My sole direct experience in the film industry is a few days working as an extra for the movie Copycat, which was my first foray into an ultimately futile attempt at an acting career. But I've also researched the filmmaking process in some detail, so that's not all I have to go on.
Much of the shape of the final story is worked out in the editing process. Directors typically shoot not only extra scenes that may or may not make it into the final cut, but they might also shoot a half-dozen or so versions of each scene, each acted a bit differently. (Or lit, or with different angles, etc.) With so much raw material to work from, the editor and director can take the film in almost any direction they choose long after shooting is completed and without having to drag the actors back in front of the cameras.
For a good example of what I'm talking about, go get the Big Trouble in Little China DVD. (As a/. reader you should own a copy of this film anyway, so if you don't have it you should buy it immediately or risk the loss of your nerd credentials.) Check out the deleted scenes, which include a number of alternate versions of scenes that actually appeared in the final cut. The director, John Carpenter, chose to make BTiLC a very fast-paced action-oriented film that almost never gives you a chance to take a breath. However, with the material at his disposal, he could have created a slower more dramatic film that was much more character-oriented.
Part of the reason for this is because very often even an experienced director can't tell how a particular script is going to work until he actually sees it on film. All this extra material allows him to pick and choose among entire scenes and subtle re-interpretations of scenes until the film conveys exactly the effect he's aiming for. Other times, I think it's because the director honestly doesn't know what will work better or what final product he's going for, and all the extra footage allows him to defer that decision until he's in the editing booth.
Epcot would make sense if only it hadn't been built a couple of decades after Walt died. Haunted Mansion, maybe?
But seriously, if he had been cryogenically frozen, don't you think he'd be on display in Tomorrowland somewhere? If not in person, then as an Animitronic figure? (OK, not Animitronic because it wouldn't be moving, but you know what I mean.) This is exactly the kind of groovy, Jetsons-type futuristic stuff Walt loved to promote.
Jane's also mentions theorized weapons 'capable of producing a beam of "gravity-like" energy that can exert an instantaneous force of 1,000g [1000 Gravities, not grams] on any object -- enough, in principle, to vaporise it, especially if the object is moving at high speed.'
If it can vaporize the target, it's also able to vaporize the weapon that's emitting the beam. Newton's Third Law of Motion hasn't been repealed as far as I know.
In a house like mine, with two machines that so rarely need to interact that it's not worth spending any of my scarce (daylight) free time to run Cat5 between them, they're useful. Interaction is rare, but it *does* happen, and I don't want to have to burn a CD-ROM every time I want to use Sneakernet.
It's also very useful to keep a boot disk with some basic recovery tools on it for those occasions when my wife does a FORMAT C:, or we have a hard drive go bad, or other similar situation. (She's only done that once, but it makes a good story. Good thing there's UNFORMAT.)
Perhaps the mathematical relationship between the pieces of the picture were left intact, but it destroys the self-contained nature of the piece. The idea is that the boy is looking at the same picture he's standing within. Lenstra has created nothing more than a "Droste" picture with elliptical distortions. (If you look at the zoomed versions of the filled-in drawing, there's another copy of the boy in it.) If that's all Escher had wanted to do, he would have selected a different grid as the foundation of his drawing; filled in like this the grid is nonsensical.
As far as our location goes, we are *definitely* in an arm, near the surface of the disc.
Actually, according to this article, we're between spiral arms. The arms themselves are apparently areas of intense star formation activity, and are thus too chaotic and contain too much hard radiation to allow long-term biological evolution.
any pretense of dealing with the subjects using moral objectivity were dismissed outright in the way the questsions were formed
What does "moral objectivity" mean here? Especially since you seem to have a problem with people who have "already made up their mind about whats Right and Wrong." Objectivity means that there's at least a widespread consensus about what the truth of the matter is; with subjects where objectivity is really possible we would expect that most people have their minds made up on them.
