Copyrights and license agreements are entirely different things. Copyright is something enforced by the government. License agreements are something that the lawyers at the software company made up. Thus, copyright is binding to everyone; license agreements (like any other private contract) are only binding to people who have accepted their terms.
I attended a talk at CalTech this weekend by Janna Levin (author of How the Universe got its Spots). Her theory is that the universe may "wrap around at the edges", a sort of 3-dimensional analogue to the old Asteroids paradigm... i.e. if you travel in a straight line long enough, you would arrive back at the point where you started. If this is in fact the case, then it's likely that many of those "thousands and thousands of galaxies" that the Hubble is seeing are, in fact, merely additional images of other galaxies, produced by light waves that are on their second (or third or fourth) trip "around" the universe. It's hard to detect the redundancy, however, since these additional images would show the galaxies at a much younger age, and thus they wouldn't look the same as the galaxies do "now" (errm... in their most direct image).
As the Matrix lady says, that oughtta really bake your noodle.:^)
Not true. You can also derive hydrogen from natural gas, fossil fuels, bacteria, or mine it from the Earth's crust. There are probably other ways as well that haven't been discovered yet.
Since solar and wind are too expensive for the forseeable future
Says who? Tcost of wind power has been dropping dramatically over the last few years. Currently it's only a little bit more expensive than the going rate. Given some more refinements of the technology and economies of scale, it will quite likely become the cheapest form of power generation. Besides, once you've factored in the cost of nuclear waste disposal, guarding against terrorists, mining uranium, environmental cleanup, etc, nuclear power isn't all that cheap either.
But the fact of the matter is, you will get advertising - so wouldn't you rather get ads for something you're actually interested in?
Isn't this the old "you're going to get raped, you might as well lie back enjoy it" argument, applied to advertising? Wouldn't it be better to find a way to get rid of the advertising? Or have commercial interests so compromised society that such a thing is no longer even thinkable?
Frankly, this may not be such a bad thing. Live technical support over the phone is an inefficient way to get things fixed, because it requires the simultaneous full attention and co-operation of at least two human beings per problem (you and the tech support person). Other modes of tech support, like e-mail, on-line chat, public on-line forums, or even (gasp) a quality printed manual are much more practical, since you don't waste your time on hold, and the company doesn't have to pay for so many hand-holders. (of course, better still is a product that is bug free and easy to use, so no support is required... but I suppose that's asking too much)
Hmm, there's probably some money to be made in a service that would match new-users-with-a-problem up with knowledgable-users-who-know-how-to-solve-that-prob lem for a given product. Once the match is made, if the user's problem is solved, the company pays a small bounty to the person who helped, and posts a transcript of the episode to their on-line support site....
MS's setup is the best OS setup I have ever used, period.
There is one better than that... no setup at all. You buy your PC at Frye's, bring it home, plug it in, and everything is already set up and ready to use. That's what Microsoft has now, and what it is desparately trying to keep any other OS from obtaining.
That's absurd. The code isn't YOURS, it doesn't belong to THE OSS COMMUNITY, it belongs to MS. You, nor the government, nor anyone else, have the rights to the source code.
Perhaps you have forgotten them Microsoft has been convicted of a crime? Criminals forfeit some of their rights. If Microsoft wanted to keep all their code, they shouldn't have broken the law.
Scrape off Be and verticly integrate it with hardware.
That would have been done a long time ago if Microsoft hadn't used its monopoly to make sure no major hardware vendor would dare to do it. If anything deserves legal redress, it's that.
I agree. I just don't "get it". When will these guys give up on the eBook idea. How many have tried and failed?
They'll get it right eventually, and it will be a HUGE hit. However, for eBook readers to take off, they have to have the following features:
The have to be as small, light, and durable as your average paperback book
The display needs to be similar in quality to a page of paper
They need to be capable of reading plain old HTML content (ideally, the 'viewing software' would be a web browser). Ideally they would have a wireless Internet connection, but just downloading content from a PC would probably suffice for a while.
