This doesn't surprise me too much. One interesting fact it does indicate is that the people who very conscientiously obey the law are not strongly represented in those who are in accidents.
Personally, I feel the only real solution is to mandate self-driving cars. Our communications technology is at a point where it's a serious waste of a human being's time to be driving, and that economic fact is going to be really hard to fight with law.
Well, that's an interesting proposal, though it seems like a really dumb hack to me.
And I don't understand any of the reasons why you think it will be a headache. The only one that really makes any sense is that you think your proposed scheme will require fewer software changes on devices.
You don't appear to explain any of your other reasons.
I'm both amused and saddened that you were modded a troll when you're speaking so much truth. The "our culture is special" argument is paraded out by the Chinese government all the time, and each time they do it it stinks a little more.
Obama did it recently too, and I lost a lot of respect for him. There's being diplomatic and there's compromising your core values. I think there was more of the latter than the former in his statements.
I've been trying to convince anybody who does setup for small networks to just do this as a matter of course. ISPs keep telling me nobody asks for IPv6. If they saw enough traffic to 192.88.99.1 they might change their tune.
Over use of all caps words and phrases combined with a strident tone trips all of my 'crank' alarms. Please reconsider your style if you want anybody to take you seriously.
Yes, dangerous to their lives. I know of several people who ended up with severe health problems from overwork. Strokes, heart attacks, that kind of thing.
With all the security holes in flash and Adobe's inability to fix them in a timely fashion I would prefer to use Adobe's flash on a box I care less about than my Linux boxes.
I wish they'd all just use HTML5 or put it on YouTube so I can use youtube-dl or something. Otherwise it either doesn't work at all (my amd64 Linux boxes) or is slow and jerky (my Mac OSX box). It's really frustrating.
To me this reads like a complete admission that government has little or nothing to fear from standard media, which is something I've felt for a long time. And they think I should be giving them my money or that Google should be paying them for their worthless prattling of the establishment line.
I've been reading all the 'realpolitik' explanations of Google's behavior, and I think that Google is still fundamentally different from almost any other publicly traded company. I don't think your explanations in terms of shareholder value represent an accurate picture of the internal motivations of Google.
I think you are more comfortable in a world where such explanations are valid. Companies always operating in their own short term best self interest has been a bedrock of both economic and political thought for at least 20 years, and more likely 90 years. It's scary that a company could become large, powerful and successful without following that formula. And it's scary that there's a large, powerful and successful company that doesn't follow it. It throws off all the rules.
It reminds me of people who insist on looking for marketing messages in Google doodles. In truth, they happen because there are silly and playful people who work for Google, and their doodles are fun. And that's it. There is no other reason.
When I read about Google's original motivations for being in China, I took them at face value. Yes, I'm sure the attraction of a big, emerging market played a factor. But I accepted that their decision was fundamentally based on moral values, not financial ones. I, personally, didn't agree with their decision, but I accepted that it was made from examining values other than simply profit.
And while I think they are upset over being hacked and are angry over the loss of their data, I really do think that the fact that the hackers seemed to be explicitly interested in the accounts of Chinese human rights activists was the biggest factor in their decision to stop censoring.
If Google seriously felt that China was too much of a threat to be profitable they would just pull out instead of simply removing censorship. Removing censorship is a decision based on morals, not economics.
This is a gross confusion of trademark and copyright. Trademark's sole purpose is to allow people to name things in the market and have other people know what they mean. It's purpose is not to push a bit of money the way of people who created the name or any other such stupid nonsense.
As a trademark, this is not in the least confusing. The phone is not an artificial person, nor is it a movie.
As for copyright. Google isn't writing a novel. The phone is not a character in a story or a movie. The name may or may not have anything to do with brand name of a line of artificial people in the movie Blade Runner, but it's certain that Google isn't copying a character or likeness out of the story. And if I recall correctly, that name wasn't even in the original story, it's only in the movie.
Regardless, copyright on stuff done by dead people is insane and stupid.
So why does the medium of the patent actually matter?
This is an interesting question, and my take on it is this...
