The summary is a good example of a situation when patents really shine at what they are:
a handbrake on innovation. Consumer has nothing to gain if a capable competitor is excluded from the
marketplace like that. Leading companies will invest in RnD, patents or not, mostly just to
keep up with the state of the art, but also because when (by chance), their engineers invent something
truly novel and useful, they will have weeks, months, or may be even years before competitors
reverse-engineer their product and learn how to build it cheaper. It is clearly not worth for the public to
pay the patent enforcement and monopoly taxes unless the patent law strongly boosts the rate of
innovation (and even then, is there really a point?).
And we have no evidence whatsoever that the patent system of any kind increases the rate of
innovation (the technological leap of the last 400 years is probably mostly due to the fossil fuels, and
we are in for another boost, due to the Internet, the holy Grail of communication). We but we have clear
examples of monopolistic behaviors, where the cost to consumer
can be directly calculated, like in every case when a cheaper competing product is barred from
the market.
The reasonable thing to do would be to start decreasing the patent term, while measuring how
it affects the rate of innovation. I would not be surprised to see that it doesn't.
but noscript really highlights the amount of CRAP that many sites use
OMG, yes. I have temp allow button on my toolbar and I click it for fun sometimes.
On wired.com, 29 scripts are blocked, and the site seems to work fine. Inside an article,
47 scripts are blocked, but I can still read the article, probably because the bulk of Wired
content is plain text with pictures, which is being handled (very well) by a super-tech known
as plain HTML.
Seriously? They want my poor rig to plow through 47 scripts, while all I get, as a Web reader,
are 6 paragraphs of text and a stupid photo?
As an American, you should see that US government is not at all different, what with the
claim that the troops in the South America are solving the drug problem (they are creating it),
or the claim that the troops in the Middle East are fighting radical Islamic terrorism
(they help to advance it, and besides, US itself is the largest and most feared terror force in the world),
or that US spreads democracy in developing countries (it topples popular governments which
champion self-determination and installs tyrannical puppets), or that US gives a shit about Human
rights outside of its borders.
Although not explicitly, this is in some way a response to Google threat to leave the country.
China also stated that they strict cyber laws and that the it forbids any kind of "hacking attack"; when asked if those laws apply to the government as well it was quickly avoided.
I can totally catch things I drop, like, half the time. Well, may be not that often,
but totally enough to make it worthwhile (because a lot of things can break). When successful,
it's mostly because the other hand was nearby already.
Two recent features in the stable release are antialiased fonts and the daemon mode (speeds up
invocation, but useless for those who never quit and use Emacs for everything). I am a big fan
and I cannot stand using anything else when I am coding (C++, Common Lisp, Bash, HTML, LaTeX)
or editing plain text (my favorite text format). I love the default integration with gcc and make, and the
fact that my ~/.emacs has clever LaTeX bindings, but the main selling point for me is the (fully justified)
feeling of total control. I like knowing that I can easily extend the functionality and/or disable any
feature I don't like.
I cannot agree that we need both proprietary and free software (just the latter would suffice),
but I came to realize that I don't care much for people who
shoot themselves in the foot by using non-free software; it actually makes me feel like
I am ahead in the game. Imho, though, computing consumers are
getting a really raw deal today in the mobile market, as it is still not possible to use a cell phone
network as a connection to the Internet with a 100% free device that can make legacy voice calls.
(So yeah, we are almost there.) If I could, I would probably
pay $800 dollars for a device like that today, just to ecourage its adoption, but also because
being on the Internet all the time is awesome! How cool would it be to have a static IPv6 address
on a device in your pocket, and so, basically, a general purpose server?
Wow, the kids today do not know how well they got it. Back in my day, all our games
were zero-player and all scores had to be recorded in base one. We would have killed for binary!
Think about it. Playing D&D with just you, the all-powerful master, and a DM who tries to make you dead, and no one else? Pointless.
I think there is something in a single-player RPG, though. May be if the mobs are very smart, the game will be challenging and rewarding to play through.
And in the end, it would have the same appeal as SimCity: kind of an RPG sandbox where the ultimate goal is your avatar itself. Make that the whole point
of the game, kind of like Diablo did with respect to the wearable items, but take it to the next level by allowing much more customization depth.
Add many, many more items and item types, item histories, Fallout-like perks, physical attributes for everything, trophies and achievements which factor into your final score,
a customized magical arsenal (they seem to be doing it in Diablo 3 with "spell runes" which alter spell effects.)
I am thinking about writing something like this, actually. I have this crazy idea: I will sacrifice the concept of "continuous space" altogether
and replace it by something very discrete. My main inspiration is NetHack, which is already very discrete, but I want something ultimately discrete where you just go
from a "town" to the "killing fields" by clicking a link and then fight whoever is in the "killing fields", loot everything and go back to "town".
I suspect that this model will allow for a very smart mob AI, which will make hard fights very interesting. It will also allow the player to
use scripts for easy encounters, hence avoiding the tedium. Only a hardcore player would be able to write these, but anyone could use them.
