IBM would be giving up the clout it might have to counterattack should Sun decide to launch a patent attack against GNU, Linux, or some other free software project that happens to outcompete their offerings.
I believe the IBM patent licensing is specifically voided for any entity that brings a patent suit against any project under an OSI license. So even if IBM's grant did apply to Sun's license and code, Sun wouldn't be protected from a patent counterattack if they sued a GPLed project.
Hmm, the article seemed like a good overview with some useful suggestions.
But it completely left out the biggest, IMHO, problem with the patent system: triple damage for "knowingly infringing." This one policy (not sure if it's in the law, or a court precedent) simply has to go before any reform based on competitors will work.
As it is, every IP lawyer tells every engineer to go out of their way not to learn about competitors patents. And certainly don't write down that you know. And abso-friggin-lutely don't let the patent lawyer know that you know. Because if there's proof, boom! triple damages. Regardless of whether you also "knew" that there was prior art, that your company already had a patent that covered the same thing, that the patent was invalid, or that it was obvious to a skilled practitioner of the art.
Overturning this one aspect of the patent system would let tech companies actively monitor their competitors patents, get valuable technical details out of them, and challenge the patents *before* infringement suits are brought by the holders. It would curb the worst of the submarine patents because companies would *know* when someone patents a standard (esp one being developed) without being forced to turn a blind eye to avoid tripling their liability later.
Just to clarify, VxWorks runs on a hell of a lot of hardware, dozens of CPUs across all the major families, thousands of device drivers.
Now, any particular instance of the kernel gets compiled for a specific processor, and only includes the drivers it needs. Which does save on some space. But a lot of that extra space comes from things like a dynamic loader/loader, graphics packages, local shells (usually in multiple flavors,) and host of other applications that are "standard."
The thing that saves *that* space is the local WDB debugging agent. It lets you offload almost all of the bells and whistles to another machine, which does the object loading, provides your shell, does whatever debugging you need, then sends simple instructions ot he agent to carry them out, and generally dramatically increase the interface capabilities without increasing footprint.
You're reading on Slashdot. Statistically, you're more likely to be young, liberal, non-religious. All areas where Kerry's leading. So if 100 people vote because of him, say 60/40, he's just gained 20 votes for Kerry. Here on/., he's probably actually thrown some votes to Badnarik and Cobb as well, which can't hurt.
But, if he told you to get out there and vote for Kerry, you'd take it as political advocacy. Whereas just saying "get out and vote!" only to people who statistically agree with him is more likely to work.
It's the basic principle behind Rock the Vote!, minority voter empowerment drives, and bible thumping preachers.
At the national level, it's still winner-take-all, and the man with the most votes wins totally. Potential 3rd party voters will still be afraid of voting Nader and giving Bush the victory.
Well, from one perspective, it is winner-take-all, since there's only one presidency. But it's not the man with the most votes, it's the person with the majority of the votes, otherwise the house decides between the top 5.
A split decision (Say 265 Kerry, 265 Bush, 8 Nader) would allow Nader's electoral candidates to decide who would be the next president (assuming they hadn't signed some sort of contract guaranteeing which way they'd vote, which would be a bad tactial move for the Greens, were this a possibility.) In this case, they'd have to vote for Kerry to change things, as Bush should have control of the house. But they'd have made a difference, without wasting thier votes, and they'd get whatever side effects of voting for Nader they wanted (like getting him on the next ballot automatically.)
The electoral college is not, technically, the cause of the winner-take-all system. That's a decision by the individual state governments on how to allocate their electors. Maine and Nebraska split their electors by district, so they're not (as) winner take all.
Were every state government to do a parliamentary-esque division of their electors to each party by % of popular vote, the electoral college system could remain in place, and you'd ahve viable third party candidates. In fact, they'd have the power to give their votes to one major party or the other if there was no clear majority. Which would put the selection of president even farther away from the popular vote, and even more contingent on the decisions of select party leadership, but eh, whatcha gonna do?
What the electoral college does do is allow for the possibility of a president who didn't win the popular vote, weigh the election in favor of the eastern seaboard's tiny states, and gaurantee that candidates have to campaign in every state, rather than focusing (as much) on the major population centers.
Badnarik, the libertarian candidate, supports the electoral college system (look up his recent/. Q&A) because of this last reason (reducing the sway of large urban populations.)
This lets you do the equivalent of key-stroke logging at the MAC layer, to which IPSEC is blind. You can set up a man-in-the-middle which intercepts all the IPSEC negotations, gets the keys/password, never gets noticed, and walks away whistling.
