According to Victor Hugo, a French XIXth century writer and politician, any work of art had two fathers : the people felt something but could not express it; an artist would feel what the people felt and translate it in a work of art; and the people would in turn make that artist famous by ackowledging his work as decribing what they felt.
When one of the two authors is dead , Hugo said, the other one -the people - should inherit all the rights . That was a courageous position from Hugo, as his family lived mostly of his own writing rights.
Perhaps it would be wise anyway to have a copyright time of 20 years after the author's death, as he/she may leave a family behind; however extending if beyond that (which is the same duration as for a patent, by the way, except that the protection duration for a patent is from its divulgation and not from its discoverer's death), especially to 70 years or even 90 years as Disney people suggest, looks like a very, very bad joke.
According to a legend that I did not verify, one of the Rotschild's became immensely rich because he knew before anybody else in London about the defeat of Napoleon in Waterloo : according to that legend, he bought a lot of stocks & shares because they were quite low, and could sell them when the news reached the press.
I am not sure it is true because the Chappe code was normally secret, so looking at the signs coould not really help. The operators themselves did not undertand what they were transmitting.
Wikipedia is like a garden : it is not fixed once and for all, and you have to keep fighting continously in order to keep it healthy and tidy. To this respect it does not differ much of our own organisms.
The defense or truth by presenting all point of views with the origin of each one is both the goal of the Wikipedia and of a vigorous, sane society. "Germ-free" have probably no real future in a living world.
I do not know about US and UK rules, but AFAIK a non-competition clause is considered by tribunals if there is no financial compensation each month for the former employee in balance of the constraint that it imposes to him for the same time in France.I had once a friend who sued for lack of compensation and won.
True, restituting in front of you the image of what is behind you, though not perfectly, is quite seducing and does provide one of the best possible camouflages, much better than the static ones.
But..
... the problem is that if you do it in only one direction, you can only fool people who are exactly in that direction. If you have to face a battlefront which extends on many miles, it just cannot work anymore.
Unless you get multidirectional lenses and multidirectional LCDs (or whatever), which looks like a very different problem, one for which we do not seem to have solutions (but of course if the militaries have a solution, they will not shout it in the streets;-) )
Those interested in the history of robotic delivery might be interested by the experience of Bruno Lussato for the warehouse of the BHV store in the 70's : automatic Fenwicks called "Zebulons" which were supposed to ensure automatic operation of deliveries and also communicated with one another in order to avoid collisions.
However the experience came perhaps too soon : the minicomputers on board did not have the reliability that one can expect today from any mainboard with its associated processor, and generated bigger inducted costs than expected, so the zebulons were abandoned some years later.
... in those countries that make more than x% of their electricity by burning fossil fuels ?
I was told for instance that about 1/3 of the electricity costs come from transporting, dispatching and billing it. Would not the electric car, where energy does not come from nuclear plants (which have their own drawbacks too), put us in the same situation than France in october 1973 ? Its governement decided at that time not to reflect fully the multiplied oil price to the industry, increasing to the base customers. The goal was to avoid penalizing the job creations. Unfortunately, Pechiney was French, Pechiney produced aluminium, 90% of the price of aluminium is the price of the electricity used in producing it, ans as Pechiney exported a good pard of its production, the net result was exporting energy at a lower price than it was bought.
The more complex a system is, the most difficult it is to solve. Alexander the Great knew about that when he chose to cut the gordian knot.
As far as I can see, it seems very similar to what Pr. Hervé This was demonstrating about 8 years ago on his French TV broadcast about molecular biochemistry, just before the chaire of molecular biochemistry was created for him at the Collège de France.
However I tasted some recipes prepared in the Frères Blanc restaurants in Paris according to Hervé This counseling and I was quite disappointed (especially by the one in which lobster crust was used to make a kind of tasteless mousseline sauce). It does not mean there is no future in the profession, but probably that there is still a long way to go from experiments to consumer products.
(That being said, I do not find the Frères Blanc restaurants very good anyway, even when they use conventional cooking; Hippopotamus rocks !;-) )
Do not worry (supposing that you are not joking;-) : the digital SLRs have a light sensor that vary between half a 35mm slide (Nikon) and nearly a full 35mm slide (Canon). This is what makes the quality of the photograph - no noise - much more that the number of pixels itself. Remember too that the 1,3 Mpx of the Palm Zire 72 was much worse concernic colors and contrast thet tha 300 Kpx od the Palm Zize 71 that preceded it. An just look at the "quality" of the 1,3 Mpx on the Asus ultraportable computers, and you will never want to forget your SLR. No way !
That being said, being able to send a crude photograph of something for any reason is of course a good thing, but whicht does not pay in the same recreation area.
