So does Linus Torvalds' homeland, Finland. A Finnish friend of mine once told me a story about how some big shot exec of Nokia received a speeding ticket worth US$104,000, because his annual income was well in the US$5 million range. All this for going 47 mph in a 31 mph zone...
This, needless to say, seems quite ridiculous. Ah, Justice. Not only is she blind, she's quite slippery too methinks.
...and paleontologists aren't really sure what caused it, far less sure than they were about what caused the K-T extinction that killed off the dinosaurs. The asteroid collision theory is floated as well for the Permian-Triassic extinction, but the theory that seems to receive the greatest currency among scientists was a massive volcanic eruption in what is today Siberia, if I recall correctly.
The trouble is all a computer can do is unarguably a mathematical method. The very idea for the computer as we know it today came out of Alan Turing's answer to David Hilbert's Second Problem: are the foundations of mathematics consistent? Ultimately, the only thing that any computer can do is mathematics, and if mathematical methods are unpatentable, then all software is ergo unpatentable. It is definitely possible to restate the Amazon one-click patent as a mathematical computation, as can the RSA patent (that might be a lot easier to do!), and any other software patent that has ever been granted by the USPTO or any other patent agency that allows software patents.
Unfortunately, I fear that, just as in the United States, the European Union may also have the best politicians money can buy...
The method presented in the paper looks a lot like James Cockle and Robert Harley's differential resolvent, which was new in 1862. This page gives an overview of some of the known methods for solving quintic and higher degree equations. Apparently, about twenty years ago Hiroshi Umemura found a general analytical solution for a polynomial equation of arbitrarily high degree involving Siegel modular forms, which are generalizations of the elliptic modular functions Charles Hermite used in 1858 as a solution to the quintic. Note: these don't violate Abel's Impossibility Theorem as they are not solutions in radicals.
I'm reminded of an article written by C.A.R. Hoare once (you may remember him as the guy who invented Quicksort), where he quotes the late Christopher Strachey:
It has long been my personal view that the separation of practical and theoretical work is artificial and injurious. Much of the practical work done in computing, both in software and in hardware design, is unsound and clumsy because the people who do it do not have any clear understanding of the fundamental principles underlying their work. Most of the abstract mathematical and theoretical work is sterile because it has no point of contact with real computing...
(the essay I refer to by the way is C.A.R. Hoare's "Programming as an Engineering Profession"). The grandparent poster shows exactly the kind of attitude Strachey so derides in the quote. If anything, this kind of fundamental disconnect seems to have gotten worse today than it was when Hoare wrote his essays on programming as an engineering profession and programming as applied mathematics.
Software, unlike many industries, has a low barrier to entry, which is why the negative effects of the patent system are more apparent there than in other industries. Ordinary people can, with only a small investment of time and equipment, can make significant contributions to advance the state of the art, and hence have a larger opportunity to collide with patents. What you describe is not fine, no matter what the industry. It is only because software has such a low barrier to entry that the kind of behavior you describe is so painfully obvious, and can occur a lot more often.
Every time the patent system is used to stifle innovation--and distressingly that seems to happen more and more often these days--counts as a FAILURE for the patent system, no matter what industry it applies to. The US patent system was created to "promote the progress of Science and the Useful Arts", so the Constitution says, and if only your legislators remembered this, they would take drastic steps to reform the patent system to ensure that it serves its purpose. Unfortunately, ampaign contributions by large corporations are ensuring the continuing regime of willful forgetfulness, it would seem.
Helping to fix things doesn't necessarily mean contributing code. Fixing bugs and/or adding features is a support issue, and nobody ever said that support for open source should also be free. If you don't pay for support, then you're basically relying on the charity of strangers, and don't have the right to be surprised if you get rebuffed sometimes. If you are like most people and can't do fixes or enhancements yourself then try to convince someone who has that ability, by paying them perhaps, to do it for you. This is, in fact, one of the oldest and most successful ways that people thought of to build a business model around Free/Open Source Software.
