If I wanted to buy a car from somebody, how would I do it? Right now the only reasonable options are PayPal, check, cash, or credit card. The only tender an ordinary person would accept for a car are cash and check, and most people wouldn't want to handle enough cash to pay for a car.
The last time I bought a car privately, the guy gave me his bank account number and I did a direct transfer online. After he confirmed the money was there, he drove the car around to my house and we were done.
On top of that I would assume two things. I must say IANAL and I've only read the Dutch and US constitutions (The Dutch ones from the 1567-republican one forward to the post 1851 amendments)
I've also read the Dutch and US constitutions, however not so much of the Dutch as you have it seems (and my Dutch is really quite rusty unfortunately - I haven't used it for more than a day at a time every few months in about the last 12 years). I can say that "in general" all three (Dutch, US, German) grant the same sorts of things, as one would expect from a constitution in a modern western nation.
but it strikes me as plausible that the practice of actual Fascism is unconstitutional in and of itself since you can't let the "right to free speech" for one group negate that same right *and* the right to the pursuit of happiness, freedom of practicing any (or no) religion and the right to a degree of safety for a whole bunch of other people.
Yep, that's pretty much it. Freedom of speech is an important right, however it does NOT trump the very first statement in the constitution, which says "Die Würde des Menschen ist unantastbar" ("Human dignity is inviolable" roughly). Therefore any violation of human dignity - including that through speech - is disallowed.
The second assumption then would be that the German constitution is good.
Unfortunately, yes... that's an assumption that must be made about any constitution, and it's always a tricky point. At what point must one step back and attempt to consider if the statements made in the constitution are indeed in the best interests of the nation/people/whatever? The classic example of course being the right to bear arms in the US - it's a constitutional right, and many there are very happy about it being so, however many others are quite against it. With a regular law, it could be up for serious debate, however with a constitutional right, things are a bit different...
I know an Israeli that claimed he read it, and that it has passages that said that the rights mentioned in said constitution is only applicable to Germans, born Germans. Now I'm not sure about that. But if that were true the Constitution wouldn't amount to a whole hill of beans for anyone that came to Germany.
That claim is definitely incorrect. It does not apply only to native born Germans. He may however have misinterpreted several parts that do make specific mention of German citizens vs non-citizens and differing statuses between them, however all of the basic rights apply to all people within the country regardless of where they come from or what reason they're here (a tourist with a one hour stopover in Frankfurt before flying off somewhere else has exactly the same basic rights as any German citizen). The differences that do exist relate to things such as "the right to live anywhere you want within the country", voting, and that sort of thing (as a resident, but non citizen, I do NOT have the right to live anywhere I want - I can travel anywhere I want of course, but my work visa is only valid if I continue to live in the state of Niedersachsen)
Germany: where the government routinely censors political ideas and historical facts without qualm, but censoring child pornography would be unconstitutional.
Citation? Germany tends to be pretty open about its history - including the very very bad stuff that happened not so long ago. It's true that certain kinds of speech and symbology related to that time is illegal to display under most (but not all) circumstances, however that doesn't stop (nor is it intended to stop) the knowledge of historical facts. Hell, even in the German "integration" course that I took when I moved here, which had a syllabus mandated by the govt, we spent quite a bit of time on talking about WW2.
Censoring political ideas, yes, I'll agree with - they do their best to stop any kind of organised Nazi-ism, but they don't stop people learning about what it is and what happened with it, only practicing it. And they don't censor any other kinds of political beliefs, no matter how much they go against the current system - there are even some outwardly racist political groups (that thankfully pretty much everyone realises are idiotic crackpots - but they are not censored).
Maybe you are from somewhere where right-wing means socialism, communism, or fascism (which are all degrees of the same thing), but in the USA, right-wing means the opposite. Like Libertarianism but with a touch of Judeo-Christian morality.
Uh.... socialism and communism are generally considered "left" and "extreme left", fascism is considered "extreme right".
I do personally find the whole left/right distinction to be silly though - political beliefs and ideologies are not a simple line. My personal political beliefs for example often fall on both ends of the scale, but I wouldn't call myself "moderate" either since I strongly advocate some things traditionally considered "left" and strongly advocate other things traditionally considered "right".
