You have a bright idea, but no-body knows how to make it work. A few million dollars worth of research might crack the problem, so you go looking
for backers willing to risk their money.
If the research program fails they lose all their money. What is in it
for them? If the research program succeeds they get a patent on the invention and get their money back and then some from the royalties.
That is the classic pro-patent argument - patents underpin a business model that funds researchers to work in their labs to crack commercially important problems. But stop and look at what defensive patents do to this. If the big players don't have to pay royalties, because of the power of their defensive patent portfollios, then the capitalists who funded the research lab cannot get a proper return on their investment.
Defensive patent portfollios don't simply mitigate some of the ill effects of a patent system, they actually undermine the rational of having a patent system at all.
In the UK constituency boundaries are drawn up by an independent boundary commission. A third party still cannot win seats, but it can contest marginal constituencies. If it has a popular policy and is attracting protest votes then one or other or both of the main parties is likely to steal the policy to avoid
losing marginal seats. So a third party can force policy changes even though it cannot win political power.
What I read about the USA tells me that boundaries are fixed by the politicians in power. In theory they could use this power to fix things so that they win majorities in Congress with a minority of the popular vote. In practise they seem to use it to make all seats safe seats. So third parties are completely frozen out.
Patents work for pharmaceuticals because it is one patent per saleable product.
There is a push on to change this, so that a drug company can get a patent on the site that a drug targets. Then subsequent drug discoveries that target that site will be covered by two patents, the early broad one on the site and the later specific one on the new drug.
At this point the patent system will start to implode. It will be hard to get research money to work on drugs for sites that are covered by patents, because the owners of the earlier patent can leech of the investors in the research for the second drug.
The patent system will end up restricting research funding in pharmaceuticals just like it does in other
areas that are overgrown by patent thickets.
This could come horribly unstuck for Nike. You can play soccer barefoot.
I assume that it is a slightly more dainty and skillful game: you cannot just lash out at the ball and expect your boots to protect your toes. Nevertheless it is a game so restricting the equippement used doesn't favour on team over another, it just leaves the players with more money to spend on beer afterwards.
There is quite a tradition of playing rugby barefoot. Perhaps letting the players talk via a website on whether to spend money on expensive equippement could end up transferring revenue from Nike to Coors.
Hind paws + Link to speculation
on
Preventing RSI?
·
· Score: 1
I've never had RSI but as a programmer/violinist/pianist I naturally take an
interest in how to avoid it. I've got an additional mouse (actually a trackball) that I've put on the floor and work with my toes. This works very well with being a touch typist; I get to keep my hands on the keyboard, in the home position.
The Pope is a genocidal war monger. He bans birth control. This leads to population pressure. Countries find that they need leibensraum or 'living room'. This leads to war and genocide. A man may be presumed to intend the reasonably forseeable consequences of his actions, hence the Pope promotes genocide.
OK i'm stretching things alot, but promotion is a very flexible weasel word, not one to use in a law that needs to be clear. 318 could be stretched to have an unreasonably wide scope.
A more subtle question is why is a section that forbids the advocation of genocide not simply titled Advocation of Genocide? Some-one is playing a little game with language. What are they up to?
Suppose that the criminal code contains a section titled Advocation of Genocide. Suppose that a politician wishes to widen the scope of the offense to a more general notion of Hate Propaganda. It is a little awkward politically. People will notice that there is a slippery slope and that Canada seems to be sliding down it.
Suppose instead that the section is already titled Hate Propaganda. Then the change can be spun as a technical change, amending the wording of the definition. The argument that outlawing the advocation of genocide is wise, but that further restrictions on speech go too far, is harder to get across when the law already uses the term Hate Propaganda even if the current definition is a narrow one.
So I am not at all impressed that the current definition of Hate Propaganda is narrowly drawn. Why use such a vague term at all unless one is planning to widen the definition later, once people have got used to the idea?
In the ruling, ex-Londoner James Scott Richardson was fined $1,000 for several Internet postings, including one calling for attacks on Jewish and Muslim agencies, temples and residences.
so it looks as though the bad guys could have been taken down for conspiring to commit criminal damage or incitement to arson, or some other offence grounded in planning or
attempting a straightforward criminal, physical act.
