Wrong scale. On the macroscopic scale - the same scale where the universe looks the same in all directions - everything is moving away from everything else. On smaller scales, of course, this isn't the case*. To see the "everything expanding" universe and the "everything homogenous" universe, you need to lower the granularity of your observations to the point that this sort of localized clustering isn't measurable. A good start would be to take Hubble's Ultra Deep Field image as your basic unit of observation (and that's still only 0.000008% of the area of the sky). In that image, only five of the objects visible (the ones with lens flare crosses) are stars, every other object is a galaxy. You can see the homogeneity of the universe in that image. Four of those galaxies colliding - even the four largest that are visible - wouldn't change the overall character of the image at all.
*Well, this may or may not be the case, depending on how well I understand the expansion of space. If the apparently-faster-than-light expansion of the early universe is, in fact, due to a combination of things flying apart and the space between them expanding, it's reasonable to think that space is still expanding. In which case, literally everything is moving apart from everything else, from the neutrons and protons in your average nucleus to galactic clusters. But I may be misunderstanding the expansion of space.
No, they wouldn't have a boost phase from the ground, but that doesn't mean they'd be undetectable. If a nuclear warhead is in LEO, it's got an angular velocity of ~7700 m/s. It's going to take a hell of a lot of delta-v (specifically, -7700 m/s)to deorbit it. Odds are good everyone will know which orbiting bodies are nukes, and everyone will be watching for the giant rocket exhaust plume that would signal its imminent descent.
This will be little different from everyone knowing where the other guy's missile silos are, and watching for the heat bloom of a launch. I suspect that, as soon as someone's got orbital nukes, everyone with a space program will put anti-satellite satellites in close orbit to the orbiting nukes, just waiting for the nuke to launch to take it out. Which would be easier, of course, than taking out missiles on the ground in someone else's country.
Frankly, there's really no advantage to keeping nuclear weapons in orbit when you can just keep them on the ground and deliver them anywhere in the world in less than 30 minutes.
Absolutely. Nothing says "on time, under budget, and successful" like an international project. In fact, we should put the UN in charge in order to ensure that this gets done in a timely fashion, using the best technology from the best providers.
No, companies only want to hire people who will be worth the money they're going to pay them. That's not the same thing. Granted, experience turns out to be one reasonably good indicator (not infallible, of course) that a given person is capable of doing whatever it is they're experienced with. What you need to do is demonstrate to a prospective employer how you're going to be worth the money you're making, no more, no less.
After all, companies aren't in the business of bringing along promising youths into stellar careers, they're in the business of building widgets (or servicing widgets, or accepting contracts for the outsourced maintenance of widgets, or whatever) in the interests of making money. Demanding they do something else in the interests of being fair to you is useless at best, and counterproductive at worst.
You need to find a company who's willing to take a flier on someone whom they've got no reason to believe is capable of doing the job they need done. Part of that is demonstrating that you can, in fact, hold down a job and get done what you're assigned to do. Whether or not it's experience in the specific technology you're interested in less important than whether you can get people to serve as good references for you when you decide to move on.
And then, in fifteen years' time, after you've had your good job for a while, you'll be on the other side of the fence: tired of shepherding ignorant new grads who are convinced they're hot shit, but who don't know thing one about whatever it is that you actually need done. Better yet, you can get laid off in favor of a cheap college grad, and then complain on slashdot about how your employer doesn't respect the skills and talents your experience gives you...
The shortest route to the truth. Which is more likely, sudden Godlike sentience, or failure and degeneration into a has-been? It may be that life was never meant to get smarter than apes are, and humans were an anomaly...
Neither. We don't have a large enough sample space to work with. Over the life of the planet, intelligence is a vanishingly small feature. But we can't tell if that's because it's inherently unlikely/unstable, or because it just takes a certain amount of time to develop before becoming completely stable.
And what do you mean by "meant to get"? Meant by whom? Whose (or what's) purpose do you suppose is being violated (or fulfilled, I suppose) by man's current dominance? Who defines the "right" or "wrong" of intelligence?
