I see what you mean, and I agree in some cases that patents are bad. Patents for obvious things, especially, bother me a great deal (Amazon 1-click checkout, common commerce methods ported to the web getting patents, etc).
However, I'm not sure that I'd go so far as to say anything mathematical shouldn't be patentable. In particular, this is an application of mathematics, not just pure math. I don't think you can come up with a new way to solve a pure math problem, or a new way of expressing an equation, and get a patent on it. You have to have an application of some sort. And that's not neccessarily a bad thing (nor necessarily a good thing either; I concede that a key element in a good patent system is a clueful patent office and patent examiners, which the US seems to be lacking.)
We could argue that ECC is a discovery rather than an invention just as easily as we can for any other technological advancement. In my opinion, it shouldn't matter which it is (because you can always argue the opposite, and being a philosophical argument, we lack a sufficiently omniscient arbiter to make the final call for us), rather patents should be awarded based on the individual merit of the invention or discovery. Whether you invent or discover (even by chance) shouldn't matter as much as how obvious, useful, or clever the invention or discovery is. i.e. Edison just kept trying every substance he could find until he discovered that tungsten made for a decent lamp filament. Does that mean Edison didn't deserve a patent for the light bulb?
Here is a list of some recent US patents of mathematics. Some are clearly nonsense that don't deserve a patent. Some, on the other hand, might be clever, useful applications that aren't obvious. I don't think we can throw them all out just because they have a mathematic basis.
Recent U.S. patents related to Mathematical Logic:
6,241,672: Method and apparatus for optically imaging solid tumor tissue
6,236,435: Apparatus and method for displaying and demonstrating a camcorder
6,233,480: Methods and apparatus for optically imaging neuronal tissue and activity
6,226,296: Metropolitan area network switching system and method of operation thereof
6,196,226: Methods and apparatus for optically imaging neuronal tissue and activity
6,161,031: Optical imaging methods
6,152,684: Method for operation of hydraulic turbine
6,119,012: Method and system for dynamically and periodically updating mobile station location data in a telecommunications network
6,081,921: Bit insertion approach to convolutional encoding
6,003,765: Electronic cash implementing method with a surveillance institution, and user apparatus and surveillance institution apparatus for implementing the same
5,999,182: Computational architecture for reasoning involving extensible graphical representations
5,995,624: Bilateral authentication and information encryption token system and method
5,976,825: Drug screening process
5,963,739: Method for verifying the total correctness of a program with mutually recursive procedures
5,924,128: Pseudo zero cycle address generator and fast memory access
5,910,898: Circuit design methods and tools
5,902,732: Drug screening process measuring changes in cell volume
5,877,967: Site and workspaces layout process employing MDS and a PDI formula in which density is calculated using a unit lattice superposed over circumscribing-convex-hulls
5,867,649: Dance/multitude concurrent computation
5,860,154: Method and apparatus for calculating effective memory addresses
5,845,639: Optical imaging methods
5,841,674: Circuit design methods and tools
5,787,432: Method and apparatus for the generation, manipulation and display of data structures
5,778,150: Flexible procedural attachment to situate reasoning systems
5,768,381: Apparatus for key distribution in an encryption system
5,758,152: Method and apparatus for the generat
Who the hell in their right mind is going to license this from the NSA?
Uh, anyone who wants to do business with or exchange sensitive info (read: pretty much anything) with the NSA. If that's you, you'll most likely have to use this to talk to them about anything important. So, it seems logical that they've acquired the ability to grant sub-licenses -- that way you can be provided with tools to encrypt and decrypt communication that works with the NSA-specific implemntation of this patented ECC concept.
Maybe you were thinking that the NSA is going to release commercial products based on ECC? I don't think so. They'll probably leave that to Certicom and just use the licensed technology for thier own use rather than resale.
I'll take that bet aginst you. The NSA didn't demand the source code, they wrote the source code. Note that NSA is not buying some software tool, they are licensing a patented encryption concept. The NSA will implement this ECC encryption technology in many different ways, on their own:
This agreement will give the NSA a nonexclusive, worldwide license with the right to grant sublicenses of MQV-based ECC covered by many of Certicom's US patents and applications and corresponding foreign rights in a limited field of use. The field of use is restricted to implementations of ECC that are over GF(p), where p is a prime greater than 2256.
