I'm British. I keep hearing Americans saying things like this, and I just don't get it. If I'm sick, I go to see my doctor. Yes, I have to make an appointment, but it's not as if I'm having to wait any real length of time. I get as good healthcare as anywhere else, and I don't have to pay a penny. Sure, there are problems with the British system - it could be more reponsive, and adopt new treatments faster - but it is generally transparent, and ensures that people do not die or become crippled, simly due to a lack of funds.
That surely has to be better than a system where treatment can be denied at the whim of an accountant?
except that the business model for books relies on there being no cheap and easy way of replicating them. Photocopying is slow and expensive, pdf files are pain to read on a screen. Mp3s took off because they are easy to duplicate at zero cost, with no appreciable loss in user experience. If ebooks become successful, or low cost printers/binders, then the text of books goes the same way as music has done. The primary value of a book is in the paper, but that provides a vehicle for recompensing the author.
If low-cost universal fabbers become common (yeah, I know, but just imagine) then you would see the same thing happening to consumer design: no simple mechanism to recover value, and therefore no incentive to produce. Music is interesting in that the live experience has an intrinsic value, but the cost of replicating a recording is effectively zero.
Yes, it was 240 pence to the pound, it was lovely, and was insanely complex. I have never been able to understand why people consider it easier to divide into 12 than 10: yes, you need to use fractions, but this is not generally considered an advanced mathematical concept.
£10 bill, 4 people? £2.50. 3 people? £3.33. For 6 people, Ok, I have to approximate, to £1.66, but by that point is does not really matter.
How exactly is that easier if my £10 bar bill is equal to 2400p? for 4 people that comes to 600p, which is, err.. £2 and 120p, which is, ermm.. £2 10/-, I think.
For the love of God, there are clearly far too many INTJs here:
Big bright objects: stars
Nearest big bright object: sun
Nearest big bright object for any human being in history, and for the foreseeable future: The Sun
Disambuguation if, (having invented FTL, and/or are a character in a novel) you happen to be in orbit around another big bright shiny thing, and are referring to "The Sun" rather than "the sun": Sol
Sure, there will be physical constraints on the form that develops, but the major constraint will be the initial body plan. Stephen Jay Gould is, of course, the Daddy on this kind of stuff, particularly in his book on the Burgess Shale, "Wonderful Life".
His point is, mainly, that contingency drives evolution, almost as much as selection, and that the fact that vertebrates evolved with 4 limbs and specific numbers of digits is just simply random chance, later acted on by selection. Given that many early forms are based around a feeding tube, you will tend to see later forms as refinements of that, but that is by no means certain. Take a look at the kind of stuff that was developing during the Cambrian explosion, and think about the variety of habitats and body templates present on Earth, let alone anywhere else.
To me, the really interesting question is why conscious tool-users took so long to evolve. Beyond a given level of complexity, say late Permian, it should be a dead cert. That delay is weird, and probably key to appreciating how many other star-faring species are around.
Doesn't anybody read any decent science fiction anymore? "Glasshouse" by Charlie Stross is a pretty good attempt, that covers the issue. It uses assembler gates and teleportation gates. Yes, they clone, and can create multiple instances of you. This can be a nuisance, but the characters just deal with it.
Yeah, except that the essence of science is that it is aimed at disproving a model, not at proving anything. It is only really in maths that you can logically 'prove' anything to be true.
What you do in the real world is:
(1) make observations (2) propose a model that explains the observations (3) make predictions based on the model (4) make further observations, to test predictions, until model breaks (5) repeat from (1)
What happens is that the models get better and better, so that the time spent at (4) tends to increase the longer people work at it, but since all our models are imperfect approximations of reality, they will all eventually need some kind of revision.
This is why science is uncertain: by definition, almost any hypothesis advanced is expected to be slightly wrong.
Yeah, a patent is a time-limited (usually 20 years) monopoly on an industrial process or device(not usually a simple idea, although the boundaries are fuzzier these days)in return for a full public disclosure.
Copyright applies to any creative endeavour: text, pictures, film, designs. You can also pay to register specific designs and trademarks. Copyrights and patents are legal protections to allow the originator to realise a financial return on the investment needed.
DRM is a process to physically prevent breaking of copyright and other legal protections. Your fabber would have to have built-in DRM, which seems unlikely for the OS versions, but is virtually guaranteed for the Sony fabber I'll be picking up in Argos in 5 years.
