You'll be paid exactly what you're worth in the market at any given time
From all appearances, this is the single non-inflammatory statement in your comment. This statement also appears to make the entirety of your point.
Presuming that you are still marginally dealing with unions at this point, you appear to be saying that untiosn will force companies to pay above-market wages for employees. You, sir, have failed economic 101 - wage controls, and above-market wages are coltrolled as much by unions as below-market by government, simply do not work. In the case of enforced above-market wages, compainies will do their best to avoid paying them (a common exanple of which would be shrinking the size of the IT departments). If laws or the nature of the buisness make outright layoffs impossible or extremely difficult, companies will seek to move as much as possible out of the union-controlled area.
Exempting physical maintinance and management, there is very little IT done here that can't be done in Japan. If the cost of buisness in Japan is cheaper than the cost of buisness in the U.S. (or UK, etc.), then companies will move -- it's as simple as that.
Who do you think this [inflation] affects more? Poor people, or rich?
[In an unassuming, Marcus Cole-type voice]Um, I hate to burst your bubble here, but it's actually the rich.[/voice]
True inflation represents an increase in prices as well as wages. The poor have their wages increased in value comparably to the price increase, so the goods-value of an hour's labor remains largely unchanged. The rich, on the other hand, have something that the poor lack - significant wealth in assets. Although some assets in wealth also move up with inflation (like property, goods, gold), anything that's in cash [like that checking account] goes down in value.
Inflation, especially in moderate amounts, is largely irrelevant when the income/wealth ratio is large, and more damaging when the opposite is true.
Also on your claim that the 'natural' state of currency is to deflate at 2%/year (which seems rather odd in and of itself... why would a currency naturally shrink?), presumably based upon gold prices related to the dollar & inflation rate, you may be neglecting the fact that the economy is growing faster than we're mining gold -- gold suffers from suply/demmand effects just like any other commodity.
In the very short term it was efficiently run. In the longer term, it failed utterly.
To be (-1, offtopic) here, we don't know how thata form of government would have worked over the long-term -- being defeated in a war kind of robbed us of that chance. Nazi-era Germany was, according to all of the histories I've read, very successful at rebuilding the economy, mobilizing its industry, and making superior weaponry (Jet Planes, anyone?) under the pressure of a couple blockades. As I remember, they ran their war machine on largely synthetic oil. The only problem was that its buisness model was based around total market/world dominance, and the Venture Capitalists weren't willing to invest in that as much as they needed.:)
To bring this back on topic, we also have yet to prove that cheatbots are capable of winning in the long term. Client-side cheats are primarially enabled due to the computer having data that the user doesn't. If/when broadband becomes the norm, a large portion of that information cheating may become obsolete as the server does much more of the LOS.
Nope - Goodwin's only applies when you compare/namecall the other side in a debate Hitler or Nazis - although the previous poster brought up the Nazi government, he firstly acknowledged that it was a bad example and he secondly was not calling cheaters Nazis: he was contrasting gamers' reactions to the cheaters based primarially upon their technical skills to modern society's (_not_ 40's society - that was a different beast) reaction to the Nazis based upon everything BUT their efficency. He did not make the implication that cheaters were white supremacists, commiting mass murder, or about to attempt to take over large portions of Europe.
Goodwin's would be invokable iff he said something like 'those cheaters are acting like the Nazi's, yet we don't condemn them like we should.'
Note for the pedantic: Goodwin's does not apply in historical debates when one side is actually taking the Nazi position on an issue.:)
Yes, we all love it, but do you really want to be a pawn for the studios, watching this scab movie while underpaid screen writers strike in solidarity?
If it means that they're going to re-release Monty Python, then yes.
system is pumping out illiterate boneheads by the thousands, teaching them that there aren't really right-or-wrong-answers to questions ("what is important is how-you-feel!") bother anyone? That self-declared film critics can write paragraphs like the one above, and be LAUDED by others instead of derided? Well, if these things don't bother you
Point One: I'm not entirely bothered by the progressive learning techniques, because in all the educational systems I've been exposed too the top-level of learning (Honors/Gifted level classes in 9'th and 10'th grades, AP in 11'th and 12'th) performs remarkably competently as a mass-educator. Those in lower rungs may be lead to beleive that they're competent when they're not, but it's not such a big deal - the world will teach them that within a year or two of HS graduation.
Point Two:
a) While your point about the writer being a film critic is somewhat valid as a questioning of his credintals, he is not making any new claim in and of itself - he is merely questioning the validity of studies published to date on the matter, and you don't need a PhD. in psychology to do that. Again, he's not pushing his own 'study.'
b) I carefully read your tirade twice, and I notice nothing that actually stands in contradiction to what he said (unless, I realize, you are operating with the premise that pornography is inherently evil. But that should be stated outright.). The film critic is not advocating unfettered access, especially in the quote you gave, he is questioning the assumption that pornography is inherently harmful. Any information presented to a child when he/she is unprepared to deal with it, or as you put it "contextualize what they see," stands a chance of harming him/her emotionally.
I quote from the article "Just because I think extreme protectionism is misguided doesn't mean that I think children should be exposed to anything and everything. Parents have to make those decisions for their own kids."
