Note true.... draw an equilateral triangle, now take your compas, put the pointy bit on any corner and the pencil bit on any other, draw a curve from that corner to the free corner. Repeat with the pointy bit on the other two corners. Now erase the straign lines - voila!
Voila? Didn't you just create a circle by doing that?
So, the distance between the outside atoms, although something so small as to not be measurable by any means whatsoever, is enough to say "that's not 10"?
That depends on the application. There are applications where 0.0001 is can be treated as 0. There are applications where 10^-100 is very different from zero. There are applications where 10^100 is infinite. There are some applications where it is not.
That is insane. I blame engineers: ergo, I blame IEEE. At some point (magical or otherwise) 9.999999.... becomes 10 to everyone in the universe except a handful of barbarians who like to ruffle feathers. It's darn near as silly as the philosopical argument about color names.
The fact that you can't imagine applications where it would matter does not mean that there aren't any. For example, in probability models you can easily run into numbers that fall outside the range of IEEE double precision floating point.
VIA has been selling the CIII as part of the EPIA Mini-ITX platform
The CPU component of the Eden Platform is referred to as ESP. C3 is the name of a processor family that's sold quite separately from the Eden Platform; I have one in an SV24 at home. There's no doubt that the C3 and ESP are very similar technologically, but they really are different products packaged and marketed differently and I'm sure VIA would like to continue selling both.
VIA's marketing is not as clear as it could be, but the parent poster is right. EPIA is the name of VIA's mini-itx boards. They are offered with C3 or Eden ESP processors. The difference is that the ESP boards run fanless. Apparently you can also run the C3 fanless if you replace the original heatsink+fan with a better/larger heatsink, but this is not endorsed by VIA.
Use one of these [linitx.com] to connect it to a spare IDE connector. The adaptor also needs power.
Unfortunately, I have not seen any similar adaptors that connect to a laptop style connector (with power) because if there where it would make a cool direct HD replacement for an older laptop.
so they(the lawmakers) scream that we should use something like IPV6 which allows enough ips for everyone to have a unique IP. then it becomes law. noone is prepared for this and the internet becomes illegal except for those who can afford to pay for Internet2.
ipv6 and internet2 are two different things, you know
read about the actual implementation of the card. Many transportation card systems use a magnetic strip. Many electronic cash cards use a chip on a card. These must be fed into a card reader and are much slower. The RF card do not need any physical contact and are VERY efficient. They are also implemented in watches and cell phones, which is obviously impossible with the magnetic or chip based cards. They are used in Hong Kong, Tokyo and apparently Washington DC (maybe Singapore?), most of Europe is using the chip based cards. If you think that one or two seconds for a transaction with a chip card is quick, you should see the number of commuters in really crowded places like Hong Kong or Tokyo sometimes: every half second counts!
Want to remove the floppy? Gee, how about using the same method I had used to *insert* the darned thing? No, you have to do something completely different.
The problem with the PC approach is that it is too easy to eject the floppy during disk activity. Of course, PC makers would always opt for the cheap mechanical eject (even IBM in their ultra-expensive PS/2 days). Apple and Sun (other workstation vendors?) choose the more expensive approach where the OS knows whether the floppy was present. I agree that the Apple UI for ejecting the floppy is pretty dumb (on a Sparcstation, you would just type eject in a terminal). IMO the best solution is the electrical eject in Zip drives, where the button first sends a signal to the OS and only spits out the disk when it gets an OK.
We white-boxed ours from a local clone maker. Micro-ATX Nforce boards, Durons, 128mb of memory. No CDROM, no hard disk, no floppy. Even in a real Micro ATX case, they are big, but they sure are fast! Many a time I've shocked an onlooker by telling them I was working on a terminal!
I'm convinced that
mini-itx boards would make excelent X-terminals. It's just a shame that cases are still relatively expensive.
I'd challenge anybody to come up with a problem that could be solved within a few hours in Perl or Python that couldn't be solved within 2 or 3 times that length of time (longer, but not "weeks") by a competent C or Java programmer. Certainly, there are jobs where Perl is absolutely the right tool. But I have a very hard time believing that there can be that much of a difference.
I suspect but that the author was thinking of Perl + CPAN versus C + ANSI libraries; not entirely fair, I know...
And there is the flaw. Rights between humans are not equivalnet to rights of animals.
Exactly. Rights of animals are natural rights. Rights between humans are social convention.
Animals do not have free will. They can know of no difference between right and wrong, because they are incapable of making choices and their link to consequences.
Of course they can: they all know that it is the right of the stronger animal to possess whatever it chooses to take. They know that a captured prey is only their property when they guard it. They know that the consequence of not defending or hiding their loot is that they loose any claim to it. This is the natural right to property because this is what occurs in nature.
This is not true of humans, who by their very nature can understand consequences from their perspective and that of others. When you can reach this level, right and wrong are no longer appear subjective - but universal measurable and observable.
