What was the point of the Amiga's RF shielding? I lived just up the road from a MW transmitter; and instead of ordinary 50 cycle power hum, unshielded audio cables -- even, sometimes, dry solder joints -- used to pick up its signal. Yet my A500 used to run just fine without that tin box inside.
I also ran it quite near to a multi-megawatt UHF/VHF transmitter complex {Sutton Coldfield, if you really must know} with neither RF shielding, nor ill effects.
Whatever RF band it was particularly sensitive to, I never found out.
Re:There should be a way to mod posters of stories
on
Apple's First Flops
·
· Score: 1
Wow..... such a shame my mod points wore off..... That would have deserved "insightful" -- and maybe even a blue dot next to my name, if the poster had bothered to log in.
It's probably not illegal as long as your TV licence is up to date, unless your TV licence specifies what transmission and reception technology you can use. I think in most countries, satellite TV is paid for through subscription services rather than a premium on the licence. Check your licence.....
As long as your TV licence is paid up, you and any members of your household are licenced to receive programmes broadcast by cable, satellite or terrestrial analogue or digital signals, or any means yet to be invented. The courts have ruled that it is fair dealing under copyright law to record a broadcast programme for viewing later.
So as long as you have a valid TV licence and the people downloading from you have valid TV licences, you should be fine with offering TV programmes for upload. After all, you paid for the privilege of receiving those broadcasts; and the receipt is on your mantelpiece {or wherever you keep your important documents}.
You might need a rebroadcast licence; but since you aren't using an RF transmitter, this should not be expensive. If the bandwidth of your outgoing connection is small enough, you could well be exempt from this requirement anyway {after all, councils and housing associations don't need a rebroadcast licence to plumb a communal antenna to several flats; the tenants' TV licences are enough}.
Now, if someone is downloading TV programmes from you without a valid TV licence, then they almost certainly are committing an offence. A simple warning on your download site ought to be enough to keep you out of trouble.
Side questions: (1) If a friend comes into your house and watches your TV, do they need to have a valid TV licence? (2) If you have a display-less TV receiver {e.g. a video recorder or NICAM receiver} in one building, connected to a receiver-less display {e.g. an old Amiga monitor with a composite video input} in another building, which building actually needs the TV licence?
Background: it is indeed an Athlon 64 running Debian. (So maybe "workstation" is a bit of a grandiose description for it; but if it's on a desktop and it's running something vaguely Unix-like, to my mind it's a workstation).
To take advantage of these extra registers in user-land on an AMD64 machine with a sane operating system such as Solaris 10 or Linux, it should involve no more effort than a recompile with the appropriate switch passed to gcc to tell it to use the extra registers in the object code it generates.
It should -- but only if the code is Properly Written in the first place and doesn't do nasty stuff like using ints as pointers.
C will let you get away with this on a system where these datatypes are the same size, because it assumes programmers are smart enough to know what they are doing; but will break royally when the machine's address space exceeds the int size. And GCC is neither smart enough to know whether or not you care about running your program on anything else, nor presumptuous enough to refuse to let you write programs which may well be non-portable, but which you had no intention of porting in the first place.
Now bear in mind that this is just one situation that will cause a compile error on a different system -- there are quite a few others. Multiply this by the number of source files in OpenOffice.org, and you'll see it isn't quite so simple.
It should be -- but thanks to someone's foolish assumptions, it isn't.
And OpenOffice.org, as you correctly point out, began life as a closed-source product. My bad for not knowing it wasn't Sun themselves who wrote it, but I still stand by my assertion: Closed source software contains serious programming faults, which its authors think they can get away with because nobody will ever know about them.
If you're going to bash Sun, at least do it properly.
Sun Microsystems are the people responsible for OpenOffice.org. Recently I acquired an AMD 64-bit workstation. I have been trying to get OpenOffice.org to compile on this thing.
It ain't having it. Not even the CVS version I checked out.
I know all about the "32-bit chroot" way of doing it. It's an ugly solution, like teaching a cat to bark. I've paid for a 64-bit processor, for crying out loud -- and I'm damned if I'm going to have it run on half its cylinders.
But OpenOffice.org keeps coming up with compile errors.
Properly-written code should not care about what processor it is running on. It's wrong from a portability point of view to assume that a particular data type can be substituted for another data type just because, on one system, they happen to have the same bit size. Yet that seems to be at the very root of the issue here. I edited file after file, lost track of where I was at, and finally gave up. Meanwhile, I've come to love KOffice.
