There's also opportunity costs that an "inventator" can claim. The claim would be that the "inventor" is losing money, because the "invention" is illegally available for free as open source.
However we twist and turn it, patents are there to get a lock on an idea to make money of said idea. Any way to limit the possibility of making money can be prosecuted. Hence Software patents still are bad.
That's the idea. A controlled society where citizens think they are free... Is perfect (from an elite point of view).
"By turning countries into labour camps, modern slavers who drag as champions of freedom" Bruce Cockburn in "They Call it Democracy"
How often have I heard: "Hey Dude, this is America, you can go everywhere". What a load of trive.
Amongst the "Pledge of Allegiance", "The Land of the Free", "Political Correctnes", and "Patriotism" the ability of critical thoughts is not considered desired or even useful.
This is a frightened country with fearful people, despite all the talk about strength. And this fear is being instrumentalized, and I'm not talking about a few cameras here and there.
M$ is absolutely not interested in strong browser technology. The Internet is bad for Microsoft, it compromises their lock on the desktop. M$ is interested in a bad browser experience so that people - especially enterprise user - revert back to fat clients, of course using Windows.
Just wait a bit, and M$ will have centrally administered applictions that install fat windows clients (just look at longhorn, avalon, etc).
So before we laugh at M$ for not fixing IE bugs, etc... That is their strategy!
That's correct. AFAIK, there is no desire to implement raw partition support. The speed difference is minimal and the required code is large. Basically, you wind up writing a FS and associated buffer management into the database. The return generally is not very high. It used to be, many years ago. These days, filesystem technology and implementations are plenty fast. Those that want raw partition access, IMO, are simply living in the past.
The point of writing directly to the disk has to do with cache management. As it turns out the LRU eviction strategy which makes sense for typical filesystem access to the disk is not at all optimal for database access. If databases access their data through the filesystem at least there should be a way to disable the filesystems caching. The performance gain can be significant.
Compare "Operating System Support for Database Management" Michael Stonebraker, et al.
I remember working for DEC as a student worker. We had one VAX that supported our entire group (VT-XXX terminals using LSE). Today my laptop is more powerful than that VAX.
I also remember when we got an upgrade to the "new" VAX line. The old ones used to be these big washing machine types of machines, we had them in the 3rd floor, and remember waiting up there to see how they get the new washing machines up there. I was waiting for a while with a colleague, when suddenly a technician came in, carrying a little box under his arm. He put the box on the old washing machine, reconnected some cables and left... Leaving me a my friend open-mouthed.
Ha. It's not only speeding either.
I recently rolled over at far less than walking speed over a stop sign at a COMPLETELY EMPTY intersection. Somewhere a cop hid somewhere (apparently he had nothing else to do), and five minutes later I had $150 (!!) ticket.
The funny thing is that I'd had the same ticket if I sped through this stop sign at speed 30.
It's also a great revenue stream for insurances. Didn't anybody else notice that government agencies (and also bigger companies) usually have a hard time to cross link their databases, especially if it would be for your benefit.
Now when there's money to make for them suddenly the insurance autmatically knows about all traffic "offenses", so they can charge more because you are "high risk".
There is a lot of evidence out there that relates the tendency to violence to the lack of premartial sex, or the sexual opression of children.
The author James W. Prescott was employed at the US Public Health Department and layed off five years after he published this document (in 1980), because he wanted to conduct more studies in the area of child abuse and neglect.
I'll probably get flamed to death for this, by people who are not even willing to consider other viewpoints than their own.
Here's the part of the act that defines "harmful to minors"
(6) Material that is harmful to minors.--The term
`material that is harmful to minors' means any communication,
picture, image, graphic image file, article, recording,
writing, or other matter of any kind that is obscene or
that--
(A) the average person, applying contemporary community
standards, would find, taking the material as a whole and
with respect to minors, is designed to appeal to, or is
designed to pander to, the prurient interest;
(B) depicts, describes, or represents, in a manner
patently offensive with respect to minors, an actual or
simulated sexual act or sexual contact, an actual or
simulated normal or perverted sexual act, or a lewd
exhibition of the genitals or post-pubescent female breast;
and
(C) taken as a whole, lacks serious literary, artistic,
political, or scientific value for minors.
