Try sleeping more than 5 hours a day when you're trying to graduate to see what happens. It is impossible to keep up schedule.
It's ironic that sleeping less makes you dumber. The less you sleep, the less productive you get, and the less time you have to sleep.
What I do is go trough the week with caffeine and energetics, party saturday and sleep the whole sunday. Yeah, I know more than anyone that this isn't healthy, but I plan to graduate some day and get fitter, happier. At least, most people survives.
I explicitly said that derivative works should be permitted right away (e.g. mashups etc.) See sig.
Sorry. I misread your post. But the thing is, it isn't so clear-cut the distinction between copying and making derivative works.
Your sig has great advice. You should follow it too.
If you read my post, you will notice that my t-shirts are derivative works, not copies. I based my designs on copyrighted characters, but the drawings per se were completely mine.
Precisely how does making copies of someone else's work for your own personal gain without their permission encourage innovation?
Distribution.
Take Led Zeppelin as an example. They hated live footages of their shows. They said that if you wanted to see they performing, you had to buy the ticket and go to the show. Consequently, the only footages of their early shows is low-quality tapes made by the public. There are a couple of shows that they decided to tape. Such is the scarcity that when they though that it was a good idea to make the DVD "How the west was won", they had to go after these fans they persecuted to get the footages and have enough material. This is my point about sitting in a mountain of gold and saying "it's mine". You shouldn't be able to do that. You are hurting the rest of mankind. If Led Zeppelin had their way, there will be no footages of their concerts available nowadays.
Try watching them. They're marvellous. Their style of performing (rave ons) was innovative and influenced a lot of music.
Now, let's see the number of bands whose members could watch their concerts live and compare it to the number who could only get videos. And tell me that restricting this information to the first group is not stifling innovation.
As for the personal gain, well. Everything is done for personal gain. You think the fans that recorded the concertos were doing that out of love for mankind? I'm not comparing the value of Watchmen t-shirts to their shows, but the principle is the same. This is how culture works.
Because you were not sufficiently creative to produce original designs for which people would pay, and felt entitled to profit from the work of others?
No and yes. I had plenty of my own designs, that sold well. I also had designs based on famous movies. Why? People wanted to buy them. And the rights owners didn't sell.
So they were entitled to sit in their gold saying "it's mine", and forbidding mankind from enjoying it? I'm sorry, I have no respect from this attitude.
Take Watchmen, par example. Its movie was stalled for how many year because of the copyright fight between Alan Moore, Fox and Warner? 20?
I had a design about them. So what should I do? Call Mr. Moore, and say to him that I wanted to sell a hundred t-shirts about his characters? But... he hadn't licensed their image to Fox? Or it was DC comics? Should I warn Warner too, just to be safe? Let's face it, it's just unrealistic. So, I should just refrain from using their image, and nobody would ever have a Watchmen t-shirt.
... but nobody is free to reproduce anything without permission ever.
That's the stupidest idea I've ever heard about copyright. So if someone makes some wonderful piece of music, innovating in rhythm and poetry, and does not feel like having competition, he can forbid mankind from ever copying and improving on that concept? He should be rewarded for his genius of course, but not in a way that stifles innovation.
Surely there are wholesalers out there who sell those licensed shirts to vendors like yourself, without you having to produce them, or pay a license fee.
That would defeat the purpose of me having a t-shirt shop. I started the business in the first place because there was a unfulfilled demand for high-quality t-shirts with themes that were known to people. There weren't any wholesale vendors that had movie t-shirts apart from the überpopular ones. And even these sucked. You know, they have to aim to the lowest denominator. My business was small enough that it could survive on the cinephiles alone.
Sorry, but as a business owner myself, I have to wonder - how did you know what their terms were without contacting them?
A fair question. I did, however, contact one of them. A relatively obscure Brasilian filmmaker. They wanted my to fly across the country to sign the rights of one t-shirt. And they wanted to license the production of no less than 50.000 units. "Excuse-me, but, it will take me about 20 years to sell all that". "Unh???". And so on. Somehow that didn't encourage me to go on and find the rights owner of every design that I wanted to sell. And even less to make international phone calls to Fox Searchlight to struck a deal to sell a million t-shirts.
I'm just thankful that Euler never registered a trademark on his name. And that BSD has that marvellous license (I had a fun one about fork()).
What you are forgetting is that this is aimed to people who do want to paint the license, but can't. There are "pirates" who will just profit from another person's works, and there always will be. The idea is that you shouldn't be forced to be one of them.
