The "steadly increasing" 20MW/second isn't that problematical if you don't put it on the grid right then but instead wait till it was needed, or use it to charge a (whatever) storage battery to span lulls and, I don't know make the hydrogen for the on-site matenence vehicles or something.
There is a complete non-issue about how to cut in this power source (compared to any other kind of generator).
How not to "waste" the power generated when you aren't cut in is a "what to do with the gravy" kind of issue for the most part.
Since they have to get up to the (230,000-volt was it?) levels to get menaingfully onto the grid in the first place I suspect that a giant bank of capacitors and a fast switching doodad are pretty much mandatory. The plant's start-up cascade should be private anyway as they could go "on-sun" exponentially before they cut in.
Of course, the larger problems of the power grid are larger problems. Especially with deregulation and "known bad places" as per the recent blackout. So wer are borrowing problems here anyway.
The water thing is "simplistic" and not terribly informative. The "gravity battery" of using weight or water to store potential energy is pretty much "known bull".
It certianly doesn't apply (mechanically) when you are talking about a large farm of small generators. The mechanical drag alone, before wear and "storing water in the bright sun" loss to evaporation and devices getting clogged with alge in execelent sunlight factors in
Directly running a pump significantly larger than a garden hose to pump water high enough to be usefull as nighttime generation is patently absurd, and would cost you 100% of the day-time peak electrical usage output of the plant.
Besides, not a heck of a lot of water in the desert with wich to perform this miracle.
I know, we could truck it in every morning...
(Oh look, hyperbole isn't argument... that sounds stupid... 8-)
It isn't the "solar power plant" guy's job to answer the power storage requriement for night time. That's a job for a battery/capacitor/whatever guy. You can't expect each application to be a perfect panecia.
Considering that *NONE* of the power grid currently stores power, demanding the solar-power guy "solve" that problem in one paragraph of an interview on promising solar power generation is asking a bit _much_ don't you think?
Do you propose he stop working just because his power system "only works" during peak demand hours?
ASIDE: Electrolysis of water into H2 and O2 is not the only way to get H2 and O2 from water. The sonic method looks rather more effective especially in the smaller scales involved here. And if the power *return* from the hydrogen were handled right, by say keeping the already-hot engines hot into the even-cooler night...?
Double-asside: "lose" efficency... "loose efficency" would not be so bad... (that's humor, my spelling is atrocious... 8-)
Note: the best place to think is _outside_ the box. 8-)
There was what? ONE WHOLE SENTENCE about hydrogen in the whole article? But the nay-sayers have latched onto it.
The _article_ was not trying to sell a panaceia. It's just honest work trying to solve "their share" (and then some) of an emerging/ongoing problem. So the solar power plant only works during peak power demand time? GOOD ENOUGH. Decommissioning every gas/coal fired peak-load accessory generator in the sunny south-west would be a *HUGE* win. Hell, 10% would be OUTSTANDING.
So the _SOLAR_ havn't done the _BATTERY_ guys' work for them. Big surprise! Burn the witch!
I mean really...
The guy almost certianly was answering the perenial "what about when it's dark" bull that has been stoping *all* solar work for far too long. You're right solar won't work at night so we should just stop thinking about it all together. Hell, coal won't work if you don't have coal so that was a dumb idea that will never work too... oh wait, look how stupid that sounds... HYPERBOLE isn't ARGUMENT. 8-)
As far has hydrogen is concerned, btw, the _sonic_ separation of hydrogen from water is actually quite promising even if most people don't even know it's even possible.
Expecting to have *that* guy answer the "night time" question through *that* reporter in *one* paragraph is asking for one or two more miricales than we deserve at this point.
(I see your bullshit and raise you unnecessary use of attitude.)
They discus the economies of scale (somewhat) by talking first about the "daytime only" nature of the power, and by _coincidence_ the fact that daytime is peak power demand time, where near-term provision will do a lot of good.
The blockquoted text is part of an "not addressed at this time" conjecture. Just liek the part where they talk about a "100 square mile generation system" not as if they are proposing one be built, but as if they were trying to convey the issues of scale and return.
At least it was clear to me when I read the article, and appreciated the "dumbed down explinations" presented, that they were trying to get effecient solar power working instead of wrapping themselves around the *POINTLESS* axle of "what about at night?".
As for the pumping water up a hill (e.g. the "gravity battery" of potential energy) I think you over-estimate the effecency of hydro-power rather a bit as well. Granted the elements are well understood, but I don't think you get the whole "pump head" issue of volume vs lift vs return potential very clearly, otherwise you would not imagine for a moment that the driect mechanical output of the systems in question were "well suted" to running the kinds of pumps you'd need, just because the striling enginges turn and so do pumps.
(_Directly_ using the mechanical energy of the small Stirling Engines to move "enough" water high "enough" to be useful in filling a resivour big "enough" to turn meaningfully sized turbans or water wheels to generate "enough" nightime electricity is a laughable debacle _before_ you consider laminar flow resistance (rising and falling), evaporation loss, pump maintenance (clogging), seeapage loss, providing source water in the first place, simple acreage or water-tower shadows, and so forth.)
The fact remains that cutting N% off our fossil fuel and polution problems is pretty much a win of N%. If we could replace 50% of the runtime on the nations fill-in generators, that would be *huge*. _TEN_ percent would be huge too.
The article and the investigators are trying to solve *their* part, what are you trying to solve by bitching about their off-hand mention of hydrogen?
The fact remains that the "energy storage" problem remians no matter what the generation system. "Batteries" for electric cars, holding solar, wind, or tidal power for return when those are not at peak. That sort of thing will remain no matter what.
The "don't bother with solar until you solve the nightime issues" frame of mind is defeatest as hell and so not terribly useful.
I suspect, were I to have to prognosticate, that we will need to revive nuclear power. Invent better batteries/fuel cells, look into _sonic_ (as opposed to electical) separation of water into hydrogen and oxygen [very promising but not often mentioned], and biomass-fuels, and all sorts of things to "solve" the current problems.
Meanwhile, if we could learn to turn off the freaking lights when we leave the room (guilty here more often than I'd like 8-) and learn to wear a sweater instead of heating the house to 75F (which I *am* good about 8-), and all sorts of simple stuff things will be "Better."
Agreed. I am a music non-buyer in general. My personal hurestic during the age of Napster was buy if I expected to want to hear this anywhere other than "here at the computer". My total CD collection, lifetime, is "about 30". My vinal count before that (I am 40), including gifts, was "about 20".
There were several groups that I "found" in napster days, that would be on my buy list simply because of Napster exposure.
But my buy list isn't backed up by much in "absolute likeliness to buy period". In fact, after napster I looked at audio-galaxy for about a month. Then just stopped. I'd still be downloading and I'd still be not buying, now I'm not doing either.