Bear in mind that this is Sun's OpenOffice.org, a piece of code they dare show us the internals of.
Now think. Sun also sell proprietary, closed-source stuff, which they don't have to worry about other people seeing. Stuff like Solaris and Java.
If OpenOffice.org is so sloppily written that it won't compile on a 64-bit system without more mods than I was prepared to make, and that's what they deign to let us look at -- then what sort of state is the code in that they won't let us see?
I have to have a phone line from NTL, even though I don't use it for anything {their broadband signal travels along the TV cable}. Of course, they tell me it's "free", but this just means "we'll make you pay for it whether you want it or not". They also claim that calls are cheaper than BT, but I never found this to be the case: "national calls at local rates" is just a euphemism for "local calls at national rates". Plus, everyone already knows my BT number. Oh: and when BT printed the phone book, they managed to miss out my NTL number anyway!
Their "free" web space, included with the broadband, is also worse than useless: there is no PHP, no database and no Perl. At first I was told this was because I was running Linux my end and their services only work with Windows. After persuading them that I had borrowed a Windows machine from next door {actually, getting a friend who knows Windows to translate for me} I succeeded in persuading them that the fault -- that I was seeing <? phpinfo() ?> instead of the PHP info screen -- lay their end. Apparently I have to pay extra for a "business" account in order to use these "advanced features" which are already running on my internet sharer. NTL's resident Linux guru {they did manage to find one} suggested I could run my own Apache server, which is true; but my IP address is subject to change at random and without warning. It would be Russian roulette running sendmail on that connection {and their DHCP server does not honour my hostname request either}. Fortunately I work for an ISP and my boss is a hacker, so I can use their DNS to handle my domain name -- everything but MX, which uses a a POP3 account on Work's server.
To add insult to injury, Slashdot {and a few other services} are blocking NTL's web proxy server {which I have not yet found a way to bypass}.
OTOH, other countries have worse problems than lousy internet services. And I quite like a decent cup of tea with milk and no sugar, sitcoms without laugh tracks, TV without adverts and the generally-accepted right not to be shot at.....
Yes, you're right. However, the typical x86 user is either running illegally-copied, closed-source games on an illegally-made copy of the closed-source "operating system" Windows; or running the closed-source malware-magnets Outlook Express and Internet Explorer, together with a ton of unwanted spyware, adware and spam-zombies, on a paid-up copy of Windows.
The future is RISC, there are no two ways about that. Unfortunately, this whole Windows thing is entirely about keeping people stuck in the past.....
By the time the kids that are learning MS Word in schools today are looking for jobs, Open Source adoption will have increased by leaps and bounds. Based on current trends, I offer the following extrapolations:
Windows XP's successor will so totally break compatibility with XP, NT, 2000, 9X, 3.1 and MS-DOS, that there will be no reason save the name to stay with Microsoft products. After all, you might just as well use OpenOffice.org as Word 2007, if Word 2007 can't open Word XP/2000/97 documents properly and costs you much more money to boot!
Meanwhile, there will be success stories from enterprises which successfully made the switch away from Microsoft {Ernie Ball won't be the last case of ditching MS to conform to code} as encouragement to try something different.
There will also be an ad-hoc network of independent small businesses whose core activity is helping other, larger businesses make the transition from Windows to Open Source.
It's already getting to the point where it will soon be economically viable for some third-world-based company to devote serious effort to writing Open Source drivers for graphics cards, for example.
I have to disagree with you there. I think it's entirely the job of the courts to determine what does and what does not constitute not fair dealing.
Parliament -- write down the laws of the land
Courts -- decide whether or not laws were broken and determine appropriate punishment
Police -- catch people who break the laws
This system has built-in checks and balances. It's certainly not perfect, but it has a less terrible worst-case scenario than any other arrangement.
So whilst there is an argument for using free software to teach, for example, programming, a course which teachs pupils spreadsheets or word processing could, arguably be using the most widespread software.
Because OpenOffice.org writer, KWord, Abiword and others all have the typing keys laid out totally different from MS Word, don't they?! And OpenOffice.org calc, KSpread and Gnumeric not only have the number keys in completely different places from MS Excel, but use different symbols for the common mathematical operations!
