Developing sentience in humans (or more precisely, Transhumans) using machine intelligence is where it's going.
But, yes, humans are a dead end - if you count being Transhuman as an "end".
Actually, one could say that the distinction between living and non-living - biological and machine - will be removed with the ascension of Transhumans, since they will have no biological components of the sort present in planetary entities, but will have all of the adaptability of biological entities.
I understand in the deeper realms of biology, the distinction between life and non-life is purely a matter of perspective and technology anyway, these days. If it interacts with its environment in some meaningful way, it's alive; if it doesn't, it isn't.
I figured you weren't attacking the band. My point in citing the stats was that the band is more than capable of being considered strictly on musical and entertainment quality grounds. A lot of people don't like their stuff because it's "pop", not "serious" rock (although some of their stuff is very serious, based as it is on the death of their mother five years ago.) They're always accused of not having enough "attitude."
It's interesting you mention the Beatles. The "British Invasion" was sort of considered exactly that. It was more of "prison break-out", I think, in that it allowed foreign bands to finally penetrate the insular US market and stop being confined to their own countries.
U2 did the same for Ireland, although their Irish nature has never been an issue since their music was entirely serious rock.
The same with Oasis - a couple of Irish lads, who are known for being British more than Irish, so much so that their official Web site doesn't seem to even mention their background. They also got their rep for being hardcore rockers by doing various stupid shit that got them arrested. (However, Andrea and Sharon Corr reckon the Corrs could easily drink them under the table!) That's how bands get known and the Corrs are NOT known for doing anything stupid.
It's interesting that right now, a group of female singers called "Celtic Women" is getting a lot of attention in the US, and Irish bands are doing very well in a lot of different places in the world. The Corrs did their current album of traditional Irish music specifically because Caroline brought up the fact that everywhere they went, people asked them to do more Irish tunes. It's also based on the song book kept by their mother, so there's a sentimental element as well.
You're right about presence. The US is very provincial. Actually, I am, too, I rarely listen to "foreign" music unless I hear something by accident that sounds good. If a group doesn't start in the US and get known here first, they tend not to do well here.
Also, as I mentioned before, if a group doesn't spend enough time here (which is partly a financial issue having to do with the label's willingness to promote), it's hard to get top billing. I've long thought the Corrs should come to the states for two or three weeks out of every month for a year and just "work" the country. Hit all the major metro areas, get on the morning TV and radio shows in each city, do a concert, move on to the next one. Their tour last year was supposed to hit 24 cities, but eight of them got cancelled - and they hadn't been to the US in four years at that point.
But at this point, they're probably too big elsewhere and too settled with financial success to want to take on that kind of promotion. Some of the fans even prefer it that way, saying that too much success would make the venues larger and more impersonal and limit access to the band, which is very good at existing concerts right now.
You're right about the state of music in the US in general. I listened to music all my life, but today I've almost no music from "outside" - all the stuff on my hard drive is stuff from ten years or more ago, and the Corrs and Tori Amos. Outside of the usual bimbo suspects, I don't even know who is big these days as bands. I do occasionally listen to Shoutcast radio on Winamp, but even then I concentrate on 80's bands I liked back then. The only new act I'm tracking today is Tara Blaise, another Irish protege of Corrs manager John Hughes.
I've never liked Crichton. Barely adequate writer, but has a huge anti-tech bias that colors everything he writes. Every story is the same: some new or weird tech is discovered, some family guy gets involved with some other people, which always includes some rocket scientist with the attitude that all tech is bad (even though he's a rocket scientist!) who makes predictions that everything will go to hell, which of course it immediately does, then the family guy has to figure out how to stop it.
Formulaic as hell.
Jurassic Park was the worst. Very contrived situations where it was obvious you were going to have trouble with the animals since management were morons. I mean, electric fences to keep out Tyrannosaurus Rex - gimme a break.
If he'd specifically state that most tech problems come not from the tech, but from the morons using it, he might have a point. But I've seen book appendixes and comments from him which explicitly reveal his anti-tech bias.
His nanotech book was universally trashed by anybody and everybody in nanotech as being completely ridiculous.
The Corrs are all about music. What the public wants is hot babes. Explain Britney, Christina, Jessica and Mariah, otherwise. Looks have always played a part in rock music from Elvis on. The Corrs aren't dumb enough to ignore looks, but they prefer to be judged on the music.
The Corrs have done minimal promotion based on their looks and always in a high-class way. You NEVER see them in bikinis like Holly Vallance or Kylie. They even did a spoof of their looks in their music video for the song "Would You Be Happier" by dressing up as a heavy metal band and a punk band.
They write their own music and have been playing instruments since they were childen. They were discovered during auditions for the movie "The Commitments" when Andrea was only 15 or 16 years old (she had a small part in the film), and subsequently by Jason Flom of Atlantic Records who put them in touch with David Foster, the top producer in the business at the time; they got a record deal by gate-crashing a Foster recording session with Michael Jackson. They've sold some 37-45 million albums worldwide and gone platinum in twenty countries and gold in most of the rest. They've played for the Pope twice, the Queen of England, Prince Charles, Clinton and Bush, and Nelson Mandela is a fan (they played for his 85th birthday and his 46664 AIDS Capetown concert, and Sharon played for the 46664 Arctic concert a couple months ago.) They were on Live 8 last month with Bono from U2, with whom they're close - Andrea and Bono just did a duet for a movie soundtrack and Sharon played on the soundtrack for "Gangs of New York" with Bono. Bono says Andrea has the best voice in the business (he's biased because they're both Irish and I think he has the hots for her). They opened for the Stones (arguably the ugliest bunch of guys in rock) some years ago, and have played with Ronnie Wood of the Stones several times since. They've sung with Pavarotti at his "Pavarotti and Friends" concert, and Andrea has duetted with Josh Groban, the classical/pop singer and one of the top ten album artists of the last couple years. They've been nominated for Grammies twice.
