Just because IP isn't physical, does NOT mean it cannot be property. But there are 2 problems here..
1) The common misconception that IP is a "right" is misguided. The wording on the law books states that the point of copyrights is to give incentive to promote the progress of knowledge. Thus, IP is a PRIVILEGE, not a RIGHT. Furthermore, it's a privilege that should only be granted when it furthers the public good, not when it hampers it.
So basically, I think some form of copyrights that reward those who produce content is good.. but it should not be at the expense of spreading the use of that content.
2) The real reason why IP is going to fail is NOT because the idea is inherently evil, but rather, it's because it's unworkable. As copying becomes easier and easier for everything we produce, there simply won't be any way to ENFORCE IP. We need to learn how to live in that world. And I for one definitely see disadvantages to it as well as advantages. We should work hard to minimize the damage and increase the good.
Actually, it's quite on-topic, since most DVDs are also encoded with Macrovision so you can't even make an analog copy by plugging your player's video output into your VCR.
Let's not forget that, with the exception of perhaps certain individuals, human beings are quite different from rats in many ways. Most importantly, our brains and skulls are much larger and quite different from those of rats. The dosage they gave the rats very possibly would be equivalent to a far far greater dosage on people.
I mean, I'm disappointed that the Wired article does not mention dosage.. it only implies that it's similar to that of normal cell phone usage.. but that would scale to far greater for rats!
I don't know how they did their study, but if they did the rat equivalent of surrounding a guy with 300 cell phones, the study would be quite worthless.
BTW - the sum of the brain power of an infinite number of monkeys is infinite. So then, it is possible to have an infinite number of monkeys filtering noise and an infinite number generating content so that all that is produced is signal (infinity + infinity = infinity). Just an idea
The problem there is that you're assuming the filtering is parallizable, which is not necessarily the case.
Well, I'm a long-term optimist, so to me, being born is like buying computers... It'll always be better to do it later, but you have to do it some time.:P
I think commercialization of our culture has its scary spots, sure, but blocking out banner ads while you read Slashdot makes no sense. The ads are how Slashdot GETS FUNDED! Without the ads, Slashdot would not be able to afford its bandwidth, systems, and personnel.
If you want to protest against ads, go ahead.. just stop reading Slashdot! Blocking them out means that you're reading something that is being made possible by other people who ARE reading the ads. In my book, this is called leeching.
So if you really want to be productive, then instead of refusing to watch ads but accepting what they pay for, I suggest you work toward thinking up an alternative way to effectively fund things. Reader-funded Slashdot, for instance.
Otherwise, either only visit ad-free sites like Google, or don't surf at all. All this hypocrisy of watching TV without the commercials or surfing the web without the ads which pay for what you're watching/reading makes me sick.
I completely agree. When the article started out, it started saying that new evidence has come forth supporting that neurons can be regenerated, but never really gave much evidence.
In short, the article just didn't present anything new. That would be okay, normally, as review articles are fine. However, the article is rather poorly written imho in that it doesn't clearly state what it's going to be about at the beginning, leaving the reader guessing.
And after I finished reading it, I still felt like the article had no real point.
I don't know... I have a feeling that the difficult of ports is in large part due to poorly written programs in the first place. A good program should be at least 40% design, and most of the implementation (i.e. the core logic of the game) could easily be cross-platform IF IT'S KEPT IN MIND TO BEGIN WITH.
I don't know if it's as little as 10%, especially for a performance-intensive game, but certainly the overhead of producing a Mac version goes WAY down if the game is designed with both platforms in mind to begin with rather than porting it as an afterthought, when the platform-specific code is deeply engrained in the program.
Also, as 47Ronin points out, a lot more Mac users would buy the game if it came out within, say, a decade of the PC version. Really.. When a game like X-Wing comes out a few YEARS after the PC version, don't you think the market would've faded a bit by then?
The problem with this is that we need to carry on with our lives. If we all took time out to grieve for every tragic death in the world, we wouldn't have time to do anything else. And after all, in a way, we owe it to the dead to live our own lives well while we still have it.
So, sure, I think it's tragic that all these people died, but what the hell am I going to do? Just sit here and cry about it? What good does that do? Maybe I could be an activist, and go advocate better building codes, but short of that, the best thing I can do is carry on with my own life, and my own life just happens to involve RAM prices, among other things. Just because there are tragic deaths doesn't mean that increased RAM prices don't ALSO affect people's happiness.
