It's already going faster than escape velocity for the altitude,
The reason I said "probably" is because making statements like this one is so hard. When talking about something tens of thousands of kilometers long, it's hard to say that "it" is doing anything, and if the tether is not tethered down nicely then even the basic behavior turns from a tractable statics problem into a hideous dynamics problem.
If the tether is using a large counterweight just past GEO (the initial tether strand won't, but later additions probably will) rather than a small counterweight far past GEO, then there's no reason why any part of the tether needs to be going faster than orbital velocity for its altitude, in which case it would still be stuck in Earth orbit no matter where it's severed.
If the tether is being used for interplanetary launches without large rocket stages, then it will need to extend far enough that its tip will be going faster than escape velocity, but this tip will be outweighed by the section near GEO - for it to leave Earth orbit, you'd have to sever it high enough up that there's not too much of the lower-velocity section weighing it down.
With all the force of fluttering newspaper. It would take hours to come down, and would be more of a pollution problem than a catastrophe.
Not even much of a pollution problem if it was buckytubes - mostly CO2, and in a sense it would just be returning carbon that we'd already removed from the biosphere to create the tower in the first place.
The thinnest part, most likely to fail I'd think,
The ground end wouldn't be any more likely to fail because it's thinner - the reason it's thinner is that it wouldn't have to withstand as much tension. It would probably be more likely to fail due to sabotage, though, and possibly just because the lower section has to deal with Van Allen radiation and the lowest section has to deal with weather.
if it were to fail, would leave it hovering just above the ground waiting to be duct taped back in place.
For the elevator to work, the thinnest part has to be in more tension than the weight of the heavest payload you want to lift at once. Take away this tension, and the elevator won't just stay in one place, it'll rise (at first) and probably go into an elliptical orbit. It wouldn't do anything bad to Earth, but as long as it was no longer in an easily predictable (and even manually adjustable) location then it would be a big piece of space junk as far as other satellites are concerned.
Take any Kazaa search query, add the phrase "parent directory" and "index of", and type it into Google. Now, who do you sue? Google, for not teaching their webcrawlers that there are good pages to index and evil pages to index? Microsoft and the Apache Software Foundation, for writing filesharing software that can commit copyright infringement?
In practice the answer will be "You sue whomever you can bully into an out-of-court settlement", but I'd like to know what this bill's sponsors think the answer should be.
Somehow I don't think that'll go over so well, considering how the last time they tried that (Crusade) they didn't even go a full season before it was cancelled.
It's worse than that: the last time they tried to create a new B5-universe series (Legend of the Rangers) they didn't get anyone to buy the series past the pilot movie.
If you have to take into account nanometer-scale effects to design something, I don't think it's too far fetched to call the result "nanotechnology".
The problem is that to in most science fiction and speculative non-fiction, "nanotechnology" has been used primarily as a synonym for "nanorobotics", which would be infinitely cooler but is much further away.
Just wait till RMS and Rob Malda start a group. And folks will whine about how their music sucks so much worse than it used to
Hey, we're not whining, we're just telling it like it is! How can you compare the original purity of the unplugged free software song with RMS's later descent into techno?
the reasonable method - foster a culture that respects copyrights and really and truly frowns upon piracy. rational behaviour leads to being able to enter into sane dialog with rightsholders about the future of intellectual property in a digital age, including looking at which areas of IPR are out of date or need revision. the culture of respect and no-tolerance-for-pirates allows for a wider range of useful services to be deployed that are now possible thanks to new technology. everybody wins.
So boiling it down, your reasonable method is: 1. Convince criminals to all respect intangible property rights and to stop committing the virtually risk-free copyright violations which net them hundreds of dollars worth of loot. 2. Convince an oligopoly of IP middlemen to all respect their customers, voluntarily relinquish the expansions of copyright power that they've been lobbying for for decades, and embrace the new publishing technologies that can make middlemen unnecessary.
I'm at a loss for words. Fortunately, I think the appropriate words have already been written:
You're living in a world of make-believe! With flowers and bells and leprechauns and magic frogs with funny little hats!