Only the US has apparently resisted them, apparently due to the fact that the radio industry here is so shuttered and payola'd that only certain classes of artists can get airtime or promotion. Even so, one or two of their albums have gone platinum here, and a couple others gold.
Also I think Atlantic Records hasn't given them the promotion they need to make it here, although they do have a ton of fanatical fans here. The other problem is they need to spend more time here since just touring every couple of years is not adequate to make it in a country this size.
I saw them live for the first time in person at the Warfield here in San Francisco last August. They put on a great live show. Fans throw teddy bears on the stage for Andrea at every show. She's also developing a rep as an actress by starring in "The Boys and Girl From County Clare" movie with Colm Meany and Bernard Hill, for which she got Best Actress in a Comedy at the HBO Comedy Film Awards and a new short movie called "The Bridge".
They're a class act (also considered the hardest working band on the Atlantic label next to Phil Collins and unfailingly professional), and treat their fans well. When the Corrboard Web site fans sent birthday greetings to Caroline and Sharon back in March, both girls posted thanks on the board, as did Jim last week after his birthday. Only Andrea didn't post except on the official Web site. Andrea makes up for that by giving away her tin whistle at the end of every concert to a fan in the front rows.
I gotta admit, their looks are important to me, but I originally discovered them by hearing their songs "Runaway" and "The Right Time" on the radio. My policy is, if I hear at least two songs that I like from an artist, I'll look into them. If most of the rest of their stuff sounds good, I'll stick with them. The Corrs music is lush romantic pop vocals, with foot-tapping Irish instru
Nanotech will absorb the biosciences within twenty or thirty years. Nanotech will absorb everything (well, of course, there will still be disciplines, but ALL the research will use nano technigues.)
That or learn AI and how to do bioinformatics using AI, which will be enabled by nanotech, but will still need people able to come up with the concepts.
Programming is a dead end profession - has been for twenty years. You have the authority - and pay - of a hotel desk clerk and the responsibility of a surgeon as a programmer. And your manager is guaranteed to be a moron making more money than you and who then screws up your project, then blames you for the failure - and he used to have your job.
One of my teachers at City College, who runs a consulting firm, told us Monday night he is moving his development side to India. He's keeping the support operation here, but the programming jobs are going to India.
He says his building landlord wants another rent increase, and his programmers want more money or they'll go work for Google.
Fine - he can get a building in India for 30% of what he's paying here - a bigger building - and he can get equally qualified programmers for $1200-1500/month there vrs $4k, $5K, $6K, $7K per month here. It's a no-brainer for him.
Meanwhile, a number of the more advanced IT classes at City College have been cancelled this semester - not enough students showed up to fill the minimum fifteen seats to justify the class. Even tonight's class, on Active Directory, barely got enough seats to meet the minimum.
Meanwhile, as I pass Hastings College of the Law on my way to City College, they seem to be full of students.
Face it, technology leadership will pass to Asia and Europe over the next decade or more, if it hasn't already. Like the US in "Snow Crash", we're only good at movies, music and delivering pizza in thirty minutes or less.
And music-wise, we're not that good either, since the Corrs new album won't be released in the US until at least next spring. Atlantic Records has gone into the toilet, apparently, with Jason Flom ushered out, who discovered the Corrs among many others.
If the Corrs can't be hits in the US with three hot babes and five hot guys because they're Irish and occasionally play an Irish trad instrumental between the pop rock (which they play on their own instruments and write the songs themselves) (especially given the number of Irish in this country), somebody explain this bimbo Shakira to me. She's from God knows where in South America, shakes a mean ass, and otherwise is indistinguishable from every other rock bimbo out there.
Meanwhile, as far as I can tell from the daily press, there are only three "musicians" in the entire United States: Britney, Christina, and Jessica. Maybe Mariah, makes it four. And I use the term "musician" or "singer" loosely.
Oh, and the octagenarian Stones - whose leader, Mick Jagger, once said the Corrs blew them off their own stage when they opened for the Stones.
Meanwhile, the only jobs left for techies is cleaning spyware off fucked up PCs for clueless Windows users.
GNU is NOT LINUX! LINUX is a kernel upon which people have decided to heap other software and the sum total of which is CALLED Linux JUST LIKE the sum total of Windows is called Windows - not BSD/Windows because some fucking BSD code is in it. And that was decided by the people who use and develop for Linux, not the FSF.
Got it now, pedant?
On top of which, I really don't give a flying fuck up a rat's ass what Stallman or the FSF or anybody contributing to GNU think about anything including Linux.
Are we clear?
When I hear Linus call Linux "GNU/Linux" and he works out a deal with Stallman and the FSF to trademark it that way, I'll give a slight rat's ass.
I hate to tell you and Stallman this, but society decides what is going to be called what, and Linux is called Linux and will NEVER be called "GNU/Linux" except by FSF pedants.