Morality isn't one of these, not anymore. With religion dethroned as the provider of the moral standard commonly regarded as objective, we are left with a half-dozen or so competing moral philosophies that are not all mutually compatible. Your choice of philosophies (or which philososphy has been foisted upon your consciousness, either overtly or covertly) determines what morality you will apply to any given situation. Objectivity in morals has gone completely out the window. In many cases we must be reduced to pragmatics, where we look at the underlying assumptions and try to see if they are workable in a society where they're universally applied.
In the case at hand, Anthony's response to objections to pedophilic elements in his work seems to be based on the proposition that because it's natural, it must be right. This fails by a reasonably pragmatic test IMO because no human society can be constructed using this as a guide. It's completely natural to fly into a murderous rage under some conditions, but just because it's natural to feel like killing another human being at times that doesn't mean we ever ought to.
Re:Does anyone else read this as ego-maniacal crap
on
Piers Anthony Unbound
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· Score: 5, Insightful
"Egomaniacal" is a good word for it. I read only the first two of the Incarnations series before I got seriously tired of his entire oeuvre. (It's interesting that he tells us it's aimed at an older audience as Xanth -- I find it not one bit more mature.) A really sizeable chunk of each volume is devoted to an Afterword detailing his life while the book was being written. I felt ripped off. There already was very little story there; to pad the length out artificially seemed dishonest to me somehow.
It's not like the case of, say, Roger Zelazny who always wrote short novels. In the days when publishers wouldn't use a larger typeface for short works like they do now so that all books are more or less the same size, you could pretty much tell how long a book was by it's thickness. Zelazny was like literary espresso anyway; his writing was dense and flavorful. Anthony's work is more like cotton candy, only with more pink and less sugar. To find that you're getting even less of a story than you thought you were was not a pleasant surprise, especially when he chooses to tell us all about his bowel problems in some detail. (Afterword to On a Pale Horse, if memory serves.)
The fact that people grow out of his juvenile fiction doesn't speak well of it at all. "Alert" adults find enjoyable nuggets -- or rather, there are parts of the book that are intended to be enjoyed by adults. Whether or not they actually do is another question. But in general, the Xanth books do not age well. There are a number of authors whom I enjoy almost as much now that I'm in my late 30s as when I discovered them as a teenager -- Zelazny (although I've since become aware of a number of subtle messages in his work that I find objectionable that the sheer literary quality of it caused me to overlook it earlier), Tolkien, Robert E. Howard, Glenn Cook, Urusula Le Guin, Gillian Bradshaw, Patricia McKillip, Harlan Ellison, Orson Scott Card, and many others. Even some of Heinlein stands up pretty well -- oddly, his juvenile fiction is much more enjoyable for me than what he wrote for adults. I can still derive a great deal of enjoyment from Baum's Oz books, which I first started reading when I was 7 or so, and I now enjoy the Harry Potter series very much, even though it's marketed directly at children.
Piers Anthony? At my age, there is nothing he has written that I can enjoy in any way, for many of the same reasons that others have detailed here. Telling us that we've grown past is isn't a good excuse. His suggestion that childhood is a somehow superior state of being is plain silly.
You don't pay for receiving calls, unless you are out of the country and are on a roving tariff (in which case you pay the bill for calling from your home country to the country you are currently in). It seems absolutely crazy to charge to receive calls, as this would cause the penetration of mobiles to drop dramatically as it would exclude poor people (e.g. many teenagers).
You're right. Despite the seeming ubiquity of cellphones in the US, they've achieved nowhere near the penetration they have in the UK. This is probably one of the reasons why.
Yes there was a need for a naval ensign, but the flag actually originated as a military banner. I'm not familiar with the historical or sociological data that could reliably tell us when the "flag fetish" began, but it seems reasonable to peg it to some time after large numbers of men were demobilized from the military and returned to civillian life. They would almost certainly have taken some of their military attitudes home with them, transferring the importance of the banner on the battlefield to a civillian context. Possibly after the Civil War, or one of the World Wars.