Only on Slashdot could a discussion about probably the most disruptive technology development in a century deteriorate into a discussion of file formats...
Pedantically, surely it was not illegal before the relevant Act was passed? (Of course, the potentially offending device had not been invented, but that is not the point, is it?)
This seems prefectly reasonable. Patents are not always bad.
The idea goes something like this:
Technology takes time and money to develop. Unprotected ideas are of no interest to an investor, as there is no guarantee that someone else will simply walk up and make off with the idea. Patenting an idea means that you can then license it to someone who can raise the millions of dollars it takes to develop a working device, driven by the incentive to make money.
This ensures that the initial idea can actually get developed. It doesn't matter how good an idea it is, if there is no economic incentive to get it working. Otherwise it simply gets left by the side of the road.
Ideally the license deal should also return some money to the state, to the benefit of the taxpayers who initially funded the concept. It is also worth bearing in mind that the patent only lasts for 20 years, and is written in such a way that it is a full, public disclosure.
I tend to agree (I submitted the story with a throwaway idiot question at the end. Sorry.) BT will move far more to become an infrastructure company, moving into the background, whether from choice or necessity.
What is more interesting for me is that I have tended not to bother much with VOIP because most of my non-tech family and friends find it too much to cope with. But, over the last month, both my father and father in law got broadband connections, and they are both in their sixties. Mass broadband takeup coupled with VOIP handsets/software being easily and simply available on the high street could radically change the way people make calls on a very large scale, which could be intersting
Oh, and Tesco dominance is scary - but I shop there every week. Someone made comments above about disliking Walmart, but not being able to stretch the household budget too far, and I feel the same way about Tesco. It was also intersting to see the comments about their DIY tills and music downloads being crappy: their online/home delivery frequently sucked in the past too, but is now very slick. If they really are taking 1 in 4 pounds spent online, I would guess they have it licked.
Moral: Tesco get started early, and keep at it until it works.
IANAL, but there is nothing (unless you agreed to some sort of implied contract when you bought the ticket, but that's another issue...) to stop you going to the game, and keeping track of the statistics. In that sense, surely the information itself is public domain. The compiled information provided by anyone who has actually done that is a different matter, however.
If I make maps, (for example), I don't claim copyright to the landscape, but I do require payment (and can claim copyright) for the time and effort I put into measuring it and making up the maps. By the same argument, anyone who actually compiles and publishes statistics should have ownership of the data it has taken them time and effort to gather, and should be able to charge for them. If you don't like it, then there is nothing to stop you compiling the data yourself from an original source.
On a related note, I understand that companies that do this kind of thing often incorporate minor, deliberate errors into the data so that they can identify copying. This could be a dummy entry on each page of the 'phone book, or a slight kink in a minor road on a map, that does not affect the usefulness of the data, but clearly identifies the origin. It can't be easily identified by an outside party either.
Yeah, Ok, except that the situation in nature is quite different. In nature there are clear mechanisms that allow you to follow the causal route all the way back to the beginning of the Universe, without the need to invoke any external intelligence. There is therefore no need to do so.
The problem with your analogy is that the software and the systems that it runs on are quite clearly the product of a technologically advanced civilisation, and so could not have spontaneously developed from simpler forms. This is not the case in nature, where there are simpler forms, and the progression through those forms and the mechanisms by which the progression occurred can be followed (if imperfectly).
And I am aware that the central argument of ID is that biological systems are so complex that they must self evidently have been the work of an intelligent being. I would take issue with that: there is a real difference between the known development route of a television and a jellyfish. The probability of a television evolving is as near to 0 as makes no difference, and the probability of a jelyfish evolving is 1.
Intelligent Design cannot be proven or disproven because all it says is that things could have been directed by an intelligence. Well, so they could, but you cannot prove that such design occurred, and such design is not necessary to explain the complexity of living systems, however much ID advocates might wish it were.
ID is therefore a non-theory, in that it does not make any testable predictions, or explain any otherwise unexplainable observations. It is, really, a fudge of a compromise that allows people to accept both evolution and creationism, but without any real merit as a concept.
Er, I wasn't trying to use a deviation to disprove the trend, I was merely reporting an observation.
And while I am quite willing to look at studies that do prove the point, I will remain highly sceptical that poor=dumb. It is far more likely that rich = better(educated/nourished/supported/housed)= performs well on IQ tests, and *that*, surely is the point to be disproved.
