"I think we can safely conclude that that particular study is full of shit. In this case lower wages does not necessarily indicate less talent."
I think we can conclude that you didn't read the actual study.
They considered A LOT more than just salary. Some of the factors they considered were: salary, rate of patent production, Ph.D. dissertation awards, doctorates earned at top-ranked universities, and employment in R&D.
A recent review of Github showed that the vast majority of projects had not gone anywhere in quite a while. It is actually rather typical. Same with Sourceforge and the like.
I have to presume OP meant "Free and Open Source", as opposed to just Open Source. Free, open source software is a particular subset of open source. There are lots of commercial open source products out there.
In my opinion, the best way to tell whether FOSS software is reputable and support will be available is to determine as best you can who, and how many, have adopted it.
OP should realize that in the world of FOSS, support is usually provided by users, not necessarily the core group of coders. If they aren't willing to dig for support on issues, maybe they should go to commercial software.
"- find their ground bases, and attack them on airfields and in hangars, e.g. with mortar fire. Be content with taking out just one at a time, or just damaging some."
And keep in mind that mortars are pretty easy to make, even with primitive tools and resources. Mortars with explosive shells have been around for centuries.
"It's to be able to escalate domestic opposition to levels which make the government think twice, rather than sitting around and letting the secret police disappear people one at a time."
There, FTFY. Populations, by and large, don't "oppress". Governments do.
But I agree with you. Anybody who thinks the general population would be up against full military force has been living too long on Fantasy Island. For one thing, every member of the U.S. military has taken an oath to uphold the Constitution. And if that isn't enough, there's the fact that they would be fighting against their own people.
But even having said that: in the U.S. today are over 300 MILLION firearms, and uncounted rounds of ammunition. Anybody who thinks that is not considerable force probably has a permanent home on that same Fantasy Island.
I should add that even that 12 Mpbs from Time-Warner is spotty. That should be plenty of bandwidth for incoming Skype voice; but in fact it cuts out a lot. Not a good deal for near $70 / month.
"$100 a month? $70 a month? That's still way too high."
If you don't need it, don't pay for it.
But in reality, it's not high at all compared to Comcast and Time-Warner. Comcast can cost around $70 for "up to 20 Mbps", and you'll be lucky if you ever actually get near that 20. Time-Warner charges about the same amount in some areas for 12 Mbps!!!
So the point isn't "it's too high", the point is: "it's a lot LOWER than those others".
"Nobody in the US opposes having the "best and the brightest" come here, but the vast majority are simply of average ability and recruited to reduce pay of people in the US."
H1-B workers are not the "best and brightest" at all. They often did not compare well to native U.S. workers. Companies just wanted them because they were cheap.
'Legal' here in the sense of 'not forbidden'. Fair use (currently) isn't a right, it's a restriction on lawsuits.
On the contrary. Fair use is both a restriction on lawsuits, and a right.
Article 1, Section 8.8
To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries;
... is the only place in the Constitution that refers to any "right" being Government-granted. But it does at least mention that they are limited. This is in contrast to other rights in the Constitution. Scholars are pretty much in agreement that (except for 8.8) the "rights" mentioned in the Constitution were not considered to be Government-granted at all. They were considered to already exist; the Constitution (including the Bill of Rights) only acknowledges their existence, it does not grant them. Something granted by government is not a "right", per se, but a privilege that, unlike actual rights, can be altered or revoked.
So copyright and patents are not "rights" in the same sense of natural rights. They are privileges granted by government for a limited time.
"Fair Use" arises when copyrights run into our natural 1st Amendment rights. Since the 1st Amendment is a natural right that may not be revoked by government, but copyright is a government-granted privilege, when the two seriously conflict it is the copyright that must yield, which has become known as "fair use". Thus fair use is a right: it is part of your 1st Amendment rights.
Lots of people predicted that this new TLD system was going to be a mess. And... it is. Seems like it has become even more of a mess each month that goes by.
I really have to wonder why anybody would have thought that it would NOT be a mess.
"Google has nothing to do with experiments in anarchy."
Neither does the internet. The internet is regulated via a number of different routes. Some of them are governments, some of them are committees. But anarchy? HELL, no.
Schmidt has proven over and over again that unless he's talking about search algorithms, you should not assume he knows just what the hell he IS talking about.
