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Submission + - Open Well-Tempered Clavier: a Kickstarter campaign for open source Bach (kickstarter.com) 1

Submitted by rDouglass
rDouglass writes: The Open Goldberg Variations team has launched a new project to make an open source, public domain version of J.S. Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier. The work is significant because of it's enormous influence on musicians and composers throughout history. A new studio recording, a new digital MuseScore score (with support for MusicXML and MIDI), as well as all source materials (multitrack WAV, lossless FLAC) will be provided as libre and gratis downloads. New to the project are publisher GRIN Verlag, as well as record label PARMA Recordings. GRIN and PARMA will produce and distribute the physical score and double CD, even though the digital versions are to be widely available and in the public domain. Their enthusiasm for the project runs counter to the general publishing and music industry's fear of digital file sharing, and shows growing momentum for finding new models to make free music commercially sustainable.

Submission + - Back when patents had to be innovative

Submitted by fermion
fermion writes: This weeks "Who Made That" column in The New York Times concerns the built in pencil eraser. In 1858 Hymen Lipman put a rubber plug into the wood shaft of a pencil. An investor then paid about 2 million in today's dollars for the patent. This investor might have become very rich had the supreme court not ruled that all Lipmen had dome was put together two known technologies, so the patent was not valid. The question is where has this need for patents to be innovative gone? After all there is the Amazon one-click patent which, after revision, has been upheld. Microsoft Activesync technology patent seems to simply patent copying information from one place to another. In this modern day do patents promote innovation, or simply protect firms from competition?

Comment Re:Low low Walmart prices (Score 1) 174

by Jens Egon (#42992163) Attached to: Growing Public Unrest Leads China To Admit To 'Cancer Villages'

Should I take that to mean that most countries have had incidents where somebody knowingly introduced poison in the food supply?

Or do you mean that China, as such, knowingly poisoned it's own people. (cite please)

Or are you trying to say that there are countries where something like this has never happened? In that case, please, name one!

I'll make it easier and let you name a country where nobody poisoned the food supply in this century. Should be easy, shouldn't it?

Comment Re:You have a logic problem (Score 1) 763

by Jens Egon (#42849295) Attached to: Texas School Board Searching For Alternatives To Evolutionary Theory

Theology works on the theory of a creator

No. It doesn't. It works on a story of a creator. There's no evidence for one; there's no way to test to see if there is one; there's no way to test to see if there isn't one (it's not falsifiable); there are no predictions re effects upon reality that arise from the idea; etc. Theism is in no way qualified as a theory. Theism is speculation, no more than that, in terms of its value in quantifying reality.

You're only right if we're talking in the abstract about just any creator, but we're not, despite any the weasel wording, we're talking about the Lord God of christianity.

And that creator creates a strong expectation that there will be no dinosaur bones (and no Auswitch etc).

My predictions of the effects that should be observed may be wrong, but nothing that causes (significant) effects on this world is truly outside the purview of sience!

Comment Re:The theory of gravity is under review :) (Score 1) 763

by Jens Egon (#42849231) Attached to: Texas School Board Searching For Alternatives To Evolutionary Theory

Secondly, it's a pointless, valueless question. It's on exactly the same level as "is there a Santa Claus?" There's zero evidence for such a thing, despite thousands of yeas of looking for same, so, other than writing fiction or cult-building, there's no reason to assume there is one, and therefore no reason to worry about whether there is one (or several.) When you concern yourself with it, you're simply self-identifying as a cultist or an intellectual lightweight.

Just because Santa is somebody's father in a suit doesn't mean he doesn't exist.

Or would you claim Officers of the Law do not exist? They, too, are just somebody's father in a suit

Comment Re:Detection is cheaper (Score 1) 686

by Jens Egon (#42085963) Attached to: Ad Blocking – a Coming Legal Battleground?

Yep, exactly. Most sites don't bother because only a small minority does it and that small minority tends to be disproportionately made up of the kooky anti-consumerist crowd anyway, who aren't worth advertising to due to their hatred of advertising in general. If ad blocking ever went mainstream you'd see more sites tying content to ads explicitly.

Freebies still give increased marketshare.

They hurt you little. They are only a serious problem for your would-be competitors.

Let them try to solve it.

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