Oh yes, didn't you know? Between gigs, she flies her pink six-wheeled Ford to some island in the Pacific, where she sips Pernod by the pool, and launches rocket planes with tiny puppet vigilantes in them who terrorise world governments and bring Freedom to their asses.
You mean they *don't* want passengers to overpower and kill any terrorists if they show up on a flight? Sorry sir, you killed this terrorist without a license, that will be a $5000 fine, and a televised apology on FOX to the viewers who were hoping to see the White House ablaze.
Or else they live on Discworld, where light travels a lot slower than c (or even a horse-drawn carriage in some parts), and the LED puzzle is really all about quantum and turtles all the way down.
Why? You can still set Google as your homepage. In fact I still do, just to
see the ocasionally cool Google Doodles (there's one today but it's lame).
Those are completely different use cases. A little search box in the frame
is very different from a search box on a web page.
Suppose the user is currently on MonsterTrucks.com. He suddenly wants to search for a bulk supplier of beef jerky. He types beef jerky in the search box on the frame, and gets to the search results. That makes the search box a non-modal interface element.
With your suggestion, he needs to navigate away from the MonsterTrucks.com and go to the Google homepage first, then type in his terms there, and only then he ends up on the search results page. That's a modal interface element: to do something unrelated to MonsterTrucks.com, he has to switch the main browser content to something else, and then use that.
It's like vi vs Emacs. In vi, if you want to move around, you have to stop editing and go into command mode. Then you stop moving around, and go into editing mode, because you can't edit while moving around. In Emacs, you can edit and move around within one mode.
If Iran ever dared to use such a weapon against anyone, it would be the last
thing it ever did.
Not necessarily. Suppose Iran used a nuke against North Korea? Would the world approve or disapprove? China would disapprove, but America might not. The UK probably would approve. Who would retaliate against Iran? Who would be allowed to bomb or even nuke Teheran? Overall, the question is difficult to answer, and that means there's a shade of gray.
Now let's say Iran used a nuke on some slightly less evil place, but still evil. Would that turn the *whole* world against Iran, or would the support be divided, with slightly more countries against than if it was North Korea?
At what point would the *whole* world unanimously support wiping Iran off the map? If Iran attacked America? If Iran attacked one of the former Soviet states?
What if Iran attacked Zimbabwe?
Perhaps you mean that those
serendipitous lightbulb moments would still occur. That's true. But it's also
trivial.
Not trivial at all. The heart of the matter, since the justification of patents is that these ideas are so precious that anyone who has them must be afforded a monopoly to exploit them, otherwise society would lose out.
Perhaps you could start by explaining why anyone would waste time & money on
R&D if a freeloading competitor who isn't hampered by said costs can crib
their invention and undercut them.
I don't have to show anything of the sort. Your premise that wasting time and money on R&D is necessary is flawed. It's thinking like a gambler: invest a lot of money upfront, and then find some clients later.
In markets where there are no patents, the R&D is concurrent with paying customers getting products. The inventions are evolutionary changes, and competitors can crib all they like, since their costs are comparable.
Without patents RSA would have Bern a trade secret.
So what? There are many competing encryption methods, and there are plenty of competent researchers.
The idea of RSA itself had been discovered before in the UK by Clifford Cocks, so let's not argue that public key cryptography would never have happened without Rivest, Shamir and Adleman. Incidentally, if patents didn't exist and the RSA company hadn't been formed, you betcha that the idea of RSA would still have been published, since the authors were at MIT. In academia, there's a little thing called publish or perish.
Patents only forbid cometing implementations not the publication of competing
designs.
Of course, who wouldn't want to design a system that nobody can use without paying a third party for the privilege? It's an open secret that the software on sourceforge that contains patented ideas is still compiled and used illegally.
All that patents actually accomplish is that users must hide what they are doing, or risk being sued.
Further patents are required to provide a procedure that would enable one
practiced in the art to reproduce the invention. That's how all us Webmasters
know how Google PageRank works,
Here's a newsflash for you: PageRank is only one small component of how Google ranks web pages. There are lots of other signals, like the size of the fonts, the layout, the blink tag (cool, I finally got to mention them on slashdot), etc. And Google doesn't publish any detailed information about that. Webmasters know what works because 1) Google explains some of its rules to them and 2) by experimentation. You can always experiment with any search engine as a black box - you try several changes, and keep the ones that improve the ranking. No patents needed.