I wonder how many of the moderators think your post is funny, and how many moderators just think it will be funny to read AdTI's next insane rant: "New Study Reveals that Linus Torvalds Supporters are Murderers"
Isn't fair to question the character and ethics of individuals that espouse contempt for intellectual property? Isn't fair to question their character, when the core of their business strategy is trust?
I certainly agree.
The difference is that I'm smart enough to recognize that when Linus Torvalds is telling a joke it isn't an expression of contempt for intellectual property, but when Ken Brown is viciously slandering an innocent author in order to try and sabotage the use of that authors creation it shows utter contempt for IP law.
Unfortunately, although everyone has questioned Brown's character, Brown doesn't want to answer any of those questions. This is just another "Linus couldn't have written Linux himself!" rant, which posts all of Browns leading questions and attempts to trap people into misleading soundbites, but which doesn't answer the most obvious question everyone has been asking: who is paying him to write this crap?
Because it's very easy to expose a C api to practically any language in existence
Absolutely.
but very difficult to expose a C++ one to anything except C++, and in fact it's generally done by flattening the API to a C one
Are you sure that's still true? It was true the last time I checked, but doing a look around today, it seems that SWIG has become very good at wrapping C++ in anything from C# to Tcl.
I think you're wrong
on
GPU Gems
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Or, at least you're wrong about modern programmable GPUs; you might have been right about the first generations of 3D cards.
See this paper for some examples which not only use the GPU simultaneously for graphics and number crunching, but which use the graphics to give real-time output of computational fluid results.
The only remaining problem I remember is that the bandwidth to current video cards is very asymmetric, which is fine for video games that just push a lot of data to the video card but not so good for numerical physics that also wants to ask for a lot of data back. I think at least one of the new PCI-Extended/Express/X/whatever standards is supposed to fix this.
Sterling is saying that nuclear power is bad because it can be used by "a dictatorial megalomaniac in command of a national economy, a secret police, and a large army" to develop nuclear weapons.
That's almost the right conclusion to reach. A more accurate conclusion would be "nuclear physics and nuclear engineering knowledge are bad because they can be used to develop nuclear weapons". Unfortunately, when you try to continue from this conclusion on to "nuclear power is bad", you can't get there: if a country doesn't have nuclear technology, then it's irrelevant whether you tell them "nuclear power is bad" or not; they're not going to be using it for electricity anyways. If a country already has nuclear technology (and especially if, like the primary greenhouse gas producers, a country already has nuclear weapons), then using fewer or no power plants isn't going to reduce their weapons arsenal or remove that capability. The Manhattan Project went from equations to bombs in a few years without the benefit of existing power plants to work with, and as information about nuclear designs spreads (a process which is more difficult to prevent than illegal mp3 trading) it's only going to get easier.
"Nothing"? What you're saying makes sense if we ignore the 4 billion years of greenness prior to WWII.
What you're saying makes sense if you ignore the first and third categories in my post. Most of the years of greenness prior to WWII are part of that third category: a world whose population was less than 2 billion instead of more than 6 billion, and whose industrialized (part of my first category) population was a smaller percentage of the whole.
So what did humankind do for greenness before nuclear power was invented?
Nothing.
Of course, there were different types of nothing; the most popular included "spewing coal smoke into the air and hoping you wouldn't be poor enough to live where you breathed too much of it", "living in dense populations without affordable energy and taking being poor for granted", and "living in sparse populations without affordable energy but having so many children that your great-grandkids couldn't hope to do the same".
You mean "misinformed wisecracks". The only reason to conflate nuclear power and nuclear weapons, as is done repeatedly here, is because you want to use the fallacy of equivocation to trick your audience into viewing even the safest reactor designs as weapons of mass destruction. You might as well blame gasoline users for the horrors of napalm.
By the time you get a "National Security Letter", it's too late to complain on Slashdot about it, because you'll be under a gag order.
