Many people are exploiting the works of the greats, like Chaucer and Shakespeare, without offering a nickle to their estates.
Yeah, right, and after a few millennia of incessant earnings, the dead poets might even decide to write again,;-) all thanks to the simple motivation provided by excessive IPRs.
Just like singers and songwriters aged 100+ will restart their careers from retirement, with great new works to surpass their legendary Woodstock performances from the 1960s, once copyright is extended, preferably indefinitely.
No, with DVI-I. While it's bulkier (and more sturdy), thanks to carrying the VGA signal as well it doesn't have HDMI's (sometimes show-stopping) disadvantage of being unable to drive the still most common projectors with analog inputs.
If you can't be sure yet what else you might need to export from this machine, in particular for access as a roadwarrior too (just terminals or also file shares to get data into and out of future projects, and possibly even forwarded access to further machines on the LAN?), 3SP's SSL-Explorer might be a good package comprising VNC, RDP etc., console prompts, network paths, web forwards (mostly through a Java helper that runs from many browsers), all encrypted as the name implies, and even more in in its commercial Enterprise Edition, which has a free trial for 2 users as well.
Even earlier, the concept of a world-spanning network of thought had previously been developed by other thinkers predominantly known in the French-speaking world as well (most notably dissident cleric Pierre Teilhard de Chardin) under the name of noosphere - the field of mind(s).
It never seemed to have made much of an impact in English until famously picked up and popularized by Eric S. Raymond (and in another variant referred to by John Perry Barlow as "Cyberspace, the new home of Mind"), recognizing the importance in retrospect when The Net was young.
Even though modding projects like JKK's caused 7" touchscreen add-ons to sell out within weeks when the first Eee PC came to market last year, making clear this should be a built-in feature, unfortunately it is missing from the new edition nonetheless, though the review for some reason neither discusses nor deplores its omission.
Anyone coming e.g. from a Psion or Nokia Communicator will know what a difference a touchscreen makes on small devices, and would surely have appreciated it at least as an option.
Whether that technology is from one operating system or another (...) doesn't matter. It's about getting it into kids' hands.
It matters just as much as in "Whether we get drugs to the kids we want to treat is all that matters": Of course it would make a major and very unwelcome difference if a program distributing life-long supplies of antibiotics and antimalaria agents (or more accurately, the knowledge and tools to make and further improve them everywhere!) with a mission statement like this switched to spreading acid and dope instead.
this author has no real understanding of how "cybercrime" is perpetrated. Seriously, how can we expect the US government to aggressively thwart botnets? The analogy basically falls flat on its face primarily because as a somewhat anonymous, automated and decentralized structure, it would be impossible to target the sources.
Authorities the world over have been trying to erode everyone's privacy in communications (with alarming success) based on the claim that they could then combat precisely this type of threat!
Command&control in structures of loosely organized cells are what they claim to be able to eradicate this way, so let (or rather, make) them try out their methods to justify their approach - in a crackdown on cybercrime. If they fail, though, we want our liberties back as we'd have no more reason to expect success from tackling an enemy that fortunately doesn't rear its ugly head all that often.
...it's odd to conclude for a device that lacks both a Psion-like touchscreen (to more than compensate for the small form factor in ease of use) and its clamshell ancestors' stellar battery life (which might have come with an Intel Atom) that:
The engineers have clearly listened to all the comments regarding the original Eee PC and attempted to put them right.
While this is one great little machine, in fact a slim ePaper-based remake of the Psion with current memory technology (not having to rely on a scary backup battery) as well as built-in WLAN, GPS (which the Eee also lacks) and Bluetooth (or maybe even doubling as a full-featured phone handset) would still be priceless even if Symbian hadn't evolved one bit in the decade since EPOC.
Microsoft, Google, and all other websites that currently use CAPTCHA, need to find a solution that puts them a step ahead of the spammers.
If these giants with millions of clients demand unrelenting criminal prosecution of spammers, don't you think they would get one that might actually work? (Remember Lawrence Lessig bet his chair on this!)
