So... what particular patent is IBM scared shitless of? Who are they trying to fool into accepting this, and why? The article isn't very clear about the mechanics of the agreement... Can it be abused beyond the scope of open source software? Say, a hardware company uses some of OIN's patents, can IBM then use any of the hardware company's patents?
My last year of college, I took a Drug and Alcohol Abuse class. It pretty much told us that pot is no worse than alcohol, etc. HOWEVER, an interesting statistic was that most car accidents involve THC in some way (whether combined with other substances or not).
Obviously, more of the USA is toking than we are lead to believe.
They're charging so as to not look anticompetitive. They didn't charge for IE, and destroyed the browser market. They didn't charge for WMP, and destroyed the media player market.
I see them charging as actually being *friendly* to the competition.
There's just so much new crazy stuff in C# 3.0 compared to 1.0. A lot of the features seem like cool ideas, at first glance, but I think I'd get annoyed after awhile with the versatility.
For me, C# 1.0 was a more perfect version of C++. Now it's just getting weird. I'd say Microsoft is trying to push a new programming paradigm into the mainstream by introducing these functional language features.
Having too many easy methods of doing something in a language makes a programmer less effective.
For example, 40 different ways to create an array/collection is just going to slow a programmer down, trying to find the best way of doing something. Maybe some programmers don't care and pick one regardless of its merits, but when I'm faced with several ways to go about something that all seem equally appealing, I get writer's block.
That's why I like C and PHP3. The languages are somewhat inherently limited, so they don't make you go nuts trying to find the best solution. In PHP you only have one real way to store arrays - a hash. In C, you don't have to worry about defining class interfaces and making them comprehensive and perfect because there are no classes.
You have several ways of using pre-written methods in C# 3.0, which is completely amazing.. until you have to write your own method and decide whether you want it to be an Extension Method or inside an Interface/abstract class/class, and then static or instance, virtual or abstract, property or get/set, etc etc. Other languages implicitly restrict you to only a couple options.
I like having a language that dictates its own coding conventions so that I don't have to figure out which way of doing something is 'more correct'. Maybe I'm nuts. Don't get me wrong, I love C#, but adding more flexibility will drive me up the wall.
Most WMV files that I play on linux are poor at seeking, whereas they don't have that problem in windows. I can't stand that so I usually just delete them.
Also, your argument about it being easiest to use in linux is crazy. Maybe you aren't using a good enough distro, but WMV was the only format I had to work for. All my AVI files, which are hodgepodges of different codecs, work fine. Hard drive space is cheap enough, I don't care about the benefits WMV brings. As far as I'm concerned, XviD + ogg are golden. I have less codec problems in linux than I ever did in windows.
I installed WMV, Real, and QuickTime codecs all at the same time, and they all work, just by throwing some DLLs around. I haven't tested streaming all that much, but I honestly don't care since streamed stuff is not worth the hassle.
Are you some Microsoft mole, trying to convert everyone to that crippled WMV format?
No, that's a precursor to LSD called LSA. Morning glory seeds contain this precursor as well. Look it up at http://www.erowid.org/ - the best drug information resource online.
Apparently, it's damn near impossible to make LSD properly because of all the equipment required.
Wow. I "went to a really crappy college" since I didn't learn anything. However, my college's computer science program is consistently ranked as one of the top 10 CS programs in the United States.
Let's just face the facts- most people are incompetent idiots, and all institutions are designed around this fact.
This means that half of your "computer gurus" with computer science degrees are just World of Warcraft/Halo playing buffoons who thought "I like computer games. I think I'll get a computer science degree."
It's in the workplace where reality sets in and those who really have knowledge can shine and be rewarded. You just have to find the right employer.
A human is someone that an existing human can relate to. I think this is a good definition.
You could put Hitler and a Jew in a room together, get them to laugh at the same jokes, and they'd consider each other human. You can't put an embryo and a human in a room together and expect them to relate any more than a human and a frog.
Furthermore, when you boil down the traits of a person between nature and nurture, we tend to be more forgiving toward unchangeable, genetic characteristics and judge more upon learned characteristics. An embryo has nothing to judge, therefore it means nothing to us. A human is someone we can judge.
