There are markets in resold life insurance contracts, known as death futures. I don't know if there is a liquid market in life-expectancy-derived instruments, but insurers and pension funds should be keen to hedge some of their risk from increased life expectancy.
Therefore, if you know that life expectancy is going to increase more than most people think, you should take a position in these instruments and profit over the long term (that is, as soon as everyone else realizes that you are probably correct). On the other hand, if you already had a long position in a life expectancy swap so that you make money as expectations of life expectation increase, it would make sense to talk up your own research and encourage people to believe lifespans will get longer so that your investment will increase in value.
So have you made any such bets on life expectancy a few decades from now?
One property DNA has that transistors don't is that with some enzymes and spare base pairs it can copy itself. You can dissolve lots of copies in a liquid and spray it about to have redundancy. Whether this is useful, I don't know. I doubt that pouring a test tube of synthetic DNA into the ocean and letting it reproduce itself and diffuse around the globe will replace Bittorrent any time soon.
White on black was good because of flicker. If a flickering monitor gives you a headache it will be worse the brighter the display. A white screen is the brightest possible and the worst for flicker. A black screen (provided you adjust the brightness on your monitor so black means no visible difference from switched off) produces no flicker. A black screen with some white letters minimizes the flicker while still letting you clearly distinguish text.
Black on white looks like a printed page so it's good for WYSIWYG, but a monitor is not a printed page.
Nowadays LCDs don't flicker, at least not that I can notice. But I still find white on black clear to read and stick with it out of habit.
If you are called a 'CIO' then you are pretty much guaranteed to be an idiot. WTF is an 'Information Officer' anyway, and how can you be the chief one if there are no others? What is wrong with being head of the IT department? It doesn't sound as swanky, which is surely a good thing, reminding you that IT is there to serve the rest of the business.
Re:I've seen an effect
on
A Year of GPLv3
·
· Score: 4, Informative
You might want to look at what happened to the Java Model Railroad Interface project. They used a permissive licence, only to find that someone else got a patent (of dubious validity, but nonetheless good enough to shake people down for money) which is claimed to cover their code, and then sued the original developers to stop distribution of the free version, while taking the code (as permitted by the licence) to sell a proprietary version themselves. You might want to choose a licence which gives you some defence against patent aggression, and GPLv3 is the latest and greatest in this respect.
But from other people's point of view, BSD licence (without the obnoxious advertising clause) is fine. They can still incorporate the code into GPLed programs if they wish, so there is no real licence fragmentation. Much better than one of the Yet Another Licences which end up fragmenting code into immiscible globs.
Indeed, this has little to do with counterfeiting. From the BBC news article:
Four perfume brands - Dior, Guerlain, Kenzo and Givenchy - sued for what they called "illicit sales" of their products.
They alleged that even auctions involving their legitimate perfumes were illegal, because only specialist dealers were permitted to sell them.
The court barred eBay from selling the four perfumes in future.
It will be interesting to see what Brussels has to say about this.
The idea of a chunk that 'could' be used to represent part of a copyrighted work is specious. Using XOR encryption, a copy of Madonna's latest video 'could' just be my weekly shopping list, encrypted with a particular one-time pad. Anything could be anything, and therefore the concept of 'could be' is useless.
Of course you can make the decision before you receive the final piece of information that you will use to make the decision. You decide in advance what you want to do, and then once you have the information you rationalize it however you like to support the decision you already reached.
The article was confusing, written in the normal cluebie breathless-hype style, and didn't seem to address the real issue: are AMD/ATI now shipping free Linux drivers for their hardware? Are these drivers included in Linux distributions? Do they support all the features of the hardware or are they crippled somehow? Yet another half-supported, buggy binary blob doesn't cut it - no, not even if the Windows drivers are of equally poor quality.
If you took part in Firefox Download Day, did you notice the unpleasant EULA that the Firefox installer pops up? Pretty much the same as any proprietary application. Looks like another case of taking free software and slapping a restrictive EULA on it for no reason other than the legal department think it's a good idea. I don't think what OpenSUSE does is right, and I'm glad I use Fedora, but it is certainly becoming more common.
Only if the different clients operate on the same working copy. If you have a different working copy (checkout) for each client you're fine. The repository is not auto-upgraded.
"For those of you who haven yet heard of the N-Prize, the N-Prize is a $19,636.90 (US) cash prize which can be claimed by any individual, or group, who are able to prove that they have put into orbit a small satellite. The satellite must weigh between 0.35 and 0.71 ounces, and must orbit the Earth at least 9 times. This project must be done within a budget of $1,963.67 (US)."
to distinguish $ (US) from $ (Australia), $ (Singapore), etc. Similarly £ (sterling) is not the same as £ (Egypt) or £ (Syria). It is a bit redundant in both cases though.
