I own a software company that does a huge amount of R&D
Sounds like you have a potential win either way: Keep researching. If software patents are rejected in Europe, don't change anything. If software patents are accepted in Europe, start patenting left right and centre, making sure that you build a large enough portfolio so as to be a noticable impediment to the big boys. Then get bought up my MS, IBM, Oracle, or whoever. It you time things right, you might just be the virgin princess bride in a bidding war.
So your dignity's overboard, you employees' jobs are in India - but dude, you yourself will be on the Bahamas.
Bezos, know - nay, renound - for founding and making a success of Amazon, one of the few successes of the dot com era, and described as "the largest bookstore in the world".
A success, that is, in selling dead trees in what was supposed to be the age of the birth of the "paperless office". And that over the 'net.
Now I'm all for books. I love books. But Amazon being a success is like Edison being a success selling better gas lamps.
And now this dude, of all people, wants to lead us into [the terrible secret of] space. So - the method of doing so, or the vehicle, is going to be top-notch (snide comments on "one-click-launches" aside). But let me guess... it's going to *look* like a steam engine... a nuclear-fusion-powered steam engine.
I don't see what the big deal is. The sticker itself could have been written by a steadfast athiest scientist.
Of course, to be fair you'd have to add the same sticker to all science books, perhaps with an additional clause as to the difference between the definitions of a law of nature and human laws. And for math and geometry... "Euclidian geometry is only one of many possible geometries, and should be approached with an open and critical mind..."
The sticker for the bible (or koran, ar whatever), now that would be more than a couple of paragraphs. ("Now this is what our father's father's father's great grand father observed, as reported throughout the chain of generations. It's up to you to judge whther there just might have been someone along the line who had some ulterior motive or agenda...")
Internet Service Providers (ISPs) should be required to reveal the names of customers who may be distributing illegal wares on peer-to-peer networks.
There goes 'presumption of innocence.'
Again.
A) The presumption of innocence only holds in criminal cases. This is civil: they only want to sue you, not arrest you. Well, OK, they do want to arrest you, but they're not going as far as to actually say that.
B) The word "may" is used. But let's face it: they know exactly who is trading what, and whether it's illegal or not. Half the files on P2P are dummies they put there themselves. Using the word "may" is just to make it pallatable to lawmakers, newsmakers, and John Q. Public.
That being said, I don't think the proposed legislation is any good, either. But I'd prefer to slam it for the right reasons.
Working for a facility management company, contracted to a large client in Switzerland, three months prior to the Y2k bitflip. Checked dozens of devices, big and small: embedded controllers for climate control, UPS's, fire alarms, you name it. Found one item: a Compaq PC used for the lighting system had a non-Y2k-compliant BIOS. The result of doing nothing would have been that the weekend lighting profiles for all (several hundred) offices, meeting rooms, and so on would have been active during the week (you know - wrong offset when attempting to calculate whether "today" is a weekend).
Replaced computer, had no problems.
Moral of the story: this was a lighting system. Big deal. The client invested several tens of thousands in the project to check three large office buildings in my location, and avoided a minor pain in return. However: everything was checked, and it might have been anything. If it had been the UPS's or the fire alarms for instance, the result of not doing anything could have been a major pain. Point is - we found something, so it wasn't just a waste of time.
(/. is the right place for anecdotal evidence, right?)
[...]if you pick up a gun and shoot someone in real life, you are 100% to blame, it doesn't matter if you have been playing fps games for 10 months straight, it just plain doesn't matter[...]
Rumour has it that the army uses FPS's to train soldiers not to think too much before pulling the trigger. The idea is that it just becomes reflex, and the games are sufficiently similar to reality that the relex cuts in even in meatspace. Sounds sensible to me, but I'm too lazy to google for it.
Point being that if you've watched 10'000 dudes' blood splatter in VR, there will be a lag between seeing the same thing in RL, and the realization that this time, it's permanent.
However, I do agree with you that individual responsibility is supreme, and if some guy is too dumb to realize that yes, FPS's have more of an effect on him than he would like to believe - lock up, chuck key, and neuter for good measure.
