"Failure to produce licenses for all commercial or shareware software
will constitute prima facie evidence of illegal possession, with penalties
that could range from the confiscation of the machine to the firing of the
user." (Italics mine)
Your point is taken in terms of people running Photoshop/CAD software/etc. Since a university has an obligation to train people to use commercial software, unfortunately, it may not be avoidable. But as a member of a theoretical chemistry research group which runs only Linux, I want to gripe about your Chemistry comments.
Most of the major Chemistry commercial software out there is available to run under Linux. Sure, it ain't free. But it doesn't imply you have to run Windows to use it.
*Gaussian runs under Linux (although they are pretty draconian about licensing in their own rights).
*QChem runs under Linux (hell, Martin Head-Gordon's research group only has one Windows box, and they only use it for the occasional PowerPoint presentation).
*CHARMM runs under Linux.
Furthermore most of the major commercial chemistry packages don't contract out with the BSA. Most of the people I know in theoretical chemistry don't run Windows. Why? Because if your jobs take months to run, you sure as hell don't want an uptime that is order days. Sure, you can't go totally open source (yet). But you can evade the juggernaut.
And for reference purposes, the next generation of theoretical chemists is pretty geek-happy. Give us another twenty years, and I'm sure you'll start seeing GPLed versions of molecular modeling programs. Hey, I'd consider doing it. The point of all this is that you *can* do things in stages. You can run whatever commercial software you want, scientifically, under Linux. And it's only going to get better. Why? Well, I know people who have license credits on Gaussian/QChem. And you know where they get their thrills? It sure ain't from the royalty check. It's from the fact that *everyone* who uses their software cites them in their articles. Citations are power in the academic world. Money is nothing.
You can tell that they're full of it for at least one reason. They claim that they can force the university to fire users, including professors. This is, quite simply, bull.
It seems to me that there's no way they can force the university to fire people over licensing issues. *Especially* professors. Most of those people have tenure, you know. Professors with tenure at my university have gotten away with embezzling grant money and sleeping with undergraduate students. Depending on the tenure contract at your school, it is probably *illegal* for the university to fire professors over this issue. BSA can't possibly wield a big enough stick for this to hold any water.
As such, it seems to me like they're protesting too much. The scenario they paint is patently ridiculous.
This is why God made pdf2ps, if you're going to be a real stinker about it.
Sheesh.
But if you insist:
here it is . Somebody else with real bandwidth grab this; this is one of our research group computers and I'll be truly smitten by my advisor if it gets slashdotted.
Fair enough. I suppose I spent five years ditching my spirituality in favor of rationality, so it didn't mean as much to me.
On the other hand, I did suffer a nasty divorce (that's a tautology, I think) a while back, so I have to admit, Komarr and ACC really resonated.
I've read DI on Baen's website. It's truly awesome. And, yes, even though I paid for the webscription, I'm planning on buying it in hardcover, too.:) What can I say? I'm a Bujold junky.
Not to disagree with you, but the Vorkosigan series is more powerful than "Curse of Chalion" just by virtue of its length--it had time for the accretion of character, weight, et cetera. I could extol the virtues of "Memory" for years on end if you let me. Not to mention "Mirror Dance". And "A Civil Campaign" was hilariously brilliant.
Of course, "Curse of Chalion" was really excellent--but the end of that scene in "Memory" where Miles wrestles with temptation, two falls out of three, consistently leaves me in tears from the sheer breathtaking magnitude of it all. Nothing in Chalion even comes close.
Some humans can read and understand machine code. Not many, but then again most people can't read C code either.
That doesn't make it protected expression. I mean, if I detonated a bomb, scientists analyzing the blast patterns could get a lot of information about what I did. Just because you can get information from a particular medium doesn't mean that the medium is one which is expressive.
Because computer source code is an expressive means for the exchange of information and ideas about computer programming, we hold that it is protected by the First Amendment.
Now if Microsoft wanted to release the source code to their IE/Windows, I don't think Appel (or anyone here) would argue with their right to do so, even if IE and Windows were inextricably tangled. Clearly, that isn't going to happen. The issue is over the executables they release. Which are not protected. The Windows CDs which MS provides do not provide for the exhange of information and ideas about programming. As a matter of fact, the EULA you have to accept to run this software specifically binds you not to try to figure out how it works. No sane person would consider a non-human-readable executable to be protected free speech. Come on.
