The usual (and ironically apropos) response to such claims of the First is that while you're free to shout "Fire!" in a crowded theatre, you're also free to bear the consequences, and would you prefer a government (fine/jail) or non-government (beating/lynching) response?
So if some idiots start a fire through the irresponsible use of their rightfully obtained weaponry, they too should expect to bear the consequences.
It's not just that it's "a computer in a different form factor" - it's a computer in a form factor that didn't previously exist *at that price point with those capabilities*. Are you familiar with the concept of tipping points?
Furthermore, the idea that "The exact same thing could be done with a laptop - and a mouse"? No. The laptop+mouse combination is more awkward from a mobility/convenience perspective and the mouse requires an appropriate surface upon which to be moved. Also, user is a four year old child.
Finally, in the niche that is assistive devices for the handicapped, see the GP's comments: "devices to help speech and hearing-impaired people to communicate were fantastically expensive". Also, heavier and less elegant.
Copyright's a great idea in theory. And, between comparable parties, in practice too. But when on one side of the table you've got John Q Author, and on the other side of the table you've got a limited liability corporation with more lawyers and accountants than you could fit inside the entire building, supported by an industry powerful enough to write laws for Congress to rubber-stamp, you've got buckley's chance that any contract between them is going to be equitable if the LLC doesn't want it to be.
What's the failure rate on SSD's though? Traditionally it has been very high if you're a power user (developer, etc).
Yeah, early SSDs were pretty crap in that department. It was all about the speed, screw the endurance.
However, I used to buy a lot of Seagate mechanical drives when I built systems, until their warranties on the models I was buying went from three years to *one* year. That did *not* inspire confidence. But meanwhile Intel started offering a 160GB SSD with a *five* year warranty. For some reason my customers don't seem to mind paying three times as much for (roughly) half the capacity when they get five times the warranty and a cold-to-desktop time under thirty seconds.:)
Admittedly, that's not for a dev machine, but if a big name like Intel is willing to offer a five year warranty on their SSDs, you might give them another try.
For sure, but when the data is "there are 2 million families in this area, and all 2 million have military-grade weaponry and the training to use it" it doesn't help so much (except perhaps to decide to leave them alone). That's the Swiss model - they too rose up against feudal overlords, and they took the 2nd Amendment's "right to bear arms" and added, "here's your free automatic rifle and emergency ammunition, you can buy anything up to and including howitzers, and we're going to train you regularly in how to wage guerilla warfare against invading forces."
As the joke goes, the Swiss don't *have* an army - they *are* the army.
Note that the Swiss didn't get invaded during WW1 and WW2, despite occupying a valuable strategic position in the heart of Europe and sitting on tonnes of gold in their banks. Even Hitler wasn't *that* crazy, and he was crazy enough to invade Russia in winter (ok, I know he started in summer, but he tried to keep going in winter).
Why did this get modded informative? It's an anecdotal heart-tugger built on lies, not a strategic analysis built on fact.
You can legally have guns in Norway, and Breivik obtained his guns via the legal channels. It wasn't a lone constable who arrived and then had to call and wait for permission to shoot; it was several heavily-armed officers with authorisation to shoot if Breivik didn't surrender. This is all available on Wikipedia, backed up with references to various media articles.
I'm also very happy to live in a country where guns are rarely seen or used. On the other hand, the Swiss seem to do alright, and their government issues every able-bodied adult male a gun and teaches them how to use it as part of their citizenship.
It's not the guns, it's the culture. America's culture is in some respects as foreign to other Western countries as Asia is, just in different ways.
It occurs to me that the main fear is of the government knowing who has guns, and thus who to confiscate those guns from?
Perhaps something along the lines of the Swiss model might serve. Since the government would then know *everyone* is armed, they might be a bit more respectful of the rest of the Bill of Rights.You'd have to do some adaptation to get it to work with US culture though.
(disclaimer: Australian poster, not Swiss, not American).
