Actually Star Trek *does* touch upon the subject of religion multiple times. Religion does indeed exist - but since Star Fleet regulations does not allow religion to influence it's operations, we rarely see it manifested in the series, other than as a convenient plot device. It's just simply not a big factor of the daily life on the Enterprise.
Matter Replication and Transmutation, and by extension nearly unlimited energy, is indeed essential for a Star Trek society. When nearly everything* can be provided on an when-I-need-it basis, capitalism does not work, since capitalism require scarcity.
As for how Earth could be united in a unified secular government, well, the official explanation is that thanks to Cochrane inventing the warp drive reactor in the mid 21st century, Vulcans appeared and helped the Earth gradually prepare for their new space age. It is not unthinkable that Earth itself will be run by a single government when you have humans on around 20 000 other planets, owned by the federation coalition. And while one shouldn't underestimate humanity's ability to quarrel with each other, one should neither ignore the xenophobic effect created when outsiders show up - especially if those outsiders are far more technologicly advanced than us.
* The only thing lacking would be living matter such as pets and humans.
Sure they do, especially if customers are using the result of the work, a song in this case. If you drink lemonade from a lemonade stand, you need to pay for the drink. Making lemonade is no guarantee of income to the lemonade owner, but if he finds a customer, he needs to get paid.
Ah, the old "Unauthorized copying is theft" fallacy. No, unauthorized copying is not theft, have never been theft and won't ever be theft, no matter how much you want it to. Even SCOTUS has confirmed that in the landmark ruling Dowling vs. US, 1985.
Unauthorized copying is a violation of rights, but it is much more akin to trespassing than anything else. It's like this. Imagine there is a lake. The lake has a beach. The beach and the lake itself is public property, but all the land around it is farmlands and thus private property, so the only way to (legally) get to the beach is by air. Those darn local people though, they do not wish to hire a helicopter ride over there. They'd rather just like to walk on the outskirts of some of that private property so they can get to the lake and enjoy a nice, cozy swim in the summer heat.
These people, trespassing on the private property just in order to be able to take a dip they, in fact, are entitled to, are technicly commiting a crime - but they do not harm any land by walking over that property, and they do not disturb anyone by simply walking. Depending on where you are from, this is even legal in some countries, provided certain rules are followed.
Are these people doing something so bad that they need to serve a jail sentence or maybe even death sentence for their lawbreaking?
That's why I believe copyright is completely outdated. It only favors the rich companies. However there do need to be some regulatio of what one can do with regards to creative works.
In short: the creator must be given some leverage against companies seeking to profit on the fruits of his/her labor. Today, copyright does the exact opposite.
Every link, button and form in my webapp can be used with JS turned off. Every single one. This means I can write automatic bot scripts with a simple HTML parser that tests my webpages for any UI regressions and report those. That's a great help when refactoring code and guaranteeing .
However, should you have a JS-enabled browser, I simply check if the call was made with AJAX - if it was, I simply bypass rendering the entire UI and instead focus on the part that was requested. All ajax calls are made by a slightly edited regular anchor tag, like this:
systemd is not just an init system. systemd is a GNU replacement. Run systemd/Linux or GNU/Linux, but don't pretend that the two operating systems are one and the same. They are not.
"most movies don't make back their initial investment in first release."
Correction. Most Hollywood movies that have spent hundreds of millions of dollars don't make back their investment. Solution: Cut down production costs.
Actors demanding 40M bucks for their role? Yeah, that will fade, sooner or later.
Look, it's market economics 101. If your product/service/whatever don't make enough money it is time to trim the fat. Why should hollywood business be any different?
Skype isn't what killed the VOIP industry. NAT and the "tiered internet" did. Once you experience the internet with no public IP addresses, well... Welcome to hell my friend. All in the name of saving a penny today and losing a dollar tomorrow.
