Big company comes in and wants to roll right over me. It's bad enough when someone takes your domain name (but under.net/.org, etc - instead of your own.com). Imagine when someone decides to pony up the cash to completely wipe you out by taking out a rootless domain in your.com domain's name?
Business model:
1. Create company claiming to solve domain problems by offering a new "more important" space for every company to register its name. 2. Charge a lot. 3. Wait for the big companies to register their domain names "just in case", to avoid someone else getting it first. 4. Profit!
I'd hate to become attached to something that the author could drop when he gets a job or girlfriend or new game system.
Actually, one of the most important things about open source projects is that the important ones DON'T disappear when they get dropped. Either a new developer picks it up, or the code is forked into a differently named project or absorbed into a larger project. Open source software can survive a primary developer disappearing much better than proprietary software can survive a company dropping support for a product.
Let's assume that you and I *are* capable of functioning in a "standard human society." Then, lets put his acheivements and yours and mine on a list side by side.
Put another way, society as a whole often benefits from well-intentioned individuals who occasionally buck the system. Many of his accomplishments are precisely because he doesn't accept the way things are, and pushes forth with his own vision regardless of public perception.
If you charge per device people get cranky with you about adding new devices and then they go find a provider that doesn't do that.
Yeah, well for that to happen, you also need there to be genuine broadband competition. In much of the U.S., broadband competition is either minimal or nonexistent.
I agree with everything you say, but I think we need to push a little harder to get people to use public transportation. Take, for example, my commute into Boston.
Population centers like Boston are the exception rather than the rule in the U.S. Most people in the U.S. don't live in the city, and have typical commutes on the order of 20-30 miles to get to work.
You can "push" for public transportation all you want, but how are you going to build a cost-effective, energy efficient, and time effective public transportation network that covers going to and from arbitrary locations over a 900 square mile region of low population density?
I've been fairly moderate about DRM in the past, until I purchased the rootkit-encumbered new Foo Fighters album. I placed it in my CD-ROM drive to encode some MP3's for my portable player, and I noticed a licensing agreement popped up. I hate those "software enhancements" on movie DVD's and audio CD's, and I did what I have always told my girlfriend to do when the InterActual ones come up: I closed the window without accepting the licensing agreement.
The software was still installed on my computer. The dirtiest thing about all this, in my opinion, is that the "A" in EULA (Agreement) is nothing of the sort.
So send them a bill for the computing resources they used without your consent, and for the labor required to remove their unauthorized installation. If they don't pay, get a lawyer.
If it's illegal for virus writers to distribute trojans, it should be equally illegal for the Foo Fighters.
The first half of the article is very parochial - kind of ooh the nasty Americans want to diminish the importance of Greenwich.
Which seems to be simply the delusion of the author, and has nothing to do with the subject of the discussion. The author has cast the entire thing as a US versus UK contest, with the noble UK scientists defending the importance of Greenwich, and the evil US overlords trying to steal it away and disrupt the lives of the common folk. First of all, I think if you polled US scientists, you'd find the vast majority of them quite content with the current system, and not calling for any change. In fact, you have to read halfway down the article to find out that the only people proposing a change are "US members of the International Telecommunications Union", without specifying which company they are referring to. Then somehow a handful of people at a telecommunications company issuing a proposal is amplified by this author to represent all US scientists and the views of Americans in general.
This is just a classic case of crappy sensationalist reporting.
No, the safest and most abundant practical source of energy is--conservation.
That's a fairly incorrect statement. Can you make a conservation-powered battery or a conservation-powered electricity plant?
Conservation is simply a proposal that everyone should just use less stuff, but it does not offer any substantial solutions for the remaining use that will continue after using "less". Populations continue to grow. Even after using "less", there are still more and more people who are each using "less", and in a short time consumption will rise to its previous level even with each person using "less". This is not a solution, simply a short postponement.
Lawyers do not represent the law, they obfuscate laws then charge enormous amounts of money to interpret those obfuscations.
Lawyers stretch and manipulate the law to the furthest extent permissible by the system to fulfill the requests of their clients. This is what they're paid to do, and someone will fulfill this need as long as it is possible to fulfill. To change it, the law would have to change the rules by which lawyers operate.
If you don't like obfuscated laws, make a rule that laws cannot be obfuscated, and must have a "plain meaning".