"Now that Widenius has some "Executives and Investors" supporting him, he becomes a target for Oracle lawyers."
I don't see why. Open Source projects (and MariaDB is pretty solidly Free & Open Source... I doubt they'd have even the slightest trouble proving that) have long enjoyed corporate support. I don't see that it changes anything.
"States used to have their own copyright laws. The 1976 copyright act nullified them going forward but they may still apply for older works."
I'm not about to claim that's wrong, because I don't recall ever hearing about it before. But the Federal government has always had the power to issue copyrights, so having separate State copyrights seems pretty strange and redundant.
U.S. Constitution, Section 8:
"The Congress shall have power...
8.8 To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries;"
See my other reply from this morning. It isn't me who is lacking understanding here. I already explained this to you, but apparently it went right over your head.
My first explanations might not have been very clear. But I have clarified in my further discussion with you. But that clarification seems to have gone right over your head. As such, I retract my earlier apology, and will simply say again: WHOOOSH!
"It's a subtle distinction (law gets subtle!), but "incriminating yourself by letting the court access files" is not the same as "incriminating yourself by showing you can access files." The latter has been ruled to fall under 5th Amendment protections. The former is still a legally open question (the courts might not agree to consider it "incriminating yourself," and instead consider it "handing over a safe key to cooperate with evidence gathering")."
Okay, I am done here. You still aren't getting it.
It isn't the material to be disclosed that is the deciding issue. It's whether divulging that information would cause the defendent to incriminate himself. The legal analysis is exactly the same.
And the former is NOT "still a legally open question". There was a solid ruling on this in Federal court just a few months ago. As if there needed to be... it has been decided before in exactly the same way.
"When I ran the anti-corrupt CD campaign for the UK Campaign for Digital Right (now defunct), the group with the most interesting complaint were the archivists. They have the responsibility to archive our culture for future generations. All the DRM and physical protections and ill-conceived laws make their job increasingly difficult."
And in the U.S., DMCA is one of the most egregious laws. We keep hearing about the "safe harbor" provisions, but those provisions would hardly be necessary if it weren't for the other, very negative parts of this disastrous law.
Having said that, I really wonder about TFA, and whether it gets things quite right. Copyright has always been a Federal matter in the U.S... it says so right there in our Constitution.
"our "examples from other recent court cases like this one" were *not* like this one: they reached different decisions based on different situations. "
Okay, here is where the misunderstanding lies. Maybe I could have explained it more clearly. My reply just above was a bit snide, but I thought you weren't getting it.
The important thing is not what particular thing this is about, the contents of the drive or the password itself. What is important is whether the court already knows whether the person is criminally involved. Because if the court already knows that, he can't "incriminate" himself. I.e., he isn't admitting that he's a criminal, it's already known.
That's what it hinges on. I probably could have explained it better. But the examples I gave are still examples of the same thing. The same reasoning applies with those: in the first case, the guy would have been incriminating himself (admitting to the court that he was a criminal) by letting the court access those files. In this case, the guy would have been incriminating himself if he gave up the password... again because the court did not know, ahead of time, that he was a criminal. And in my other example, it was already known with reasonable certainty (and with "reasonable particularity") that he was a criminal. So he could not incriminate himself.
The only difference here is that it was the password itself, not the contents of the files, that were not "known with reasonable particularity".
Other than that, THE LEGAL REASONING IS IDENTICAL. It isn't the particular thing that isn't known, it's whether criminality is already known, that is the important factor.
As I explained to someone elsewhere on this page, before your reply to me, this exact scenario is still covered by the same logic.
"A HFT sees this discrepancy and immediately buys the share from Alice for $10, sells it to Bob for $20 and makes $10 profit just by being quick."
I know how it works.
"... but because you have many companies competing to do HFT, the differences in buy/sell prices end up being much smaller."
It's more a function of the frequency than the volume. But yes.
"Once the price gets to $14.99, an HFT catches the discrepancy and buys the $14.99 share from Alice and sells it to Bob for $15."
As far as I am concerned, you're just repeating yourself here.
"An HFT could have made more money by waiting until the price dropped to like $10 and selling to Bob for $15, making $5 profit, except that another HFT would have jumped on the opportunity way before the price dropped to $10."
I *KNOW* how it works.