We've seen technical solutions supposedly "solving spam" fail for more than a decade, ruining access from character terminals, mobile devices, screen readers, and many other reasonable things more in the process - while making every little contribution to discussions a time-consuming issue of solving captchas, waiting for confirmation mails, and signing up everywhere, over and over again.
If all the organizations that have been eroding our privacy allegedly for fighting whatever happens to be the Horseman of the day (and want to keep the surveillance society that way) can actually catch anyone, let them prove it by putting scores of spammers, malware makers and bot herders behind bars - within a few weeks of course, because they (say) they can.
With the money this guy has surely he could afford to build a version of the Analytical Engine. It's not a giant leap for the machinists involved in such a project, given that the fine specifications for the various gears, wheels and cogs is a no-brainer for today's technology -- all the parts could be laser cut by a robot. It would be truly awe-inspiring to see the first computer functioning in all its glory, for indeed it is Turing complete and lays out many of the concepts used in modern digital computers.
That Nathan Myhrvold of Intellectual Ventures "fame" should spend his fortune to draw the attention to the works of Charles Babbage and Ada Lovelace (and, by extension, Alan Turing), which as shown by a legal bestseller help make such a good case to debunk software patents and the trolls that hoard them...
And that, of course, is why most Slashdotters don't want pay-as-you go pricing: They'd be at the top of the usage list and so would pay accordingly.
No, it's because they are sufficiently tech-savvy to have long realized that an IP connection is a two-way street between your system and a few billion others, so one can't pretend to be entirely in control of one's traffic on each and every port all of the time. Only the easily fooled fall for plans the expense of which is dynamically based on circumstances they can only definitely influence by pulling the plug. I.e. pay-as-you-go is a misnomer as others can contribute to the load on your line as well (to cite your own example, host only one file and see it get slashdotted - your money could literally be gone in no time on pay-as-"you"-go).
ISPs themselves would never lease their own lines based on volume rather than bandwidth - they surely know why.
And that's not even factoring in the further harm pay-as-you-go would do to the end-to-end structure of the Net...
If they think there isn't money to be made (and can't figure out the potential of giving cable/DSL subscribers free WLAN access on the road as an extra, much like Fon does), well, then, as has been proposed years ago, just let someone else do the job, such as the Baptists.
Which seems to matter so much since you can of course pick your OS of choice on each and every device you have to use (few come without a clock these days)...
Congresscritters have to be told again that in a networked, computerized world where accurate, continuous time- and record-keeping is of the essence, it has become one of the worst ideas ever to mess around with the clocks twice a year (in particular now that everyone has about a dozen of them in various devices), at different dates and points in time all around the globe. High time indeed, literally, to put an end to this tremendous waste of resources (and everyone's time) that is Daylight Saving Time.
I have no intentions of doing it just to publish a paper. (...) I would only do it for financial gain. Without software patents no financial gain can be made from solving an outstanding problem of this magnitude.... that is none for the person who would solve the problem. All the leprecons who'd "implement" the solution would stand to earn [by extension: and have to pay superwiz] large amounts of money. To summarize: no patents=no solution to an outstanding problem.
So if your financial gain is the issue (that everyone else should suffer to further), shouldn't you have checked that 35 U.S.C. 101 contained "algorithm" in addition to "process, machine, manufacture, or composition of matter" before entering the field and number-crunching all the way to your degree; i.e. consequently have chosen something else, such as rock music or becoming a movie star (see, Cipher in The Matrix was facing that question too...;-)) - or even, becoming a Congresscritter with sufficient following to repeal all parts that are inconvenient to your goal, and marked in bold below, from Art. 1 of the Constitution?
To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries
Donald E. Knuth: An algorithm is an abstract concept unrelated to physical laws of the universe.
This is easily an argument for software patents. Abstractions are result of human creativity (and often its method). As such they are original and useful science (to some they even art). Therefore, they pass the litmus test for patentability directly established by The Constitution.
