I'm a big believer that price and cost should reflect each other.
Then it's about time the US price of gas reflected it's cost!
The US government subsidizes gasoline with military operations. It never fails to spend at least $10,000,000,000 per year, and this year the cost has been more than ten times that ("$87 billion" is an oft-quoted figure, and only part of it)
All this money to protect gasoline supply is labelled as "Defense" spending, and comes out of all federal taxes. All Americans pay to keep gas prices low- and the only way they can reclaim some of that cash is to buy more fuel.
Anyone trying to live without a car will subsidize everyone else's SUVs with his 1040s.
PS. The war for petroleum costs not just money, but lives... everyone who died on Sept 11 2001, for example...
Wrong. They have another kind of service: Passenger rail to low population towns in the barren Republican-voting "Red States". Places that Greyhound is hardly willing to service because there are so few passengers (and all rural dwellers have cars anyhow). That is where the most really goes to.
The federal legislators from those backwoods know that passenger rail isn't needed there, but they don't care: shutting down the trains would be a sign of regression, and they don't want that. A Congressional vote to uphold Amtrak's prohibition against closing lines is a kind of pork that applies to the whole country- and as such, it will never be defeated.
The first is not profitable.
Wrong. If Amtrak was legally allowed to shutdown everything west of the Mississippi, leaving basically just the NEC operating, it would be equally as profitable as any airline.
The second is profitable. Because Amtrak charges ~$2k for a bed car and since they rent the rails from freight companies,
Beyond wrong. What decade do you live in, where the wealthy decide "I'll reserve a week in advance, spending $2000 and then 15 hours in a bunk, instead of buying a next-day $400 planeticket that'll land 3.5 hours after takeoff?"
Seriously, go to the Amtrak website and find one of these alledged $2k sleeper fares. They don't exist.
Both Minix and Linux were named to resemble Unix... which is fine, because they are philosophical descendants of Unix and technically highly related.
Lindows, OTOH, is not descended from or related to Windows in any way. The only similarity is that they both target the same group of potential customers, and the Lindows company is clearly banking on confusion with the Windows trademark.
Apparently, "windows" to decribe a "computer windowing enviroment" was a generic term in computing long before Microsoft came about.
Absolutely not. "windows" was used as a plural word to describe parts of graphical environments. Never to refer to the environment has a whole.
Piror to Microsoft coming along, nobody said "Run windows and then launch the editor". People said "Open two new windows", but those are entirely different usages.
In Germany, Microsoft has allegedly licensed the Explorer trademark from a relatively unknown software company.
Not just Germany. In the US, there was a web company founded in around 1995 or so called "Internet Explorer". They completely owned that trademark. Microsoft bought them out just to get it.
In general, RISC architecture tends to perform better at floating point than intel.
That's the opposite of true. Traditionally, CISC (like Intel) tries to create many powerful instructions, and for example has opcodes which multiply or divide a floating point number in one step.
But RISC was designed with the realization that floating point math isn't very important- most computer programs can get by fine with integers alone. So the original RISC systems were worse at fp (forcing compiler developers to emulate multiplication in their own code), concentrating on integer speed instead.
But to just pretend the real Battlestar Galactica never happened and just do a complete re-do is absurd. People grudgingly tolerate
Your position is completely backwards. People hate the new StarWars ep I&II, and feel it dimishes the original trilogy precisely because it's presented as a continuation of the same story.
If "Episode 1" had been a completely different movie, separate from Star Wars, it's drastic stylistic differences would've been more justified. It could've got new fans who judge it on its own merits, rather than be tainted with comparisons to the original, or hobbled by awkward continuity matchups.
Preparing a re-make or re-imagining is the next best thing to creating a new original project, and is far superior to tacking on yet more sequels to a concluded series.
There's no reason the laws have to be uniform across large trucks and personal cars. Truckers already face regulations that don't apply to others, such as the maximum hours they can drive per day.
It's be easy enough to enact duel speed limits for vehicles over and under (say) 10,000 lbs.
the road is wet and someone skids and wraps around a telephone pole at 60 miles per hour, do you really think the effect is going to be that different than at 55 miles per hour?