In "Island" Aldous Huxley suggests that these imballanced people be emloyed in some area where they have a physical outlet, such as being a lumberjack.
Monty Python goes one step further, of course, and suggests that what these imballanced people *really* want to do is to wear "suspenders and a bra", and to be "just like mama".
... is there a "Monty Python's Lumberjack Song" mod for CS?
Oh, and ask the people of Switzerland and Swedan if they are happy with their political systems. I'd bet they'd have some gripes too...
Living in Switzerland this is a frequent item of debate. People in Switzerland (I'm not Swiss myself) often display a certain arrogance, expressing a feeling that their system is better than for example the American one: direct democracy, a truly multi-party political landscape, particularly civilised political discourse, and so on. One thing that often gets forgotten however is that there are all of six or seven million Swiss citizens. Imagine just New York or Los Angeles with its own army and a department of foreign affairs added on. Hell yeah you could run it efficiently. Try to extropolate it to one third of a billion people though, and it all falls apart. This just to say that I don't think political systems can be grafted onto a given society and be expected to work. They can't even be compared very well. Swiss-style democracy couldn't hande the 100 or 1000 times the amount of money in circulation in the US, or the direct international influence, and many American-style politicians wouldn't last long in Switzerland because a too large a part of society would know them either personally, or through friends or friends of friends. Here, someone being a coke-head or not is not a matter of debate over a period of five or six years, it's a matter of fact that is found out and laid down within a couple of days.
... than a scam. Imagine some design student figuring out what would be nice (and having read Idoru), setting up a site with the "device the world has been waiting for".
... either that, or it's satire. *Weeks* on a single battery? Yeah, right.
Question: where did this link come from then? Could be the finals project of some design-cum-marketing dude.
Thanks for the numbers. I thought the geothermal bit was a joke, but after re-reading it, I'm not so sure. Without the numbers, I'd put it this way: humans as a whole have a discernable impact on the environment. That is: the biosphere. Outside of that, the impact is not detectable (let alone non-catastrophic). Some things are measurable: number of species going extinct, depletion of the ozone layer, fewer catchable fish in the sea, and so on. All in the biosphere. But still, if humankind abandons a city, it takes no more that the blink of the eye, in geological terms, and what used to be a city is once more indistinguishable from the surrounding countryside. Which leads me to the question: why save energy? Reduce pollution, fine, minimise the environmental impact, OK. But using less energy just out of principle makes no sense to me. As far as I'm concerned, if it's clean, if there's no impact on the environment: bring it on.
Ah, you're suspicious, but not suspicious enough: when the passport-checking dude asks you how long you were in the US the last time you were here, he's checking whether what you say tallies with what is stamped in your passport, and maybe with what he sees on his screen-thing in front of him. You know, stolen passports, identity-switching twin sibling terrorist nutjobs, and so on.
Or more in general: whenever you observe anyone doing something stupid, ask yourself if it might not be you who's the butt of the joke.
[...] CEO Scott McNealy [...] quote [...] "This agreement will be of significant benefit to [...] customers who want to combine server products from multiple vendors and achieve seamless computing in a heterogeneous computing environment. We look forward [... yadda yadda]"
Or take the Uplift series by David Brin (which I don't like, but hey - there are some interesting things in there), or the word "mu" which many/.-ers are acquainted with: trinary logic. Brin has his uplifted Dolphins talk & think in a trinary logic system, and the word "mu" (as I understand it) is the answer to an unanswerable question, like "n/a".
The binary system may historically have been adopted in computing for its comparitively simple implementation, but the way it corresponds to everyday speech & thought is a bit uncanny: something is either true/false or black/white and so on. Which influenced which?
Take the question "have you stopped beating your wife yet?", or the statement (neo-Godwin alert) "you are either with us, or you are with the terrorists": they are gramatically properly formulated, and appear superficially legitimate - in English. But in Brin's speculated trinary system of thought and communication, the statements would probably seem just silly.