First, there is the implication that God smiles upon the U.S. first and/or most. Second, there is the presence of the exact same sort of empty ritual present in religious worship.
First, there's no such implication. (I see no reason to support this further; it seems fair to counter your bald assertion with one of my own. Besides, it seems clear enough -- to me, anyway -- from a plain reading of the text.) Second, you need to clarify which religious ritual you're talking about. The rituals of my religion are anything but empty.
And no, a symbol that substitutes for cultural unity isn't an idol. There. You asked a question and I answered. If you meant to imply that such a symbol is an idol, you'll once again have to provide something other than bald assertion.
And what is the difference between them? Is one, or the other, less true, less wholly felt, or said such that God sees what you say less?
Yes, actually. God sees all no matter what we do, but men for their part seem to take vows more seriously when they invoke him as a witness, in general. If you're an exception to that generality, then good for you.
And you're incorrect about pledges. As a verb it means to make a promise or agreement. Although it can be enforced by the exchange of a valuable token of some kind, that's not a necessary condition of one, and in any event does not involve calling upon any higher power. An oath is sealed by calling upon some external force at witness. Someone who feels he is commanded by God to always speak the truth (this is what I take your idiosyncratic phrase "holy leading" to mean) and concomitantly forbidden to make oaths ought to be able to offer a pledge with a clear conscience. I'd think that if that pledge takes note of God's omnipotence -- aren't we all "under God" no matter where we live? -- without actually calling upon him as witness, so much the better.
It's interesting that with all this you feel no loyalty to the country that does not interfere with your freedom practise your religion, to the point where the Constitution even allows for affirmations where it otherwise calls for oaths so that persons of your persuasion need not violate their beliefs in order to take a public duty upon themselves. At the very least, some might perceive you as ungrateful.
The rest of the world finds the fetish the US makes over its flag somewhat peculiar.
It is somewhat peculiar, but it or something like it was probably inevitable. Culturally, the US is much more diverse than any single European nation, although just possibly not much more than the EU taken as a whole. Since we do not share a single culture, culture alone cannot be a unifying principle. The flag is one of the more important symbols that have come to be a substitute for it.
Finally the main objection to the pledge historically has been from religious groups, in particular the Quakers. For us the pledge of allegiance to a physical object is tantamount to idol worship which we have rather strong view against. Furthermore we don't make oaths by heaven for that is of God, nor by earth as that is his footstool.
That's nice, and scriptural, but you need to explain more to avoid the impression that these objections are irrelevant. The meaning of "pledge" is on the same level roughly as promise; it doesn't quite rise to the status of an oath. Even if it did it's not being made "by" either heaven or earth, nor even God. God is mentioned as an attribute of the nation, "under God", not called upon as witness.
Despite the fact that Mozilla has all the features I want and I'd love to use it if only to avoid the whack- a-mole pop-up-ad game, I'm too used to hitting Alt+D to go to the address bar. So sue me. One tiny difference and you lose your commodity status.
He's got a good point here, you know. I stayed away from Opera for a long time for no better reason than that the Back button was in the wrong place. Yes, thank you, I know there are many useful keyboard shortcuts in Opera, but I don't want to be forced to learn them to use the product comfortably. The Back button goes on the left side of the tool bar, which itself is just below the menu bar -- and that's the way I likes it, dad-gummit!
All true geeks lust for a machine like this one that still allows you to program it and examine its state via the front panel, but this is an absolute requirement for all sincere geeks-in-training! Flush VB down the toilet if you haven't already; forget Perl, OOL, Linux and anything with an API that places 5 or 6 layers of insulation between you and the bare metal! If you really want to understand how a computer does it's job on a fundamental level, if you want to actually learn what the thing's doing, then you cannot do without a good basic machine like this. You will never be able to stand among the Great Geeks of History if you lack this kind of experience.
You took the words right out of my, um, keyboard. Look, even on NASA's budget, $75k is peanuts. It's well worth it from their point of view to fund one of these things every so often on the off-off-off-chance there's something to it. Now, I would be willing to bet that if this isn't just a bunch of smoke and mirrors, the true explanation is something other than what Mills is putting out, but that doesn't mean it's not potentially useful.
