People detained in Guantonimo have NO rights, even those given to non-citizens.
Yes, they do. They have obtained the right to gun privacy. (My original source for this is the book by Michael Moore called "Dude, where's my country?", but the above link was the first I could find on google.:) )
Remember, movie piracy doesn't just hurt actors, but also camera operators, key grips, makeup artists, and costumers.
On first reading I misread this as "movie piracy... (hurts)... customers". I really got too accustomed (or accostumed?) to reading these kinds of arguments pro or against movie copying, especially the parts where they say it will hurt consumers/customers (difference?) in the end, so I kind-of automatically read the closest word I usually see in this context.:)
"I'm too stupid to understand that circular dependencies can be resolved by specifying BOTH.rpms together on the command line, and that problems hardly ever occur if one uses proper Red Hat packages instead of mixing SuSE, Mandrake and Joe's Linux packages together (which the system wasn't designed for)."
OK, but I don't think that's the dependency hell people usually talk about. The trouble with distros that don't use some APT-like tool is that you can't install certain RPMs unless you manually install all RPMs in the transitive closure of the requires-relationship starting at the RPM you want to install. Also, you must then manually upgrade any packages that don't work with the new version of whatever you're installing (and recursively so until everything checks out again). Yes, there is apt-rpm. But that isn't installed by default AFAIK, and without it Red Hat users are stuck in the tar pits of dependency hell.
This is definitely something that could happen if dependence on such a centralized system would ever become the norm. However, what will probably happen is that there will be a lot of locality in the processing power supply, e.g., devices in your house normally use your own PC (or maybe the PC of someone close to you), if they don't use it fully then others can use it (and you actually get paid for this!). You then have a system where you're not dependent on your own PC's computing power anymore, and if your PC accidentally breaks down there is always backup power to be drawn from a bit further away so that your fridge can continue to do it's very important calculations (e.g., chemical analysis of the gases in the fridge to detect rotting food, or something). Shortages only become a problem when the system as a whole has undercapacity. Even in that scenario, the only thing that can happen is that some computation jobs are denied. In addition, market mechanisms (e.g., rising prices of computing power that accompany the higher demand) and the fact that people pay and get paid directly for their computer power (micropayments!) will make sure that undercapacity will not occur, because the more price-conscious users will back out from using too much computing power if the price gets too high. Currently the total computation capacity in the world is a factor 10 greater than what is actually used (given that most PCs sit idle most of the time, even when they're being used!), so I don't expect problems soon.:)
It's funny how people always seem to find a way to confuse what is meant by a "grid". The posting talks about a "4x4 grid" without clarification of the term "grid", which is confusing because grid computing has nothing to do with processing units being lined up in a grid. The "grid" in "grid computing" comes from an analogy with the power grid, not from any form of "grid layout". The analogy is based on the fact that with grid computing, you simply plug your "computing power client appliance" (not necessarily a PC, could be the fridge) into the "computing power outlet" in the wall (a network port, usually), and you can "consume computing power", like you would do with electricity. Computational grids don't even necessarily have to support parallel programs; it is easy to imagine grids that have a maximum allocated unit of a single processor. What makes such grids grids is that you can allocate the power on demand, when you need it, instead of that you have to have your own "computing power generator" (read: megapower CPU) at home.
In high school, or at least, in the Dutch equivalent of that. However, I don't think that even the best schools would have taught me the gender of "Login".:) You're right about Name however, I could have remembered that.
(Just to ensure that the old adage becomes true, the one that says that when a discussion becomes longer the chance that a comparison to Nazis pop up becomes 100%:) )
University students have been widely viewed as the core of the various file-swapping networks ever since the appearance of Napster on the digital scene in late 1999. Universities have seen half or more of their network bandwidth used by people uploading and downloading songs, software and movies over the past few years.
The only reason they're able to say that it's done so much on universities is that universities are very large organisations consisting for a large part of people who only have internet access through this network; basically, you could see a university as a ISP for "home users" which happens to have only broadband users. If the RIAA would go after ISPs like they go after universities, they would definitely not get so much cooperation from the ISPs as from the universities, because the ISPs are in the bandwidth business and would not like to lose their customers - if word gets out that an ISP actually works with the RIAA, everyone who does file-swapping (e.g., half the customers?) will move to another ISP out of concern over their safety. Therefore, the only reason that the RIAA goes after the educational institutions is that they're easy targets: they don't have a reason not to respond, and they don't have money to fight legal battles in order to not have to respond.
