But Schmidt also doesn't have much patience for critics: 'Criticisms are inevitably from people who are afraid of change, or who have not figured out that there will be an adaptation of society.'"
Fucking idiot. Criticisms don't only come from people who are afraid of change. Personally, I don't even consider my body to be what makes me "me", and would love to replace it all with sturdier mechanical parts. I love the rate at which humans keep making technology smaller and merging with it: Clothes are Wearable Shelters. Glasses are magnifying lenses you wear, and Contacts are glasses IN your eyes. We have titanium hips and even exoskeletons helping the disabled to walk again. Tech is great! Adding a digital camera and HUD to my optical systems sounds awesome!
However, I WANT TO CONTROL MY BODY. I don't value my flesh the same way others do, but I realize that it IS important to be able to control my body in whatever form it takes. I don't want to wear a prison. I don't want to wear a tracking device (unless I can control who can track it). I consider my clothes to be just a part of my body as I consider my bones. My skin is a mobile temperature regulating wetsuit perfect for being born on Earth and exploring a great deal of this Planet; I've grown quite attached to my body and its more temporary parts (shirts, hair, etc), and respect and care for my self-grown or artificial coverings; I would treat any replacement or modification thereof as equally valuable and deserving of care. Most of all, I want to be able to fix things if they break, and a replacement is a ways off -- That's a prime concern for anything I integrate with in a substantial life affecting way.
Fortunately my skin is self healing, it contains the data and systems needed to provide this function and I carry the repair mechanisms with me everywhere -- It's important to my continued exploration of this world. I know how contacts work exactly, their design is fully transparent to me. I know how to fix glasses and the mathematics for shaping their lenses are readily available to me. Where are the damn design documents, technical specs, and and source code for these new optical sensors you're selling me? If they're to become part of my body in a significant degree to change ME then I NEED this basic info, or we're at an impasse. I need to be able to know EVERYTHING about how they operate. If they're not just toys, if they will potentially help me change the life I live, then there are some CONCERNS and Criticisms that need to be addressed -- Firstly, your attitude towards my concerns, and secondly the degree of ownership I have over these new body parts we both want me to adopt.
I want to control my clothes. I don't want what I wear spying on me or sending signals that I don't want them to send. I don't want YOU to own MY BODY or everything that I do; Especially I don't want you owning copyright over all the things I see. There are a host of other concerns I have, but I don't care to voice them all here because I have better things to do than put forth questions into culture that will be ignored by the likes of Schmidt. If you shy away from the concerns of critics then I guess you don't care to reassure the people who are your prime adopters, most ready for change that you actually give a fuck about what's really important. The privacy implications become GREATLY increased the closer I integrate any technology with my brain, you fool!
Seriously, someone ought to filter this fucker's output because he's making himself out to be a fucking idiot. Let me get this straight, I shouldn't be able to give my eyeballs wings and let them soar over the land and see what they can see, but I shouldn't criticize people who want to co-opt my visions for marketing purposes? For someone who advocates adapting to social changes wrought by technological advances, Schmidt seems to be pretty fucking hypocritical when it comes to actually adjusting to the changes himself. That f
... The question of why aliens might 'want to come here' is probably fundamentally flawed because we are forming that question from our current (tiny) viewpoint. The word 'want' might not apply at all to someone 1000 times smarter than us.
I've studied neuron systems in both animals and computer simulations. Know what happens when the inputs become the same over enough time? Boredom. Know what happens if you just randomly change one pixel in a field of view of an OCR machine intelligence? The same thing that happens when you do that with people. They stare at it. They fixate on the new input, they'll study that which they do not know or have not explained. That's why we explore. It's not a human thing, it's a LIFE thing.
Neural networks may not be the primordial soup du jouer, but any complex system I observe, from selection pressure applied to randomly arrange instruction sets, or simplified chemical bonding chain sims, the tendency to "know" and experience more and generally become more complex is a common thread. If conditions are too hostile to allow such complexity to arise, then I wouldn't expect something like sentience, however, once that critical mass has been reached you can bet your bottom dollar the aliens would want to come and say "Hi", if for no other reason than to know more about the Universe.
Imagine what would happen if we detected a faint ordered "intelligent" signal from space, even a primitive one. Despite the impossible odds that the civilization would even be around to hear our response, EVERY damn nerd with a satellite dish would be re-purposing it to broadcast everything from the complete works of Shakespeare to Girl-on-Xenomorph Porn. You think mountain climbers climb because they want to? No. Go talk to one. The mountain is THERE. It must be climbed. There's an almost insatiable lust in explorers, human, animal and artificial alike. If you think for one second that we'd turn down the chance to pop over for a spot of alien tea, were it in our power to do so, then you haven't been studying life for very long.
