You do know that people do not wear helmets while driving motorcycles, even on highways ignoring the laws, which exists against such driving.
Nano will be definitely a much safer proposition, even if they don't use the provided seat belts. Talking about Air Bags is luxury. Even medium level cars don't have those in India, and I am sure in many developing countries around the world, where they are thinking of exporting it.
A simple car is like open hardware, anybody can fix it.
I have worked for 12 years and only for the last year used Java. For rest of the period it was plain C. But we are not talking of which language you need in the field. We are talking of understanding how computers work. Without C and assembly you will never get to know these. Also a Functional Language is required. I mostly skipped my Prologue, and didn't give Lisp enough importance. That has made it difficult for me to understand some types of code.
You need to know different types of language in the very beginning to recognize different paradigms. To decide when to use which language. We are talking about Engineering course here. Teaching only java is like teaching only motors to electrical guys. You want to learn all basic techniques. It may be that you apply only one, but then you will not be out of your depth when you are put into a different place.
I would think the best language to start with is quite possibly C. Pascal used to be better, but its no longer used. I personally would prefer a scripting language like Python or Perl. I think scripting languages are better because there is no complexity of the compiler involved.
I would think it better to have functional language next. Students are much more receptive in the earlier years, and Functional programming does take some getting used to. I don't know much to recommend these languages;-).
After that I would take an Object Oriented Language, Preferably Java. It is a nice Object Oriented Language.
The important thing is that these languages must not be taught as languages, but as a tool to understand some Computer Science subject. For example we had something like this in my science courses
1) Data-Structures : Pascal 2) Linear Programming: FORTRAN 3) Programming Languages : Lisp 4) Graphics: C (Now it would be better to use something like C++) 5) Systems Programming: Assembly 6) Filing Systems / Database: Cobol (I would think java would be good here) 7) Artificial Intelligence: Prologue
I think now the layout now could be 1) Data-Structures: C 2) Mathematics (Set-theory, Combinatronics, Boolean Algebra, Linear Programming): Scheme, (C for Linear Programming) 3) Graphics: C++ 4) Systems Programming and Operating Systems: C, Assembly, and shell 5) Databases: Java 6) Windowing Systems: Java 7) Compilers: Perl and Yacc 8) Artificial Intelligence: Scheme
I am not sure Ada is required as such, because it is not used as much as other languages. I think having different types of languages will put enough base in people to learn Ada later on if required. I would have liked to fit Python somewhere, but I don't know where;-). It does everything well but nothing specifically better.
The only way out for HD-DVD is to concede defeat and open the specification in ways that Hollywood cannot handle. By removing the DRM, and removing any RAND licensing. Allowing anybody to produce HD-DVD devices and disks without obtaining license. Only act as a certification agency.
This will allow cheap HD-DVD devices and disks to be made in China and dumped into the US market. These will be used by people wanting to rip, burn, and trade the BlueRay DVDs available in the market. That would be sweet revenge;-).
There is a huge market potential for HD-DVD in backups.
The articles on this site are wrong on so many levels.
So it is true that the XO (the OLPC laptop) costs around 4 times the monthly salary of a teacher in rural areas. But how much that matters when the aim is not to just teach them to read and write but to impart them a good education.
I don't know how many people from India would like to teach their children in Government schools. I know I will not. The question is why won't anybody want to teach their children in government schools.
The answer is that the schools impart pathetic education. They literally kill any talent that the children may have. They are the reason why we have an education divide in India. Children from poor families have no hope for ever getting out of the cycle. The relatively richer people have much better education.
I will give you a different scale to ponder. India has a population of 1 billion. There will be at least 100 million children that need to be educated. Assuming that you want to give good education to these children, comparable to what the rich get. The good schools have a teacher to student ratio of 1:20 at lower levels and 1:30 at higher levels. That will mean that you need 4 million teachers. You will also need to provide good salaries to them to attract teachers that have the same level of education and capabilities as the good schools. You will have to pay a minimum of of 10000Rs in the cities and 5000Rs in the rural areas, not the pathetic 2000Rs that is given to them.
The other question is how will you get 4 million decent teachers when there are so many more paying jobs in the country, for well educated people.
