I would love for everybody to have the same access to knowledge and the same access to the opportunity to contribute and move humanity forward.
Well, that statement gives me the "warm fuzzies" too, for a second, until I wake up to reality and remember that enough people think that the best opportunity to "move forward" is for their country/terrorist organization to join the nuclear club. Just look at Pakistan. Their country has innumerable problems with underdevelopment, but building a nuclear bomb somehow took priority.
Giving North Korea the opportunity to "move forward" into the glorious future of compact, deliverable, high-yield nuclear weapons without the need for elaborate and detectable testing doesn't seem like a great service to the world at large. But maybe that's just me.
I've always wondered why Microsoft never ported COM & a few other things to Mac, Linux, etc., 'cause that would let them leverage their existing codebase on new platforms.
Well, if they had, and let this secret out, what's to keep anyone else from porting their Windows apps to other OS's?
MS is 1000% dedicated to making sure that the flow of users and applications into Windows is a one-way flow. Nothing that could possibly let something supplant Windows is going to be tolerated. Perhaps you heard of this thing called the Web, and a company called Netscape that started the idea that you could write applications that were largely platform agnostic?
I certainly agree that PTO approval is not unimpeachable evidence of a patent's validity. It is however, prima facie evidence that the patent is probably valid, and requires a serious effort to undermine it, not just what an average slashdot poster comes up with in a fit of pique.
People make mistakes, even serious ones. But I'll bet that the patent examiner looked more carefully and understood the legal issues involved more thoroughly than the rash of slashdot complainers that comes out of the woodwork everytime one of these stories is posted.
In a court of law, the burden of proof, once a patent has been granted, falls to those who would contest the patent, not on the holder of the patent. And the only true definition of the validity of a patent is one ruled on in a court of law.
I read my own post, which was the first I know of to have brought Wozniak into the discussion. While not perfectly explicit, *I* was considering Wozniak to be the inventor of the Apple II circuit, and my recollection of the previous Slashdot discussion was that Wozniak name came up in association with the purported "prior art" in the LCD case.
Reading your posts, this is the first mention I can find of later Apple II programmers being the parties under discussion. You appear to have changed the subject, which is of course not an offense of any kind, but I fail to see how my reading skills could have been remediated to better follow your shift.
The question was not whether every patent was valid. That is an absurd standard. The question is whether a patent mentioned on slashdot is actually vulnerable to the prior art claims that a bunch of slashdot posters come up with, apparently off the top of their head.
Patent examiners are expected to examine patents, not grant them. As for their failure to recognize prior art, I would be much more impressed if a licensed member of the patent bar described the invalidity of a patent rather than some Lotus engineer. The legal definition of "prior art" is not a subject of engineering, but a subject of law.
I certainly never claimed to have read the patent more carefully than anyone on slashdot. I never claimed to have read the patent at all. I was simply making a statement that almost all slashdot discussions on patents and "prior art" fail to reach the threshold of "worth considering."
"or" and "not" can be interpreted as Boolean algebra.
Google does make some effort to extract this Boolean algebra from queries. The underlining may be an artifact of this; from the results I get when the phrase "to be or not to be" is quoted, it appears not to influence the results.
This is a part of a huge area for what might be termed "bugs" in search engines. All of them have to deal with the fact that 99% of people do not understand how to efficiently describe a search, much less how to describe one to a computer. Given just a blank box, who knows what people will type. Making them happy with the results they get back is as much dumb luck as programming expertise.
Actually, I *do* have a reason to believe that the patent is not covered in prior art/obvious, etc. The PTO granted the damn patent, hence, they had to convince a patent examiner.
The burden of proof for prior art to invalidate a patent would require a detailed examination of the patent in question, and a detailed discussion of the "obvious" nature of the method given the prior art. But nobody provides that. They just say "oh, my copier was phoning the vendor in 1938, must be prior art. PTO is fucked up." No detail at all, no sign of having any clue about the patent other than the one sentence given in the article summary.
Now, I could just assume that the patent office is totally broken, patent examiners are moronic crack smokers, or whatever, so the majority of patents are actually invalid. Then, any patent that comes along will have a greater than 50% chance of being prior art, obvious, or whatever, and I could then start with the slashdot community's default assumption.