BTW, isn't it stupid that there's basically discrimination going on against people who have non-mainstream music tastes? I would be very happy to listen to commercial radio stations that sent out the kind of music that I like, but there simply aren't any stations like that. If you don't have money and you don't have a mainstream music taste, you're basically forced to either live without music or to "steal".
In The Netherlands it is kind-of legal (I don't know exactly how legal, IANAL) for you to live in a house that's been abandoned by the owner. Abandoned in this case means that the owner keeps the house unused for his own reasons (e.g., waiting for a better housing market to make a profit). AFAIK, it's not actually legal but they can't deny you stuff like electricity and water and they can't kick you out unless the owner is actually going to do something with the house. A strange consequence of this is that owners now rent their houses to other people even if they don't really want to, just to prevent other people from moving in there - so, the final effect of this being legit is not that it's legal to live in other people's houses for free, but that it's become impossible to keep unused houses off the market if there's a housing shortage, which is a good thing. I think there should be something like this in the law for IP, e.g., that you can't keep intellectual property that you own off the market if you're not going to do something with it yourself, and that you might be forced to allow licensing if you don't have plans to develop a product with the knowledge. The "abandonware clause" is a solution very much like in the abandoned-houses example. This would work well to prevent the just-because-we-can type of keeping-stuff-off-the-market behavior we see from companies that are too lazy to look if they're actually doing something with things they own.
I've seen an especially nice version of these dynamic stack frames in Cyclone. For those of you who don't know it, Cyclone is kind of a type-safe, pointer-safe version of C, mixed with some good features found in languages like ML. It takes only simple transformations to compile C code as Cyclone (mostly having to do with minor pointer syntax differences).
Cyclone has region-based memory protection, which means that you can't do stuff like return pointers to local variables etc. because it statically checks the pointer lifetime using region tags that are part of the pointer type. Example: you can have a pointer-to-memory-belonging-to-region-foo, where foo is a function or some other static scope, (written sometype * `foo, although the default region tag is usually correct, then it's just sometype *) which can point to heap memory because that's garbage-collected and guaranteed to live at least as long as function foo's memory, but you can't have a pointer-to-memory-belonging-to-region-Heap pointing to a variable on the local stack: if you have a local variable x and take the address, the type of that is pointer-to-memory-in-region-foo, and that type is not allowed to be cast to pointer-to-memory-in-region-Heap because foo's memory doesn't necessarily live as long as Heap does.
They combined this region-based mechanism with dynamic "stack frames": You can open a dynamic region to open up a new "stack frame" or separate heap of memory bound to a scope in the program, so when an exception is thrown or when you exit the scope the memory is automatically deallocated. The good thing is, you can't go wrong, because the region-based pointer lifetime checking will prohibit you from casting a pointer into that specific region to a pointer into a region with a longer lifetime, so you will never have dangling pointers into such a dynamic region: you will get a compile-time error when you attempt to do this.
I just did a "strings/usr/bin/mail" and these are some of the results:
Write what file!?
mail's idea of conditions is screwed up
-- Can't dump core.
Okie dokie
Too much "sourcing" going on.
(Interrupt -- one more to kill letter)
Too many regrets
And I wonder what the string "metoo" that also appears is used for! At least now I also know for sure that I'm not dreaming on the day I see "Thou hast new mail." instead of "You have new mail.": the string is actually in there.
Well, I've learned my lesson. Next time I'll just submit this as a story. I didn't do it the previous time because I didn't know if the project was ready for that kind of public attention yet, and as there are guys working on this project down the hall from where I work (the Leiden Institute for Advanced Computer Science LIACS) I didn't want to get involved in drawing too much attention when the project wasn't really up to speed yet.
I already posted a comment linking to this, as a reply to an earlier story on telescopes (here), and I didn't get modded up to even 2, and now it's a headline? Pfff. I don't believe this.
