Didn't the guy who originally spurred Mozilla off of Netscape leave and open a café a couple of years ago? And then a few months ago, when Mozilla 1 was released, they held a Mozilla 1 party in his café?
I recall a TV ad that went on about getting a patent for things, and it said something like:
Who invented the telephone?
A) Alexander Graham Bell, or B) Elisha Gray
And then it crossed it all out, and put C) Both!
Yet, hardly anyone has heard of Elisha Gray, yet Elisha actually invented the telephone before Bell. The problem? He submitted his patent two hours after Bell. And even though Bell's patent was actually flawed and incorrect, Bell still got the title of 'who invented the telephone'.
Good luck stealing from Benjamin Franklin. You can't steal an idea if the originator is giving it away for free.
Untrue. Just because someone doesn't have a patent doesn't mean they have put the idea in the public domain.
Someone else could have taken Ben's invention and really had a hit with it, and then THEY would have been remembered as the inventor.. even though they weren't!
Ben, and Richard Stallman, have relied on the fame of being the originators of what they have produced. They might not have got rich from their inventions (Stallman still being alive, and with a chance, of course) but they still got the credit.
If everyone gave their ideas away for free these days, they'd be stolen and exploited, and the inventors' names would quickly be forgotten.
The meaning of life is not to rack up as many points on some financial scorechart as possible. After all, why do you spend your life making money anyway? Just so you can spend it to be happy and secure, and to provide for your dependants. Yet I'm not approving Communism. Individual achievements must be recognized, how can we do this? Patents and fame. Unfortunately, fame often goes to the wrong people, so patents are necessary.
Instead of being happy little campers like Franklin who do things to help others, we rush after money and desperately try to hoard our own little pile of it. Why?
Because no matter what you've got, someone else will always try to take a piece of it. Whether it's the government with their taxes, or even 'competitors' who want to steal all of your business or your inventions.. someone wants to steal from you.
That's why we have patents. Patents go a long way to stopping others from stealing what took you so long to create.
Sure, patents aren't all that great, but for a capitalist nation to work without them, we'd need to become 100% Libertarian and idealistic, and that isn't going to happen. As soon as it does, some rotten apple will steal to increase his slice of the pie, and so it goes again.
So, that's how we life. We don't all just get our acre of land, stay self sufficient, and enjoy our days out in the sun.. Instead we slave away in offices, coming up with ideas, and trying to make a million dollars, so that we get a bigger share of the pie. It's not a great system, but what viable alternatives are there? Communism? Yeah, right.
Actually, you are right about the assured security thing, I was using it loosely. However..
Protecting your home (and your person) is your job. Figuring out who the bad guy is and attempting to prosecute them (should you fail at YOUR job) is what the police do.
This might be the case in Texas, but it's not in most of the world. Let me speak from a UK standpoint here, as I'm more familiar with those laws..
In the UK, if someone breaks into your house, and injures themselves by falling on a step or some sort of 'trap' you have devised (such as electrifying door handles, etc).. you can be prosecuted, and the intruder can sue you for damages. This happens.
You are not legally allowed to protect your property in any way you want, and if you harm any intruder, you are likely to be in front of a judge pretty quick. This is why it's illegal to carry knives or guns even if they're only for 'self protection'. Self protection is not a concept that is really recognised in UK law. If you injure someone, you're in the shit, simple as that.
It will be interesting to see them stick to their high and mightly morals and actually move.
Your sarcasm is well put, and you're right.
Every time there's a 'crisis' or an 'injustice' of some sort in the UK, you end up with numerous celebrities and public figures bleating on about how they'll 'leave the country' if such-and-such happens.. AND THEY NEVER DO!
I remember that thousands of contractors were going to leave the country when IR35 came into force, and they didn't. If they did, there'd still be a contracting industry in the UK;-) but it's currently overstaffed.
Perhaps people WOULD change countries if it was an easy thing to do. I want to move to the USA, but you can bet sure as hell that they won't let me! I'm stuck in the UK till I get a degree, to the front of the visa queue, or come into $500k I can invest over there:-(
Remember that in 1984, the main character believed that a true revolution against an evil government could not be started by a small gang of intellectuals, but that it would have to be the 'dumb masses' (known as the 'proles') who could summon the power to do it?