Now, the idea of "wanting" might not apply to even us in a post-scarcity economy, but you can be damn sure that keeping fresh configurations of neurons firing is the unwritten prime directive of the cosmos. Accelerating the rate of knowing just makes you get bored FASTER! It means you need more input quicker to keep you entertained. What do you get the cosmic collective mind that already knows everything? 7 billion irrational unpredictable under-evolved pets to study, that's what.
Does anyone besides me find it ironic that the piracy capital of the world managed to sue a US company? And win?
Of all the places to lose a copyright infringement case as a defendant...how the hell did it happen in China of all places?
Simple. Copyright holder sues unlicensed distributor of content. Funny how those crazy laws work, eh? I mean, wow! It's like they totally disregarded the American and Chinese "Pirate" citizens, and just had a case over copyright infringement between businesses that didn't wind up costing some huge ridiculous millions in damages. That's INSANE! LOL, silly China.
Yeah, I don't have a problem with genetically modified food sciences, but you give 'em an inch and they take a mile. If we could trust them to simply improve the size and frequency of fruiting bodies' production then that would be great, but they don't stop there -- Some of these GMO food producers decide that we need to make poisonous plants to prevent bugs from eating them without actual long-term studies to validate their claims of harmlessness -- Scientists don't make conclusions based on lack of evidence. We need proof they're not harmful to us and the environment. We don't have that proof.
It's the unwillingness of people to think clearly that is harming us. We can use SOME types of genetic modifications without using others; However, corporations maximize profits and pundits aren't typically adequately educated, so we end up with people polarized on the issue and no real way forward -- no compromises, no middle ground.
The wholesale rejection is the only option for some if the ones making the modified food say they'll put the poison gene in or you get no GMO at all... The gene splicers are just as much at fault for this, and that's without even delving into BS patent issues and neutered seeds that could lead to even MORE dependence on foreign entities for food.
Be careful when you paint with a wide brush, you may end up with paint in your eyes.
The hallway time is the reason to go. Some of the sessions and labs get your in person with the leads of most of the teams and its not unheard of for app developers or companies who have issues to vent them there and see software updates in the future reflect those problems. The sessions they post online for everyone, but the hallway time and closed discussions are absolutely worth the cost of 1-2 tickets, not to mention you are not just talking about Apple here, but Google comes and pretty much every major developer is there.
Wow, that's interesting! I never thought folks would pay for permission to gather in hallways! If that's the real reason to go, then you'd think devs would pay far less for some convention space, multiple times a year. Back in my day I just went to SIGs (special interest groups) at HAL-PC (a local computer club). There were regular gatherings where everyone would get together in a huge meet-up too. Why, I remember watching demonstrations of OS/2 Warp at the George R Brown convention center, and Windows95 later (in 1996...). Witnessing new "cutting edge" presentations (marketing) stuff cost me yearly club dues of $50. The hallway time was just as good, if not better than at today's events -- due to local meetups meaning we could actully hook up aftwerwards and actually do something together.
I guess in the digital world folks can just collaborate online, so demand for local SIGs has dwindled. You know what? Someone ought to come up with an online digital equivalent of those real-world forums for folks who share similar interests. I bet it would be a big hit with the kids these days. You could charge a fortune for accounts!
Oh, and I don't have any lawn you can get off of. I'm only 30-ish (in Earth years).
Welcome to The New Digtal Age.
Just like all others ages that came before there are two different sets of rules for the elites and the commoners.
The primary differences the Digital Ages offers are merely the ways in which said rules are subverted, abused, obscured, and/or exposed; And the fact you can now leverage artificial scarcity by confusing people about the economics of infinitely reproducible digital "goods"...
Companies that gather their wealth by leveraging artificial scarcity (bits are in infinite supply) can easily slash their workforces and continue profiting by their infinite price hikes: if ( supply == infinity ) price = 0;// Regardless of cost to create. If price is greater than zero then the markup tends toward infinity.
If instead the company was marketing something that is actually scarce -- it's ability to do work: configure the bits -- then their profit would be directly related to the capacity to perform work and create new content. Right now their profits are decoupled from the actual artists capable of creating works -- The people you want your money to go towards when you pay for the works. This system of publishing is flawed: By having no guarantee of even interest from the customers the publishers gamble with the fate of those making the works. If they make a great product one round, but stumble once, they are cut away as failures.
