In the 19th century, there was heavy competition for the implementation of the telephone system. Edison wanted to enter the market. But Bell had already patented the system! What Edison did, then, was to invent a new way by which sounds can be inputted and outputted, and using his own, new system, managed to challenge Bell. Hence, patents in this case directly drove innovation.
But what if Bell had recieved a software patent? Then the patent would not cover, as in this case, the process by which his telephone worked. Instead, he would be able to patent the idea of long distance voice communication. Edison would not be able to enter the market, even if he improved on the implementation.
Software patents aren't patents. They are ways of making money by preventing innovation.
The stability of the past 10000 years is a complete historical anomoly
That doesn't make sense at all. History only goes back 3k years or so... how could it be a historical anomaly if we don't have data for other times? And besides, what was so different back then? Dramatic changes need to have some sort of cause for them - there is no such thing as luck. Besides, it seems absurd to suggest that mankind messing with the weather back before roman times (when what? 0.001% of land is cultivated, and the global population was around 10 million, and annual carbon emissions less than current daily emissions...) would be sufficient to keep weather stable for then.)
What's your source for drastic natural variations in that period?
We have 400k years of pretty good temperature and CO2 data now from the Vostock ice cores, and it's clear that a stable climate is an illusion caused by man's relatively short lifespan.
Whatever. But there's a missing element in the middle of this - timescale. With the onset and end of ice ages, we are talking about geological timescales - minimum of thousands of years for any discernable difference. Minus global warming, the timings will be incredibly gradual - civilisation as we know it will probably be gone by then. It isn't absolutely stable, but it's stable enough. It will be the same general sort of thing in which civilisation has developed for the last 1000 years or so.
Global warming isn't like that. Not only is the temperature the highest it has been, it's been climbing at an astronomical rate. The timescale we are talking about is hundreds of years - several orders of magnitude faster. Further, increased temperature is inherently worse that decreased temperature - you are feeding more energy into the weather system, and all things being equal, that raises the incidence of more chaotic weather.
Finally, there's direct frictional costs from the rate this is all happening. As temperatures change, the bands in which certain crop can be grown will move and change. Entire agricultural zones will change. Some will be able to adapt to this, but many will not. And it will be extremely expensive in terms of lost productivity and need to retrain and so on. If you think this is a good thing, then why don't the cheerleaders for 'adaptation' help fund the efforts of the poorer nations?
Skirting the Godwin rule a bit, but Nazi Germany was one of the most technologically advanced nations in the world at the time (Engineering mostly, biology... not so much.)
Scientific progress is a neccessary but not sufficient condition for a free and happy state.
B) the use of the drug becomes so widespread that market forces make it mandatory. When one or both of those happens, what then?
Who cares? Then the human race, as a whole, gets a higher level of productivity. Then the drug becomes as ubiquitous as clothing - which is just as unnatural, but gives clothed people (at least in colder climates) a great advantage over those unclothed. The only danger comes from evil producers restricting the supply - but that's an argument to increase availability and spread out production, not to reduce it.
Nah, this has uses in allowing software to detect fine changes in pressure, allowing certain systems to be more sensitive and flexible in their operation. For example, attached to an appropiate image recognition package, the robot will be able to maintain the right force and pressure and so on.
I.e. it lets sexbots distinguish ahhhhs from arrrrghs.
Most of the commentators have latched on to the drugs are bad conclusion, so maybe it's time for some devil's advocating... Suppose a drug is invented that has almost no adverse side effect - would it be ok to take it?
There's an assumption in most people's responses that drugs must inherently have a bad sideeffect. That the badness of the side effect is in general proportion to the benefits obtained. Hence, it cannot be good to take X, because X must have a hidden side effect that cancels out any advantages it may provide. Such reasoning may be true when we were kids and were having the 'Drugs -just say NO' message drummed into us, but they aren't going to be true forever. And it's not as though the 'healthy' alternatives are really perfect, either. Exercise to improve fitness is fraught with physical risks. Increased study to boost academics hurts social lives, and may well have a greater cumulative harm than impotence 30 years down the line. (At least, if you've been taking drugs, you've actually slept with someone in that time) How many teenage suicides would have been averted if the victim was taking recreational drugs, and kept taking them? (So no withdrawal symptoms...)
