Tell you what... Give us back the hundred years of culture you stole from us and you can have this for a reasonable time -- say, 15 years. Keep the position that you stole that longer term fair and square and we can't have it back, and you'll find most people don't care what the law says. You steal from the people. You steal from the artists. And you think people won't react by treating you like a greedy little troll with no entitlement to intellectual property rights?
Thomas Macauley gave two speeches on copyright extension. He covered all the salient points we're going to touch here on slashdot today, and a few more. They are hosted here. Please note that the host is a publisher, and Macauley was himself a distinguished author. It was over 160 years ago, but it's still a good read.
After that, if you have the math to sift through these two papers on the subject, you may agree with their author that the maximum benefit to authors and the public comes with copyright terms of about 15 years. The farther you get from optimum, the less benefit both creators and consumers see - not more for one and less for the other depending on direction, as one might assume.
Excessive length of copyright harms content creators, too.
The product page is here. There are pictures. And specifications. And video. I think we can skip the rest of the blogofrenzy and get our info from the source.
BTW, this looks pretty much like a DL1000 installed backward. It's probably different in some other meaningful way. I didn't look too close.
Everybody's coming with the 1/2 width 1U servers now. HP has quite a few of them. They're more dense even than HP blades, and they use standard interconnects.
The recently announced DL1000 is another one, with the connections in the back as is traditional, and up to 16 SAS drives.
It is a cool look when your datacenter doubles as a social gathering place. I've done it too. Not so cool when somebody falls into a server, the cat decides to play with the CPU fan, that sort of thing. Definitely want to go with the non conductive remote control helecopter.
I heard Google started with restaurant racks or something like that.
While it doesn't refute the idea of outside seeding, it certainly refutes the necessity of it.
I didn't say it was necessary. Life did have to arise somewhere after all. I just think it's arrogant to think that we were the special First One without proof.
First, the first age of life on this planet is known to be prior to your statement. Also, when citing statistics about times in the billions of years you should give reliability of data figures. Since we're talking about stuff that happened long ago, 10% reliability is a big deal - it's 400MY.
But even if it were... some time after the planet formed there was a period of bombardment which, in individual cases, raised the average surface temperature above 600C for prolonged periods of time.
In short, life established at the minimum time that it feasibly could, leaving open the question of whether it arose naturally or was planted by extant dormant life in the forming cloud.
Ok, $100k may be a bit much. How about $10K? If your cause is just, you can buy that bond for $1K. Garage inventor guy could put a couple weeks in at Taco Bell to get his patent considered.
As for scrapping the whole thing? Yeah, you could sell that to me if you tried. Unfortunately you would need an amendment to the Constitution, and those are scarce these days.
Perhaps that's how it works, we either make it through or we don't. If we don't then wait a few million years....something else will popup.
Indeed. There was a sun here before our sun. It had planets. It went nova and gave us all our elements above iron. From the planetary masses that orbited that star, and some masses from its interiour, came our planet. There may have been life there. It may have been spread far and wide. Particularly hardy forms of that life may have been frozen in comets, to bombard our Earth with the material to form life, or life itself. It seems likely given how soon life arose after the planet was cool enough to accept it.
We're not bacteria. We're exceedingly frail. We can't survive the kind of hit that wiped out the dinosaurs (6 times?). We definitely can't survive the sun going Nova. One way or another our planet and sun will fail us. We can get off it, or we can be a subject of study for the next intelligent life form to arise. The advantage that we have over the dinosaurs is that we are aware of the choice and we get to choose. I would prefer the former. If we choose the latter then I'm willing to accept that we deserve our fate. My purpose here is only to help people make an informed choice.
If mankind stakes our survival on this one planet, then we will be wiped out. The solace of your wiped out offspring is irrelevant to this issue. Either one of your offspring will live on some other rock that survives, or they won't. As a species, we can choose to have offsite backups of our genome, or we can not. Either way, all higher life on Earth will be wiped out eventually again. This blog being slashdot, it's a pretty easy to bet that many here see the virtue in a good disaster recovery plan.
War certainly has driven a great deal of innovation.
That it has. Michelangelo got his engineering degree building war machines. Those machines have taught us a lot about ballistics, momentum, and other fields of physics.
But I think the question is why doesn't the government fund research outside of war?
The proper domains of the US government are to provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare and secure the blessings of liberty. You've covered defense. General welfare is covered by the USDA and the FDA, where they ensure the food and drugs we get are (supposedly) wholesome and nutritious. The blessings of liberty need no research - they need common sense (in rare supply these days, I'll admit).
The true answer to your post lies in the US Constitution, Article 1, Section 8, clause 8: "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries."
