. Which is why you get not entirely scientifically supported regulations instead, that may or may not do much good, but that perhaps make it appear that someone's doing something about something so the can of worms can be shoved under the carpet until we have computer driven cars instead.
The only simple way to reduce the workload of the patent office is to cut certain fields right out of consideration.
The only long term way to reduce the workload and balance the system is for the patent office to actually pay the cost of the patents. With a fixed budget limit on how much the system is allowed to cost the economy, the system would automatically balance itself; grant too many patents and each patent would pay out a pittance to the holder, grant too few and the payout per patent would be large, but limited to very few beneficiaries. The stakeholders themselves would have an interest in getting the balance right.
Without an actual price tag, for as long as the cost of the system is hidden simply as higher costs of products, there is no incentive to actually fix the system. Politicians won't have to defend a huge post in the budget (with significant funds of essentially taxpayer money going to foreign corporations), the patent office has no reason not to increase scope and lower standards (most of their 'customers' have no objection to getting more patents), and the ones paying for it all basically have no say.
A little honesty about how patents are actually financed would go a long way.
From what's leaked it sounds like it's basically a case of someone sleeping with more than one woman, being sloppy with protection, women getting pissed off and anxious about STD's and involving the Swedish judiciary which gets the brilliant (and internally divisive) idea to use it as a pilot case on whether consent can be considered having not been given, if it was predicated upon the use of effective protection. Which is why you get one attorney saying 'rape!', the next one saying 'idiot, it's barely even minor assault in the worst case, if even intentional', and the third going 'hmmm... interesting theory, lets victimize someone (and maybe save the first attorney) to test it'.
Ah, well, if consent can be predicated upon such issues I suspect we'll get a whole load of 'rape' charges against women who said they were on the pill...
there are a lot of benefits of copyright and patents.
Patents and copyrights are essentially taxation systems, and as with all such transfer systems there's some party benefiting and other parties paying the bill. Compared to other taxation systems, the efficiency grade of 5-20% is horrifically low; imagine if that percentage of funding for any other government scheme was all that actually went to the purpose (ie, the payoff/investment in the creators).
Outright having the state pay for the R&D or pay for music/writing/etc on a per-use base or similar would divert 5-20 times as much money towards the purpose at the same cost to the economy today. Or we could have the same level of production as we have today at a fifth to a twentieth of the cost.
That is fairly concisely summarized as an abject failure. And that doesn't even start to go into the really damaging parts of the system that create problems for derivative or combined works, which are the foundation of creativity. Imagine the number of works we wouldn't have today if Shakespeare or HC Andersen had had permanent copyright...
but it wasn't until patents made it profitable to invent things that people began applying them...
It's always profitable to invent improvements to your production. Saving money means more profit. Whether or not it's profitable to spin off a separate business around that improvement and/or publish it may vary.
But it's more likely that the spread of information is the main driver behind the accelerating pace of invention and creation; more inspiration, more access to necessary knowledge, more improvements by example, etc. Patents used to have a mitigating factor there, as they worked to disseminate knowledge in the previous century. Today, the chance that any invention for which there is an actual application would stay unknown and not get invented half a dozen more times for the duration of a patent is unlikely. Far below the chance that your average invention will be torpedoed by a half-dozen other patents that will prevent it from actually being monetized.
Personally I tend to advocate a system which removes the damaging aspects of copyrights and patents, ie, the exclusivity, and moving over the monetary incentives to something akin to a per-use automatic payout system/mandatory licensing scheme. Instead of getting the right to sue someone who uses your invention you'd get a check from the patent office if someone used your invention, and instead of getting screwed by the media corps you'd automatically get a set percentage of the revenue from anyone selling/profiting from the work. Such funds should further be managed within the government budget (so they can be audited and analysed for cost efficiency and tuned to maximize benefit (do people write more after they're getting $500k per year? or would a payout ceiling pushing the incentive further down the chain create more value for the economy?)) like any other tax/benefit scheme and not hidden away like the current ones are.
Unfortunately, the frame of reference of several significant players in the system is decidedly mainly local. The theory of globalization you express works until you add fixed currencies, central banks acting on local variables in a global system and government + CB enforced borrowing on a local basis.
a great time for innovative companies to form and produce new goods
That certainly wouldn't hire local labour. Local labour growth will be limited to the kind of society for creative anachronism theme-park work mentioned in the article (or at the Federal Reserve).
