If you create something really novel, even if it is in software, why *shouldn't* you be able to get a patent on it?
Because software is such a specialised field that the patent office cannot distinguish between worthwhile and non-worthwhile patents.
Since the overall penalty to society for not allowing any software patents is less than the penalty for allowing the non-worthwhile patents, the only thing to do is to disallow them all.
If you could actually set up a competent software patent office who could distinguish the good patents from the stupid ones, that'd be great. Unfortunately, that's not going to happen.
What makes you think many would be interested in parenting in their 100+ years?
Besides, it doesn't matter how long you live, women only have a finite number of eggs and they run out somewhere between 50 and 60. You can't get pregnant after then, unless you're willing to go for expensive, fiddly and high-tech workaround like embryo implantation.
Should Osama and crew learn all of the ways that we spy on them, they are liable to change their tactics and make it that much harder for us to try to foil them.... In short, for ANY government to function, it must have secrets and be able to keep them.
Not at all. This is the classic security-through-obscurity argument.
A much better approach is to come up with a strategy where you come out ahead even though the other players know what you know. In fact, it's possible to come up with strategies where you come out ahead because the other players know what you know.
Try playing a game of Warcraft or Command and Conquer some time with fog-of-war turned off. You can see exactly what your opponents are doing, but you can still win. Civilisation (with a lower case c) is, of course, immeasurably more complicated, but it's all the same thing.
As an (extremely simplistic) example that would have made it impossible for the WTC attack to have been performed in that form, put heavy-duty, lockable doors across the crew compartments of all jet liners, and make sure they can't be opened during flight. Annoying, yes, but now the worst case scenario is that a hijacker could kill all the passengers --- and not thousands of other people.
The author obviously never tried RiscOS : on my 33MHz RiscPC (bought in Dec94), there's still nothing that can match its responsiveness... except a 202MHz Strong-ARM RiscPC.
Back in days of yore I was a real Acorn fanboy, and recently I inherited a RiscPC from a friend.
It's true, they're incredibly fast and smooth and responsive and... and I can't find anything useful to do with it. That 33MHz processor simply doesn't have enough power to do anything that involves number-crunching. If you install Linux on it, it really gets driven home how slow the hardware is.
And you reboot into RiscOS and it's snappy and streamlined and... and there aren't any modern applications. No Firefox or Thunderbird. No Open Office (although I do have a copy of Ovation, which is pretty good). Even the network card is coax and won't plug in to my LAN.
I really want to do something useful with this thing, but can't. I can't even play games on it, because the RiscPC is sufficiently different from its predecessor, the Archimedes, that most Archimedes games won't run. Still no Nevryon! Sob.
Edge Magazine is a fun but serious gaming magazine for, like, actual adults. Reading it is a rather odd experience. It has articles that are interesting and which you find yourself thinking about.
It's a bit sad that this comes across as being unusual these days.
Airline Pilots are waaaayyyy overpaid for the amount of work they do. An Airline Pilot I know put in 1-2 months away from home in a year and got paid well into the six figures...
Airline pilots are among that class of people where you pay them a lot in the hope they won't have to earn that pay.
These days, all airline pilots have to do most of the time is (a) take off (which is easy), (b) push the AUTOPILOT button (also quite easy), and (c) do the paperwork (which is not easy, and very tedious). The computer will fly them to their destination and land them, assuming everything goes well.
Unfortunately, if things don't go well, your pilot starts needing to earn its pay. If things badly don't go well, you'd better hope that the pilot is worth paying a lot, because an entire planeload of people could be very dead all over the place.
I know enough about flying to be just fine with paying airline pilots lots of money, thanks very much.
Do yourselves a favor; try ion for 15 minutes and you'll be hooked.
I use Ion on all my machines. I'm currently typing this on my triple-headed work machine. It r0xxors.
You don't realise quite how much time you spend shuffling windows around a conventional desktop until you don't have to any more. Under Ion, I set up a workspace for each application, drop the application into it, and the application uses 100% of the available screen real estate every time, painlessly... it's wonderful.
There are a few problems to do with dialogue handling, but they're managable. And, alas, some applications (Eclipse diediediedie) don't conform to the WM specs properly which means that they get confused under Ion and produce zero-sized dialogues. But on the whole it's superb.
