Unless you think that specific pieces of directionally influenced [non-symmetric] 4D to 3D
matrix math with interactive tuning are just so obvious to everybody that they're not worth protecting.
I am afraid I do not consider mathematics to be "protectable", obvious or otherwise.
By all means give credit to those who made the discovery, but why should I or anyone else have to buy a license to multiply some numbers? Should we have to pay the descendants of Isaac Newton for calculating gravitational forces or solving a differential equation?
Why bother making the ISOs? In order to make ISOs in Linux you have to first copy all the files into a directory, and then call mkisofs on that directory.
Why not just leave all the files in the/something/movietitle directory where they started and not bother with mkisofs and mount?
Note that, although I have written this post from a very Europe-oriented perspective, the arguments apply equally well to other parts of the world, e.g. China.
That is, assuming that Slashdot is actually accessible from China, which would seem somewhat unlikely given that the Chinese government considers the BBC subversive.
Can't stop the friend-of-a-friend idiot who hits "reply to all."
Actually I find that these are great sources of fascinating tid-bits of information from your friend's friends, which they expected to remain private but ended up being delivered promptly to your inbox.
IIRC standard DVD rate is around 11 Mbps, although I guess this could be the maximum rather than the average.
MPEG-4 is more efficient at low bitrates than MPEG-2/1. I am not sure that MPEG-4 encoding is even capable of reaching 7.5 Mbps - the maximum I have seen for DivX movies is around 2 Mbps with the minimum quantiser used for all frames. For high bitrates I believe MPEG-2 is actually better, so I am not sure why they propose MPEG-4 for this purpose.
Groklaw has warned that anyone who gains access to the Windows source, whether or not they actually read it, may legally impair their ability to make contributions to open source resembling anything that exists in Windows.
To be honest I think this warning is probably overstated, since in order to prove infringement by an open-source contributor, MSFT would have to prove:
That the contributor accessed or had access to the leaked source.
That the actual contributed code contains material that is copyrighted by MSFT
IANAL but it would seem to me that simply saying "you saw the code and contributed this open-source feature that resembles ours, therefore you must have copied our code" would not hold a lot of water in a copyright-infringement case.
Patent infringement is another matter of course, but then you can infringe patents whether or not you see the code so this would not appear to be of much relevance.
It's probably for the same reason that there are more dead people than live people.
Actually, if populations are assumed to increase exponentially, it can be shown that the number of people currently living is greater than the number of people who have ever died.
Some blue pigments like the cobalt in the rover color chip also emit this longer-wavelength light, which is not visible to the human eye."
If it's a *blue* pigment, why does it emit a *longer* (i.e. infrared) wavelength?
Clarification of the original statement: "some materials, such as cobalt, which reflect light that appears blue to the human eye, also reflect light in the infra-red range".
It emits both blue and infra-red, neither has any effect on the other - we just only see the blue because the human eye does not detect infra-red.
It is ludicrous to assume that moving the net into the control of governments will reduce the level of corporate control. Most Western governments seem to be in bed with the corporations anyway, so this idea will just increase the power of both corporations and the government.
The article demonstrates an appalling lack of skepticism and common sense. We are supposed to trust the British government just because they are "not like the United States or China"? Maybe they are not, at the moment, but they could become so at any time. Voluntarily giving extra power to the governments is one of the stupidest ideas suggestable.
You'd think that human evolution would've at least carried us to the point where such measures weren't needed but look at the state of the world.
No I wouldn't.
Evolution works by selecting behaviours that are good for the gene, not the species or individual. As crime does not necessarily prevent the criminal from passing on their genes, there is no reason for natural selection to weed out crime.
Open up severable ports at the same time and multiplex your signal over several of them while sending noise over the ununsed ports randomly switching between ports using a syncronized random selector.
If there are 100 porn advertising videos that take up the space of one copy of Lord of the Rings, would the people that generated this statistic say that the content is 50% legal and 50% illegal? Or would they say that roughly 1% (1 video out of a total of 101) is illegal?
C# did not "innovate" any of these. It might well have implemented them before Java, but most of them were available in various programming languages long before C# arrived on the scene.
Does this mean that many/most of Wiki's contributions are in small amounts?
I would imagine that that is almost certainly the case - a dollar here, a fiver there, very few large donations.
After all, many people would be prepared to donate a few quid to a useful online resource, but far fewer are going to break the bank over it.
K
Re:What I think will be interesting is...
on
Google v. Microsoft
·
· Score: 1
The reaction of people like those found on Slashdot if Microsoft actually crafts a search engine that is demonstrably better than Google
And that is one hell of an "if".
Since when have Microsoft ever made a product that was "demonstrably better" than its competitors (with the possible borderline exception of Netscape)?
Most evidence suggests they use market forces and existing dominance to popularise their products, not technical excellence.