When you do that, the amount of blood that goes through your arms will go to a standstill. I've discovered (by watching my own RSI problems and the problems that my friends had) that most of the problems with RSI are due to a lack of blood in the arms. The muscles in the arms cannot cope with any kind of strain if they do not get enough blood to fix themselves up and to remove the acids they produce when they are strained. Lack of blood is generally caused by two things:
1. Posture. The way you sit very heavily influences the amount of blood that goes through your arms and hands, and this influences the amount of work that they can do.
2. Lack of muscle training. This all boils down to the blood argument again, because training your muscles actually means increasing the amount of blood that goes through your muscles. You don't need to train the muscles, you need to train the VEINS in the muscles, so that they get bigger. This will reduce the "resistance to blood" (the same way it works with electricity) of your whole arm, and will therefore increase the amount of blood that goes to your arm & muscle.
If your arm muscles don't have enough blood, they cannot recover from strain as quickly as is needed, and you WILL develop RSI in your arm muscles. Especially if you are a good worker - lazy people don't get RSI, it's the people that work overtime at crunch time that get it. Often people don't notice that they are getting it during regular hours, they only get the real problems when they work harder for a period of time. And then the problems don't go away anymore, because the amount of blood that flows through their arms is just enough to recuperate from an average day's work, but not to repair the large amounts of wear-and-tear that you get when you work overtime.
General recipe for recovering from blood-shortage based RSI (which is all muscle-based RSI, as far as I've seen): - When your arms hurt, use them MORE instead of less. Train them, even though they hurt. Don't overdo it, but a little light training will not make them hurt more, it will make them hurt LESS. - Work on your posture so that you get the most blood into your arms while you are working. You can *feel* how much blood there is going to your arms at any time: more blood means that your arms will start tingling. Listen to your body - it will tell you what the right posture is.
I used to get no spam at all, because I used
obfuscated addresses whenever
possible. BUT. I recently reacquired an e-mail
address that I had until 1997, it hadn't been
working in the mean time (all mail had bounced),
and on this e-mail address I STILL get a couple of
spams a day, even though the address has been in
disuse for four years! Kind of makes me wonder
how much of the spam that is sent actually
arrives at e-mail addresses that still exist.
I can imagine that in a couple of years the net
will collapse not by the amount of spam received
but by the amount of spam not received
(and the bounce messages that follow, quoting the
entire spam message again).
Cheap food and medical sources, sure!
on
Patent Nonsense
·
· Score: 1
He could better spend his time focusing on how to get these countries the cheap food and medical sources they need, rather than putting forth examples of 'patentless society'.
This view is exactly the view that does not help these people. Poor countries do not really need cheap food. They do not need cheap medicine. They do not need money. They need a way to provide for themselves! How can they do that? They have to flourish economically. The only way for a poor, underdeveloped country to flourish economically is by being allowed to compete honestly, to do what they do best (to produce things cheaply) and to be able to exploit the advantage they have in that area. In the mean time, what happens instead is that, because of intellectual property laws, the poor countries cannot produce stuff cheaply because they did not invent the stuff - however, big corporations from the rich countries CAN come in and buy cheap labour there, without giving the country any of the advantages it would have if it could keep the production in its own hands (e.g., the profits). Basically, we keep 'em working and pay them only what they need to live on, and then we go and take the profits home. That's called exploitation. Also, the smarter people there have not even got an incentive to learn and get into a management career, because all the higher positions in large factories in their own country are continued to be held by people from the rich countries. There is no investment in human capital. Only exploitation.
I don't say that the intellectual property laws aren't good for something. It's just that the underdeveloped countries are hampered by them because all *they* can do is produce things cheaply, and they don't have the chance to build up a pool of intellectual property themselves, so basically they will always be dependent on the intellectual property owners. Later, when they *are* developed, they will not have a chance anymore to build up an intellectual property pool, because we already invented and patented everything before they had the chance. It's just like in the old days, when power was with the people who owned the factories: now the rich countries own the stuff needed to produce, and the poor countries cannot change this except maybe through a revolution, overthrowing the western world with its intellectual property laws, forcing them to share.
This is pretty far-fetched, so excuse me if this doesn't make any sense.