This man is arguing that it is not doing a child a favor to protect him/her completely from "inappropriate" material until the day he/she is 18 -- he argues that, if anything, the protectionism is doing him/her a disservice by both discouraging open discussion and decreasing preparation for the uncensored wonder of adult life. He says nothing about parental teachings of value (so long as they're not contradictory). He says nothing about parental guidance in general. And he is certainly not promoting or enocouraging the media as the primary source of values.
Your tirade was informed and insightful, but unfortunately you unleashed it upon someone who apparantly doesn't disagree with you.
I recently got a new logitech optical, wheeled mouse after my ancient mouse decided to effectively give up. Within a few days of using it, I noticed that my wrist/hand wasn't feeling quite right, and the oddest bit was happening to my middle finger of the right hand (the wheel finger) - it occasionally throbbed back and forth a little bit in time with my pulse.
Solution? Two-finger mousing. Index finger on left button, middle finger on right button, and the index finget actually muves over to wheel. All problems went away.
network as computers that are. The reason for this is simple: We have only a limited number of hubs, and there simple aren't enough to maintain two entirely seperare networks. Since the gradebook boxes do have to talk to each other, that means they have to share hubs with Internet machines. Could that be what happened in California?
IANANE (I Am Not A Networking Expert), but couldn't two seperate networks be theoreticially accomplished over the same wires via creative assignments of IP addresses & subnet masks?
IE, if one set of computers was 121.128.0.x, and the other was 121.0.0.x, and the subnet mask was 255.128.0.0.0 (forgive me if I get this wrong, I forget whether subnet masks are negative or positive), the computers might not be able to talk to each other, especially without a gateway set on the internal ones.
The server was physically removed by the police, and the disks wiped after 'evidence' was removed. All known backups were destroyed,
A. If everything has been destroyed except the 'evidence,' how is the university going to press its claim that this is their intellectual property? Seems like they'll have a hard time proving that.
More importantly, he just won every legal argument he could muster about the site. If the disks were wiped and only selected evidence was saved, as he claims, there is no, zero, and zilch way for him to get supporting evidence from that server. Essentially, he is unable to examine the entirety of the evidence, which is a fundamental violation of due process.
The real collapse will occur when these resources start to run out. This appears to be starting to happen to both oil and natural gas right now. Once demand exceeds all possible supply, the shit's gonna hit the fan and it's going to be a lot sooner than your AIs.
Um... hate to break this to you, but "these resources," or their functional equivalents, will never run out. We can synthesize oil today, and I suspect that it would be similar with natural gas. The only problem is that the synthetics are more expensive than what comes from the dirt, but that will change when the absolute supply begins to run out.
The only limiting factor in the synthesis of fuel (although Hydrogen would be better - we only use oil 'cause it's available and cheap) is energy, and that's pretty abundant, even when you exclude fuel-burning. At the extreme, I haven't heard serious problems raised with the idea of solar-orbit, solar-cell power plants.
Resources will not simply "run out" - they will be synthesized more and more, and the cost will go up. But they will not run out.
Let's take this one line by line:
on
Mundie Responds
·
· Score: 1
Here, I'll counter the main arguments of Mundie. ample quotation provided.
The business model for commercial software has a proven track record and is a key engine of economic growth for many countries. It has boosted productivity and efficiency in almost every sector of the economy, as businesses and individuals have enjoyed the wealth of tools, information and other activities made possible in the PC era.
It's not the buisness model that has boosted productivity - Joe Secretary doesn't care where his word processor came from, so long as he can use it well. The software (& hardware) itself is responsible for boosting productivity. Mundie attempts to draw a false analogy between commercial software and economic growth in non-software companies, whereas the relationship is from software in general.
We believe that one of these mechanisms is intellectual property rights. Without intellectual property protection, neither innovation nor a healthy commercial software industry is sustainable. The last 50 years of public- and private-sector collaboration has demonstrated that when intellectual property rights are protected, innovators are rewarded for their efforts. Furthermore, technology is advanced guaranteeing economic growth and a cycle of future collaboration, investment and innovation.
The GPL, according to everyone but RMS at his most radical, does not undermine IP by any means - in fact, it relies upon it for enforcement of the licence. What Microsoft's PR doesn't seem to get is that GPL'd code would not be available if it were not for the GPL. It would be binary-only, and no one would be able to use it. Under the GPL, the code is available for use, something completely new.
This isn't to say that some companies won't find a business plan that can make money releasing products under the GPL. We have yet to see such companies emerge, but perhaps some will. Recent history tells us, however, that finding a business model that works is difficult. According to ZDNet News, "Ransom Love, CEO of Caldera Systems...said he thinks Microsoft was right in its claim that the GPL doesn't make much business sense."
I'm sure some companies will emerge under a successful buisness model of selling proprietary software, too. GNU/Linux is pretty much the fundamental drive behind adoption of the GPL, and it's only been a few years since it got large enough to actually have companies built around the GPL. Companies that release GPL'd code don't (unless they're entirely stupid) indend to make money from the software - they make money from support, manuals, and everything else that makes it nice to use. The GPL makes great sense if your primary buisness isn't software, and you don't want to or can't afford a huge in-house development team for it. Drivers, for example.
Alfred North Whitehead, the renowned British philosopher, logician and mathematician, observed: "It is a great mistake to think that the bare scientific idea is the required invention, so that it has only to be picked up and used. An intense period of imaginative design lies between. One element in the new method is just the discovery of how to set about bridging the gap between the scientific ideas and the ultimate product. It is a process of disciplined attack upon one difficulty after another."
