Not according to the terms:

Upon purchasing the Artwork, Collector may establish a new value for the Artwork. The new value may not exceed current market expectations for the Artwork based on the current value of work by the Artist...This value will be set as the minimum bid of the auction.

Note there is only a ceiling to the value, no floor: if after purchasing, I feel that the value has decreased, I can establish this as the new value for the Artwork and so set it as the minimum for the auction.

Regarding the 15%, according to this term:

Collector is responsible for any and all fees and charges generated by the Artwork on the Auction Venue.

the eBay auction fees are the responsibilty of the collector, not the artist. This looks more like a "beat the copyright limitation" of n years to ensure income permanently:

Note that it resells itself every 7 days, every week - the artist gets 15% of every change in value every week, a nice little wage packet.

All the "rules" state is:

"Appreciated Value" of the Work for the purposes of this Agreement, shall be the increase, if any, in the value or price of the Work over the price for which the Collector had purchased the Artwork.

There is no statement that the increase has to be positive; mathematically, a decrease is a negative increase. ergo according to the rule:

In the event of a sale the Collector agrees to pay a sum equal to fifteen percent (15%) of the Appreciated Value (as hereinafter defined), if any

there is no limitation that the Appreciated Value (as defined above) has to be positive and so according to the rule

occasioned by such transfer or distribution or payment of insurance proceeds to the Artist (or Artist's agent for the purpose) within thirty days of the sale.

the artist has 30 days to pay up (as that is the only way the seller can pay a negative amount).

Interestingly, if the artist fails to pay up, this rule would surely kick in:

Any failure to follow these terms without prior consent of Artist will forfeit the status of the Artwork as a legitimate work of art. The item will no longer be considered a genuine work by the Artist and any value associated with it will be reduced to its value as a material object and not a work of art.

and the artist would no longer consider it a work of art. Similarly, should a renter^Wpurchaser of the item fail to keep to the conditions, this rule would also kick in.

However, I wonder exactly how the original "artist" is going to cope if someone like Marcel Duchamp, takes the now material object and attaches the found art moniker to it, calls it something like "black cube", signs it with white paint and declares it as art again?

Mefinx you mean 0xFFFF = 0110 0101 0101 0011 0101 in BCD?

Whatever the base (>= 2), 101 / 10 is *ALWAYS* 10.1 in that base.

Shirley you made sum mishtake:

• binary -> decimal: 10.1 -> 2.5
• octal -> decimal: 10.1 -> 8.125
• hexadecimal -> decimal: 10.1 -> 16.0625

I'd love to know in what base 10.1 converts to 128.5 in decimal. (It can't be base 128 as implied by 10 => 128, similarly it can't be 2 as implied by .1 => .5 = 1/2)

Mefinx you also missed a base:

• base 3 -> decimal: 10.1 -> 3.33....

In fact for any base not of the form "(2^m)(5^n)" any [proper] rational fraction in that base is a recurring decimal (in base 10); thus 0.1 in base 3 is 1/3 in decimal and is a recurring fraction in decimal.

Similarly, any fraction that is not of the form m/(2^n) in decimal is recurring in binary and cannot be represented exactly; 0.1 in decimal = 1/10 which is NOT of the form m/(2^n) and thus cannot be exactly represented in binary - it is in fact 0.0001 1001 1001... (or in hexadecimal (for easier reading): 0.199...) and so will introduce rounding errors.

Talk about stupid errors...

Errm, patents are supposed to be usable by someone skilled in the art to produce the invention; no? If the patent examiner can't understand what the patent is about then either:

• a) The patent examiner isn't skilled in the art; or
• b) The patent isn't disclosing the [full] details of the patent [clearly enough for a skilled person];

or both. In the case of (b), the patent should be instantly rejected as it doesn't fulfil the criteria of disclosing details for a limited monopoly,

In the case of (a) the examiner should refer to someone who is [so skilled] to give guidance and to fail to do so is negligence (and so either personally or the USPTO should be liable for costs incurred in defending against such a patent when the patent is shown to be issued wrongly).

SED
LDA #$12
CLC
ADC #$19

The Accumulator of the 6502 8-bit processor (circa 1978) now contains 0x31; the top nybble contains the MSD in decimal.

Ok, so this is actually only using only 1/2 the word size - 4 bits - packed 2 to a byte.

But this isn't what seems to be implied by the summary, namely, instead of using a BCD style, you only use the first B^n numbers of the word, ieeg for 8-bit and 10^2, you use 0x00-0x63 to represent 0-99 and you still have to convert the binary to decimal, just that each word contains a single base B number, which for B=10^n would be n decimal digits.

And that sounds very similar to the problem we were set as the end of the 1st year of my maths degree back in 1984 as part of a computing unit:: calculate every [decimal] digit of 2^3000 using a CBM PET. In BASIC the obvious answer was to use an array of "bignums" (each holding, say, 0-999) and then to print out each element with leading zeros (except the first). (Choosing 0-999 means that each element contains the "normal" 3 digit split for writing big numbers.)

I'm waiting^Wworking for the day when my wii in the wii fit doesn't change shape dramatically when matching mine...

Whether you use a comma or a period is very unlikely to have anything to do with "logic", and more to do with language.

It's more likely to be the other way round: if a comma is used to separate the whole from the decimal, it is read as a comma, similarly if a point is used it is read as a point.

Danish is using the system we used to use in the UK (when I was a school) - long numbers: Thousand = 10^3, Million = 10^6, Thousand Million = 10^9 (= Milliard), Billion = 10^12, ... unlike the American short numbers: Thousand = 10^3, Million = 10^6, Billion = 10^9, ... (very metric!)