As far as humans being an anomaly...well, yes. But then, so is every other species on the planet. After all, we only have one example of each species. This goes hand-in-hand with having only one example of an ecosystem. We can't tell if insects fill an ecological niche that needs to be filled in every ecosystem, thereby making insects or insect-analogues as common as...well, insects - or if they're unique to our environment. We don't know the same thing about intelligence, either.
Unless, of course, you're postulating a deity, which would provide an answer for who "meant" anything to be. But in that case, it's much more probable that the deity created intelligence for a purpose, rather than as a mistake. That is, assuming you're not postulating a deeply flawed deity with little control over the universe...which is likely to be indistinguishable from no deity at all. See my first few paragraphs.
FTL travel I'll give you; it would take a major rewrite of physics to make that a reality. It's not happening.
AI, though? I'm unaware of any fundamental reason AI can't be realized. Quite the opposite: the fact that what we term intelligence has already arisen naturally rather strongly implies that it can be done. It may not be right around the corner, but - unlike FTL travel - we know intelligence to exist; all we have to do is replicate it.
And unlimited energy? If you're defining it as depressingly rigorously as possible, and referring solely to conservation of energy, yes, of course. But you don't need to violate conservation to provide unlimited energy from the point of view of the human race. Just harnessing a significant percentage of the energy the sun blasts out in all directions would solve our energy problems forever. Just like AI, we know it's there, it's a matter of engineering a way to use it.
Agreed - use cases are a good place to start. But I don't see any reason you can't make the use cases themselves somewhat more entertaining than a bland list of bullet points and screen shots. It's also helpful if the use case document goes into some detail (but not too much) about why you're performing each step, and the ramifications of doing things differently.
Of course, that kind of documentation is hard to write. I'm certainly no good at it.
This is where the term "irreducible complexity" turns out to actually mean something.
That is, not all software can be made fire-and-forget that way. Most of the software the end user actually interfaces with, perhaps, but not much more. I'm a SQL Server DBA by profession*, and the idea of a DB server install that "just works" is almost incomprehensible, because the definition of "just works" varies so much depending on what you intend to do with it. Does "just working" include a backup strategy? It should, because if you don't have DB backups, you don't have DBs. But without knowing what kind of downtime tolerance you've got, what your storage architecture and capacity are, or how sensitive your inforamtion is, you can't have a sane backup strategy. Does "just working" include a security model? It should, because you probably don't want everyone in the world looking into your database. But without knowing whether users are logging directly into the server, or only applications are, you can't design a sane approach to security.
The same is going to be true of a lot of software. It's one thing to get it "working" in the sense that Apache is serving up pages, SQL Server is fielding SQL strings, or your ASA is blocking inbound connections. It's another thing entirely to get it working right - and the definition of "right" varies so wildly from circumstance to circumstance that it's, in my opinion, impossible to make it somehow simple (in the Apple sense of the term).
*Yes, you may feel free to make jokes about how maybe it would "just work" if I didn't use an MS product.
But you're talking about a different goal. Tech docs that are designed to be good at answering specific question aren't, and shouldn't be, read start-to-finish, any more than a dictionary should. But docs that are designed to introduce you to something should be, and there may be a role for creative writing in that instance.
Perhaps a distinction needs to be drawn between "documentation" and "tutorials." I think the goal of the creative documenting in question, here, is more regarding the latter than the former.
There are two purposes to documentation: one is to serve as a reference. That is, when someone who is generally familiar with the system needs to know how to do a particular thing (be it design a cursor, add a command line switch, locate a config file, apply an update, or whatever), there needs to be a document that can be used to easily find that particular answer. This is the goal being striven towards (largely successfully) by man pages.
The other purpose, however, is to make someone who is completely ignorant of the system familiar with it. Most software documentation is terrible at this. Telling me how to do something isn't helpful if I don't know why I'd want to - or, worse, don't even know that such a thing can be done.
Since I haven't used a bad car analogy in a while: having a document that explains how to install a cold-air intake on my car is useless if I've never heard of a cold-air intake.
