Too late, I'm already on my way to the patent office for the grilling patent. I'm also getting patents on boiling, deep frying, and roasting, so do please go ahead and use them... after paying me $100 per use in royalties.
That is a good point. My guess is that a good chunk of people downright hate copyright law, and just don't want to admit it (since according to the media, such a view would be quite unheard of), so they'll wait for the politically correct time to voice their reserved complaints.
Personally, I don't think copyright should even exist, no less there be a $500k penalty per infringement on it, so I'm in the sue noone camp. And I consider myself a content producer. Copyrights fiscally hurt 99%+ of all people, and have a quite strong negative effect on the economy. An industry that takes a large share of GDP for little production is a drag on the economy, not good for it, as the RIAA spin-meisters would have us believe. It's the same arguments that SCO and Microsoft make to support their monopolies.
Probably not. It's so much easier to get a bank of burners and manufacture your own copies than to get a speedboat and a hardy crew to capture a freighter carrying CDs, and there's that slight ethic problem of stealing that goes with taking what is not yours. Carrying away the loot isn't that easy either.
While some may argue that piracy refers to some other act, which I do not need to name, that term was originally coined by the great-granddaddy of the RIAA in England, and I don't respect a term if it's 250 years old just because it's a 250 year old dysphemism
Noise holds VERY little energy. 1 watt per square meter is enough to make you deaf if listened to long enough, and is 120 dB on the decibel scale (insanely loud).
The average computer puts out well under 1 mW (~80 dB with the box a metre away), and that would be one noisy box.
Helium is a very scarce gas, with most of the reserves held by one country (the US). It's found in a few very special natural gas fields, and once they're gone, we're out of helium. Since helium is a noble gas, it can only be found in its gaseous state, so there are no low grade helium ores to mine once we run out of the easy to get helium.
Hmm, I never noticed the ad. Probably having javascript and java off, and no flash plugin installed must really reduce their options. Konqueror lets you turn java and javascript off, but make exceptions for sites that require it (mostly school stuff). Also, when you do enable javascript, it has a smart popup blocking option.
Banner ads get through, but anything more intrusive rarely does.
Why, in a world without IP protection, would anyone give away their source code? That part is poorly explained in FSF philosophy.
Because without an artificial monopoly, you need every competitive edge you can get. If the company that designed the Super RISC chip keeps the physical implementation a trade secret, companies will go for the Hyper RISC chip, which does give out its physical implementation, since they can always call up a custom chip company to make some Hyper RISC chips should the original supplier go out of business.
If you make a Linux distro but only distribute binary, your company will have to shoulder all the costs of development, and your customers would require a lot more calls to your help desk because they can't figure out the solution/workaround from the source, and you can't raise your prices or rates for service because you have to keep the total cost of ownership competitive.
This still leaves a few gaps, like with the source code to voting systems, but that problem is political in origin, as nothing stopped the government from demanding open source as part of the contract.
And if all else fails, there's reverse engineering. Even monstrosities like MS Windows have been at least partially reverse engineered. A positive legal climate for reverse engineering might well usher in a new era of reverse engineering that will make WINE look like a warmup.
Transporters are blocked by shields, so you'd have to bring the shields down first. Once shields are down, as single photon torpedo usually does the job.
At least in the US, you can go to jail for stealing a piece of chewing gum worth five cents. Shoplifting is good for jail time with no minimum value taken.
Of course, my view is that both laws (copyright and shoplifting) are way too strict. I feel that copyright should be abolished and replaced with an anti-plagarism law, and no more (funnily enough, plagarism isn't a crime if the work is public domain, as FOX has taken advantage of. I can't remember the exact case), while shoplifting should just make the punishment fit the crime.
This is the kind of 'trust' I give to my three year old kid!
Man, you must either be one sadistic person or have one really nasty kid. DRM is like tying your kid with a dog leash to the toilet bowl because you don't trust that he won't sneak out and go to his best friend's birthday party while you're out shopping.
