He went to jail because he was committing trademark infringement by printing Microsoft and Dell logos on the discs and using trademarked names on his pirated discs.
But the software *was* genuine Dell and Microsoft. It's like putting a Ford badge on a Ford car.
In a way it's natural to have a confusion between the intellectual property itself and the carrier. For years that was the way copyright was enforced. And in fact the guy was in the business, partly, of selling these discs. But he wasn't selling the IP itself, he was selling access to the IP. It's only confusing because copyright depended for so many years upon controlling physical copies. It's like a bug in the IP system caused by legacy feature support.
There was a time when you couldn't get by in certain jobs with out VB. In any case, the language was beside the point; it was the development environment and connection to other systems that made VB important, which exactly makes my point about marketing.
As for Javascript, it really is a very interesting language if you understand functional programming.
The internal combustion engine killing ray was a staple of 1920s and 30's pulp fiction super-science villains. It was a common trope in spy thrillers and detective stories. In those stories airplanes (the highest of high tech) were continually falling mysteriously out of the sky, brought down by the villain and his henchmen's engine freezing ray.
If you think about it, the internal combustion engine in 1930 was newer to the general public than the computer is today. Before the model T in 1908 it was an extreme rarity -- it was still the era of horses and steam engines. And rays were the latest thing too. X-rays had been discovered only 35 years earlier -- in our time reference, that's about the time that the ARPANET migrated to TCP/IP or the IBM PC was introduced. There was a positive mania for radiation. Shoe-fitting x-ray fluoroscopes started to show up in shoe stores and people were consuming radium-based patent medicines -- what we'd call supplements today. Some people died so hot they had to be buried in lead caskets.
The thing is if this concept is proved, some of those old pulp magazine super-science scenarios have to be regarded as physically plausible. Fu Manchu was, in modern terms, a "terrorist".
300 K is power.... the *rate* of energy being expended. So if you use that power for a very short time, it's actually not much energy.
People are, to a first approximation, a 20 kilo bag containing 40 liter of water. It takes roughly 168000 joules to raise the temperature of that water by 1 degree. So 168 kJ/300 kw ==.56 seconds. So a 10 ms pulse, if delivered entirely into an average human body, would only raise the temperature of that body by one hundreths of a degree *averaged over the entire body*. Granted the heating effects would be concentrated on the surface of the body, but if you made the pulse sufficiently short a person wouldn't feel anything.
A computer operating at clock speed of hundreds of megahertz, however, is vulnerable to transients lasting only microseconds.
So this is kind of like the way you need a surge protector to protect your computer but not an old-school incandescent light bulb. People are, from a voltage transient standpoint, more like a light bulb than a computer.
That's kind of naive. The best language to program in is the one that has the most brainshare. It's where the jobs are and where posting a job will find the greatest pool of candidates.
Marketing isn't just about creating manipulative communication, although that's part of it. It's the practical study of how to exploit human economic behavior.
It's not that blue light that damages breast or prostate tissue directly. It's neurologically-mediated endocrine changes that have been well documented now for decades. It's only more recently that those endocrine changes have been linked to cancer.
The chain of causation is blue light -> retina -> optic nerve -> suprachiasmatic nucleus of the hypothalamus -> pineal gland -> {disrupted hormones including melatonin and serotonin} -> {multiple and widespread physiological disturbances including disturbed sleep and chronic inflammation} -> {breast and prostate cell damage, precise mechanisms unknown}.
Over the years one thing I've seen over and over is the huge difference having a few good people at the right time and place makes. It's often occured to me that you could excel at anything by just trying a little harder than other guy does to find good people. So the idea of a highly automated factory that also cleverly leverages human potential sounded plausible to me.
But your post human potential has a downside too. The mentality of any group collectively never rises far above its least common denominator.
There's the other Procrustean solution. Samsung makes a 110 inch TV that is 1.8 meters high and 2.6 meters across. It's built to order and will set you back 15 million won.
Even at UHD resolution with middle-aged vision, you should be able to dissatisfying yourself from at least arm's length.