What the lguest docs are trying to do is solve the latter problem. They're trying to take a system that someone doesn't know anything about (aside from just enough to be interested in it at all) and get that someone up to speed in a general way.
"How" is a good question to answer, but so are "why" and "what." Gimmicky documentation isn't necessary or desirable for the first, but may very well be both for the second and third.
IMHO, the two most important places to target with Linux are businesses and schools.
...and you shouldn't bother with schools.
No, really.
Apple tried that (might still be trying it, for all I know), and it didn't make any difference. When I was in K-8 (eighties), you would have been hard-pressed to find a non-Apple product in any of the classrooms. When I was in HS (90-94), the school computer lab had only Macs. Our two semesters of programming were taught in Pascal on Macs. It wasn't until college that I had a PC computer lab available to me. Didn't make any difference at all.
Why not? Because I didn't make the purchasing decisions for my family. My parents did. And my dad had to use PCs at work. This had nothing to do with what he had grown up using - PCs were thin on the ground when he graduated HS in '67 - but with what his office had purchased. Which means, despite Apple's best efforts at co-opting the brains of America's youth, I learned to use the PC.
Which is why, once the PC was entrenched on the office desktop, that was it. If we want Linux/BSD/HURD/what-have-you to gain widespread adoption, it's the business desktop that we need to target.
My new hobby is going to start with reading through slashdot threads concerning the role of women in IT. Then I'm going to count the posts containing a statement that women are inherently less suitable for IT. This will be followed by counting the number of responses criticizing that statement.
And then I'm going to count the posts containing a statement which claims that people who are good at IT are inherently socially inept. This will be followed by counting the number of responses criticizing that statement.
No, it's not a mistake; it's the foundation of almost all contract law. The whole point of a contract is to guarantee future performance, be it delivery of goods, money, or service. If the contract isn't in effect until the delivery has happened, what good is the contract? As a somewhat degenerate case, if the contract isn't in effect until the money has changed hands, it would be impossible to perform a credit card transaction for more than $25 (look at the bottom of the document you sign). It would, in fact, be impossible to have a credit card, since you would claim that you didn't owe Visa any money; your contract was void until money changed hands.
The point of purchase transaction is a special case of contract; the exchange of goods for money itself serves as the contract, as opposed to a written agreement specifying the terms of the contract.
In the case of eBay - according, at least, to the rules promulgated by eBay, and dependent upon a US court upholding them as valid - the contract is in effect upon bid. That's what the bidder agreed to when submitting the bid, and the seller agreed to when offering the item for auction (subject to reserve price). It is no less well-defined than an exchange of money; there's no reason to think it's somehow more ambiguous.
The point is, you can't make contracts only effective upon exchange of money, since the very idea of a contract depends upon its authority over future performance.
I can't tell if this is the troll version of the long con, or if you've really got some sort of point about Apple, here.
If the former, I have to say, it's a well-played troll. If the latter, it would be nice if you got off your ass and made whatever devastating point you're so coyly alluding to.
I'm sure everyone's going to bitch about how Google should use SSL for everything. And from a marketing perspective, maybe they should.
But the openness of your wireless network really isn't their problem. You don't blame the banks if you shout your PIN out while you're at the ATM, do you? Or, more aptly, you don't blame the bank if you trust your ATM card and PIN to some stranger in a coffee shop.
It isn't Google's responsibility to secure your connection end-to-end. It's far more reasonable to think that it's your responsibility to not broadcast sensitive information in plaintext!!
Your assumption is that he deserves to make a living off writing the software. This may not be the case. If you assume a priori that the creator of the work has the right to absolute control of use, sale, and distribution of the work, there's no question that The Pirate Bay is unconscionable.