Take my case for example. I ran a small t-shirt store, whose drawings included, but were not limited to, characters of famous and not-so-famous movies, who were definitely copyrighted and/or trademarked. I did make money off them, and never paid the creators a dime. Why? The cost to get a license agreement with just one of the biggies would be enough to put me out of business. And their terms weren't suited to me as well. They wanted a huge upfront payment followed by a small per-unit cost.
So, as a law-abiding citizen, I just went out of business? Of course not, I just didn't contact them and hoped that they wouldn't contact me.
The terms that Doctorow proposes would suit my purpose just fine. And I would pay.
Also, I don't think the big distributors would be against it. The distribution terms he proposes aren't advantageous to a big distributor. It wouldn't be fostering competition. And I doubt that the shop from around the corner can damage them.
Why all this hatred, young man? They are just human, after all.
It is not that obvious that everything will come out right. TF1 has a incestuous relationship with the french government. They have done worst things in the past and got away. However, none was so blatantly against the law as this one, and so easy to sue about.
Yes, some action has to be taken against piracy. It has gotten to a point where no nation in the world is capable of enforcing their laws.
There were some pirates that were caugh, most notably by the US, but they are very few comparing to the whole, and piracy is just growing. And to try them... it's just useless. The laws aren't adequate, jurisdiction is confused, a mess.
We need some serious legislative action. But what do we see? France comes with a baseball law. Why??? Although I don't defend pirates' access to the internet, I fail to see the connection. They use mostly radio signals to locate their victims.
Now EU has come and said that internet is a fundamental right. I agree wholeheartdly. It's hard to see how a modern persion would function economically without teh tubes. But it worries me that they are trying to become the US, in this very bad habit of overstepping its jurisdiction. Why the hell would the EU have a say in Somalia?
Seems to me like reverse psychology. Arguments against Ubuntu:
1 - It is brown. 2 - It sucks.
Great logic. If someone truly hates Ubuntu, why insist so much that others try it? And even tries to sympathise: "Windows advocates do download it", so you won't be a traitor if you use it.
With the added bonus that after such a bad recommendation, anything that works will be seen as a boon.
Can't we just let this die? There are plenty of unused IPv4 addresses, sure. Most are hard to get due to political problems. No company will re-IP all their network just out of goodwill. So what?
The sooner IPv4 addresses end the better. Any quantity that is salvaged is just delaying the inevitable, and hurting IPv6. We could be in a much better infrastructure today if it wasn't for all this whining and "business case"ing.
So what that these companies can make a buck selling the addresses? Anyone dumb enough to pay instead of upgrading does not deserve the money.
Through my university, about 40 minutes. Through my home connection, about a day and a half. Even taking $LONG_TIME to write the disc and $LESS_LONG_TIME to read it, it would be faster to just burn the thing and driving it through traffic.
But when I want to move such a huge amount of data around, I just take my external HD. Which probably already has that data written to it.
The first home use I'd think for that is renting movies. But there aren't 250 GB movie files nowadays. I'm sure when they show up, broadband will be fast enough to take care of them. Just like today I can download 5 GB movies without breaking a sweat.
We have fast cheap broadband virtually everywhere in the civilised world (excluding US, of course). We have dirt cheap HDs.
Video retailers are moving to streaming. Backups are done in RAID servers. Everyone has a thumb drive to carry small files or has a ftp server to transfer big ones.
Why would anyone be burning discs today? I don't see why I should be excited by optical media technology. In the 90's this would be huge. Today, its just an interesting toy.
It's really in there best interests to maintain competition.
I'm still trying to make sense of this sentence. In there where? There is a period missing? "It's really in there. Best interests to maintain competition." Would be a little rorschachy, but makes sense.
That's what you get when you let americans take care of a common good. All they care is about making money out of it. And the worst thing is that ICANN is actually a non-profit corporation. WTF? They're being assholes just out of habit?
I hope that with this scam the rest of the word finally gets their act together and remove the control of the Internet from the hands of the USA. They have repeatedly proven that they are too incompetent to do this immensely important job. And the Internet is international, for fuck's sake. It's the UN that should take care of it.
Darn, they couldn't even house the root serves in the US due to the laws allowing wiretapping foreign traffic.
I guess it's more or less the reason why we're stuck with Unix for ~40 years. It was good enough when it came out, it is good enough today. It was more or less free, it continues to be more or less free or cheap. And it has been patched all the way to hell from there.
Some superior software design has showed up since, and more will, but it don't think we'll see Unix dying anytime soon.