I don't dispute that birth rates in less developed countries is higher. However, if I choose to have one child, think about the resources this child will consume. Computers, rides to school, movies, music, ballet class. Education. My time; my spouse's time. 15+ years of educators' time. All the books I can find. Fresh food shipped from Brazil. Thousands of dollars of health care. Any opportunity that I can give this child, I will.
Now think about the resources a child born in Uganda will consume. Okay, really think about it. If its lucky, food on a regular basis. If its lucky, a set of clothing that fits, and a couple shots.
The comment that we here in the developed world should think about our breeding is not without merit. It's true that other places have more kids. But they're using so much less. Now, I can't do a whole lot about women in Nigeria who have, on average, eight kids.
But I can recognize that if I choose to have kids here, I'm placing a bigger burden on the planet with my one than all eight of that woman's.
I would put more weight in the fact that I'm the only one complaining, if all the people who are saying I shouldn't be complaining weren't guys.
Bing! Your wish is granted. I'm a girl. There's nothing wrong with sex. There's nothing wrong with talking about sex. There's nothing engendered about the activity either. Sex is something that should be fun for both men and women. It seems to me that the more sexist attitude is that women don't/shouldn't discuss sex.
Re:An AWESOME Weapon.....
on
Stopping Light
·
· Score: 1
Uh, this awesome weapon already exists, and it is called... a laser. In a laser, you have a mirrored cavity. Electromagnetic radiation (light waves) are created by creating excited states, through pumping by some means. Sometimes this pumping occurs by electric current. But, for instance, the Titanium Sapphire laser is pumped by an Argon-Ion laser.
Not particularly effective as a battle-weapon, no.
I imagine these things must be pretty slow, since they are powered by chemical reactions.
DNA base pairs are not held together by chemical bonding. That would be a really, really difficult. They're held together by hydrogen bonds. The breaking and formation of hydrogen bonds takes on the order of picoseconds (it's the same timescale as rotations in the medium, since that's the basic mechanism for their breaking). Furthermore, they can break and form in parallel.
You can read more about the mechanism for base pairing here or if you want to see google render the pdf here .
Somewhere in the middle, please
on
Patent Nonsense
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
The point here is not that we should completely scrap patent laws. The point is that we should be wary about what we start labelling "intellectual property". There are two extremes. One has no protection whatsoever. So people lose a major incentive (profit) to produce new works. This is bad for society. But the other extreme is one in which everything is so tightly controlled that the great new works which are invented can't be disseminated to the people who need them (case in point: as mentioned in the article, the countries that really need it--African nations with 20-30% HIV positive rates can't use the AIDS drugs).
There's no point in creating a multitude of useful and interesting things if nobody ever gets to use them. Somwhere between these two extremes is something that approaches sanity. Unfortunately, we seem to be cheerfully careening down the path towards over-control.
Total baloney. When I was in grade school, I kept hearing how women weren't as good at science or math or putting things together. There was a social disincentive for women to learn stuff, because we were taught it wasn't something we should be interested in. I thought they were right, so I started to major in English in college. It didn't take long for me to figure out that I wanted to figure out how things worked, and to become a techno-geek.
But the generation before me--my mother--was even worse. They were told they wouldn't need jobs, that their husbands would take care of them, so worry about being a good wife and mother, not about your career.
Now I'm a PhD student in Physical Chemistry right now at a top-ranked university. We care about how things work, thank you. Students in my year of incoming graduate students build lasers, designs complicated NMR experiments, and work on complex computational models. My incoming class was also 50% female.
The course I TAed for last semester (an upper division physical chemistry class) was more than 50% female (over 150 students). The top three scorers in the class were all female. Furthermore, the women in the class outscored the men by almost 1/2 a standard deviation.
Let me assure you, once women stop hearing bullshit about how little they care about science and technology, we are every bit as excited, interested, and competent as you men.
The percentages of women who are interested in how things work is increasing. The only reason women get turned off in the first place is not because they don't care how things work is because they hear people say things like:
"Most women simply don't care about how things work. They want to click a button and have it simply work."
I don't think that it's so ridiculous to claim that the recording industry has a de facto monopoly. I think your idea of "monopoly" is a little confused. Monopolies can occur for a wide variety of reasons other than a governmental mandate. For instance, it's demonstrably legal to have operating systems besides those provided by Microsoft, and yet Microsoft is pretty darned close to a monopoly.