"When Linus Torvalds wrote Linux, he filled the last major gap"
Yeah, right, the one Stallman couldn't fucking fill for twenty fucking years. THIS is why he wants it called "GNU/Linux", not some bullshit about what percentage is the kernel vrs what percentage is the ancillary system software. His fucking eqo will not let him admit that Linus did the job he couldn't do - create a fucking KERNEL.
Not a C compiler, not a grep, not a bash - a fucking KERNEL - without which the rest of the stuff is so much useless crap (excepting the compilers, of course, without which everything is useless crap - unless you want to code in machine language.)
Sorry, but I've had FOUR FUCKING/. PEDANTS fuck with me today, and I've had it with you morons. I have no patience with assholes trying to score points on bullshit and from now on,/. pedants are going to get it both barrels.
Look, stupid, who cares whether you make money or not? The license says "gross revenue". Who cares? The bottom line is you owe $5K.
If your gross revenue (and I don't give a fuck what the accounting term is, you idiot, I don't care if they call it "goatsex revenue") is zero to $100K, you pay $200.
This isn't fucking rocket science, nor is any quibbling required.
The fee schedule is perfectly simple.
Notice they're not even talking about ACTUAL figures, they're talking about PROJECTED ANNUAL - if you want to get pedantic. Which means if they THINK you're going to make $100K, you owe $200.
"GNU/Linux" as a TRADEMARK would have to be sublicensed from LMI. As far as I can tell, the word "GNU" is not trademarked by the FSF, nor is "GNU/Linux." They simply say Linux should be so referred to because of the GNU software included with the Linux kernel.
"GNU/Linux" as a TERM used to describe Linux would not be subject to licensing under fair use. And this seems to be what the FSF is doing.
No, it has nothing to do with "subsidizing" costs for lower fee users. That may be an effect, but it's not the cause.
It has to do with being unable to determine revenue sufficient to offset costs because you don't know how many "users" the trademark will have. You can't charge a flat fee and recover costs if you don't know how many people will pay the flat fee - or even how many people exist that could or would pay the fee.
All you can do is charge something "reasonable" based on ability to pay and hope you get enough people wanting to license the trademark that it offsets the costs of registering the trademark in other countries, reviewing registered trademarks that might infringe, sending out cease-and-desist letters and so forth.
As for whether a licensee made a profit or not on their million dollars, that is entirely irrelevant to how you set your fees. Obviously someone with a revenue of a million dollars is more LIKELY to be able to pay $5,000 than someone who made zero dollars. This is hardly "discrimination."
And being a pedant doesn't gain you any points. "Discrimination" has the dictionary definition you cite, but "discrimination" is illegal when you're a housing owner. No one is "discriminating" against corporations which was the accusation - the FEES are discriminating based on ability to pay - which is perfectly fair. Charging $200 for a company making a million dollars and someone making zero dollars would be discriminating against the person making zero dollars in favor of the person making a million dollars.
In other words, the "discrimination" charge is irrelevant politically correct crap.
Anybody talking about quality or mindshare doesn't understand trademark.
Trademark is solely and entirely about helping the consumer determine who made a product or where it comes from.
The Linux kernel is the only thing in a Linux distro that Linus cares about - and it's been named Linux and should not be applied to any kernel that doesn't include kernel code approved by Linus and the kernel developers.
The name also should not be appropriated by someone else who can then charge UNREASONABLE fees for its use - as was attempted once already.
Linus doesn't care if your distro sucks, only whether it's named Linux but doesn't have the Linux kernel code in it sufficient to be called Linux. (What that amount is, I have no idea - ask Linus.)
Now, you could complain that if somebody produces a distro with a really crappy kernel mod that still qualifies as Linux and uses the Linux name, then Linus isn't really accomplishing anything with the trademark IN THAT SPECIFIC CASE.
But he COULD indeed refuse to license the name to that distro specifically because it would harm the reputation of the Linux name. That's one of the things a trademark holder can and will do - review the quality of products which are being applied for a sublicense. This is one of the costs of being a trademark holder, if you want to do it. If the product sucks, you refuse to sublicense the name.
Microsoft could indeed say Vista was a Linux-based OS. That's simply outside the scope of trademark law. Other laws might apply, but not trademark law. Red Hat might have a Lanham Act case against Microsoft if they did that. Deliberate misleading the consumer as to the origin of your product is indeed illegal regardless of trademark. Somebody would take Microsoft to court and the court would have to decide how much of Linux is really in Vista and whether Microsoft's marketing was "true" or not.
Please do not include any trademark acknowledgements in GNU software packages or documentation.
Trademark acknowledgements are the statements that such-and-such is a trademark of so-and-so. The GNU Project has no objection to the basic idea of trademarks, but these acknowledgements feel like kowtowing, and there is no legal requirement for them, so we don't use them.
What is legally required, as regards other people's trademarks, is to avoid using them in ways which a reader might reasonably understand as naming or labeling our own programs or activities. For example, since "Objective C" is (or at least was) a trademark, we made sure to say that we provide a "compiler for the Objective C language" rather than an "Objective C compiler". The latter would have been meant as a shorter way of saying the former, but it does not explicitly state the relationship, so it could be misinterpreted as using "Objective C" as a label for the compiler rather than for the language.
Personal and commercial USERS do not infringe on trademarks.
All Linux users are completely unaffected by trademark enforcement.
The only people affected are people who have a registered or common-law trademark which includes the word "Linux" in it.
If you write a book called "Linux for Dummies", that's copyrighted, not trademarked. You owe nothing.
