What they should do is start en masse denying patents. That should chill the application rate.
But they won't. When Reagan dropped funding to the USPTO, their only source of funding left was fees paid for patents granted. It's in the best interests of the USPTO to grant patents in order to maintain or increase its funding. Is this a conflict of interest? Sure. But that never stopped anyone in government before...
The Patent Office can only issue based on what is available, so it will be up to Apple to prove, if it can, that its interface was documented and notarized before Creative.
Actually, no. Patent protection is not retroactive to the date of invention. It is at most retroactive to one year prior to filing. Therefore, all Apple has to do is show that they had an interface documented one year prior to Creative's applying for the patent. Shouldn't be hard since the iPod has been around since 2001. But this isn't about the law or any genuine grievance. This is about harassing Apple and attempting to break their lock on the online music delivery market.
No, they *think* the problem is threads. As another poster pointed out they're still plenty clueless about what's actually going on.
Arguments about when OS X got native threading (which is what your link there is about) are moot. What is at issue is the performance of the OS X threading architecture. From the article (by way of Apple):
"POSIX thread (commonly referred to as a "pthread") is a lightweight wrapper around a Mach thread that enables it to be used by user-level processes. POSIX threads are the basis for all of the application-level threads."
So the use of lmbench to get an idea of how fast OS X handles thread and process creation is valid. Therefore, your link does not invalidate the lmbench results of Johan's tests, which were done as part of a search to find out why MySQL performed so much worse in OS X than in Linux on the same hardware. People can whine and say MySQL is broken, but you can't argue with the lmbench results. Process and thread creation in OS X is simply slow.
And none of that changes that fact that MySQL has problems on the Mac. If you know it has problems, then why continue beating a dead horse? Because they wanted to find out why it has problems on the Mac. And they seem to have found the answer in the way OSX handles threads.
Hey, if you want to have kids...sure, you need a lifetime partner, but, if you don't really want any, and frankly, it would put a serious damper on my lifestyle..then who needs it?
You'll sing a different tune when you're older, and the hot young girls no longer respond to the bling hanging below your sagging waddle. Then, you will look like the pathetic, skirt-chasing 40-year-old that you will be.
More likely, Apple will pull some patent they've been hanging onto that some newish version of Windows violates. Both sides will realize that both patents will probably be overturned at great expense, and a cross licensing agreement will make this all go away.
Or...
From the article:
"Microsoft and Apple have previously licensed their respective patent portfolios to one another and we maintain a good working relationship with Apple."
...Microsoft wants something specific from Apple and is using this as a lever.
One company creates a product, markets it and attempts to patent it after it has become hugely successful. Another company sprays patents all over the place, doesn't attempt to develop any of them into products, notices that one of them can cover this succesful product, and then attempts to siphon off money like some revenue leech, making the product more expensive and discouraging others from going to market with their ideas.
What part of this is fostering innovation and competition in the marketplace?
I agree with your conclusions -- and those conclusions are bad why? That some of us seek to be more than human, to think differently and experience that which we cannot in our current form is a problem?
Not my problem, and probably not your problem, given the state of our technology. Perhaps it's a personal choice on my part to want to stay human, and be repulsed by the alternative. Perhaps it is some sort of instinct pushing towards species survival.
Is there insufficient room in our world for more than one sentient species? Would we not be stronger by combining such differences in life approaches?
There's barely enough room in our world for slightly genetically variated 'races', and you're asking if an entirely new species would be welcome? Have you read any history?
Sure. But at what point do we cross the line between an augmented human and something different altogether? Do I want to be a demi, a cyb or a draff? Fortunately for me, that sort of problem is unlikely to confront me in my lifetime, but I think I know my answer already.
So why is it that a "trans-human" cannot do any of these? Sure the mechanisms to do them might be a little different, but many of these things derive meaning from our perceptions of them, not from the fact that the sensations arrive on "wet neurons".
You, your personality, your view of the world, that is to say, all of things that make you the individual you are, are a result of your experiences and how you view the world. If you fundamentally change any of those things, you change who you are. Change them enough, like say, replace sensory organs, add cognitive prosthetics, extra mouths and genitalia, replace your skelatal structure and musculature, etc., and the result is no longer human. It would not react to stimuli as a human does. The results of its actions would not be the same as those for a human. It would not perceive life as a human does. It would not be human.
Like singing? Try singing out of three mouths all at once, harmonizing with yourself. Like making love? Try making love with 1,000 other transhumans all at the same time. Who knows what would be possible.
Sounds very cool. Not at all human, but very cool.