Thank you for just supporting the argument. Under the GPL, any popular product (or product-in-development) is sure to have many eyes looking upon it, and these many eyes can "attack upon one difficulty after another" far faster than the inherently limited in-house design team. GPL'd code has the potential to get done faster.
When comparing the commercial software model to the open-source software model, look carefully at the business plans and licensing structures that form their foundations. This comparison leads to the conclusion that the commercial software model alone has the capacity for sustaining real economic growth. Intellectual capital has always been, and will remain, the core asset of the software industry, and of almost every other industry. Preserving that capital--and investing in its constant renewal--benefits everyone. (Emphasis mine)
Firstly, Mundie just confirmed suspicions that Microsoft, from now on, intends to make its monet through simple replacement of old software, not through new innovation & completely new products.
Secondly, commerical software is only a tool of growth to the commercial software industry - given equal-quality products & support, a buisness simply doesn't care what brand name is on its server. To the buisness, it only matters that it works.
Finally, there is a term for "Preserving that capital--and investing in its constant renewal." It's called depreciation, and it's an inefficency. Depreciation is work spent replacing what you have instead of work spent growing, and that's why we have a Net-Domestic-Product (NDP) that accounts for it. Depreciation is a bad thing, and it should be avoided whenever feasible. According to Microsoft, one of their complete Uber-Systems (using their poducts from the boss's PDA on up to the super-servers) is ideally upgraded (in software) every 3 years or so, and their new leased licencing schemes seem to corroberate that. However, it's arguable at best that their new products are any better than their old ones, especially if you discount stability (which really should have been a priority since the beginning). If the software was GNU/Linux/Apache/MySQL/etc. and thus had an almost zero upgrade cost, the money could have been spent doing something else. Something more efficent. Something more productive.
Microsoft makes its money through depreciation costs. If something were to come along and decrease or eliminate the depreciation costs, the economy as a whole would be better off for it, as that money could be spent growing instead of replacing. Microsoft is fundamentally afraid that GNU/Linux & GPL will make those depreciation costs almost zero and thus makes it's buisness obsolete.
All of its arguments about proprietary software helping the economy (as opposed to Free/GPL/Etc.) apply almost exclusively to the Standardized Software Applications subset of the economy (Windows, Office, etc. NOT contracted, built-for-client software), which makes its money through inefficencies. GPL'd Applications, which have a tremendous development team precisely because of its widespread use, goes a long way to eliminating the inefficencies in the upgrade cycle - bugs are fixed, needed features are added, and there is no planned obsolecense all for zero cost to the adoptee.
Hey, could you stop using the ackronym GM? I keep getting it confused with Game Master, ala D&D.
how many lifetimes will it take to accurately decide whether the Game Master kids are alright? No matter what, it is too early to say that Game Mastering is 100% safe or that it will even give the recipient a higher quality of life.
Worse, it would do no good. You could use every square inch of the planet to produce food for humans, and have the most effecient distribution system possible, and there would still be widespread starvation. Why? Because populations always grow to meet their supply of food, whether that population consists of rats in a cage or humans in the wild is immaterial.
Sigh - the above post falls right into the malthustrian trap.
If we knew for a fact that every single sqare inch of dirt was going to become unsuitable for farming in 20 years, you'd likely predict total starvation. I, on the other hand, would predict some world hunger, radical changing of diets, but that the human species would go on.
Why would I predict that? This one is REAL easy - hydroponic farming. It is done to some limited extent today, and easily within 20 years it will be possible for high yields of staple products. Humanity has finally outgrown the malthustrian limitations. 20 years would be, in fact, plenty of time for the development of _space based_ food-growing tech if the incentive was great enough.
We currently are only using the dirt because it's the cheapest method of growing food. Hydroponics, et. all work, but they're horribly expensive by comparison. For all intents and purposes, the food supply is now UNLIMITED, given enough lead time.
Also, the food supply is not the sole limiting factor of species populations (contrasting with bio and calc 101, where they're teaching you exponential functions). There are also limits based upon predator populations, living space, and possibly some self-regulating behavior (lemmings jump off of cliffs, for example - it could be that destructive violence is a population-limiting behavior).
Finally, to bring this somewhat back on topic, the argument that we shouldn't help infertile couples is a scary one. That simple argument is equivalent to 'we shouldn't make cars because they pollute & take resources better spent feeding the poor', 'we shouldn't burn oil because it pollutes', and 'we shouldn't own houses when some people have to live in tenements & on the streets'. If you drive a car, use a light bulb every now and then, and have more square footage to yourself than the average college dorm bedroom, act before you speak.
PS: Population growth increases with the initial introduction of medical technology to decrease death rates and decreases with wealth. Rich countries have naturally decreasing populations, the U.S. included with nearly all of Western Europe. I don't see any massive starvation there, so the growth to carrying capacity argument might be flawed.
Of course, distributing any such hack for the purpose of defeating the security is a violation of the CDMA
The brillianat thing about this copy-control mechanism is that it is by no means any form of security. What the RIAA is doing is making their disks compatible with the CD-Audio format, but not the Data format; any driver hack that allows reading is 'making the drive fully compatible with the CD-Audio standard,' which sounds like a very large noninfringing use to me.
1. If corporations don't have to worry about this what stops me from getting my "big corp" sysadmin buddie to lend me a copy of there CD.
