Wrong. Now we see that there's a positive correlation between rising temperatures and piracy. Therefore global warming is causing piracy and vice versa!
I just drew a similar graph. plotting global warming against piracy. I have concluded that global warming causes piracy, and in turn, piracy causes global warming.
Now, to get the RIAA to become constructive, we should point out that solving global warming will necessarily solve piracy.
In the event of a pre-IPO company, it should also include the difference in a competitive salary vs current salary (and reasonable bonuses or raises) for the duration it will take before vesting occurs and insert "You're paying $____ for the possibility that you will cash out big." Just to put that in perspective.
And, frankly, fuck these guys for suggesting that it's the only way we get any content on the internet.
I agree. A "think tank" that can't think of a way to monetize content on the internet that doesn't invade peoples' privacy isn't much of a think tank, now is it?
Really? Do you genuinely think the sales/revenue model changes the fundamental nature of the book?
The "fundamental nature"? What are you talking about? I'm talking about quality, and in the case of quality, absolutely. Let me turn that poorly thought-out complaint back on you. Let's talk about cable internet for a moment. Do you genuinely think the sales/revenue model changes the fundamental nature of the cable? Well no, because the "fundamental nature" of something doesn't matter. That's like saying "all internet connections are the same because you're still just capable of sending bits to another machine anywhere in the world." How full of shit would that statement be? It's very clear when an internet subscription is maintained by a capitalist sales/revenue model that precludes user choice (see: most of the US), that the quality necessarily tends towards "bad" while prices don't reflect the quality of service rendered. Take another look at these poor quality textbooks being used only out of bribery. It's a very good analogy because students don't get to choose what text they use, and because these poor quality texts that pander to teachers are generally priced very far above what is reasonable for that quality (especially compared to the available "good" texts). User choice is precluded with a bad quality + high price. Interesting.
Does the act that governor signed specify books without teachers manuals?
Yes. If the text is to be open source, that necessarily includes the teacher's manual. Precluding access to a part of it would violate the fact that it's open source. So either there is no teacher's manual or it's not really open source. Or, as is often the case, the people who wrote this legislation have a very poor understanding of "open source."
And does dispensing with closed-copyright make it A) harder or B) easier for teachers to share tutorial sheets derived from book content?
The bill would require the council to establish a competitive request-for-proposal process in which faculty members, publishers, and other interested parties would apply for funds to produce, in 2013, 50 high-quality, affordable, digital open source textbooks and related materials, meeting specified requirements.
But really, just how "competitive" do any of these things every really turn out to be? I don't think it necessarily needs to be open source. It just needs to be of an acceptable quality (there are plenty of texts that are of an acceptable quality already), but the price gouging and repeat-sales tactics being used by the industry need to be severely punished and banned.
An alternative "option" is not very useful if it's an option. Many professors still use texts just because the company providing the text gives them a teacher's manual and course work so they don't have to do as much work. It's hard to provide those resources in an open-source book. I always found a good loophole to this whole gratuitous mess: I'd just go look at a book's references and find those texts. I had a compiler theory text in College that referred to Ullman's text at least 3 times each chapter, so I went and looked on Amazon and sure enough, I could get a copy of the dragon book (first edition) for $10, the text my text was always saying "for a better explanation, see x in y." The best book already was affordable, but we didn't use it because.. duh duh duh duh! It didn't come with free course materials. That bribery should be completely illegal.
There are only 30,240 different ways. So I would guess that only took a few weeks. Not much to learn from it, though. I would've done it just to see if the teacher would've graded it.
This. I'm tired of the government subsidizing something and calling it "reform" or "free." The problem with textbooks isn't the price we have to pay, it's the price PERIOD. Shifting the burden on to taxpayers instead of individuals actually changes nothing. Real reform says to textbook manufacturers:
You cannot re-release the same book as a "separate edition" just because you changed the questions at the end of each section or fixed a typo.
You cannot bundle a textbook with online courseware that is not re-usable.
You cannot sell a textbook used by an educational institution for more than double the price of the projected amortized cost of that book with an expected initial sale rate of 50,000 texts. Also, every penny of the cost to create that text must be completely publicly disclosed.
You cannot offer "deals" such as providing coursework to professors and teachers in order to bribe them into using your texts. If your text sucks, it won't be used, make better texts, fucking idiots.
