But the biggest problem is the Orwellian creepiness of it. Taxing thoughts!
The government is already in the Orwellian business of granting monopolies on thoughts. What makes it any creepier to add some user fees to the process?
When you can fill thousands of taverns around this country every week guys whose eyes are rivited to big-screen TVs watching live coverage from the moon, then you can talk about competing with the NFL. But you won't. You're not going to generate even a tiny fraction of $10B from interest in a moon base. The number of hours of TV is irrelevant; unlike sporting events, nobody is going to want to watch that more than one or two times.
Moreover, $10 billion to set up a moon base is a joke. You're taking unfiltered, unrealistic best-case estimates from wide-eyed "futurists" and swallowing them hook line and sinker. Even if you started with more realistic estimates, the project would almost certainly end up with schdule slips and cost overruns. This happens routinely in private industry too.
My system becomes very sluggish if I do something like md5sum an ISO. However, my CPU utilization is not maxed, and lowering the process priority doesn't seem to help. If I let it run by itself and then come back to the machine when it's done, I see all of the apps and window manager have been totally swapped out and will take many seconds just to repaint the first time I clear the screensaver.
This tells me that the sluggishness is due to the interaction between virtual memory and heavy I/O activity, not CPU load. Another CPU probably isn't going to help at all in this situation.
You want to run a moon base on entertainment value.
Let's compare with one of the largest entertainment driven enterprises in the world: the Olympics. To support itself every 2 years with TV and licensing revenue it generates more hype than most anyone can stand. Their total revenues average out to a couple of $Billion per year. That kind of money isn't going to put a dent in what's required to design, build and run a moon base, whether it's government or private.
The Olympics has the advantage of covering an activity that billions of people have a deep interest in: sports. Only a tiny minority of geeks care about the moon at all. Look at what happened after about Apollo 12: people lost almost all interest.
There is no way that you're going to generate enough hype to support an enterprise many times more expensive than the Olympics that revolves around having a couple of guys kicking around aimlessly in a bubble on the moon. That's just boring, and it's not going to work.
There's an immense revenue stream available for private/commercial spaceflight.
Such as?
The only obvious profitable space-based activities are communications satellites and imaging satellites. Both of these have already been privatized.
To address the usual suspects:
1. The novelty of sending rich people into space for jollies is going to wear off real quick. That's not a basis to support an entire space industry.
2. Mining activities don't make sense. The universe is comprised of chemical elements. There are few if any elements available in space that arent' available on earth or can't be substituted by other materials. The only obvious exception, helium isotopes for fusion fuel, would be great except that we most likely won't be using fusion fuel for decades.
Heck, all it would really need is to be off by default and the user has to either turn it on or install a special module.
With ActiveX, you're using IE as a custom client UI for your apps, not as a web browser. Why should other web browsers turn themselves into a general-purpose Win32 UI platform? That's not their focus.
What would be wrong with just staying with IE for your Win32 application? You can still keep it around just as a container for your custom-coded UI clients.
If you want to actually *browse* the wold-wide-web instead of running little Win32 applications, nothing's stopping you from using other more modern browsers.
Re:Bad example: Compaq gone, IBM still alive
on
Dell Still Intel Only
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· Score: 2, Interesting
IBM is still alive. And kicking nicely.
Compaq as a company is gone. It's owner - HP - is nothing more than an ink-delivery system for printers (look at where all HP's profits come from...).
However, if you strip away all of the other unrelated businesses that IBM and HP are in, it looks a little different. IBM is just about out of the PC market altogether, whereas HP is still a big player, profits or not.
On the topic of the original GP post: The 286 vs 386 isn't that comparable to today's situation. The 386 had almost 3X the performance of the 286, plus it added virtual memory and removed the shackles of 16-bit pointers. It was a massive upgrade.
The new dual core chips don't offer anything that you can't currently get with a dual CPU motherboard. It's pretty much just a packaging issue. It's an internal implementation detail that may temporarily affect the system vendor's cost margins, but a few months delay introducing them probably won't have much long-term effect.
In the interest of progress, you protect the rights of the individual - just as I said.