I don't think it's valid to judge Mozilla's speed just yet, since it's not very optimized at all at this point. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if there's still a lot of debugging code in there.
In short, you should never judge the speed of an app before the release version.
I never said I don't respect the effort. As a matter of fact, I actually think that in general, the Mozilla team is doing a great job, and I'm really looking forward to using Mozilla.
But UI is a big concern of mine, and, as you say, it would take a lot of effort to recreate the Mac L&F. But most importantly, as far as I can tell, little to no effort is being put in to this area right now.
As a Mac user, I was concerned about the non-Mac-ness of Mozilla's interface. But some people argued the merits of using XUL for cross-platform-ness, making it easier to port and synchronize and so forth...
HOWEVER, isn't this precisely what happened with Word 6 on the Mac? In the interest of making the software identical across platforms, the Mac version lacked consistency with all other Mac applications, and didn't function in the way a Mac application was supposed to behave. Everyone was up in arms about this, even causing Microsoft to release a (non-free) "downgrade" to Word 5.1. The people rejoiced when Word 98 felt much more (though not enough, imho) like a standard Mac application.
Is not the same thing happening to Mozilla? After all, even if, a skin is written to make it LOOK like Mac app, as long as it uses XML and not standard Mac toolbox controls, it simply will not FEEL like a Mac app. In M10, for instance, text-selection is a simple inverted white-on-black box, instead of using the standard Mac settings for text-selection coloring. Likewise, many controls do not function as they do on a Mac. This will not be changed with a mere skin.
I think interface consistency within an operating system and the apps written for it are incredibly important, and I'm afraid Mozilla will not achieve this goal, and remind us in many ways of Word 6's cross-platform interface fiasco.
So my question is, will it be possible to actually make the Mac version of Mozilla use actual standard Mac controls? Does XUL support this? Or does it only support an approximation, in effect rewriting the Mac controls and not quite getting it right and getting a slightly off feel?
Actually, it seems the problem with machine translation isn't so much that human brains are more intelligent, but that humans have more environmental context from which to get the subtleties of our evolving languages.
This reminds me that I wish I had more 80's Techno. You know, stuff that sounds like the music in those demos and stuff. Preferably the stuff that sounds as European as possible.:)
Anyway, can anyone recommend any bands? I mean, all I can find on CDNow and stuff are the 90's electronica/techno stuff. I have no clue what techno bands were around and good bain the, say, early-mid (or even late) 80's. I'd love for someone to help me find some.
I think the whole point of a GUI, and of a well-designed interface in general, is that you don't HAVE to spend lots of time learning to use the interface.. It should just be obvious and take a few hours or a few days at most to learn.
While I personally don't have a problem with the situation since if/. becomes biased (other than blatantly in favor of Linux) we'll be the first to notice and scream about it, I should point out the flaw in your argument:
This would be a valid concern if the person writing the article actually received revenue from the banner clicks...
Who wrote the article is irrelevant since/. choses which articles to post. They could conceivably have gotten one bad review and one good review and chosen to go with the good review because it'll make their advertiser happy.
Teaching about Bad Laws and Bad Science
on
One for the Kids
·
· Score: 3
I completely agree. I think criticial thinking is something that's not emphasized nearly enough (if at all) in the US education system today. Whether it's laws or science, we need to teach kids more about free speech and the scientific method.
What do we do instead? Teach them what's good and what's bad.. and what the "correct" answer on a science exam is. Why do we do this? My guess is that it's because it's far easier to tell a kid things in clear black and white so they don't talk back to you. Adults don't want kids talking back to them.
Imagine a kid challenging your commands or telling the science teacher that he thinks his exam was graded incorrectly.
In the long run, these kids grow up to be credulous and apathetic as adults.
Slashdot Mirror
Just because IP isn't physical, does NOT mean it cannot be property. But there are 2 problems here..
1) The common misconception that IP is a "right" is misguided. The wording on the law books states that the point of copyrights is to give incentive to promote the progress of knowledge. Thus, IP is a PRIVILEGE, not a RIGHT. Furthermore, it's a privilege that should only be granted when it furthers the public good, not when it hampers it.
So basically, I think some form of copyrights that reward those who produce content is good.. but it should not be at the expense of spreading the use of that content.
2) The real reason why IP is going to fail is NOT because the idea is inherently evil, but rather, it's because it's unworkable. As copying becomes easier and easier for everything we produce, there simply won't be any way to ENFORCE IP. We need to learn how to live in that world.