"The efficiency created is that the price of shares is very quickly equalized across different trades and different markets. Because of all the actions of all the trading (a large part being HFT), we know the price is $15. In fact Alice can offer to sell for $14.99 and an HFT will buy the share before Bob even places his bid for $15.01, because the HFT has calculated that someone will offer at least $15."
But that's efficiency of "The Market". That's not "efficient allocation of resources". Not the same thing.
"It is not the trades between the HFT that has positive effects on the economy. It is the trade between the eventual buyer and seller that might not have happened (or happened so quickly) that was facilitated by HFT that helps the economy."
And now we're back to square one. I understand what you are saying: that HFT helps the market find it's equilibrium value faster. And that may be true, in theory.
However, the reality of HFT has been imperfect algorithms and market mistakes. Extreme volatility. HFT developers say these are bugs that are largely worked out... but it continues to happen. It happened just the other day, which was the whole reason for this discussion on Slashdot. This volatility means that it does NOT find market equilibrium reliably, or even more quickly. On the contrary: it is prone to positive feedback, which is a potentially disastrous thing in a stock market.
Second, regarding efficient allocation of resources: as a consequence of my first point (equilibrium prices not found reliably), AND when you add in the fact that HFT happens far too fast to affect allocation of physical resources (except for establishing price, which we have already seen is unreliable), then I say that it does not lead to efficient allocation of resources. In theory it could, but we are very far from making that ideal theory happen.
And I want to emphasize that allocation of resources in any production-based economy (which means just about any economy) has to take place physically, or the actual economy is not affected. Wheat needs to go from farm to mills to factories. Software has to be delivered. Etc.
In my opinion, it is this bit about getting "the market" confused with the actual sources of economic wealth that is one of the primary diseases of our country today.
Slashdot Mirror
"I think we can safely conclude that that particular study is full of shit. In this case lower wages does not necessarily indicate less talent."
I think we can conclude that you didn't read the actual study.
They considered A LOT more than just salary. Some of the factors they considered were: salary, rate of patent production, Ph.D. dissertation awards, doctorates earned at top-ranked universities, and employment in R&D.
A recent review of Github showed that the vast majority of projects had not gone anywhere in quite a while. It is actually rather typical. Same with Sourceforge and the like.
I have to presume OP meant "Free and Open Source", as opposed to just Open Source. Free, open source software is a particular subset of open source. There are lots of commercial open source products out there.
In my opinion, the best way to tell whether FOSS software is reputable and support will be available is to determine as best you can who, and how many, have adopted it.
OP should realize that in the world of FOSS, support is usually provided by users, not necessarily the core group of coders. If they aren't willing to dig for support on issues, maybe they should go to commercial software.
"The saddest part is the self contradiction"
This.
How does OP pretend to know what an alien race might think? Especially one that is many times smarter than he is?
"- find their ground bases, and attack them on airfields and in hangars, e.g. with mortar fire. Be content with taking out just one at a time, or just damaging some."
And keep in mind that mortars are pretty easy to make, even with primitive tools and resources. Mortars with explosive shells have been around for centuries.
"It's to be able to escalate domestic opposition to levels which make the government think twice, rather than sitting around and letting the secret police disappear people one at a time."
There, FTFY. Populations, by and large, don't "oppress". Governments do.
But I agree with you. Anybody who thinks the general population would be up against full military force has been living too long on Fantasy Island. For one thing, every member of the U.S. military has taken an oath to uphold the Constitution. And if that isn't enough, there's the fact that they would be fighting against their own people.
But even having said that: in the U.S. today are over 300 MILLION firearms, and uncounted rounds of ammunition. Anybody who thinks that is not considerable force probably has a permanent home on that same Fantasy Island.
I should add that even that 12 Mpbs from Time-Warner is spotty. That should be plenty of bandwidth for incoming Skype voice; but in fact it cuts out a lot. Not a good deal for near $70 / month.
"$100 a month? $70 a month? That's still way too high."
If you don't need it, don't pay for it.
But in reality, it's not high at all compared to Comcast and Time-Warner. Comcast can cost around $70 for "up to 20 Mbps", and you'll be lucky if you ever actually get near that 20. Time-Warner charges about the same amount in some areas for 12 Mbps!!!
So the point isn't "it's too high", the point is: "it's a lot LOWER than those others".
