There are, at a glance, at least four places where arrows cross, but shouldn't have to if the circles were moved. The worst case is the Oracle-to-Google arrow that has no reason to cross Nokia-to-Toshiba.
Move HTC above ELAN and Microsoft to the upper left corner.
Swap Sharp and Samsung.
Hell, just put the thing through dotty and nothing really has to cross.
I admit its is a legal pile-o-crap, but the dishonest way the graphical designer "tangled" it is either willful inflationary manipulation of opinion, or its just plain incompetence.
According to some metalurgests there is now the belief that the actors in Damascus Steel couldn't have patented the invention because they, themselves, didn't know what it was.
In particular it is very, very hard to get a sample of the stuff today, but in the few cases where it has been managed, there have been systematic impurities in the base metal. It is now believed by many that the "secret" was not the technique of the invention but the fact that the iron was from a particular mine where there was a natural alloy undetectable by the iron workers of the time. So "the secret of Damascus Steel" didn't die off with the secret masters, it petered out with the ore.
The real lesson here is that truth is in the details.
Software patents lack those details in every case.
And the one "hardware" cum system patent I was involved with was adulterated by the lawyer to the point where, having been the "inventor" myself, and having written the original draft of the patent information, I was sure that after comparing the actual invention and the original draft to what got filed, well the original invention could have been successfully argued to lie outside the patent.
Let me say that again, the patent as filed had been so lawyerized and generalized that the box on my desk was not properly described by the patent.
When I pointed the details of this out to my boss and the lawyer, I was assured that it was normal practice to cast as wide a net with the patent application as possible and that it didn't particularly matter that the individual implementation was sufficiently variant from the claims to be arguable. The protection was in the threat of having to have that argument in a court of law.
So there it is, the patents are bing filed with an eye to litigation and the ability to threaten same for business purposes. No recording of actual inventiveness here. Just the widest net and the most direct-able shadow.
Sure, other lawyers would give lip service to that being bad and wrong, but having learned the "state of the art" of constructing claims I have yet to see a modern patent, particularly where software and computers are involved, that doesn't show obvious signs of having been "broadened" from describing a particular invented thing. The first big warning sign is the "or in the alternate" language.
Patents have become a joke, not a funny one, and far too long in the telling.
Software patents are works of fiction that, if they described the invention, would consist entirely of source code, as the source code is the only actual and accurate description of the program.
FOSS depends on copyright, and the General Public LICENSE (GPL etc) already depends on this.
There is no "oh, crap" about this at all.
This isn't actually bad law per se as you have never been able to sell-on rights you didn't already possess.
Where the GPL is on high ground is that there is no attempt to license "use" but this is normal since there is no legal "use right". GPL relies on licensing copies, as there is a "copyright" issue.
For GPL at least, if you gave, or indeed re-sold, your original media as originally received, it would be a neutral act.
An important thing here is that the GPL is _NOT_ an "end user license agreement" as there is no "use right" law on which to hang that, and the "open" part of FOSS is that whole freedom to use thing anyway.
Even though IANAL I assure you that the problem here is the EULA, which applies terms to the user "after the fact" of sale or receipt of goods. I support (reasonable) copyright, FOSS and the GPL. I never read EULAs, and do everything I can to subvert them. I like to "click through" or otherwise install software when drunk. I like to have other people click the buttons on my screen for me. When I am installing things for other people I click "I agree" without telling them there was a EULA at all, and then make sure I never "use" the software in question so that there never was an "(I) as end user".
EULAs are pure rubbish and were invented by non-lawyers and became "expected" before anybody ever considered if they were rational. They aren't.
(2) a picture book, where each picture was a dot-splash computer readable input grid.
(3) a series of tear-out punch cards.
(4) a stack of punch cards.
In point of fact the fundamental problem here is that the participants are pretending that the delivery method of the information makes the information a wholly new thing.
In the case of the DVD, the book just happens to be round and most easily readable by computer.
Selling me the book, then trying to control my use of the contents thereof is stupid, but its a stupidity I can see that many people who have been conditioned to think that computers are magic, may not be able to see.
We may have to wait till today's kids are on the bench for most of this stuff to be undone as bad rulings.
I (not the original poster) make six figures a year. I buy a lot of gear. I own my own house (etc) and I select strongly against companies that do not open source their specs and drivers. Granted I cannot avoid such things completely. But I do try and I do substantially succeed.
I work in defense contracting. My projects substantially select against hardware that doesn't open source their drivers. Granted they do not avoid such things completely, but they do dry and substantially succeed.
See the pattern?
In both cases this is rampant self interest. And why shouldn't it be? Both options cost the same, the open sourced (or open source compatible) option works just as well, but in one I have more options and choices and it cost the company nothing and profited them my business.
Closed source code is a freak outcome of the 1980's PC culture as fostered by MS. For decades before that all software came with source. Heck, the original PC Technical Manual contained a printout of the BIOS for the IBM PC.
"Closed Source" information theory died in the renaissance, it came back for a bit these last twenty years, but it is just a blip.
eh... "input, output, and logging" as you describe is _one_ data store in the original post, namely the disk cum filesystem. That's why the original article said (paraphrased) "the disk being one data store." If you intelligently apply the rule then disk + database is okay, disk + net is okay, database + net is okay, but disk + database + net is probably unnecessarily complex.
eh (further)... the article presumed linux, and I will skip the *NIX vs MS debate here. The rule espoused is better stated If you have a wheel already don't try to invent it. *NIX vs MS is, in this context, only a difference of how many wheels you have and how well they work together.
eh (further still)... benchmarking subprocess.Popen(['convert',...]) is a myopic response, foremost because if you are CPU bound then you may have already surpassed the predicate condition on the choice. Since ImageMagick is also a _library_ there is no need to call it through fork/exec anyway. So since you didn't investigate the tools maybe you shouldn't be critiquing their use or offering benchmark advice.
eh (yet further still)... games, at the level you are speaking of, are always CPU bound for rendering. By definition the machine (and the network latency of transferring pre-rendered frames etc) makes the machine the bottleneck in the game if it were monolithic. Your example supports the need for the predicate "if" rather than counters it. That is, you have provided an example of when you _do_ need to distribute the processing load rather than engage in the argument about when you _shouldn't_.
eh (yet again)... you give an example of where you _cannot_ buy your way out of a performance problem rather than discuss a situation where you _could_ buy your way out and then discussing the merits of performing the purchase rather than rewriting the code. That is, you have brought everyone and their car as a citation into a discussion of trans-Atlantic travel. The OP is discussing the use of upgrading to heavy haulers to cross an ocean and you yell "but most people only drive cars" as if it had the slightest bearing on the conversation.