Why would we think that a MOON that revolves around a planet is anything like what Earth ever was like.
How will we know unless we look?
You want to study the Earth; fine, study it. Lots of people are. But it's hard to understand anything if you've only got a single example. Looking at Titan, and indeed, Mars, Venus, or anywhere else, gives us more information about Earth. If we see similarities, we can ask ourselves why there are similarities given the different environments; if there are differences, we study them learn exactly what is different, and why. Either way, our total understanding of the universe goes up.
No one is seriously thinking of colonising Titan, ever. It is -200 degrees below zero on the surface. It offers no benefits over other planetary bodies.
Actually, that's completely wrong. Titan is ideal real estate for an off-world colony. It's perfectly located for easy access to orbiting resources; Saturn and its rings. It has enough gravity to be comfortable. It has huge amounts of water ice, from which oxygen can be easily generated. The atmosphere is a nitrogen-methane mix, which turns out to be almost perfect as propellent for nuclear rockets (when they get off the ground). The atmosphere will also protect the surface from Saturn's lethal radiation.
Maybe when we have to tech to actually consider colonising planets, we can send probes out then for that purpose. Right now, it is a waste of money.
We have the tech. We could set up a base right now, if we could get there. (Development of a decent propulsion system is ongoing, nuclear rockets should be along soon.) As for being a waste of money... the entire Cassini mission cost 3.3 billion dollars. The war in Iraq is spending about that much every 20 days. Cassini's cheap.
...or, to a lesser extent C++, because of the way C scoping works:
static global variables have scope within the module they're defined in. Which means that two static globals in different source files don't collide, because they're in different modules.
Including everything into one big source file will mean that they're both in the same module, and so will collide. Not good.
Anyone with more knowledge of meteor physics than me have an explanation?
Meteors don't work like that, basically. What happens is that anything moving above a certain speed gets vapourised; shooting stars are. If it's large enough that it doesn't vapourise completely, what's left hits the ground at kilometres per second and makes a hell of a bang.
However, anything moving slowly gets slowed to a stop by the atmosphere, at which point it just falls.
The net effect is that meteors hit the ground either at kilometres per second or about two or three hundred miles per hour, and nothing in between.
God: Look, I appreciate the flattery, and I encourage you to keep at it. But read the job description -- you qualify for My job when you derive a universe capable of evolving intelligent life based on the setting of a small number of physical constants, and you can have My job when your resume' includes experimental proof in the form of a portfolio that includes your worshippers.
You should read Permutation City, by Greg Egan --- it's a seriously mind-blowing book where the characters do exactly that.
Except the people in the derived universe, on being presented with proof of their creators, basically reject it, come up with their own parallel theory of Creation based on a steady-state model (and so doesn't need a Creator, or even a Creation), and hey, they suddenly turn out to be right.
After growing up on Povray, I find that mesh-based modellers just feel far too fuzzy and vague to be at all useful. How are you supposed to do anything precisely by hauling points around by hand? What are you supposed to do if you discover that you wanted to change your mind about something half an hour ago? Do it all again? Ugh.
CSG allows a completely different approach, more like programmer, that suits me far better. I'm currently 50% of the way through the download. Kewl.
On an unrelated note, I suspect the 280kB PNG on their home page is causing them loads of pain at the moment...
It's much more likely to be psychosomatic than anything else. The fact that you can see that your wife is using the phone near you totally prevents that experiment from ruling out psychosomatic effects.
*nods*
Get your wife to fake making a call sometime --- going through all the motions, pretending to talk to someone, but with the phone turned off. And not telling you when, of course. I'd be interested to know what happens.
The moral in Sen to Chihiro no kamikaukushi ("Spirited Away") is basically "Don't destroy the environment" and "Children should learn manners".
There's more to it than that. Other themes I spotted:
Evil is a matter of perception. (The shadow-creature, Yubaba, and Yubaba's sister are all initially portrayed as evil until Chihiro learns more about them; and then they're not, they're just people.)