2. and even worse, if my machine will check into there central server fronm time to time what happens if it is down? We all know MS server products are stable, yeah right. Maybe they plan to run this server off of BSD like hotmail. When this server is down by crash, DOS Attack, or Squirrel chewing through the fiber cable are we out of luck, or even if my DSL line is down that day can I not use my computer till it comes back up? Just a little bit ago all of MSs Servers were down for a few days due to a DNS problem (or so they say)imagine if it was you desktops time to check in durring this outage, yikes.
1) Business versions, according to the Register, will not have this copy protection in it (the sdysadmins would revolt if it did)- anything with a multiple license, essentially. So you _can_ borrow the CD from work.
2) Last I've heard on it, it only checks in at install time. If that goes down or you have no internet connection, there are also reportedly phone numbers for you to get the key that way.
Yes, I aggree that they did an acceptable job for (probably) a bunch of technophobic Rv writers.
The only real flaw in it, that they used technobablle that didn't quite make sense, is completely irrelevant for the normal viewer, for whom computers are magic and can do anything.
If you don't know it's impossible, it's believable.
Althought I have limited knowledge of CPU design, I fear that this will fall apart in application. At the very least, the lack of a clock signal will mean that some instructions finish marginally faster than others; anything that's running 'behind' will have to wait for the next transistor-equivalent to be free. In more coherent terms, I fear that this chip will waste a good deal of time as, without regulation of a clock, the cpu will hit bottlenecks in slower components.
Anyone with experience in chip design want to make an evaluation of the possibility?
And the more complex it gets, the harder it is to see how a "simple" change can produce a series of mutations that leads to macro-evolution working.
On the contrary! As the system becomes more and more complex, it is more and more likely to become pseudo-chaotic. In chaotic systems, a small change in inputs can (and probably will) cause a large and unpredictable change inthe output.
If the genome (of anything) is such a system, then a change in a single gene or two can produce results changing the entire organism. Thus a single random mutation may, in fact, cause a large effect on the individual/species, undermining the counter-Darwinian argument that there simply has not been enough time for evolution to take place.
This also seems to play out in current similarity tests; as I seem to remember, for all their differences humans share about 99% of their genetic code - the closest species of monkey is only a percent or two off of that.
Theoretical advances from the study of the supercooled atoms aside, does anyone here have any idea how this technology might be directly put to some use?
As I seem to understand it, we're currently limited to cooling a few dozen atoms at a time; sure, they get awful cold, but hypercooled atoms won't be a major component of any system until we can get the number up into the thousands or tens of thousands range.
That's not amazing. If anything, it's extremely sad. Would these same people expend as much effort getting and retaining a job as they do stealing DSS, they'd have more than enough money to be able to PAY for DSS. People like this make me sick.
Aw, come on. Even presuming that all the people that were using hacked cards were doing so in the US, where it is illegal, as opposed to some/most being in Canada, where it's (according to previous comments) perfectly legal, your argument is still flawed.
Why do you climb a mountain? Because it's there. Half of the purpose of hacking like this [and it is hacking, not cracking, when you actually develop a new workaround like this] is the fun. Sure, these people are probably spending more in development than they'd spend on a full subscription, but that's like driving around the mountain.
Here we somewhat agree, I don't believe open source will every take off for end-user applcations (The Gimp excetped of course).
But I do think it will continue with the writing of drivers and improvement of applications that provide services (like Apache, mySQL, in other words applications used to make end user applications, or provide services, via the web to end users.)
I'm going to have to respectully disagree with you on this. While I too have my doubts that "time-limited" applications like (most) games will never truly take off as open source movements [1], many end-user applications have the same level of need as the lower level hardware support.
Open source software fundamentally serves a need; many people/programmers need their hardware to run, so they develop and maintain open source drivers. Many people need a web server, so they create/maintain one. Many people need a gui - they're there.
Propriatary development, however, is often directed lower-volume needs, especially when it's not a need for a tool. This is probably why the more obscure office tools, like page-setters and the like, don't have a tremendous open source following.
Mainstream office applications, some of the primary and necessary end-user applications, fall into the 'needed tools' category. Gcc is all fine and dandy, but I'm probably not going to be writing my {foo for my boss} in it. Many people need a feature-complete and stable office suite, geeks included - just like many people need a photoshop-like graphics app, which you excepted from your end-user clause. For that reason, I expect an open source office suite will (eventually) reach a feature-complete, usable state.
[1] - Most games are fundamentally driven by the vision of a core team. They're also on fairly tight releasing schedules, and often have to be complete upon release (especially when they're supposed to be commercially viable). Open source software tends to lack all of these - since programmers aren't paid, they're not likely to work on features they don't care much for. Also, open source software (often) never really reaches a 'finished, done, end of the line' state - it's ultimate feature creap (See: Emacs), and a developer can't release part of a game into the mainstream.
Of course, reasonable people will disagree on this, and I'm not at my most coherent now.
Maybe DoD wants to know how many people are visiting/., reading JK's article, and trying to order a copy of Voices in the Hellmouth;) I highly doubt that the DoD would be looking for successfully visited sites. Advertising wouldn't have much to do with National Defense. Of course, maybe they're in cahoots with the NSA in looking for brainwashing ad services. Who knows.
