As highlighted by the WSJ, the case draws attention to an expectation gap between real books and their digital counterparts: the latter is simply a license to read the content on your device.
Or so DRM advocates would have you believe. Copyright law just doesn't read that way. A copy of the book existed on the users' device before Amazon removed it. Amazon destroyed those copies. It's more practical for them to do this than for them to burn customer copies of real books they sold, but it's no different in terms of copyrigh tlaw.
Not only that, but the Palmerian style was the one you lefties like me hated, either because they forced you to use your right hand or just because you could never get the slant right and still form all the letters while staying on the baseline.
I'm a righty and my letters always ended up straight up and down, no slant. (And largely illegible, and me with a visible cramp in my hand.)
Oh yeah forget about writing a signature on checks and employment agreements and employment forms. You can just have someone witness your "X" in place of a cursive signature.
There's no law against a print signature. Or an illegible scrawl, which is what most people have after a while.
(Actually, I can: 1. If an AI develops emotions, they were probably programmed in, not just magically "there". 2. It's unlikely that the programmer loses control over an AI, or doesn't understand how it works. Even if it is grown by some overly complex evolutionary algorithm, you still know what it can and cannot do - unless it runs windows or something....).
Yeah, "unless it runs windows or something". You refute your own argument. It's easy to write software which behaves in ways its own programmers don't understand. And the idea of emotions -- or AI itself -- coming about as emergent phenomena is not as ridiculous as you'd like to think. Particularly if you're trying to develop an AI by simulating a brain; if your simulation is good enough on the low level, you should get all the high level effects without explicitly programming them in.
Mostly it's just uninformed garbage dreamed up by people with a very shallow grasp of science who think their story needs a "realistic" doom scenario and some kind of moral message.
There's plenty of that sort of hack out there, but Arthur C. Clarke ("Dial F For Frankenstein") was never one of them.
anything that is super intelligent is likely not to act as dumb as unethical as a human, with great power comes great responsibility.
"With great power comes great responsibility" is prescriptive, not descriptive. The descriptive version at least applied to human beings is "Power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely". Anything super intelligent won't act as dumb as a human (by definition), but there's no reason to suppose it will even have a concept of ethics. Even if it does, it may consider human beings beneath notice, as worthy of consideration as bacteria are to us.
Microsoft-hating is a disease that you catch from doing business with Microsoft.
Modded funny, but insightful is more like it. If someone were to force Torvalds to do all his coding on a Windows box using Visual Studio and Visual Sourcesafe, he'd pick up at least a minor case of Microsoft-hate.
First, "software" under copyright is now the "shiny disc" not the source code. It's been that way since at least the late 70's. That means that "example video game" is published in a proprietary medium but the source code and media is retained in a vault as "trade secret". So while FOSS is playing by the rules and losing their rights in 5 years "game company" is not losing their work because it's not "published".
The source code is an "unpublished work", not necessarily a trade secret.
Next, at the enterprise level much code (or things like ERP or HR systems) is "leased" to corporate IT departments, not sold. In some of the code I've seen the programs are under private copyright, and have contractual terms that the code given to the company is "unreleased trade secrets" therefore it won't ever fall under regular copyright rules because it's not "published" publicly, it's kept as a "work in progress". I can see that extended to EULAs quite easily, especially for things like downloadable content... you're just "borrowing".
Abuse of trade secret laws is a separate issue; offering something to the public and yet claiming the same something is a legally protected "trade secret" makes no sense and shouldn't be legally possible. If you want to have trade secret protection, you should actually have to make an attempt to keep it a secret -- offering it for $50, $500, or even $50,000 to all comers isn't doing so.
Lastly, "Public Domain" isn't something that legally exists.
As Nietzsche put it (I think), before you can change the world, you must first change yourself. As long as you're on the outside looking in, you cannot effectively cause change.
Ah, but there's the paradox. Once you're on the inside, you have the perspective of the insider and don't WANT to cause change.
<looks into abyss. When it looks back, hocks a loogie into it>
Exactly. One of the worst traps you can fall into in professional life is to believe ideas have worth. Sorry, but they are almost worthless. Even a good implementation is borderline worthless without the proper business processes including marketing and advertising.
The problem being that the business guys will take the lion's share, if not all, of the credit AND the money. The solution, if you can't do it all yourself? There is none. Best to just keep your ideas and projects to yourself and deny it to those guys who do the last 10% of the work yet take 95+% of the credit.