So instead, today you should make up a webpage stating basically what you've just said above: "I have never seen any requests for passwords or email from any law enforcement agency in my time working here." and post a link to it for us. That way, if you ever do get a NSL, then you don't have to violate your gag order and tell anyone about it, you just need to take down the webpage telling them the opposite and wait for people to notice.;-)
I knew I should have qualified that statement. Let me try to be more clear:
99.9% Win32 compatibility is a valuable product. Windows has been replaceable as an operating system for years, but it still isn't replaceable as a Win32 implementation. This value isn't because of the sublime design of the Windows APIs, of course, but because there are so very many valuable programs that have been written which require those APIs. Some people don't need to use any of those programs, of course, but many people who have been using Windows for specialized applications for enough years are now dependent on some of them. If all you have on your system are "Windows98 + Office2000" then there are several solid alternatives available that you could switch to right now. However, if you have "Windows98 + Office2000 + ACS Financial Suite + Punch Home Design", or "Windows2000 + OfficeXP + Microsoft Project + Broderbund Family Tree Maker", then Wine probably isn't a sufficient solution yet and nothing else comes close.
This compatibility just isn't something that OEMs can adequately replace right now. They will be able to replace it eventually, of course - the only way Microsoft might prevent that is to try a "reimplementing our APIs is a copyright violation" lawsuit or to play "new-API-of-the-week", but SCO seems to be failing at the former and Mono+dotGNU seem to be keeping up with the latter. That's the reason why it's scary to see Microsoft moving into the computer business: it won't matter much if we don't need Windows anymore, if all the companies that can sell Windows-free computers have been marginalized by then.
Microsoft has to keep adding crap to windows in order to sell the next version.
Yes, but that's because they're competing with their own past sales as much as with anyone else. If everyone knew that you could legally move Windows from your old computer onto your new computer and every computer manufacturer was willing to take the Windows OS and price off any of their systems, then Win98 would still have a majority marketshare.
The only laws they might be breaking are antitrust laws, and they've discovered that the payoff for breaking those laws vastly exceeds the punishment.
Wouldn't that be some type of conflict of interest? If they sell windows to computer manufactures...
Yup. And at this point any smart computer manufacturers are looking at the history of Microsoft's other collaborations and wondering how they can get out of the trap they're in: they sell a product component that Microsoft can easily replace, but Microsoft sells a product component that OEMs can't effectively replace at all.
No it isn't. Air at STP weighs 0.0013 gm/cm^3. Liquid hydrogen weighs 0.07 gm/cm^3, about 50 times more.
Re:Dismally Realistic Science
on
Out of Gas
·
· Score: 1
By burning 400 years worth of solar energy input every year
There must be a big difference between 400 years worth of naturally produced biomass (as your quote states) and 400 years worth of solar energy. Human energy use (the stuff we "burn" in combustion and fission, anyway) is roughly 12 terawatts, and sunlight reaching the ground is about 84 terawatts. If biomass really requires 2800 units of solar input for every one unit of fuel output, then we wouldn't bother considering it (except for waste biomass from agriculture) as a replacement for fossil fuels; even the cheapest solar cells would be orders of magnitude more efficient.
"BayStar's lawyers, he said, still haven't told SCO's lawyers how SCO breached their contract. So McBride figures BayStar doesn't have a legal leg to stand on and won't be able to get its money back."
That's right, Darl, and don't you just hate it when someone accuses you of doing something wrong but refuses to tell you precisely what?
I dont know about fair use rights, but i do know that i have the right to do whatever i want in my own home with something ive legally purchased (apart from obvious things like building nuclear reactors or using a dvd as murder weapon). Now you might argue that this law doesnt exist, but i think you'll find it right next to the law that says "people have common sense freedoms so suck my dick"
This is technically correct, but seems to be worded for Slashdot readers rather than a more appropriate audience. You might want to call those laws "the ninth and tenth amendments" when writing your Congressman.;-)
In fact, you might want to leave oral sex metaphors out of your letter altogether. The Republicans will just be distracted or offended by the subject, the Democrats will just be embarrassed or defensive about it, and then neither group will pay attention to your actual topic.