And I for one definitely see disadvantages to it as well as advantages.
We should work hard to minimize the damage and increase the good.
This is OT for DVD
Actually, it's quite on-topic, since most DVDs are also encoded with Macrovision so you can't even make an analog copy by plugging your player's video output into your VCR.
Let's not forget that, with the exception of perhaps certain individuals, human beings are quite different from rats in many ways. Most importantly, our brains and skulls are much larger and quite different from those of rats. The dosage they gave the rats very possibly would be equivalent to a far far greater dosage on people.
I mean, I'm disappointed that the Wired article does not mention dosage.. it only implies that it's similar to that of normal cell phone usage.. but that would scale to far greater for rats!
I don't know how they did their study, but if they did the rat equivalent of surrounding a guy with 300 cell phones, the study would be quite worthless.
I completely agree. The whole concept of windows is based on a 2D interface. People need to really get thinking on effective 3D GUIs.
Nuke 'em from orbit. It's the only way to be sure.
:)
BTW - the sum of the brain power of an infinite number of monkeys is infinite. So then, it is possible to have an infinite number of monkeys filtering noise and an infinite number generating content so that all that is produced is signal (infinity + infinity = infinity). Just an idea
The problem there is that you're assuming the filtering is parallizable, which is not necessarily the case.
Well, I'm a long-term optimist, so to me, being born is like buying computers... It'll always be better to do it later, but you have to do it some time. :P
I think commercialization of our culture has its scary spots, sure, but blocking out banner ads while you read Slashdot makes no sense. The ads are how Slashdot GETS FUNDED! Without the ads, Slashdot would not be able to afford its bandwidth, systems, and personnel.
If you want to protest against ads, go ahead.. just stop reading Slashdot! Blocking them out means that you're reading something that is being made possible by other people who ARE reading the ads. In my book, this is called leeching.
So if you really want to be productive, then instead of refusing to watch ads but accepting what they pay for, I suggest you work toward thinking up an alternative way to effectively fund things. Reader-funded Slashdot, for instance.
Otherwise, either only visit ad-free sites like Google, or don't surf at all.
All this hypocrisy of watching TV without the commercials or surfing the web without the ads which pay for what you're watching/reading makes me sick.
I completely agree. When the article started out, it started saying that new evidence has come forth supporting that neurons can be regenerated, but never really gave much evidence.
/.
In short, the article just didn't present anything new. That would be okay, normally, as review articles are fine. However, the article is rather poorly written imho in that it doesn't clearly state what it's going to be about at the beginning, leaving the reader guessing.
And after I finished reading it, I still felt like the article had no real point.
It's certainly not worthy of being posted to
I don't know... I have a feeling that the difficult of ports is in large part due to poorly written programs in the first place. A good program should be at least 40% design, and most of the implementation (i.e. the core logic of the game) could easily be cross-platform IF IT'S KEPT IN MIND TO BEGIN WITH.
I don't know if it's as little as 10%, especially for a performance-intensive game, but certainly the overhead of producing a Mac version goes WAY down if the game is designed with both platforms in mind to begin with rather than porting it as an afterthought, when the platform-specific code is deeply engrained in the program.
Also, as 47Ronin points out, a lot more Mac users would buy the game if it came out within, say, a decade of the PC version. Really.. When a game like X-Wing comes out a few YEARS after the PC version, don't you think the market would've faded a bit by then?
Don't forget to count the opportunity cost of advocating your favorite candidate when you could be working a second job! :P
About that humour thing. Lemme tell a few jokes at your relative's funeral, I'm sure that will make everyone happy!
Actually, afaik, people DO make lots of jokes about the deceased at funerals, because it helps them bond and makes them feel better.
I hope that people can laugh about me (or even at me) at my funeral so at least they're having fun instead of just sitting around weeping.
The problem with this is that we need to carry on with our lives. If we all took time out to grieve for every tragic death in the world, we wouldn't have time to do anything else.
And after all, in a way, we owe it to the dead to live our own lives well while we still have it.
So, sure, I think it's tragic that all these people died, but what the hell am I going to do? Just sit here and cry about it? What good does that do? Maybe I could be an activist, and go advocate better building codes, but short of that, the best thing I can do is carry on with my own life, and my own life just happens to involve RAM prices, among other things. Just because there are tragic deaths doesn't mean that increased RAM prices don't ALSO affect people's happiness.