Oh yeah, and not too expensive either (
And there is something about holding and reading a book - that a computer just can't replace.
That something is a lightweight, portable, durable, and extremely readable display. LCD screens can't replace that. But electronic paper displays can, and hopefully will.
If you take parts to be true and parts to be false the bible is nothing more than a bunch of nice fairy tales with moral lessons.
... which is pretty much the conclusion I came to as well.:^) But even as a book of fairy tales, some of the moral lessons do have truth to them (in that they reflect a cultural distillation of what sort of behaviour is beneficial to one's self and society, and what behaviour is not)
If you can do that, then you have no moral standard. No one can come to you and say look this is in God's word, this is wrong.
Arguably no one can do that anyway in many cases, since the Bible contradicts itself on some issues. One book of the Bible says one thing, another says the opposite. Which should one believe?
And why can't it be the case that parts of the Bible are true, and other parts are false? Or that some parts are true in spirit, but not meant to be taken literally/scientifically? Why the black-and-whitism?
He purported to have proved Evolutionism by making his Macintosh draw little squiggles -- or "biomorphs" as he called them -- that changed over "generations". (This of course begs the question: if it took a created machine running created software to make these squiggles, how then does that refute Creation?)
I realize the article is a hoax, but this is an example of reasoning that I hear fairly often from Creationists. They believe that if Creationism is true, then evolution must be false, and vice versa. But as the example above points out, software-based 'evolution' was created by an intelligent being. Move the scenario back to the real world, and it works there too -- there is nothing to prevent an all-powerful God from creating a Universe that generates human life through evolutionary processes. You can have your Creationism and evolution too.
Touche.:^) However, I think there is a difference... in this case, there is a good chance that the up-front recycling deposit would be both enforcable and fair to the consumer. In the mp3 case, there is no reasonable way to keep people from copying any mp3 they like, so we might as well fall back to a voluntary system that has some chance of working and also provides significant benefits for the consumer.
No, having everyone pay for the actual costs is the answer. For the "good people", it makes little difference, since they would have paid the recycling fee in either scenario. For the "other people", it makes sure that they have an inncentive to recycle.
having a 5c bottle tax is just fine, most people don't bother to collect that even when they do recycle em. but $30 is something altogether
Well, let's see... a bottle of soda is around $1.25 around here, so a 5 cent deposit is 4% of the purchase price. If your new computer systems costs you $750, then $30 is... 4% of the purchase price. Seems pretty reasonable to me.
I'm all for conservation. But why pay for an item to be thrown away, when you buy it(new)?
Because that way it is certain that you do pay for the recycling fee. When the time comes to get rid of your old machine, you want to have an incentive to recycle the machine (i.e. a deposit refund), not an incentive to bury it somewhere (i.e. a recycling charge). In this way we can avoid spending $$$ on "recycling enforcement" trying to watch everybody all the time to make sure they recycle properly -- if they can get money back by recycling, they will do it on their own! (hell, even when they don't, you'll have other people going through the garbage to pick out the PCs and get the deposit money)
(Note: the above assumes that you actually do get a deposit refund when you recycle your old PC... from the article, it's not clear that is the case. But it should be)
Why not just make recycling voluntary? Those who want to "help save the cute fluffy bunnies" can pay market rates to dispose of their waste in an environmentally-friendly manner, and those of us who don't give a rat's ass can just dump it.
Good idea... how about we make all taxes voluntary? That way people who want to support their government can do so, and people who don't give a rat's ass don't have to.
Oh yeah, because IT WOULDN'T WORK. If we're going to be serious about getting something accomplished, it has to be made hard to avoid. Otherwise, enough people would "free-load" on the system to make it ineffective.
Interesting note - apparently, you burn less fossil fuel over time if you "dig more oil out of the ground to make new plastics from scratch" than you do in "melting down old plastics to make new plastics".