Law is fundamental to society. (There are laws and rules everywhere, and they can't be broken: if you don't cross the river before sunset, you're trapped. Yubaba must give you a job if you ask for it. Chihiro's boyfriend whose name I forget stole the charm, therefore it must be returned.)
Everything has its place. (The shadow creature doesn't belong in the bath-house; it's evil there. But it's not when it's outside. Chihiro doesn't belong in that world, where she's considered disgusting and dangerous; she belongs in the mundane world.)
Work is important. (There is no free ride. You have an obligation to society --- and, therefore, society has an obligation to you.)
Hollywood tends to push the blatantly false and downright dangerous True love conquers all (and don't put up with anything less) and You can do anything if only you want it hard enough. Frankly, I find Miyazaki's themes of social responsibility and the benefits of hard work far more suitable for children.
I love Howl's Moving Castle (and it's sequel Castle in the Air, which I think is even better). I'm eagerly awaiting seeing what he's done with it.
However, I cannot talk on a cell phone very long because it causes the muscles in my face to spasm and/or hurt - not a sharp pain, but noticeable. It was WAY worse with the 800 Mhz phone than with my 2.4 GHz phone, but there definitely is an effect. I limit my calls to about 5 min.
Off the top of my head, possibly causes for this could be:
An effect of holding the cell phone up to your head in an unnatural posture. (I assume your 800MHz phone is lighter than the 2.4GHz one, right?)
General stress caused by having to focus your attention on a small, tinny voice rather than your immediate surroundings.
A learned response caused because some random muscle strain made you associate the phone with facial pains in the past, and you're psychosomatically inducing them now.
I don't think that microwave emission has anything to do with it --- but a very easy test for any of these is simple: get a headset. More comfortable, less stressful, and if there are any problems caused by microwave emissions, your face will be receiving orders of magnitude less energy.
I'm addicted now, though. But I still love the taste, and moving from the halfway-decent coffee I usually drink to shitty cheapass Folgers coffee would be more torture than the money I would save would be worth.
I drink coffee, but I don't think it tastes of anything special. I think it smells wonderful, though.
I have an uncle in north-east Queensland who grows very small quantities of very expensive coffee. (Obligatory plug and review; hi, uncle Mike!) Whenever I go to visit I have to find a way of politely dissuading him from giving me a bag because it's completely wasted on me...
BTW, he suggests keeping good coffee in the freezer. It doesn't lose its taste as quickly.
??? Wait... I was to understand the technologies would behave entirely the opposite of what you demonstrate in your post. Wouldn't the LCD screens get "ghost" images more readily than the Plasma screens?
Not LCD. LED. The replacement screens are big matrices of mini amber LEDs. They don't get colour, but they also don't get ghosting, fading, burn-in, having to replace them every year, and big electrical bills.
...which, of course, goes hand-in-hand with Ormgas streaming radio: all remixes, all the time, and most of it is damned good. (I recently put together a FF remix album for a friend, with four McVaffe piano tracks on it: live recordings. The guy is seriously talented.)
Ormgas is ogg powered, too. Which is nice.
I'll warn you, however, that there are about, say, infinity remixes of that song from Mega Man II. You know the one...
I was surprised to find that there are only eight Wizards & Warriors remixes.
...in London installed big plasma TV screens all over the place to use as status boards. This was a few years back.
Let me see: they're on 24 hours a day and they tend to display the same image for very long periods of time. Can you guess what happened? Yup, within six months they were badly burnt, and after a couple of years they were nearly unreadable.
They've recently all been replaced with orange LED-grid displays. They're brighter, bigger, much easier to read, and probably have huge lifetimes.
I hate to think how much money they spent on all those plasma screens...
Incidentally, even on regular factory-produced "silver" CDs, the data layer is only a few microns beneath the *label side*. If you're going to scratch one, do it on the non-label side. Leaving it on your desk label side down, which seems more intuitive, is more likely to damage it.
Cow orker of mine once had a CD in a desk drawer with a leaky bottle of whiteboard cleaner. When she discovered it, she found she had a completely blank, transparent disk of plastic and a perfectly round piece of aluminium foil --- the data layer had peeled off.
I suggested gluing it back on, but she didn't seem to be terribly impressed with that...