Then the article goes on to quote the Human Rights Act
The Human Rights Act prohibits the communication of messages over the Internet likely to expose people to hatred or contempt based on religion or race.
So a moral panic about incitement has been leveraged to pass a law that gives the authorities wide powers to tell people to shut the fuck up or else, and all in the name of human rights.
The article claims that disruptive change can only happen outside big companies
Thirty years ago, the primary source for innovation was large corporate labs. That is where all of the money went. Then, 20 to 25 years ago, the source of ideas and creativity shifted to venture funds and startups.
Over the past 20 years, we've seen the economy and society change due to innovation from small independent efforts outside of corporate labs. Technology has enabled startups to have a big influence, and consequently they have had a tremendous effect in the technology scene today.
For an example of a disruptive technology that is likely to come out of a large corporate lab, have a look at my essay. It argues that
telepresence will displace business airtravel. This is a fairly common place idea. It will be very disruptive and it will come. It will make the fortunes of those who get the timing right. I argued in 2001 for a 2010 to 2020 timescale. Maybe that is twenty years too early. What is relevant to this thread on/. is the question of what kind of
business could make it happen. What kind of technology is needed?
Much of the technology required is in place already. Webcams are familiar. Many companies save on telephone call charges by using the internet in the form of Voice Over IP. Short range wireless connections to Local Area Networks are already in use. Radio controlled cars capable of driving about offices are popular children's toys.
Servo-ing the cameras at the far end to the users movements at the near end exists as expensive military technology. It is the kind of technology that will plummet in price with mass production. Speed of light delays will cause lags when working on the opposite side of the globe, which may lead to seasickness. Seasickness did not block the development of sea travel. It can probably be avoided by suitable signal processing, such as near-end caching.
The telepresence itself is a fancy bit of kit with much of the complication and expense of a humanoid robot. Well it doesn't need a brain, it is remote controlled, so that dodges the road-block problem of artificial intelligence. Nevertheless, it is still a huge undertaking. It requires a big, well funded research lab to focus on the problem and stick at it for many years. There is a range of challenges, both purely technical challenges of engineering a robot, and human-factors challenges of making it pleasant to operate.
I see it as strictly a big company game. Sony could pull it off. Perhaps Toyota. Who else?
Notice that I've picked a difficult point to argue. I'm trying to say that some disruptive changes need big companies to see the development through to completion. I've tried to give an example, but disruptive changes are always controversial before they happen, so you might not believe in the example I've given. If the next disruptive change is not the replacement of business airtravel by telepresence what will it be? I don't see any reason to write off big companies and their corporate development labs.
The article casts Stallman as impractical. However the freedoms in the GPL are of
practical importance. One might for example be using GPL software in a large organistion
to get away from per seat licencing, using the freedom to share the software with
multiple employees. If some "pragmatism" finds a way round GPL 2 so that you have to pay
per seat for the link to the website that enables the software, that is not very practical for the users.
If you are going to do what the article does and merely assert that freedom is in opposition to practicality, you are saying nothing at all.
I'm planning to nip over there to take a look. Once my starship is up to its
cruising speed of 99.999% of c, the event will only be a million years ago.
The main effect of the traditional copyright term of
fourteen years is to protect creative artists from competing
with copies of their own recent work. This protection allows
the publishers to charge more for the works for art and pay
royalties to the artists. The royalties are sufficient for
some artists to work full time at their art. Thus the
general public both pay more money and benefit by being
supplied with more work by the artists they love. Overall a
traditional fourteen year copyright term is a good thing.
Modern copyright last for 60 or 70 years after the death of the
artist. The main effect of these extra years of copyright
protection are to permit the copyright owners (clearly not
the artist himself) to prevent older work entering the
public domain. The older work becomes unavailable.
Two works whose unavailability has vexed me are
L The Gamma Function by Emil Artin
A Discipline of Programming by Edgars Dijkstra
There may be other books I would like to buy that are so
thoroughly unavailable that I could never hear of them. Long
copyright have the effect of destroying works of art.
