That's the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, and is the subject of very considerable debate. Frankly, I think the Wikipedia entry gives a little too much credence to it, IIRC psychologists think it's only true in a very weak sense.
Who knows, maybe an Apollo-scale effort could be mounted to stop the impact. But I wouldn't count on it. It is a hard problem, and sheer manpower dollars may not be enough.
If it really threatened the existence of humanity as a species, we could put in a heck of a lot more effort in than Apollo. Gross world product was about 20 trillion 1987 dollars, back in 1994, according to a few seconds of googling (can't find more accurate figures). It's probably about 25 trillion now. If we could devote 25% of this effort towards saving the world (I believe that the USA diverted about 50% of its GDP towards the military in WWII), that's 12.5 trillion 1987 dollars annually. That buys you a heck of a lot of stuff...
If they're terrorists, they have almost no rights.
Aside from repeated assertions by various administration officials, how do we know the people detained in Guantanamo Bay are indeed terrorists?
Imagine if US citizens were being held indefinitely without trial by a foriegn government, who kept on blithely asserting "these people are dangerous terrorists" without actually providing any evidence that this is the case. You'd be demanding the US Government sent in the Marines within the hour. So why is it alright for the US to do it to the citizens of other countries?
Australia does not have US-style fair use provisions. It instead has "fair dealing" provison that allow some usage for the purpose of reporting news, critical review, or education.
They are more restrictive than US law.
Personally, if the FTA gets up, as an Aussie we should start campaigning for US-style fair use provisions, all in the name of "harmonizing with the largest economy in the world", of course.
I don't have Bradley Edwards' book with me which discusses this in some detail, but IIRC you can't build a space elevator on the moon because the "selino-stationary" orbit is way, way, way, too far out.
The other issue with that quoting these kind of "this industry is worth $BIGNUM so it deserves protection" is that they're all variations on the Broken window fallacy
That 11.7 billion wouldn't have disappeared if there was no spam. It could have been spent elsewhere, thus generating similar or greater economic benefits and not imposing parasitic costs to the rest of us in dealing with the spammers' crap. If it was not spent, and was kept in people's pockets, that would probably be a good thing for the American economy as well, considering the ridiculous level of US consumer debt...
Now that India is able to build nuclear bombs, and has its software industry taking off - is it not an indication that it can stand on its own, thus the world can stop sending money to "help" it? Is the government spending the newfound taxmoney on weapons but not on its peoples living conditions?
India's economy is growing rapidly, but there are still hundreds of millions of people who are in absolute poverty - as in not getting enough to eat type poverty. Relative prosperity has only reached maybe 10% of the population so far.
For context: the most common type of structural steel currently used has a yield strength of 350 Mpa. 100 GPa is 285 times stronger.
Yes, it sounds outrageous, but it's theoretically possible to do this with nanotubes, apparently. As I understand it, nobody has actually demonstrated a macroscopic piece of nanotube composite with this kind of strength though.
To suggest that this can be achieved in a couple of years sounds silly to me, considering whatever material used would a lengthy term of testing and a proven track record before sinking billions of dollars into it.
True, but the things made possible with such a material would surely attract billions of dollars worth of R&D. Can you imagine what it could do for things like aircraft design?
For those suggesting ESR should fix this himself, those of you with long memories might remember CML2, Eric's attempt to fix kernel configuration (for the purposes of compiling a kernel from source).
The kernel configuration system back in 2.4 was crufty and not very user-friendly. So Eric decided to build a new system, CML2. It ended up not going in for a variety of reasons, not the least of which was probably a lot of people don't like him all that much. However, in that case he was practising exactly he is preaching here - making software easier for non-gurus to use.
If somebody put out a faked photo "proving" Bush was AWOL, how many of you would cheer?
If it was faked, "we" (by which I mean Democrat supporters and the untold millions outside America willing them on and wishing they could help) would be peeved. Not because we have any sympathy for Shrub, but because it would be unhelpful to the ultimate goal - replacing him with somebody else, and believe me, the left is really, really focussed on the ultimate goal at the moment.
