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Planting trees is fine, but hardly the best use of your time since trees tend to pop up on their own just fine. If you want to sequester carbon, your time is probably better spent preventing the carbon which has already been bound in existing trees from being released into the atmosphere. For instance by burying a tree in an anaerobic swamp. Less romantic, more effective.

sudo

Because it's fun? An opportunity to develop skills? Peer recognition? Because you need the software/bugfix/feature yourself and can't or won't make money out of it for some reason anyway so there's nothing to lose? Need a reference to further your career? These are the kinds of reasons I believe in. Do these apply to non-coders?

Anyone who writes code should care about succinctness. For every line of code you write there is a probability that you make a mistake. The bigger your program, the more room for mistakes.

Couldn't find the answer on the site. May be blind.

So you make a quantum mechanical system which evolves over time and which only reveals the correct key if observed at the correct time. Observing it at any other time erases (parts of) the required information. Practically difficult to make if we're talking about delays longer than picoseconds probably, but the problem specification didn't include a timescale.

AFAIR, you're not allowed to plan a flight with less than 30 minutes of fuel left at landing. So this is for very short hops indeed. Source: Have a (mostly unused) pilot's license.

a man has a 1 in 9 chance of being murdered during his lifetime.

And usually towards the end of his lifetime.

Navier-Stokes emerges as a continuous model from a classical particle model. Even a direct simulation of the particle model, allowing all particlas to interact with all others, is only O(n^2). A quantum mechanical simulation is more like O(2^n)

anyone can register an account?"

FAQ says:

Can somebody please reexplain this in a way that a dumb child would understand?

The transmission was not shut down at 01:07 as I understand it, that was the last automatic transmission from the engine system. These are half-hourly, so you wouldn't expect another one if the plane disintegrated at 01:21.

A curious thing is that the last contact with the pilots was a handover from one ATC to another. The Malaysian ATC told them to contact Vietnamese ATC, which they acknowledged but never did. Normally, you'd do that right away (I think).

You could argue that patents are unneccessary because all innovation could be directly funded by government. That's another discussion, though. The innovations mentioned in the brief were things like http, gnu/linux and hadoop. One of these was government funded, the two others are knock-offs of things that to the best of my knowledge originated in private companies (unix and map/reduce). Of course there is an exchange of ideas between academia, private companies and open-souce projects. All of these also come up with new ideas, but the questions are: at which rate, and how would these rates be affected by the abolishment of software patents in the USA? I'm not at all convinced that the overall rate of innovation would suffer, but the argument in the brief does not contribute to that one way or the other.

That is a valid example of open source innovation, but can hardly be used in an argument against software patents. If we want a software industry, i.e. companies whose investment in software development isn't recouped through hardware sales, we can't go back to the business model of the 60s. And I think we all want a software industry.

The reason why the very start of a field is important to this debate is that this is where innovation happens, and the main argument for software patents is that it allegedly fosters innovation. That's also why the very first origins of httpd matter when it's being used as an example. Those things that originate in academia are usually not patented, since academia has a culture of publishing without patenting.

The important thing here is not the number of users or developers of a product, but its degree of innovation. As mentioned earlier, innovation also happens on a smaller scale within projects all the time, but if open source is to prove that software innovation doesn't need software patents, as the brief claims, then it should be possible to find widely known examples of innovative open source software. Maybe CMS is one, in which case it should have been mentioned in the brief instead of projects that are knock-offs of various patented and government-funded work.

That is evidence that software innovation can happen without software patents. The success of open source (at least as far as it has been exemplified thus far) is not.

Which fields have started off as open source? You mention CMS and web servers. Web servers started out open source, but since that work was government-funded it's a bit tangent to a debate about software patents. I don't know the history of CMS. Maybe that's a good example.

On the other hand, the argument that patents cause innovation is also false, if based only on the observation that innovations (and many things that aren't) nowadays tend to be patented.