You forgot to mention that selling pianos (Steinway's or any other type) to the general public would be aiding and abetting theft of Steinway's IP, even when similar sales were made by Steinway themselves: assuming we want to follow this analogy to its SCO type conclusion.
No... off topic here. You need to bring it up when people are arguing about the merits of two button, three button and five button mice. Make the case for a zero button mouse then!
Actually, these giant catfish are quite a delicacy. The price is such that many locals have never had an opportunity to eat it: only a handful are taken each season and the top Bangkok restaurants buy them.
1) In my experience, the initial drivers for optical drives are extremely poor. Often, the improved error recovery on updated drivers will allow the drive to be used for longer.
2) Any CDs/DVDs that are used frequently should be ISO images on the hard drive and accessed via virtual optical drives (Windows) or a loop mount (Linux). This reduces wear and tear on the drive.
The behaviour is interesting. It appears to work randomly. Here is my theory: I believe Google has a rule that the internal response time for any search query must be less than 0.25 seconds. Any response fragments that have not been derived within this cutoff period are just dropped. As a new capability in search, there is probably not yet enough computing power assigned to it to consistently return the information in time.
Re:Well maybe the realized that it's hard
on
The Baby Bootstrap?
·
· Score: 1
If (big if) the baby analogy is valid for a kind of bootstrapped intelligence, then you would presumably need a kind of nurturing process to accompany the unstructured learning. Babies absorb a tremendous amount but later discard most of it. They are guided in what to remember by those they identify with. It is worth noting that the child's intelligence and general attitude are significantly affected by the quality of this nurturing.
I do not regard Iran as harmless. However, they have been given a highly convincing demonstration of the dangers of not having weapons of mass destruction. When the US attacks your next door neighbour and then more or less announces that you are a top candidate to be next, it is understandable that you want a deterrent.
As it happens, I was just this morning trying to deal with a user whose viewer died trying to deal with high resolution PDF files. Other programs handled them slowly, especially for printing, but at least they did not die.
I am a fan of the PDF format: it is very suitable for cross-platform document distribution. It certainly has its problems though. I have yet to find a fool proof way of ensuring everyone can read the files. Also this week, I have some recipients (three of about a dozen) complaining they cannot open PDF files that were created on Linux in Acrobat 3/4 format. I can open them using the same versions of Acrobat Reader they claim to be using, on the same operating system they are using. Resending the files produced the same result... an aggravating problem to fix when you cannot reproduce the problem... sigh!
I found your post fascinating. I am sure it reflects the real thinking of most of the politicians who presented Al Qaeda links and potential mushroom clouds as the reason for the invasion of Iraq. I actually agree with much of your post, especially the ease with which the masses can be controlled and the fact that the political labels of those doing the manipulation are largely irrelevant. I am glad you did not try to insult our intelligence with claims that the invasion was to free the Iraqis from a tyranical regime. However, I think you (and others who think like you) are dangerously wrong in believing you can pacify the Middle East.
The animosity between the Arab (and wider Moslem) world and the U.S. has developed gradually. The first seeds of conflict arose over America's one-sided approach to the dispute between Israel and the Arabs (especially the Palestinians). American support for corrupt governments in the region was also resented. However, until Gulf War I, there was no real organised attempt to hit back at the U.S., in spite of Libia's periodic sabre rattling.
The first major increase in tension came with the large American presence in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and other M.E. countries starting with GW I. Confronting Saddam Hussein at that time was unavoidable, of course, but the U.S. should have been looking to disengage as soon as possible instead of planning a permanent presence. A gradual escalation in the resentment of the Arab general population started at the time and continues to grow. Even at the time of 9/11, however, the number actually willing to take up arms against the U.S. was still relatively few.
The situation now is different. There are already tens of thousands of Iraqis willing to fight and die to free their land from U.S. occupation. They have the tacit support of a majority of the Iraqi population, and of a few battle hardened foreign fighters. Now the critical factor: the greater the attempted repression of the population by the U.S., the more support for the resistance will grow. In Afghanistan and Pakistan, large groups are committed to attacking U.S. interests. Smaller numbers are active elsewhere.