If the posted speed limit is 55 and you're travelling 55 mph on a wet road, you are already guilty of speeding.
Speed limits, by US law, are weather-sensitive. The posted values on signs only apply in "normal" weather. If the weather is better than normal (totally dry, clear sky, high sun), you can travel 5mph faster than posted. If driving is impaired by darkness, fog, or precipitation, then you must drive below the stated limit or be guilty of speeding.
Police hardly ever enforce it like that, but they can pull you over for going 35 on the freeway in a blizzard.
Not necessarily. Those two words aren't conflicting, but they're not synonyms either.
The US republic happens to be a democracy, but a government could fit the definition of either republic or democracy without also being the other. (For example, Japan and the UK are democratic but not republican, since the head of state is a monarch)
That is especially true when you consider that the ancient definition of democracy differs from the modern one.
there's always some 'effective' liability imposed by business reality.
But that 'effective' liability is not effective, because the effect of Microsoft selling safe products hasn't been realized.
That point is additionally bogus because the topic is the percieved non-accountability of Linux as compared to Microsoft Windows. The "business reality" that supposedly puts an "effective liability" on Microsoft effects Linux in exactly the same way: if the software screws up, people will use something else next time.
In fact, the accountability of Linux is much greater from that perspective, as Linux users are more able to quickly switch to a competitor (their same apps will run on BSD or Solaris, but Windows-specific programs aren't so easy to migrate)
Now how about you attempt the reverse and much harder problem, and find me someone who decided he did not want to invent because he wouldn't get a patent.
"is it a great wonderfull new idea rather than just an incremental change that would be obvious to any engineer faced with the same problem?"
Few of Edison's own patents meet that test. The phonograph may have been new, but the light bulb (his most famous invention, in 1879) had already been created by others as early as 1841. His own modifications were incremental. Yet of course he still got a patent.
Other legendary inventors who did incremental changes to existing ideas (followed by the inventor who made the original, but less efficient device):
Sam Morse : Charles Wheatstone
Orville & Wilbur Wright : Samuel Langley
James Watt : Thomas Newcomen
Arguably, however, patents are better given to someone who makes an incremental improvement, rather than a revolutionary one. Patents (and all of "Intellectual Property") are only meant to encourage progress. Genius, heroic inventors are quite likely to pursue their insight regardless of the prospect of patent protection- and if they succeed and earn a patent, it's likely to take a decade or more before the concept really becomes profitable. Potential competitors will be slow to recognize and accept the totally new idea.
The phonograph and airplane, for example, both had patents granted for them, and both became huge industries (one with annual revenue in the billions, the other in the trillions). But the patents were almost expired before the business models really started to get into wide-scale profitability.
But, an incremental improvement is more vulnerable to being rapidly duplicated. Someone prespiring away at finding the right combination of gas and filament to make the light-bulb really practical runs a true risk of someone else buying his first product and starting to sell a reproduction just 3 months later.
A much fairer patent system would give the examiner more options than just a yes/no response. Not all inventions are inherently deserving of the same length of protection. If the government recognized this, the assignment of bad patents would be far less damaging, as only the best patents would get the long, multi-decade terms.
Software patents especially (if they are allowed to exist at all) show last much shorter than those for physical machines. Suppose the Amazon 1-click patent had lasted for just 2-3 years. That'd be not nearly as bad as the prospect of continuing to avoid one-click ordering in 2017.
On the contrary, he misues it all the time. He's even authored an entire book dedicated to that misuse. He's tried to change the definition of "hacker", and apparently you're falling for it.
Interestingly, ESR has recently augmented his definition of 'hacker' with a reference to the MIT Model Railroad Club, who were the first users of 'hack' in regards to computers. Apparently he couldn't completely ignore the truth... but he still omits that all of their computer use was without permission from the owners!
"Hacker" has always implied sneaking into someone else's computer.
Launching a DDoS does not require the slightest bit of hacking.
