Software patents are good in theory, but bad in practice. At least the american type of patents.
Patents are often broad and trivial:
I mean, "one click shopping" for crying out loud!
Patents protect Big Corps more than startups and individuals. This renders the entire concept of patents useless. Supposedly, the meaning of pathents is to protect innovators from 800pound (soon to be 400kg, unfortunately) gorillas.
The combination of obvious, overly broad patents and increased Big Corp influens will obviously not favor innovation, since the Big Corps can patent everything and it's uncle no matter how trivial it is (they have the money to do so) and just sit back on their asses and collect money from other peoples work.
And trying to fight a Big Corp in court is next to useless if you are not a Big Corp yourself. More money generally beats less money...
This is not how things should be.
Stop this madness!
What good would that do?
In the end, the price is always paid by the little guy.
Corporations buy our work, then sell us back the fruits of our labor (at a profit naturally).
Simply because the work a person do is the only source of wealth there is. A company may live on other company, but then that company has to make up for it by extracting more money from someone, and in the bottom of the food chain are always regular people.
Face it, we always pay! I wish there was an obvious better solution, but this shitty system seems to be what works... Human nature I guess...
Well... I would say the ML in XML states the obvious, it is not a programming language.
But as a meta language it can be used to define programming languages.
XSL-T for example... that is one weird language, an unholy mix of procedural programming and whatnot...
Then, all you need is a "runtime" (like Xcalan) and you're good to go.
The chameleon like capabilities XSL gives XML is the #1 (to me at least) reason XML is so useful.
You must somehow build a spacecraft that can travel at 66.9 Million Miles per hour, non-stop for 30 years, and can accomodate a crew for that same 30 years.
No, you dont. You must build a spacecraft that can _accelerate to 66.9 Million Miles per hour, and deccellerate a few decades later.
Once you have picked up speed in space there is no additional effort to keep it, since there is very little friction in the near-emptyness of space.
You are right about one thing though.
Interplanetarry travel is a lot harder than most people think...
Ever heard of a little something called binary black holes?
This little thingies has two tightly focused, _really_ hot jetstreams of radiation going out in opposite directions, but doesn't emitt much in other directions (They're black holes after all, so they suck up pretty much everything that could make them detectable).
Well, now imagine a spinning binary black hole.
It'll be almost undetectable... until it happens to spin so that one of the jetstreams hit a planet and fry it to a crisp.
We _could_ have things like this just around the corner (astronomically speaking) and not be aware of it.
I don't know how common this type of celestial bodies are, but for life, they are definitly a Bad Thing, since they could effectivly "reset" a planet and life would have to start all over again...
"It is impossible to divide a cube into two cubes, a fourth
power into two fourth powers, and in general any power except
the square into two powers with the same exponents,...I have
discovered a truly wonderful proof of this, but the margin is
too narrow to hold it."
He was a really clever guy, but that was really far out... =) The difference of Fermat and this "inventor"-guy of course beeing that Fermat is/was a very merited scientist, and his credibility made it possible for him to sneak this one past.
Follow this link to check it out in more depth. I found the Fermat reference really fun, but perhaps it's just us (ex) math types...
This is obviously a great improvement over most computer related books on the market. Java In A Nutshell never really cut it as a paperweight, and my dead tree in-pile has grown a lot lately.
This book will be a great fix, since all those pages (and the spaces inbetween) will keep an almost infinite number of cheets of paper, scraps of paper, postIt notes and the like in place.
Not to mention guns...
Mass murder rates would probably plummet if potential mass murderers would have to try taking out a building armed with a sharpened stick.
This is not flamebait.
I just wonder if it wouldent be wiser to try to contain the effects of violence rather than eradicate it through symbolic knee-jerk reactions...
Moral Panic regularly shows it's ugly head.
It tends to hit all new, and all youth related trends in society.
For example, every single new kind of music since the renaisance(sp?) has been accused of courrupting the youth. (Jazz, Rock, Rap...) Not to mention, comics, novels, violent movies etc.
There is a very obvious pattern of finding scapegoats for complex issues. This is probably as old as man, and very hard to get rid of.