I once read a short story whose title I can't recall (I think it was called something like 'First Contact') by an author I can't recall about some aliens that come into contact with humans in the far distant future. The humans are extremely specialized, and the contact was made with a merchant ship of sorts, so they send this liason to deal with the aliens.
This liason has all sorts of implants and of course barely resembles anything we would consider human and does things like running back to his ship for food and sex with a sort of living blow up doll whenever he frets about how all contact with alien races always results in war and their complete destruction. Meanwhile the aliens debate with each other about family and honour and what is the right thing to do. Guess which civilization appeared more human?
By that sort of logic, people who are mute are leaning towards being inhuman. Or anyone that's fasting, for that matter.
Only if your logic involves straw men. My point is that human beings are far more than cognitive machines. It's the entire human experience that makes life what it is. If you fundamentally change what we are, we are no longer human, but some other life form altogether. Intelligent? Probably. Sentient? Certainly. But not human.
I just don't understand. In what way is this repugnant? Being a transhuman cyborg sounds far more elegant and efficient than being a bio-organism.
It's repugnant because it is not human. What is the point of being alive if you can't touch and feel and listen and eat and sleep and make love and sing and do all of these human things? What is the advantage of elegance and efficiency if you are no longer yourself, no longer human?
A turbocharger increases the backpressure, which increases the engine load. It would probably be just as effective (though more geometrically challenging) to run the turbo-charger directly off the shaft.
You mean a supercharger would be just as effective? Maybe.
CompTIA, representing small- and medium-sized information technology companies, echoed this view. "Conflicting views have confused the issue and made it difficult for the parliament to reach a clear and balanced decision that would adequately support innovation."
Translation: "We're happy the legislation was shot down, because it didn't go far enough."
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What they should do is start en masse denying patents. That should chill the application rate.
But they won't. When Reagan dropped funding to the USPTO, their only source of funding left was fees paid for patents granted. It's in the best interests of the USPTO to grant patents in order to maintain or increase its funding. Is this a conflict of interest? Sure. But that never stopped anyone in government before...
The Patent Office can only issue based on what is available, so it will be up to Apple to prove, if it can, that its interface was documented and notarized before Creative.
Actually, no. Patent protection is not retroactive to the date of invention. It is at most retroactive to one year prior to filing. Therefore, all Apple has to do is show that they had an interface documented one year prior to Creative's applying for the patent. Shouldn't be hard since the iPod has been around since 2001. But this isn't about the law or any genuine grievance. This is about harassing Apple and attempting to break their lock on the online music delivery market.
No, they *think* the problem is threads. As another poster pointed out they're still plenty clueless about what's actually going on.
Arguments about when OS X got native threading (which is what your link there is about) are moot. What is at issue is the performance of the OS X threading architecture. From the article (by way of Apple):
"POSIX thread (commonly referred to as a "pthread") is a lightweight wrapper around a Mach thread that enables it to be used by user-level processes. POSIX threads are the basis for all of the application-level threads."
So the use of lmbench to get an idea of how fast OS X handles thread and process creation is valid. Therefore, your link does not invalidate the lmbench results of Johan's tests, which were done as part of a search to find out why MySQL performed so much worse in OS X than in Linux on the same hardware. People can whine and say MySQL is broken, but you can't argue with the lmbench results. Process and thread creation in OS X is simply slow.
And none of that changes that fact that MySQL has problems on the Mac. If you know it has problems, then why continue beating a dead horse?
Because they wanted to find out why it has problems on the Mac. And they seem to have found the answer in the way OSX handles threads.
Hey, if you want to have kids...sure, you need a lifetime partner, but, if you don't really want any, and frankly, it would put a serious damper on my lifestyle..then who needs it?
You'll sing a different tune when you're older, and the hot young girls no longer respond to the bling hanging below your sagging waddle. Then, you will look like the pathetic, skirt-chasing 40-year-old that you will be.
"Intel doesn't have a mature line of AMD64/EM64T products just yet."
I call BS.
There is Xeon, and Itanium.
Xeon 64-bit performance is less than stellar when compared to the Athlon64.
The Itanium isn't even an AMD64/EMT64 architecture. It's EPIC architecture is referred to as IA64.
What do you mean run? He said "composed entirely of turtles". You must have watched too many cartoons, real turtles don't run!
Will it crawl Linux?
...you first.
The wiki isn't very objective. Right at the top in the brief biography, is says: "She is also a SCO whore."
No, it doesn't. Nowhere on the entire page does it say that sentence you have in quotes.
More likely, Apple will pull some patent they've been hanging onto that some newish version of Windows violates. Both sides will realize that both patents will probably be overturned at great expense, and a cross licensing agreement will make this all go away.