I still havn't bought a thing. I can say with certianty that nothing I downloaded during that era represents even the slightest form of lost sale, because even in the complete abscence of music downloading, I still dont buy.
The RIAA has not lost a dime to my previous downloading, they have gained at least one as-new sale, and I'm sure I have bought at least two things used, after hearing it on download. (but that used sale money doesn't go to them anyway.) Under no possible intrepretation can any of my past downloading be characterized as any lost revenue anywhere.
I am not a "music person" beyond listing to the radio in my car. I do buy DVDs. I might by CDs if the price were way down and I was sensitzed to the existence of the song, and the CD showed up on the end-cap display and caught my eye.
Where I will search out a DVD, I cannot be bothered to even browse the CDs.
(I occasionally use Bittorrent to download a Linux distro etc. so my legitamate to illicit ratio for P2P use puts me *way* into the legitamate uses only category.)
So in my case, the free music downloads made me honestly "more likely to buy" but the absolute value of that vector was too slight to mean much.
I do have first-hand knowledge of people who bought lots of what they downloaded. My roomate hoovered through Napster, and bought lots of what he fetched. That knowledge may not be worth much since (really) Napster comes to us from the pre-history of MP3, where only your computer could play the downloads. I suspect that the numbers have changed due to the nomad/ipod group and the "cd players" for your car that will play a data-disk full of MP3s.
I am the epitome of "if this were really cheap and came to me really easy, and didn't suck, I'd be a goldmine, but barring that, I don't factor at all" crossection of the market that the RIAA just doesn't reach or comprehend.
I know how I would make the ??AA people lots of money via P2P, but they arn't ready for what I'd have to say. (Scavenge my previous Slashdot posts for "The Big Red Button" if you care to know my take on the formula for P2P music sales on the net.)
Sometimes I think these moderator people are insane.
While the patent itself is for BASIC, the claims and abstract are quite elementary. I even *quoted* the abstract in its entirity. And doing a not-equal operation on a pair of pointers is all about finding out whether two vairables "point to the same location in memory".
In the old PC environment, with the non-flat memory model the pointers would need to be normalized (a-la the HUGE memory model), but that's about it.
The above if statement contains "A system, method and computer-readable medium support the use of a single operator that allows a comparison of two variables to determine if the two variables point to the same location in memory." (The quote is the entire abstract of the patent application.)
I'm sorry, but God needs to destroy the USPTO from space at this point.
I call "straw man". If ease and speed and transfer quality were the only points, there wouldn't be 7 (at last count) fully purchased copies of "dark side of the moon" in my house. My house is full of _professional_ grade mastering equipment and I or my roommate could have as much perfect-quality transfer as we could stomach.
I own more DVDs than CDs, my roommate is more CDs than DVDs (he likes music, I like movies).
I buy what I could *rent* all the time. Both rent and buy have the same "speed" and "quality".
The cumulative noise and error arguments only hold water if you expect that the chain of copies would be linear. In point of fact the reason that most recordings never got more that three steps away from the master is that there is not sufficient motivation to go four.
The field of argument is, of course, a bit poisoned because, if I recall correctly, the MPAA (etc) likened the VCR to the Boston Strangler. Nice, but bull.
The "but these copies are perfect" stuff is crap.
Napster didn't produce any statistically negative impact on music purchases overall. Some studies argue for a _slight_ improvement actually. No "overall" study showed a decline, even though a bunch of "just look at the sharers" style studies purported a loss of sales but the sample sizes and questions used in those studies were biased and dishonest (IMHO). But for the sake of argument I'll call it flat, which would be justified by "the average outcome of the study results".
So, if on average, the studies on average, said there was no impact from Napster at its peak, the "easy perfect copy" effect is demonstrated to be a non-factor.
My private codicil is "for music", as I believe the impact on movies will be different because we don't, as a culture, *expect* to repeat/replay the movie experience. So I suspect the buy-after-view part of the model will be substantially less for movies than it is for music.
But that's just me.
Note that I don't address the "legality" or "morality" of the issues. I presume, and justly I think, that the likelihood of stopping illicit copying is about the same as the effectiveness of prohibition. That is, the act is here to stay. That this persistence of action will remain constant no matter what you position is on the applicability of the words "own" and "steal" to copyrighted works. So there is little use in arguing that point here and now.
I guess I forgot to use the words "reputable" or at least "unbiased". Anybody can construct a "study" to verify virtually any economic proposition.
For instance, I can track the behavior of someone I know will not buy no matter what, and then "Correlate" that non-buy to any factor I wish including available downloads. But that would be disingenuous.
The "particular cases" are not significant. For every guy who downloaded because he doesn't want to have to pay, there's a guy who bought because he stumbled across something neat in his downloads. It is a chaotic system, and no matter how much anybody screams otherwise, the measurements need to be broad. After all, in a chaotic mass of particles, the individual particles don't matter. So all the arguments are "oh oh, that particle went south, I'm being harmed" "nah uh, I'm a particle and I never went north until this came along."
It's absurd.
The more honest studies just chart sales vs economic climate, because both metrics are equally broad and fuzzy and equally fair indicators. IF there were more particles going south now (to a degree that was statistically significant) the outer-surface studies would show that. And they don't.
Part of the poisoned mind-set is that "create a lost sale" and it's cohort mis-understandings.
You cannot "create a lost sale" nor can you measure the presence of "lost sales" because you have NO INFORMATION about whether the particle in question "would have bought if not for X". Did the guy not buy because he could download? Or was it because it wasn't worth the asking price? Or because he didn't think it was worth the asking price? Or because he couldn't afford the asking price?
Each particle has his own reasons (or unreasonableness 8-), but the facts are simple.
By no near measure can one honestly turn "number of downloads" into "number of lost sales". Even "safe ratios" that appear to be over generous aren't legitimate because we have no information. We don't know how many downloads created sales either. So there when some guy says "well lets say that just 1% of these downloads represent lost sales" if he doesn't then say "and lets say that just 1% of these downloads caused new sales" he is being a "political hack".
We don't even have a _model_ on which to base a _guess_ of harm.
That all sorts of people claim to see all sorts of numbers, the honest studies that chart the sales and the economic conditions and then look for perturbations in those numbers coinciding with trends in downloading show "no statistically significant correlation."
I think music downloading is a push.
I think that movie downloading would be different because the re-watch value of movies is so low that the download-led-to-sale component would be disproportionately low compared to the download-prevented-sale numbers. That's just a gut feeling based on the different levels of user commitment required by music and movies and so to the likelihood of the guy, having just watched the download, thinking to himself "I gotta have a good copy of that". I could be wrong, as gut feelings often are.