I roughly understand from the comments that this law only applies to digital devices. So if I were to build an analog device which does not implement the security measures, this would not be a problem? What exactly is the boundary between analog and digital? If I used a base-65536 digital device (using 65536-based digits, thus using 65536 different voltages to represent different digit values), is that still a digital device? Even if all numbers are 1-digit numbers? What's the difference between such a device that and an analog device with about the same precision?
I would be happy to pay that for a CD. Regular prices here (the Netherlands) are a lot higher. At the time when the Euro/$ ratio was about 1, we paid about 20 Euros = $20 for a CD. Right now it's become better, but we still pay the same 20 Euros = about $17 for a CD.
As I recall the PPC and x86 architecture have a different endianness. Wouldn't there be an unfair advantage for the processor that was cross-compiling for an architecture with the same endianness? Endianness-conversion costs time, and when you have a compiler writing large amounts of files with a different endianness than it's own, that might take large amounts of time!
I guess the key word is essential here.
Over the years, many nonessential elements have entered the realm of software development, or things have become nonessential through technical developments.
For example, designing everything up front used to be essential in the seventies and eighties because software was not malleable enough to facilitate correcting design mistakes later. With the size of today's systems it's become largely impossible to think of everything up front, also because requirements usually change very fast, and the basic reason for doing it has virtually disappeared: because of OO the design of software has become much more malleable (think refactoring). Also, designing up front adds to the cost of change later in the process, because you have to keep a lot of design documentation up to date. Still, many people keep thinking designing up front is necessary for software development.
These XP guys asked the right questions for every part of today's development processes: is this part of the essence or is it just a burden? What if we took it out? What if we took it to the max?
In the example of designing up front, taking it to the max has been tried for so many years. It doesn't work. So they dumped it, saving time for activities that DO work when taken to the max.
Slashdot Mirror
People detained in Guantonimo have NO rights, even those given to non-citizens.
:) )
Yes, they do. They have obtained the right to gun privacy. (My original source for this is the book by Michael Moore called "Dude, where's my country?", but the above link was the first I could find on google.
Remember, movie piracy doesn't just hurt actors, but also camera operators, key grips, makeup artists, and costumers.
... (hurts) ... customers". I really got too accustomed (or accostumed?) to reading these kinds of arguments pro or against movie copying, especially the parts where they say it will hurt consumers/customers (difference?) in the end, so I kind-of automatically read the closest word I usually see in this context. :)
On first reading I misread this as "movie piracy
"I'm too stupid to understand that circular dependencies can be resolved by specifying BOTH .rpms together on the command line, and that problems hardly ever occur if one uses proper Red Hat packages instead of mixing SuSE, Mandrake and Joe's Linux packages together (which the system wasn't designed for)."
OK, but I don't think that's the dependency hell people usually talk about. The trouble with distros that don't use some APT-like tool is that you can't install certain RPMs unless you manually install all RPMs in the transitive closure of the requires-relationship starting at the RPM you want to install. Also, you must then manually upgrade any packages that don't work with the new version of whatever you're installing (and recursively so until everything checks out again). Yes, there is apt-rpm. But that isn't installed by default AFAIK, and without it Red Hat users are stuck in the tar pits of dependency hell.
This is definitely something that could happen if dependence on such a centralized system would ever become the norm. However, what will probably happen is that there will be a lot of locality in the processing power supply, e.g., devices in your house normally use your own PC (or maybe the PC of someone close to you), if they don't use it fully then others can use it (and you actually get paid for this!). You then have a system where you're not dependent on your own PC's computing power anymore, and if your PC accidentally breaks down there is always backup power to be drawn from a bit further away so that your fridge can continue to do it's very important calculations (e.g., chemical analysis of the gases in the fridge to detect rotting food, or something). Shortages only become a problem when the system as a whole has undercapacity. Even in that scenario, the only thing that can happen is that some computation jobs are denied. In addition, market mechanisms (e.g., rising prices of computing power that accompany the higher demand) and the fact that people pay and get paid directly for their computer power (micropayments!) will make sure that undercapacity will not occur, because the more price-conscious users will back out from using too much computing power if the price gets too high. Currently the total computation capacity in the world is a factor 10 greater than what is actually used (given that most PCs sit idle most of the time, even when they're being used!), so I don't expect problems soon. :)
It's funny how people always seem to find a way to confuse what is meant by a "grid". The posting talks about a "4x4 grid" without clarification of the term "grid", which is confusing because grid computing has nothing to do with processing units being lined up in a grid. The "grid" in "grid computing" comes from an analogy with the power grid, not from any form of "grid layout". The analogy is based on the fact that with grid computing, you simply plug your "computing power client appliance" (not necessarily a PC, could be the fridge) into the "computing power outlet" in the wall (a network port, usually), and you can "consume computing power", like you would do with electricity. Computational grids don't even necessarily have to support parallel programs; it is easy to imagine grids that have a maximum allocated unit of a single processor. What makes such grids grids is that you can allocate the power on demand, when you need it, instead of that you have to have your own "computing power generator" (read: megapower CPU) at home.