One can write a script, for example, which goes into an easy area, defeats mobs (if any) by swinging a melee weapon repeatedly, loots everything,
and comes back.
Oh and the time is too, of course, will have to be discrete, but I cannot decide how that should be done. One can do turns (Fallout 1,2) or instant actions
with cooldowns (NetHack). I'll probably stick with the latter, unless an even better system is possible.
These all are valid concerns except for magic. The only purpose of the latter is to
increase the playability at the expense of realism. It should be done tastefully and in a way
which allows to suspend disbelief, but it should definitely give a player abilities that are funky.
A bigger problem than all of these is the fact that computer opponents are incredibly stupid.
Fighting a mob in WoW feels like a resource management exercise, which it is.
I totally believe this. My ssh server at school would get (felt like) thousands of login attempts per day,
usually from several different countries. They are using interesting username lists. They went away after I
moved the port, but now I think about bringing them back and doing some stats.
Hmm. May be that's their plan. USA will get rid of the national debt by suing Chinese people over copyright
violations and slapping them with statutory penalties. Let's see, with $150000 per infringement, they
only need to sue for 80 million violations to get back 12 trillion or so. They just need stronger copyright treaties.
I agree with your prediction, and I have a good reason to believe that GNU/Linux would have been
much more resilient with respect to malware. It has to do with the software sources and trust.
Since we have the freedom to read the source of everything we use, we can build trusted software
repositories with a security policy that is based on facts. Nice, verifiable facts. The authors are known,
some (and way too few!) by name, and the code is under a lot of scrutiny.
In the world of binary blobs, on the other hand, the security is all hearsay. Acceptable policies
sound like "dude, everyone uses this" and "torrent sites have a lot of infected programs".
There is not and never will be a reliable authority on what is safe in the non-free world. They
could try reviewing everything, like they do for the iPhone today, but they will never be able
to afford it for a fully-featured commodity OS. The community-supported free software is crushing them
here as we speak.
Slashdot Mirror
The summary is a good example of a situation when patents really shine at what they are: a handbrake on innovation. Consumer has nothing to gain if a capable competitor is excluded from the marketplace like that. Leading companies will invest in RnD, patents or not, mostly just to keep up with the state of the art, but also because when (by chance), their engineers invent something truly novel and useful, they will have weeks, months, or may be even years before competitors reverse-engineer their product and learn how to build it cheaper. It is clearly not worth for the public to pay the patent enforcement and monopoly taxes unless the patent law strongly boosts the rate of innovation (and even then, is there really a point?).
And we have no evidence whatsoever that the patent system of any kind increases the rate of innovation (the technological leap of the last 400 years is probably mostly due to the fossil fuels, and we are in for another boost, due to the Internet, the holy Grail of communication). We but we have clear examples of monopolistic behaviors, where the cost to consumer can be directly calculated, like in every case when a cheaper competing product is barred from the market.
The reasonable thing to do would be to start decreasing the patent term, while measuring how it affects the rate of innovation. I would not be surprised to see that it doesn't.
A direct personal experience? [Ducks]
It's a gateway substance to LSD, for sure.
May be we could build a very tall mountain, with ISS just on top? I tried drawing to scale.
Not really. These scientists are obviously using the fabled what-if machine.
but noscript really highlights the amount of CRAP that many sites use
OMG, yes. I have temp allow button on my toolbar and I click it for fun sometimes. On wired.com, 29 scripts are blocked, and the site seems to work fine. Inside an article, 47 scripts are blocked, but I can still read the article, probably because the bulk of Wired content is plain text with pictures, which is being handled (very well) by a super-tech known as plain HTML.
Seriously? They want my poor rig to plow through 47 scripts, while all I get, as a Web reader, are 6 paragraphs of text and a stupid photo?
I have to second this. NoScript is now my favorite extension, with ABP being a close second.
As an American, you should see that US government is not at all different, what with the claim that the troops in the South America are solving the drug problem (they are creating it), or the claim that the troops in the Middle East are fighting radical Islamic terrorism (they help to advance it, and besides, US itself is the largest and most feared terror force in the world), or that US spreads democracy in developing countries (it topples popular governments which champion self-determination and installs tyrannical puppets), or that US gives a shit about Human rights outside of its borders.
Although not explicitly, this is in some way a response to Google threat to leave the country. China also stated that they strict cyber laws and that the it forbids any kind of "hacking attack"; when asked if those laws apply to the government as well it was quickly avoided.
I can totally catch things I drop, like, half the time. Well, may be not that often, but totally enough to make it worthwhile (because a lot of things can break). When successful, it's mostly because the other hand was nearby already.
How much is "almost infinite"?