But if the MPAA doesn't separate itself from the RIAA by a good bit, the statistical disproof (well, demonstration of lack of proof anyway) of harm from music downloading will prevent the MPAA's separate issues from getting the separate consideration it deserves.
One of your fallacies is that you presume that the RIAA is being "hurt" by internet downloading of music.
They'd like you to think that they are being so hurt.
But all the studies say otherwise, citing no statistical variance in sales compared to the general economic condition before, during, or after peak Napster use.
The fact is that the "harm" only exists in the feevered dreams of averice fixed firmly in the deluded heads of RIAA executives.
The harm to the MPAA might be higher, as really bad movies dont' get purchased or re-rented. Heck, most people who buy DVDs don't watch them more than once or twice. So if somone downloads a marginal movie, they are less likely to buy/rent it by a wide margin.
Music has a much lower commitment-to-engage than a movie. You can listen to music in your car or on the bus or while you are doing any number of other things. Movies you have to stop and watch.
Since Music is more re-usable the purchase-after-download factor has to be pretty high.
I would think for movies it would be otherwise.
To some extent the MPAA's strongest argument to stop downloading would be to first _GUT_ the RIAA's claims to harm and then show why it's different for movies. Without that infighting the "**AA" effect will damn the MPAA with the RIAA's brush.
Sucks to be them.
Solidarity with shit-covered losers will likely result in you finding yourself covered in shit, think about that MPAA...
[step zero, I get to convince register.com to add key record support at no extra charge or start my own full-time DNS server. but I digress.]
So spammer bob comes along and registers foo.com and points it at his own DNS server.
Then he fabricates X.Y.Z.foo.com (where X Y and Z are variables) and generates accompanying keys. [Or he slips $1000USD to some lacky at yahoo.com and makes off with their secret key.]
He then sends his email through open relays and zombie machines.
The mailer agents *MUST* then start relying on reverse-resolve (which already happens in the "hello message" of most SMTP agents anyway) to make sure that the "most prior step" is valid, which is fine until you get to the origin machines with valid domains that don't identify themselves with their reverse-resolvable ids.
Meanwhile: Spammer Ted just buys some trojan time on a zombie network and send out his spam as "properly signed" email from you and me, "prooving" that you and I are the ones offering penis cream.
So you have this rolling yellow-snow ball galumphing down hill containing:
-- elaborate key spaces constructed by spammers -- compromised keys -- complex fee-structures for legitimate small operators to get support from registrars and ISPs -- unvarifiable origins or over-verified origins -- INCREASED INCENTIVE to virus/trojan PCs to have mail go out with those owned-machines' identies.
See, as soon as spammers begin dilluting their namespaces by registering foo.com and then running their onw name-server so that they can create X.Y.Z.foo.com they will be able to flood the keyspace. The providers will not be able to just fliter on two-names automatically (e.g. foo.com) because real organizations that use the DNS correctly (like mit.edu etc) don't flatten tehir domain space.
Alternately, the infinite number of zombie machines can (do) spew the spam from real machines which would presumably generate real signed mail via outlook. Or the spammers will send the mail through the zombies already crafted with their plurality of domains and keys.
So it is *INEVITABLE* that the reverse-resolve that is already part of the SMTP "hello message" verification will *have* to be brought into the standard in version 1.1 or 2 or whatever.
So, to summarize:
1) bogus sub-domains leads to flooded domian key space and self-imposed denial-of-service as the receiving-side key-store has to look up pluralities of keys.
2) existing reverse-resolve gets factored in to prevent zombie relay of well crafted, elaboratly keyed "domain key valid" email.
"...domain key is tied to the domain name and not the SMTP server address."
Yes, and no. The domain name of an SMTP remote end is often reverse-resolved to verify that the message is comming from the machine that named in the "hello" message in the SMTP exchange.
My reverse resolution doesn't match my forward claim.
This is (currently) ok [I think] for some agents, but not for others. As soon as the triangle is closed (all three must match) the damage will be intense.
Remember that a lot of black/white listing is done by address range. Reverse resolve isn't that far away.
Among other things it will prevent a spammer from registering "foo.com" and then inventing X.Y.Z.foo.com (where X Y and Z are varables) and *flooding* the domain key space with keys for these multiple domains. Then the servers and the lists will have to deal with a plurality of origin domains. The lists cannot really be geared to just use foo.com because lots of real organizations (mit.edu etc) use real multiple level domains (the way we are supposed to but don't out here in the untaimed stupidity-infected as-many-words-as-we-want.com world).
The problem space becomes "elaborative". As soon as the spammers decide to get clever the system will colapse, or at the least form its very-own self-denial-of-service ring.
Like nay good quick fix, this is "good idea" from the pre-history of fact.
Spam sent from zombie (pwned) machines and open relays will all come from valid domains.
Forged from locations *also* can come from valid domains.
For an idea to be good it has to be "simple" _AND_ "effective".
This will just encourage less traceability and cut of legitimate and careful operators.
Consider I have a domin, I do tiny bits of email, my *reverse* domain is going to show up as bunch-of-numbers-provider-tld, which won't match my sendings unless I pay lots and lots of money to my provider (Ok, I'll say it, "Comcast") for a business account wiht a proper inverse DNS entry.
So this is shaft common people and encourage virus/trojan writers and open the door for profiteering.
Yea... that'll help a hell of a lot.
(not) Short Plain-English Version Answer
on
Holub on Patterns
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Ok, to summarize his point. If you are making a "thing" then the operations on that thing should be contained inside that thing. So if you make these little routines that do nothing more than let you peek into "thing" to see "the real thing" inside, your "thing" isn't your friend.
As a peice of mental oragmi (and to fold my own self in here, instead of _just_ trying to paraphrase this guy).
There is nothing wrong (IMHO) to exposing parts of your thing via accessors and setters AS LONG AS you think of these methods as "translation to the outside world".
That is, if you find yourself writing NewThing.setValue(OldThing.getValue() * 5) then you are no longer getting any useful work out of having "thing" in the first place, and this is bad. It's bad because you are requiring yourself/the world to reach behind a blined and operate on something that you hope will remain stable.
Accessors and Setters are "good", however, (my view, not his) when you lear to see them as moments-of-control that you wrap around the need to communicate "parts of thing" with the outside world. These moments of control may involve locking or provide you the opportunity for "lazy evalutation" of a "thingness" that might exist in any of several forms. For instance, in TCL all of the values exist as this mutable state of "string or whatever". If you are working with the value as a string then it is best represented internally as a string; if as an integer then as an integer; etc. So having a getValueAsString() and getValueAsInteger() accessors make sense as they have that opportunity to do things while communicating with the outside world.
Such an enlightened thing should, however, have a [+= int] operator, and that operator should be used in global preference to dong set(get()+X).