But that's the question that needs to be answered: to what extent does the creator of the work have the right to absolute control over it? I think most people - even on slashdot - would agree that the creator deserves some degree of control (I don't suspect you'd find many people who think the creator doesn't even deserve proper accreditation). I also think most people - even yourself - would agree that the creator doesn't deserve absolute control over the work (once you've purchased a book, can the creator swing by and disallow you from re-reading it?). Clearly, there's a balance that needs to be struck. There is a growing number of people (particularly obvious on slashdot) who believe that the current copyright regime has strayed much too far towards the control of the rights holder (which is not to be confused with the creator). I think it's telling, for example, that patents last 20 years from filing, while copyrights last 70 years past the death of the author.
The fundamental problem - as I see it, anyway - is that we've gotten caught up in trying to make money off a non-scarce good (copies of the work in question), rather than trying to make money off a scarce good (creativity). Market forces dictate that the price of a non-scarce good will always approach zero; it's difficult to successfully fight that (witness the current struggles). The ability to create, however, clearly is a scarce good. It seems to me that it would be easier to design a system whereby people are paid to create, rather than paid for copies of what they have created. Note that by "easier" I do not mean "easy" in an objective sense. But almost anything would be easier (as a society) than the current environment.
It's an interesting study to me, in fact, how the practice of selling copies of works came to be the dominant one. Prior to the 20th century, it certainly wasn't the norm for anything but books. Prior to the eighties, it certainly wasn't the norm for anything but books and music. It seems that it is the increase in technology that allowed copies to be distributed that created the market for the sale of copies. Given a somewhat historical perspective of the 20th century, it would have been easy for anyone who frequent slashdot to tell the people setting up their businesses on this basis that technology always gets cheaper. If your business model depends on the difficulty of making copies (as in, pressing records, or exposing film), your business model is guaranteed to fail at some future date.
It shouldn't be surprising that as copies get easier to make and distribute, those in the business of making and distributing copies find it harder to make money on the deal.
the idea is great, it's just the execution that needs work
While I see where you're coming from, I also think you're misrepresenting. It's the execution that's the hard part; ideas are easy (for proof of this statement, go read pretty much anything Peter Molyneaux has ever said). I mean, I have an idea for an RPG with an open/sandbox play style, but in which the world also evolves around you (you don't have to do the main quest, but the more time you spend not doing it, the worse the world gets and the harder it is to take on the Big Evil).
I've also got an idea for a racer where the goal is to get from point A to point B under various traffic conditions (ideally pulled from real-world traffic data on the fly) faster than your opponent. You can drive however you want over whatever route you want, but if a cop decides to pull you over, you lose.
These may be great ideas (or not, of course), but it doesn't matter - I don't have the capacity to bring them to fruition, so no one will ever find out.
The point is, it's not like having everything done but the execution means they can fix it easily. The execution is the game.
I won't disagree with you, but that's pretty much indistinguishable from running out of IPv4 addresses as far as the ISPs are concerned, which (of course) will cause the change.
The basic problem with this "must change to IPv6" business is that it's bogus. No one "must" do anything. There isn't a body in the world that can force all internet-connected businesses to switch to IPv6. You've got the same problem if you start talking about end users, only it's a couple orders of magnitude worse.
The only things I can see happening that might cause a changeover? If Google went IPv6-only, you'd see some quick change. If major universities wanted to re-create the original internet evolution by going IPv6-only on their own, essentially separate, network, you'd start seeing consumer IPv6 equipment rolling out, which might eventually lead to the switch. Or you'd need Cisco, EMC, or the like to cut over to all IPv6-only equipment for sale, which would force adoption of IPv6 in the data center.
I don't see any of those things happening, which means the only remaining option will be when we run out of IPv4 addresses. It'll be like Y2K, only on a shorter time horizon, and with a much harder fix.
All machines that have an IP address are public facing for crying out loud!
No wonder my old computer keeps getting viruses! I thought I was safe when I disconnected the patch cable, but it's still got IP 127.0.0.1 - it's been public-facing ALL THIS TIME!
Slashdot Mirror
the final galaxy will have more or less the same mass as the originals, after all
Less. It will have less.
If I had mod points and I hadn't already commented, I'd bump you.
/. for a while. Thanks.