Net Neutrality isn't just the idea of unfiltered traffic. It's the idea that everyone on the internet are peers. Sure Google have more bandwidth than me, but I can still talk to Google as a peer, not as a lower-class citizen. Even my ISP is my peer, not my master. That's the great thing about the internet.:)
If it's a device someone else built that you yourself is trying to replicate in your own environment, then it would be perfectly fine to do so. Those certifications are first and foremost intended as a safeguard measure so that device manufacturers does not sell equipment that are hazardous in any way. Electricity is, after all, not very healthy in large quantities, and neither is radiation.
However, in your home, noone can tell you what you can and can't build. A home-built device could be every bit as safe as an official one, but since it is home built, there are no guarantees a faulty soldering may, say, bypass a certain part making the product overheat and release poisonous gas. Therefore such a device may not be sold, but it may very well be built, at your own expense and risk.
That's easy. Hardware once created is permanent. Take the good old NES console - it's still the same old console now, as it was 1985. There's almost 30 years between that!
Therefore it won't be hard at all to get a consumer device CSA-certified. After all, some company is producing that device, meaning they are in control of how, when and why it is built. That doesn't change even if the hardware is open.
Open Hardware means the schematics are open for everyone to make use of. It does not mean that you can magically 3D-print your own super-awesome graphics card (atleast not yet) - it would require a lot of time and effort to create that card, even with the help of an RPM (Rapid Prototyping Machine) and open schematics. It is, however, easier to add your own stuff to the hardware and modify it to better suit your own needs, if you have the skill and inclination to do so. Doing that will void your warranty though, so watch out!
You seem to not have your facts straight. First off you are describing anarchy, and while anarchy is a nice thought anarchy can never exist naturally, it's fleeting state exists in the same way as alkali metals exists in nature. As part of a greater whole.
Secondly, your definition of anarchy is completely wrong. Allow me to fix it for you. "To them, freedom means being able to do whatever they want whenever they want in any way they want as long as it doesn't limit the freedoms of others."
From what I gather, it's not *that* bad - most apps depending on systemd do so for the cgroups support. If one could extract the cgroups functionality into a separate library and get projects to use that instead, the need for systemd would be a lot less.
Systemd is eating up everything low-level though. Before systemd, a Linux system would look like this:
Kernel -> (collection of init/syslog/pam/udev/whatever) -> Bash -> GUI
Now it's
Kernel -> systemd -> Bash -> GUI
And to be quite honest, I'm not sure if systemd will leave Bash well enough alone, either. I for one prefer uselessd over systemd. Others may disagree.
I don't have the time to do it myself, but check out Mediagoblin and BuddyCloud - If you can figure out a way to replace BCs media server with Mediagoblin it would probably solve everything.
And I think the absolutely best chance of success would be if one made a social "network" that allowed one to share (and possibly monetize your own) content - think Youtube, but distributed and not limited to movies but to everything - pictures, audio, video, blog posts etc.:)
Best way to accomplish that using current technology would be to use BuddyCloud and replace its mediaserver with GNU Media Goblin. In the future however, it might be possible to do this without administering a physical server - it'll all be decentralised and in the cloud. That would be most convenient, but of course there are quite a few issues to resolve before then, not the least with regards to privacy...
The government shouldn't be providing services that can be done by the private sector.
The government should provide a service whenever profit-driven models aren't good enough. Infrastructure is one such area where private companies often fail to meet the needs of its users.
So no, not all government services are inherently "evil". But that is besides the point. If you RTFA then you'd see that the swedish model basicly require an open-access policy - once fibers are built they are there for everyone to use. Meaning, ISPs do not compete over infrastructure, they share it and compete over services.
"All daemons made when sysvinit was king will work with systemd. It is backward compatible, even with sysvinit scripts (there are some few documented corner cases)"
Yes. But that's completely beside the point.
The problem described is not that old stuff won't work/is portable; the problem is that new stuff, stuff that use fancy systemd-specific parts, are not portable. This means there will be great services, down the road, that people will want to run on other UNIX-like OSes than Linux, like say, FreeBSD or OSX.