If we look at things in a certain way, there is no special evil associated with using chemicals to achieve some effect over carrying out some other activity. As technology improves, the lines are bound to blur even further.
The funny thing is, I wrote that post to suggest that most people are a good deal more socialist, and aspects of socialism a good deal less insane than is generally made out. Not a single line of my post actually attacks socialism. Rather, I am saying that if you buy into the perfect markets producing perfect results ideology which runs the current world economy, the current behaviour is the logical conclusion.
Socialism isn't a four letter word. If you think it is, what excuse do you have against outsourcing but xenophobia? The response to my post is a chain of knee-jerk 'no I'm not a commie' replies, but after that people seem to get the right idea. Social effects do matter as well as economic ones. Free market principles cannot be blindly followed. Capitalism needs to be combined with social awareness. Etc.
Was that post a troll? Maybe it was. But it seems to me, sitting in a relatively economically left wing country, that socialist economic thinking is quite alive in the US after all. It just needs a name change.
There's a whiff of xenophobia about all this. I mean, let's take this piece by piece... what's wrong here?
Is the generic idea of outsourcing wrong? That's just capitalism, people. In a free market, companies are allowed to maximise their own profitability and they can do this by outsourcing. If we trust free market principles, it turns out that such behaviour is in the long term in fact the best for everyone - outsourcing ventures are only successful if they achieve the right balance and provide good service for reduced costs. I'd trust that the company's execs thought a bit harder and made more careful studies than you have in the 5 minute interval between reading and replying. If this messes up, it would hurt *them* most. The fact that outsourcing is most profitable is a problem for politicians to deal with, not for individual banks to decide. And like patriotic fervour ever factors into an employee's loyalty.
If the fact that employees are low paid in other countries bad? Low pay doesn't matter as much as wage-price ratios - while according to direct currency conversions people are alot worse off, reduced cost of living in other countries somewhat offsets that situation. In the long term, increased globalisation of businesses helps drive up wages in foreign countries, not the reverse. The only remaining way to ease this situation is by international organisations like the UN, and that aspect is none of the bank's business.
Is the fact that these replacements will be trained by current employees bad? Of course, it's unfortunate for the current employees, but folks, this is what capitalism entails. If these people are skilled enough, they can find other jobs. *Not* helping train their replacements won't help them in any way - and it isn't that their jobs are much easier or better than dealing with Indian trainees. Training the new techs means is good for the company - who get a stabler transition, good for the customers of the company - who get better service, good for the new techs - who are less likely to be corrupt because they've invested effort into a career rather than a short term job, and makes no difference to the employees who are leaving.
Sure, it may be insensitive, but it's just good business sense. Or are you a socialist?
In a word, they won't. The data's encrypted, so there is literally no way they can enforce it.
The 'pledge' is basically legal protection, so that if someone did use the extension to do whatever bad things, (and really, most of them seem pretty impossible to use the extension to do) Google will not themselves be blamed. Realistically, this sort of measure probably won't get them very far in a real court case, but hey, every little helps.
Suppose every Windows server was perfect. No downtime at all in a year. Then that gives our linux machines an average of 1752 hours of downtime per year. Every UNIX machine has to be perfect as well. So we need to account for an average of at most 19.5 hours of downtime by adjusting the proportions involved.
This means that at most 19.5/1752 = 1% of machines in their survey were Linux machines.
Well, General Relativity works in 4D, where this result applies, and lots of things in general relativity are basically 3-manifolds. So, if warp drives are invented at any point in the future, the proof of this conjecture will reassure us that Picard can get from Rigel to Farpoint station without being spewed out as salami.
More generalised versions might also result, which will help us along with string theory and move us closer to cool stuff like this.
First, think in Four Dimensions. Not in terms of time, or something, but as a fourth spacial dimension - like in terms of up down, left right, in out, and foo bar. A 3 sphere is a sphere in that sort of space. For example, in three dimensions, a 2-sphere is just a normal sphere - a group of points that are all the same distance from a certain centre point. A 3-sphere in 4 dimensions is just the set of points in four dimensional space that are the same 'distance' from a point in 4D. (We define distance using the pythagorus formula sqrt(x^2 + y^2 + z^2 + k^2).)