I haven't laughed out loud at something on
Wrong scale. On the macroscopic scale - the same scale where the universe looks the same in all directions - everything is moving away from everything else. On smaller scales, of course, this isn't the case*. To see the "everything expanding" universe and the "everything homogenous" universe, you need to lower the granularity of your observations to the point that this sort of localized clustering isn't measurable. A good start would be to take Hubble's Ultra Deep Field image as your basic unit of observation (and that's still only 0.000008% of the area of the sky). In that image, only five of the objects visible (the ones with lens flare crosses) are stars, every other object is a galaxy. You can see the homogeneity of the universe in that image. Four of those galaxies colliding - even the four largest that are visible - wouldn't change the overall character of the image at all.
*Well, this may or may not be the case, depending on how well I understand the expansion of space. If the apparently-faster-than-light expansion of the early universe is, in fact, due to a combination of things flying apart and the space between them expanding, it's reasonable to think that space is still expanding. In which case, literally everything is moving apart from everything else, from the neutrons and protons in your average nucleus to galactic clusters. But I may be misunderstanding the expansion of space.
No, they wouldn't have a boost phase from the ground, but that doesn't mean they'd be undetectable. If a nuclear warhead is in LEO, it's got an angular velocity of ~7700 m/s. It's going to take a hell of a lot of delta-v (specifically, -7700 m/s)to deorbit it. Odds are good everyone will know which orbiting bodies are nukes, and everyone will be watching for the giant rocket exhaust plume that would signal its imminent descent.
This will be little different from everyone knowing where the other guy's missile silos are, and watching for the heat bloom of a launch. I suspect that, as soon as someone's got orbital nukes, everyone with a space program will put anti-satellite satellites in close orbit to the orbiting nukes, just waiting for the nuke to launch to take it out. Which would be easier, of course, than taking out missiles on the ground in someone else's country.
Frankly, there's really no advantage to keeping nuclear weapons in orbit when you can just keep them on the ground and deliver them anywhere in the world in less than 30 minutes.
Absolutely. Nothing says "on time, under budget, and successful" like an international project. In fact, we should put the UN in charge in order to ensure that this gets done in a timely fashion, using the best technology from the best providers.
No, companies only want to hire people who will be worth the money they're going to pay them. That's not the same thing. Granted, experience turns out to be one reasonably good indicator (not infallible, of course) that a given person is capable of doing whatever it is they're experienced with. What you need to do is demonstrate to a prospective employer how you're going to be worth the money you're making, no more, no less.
After all, companies aren't in the business of bringing along promising youths into stellar careers, they're in the business of building widgets (or servicing widgets, or accepting contracts for the outsourced maintenance of widgets, or whatever) in the interests of making money. Demanding they do something else in the interests of being fair to you is useless at best, and counterproductive at worst.
You need to find a company who's willing to take a flier on someone whom they've got no reason to believe is capable of doing the job they need done. Part of that is demonstrating that you can, in fact, hold down a job and get done what you're assigned to do. Whether or not it's experience in the specific technology you're interested in less important than whether you can get people to serve as good references for you when you decide to move on.
And then, in fifteen years' time, after you've had your good job for a while, you'll be on the other side of the fence: tired of shepherding ignorant new grads who are convinced they're hot shit, but who don't know thing one about whatever it is that you actually need done. Better yet, you can get laid off in favor of a cheap college grad, and then complain on slashdot about how your employer doesn't respect the skills and talents your experience gives you...
Neither. We don't have a large enough sample space to work with. Over the life of the planet, intelligence is a vanishingly small feature. But we can't tell if that's because it's inherently unlikely/unstable, or because it just takes a certain amount of time to develop before becoming completely stable.
And what do you mean by "meant to get"? Meant by whom? Whose (or what's) purpose do you suppose is being violated (or fulfilled, I suppose) by man's current dominance? Who defines the "right" or "wrong" of intelligence?