If you create a distro called "Bumfuck" with the Linux kernel in it, you owe nothing.
If you create a distro called "Bumfuck Linux", you owe $200/year up to $5,000/year depending on how much revenue you actually make from the distro. If you make a million dollars, you owe $5,000. If you make a billion dollars, you owe $5,000. If you make nothing, you owe $200 - if it isn't waived (but you still have to sign a Sublicense Agreement.)
The problem with arguing that the term is generic is the GPL.
The kernel may be modified heavily, but all Linux versions essentially stem from the original release under the GPL.
Thus I think a good case could be made that the term is not at all generic - it applies specifically to all versions of the Linux kernel received under the GPL from the original release from Linus. Nobody has produced a Linux kernel that has nothing of the actual Linux kernel in it and called it "Linux" AFAIK and the community has let it stand. One of the reasons for trademarking the word "Linux" is to prevent this from happening.
Also, it is not used as a verb anywhere - you don't "Linux" something, like you "xerox" copies. For a trademark to be generic, it usually needs to be used as a verb - which is why trademark lawyers always tell the company never to use their trademark as a verb - always as a noun.
It still might be possible to argue that enforcement efforts have been lax. But Linus has defended the trademark before back to 1995, so he has prior history of defending it.
Actually it's not the charge so much as the requirement to sublicense the trademark.
LMI can waive fees - they presumably just can't waive all of them. And they have to require a signed Sublicense Agreement even from those entities where the fee was waived.
The charging is simply to attempt to offset the costs of the enforcement effort which, as has been pointed out, has cost Maddog $250,000 over the last X years.
The costs include the cost of reviewing trademarks, the cost of registering the trademark in other countries, the cost of enforcement efforts, etc.
It has nothing to do with the cost of processing a Sublicense from a given organization. Since you can't know how many companies you will sublicense to, you can't set your revenue goals based on a flat rate. All you can do is set a "fair" rate based on the value of the trademark to the entity.
Thus, non-profits pay $200 - and somebody making a million dollars or more off Linux pays 1/2-1% up to the $5,000 maximum. If IBM comes out with "Big Blue Linux" and makes a billion dollars from it, they still pay only $5,000 per year. Hardly "discrimination."
"we need to remove points of control like this one and put them in the hands of trusted organizations or legal agreements."
When you come up with a way that deals with the realities of trademark law, let us know.
For now, the trademark has to be owned by somebody - just like the copyright on Linux which also happens to be owned by Linus.
And the trademark has to be defended or it will be lost - and you'll have SCO Linux that contains no Linux kernel code at all.
Besides, what organization do you trust?/.? The Church of Scientology? Linux Mark International (which is assigned the trademark enforcement process by Linus - and is run by a guy named "Maddog")? The OSDL? The FSF? The EFF?
In the end, Linus owns the Linux copyright. If he doesn't want to give it up to one of those organizations, you're stuck.
If anything ridiculous happens like Linus converting to Scientology and assigning all his assets to Tom Cruise, including the Linux copyright and trademark, under the GPL all existing versions of Linux are safe. You just mass rename them and call them something else.
Big deal. I'm not holding my breath. I assume he has arrangements in case he hits by a truck driven by Steve Ballmer as well.
As I point out above, Linus doesn't get it either.
Trademark is NOT primarily about protecting your company or product name from infringement for the benefit of the company.
It's about protecting the CONSUMER by identifying where a product comes from.
Trademarks exist so the consumer doesn't get misled that your product comes from somebody else.
Your company ALSO gets protection from the consumer being misled - and thereby losing business - by trademarking and this is what defending trademark from infringement is about.
But the primary purpose is to protect the consumer - at least, that's what the government says, if you believe them.
In addition, a trademark does NOT have to be registered to be a valid trademark. It simply has to be in actual use and defended. It's just easier to defend a registered trademark because you have a presupposition of validity if you registered it and you have a date from which it was effectively trademarked.
Linus did not do a good job of explaining the whole situation in his post. Groklaw did a better job.
First, there is a grandfather clause - if you've already been given permission to use the name "Linux", the charge is ZERO.
Second, the point of trademark protection is to "protect the consumer", NOT the company with the trademark - even Linus doesn't get this, based on his kernel list post. The consumer is supposed to be able to tell where a product came from.
Being non-profit doesn't change that.
Yes, they can waive fees, and I expect they will for anybody who really can't pay.
Even "non-profits" can afford $200/year.
Besides, when did Goodwill change its name to "Goodwill Linux"?
The only "non-profits" involved are likely to be small distros, most of whom could easily afford $200/year - particularly since if you don't call it "Bumfuck Linux" and just call it "Bumfuck", you don't have to license it at all.
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And it's pronounced Artoo - and that's how a lot of people spell it, too.
You obviously are not a Star Wars fan.
Nobody ever spells C3PO that way, although they call him Threepio and sometimes spell it THAT way.
Dude.
Actually, no.
Developing sentience in humans (or more precisely, Transhumans) using machine intelligence is where it's going.
But, yes, humans are a dead end - if you count being Transhuman as an "end".
Actually, one could say that the distinction between living and non-living - biological and machine - will be removed with the ascension of Transhumans, since they will have no biological components of the sort present in planetary entities, but will have all of the adaptability of biological entities.
I understand in the deeper realms of biology, the distinction between life and non-life is purely a matter of perspective and technology anyway, these days. If it interacts with its environment in some meaningful way, it's alive; if it doesn't, it isn't.
