Neither is it fair that Disney stole Osamu Tezuka's Kimba for use in The Lion King.

The Constitutional requirement is: (1) to authors and inventors, (2) for a limited time, (3) in order to promote progress in the sciences and arts.

It is impossible that extending the copyright term for works of a fifty-year-dead author can encourage him to produce more work. Nor is the resulting term "limited" in either in mathematical or human terms. And the current Mickey Mouse "copyright owners" are certainly NOT that author nor inventor.

A few years ago the U.S. military were evaluating a new hybrid vehicle to replace the Hummer. Their main interest was logistics, since Hummers aren't the most economical vehicles to operate. They couldn't help but notice that in electric mode their new vehicle was quiet.

Around here the Toyotas are positively noisy. The Teslas, on the other hand, only make a faint whirr from their tires.

...laura

People are so poor they can't afford to commit crime any more.

Sure the ISA is open, but that is just for the CPU. A meaningful inplementation needs all the stuff that goes around it, and, as with all electronics, volume is king.

Theoretically, as you say, someone who needs a CPU to embed could choose Sparc. Then they could set about developing the rest of the system. But when they place an order, they better have a vlome market - or they would be better of with an alternative by a very large margin.

The existing Sparc targets a very specific market (web/database servers) at which it excels, but the market is not really big enough for other players to have massively bigger volume. The machines for this market have more IP outside the CPU than in it - it is about transactions per second, not instructions per second.

I have tried using Sparc as a workstation, and I am using Intel now. Its about the external infrastructure, not the product. My servers are all Sparc (OpenBSD, not Solaris - no hideous licencing problems, and Solaris majors on features I don't need - but if I did, the licence fees might be worth the money.

Now if a Sparc product was to target the mobile phone market?

We're collectively producing more rice than we eat. Japan is stockpiling unused rice every year, and the world markets are flooded with cheap rice. Food insufficiency (starvation, malnutrition) is currently a problem of resource allocation, not production.

At the same time, the consumers in the big rice consuming countries aren't eating just "rice". You can typically find many dozens of very specific breeds of rice with differences in flavour, texture, firmness, size and so on. And that's within a single type (Japonica, say).

I suspect this would only be useful for rice grown for feed or as an industrial crop. But for feed, source of starch and so on there are already other, well entrenched crops available, so I don't see much of a practical impact of this development.

Oh, wait ...

What is the alternate solution? Are you willing to pay for a subscription to every site you visit? Do you want more "native content" intermixed with all these articles?

Or, you know, less content. It's not as if we're all sitting around wishing there was more stuff on the internet to read, right?

We pay a monthly subscription for our online daily newspaper. I occasionally pay for things such as printed anthologies of online comics I follow, buy books by authors whose blogs and articles I read. I subscribe to a couple of websites.

At one end there is high-quality content such as newspapers (which is high quality in my home country) and other stuff like I listed above. Stuff that is good enough that people really do want to pay for it.

At the other end a lot of people out there are creating good stuff completely for free. You've got academics, programmers and other professionals with a day job that write to spread what they learn. You've got hobbyists sharing their passion. Small businesses publishing good stuff to promote their name and skills. Factual events are widely and freely reported.

The content farms, clickbait sites and the rest out there is squeezed between these two. The high-quality stuff sets the bar for what people expect in order to part with their money. The free stuff sets the bar on what people accept before they abandon you and leave for better sources.

If your business depends on having so much advertising that it drives people to block stuff or leave, then you have no business being in business at all.

SCO argue otherwise: You only have to claim ownership, not actually have even the vaguest title to it.

The standard desktop at the company I work for used to be a Sun Ultra 5, and when the company imploded I picked an Ultra 5 with a fast processor (400 MHz), put some more memory in it, took it home and put Debian on it. It worked fine. Entirely decent interactive performance, like a fast Pentium 2. Not a box for video editing or other high-CPU/bandwidth activities, but fine otherwise.

I was amused to note that it wasn't a Windows box, so it was immune to Windows attacks. It wasn't an x86 box, so it was immune to x86 attacks. I guess I amuse easily. :-)

We had a pile of 32 bit SparcStations. We (literally) couldn't give them away.

...laura

Or at least an order of magnitude less acceptable than slapping your customers round the face with a wet fish.

Why did anyone need to do any research to discover that this was the optimal way of pissing of web users?

Well, it should mean something like "between the walls", but in context I've no idea...except that other people seem to be implying that it means you need to install a program to read the content of a web site. Truly a bad idea. So I guess that, say, Flash is an interstitial.

The filter would send the automated request of a clean version of the email.

Is it realy Germanic in origin? I thought it must certainly go further back than that considering that derivitives are common in Spanish, English, and German. I'm not sure about Italian. My suspicion is that the Lombards carried it into Spain, and they were hardly Germanic. (Of course, perhaps Ferdinand isn't really Fred, but I suspect that it is.) Various web sites list differing dirivations, but as many go back to Gothic roots as to Germanic, so my suspcion is that it goes to a common ancestral tongue. Do remember that dialects can change pronunciations, and small slips are to be expected rather than surprising.

I was wondering if, over time, his natural shell would underplate the artificial shell until it could just be allowed to weather away. Of course, this might well take awhile.