To clarify, I use "state" as a term of (political) art -- an "internally autonomous territorial or political unit constituting a federation under one government."
The term "state" is generally preferred in these cases because it refers primarily to political organization; "country" is closely linked to the physical geography, and "nation" to ethnic or cultural groupings.
In any case, don't you guys have "provinces," not "states?"
The main focus of most international patent treaties is the normalization of laws between nations. In this case, NAFTA Article 1709 (3) is probably controlling vis a vis the United States:
A Party may exclude from patentability inventions if preventing in its territory the commercial exploitation of the inventions is necessary to protect
ordre public or morality * * * provided that the exclusion is not based solely on the ground that the Party prohibits commercial exploitation in its territory of the subject matter of the patent.
NAFTA (and WTO/TRIPS) explicitly include only microorganisms and plants in their patentability requirements, so technically Canada is free to deny patent coverage to the oncomouse. However, if I were corporate (or industry) counsel, I'd bring suit in the NAFTA tribunal on the grounds that Canada is violating 1709(3) by effectively prohibiting the exploitation of biotechnology by ruling that bio-engineered animals don't qualify for invention protection. It's a questionable argument at best, but cases have been won at the tribunals with far less.
This will become an issue as biotech organisms start appearing en masse (whenever that might be). Right now, there's no real incentive to produce, in Canada, nonpatented oncomice, simply because most of the countries to which you'd export (e.g., the U.S., Japan) would allow infringement suits. As the suite of gengineered organisms expands, however, expect a great deal of political and legal pressure for Canada to fall in line with the other states.
Do you think the answer to having a massive and unreliable network is to build a second identical network?
According to my former employers at WorldCom, yes!
Okay, maybe not the best example. But it was always fun to be on conference calls when we had to explain to the customer why their backup network had gone down at the exact same time as the primary... assuming your idea of fun correlates with the deeper circles of Dante's hell.
Justice Rehnquist, a noted Gilbert and Sullivan fan (he designed his robe after a costume used in a production of Iolanthe), would no doubt appreciate your argument. But he might be tempted to reply
The Law is the true embodiment
Of everything that's excellent.
It has no kind of fault or flaw,
And I, my Lords, embody the Law.
I can only imagine what it would be like if they had pets in the game. A bunch of dead neglected dogs, cats, birds, hamsters, etc.
They had a downloadable hamster ("Downloadable Hamster?" Sounds like a really bad college band) that, if not kept healthy, would infect its owners with a fatal virus.
The result? You guessed it: SimPlague. Just goes to show ya.
I have also personally ran a website which contained fairly controversial material (based on this story) that I saw listed on their website and then removed shortly thereafter....
And I'm the first to mention this here so far? You should all be modded down -1 for naiveté.
Hm. And yet the WayBack Machine has the Project Censored page here, and even the AlterNet story linked therein. Ah, but yes, it must be a conspiracy by the Big Eye In The Pyramid -- someone call Hagbard Celine. Fnord.
Lucas went on to say that the proliferation of free and illegal downloading of content on the Internet could eventually lead studios to shy away from spending as much as they do on blockbuster movies since it won't be nearly as profitable for them to do so.
Oh, dear God, I can only hope so. The brief heyday of director-centric blockbusters in the 1960s and '70s -- Jaws, Apocalypse Now, Kubrick's best works, and, yes, even Star Wars -- has simply given way to overhyped, overextended special effects larded with committee-designed dialogue and focus-tested credit crawls. Am I supposed to believe that companies choosing to spend billions of dollars less on overplotted tripe like Clone Wars is a bad thing? Perhaps, if the financial stakes weren't so high for the studios and directors, they'd be willing to try riskier experiments in film.
Actually, I believe that Shatner's books are ghostwritten by one Ron Goulart; see, for example, this recent story on the use of ghostwriters by celebrities.
But really, who the hell cares about this kiddie crap?
Judging by the traffic on this story, quite a few people.
Just because you neither share nor even understand their interests doesn't make your post any less rude. Although I'm not particularly interested in either Star Wars or cartoons, it would be uncivil for me to simply barge around like the proverbial bull, accusing those who are of being "childish." Nonetheless, to judge by your post -- and its snide insinuation that many of the posters to Slashdot are, unlike you, incapable of caring for themselves -- civility is not a priority of yours. Unfortunate.
