The real mistake is the political (d)elusion that spam "needs" to be tolerated in general, only because it is advocated by a few hundred sociopaths who ruin eMail for the rest of the planet's population.
Make a law with real teeth against unsolicited advertising. Simple as that. (Should have been on the books since 1994 already, though!) We probably still don't need something like "public executions of prolific spammers during the superbowl break" (yet) - just one day behind bars per UBE message sent should do to end eMail abuse.
(And don't get me started on an alleged "First Amendment right for making noise at everyone else's expense" - there's no such thing as a constitutional entitlement to writing your ads on bricks and smash them through other people's windows...)
19th century engineering wasn't really up to building the Analytical Engine. Babbage famously said, late in his life, that he would gladly give up the rest of his time if he could spend just three days 500 years in the future. Of course a man who was really out of this time was Leonardo DaVinci, who sketched a 13 digit cogwheel digital adder in the 15th century.
The most widely accepted reason for this failure is that Victorian mechanical engineering were not sufficiently developed to produce parts with sufficient precision.
(...)
By previous standards these engines were monumental in conception, size and complexity.
(...)
Babbage failed to complete the construction of any of his engines. His failures were not failures of principle but of practical accomplishment. However, the legend of his work if not its technical detail remained part of the folklore amongst those who pursued the ideal of automated calculation after his death.
(...)
The advantage of using the method of differences is that it eliminates the need for multiplication and division in the calculation of a particular class of mathematical functions called polynomials. The Difference Engine only used addition which is easier to mechanise than multiplication and division.
Manufacturing parts for his engines stretched the standards of engineering practice of the time. The intricate shapes required special jigs and tools and the Engines' mechanisms demanded hundreds of near-identical precision parts. Babbage conceived his Engine designs at a time when production techniques were in transition between craft traditions and mass-production and there was not yet the means of producing repeated parts automatically.
(...)
Babbage conducted an extensive survey of manufacturing techniques and practice by visiting manufactures and craft workshops in England and on the Continent. He concluded that the precision and intricacy required for the construction of his Engine were beyond the capabilities of the technology of the day. This study, conducted during the 1820s, formed the basis of his influential book entitled On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, published in 1832.
(...)
Babbage benefited from substantial government funding - £17,500. But work on the Engine was halted in 1833 when Clement downed tools following an unresolved dispute over compensation for moving his workshop four miles to new premises near Babbage's house.
(...)
The reasons for his failure continue to exercise historians. Factors cited include Babbage's allegedly difficult personality, unconvincing progress, disputes with his engineer, Joseph Clement, political instability and the eventual withdrawal of government funding, though the view most often repeated in histories of computing is that Babbage's failure was due to limitations in Victorian machine tool technology.
To explore the thesis that the limitation of Victorian engineering was a contributory factor in Babbage's failure to complete any of his machines the Science Museum set about constructing Babbage's Difference Engine No. 2 in 1985. Before the engine could be constructed the original design drawings were redrawn and expanded to provide the engineering detail needed for modern manufacture.
(...)
Modern techniques were used in the manufacture of repeat parts but care was taken to restrict limits of precisi
Zuse, during the late 1930s, could not know of parallel developments occurring in the English-speaking parts of the world (then at war), which he did "beat" by a couple of years, and reportly learned of Babbage only at the patent office, after "re-inventing" many of the 19th-century concepts himself.
Babbage+Lovelace probably come closest to being the inventors of IT, and were recognised as such in particular by Turing, but they never saw the actual machine running in their lifetimes. At any rate, there are many more candidates, contributors and contenders for this honor than one usually learns at school or from the news media...
Here is one very interesting article by an author not to be confused with the interviewer (as they are bearing almost the same last name):
Randell, From Analytical Engine to Electronic Digital Computer,
http://www.cs.ncl.ac.uk/research/pubs/articles/pap ers/398.pdf
Having a projector that size would make it so much easier to view all your converted, downloaded, mega-shrinked videos on the back of the student in front of you.
Just be sure to limit the brightness and keep the image moving to prevent burn-in on that poor guy... for most self-respecting technology companies (outside Redmond at least, but maybe even they run Linux in private) probably wouldn't want to recruit anyone with a Windows desktop and Start bar tattooed on his back!;-/ What is more, nobody likes to hear yells of "Alt-F4" on the beach or [censored] anywhere else...