If you don't accept this logic, look at how we treat children vs adults in the eyes of the law. The older you get, the more responsible for your own actions you are, and the more rights you have. We judge people based on the characteristics they learn, or have not corrected through learning. We give children extra chances when it comes to crime. For some reason, they aren't considered fully human when it comes to the inalienable right to vote.
An embryo is just a stage to the creation of a human being. Is it horrible to kill one? Sure, just as horrible as it is to slaughter cattle, chickens, and other farm animals for food. In fact, carrots and potatoes are killed, too, during harvesting. Pro-life... pro-life is a misnomer. People are going to abort babies and eat steak and mashed potatoes no matter what craziness ensues.
So there's your debate. Boo hoo, "it could have been a kid". Well, then every guy who masterbates is guilty, and so are the girls who let their eggs go to waste every month. Oh, one gamete is not a life but two together is? Get with the program. There are MILLIONS of people using birth control RIGHT NOW and there's not a thing you can do about it. "But... they could be having kids!!!" OH JOY, more brats to make noise in movie theaters.
And on a side note, people who have funerals for miscarriages are retarded.
I wholeheartedly agree with this comment, but I'm going to play devil's advocate anyway, because I think there might be a valid argument other than "God says this is wrong."
As a nation becomes more fragmented by differing moralities, it's harder for everybody to interact together in a peaceful manner. That's why there are some moral rules to keep people loosely in-line and on the same playing field, such as only being able to marry one person.
The more 'deviant' people are allowed to be in mainstream society, the more the 'moral' people will make noise and seclude themselves. There will be more hate and fragmentation of the society. Therefore, the government mustn't totally alienate either side of any particular issue.
With all this talk of DSL vs Cable, howcome my cable bill is still like $80/month for sub-par service?
I use maybe 3 channels of cable, and that part of the bill costs 50 bucks! Not to mention, they block my service internet ports and ask me to pay bajillions for a business account to run a personal website.
The DSL around here sucks. The cable around here sucks. Satellite isn't an option because I want 99% reliable internet.
I don't want a land-line. I don't want any web-portal, pop-up blocker tools, tech support, or whatever whiz-bang features ISPs use these days. I don't want 77 of my ~90 TV channels.
I am so fucking tired of these communications companies and their monopolies. I am in a state capitol, a fairly big city. For godsake, I should have better service than they offer. If I lived in the boonies, I would be glad to have internet access at all, but that is not the case.
This is incredibly unfair to consumers. I have no choice but to pay either SBC, Charter, or DirecTV for broadband internet access. I don't want to fund any of those bastards!
Yeah, a little off-topic perhaps, but I need to vent.
There is no genetic diversity once a 'breed' is established, I would imagine. They are bred to have the same physical and mental attributes each and every generation. They are bred to be the same as they have been established, which means no more diverging from the main K-9 line.
On a side note, this sort of in-breeding and gene stagnation has negative evolutionary consequences. Although the dog might be 'fit' to reproduce now since humans do the selecting and breeding, it is less and less fit to survive. For example, bull dogs are starting to have heads that are too large for them to even lift. Daschunds have extremely long backs that easily have problems. Cocker spaniels have ear infections because of their long ears. Most major breeds have bad allergy problems as well. Mutts are usually healthier animals since there is more genetic diversity, but nobody wants a mutt.
I forgot what the evolutionary term is, but there is a certain point when a limited population becomes extremely dangerous for the survival of a species. Apparently the cheetahs just got by after we pruned off most of them. You need a fairly large gene pool to get a new species. This in-breeding thing is pretty dangerous.
The same thing is happening with all of our domesticated fruits and vegetables. Bananas are more and more susceptable to fungi and other pests. I read an article a few years ago about how bananas as we know them will eventually become extinct.
Which brings us to an even more interesting question: how is selective breeding and modern medicine degenerating the human gene pool? Are we going to be muscle-less blobs that can't survive without robots? Are we going to be so stupid that we need computers to run our lives? Or is that only going to be the Slashdot population, and the 'beautiful' people will become more cosmetically disfigured by gigangic breasts and other such desired features? Is that how human women got such big titties in the first place, at least in certain lineages?