All other labor markets do not use artificial scarcity. Artists can be commissioned to make works and they can rest secure in that their efforts have been funded. Mechanics and Home builders and all service industry employees get guarantees for their work in the form of employment contracts, the laws of the land ensure they will get paid for their work. The workers under a Publisher are actually guaranteed via employment contract, but the publisher itself has no assurance that the real customer will pay the price sufficient to keep producing works.
Clearly the problem is copyright -- The enforcement of artificial scarcity. You don't own your work, the customer who paid for it does. Only by the economically untenable practice of enforcing copyright are the producers able to sell something that is in infinite supply (copies). It would be like selling ice to Eskimos, or sand to beach bums.
Interestingly, crowd funding has come a long way towards cutting out the Publishers who seek to maximize profit far beyond the cost to create works. Instead you can ask the customers directly what works they would like to fund, and then do the work for the agreed upon price, then give the works to all the public for free (because they already paid to have it created). To the artists themselves this is no different than working under the Publisher. Sadly, greed prevents most of the independent developers who crowd-source funding from avoiding the artificial scarcity racket -- They fall to the same moronic methods that the Publishers do when they sell copies. The publishers must inflate price just to justify their own existence, but their practices do not need to exist. Instead, they could simply do more work to make more money -- get assurances from the customers for payment and make new things -- and never have to worry about being laid off again.
I write this to inform any former EA employees (or anyone in their positions) that there is another way to make a living -- The way I do: You can have a solid future, but you must change your damn minds about copyrights. Market your ability to do work directly to the customers, like all others in labor markets do. If you can't manage to come to grips with the reality that selling Ice to Eskimos is a laughable business strategy for everyone involved, then at least unionize you fools! Crunch Time?! NO. That reeks of incompetent management, and abusive manipulation. It is no coincidence that the workers having the problems of instability, churn and abuse to this degree are also those that ultimately make profits by way of artificial scarcity...
I wouldn't go that far, but at the very least look into PostgreSQL and see what it can do -- I mean, doesn't look like it's going to be upended anytime soon.
Also, this whole mess is what happens when folks settle for non-free binary blobs in their otherwise free & open source software.
If by some miracle the copyright terms get shortened and abandoned works enter the public domain sooner, then we win.
What's more likely to happen is that they'll make the copyright laws even more restrictive with longer terms bigger fines for infringement, etc. Go down this road far enough and the common folk will start to feel pressure from the jackboot at their throat and actually do something about it.
In other words: Either they make it worse, and who gives a crap -- it really can't get much worse than it is right now, or it gets a bit better.
IMO, I'd rather have copyright laws get a lot worse and eventually force a drastic change than have some piddling teeter-totter back and forth to stay just under the amount of crap the public will put up with -- Which is what's actually happening here.
I agree, but you don't even need to pull out the physical analogues (nudie mags), you can just say: Well, what if they have a saved smut images and videos on their laptop / mobile phone. Can't they just pull those right up and look at them anytime anywhere? WIFI be damned, the censorship law does absolutely nothing. Hell, you could put your smart-phone in your pants, snap a shot, and pull it back out with porn on it.
Hell ditch ALL the tech: what's to keep folks from being lewd right there in public without even needing pictures or printouts?! What are you going to do if orgies break out in the streets?! Castrate EVERYONE! Including the Kids! It's the only way to be SAFE from PORN!!!
Guh, what a daft git Cameron is. Whatever indecency law that prevents folks from whipping out their cocks and having a wank any time they please in public already has you covered when it comes to free public WIFI porn on laptops.
So, if you make your fortune by collecting information about everything including what some folks would consider 'private', readily divulge the information to governments without notifying those the data was collected about, then have a problem when others begin collecting information that's publicly available, does that make you a fool or a hypocrite an elitist, or what? I'm having a problem classifying the degree to which Schmidt's foot is crammed down his own throat.
I really think we need to change the 2nd amendment to be "The Right to Bear Technology" (this includes cryptography).
If you break the html standard... each browser will interpret things even more differently than they already do.
Yep, the author doesn't truly understand WHY HTML works and that's because it's interpreted by the browser a certain way.