I don't think it's valid to judge Mozilla's speed just yet, since it's not very optimized at all at this point. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if there's still a lot of debugging code in there.
In short, you should never judge the speed of an app before the release version.
I never said I don't respect the effort. As a matter of fact, I actually think that in general, the Mozilla team is doing a great job, and I'm really looking forward to using Mozilla.
But UI is a big concern of mine, and, as you say, it would take a lot of effort to recreate the Mac L&F. But most importantly, as far as I can tell, little to no effort is being put in to this area right now.
As a Mac user, I was concerned about the non-Mac-ness of Mozilla's interface. But some people argued the merits of using XUL for cross-platform-ness, making it easier to port and synchronize and so forth...
HOWEVER, isn't this precisely what happened with Word 6 on the Mac? In the interest of making the software identical across platforms, the Mac version lacked consistency with all other Mac applications, and didn't function in the way a Mac application was supposed to behave.
Everyone was up in arms about this, even causing Microsoft to release a (non-free) "downgrade" to Word 5.1. The people rejoiced when Word 98 felt much more (though not enough, imho) like a standard Mac application.
Is not the same thing happening to Mozilla? After all, even if, a skin is written to make it LOOK like Mac app, as long as it uses XML and not standard Mac toolbox controls, it simply will not FEEL like a Mac app. In M10, for instance, text-selection is a simple inverted white-on-black box, instead of using the standard Mac settings for text-selection coloring.
Likewise, many controls do not function as they do on a Mac. This will not be changed with a mere skin.
I think interface consistency within an operating system and the apps written for it are incredibly important, and I'm afraid Mozilla will not achieve this goal, and remind us in many ways of Word 6's cross-platform interface fiasco.
So my question is, will it be possible to actually make the Mac version of Mozilla use actual standard Mac controls? Does XUL support this? Or does it only support an approximation, in effect rewriting the Mac controls and not quite getting it right and getting a slightly off feel?
D'oh! it double-converted my characters! It looked fine in preview, though.
Ug.
Anyway, use ampersand-lt and ampersand-gt.
There.
(Totally off-topic: Has anyone figured out how to get literal angle brackets in a /. comment yet?)
You can use the standard < and >.
Actually, it seems the problem with machine translation isn't so much that human brains are more intelligent, but that humans have more environmental context from which to get the subtleties of our evolving languages.
This reminds me that I wish I had more 80's Techno. You know, stuff that sounds like the music in those demos and stuff. Preferably the stuff that sounds as European as possible. :)
Anyway, can anyone recommend any bands? I mean, all I can find on CDNow and stuff are the 90's electronica/techno stuff. I have no clue what techno bands were around and good bain the, say, early-mid (or even late) 80's. I'd love for someone to help me find some.
Thanks!
Well, "no other way" is a bit of an exaggeration. you could use MPW with MrC, iirc...
;)
A Mac program with a command line. What more could a Linux geek as for on a Mac?
I think the whole point of a GUI, and of a well-designed interface in general, is that you don't HAVE to spend lots of time learning to use the interface.. It should just be obvious and take a few hours or a few days at most to learn.
While I personally don't have a problem with the situation since if /. becomes biased (other than blatantly in favor of Linux) we'll be the first to notice and scream about it, I should point out the flaw in your argument:
/. choses which articles to post. They could conceivably have gotten one bad review and one good review and chosen to go with the good review because it'll make their advertiser happy.
This would be a valid concern if the person writing the article actually received revenue from the banner clicks...
Who wrote the article is irrelevant since
I completely agree.
I think criticial thinking is something that's not emphasized nearly enough (if at all) in the US education system today.
Whether it's laws or science, we need to teach kids more about free speech and the scientific method.
What do we do instead? Teach them what's good and what's bad.. and what the "correct" answer on a science exam is. Why do we do this? My guess is that it's because it's far easier to tell a kid things in clear black and white so they don't talk back to you. Adults don't want kids talking back to them.
Imagine a kid challenging your commands or telling the science teacher that he thinks his exam was graded incorrectly.
In the long run, these kids grow up to be credulous and apathetic as adults.
Well it's OBVIOUSLY wrong. That's the whole point of it.. but the trick is to figure out just what the problem with.
I remember this basic problem from way back being on page 444 of my 8th grade math book. (Don't ask me why I still remember that.)