So it isnt "really bad" to offer the user the opportunity to communicate with your object, but if you find that the objects *prefer* to be tweaked via this communication, then you have made a mistake that will cost you a lot _eventually_.
In practice, you can avoid this trap by being liberal with the getters but stingy as heck with the setters.
For instance a network socket object should have a lot of getters for things like "local address" and "peer address" and "lcoal port" and "general health"; but you don't want to "set peer address then connect" you want to socket.connectTo(PeerAddress).
Anoter example is "const string & someImportnatValue()" where your object maintians some important string and you might want to let the world examine that important value. But you don't ever let the world "replace" that value whole-scale. You allow the world to opperate uppon the thing, which *may* change the string too.
So expose spesific items of interest through accessors, but only provide "operators" as a means of changing what must change.
After all, if someone can just set a value, then how do you maintian your invariants (requirements of state)?
If you have written a true operator that you have chosen to call "set", then your name is probably wrong at least.
It's a distinction between grays in many cases.
Rule of thumb: the code that changes a thing should be owned by the thing. If you are "borrowing out" some key value, operating on it in the wild, and then "putting it back in" you are probably making code that will cause you harm, because now everybody is "diddling" your state in their alien and undefined-to-you code.
2) love. One person can destroy love, just not their own. But I'll give it to you.
3) Enviornment. Here you need to hold your horses. The quote IS NOT "being the only one who can destroy a thing, you can control a thing". The quote only requires that you can destroy a thing. It doesn't infer that you have to be the only one able to destroy that thing.
So the quote is wrong, as per the original poster.
I can destroy an animal, but that is only the same thing as controlling it within some fractured world view. And spoilsporting doesn't equal control.
Do the thought experiment. Get a dog or a horse. Put a collar on the animal and then put a remote controlled bomb on the collar. Now, with the one button ("destroy") on that remote, and nothing else, make the horse heard sheep or make the dog pull a cart. [and so on.]
If control means ruin, the fine, control it is.
But outside of this one very limited sense, that is not control, and it is particularly not control of the thing.
The power to destroy a thing grants only the power to influence the people who value that thing, and only as far as they value it.
Remember, some moistened bink, lying on her back, distributing swords, is no basis for a system of government... and neither is the wanton applicaiton of trite aphorisims.
Seriously, this wouldn't be news if it werent for the fact that the cash-entropy cost of Microsoft Windows is sucking the GNP of this country dry.
I know Windows costs *my* employer money bcause every time the expensive tool-chain that lets me work on our product jams-up against a windows issue, I lose my train of thought and waste ten minutes rebooting.
Might as well just at three weeks of paid vacation to my schedule and get us some shite that works. It'd make me happer too.
You have obviously never worked in deep government sub-contracting or nay job where software flows liked flood waters. After a bit, you say "don't we need a license for this?" and you get laughed at or ignored. (This was government sub-contracting where it wasn't abnormal to be working with $250,000 first-seat, $40,000 each additional seat software. They didn't even *blink* at whole instance so fdatabases of office suites.)
It's like drinking from a firehose full of brandy. Hard to control and intoxicating as hell.
Add to that the fact that when almost everything is site-licensed, you stop looking for things that arnt.
It's in the economies of scale.
So yes and avast, I feel pretty safe in thingking that Redmond is awash in insufficently licensed "grey to black" copies of just about anything you can imagine.
And *no* company can even pretend to be 100% compliant.
It doesn't matter how many licenses they have. Were they held to the same fire as the rest of us (not that I expect them to be) the only quesiton is how the following mathematical expression would be evaulated:
Which nets money owed, one half for each of BSA and Copyright holder.
See, the BSA, again were they to treat Microsoft impartially, would not audit for "SoundForge" the'd audit for all sorts of stuff. And you just *know* that there is warze out the ynig-yang there. [Since they dont have to track MS products for license compliance, they almost cirtianly have grown into the habbit of not tracking *any* licenses.]
Plus, as we know, If you copy music or a movie, even if you own the DVD, you are still a pirate. So the fact that they warzed SoundForge isn't forgiven by having any other licenses for it, even by count.
That is a bit like "scoring" some drugs on the street, getting caught, and pleading a valid perscription. The act is a crime, which isn't oblivated by license.
One wonders if the nororious (now) distribution of the material created with the stolen program, and the (arguable) profit which Microsoft made by its distribution of the output from the stolen work, could raise significant fincial liability...?
That shoudl be the paultry $150,000 for copyright violation at least.
SoundForge should, at least, be able to call a BSA audit on Microsoft...
Oh, I just got a warm fuzzy at imagining Microsoft having to submit to a BSA audit. After all, if they think it's good for us, isn't it good for them?
I wonder what the bounty would be, and how fast we can flood the BSA with "tips"? After-all, we *have* the evidence distributed ever-so-widely... 8-)
What you want to bet that the BSA wouldn't do their jobs *this* *time*?
They didn't "pull out an Ace". They filed the Ace in good order some time ago and in the latest filing they kind of pointed it out more significantly.
The short-version is that the board of directors meeting the day before the critical Asset Purchase Agreement stuf makes spesific mention of Novell *retaining* all the copyrights, and they have (previously) filed those minutes with the court, so they get to sit their as sort of the last word on the motion to dismiss.
So much so that the court may, in light of SCO's foolish attempt to "add evidence" (in the form of a declaration) during the motion to dismiss, convert the motion to dismiss into a summary judgment.
[Notis Obscuris: The first usage of "computer" was the simple and obvious "one who computes", i.e. a person. The thing on your desk is an example of the artificial computer, a proper successor to the mechanical computer, and faster but far less flexible than "the first" computer.]
[To get really obscure, the movie "the computer wore tennis shoes" is doubly ironic as a watershed recognition that people had lost the computer concept and invented the god machine so ubiquetously (sp?) that it became an "ooooh golly" to imagine a person who could think... 8-)]
[So] I didn't know it existed, but this tool sounds relly useful to me as a completely "white" application.
I work at a company that makes cell phone system test gear. We help cell phone companies set up quality and throughput testing and transport/content correctness.
Many is the time when, as I develop the tidbits, I want to see the data flow and content actually being received. I have become a zen grand master of getting my ass lost piecing together partial frames and retransmits.
A program that reconstructs the session streams into "content" for me would be amazingly useful.
Not so much as an "admin" tool, and more as a development aid, this thing sounds well worth investigating.
Slashdot Mirror
The "steadly increasing" 20MW/second isn't that problematical if you don't put it on the grid right then but instead wait till it was needed, or use it to charge a (whatever) storage battery to span lulls and, I don't know make the hydrogen for the on-site matenence vehicles or something.
There is a complete non-issue about how to cut in this power source (compared to any other kind of generator).