It's like folks are ignorant that PDFs use PostScript, which looks a lot more the same across devices and rendererers than HTML because that's what it was designed to do. The issue I have is that we could actually do that for the web. We could come up with a compact text / glyph rendering specification that gave proper down to the pixel instructions how things should be rendered, even at various resolutions. It could be very simple too, because you wouldn't have to define a hundred different tags to to the same thing: Apply color and positioning attributes to shapes. Once we have that low level definition system, you could re-implement HTML atop it if you wanted, or we could come up with domain specific markups -- And they can all compile down to the same standardized pixel perfect text & shape rendering system. I mean, we know how to do this. We've done it, we keep doing it. Look at SVG, that's what happens when you try to implement glyph systems atop HTML... Yeah, I know XML != HTML, but which came first? I know ECMA Script is supposed to be the definition of JavaScript, but guess which came first? These things weren't designed to do the jobs we're applying them to, and we all suffer for it. At the end of the day we're using a stateless protocol for document interchange and a static content display system along with a horribly slow and inefficient scripting language to create stateful dynamic web applications, and we demand performance. Look if you give me a picture frame made of wood, a canvas and some paint, and I produce your content then you say you want it to animate and remember who looked at it, and be strong as steel... Well, I'm going to tell you we need to start over, you fucking changed the project's parameters too much.... We need to start over. Things have changed, we're shoehorning in too much crap atop a shite standard that was okay for one thing, but isn't really geared towards what we want to do now.
This is backwards standardization of BASIC features is all because we're using the web for applications. Crap, I JUST NOW in Firefox 20 am able to generate a data URL with client side javascript that allows you to click it and save your data to disk. Next up? Being able to load a file into the damn program. No, that's not even fucking there yet, yes the file reader API is somewhat existant in some browsers, but it's a BASIC fucking feature, but come the cunt on man! Why isn't it working and in the standard already?!?! Because, we're using HTML+JS for shit it was never intended to do, and when you keep bolting all these extra features instead of starting out with them, you wind up with something that's so horribly complex it's damn near impossible to maintain and is riddled with security problems -- Gee, just like the fucking Web.
Customer changes the goalposts drastically, we scrap it all and re-engineer it. If we don't we KNOW what the crap will happen. We have PROOF. It's time to let HTML die.
We have defined electron as matter only because it is part of what we're made of. If however, atoms were composed of positrons instead of electrons, wouldn't electrons be considered anti-matter?
Perhaps, but that's the thing. Super symmetry doesn't exist, so things would work differently in the anti-matter dominated universe.
i mean isn't that the only difficulty of assembling ikea furniture? reading the manual instead of just diving in and hoping you'll figure it out yourself?
Often times the dive-in approach is required at some stage -- even if you RTFM -- due to incompleteness or mistake laden documentation.
In other words: T M is to F'd to R.
Exactly. And that's the whole point so many people seem to be missing here: we nerds KNOW this "acquihire" was bogus and stupid, but the mainstream media and the 99% of non-geek population saw all the headlines about Yahoo! buying some hip startup (from a 17 year old genius no less!), said to themselves "that's cool" and MOVED ON to other issues.
IOW, Yahoo! bought "coolness" for 30 millions. I say it was a good deal.
Yahoo rented mild "coolness" for all of 3days or so at most in the main demographics before they, as you put it, "MOVED ON to other issues". Anyone with half a brain realized it was a dumb move. I say it was a crappy deal; Bottomless coffers be damned. Even my non-tech savvy mom said, "They paid how many millions for live-bookmarks like in Firefox? It's making the news because it's stupid, right? If I had stock there I'd sell it before they mess up big." -- While she was somewhat wrong, it does some crappy summarizing thing too (but folks who publish RSS feeds do usually provide a quick headline / summary in the titles), she was mostly right, IMO. She said it reminded her of when she got rid of AOL and then they became AOL-Warner Cable (she meant time-warner), since she doesn't use yahoo mail anymore.
All the anecdotal evidence I've come by points to their "coolness" was equivalent to tripping over nothing like a klutz then saying, "I meant to do that", except it cost $30 million to do so.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, that's some pot/kettle 'black'
More like pot calling the refrigerator black.
More like pot smoking the refridgerator sober.
But Schmidt also doesn't have much patience for critics: 'Criticisms are inevitably from people who are afraid of change, or who have not figured out that there will be an adaptation of society.'"
Fucking idiot. Criticisms don't only come from people who are afraid of change. Personally, I don't even consider my body to be what makes me "me", and would love to replace it all with sturdier mechanical parts. I love the rate at which humans keep making technology smaller and merging with it: Clothes are Wearable Shelters. Glasses are magnifying lenses you wear, and Contacts are glasses IN your eyes. We have titanium hips and even exoskeletons helping the disabled to walk again. Tech is great! Adding a digital camera and HUD to my optical systems sounds awesome!