Notice that the only specific topic defined is sexual content. The rest can almost be applied to anything.
Where does our obsession with Sex come from? Is it better to present children with violence, death and war?
It's funny that a movie where you can see a Nipple is automatically Rated-R, whereas other movies where 100s of people are killed maybe be rated PG-13 (or whatever). Violence is ok, Sex evil? Please.
Now we're trying to do the same with the internet. No, thank you very much.
To keep routing tables small, most ISP use classless routing. Of course this requires all IP adresses for an ISP have a (hopefully long) common prefix (or at least very few common prefixes).
Moving single IP adresses or small address blocks will break classless routing. Suddenly it is not not enough anymore to look at a prefix to determine the "rough" direction where to route a packet. These special IPs need their own entry in the routing table.
Now if a big corporation like IBM switches ISP that may not be a big deal, the new ISP would just add IBM's prefix to its routing tables.
Individual IPs, however, will literally make the routing algorithms non-scalable.
I agree. The "Winner takes it all" policy naturally leads to a two party system (2-party is the only stable system, every multiparty system will degenerate after a while to the 2-party system if there can be only one winner).
Hence it is no accident that choices are limited, and the political agendas are aligned along the major "fault-lines" of the population.
(I wouldn't say that the US is too democratic, though. The current system has advantages and disadvantages. One advantage is that the elections lead to an administration that can act fast and efficient instead of having to find consent among multiple parties.)
Back to the topic... It is almost impossible to be represented if you want:
be pro-choice, and still the right to bear arms
less military and still less taxes and less government
a more social system and still an overall christian state
Just to name a few (these are not my political views, and you can find more and recombine the topics differently and find more fault-lines, but you get the idea.)
The solution is a multiparty administration or more power to congress. That would at least enable multiple parties as they could form coalitions in order to gain majorities.
Maybe then we'd have a viable christian party, the greens, the military supporters, the conservatives, the libertarians, pro-choice party, you name it, and people can choose what to vote for (and whenever enough people - say 3-5% of the population - have a common goal they can form their own party and participate in political decisions), and their vote is not lost.
How many terrorists are US citizens? Even if they previously they student visas, etc, terrorist groups just have to stay out of the US until right before the attack. There will be no records on them, and hence this does nothing to prevent them from pursuing their actions.
But now there is this huge pool easily accessible information out there, just waiting to be used for other purposes.
Anyway, IMHO there will never be an attack like 9/11 again, because on 9/11 the terrorists relied on the will and hope of the passengers to stay alive. Now, if a plane is hijacked the passengers will have to assume that they will die, hence it will be impossible to control them (what would you threadten them with?) That's what happened to the 4th plane on 9/11 when people on the plane learned about the other attacks via cellphone.
Some bigger companies already changed policy to hand out restricted stock instead of options. I.e. instead of 5000 options, you get 500 (or whatever) restricted stocks that represent immediate value.
Costs the company the same (or more?), but does not have to be accounted for.
And that my friend is exactly why the US won't stay a super power for long.
It happened to the Greeks, the Romans, to some extend the French, the Spaniards, (heck the Germans too). I actually read an article a long time ago in "Scientific America" (I think), putting forth the theory that every super power will eventually vanish, due to complacency and self rightousness and exploitation by a few rich people.
Just look around you, you can already see it. Kids are already overweight at age of six, sitting in front of the TV all day. People watch their "games", cheering their heroic soldiers while drinking beer. Education is declining. People watch nothing but so called "reality" shows. Typically both spouses have to work now in order to keep a lifestyle that could be supported by only one income just a decade ago. Politics are reduced cheap TV shows (infotainment). All political discussion has been reduced to "Democratic or Republican". Etc, etc, etc. The list goes on and on. (All this is of course not limited to the US, but seen in many western countries)
The US maybe be currently the strongest military power on this planet financed by a $480.000.000.000/Year military budget, at the expense of US citizens (and that is excluding current Afghanistan and Iraq war costs). Ironically that does not even seem to be enough to control a little arabic country that has been bled out by over 10 years of economic sanctions. And as violence tends to create more violence, it is not even used to keep the american people safe.