Wouldn't an eccentric design like a donut have negative latency implications, with the components being farther apart and more spread out in order to make way for cooling?
There is absolutely no discernable difference between XP Home and XP Professional. Both look like children's toys, with the stupid dog when you go to search for files. Look, it's supposed to be "professional." Obviously, it's not. On top of all the extra "features" you have to turn off to get things done, you have even more useless garbage protected by "Windows File Protection."
Professional should mean that it's extremely and easily configurable, basic, and powerful.
Windows 2000 was professional - a step in the right direction. Windows 2003 is professional, too, but it costs multiples more than XP Pro since it's bundled with the server applications.
Just like you, I wanted my programs and data separated on Windows, too. I also wanted Windows File Protection disabled, Outlook Express deleted, and a variety of other normal requests that a 'professional' or 'power user' would want.
Well, I got my separate partitions eventually with a lot of ghetto-rigging, and I got my command line by downloading GNU utilities, and I got other things fixed by searching out a variety of hacks and tweaks. So about the third time I had to set that all up from scratch, I decided it was time to switch to Linux, since my Windows was set up like Unix anyway. If you can't get things done with Debian, at least you have a ton of other Linux options (including from scratch). Don't give up! I promise your Linux experiences can only get better the more you explore. The more I explored Windows, I only got annoyed at what I couldn't do, configure, or turn off.
Slashdot Mirror
In other news, Kansas scientists are calling for an adjustment of -100 years.
So... what particular patent is IBM scared shitless of?
Who are they trying to fool into accepting this, and why?
The article isn't very clear about the mechanics of the agreement...
Can it be abused beyond the scope of open source software? Say, a hardware company uses some of OIN's patents, can IBM then use any of the hardware company's patents?
My last year of college, I took a Drug and Alcohol Abuse class. It pretty much told us that pot is no worse than alcohol, etc. HOWEVER, an interesting statistic was that most car accidents involve THC in some way (whether combined with other substances or not).
Obviously, more of the USA is toking than we are lead to believe.
Wow, "crackpot McCain and worthless Feingold."
You must like bland, party-line politicians.
The fact that most of the internet infrastructure is in ASCII, I believe, speaks for itself.
Domain names
C code
HTML
American Standard Code for Information Interchange
That means only Americans should be using the internet.
They're charging so as to not look anticompetitive.
They didn't charge for IE, and destroyed the browser market.
They didn't charge for WMP, and destroyed the media player market.
I see them charging as actually being *friendly* to the competition.
For being so technologically behind, he sure knows how to use a blog and pollute the internet with his opinions.
Ok, so he's complaining about new tech fads... on his blog. Does anyone else find this inconsistent?
There's just so much new crazy stuff in C# 3.0 compared to 1.0. A lot of the features seem like cool ideas, at first glance, but I think I'd get annoyed after awhile with the versatility.
For me, C# 1.0 was a more perfect version of C++. Now it's just getting weird. I'd say Microsoft is trying to push a new programming paradigm into the mainstream by introducing these functional language features.
Having too many easy methods of doing something in a language makes a programmer less effective.
For example, 40 different ways to create an array/collection is just going to slow a programmer down, trying to find the best way of doing something. Maybe some programmers don't care and pick one regardless of its merits, but when I'm faced with several ways to go about something that all seem equally appealing, I get writer's block.
That's why I like C and PHP3. The languages are somewhat inherently limited, so they don't make you go nuts trying to find the best solution. In PHP you only have one real way to store arrays - a hash. In C, you don't have to worry about defining class interfaces and making them comprehensive and perfect because there are no classes.
You have several ways of using pre-written methods in C# 3.0, which is completely amazing.. until you have to write your own method and decide whether you want it to be an Extension Method or inside an Interface/abstract class/class, and then static or instance, virtual or abstract, property or get/set, etc etc. Other languages implicitly restrict you to only a couple options.
I like having a language that dictates its own coding conventions so that I don't have to figure out which way of doing something is 'more correct'. Maybe I'm nuts. Don't get me wrong, I love C#, but adding more flexibility will drive me up the wall.