That's less precise than is usual. Week/county is more typical in infectious disease surveillance. But in any case, it's not the case that even that's "not enough to do science". It's not enough to do a lot of things you might want, but I've seen results with not much more than that precision that were useful (e.g. the spread of the Asian Tiger Mosquito from its introduction through California plant nurseries).
China is 20% of the world's population. Even if they punch way below their weight, in a serious bid for technological leadership sheer size.
Consider Liechtenstein. It may be a terrific place to live -- in fact it's got the world's highest per capita income $139,100. But with just 39,000 inhabitants, it's never going to be a world power at anything.
Now the United States is the third most populous country in the world. Our world-leading higher education system means we punch way above our weight. But realistically we're only 5% of the world's population. To put that in perspective, India, the second most populous country, may have a huge poverty problem, but its middle class (267 million) is larger than the US middle class (121 million). Within the next decade, the size of the Chinese middle class is expected to outstrip the size of the entire US population.
So the only way we're not going to lose ground to China on technological leadership is if China screws up badly. Or we make a really concerted effort to step up our game. Possibly both would be needed. The thing is, I don't think Americans realize this; we think of tech leadership as a birthright. People would be amazed to realize that other countries have better Internet, better phone, and better health care than we do.
"Solid research" means meeting the normal standards for research in that field.
I've actually worked with public health data, and the standard for exchanging data is to aggregate that data in such a way that personally identifiable information is not recoverable. For example when you report an HIV case, you know the person lives at 123 Maple Street, but you instead report it as occurring within a geographic area that contains enough people that it's not feasible to work out who that person is, even if you combine it with other data.
That's the usual standard. If you ask for surveillance data, you get sanitized data, never raw data. It may limit the kinds of conclusions you draw, but it doesn't undermine the validity of the conclusion you *do* draw.
The intent may be to hobble the use of public health data, but it will may also force pesticide companies to publish trade secrets in order to have their products registered for legal use. At present this data is treated as confidential by the EPA.
This will not only affect new pesticides, it could also affect already registered pesticides, even if you grandfathered in the original registration. That's because a new registration number needs to be issued whenever the manufacturer changes any of the inert ingredients in the formulation, or even makes changes to the the production processes.
China's coal consumption peaked three years ago; in 2014 the percent of electricity generated by coal was 78%; in 2017 it was only 66%. As in the US, the decline in coal has been from an aggressive push in to natural gas. Natural gas is not emissions free, but it is much cleaner than either coal electricity generation or diesel vehicle engines.
China is also planning on bringing on a lot more wind power in the coming decades.
What will do the moose in is the same thing that did the auroch in in the 1600s - habitat loss. The giant auroch is the wild ancestor of domestic cattle, and was an important game species from paleolithic times up to the Middle Ages. It was probably the very first species human attempted to prevent from going extinct, first by increasingly restrictive hunting limits, and then by establishing reserves. But an animal that size (over three thousand pounds in the paleolithic period) needs an enormous range to support healthy populations.
Expect moose populations to decline as their range is restricted by human development and climate change, starting at the southern end of their range where they're most vulnerable. A little further north the decline won't be as apparent as the moose population is concentrated in its restricted range, but you will see more diseased animals.
would be very difficult to detect by archaeological means.
That's because a perfectly civilization would never throw anything matter away; just entropy.
Take shell middens, something we know a number of extinct civilizations by. State fish and wildlife agencies encourage restaurants to send their oyster shells to programs which return them to the ocean; it turns out that old oyster shells are the preferred habitat for oyster larvae.
Of course the archaeological resource par excellence is the burial. Eventually we're going to run out of space for graves, and later even cremation is going to be present pollution issues. Sooner or later we're going to have to compost people. It sounds weird, but in truth if you look at our funerary practices they're already weird.
Coal mining before the Industrial Revolution was a very minor affair, and most civilizations never did it. Not Egypt, Kush, Babylonia, Persia or India for example. None of these civilizations left plastic remains.
The ancient Chinese and Romans did seek out and exploit coal, but they did not manage deplete reserves in any of their territories.