Every shot at least 4 times. Even quiet dialogue scenes.
That's not actually very much, and maybe that's part of the problem. Every shot was done only 4 times when they actually needed more work.
I've been a movie extra. One memorable day I was in a shoot that took up about 15 seconds of screen time. We did at least 20 takes, with the director trying the scene out several different ways. This isn't unusual in the least.
Re:One thing I've NEVER seen here....
on
Fair IP Laws?
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· Score: 4, Informative
IANAL, so I'm arguing at a significant disadvantage here, but maybe I'll learn something.
The main problem as I see it is that the discipline of Software Engineering is still in its infancy. It doesn't even have the advantage that, say, Mechanical Engineering had at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution where all the basic building blocks (wheels, gears, pistons, cams, flywheels, etc.) had already been devised centuries before for the most part, and no one had to hesitate to make use of them for fear of violating someone else's IP rights. Software engineers are still, by and large, inventing the wheel. Or maybe we've advanced as far as the cam. The point is that all the basic tools of the trade, which in other disciplines were developed long before IP law was even remotely contemplated, are still in the process of assuming their standardized forms. It can only benefit "the progress of science and useful arts" to allow these tools to develop unimpeded.
But there's another aspect that's a problem that you pointed up in your post when you said, "Or is it simply that because there are so many talented programmers out there who can write code that does the same thing as the patented code that they don't want any impediments whatsoever?" The task that the software is accomplishing ought not be patentable. Imagine if the inventor of the locomotive had been awarded a patent that covered any form of self-propelled conveyance. Had such a patent still been valid some 80 years later (and it wouldn't have been at the time, but bear with me -- we may be headed this way anyhow) then the inventor of the automobile would have had to license this patent to build the first car! Rather, it's the underlying method by which this task is performed (steam engine vs. internal combustion engine) that ought to be patentable, and as I understand it, traditionally has been in IP law.
I don't say even that without a qualm or two, since computational methods (algorithms) traditionally have been in the domain of the academy, and in many cases patenting of an algorithm is as absurd as patenting a mathematical theorem. That is to say, it's to an extent an implicit property of the formal system in which it exists. But one does have to draw the line somewhere, and truly clever and innovative algorithms ought to be rewarded with a temporary monopoly, IMO. (But if the same task can be accomplished with an algorithm that is not mathematically identical, that's another story.)
And if I had a space ship, I wouldn't take your left nut (or anyone else's) in exchange for it. I strongly suspect that I don't value your nuts anywhere near as much as you do.
National security, huh? Does Gates understand that anything that must remain undisclosed for national security reasons is classified? Does he really want to have to deal with everything that entails: Security clearances and background investigations for every one of his employees, periodic audits, regulations that control how every single piece of paper and magnetic media is handled, filed, and disposed of?
I work for a defense contractor and have had to put up with this for years. I suppose MS can go this route if they really want to. They're already bloated enough; add government security procedures to the mix and they'll become every bit as agile and responsive as any other constituent of the Military-Industrial Complex.
Slashdot Mirror
Much of the shape of the final story is worked out in the editing process. Directors typically shoot not only extra scenes that may or may not make it into the final cut, but they might also shoot a half-dozen or so versions of each scene, each acted a bit differently. (Or lit, or with different angles, etc.) With so much raw material to work from, the editor and director can take the film in almost any direction they choose long after shooting is completed and without having to drag the actors back in front of the cameras.
For a good example of what I'm talking about, go get the Big Trouble in Little China DVD. (As a /. reader you should own a copy of this film anyway, so if you don't have it you should buy it immediately or risk the loss of your nerd credentials.) Check out the deleted scenes, which include a number of alternate versions of scenes that actually appeared in the final cut. The director, John Carpenter, chose to make BTiLC a very fast-paced action-oriented film that almost never gives you a chance to take a breath. However, with the material at his disposal, he could have created a slower more dramatic film that was much more character-oriented.