You may be wondering why publishers don't put old works,
that they no longer sell, into the public domain. A
simple, though inexact analogy, makes the point.
Imagine that the building regulations stated that old houses
were to be considered unfit for human habitation and
demolished simply because of their age and regardless of
their actual condition. Three points arise:
Such regulations would indeed benefit the political
constituency that they were intended to pander to. Builders
would get a steady stream of profitable work replacing old
houses.
Every time there was a recession in the building trade
there would be political pressure to change the age limit,
triggering a new wave of demolitions and a new wave of
building.
The policy is obviously insane. The fact that there is a
political dynamic that pushes towards an even more
destructive age limit is a serious flaw in modern political
systems.
Perhaps the worst inaccuracy in this analogy is that
cultural life is cumulative. Artists cannot create in a
vacuum but must draw inspiration from their influences. If
artists only have fourteen years to profit from their own
works that also means that they have only fourteen years to
wait before building on top of the new work of another artist.
It is wrong to say that artists gain nothing by royalties
paid after they have been dead for 59 years. They actually
lose a great deal. They must meet an artificial and
legalistic definition of novelty that prevents them from
re-invigorating the works of artists long dead.
Over the next two decades gramophone recordings of the early
electric guitar repertoire will be entering the public
domain. This will put a floor under the quality of popular
music. Obviously young persons will rush to buy to the
latest and best. Even second rate new music will be preferred
to the stuff that grand-dad listened to. But third rate
bands are out of luck. They cannot make a living in
competition with the best of old recordings.
That is as it should be. Cultural life should progress with
an accumulation of classics.
There is pressure from business to extend copyright. It is
important to get to the heart of the matter. "Extending
copyright" means destroying good, old music so that business
can make money selling new, crap music.
No per seat fees and you get the source. Who actually benefits? It is not much use to a sole
trader. He cannot spare the time to fix bugs and recompile, and he is only saving one license fee.
On the other hand, you only have to fix a bug once. A large company can employ a few free software programmers to take advantage of access to the source. They can compare the costs to
what they save on license fees. If they are big enough, they are bound to come out ahead.
It is completely natural for heads of large organisations and governments to want to force
through the adoption of free software, for it is at the top of the organisation that per seat license fees are agregated and compared to the once per organisation costs of hiring your own experts.
In Neo-classical economics the economically efficient price is the marginal cost of production. The GPL lets you sell GPL software, but prevents you from unbundling the various rights. Once you have sold it the purchaser can make copies and sell those without paying you royalties. This competition drives the price down to the marginal cost of production. Often this is effectively zero.
The GPL has the effect of arranging for the price of software to be that recommended by neo-classical economics as efficient.
This EU press release gives the impression that if the documentation is inaccurate Microsoft must correct it, and if it is incomplete Microsoft must write some more.
Microsoft has prepared several versions of the Technical Documentation since the 2004 Decision, and none has complied with the requirements of that Decision. The Commission understands that Microsoft has recently prepared revised documentation addressing only points relating to formatting (e.g. typos, missing hyperlinks), but not the general concerns about completeness and accuracy. That is the reason why it continues to be the Commission's conclusion that Microsoft is not in compliance with its obligations, i.e. that the technical documentation is not complete and accurate.
Microsoft is required, within 120 days, to disclose complete and accurate interface documentation
What if Microsoft made a poor job of writing the interface documentation that is internal to the company and do not have complete and accurate documentation to disclose?
Is this giving them 120 days to write it, or is it 120 days to gather together what they already have?
If the EU require Microsoft to disclose the documentation of the protocols required for interoperability then Microsoft need only disclose the documentation it actually has. If its own programmers fill gaps in the formal documention by consulting the source then the actual documentation is the inadequate formal documentional together with the source.
If the EU require Microsoft to provide documentation Microsoft might need to hire some technical authors and pay fines while those authors write.
In terms of fostering competition, it makes most sense for the EU to require Microsoft to provide documentation. The aim of competition policy is to enable competitors to write competing implementations of the protocols. That is technically easier if there is a specification to work from that is good enough to use directly without having to reverse engineer the original code.