At least with router (Linksys), the MAC can be changed on the fly (never tested it, but there's an entry to do so in the config). Doesn't seem like spoofing an endless list of MACs should be too hard.
I don't have a compiler in need of writing, but I can think on one large, unnamed company that needs help on it's Longhorn version on Visual BASIC. Your friend should fit in just right with them.
Speaking as a person who's never used a cell phone, the button between start and end would logically be a pause or a hold button. That's how it works on cassette players, VCRs, and computer mp3 players.
Make the button a red button and put a little see-through plastic cover on it that you have to flip open to push, and people will know what it's for, and you won't get accidental activations.
Not only that, but we might start seriously exploiting oil shale and peat, which have even lower net energy than coal (possibly negative for oil shale) and even higher carbon emissions. There is enough carbon out there to heat the earth an easy 10 degrees Centigrade if we burnt it all.
Which goes to show that we should be using NDP (Net Domestic Product), not GDP (Gross National Product). NDP subtracts out depreciation, which would make the question of "Is software an investment?" mostly irrelevent. Personally, I think that writing software is an investment, but buying software is an operating cost (since the actual contribution to NDP is done by the writers of the software, and everything from then is just moving money around).
Semantics are very important. Take the following example:
There exists a planet with four nations, the Evil Dictatorship of Terrorism and Nasty Stuff, the Holy Alliance of the Forces of Good, Swampland, and the Axis of Evil. They are led by Satan, God, Hydra, and Devil respectively.
At this point, which country is run by the good guys and which by the bad guys? Which countries are terrorist havens and which despise it? Let's describe them a bit more.
In the Dictatorship of Terrorism, the citizens comes together ever 5 years to elect a new dictator, who dictates the wishes of the citizens, and if he fails to dictate their wishes, he can be recalled and replaced.
In the Holy Alliance, God's will is expressed through a spiritual leader who is beholded only through God. Common people are to worship the enlightened leader and give 100% of their labor and blood to him, and based on God's will, they are either sent to war to spread his word, or build great palaces for their great leader. Religious facilities are located near natural resources, and belch smoke as if it were the dawn of the Industrial Revolution.
Swampland consists of great plastic and composite cities stretching thousands of metres into the sky. The city is immaculate because of all the automatons which patrol the city cleaning litter. Their magnificent ruler, Hydra, has his name because the tradition in Swampland is to name things ugly names to avoid upsetting the gods, who can be very jealous.
The Axis of Evil was formed in response to the Holy Alliance and Devil, their humble leader, was named in honor of Deviled Ham, the national food. Axis of Evil is the name given to them by the Holy Alliance. The local name is Erkania, which has no known meaning. After a ten year war with the Holy Alliance, known as the great war, a cease-fire was called, but massive forces remain on both sides of the border and the Holy Alliance is always provoking tensions. The Axis of Evil has been allied with the Dictatorship of Terrorism since the great war.
Now, what countries are good and bad. Semantics are VERY important indeed.
Sure, 100 bucks for a car is a steal if used for the right purpose. 15 bucks a gallon for petrol is cheap enough if it's in the hands of teenager whose going to smash it up in a few months if the cops don't seize the vehicle for drunk driving first. It would also make a good car for inner-city drag races, and any other thing you wouldn't do with a $20,000 new car. It would also make a mockery of NYC's vehicle seizure law (for drunk driving).
Pricing anything under marginal cost is economically damaging, as it will encourage reckless uses and neglect, while punishing efficient uses (like using the car for commuting).
Well, the GPL only applies if you redistribute the software, and you don't have to agree to it if you're just a user, so normal liability laws would apply. Unless you're intentionally adding viruses or completely disregarding the 1,000 complaints in your e-mail that your software fried someone's monitor, I don't think it's much of an issue.
The GPL would protect you if someone took your code, modified it (added a virus), and redistributed it though, but it won't protect you if you introduced the virus.
A lot of it has 'left the building'. Something like 99% of natural gas and a similar amount of all oil formed finds its way to the surface where it gets broken down by bacteria (oil) or mixed into the atmosphere (gas).
