If something already exists, except for the "on the Internet" part, then clearly that's neither invention, nor not obvious to a person skilled in the field.
So I don't see why this talk of "it doesn't mention the Internet" is even relevant.
Alcohol has good sides too, it decreases the risks of getting heart diseases, that sort of thing. Drinking 1 glass, for males possibly 2 glasses of alchohol per day probably gives more benefit than harm.
Source: _Eat, Drink, and Be Healthy: The Harvard Medical School Guide to Healthy Eating_, by Walter C. Millett.
Chess is boxing with the mind. Also, if you make no mistakes, it's a draw. As if that ever happens...
If you lose, you truly have no-one to blame but yourself. No excuses. There is no random factor, you have full information, the game is initially equal. Losing without a chance after a lifetime of study hurts.
There's no difference between a "theory", a "theorem", a "law", etc in science. They're all just synonyms for theory, to give them different names. Science deals with theories. Math deals with theorems.
I've remarked before, it's only Americans that have this idea that a "law" is better than a "theory", etc.
Can someone explain to me why that is? Is this taught in schools? Is it caused by Creationists (another US phenomenon) trying to muddy the waters by suggesting "evolution theory" hasn't made it to "law status" yet?
Then the switch to Linux happens, and nobody has sat down and used Windows 2000. So they have no idea that the stability is a hell of a lot greater (it's based on NT instead of DOS) or that work can actually be done about it.
You're probably right. I have to use Windows at work sometimes, and it's not so bad. Mainly small irritations because of little differences with Linux/X. It's certainly very usable.
However, I'm perfectly happy with my Linux system now. It does everything I want. I know all the short cuts. It's free, and it's constantly improving. The quality of Windows is just not very relevant anymore.
It's not a case of supply and demand. If the high prices were caused by lack of supply, then the stores would have to pay the factories high prices as well. Supply and demand can't explain a huge resale markup on an unchanged end product.
Your main point though, "they sell at this price because people are willing to pay this" stands, of course. But that's not because of supply and demand, that's because of how people work (putting $30 on top of an already large bill is less of a problem than paying $30 for something on its own), and the fact that they don't have complete information about the market.
Whether that makes it a rip-off or not, decide for yourself.
You mean if Linux is changed to hijack a binary module and swallow it into the kernel without the driver's permission?
And enforce the GPL on it?
No, just use it. That's allowed (that's always allowed). If you do that, you're not allowed to distribute the result anymore though, by the GPL, and probably by the license of whatever proprietary module we're talking about.
Remember, copyright law always allows using things, it just restricts copying and distribution.
Ah, that would be the quantum computer on board the manned space expedition to Mars, power by a fission-reactor ion-drive. Back home we can watch it via our ubiquetous videophones, or our Linux powered desktops, which can run applications with true Artificial Intelligence. All our homes will be supplied by nuclear electricity that is too cheap to meter. There will be peace in Isreal.. etc..
We live in such interesting times that everyone is taking everything for granted. The idea of a quantum computer was born in 1982 (history of Quantum computing). Now, just over twenty years later, we already have brought bits of the idea into practice - that is stunningly fast, compared with history. Quantum computers are an extremely advanced idea.
Charles Babbage got the idea of a general computer around 1812 (Babbage), but one wasn't built until World War II.
So after only 20 years we already have done some tiny, extremely simple calculations involving a few qubits. Very far from being useful, and still totally amazing that we've come so far. Most ideas take twenty years to become widely known before they're looked at seriously.
So Slashdot readers compare it to Duke Nukem and flying cars, and laugh. These times are so interesting that everyone is jaded.
I'd be willing to bet, though, that the slow decline in IT salaries (developers in particular, where I have experience) won't be affected at all by this news.
That's because American software developers were totally overpaid during the 90s.
Well, it's a ribbon in a very remote location, without large numbers of civilians nearby.
If you believe it's a terrorist target, then Cape Canaveral must be a bigger target - easier to reach, easier to hit. Is that a good reason to stop sending rockets into space?
If the light is sent in a beam that doesn't spread out at all (like a theoretical perfect laser), then the power doesn't drop at all. Not even linearly with distance.