A 3-manifold is another four dimensional object - in fact, a class of objects. They are the analogies of surfaces in 3D space, only again we have it in 4D space. The 3-sphere, for example is an example of a 3-manifold. Simple, connected and closed are two topological properties describing what a surface is like. In layman's terms, simple connected and close means that the surface is well... just an obvious surface. The simple-connected-closed-3-manifold taken together essentially rule out the bizzare sorts of objects that mathematicians come up with. There won't be any 'holes' in the object, and there won't be any non-solid boundaries, the object can't go through itself, and you can't take two seperate objects and pretend the pair is a single one.
So what does the conjecture say? It says that if we have any 3-manifold satisfying certain properties, there is way of distorting it (that's basically what homeomorphism means. Like you take the object as a piece of putty and stretch and pull it, or fold it, or whatever without cutting or gluing bits together) to make it into a 3-sphere.
It's a sort of bubblegum theorem. You can chew up the manifold and blow it into a bubble. (Okay, it's not really like that, topologists.... But it's close enough)
'My intention was never to disrupt security. The fact that I logged on and there were no passwords means that there was no security,' McKinnon said, outside the hearing at London's Bow Street Magistrates Court.
Who faces 5 years and $250k in fines.
Reading that thread, there is a general consensus that McKinnon deserved it - the ease of entry didn't matter, so long as he was aware that he was tresspassing.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh, just an experiment, he says. But how do we know? HOW DO WE KNOW?!?
Please, arrest him quickly and torture him so that we may learn the true horror of his plot.
Let's show this by historical example.
In the 19th century, there was heavy competition for the implementation of the telephone system. Edison wanted to enter the market. But Bell had already patented the system! What Edison did, then, was to invent a new way by which sounds can be inputted and outputted, and using his own, new system, managed to challenge Bell. Hence, patents in this case directly drove innovation.
But what if Bell had recieved a software patent? Then the patent would not cover, as in this case, the process by which his telephone worked. Instead, he would be able to patent the idea of long distance voice communication. Edison would not be able to enter the market, even if he improved on the implementation.
Software patents aren't patents. They are ways of making money by preventing innovation.
The stability of the past 10000 years is a complete historical anomoly
That doesn't make sense at all. History only goes back 3k years or so... how could it be a historical anomaly if we don't have data for other times? And besides, what was so different back then? Dramatic changes need to have some sort of cause for them - there is no such thing as luck. Besides, it seems absurd to suggest that mankind messing with the weather back before roman times (when what? 0.001% of land is cultivated, and the global population was around 10 million, and annual carbon emissions less than current daily emissions...) would be sufficient to keep weather stable for then.)
What's your source for drastic natural variations in that period?
We have 400k years of pretty good temperature and CO2 data now from the Vostock ice cores, and it's clear that a stable climate is an illusion caused by man's relatively short lifespan.
Whatever. But there's a missing element in the middle of this - timescale. With the onset and end of ice ages, we are talking about geological timescales - minimum of thousands of years for any discernable difference. Minus global warming, the timings will be incredibly gradual - civilisation as we know it will probably be gone by then. It isn't absolutely stable, but it's stable enough. It will be the same general sort of thing in which civilisation has developed for the last 1000 years or so.
Global warming isn't like that. Not only is the temperature the highest it has been, it's been climbing at an astronomical rate. The timescale we are talking about is hundreds of years - several orders of magnitude faster. Further, increased temperature is inherently worse that decreased temperature - you are feeding more energy into the weather system, and all things being equal, that raises the incidence of more chaotic weather.
Finally, there's direct frictional costs from the rate this is all happening. As temperatures change, the bands in which certain crop can be grown will move and change. Entire agricultural zones will change. Some will be able to adapt to this, but many will not. And it will be extremely expensive in terms of lost productivity and need to retrain and so on. If you think this is a good thing, then why don't the cheerleaders for 'adaptation' help fund the efforts of the poorer nations?
Dammit, I actually checked that.
Amazing that no one on the internet has actually made such a screensaver.
