By your argument, China's GNP is significantly lower than stated as well. After all, if everyone in China decided to sell everything they own to the rest of the world, surely the prices would go down. Anyway, your statement isn't even accurate... He calculates how much everything that is produced in Norath in a given year could be sold for on eBay.; this is the same as calculating how much everything that is produced by the chinese in a given year can be sold for, which is roughly what GNP is meant to represent. Calculating what everything they own could be sold for is something entirely different, that would be calculating wealth. A little background in the relevent subject matter would be helpful before you go off and rant about an academic's work.
BTW, His attempt to calculate GNP and exchange rate is rather profound. After all, the majority of the world's currency exist only on electronic ledgers (I suggest researching the difference between Cash, M1, M2 and M3 to appreciate the validity of this statement), which makes them rather similar to pp, does it not. The only real difference being that pp is not backed by a soveriegn nation. Arguably Norath's currency is far more liquid (easily interchangeable for other assets, currency in particular) than many a sovereign currency. Try aquiring $100(USD) worth of pp and the same in yen and tell me which happenned more quickly, and with less overhead (admittedly some/. readers would not have any trouble getting the yen quickly but most would.)
Of course, you have to admit that the technology in the swatch watch merits patentability. So if the point is to show merit for a patent, perhaps the test is sufficient.
Findlaw.com provides a lot of real world contracts for free at:
http://allbusiness.findlaw.com/type/operations/ser vices.html
http://allbusiness.findlaw.com/industries/technolo gy/programming.html
I have used these contracts as a resource for understanding what terms are typical and find them to be a very useful starting point for building a contract with lawyers. You should always run your contracts by a lawyer before signing them.
How is a record company any different from, say, a Venture Capatalist?
Actually VC's are looking to make their money back plus significant returns over a 2-3 year window; usually through an IPO or sale based exit strategy (they are almost never in it for the long haul.) The major difference between the two is that Record Companies give the artist a loan while VC's buy equity. If the Record Companies could purchase a portion of the artists rights to their royalties, then they would be in almost identical businesses. The financial equivalent of Record Companies would be a Fund that invest entirely in junk bonds.
WOW!!!, My girlfreind and I stuck it out in the freezing cold from 4:20AM-5:30AM. On one of the clearest nights this season we could see far more stars than usual and knew we had a good chance for spotting some meteors. Little did we realize the show that was in store for us. I'd say we were seeing ~20 meteors a minute consistently for the entire period. There were definitely bouts with few if any followed by peaks where 5 or 6 meteors would streak the sky simultaneously. Considering the estimates were that only 500/hour would be visible if we were lucky, we must have been very very lucky, as we were exceeding those numbers by quite a bit. I can't wait to find out the final tally on last night's storm. Imagine that we were able to see so much from Brooklyn, NY... I never would have thought. Our friends in Australia are in for one hell of a show if there meets predictions.
Well, Clearly the RIAA does not represent artists; one need only examine the title for which the acronym stands to know that.
The major 'non-profits' that represent the artist interests would be the PRO's such as ASCAP, BMI, SESAC, etc. These are the groups that sell blanket liscenses for broadcasting to the major networks, cable, radio, as well as bars, restaurants, and stores. Unfortunately for the artists, the PRO's are run primarily by boards whose members have significant stakes elsewhere in the recording industry... Hence the need for groups like the RAC.
Sadly, Lobbying is much much much cheaper than this. Getting bills introduced, strong-armed and passed by your party of choice will typically not run you more than a MM or two - double that if the bill is particularly onerous.
This is an old problem. An analog is the credit card industry. Even if you carefully protect your credit card info, you're still paying for all the people who get their CC number and expiry date stolen. CC companies past [sic] the cost to all of us clients.
Well, actually it is the merchants who take on the burden of fraudulently used credit cards, not the consumer. This happens in two ways:
First, the merchant pays a discount fee on the purchase. A portion of this discount fee is really a markup on the portion of the inherent risks that are born by the card association and the member banks. Over the last 30 years average discount fees have dropped from 7% to 2% largely due to reduced amount of fraud.
Second, if a card is used fraudulently, the Card Holder notifies his/her Issuing Bank which issues a charge back on the transaction. The merchant ends up eating the entire cost of the purchase in addition to a substantial chargeback fee. If a merchant has too many chargebacks over several months, then the card association will begin levying very large fines on the merchant.