Assuming your recycling plant is getting all its power from fossil fuels, of course. In a sane world, we'd also be working on switching to renewable power sources. Once that is done, recycling would take no fossil fuels at all, just lots of sun/wind/waves/etc.
I don't take being forced to do anything very well when it doesn't harm anyone else, and neither should you!
If you think spreading lead and other poisons around the countryside isn't hurting anyone else, then you haven't thought things through.
Oh, there's also the little problem of the fact that recycling certain materials is actually more harmful to the environment (energy usage and byproduct wise) than making them in the first place
That is debatable, but somewhat orthogonal to the issue at hand -- the important thing is that the computer parts don't end up spread all over the country, leaking into the ground water, or being burned into the air in China. So the goal here is to make sure they are collected and dealt with safely; whether that means recycling them or just sequestering them in a safe location is a separate issue.
The answer is to make recyling paletable and easy, never _force_.
Nobody is proposing forcing anyone to recycle anything here. On the other hand, when you choose to recycle your old PC, under this plan, you won't be charged to do so. An improvement on this plan would be to charge $10 more on top of the recycling cost, and give that back to the consumer when s/he recycles their computer; this would be a further incentive to bring the computers in instead of just dumping them somewhere.
Note how well a similar system works for income taxes... by giving people a refund check every year, the IRS encourages everyone to send in their tax forms on time. Even though people were charged more up front, and thus aren't really getting any money, they feel like they are getting something out of doing the right thing.
So your solar electricity plant has a large ecological impact (dozens or hundreds of acres required) and can't produce electricity as reliably as a stinky old coal plant. Plus you have to clean the mirrors/solar cells
The stinky old power plant isn't going to be very reliable when the coal runs out... and, once you factor in the costs of the environmental damage, cancer, and lawsuits, it probably isn't all that cheap either.
As far as solar power being problematic, that's true if you are thinking solely of collecting it via photovoltaic cells. But try doing it with Solar Chimneys or indirectly via windmills, and you'll find the cost/benefit ratio to be quite competitive. (factor in the long term environmental costs, and the fact that you don't have to keep digging up fuel, and these methods are much cheaper than coal!)
Zero emission is nice. But is it worth an even greater use of fossil fuels, and even greater CO2 release than before ?
Perhaps... if it means that when the fossil fuels run out, or become too scarce to be cheap anymore, that we already have everything in place to easily switch to hydrogen from renewable sources.
[The GPL] makes the code that was taxpayer-funded inaccessable to the businesses and proprietary software developers who also paid for its creation
No, those businesses' refusal to open source their own code is what makes the GPL'd code inaccessible to them. If they are willing to GPL their own code, then they can use the GPL'd code just as much as anyone else can. The fact that they are unwilling to GPL their own code is their problem, not the GPL's.
Having said that, I think releasing government-funded code into the public domain is a reasonable alternative to GPL'ing it, for most things.
One possible problem is that your eval-users receive their password email "a few hours" after signing up. You really should send the email immediately, so that the user can download and install the software in the same session. If I have to register, then wait for an email, that means I'm going to go on to other things in the meantime, and I may get sidetracked so that when the email finally does arrive, I no longer have the time or inclination to handle it at the moment, and so it gets forgotten.
So, my recommendation: automate your process so that the user can download the software *immediately* (or at least, within a few minutes of completing the registration information). That should help.
I'm not sure why one would need Human Subjects Approval (tm) just to let kids use a web browser. Does not every bookstore and Internet cafe already let anyone use a web browser? Or if it is the collection of data about usage patterns that is requires Approval.... does not every commercial web site already collect usage data about its users?
So what's the problem? I would think at most you could just put a little disclaimer notice next to the terminal: "this terminal is part of a usage research study. Feel free to use it, but know that you are being monitored while doing so."
Slashdot Mirror
Copyrights and license agreements are entirely different things. Copyright is something enforced by the government. License agreements are something that the lawyers at the software company made up. Thus, copyright is binding to everyone; license agreements (like any other private contract) are only binding to people who have accepted their terms.