The EU is requiring documentation of the protocols. Microsoft is offering the source code.
Traditionally people complain that Free Software is poorly documented. Free Software zealots say "Read the source code." People laugh at them. Reading the source code is a poor substitute for proper documentation of a communication protocol.
Will the EU laugh at Microsoft? Will they rule that Microsoft can provide source code in lieu of documentation provided that they pay compensation to those who must work out the protocol from the source when they have a legal entitlement to documentation?
It has already
replaced copper in electrical applications that benefit from it being twice
as conductive per unit mass.
It is 65% of the conductivity of copper by volume, close enough that one can just use a slightly fatter (though lighter) wire, and still get the same resistance.
It is pretty radical to say that freedom matters at all. Look at any public debate in which safety is at issue. The proponents of a law say "Banning X will save N lives."; can the opponents respond "Well that would be quite an instrusive law, being free would be worth M lives"? In public debate today M=0 and N > 0 carries the day.
They Space Shuttle was also a failure in that it was way too expensive, its cargo capacity was too small and not expandable.
Stop and ask yourself "What was the point of the Space Shuttle?". Man had already gone to the moon and stopped going because it was very expensive. The point of the Shuttle was to be cheaper. That was all. Re-useable was a means to an end - be cheaper.
When the Shuttle failed to be cheaper than big dumb rockets it failed utterly; there wasn't any other point to it.
I've put a trackball on the floor, and I'm spinning the ball with my toes. That spares my hands and lets me leave my fingers in the home position for touch typing on the keyboard.
The trackball only has two buttons and I need three for X11 on FreeBSD so I've started the mouse demon with
moused -p/dev/cuaa1 -3 -E 500
"-3" gives me three button emulation, "-E" adjusts how simultaneous the left and right buttons have to be to count as the middle button. I boost it from 100ms to 500ms to accomodate my relative lack of coordination when I try to click both buttons with my toes
Try to partition a 4x4x4 cube into 8 pieces, each of 8 cubelets.
Each piece must hold together as a physical object. ie cubelets must be joined face-to-face.
So far this is very easy.
The extra twist is that the center of gravity of each piece must lie outside of the piece.
Example 1: the 0,0,0 and 0,0,1 cubelets share a face, but the center of gravity, at 0,0,1/2 lies on the face of 0,0,0, so it is not allowed
Example 2: the 0,0,0,and 2,2,2 cubelets have center of gravity 1,1,1. That is outside both cubelets, but they don't touch so that is not allowed either.
The origin of the puzzle is in statistical pattern recognition: come up with a gnarly but fair test for recognition methods aimed at twisty shapes in low dimensions.
There might not be a solution. I imagine it as a computer search problem. So the puzzle is the meta-puzzle: how to write a program to solve this?
I'm still not seeing any problem. I've tried making some classes as you describe
CL-USER(1): (defclass a ()((one:accessor one:initarg:one))) CL-USER(2): (defclass b (a)((two:accessor two:initarg:two))) CL-USER(3): (defclass c (a)((three:accessor three:initarg:three))) CL-USER(4): (defclass d (b c)((four:accessor four:initarg:four))) CL-USER(5): (defvar o (make-instance 'd:one 1:two 2:three 3:four 4)) O CL-USER(6): (describe o) #<D @ #x1048d852> is an instance of #<STANDARD-CLASS D>:
The following slots have:INSTANCE allocation:
ONE 1
THREE 3
TWO 2
FOUR 4
but I'm not seeing why there is any difficulty. Look at the calculation of the class precedence list. The order must be D B C because that is the order they come in the definition of class D. The only question is "where does A go?". But (defclass C (A)...) says that A must come after C. The list can only be D B C A. It is totally ordered by the constraints that are explicit in the class definitions.
The only difference from single-inheritance is that B doesn't get slots from C.
Slashdot Mirror
You have a bright idea, but no-body knows how to make it work. A few million dollars worth of research might crack the problem, so you go looking for backers willing to risk their money.
If the research program fails they lose all their money. What is in it for them? If the research program succeeds they get a patent on the invention and get their money back and then some from the royalties.