That uncertainty rather than outsourcing is why the unemployment won't go down.
Lack of demand is why unemployment won't go down, and demand driven by credit is unlikely to recover any time soon. People have figured out that the state isn't going to save for them, their retirement schemes will probably be bankrupt by the time they need them, and their house isn't going to recover it's ATM function any time soon. With the last 20 years of artificially induced massive overspending there's a fairly severe economic hole to fill in before demand recovers to anywhere near baseline.
It's interesting to compare 3d video to that other technology nobody actually seems to want; video phones. They have a similar time lines, with video telephony starting in the 30's, and going through several waves of hype with little adoption outside the specific fields where they have some specific utility.
Maybe we'll soon see a great superimposed wave of 3d video telephony, coming to an abrupt end when the hobby of thrusting things in peoples faces suddenly becomes excessively obscene.
It's not a stretch to say that it's rape if a man obtains consent for sex by falsely telling her he will wear a condom.
Rape implies the sex was non-consensual. If the sex was consensual but the risks of unprotected sex were not, that would be more appropriately regarded as assault (similar to subjecting someone to such risks in other ways, such as deliberately exposing them to various hazardous substances without their consent).
In the same vein of legal exploration, if a male consents to sex on the condition that she's on the pill, would that mean she's guilty of rape if she's not? Or some other crime? (Assault hardly seems appropriate in that case as the STD risk would be unchanged and any later possible bodily harm would happen to her).
Moving the bedroom even further into the courts than it is today creates a whole class of issues; when consent becomes conditional upon chains of unverifiable assumptions, rather than plain 'yes' or 'no - and get out of my house you freak' you'll end up having to have your lawyer present to protect you from possible (il)legal exposure.
Yes, it is the GPL's fault. The CDDL is a per-file license. It places absolutely no restrictions on what other code can be combined with it in other files.
As the CDDL is deliberately GPL incompatible, had there not been any other issues, one can assume that Sun would have added 'may not be distributed together with GPL licensed code'. The CDDL/GPL incompatibility was on purpose, it was a feature asked for by Solaris engineers. Had the Linux kernel been BSD licensed, the CDDL would have been made incompatible with the BSD license.
Generally, fault implies some form of control over the issue. Under the circumstances, the only party with any control in this case would have been Sun, and as they would have redesigned the license until it was not compatible, it's quite obvious where any 'fault' should be assigned.
And unless the Oracle buyout has changed some attitudes within Sun for the better (heh), it's also quite naive of KQ Infotech to believe that Sun/Oracle would not go after them for violating the point of the license, as opposed to the actual text of the license (assuming any wider distribution). Standing is hardly a necessary prerequisite for a company of Oracles size to grind a small company into dust in the courts (and both Oracle and Sun would have standing as kernel contributors to sue any distributor of ZFS+Linux kernel combo).
Personally I can't say I consider it either a big loss or much to complain about. ZFS was a huge (HUGE) deal for Solaris, considering the painfully anemic storage stack it had in disksuite+ufs, but for any OS with a more modern volume management and file system stack it merely boiled down to a few nice features and some drawbacks, depending on your underlying storage architecture (SAN capabilities, etc).
You may have figured out the cause of colony collapse disorder. It's actually Monsanto enforcing restraining orders on the bees.
Frankly, I wouldn't put it past Monsanto to actually be behind something like CCD. If they wipe out natural bees, they could launch genetically modified bees that you'd have to buy from Monsanto every year.
That company needs to be shut down for the good of humankind.
With the surface area of a 5.25" drive and today's densities you could probably fit 10-20TB in them. I'd definitely buy several if they had an attractive price of around 30-50% of 3.5" price/GB. Speed isn't much of an issue and if it were I'd go with striped SSD's or simply more RAM anyway, but sheer storage capacity is never enough, and if it ever becomes enough, I can certainly use up even more by expanding redundancy.
That could be, for that specific benchmark AMD created, but it was not true for my own applications.
Which is why you often see a whole multitude of synthetic and real-world benchmarks in any actual comparisons.