As the Matrix lady says, that oughtta really bake your noodle.
Not true. You can also derive hydrogen from natural gas, fossil fuels, bacteria, or mine it from the Earth's crust. There are probably other ways as well that haven't been discovered yet.
Since solar and wind are too expensive for the forseeable future
Says who? Tcost of wind power has been dropping dramatically over the last few years. Currently it's only a little bit more expensive than the going rate. Given some more refinements of the technology and economies of scale, it will quite likely become the cheapest form of power generation. Besides, once you've factored in the cost of nuclear waste disposal, guarding against terrorists, mining uranium, environmental cleanup, etc, nuclear power isn't all that cheap either.
Yes, I think nobody would notice. Not if you were discreet about it, and the photocopy was small and colored the same as your finger.
"Frequent shopper" cards are easy and fun to trade with your friends! Try it!
Fingers are not so easy or fun to trade.
Isn't this the old "you're going to get raped, you might as well lie back enjoy it" argument, applied to advertising? Wouldn't it be better to find a way to get rid of the advertising? Or have commercial interests so compromised society that such a thing is no longer even thinkable?
Hmm, there's probably some money to be made in a service that would match new-users-with-a-problem up with knowledgable-users-who-know-how-to-solve-that-pro
There is one better than that... no setup at all. You buy your PC at Frye's, bring it home, plug it in, and everything is already set up and ready to use. That's what Microsoft has now, and what it is desparately trying to keep any other OS from obtaining.
Perhaps you have forgotten them Microsoft has been convicted of a crime? Criminals forfeit some of their rights. If Microsoft wanted to keep all their code, they shouldn't have broken the law.
That would have been done a long time ago if Microsoft hadn't used its monopoly to make sure no major hardware vendor would dare to do it. If anything deserves legal redress, it's that.
(and before anyone whines about their city not having enough bike lanes... here is yet another incentive to add some)
They'll get it right eventually, and it will be a HUGE hit. However, for eBook readers to take off, they have to have the following features:
And there is something about holding and reading a book - that a computer just can't replace.
That something is a lightweight, portable, durable, and extremely readable display. LCD screens can't replace that. But electronic paper displays can, and hopefully will.
... which is pretty much the conclusion I came to as well.
If you can do that, then you have no moral standard. No one can come to you and say look this is in God's word, this is wrong.
Arguably no one can do that anyway in many cases, since the Bible contradicts itself on some issues. One book of the Bible says one thing, another says the opposite. Which should one believe?
And why can't it be the case that parts of the Bible are true, and other parts are false? Or that some parts are true in spirit, but not meant to be taken literally/scientifically? Why the black-and-whitism?
He purported to have proved Evolutionism by making his Macintosh draw little squiggles -- or "biomorphs" as he called them -- that changed over "generations". (This of course begs the question: if it took a created machine running created software to make these squiggles, how then does that refute Creation?)
I realize the article is a hoax, but this is an example of reasoning that I hear fairly often from Creationists. They believe that if Creationism is true, then evolution must be false, and vice versa. But as the example above points out, software-based 'evolution' was created by an intelligent being. Move the scenario back to the real world, and it works there too -- there is nothing to prevent an all-powerful God from creating a Universe that generates human life through evolutionary processes. You can have your Creationism and evolution too.
Touche. :^) However, I think there is a difference... in this case, there is a good chance that the up-front recycling deposit would be both enforcable and fair to the consumer. In the mp3 case, there is no reasonable way to keep people from copying any mp3 they like, so we might as well fall back to a voluntary system that has some chance of working and also provides significant benefits for the consumer.
No, having everyone pay for the actual costs is the answer. For the "good people", it makes little difference, since they would have paid the recycling fee in either scenario. For the "other people", it makes sure that they have an inncentive to recycle.
having a 5c bottle tax is just fine, most people don't bother to collect that even when they do recycle em. but $30 is something altogether
Well, let's see... a bottle of soda is around $1.25 around here, so a 5 cent deposit is 4% of the purchase price. If your new computer systems costs you $750, then $30 is... 4% of the purchase price. Seems pretty reasonable to me.
