Archive for October, 2008
October 30, 2008 at 2:33 pm · Filed under del.icio.us
-
-
"Magnetic tape, which stores most of the world’s computer backups, can degrade within a decade. According to the National Archives Web site by the mid-1970s, only two machines could read the data from the 1960 U.S. Census: One was in Japan, the other in the Smithsonian Institution. Some of the data collected from NASA’s 1976 Viking landing on Mars is unreadable and lost forever."
October 29, 2008 at 2:02 am · Filed under del.icio.us
-
"Correcting Inventorship: An issued patent is presumed to name the correct inventors. Thus, an inventorship challenge must bring "clear and convincing evidence" that the newly surfaced inventor "contributed to the conception of the claimed invention." "Simply reducing to practice that which has been conceived by others is insufficient for co-inventorship." Under the clear and convincing standard, the inventorship challenge "must be corroborated by independent evidence.""
October 23, 2008 at 2:00 am · Filed under del.icio.us
October 21, 2008 at 2:00 am · Filed under del.icio.us
October 20, 2008 at 2:00 am · Filed under del.icio.us
October 19, 2008 at 2:00 am · Filed under del.icio.us
October 18, 2008 at 2:00 am · Filed under del.icio.us
October 16, 2008 at 2:01 am · Filed under del.icio.us
-
“Post-autistic economics” (PAE) is the name now taken by those few economists who hope to rescue the discipline from the neoclassical model; the name is an homage to the dissident French students, whose manifesto called the standard model “autistic.” It is a hilariously apt (albeit mildly offensive) diagnosis, and it could be just as well applied to Homo economicus himself, the economic actor envisioned by the neoclassical theory, who performs dazzling calculations of utility maximization despite being entirely unable to communicate with his fellow man.
-
"My father the anthropologist and I are alike in one way at least: we don’t suffer fruitless systems in silence. In one way at least, we are different: I cannot content myself with complaining to the powerless and uninvolved."
-
"Deregulate "the copy": Copyright law is triggered every time there is a copy. In the digital age, where every use of a creative work produces a "copy," that makes as much sense as regulating breathing. The law should also give up its obsession with "the copy," and focus instead on uses — like public distributions of copyrighted work — that connect directly to the economic incentive copyright law was intended to foster."
-
"We think they [Google] are doing great stuff," Kahle said in a 2006 interview with CNET. "If the materials would be made available for broad public search and educational use we'd be all for it."
-
"This decision has confirmed what was already obvious from a plain reading of the statutes, that Minnesota cities can use their bonding authority for deploying the essential infrastructure of the next century."
-
October 15, 2008 at 2:01 am · Filed under del.icio.us
-
"…How are such things as editions, states, variants, or even the book itself to be discussed? To what extent is a printed book singular? And to what extent does the (inaccurate) scholarly assumption that it is not, enable reasonable and useful discussion of such objects to proceed?"
-
"Assume, as Roosevelt did, a population in which there are some weak-minded people, prone to violence. What makes such people fixate on a public figure? Roosevelt thought it could only be the language, bordering on incitement, with which it had become acceptable to attack public figures."
-
"I have not even touched on the fascinating possibilities of interstellar finance, where spot and forward exchange markets will have to be supplemented by conditional present markets."
-
October 14, 2008 at 2:01 am · Filed under del.icio.us
Older entries »