What's really funny is that 20-30 years ago the earth was apparently cooling for all the man-made reasons it is warming now.
You know, I can't remember there being a massive consensus across the vast majority of climate scientists 20-30 years ago saying that the earth going through global cooling. No, there were a handful who came up with that theory and you know what, that theory has been shown to not be accurate.
Personally, I'll go with the general consensus and the multiple independent data sets that indicate that global warming is happening and is caused by man. When I look at who supports the AGW theory and who is against it, I know which ones I would choose to trust more.
Also consider that we don't get a second chance. The earth isn't a lab that we can reset if our "experiment" doesn't work. We had better err on the side of caution. Sure the world won't end, climate change won't wipe out the human race, but if it does continue the way it looks like it's going, then millions upon millions of people are going to die - though probably not you and me in the developed nations. Trillions of dollars worth of damage is going to be done to our infrastructure.
There was a big stink when the hole in the Ozone Layer over Antarctica was huge, but nobody said a word when it shrunk back up and nearly disappeard. I'll bet most people think it's just getting bigger.
This is just another area where climate scientists got it wrong, changed their mind about the whole thing, and the rest of the world just pretends nothing changed.
You are aware that scientists worked out the CFCs were the cause of the Ozone hole and that the nations of world got together and did something about it - the Montreal Protocol. When we stopped pumping CFCs into the atmosphere the ozone hole began to repair itself - just like the scientists predicted!
So by your argument, we must already have criminal gangs infiltrating phone companies so that they can run a database query on all their subscribers for those whose phone usage has had a significant drop in the last few days? It is directly analogous and yet no-one seems to have a problem with phone companies keeping detailed records of all calls made from your land line.
Of course the statistic on how many they allowed to die by refusing to pay out or by refusing to allow someone to get insurance in the first place is not available.
Or alternatively they could decide to manufacture "artists" and only produce a product that has any commercial appeal for say six months at most and not care if they lose the right to publish it in 35 years... Oh wait...
The 'deal' with copyright is that the government will spend our taxes protecting the monopoly that copyright gives an artist in return for the copyrighted material eventually entering the public domain to enrich the lives of its citizens.
So yes new music is available for you to purchase right now at a price you're happy with, but what about in 10 years, or 20 years or 100 years? As an example, there are some great novels from the 70s and 80s that I would love to read, but the original publisher isn't printing them any more. If their copyright had expired then other publishers might be willing to sell them to me, or god forbid some kind person might scan and make the text available through project Gutenberg.
A significant portion of our culture is being lost because it can't be copied legally and by the time its copyright has expired there are literally no copies left. That doesn't seem to fit the 'deal'.
It should not be up to Google to decide that they can publish a work that is still protected by copyright just because they can't determine who the copyright owner is whether they've made a good faith effort or not. Instead, Copyright law should be updated to take into account orphaned works and what one can and can't do with them.
I can suggest three possibilities for handling orphaned works:
They should fall into the public domain so that everyone can take advantage of them
Require a standard fee to be paid into a fund if someone wants to exploit them commercially. This fund could be used to compensate an author of an orphaned work if they are later found, and be used to promote literacy or fund libraries etc.
Only allow not-for-profit use of orphaned works.
Don't allow their use until after their copyright period expires
In my mind the solution is to reduce copyright terms to something more reasonable. Hardly any works earn money for their copyright holders after the first few years, and practically zero after a couple of decades. So set the copy period to be 20 years. Then there wouldn't be many orphaned works and society would be richer from all the public domain material.
Forgetting about the Security Theatre side of the threat level for a moment. I always thought it would be best if the threat level was related to something that people could get a real grasp of. For example:
Risk of being injured or killed today by terrorists is the same as:
Socks - you have about as much chance of being injured by a terrorist today as by being injured putting on your socks.
Slippery Floor - a little higher than "Socks".
Crossing the Road - clearly higher than "Slippery Floor".
... etc.
And we know we really need to be on guard when the terror threat reaches: "Automobile Accident" or "Smoking". Fortunately, I think we'll probably find we haven't actually reached "Socks" level yet. Of course we'll never have such a system since it was clearly inform the public.
Which network do you monitor? The wired ethernet? The "visible" wireless connection? Maybe it communicates wirelessly with a hidden wireless network adaptor only at set times of day (when the guy who sent the laptop is sitting outside the Gov's office waiting to receive the data).