Without Artoo, it's NOT an X-wing!
I figured you weren't attacking the band. My point in citing the stats was that the band is more than capable of being considered strictly on musical and entertainment quality grounds. A lot of people don't like their stuff because it's "pop", not "serious" rock (although some of their stuff is very serious, based as it is on the death of their mother five years ago.) They're always accused of not having enough "attitude."
It's interesting you mention the Beatles. The "British Invasion" was sort of considered exactly that. It was more of "prison break-out", I think, in that it allowed foreign bands to finally penetrate the insular US market and stop being confined to their own countries.
U2 did the same for Ireland, although their Irish nature has never been an issue since their music was entirely serious rock.
The same with Oasis - a couple of Irish lads, who are known for being British more than Irish, so much so that their official Web site doesn't seem to even mention their background. They also got their rep for being hardcore rockers by doing various stupid shit that got them arrested. (However, Andrea and Sharon Corr reckon the Corrs could easily drink them under the table!) That's how bands get known and the Corrs are NOT known for doing anything stupid.
It's interesting that right now, a group of female singers called "Celtic Women" is getting a lot of attention in the US, and Irish bands are doing very well in a lot of different places in the world. The Corrs did their current album of traditional Irish music specifically because Caroline brought up the fact that everywhere they went, people asked them to do more Irish tunes. It's also based on the song book kept by their mother, so there's a sentimental element as well.
You're right about presence. The US is very provincial. Actually, I am, too, I rarely listen to "foreign" music unless I hear something by accident that sounds good. If a group doesn't start in the US and get known here first, they tend not to do well here.
Also, as I mentioned before, if a group doesn't spend enough time here (which is partly a financial issue having to do with the label's willingness to promote), it's hard to get top billing. I've long thought the Corrs should come to the states for two or three weeks out of every month for a year and just "work" the country. Hit all the major metro areas, get on the morning TV and radio shows in each city, do a concert, move on to the next one. Their tour last year was supposed to hit 24 cities, but eight of them got cancelled - and they hadn't been to the US in four years at that point.
But at this point, they're probably too big elsewhere and too settled with financial success to want to take on that kind of promotion. Some of the fans even prefer it that way, saying that too much success would make the venues larger and more impersonal and limit access to the band, which is very good at existing concerts right now.
You're right about the state of music in the US in general. I listened to music all my life, but today I've almost no music from "outside" - all the stuff on my hard drive is stuff from ten years or more ago, and the Corrs and Tori Amos. Outside of the usual bimbo suspects, I don't even know who is big these days as bands. I do occasionally listen to Shoutcast radio on Winamp, but even then I concentrate on 80's bands I liked back then. The only new act I'm tracking today is Tara Blaise, another Irish protege of Corrs manager John Hughes.
I've never liked Crichton. Barely adequate writer, but has a huge anti-tech bias that colors everything he writes. Every story is the same: some new or weird tech is discovered, some family guy gets involved with some other people, which always includes some rocket scientist with the attitude that all tech is bad (even though he's a rocket scientist!) who makes predictions that everything will go to hell, which of course it immediately does, then the family guy has to figure out how to stop it.
Formulaic as hell.
Jurassic Park was the worst. Very contrived situations where it was obvious you were going to have trouble with the animals since management were morons. I mean, electric fences to keep out Tyrannosaurus Rex - gimme a break.
If he'd specifically state that most tech problems come not from the tech, but from the morons using it, he might have a point. But I've seen book appendixes and comments from him which explicitly reveal his anti-tech bias.
His nanotech book was universally trashed by anybody and everybody in nanotech as being completely ridiculous.
I'm waiting for Fire-Groundhog and its email companion ThunderChicken.
The Corrs are all about music. What the public wants is hot babes. Explain Britney, Christina, Jessica and Mariah, otherwise. Looks have always played a part in rock music from Elvis on. The Corrs aren't dumb enough to ignore looks, but they prefer to be judged on the music.
The Corrs have done minimal promotion based on their looks and always in a high-class way. You NEVER see them in bikinis like Holly Vallance or Kylie. They even did a spoof of their looks in their music video for the song "Would You Be Happier" by dressing up as a heavy metal band and a punk band.
They write their own music and have been playing instruments since they were childen. They were discovered during auditions for the movie "The Commitments" when Andrea was only 15 or 16 years old (she had a small part in the film), and subsequently by Jason Flom of Atlantic Records who put them in touch with David Foster, the top producer in the business at the time; they got a record deal by gate-crashing a Foster recording session with Michael Jackson. They've sold some 37-45 million albums worldwide and gone platinum in twenty countries and gold in most of the rest. They've played for the Pope twice, the Queen of England, Prince Charles, Clinton and Bush, and Nelson Mandela is a fan (they played for his 85th birthday and his 46664 AIDS Capetown concert, and Sharon played for the 46664 Arctic concert a couple months ago.) They were on Live 8 last month with Bono from U2, with whom they're close - Andrea and Bono just did a duet for a movie soundtrack and Sharon played on the soundtrack for "Gangs of New York" with Bono. Bono says Andrea has the best voice in the business (he's biased because they're both Irish and I think he has the hots for her). They opened for the Stones (arguably the ugliest bunch of guys in rock) some years ago, and have played with Ronnie Wood of the Stones several times since. They've sung with Pavarotti at his "Pavarotti and Friends" concert, and Andrea has duetted with Josh Groban, the classical/pop singer and one of the top ten album artists of the last couple years. They've been nominated for Grammies twice.