By encouraging intellectual property suits and elevating copyrights and patents to their present position we've gotten to the point where these things prevent the progress they were intended to promote. Since progress is the essential good that exclusive rights to inventions and creations were created for, it only makes sense to do away with the protections now that have come to subvert that need. We should immediately abolish and vacate all patents and copyrights, and prohibit their issue except in the cause of progress. When they issue they should be for no more than the original terms - 17 years for patents, 27 years for copyright, no extensions and whether or not the inventor or creator is dead is irrelevant.
Also, to post a patent you should have to post a $100,000 bond that the material is original. If the material is unoriginal, the bond would be forfeit. This will to some small degree decrease the trolls who use the spare time on their lawyer retainer contracts to file unuseful or obvious patents.
Before you argue with me on this, consider this merit of copyright: Sonny Bono believed that copyright should last "forever". When informed that this would violate the US Constitution's mandate of "for limited times" he offered "Forever, less one day". A lawmaker and intellectual property rights activist himself, he co-authored and promoted The Copyright Term Extension Act (CTEA) of 1998. This law prevented many thousands of works from falling into the public domain (your ownership and mine - essentially, "the pool of our culture"). Essentially, with this law they deprived you and me of stuff that would have been ours in due course. They stole from us. It spanned the time until the next extension of copyright which, although it doesn't guarantee perpetual protection of Steamboat Willie, does guarantee his protection until such time as they can extend it again, ad infinitum.
Cher, and Sonny Bono's estate are now suing Universal music over the profits from the rights to his music. Apparently this stalwart pillar of the community is accused of using accounting tricks and shell corporations to evade paying the estate of this esteemed artist his due share.
So when they say it's for the artist... beware. The truth is that in Hollywood a share of the net is a share of nothing - always. It's kind of ironic that the people he worked so hard to serve are robbing his grave, seeing as how he worked so hard to enable them to steal from us.
Raw research properly conducted on unexplored issues always discovers something. Either the experiment worked or it did not, and either way, something was learned. It always pays dividends - if not in new products and methods, in the avoidance of the repetition of failed experiments. This doesn't help the profits of the corporations that fund the election of political tools. That's progress. Progress is not the government's goal. The purposes of government are to ensure its persistence and toward that goal to deplete the surplus productivity so as to eliminate a surfeit of leisure. An excess of leisure is an invitation to insurrection.
TFS is correct that the US government forgot these things for a while, but they've remembered them since.
But... to answer the question: the big and the small. The fast and the slow. The literal, the virtual and the speculative. Most importantly, how to get offsite backup on the human genome. If we don't do that then nothing else matters.
The Family Guy is funny, in a sitcom sort of way. I'll agree Futurama had more depth to their humor, and a better grasp of irony. A better show overall.
They're both fun when I happen to catch them, but I don't have time to set aside for either (or any, frankly).
Sharepoint is wonderful. I used to get all my cross-company plans, developments and projects from it. I could enter a couple of searches and have everything: executive travel. department budgets, next years product strategies, customer and vendor lists, even skunkworks projects with circuit layouts and logic diagrams. Definitely a huge career pusher once the gig was over.
And I was just a temp clerk in the mailroom. I wonder what people with privileges had access to.
Once upon a time there were murderous thieves on the high seas. The cure was to license the hunting of them, with the prize whatever spoils they had won. Not the best system, bt it worked.
Why is it these days that when I see the words "too big to fail" attached to a company that I automatically imagine it is secretly burning down from within?
It's not a few compromised hosts. It's several millions under the control of no more than ten people. Any one of them could sht down the Internet, and would if they saw a profit in it.
Of course. The purpose of software is to generate revene for programmers and their employers. The availability of free and convenient sources of good software demotivates the professsional programmer by devaluing his product until he can't get money for it unless it's innovative, more powerful or easier to use.
These "free software" rogue programmers must be stopped! If this were allowed to continue for a couple decades, the jerks might even make whole operating systems and office suites. Average people might work an entire day without using any paid-for software at all. This is anarchy.
Slashdot Mirror
My God! It's full of anti-worms.
Tell you what... Give us back the hundred years of culture you stole from us and you can have this for a reasonable time -- say, 15 years. Keep the position that you stole that longer term fair and square and we can't have it back, and you'll find most people don't care what the law says. You steal from the people. You steal from the artists. And you think people won't react by treating you like a greedy little troll with no entitlement to intellectual property rights?
Thomas Macauley gave two speeches on copyright extension. He covered all the salient points we're going to touch here on slashdot today, and a few more. They are hosted here. Please note that the host is a publisher, and Macauley was himself a distinguished author. It was over 160 years ago, but it's still a good read.