Spoken like someone who has never needed to run a real high-end enterprise system. Most typical enterprise systems need to be running 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year, with little or no downtime AT ALL. Downtime tends to have awful consequences that range from losing significant amounts of money (a telecom billing database system I once helped set up would lose the telco the equivalent of about US$10,000 every minute it was down), to causing mayhem, death, and destruction (the canonical example is the control systems for a nuclear power plant). If you run these kinds of systems, where downtime can mean incredible expense and/or disaster, single points of failure must necessarily be avoided as much as possible This is generally done by providing redundancy, and that means greater expense, and such expenses are generally justified by considering what happens in the event of failure. It's a business decision, and these are the kinds of choices that mid- to high-level IT management in enterprises has to weigh and measure.
As for administrators, think of it this way: if a system administrator who knows all of the intimate details of the system gets run over by a bus on the way to the data center or is otherwise incapacitated, you're in a world of difficulty. Having many people who know the system well enough to manage it competently decreases your risk of exposure, as the chance that all of them will become simultaneously incapacitated is much lower. You can even do load balancing, and individual administrators don't get overwhelmed by their duties and hence are more productive.
Enterprise computing is all about risk management, and eliminating single points of failure is one way to reduce risk. I think even you should know that.
Actually no. Incorporation is not the only way copyright works. Otherwise the following would be legal:
a) Compiling source to create a binary and considering that a new work (no incorporation at all)
GCC has no exceptions for this, and yes, the FSF doesn't even try to assert copyright for anything compiled with GCC, and try to say that if you compile anything with GCC you are subject to the GPL. Copyright law only gives the copyright holder the exclusive rights to copy, modify, and distribute, and using a compiler to create another program does none of these things, so it requires no license. If some compiler vendor wanted this kind of power they would need to enter into a contract with their customers; a copyright license by itself cannot do this, and well, some of them do, I think.
b) Translating a work
This requires the translator to modify the entire copyrighted work, and hence, yes, it requires a license from the copyright holder of the original work. This is forbidden by copyright unless properly licensed. Same goes for ripping a CD track to produce an MP3. It is not because an MP3 player is required to play the track, but because modification of the original copyrighted work was done.
c) Taking a piece of music and playing it on your own equipment (no incorporation).
Who says that this is not legal? This is all perfectly legal. We all do this every day, and do not require special licenses from the RIAA record labels to do so, unless there's something in the CD liner notes that I haven't seen (and yes, I'm one of those people who actually reads everything printed in a CD liner note).
So, by your theory, every program running under Windows is a derivative work of Windows, and thus, every program running under Windows is actually owned by Microsoft and they can assert copyrights to it, and I need a further license from them if I want to make a program that runs on their OS. What a load of hogwash! You must be living in the same universe that Darl McBride is in, as you're making the same kind of twisted misinterpretations of copyright law that SCO is making.
You can't take a Linux binary and run it under x86 Solaris. The reason is there are links whether they be direct or indirect (BSD actually contains a compatibility layer). If A does not operate without B then it is a derivative of B, whether it contains B or not.
I don't think any present theory of derivative works under copyright law would support you in this. Present case law concerning derivative works seems to deal solely with incorporating significant portions of one work within another, and your theory of non-operation as derivative work is stretching things a LOT. Distributing A+B by definition be just "mere aggregation" which is specifically permitted by the GPL.
Exemption or no exemption, applications running under Linux would not need to be GPLed, as they would be merely using the kernel, and the GPL explicitly allows this in section 0: "Activities other than copying, distribution and modification are not covered by this License; they are outside its scope." You are not copying, distributing, or modifying kernel code when you run a program under Linux, so the GPL's rules don't apply. On the other hand, linking to a library is a totally different proposition, as it generally involves taking part of the library and incorporating its object code into a program. To distribute such a linked program would require distributing the library code as well, and *that* is covered by the GPL. That was the motivation for the LGPL.
These people/companies are getting desperate. Sure, I don't think DRM is a silver bullet either, but it is at least slowing the problem until they can figure out a better, long-term solution.