XO is not an attempt to provide education to children with no money. It is an attempt to provide a simple way for the poor but interested children to have a decent education. You cannot do it through teachers. You will never find enough. The internet is a very good teacher. It can help the interested children to learn more than their teachers know.
The XO is not for the famished children. Those children do need security, water, etc more. But they are not the only ones.
It is for children from lower middle class background that cannot afford a good education and must rely on what the teachers at government schools provide. The XO can augment the education that they get in schools. The fact is that their current teachers haven't had any decent education. They don't know enough. They are not good teachers. You can read how teachers are torturing their students. These news items are now coming almost daily. All these are not from good expensive schools but government schools.
The XO can allow the children to read themselves. To know what their teachers don't know, and would not even be interested in knowing. It can provide access to the Wikipedia, to online books, even if they cannot afford the books. XO also has enough features to bring out their creativity.
You must think that these children should only learn enough to become clerks or even lower. But why shouldn't they have a better education, that brings out their creativity.
I have not studied in government school either, but my brother had the misfortune of attending such a school for a couple of years. That is a reason why I think that for the poor people the XO is the only way out.
Another problem is that the Indian government is not even interested in education. Its not an issue that wins votes. I don't expect them to ever get XO in India.
BTW I will be buying one for my son, when it is available in India. It is a wonderful machine. I hope that other people in my community buy them too. They are great for children to communicate and be creative. My son is just 4 years but loves computers a lot. I am afraid of giving a normal laptop to him. He may break it, and they are too expensive. The XO is virtually indestructible and can be used by children.
The reasoning goes like this. 1) The universe cools down and a vast amount of protons and electrons are generated. 2) These combine to form hydrogen. 3) The universe is still very small but expanding very rapidly. 4) The uncertainty principle makes sure that there are some pockets with very high density (comparatively speaking). 5) Some high density regions develop enough gravity to pull in lots of other hydrogen. 6) Everything does not fall straight it goes in circles like planets don't fall directly towards the sun. 7) The hydrogen clouds are so huge that they contain enough matter to create galaxies. 8) The cloud revolves around its center falling inward. 9) The center does not glow like the sun because of the immense amount of matter. It actually reaches the black hole stage with a very negligible star phase. 10) This is the super-massive black hole at the galactic center. Lighter matter then spreads out because of interactions with heavier matter falling in. The heavier matter eventually becomes a part of the black hole at the center. 11) Normally it becomes a nearly circular disk.
The only weird thing (for me) is that it does not start out as a sphere but as a strip (I believe not a thin strip).
"after you do the math it works out that if you don't have supersymmetry you need precisely 26 dimensions to fit what we observe, with supersymmetry you only need 10 or 11, the 11th unique to M-theory seems to explain phenomenae predicted by the 5 major string theories common a few years ago."
The only problem being that SuperSymmetry is not observed in reality. But still nobody talks that 10/11 dimensions are actually not allowed and string theory will need 26 dimensions.
Why is nobody working on finding M-Theory? Seems like some grants problem.
"except that we have observed objects in the universe that seem to have wrenched dark matter out into the open, free of most of the visible matter."
Except that MOND predicts Rotation Curves in Galaxies pretty well. Why should Dark Matter try to align itself the way MOND predicts? Isn't it a very big and problematic fine tuning problem.
Ofcourse there maybe dark matter at the Cluster level. I am not against dark matter. I am just against its having no degrees of freedom, and being Cold. Any Cold matter affected by gravity must clump. And Clumps must be seen more easily, near our galaxy.
"space is in fact expanding, not only that but the expansion is accellerating over time"
That is a fact, and nothing not even Standard theory explains why. That was the GPs contention.
"we have a few years or less before we can start really testing some of the predictions of quantum gravity and string theory in general"
Not in General, rather in particular. Quantum Gravity is the general thing. I don't know if we have any predictions for quantum gravity yet. I had thought that we were not even at that stage. At least LQG people don't claim that they can predict anything. For predicting anything you must first explain somethings that are happening around us. SuperSymmetry has already failed as it doesn't exist for the particles that are observed. No amount of it's working on unobserved particles will help it. It should have worked for all particles to have been valid.