"Nobody in the US opposes having the "best and the brightest" come here, but the vast majority are simply of average ability and recruited to reduce pay of people in the US."
I think you're referring to this study.
H1-B workers are not the "best and brightest" at all. They often did not compare well to native U.S. workers. Companies just wanted them because they were cheap.
'Legal' here in the sense of 'not forbidden'. Fair use (currently) isn't a right, it's a restriction on lawsuits.
On the contrary. Fair use is both a restriction on lawsuits, and a right.
Article 1, Section 8.8
To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries;
... is the only place in the Constitution that refers to any "right" being Government-granted. But it does at least mention that they are limited. This is in contrast to other rights in the Constitution. Scholars are pretty much in agreement that (except for 8.8) the "rights" mentioned in the Constitution were not considered to be Government-granted at all. They were considered to already exist; the Constitution (including the Bill of Rights) only acknowledges their existence, it does not grant them. Something granted by government is not a "right", per se, but a privilege that, unlike actual rights, can be altered or revoked.
So copyright and patents are not "rights" in the same sense of natural rights. They are privileges granted by government for a limited time.
"Fair Use" arises when copyrights run into our natural 1st Amendment rights. Since the 1st Amendment is a natural right that may not be revoked by government, but copyright is a government-granted privilege, when the two seriously conflict it is the copyright that must yield, which has become known as "fair use". Thus fair use is a right: it is part of your 1st Amendment rights.
But if I recall, those were private cameras, from a store.
They cooperated with police, and gave them the footage. I doubt very much the police would have been able to demand it.
Lots of people predicted that this new TLD system was going to be a mess. And... it is. Seems like it has become even more of a mess each month that goes by.
I really have to wonder why anybody would have thought that it would NOT be a mess.
"Pearson Vue also administer the theory component of the UK driving test."
Wait... What???
How much "theory" do you need to know in order to drive in the UK? Do you have to explain how Ackerman Steering works, or what?
"Google has nothing to do with experiments in anarchy."
Neither does the internet. The internet is regulated via a number of different routes. Some of them are governments, some of them are committees. But anarchy? HELL, no.
Schmidt has proven over and over again that unless he's talking about search algorithms, you should not assume he knows just what the hell he IS talking about.
"Now that Widenius has some "Executives and Investors" supporting him, he becomes a target for Oracle lawyers."
I don't see why. Open Source projects (and MariaDB is pretty solidly Free & Open Source... I doubt they'd have even the slightest trouble proving that) have long enjoyed corporate support. I don't see that it changes anything.
I like this thinking. I'd love to see the DMCA shitcanned.
"States used to have their own copyright laws. The 1976 copyright act nullified them going forward but they may still apply for older works."
I'm not about to claim that's wrong, because I don't recall ever hearing about it before. But the Federal government has always had the power to issue copyrights, so having separate State copyrights seems pretty strange and redundant.
U.S. Constitution, Section 8:
"The Congress shall have power...
8.8 To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries;"
Yes. Especially since it's a "drop in" replacement for MySQL.
I was already tempted. Now I'm pretty much convinced.
As I stated myself in another reply, I now recognize this. But thanks for trying to clarify.
See my other reply from this morning. It isn't me who is lacking understanding here. I already explained this to you, but apparently it went right over your head.
My first explanations might not have been very clear. But I have clarified in my further discussion with you. But that clarification seems to have gone right over your head. As such, I retract my earlier apology, and will simply say again: WHOOOSH!
"It's a subtle distinction (law gets subtle!), but "incriminating yourself by letting the court access files" is not the same as "incriminating yourself by showing you can access files." The latter has been ruled to fall under 5th Amendment protections. The former is still a legally open question (the courts might not agree to consider it "incriminating yourself," and instead consider it "handing over a safe key to cooperate with evidence gathering")."
Okay, I am done here. You still aren't getting it.
It isn't the material to be disclosed that is the deciding issue. It's whether divulging that information would cause the defendent to incriminate himself. The legal analysis is exactly the same.
And the former is NOT "still a legally open question". There was a solid ruling on this in Federal court just a few months ago. As if there needed to be... it has been decided before in exactly the same way.
"When I ran the anti-corrupt CD campaign for the UK Campaign for Digital Right (now defunct), the group with the most interesting complaint were the archivists. They have the responsibility to archive our culture for future generations. All the DRM and physical protections and ill-conceived laws make their job increasingly difficult."