AMD has stopped with that fraudulent practice of inventing fake numbers to pretend having superior performance.
Personally I found them to be as reasonably accurate as could be expected. But today neither Intel nor AMD is making specific comparison claims any more, most likely because multi core scaling exacerbates the effects you got hit by several times. Any synthetic benchmark showing the general performance of a specific cpu compared to the general performance of another cpu could be off on an order of magnitude depending on the application, number of cores, clock speed, bus architecture, etc.
It's simply buyer beware, either run an actual performance test with your application or research a commonly used benchmark that can act as a proxy for your approximate needs.
Slashdot Mirror
Or is it as easy as releasing a "new version" with a new version number and including an "updated license"?
If they have required copyright assignment for outside contributions, which OO has, it's that easy. For projects without copyright assignment it's much more difficult, as you have to have the agreement of all contributors (excepting automatic update clauses like the GPLs GPL version X or later).
Of course, you cannot retroactively change the license, so previously released code would remain viable to use for a fork.
How do they get the lasers only to burn the cancer cells and not burn tissue on the way to the cancer cells?
It's not an external laser, it's a probe emits the laser beam from one side. So you still need to stick the probe into the brain until you get to the parts you want to light up.
I got email delivered over a modem in the early 90's. The fact that it's now delivered over a GSM modem is hardly 'innovation', no matter what company tries to claim it as such.
I used to vote along the 'realistic' least evil lines, but over the last decade I've come to regard voters in democracies as complicit in, and responsible for the policies of the ones we vote for. And so I cannot vote for any party whose actions I find unconscionable; I'd carry the stain of responsibility, no matter how small a part, for their actions on my conscience.
I might not get a candidate that wins these days, but at least I'm not getting betrayed by mine or made part of their crimes.
The original Class A allocations were not made under the same terms that modern allocations are made under
How long and in to which range? It's not merely the original allocations, there are a lot of companies using public addresses for what are effectively not public networks.
And in the case of IP addresses, I'm not sure I'd trust any such 'ownership' in a crunch; the ownership of an address is dependent on everyone elses willingness to route (or fail to route, in the case of unavailable allocated networks) those packets.
Migrating them off of those addresses would be expensive.
Who cares? Reusing their IP addresses for the real internet basically doesn't affect them if their network is blocked off anyway. Sure they wouldn't be able to access anything on the outside with those IP addresses (unless they modify their gateway infrastructure), but considering any new owner of the address would otherwise be just as unreachable to them on IPv6 space, they have little to complain about. If they eventually want to migrate, that's up to them, their problem, their cost.
Plus, as time goes on, those addresses are going to be valuable.
Mmm, about as valuable as my collection of 5 1/4 inch floppies. IPv6 ain't exactly rocket science, and there really isn't much but sheer inertia and the lack of abject necessity that's slowing adoption. Once the tipping point is reached and we get v6 only services and/or customers, then we'll get the whole 'why didn't anyone plan for this!' whines and five years of emergency implementation projects run by a whole lot of consultants with no experience at all.
Yay. It'll be even funnier than y2k..
To be fair, if corporations using 'real' IP addresses without allowing connectivity to them from the internet were forced to return them (ie, everyone using non-local addresses for office networks behind firewalls), we might stretch it out a bit longer. You wouldn't even have to actually schedule any migration; if the addresses do all their accesses through proxies anyway it would be possible, if slightly nasty, to simply appropriate the address ranges and let the companies deal (via protocol gateway infrastructure or by switching to local addresses instead). The actual breakage would be limited.
Of course, it would probably be less painful for them to switch to ipv6, which would also solve integration issues during mergers and simplify things internally when ip shortage creates problems there as well.
Still, with the level of organizational head-in-sand behaviour I've noticed, I expect that's what it's going to take. A call from ARIN to corporate network departments saying 'gee, we can't ping anything in your assigned range; obviously you're not using it so next Monday someone else is getting it, kthx.' might actually kick some momentum into some places where it's sorely needed.
will shut the hell up since they want to live
Assuming the situation is such that there is time enough for everyone in the car to notice it. In which case it's probably not that dangerous a situation. More likely, if they're lucky they've shut up because they got shocked by the emergency hard breaking or other indication of the already resolved dangerous situation, or, if less lucky, they've shut up because they're unconscious or have a steel bar through their chest.
someone at the other end of a phone line keeps talking(and distracting).