I'm guessing that most people on Slashdot *do* believe the patent system is broken, but only because they read enough purported examples on Slashdot to convince themselves. A bit of a circular argument, isn't it?
Woz's circuit took advantage of. Feeding that same signal into a high rez monochrome monitor reveals the higher frequency (ie subpixel) luma pattern.
Ah, I think I understand your point of view. You seem to think that Woz's goal was better resolution. That's just totally wrong. Woz wanted color graphics from a minimal number of chips. Nobody took advantage of sub-pixel resolution, first, because nobody was using high-quality monitors, and, secondly, the sub-pixel shifts were not per-pixel.
Sure, by the time the IIe and IIgs came around, the 80-column card doubled the resolution of the various graphics modes, but by then, IBM PCs had pushed the graphics envelope to VGA, which didn't have any of the quirks of the Apple II solution.
I'm aware of the standard "person having ordinary skill in the art". Obviousness, however, does not mean that *after* reading the claims someone skilled in the art says "oh, that's obvious." Lots of things appear obvious after they are explained.
It means that *without* reading the claims, a person with ordinary skill would, based on the prior art or generally available knowledge, have a suggestion or motivation to try the claim, with a reasonable expectation of success.
The color generated by the Apple II video signal isn't "subpixel." NTSC doesn't even have well-defined pixels. It has only a bandwidth limitation and a horizontal scan rate. The phase modulation determining the color is related to the timing of the pulse coming out of Woz's graphics generation circuitry. LCDs have well-defined pixels, each of fixed colors. No phase & timing involved.
The idea that a TTL circuit generating video waveforms is the "same method" as taking into account the physical arrangment of LCD subpixels when rendering letterforms is a perfect example of the Slashdot patent mentality. No one could ever patent *anything* if the patent had to be robust against that kind of broad conception of "prior art."
Perhaps we could develop a Slashdot reading model which understands that a patent is really about the claims, not about the abstract or a simple short phrase summarizing the patent.
For God's sake, any patent can be summarized into a phrase making it sound obvious, and most patents are actually about some marginally improved twist on a mature technology. That's why they have things like cites of previous patents.
On Slashdot, any new patent gets described in a way that makes a caveman beating two rocks together sound like prior art. I recall some clever LCD resolution enhancement get compared to Wozniak's also clever but completely unrelated scheme for kludging NTSC color out of a TTL circuit.
We need a new moderation "-100 Just doesn't understand."
Actually, Lisp is an ideal platform for kick-ass windowing systems, such as CLIM. One key feature of CLIM is that the data sent to windows still remembers where it came from. As opposed to conventional window systems, where stuff either becomes pixels, or, if you are lucky, selectable as text.
RMS came from the AI lab at MIT, who were using Lisp machines as personal workstations before workstations even became common. These machines had OS's that had user-readable and user-modifiable code all the way down to and including the hardware microcode!
It's a shame that the UNIX model of "everything becomes an undifferentiated stream of byte-sized characters" took over the world. That world gives us solutions like Perl, which proliferate quick-and-dirty hacks that make all sorts of assumptions on the format of text streams to try to reconstruct the data hidden within them. When the assumptions fail (Y2K, anyone?) all sorts of things break.
Imagine if any time value anywhere in the system *understood* that it was a time. You could display it on the screen if you wanted, but you wouldn't use that text for processing, rather you would use the time value itself. Human display is separate from the machine representation. That is the idea behind CLIM.
Note: RMS doesn't fully get it, unfortunately. Consider Emacs, which has a Lisp-like extension language, but is unbelievably out-of-date. It uses default dynamic scope, which has been known since the 70s to be an ugly mistake, doesn't support packages, so names all have to have long prefixes, and doesn't fully use structured data types, so that all sorts of code depends on properly forming nested lists. But, RMS being RMS, he can't be persuaded to change his approach.
Sheesh, are you Canadians so desperate you have to make things up?
Naismith was born in Almonte, Ontairo, and attended McGill, but invented basketball in Springfield, MA, in the U.S. Hence the location of the Basketball Hall of Fame in that city.
The point is probably not that battery life is changed, but that the time remaining display is no longer accurate. The software doesn't release little gnomes to eat your battery or anything.
You mean, write Fortran-style programs in a crippled sub-dialect of C?
Plus, how many C compilers are made to optimize for this case that is extremely common in Fortran, but extremely rare in C code?