The longer the U.S. stays in the region, the more resistance to their presence will grow. If the U.S. attempts to spread the war wider, say by an invasion of Syria, the problems will become even greater.
It is tempting to point to the Israeli success in subjugating the Palestinians and to believe the U.S. with its enormous military power would be able to do at least as well. The U.S. attack on Falluja (and similar attacks elsewhere) certainly seem to come from the Israeli playbook. There is a crucial difference. The Israelis are willing to continue their oppression indefinitely. For the U.S., the costs (politically and in terms of military morale) of taking a thousand American dead annually -- year in, year out -- are not supportable in the long term. It sometimes seems that the U.S. learnt nothing from Vietnam: about the resiliance of a domestic resistance and the difficulty of maintaining morale in armed forces who know they are pursuing an unjust war.
... on the rule that "ignorance of the law is no excuse". It would be amusing if it were not so tragic. Here are people enforcing laws against others with neither party aware of the full wording of the law.
Here is a law, furthermore, that was not passed in accordance with the constitution. We have faceless individuals deciding on controls on everyday movement and almost no questioning of their right to do so.
I am actually surprised Mr Gilmore has not asked for a court injunction asking either for proof that such a law exists (and its text) or for the regulation to be lifted.
You underestimate Microsoft. They understand all right. However, the race to patent algorythms is on, and Microsoft will not allow a little thing like prior art prevent them trying to grab almost any idea you can imagine.
As others have mentioned, small companies and individuals cannot afford to even contemplate getting into a patent dispute with a large company -- even if the large company's claim is frivolous. Anyone who thinks Microsoft will not start using these patents once they judge it is in their competitive best interests does not understand the nature of this abusive monopoly.
Briefly, I think it is quite probable that the characteristics that allow a species to become dominant and develop advanced technology ensure the species' destruction once the technology becomes sufficiently advanced.
A short post cannot contain much detail. As far as humans are concerned we see
A period of struggle for survival. During this period, gradual development of some basic technologies helped. However, a willingness to band together in groups and fight and kill or enslave humans in other groups (as well as animals) to gain access to critical resources was probably most important.
To ensure cohesion of an individual group and optimise its effectiveness as a fighting force, dominant leaders who could dicate to the rest of the group were necessary. As a practical matter, the leader was normally an individual who was single minded in his pursuit of power and totally amoral in the methods used to achieve it. This was combined with more positive strengths such as physical prowess and general intelligence to allow him (usually, occasionally her) to win and maintain his position.
Once technology reached a certain point, both
the instinct to band together in groups and seek conflict with other groups, and
the tendency to allow amoral, power-mad individuals to gain leadership of the groups
became counter productive. However, they are built into our genetic makeup and few would be willing to even consider genetic engineering to eliminate these traits.
Technology tends to develop at an exponential rate. While initial developments occurred over a very long time period, once technology reaches a certain level, progress becomes very rapid. There is insufficient time for scientists to educate the population as whole as to the dangers of new technologies before the amoral leaders have already started misusing them.
It is inevitable that power crazed individuals, eventually possessing enormous power, will clash with each other: destroying the rest of us in the process. There is no way of predicting how the end will come, but quite likely in a totally different way to that any of us currently imagine -- and I guess it might happen in less than 50 years.
"How much knowledge can you take away from your previous employer, even if all that knowledge is just in your head?"
Cough... splutter... splutter
Are we saying that a company should not be able to hire a software engineer with knowledge of straightforward user interface techniques if he previously used that knowledge at other companies? The techniques were patented which means by definition that they were published to the world. You are not, of course, allowed to take code owned by a prior employer and reuse it. However, I have no idea how I would do software development when I needed to remember whether I used a particular technique for a previous employer and avoid using it if so. What would be the position if another member of the team implemented something similar and I recognised a bug in his code -- would I be unable to fix it because I might not have recognised the bug in the absence of prior experience? Frankly, short of a full frontal lobotomy performed on a departing employee, I see no practical way of enforcing such guidelines.
Operating systems in rifles may come sooner than we think. When I was a kid, the idea of the telephone handset running a Unix like system was not exactly intuitive.