How not to "waste" the power generated when you aren't cut in is a "what to do with the gravy" kind of issue for the most part.
Since they have to get up to the (230,000-volt was it?) levels to get menaingfully onto the grid in the first place I suspect that a giant bank of capacitors and a fast switching doodad are pretty much mandatory. The plant's start-up cascade should be private anyway as they could go "on-sun" exponentially before they cut in.
Of course, the larger problems of the power grid are larger problems. Especially with deregulation and "known bad places" as per the recent blackout. So wer are borrowing problems here anyway.
The water thing is "simplistic" and not terribly informative. The "gravity battery" of using weight or water to store potential energy is pretty much "known bull".
It certianly doesn't apply (mechanically) when you are talking about a large farm of small generators. The mechanical drag alone, before wear and "storing water in the bright sun" loss to evaporation and devices getting clogged with alge in execelent sunlight factors in
Directly running a pump significantly larger than a garden hose to pump water high enough to be usefull as nighttime generation is patently absurd, and would cost you 100% of the day-time peak electrical usage output of the plant.
Besides, not a heck of a lot of water in the desert with wich to perform this miracle.
I know, we could truck it in every morning...
(Oh look, hyperbole isn't argument... that sounds stupid... 8-)
It isn't the "solar power plant" guy's job to answer the power storage requriement for night time. That's a job for a battery/capacitor/whatever guy. You can't expect each application to be a perfect panecia.
Considering that *NONE* of the power grid currently stores power, demanding the solar-power guy "solve" that problem in one paragraph of an interview on promising solar power generation is asking a bit _much_ don't you think?
Do you propose he stop working just because his power system "only works" during peak demand hours?
ASIDE: Electrolysis of water into H2 and O2 is not the only way to get H2 and O2 from water. The sonic method looks rather more effective especially in the smaller scales involved here. And if the power *return* from the hydrogen were handled right, by say keeping the already-hot engines hot into the even-cooler night...?
Double-asside: "lose" efficency... "loose efficency" would not be so bad... (that's humor, my spelling is atrocious... 8-)
Note: the best place to think is _outside_ the box. 8-)
There was what? ONE WHOLE SENTENCE about hydrogen in the whole article? But the nay-sayers have latched onto it.
The _article_ was not trying to sell a panaceia. It's just honest work trying to solve "their share" (and then some) of an emerging/ongoing problem. So the solar power plant only works during peak power demand time? GOOD ENOUGH. Decommissioning every gas/coal fired peak-load accessory generator in the sunny south-west would be a *HUGE* win. Hell, 10% would be OUTSTANDING.
So the _SOLAR_ havn't done the _BATTERY_ guys' work for them. Big surprise! Burn the witch!
I mean really...
The guy almost certianly was answering the perenial "what about when it's dark" bull that has been stoping *all* solar work for far too long. You're right solar won't work at night so we should just stop thinking about it all together. Hell, coal won't work if you don't have coal so that was a dumb idea that will never work too... oh wait, look how stupid that sounds... HYPERBOLE isn't ARGUMENT. 8-)
As far has hydrogen is concerned, btw, the _sonic_ separation of hydrogen from water is actually quite promising even if most people don't even know it's even possible.
Expecting to have *that* guy answer the "night time" question through *that* reporter in *one* paragraph is asking for one or two more miricales than we deserve at this point.
(I see your bullshit and raise you unnecessary use of attitude.)
They discus the economies of scale (somewhat) by talking first about the "daytime only" nature of the power, and by _coincidence_ the fact that daytime is peak power demand time, where near-term provision will do a lot of good.
The blockquoted text is part of an "not addressed at this time" conjecture. Just liek the part where they talk about a "100 square mile generation system" not as if they are proposing one be built, but as if they were trying to convey the issues of scale and return.
At least it was clear to me when I read the article, and appreciated the "dumbed down explinations" presented, that they were trying to get effecient solar power working instead of wrapping themselves around the *POINTLESS* axle of "what about at night?".
As for the pumping water up a hill (e.g. the "gravity battery" of potential energy) I think you over-estimate the effecency of hydro-power rather a bit as well. Granted the elements are well understood, but I don't think you get the whole "pump head" issue of volume vs lift vs return potential very clearly, otherwise you would not imagine for a moment that the driect mechanical output of the systems in question were "well suted" to running the kinds of pumps you'd need, just because the striling enginges turn and so do pumps.
(_Directly_ using the mechanical energy of the small Stirling Engines to move "enough" water high "enough" to be useful in filling a resivour big "enough" to turn meaningfully sized turbans or water wheels to generate "enough" nightime electricity is a laughable debacle _before_ you consider laminar flow resistance (rising and falling), evaporation loss, pump maintenance (clogging), seeapage loss, providing source water in the first place, simple acreage or water-tower shadows, and so forth.)
The fact remains that cutting N% off our fossil fuel and polution problems is pretty much a win of N%. If we could replace 50% of the runtime on the nations fill-in generators, that would be *huge*. _TEN_ percent would be huge too.
The article and the investigators are trying to solve *their* part, what are you trying to solve by bitching about their off-hand mention of hydrogen?
The fact remains that the "energy storage" problem remians no matter what the generation system. "Batteries" for electric cars, holding solar, wind, or tidal power for return when those are not at peak. That sort of thing will remain no matter what.
The "don't bother with solar until you solve the nightime issues" frame of mind is defeatest as hell and so not terribly useful.
I suspect, were I to have to prognosticate, that we will need to revive nuclear power. Invent better batteries/fuel cells, look into _sonic_ (as opposed to electical) separation of water into hydrogen and oxygen [very promising but not often mentioned], and biomass-fuels, and all sorts of things to "solve" the current problems.
Meanwhile, if we could learn to turn off the freaking lights when we leave the room (guilty here more often than I'd like 8-) and learn to wear a sweater instead of heating the house to 75F (which I *am* good about 8-), and all sorts of simple stuff things will be "Better."
And better is... better.
Agreed. I am a music non-buyer in general. My personal hurestic during the age of Napster was buy if I expected to want to hear this anywhere other than "here at the computer". My total CD collection, lifetime, is "about 30". My vinal count before that (I am 40), including gifts, was "about 20".
There were several groups that I "found" in napster days, that would be on my buy list simply because of Napster exposure.
But my buy list isn't backed up by much in "absolute likeliness to buy period". In fact, after napster I looked at audio-galaxy for about a month. Then just stopped. I'd still be downloading and I'd still be not buying, now I'm not doing either.
I still havn't bought a thing. I can say with certianty that nothing I downloaded during that era represents even the slightest form of lost sale, because even in the complete abscence of music downloading, I still dont buy.