However, most telcos are switching to DMT because I think it's more scalable.
;)
Dude, you have POWER! If you thought IP over carrier pigeons were more scalable, would they switch to that?
That's...
:) You're right about Name however, I could have remembered that.
ein Name, ein Login, ein Fuehrer
Where do kids learn German grammar these days?
In high school, or at least, in the Dutch equivalent of that. However, I don't think that even the best schools would have taught me the gender of "Login".
"One name one login."
:) )
Eine Name, eine Login, ein Fuehrer!
(Just to ensure that the old adage becomes true, the one that says that when a discussion becomes longer the chance that a comparison to Nazis pop up becomes 100%
University students have been widely viewed as the core of the various file-swapping networks ever since the appearance of Napster on the digital scene in late 1999. Universities have seen half or more of their network bandwidth used by people uploading and downloading songs, software and movies over the past few years.
The only reason they're able to say that it's done so much on universities is that universities are very large organisations consisting for a large part of people who only have internet access through this network; basically, you could see a university as a ISP for "home users" which happens to have only broadband users. If the RIAA would go after ISPs like they go after universities, they would definitely not get so much cooperation from the ISPs as from the universities, because the ISPs are in the bandwidth business and would not like to lose their customers - if word gets out that an ISP actually works with the RIAA, everyone who does file-swapping (e.g., half the customers?) will move to another ISP out of concern over their safety. Therefore, the only reason that the RIAA goes after the educational institutions is that they're easy targets: they don't have a reason not to respond, and they don't have money to fight legal battles in order to not have to respond.
BTW, isn't it stupid that there's basically discrimination going on against people who have non-mainstream music tastes? I would be very happy to listen to commercial radio stations that sent out the kind of music that I like, but there simply aren't any stations like that. If you don't have money and you don't have a mainstream music taste, you're basically forced to either live without music or to "steal".
In The Netherlands it is kind-of legal (I don't know exactly how legal, IANAL) for you to live in a house that's been abandoned by the owner. Abandoned in this case means that the owner keeps the house unused for his own reasons (e.g., waiting for a better housing market to make a profit). AFAIK, it's not actually legal but they can't deny you stuff like electricity and water and they can't kick you out unless the owner is actually going to do something with the house. A strange consequence of this is that owners now rent their houses to other people even if they don't really want to, just to prevent other people from moving in there - so, the final effect of this being legit is not that it's legal to live in other people's houses for free, but that it's become impossible to keep unused houses off the market if there's a housing shortage, which is a good thing. I think there should be something like this in the law for IP, e.g., that you can't keep intellectual property that you own off the market if you're not going to do something with it yourself, and that you might be forced to allow licensing if you don't have plans to develop a product with the knowledge. The "abandonware clause" is a solution very much like in the abandoned-houses example. This would work well to prevent the just-because-we-can type of keeping-stuff-off-the-market behavior we see from companies that are too lazy to look if they're actually doing something with things they own.
Garage maybe, not garbage. Subtle difference, I admit.
I've seen an especially nice version of these dynamic stack frames in Cyclone. For those of you who don't know it, Cyclone is kind of a type-safe, pointer-safe version of C, mixed with some good features found in languages like ML. It takes only simple transformations to compile C code as Cyclone (mostly having to do with minor pointer syntax differences).