It's all so rediculous, if it wasn't so serious it would be actually funny.
How long are the american people willing to pay for that (at the expense of education, health care, social security, high long term interest rates, etc, etc)? Right now there's some kind of almost blind patriotism that keeps people on the line, but it can't hide the truth forever.
Just look at this number again: $480.000.000.000/Year plus currently $200.000.000.000 for Iraq. Does anybody realize how much money that is? Doesn't anybody else think this money could be better spent then using it to essentially piss of the rest of the population of this planet, and especially Muslims?
In terms of economic output the US is already second in line behind the EU. And BTW George W. was great for the EU, leading to a common mindset to accept less somewhat national independence in order to be able to jointly withstand US interests (at least this is how it is perceived by many).
I could not agree more. It seems to become common standard to sit on a patent until the technology becomes mainstream and cannot be changed or removed anymore. The patent as such may be valid, but that is not point here.
Patent law has to change to provide a maximum timeframe between when an infringement is detected and when legal action is taken.
I was using Slackware from its inception in 1993 (ahhh... I remember downloading a large set of floppy images over night at work from my Ultrix machine, storing the "large" files on my DEC/VMS diskspace). After a long digression over FreeBSD, RedHat, I came back to Slackware last year... I already ordered the CD, not that I couldn't download the iso's but this a great distribution and if I can help to keep it going I'll do so.
Hmm. In the end there is a balance between privacy and security. I don't feel cops on patrol invade my privacy, even though they may oberserve my actions and act if I'm committing a crime. On the other hand I didn't want them to pre-arrest me every now and then, because I may commit a crime. The truth is in the middle.
"If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear" is missing the point, because "fear" refers to possible prosecution. Of course I don't have to fear prosecution if have nothing to hide. But that does not mean that I'm willing to give up my basic right to privacy, just because somebody thinks I may commit a crime at some time. And as I said before, information will be misused, so it is very important to keep a tap on who can collect what information when.
There's an old theory which goes something like this: "Because of the lack of control in democratic societies, laws should drafted such that almost everybody is violating the law sometimes. With sufficient information gathering policies, it is then always possible to apply force to any person".
Laws increasing governments' power will ultimately be abused.
How long before the transmitted information will be used to catch tax-evaders? Be crosslinked with other data to find *potential* criminals (Minority Report anyone)?
The funny thing is that this information won't even help to catch any terrorists. How often can a suicide bomber be caught repeating his crimes? All that terrorist groups have to do is to send previously unknown people.
The only people suffering are average joes going about their lives.
And don't tell me: "If you don't have anything to hide, why bother." If that is the case, than why not install a camera in everybodys home ala 1984... Nothing to hide... No problem... Right?
And this is just the beginning. I remember a few years back an extensive camera system was installed in London, allegedly to find terrorists. Well, now this system is being used to catch speeders, and to track where everybody is going in the city just in case (which is used to collect tolls).
I actually like Mozilla.
On paging operating systems the parts of the executable you don't use are never loaded anyway. And I for one do not see any speed improvements with Firefox as far as page rendering is concerned.
Also if you happen to use the Browser and Email reader (like I do) you're better of using the integrated Mozilla as compared to two executables (Firefox and Thunderbird).
I hope Mozilla continues.
I've burnt a Karma point, have been called an asshole, a dictator, to fuck myself, it was suggested that I be shot (if that would only be allowed in this country), it has been said "words are just words" (than why the big deal?), and nonsense like Germany moves itself closer to Hitler Germany, etc, etc, etc.
So to all who did *not* like to let me express my free speech... Thank you. You have proven my point.