Being the NSA doesn't guarantee you can develop the best technology in every security-related area. If another company or research institute happens to come up with a technology that's remarkably better than anything else like it and patent it first (such as the ECC mentioned in the article), the NSA should and does license it. That is, they buy the the rights to use the technology that someone else spent a lot of time and effort to develop (maybe even more than the NSA put forth in this field) .
It's not like the NSA is buying a binary encryption software package they can't decompile, or shipping the secrets up to Canada for encrypting. This isn't a security concern. The NSA bought the concept of ECC, and Certicom deserves to be paid fairly for it. The NSA can do anything they want with ECC now, including grant sub-licenses without approvasl from Certicom. The only restriction is to require a minimum level of ecryption field size (encryption strength), which isn't a problem for NSA:
This agreement will give the NSA a nonexclusive, worldwide license with the right to grant sublicenses of MQV-based ECC covered by many of Certicom's US patents and applications and corresponding foreign rights in a limited field of use. The field of use is restricted to implementations of ECC that are over GF(p), where p is a prime greater than 2256.
The NSA practically can't not follow the license -- it's world-wide and allows granting sub-licenses, and is only restricted to use above a certain security level. The NSA would have to use relatively insecure implementations of the technology to violate the license, and I think that's unlikely:
Certicom Corp. (TSX: CIC), a leading provider of wireless security solutions, today announced that the National Security Agency (NSA) in Maryland has purchased extensive licensing rights to Certicom's MQV-based Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) intellectual property. ECC is becoming a crucial technology for protecting national security information.
This agreement will give the NSA a nonexclusive, worldwide license with the right to grant sublicenses of MQV-based ECC covered by many of Certicom's US patents and applications and corresponding foreign rights in a limited field of use. The field of use is restricted to implementations of ECC that are over GF(p), where p is a prime greater than 2256. Outside the field of use, Certicom will retain all rights to the technology for other industries that require the same levels of security, including state and local government agencies. Certicom will continue its policy of making its intellectual property available to implementers of ECC under normal commercial terms on a non discriminatory basis.
The problem there is that how does the company stay in business if they have to maintain a server for thousands of players to play on but their only revenue stream is the initial purchase?
How about by selling in-game items (maybe even skills and other types of benefits) for real cash?
Some of those with a life and a job who can't spend 80 hours/week grinding away in the game might fork over $5 for that +1 Sword of Defenestration they've had their eye on.
Then, of course, it follow that players should also be able to sell items to each other, for real money, on ebay or maybe even on an auction site maintained by the game developer, who would then get a little cut of the selling price of the items bought from other players.
Someone will shake things up with new ideas like this, and if they succeed in implementing it right, I might actually play one of these games for longer than the trial period.
I think the best way to insure these machines aren't used nefariously is to do rigorous exit polling and make sure your candidate (whoever he/she may be) suceeds by a margin that can't be fudged by a few hundred votes one way or another.
So, let me see if I got this right: to curb cheating in the existing poll, we add another poll? Oh, and make sure there are no close races.
How does the first help at all, and how do we do the second, exactly?
No it wasn't. Your point was that the original version contained the phrase "under god"
How many posts are you going waste trying to tell me what my point was? I guess as long as I keep feeding your trolly self. I'm going to teach you something here, so read carefully:
If there are situations where someone must say the pledge, such as when becoming a naturalized citizen, then there should be an alternate, godless version.
That, friend, was my point. It was a quote -- the most important part even -- of the post you've been haranguing me about for the last two days. Anything else you read my the post, correct or not, has no bearing on this point. You know, you're either incredibly vain or asshat stupid to argue with me about what point I wanted to make. I really thought you were just slow at first, but now I see you're both slow and and an annoying troll.
Listen kid, if you'd read anything I wrote instead of wasting my time mounting your moronic tirade, you'd have seen me say "I'm not a pledge expert -- that info came in while I was posting. Thank you for the info." And again, oh reading-comprehension-challenged one, no matter how many times you ignorantly insist otherwise, that was not my point -- my point was that we need a godless version, and whether or not the original was or was not godless doesn't change that. You're either trolling, or really, really stupid. Or both.