It's too much hassle to make unknown hardware secure, so donate the laptops to charity (after wiping the software) instead or bin them.
But having PDF that has its page size the same size of the screen still defeats one of the major advantages of an ebook. That is, the ability to change font size and re-flow the text accordingly.
I often change font size to fit the conditions in which I'm reading on my Cybook. Typically I use a single font-size that I'm comfortable with, but there are times when I like it to be larger: in dim light when I don't want to strain my eyes reading it; when its on the book stand on my exercise bike and thus further away than I would normally hold it, when I'm on a train and I need to compensate for my hand shaking etc.
Article contains the terms "ATM Machine" and "PIN Number". Read at your own risk.
...I've not seen anyone complain about it elsewhere...
New Scientist had a whole series, in their feedback section, on the concept of Redundant Acronym Syndrome, or as they usually called it: RAS Syndrome. But then I guess there is a large overlap between Slashdot readers and New Scientist Readers.
It always used to confuse me when I visited the USA. After all, in public places, the "bathroom" doesn't have a bath in it. I've never understood why that euphemism for a toilet took hold in the USA. Of course all other names are also euphemisms, even toilet. And don't get me started on "restroom", I don't go there for a rest:)
The wording is: "You do not have to say anything. But it may harm your defence if you do not mention when questioned something which you later rely on in court. Anything you do say may be given in evidence."
What this means is that if you don't for example give a reason when questioned about breaking into someone's house and then try to defend yourself by saying "oh they gave me permission", then the jury is allowed to take the initial silence into account, for example considering that an innocent person would immediately say that they had permission etc.
If you present a good reason why you were silent, for example, because you needed a translator, or because you were traumatised etc then the jury can decide that it was perfectly reasonable for you to have been silent at first and later give in defence in court.
Personally, I don't really agree with this, but it at least isn't quite as bad as "if you are silent then you must be guilty".
I have a Bookean Cybook and I can sympathise with you about reading PDFs on ebook readers.
In the end I wrote a rough PDF to html application and now read them as html which seems to work really well. In fact, it seems to work better than the mobi-pocket format for me at least.
Of course since the Kindle is only available in USA, then Google could corner the market in the rest of the world!
I have a Bookeen Cybook and live in the UK. If I could buy and read "Kindle Edition" books on it then I'd agree with you, but Amazon have specifically decided that they won't sell them to me. If Google offer a service that allows me to buy books from them at a reasonable price then they'll get my custom.
Presently I buy from Baen because of their enlightened attitude about DRM (and of course because I enjoy the books they publish).
I think the problem with TV and movies is actually because the script writer says 'hard drive' but the director decides that it too hard or time-consuming to work with hard drive and so directs the actors to use the whole computer case but doesn't change the script.
For example, I just saw the new Knight Rider (only just premiered on UK TV) and they keep talking about "they took the hard drives" when it was the whole case that had been taken. Definitely looked to me that it was mismatch between script and direction.
Betfair do not currently operate in the USA. They don't allow people with US addresses or IP addresses use their system.
So I guess it does not affect them.
One of their policies is that they do whatever they reasonably can do to only provide their services where it is legal to do so.
One could look at Baen and their free e-books - I know it's not the same as music since most people prefer physical books - but they've clearly demonstrated that offering (some) material free increases their sales.
Does downloading music actually increase the amount you buy, or is it simply the case that the people who are most interested in music download and buy the most.
I don't have stats so this is just speculation based on personal experience. Availability and access (via 'free' downloads) can increase a person's interest in music.
From a personal point of view, having easy access to lots of MP3 ripped from my CD collection (which was illegal at the time) reignited my interest in music and led to me buying CDs again after a long gap. And considering books, access to a free library of books at Baen has meant that I've tried before I bought, and now I'm buying more books from Baen than from other publishers.
GMT doesn't have leap seconds since it is explicitly defined in terms of mean solar time at the meridian at Greenwich. So the length of a second in GMT is variable so that that solar day divides neatly.
UTC is based on the SI-Second, which is of a fixed duration and hence needs leap seconds in order to remain approximately in line with solar time. Leap seconds are added to prevent UTC getting more than 0.9 seconds out of line with UT1.
Re:This is a huge amount of work
on
Linux 2.6.27 Out
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
I've been pair programming for a while now and I whole heartedly agree that it does work very well.