It does not matter whether a government allows freedom of speech or not, if the society you live in does not really enable to exercise this right. Yes, there's no law to prevent freedom of speech, there's no law that prevents SCO from stating that they own Linux. In Germany they got an immediate gag order until they can show proof. Is that a violation of free speech?
And, yes, people have been arrested (for example for claiming in front of the WTC that Bin Laden had nothing to do with the events of 9/11, but - oh - that is sooo different from denying the Holocaust, isn't it?) for trying exercise this right. People have also been arrested because they support terrorist organization. If you're pro-choice you may end up on some hate website suggesting you'd be shot or targeted in other ways... Freedom of speech? Yeah, right!
People are so self righteous in proclaiming how free the US is.
Do you guys know that your schoolbooks are censored by all kinds of groups (left, right, relgious, etc). Yes, the law doesn't mandate anything, but you lose funding for your books, or schools are forbidden by some random boards to use it... This is the worst conceivable limitation of free speech. How about banning teaching of darwinism in some states? Heck even the american bible is censored from topics that aren't "christian".
Believe me, I lived in many countries all over Europe and the US for a long time and the US is the most unfree place of all western countries. On paper it's all fine, in reality it's a load of trive. You can claim and believe whatever you want, it does not change a thing. And... Unless you have lived somewhere else and saw how other people live their lifes, you can make *no* claims whatsoever about how free or unfree they live.
You can't call for killing somebody.
You can't state knowingly wrong "fact" about a presidential candidate without being sued.
You can'd say everything you want on product review pages without risking being sued by the producer (for the negative review).
In Germany you can't say "The Holocaust did not happen".
It's absolutely justified banning public statements like "All jews should be gased" or "All blacks should be hung" or "Our race should be cleansed".
It would, however, be harmful to ban statements like "Based on emperical evidence, *** tend to *** and are more likely to ***".
And you see, I had to leave blanks, because the obsession with political correctness in this country, to the point to of just denying/ignoring fact.
Correct it's not 3D. If it was true 3D you could walk around the scene and view it from different sides, or at least change your angles.
Computer graphics people sometimes call this 2 1/2D. It's also obvious from an information theory viewpoint. The information you need for this 2 1/2D image is only twice then need form simple 2D (one image for each eye). A true 3D representation would require much more information.
That they mentioned the double click does not mean they patented it. They may
have patented the use of the double click when combined with time-based
selection of the application to be launched, but that is FAR from the same
thing. And as far as I know - hasn't been done on any system anyway. Personally
I think it'd be rather unwieldy which probably explains why nobody did it:)
Are you saying that taking two trivial "inventions" and combining them in an obvious way, suddenly makes for a worthy patent?
Like combining:
1. time coded action on a button (real or virtual)
2. using the button a on limited resource device to start an application
Or like:
1. combining a set of sounds to form a melody
2. playing such a melody on cell phone
In related news a new bill has been passed requiring every newborn to be implanted a security chip.
This chip - unpon receipt of proper proof of payment - will unlock the individual's eyes and ears. This is to protect our investment in the patented design of flowers and birds... So that we can continue to innovate and develop new species for your entertainment.
"Nobody can run 100m in less than 10secs, because the human leg is not strong enough". "Albert Einstein could not possibly develope his theory of relativity in such a short amount of time". "Microsoft didn't develop the initial version of Windows, because they only knew how to write Basic code". "Iraq was involved in the events of 9/11 and has WMDs, because all dictators are terrorists". "The moon mission was a fake. The US did not have the technology and money to pull that off". "The Allies could never have won against Germany, because they didn't have enough troups. Hence we all live in a state of hynosis believing the Allies won".
I can even write a book about all this. I can even come up with circumstantial "proof" backing my claim. That does not change facts.
So instead of getting upset just ignore the guy. Nobody takes him seriously anyway.
The only person who knows whether Linus wrote all of the first version of Linux is Linus. We can all claim whatever we want, it doesn't change a bit.
And let me just say this: Everybody with some knowledge in OS theory could write the *first* version of Linux in six months (and this is not to discredit Linus). I remember we wrote a virtual memory management system and filesytem in our OS lecture in 1/2 semesters and that was only one of our projects.