So, having failed utterly to understand the articles points about using existing technology and keeping things manageable, you have made several observations of the "but since sometimes you cannot keep things simple, you should never try to" or some such nonsense. Citing already accounted-for corner-cases in apparent inability to understand the scope of the general case doesn't really add much to the discussion of the general case.
There is a reason the original article was filled with predicates like "if" and "when". Giving examples outside those predicates is, in no way, applicable to the discussion within those predicates.
[snark]Please post you CV so that I can make sure I never hire you to do a requirements analysis...[/snark]
As I have said before, the "total gas saved" isn't the point. The reduction in pollution added to the near parity of dollars was my purchase metric.
"Green-ness" isn't just a measure of miles-per-gallon. That is a strong indicator, but burning slightly more gas in some situations (like climbing hills) so that the engine can run in a more efficient (clean) configuration, and then recovering some of that energy in the battery for later represents a loss of overall drive. The cost of going from kinetic energy to battery and back again does take its toll. The reduction of carbon monoxide and nitrous oxide (etc) emissions in favor of the higher mpg was a known. I put my money where my sensibilities were, and consequently paid-forward to skew the market in a "Greener" direction.
As an early adopter I knew that I wouldn't necessarily recoup my expense before I got to an expensive battery change. That wasn't the point.
Though if gas goes back to $4.00+ usd I might so recoup.
[In more "Internet Friendly" jargon, I wouldn't be able to emit so much Smug if I made back all my money... 8-)]
Rating articles is like voting, and there is _something_ wrong with every voting system except for Despotism (where the only voter gets the only vote, so the voting never has "surprise" results.)
Being able to vote a particular story up once, is better than being able to vote a particular story up and every competing story down. The former is "one man one vote" and the latter is one man, lots of votes _and_ a pitchfork.
So up-only is better than one up or down per story. Especially since fifty downs is a lynching on digg.
But nothing beats proper editorial control, if anybody can agree on "proper" for the particular use.
You only _really_ need the compressors and at the cargo terminals anyway.
Land ship. Hook up hose. Re-compress the gas with a target displacement smaller than that needed to lift the empty ship. Take off cargo. Load on cargo. Vent gas to desired buoyancy. Fly away.
Keep the gas on the ship. Keep small compressors on the ship for in-flight tweaking. Use shore power and shore compressors for the big changes.
Heck, "vent" the gas to an empty (e.g. partial vacuum) ground-station holding tank and you can probably offload the gas faster than you can get the cargo unstrapped.
These are not hard issues at all, and involve less "dangerous or difficult logistics" than refueling.
The parent of my parent post brings up putting rocks in sailing vessels as argumentative support, he is wrong for at least two reasons.
(1) Many modern non-sailing vessels still use ballast. The problem isn't old-timey nor is it "solved", nor is it _really_ the same issue as buoyancy with respect to airships. In a seagoing vessel the problem is that a non-trivial amount of the vessel must remain "above" the water over which the vessel must remain buoyant. As such, to remain upright, as cargo is loaded above the waterline, one must add weight below the water line to keep the ship upright. In an airship the entire ship is "submerged" in the air, so the issues are much simpler. That is, an airship and a submarine are in the same domain, but an airship and a sailing ship are not.
[ASIDE: One of the things the boat commander of a submarine must watch for is rolling over during initial dive. In surface operation, the sub is a surface ship, and its center of gravity is below its center of buoyancy just like any other ship. In underwater operation the center of gravity must be above the center of buoyancy or it won't sink below the surface. That moment when the two must cross is tricky, as they must "cross", not "pass each other". That is, if say the port side takes on ballast faster, the center of gravity would pass to the port of the center of buoyancy and the ship would roll. The normal way to make this happen most safely is to be under-way at the time of submersion or surfacing so that the wing-like bow planes and rudder etc. can be used to counter any small tendency to roll. The single most dangerous submarine maneuver is the static (non-moving) submerge. It is virtually never done as messing it up is expensive in both lives and equipment. Surfacing is safer than submerging as "blowing" the ballast tanks can right the ship very quickly if it starts to roll, and can be done before reaching the surface. That leads to that really dramatic "breaching" thing where a significant fraction of the sub leaves the water entirely before crashing back to the surface. Dramatic, "safe", but again, hard on the men and gear. (I hear it's fun though... 8-)]
(2) Ballast was much more spoken of, and "tricker" in the age of sail as the power source (the wind) wanted to push the ship over anyway. Additionally, _letting_ or even encouraging the wind to push the ship over a little (e.g. heeling) could lead to increased speeds and efficiencies.
(3) Ballast in seagoing vessels is more important and variable because you want enough to stay upright, but each little bit more than that sinks the ship a little more, causing more of it to interface with the viscous watter instead of the less-viscous air.
(4) Water can not be meaningfully compressed. Things "denser than" water also cannot be meaningfully compressed. (e.g. compressed enough to substantially effect displacement.) Air and lifting gas is eminently compressible. Consequently airships, in issues of both displacement and buoyancy, are completely dissimilar to anything seagoing (except a scuba diver in a wetsuit 8-) so none of the natures and limits you (grandparent poster) mention really apply as such.