You're assuming "civilization" looks like 20th Century civilization. In fact it could look very different. But it raises a good question: what, exactly, is a "civilization".
It turns out the thing that distinguishes a civilization from other kinds of societies in the minds of people who think about these thing is this: social stratification. In a civilization, most people have to work for someone else.
Christians, among other people, although in this country when they want to commit suicide they're more apt to use guns and the police as their instruments. I suspect that's because guns are easy to get here. If you have to build your own instrument of mass murder, improvised explosives are the way to go.
In a world in which email, voice mail, even answering machines were exotic technology, the single most common task in an office was preparation of memos and letters to be printed on standard on ANSI A sized, or ISO A4 sized paper.
Portrait orientation is ideal for that task. The only reason most early office computers had landscape displays is that character-oriented displays wouldn't have had the resolution to display a typewritten line of text had they been designed for portrait mode. Since Xerox was offering a computer with a high resolution pixel-oriented screen, it made perfect sense to offer it in the orientation that was ideal for the most common thing it had to do.
Today, though, our mix of tasks are different, and portrait orientation would be annoying for most people. I actually think 4:3 is probably the best overall compromise for an office-oriented mix of tasks; 16:9 for an entertainment oriented mix. But increasingly designers are expecting you to have a lot of horizontal room, so 4:3 is less viable on smaller screens than it ought to be.
The thing is all the obvious applications for smart glasses that are useful to you as a user are task oriented. Driving directions, for example. If you could get the price, styling, and performance of these things in the right place, they'd have niche applications.
But that's not the vision, is it? The vision is for you to have these things on your face every waking moment, so that the vendor can track and shape your behavior as a consumer.
That's easy with something like a smart speaker (which would be more accurately called a "smart microphone") that you buy and stick in the corner of a room. It's not so easy with something you have to wear, and have to recharge the more you use it.
I've never met a person who is genuinely guided by his religious or philosophical principles. The main function of those things is to give you rationalizations for the things you do. The more convinced that someone is that he's a good whatever he calls himself, the more self-deluded he is.
The idea of Muslims who are robotically diabolical or Christians that are robotically saintly is ludicrous. It's like thinking being a Selena Gomez fan makes you profoundly different from an Ariana Grande fan.
By your theory the entire ocean should be full of coral reefs, because evolution will adapt corals to a wide variety of conditions. This is counter-factual. Nature doesn't make coral reefs as a goal. They just happen under a narrow set of conditions as a side effect of population survival. If the conditions change, and the descendants of a the current population of hard corals survive, they'll adopt different lifestyles like their relatives the soft corals.
And since hard corals are a keystone species, that means you'll end up with a completely different ecosystem, dominated by weedy species with short, explosive reproductive life cycles. This is a natural process that goes on all the time, but it is unusual for it to happen on a global scale. The last event like this was 66 million years ago, long before the first primitive hominid emerges in the fossil record.
People have good reason to discount evolutionary adaptation to anthropogenic climate change, at least as far as holding out hope of maintaining the status quo environment or producing one equally as rich. Sure, things'll be fine in a million years, which is a blink of an eye geologically. But they won't be so fine in 100 years, or even 10,000.
In a way, old times are going back to how they used to be.
Up until 1949, the US movie industry was dominated by the "big five" movie studios, in something called the "studio system". In the studio system, the studios not only made the movies, they owned the movie theaters as well, exercising monopoly control over independent theaters by forcing them to purchase and show less popular movies. In an age before TV where almost everybody went to the movies every week, that was guaranteed profit.
That's kind of what Netflix does with its interface. It started as a content middleman, but it's using its control of the app in your smart TV to steer you toward Netflix original content, most of which, like the vast majority of Golden Age Hollywood movies, are mediocre. Strategic ownership of theaters in places where they can influence taste makers is consistent with that strategy. It makes little sense on its own, and it's not a long-term strategy, it's a short-to-mid term strategy to increase brain share. That's obviously Netflix's long term game.
Slashdot Mirror
But the software *was* genuine Dell and Microsoft. It's like putting a Ford badge on a Ford car.