And that long-term solution is the old adage: "Evolve or face extinction." This is something they seem determined not to do however. They're dinosaurs and the giant asteroid called the digital age is headed straight for them. I won't weep over their graves when they're gone. They would prefer we uninvent the computer; at their heart that's what a lot of the laws they've passed and are attempting to pass are trying very hard to do. Same goes for the DRM that they're forcing down our throats; they destroy the very essence of what makes a computer useful.
Unfortunately, all of that's just like launching nuclear weapons into the meteor. It breaks up into fragments and you still get the extinction event. Arguably their use of DRM has actually made the problem worse, not better, as more and more people are alienated by ever more intrusive DRM that treats honest people like criminals.
Spin is basically an intrinsic angular momentum property possessed by quantum particles. It's as if these particles are all naturally spinning like little tops, and the angular momentum inherent in this spinning is found to always be multiples of 1/2 of Planck's constant divided by twice pi or 1.05450*10^-34 J*s. As you know, the force-carrying particles all have integer spin, and the matter particles all have half-integral spin.
Spin is one of the easiest quantum properties to measure, especially for charged particles, which accounts for its popularity as a building block in quantum computers. You measure spin the same way you measure angular momentum in the macro world of classical physics, apply a torque to the particle. This will cause the particle to precess at a particular rate that would be characteristic of its angular momentum. An easy way to do this for a charged particle would be to place it in a strong magnetic field. A spinning charged particle would have a magnetic moment, hence putting it in a magnetic field would cause it to align with the field, and since accelerating a charged particle causes it to radiate photons, you can measure angular momentum by measuring the frequency of the emitted radiation (this is known as the Larmor frequency). This is essentially what happens in the Stern-Gerlach experiment that first established the quantization of angular momentum (except that the original Stern-Gerlach experiments actually measured the actual physical deflection of ions passing through a nonuniform magnetic field), and is the basis for nuclear magnetic resonance techniques. Some of the most promising quantum computer designs are actually based on using nuclear spins as qubits, and using NMR techniques to prepare spin states and induce the behavior of quantum logic gates.
Unfortunately, it would seem that in a world such as this, with patent law combined with large corporations with deep pockets, "the little guy who innovates" never stands a chance. Look at what happened to Philo Farnsworth. RCA broke him in spite of his patents on televison, and he died bitter and unrecognized for his innovation. It was only decades after his death that his role was properly recognized. The situation is far worse now than it was in Farnsworth's day. It will only be a matter of time before this "little guy" will get steamrollered with a cross-licensing agreement or patent invalidation lawsuit that totally nullifies any financial benefit he might have derived from his invention, and his chances of becoming the "not-so-little guy in reward" are slim to none.
Face it, the only way you can derive benefit from the patent system in this day and age is if you work for a large corporation, and even then it is not you, but the corporation that will benefit the most from the patents. The whole argument of "patents protecting the small inventor" is a load of hogwash. Any corporation with deep enough pockets and sufficient motivation (and yes, there are plenty of those around in all of the interesting fields of endeavor) can bury you and make money off your ideas in spite of your patents, just like what they did to Farnsworth. Frankly, I think that this would be a much better world if patents did not exist altogether, or were even more heavily restricted and controlled then they ever were.
By the way, the patent system's purpose isn't to reward the little guy who innovates. It's to promote the progress of science and the useful arts, as your nation's constitution puts it. It rewards the inventor so as to encourage people to keep on inventing. As it exists today, the patent system is too weighted in favor of large corporations to be more than marginally effective in promoting the progress of science and the useful arts, most especially in the fields of endeavor where ordinary people are capable of making significant contributions.
Riemann did not "discover" the Riemann zeta function. It was known and many important properties were discovered by Johann Bernoulli and Leonhard Euler 200 years before Riemann was even born, e.g. the fact that zeta(n) for n an even number is a rational multiple of a pi^n, and the fact that there exists an infinite product representation of zeta(s) that goes through all of the prime numbers. If John Derbyshire's book Prime Obsession is correct, Riemann knew all about that latter result of Euler's and thought that it might allow the application of all of the powerful tools of real and complex analysis that were being developed in his time to be applied to the theory of prime numbers. His struggling with it led to the formulation of the Riemann hypothesis and the entire branch of analytic number theory.