Re:How lightweight, if it requires gtk+?
on
Xfce 4.2.0 Released
·
· Score: 1
Can someone explain to me the current seeming attraction of pen drive based distros. I always carry a pen drive, and they are certainly suitable for some purposes. There is no better solution for persistent files that are subject to alteration. However, most of the files involved in running a system do not fall into that category.
What is the advantage of a pen drive based distro over a credit-card-sized DVD based distro that supports a mounted pen drive for the relatively small number of files that must be kept but also need to be writeable?
In reality, both costs and limitations on police powers are a matter for debate. Sure, an excessive budget is an invitation to corruption. However, without safeguards on personal freedoms (enshrined by law and backed up with proper oversight) abuse of power becomes not only possible but likely.
Law enforcement needs enough money and enough power to get the job done, but the guidelines should be decided by society as a whole, and the use of both the money and the power needs to be monitored.
The cost is not the issue for me. Law enforcement costs money, but a certain amunt of it is necessaey. What I DO object to is law enforcement being allowed to operate without proper controls. That leads to a police state.
However, in long term, the projects using IBM's patents are going to effectively become IBM's weapon against its commercial competitors as IBM would be the only one qualified to including these projects in its commercial offering.
You missed the most creative part of this whole initiative. If you are worried about IBM incorporating the (BSD licensed? not GPL) code in their commercial offering, then just persuade the developers to use your software patents too. That may, in some cases, become a necessary defensive move. I think this is going to be huge.
Your post is not a troll. However, it shows you understand the open source movement a lot less than does IBM.
IBM has gradually over a period of more than 30 years learned that the highest quality software (meaning that most useful to its users) is developed by a synergy of committed users and enthusiastic developers.
Someone should write a book on the subject. As one example, IBM's mainframe VM operating system was made useful by committed groups of its users and IBM suffered the consequences when it partially closed that source -- this was in the 1970s and early 1980s.
IBM is now a services company that wants cheap, high quality software it can use on customer projects. IBM understands the best way to get it. In your words they "throw away 40 million dollars" in Linux development, "throw away" a software development suite worth tens of millions, "throw away" the opportunity to charge open source projects for software royalties (a lot of revenue that would be). In return, they just bill a few more billion for their services business. Really dumb.
Google's objective at this stage is to build market share. There is a limit to what they are willing to spend to achieve this, but a free POP3 web service costs very little.
They are looking at the big picture 5-10 years from now. By then, most people will not bother to load programs and data onto their own computers. It will be much easier to use online services and reduce the home 'computer' to just a glorified display device. No problems with viruses and spyware. No struggling with installs. Something that is as close to 'idiot proof' as use of software can get. There will be a very few big players at that time that will make big bucks. Google's objective is to be number one.
The parent was correctly moderated as flamebait, but it provides an opportunity to correct a popular misconception. Al Jazeera is an excellent news organisation that tries to be fairly balanced. Most of the senior journalists were originally part of the BBC Arabic Service who started Al Jazeera when the BBC more or less discontinued a serious Arabic service. As individuals, they have their own viewpoints. They are also under tremendous political pressures (governments, including the current US one in Iraq, frequently try to prevent them reporting freely). That does not prevent them from doing their best to report honestly. Before running their coverage down, people should read and evaluate what they write and broadcast.
Does ALL of the functionality of Trillian Pro work under WINE? For instance, does the video and voice stuff work? If not, an FAQ entry implying Linux support would need to be very carefully worded to avoid demands to make the missing functionality available.
I suspect they deliberately leave it to others to indicate Trillian under WINE works without any risk of implying they will support it.
Re:IANAL, but I see Segway lawsuits...
on
Segway Polo
·
· Score: 1
In the US, I see lawsuits whenever I see someone preparing hot beverages. A lawsuit around something like this (based, perhaps, on the lack of a warning label to the effect that crashing them may lead to injury) just seems "normal".
Slashdot Mirror
You forgot to mention that selling pianos (Steinway's or any other type) to the general public would be aiding and abetting theft of Steinway's IP, even when similar sales were made by Steinway themselves: assuming we want to follow this analogy to its SCO type conclusion.