Oh, wait, no, they don't. QWERTY keyboard, numbers in the same place, + for add, - for subtract.
There's also a compelling argument to be made against using any kind of WYSIWYG word processing: it encourages you to think too hard about the rendering at the expense of the content. Not many people can be both a calligrapher and a poet.....
Once schools are teaching how to use Free software, then businesses will no longer be able to use the bogus argument "but that's what they teach in schools" as a reason to stick with Microsoft.
Schools should not be Microsoft training centres anyway. We pay for schools with our Council Tax, and this particular Council Tax payer resents having my hard-earned spent on consolidating a foreign monopoly.
Try this and either this or this: it's not quite the real thing, but it's as near as you're going to get for the time being. And you will certainly get to "dump Windows but not all of your hardware".
If you're going to burgle premises where dogs may be kept, you need a trick up your sleeve. Well..... it's not so much a trick, it's basic canine psychology. Do this with the dog watching: Take a previously-placed-there Mars bar out of your back pocket. Unwrap it. Take a good sized bite out of it. Offer it down to the dog. You have now tamed the dog. It really is that simple. It works with any breed of Canis lupus, from a little Yorkshire terrier up to a full-grown arctic timber wolf.
HOW IT WORKS: As far as the dog is concerned, you caught something that was good to eat {dogs are hunters -- they think all food has to be caught}, skinned it {wrapping is a human concept}, took a bite and passed it on. Which is exactly what the alpha pair do at the conclusion of the hunt -- the alpha dog and bitch always eat first, no matter who made the kill, and then the lower members of the pack must take their turns. Mealtimes for dogs are a reinforcement {and maybe re-arrangement} of the pack hierarchy: not every member of the pack survives the hunt, nobody wants to make a serious leadership challenge for fear of food going to waste, and no member wants to be too greedy, for fear of being demoted.
The only way to blow this is to lose your nerve. The instant you display any signs that you are not the pack leader, your cover is blown. The real alphas would never have any reason to doubt the intentions of other members of their pack; so anyone who so much as looks wary of being attacked is obviously an impostor. If all is lost, lie still on your back, offering no resistance and you might not be killed.
Why not just apt-get update && apt-get install squid &&/etc/init.d/squid start instead? Set your proxy in Konqueror to the IP address of the machine you installed Squid on, port 3128, for all protocols. Then write some Squid rules for blocking adverts.
Incomplete example: (note to put a \ before each., because these are actually regular expressions)
This will work right across your LAN, of course -- and beyond, if you configure your broadband router / IPtables to pass on port 3128 to the outside world. And only people with root access on the proxy server -- which is behind a locked door in your home -- will know what you're surfing.
Assuming Aussie law is something like the law over here, then the Government probably could apply for a Compulsory Purchase Order on the patent rights. CPOs have been used in the past to obtain land necessary for various projects deemed to be In The Greater Public Interest {e.g. the Channel Tunnel Rail Link which runs through Kent}. Although CPOs have traditionally been applied to land, the reason for this has been simply that movable property doesn't usually get in the way of government projects -- it can always just be ordered to be moved.
Treating patent rights as being equivalent to land might set a nasty precedent, though. So the Government -- who, after all, are the ultimate authority to which the patent office answer -- could just decide to annul the patent. Problem solved, everybody happy.
Remember, the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few; but the needs of the few outweigh the whims and caprices of the many.
Copyrights, and even patents, protect only one particular means to a given end. {In fact a patent can't, shouldn't and never used to be granted if it covers the sole means to an end. Encouraging innovation, see -- if you can't use a flint pressed by a spring against a revolving steel wheel to ignite a vapourised fuel drawn up on a wick, then everyone else has to think of some other way to light their cigarettes. OTOH, if a patent on one kind of cigarette lighter meant nobody else were allowed to make any kind of portable apparatus for establishing ignition of nicotine inhalation devices, that would be stifling competition -- which is a different thing.} Everyone else is free to use any other means to the same end -- and all means to the same end are equally valid, so long as the end was properly specified in the first place.
I remember downloading all seven CDs of Woody-i386 when I first got broadband -- that was when it was a brand-new release and I was running something like Slink or Potato on my connection-sharing box {then a '486}.