Fortran compilers are the best compilers for Fortran programs. C compilers are best for C programs. Fortran compilers can be expected to perform poorly on "C-like" structures, and C compilers are likely to perform poorly with "Fortran-like" programs.
Sure, but it expands into C++ code. You still need a very wise C++ compiler to turn this into efficient machine code.
A decent Fortran compiler knows more about the original statement than the C++ compiler can, and also, a Fortran compiler's number one reason for existence is to optimize array accesses.
A C++ compiler is lucky to correctly compile all of the heinous complexity of the C++ language, much less aggressively optimize this type of array access.
I'd be much more impressed if the poster had shown the resulting machine code.
The situation may well be like the electronics industry in the 1950s and 1960s -- a few large corporations with extensive circuit patent portfolios built all the electronic devices, and avoided patent lawsuits by cross-licensing the portfolios back and forth. But little guys without a portfolio were effectively locked out. They couldn't afford to license the patented circuits they needed individually.
And, as we all know, that destroyed the electronics industry so it is now as dead as the buggy whip industry, a pale shell of what it might have been...
Oh, wait, the electronics industry grew faster and larger than any other technological area with the possible exception of aerospace. And was largely responsible for the success of the "space" part of aerospace.
Perhaps large patent portfolios are a symptom of an area that has such vast potential for innovation that even large companies cannot possibly control it all, rather than a symptom of large companies taking control of a finite, slowly growing field.
Hmmm. Yeah, I'm sure the Apple Store will be overjoyed that someone is spending hours using a Mac for commercial web development without actually deciding it is important enough to actually *buy one*.
Just drop $900 for an eMac, already. If you aren't actually making money developing these web sites, then why the hell go to all the effort of making them flashy enough to have rendering issues?
The missing piece is the heat put out by the bridge ASICs that are providing the huge pipe to memory.
Putting a PPC970 in a laptop with a memory & bus controller that also fits within laptop power constraints will result in a memory bandwidth that is as choked down as a G4 is, I suspect.
"bels" are factors of 10, whic most people mean when they speak of orders of magnitude. decibels are one-tenth of a bel, hence the prefix. 4 dB is 4/10 of a factor of 10, or something like a factor of 2.5.
1 dB is is a factor of 1.26, i.e. a 25% increase.
Further complicating the situation is that most people don't listen to their music with an acoustic power meter. Psychoacoustically, there is a non-linear relationship between perceived loudness and acoustic power. The commonly quoted "10 dB is twice as loud" is not an exact relationship, but is rather close at low sound levels.
If you consider Paul to be a good witness to the Christian faith, that is. Who knows how accurate his views were, considering he never met Christ except through a vision/epileptic aura? That Paul's interpretations of Christ became widespread does not mean they are accurate, unless you are particularly credulous and attribute the spread of Paul's ideas to their "divine inspiration" as opposed to good marketing or luck.
And if you think marketing had nothing to do with it, consider how convenient various visions of Peter were: no need to abide by dietary laws, or get circumcised! Sure makes it easier for those Gentiles to join up, now, doesn't it? Reminds one of Mohammed, and how often he had a new revealed truth just when it came in handy to justify a new strategy or change in plan.
All sorts of crazy stuff is in non-canonical books; who is to say that the elders of the early Church picked the right books to be canonical, and didn't leave out some no longer extant, but more "accurate" scriptures?
This is not to knock Christian faith, or Muslim faith, just to knock the fixation people have on sacred texts and traditions. Have whatever religion you want, but don't think something written on a page two thousand years ago is some kind of divine Dictaphone tape.
I think you've missed the point because you are focusing on the duplication. I don't need to cheaply duplicate the artifacts to allow free access. I could just nationalize all the museums and say "everybody can come in for free." I.e. "those works of art are too valuable to the community to allow you to restrict access." Yet we allow private collectors to prevent public viewing.
The low cost of duplication/additional admission does not alter the right of the owner of the museum restricting people's rights to view the artifacts.
Plus, part of what gives these artifacts value is the uniqueness. We *do* let people make copies of most of these works. Lots of amateur painters will make copies of the masters. My uncle made a copy of Vermeer's Girl with a Pearl Earring. He's a good enough painter and I'm ignorant enough that I probably couldn't tell the difference. Nifty, but not Vermeer, is it? Rodin and his workshop made multiple copies of the Thinker from the same cast, but if I were to make an exact duplicate, would it really be the same experience to look at it?