If it does spread, the area that the beam "crosses", increases proportional to the square of the distance, so the power decreases by that.
This gubblick contains many
nonsklarkish English flutzpahs, but the overall pluggandisp
can be glorked from context"
(David Moser, quoted by
Douglas Hofstadter in his "Metamagical Themas" column in the
January 1981 "Scientific American")
The conclusion is that the human brain is a very weird thing indeed:-)
its really more of an OBSERVATION than a LAW. a THEOREM at best. While it has held true through my short lifetime so far, it certainly does not qualify as a LAW.
Always an interesting cultural weirdness, this hierarchy of "law" beats "theory" beats... I don't know.
That's completely unknown in the rest of the world. Most of these words are just synonyms for each other, there's no official definition of what a "law" is. Sometimes part of a theory is named "Foo's Law", "Bar's Theory", or whatever, but those are just names. They're not actually different things.
(Except of course in math, where 'theorem' has an exact definition, of a statement that can be proven from the axioms)
Just wondering whether you Americans realize this:-)
They say that there is a one in 909,000 chance of asteroid 2003 QQ47 impacting our planet.
The chances of a catastrophe are likely to become even slimmer once more measurements of the asteroid's orbit have been made.
Yes, duh. With our current knowledge, there is a 1 in 909,000 chance of the chance going to 1, and a 908,999 in 909,000 chance of the chance going to 0.
Saying it is likely to become slimmer is a totally content-less comment.
A chance of 1 in 909,000! That was a close shave, people.
As is well known, things that have a 1 in a million chance of occurring happen nine times out of ten. But 909,000 is such an odd number, we should be safe.
Nope, what is hillarious is that all that is required to prevent this is legislation requiring any american company to pay any employee US equivalent wages for the job they do, regardless of the work they are doing.
You, as a country, can't afford that. You also can't afford to pay people inside the US those wages for all that work - you don't even have the people. Look at the trade deficit. The amount of stuff you get from abroad is fucking huge. The only reason the US has a higher standard of living is because everything is outsourced. The moment you start paying everyone US wages, Americans won't be able to buy that stuff, and neither will anyone else buy American.
This is capitalism, you may have heard of it. You must compete. So either you become better than the programmers there, or you drop your wages to their level, or you get out of this business. Fourth option: move to India.
Eventually the whole country will have to drop the wages. With this trade deficit, eventually the dollar is going to fall like a rock. Then you won't be able to import much anymore, but your wages will be cheaper.
The US will always have advantages, they'll always have a higher standard of living; lots of natural resources and a culture where the people are willing to work really hard. But there's no reason why it should stay as lopsided as it is now.
If the actual sharing was the problem, the distribution itself, then we wouldn't have radio stations playing music either, because that also lets people listen to music they didn't pay for, but it's a bit different because you don't really get a choice of what you hear.
As far as I know, copyright law doesn't prohibit having copies of a song. It restricts distribution; making copies, if you will. Compare to the GPL (since this is Slashdot); it can't give rights to use and the code, since you already have that right, it just grants you distribution rights under certain restrictions.
And the radio stations have distribution rights, since they have to pay for each song they air (or have been given the rights in some other deal). You do not have that right.
Perhaps in the US just downloading is also not allowed (through some other law than just copyright law), but in the EU downloading is perfectly fine legally, sharing is not.
The RIAA is using MD5 hashes as a basis for proof that the individual in question downloaded the files they are sharing, instead of ripping them from their own CD collection.
What's the point? It's the sharing that is illegal (you are not allowed to distribute the songs). It doesn't matter how you got the mp3, does it? It's just extra evidence.
I think that post went without a reply for so long because everything is thinking they're missing the joke, so they'd just look silly pointing out the mistake.
Slashdot Mirror
If something already exists, except for the "on the Internet" part, then clearly that's neither invention, nor not obvious to a person skilled in the field.
So I don't see why this talk of "it doesn't mention the Internet" is even relevant.
But of course, I suppose I lack cynicism...
Alcohol has good sides too, it decreases the risks of getting heart diseases, that sort of thing. Drinking 1 glass, for males possibly 2 glasses of alchohol per day probably gives more benefit than harm.