Natural gas and oil reservoirs are formed only when you have the old plant material AND and an inpermeable layer of stone formed over it (like limestone). The reservoir must not be tipped over or broken open (say, by mountain building) for the hundreds of millions of years between the time it was formed and now.
Also, most plant material decomposes. Only a small fraction that is buried very rapidly in anaerobic conditions gets turned into oil or gas. The rest gets decomposed into water and CO2.
And last but not least, the oil can get broken down by oil-eating bacteria if there is a supply of oxygen (doesn't need much, as they have millions of years to do their work).
Human muscles are about 25% efficient, which is about on par to a modern gasoline engine.
Also, heavy people do burn a lot of calories. What goes in must come out, and since heavy people eat a lot, they also burn a lot.
Either way, humans have a major advantage over cars in that humans only move ~70kg of flesh, while cars move 3,000kg of metal and plastic. If you're doing moderate power biking, you'll burn about 300 calories/hour and go perhaps 20km/hour. A litre of gasoline holds about 7,500 calories, so the energy equivalent of gasoline will power a human for 25 hours or 500km.
Good luck making a 500 km/litre car. The best production cars get about 33 km/litre, and a hummer gets 4km/litre. That's over a 100-1 advantage for the bike. Bikes still beat the best car Europeans can make by 15-1.
With fuel to power a biker from NYC to LA (10 litres, or 10kg, a Hummer would make it out of Manhatten and into the suburbs of NJ before running out of a gas 15-30 minutes later. The 3-litre/100-km car that Volkswagen makes would make it into Pennsylvania after running for several hours. The bicyclist would make it all the way, and take about 20 days (12 hours/day).
Another way to look at it is the power. A human delivers about 600W peak, and needs about 100W to power the bicycle. A Hummer can give about 250,000W, of which perhaps 75,000W are needed to keep it at highway speed.
Even when you price the bike's fuel using human food, it's still cheaper. Let's say rice/pasta is 50 cents/kg, and it's mostly starch (4 calories/gram or 40% of gasoline's energy density). Gasoline is 25 cents/litre (US price w/out tax). The bike will need 25kg of rice, or $12.50 of rice. The Volkswagen will need 150 litres or $37.50 of gasoline, and the hummer will need 1,250 litres, or $312.50 of gasoline.
Any way you look at it, bikes win on both net energy, gross energy, and even when the food is bought retail, money, and it even beats the best car out there.
People have been rubbing amber and silk together for millenia. So these researchers used water and glass. It's called static electricity. Static electricity is a horribly inefficient way to generating current, and when they say its efficiency is a fraction of a percent, I think.001% is more likely than.8%.
As far as cell phone powering, how are you going to move the water in the first place? By running a boiler in the cell phone to make steam to turn a turbine which runs a pump which moves the water? Seems kind of stupid to me.
[cough and gags] 400 bucks is at least twice the depreciated value of my computer (750 MHz Athlon, 128MB RAM, Mandrake 7.1).
400 bucks is the tuition for one of my classes, or books for 6 months, if I bought all my books and didn't sell any afterwards, or about 18 months of books the way I handle it.
400 bucks is food for a year if I really stretched it (no meat, dry cereal, or imported fruits, only stuff like pasta, rice, corn, apples, grapes, potatoes, etc).
400 bucks is enough for 9 months of cable modem service (which is shared by 3 computers, so for my share, it would be 27 months).
And this is in New York City. I'm sure that in Bangalore, India (where my cursed future tech job is probably going), incomes are much lower, and 400 bucks would seem like even more of an outrageous price.
I did try to run it (got a free copy off of P2P) back when my computer was running WinME, but it took several minutes to load and my poor 128MB of RAM proved woefully inadequate.
Slashdot Mirror
Too late, I'm already on my way to the patent office for the grilling patent. I'm also getting patents on boiling, deep frying, and roasting, so do please go ahead and use them ... after paying me $100 per use in royalties.