In a way it's natural to have a confusion between the intellectual property itself and the carrier. For years that was the way copyright was enforced. And in fact the guy was in the business, partly, of selling these discs. But he wasn't selling the IP itself, he was selling access to the IP. It's only confusing because copyright depended for so many years upon controlling physical copies. It's like a bug in the IP system caused by legacy feature support.
There was a time when you couldn't get by in certain jobs with out VB. In any case, the language was beside the point; it was the development environment and connection to other systems that made VB important, which exactly makes my point about marketing.
As for Javascript, it really is a very interesting language if you understand functional programming.
The internal combustion engine killing ray was a staple of 1920s and 30's pulp fiction super-science villains. It was a common trope in spy thrillers and detective stories. In those stories airplanes (the highest of high tech) were continually falling mysteriously out of the sky, brought down by the villain and his henchmen's engine freezing ray.
If you think about it, the internal combustion engine in 1930 was newer to the general public than the computer is today. Before the model T in 1908 it was an extreme rarity -- it was still the era of horses and steam engines. And rays were the latest thing too. X-rays had been discovered only 35 years earlier -- in our time reference, that's about the time that the ARPANET migrated to TCP/IP or the IBM PC was introduced. There was a positive mania for radiation. Shoe-fitting x-ray fluoroscopes started to show up in shoe stores and people were consuming radium-based patent medicines -- what we'd call supplements today. Some people died so hot they had to be buried in lead caskets.
The thing is if this concept is proved, some of those old pulp magazine super-science scenarios have to be regarded as physically plausible. Fu Manchu was, in modern terms, a "terrorist".
300 K is power.... the *rate* of energy being expended. So if you use that power for a very short time, it's actually not much energy.
People are, to a first approximation, a 20 kilo bag containing 40 liter of water. It takes roughly 168000 joules to raise the temperature of that water by 1 degree. So 168 kJ/300 kw == .56 seconds. So a 10 ms pulse, if delivered entirely into an average human body, would only raise the temperature of that body by one hundreths of a degree *averaged over the entire body*. Granted the heating effects would be concentrated on the surface of the body, but if you made the pulse sufficiently short a person wouldn't feel anything.
A computer operating at clock speed of hundreds of megahertz, however, is vulnerable to transients lasting only microseconds.
So this is kind of like the way you need a surge protector to protect your computer but not an old-school incandescent light bulb. People are, from a voltage transient standpoint, more like a light bulb than a computer.
That's kind of naive. The best language to program in is the one that has the most brainshare. It's where the jobs are and where posting a job will find the greatest pool of candidates.
Marketing isn't just about creating manipulative communication, although that's part of it. It's the practical study of how to exploit human economic behavior.
It's not that blue light that damages breast or prostate tissue directly. It's neurologically-mediated endocrine changes that have been well documented now for decades. It's only more recently that those endocrine changes have been linked to cancer.
The chain of causation is blue light -> retina -> optic nerve -> suprachiasmatic nucleus of the hypothalamus -> pineal gland -> {disrupted hormones including melatonin and serotonin} -> {multiple and widespread physiological disturbances including disturbed sleep and chronic inflammation} -> {breast and prostate cell damage, precise mechanisms unknown}.
Over the years one thing I've seen over and over is the huge difference having a few good people at the right time and place makes. It's often occured to me that you could excel at anything by just trying a little harder than other guy does to find good people. So the idea of a highly automated factory that also cleverly leverages human potential sounded plausible to me.
But your post human potential has a downside too. The mentality of any group collectively never rises far above its least common denominator.
Old people vote.
There's the other Procrustean solution. Samsung makes a 110 inch TV that is 1.8 meters high and 2.6 meters across. It's built to order and will set you back 15 million won.
Even at UHD resolution with middle-aged vision, you should be able to dissatisfying yourself from at least arm's length.
That's less precise than is usual. Week/county is more typical in infectious disease surveillance. But in any case, it's not the case that even that's "not enough to do science". It's not enough to do a lot of things you might want, but I've seen results with not much more than that precision that were useful (e.g. the spread of the Asian Tiger Mosquito from its introduction through California plant nurseries).