Source: _Eat, Drink, and Be Healthy: The Harvard Medical School Guide to Healthy Eating_, by Walter C. Millett.
Chess is boxing with the mind. Also, if you make no mistakes, it's a draw. As if that ever happens...
If you lose, you truly have no-one to blame but yourself. No excuses. There is no random factor, you have full information, the game is initially equal. Losing without a chance after a lifetime of study hurts.
There's no difference between a "theory", a "theorem", a "law", etc in science. They're all just synonyms for theory, to give them different names. Science deals with theories. Math deals with theorems.
I've remarked before, it's only Americans that have this idea that a "law" is better than a "theory", etc.
Can someone explain to me why that is? Is this taught in schools? Is it caused by Creationists (another US phenomenon) trying to muddy the waters by suggesting "evolution theory" hasn't made it to "law status" yet?
Then the switch to Linux happens, and nobody has sat down and used Windows 2000. So they have no idea that the stability is a hell of a lot greater (it's based on NT instead of DOS) or that work can actually be done about it.
You're probably right. I have to use Windows at work sometimes, and it's not so bad. Mainly small irritations because of little differences with Linux/X. It's certainly very usable.
However, I'm perfectly happy with my Linux system now. It does everything I want. I know all the short cuts. It's free, and it's constantly improving. The quality of Windows is just not very relevant anymore.
Where can I get whatever it is you're smoking?
It's not a case of supply and demand. If the high prices were caused by lack of supply, then the stores would have to pay the factories high prices as well. Supply and demand can't explain a huge resale markup on an unchanged end product.
Your main point though, "they sell at this price because people are willing to pay this" stands, of course. But that's not because of supply and demand, that's because of how people work (putting $30 on top of an already large bill is less of a problem than paying $30 for something on its own), and the fact that they don't have complete information about the market.
Whether that makes it a rip-off or not, decide for yourself.
You mean if Linux is changed to hijack a binary module and swallow it into the kernel without the driver's permission?
And enforce the GPL on it?
No, just use it. That's allowed (that's always allowed). If you do that, you're not allowed to distribute the result anymore though, by the GPL, and probably by the license of whatever proprietary module we're talking about.
Remember, copyright law always allows using things, it just restricts copying and distribution.
Ah, that would be the quantum computer on board the manned space expedition to Mars, power by a fission-reactor ion-drive. Back home we can watch it via our ubiquetous videophones, or our Linux powered desktops, which can run applications with true Artificial Intelligence. All our homes will be supplied by nuclear electricity that is too cheap to meter. There will be peace in Isreal.. etc..
We live in such interesting times that everyone is taking everything for granted. The idea of a quantum computer was born in 1982 (history of Quantum computing). Now, just over twenty years later, we already have brought bits of the idea into practice - that is stunningly fast, compared with history. Quantum computers are an extremely advanced idea.
Charles Babbage got the idea of a general computer around 1812 (Babbage), but one wasn't built until World War II.
So after only 20 years we already have done some tiny, extremely simple calculations involving a few qubits. Very far from being useful, and still totally amazing that we've come so far. Most ideas take twenty years to become widely known before they're looked at seriously.
So Slashdot readers compare it to Duke Nukem and flying cars, and laugh. These times are so interesting that everyone is jaded.
I'd be willing to bet, though, that the slow decline in IT salaries (developers in particular, where I have experience) won't be affected at all by this news.
That's because American software developers were totally overpaid during the 90s.
Well, it's a ribbon in a very remote location, without large numbers of civilians nearby.
If you believe it's a terrorist target, then Cape Canaveral must be a bigger target - easier to reach, easier to hit. Is that a good reason to stop sending rockets into space?
If the light is sent in a beam that doesn't spread out at all (like a theoretical perfect laser), then the power doesn't drop at all. Not even linearly with distance.
If it does spread, the area that the beam "crosses", increases proportional to the square of the distance, so the power decreases by that.
So it would never decrease linearly.
Wow. Cool. Compare that to sentences like this:
This gubblick contains many nonsklarkish English flutzpahs, but the overall pluggandisp can be glorked from context"
(David Moser, quoted by Douglas Hofstadter in his "Metamagical Themas" column in the January 1981 "Scientific American")
The conclusion is that the human brain is a very weird thing indeed :-)
It's not different. In your analogy, you could that the top two candidates are Windows Type 1 and Windows Type 2, or something like that.