"Computer hacking" is defined as "operating a computer in a manner inconsistent with it's designed intent". Thus a DDoS fits perfectly. It's much more accurate than your other suggestions:
Criminal: Entirely free of content. You'd have to be more specific. Also, computer tampering is not illegal in all jurisdictions, so not every hack is a crime (far from it)
Script kiddie: Implies knowledge about the modus operandi that you can't possibly have (without being an accomplice). Do you know the assailant is an amateur who can barely run the kits he downloads?
Script monkey: Makes a rather ludicrous suggestion of the perpetrator's species.
Some people would likely suggest cracker. That is not correct for all DoS attacks, because cracker (as a person, not a food) is someone who penetrates security. However, a DDoS normally involves taking over several other computers beforehand, so cracker is likely to be appropriate.
Has anybody thought about creating competition to USPTO?
So what you're saying is, people should spontaneously do the jobs of federal employees for free?
Imagine a site (like freshmeat) accepting ideas with a prototype implementation (perl, python, Lisp, etc.)
Imagine any USENET group at all, and whenever a developer thinks up an idea, he just pushes it into an external news archive where he can forever after retrieve it as prior art if someone later shows up with a patent.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm a big believer that price and cost should reflect each other.
Then it's about time the US price of gas reflected it's cost!
The US government subsidizes gasoline with military operations. It never fails to spend at least $10,000,000,000 per year, and this year the cost has been more than ten times that ("$87 billion" is an oft-quoted figure, and only part of it)
All this money to protect gasoline supply is labelled as "Defense" spending, and comes out of all federal taxes. All Americans pay to keep gas prices low- and the only way they can reclaim some of that cash is to buy more fuel.
Anyone trying to live without a car will subsidize everyone else's SUVs with his 1040s.
PS. The war for petroleum costs not just money, but lives... everyone who died on Sept 11 2001, for example...
Amtrak has 2 types of service:
Wrong. They have another kind of service: Passenger rail to low population towns in the barren Republican-voting "Red States". Places that Greyhound is hardly willing to service because there are so few passengers (and all rural dwellers have cars anyhow). That is where the most really goes to.
The federal legislators from those backwoods know that passenger rail isn't needed there, but they don't care: shutting down the trains would be a sign of regression, and they don't want that. A Congressional vote to uphold Amtrak's prohibition against closing lines is a kind of pork that applies to the whole country- and as such, it will never be defeated.
The first is not profitable.
Wrong. If Amtrak was legally allowed to shutdown everything west of the Mississippi, leaving basically just the NEC operating, it would be equally as profitable as any airline.
The second is profitable. Because Amtrak charges ~$2k for a bed car and since they rent the rails from freight companies,
Beyond wrong. What decade do you live in, where the wealthy decide "I'll reserve a week in advance, spending $2000 and then 15 hours in a bunk, instead of buying a next-day $400 planeticket that'll land 3.5 hours after takeoff?"
Seriously, go to the Amtrak website and find one of these alledged $2k sleeper fares. They don't exist.
Both Minix and Linux were named to resemble Unix... which is fine, because they are philosophical descendants of Unix and technically highly related.
Lindows, OTOH, is not descended from or related to Windows in any way. The only similarity is that they both target the same group of potential customers, and the Lindows company is clearly banking on confusion with the Windows trademark.
I know you can't trade mark a design as such but geeze
Designs can be patented though. For example, Apple has a patent on a high-resolution icon of a wireframe wastepaper basket in the corner of a screen.
which obviously predates X-Windows
It's easy to predate X-Windows, since X-Windows doesn't exist yet.
There is a project called the "X Window System", but they never called it "windows". They never put an S on the end of the word. "Window" != "Windows"
After the popularity of Microsoft(tm) Windows(r) grew, some people started using "X-Windows" to mean the "X Window System".
Apparently, "windows" to decribe a "computer windowing enviroment" was a generic term in computing long before Microsoft came about.
Absolutely not. "windows" was used as a plural word to describe parts of graphical environments. Never to refer to the environment has a whole.