Spending on research does not make a company an innovator any more than going to church makes a person religious. Innovation involves making bets on the new and untried research. You may have a ton of research behind you but if you don't have the balls to use it to make something new that will actually be used by someone, then you aren't innovating, you're wanking, paying lip service at the altar of innovation, as much as a hypocrite showing up at church faithfully every Sunday while failing to apply his faith in daily life.
From the article, that's exactly what they're doing. Further, their ENTIRE history from day one shows them to be parasites who wait for someone with a good idea they can pounce on just as it's becoming big.
Frankly, I still don't see why they should have bothered. Anyone who's gotten over the bar enough to know how to load and use their drivers should have read in their documentation that the many repetitive warnings were benign. They say:
Actually, we also have no desire nor purpose to prevent tainting. The purpose of the workaround is to avoid repetitive warning messages generated when multiple modules belonging to a single logical "driver" are loaded (even when a module is only probed but not used due to the hardware not being present). Although the issue may sound trivial/harmless to people on the lkml, it was a
frequent cause of confusion for the average person.
Who are these "average persons" they talk about here I wonder, who have the know-how to manually load binary kernel modules and at the same time do so without reading the instructions that came along with it carefully? A newbie would be intimidated by the whole process and try to read the docs as carefully as possible before trying it, so it can't be them... They should have written a FAQ and clean documentation about this issue, instead of lying to Linus and his merry band of kernel hackers.
What I'd like to see incorporated in their protocols is the proper use of forward error correction techniques to speed up file tranfers. Most Internet file transfer protocols these days make use of automatic rerequest to correct mistransmitted packets, which can be costly when large amounts of data are to be transferred over unreliable links. I've heard that it is possible to make use of erasure codes such as Reed-Solomon or Tornado codes to speed up multicast bulk data transfers. Michael Luby the inventor of the Tornado codes, has actually considered this application for his error correcting codes in the paper "Accessing Multiple Mirror Sites in Parallel: Using Tornado Codes to Speed Up Downloads". I wonder if this approach would help improve this application's performance?
Googling for "Bangungot ng bayan" brings up as its first hit the website for Philippine presidential candidate and former actor Fernando Poe Jr. The phrase literally means "national nightmare", with the word "bangungot" meaning a nightmare that kills you if you don't wake up from it. Fortunately, the site linked to is not official, as FPJ doesn't even have one (the only Philippine presidential candidate who doesn't).
Ah, this whole thing brings back some memories about furor over some of the unilateral actions of the Philippine ccTLD administrator, Joel Disini. He once tried to market the.PH domain as.PHone and make it do essentially the same thing that these industry bigwigs are trying to do with their.mobile. From the people who signed NDA's to see the technology in action, he apparently succeeded. However, his use of the domain in such a unilateral fashion drew heavy criticism from the Philippine Internet community, and it never was actually deployed.
Apache and xinetd are hardly if ever linked to. They're not even libraries. Every GPLed program that wilfully uses OpenSSL must add a special exception that they may link the program with OpenSSL. Had the licensing for XFree86 always been this way, just as OpenSSL's has, we wouldn't have this problem. Actually, it's not the GPL-incompatibility of the license that is the problem, but the fact that we have a very abrupt change from being GPL-compatible on the one hand to suddenly becoming GPL-incompatible. This change affects thousands of GPLed projects that depend on the XFree86 libraries, and would require that each and every one of them have a similar special exception as GPL programs linking to OpenSSL do.
And now for a political subtext... The whole issue with the naming GNU/Linux vs Linux is about attribution. To my mind it's unreasonable on the one hand to campaign for recognition in this way, and on the other to have a GPL that is incompatible with giving credit where it is due. It seems to me that there is a strong streak of not-invented-here at work.
The difference here is that RMS is asking people to give attribution, while David Dawes and the people at XFree86, by putting the attribution requirement in their license, is telling people they must to do it. Or else risk opening themselves up to a copyright infringement lawsuit.