Summary: available free of charge for academic or internal business use.
For its time, this was a relatively permissive license, but does not qualify it as open source.
Actually, these giant catfish are quite a delicacy. The price is such that many locals have never had an opportunity to eat it: only a handful are taken each season and the top Bangkok restaurants buy them.
1) In my experience, the initial drivers for optical drives are extremely poor. Often, the improved error recovery on updated drivers will allow the drive to be used for longer.
2) Any CDs/DVDs that are used frequently should be ISO images on the hard drive and accessed via virtual optical drives (Windows) or a loop mount (Linux). This reduces wear and tear on the drive.
The behaviour is interesting. It appears to work randomly. Here is my theory: I believe Google has a rule that the internal response time for any search query must be less than 0.25 seconds. Any response fragments that have not been derived within this cutoff period are just dropped. As a new capability in search, there is probably not yet enough computing power assigned to it to consistently return the information in time.
If (big if) the baby analogy is valid for a kind of bootstrapped intelligence, then you would presumably need a kind of nurturing process to accompany the unstructured learning. Babies absorb a tremendous amount but later discard most of it. They are guided in what to remember by those they identify with. It is worth noting that the child's intelligence and general attitude are significantly affected by the quality of this nurturing.
I do not regard Iran as harmless. However, they have been given a highly convincing demonstration of the dangers of not having weapons of mass destruction. When the US attacks your next door neighbour and then more or less announces that you are a top candidate to be next, it is understandable that you want a deterrent.
I am a fan of the PDF format: it is very suitable for cross-platform document distribution. It certainly has its problems though. I have yet to find a fool proof way of ensuring everyone can read the files. Also this week, I have some recipients (three of about a dozen) complaining they cannot open PDF files that were created on Linux in Acrobat 3/4 format. I can open them using the same versions of Acrobat Reader they claim to be using, on the same operating system they are using. Resending the files produced the same result ... an aggravating problem to fix when you cannot reproduce the problem ... sigh!
The animosity between the Arab (and wider Moslem) world and the U.S. has developed gradually. The first seeds of conflict arose over America's one-sided approach to the dispute between Israel and the Arabs (especially the Palestinians). American support for corrupt governments in the region was also resented. However, until Gulf War I, there was no real organised attempt to hit back at the U.S., in spite of Libia's periodic sabre rattling.
The first major increase in tension came with the large American presence in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and other M.E. countries starting with GW I. Confronting Saddam Hussein at that time was unavoidable, of course, but the U.S. should have been looking to disengage as soon as possible instead of planning a permanent presence. A gradual escalation in the resentment of the Arab general population started at the time and continues to grow. Even at the time of 9/11, however, the number actually willing to take up arms against the U.S. was still relatively few.
The situation now is different. There are already tens of thousands of Iraqis willing to fight and die to free their land from U.S. occupation. They have the tacit support of a majority of the Iraqi population, and of a few battle hardened foreign fighters. Now the critical factor: the greater the attempted repression of the population by the U.S., the more support for the resistance will grow. In Afghanistan and Pakistan, large groups are committed to attacking U.S. interests. Smaller numbers are active elsewhere.
The longer the U.S. stays in the region, the more resistance to their presence will grow. If the U.S. attempts to spread the war wider, say by an invasion of Syria, the problems will become even greater.
It is tempting to point to the Israeli success in subjugating the Palestinians and to believe the U.S. with its enormous military power would be able to do at least as well. The U.S. attack on Falluja (and similar attacks elsewhere) certainly seem to come from the Israeli playbook. There is a crucial difference. The Israelis are willing to continue their oppression indefinitely. For the U.S., the costs (politically and in terms of military morale) of taking a thousand American dead annually -- year in, year out -- are not supportable in the long term. It sometimes seems that the U.S. learnt nothing from Vietnam: about the resiliance of a domestic resistance and the difficulty of maintaining morale in armed forces who know they are pursuing an unjust war.
Here is a law, furthermore, that was not passed in accordance with the constitution. We have faceless individuals deciding on controls on everyday movement and almost no questioning of their right to do so.