Finally, and as has already been stated in the discussion to this article: of course, all programming languages end up in binary machine code - but on the higher levels of abstraction, other things can be going on. Take OO: the silicon knows nothing of objects, but compared to procedural programming, it's a fundamentally different way of formulating, thinking about, and solving problems. Imagine (hey, it must already exist somewhere), a language which requires not just "if.. then.. else.. endif", but "if.. then.. not.. mu.. endif"
It's hosted at the ETH - the federal institute of technology in Switzerland. Say if you saw something hosted at "mit.edu", you wouldn't worry about it either, right?:)
Reading this article, and the many that came before on the subject of "silly patents", the following occurs to me:
- There is hardly a workday that passes where I am not called upon to come up with several solutions to problems that, by the standards given by this patent, are eminently patentable. - The solutions I come up with that make me happy, about once a fortnight - meaning that I drink my next cup of coffee with a smile - are pure fucking genius, and by rights ought to make me richer than Bill. - The solutions I come up with, about once every couple of months, where I actually wave my co-workers over and go "lookit this!", and am disappointed if they don't go "neeet!... so how's it done?", lift me into god-like status, blinding all those in a three-mile radius around me with my sheer brilliance.
The fact that the people in my immediate environment are not blind tells me either A) that, in fact, most people working in IT have gained this god-like status and are immune to the blinding light, or B) that the people who came up with those patents that do hit the/. frontpage belong to some arcane subgroup of humanity the members of which should strike through one, if not both of the "sapiens" following the implied description of their species.
/end rant
Well, at least guys like this make SCO feel less alone in the world.
It's nice to see a discussion board put to use in the intended fashion: to smack down people who you think are wrong without offering up any more enlightened opinion of your own. Thus the cycle of information exchange is kept alive.
Slashdot Mirror
- I own a software company that does a huge amount of R&D
Sounds like you have a potential win either way: Keep researching. If software patents are rejected in Europe, don't change anything. If software patents are accepted in Europe, start patenting left right and centre, making sure that you build a large enough portfolio so as to be a noticable impediment to the big boys. Then get bought up my MS, IBM, Oracle, or whoever. It you time things right, you might just be the virgin princess bride in a bidding war.So your dignity's overboard, you employees' jobs are in India - but dude, you yourself will be on the Bahamas.
Bezos, know - nay, renound - for founding and making a success of Amazon, one of the few successes of the dot com era, and described as "the largest bookstore in the world".
... it's going to *look* like a steam engine ... a nuclear-fusion-powered steam engine.
A success, that is, in selling dead trees in what was supposed to be the age of the birth of the "paperless office". And that over the 'net.
Now I'm all for books. I love books. But Amazon being a success is like Edison being a success selling better gas lamps.
And now this dude, of all people, wants to lead us into [the terrible secret of] space. So - the method of doing so, or the vehicle, is going to be top-notch (snide comments on "one-click-launches" aside). But let me guess
I don't see what the big deal is. The sticker itself could have been written by a steadfast athiest scientist.
... "Euclidian geometry is only one of many possible geometries, and should be approached with an open and critical mind ..."
...")
Of course, to be fair you'd have to add the same sticker to all science books, perhaps with an additional clause as to the difference between the definitions of a law of nature and human laws. And for math and geometry
The sticker for the bible (or koran, ar whatever), now that would be more than a couple of paragraphs. ("Now this is what our father's father's father's great grand father observed, as reported throughout the chain of generations. It's up to you to judge whther there just might have been someone along the line who had some ulterior motive or agenda
There goes 'presumption of innocence.'
Again.
A) The presumption of innocence only holds in criminal cases. This is civil: they only want to sue you, not arrest you.
Well, OK, they do want to arrest you, but they're not going as far as to actually say that.
B) The word "may" is used. But let's face it: they know exactly who is trading what, and whether it's illegal or not. Half the files on P2P are dummies they put there themselves. Using the word "may" is just to make it pallatable to lawmakers, newsmakers, and John Q. Public.
That being said, I don't think the proposed legislation is any good, either. But I'd prefer to slam it for the right reasons.