Of course, I'm speaking of the EA's and Vivendi's of the world rather than independent game design houses like Skunk Studios. Comparing the two is sort of like comparing the RIAA to an independent record label. Further, I'm speaking of a general trend, which is not invalidated by the handful of exceptions you mention.
One or two per system is a far cry from how things were 10-15 years ago. Back then it seems that even the majors were not afraid to push the envelope and try something new and unproven in the market. Now, the one or two original and innovative games you mention get ridden over by at least half a dozen imitators and me-too poor copies. This is similar to the situation we have with RIAA music; the analogy between the gaming industry and the music industry is actually quite accurate.
Huh? Repackaging old games is ORIGINAL? Please... Where's the innovation and originality in that? You're living the shadows of the past instead of making something new.
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So does Linus Torvalds' homeland, Finland. A Finnish friend of mine once told me a story about how some big shot exec of Nokia received a speeding ticket worth US$104,000, because his annual income was well in the US$5 million range. All this for going 47 mph in a 31 mph zone...
This, needless to say, seems quite ridiculous. Ah, Justice. Not only is she blind, she's quite slippery too methinks.
...and paleontologists aren't really sure what caused it, far less sure than they were about what caused the K-T extinction that killed off the dinosaurs. The asteroid collision theory is floated as well for the Permian-Triassic extinction, but the theory that seems to receive the greatest currency among scientists was a massive volcanic eruption in what is today Siberia, if I recall correctly.
The trouble is all a computer can do is unarguably a mathematical method. The very idea for the computer as we know it today came out of Alan Turing's answer to David Hilbert's Second Problem: are the foundations of mathematics consistent? Ultimately, the only thing that any computer can do is mathematics, and if mathematical methods are unpatentable, then all software is ergo unpatentable. It is definitely possible to restate the Amazon one-click patent as a mathematical computation, as can the RSA patent (that might be a lot easier to do!), and any other software patent that has ever been granted by the USPTO or any other patent agency that allows software patents.
Unfortunately, I fear that, just as in the United States, the European Union may also have the best politicians money can buy...
The method presented in the paper looks a lot like James Cockle and Robert Harley's differential resolvent, which was new in 1862. This page gives an overview of some of the known methods for solving quintic and higher degree equations. Apparently, about twenty years ago Hiroshi Umemura found a general analytical solution for a polynomial equation of arbitrarily high degree involving Siegel modular forms, which are generalizations of the elliptic modular functions Charles Hermite used in 1858 as a solution to the quintic. Note: these don't violate Abel's Impossibility Theorem as they are not solutions in radicals.
I'm reminded of an article written by C.A.R. Hoare once (you may remember him as the guy who invented Quicksort), where he quotes the late Christopher Strachey:
(the essay I refer to by the way is C.A.R. Hoare's "Programming as an Engineering Profession"). The grandparent poster shows exactly the kind of attitude Strachey so derides in the quote. If anything, this kind of fundamental disconnect seems to have gotten worse today than it was when Hoare wrote his essays on programming as an engineering profession and programming as applied mathematics.
Software, unlike many industries, has a low barrier to entry, which is why the negative effects of the patent system are more apparent there than in other industries. Ordinary people can, with only a small investment of time and equipment, can make significant contributions to advance the state of the art, and hence have a larger opportunity to collide with patents. What you describe is not fine, no matter what the industry. It is only because software has such a low barrier to entry that the kind of behavior you describe is so painfully obvious, and can occur a lot more often.
Every time the patent system is used to stifle innovation--and distressingly that seems to happen more and more often these days--counts as a FAILURE for the patent system, no matter what industry it applies to. The US patent system was created to "promote the progress of Science and the Useful Arts", so the Constitution says, and if only your legislators remembered this, they would take drastic steps to reform the patent system to ensure that it serves its purpose. Unfortunately, ampaign contributions by large corporations are ensuring the continuing regime of willful forgetfulness, it would seem.