I've never been to either country, but I just have this feeling that they are quite similar to Denmark. Small countries where the people are perfectly happy to lead quiet lives out of the lime light of the world stage and yet producing a large amount of culture and research compared to their size.
As a New Zealander that has lived in the Netherlands and visited Denmark, you're quite right:)
(actually, I'm just down the road a bit from you at the moment - living in Northern Germany these days)
I once had date (GNU coreutils) give the output "Today is Prickle-Prickle, the 12nd day of The Aftermath in the YOLD 3172".
No you didn't... you probably typed "ddate" by mistake. As far as I can tell, "date" has never had some kind of silly easter egg like this (for exactly the reasons you describe - it would be BAD to do so)
And by the way, what's the reference in the joke?
ddate gives the Discordian date, rather than the Gregorian one that you're probably used to...
Try it on a Mac. If you can get it to run without issue for more than 6 hours, then you deserve a medal.
Hand me my medal then... over 35 days and counting (basically since the last time I had to reset for a software update).
That said though, it seems to me that the majority of the people that complain about Firefox instability are those that have a very large number of windows/tabs open - multiple windows, each with multiple tabs, bring it up to the "hundreds of tabs" range. I never use anywhere NEAR that level of tabs (I never have more than one window open except for the occasional "wanted" popup such as those from my work's webmail system) - currently, I have 6 tabs open, which is about my normal, and if I get lost in something, it may spike as high as 30, but not for more than a few hours at a time.
Under the circumstances described above, I've never experienced any Firefox instability on my Mac or my Linux systems with any release version of Firefox that I've used. I've had the occasional crash on my Windows systems at work, but not more than once or twice a week, and generally it appears to be on sites with Flash (not that I consider that an excuse - something needs to be fixed there, but it's not a huge bother).
But the fact that "so many" people do, in fact, have issues with Firefox is a question for Mozilla. Rather than add in yet more features, would their time not be better spent in stabilizing the core of the browser? Leave the features to add-ins.
This, I can absolutely agree with, but as a developer of other software, and frequent user of Firefox, I wish people would be more precise in their bug reporting!
And what exactly would they be "doing for humanity" that remotely-controller/pre-programmed machines couldn't do?
I think the biggest thing is that they'd be able to notice things that robots don't. A human can just look around, say "oh hey, that looks interesting!", and go sample a bit. With the Mars Rovers for example, I often wondered how often they'd just driven past something potentially interesting without the operator even noticing it's there (remembering a combination of the time lag, the "pre-set driving instructions" and how often they have actually stopped to look around (not all that often!)) - this wouldn't be an issue with humans.
Also, I'd imagine that the humans would have access to a wider array of test tools back in their base, so after getting interesting things to sample, they'd have a lot of different ways to test it (and indeed make a decision about that) rather than "dump it in one of two or three test systems and wait for results"
It's actually legal to own despite its recreational properties.
Going off on a bit of a tangent here, but this statement just sums up everything I hate about the 'war on drugs'. Despite its recreational properties? Despite?!
You can calculate area with infinite depths right? If the converge towards each other but never touch it still has finite space
That's pretty much what I was saying - I think you probably CAN'T. Any finite depth approaching infinite is calculable, however in my opinion it's just a numbers game after a certain point, because the universe probably does NOT work that way. Just as there's the Planck Length as the smallest size that is measurable (most likely), I think the universe in fact also has a "smallest size of existence" (which may be any size from the Planck length down, however being interested in string theory, I like the idea of it being "the width of a string"), and that it's meaningless to refer to anything smaller even if you can mathematically model such a concept.
the person who is being hated by myself is to be killed by myself by employment of the method of the bomb conflagration saving if it is the case that I am receiving the stipend of an amount that is one million of dollars. sandwich.
Oddly, if you translate that in to French and back (using Google translate), you get "the person who is hated by myself is to be killed by myself by using the method of the bomb save conflagration if it is that I receive an allocation of that amount is to a million dollars. sandwich.", which is (IMHO) slightly MORE readable than your original!
Not necessarily. We can't really know about anything smaller than the Planck length, so in practical terms your paradox probably fails. The universe may be discrete on those scales.