The poster to whom you replied probably is referring to a capacitor, although a better quality post-rectification filter could well have an inductor in series in the hot line with an electrolytic capacitor connected between ground and each of the inductor's terminals
I have a nice one with diode bridge, inductor, capacitors, and an NTC resistor to reduce inrush current. But a lot of wall warts nowadays are actually switchers.
Velcro/hook & loop is very nice because it is reusable, and it won't slice up your arms like cut-off zip ties can (some telcos actually explicitly ban zip-ties for this exact reason - many techs have to use wax string).
Presumably either they've never heard of a cable-tie gun (which puts a consistent tension on the cable ties and cuts it off so the sharp surface isn't exposed) or they couldn't get the techs to use them.
If I'm reading the article right, this doesn't save any energy at all (and might increase total energy consumption). It's a way of spreading out power use over time, so you can get more servers without increasing peak power capacity. It makes sense for some loads (why run at 2Ghz for 2 minutes of every 30 when you can save power by running at 500Mhz for 8 minutes). But for interactive loads it won't be good.
Power: Get a big power strip (like for a lab bench, with lots of space between outlets -- NewEgg sells some), and attach it to your desk. This lets you keep the cables under the desk and (with wire ties and possibly duct tape) off the floor.
Ethernet: Same thing; mount your hubs/routers so a wire always has a straight shot without having to go around or through anything, then wrap up excess cable. You'll just have one cable to your wall plate for power and one for networking.
Cables for portable devices are not as easy to solve but cleaning up power and ethernet makes a big difference.
Yeah, it looks like it covers gestures. Probably anticipated by the prior art, including Graffiti and Unistrokes. At least it's not as obviously bogus as the abstract makes it appear.
Where have you seen a LiPo with a charge rate of 10C? There's plenty with 10C to 30C discharge rate, but charge rate is still usually 1C, though I've seen some claim up to 5C.
What I want to know is...how can they create a battery strong enough to power a car for that distance/speed that be charged in 10 minutes but the battery in my cell phone and Blackberry still take no less than 45m.
The batteries in your cell phone and Blackberry are lithium polymer, based on lithium cobalt chemistry. These have the highest energy density of common commercially available batteries, but their safe charging rate is limited to somewhere around 1C -- that is, 1 amp per amp-hour of capacity.
The MIT batteries are lithium iron phosphate. These unfortunately have much lower energy density than lithium cobalt polymer cells (not in the least because there's no polymer version available; the cell are in a metal casing). But they have a high power density and they can take charge rates around 4-5C (for the regular cells; they don't have the specs on the automotive cells on their website). That translates to much shorter charge times.
What a load of crap, back in 2006 NBC dateline had a bunch of muslims go to a Nascar race and see if they were harassed, guess what they were NOT bothered at all.
Of course not, they fit right in. Pretty much everyone at a Nascar race likes to blow stuff up.
In an ideal world you combine the two cycles and get Homogeneous charge compression ignition where everything in the cylinder goes BOOM with 0 fuel left over at exactly the same time.
"BOOM" is right. That's (by definition) detonation, and the force you get as a result is quite an engineering challenge to harness.
The "Made in China" label on my 622s says otherwise.
Your local farmer's market would be happy to sell you all the fixins' of a Big Mac, and you can get a good idea about how sustainable their operation is by actually talking to the people who farm it.
I've never heard anything about farm life -- either from people who used to do it or less directly -- which suggests it's any better than sweatshop labor.
Slashdot Mirror
Or so DRM advocates would have you believe. Copyright law just doesn't read that way. A copy of the book existed on the users' device before Amazon removed it. Amazon destroyed those copies. It's more practical for them to do this than for them to burn customer copies of real books they sold, but it's no different in terms of copyrigh tlaw.
I'm a righty and my letters always ended up straight up and down, no slant. (And largely illegible, and me with a visible cramp in my hand.)
There's no law against a print signature. Or an illegible scrawl, which is what most people have after a while.
Yeah, "unless it runs windows or something". You refute your own argument. It's easy to write software which behaves in ways its own programmers don't understand. And the idea of emotions -- or AI itself -- coming about as emergent phenomena is not as ridiculous as you'd like to think. Particularly if you're trying to develop an AI by simulating a brain; if your simulation is good enough on the low level, you should get all the high level effects without explicitly programming them in.
There's plenty of that sort of hack out there, but Arthur C. Clarke ("Dial F For Frankenstein") was never one of them.