Send cash or money order to patent_master666
That is a good point. My guess is that a good chunk of people downright hate copyright law, and just don't want to admit it (since according to the media, such a view would be quite unheard of), so they'll wait for the politically correct time to voice their reserved complaints.
Personally, I don't think copyright should even exist, no less there be a $500k penalty per infringement on it, so I'm in the sue noone camp. And I consider myself a content producer. Copyrights fiscally hurt 99%+ of all people, and have a quite strong negative effect on the economy. An industry that takes a large share of GDP for little production is a drag on the economy, not good for it, as the RIAA spin-meisters would have us believe. It's the same arguments that SCO and Microsoft make to support their monopolies.
Probably not. It's so much easier to get a bank of burners and manufacture your own copies than to get a speedboat and a hardy crew to capture a freighter carrying CDs, and there's that slight ethic problem of stealing that goes with taking what is not yours. Carrying away the loot isn't that easy either.
While some may argue that piracy refers to some other act, which I do not need to name, that term was originally coined by the great-granddaddy of the RIAA in England, and I don't respect a term if it's 250 years old just because it's a 250 year old dysphemism
Noise holds VERY little energy. 1 watt per square meter is enough to make you deaf if listened to long enough, and is 120 dB on the decibel scale (insanely loud).
The average computer puts out well under 1 mW (~80 dB with the box a metre away), and that would be one noisy box.
Helium is a very scarce gas, with most of the reserves held by one country (the US). It's found in a few very special natural gas fields, and once they're gone, we're out of helium. Since helium is a noble gas, it can only be found in its gaseous state, so there are no low grade helium ores to mine once we run out of the easy to get helium.
how many very small countries are known for liberal rule and are similarly prosperous and orderly?
Check out Tuvalu or Belgium. Tuvalu has a grand total of 2 people in their jails, and Belgium has legalized marajuana.
Tuvalu isn't that wealthy, but it is very stable, and Belgium is both wealthy and stable.
Hmm, I never noticed the ad. Probably having javascript and java off, and no flash plugin installed must really reduce their options. Konqueror lets you turn java and javascript off, but make exceptions for sites that require it (mostly school stuff). Also, when you do enable javascript, it has a smart popup blocking option.
Banner ads get through, but anything more intrusive rarely does.
Why, in a world without IP protection, would anyone give away their source code? That part is poorly explained in FSF philosophy.
Because without an artificial monopoly, you need every competitive edge you can get. If the company that designed the Super RISC chip keeps the physical implementation a trade secret, companies will go for the Hyper RISC chip, which does give out its physical implementation, since they can always call up a custom chip company to make some Hyper RISC chips should the original supplier go out of business.
If you make a Linux distro but only distribute binary, your company will have to shoulder all the costs of development, and your customers would require a lot more calls to your help desk because they can't figure out the solution/workaround from the source, and you can't raise your prices or rates for service because you have to keep the total cost of ownership competitive.
This still leaves a few gaps, like with the source code to voting systems, but that problem is political in origin, as nothing stopped the government from demanding open source as part of the contract.
And if all else fails, there's reverse engineering. Even monstrosities like MS Windows have been at least partially reverse engineered. A positive legal climate for reverse engineering might well usher in a new era of reverse engineering that will make WINE look like a warmup.
Transporters are blocked by shields, so you'd have to bring the shields down first. Once shields are down, as single photon torpedo usually does the job.
At least in the US, you can go to jail for stealing a piece of chewing gum worth five cents. Shoplifting is good for jail time with no minimum value taken.
Of course, my view is that both laws (copyright and shoplifting) are way too strict. I feel that copyright should be abolished and replaced with an anti-plagarism law, and no more (funnily enough, plagarism isn't a crime if the work is public domain, as FOX has taken advantage of. I can't remember the exact case), while shoplifting should just make the punishment fit the crime.
This is the kind of 'trust' I give to my three year old kid!
Man, you must either be one sadistic person or have one really nasty kid. DRM is like tying your kid with a dog leash to the toilet bowl because you don't trust that he won't sneak out and go to his best friend's birthday party while you're out shopping.