Mod parent up - AC or not... I had to scroll a LONG way before seeing this argument and was going to post it myself if no-one else had. There's a lot of "weird" points about the universe that just don't seem to make sense. Posts such as the GP saying, "Clearly this definition of reality is flawed: stop using it." (with regard to travelling through an infinite number of points in a finite time) are all well and good, but don't go anywhere towards explaining WHY this definition is flawed. By defining the universe as discrete rather than continuous, it is no longer flawed, as with many other oddities and apparent paradoxes.
This would also potentially have an interesting effect on Pi in that if the number itself is truly irrational, then it's also wrong for every case we're using it - we actually should HAVE TO round it off somewhere to be correct when using it in models of the physical universe.
I'm in my late thirties and I learned to type in a mechanical typewriter (in high-school). I took the elective (which was popular among low-achievers) so that I could type faster on my Commodore-64. You see I used to hunt-and-peck, and thought that touch-typing would help (it did). But I distinctly remember having to hand-in term papers, book reports, monographs, and other reports in typed paper; some for high school, but mostly for university. And in the late 80s through early 90s that meant using typewriters with carbon paper copies.
Just turned 30 myself, so looks like I'm a bit under a decade behind you, but a decade ahead of the referenced people. I've never seen carbon paper in the real world, and only used mechanical typewriters as a piece of "interesting history". My first computer was an Apple ][ in 1983 (age 4) and even in primary school, the times we were exposed to keyboards were BBC Micros or Apple ][e systems (by that stage I had a C64 at home though). By high-school, a mix of Win3.x and RISC-OS systems with the occasional early Mac were what was available (and I'd gone up to high end Amigas at home), and typing classes were definitely only conducted on the school PCs running DOS versions of typing-teacher style apps and WordPerfect.
That's quite a change just between our decades and I hadn't stopped to consider how different it must be for those one or two decades behind me.
Yet so far, I've only received spam in English. Sure, spam from different languages exists, but it's rare and negligible for now.
That depends on your email address as far as I can see... in my Google Mail spam folder, I pretty much only see English. In my work spam folder (".eu" domain) I get French, German and English. In one of my other private accounts (".nl" domain) I get English, Dutch and German. The amount of spam in German seems to be on the rise in all three though.
You may be a troll and have hopeless grammar, but nevertheless as a "hippy treehugger" myself, I absolutely agree with you. Being a greenie and being OPPOSED to nuclear energy has always struck me as complete madness.
This is actually quite interesting for me, since we've gone through (or are going through) a similar thing in the MFP (Multi Functional Peripheral (Printer/Scanner/Copier/Fax machine)) manufacturer industry. While it may be much less glamorous than the world of robotics, we do essentially need to deal with a lot of the same concepts.
Essentially, an MFP has two main "parts" to the firmware. One is Engine control, which tells all the physical bits how and when to move, temperature control for the fuser, paper take-up, feeding mechanisms, electrostatic charging, laser control and so on. The other is the "user" part, where we deal with how to access networks, interpreting print jobs, user authentication systems, file format conversion, user interface and so on.
The "user" part generally is pretty standardised for each individual manufacturer across the manufacturer's range. As a base, it's not uncommon to run things on an RTOS such as some flavours of Linux or VxWorks.
For the "Engine Control" part however, it's a lot more chaotic. Almost every machine from every manufacturer is going to be vastly different with code being rewritten many times for what is essentially doing the same thing, just with a bit of different hardware. My day job is as a developer for these things, but pretty much exclusively in the "user" part of things and I haven't even touched the Engine control. I do however talk from time to time with the engine guys, and they're in DESPERATE need of some standardisation. Personally, I'd love to see standardisation across the industry, but I doubt it'll happen. If we ever do get there (which they appear to be heading towards, slowly), we'll probably end up with a different solution for everything in each different manufacturer, which is the current state of play for the "user" part also.
In any case, we are not robots programmed by the structure and chemistry of our brains.
My apologies for trotting out an old and overused meme... but, [citation needed]...
I absolutely think we ARE robots that are programmed by the structure and chemistry of our brains and would be extremely surprised to discover that there is some other factor involved. Of course there are other factors that you could mention (environment, upbringing, etc), however these are all things that influence the structure and chemistry of the brain, and so are just another abstraction layer rather than being different things to the structure and chemistry specifically.