If you don't like the threat of punitive lawsuits without merit, then change the rules of the system so that a rich entity can't force a defendant into bankruptcy by hiring better lawyers than the defendant can afford. The system facilitates this, not the lawyers, and there are many ways the system could be changed.
It seems like consistency to the point of insanity ("doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results") is valued by a large portion, perhaps a majority, of the electorate over reasoned views that may evolve over time in response to new information or a changing situation.
In a hostile environment in which any idea will be attacked by someone, and no good ideas are rewarded, the politicians which say the least and think the least will rise to the top.
If you want to fix that, you have to start rewarding politicians for promoting good ideas (when was the last time you saw coverage of such a thing?). That means there has to be substantial positive news coverage of good and meaningful decisions, and this coverage must be as much as, or greater than, the coverage of politicians that have done something stupid but with little impact.
2. More seriously, there is no guarentee that fusion power will ever be workable. It may not be feasible in our universe to ever get more power out of a fusion reaction than you put in.
Absolute nonsense. Ever see that glowing thing in the sky? Ever hear of hydrogen bombs?
Power-producing fusion is a proven fact, and using it for electricity production is a technological challenge that most experts in fusion think we can surpass in a timely fashion with proper funding and research effort.
>all the pages go blank after a few hours of reading Huh? You mean if you take the batteries out of your PDA or break it? Or is this some specific form of DRM that erases the e-book after a specific length of time? All the pages go blank in a book if you dip it in acid. What's your point?
Either you're being facetious, or completely missed the point. The PDA's battery will run out if not plugged in. And if you can plug in your PDA, then you're not on the move, so why do you need it to be on a PDA? If you ARE on the move such that you can't be plugged in, a physical book will significantly outlast an electronic one. And if you're at home, at the office, or near an outlet, a laptop or desktop will usually do the job with far more screen space and storage space than a 5cm window.
Now if you want to make the point that you seemed to imply in your above post, that the PDA lets you use free books that you download without paying for a physical copy, and that this saves money if you happen to have a short daily commute on public transportation during which you like to read free books, then I could see that serving a useful purpose for you. But since the original poster's question was about why PDAs have not exploded with demand, then I think my point stands that the number of people who would demand features of this sort are low.
For any travel longer than an hour or two, the PDA as a book source starts to lose its value compared to a physical book due to the PDA's short battery life. For anyone who walks, bikes, or drives to and from work, class, or wherever they go, neither a PDA nor book can be used during this. And upon getting to work, many people already have access to computers, so having a separate PDA for reading books at work wouldn't be useful. If I have documents I need to access anywhere I go, I just stick them on my thumbdrive or on a server somewhere.
If it isn't replicable it isn't science. Part and parcel of the empirical method.
Your statement is only correct for sufficiently suitable definitions of the word "replicable". An experiment does NOT have to succeed every time it is performed in order to be replicable, that itself is a common myth of "perfect science". In actuality, experiments have so many complex variables, that even solid research at high quality labs will have a significant failure rate in performing an experiment. In some fields this problem is fixed by simply examining sources of failure and then repeating the experiment until valid results are obtained, and in other fields the problem is fixed by using statistical analysis to determine how many successful experimental results are statistically significant.
But in very few fields does everything just work out flawlessly the first time an experiment is tried. This would be like writing a 20,000 line program and compiling it with no syntax errors or bugs on the first try.
My iPaq PDA has degenerated into being a glorified ebook reader.
It also weighs about as much as a book, costs 10 times more than a book, and all the pages go blank after a few hours of reading. Yeah, so maybe you can store a few ebooks on there, but seriously, how many ebooks can you read in those few hours of battery life anyway?
Personally, I can't find much worth doing with a PDA that isn't already done better by something else. They have no "killer ap".
>>are we still assuming that violent video games lead to violent behaviour in real-life?
>They do.
Prove it. The burden is on you to prove your claim. Show us a collection of peer-reviewed studies which show statistically significant CAUSATION between violent video games and subsequent violent behavior in real-life, and which show us the statistical effect size of this.
Note that correlation studies which show that people prone to violence are more likely to play violent video games do not at all count as evidence for this, since correlation does not equal causation.
I pretty much do just that. I have a Mythtv box, and usually I watch any programs it has recorded when I have the time. And when I do, I skip ads. Even when I watch "live" tv, I usually watch it at 90% rate, so that I'm able to skip at least part of the commercial break.