As far as humans being an anomaly...well, yes. But then, so is every other species on the planet. After all, we only have one example of each species. This goes hand-in-hand with having only one example of an ecosystem. We can't tell if insects fill an ecological niche that needs to be filled in every ecosystem, thereby making insects or insect-analogues as common as...well, insects - or if they're unique to our environment. We don't know the same thing about intelligence, either.
Unless, of course, you're postulating a deity, which would provide an answer for who "meant" anything to be. But in that case, it's much more probable that the deity created intelligence for a purpose, rather than as a mistake. That is, assuming you're not postulating a deeply flawed deity with little control over the universe...which is likely to be indistinguishable from no deity at all. See my first few paragraphs.
Wow, pessimistic much?
FTL travel I'll give you; it would take a major rewrite of physics to make that a reality. It's not happening.
AI, though? I'm unaware of any fundamental reason AI can't be realized. Quite the opposite: the fact that what we term intelligence has already arisen naturally rather strongly implies that it can be done. It may not be right around the corner, but - unlike FTL travel - we know intelligence to exist; all we have to do is replicate it.
And unlimited energy? If you're defining it as depressingly rigorously as possible, and referring solely to conservation of energy, yes, of course. But you don't need to violate conservation to provide unlimited energy from the point of view of the human race. Just harnessing a significant percentage of the energy the sun blasts out in all directions would solve our energy problems forever. Just like AI, we know it's there, it's a matter of engineering a way to use it.
Agreed - use cases are a good place to start. But I don't see any reason you can't make the use cases themselves somewhat more entertaining than a bland list of bullet points and screen shots. It's also helpful if the use case document goes into some detail (but not too much) about why you're performing each step, and the ramifications of doing things differently.
Of course, that kind of documentation is hard to write. I'm certainly no good at it.
This is where the term "irreducible complexity" turns out to actually mean something.
That is, not all software can be made fire-and-forget that way. Most of the software the end user actually interfaces with, perhaps, but not much more. I'm a SQL Server DBA by profession*, and the idea of a DB server install that "just works" is almost incomprehensible, because the definition of "just works" varies so much depending on what you intend to do with it. Does "just working" include a backup strategy? It should, because if you don't have DB backups, you don't have DBs. But without knowing what kind of downtime tolerance you've got, what your storage architecture and capacity are, or how sensitive your inforamtion is, you can't have a sane backup strategy. Does "just working" include a security model? It should, because you probably don't want everyone in the world looking into your database. But without knowing whether users are logging directly into the server, or only applications are, you can't design a sane approach to security.
The same is going to be true of a lot of software. It's one thing to get it "working" in the sense that Apache is serving up pages, SQL Server is fielding SQL strings, or your ASA is blocking inbound connections. It's another thing entirely to get it working right - and the definition of "right" varies so wildly from circumstance to circumstance that it's, in my opinion, impossible to make it somehow simple (in the Apple sense of the term).
*Yes, you may feel free to make jokes about how maybe it would "just work" if I didn't use an MS product.
But you're talking about a different goal. Tech docs that are designed to be good at answering specific question aren't, and shouldn't be, read start-to-finish, any more than a dictionary should. But docs that are designed to introduce you to something should be, and there may be a role for creative writing in that instance.
Perhaps a distinction needs to be drawn between "documentation" and "tutorials." I think the goal of the creative documenting in question, here, is more regarding the latter than the former.
There are two purposes to documentation: one is to serve as a reference. That is, when someone who is generally familiar with the system needs to know how to do a particular thing (be it design a cursor, add a command line switch, locate a config file, apply an update, or whatever), there needs to be a document that can be used to easily find that particular answer. This is the goal being striven towards (largely successfully) by man pages.
The other purpose, however, is to make someone who is completely ignorant of the system familiar with it. Most software documentation is terrible at this. Telling me how to do something isn't helpful if I don't know why I'd want to - or, worse, don't even know that such a thing can be done.
Since I haven't used a bad car analogy in a while: having a document that explains how to install a cold-air intake on my car is useless if I've never heard of a cold-air intake.