There some two million hits for a blue fiber laser (at least some of them genuine, one should expect, and at a usable wavelength?), and that's not even counting yet another half a million in British spelling...
The last time I looked Microsoft was using over 100 Linux servers to despense their wares, patches, updates, etc... Akai (sp?) was their contractor.
Not quite (that's a consumer electronics brand), but I guess maybe "ma" as in Akamai could help...
But back on topic, this guy cannot seriously have expected to help build the future of Linux at Microsoft... They probably wanted to learn from him very much indeed about how penguins can fly, but that would quite likely have been out of about the same motivation as the Fowling & Duck Shooting Association might have for hiring an ornithologist.;-/
And if one thing should be taken from this experience, above anything else, should the fate of the universe ever be in your hands, only bother to seek the aid of girls under the age of 30.
Not from this one, however...
the girl in the red cloak and hood
...as you'd better realize that she is in fact the sentient Agent Smith.
One lesson learned from the history of armed conflict should be that the single most important reason for a party to urgently try and capture a bridge is to find a way to invade with their incoming troops and tanks.
However, even for politicians it should be plain to see that their options on software patents are just as binary as that field itself: There are questions where, as between a logical 0 and 1, there is no room for "compromise".
The first company into almost any field will fail. But if it leaves enough patents behind it, these may strangle all its successors. Patenting ideas rewards failure and makes success more difficult. You can't argue that they are needed as incentives. Bill Gates made his fortune in a world without software patents - and if that's not big enough to act as an incentive, nothing is.
...is this little gem by Eric Flint on the Baen Free Library homepage:
[P]iracy occurs when artificial restrictions in the market jack up prices
beyond what people think are reasonable. The "regulation-enforcement-more
regulation" strategy is a bottomless pit which continually recreates (on a
larger scale) the problem it supposedly solves. And that commercial effect
is often compounded by the more general damage done to social and
political freedom.
One should hope that someone (preferably high up the corporate ladder) at SONY starts to think about it:
When they make things digitally restricted and quite literally "locked up in crypto bottles" (John Perry Barlow), the fallout (especially among all the tech-savvy that should be the earliest adopters at premium prices) tends to be the one that can be seen from the start of this discussion: an immediate association with practices perceived as "evil" (why would any company in their right mind want to match Microsoft on this one?!) that only billions in advertising (if anything) can make go away again...
Once they do get over their impulse to restrict and restrain, however, and simply sell the customer what the customer wants (cf. reprogrammable Aibos, MP3/4-capable players - and remember when everyone wanted a "Walkman(TM)"?), volume, clever additional applications, and the power of a premium brand more than make up for anything DRM (and lawsuits against tinkerers) could ever have earned them - and this improves rather than taints the image they enjoy in the public eye.
Can't think of a better display for resurrecting something like the Newton or better yet, the Psion - just half as thick and at third of the weight, four times the battery life, and only a fifth of the 1990s' price...
Rather than your average pseudo-commercial list of branded devices, it's a list of improvements
...not even naming precisely (let alone linking to) the actual innovations it praises. Whether online or printed, this is a major inconvenience to the reader - but hopefully among next year's top ten, they'll discover "the deeplink".
The SUV's hard drives boot up, its censors come to life, and it's ready to roll. Here's how Stanley works. - J.D.
Not sure I wanna be censored by my car... Hopefully it won't have "auto-swearword-beepover" & DRM in the on-board audio system, too!
To some 17-year-old who loses 10 cents on every typo he makes (somewhere in an obscure German town), though, this could be a wakeup call for coding more AI into spell-checking.;-)
It is rare to see an article devoted to decades of lawsuits seriously covering this subject matter in such an enjoyable, highly readable and appropriately tongue-in-cheek way. Bear that bookmark in mind as one piece to submit on upcoming calls for contenders to the crown of "online journalism of the year" awards...
The European Parliament (which would have had a power of veto in the procedure) approved the draconian directive on first reading without much of a fight - putting 450 million people under massive surveillance with no justification whatsoever (other than the Four Horsemen of the Infocalypse).
Loopholes aplenty have already triggered plans e.g. in Poland to extend the storage even further, to a staggering 15 years (!), and remaining safeguards (if any) are not expected to last: The media industry wants access to that data, too (and a further directive is in the works, cf. the EU Legislative Observatory).