Something along those lines, and breaking any of those rules results in a $5,000 fine per individual textbook violating the above rules. That would effectively stop this price-gouging nonsense and we wouldn't need subsidies to provide "free texts" to students. They'd be able to afford a $30 book, especially if they could just buy one used by a student who took the same class last semester, and with knowledge that they could just sell that text to a student in the next class.
We also need reform of scientific articles/publications that students might find useful for research so that Universities aren't forced to pay exorbitant fees to provide their students with access to research that was funded by tax money in the first place. Elsevier, and others like them, should be forced to follow a similar guideline, or just outright banned for their incredibly stupid and unfair practices.
Further, government subsidized health insurance doesn't solve the problem. Now you're just funneling money from tax payers into insurance companies who continue to charge outlandish premiums justified by the outlandish (and unjustified) costs of just about every medical procedure, device, and/or drug. This country hasn't seen a real reform of anything since the 60s.
If such minor variable changes constitute a whole new game, WoW would be WoW 1381 or something close by now. How would you feel buying a new copy of WoW every time they changed the stats on an item? Nonsensical.
I'm no zealot. Does anyone deny that Chrome is significantly better than IE? So then why, when faced with a similar question, do so many Apple users deny that Apple Maps is similarly worse than Google Maps? I like Android, sure, but this is an obvious one. If advising someone who's looking to make a purchase on the basis of maps support that they should pick the phone (not *A* phone, but one of a huge range of phones, some with incredible battery like the Razr, phones with more power, or even budget phones) with the best maps application is enough to make one a "zealot," this community has completely failed.
To help cool peoples' lids: this post was written on my Macbook Pro. Woah.
That's a lot of moderation. It appears the fanboys are out in force lately, armed with their "new" iPhone 5s, ready to defend their poor decision making skills and exorbitant purchases. Enjoy your last-gen phones, gentlemen.
Android's mapping/navigation is so superior to the native stuff on iOS and even the paid store products it's not funny. The choice is clear. Though you should definitely get a car charger and dock if you plan on using it as a navigator. Active GPS + screen on = huge power drain.
It sounds like the people you know don't appreciate quality and instead prefer a brand. And to answer the obvious question you posed: the reason they didn't have a maps app ready to go is because Apple was making their own. Google wanted everyone to see just how reliant the iOS experience is on a good maps app (in particular, that iOS was only as good as it was because it had a Google product powering its most-used feature), and that Apple, not really caring about users at all, removed the best map system in the world to replace it with one apparently hacked together by interns in a few weeks. Maybe, just maybe, the sudden jolt you feel (something like a train slamming into a fortified 50 foot thick solid steel wall), will cause some non-reality-distorted Apple users to leave that broken platform behind. You've provided clear evidence that the reality distortion field behaves much like gravity; Apple is the singularity and there is an event horizon beyond which there is no hope of escape.
This isn't security by obscurity. And to point out, all current security is based on obscurity. The fact that all you need is a key to get access to something is, by definition, securing something by obscurity (the key is obscured). A measure of the quality of a security system is how local the obscurity is, which makes it easier to measure the strength. So if ALL of the obscurity is in the key, and there isn't an attack to weaken the key space, it's pretty easy to determine just how secure something is.
This, on the other hand, is not telling the criminals that the armored truck accidentally broke down on its route. The point of security here isn't "we have flaws but if nobody ever knows about them, we're fine", it's "we have flaws that were reported, we're working to fix them, and we'd rather not publicly announce them until they're fixed." There's a huge difference.
A person who makes death threats AND owns a knife is a potential problem of great severity, too. What about a fork? How about household chemicals? A belt? A hammer? A nailgun? A saw or chainsaw? Any number of gardening tools? How about one of those iron things you use to poke a fire? Pretty deadly spear you've got there. How about a maglite?
The "he has a gun and therefore is automatically guilty" nonsense needs to stop. There are plenty of other good weapons to accuse, too.
I'd also like to point out that Apple didn't do the patent troll first. Though I'm sure now that they are trolling, Apple fanboys will credit Apple with the idea of obtaining overly-generic patents or patents on things that already exist then suing their competitors with them. They'll call it the iPatent for sure.
I find this is because there's a significantly different design principle at play here. OSX is built around simplicity and presenting less information so as to make it easier to use for "normal" people (ie: people who aren't going to be re-configuring the OS, etc). Windows is built around providing you basically every feature you could want to change in a UI, that's pretty trivial to access if you know how (a few remain command-line only, and most things can be changed from command line but not all).