Working for a facility management company, contracted to a large client in Switzerland, three months prior to the Y2k bitflip. Checked dozens of devices, big and small: embedded controllers for climate control, UPS's, fire alarms, you name it. Found one item: a Compaq PC used for the lighting system had a non-Y2k-compliant BIOS. The result of doing nothing would have been that the weekend lighting profiles for all (several hundred) offices, meeting rooms, and so on would have been active during the week (you know - wrong offset when attempting to calculate whether "today" is a weekend).
/. is the right place for anecdotal evidence, right?)
Replaced computer, had no problems.
Moral of the story: this was a lighting system. Big deal. The client invested several tens of thousands in the project to check three large office buildings in my location, and avoided a minor pain in return. However: everything was checked, and it might have been anything. If it had been the UPS's or the fire alarms for instance, the result of not doing anything could have been a major pain. Point is - we found something, so it wasn't just a waste of time.
(
[...]if you pick up a gun and shoot someone in real life, you are 100% to blame, it doesn't matter if you have been playing fps games for 10 months straight, it just plain doesn't matter[...]
Rumour has it that the army uses FPS's to train soldiers not to think too much before pulling the trigger. The idea is that it just becomes reflex, and the games are sufficiently similar to reality that the relex cuts in even in meatspace.
Sounds sensible to me, but I'm too lazy to google for it.
Point being that if you've watched 10'000 dudes' blood splatter in VR, there will be a lag between seeing the same thing in RL, and the realization that this time, it's permanent.
However, I do agree with you that individual responsibility is supreme, and if some guy is too dumb to realize that yes, FPS's have more of an effect on him than he would like to believe - lock up, chuck key, and neuter for good measure.
In "Island" Aldous Huxley suggests that these imballanced people be emloyed in some area where they have a physical outlet, such as being a lumberjack.
Monty Python goes one step further, of course, and suggests that what these imballanced people *really* want to do is to wear "suspenders and a bra", and to be "just like mama".
... is there a "Monty Python's Lumberjack Song" mod for CS?
"The audio clip is available via my blog."
That's a self-negating statement if I've seen heard one.
Oh, and ask the people of Switzerland and Swedan if they are happy with their political systems. I'd bet they'd have some gripes too...
Living in Switzerland this is a frequent item of debate. People in Switzerland (I'm not Swiss myself) often display a certain arrogance, expressing a feeling that their system is better than for example the American one: direct democracy, a truly multi-party political landscape, particularly civilised political discourse, and so on. One thing that often gets forgotten however is that there are all of six or seven million Swiss citizens. Imagine just New York or Los Angeles with its own army and a department of foreign affairs added on. Hell yeah you could run it efficiently. Try to extropolate it to one third of a billion people though, and it all falls apart.
This just to say that I don't think political systems can be grafted onto a given society and be expected to work. They can't even be compared very well. Swiss-style democracy couldn't hande the 100 or 1000 times the amount of money in circulation in the US, or the direct international influence, and many American-style politicians wouldn't last long in Switzerland because a too large a part of society would know them either personally, or through friends or friends of friends. Here, someone being a coke-head or not is not a matter of debate over a period of five or six years, it's a matter of fact that is found out and laid down within a couple of days.
... than a scam. Imagine some design student figuring out what would be nice (and having read Idoru), setting up a site with the "device the world has been waiting for".
... either that, or it's satire. *Weeks* on a single battery? Yeah, right.
Question: where did this link come from then? Could be the finals project of some design-cum-marketing dude.
Well
[tinny voice] - Warning! You are about to experience a rollover!
[tinny voice] - Told you so.
/yeah, I can see how that would be useful
Thanks for the numbers. I thought the geothermal bit was a joke, but after re-reading it, I'm not so sure. Without the numbers, I'd put it this way: humans as a whole have a discernable impact on the environment. That is: the biosphere. Outside of that, the impact is not detectable (let alone non-catastrophic). Some things are measurable: number of species going extinct, depletion of the ozone layer, fewer catchable fish in the sea, and so on. All in the biosphere. But still, if humankind abandons a city, it takes no more that the blink of the eye, in geological terms, and what used to be a city is once more indistinguishable from the surrounding countryside.