The issue is that when one group of people controls the channels of distribution to a large extent, abuse becomes possible. Now, the claim to which you replied stated that historically, the recording industry has tried to control the distribution of its products entirely. Court decisions have been made about this issue before. In fact, even though I didn't make the music, nor do I have any rights to it, I can decide who gets to listen to it. I have to pay for that privilege, but it is mine nonetheless.
Now we get into the gray area. The deal does not say that the recording industry can prevent people from webcasting their music. However, if the price for that rebroadcasting is set too high, it essentially creates an impassable barrier; in effect, it makes it economically impossible (if hypothetically feasible) for webcasting to occur.
That's why it was claimed to be abusive. They control the music. They control the rights to the music. If you let them control the distribution of the music, too, you're giving them too much power.
Uh, they're supposed to cancel. That's why I said ($/MHz) was a unit conversion factor. It converts MHz to $. The difference between the equation I had and the equation the OP put up is that he named his variables (price, clock speed) the same thing that he named his units ($, MHz) which is why it was confusing. The statement wasn't wrong, per se, but the formulation was unclear.
Slashdot Mirror
"Failure to produce licenses for all commercial or shareware software will constitute prima facie evidence of illegal possession, with penalties that could range from the confiscation of the machine to the firing of the user." (Italics mine)
Most of the major Chemistry commercial software out there is available to run under Linux. Sure, it ain't free. But it doesn't imply you have to run Windows to use it.
*Gaussian runs under Linux (although they are pretty draconian about licensing in their own rights).
*QChem runs under Linux (hell, Martin Head-Gordon's research group only has one Windows box, and they only use it for the occasional PowerPoint presentation).
*CHARMM runs under Linux.
Furthermore most of the major commercial chemistry packages don't contract out with the BSA. Most of the people I know in theoretical chemistry don't run Windows. Why? Because if your jobs take months to run, you sure as hell don't want an uptime that is order days. Sure, you can't go totally open source (yet). But you can evade the juggernaut.
And for reference purposes, the next generation of theoretical chemists is pretty geek-happy. Give us another twenty years, and I'm sure you'll start seeing GPLed versions of molecular modeling programs. Hey, I'd consider doing it. The point of all this is that you *can* do things in stages. You can run whatever commercial software you want, scientifically, under Linux. And it's only going to get better. Why? Well, I know people who have license credits on Gaussian/QChem. And you know where they get their thrills? It sure ain't from the royalty check. It's from the fact that *everyone* who uses their software cites them in their articles. Citations are power in the academic world. Money is nothing.
It seems to me that there's no way they can force the university to fire people over licensing issues. *Especially* professors. Most of those people have tenure, you know. Professors with tenure at my university have gotten away with embezzling grant money and sleeping with undergraduate students. Depending on the tenure contract at your school, it is probably *illegal* for the university to fire professors over this issue. BSA can't possibly wield a big enough stick for this to hold any water.
As such, it seems to me like they're protesting too much. The scenario they paint is patently ridiculous.
Sheesh.
But if you insist: here it is . Somebody else with real bandwidth grab this; this is one of our research group computers and I'll be truly smitten by my advisor if it gets slashdotted.
On the other hand, I did suffer a nasty divorce (that's a tautology, I think) a while back, so I have to admit, Komarr and ACC really resonated.
I've read DI on Baen's website. It's truly awesome. And, yes, even though I paid for the webscription, I'm planning on buying it in hardcover, too. :) What can I say? I'm a Bujold junky.
Of course, "Curse of Chalion" was really excellent--but the end of that scene in "Memory" where Miles wrestles with temptation, two falls out of three, consistently leaves me in tears from the sheer breathtaking magnitude of it all. Nothing in Chalion even comes close.
"The Spirit Ring" really was sub-par, though.
That doesn't make it protected expression. I mean, if I detonated a bomb, scientists analyzing the blast patterns could get a lot of information about what I did. Just because you can get information from a particular medium doesn't mean that the medium is one which is expressive.
Because computer source code is an expressive means for the exchange of information and ideas about computer programming, we hold that it is protected by the First Amendment.