This safe, naturally occurring, unmodified virus [...] an important discovery in the treatment of 2/3 of all human cancers [...] is patented [...]
Seems there's something very wrong about this...
Nope. The links spell it out clearly(well at least the uspto one). They patented a process not a virus.
Then TFA (as quoted above) is wrong.
Do some freaking research.
Then please do follow your own advice and compare the provisions: One is wide and vague so strange things happen, the other one says (e.g. in article 52 subsection 4):
Methods for treatment of the human or animal body by surgery or therapy and diagnostic methods practised on the human or animal body shall not be regarded as inventions which are susceptible of industrial application [...]
while the full provisions of this as well as the subsequent article make an interesting read (and yet strange things happen there, too).
We've survived thousands of years without tv, tv-remotes, radio, computers, the internet, (mobile) phones, electricity, soap, toilets, toiletpaper, shoes, penicillin and the list goes on and on and on..... so that stuff is all "Massive technological overkill" (if we'd follow your line of thought) because we can survive without it.
A "massive technological overkill" is only that one step too far which shatters the achievements from a few thousand years of civilisation. Replacing remote controls by tagging everyone with transponder implants like cattle for the slaughter should therefore quite easily qualify as "massive technological overkill". Incidentally, in Forbidden Planet indeed it wasThe Id Monster which took 'em all out. Now how visionary is that for a 1956 movie?
Next thing you know, on unwrapping a DVD or your new DVR, it injects&infects you with a RFID chip and makes you a slave to the intruders taking over your life and your living room (once again, just turn on SciFi channel for a depiction - this time it's the biting black stones in Robin Cook's Invasion;-)).
The more important question is: Why can't you get one?!
For every one such machine sold at $200 in the more well-off parts of the world, they could give two more laptops away at even half price (or if need be, even another one for free) to the countries and people otherwise most unlikely to afford them even at $100.
Moreover, I don't see how it makes sense to withhold the machine (despite a focus on open source so strong that it reportedly made them reject even free MacOS) from those who may want to develop for it, "pro bono", without being part of the target audience.
So why in the world would they not sell it to everyone... probably with a less colorful lid - so it would be even more validated (and valued by the students) as something that's useful beyond school, while the green color would make everyone with a diverted "educational edition" look ridiculous at first sight in the early years) from day one?
(And please don't you say: "because it would cannibalize a market for overprized low-end laptops"!)
As of yet, they don't seem to have realized how the restriction to the educational market (and its unnecessary automated enforcement with huge potential for abuse) only add to a problem...
To overcome the potential problem of secondary "grey markets" for the machines, Professor Negroponte said the idea was that they would be so ubiquitous and prominent it would deter potential re-selling.
"I hope there would be community pressure so it does not appear in the secondary market. The technology is in it so that the machine is disabled if not connected to the network after a few days," he added.
...which could so easily be resolved in a way even cross-subsidizing the project's original aim:
Although the laptops will initially be available to government only, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is in talks with commercial manufacturers to make it available on the open market.
The connection between both issues should be obvious.
The current state of the USPTO could allow me to patent a method for buying "hot stocks" now with information from the future based on my special method for "non-temporal pipelining" [...]
Slashdot Mirror
Make a law with real teeth against unsolicited advertising. Simple as that. (Should have been on the books since 1994 already, though!) We probably still don't need something like "public executions of prolific spammers during the superbowl break" (yet) - just one day behind bars per UBE message sent should do to end eMail abuse.
(And don't get me started on an alleged "First Amendment right for making noise at everyone else's expense" - there's no such thing as a constitutional entitlement to writing your ads on bricks and smash them through other people's windows...)
Indeed...
Its price and proportions would have been staggering, but much like by the IBM-sponsored collection of Leonardo's machines at Clos Luce, the myth that it wouldn't have been feasible has now actually been dispelled for the case of Babbage as well by building a working engine from the original designs to the tolerances of their time - these are the relevant excerpts from the project documentation:
Babbage+Lovelace probably come closest to being the inventors of IT, and were recognised as such in particular by Turing, but they never saw the actual machine running in their lifetimes. At any rate, there are many more candidates, contributors and contenders for this honor than one usually learns at school or from the news media...