"With great power comes great responsibility" is prescriptive, not descriptive. The descriptive version at least applied to human beings is "Power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely". Anything super intelligent won't act as dumb as a human (by definition), but there's no reason to suppose it will even have a concept of ethics. Even if it does, it may consider human beings beneath notice, as worthy of consideration as bacteria are to us.
I'll take the Dalek. Paula Abdul is moderately more annoying, AND she can navigate stairs, eliminating my main escape route.
Modded funny, but insightful is more like it. If someone were to force Torvalds to do all his coding on a Windows box using Visual Studio and Visual Sourcesafe, he'd pick up at least a minor case of Microsoft-hate.
The source code is an "unpublished work", not necessarily a trade secret.
Abuse of trade secret laws is a separate issue; offering something to the public and yet claiming the same something is a legally protected "trade secret" makes no sense and shouldn't be legally possible. If you want to have trade secret protection, you should actually have to make an attempt to keep it a secret -- offering it for $50, $500, or even $50,000 to all comers isn't doing so.
Here in the United States, it sure does.
Ah, but there's the paradox. Once you're on the inside, you have the perspective of the insider and don't WANT to cause change.
<looks into abyss. When it looks back, hocks a loogie into it>
The problem being that the business guys will take the lion's share, if not all, of the credit AND the money. The solution, if you can't do it all yourself? There is none. Best to just keep your ideas and projects to yourself and deny it to those guys who do the last 10% of the work yet take 95+% of the credit.
(what, cynical, me?)
-1, Did Not Do The Research
Federal judges are appointed for life, not elected.
You have it backwards. Microsoft settled for taking over the world because they couldn't be Apple.
I have a nice one with diode bridge, inductor, capacitors, and an NTC resistor to reduce inrush current. But a lot of wall warts nowadays are actually switchers.
Presumably either they've never heard of a cable-tie gun (which puts a consistent tension on the cable ties and cuts it off so the sharp surface isn't exposed) or they couldn't get the techs to use them.
If I'm reading the article right, this doesn't save any energy at all (and might increase total energy consumption). It's a way of spreading out power use over time, so you can get more servers without increasing peak power capacity. It makes sense for some loads (why run at 2Ghz for 2 minutes of every 30 when you can save power by running at 500Mhz for 8 minutes). But for interactive loads it won't be good.
Power: Get a big power strip (like for a lab bench, with lots of space between outlets -- NewEgg sells some), and attach it to your desk. This lets you keep the cables under the desk and (with wire ties and possibly duct tape) off the floor.
Ethernet: Same thing; mount your hubs/routers so a wire always has a straight shot without having to go around or through anything, then wrap up excess cable. You'll just have one cable to your wall plate for power and one for networking.
Cables for portable devices are not as easy to solve but cleaning up power and ethernet makes a big difference.
Yeah, it looks like it covers gestures. Probably anticipated by the prior art, including Graffiti and Unistrokes. At least it's not as obviously bogus as the abstract makes it appear.
Where have you seen a LiPo with a charge rate of 10C? There's plenty with 10C to 30C discharge rate, but charge rate is still usually 1C, though I've seen some claim up to 5C.
The batteries in your cell phone and Blackberry are lithium polymer, based on lithium cobalt chemistry. These have the highest energy density of common commercially available batteries, but their safe charging rate is limited to somewhere around 1C -- that is, 1 amp per amp-hour of capacity.
The MIT batteries are lithium iron phosphate. These unfortunately have much lower energy density than lithium cobalt polymer cells (not in the least because there's no polymer version available; the cell are in a metal casing). But they have a high power density and they can take charge rates around 4-5C (for the regular cells; they don't have the specs on the automotive cells on their website). That translates to much shorter charge times.
My screen is an S-IPS, you ignorant clod!
POWER is an ordinary RISC architecture, not at all like the Cell. Programming for it isn't a problem.
Of course not, they fit right in. Pretty much everyone at a Nascar race likes to blow stuff up.
"BOOM" is right. That's (by definition) detonation, and the force you get as a result is quite an engineering challenge to harness.
1) Collect images of goatse, lemonparty, etc
2) Move to folder marked "Private"
3) Loosen memory chip
4) Bring computer to snoopy repair shop.
5) Laugh as crooked tech's scream "Augghh, my eyes!"
(there is no ???, but there also is no profit. Sorry)
The "Made in China" label on my 622s says otherwise.
I've never heard anything about farm life -- either from people who used to do it or less directly -- which suggests it's any better than sweatshop labor.