The hardware for Linux is more expensive because it is assumed that for the same hardware, Linux can handle less load than Windows, therefore, you need more hardware if you deploy Linux, hence higher cost. That's weird, how did they come up with that assumption? It's certainly not explained in the "open methodology".
This is a fundamental flaw in logic known as "begging the question" - by assuming what you want to prove and then "proving" your conclusion based on that incorrect assumption.
I.E. "Linux is less cost-effective in performance than Windows, therefore you need more expensive hardware to run it, therefore you have to spend more to achieve the same performance, therefore Linux is less cost-effective in performance than Windows."
If this is truly what they are saying, then I would be tempted to dismiss the whole campaign as illogical garbage.
The rewritable version has a higher capacity than the read-only type, according to that table.
Is that a misprint? Surely the manufactured disks cannot be smaller than the rewritable disks - otherwise what is the point in using the read-only version at all?
The scientific fact of gender differences is that most gender-linked variables exhibit a broad normal distribution with a mean that differs by around 10 per cent across the genders and a very large overlap. Any obstacles that need "overcoming" are primarily caused by social pressures and role-playing, rather than anything to do with genetics.
However, as you say, every child is unique, and the "average distribution" is irrelevant in the context of a single individual child. One could probably calculate the probability of a given individual corresponding to their "expected" behaviour with a good degree of accuracy, although I cannot be bothered to attempt to do so.
What has Word document security got to do with DRM? You can't control what happens to a Word document after it's distributed, only whether somebody can or cannot look at it (and once the password's out, anybody can use it, forever).
Word passwords are no more DRM than PGP or NTFS encryption.
Slashdot Mirror
By all means give credit to those who made the discovery, but why should I or anyone else have to buy a license to multiply some numbers? Should we have to pay the descendants of Isaac Newton for calculating gravitational forces or solving a differential equation?
Thoughts are not property. Period.
K
Why not just leave all the files in the
K
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K
Nothing to see here, move along...
K
MPEG-4 is more efficient at low bitrates than MPEG-2/1. I am not sure that MPEG-4 encoding is even capable of reaching 7.5 Mbps - the maximum I have seen for DivX movies is around 2 Mbps with the minimum quantiser used for all frames. For high bitrates I believe MPEG-2 is actually better, so I am not sure why they propose MPEG-4 for this purpose.
K
- That the contributor accessed or had access to the leaked source.
- That the actual contributed code contains material that is copyrighted by MSFT
IANAL but it would seem to me that simply saying "you saw the code and contributed this open-source feature that resembles ours, therefore you must have copied our code" would not hold a lot of water in a copyright-infringement case.Patent infringement is another matter of course, but then you can infringe patents whether or not you see the code so this would not appear to be of much relevance.
K
Actually, if populations are assumed to increase exponentially, it can be shown that the number of people currently living is greater than the number of people who have ever died.
K
It emits both blue and infra-red, neither has any effect on the other - we just only see the blue because the human eye does not detect infra-red.
K
The article demonstrates an appalling lack of skepticism and common sense. We are supposed to trust the British government just because they are "not like the United States or China"? Maybe they are not, at the moment, but they could become so at any time. Voluntarily giving extra power to the governments is one of the stupidest ideas suggestable.
K
Evolution works by selecting behaviours that are good for the gene, not the species or individual. As crime does not necessarily prevent the criminal from passing on their genes, there is no reason for natural selection to weed out crime.
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That depends on who is paying them at the time.
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C# did not "innovate" any of these. It might well have implemented them before Java, but most of them were available in various programming languages long before C# arrived on the scene.
K
After all, many people would be prepared to donate a few quid to a useful online resource, but far fewer are going to break the bank over it.
K
Since when have Microsoft ever made a product that was "demonstrably better" than its competitors (with the possible borderline exception of Netscape)?
Most evidence suggests they use market forces and existing dominance to popularise their products, not technical excellence.
K
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</semi-humour>
This is a fundamental flaw in logic known as "begging the question" - by assuming what you want to prove and then "proving" your conclusion based on that incorrect assumption.
I.E. "Linux is less cost-effective in performance than Windows, therefore you need more expensive hardware to run it, therefore you have to spend more to achieve the same performance, therefore Linux is less cost-effective in performance than Windows."
If this is truly what they are saying, then I would be tempted to dismiss the whole campaign as illogical garbage.
K
Is that a misprint? Surely the manufactured disks cannot be smaller than the rewritable disks - otherwise what is the point in using the read-only version at all?
K
That will make the local vandals happy.
K
However, as you say, every child is unique, and the "average distribution" is irrelevant in the context of a single individual child. One could probably calculate the probability of a given individual corresponding to their "expected" behaviour with a good degree of accuracy, although I cannot be bothered to attempt to do so.
K
Seriously, gender-stereotyping children at that sort of age does not set the scene for an equal, open-minded society.
K
Word passwords are no more DRM than PGP or NTFS encryption.
K