Salaries also depend on location of course - working in Munich will pay a lot better than working in Essen. Of course, living in Munich is a lot more expensive as well...
It should be noted that a single person can expect to pay about 50% of his gross income in taxes and social security. Married couples can pool and split their income for taxation, non-working partners are covered by most social security services for free, and there is a choice of tax credits or direct support for children. Social security includes fairly good medical support, unemployment insurance, and a retirement income that may or may not be sufficient to live on in the future.
Salaries are for a fixed amount of time (35-40 hours per week, with 40 hours being more common in IT-related branches), more work is paid separatly.
Also included are about 28-30 days of paid vacation (plus a lot of religous and national holidays).
Hey! I suggested Ric Flair at Time's Man of the Century poll! He's the Man! 11 (or 15? or 25?) times World Heavyweight Champion of the World! Whoooooooooo!
However, the degree of support he got surprised me a little bit...
Actualy, while at uni, my friends and I did something like that: we pooled our money (over $70AUD I think) together to get a game (Eye of the Beholder 2) and shared copies.
That's the point of view taken by the IP owners. The other question is how many of you would have bought the game at full price. Only one? ->No loss to the producer. None (because to expensive?) -> they are even better off with illegal copying;-)
Counting the number of copies, multiplying them by the cover price and crying "Billions and Billions of loss!" is a tactic that might impress politicians, but has no basis in reality.
If you know of any school where retargetable, optimizing and portable compilers for the full C language are an undergraduate project, I would like to hire some of their students.
I had to implement a compiler as an undergrad project - it compiled a fairly small subset of Pascal, target language was LISP, and we ignored linking, optimizing, library support and so on.
If you compare such a a project to gcc, I want your estimates for a couple of projects of mine - they might come out a lot cheaper than I ever imagined.
"France, Russia, and France" why would France be twice as pissed off as Russia?
Once because France is always pissed of by whatever anyone does (but particularly by things done by the US), and once because deploying an ABM system is a really stupid idea at the moment.
There is one more alternative for country X, especially if it notes that country Y can outspend it in the forseeable future. X can decide to fight a war as long as its position is still about equal. More realistically, it can demand construction of ABM systems to stop "or else" and then get into a spiral of escalation.
A remark on your side comment: No, the flag does not "stick" in 1/6th Earth gravity, at least not for an appreciable moment. The flags on the moon simply had a steel (or more likely aluminium) rod reinforcing the upper edge!
I don't know the details of US patent law. However, in most countries research into areas covered by patents is explicitly allowed. You are not allowed to use the results without the patent holders assent, but you can research as much as you want to.
Isn't that the idea behind cypherpunks/cypherpunks? I was ROTFL as I tried to log into the New York Times shortly after they disabled that account, created a new one, and got the suggestion to use cypherpunks119 as the user id (apparently cypherpunks1-118 were already used by other/.ers).
chmod ugo+w ~/.netscape/cookies netscape & [Log into Slashdot, exit Netscape] chmod ugo-w ~/.netscape/cookies netscape & [Surf all the world with short-lived cookies only]
Yes, it does make a difference. Just consider, after a good night of pr0n from the web you switch off your Gatesian "one account fits all" computer and in the next morning that super-geeky SO you finally met at the Linux meeting logs into Slashdot and is presented with explicit ads from "MegaFixen Fuckholes Inc.".
Or consider trading this kind of information - wouldn't you be interested in the fact that your neighbour clicks both Alcoholic Anonymous and Ballantines thrice a day?
The bottom line is that this kind of information is and should be private. In many countries there are privacy protection laws already, but as always the internet makes national laws rather useless ("we are not collecting any information, our ad-serving Bermuda subsidiary is").
I just sent the following letter to Amazon.com and Amazon.de. Let them know that you don't like their behaviour.
Dear Ladies and Sirs,
I have been a regular customer of your German dependency and an occasional customer of your main business. Up to now I have been very satisfied with your services and recommended them to friends and acquaintances.
However, I have been made aware of the fact that you have obtained a patent on your so-called "1-Click-technology" and have used this patent not only defensively, but actively sued Barnes and Noble over this issue.