When I acquired a notebook PC in '03, I installed Woody on it..... for about a week. Then I went over to Sid for KDE3, and never looked back. Just occasionally there have been disappointments with packages not quite working. Sometimes I've found the answer on Google; other times, Debian must have fixed it themselves because apt-get update && apt-get upgrade just worked. Of course, this is to be expected given that any file might be updated at anytime -- someone could be uploading a replacement for what you're downloading right at the same time. On my 64-bit box {pure64, a special flavour of Sid} I've done The Magic Commands twice in succession and got upgrades both times.
Sarge is more than ready to go, by any other distro's standards. Debian just have very high ideals, is all -- and they aim to run on mainframes, minis and workstations, not just PCs. If there's something that won't work in one of the more esoteric architectures Debian support, then it will hold up the i386 and PowerPC releases. If for some reason you were running multiple architectures, would you rather have a distro that was inconsistent from one to another?
No doubt soon, I'll have to install Sarge on two heavily-used servers at work {some are already running it}. That'll be fun.....
In the UK, the tax on alcohol and fags is very expensive: this is to compensate the National Health Service for the extra cost of treating illness caused by drinking and smoking.
It can work out cheaper -- especially if you live in the South -- to travel to the Continent and return with a carload of beer and tobacco, than to buy such things here. {Of course, you have then paid your taxes to the French, Belgian or whatever government. But in those countries, you have to pay towards any medical treatment you receive: everybody has medical insurance which is paid for separately, not through pay-as-you-earn.}
So it will be the same with storage devices in the Netherlands, if this tax is approved. Under European law, once you have paid any taxes applicable to an article at the time of sale, it is your property and you cannot be held liable for any further tax if you move that article to another country {unless you sell it}. As long as some EU member state does not impose this tax, and an audit trail exists to show that the transaction occurred in that country, nobody in the Netherlands need pay it.
The British government is now finding, for the first time, that due to the availability of cheap poisons overseas, it is losing money treating lung cancer and other smoking-related patients. This is why we are seeing a clampdown on smokers' rights: the smoker is no longer an important contributor to the Government's coffers, but a tax-dodger. And this is why the UK government is making such a big noise about obesity: the fag tax money is drying up, so another source of revenue is required to replace the millions in nicotine-stained pound notes. Soon, crisps and Mars bars will be taxed; the government will spout about the evils of junk food with one hand {instantly doubling its attractiveness to kids}, while raking in the "dirty" money with the other.
One could argue that it is not the act of buying fags that gives you cancer, but smoking them. And if you have to walk to the shop to buy your junk food, then you might well be undoing the "damage" on the way..... But nobody has come up with a way {yet} of reliably taxing the act of smoking a cigarette, just the same as no-one has found a way of reliably ensuring that a songwriter receives the same few pence they would have received from the sale of a song on CD everytime someone makes a copy of that song independently of the CD company.
Slashdot Mirror
What was the point of the Amiga's RF shielding? I lived just up the road from a MW transmitter; and instead of ordinary 50 cycle power hum, unshielded audio cables -- even, sometimes, dry solder joints -- used to pick up its signal. Yet my A500 used to run just fine without that tin box inside.
I also ran it quite near to a multi-megawatt UHF/VHF transmitter complex {Sutton Coldfield, if you really must know} with neither RF shielding, nor ill effects.
Whatever RF band it was particularly sensitive to, I never found out.
Wow ..... such a shame my mod points wore off ..... That would have deserved "insightful" -- and maybe even a blue dot next to my name, if the poster had bothered to log in.
It's probably not illegal as long as your TV licence is up to date, unless your TV licence specifies what transmission and reception technology you can use. I think in most countries, satellite TV is paid for through subscription services rather than a premium on the licence. Check your licence .....
As long as your TV licence is paid up, you and any members of your household are licenced to receive programmes broadcast by cable, satellite or terrestrial analogue or digital signals, or any means yet to be invented. The courts have ruled that it is fair dealing under copyright law to record a broadcast programme for viewing later.
So as long as you have a valid TV licence and the people downloading from you have valid TV licences, you should be fine with offering TV programmes for upload. After all, you paid for the privilege of receiving those broadcasts; and the receipt is on your mantelpiece {or wherever you keep your important documents}.
You might need a rebroadcast licence; but since you aren't using an RF transmitter, this should not be expensive. If the bandwidth of your outgoing connection is small enough, you could well be exempt from this requirement anyway {after all, councils and housing associations don't need a rebroadcast licence to plumb a communal antenna to several flats; the tenants' TV licences are enough}.