MOND predicts Galactic Rotation curves very well. That is all there is to it. It is a law not unlike Kepler's laws and must be explained by any gravitational theory, just like Newtonian theory did for Kepler's Laws. It doesn't work very well on larger than galactic scales and the real underlying theory may behave differently at larger scales. There are known problems at Cluster scales.
String theory on the other hand is just a mathematical framework which tries to build reality from a single basic structure 'string'. The Mathematics requires many dimensions (or variables) to become consistent. The real problem with the theory is that there have been no significant successes in relating its results to reality. Some of its predictions like Super Symmetry which looked very appealing have been proved to be false. Recently it has been determined that there are infinite number of string theories, some of which can be used to model bits of reality, but never all by the same theory. This is a big problem. Now String Theorists say that all string theories are part of a superset which they call M-Theory. The real funny thing about M-theory is that nobody knows what it is. And even more interesting is that nobody is working on it. It is expected to reveal itself at some time in the future when the time is right. So String theory is now in a state of working on other problems while waiting for the revelation.
On a positive side String Theory has given some very powerful mathematical tools to physicists for probing the Unified Gravity problem. LQG has benefited a lot from these tools. I wish that String Theory was termed as a mathematical theory instead of a physical one.
Its only a one time cost anyway. As the interface documents can be provided along with the software on the CD. Open Source software generally comes along with the interface document, the code itself. You cannot beat it, with documents. In my opinion there should be a monopoly tax a hefty one for a company that does not provide all interfaces. Basically a monopoly already has enough benefits from economies of scale that it shouldn't have the benefit of thwarting competition. A non-monopoly should be able to thwart competition, to survive or kill itself due to too much such anti-consumer measures. Being a monopoly means that the consumer has no choice, which means that competitors need all help to create choice. This requires preventing anti-competitive measures like preventing inter-working solution from third parties.
The thing is that you cannot own ideas the same way as you own a physical object. For a physical object you have paid for everything that was needed to build it. But the same is not true for ideas. Ideas like objects don't arise from thin air. They are based on some raw materials.
For example a chair is made up of wood, some nails, you also have to use some tools to build it. You can rent the tools and pay for the raw materials. This way you have paid for everything that goes into making the chair. The same is not true of an idea. Lets take an example of music. Can music be created in a vacuum? No. It needs the octave. It needs the knowledge of several instruments. When you make music, you need to have some grounding into music. Have you paid for all those things? No. So how can you claim exclusive rights to music that you did not created in vacuum.
I am not against copyright. Musicians do need to obtain some benefit from their work. But the music should go back to the public domain from where you had taken your inspiration. There is also the point that a popular piece should not allow a person to rest on his/her laurels and not need to produce anything. When the rest of the people have to toil daily for their food, why should authors and musicians be singled out as the privileged class and have to work for creating only one good piece. I would prefer if the musicians are forced to keep on creating things, for their food like the rest of us. The authors are forced to keep writing books for putting food on their table.
The copyright and patents should be defined in such a way that it does not defeat their purpose. Copyright was created to prevent anybody to make money off of authors work without paying anything to the authors. Patents were created to give an incentive to inventors so that they would show their ideas to everybody, and not keep them secret.
I don't know why trade secrets are afforded any kind of protections at all. This is a great mystery to me. Trade secrets when exposed should stay exposed, and government should do nothing about it. Why have trade secrets and not apply for patents? Nowadays what is happening is that people are applying for patents on obvious things for preventing startups from competing and keeping secret non-obvious things. Exactly things that we don't want.
I would like to point out that your quote says that there is a negative impact on TRADITIONAL sales. The study just says that the Recording Industry is seeing a negative impact because they are stuck in a traditional sales model. They should start doing non-DRM internet sales, which are easier than the P2P network, like iTunes.
You are missing the fact that the only reason that Recording Companies are seeing small negative impact due to file sharing is because they are not providing an easy way to the people to get their stuff. People should not be punished for the incompetence of Dinosaurs.
I think you are wrong. I believe that its never possible to write the best code in the first attempt. This means that it is better to always develop in a prototyping mode. It gets you running faster, and that helps you understand how it should actually be done. Later when you know how it should be implemented then move out your most experienced developer from the main code and give him/her the task to re-implement it while also supporting the older one. Since the person already knows the system inside out he will be able to develop it much faster. But again make the new one also a prototype. Because you never know where this new design may let you take it. Also if you try to make a polished software it may take away too much resources and make it a liability.