But are they? Not very long ago, a large number of people believed that means of production should not be property of individuals. That the fact that natives happend to live on a piece of land earlier did not give them superior claims to said piece of land. Somewhat longer ago, large groups believed that conquest and looting were a legitimate means to acquire property. If I were to discover a tribe that has no notion of individual property as we have, would you call them unnatural?
Right and wrong are exactly social conventions. In nature, no living creature has a "right to live". In many societies, people do, because this arrangement happens to make them more productive. But in some societies, the individuals right to live will be overridden when it appears beneficial to the society at large not to let them live. Even the States in United Stated are divided over this issue, as homogeneous as they might appear to outsiders.
It is from this nature that property rights derive, from an understanding that not everyone can use something at the same time, and a non subjective method of allocation and mutual respect. IP does not follow this mantra.
The nature of property rights derive from the understanding that we would collectively be much more productive if we did not spend too much of our resources guarding what we will eat tomorrow and where we will sleep next week. In nature, I have no right to expect other living creatures to acknowledge the invisible bond between me and my hoards. By and large, we all agree that we are better of if everyone just did.
In nature, I have no right to expect others not to repeat a story or song that I devised and performed without my approval. It might turn out that we are all better of if you did, to some degree. This is the very nature of the dispute.
There is no natural "right" to ownership of ideas, unlike physical property, because ideas can be duplicated infinitely, unlike physical goods. If I take your idea, we both have it. If I take your car, you have to walk to work.
Why is there a natural right to ownership of physical property? When I catch a fish from the river, is it mine? (When does it cease to be the possession of the river and become mine?) If you subsequently stole or robbed the fish from me, is it yours? Now how would you answer these questions if I was a bear and you were a much stronger or faster bear? Now what is the "natural right" and what is the "social contract"?
Government is not about sacrificing rights for common unity and security, but rather about people having natural law rights who organize to secure those rights.
Property rights are a natural law right, copyrights and patents are not.
No, the parent of this thread had a point.
Common property rights are not natural rights. Natural would be that what you can take by force or by stealth is your possession, but only for as long as you are willing and able to guard it. Witness "property" in the animal kingdom.
Long ago, we humans realized that we would collectively be better off if we would acknowledge property. This is a social contract, one which most people agree is beneficiary. IP is a different contract. Talented individuals are promised a great amount of control to give them more incentive to produce. It seems likely that there is a point between too much control and too little that is most beneficiary to mankind. Finding this is rather difficult, since the overall benefits and losses are hard to quantify.
But the main point of this reply is, common property is no more "natural" than IP is.
I forgot to add that in China the pirates
[...]
* sell an inferior product to the public while setting their prices arbitrarily
* care only about their own profits while screwing the artists and the consumers.
But the price setting is the crucial difference, it is not set arbitrarity. In China, there is almost a classical competitive market, where products are sold near marginal costs (media costs). If one producer sets the price much higher, someone else will take his sales by selling for somewhat less. This is possible because of disregard for copyrights.
In the US, the producers act like a monopolist or cartel: the prices are presumably set at profit maximizing level. Many./ argue that sales would be much higher with lower prices. Of course sales volume will increase. But from the label's point of view, the increase in unit sales will not offset the decrease in revenue resulting from the price drop.
In the US, copyright was adapted with full knowledge of this situation. The idea was that IP would be underproduced in a free market. With a free market for IP, the original producer must price both a high fixed costs and some marginal costs in his product to survive, but copying suppliers can always undercut his price because they do not bear the fixed costs of the creation. The cd and dvd market in China is exactly in this situation. The original fixed costs of producing an Hollywood film is borne by those who pay the official distributors (mostly Americans and Europeans). In China (and many other countries that disregard IP laws), consumers get the best of both worlds: they pay the low marginal cost (dvd media) but do not experience undersupply, since the fixed costs to keep the studios producing are paid by Europeans and Americans. The domestic film industry is in a difficult position. They cannot pass the fixed costs to other audiences, so their products would be more expensive than a Hollywood production (produced with a much bigger budget!).
Whether the current copyright laws lead to a desirable level of IP output is debatable. But realize that the amount of media products we have been able to enjoy in the past century is the result of both technology and monopoly creating laws.
I think you mean "copying copyrighted material IS wrong", unless you mean that I actually break into the artists home and swipe his original drafts. Please use the proper terminology.
Copyrights are there for a reason
And what exactly do you think this reason is?
If I own a work of art that I've put a lot of effort into, I certainly do not want it copied around without any control on my part, unless I've specifically granted everyone permission to do so
I'll give you a waterproof method to keep 100% control of your art: keep it in you're head. If you don't have a photographic memory, you can settle for the next best thing: record it on some medium and seal it in a vault. Most "artists" seek the exact opposite route of wide dissemination of their work, with the knowledge that the probability of them keeping control is virtually zero. The main reason is that in the past century, both law and technology happend to be in place to allow a handful of performers to amass wealth that no performer in the centuries before could ever hope to posess. Technology is now closing this window of opportunity rapidly, and I doubt it can be kept open by law.