Cyclone has region-based memory protection, which means that you can't do stuff like return pointers to local variables etc. because it statically checks the pointer lifetime using region tags that are part of the pointer type. Example: you can have a pointer-to-memory-belonging-to-region-foo, where foo is a function or some other static scope, (written sometype * `foo, although the default region tag is usually correct, then it's just sometype *) which can point to heap memory because that's garbage-collected and guaranteed to live at least as long as function foo's memory, but you can't have a pointer-to-memory-belonging-to-region-Heap pointing to a variable on the local stack: if you have a local variable x and take the address, the type of that is pointer-to-memory-in-region-foo, and that type is not allowed to be cast to pointer-to-memory-in-region-Heap because foo's memory doesn't necessarily live as long as Heap does.
They combined this region-based mechanism with dynamic "stack frames": You can open a dynamic region to open up a new "stack frame" or separate heap of memory bound to a scope in the program, so when an exception is thrown or when you exit the scope the memory is automatically deallocated. The good thing is, you can't go wrong, because the region-based pointer lifetime checking will prohibit you from casting a pointer into that specific region to a pointer into a region with a longer lifetime, so you will never have dangling pointers into such a dynamic region: you will get a compile-time error when you attempt to do this.
I just did a "strings /usr/bin/mail" and these are some of the results:
Write what file!?
mail's idea of conditions is screwed up
-- Can't dump core.
Okie dokie
Too much "sourcing" going on.
(Interrupt -- one more to kill letter)
Too many regrets
And I wonder what the string "metoo" that also appears is used for! At least now I also know for sure that I'm not dreaming on the day I see "Thou hast new mail." instead of "You have new mail.": the string is actually in there.
dumping core to /dev/cdrom.
Well, I've learned my lesson. Next time I'll just submit this as a story. I didn't do it the previous time because I didn't know if the project was ready for that kind of public attention yet, and as there are guys working on this project down the hall from where I work (the Leiden Institute for Advanced Computer Science LIACS) I didn't want to get involved in drawing too much attention when the project wasn't really up to speed yet.
I already posted a comment linking to this, as a reply to an earlier story on telescopes (here), and I didn't get modded up to even 2, and now it's a headline? Pfff. I don't believe this.
What about the Square Kilometer Array? I know, it's a radio telescope, but it's bigger!
When you do that, the amount of blood that goes through your arms will go to a standstill. I've discovered (by watching my own RSI problems and the problems that my friends had) that most of the problems with RSI are due to a lack of blood in the arms. The muscles in the arms cannot cope with any kind of strain if they do not get enough blood to fix themselves up and to remove the acids they produce when they are strained. Lack of blood is generally caused by two things:
1. Posture. The way you sit very heavily influences the amount of blood that goes through your arms and hands, and this influences the amount of work that they can do.
2. Lack of muscle training. This all boils down to the blood argument again, because training your muscles actually means increasing the amount of blood that goes through your muscles. You don't need to train the muscles, you need to train the VEINS in the muscles, so that they get bigger. This will reduce the "resistance to blood" (the same way it works with electricity) of your whole arm, and will therefore increase the amount of blood that goes to your arm & muscle.
If your arm muscles don't have enough blood, they cannot recover from strain as quickly as is needed, and you WILL develop RSI in your arm muscles. Especially if you are a good worker - lazy people don't get RSI, it's the people that work overtime at crunch time that get it. Often people don't notice that they are getting it during regular hours, they only get the real problems when they work harder for a period of time. And then the problems don't go away anymore, because the amount of blood that flows through their arms is just enough to recuperate from an average day's work, but not to repair the large amounts of wear-and-tear that you get when you work overtime.
General recipe for recovering from blood-shortage based RSI (which is all muscle-based RSI, as far as I've seen):
- When your arms hurt, use them MORE instead of less. Train them, even though they hurt. Don't overdo it, but a little light training will not make them hurt more, it will make them hurt LESS.
- Work on your posture so that you get the most blood into your arms while you are working. You can *feel* how much blood there is going to your arms at any time: more blood means that your arms will start tingling. Listen to your body - it will tell you what the right posture is.
(Switching from std::string to CString to get something to run on a PDA.)