No, you said that "copyright exists to protect the rights of the individual". You didn't say anything about progress.
Arguing over whether copyright exists to further progress or protect individual rights is foolish - they both come as a result of copyright.
Except that you and people like you in congress forget what copyright is for and start going off the deep end. Also, copyright gives a few individuals more rights at the expense of taking a way rights of many more other individuals. And then, after some large but theoretically finite amount of time, it puts the rights back where they started. It's highly questionable with all this arbitrary transfer back and forth whether copyright "protects individual rights" at all.
Honestly, you can cite the wording of laws but an intelligent person also interprets how those laws are being applied.
*Why* the laws exist and *how* they are currently applied don't necessarily have much to do with each other. You were making an assertion about why they exist.
But while the OS bears plenty of similarities to Tiger, Allchin stressed that Microsoft has broken new ground in Longhorn. For example, document icons are no longer a hint of the type of file, but rather a small picture of the file itself. The icon for a Word document, for example, is a tiny iteration of the first page of the file.
Some new ground. Both KDE and Gnome have had this feature for a good while.
Copyright exists to protect the rights of the individual.
False:
The Congress shall have Power...
To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries
The US Constitution specifically states that copyrights are to promote progress; it does not mention any protecting any rights of individuals. In fact, it is explaining why it is allowing congress to take away rights that individuals would otherwise have over their own physical property just because it happens to have information fixed on it that came from somewhere else.
Any rights that copyright gives to the creator at the expense of others is a windfall side-effect for the creator. The primary goal as stated in the clause is basically economic stimulus. These rights are a means to an end, not an end in themselves.
Just because you state something does not make it true or even a valid argument.
If you'd like to show us an example of Microsoft using patents this way *against* other companies, I'm all ears
Of course they're not going to bother with enforcing their patents now. It's currently much easier for them to make money the way they've always made it.
However, if the situation ever changes and they start to have disappointing quarterly earnings reports, then you can expect to see them trying new methods to keep the revenue flowing. They could become a monster version of SCO, but with competent management and lawyers.
Note that IBM already generates large amounts of revenue from their patent portfolio. It's not just for defense. (And even these "defensive" patents are usually used in a passive-aggressive manner, traded between large companies in cross-licensing agreements to build up an oligarchy where it's harder for small players to break into the marketplace.) However, since much of IBM's patents are on hardware, it has tended to be less of a potential threat to the average small-time developer. That could change too, as IBM focuses more on software and services.
What does it tell you about the state of NASA when it takes Burt Rutan 4 days to get his ship back into orbit, while it takes NASA two years?
It tells me that you don't know an apple from an orange.
The most directly comparable government project to the SpaceShip One was the X-15. It flew just as high as SS1 (and it could fly ~4X faster to boot). The only thing SS1 has over the X-15 is two extra passenger seats. In both cases the vehicles only achieve 3% of the kinetic+potential energy required to get "into orbit".
A quick review of the mission history shows that they did a 1-day turnaround for two launches in December, 1964. One could also ask why it took 40 years before Rutan achieved a similar feat.
Yes... a perfect solution for anyone willing to shell out >$300 for a keyboard....
Since they're talking about hospitals here, I would expect the problem to get solved a different way: For each patient they'll break out a brand-new $20 keyboard every day, and throw the previous one in the trash. Then they'll tack a daily $150 keyboard charge onto the patient's bill.
If McVoy thinks that reverse-engineering is so "dishonest", then why did he offer to give free tools to a worldwide project whose primary focus is to reverse-engineering an entire OS?
The most likely reason is that the reason was to get some cheap marketing exposure for his product.
IMO, it seems a little hypocritical that he's starting the name-calling only after the reverse-engineering isn't benefitting himself.
I got the claims off of the USPTO website. It's an already-granted patent, 6,004,596 issued in 1999, which Smuckers obtained by buying out the "inventors" company. The denial story is about their attempts to expand it even further.
What stops the manufacturer of these machines from selling them to a competitor? What stops other manufacturers from making them if the design gets leaked?
If there is anything unique about the machines they designed, they should get a patent on that. But they didn't. They got a patent on the sandwich.