Sorry to cast an umbrella under your rain but...
on
The Second Age of Airships
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· Score: 4, Informative
(1) one only needs the "modern" technology of the "compressor" to re-compress the gas into dense storage cylinders. They _used_ to vent the gas because the compressors and storage were more expensive and heavy than the cheap replacement gas. Modern technology can solve this really easy. You can fit 80 cubic feet of air (so probably like 100 cubic feet of helium) into a scuba tank, and it would be quite heavy thereafter. Intelligently done, a large number of flexible ballon-like bladders and one or two semi-rigid (pressurized) bladders would be easily sufficient to change the overall displacement of an airship by up to 50 percent without even getting into "high" pressures (e.g. more than three atmospheres or so in the pressurized fixed-size bladders). It's not rocket science, its basic pressure mechanics and displacement.
(2) many of the craft being discussed are only "mostly buoyant", with vectored thrust and lifting bodies etc, so that the static weight of the craft is neutrally boyant, then only the thrust to lift or fly the cargo is spent. E.g. the goal is to make the weight of the _vehicle_ free. Think of the helicopter. Right now we have to maintain thrust to lift the copter and the people, which uses far more fuel than just lifting the people.
(2a) once you are lifting only the cargo weight, crashes are lots safter as something with the weight of the cargo but the drag profile of the whole vehicle will have a much lower in-atmosphere terminal velocity, unless of course someone decided to shape it like a giant dart pointing straight down. 8-)
So, Good Sir Nay-Sayer, yes, if nobody actually thinks about the problem, then ballast becomes a hassle. But then again, if nobody thinks about breaks, a speeding car is quite a problem as well.
I forget the super famous author, but in the book Diamond Age this very thing is done to help hold up large buildings. The enabling technology is nanotech capable of manufacturing large diamond bladders (both strong and airtight) then using pumps, then nano-pumps, to vacate the volume enclosed in the very rigid shapes before the pump aperture itself is sealed with diamond by the nanobot construction methods.
The only practical reason that this is impractical today is the lack of that nano-deoposition in real space. To date we cannot create a structure that is strong enough to remain voluminous but empty under 14.5lbs per square inch large enough to provide nontrivial lift without using materials heavier than the volume of air displaced.
But someday... yes... with the right materials a "simply empty" or "nearly empty" rigid sphere/elipse/etc could be used as a lifting device.
Actually, at much larger scales, one could make a "giant greenhouse" that could lift itself based on air temperature differences with no vacuum or specialized lifting gas at all. But these things would be "small city" sized. (See R. Buckminster Fuller for details of this sort of floating city.)
All these arguments and more than half the point is being lost.
The goal in the larger scope is to do something about the poison gas, and maybe even the CO2 emissions.
While it is generally true that better mileage is more efficient (kinda by definition) it isn't necessarily "cleaner" when you get better overall mileage. In particular the from-a-stop acceleration and cold-engine profile of a pure gas engine can really spike the curve on emissions, effectively taking-back a good chunk of the win for better gas mileage.
My prius, for instance, has some odd engine speed vs ground speed profiles, particularly when climbing hills. But a careful ear says that the loss paid for turning that fast-torque excess into battery-stored potential lets the engine run at a less-emissions efficiency.
For instance my Prius _NEVER_ knocks or pings. That is it never gets into the 'ugly' combustion profiles. This wastes some non-trivial energy (q.v. mileage) as teh conversion costs to and then eventually from battery is a non-trivial loss.
So yea, there are a few cars that get "Better" mileage, but none that I know of get "Cleaner" mileage.
And since mileage is basically a log curve (the savings going from 13 mpg to 23 mpg is more than going from 25 mpg to 40), the "extra" mileage I could get from a 60mpg 3-cyl super-micro over my 50mpg hybrid isn't worth the carbon monoxide and the half-burned hydrocarbons.
The next step is pure electric, as that both improves the CO and the unburnt hydrocarbons, and _also_ cuts down on the CO2 per mile over _any_ internal combustion vehicle.
The "plug-in hybrid" is, for a smart purchaser, a "pure electric" with on-the-road extensions for those _rare_ times you don't get to get a charge. For all the dumbasses who will end up "forgetting" to plug in most nights, it is at least as good as a current gen hybrid.
In all cases, the whole mileage thing is kinda not the _real_ point of the technology. It's just the first cut for the people who want to oversimplify. The tax credits are for the emissions profiles not the gas mileage. It's that whole "clean air" thing again.
Don't you just hate it when the stupid liberals try to reduce the amount of toxic crap your kids are breathing? How self-centered of them... oh wait...
I am champing at the bit for either a plug-in hibred or an all electric car. I am 45 and I don't make 200,000 a year by a long shot.
Statistic fail by partisan bullshit "research group".
Plus, in every industry, the first fruits are expensive and generally sold to the more well off. Remember when microwave ovens cost thousands of dollars?
It's called the economy of scale.
And even as this "research" is coming out, one major U.S. manufacturer has increased their 2012 production quotas by half because of existing demand.
just another case of us being lied to using unfounded statistics.
The use of "want" in a technical discussion to describe statistical or physical tendencies is not unprecedented. Nor is it particularly anthropomorphic.
For instance, discussing diffusion across a barrier leads to a statement like "the system wants to reach equilibrium" being a concise summary.
There is at least one definition of "want" that doesn't require consciousness (from dict.die.net/want) [quote]2: have need of: "This piano wants the attention of a competent tuner"[/quote]; so don't get too tied up in your smug failure to comprehend the English language.
So anyway, "information wants to be free" in the sense that spreads essentially without diffusion. It does spread with some error, as in your limited understanding of the word 'want' etc. but the factual concentration doesn't diminish at the source at the time of spread.
Anybody who has ever tried to stop or counter a rumor knows just how free information wants to be. Its downright contagious. Companies are constantly trying to hold back and strengthen their information dikes. We even call the secret or unintended release of information "a leak". Water wants to spread, and information wants to spread.
The statement "information wants to be free", as quoted, seems intended to infer that information wants to have no price. _That_ is something I have no direct opinion on since there is no inherent evidence that information has any cost bias (for or against) at all.