...Microsoft wants something specific from Apple and is using this as a lever.
Or...
From the article:
"Microsoft and Apple have previously licensed their respective patent portfolios to one another and we maintain a good working relationship with Apple."
One company creates a product, markets it and attempts to patent it after it has become hugely successful. Another company sprays patents all over the place, doesn't attempt to develop any of them into products, notices that one of them can cover this succesful product, and then attempts to siphon off money like some revenue leech, making the product more expensive and discouraging others from going to market with their ideas.
What part of this is fostering innovation and competition in the marketplace?
I agree with your conclusions -- and those conclusions are bad why? That some of us seek to be more than human, to think differently and experience that which we cannot in our current form is a problem?
Not my problem, and probably not your problem, given the state of our technology. Perhaps it's a personal choice on my part to want to stay human, and be repulsed by the alternative. Perhaps it is some sort of instinct pushing towards species survival.
Is there insufficient room in our world for more than one sentient species? Would we not be stronger by combining such differences in life approaches?
There's barely enough room in our world for slightly genetically variated 'races', and you're asking if an entirely new species would be welcome? Have you read any history?
Where do you draw the line though?
I don't know how to draw that line, but I suspect it will be like pornography: it will defy definition, but we'll know it when we see it.
Sure. But at what point do we cross the line between an augmented human and something different altogether? Do I want to be a demi, a cyb or a draff? Fortunately for me, that sort of problem is unlikely to confront me in my lifetime, but I think I know my answer already.
So why is it that a "trans-human" cannot do any of these? Sure the mechanisms to do them might be a little different, but many of these things derive meaning from our perceptions of them, not from the fact that the sensations arrive on "wet neurons".
You, your personality, your view of the world, that is to say, all of things that make you the individual you are, are a result of your experiences and how you view the world. If you fundamentally change any of those things, you change who you are. Change them enough, like say, replace sensory organs, add cognitive prosthetics, extra mouths and genitalia, replace your skelatal structure and musculature, etc., and the result is no longer human. It would not react to stimuli as a human does. The results of its actions would not be the same as those for a human. It would not perceive life as a human does. It would not be human.
Like singing? Try singing out of three mouths all at once, harmonizing with yourself. Like making love? Try making love with 1,000 other transhumans all at the same time. Who knows what would be possible.
Sounds very cool. Not at all human, but very cool.
I once read a short story whose title I can't recall (I think it was called something like 'First Contact') by an author I can't recall about some aliens that come into contact with humans in the far distant future. The humans are extremely specialized, and the contact was made with a merchant ship of sorts, so they send this liason to deal with the aliens.
This liason has all sorts of implants and of course barely resembles anything we would consider human and does things like running back to his ship for food and sex with a sort of living blow up doll whenever he frets about how all contact with alien races always results in war and their complete destruction. Meanwhile the aliens debate with each other about family and honour and what is the right thing to do. Guess which civilization appeared more human?
By that sort of logic, people who are mute are leaning towards being inhuman. Or anyone that's fasting, for that matter.
Only if your logic involves straw men. My point is that human beings are far more than cognitive machines. It's the entire human experience that makes life what it is. If you fundamentally change what we are, we are no longer human, but some other life form altogether. Intelligent? Probably. Sentient? Certainly. But not human.
As for repugnant, I happen to think that staying as human is severly repugnant.
Self-hatred will get you nowhere.
Emotional knee-jerk reaction.
Damn straight. A very human reaction at that.
I suppose it's a sin too.
Irrelevant. That word should fit with your mechanistic life view.
I just don't understand. In what way is this repugnant? Being a transhuman cyborg sounds far more elegant and efficient than being a bio-organism.
It's repugnant because it is not human. What is the point of being alive if you can't touch and feel and listen and eat and sleep and make love and sing and do all of these human things? What is the advantage of elegance and efficiency if you are no longer yourself, no longer human?
It is hard to imagine anything more repugnant than the 'trans-human' cyborg 'life' you are describing here.
Everybody knows the world is flat, the moonwalks were faked and no men or women have ever gone into space. Sheesh.
How about DAT? minidisc? Those are digital recorders too, are there levies on those?
No to DAT, yes to minidisc.
A turbocharger increases the backpressure, which increases the engine load. It would probably be just as effective (though more geometrically challenging) to run the turbo-charger directly off the shaft.
You mean a supercharger would be just as effective? Maybe.
CompTIA, representing small- and medium-sized information technology companies, echoed this view. "Conflicting views have confused the issue and made it difficult for the parliament to reach a clear and balanced decision that would adequately support innovation."
Translation: "We're happy the legislation was shot down, because it didn't go far enough."