And in the U.S., DMCA is one of the most egregious laws. We keep hearing about the "safe harbor" provisions, but those provisions would hardly be necessary if it weren't for the other, very negative parts of this disastrous law.
Having said that, I really wonder about TFA, and whether it gets things quite right. Copyright has always been a Federal matter in the U.S... it says so right there in our Constitution.
"our "examples from other recent court cases like this one" were *not* like this one: they reached different decisions based on different situations. "
Okay, here is where the misunderstanding lies. Maybe I could have explained it more clearly. My reply just above was a bit snide, but I thought you weren't getting it.
The important thing is not what particular thing this is about, the contents of the drive or the password itself. What is important is whether the court already knows whether the person is criminally involved. Because if the court already knows that, he can't "incriminate" himself. I.e., he isn't admitting that he's a criminal, it's already known.
That's what it hinges on. I probably could have explained it better. But the examples I gave are still examples of the same thing. The same reasoning applies with those: in the first case, the guy would have been incriminating himself (admitting to the court that he was a criminal) by letting the court access those files. In this case, the guy would have been incriminating himself if he gave up the password... again because the court did not know, ahead of time, that he was a criminal. And in my other example, it was already known with reasonable certainty (and with "reasonable particularity") that he was a criminal. So he could not incriminate himself.
"Read The Effing Ruling:"
WHOOSH! much?
The only difference here is that it was the password itself, not the contents of the files, that were not "known with reasonable particularity".
Other than that, THE LEGAL REASONING IS IDENTICAL. It isn't the particular thing that isn't known, it's whether criminality is already known, that is the important factor.
As I explained to someone elsewhere on this page, before your reply to me, this exact scenario is still covered by the same logic.
s / equilibrium value / equilibrium price
"A HFT sees this discrepancy and immediately buys the share from Alice for $10, sells it to Bob for $20 and makes $10 profit just by being quick."
I know how it works.
"... but because you have many companies competing to do HFT, the differences in buy/sell prices end up being much smaller."
It's more a function of the frequency than the volume. But yes.
"Once the price gets to $14.99, an HFT catches the discrepancy and buys the $14.99 share from Alice and sells it to Bob for $15."
As far as I am concerned, you're just repeating yourself here.
"An HFT could have made more money by waiting until the price dropped to like $10 and selling to Bob for $15, making $5 profit, except that another HFT would have jumped on the opportunity way before the price dropped to $10."
I *KNOW* how it works.
"The efficiency created is that the price of shares is very quickly equalized across different trades and different markets. Because of all the actions of all the trading (a large part being HFT), we know the price is $15. In fact Alice can offer to sell for $14.99 and an HFT will buy the share before Bob even places his bid for $15.01, because the HFT has calculated that someone will offer at least $15."
But that's efficiency of "The Market". That's not "efficient allocation of resources". Not the same thing.
"It is not the trades between the HFT that has positive effects on the economy. It is the trade between the eventual buyer and seller that might not have happened (or happened so quickly) that was facilitated by HFT that helps the economy."
And now we're back to square one. I understand what you are saying: that HFT helps the market find it's equilibrium value faster. And that may be true, in theory.
However, the reality of HFT has been imperfect algorithms and market mistakes. Extreme volatility. HFT developers say these are bugs that are largely worked out... but it continues to happen. It happened just the other day, which was the whole reason for this discussion on Slashdot. This volatility means that it does NOT find market equilibrium reliably, or even more quickly. On the contrary: it is prone to positive feedback, which is a potentially disastrous thing in a stock market.
Second, regarding efficient allocation of resources: as a consequence of my first point (equilibrium prices not found reliably), AND when you add in the fact that HFT happens far too fast to affect allocation of physical resources (except for establishing price, which we have already seen is unreliable), then I say that it does not lead to efficient allocation of resources. In theory it could, but we are very far from making that ideal theory happen.
And I want to emphasize that allocation of resources in any production-based economy (which means just about any economy) has to take place physically, or the actual economy is not affected. Wheat needs to go from farm to mills to factories. Software has to be delivered. Etc.
In my opinion, it is this bit about getting "the market" confused with the actual sources of economic wealth that is one of the primary diseases of our country today.