The fact the Brown needed to quote Tannenbaum out of context was enough for me to ignore him.
Slashdot Mirror
There's also opportunity costs that an "inventator" can claim.
The claim would be that the "inventor" is losing money, because the "invention" is illegally available for free as open source.
However we twist and turn it, patents are there to get a lock on an idea to make money of said idea. Any way to limit the possibility of making money can be prosecuted. Hence Software patents still are bad.
"By turning countries into labour camps, modern slavers who drag as champions of freedom" Bruce Cockburn in "They Call it Democracy"
How often have I heard: "Hey Dude, this is America, you can go everywhere". What a load of trive.
Amongst the "Pledge of Allegiance", "The Land of the Free", "Political Correctnes", and "Patriotism" the ability of critical thoughts is not considered desired or even useful.
This is a frightened country with fearful people, despite all the talk about strength. And this fear is being instrumentalized, and I'm not talking about a few cameras here and there.
M$ is absolutely not interested in strong browser technology. The Internet is bad for Microsoft, it compromises their lock on the desktop.
M$ is interested in a bad browser experience so that people - especially enterprise user - revert back to fat clients, of course using Windows.
Just wait a bit, and M$ will have centrally administered applictions that install fat windows clients (just look at longhorn, avalon, etc).
So before we laugh at M$ for not fixing IE bugs, etc... That is their strategy!
The point of writing directly to the disk has to do with cache management. As it turns out the LRU eviction strategy which makes sense for typical filesystem access to the disk is not at all optimal for database access. If databases access their data through the filesystem at least there should be a way to disable the filesystems caching. The performance gain can be significant.
Compare "Operating System Support for Database Management" Michael Stonebraker, et al.
I remember working for DEC as a student worker. We had one VAX that supported our entire group (VT-XXX terminals using LSE). Today my laptop is more powerful than that VAX.
I also remember when we got an upgrade to the "new" VAX line. The old ones used to be these big washing machine types of machines, we had them in the 3rd floor, and remember waiting up there to see how they get the new washing machines up there.
I was waiting for a while with a colleague, when suddenly a technician came in, carrying a little box under his arm. He put the box on the old washing machine, reconnected some cables and left... Leaving me a my friend open-mouthed.
I recently rolled over at far less than walking speed over a stop sign at a COMPLETELY EMPTY intersection. Somewhere a cop hid somewhere (apparently he had nothing else to do), and five minutes later I had $150 (!!) ticket.
The funny thing is that I'd had the same ticket if I sped through this stop sign at speed 30.
It's also a great revenue stream for insurances. Didn't anybody else notice that government agencies (and also bigger companies) usually have a hard time to cross link their databases, especially if it would be for your benefit. Now when there's money to make for them suddenly the insurance autmatically knows about all traffic "offenses", so they can charge more because you are "high risk".
There is a lot of evidence out there that relates the tendency to violence to the lack of premartial sex, or the sexual opression of children.
The author James W. Prescott was employed at the US Public Health Department and layed off five years after he published this document (in 1980), because he wanted to conduct more studies in the area of child abuse and neglect.
I'll probably get flamed to death for this, by people who are not even willing to consider other viewpoints than their own.
(6) Material that is harmful to minors.--The term `material that is harmful to minors' means any communication, picture, image, graphic image file, article, recording, writing, or other matter of any kind that is obscene or that--
(A) the average person, applying contemporary community standards, would find, taking the material as a whole and with respect to minors, is designed to appeal to, or is designed to pander to, the prurient interest;
(B) depicts, describes, or represents, in a manner patently offensive with respect to minors, an actual or simulated sexual act or sexual contact, an actual or simulated normal or perverted sexual act, or a lewd exhibition of the genitals or post-pubescent female breast; and
(C) taken as a whole, lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value for minors.
Notice that the only specific topic defined is sexual content. The rest can almost be applied to anything.
Where does our obsession with Sex come from? Is it better to present children with violence, death and war?