Fact is that scapegoating is a easy way to analyze a problem. Of course it's not accurate, but people tend to like simple explanations. And if you think you have an explanation to a problem it makes the consequenses of the problem less frightening.
For example, the statements:
Children kill eachother because they play too much quake!
Al Quaida bombed us because Bin Laden is evil incarnate!
Makes people feel good, because they see a clear cause to the problem, an easy fix, and most importantly:
It's not their responsability! It makes people feel good that it is not their fault.
They don't want to hear things like:
People join Al Quaida because their lives suck so much they think it makes sense. They blame you for their misery, partly based on that you have (for example) bombed at least one country in the middle east region every decade for some time now. If you or your family got beaten wouldn't you consider the person on the other end of the stick an enemy? With a different US foreign policy Bin Laden might not have (m)any followers.
This statement is probably at least equally true to the statement of Bin Laden being Evil. But for the reasons above it will obviously gather less followers.
I think this is just a basic flaw in humans and the only way to deal with it is to be aware of it, and show some healthy skepticism about overly simple solutions to complex problems.
Because they don't work.
...and sometimes the consequenses can be really, really horrible.
This is a link to my ISP
The site is available in the nordic languages and, of course English.
Read, envy, and take to the streets to demand this bandwidth for the masses.
In _all_ countries.
If you haven't experienced a 10Mb/s line to your home, you probably have no idea what the potential uses of the internet are. A fat pipe makes a lot of cool things possible.
Some of them are legal, others should probably be.
(I realize that food, water and shelter is more important, but you get the idea.)
I too find this solution to be absolutly amazing.
Amazingly cool.
Amazingly "cheep".
Amazingly interesting.
However, teaming up with google doesn't strik me as a particulary good idea. This project probably has a different scope then a pure web search engine, but, assuming there _is_ a substantial overlap between the projects. I for one would love to see some new high quality attemts at searching vast amounts of data.
Google might be the best there is right now, but some serious competition should make them even better. (Or, there will be a new top dog, wish of course would be equally good.)
Anyway,
Well, actually I have a 10Mb/s line. And unrestricted access.
All this for 20$ a month.
This of course means you _can_ get a good connection cheep, it _is_ possible.
Of course you have to not live in the US.
And to be fare, I am one of the lucky few even here.
Yes, seems that the US and mr Bush hasn't had much interest in human rights, or international agreements lately.
US refused a permanent international court for war crimes (a year ago), and instead (recently) declared that any foreigners the US government felt like busting could be sentenced to capital punishment in secret military trials...
Sometimes you guys scare me...
And we are supposed to be on the same side in this...
1.) We're not talking about restricting domestic encryption here. The issue is specifically about export restrictions.
There is a world outside the US that have legitimate use for strong cryptography.
Standards are a Good Thing, and establishing crypto standards, or even to make it a world wide standard to encrypt sensitive data is (or should be) a Good Thing to.
This necessery world wide development is slowed down because some US government officials has their heads stuck so far up their asses that they value the use of Echelon to spy on Europeans higher than hardening the global community against terrorism, industrial espionage and script kiddies.
This is going to come back and bite _all_ our asses, US or European in one way or an other, mark my words.
If you check again you will see that ZDNet now states that the poll has been rigged by MS.
Too bad this probably happens all the time.
At one point I actually held some hopes of that MS was going to play (almost) fair in the future.
Then I woke up...
Really it's a shame a company that size can't show some common sense or style.
You can't tell the difference between useful and useless cookies from the clients perspective.
Many sites store the actual info "contained" in the cookie on the server. (this is mostly a Good Thing, since sending to much useful information back and forth in cookis is dubious from a security point of view.)
This means the actual cookie only contains an id so the server can identify the user and find the relevant information.
There is no way the client can notice any difference between this cookie and a useless cookie since all the action takes place on the server.
So, while I agree that it would be a very nice feature, it's just not doable.
Slashdot Mirror
Software patents are good in theory, but bad in practice. At least the american type of patents.
Patents are often broad and trivial:
I mean, "one click shopping" for crying out loud!