Only the US has apparently resisted them, apparently due to the fact that the radio industry here is so shuttered and payola'd that only certain classes of artists can get airtime or promotion. Even so, one or two of their albums have gone platinum here, and a couple others gold.
Also I think Atlantic Records hasn't given them the promotion they need to make it here, although they do have a ton of fanatical fans here. The other problem is they need to spend more time here since just touring every couple of years is not adequate to make it in a country this size.
I saw them live for the first time in person at the Warfield here in San Francisco last August. They put on a great live show. Fans throw teddy bears on the stage for Andrea at every show. She's also developing a rep as an actress by starring in "The Boys and Girl From County Clare" movie with Colm Meany and Bernard Hill, for which she got Best Actress in a Comedy at the HBO Comedy Film Awards and a new short movie called "The Bridge".
They're a class act (also considered the hardest working band on the Atlantic label next to Phil Collins and unfailingly professional), and treat their fans well. When the Corrboard Web site fans sent birthday greetings to Caroline and Sharon back in March, both girls posted thanks on the board, as did Jim last week after his birthday. Only Andrea didn't post except on the official Web site. Andrea makes up for that by giving away her tin whistle at the end of every concert to a fan in the front rows.
I gotta admit, their looks are important to me, but I originally discovered them by hearing their songs "Runaway" and "The Right Time" on the radio. My policy is, if I hear at least two songs that I like from an artist, I'll look into them. If most of the rest of their stuff sounds good, I'll stick with them. The Corrs music is lush romantic pop vocals, with foot-tapping Irish instru
Switch to nanotech.
Nanotech will absorb the biosciences within twenty or thirty years. Nanotech will absorb everything (well, of course, there will still be disciplines, but ALL the research will use nano technigues.)
That or learn AI and how to do bioinformatics using AI, which will be enabled by nanotech, but will still need people able to come up with the concepts.
Programming is a dead end profession - has been for twenty years. You have the authority - and pay - of a hotel desk clerk and the responsibility of a surgeon as a programmer. And your manager is guaranteed to be a moron making more money than you and who then screws up your project, then blames you for the failure - and he used to have your job.
One of my teachers at City College, who runs a consulting firm, told us Monday night he is moving his development side to India. He's keeping the support operation here, but the programming jobs are going to India.
He says his building landlord wants another rent increase, and his programmers want more money or they'll go work for Google.
Fine - he can get a building in India for 30% of what he's paying here - a bigger building - and he can get equally qualified programmers for $1200-1500/month there vrs $4k, $5K, $6K, $7K per month here. It's a no-brainer for him.
Meanwhile, a number of the more advanced IT classes at City College have been cancelled this semester - not enough students showed up to fill the minimum fifteen seats to justify the class. Even tonight's class, on Active Directory, barely got enough seats to meet the minimum.
Meanwhile, as I pass Hastings College of the Law on my way to City College, they seem to be full of students.
Face it, technology leadership will pass to Asia and Europe over the next decade or more, if it hasn't already. Like the US in "Snow Crash", we're only good at movies, music and delivering pizza in thirty minutes or less.
And music-wise, we're not that good either, since the Corrs new album won't be released in the US until at least next spring. Atlantic Records has gone into the toilet, apparently, with Jason Flom ushered out, who discovered the Corrs among many others.
If the Corrs can't be hits in the US with three hot babes and five hot guys because they're Irish and occasionally play an Irish trad instrumental between the pop rock (which they play on their own instruments and write the songs themselves) (especially given the number of Irish in this country), somebody explain this bimbo Shakira to me. She's from God knows where in South America, shakes a mean ass, and otherwise is indistinguishable from every other rock bimbo out there.
Meanwhile, as far as I can tell from the daily press, there are only three "musicians" in the entire United States: Britney, Christina, and Jessica. Maybe Mariah, makes it four. And I use the term "musician" or "singer" loosely.
Oh, and the octagenarian Stones - whose leader, Mick Jagger, once said the Corrs blew them off their own stage when they opened for the Stones.
Meanwhile, the only jobs left for techies is cleaning spyware off fucked up PCs for clueless Windows users.
I KNOW the fucking history of GNU.
GNU is NOT LINUX! LINUX is a kernel upon which people have decided to heap other software and the sum total of which is CALLED Linux JUST LIKE the sum total of Windows is called Windows - not BSD/Windows because some fucking BSD code is in it. And that was decided by the people who use and develop for Linux, not the FSF.
Got it now, pedant?
On top of which, I really don't give a flying fuck up a rat's ass what Stallman or the FSF or anybody contributing to GNU think about anything including Linux.
Are we clear?
When I hear Linus call Linux "GNU/Linux" and he works out a deal with Stallman and the FSF to trademark it that way, I'll give a slight rat's ass.
I hate to tell you and Stallman this, but society decides what is going to be called what, and Linux is called Linux and will NEVER be called "GNU/Linux" except by FSF pedants.
"When Linus Torvalds wrote Linux, he filled the last major gap"
Yeah, right, the one Stallman couldn't fucking fill for twenty fucking years. THIS is why he wants it called "GNU/Linux", not some bullshit about what percentage is the kernel vrs what percentage is the ancillary system software. His fucking eqo will not let him admit that Linus did the job he couldn't do - create a fucking KERNEL.
Not a C compiler, not a grep, not a bash - a fucking KERNEL - without which the rest of the stuff is so much useless crap (excepting the compilers, of course, without which everything is useless crap - unless you want to code in machine language.)