Although this is just a throwaway comment, it's completely invalid. I happen to go to (for the next 4 mos.) a high school that's recently installed the N2H2 software, much to the chagrin of prettty much any and all teachers that want to use the Internet in classrooms.
Slashdot is blocked.
Yes, I said Slashdot is blocked. It's even (probably) appropriately categorized (they don't actually show which category blocks the site)- Bess, in its default (block all) configuration, blocks sites that allow posting of semi-permanent or permanent comments.
Thankfully, they don't block either www.irtc.org, the Internet Raytracing Competition, or www.lp.org, the Libertarian Party website [vital in a government class].
Although the sun page (second link in parent) is mostly a bunch of anti.NET propaganda [in the same manner that Microsoft is pro.NET propaganda], it does contain one key insight:
Even then, developers architecting applications in C# face another set of pitfalls: lock-in. Any nontrivial application will need to use higher-level APIs (e.g. for database access, etc.) that are unlikely to be in the libraries turned over to a standards body. It doesn't take 100% of your application to be tied to.NET to result in platform lock -- just one critical piece. Therefore, by definition, any nontrivial.NET application will likely be extremely difficult to port to another operating system. The result is vendor lock in, the vendor being Microsoft. The Java language, VM, and APIs are all vendor neutral. There is no vendor lock in.
(Emphasis mine)
Microsoft, by upgrading all of its (by now fairly standard) development kits to.NET versions will be encouraging mainstream development to take place exclusively on the.NET platform.
By only releasing nonciritical libraries, any application developed on.NET will be locked to Microsoft-supported operating systems.
Therefore, mainstream development will be locked to Microsoft-supported operating systems, I.E. Windows. This, if adopted, will put one hell of a dent into third-party development and porting efforts on Linux/BSD/OS X development systems [which, incidentally, are all quite close to one another and might very well present a big challenge to Windows dominance in the future in the absence of developer incentives {see.NET}].
Microsoft, just like everyone else, probably knows that renting Office applications has as much of a chance to fly as my 17" monitor. The futore of.NET is in development, and that's really scary.
Slashdot Mirror
Do you want to invoke Goodwin, or should I?
From all appearances, this is the single non-inflammatory statement in your comment. This statement also appears to make the entirety of your point.
Presuming that you are still marginally dealing with unions at this point, you appear to be saying that untiosn will force companies to pay above-market wages for employees. You, sir, have failed economic 101 - wage controls, and above-market wages are coltrolled as much by unions as below-market by government, simply do not work. In the case of enforced above-market wages, compainies will do their best to avoid paying them (a common exanple of which would be shrinking the size of the IT departments). If laws or the nature of the buisness make outright layoffs impossible or extremely difficult, companies will seek to move as much as possible out of the union-controlled area.
Exempting physical maintinance and management, there is very little IT done here that can't be done in Japan. If the cost of buisness in Japan is cheaper than the cost of buisness in the U.S. (or UK, etc.), then companies will move -- it's as simple as that.
[In an unassuming, Marcus Cole-type voice]Um, I hate to burst your bubble here, but it's actually the rich.[/voice]
True inflation represents an increase in prices as well as wages. The poor have their wages increased in value comparably to the price increase, so the goods-value of an hour's labor remains largely unchanged. The rich, on the other hand, have something that the poor lack - significant wealth in assets. Although some assets in wealth also move up with inflation (like property, goods, gold), anything that's in cash [like that checking account] goes down in value.
Inflation, especially in moderate amounts, is largely irrelevant when the income/wealth ratio is large, and more damaging when the opposite is true.
Also on your claim that the 'natural' state of currency is to deflate at 2%/year (which seems rather odd in and of itself... why would a currency naturally shrink?), presumably based upon gold prices related to the dollar & inflation rate, you may be neglecting the fact that the economy is growing faster than we're mining gold -- gold suffers from suply/demmand effects just like any other commodity.
To be (-1, offtopic) here, we don't know how thata form of government would have worked over the long-term -- being defeated in a war kind of robbed us of that chance. Nazi-era Germany was, according to all of the histories I've read, very successful at rebuilding the economy, mobilizing its industry, and making superior weaponry (Jet Planes, anyone?) under the pressure of a couple blockades. As I remember, they ran their war machine on largely synthetic oil. The only problem was that its buisness model was based around total market/world dominance, and the Venture Capitalists weren't willing to invest in that as much as they needed. :)
To bring this back on topic, we also have yet to prove that cheatbots are capable of winning in the long term. Client-side cheats are primarially enabled due to the computer having data that the user doesn't. If/when broadband becomes the norm, a large portion of that information cheating may become obsolete as the server does much more of the LOS.
Goodwin's would be invokable iff he said something like 'those cheaters are acting like the Nazi's, yet we don't condemn them like we should.'
Note for the pedantic: Goodwin's does not apply in historical debates when one side is actually taking the Nazi position on an issue. :)
If it means that they're going to re-release Monty Python, then yes.
Point One: I'm not entirely bothered by the progressive learning techniques, because in all the educational systems I've been exposed too the top-level of learning (Honors/Gifted level classes in 9'th and 10'th grades, AP in 11'th and 12'th) performs remarkably competently as a mass-educator. Those in lower rungs may be lead to beleive that they're competent when they're not, but it's not such a big deal - the world will teach them that within a year or two of HS graduation.