As fas as I know, the majors pay the programmers of the main radio stations so they will put their records "on the air", knowing that otherwise nobody would hear about them nor buy them. Of course, this is not done officially, but from somebody having worked in Radio-Luxembourg, I have been told that. Frome the same source, what is paid to the disc-jockeys represents slightly more that what the radio stations gives to the RIAA. Just my two cents.
According to the Franch patent law, if the person or company who buys or owns a patent does not begin to realize within a delay of 2 years, the original inventor gets back all his rights on the patent
The legislator decidend at tha time that it was not a good thing for the common welfare to leave a patentable idea unused inside a drawer. So use it or lend it back to its first owner, who can immediately do whatever he wants with it, including selling it to any other company or using it by himself.
This excellent disposition is jeopardized by a trend for european unification of the patent process, which would be a shame for mankind.
When you use Google, you are trying to get information on a given subject. Knowing that, you can be shown discreet links relevant to what you are interested in. I do not see what could be wrong with that. Neither, seemingly, do Google users.
When you use Wikipedia (as a reader, not an editor), you are trying to get information on a given subject. Knowing that, would you not be shown discreet links relevant to what you are interested in ? I do not see what could be wrong with that. Neither, I am sure, would Google users.
Manipulative advertisement is clearly a problem. Why would mere - and optional - information be ?
switched to Apple so that I could run Mac, Windows, and Linux software on the same computer. It's really the killer feature of the Mac platform, so I'd expect that any computer company with sense would be trying to get on board.
In order to permanently one's reflexes between 3 slightly different GUIs (4 if you have to use use both Gnome and KDE) as one goes from one system to the other ???
I am afraid I do not get the point here.
To use both KDE/Linux and (sometimes) Windows on my PC, I use the free version of VMWare. However alike the environments are, it the differences and only them that one notices, because they are so irritating.
Maybe we should once and for all consider the system like the basement of a home : we all know it is necessary, most of us prefer not to live there, and go reluctantly down only with a good reason in mind and for a short lapse of time. Come on ! The place where you "live" when using your personal computer is a place of applications. The system is just the necessary evil unavoidable to run them:-)
If you like changing your habits and lose a lot of time on irritating details, I suggest you switch your keybord from QWERTY to AZERTY from time to time. The change is small to, but just as much irritating, and far easier to implement;-)
They are since 1999 at least in the Airbus A340 Worldliner series planes; however perhaps they use different kind of dimmers that deal with the frequency instead of the voltage (because a given amount of voltage is needed in order to get any light at all); perhaps this will reach homes when prices get cheaper through distribution. Indeed why not thanks to Wal-Mart ?;-)
Under Ubuntu, I use the hibernation mode, that almost does not consume anything (hard disks off, processor off, fans off, just the LED on the Asus mainboard is on to indicate that some power stays present in case an USB device would need it, and I think this can be changed in the BIOS too).
I remember that back in the times of Windows NT we had to reboot the machine once a week, otherwise the time to get an echo of ONE touch on the screen would have been even slower than on an old ASR/KSR 33 (!). Under Linux, however, swapoff -a (= "stop using any swap space !") ensures that everything gets back in RAM if there is place for it (command "free"); in fact, I will work most of the time after a swapoff -a, and just issue the swapon -a (= "you can swap again") before hibernating the machine (because the memory image is kept, logically enough, in the swap file). This can be made automatic as well, in fact, but perhaps not in a distribution-consistent way.
Getting back from hibernation mode is much faster, probably because you bypass all the temporizations that are in the boot scripts. Moreover, everything is already initialized, and ready to run; up to the last web pages you were browsing with Firefox when you hibernated:-)
Remember that people who say.NET has no future as perhaps just as dumb as the one who said that also of APL, PL/I, the token-ring LAN, the MCA bus or OS/2. Something which is launched by a big company cannot fail to have a bright future. Once in a while.
Perhaps you know how Richard Feynman demonstrated unsecurity where he was working ? He opened the safes and left a note in it saying : guess who !:-D
Likewise, you could go to a site like packetstorm, and learn the security holes of the monthe (some "exploits" are coded there in Perl, and rather easy to use). Most of the time, tey allow you to get root access via a buffer overflow or a series of escape sequences.
Have a close and truthful friend of yours pirating their/your machine while you are discussing with your relatives and they are working on it. Seeing messages addressed to them and coming form nowhere (and why not a shutdown -h with a safe delay) while you are notr on the keyboard should be a very good vaccination for them:-)
The idea is that the Google team seems to have its own idea of what is good for him and the Internet, just as any hardware or software vendor (think about the success of Adobe's PDF).
Experience shows that such standards become open some day or disappear, and in fact they sometime do both (for instance the token-ring technology, or Netscape as a company).