I have always taken "information wants to be free" to mean that information wants to escape its confines. This is an inherent truth IMHO, because I understand "monkey see, monkey do" and I have watched rumors spread, and I have a DOD clearance and spend a non-trivial part of each day guarding against the unintentional spread of information, and I have been trained to be aware of that tendency to spread.
If you don't believe that information wants to spread, I suggest you leave an iPhone prototype, or sheaf of papers marked "classified", unattended in a bar some time. 8-)
So if someone harms one of the kids then the reckless endangerment kicks in?
That seems less than ideal.
And I know for a fact that WBC has been physically attacked while on protest. In particular some WBC idiot stamping on a american flag got his ass beat more or less in front of the police by a good ol' boy in eastern washington. The police sauntered over and stopped things in their own time.
As for what CPS could do, and the lawsuits that result, you would be surprised at how long it can take to unsnarl CPS actions and how resistant they can be to suit. "Family Court" is _almost_ as fair as Gitmo...
["Funny"] I've thought of several funny semi-violent responses...
Get five or ten street-boys to jizz in a squirt gun, use said squirt gun to "anoint" WBC while holding "WBC shows gay spunk as Phred hoped" sign.
Get geek to factor wind biases and then use "Bear Spray" suitably up-wind.
[Serious] But in truth, if WBC ever showed up in my region I would file a "reckless child endangerment" complaint against them with the department of child and family services. They are clearly trying to incite violence with "fighting words", to the degree that the cops have to show up to protect them. They are also using their children basically as "human shields" by bringing them, and putting them in harm's way, without regard to the safety of the minor children.
If they _don't_ think that the children would be in danger, why do they pre-arrange police protection?
I think WBC needs to be dragged through family court whenever they show up with kids and make them hold signs that inspire people to punch people in the face.
If the adults want to do it, then fine. But not the kids.
This story is a Top Secret bogey man.
on
Top Secret America
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· Score: 1
You ask: why do we need this many programs top secret.
Often times your clearance isn't about what you are doing, but what someone is doing next to you. For instance you _might_ want to have an electrician have a Secret or Top Secret clearance because you want someone who can go into that room and replace the blown outlet next to the big rack of papers.
The various classification levels are _really_ about who can go where without constant supervision and whether, when some person enters, you have to stop working and wait for them.
So is is more expensive to clear one guy with a particular skill, or have one guy with a particular skill followed around by another guy, and requiring that everyone anywhere near that guy to stop working and close up shop because the one skilled guy will be in some compartment for minutes to hours.
It is often cheaper and better and more realistic to expand a web of trust rather than serialize massive operations.
All a clearance really is, is a way of determining how many people have to watch the watchers.
Meanwhile a classified operation may generate ream after ream of paper that doesn't really need to be classified, but the requirement to declassify that non-valuable paper is usually that several people have to read and understand that paper to certify that it doesn't contain the few things that _must_ be protected. Consider a classic core dump. Page after page of hex digits. Can you certify that none of those sequences represent classified info? Probably not. So you use it, you treat it as classified, and when you reach the control-or-destroy time limit you either put it under document control (stamp, register, file etc) or toss it into the classified disposal bin/box/device/etc.
You have to think about classified stuff the same way you would think about handling a large quantity of street drugs, gemstones, or toxic waste. You want to be able to know that it is okay to leave "the package" with anybody in the chain of custody, and you want to be able to say "if the package is not in the safe, you can know for sure who has it".
So the mechanism of classification, which looks all huge in this sort of expose, isn't what you think. And huge isn't always a waste anyway.
And I have seen things like forty people having to stop working and clean _everything_ off their respective workspaces because some uncleared big-wig wanted to walk through a classified area. Between clean up, visit, and resumption that was a loss of forty man hours. Who wants to have to go through that every time someone delivers water, or comes in to vacuum.
It can get byzantine, but you know what, without all those "proved trustworthy" cogs, there would be a huge amount of waste and destruction generated by a _tiny_ _tiny_ fraction of the total effort. It may not be uncommon for a multi-million dollar effort to go classified because a device smaller than a suitcase must be treated as classified but also "sometimes needs to be in near continual operation". etc. Without the classification being spread out, whenever the device was turned off all the computer hard drives would have to be collected up and stowed and so on. Easier to just classify the project than have two perfectly distinct sets of "everything that can store data" in one office.
So yeah, "Bob's T.S. Exterminators" sounds like a waste, until you have to set up somewhere specific and both get a job done and deal with a continuous influx of vermin.
But the fact is that dealing with classified _anything_ is an expensive, elaborate hassle. Anybody and everybody at every level of the government _hates_ it. You don't want to generate classified, you don't want to open classified containment, you _really_ don't want to have to ship classified material between installations. For reasons of pure ease of daily life and good old corporate greed, the bare minimum of stuff is classified, and at the last possible instant to boot.
Classified junk might as well be called "weaponized radioactive herpes
You are not the entire internet, you are a statistical outlier. Sorry, but it's true. On the whole, counter-copyright downloading is apparently still on the rise. Plus you seem to be engaged in the "low and dumb" end of the pool if you've been "contacted twice" and didn't get enough details the first time to avoid the second via encryption, port hopping, "safe peer" or any number of other means.
Oddly enough I don't do any counter-copyright downloading and I already use these techniques just to stay out of the big net of stupid. I move non-trivial amounts of data so it would suck to be mistaken for a "warze kiddy".
I would bet, given no other information than provided, that they were never "Contacted by Rights Holders" at all. You ISP probably just didn't like you usage profile. Did they cite title downloaded and time performed or just call you naughty on an approximate date?
I feel your pain though. Guilty until proven innocent sucks, though you do seem to be admitting guilt.
Slashdot Mirror
Machinery, not Management. There is no managing taking place.
Anything without a consciousness, or at least a conscience, should not be allowed to speak at all.
sure... but how do you fill the passing car with water first?
Filling a passing car with water, _that's_ what I would like to have a gun do.