To be honest, I can't see the point in fighting this. It's a bad way to go, sure, but a fistful of academics and computer scientists isn't going to sway the supposed 'ideals' of modern government. Keeping track of citizens is seen to be a good thing, and the only way we can stop governments bringing in draconian laws like these is to get millions of *common people* to rebel against it.
This isn't going to happen. I've had discussions with people, and asked them what they thought about losing their privacy, and they generally believe that if you're doing nothing wrong, then who cares?
The proles are useless, and they are not going to help in this fight. Stupid laws like the DMCA, IR35, RIP, terrorist Acts, will continue to pass through while governments preach that they'll improve your security.
Sure, they might improve security, but for every bit of assured security you gain, you lose a bit of assured freedom too.
I wasn't specifically talking about MEPs, who are elected by the public. I'm talking about the thousands of higher level bureaucrats who run the whole EU game.
Either way, saying that the public votes for MEPs is only half right. The public knows NOTHING about MEPs, and AFAIR the turnout for the European Council Elections was lower than 30%!
Well, gee, let's hold an election on matters of biochemistry and see if the public will understand WTF it's all about without being briefed. The average voter knows nothing about MEPs, simply because they're told nothing about it.
My point remains. The EU is taking over Europe by stealth, whether that's a good thing or not.
The EU likes to pretend that it's an oh so noble institution, whereas the US is run by mobsters. Well, most Europeans are fully aware that the EU and the European Parliament are staffed by some of the laziest, overly bureaucratic morons and crooks that this planet has ever seen.
Infact, the politicians behind the EU are somewhat like Nazis. They were NOT ELECTED BY THE PUBLIC, and have just taken power by blinding the governments of member states with nonsense about 'improved trade' and 'less economic barriers'.
Countries that are in the EU are forced to take on the laws as the EU dictates. Britain has a say in what laws it wants to take, but if the other states vote against it.. then 60,000,000 British citizens will be subject to a law that even their government opposes!
The EU parliament are nothing but Nazis in liberal clothing.
You're quite correct, but you need to take air resistance into account. The current might be X amps at the terminal, but after taking into account all of the resistance, you're looking at (X divided by hundreds) at the point of contact.
This actually raises the interesting point that you couldn't design a tesla coil that could stun, but not kill, for as the intruder moves closer, the ampage increases exponentially.
You're right on the second point, however.
Just pretty lightning.. not effective, here's why.
on
Build Your Own Tesla Coil
·
· Score: 1, Informative
The tesla coil described in the page is not really of much practical use.
It operates at a high voltage and low current. This means that, yeah, it looks impressive, but any actual damage it could cause would be extremely limited. If you want something like the tesla coils in C&C, you have some problems to overcome.
The first is something that is directional. The tesla coils in C&C were far beyond today's technology, since electricity naturally flows to the nearest earth.
To really hurt something or burn something, you're looking at throwing at least 100 amps from the coil. This is far away from the 100 milliamps that current tesla coils use. But for the fun of it, let's work out what sort of power you'd need to really cause some serious damage.
So, we have the 100 amps. What about the voltage? 10,000 volts is the right sort of voltage to be able to shoot a beam of tesla lightning about 20 metres. This is calculated by taking the SU air density of 2.5Fd per metre, and multiplying that by (current / air impedence), or (100 / 0.0279)..
So, 2.5 * (100 / 0.0261) = 9,578.54 volts.. close enough to 10,000 volts anyway.
And 10,000 volts at 100 amps? You do the math. You are talking about a serious amount of electricity.
And don't forget.. the thing would have a constant load! When the coil isn't zapping intruders (okay, it's a stupid concept but I'm just pointing out the practicalities).. you're still sucking up several megawatts of power with it just going straight back to earth!
So, this is a great idea, and a cute trial.. but you're never going to get a tesla coil that can really injure people like in C&C. It's all just pretty patterns in the sky for now...:-(
hairy_hippy: You speak a lot of sense, but the EU is not going to be a group of different nations for much longer.
The EU is becoming a federation.. in effect, a country of its own. Each current country, France, Germany, UK, etc.. will become a 'state' within the EU.