The RIAA has not lost a dime to my previous downloading, they have gained at least one as-new sale, and I'm sure I have bought at least two things used, after hearing it on download. (but that used sale money doesn't go to them anyway.) Under no possible intrepretation can any of my past downloading be characterized as any lost revenue anywhere.
I am not a "music person" beyond listing to the radio in my car. I do buy DVDs. I might by CDs if the price were way down and I was sensitzed to the existence of the song, and the CD showed up on the end-cap display and caught my eye.
Where I will search out a DVD, I cannot be bothered to even browse the CDs.
(I occasionally use Bittorrent to download a Linux distro etc. so my legitamate to illicit ratio for P2P use puts me *way* into the legitamate uses only category.)
So in my case, the free music downloads made me honestly "more likely to buy" but the absolute value of that vector was too slight to mean much.
I do have first-hand knowledge of people who bought lots of what they downloaded. My roomate hoovered through Napster, and bought lots of what he fetched. That knowledge may not be worth much since (really) Napster comes to us from the pre-history of MP3, where only your computer could play the downloads. I suspect that the numbers have changed due to the nomad/ipod group and the "cd players" for your car that will play a data-disk full of MP3s.
I am the epitome of "if this were really cheap and came to me really easy, and didn't suck, I'd be a goldmine, but barring that, I don't factor at all" crossection of the market that the RIAA just doesn't reach or comprehend.
I know how I would make the ??AA people lots of money via P2P, but they arn't ready for what I'd have to say. (Scavenge my previous Slashdot posts for "The Big Red Button" if you care to know my take on the formula for P2P music sales on the net.)
Sometimes I think these moderator people are insane.
While the patent itself is for BASIC, the claims and abstract are quite elementary. I even *quoted* the abstract in its entirity. And doing a not-equal operation on a pair of pointers is all about finding out whether two vairables "point to the same location in memory".
In the old PC environment, with the non-flat memory model the pointers would need to be normalized (a-la the HUGE memory model), but that's about it.
So this is very much on-topic.
char * X; ... ...
char * Y;
if (X != Y) {
}
The above if statement contains "A system, method and computer-readable medium support the use of a single operator that allows a comparison of two variables to determine if the two variables point to the same location in memory." (The quote is the entire abstract of the patent application.)
I'm sorry, but God needs to destroy the USPTO from space at this point.
I call "straw man". If ease and speed and transfer quality were the only points, there wouldn't be 7 (at last count) fully purchased copies of "dark side of the moon" in my house. My house is full of _professional_ grade mastering equipment and I or my roommate could have as much perfect-quality transfer as we could stomach.
I own more DVDs than CDs, my roommate is more CDs than DVDs (he likes music, I like movies).
I buy what I could *rent* all the time. Both rent and buy have the same "speed" and "quality".
The cumulative noise and error arguments only hold water if you expect that the chain of copies would be linear. In point of fact the reason that most recordings never got more that three steps away from the master is that there is not sufficient motivation to go four.
The field of argument is, of course, a bit poisoned because, if I recall correctly, the MPAA (etc) likened the VCR to the Boston Strangler. Nice, but bull.
The "but these copies are perfect" stuff is crap.
Napster didn't produce any statistically negative impact on music purchases overall. Some studies argue for a _slight_ improvement actually. No "overall" study showed a decline, even though a bunch of "just look at the sharers" style studies purported a loss of sales but the sample sizes and questions used in those studies were biased and dishonest (IMHO). But for the sake of argument I'll call it flat, which would be justified by "the average outcome of the study results".
So, if on average, the studies on average, said there was no impact from Napster at its peak, the "easy perfect copy" effect is demonstrated to be a non-factor.
My private codicil is "for music", as I believe the impact on movies will be different because we don't, as a culture, *expect* to repeat/replay the movie experience. So I suspect the buy-after-view part of the model will be substantially less for movies than it is for music.
But that's just me.
Note that I don't address the "legality" or "morality" of the issues. I presume, and justly I think, that the likelihood of stopping illicit copying is about the same as the effectiveness of prohibition. That is, the act is here to stay. That this persistence of action will remain constant no matter what you position is on the applicability of the words "own" and "steal" to copyrighted works. So there is little use in arguing that point here and now.
I guess I forgot to use the words "reputable" or at least "unbiased". Anybody can construct a "study" to verify virtually any economic proposition.
For instance, I can track the behavior of someone I know will not buy no matter what, and then "Correlate" that non-buy to any factor I wish including available downloads. But that would be disingenuous.
The "particular cases" are not significant. For every guy who downloaded because he doesn't want to have to pay, there's a guy who bought because he stumbled across something neat in his downloads. It is a chaotic system, and no matter how much anybody screams otherwise, the measurements need to be broad. After all, in a chaotic mass of particles, the individual particles don't matter. So all the arguments are "oh oh, that particle went south, I'm being harmed" "nah uh, I'm a particle and I never went north until this came along."
It's absurd.
The more honest studies just chart sales vs economic climate, because both metrics are equally broad and fuzzy and equally fair indicators. IF there were more particles going south now (to a degree that was statistically significant) the outer-surface studies would show that. And they don't.
Part of the poisoned mind-set is that "create a lost sale" and it's cohort mis-understandings.
You cannot "create a lost sale" nor can you measure the presence of "lost sales" because you have NO INFORMATION about whether the particle in question "would have bought if not for X". Did the guy not buy because he could download? Or was it because it wasn't worth the asking price? Or because he didn't think it was worth the asking price? Or because he couldn't afford the asking price?
Each particle has his own reasons (or unreasonableness 8-), but the facts are simple.
By no near measure can one honestly turn "number of downloads" into "number of lost sales". Even "safe ratios" that appear to be over generous aren't legitimate because we have no information. We don't know how many downloads created sales either. So there when some guy says "well lets say that just 1% of these downloads represent lost sales" if he doesn't then say "and lets say that just 1% of these downloads caused new sales" he is being a "political hack".
We don't even have a _model_ on which to base a _guess_ of harm.
That all sorts of people claim to see all sorts of numbers, the honest studies that chart the sales and the economic conditions and then look for perturbations in those numbers coinciding with trends in downloading show "no statistically significant correlation."
I think music downloading is a push.
I think that movie downloading would be different because the re-watch value of movies is so low that the download-led-to-sale component would be disproportionately low compared to the download-prevented-sale numbers. That's just a gut feeling based on the different levels of user commitment required by music and movies and so to the likelihood of the guy, having just watched the download, thinking to himself "I gotta have a good copy of that". I could be wrong, as gut feelings often are.
But if the MPAA doesn't separate itself from the RIAA by a good bit, the statistical disproof (well, demonstration of lack of proof anyway) of harm from music downloading will prevent the MPAA's separate issues from getting the separate consideration it deserves.
IMHO of course.