See that yet? And if that's not clear enough for you: I was wrong about the "original" pledge including god. So, did you come yet? I hope so, because this is getting sickening. Why do you care so much about an ancillary, non-crucial statement? Did someone piss on your cornflakes, or are you always this much of an asshole?
Take your bullshit father-fantasy and your little life lesson to someone who needs it or cares. And while you're at it, note that people will think less of you for acting like a pedantic ass and failing to listen to a valid point because you can't let go of the thrill you get from dwelling on the mistakes of others.
Sigh. You still didn't read it. I'm rather sorry I mentioned "original" at all now, since my (+5 Insightful, BTW) point in no way depended on it. The point, for the last time, is that, no matter whether the original mentions god or not, the current one does, and we make some people say it, so there should be one they can say without god in it.
What is so hard to understand about that? Why do you insist on dwelling on an irrelevant aside? Nevermind, I don't care. Fuck off.
I'm not sure what sort of test equipment you mean, but it most likely included more vacuum tubes and big wires than integrated circuits implanted on semiconductors with tiny little wires susceptible to electromigration.
After all, the transistor wasn't invented until 1956, and the integrated circuit wasn't developed until 1958 and 1959 (which is what we're talking about wearing out here), and wasn't in widespread use for another few years. It's unlikely that any test equipment from 195x includes even a single integrated circuit. I'd be interested to hear of any exceptions.
The Apple II was introduced in 1977, that's less than 30 years. And, the chips in that are very old process, with very wide, thick wires and and operating frequency low enough to completely ignore electromigration forever.
So, I'm not sure how this is relevant, but it seems to reinformce my point, so thatnk, not that it needed reinforcing.
That's easy? Sounds like a PITA to me. Take a look at DVarchive - you can make any PC on your LAN look like another PVR box, stream shows from the PVR to the PC, copy the shows either direction, etc.
Now that's easy, but of course it only works with replayTV.
No, commercial-skipping with a TiVO is manual (and you have to enter a code to enable the "30-second skip" button, otherwise you have to fast-forward an stop at the right time -- not hard to learn, and effective once you do, but not automatic).
ReplayTV, on the other hand, does have automatic commercial-skip on playback (it still records the commercials, but it will automatically skip over them when playing back, if you want it to).
Of course, replay had some financial trouble, partly because of lawsuits over this commercial skip feature (and the internet-show-sharing function), and ended up being bought up by Denon/Marantz (D&M), who announced that these cool features may not be available in new replayTV models. So, if you want no commercials, buy a series 5xxx replaytv while you still can.
And Yes, it tells you how to get the shows off of your TiVo onto your computer's hard drive.
This is vague -- last I heard getting shows from a TiVo to a PC was a pain, and streaming recorded shows to a PC was impossible. Does anyone know if this problem has been solved yet, and if so please point me to a relevant tool such as DVArchive for the replayTV series (which does all of the above).
And please don't start the TiVO/Replay religious war here; I'm not trolling for it, I'm really curious. I'm in the market for another PVR, and while I'm happy with the replay, I might try a TiVo if I can stream shows to a PC (which, in my home drives the A/V input which is injected to cable channel 80, so I can see anything on any TV).
Right, and the standard in the ASIC industry is a 40 year lifetime minimum before electromigration will lead to failure in normal use (which means yo keep the chip in the allowed operating temperature range, regardless of if it's overclocked or not). That's 40 years. What hardware were you using 40 years ago?
Point is, even running chips hot, to a degree, (pun not intended) doesn't reduce their lifetime enough to worry.
Some of the other points, such as increased power use, and accelerated failure of mechanical components such as hard drives, are valid. But chip wear-out is a non issue -- you'd have to heat your chip past the point of system stability to get the em lifetime down low enough to care about it.
No, I don't care, and besides, you just learned all that from reading the replies to my original post, which were all redundant repetitions of posts made while I was making my original post. Which, as you'd know had you bothered to read it before posting, included the main point that we need a godless version of the pledge.
Somehow, you and about a half-dozen other idiots read just enough of my post to confuse youreselves into thinking I was pro-god-pledge, which I'm not.
What's scary is your lack of reading comprehension. And the incredible number of redundant posts in this thread (yours included) not modded thusly.