I suspect that once it becomes the norm, it would all get merged together into one concept: Good old fashioned product placement.
Skirting the Godwin rule a bit, but Nazi Germany was one of the most technologically advanced nations in the world at the time (Engineering mostly, biology... not so much.) Scientific progress is a neccessary but not sufficient condition for a free and happy state.
Quit giving the Martian Council ideas, traitor!
(n/t)
Who cares? Then the human race, as a whole, gets a higher level of productivity. Then the drug becomes as ubiquitous as clothing - which is just as unnatural, but gives clothed people (at least in colder climates) a great advantage over those unclothed. The only danger comes from evil producers restricting the supply - but that's an argument to increase availability and spread out production, not to reduce it.
Nah, this has uses in allowing software to detect fine changes in pressure, allowing certain systems to be more sensitive and flexible in their operation. For example, attached to an appropiate image recognition package, the robot will be able to maintain the right force and pressure and so on. I.e. it lets sexbots distinguish ahhhhs from arrrrghs.
Most of the commentators have latched on to the drugs are bad conclusion, so maybe it's time for some devil's advocating... Suppose a drug is invented that has almost no adverse side effect - would it be ok to take it?
There's an assumption in most people's responses that drugs must inherently have a bad sideeffect. That the badness of the side effect is in general proportion to the benefits obtained. Hence, it cannot be good to take X, because X must have a hidden side effect that cancels out any advantages it may provide. Such reasoning may be true when we were kids and were having the 'Drugs -just say NO' message drummed into us, but they aren't going to be true forever. And it's not as though the 'healthy' alternatives are really perfect, either. Exercise to improve fitness is fraught with physical risks. Increased study to boost academics hurts social lives, and may well have a greater cumulative harm than impotence 30 years down the line. (At least, if you've been taking drugs, you've actually slept with someone in that time) How many teenage suicides would have been averted if the victim was taking recreational drugs, and kept taking them? (So no withdrawal symptoms...)
If we look at things in a certain way, there is no special evil associated with using chemicals to achieve some effect over carrying out some other activity. As technology improves, the lines are bound to blur even further.
You'll find out in exactly 15 minutes and 22 seconds.
The funny thing is, I wrote that post to suggest that most people are a good deal more socialist, and aspects of socialism a good deal less insane than is generally made out. Not a single line of my post actually attacks socialism. Rather, I am saying that if you buy into the perfect markets producing perfect results ideology which runs the current world economy, the current behaviour is the logical conclusion.
Socialism isn't a four letter word. If you think it is, what excuse do you have against outsourcing but xenophobia? The response to my post is a chain of knee-jerk 'no I'm not a commie' replies, but after that people seem to get the right idea. Social effects do matter as well as economic ones. Free market principles cannot be blindly followed. Capitalism needs to be combined with social awareness. Etc.
Was that post a troll? Maybe it was. But it seems to me, sitting in a relatively economically left wing country, that socialist economic thinking is quite alive in the US after all. It just needs a name change.
There's a whiff of xenophobia about all this. I mean, let's take this piece by piece... what's wrong here?
Is the generic idea of outsourcing wrong? That's just capitalism, people. In a free market, companies are allowed to maximise their own profitability and they can do this by outsourcing. If we trust free market principles, it turns out that such behaviour is in the long term in fact the best for everyone - outsourcing ventures are only successful if they achieve the right balance and provide good service for reduced costs. I'd trust that the company's execs thought a bit harder and made more careful studies than you have in the 5 minute interval between reading and replying. If this messes up, it would hurt *them* most. The fact that outsourcing is most profitable is a problem for politicians to deal with, not for individual banks to decide. And like patriotic fervour ever factors into an employee's loyalty.
If the fact that employees are low paid in other countries bad? Low pay doesn't matter as much as wage-price ratios - while according to direct currency conversions people are alot worse off, reduced cost of living in other countries somewhat offsets that situation. In the long term, increased globalisation of businesses helps drive up wages in foreign countries, not the reverse. The only remaining way to ease this situation is by international organisations like the UN, and that aspect is none of the bank's business.