Speaking personally, I would rather get paid less and be able to retain all of the rights to what I create, but I don't really know if that is much of an option anywhere...
My current employment contract (I'm a programmer) says that everything I write exists in two forms - one belongs to the company and the other to myself. So, should I leave the company, essentially I can fork all of my own code. Any images/etc in the projects that I didn't create (which is most of them, I'm not much of an icon/GUI/prettyness kind of guy) belong to the company, so I'd have to remove those, but I could easily fork it with a new "theme" and release some products the day after I left the company.
It's also worth noting that I of course have a non-compete clause (only valid for while I work there - not one of these silly "can't compete after you leave" things (which is not enforceable most places anyway)), and so couldn't compete directly against the company while still working for them, so the company is okay with the idea.
Originally, the wording to say I can keep my code wasn't in my employment contract, but when I was being hired, I asked about it and they basically just said, "sure, why not?" and added it in. It surprised me a little, but I wasn't going to make a fuss! Mostly I think they agreed to it because of the way that I phrased it originally - basically I said that by doing so, I'd also bring IN all of the software I have written to date in my life and use that as a base for the projects I'd be working on instead of writing it all again from scratch... they got several years worth of development in one go, and I get to keep working on my own projects knowing that they're still mine (just not "exclusively" mine) after I leave - it's a good situation for both sides.
Most likely, when I leave the company, any projects I am no longer interested in working on, I'll release as open source after scouring out the company specific stuff. Also, maybe some of the stuff I am still interested in working on also, but that depends what my next job is.
Slashdot Mirror
If I wanted to buy a car from somebody, how would I do it? Right now the only reasonable options are PayPal, check, cash, or credit card. The only tender an ordinary person would accept for a car are cash and check, and most people wouldn't want to handle enough cash to pay for a car.
The last time I bought a car privately, the guy gave me his bank account number and I did a direct transfer online. After he confirmed the money was there, he drove the car around to my house and we were done.
On top of that I would assume two things. I must say IANAL and I've only read the Dutch and US constitutions (The Dutch ones from the 1567-republican one forward to the post 1851 amendments)
I've also read the Dutch and US constitutions, however not so much of the Dutch as you have it seems (and my Dutch is really quite rusty unfortunately - I haven't used it for more than a day at a time every few months in about the last 12 years). I can say that "in general" all three (Dutch, US, German) grant the same sorts of things, as one would expect from a constitution in a modern western nation.
but it strikes me as plausible that the practice of actual Fascism is unconstitutional in and of itself since you can't let the "right to free speech" for one group negate that same right *and* the right to the pursuit of happiness, freedom of practicing any (or no) religion and the right to a degree of safety for a whole bunch of other people.
Yep, that's pretty much it. Freedom of speech is an important right, however it does NOT trump the very first statement in the constitution, which says "Die Würde des Menschen ist unantastbar" ("Human dignity is inviolable" roughly). Therefore any violation of human dignity - including that through speech - is disallowed.
The second assumption then would be that the German constitution is good.
Unfortunately, yes... that's an assumption that must be made about any constitution, and it's always a tricky point. At what point must one step back and attempt to consider if the statements made in the constitution are indeed in the best interests of the nation/people/whatever? The classic example of course being the right to bear arms in the US - it's a constitutional right, and many there are very happy about it being so, however many others are quite against it. With a regular law, it could be up for serious debate, however with a constitutional right, things are a bit different...
I know an Israeli that claimed he read it, and that it has passages that said that the rights mentioned in said constitution is only applicable to Germans, born Germans. Now I'm not sure about that. But if that were true the Constitution wouldn't amount to a whole hill of beans for anyone that came to Germany.
That claim is definitely incorrect. It does not apply only to native born Germans. He may however have misinterpreted several parts that do make specific mention of German citizens vs non-citizens and differing statuses between them, however all of the basic rights apply to all people within the country regardless of where they come from or what reason they're here (a tourist with a one hour stopover in Frankfurt before flying off somewhere else has exactly the same basic rights as any German citizen). The differences that do exist relate to things such as "the right to live anywhere you want within the country", voting, and that sort of thing (as a resident, but non citizen, I do NOT have the right to live anywhere I want - I can travel anywhere I want of course, but my work visa is only valid if I continue to live in the state of Niedersachsen)
Germany: where the government routinely censors political ideas and historical facts without qualm, but censoring child pornography would be unconstitutional.