McGrattan boasts that 70% to 80% of the time, she can look at a chunk of computer code and tell if it was written by a man or a woman.
I can get way better accuracy than that. Just say 'it was written by a man' and more than 90% of the time you will be correct.
The article goes on to say that only 20% of programmers at Ingres are female, and most of those are in QA or localization, so this strategy would work for Ingres code too.
The British parties are formed as a party representation, if 15% of the population votes for your party you get about 15% of the Parliament seats. Here each seat is based on geography instead of political identity.
The British system is also based on geographical constituencies. It is not proportional to number of votes cast.
For example, in 2005 the Labour party won 35% of the vote but 55% of seats, making it the next government. The Conservative party got 32% of the vote and 31% of the seats, and the Liberal Democrats got 22% of the vote but only 10% of the seats. So the electoral system favours large parties and tends towards a two-party contest.
The most efficient forms of democratic government have lots of smaller parties in which none have enough power to filibuster each other. The english have a much more efficient government than we do, so do the Japanese.
These two sentences completely contradict each other. The United Kingdom has basically a two-party system, with government and opposition swapping places every decade or so. There is one small third party and the remaining parties are all regional/nationalist ones with only a handful of representatives.
As for Japan, it was ruled by the same single party from 1955 until 1993, and for much of the time since then.
If you want to see a system with lots of small parties, look at Italy. Germany is in between the two extremes, with four or five medium to large parties.
Oh, I see what you meant: if the copyright term is the author's lifetime, then a work produced by a 20 year old has more value than one produced by a 70 year old. It's a fair point but somehow people feel that it is fair for authors to exercise control over their work while they live.
I think the original formulation struck a good balance: 14 years, extensible for another 14 while the author is alive. This still has a bias towards younger authors but it's less.
That doesn't make any sense. Even with infinite copyright, if an older worker is no longer producing new material you can lay them off and still keep getting royalties from the work they produced when young. The value of employing someone depends on the work they are doing now, not what they did in the past. A fourteen year copyright term doesn't change the economics.
Of course, this applies only if you assume companies are out to get the maximum profit. If you assume that record companies and publishers are charitable trusts set up to provide employment for talented authors and look after them in their old age, it might make sense to ensure that the companies keep getting the money they so desperately need to continue the good work.
LG intended the products only to be used with Intel chipsets; otherwise, they would have charged a higher price.
That hardly seems like an argument you can make in a court of law.
Whatever the other effects of this holding may be, licensees will only be able to buy all the bundle of intellectual property rights (which slashdotters hate) or none at all. They can't only buy the portion of the bundle that they can afford.
That may be so, but it has the same ring as 'You won't be able to buy the right to just play a song once, you'll have to buy it outright or not at all', or 'It will no longer be possible to buy just the right to run software on your own PC; you will have to also get the right to resell it second-hand, or not buy it at all'. Usually with artificial monopolies like copyright and patents there are some restrictions on how the monopoly can be exercised. That's usually considered a good thing because it stops legal obstacles getting in the way of the general public and businesses, while still allowing the copyright holder or patent holder to make money, even if not quite as much money as they could make with total control over licensing.
Slashdot Mirror
'car' is not an abbreviation of 'carriage', although they share a common root.
There are markets in resold life insurance contracts, known as death futures. I don't know if there is a liquid market in life-expectancy-derived instruments, but insurers and pension funds should be keen to hedge some of their risk from increased life expectancy.
Therefore, if you know that life expectancy is going to increase more than most people think, you should take a position in these instruments and profit over the long term (that is, as soon as everyone else realizes that you are probably correct). On the other hand, if you already had a long position in a life expectancy swap so that you make money as expectations of life expectation increase, it would make sense to talk up your own research and encourage people to believe lifespans will get longer so that your investment will increase in value.
So have you made any such bets on life expectancy a few decades from now?
We'll know that the new technology has taken over when people no longer need to refer to it as a solid state 'disk'.
One property DNA has that transistors don't is that with some enzymes and spare base pairs it can copy itself. You can dissolve lots of copies in a liquid and spray it about to have redundancy. Whether this is useful, I don't know. I doubt that pouring a test tube of synthetic DNA into the ocean and letting it reproduce itself and diffuse around the globe will replace Bittorrent any time soon.
Yeah, welcome to Windows.
White on black was good because of flicker. If a flickering monitor gives you a headache it will be worse the brighter the display. A white screen is the brightest possible and the worst for flicker. A black screen (provided you adjust the brightness on your monitor so black means no visible difference from switched off) produces no flicker. A black screen with some white letters minimizes the flicker while still letting you clearly distinguish text.