I turn off my computer every night, when it isn't downloading something. It's about 6 hours of near-zero power consumption every day. If everyone did that it would make a difference in energy use. I could just suspend, but if it isn't going to do anything anyway, let's save a couple more joules, shall we?
And when I boot it in the morning, I don't want to have to wait two minutes just to see xkcd.
Especially since Arjan demonstrated it was so easy to optimise the process.
I think if the boot was quick to begin with, people wouldn't have got this bad habit of leaving the computer on 24/7. Just because Linux can run months straight doesn't mean that it should.
There is nothing puzzling about quantum theory. It is just unintuitive.
All the bizzare facts can be derived from two simple postulates:
1 - Quantum status are described in a complex vector space with inner product called the Hilbert space.
2 - Evolution of closed quantum systems is unitary. That is, reversible.
There's nothing bizzare about these. I have never seen anyone arguing about them. They can be used to derive quantum mechanics, and, together with the measurement postulate (the really weird one), explain all the experimental data we have.
So, where's the need for a "fractal theory" to "make sense" of quantum mechanics? All I see is a abstract full of buzzwords: "quantum theory of gravity should unify the causal non-euclidean geometry of space time with the atemporal fractal geometry of state space."
We need indeed a reformulation of quantum mechanics capable of accounting for relativity in a mathematically sound way. But that is not done batlantly disregarding experimental data (the Bell inequalities' violations).
Slashdot Mirror
I'm sorry but this is just stupid.
You're suggesting that that incredible mess that is the Start Menu is better than the self-organized gnome-menu?
Only the fact that you need a search function in the menu to be able to find your apps is a dead giveaway.
gnome-menu has things separated in logical categories, with few things per category. What in this collides with real workflow?
Frankly, gnome (and linux in general) has made some weird design choices, but your example is a very unfortunate one.
Try sleeping more than 5 hours a day when you're trying to graduate to see what happens. It is impossible to keep up schedule.
It's ironic that sleeping less makes you dumber. The less you sleep, the less productive you get, and the less time you have to sleep.
What I do is go trough the week with caffeine and energetics, party saturday and sleep the whole sunday. Yeah, I know more than anyone that this isn't healthy, but I plan to graduate some day and get fitter, happier. At least, most people survives.
I explicitly said that derivative works should be permitted right away (e.g. mashups etc.) See sig.
Sorry. I misread your post. But the thing is, it isn't so clear-cut the distinction between copying and making derivative works.
Your sig has great advice. You should follow it too.
If you read my post, you will notice that my t-shirts are derivative works, not copies. I based my designs on copyrighted characters, but the drawings per se were completely mine.
Precisely how does making copies of someone else's work for your own personal gain without their permission encourage innovation?
Distribution.
Take Led Zeppelin as an example. They hated live footages of their shows. They said that if you wanted to see they performing, you had to buy the ticket and go to the show. Consequently, the only footages of their early shows is low-quality tapes made by the public. There are a couple of shows that they decided to tape. Such is the scarcity that when they though that it was a good idea to make the DVD "How the west was won", they had to go after these fans they persecuted to get the footages and have enough material. This is my point about sitting in a mountain of gold and saying "it's mine". You shouldn't be able to do that. You are hurting the rest of mankind. If Led Zeppelin had their way, there will be no footages of their concerts available nowadays.
Try watching them. They're marvellous. Their style of performing (rave ons) was innovative and influenced a lot of music.
Now, let's see the number of bands whose members could watch their concerts live and compare it to the number who could only get videos. And tell me that restricting this information to the first group is not stifling innovation.
As for the personal gain, well. Everything is done for personal gain. You think the fans that recorded the concertos were doing that out of love for mankind? I'm not comparing the value of Watchmen t-shirts to their shows, but the principle is the same. This is how culture works.
Because you were not sufficiently creative to produce original designs for which people would pay, and felt entitled to profit from the work of others?
No and yes. I had plenty of my own designs, that sold well. I also had designs based on famous movies. Why? People wanted to buy them. And the rights owners didn't sell.
So they were entitled to sit in their gold saying "it's mine", and forbidding mankind from enjoying it? I'm sorry, I have no respect from this attitude.
Take Watchmen, par example. Its movie was stalled for how many year because of the copyright fight between Alan Moore, Fox and Warner? 20?
I had a design about them. So what should I do? Call Mr. Moore, and say to him that I wanted to sell a hundred t-shirts about his characters? But... he hadn't licensed their image to Fox? Or it was DC comics? Should I warn Warner too, just to be safe? Let's face it, it's just unrealistic. So, I should just refrain from using their image, and nobody would ever have a Watchmen t-shirt.