Besides, the PageRank equation isn't particularly novel. It's been studied by mathematicians before: it's one of the simplest dynamics on a network. We're talking 1950s and earlier.
and that's what enables generic
pharmaceutical companies to produce inexpensive yet highly effective
medicines once the brand name manufacturers have been repaid for the billions
of dollars and decades of blood, sweat, toil and tears required to invent a
new medicine that will benefit all of humanity, in many cases for the rest of
eternity.
Truly novel products don't need patents to be thought up, just people. And we have more highly educated people in the world today than at any time in the past. If one guy doesn't invent it, someone else will. As long as nobody stops them.
Your own example shows that the real problem is that marketing costs a lot of money up front, especially when attempting to create a new market, and the company understandably would like to recoup that cost through monopoly pricing. If that's the problem, then the economists should come up with a better system than one which stifles the development of ideas because some company half way across the world paid for a piece of paper.
That said, you also haven't shown that the world benefits more from 1) having one company spending a fortune to create a market exclusively for itself, as opposed to 2) having lots of companies gradually evolve a market where they all compete while investing their profits.
It's often more effective to intimidate the geeks. What are they going to do? Take revenge? Then they can be treated like terrorists. It's better to repeal bad laws.
Sheckley is one of my favourite sci-fi authors. "The Status Civilization" is a classic, but I'd recommend pretty much all the stories written in the 50s/60s. He's also written franchise novels in the late 90s, but I haven't read them, and I doubt that the sorts of story constraints involved would make for memorable sci-fi.
Yes, because the RIAA can just phone you at home, and *poof* your hard drive fails. Or a court can place an injunction on one of your neighbours, and *poof* your hard drive fails. Or the US government can shut down the local telephone book company, and *poof* your hard drive fails.
That's a lot of failure modes, I'm starting to think local storage really is more hassle than it's worth.
Somebody set up us the <INTERCEPTION NOTICE> This post is being investigated by the Department of Homeland Security. If you are the author of this post, please contact 555-1234, we need your help. </INTERCEPTION NOTICE>
Are you sure she was really a redhead? There's a simple test you can perform, but sadly this comment box is too short to explain it to slashdot readers.
So you advocate not allowing natural efficiencies to come about so that more total money continues to go into
IT and people who like computers can continue to be happy?
I like how you slipped the word natural in there, to make efficiencies (another nice word, who wouldn't want to be efficient?) more desirable. If it's natural, then it must be right. Perhaps you can make an oblique reference to God or the invisible hand of the market, while you're at it?
GP was right on the money. In general, "creating jobs" can be good or bad. The real aim is increasing
efficiency and quality of life long term without causing too much damage in the short term.
Except that efficiency and quality of life aren't fully correlated, and not at all in some cases.
Yes creating jobs can be good or bad, and yes increasing quality of life is a great aim. What isn't a great aim is ignoring quality of life and going for efficiency instead, while claiming the two are magically inseparable.
So while theoretically, society is always better off via efficiency, I wouldn't be so quick
to simply dismiss concerns.
Not even theoretically. Economic efficiency has no relation to happiness, nor does it try to accomodate it in any way.
Let's say in the best of all possible worlds that all these IT workers find jobs and become nurses and teachers. They'll get paid, but will they be happy? IT workers tend to like computers. Improving efficiency in this case would decrease substantially their happiness.
Efficiency is increased by forcing people to do things that there is demand for, as opposed to doing things that they actually enjoy. It's a fallacy to assume that society is better off by increasing efficiency, and while it could in principle go either way in particular cases, the much higher stress levels in modern societies suggest that in fact, increased efficiency makes societies worse off.
Not in mathematics. I didn't use the third rate designation lightly in this case. American mathematics prior to the 1930s was not world class, whereas Germany from about 1905-1930 was the leading mathematical country in the world, having taken over from France. The French took a particularly severe blow in World War I, because all the young mathematicans were sent to the front to die. After WWI, French mathematics didn't recover until a bunch of students rebelled and learned the new mathematics from the Germans around the 1930s and really started teaching after the second great war. These students became known as the Bourbaki group. By the time of WWII, all the significant work was being done in the US and, separately, in the USSR. This separation broke down only slowly and the mathematical world united around about the 1980s.
they remind me of some of the good books
we had in America, 50 or 70 years ago.
