Which means that only suckers/chumps would pick the pumpkins (or write the software, or create music), since their hard work would be immediately leeched away.
Here's a hint... if everyone could get infinite free pumpkins then anyone who picked pumpkins *would* be a chump.
Software's not quite the same. Software is a complex tool that lets people accomplish things - accomplishing things is worthwhile, so software will continue to be developed even if nobody buys it.
A more interesting example is expensive Hollywood movies - as home thearters get as good as cinemas they may stop being sustainable. That's sad, but it's not so sad that I'd be willing to give up basic freedoms to preserve the MPAA's business model.
the crime is mass-distributing stolen goods, and that's all there is to it.
So... what exactly are these "goods" and how were they "stolen"? Did it take a big truck to carry them around? How much is it going to cost the origional owners to replace them?
Oh wait... no theft occured at all. There were no "goods" and nobody lost anything tangible at all. Why is someone going to jail for this?
Yea, there's probably prior art for all of these. Not to mention the fact that they're blatantly obvious to someone with "average skill in the art".
This is really funny though for those of us who have been paying attention. We always knew that IBM had patents on stuff like "Performing calculations by means of an electronic device" and "Using matter as a structural element in a product". It's amusing to watch a company like Amazon get LARTed for thinking they could use patents against IBM.
The whole patent situation is really absurd, but it takes examples like this to really have something to point at while making this case. Patents are a very powerful weapon for a rich organization, and that's really their only purpose at this point.
Linux is fine for the average Joe, same as it's been for the last couple years. It's the power user who's attached to his Windows apps who will have trouble with Linux.
The fact of the matter is... Windows runs Windows programs better than Linux does. Wow! What a discovery. Another (more interesting) fact is that Linux applications are fine for pretty much any actual task that a user might want to accomplish with a computer.
Current games support two cores pretty well. Games currently being written are generally written to support either "up to 4 cores", "up to 8 cores", or "a whole shitload of cores".
Since core count is going up, multi-core systems is where it's at for future high performance applications.
No... it's not just you. In fact, this comment has appeared something like five times before you said it.
And, beyond that, the comment is idiotic because adding more cores continues to be useful for quite a while - it's not a useless marketting thing like the seventh razorblade.
The cheaper processors don't have the additional inter-socket hypertransport link that's needed for a dual socket setup. They *could* create low end Socket F processors for 4x4, but it's more effecitve for them to use their production capacity for higher margin stuff. Remember that these 4x4 FX processors are basically identical to their current-generation Opterons - a market that they can't really afford to either give cheaper processors or reduce production for.
AMD never claimed that they would be using socket 939 for 4x4, or that any Athlon X2 processor would work. In fact, if you thought about it a little bit you'd realize that that isn't even possible... socket 939 doesn't have enough hypertransport links.
From an upgradability perspective, Socket 939 is pretty solid. The fact that they needed a new socket for their riduculus enthusiast platform isn't something that you should really be upset about.
For a complex problem, it *can* be hard to actually define what the best possible solution is.
That doesn't mean that we can't point to things that are poorly built and say "we can do better than that", and the human body is poorly built in a number of ways.
You mention issues like and glucose efficiency - and most of the other problems you mention, there's no reason for those to be worse in a mechanical arm than a natural arm. Those are well defined performance properties, and they will be solved with enough engineering.
As for damage and the complexities of insulin, well - there's a reason why I explicitly mentioned those in my origional post - they're problems that would need to get dealt with. When it comes to insulin, I'd like to see computerized insulin control systems right now, reguarless of artifical hardware running on glucose.
The human body *is* complex, but the level of complexity that engineers are able to deal with is constantly increasing. I see no reason to believe that replicating - and improving upon - the fuction of a human limb is beyond our abilities. I'll probably live to see it.
No. For a given organism, evolution only cares about two outcomes: death and reproduction. Anything the organism does that doesn't result in its genes being preserved has nothing to do with evolution.
Consider that cyberleg. We can build it to run off glucose in order to avoid it running out of batteries. We can easily give it the performance characteristics of an athlete - we know the human body can take that. It will never get out of shape. Assuming it has sufficient glucose (which is easy to introduce to your body, especially if you deal with the insulin thing right), it will never get tired.