I was refering to the Google team and set of ideas and not specifically to the Google search engine (everybody knows how to build a search engine, though some will be more efficient than others).
I wonder if Google people do not already know where they want it to go, and have begun doing it without creating committees or anything. Did not Winston Churchill say in his time that a camel was a horse designed by a committee ?
The egg. Dinosaurs laid eggs much before there ever was a single hen.
Now, if you say "those were not hen eggs, I shall agree with you on that too, and therefore ask you what you call an hen egg ? An egg which is laid by a hen ? In that case, according to your definition, the hen came first, whatever where it came from (let us say a "protohen"). Or would you define it as a something that can give birth (after some infancy process) to a hen ? In that case, the converse will be true. The choice is yours:-)
Okay, that does not help to solve the Microsoft problem, but as I am only using OpenOffice, I shall not mind a bit:-D
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When one of the two authors is dead , Hugo said, the other one -the people - should inherit all the rights . That was a courageous position from Hugo, as his family lived mostly of his own writing rights.
Perhaps it would be wise anyway to have a copyright time of 20 years after the author's death, as he/she may leave a family behind; however extending if beyond that (which is the same duration as for a patent, by the way, except that the protection duration for a patent is from its divulgation and not from its discoverer's death), especially to 70 years or even 90 years as Disney people suggest, looks like a very, very bad joke.
I am not sure it is true because the Chappe code was normally secret, so looking at the signs coould not really help. The operators themselves did not undertand what they were transmitting.
As our Italian friends say Si non e vero... ;-)
The defense or truth by presenting all point of views with the origin of each one is both the goal of the Wikipedia and of a vigorous, sane society. "Germ-free" have probably no real future in a living world.
I do not know about US and UK rules, but AFAIK a non-competition clause is considered by tribunals if there is no financial compensation each month for the former employee in balance of the constraint that it imposes to him for the same time in France.I had once a friend who sued for lack of compensation and won.
... to something like : François-D'; delete table taxpayers; while it still works on some sites :-D
"Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men."
Lord Acton, letter to Bishop Mandell Creighton, 1887
"Any Constitution tant does not take into account the fact that a government can be perverted is useless"
Maximilien de Robespierre
But..
... the problem is that if you do it in only one direction, you can only fool people who are exactly in that direction. If you have to face a battlefront which extends on many miles, it just cannot work anymore.
Unless you get multidirectional lenses and multidirectional LCDs (or whatever), which looks like a very different problem, one for which we do not seem to have solutions (but of course if the militaries have a solution, they will not shout it in the streets ;-) )
However the experience came perhaps too soon : the minicomputers on board did not have the reliability that one can expect today from any mainboard with its associated processor, and generated bigger inducted costs than expected, so the zebulons were abandoned some years later.
http://www.google.fr/search?hl=fr&q=lussato+z%C3%A9bulons
I was told for instance that about 1/3 of the electricity costs come from transporting, dispatching and billing it. Would not the electric car, where energy does not come from nuclear plants (which have their own drawbacks too), put us in the same situation than France in october 1973 ? Its governement decided at that time not to reflect fully the multiplied oil price to the industry, increasing to the base customers. The goal was to avoid penalizing the job creations. Unfortunately, Pechiney was French, Pechiney produced aluminium, 90% of the price of aluminium is the price of the electricity used in producing it, ans as Pechiney exported a good pard of its production, the net result was exporting energy at a lower price than it was bought.
The more complex a system is, the most difficult it is to solve. Alexander the Great knew about that when he chose to cut the gordian knot.
However I tasted some recipes prepared in the Frères Blanc restaurants in Paris according to Hervé This counseling and I was quite disappointed (especially by the one in which lobster crust was used to make a kind of tasteless mousseline sauce). It does not mean there is no future in the profession, but probably that there is still a long way to go from experiments to consumer products.
(That being said, I do not find the Frères Blanc restaurants very good anyway, even when they use conventional cooking; Hippopotamus rocks ! ;-) )
That being said, being able to send a crude photograph of something for any reason is of course a good thing, but whicht does not pay in the same recreation area.
As fas as I know, the majors pay the programmers of the main radio stations so they will put their records "on the air", knowing that otherwise nobody would hear about them nor buy them. Of course, this is not done officially, but from somebody having worked in Radio-Luxembourg, I have been told that. Frome the same source, what is paid to the disc-jockeys represents slightly more that what the radio stations gives to the RIAA. Just my two cents.
The legislator decidend at tha time that it was not a good thing for the common welfare to leave a patentable idea unused inside a drawer. So use it or lend it back to its first owner, who can immediately do whatever he wants with it, including selling it to any other company or using it by himself.