One of your fallacies is that you presume that the RIAA is being "hurt" by internet downloading of music.
They'd like you to think that they are being so hurt.
But all the studies say otherwise, citing no statistical variance in sales compared to the general economic condition before, during, or after peak Napster use.
The fact is that the "harm" only exists in the feevered dreams of averice fixed firmly in the deluded heads of RIAA executives.
The harm to the MPAA might be higher, as really bad movies dont' get purchased or re-rented. Heck, most people who buy DVDs don't watch them more than once or twice. So if somone downloads a marginal movie, they are less likely to buy/rent it by a wide margin.
Music has a much lower commitment-to-engage than a movie. You can listen to music in your car or on the bus or while you are doing any number of other things. Movies you have to stop and watch.
Since Music is more re-usable the purchase-after-download factor has to be pretty high.
I would think for movies it would be otherwise.
To some extent the MPAA's strongest argument to stop downloading would be to first _GUT_ the RIAA's claims to harm and then show why it's different for movies. Without that infighting the "**AA" effect will damn the MPAA with the RIAA's brush.
Sucks to be them.
Solidarity with shit-covered losers will likely result in you finding yourself covered in shit, think about that MPAA...
I think you are insufficently paranoid... 8-)
(Oversimplified myself)
[step zero, I get to convince register.com to add key record support at no extra charge or start my own full-time DNS server. but I digress.]
So spammer bob comes along and registers foo.com and points it at his own DNS server.
Then he fabricates X.Y.Z.foo.com (where X Y and Z are variables) and generates accompanying keys. [Or he slips $1000USD to some lacky at yahoo.com and makes off with their secret key.]
He then sends his email through open relays and zombie machines.
The mailer agents *MUST* then start relying on reverse-resolve (which already happens in the "hello message" of most SMTP agents anyway) to make sure that the "most prior step" is valid, which is fine until you get to the origin machines with valid domains that don't identify themselves with their reverse-resolvable ids.
Meanwhile: Spammer Ted just buys some trojan time on a zombie network and send out his spam as "properly signed" email from you and me, "prooving" that you and I are the ones offering penis cream.
So you have this rolling yellow-snow ball galumphing down hill containing:
-- elaborate key spaces constructed by spammers
-- compromised keys
-- complex fee-structures for legitimate small operators to get support from registrars and ISPs
-- unvarifiable origins or over-verified origins
-- INCREASED INCENTIVE to virus/trojan PCs to have mail go out with those owned-machines' identies.
Yep, nothing half-baked or easily spoofed here...
Carry On...
I over-simplified myself I guess. You are right.
And kind of wrong too...
See, as soon as spammers begin dilluting their namespaces by registering foo.com and then running their onw name-server so that they can create X.Y.Z.foo.com they will be able to flood the keyspace. The providers will not be able to just fliter on two-names automatically (e.g. foo.com) because real organizations that use the DNS correctly (like mit.edu etc) don't flatten tehir domain space.
Alternately, the infinite number of zombie machines can (do) spew the spam from real machines which would presumably generate real signed mail via outlook. Or the spammers will send the mail through the zombies already crafted with their plurality of domains and keys.
So it is *INEVITABLE* that the reverse-resolve that is already part of the SMTP "hello message" verification will *have* to be brought into the standard in version 1.1 or 2 or whatever.
So, to summarize:
1) bogus sub-domains leads to flooded domian key space and self-imposed denial-of-service as the receiving-side key-store has to look up pluralities of keys.
2) existing reverse-resolve gets factored in to prevent zombie relay of well crafted, elaboratly keyed "domain key valid" email.
3) common small-scale users get screwed.
yep... no holes there...
"...domain key is tied to the domain name and not the SMTP server address."
Yes, and no. The domain name of an SMTP remote end is often reverse-resolved to verify that the message is comming from the machine that named in the "hello" message in the SMTP exchange.
My reverse resolution doesn't match my forward claim.
This is (currently) ok [I think] for some agents, but not for others. As soon as the triangle is closed (all three must match) the damage will be intense.
Remember that a lot of black/white listing is done by address range. Reverse resolve isn't that far away.
Among other things it will prevent a spammer from registering "foo.com" and then inventing X.Y.Z.foo.com (where X Y and Z are varables) and *flooding* the domain key space with keys for these multiple domains. Then the servers and the lists will have to deal with a plurality of origin domains. The lists cannot really be geared to just use foo.com because lots of real organizations (mit.edu etc) use real multiple level domains (the way we are supposed to but don't out here in the untaimed stupidity-infected as-many-words-as-we-want.com world).
The problem space becomes "elaborative". As soon as the spammers decide to get clever the system will colapse, or at the least form its very-own self-denial-of-service ring.
In the evolution of things, this is bad.
Like nay good quick fix, this is "good idea" from the pre-history of fact.
Spam sent from zombie (pwned) machines and open relays will all come from valid domains.
Forged from locations *also* can come from valid domains.
For an idea to be good it has to be "simple" _AND_ "effective".
This will just encourage less traceability and cut of legitimate and careful operators.
Consider I have a domin, I do tiny bits of email, my *reverse* domain is going to show up as bunch-of-numbers-provider-tld, which won't match my sendings unless I pay lots and lots of money to my provider (Ok, I'll say it, "Comcast") for a business account wiht a proper inverse DNS entry.
So this is shaft common people and encourage virus/trojan writers and open the door for profiteering.
Yea... that'll help a hell of a lot.
Ok, to summarize his point. If you are making a "thing" then the operations on that thing should be contained inside that thing. So if you make these little routines that do nothing more than let you peek into "thing" to see "the real thing" inside, your "thing" isn't your friend.
As a peice of mental oragmi (and to fold my own self in here, instead of _just_ trying to paraphrase this guy).
There is nothing wrong (IMHO) to exposing parts of your thing via accessors and setters AS LONG AS you think of these methods as "translation to the outside world".
That is, if you find yourself writing NewThing.setValue(OldThing.getValue() * 5) then you are no longer getting any useful work out of having "thing" in the first place, and this is bad. It's bad because you are requiring yourself/the world to reach behind a blined and operate on something that you hope will remain stable.
Accessors and Setters are "good", however, (my view, not his) when you lear to see them as moments-of-control that you wrap around the need to communicate "parts of thing" with the outside world. These moments of control may involve locking or provide you the opportunity for "lazy evalutation" of a "thingness" that might exist in any of several forms. For instance, in TCL all of the values exist as this mutable state of "string or whatever". If you are working with the value as a string then it is best represented internally as a string; if as an integer then as an integer; etc. So having a getValueAsString() and getValueAsInteger() accessors make sense as they have that opportunity to do things while communicating with the outside world.