It's application in this case is pretty simple: if a business need isn't met by free software, then proprietary software companies can still meet it and nothing has changed. If a business need is met by free software, then the value of any proprietary software companies who previously met that need hasn't been "destroyed", it has simply been transferred to their ex-customers, who now have more money to spend elsewhere.
This is something which will happen with or without free software, in fact. Economics 101 says that in equilibrium, marginal price will equal marginal cost, and even for closed source software marginal cost is under $1. It's possible to delay that price drop (by using monopoly power to deter competitors who might get into a price war with you, for example), but not to prevent it. Even if there was only one software company on the market, eventually they'd be outcompeted by the previous versions of their own products, which don't wear out and need to be replaced like tangible goods do.
Just a derivative work of the Linux kernel? I doubt it. If MS really wanted to make a proprietary Linux distribution, they'd probably bundle it with a bunch of closed source user space software. You'd still be free to resell the kernel they gave you (and any modifications they made to it) for $14.95, but you wouldn't be able to redistribute other MS programs just because they came on the same CD-ROM.
Uh, the blogger was talking about people sitting on similar ideas in order to submarine the company later on.
That was only one of the things the blogger was talking about. One of the other things he was talking about, and the one I was responding to, was the idea that big companies with lots of patents wouldn't threaten to sue small developers because it would be bad for their image.
You linked to an incident that dealt very specifically with the patented ASF file format, not some vaguely similar idea that someone is using to keep someone else from doing something similar.
Exactly: VirtualDub wasn't trying to do something similar, they were trying to do something compatible. It's not like there was some special feature of ASF that they were trying to exploit because it was an improvement over MPG, AVI, or any other movie format they can open. They just wanted to be able to decode a Microsoft file format-du-jour, and found that MS had effectively made doing so illegal.
Since some of the biggest current MS patent concerns are "Microsoft is patenting parts of their filesystem format - will we be able to make free operating system drivers that can read them?" and "Microsoft is patenting aspects of their future word processor format - will we be able to make free office suite filters that can import them?", I think the fact that they've used patents to scare developers away from their formats in the past is very relevant when guessing how they might use their patents in the future.
Slashdot Mirror
It's already going faster than escape velocity for the altitude,
The reason I said "probably" is because making statements like this one is so hard. When talking about something tens of thousands of kilometers long, it's hard to say that "it" is doing anything, and if the tether is not tethered down nicely then even the basic behavior turns from a tractable statics problem into a hideous dynamics problem.
If the tether is using a large counterweight just past GEO (the initial tether strand won't, but later additions probably will) rather than a small counterweight far past GEO, then there's no reason why any part of the tether needs to be going faster than orbital velocity for its altitude, in which case it would still be stuck in Earth orbit no matter where it's severed.
If the tether is being used for interplanetary launches without large rocket stages, then it will need to extend far enough that its tip will be going faster than escape velocity, but this tip will be outweighed by the section near GEO - for it to leave Earth orbit, you'd have to sever it high enough up that there's not too much of the lower-velocity section weighing it down.
With all the force of fluttering newspaper. It would take hours to come down, and would be more of a pollution problem than a catastrophe.
Not even much of a pollution problem if it was buckytubes - mostly CO2, and in a sense it would just be returning carbon that we'd already removed from the biosphere to create the tower in the first place.
The thinnest part, most likely to fail I'd think,
The ground end wouldn't be any more likely to fail because it's thinner - the reason it's thinner is that it wouldn't have to withstand as much tension. It would probably be more likely to fail due to sabotage, though, and possibly just because the lower section has to deal with Van Allen radiation and the lowest section has to deal with weather.
if it were to fail, would leave it hovering just above the ground waiting to be duct taped back in place.
For the elevator to work, the thinnest part has to be in more tension than the weight of the heavest payload you want to lift at once. Take away this tension, and the elevator won't just stay in one place, it'll rise (at first) and probably go into an elliptical orbit. It wouldn't do anything bad to Earth, but as long as it was no longer in an easily predictable (and even manually adjustable) location then it would be a big piece of space junk as far as other satellites are concerned.