Hey, believe it or not, not all religions belive in a higher power of some kind! Shinto and Buddhism (most sects) for example. So, in trying to show the universal appeal and genericity of the "something better than us" and how, obviously, that should offend no one, you completely failed to note the religions that don't buy into the concept at all. So, your point, while true in most Western religions, is moot.
Some may argue that kids don't have to say the pledge, but in practice, that's just not true in many (most? all?) cases.
I meant:
Some may argue that kids are not really required to say the pledge, but in practice, that's just not true in many (most? all?) cases.
Here's a case where the distinction between have to and required to is important. I'm sorry for the confusion.
I do think kids should say something like the pledge (sans god, of course), and the bill of rights is too long (maybe a summary of it? I'm open to ideas . . . ), but I'm not inflexible on this. The point, as you surmised, is to inculcate the little vacuum-heads with the principles of their nation. I think it would be OK to make it something more relvant or understandable than the pledge, but I'm not totally against the pledge (again, sans-god version please). Though the youngest may not get it at first, the do memorize it, and eventually, one day, they realize what it means and then they understand why they've been saying it, and that ubiquitious epiphany is worth all the hassle, IMHO.
if more than 50% of this country believe in God, it *IS* a country "under God"--even if some citizens don't share the belief
Wh-wh-what? No, my friend, in that case it's a country with some percentage of citizens greater than 50% (but less than 100%) who consider themselves "under god." It's an important distinction. You don't have to agree with Bush (even if more than 50% of everyone does), and you don't have to be "under god".
Freedom OF religion is not freedom FROM religion. You have no right to not hear God mentioned in everyday life. Get used to it.
You are out of your mind. Yes the fuck it is. It's freedom from any specific religion being endorsed by the state. And I do have a right not to hear god mentioned by the local, state, or federal governments. Don't believe me? Ask the Supreme Court of this fine country.
Newsflash: some religions do not worship the same gods as others, and some worship no god at all. That's all perfectly cool in the US, and no government org or officer has the right to do anything that advocates any one religion. I think you should get used to that, because that is truly the way it is.
Anyone that cannot see the difference between how "under God" affects the godless and slavery affected the blacks is not one that really has anything valid to argue.
And you are short-sighted and weak of mind. "under god" excludes and alienates those who do not believe in god, and at least implicitly gives Xtians (who are already dangerously self-righteous in many cases) justification for government-approved ostracizing of non-Xtians. It's OK to preach your intolerance in your church or at the local street-corner, but keep it the fuck out of government.
There are many ways conscious objectors to these words can resolve this without having to go pissing and moaning to the courts.
My point is wholly unaffected; you apparently did not read my post. The "original", given the new info I just learned, includes no god reference, so "the original is still the original." I have no problem with that -- let's turn it back to the way it was, before the god nonsense. That wasn't my point, but I'm sorry if my post was unclear.
My point, risking redundancy, was that regardless of what's "original", there must be a "godless" version available for cases where (1) someone has to say the pledge for some reason and (2) that someone doesn't want to refer to god or gods or goddesses or anything similar.
That point stands, regardless of what the original was.
It's not the original. The original pledge had no reference to god,
as has been said several times already, it was added in the 1950s.
I'm not a pledge expert -- that info came in while I was posting. Thank you for the info.
That's a fine theory, if not for the fact that that's not the original. The phrase "under God" was added during the 50s as part of McCarthyism's attack on godless communism. So, given that fact, I assume that you will be supporting the return of the Pledge to it's "original" godless version?
Again, I didn't know that, and yes, I do absolutely support the return of the pledge to its original godless version. More importantly, though (and this was my original point, and it stands), whether or not the "official" pledge becomes godless or not, there needs to be a godless version available for whatever purposes require a pledge today.
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I see what you mean, and I agree in some cases that patents are bad. Patents for obvious things, especially, bother me a great deal (Amazon 1-click checkout, common commerce methods ported to the web getting patents, etc).
However, I'm not sure that I'd go so far as to say anything mathematical shouldn't be patentable. In particular, this is an application of mathematics, not just pure math. I don't think you can come up with a new way to solve a pure math problem, or a new way of expressing an equation, and get a patent on it. You have to have an application of some sort. And that's not neccessarily a bad thing (nor necessarily a good thing either; I concede that a key element in a good patent system is a clueful patent office and patent examiners, which the US seems to be lacking.)