What the lguest docs are trying to do is solve the latter problem. They're trying to take a system that someone doesn't know anything about (aside from just enough to be interested in it at all) and get that someone up to speed in a general way.
"How" is a good question to answer, but so are "why" and "what." Gimmicky documentation isn't necessary or desirable for the first, but may very well be both for the second and third.
No, really.
Apple tried that (might still be trying it, for all I know), and it didn't make any difference. When I was in K-8 (eighties), you would have been hard-pressed to find a non-Apple product in any of the classrooms. When I was in HS (90-94), the school computer lab had only Macs. Our two semesters of programming were taught in Pascal on Macs. It wasn't until college that I had a PC computer lab available to me. Didn't make any difference at all.
Why not? Because I didn't make the purchasing decisions for my family. My parents did. And my dad had to use PCs at work. This had nothing to do with what he had grown up using - PCs were thin on the ground when he graduated HS in '67 - but with what his office had purchased. Which means, despite Apple's best efforts at co-opting the brains of America's youth, I learned to use the PC.
Which is why, once the PC was entrenched on the office desktop, that was it. If we want Linux/BSD/HURD/what-have-you to gain widespread adoption, it's the business desktop that we need to target.
My new hobby is going to start with reading through slashdot threads concerning the role of women in IT. Then I'm going to count the posts containing a statement that women are inherently less suitable for IT. This will be followed by counting the number of responses criticizing that statement.
And then I'm going to count the posts containing a statement which claims that people who are good at IT are inherently socially inept. This will be followed by counting the number of responses criticizing that statement.
I don't think this claim can ever be made when a digital machine is being used.
This statement is accurate, but would be just as accurate (and more complete) if you substituted "the universe" for "a digital machine."
In case that was actually a question: it's spelled Sotheby's.
No, it's not a mistake; it's the foundation of almost all contract law. The whole point of a contract is to guarantee future performance, be it delivery of goods, money, or service. If the contract isn't in effect until the delivery has happened, what good is the contract? As a somewhat degenerate case, if the contract isn't in effect until the money has changed hands, it would be impossible to perform a credit card transaction for more than $25 (look at the bottom of the document you sign). It would, in fact, be impossible to have a credit card, since you would claim that you didn't owe Visa any money; your contract was void until money changed hands.
The point of purchase transaction is a special case of contract; the exchange of goods for money itself serves as the contract, as opposed to a written agreement specifying the terms of the contract.
In the case of eBay - according, at least, to the rules promulgated by eBay, and dependent upon a US court upholding them as valid - the contract is in effect upon bid. That's what the bidder agreed to when submitting the bid, and the seller agreed to when offering the item for auction (subject to reserve price). It is no less well-defined than an exchange of money; there's no reason to think it's somehow more ambiguous.
The point is, you can't make contracts only effective upon exchange of money, since the very idea of a contract depends upon its authority over future performance.
I can't tell if this is the troll version of the long con, or if you've really got some sort of point about Apple, here.
If the former, I have to say, it's a well-played troll. If the latter, it would be nice if you got off your ass and made whatever devastating point you're so coyly alluding to.
I'm sure everyone's going to bitch about how Google should use SSL for everything. And from a marketing perspective, maybe they should.
But the openness of your wireless network really isn't their problem. You don't blame the banks if you shout your PIN out while you're at the ATM, do you? Or, more aptly, you don't blame the bank if you trust your ATM card and PIN to some stranger in a coffee shop.
It isn't Google's responsibility to secure your connection end-to-end. It's far more reasonable to think that it's your responsibility to not broadcast sensitive information in plaintext!!
Your assumption is that he deserves to make a living off writing the software. This may not be the case. If you assume a priori that the creator of the work has the right to absolute control of use, sale, and distribution of the work, there's no question that The Pirate Bay is unconscionable.