This is the German influence. Just prior to WWII, nearly all great German (and east European) mathematicians fled the Nazis, and ended up quite often in the US. At the time, the US was a third rate nation in terms of mathematics, but by the time of the 60s, the new generation that was taught by those great mathematicians was ready to do amazing things.
What complete nonsense. The USSR had some of the best scientists in the world, and believe it or not, they did write their own textbooks. Luckily, the iron curtain was porous enough to allow some exchanges and publishing of translated textbooks from the other side (in both directions).
Slashdot Mirror
Uhm. Israel was right about Iraq? About what?
Oh yes, didn't you know? Between gigs, she flies her pink six-wheeled Ford to some island in the Pacific, where she sips Pernod by the pool, and launches rocket planes with tiny puppet vigilantes in them who terrorise world governments and bring Freedom to their asses.
You mean they *don't* want passengers to overpower and kill any terrorists if they show up on a flight? Sorry sir, you killed this terrorist without a license, that will be a $5000 fine, and a televised apology on FOX to the viewers who were hoping to see the White House ablaze.
Or else they live on Discworld, where light travels a lot slower than c (or even a horse-drawn carriage in some parts), and the LED puzzle is really all about quantum and turtles all the way down.
Those are completely different use cases. A little search box in the frame is very different from a search box on a web page.
Suppose the user is currently on MonsterTrucks.com. He suddenly wants to search for a bulk supplier of beef jerky. He types beef jerky in the search box on the frame, and gets to the search results. That makes the search box a non-modal interface element.
With your suggestion, he needs to navigate away from the MonsterTrucks.com and go to the Google homepage first, then type in his terms there, and only then he ends up on the search results page. That's a modal interface element: to do something unrelated to MonsterTrucks.com, he has to switch the main browser content to something else, and then use that.
It's like vi vs Emacs. In vi, if you want to move around, you have to stop editing and go into command mode. Then you stop moving around, and go into editing mode, because you can't edit while moving around. In Emacs, you can edit and move around within one mode.
Good stuff. Here's a pie-cutter for those who RTFL.
Not necessarily. Suppose Iran used a nuke against North Korea? Would the world approve or disapprove? China would disapprove, but America might not. The UK probably would approve. Who would retaliate against Iran? Who would be allowed to bomb or even nuke Teheran? Overall, the question is difficult to answer, and that means there's a shade of gray.
Now let's say Iran used a nuke on some slightly less evil place, but still evil. Would that turn the *whole* world against Iran, or would the support be divided, with slightly more countries against than if it was North Korea?
At what point would the *whole* world unanimously support wiping Iran off the map? If Iran attacked America? If Iran attacked one of the former Soviet states? What if Iran attacked Zimbabwe?
You can't be serious? Look at the OP's UID. These guys practically invented Slashdot's "Never RTFA" rule.
Look through the past slashdot stories on drugs and the pharma industry.
Not trivial at all. The heart of the matter, since the justification of patents is that these ideas are so precious that anyone who has them must be afforded a monopoly to exploit them, otherwise society would lose out.
I don't have to show anything of the sort. Your premise that wasting time and money on R&D is necessary is flawed. It's thinking like a gambler: invest a lot of money upfront, and then find some clients later.
In markets where there are no patents, the R&D is concurrent with paying customers getting products. The inventions are evolutionary changes, and competitors can crib all they like, since their costs are comparable.
So what? There are many competing encryption methods, and there are plenty of competent researchers.
The idea of RSA itself had been discovered before in the UK by Clifford Cocks, so let's not argue that public key cryptography would never have happened without Rivest, Shamir and Adleman. Incidentally, if patents didn't exist and the RSA company hadn't been formed, you betcha that the idea of RSA would still have been published, since the authors were at MIT. In academia, there's a little thing called publish or perish.
Of course, who wouldn't want to design a system that nobody can use without paying a third party for the privilege? It's an open secret that the software on sourceforge that contains patented ideas is still compiled and used illegally. All that patents actually accomplish is that users must hide what they are doing, or risk being sued.
