It has, just hasn't been widely reported. According to this article, there are about 600 radiation scanners deployed around the country and the rate of false positives is so high that the guy in charge of the Homeland Security Dept. nuclear office says they are pretty useless in practice:
True, but since there are legitimate reasons for emitting radiation they should take that into account. The last thing people (or cats) undergoing radiation therapy for cancer need is to be stopped and searched on every corner
I don't think he should be killed or raped, but he should be put away for more than a year. The cumulative damage he caused to many people in bandwidth costs alone is probably much more than the guy who vandalized a few SUVs as an environmental protest and got 10 years or whatever, too lazy to look up the details. If you want to deter a crime that is easy to commit and where those committing it are hard to catch (as with spam) you do it by imposing harsher sentences.
Most of that aid goes to (semi)developed countries like Colombia, Israel and Egypt for political reasons, or to Iraq and Afganistan (which we fucked up in the first place), instead of to the poorest countries in the world:
Most people learn some things along the way, whether it's about the latest court case involving some celebrity or how once you infect your PC with a virus for the 20th time maybe you shouldn't open those attachments after all. The problem is not so much with learning but with thinking. What large majority of people call "thinking" has nothing to do with rational analysis of the facts. Instead, it is a process of feeling around for a consensus opinion of the majority, or some authority, political or otherwise, without even being aware that that's what they are doing. If that opinion fits with their personal interests then it's that much easier to acquire. Take religion in ex-communist countries for example, before communism (almost everybody is religious), during (almost nobody is religious) and after (almost everybody is religious again). You think that has anything at all to do with knowing anything about religion. Filling their brains with new knowledge doesn't make that much difference because they wouldn't know how to use it anyway.
- give some X for free so they buy more X later
- give X for free and sell supplies for X
- give X for free and sell advertising on X
All done for many years by such a diverse group as drug dealers, razor manufacturers and magazine publishers. There is not a single example in the article that doesn't fall into one of those three categories.
It may be true that the Internet is a making that kind of marketing much easier and more common, and it may be an interesting subject for a book. However his approach is needlessly sensationalist: "$0.00 is the future of business", "free changes everything", "freeconomics" etc. It's worth remembering that the same laws of economics (and laws of nature) still apply as they always have. A business can only survive if it sells its products for more money than they cost to produce. The rest is just marketing tactics.
$171 million to build and demonstrate a launch system capable of delivering cargo to the international space station.
You mean they are getting paid to demonstrate something like the 42 year old Soyuz? And once we have a way of delivering something to the earth's orbit, we can get ready for the big push to fly to the moon over the next 20 years or whatever. If someone in the 1960 predicted this would be the state of the US space program 50 years later, people would laugh at how ridiculously pessimistic that prediction was.
Only if there is no other intelligent life in the universe in which case any technology that is the best in some way on earth is also the best in the universe.
Anyway, what can it do? You'd think they would give some examples of burning holes through stuff.
How in the world do you infer that the projects are "so successful"?
Because if you define success as somebody using open source (as slashdot editors and most posters do), then all open source projects are by definition successful. Failure would be if they used closed source, and if they used microsoft it would be a disaster.
Like the author of the article, and some other people in this thread, you miss the point. I agree that all of those things exist and they do add some value, but, in my opinion, nowhere near enough to replace paying for the actual products. Take a combined annual revenue of music, movie, software and publishing industries. Many, many billions of dollars, right. Now imagine all those products are available for free and simple download. You are saying that more than a tiny fraction of that revenue (and those jobs) can be replaced by these added services? Most of these services exist now and they don't make that much money by comparison to product sales.
Ok, you are a pea-brained smelly ape. I guess that takes care of the insults.
You miss the point completely. I am too lazy to go through all the points again, but let me try to summarize it in a simple way so that perhaps you can understand: I never said that those eight things don't exist, just that they don't provide anywhere near enough value, that people would be to pay for, to replace the current system.
The things that are listed in the article are nowhere near enough to compensate an author for the time it takes to write a book. Hence, less people would write books. You don't see that as dangerous direction to go?
Actually, now that I think about it, the article and those such as yourself who agree with it are not just silly as I originally thought, but actually dangerous.
Actually, I kind of like the concept that you have to work for a living by continually providing value rather than create a monopoly on some idea or expression of an idea and coast on monopoly rents.