Citation? Germany tends to be pretty open about its history - including the very very bad stuff that happened not so long ago. It's true that certain kinds of speech and symbology related to that time is illegal to display under most (but not all) circumstances, however that doesn't stop (nor is it intended to stop) the knowledge of historical facts. Hell, even in the German "integration" course that I took when I moved here, which had a syllabus mandated by the govt, we spent quite a bit of time on talking about WW2.
Censoring political ideas, yes, I'll agree with - they do their best to stop any kind of organised Nazi-ism, but they don't stop people learning about what it is and what happened with it, only practicing it. And they don't censor any other kinds of political beliefs, no matter how much they go against the current system - there are even some outwardly racist political groups (that thankfully pretty much everyone realises are idiotic crackpots - but they are not censored).
I find your comments and your sig to be in an interesting juxtaposition...
No definition of stealing requires the deprivation of physical property.
Perhaps according to your dictionary, however please see this earlier slashdot post of mine where I cite several laws that specifically mention it.
Maybe you are from somewhere where right-wing means socialism, communism, or fascism (which are all degrees of the same thing), but in the USA, right-wing means the opposite. Like Libertarianism but with a touch of Judeo-Christian morality.
Uh.... socialism and communism are generally considered "left" and "extreme left", fascism is considered "extreme right".
I do personally find the whole left/right distinction to be silly though - political beliefs and ideologies are not a simple line. My personal political beliefs for example often fall on both ends of the scale, but I wouldn't call myself "moderate" either since I strongly advocate some things traditionally considered "left" and strongly advocate other things traditionally considered "right".
(even remember doing international calls to download a file from a BBS overseas)
Yep, the first time I was ever convicted of a crime was for that :/
Actually, "NO CARRIER" tended to be the common disconnection message... yeh, kids these days.
Space is big,
Space is dark,
It's hard to find,
A place to park.
I've never been to either country, but I just have this feeling that they are quite similar to Denmark. Small countries where the people are perfectly happy to lead quiet lives out of the lime light of the world stage and yet producing a large amount of culture and research compared to their size.
As a New Zealander that has lived in the Netherlands and visited Denmark, you're quite right :)
(actually, I'm just down the road a bit from you at the moment - living in Northern Germany these days)
I once had date (GNU coreutils) give the output "Today is Prickle-Prickle, the 12nd day of The Aftermath in the YOLD 3172".
No you didn't... you probably typed "ddate" by mistake. As far as I can tell, "date" has never had some kind of silly easter egg like this (for exactly the reasons you describe - it would be BAD to do so)
And by the way, what's the reference in the joke?
ddate gives the Discordian date, rather than the Gregorian one that you're probably used to...
Try it on a Mac. If you can get it to run without issue for more than 6 hours, then you deserve a medal.
Hand me my medal then... over 35 days and counting (basically since the last time I had to reset for a software update).
That said though, it seems to me that the majority of the people that complain about Firefox instability are those that have a very large number of windows/tabs open - multiple windows, each with multiple tabs, bring it up to the "hundreds of tabs" range. I never use anywhere NEAR that level of tabs (I never have more than one window open except for the occasional "wanted" popup such as those from my work's webmail system) - currently, I have 6 tabs open, which is about my normal, and if I get lost in something, it may spike as high as 30, but not for more than a few hours at a time.
Under the circumstances described above, I've never experienced any Firefox instability on my Mac or my Linux systems with any release version of Firefox that I've used. I've had the occasional crash on my Windows systems at work, but not more than once or twice a week, and generally it appears to be on sites with Flash (not that I consider that an excuse - something needs to be fixed there, but it's not a huge bother).
But the fact that "so many" people do, in fact, have issues with Firefox is a question for Mozilla. Rather than add in yet more features, would their time not be better spent in stabilizing the core of the browser? Leave the features to add-ins.
