While the US may have higher average income than Australia, Australia doesn't have the crippling poverty issues that the US does, there's a lot less income inequality and the cost differences are largely the result of corporate gouging, where additional taxes etc come into it, it's mostly luxury goods.
All in all Australians have some of the highest quality of life in the world.
I had this argument in another thread just yesterday. The laws of thermodynamics are obviously wrong. Wrong in the same way that Newtonian physics is wrong. Meaning that it is close enough for anything I will ever get my hands on, but that it clearly does not explain everything that is happening, and it is clearly violated at some point.
The day the 2nd law of thermodynamics is proved wrong is the day one of Stalin's descendants goes back in time, kills Stalin, then returns to his own time and spends the rest of the day playing catch with his son in a world where Stalin never came to power.
I used to adhere to the Theory of Entropy. Made sense at the time kinda like the flat world and Earth being the center of everything.
With a greater understanding of Physics and Cosmology, I've come to realize that the Earth is not flat nor the center of everything. With the realization that Energy is neither created nor destroyed only converted - the Theory of Entropy is disrupted in my mind and therefore proven false.
Uh, there is no "Theory of Entropy", entropy is a phenomena described in Information Theory. Maybe next time you set out to disprove a theory, make sure it's a real theory first.
In the first paragraph he's saying that it's unnecessary to think of information as encoded as matter and energy, because from the universe's perspective energy and matter is information and it's all being processed at the bit level. (although it's actually the information level, because it's not binary, so no bits involved)
In the second paragraph he's saying that measuring this information as it's processed could be useful as it would allow us to model physical interactions with near perfect accuracy, but we'd have to come up with our own way of encoding this information into format we can manipulate.
If I understand your argument, you're speculating that the universe is a pantheistic, evolving computation seeking entropy?
It's a mistake to think of the computational universe model as having agency. It's just the idea that since all activity in the universe can be abstracted as information (this is the foundation of quantum mechanics), then every interaction is a computation.
tl;dr: The universe laughs at your tiny minds and their ideas of magical superhumans and information that cannot be known. Ho ho ho.
this is starting to sound interesting. could you elucidate please?
There's a number of things he could mean; but my guess is he's thinking of the digital model of a computational universe, which clashes with thermodynamics in a number of ways as opposed to the quantum model, which doesn't. (provided we figure out the whole quantum gravity debacle)
If you're interested I recommend you pick up Seth Lloyd's Programming the Universe. It's a great introduction to QM and quantum computing and is totally accessible for anyone with a high school education.
The only good advice to TrueCrypt users is to actually have a hidden partition and to immediately hand over the keys for it when asked at a border inspection. Anything else is is pure folly. http://xkcd.com/538/ applies without restriction.
I disagree thoroughly. If you're travelling then encrypt your disk, but don't keep any personal files on your machine whatsoever, store it all in encrypted archives and upload it.
if you kill the viability of the ad to any serious degree, you can expect some kind of consequential change on the horizon.
Collapse of the broadcast entity? Why would I have a problem with this? The “broadcast entity” is the favoured medium of the copyright cartels, who’re doing their best to make the interaction between artist and audience as painful as possible so they can continue on in their role as intermediary. At the same time like any business they want to maximise their profits and minimize their risk. Only “risk” here takes the form of investing in new content, meaning that originality and experimentation are deemed as negative values.
The collapse of the broadcast entity would speed up the disintermediation between artist and audience and expose new streams of revenue and financing. We’d end up with more artists making more money, producing more content that costs less.
Nothing he said was trolling.
Nothing he said was BS.
Nothing he said was pro-RIAA/MPAA.
True. False. False.
A producer, or creator or author or whatever you want to call him
Artist.
has a fundamental right to profit off his created work (his "goods and services") the same as any other. Merely supporting that right is not the same as supporting the MPAA, nor is it BS.
No one's telling them they can't profit off their work, I totally support that right. That doesn't mean they have a fundamental right to tell me what I can or can't do with my physical property.
And lets not play make-believe; in the current environment the artists aren't the ones that are making the profits. When I go see a band live and buy some shitty stickers out of the back of the drummer's car for $9, I'm contributing more to his profits than a hundred people who bought the album of iTunes.
Free copying only encourages the proliferation of art. Restricting copying only serves to impoverish the majority of artists by placing obstacles between their art and their consumers. Every time you give your money over to the copyright cartel, you're reinforcing a system that manipulates the law to exploit artists and consumers.