I am a trained computer scientist and consider the "1-Click-technology" to be neither innovative nor "non-obvious for a practioner of the art". The patent should never have been issued in the first place. I consider the act of using it to hamper your competition with a lawsuit to be highly offensive.
For these reasons I will stop recommending Amazon, and I will carefully consider other options before using your services again.
Im sorry, but most of this is nonsense. No crime organization is going to illegally copy software and use the proceeds to subsidise other crimes. The number of people who commit crimes although it costs them real money is very small, and I bet even fewer of them are in organized crime.
Of course the loss figures cited by the software industries are similar nonsense. They usually assume that each illegal copy would have been sold at full price. Moreover, they totally ignore the fact that the user of the illegal copy (and hence the overall economy) has a net gain from this use - after all, he does not need to spend the money on the software, but can use it to improve his business or his live in some other ways (which usually involve buying other goods or services).
I don't condone illegal software copying, but the overall economic loss is much lower than alledged. In fact, there might even be an overall gain for the economy, as more people are able to work more productive using their illegal copies;-)
There are at least two requirements for a patent to be granted: The invention has to be new, and it has to be non-obvious for a practioner of the art. This patent is pretty weak on both legs. As someone wrote above, any pizza delivery service that uses a customer number does the same thing. And storing some information on a server and using a cookie to retrieve it is about as obvious as it gets.
I would really like to patent a method to generate new patent application by taking a well-known and/or obvious process or method and adding "on the internet" to it. However, I suspect that there is to much prior art out there...
The name of the man is Gödel, or if you are umlaut-challenged, Goedel, and his incompletness result implies nothing of what you say. What is says is than for any formal system that is at least powerful enough to describe elementary number theory, there exists sentences ("theorems") that are true, but not provably true.
Not only did you get your assumpions wrong (I can easily devise formal systems that are complete and yet quite useful), the complete assertion makes little sense in this context.
I do hope you encrypt the mail reading session with a separate key - otherwise the clear text is going over the network between DI and the receipient.
And you need to hope that the receipient will not hit the "Save as" button on his or her web browser ("for convenience"). Then there is browser caches, Web proxies and so on - there are more ways to attack this than I can count on my fingers (in binary).
The whole concept sounds like nonsense to me - if you trust the receipient at all, you can just have him delete the email after being done with it.
Just wait for the first AFP or CNN message or congressional testimony reading "...according to/., an high-profile electronic think tank composed of leading members of the geek community"...
Strictly speaking, a programming language is Turing-complete, if the programs you can write in this language can compute the same set of functions as the set of all Turing machines can. The typical proof to show this simply shows that your programming language can be used to simulate an arbitrary Turing machine.
A Turing-machine is a very simple computer that has an infinite, linearly organize memory, has a finite number of states, and may, depending on the current state and the character at the current memory address, perform some simple actions like increase or decrease the memory pointer by one, or write a character at the current location.
There are a large number of different but equivalent specifications for Turing machines, and the so-called "Thesis of (Alonzo) Church" states that everything that can be computed at all can be computed by a Turing machine. So far, most computer scientists do agree.
Less strictly speaking, a programming language is Turing-complete if it can be used to compute all Turing-computable functions if we abstract from the limited memory in real computers. Any language that allows assignments, simple arithmetic and conditionals, and either goto or while, is Turing-complete.
Not, that would not satisfy the GPL. If the binary is a derivative work of a GPL'ed piece of code (which it almost certainly is if it incorporates non-trivial pieces), they have to release all of the source used to create the binary.
You cannot create and distribute a derivative work without the consent of the original copyright holder, and for GPL'ed programs that consent is usually only given under the GPL, which states that the complete source to the derivative work has to be published (and other stuff...).
Obviously Suns attitude make good business sense - shunt users of old hardware onto a similar platform and get rid of the support headaches. but Sun do seem to have a more supportive attitude all round than Apple. They are far more keen to get people using their hardware, even if it means losing software revenue.
Well, one thing to keep in mind is that SUN has a long history as a hacker-friendly company. It was founded by hackers, and much of its software was and is written by hackers.