We could argue that ECC is a discovery rather than an invention just as easily as we can for any other technological advancement. In my opinion, it shouldn't matter which it is (because you can always argue the opposite, and being a philosophical argument, we lack a sufficiently omniscient arbiter to make the final call for us), rather patents should be awarded based on the individual merit of the invention or discovery. Whether you invent or discover (even by chance) shouldn't matter as much as how obvious, useful, or clever the invention or discovery is. i.e. Edison just kept trying every substance he could find until he discovered that tungsten made for a decent lamp filament. Does that mean Edison didn't deserve a patent for the light bulb?
Here is a list of some recent US patents of mathematics. Some are clearly nonsense that don't deserve a patent. Some, on the other hand, might be clever, useful applications that aren't obvious. I don't think we can throw them all out just because they have a mathematic basis.
Recent U.S. patents related to Mathematical Logic:
6,241,672: Method and apparatus for optically imaging solid tumor tissue
6,236,435: Apparatus and method for displaying and demonstrating a camcorder
6,233,480: Methods and apparatus for optically imaging neuronal tissue and activity
6,226,296: Metropolitan area network switching system and method of operation thereof
6,196,226: Methods and apparatus for optically imaging neuronal tissue and activity
6,161,031: Optical imaging methods
6,152,684: Method for operation of hydraulic turbine
6,119,012: Method and system for dynamically and periodically updating mobile station location data in a telecommunications network
6,081,921: Bit insertion approach to convolutional encoding
6,003,765: Electronic cash implementing method with a surveillance institution, and user apparatus and surveillance institution apparatus for implementing the same
5,999,182: Computational architecture for reasoning involving extensible graphical representations
5,995,624: Bilateral authentication and information encryption token system and method
5,976,825: Drug screening process
5,963,739: Method for verifying the total correctness of a program with mutually recursive procedures
5,924,128: Pseudo zero cycle address generator and fast memory access
5,910,898: Circuit design methods and tools
5,902,732: Drug screening process measuring changes in cell volume
5,877,967: Site and workspaces layout process employing MDS and a PDI formula in which density is calculated using a unit lattice superposed over circumscribing-convex-hulls
5,867,649: Dance/multitude concurrent computation
5,860,154: Method and apparatus for calculating effective memory addresses
5,845,639: Optical imaging methods
5,841,674: Circuit design methods and tools
5,787,432: Method and apparatus for the generation, manipulation and display of data structures
5,778,150: Flexible procedural attachment to situate reasoning systems
5,768,381: Apparatus for key distribution in an encryption system
5,758,152: Method and apparatus for the generat
Who the hell in their right mind is going to license this from the NSA?
Uh, anyone who wants to do business with or exchange sensitive info (read: pretty much anything) with the NSA. If that's you, you'll most likely have to use this to talk to them about anything important. So, it seems logical that they've acquired the ability to grant sub-licenses -- that way you can be provided with tools to encrypt and decrypt communication that works with the NSA-specific implemntation of this patented ECC concept.
Maybe you were thinking that the NSA is going to release commercial products based on ECC? I don't think so. They'll probably leave that to Certicom and just use the licensed technology for thier own use rather than resale.
I'll take that bet aginst you. The NSA didn't demand the source code, they wrote the source code. Note that NSA is not buying some software tool, they are licensing a patented encryption concept. The NSA will implement this ECC encryption technology in many different ways, on their own:
This agreement will give the NSA a nonexclusive, worldwide license with the right to grant sublicenses of MQV-based ECC covered by many of Certicom's US patents and applications and corresponding foreign rights in a limited field of use. The field of use is restricted to implementations of ECC that are over GF(p), where p is a prime greater than 2256.
Being the NSA doesn't guarantee you can develop the best technology in every security-related area. If another company or research institute happens to come up with a technology that's remarkably better than anything else like it and patent it first (such as the ECC mentioned in the article), the NSA should and does license it. That is, they buy the the rights to use the technology that someone else spent a lot of time and effort to develop (maybe even more than the NSA put forth in this field) .