Helping to fix things doesn't necessarily mean contributing code. Fixing bugs and/or adding features is a support issue, and nobody ever said that support for open source should also be free. If you don't pay for support, then you're basically relying on the charity of strangers, and don't have the right to be surprised if you get rebuffed sometimes. If you are like most people and can't do fixes or enhancements yourself then try to convince someone who has that ability, by paying them perhaps, to do it for you. This is, in fact, one of the oldest and most successful ways that people thought of to build a business model around Free/Open Source Software.
Spoken like someone who has never needed to run a real high-end enterprise system. Most typical enterprise systems need to be running 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year, with little or no downtime AT ALL. Downtime tends to have awful consequences that range from losing significant amounts of money (a telecom billing database system I once helped set up would lose the telco the equivalent of about US$10,000 every minute it was down), to causing mayhem, death, and destruction (the canonical example is the control systems for a nuclear power plant). If you run these kinds of systems, where downtime can mean incredible expense and/or disaster, single points of failure must necessarily be avoided as much as possible This is generally done by providing redundancy, and that means greater expense, and such expenses are generally justified by considering what happens in the event of failure. It's a business decision, and these are the kinds of choices that mid- to high-level IT management in enterprises has to weigh and measure.
As for administrators, think of it this way: if a system administrator who knows all of the intimate details of the system gets run over by a bus on the way to the data center or is otherwise incapacitated, you're in a world of difficulty. Having many people who know the system well enough to manage it competently decreases your risk of exposure, as the chance that all of them will become simultaneously incapacitated is much lower. You can even do load balancing, and individual administrators don't get overwhelmed by their duties and hence are more productive.
Enterprise computing is all about risk management, and eliminating single points of failure is one way to reduce risk. I think even you should know that.
Never send a human to do a machine's job...
I think Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz should rise out of his grave and avenge his invention. :)
GCC has no exceptions for this, and yes, the FSF doesn't even try to assert copyright for anything compiled with GCC, and try to say that if you compile anything with GCC you are subject to the GPL. Copyright law only gives the copyright holder the exclusive rights to copy, modify, and distribute, and using a compiler to create another program does none of these things, so it requires no license. If some compiler vendor wanted this kind of power they would need to enter into a contract with their customers; a copyright license by itself cannot do this, and well, some of them do, I think.
This requires the translator to modify the entire copyrighted work, and hence, yes, it requires a license from the copyright holder of the original work. This is forbidden by copyright unless properly licensed. Same goes for ripping a CD track to produce an MP3. It is not because an MP3 player is required to play the track, but because modification of the original copyrighted work was done.
Who says that this is not legal? This is all perfectly legal. We all do this every day, and do not require special licenses from the RIAA record labels to do so, unless there's something in the CD liner notes that I haven't seen (and yes, I'm one of those people who actually reads everything printed in a CD liner note).
So, by your theory, every program running under Windows is a derivative work of Windows, and thus, every program running under Windows is actually owned by Microsoft and they can assert copyrights to it, and I need a further license from them if I want to make a program that runs on their OS. What a load of hogwash! You must be living in the same universe that Darl McBride is in, as you're making the same kind of twisted misinterpretations of copyright law that SCO is making.
I don't think any present theory of derivative works under copyright law would support you in this. Present case law concerning derivative works seems to deal solely with incorporating significant portions of one work within another, and your theory of non-operation as derivative work is stretching things a LOT. Distributing A+B by definition be just "mere aggregation" which is specifically permitted by the GPL.
Exemption or no exemption, applications running under Linux would not need to be GPLed, as they would be merely using the kernel, and the GPL explicitly allows this in section 0: "Activities other than copying, distribution and modification are not covered by this License; they are outside its scope." You are not copying, distributing, or modifying kernel code when you run a program under Linux, so the GPL's rules don't apply. On the other hand, linking to a library is a totally different proposition, as it generally involves taking part of the library and incorporating its object code into a program. To distribute such a linked program would require distributing the library code as well, and *that* is covered by the GPL. That was the motivation for the LGPL.
And that long-term solution is the old adage: "Evolve or face extinction." This is something they seem determined not to do however. They're dinosaurs and the giant asteroid called the digital age is headed straight for them. I won't weep over their graves when they're gone. They would prefer we uninvent the computer; at their heart that's what a lot of the laws they've passed and are attempting to pass are trying very hard to do. Same goes for the DRM that they're forcing down our throats; they destroy the very essence of what makes a computer useful.