Movies and music are NOT free. Get that through your head.
Except there's plenty of music and movies out there that are distributed for free, in fact since we started being able to reproduce content for free there's been an explosion in the number of artists out there making music and film.
You might find it convenient to freely stream a flick some conglomerate of investors sank $100 million to produce. No matter how you rationalize what you're doing you're taking for free what someone spent money to produce and is trying to sell.
I don't *need* to rationalize it. It's my hardware and thus my data. If there's anything rationalize, you need to rationalize to ME why you should be able to tell me what I can and can't do with my own hardware.
The fundamentals will not change.
No they wont. Free copying is here to stay. There's more ways to monetize content than just charging per copy. Artists are still going to be willing to create art for reasons beyond money.
Not thinking a movie is worth of your $10 is not an excuse. Thinking the lead actor is an untalented douche is not an excuse. Hating the producer is not an excuse. Your convenience is not an excuse.
I don't need an excuse: My hardware, my data. You need an excuse to tell me why I can't do what I want with my physical property.
You are not entitled to free shit and you are not a delicate unique little snowflake.
I'm entitled to copy what I want, when I want. You know why? That's right; because it's my hardware baby. And I'm far from unique, there's millions of people know that the current copyright situation is untenable and unsustainable.
If all it takes is for one laid-off ex employee criticizing the management structure for it to be deemed not to have worked, then there's no such thing as a workable management structure.
It's enforced very often, just not always. Sooner or later someone (often like me) comes along and sweeps it up.
I'm not a part of any "wiki-clique", I don't contribute any actual content, but if I'm browsing and I notice something untidy I'll tidy it up or put a relevant sign.
Wikipedia does something in between, leaving both sides unhappy with it.
You can't please everyone all the time, but Wikipedia does a damn good job at pleasing a lot of people.
The humanities are subversive. They undermine the claims of all authorities, whether political, religious or scientific.
But not academic.The humanities have become woefully dogmatic and riddled with citogenesis, where theories without a solid body of supporting evidence are held up as solid platforms from which other assumptions can be made.
Then again, perhaps the humanities could use an influx of students of engineering and hard sciences. Could be entertaining...
Comfortable don't enter into it. How are they supposed to live? If you've been supporting a family on 45k, How do you suppose to support them on half of that?
But they did have that choice. They had the choice between having wages cut in half or wages going to zero.
If we want to talk about choices how about the executives choices to purchase a company and then immediately start loading it up with debt? How about the choice to give themselves pay rises while the company fell apart under their watch?
Last time I checked, half is still greater than zero. Pretty hard to pay your bills with no job at all.
Not being able to pay your bills on 20k is still not able to pay your bills. What exactly aren't you getting about that? But where do you suppose the union draws the line? 10k? 5k? This is exactly there are social safety nets.
It sounds like the union was fighting for wages instead of fighting for a healthy company.
It's not the union's job to manage the company. That is management's job. And they're paid a hell of a lot more than anyone in the union for it.
If I'm the union negotiator and management comes to me and says I need a 30% drop in every employee's wages, my response is going to be to ask for an equity stake in the company in lieu of pay and a seat on the board of directors.
Yeah, they'd have literally laughed in your face. I don't think you understand what happened here; the company was bought by vulture capitalists, loaded up with debt and when the creditors came calling they literally held the company to ransom so they could look the worker's pensions and their salaries. Even in a refinancing negotiation where the board gives a shit about the company you'd get laughed at.
The union didn't apparently demand a deal like this and thus pretty much cut their own throat.
Because 1) it'd never happen and 2) it'd still be a shitty deal for the workers.
Actually it is their fault. The union could have conceded more but chose not to
How exactly? Wages had been cut from 45k to 35k, now the executive was asking to cut that by another 30%.
How would these workers continue to afford to pay their bills after having their wages effectively cut in half?
In what world is it the union's fault that the executive mismanaged the company so badly that they couldn't afford to pay their workers a livable wage?
Know I'll get modded down for going against Slashdot groupthink.
You should be modded down, but not for that.
But what is the argument suggesting? "It all happened on a computer, it shouldn't be prosecuted?"
No, the argument is that it's equivalent to mailing a request to AT&T asking them to send you a database of their customer's private details, having them do so, and then getting you charged once you've gone to the media to blow the whistle on what AT&T is doing.