They do pass the test for the "to creators" part - i.e. for copyright in the particular expression as a work (e.g. a paper in in a maths/CS journal, or more recently, a program - preferably free if already paid for by public research grants), not for patents. Moreover, the founders never said "Patents shall be awarded to all...", but "Congress shall have power to"...make a balanced decision for the benefit of the public ("to promote progress"). The author or inventor benefitting is just an inevitable (albeit welcome) side effect.
The problem with software patents is that anything that's really novel (...) is basically a mathematical algorithm. Since you can't patent mathematical algorithms, there shouldn't be any need for software patents. I'm not sure if I've ever seen anything really inventive in software that wasn't a mathematical algorithm.
According to a paper posted just below, you find yourself in perfect agreement with no lesser IT guru than Donald E. Knuth, author of The Art of Computer Programming, who had already admonished the US Commissioner of Patents and Trademarks many years ago that:
To a computer scientist, [any distinction between different kinds of algorithms to make them patentable] makes no sense, because every algorithm is as mathematical as anything could be. An algorithm is an abstract concept unrelated to physical laws of the universe.
They did not patent the crap execution of the idea, just the idea itself.
Here's a place where patents really suck: a good idea gets sat on and cannot be used by people would could make into something good.
Trouble is, for someone awarded a monopoly, a crappy implementation is good enough (who in the purchasing department would bet their head on a competitor that might go down in a patent lawsuit?), and not even required: In fact, a better implementation by an unwitting infringer makes an even more promising target for a troll reaping the reward of everyone else's work.
No wonder that from the dawn of technological history, everyone who put some thought into this kind of protection ended up with a devastating indictment of business method/software patents: Quite an insightful link (tracing the take of intellectual aces and geek heroes on IP through times and ages) has recently been posted at http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=462352&cid=22512878.
I know very few people who would ever attempt re-installing Windows without a pro technician
Indeed. TFA makes the mistake of taking the most important elements out of the equation:
Ignore for a moment all the crap about Windows being pre-installed and such. Let's say you have a computer-newbie friend, called Compy McNewb, who's just bought a new computer and is getting ready to install an OS.
...making the author's whole approach one which is bound to come up with the wrong conclusions, especially as it requires the extra assumption (unlikely as it is especially in these days of mandatory activation and WGA) that Linux is competing against pirated rather than pre-installed Windows.
The simple fact is that in a market working according to the normal mechanisms, Compy McNewb would either have a "blank" hard disk in his shiny new computer at this point, and to choose from operating systems ranging from free to expensive, or he would have been able to find a vendor giving him a huge discount for not requiring an expensive OS even if that was conventionally factored into the retail prices on display (which in itself would be surprising).
If neither is the case, little can be inferred about the merits of Linux and its marketing, but quite a lot can be... about the efficiency of antitrust enforcement.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, right, and after a few millennia of incessant earnings, the dead poets might even decide to write again, ;-) all thanks to the simple motivation provided by excessive IPRs.
Just like singers and songwriters aged 100+ will restart their careers from retirement, with great new works to surpass their legendary Woodstock performances from the 1960s, once copyright is extended, preferably indefinitely.
Gambling should not be rewarded, and much less so by giving the jackpot to every player.
As can be seen e.g. from the article linked here, eminent lawyers, economists and computer scientists left no doubt that the purported foundations for making software patentable were shaky at best.
With iPhones around and people desperately clinging to the clamshells of their ancient Psions and fixing the Eee's missing features by eerily advanced DIY, when will Asus et al. finally look/listen/learn?
No, with DVI-I. While it's bulkier (and more sturdy), thanks to carrying the VGA signal as well it doesn't have HDMI's (sometimes show-stopping) disadvantage of being unable to drive the still most common projectors with analog inputs.
If you can't be sure yet what else you might need to export from this machine, in particular for access as a roadwarrior too (just terminals or also file shares to get data into and out of future projects, and possibly even forwarded access to further machines on the LAN?), 3SP's SSL-Explorer might be a good package comprising VNC, RDP etc., console prompts, network paths, web forwards (mostly through a Java helper that runs from many browsers), all encrypted as the name implies, and even more in in its commercial Enterprise Edition, which has a free trial for 2 users as well.