I guess soon we'll have offloaded this entire boobies->sperm process to mice. Science!
Worth reading if you've read Elegant Universe?
on
The Fabric of the Cosmos
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
I finished Elegant Universe a few weeks ago, after having put it down for most of a year because I couldn't stand to read another rehashing of QM, relativitiy, isn't this weird. After skipping those chapters, the second half was quite engrossing.
Is it worth reading this if you already read and enjoyed Elegant Universe, or is it just a watered down version without explaining the math?
I would hope a reviewer would give a little more insight into whether to read it or not.
Probably true in the real world, but the DARPA Challenge specified that these had to be land vehicles, ruling out flight as a primary method of transportation.
I did contemplate using a variable wing as the main body of a small entrant. Shift one way to act as a spoiler, shift the other way when you come to an obstacle for a short glideup and over. You still get all your drive from the ground.
When this came out a few days ago, it was my understanding that CA acquired a bunch of Unixware licenses as part of the earlier settlement. They needed these licenses to come into compliance, since they were using (or had sold) machines running Unixware.
Then, after the fact, SCO decided to give all existing Unixware licensees Linux rights as well. If CA didn't even know they were getting Linux (as opposed to Unixware) licenses, that's a crucial distinction.
Yes, it is "parasitic". And the kernel license should be updated to put a stop to this.
That just can't happen without a significant change to the driver interfaces. Those driver developers already have those rights under the existing license to derive from the current version of the kernel. As long as the drivers are binary compatible, they're alright regardless of what other derived works have whatever other licenses applied to them.
According the the articale (gasp) it seems Iowa agrees with you, as that's what they're doing. Four of five seats were reasonably competitive last election, so it seems to have worked out.
Hopefully the courts will end up mandating such commissions...and they can really maintain their independence. I think they'll probably stay mostly independent, but it'll take a few more court cases.
Each halving of line width is a quadrupling of density, so your limit is pushed out to 32 years.
As for going 3-D, even sticking to your strict definition of Moore's law, we'd still be fitting more transistors in the same chip area, so it'd count.
3 years is a lot of time for stuff to happen, I suspect we'll get at least one more "free" doubling just from a leap in transistor design.
More general, though, if some other technology comes along and we start using carbon transistors, or optical switches, or some more esoteric technology that allows us to do twice as may calculations in the same amount of time on a certain sized sliver of what-have-you, that's still going to be called Moore's law if it follows the pattern continuously, regardless of how hard you hold onto the stricter definition. If we shift to a new technology, and computing continues to double, no-one will be claiming that Moore's law is dead.
If, not when. It could be that silicon transistors are the best we're going to do, and Moore's law (in either the stricti or the lax form) only has another few decades in it. It certainly has to peter out sometime.
I think the point of the post you were responding to was that aid organization spend a lot (most, from what I understand) of their money on adminstration, fund raising, sending out cute little cards, etc.
Thus, you can make sure you get 100% of your money to people in need if you do it yourself, locally.
I see no lack of understanding of the situation in the post you responded to, they just don't think cutesy organizations like buy a share of a donated llama are effective. I tend to agree with them, and they certainly don't seem to have missed some subtlety in the post.
Selfish Koreans, they could have liberated an entire other country and freed them from an oppressive dictator and his sadistic cronies, giving future generations a chance to live in a decent world with some sense of empoerment. Instead they'll just be watching pr0n and spewing spam.
Hopefully FatWallet will stand up for themselves again, and Best Buy will be laughed out of court.
No, no, NO.
If Best Buy gets laughed out of court in the middle of December, they've already won. Fat Wallet took down their ads, had to hire a lawyer, free speech was stifled.
I am sad to see that FatWallet blinked this time, after staring down Walmart and getting them to back down. The argument that facts cannot be copyrighted seems solid, and the DMCA shouldn't change that (except for removign due proes, of course.) We need this case to go to court, and the countersuit to be pursued even after Best Buy drops it two weks after the fact.
Fuckers.
The only possible good outcome here is if Fat Wallet stood up, kept up the ads, and countersued.
The DMCA doesn't change whether something is copyrightable, and facts
Slashdot Mirror
IBM would be giving up the clout it might have to counterattack should Sun decide to launch a patent attack against GNU, Linux, or some other free software project that happens to outcompete their offerings.
I believe the IBM patent licensing is specifically voided for any entity that brings a patent suit against any project under an OSI license. So even if IBM's grant did apply to Sun's license and code, Sun wouldn't be protected from a patent counterattack if they sued a GPLed project.
Yeah, but he forgot to add "with a computer" to the end. Those magic words make it new and special!