Black on white looks like a printed page so it's good for WYSIWYG, but a monitor is not a printed page.
Nowadays LCDs don't flicker, at least not that I can notice. But I still find white on black clear to read and stick with it out of habit.
If you are called a 'CIO' then you are pretty much guaranteed to be an idiot. WTF is an 'Information Officer' anyway, and how can you be the chief one if there are no others? What is wrong with being head of the IT department? It doesn't sound as swanky, which is surely a good thing, reminding you that IT is there to serve the rest of the business.
You might want to look at what happened to the Java Model Railroad Interface project. They used a permissive licence, only to find that someone else got a patent (of dubious validity, but nonetheless good enough to shake people down for money) which is claimed to cover their code, and then sued the original developers to stop distribution of the free version, while taking the code (as permitted by the licence) to sell a proprietary version themselves. You might want to choose a licence which gives you some defence against patent aggression, and GPLv3 is the latest and greatest in this respect.
But from other people's point of view, BSD licence (without the obnoxious advertising clause) is fine. They can still incorporate the code into GPLed programs if they wish, so there is no real licence fragmentation. Much better than one of the Yet Another Licences which end up fragmenting code into immiscible globs.
It will be interesting to see what Brussels has to say about this.
That's the pound-force which is a different unit from the pound-mass. I'm surprised it is still used anywhere.
The idea of a chunk that 'could' be used to represent part of a copyrighted work is specious. Using XOR encryption, a copy of Madonna's latest video 'could' just be my weekly shopping list, encrypted with a particular one-time pad. Anything could be anything, and therefore the concept of 'could be' is useless.
Of course you can make the decision before you receive the final piece of information that you will use to make the decision. You decide in advance what you want to do, and then once you have the information you rationalize it however you like to support the decision you already reached.
The article was confusing, written in the normal cluebie breathless-hype style, and didn't seem to address the real issue: are AMD/ATI now shipping free Linux drivers for their hardware? Are these drivers included in Linux distributions? Do they support all the features of the hardware or are they crippled somehow? Yet another half-supported, buggy binary blob doesn't cut it - no, not even if the Windows drivers are of equally poor quality.
If you took part in Firefox Download Day, did you notice the unpleasant EULA that the Firefox installer pops up? Pretty much the same as any proprietary application. Looks like another case of taking free software and slapping a restrictive EULA on it for no reason other than the legal department think it's a good idea. I don't think what OpenSUSE does is right, and I'm glad I use Fedora, but it is certainly becoming more common.
Only if the different clients operate on the same working copy. If you have a different working copy (checkout) for each client you're fine. The repository is not auto-upgraded.
I think you mean
"For those of you who haven yet heard of the N-Prize, the N-Prize is a $19,636.90 (US) cash prize which can be claimed by any individual, or group, who are able to prove that they have put into orbit a small satellite. The satellite must weigh between 0.35 and 0.71 ounces, and must orbit the Earth at least 9 times. This project must be done within a budget of $1,963.67 (US)."
to distinguish $ (US) from $ (Australia), $ (Singapore), etc. Similarly £ (sterling) is not the same as £ (Egypt) or £ (Syria). It is a bit redundant in both cases though.
The article goes on to say that only 20% of programmers at Ingres are female, and most of those are in QA or localization, so this strategy would work for Ingres code too.
For example, in 2005 the Labour party won 35% of the vote but 55% of seats, making it the next government. The Conservative party got 32% of the vote and 31% of the seats, and the Liberal Democrats got 22% of the vote but only 10% of the seats. So the electoral system favours large parties and tends towards a two-party contest.
As for Japan, it was ruled by the same single party from 1955 until 1993, and for much of the time since then.
If you want to see a system with lots of small parties, look at Italy. Germany is in between the two extremes, with four or five medium to large parties.
He said 'opting for Mac over Windows' as if that were the choice.
Do you think that ten bits is inadequate for the green channel?
Oh, I see what you meant: if the copyright term is the author's lifetime, then a work produced by a 20 year old has more value than one produced by a 70 year old. It's a fair point but somehow people feel that it is fair for authors to exercise control over their work while they live.
I think the original formulation struck a good balance: 14 years, extensible for another 14 while the author is alive. This still has a bias towards younger authors but it's less.
That doesn't make any sense. Even with infinite copyright, if an older worker is no longer producing new material you can lay them off and still keep getting royalties from the work they produced when young. The value of employing someone depends on the work they are doing now, not what they did in the past. A fourteen year copyright term doesn't change the economics.
Of course, this applies only if you assume companies are out to get the maximum profit. If you assume that record companies and publishers are charitable trusts set up to provide employment for talented authors and look after them in their old age, it might make sense to ensure that the companies keep getting the money they so desperately need to continue the good work.