Reasoning like that is exactly how this mess came to be.
I bought from them, no problem at all. It was also very fast, taking four days or so to send to Europe, if I recall correctly, it's been a while.
I like Fred Wilson. And there are some other things I'll buy soon.
We old guys have stood on the right altar, Amulet in hand, and choked on a tin of spinach right there.
And we still love the game!
Kids nowadays, can't tell a d from a D.
its really more of an OBSERVATION than a LAW. a THEOREM at best. While it has held true through my short lifetime so far, it certainly does not qualify as a LAW.
Always an interesting cultural weirdness, this hierarchy of "law" beats "theory" beats... I don't know.
That's completely unknown in the rest of the world. Most of these words are just synonyms for each other, there's no official definition of what a "law" is. Sometimes part of a theory is named "Foo's Law", "Bar's Theory", or whatever, but those are just names. They're not actually different things.
(Except of course in math, where 'theorem' has an exact definition, of a statement that can be proven from the axioms)
Just wondering whether you Americans realize this :-)
For example, there is no way that you can prove that you exist. Cogito, ergo sum doesn't work (you might be a program that passes the Turing test).
If you are a program, that means you are.
They say that there is a one in 909,000 chance of asteroid 2003 QQ47 impacting our planet.
The chances of a catastrophe are likely to become even slimmer once more measurements of the asteroid's orbit have been made.
Yes, duh. With our current knowledge, there is a 1 in 909,000 chance of the chance going to 1, and a 908,999 in 909,000 chance of the chance going to 0.
Saying it is likely to become slimmer is a totally content-less comment.
A chance of 1 in 909,000! That was a close shave, people.
As is well known, things that have a 1 in a million chance of occurring happen nine times out of ten. But 909,000 is such an odd number, we should be safe.
What part of "the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed" do you not understand
The comma.Nope, what is hillarious is that all that is required to prevent this is legislation requiring any american company to pay any employee US equivalent wages for the job they do, regardless of the work they are doing.
You, as a country, can't afford that. You also can't afford to pay people inside the US those wages for all that work - you don't even have the people. Look at the trade deficit. The amount of stuff you get from abroad is fucking huge. The only reason the US has a higher standard of living is because everything is outsourced. The moment you start paying everyone US wages, Americans won't be able to buy that stuff, and neither will anyone else buy American.
This is capitalism, you may have heard of it. You must compete. So either you become better than the programmers there, or you drop your wages to their level, or you get out of this business. Fourth option: move to India.
Eventually the whole country will have to drop the wages. With this trade deficit, eventually the dollar is going to fall like a rock. Then you won't be able to import much anymore, but your wages will be cheaper.
The US will always have advantages, they'll always have a higher standard of living; lots of natural resources and a culture where the people are willing to work really hard. But there's no reason why it should stay as lopsided as it is now.
If the actual sharing was the problem, the distribution itself, then we wouldn't have radio stations playing music either, because that also lets people listen to music they didn't pay for, but it's a bit different because you don't really get a choice of what you hear.
As far as I know, copyright law doesn't prohibit having copies of a song. It restricts distribution; making copies, if you will. Compare to the GPL (since this is Slashdot); it can't give rights to use and the code, since you already have that right, it just grants you distribution rights under certain restrictions.
And the radio stations have distribution rights, since they have to pay for each song they air (or have been given the rights in some other deal). You do not have that right.
Perhaps in the US just downloading is also not allowed (through some other law than just copyright law), but in the EU downloading is perfectly fine legally, sharing is not.
The RIAA is using MD5 hashes as a basis for proof that the individual in question downloaded the files they are sharing, instead of ripping them from their own CD collection.
What's the point? It's the sharing that is illegal (you are not allowed to distribute the songs). It doesn't matter how you got the mp3, does it? It's just extra evidence.
I think that post went without a reply for so long because everything is thinking they're missing the joke, so they'd just look silly pointing out the mistake.
That, or I missed the joke...