The idea of "leaking" the secret about a crimped PBJ with PB on both slices of bread is absurd. It's not innovative, it's obvious, and it took just about zero investment of time and capital to come up with. Here are the exact claims from the patent:
1. A sealed crustless sandwich, comprising:
a first bread layer having a first perimeter surface coplanar to a contact surface;
at least one filling of an edible food juxtaposed to said contact surface;
a second bread layer juxtaposed to said at least one filling opposite of said first bread layer, wherein said second bread layer includes a second perimeter surface similar to said first perimeter surface;
a crimped edge directly between said first perimeter surface and said second perimeter surface for sealing said at least one filling between said first bread layer and said second bread layer;
wherein a crust portion of said first bread layer and said second bread layer has been removed.
2. The sealed crustless sandwich of claim 1, wherein said crimped edge includes a plurality of spaced apart depressions for increasing a bond of said crimped edge.
3. The sealed crustless sandwich of claim 2, wherein said crimped edge is a finite distance from said at least one filling for increasing said bond.
4. The sealed crustless sandwich of claim 3, wherein said at least one filling comprises:
a first filling;
a second filling;
a third filling; and
wherein said second filling is completely surrounded by said first filling and said third filling for preventing said second filling from engaging said first bread layer and said second bread layer.
5. The sealed crustless sandwich of claim 4, wherein said first filling and third filling have sealing characteristics.
6. The sealed crustless sandwich of claim 5, wherein:
said first filling is juxtaposed to said first bread layer;
said third filling is juxtaposed to said second bread layer; and
an outer edge of said first filling and said third filling are engaged to one another to form a reservoir for retaining said second filling in between.
7. The sealed crustless sandwich of claim 6, wherein said first filling and said third filling are comprised of peanut butter; and said second filling is comprised of a jelly.
8. The sealed crustless sandwich of claim 7, wherein said crimped edge is formed into a substantially circular shape.
9. A sealed crustless sandwich, comprising:
a first bread layer having a first perimeter surface, a first crust portion and a first contact surface;
a first filling juxtaposed to said first contact surface;
a second bread layer having a second perimeter surface, a second crust portion and a second contact surface;
a second filling juxtaposed to said second contact surface;
a third filling;
a crimped edge directly between said first and second perimeter surfaces for sealing said first, second, and third fillings between said first and second bread layers;
wherein said first and second crust portions have been removed and said third filling is encapsulated by said first and second fillings.
10. The sealed crustless sandwich of claim 9 wherein said first filling and said second filling have sealing characteristics.
There are two parts to this patent: (1) So the jelly soaks through the non peanut-buttered side. 90% of the population could solve that dillemma in 30 seconds by putting PB on both sides. (2) So the sandwich is loose. Crimp it just like ravioli has been crimped for over a century.
Notice that there is not a single reference to any machine that could make this sandwich. Just two dead-simple ideas that even a person of low intelligence would think of as soon as they saw the problem description.
This is not some mysterious rocket-science research that needs to be nurtured. It's just a sandwich that you could make in your kitchen in 60 seconds, except that now it's illegal.
They're imperceptibly thicker and larger. It's not a real polygonal rim, like some foreign coins I've seen. IIRC, that was the original idea, but the vending machine industry nixed that too. It's got an octogonal relief lightly carved into the perfectly circular rim. That's just about useless.
Smooth rim isn't very useful because old quarters get worn ridges and are almost smooth too. Color is only usefull under good lighting.
Face it, the mint screwed up. None of our other coins are anywhere near as close to each other. You don't need to apologize for their incompetence.
Consider that, fishing around in your pocket, a $1 bill bears a striking resemblance to a $50 bill, $20 bill, $10 bill, $5 bill, and $2 bill. Does this make the $1 bill difficult to use or identify?
Yes it does. Most countries aren't so silly as to make all of their bill denominations the same size and color. But that's another rant.
Which isn't distinguishable without good lighting.
If you're fishing around in your pocket, it's not easy to distinguish them. The ridges on quarters often get worn down, so those don't help much either. It also doesn't help that the dollar coin is also a dead ringer for many existing tollroad tokens and similar pseudo-coins.