Such an enlightened thing should, however, have a [+= int] operator, and that operator should be used in global preference to dong set(get()+X).
So it isnt "really bad" to offer the user the opportunity to communicate with your object, but if you find that the objects *prefer* to be tweaked via this communication, then you have made a mistake that will cost you a lot _eventually_.
In practice, you can avoid this trap by being liberal with the getters but stingy as heck with the setters.
For instance a network socket object should have a lot of getters for things like "local address" and "peer address" and "lcoal port" and "general health"; but you don't want to "set peer address then connect" you want to socket.connectTo(PeerAddress).
Anoter example is "const string & someImportnatValue()" where your object maintians some important string and you might want to let the world examine that important value. But you don't ever let the world "replace" that value whole-scale. You allow the world to opperate uppon the thing, which *may* change the string too.
So expose spesific items of interest through accessors, but only provide "operators" as a means of changing what must change.
After all, if someone can just set a value, then how do you maintian your invariants (requirements of state)?
If you have written a true operator that you have chosen to call "set", then your name is probably wrong at least.
It's a distinction between grays in many cases.
Rule of thumb: the code that changes a thing should be owned by the thing. If you are "borrowing out" some key value, operating on it in the wild, and then "putting it back in" you are probably making code that will cause you harm, because now everybody is "diddling" your state in their alien and undefined-to-you code.
It's bad to be everybody else's (deleted).
Kinda wrong.
2) love. One person can destroy love, just not their own. But I'll give it to you.
3) Enviornment. Here you need to hold your horses. The quote IS NOT "being the only one who can destroy a thing, you can control a thing". The quote only requires that you can destroy a thing. It doesn't infer that you have to be the only one able to destroy that thing.
So the quote is wrong, as per the original poster.
I can destroy an animal, but that is only the same thing as controlling it within some fractured world view. And spoilsporting doesn't equal control.
Do the thought experiment. Get a dog or a horse. Put a collar on the animal and then put a remote controlled bomb on the collar. Now, with the one button ("destroy") on that remote, and nothing else, make the horse heard sheep or make the dog pull a cart. [and so on.]
If control means ruin, the fine, control it is.
But outside of this one very limited sense, that is not control, and it is particularly not control of the thing.
The power to destroy a thing grants only the power to influence the people who value that thing, and only as far as they value it.
Remember, some moistened bink, lying on her back, distributing swords, is no basis for a system of government... and neither is the wanton applicaiton of trite aphorisims.
Seriously, this wouldn't be news if it werent for the fact that the cash-entropy cost of Microsoft Windows is sucking the GNP of this country dry.
I know Windows costs *my* employer money bcause every time the expensive tool-chain that lets me work on our product jams-up against a windows issue, I lose my train of thought and waste ten minutes rebooting.
Might as well just at three weeks of paid vacation to my schedule and get us some shite that works. It'd make me happer too.
You have obviously never worked in deep government sub-contracting or nay job where software flows liked flood waters. After a bit, you say "don't we need a license for this?" and you get laughed at or ignored. (This was government sub-contracting where it wasn't abnormal to be working with $250,000 first-seat, $40,000 each additional seat software. They didn't even *blink* at whole instance so fdatabases of office suites.)
It's like drinking from a firehose full of brandy. Hard to control and intoxicating as hell.
Add to that the fact that when almost everything is site-licensed, you stop looking for things that arnt.
It's in the economies of scale.
So yes and avast, I feel pretty safe in thingking that Redmond is awash in insufficently licensed "grey to black" copies of just about anything you can imagine.
And *no* company can even pretend to be 100% compliant.
It doesn't matter how many licenses they have. Were they held to the same fire as the rest of us (not that I expect them to be) the only quesiton is how the following mathematical expression would be evaulated:
c opies]) * Henious_Penalty * 2
(Total_Copies - Number_Of_Provable_Licenses[attached_to_spesific_
Which nets money owed, one half for each of BSA and Copyright holder.
See, the BSA, again were they to treat Microsoft impartially, would not audit for "SoundForge" the'd audit for all sorts of stuff. And you just *know* that there is warze out the ynig-yang there. [Since they dont have to track MS products for license compliance, they almost cirtianly have grown into the habbit of not tracking *any* licenses.]
Plus, as we know, If you copy music or a movie, even if you own the DVD, you are still a pirate. So the fact that they warzed SoundForge isn't forgiven by having any other licenses for it, even by count.
That is a bit like "scoring" some drugs on the street, getting caught, and pleading a valid perscription. The act is a crime, which isn't oblivated by license.
IMHO. BTW IANAL.
One wonders if the nororious (now) distribution of the material created with the stolen program, and the (arguable) profit which Microsoft made by its distribution of the output from the stolen work, could raise significant fincial liability...?
That shoudl be the paultry $150,000 for copyright violation at least.
SoundForge should, at least, be able to call a BSA audit on Microsoft...
Oh, I just got a warm fuzzy at imagining Microsoft having to submit to a BSA audit. After all, if they think it's good for us, isn't it good for them?
I wonder what the bounty would be, and how fast we can flood the BSA with "tips"? After-all, we *have* the evidence distributed ever-so-widely... 8-)
What you want to bet that the BSA wouldn't do their jobs *this* *time*?
They didn't "pull out an Ace". They filed the Ace in good order some time ago and in the latest filing they kind of pointed it out more significantly.
The short-version is that the board of directors meeting the day before the critical Asset Purchase Agreement stuf makes spesific mention of Novell *retaining* all the copyrights, and they have (previously) filed those minutes with the court, so they get to sit their as sort of the last word on the motion to dismiss.
So much so that the court may, in light of SCO's foolish attempt to "add evidence" (in the form of a declaration) during the motion to dismiss, convert the motion to dismiss into a summary judgment.
Whoops. 8-)
Only by running him over.
[Notis Obscuris: The first usage of "computer" was the simple and obvious "one who computes", i.e. a person. The thing on your desk is an example of the artificial computer, a proper successor to the mechanical computer, and faster but far less flexible than "the first" computer.]
[To get really obscure, the movie "the computer wore tennis shoes" is doubly ironic as a watershed recognition that people had lost the computer concept and invented the god machine so ubiquetously (sp?) that it became an "ooooh golly" to imagine a person who could think... 8-)]
[So] I didn't know it existed, but this tool sounds relly useful to me as a completely "white" application.
I work at a company that makes cell phone system test gear. We help cell phone companies set up quality and throughput testing and transport/content correctness.
Many is the time when, as I develop the tidbits, I want to see the data flow and content actually being received. I have become a zen grand master of getting my ass lost piecing together partial frames and retransmits.
A program that reconstructs the session streams into "content" for me would be amazingly useful.
Not so much as an "admin" tool, and more as a development aid, this thing sounds well worth investigating.