The malleability of the medium has a whole lot to say about the economic cost the patent system imposes on works created in the medium.
As our tools for manipulating the physical world in an automated fashion become more precise, cheaper and more flexible the physical world is going to start having the same kinds of problems with the patent system imposing an unacceptable burden that it currently has with software.
People do not think of entrances they don't use every day. They forget they exist. Especially in a panic situation.
In the case of fire, this can be mitigated by having a few people who know where the exits are because fires usually don't kill people right away and when they do they don't intelligently target people.
In the case of a school shooting the panic level is going to be a lot higher. And people will already be dead, quite possibly the ones who could've helped the most.
No, it doesn't. What needs to happen is that coverage of these kinds of incidents becomes just a tad bit more rational so the school doesn't need to cover itself for a non-mistake.
Bad things happen. There might be small things might be able to prevent them. But treating people in the way that the U of MN is treating this student is not a small thing. It's an very deep erosion of people's ability to express themselves.
With modern distributed revision control systems this situation can be handled pretty effectively. But, of course, a distributor is under no obligation to provide the revision control history.
I sort of think that should change, at least in the case of code that's in a Mercurial (or some other tool like it) repository. Or at least it should be considered the polite thing to do.
I've had some jobs that were pretty inconvenient public transportation-wise. Though I'm also happy living near fairly dense population centers.
I don't exactly disagree with you. But I think it could be improved a whole lot. There are some really interesting and a little crazy ideas out there in the realm of public transportation that are being ignored. And in the US, getting a city to use trains is like pulling teeth even though when I've seen it done it turns out fantastically well.
Yep, agreed. Which why I mentioned that exact same thing in my post.
Oops! *sheepish grin* I should've read the last sentence and phrased it differently. My main point was the last paragraph anyway. Driving is a waste of valuable human time.
Hands-free devices do little to reduce accidents. The big thing that causes accidents while using cell phones is the fact that most people devote most of their attention to the conversation.
When someone is with you in the car they can see the road conditions just as well as you can. They will often shut up when you are in a tense situation that needs your focus. When someone is on a cell phone they will chatter away regardless and your attention will be divided.
If you're going to use a cell phone in a car you have to be willing to tell the person on the other end to shut up for a bit when you need to and to be able to recognize when you need to. And the person at the other end has to recognize that this isn't rudeness on your part, but a basic safety precaution.
In reality, as I mentioned in another post, driving is a horrible deplorable waste of human time and attention. It would be better done by machines. The next best would be to have it done by a very small few in society so only their time was wasted, but people seem allergic to public transportation.
It's hard to enforce, and you would have to get enforcement percentages way up there for people to decide the risk/reward ratio wasn't worth it. And your police officers have more important things to be doing with their time.
No, the thing to do if you're a government and want to make people safer given this behavior is to do everything you possibly can to encourage the development and use of economical self-driving cars and/or really excellent public transportation.
Frankly, driving is a waste of valuable time and a task humans are ill-suited to doing.
Yeah, I'm disappointed in Python and OpenSSH for that reason. It's a balance between how good something is, what alternatives exist and risk. I guess it would be more accurate to say I prefer.
I worked on a proprietary version of OpenSSH at my last job. I thought the companies who bought our product were insane. Not because they had a free as in beer alternative, but because I would never for the life of me rely on a non-Open Source cryptography product, especially one that's used for so many sensitive things. And I got the impression from the kinds of questions their engineers asked of us that they felt the same way. It seemed very much like them trying to find sound technical reasons to reject our product in favor of OpenSSH.
I think we would've better served ourselves and our customers by being Open Source. I wish that we hadn't had the choice not to be and management had been forced into the decision to start down that path.
I avoid the use of BSD licensed software because I run the risk of learning to use something in which future versions are locked behind a proprietary wall. That negatively impacts the usefulness of the software for me.
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This doesn't surprise me too much. One interesting fact it does indicate is that the people who very conscientiously obey the law are not strongly represented in those who are in accidents.