This doesn't mean that the software itself can be written in an ugly way. It doesn't really take too much time to write the code decently. Just don't spend too much time including all the features that you think you will need in the future. Just implement as many as you think you need now.
Most successful open source products work the same way. They focus on the present, and will do a rewrite in the future.
Many of the medicines have a specific smell. Some are colored, and I am talking of the liquid variety. They also sometimes use powders. I don't believe in Homeopathy completely. But some homeopathy doctors are good at some specific medicines. And I use Homeopathy when I know that Modern medicine does not have any cure for it. For example Rheumatoid Arthritis. The only real solution is to remove the cap when there is no improvement with various medicines which are not guaranteed to work. A Homeopathy doctor in our city specializes in Arthritis treatments. He gives one special medicine which is a dark brown liquid, and it works. He did give us the composition of it, and the ingredients are found in Homeopathy shops. My wife could not move when she had got it. With this doctors treatment she could get up within a month. Afterwards sometimes she would get hardened nodes but a couple of days of the treatment would solve it. Now she has been free from it for a few years.
This is really very important to not lose track of what is an observed phenomena and what is an "inferred" phenomena, based on current theories to explain other observations.
Similarly Big Bang is not an Observed Phenomena, but expansion of the universe is an observed phenomena, which along with other phenomena predict a Big Bang.
To put this in perspective even Dark Matter and Dark Energy are not observed phenomena, they are simply inferred to explain galactic and extra galactic rotation curves, and accelerating cosmic expansion respectively.
There are so many inferred phenomena that it is quite possible to get convinced of the inferred phenomena as if it was an observed phenomena.
What are you talking about. The problem here is that tj is ignoring the replies received from the server because they are sent over multicast. While Vista expects only broadcast. This is simply a failure of Vista to apply this rule.
He has been trying to prove some kind of handedness in all his papers. One look at his list of papers will give an overwhelming feeling of him being a crackpot.
Actually he put his video in public domain. You should only use some form of Creative Commons License, and include it as the first frame of the Video. This will make anybody think twice before using your video without allowing the same courtesy to you. If everybody did that, we would simply find that these stealing ***** need to change their policies.
But ofcourse everybody will need to do this, a very difficult job indeed. We need to have a movement for it. We need it to become as popular as the Free/Open Software movement.
"Downloading's a bit different in that you don't need to have the original to download an MP3. The vast majority of downloaders don't have the originals. Ergo, lost profits."
I will grant you that the vast majority of downloaders don't have the originals. But I will not grant you lost profits. There are several reasons why people download illegally and very few of them would actually mean a lost sale.
1) Lots of times people are just trying out new music to see how well it goes. There are seldom ways to listen to the other tracks on the CD which did not catch the fancy of the RIAA. Also mostly CDs contain only one or two good songs and many people cannot justify the expense of buying the whole CD. This is a lost sale only because there is no respectable singles service.
2) Other times it is simply not available, because RIAA is not fast enough to provide it in the shelves, or in some countries. This would not be a lost sale if RIAA had provided a respectable download site. These people normally do buy the music when eventually it becomes available, unless they get bored with the music by the time it is released.
3) In some cases the downloader is a music junky who has already spent all his money procuring music and still cannot get enough and resorts to downloading. This is definitely not a lost sale, because the person cannot buy any more music.
4) Majority don't have music as their prime motivator, and just listen to it as a passtime. They are not able to justify buying the music at the current exorbitant prices. These is a lost sale only because the cost of music is too high. For some people the cost will always be too high, for them it is not a lost sale as they will never buy music anyway.
5) There are others in countries where it is quite difficult to obtain the music that they want, and have no other option but to download. These are not lost sales, because the currency is not fully convertible in many countries and will remain so for the foreseeable future.
6) There are many people who find downloading music more convenient then driving out to the store. This is the biggest group and they will buy if provided with a convenient download option. A website which holds a huge collection of songs. You see why ipod is so popular.