China is 20% of the world's population. Even if they punch way below their weight, in a serious bid for technological leadership sheer size.
Consider Liechtenstein. It may be a terrific place to live -- in fact it's got the world's highest per capita income $139,100. But with just 39,000 inhabitants, it's never going to be a world power at anything.
Now the United States is the third most populous country in the world. Our world-leading higher education system means we punch way above our weight. But realistically we're only 5% of the world's population. To put that in perspective, India, the second most populous country, may have a huge poverty problem, but its middle class (267 million) is larger than the US middle class (121 million). Within the next decade, the size of the Chinese middle class is expected to outstrip the size of the entire US population.
So the only way we're not going to lose ground to China on technological leadership is if China screws up badly. Or we make a really concerted effort to step up our game. Possibly both would be needed. The thing is, I don't think Americans realize this; we think of tech leadership as a birthright. People would be amazed to realize that other countries have better Internet, better phone, and better health care than we do.
"Solid research" means meeting the normal standards for research in that field.
I've actually worked with public health data, and the standard for exchanging data is to aggregate that data in such a way that personally identifiable information is not recoverable. For example when you report an HIV case, you know the person lives at 123 Maple Street, but you instead report it as occurring within a geographic area that contains enough people that it's not feasible to work out who that person is, even if you combine it with other data.
That's the usual standard. If you ask for surveillance data, you get sanitized data, never raw data. It may limit the kinds of conclusions you draw, but it doesn't undermine the validity of the conclusion you *do* draw.
Not disclosing public health data does not make a result non-reproducible. It just makes it less convenient to reproduce.
In your conception of "reproducible", gravity wave detection is not science, because you can't reproduce the detection of any specific event.
The intent may be to hobble the use of public health data, but it will may also force pesticide companies to publish trade secrets in order to have their products registered for legal use. At present this data is treated as confidential by the EPA.
This will not only affect new pesticides, it could also affect already registered pesticides, even if you grandfathered in the original registration. That's because a new registration number needs to be issued whenever the manufacturer changes any of the inert ingredients in the formulation, or even makes changes to the the production processes.
China's coal consumption peaked three years ago; in 2014 the percent of electricity generated by coal was 78%; in 2017 it was only 66%. As in the US, the decline in coal has been from an aggressive push in to natural gas. Natural gas is not emissions free, but it is much cleaner than either coal electricity generation or diesel vehicle engines.
China is also planning on bringing on a lot more wind power in the coming decades.
Well, the entire point is not yet.
What will do the moose in is the same thing that did the auroch in in the 1600s - habitat loss. The giant auroch is the wild ancestor of domestic cattle, and was an important game species from paleolithic times up to the Middle Ages. It was probably the very first species human attempted to prevent from going extinct, first by increasingly restrictive hunting limits, and then by establishing reserves. But an animal that size (over three thousand pounds in the paleolithic period) needs an enormous range to support healthy populations.
Expect moose populations to decline as their range is restricted by human development and climate change, starting at the southern end of their range where they're most vulnerable. A little further north the decline won't be as apparent as the moose population is concentrated in its restricted range, but you will see more diseased animals.
would be very difficult to detect by archaeological means.
That's because a perfectly civilization would never throw anything matter away; just entropy.
Take shell middens, something we know a number of extinct civilizations by. State fish and wildlife agencies encourage restaurants to send their oyster shells to programs which return them to the ocean; it turns out that old oyster shells are the preferred habitat for oyster larvae.
Of course the archaeological resource par excellence is the burial. Eventually we're going to run out of space for graves, and later even cremation is going to be present pollution issues. Sooner or later we're going to have to compost people. It sounds weird, but in truth if you look at our funerary practices they're already weird.
Coal mining before the Industrial Revolution was a very minor affair, and most civilizations never did it. Not Egypt, Kush, Babylonia, Persia or India for example. None of these civilizations left plastic remains.