Personally, I feel the only real solution is to mandate self-driving cars. Our communications technology is at a point where it's a serious waste of a human being's time to be driving, and that economic fact is going to be really hard to fight with law.
Well, that's an interesting proposal, though it seems like a really dumb hack to me.
And I don't understand any of the reasons why you think it will be a headache. The only one that really makes any sense is that you think your proposed scheme will require fewer software changes on devices.
You don't appear to explain any of your other reasons.
Why? A bald assertion like that with nothing to back it up is pointless and stupid.
I'm both amused and saddened that you were modded a troll when you're speaking so much truth. The "our culture is special" argument is paraded out by the Chinese government all the time, and each time they do it it stinks a little more.
Obama did it recently too, and I lost a lot of respect for him. There's being diplomatic and there's compromising your core values. I think there was more of the latter than the former in his statements.
I've been trying to convince anybody who does setup for small networks to just do this as a matter of course. ISPs keep telling me nobody asks for IPv6. If they saw enough traffic to 192.88.99.1 they might change their tune.
I don't really disagree with you, but...
Over use of all caps words and phrases combined with a strident tone trips all of my 'crank' alarms. Please reconsider your style if you want anybody to take you seriously.
Yes, dangerous to their lives. I know of several people who ended up with severe health problems from overwork. Strokes, heart attacks, that kind of thing.
Such stupid policies should be given all possible economic disincentive.
With all the security holes in flash and Adobe's inability to fix them in a timely fashion I would prefer to use Adobe's flash on a box I care less about than my Linux boxes.
I wish they'd all just use HTML5 or put it on YouTube so I can use youtube-dl or something. Otherwise it either doesn't work at all (my amd64 Linux boxes) or is slow and jerky (my Mac OSX box). It's really frustrating.
To me this reads like a complete admission that government has little or nothing to fear from standard media, which is something I've felt for a long time. And they think I should be giving them my money or that Google should be paying them for their worthless prattling of the establishment line.
I've been reading all the 'realpolitik' explanations of Google's behavior, and I think that Google is still fundamentally different from almost any other publicly traded company. I don't think your explanations in terms of shareholder value represent an accurate picture of the internal motivations of Google.
I think you are more comfortable in a world where such explanations are valid. Companies always operating in their own short term best self interest has been a bedrock of both economic and political thought for at least 20 years, and more likely 90 years. It's scary that a company could become large, powerful and successful without following that formula. And it's scary that there's a large, powerful and successful company that doesn't follow it. It throws off all the rules.
It reminds me of people who insist on looking for marketing messages in Google doodles. In truth, they happen because there are silly and playful people who work for Google, and their doodles are fun. And that's it. There is no other reason.
When I read about Google's original motivations for being in China, I took them at face value. Yes, I'm sure the attraction of a big, emerging market played a factor. But I accepted that their decision was fundamentally based on moral values, not financial ones. I, personally, didn't agree with their decision, but I accepted that it was made from examining values other than simply profit.
And while I think they are upset over being hacked and are angry over the loss of their data, I really do think that the fact that the hackers seemed to be explicitly interested in the accounts of Chinese human rights activists was the biggest factor in their decision to stop censoring.
If Google seriously felt that China was too much of a threat to be profitable they would just pull out instead of simply removing censorship. Removing censorship is a decision based on morals, not economics.
This is a gross confusion of trademark and copyright. Trademark's sole purpose is to allow people to name things in the market and have other people know what they mean. It's purpose is not to push a bit of money the way of people who created the name or any other such stupid nonsense.
As a trademark, this is not in the least confusing. The phone is not an artificial person, nor is it a movie.
As for copyright. Google isn't writing a novel. The phone is not a character in a story or a movie. The name may or may not have anything to do with brand name of a line of artificial people in the movie Blade Runner, but it's certain that Google isn't copying a character or likeness out of the story. And if I recall correctly, that name wasn't even in the original story, it's only in the movie.
Regardless, copyright on stuff done by dead people is insane and stupid.
So why does the medium of the patent actually matter?
This is an interesting question, and my take on it is this...