Point Two:
a) While your point about the writer being a film critic is somewhat valid as a questioning of his credintals, he is not making any new claim in and of itself - he is merely questioning the validity of studies published to date on the matter, and you don't need a PhD. in psychology to do that. Again, he's not pushing his own 'study.'
b) I carefully read your tirade twice, and I notice nothing that actually stands in contradiction to what he said (unless, I realize, you are operating with the premise that pornography is inherently evil. But that should be stated outright.). The film critic is not advocating unfettered access, especially in the quote you gave, he is questioning the assumption that pornography is inherently harmful. Any information presented to a child when he/she is unprepared to deal with it, or as you put it "contextualize what they see," stands a chance of harming him/her emotionally.
I quote from the article "Just because I think extreme protectionism is misguided doesn't mean that I think children should be exposed to anything and everything. Parents have to make those decisions for their own kids."
This man is arguing that it is not doing a child a favor to protect him/her completely from "inappropriate" material until the day he/she is 18 -- he argues that, if anything, the protectionism is doing him/her a disservice by both discouraging open discussion and decreasing preparation for the uncensored wonder of adult life. He says nothing about parental teachings of value (so long as they're not contradictory). He says nothing about parental guidance in general. And he is certainly not promoting or enocouraging the media as the primary source of values.
Your tirade was informed and insightful, but unfortunately you unleashed it upon someone who apparantly doesn't disagree with you.
I recently got a new logitech optical, wheeled mouse after my ancient mouse decided to effectively give up. Within a few days of using it, I noticed that my wrist/hand wasn't feeling quite right, and the oddest bit was happening to my middle finger of the right hand (the wheel finger) - it occasionally throbbed back and forth a little bit in time with my pulse.
Solution? Two-finger mousing. Index finger on left button, middle finger on right button, and the index finget actually muves over to wheel. All problems went away.
IANANE (I Am Not A Networking Expert), but couldn't two seperate networks be theoreticially accomplished over the same wires via creative assignments of IP addresses & subnet masks?
IE, if one set of computers was 121.128.0.x, and the other was 121.0.0.x, and the subnet mask was 255.128.0.0.0 (forgive me if I get this wrong, I forget whether subnet masks are negative or positive), the computers might not be able to talk to each other, especially without a gateway set on the internal ones.
A. If everything has been destroyed except the 'evidence,' how is the university going to press its claim that this is their intellectual property? Seems like they'll have a hard time proving that.
More importantly, he just won every legal argument he could muster about the site. If the disks were wiped and only selected evidence was saved, as he claims, there is no, zero, and zilch way for him to get supporting evidence from that server. Essentially, he is unable to examine the entirety of the evidence, which is a fundamental violation of due process.
Um... hate to break this to you, but "these resources," or their functional equivalents, will never run out. We can synthesize oil today, and I suspect that it would be similar with natural gas. The only problem is that the synthetics are more expensive than what comes from the dirt, but that will change when the absolute supply begins to run out.
The only limiting factor in the synthesis of fuel (although Hydrogen would be better - we only use oil 'cause it's available and cheap) is energy, and that's pretty abundant, even when you exclude fuel-burning. At the extreme, I haven't heard serious problems raised with the idea of solar-orbit, solar-cell power plants.
Resources will not simply "run out" - they will be synthesized more and more, and the cost will go up. But they will not run out.
The business model for commercial software has a proven track record and is a key engine of economic growth for many countries. It has boosted productivity and efficiency in almost every sector of the economy, as businesses and individuals have enjoyed the wealth of tools, information and other activities made possible in the PC era.
It's not the buisness model that has boosted productivity - Joe Secretary doesn't care where his word processor came from, so long as he can use it well. The software (& hardware) itself is responsible for boosting productivity. Mundie attempts to draw a false analogy between commercial software and economic growth in non-software companies, whereas the relationship is from software in general.
We believe that one of these mechanisms is intellectual property rights. Without intellectual property protection, neither innovation nor a healthy commercial software industry is sustainable. The last 50 years of public- and private-sector collaboration has demonstrated that when intellectual property rights are protected, innovators are rewarded for their efforts. Furthermore, technology is advanced guaranteeing economic growth and a cycle of future collaboration, investment and innovation.
The GPL, according to everyone but RMS at his most radical, does not undermine IP by any means - in fact, it relies upon it for enforcement of the licence. What Microsoft's PR doesn't seem to get is that GPL'd code would not be available if it were not for the GPL. It would be binary-only, and no one would be able to use it. Under the GPL, the code is available for use, something completely new.
This isn't to say that some companies won't find a business plan that can make money releasing products under the GPL. We have yet to see such companies emerge, but perhaps some will. Recent history tells us, however, that finding a business model that works is difficult. According to ZDNet News, "Ransom Love, CEO of Caldera Systems...said he thinks Microsoft was right in its claim that the GPL doesn't make much business sense."
I'm sure some companies will emerge under a successful buisness model of selling proprietary software, too. GNU/Linux is pretty much the fundamental drive behind adoption of the GPL, and it's only been a few years since it got large enough to actually have companies built around the GPL. Companies that release GPL'd code don't (unless they're entirely stupid) indend to make money from the software - they make money from support, manuals, and everything else that makes it nice to use. The GPL makes great sense if your primary buisness isn't software, and you don't want to or can't afford a huge in-house development team for it. Drivers, for example.