Now, if someone is downloading TV programmes from you without a valid TV licence, then they almost certainly are committing an offence. A simple warning on your download site ought to be enough to keep you out of trouble.
Side questions: (1) If a friend comes into your house and watches your TV, do they need to have a valid TV licence? (2) If you have a display-less TV receiver {e.g. a video recorder or NICAM receiver} in one building, connected to a receiver-less display {e.g. an old Amiga monitor with a composite video input} in another building, which building actually needs the TV licence?
C will let you get away with this on a system where these datatypes are the same size, because it assumes programmers are smart enough to know what they are doing; but will break royally when the machine's address space exceeds the int size. And GCC is neither smart enough to know whether or not you care about running your program on anything else, nor presumptuous enough to refuse to let you write programs which may well be non-portable, but which you had no intention of porting in the first place.
Now bear in mind that this is just one situation that will cause a compile error on a different system -- there are quite a few others. Multiply this by the number of source files in OpenOffice.org, and you'll see it isn't quite so simple.
It should be -- but thanks to someone's foolish assumptions, it isn't.
And OpenOffice.org, as you correctly point out, began life as a closed-source product. My bad for not knowing it wasn't Sun themselves who wrote it, but I still stand by my assertion: Closed source software contains serious programming faults, which its authors think they can get away with because nobody will ever know about them.
If you're going to bash Sun, at least do it properly.
Sun Microsystems are the people responsible for OpenOffice.org. Recently I acquired an AMD 64-bit workstation. I have been trying to get OpenOffice.org to compile on this thing.
It ain't having it. Not even the CVS version I checked out.
I know all about the "32-bit chroot" way of doing it. It's an ugly solution, like teaching a cat to bark. I've paid for a 64-bit processor, for crying out loud -- and I'm damned if I'm going to have it run on half its cylinders.
But OpenOffice.org keeps coming up with compile errors.
Properly-written code should not care about what processor it is running on. It's wrong from a portability point of view to assume that a particular data type can be substituted for another data type just because, on one system, they happen to have the same bit size. Yet that seems to be at the very root of the issue here. I edited file after file, lost track of where I was at, and finally gave up. Meanwhile, I've come to love KOffice.
Bear in mind that this is Sun's OpenOffice.org, a piece of code they dare show us the internals of.
Now think. Sun also sell proprietary, closed-source stuff, which they don't have to worry about other people seeing. Stuff like Solaris and Java.
If OpenOffice.org is so sloppily written that it won't compile on a 64-bit system without more mods than I was prepared to make, and that's what they deign to let us look at -- then what sort of state is the code in that they won't let us see?
BT are bad, but NTL are worse.
.....
I have to have a phone line from NTL, even though I don't use it for anything {their broadband signal travels along the TV cable}. Of course, they tell me it's "free", but this just means "we'll make you pay for it whether you want it or not". They also claim that calls are cheaper than BT, but I never found this to be the case: "national calls at local rates" is just a euphemism for "local calls at national rates". Plus, everyone already knows my BT number. Oh: and when BT printed the phone book, they managed to miss out my NTL number anyway!
Their "free" web space, included with the broadband, is also worse than useless: there is no PHP, no database and no Perl. At first I was told this was because I was running Linux my end and their services only work with Windows. After persuading them that I had borrowed a Windows machine from next door {actually, getting a friend who knows Windows to translate for me} I succeeded in persuading them that the fault -- that I was seeing <? phpinfo() ?> instead of the PHP info screen -- lay their end. Apparently I have to pay extra for a "business" account in order to use these "advanced features" which are already running on my internet sharer. NTL's resident Linux guru {they did manage to find one} suggested I could run my own Apache server, which is true; but my IP address is subject to change at random and without warning. It would be Russian roulette running sendmail on that connection {and their DHCP server does not honour my hostname request either}. Fortunately I work for an ISP and my boss is a hacker, so I can use their DNS to handle my domain name -- everything but MX, which uses a a POP3 account on Work's server.
To add insult to injury, Slashdot {and a few other services} are blocking NTL's web proxy server {which I have not yet found a way to bypass}.
