No the "theory" as you call it is true. If you have a deed, you own the property. Very simple. It's been upheld in the courts multiple times. What he was describing was eminent domain siezures for specious reasons, which I believe this ruling solidifies even if the majority make mouth noises to the contrary. What you describe is something totally different. As a citizen of the U.S. I have an obligation to pay for my share of the government. This is done through taxes of different types. What you are talking about is the government siezing your property do to non-payment of taxes. That has nothing to do with eminent domain.
Obviously you've never seen me web surf.;) Two or three instances of firefox open with multiple tabs each. Memory use maxed, harddrive clacking away...
The problem of designing a house is, by and large, a solved problem. Sure,
there are requirements like soil structures, energy efficiency, and building
codes, but by and large a given house has few if any "new" problems,
and the combination of problems to solve isn't huge.
OK. Here is where we
begin to diverge. While I agree that
there are not very many new problems that need solving in designing and
building a house, I also don't think there are many new challenges in most
software projects.
Designing software is much more complex and a software designer or team is
likely to have at least one, if not many, problems that have never been solved
before.
Once again, I disagree with this. There are very few problems that I come
across now that I didn't see 20 years ago.
Granted that the tools have evolved and changed a bit over those years,
but the problems are the same.
A better comparison would be designing a city, or perhaps a high-rise office
building or manufacturing plant, and even that only compares with modest-sized
software projects.
At this point I have to question your knowledge of modern high-rise
building architectural design. Being acquainted
with two people that do this type of work for a living, I can attest that a 40
story building is probably much more complex than all but a few software
designs. One of the major differences is
that the architectural firm will have dozens or even hundreds of persons
working on the design of a building, but there is one person that has to OK
everything. I mean everything. Even something as petty as the color of the
bricks used in the facade. That person
is the lead architect. There are people
designing plumbing, electrical, heating/cooling, as well as doing building code
adherence, and the list goes on, but they must all be OK'd by the lead before
they become part of the finished design.
Notice we haven't even started building the damn thing?
Now that we start building the thing, you have contractors
that must adhere to the design. This includes
things like materials spec adherence and much, much more. If the design calls for a certain grade of
bolt, you can't just use what you have lying around. As it's being built the architect inspects
things, as well as, the building inspectors for the different government jurisdictions. If it doesn't meet their requirements, it
gets ripped out and re-done. Once it's
done, the lead still has to sign off that it was built to the, usually slightly
modified, design. Now you can get your occupancy
inspection to use the damn thing.
So, what did all of this get you? I mean it was a pain in the butt having to
have this architect waste all your money with his huge staff just to design
your building, then he was allowed to push your contractors around. So what DID you get for all this? A building that won't fall down under most
circumstances. Oh, did I mention that in
most places you are required by law to use a certified architectural firm for your
design, and that if there are problems with the building the lead architect can
be held civilly and criminally liable for problems?
After all, most houses have only one architect for the overall design and a
handful of specialists designing subsystems like the electrical layout. Most
modern good-sized software projects have a lot more people contributing to the
overall design.
And no one in charge of making sure it works. We need the equivalent of "lead architects"
for development projects.
Take your last sentence and scrap the rest. Coal and oil are simply energy that was "stored" before people were around. When you burn your coal, you are not creating energy, as I see you understand from that last line you wrote, but simply "unstoring" it. Gasoline is simply a way for me to have energy at hand when my car needs it while zipping down the road at 80MPH. Whether I store the energy myself in a battery, or a giant fern did it for me 120 million years ago doesn't matter. Hell the fern was even less efficient at storing the energy than I was with my battery. By orders of magnitude.
All that matters to me is that I have the energy I need, at the time I need, where I need it.
One of the main differences is that patents have something resembling realistic expiration terms. 20 years from application, the last I remember seeing. That means that IBM, or Microsoft, or whomever can only monopolize the information for 20 years, then anyone can use it to produce an item. That means that if I invent something at 30 that pays well, and I want to continue getting income after I turn 50, I need to invent something new. Thus adding to society. If I write a book or song, my grandchildren will still make money off it with them making no contribution to society. That's the problem as I see it.
Yes, yes. We understand that very few people "get it" unless they either have the joke explained to them, or have the fact that it is supposed to be humerous telegraphed.
Having a joke rely on the fact that 1. the reader at least quick scanned the backing material(the article) and that 2. they must actually THINK for a moment must not be allowed. If we require that then the terrorists have already won.