Part of the reason for this is because very often even an experienced director can't tell how a particular script is going to work until he actually sees it on film. All this extra material allows him to pick and choose among entire scenes and subtle re-interpretations of scenes until the film conveys exactly the effect he's aiming for. Other times, I think it's because the director honestly doesn't know what will work better or what final product he's going for, and all the extra footage allows him to defer that decision until he's in the editing booth.
But seriously, if he had been cryogenically frozen, don't you think he'd be on display in Tomorrowland somewhere? If not in person, then as an Animitronic figure? (OK, not Animitronic because it wouldn't be moving, but you know what I mean.) This is exactly the kind of groovy, Jetsons-type futuristic stuff Walt loved to promote.
Now if only someone would find a practical application for Pascal...
If it can vaporize the target, it's also able to vaporize the weapon that's emitting the beam. Newton's Third Law of Motion hasn't been repealed as far as I know.
...but why exactly is this in the Education topic? Surely something like Technology, Programming, or Bug would describe it better.
It's also very useful to keep a boot disk with some basic recovery tools on it for those occasions when my wife does a FORMAT C:, or we have a hard drive go bad, or other similar situation. (She's only done that once, but it makes a good story. Good thing there's UNFORMAT.)
Perhaps the mathematical relationship between the pieces of the picture were left intact, but it destroys the self-contained nature of the piece. The idea is that the boy is looking at the same picture he's standing within. Lenstra has created nothing more than a "Droste" picture with elliptical distortions. (If you look at the zoomed versions of the filled-in drawing, there's another copy of the boy in it.) If that's all Escher had wanted to do, he would have selected a different grid as the foundation of his drawing; filled in like this the grid is nonsensical.
Actually, according to this article, we're between spiral arms. The arms themselves are apparently areas of intense star formation activity, and are thus too chaotic and contain too much hard radiation to allow long-term biological evolution.
What does "moral objectivity" mean here? Especially since you seem to have a problem with people who have "already made up their mind about whats Right and Wrong." Objectivity means that there's at least a widespread consensus about what the truth of the matter is; with subjects where objectivity is really possible we would expect that most people have their minds made up on them.
Morality isn't one of these, not anymore. With religion dethroned as the provider of the moral standard commonly regarded as objective, we are left with a half-dozen or so competing moral philosophies that are not all mutually compatible. Your choice of philosophies (or which philososphy has been foisted upon your consciousness, either overtly or covertly) determines what morality you will apply to any given situation. Objectivity in morals has gone completely out the window. In many cases we must be reduced to pragmatics, where we look at the underlying assumptions and try to see if they are workable in a society where they're universally applied.
In the case at hand, Anthony's response to objections to pedophilic elements in his work seems to be based on the proposition that because it's natural, it must be right. This fails by a reasonably pragmatic test IMO because no human society can be constructed using this as a guide. It's completely natural to fly into a murderous rage under some conditions, but just because it's natural to feel like killing another human being at times that doesn't mean we ever ought to.
It's not like the case of, say, Roger Zelazny who always wrote short novels. In the days when publishers wouldn't use a larger typeface for short works like they do now so that all books are more or less the same size, you could pretty much tell how long a book was by it's thickness. Zelazny was like literary espresso anyway; his writing was dense and flavorful. Anthony's work is more like cotton candy, only with more pink and less sugar. To find that you're getting even less of a story than you thought you were was not a pleasant surprise, especially when he chooses to tell us all about his bowel problems in some detail. (Afterword to On a Pale Horse, if memory serves.)