The question is whether fewer people will come up with new works if their value is so drastically reduced and whether society will lose out overall. Take books for example. Where is the incentive for an author to write a new book if it can be immediately copied for free by anybody. Did it ever occur that by removing copyright protection we are going back to the time where authors could not make a living by their works and therefore the marketplace of ideas is limited to idle wealthy and those willing to make the sacrifice of living in poverty.
For most of the history copyright wasn't an issue since easy copying and wide distribution were not possible (or practical). Musicians, made a living either by performing their own work or by being supported by wealthy patrons. Painters/sculptors made and sold unique products that were not easily copied. Writers, well they kind of struggled. None of them made a good living out of their art, and for that reason it was mostly members of the privileged classes who engaged in it.
It is interesting that in preference to the, admittedly flawed, copyright system we have today your would like to see artists placed at the mercy of wealthy patrons or even worse, supported by taxpayers money.
Ok, to summarize for those too lazy to read the whole article: his point is that since its getting so easy to copy things (digital and in some cases physical), the actual products will become super abundant and therefore worthless (free). Instead of paying for the products, people will pay for other things.
Immediacy - You pay to get it right away, becomes free later. Nonsense. A free copy can be made available as soon as a non-free copy, even sooner - see movies "released" on bit torrent before they show up in theaters.
Personalization - You pay to get it specially personalized the way you want it. Doesn't apply to a vast majority of products. His examples: book ending tailored to your preferences, aspirin tailored to your DNA are both ridiculous.
Interpretation - You pay for help with using the product. Again, applies to only a small minority of the products. Support for complex software is one, but how many other examples can you think of?
Authenticity -- You pay to ensure that the album is really performed by the band (his example). I don't even know what he means by that. Is there a big problem with people downloading a song by, say, Metallica, only to realize that it was actually performed by some other band? I don't think so.
Accessibility -- You pay somebody else to store your digital possessions and serve them to you on demand? Again, there may be a small value in that for certain things (backups etc) but I prefer to keep my music/movie/book etc collections on my own keychain, thank you very much.
Embodiment -- I guess what he means by this is that you may want to pay to have a fancy copy in some cases. For example, the book is free but you pay for a pretty old-fashioned hardcover binding or whatever.
Patronage -- You pay out of goodness of your heart because you want the musician/artist/author to make some money. Yeah right.
Findability -- You pay for a service that helps you find stuff that you want. Those are free now, but in the future they will become for pay, according to him.
I'm sorry, but if thats the best people can come up with as the "new" economy, we are screwed.
The only reason I go to starbucks (and unfortunately pay for the wireless) is that where i live they are the only 24 hour coffee shops and call me crazy but i get the most work done at a coffee shop late at night. In fact I get more done in about 3 hours (midnight to 3am or so) than i would if i was working in the office for 8 hours. I know its not everybody's cup of tee (coffee?), but hooray indeed from me if it means i'll be paying less than t-mobile overpriced service.
Well, perhaps then Real should include a note with their products saying "our product may contain security bugs, but pretty please don't try to find them as we prefer that nobody should know about them". It doesn't work. Bugs are there to be found, and somebody will find them sooner or later. If I was their customer, I would actually prefer to pay in order to have a security hole fixed, then to live with it and hope that nobody ever finds out. Take Consumer Reports. They find all kinds of problems with various products and they make that information available. I like to know if a product I have or plan on buying has some serious problems, so I consider it a very valuable service. But you got to pay for it, its not free.
I see your point about possibility of a veiled threat that "if you don't pay me, some criminal might, wink wink", and maybe it is, but unfortunately there isn't much that can be done about it. If you want that information and they put in effort to obtain it, then they have the right to charge you for it.
Slashdot Mirror
material of the future may be graphene rather than silicon
Yeah, but does this graphene feel like real breasts
It has, just hasn't been widely reported. According to this article, there are about 600 radiation scanners deployed around the country and the rate of false positives is so high that the guy in charge of the Homeland Security Dept. nuclear office says they are pretty useless in practice:
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,257004,00.html?sPage=fnc/specialsections/homelandsecurity
True, but since there are legitimate reasons for emitting radiation they should take that into account. The last thing people (or cats) undergoing radiation therapy for cancer need is to be stopped and searched on every corner
You never know with those feline terrorists.