It's funny that a movie where you can see a Nipple is automatically Rated-R, whereas other movies where 100s of people are killed maybe be rated PG-13 (or whatever). Violence is ok, Sex evil? Please.
Now we're trying to do the same with the internet. No, thank you very much.
Moving single IP adresses or small address blocks will break classless routing. Suddenly it is not not enough anymore to look at a prefix to determine the "rough" direction where to route a packet. These special IPs need their own entry in the routing table.
Now if a big corporation like IBM switches ISP that may not be a big deal, the new ISP would just add IBM's prefix to its routing tables.
Individual IPs, however, will literally make the routing algorithms non-scalable.
Hence it is no accident that choices are limited, and the political agendas are aligned along the major "fault-lines" of the population.
(I wouldn't say that the US is too democratic, though. The current system has advantages and disadvantages. One advantage is that the elections lead to an administration that can act fast and efficient instead of having to find consent among multiple parties.)
Back to the topic... It is almost impossible to be represented if you want:
- be pro-choice, and still the right to bear arms
- less military and still less taxes and less government
- a more social system and still an overall christian state
Just to name a few (these are not my political views, and you can find more and recombine the topics differently and find more fault-lines, but you get the idea.)The solution is a multiparty administration or more power to congress. That would at least enable multiple parties as they could form coalitions in order to gain majorities. Maybe then we'd have a viable christian party, the greens, the military supporters, the conservatives, the libertarians, pro-choice party, you name it, and people can choose what to vote for (and whenever enough people - say 3-5% of the population - have a common goal they can form their own party and participate in political decisions), and their vote is not lost.
- These tools/extended rights will be abused.
- They won't help to prevent terrorist attacks.
How many terrorists are US citizens? Even if they previously they student visas, etc, terrorist groups just have to stay out of the US until right before the attack. There will be no records on them, and hence this does nothing to prevent them from pursuing their actions.But now there is this huge pool easily accessible information out there, just waiting to be used for other purposes.
Anyway, IMHO there will never be an attack like 9/11 again, because on 9/11 the terrorists relied on the will and hope of the passengers to stay alive. Now, if a plane is hijacked the passengers will have to assume that they will die, hence it will be impossible to control them (what would you threadten them with?) That's what happened to the 4th plane on 9/11 when people on the plane learned about the other attacks via cellphone.
It won't help.
Some bigger companies already changed policy to hand out restricted stock instead of options. I.e. instead of 5000 options, you get 500 (or whatever) restricted stocks that represent immediate value.
Costs the company the same (or more?), but does not have to be accounted for.
And that my friend is exactly why the US won't stay a super power for long.
It happened to the Greeks, the Romans, to some extend the French, the Spaniards, (heck the Germans too).
I actually read an article a long time ago in "Scientific America" (I think), putting forth the theory that every super power will eventually vanish, due to complacency and self rightousness and exploitation by a few rich people.
Just look around you, you can already see it. Kids are already overweight at age of six, sitting in front of the TV all day. People watch their "games", cheering their heroic soldiers while drinking beer. Education is declining. People watch nothing but so called "reality" shows. Typically both spouses have to work now in order to keep a lifestyle that could be supported by only one income just a decade ago. Politics are reduced cheap TV shows (infotainment). All political discussion has been reduced to "Democratic or Republican". Etc, etc, etc. The list goes on and on.
(All this is of course not limited to the US, but seen in many western countries)
The US maybe be currently the strongest military power on this planet financed by a $480.000.000.000/Year military budget, at the expense of US citizens (and that is excluding current Afghanistan and Iraq war costs).
Ironically that does not even seem to be enough to control a little arabic country that has been bled out by over 10 years of economic sanctions.
And as violence tends to create more violence, it is not even used to keep the american people safe.
It's all so rediculous, if it wasn't so serious it would be actually funny.
How long are the american people willing to pay for that (at the expense of education, health care, social security, high long term interest rates, etc, etc)? Right now there's some kind of almost blind patriotism that keeps people on the line, but it can't hide the truth forever.