There are, at a glance, at least four places where arrows cross, but shouldn't have to if the circles were moved. The worst case is the Oracle-to-Google arrow that has no reason to cross Nokia-to-Toshiba.
Move HTC above ELAN and Microsoft to the upper left corner.
Swap Sharp and Samsung.
Hell, just put the thing through dotty and nothing really has to cross.
I admit its is a legal pile-o-crap, but the dishonest way the graphical designer "tangled" it is either willful inflationary manipulation of opinion, or its just plain incompetence.
Who made this graph? Fox News?
I've been using the last four digits of PI as my pin for years, now I'm gonna have to change it.
According to some metalurgests there is now the belief that the actors in Damascus Steel couldn't have patented the invention because they, themselves, didn't know what it was.
In particular it is very, very hard to get a sample of the stuff today, but in the few cases where it has been managed, there have been systematic impurities in the base metal. It is now believed by many that the "secret" was not the technique of the invention but the fact that the iron was from a particular mine where there was a natural alloy undetectable by the iron workers of the time. So "the secret of Damascus Steel" didn't die off with the secret masters, it petered out with the ore.
The real lesson here is that truth is in the details.
Software patents lack those details in every case.
And the one "hardware" cum system patent I was involved with was adulterated by the lawyer to the point where, having been the "inventor" myself, and having written the original draft of the patent information, I was sure that after comparing the actual invention and the original draft to what got filed, well the original invention could have been successfully argued to lie outside the patent.
Let me say that again, the patent as filed had been so lawyerized and generalized that the box on my desk was not properly described by the patent.
When I pointed the details of this out to my boss and the lawyer, I was assured that it was normal practice to cast as wide a net with the patent application as possible and that it didn't particularly matter that the individual implementation was sufficiently variant from the claims to be arguable. The protection was in the threat of having to have that argument in a court of law.
So there it is, the patents are bing filed with an eye to litigation and the ability to threaten same for business purposes. No recording of actual inventiveness here. Just the widest net and the most direct-able shadow.
Sure, other lawyers would give lip service to that being bad and wrong, but having learned the "state of the art" of constructing claims I have yet to see a modern patent, particularly where software and computers are involved, that doesn't show obvious signs of having been "broadened" from describing a particular invented thing. The first big warning sign is the "or in the alternate" language.
Patents have become a joke, not a funny one, and far too long in the telling.
Software patents are works of fiction that, if they described the invention, would consist entirely of source code, as the source code is the only actual and accurate description of the program.
FOSS depends on copyright, and the General Public LICENSE (GPL etc) already depends on this.
There is no "oh, crap" about this at all.
This isn't actually bad law per se as you have never been able to sell-on rights you didn't already possess.
Where the GPL is on high ground is that there is no attempt to license "use" but this is normal since there is no legal "use right". GPL relies on licensing copies, as there is a "copyright" issue.
For GPL at least, if you gave, or indeed re-sold, your original media as originally received, it would be a neutral act.
An important thing here is that the GPL is _NOT_ an "end user license agreement" as there is no "use right" law on which to hang that, and the "open" part of FOSS is that whole freedom to use thing anyway.
Even though IANAL I assure you that the problem here is the EULA, which applies terms to the user "after the fact" of sale or receipt of goods. I support (reasonable) copyright, FOSS and the GPL. I never read EULAs, and do everything I can to subvert them. I like to "click through" or otherwise install software when drunk. I like to have other people click the buttons on my screen for me. When I am installing things for other people I click "I agree" without telling them there was a EULA at all, and then make sure I never "use" the software in question so that there never was an "(I) as end user".
EULAs are pure rubbish and were invented by non-lawyers and became "expected" before anybody ever considered if they were rational. They aren't.
The book could just as easily be:
(1) printed in an OCR font.
(2) a picture book, where each picture was a dot-splash computer readable input grid.
(3) a series of tear-out punch cards.
(4) a stack of punch cards.
In point of fact the fundamental problem here is that the participants are pretending that the delivery method of the information makes the information a wholly new thing.
In the case of the DVD, the book just happens to be round and most easily readable by computer.
Selling me the book, then trying to control my use of the contents thereof is stupid, but its a stupidity I can see that many people who have been conditioned to think that computers are magic, may not be able to see.
We may have to wait till today's kids are on the bench for most of this stuff to be undone as bad rulings.
I (not the original poster) make six figures a year. I buy a lot of gear. I own my own house (etc) and I select strongly against companies that do not open source their specs and drivers. Granted I cannot avoid such things completely. But I do try and I do substantially succeed.
I work in defense contracting. My projects substantially select against hardware that doesn't open source their drivers. Granted they do not avoid such things completely, but they do dry and substantially succeed.
See the pattern?
In both cases this is rampant self interest. And why shouldn't it be? Both options cost the same, the open sourced (or open source compatible) option works just as well, but in one I have more options and choices and it cost the company nothing and profited them my business.
Closed source code is a freak outcome of the 1980's PC culture as fostered by MS. For decades before that all software came with source. Heck, the original PC Technical Manual contained a printout of the BIOS for the IBM PC.
"Closed Source" information theory died in the renaissance, it came back for a bit these last twenty years, but it is just a blip.
eh... "input, output, and logging" as you describe is _one_ data store in the original post, namely the disk cum filesystem. That's why the original article said (paraphrased) "the disk being one data store." If you intelligently apply the rule then disk + database is okay, disk + net is okay, database + net is okay, but disk + database + net is probably unnecessarily complex.
eh (further)... the article presumed linux, and I will skip the *NIX vs MS debate here. The rule espoused is better stated If you have a wheel already don't try to invent it. *NIX vs MS is, in this context, only a difference of how many wheels you have and how well they work together.
eh (further still)... benchmarking subprocess.Popen(['convert', ...]) is a myopic response, foremost because if you are CPU bound then you may have already surpassed the predicate condition on the choice. Since ImageMagick is also a _library_ there is no need to call it through fork/exec anyway. So since you didn't investigate the tools maybe you shouldn't be critiquing their use or offering benchmark advice.
eh (yet further still)... games, at the level you are speaking of, are always CPU bound for rendering. By definition the machine (and the network latency of transferring pre-rendered frames etc) makes the machine the bottleneck in the game if it were monolithic. Your example supports the need for the predicate "if" rather than counters it. That is, you have provided an example of when you _do_ need to distribute the processing load rather than engage in the argument about when you _shouldn't_.
eh (yet again)... you give an example of where you _cannot_ buy your way out of a performance problem rather than discuss a situation where you _could_ buy your way out and then discussing the merits of performing the purchase rather than rewriting the code. That is, you have brought everyone and their car as a citation into a discussion of trans-Atlantic travel. The OP is discussing the use of upgrading to heavy haulers to cross an ocean and you yell "but most people only drive cars" as if it had the slightest bearing on the conversation.