The problem with the former is that it severely inhibits what experienced/skilled users can do with your software. When an interface is intentionally made simpler so people don't have a hard time learning how to use it, it necessarily means feature restriction. As you say, I've found that I spend more time in a terminal on OSX than I do in its pretty looking interfaces, because they're just useless. There's a hard ceiling on how productive you can be on OSX at certain tasks, and more so on an iDevice. And yes, this is highly application-specific, so things like Sublime Text don't suffer from this even on OSX while looking pretty (because it has a metric fuckton of shortcuts, and they're lovely), but most of the stock OSX things do, and everyone trying to design software in the "OSX-way" are running into the same issue. It's the same problem I still have with the new GMail interface. It may be simpler to understand for fresh users (and honestly, fresh users : experienced users has to be somewhere around 1:500), but I feel half as productive with it.
The problem with the latter is that because the goal is to expose all functionality in UI, there's a lot of UI, and UI is hard to get right. It also results in tons of menus and option panes to expose that feature set, and those tend to be really ugly and clunky to navigate. Compare editing Sublime Text's settings to configuring VS2010's settings. I can ctrl+f on a settings file. I can replace in a settings file. And I have a user-override file that I can clear to instantly restore my settings to the default, and I don't have to go hunting down some never-documented ini/cfg/whatever file that houses some of the configuration (project files) or *gulp* editing registry settings. In VS it's windows upon windows upon windows with option pane upon option pane upon multi-billion row drop-down upon ugly wizard upon.. fuck me. But for a lot of use-cases, I find I'm more productive in Windows because the thought process is different than OSX: more functionality. Sometimes this makes it harder for a person to use software initially, but productivity isn't as impacted by it.
So the real solution here should be obvious from my complaints. A hybrid between the two. OSX-style minimalism is fine, so long as you provide a user the ability to enable more features so you aren't handicapping their productivity. Windows-style feature richness is fine, so long as you aren't exposing it to a user in a horribly inefficient manner (ugly, hacked-together UI). Prefer config files over hundreds of screens of option pages. They are painful to use, and I've NEVER seen one done right, not even skeublearghs. Allow users to open and edit config files within your application, or launch a text editor. Anything that obeys normal editing shortcuts and has an undo history and is searchable is sufficient, you don't have to re-implement Textmate, Sublime Text, vim, or Emacs.
This is why I both like and hate Linuxes like Ubuntu. A lot of things are trivially configurable via/etc/, even if some aren't consistent with others, and more in ~/. directories or config files, but some things are even more insidiously hidden than that. The changes in interface could work, but they hide way too much functionality in inconsistent command line invocation, and it's not immediately clear what executable a window represents, nor whether it is a process forked by a parent. Even if you know how to do that via command line, you shouldn
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Wrong. Now we see that there's a positive correlation between rising temperatures and piracy. Therefore global warming is causing piracy and vice versa!
I just drew a similar graph. plotting global warming against piracy. I have concluded that global warming causes piracy, and in turn, piracy causes global warming.
Now, to get the RIAA to become constructive, we should point out that solving global warming will necessarily solve piracy.
To be fair, he didn't say xor.
In the event of a pre-IPO company, it should also include the difference in a competitive salary vs current salary (and reasonable bonuses or raises) for the duration it will take before vesting occurs and insert "You're paying $____ for the possibility that you will cash out big." Just to put that in perspective.
I agree. A "think tank" that can't think of a way to monetize content on the internet that doesn't invade peoples' privacy isn't much of a think tank, now is it?
The "fundamental nature"? What are you talking about? I'm talking about quality, and in the case of quality, absolutely. Let me turn that poorly thought-out complaint back on you. Let's talk about cable internet for a moment. Do you genuinely think the sales/revenue model changes the fundamental nature of the cable? Well no, because the "fundamental nature" of something doesn't matter. That's like saying "all internet connections are the same because you're still just capable of sending bits to another machine anywhere in the world." How full of shit would that statement be? It's very clear when an internet subscription is maintained by a capitalist sales/revenue model that precludes user choice (see: most of the US), that the quality necessarily tends towards "bad" while prices don't reflect the quality of service rendered. Take another look at these poor quality textbooks being used only out of bribery. It's a very good analogy because students don't get to choose what text they use, and because these poor quality texts that pander to teachers are generally priced very far above what is reasonable for that quality (especially compared to the available "good" texts). User choice is precluded with a bad quality + high price. Interesting.
Yes. If the text is to be open source, that necessarily includes the teacher's manual. Precluding access to a part of it would violate the fact that it's open source. So either there is no teacher's manual or it's not really open source. Or, as is often the case, the people who wrote this legislation have a very poor understanding of "open source."