These same idividuals are ignorant enough to believe that they will recieve 72 black-eyed virgins. Find me a passage in th qu'ran that supports that! These are superstitous farmers who took over their war ravaged country... Creating new superstitiouns might work. Better chance than turning their sand into glass, which will only create more terrorists.
Mod this up, please. Paul makes a point which is very presentable to any member of Congress. Most are lawyers... and are in the business of writing laws (that's what politicians do when they aren't deciding how to spend the country's money.) The pro bono argument is something they can chew on and understand.
I'm not sure if you example is relevent then. You see, all the images you were working with were very similar. It is of little surprise that you were able to find a wavelet codec that worked very well for these images. However, if you took the same wavelets and applied them to a wide range of image types, do you really expect your compression to work as well.
This is a common mistake that people make. Someone designs a compression scheme that works really well for specific cases and thinks that it will work in the general case. Hell, I once designed a custom lossless scheme for handling certain classes of bitmaps that beat lzw by a factor 5:1, but I guarentee you if you applied it to bitmaps that we were not interested in, it would have been very unimpressive. I suspect the same can be said for the wavelets your group was using.
Dead on! I read the NY Times every day (cause I live there.) Guess which section I skip every day.
Truth be told, there aren't many papers that do a good job on their business sections. These sections suffer from the same problems as IT journalism. It is appaling that you can find the exact same articles the same day in every newspaper business section across the country and they read the same verbatim because the supposed journalists didn't even bother to rewrite the AP or Reuters releases or the PR fluff pieces that the companies mailed out.
Folks, that is business news in America, that is how it has been for some time... IT news is just a duplication of the older, more successful and more entrenched system of business journalism.
Here. Here. This has always been the bane of my moderations. There is just no good way of moderating down a well written but uninformed piece of garbage. Happens all the time. I have degrees in mathematics, physics and electrical engineering. I pretty much ONLY moderate on topics relating to fields I know a good bit about. And there are always +5 informative posts that are wrong due to fundamental misunderstandings of the concepts involved. How does one moderate this. These misconceptions are common and understandable, there is no nice way of saying, "excuse me, but no the moon isn't made of cheese" so this comment needs to be rated down. I always use -1 overrated for this, because it is the closest fit. It boggles my mind that there are not other categories for moderating down. I'm sure that I've taken hits when people disagreed during the metamoderation because they were as uniformed as the original authors. It would be nice if the moderators had a meens of posting a note to metamoderators about why they chose to moderate down.
Most of our population, and most of our teachers, don't even realize that they are scientifically ignorant. Ask them to state an opinion on global warming or nutrition or any other scientifically related field and they will be glad do so with confidence! We need to at least educate people about what science is so they can have some idea of how to treat the results of science, and how to evaluate their own level of knowledge.
Ummm, here on slashdot it is obviously considered de rigueur for non-scientist to comment on all of those and more. I couldn't agree more with you more, unfortunately, most of the people here (despite being highly educated and remarkably intelligent) fit into the category you are describing, and don't even realize it - therefore you are talking to mostly deaf ears. For all the rest, you are simply preaching to the choir.
I did the calculations a while ago to figure out what the pressure would be across the horizontal surface area of a person of a free-falling column of water. After only about 30 feet of drop the force was on the order of a metric tonne. The reason for my curiosity is that a friend of mine had had her back broken jumping off a thirty foot waterfall. I was incredulous about how this could happen until an EMT friend explained that this commonly happens when people jump too close to large waterfalls as they often get pulled into the waterfall itself and upon hitting the lake/pond/body of water they take on several tonnes of force. He even quoted a rule of thumb very much along the lines of 1 ton per 30 feet. If that holds, then a tank of water (presuming it did not break into droplets, though almost certainly it would unless it was a very very big tank) would hit people on the streets below the ESB with a force of ~60 tons! You would be crushed and die instantly.
Wow, I had never before given much consideration to the fact that the two sides of an orbiting moon would have completely different day/night cycles. Imagine what the early model of the solar system would be for a species living on the far side of such a moon. Such a species would never see the planet they were orbiting around and would be almost certainly be convinced that they were on a stationary body. Meanwhile another species on the near side would have the planet at a mostly fixed point in both their day and night skys, and would be able to tell the time at night by where in the cycle of wax and wane the planet was from the light of the star. There must be a science fiction novel with a similar setting... suggestions?