Alfred North Whitehead, the renowned British philosopher, logician and mathematician, observed: "It is a great mistake to think that the bare scientific idea is the required invention, so that it has only to be picked up and used. An intense period of imaginative design lies between. One element in the new method is just the discovery of how to set about bridging the gap between the scientific ideas and the ultimate product. It is a process of disciplined attack upon one difficulty after another."
Thank you for just supporting the argument. Under the GPL, any popular product (or product-in-development) is sure to have many eyes looking upon it, and these many eyes can "attack upon one difficulty after another" far faster than the inherently limited in-house design team. GPL'd code has the potential to get done faster.
When comparing the commercial software model to the open-source software model, look carefully at the business plans and licensing structures that form their foundations. This comparison leads to the conclusion that the commercial software model alone has the capacity for sustaining real economic growth. Intellectual capital has always been, and will remain, the core asset of the software industry, and of almost every other industry. Preserving that capital--and investing in its constant renewal--benefits everyone. (Emphasis mine)
Firstly, Mundie just confirmed suspicions that Microsoft, from now on, intends to make its monet through simple replacement of old software, not through new innovation & completely new products.
Secondly, commerical software is only a tool of growth to the commercial software industry - given equal-quality products & support, a buisness simply doesn't care what brand name is on its server. To the buisness, it only matters that it works.
Finally, there is a term for "Preserving that capital--and investing in its constant renewal." It's called depreciation, and it's an inefficency. Depreciation is work spent replacing what you have instead of work spent growing, and that's why we have a Net-Domestic-Product (NDP) that accounts for it. Depreciation is a bad thing, and it should be avoided whenever feasible. According to Microsoft, one of their complete Uber-Systems (using their poducts from the boss's PDA on up to the super-servers) is ideally upgraded (in software) every 3 years or so, and their new leased licencing schemes seem to corroberate that. However, it's arguable at best that their new products are any better than their old ones, especially if you discount stability (which really should have been a priority since the beginning). If the software was GNU/Linux/Apache/MySQL/etc. and thus had an almost zero upgrade cost, the money could have been spent doing something else. Something more efficent. Something more productive.
Microsoft makes its money through depreciation costs. If something were to come along and decrease or eliminate the depreciation costs, the economy as a whole would be better off for it, as that money could be spent growing instead of replacing. Microsoft is fundamentally afraid that GNU/Linux & GPL will make those depreciation costs almost zero and thus makes it's buisness obsolete.
All of its arguments about proprietary software helping the economy (as opposed to Free/GPL/Etc.) apply almost exclusively to the Standardized Software Applications subset of the economy (Windows, Office, etc. NOT contracted, built-for-client software), which makes its money through inefficencies. GPL'd Applications, which have a tremendous development team precisely because of its widespread use, goes a long way to eliminating the inefficencies in the upgrade cycle - bugs are fixed, needed features are added, and there is no planned obsolecense all for zero cost to the adoptee.
--
Christopher Subich
Actually, given some of the GM's I know...
If we knew for a fact that every single sqare inch of dirt was going to become unsuitable for farming in 20 years, you'd likely predict total starvation. I, on the other hand, would predict some world hunger, radical changing of diets, but that the human species would go on.
Why would I predict that? This one is REAL easy - hydroponic farming. It is done to some limited extent today, and easily within 20 years it will be possible for high yields of staple products. Humanity has finally outgrown the malthustrian limitations. 20 years would be, in fact, plenty of time for the development of _space based_ food-growing tech if the incentive was great enough.
We currently are only using the dirt because it's the cheapest method of growing food. Hydroponics, et. all work, but they're horribly expensive by comparison. For all intents and purposes, the food supply is now UNLIMITED, given enough lead time.
Also, the food supply is not the sole limiting factor of species populations (contrasting with bio and calc 101, where they're teaching you exponential functions). There are also limits based upon predator populations, living space, and possibly some self-regulating behavior (lemmings jump off of cliffs, for example - it could be that destructive violence is a population-limiting behavior).
Finally, to bring this somewhat back on topic, the argument that we shouldn't help infertile couples is a scary one. That simple argument is equivalent to 'we shouldn't make cars because they pollute & take resources better spent feeding the poor', 'we shouldn't burn oil because it pollutes', and 'we shouldn't own houses when some people have to live in tenements & on the streets'. If you drive a car, use a light bulb every now and then, and have more square footage to yourself than the average college dorm bedroom, act before you speak.
PS: Population growth increases with the initial introduction of medical technology to decrease death rates and decreases with wealth. Rich countries have naturally decreasing populations, the U.S. included with nearly all of Western Europe. I don't see any massive starvation there, so the growth to carrying capacity argument might be flawed.
Okay, now what would the building committe think about this? They get upset enough when I try to paint my house _one_ color!
The brillianat thing about this copy-control mechanism is that it is by no means any form of security. What the RIAA is doing is making their disks compatible with the CD-Audio format, but not the Data format; any driver hack that allows reading is 'making the drive fully compatible with the CD-Audio standard,' which sounds like a very large noninfringing use to me.