Cost of duplication is also not much of an issue even for the printed word. We don't seem to have any shortage of cheap editions of the Bible, Federalist Papers, or other works in the public domain, although the physical cost of duplication is the same as for copyrighted works. The Gideons can afford to give away their Bibles.
Practically everything in our society is "artificial." Ownership of land, political borders, voting, rules of baseball, the novel as a literary form. Whatever. "Artificial" does not mean "easily or obviously disposable."
There are any number of abstractions that are treated like goods which are not physical goods, and are not exclusive.
Charging admission is one example. In the usual state of affairs, I can sell more than one person the right to enter a museum. Just because I sell you the right to enter doesn't mean I can't sell another person the identical right of admission. And if you sneak in, I can have you hauled off by the cops, although you haven't taken anything physical.
True, I can't sell someone else the right to occupy the same spot that you do at the same time, but he can't do that outside the museum either.
The airlines sell more rights for admission (actually, only the contract to deliver you from your origin to destination) to a plane than there are seats. Just because they have sold all the notional seats doesn't mean they can't sell a number of additional tickets, although in principle they are selling you something they are not sure they have.
Insurance is yet another fascinating example. I can collect money from you in exchange for a promise; that is, that I promise to pay you a certain amount if a certain event occurs. I can make promises to any number of people, and even promise different people money at different odds for the same event.
Stock options, futures, annuities, etc., are all powerful abstract goods.
Modern societies operate much more efficiently because of these abstractions. That is why they are valuable, much like the idea of "due process" and "legal rights" are valuable. They are abstract, but hardly arbitrary.
The important thing that Gnumeric is missing is the VBA portion of MS Excel. You can do *really* far out things to customize Excel by using VBA. That's the basis for add-ins to Excel. Need to use a commercial add-in? Not going to get it in a Gnumeric version.
MS Access support is just one of the more important aspects to VBA.
Slashdot Mirror
I would love for everybody to have the same access to knowledge and the same access to the opportunity to contribute and move humanity forward.
Well, that statement gives me the "warm fuzzies" too, for a second, until I wake up to reality and remember that enough people think that the best opportunity to "move forward" is for their country/terrorist organization to join the nuclear club. Just look at Pakistan. Their country has innumerable problems with underdevelopment, but building a nuclear bomb somehow took priority.
Giving North Korea the opportunity to "move forward" into the glorious future of compact, deliverable, high-yield nuclear weapons without the need for elaborate and detectable testing doesn't seem like a great service to the world at large. But maybe that's just me.
I've always wondered why Microsoft never ported COM & a few other things to Mac, Linux, etc., 'cause that would let them leverage their existing codebase on new platforms.
Well, if they had, and let this secret out, what's to keep anyone else from porting their Windows apps to other OS's?
MS is 1000% dedicated to making sure that the flow of users and applications into Windows is a one-way flow. Nothing that could possibly let something supplant Windows is going to be tolerated. Perhaps you heard of this thing called the Web, and a company called Netscape that started the idea that you could write applications that were largely platform agnostic?
I certainly agree that PTO approval is not unimpeachable evidence of a patent's validity. It is however, prima facie evidence that the patent is probably valid, and requires a serious effort to undermine it, not just what an average slashdot poster comes up with in a fit of pique.
People make mistakes, even serious ones. But I'll bet that the patent examiner looked more carefully and understood the legal issues involved more thoroughly than the rash of slashdot complainers that comes out of the woodwork everytime one of these stories is posted.
In a court of law, the burden of proof, once a patent has been granted, falls to those who would contest the patent, not on the holder of the patent. And the only true definition of the validity of a patent is one ruled on in a court of law.
I read my own post, which was the first I know of to have brought Wozniak into the discussion. While not perfectly explicit, *I* was considering Wozniak to be the inventor of the Apple II circuit, and my recollection of the previous Slashdot discussion was that Wozniak name came up in association with the purported "prior art" in the LCD case.
Reading your posts, this is the first mention I can find of later Apple II programmers being the parties under discussion. You appear to have changed the subject, which is of course not an offense of any kind, but I fail to see how my reading skills could have been remediated to better follow your shift.