It's not like the NSA is buying a binary encryption software package they can't decompile, or shipping the secrets up to Canada for encrypting. This isn't a security concern. The NSA bought the concept of ECC, and Certicom deserves to be paid fairly for it. The NSA can do anything they want with ECC now, including grant sub-licenses without approvasl from Certicom. The only restriction is to require a minimum level of ecryption field size (encryption strength), which isn't a problem for NSA:
This agreement will give the NSA a nonexclusive, worldwide license with the right to grant sublicenses of MQV-based ECC covered by many of Certicom's US patents and applications and corresponding foreign rights in a limited field of use. The field of use is restricted to implementations of ECC that are over GF(p), where p is a prime greater than 2256.
The NSA practically can't not follow the license -- it's world-wide and allows granting sub-licenses, and is only restricted to use above a certain security level. The NSA would have to use relatively insecure implementations of the technology to violate the license, and I think that's unlikely:
Certicom Corp. (TSX: CIC), a leading provider of wireless security solutions, today announced that the National Security Agency (NSA) in Maryland has purchased extensive licensing rights to Certicom's MQV-based Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) intellectual property. ECC is becoming a crucial technology for protecting national security information.
This agreement will give the NSA a nonexclusive, worldwide license with the right to grant sublicenses of MQV-based ECC covered by many of Certicom's US patents and applications and corresponding foreign rights in a limited field of use. The field of use is restricted to implementations of ECC that are over GF(p), where p is a prime greater than 2256. Outside the field of use, Certicom will retain all rights to the technology for other industries that require the same levels of security, including state and local government agencies. Certicom will continue its policy of making its intellectual property available to implementers of ECC under normal commercial terms on a non discriminatory basis.
The problem there is that how does the company stay in business if they have to maintain a server for thousands of players to play on but their only revenue stream is the initial purchase?
How about by selling in-game items (maybe even skills and other types of benefits) for real cash?
Some of those with a life and a job who can't spend 80 hours/week grinding away in the game might fork over $5 for that +1 Sword of Defenestration they've had their eye on.
Then, of course, it follow that players should also be able to sell items to each other, for real money, on ebay or maybe even on an auction site maintained by the game developer, who would then get a little cut of the selling price of the items bought from other players.
Someone will shake things up with new ideas like this, and if they succeed in implementing it right, I might actually play one of these games for longer than the trial period.
I think the best way to insure these machines aren't used nefariously is to do rigorous exit polling and make sure your candidate (whoever he/she may be) suceeds by a margin that can't be fudged by a few hundred votes one way or another.
So, let me see if I got this right: to curb cheating in the existing poll, we add another poll? Oh, and make sure there are no close races.
How does the first help at all, and how do we do the second, exactly?
RTFA: it's waterproof. If water falling in those "spaces" won't kill it, your pop-tart crumbs won't either.
No it wasn't. Your point was that the original version contained the phrase "under god"
How many posts are you going waste trying to tell me what my point was? I guess as long as I keep feeding your trolly self. I'm going to teach you something here, so read carefully:
If there are situations where someone must say the pledge, such as when becoming a naturalized citizen, then there should be an alternate, godless version.
That, friend, was my point. It was a quote -- the most important part even -- of the post you've been haranguing me about for the last two days. Anything else you read my the post, correct or not, has no bearing on this point. You know, you're either incredibly vain or asshat stupid to argue with me about what point I wanted to make. I really thought you were just slow at first, but now I see you're both slow and and an annoying troll.
Please, STFU; I'm tired of your trolling now.
Listen kid, if you'd read anything I wrote instead of wasting my time mounting your moronic tirade, you'd have seen me say "I'm not a pledge expert -- that info came in while I was posting. Thank you for the info." And again, oh reading-comprehension-challenged one, no matter how many times you ignorantly insist otherwise, that was not my point -- my point was that we need a godless version, and whether or not the original was or was not godless doesn't change that. You're either trolling, or really, really stupid. Or both.
See that yet? And if that's not clear enough for you: I was wrong about the "original" pledge including god. So, did you come yet? I hope so, because this is getting sickening. Why do you care so much about an ancillary, non-crucial statement? Did someone piss on your cornflakes, or are you always this much of an asshole?