Piror to Microsoft coming along, nobody said "Run windows and then launch the editor". People said "Open two new windows", but those are entirely different usages.
If Microsoft was trying to trademark "Operating System"
Microsoft Disk Operating System(TM)
In Germany, Microsoft has allegedly licensed the Explorer trademark from a relatively unknown software company.
Not just Germany. In the US, there was a web company founded in around 1995 or so called "Internet Explorer". They completely owned that trademark. Microsoft bought them out just to get it.
that would kill you on any OS.
It never bothers my friends with Microsoft(tm) Windows(r)! at least until they make the mistake of writing in Java...
In general, RISC architecture tends to perform better at floating point than intel.
That's the opposite of true. Traditionally, CISC (like Intel) tries to create many powerful instructions, and for example has opcodes which multiply or divide a floating point number in one step.
But RISC was designed with the realization that floating point math isn't very important- most computer programs can get by fine with integers alone. So the original RISC systems were worse at fp (forcing compiler developers to emulate multiplication in their own code), concentrating on integer speed instead.
But to just pretend the real Battlestar Galactica never happened and just do a complete re-do is absurd. People grudgingly tolerate
Your position is completely backwards. People hate the new StarWars ep I&II, and feel it dimishes the original trilogy precisely because it's presented as a continuation of the same story.
If "Episode 1" had been a completely different movie, separate from Star Wars, it's drastic stylistic differences would've been more justified. It could've got new fans who judge it on its own merits, rather than be tainted with comparisons to the original, or hobbled by awkward continuity matchups.
Preparing a re-make or re-imagining is the next best thing to creating a new original project, and is far superior to tacking on yet more sequels to a concluded series.
Why does the AI from the Matrix want to kill us??
They certainly didn't want it very badly... it shouldn't have been that hard to shut off the feeding tubes.
You deserve a ticket.
He deserves a high paying career as a Boeing contractor designing our nation's next generation of low-altitude combat aircraft.
There's no reason the laws have to be uniform across large trucks and personal cars. Truckers already face regulations that don't apply to others, such as the maximum hours they can drive per day.
It's be easy enough to enact duel speed limits for vehicles over and under (say) 10,000 lbs.
the road is wet and someone skids and wraps around a telephone pole at 60 miles per hour, do you really think the effect is going to be that different than at 55 miles per hour?
If the posted speed limit is 55 and you're travelling 55 mph on a wet road, you are already guilty of speeding.
Speed limits, by US law, are weather-sensitive. The posted values on signs only apply in "normal" weather. If the weather is better than normal (totally dry, clear sky, high sun), you can travel 5mph faster than posted. If driving is impaired by darkness, fog, or precipitation, then you must drive below the stated limit or be guilty of speeding.
Police hardly ever enforce it like that, but they can pull you over for going 35 on the freeway in a blizzard.
Pledge of allegiance excerpt:
The Pledge of Allegiance has no legal weight. If it did, it'd be unconstitutional (the currently-popular McCarthyite version, not the original).
republic is a democracy.
Not necessarily. Those two words aren't conflicting, but they're not synonyms either.
The US republic happens to be a democracy, but a government could fit the definition of either republic or democracy without also being the other. (For example, Japan and the UK are democratic but not republican, since the head of state is a monarch)
That is especially true when you consider that the ancient definition of democracy differs from the modern one.
mandating a no-evil-uses-with-EZPass policy
Why do you imply that speed-monitoring ("to save lives") with EZPass is evil?
The police have a long established practice of secretly observing motorists to uphold public safety.
"Speed check by Radar"
"Unmarked patrol cars"
"Speed check from Aircraft"
Nobody's organizing a protest against signs like that. No politician thinks he can score civil-libertarian points by tearing them down.
How is "Speed check by EZPass" much different?
Windows 98 has got to be some of the worst software ever released on a large scale,
Step into the carnival of pain, and witness the cruel world of Windows 3.0 or the perverse horror of Windows ME...
there's always some 'effective' liability imposed by business reality.
But that 'effective' liability is not effective, because the effect of Microsoft selling safe products hasn't been realized.