7) Lastly people do not find downloading music as stealing, and no amount of propaganda will change that. It is like telling them that it is illegal to share books with each other. Actually the trouble is that people find sharing good. It may be good for people but it is not good for Artists. Unfortunately the scenario has changed too fast and the education has not changed fast enough. Otherwise the better option would have been to start early and teach children that sharing is bad. Show how sharing with others leads to misery. "The Right to Read" would be a nice example they need more stories like that, obviously with the opposite slant.
Actually RIAA is digging its own grave by not providing people with what they want. They think that their customers are thieves and actually wouldn't want to pay for their music. I don't know about you but I don't like to be treated so shabbily. Fortunately, I don't really care about music too much (that too old Bollywood variety, which nobody listens). So I don't really have to put up with the shabby treatment of RIAA.
You mean that I have a MS Windows copy, which I bought with my PC, now I can sell it on eBay and say that I don't agree with the license which prohibits from selling it.
I know in this case the EULA may be suspect, but still I cannot just disagree with the license and break it. The license must be invalid to be clear of any wrong doing.
I agree that censorship can be done by private entities. Like in the case of Slashdot, it can censor the speech on this forum, and it will be called censorship. Even though slashdot is not very powerful, it still can censor.
But what Walmart does with music or videos should not be termed censorship, because it is not stopping you from going out and buying music from other stores. It is also not stopping you from playing music from other stores in their stores. If they start to stop people from singing those lyrics in their stores then it will be censorship. But I think most non-adult stores will object to something like that, causing censorship.
The actual term is Bowdlerization of music, which is very different from censorship, as it creates a different version along with the original. It is like a parody, but with a different intent. But it doesn't stop the other version. I do think that it is subverting the original lyrics as they don't advertise the modified nature of the music prominently.
When I say I bought a house or a car. I have spent money to acquire the rights to the brick mortar, iron, labour everything that goes into the building of this house or car. There has been a transaction between the previous owner and me which says that the transaction was fair.
Now when you say that you have written a piece of work. Can you say that you have paid back for every piece of information that you used to produce that work. You cannot. There are literally millions of small pieces of information that goes into creating that work. It is true that a lot of creativity and effort goes into producing that work, but it is still built on a large amount of information that had required a lot of creativity, and effort. You never did pay for these pieces of information. You just used it and now you are trying to steal when you try to deny the right of those creators and their survivors (ie the public) to also enjoy the fruits of your labour, as you did theirs.
I am not against copyright, as long as it is copyright and not some kind of stupid "intellectual" property right. Copyright has a stated purpose, which is to allow creators to gain some payment for their efforts. But it is only that. Trying to make it into a perpetually owned property is an attempt to steal from the public domain. The same goes for patents, but the problem is less severe there.
In light of the above, copyright should be very limited in time, and scope. It should give some inalienable rights, such as attribution. But commercial rights should be severely curtailed. I believe, to just commercialize a product you should be required to register your work at the copyright office stating your intention to benefit from it, and providing a copy for its library. The right to benefit from it should be only for a very limited time, like 5 years (from the point of registration) allowing for one extension of another 5 years. Anything more in the Internet age is stupid and excessive. Works owned by Corporations should not be allowed to have an extension, that will make it more difficult for corporations to steal from the artists.
Everybody should be required to earn their living, and artists or RIAA/MPAA should not be above it. This means that no perpetually milking the only good thing that you produced.
There is a deeper meaning to the following quote by Newton which some people will never have the humility to understand. "If I have seen a little further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants."
I agree with you and your analogy. But the problem is that it goes no further in convincing a guy, who doesn't see it as immoral. See if the whaler wouldn't mind driving the whales into extinction he wouldn't care. The problem is that there will be a time when the whales are going to be extinct at that time he will be out of job. So it would make sense to plan for now and give up whaling. But it is just a question of how driven the whaler is.
I would take a stronger analogy. Why is killing another person wrong. Is it morally wrong? It depends on the person doing the killing. The murderer may think that the other person has no right to live because of some reason, and since it is morally wrong for the person to live, so it is his right^W duty to kill him. No amount of convincing the guy will help. But since killing affects a lot of people directly in a very bad way, so this has been traditionally considered a bad enough thing to be made a criminal offense with very stiff penalties. But in the case of whaling there are no laws, as it does not affect many people directly.