However, I WANT TO CONTROL MY BODY. I don't value my flesh the same way others do, but I realize that it IS important to be able to control my body in whatever form it takes. I don't want to wear a prison. I don't want to wear a tracking device (unless I can control who can track it). I consider my clothes to be just a part of my body as I consider my bones. My skin is a mobile temperature regulating wetsuit perfect for being born on Earth and exploring a great deal of this Planet; I've grown quite attached to my body and its more temporary parts (shirts, hair, etc), and respect and care for my self-grown or artificial coverings; I would treat any replacement or modification thereof as equally valuable and deserving of care. Most of all, I want to be able to fix things if they break, and a replacement is a ways off -- That's a prime concern for anything I integrate with in a substantial life affecting way.
Fortunately my skin is self healing, it contains the data and systems needed to provide this function and I carry the repair mechanisms with me everywhere -- It's important to my continued exploration of this world. I know how contacts work exactly, their design is fully transparent to me. I know how to fix glasses and the mathematics for shaping their lenses are readily available to me. Where are the damn design documents, technical specs, and and source code for these new optical sensors you're selling me? If they're to become part of my body in a significant degree to change ME then I NEED this basic info, or we're at an impasse. I need to be able to know EVERYTHING about how they operate. If they're not just toys, if they will potentially help me change the life I live, then there are some CONCERNS and Criticisms that need to be addressed -- Firstly, your attitude towards my concerns, and secondly the degree of ownership I have over these new body parts we both want me to adopt.
I want to control my clothes. I don't want what I wear spying on me or sending signals that I don't want them to send. I don't want YOU to own MY BODY or everything that I do; Especially I don't want you owning copyright over all the things I see. There are a host of other concerns I have, but I don't care to voice them all here because I have better things to do than put forth questions into culture that will be ignored by the likes of Schmidt. If you shy away from the concerns of critics then I guess you don't care to reassure the people who are your prime adopters, most ready for change that you actually give a fuck about what's really important. The privacy implications become GREATLY increased the closer I integrate any technology with my brain, you fool!
Seriously, someone ought to filter this fucker's output because he's making himself out to be a fucking idiot. Let me get this straight, I shouldn't be able to give my eyeballs wings and let them soar over the land and see what they can see, but I shouldn't criticize people who want to co-opt my visions for marketing purposes? For someone who advocates adapting to social changes wrought by technological advances, Schmidt seems to be pretty fucking hypocritical when it comes to actually adjusting to the changes himself. That f
I've studied neuron systems in both animals and computer simulations. Know what happens when the inputs become the same over enough time? Boredom. Know what happens if you just randomly change one pixel in a field of view of an OCR machine intelligence? The same thing that happens when you do that with people. They stare at it. They fixate on the new input, they'll study that which they do not know or have not explained. That's why we explore. It's not a human thing, it's a LIFE thing.
Neural networks may not be the primordial soup du jouer, but any complex system I observe, from selection pressure applied to randomly arrange instruction sets, or simplified chemical bonding chain sims, the tendency to "know" and experience more and generally become more complex is a common thread. If conditions are too hostile to allow such complexity to arise, then I wouldn't expect something like sentience, however, once that critical mass has been reached you can bet your bottom dollar the aliens would want to come and say "Hi", if for no other reason than to know more about the Universe.
Imagine what would happen if we detected a faint ordered "intelligent" signal from space, even a primitive one. Despite the impossible odds that the civilization would even be around to hear our response, EVERY damn nerd with a satellite dish would be re-purposing it to broadcast everything from the complete works of Shakespeare to Girl-on-Xenomorph Porn. You think mountain climbers climb because they want to? No. Go talk to one. The mountain is THERE. It must be climbed. There's an almost insatiable lust in explorers, human, animal and artificial alike. If you think for one second that we'd turn down the chance to pop over for a spot of alien tea, were it in our power to do so, then you haven't been studying life for very long.
Now, the idea of "wanting" might not apply to even us in a post-scarcity economy, but you can be damn sure that keeping fresh configurations of neurons firing is the unwritten prime directive of the cosmos. Accelerating the rate of knowing just makes you get bored FASTER! It means you need more input quicker to keep you entertained. What do you get the cosmic collective mind that already knows everything? 7 billion irrational unpredictable under-evolved pets to study, that's what.
Does anyone besides me find it ironic that the piracy capital of the world managed to sue a US company? And win?