That point is additionally bogus because the topic is the percieved non-accountability of Linux as compared to Microsoft Windows. The "business reality" that supposedly puts an "effective liability" on Microsoft effects Linux in exactly the same way: if the software screws up, people will use something else next time.
In fact, the accountability of Linux is much greater from that perspective, as Linux users are more able to quickly switch to a competitor (their same apps will run on BSD or Solaris, but Windows-specific programs aren't so easy to migrate)
Find me one!
Every single inventor of anything before 1960.
Now how about you attempt the reverse and much harder problem, and find me someone who decided he did not want to invent because he wouldn't get a patent.
Few of Edison's own patents meet that test. The phonograph may have been new, but the light bulb (his most famous invention, in 1879) had already been created by others as early as 1841. His own modifications were incremental. Yet of course he still got a patent.
Other legendary inventors who did incremental changes to existing ideas (followed by the inventor who made the original, but less efficient device):
Arguably, however, patents are better given to someone who makes an incremental improvement, rather than a revolutionary one. Patents (and all of "Intellectual Property") are only meant to encourage progress. Genius, heroic inventors are quite likely to pursue their insight regardless of the prospect of patent protection- and if they succeed and earn a patent, it's likely to take a decade or more before the concept really becomes profitable. Potential competitors will be slow to recognize and accept the totally new idea.
The phonograph and airplane, for example, both had patents granted for them, and both became huge industries (one with annual revenue in the billions, the other in the trillions). But the patents were almost expired before the business models really started to get into wide-scale profitability.
But, an incremental improvement is more vulnerable to being rapidly duplicated. Someone prespiring away at finding the right combination of gas and filament to make the light-bulb really practical runs a true risk of someone else buying his first product and starting to sell a reproduction just 3 months later.
A much fairer patent system would give the examiner more options than just a yes/no response. Not all inventions are inherently deserving of the same length of protection. If the government recognized this, the assignment of bad patents would be far less damaging, as only the best patents would get the long, multi-decade terms.
Software patents especially (if they are allowed to exist at all) show last much shorter than those for physical machines. Suppose the Amazon 1-click patent had lasted for just 2-3 years. That'd be not nearly as bad as the prospect of continuing to avoid one-click ordering in 2017.
ESR doesn't misuse the term
On the contrary, he misues it all the time. He's even authored an entire book dedicated to that misuse. He's tried to change the definition of "hacker", and apparently you're falling for it.
Interestingly, ESR has recently augmented his definition of 'hacker' with a reference to the MIT Model Railroad Club, who were the first users of 'hack' in regards to computers. Apparently he couldn't completely ignore the truth... but he still omits that all of their computer use was without permission from the owners!
"Hacker" has always implied sneaking into someone else's computer.
Launching a DDoS does not require the slightest bit of hacking.
"Computer hacking" is defined as "operating a computer in a manner inconsistent with it's designed intent". Thus a DDoS fits perfectly. It's much more accurate than your other suggestions:
Criminal: Entirely free of content. You'd have to be more specific. Also, computer tampering is not illegal in all jurisdictions, so not every hack is a crime (far from it)
Script kiddie: Implies knowledge about the modus operandi that you can't possibly have (without being an accomplice). Do you know the assailant is an amateur who can barely run the kits he downloads?
Script monkey: Makes a rather ludicrous suggestion of the perpetrator's species.
Some people would likely suggest cracker. That is not correct for all DoS attacks, because cracker (as a person, not a food) is someone who penetrates security. However, a DDoS normally involves taking over several other computers beforehand, so cracker is likely to be appropriate.
Has anybody thought about creating competition to USPTO?
So what you're saying is, people should spontaneously do the jobs of federal employees for free?
Imagine a site (like freshmeat) accepting ideas with a prototype implementation (perl, python, Lisp, etc.)
Imagine any USENET group at all, and whenever a developer thinks up an idea, he just pushes it into an external news archive where he can forever after retrieve it as prior art if someone later shows up with a patent.
It's like your website, but free and extant.