This is completely immaterial to the discussion.
But really, just how "competitive" do any of these things every really turn out to be? I don't think it necessarily needs to be open source. It just needs to be of an acceptable quality (there are plenty of texts that are of an acceptable quality already), but the price gouging and repeat-sales tactics being used by the industry need to be severely punished and banned.
An alternative "option" is not very useful if it's an option. Many professors still use texts just because the company providing the text gives them a teacher's manual and course work so they don't have to do as much work. It's hard to provide those resources in an open-source book. I always found a good loophole to this whole gratuitous mess: I'd just go look at a book's references and find those texts. I had a compiler theory text in College that referred to Ullman's text at least 3 times each chapter, so I went and looked on Amazon and sure enough, I could get a copy of the dragon book (first edition) for $10, the text my text was always saying "for a better explanation, see x in y." The best book already was affordable, but we didn't use it because.. duh duh duh duh! It didn't come with free course materials. That bribery should be completely illegal.
Touché.
There are only 30,240 different ways. So I would guess that only took a few weeks. Not much to learn from it, though. I would've done it just to see if the teacher would've graded it.
Something along those lines, and breaking any of those rules results in a $5,000 fine per individual textbook violating the above rules. That would effectively stop this price-gouging nonsense and we wouldn't need subsidies to provide "free texts" to students. They'd be able to afford a $30 book, especially if they could just buy one used by a student who took the same class last semester, and with knowledge that they could just sell that text to a student in the next class.
We also need reform of scientific articles/publications that students might find useful for research so that Universities aren't forced to pay exorbitant fees to provide their students with access to research that was funded by tax money in the first place. Elsevier, and others like them, should be forced to follow a similar guideline, or just outright banned for their incredibly stupid and unfair practices.
Further, government subsidized health insurance doesn't solve the problem. Now you're just funneling money from tax payers into insurance companies who continue to charge outlandish premiums justified by the outlandish (and unjustified) costs of just about every medical procedure, device, and/or drug. This country hasn't seen a real reform of anything since the 60s.
If such minor variable changes constitute a whole new game, WoW would be WoW 1381 or something close by now. How would you feel buying a new copy of WoW every time they changed the stats on an item? Nonsensical.
I'm no zealot. Does anyone deny that Chrome is significantly better than IE? So then why, when faced with a similar question, do so many Apple users deny that Apple Maps is similarly worse than Google Maps? I like Android, sure, but this is an obvious one. If advising someone who's looking to make a purchase on the basis of maps support that they should pick the phone (not *A* phone, but one of a huge range of phones, some with incredible battery like the Razr, phones with more power, or even budget phones) with the best maps application is enough to make one a "zealot," this community has completely failed.
To help cool peoples' lids: this post was written on my Macbook Pro. Woah.
That's a lot of moderation. It appears the fanboys are out in force lately, armed with their "new" iPhone 5s, ready to defend their poor decision making skills and exorbitant purchases. Enjoy your last-gen phones, gentlemen.
This is called speculation. We typically don't convict people on speculation. Unless it involves children, in which case guilty is always assumed.
I just took this picture on my Android device: http://i.imgur.com/42oQd.png
:)
The reality distortion field is strong with this one! Also, not having textures just means I'm saving that much bandwidth.
Android's mapping/navigation is so superior to the native stuff on iOS and even the paid store products it's not funny. The choice is clear. Though you should definitely get a car charger and dock if you plan on using it as a navigator. Active GPS + screen on = huge power drain.
Seriously. MOOC? Seriously?
Well electronics tend to show up in medical scans. If a device dissolves, however, and is then excreted, it doesn't. Just a thought.
It sounds like the people you know don't appreciate quality and instead prefer a brand. And to answer the obvious question you posed: the reason they didn't have a maps app ready to go is because Apple was making their own. Google wanted everyone to see just how reliant the iOS experience is on a good maps app (in particular, that iOS was only as good as it was because it had a Google product powering its most-used feature), and that Apple, not really caring about users at all, removed the best map system in the world to replace it with one apparently hacked together by interns in a few weeks. Maybe, just maybe, the sudden jolt you feel (something like a train slamming into a fortified 50 foot thick solid steel wall), will cause some non-reality-distorted Apple users to leave that broken platform behind. You've provided clear evidence that the reality distortion field behaves much like gravity; Apple is the singularity and there is an event horizon beyond which there is no hope of escape.