Personally I can easily tune out talking, but passenger interaction often extends to more physical or interactive requests like 'Look at that! Quick! You're gonna miss it!' that are harder to tune out.
Dictating a text messege would not have that problem
Agreed, good speech input and speech output systems would probably make 'texting' a whole lot safer.
Does it all go out the window because you're being fed by someone who matches your politics?
In the case of TLA agencies, their proven track record means they've got a reversed burden of proof. It doesn't matter whose politics it matches; such actions by these agencies would merely be a continuation of an established pattern of behaviour, and to assume any significant change without proof would be naive. Of course, should they allow enough transparency to establish any such reasonably reliable proof, there probably wouldn't be any reason for a site like Wikileaks to exist...
Every nightclub and restaurant would have to hire musicians
It's doubtful that the economy could carry such an increase in musicians at any decent wage (even without the dead weight of the recording industry); more likely many restaurants would do without to keep prices down and turn to other ambient sounds (think wind/waterdriven random bells and such) if needed for atmosphere, and we'd all be 'poorer' as a measure of value perceived.
As monopoly pricing is set in relation to what the market can bear, not how cheaply something can be produced, it's likely that the aggregate spent on audiovisual entertainment is limited and at a maximum related to disposable income of the consumers in the economy. In such an economic system there are basically no changes the industry as a whole will gain from; they'll just cannibalize themselves, redirecting money from recording to live artists or back again, from music to film, from independents to majors and back again, etc. That also means that money the industry spends on things like lawyers, lobbyists, marketing, etc, is taken directly out of the money available for creators as a whole, leading to a whole lot more starving within the industry than there would otherwise be.
Partitioning is a pipe dream; any network with a significant number of users will have uncontrolled exchanges with the internet.
The only way to have reasonable security is to keep certain subsystems separate and accessible only via specific gateways; no user is ever logically placed on those segments, and they are only ever accessed over very few very specific interfaces.
It is arguably part of growing up.
Or it's a part of living in a society with too many unethical laws.
it is fair to circumvent arrangements that clearly punish the wrong people
As the judicial system and legislature has long since detached from common ethics, it's a moral imperative to ignore such arrangements and help anyone who needs help to circumvent them.
The goal is the same, just the process is a bit different.
Indeed; corruption is far more efficient and you can often get away with the other guy having no vote. Especially if the other guy/the enemy is the public in general.
No need to give it a fancy name.
It's much easier for sales if you give it a fancy name, and preferably one that doesn't trigger comparisons with other solutions.
Of course, as deduplication is mainly a solution for enterprises that have been tricked into buying obscenely expensive storage, and who lack any coherent data storage policy and tiering strategy, the fancy name might be superfluous; they're spread wide and lubed up already.
stated that there was no difference in the danger level if you were holding the phone or using a hands free device.
Trouble is, if you open up that can of worms you'll get studies noting there's no difference between hands free phone chatting and talking to passengers, and that kids in the car are much more dangerous than even using a chat client on a smart phone while driving and eventually you'll get the conclusion that drivers should be isolated and on uppers, while passengers should be in a separate compartment.
And that just won't be politically manageable. Which is why you get not entirely scientifically supported regulations instead, that may or may not do much good, but that perhaps make it appear that someone's doing something about something so the can of worms can be shoved under the carpet until we have computer driven cars instead.
The only simple way to reduce the workload of the patent office is to cut certain fields right out of consideration.
The only long term way to reduce the workload and balance the system is for the patent office to actually pay the cost of the patents. With a fixed budget limit on how much the system is allowed to cost the economy, the system would automatically balance itself; grant too many patents and each patent would pay out a pittance to the holder, grant too few and the payout per patent would be large, but limited to very few beneficiaries. The stakeholders themselves would have an interest in getting the balance right.
Without an actual price tag, for as long as the cost of the system is hidden simply as higher costs of products, there is no incentive to actually fix the system. Politicians won't have to defend a huge post in the budget (with significant funds of essentially taxpayer money going to foreign corporations), the patent office has no reason not to increase scope and lower standards (most of their 'customers' have no objection to getting more patents), and the ones paying for it all basically have no say.