Gallon: 128 fluid ounces, 16 cups, 8 pints, or 4 quarts
Quart: 32 fluid ounces, 64 Tablespoons, 4 cups, or 2 pints
Pint: 16 fluid ounces, 96 teaspoons, 32 Tablespoons, or 2 cups

Only on your side of the pond....on this side:

Gallon: 160 fluid ounces
Quart: 40 fluid ounces
Pint: 20 fluid ounces

Here in the states the crime rate really started to rise quickly in the sixties and seventies, when we started reducing sentences and emphasizing rehabilitation over the incapacitation model we had in the fifties and prior.

Congratulations on obeying the first rule of assumed consequences.

Or to put it another way:

"June 25, 1962, the Supreme Court has ruled that school prayer and Bible reading shall cease in all public school systems. It is now official; God has been removed from the classroom in the United States of America."

along with your

"Here in the states the crime rate really started to rise quickly in the sixties..."

would suggest that it was the banning of "school prayer and Bible reading" at the beginning of the sixties that caused the crime rate the rise.

So which is it? The change in sentencing or the change in religious observance? Or both; or neither and something else entirely different, or was it just one of the factors, along with many others which if one was missing would make a little, but not much reduction in the crime rate?

[Sorry, after reading "How to lie with Statistics" by Darrell Huff, I have to question every statistic, and statistical conclusion (eg regression) presented to me.]

IIRC the method to encrypt was to get the relevant wheels in the relevant order, set the key letters, insert into machine, use the initial setting, and plug up the letter swaps - these were changed on a daily basis. The operator then chose a 3 character key for his message and typed this in twice to create the first 6 characters of the encrypted message; finally, the wheels were reset to the operator's chosen key and the message encrypted.

On receipt, the daily initial setting was set up and the first 6 characters of the message entered whereupon the key should come out twice (allowing transmission errors to be spotted...and also allowing a weak spot for breakers).

The operators, having to send lots of messages tended to get lazy and use sequences on the keyboard, eg if they had been using the QWERTY keyboard, they would use keys like: QWE, QAZ, WSX, ZAQ, XSW, EWQ, etc.

A lot of work was done on breaking Enigma BEFORE WWII - by the Polish.

The wheel wirings had been discovered (whether by fair means or foul - ie capturing the actual wheels - I can't remember). Enigma was basically hacked^Wcracked by using the fact that a lot of the German messages had key, crib phrases at the start or end of the messages, and that no letter could encrypt to itself. It was Bombes which were the set the task of finding the starting position of the wheels given a possible crib match.

The German Navy used an enhanced enigma machine which used 4 instead of the normal 3 rotating wheels and so was harder to crack. That was helped by the capture of the settings books (about 2 years before the US entered the war).

It was the Lorentz cypher, as used by Hitler and the high command, was the cypher that was decrypted with the aid of the Colossi. A Lorentz machine was bult at Bletchely Park by modifying a British cypher machine.

Bletchley Park is well worth a visit to see the reconstructed Colossus and the computing museum - it was most odd to see the computers I used as a wee lad in the museum.

I presume you've never heard of a loss leader then?

Of course you could install Linux but the agreement was for a working computer so even if contract law does not apply, unless Lenovo installed it for you it would be possible to argue that it is not "fit for purpose" under sales law.

Not forgetting that a few years ago, when Windows came pre-installed it was declared not "fit for purpose" by Microsoft itself! - you had to install further software to make it so fit.

The problem comes that you don't buy Windows (which can be argued is not fit for purpose), but a licence to USE Windows (which IS fit for it's purpose...just).

Take a GPL'd piece of code and remove the GPL - what do you have left? All you are left with is plain old Copyright which means you can't use the code (which was GPL'd) at all without the holder's permission; you could contact them for a licence (so that argument of having to re-invent the wheel is bogus), or get your own code written any way. The only reason GPL is viral or poison is the underlying Copyright - GPL takes Copyright and adds rights you would not normally have; without GPL you lose those right and would be in [danger of] copyright infringement if you were to use it commercially.

As a commercial company your aim is to generate profits which means as low as possible with the costs and as high as possible with the income from sales (whether that be sales of goods, services, etc). Which means that if you need a code library you try to get it as cheaply as possible - ie something like BSD licensed code where you don't have to pay the authors a single cent.

However, some authors object to you piggy backing them and making money off their effort with no reward to themselves; so they insist that the payment to them is that you release any modification to their code like they originally released their code so that others can also benefit from the code (ie GPL). Now if a company doesn't like this way of doing things, they are free to contact the original author(s) to license the code under different terms, one where money would more than likely have to change hands from the company to the author(s), thus putting up the costs, especially if a piece of GPL code has had a few modifications in which case EVERY one of those authors would have to be contacted and a licence agreed between each and every one of them (not needing to re-invent the wheel).

Also, how much can you trust closed source software? Can you be sure it isn't infringing someones copyright?

The only conclusion I can come to is that all those who moan about the GPL are those who would rather not pay the author(s) for their work - get something for nothing. Aaaaarrrrrrrrr, Jim Lad...

Microsoft played by the rules, and you're upset about it?

Not quite...they decided to use GPL'd code contrary to the licence and so were guilty of copyright infringement (or piracy). When pointed out, they decided to obey the licence and release the code as GPL.

What most people are upset about is not that they've released the code as GPL, but the REASON they gave for doing it. To be honest they would have announced (something like):

However, they hushed up the fact of the GPL violation.

So the conclusion is that MS weren't interested in playing by the rules and were only forced to release the code when they were caught red handed with a copyright infringement (which is the result of ignoring the GPL).

The question that comes to me as a result of this is: how much code have they got away with using contrary to the licence of said code, ie of how much copyright infringement are MS guilty? The advantage of closed source code...