Just look at this number again: $480.000.000.000/Year plus currently $200.000.000.000 for Iraq. Does anybody realize how much money that is? Doesn't anybody else think this money could be better spent then using it to essentially piss of the rest of the population of this planet, and especially Muslims?
In terms of economic output the US is already second in line behind the EU. And BTW George W. was great for the EU, leading to a common mindset to accept less somewhat national independence in order to be able to jointly withstand US interests (at least this is how it is perceived by many).
I could not agree more. It seems to become common standard to sit on a patent until the technology becomes mainstream and cannot be changed or removed anymore.
The patent as such may be valid, but that is not point here.
Patent law has to change to provide a maximum timeframe between when an infringement is detected and when legal action is taken.
support Patrick's effort...
I was using Slackware from its inception in 1993 (ahhh... I remember downloading a large set of floppy images over night at work from my Ultrix machine, storing the "large" files on my DEC/VMS diskspace).
After a long digression over FreeBSD, RedHat, I came back to Slackware last year...
I already ordered the CD, not that I couldn't download the iso's but this a great distribution and if I can help to keep it going I'll do so.
Hmm.
In the end there is a balance between privacy and security.
I don't feel cops on patrol invade my privacy, even though they may oberserve my actions and act if I'm committing a crime.
On the other hand I didn't want them to pre-arrest me every now and then, because I may commit a crime.
The truth is in the middle.
"If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear" is missing the point, because "fear" refers to possible prosecution. Of course I don't have to fear prosecution if have nothing to hide. But that does not mean that I'm willing to give up my basic right to privacy, just because somebody thinks I may commit a crime at some time.
And as I said before, information will be misused, so it is very important to keep a tap on who can collect what information when.
There's an old theory which goes something like this:
"Because of the lack of control in democratic societies, laws should drafted such that almost everybody is violating the law sometimes. With sufficient information gathering policies, it is then always possible to apply force to any person".
As history taught us (or not is seems)...
Laws increasing governments' power will ultimately be abused.
How long before the transmitted information will be used to catch tax-evaders? Be crosslinked with other data to find *potential* criminals (Minority Report anyone)?
The funny thing is that this information won't even help to catch any terrorists. How often can a suicide bomber be caught repeating his crimes? All that terrorist groups have to do is to send previously unknown people.
The only people suffering are average joes going about their lives.
And don't tell me: "If you don't have anything to hide, why bother." If that is the case, than why not install a camera in everybodys home ala 1984... Nothing to hide... No problem... Right?
And this is just the beginning. I remember a few years back an extensive camera system was installed in London, allegedly to find terrorists. Well, now this system is being used to catch speeders, and to track where everybody is going in the city just in case (which is used to collect tolls).
- Represents the team to upper management.
- Shields team members from politics.
- Does not micromanage.
- Trusts members of the team to get their job done. (this may be the most important one)
- Provides advice when asked.
- Works with teammembers to help them achieve their personal goals.
- Does not request long hours unless the team suggests it.
- Understands group dynamics, who can work best with whome.
- Understands (of course) the project.
- Defines realistic goals and deadlines (after conferring with the teammembers)
- Does not work on technical issues, unless asked by team.
- Knows how to motivate different types of people.
- Knows when to delegate.
I'm architect in my team and always interview new candidates for the manager positions (my bosses).On paging operating systems the parts of the executable you don't use are never loaded anyway. And I for one do not see any speed improvements with Firefox as far as page rendering is concerned.
Also if you happen to use the Browser and Email reader (like I do) you're better of using the integrated Mozilla as compared to two executables (Firefox and Thunderbird).
I hope Mozilla continues.
I've burnt a Karma point, have been called an asshole, a dictator, to fuck myself, it was suggested that I be shot (if that would only be allowed in this country), it has been said "words are just words" (than why the big deal?), and nonsense like Germany moves itself closer to Hitler Germany, etc, etc, etc.
So to all who did *not* like to let me express my free speech... Thank you. You have proven my point.