(Notice there's no smiley? That means this is an attempt at droll sarcasm. It is an aquired taste in humor, and will most likely be modded as troll or flamebait. Since I have commited the sin of "explaining the joke" I am now going to hell. Thanks!)
Oops, So sorry. Forgive me oh great and powerful spelling NAZI. I shall write "illegal" 1000 time to make up for that terrible oversight. Feel better now? Bet you knew what I meant though.:)
That's because you left out a word between "a" and "monopoly" in the last sentence. That word is illegle. Patents are LEGAL mopolies issued for limited periods of time. They used to have requirements like "no prior art" and "spark of genius", but they don't apply them any more as far as I can tell. I fully agree that being able to patent things like naturaly occuring nucleic acid sequences and math equations is nuts. At least the period is only 20 years, so others can utilize them before the heat death of the universe unlike copyrights.
No. It's funny if you DO have a bit of network knowledge. The first IP is loopback, and unless poorly implemented on a system, it never even leaves the stack. The second is at best a machine on your local segment since it is not routable, or at worst your own machine. This means that you're either attackinmg friends and coworkers, yourself, or the bit bucket in your router.;)
Well, I've just killed the funny by explaining the joke. Damn, now I'm going to hell.
Umm, they dispatch law enforcement to investigate, they discover it was a false alarm, and life moves on? Do a little checking about how many times over the years police have been dispatched to 911 calls where there was no response from the caller to the query about the nature of the emergency, only to find out the family pet has knocked the phone off the desk and the emergency autodial button did it's job.
False alarms are annoying, but that ease of use was importatnt when my friends mother fell. She hit her head and injured herself very severly. It took her several pain filled disoriented hours to drag herself across two rooms to the phone. When she got there she could not focus enough to dial three little numbers, but she recognized the picture of an ambulance on a button.
Cool, but then how does one of Bill Gates foundations own copyrights to so many digital representations of public domain works of art? Why do people have to pay to use photographs of items like the "Mona Lisa"? I have no idea what the quote that you used is actually saying since I haven't seen the ruling, but "spark of originality" is not a criterion of copyright. It probably has to do with the "slavish reproduction" meaning that there was no new content, therefore nothing to copyright. All they would need to do to add content to the images would be to have the image with a NYPL logo background, and viola. The image of the PD work aginst a NYPL background is something new they created, and is therefore elegible for copyright. This is why you can put PD content in films and photographs, and not somehow have the new item instantly become PD. If you have additional cites or pointers to additional information, I would really appreciate looking at it.
The original sources are most likely public domain, but the digital images that the library system made are copyrighted. They even have a licensing department that you can contact if you want to use the hi-resoloution images.
Last I checked, my PINs are by card. My PIN and my wifes PIN are different, but access the same accounts. At least for my financial institution, the pin is stored on the card, but in tripple DES encryption. When I perform a transaction, the pin I enter, and the encrypted PIN are both sent to my bank, which encrypts the PIN I enter with thier key, and compares them. No matchee, no money. When I changed my PIN a few years back, they punched my account data into a terminal, I put in the pin I wanted, and then swipped the card. When I walked back to the loby, my card worked with the new PIN, no problem.
From the article... "The flagship product, Nanosolar SolarPly, is a 14 feet x 10 feet solar electricity module delivering 120 watts per square inch at 110V."
Cool. That's 2.4 megawatt a sheet. Damn, I need some of those.;)
Really? Gee, that never occured to me.;) Sorry for the sarcasm, couldn't resist.
I'm waiting for governments to start having "Tax Auctions" annually. Basicly, the government would put all properties in an area on the block, and whoever agrees to pay the most in property taxes can get the properties through eminient domain for what the government decides should be the "just compensation." They would post the "just compensation" prices before the auction just like they do for existing taxation purposes.
Gods, I hope I didn't just give some asswipe politician an idea.
Um, excuse me, but as anyone can tell you, the universe revolves around ME! Therefore the sun is going around me really fast, not the other way around.
Sheesh.
Vendela, Kate, Tyra, feed me more peeled grapes while you finish my massage.
Probably not a lot more than are daily inconvienienced by poorly functioning mag stripe readers. That said, I don't think I will be trying the scanners anytime soon.
Slashdot Mirror
No the "theory" as you call it is true. If you have a deed, you own the property. Very simple. It's been upheld in the courts multiple times. What he was describing was eminent domain siezures for specious reasons, which I believe this ruling solidifies even if the majority make mouth noises to the contrary. What you describe is something totally different. As a citizen of the U.S. I have an obligation to pay for my share of the government. This is done through taxes of different types. What you are talking about is the government siezing your property do to non-payment of taxes. That has nothing to do with eminent domain.