Is that the same game where some guy just bought himself his own island? Makes a lot of sense from the way you've described the game.
Yup, that's the one.
The guy actually stands to make a decent amount of money if he can develop it properly: not only does it have not insignificant 'natural' resources (which he can either exploit himself or subcontract), he can sell off land himself. If he's smart and can turn it into a desireable trading centre, he ought to do quite well. PE is planning to allow real-world companies to set up shops in the game; I wonder if anyone's approached him...
The way it works is that playing is completely free. However, equipment in the game costs game money, and the easiest way to get game money is to spend real money on it.
It is possible to play without spending anything, but you'll end up having to do a lot of grinding in order to make enough money to buy a piece of equipment that will let you make some more money, etc. Spending will let you shortcut this to a fair extent.
(Currently I've sunk $10 into it. This bought me some decent armour, a low-level newbie gun, and some ammo for the gun. So far, I haven't managed to break even when hunting, but that's because I'm crap at it. I'm also practicing sweat gathering, which is sort of like milking except they tend to maul you at the same time. You end up with lots of little bottles that you can sell.)
One interesting side effect of all this, plus the fact that equipment wears out and needs to be repaired, is that everyone is obsessed with money. Poke around on the 'net and you'll find detailed analyses of how much a weapon costs to use: per hit, per unit damage, per swing, etc. Newbies are better off with weapons with low cost per swing/shot; experts are better off with low cost per unit damage. All equipment wears out and needs to be repaired.
The first time I killed an animal I got 0.78 ped loot from it (== 7.8 US cents). The record is apparently 29000 ped (== just under three thousand dollars)...
There are other ways you can make money in-game: hunting and sweat gathering are the main ones open to newbies, but there's also crafting, shopkeeping, mining, plus all the various service industries like guides, distracting animals while other people shoot at them, trading, etc. PE has a thriving economy.
If you're interested, give it a try --- just download and run. It is, after all, free.
Slashdot Mirror
Because software is such a specialised field that the patent office cannot distinguish between worthwhile and non-worthwhile patents.
Since the overall penalty to society for not allowing any software patents is less than the penalty for allowing the non-worthwhile patents, the only thing to do is to disallow them all.
If you could actually set up a competent software patent office who could distinguish the good patents from the stupid ones, that'd be great. Unfortunately, that's not going to happen.
Besides, it doesn't matter how long you live, women only have a finite number of eggs and they run out somewhere between 50 and 60. You can't get pregnant after then, unless you're willing to go for expensive, fiddly and high-tech workaround like embryo implantation.
Not at all. This is the classic security-through-obscurity argument.
A much better approach is to come up with a strategy where you come out ahead even though the other players know what you know. In fact, it's possible to come up with strategies where you come out ahead because the other players know what you know.
Try playing a game of Warcraft or Command and Conquer some time with fog-of-war turned off. You can see exactly what your opponents are doing, but you can still win. Civilisation (with a lower case c) is, of course, immeasurably more complicated, but it's all the same thing.
As an (extremely simplistic) example that would have made it impossible for the WTC attack to have been performed in that form, put heavy-duty, lockable doors across the crew compartments of all jet liners, and make sure they can't be opened during flight. Annoying, yes, but now the worst case scenario is that a hijacker could kill all the passengers --- and not thousands of other people.
Back in days of yore I was a real Acorn fanboy, and recently I inherited a RiscPC from a friend.
It's true, they're incredibly fast and smooth and responsive and... and I can't find anything useful to do with it. That 33MHz processor simply doesn't have enough power to do anything that involves number-crunching. If you install Linux on it, it really gets driven home how slow the hardware is.
And you reboot into RiscOS and it's snappy and streamlined and... and there aren't any modern applications. No Firefox or Thunderbird. No Open Office (although I do have a copy of Ovation, which is pretty good). Even the network card is coax and won't plug in to my LAN.
I really want to do something useful with this thing, but can't. I can't even play games on it, because the RiscPC is sufficiently different from its predecessor, the Archimedes, that most Archimedes games won't run. Still no Nevryon! Sob.
It's a bit sad that this comes across as being unusual these days.
Airline pilots are among that class of people where you pay them a lot in the hope they won't have to earn that pay.