At least with router (Linksys), the MAC can be changed on the fly (never tested it, but there's an entry to do so in the config). Doesn't seem like spoofing an endless list of MACs should be too hard.
I don't have a compiler in need of writing, but I can think on one large, unnamed company that needs help on it's Longhorn version on Visual BASIC. Your friend should fit in just right with them.
Speaking as a person who's never used a cell phone, the button between start and end would logically be a pause or a hold button. That's how it works on cassette players, VCRs, and computer mp3 players.
Make the button a red button and put a little see-through plastic cover on it that you have to flip open to push, and people will know what it's for, and you won't get accidental activations.
Not only that, but we might start seriously exploiting oil shale and peat, which have even lower net energy than coal (possibly negative for oil shale) and even higher carbon emissions. There is enough carbon out there to heat the earth an easy 10 degrees Centigrade if we burnt it all.
Which goes to show that we should be using NDP (Net Domestic Product), not GDP (Gross National Product). NDP subtracts out depreciation, which would make the question of "Is software an investment?" mostly irrelevent. Personally, I think that writing software is an investment, but buying software is an operating cost (since the actual contribution to NDP is done by the writers of the software, and everything from then is just moving money around).
Semantics are very important. Take the following example:
There exists a planet with four nations, the Evil Dictatorship of Terrorism and Nasty Stuff, the Holy Alliance of the Forces of Good, Swampland, and the Axis of Evil. They are led by Satan, God, Hydra, and Devil respectively.
At this point, which country is run by the good guys and which by the bad guys? Which countries are terrorist havens and which despise it? Let's describe them a bit more.
In the Dictatorship of Terrorism, the citizens comes together ever 5 years to elect a new dictator, who dictates the wishes of the citizens, and if he fails to dictate their wishes, he can be recalled and replaced.
In the Holy Alliance, God's will is expressed through a spiritual leader who is beholded only through God. Common people are to worship the enlightened leader and give 100% of their labor and blood to him, and based on God's will, they are either sent to war to spread his word, or build great palaces for their great leader. Religious facilities are located near natural resources, and belch smoke as if it were the dawn of the Industrial Revolution.
Swampland consists of great plastic and composite cities stretching thousands of metres into the sky. The city is immaculate because of all the automatons which patrol the city cleaning litter. Their magnificent ruler, Hydra, has his name because the tradition in Swampland is to name things ugly names to avoid upsetting the gods, who can be very jealous.
The Axis of Evil was formed in response to the Holy Alliance and Devil, their humble leader, was named in honor of Deviled Ham, the national food. Axis of Evil is the name given to them by the Holy Alliance. The local name is Erkania, which has no known meaning. After a ten year war with the Holy Alliance, known as the great war, a cease-fire was called, but massive forces remain on both sides of the border and the Holy Alliance is always provoking tensions. The Axis of Evil has been allied with the Dictatorship of Terrorism since the great war.
Now, what countries are good and bad. Semantics are VERY important indeed.
Sure, 100 bucks for a car is a steal if used for the right purpose. 15 bucks a gallon for petrol is cheap enough if it's in the hands of teenager whose going to smash it up in a few months if the cops don't seize the vehicle for drunk driving first. It would also make a good car for inner-city drag races, and any other thing you wouldn't do with a $20,000 new car. It would also make a mockery of NYC's vehicle seizure law (for drunk driving).
Pricing anything under marginal cost is economically damaging, as it will encourage reckless uses and neglect, while punishing efficient uses (like using the car for commuting).
Well, the GPL only applies if you redistribute the software, and you don't have to agree to it if you're just a user, so normal liability laws would apply. Unless you're intentionally adding viruses or completely disregarding the 1,000 complaints in your e-mail that your software fried someone's monitor, I don't think it's much of an issue.
The GPL would protect you if someone took your code, modified it (added a virus), and redistributed it though, but it won't protect you if you introduced the virus.