2. and even worse, if my machine will check into there central server fronm time to time what happens if it is down? We all know MS server products are stable, yeah right. Maybe they plan to run this server off of BSD like hotmail. When this server is down by crash, DOS Attack, or Squirrel chewing through the fiber cable are we out of luck, or even if my DSL line is down that day can I not use my computer till it comes back up? Just a little bit ago all of MSs Servers were down for a few days due to a DNS problem (or so they say)imagine if it was you desktops time to check in durring this outage, yikes. 1) Business versions, according to the Register, will not have this copy protection in it (the sdysadmins would revolt if it did)- anything with a multiple license, essentially. So you _can_ borrow the CD from work.
2) Last I've heard on it, it only checks in at install time. If that goes down or you have no internet connection, there are also reportedly phone numbers for you to get the key that way.
The only real flaw in it, that they used technobablle that didn't quite make sense, is completely irrelevant for the normal viewer, for whom computers are magic and can do anything.
If you don't know it's impossible, it's believable.
Anyone with experience in chip design want to make an evaluation of the possibility?
On the contrary! As the system becomes more and more complex, it is more and more likely to become pseudo-chaotic. In chaotic systems, a small change in inputs can (and probably will) cause a large and unpredictable change inthe output.
If the genome (of anything) is such a system, then a change in a single gene or two can produce results changing the entire organism. Thus a single random mutation may, in fact, cause a large effect on the individual/species, undermining the counter-Darwinian argument that there simply has not been enough time for evolution to take place. This also seems to play out in current similarity tests; as I seem to remember, for all their differences humans share about 99% of their genetic code - the closest species of monkey is only a percent or two off of that.
As I seem to understand it, we're currently limited to cooling a few dozen atoms at a time; sure, they get awful cold, but hypercooled atoms won't be a major component of any system until we can get the number up into the thousands or tens of thousands range.
Aw, come on. Even presuming that all the people that were using hacked cards were doing so in the US, where it is illegal, as opposed to some/most being in Canada, where it's (according to previous comments) perfectly legal, your argument is still flawed.
Why do you climb a mountain? Because it's there. Half of the purpose of hacking like this [and it is hacking, not cracking, when you actually develop a new workaround like this] is the fun. Sure, these people are probably spending more in development than they'd spend on a full subscription, but that's like driving around the mountain.
I'm going to have to respectully disagree with you on this. While I too have my doubts that "time-limited" applications like (most) games will never truly take off as open source movements [1], many end-user applications have the same level of need as the lower level hardware support.
Open source software fundamentally serves a need; many people/programmers need their hardware to run, so they develop and maintain open source drivers. Many people need a web server, so they create/maintain one. Many people need a gui - they're there.
Propriatary development, however, is often directed lower-volume needs, especially when it's not a need for a tool. This is probably why the more obscure office tools, like page-setters and the like, don't have a tremendous open source following.
Mainstream office applications, some of the primary and necessary end-user applications, fall into the 'needed tools' category. Gcc is all fine and dandy, but I'm probably not going to be writing my {foo for my boss} in it. Many people need a feature-complete and stable office suite, geeks included - just like many people need a photoshop-like graphics app, which you excepted from your end-user clause. For that reason, I expect an open source office suite will (eventually) reach a feature-complete, usable state.
[1] - Most games are fundamentally driven by the vision of a core team. They're also on fairly tight releasing schedules, and often have to be complete upon release (especially when they're supposed to be commercially viable). Open source software tends to lack all of these - since programmers aren't paid, they're not likely to work on features they don't care much for. Also, open source software (often) never really reaches a 'finished, done, end of the line' state - it's ultimate feature creap (See: Emacs), and a developer can't release part of a game into the mainstream.
Of course, reasonable people will disagree on this, and I'm not at my most coherent now.
Although this is just a throwaway comment, it's completely invalid. I happen to go to (for the next 4 mos.) a high school that's recently installed the N2H2 software, much to the chagrin of prettty much any and all teachers that want to use the Internet in classrooms.
Slashdot is blocked.
Yes, I said Slashdot is blocked. It's even (probably) appropriately categorized (they don't actually show which category blocks the site)- Bess, in its default (block all) configuration, blocks sites that allow posting of semi-permanent or permanent comments.
Thankfully, they don't block either www.irtc.org, the Internet Raytracing Competition, or www.lp.org, the Libertarian Party website [vital in a government class].
Even then, developers architecting applications in C# face another set of pitfalls: lock-in. Any nontrivial application will need to use higher-level APIs (e.g. for database access, etc.) that are unlikely to be in the libraries turned over to a standards body. It doesn't take 100% of your application to be tied to .NET to result in platform lock -- just one critical piece. Therefore, by definition, any nontrivial .NET application will likely be extremely difficult to port to another operating system. The result is vendor lock in, the vendor being Microsoft. The Java language, VM, and APIs are all vendor neutral. There is no vendor lock in.
(Emphasis mine)
Microsoft, by upgrading all of its (by now fairly standard) development kits to .NET versions will be encouraging mainstream development to take place exclusively on the .NET platform.
By only releasing nonciritical libraries, any application developed on .NET will be locked to Microsoft-supported operating systems.
Therefore, mainstream development will be locked to Microsoft-supported operating systems, I.E. Windows. This, if adopted, will put one hell of a dent into third-party development and porting efforts on Linux/BSD/OS X development systems [which, incidentally, are all quite close to one another and might very well present a big challenge to Windows dominance in the future in the absence of developer incentives {see .NET}].
Microsoft, just like everyone else, probably knows that renting Office applications has as much of a chance to fly as my 17" monitor. The futore of .NET is in development, and that's really scary.