Shhh. Don't make them think. It gives them a headache.
Obviously you've never seen me web surf. ;) Two or three instances of firefox open with multiple tabs each. Memory use maxed, harddrive clacking away...
Building software is NOT like designing a house.
Right so far. They are not alike.
The problem of designing a house is, by and large, a solved problem. Sure, there are requirements like soil structures, energy efficiency, and building codes, but by and large a given house has few if any "new" problems, and the combination of problems to solve isn't huge.
OK. Here is where we begin to diverge. While I agree that there are not very many new problems that need solving in designing and building a house, I also don't think there are many new challenges in most software projects.
Designing software is much more complex and a software designer or team is likely to have at least one, if not many, problems that have never been solved before.
Once again, I disagree with this. There are very few problems that I come across now that I didn't see 20 years ago. Granted that the tools have evolved and changed a bit over those years, but the problems are the same.
A better comparison would be designing a city, or perhaps a high-rise office building or manufacturing plant, and even that only compares with modest-sized software projects.
At this point I have to question your knowledge of modern high-rise building architectural design. Being acquainted with two people that do this type of work for a living, I can attest that a 40 story building is probably much more complex than all but a few software designs. One of the major differences is that the architectural firm will have dozens or even hundreds of persons working on the design of a building, but there is one person that has to OK everything. I mean everything. Even something as petty as the color of the bricks used in the facade. That person is the lead architect. There are people designing plumbing, electrical, heating/cooling, as well as doing building code adherence, and the list goes on, but they must all be OK'd by the lead before they become part of the finished design. Notice we haven't even started building the damn thing?
Now that we start building the thing, you have contractors that must adhere to the design. This includes things like materials spec adherence and much, much more. If the design calls for a certain grade of bolt, you can't just use what you have lying around. As it's being built the architect inspects things, as well as, the building inspectors for the different government jurisdictions. If it doesn't meet their requirements, it gets ripped out and re-done. Once it's done, the lead still has to sign off that it was built to the, usually slightly modified, design. Now you can get your occupancy inspection to use the damn thing.
So, what did all of this get you? I mean it was a pain in the butt having to have this architect waste all your money with his huge staff just to design your building, then he was allowed to push your contractors around. So what DID you get for all this? A building that won't fall down under most circumstances. Oh, did I mention that in most places you are required by law to use a certified architectural firm for your design, and that if there are problems with the building the lead architect can be held civilly and criminally liable for problems?
After all, most houses have only one architect for the overall design and a handful of specialists designing subsystems like the electrical layout. Most modern good-sized software projects have a lot more people contributing to the overall design.
And no one in charge of making sure it works. We need the equivalent of "lead architects" for development projects.
Take your last sentence and scrap the rest. Coal and oil are simply energy that was "stored" before people were around. When you burn your coal, you are not creating energy, as I see you understand from that last line you wrote, but simply "unstoring" it. Gasoline is simply a way for me to have energy at hand when my car needs it while zipping down the road at 80MPH. Whether I store the energy myself in a battery, or a giant fern did it for me 120 million years ago doesn't matter. Hell the fern was even less efficient at storing the energy than I was with my battery. By orders of magnitude.
All that matters to me is that I have the energy I need, at the time I need, where I need it.
One of the main differences is that patents have something resembling realistic expiration terms. 20 years from application, the last I remember seeing. That means that IBM, or Microsoft, or whomever can only monopolize the information for 20 years, then anyone can use it to produce an item. That means that if I invent something at 30 that pays well, and I want to continue getting income after I turn 50, I need to invent something new. Thus adding to society. If I write a book or song, my grandchildren will still make money off it with them making no contribution to society. That's the problem as I see it.
3 words ... Ham Radio Operators ... ... will be rounded up for the safety of the human race.
Hey, only two thing ever came out of U.C. Berkeley. LSD and BSD. Do I have to draw you a picture?!?!
Yes, yes. We understand that very few people "get it" unless they either have the joke explained to them, or have the fact that it is supposed to be humerous telegraphed.
Having a joke rely on the fact that 1. the reader at least quick scanned the backing material(the article) and that 2. they must actually THINK for a moment must not be allowed. If we require that then the terrorists have already won.