That is the classic pro-patent argument - patents underpin a business model that funds researchers to work in their labs to crack commercially important problems. But stop and look at what defensive patents do to this. If the big players don't have to pay royalties, because of the power of their defensive patent portfollios, then the capitalists who funded the research lab cannot get a proper return on their investment.
Defensive patent portfollios don't simply mitigate some of the ill effects of a patent system, they actually undermine the rational of having a patent system at all.
In the UK constituency boundaries are drawn up by an independent boundary commission. A third party still cannot win seats, but it can contest marginal constituencies. If it has a popular policy and is attracting protest votes then one or other or both of the main parties is likely to steal the policy to avoid losing marginal seats. So a third party can force policy changes even though it cannot win political power.
What I read about the USA tells me that boundaries are fixed by the politicians in power. In theory they could use this power to fix things so that they win majorities in Congress with a minority of the popular vote. In practise they seem to use it to make all seats safe seats. So third parties are completely frozen out.
Patents work for pharmaceuticals because it is one patent per saleable product.
There is a push on to change this, so that a drug company can get a patent on the site that a drug targets. Then subsequent drug discoveries that target that site will be covered by two patents, the early broad one on the site and the later specific one on the new drug.
At this point the patent system will start to implode. It will be hard to get research money to work on drugs for sites that are covered by patents, because the owners of the earlier patent can leech of the investors in the research for the second drug.
The patent system will end up restricting research funding in pharmaceuticals just like it does in other areas that are overgrown by patent thickets.
This could come horribly unstuck for Nike. You can play soccer barefoot. I assume that it is a slightly more dainty and skillful game: you cannot just lash out at the ball and expect your boots to protect your toes. Nevertheless it is a game so restricting the equippement used doesn't favour on team over another, it just leaves the players with more money to spend on beer afterwards.
There is quite a tradition of playing rugby barefoot. Perhaps letting the players talk via a website on whether to spend money on expensive equippement could end up transferring revenue from Nike to Coors.
I've never had RSI but as a programmer/violinist/pianist I naturally take an interest in how to avoid it. I've got an additional mouse (actually a trackball) that I've put on the floor and work with my toes. This works very well with being a touch typist; I get to keep my hands on the keyboard, in the home position.
The Pope is a genocidal war monger. He bans birth control. This leads to population pressure. Countries find that they need leibensraum or 'living room'. This leads to war and genocide. A man may be presumed to intend the reasonably forseeable consequences of his actions, hence the Pope promotes genocide.
OK i'm stretching things alot, but promotion is a very flexible weasel word, not one to use in a law that needs to be clear. 318 could be stretched to have an unreasonably wide scope.
A more subtle question is why is a section that forbids the advocation of genocide not simply titled Advocation of Genocide? Some-one is playing a little game with language. What are they up to?
Suppose that the criminal code contains a section titled Advocation of Genocide. Suppose that a politician wishes to widen the scope of the offense to a more general notion of Hate Propaganda. It is a little awkward politically. People will notice that there is a slippery slope and that Canada seems to be sliding down it.
Suppose instead that the section is already titled Hate Propaganda. Then the change can be spun as a technical change, amending the wording of the definition. The argument that outlawing the advocation of genocide is wise, but that further restrictions on speech go too far, is harder to get across when the law already uses the term Hate Propaganda even if the current definition is a narrow one.
So I am not at all impressed that the current definition of Hate Propaganda is narrowly drawn. Why use such a vague term at all unless one is planning to widen the definition later, once people have got used to the idea?
The article talks about advocating attacks
so it looks as though the bad guys could have been taken down for conspiring to commit criminal damage or incitement to arson, or some other offence grounded in planning or attempting a straightforward criminal, physical act.Then the article goes on to quote the Human Rights Act
So a moral panic about incitement has been leveraged to pass a law that gives the authorities wide powers to tell people to shut the fuck up or else, and all in the name of human rights.
I see it as strictly a big company game. Sony could pull it off. Perhaps Toyota. Who else?