Here's a newsflash for you: PageRank is only one small component of how Google ranks web pages. There are lots of other signals, like the size of the fonts, the layout, the blink tag (cool, I finally got to mention them on slashdot), etc. And Google doesn't publish any detailed information about that. Webmasters know what works because 1) Google explains some of its rules to them and 2) by experimentation. You can always experiment with any search engine as a black box - you try several changes, and keep the ones that improve the ranking. No patents needed.
Besides, the PageRank equation isn't particularly novel. It's been studied by mathematicians before: it's one of the simplest dynamics on a network. We're talking 1950s and earlier.
That's been debunked before.
Your own example shows that the real problem is that marketing costs a lot of money up front, especially when attempting to create a new market, and the company understandably would like to recoup that cost through monopoly pricing. If that's the problem, then the economists should come up with a better system than one which stifles the development of ideas because some company half way across the world paid for a piece of paper.
That said, you also haven't shown that the world benefits more from 1) having one company spending a fortune to create a market exclusively for itself, as opposed to 2) having lots of companies gradually evolve a market where they all compete while investing their profits.
It's often more effective to intimidate the geeks. What are they going to do? Take revenge? Then they can be treated like terrorists. It's better to repeal bad laws.
Sheckley is one of my favourite sci-fi authors. "The Status Civilization" is a classic, but I'd recommend pretty much all the stories written in the 50s/60s. He's also written franchise novels in the late 90s, but I haven't read them, and I doubt that the sorts of story constraints involved would make for memorable sci-fi.
I heard that the Coca-Cola company has put in a bid to paint is *mostly* red.
That's a lot of failure modes, I'm starting to think local storage really is more hassle than it's worth.
Somebody set up us the <INTERCEPTION NOTICE> This post is being investigated by the Department of Homeland Security. If you are the author of this post, please contact 555-1234, we need your help. </INTERCEPTION NOTICE>
Are you sure she was really a redhead? There's a simple test you can perform, but sadly this comment box is too short to explain it to slashdot readers.
I like how you slipped the word natural in there, to make efficiencies (another nice word, who wouldn't want to be efficient?) more desirable. If it's natural, then it must be right. Perhaps you can make an oblique reference to God or the invisible hand of the market, while you're at it?
Except that efficiency and quality of life aren't fully correlated, and not at all in some cases. Yes creating jobs can be good or bad, and yes increasing quality of life is a great aim. What isn't a great aim is ignoring quality of life and going for efficiency instead, while claiming the two are magically inseparable.
Not even theoretically. Economic efficiency has no relation to happiness, nor does it try to accomodate it in any way.
Let's say in the best of all possible worlds that all these IT workers find jobs and become nurses and teachers. They'll get paid, but will they be happy? IT workers tend to like computers. Improving efficiency in this case would decrease substantially their happiness.
Efficiency is increased by forcing people to do things that there is demand for, as opposed to doing things that they actually enjoy. It's a fallacy to assume that society is better off by increasing efficiency, and while it could in principle go either way in particular cases, the much higher stress levels in modern societies suggest that in fact, increased efficiency makes societies worse off.
The kind that puts hair on your chest^H^H^H^H palms.
Not in mathematics. I didn't use the third rate designation lightly in this case. American mathematics prior to the 1930s was not world class, whereas Germany from about 1905-1930 was the leading mathematical country in the world, having taken over from France. The French took a particularly severe blow in World War I, because all the young mathematicans were sent to the front to die. After WWI, French mathematics didn't recover until a bunch of students rebelled and learned the new mathematics from the Germans around the 1930s and really started teaching after the second great war. These students became known as the Bourbaki group. By the time of WWII, all the significant work was being done in the US and, separately, in the USSR. This separation broke down only slowly and the mathematical world united around about the 1980s.
This is the German influence. Just prior to WWII, nearly all great German (and east European) mathematicians fled the Nazis, and ended up quite often in the US. At the time, the US was a third rate nation in terms of mathematics, but by the time of the 60s, the new generation that was taught by those great mathematicians was ready to do amazing things.
What complete nonsense. The USSR had some of the best scientists in the world, and believe it or not, they did write their own textbooks. Luckily, the iron curtain was porous enough to allow some exchanges and publishing of translated textbooks from the other side (in both directions).
No, it was "lost". There was no "trading", as there was (and is) no "informed consent" in any meaningful sense of the word.