If your theory was correct, we wouldn't need to have such a large difference between pennies, dimes, nickels and quarters either.
Slashdot Mirror
The government is already in the Orwellian business of granting monopolies on thoughts. What makes it any creepier to add some user fees to the process?
Moreover, $10 billion to set up a moon base is a joke. You're taking unfiltered, unrealistic best-case estimates from wide-eyed "futurists" and swallowing them hook line and sinker. Even if you started with more realistic estimates, the project would almost certainly end up with schdule slips and cost overruns. This happens routinely in private industry too.
This tells me that the sluggishness is due to the interaction between virtual memory and heavy I/O activity, not CPU load. Another CPU probably isn't going to help at all in this situation.
Let's compare with one of the largest entertainment driven enterprises in the world: the Olympics. To support itself every 2 years with TV and licensing revenue it generates more hype than most anyone can stand. Their total revenues average out to a couple of $Billion per year. That kind of money isn't going to put a dent in what's required to design, build and run a moon base, whether it's government or private.
The Olympics has the advantage of covering an activity that billions of people have a deep interest in: sports. Only a tiny minority of geeks care about the moon at all. Look at what happened after about Apollo 12: people lost almost all interest.
There is no way that you're going to generate enough hype to support an enterprise many times more expensive than the Olympics that revolves around having a couple of guys kicking around aimlessly in a bubble on the moon. That's just boring, and it's not going to work.
Such as?
The only obvious profitable space-based activities are communications satellites and imaging satellites. Both of these have already been privatized.
To address the usual suspects:
1. The novelty of sending rich people into space for jollies is going to wear off real quick. That's not a basis to support an entire space industry.
2. Mining activities don't make sense. The universe is comprised of chemical elements. There are few if any elements available in space that arent' available on earth or can't be substituted by other materials. The only obvious exception, helium isotopes for fusion fuel, would be great except that we most likely won't be using fusion fuel for decades.
...so by your logic, people who commit really hard-to-catch crimes like dropping candybar wrappers into the outhouse at a state park should be shot.
With ActiveX, you're using IE as a custom client UI for your apps, not as a web browser. Why should other web browsers turn themselves into a general-purpose Win32 UI platform? That's not their focus.
What would be wrong with just staying with IE for your Win32 application? You can still keep it around just as a container for your custom-coded UI clients. If you want to actually *browse* the wold-wide-web instead of running little Win32 applications, nothing's stopping you from using other more modern browsers.
Compaq as a company is gone. It's owner - HP - is nothing more than an ink-delivery system for printers (look at where all HP's profits come from...).
However, if you strip away all of the other unrelated businesses that IBM and HP are in, it looks a little different. IBM is just about out of the PC market altogether, whereas HP is still a big player, profits or not.
On the topic of the original GP post: The 286 vs 386 isn't that comparable to today's situation. The 386 had almost 3X the performance of the 286, plus it added virtual memory and removed the shackles of 16-bit pointers. It was a massive upgrade.
The new dual core chips don't offer anything that you can't currently get with a dual CPU motherboard. It's pretty much just a packaging issue. It's an internal implementation detail that may temporarily affect the system vendor's cost margins, but a few months delay introducing them probably won't have much long-term effect.
No, you said that "copyright exists to protect the rights of the individual". You didn't say anything about progress.
Arguing over whether copyright exists to further progress or protect individual rights is foolish - they both come as a result of copyright.
Except that you and people like you in congress forget what copyright is for and start going off the deep end. Also, copyright gives a few individuals more rights at the expense of taking a way rights of many more other individuals. And then, after some large but theoretically finite amount of time, it puts the rights back where they started. It's highly questionable with all this arbitrary transfer back and forth whether copyright "protects individual rights" at all.
Honestly, you can cite the wording of laws but an intelligent person also interprets how those laws are being applied.
*Why* the laws exist and *how* they are currently applied don't necessarily have much to do with each other. You were making an assertion about why they exist.