That made me laugh. I wish I had mod points.
I wore a hole in my spacebar once, from normal usage.
Most WMV files that I play on linux are poor at seeking, whereas they don't have that problem in windows. I can't stand that so I usually just delete them.
Also, your argument about it being easiest to use in linux is crazy. Maybe you aren't using a good enough distro, but WMV was the only format I had to work for. All my AVI files, which are hodgepodges of different codecs, work fine. Hard drive space is cheap enough, I don't care about the benefits WMV brings. As far as I'm concerned, XviD + ogg are golden. I have less codec problems in linux than I ever did in windows.
I installed WMV, Real, and QuickTime codecs all at the same time, and they all work, just by throwing some DLLs around. I haven't tested streaming all that much, but I honestly don't care since streamed stuff is not worth the hassle.
Are you some Microsoft mole, trying to convert everyone to that crippled WMV format?
No, that's a precursor to LSD called LSA. Morning glory seeds contain this precursor as well. Look it up at http://www.erowid.org/ - the best drug information resource online.
Apparently, it's damn near impossible to make LSD properly because of all the equipment required.
Wow. I "went to a really crappy college" since I didn't learn anything. However, my college's computer science program is consistently ranked as one of the top 10 CS programs in the United States.
Let's just face the facts- most people are incompetent idiots, and all institutions are designed around this fact.
This means that half of your "computer gurus" with computer science degrees are just World of Warcraft/Halo playing buffoons who thought "I like computer games. I think I'll get a computer science degree."
It's in the workplace where reality sets in and those who really have knowledge can shine and be rewarded. You just have to find the right employer.
With the rising price of gasoline, music companies must charge more for their products in order to make up for increased shipping costs.
Oh, wait. Nevermind. Yeah, they're just jerks.
A human is someone that an existing human can relate to. I think this is a good definition.
You could put Hitler and a Jew in a room together, get them to laugh at the same jokes, and they'd consider each other human. You can't put an embryo and a human in a room together and expect them to relate any more than a human and a frog.
Furthermore, when you boil down the traits of a person between nature and nurture, we tend to be more forgiving toward unchangeable, genetic characteristics and judge more upon learned characteristics. An embryo has nothing to judge, therefore it means nothing to us. A human is someone we can judge.
If you don't accept this logic, look at how we treat children vs adults in the eyes of the law. The older you get, the more responsible for your own actions you are, and the more rights you have. We judge people based on the characteristics they learn, or have not corrected through learning. We give children extra chances when it comes to crime. For some reason, they aren't considered fully human when it comes to the inalienable right to vote.
An embryo is just a stage to the creation of a human being. Is it horrible to kill one? Sure, just as horrible as it is to slaughter cattle, chickens, and other farm animals for food. In fact, carrots and potatoes are killed, too, during harvesting. Pro-life... pro-life is a misnomer. People are going to abort babies and eat steak and mashed potatoes no matter what craziness ensues.
So there's your debate. Boo hoo, "it could have been a kid". Well, then every guy who masterbates is guilty, and so are the girls who let their eggs go to waste every month. Oh, one gamete is not a life but two together is? Get with the program. There are MILLIONS of people using birth control RIGHT NOW and there's not a thing you can do about it. "But... they could be having kids!!!" OH JOY, more brats to make noise in movie theaters.
And on a side note, people who have funerals for miscarriages are retarded.
Masturbating really does make you blind, so long as you do it to porn!
Wow, it took me awhile to realize this wasn't a story about patents. I'm so used to seeing patent stories!
Oh shit. The next generation of blogs will be home-made reality tv.
HELP
I wholeheartedly agree with this comment, but I'm going to play devil's advocate anyway, because I think there might be a valid argument other than "God says this is wrong."
As a nation becomes more fragmented by differing moralities, it's harder for everybody to interact together in a peaceful manner. That's why there are some moral rules to keep people loosely in-line and on the same playing field, such as only being able to marry one person.
The more 'deviant' people are allowed to be in mainstream society, the more the 'moral' people will make noise and seclude themselves. There will be more hate and fragmentation of the society. Therefore, the government mustn't totally alienate either side of any particular issue.