It could be boring if you were always the observer, but the idea is that you mix it up a bit. You don't spend a long time as observer in one stretch. You should spend about 50% of your time as the observer but perhaps in hour long periods.
Additionally, it brings a level of social interaction to programming. You're working with colleague and are constantly bouncing ideas off each other which certainly overrides any possibility of being bored. If you're just sitting there watching then you're not pairing.
Additionally you want to rotate your pairs fairly frequently. That way you get to understand much more of the code base and get to learn from everyone on the team and they get to learn from you.
I've tried the 'get together every once in a while' approach to see if it was as good as pairing, and while it does work better than working alone, it doesn't, for my team at least, work anywhere as well as pairing. With pairing you know that you're explicitly working as a team and taking shared responsibility for code and those benefits out weigh the extra lines of codes that could be written by two independent coders.
While I personally hate DST, there are lots of reasons why one would use it instead of providing more flexible work schedules. Things like public transport timetables, school hours, work contracts specifying hours at work, TV schedules etc. which means one can't easily just adjust your own timetable to give you the best use of sunlight hours. Until these are also solved to allow more flexibility then DST remains a compromise that most of society seems to be happy with.
The problem of course with this is that Ryanair are a "low cost" airline. The "low cost" doesn't really apply to the price of the tickets it applies to the cost of running their business. They won't have a huge IT department running the site who can check and block IP addresses. Their web site software is itself an off the shelf product so they can't really change it easily to block scraping and in many ways it's the fact that it is an off the shelf product that means that it can be scrapped economically - there are dozens of airlines who use the same software and so if you can scrape one you can scrape them all. And if you can scrape the airlines who want you to sell their flights why not also scrape the ones who don't?
Ah, but Ryanair didn't take the end customers' money, the agents did (and added their own 'booking fee' on top).
The customers' contracts are with the agent so the customers can sue the agent for not fulfilling the contract.
The agent will probably have difficult complaining to Ryanair since their screen scraper application accepted the terms and conditions that said Ryanair won't honor tickets placed by agents.
I've worked on a site for a tour operator that decided that they were going to scrape Ryanair's site. I explicitly gave them my professional advice that could have problems if they did it without an agreement from Ryanair (of course Ryanair wouldn't enter in an agreement), but they continued anyway.
The reason that they did was exactly the same reason why Ryanair want to be the only ones selling their flights. The tour operator were making their money from the hotel, car hire and insurance etc that they sold with a Ryanair flight.
They took a specific business risk that benefit of doing this (at least until Ryanair stopped them) outweighed the potential downside.
Slashdot Mirror
How about wind turbines?
What's really funny is that 20-30 years ago the earth was apparently cooling for all the man-made reasons it is warming now.
You know, I can't remember there being a massive consensus across the vast majority of climate scientists 20-30 years ago saying that the earth going through global cooling. No, there were a handful who came up with that theory and you know what, that theory has been shown to not be accurate.
Personally, I'll go with the general consensus and the multiple independent data sets that indicate that global warming is happening and is caused by man. When I look at who supports the AGW theory and who is against it, I know which ones I would choose to trust more.
Also consider that we don't get a second chance. The earth isn't a lab that we can reset if our "experiment" doesn't work. We had better err on the side of caution. Sure the world won't end, climate change won't wipe out the human race, but if it does continue the way it looks like it's going, then millions upon millions of people are going to die - though probably not you and me in the developed nations. Trillions of dollars worth of damage is going to be done to our infrastructure.
There was a big stink when the hole in the Ozone Layer over Antarctica was huge, but nobody said a word when it shrunk back up and nearly disappeard. I'll bet most people think it's just getting bigger.
This is just another area where climate scientists got it wrong, changed their mind about the whole thing, and the rest of the world just pretends nothing changed.
You are aware that scientists worked out the CFCs were the cause of the Ozone hole and that the nations of world got together and did something about it - the Montreal Protocol. When we stopped pumping CFCs into the atmosphere the ozone hole began to repair itself - just like the scientists predicted!
So by your argument, we must already have criminal gangs infiltrating phone companies so that they can run a database query on all their subscribers for those whose phone usage has had a significant drop in the last few days? It is directly analogous and yet no-one seems to have a problem with phone companies keeping detailed records of all calls made from your land line.