A little honesty about how patents are actually financed would go a long way.
From what's leaked it sounds like it's basically a case of someone sleeping with more than one woman, being sloppy with protection, women getting pissed off and anxious about STD's and involving the Swedish judiciary which gets the brilliant (and internally divisive) idea to use it as a pilot case on whether consent can be considered having not been given, if it was predicated upon the use of effective protection. Which is why you get one attorney saying 'rape!', the next one saying 'idiot, it's barely even minor assault in the worst case, if even intentional', and the third going 'hmmm... interesting theory, lets victimize someone (and maybe save the first attorney) to test it'.
Ah, well, if consent can be predicated upon such issues I suspect we'll get a whole load of 'rape' charges against women who said they were on the pill...
there are a lot of benefits of copyright and patents.
Patents and copyrights are essentially taxation systems, and as with all such transfer systems there's some party benefiting and other parties paying the bill. Compared to other taxation systems, the efficiency grade of 5-20% is horrifically low; imagine if that percentage of funding for any other government scheme was all that actually went to the purpose (ie, the payoff/investment in the creators).
Outright having the state pay for the R&D or pay for music/writing/etc on a per-use base or similar would divert 5-20 times as much money towards the purpose at the same cost to the economy today. Or we could have the same level of production as we have today at a fifth to a twentieth of the cost.
That is fairly concisely summarized as an abject failure. And that doesn't even start to go into the really damaging parts of the system that create problems for derivative or combined works, which are the foundation of creativity. Imagine the number of works we wouldn't have today if Shakespeare or HC Andersen had had permanent copyright...
but it wasn't until patents made it profitable to invent things that people began applying them...
It's always profitable to invent improvements to your production. Saving money means more profit. Whether or not it's profitable to spin off a separate business around that improvement and/or publish it may vary.
But it's more likely that the spread of information is the main driver behind the accelerating pace of invention and creation; more inspiration, more access to necessary knowledge, more improvements by example, etc. Patents used to have a mitigating factor there, as they worked to disseminate knowledge in the previous century. Today, the chance that any invention for which there is an actual application would stay unknown and not get invented half a dozen more times for the duration of a patent is unlikely. Far below the chance that your average invention will be torpedoed by a half-dozen other patents that will prevent it from actually being monetized.
Personally I tend to advocate a system which removes the damaging aspects of copyrights and patents, ie, the exclusivity, and moving over the monetary incentives to something akin to a per-use automatic payout system/mandatory licensing scheme. Instead of getting the right to sue someone who uses your invention you'd get a check from the patent office if someone used your invention, and instead of getting screwed by the media corps you'd automatically get a set percentage of the revenue from anyone selling/profiting from the work. Such funds should further be managed within the government budget (so they can be audited and analysed for cost efficiency and tuned to maximize benefit (do people write more after they're getting $500k per year? or would a payout ceiling pushing the incentive further down the chain create more value for the economy?)) like any other tax/benefit scheme and not hidden away like the current ones are.
It all depends on your frame of reference
Unfortunately, the frame of reference of several significant players in the system is decidedly mainly local. The theory of globalization you express works until you add fixed currencies, central banks acting on local variables in a global system and government + CB enforced borrowing on a local basis.
a great time for innovative companies to form and produce new goods
That certainly wouldn't hire local labour. Local labour growth will be limited to the kind of society for creative anachronism theme-park work mentioned in the article (or at the Federal Reserve).
That uncertainty rather than outsourcing is why the unemployment won't go down.
Lack of demand is why unemployment won't go down, and demand driven by credit is unlikely to recover any time soon. People have figured out that the state isn't going to save for them, their retirement schemes will probably be bankrupt by the time they need them, and their house isn't going to recover it's ATM function any time soon. With the last 20 years of artificially induced massive overspending there's a fairly severe economic hole to fill in before demand recovers to anywhere near baseline.
It's interesting to compare 3d video to that other technology nobody actually seems to want; video phones. They have a similar time lines, with video telephony starting in the 30's, and going through several waves of hype with little adoption outside the specific fields where they have some specific utility.