This, I can absolutely agree with, but as a developer of other software, and frequent user of Firefox, I wish people would be more precise in their bug reporting!
And what exactly would they be "doing for humanity" that remotely-controller/pre-programmed machines couldn't do?
I think the biggest thing is that they'd be able to notice things that robots don't. A human can just look around, say "oh hey, that looks interesting!", and go sample a bit. With the Mars Rovers for example, I often wondered how often they'd just driven past something potentially interesting without the operator even noticing it's there (remembering a combination of the time lag, the "pre-set driving instructions" and how often they have actually stopped to look around (not all that often!)) - this wouldn't be an issue with humans.
Also, I'd imagine that the humans would have access to a wider array of test tools back in their base, so after getting interesting things to sample, they'd have a lot of different ways to test it (and indeed make a decision about that) rather than "dump it in one of two or three test systems and wait for results"
Does anybody still remember the list?
Anyone who doesn't is too young to be here...
(Random "Get off my lawn" ranting)
It's actually legal to own despite its recreational properties.
Going off on a bit of a tangent here, but this statement just sums up everything I hate about the 'war on drugs'. Despite its recreational properties? Despite?!
</rant>
You can calculate area with infinite depths right? If the converge towards each other but never touch it still has finite space
That's pretty much what I was saying - I think you probably CAN'T. Any finite depth approaching infinite is calculable, however in my opinion it's just a numbers game after a certain point, because the universe probably does NOT work that way. Just as there's the Planck Length as the smallest size that is measurable (most likely), I think the universe in fact also has a "smallest size of existence" (which may be any size from the Planck length down, however being interested in string theory, I like the idea of it being "the width of a string"), and that it's meaningless to refer to anything smaller even if you can mathematically model such a concept.
No... we can only MEASURE so far down, and then measurement becomes impossible - read your own link!
The verdict is out on whether the universe actually IS discrete or not (I'm leaning towards yes, but good arguments could sway me either way).
the person who is being hated by myself is to be killed by myself by employment of the method of the bomb conflagration saving if it is the case that I am receiving the stipend of an amount that is one million of dollars. sandwich.
Oddly, if you translate that in to French and back (using Google translate), you get "the person who is hated by myself is to be killed by myself by using the method of the bomb save conflagration if it is that I receive an allocation of that amount is to a million dollars. sandwich.", which is (IMHO) slightly MORE readable than your original!
Not necessarily. We can't really know about anything smaller than the Planck length, so in practical terms your paradox probably fails. The universe may be discrete on those scales.
Mod parent up - AC or not... I had to scroll a LONG way before seeing this argument and was going to post it myself if no-one else had. There's a lot of "weird" points about the universe that just don't seem to make sense. Posts such as the GP saying, "Clearly this definition of reality is flawed: stop using it." (with regard to travelling through an infinite number of points in a finite time) are all well and good, but don't go anywhere towards explaining WHY this definition is flawed. By defining the universe as discrete rather than continuous, it is no longer flawed, as with many other oddities and apparent paradoxes.
This would also potentially have an interesting effect on Pi in that if the number itself is truly irrational, then it's also wrong for every case we're using it - we actually should HAVE TO round it off somewhere to be correct when using it in models of the physical universe.
I'm in my late thirties and I learned to type in a mechanical typewriter (in high-school). I took the elective (which was popular among low-achievers) so that I could type faster on my Commodore-64. You see I used to hunt-and-peck, and thought that touch-typing would help (it did). But I distinctly remember having to hand-in term papers, book reports, monographs, and other reports in typed paper; some for high school, but mostly for university. And in the late 80s through early 90s that meant using typewriters with carbon paper copies.
Just turned 30 myself, so looks like I'm a bit under a decade behind you, but a decade ahead of the referenced people. I've never seen carbon paper in the real world, and only used mechanical typewriters as a piece of "interesting history". My first computer was an Apple ][ in 1983 (age 4) and even in primary school, the times we were exposed to keyboards were BBC Micros or Apple ][e systems (by that stage I had a C64 at home though). By high-school, a mix of Win3.x and RISC-OS systems with the occasional early Mac were what was available (and I'd gone up to high end Amigas at home), and typing classes were definitely only conducted on the school PCs running DOS versions of typing-teacher style apps and WordPerfect.