But that's the question that needs to be answered: to what extent does the creator of the work have the right to absolute control over it? I think most people - even on slashdot - would agree that the creator deserves some degree of control (I don't suspect you'd find many people who think the creator doesn't even deserve proper accreditation). I also think most people - even yourself - would agree that the creator doesn't deserve absolute control over the work (once you've purchased a book, can the creator swing by and disallow you from re-reading it?). Clearly, there's a balance that needs to be struck. There is a growing number of people (particularly obvious on slashdot) who believe that the current copyright regime has strayed much too far towards the control of the rights holder (which is not to be confused with the creator). I think it's telling, for example, that patents last 20 years from filing, while copyrights last 70 years past the death of the author.
The fundamental problem - as I see it, anyway - is that we've gotten caught up in trying to make money off a non-scarce good (copies of the work in question), rather than trying to make money off a scarce good (creativity). Market forces dictate that the price of a non-scarce good will always approach zero; it's difficult to successfully fight that (witness the current struggles). The ability to create, however, clearly is a scarce good. It seems to me that it would be easier to design a system whereby people are paid to create, rather than paid for copies of what they have created. Note that by "easier" I do not mean "easy" in an objective sense. But almost anything would be easier (as a society) than the current environment.
It's an interesting study to me, in fact, how the practice of selling copies of works came to be the dominant one. Prior to the 20th century, it certainly wasn't the norm for anything but books. Prior to the eighties, it certainly wasn't the norm for anything but books and music. It seems that it is the increase in technology that allowed copies to be distributed that created the market for the sale of copies. Given a somewhat historical perspective of the 20th century, it would have been easy for anyone who frequent slashdot to tell the people setting up their businesses on this basis that technology always gets cheaper. If your business model depends on the difficulty of making copies (as in, pressing records, or exposing film), your business model is guaranteed to fail at some future date.
It shouldn't be surprising that as copies get easier to make and distribute, those in the business of making and distributing copies find it harder to make money on the deal.
the idea is great, it's just the execution that needs work
While I see where you're coming from, I also think you're misrepresenting. It's the execution that's the hard part; ideas are easy (for proof of this statement, go read pretty much anything Peter Molyneaux has ever said). I mean, I have an idea for an RPG with an open/sandbox play style, but in which the world also evolves around you (you don't have to do the main quest, but the more time you spend not doing it, the worse the world gets and the harder it is to take on the Big Evil).
I've also got an idea for a racer where the goal is to get from point A to point B under various traffic conditions (ideally pulled from real-world traffic data on the fly) faster than your opponent. You can drive however you want over whatever route you want, but if a cop decides to pull you over, you lose.
These may be great ideas (or not, of course), but it doesn't matter - I don't have the capacity to bring them to fruition, so no one will ever find out.
The point is, it's not like having everything done but the execution means they can fix it easily. The execution is the game.
I won't disagree with you, but that's pretty much indistinguishable from running out of IPv4 addresses as far as the ISPs are concerned, which (of course) will cause the change.
Microsoft still makes Works? And they charge money for it? Is it still one of the best document-encryption tools around?
I haven't even seen a Microsoft Works installation since the days when I'd carry around a floppy with Norton Utilities on it - and use it often.
The basic problem with this "must change to IPv6" business is that it's bogus. No one "must" do anything. There isn't a body in the world that can force all internet-connected businesses to switch to IPv6. You've got the same problem if you start talking about end users, only it's a couple orders of magnitude worse.
The only things I can see happening that might cause a changeover? If Google went IPv6-only, you'd see some quick change. If major universities wanted to re-create the original internet evolution by going IPv6-only on their own, essentially separate, network, you'd start seeing consumer IPv6 equipment rolling out, which might eventually lead to the switch. Or you'd need Cisco, EMC, or the like to cut over to all IPv6-only equipment for sale, which would force adoption of IPv6 in the data center.
I don't see any of those things happening, which means the only remaining option will be when we run out of IPv4 addresses. It'll be like Y2K, only on a shorter time horizon, and with a much harder fix.
All machines that have an IP address are public facing for crying out loud!
No wonder my old computer keeps getting viruses! I thought I was safe when I disconnected the patch cable, but it's still got IP 127.0.0.1 - it's been public-facing ALL THIS TIME!
I've gotta go shut that thing down!