After that, if you have the math to sift through these two papers on the subject, you may agree with their author that the maximum benefit to authors and the public comes with copyright terms of about 15 years. The farther you get from optimum, the less benefit both creators and consumers see - not more for one and less for the other depending on direction, as one might assume.
Excessive length of copyright harms content creators, too.
And apparently a distinguished mathematician has done the math. Benefits are optimized at about fifteen years
By the way... the Sonny Bono who promoted laws for eternal protection of copyright failed miserably. His estate is now suing UMG for royalties they claim to be robbed of.
So even the great extensionator himself isn't seeing any benefit from the tyranny he imposed on us all.
I don't remember when. I do remember where.
Until the law gets back to where a reasonable person would consider it fair, it will be ignored. We may have to pass through zero to get there.
Reference here.
An unfair law is ignored - and should be.
There's the whole rest of the Internet, if this blog doesn't suit you.
But posting comments about how much you dislike a blog, on that blog? That's above mid range on the fail-meter right there.
Did IE hide your address bar, and now you can't get out? Here, let me help.
The product page is here. There are pictures. And specifications. And video. I think we can skip the rest of the blogofrenzy and get our info from the source.
BTW, this looks pretty much like a DL1000 installed backward. It's probably different in some other meaningful way. I didn't look too close.
Everybody's coming with the 1/2 width 1U servers now. HP has quite a few of them. They're more dense even than HP blades, and they use standard interconnects.
The recently announced DL1000 is another one, with the connections in the back as is traditional, and up to 16 SAS drives.
It is a cool look when your datacenter doubles as a social gathering place. I've done it too. Not so cool when somebody falls into a server, the cat decides to play with the CPU fan, that sort of thing. Definitely want to go with the non conductive remote control helecopter.
I heard Google started with restaurant racks or something like that.
Oh. And the direct from the source link is go extremescale
While it doesn't refute the idea of outside seeding, it certainly refutes the necessity of it.
I didn't say it was necessary. Life did have to arise somewhere after all. I just think it's arrogant to think that we were the special First One without proof.
First, the first age of life on this planet is known to be prior to your statement. Also, when citing statistics about times in the billions of years you should give reliability of data figures. Since we're talking about stuff that happened long ago, 10% reliability is a big deal - it's 400MY.
But even if it were... some time after the planet formed there was a period of bombardment which, in individual cases, raised the average surface temperature above 600C for prolonged periods of time.
In short, life established at the minimum time that it feasibly could, leaving open the question of whether it arose naturally or was planted by extant dormant life in the forming cloud.
And by unapproved, I mean deals not approved by Hollywood and Redmond.
Seriously, are we looking for justice from the RIAADOJ? We may as well look for truth from Muhammed Saeed al-Sahaf.
Ok, $100k may be a bit much. How about $10K? If your cause is just, you can buy that bond for $1K. Garage inventor guy could put a couple weeks in at Taco Bell to get his patent considered.
As for scrapping the whole thing? Yeah, you could sell that to me if you tried. Unfortunately you would need an amendment to the Constitution, and those are scarce these days.
Perhaps that's how it works, we either make it through or we don't. If we don't then wait a few million years....something else will popup.
Indeed. There was a sun here before our sun. It had planets. It went nova and gave us all our elements above iron. From the planetary masses that orbited that star, and some masses from its interiour, came our planet. There may have been life there. It may have been spread far and wide. Particularly hardy forms of that life may have been frozen in comets, to bombard our Earth with the material to form life, or life itself. It seems likely given how soon life arose after the planet was cool enough to accept it.
We're not bacteria. We're exceedingly frail. We can't survive the kind of hit that wiped out the dinosaurs (6 times?). We definitely can't survive the sun going Nova. One way or another our planet and sun will fail us. We can get off it, or we can be a subject of study for the next intelligent life form to arise. The advantage that we have over the dinosaurs is that we are aware of the choice and we get to choose. I would prefer the former. If we choose the latter then I'm willing to accept that we deserve our fate. My purpose here is only to help people make an informed choice.
If mankind stakes our survival on this one planet, then we will be wiped out. The solace of your wiped out offspring is irrelevant to this issue. Either one of your offspring will live on some other rock that survives, or they won't. As a species, we can choose to have offsite backups of our genome, or we can not. Either way, all higher life on Earth will be wiped out eventually again. This blog being slashdot, it's a pretty easy to bet that many here see the virtue in a good disaster recovery plan.
War certainly has driven a great deal of innovation.