Now, if you can hold patents within individual states within one large master country.. then that's great. But it sure doesn't work that way in the US. You can't hold patents in, say, Alabama and another in Texas.. they're for the whole country.
Europe is quickly becoming a single country, hence I raised the question.
Most Americans probably won't understand what this is about, but it's worth asking anyway..
With new states set to join the EU, and perhaps even more joining in the future, how will the patent office deal with this?
For example, a company in Romania could have a national patent on, say, a form of compression. A company in the EU may also hold a similar patent.
When Romania joins the EU what happens to harmonize the patent law across the EU? Does the EU patent immediately get preferential treatment? Or does the older patent of the two get the final EU patent?
If this is the case, could a company in a country currently outside the EU get broad patents for a whole bunch of areas, and then claim licencing fees when they join the EU and have their patents validated?
Also, what happens to patents currently held in multiple countries already in the EU? Does the EU take precedence, or do the countries have to fight it out? For example, people in Sweden and the UK might both have patents on the same thing!
The original poster is not a troll, here's why.
on
IBM's Deep View
·
· Score: 2
He has a point. A dual headed GeForce 4 can drive two displays at 1600x1200 without problem, which comes out to 3200x1200. Okay, that's not quite 3600x2400, but we're not talking miles off. Why does it require 8 Linux machines just to rustle up the power to display images on a screen of that resolution?
I could understand if the Linux boxes were running a powerful simulation or something, but surely we can get devices of that resolution running on a single PC with some pretty intense hardware.
Or, is GeForce 4 et al really on the cutting edge? What do the people with millions of dollars use? Do they have to start using multiple machines like IBM? Sounds unlikely to me. What about the military? Surely someone is one step ahead of the latest consumer technology?
Re:Which is why you use an LCD...
on
IBM's Deep View
·
· Score: 1
You're right, but I just had a brainwave..
Could you make a monitor that has multiple skewed electron beams so that you get a more LCD-like effect of the whole image appearing at once?
Prediction for tomorrow's Slashdot front page
on
The Bulova Accutron
·
· Score: 1, Offtopic
somebozo writes "The facsimile machine, introduced in 1966, is an amazing device that sends images through a phone line! It's far quicker than sending something in the mail and a real advancement in communications technology! Prior to learning about the fax machine, I had never learned about it before. Very interesting." Gee, we are really running short on stories today.
Okay, let's get them out of the way so other people can start some real discussions. Here are all the clichéd posts in one easy-to-read post!
(+1 Funny) -- "The Bulova Accutron replaces the old Bulova Helluvaweight, a valve operated watch which the wearer pulled along behind them in a shopping cart."
(-1 Flamebait) -- "Who cares about this old crap? It's just old technology that we don't use now anyway."
(-1 Troll) -- "This sucks. Using transistors in a watch? Nowadays we use pure silicon, which they actually had in the 60's but they were unable to see the benefits."
(-1 Overrated) -- "Hi, I'm John Romero/Alan Cox/Linus Torvalds, and I thought I'd drop in and just say 'Hi'"
The number of telephones for every 100 residents in the major cities will rise from only four to 20 by the year 2000.
Ha!
You can get better than KVM for little more money.
on
USB KVMs Compared
·
· Score: 5, Informative
KVMs are good, and they certainly have a variety of specialized uses, but they're not versatile enough, in my opinion. For example, in situations where two computer might need to both be used at once. What do you do then?
I've been looking around for solutions to this problem, because I've been thinking of opening a cybercafe, and I found something called BeTwin.
BeTwin is like the inverse of a KVM switch. Instead of having one keyboard, monitor, and mouse control one of a bunch of machines.. it turns a single machine -into- the bunch of machines.
Licences are $80 a head, and you can have up to 5 people independently using a single Windows 2000/XP machine just by plugging 5 USB keyboards, 5 USB mice, and 5 graphics cards into a computer (5 USB speakers too, if you think the USB bandwidth will take it!).. absolutely ideal for cybercafes where processing requirements on each station are low.
I have decided to go with the Linux route, rather than pay these fees, but thought I'd share it anyway.
That 'Flow' game listed on the results page there is worth downloading. 600kb download, and it's not as easy as it sounds. Been playing it for a little while now.