Stealing private information and releasing in publicly isn't just obviously illegal, it caused grief for 114,000 people
There was no theft: AT&T had built a system which permitted anyone who made a request for this information to be given it. As a private individual, Mr Auernheimer is not beholden to keep this information a secret. Their right to privacy does not trump his right to free speech.
Even if AT&T has a shitty security system, that doesn't make it legal to break in.
As above, their security system was not breached, it simply didn’t cover the data he requested. He didn't break in. He sent a request for information, they gave it to him.
I'd love to see Slashdot do more mundane crimes. Maybe the home had a sign saying "beware of dog," but the dog was actually at the vet, so the robber was just publicizing a security flaw.
The problem with this comparison is that unlike the world of computers, the physical world doesn’t have explicit permissions that govern interactions. In this example it would be more like the sign said “Interaction with Dog permitted for all.” And then punishing someone for playing with him.
I'm sorry, but after watching Stallman eat his own foot-candy *while giving a presentation*, I can no longer take *anything* he says seriously
That's seems like more of a problem with you though than with him. His lack of social grace has little relevance to his insights on computing, but someone being narrow minded has an impact across a large potion of their life.
That's it - the economy doesn't figure out who 'deserves' the most pay, it's supply and demand... only.
Spoken like a true Libertarian: A sweeping statement with little attention given to reality.
There's a hell of a lot more that factors into pay rates for industries - even at a macro level - than just supply and demand. Industry trends, transfer pricing, changes in goods costs within in an industry, the difference between internal and external facing roles. There's a myriad of factors that go into the equation.
The reactor was well designed to faulty assumptions that in retrospect never should have been accepted.
Yes, thank you.
It seems that people have this idea that the standards, practices and methods of creating a nuclear plant stopped improving sometime during the 1960's. I'm hugely concerned about our environment so I despair at this kneejerk anti-nuclear reaction we've inherited from our hippie fore-bearers that's standing in the way of getting rid of the primitive reactors we've been running for decades and building new reactors vastly improved in safety, efficiency and waste reduction.
Citing the Fukushima plant as an argument against building new reactors is like someone arguing you shouldn't buy a new Volvo S80 because the Ford Pinto you're driving is such a deathtrap.
Slashdot Mirror
While the US may have higher average income than Australia, Australia doesn't have the crippling poverty issues that the US does, there's a lot less income inequality and the cost differences are largely the result of corporate gouging, where additional taxes etc come into it, it's mostly luxury goods. All in all Australians have some of the highest quality of life in the world.
I had this argument in another thread just yesterday. The laws of thermodynamics are obviously wrong. Wrong in the same way that Newtonian physics is wrong. Meaning that it is close enough for anything I will ever get my hands on, but that it clearly does not explain everything that is happening, and it is clearly violated at some point.
The day the 2nd law of thermodynamics is proved wrong is the day one of Stalin's descendants goes back in time, kills Stalin, then returns to his own time and spends the rest of the day playing catch with his son in a world where Stalin never came to power.
I used to adhere to the Theory of Entropy. Made sense at the time kinda like the flat world and Earth being the center of everything.
With a greater understanding of Physics and Cosmology, I've come to realize that the Earth is not flat nor the center of everything. With the realization that Energy is neither created nor destroyed only converted - the Theory of Entropy is disrupted in my mind and therefore proven false.
Uh, there is no "Theory of Entropy", entropy is a phenomena described in Information Theory. Maybe next time you set out to disprove a theory, make sure it's a real theory first.
In the second paragraph he's saying that measuring this information as it's processed could be useful as it would allow us to model physical interactions with near perfect accuracy, but we'd have to come up with our own way of encoding this information into format we can manipulate.
If I understand your argument, you're speculating that the universe is a pantheistic, evolving computation seeking entropy?
It's a mistake to think of the computational universe model as having agency. It's just the idea that since all activity in the universe can be abstracted as information (this is the foundation of quantum mechanics), then every interaction is a computation.
tl;dr: The universe laughs at your tiny minds and their ideas of magical superhumans and information that cannot be known. Ho ho ho.
this is starting to sound interesting. could you elucidate please?
There's a number of things he could mean; but my guess is he's thinking of the digital model of a computational universe, which clashes with thermodynamics in a number of ways as opposed to the quantum model, which doesn't. (provided we figure out the whole quantum gravity debacle)
If you're interested I recommend you pick up Seth Lloyd's Programming the Universe. It's a great introduction to QM and quantum computing and is totally accessible for anyone with a high school education.
That would mean returning it to the atmosphere.