Now, that's no car-tossing cyberarm, but it's definately an improvement on the stock equipment. The downside is maintnence, but anyone who's paid too much attention to cyberpunk settings knows that - and that can be reduced with better engineering.
Oh, I think we can do better than that. Remember that "everything that's not good enough dies" combines with "anything that's better than it needs to be gets pwned by random mutations".
even the most avid proponents of evolution refer to it as "theory".
Yup. Like the theory of gravity.
There's no question that organisms evolve any more than there is question that masses attract eachother. There is some debate about the exact mechanism for these effects, but there's no question that they happen.
What, exactly, do you mean by "versitility" and "adaptability"? Give examples.
Outengineering a biological system isn't nessisarily easy, but I assure you that it's possible. High tech devices aren't always better, but they frequently are - which is why we build them.
Arrogance is a virtue. Without it, we would give up without even trying.
That's not to say that you're not right. We have a ton of stuff to learn from biological systems - we've barely begun to scratch the surface on all the useful stuff that evolution has come up with.
Prosthetics are getting better all the time, but they will never be as good as the limbs we were born with.
Why not? I see no good reason why competent engineering can't eventually beat a chunk of meat.
It's not like we were intelligently designed... we evolved. Evolution will tend to produce good solutions to problems, but it will hardly ever produce the best possible solution. Once we get nerve-circuit interfaces down, we should have no problem outengineering most of the human body.
Oh, money follows from fame readily enough. You don't get to live on licencing costs like a leach, but you definately get your choice of jobs in your field. Do you really think that Ron Rivest would have ended up begging on the street if they hadn't been able to get a patent on RSA?
People who aren't able to cope with the world around them can go live in group homes.
Those who think they're up to living in the real world can cope with spending 10 or 15 minutes of research per hundred dollars they're going to spend on a new product.
That's sketchy. I guess you're probably right - assuming that there is nothing in the header file other than minimal function prototypes. If it defines macros then you're probably a derivitive work.
Slashdot Mirror
Here's a hint... if everyone could get infinite free pumpkins then anyone who picked pumpkins *would* be a chump.
Software's not quite the same. Software is a complex tool that lets people accomplish things - accomplishing things is worthwhile, so software will continue to be developed even if nobody buys it.
A more interesting example is expensive Hollywood movies - as home thearters get as good as cinemas they may stop being sustainable. That's sad, but it's not so sad that I'd be willing to give up basic freedoms to preserve the MPAA's business model.
So... what exactly are these "goods" and how were they "stolen"? Did it take a big truck to carry them around? How much is it going to cost the origional owners to replace them?
Oh wait... no theft occured at all. There were no "goods" and nobody lost anything tangible at all. Why is someone going to jail for this?
Yea, there's probably prior art for all of these. Not to mention the fact that they're blatantly obvious to someone with "average skill in the art".
This is really funny though for those of us who have been paying attention. We always knew that IBM had patents on stuff like "Performing calculations by means of an electronic device" and "Using matter as a structural element in a product". It's amusing to watch a company like Amazon get LARTed for thinking they could use patents against IBM.
The whole patent situation is really absurd, but it takes examples like this to really have something to point at while making this case. Patents are a very powerful weapon for a rich organization, and that's really their only purpose at this point.
Linux is fine for the average Joe, same as it's been for the last couple years. It's the power user who's attached to his Windows apps who will have trouble with Linux.
The fact of the matter is... Windows runs Windows programs better than Linux does. Wow! What a discovery. Another (more interesting) fact is that Linux applications are fine for pretty much any actual task that a user might want to accomplish with a computer.
Current games support two cores pretty well. Games currently being written are generally written to support either "up to 4 cores", "up to 8 cores", or "a whole shitload of cores".
Since core count is going up, multi-core systems is where it's at for future high performance applications.
No... it's not just you. In fact, this comment has appeared something like five times before you said it.
And, beyond that, the comment is idiotic because adding more cores continues to be useful for quite a while - it's not a useless marketting thing like the seventh razorblade.
I'm pretty sure they're referring to four cores and *four graphics cards*. The "x" isn't multiplication, it's more like a funny looking comma.