Of course the statistic on how many they allowed to die by refusing to pay out or by refusing to allow someone to get insurance in the first place is not available.
Or alternatively they could decide to manufacture "artists" and only produce a product that has any commercial appeal for say six months at most and not care if they lose the right to publish it in 35 years... Oh wait...
The 'deal' with copyright is that the government will spend our taxes protecting the monopoly that copyright gives an artist in return for the copyrighted material eventually entering the public domain to enrich the lives of its citizens.
So yes new music is available for you to purchase right now at a price you're happy with, but what about in 10 years, or 20 years or 100 years? As an example, there are some great novels from the 70s and 80s that I would love to read, but the original publisher isn't printing them any more. If their copyright had expired then other publishers might be willing to sell them to me, or god forbid some kind person might scan and make the text available through project Gutenberg.
A significant portion of our culture is being lost because it can't be copied legally and by the time its copyright has expired there are literally no copies left. That doesn't seem to fit the 'deal'.
It should not be up to Google to decide that they can publish a work that is still protected by copyright just because they can't determine who the copyright owner is whether they've made a good faith effort or not. Instead, Copyright law should be updated to take into account orphaned works and what one can and can't do with them.
I can suggest three possibilities for handling orphaned works:
In my mind the solution is to reduce copyright terms to something more reasonable. Hardly any works earn money for their copyright holders after the first few years, and practically zero after a couple of decades. So set the copy period to be 20 years. Then there wouldn't be many orphaned works and society would be richer from all the public domain material.
Forgetting about the Security Theatre side of the threat level for a moment. I always thought it would be best if the threat level was related to something that people could get a real grasp of. For example:
Risk of being injured or killed today by terrorists is the same as:
And we know we really need to be on guard when the terror threat reaches: "Automobile Accident" or "Smoking". Fortunately, I think we'll probably find we haven't actually reached "Socks" level yet. Of course we'll never have such a system since it was clearly inform the public.
Which network do you monitor? The wired ethernet? The "visible" wireless connection? Maybe it communicates wirelessly with a hidden wireless network adaptor only at set times of day (when the guy who sent the laptop is sitting outside the Gov's office waiting to receive the data).
It's too much hassle to make unknown hardware secure, so donate the laptops to charity (after wiping the software) instead or bin them.
But having PDF that has its page size the same size of the screen still defeats one of the major advantages of an ebook. That is, the ability to change font size and re-flow the text accordingly.
I often change font size to fit the conditions in which I'm reading on my Cybook. Typically I use a single font-size that I'm comfortable with, but there are times when I like it to be larger: in dim light when I don't want to strain my eyes reading it; when its on the book stand on my exercise bike and thus further away than I would normally hold it, when I'm on a train and I need to compensate for my hand shaking etc.
Article contains the terms "ATM Machine" and "PIN Number". Read at your own risk.
...I've not seen anyone complain about it elsewhere...
New Scientist had a whole series, in their feedback section, on the concept of Redundant Acronym Syndrome, or as they usually called it: RAS Syndrome. But then I guess there is a large overlap between Slashdot readers and New Scientist Readers.
When working for a car company, I saw the ultimate redundant acronym syndrome in a few software specifications: Vehicle Identification VIN Number.
It always used to confuse me when I visited the USA. After all, in public places, the "bathroom" doesn't have a bath in it. I've never understood why that euphemism for a toilet took hold in the USA. Of course all other names are also euphemisms, even toilet. And don't get me started on "restroom", I don't go there for a rest :)
The wording is: "You do not have to say anything. But it may harm your defence if you do not mention when questioned something which you later rely on in court. Anything you do say may be given in evidence."
What this means is that if you don't for example give a reason when questioned about breaking into someone's house and then try to defend yourself by saying "oh they gave me permission", then the jury is allowed to take the initial silence into account, for example considering that an innocent person would immediately say that they had permission etc.
If you present a good reason why you were silent, for example, because you needed a translator, or because you were traumatised etc then the jury can decide that it was perfectly reasonable for you to have been silent at first and later give in defence in court.
Personally, I don't really agree with this, but it at least isn't quite as bad as "if you are silent then you must be guilty".
I have a Bookean Cybook and I can sympathise with you about reading PDFs on ebook readers.
In the end I wrote a rough PDF to html application and now read them as html which seems to work really well. In fact, it seems to work better than the mobi-pocket format for me at least.