I am actually surprised Mr Gilmore has not asked for a court injunction asking either for proof that such a law exists (and its text) or for the regulation to be lifted.
As others have mentioned, small companies and individuals cannot afford to even contemplate getting into a patent dispute with a large company -- even if the large company's claim is frivolous. Anyone who thinks Microsoft will not start using these patents once they judge it is in their competitive best interests does not understand the nature of this abusive monopoly.
A short post cannot contain much detail. As far as humans are concerned we see
- the instinct to band together in groups and seek conflict with other groups, and
- the tendency to allow amoral, power-mad individuals to gain leadership of the groups
became counter productive. However, they are built into our genetic makeup and few would be willing to even consider genetic engineering to eliminate these traits.... was 100% right!
Are we saying that a company should not be able to hire a software engineer with knowledge of straightforward user interface techniques if he previously used that knowledge at other companies? The techniques were patented which means by definition that they were published to the world. You are not, of course, allowed to take code owned by a prior employer and reuse it. However, I have no idea how I would do software development when I needed to remember whether I used a particular technique for a previous employer and avoid using it if so. What would be the position if another member of the team implemented something similar and I recognised a bug in his code -- would I be unable to fix it because I might not have recognised the bug in the absence of prior experience? Frankly, short of a full frontal lobotomy performed on a departing employee, I see no practical way of enforcing such guidelines.
Operating systems in rifles may come sooner than we think. When I was a kid, the idea of the telephone handset running a Unix like system was not exactly intuitive.
What is the advantage of a pen drive based distro over a credit-card-sized DVD based distro that supports a mounted pen drive for the relatively small number of files that must be kept but also need to be writeable?
Law enforcement needs enough money and enough power to get the job done, but the guidelines should be decided by society as a whole, and the use of both the money and the power needs to be monitored.
The cost is not the issue for me. Law enforcement costs money, but a certain amunt of it is necessaey. What I DO object to is law enforcement being allowed to operate without proper controls. That leads to a police state.
You missed the most creative part of this whole initiative. If you are worried about IBM incorporating the (BSD licensed? not GPL) code in their commercial offering, then just persuade the developers to use your software patents too. That may, in some cases, become a necessary defensive move. I think this is going to be huge.
IBM has gradually over a period of more than 30 years learned that the highest quality software (meaning that most useful to its users) is developed by a synergy of committed users and enthusiastic developers.
Someone should write a book on the subject. As one example, IBM's mainframe VM operating system was made useful by committed groups of its users and IBM suffered the consequences when it partially closed that source -- this was in the 1970s and early 1980s.
IBM is now a services company that wants cheap, high quality software it can use on customer projects. IBM understands the best way to get it. In your words they "throw away 40 million dollars" in Linux development, "throw away" a software development suite worth tens of millions, "throw away" the opportunity to charge open source projects for software royalties (a lot of revenue that would be). In return, they just bill a few more billion for their services business. Really dumb.
They are looking at the big picture 5-10 years from now. By then, most people will not bother to load programs and data onto their own computers. It will be much easier to use online services and reduce the home 'computer' to just a glorified display device. No problems with viruses and spyware. No struggling with installs. Something that is as close to 'idiot proof' as use of software can get. There will be a very few big players at that time that will make big bucks. Google's objective is to be number one.
The parent was correctly moderated as flamebait, but it provides an opportunity to correct a popular misconception. Al Jazeera is an excellent news organisation that tries to be fairly balanced. Most of the senior journalists were originally part of the BBC Arabic Service who started Al Jazeera when the BBC more or less discontinued a serious Arabic service. As individuals, they have their own viewpoints. They are also under tremendous political pressures (governments, including the current US one in Iraq, frequently try to prevent them reporting freely). That does not prevent them from doing their best to report honestly. Before running their coverage down, people should read and evaluate what they write and broadcast.
I suspect they deliberately leave it to others to indicate Trillian under WINE works without any risk of implying they will support it.
In the US, I see lawsuits whenever I see someone preparing hot beverages. A lawsuit around something like this (based, perhaps, on the lack of a warning label to the effect that crashing them may lead to injury) just seems "normal".