These days, all airline pilots have to do most of the time is (a) take off (which is easy), (b) push the AUTOPILOT button (also quite easy), and (c) do the paperwork (which is not easy, and very tedious). The computer will fly them to their destination and land them, assuming everything goes well.
Unfortunately, if things don't go well, your pilot starts needing to earn its pay. If things badly don't go well, you'd better hope that the pilot is worth paying a lot, because an entire planeload of people could be very dead all over the place.
I know enough about flying to be just fine with paying airline pilots lots of money, thanks very much.
I use Ion on all my machines. I'm currently typing this on my triple-headed work machine. It r0xxors.
You don't realise quite how much time you spend shuffling windows around a conventional desktop until you don't have to any more. Under Ion, I set up a workspace for each application, drop the application into it, and the application uses 100% of the available screen real estate every time, painlessly... it's wonderful.
There are a few problems to do with dialogue handling, but they're managable. And, alas, some applications (Eclipse diediediedie) don't conform to the WM specs properly which means that they get confused under Ion and produce zero-sized dialogues. But on the whole it's superb.
How will we know unless we look?
You want to study the Earth; fine, study it. Lots of people are. But it's hard to understand anything if you've only got a single example. Looking at Titan, and indeed, Mars, Venus, or anywhere else, gives us more information about Earth. If we see similarities, we can ask ourselves why there are similarities given the different environments; if there are differences, we study them learn exactly what is different, and why. Either way, our total understanding of the universe goes up.
No one is seriously thinking of colonising Titan, ever. It is -200 degrees below zero on the surface. It offers no benefits over other planetary bodies.
Actually, that's completely wrong. Titan is ideal real estate for an off-world colony. It's perfectly located for easy access to orbiting resources; Saturn and its rings. It has enough gravity to be comfortable. It has huge amounts of water ice, from which oxygen can be easily generated. The atmosphere is a nitrogen-methane mix, which turns out to be almost perfect as propellent for nuclear rockets (when they get off the ground). The atmosphere will also protect the surface from Saturn's lethal radiation.
Maybe when we have to tech to actually consider colonising planets, we can send probes out then for that purpose. Right now, it is a waste of money.
We have the tech. We could set up a base right now, if we could get there. (Development of a decent propulsion system is ongoing, nuclear rockets should be along soon.) As for being a waste of money... the entire Cassini mission cost 3.3 billion dollars. The war in Iraq is spending about that much every 20 days. Cassini's cheap.
...the Toast Marketing Board!
static global variables have scope within the module they're defined in. Which means that two static globals in different source files don't collide, because they're in different modules.
Including everything into one big source file will mean that they're both in the same module, and so will collide. Not good.
Can't say about other languages, though.
Meteors don't work like that, basically. What happens is that anything moving above a certain speed gets vapourised; shooting stars are. If it's large enough that it doesn't vapourise completely, what's left hits the ground at kilometres per second and makes a hell of a bang.
However, anything moving slowly gets slowed to a stop by the atmosphere, at which point it just falls.
The net effect is that meteors hit the ground either at kilometres per second or about two or three hundred miles per hour, and nothing in between.
You should read Permutation City, by Greg Egan --- it's a seriously mind-blowing book where the characters do exactly that.
Except the people in the derived universe, on being presented with proof of their creators, basically reject it, come up with their own parallel theory of Creation based on a steady-state model (and so doesn't need a Creator, or even a Creation), and hey, they suddenly turn out to be right.
CSG allows a completely different approach, more like programmer, that suits me far better. I'm currently 50% of the way through the download. Kewl.
On an unrelated note, I suspect the 280kB PNG on their home page is causing them loads of pain at the moment...
...which is going to make it really awkward should Miyazaki ever decide to film it!
*nods*
Get your wife to fake making a call sometime --- going through all the motions, pretending to talk to someone, but with the phone turned off. And not telling you when, of course. I'd be interested to know what happens.
There's more to it than that. Other themes I spotted:
Hollywood tends to push the blatantly false and downright dangerous True love conquers all (and don't put up with anything less) and You can do anything if only you want it hard enough. Frankly, I find Miyazaki's themes of social responsibility and the benefits of hard work far more suitable for children.