Of course since the Kindle is only available in USA, then Google could corner the market in the rest of the world!
I have a Bookeen Cybook and live in the UK. If I could buy and read "Kindle Edition" books on it then I'd agree with you, but Amazon have specifically decided that they won't sell them to me. If Google offer a service that allows me to buy books from them at a reasonable price then they'll get my custom.
Presently I buy from Baen because of their enlightened attitude about DRM (and of course because I enjoy the books they publish).
For example, I just saw the new Knight Rider (only just premiered on UK TV) and they keep talking about "they took the hard drives" when it was the whole case that had been taken. Definitely looked to me that it was mismatch between script and direction.
Betfair do not currently operate in the USA. They don't allow people with US addresses or IP addresses use their system. So I guess it does not affect them. One of their policies is that they do whatever they reasonably can do to only provide their services where it is legal to do so.
One could look at Baen and their free e-books - I know it's not the same as music since most people prefer physical books - but they've clearly demonstrated that offering (some) material free increases their sales.
Does downloading music actually increase the amount you buy, or is it simply the case that the people who are most interested in music download and buy the most.
I don't have stats so this is just speculation based on personal experience. Availability and access (via 'free' downloads) can increase a person's interest in music.
From a personal point of view, having easy access to lots of MP3 ripped from my CD collection (which was illegal at the time) reignited my interest in music and led to me buying CDs again after a long gap. And considering books, access to a free library of books at Baen has meant that I've tried before I bought, and now I'm buying more books from Baen than from other publishers.
UTC is based on the SI-Second, which is of a fixed duration and hence needs leap seconds in order to remain approximately in line with solar time. Leap seconds are added to prevent UTC getting more than 0.9 seconds out of line with UT1.
I've been pair programming for a while now and I whole heartedly agree that it does work very well. It could be boring if you were always the observer, but the idea is that you mix it up a bit. You don't spend a long time as observer in one stretch. You should spend about 50% of your time as the observer but perhaps in hour long periods. Additionally, it brings a level of social interaction to programming. You're working with colleague and are constantly bouncing ideas off each other which certainly overrides any possibility of being bored. If you're just sitting there watching then you're not pairing. Additionally you want to rotate your pairs fairly frequently. That way you get to understand much more of the code base and get to learn from everyone on the team and they get to learn from you. I've tried the 'get together every once in a while' approach to see if it was as good as pairing, and while it does work better than working alone, it doesn't, for my team at least, work anywhere as well as pairing. With pairing you know that you're explicitly working as a team and taking shared responsibility for code and those benefits out weigh the extra lines of codes that could be written by two independent coders.
While I personally hate DST, there are lots of reasons why one would use it instead of providing more flexible work schedules. Things like public transport timetables, school hours, work contracts specifying hours at work, TV schedules etc. which means one can't easily just adjust your own timetable to give you the best use of sunlight hours. Until these are also solved to allow more flexibility then DST remains a compromise that most of society seems to be happy with.
The problem of course with this is that Ryanair are a "low cost" airline. The "low cost" doesn't really apply to the price of the tickets it applies to the cost of running their business. They won't have a huge IT department running the site who can check and block IP addresses. Their web site software is itself an off the shelf product so they can't really change it easily to block scraping and in many ways it's the fact that it is an off the shelf product that means that it can be scrapped economically - there are dozens of airlines who use the same software and so if you can scrape one you can scrape them all. And if you can scrape the airlines who want you to sell their flights why not also scrape the ones who don't?
Ah, but Ryanair didn't take the end customers' money, the agents did (and added their own 'booking fee' on top). The customers' contracts are with the agent so the customers can sue the agent for not fulfilling the contract. The agent will probably have difficult complaining to Ryanair since their screen scraper application accepted the terms and conditions that said Ryanair won't honor tickets placed by agents. I've worked on a site for a tour operator that decided that they were going to scrape Ryanair's site. I explicitly gave them my professional advice that could have problems if they did it without an agreement from Ryanair (of course Ryanair wouldn't enter in an agreement), but they continued anyway. The reason that they did was exactly the same reason why Ryanair want to be the only ones selling their flights. The tour operator were making their money from the hotel, car hire and insurance etc that they sold with a Ryanair flight. They took a specific business risk that benefit of doing this (at least until Ryanair stopped them) outweighed the potential downside.