Arguably, boycotts are rarely, if ever, successful in effecting change in and of themselves. Generally, they work when they seek to change a situation that is ancillary to a company's strategy. (For example, boycotts of companies that advertise on controversial television shows have proven sporadically effective, while attempts to change corporate purchasing or manufacturing practices rarely work.)
Boycotts can be useful to their sponsors when they raise public awareness of an issue -- e.g., racial discrimination in the American South, or use of inexpensive labor overseas -- but as an economic practice, they're of rather mixed utility at best. And, given the technical and abstract nature of the problem at hand, I doubt that a boycott of music CDs will excite any fear in the EMI boardroom.
There are only two directly effective ways of fighting digital rights removal that I can think of: the first is for affected parties to bring suit against corporate practices, where applicable, and against DRR laws; the second is to directly lobby Congress, and to show Congresspeople both that there are sound policy reasons to vote against DRR laws like the DMCA, and that there are benefits to be reaped -- i.e., contributions, publicity, and voter support -- from supporting digital rights.
So, here's my question: would you spend, say, $100 a year to a "slashPAC" that would lobby Congress, prepare voter guides, and make contributions to appropriate candidates? Would you attend political functions on behalf of such a PAC, write your Congressional representatives, or work the phones for political candidates?
It's been said that the religious right would do anything to put a President in the White House; failing that, they'd put a Senator in Congress; failing that, they'd put a representative in the state house; failing that, they'd put a dogcatcher in the streets. If geeks mustered that same sort of political strength, putting their issues on the table from City Hall to Congressional hearings, then no two-bit coalition of entertainment companies could stand in our way.
The page being slashdotted, it's hard to really tell, but according to this article excerpt, it's simply:
software that automatically arranges your computer files in chronological order and displays them on your monitor with the most recent files featured prominently in the foreground. Scopeware... transfers the role of file clerk from you to the computer, seamlessly ordering documents of all sorts into convenient, time-stamped files."
To me, this sounds kind of like a file-based, somewhat less-functional version of Lotus Agenda (or Mitch Kapor's latest project). So, in the sense of being an application that tracks and organizes files, it's filesystem-irrelevant, just as, say, the "recent documents" screen in Word is filesystem-irrelevant.
Two words: too high! For $125 more I could buy a 20 gig iPod -- a little larger, a lot more space. For that matter, I could spend a flat $199 and get the dear-god-that's-tiny Initial portable DVD/CD/MP3-CD player.
Just $0.02 (plus two hundred bucks, give or take).
I'm going to lose precious karma with this post, but...
It's true that the USA-PATRIOT Act has a number of provisions that are of questionable Constitutionality and dubious value to the War Against Terror (TM, Pat. Pending). However, this article (gratuitous link)is nothing more than gross conjecture without evidence. As we say down here in Texas, he's sellin' a whole lotta bull and not much steak.
It is illegal for a wiretap or datatap to be undertaken without judicial oversight and authorization (see United States v. United States District Court, 407 U.S. 297 (1972), holding "Fourth Amendment freedoms cannot properly be guaranteed if domestic security surveillances may be conducted solely within the discretion of the Executive Branch."). The expanded tap provisions of USA-PATRIOT allow for a greater level of secrecy to surround specific wire- or datataps (specifically, those approved by the special FISA court for national security issues), but federal law enforcement does not have carte blanche to go around randomly listening in to our conversations. In order for a tap to pass Constitutional muster, it has to be narrowly drawn. Setting up a general-purpose dragnet to pull in data from all library patrons, the vast majority of whom cannot legally be targeted by a FISA tap order, would get drop-kicked out of the most deferential judge's chambers. (Orrin Hatch's statement on FISA taps under USA-PATRIOT is here, and the ALA's interpretation of the Act is here).
The FBI does have expanded powers to grab library records, for purposes of domestic law enforcement as well as international espionage and terror investigations, but that's very different -- if no less disturbing -- than ongoing monitoring, and would be sufficient to trigger the librarians' circumspection. It certainly doesn't mean that the Feds slapped a Carnivore underneath the public terminal carousel.
During his address, Palmisano said he saw signs that the global economy may have hit bottom and is flattening out. But he also said the tech sector would be slow to rebound because of the enormous growth and overinvestment of the Slate 1990s.
In any case, I'm not sure how far this return-to-the-mainframe idea will take us; we've had the technological framework for doing this for years -- think RPC, OpenStep's Distributed Objects, Sun's GRID engine -- but where's the real value to the department's bottom line?