Sorry, but I've had FOUR FUCKING
Stay the fuck away from my posts.
Look, stupid, who cares whether you make money or not? The license says "gross revenue". Who cares? The bottom line is you owe $5K.
If your gross revenue (and I don't give a fuck what the accounting term is, you idiot, I don't care if they call it "goatsex revenue") is zero to $100K, you pay $200.
This isn't fucking rocket science, nor is any quibbling required.
The fee schedule is perfectly simple.
Notice they're not even talking about ACTUAL figures, they're talking about PROJECTED ANNUAL - if you want to get pedantic. Which means if they THINK you're going to make $100K, you owe $200.
Deal with it! Go buy Bill Gates a beer!
Jesus, where does
I see - you're either an idiot or a troll.
Plonk! (Oh, wait, this isn't Usenet...)
I mean, someone who can't comprehend that a million dollars is more than zero dollars needs serious help, or is simply being deliberately obtuse.
Fuck off, moron.
I'm not sure about that.
"GNU/Linux" as a TRADEMARK would have to be sublicensed from LMI. As far as I can tell, the word "GNU" is not trademarked by the FSF, nor is "GNU/Linux." They simply say Linux should be so referred to because of the GNU software included with the Linux kernel.
"GNU/Linux" as a TERM used to describe Linux would not be subject to licensing under fair use. And this seems to be what the FSF is doing.
I said that if your REVENUE is a million dollars, you owe $5K. If your REVENUE is a billion dollars, you owe $5k.
If your revenue is nothing, you owe whatever the minimum figure is.
YOU read the fucking fee schedule as follows:
Non-Profit Tier
Annual Fee = US$200
For Profit/Other Tier 2
[Total projected annual gross revenue between zero and US $100,000]
Annual Fee = US $200
What part of "revenue between ZERO and US $100,000 Annual Fee = US $200" don't you understand?
No, it has nothing to do with "subsidizing" costs for lower fee users. That may be an effect, but it's not the cause.
It has to do with being unable to determine revenue sufficient to offset costs because you don't know how many "users" the trademark will have. You can't charge a flat fee and recover costs if you don't know how many people will pay the flat fee - or even how many people exist that could or would pay the fee.
All you can do is charge something "reasonable" based on ability to pay and hope you get enough people wanting to license the trademark that it offsets the costs of registering the trademark in other countries, reviewing registered trademarks that might infringe, sending out cease-and-desist letters and so forth.
As for whether a licensee made a profit or not on their million dollars, that is entirely irrelevant to how you set your fees. Obviously someone with a revenue of a million dollars is more LIKELY to be able to pay $5,000 than someone who made zero dollars. This is hardly "discrimination."
And being a pedant doesn't gain you any points. "Discrimination" has the dictionary definition you cite, but "discrimination" is illegal when you're a housing owner. No one is "discriminating" against corporations which was the accusation - the FEES are discriminating based on ability to pay - which is perfectly fair. Charging $200 for a company making a million dollars and someone making zero dollars would be discriminating against the person making zero dollars in favor of the person making a million dollars.
In other words, the "discrimination" charge is irrelevant politically correct crap.
It's not protecting quality or mindshare.
It's protecting the NAME. Period.
Anybody talking about quality or mindshare doesn't understand trademark.
Trademark is solely and entirely about helping the consumer determine who made a product or where it comes from.
The Linux kernel is the only thing in a Linux distro that Linus cares about - and it's been named Linux and should not be applied to any kernel that doesn't include kernel code approved by Linus and the kernel developers.
The name also should not be appropriated by someone else who can then charge UNREASONABLE fees for its use - as was attempted once already.
Linus doesn't care if your distro sucks, only whether it's named Linux but doesn't have the Linux kernel code in it sufficient to be called Linux. (What that amount is, I have no idea - ask Linus.)
Now, you could complain that if somebody produces a distro with a really crappy kernel mod that still qualifies as Linux and uses the Linux name, then Linus isn't really accomplishing anything with the trademark IN THAT SPECIFIC CASE.
But he COULD indeed refuse to license the name to that distro specifically because it would harm the reputation of the Linux name. That's one of the things a trademark holder can and will do - review the quality of products which are being applied for a sublicense. This is one of the costs of being a trademark holder, if you want to do it. If the product sucks, you refuse to sublicense the name.
Microsoft could indeed say Vista was a Linux-based OS. That's simply outside the scope of trademark law. Other laws might apply, but not trademark law. Red Hat might have a Lanham Act case against Microsoft if they did that. Deliberate misleading the consumer as to the origin of your product is indeed illegal regardless of trademark. Somebody would take Microsoft to court and the court would have to decide how much of Linux is really in Vista and whether Microsoft's marketing was "true" or not.
See my response above.
The FSF has no objection to trademarks, but they don't use them. They also don't want to be caught using somebody else's trademark in their software.
And GNU is not the Linux kernel in any event. GNU is SOME of the paraphanalia piled onto Linux.
Go here: http://www.gnu.org/prep/standards/html_node/Tradem arks.html which says the following:
2.3 Trademarks
Please do not include any trademark acknowledgements in GNU software packages or documentation.
Trademark acknowledgements are the statements that such-and-such is a trademark of so-and-so. The GNU Project has no objection to the basic idea of trademarks, but these acknowledgements feel like kowtowing, and there is no legal requirement for them, so we don't use them.