1) This is old news. You can find a much better story from yesterday over at the EETimes.
2) This is for embedded systems and is not really relevent for PC based systems.
3) This isn't even taped out yet... matter of fact they are not even planning to have the design done for another 18 months... it is vapour until you can actually buy it and that isn't slated until sometime in 2003.
4) This might give Transmeta a serious run for its money if it is ever produced, because they are both in the same space... Of course, TMTA being still around in 2003 is a bit on the presumptious side.
5) Oh never mind, why do I even bother...
Ummm, the sun is not a ball of gas with a little interspersed plasma. It is a giant ball of plasma. Plasma is an ionized gas. ANY gas as hot as the sun is automtically a plasma because the outermost electrons cannot be bound to the atoms at such a temperature (even for hydrogen) and are therefore ionized and thus it is a plasma by definition. Cold plasmas can be generated as well.
This case has nothing to do with the DCMA. If you read the Court's opinion you would know that. If it were a DCMA violation it would show up in federal court as that is a federal law. This is in state court and is dealing with state laws (as any citizen of the US, much less 1st year poli-sci major should know!) In this case it is a violation of California's trade secret laws, NOT copyright laws. Basically the Court is saying that yes, this case can be tried in California (it gives a list of 7 requirements for this and why this decision meets the requirements.)
The disturbing parts of the brief have to do with the Court's confusion over many of the facts of the case and with technology in general, not to mention the clear bias it has towards the defendant, "open source" and reverse engineering. However, I would be very surprised if this ruling is struck down by Caifornia's Supreme Court (not to be confused with the US Supreme Court.)
While most individuals on slashdot may not have compromised machines... how many compromised machines are out there? If an primitive intelligece were to form, it would never be allowed to take hold of most machines. But it could certainly exist entirely in the domain of poorly managed boxes, and nobody would ever have to know;)
Slashdot Mirror
By your argument, China's GNP is significantly lower than stated as well. After all, if everyone in China decided to sell everything they own to the rest of the world, surely the prices would go down. Anyway, your statement isn't even accurate... He calculates how much everything that is produced in Norath in a given year could be sold for on eBay.; this is the same as calculating how much everything that is produced by the chinese in a given year can be sold for, which is roughly what GNP is meant to represent. Calculating what everything they own could be sold for is something entirely different, that would be calculating wealth. A little background in the relevent subject matter would be helpful before you go off and rant about an academic's work.
/. readers would not have any trouble getting the yen quickly but most would.)
BTW, His attempt to calculate GNP and exchange rate is rather profound. After all, the majority of the world's currency exist only on electronic ledgers (I suggest researching the difference between Cash, M1, M2 and M3 to appreciate the validity of this statement), which makes them rather similar to pp, does it not. The only real difference being that pp is not backed by a soveriegn nation. Arguably Norath's currency is far more liquid (easily interchangeable for other assets, currency in particular) than many a sovereign currency. Try aquiring $100(USD) worth of pp and the same in yen and tell me which happenned more quickly, and with less overhead (admittedly some
Of course, you have to admit that the technology in the swatch watch merits patentability. So if the point is to show merit for a patent, perhaps the test is sufficient.
Findlaw.com provides a lot of real world contracts for free at:r vices.htmlo gy/programming.html
http://allbusiness.findlaw.com/type/operations/se
http://allbusiness.findlaw.com/industries/technol
I have used these contracts as a resource for understanding what terms are typical and find them to be a very useful starting point for building a contract with lawyers. You should always run your contracts by a lawyer before signing them.
I hope this helps.
Nice! Simultaneously funny and profound.
LOL, someone mod up. Great Retort!
How is a record company any different from, say, a Venture Capatalist?
Actually VC's are looking to make their money back plus significant returns over a 2-3 year window; usually through an IPO or sale based exit strategy (they are almost never in it for the long haul.) The major difference between the two is that Record Companies give the artist a loan while VC's buy equity. If the Record Companies could purchase a portion of the artists rights to their royalties, then they would be in almost identical businesses. The financial equivalent of Record Companies would be a Fund that invest entirely in junk bonds.