Apple, on the other hand, is and, at least since the introduction of the Mac, was a suit company. Woz was forced out relatively early...
I can imagine young, dynamic silk-tie suits with expensive haircuts trying to jump onto the free software bandwaggon, but I cannot imagine them to understand the movement, or to have lot's of staying power.
So my impression is that SUN supports Linux because of its corporate mentality, while Apple does it in spite of this.
Well, charging for a limited right to use a free resource is viewed as problematic by many people, but I can see some justification for it.
What I consider inacceptable is the trick e.g. Unisys is playing: Give away a product (or fail to enforce a patent) until the market has widely accepted your product, and then use the market position achieved by misrepresenting your intentions to milk the customers.
This is exactly how many large companies try to build monopolies.
There are two problems with your suggestion: First, the cheap $5000 licence is only valid for intranet sites and pretty limited internet web sites, not for any programs. Unisys at one time offered a license for programs for 1.5% of the retail price or 15 cent per copy, whichever was more - maybe we could grab them there and run a web-based transformator.
Secondly, however, if the original image is encumbered, running it through a purifier would not remove the encumbrance.
However, I seriously doubt that the pictures themselves are encumbered at all. Unisys claims this, but even they word it rather weakly. Programs that generate GIFs may violate the patent, but not the results of running these programs. And that means that the creators of GIFs can perhaps be sued, but not the distributors. Most probably, only authors of programs using the algorithm are liable, but there is little money to be had from them, and hence Unisys tries to milk fatter cows (or more of them...).
Regardless, I say lets switch to PNG. Open standards rule.
Slashdot Mirror
I suspect that there is a typo in the previous post. Number 265 is the Avalon cluster, number 256 some proprietary crap^H^H^H^Hengineering wonder.
It should be noted that a single person can expect to pay about 50% of his gross income in taxes and social security. Married couples can pool and split their income for taxation, non-working partners are covered by most social security services for free, and there is a choice of tax credits or direct support for children. Social security includes fairly good medical support, unemployment insurance, and a retirement income that may or may not be sufficient to live on in the future.
Salaries are for a fixed amount of time (35-40 hours per week, with 40 hours being more common in IT-related branches), more work is paid separatly.
Also included are about 28-30 days of paid vacation (plus a lot of religous and national holidays).
However, the degree of support he got surprised me a little bit...
*grin*
That's the point of view taken by the IP owners. The other question is how many of you would have bought the game at full price. Only one? ->No loss to the producer. None (because to expensive?) -> they are even better off with illegal copying ;-)
Counting the number of copies, multiplying them by the cover price and crying "Billions and Billions of loss!" is a tactic that might impress politicians, but has no basis in reality.
I had to implement a compiler as an undergrad project - it compiled a fairly small subset of Pascal, target language was LISP, and we ignored linking, optimizing, library support and so on.
If you compare such a a project to gcc, I want your estimates for a couple of projects of mine - they might come out a lot cheaper than I ever imagined.
why would France be twice as pissed off as Russia?
Once because France is always pissed of by whatever anyone does (but particularly by things done by the US), and once because deploying an ABM system is a really stupid idea at the moment.
Scary...
A remark on your side comment: No, the flag does not "stick" in 1/6th Earth gravity, at least not for an appreciable moment. The flags on the moon simply had a steel (or more likely aluminium) rod reinforcing the upper edge!
The Register has an article on this in English languange at http://www.theregister.co.uk/991024 -000005.html.
I don't know the details of US patent law. However, in most countries research into areas covered by patents is explicitly allowed. You are not allowed to use the results without the patent holders assent, but you can research as much as you want to.
*grin*
chmod ugo+w ~/.netscape/cookies
netscape &
[Log into Slashdot, exit Netscape]
chmod ugo-w ~/.netscape/cookies
netscape &
[Surf all the world with short-lived cookies only]
Or consider trading this kind of information - wouldn't you be interested in the fact that your neighbour clicks both Alcoholic Anonymous and Ballantines thrice a day?
The bottom line is that this kind of information is and should be private. In many countries there are privacy protection laws already, but as always the internet makes national laws rather useless ("we are not collecting any information, our ad-serving Bermuda subsidiary is").