Before systemd, this was easy to accomplish. After systemd, you need to write a software abstraction layer that hides the systemd-specific parts. It's a giant problem just waiting to come up and bite someone in the ass.
Linux has automatic updates, and a friendly icon pops up saying "We installed stuff on your computer, you should reboot at your convenience."
Windows, on the other hand, installs those updates and then tells me "you have five minutes to quit whatever it is that you are doing before we reboot your computer."
Whoever decided that was a good idea should be shot.
All software has holes, but atleast Linux lets me upgrade my machine when I want it to, not force me when I'm right in the middle of something.
I still get those from Windows on a regular basis. It still annoys me. And if you say "Oh but that's so easy to fix, just do xyz" - well, it's dead-easy to fix a lot of things with Linux commandline too. And just as much a valid solution to a given problem. So there. Neither OS is better than the other, but some have more strengths than others.
I still regularly get "need to upgrade reboots" on my Windows machine. It's atleast once a month and always seems to pop up when I'm playing a game of LoL or CS:Go.
Yes, I use my Windows as a Wintendo. Got a problem with that?
If the carriers in the US are not afraid of the coming Android hegemony, then they should be. The rest of the world already is - they've seen that the iPhone and iPod is heading the same way as the Macintosh two decades earlier did. Apple is repeating the same mistakes it did then. Apple will therefore slowly sink below 10% marketshare, just as the WinPhone is now.
And regardless whether you choose to trust an expert with a most impressive track record when it comes to predicting the WinPhone market, well... Your loss.:)
First, if we're talking about getting to the "third Ecosystem" as a measurement of success, then you would need at least 10% of the market. WP is not gaining market share - it is slowly losing it. There are two ways one can gain those kind of numbers, now;
1. Someone creates a consumer phone that is an order of magnitude better than what we have today, extremely well polished, and not based on Android/iOS. Since the bar has been raised ridiculously high the chances of that happening are very slim. Or to put it this way: had the first iPhone hit the streets today, it would've been laughed out of market. 2. Carriers decide "Ok, we need to do something about this Android hegemony or forever be slaves to Google", and decide to take one of the open alternatives and collaborate on making it up to par. However, given the nature of carriers, that would be even more unlikely. Imagine Verizon, AT&T, T-Mobile and Sprint all go together to create a common platform, don't really think so...
Second, the way Tomi compares the smartphone sales numbers seems legit to me. He takes all smartphone unit sales including legacy platforms still being sold today (e.g. Blackberry). If one is to ignore legacy platforms then yes, WP has a greater market share compared to Android and iOS.
Dude, the N9 had glowing reviews from several heavy names, that is irrefutable fact. The N9 was seen as a potential rival to iPhone, that too is irrefutable fact. And it sold like hotcakes in the few countries that released it, even with no future.
Moreover there was no viable path to creating an ecosystem.
Because Elop had killed any chances of it once the N9 hit the ground, yes? It still outsold Lumias once it was released, though.
I gave you details from Kanter. We're done. You obviously have no respect for simple factual refutation, preferring to live in Tomi's world of paranoid delusion even when confronted with data.
That doesn't change the fact that Tomi consistently had the most accurate predictions about current market share of the WinPhone platform and Nokia in and of itself. Or are you saying Windows Phone in reality does not have an installed base of around 3% of the market, today? Despite all the billions thrown at it, despite all the failures that Nokia had going WinPhone exclusive? Are you saying WinPhone did, in fact, consist of more than 2.2% of all phones sold in Q1 2014?
I can't see any chance of WinPhone recovering. Not going to happen. It will be stuck below the 10% threshold for atleast a decade. Android won the mobile war, and any platform that is going to be a serious contender needs to be more open than Android to succeed. Because that is the only way to make a dent in the marketshare.
Slashdot Mirror
It is ironic this is on Youtube since that was what RMS explicitly told you *not* to do.
On the other hand, if one would follow *all* the rules RMS has, well...