Not to add a "me too", but a MythTV install really does change the value of TV. If you don't have it, you don't know what you're missing. Get a cheap $50 TV card, setup MythTV, and have it record everything you would even consider watching throughout the week. Then instead of wasting time watching whatever crap happens to be on at that hour, you always have TV shows around that you would want to watch, which you can pause whenever you want. Typical storage is around 1.3 gigs per hour, which is cheaper than videotape, and much less clumsy.
This also means you can take advantage of reruns of an entire series. Often a series is rerun in order during the daytime, but unless you're unemployed and watch TV all day, you don't have time to watch them all in order. With DVR, you can record them and watch them in order, and follow along with the arching plots.
Syntax highlighting and auto-indentation can only take you so far. Lisp itself is designed the way a computer thinks, not the way a human thinks. Sure, we can train ourselves to process Lisp code, but this will never compare to the debugging ability from that corresponding level of training in a language designed more along the lines of human thought.
Sure, you can find demonstrations of things that fail in C which won't fail in Common Lisp. But Common Lisp is not exactly known for the human readability of its syntax, and human readability is the key to reducing algorithmic bugs.
No one wants to have to be logged on to write a quick letter in a word processor.
That may be true, but there is a certain value in having the letter itself located in a decentralized location. If you could somehow securely access, edit, and print your documents from any terminal in the world, without carrying a bulky laptop around, then that could be of significant value. So it's not the actual editing that needs networking, but the data access.
While I'm quite fond of having the command-line and programming tools included in a distribution for their intrinsic value, your argument in favor of this is definitely reminiscint of the arguments used in support of supply-side economics.
A late reply... But I just wanted to comment that while adaptable toolbars are an interesting idea, and could make work smoother on ones own computer, they also result in you having a lot of habits which no longer work when you have to do work on another computer. Many people seem to at least have one work and one home computer, and if the same programs have adapted differently on these, then that can be confusing. Configurable toolbars are nicer because you can copy or redo configurations, and they stay consistent allowing you to adapt to a layout that isn't dynamically changing on you.
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Big company comes in and wants to roll right over me. It's bad enough when someone takes your domain name (but under .net/.org, etc - instead of your own .com). Imagine when someone decides to pony up the cash to completely wipe you out by taking out a rootless domain in your .com domain's name?
Business model:
1. Create company claiming to solve domain problems by offering a new "more important" space for every company to register its name.
2. Charge a lot.
3. Wait for the big companies to register their domain names "just in case", to avoid someone else getting it first.
4. Profit!
(Hey, that one actually works...)
I'd hate to become attached to something that the author could drop when he gets a job or girlfriend or new game system.
Actually, one of the most important things about open source projects is that the important ones DON'T disappear when they get dropped. Either a new developer picks it up, or the code is forked into a differently named project or absorbed into a larger project. Open source software can survive a primary developer disappearing much better than proprietary software can survive a company dropping support for a product.
And the 500 wireless router hops it would take you just to get a packet across a small city would give you how many minutes of lag?
Let's assume that you and I *are* capable of functioning in a "standard human society." Then, lets put his acheivements and yours and mine on a list side by side.
Put another way, society as a whole often benefits from well-intentioned individuals who occasionally buck the system. Many of his accomplishments are precisely because he doesn't accept the way things are, and pushes forth with his own vision regardless of public perception.
If you charge per device people get cranky with you about adding new devices and then they go find a provider that doesn't do that.
Yeah, well for that to happen, you also need there to be genuine broadband competition. In much of the U.S., broadband competition is either minimal or nonexistent.
I agree with everything you say, but I think we need to push a little harder to get people to use public transportation. Take, for example, my commute into Boston.
Population centers like Boston are the exception rather than the rule in the U.S. Most people in the U.S. don't live in the city, and have typical commutes on the order of 20-30 miles to get to work.
You can "push" for public transportation all you want, but how are you going to build a cost-effective, energy efficient, and time effective public transportation network that covers going to and from arbitrary locations over a 900 square mile region of low population density?
I've been fairly moderate about DRM in the past, until I purchased the rootkit-encumbered new Foo Fighters album. I placed it in my CD-ROM drive to encode some MP3's for my portable player, and I noticed a licensing agreement popped up. I hate those "software enhancements" on movie DVD's and audio CD's, and I did what I have always told my girlfriend to do when the InterActual ones come up: I closed the window without accepting the licensing agreement.
The software was still installed on my computer. The dirtiest thing about all this, in my opinion, is that the "A" in EULA (Agreement) is nothing of the sort.