I love Howl's Moving Castle (and it's sequel Castle in the Air, which I think is even better). I'm eagerly awaiting seeing what he's done with it.
Off the top of my head, possibly causes for this could be:
I don't think that microwave emission has anything to do with it --- but a very easy test for any of these is simple: get a headset. More comfortable, less stressful, and if there are any problems caused by microwave emissions, your face will be receiving orders of magnitude less energy.
I drink coffee, but I don't think it tastes of anything special. I think it smells wonderful, though.
I have an uncle in north-east Queensland who grows very small quantities of very expensive coffee. (Obligatory plug and review; hi, uncle Mike!) Whenever I go to visit I have to find a way of politely dissuading him from giving me a bag because it's completely wasted on me...
BTW, he suggests keeping good coffee in the freezer. It doesn't lose its taste as quickly.
Not LCD. LED. The replacement screens are big matrices of mini amber LEDs. They don't get colour, but they also don't get ghosting, fading, burn-in, having to replace them every year, and big electrical bills.
...which, of course, goes hand-in-hand with Ormgas streaming radio: all remixes, all the time, and most of it is damned good. (I recently put together a FF remix album for a friend, with four McVaffe piano tracks on it: live recordings. The guy is seriously talented.)
Ormgas is ogg powered, too. Which is nice.
I'll warn you, however, that there are about, say, infinity remixes of that song from Mega Man II. You know the one...
I was surprised to find that there are only eight Wizards & Warriors remixes.
Let me see: they're on 24 hours a day and they tend to display the same image for very long periods of time. Can you guess what happened? Yup, within six months they were badly burnt, and after a couple of years they were nearly unreadable.
They've recently all been replaced with orange LED-grid displays. They're brighter, bigger, much easier to read, and probably have huge lifetimes.
I hate to think how much money they spent on all those plasma screens...
Cow orker of mine once had a CD in a desk drawer with a leaky bottle of whiteboard cleaner. When she discovered it, she found she had a completely blank, transparent disk of plastic and a perfectly round piece of aluminium foil --- the data layer had peeled off.
I suggested gluing it back on, but she didn't seem to be terribly impressed with that...
Yup, that's the one.
The guy actually stands to make a decent amount of money if he can develop it properly: not only does it have not insignificant 'natural' resources (which he can either exploit himself or subcontract), he can sell off land himself. If he's smart and can turn it into a desireable trading centre, he ought to do quite well. PE is planning to allow real-world companies to set up shops in the game; I wonder if anyone's approached him...
(More info on the island, including some very pretty pictures.)
The way it works is that playing is completely free. However, equipment in the game costs game money, and the easiest way to get game money is to spend real money on it.
It is possible to play without spending anything, but you'll end up having to do a lot of grinding in order to make enough money to buy a piece of equipment that will let you make some more money, etc. Spending will let you shortcut this to a fair extent.
(Currently I've sunk $10 into it. This bought me some decent armour, a low-level newbie gun, and some ammo for the gun. So far, I haven't managed to break even when hunting, but that's because I'm crap at it. I'm also practicing sweat gathering, which is sort of like milking except they tend to maul you at the same time. You end up with lots of little bottles that you can sell.)
One interesting side effect of all this, plus the fact that equipment wears out and needs to be repaired, is that everyone is obsessed with money. Poke around on the 'net and you'll find detailed analyses of how much a weapon costs to use: per hit, per unit damage, per swing, etc. Newbies are better off with weapons with low cost per swing/shot; experts are better off with low cost per unit damage. All equipment wears out and needs to be repaired.
The first time I killed an animal I got 0.78 ped loot from it (== 7.8 US cents). The record is apparently 29000 ped (== just under three thousand dollars)...
There are other ways you can make money in-game: hunting and sweat gathering are the main ones open to newbies, but there's also crafting, shopkeeping, mining, plus all the various service industries like guides, distracting animals while other people shoot at them, trading, etc. PE has a thriving economy.
If you're interested, give it a try --- just download and run. It is, after all, free.
Do-not-flih...
Doughnut fly...
Do-nut-fly...
Duh-not-fluh...
Apparently not.