Take any Kazaa search query, add the phrase "parent directory" and "index of", and type it into Google. Now, who do you sue? Google, for not teaching their webcrawlers that there are good pages to index and evil pages to index? Microsoft and the Apache Software Foundation, for writing filesharing software that can commit copyright infringement?
In practice the answer will be "You sue whomever you can bully into an out-of-court settlement", but I'd like to know what this bill's sponsors think the answer should be.
Somehow I don't think that'll go over so well, considering how the last time they tried that (Crusade) they didn't even go a full season before it was cancelled.
It's worse than that: the last time they tried to create a new B5-universe series (Legend of the Rangers) they didn't get anyone to buy the series past the pilot movie.
If you have to take into account nanometer-scale effects to design something, I don't think it's too far fetched to call the result "nanotechnology".
The problem is that to in most science fiction and speculative non-fiction, "nanotechnology" has been used primarily as a synonym for "nanorobotics", which would be infinitely cooler but is much further away.
Just wait till RMS and Rob Malda start a group.
And folks will whine about how their music sucks so much worse than it used to
Hey, we're not whining, we're just telling it like it is! How can you compare the original purity of the unplugged free software song with RMS's later descent into techno?
the reasonable method - foster a culture that respects copyrights and really and truly frowns upon piracy. rational behaviour leads to being able to enter into sane dialog with rightsholders about the future of intellectual property in a digital age, including looking at which areas of IPR are out of date or need revision. the culture of respect and no-tolerance-for-pirates allows for a wider range of useful services to be deployed that are now possible thanks to new technology. everybody wins.
So boiling it down, your reasonable method is:
1. Convince criminals to all respect intangible property rights and to stop committing the virtually risk-free copyright violations which net them hundreds of dollars worth of loot.
2. Convince an oligopoly of IP middlemen to all respect their customers, voluntarily relinquish the expansions of copyright power that they've been lobbying for for decades, and embrace the new publishing technologies that can make middlemen unnecessary.
I'm at a loss for words. Fortunately, I think the appropriate words have already been written:
You're living in a world of make-believe! With flowers and bells and leprechauns and magic frogs with funny little hats!
I wonder how many of the moderators think your post is funny, and how many moderators just think it will be funny to read AdTI's next insane rant: "New Study Reveals that Linus Torvalds Supporters are Murderers"
Isn't fair to question the character and ethics of individuals that espouse contempt for intellectual property? Isn't fair to question their character, when the core of their business strategy is trust?
I certainly agree.
The difference is that I'm smart enough to recognize that when Linus Torvalds is telling a joke it isn't an expression of contempt for intellectual property, but when Ken Brown is viciously slandering an innocent author in order to try and sabotage the use of that authors creation it shows utter contempt for IP law.
Unfortunately, although everyone has questioned Brown's character, Brown doesn't want to answer any of those questions. This is just another "Linus couldn't have written Linux himself!" rant, which posts all of Browns leading questions and attempts to trap people into misleading soundbites, but which doesn't answer the most obvious question everyone has been asking: who is paying him to write this crap?
Because it's very easy to expose a C api to practically any language in existence
Absolutely.
but very difficult to expose a C++ one to anything except C++, and in fact it's generally done by flattening the API to a C one
Are you sure that's still true? It was true the last time I checked, but doing a look around today, it seems that SWIG has become very good at wrapping C++ in anything from C# to Tcl.
Or, at least you're wrong about modern programmable GPUs; you might have been right about the first generations of 3D cards.
See this paper for some examples which not only use the GPU simultaneously for graphics and number crunching, but which use the graphics to give real-time output of computational fluid results.
The only remaining problem I remember is that the bandwidth to current video cards is very asymmetric, which is fine for video games that just push a lot of data to the video card but not so good for numerical physics that also wants to ask for a lot of data back. I think at least one of the new PCI-Extended/Express/X/whatever standards is supposed to fix this.
Sterling is saying that nuclear power is bad because it can be used by "a dictatorial megalomaniac in command of a national economy, a secret police, and a large army" to develop nuclear weapons.