You really need to pick up a chemistry textbook.
Dunno, turn it into sugar and oxygen maybe? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photosynthesis
The only good advice to TrueCrypt users is to actually have a hidden partition and to immediately hand over the keys for it when asked at a border inspection. Anything else is is pure folly. http://xkcd.com/538/ applies without restriction.
I disagree thoroughly. If you're travelling then encrypt your disk, but don't keep any personal files on your machine whatsoever, store it all in encrypted archives and upload it.
if you kill the viability of the ad to any serious degree, you can expect some kind of consequential change on the horizon.
Collapse of the broadcast entity? Why would I have a problem with this? The “broadcast entity” is the favoured medium of the copyright cartels, who’re doing their best to make the interaction between artist and audience as painful as possible so they can continue on in their role as intermediary. At the same time like any business they want to maximise their profits and minimize their risk. Only “risk” here takes the form of investing in new content, meaning that originality and experimentation are deemed as negative values.
The collapse of the broadcast entity would speed up the disintermediation between artist and audience and expose new streams of revenue and financing. We’d end up with more artists making more money, producing more content that costs less.
Nothing he said was trolling. Nothing he said was BS. Nothing he said was pro-RIAA/MPAA.
True. False. False.
A producer, or creator or author or whatever you want to call him
Artist.
has a fundamental right to profit off his created work (his "goods and services") the same as any other. Merely supporting that right is not the same as supporting the MPAA, nor is it BS.
No one's telling them they can't profit off their work, I totally support that right. That doesn't mean they have a fundamental right to tell me what I can or can't do with my physical property. And lets not play make-believe; in the current environment the artists aren't the ones that are making the profits. When I go see a band live and buy some shitty stickers out of the back of the drummer's car for $9, I'm contributing more to his profits than a hundred people who bought the album of iTunes.
Free copying only encourages the proliferation of art. Restricting copying only serves to impoverish the majority of artists by placing obstacles between their art and their consumers. Every time you give your money over to the copyright cartel, you're reinforcing a system that manipulates the law to exploit artists and consumers.
Movies and music are NOT free. Get that through your head.
Except there's plenty of music and movies out there that are distributed for free, in fact since we started being able to reproduce content for free there's been an explosion in the number of artists out there making music and film.
You might find it convenient to freely stream a flick some conglomerate of investors sank $100 million to produce. No matter how you rationalize what you're doing you're taking for free what someone spent money to produce and is trying to sell.
I don't *need* to rationalize it. It's my hardware and thus my data. If there's anything rationalize, you need to rationalize to ME why you should be able to tell me what I can and can't do with my own hardware.
The fundamentals will not change.
No they wont. Free copying is here to stay. There's more ways to monetize content than just charging per copy. Artists are still going to be willing to create art for reasons beyond money.
Not thinking a movie is worth of your $10 is not an excuse. Thinking the lead actor is an untalented douche is not an excuse. Hating the producer is not an excuse. Your convenience is not an excuse.
I don't need an excuse: My hardware, my data. You need an excuse to tell me why I can't do what I want with my physical property.
You are not entitled to free shit and you are not a delicate unique little snowflake.
I'm entitled to copy what I want, when I want. You know why? That's right; because it's my hardware baby. And I'm far from unique, there's millions of people know that the current copyright situation is untenable and unsustainable.
If all it takes is for one laid-off ex employee criticizing the management structure for it to be deemed not to have worked, then there's no such thing as a workable management structure.
Wikipedia does something in between, leaving both sides unhappy with it.
You can't please everyone all the time, but Wikipedia does a damn good job at pleasing a lot of people.
The humanities are subversive. They undermine the claims of all authorities, whether political, religious or scientific.
But not academic.The humanities have become woefully dogmatic and riddled with citogenesis, where theories without a solid body of supporting evidence are held up as solid platforms from which other assumptions can be made. Then again, perhaps the humanities could use an influx of students of engineering and hard sciences. Could be entertaining...
No one said it would be a comfortable experience.
Comfortable don't enter into it. How are they supposed to live? If you've been supporting a family on 45k, How do you suppose to support them on half of that?
But they did have that choice. They had the choice between having wages cut in half or wages going to zero.
If we want to talk about choices how about the executives choices to purchase a company and then immediately start loading it up with debt? How about the choice to give themselves pay rises while the company fell apart under their watch?
Last time I checked, half is still greater than zero. Pretty hard to pay your bills with no job at all.