With all this talk of DSL vs Cable, howcome my cable bill is still like $80/month for sub-par service?
I use maybe 3 channels of cable, and that part of the bill costs 50 bucks! Not to mention, they block my service internet ports and ask me to pay bajillions for a business account to run a personal website.
The DSL around here sucks. The cable around here sucks. Satellite isn't an option because I want 99% reliable internet.
I don't want a land-line. I don't want any web-portal, pop-up blocker tools, tech support, or whatever whiz-bang features ISPs use these days. I don't want 77 of my ~90 TV channels.
I am so fucking tired of these communications companies and their monopolies. I am in a state capitol, a fairly big city. For godsake, I should have better service than they offer. If I lived in the boonies, I would be glad to have internet access at all, but that is not the case.
This is incredibly unfair to consumers. I have no choice but to pay either SBC, Charter, or DirecTV for broadband internet access. I don't want to fund any of those bastards!
Yeah, a little off-topic perhaps, but I need to vent.
Um... just dump the marines in California and tell them that it's some strange, far-off land full of dangerous terrorists.
There is no genetic diversity once a 'breed' is established, I would imagine. They are bred to have the same physical and mental attributes each and every generation. They are bred to be the same as they have been established, which means no more diverging from the main K-9 line.
On a side note, this sort of in-breeding and gene stagnation has negative evolutionary consequences. Although the dog might be 'fit' to reproduce now since humans do the selecting and breeding, it is less and less fit to survive. For example, bull dogs are starting to have heads that are too large for them to even lift. Daschunds have extremely long backs that easily have problems. Cocker spaniels have ear infections because of their long ears. Most major breeds have bad allergy problems as well. Mutts are usually healthier animals since there is more genetic diversity, but nobody wants a mutt.
I forgot what the evolutionary term is, but there is a certain point when a limited population becomes extremely dangerous for the survival of a species. Apparently the cheetahs just got by after we pruned off most of them. You need a fairly large gene pool to get a new species. This in-breeding thing is pretty dangerous.
The same thing is happening with all of our domesticated fruits and vegetables. Bananas are more and more susceptable to fungi and other pests. I read an article a few years ago about how bananas as we know them will eventually become extinct.
Which brings us to an even more interesting question: how is selective breeding and modern medicine degenerating the human gene pool? Are we going to be muscle-less blobs that can't survive without robots? Are we going to be so stupid that we need computers to run our lives? Or is that only going to be the Slashdot population, and the 'beautiful' people will become more cosmetically disfigured by gigangic breasts and other such desired features? Is that how human women got such big titties in the first place, at least in certain lineages?
Wouldn't an eccentric design like a donut have negative latency implications, with the components being farther apart and more spread out in order to make way for cooling?
I was wondering that too... but then I started thinking about the effects of being able to put a heat sink on all surfaces of the chip.
I mean, isn't that just as good, if not better? Or is there something I'm missing?
There is absolutely no discernable difference between XP Home and XP Professional. Both look like children's toys, with the stupid dog when you go to search for files. Look, it's supposed to be "professional." Obviously, it's not. On top of all the extra "features" you have to turn off to get things done, you have even more useless garbage protected by "Windows File Protection."
Professional should mean that it's extremely and easily configurable, basic, and powerful.
Windows 2000 was professional - a step in the right direction. Windows 2003 is professional, too, but it costs multiples more than XP Pro since it's bundled with the server applications.
Just like you, I wanted my programs and data separated on Windows, too. I also wanted Windows File Protection disabled, Outlook Express deleted, and a variety of other normal requests that a 'professional' or 'power user' would want.
Well, I got my separate partitions eventually with a lot of ghetto-rigging, and I got my command line by downloading GNU utilities, and I got other things fixed by searching out a variety of hacks and tweaks. So about the third time I had to set that all up from scratch, I decided it was time to switch to Linux, since my Windows was set up like Unix anyway. If you can't get things done with Debian, at least you have a ton of other Linux options (including from scratch). Don't give up! I promise your Linux experiences can only get better the more you explore. The more I explored Windows, I only got annoyed at what I couldn't do, configure, or turn off.