Perhaps it was a persian cat? You can never be too careful with those Al-Qaeda supporters
I don't think he should be killed or raped, but he should be put away for more than a year. The cumulative damage he caused to many people in bandwidth costs alone is probably much more than the guy who vandalized a few SUVs as an environmental protest and got 10 years or whatever, too lazy to look up the details. If you want to deter a crime that is easy to commit and where those committing it are hard to catch (as with spam) you do it by imposing harsher sentences.
You are just misinformed. USA foreign aid as a percentage of the GDI is the lowest of just about any developed country:
http://markc1.typepad.com/relentlesslyoptimistic/images/foreign_aid_chart1.GIF
Most of that aid goes to (semi)developed countries like Colombia, Israel and Egypt for political reasons, or to Iraq and Afganistan (which we fucked up in the first place), instead of to the poorest countries in the world:
http://static.flickr.com/51/189662626_257b15004f_o.jpg
You think you're a tough guy? I'm posting at 4am!
Most people learn some things along the way, whether it's about the latest court case involving some celebrity or how once you infect your PC with a virus for the 20th time maybe you shouldn't open those attachments after all.
The problem is not so much with learning but with thinking. What large majority of people call "thinking" has nothing to do with rational analysis of the facts. Instead, it is a process of feeling around for a consensus opinion of the majority, or some authority, political or otherwise, without even being aware that that's what they are doing. If that opinion fits with their personal interests then it's that much easier to acquire. Take religion in ex-communist countries for example, before communism (almost everybody is religious), during (almost nobody is religious) and after (almost everybody is religious again). You think that has anything at all to do with knowing anything about religion. Filling their brains with new knowledge doesn't make that much difference because they wouldn't know how to use it anyway.
It all boils down to:
- give some X for free so they buy more X later
- give X for free and sell supplies for X
- give X for free and sell advertising on X
All done for many years by such a diverse group as drug dealers, razor manufacturers and magazine publishers. There is not a single example in the article that doesn't fall into one of those three categories.
It may be true that the Internet is a making that kind of marketing much easier and more common, and it may be an interesting subject for a book. However his approach is needlessly sensationalist: "$0.00 is the future of business", "free changes everything", "freeconomics" etc. It's worth remembering that the same laws of economics (and laws of nature) still apply as they always have. A business can only survive if it sells its products for more money than they cost to produce. The rest is just marketing tactics.
$171 million to build and demonstrate a launch system capable of delivering cargo to the international space station.
You mean they are getting paid to demonstrate something like the 42 year old Soyuz? And once we have a way of delivering something to the earth's orbit, we can get ready for the big push to fly to the moon over the next 20 years or whatever. If someone in the 1960 predicted this would be the state of the US space program 50 years later, people would laugh at how ridiculously pessimistic that prediction was.
it is the most powerful laser in the universe
Only if there is no other intelligent life in the universe in which case any technology that is the best in some way on earth is also the best in the universe.
Anyway, what can it do? You'd think they would give some examples of burning holes through stuff.
How in the world do you infer that the projects are "so successful"?
Because if you define success as somebody using open source (as slashdot editors and most posters do), then all open source projects are by definition successful. Failure would be if they used closed source, and if they used microsoft it would be a disaster.
Like the author of the article, and some other people in this thread, you miss the point. I agree that all of those things exist and they do add some value, but, in my opinion, nowhere near enough to replace paying for the actual products. Take a combined annual revenue of music, movie, software and publishing industries. Many, many billions of dollars, right. Now imagine all those products are available for free and simple download. You are saying that more than a tiny fraction of that revenue (and those jobs) can be replaced by these added services? Most of these services exist now and they don't make that much money by comparison to product sales.
Ok, you are a pea-brained smelly ape. I guess that takes care of the insults.
You miss the point completely. I am too lazy to go through all the points again, but let me try to summarize it in a simple way so that perhaps you can understand: I never said that those eight things don't exist, just that they don't provide anywhere near enough value, that people would be to pay for, to replace the current system.
The things that are listed in the article are nowhere near enough to compensate an author for the time it takes to write a book. Hence, less people would write books. You don't see that as dangerous direction to go?