Take your bullshit father-fantasy and your little life lesson to someone who needs it or cares. And while you're at it, note that people will think less of you for acting like a pedantic ass and failing to listen to a valid point because you can't let go of the thrill you get from dwelling on the mistakes of others.
Go away troll.
Sigh. You still didn't read it. I'm rather sorry I mentioned "original" at all now, since my (+5 Insightful, BTW) point in no way depended on it. The point, for the last time, is that, no matter whether the original mentions god or not, the current one does, and we make some people say it, so there should be one they can say without god in it.
What is so hard to understand about that? Why do you insist on dwelling on an irrelevant aside? Nevermind, I don't care. Fuck off.
I'm not sure what sort of test equipment you mean, but it most likely included more vacuum tubes and big wires than integrated circuits implanted on semiconductors with tiny little wires susceptible to electromigration.
After all, the transistor wasn't invented until 1956, and the integrated circuit wasn't developed until 1958 and 1959 (which is what we're talking about wearing out here), and wasn't in widespread use for another few years. It's unlikely that any test equipment from 195x includes even a single integrated circuit. I'd be interested to hear of any exceptions.
The Apple II was introduced in 1977, that's less than 30 years. And, the chips in that are very old process, with very wide, thick wires and and operating frequency low enough to completely ignore electromigration forever.
So, I'm not sure how this is relevant, but it seems to reinformce my point, so thatnk, not that it needed reinforcing.
Thanks for the info; I'll look into TyServer/client.
I assume there's still no way to stream shows from a TiVO (as in begin viewing immediately, as opposed to downloading first)?
That's easy? Sounds like a PITA to me. Take a look at DVarchive - you can make any PC on your LAN look like another PVR box, stream shows from the PVR to the PC, copy the shows either direction, etc.
Now that's easy, but of course it only works with replayTV.
No, commercial-skipping with a TiVO is manual (and you have to enter a code to enable the "30-second skip" button, otherwise you have to fast-forward an stop at the right time -- not hard to learn, and effective once you do, but not automatic).
ReplayTV, on the other hand, does have automatic commercial-skip on playback (it still records the commercials, but it will automatically skip over them when playing back, if you want it to).
Of course, replay had some financial trouble, partly because of lawsuits over this commercial skip feature (and the internet-show-sharing function), and ended up being bought up by Denon/Marantz (D&M), who announced that these cool features may not be available in new replayTV models. So, if you want no commercials, buy a series 5xxx replaytv while you still can.
And Yes, it tells you how to get the shows off of your TiVo onto your computer's hard drive.
This is vague -- last I heard getting shows from a TiVo to a PC was a pain, and streaming recorded shows to a PC was impossible. Does anyone know if this problem has been solved yet, and if so please point me to a relevant tool such as DVArchive for the replayTV series (which does all of the above).
And please don't start the TiVO/Replay religious war here; I'm not trolling for it, I'm really curious. I'm in the market for another PVR, and while I'm happy with the replay, I might try a TiVo if I can stream shows to a PC (which, in my home drives the A/V input which is injected to cable channel 80, so I can see anything on any TV).
Oh, where do you get that? At NEC, LSI, IBM, Toshiba, and Mitsubishi, it's 40, and has been so from 0.5um to 90nm, in my experience. Maybe older tech?
It's not new. Where have you been? Try one of those new-fangled dictionary thingies, they're chock full of stuff like that:
/-shn&l, -sh&-n&l/ adjective
informational
there's also an adverb version:
informationally adverb
Wow, eh? You learned something new today!
Right, and the standard in the ASIC industry is a 40 year lifetime minimum before electromigration will lead to failure in normal use (which means yo keep the chip in the allowed operating temperature range, regardless of if it's overclocked or not). That's 40 years. What hardware were you using 40 years ago?
Point is, even running chips hot, to a degree, (pun not intended) doesn't reduce their lifetime enough to worry.
Some of the other points, such as increased power use, and accelerated failure of mechanical components such as hard drives, are valid. But chip wear-out is a non issue -- you'd have to heat your chip past the point of system stability to get the em lifetime down low enough to care about it.