So send them a bill for the computing resources they used without your consent, and for the labor required to remove their unauthorized installation. If they don't pay, get a lawyer.
If it's illegal for virus writers to distribute trojans, it should be equally illegal for the Foo Fighters.
The first half of the article is very parochial - kind of ooh the nasty Americans want to diminish the importance of Greenwich.
Which seems to be simply the delusion of the author, and has nothing to do with the subject of the discussion. The author has cast the entire thing as a US versus UK contest, with the noble UK scientists defending the importance of Greenwich, and the evil US overlords trying to steal it away and disrupt the lives of the common folk. First of all, I think if you polled US scientists, you'd find the vast majority of them quite content with the current system, and not calling for any change. In fact, you have to read halfway down the article to find out that the only people proposing a change are "US members of the International Telecommunications Union", without specifying which company they are referring to. Then somehow a handful of people at a telecommunications company issuing a proposal is amplified by this author to represent all US scientists and the views of Americans in general.
This is just a classic case of crappy sensationalist reporting.
No, the safest and most abundant practical source of energy is--conservation.
That's a fairly incorrect statement. Can you make a conservation-powered battery or a conservation-powered electricity plant?
Conservation is simply a proposal that everyone should just use less stuff, but it does not offer any substantial solutions for the remaining use that will continue after using "less". Populations continue to grow. Even after using "less", there are still more and more people who are each using "less", and in a short time consumption will rise to its previous level even with each person using "less". This is not a solution, simply a short postponement.
Lawyers do not represent the law, they obfuscate laws then charge enormous amounts of money to interpret those obfuscations.
Lawyers stretch and manipulate the law to the furthest extent permissible by the system to fulfill the requests of their clients. This is what they're paid to do, and someone will fulfill this need as long as it is possible to fulfill. To change it, the law would have to change the rules by which lawyers operate.
If you don't like obfuscated laws, make a rule that laws cannot be obfuscated, and must have a "plain meaning".
If you don't like the threat of punitive lawsuits without merit, then change the rules of the system so that a rich entity can't force a defendant into bankruptcy by hiring better lawyers than the defendant can afford. The system facilitates this, not the lawyers, and there are many ways the system could be changed.
If you have an 8-ways dual-channel Opteron setup, you get 8x2x400x64 = 410Gbit/s... almost half-way there.
Now, if I could figure out a way to RAID-5 my ram...
It seems like consistency to the point of insanity ("doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results") is valued by a large portion, perhaps a majority, of the electorate over reasoned views that may evolve over time in response to new information or a changing situation.
In a hostile environment in which any idea will be attacked by someone, and no good ideas are rewarded, the politicians which say the least and think the least will rise to the top.
If you want to fix that, you have to start rewarding politicians for promoting good ideas (when was the last time you saw coverage of such a thing?). That means there has to be substantial positive news coverage of good and meaningful decisions, and this coverage must be as much as, or greater than, the coverage of politicians that have done something stupid but with little impact.
2. More seriously, there is no guarentee that fusion power will ever be workable. It may not be feasible in our universe to ever get more power out of a fusion reaction than you put in.
Absolute nonsense. Ever see that glowing thing in the sky? Ever hear of hydrogen bombs?
Power-producing fusion is a proven fact, and using it for electricity production is a technological challenge that most experts in fusion think we can surpass in a timely fashion with proper funding and research effort.
>all the pages go blank after a few hours of reading
Huh? You mean if you take the batteries out of your PDA or break it? Or is this some specific form of DRM that erases the e-book after a specific length of time? All the pages go blank in a book if you dip it in acid. What's your point?
Either you're being facetious, or completely missed the point. The PDA's battery will run out if not plugged in. And if you can plug in your PDA, then you're not on the move, so why do you need it to be on a PDA? If you ARE on the move such that you can't be plugged in, a physical book will significantly outlast an electronic one. And if you're at home, at the office, or near an outlet, a laptop or desktop will usually do the job with far more screen space and storage space than a 5cm window.
Now if you want to make the point that you seemed to imply in your above post, that the PDA lets you use free books that you download without paying for a physical copy, and that this saves money if you happen to have a short daily commute on public transportation during which you like to read free books, then I could see that serving a useful purpose for you. But since the original poster's question was about why PDAs have not exploded with demand, then I think my point stands that the number of people who would demand features of this sort are low.