You may already have read The Mismeasure of Man by Stephen Jay Gould, which discusses many of these points far better than I could ever hope to.
I mentioned Godwin's law because as soon as you start discussions about there being a genetic basis to societal differences, you are one step away from discussing eugenics and National Socialism. I mentioned it, not because I did not want to seem a fool (I'm not quite sure why that would be, actually), but because that discussion looked like an inevitable next step. I was right, too, take a look further down.
Now, saying "smart people make more money than *dumb* people", well *that* makes me look like a fool who should check what he writes more carefully;-)
Is there not a major assumption being made here - that smart people are wealthier than poor people?
I think of myself as pretty smart, but I know a lot of dumb people who earn more than I do. Wealth (and by implication survival in the modern world - although that is another questionable assumption) is far more a matter of luck and inheritance (wealth or status, not genes) than intelligence.
In fact, I suspect that there are far more important qualities, relating to the ability to focus on specific activities or goals that are relevant to an individuals wealth generating ability.
In any event, I would completely reject your implication that we kill off the poor because they are polluting the human gene pool. Your argument is based on false assumptions, could itself potentially remove useful variety from the gene pool, and goes against every compassionate human instinct I possess.
I don't like it.
Sorry.
At this point, I think we should invoke Godwin's law , and shut up.
Not to mention that commercially manufactured bread (in the UK at least) may in fact be making you ill: see for example here or look up "Felicity Lawrence" and the " Chorleywood Bread-Making Process"
YEah, last one I had (family history again: I've been screened twice and I'm 35) I was pretty well sedated, but the discomfort from the gas they pump in to inflate the colon was still noticeable. Like really bad gas in your sleep.
I feel quite moved to have read so many personal experiences about people having their insides inspected. Shouldn't we form a support group or something?
Slashdot Mirror
I'm British. I keep hearing Americans saying things like this, and I just don't get it. If I'm sick, I go to see my doctor. Yes, I have to make an appointment, but it's not as if I'm having to wait any real length of time. I get as good healthcare as anywhere else, and I don't have to pay a penny. Sure, there are problems with the British system - it could be more reponsive, and adopt new treatments faster - but it is generally transparent, and ensures that people do not die or become crippled, simly due to a lack of funds.
That surely has to be better than a system where treatment can be denied at the whim of an accountant?
Cheers.
Yeah,
except that the business model for books relies on there being no cheap and easy way of replicating them. Photocopying is slow and expensive, pdf files are pain to read on a screen. Mp3s took off because they are easy to duplicate at zero cost, with no appreciable loss in user experience. If ebooks become successful, or low cost printers/binders, then the text of books goes the same way as music has done. The primary value of a book is in the paper, but that provides a vehicle for recompensing the author.
If low-cost universal fabbers become common (yeah, I know, but just imagine) then you would see the same thing happening to consumer design: no simple mechanism to recover value, and therefore no incentive to produce. Music is interesting in that the live experience has an intrinsic value, but the cost of replicating a recording is effectively zero.
Nah, it's not in your genes, you're just too tired to give a shit.
Oh, and happy too, of course.
Chuck
Yes, it was 240 pence to the pound, it was lovely, and was insanely complex. I have never been able to understand why people consider it easier to divide into 12 than 10: yes, you need to use fractions, but this is not generally considered an advanced mathematical concept.
£10 bill, 4 people? £2.50. 3 people? £3.33. For 6 people, Ok, I have to approximate, to £1.66, but by that point is does not really matter.
How exactly is that easier if my £10 bar bill is equal to 2400p? for 4 people that comes to 600p, which is, err.. £2 and 120p, which is, ermm.. £2 10/-, I think.
Fascinating, but daft, sorry.
For the love of God, there are clearly far too many INTJs here:
Big bright objects: stars
Nearest big bright object: sun
Nearest big bright object for any human being in history, and for the foreseeable future: The Sun
Disambuguation if, (having invented FTL, and/or are a character in a novel) you happen to be in orbit around another big bright shiny thing, and are referring to "The Sun" rather than "the sun": Sol
Sheesh.
I saw it as a teenager, and thought it was very odd.
My 6 and 4 year olds love the DVD though. Obviously a tougher generation
Sure, there will be physical constraints on the form that develops, but the major constraint will be the initial body plan. Stephen Jay Gould is, of course, the Daddy on this kind of stuff, particularly in his book on the Burgess Shale, "Wonderful Life".