Slashdot Mirror
Didn't the guy who originally spurred Mozilla off of Netscape leave and open a café a couple of years ago? And then a few months ago, when Mozilla 1 was released, they held a Mozilla 1 party in his café?
What happened to that guy?
I recall a TV ad that went on about getting a patent for things, and it said something like:
Who invented the telephone?
A) Alexander Graham Bell, or
B) Elisha Gray
And then it crossed it all out, and put C) Both!
Yet, hardly anyone has heard of Elisha Gray, yet Elisha actually invented the telephone before Bell. The problem? He submitted his patent two hours after Bell. And even though Bell's patent was actually flawed and incorrect, Bell still got the title of 'who invented the telephone'.
More information here.
Of course, it depends on how much you value fame. But, really, what is life about? Surely it'd be nice to have a legacy.
I agree with your opinion on Franklin, however. I just chose him as an example.
Good luck stealing from Benjamin Franklin. You can't steal an idea if the originator is giving it away for free.
Untrue. Just because someone doesn't have a patent doesn't mean they have put the idea in the public domain.
Someone else could have taken Ben's invention and really had a hit with it, and then THEY would have been remembered as the inventor.. even though they weren't!
Ben, and Richard Stallman, have relied on the fame of being the originators of what they have produced. They might not have got rich from their inventions (Stallman still being alive, and with a chance, of course) but they still got the credit.
If everyone gave their ideas away for free these days, they'd be stolen and exploited, and the inventors' names would quickly be forgotten.
The meaning of life is not to rack up as many points on some financial scorechart as possible. After all, why do you spend your life making money anyway? Just so you can spend it to be happy and secure, and to provide for your dependants. Yet I'm not approving Communism. Individual achievements must be recognized, how can we do this? Patents and fame. Unfortunately, fame often goes to the wrong people, so patents are necessary.
Instead of being happy little campers like Franklin who do things to help others, we rush after money and desperately try to hoard our own little pile of it. Why?
Because no matter what you've got, someone else will always try to take a piece of it. Whether it's the government with their taxes, or even 'competitors' who want to steal all of your business or your inventions.. someone wants to steal from you.
That's why we have patents. Patents go a long way to stopping others from stealing what took you so long to create.
Sure, patents aren't all that great, but for a capitalist nation to work without them, we'd need to become 100% Libertarian and idealistic, and that isn't going to happen. As soon as it does, some rotten apple will steal to increase his slice of the pie, and so it goes again.
So, that's how we life. We don't all just get our acre of land, stay self sufficient, and enjoy our days out in the sun.. Instead we slave away in offices, coming up with ideas, and trying to make a million dollars, so that we get a bigger share of the pie. It's not a great system, but what viable alternatives are there? Communism? Yeah, right.
Actually, you are right about the assured security thing, I was using it loosely. However..
Protecting your home (and your person) is your job. Figuring out who the bad guy is and attempting to prosecute them (should you fail at YOUR job) is what the police do.
This might be the case in Texas, but it's not in most of the world. Let me speak from a UK standpoint here, as I'm more familiar with those laws..
In the UK, if someone breaks into your house, and injures themselves by falling on a step or some sort of 'trap' you have devised (such as electrifying door handles, etc).. you can be prosecuted, and the intruder can sue you for damages. This happens.
You are not legally allowed to protect your property in any way you want, and if you harm any intruder, you are likely to be in front of a judge pretty quick. This is why it's illegal to carry knives or guns even if they're only for 'self protection'. Self protection is not a concept that is really recognised in UK law. If you injure someone, you're in the shit, simple as that.
It will be interesting to see them stick to their high and mightly morals and actually move.
;-) but it's currently overstaffed.
:-(
Your sarcasm is well put, and you're right.
Every time there's a 'crisis' or an 'injustice' of some sort in the UK, you end up with numerous celebrities and public figures bleating on about how they'll 'leave the country' if such-and-such happens.. AND THEY NEVER DO!
I remember that thousands of contractors were going to leave the country when IR35 came into force, and they didn't. If they did, there'd still be a contracting industry in the UK
Perhaps people WOULD change countries if it was an easy thing to do. I want to move to the USA, but you can bet sure as hell that they won't let me! I'm stuck in the UK till I get a degree, to the front of the visa queue, or come into $500k I can invest over there
Remember that in 1984, the main character believed that a true revolution against an evil government could not be started by a small gang of intellectuals, but that it would have to be the 'dumb masses' (known as the 'proles') who could summon the power to do it?