I'm glad to hear that you feel that way. I'll be making arrangments with your payroll department to get a certain amount deducted from your pay and sent to my bank account every month. Don't worry, it won't be a large amount, only $15 (about the price of a CD). I'm sure your payroll officer will agree because it is not theft since you will never see the money on your paycheck in the first place.
If you can get away with this, be my guest. Actually there is this shadowy organization called IRS that already does this. And it's way more than $15.
What Lessig's blog states is correct in that it's now up to the citizens to get Congress to reform IP law. Which, realistically, is how it should've gone in the first place. It's not going to be an easy fight, but the fights that are worth it rarely are. And things may very well get worse before they get better... but that's how it often goes.
This is essentially a lost fight. In a few days, the indignant outcries will be lost in the noise of Iraq, Economic Recovery or the Latest Box Office Hit. The few actions organized around web communities like/. and k5 will have as much impact as the original protests against the CTEA bill had 5 years ago.
The problem is, the man in the street does not perceive that he has lost anything. Being able to freely copy Fitzgerald, Gershwin or Wharton will not incite him to march the streets or write his "representative".
Concerning petitioners' assertion that Congress might evade the limitation on its authority by stringing together "an unlimited number of 'limited Times,'" the Court of Appeals stated that such legislative misbehavior "clearly is not the situation before us."
How many CTEA's are required for the Court to realize that this clearly is the situation before us?
Oh good then I get to move into your house when the rights expire on your ownership of it. How come that is different?
It is not different if I were to sneak into your house and take your stacks of paper notes or your hard disk. The situation now is that you duplicate my house on your own property, and I don't have any problems with that.
My works are mine. I made them. Why do I have to give them up for free but other items of ownership are not under those same provisions? As for family businesses they are NOT gifted.
Then why don't just you keep your ideas in your head, or in a vault? Nobody is forcing you to publish them.
Slashdot Mirror
look for "reuleaux triangle" on google
read about the actual implementation of the card. Many transportation card systems use a magnetic strip. Many electronic cash cards use a chip on a card. These must be fed into a card reader and are much slower. The RF card do not need any physical contact and are VERY efficient. They are also implemented in watches and cell phones, which is obviously impossible with the magnetic or chip based cards. They are used in Hong Kong, Tokyo and apparently Washington DC (maybe Singapore?), most of Europe is using the chip based cards. If you think that one or two seconds for a transaction with a chip card is quick, you should see the number of commuters in really crowded places like Hong Kong or Tokyo sometimes: every half second counts!
The problem with the PC approach is that it is too easy to eject the floppy during disk activity. Of course, PC makers would always opt for the cheap mechanical eject (even IBM in their ultra-expensive PS/2 days). Apple and Sun (other workstation vendors?) choose the more expensive approach where the OS knows whether the floppy was present. I agree that the Apple UI for ejecting the floppy is pretty dumb (on a Sparcstation, you would just type eject in a terminal). IMO the best solution is the electrical eject in Zip drives, where the button first sends a signal to the OS and only spits out the disk when it gets an OK.
&leq
There there. There there.
In the US, the producers act like a monopolist or cartel: the prices are presumably set at profit maximizing level. Many ./ argue that sales would be much higher with lower prices. Of course sales volume will increase. But from the label's point of view, the increase in unit sales will not offset the decrease in revenue resulting from the price drop.
In the US, copyright was adapted with full knowledge of this situation. The idea was that IP would be underproduced in a free market. With a free market for IP, the original producer must price both a high fixed costs and some marginal costs in his product to survive, but copying suppliers can always undercut his price because they do not bear the fixed costs of the creation. The cd and dvd market in China is exactly in this situation. The original fixed costs of producing an Hollywood film is borne by those who pay the official distributors (mostly Americans and Europeans). In China (and many other countries that disregard IP laws), consumers get the best of both worlds: they pay the low marginal cost (dvd media) but do not experience undersupply, since the fixed costs to keep the studios producing are paid by Europeans and Americans. The domestic film industry is in a difficult position. They cannot pass the fixed costs to other audiences, so their products would be more expensive than a Hollywood production (produced with a much bigger budget!).
Whether the current copyright laws lead to a desirable level of IP output is debatable. But realize that the amount of media products we have been able to enjoy in the past century is the result of both technology and monopoly creating laws.
Imagine the shock of realizing that free software developers do not have to suck up to their "customers".
The problem is, the man in the street does not perceive that he has lost anything. Being able to freely copy Fitzgerald, Gershwin or Wharton will not incite him to march the streets or write his "representative".