Oh, and as far as dirty tricks go, as far as a lot fo the left is concerned the Bush administration (maybe not Bush himself, whom they regard as a lazy oaf who gets told what to do by Rove and Cheney) doesn't need any lessons from the Nixon administration. Heck, it seems like half of them were in the Nixon administration.
Well yes, business model patents and others (though business models are the worst offenders) where the claim is, "X is an established thing or process, but I propose to do it in conjunction with Y!" are absurd.
About three years ago, the Australian government did a review of its intellectual property policy. Anyway, one of the proposals was tightening up the "inventiveness test" for patents, as follows:
The Committee also recommends that, when considering inventive step, it should be permissible to combine two or more documents or parts of documents, different parts of the same document or other pieces of prior art where such a combination would have been obvious to the person skilled in the art.
That should neatly deal with the stupid patents of the type you describe.
The entire document is well worth a read, actually. In a lot of ways it's going in the right direction, making patents harder to get, and recommending that Australia not extend its copyright term. Pity that its recommendations will get chucked out the window as part of our "Free Trade Agreement" (which isn't really very free at all) with the US.
If you read the whole letter you'll notice a lot of it has to do with Palestine...
As I understand it, there's a belief in some quarters that, with respect to Palestine, OBL is taking a leaf out of the Trotskyite handbook in taking advantage of local grievances.
Not sure whether it's true or not, but it's plausible. I think we've seen plenty of BS from Western politicians in regards to actions in the "war on terror" so far...
You are scum. You are the lowest of the low. Dogs refuse to piss on you to preserve their own dignity. Arthritic old ladies would stab you to peath with crochet hooks if they could find out which sewer you live in. Little children prefer to spend time with Michael Jackson than you. I hope that slow-growing flesh-eating bacteria are introduced to your innards, and the only treatment doctors provide is to throw you, naked, into a padded cell so you can't end your misery prematurely. And, once you finally, painfully, agonizingly die, I hope I'm wrong about the existence of Hell and Satan makes you his pet project.
#ifdef TO_PEANUT_GALLERY
I never thought I'd get the opportunity to say that to a spammer! That was fun!
If I'm reading this correctly, GPL incompatibility isn't a huge issue with regards to Apache.
What this means is it can't be linked (like a library is linked) with GPL'd code. But that's not an issue anyway, as Apache doesn't need to link to any GPL'd code. Pretty much all the libraries on a Linux system are LGPL'd (or under even less restrictive licenses like the BSD license), which can be dynamically linked to anything, including proprietary code - yep, that's right, Microsoft Word could be legally linked to an LGPL'd library.
Where it does matter is if somebody wants to add a piece of code from a GPL'd project in Apache, or a piece of Apache to a GPL project.
So, this would be nice to sort out, but it doesn't have the urgency of the XFree86 issue, where all the end-user apps on the system link to the X libraries.
The open source project I used to work on had a "won't fix" category, as well as a "won't fix until the next major revision" category. The "won't fix" was for things that our opinion weren't broken, and the "won't fix till later..." were for issues that required major structural changes to fix.
I'm not a robotics expert, but a good friend of mine is, and I did study this stuff as an undergrad not that long ago.
The difficulty with autonomous land vehicles is using sensor data to figure out what the environment is like, and using that information to plan what to do next. Both are AI problems, not hardware problems (though, certainly, clever sensor hardware and lots of computer power helps).
As a foriegner like yourself, I think your claim is a little exaggerated.
Whether we like it or not, the US is the most powerful country on Earth, with an enormous economic and military influence. Its government consequently has the diplomatic clout to influence governments the world over, for good and bad. Its "soft power", as the generator of more exported popular culture than anywhere else on Earth, and much of the world's scientific output, is also profound.
Additionally, for a native English speaker like myself, the USA is another part of the Anglosphere.
So, for the vast majority of Slashdot's foriegn readership, I'd think what happens in the US state of Georgia is more interesting than what happens in the former Soviet republic.