Because that way it is certain that you do pay for the recycling fee. When the time comes to get rid of your old machine, you want to have an incentive to recycle the machine (i.e. a deposit refund), not an incentive to bury it somewhere (i.e. a recycling charge). In this way we can avoid spending $$$ on "recycling enforcement" trying to watch everybody all the time to make sure they recycle properly -- if they can get money back by recycling, they will do it on their own! (hell, even when they don't, you'll have other people going through the garbage to pick out the PCs and get the deposit money)
(Note: the above assumes that you actually do get a deposit refund when you recycle your old PC... from the article, it's not clear that is the case. But it should be)
Good idea... how about we make all taxes voluntary? That way people who want to support their government can do so, and people who don't give a rat's ass don't have to.
Oh yeah, because IT WOULDN'T WORK. If we're going to be serious about getting something accomplished, it has to be made hard to avoid. Otherwise, enough people would "free-load" on the system to make it ineffective.
Interesting note - apparently, you burn less fossil fuel over time if you "dig more oil out of the ground to make new plastics from scratch" than you do in "melting down old plastics to make new plastics".
Assuming your recycling plant is getting all its power from fossil fuels, of course. In a sane world, we'd also be working on switching to renewable power sources. Once that is done, recycling would take no fossil fuels at all, just lots of sun/wind/waves/etc.
If you think spreading lead and other poisons around the countryside isn't hurting anyone else, then you haven't thought things through.
Oh, there's also the little problem of the fact that recycling certain materials is actually more harmful to the environment (energy usage and byproduct wise) than making them in the first place
That is debatable, but somewhat orthogonal to the issue at hand -- the important thing is that the computer parts don't end up spread all over the country, leaking into the ground water, or being burned into the air in China. So the goal here is to make sure they are collected and dealt with safely; whether that means recycling them or just sequestering them in a safe location is a separate issue.
The answer is to make recyling paletable and easy, never _force_.
Nobody is proposing forcing anyone to recycle anything here. On the other hand, when you choose to recycle your old PC, under this plan, you won't be charged to do so. An improvement on this plan would be to charge $10 more on top of the recycling cost, and give that back to the consumer when s/he recycles their computer; this would be a further incentive to bring the computers in instead of just dumping them somewhere.
Note how well a similar system works for income taxes... by giving people a refund check every year, the IRS encourages everyone to send in their tax forms on time. Even though people were charged more up front, and thus aren't really getting any money, they feel like they are getting something out of doing the right thing.
The stinky old power plant isn't going to be very reliable when the coal runs out... and, once you factor in the costs of the environmental damage, cancer, and lawsuits, it probably isn't all that cheap either.
As far as solar power being problematic, that's true if you are thinking solely of collecting it via photovoltaic cells. But try doing it with Solar Chimneys or indirectly via windmills, and you'll find the cost/benefit ratio to be quite competitive. (factor in the long term environmental costs, and the fact that you don't have to keep digging up fuel, and these methods are much cheaper than coal!)
and even greater CO2 release than before ?
Perhaps... if it means that when the fossil fuels run out, or become too scarce to be cheap anymore, that we already have everything in place to easily switch to hydrogen from renewable sources.
No, those businesses' refusal to open source their own code is what makes the GPL'd code inaccessible to them. If they are willing to GPL their own code, then they can use the GPL'd code just as much as anyone else can. The fact that they are unwilling to GPL their own code is their problem, not the GPL's.
Having said that, I think releasing government-funded code into the public domain is a reasonable alternative to GPL'ing it, for most things.
So, my recommendation: automate your process so that the user can download the software *immediately* (or at least, within a few minutes of completing the registration information). That should help.
So what's the problem? I would think at most you could just put a little disclaimer notice next to the terminal: "this terminal is part of a usage research study. Feel free to use it, but know that you are being monitored while doing so."