False:
The US Constitution specifically states that copyrights are to promote progress; it does not mention any protecting any rights of individuals. In fact, it is explaining why it is allowing congress to take away rights that individuals would otherwise have over their own physical property just because it happens to have information fixed on it that came from somewhere else.Any rights that copyright gives to the creator at the expense of others is a windfall side-effect for the creator. The primary goal as stated in the clause is basically economic stimulus. These rights are a means to an end, not an end in themselves.
Just because you state something does not make it true or even a valid argument.
True, as you've just demonstrated.
You do if it's worth enough.
The argument was true in 1997, and it's still true today.
Of course they're not going to bother with enforcing their patents now. It's currently much easier for them to make money the way they've always made it.
However, if the situation ever changes and they start to have disappointing quarterly earnings reports, then you can expect to see them trying new methods to keep the revenue flowing. They could become a monster version of SCO, but with competent management and lawyers.
Note that IBM already generates large amounts of revenue from their patent portfolio. It's not just for defense. (And even these "defensive" patents are usually used in a passive-aggressive manner, traded between large companies in cross-licensing agreements to build up an oligarchy where it's harder for small players to break into the marketplace.) However, since much of IBM's patents are on hardware, it has tended to be less of a potential threat to the average small-time developer. That could change too, as IBM focuses more on software and services.
But few if any of those involve exponential improvement.
It tells me that you don't know an apple from an orange.
The most directly comparable government project to the SpaceShip One was the X-15. It flew just as high as SS1 (and it could fly ~4X faster to boot). The only thing SS1 has over the X-15 is two extra passenger seats. In both cases the vehicles only achieve 3% of the kinetic+potential energy required to get "into orbit".
A quick review of the mission history shows that they did a 1-day turnaround for two launches in December, 1964. One could also ask why it took 40 years before Rutan achieved a similar feat.
Since they're talking about hospitals here, I would expect the problem to get solved a different way: For each patient they'll break out a brand-new $20 keyboard every day, and throw the previous one in the trash. Then they'll tack a daily $150 keyboard charge onto the patient's bill.
IMO, it seems a little hypocritical that he's starting the name-calling only after the reverse-engineering isn't benefitting himself.
Of course, expensive hardware has to be recommended to compensate for the fact that it's slow.
I got the claims off of the USPTO website. It's an already-granted patent, 6,004,596 issued in 1999, which Smuckers obtained by buying out the "inventors" company. The denial story is about their attempts to expand it even further.
I did, you abrasive schmuck.
I showed you the claims of the patent in question, and I explained exactly why the claims are bogus.
Are you saying that the claims don't cover a sandwich? Can you read and comprehend English?
If there is anything unique about the machines they designed, they should get a patent on that. But they didn't. They got a patent on the sandwich.
The idea of "leaking" the secret about a crimped PBJ with PB on both slices of bread is absurd. It's not innovative, it's obvious, and it took just about zero investment of time and capital to come up with. Here are the exact claims from the patent:
There are two parts to this patent: (1) So the jelly soaks through the non peanut-buttered side. 90% of the population could solve that dillemma in 30 seconds by putting PB on both sides. (2) So the sandwich is loose. Crimp it just like ravioli has been crimped for over a century.
Notice that there is not a single reference to any machine that could make this sandwich. Just two dead-simple ideas that even a person of low intelligence would think of as soon as they saw the problem description.
This is not some mysterious rocket-science research that needs to be nurtured. It's just a sandwich that you could make in your kitchen in 60 seconds, except that now it's illegal.
Smooth rim isn't very useful because old quarters get worn ridges and are almost smooth too. Color is only usefull under good lighting.
Face it, the mint screwed up. None of our other coins are anywhere near as close to each other. You don't need to apologize for their incompetence.
Yes it does. Most countries aren't so silly as to make all of their bill denominations the same size and color. But that's another rant.
What is it, 10% bigger?
(2) gold-ish in color
Which isn't distinguishable without good lighting.
If you're fishing around in your pocket, it's not easy to distinguish them. The ridges on quarters often get worn down, so those don't help much either. It also doesn't help that the dollar coin is also a dead ringer for many existing tollroad tokens and similar pseudo-coins.
If your theory was correct, we wouldn't need to have such a large difference between pennies, dimes, nickels and quarters either.