OTOH, other countries have worse problems than lousy internet services. And I quite like a decent cup of tea with milk and no sugar, sitcoms without laugh tracks, TV without adverts and the generally-accepted right not to be shot at
Yes, you're right. However, the typical x86 user is either running illegally-copied, closed-source games on an illegally-made copy of the closed-source "operating system" Windows; or running the closed-source malware-magnets Outlook Express and Internet Explorer, together with a ton of unwanted spyware, adware and spam-zombies, on a paid-up copy of Windows.
.....
The future is RISC, there are no two ways about that. Unfortunately, this whole Windows thing is entirely about keeping people stuck in the past
Then that is broken, and needs fixing.
By the time the kids that are learning MS Word in schools today are looking for jobs, Open Source adoption will have increased by leaps and bounds. Based on current trends, I offer the following extrapolations:
Windows XP's successor will so totally break compatibility with XP, NT, 2000, 9X, 3.1 and MS-DOS, that there will be no reason save the name to stay with Microsoft products. After all, you might just as well use OpenOffice.org as Word 2007, if Word 2007 can't open Word XP/2000/97 documents properly and costs you much more money to boot!
Meanwhile, there will be success stories from enterprises which successfully made the switch away from Microsoft {Ernie Ball won't be the last case of ditching MS to conform to code} as encouragement to try something different.
There will also be an ad-hoc network of independent small businesses whose core activity is helping other, larger businesses make the transition from Windows to Open Source.
It's already getting to the point where it will soon be economically viable for some third-world-based company to devote serious effort to writing Open Source drivers for graphics cards, for example.
I have to disagree with you there. I think it's entirely the job of the courts to determine what does and what does not constitute not fair dealing.
Parliament -- write down the laws of the land
Courts -- decide whether or not laws were broken and determine appropriate punishment
Police -- catch people who break the laws
This system has built-in checks and balances. It's certainly not perfect, but it has a less terrible worst-case scenario than any other arrangement.
Oh, wait, no, they don't. QWERTY keyboard, numbers in the same place, + for add, - for subtract.
There's also a compelling argument to be made against using any kind of WYSIWYG word processing: it encourages you to think too hard about the rendering at the expense of the content. Not many people can be both a calligrapher and a poet
Once schools are teaching how to use Free software, then businesses will no longer be able to use the bogus argument "but that's what they teach in schools" as a reason to stick with Microsoft.
Schools should not be Microsoft training centres anyway. We pay for schools with our Council Tax, and this particular Council Tax payer resents having my hard-earned spent on consolidating a foreign monopoly.
Try this and either this or this: it's not quite the real thing, but it's as near as you're going to get for the time being. And you will certainly get to "dump Windows but not all of your hardware".
Does this mean Del Boy can finally say Bonjour to all that poncing about with IP addresses?
If you're going to burgle premises where dogs may be kept, you need a trick up your sleeve. Well ..... it's not so much a trick, it's basic canine psychology. Do this with the dog watching: Take a previously-placed-there Mars bar out of your back pocket. Unwrap it. Take a good sized bite out of it. Offer it down to the dog. You have now tamed the dog. It really is that simple. It works with any breed of Canis lupus, from a little Yorkshire terrier up to a full-grown arctic timber wolf.
HOW IT WORKS: As far as the dog is concerned, you caught something that was good to eat {dogs are hunters -- they think all food has to be caught}, skinned it {wrapping is a human concept}, took a bite and passed it on. Which is exactly what the alpha pair do at the conclusion of the hunt -- the alpha dog and bitch always eat first, no matter who made the kill, and then the lower members of the pack must take their turns. Mealtimes for dogs are a reinforcement {and maybe re-arrangement} of the pack hierarchy: not every member of the pack survives the hunt, nobody wants to make a serious leadership challenge for fear of food going to waste, and no member wants to be too greedy, for fear of being demoted.
The only way to blow this is to lose your nerve. The instant you display any signs that you are not the pack leader, your cover is blown. The real alphas would never have any reason to doubt the intentions of other members of their pack; so anyone who so much as looks wary of being attacked is obviously an impostor. If all is lost, lie still on your back, offering no resistance and you might not be killed.
Incomplete example: (note to put a \ before each
Assuming Aussie law is something like the law over here, then the Government probably could apply for a Compulsory Purchase Order on the patent rights. CPOs have been used in the past to obtain land necessary for various projects deemed to be In The Greater Public Interest {e.g. the Channel Tunnel Rail Link which runs through Kent}. Although CPOs have traditionally been applied to land, the reason for this has been simply that movable property doesn't usually get in the way of government projects -- it can always just be ordered to be moved.