WOW!!!, My girlfreind and I stuck it out in the freezing cold from 4:20AM-5:30AM. On one of the clearest nights this season we could see far more stars than usual and knew we had a good chance for spotting some meteors. Little did we realize the show that was in store for us. I'd say we were seeing ~20 meteors a minute consistently for the entire period. There were definitely bouts with few if any followed by peaks where 5 or 6 meteors would streak the sky simultaneously. Considering the estimates were that only 500/hour would be visible if we were lucky, we must have been very very lucky, as we were exceeding those numbers by quite a bit. I can't wait to find out the final tally on last night's storm. Imagine that we were able to see so much from Brooklyn, NY... I never would have thought. Our friends in Australia are in for one hell of a show if there meets predictions.
Well, Clearly the RIAA does not represent artists; one need only examine the title for which the acronym stands to know that.
The major 'non-profits' that represent the artist interests would be the PRO's such as ASCAP, BMI, SESAC, etc. These are the groups that sell blanket liscenses for broadcasting to the major networks, cable, radio, as well as bars, restaurants, and stores. Unfortunately for the artists, the PRO's are run primarily by boards whose members have significant stakes elsewhere in the recording industry... Hence the need for groups like the RAC.
Well, plasmas aren't necessarily more energetic than gasses. Plasmas are basically ion gasses and can be either hot or cold.
Sadly, Lobbying is much much much cheaper than this. Getting bills introduced, strong-armed and passed by your party of choice will typically not run you more than a MM or two - double that if the bill is particularly onerous.
or maybe they would go for Microshaft
This is an old problem. An analog is the credit card industry. Even if you carefully protect your credit card info, you're still paying for all the people who get their CC number and expiry date stolen. CC companies past [sic] the cost to all of us clients.
Well, actually it is the merchants who take on the burden of fraudulently used credit cards, not the consumer. This happens in two ways:
First, the merchant pays a discount fee on the purchase. A portion of this discount fee is really a markup on the portion of the inherent risks that are born by the card association and the member banks. Over the last 30 years average discount fees have dropped from 7% to 2% largely due to reduced amount of fraud.
Second, if a card is used fraudulently, the Card Holder notifies his/her Issuing Bank which issues a charge back on the transaction. The merchant ends up eating the entire cost of the purchase in addition to a substantial chargeback fee. If a merchant has too many chargebacks over several months, then the card association will begin levying very large fines on the merchant.
These same idividuals are ignorant enough to believe that they will recieve 72 black-eyed virgins. Find me a passage in th qu'ran that supports that! These are superstitous farmers who took over their war ravaged country... Creating new superstitiouns might work. Better chance than turning their sand into glass, which will only create more terrorists.
Mod this up, please. Paul makes a point which is very presentable to any member of Congress. Most are lawyers... and are in the business of writing laws (that's what politicians do when they aren't deciding how to spend the country's money.) The pro bono argument is something they can chew on and understand.
I'm not sure if you example is relevent then. You see, all the images you were working with were very similar. It is of little surprise that you were able to find a wavelet codec that worked very well for these images. However, if you took the same wavelets and applied them to a wide range of image types, do you really expect your compression to work as well.
This is a common mistake that people make. Someone designs a compression scheme that works really well for specific cases and thinks that it will work in the general case. Hell, I once designed a custom lossless scheme for handling certain classes of bitmaps that beat lzw by a factor 5:1, but I guarentee you if you applied it to bitmaps that we were not interested in, it would have been very unimpressive. I suspect the same can be said for the wavelets your group was using.
Dead on!
I read the NY Times every day (cause I live there.) Guess which section I skip every day.
Truth be told, there aren't many papers that do a good job on their business sections. These sections suffer from the same problems as IT journalism. It is appaling that you can find the exact same articles the same day in every newspaper business section across the country and they read the same verbatim because the supposed journalists didn't even bother to rewrite the AP or Reuters releases or the PR fluff pieces that the companies mailed out.
Folks, that is business news in America, that is how it has been for some time... IT news is just a duplication of the older, more successful and more entrenched system of business journalism.
Here. Here. This has always been the bane of my moderations. There is just no good way of moderating down a well written but uninformed piece of garbage. Happens all the time. I have degrees in mathematics, physics and electrical engineering. I pretty much ONLY moderate on topics relating to fields I know a good bit about. And there are always +5 informative posts that are wrong due to fundamental misunderstandings of the concepts involved. How does one moderate this. These misconceptions are common and understandable, there is no nice way of saying, "excuse me, but no the moon isn't made of cheese" so this comment needs to be rated down. I always use -1 overrated for this, because it is the closest fit. It boggles my mind that there are not other categories for moderating down. I'm sure that I've taken hits when people disagreed during the metamoderation because they were as uniformed as the original authors. It would be nice if the moderators had a meens of posting a note to metamoderators about why they chose to moderate down.