Notice that I've picked a difficult point to argue. I'm trying to say that some disruptive changes need big companies to see the development through to completion. I've tried to give an example, but disruptive changes are always controversial before they happen, so you might not believe in the example I've given. If the next disruptive change is not the replacement of business airtravel by telepresence what will it be? I don't see any reason to write off big companies and their corporate development labs.
The article casts Stallman as impractical. However the freedoms in the GPL are of practical importance. One might for example be using GPL software in a large organistion to get away from per seat licencing, using the freedom to share the software with multiple employees. If some "pragmatism" finds a way round GPL 2 so that you have to pay per seat for the link to the website that enables the software, that is not very practical for the users.
If you are going to do what the article does and merely assert that freedom is in opposition to practicality, you are saying nothing at all.
I'm planning to nip over there to take a look. Once my starship is up to its cruising speed of 99.999% of c, the event will only be a million years ago.
It is not such old news after all
The main effect of the traditional copyright term of fourteen years is to protect creative artists from competing with copies of their own recent work. This protection allows the publishers to charge more for the works for art and pay royalties to the artists. The royalties are sufficient for some artists to work full time at their art. Thus the general public both pay more money and benefit by being supplied with more work by the artists they love. Overall a traditional fourteen year copyright term is a good thing.
Modern copyright last for 60 or 70 years after the death of the artist. The main effect of these extra years of copyright protection are to permit the copyright owners (clearly not the artist himself) to prevent older work entering the public domain. The older work becomes unavailable.
Two works whose unavailability has vexed me are
There may be other books I would like to buy that are so thoroughly unavailable that I could never hear of them. Long copyright have the effect of destroying works of art.
You may be wondering why publishers don't put old works, that they no longer sell, into the public domain. A simple, though inexact analogy, makes the point.
Imagine that the building regulations stated that old houses were to be considered unfit for human habitation and demolished simply because of their age and regardless of their actual condition. Three points arise:
Perhaps the worst inaccuracy in this analogy is that cultural life is cumulative. Artists cannot create in a vacuum but must draw inspiration from their influences. If artists only have fourteen years to profit from their own works that also means that they have only fourteen years to wait before building on top of the new work of another artist. It is wrong to say that artists gain nothing by royalties paid after they have been dead for 59 years. They actually lose a great deal. They must meet an artificial and legalistic definition of novelty that prevents them from re-invigorating the works of artists long dead.
Over the next two decades gramophone recordings of the early electric guitar repertoire will be entering the public domain. This will put a floor under the quality of popular music. Obviously young persons will rush to buy to the latest and best. Even second rate new music will be preferred to the stuff that grand-dad listened to. But third rate bands are out of luck. They cannot make a living in competition with the best of old recordings.
That is as it should be. Cultural life should progress with an accumulation of classics.
There is pressure from business to extend copyright. It is important to get to the heart of the matter. "Extending copyright" means destroying good, old music so that business can make money selling new, crap music.
No per seat fees and you get the source. Who actually benefits? It is not much use to a sole trader. He cannot spare the time to fix bugs and recompile, and he is only saving one license fee.
On the other hand, you only have to fix a bug once. A large company can employ a few free software programmers to take advantage of access to the source. They can compare the costs to what they save on license fees. If they are big enough, they are bound to come out ahead.
It is completely natural for heads of large organisations and governments to want to force through the adoption of free software, for it is at the top of the organisation that per seat license fees are agregated and compared to the once per organisation costs of hiring your own experts.
In Neo-classical economics the economically efficient
price is the marginal cost of production. The GPL
lets you sell GPL software, but prevents you from
unbundling the various rights. Once you have sold it
the purchaser can make copies and sell those without
paying you royalties. This competition drives the price
down to the marginal cost of production. Often this is
effectively zero.
The GPL has the effect of arranging for the price of software
to be that recommended by neo-classical economics as
efficient.
This EU press release gives the impression that if the documentation is inaccurate Microsoft must correct it, and if it is incomplete Microsoft must write some more.
If the EU require Microsoft to disclose the documentation of the protocols required for interoperability then Microsoft need only disclose the documentation it actually has. If its own programmers fill gaps in the formal documention by consulting the source then the actual documentation is the inadequate formal documentional together with the source.