So, having failed utterly to understand the articles points about using existing technology and keeping things manageable, you have made several observations of the "but since sometimes you cannot keep things simple, you should never try to" or some such nonsense. Citing already accounted-for corner-cases in apparent inability to understand the scope of the general case doesn't really add much to the discussion of the general case.
There is a reason the original article was filled with predicates like "if" and "when". Giving examples outside those predicates is, in no way, applicable to the discussion within those predicates.
[snark]Please post you CV so that I can make sure I never hire you to do a requirements analysis...[/snark]
As I have said before, the "total gas saved" isn't the point. The reduction in pollution added to the near parity of dollars was my purchase metric.
"Green-ness" isn't just a measure of miles-per-gallon. That is a strong indicator, but burning slightly more gas in some situations (like climbing hills) so that the engine can run in a more efficient (clean) configuration, and then recovering some of that energy in the battery for later represents a loss of overall drive. The cost of going from kinetic energy to battery and back again does take its toll. The reduction of carbon monoxide and nitrous oxide (etc) emissions in favor of the higher mpg was a known. I put my money where my sensibilities were, and consequently paid-forward to skew the market in a "Greener" direction.
As an early adopter I knew that I wouldn't necessarily recoup my expense before I got to an expensive battery change. That wasn't the point.
Though if gas goes back to $4.00+ usd I might so recoup.
[In more "Internet Friendly" jargon, I wouldn't be able to emit so much Smug if I made back all my money... 8-)]
Rating articles is like voting, and there is _something_ wrong with every voting system except for Despotism (where the only voter gets the only vote, so the voting never has "surprise" results.)
Being able to vote a particular story up once, is better than being able to vote a particular story up and every competing story down. The former is "one man one vote" and the latter is one man, lots of votes _and_ a pitchfork.
So up-only is better than one up or down per story. Especially since fifty downs is a lynching on digg.
But nothing beats proper editorial control, if anybody can agree on "proper" for the particular use.
wait... I guess we agree...
You only _really_ need the compressors and at the cargo terminals anyway.
Land ship. Hook up hose. Re-compress the gas with a target displacement smaller than that needed to lift the empty ship. Take off cargo. Load on cargo. Vent gas to desired buoyancy. Fly away.
Keep the gas on the ship. Keep small compressors on the ship for in-flight tweaking. Use shore power and shore compressors for the big changes.
Heck, "vent" the gas to an empty (e.g. partial vacuum) ground-station holding tank and you can probably offload the gas faster than you can get the cargo unstrapped.
These are not hard issues at all, and involve less "dangerous or difficult logistics" than refueling.
The parent of my parent post brings up putting rocks in sailing vessels as argumentative support, he is wrong for at least two reasons.
(1) Many modern non-sailing vessels still use ballast. The problem isn't old-timey nor is it "solved", nor is it _really_ the same issue as buoyancy with respect to airships. In a seagoing vessel the problem is that a non-trivial amount of the vessel must remain "above" the water over which the vessel must remain buoyant. As such, to remain upright, as cargo is loaded above the waterline, one must add weight below the water line to keep the ship upright. In an airship the entire ship is "submerged" in the air, so the issues are much simpler. That is, an airship and a submarine are in the same domain, but an airship and a sailing ship are not.
[ASIDE: One of the things the boat commander of a submarine must watch for is rolling over during initial dive. In surface operation, the sub is a surface ship, and its center of gravity is below its center of buoyancy just like any other ship. In underwater operation the center of gravity must be above the center of buoyancy or it won't sink below the surface. That moment when the two must cross is tricky, as they must "cross", not "pass each other". That is, if say the port side takes on ballast faster, the center of gravity would pass to the port of the center of buoyancy and the ship would roll. The normal way to make this happen most safely is to be under-way at the time of submersion or surfacing so that the wing-like bow planes and rudder etc. can be used to counter any small tendency to roll. The single most dangerous submarine maneuver is the static (non-moving) submerge. It is virtually never done as messing it up is expensive in both lives and equipment. Surfacing is safer than submerging as "blowing" the ballast tanks can right the ship very quickly if it starts to roll, and can be done before reaching the surface. That leads to that really dramatic "breaching" thing where a significant fraction of the sub leaves the water entirely before crashing back to the surface. Dramatic, "safe", but again, hard on the men and gear. (I hear it's fun though... 8-)]
(2) Ballast was much more spoken of, and "tricker" in the age of sail as the power source (the wind) wanted to push the ship over anyway. Additionally, _letting_ or even encouraging the wind to push the ship over a little (e.g. heeling) could lead to increased speeds and efficiencies.
(3) Ballast in seagoing vessels is more important and variable because you want enough to stay upright, but each little bit more than that sinks the ship a little more, causing more of it to interface with the viscous watter instead of the less-viscous air.
(4) Water can not be meaningfully compressed. Things "denser than" water also cannot be meaningfully compressed. (e.g. compressed enough to substantially effect displacement.) Air and lifting gas is eminently compressible. Consequently airships, in issues of both displacement and buoyancy, are completely dissimilar to anything seagoing (except a scuba diver in a wetsuit 8-) so none of the natures and limits you (grandparent poster) mention really apply as such.