Or possibly some of the ENORMOUS PILE OF MONEY HE STOLE.
(Yes, he just resold them, but $60*30,000 = $1.8 Million at least in his pocket.)
Hmm, the article seemed like a good overview with some useful suggestions.
But it completely left out the biggest, IMHO, problem with the patent system: triple damage for "knowingly infringing." This one policy (not sure if it's in the law, or a court precedent) simply has to go before any reform based on competitors will work.
As it is, every IP lawyer tells every engineer to go out of their way not to learn about competitors patents. And certainly don't write down that you know. And abso-friggin-lutely don't let the patent lawyer know that you know. Because if there's proof, boom! triple damages. Regardless of whether you also "knew" that there was prior art, that your company already had a patent that covered the same thing, that the patent was invalid, or that it was obvious to a skilled practitioner of the art.
Overturning this one aspect of the patent system would let tech companies actively monitor their competitors patents, get valuable technical details out of them, and challenge the patents *before* infringement suits are brought by the holders. It would curb the worst of the submarine patents because companies would *know* when someone patents a standard (esp one being developed) without being forced to turn a blind eye to avoid tripling their liability later.
Just to clarify, VxWorks runs on a hell of a lot of hardware, dozens of CPUs across all the major families, thousands of device drivers.
Now, any particular instance of the kernel gets compiled for a specific processor, and only includes the drivers it needs. Which does save on some space. But a lot of that extra space comes from things like a dynamic loader/loader, graphics packages, local shells (usually in multiple flavors,) and host of other applications that are "standard."
The thing that saves *that* space is the local WDB debugging agent. It lets you offload almost all of the bells and whistles to another machine, which does the object loading, provides your shell, does whatever debugging you need, then sends simple instructions ot he agent to carry them out, and generally dramatically increase the interface capabilities without increasing footprint.
It's actually pretty straightforward.
/., he's probably actually thrown some votes to Badnarik and Cobb as well, which can't hurt.
You're reading on Slashdot. Statistically, you're more likely to be young, liberal, non-religious. All areas where Kerry's leading. So if 100 people vote because of him, say 60/40, he's just gained 20 votes for Kerry. Here on
But, if he told you to get out there and vote for Kerry, you'd take it as political advocacy. Whereas just saying "get out and vote!" only to people who statistically agree with him is more likely to work.
It's the basic principle behind Rock the Vote!, minority voter empowerment drives, and bible thumping preachers.
At the national level, it's still winner-take-all, and the man with the most votes wins totally. Potential 3rd party voters will still be afraid of voting Nader and giving Bush the victory.
Well, from one perspective, it is winner-take-all, since there's only one presidency. But it's not the man with the most votes, it's the person with the majority of the votes, otherwise the house decides between the top 5.
A split decision (Say 265 Kerry, 265 Bush, 8 Nader) would allow Nader's electoral candidates to decide who would be the next president (assuming they hadn't signed some sort of contract guaranteeing which way they'd vote, which would be a bad tactial move for the Greens, were this a possibility.) In this case, they'd have to vote for Kerry to change things, as Bush should have control of the house. But they'd have made a difference, without wasting thier votes, and they'd get whatever side effects of voting for Nader they wanted (like getting him on the next ballot automatically.)
The electoral college is not, technically, the cause of the winner-take-all system. That's a decision by the individual state governments on how to allocate their electors. Maine and Nebraska split their electors by district, so they're not (as) winner take all.
/. Q&A) because of this last reason (reducing the sway of large urban populations.)
Were every state government to do a parliamentary-esque division of their electors to each party by % of popular vote, the electoral college system could remain in place, and you'd ahve viable third party candidates. In fact, they'd have the power to give their votes to one major party or the other if there was no clear majority. Which would put the selection of president even farther away from the popular vote, and even more contingent on the decisions of select party leadership, but eh, whatcha gonna do?
What the electoral college does do is allow for the possibility of a president who didn't win the popular vote, weigh the election in favor of the eastern seaboard's tiny states, and gaurantee that candidates have to campaign in every state, rather than focusing (as much) on the major population centers.
Badnarik, the libertarian candidate, supports the electoral college system (look up his recent
Two words: ARP poisoning
This lets you do the equivalent of key-stroke logging at the MAC layer, to which IPSEC is blind. You can set up a man-in-the-middle which intercepts all the IPSEC negotations, gets the keys/password, never gets noticed, and walks away whistling.
How about calling it the Lorld Lide Leb then, if it'll piss Microsoft off?
using wasabi to implement "Super Bass".
Are they ill-tempered?