What is legally required, as regards other people's trademarks, is to avoid using them in ways which a reader might reasonably understand as naming or labeling our own programs or activities. For example, since "Objective C" is (or at least was) a trademark, we made sure to say that we provide a "compiler for the Objective C language" rather than an "Objective C compiler". The latter would have been meant as a shorter way of saying the former, but it does not explicitly state the relationship, so it could be misinterpreted as using "Objective C" as a label for the compiler rather than for the language.
Personal and commercial USERS do not infringe on trademarks.
All Linux users are completely unaffected by trademark enforcement.
The only people affected are people who have a registered or common-law trademark which includes the word "Linux" in it.
If you write a book called "Linux for Dummies", that's copyrighted, not trademarked. You owe nothing.
If you create a distro called "Bumfuck" with the Linux kernel in it, you owe nothing.
If you create a distro called "Bumfuck Linux", you owe $200/year up to $5,000/year depending on how much revenue you actually make from the distro. If you make a million dollars, you owe $5,000. If you make a billion dollars, you owe $5,000. If you make nothing, you owe $200 - if it isn't waived (but you still have to sign a Sublicense Agreement.)
The problem with arguing that the term is generic is the GPL.
The kernel may be modified heavily, but all Linux versions essentially stem from the original release under the GPL.
Thus I think a good case could be made that the term is not at all generic - it applies specifically to all versions of the Linux kernel received under the GPL from the original release from Linus. Nobody has produced a Linux kernel that has nothing of the actual Linux kernel in it and called it "Linux" AFAIK and the community has let it stand. One of the reasons for trademarking the word "Linux" is to prevent this from happening.
Also, it is not used as a verb anywhere - you don't "Linux" something, like you "xerox" copies. For a trademark to be generic, it usually needs to be used as a verb - which is why trademark lawyers always tell the company never to use their trademark as a verb - always as a noun.
It still might be possible to argue that enforcement efforts have been lax. But Linus has defended the trademark before back to 1995, so he has prior history of defending it.
Actually it's not the charge so much as the requirement to sublicense the trademark.
LMI can waive fees - they presumably just can't waive all of them. And they have to require a signed Sublicense Agreement even from those entities where the fee was waived.
The charging is simply to attempt to offset the costs of the enforcement effort which, as has been pointed out, has cost Maddog $250,000 over the last X years.
The costs are not specific to the organization.
The costs include the cost of reviewing trademarks, the cost of registering the trademark in other countries, the cost of enforcement efforts, etc.
It has nothing to do with the cost of processing a Sublicense from a given organization. Since you can't know how many companies you will sublicense to, you can't set your revenue goals based on a flat rate. All you can do is set a "fair" rate based on the value of the trademark to the entity.
Thus, non-profits pay $200 - and somebody making a million dollars or more off Linux pays 1/2-1% up to the $5,000 maximum. If IBM comes out with "Big Blue Linux" and makes a billion dollars from it, they still pay only $5,000 per year. Hardly "discrimination."
"we need to remove points of control like this one and put them in the hands of trusted organizations or legal agreements."
/.? The Church of Scientology? Linux Mark International (which is assigned the trademark enforcement process by Linus - and is run by a guy named "Maddog")? The OSDL? The FSF? The EFF?
When you come up with a way that deals with the realities of trademark law, let us know.
For now, the trademark has to be owned by somebody - just like the copyright on Linux which also happens to be owned by Linus.
And the trademark has to be defended or it will be lost - and you'll have SCO Linux that contains no Linux kernel code at all.
Besides, what organization do you trust?
In the end, Linus owns the Linux copyright. If he doesn't want to give it up to one of those organizations, you're stuck.
If anything ridiculous happens like Linus converting to Scientology and assigning all his assets to Tom Cruise, including the Linux copyright and trademark, under the GPL all existing versions of Linux are safe. You just mass rename them and call them something else.
Big deal. I'm not holding my breath. I assume he has arrangements in case he hits by a truck driven by Steve Ballmer as well.
As I point out above, Linus doesn't get it either.
Trademark is NOT primarily about protecting your company or product name from infringement for the benefit of the company.
It's about protecting the CONSUMER by identifying where a product comes from.
Trademarks exist so the consumer doesn't get misled that your product comes from somebody else.
Your company ALSO gets protection from the consumer being misled - and thereby losing business - by trademarking and this is what defending trademark from infringement is about.
But the primary purpose is to protect the consumer - at least, that's what the government says, if you believe them.
In addition, a trademark does NOT have to be registered to be a valid trademark. It simply has to be in actual use and defended. It's just easier to defend a registered trademark because you have a presupposition of validity if you registered it and you have a date from which it was effectively trademarked.
Linus did not do a good job of explaining the whole situation in his post. Groklaw did a better job.
First, there is a grandfather clause - if you've already been given permission to use the name "Linux", the charge is ZERO.
Second, the point of trademark protection is to "protect the consumer", NOT the company with the trademark - even Linus doesn't get this, based on his kernel list post. The consumer is supposed to be able to tell where a product came from.
Being non-profit doesn't change that.
Yes, they can waive fees, and I expect they will for anybody who really can't pay.
Even "non-profits" can afford $200/year.
Besides, when did Goodwill change its name to "Goodwill Linux"?
The only "non-profits" involved are likely to be small distros, most of whom could easily afford $200/year - particularly since if you don't call it "Bumfuck Linux" and just call it "Bumfuck", you don't have to license it at all.