This isn't security by obscurity. And to point out, all current security is based on obscurity. The fact that all you need is a key to get access to something is, by definition, securing something by obscurity (the key is obscured). A measure of the quality of a security system is how local the obscurity is, which makes it easier to measure the strength. So if ALL of the obscurity is in the key, and there isn't an attack to weaken the key space, it's pretty easy to determine just how secure something is.
This, on the other hand, is not telling the criminals that the armored truck accidentally broke down on its route. The point of security here isn't "we have flaws but if nobody ever knows about them, we're fine", it's "we have flaws that were reported, we're working to fix them, and we'd rather not publicly announce them until they're fixed." There's a huge difference.
A person who makes death threats AND owns a knife is a potential problem of great severity, too. What about a fork? How about household chemicals? A belt? A hammer? A nailgun? A saw or chainsaw? Any number of gardening tools? How about one of those iron things you use to poke a fire? Pretty deadly spear you've got there. How about a maglite?
The "he has a gun and therefore is automatically guilty" nonsense needs to stop. There are plenty of other good weapons to accuse, too.
I'd also like to point out that Apple didn't do the patent troll first. Though I'm sure now that they are trolling, Apple fanboys will credit Apple with the idea of obtaining overly-generic patents or patents on things that already exist then suing their competitors with them. They'll call it the iPatent for sure.
I find this is because there's a significantly different design principle at play here. OSX is built around simplicity and presenting less information so as to make it easier to use for "normal" people (ie: people who aren't going to be re-configuring the OS, etc). Windows is built around providing you basically every feature you could want to change in a UI, that's pretty trivial to access if you know how (a few remain command-line only, and most things can be changed from command line but not all).
.. fuck me. But for a lot of use-cases, I find I'm more productive in Windows because the thought process is different than OSX: more functionality. Sometimes this makes it harder for a person to use software initially, but productivity isn't as impacted by it.
/etc/, even if some aren't consistent with others, and more in ~/. directories or config files, but some things are even more insidiously hidden than that. The changes in interface could work, but they hide way too much functionality in inconsistent command line invocation, and it's not immediately clear what executable a window represents, nor whether it is a process forked by a parent. Even if you know how to do that via command line, you shouldn
The problem with the former is that it severely inhibits what experienced/skilled users can do with your software. When an interface is intentionally made simpler so people don't have a hard time learning how to use it, it necessarily means feature restriction. As you say, I've found that I spend more time in a terminal on OSX than I do in its pretty looking interfaces, because they're just useless. There's a hard ceiling on how productive you can be on OSX at certain tasks, and more so on an iDevice. And yes, this is highly application-specific, so things like Sublime Text don't suffer from this even on OSX while looking pretty (because it has a metric fuckton of shortcuts, and they're lovely), but most of the stock OSX things do, and everyone trying to design software in the "OSX-way" are running into the same issue. It's the same problem I still have with the new GMail interface. It may be simpler to understand for fresh users (and honestly, fresh users : experienced users has to be somewhere around 1:500), but I feel half as productive with it.
The problem with the latter is that because the goal is to expose all functionality in UI, there's a lot of UI, and UI is hard to get right. It also results in tons of menus and option panes to expose that feature set, and those tend to be really ugly and clunky to navigate. Compare editing Sublime Text's settings to configuring VS2010's settings. I can ctrl+f on a settings file. I can replace in a settings file. And I have a user-override file that I can clear to instantly restore my settings to the default, and I don't have to go hunting down some never-documented ini/cfg/whatever file that houses some of the configuration (project files) or *gulp* editing registry settings. In VS it's windows upon windows upon windows with option pane upon option pane upon multi-billion row drop-down upon ugly wizard upon
So the real solution here should be obvious from my complaints. A hybrid between the two. OSX-style minimalism is fine, so long as you provide a user the ability to enable more features so you aren't handicapping their productivity. Windows-style feature richness is fine, so long as you aren't exposing it to a user in a horribly inefficient manner (ugly, hacked-together UI). Prefer config files over hundreds of screens of option pages. They are painful to use, and I've NEVER seen one done right, not even skeublearghs. Allow users to open and edit config files within your application, or launch a text editor. Anything that obeys normal editing shortcuts and has an undo history and is searchable is sufficient, you don't have to re-implement Textmate, Sublime Text, vim, or Emacs.
This is why I both like and hate Linuxes like Ubuntu. A lot of things are trivially configurable via
So he had to write them a check for $.20 and put $.20 - 1 + 1? Weak.
that doesn't really matter.