No, I don't care, and besides, you just learned all that from reading the replies to my original post, which were all redundant repetitions of posts made while I was making my original post. Which, as you'd know had you bothered to read it before posting, included the main point that we need a godless version of the pledge.
Somehow, you and about a half-dozen other idiots read just enough of my post to confuse youreselves into thinking I was pro-god-pledge, which I'm not.
What's scary is your lack of reading comprehension. And the incredible number of redundant posts in this thread (yours included) not modded thusly.
Hey, believe it or not, not all religions belive in a higher power of some kind! Shinto and Buddhism (most sects) for example. So, in trying to show the universal appeal and genericity of the "something better than us" and how, obviously, that should offend no one, you completely failed to note the religions that don't buy into the concept at all. So, your point, while true in most Western religions, is moot.
Thanks for playing, though!
When I said:
Some may argue that kids don't have to say the pledge, but in practice, that's just not true in many (most? all?) cases.
I meant:
Some may argue that kids are not really required to say the pledge, but in practice, that's just not true in many (most? all?) cases.
Here's a case where the distinction between have to and required to is important. I'm sorry for the confusion.
I do think kids should say something like the pledge (sans god, of course), and the bill of rights is too long (maybe a summary of it? I'm open to ideas . . . ), but I'm not inflexible on this. The point, as you surmised, is to inculcate the little vacuum-heads with the principles of their nation. I think it would be OK to make it something more relvant or understandable than the pledge, but I'm not totally against the pledge (again, sans-god version please). Though the youngest may not get it at first, the do memorize it, and eventually, one day, they realize what it means and then they understand why they've been saying it, and that ubiquitious epiphany is worth all the hassle, IMHO.
if more than 50% of this country believe in God, it *IS* a country "under God"--even if some citizens don't share the belief
Wh-wh-what? No, my friend, in that case it's a country with some percentage of citizens greater than 50% (but less than 100%) who consider themselves "under god." It's an important distinction. You don't have to agree with Bush (even if more than 50% of everyone does), and you don't have to be "under god".
Freedom OF religion is not freedom FROM religion. You have no right to not hear God mentioned in everyday life. Get used to it.
You are out of your mind. Yes the fuck it is. It's freedom from any specific religion being endorsed by the state. And I do have a right not to hear god mentioned by the local, state, or federal governments. Don't believe me? Ask the Supreme Court of this fine country.
Newsflash: some religions do not worship the same gods as others, and some worship no god at all. That's all perfectly cool in the US, and no government org or officer has the right to do anything that advocates any one religion. I think you should get used to that, because that is truly the way it is.
Anyone that cannot see the difference between how "under God" affects the godless and slavery affected the blacks is not one that really has anything valid to argue.
And you are short-sighted and weak of mind. "under god" excludes and alienates those who do not believe in god, and at least implicitly gives Xtians (who are already dangerously self-righteous in many cases) justification for government-approved ostracizing of non-Xtians. It's OK to preach your intolerance in your church or at the local street-corner, but keep it the fuck out of government.
There are many ways conscious objectors to these words can resolve this without having to go pissing and moaning to the courts.
Such as?
My point is wholly unaffected; you apparently did not read my post. The "original", given the new info I just learned, includes no god reference, so "the original is still the original." I have no problem with that -- let's turn it back to the way it was, before the god nonsense. That wasn't my point, but I'm sorry if my post was unclear.
My point, risking redundancy, was that regardless of what's "original", there must be a "godless" version available for cases where (1) someone has to say the pledge for some reason and (2) that someone doesn't want to refer to god or gods or goddesses or anything similar.
That point stands, regardless of what the original was.
It's not the original. The original pledge had no reference to god, as has been said several times already, it was added in the 1950s.
I'm not a pledge expert -- that info came in while I was posting. Thank you for the info.
That's a fine theory, if not for the fact that that's not the original. The phrase "under God" was added during the 50s as part of McCarthyism's attack on godless communism. So, given that fact, I assume that you will be supporting the return of the Pledge to it's "original" godless version?
Again, I didn't know that, and yes, I do absolutely support the return of the pledge to its original godless version. More importantly, though (and this was my original point, and it stands), whether or not the "official" pledge becomes godless or not, there needs to be a godless version available for whatever purposes require a pledge today.