A lot of it has 'left the building'. Something like 99% of natural gas and a similar amount of all oil formed finds its way to the surface where it gets broken down by bacteria (oil) or mixed into the atmosphere (gas).
Natural gas and oil reservoirs are formed only when you have the old plant material AND and an inpermeable layer of stone formed over it (like limestone). The reservoir must not be tipped over or broken open (say, by mountain building) for the hundreds of millions of years between the time it was formed and now.
Also, most plant material decomposes. Only a small fraction that is buried very rapidly in anaerobic conditions gets turned into oil or gas. The rest gets decomposed into water and CO2.
And last but not least, the oil can get broken down by oil-eating bacteria if there is a supply of oxygen (doesn't need much, as they have millions of years to do their work).
Human muscles are about 25% efficient, which is about on par to a modern gasoline engine.
Also, heavy people do burn a lot of calories. What goes in must come out, and since heavy people eat a lot, they also burn a lot.
Either way, humans have a major advantage over cars in that humans only move ~70kg of flesh, while cars move 3,000kg of metal and plastic. If you're doing moderate power biking, you'll burn about 300 calories/hour and go perhaps 20km/hour. A litre of gasoline holds about 7,500 calories, so the energy equivalent of gasoline will power a human for 25 hours or 500km.
Good luck making a 500 km/litre car. The best production cars get about 33 km/litre, and a hummer gets 4km/litre. That's over a 100-1 advantage for the bike. Bikes still beat the best car Europeans can make by 15-1.
With fuel to power a biker from NYC to LA (10 litres, or 10kg, a Hummer would make it out of Manhatten and into the suburbs of NJ before running out of a gas 15-30 minutes later. The 3-litre/100-km car that Volkswagen makes would make it into Pennsylvania after running for several hours. The bicyclist would make it all the way, and take about 20 days (12 hours/day).
Another way to look at it is the power. A human delivers about 600W peak, and needs about 100W to power the bicycle. A Hummer can give about 250,000W, of which perhaps 75,000W are needed to keep it at highway speed.
Even when you price the bike's fuel using human food, it's still cheaper. Let's say rice/pasta is 50 cents/kg, and it's mostly starch (4 calories/gram or 40% of gasoline's energy density). Gasoline is 25 cents/litre (US price w/out tax). The bike will need 25kg of rice, or $12.50 of rice. The Volkswagen will need 150 litres or $37.50 of gasoline, and the hummer will need 1,250 litres, or $312.50 of gasoline.
Any way you look at it, bikes win on both net energy, gross energy, and even when the food is bought retail, money, and it even beats the best car out there.
People have been rubbing amber and silk together for millenia. So these researchers used water and glass. It's called static electricity. Static electricity is a horribly inefficient way to generating current, and when they say its efficiency is a fraction of a percent, I think .001% is more likely than .8%.
As far as cell phone powering, how are you going to move the water in the first place? By running a boiler in the cell phone to make steam to turn a turbine which runs a pump which moves the water? Seems kind of stupid to me.
Well, all of the above support a windowing enviorment (XWindows, with KDE or Gnome running over it).
[cough and gags]
400 bucks is at least twice the depreciated value of my computer (750 MHz Athlon, 128MB RAM, Mandrake 7.1).
400 bucks is the tuition for one of my classes, or books for 6 months, if I bought all my books and didn't sell any afterwards, or about 18 months of books the way I handle it.
400 bucks is food for a year if I really stretched it (no meat, dry cereal, or imported fruits, only stuff like pasta, rice, corn, apples, grapes, potatoes, etc).
400 bucks is enough for 9 months of cable modem service (which is shared by 3 computers, so for my share, it would be 27 months).
And this is in New York City. I'm sure that in Bangalore, India (where my cursed future tech job is probably going), incomes are much lower, and 400 bucks would seem like even more of an outrageous price.
I did try to run it (got a free copy off of P2P) back when my computer was running WinME, but it took several minutes to load and my poor 128MB of RAM proved woefully inadequate.
It works the other way around. The radio station gets paid to play the song (payola), and it gets even more profit from the advertisements.