To be honest, I can't see the point in fighting this. It's a bad way to go, sure, but a fistful of academics and computer scientists isn't going to sway the supposed 'ideals' of modern government. Keeping track of citizens is seen to be a good thing, and the only way we can stop governments bringing in draconian laws like these is to get millions of *common people* to rebel against it.
This isn't going to happen. I've had discussions with people, and asked them what they thought about losing their privacy, and they generally believe that if you're doing nothing wrong, then who cares?
The proles are useless, and they are not going to help in this fight. Stupid laws like the DMCA, IR35, RIP, terrorist Acts, will continue to pass through while governments preach that they'll improve your security.
Sure, they might improve security, but for every bit of assured security you gain, you lose a bit of assured freedom too.
I wasn't specifically talking about MEPs, who are elected by the public. I'm talking about the thousands of higher level bureaucrats who run the whole EU game.
Either way, saying that the public votes for MEPs is only half right. The public knows NOTHING about MEPs, and AFAIR the turnout for the European Council Elections was lower than 30%!
Well, gee, let's hold an election on matters of biochemistry and see if the public will understand WTF it's all about without being briefed. The average voter knows nothing about MEPs, simply because they're told nothing about it.
My point remains. The EU is taking over Europe by stealth, whether that's a good thing or not.
The EU likes to pretend that it's an oh so noble institution, whereas the US is run by mobsters. Well, most Europeans are fully aware that the EU and the European Parliament are staffed by some of the laziest, overly bureaucratic morons and crooks that this planet has ever seen.
Infact, the politicians behind the EU are somewhat like Nazis. They were NOT ELECTED BY THE PUBLIC, and have just taken power by blinding the governments of member states with nonsense about 'improved trade' and 'less economic barriers'.
Countries that are in the EU are forced to take on the laws as the EU dictates. Britain has a say in what laws it wants to take, but if the other states vote against it.. then 60,000,000 British citizens will be subject to a law that even their government opposes!
The EU parliament are nothing but Nazis in liberal clothing.
Really? Oh, fair enough. I guess the ass fell out of this one then. I think this blatant troll has gone on long enough ;-)
You're quite correct, but you need to take air resistance into account. The current might be X amps at the terminal, but after taking into account all of the resistance, you're looking at (X divided by hundreds) at the point of contact.
This actually raises the interesting point that you couldn't design a tesla coil that could stun, but not kill, for as the intruder moves closer, the ampage increases exponentially.
You're right on the second point, however.
The tesla coil described in the page is not really of much practical use.
:-(
It operates at a high voltage and low current. This means that, yeah, it looks impressive, but any actual damage it could cause would be extremely limited. If you want something like the tesla coils in C&C, you have some problems to overcome.
The first is something that is directional. The tesla coils in C&C were far beyond today's technology, since electricity naturally flows to the nearest earth.
To really hurt something or burn something, you're looking at throwing at least 100 amps from the coil. This is far away from the 100 milliamps that current tesla coils use. But for the fun of it, let's work out what sort of power you'd need to really cause some serious damage.
So, we have the 100 amps. What about the voltage? 10,000 volts is the right sort of voltage to be able to shoot a beam of tesla lightning about 20 metres. This is calculated by taking the SU air density of 2.5Fd per metre, and multiplying that by (current / air impedence), or (100 / 0.0279)..
So, 2.5 * (100 / 0.0261) = 9,578.54 volts.. close enough to 10,000 volts anyway.
And 10,000 volts at 100 amps? You do the math. You are talking about a serious amount of electricity.
And don't forget.. the thing would have a constant load! When the coil isn't zapping intruders (okay, it's a stupid concept but I'm just pointing out the practicalities).. you're still sucking up several megawatts of power with it just going straight back to earth!
So, this is a great idea, and a cute trial.. but you're never going to get a tesla coil that can really injure people like in C&C. It's all just pretty patterns in the sky for now...
hairy_hippy: You speak a lot of sense, but the EU is not going to be a group of different nations for much longer.