The ancient Chinese and Romans did seek out and exploit coal, but they did not manage deplete reserves in any of their territories.
You're assuming "civilization" looks like 20th Century civilization. In fact it could look very different. But it raises a good question: what, exactly, is a "civilization".
It turns out the thing that distinguishes a civilization from other kinds of societies in the minds of people who think about these thing is this: social stratification. In a civilization, most people have to work for someone else.
Christians, among other people, although in this country when they want to commit suicide they're more apt to use guns and the police as their instruments. I suspect that's because guns are easy to get here. If you have to build your own instrument of mass murder, improvised explosives are the way to go.
In a world in which email, voice mail, even answering machines were exotic technology, the single most common task in an office was preparation of memos and letters to be printed on standard on ANSI A sized, or ISO A4 sized paper.
Portrait orientation is ideal for that task. The only reason most early office computers had landscape displays is that character-oriented displays wouldn't have had the resolution to display a typewritten line of text had they been designed for portrait mode. Since Xerox was offering a computer with a high resolution pixel-oriented screen, it made perfect sense to offer it in the orientation that was ideal for the most common thing it had to do.
Today, though, our mix of tasks are different, and portrait orientation would be annoying for most people. I actually think 4:3 is probably the best overall compromise for an office-oriented mix of tasks; 16:9 for an entertainment oriented mix. But increasingly designers are expecting you to have a lot of horizontal room, so 4:3 is less viable on smaller screens than it ought to be.
The thing is all the obvious applications for smart glasses that are useful to you as a user are task oriented. Driving directions, for example. If you could get the price, styling, and performance of these things in the right place, they'd have niche applications.
But that's not the vision, is it? The vision is for you to have these things on your face every waking moment, so that the vendor can track and shape your behavior as a consumer.
That's easy with something like a smart speaker (which would be more accurately called a "smart microphone") that you buy and stick in the corner of a room. It's not so easy with something you have to wear, and have to recharge the more you use it.
I've never met a person who is genuinely guided by his religious or philosophical principles. The main function of those things is to give you rationalizations for the things you do. The more convinced that someone is that he's a good whatever he calls himself, the more self-deluded he is.
The idea of Muslims who are robotically diabolical or Christians that are robotically saintly is ludicrous. It's like thinking being a Selena Gomez fan makes you profoundly different from an Ariana Grande fan.
By your theory the entire ocean should be full of coral reefs, because evolution will adapt corals to a wide variety of conditions. This is counter-factual. Nature doesn't make coral reefs as a goal. They just happen under a narrow set of conditions as a side effect of population survival. If the conditions change, and the descendants of a the current population of hard corals survive, they'll adopt different lifestyles like their relatives the soft corals.
And since hard corals are a keystone species, that means you'll end up with a completely different ecosystem, dominated by weedy species with short, explosive reproductive life cycles. This is a natural process that goes on all the time, but it is unusual for it to happen on a global scale. The last event like this was 66 million years ago, long before the first primitive hominid emerges in the fossil record.
People have good reason to discount evolutionary adaptation to anthropogenic climate change, at least as far as holding out hope of maintaining the status quo environment or producing one equally as rich. Sure, things'll be fine in a million years, which is a blink of an eye geologically. But they won't be so fine in 100 years, or even 10,000.
It'd be doing your bit.
In a way, old times are going back to how they used to be.
Up until 1949, the US movie industry was dominated by the "big five" movie studios, in something called the "studio system". In the studio system, the studios not only made the movies, they owned the movie theaters as well, exercising monopoly control over independent theaters by forcing them to purchase and show less popular movies. In an age before TV where almost everybody went to the movies every week, that was guaranteed profit.
That's kind of what Netflix does with its interface. It started as a content middleman, but it's using its control of the app in your smart TV to steer you toward Netflix original content, most of which, like the vast majority of Golden Age Hollywood movies, are mediocre. Strategic ownership of theaters in places where they can influence taste makers is consistent with that strategy. It makes little sense on its own, and it's not a long-term strategy, it's a short-to-mid term strategy to increase brain share. That's obviously Netflix's long term game.