... but nobody is free to reproduce anything without permission ever.
That's the stupidest idea I've ever heard about copyright. So if someone makes some wonderful piece of music, innovating in rhythm and poetry, and does not feel like having competition, he can forbid mankind from ever copying and improving on that concept? He should be rewarded for his genius of course, but not in a way that stifles innovation.
Surely there are wholesalers out there who sell those licensed shirts to vendors like yourself, without you having to produce them, or pay a license fee.
That would defeat the purpose of me having a t-shirt shop. I started the business in the first place because there was a unfulfilled demand for high-quality t-shirts with themes that were known to people. There weren't any wholesale vendors that had movie t-shirts apart from the überpopular ones. And even these sucked. You know, they have to aim to the lowest denominator. My business was small enough that it could survive on the cinephiles alone.
Sorry, but as a business owner myself, I have to wonder - how did you know what their terms were without contacting them?
A fair question. I did, however, contact one of them. A relatively obscure Brasilian filmmaker. They wanted my to fly across the country to sign the rights of one t-shirt. And they wanted to license the production of no less than 50.000 units. "Excuse-me, but, it will take me about 20 years to sell all that". "Unh???". And so on. Somehow that didn't encourage me to go on and find the rights owner of every design that I wanted to sell. And even less to make international phone calls to Fox Searchlight to struck a deal to sell a million t-shirts.
I'm just thankful that Euler never registered a trademark on his name. And that BSD has that marvellous license (I had a fun one about fork()).
What you are forgetting is that this is aimed to people who do want to paint the license, but can't. There are "pirates" who will just profit from another person's works, and there always will be. The idea is that you shouldn't be forced to be one of them.
Take my case for example. I ran a small t-shirt store, whose drawings included, but were not limited to, characters of famous and not-so-famous movies, who were definitely copyrighted and/or trademarked. I did make money off them, and never paid the creators a dime. Why? The cost to get a license agreement with just one of the biggies would be enough to put me out of business. And their terms weren't suited to me as well. They wanted a huge upfront payment followed by a small per-unit cost.
So, as a law-abiding citizen, I just went out of business? Of course not, I just didn't contact them and hoped that they wouldn't contact me.
The terms that Doctorow proposes would suit my purpose just fine. And I would pay.
Also, I don't think the big distributors would be against it. The distribution terms he proposes aren't advantageous to a big distributor. It wouldn't be fostering competition. And I doubt that the shop from around the corner can damage them.
Apparently you haven't noticed update-manager, that wastes 4 M of RAM to do a job that cron would take half a K to do.
Why all this hatred, young man? They are just human, after all.
It is not that obvious that everything will come out right. TF1 has a incestuous relationship with the french government. They have done worst things in the past and got away. However, none was so blatantly against the law as this one, and so easy to sue about.
He can and will. Here's a better source (in french).
In a nutshell, his lawyer's case is as the parent said, and quoting her: "This is discrimination, a felony of opinion, it is just scandalous."
It will be intresting to follow this case. I'd be very happy if someone can do something against TF1.
Yes, some action has to be taken against piracy. It has gotten to a point where no nation in the world is capable of enforcing their laws.
There were some pirates that were caugh, most notably by the US, but they are very few comparing to the whole, and piracy is just growing. And to try them... it's just useless. The laws aren't adequate, jurisdiction is confused, a mess.
We need some serious legislative action. But what do we see? France comes with a baseball law. Why??? Although I don't defend pirates' access to the internet, I fail to see the connection. They use mostly radio signals to locate their victims.
Now EU has come and said that internet is a fundamental right. I agree wholeheartdly. It's hard to see how a modern persion would function economically without teh tubes. But it worries me that they are trying to become the US, in this very bad habit of overstepping its jurisdiction. Why the hell would the EU have a say in Somalia?
Tell this to the thousands of developers that are trying to implement a OS in javascript on top of the browsers. Please.
Seems to me like reverse psychology. Arguments against Ubuntu:
1 - It is brown.
2 - It sucks.
Great logic. If someone truly hates Ubuntu, why insist so much that others try it? And even tries to sympathise: "Windows advocates do download it", so you won't be a traitor if you use it.
With the added bonus that after such a bad recommendation, anything that works will be seen as a boon.
I like the way internet trolling is evolving.
+5 Insightful again?