Not being able to pay your bills on 20k is still not able to pay your bills. What exactly aren't you getting about that? But where do you suppose the union draws the line? 10k? 5k? This is exactly there are social safety nets.
It sounds like the union was fighting for wages instead of fighting for a healthy company.
It's not the union's job to manage the company. That is management's job. And they're paid a hell of a lot more than anyone in the union for it.
If I'm the union negotiator and management comes to me and says I need a 30% drop in every employee's wages, my response is going to be to ask for an equity stake in the company in lieu of pay and a seat on the board of directors.
Yeah, they'd have literally laughed in your face. I don't think you understand what happened here; the company was bought by vulture capitalists, loaded up with debt and when the creditors came calling they literally held the company to ransom so they could look the worker's pensions and their salaries. Even in a refinancing negotiation where the board gives a shit about the company you'd get laughed at.
The union didn't apparently demand a deal like this and thus pretty much cut their own throat.
Because 1) it'd never happen and 2) it'd still be a shitty deal for the workers.
Actually it is their fault. The union could have conceded more but chose not to
How exactly? Wages had been cut from 45k to 35k, now the executive was asking to cut that by another 30%. How would these workers continue to afford to pay their bills after having their wages effectively cut in half? In what world is it the union's fault that the executive mismanaged the company so badly that they couldn't afford to pay their workers a livable wage?
Brute forcing of SSL may be possible, but the question is surely whether can it be done in enough volume to be useful?
You don't need to break the SSL encryption to see where the messages are going and how much data they contain if you have a tap on the whole network,
Gotta say, after everything I've heard on the Internet; the Zionist conspiracy really doesn't live up to the hype...
Know I'll get modded down for going against Slashdot groupthink.
You should be modded down, but not for that.
But what is the argument suggesting? "It all happened on a computer, it shouldn't be prosecuted?"
No, the argument is that it's equivalent to mailing a request to AT&T asking them to send you a database of their customer's private details, having them do so, and then getting you charged once you've gone to the media to blow the whistle on what AT&T is doing.
Stealing private information and releasing in publicly isn't just obviously illegal, it caused grief for 114,000 people
There was no theft: AT&T had built a system which permitted anyone who made a request for this information to be given it. As a private individual, Mr Auernheimer is not beholden to keep this information a secret. Their right to privacy does not trump his right to free speech.
Even if AT&T has a shitty security system, that doesn't make it legal to break in.
As above, their security system was not breached, it simply didn’t cover the data he requested. He didn't break in. He sent a request for information, they gave it to him.
I'd love to see Slashdot do more mundane crimes. Maybe the home had a sign saying "beware of dog," but the dog was actually at the vet, so the robber was just publicizing a security flaw.
The problem with this comparison is that unlike the world of computers, the physical world doesn’t have explicit permissions that govern interactions. In this example it would be more like the sign said “Interaction with Dog permitted for all.” And then punishing someone for playing with him.
I would be curious what (probably bullshit) legal theory the telecom lobby would use?
Probably on anti-competitiveness grounds -_-
I'm sorry, but after watching Stallman eat his own foot-candy *while giving a presentation*, I can no longer take *anything* he says seriously
That's seems like more of a problem with you though than with him. His lack of social grace has little relevance to his insights on computing, but someone being narrow minded has an impact across a large potion of their life.
That's it - the economy doesn't figure out who 'deserves' the most pay, it's supply and demand ... only.
Spoken like a true Libertarian: A sweeping statement with little attention given to reality.
There's a hell of a lot more that factors into pay rates for industries - even at a macro level - than just supply and demand. Industry trends, transfer pricing, changes in goods costs within in an industry, the difference between internal and external facing roles. There's a myriad of factors that go into the equation.
It only takes one stupid idiot to ruin a good thing.
Not if it's designed correctly.
The reactor was well designed to faulty assumptions that in retrospect never should have been accepted.
Yes, thank you.
It seems that people have this idea that the standards, practices and methods of creating a nuclear plant stopped improving sometime during the 1960's. I'm hugely concerned about our environment so I despair at this kneejerk anti-nuclear reaction we've inherited from our hippie fore-bearers that's standing in the way of getting rid of the primitive reactors we've been running for decades and building new reactors vastly improved in safety, efficiency and waste reduction.
Citing the Fukushima plant as an argument against building new reactors is like someone arguing you shouldn't buy a new Volvo S80 because the Ford Pinto you're driving is such a deathtrap.