Microlith is pointing out that network neutrality is an unfortunate necessity - because we simply cannot trust for-profits to act in any way other than short-term selfishness, and they have enough rope to hang everyone along with themselves.
re 1, if users want a long (>16) passphrase, this is a good thing re 4, I refer you to https://xkcd.com/936/ ditch 6+7 add: * client-side entropy check to reject cryptographically weak passwords * server-side sanity check including (but not limited to) a quick dictionary+rainbow test * option of pairing a CSPRNG authenticator (via mobile app or dedicated device) * system's security has been vetted by people who actually know what the hell they're doing:)
I suspect he was referring to how a round designed to penetrate and keep on going, does not deposit its entire KE (kinetic energy) within your body, while a round designed to stop on hitting you does deposit its entire KE in your body; such designs rely on increasing the affected cross-sectional area, which in turn means an increased probability of hitting something vital and/or causing more blood loss.
As a third party, I suggest you also provide your evidence that patents benefit more than they stifle. After all, if you can't support your conclusion with facts, then, while it may be true, you'll never convince a reasonable person.
And this is part of the problem. We've only access to the one trouser leg of time, where patents exist and are pretty much systemic. So figuring out to the last counted bean whether the absence of patents would have led to a better standard of living is, to use a technical term, bloody hard.
But we can reason out a few things. Patents are a negative grant. If I have a patent, and you independently come up with the same idea, you can't profit from the sweat of your own brow without my permission. Winner takes all, and screw the rest of you. How is that not stifling?
"A friend of mine is an MSDN subscriber and gave me an ISO of Windows 7 Home Premium, exactly as on the laptop originally." "I discover that I have only an OEM license for Windows 7" [...] "I legally have a license to use from an installation DVD that has that version on it."
There's your problem. It's actually *not* exactly the same, and you were given the wrong ISO. There's more than one distribution image for Windows 7, each almost identical to the rest - except for the code that handles activation, which accepts only certain key sets depending on whether the disc is intended for OEM, retail, etcetera. It's a PITA as you discovered, just not for the reason you thought. They do the same with their Office line, more of those same-but-different discs depending on whether it's OEM, Academic, Retail, Corporate, etc. It inconveniences their paying customers but has no deterrent on pirates that I can discern (if anything, I think it would only encourage them).
Machines that come with Windows 7 should (ethically at least) come with recovery media, but skinflint OEMs instead tend to sell them with a recovery partition and a one-shot image burner app to create your own set of discs - which many customers utterly fail to understand, or even know about, until it's too late.
Inconstant Moon by Larry Niven. Also the name of the volume of short stories in which this story can be found. The protagonist initially assumes the sun has gone nova. I think I lost my copy to someone who borrowed it and didn't return it, which is a shame, because they're all excellent stories (IMNSHO).
Hmm. What defines "unpublished"? If Kickstarter was a dead-tree book company and their print-on-demand API had a bug that allowed stores to order copies of books the authors weren't planning to release until next year, would those books still be considered "unpublished" (as far as ideas went, since the topic is patents) despite the fact that several dozen copies were now sitting in the "new release" section of my local bookstore?
Sometimes. I've noticed the more popular a video, the more chance youtube will play an ad before playing the video. Some uploaders will enable the video ads themselves. I don't mind it much, they're short and they're skippable after five seconds (and now that they're geo-targetting, occasionally even relevant:p).
Irony: the advertisement for Diablo 3 that played before the clip? It allowed me to skip it after five seconds, but didn't allow me to pause or rewind it to watch again....
What I find ironic is how the industry spends a fortune on advertising to brainwash kids into "impulse" buying habits, spends a further fortune on bribing the government to extend their copyrights and cut their taxes (that go in part to the education system), and then complains when those same kids "impulse" download since they lack the education to understand why modern copyright originally existed in the first place.
Excuse my inner cynic, but when I basically hear something that sounds too good to be true, and then the guy says it's free, I start looking for the other end of the line attached to that hook. And I'm already more dependent on Google than I like.:p
Slashdot Mirror
The usual (and ironically apropos) response to such claims of the First is that while you're free to shout "Fire!" in a crowded theatre, you're also free to bear the consequences, and would you prefer a government (fine/jail) or non-government (beating/lynching) response?
So if some idiots start a fire through the irresponsible use of their rightfully obtained weaponry, they too should expect to bear the consequences.