Treating patent rights as being equivalent to land might set a nasty precedent, though. So the Government -- who, after all, are the ultimate authority to which the patent office answer -- could just decide to annul the patent. Problem solved, everybody happy.
Remember, the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few; but the needs of the few outweigh the whims and caprices of the many.
In the short term there would undoubtedly be much opposition
But that's the whole point!
Copyrights, and even patents, protect only one particular means to a given end. {In fact a patent can't, shouldn't and never used to be granted if it covers the sole means to an end. Encouraging innovation, see -- if you can't use a flint pressed by a spring against a revolving steel wheel to ignite a vapourised fuel drawn up on a wick, then everyone else has to think of some other way to light their cigarettes. OTOH, if a patent on one kind of cigarette lighter meant nobody else were allowed to make any kind of portable apparatus for establishing ignition of nicotine inhalation devices, that would be stifling competition -- which is a different thing.} Everyone else is free to use any other means to the same end -- and all means to the same end are equally valid, so long as the end was properly specified in the first place.
So did the Thirteenth Amendment make the USA more free, or less free?
I remember downloading all seven CDs of Woody-i386 when I first got broadband -- that was when it was a brand-new release and I was running something like Slink or Potato on my connection-sharing box {then a '486}.
..... for about a week. Then I went over to Sid for KDE3, and never looked back. Just occasionally there have been disappointments with packages not quite working. Sometimes I've found the answer on Google; other times, Debian must have fixed it themselves because apt-get update && apt-get upgrade just worked. Of course, this is to be expected given that any file might be updated at anytime -- someone could be uploading a replacement for what you're downloading right at the same time. On my 64-bit box {pure64, a special flavour of Sid} I've done The Magic Commands twice in succession and got upgrades both times.
.....
When I acquired a notebook PC in '03, I installed Woody on it
Sarge is more than ready to go, by any other distro's standards. Debian just have very high ideals, is all -- and they aim to run on mainframes, minis and workstations, not just PCs. If there's something that won't work in one of the more esoteric architectures Debian support, then it will hold up the i386 and PowerPC releases. If for some reason you were running multiple architectures, would you rather have a distro that was inconsistent from one to another?
No doubt soon, I'll have to install Sarge on two heavily-used servers at work {some are already running it}. That'll be fun
144 000 == number of vacancies in Heaven according to Jehovah's Witnesses
68 000 == number of transistors in a certain rather well-known microprocessor
In the UK, the tax on alcohol and fags is very expensive: this is to compensate the National Health Service for the extra cost of treating illness caused by drinking and smoking.
..... But nobody has come up with a way {yet} of reliably taxing the act of smoking a cigarette, just the same as no-one has found a way of reliably ensuring that a songwriter receives the same few pence they would have received from the sale of a song on CD everytime someone makes a copy of that song independently of the CD company.
It can work out cheaper -- especially if you live in the South -- to travel to the Continent and return with a carload of beer and tobacco, than to buy such things here. {Of course, you have then paid your taxes to the French, Belgian or whatever government. But in those countries, you have to pay towards any medical treatment you receive: everybody has medical insurance which is paid for separately, not through pay-as-you-earn.}
So it will be the same with storage devices in the Netherlands, if this tax is approved. Under European law, once you have paid any taxes applicable to an article at the time of sale, it is your property and you cannot be held liable for any further tax if you move that article to another country {unless you sell it}. As long as some EU member state does not impose this tax, and an audit trail exists to show that the transaction occurred in that country, nobody in the Netherlands need pay it.
The British government is now finding, for the first time, that due to the availability of cheap poisons overseas, it is losing money treating lung cancer and other smoking-related patients. This is why we are seeing a clampdown on smokers' rights: the smoker is no longer an important contributor to the Government's coffers, but a tax-dodger. And this is why the UK government is making such a big noise about obesity: the fag tax money is drying up, so another source of revenue is required to replace the millions in nicotine-stained pound notes. Soon, crisps and Mars bars will be taxed; the government will spout about the evils of junk food with one hand {instantly doubling its attractiveness to kids}, while raking in the "dirty" money with the other.
One could argue that it is not the act of buying fags that gives you cancer, but smoking them. And if you have to walk to the shop to buy your junk food, then you might well be undoing the "damage" on the way