Now if Microsoft wanted to release the source code to their IE/Windows, I don't think Appel (or anyone here) would argue with their right to do so, even if IE and Windows were inextricably tangled. Clearly, that isn't going to happen. The issue is over the executables they release. Which are not protected. The Windows CDs which MS provides do not provide for the exhange of information and ideas about programming. As a matter of fact, the EULA you have to accept to run this software specifically binds you not to try to figure out how it works. No sane person would consider a non-human-readable executable to be protected free speech. Come on.
I don't dispute that birth rates in less developed countries is higher. However, if I choose to have one child, think about the resources this child will consume. Computers, rides to school, movies, music, ballet class. Education. My time; my spouse's time. 15+ years of educators' time. All the books I can find. Fresh food shipped from Brazil. Thousands of dollars of health care. Any opportunity that I can give this child, I will.
Now think about the resources a child born in Uganda will consume. Okay, really think about it. If its lucky, food on a regular basis. If its lucky, a set of clothing that fits, and a couple shots.
The comment that we here in the developed world should think about our breeding is not without merit. It's true that other places have more kids. But they're using so much less. Now, I can't do a whole lot about women in Nigeria who have, on average, eight kids.
But I can recognize that if I choose to have kids here, I'm placing a bigger burden on the planet with my one than all eight of that woman's.
Bing! Your wish is granted. I'm a girl. There's nothing wrong with sex. There's nothing wrong with talking about sex. There's nothing engendered about the activity either. Sex is something that should be fun for both men and women. It seems to me that the more sexist attitude is that women don't/shouldn't discuss sex.
Not particularly effective as a battle-weapon, no.
DNA base pairs are not held together by chemical bonding. That would be a really, really difficult. They're held together by hydrogen bonds. The breaking and formation of hydrogen bonds takes on the order of picoseconds (it's the same timescale as rotations in the medium, since that's the basic mechanism for their breaking). Furthermore, they can break and form in parallel.
You can read more about the mechanism for base pairing here or if you want to see google render the pdf here .
There's no point in creating a multitude of useful and interesting things if nobody ever gets to use them. Somwhere between these two extremes is something that approaches sanity. Unfortunately, we seem to be cheerfully careening down the path towards over-control.
But the generation before me--my mother--was even worse. They were told they wouldn't need jobs, that their husbands would take care of them, so worry about being a good wife and mother, not about your career.
Now I'm a PhD student in Physical Chemistry right now at a top-ranked university. We care about how things work, thank you. Students in my year of incoming graduate students build lasers, designs complicated NMR experiments, and work on complex computational models. My incoming class was also 50% female.
The course I TAed for last semester (an upper division physical chemistry class) was more than 50% female (over 150 students). The top three scorers in the class were all female. Furthermore, the women in the class outscored the men by almost 1/2 a standard deviation.
Let me assure you, once women stop hearing bullshit about how little they care about science and technology, we are every bit as excited, interested, and competent as you men.
The percentages of women who are interested in how things work is increasing. The only reason women get turned off in the first place is not because they don't care how things work is because they hear people say things like:
"Most women simply don't care about how things work. They want to click a button and have it simply work."
Off my soapbox now....
The issue is that when one group of people controls the channels of distribution to a large extent, abuse becomes possible. Now, the claim to which you replied stated that historically, the recording industry has tried to control the distribution of its products entirely. Court decisions have been made about this issue before. In fact, even though I didn't make the music, nor do I have any rights to it, I can decide who gets to listen to it. I have to pay for that privilege, but it is mine nonetheless.
Now we get into the gray area. The deal does not say that the recording industry can prevent people from webcasting their music. However, if the price for that rebroadcasting is set too high, it essentially creates an impassable barrier; in effect, it makes it economically impossible (if hypothetically feasible) for webcasting to occur.
That's why it was claimed to be abusive. They control the music. They control the rights to the music. If you let them control the distribution of the music, too, you're giving them too much power.
Uh, they're supposed to cancel. That's why I said ($/MHz) was a unit conversion factor. It converts MHz to $. The difference between the equation I had and the equation the OP put up is that he named his variables (price, clock speed) the same thing that he named his units ($, MHz) which is why it was confusing. The statement wasn't wrong, per se, but the formulation was unclear.
Price (in $) = 2 * (clock speed in MHz) * ($/MHz).
So determining the price for a 250 MHz machine gives you:
Price = 2*250 MHz *($/MHz) = $500