The EU is becoming a federation.. in effect, a country of its own. Each current country, France, Germany, UK, etc.. will become a 'state' within the EU.
Now, if you can hold patents within individual states within one large master country.. then that's great. But it sure doesn't work that way in the US. You can't hold patents in, say, Alabama and another in Texas.. they're for the whole country.
Europe is quickly becoming a single country, hence I raised the question.
502 - Server Busy
Most Americans probably won't understand what this is about, but it's worth asking anyway..
With new states set to join the EU, and perhaps even more joining in the future, how will the patent office deal with this?
For example, a company in Romania could have a national patent on, say, a form of compression. A company in the EU may also hold a similar patent.
When Romania joins the EU what happens to harmonize the patent law across the EU? Does the EU patent immediately get preferential treatment? Or does the older patent of the two get the final EU patent?
If this is the case, could a company in a country currently outside the EU get broad patents for a whole bunch of areas, and then claim licencing fees when they join the EU and have their patents validated?
Also, what happens to patents currently held in multiple countries already in the EU? Does the EU take precedence, or do the countries have to fight it out? For example, people in Sweden and the UK might both have patents on the same thing!
He has a point. A dual headed GeForce 4 can drive two displays at 1600x1200 without problem, which comes out to 3200x1200. Okay, that's not quite 3600x2400, but we're not talking miles off. Why does it require 8 Linux machines just to rustle up the power to display images on a screen of that resolution?
I could understand if the Linux boxes were running a powerful simulation or something, but surely we can get devices of that resolution running on a single PC with some pretty intense hardware.
Or, is GeForce 4 et al really on the cutting edge? What do the people with millions of dollars use? Do they have to start using multiple machines like IBM? Sounds unlikely to me. What about the military? Surely someone is one step ahead of the latest consumer technology?
You're right, but I just had a brainwave..
Could you make a monitor that has multiple skewed electron beams so that you get a more LCD-like effect of the whole image appearing at once?
somebozo writes "The facsimile machine, introduced in 1966, is an amazing device that sends images through a phone line! It's far quicker than sending something in the mail and a real advancement in communications technology! Prior to learning about the fax machine, I had never learned about it before. Very interesting." Gee, we are really running short on stories today.
Okay, let's get them out of the way so other people can start some real discussions. Here are all the clichéd posts in one easy-to-read post!
(+1 Funny) -- "The Bulova Accutron replaces the old Bulova Helluvaweight, a valve operated watch which the wearer pulled along behind them in a shopping cart."
(-1 Flamebait) -- "Who cares about this old crap? It's just old technology that we don't use now anyway."
(-1 Troll) -- "This sucks. Using transistors in a watch? Nowadays we use pure silicon, which they actually had in the 60's but they were unable to see the benefits."
(-1 Overrated) -- "Hi, I'm John Romero/Alan Cox/Linus Torvalds, and I thought I'd drop in and just say 'Hi'"
I can't believe no-one has mentioned the port of Doom for the Atari 2600 yet!
The Telecom Digest from November 1983.
It claims that in China..
The number of telephones for every 100 residents in the major cities will rise from only four to 20 by the year 2000.
Ha!
KVMs are good, and they certainly have a variety of specialized uses, but they're not versatile enough, in my opinion. For example, in situations where two computer might need to both be used at once. What do you do then?
I've been looking around for solutions to this problem, because I've been thinking of opening a cybercafe, and I found something called BeTwin.
BeTwin is like the inverse of a KVM switch. Instead of having one keyboard, monitor, and mouse control one of a bunch of machines.. it turns a single machine -into- the bunch of machines.
Licences are $80 a head, and you can have up to 5 people independently using a single Windows 2000/XP machine just by plugging 5 USB keyboards, 5 USB mice, and 5 graphics cards into a computer (5 USB speakers too, if you think the USB bandwidth will take it!).. absolutely ideal for cybercafes where processing requirements on each station are low.
I have decided to go with the Linux route, rather than pay these fees, but thought I'd share it anyway.
Actually, I just realised it's kinda like Marble Madness on the SNES.
That 'Flow' game listed on the results page there is worth downloading. 600kb download, and it's not as easy as it sounds. Been playing it for a little while now.