(1) one only needs the "modern" technology of the "compressor" to re-compress the gas into dense storage cylinders. They _used_ to vent the gas because the compressors and storage were more expensive and heavy than the cheap replacement gas. Modern technology can solve this really easy. You can fit 80 cubic feet of air (so probably like 100 cubic feet of helium) into a scuba tank, and it would be quite heavy thereafter. Intelligently done, a large number of flexible ballon-like bladders and one or two semi-rigid (pressurized) bladders would be easily sufficient to change the overall displacement of an airship by up to 50 percent without even getting into "high" pressures (e.g. more than three atmospheres or so in the pressurized fixed-size bladders). It's not rocket science, its basic pressure mechanics and displacement.
(2) many of the craft being discussed are only "mostly buoyant", with vectored thrust and lifting bodies etc, so that the static weight of the craft is neutrally boyant, then only the thrust to lift or fly the cargo is spent. E.g. the goal is to make the weight of the _vehicle_ free. Think of the helicopter. Right now we have to maintain thrust to lift the copter and the people, which uses far more fuel than just lifting the people.
(2a) once you are lifting only the cargo weight, crashes are lots safter as something with the weight of the cargo but the drag profile of the whole vehicle will have a much lower in-atmosphere terminal velocity, unless of course someone decided to shape it like a giant dart pointing straight down. 8-)
So, Good Sir Nay-Sayer, yes, if nobody actually thinks about the problem, then ballast becomes a hassle. But then again, if nobody thinks about breaks, a speeding car is quite a problem as well.
I forget the super famous author, but in the book Diamond Age this very thing is done to help hold up large buildings. The enabling technology is nanotech capable of manufacturing large diamond bladders (both strong and airtight) then using pumps, then nano-pumps, to vacate the volume enclosed in the very rigid shapes before the pump aperture itself is sealed with diamond by the nanobot construction methods.
The only practical reason that this is impractical today is the lack of that nano-deoposition in real space. To date we cannot create a structure that is strong enough to remain voluminous but empty under 14.5lbs per square inch large enough to provide nontrivial lift without using materials heavier than the volume of air displaced.
But someday... yes... with the right materials a "simply empty" or "nearly empty" rigid sphere/elipse/etc could be used as a lifting device.
Actually, at much larger scales, one could make a "giant greenhouse" that could lift itself based on air temperature differences with no vacuum or specialized lifting gas at all. But these things would be "small city" sized. (See R. Buckminster Fuller for details of this sort of floating city.)
All these arguments and more than half the point is being lost.
The goal in the larger scope is to do something about the poison gas, and maybe even the CO2 emissions.
While it is generally true that better mileage is more efficient (kinda by definition) it isn't necessarily "cleaner" when you get better overall mileage. In particular the from-a-stop acceleration and cold-engine profile of a pure gas engine can really spike the curve on emissions, effectively taking-back a good chunk of the win for better gas mileage.
My prius, for instance, has some odd engine speed vs ground speed profiles, particularly when climbing hills. But a careful ear says that the loss paid for turning that fast-torque excess into battery-stored potential lets the engine run at a less-emissions efficiency.
For instance my Prius _NEVER_ knocks or pings. That is it never gets into the 'ugly' combustion profiles. This wastes some non-trivial energy (q.v. mileage) as teh conversion costs to and then eventually from battery is a non-trivial loss.
So yea, there are a few cars that get "Better" mileage, but none that I know of get "Cleaner" mileage.
And since mileage is basically a log curve (the savings going from 13 mpg to 23 mpg is more than going from 25 mpg to 40), the "extra" mileage I could get from a 60mpg 3-cyl super-micro over my 50mpg hybrid isn't worth the carbon monoxide and the half-burned hydrocarbons.
The next step is pure electric, as that both improves the CO and the unburnt hydrocarbons, and _also_ cuts down on the CO2 per mile over _any_ internal combustion vehicle.
The "plug-in hybrid" is, for a smart purchaser, a "pure electric" with on-the-road extensions for those _rare_ times you don't get to get a charge. For all the dumbasses who will end up "forgetting" to plug in most nights, it is at least as good as a current gen hybrid.
In all cases, the whole mileage thing is kinda not the _real_ point of the technology. It's just the first cut for the people who want to oversimplify. The tax credits are for the emissions profiles not the gas mileage. It's that whole "clean air" thing again.
Don't you just hate it when the stupid liberals try to reduce the amount of toxic crap your kids are breathing? How self-centered of them... oh wait...
I am champing at the bit for either a plug-in hibred or an all electric car. I am 45 and I don't make 200,000 a year by a long shot.
Statistic fail by partisan bullshit "research group".
Plus, in every industry, the first fruits are expensive and generally sold to the more well off. Remember when microwave ovens cost thousands of dollars?
It's called the economy of scale.
And even as this "research" is coming out, one major U.S. manufacturer has increased their 2012 production quotas by half because of existing demand.
just another case of us being lied to using unfounded statistics.
The use of "want" in a technical discussion to describe statistical or physical tendencies is not unprecedented. Nor is it particularly anthropomorphic.
For instance, discussing diffusion across a barrier leads to a statement like "the system wants to reach equilibrium" being a concise summary.
There is at least one definition of "want" that doesn't require consciousness (from dict.die.net/want) [quote]2: have need of: "This piano wants the attention of a competent tuner"[/quote]; so don't get too tied up in your smug failure to comprehend the English language.
So anyway, "information wants to be free" in the sense that spreads essentially without diffusion. It does spread with some error, as in your limited understanding of the word 'want' etc. but the factual concentration doesn't diminish at the source at the time of spread.
Anybody who has ever tried to stop or counter a rumor knows just how free information wants to be. Its downright contagious. Companies are constantly trying to hold back and strengthen their information dikes. We even call the secret or unintended release of information "a leak". Water wants to spread, and information wants to spread.
The statement "information wants to be free", as quoted, seems intended to infer that information wants to have no price. _That_ is something I have no direct opinion on since there is no inherent evidence that information has any cost bias (for or against) at all.