For any travel longer than an hour or two, the PDA as a book source starts to lose its value compared to a physical book due to the PDA's short battery life. For anyone who walks, bikes, or drives to and from work, class, or wherever they go, neither a PDA nor book can be used during this. And upon getting to work, many people already have access to computers, so having a separate PDA for reading books at work wouldn't be useful. If I have documents I need to access anywhere I go, I just stick them on my thumbdrive or on a server somewhere.
If it isn't replicable it isn't science. Part and parcel of the empirical method.
Your statement is only correct for sufficiently suitable definitions of the word "replicable". An experiment does NOT have to succeed every time it is performed in order to be replicable, that itself is a common myth of "perfect science". In actuality, experiments have so many complex variables, that even solid research at high quality labs will have a significant failure rate in performing an experiment. In some fields this problem is fixed by simply examining sources of failure and then repeating the experiment until valid results are obtained, and in other fields the problem is fixed by using statistical analysis to determine how many successful experimental results are statistically significant.
But in very few fields does everything just work out flawlessly the first time an experiment is tried. This would be like writing a 20,000 line program and compiling it with no syntax errors or bugs on the first try.
My iPaq PDA has degenerated into being a glorified ebook reader.
It also weighs about as much as a book, costs 10 times more than a book, and all the pages go blank after a few hours of reading. Yeah, so maybe you can store a few ebooks on there, but seriously, how many ebooks can you read in those few hours of battery life anyway?
Personally, I can't find much worth doing with a PDA that isn't already done better by something else. They have no "killer ap".
I dare you to find me a more powerful pillow than the one I've been using for 18ish years.
I guess that pillow has really started to "grow" on you...
>>are we still assuming that violent video games lead to violent behaviour in real-life?
>They do.
Prove it. The burden is on you to prove your claim. Show us a collection of peer-reviewed studies which show statistically significant CAUSATION between violent video games and subsequent violent behavior in real-life, and which show us the statistical effect size of this.
Note that correlation studies which show that people prone to violence are more likely to play violent video games do not at all count as evidence for this, since correlation does not equal causation.
I pretty much do just that. I have a Mythtv box, and usually I watch any programs it has recorded when I have the time. And when I do, I skip ads. Even when I watch "live" tv, I usually watch it at 90% rate, so that I'm able to skip at least part of the commercial break.
Not to add a "me too", but a MythTV install really does change the value of TV. If you don't have it, you don't know what you're missing. Get a cheap $50 TV card, setup MythTV, and have it record everything you would even consider watching throughout the week. Then instead of wasting time watching whatever crap happens to be on at that hour, you always have TV shows around that you would want to watch, which you can pause whenever you want. Typical storage is around 1.3 gigs per hour, which is cheaper than videotape, and much less clumsy.
This also means you can take advantage of reruns of an entire series. Often a series is rerun in order during the daytime, but unless you're unemployed and watch TV all day, you don't have time to watch them all in order. With DVR, you can record them and watch them in order, and follow along with the arching plots.
Auto-skip of commercials is just a bonus.
In physics, the simpler answers tend to be the correct ones.
Correction: The simplest answers which explain the most evidence tend to be more correct.
Syntax highlighting and auto-indentation can only take you so far. Lisp itself is designed the way a computer thinks, not the way a human thinks. Sure, we can train ourselves to process Lisp code, but this will never compare to the debugging ability from that corresponding level of training in a language designed more along the lines of human thought.
Sure, you can find demonstrations of things that fail in C which won't fail in Common Lisp. But Common Lisp is not exactly known for the human readability of its syntax, and human readability is the key to reducing algorithmic bugs.
No one wants to have to be logged on to write a quick letter in a word processor.
That may be true, but there is a certain value in having the letter itself located in a decentralized location. If you could somehow securely access, edit, and print your documents from any terminal in the world, without carrying a bulky laptop around, then that could be of significant value. So it's not the actual editing that needs networking, but the data access.
While I'm quite fond of having the command-line and programming tools included in a distribution for their intrinsic value, your argument in favor of this is definitely reminiscint of the arguments used in support of supply-side economics.
A late reply... But I just wanted to comment that while adaptable toolbars are an interesting idea, and could make work smoother on ones own computer, they also result in you having a lot of habits which no longer work when you have to do work on another computer. Many people seem to at least have one work and one home computer, and if the same programs have adapted differently on these, then that can be confusing. Configurable toolbars are nicer because you can copy or redo configurations, and they stay consistent allowing you to adapt to a layout that isn't dynamically changing on you.