Of all the places to lose a copyright infringement case as a defendant...how the hell did it happen in China of all places?
Simple. Copyright holder sues unlicensed distributor of content. Funny how those crazy laws work, eh? I mean, wow! It's like they totally disregarded the American and Chinese "Pirate" citizens, and just had a case over copyright infringement between businesses that didn't wind up costing some huge ridiculous millions in damages. That's INSANE! LOL, silly China.
Yeah, I don't have a problem with genetically modified food sciences, but you give 'em an inch and they take a mile. If we could trust them to simply improve the size and frequency of fruiting bodies' production then that would be great, but they don't stop there -- Some of these GMO food producers decide that we need to make poisonous plants to prevent bugs from eating them without actual long-term studies to validate their claims of harmlessness -- Scientists don't make conclusions based on lack of evidence. We need proof they're not harmful to us and the environment. We don't have that proof.
It's the unwillingness of people to think clearly that is harming us. We can use SOME types of genetic modifications without using others; However, corporations maximize profits and pundits aren't typically adequately educated, so we end up with people polarized on the issue and no real way forward -- no compromises, no middle ground.
The wholesale rejection is the only option for some if the ones making the modified food say they'll put the poison gene in or you get no GMO at all... The gene splicers are just as much at fault for this, and that's without even delving into BS patent issues and neutered seeds that could lead to even MORE dependence on foreign entities for food.
Be careful when you paint with a wide brush, you may end up with paint in your eyes.
And all I get is 1.5mbps DSL because they are still using ancient copper out in my neck of the woods. C'mon... PLEASE.
They are trying to Link you with the technology of the Century!
They just prefer a different set of decades than you do.
The hallway time is the reason to go. Some of the sessions and labs get your in person with the leads of most of the teams and its not unheard of for app developers or companies who have issues to vent them there and see software updates in the future reflect those problems. The sessions they post online for everyone, but the hallway time and closed discussions are absolutely worth the cost of 1-2 tickets, not to mention you are not just talking about Apple here, but Google comes and pretty much every major developer is there.
Wow, that's interesting! I never thought folks would pay for permission to gather in hallways! If that's the real reason to go, then you'd think devs would pay far less for some convention space, multiple times a year. Back in my day I just went to SIGs (special interest groups) at HAL-PC (a local computer club). There were regular gatherings where everyone would get together in a huge meet-up too. Why, I remember watching demonstrations of OS/2 Warp at the George R Brown convention center, and Windows95 later (in 1996...). Witnessing new "cutting edge" presentations (marketing) stuff cost me yearly club dues of $50. The hallway time was just as good, if not better than at today's events -- due to local meetups meaning we could actully hook up aftwerwards and actually do something together.
I guess in the digital world folks can just collaborate online, so demand for local SIGs has dwindled. You know what? Someone ought to come up with an online digital equivalent of those real-world forums for folks who share similar interests. I bet it would be a big hit with the kids these days. You could charge a fortune for accounts!
Oh, and I don't have any lawn you can get off of. I'm only 30-ish (in Earth years).
Who do I contact to invest in your Ticket Futures market?
Welcome to The New Digtal Age.
Just like all others ages that came before there are two different sets of rules for the elites and the commoners.
The primary differences the Digital Ages offers are merely the ways in which said rules are subverted, abused, obscured, and/or exposed; And the fact you can now leverage artificial scarcity by confusing people about the economics of infinitely reproducible digital "goods"...
Dear poster,
Please add the following line to your host file(s):
0.0.0.0 slashdot.org
Companies that gather their wealth by leveraging artificial scarcity (bits are in infinite supply) can easily slash their workforces and continue profiting by their infinite price hikes: // Regardless of cost to create.
if ( supply == infinity ) price = 0;
If price is greater than zero then the markup tends toward infinity.
If instead the company was marketing something that is actually scarce -- it's ability to do work: configure the bits -- then their profit would be directly related to the capacity to perform work and create new content. Right now their profits are decoupled from the actual artists capable of creating works -- The people you want your money to go towards when you pay for the works. This system of publishing is flawed: By having no guarantee of even interest from the customers the publishers gamble with the fate of those making the works. If they make a great product one round, but stumble once, they are cut away as failures.
All other labor markets do not use artificial scarcity. Artists can be commissioned to make works and they can rest secure in that their efforts have been funded. Mechanics and Home builders and all service industry employees get guarantees for their work in the form of employment contracts, the laws of the land ensure they will get paid for their work. The workers under a Publisher are actually guaranteed via employment contract, but the publisher itself has no assurance that the real customer will pay the price sufficient to keep producing works.