Here is one very interesting article by an author not to be confused with the interviewer (as they are bearing almost the same last name): Randell, From Analytical Engine to Electronic Digital Computer, http://www.cs.ncl.ac.uk/research/pubs/articles/pap ers/398.pdf
Moreover, years have gone by already since Schneider/Jenoptik demonstrated their "laser display technology" (albeit "diode-pumped solid-state", i.e. not quite as tiny...) and announced to have "developed the heart of this technology, the Red-Green-Blue laser (RGB laser), ready for mass production." [sic!]
But back on topic, this guy cannot seriously have expected to help build the future of Linux at Microsoft... They probably wanted to learn from him very much indeed about how penguins can fly, but that would quite likely have been out of about the same motivation as the Fowling & Duck Shooting Association might have for hiring an ornithologist. ;-/
Need I say more... (Follow the links, Luke! ;-))
However, even for politicians it should be plain to see that their options on software patents are just as binary as that field itself: There are questions where, as between a logical 0 and 1, there is no room for "compromise".
When they make things digitally restricted and quite literally "locked up in crypto bottles" (John Perry Barlow), the fallout (especially among all the tech-savvy that should be the earliest adopters at premium prices) tends to be the one that can be seen from the start of this discussion: an immediate association with practices perceived as "evil" (why would any company in their right mind want to match Microsoft on this one?!) that only billions in advertising (if anything) can make go away again...
Once they do get over their impulse to restrict and restrain, however, and simply sell the customer what the customer wants (cf. reprogrammable Aibos, MP3/4-capable players - and remember when everyone wanted a "Walkman(TM)"?), volume, clever additional applications, and the power of a premium brand more than make up for anything DRM (and lawsuits against tinkerers) could ever have earned them - and this improves rather than taints the image they enjoy in the public eye.
How about proposing just that to the manufacturers?
(BTW not that this would be needed in a PDA, but they do have even have color prototypes already...)
To some 17-year-old who loses 10 cents on every typo he makes (somewhere in an obscure German town), though, this could be a wakeup call for coding more AI into spell-checking. ;-)
It is rare to see an article devoted to decades of lawsuits seriously covering this subject matter in such an enjoyable, highly readable and appropriately tongue-in-cheek way.
Bear that bookmark in mind as one piece to submit on upcoming calls for contenders to the crown of "online journalism of the year" awards...
According to their own Press Service: Deal on EU data retention law; more comprehensive version in German: Ja zur Vorratsdatenspeicherung bis zu zwei Jahren - Keine Speicherung der Kommunikationsinhalte. Incidentally, even the latter "limitation" (allegedly no storage of the contents of communications) is void in particular with respect to URLs - these being identifiers for the contents transmitted anyway.
Loopholes aplenty have already triggered plans e.g. in Poland to extend the storage even further, to a staggering 15 years (!), and remaining safeguards (if any) are not expected to last: The media industry wants access to that data, too (and a further directive is in the works, cf. the EU Legislative Observatory).
http://www.uspto.gov/web/offices/pac/mpep/document s/appxl_35_U_S_C_101.htm
http://www.european-patent-office.org/legal/epc/e/ ar52.html / ar53.html
http://www.european-patent-office.org/legal/epc/e
Next thing you know, on unwrapping a DVD or your new DVR, it injects&infects you with a RFID chip and makes you a slave to the intruders taking over your life and your living room (once again, just turn on SciFi channel for a depiction - this time it's the biting black stones in Robin Cook's Invasion ;-)).
For every one such machine sold at $200 in the more well-off parts of the world, they could give two more laptops away at even half price (or if need be, even another one for free ) to the countries and people otherwise most unlikely to afford them even at $100.
Moreover, I don't see how it makes sense to withhold the machine (despite a focus on open source so strong that it reportedly made them reject even free MacOS) from those who may want to develop for it, "pro bono", without being part of the target audience.
So why in the world would they not sell it to everyone... probably with a less colorful lid - so it would be even more validated (and valued by the students) as something that's useful beyond school, while the green color would make everyone with a diverted "educational edition" look ridiculous at first sight in the early years) from day one?
(And please don't you say: "because it would cannibalize a market for overprized low-end laptops"!)
As of yet, they don't seem to have realized how the restriction to the educational market (and its unnecessary automated enforcement with huge potential for abuse) only add to a problem...