That's almost the right conclusion to reach. A more accurate conclusion would be "nuclear physics and nuclear engineering knowledge are bad because they can be used to develop nuclear weapons". Unfortunately, when you try to continue from this conclusion on to "nuclear power is bad", you can't get there: if a country doesn't have nuclear technology, then it's irrelevant whether you tell them "nuclear power is bad" or not; they're not going to be using it for electricity anyways. If a country already has nuclear technology (and especially if, like the primary greenhouse gas producers, a country already has nuclear weapons), then using fewer or no power plants isn't going to reduce their weapons arsenal or remove that capability. The Manhattan Project went from equations to bombs in a few years without the benefit of existing power plants to work with, and as information about nuclear designs spreads (a process which is more difficult to prevent than illegal mp3 trading) it's only going to get easier.
"Nothing"? What you're saying makes sense if we ignore the 4 billion years of greenness prior to WWII.
What you're saying makes sense if you ignore the first and third categories in my post. Most of the years of greenness prior to WWII are part of that third category: a world whose population was less than 2 billion instead of more than 6 billion, and whose industrialized (part of my first category) population was a smaller percentage of the whole.
So what did humankind do for greenness before nuclear power was invented?
Nothing.
Of course, there were different types of nothing; the most popular included "spewing coal smoke into the air and hoping you wouldn't be poor enough to live where you breathed too much of it", "living in dense populations without affordable energy and taking being poor for granted", and "living in sparse populations without affordable energy but having so many children that your great-grandkids couldn't hope to do the same".
You mean "misinformed wisecracks". The only reason to conflate nuclear power and nuclear weapons, as is done repeatedly here, is because you want to use the fallacy of equivocation to trick your audience into viewing even the safest reactor designs as weapons of mass destruction. You might as well blame gasoline users for the horrors of napalm.
By the time you get a "National Security Letter", it's too late to complain on Slashdot about it, because you'll be under a gag order.
;-)
So instead, today you should make up a webpage stating basically what you've just said above: "I have never seen any requests for passwords or email from any law enforcement agency in my time working here." and post a link to it for us. That way, if you ever do get a NSL, then you don't have to violate your gag order and tell anyone about it, you just need to take down the webpage telling them the opposite and wait for people to notice.
Can't replace at all?
I knew I should have qualified that statement. Let me try to be more clear:
99.9% Win32 compatibility is a valuable product. Windows has been replaceable as an operating system for years, but it still isn't replaceable as a Win32 implementation. This value isn't because of the sublime design of the Windows APIs, of course, but because there are so very many valuable programs that have been written which require those APIs. Some people don't need to use any of those programs, of course, but many people who have been using Windows for specialized applications for enough years are now dependent on some of them. If all you have on your system are "Windows98 + Office2000" then there are several solid alternatives available that you could switch to right now. However, if you have "Windows98 + Office2000 + ACS Financial Suite + Punch Home Design", or "Windows2000 + OfficeXP + Microsoft Project + Broderbund Family Tree Maker", then Wine probably isn't a sufficient solution yet and nothing else comes close.
This compatibility just isn't something that OEMs can adequately replace right now. They will be able to replace it eventually, of course - the only way Microsoft might prevent that is to try a "reimplementing our APIs is a copyright violation" lawsuit or to play "new-API-of-the-week", but SCO seems to be failing at the former and Mono+dotGNU seem to be keeping up with the latter. That's the reason why it's scary to see Microsoft moving into the computer business: it won't matter much if we don't need Windows anymore, if all the companies that can sell Windows-free computers have been marginalized by then.
Microsoft has to keep adding crap to windows in order to sell the next version.
Yes, but that's because they're competing with their own past sales as much as with anyone else. If everyone knew that you could legally move Windows from your old computer onto your new computer and every computer manufacturer was willing to take the Windows OS and price off any of their systems, then Win98 would still have a majority marketshare.
Could they even legally do this?
The only laws they might be breaking are antitrust laws, and they've discovered that the payoff for breaking those laws vastly exceeds the punishment.
Wouldn't that be some type of conflict of interest? If they sell windows to computer manufactures...