Clearly the problem is copyright -- The enforcement of artificial scarcity. You don't own your work, the customer who paid for it does. Only by the economically untenable practice of enforcing copyright are the producers able to sell something that is in infinite supply (copies). It would be like selling ice to Eskimos, or sand to beach bums.
Interestingly, crowd funding has come a long way towards cutting out the Publishers who seek to maximize profit far beyond the cost to create works. Instead you can ask the customers directly what works they would like to fund, and then do the work for the agreed upon price, then give the works to all the public for free (because they already paid to have it created). To the artists themselves this is no different than working under the Publisher. Sadly, greed prevents most of the independent developers who crowd-source funding from avoiding the artificial scarcity racket -- They fall to the same moronic methods that the Publishers do when they sell copies. The publishers must inflate price just to justify their own existence, but their practices do not need to exist. Instead, they could simply do more work to make more money -- get assurances from the customers for payment and make new things -- and never have to worry about being laid off again.
I write this to inform any former EA employees (or anyone in their positions) that there is another way to make a living -- The way I do: You can have a solid future, but you must change your damn minds about copyrights. Market your ability to do work directly to the customers, like all others in labor markets do. If you can't manage to come to grips with the reality that selling Ice to Eskimos is a laughable business strategy for everyone involved, then at least unionize you fools! Crunch Time?! NO. That reeks of incompetent management, and abusive manipulation. It is no coincidence that the workers having the problems of instability, churn and abuse to this degree are also those that ultimately make profits by way of artificial scarcity...
I wouldn't go that far, but at the very least look into PostgreSQL and see what it can do -- I mean, doesn't look like it's going to be upended anytime soon.
Also, this whole mess is what happens when folks settle for non-free binary blobs in their otherwise free & open source software.
bad ... good ... pleased ... smells like ... gayness... because ... bad ... Good ... LUCKY ... willing ... means ... little ... cool ... try ... bullshit ... can ... whining ... cry ... community ... really ... need ... brilliant ... circle jerk ... offer ... rainbows ... unicorns ... best ... community?
Well, that's like, your opinion, man.
Humans are not Plants.
If by some miracle the copyright terms get shortened and abandoned works enter the public domain sooner, then we win.
What's more likely to happen is that they'll make the copyright laws even more restrictive with longer terms bigger fines for infringement, etc. Go down this road far enough and the common folk will start to feel pressure from the jackboot at their throat and actually do something about it.
In other words: Either they make it worse, and who gives a crap -- it really can't get much worse than it is right now, or it gets a bit better.
IMO, I'd rather have copyright laws get a lot worse and eventually force a drastic change than have some piddling teeter-totter back and forth to stay just under the amount of crap the public will put up with -- Which is what's actually happening here.
I agree, but you don't even need to pull out the physical analogues (nudie mags), you can just say: Well, what if they have a saved smut images and videos on their laptop / mobile phone. Can't they just pull those right up and look at them anytime anywhere? WIFI be damned, the censorship law does absolutely nothing. Hell, you could put your smart-phone in your pants, snap a shot, and pull it back out with porn on it.
Hell ditch ALL the tech: what's to keep folks from being lewd right there in public without even needing pictures or printouts?! What are you going to do if orgies break out in the streets?! Castrate EVERYONE! Including the Kids! It's the only way to be SAFE from PORN!!!
Guh, what a daft git Cameron is. Whatever indecency law that prevents folks from whipping out their cocks and having a wank any time they please in public already has you covered when it comes to free public WIFI porn on laptops.
So, if you make your fortune by collecting information about everything including what some folks would consider 'private', readily divulge the information to governments without notifying those the data was collected about, then have a problem when others begin collecting information that's publicly available, does that make you a fool or a hypocrite an elitist, or what? I'm having a problem classifying the degree to which Schmidt's foot is crammed down his own throat.
I really think we need to change the 2nd amendment to be "The Right to Bear Technology" (this includes cryptography).
If you break the html standard... each browser will interpret things even more differently than they already do.
Yep, the author doesn't truly understand WHY HTML works and that's because it's interpreted by the browser a certain way.