The malleability of the medium has a whole lot to say about the economic cost the patent system imposes on works created in the medium.
As our tools for manipulating the physical world in an automated fashion become more precise, cheaper and more flexible the physical world is going to start having the same kinds of problems with the patent system imposing an unacceptable burden that it currently has with software.
But nobody steps in to bail out the tiny corporation when their business fails because they run it poorly.
Or that he's the guy the other ones all go to when they have a question about laying bricks.
People do not think of entrances they don't use every day. They forget they exist. Especially in a panic situation.
In the case of fire, this can be mitigated by having a few people who know where the exits are because fires usually don't kill people right away and when they do they don't intelligently target people.
In the case of a school shooting the panic level is going to be a lot higher. And people will already be dead, quite possibly the ones who could've helped the most.
No, it doesn't. What needs to happen is that coverage of these kinds of incidents becomes just a tad bit more rational so the school doesn't need to cover itself for a non-mistake.
Bad things happen. There might be small things might be able to prevent them. But treating people in the way that the U of MN is treating this student is not a small thing. It's an very deep erosion of people's ability to express themselves.
With modern distributed revision control systems this situation can be handled pretty effectively. But, of course, a distributor is under no obligation to provide the revision control history.
I sort of think that should change, at least in the case of code that's in a Mercurial (or some other tool like it) repository. Or at least it should be considered the polite thing to do.
I've actually never had a driver's license. :-)
I've had some jobs that were pretty inconvenient public transportation-wise. Though I'm also happy living near fairly dense population centers.
I don't exactly disagree with you. But I think it could be improved a whole lot. There are some really interesting and a little crazy ideas out there in the realm of public transportation that are being ignored. And in the US, getting a city to use trains is like pulling teeth even though when I've seen it done it turns out fantastically well.
Yep, agreed. Which why I mentioned that exact same thing in my post.
Oops! *sheepish grin* I should've read the last sentence and phrased it differently. My main point was the last paragraph anyway. Driving is a waste of valuable human time.
Hands-free devices do little to reduce accidents. The big thing that causes accidents while using cell phones is the fact that most people devote most of their attention to the conversation.
When someone is with you in the car they can see the road conditions just as well as you can. They will often shut up when you are in a tense situation that needs your focus. When someone is on a cell phone they will chatter away regardless and your attention will be divided.
If you're going to use a cell phone in a car you have to be willing to tell the person on the other end to shut up for a bit when you need to and to be able to recognize when you need to. And the person at the other end has to recognize that this isn't rudeness on your part, but a basic safety precaution.
In reality, as I mentioned in another post, driving is a horrible deplorable waste of human time and attention. It would be better done by machines. The next best would be to have it done by a very small few in society so only their time was wasted, but people seem allergic to public transportation.
It's hard to enforce, and you would have to get enforcement percentages way up there for people to decide the risk/reward ratio wasn't worth it. And your police officers have more important things to be doing with their time.
No, the thing to do if you're a government and want to make people safer given this behavior is to do everything you possibly can to encourage the development and use of economical self-driving cars and/or really excellent public transportation.
Frankly, driving is a waste of valuable time and a task humans are ill-suited to doing.
Yeah, I'm disappointed in Python and OpenSSH for that reason. It's a balance between how good something is, what alternatives exist and risk. I guess it would be more accurate to say I prefer.
I worked on a proprietary version of OpenSSH at my last job. I thought the companies who bought our product were insane. Not because they had a free as in beer alternative, but because I would never for the life of me rely on a non-Open Source cryptography product, especially one that's used for so many sensitive things. And I got the impression from the kinds of questions their engineers asked of us that they felt the same way. It seemed very much like them trying to find sound technical reasons to reject our product in favor of OpenSSH.
I think we would've better served ourselves and our customers by being Open Source. I wish that we hadn't had the choice not to be and management had been forced into the decision to start down that path.
I avoid the use of BSD licensed software because I run the risk of learning to use something in which future versions are locked behind a proprietary wall. That negatively impacts the usefulness of the software for me.