I spent a number of years working on an extremely computationally-intense business process for the not-so-late, not-so-lamented WorldCom. For about half of that time, I was running the systems architecture and administration group, so performance management was a huge concern. We chewed up a lot of user time, but we were primarily hampered at every layer of the process by I/O (disk and network) and memory constraints. The same has been true of the accounting and provisioning systems I've worked with since then: the enterprise-level bottlenecks these days are things that can't be purchased on demand.
I'm sure there's a market for these kinds of services -- medical imaging, for example, though the network costs would be high -- but something to bet the Big Blue (computing) Farm on? I just don't see it. *shrug*
Is there something inherently bad about PHP that should make me shy away from it, or is it more of a religious debate?
Praise the Lord and pass the pretty-printer! I'm not a PHP fan, but I don't think any of us can make a strong argument against it, except that it's not a general-purpose language, and thus falls into the same geek category as Cold Fusion, Office macros, and, well, ASP. There's a very strong bias against using tools crafted for the job when the job is defined as a presentation method.
If you like, blame the tacit geek belief that any language they learn should allow inline assembler, have CORBA bindings, multithread, and let you hack a serial port monitor to control intelligent coffeemakers.
Re:Oh no, Yahoo's system works and is stable!
on
Yahoo Moving to PHP
·
· Score: 2, Funny
And just what sort of language is C/C++ anyway I've heard of C and I've heard of C++, but what is C/C++?
Slashdot Mirror
The term "state" is generally preferred in these cases because it refers primarily to political organization; "country" is closely linked to the physical geography, and "nation" to ethnic or cultural groupings.
In any case, don't you guys have "provinces," not "states?"
This will become an issue as biotech organisms start appearing en masse (whenever that might be). Right now, there's no real incentive to produce, in Canada, nonpatented oncomice, simply because most of the countries to which you'd export (e.g., the U.S., Japan) would allow infringement suits. As the suite of gengineered organisms expands, however, expect a great deal of political and legal pressure for Canada to fall in line with the other states.
Ironically, that's where Joss Whedon began his career as a staff writer. *shrug*
According to my former employers at WorldCom, yes!
Okay, maybe not the best example. But it was always fun to be on conference calls when we had to explain to the customer why their backup network had gone down at the exact same time as the primary ... assuming your idea of fun correlates with the deeper circles of Dante's hell.
The Law is the true embodiment
Of everything that's excellent.
It has no kind of fault or flaw,
And I, my Lords, embody the Law.
They had a downloadable hamster ("Downloadable Hamster?" Sounds like a really bad college band) that, if not kept healthy, would infect its owners with a fatal virus.
The result? You guessed it: SimPlague. Just goes to show ya.
And I'm the first to mention this here so far? You should all be modded down -1 for naiveté.
Hm. And yet the WayBack Machine has the Project Censored page here, and even the AlterNet story linked therein. Ah, but yes, it must be a conspiracy by the Big Eye In The Pyramid -- someone call Hagbard Celine. Fnord.
-1, Delusional.
There's an excellent interview with Kahle on technical details at O'Reilly's own archive -- here.
Oh, dear God, I can only hope so. The brief heyday of director-centric blockbusters in the 1960s and '70s -- Jaws, Apocalypse Now, Kubrick's best works, and, yes, even Star Wars -- has simply given way to overhyped, overextended special effects larded with committee-designed dialogue and focus-tested credit crawls. Am I supposed to believe that companies choosing to spend billions of dollars less on overplotted tripe like Clone Wars is a bad thing? Perhaps, if the financial stakes weren't so high for the studios and directors, they'd be willing to try riskier experiments in film.
Actually, I believe that Shatner's books are ghostwritten by one Ron Goulart; see, for example, this recent story on the use of ghostwriters by celebrities.
Judging by the traffic on this story, quite a few people.
Just because you neither share nor even understand their interests doesn't make your post any less rude. Although I'm not particularly interested in either Star Wars or cartoons, it would be uncivil for me to simply barge around like the proverbial bull, accusing those who are of being "childish." Nonetheless, to judge by your post -- and its snide insinuation that many of the posters to Slashdot are, unlike you, incapable of caring for themselves -- civility is not a priority of yours. Unfortunate.