This excellent disposition is jeopardized by a trend for european unification of the patent process, which would be a shame for mankind.
When you use Wikipedia (as a reader, not an editor), you are trying to get information on a given subject. Knowing that, would you not be shown discreet links relevant to what you are interested in ? I do not see what could be wrong with that. Neither, I am sure, would Google users.
Manipulative advertisement is clearly a problem. Why would mere - and optional - information be ?
In order to permanently one's reflexes between 3 slightly different GUIs (4 if you have to use use both Gnome and KDE) as one goes from one system to the other ???
I am afraid I do not get the point here.
To use both KDE/Linux and (sometimes) Windows on my PC, I use the free version of VMWare. However alike the environments are, it the differences and only them that one notices, because they are so irritating.
Maybe we should once and for all consider the system like the basement of a home : we all know it is necessary, most of us prefer not to live there, and go reluctantly down only with a good reason in mind and for a short lapse of time. Come on ! The place where you "live" when using your personal computer is a place of applications. The system is just the necessary evil unavoidable to run them :-)
If you like changing your habits and lose a lot of time on irritating details, I suggest you switch your keybord from QWERTY to AZERTY from time to time. The change is small to, but just as much irritating, and far easier to implement ;-)
Are you serious ? I had always thought that "The Mark" was the "Microsoft Windows Compatible" logo :-(
It cannot be a coincidence. I am surprised that creationists do not argue that this sublime way things fit together proves the existence of God :-)
(Just joking)
Also the beautiful thing that the volt per meter is the very same thing than the newton per coulomb has something awesome.
They are since 1999 at least in the Airbus A340 Worldliner series planes; however perhaps they use different kind of dimmers that deal with the frequency instead of the voltage (because a given amount of voltage is needed in order to get any light at all); perhaps this will reach homes when prices get cheaper through distribution. Indeed why not thanks to Wal-Mart ? ;-)
I remember that back in the times of Windows NT we had to reboot the machine once a week, otherwise the time to get an echo of ONE touch on the screen would have been even slower than on an old ASR/KSR 33 (!). Under Linux, however, swapoff -a (= "stop using any swap space !") ensures that everything gets back in RAM if there is place for it (command "free"); in fact, I will work most of the time after a swapoff -a, and just issue the swapon -a (= "you can swap again") before hibernating the machine (because the memory image is kept, logically enough, in the swap file). This can be made automatic as well, in fact, but perhaps not in a distribution-consistent way.
Getting back from hibernation mode is much faster, probably because you bypass all the temporizations that are in the boot scripts. Moreover, everything is already initialized, and ready to run; up to the last web pages you were browsing with Firefox when you hibernated :-)
Remember that people who say .NET has no future as perhaps just as dumb as the one who said that also of APL, PL/I, the token-ring LAN, the MCA bus or OS/2. Something which is launched by a big company cannot fail to have a bright future. Once in a while.
Well who ever said that you have to be the family tech support to hack their machines froms the Internet ! (grin)
Perhaps you know how Richard Feynman demonstrated unsecurity where he was working ? He opened the safes and left a note in it saying : guess who ! :-D
Likewise, you could go to a site like packetstorm, and learn the security holes of the monthe (some "exploits" are coded there in Perl, and rather easy to use). Most of the time, tey allow you to get root access via a buffer overflow or a series of escape sequences.
Have a close and truthful friend of yours pirating their/your machine while you are discussing with your relatives and they are working on it. Seeing messages addressed to them and coming form nowhere (and why not a shutdown -h with a safe delay) while you are notr on the keyboard should be a very good vaccination for them :-)
The idea is that the Google team seems to have its own idea of what is good for him and the Internet, just as any hardware or software vendor (think about the success of Adobe's PDF).
Experience shows that such standards become open some day or disappear, and in fact they sometime do both (for instance the token-ring technology, or Netscape as a company).
I was refering to the Google team and set of ideas and not specifically to the Google search engine (everybody knows how to build a search engine, though some will be more efficient than others).
I wonder if Google people do not already know where they want it to go, and have begun doing it without creating committees or anything. Did not Winston Churchill say in his time that a camel was a horse designed by a committee ?
The egg. Dinosaurs laid eggs much before there ever was a single hen.
Now, if you say "those were not hen eggs, I shall agree with you on that too, and therefore ask you what you call an hen egg ? An egg which is laid by a hen ? In that case, according to your definition, the hen came first, whatever where it came from (let us say a "protohen"). Or would you define it as a something that can give birth (after some infancy process) to a hen ? In that case, the converse will be true. The choice is yours :-)
Okay, that does not help to solve the Microsoft problem, but as I am only using OpenOffice, I shall not mind a bit :-D