Patents protect Big Corps more than startups and individuals. This renders the entire concept of patents useless. Supposedly, the meaning of pathents is to protect innovators from 800pound (soon to be 400kg, unfortunately) gorillas.
The combination of obvious, overly broad patents and increased Big Corp influens will obviously not favor innovation, since the Big Corps can patent everything and it's uncle no matter how trivial it is (they have the money to do so) and just sit back on their asses and collect money from other peoples work.
And trying to fight a Big Corp in court is next to useless if you are not a Big Corp yourself. More money generally beats less money...
This is not how things should be.
Stop this madness!
What good would that do?
In the end, the price is always paid by the little guy.
Corporations buy our work, then sell us back the fruits of our labor (at a profit naturally).
Simply because the work a person do is the only source of wealth there is. A company may live on other company, but then that company has to make up for it by extracting more money from someone, and in the bottom of the food chain are always regular people.
Face it, we always pay!
I wish there was an obvious better solution, but this shitty system seems to be what works...
Human nature I guess...
Well... I would say the ML in XML states the obvious, it is not a programming language.
But as a meta language it can be used to define programming languages.
XSL-T for example... that is one weird language, an unholy mix of procedural programming and whatnot...
Then, all you need is a "runtime" (like Xcalan) and you're good to go.
The chameleon like capabilities XSL gives XML is the #1 (to me at least) reason XML is so useful.
Argentina is one thing...
But imagine a more important node. Like the London or Frankfurt or Tokyo stock exchange.
The asian crisis a few years ago was just a tadste of what could happen.
The globalization of bussines makes the overall system more vulnerable, since damages spread easily across the network.
No, you dont. You must build a spacecraft that can _accelerate to 66.9 Million Miles per hour, and deccellerate a few decades later.
Once you have picked up speed in space there is no additional effort to keep it, since there is very little friction in the near-emptyness of space.
You are right about one thing though.
Interplanetarry travel is a lot harder than most people think...
Ever heard of a little something called binary black holes?
This little thingies has two tightly focused, _really_ hot jetstreams of radiation going out in opposite directions, but doesn't emitt much in other directions (They're black holes after all, so they suck up pretty much everything that could make them detectable).
Well, now imagine a spinning binary black hole.
It'll be almost undetectable... until it happens to spin so that one of the jetstreams hit a planet and fry it to a crisp.
We _could_ have things like this just around the corner (astronomically speaking) and not be aware of it.
I don't know how common this type of celestial bodies are, but for life, they are definitly a Bad Thing, since they could effectivly "reset" a planet and life would have to start all over again...
"It is impossible to divide a cube into two cubes, a fourth power into two fourth powers, and in general any power except the square into two powers with the same exponents,...I have discovered a truly wonderful proof of this, but the margin is too narrow to hold it."
He was a really clever guy, but that was really far out... =)
The difference of Fermat and this "inventor"-guy of course beeing that Fermat is/was a very merited scientist, and his credibility made it possible for him to sneak this one past.
Follow this link to check it out in more depth.
I found the Fermat reference really fun, but perhaps it's just us (ex) math types...
This is obviously a great improvement over most computer related books on the market.
Java In A Nutshell never really cut it as a paperweight, and my dead tree in-pile has grown a lot lately.
This book will be a great fix, since all those pages (and the spaces inbetween) will keep an almost infinite number of cheets of paper, scraps of paper, postIt notes and the like in place.
A elegant solution to a complex problem.
Not to mention guns...
Mass murder rates would probably plummet if potential mass murderers would have to try taking out a building armed with a sharpened stick.
This is not flamebait.
I just wonder if it wouldent be wiser to try to contain the effects of violence rather than eradicate it through symbolic knee-jerk reactions...
Moral Panic regularly shows it's ugly head.
...and sometimes the consequenses can be really, really horrible.
It tends to hit all new, and all youth related trends in society.
For example, every single new kind of music since the renaisance(sp?) has been accused of courrupting the youth. (Jazz, Rock, Rap...) Not to mention, comics, novels, violent movies etc.
There is a very obvious pattern of finding scapegoats for complex issues. This is probably as old as man, and very hard to get rid of.