His point is, mainly, that contingency drives evolution, almost as much as selection, and that the fact that vertebrates evolved with 4 limbs and specific numbers of digits is just simply random chance, later acted on by selection. Given that many early forms are based around a feeding tube, you will tend to see later forms as refinements of that, but that is by no means certain. Take a look at the kind of stuff that was developing during the Cambrian explosion, and think about the variety of habitats and body templates present on Earth, let alone anywhere else.
To me, the really interesting question is why conscious tool-users took so long to evolve. Beyond a given level of complexity, say late Permian, it should be a dead cert. That delay is weird, and probably key to appreciating how many other star-faring species are around.
Doesn't anybody read any decent science fiction anymore? "Glasshouse" by Charlie Stross is a pretty good attempt, that covers the issue. It uses assembler gates and teleportation gates. Yes, they clone, and can create multiple instances of you. This can be a nuisance, but the characters just deal with it.
Cheers, chuck
That's about £400, right?
Temple Grandin. www.grandin.com. Fascinating person. Wrote a couple of books that are well worth reading.
Yeah, except that the essence of science is that it is aimed at disproving a model, not at proving anything. It is only really in maths that you can logically 'prove' anything to be true.
What you do in the real world is:
(1) make observations
(2) propose a model that explains the observations
(3) make predictions based on the model
(4) make further observations, to test predictions, until model breaks
(5) repeat from (1)
What happens is that the models get better and better, so that the time spent at (4) tends to increase the longer people work at it, but since all our models are imperfect approximations of reality, they will all eventually need some kind of revision.
This is why science is uncertain: by definition, almost any hypothesis advanced is expected to be slightly wrong.
Chuck
Yeah, a patent is a time-limited (usually 20 years) monopoly on an industrial process or device(not usually a simple idea, although the boundaries are fuzzier these days)in return for a full public disclosure.
Copyright applies to any creative endeavour: text, pictures, film, designs. You can also pay to register specific designs and trademarks. Copyrights and patents are legal protections to allow the originator to realise a financial return on the investment needed.
DRM is a process to physically prevent breaking of copyright and other legal protections. Your fabber would have to have built-in DRM, which seems unlikely for the OS versions, but is virtually guaranteed for the Sony fabber I'll be picking up in Argos in 5 years.
Only on Slashdot could a discussion about probably the most disruptive technology development in a century deteriorate into a discussion of file formats...
Pedantically, surely it was not illegal before the relevant Act was passed? (Of course, the potentially offending device had not been invented, but that is not the point, is it?)
We'll all be a couple of billion years dead, but hey, at least the new planet will have a name.
Happens all the time in any non-dead language.
Chuck
This seems prefectly reasonable. Patents are not always bad.
The idea goes something like this:
Technology takes time and money to develop. Unprotected ideas are of no interest to an investor, as there is no guarantee that someone else will simply walk up and make off with the idea. Patenting an idea means that you can then license it to someone who can raise the millions of dollars it takes to develop a working device, driven by the incentive to make money.
This ensures that the initial idea can actually get developed. It doesn't matter how good an idea it is, if there is no economic incentive to get it working. Otherwise it simply gets left by the side of the road.
Ideally the license deal should also return some money to the state, to the benefit of the taxpayers who initially funded the concept. It is also worth bearing in mind that the patent only lasts for 20 years, and is written in such a way that it is a full, public disclosure.
And, yes, I have worked in IP.
I tend to agree (I submitted the story with a throwaway idiot question at the end. Sorry.) BT will move far more to become an infrastructure company, moving into the background, whether from choice or necessity.
What is more interesting for me is that I have tended not to bother much with VOIP because most of my non-tech family and friends find it too much to cope with. But, over the last month, both my father and father in law got broadband connections, and they are both in their sixties. Mass broadband takeup coupled with VOIP handsets/software being easily and simply available on the high street could radically change the way people make calls on a very large scale, which could be intersting
Oh, and Tesco dominance is scary - but I shop there every week. Someone made comments above about disliking Walmart, but not being able to stretch the household budget too far, and I feel the same way about Tesco. It was also intersting to see the comments about their DIY tills and music downloads being crappy: their online/home delivery frequently sucked in the past too, but is now very slick. If they really are taking 1 in 4 pounds spent online, I would guess they have it licked.
Moral: Tesco get started early, and keep at it until it works.
Now, if only I had spare cash to buy shares...