Boycotts can be useful to their sponsors when they raise public awareness of an issue -- e.g., racial discrimination in the American South, or use of inexpensive labor overseas -- but as an economic practice, they're of rather mixed utility at best. And, given the technical and abstract nature of the problem at hand, I doubt that a boycott of music CDs will excite any fear in the EMI boardroom.
There are only two directly effective ways of fighting digital rights removal that I can think of: the first is for affected parties to bring suit against corporate practices, where applicable, and against DRR laws; the second is to directly lobby Congress, and to show Congresspeople both that there are sound policy reasons to vote against DRR laws like the DMCA, and that there are benefits to be reaped -- i.e., contributions, publicity, and voter support -- from supporting digital rights.
So, here's my question: would you spend, say, $100 a year to a "slashPAC" that would lobby Congress, prepare voter guides, and make contributions to appropriate candidates? Would you attend political functions on behalf of such a PAC, write your Congressional representatives, or work the phones for political candidates?
It's been said that the religious right would do anything to put a President in the White House; failing that, they'd put a Senator in Congress; failing that, they'd put a representative in the state house; failing that, they'd put a dogcatcher in the streets. If geeks mustered that same sort of political strength, putting their issues on the table from City Hall to Congressional hearings, then no two-bit coalition of entertainment companies could stand in our way.
$0.02.
Just $0.02 (plus two hundred bucks, give or take).
It's true that the USA-PATRIOT Act has a number of provisions that are of questionable Constitutionality and dubious value to the War Against Terror (TM, Pat. Pending). However, this article (gratuitous link)is nothing more than gross conjecture without evidence. As we say down here in Texas, he's sellin' a whole lotta bull and not much steak.
It is illegal for a wiretap or datatap to be undertaken without judicial oversight and authorization (see United States v. United States District Court, 407 U.S. 297 (1972), holding "Fourth Amendment freedoms cannot properly be guaranteed if domestic security surveillances may be conducted solely within the discretion of the Executive Branch."). The expanded tap provisions of USA-PATRIOT allow for a greater level of secrecy to surround specific wire- or datataps (specifically, those approved by the special FISA court for national security issues), but federal law enforcement does not have carte blanche to go around randomly listening in to our conversations. In order for a tap to pass Constitutional muster, it has to be narrowly drawn. Setting up a general-purpose dragnet to pull in data from all library patrons, the vast majority of whom cannot legally be targeted by a FISA tap order, would get drop-kicked out of the most deferential judge's chambers. (Orrin Hatch's statement on FISA taps under USA-PATRIOT is here, and the ALA's interpretation of the Act is here).
The FBI does have expanded powers to grab library records, for purposes of domestic law enforcement as well as international espionage and terror investigations, but that's very different -- if no less disturbing -- than ongoing monitoring, and would be sufficient to trigger the librarians' circumspection. It certainly doesn't mean that the Feds slapped a Carnivore underneath the public terminal carousel.
One online magazine did all that? Now I know who to blame!
In any case, I'm not sure how far this return-to-the-mainframe idea will take us; we've had the technological framework for doing this for years -- think RPC, OpenStep's Distributed Objects, Sun's GRID engine -- but where's the real value to the department's bottom line?
I spent a number of years working on an extremely computationally-intense business process for the not-so-late, not-so-lamented WorldCom. For about half of that time, I was running the systems architecture and administration group, so performance management was a huge concern. We chewed up a lot of user time, but we were primarily hampered at every layer of the process by I/O (disk and network) and memory constraints. The same has been true of the accounting and provisioning systems I've worked with since then: the enterprise-level bottlenecks these days are things that can't be purchased on demand.
I'm sure there's a market for these kinds of services -- medical imaging, for example, though the network costs would be high -- but something to bet the Big Blue (computing) Farm on? I just don't see it. *shrug*
Praise the Lord and pass the pretty-printer! I'm not a PHP fan, but I don't think any of us can make a strong argument against it, except that it's not a general-purpose language, and thus falls into the same geek category as Cold Fusion, Office macros, and, well, ASP. There's a very strong bias against using tools crafted for the job when the job is defined as a presentation method.
If you like, blame the tacit geek belief that any language they learn should allow inline assembler, have CORBA bindings, multithread, and let you hack a serial port monitor to control intelligent coffeemakers.
Code that uses malloc() and cout, of course. ;)
Talk about "cats sleeping with dogs" -- what about that Microsoft .NET advertisement right below the story???