I have always taken "information wants to be free" to mean that information wants to escape its confines. This is an inherent truth IMHO, because I understand "monkey see, monkey do" and I have watched rumors spread, and I have a DOD clearance and spend a non-trivial part of each day guarding against the unintentional spread of information, and I have been trained to be aware of that tendency to spread.
If you don't believe that information wants to spread, I suggest you leave an iPhone prototype, or sheaf of papers marked "classified", unattended in a bar some time. 8-)
So if someone harms one of the kids then the reckless endangerment kicks in?
That seems less than ideal.
And I know for a fact that WBC has been physically attacked while on protest. In particular some WBC idiot stamping on a american flag got his ass beat more or less in front of the police by a good ol' boy in eastern washington. The police sauntered over and stopped things in their own time.
As for what CPS could do, and the lawsuits that result, you would be surprised at how long it can take to unsnarl CPS actions and how resistant they can be to suit. "Family Court" is _almost_ as fair as Gitmo...
["Funny"]
I've thought of several funny semi-violent responses...
Get five or ten street-boys to jizz in a squirt gun, use said squirt gun to "anoint" WBC while holding "WBC shows gay spunk as Phred hoped" sign.
Get geek to factor wind biases and then use "Bear Spray" suitably up-wind.
[Serious]
But in truth, if WBC ever showed up in my region I would file a "reckless child endangerment" complaint against them with the department of child and family services. They are clearly trying to incite violence with "fighting words", to the degree that the cops have to show up to protect them. They are also using their children basically as "human shields" by bringing them, and putting them in harm's way, without regard to the safety of the minor children.
If they _don't_ think that the children would be in danger, why do they pre-arrange police protection?
I think WBC needs to be dragged through family court whenever they show up with kids and make them hold signs that inspire people to punch people in the face.
If the adults want to do it, then fine. But not the kids.
You ask: why do we need this many programs top secret.
Often times your clearance isn't about what you are doing, but what someone is doing next to you. For instance you _might_ want to have an electrician have a Secret or Top Secret clearance because you want someone who can go into that room and replace the blown outlet next to the big rack of papers.
The various classification levels are _really_ about who can go where without constant supervision and whether, when some person enters, you have to stop working and wait for them.
So is is more expensive to clear one guy with a particular skill, or have one guy with a particular skill followed around by another guy, and requiring that everyone anywhere near that guy to stop working and close up shop because the one skilled guy will be in some compartment for minutes to hours.
It is often cheaper and better and more realistic to expand a web of trust rather than serialize massive operations.
All a clearance really is, is a way of determining how many people have to watch the watchers.
Meanwhile a classified operation may generate ream after ream of paper that doesn't really need to be classified, but the requirement to declassify that non-valuable paper is usually that several people have to read and understand that paper to certify that it doesn't contain the few things that _must_ be protected. Consider a classic core dump. Page after page of hex digits. Can you certify that none of those sequences represent classified info? Probably not. So you use it, you treat it as classified, and when you reach the control-or-destroy time limit you either put it under document control (stamp, register, file etc) or toss it into the classified disposal bin/box/device/etc.
You have to think about classified stuff the same way you would think about handling a large quantity of street drugs, gemstones, or toxic waste. You want to be able to know that it is okay to leave "the package" with anybody in the chain of custody, and you want to be able to say "if the package is not in the safe, you can know for sure who has it".
So the mechanism of classification, which looks all huge in this sort of expose, isn't what you think. And huge isn't always a waste anyway.
And I have seen things like forty people having to stop working and clean _everything_ off their respective workspaces because some uncleared big-wig wanted to walk through a classified area. Between clean up, visit, and resumption that was a loss of forty man hours. Who wants to have to go through that every time someone delivers water, or comes in to vacuum.
It can get byzantine, but you know what, without all those "proved trustworthy" cogs, there would be a huge amount of waste and destruction generated by a _tiny_ _tiny_ fraction of the total effort. It may not be uncommon for a multi-million dollar effort to go classified because a device smaller than a suitcase must be treated as classified but also "sometimes needs to be in near continual operation". etc. Without the classification being spread out, whenever the device was turned off all the computer hard drives would have to be collected up and stowed and so on. Easier to just classify the project than have two perfectly distinct sets of "everything that can store data" in one office.
So yeah, "Bob's T.S. Exterminators" sounds like a waste, until you have to set up somewhere specific and both get a job done and deal with a continuous influx of vermin.
But the fact is that dealing with classified _anything_ is an expensive, elaborate hassle. Anybody and everybody at every level of the government _hates_ it. You don't want to generate classified, you don't want to open classified containment, you _really_ don't want to have to ship classified material between installations. For reasons of pure ease of daily life and good old corporate greed, the bare minimum of stuff is classified, and at the last possible instant to boot.
Classified junk might as well be called "weaponized radioactive herpes
This self-destruct lock is basically the same thing as TiVO, and the GPL v3 contains anti-TiVO provisions.
No we see why GPL v3 was necessary and v2 should be retired.
You are not the entire internet, you are a statistical outlier. Sorry, but it's true. On the whole, counter-copyright downloading is apparently still on the rise. Plus you seem to be engaged in the "low and dumb" end of the pool if you've been "contacted twice" and didn't get enough details the first time to avoid the second via encryption, port hopping, "safe peer" or any number of other means.
Oddly enough I don't do any counter-copyright downloading and I already use these techniques just to stay out of the big net of stupid. I move non-trivial amounts of data so it would suck to be mistaken for a "warze kiddy".
I would bet, given no other information than provided, that they were never "Contacted by Rights Holders" at all. You ISP probably just didn't like you usage profile. Did they cite title downloaded and time performed or just call you naughty on an approximate date?
I feel your pain though. Guilty until proven innocent sucks, though you do seem to be admitting guilt.
The entire internet seems to be quaking in fear and ceasing and desisting all over the place.
Quite a well-spent $16M for that one case alone.