Chuck
IANAL, but there is nothing (unless you agreed to some sort of implied contract when you bought the ticket, but that's another issue...) to stop you going to the game, and keeping track of the statistics. In that sense, surely the information itself is public domain. The compiled information provided by anyone who has actually done that is a different matter, however.
If I make maps, (for example), I don't claim copyright to the landscape, but I do require payment (and can claim copyright) for the time and effort I put into measuring it and making up the maps. By the same argument, anyone who actually compiles and publishes statistics should have ownership of the data it has taken them time and effort to gather, and should be able to charge for them. If you don't like it, then there is nothing to stop you compiling the data yourself from an original source.
On a related note, I understand that companies that do this kind of thing often incorporate minor, deliberate errors into the data so that they can identify copying. This could be a dummy entry on each page of the 'phone book, or a slight kink in a minor road on a map, that does not affect the usefulness of the data, but clearly identifies the origin. It can't be easily identified by an outside party either.
Chuck
Yeah, Ok, except that the situation in nature is quite different. In nature there are clear mechanisms that allow you to follow the causal route all the way back to the beginning of the Universe, without the need to invoke any external intelligence. There is therefore no need to do so.
The problem with your analogy is that the software and the systems that it runs on are quite clearly the product of a technologically advanced civilisation, and so could not have spontaneously developed from simpler forms. This is not the case in nature, where there are simpler forms, and the progression through those forms and the mechanisms by which the progression occurred can be followed (if imperfectly).
And I am aware that the central argument of ID is that biological systems are so complex that they must self evidently have been the work of an intelligent being. I would take issue with that: there is a real difference between the known development route of a television and a jellyfish. The probability of a television evolving is as near to 0 as makes no difference, and the probability of a jelyfish evolving is 1.
Intelligent Design cannot be proven or disproven because all it says is that things could have been directed by an intelligence. Well, so they could, but you cannot prove that such design occurred, and such design is not necessary to explain the complexity of living systems, however much ID advocates might wish it were.
ID is therefore a non-theory, in that it does not make any testable predictions, or explain any otherwise unexplainable observations. It is, really, a fudge of a compromise that allows people to accept both evolution and creationism, but without any real merit as a concept.
Er, I wasn't trying to use a deviation to disprove the trend, I was merely reporting an observation.
;-)
And while I am quite willing to look at studies that do prove the point, I will remain highly sceptical that poor=dumb. It is far more likely that rich = better(educated/nourished/supported/housed)= performs well on IQ tests, and *that*, surely is the point to be disproved.
You may already have read The Mismeasure of Man by Stephen Jay Gould, which discusses many of these points far better than I could ever hope to.
I mentioned Godwin's law because as soon as you start discussions about there being a genetic basis to societal differences, you are one step away from discussing eugenics and National Socialism. I mentioned it, not because I did not want to seem a fool (I'm not quite sure why that would be, actually), but because that discussion looked like an inevitable next step. I was right, too, take a look further down.
Now, saying "smart people make more money than *dumb* people", well *that* makes me look like a fool who should check what he writes more carefully
Is there not a major assumption being made here - that smart people are wealthier than poor people?
I think of myself as pretty smart, but I know a lot of dumb people who earn more than I do. Wealth (and by implication survival in the modern world - although that is another questionable assumption) is far more a matter of luck and inheritance (wealth or status, not genes) than intelligence.
In fact, I suspect that there are far more important qualities, relating to the ability to focus on specific activities or goals that are relevant to an individuals wealth generating ability.
In any event, I would completely reject your implication that we kill off the poor because they are polluting the human gene pool. Your argument is based on false assumptions, could itself potentially remove useful variety from the gene pool, and goes against every compassionate human instinct I possess.
I don't like it.
Sorry.
At this point, I think we should invoke Godwin's law , and shut up.
Not to mention that commercially manufactured bread (in the UK at least) may in fact be making you ill: see for example here or look up "Felicity Lawrence" and the " Chorleywood Bread-Making Process"
Chuck
Absolutely.
That's why Johhny Vegas is so funny.
Chuck
YEah, last one I had (family history again: I've been screened twice and I'm 35) I was pretty well sedated, but the discomfort from the gas they pump in to inflate the colon was still noticeable. Like really bad gas in your sleep.
I feel quite moved to have read so many personal experiences about people having their insides inspected. Shouldn't we form a support group or something?
Chuck