Maybe we'll soon see a great superimposed wave of 3d video telephony, coming to an abrupt end when the hobby of thrusting things in peoples faces suddenly becomes excessively obscene.
It's not a stretch to say that it's rape if a man obtains consent for sex by falsely telling her he will wear a condom.
Rape implies the sex was non-consensual. If the sex was consensual but the risks of unprotected sex were not, that would be more appropriately regarded as assault (similar to subjecting someone to such risks in other ways, such as deliberately exposing them to various hazardous substances without their consent).
In the same vein of legal exploration, if a male consents to sex on the condition that she's on the pill, would that mean she's guilty of rape if she's not? Or some other crime? (Assault hardly seems appropriate in that case as the STD risk would be unchanged and any later possible bodily harm would happen to her).
Moving the bedroom even further into the courts than it is today creates a whole class of issues; when consent becomes conditional upon chains of unverifiable assumptions, rather than plain 'yes' or 'no - and get out of my house you freak' you'll end up having to have your lawyer present to protect you from possible (il)legal exposure.
Yes, it is the GPL's fault. The CDDL is a per-file license. It places absolutely no restrictions on what other code can be combined with it in other files.
As the CDDL is deliberately GPL incompatible, had there not been any other issues, one can assume that Sun would have added 'may not be distributed together with GPL licensed code'. The CDDL/GPL incompatibility was on purpose, it was a feature asked for by Solaris engineers. Had the Linux kernel been BSD licensed, the CDDL would have been made incompatible with the BSD license.
Generally, fault implies some form of control over the issue. Under the circumstances, the only party with any control in this case would have been Sun, and as they would have redesigned the license until it was not compatible, it's quite obvious where any 'fault' should be assigned.
And unless the Oracle buyout has changed some attitudes within Sun for the better (heh), it's also quite naive of KQ Infotech to believe that Sun/Oracle would not go after them for violating the point of the license, as opposed to the actual text of the license (assuming any wider distribution). Standing is hardly a necessary prerequisite for a company of Oracles size to grind a small company into dust in the courts (and both Oracle and Sun would have standing as kernel contributors to sue any distributor of ZFS+Linux kernel combo).
Personally I can't say I consider it either a big loss or much to complain about. ZFS was a huge (HUGE) deal for Solaris, considering the painfully anemic storage stack it had in disksuite+ufs, but for any OS with a more modern volume management and file system stack it merely boiled down to a few nice features and some drawbacks, depending on your underlying storage architecture (SAN capabilities, etc).
Sounds like the real answer if for companies to get rid of egomaniac assholes in IT before they are in a position to cause trouble.
Just be careful that the companies policy for getting rid of egomaniac assholes doesn't mean fast-tracking them for management.
Of course, the downside with that might mean missing out on the next Bill/Steve/Larry level CEO material...
You may have figured out the cause of colony collapse disorder. It's actually Monsanto enforcing restraining orders on the bees.
Frankly, I wouldn't put it past Monsanto to actually be behind something like CCD. If they wipe out natural bees, they could launch genetically modified bees that you'd have to buy from Monsanto every year.
That company needs to be shut down for the good of humankind.
With the surface area of a 5.25" drive and today's densities you could probably fit 10-20TB in them. I'd definitely buy several if they had an attractive price of around 30-50% of 3.5" price/GB. Speed isn't much of an issue and if it were I'd go with striped SSD's or simply more RAM anyway, but sheer storage capacity is never enough, and if it ever becomes enough, I can certainly use up even more by expanding redundancy.
That could be, for that specific benchmark AMD created, but it was not true for my own applications.
Which is why you often see a whole multitude of synthetic and real-world benchmarks in any actual comparisons.
AMD has stopped with that fraudulent practice of inventing fake numbers to pretend having superior performance.
Personally I found them to be as reasonably accurate as could be expected. But today neither Intel nor AMD is making specific comparison claims any more, most likely because multi core scaling exacerbates the effects you got hit by several times. Any synthetic benchmark showing the general performance of a specific cpu compared to the general performance of another cpu could be off on an order of magnitude depending on the application, number of cores, clock speed, bus architecture, etc.
It's simply buyer beware, either run an actual performance test with your application or research a commonly used benchmark that can act as a proxy for your approximate needs.