Most of our population, and most of our teachers, don't even realize that they are scientifically ignorant. Ask them to state an opinion on global warming or nutrition or any other scientifically related field and they will be glad do so with confidence! We need to at least educate people about what science is so they can have some idea of how to treat the results of science, and how to evaluate their own level of knowledge.
Ummm, here on slashdot it is obviously considered de rigueur for non-scientist to comment on all of those and more. I couldn't agree more with you more, unfortunately, most of the people here (despite being highly educated and remarkably intelligent) fit into the category you are describing, and don't even realize it - therefore you are talking to mostly deaf ears. For all the rest, you are simply preaching to the choir.
Ahh, then the answer is most certainly yes.
I did the calculations a while ago to figure out what the pressure would be across the horizontal surface area of a person of a free-falling column of water. After only about 30 feet of drop the force was on the order of a metric tonne. The reason for my curiosity is that a friend of mine had had her back broken jumping off a thirty foot waterfall. I was incredulous about how this could happen until an EMT friend explained that this commonly happens when people jump too close to large waterfalls as they often get pulled into the waterfall itself and upon hitting the lake/pond/body of water they take on several tonnes of force. He even quoted a rule of thumb very much along the lines of 1 ton per 30 feet. If that holds, then a tank of water (presuming it did not break into droplets, though almost certainly it would unless it was a very very big tank) would hit people on the streets below the ESB with a force of ~60 tons! You would be crushed and die instantly.
Wow, I had never before given much consideration to the fact that the two sides of an orbiting moon would have completely different day/night cycles. Imagine what the early model of the solar system would be for a species living on the far side of such a moon. Such a species would never see the planet they were orbiting around and would be almost certainly be convinced that they were on a stationary body. Meanwhile another species on the near side would have the planet at a mostly fixed point in both their day and night skys, and would be able to tell the time at night by where in the cycle of wax and wane the planet was from the light of the star. There must be a science fiction novel with a similar setting... suggestions?
A couple of notes:
1) This is old news. You can find a much better story from yesterday over at the EETimes.
2) This is for embedded systems and is not really relevent for PC based systems.
3) This isn't even taped out yet... matter of fact they are not even planning to have the design done for another 18 months... it is vapour until you can actually buy it and that isn't slated until sometime in 2003.
4) This might give Transmeta a serious run for its money if it is ever produced, because they are both in the same space... Of course, TMTA being still around in 2003 is a bit on the presumptious side.
5) Oh never mind, why do I even bother...
Even if you neglect the air resitance. The "gravity bomb" will be only traveling 1700 m/hr after a 96,500 ft drop.
Ummm, the sun is not a ball of gas with a little interspersed plasma. It is a giant ball of plasma. Plasma is an ionized gas. ANY gas as hot as the sun is automtically a plasma because the outermost electrons cannot be bound to the atoms at such a temperature (even for hydrogen) and are therefore ionized and thus it is a plasma by definition. Cold plasmas can be generated as well.
This case has nothing to do with the DCMA. If you read the Court's opinion you would know that. If it were a DCMA violation it would show up in federal court as that is a federal law. This is in state court and is dealing with state laws (as any citizen of the US, much less 1st year poli-sci major should know!) In this case it is a violation of California's trade secret laws, NOT copyright laws. Basically the Court is saying that yes, this case can be tried in California (it gives a list of 7 requirements for this and why this decision meets the requirements.)
The disturbing parts of the brief have to do with the Court's confusion over many of the facts of the case and with technology in general, not to mention the clear bias it has towards the defendant, "open source" and reverse engineering. However, I would be very surprised if this ruling is struck down by Caifornia's Supreme Court (not to be confused with the US Supreme Court.)
While most individuals on slashdot may not have compromised machines... how many compromised machines are out there? If an primitive intelligece were to form, it would never be allowed to take hold of most machines. But it could certainly exist entirely in the domain of poorly managed boxes, and nobody would ever have to know ;)