Unfortunately, all of that's just like launching nuclear weapons into the meteor. It breaks up into fragments and you still get the extinction event. Arguably their use of DRM has actually made the problem worse, not better, as more and more people are alienated by ever more intrusive DRM that treats honest people like criminals.
Spin is basically an intrinsic angular momentum property possessed by quantum particles. It's as if these particles are all naturally spinning like little tops, and the angular momentum inherent in this spinning is found to always be multiples of 1/2 of Planck's constant divided by twice pi or 1.05450*10^-34 J*s. As you know, the force-carrying particles all have integer spin, and the matter particles all have half-integral spin.
Spin is one of the easiest quantum properties to measure, especially for charged particles, which accounts for its popularity as a building block in quantum computers. You measure spin the same way you measure angular momentum in the macro world of classical physics, apply a torque to the particle. This will cause the particle to precess at a particular rate that would be characteristic of its angular momentum. An easy way to do this for a charged particle would be to place it in a strong magnetic field. A spinning charged particle would have a magnetic moment, hence putting it in a magnetic field would cause it to align with the field, and since accelerating a charged particle causes it to radiate photons, you can measure angular momentum by measuring the frequency of the emitted radiation (this is known as the Larmor frequency). This is essentially what happens in the Stern-Gerlach experiment that first established the quantization of angular momentum (except that the original Stern-Gerlach experiments actually measured the actual physical deflection of ions passing through a nonuniform magnetic field), and is the basis for nuclear magnetic resonance techniques. Some of the most promising quantum computer designs are actually based on using nuclear spins as qubits, and using NMR techniques to prepare spin states and induce the behavior of quantum logic gates.
Unfortunately, it would seem that in a world such as this, with patent law combined with large corporations with deep pockets, "the little guy who innovates" never stands a chance. Look at what happened to Philo Farnsworth. RCA broke him in spite of his patents on televison, and he died bitter and unrecognized for his innovation. It was only decades after his death that his role was properly recognized. The situation is far worse now than it was in Farnsworth's day. It will only be a matter of time before this "little guy" will get steamrollered with a cross-licensing agreement or patent invalidation lawsuit that totally nullifies any financial benefit he might have derived from his invention, and his chances of becoming the "not-so-little guy in reward" are slim to none.
Face it, the only way you can derive benefit from the patent system in this day and age is if you work for a large corporation, and even then it is not you, but the corporation that will benefit the most from the patents. The whole argument of "patents protecting the small inventor" is a load of hogwash. Any corporation with deep enough pockets and sufficient motivation (and yes, there are plenty of those around in all of the interesting fields of endeavor) can bury you and make money off your ideas in spite of your patents, just like what they did to Farnsworth. Frankly, I think that this would be a much better world if patents did not exist altogether, or were even more heavily restricted and controlled then they ever were.
By the way, the patent system's purpose isn't to reward the little guy who innovates. It's to promote the progress of science and the useful arts, as your nation's constitution puts it. It rewards the inventor so as to encourage people to keep on inventing. As it exists today, the patent system is too weighted in favor of large corporations to be more than marginally effective in promoting the progress of science and the useful arts, most especially in the fields of endeavor where ordinary people are capable of making significant contributions.
I think you have it all backwards.
Riemann did not "discover" the Riemann zeta function. It was known and many important properties were discovered by Johann Bernoulli and Leonhard Euler 200 years before Riemann was even born, e.g. the fact that zeta(n) for n an even number is a rational multiple of a pi^n, and the fact that there exists an infinite product representation of zeta(s) that goes through all of the prime numbers. If John Derbyshire's book Prime Obsession is correct, Riemann knew all about that latter result of Euler's and thought that it might allow the application of all of the powerful tools of real and complex analysis that were being developed in his time to be applied to the theory of prime numbers. His struggling with it led to the formulation of the Riemann hypothesis and the entire branch of analytic number theory.