It does not matter whether a government allows freedom of speech or not, if the society you live in does not really enable to exercise this right.
Yes, there's no law to prevent freedom of speech, there's no law that prevents SCO from stating that they own Linux. In Germany they got an immediate gag order until they can show proof. Is that a violation of free speech?
And, yes, people have been arrested (for example for claiming in front of the WTC that Bin Laden had nothing to do with the events of 9/11, but - oh - that is sooo different from denying the Holocaust, isn't it?) for trying exercise this right.
People have also been arrested because they support terrorist organization.
If you're pro-choice you may end up on some hate website suggesting you'd be shot or targeted in other ways... Freedom of speech? Yeah, right!
People are so self righteous in proclaiming how free the US is.
Do you guys know that your schoolbooks are censored by all kinds of groups (left, right, relgious, etc). Yes, the law doesn't mandate anything, but you lose funding for your books, or schools are forbidden by some random boards to use it... This is the worst conceivable limitation of free speech. How about banning teaching of darwinism in some states?
Heck even the american bible is censored from topics that aren't "christian".
Believe me, I lived in many countries all over Europe and the US for a long time and the US is the most unfree place of all western countries. On paper it's all fine, in reality it's a load of trive. You can claim and believe whatever you want, it does not change a thing.
And... Unless you have lived somewhere else and saw how other people live their lifes, you can make *no* claims whatsoever about how free or unfree they live.
You can't call for killing somebody.
You can't state knowingly wrong "fact" about a presidential candidate without being sued.
You can'd say everything you want on product review pages without risking being sued by the producer (for the negative review).
In Germany you can't say "The Holocaust did not happen".
It's absolutely justified banning public statements like "All jews should be gased" or "All blacks should be hung" or "Our race should be cleansed".
It would, however, be harmful to ban statements like "Based on emperical evidence, *** tend to *** and are more likely to ***".
And you see, I had to leave blanks, because the obsession with political correctness in this country, to the point to of just denying/ignoring fact.
Correct it's not 3D.
If it was true 3D you could walk around the scene and view it from different sides, or at least change your angles.
Computer graphics people sometimes call this 2 1/2D.
It's also obvious from an information theory viewpoint. The information you need for this 2 1/2D image is only twice then need form simple 2D (one image for each eye). A true 3D representation would require much more information.
Are you saying that taking two trivial "inventions" and combining them in an obvious way, suddenly makes for a worthy patent?
Like combining:
1. time coded action on a button (real or virtual)
2. using the button a on limited resource device to start an application
Or like:
1. combining a set of sounds to form a melody
2. playing such a melody on cell phone
I have to disagree with you on this one.
This chip - unpon receipt of proper proof of payment - will unlock the individual's eyes and ears. This is to protect our investment in the patented design of flowers and birds... So that we can continue to innovate and develop new species for your entertainment.
Thank you very much...
Just ignore that guy (Brown).
I can claim all of the following:
"Nobody can run 100m in less than 10secs, because the human leg is not strong enough".
"Albert Einstein could not possibly develope his theory of relativity in such a short amount of time".
"Microsoft didn't develop the initial version of Windows, because they only knew how to write Basic code".
"Iraq was involved in the events of 9/11 and has WMDs, because all dictators are terrorists".
"The moon mission was a fake. The US did not have the technology and money to pull that off".
"The Allies could never have won against Germany, because they didn't have enough troups. Hence we all live in a state of hynosis believing the Allies won".
I can even write a book about all this. I can even come up with circumstantial "proof" backing my claim. That does not change facts.
So instead of getting upset just ignore the guy. Nobody takes him seriously anyway.
The only person who knows whether Linus wrote all of the first version of Linux is Linus. We can all claim whatever we want, it doesn't change a bit.
And let me just say this: Everybody with some knowledge in OS theory could write the *first* version of Linux in six months (and this is not to discredit Linus). I remember we wrote a virtual memory management system and filesytem in our OS lecture in 1/2 semesters and that was only one of our projects.
The fact the Brown needed to quote Tannenbaum out of context was enough for me to ignore him.