There had been a flurry of versions (all very usable indeed) and lively discussion up until RC19, with the project even proposed for inclusion into Ubuntu, but just before the final release, suddenly not much has been heard from the project since May anymore, and http://www.3sp.com/forums/forums/show/18.page (as well as the fact that http://www.sshtools.com/showSslExplorerCommunity.do now redirects to the commercial version) gets me a bit worried - does anyone have more recent news on this promising project?
Even earlier, the concept of a world-spanning network of thought had previously been developed by other thinkers predominantly known in the French-speaking world as well (most notably dissident cleric Pierre Teilhard de Chardin) under the name of noosphere - the field of mind(s).
It never seemed to have made much of an impact in English until famously picked up and popularized by Eric S. Raymond (and in another variant referred to by John Perry Barlow as "Cyberspace, the new home of Mind"), recognizing the importance in retrospect when The Net was young.
Even though modding projects like JKK's caused 7" touchscreen add-ons to sell out within weeks when the first Eee PC came to market last year, making clear this should be a built-in feature, unfortunately it is missing from the new edition nonetheless, though the review for some reason neither discusses nor deplores its omission.
Anyone coming e.g. from a Psion or Nokia Communicator will know what a difference a touchscreen makes on small devices, and would surely have appreciated it at least as an option.
Of course it would make a major and very unwelcome difference if a program distributing life-long supplies of antibiotics and antimalaria agents (or more accurately, the knowledge and tools to make and further improve them everywhere!) with a mission statement like this switched to spreading acid and dope instead.
Command&control in structures of loosely organized cells are what they claim to be able to eradicate this way, so let (or rather, make) them try out their methods to justify their approach - in a crackdown on cybercrime. If they fail, though, we want our liberties back as we'd have no more reason to expect success from tackling an enemy that fortunately doesn't rear its ugly head all that often.
We've seen technical solutions supposedly "solving spam" fail for more than a decade, ruining access from character terminals, mobile devices, screen readers, and many other reasonable things more in the process - while making every little contribution to discussions a time-consuming issue of solving captchas, waiting for confirmation mails, and signing up everywhere, over and over again.
If all the organizations that have been eroding our privacy allegedly for fighting whatever happens to be the Horseman of the day (and want to keep the surveillance society that way) can actually catch anyone, let them prove it by putting scores of spammers, malware makers and bot herders behind bars - within a few weeks of course, because they (say) they can.
ISPs themselves would never lease their own lines based on volume rather than bandwidth - they surely know why.
And that's not even factoring in the further harm pay-as-you-go would do to the end-to-end structure of the Net...
If they think there isn't money to be made (and can't figure out the potential of giving cable/DSL subscribers free WLAN access on the road as an extra, much like Fon does), well, then, as has been proposed years ago, just let someone else do the job, such as the Baptists.
Congresscritters have to be told again that in a networked, computerized world where accurate, continuous time- and record-keeping is of the essence, it has become one of the worst ideas ever to mess around with the clocks twice a year (in particular now that everyone has about a dozen of them in various devices), at different dates and points in time all around the globe. High time indeed, literally, to put an end to this tremendous waste of resources (and everyone's time) that is Daylight Saving Time.
No wonder that from the dawn of technological history, everyone who put some thought into this kind of protection ended up with a devastating indictment of business method/software patents: Quite an insightful link (tracing the take of intellectual aces and geek heroes on IP through times and ages) has recently been posted at http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=462352&cid=22512878.
The simple fact is that in a market working according to the normal mechanisms, Compy McNewb would either have a "blank" hard disk in his shiny new computer at this point, and to choose from operating systems ranging from free to expensive, or he would have been able to find a vendor giving him a huge discount for not requiring an expensive OS even if that was conventionally factored into the retail prices on display (which in itself would be surprising).
If neither is the case, little can be inferred about the merits of Linux and its marketing, but quite a lot can be... about the efficiency of antitrust enforcement.
How about if "energy reporters" (sic) tried tapping the mysterious truths of thermodynamics instead?
And then there were IBM's OS/2-toting nuns ("my mobile") & gears supplier (to Japanese clients)... Sightings, anyone?