That's the kind of narrow-minded crap your parents (or maybe your grandparents, it's 40 years ago now) probably spouted about The Beatles.
For an example of what you dismissively term "just playing records", might I suggest you check out The Avalanches. They get called DJ's, but it's a very long way away from what a DJ does at an office party (which is actually a more difficult skill than you think, having tried it). Virtually everything on there is sampled from something else, but the sources are very obscure and they're combined in ways you'd never think of.
And as for hip-hop, they're poets who work to a drum beat. Sure, Sturgeon's law applies, but I can name approximately 1 squillion mediocre rock acts. (Creed? Any nu-metal act with a misplaced "k" in their name?) A good example of the close relationship was the well-known poet Allen Ginsberg's 1996 collaboration with Paul McCartney and Phillip Glass, The Ballad of the Skeletons. Or, alternatively, you could try listening closely to Eminem's Stan. It's a very perceptive commentary on the mentality of some of his own fans, and Dr. Dre, his producer, was brilliant to figure out how well Dido's Thank You fitted with it.
Oh, and as for performances based mostly around sequencing, ever heard of 1970's German techno precursors Kraftwerk?
Reading the patent, your interpretation seems correct, but what the heck is novel or nonobvious about that? Any competent programmer could come up with a method for doing the same thing in a few hours.
Now, while you or I might know that Pixar are the ones responsible for their movies, but Joe and Jane Sixpack doesn't. All they know is "Disney = will keep kids entertained = will not contain any concepts that offend my sensibilities. Pixar? Who are these weird Pixar people? How can I be sure that this movie isn't some evil plot by those liberal Californian freaks to pollute my children's minds?"
I'm not sure how much slapping a Disney label on a kids' movie is worth, but it sure ain't zero.
I've posted this a dozen times now...the space elevator is not possible with current technology. It's not a matter of engineering. While people are continuing to dicker with the stuff, nobody has managed to make a nanotube composite that is vaguely strong enough, let alone figured out how to churn out thousands of tonnes at a time. It's definitely worth throwing $MODERATELY_LARGE_SUM at it, for myriad applications. If it turns out to be possible, then we can throw $BIGNUM at space elevators across the whole damn solar system and become the multi-planet species we are destined to become.
But until it's proved possible, we shouldn't base our entire space program around a pipe dream.
One thing you might want to consider before laying down too much cash is "how enthusiastic am I about making movies?"
I played around with making videos back in the days of VHS-C, as did my Dad (who, before that, used to make movies with Super-8 film). Although video editing software is much easier to work with than the edit controllers then available, it's still a bitch to do. To make something watchable, you end up shooting 10 times what makes it to screen, particularly of the interesting bits of whatever it is you're doing. Therefore, you're too busy shooting to enjoy whatever it is you're there for in the first place. Despite image stabilizers, to get decent footage (and to stop your arms getting tired) you need a tripod anyway, as well as extra batteries, auxiliary microphones...and it goes on. Getting decent-quality sound is also a bitch. Then you have to edit it together. Often, once you get home you find that you're missing key things, so for future events you start making a shot list to make sure you get everything...so, to make watchable videos you end up becoming a video director rather than a participant.
If you're not into all that, you just want a record of a few things and you'll settle for Aunt Mildred being recognisable, a low-end camera will do the job just fine, and spending more than that is a waste. You'll make a far better video with a $500 camera with the right accessories and a bit of effort than a $2000 camera stupidly used.
According to this article, about 68 million Indian households have TV sets, scooters, and maybe refrigerators, and that's growing rapidly. Simultaneously, though, over half of India's children don't get enough to eat.
So, yes, India is becoming richer, but it's going to take a long time for that wealth to make it all the way around the community.
Slashdot Mirror
That's the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, and is the subject of very considerable debate. Frankly, I think the Wikipedia entry gives a little too much credence to it, IIRC psychologists think it's only true in a very weak sense.