The cheaper processors don't have the additional inter-socket hypertransport link that's needed for a dual socket setup. They *could* create low end Socket F processors for 4x4, but it's more effecitve for them to use their production capacity for higher margin stuff. Remember that these 4x4 FX processors are basically identical to their current-generation Opterons - a market that they can't really afford to either give cheaper processors or reduce production for.
AMD never claimed that they would be using socket 939 for 4x4, or that any Athlon X2 processor would work. In fact, if you thought about it a little bit you'd realize that that isn't even possible... socket 939 doesn't have enough hypertransport links.
From an upgradability perspective, Socket 939 is pretty solid. The fact that they needed a new socket for their riduculus enthusiast platform isn't something that you should really be upset about.
For a complex problem, it *can* be hard to actually define what the best possible solution is.
That doesn't mean that we can't point to things that are poorly built and say "we can do better than that", and the human body is poorly built in a number of ways.
You mention issues like and glucose efficiency - and most of the other problems you mention, there's no reason for those to be worse in a mechanical arm than a natural arm. Those are well defined performance properties, and they will be solved with enough engineering.
As for damage and the complexities of insulin, well - there's a reason why I explicitly mentioned those in my origional post - they're problems that would need to get dealt with. When it comes to insulin, I'd like to see computerized insulin control systems right now, reguarless of artifical hardware running on glucose.
The human body *is* complex, but the level of complexity that engineers are able to deal with is constantly increasing. I see no reason to believe that replicating - and improving upon - the fuction of a human limb is beyond our abilities. I'll probably live to see it.
That's the neat thing about evolving sentience... yes.
No. For a given organism, evolution only cares about two outcomes: death and reproduction. Anything the organism does that doesn't result in its genes being preserved has nothing to do with evolution.
Consider that cyberleg. We can build it to run off glucose in order to avoid it running out of batteries. We can easily give it the performance characteristics of an athlete - we know the human body can take that. It will never get out of shape. Assuming it has sufficient glucose (which is easy to introduce to your body, especially if you deal with the insulin thing right), it will never get tired.
Now, that's no car-tossing cyberarm, but it's definately an improvement on the stock equipment. The downside is maintnence, but anyone who's paid too much attention to cyberpunk settings knows that - and that can be reduced with better engineering.
Oh, I think we can do better than that. Remember that "everything that's not good enough dies" combines with "anything that's better than it needs to be gets pwned by random mutations".
You are absolutely correct.
It just annoys me when people assume that technology isn't going to improve, or that the human body is the pinnacle of perfection.
Yup. Like the theory of gravity.
There's no question that organisms evolve any more than there is question that masses attract eachother. There is some debate about the exact mechanism for these effects, but there's no question that they happen.
What, exactly, do you mean by "versitility" and "adaptability"? Give examples.
Outengineering a biological system isn't nessisarily easy, but I assure you that it's possible. High tech devices aren't always better, but they frequently are - which is why we build them.
That's not to say that you're not right. We have a ton of stuff to learn from biological systems - we've barely begun to scratch the surface on all the useful stuff that evolution has come up with.
Why not? I see no good reason why competent engineering can't eventually beat a chunk of meat.
It's not like we were intelligently designed... we evolved. Evolution will tend to produce good solutions to problems, but it will hardly ever produce the best possible solution. Once we get nerve-circuit interfaces down, we should have no problem outengineering most of the human body.
So... are your IP rights gone because you're a slashdotter, and most slashdotters aren't concerned about IP rights?
Oh, money follows from fame readily enough. You don't get to live on licencing costs like a leach, but you definately get your choice of jobs in your field. Do you really think that Ron Rivest would have ended up begging on the street if they hadn't been able to get a patent on RSA?
People who aren't able to cope with the world around them can go live in group homes.
Those who think they're up to living in the real world can cope with spending 10 or 15 minutes of research per hundred dollars they're going to spend on a new product.
With enough bullets at high enough velocity, the concussive force will do the job.
That's sketchy. I guess you're probably right - assuming that there is nothing in the header file other than minimal function prototypes. If it defines macros then you're probably a derivitive work.