Finally, mice produce monkey sperm."
I guess soon we'll have offloaded this entire boobies->sperm process to mice. Science!
I finished Elegant Universe a few weeks ago, after having put it down for most of a year because I couldn't stand to read another rehashing of QM, relativitiy, isn't this weird. After skipping those chapters, the second half was quite engrossing.
Is it worth reading this if you already read and enjoyed Elegant Universe, or is it just a watered down version without explaining the math?
I would hope a reviewer would give a little more insight into whether to read it or not.
Probably true in the real world, but the DARPA Challenge specified that these had to be land vehicles, ruling out flight as a primary method of transportation.
I did contemplate using a variable wing as the main body of a small entrant. Shift one way to act as a spoiler, shift the other way when you come to an obstacle for a short glideup and over. You still get all your drive from the ground.
When this came out a few days ago, it was my understanding that CA acquired a bunch of Unixware licenses as part of the earlier settlement. They needed these licenses to come into compliance, since they were using (or had sold) machines running Unixware.
Then, after the fact, SCO decided to give all existing Unixware licensees Linux rights as well. If CA didn't even know they were getting Linux (as opposed to Unixware) licenses, that's a crucial distinction.
They check the serial numbers, and if they've been destroyed, require you to have the same piece from every bill you are redeeming.
It'd be difficult to pass of 1/3 of two differnt bills taped together, regardless.
That would make it too easy to sell votes directly to the politicians.
'round here, we make them buy our votes from us indirectly by going through the media.
You should always trust the results from the more powerful female computer.
I was quoting from someone who responded to you, that first line was supposed to be italicized, but I had a brain fart.
I am in basic agreement with you that it is not parisitic on the part of binary module verndors.
Yes, it is "parasitic". And the kernel license should be updated to put a stop to this.
That just can't happen without a significant change to the driver interfaces. Those driver developers already have those rights under the existing license to derive from the current version of the kernel. As long as the drivers are binary compatible, they're alright regardless of what other derived works have whatever other licenses applied to them.
According the the articale (gasp) it seems Iowa agrees with you, as that's what they're doing. Four of five seats were reasonably competitive last election, so it seems to have worked out.
Hopefully the courts will end up mandating such commissions...and they can really maintain their independence. I think they'll probably stay mostly independent, but it'll take a few more court cases.
Each halving of line width is a quadrupling of density, so your limit is pushed out to 32 years.
As for going 3-D, even sticking to your strict definition of Moore's law, we'd still be fitting more transistors in the same chip area, so it'd count.
3 years is a lot of time for stuff to happen, I suspect we'll get at least one more "free" doubling just from a leap in transistor design.
More general, though, if some other technology comes along and we start using carbon transistors, or optical switches, or some more esoteric technology that allows us to do twice as may calculations in the same amount of time on a certain sized sliver of what-have-you, that's still going to be called Moore's law if it follows the pattern continuously, regardless of how hard you hold onto the stricter definition. If we shift to a new technology, and computing continues to double, no-one will be claiming that Moore's law is dead.
If, not when. It could be that silicon transistors are the best we're going to do, and Moore's law (in either the stricti or the lax form) only has another few decades in it. It certainly has to peter out sometime.
I think the point of the post you were responding to was that aid organization spend a lot (most, from what I understand) of their money on adminstration, fund raising, sending out cute little cards, etc.
Thus, you can make sure you get 100% of your money to people in need if you do it yourself, locally.
I see no lack of understanding of the situation in the post you responded to, they just don't think cutesy organizations like buy a share of a donated llama are effective. I tend to agree with them, and they certainly don't seem to have missed some subtlety in the post.
I'm convinced.
Selfish Koreans, they could have liberated an entire other country and freed them from an oppressive dictator and his sadistic cronies, giving future generations a chance to live in a decent world with some sense of empoerment. Instead they'll just be watching pr0n and spewing spam.
Hopefully FatWallet will stand up for themselves again, and Best Buy will be laughed out of court.
No, no, NO.
If Best Buy gets laughed out of court in the middle of December, they've already won. Fat Wallet took down their ads, had to hire a lawyer, free speech was stifled.
I am sad to see that FatWallet blinked this time, after staring down Walmart and getting them to back down. The argument that facts cannot be copyrighted seems solid, and the DMCA shouldn't change that (except for removign due proes, of course.) We need this case to go to court, and the countersuit to be pursued even after Best Buy drops it two weks after the fact.
Fuckers.
The only possible good outcome here is if Fat Wallet stood up, kept up the ads, and countersued.
The DMCA doesn't change whether something is copyrightable, and facts