Is the fact that these replacements will be trained by current employees bad? Of course, it's unfortunate for the current employees, but folks, this is what capitalism entails. If these people are skilled enough, they can find other jobs. *Not* helping train their replacements won't help them in any way - and it isn't that their jobs are much easier or better than dealing with Indian trainees. Training the new techs means is good for the company - who get a stabler transition, good for the customers of the company - who get better service, good for the new techs - who are less likely to be corrupt because they've invested effort into a career rather than a short term job, and makes no difference to the employees who are leaving.
Sure, it may be insensitive, but it's just good business sense. Or are you a socialist?
In a word, they won't. The data's encrypted, so there is literally no way they can enforce it.
The 'pledge' is basically legal protection, so that if someone did use the extension to do whatever bad things, (and really, most of them seem pretty impossible to use the extension to do) Google will not themselves be blamed. Realistically, this sort of measure probably won't get them very far in a real court case, but hey, every little helps.
What command? Seriously, don't people proof-bread anything anymore?
I, for one, welcome our new DS supply increasing overlords.
We can crunch the maths another way.
Suppose every Windows server was perfect. No downtime at all in a year. Then that gives our linux machines an average of 1752 hours of downtime per year. Every UNIX machine has to be perfect as well. So we need to account for an average of at most 19.5 hours of downtime by adjusting the proportions involved.
This means that at most 19.5/1752 = 1% of machines in their survey were Linux machines.
Does this sound like a good survey to you?
Don't worry. Many of these assholes should be kicked out come the elections in November.
Whether they would be replaced by new assholes, though, remains to be seen.
FF 1.5.3 on a fresh Dapper installation is fine. And old Slashdot had display problems for me, so meh.
The AC post, that is.
No one's saying Google's behaviour is good in this, but the moral equivalence between Google and Yahoo just doesn't exist.
Erm, a wikipedia quote hardly proves anything, especially given that it has only recently added.
Still, I'd like to give Cao and Zhu the benefit of the doubt, for now.
Well, General Relativity works in 4D, where this result applies, and lots of things in general relativity are basically 3-manifolds. So, if warp drives are invented at any point in the future, the proof of this conjecture will reassure us that Picard can get from Rigel to Farpoint station without being spewed out as salami.
More generalised versions might also result, which will help us along with string theory and move us closer to cool stuff like this.
First, think in Four Dimensions. Not in terms of time, or something, but as a fourth spacial dimension - like in terms of up down, left right, in out, and foo bar. A 3 sphere is a sphere in that sort of space. For example, in three dimensions, a 2-sphere is just a normal sphere - a group of points that are all the same distance from a certain centre point. A 3-sphere in 4 dimensions is just the set of points in four dimensional space that are the same 'distance' from a point in 4D. (We define distance using the pythagorus formula sqrt(x^2 + y^2 + z^2 + k^2).)
A 3-manifold is another four dimensional object - in fact, a class of objects. They are the analogies of surfaces in 3D space, only again we have it in 4D space. The 3-sphere, for example is an example of a 3-manifold. Simple, connected and closed are two topological properties describing what a surface is like. In layman's terms, simple connected and close means that the surface is well... just an obvious surface. The simple-connected-closed-3-manifold taken together essentially rule out the bizzare sorts of objects that mathematicians come up with. There won't be any 'holes' in the object, and there won't be any non-solid boundaries, the object can't go through itself, and you can't take two seperate objects and pretend the pair is a single one.
So what does the conjecture say? It says that if we have any 3-manifold satisfying certain properties, there is way of distorting it (that's basically what homeomorphism means. Like you take the object as a piece of putty and stretch and pull it, or fold it, or whatever without cutting or gluing bits together) to make it into a 3-sphere.
It's a sort of bubblegum theorem. You can chew up the manifold and blow it into a bubble. (Okay, it's not really like that, topologists.... But it's close enough)
This does have a parallel with another recent case, though - specifically:
5 58200
http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/05/10/1
'My intention was never to disrupt security. The fact that I logged on and there were no passwords means that there was no security,' McKinnon said, outside the hearing at London's Bow Street Magistrates Court.
Who faces 5 years and $250k in fines.
Reading that thread, there is a general consensus that McKinnon deserved it - the ease of entry didn't matter, so long as he was aware that he was tresspassing.