The fact that people grow out of his juvenile fiction doesn't speak well of it at all. "Alert" adults find enjoyable nuggets -- or rather, there are parts of the book that are intended to be enjoyed by adults. Whether or not they actually do is another question. But in general, the Xanth books do not age well. There are a number of authors whom I enjoy almost as much now that I'm in my late 30s as when I discovered them as a teenager -- Zelazny (although I've since become aware of a number of subtle messages in his work that I find objectionable that the sheer literary quality of it caused me to overlook it earlier), Tolkien, Robert E. Howard, Glenn Cook, Urusula Le Guin, Gillian Bradshaw, Patricia McKillip, Harlan Ellison, Orson Scott Card, and many others. Even some of Heinlein stands up pretty well -- oddly, his juvenile fiction is much more enjoyable for me than what he wrote for adults. I can still derive a great deal of enjoyment from Baum's Oz books, which I first started reading when I was 7 or so, and I now enjoy the Harry Potter series very much, even though it's marketed directly at children.
Piers Anthony? At my age, there is nothing he has written that I can enjoy in any way, for many of the same reasons that others have detailed here. Telling us that we've grown past is isn't a good excuse. His suggestion that childhood is a somehow superior state of being is plain silly.
They should be very, very careful. You never know what might happen with mail-order gene sequences, or genetic material from eBay or such places.
Here ya go! It's Cheetos, but so what?
You're right. Despite the seeming ubiquity of cellphones in the US, they've achieved nowhere near the penetration they have in the UK. This is probably one of the reasons why.
Yes there was a need for a naval ensign, but the flag actually originated as a military banner. I'm not familiar with the historical or sociological data that could reliably tell us when the "flag fetish" began, but it seems reasonable to peg it to some time after large numbers of men were demobilized from the military and returned to civillian life. They would almost certainly have taken some of their military attitudes home with them, transferring the importance of the banner on the battlefield to a civillian context. Possibly after the Civil War, or one of the World Wars.
First, there's no such implication. (I see no reason to support this further; it seems fair to counter your bald assertion with one of my own. Besides, it seems clear enough -- to me, anyway -- from a plain reading of the text.) Second, you need to clarify which religious ritual you're talking about. The rituals of my religion are anything but empty.
And no, a symbol that substitutes for cultural unity isn't an idol. There. You asked a question and I answered. If you meant to imply that such a symbol is an idol, you'll once again have to provide something other than bald assertion.
And what is the difference between them? Is one, or the other, less true, less wholly felt, or said such that God sees what you say less?
Yes, actually. God sees all no matter what we do, but men for their part seem to take vows more seriously when they invoke him as a witness, in general. If you're an exception to that generality, then good for you.
And you're incorrect about pledges. As a verb it means to make a promise or agreement. Although it can be enforced by the exchange of a valuable token of some kind, that's not a necessary condition of one, and in any event does not involve calling upon any higher power. An oath is sealed by calling upon some external force at witness. Someone who feels he is commanded by God to always speak the truth (this is what I take your idiosyncratic phrase "holy leading" to mean) and concomitantly forbidden to make oaths ought to be able to offer a pledge with a clear conscience. I'd think that if that pledge takes note of God's omnipotence -- aren't we all "under God" no matter where we live? -- without actually calling upon him as witness, so much the better.
It's interesting that with all this you feel no loyalty to the country that does not interfere with your freedom practise your religion, to the point where the Constitution even allows for affirmations where it otherwise calls for oaths so that persons of your persuasion need not violate their beliefs in order to take a public duty upon themselves. At the very least, some might perceive you as ungrateful.
It is somewhat peculiar, but it or something like it was probably inevitable. Culturally, the US is much more diverse than any single European nation, although just possibly not much more than the EU taken as a whole. Since we do not share a single culture, culture alone cannot be a unifying principle. The flag is one of the more important symbols that have come to be a substitute for it.
Finally the main objection to the pledge historically has been from religious groups, in particular the Quakers. For us the pledge of allegiance to a physical object is tantamount to idol worship which we have rather strong view against. Furthermore we don't make oaths by heaven for that is of God, nor by earth as that is his footstool.
That's nice, and scriptural, but you need to explain more to avoid the impression that these objections are irrelevant. The meaning of "pledge" is on the same level roughly as promise; it doesn't quite rise to the status of an oath. Even if it did it's not being made "by" either heaven or earth, nor even God. God is mentioned as an attribute of the nation, "under God", not called upon as witness.