For example?
Actually, now that I think about it, the article and those such as yourself who agree with it are not just silly as I originally thought, but actually dangerous.
Actually, I kind of like the concept that you have to work for a living by continually providing value rather than create a monopoly on some idea or expression of an idea and coast on monopoly rents.
The question is whether fewer people will come up with new works if their value is so drastically reduced and whether society will lose out overall. Take books for example. Where is the incentive for an author to write a new book if it can be immediately copied for free by anybody. Did it ever occur that by removing copyright protection we are going back to the time where authors could not make a living by their works and therefore the marketplace of ideas is limited to idle wealthy and those willing to make the sacrifice of living in poverty.
How many people does the author think use those silly picture frames?
For most of the history copyright wasn't an issue since easy copying and wide distribution were not possible (or practical). Musicians, made a living either by performing their own work or by being supported by wealthy patrons. Painters/sculptors made and sold unique products that were not easily copied. Writers, well they kind of struggled. None of them made a good living out of their art, and for that reason it was mostly members of the privileged classes who engaged in it.
It is interesting that in preference to the, admittedly flawed, copyright system we have today your would like to see artists placed at the mercy of wealthy patrons or even worse, supported by taxpayers money.
Ok, to summarize for those too lazy to read the whole article: his point is that since its getting so easy to copy things (digital and in some cases physical), the actual products will become super abundant and therefore worthless (free). Instead of paying for the products, people will pay for other things.
Immediacy - You pay to get it right away, becomes free later. Nonsense. A free copy can be made available as soon as a non-free copy, even sooner - see movies "released" on bit torrent before they show up in theaters.
Personalization - You pay to get it specially personalized the way you want it. Doesn't apply to a vast majority of products. His examples: book ending tailored to your preferences, aspirin tailored to your DNA are both ridiculous.
Interpretation - You pay for help with using the product. Again, applies to only a small minority of the products. Support for complex software is one, but how many other examples can you think of?
Authenticity -- You pay to ensure that the album is really performed by the band (his example). I don't even know what he means by that. Is there a big problem with people downloading a song by, say, Metallica, only to realize that it was actually performed by some other band? I don't think so.
Accessibility -- You pay somebody else to store your digital possessions and serve them to you on demand? Again, there may be a small value in that for certain things (backups etc) but I prefer to keep my music/movie/book etc collections on my own keychain, thank you very much.
Embodiment -- I guess what he means by this is that you may want to pay to have a fancy copy in some cases. For example, the book is free but you pay for a pretty old-fashioned hardcover binding or whatever.
Patronage -- You pay out of goodness of your heart because you want the musician/artist/author to make some money. Yeah right.
Findability -- You pay for a service that helps you find stuff that you want. Those are free now, but in the future they will become for pay, according to him.
I'm sorry, but if thats the best people can come up with as the "new" economy, we are screwed.
Ah, good old soviet union. Send these 6% to gulag and domain-squatter and probably spam problem solved.
The only reason I go to starbucks (and unfortunately pay for the wireless) is that where i live they are the only 24 hour coffee shops and call me crazy but i get the most work done at a coffee shop late at night. In fact I get more done in about 3 hours (midnight to 3am or so) than i would if i was working in the office for 8 hours. I know its not everybody's cup of tee (coffee?), but hooray indeed from me if it means i'll be paying less than t-mobile overpriced service.
"abstract (b-strkt', b'strkt')
adj.
1. Considered apart from concrete existence."
Sounds about right to me
Very concise. I like it
Well, perhaps then Real should include a note with their products saying "our product may contain security bugs, but pretty please don't try to find them as we prefer that nobody should know about them". It doesn't work. Bugs are there to be found, and somebody will find them sooner or later. If I was their customer, I would actually prefer to pay in order to have a security hole fixed, then to live with it and hope that nobody ever finds out. Take Consumer Reports. They find all kinds of problems with various products and they make that information available. I like to know if a product I have or plan on buying has some serious problems, so I consider it a very valuable service. But you got to pay for it, its not free.
I see your point about possibility of a veiled threat that "if you don't pay me, some criminal might, wink wink", and maybe it is, but unfortunately there isn't much that can be done about it. If you want that information and they put in effort to obtain it, then they have the right to charge you for it.