If the EU require Microsoft to provide documentation Microsoft might need to hire some technical authors and pay fines while those authors write.
In terms of fostering competition, it makes most sense for the EU to require Microsoft to provide documentation. The aim of competition policy is to enable competitors to write competing implementations of the protocols. That is technically easier if there is a specification to work from that is good enough to use directly without having to reverse engineer the original code.
The EU is requiring documentation of the protocols. Microsoft is offering the source code.
Traditionally people complain that Free Software is poorly documented. Free Software zealots say "Read the source code." People laugh at them. Reading the source code is a poor substitute for proper documentation of a communication protocol.
Will the EU laugh at Microsoft? Will they rule that Microsoft can provide source code in lieu of documentation provided that they pay compensation to those who must work out the protocol from the source when they have a legal entitlement to documentation?
It has already replaced copper in electrical applications that benefit from it being twice as conductive per unit mass.
It is 65% of the conductivity of copper by volume, close enough that one can just use a slightly fatter (though lighter) wire, and still get the same resistance.
It is pretty radical to say that freedom matters at all. Look at any public debate in which safety is at issue. The proponents of a law say "Banning X will save N lives."; can the opponents respond "Well that would be quite an instrusive law, being free would be worth M lives"? In public debate today M=0 and N > 0 carries the day.
Stop and ask yourself "What was the point of the Space Shuttle?". Man had already gone to the moon and stopped going because it was very expensive. The point of the Shuttle was to be cheaper. That was all. Re-useable was a means to an end - be cheaper.
When the Shuttle failed to be cheaper than big dumb rockets it failed utterly; there wasn't any other point to it.
Jim crow laws were opposed by business in pursuit of profit.
Consider xyxyxyxyx....
You must need some commutation relations
I've put a trackball on the floor, and I'm spinning the ball with my toes. That spares my hands and lets me leave my fingers in the home position for touch typing on the keyboard.
The trackball only has two buttons and I need three for X11 on FreeBSD so I've started the mouse demon with
"-3" gives me three button emulation, "-E" adjusts how simultaneous the left and right buttons have to be to count as the middle button. I boost it from 100ms to 500ms to accomodate my relative lack of coordination when I try to click both buttons with my toesTry to partition a 4x4x4 cube into 8 pieces, each of 8 cubelets.
Each piece must hold together as a physical object.
ie cubelets must be joined face-to-face.
So far this is very easy.
The extra twist is that the center of gravity of each piece must lie
outside of the piece.
Example 1: the 0,0,0 and 0,0,1 cubelets share a face, but the center of gravity,
at 0,0,1/2 lies on the face of 0,0,0, so it is not allowed
Example 2: the 0,0,0,and 2,2,2 cubelets have center of gravity 1,1,1.
That is outside both cubelets, but they don't touch so that is not allowed
either.
The origin of the puzzle is in statistical pattern recognition: come up with
a gnarly but fair test for recognition methods aimed at twisty shapes in low
dimensions.
There might not be a solution. I imagine it as a computer search problem.
So the puzzle is the meta-puzzle: how to write a program to solve this?
I'm still not seeing any problem. I've tried making some classes as you describe
:accessor one :initarg :one))) :accessor two :initarg :two))) :accessor three :initarg :three))) :accessor four :initarg :four))) :one 1 :two 2 :three 3 :four 4)) :INSTANCE allocation:
...) says that A must come after C. The list can only be D B C A. It is totally ordered by the constraints that are explicit in the class definitions.
CL-USER(1): (defclass a ()((one
CL-USER(2): (defclass b (a)((two
CL-USER(3): (defclass c (a)((three
CL-USER(4): (defclass d (b c)((four
CL-USER(5): (defvar o (make-instance 'd
O
CL-USER(6): (describe o)
#<D @ #x1048d852> is an instance of #<STANDARD-CLASS D>:
The following slots have
ONE 1
THREE 3
TWO 2
FOUR 4
but I'm not seeing why there is any difficulty. Look at the calculation of the class precedence list. The order must be D B C because that is the order they come in the definition of class D. The only question is "where does A go?". But (defclass C (A)
The only difference from single-inheritance is that B doesn't get slots from C.