(Notice there's no smiley? That means this is an attempt at droll sarcasm. It is an aquired taste in humor, and will most likely be modded as troll or flamebait. Since I have commited the sin of "explaining the joke" I am now going to hell. Thanks!)
Oops, So sorry. Forgive me oh great and powerful spelling NAZI. I shall write "illegal" 1000 time to make up for that terrible oversight. Feel better now? Bet you knew what I meant though. :)
That's because you left out a word between "a" and "monopoly" in the last sentence. That word is illegle. Patents are LEGAL mopolies issued for limited periods of time. They used to have requirements like "no prior art" and "spark of genius", but they don't apply them any more as far as I can tell. I fully agree that being able to patent things like naturaly occuring nucleic acid sequences and math equations is nuts. At least the period is only 20 years, so others can utilize them before the heat death of the universe unlike copyrights.
No. It's funny if you DO have a bit of network knowledge. The first IP is loopback, and unless poorly implemented on a system, it never even leaves the stack. The second is at best a machine on your local segment since it is not routable, or at worst your own machine. This means that you're either attackinmg friends and coworkers, yourself, or the bit bucket in your router. ;)
Well, I've just killed the funny by explaining the joke. Damn, now I'm going to hell.
And when your dog hits it?!?!
Umm, they dispatch law enforcement to investigate, they discover it was a false alarm, and life moves on? Do a little checking about how many times over the years police have been dispatched to 911 calls where there was no response from the caller to the query about the nature of the emergency, only to find out the family pet has knocked the phone off the desk and the emergency autodial button did it's job.
False alarms are annoying, but that ease of use was importatnt when my friends mother fell. She hit her head and injured herself very severly. It took her several pain filled disoriented hours to drag herself across two rooms to the phone. When she got there she could not focus enough to dial three little numbers, but she recognized the picture of an ambulance on a button.
Big Brother is watching you. ;)
Come get some.
Yes!
Cool, but then how does one of Bill Gates foundations own copyrights to so many digital representations of public domain works of art? Why do people have to pay to use photographs of items like the "Mona Lisa"? I have no idea what the quote that you used is actually saying since I haven't seen the ruling, but "spark of originality" is not a criterion of copyright. It probably has to do with the "slavish reproduction" meaning that there was no new content, therefore nothing to copyright. All they would need to do to add content to the images would be to have the image with a NYPL logo background, and viola. The image of the PD work aginst a NYPL background is something new they created, and is therefore elegible for copyright. This is why you can put PD content in films and photographs, and not somehow have the new item instantly become PD. If you have additional cites or pointers to additional information, I would really appreciate looking at it.
The original sources are most likely public domain, but the digital images that the library system made are copyrighted. They even have a licensing department that you can contact if you want to use the hi-resoloution images.
Last I checked, my PINs are by card. My PIN and my wifes PIN are different, but access the same accounts. At least for my financial institution, the pin is stored on the card, but in tripple DES encryption. When I perform a transaction, the pin I enter, and the encrypted PIN are both sent to my bank, which encrypts the PIN I enter with thier key, and compares them. No matchee, no money. When I changed my PIN a few years back, they punched my account data into a terminal, I put in the pin I wanted, and then swipped the card. When I walked back to the loby, my card worked with the new PIN, no problem.
From the article... "The flagship product, Nanosolar SolarPly, is a 14 feet x 10 feet solar electricity module delivering 120 watts per square inch at 110V."
;)
Cool. That's 2.4 megawatt a sheet. Damn, I need some of those.
Really? Gee, that never occured to me.
I'm waiting for governments to start having "Tax Auctions" annually. Basicly, the government would put all properties in an area on the block, and whoever agrees to pay the most in property taxes can get the properties through eminient domain for what the government decides should be the "just compensation." They would post the "just compensation" prices before the auction just like they do for existing taxation purposes.
Gods, I hope I didn't just give some asswipe politician an idea.
Um, excuse me, but as anyone can tell you, the universe revolves around ME! Therefore the sun is going around me really fast, not the other way around.
Sheesh.
Vendela, Kate, Tyra, feed me more peeled grapes while you finish my massage.
Probably not a lot more than are daily inconvienienced by poorly functioning mag stripe readers. That said, I don't think I will be trying the scanners anytime soon.
NIMH? National Institutes of Mental Health funds stem cell research? Umm, do you mean NIH? National Institutes of Health.
Here is the NIH stem cell policy page for anyone interested.
http://www.ninds.nih.gov/funding/research/stem_cel l/
SpaceWEP?