It's like folks are ignorant that PDFs use PostScript, which looks a lot more the same across devices and rendererers than HTML because that's what it was designed to do. The issue I have is that we could actually do that for the web. We could come up with a compact text / glyph rendering specification that gave proper down to the pixel instructions how things should be rendered, even at various resolutions. It could be very simple too, because you wouldn't have to define a hundred different tags to to the same thing: Apply color and positioning attributes to shapes. Once we have that low level definition system, you could re-implement HTML atop it if you wanted, or we could come up with domain specific markups -- And they can all compile down to the same standardized pixel perfect text & shape rendering system. I mean, we know how to do this. We've done it, we keep doing it. Look at SVG, that's what happens when you try to implement glyph systems atop HTML... Yeah, I know XML != HTML, but which came first? I know ECMA Script is supposed to be the definition of JavaScript, but guess which came first? These things weren't designed to do the jobs we're applying them to, and we all suffer for it. At the end of the day we're using a stateless protocol for document interchange and a static content display system along with a horribly slow and inefficient scripting language to create stateful dynamic web applications, and we demand performance. Look if you give me a picture frame made of wood, a canvas and some paint, and I produce your content then you say you want it to animate and remember who looked at it, and be strong as steel... Well, I'm going to tell you we need to start over, you fucking changed the project's parameters too much.... We need to start over. Things have changed, we're shoehorning in too much crap atop a shite standard that was okay for one thing, but isn't really geared towards what we want to do now.
This is backwards standardization of BASIC features is all because we're using the web for applications. Crap, I JUST NOW in Firefox 20 am able to generate a data URL with client side javascript that allows you to click it and save your data to disk. Next up? Being able to load a file into the damn program. No, that's not even fucking there yet, yes the file reader API is somewhat existant in some browsers, but it's a BASIC fucking feature, but come the cunt on man! Why isn't it working and in the standard already?!?! Because, we're using HTML+JS for shit it was never intended to do, and when you keep bolting all these extra features instead of starting out with them, you wind up with something that's so horribly complex it's damn near impossible to maintain and is riddled with security problems -- Gee, just like the fucking Web.
Customer changes the goalposts drastically, we scrap it all and re-engineer it. If we don't we KNOW what the crap will happen. We have PROOF. It's time to let HTML die.
You folks that torrent movies and stuff that is not in the public domain are crazy in my book.
"You black folks that ignore corrupt laws and sit at the front of the bus are crazy in my book!"
You ask for a companion programming language and at the same time propose eliminating Javascript. I see a contradiction in there.
As someone who uses JavaScript daily, I see no contradiction. Perhaps you've confused it with an programming language?
I guess sex has its price to pay.
Who needs sex if you've got your own cold concrete womb to play in?
We have defined electron as matter only because it is part of what we're made of. If however, atoms were composed of positrons instead of electrons, wouldn't electrons be considered anti-matter?
Perhaps, but that's the thing. Super symmetry doesn't exist, so things would work differently in the anti-matter dominated universe.
Now, if the human would hold the tabletop near the robot, and the robot would pick up the legs and screw them in, that would be something.
Or, if the human could just relax on the tabletop while the robot screwed it, that would be something.
i mean isn't that the only difficulty of assembling ikea furniture? reading the manual instead of just diving in and hoping you'll figure it out yourself?
Often times the dive-in approach is required at some stage -- even if you RTFM -- due to incompleteness or mistake laden documentation.
In other words: T M is to F'd to R.
Exactly. And that's the whole point so many people seem to be missing here: we nerds KNOW this "acquihire" was bogus and stupid, but the mainstream media and the 99% of non-geek population saw all the headlines about Yahoo! buying some hip startup (from a 17 year old genius no less!), said to themselves "that's cool" and MOVED ON to other issues.
IOW, Yahoo! bought "coolness" for 30 millions. I say it was a good deal.
Yahoo rented mild "coolness" for all of 3days or so at most in the main demographics before they, as you put it, "MOVED ON to other issues". Anyone with half a brain realized it was a dumb move. I say it was a crappy deal; Bottomless coffers be damned. Even my non-tech savvy mom said, "They paid how many millions for live-bookmarks like in Firefox? It's making the news because it's stupid, right? If I had stock there I'd sell it before they mess up big." -- While she was somewhat wrong, it does some crappy summarizing thing too (but folks who publish RSS feeds do usually provide a quick headline / summary in the titles), she was mostly right, IMO. She said it reminded her of when she got rid of AOL and then they became AOL-Warner Cable (she meant time-warner), since she doesn't use yahoo mail anymore.
All the anecdotal evidence I've come by points to their "coolness" was equivalent to tripping over nothing like a klutz then saying, "I meant to do that", except it cost $30 million to do so.