Can't we just let this die? There are plenty of unused IPv4 addresses, sure. Most are hard to get due to political problems. No company will re-IP all their network just out of goodwill. So what?
The sooner IPv4 addresses end the better. Any quantity that is salvaged is just delaying the inevitable, and hurting IPv6. We could be in a much better infrastructure today if it wasn't for all this whining and "business case"ing.
So what that these companies can make a buck selling the addresses? Anyone dumb enough to pay instead of upgrading does not deserve the money.
Through my university, about 40 minutes. Through my home connection, about a day and a half. Even taking $LONG_TIME to write the disc and $LESS_LONG_TIME to read it, it would be faster to just burn the thing and driving it through traffic.
But when I want to move such a huge amount of data around, I just take my external HD. Which probably already has that data written to it.
The first home use I'd think for that is renting movies. But there aren't 250 GB movie files nowadays. I'm sure when they show up, broadband will be fast enough to take care of them. Just like today I can download 5 GB movies without breaking a sweat.
We have fast cheap broadband virtually everywhere in the civilised world (excluding US, of course). We have dirt cheap HDs.
Video retailers are moving to streaming. Backups are done in RAID servers. Everyone has a thumb drive to carry small files or has a ftp server to transfer big ones.
Why would anyone be burning discs today? I don't see why I should be excited by optical media technology. In the 90's this would be huge. Today, its just an interesting toy.
It's really in there best interests to maintain competition.
I'm still trying to make sense of this sentence. In there where? There is a period missing? "It's really in there. Best interests to maintain competition." Would be a little rorschachy, but makes sense.
But lowers the profit/account ratio, thus increasing the cost/spam.
No? All television companies in my country have a *.tv domain. A lot of cash they've spent.
That's what you get when you let americans take care of a common good. All they care is about making money out of it. And the worst thing is that ICANN is actually a non-profit corporation. WTF? They're being assholes just out of habit?
I hope that with this scam the rest of the word finally gets their act together and remove the control of the Internet from the hands of the USA. They have repeatedly proven that they are too incompetent to do this immensely important job. And the Internet is international, for fuck's sake. It's the UN that should take care of it.
Darn, they couldn't even house the root serves in the US due to the laws allowing wiretapping foreign traffic.
I guess it's more or less the reason why we're stuck with Unix for ~40 years. It was good enough when it came out, it is good enough today. It was more or less free, it continues to be more or less free or cheap. And it has been patched all the way to hell from there.
Some superior software design has showed up since, and more will, but it don't think we'll see Unix dying anytime soon.
Energy saving.
I turn off my computer every night, when it isn't downloading something. It's about 6 hours of near-zero power consumption every day. If everyone did that it would make a difference in energy use. I could just suspend, but if it isn't going to do anything anyway, let's save a couple more joules, shall we?
And when I boot it in the morning, I don't want to have to wait two minutes just to see xkcd.
Especially since Arjan demonstrated it was so easy to optimise the process.
I think if the boot was quick to begin with, people wouldn't have got this bad habit of leaving the computer on 24/7. Just because Linux can run months straight doesn't mean that it should.
Exponential, sir? I highly doubt it.
With chaching, I'd said the growth is less than linear.
I sincerely hope so. Countless times I've seen my students forgeting all the good manners of using object-oriented cat, like in this shameless UUOC:
n00b@nix:~/bin$cat >> cat.cpp
#include <iostream>
#include <string>
main(){
std::string a;
while(42){std::cin>>a;std::cout<<a<<'\n';}}
^C
n00b@nix:~/bin$cat cat.cpp | g++ -o cat
n00b@nix:~/bin$cat >> dog.cpp
Exactly. It just depends on how fast you are moving.
There is nothing puzzling about quantum theory. It is just unintuitive.
All the bizzare facts can be derived from two simple postulates:
1 - Quantum status are described in a complex vector space with inner product called the Hilbert space.
2 - Evolution of closed quantum systems is unitary. That is, reversible.
There's nothing bizzare about these. I have never seen anyone arguing about them. They can be used to derive quantum mechanics, and, together with the measurement postulate (the really weird one), explain all the experimental data we have.
So, where's the need for a "fractal theory" to "make sense" of quantum mechanics? All I see is a abstract full of buzzwords: "quantum theory of gravity should unify the causal non-euclidean geometry of space time with the atemporal fractal geometry of state space."
We need indeed a reformulation of quantum mechanics capable of accounting for relativity in a mathematically sound way. But that is not done batlantly disregarding experimental data (the Bell inequalities' violations).