Maybe we already have. Would you recognize a naked Martian if you saw one?
Won't this necessarily involve going outside at some point?
He's got a good point here, you know. I stayed away from Opera for a long time for no better reason than that the Back button was in the wrong place. Yes, thank you, I know there are many useful keyboard shortcuts in Opera, but I don't want to be forced to learn them to use the product comfortably. The Back button goes on the left side of the tool bar, which itself is just below the menu bar -- and that's the way I likes it, dad-gummit!
All true geeks lust for a machine like this one that still allows you to program it and examine its state via the front panel, but this is an absolute requirement for all sincere geeks-in-training! Flush VB down the toilet if you haven't already; forget Perl, OOL, Linux and anything with an API that places 5 or 6 layers of insulation between you and the bare metal! If you really want to understand how a computer does it's job on a fundamental level, if you want to actually learn what the thing's doing, then you cannot do without a good basic machine like this. You will never be able to stand among the Great Geeks of History if you lack this kind of experience.
You took the words right out of my, um, keyboard. Look, even on NASA's budget, $75k is peanuts. It's well worth it from their point of view to fund one of these things every so often on the off-off-off-chance there's something to it. Now, I would be willing to bet that if this isn't just a bunch of smoke and mirrors, the true explanation is something other than what Mills is putting out, but that doesn't mean it's not potentially useful.
That's not actually very much, and maybe that's part of the problem. Every shot was done only 4 times when they actually needed more work.
I've been a movie extra. One memorable day I was in a shoot that took up about 15 seconds of screen time. We did at least 20 takes, with the director trying the scene out several different ways. This isn't unusual in the least.
The main problem as I see it is that the discipline of Software Engineering is still in its infancy. It doesn't even have the advantage that, say, Mechanical Engineering had at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution where all the basic building blocks (wheels, gears, pistons, cams, flywheels, etc.) had already been devised centuries before for the most part, and no one had to hesitate to make use of them for fear of violating someone else's IP rights. Software engineers are still, by and large, inventing the wheel. Or maybe we've advanced as far as the cam. The point is that all the basic tools of the trade, which in other disciplines were developed long before IP law was even remotely contemplated, are still in the process of assuming their standardized forms. It can only benefit "the progress of science and useful arts" to allow these tools to develop unimpeded.
But there's another aspect that's a problem that you pointed up in your post when you said, "Or is it simply that because there are so many talented programmers out there who can write code that does the same thing as the patented code that they don't want any impediments whatsoever?" The task that the software is accomplishing ought not be patentable. Imagine if the inventor of the locomotive had been awarded a patent that covered any form of self-propelled conveyance. Had such a patent still been valid some 80 years later (and it wouldn't have been at the time, but bear with me -- we may be headed this way anyhow) then the inventor of the automobile would have had to license this patent to build the first car! Rather, it's the underlying method by which this task is performed (steam engine vs. internal combustion engine) that ought to be patentable, and as I understand it, traditionally has been in IP law.
I don't say even that without a qualm or two, since computational methods (algorithms) traditionally have been in the domain of the academy, and in many cases patenting of an algorithm is as absurd as patenting a mathematical theorem. That is to say, it's to an extent an implicit property of the formal system in which it exists. But one does have to draw the line somewhere, and truly clever and innovative algorithms ought to be rewarded with a temporary monopoly, IMO. (But if the same task can be accomplished with an algorithm that is not mathematically identical, that's another story.)
And if I had a space ship, I wouldn't take your left nut (or anyone else's) in exchange for it. I strongly suspect that I don't value your nuts anywhere near as much as you do.
I work for a defense contractor and have had to put up with this for years. I suppose MS can go this route if they really want to. They're already bloated enough; add government security procedures to the mix and they'll become every bit as agile and responsive as any other constituent of the Military-Industrial Complex.
Boy, that'd be a hoot.