Fact is that scapegoating is a easy way to analyze a problem. Of course it's not accurate, but people tend to like simple explanations. And if you think you have an explanation to a problem it makes the consequenses of the problem less frightening.
For example, the statements:
Children kill eachother because they play too much quake!
Al Quaida bombed us because Bin Laden is evil incarnate!
Makes people feel good, because they see a clear cause to the problem, an easy fix, and most importantly:
It's not their responsability! It makes people feel good that it is not their fault.
They don't want to hear things like:
People join Al Quaida because their lives suck so much they think it makes sense. They blame you for their misery, partly based on that you have (for example) bombed at least one country in the middle east region every decade for some time now. If you or your family got beaten wouldn't you consider the person on the other end of the stick an enemy? With a different US foreign policy Bin Laden might not have (m)any followers.
This statement is probably at least equally true to the statement of Bin Laden being Evil. But for the reasons above it will obviously gather less followers.
I think this is just a basic flaw in humans and the only way to deal with it is to be aware of it, and show some healthy skepticism about overly simple solutions to complex problems.
Because they don't work.
This is a link to my ISP
The site is available in the nordic languages and, of course English.
Read, envy, and take to the streets to demand this bandwidth for the masses.
In _all_ countries.
If you haven't experienced a 10Mb/s line to your home, you probably have no idea what the potential uses of the internet are. A fat pipe makes a lot of cool things possible.
Some of them are legal, others should probably be.
(I realize that food, water and shelter is more important, but you get the idea.)
I too find this solution to be absolutly amazing.
Amazingly cool.
Amazingly "cheep".
Amazingly interesting.
However, teaming up with google doesn't strik me as a particulary good idea. This project probably has a different scope then a pure web search engine, but, assuming there _is_ a substantial overlap between the projects. I for one would love to see some new high quality attemts at searching vast amounts of data.
Google might be the best there is right now, but some serious competition should make them even better. (Or, there will be a new top dog, wish of course would be equally good.)
Anyway,
Well, actually I have a 10Mb/s line. And unrestricted access.
All this for 20$ a month.
This of course means you _can_ get a good connection cheep, it _is_ possible.
Of course you have to not live in the US.
And to be fare, I am one of the lucky few even here.
I notice you posted that as AC.
I probably could crack some jokes about that, but it doesn't seem to be worth it...
Yes, seems that the US and mr Bush hasn't had much interest in human rights, or international agreements lately.
US refused a permanent international court for war crimes (a year ago), and instead (recently) declared that any foreigners the US government felt like busting could be sentenced to capital punishment in secret military trials...
Sometimes you guys scare me...
And we are supposed to be on the same side in this...
I don't like MS very much.
But are you seriously blaming Bill G for this?
I have a hard time taking you seriously...
1.) We're not talking about restricting domestic encryption here. The issue is specifically about export restrictions. There is a world outside the US that have legitimate use for strong cryptography. Standards are a Good Thing, and establishing crypto standards, or even to make it a world wide standard to encrypt sensitive data is (or should be) a Good Thing to. This necessery world wide development is slowed down because some US government officials has their heads stuck so far up their asses that they value the use of Echelon to spy on Europeans higher than hardening the global community against terrorism, industrial espionage and script kiddies. This is going to come back and bite _all_ our asses, US or European in one way or an other, mark my words.
Bleeding Edge == New, probably not stable and hopefully cool.
If you check again you will see that ZDNet now states that the poll has been rigged by MS. Too bad this probably happens all the time. At one point I actually held some hopes of that MS was going to play (almost) fair in the future. Then I woke up... Really it's a shame a company that size can't show some common sense or style.
Don't you mean:
Duck and Cover =)
You can't tell the difference between useful and useless cookies from the clients perspective.
Many sites store the actual info "contained" in the cookie on the server. (this is mostly a Good Thing, since sending to much useful information back and forth in cookis is dubious from a security point of view.)
This means the actual cookie only contains an id so the server can identify the user and find the relevant information.
There is no way the client can notice any difference between this cookie and a useless cookie since all the action takes place on the server.
So, while I agree that it would be a very nice feature, it's just not doable.