Spending on research does not make a company an innovator any more than going to church makes a person religious. Innovation involves making bets on the new and untried research. You may have a ton of research behind you but if you don't have the balls to use it to make something new that will actually be used by someone, then you aren't innovating, you're wanking, paying lip service at the altar of innovation, as much as a hypocrite showing up at church faithfully every Sunday while failing to apply his faith in daily life.
From the article, that's exactly what they're doing. Further, their ENTIRE history from day one shows them to be parasites who wait for someone with a good idea they can pounce on just as it's becoming big.
Frankly, I still don't see why they should have bothered. Anyone who's gotten over the bar enough to know how to load and use their drivers should have read in their documentation that the many repetitive warnings were benign. They say:
Who are these "average persons" they talk about here I wonder, who have the know-how to manually load binary kernel modules and at the same time do so without reading the instructions that came along with it carefully? A newbie would be intimidated by the whole process and try to read the docs as carefully as possible before trying it, so it can't be them... They should have written a FAQ and clean documentation about this issue, instead of lying to Linus and his merry band of kernel hackers.
What I'd like to see incorporated in their protocols is the proper use of forward error correction techniques to speed up file tranfers. Most Internet file transfer protocols these days make use of automatic rerequest to correct mistransmitted packets, which can be costly when large amounts of data are to be transferred over unreliable links. I've heard that it is possible to make use of erasure codes such as Reed-Solomon or Tornado codes to speed up multicast bulk data transfers. Michael Luby the inventor of the Tornado codes, has actually considered this application for his error correcting codes in the paper "Accessing Multiple Mirror Sites in Parallel: Using Tornado Codes to Speed Up Downloads". I wonder if this approach would help improve this application's performance?
Googling for "Bangungot ng bayan" brings up as its first hit the website for Philippine presidential candidate and former actor Fernando Poe Jr. The phrase literally means "national nightmare", with the word "bangungot" meaning a nightmare that kills you if you don't wake up from it. Fortunately, the site linked to is not official, as FPJ doesn't even have one (the only Philippine presidential candidate who doesn't).
Gee, have I just increased the site's pagerank?
Ah, this whole thing brings back some memories about furor over some of the unilateral actions of the Philippine ccTLD administrator, Joel Disini. He once tried to market the .PH domain as .PHone and make it do essentially the same thing that these industry bigwigs are trying to do with their .mobile. From the people who signed NDA's to see the technology in action, he apparently succeeded. However, his use of the domain in such a unilateral fashion drew heavy criticism from the Philippine Internet community, and it never was actually deployed.
Apache and xinetd are hardly if ever linked to. They're not even libraries. Every GPLed program that wilfully uses OpenSSL must add a special exception that they may link the program with OpenSSL. Had the licensing for XFree86 always been this way, just as OpenSSL's has, we wouldn't have this problem. Actually, it's not the GPL-incompatibility of the license that is the problem, but the fact that we have a very abrupt change from being GPL-compatible on the one hand to suddenly becoming GPL-incompatible. This change affects thousands of GPLed projects that depend on the XFree86 libraries, and would require that each and every one of them have a similar special exception as GPL programs linking to OpenSSL do.
The difference here is that RMS is asking people to give attribution, while David Dawes and the people at XFree86, by putting the attribution requirement in their license, is telling people they must to do it. Or else risk opening themselves up to a copyright infringement lawsuit.
Of course, I'm speaking of the EA's and Vivendi's of the world rather than independent game design houses like Skunk Studios. Comparing the two is sort of like comparing the RIAA to an independent record label. Further, I'm speaking of a general trend, which is not invalidated by the handful of exceptions you mention.
One or two per system is a far cry from how things were 10-15 years ago. Back then it seems that even the majors were not afraid to push the envelope and try something new and unproven in the market. Now, the one or two original and innovative games you mention get ridden over by at least half a dozen imitators and me-too poor copies. This is similar to the situation we have with RIAA music; the analogy between the gaming industry and the music industry is actually quite accurate.
Huh? Repackaging old games is ORIGINAL? Please... Where's the innovation and originality in that? You're living the shadows of the past instead of making something new.