The question was not whether every patent was valid. That is an absurd standard. The question is whether a patent mentioned on slashdot is actually vulnerable to the prior art claims that a bunch of slashdot posters come up with, apparently off the top of their head.
Patent examiners are expected to examine patents, not grant them. As for their failure to recognize prior art, I would be much more impressed if a licensed member of the patent bar described the invalidity of a patent rather than some Lotus engineer. The legal definition of "prior art" is not a subject of engineering, but a subject of law.
I certainly never claimed to have read the patent more carefully than anyone on slashdot. I never claimed to have read the patent at all. I was simply making a statement that almost all slashdot discussions on patents and "prior art" fail to reach the threshold of "worth considering."
"or" and "not" can be interpreted as Boolean algebra.
Google does make some effort to extract this Boolean algebra from queries. The underlining may be an artifact of this; from the results I get when the phrase "to be or not to be" is quoted, it appears not to influence the results.
This is a part of a huge area for what might be termed "bugs" in search engines. All of them have to deal with the fact that 99% of people do not understand how to efficiently describe a search, much less how to describe one to a computer. Given just a blank box, who knows what people will type. Making them happy with the results they get back is as much dumb luck as programming expertise.
Actually, I *do* have a reason to believe that the patent is not covered in prior art/obvious, etc. The PTO granted the damn patent, hence, they had to convince a patent examiner.
The burden of proof for prior art to invalidate a patent would require a detailed examination of the patent in question, and a detailed discussion of the "obvious" nature of the method given the prior art. But nobody provides that. They just say "oh, my copier was phoning the vendor in 1938, must be prior art. PTO is fucked up." No detail at all, no sign of having any clue about the patent other than the one sentence given in the article summary.
Now, I could just assume that the patent office is totally broken, patent examiners are moronic crack smokers, or whatever, so the majority of patents are actually invalid. Then, any patent that comes along will have a greater than 50% chance of being prior art, obvious, or whatever, and I could then start with the slashdot community's default assumption.
I'm guessing that most people on Slashdot *do* believe the patent system is broken, but only because they read enough purported examples on Slashdot to convince themselves. A bit of a circular argument, isn't it?
Woz's circuit took advantage of. Feeding that same signal into a high rez monochrome monitor reveals the higher frequency (ie subpixel) luma pattern.
Ah, I think I understand your point of view. You seem to think that Woz's goal was better resolution. That's just totally wrong. Woz wanted color graphics from a minimal number of chips. Nobody took advantage of sub-pixel resolution, first, because nobody was using high-quality monitors, and, secondly, the sub-pixel shifts were not per-pixel.
Sure, by the time the IIe and IIgs came around, the 80-column card doubled the resolution of the various graphics modes, but by then, IBM PCs had pushed the graphics envelope to VGA, which didn't have any of the quirks of the Apple II solution.
I'm aware of the standard "person having ordinary skill in the art". Obviousness, however, does not mean that *after* reading the claims someone skilled in the art says "oh, that's obvious." Lots of things appear obvious after they are explained.
It means that *without* reading the claims, a person with ordinary skill would, based on the prior art or generally available knowledge, have a suggestion or motivation to try the claim, with a reasonable expectation of success.
The color generated by the Apple II video signal isn't "subpixel." NTSC doesn't even have well-defined pixels. It has only a bandwidth limitation and a horizontal scan rate. The phase modulation determining the color is related to the timing of the pulse coming out of Woz's graphics generation circuitry. LCDs have well-defined pixels, each of fixed colors. No phase & timing involved.
The idea that a TTL circuit generating video waveforms is the "same method" as taking into account the physical arrangment of LCD subpixels when rendering letterforms is a perfect example of the Slashdot patent mentality. No one could ever patent *anything* if the patent had to be robust against that kind of broad conception of "prior art."
Perhaps we could develop a Slashdot reading model which understands that a patent is really about the claims, not about the abstract or a simple short phrase summarizing the patent.
For God's sake, any patent can be summarized into a phrase making it sound obvious, and most patents are actually about some marginally improved twist on a mature technology. That's why they have things like cites of previous patents.
On Slashdot, any new patent gets described in a way that makes a caveman beating two rocks together sound like prior art. I recall some clever LCD resolution enhancement get compared to Wozniak's also clever but completely unrelated scheme for kludging NTSC color out of a TTL circuit.