Actually Star Trek *does* touch upon the subject of religion multiple times. Religion does indeed exist - but since Star Fleet regulations does not allow religion to influence it's operations, we rarely see it manifested in the series, other than as a convenient plot device. It's just simply not a big factor of the daily life on the Enterprise.
Matter Replication and Transmutation, and by extension nearly unlimited energy, is indeed essential for a Star Trek society. When nearly everything* can be provided on an when-I-need-it basis, capitalism does not work, since capitalism require scarcity.
As for how Earth could be united in a unified secular government, well, the official explanation is that thanks to Cochrane inventing the warp drive reactor in the mid 21st century, Vulcans appeared and helped the Earth gradually prepare for their new space age. It is not unthinkable that Earth itself will be run by a single government when you have humans on around 20 000 other planets, owned by the federation coalition. And while one shouldn't underestimate humanity's ability to quarrel with each other, one should neither ignore the xenophobic effect created when outsiders show up - especially if those outsiders are far more technologicly advanced than us.
* The only thing lacking would be living matter such as pets and humans.
Sure they do, especially if customers are using the result of the work, a song in this case. If you drink lemonade from a lemonade stand, you need to pay for the drink. Making lemonade is no guarantee of income to the lemonade owner, but if he finds a customer, he needs to get paid.
Ah, the old "Unauthorized copying is theft" fallacy. No, unauthorized copying is not theft, have never been theft and won't ever be theft, no matter how much you want it to. Even SCOTUS has confirmed that in the landmark ruling Dowling vs. US, 1985.
Unauthorized copying is a violation of rights, but it is much more akin to trespassing than anything else. It's like this. Imagine there is a lake. The lake has a beach. The beach and the lake itself is public property, but all the land around it is farmlands and thus private property, so the only way to (legally) get to the beach is by air. Those darn local people though, they do not wish to hire a helicopter ride over there. They'd rather just like to walk on the outskirts of some of that private property so they can get to the lake and enjoy a nice, cozy swim in the summer heat.
These people, trespassing on the private property just in order to be able to take a dip they, in fact, are entitled to, are technicly commiting a crime - but they do not harm any land by walking over that property, and they do not disturb anyone by simply walking. Depending on where you are from, this is even legal in some countries, provided certain rules are followed.
Are these people doing something so bad that they need to serve a jail sentence or maybe even death sentence for their lawbreaking?
How right you are.
That's why I believe copyright is completely outdated. It only favors the rich companies. However there do need to be some regulatio of what one can do with regards to creative works.
In short: the creator must be given some leverage against companies seeking to profit on the fruits of his/her labor. Today, copyright does the exact opposite.
I like to go down the middle road myself.
Every link, button and form in my webapp can be used with JS turned off. Every single one. This means I can write automatic bot scripts with a simple HTML parser that tests my webpages for any UI regressions and report those. That's a great help when refactoring code and guaranteeing .
However, should you have a JS-enabled browser, I simply check if the call was made with AJAX - if it was, I simply bypass rendering the entire UI and instead focus on the part that was requested. All ajax calls are made by a slightly edited regular anchor tag, like this:
<a class="ajaxlink" href="index.php?action=foo#bar">load foo</a>
<div id="bar">Foo loads here</div>
Never seen this anywhere else, wonder why?
systemd is not just an init system. systemd is a GNU replacement. Run systemd/Linux or GNU/Linux, but don't pretend that the two operating systems are one and the same. They are not.
"most movies don't make back their initial investment in first release."
Correction. Most Hollywood movies that have spent hundreds of millions of dollars don't make back their investment. Solution: Cut down production costs.
Actors demanding 40M bucks for their role? Yeah, that will fade, sooner or later.
Look, it's market economics 101. If your product/service/whatever don't make enough money it is time to trim the fat. Why should hollywood business be any different?
Skype isn't what killed the VOIP industry. NAT and the "tiered internet" did. Once you experience the internet with no public IP addresses, well... Welcome to hell my friend. All in the name of saving a penny today and losing a dollar tomorrow.