Yup. And at this point any smart computer manufacturers are looking at the history of Microsoft's other collaborations and wondering how they can get out of the trap they're in: they sell a product component that Microsoft can easily replace, but Microsoft sells a product component that OEMs can't effectively replace at all.
Even liquid hydrogen is lighter than air
No it isn't. Air at STP weighs 0.0013 gm/cm^3. Liquid hydrogen weighs 0.07 gm/cm^3, about 50 times more.
By burning 400 years worth of solar energy input every year
There must be a big difference between 400 years worth of naturally produced biomass (as your quote states) and 400 years worth of solar energy. Human energy use (the stuff we "burn" in combustion and fission, anyway) is roughly 12 terawatts, and sunlight reaching the ground is about 84 terawatts. If biomass really requires 2800 units of solar input for every one unit of fuel output, then we wouldn't bother considering it (except for waste biomass from agriculture) as a replacement for fossil fuels; even the cheapest solar cells would be orders of magnitude more efficient.
"BayStar's lawyers, he said, still haven't told SCO's lawyers how SCO breached their contract. So McBride figures BayStar doesn't have a legal leg to stand on and won't be able to get its money back."
That's right, Darl, and don't you just hate it when someone accuses you of doing something wrong but refuses to tell you precisely what?
I dont know about fair use rights, but i do know that i have the right to do whatever i want in my own home with something ive legally purchased (apart from obvious things like building nuclear reactors or using a dvd as murder weapon). Now you might argue that this law doesnt exist, but i think you'll find it right next to the law that says "people have common sense freedoms so suck my dick"
;-)
This is technically correct, but seems to be worded for Slashdot readers rather than a more appropriate audience. You might want to call those laws "the ninth and tenth amendments" when writing your Congressman.
In fact, you might want to leave oral sex metaphors out of your letter altogether. The Republicans will just be distracted or offended by the subject, the Democrats will just be embarrassed or defensive about it, and then neither group will pay attention to your actual topic.
Wikipedia summarizes the allegory here.
It's application in this case is pretty simple: if a business need isn't met by free software, then proprietary software companies can still meet it and nothing has changed. If a business need is met by free software, then the value of any proprietary software companies who previously met that need hasn't been "destroyed", it has simply been transferred to their ex-customers, who now have more money to spend elsewhere.
This is something which will happen with or without free software, in fact. Economics 101 says that in equilibrium, marginal price will equal marginal cost, and even for closed source software marginal cost is under $1. It's possible to delay that price drop (by using monopoly power to deter competitors who might get into a price war with you, for example), but not to prevent it. Even if there was only one software company on the market, eventually they'd be outcompeted by the previous versions of their own products, which don't wear out and need to be replaced like tangible goods do.
Just a derivative work of the Linux kernel? I doubt it. If MS really wanted to make a proprietary Linux distribution, they'd probably bundle it with a bunch of closed source user space software. You'd still be free to resell the kernel they gave you (and any modifications they made to it) for $14.95, but you wouldn't be able to redistribute other MS programs just because they came on the same CD-ROM.
Uh, the blogger was talking about people sitting on similar ideas in order to submarine the company later on.
That was only one of the things the blogger was talking about. One of the other things he was talking about, and the one I was responding to, was the idea that big companies with lots of patents wouldn't threaten to sue small developers because it would be bad for their image.
You linked to an incident that dealt very specifically with the patented ASF file format, not some vaguely similar idea that someone is using to keep someone else from doing something similar.
Exactly: VirtualDub wasn't trying to do something similar, they were trying to do something compatible. It's not like there was some special feature of ASF that they were trying to exploit because it was an improvement over MPG, AVI, or any other movie format they can open. They just wanted to be able to decode a Microsoft file format-du-jour, and found that MS had effectively made doing so illegal.
Since some of the biggest current MS patent concerns are "Microsoft is patenting parts of their filesystem format - will we be able to make free operating system drivers that can read them?" and "Microsoft is patenting aspects of their future word processor format - will we be able to make free office suite filters that can import them?", I think the fact that they've used patents to scare developers away from their formats in the past is very relevant when guessing how they might use their patents in the future.