Three counterpoints:
It's not just that it's "a computer in a different form factor" - it's a computer in a form factor that didn't previously exist *at that price point with those capabilities*. Are you familiar with the concept of tipping points?
Furthermore, the idea that "The exact same thing could be done with a laptop - and a mouse"? No. The laptop+mouse combination is more awkward from a mobility/convenience perspective and the mouse requires an appropriate surface upon which to be moved. Also, user is a four year old child.
Finally, in the niche that is assistive devices for the handicapped, see the GP's comments: "devices to help speech and hearing-impaired people to communicate were fantastically expensive". Also, heavier and less elegant.
Red Dwarf - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KUFkb0d1kbU
I mean, if you're going to break the laws of physics, might as well go for broke. :)
Not the OP, but - "hypothetically"? Ha ha.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollywood_accounting
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent_seeking
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_Bono_Copyright_Term_Extension_Act
- specifically https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Copyright_term.svg
Copyright's a great idea in theory. And, between comparable parties, in practice too. But when on one side of the table you've got John Q Author, and on the other side of the table you've got a limited liability corporation with more lawyers and accountants than you could fit inside the entire building, supported by an industry powerful enough to write laws for Congress to rubber-stamp, you've got buckley's chance that any contract between them is going to be equitable if the LLC doesn't want it to be.
I think that should be the other way around? Otherwise you end up in "we had to destroy the village to save it" territory.
Yeah, early SSDs were pretty crap in that department. It was all about the speed, screw the endurance.
However, I used to buy a lot of Seagate mechanical drives when I built systems, until their warranties on the models I was buying went from three years to *one* year. That did *not* inspire confidence. But meanwhile Intel started offering a 160GB SSD with a *five* year warranty. For some reason my customers don't seem to mind paying three times as much for (roughly) half the capacity when they get five times the warranty and a cold-to-desktop time under thirty seconds. :)
Admittedly, that's not for a dev machine, but if a big name like Intel is willing to offer a five year warranty on their SSDs, you might give them another try.
For sure, but when the data is "there are 2 million families in this area, and all 2 million have military-grade weaponry and the training to use it" it doesn't help so much (except perhaps to decide to leave them alone). That's the Swiss model - they too rose up against feudal overlords, and they took the 2nd Amendment's "right to bear arms" and added, "here's your free automatic rifle and emergency ammunition, you can buy anything up to and including howitzers, and we're going to train you regularly in how to wage guerilla warfare against invading forces."
As the joke goes, the Swiss don't *have* an army - they *are* the army.
Note that the Swiss didn't get invaded during WW1 and WW2, despite occupying a valuable strategic position in the heart of Europe and sitting on tonnes of gold in their banks. Even Hitler wasn't *that* crazy, and he was crazy enough to invade Russia in winter (ok, I know he started in summer, but he tried to keep going in winter).
Why did this get modded informative? It's an anecdotal heart-tugger built on lies, not a strategic analysis built on fact.
You can legally have guns in Norway, and Breivik obtained his guns via the legal channels. It wasn't a lone constable who arrived and then had to call and wait for permission to shoot; it was several heavily-armed officers with authorisation to shoot if Breivik didn't surrender. This is all available on Wikipedia, backed up with references to various media articles.
I'm also very happy to live in a country where guns are rarely seen or used. On the other hand, the Swiss seem to do alright, and their government issues every able-bodied adult male a gun and teaches them how to use it as part of their citizenship.
It's not the guns, it's the culture. America's culture is in some respects as foreign to other Western countries as Asia is, just in different ways.
It occurs to me that the main fear is of the government knowing who has guns, and thus who to confiscate those guns from?
Perhaps something along the lines of the Swiss model might serve. Since the government would then know *everyone* is armed, they might be a bit more respectful of the rest of the Bill of Rights.You'd have to do some adaptation to get it to work with US culture though.
(disclaimer: Australian poster, not Swiss, not American).