We need a new moderation "-100 Just doesn't understand."
Actually, Lisp is an ideal platform for kick-ass windowing systems, such as CLIM. One key feature of CLIM is that the data sent to windows still remembers where it came from. As opposed to conventional window systems, where stuff either becomes pixels, or, if you are lucky, selectable as text.
RMS came from the AI lab at MIT, who were using Lisp machines as personal workstations before workstations even became common. These machines had OS's that had user-readable and user-modifiable code all the way down to and including the hardware microcode!
It's a shame that the UNIX model of "everything becomes an undifferentiated stream of byte-sized characters" took over the world. That world gives us solutions like Perl, which proliferate quick-and-dirty hacks that make all sorts of assumptions on the format of text streams to try to reconstruct the data hidden within them. When the assumptions fail (Y2K, anyone?) all sorts of things break.
Imagine if any time value anywhere in the system *understood* that it was a time. You could display it on the screen if you wanted, but you wouldn't use that text for processing, rather you would use the time value itself. Human display is separate from the machine representation. That is the idea behind CLIM.
Note: RMS doesn't fully get it, unfortunately. Consider Emacs, which has a Lisp-like extension language, but is unbelievably out-of-date. It uses default dynamic scope, which has been known since the 70s to be an ugly mistake, doesn't support packages, so names all have to have long prefixes, and doesn't fully use structured data types, so that all sorts of code depends on properly forming nested lists. But, RMS being RMS, he can't be persuaded to change his approach.
Sheesh, are you Canadians so desperate you have to make things up?
Naismith was born in Almonte, Ontairo, and attended McGill, but invented basketball in Springfield, MA, in the U.S. Hence the location of the Basketball Hall of Fame in that city.
The point is probably not that battery life is changed, but that the time remaining display is no longer accurate. The software doesn't release little gnomes to eat your battery or anything.
You mean, write Fortran-style programs in a crippled sub-dialect of C?
Plus, how many C compilers are made to optimize for this case that is extremely common in Fortran, but extremely rare in C code?
Fortran compilers are the best compilers for Fortran programs. C compilers are best for C programs. Fortran compilers can be expected to perform poorly on "C-like" structures, and C compilers are likely to perform poorly with "Fortran-like" programs.
Sure, but it expands into C++ code. You still need a very wise C++ compiler to turn this into efficient machine code.
A decent Fortran compiler knows more about the original statement than the C++ compiler can, and also, a Fortran compiler's number one reason for existence is to optimize array accesses.
A C++ compiler is lucky to correctly compile all of the heinous complexity of the C++ language, much less aggressively optimize this type of array access.
I'd be much more impressed if the poster had shown the resulting machine code.
The situation may well be like the electronics industry in the 1950s and 1960s -- a few large corporations with extensive circuit patent portfolios built all the electronic devices, and avoided patent lawsuits by cross-licensing the portfolios back and forth. But little guys without a portfolio were effectively locked out. They couldn't afford to license the patented circuits they needed individually.
And, as we all know, that destroyed the electronics industry so it is now as dead as the buggy whip industry, a pale shell of what it might have been...
Oh, wait, the electronics industry grew faster and larger than any other technological area with the possible exception of aerospace. And was largely responsible for the success of the "space" part of aerospace.
Perhaps large patent portfolios are a symptom of an area that has such vast potential for innovation that even large companies cannot possibly control it all, rather than a symptom of large companies taking control of a finite, slowly growing field.
Hmmm. Yeah, I'm sure the Apple Store will be overjoyed that someone is spending hours using a Mac for commercial web development without actually deciding it is important enough to actually *buy one*.
Just drop $900 for an eMac, already. If you aren't actually making money developing these web sites, then why the hell go to all the effort of making them flashy enough to have rendering issues?
Obviously, he was hosting his DNS on the toaster as well, and it got slashdotted.
Duh!
The missing piece is the heat put out by the bridge ASICs that are providing the huge pipe to memory.
Putting a PPC970 in a laptop with a memory & bus controller that also fits within laptop power constraints will result in a memory bandwidth that is as choked down as a G4 is, I suspect.
"bels" are factors of 10, whic most people mean when they speak of orders of magnitude. decibels are one-tenth of a bel, hence the prefix. 4 dB is 4/10 of a factor of 10, or something like a factor of 2.5.