Two recent features in the stable release are antialiased fonts and the daemon mode (speeds up invocation, but useless for those who never quit and use Emacs for everything). I am a big fan and I cannot stand using anything else when I am coding (C++, Common Lisp, Bash, HTML, LaTeX) or editing plain text (my favorite text format). I love the default integration with gcc and make, and the fact that my ~/.emacs has clever LaTeX bindings, but the main selling point for me is the (fully justified) feeling of total control. I like knowing that I can easily extend the functionality and/or disable any feature I don't like.
(defun search-dupe-words ()
"Search for word dupes"
(interactive)
(search-forward-regexp "[^a-z]\\([a-z]+\\) \\1[^a-z]"))
(global-set-key (kbd "<f7>") 'search-dupe-words)
Pff, I routinely telnet to port 22 and do the encryption by hand. Copying pictures is a bit of a drag...
I cannot agree that we need both proprietary and free software (just the latter would suffice), but I came to realize that I don't care much for people who shoot themselves in the foot by using non-free software; it actually makes me feel like I am ahead in the game. Imho, though, computing consumers are getting a really raw deal today in the mobile market, as it is still not possible to use a cell phone network as a connection to the Internet with a 100% free device that can make legacy voice calls. (So yeah, we are almost there.) If I could, I would probably pay $800 dollars for a device like that today, just to ecourage its adoption, but also because being on the Internet all the time is awesome! How cool would it be to have a static IPv6 address on a device in your pocket, and so, basically, a general purpose server?
How do you know they are fake? We have to figure this out if I am to sleep tonight.
It's about equal.
By not buying or reading this book, I am doing what Perelman surely would have wanted.
Wow, the kids today do not know how well they got it. Back in my day, all our games were zero-player and all scores had to be recorded in base one. We would have killed for binary!
Think about it. Playing D&D with just you, the all-powerful master, and a DM who tries to make you dead, and no one else? Pointless.
I think there is something in a single-player RPG, though. May be if the mobs are very smart, the game will be challenging and rewarding to play through. And in the end, it would have the same appeal as SimCity: kind of an RPG sandbox where the ultimate goal is your avatar itself. Make that the whole point of the game, kind of like Diablo did with respect to the wearable items, but take it to the next level by allowing much more customization depth. Add many, many more items and item types, item histories, Fallout-like perks, physical attributes for everything, trophies and achievements which factor into your final score, a customized magical arsenal (they seem to be doing it in Diablo 3 with "spell runes" which alter spell effects.)
I am thinking about writing something like this, actually. I have this crazy idea: I will sacrifice the concept of "continuous space" altogether and replace it by something very discrete. My main inspiration is NetHack, which is already very discrete, but I want something ultimately discrete where you just go from a "town" to the "killing fields" by clicking a link and then fight whoever is in the "killing fields", loot everything and go back to "town". I suspect that this model will allow for a very smart mob AI, which will make hard fights very interesting. It will also allow the player to use scripts for easy encounters, hence avoiding the tedium. Only a hardcore player would be able to write these, but anyone could use them. One can write a script, for example, which goes into an easy area, defeats mobs (if any) by swinging a melee weapon repeatedly, loots everything, and comes back.
Oh and the time is too, of course, will have to be discrete, but I cannot decide how that should be done. One can do turns (Fallout 1,2) or instant actions with cooldowns (NetHack). I'll probably stick with the latter, unless an even better system is possible.
These all are valid concerns except for magic. The only purpose of the latter is to increase the playability at the expense of realism. It should be done tastefully and in a way which allows to suspend disbelief, but it should definitely give a player abilities that are funky.
A bigger problem than all of these is the fact that computer opponents are incredibly stupid. Fighting a mob in WoW feels like a resource management exercise, which it is.
I totally believe this. My ssh server at school would get (felt like) thousands of login attempts per day, usually from several different countries. They are using interesting username lists. They went away after I moved the port, but now I think about bringing them back and doing some stats.
Hmm. May be that's their plan. USA will get rid of the national debt by suing Chinese people over copyright violations and slapping them with statutory penalties. Let's see, with $150000 per infringement, they only need to sue for 80 million violations to get back 12 trillion or so. They just need stronger copyright treaties.
I put the new one on top of the old one. XCF here, you will need tar, bzip2, gimp.
I can definitely find a few places where the new image has a small spot, while the old one has dark background.
I agree with your prediction, and I have a good reason to believe that GNU/Linux would have been much more resilient with respect to malware. It has to do with the software sources and trust.
Since we have the freedom to read the source of everything we use, we can build trusted software repositories with a security policy that is based on facts. Nice, verifiable facts. The authors are known, some (and way too few!) by name, and the code is under a lot of scrutiny. In the world of binary blobs, on the other hand, the security is all hearsay. Acceptable policies sound like "dude, everyone uses this" and "torrent sites have a lot of infected programs". There is not and never will be a reliable authority on what is safe in the non-free world. They could try reviewing everything, like they do for the iPhone today, but they will never be able to afford it for a fully-featured commodity OS. The community-supported free software is crushing them here as we speak.