You don't switch to something thats even LESS portable.
I'd rather think they made a brilliant move. As their software now runs on a PDA, I would consider it more portable.
I used to get no spam at all, because I used obfuscated addresses whenever possible. BUT. I recently reacquired an e-mail address that I had until 1997, it hadn't been working in the mean time (all mail had bounced), and on this e-mail address I STILL get a couple of spams a day, even though the address has been in disuse for four years! Kind of makes me wonder how much of the spam that is sent actually arrives at e-mail addresses that still exist. I can imagine that in a couple of years the net will collapse not by the amount of spam received but by the amount of spam not received (and the bounce messages that follow, quoting the entire spam message again).
He could better spend his time focusing on how to get these countries the cheap food and medical sources they need, rather than putting forth examples of 'patentless society'.
This view is exactly the view that does not help these people. Poor countries do not really need cheap food. They do not need cheap medicine. They do not need money. They need a way to provide for themselves! How can they do that? They have to flourish economically. The only way for a poor, underdeveloped country to flourish economically is by being allowed to compete honestly, to do what they do best (to produce things cheaply) and to be able to exploit the advantage they have in that area. In the mean time, what happens instead is that, because of intellectual property laws, the poor countries cannot produce stuff cheaply because they did not invent the stuff - however, big corporations from the rich countries CAN come in and buy cheap labour there, without giving the country any of the advantages it would have if it could keep the production in its own hands (e.g., the profits). Basically, we keep 'em working and pay them only what they need to live on, and then we go and take the profits home. That's called exploitation. Also, the smarter people there have not even got an incentive to learn and get into a management career, because all the higher positions in large factories in their own country are continued to be held by people from the rich countries. There is no investment in human capital. Only exploitation.
I don't say that the intellectual property laws aren't good for something. It's just that the underdeveloped countries are hampered by them because all *they* can do is produce things cheaply, and they don't have the chance to build up a pool of intellectual property themselves, so basically they will always be dependent on the intellectual property owners. Later, when they *are* developed, they will not have a chance anymore to build up an intellectual property pool, because we already invented and patented everything before they had the chance. It's just like in the old days, when power was with the people who owned the factories: now the rich countries own the stuff needed to produce, and the poor countries cannot change this except maybe through a revolution, overthrowing the western world with its intellectual property laws, forcing them to share.
This is pretty far-fetched, so excuse me if this doesn't make any sense.
I roughly understand from the comments that this law only applies to digital devices. So if I were to build an analog device which does not implement the security measures, this would not be a problem? What exactly is the boundary between analog and digital? If I used a base-65536 digital device (using 65536-based digits, thus using 65536 different voltages to represent different digit values), is that still a digital device? Even if all numbers are 1-digit numbers? What's the difference between such a device that and an analog device with about the same precision?
I would be happy to pay that for a CD. Regular prices here (the Netherlands) are a lot higher. At the time when the Euro/$ ratio was about 1, we paid about 20 Euros = $20 for a CD. Right now it's become better, but we still pay the same 20 Euros = about $17 for a CD.
As I recall the PPC and x86 architecture have a different endianness. Wouldn't there be an unfair advantage for the processor that was cross-compiling for an architecture with the same endianness? Endianness-conversion costs time, and when you have a compiler writing large amounts of files with a different endianness than it's own, that might take large amounts of time!
I guess the key word is essential here.
Over the years, many nonessential elements have entered the realm of software development, or things have become nonessential through technical developments.
For example, designing everything up front used to be essential in the seventies and eighties because software was not malleable enough to facilitate correcting design mistakes later. With the size of today's systems it's become largely impossible to think of everything up front, also because requirements usually change very fast, and the basic reason for doing it has virtually disappeared: because of OO the design of software has become much more malleable (think refactoring). Also, designing up front adds to the cost of change later in the process, because you have to keep a lot of design documentation up to date. Still, many people keep thinking designing up front is necessary for software development.
These XP guys asked the right questions for every part of today's development processes: is this part of the essence or is it just a burden? What if we took it out? What if we took it to the max?
In the example of designing up front, taking it to the max has been tried for so many years. It doesn't work. So they dumped it, saving time for activities that DO work when taken to the max.