Net Neutrality isn't just the idea of unfiltered traffic. It's the idea that everyone on the internet are peers. Sure Google have more bandwidth than me, but I can still talk to Google as a peer, not as a lower-class citizen. Even my ISP is my peer, not my master. That's the great thing about the internet. :)
I actually tried systemd the other day.
It's a decent OS but it *really* needs a better init system...
To be fair, trademarks would still be around...
If it's a device someone else built that you yourself is trying to replicate in your own environment, then it would be perfectly fine to do so. Those certifications are first and foremost intended as a safeguard measure so that device manufacturers does not sell equipment that are hazardous in any way. Electricity is, after all, not very healthy in large quantities, and neither is radiation.
However, in your home, noone can tell you what you can and can't build. A home-built device could be every bit as safe as an official one, but since it is home built, there are no guarantees a faulty soldering may, say, bypass a certain part making the product overheat and release poisonous gas. Therefore such a device may not be sold, but it may very well be built, at your own expense and risk.
That's easy. Hardware once created is permanent. Take the good old NES console - it's still the same old console now, as it was 1985. There's almost 30 years between that!
Therefore it won't be hard at all to get a consumer device CSA-certified. After all, some company is producing that device, meaning they are in control of how, when and why it is built. That doesn't change even if the hardware is open.
Open Hardware means the schematics are open for everyone to make use of. It does not mean that you can magically 3D-print your own super-awesome graphics card (atleast not yet) - it would require a lot of time and effort to create that card, even with the help of an RPM (Rapid Prototyping Machine) and open schematics. It is, however, easier to add your own stuff to the hardware and modify it to better suit your own needs, if you have the skill and inclination to do so. Doing that will void your warranty though, so watch out!
You seem to not have your facts straight. First off you are describing anarchy, and while anarchy is a nice thought anarchy can never exist naturally, it's fleeting state exists in the same way as alkali metals exists in nature. As part of a greater whole.
Secondly, your definition of anarchy is completely wrong. Allow me to fix it for you. "To them, freedom means being able to do whatever they want whenever they want in any way they want as long as it doesn't limit the freedoms of others."
From what I gather, it's not *that* bad - most apps depending on systemd do so for the cgroups support. If one could extract the cgroups functionality into a separate library and get projects to use that instead, the need for systemd would be a lot less.
Systemd is eating up everything low-level though. Before systemd, a Linux system would look like this:
Kernel -> (collection of init/syslog/pam/udev/whatever) -> Bash -> GUI
Now it's
Kernel -> systemd -> Bash -> GUI
And to be quite honest, I'm not sure if systemd will leave Bash well enough alone, either. I for one prefer uselessd over systemd. Others may disagree.
I don't have the time to do it myself, but check out Mediagoblin and BuddyCloud - If you can figure out a way to replace BCs media server with Mediagoblin it would probably solve everything.
And I think the absolutely best chance of success would be if one made a social "network" that allowed one to share (and possibly monetize your own) content - think Youtube, but distributed and not limited to movies but to everything - pictures, audio, video, blog posts etc. :)
Best way to accomplish that using current technology would be to use BuddyCloud and replace its mediaserver with GNU Media Goblin. In the future however, it might be possible to do this without administering a physical server - it'll all be decentralised and in the cloud. That would be most convenient, but of course there are quite a few issues to resolve before then, not the least with regards to privacy...
The government should provide a service whenever profit-driven models aren't good enough. Infrastructure is one such area where private companies often fail to meet the needs of its users.
So no, not all government services are inherently "evil". But that is besides the point. If you RTFA then you'd see that the swedish model basicly require an open-access policy - once fibers are built they are there for everyone to use. Meaning, ISPs do not compete over infrastructure, they share it and compete over services.
"All daemons made when sysvinit was king will work with systemd. It is backward compatible, even with sysvinit scripts (there are some few documented corner cases)"
Yes. But that's completely beside the point.