Dear Ladies and Sirs,
I have been a regular customer of your German dependency and an occasional customer of your main business. Up to now I have been very satisfied with your services and recommended them to friends and acquaintances.
However, I have been made aware of the fact that you have obtained a patent on your so-called "1-Click-technology" and have used this patent not only defensively, but actively sued Barnes and Noble over this issue.
I am a trained computer scientist and consider the "1-Click-technology" to be neither innovative nor "non-obvious for a practioner of the art". The patent should never have been issued in the first place. I consider the act of using it to hamper your competition with a lawsuit to be highly offensive.
For these reasons I will stop recommending Amazon, and I will carefully consider other options before using your services again.
Yours faithfully,
etc...
Of course the loss figures cited by the software industries are similar nonsense. They usually assume that each illegal copy would have been sold at full price. Moreover, they totally ignore the fact that the user of the illegal copy (and hence the overall economy) has a net gain from this use - after all, he does not need to spend the money on the software, but can use it to improve his business or his live in some other ways (which usually involve buying other goods or services).
I don't condone illegal software copying, but the overall economic loss is much lower than alledged. In fact, there might even be an overall gain for the economy, as more people are able to work more productive using their illegal copies ;-)
I would really like to patent a method to generate new patent application by taking a well-known and/or obvious process or method and adding "on the internet" to it. However, I suspect that there is to much prior art out there...
Not only did you get your assumpions wrong (I can easily devise formal systems that are complete and yet quite useful), the complete assertion makes little sense in this context.
And you need to hope that the receipient will not hit the "Save as" button on his or her web browser ("for convenience"). Then there is browser caches, Web proxies and so on - there are more ways to attack this than I can count on my fingers (in binary).
The whole concept sounds like nonsense to me - if you trust the receipient at all, you can just have him delete the email after being done with it.
Just wait for the first AFP or CNN message or congressional testimony reading "...according to /., an high-profile electronic think tank composed of leading members of the geek community"...
A Turing-machine is a very simple computer that has an infinite, linearly organize memory, has a finite number of states, and may, depending on the current state and the character at the current memory address, perform some simple actions like increase or decrease the memory pointer by one, or write a character at the current location.
There are a large number of different but equivalent specifications for Turing machines, and the so-called "Thesis of (Alonzo) Church" states that everything that can be computed at all can be computed by a Turing machine. So far, most computer scientists do agree.
Less strictly speaking, a programming language is Turing-complete if it can be used to compute all Turing-computable functions if we abstract from the limited memory in real computers. Any language that allows assignments, simple arithmetic and conditionals, and either goto or while, is Turing-complete.
There is a fairly good description at this web site.
You cannot create and distribute a derivative work without the consent of the original copyright holder, and for GPL'ed programs that consent is usually only given under the GPL, which states that the complete source to the derivative work has to be published (and other stuff...).
Apple, on the other hand, is and, at least since the introduction of the Mac, was a suit company. Woz was forced out relatively early...
I can imagine young, dynamic silk-tie suits with expensive haircuts trying to jump onto the free software bandwaggon, but I cannot imagine them to understand the movement, or to have lot's of staying power.
So my impression is that SUN supports Linux because of its corporate mentality, while Apple does it in spite of this.
What I consider inacceptable is the trick e.g. Unisys is playing: Give away a product (or fail to enforce a patent) until the market has widely accepted your product, and then use the market position achieved by misrepresenting your intentions to milk the customers.
This is exactly how many large companies try to build monopolies.
Secondly, however, if the original image is encumbered, running it through a purifier would not remove the encumbrance.
However, I seriously doubt that the pictures themselves are encumbered at all. Unisys claims this, but even they word it rather weakly. Programs that generate GIFs may violate the patent, but not the results of running these programs. And that means that the creators of GIFs can perhaps be sued, but not the distributors. Most probably, only authors of programs using the algorithm are liable, but there is little money to be had from them, and hence Unisys tries to milk fatter cows (or more of them...).
Regardless, I say lets switch to PNG. Open standards rule.
...which is true because we define "=" to represent equality and equality to be a congruence relation (and hence reflexive).