If it really threatened the existence of humanity as a species, we could put in a heck of a lot more effort in than Apollo. Gross world product was about 20 trillion 1987 dollars, back in 1994, according to a few seconds of googling (can't find more accurate figures). It's probably about 25 trillion now. If we could devote 25% of this effort towards saving the world (I believe that the USA diverted about 50% of its GDP towards the military in WWII), that's 12.5 trillion 1987 dollars annually. That buys you a heck of a lot of stuff...
Aside from repeated assertions by various administration officials, how do we know the people detained in Guantanamo Bay are indeed terrorists?
Imagine if US citizens were being held indefinitely without trial by a foriegn government, who kept on blithely asserting "these people are dangerous terrorists" without actually providing any evidence that this is the case. You'd be demanding the US Government sent in the Marines within the hour. So why is it alright for the US to do it to the citizens of other countries?
Personally, if the FTA gets up, as an Aussie we should start campaigning for US-style fair use provisions, all in the name of "harmonizing with the largest economy in the world", of course.
I don't have Bradley Edwards' book with me which discusses this in some detail, but IIRC you can't build a space elevator on the moon because the "selino-stationary" orbit is way, way, way, too far out.
That 11.7 billion wouldn't have disappeared if there was no spam. It could have been spent elsewhere, thus generating similar or greater economic benefits and not imposing parasitic costs to the rest of us in dealing with the spammers' crap. If it was not spent, and was kept in people's pockets, that would probably be a good thing for the American economy as well, considering the ridiculous level of US consumer debt...
India's economy is growing rapidly, but there are still hundreds of millions of people who are in absolute poverty - as in not getting enough to eat type poverty. Relative prosperity has only reached maybe 10% of the population so far.
Yes, it sounds outrageous, but it's theoretically possible to do this with nanotubes, apparently. As I understand it, nobody has actually demonstrated a macroscopic piece of nanotube composite with this kind of strength though.
True, but the things made possible with such a material would surely attract billions of dollars worth of R&D. Can you imagine what it could do for things like aircraft design?
The kernel configuration system back in 2.4 was crufty and not very user-friendly. So Eric decided to build a new system, CML2. It ended up not going in for a variety of reasons, not the least of which was probably a lot of people don't like him all that much. However, in that case he was practising exactly he is preaching here - making software easier for non-gurus to use.
Could somebody explain to me how in the world this is supposed to be a good thing?
If it was faked, "we" (by which I mean Democrat supporters and the untold millions outside America willing them on and wishing they could help) would be peeved. Not because we have any sympathy for Shrub, but because it would be unhelpful to the ultimate goal - replacing him with somebody else, and believe me, the left is really, really focussed on the ultimate goal at the moment.
Oh, and as far as dirty tricks go, as far as a lot fo the left is concerned the Bush administration (maybe not Bush himself, whom they regard as a lazy oaf who gets told what to do by Rove and Cheney) doesn't need any lessons from the Nixon administration. Heck, it seems like half of them were in the Nixon administration.
About three years ago, the Australian government did a review of its intellectual property policy. Anyway, one of the proposals was tightening up the "inventiveness test" for patents, as follows:
That should neatly deal with the stupid patents of the type you describe.The entire document is well worth a read, actually. In a lot of ways it's going in the right direction, making patents harder to get, and recommending that Australia not extend its copyright term. Pity that its recommendations will get chucked out the window as part of our "Free Trade Agreement" (which isn't really very free at all) with the US.
As I understand it, there's a belief in some quarters that, with respect to Palestine, OBL is taking a leaf out of the Trotskyite handbook in taking advantage of local grievances.
Not sure whether it's true or not, but it's plausible. I think we've seen plenty of BS from Western politicians in regards to actions in the "war on terror" so far...
IIRC, the wines that taste at their best many years after bottling are mainly red wines made from Shiraz or Cabernet Sauvignon.
I never thought I'd get the opportunity to say that to a spammer! That was fun!