The problem described is not that old stuff won't work/is portable; the problem is that new stuff, stuff that use fancy systemd-specific parts, are not portable. This means there will be great services, down the road, that people will want to run on other UNIX-like OSes than Linux, like say, FreeBSD or OSX.
Before systemd, this was easy to accomplish. After systemd, you need to write a software abstraction layer that hides the systemd-specific parts. It's a giant problem just waiting to come up and bite someone in the ass.
You are missing the point.
Linux has automatic updates, and a friendly icon pops up saying "We installed stuff on your computer, you should reboot at your convenience."
Windows, on the other hand, installs those updates and then tells me "you have five minutes to quit whatever it is that you are doing before we reboot your computer."
Whoever decided that was a good idea should be shot.
Sorry to hear that. Bitch at your overlords they're holding you back, because that's in essence what they are doing.
Maybe they'll listen once they realise they are the laughing stock of everyone else in the world... :)
All software has holes, but atleast Linux lets me upgrade my machine when I want it to, not force me when I'm right in the middle of something.
I still get those from Windows on a regular basis. It still annoys me. And if you say "Oh but that's so easy to fix, just do xyz" - well, it's dead-easy to fix a lot of things with Linux commandline too. And just as much a valid solution to a given problem. So there. Neither OS is better than the other, but some have more strengths than others.
I still regularly get "need to upgrade reboots" on my Windows machine. It's atleast once a month and always seems to pop up when I'm playing a game of LoL or CS:Go.
Yes, I use my Windows as a Wintendo. Got a problem with that?
If the carriers in the US are not afraid of the coming Android hegemony, then they should be. The rest of the world already is - they've seen that the iPhone and iPod is heading the same way as the Macintosh two decades earlier did. Apple is repeating the same mistakes it did then. Apple will therefore slowly sink below 10% marketshare, just as the WinPhone is now.
And regardless whether you choose to trust an expert with a most impressive track record when it comes to predicting the WinPhone market, well... Your loss. :)
First, if we're talking about getting to the "third Ecosystem" as a measurement of success, then you would need at least 10% of the market. WP is not gaining market share - it is slowly losing it. There are two ways one can gain those kind of numbers, now;
1. Someone creates a consumer phone that is an order of magnitude better than what we have today, extremely well polished, and not based on Android/iOS. Since the bar has been raised ridiculously high the chances of that happening are very slim. Or to put it this way: had the first iPhone hit the streets today, it would've been laughed out of market.
2. Carriers decide "Ok, we need to do something about this Android hegemony or forever be slaves to Google", and decide to take one of the open alternatives and collaborate on making it up to par. However, given the nature of carriers, that would be even more unlikely. Imagine Verizon, AT&T, T-Mobile and Sprint all go together to create a common platform, don't really think so...
Second, the way Tomi compares the smartphone sales numbers seems legit to me. He takes all smartphone unit sales including legacy platforms still being sold today (e.g. Blackberry). If one is to ignore legacy platforms then yes, WP has a greater market share compared to Android and iOS.
Dude, the N9 had glowing reviews from several heavy names, that is irrefutable fact. The N9 was seen as a potential rival to iPhone, that too is irrefutable fact. And it sold like hotcakes in the few countries that released it, even with no future.
Because Elop had killed any chances of it once the N9 hit the ground, yes? It still outsold Lumias once it was released, though.
That doesn't change the fact that Tomi consistently had the most accurate predictions about current market share of the WinPhone platform and Nokia in and of itself. Or are you saying Windows Phone in reality does not have an installed base of around 3% of the market, today? Despite all the billions thrown at it, despite all the failures that Nokia had going WinPhone exclusive? Are you saying WinPhone did, in fact, consist of more than 2.2% of all phones sold in Q1 2014?
I can't see any chance of WinPhone recovering. Not going to happen. It will be stuck below the 10% threshold for atleast a decade. Android won the mobile war, and any platform that is going to be a serious contender needs to be more open than Android to succeed. Because that is the only way to make a dent in the marketshare.