That's quite a change just between our decades and I hadn't stopped to consider how different it must be for those one or two decades behind me.
Yet so far, I've only received spam in English. Sure, spam from different languages exists, but it's rare and negligible for now.
That depends on your email address as far as I can see... in my Google Mail spam folder, I pretty much only see English. In my work spam folder (".eu" domain) I get French, German and English. In one of my other private accounts (".nl" domain) I get English, Dutch and German. The amount of spam in German seems to be on the rise in all three though.
You may be a troll and have hopeless grammar, but nevertheless as a "hippy treehugger" myself, I absolutely agree with you. Being a greenie and being OPPOSED to nuclear energy has always struck me as complete madness.
Save the planet, use clean nuclear energy!
This is actually quite interesting for me, since we've gone through (or are going through) a similar thing in the MFP (Multi Functional Peripheral (Printer/Scanner/Copier/Fax machine)) manufacturer industry. While it may be much less glamorous than the world of robotics, we do essentially need to deal with a lot of the same concepts.
Essentially, an MFP has two main "parts" to the firmware. One is Engine control, which tells all the physical bits how and when to move, temperature control for the fuser, paper take-up, feeding mechanisms, electrostatic charging, laser control and so on. The other is the "user" part, where we deal with how to access networks, interpreting print jobs, user authentication systems, file format conversion, user interface and so on.
The "user" part generally is pretty standardised for each individual manufacturer across the manufacturer's range. As a base, it's not uncommon to run things on an RTOS such as some flavours of Linux or VxWorks.
For the "Engine Control" part however, it's a lot more chaotic. Almost every machine from every manufacturer is going to be vastly different with code being rewritten many times for what is essentially doing the same thing, just with a bit of different hardware. My day job is as a developer for these things, but pretty much exclusively in the "user" part of things and I haven't even touched the Engine control. I do however talk from time to time with the engine guys, and they're in DESPERATE need of some standardisation. Personally, I'd love to see standardisation across the industry, but I doubt it'll happen. If we ever do get there (which they appear to be heading towards, slowly), we'll probably end up with a different solution for everything in each different manufacturer, which is the current state of play for the "user" part also.
In any case, we are not robots programmed by the structure and chemistry of our brains.
My apologies for trotting out an old and overused meme... but, [citation needed]...
I absolutely think we ARE robots that are programmed by the structure and chemistry of our brains and would be extremely surprised to discover that there is some other factor involved. Of course there are other factors that you could mention (environment, upbringing, etc), however these are all things that influence the structure and chemistry of the brain, and so are just another abstraction layer rather than being different things to the structure and chemistry specifically.
Speaking personally, I would rather get paid less and be able to retain all of the rights to what I create, but I don't really know if that is much of an option anywhere...
My current employment contract (I'm a programmer) says that everything I write exists in two forms - one belongs to the company and the other to myself. So, should I leave the company, essentially I can fork all of my own code. Any images/etc in the projects that I didn't create (which is most of them, I'm not much of an icon/GUI/prettyness kind of guy) belong to the company, so I'd have to remove those, but I could easily fork it with a new "theme" and release some products the day after I left the company.
It's also worth noting that I of course have a non-compete clause (only valid for while I work there - not one of these silly "can't compete after you leave" things (which is not enforceable most places anyway)), and so couldn't compete directly against the company while still working for them, so the company is okay with the idea.
Originally, the wording to say I can keep my code wasn't in my employment contract, but when I was being hired, I asked about it and they basically just said, "sure, why not?" and added it in. It surprised me a little, but I wasn't going to make a fuss! Mostly I think they agreed to it because of the way that I phrased it originally - basically I said that by doing so, I'd also bring IN all of the software I have written to date in my life and use that as a base for the projects I'd be working on instead of writing it all again from scratch... they got several years worth of development in one go, and I get to keep working on my own projects knowing that they're still mine (just not "exclusively" mine) after I leave - it's a good situation for both sides.
Most likely, when I leave the company, any projects I am no longer interested in working on, I'll release as open source after scouring out the company specific stuff. Also, maybe some of the stuff I am still interested in working on also, but that depends what my next job is.