What this means is it can't be linked (like a library is linked) with GPL'd code. But that's not an issue anyway, as Apache doesn't need to link to any GPL'd code. Pretty much all the libraries on a Linux system are LGPL'd (or under even less restrictive licenses like the BSD license), which can be dynamically linked to anything, including proprietary code - yep, that's right, Microsoft Word could be legally linked to an LGPL'd library.
Where it does matter is if somebody wants to add a piece of code from a GPL'd project in Apache, or a piece of Apache to a GPL project. So, this would be nice to sort out, but it doesn't have the urgency of the XFree86 issue, where all the end-user apps on the system link to the X libraries.
The open source project I used to work on had a "won't fix" category, as well as a "won't fix until the next major revision" category. The "won't fix" was for things that our opinion weren't broken, and the "won't fix till later..." were for issues that required major structural changes to fix.
The difficulty with autonomous land vehicles is using sensor data to figure out what the environment is like, and using that information to plan what to do next. Both are AI problems, not hardware problems (though, certainly, clever sensor hardware and lots of computer power helps).
Whether we like it or not, the US is the most powerful country on Earth, with an enormous economic and military influence. Its government consequently has the diplomatic clout to influence governments the world over, for good and bad. Its "soft power", as the generator of more exported popular culture than anywhere else on Earth, and much of the world's scientific output, is also profound.
Additionally, for a native English speaker like myself, the USA is another part of the Anglosphere.
So, for the vast majority of Slashdot's foriegn readership, I'd think what happens in the US state of Georgia is more interesting than what happens in the former Soviet republic.
For an example of what you dismissively term "just playing records", might I suggest you check out The Avalanches. They get called DJ's, but it's a very long way away from what a DJ does at an office party (which is actually a more difficult skill than you think, having tried it). Virtually everything on there is sampled from something else, but the sources are very obscure and they're combined in ways you'd never think of.
And as for hip-hop, they're poets who work to a drum beat. Sure, Sturgeon's law applies, but I can name approximately 1 squillion mediocre rock acts. (Creed? Any nu-metal act with a misplaced "k" in their name?) A good example of the close relationship was the well-known poet Allen Ginsberg's 1996 collaboration with Paul McCartney and Phillip Glass, The Ballad of the Skeletons. Or, alternatively, you could try listening closely to Eminem's Stan. It's a very perceptive commentary on the mentality of some of his own fans, and Dr. Dre, his producer, was brilliant to figure out how well Dido's Thank You fitted with it.
Oh, and as for performances based mostly around sequencing, ever heard of 1970's German techno precursors Kraftwerk?
Reading the patent, your interpretation seems correct, but what the heck is novel or nonobvious about that? Any competent programmer could come up with a method for doing the same thing in a few hours.
I'm not sure how much slapping a Disney label on a kids' movie is worth, but it sure ain't zero.
But until it's proved possible, we shouldn't base our entire space program around a pipe dream.
I played around with making videos back in the days of VHS-C, as did my Dad (who, before that, used to make movies with Super-8 film). Although video editing software is much easier to work with than the edit controllers then available, it's still a bitch to do. To make something watchable, you end up shooting 10 times what makes it to screen, particularly of the interesting bits of whatever it is you're doing. Therefore, you're too busy shooting to enjoy whatever it is you're there for in the first place. Despite image stabilizers, to get decent footage (and to stop your arms getting tired) you need a tripod anyway, as well as extra batteries, auxiliary microphones...and it goes on. Getting decent-quality sound is also a bitch. Then you have to edit it together. Often, once you get home you find that you're missing key things, so for future events you start making a shot list to make sure you get everything...so, to make watchable videos you end up becoming a video director rather than a participant.
If you're not into all that, you just want a record of a few things and you'll settle for Aunt Mildred being recognisable, a low-end camera will do the job just fine, and spending more than that is a waste. You'll make a far better video with a $500 camera with the right accessories and a bit of effort than a $2000 camera stupidly used.
So, yes, India is becoming richer, but it's going to take a long time for that wealth to make it all the way around the community.