1 dB is is a factor of 1.26, i.e. a 25% increase.
Further complicating the situation is that most people don't listen to their music with an acoustic power meter. Psychoacoustically, there is a non-linear relationship between perceived loudness and acoustic power. The commonly quoted "10 dB is twice as loud" is not an exact relationship, but is rather close at low sound levels.
If you consider Paul to be a good witness to the Christian faith, that is. Who knows how accurate his views were, considering he never met Christ except through a vision/epileptic aura? That Paul's interpretations of Christ became widespread does not mean they are accurate, unless you are particularly credulous and attribute the spread of Paul's ideas to their "divine inspiration" as opposed to good marketing or luck.
And if you think marketing had nothing to do with it, consider how convenient various visions of Peter were: no need to abide by dietary laws, or get circumcised! Sure makes it easier for those Gentiles to join up, now, doesn't it? Reminds one of Mohammed, and how often he had a new revealed truth just when it came in handy to justify a new strategy or change in plan.
All sorts of crazy stuff is in non-canonical books; who is to say that the elders of the early Church picked the right books to be canonical, and didn't leave out some no longer extant, but more "accurate" scriptures?
This is not to knock Christian faith, or Muslim faith, just to knock the fixation people have on sacred texts and traditions. Have whatever religion you want, but don't think something written on a page two thousand years ago is some kind of divine Dictaphone tape.
32-bit data, yes. However, the "baby" Mark I you refer to had only 13-bit addresses.
I think you've missed the point because you are focusing on the duplication. I don't need to cheaply duplicate the artifacts to allow free access. I could just nationalize all the museums and say "everybody can come in for free." I.e. "those works of art are too valuable to the community to allow you to restrict access." Yet we allow private collectors to prevent public viewing.
The low cost of duplication/additional admission does not alter the right of the owner of the museum restricting people's rights to view the artifacts.
Plus, part of what gives these artifacts value is the uniqueness. We *do* let people make copies of most of these works. Lots of amateur painters will make copies of the masters. My uncle made a copy of Vermeer's Girl with a Pearl Earring. He's a good enough painter and I'm ignorant enough that I probably couldn't tell the difference. Nifty, but not Vermeer, is it? Rodin and his workshop made multiple copies of the Thinker from the same cast, but if I were to make an exact duplicate, would it really be the same experience to look at it?
Cost of duplication is also not much of an issue even for the printed word. We don't seem to have any shortage of cheap editions of the Bible, Federalist Papers, or other works in the public domain, although the physical cost of duplication is the same as for copyrighted works. The Gideons can afford to give away their Bibles.
Practically everything in our society is "artificial." Ownership of land, political borders, voting, rules of baseball, the novel as a literary form. Whatever. "Artificial" does not mean "easily or obviously disposable."
There are any number of abstractions that are treated like goods which are not physical goods, and are not exclusive.
Charging admission is one example. In the usual state of affairs, I can sell more than one person the right to enter a museum. Just because I sell you the right to enter doesn't mean I can't sell another person the identical right of admission. And if you sneak in, I can have you hauled off by the cops, although you haven't taken anything physical.
True, I can't sell someone else the right to occupy the same spot that you do at the same time, but he can't do that outside the museum either.
The airlines sell more rights for admission (actually, only the contract to deliver you from your origin to destination) to a plane than there are seats. Just because they have sold all the notional seats doesn't mean they can't sell a number of additional tickets, although in principle they are selling you something they are not sure they have.
Insurance is yet another fascinating example. I can collect money from you in exchange for a promise; that is, that I promise to pay you a certain amount if a certain event occurs. I can make promises to any number of people, and even promise different people money at different odds for the same event.
Stock options, futures, annuities, etc., are all powerful abstract goods.
Modern societies operate much more efficiently because of these abstractions. That is why they are valuable, much like the idea of "due process" and "legal rights" are valuable. They are abstract, but hardly arbitrary.
The important thing that Gnumeric is missing is the VBA portion of MS Excel. You can do *really* far out things to customize Excel by using VBA. That's the basis for add-ins to Excel. Need to use a commercial add-in? Not going to get it in a Gnumeric version.
MS Access support is just one of the more important aspects to VBA.