Which leads me to the question: why save energy? Reduce pollution, fine, minimise the environmental impact, OK. But using less energy just out of principle makes no sense to me. As far as I'm concerned, if it's clean, if there's no impact on the environment: bring it on.
Darn - foiled again.
And it would have worked, too, if it weren't for those pesky anonymous cowards.
/lesson learned: respect the Google
... those damn Polish astonauts knocking on the door again, giggling with glee.
/so how come a land-locked country came to have submarines anyway?
Ah, you're suspicious, but not suspicious enough: when the passport-checking dude asks you how long you were in the US the last time you were here, he's checking whether what you say tallies with what is stamped in your passport, and maybe with what he sees on his screen-thing in front of him. You know, stolen passports, identity-switching twin sibling terrorist nutjobs, and so on.
Or more in general: whenever you observe anyone doing something stupid, ask yourself if it might not be you who's the butt of the joke.
- [...] CEO Scott McNealy [...] quote [...]
In other words: he's been had."This agreement will be of significant benefit to [...] customers who want to combine server products from multiple vendors and achieve seamless computing in a heterogeneous computing environment. We look forward [... yadda yadda]"
Now if it were holograms, I'd be impressed.
:-)
/ I mean, what we got freakin' LASERs in these things for anyway?
- (Chinese
... English)
Or take the Uplift series by David Brin (which I don't like, but hey - there are some interesting things in there), or the word "mu" which manyThe binary system may historically have been adopted in computing for its comparitively simple implementation, but the way it corresponds to everyday speech & thought is a bit uncanny: something is either true/false or black/white and so on. Which influenced which?
Take the question "have you stopped beating your wife yet?", or the statement (neo-Godwin alert) "you are either with us, or you are with the terrorists": they are gramatically properly formulated, and appear superficially legitimate - in English. But in Brin's speculated trinary system of thought and communication, the statements would probably seem just silly.
Finally, and as has already been stated in the discussion to this article: of course, all programming languages end up in binary machine code - but on the higher levels of abstraction, other things can be going on. Take OO: the silicon knows nothing of objects, but compared to procedural programming, it's a fundamentally different way of formulating, thinking about, and solving problems. Imagine (hey, it must already exist somewhere), a language which requires not just "if
/or something
It's hosted at the ETH - the federal institute of technology in Switzerland. Say if you saw something hosted at "mit.edu", you wouldn't worry about it either, right? :)
Reading this article, and the many that came before on the subject of "silly patents", the following occurs to me:
... so how's it done?", lift me into god-like status, blinding all those in a three-mile radius around me with my sheer brilliance.
/. frontpage belong to some arcane subgroup of humanity the members of which should strike through one, if not both of the "sapiens" following the implied description of their species.
- There is hardly a workday that passes where I am not called upon to come up with several solutions to problems that, by the standards given by this patent, are eminently patentable.
- The solutions I come up with that make me happy, about once a fortnight - meaning that I drink my next cup of coffee with a smile - are pure fucking genius, and by rights ought to make me richer than Bill.
- The solutions I come up with, about once every couple of months, where I actually wave my co-workers over and go "lookit this!", and am disappointed if they don't go "neeet!
The fact that the people in my immediate environment are not blind tells me either A) that, in fact, most people working in IT have gained this god-like status and are immune to the blinding light, or B) that the people who came up with those patents that do hit the
/end rant
Well, at least guys like this make SCO feel less alone in the world.
... making lots of money, more like.
/obref spotter gets a cookie.
I dunno ... I think it'd be funny to see a subpoena for one "Mr. Coward, Anonymous"
/. log IPs?
...or does
I was not aware of that. Do you know how widly the stock is spread?
It's nice to see a discussion board put to use in the intended fashion: to smack down people who you think are wrong without offering up any more enlightened opinion of your own. Thus the cycle of information exchange is kept alive.
Remember, kids: it's a zero-sum game.