Microlith is pointing out that network neutrality is an unfortunate necessity - because we simply cannot trust for-profits to act in any way other than short-term selfishness, and they have enough rope to hang everyone along with themselves.
re 1, if users want a long (>16) passphrase, this is a good thing :)
re 4, I refer you to https://xkcd.com/936/
ditch 6+7
add:
* client-side entropy check to reject cryptographically weak passwords
* server-side sanity check including (but not limited to) a quick dictionary+rainbow test
* option of pairing a CSPRNG authenticator (via mobile app or dedicated device)
* system's security has been vetted by people who actually know what the hell they're doing
Currently, the government has taken responsibility. For certain values of taken, anyway.
I suspect he was referring to how a round designed to penetrate and keep on going, does not deposit its entire KE (kinetic energy) within your body, while a round designed to stop on hitting you does deposit its entire KE in your body; such designs rely on increasing the affected cross-sectional area, which in turn means an increased probability of hitting something vital and/or causing more blood loss.
As a third party, I suggest you also provide your evidence that patents benefit more than they stifle. After all, if you can't support your conclusion with facts, then, while it may be true, you'll never convince a reasonable person.
And this is part of the problem. We've only access to the one trouser leg of time, where patents exist and are pretty much systemic. So figuring out to the last counted bean whether the absence of patents would have led to a better standard of living is, to use a technical term, bloody hard.
But we can reason out a few things. Patents are a negative grant. If I have a patent, and you independently come up with the same idea, you can't profit from the sweat of your own brow without my permission. Winner takes all, and screw the rest of you. How is that not stifling?
So basically adding "on a computer" makes pure math patentable? That's insane.
"A friend of mine is an MSDN subscriber and gave me an ISO of Windows 7 Home Premium, exactly as on the laptop originally."
"I discover that I have only an OEM license for Windows 7" [...] "I legally have a license to use from an installation DVD that has that version on it."
There's your problem. It's actually *not* exactly the same, and you were given the wrong ISO. There's more than one distribution image for Windows 7, each almost identical to the rest - except for the code that handles activation, which accepts only certain key sets depending on whether the disc is intended for OEM, retail, etcetera. It's a PITA as you discovered, just not for the reason you thought. They do the same with their Office line, more of those same-but-different discs depending on whether it's OEM, Academic, Retail, Corporate, etc. It inconveniences their paying customers but has no deterrent on pirates that I can discern (if anything, I think it would only encourage them).
Machines that come with Windows 7 should (ethically at least) come with recovery media, but skinflint OEMs instead tend to sell them with a recovery partition and a one-shot image burner app to create your own set of discs - which many customers utterly fail to understand, or even know about, until it's too late.
Inconstant Moon by Larry Niven. Also the name of the volume of short stories in which this story can be found. The protagonist initially assumes the sun has gone nova. I think I lost my copy to someone who borrowed it and didn't return it, which is a shame, because they're all excellent stories (IMNSHO).
If you want massive spoilers, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inconstant_Moon gives a brief synopsis of each of the stories in the collection.
Hmm. What defines "unpublished"? If Kickstarter was a dead-tree book company and their print-on-demand API had a bug that allowed stores to order copies of books the authors weren't planning to release until next year, would those books still be considered "unpublished" (as far as ideas went, since the topic is patents) despite the fact that several dozen copies were now sitting in the "new release" section of my local bookstore?
Sometimes. I've noticed the more popular a video, the more chance youtube will play an ad before playing the video. Some uploaders will enable the video ads themselves. I don't mind it much, they're short and they're skippable after five seconds (and now that they're geo-targetting, occasionally even relevant :p).
I do use Adblock Plus, I just tend to disable it on sites I visit regularly unless their ads become annoying.
Irony: the advertisement for Diablo 3 that played before the clip? It allowed me to skip it after five seconds, but didn't allow me to pause or rewind it to watch again....
What I find ironic is how the industry spends a fortune on advertising to brainwash kids into "impulse" buying habits, spends a further fortune on bribing the government to extend their copyrights and cut their taxes (that go in part to the education system), and then complains when those same kids "impulse" download since they lack the education to understand why modern copyright originally existed in the first place.
"Just Do It", indeed.
Did you miss the GP's mention of the laws of physics? When - not if - cars and gum can be downloaded, they certainly will be.
Excuse my inner cynic, but when I basically hear something that sounds too good to be true, and then the guy says it's free, I start looking for the other end of the line attached to that hook. And I'm already more dependent on Google than I like. :p