That it has. Michelangelo got his engineering degree building war machines. Those machines have taught us a lot about ballistics, momentum, and other fields of physics.
But I think the question is why doesn't the government fund research outside of war?
The proper domains of the US government are to provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare and secure the blessings of liberty. You've covered defense. General welfare is covered by the USDA and the FDA, where they ensure the food and drugs we get are (supposedly) wholesome and nutritious. The blessings of liberty need no research - they need common sense (in rare supply these days, I'll admit).
The true answer to your post lies in the US Constitution, Article 1, Section 8, clause 8: "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries."
By encouraging intellectual property suits and elevating copyrights and patents to their present position we've gotten to the point where these things prevent the progress they were intended to promote. Since progress is the essential good that exclusive rights to inventions and creations were created for, it only makes sense to do away with the protections now that have come to subvert that need. We should immediately abolish and vacate all patents and copyrights, and prohibit their issue except in the cause of progress. When they issue they should be for no more than the original terms - 17 years for patents, 27 years for copyright, no extensions and whether or not the inventor or creator is dead is irrelevant.
Also, to post a patent you should have to post a $100,000 bond that the material is original. If the material is unoriginal, the bond would be forfeit. This will to some small degree decrease the trolls who use the spare time on their lawyer retainer contracts to file unuseful or obvious patents.
Before you argue with me on this, consider this merit of copyright: Sonny Bono believed that copyright should last "forever". When informed that this would violate the US Constitution's mandate of "for limited times" he offered "Forever, less one day". A lawmaker and intellectual property rights activist himself, he co-authored and promoted The Copyright Term Extension Act (CTEA) of 1998. This law prevented many thousands of works from falling into the public domain (your ownership and mine - essentially, "the pool of our culture"). Essentially, with this law they deprived you and me of stuff that would have been ours in due course. They stole from us. It spanned the time until the next extension of copyright which, although it doesn't guarantee perpetual protection of Steamboat Willie, does guarantee his protection until such time as they can extend it again, ad infinitum.
Cher, and Sonny Bono's estate are now suing Universal music over the profits from the rights to his music. Apparently this stalwart pillar of the community is accused of using accounting tricks and shell corporations to evade paying the estate of this esteemed artist his due share.
So when they say it's for the artist... beware. The truth is that in Hollywood a share of the net is a share of nothing - always. It's kind of ironic that the people he worked so hard to serve are robbing his grave, seeing as how he worked so hard to enable them to steal from us.
Raw research properly conducted on unexplored issues always discovers something. Either the experiment worked or it did not, and either way, something was learned. It always pays dividends - if not in new products and methods, in the avoidance of the repetition of failed experiments. This doesn't help the profits of the corporations that fund the election of political tools. That's progress. Progress is not the government's goal. The purposes of government are to ensure its persistence and toward that goal to deplete the surplus productivity so as to eliminate a surfeit of leisure. An excess of leisure is an invitation to insurrection.
TFS is correct that the US government forgot these things for a while, but they've remembered them since.
But... to answer the question: the big and the small. The fast and the slow. The literal, the virtual and the speculative. Most importantly, how to get offsite backup on the human genome. If we don't do that then nothing else matters.
Do you really think that soil is still fit to grow food in? I'd rather bet on global warming thawing some permafrost.
The Family Guy is funny, in a sitcom sort of way. I'll agree Futurama had more depth to their humor, and a better grasp of irony. A better show overall.
They're both fun when I happen to catch them, but I don't have time to set aside for either (or any, frankly).
Sharepoint is wonderful. I used to get all my cross-company plans, developments and projects from it. I could enter a couple of searches and have everything: executive travel. department budgets, next years product strategies, customer and vendor lists, even skunkworks projects with circuit layouts and logic diagrams. Definitely a huge career pusher once the gig was over.
And I was just a temp clerk in the mailroom. I wonder what people with privileges had access to.
Once upon a time there were murderous thieves on the high seas. The cure was to license the hunting of them, with the prize whatever spoils they had won. Not the best system, bt it worked.
Why is it these days that when I see the words "too big to fail" attached to a company that I automatically imagine it is secretly burning down from within?
It's not a few compromised hosts. It's several millions under the control of no more than ten people. Any one of them could sht down the Internet, and would if they saw a profit in it.
Of course. The purpose of software is to generate revene for programmers and their employers. The availability of free and convenient sources of good software demotivates the professsional programmer by devaluing his product until he can't get money for it unless it's innovative, more powerful or easier to use.
These "free software" rogue programmers must be stopped! If this were allowed to continue for a couple decades, the jerks might even make whole operating systems and office suites. Average people might work an entire day without using any paid-for software at all. This is anarchy.