Now if we come back to our original question. Releasing closed source code is immoral because it tries to create an artificial scarcity which is not economically beneficial for the general population. It is not the way for global prosperity. But the problem is it does not affect people directly. It only affects people doing the immoral thing directly in a good way;-). So the law goes in the other way. It actually encourages you to keep your source closed. So we have to first reach a stage where people consider it neutral, just like the whaling enterprise. I believe we are quite far from that stage.
I agree with Stallman, but I see that he is much ahead of all of us. I have also been creating closed source software, but I guess I am not too concerned with morality:-(. I am more concerned with my well being on a short term basis.
We will eventually have micro-fusion devices in a couple of thousand years;-). That is a pre-requisite for intersteller travel. At that point there will be no energy problems.
We should also have found a way to live forever in the next couple of thousand years;-). This should not be impossible, by merging our brains with Machines. Ofcourse the problem may be recalling old information, but we will eventually learn to throw away or store offsite non-useful data. At this point exploration will not require generational ships for breeding, but only for a society.
We may also be able to convert humans into information, but I don't know if uncertainty principle will allow that. Assuming that we could then we could first send information to human conversion devices at sub-light speed, then establish repeaters on the way at every light-hour/light-day or so and once the infra-structure is ready then you can send your clones to the far off planet for colonization.
I think that the first two are inevitable, the third may be possible, and FTL will not be possible.
Slashdot Mirror
You do know that people do not wear helmets while driving motorcycles, even on highways ignoring the laws, which exists against such driving.
Nano will be definitely a much safer proposition, even if they don't use the provided seat belts. Talking about Air Bags is luxury. Even medium level cars don't have those in India, and I am sure in many developing countries around the world, where they are thinking of exporting it.
A simple car is like open hardware, anybody can fix it.
I have worked for 12 years and only for the last year used Java. For rest of the period it was plain C.
But we are not talking of which language you need in the field. We are talking of understanding how computers work. Without C and assembly you will never get to know these. Also a Functional Language is required. I mostly skipped my Prologue, and didn't give Lisp enough importance. That has made it difficult for me to understand some types of code.
You need to know different types of language in the very beginning to recognize different paradigms. To decide when to use which language. We are talking about Engineering course here. Teaching only java is like teaching only motors to electrical guys. You want to learn all basic techniques. It may be that you apply only one, but then you will not be out of your depth when you are put into a different place.
I would think the best language to start with is quite possibly C. Pascal used to be better, but its no longer used. I personally would prefer a scripting language like Python or Perl. I think scripting languages are better because there is no complexity of the compiler involved.
;-).
;-). It does everything well but nothing specifically better.
I would think it better to have functional language next. Students are much more receptive in the earlier years, and Functional programming does take some getting used to. I don't know much to recommend these languages
After that I would take an Object Oriented Language, Preferably Java. It is a nice Object Oriented Language.
The important thing is that these languages must not be taught as languages, but as a tool to understand some Computer Science subject. For example we had something like this in my science courses
1) Data-Structures : Pascal
2) Linear Programming: FORTRAN
3) Programming Languages : Lisp
4) Graphics: C (Now it would be better to use something like C++)
5) Systems Programming: Assembly
6) Filing Systems / Database: Cobol (I would think java would be good here)
7) Artificial Intelligence: Prologue
I think now the layout now could be
1) Data-Structures: C
2) Mathematics (Set-theory, Combinatronics, Boolean Algebra, Linear Programming): Scheme, (C for Linear Programming)
3) Graphics: C++
4) Systems Programming and Operating Systems: C, Assembly, and shell
5) Databases: Java
6) Windowing Systems: Java
7) Compilers: Perl and Yacc
8) Artificial Intelligence: Scheme
I am not sure Ada is required as such, because it is not used as much as other languages. I think having different types of languages will put enough base in people to learn Ada later on if required. I would have liked to fit Python somewhere, but I don't know where
-anandsr
The only way out for HD-DVD is to concede defeat and open the specification in ways that Hollywood cannot handle. By removing the DRM, and removing any RAND licensing. Allowing anybody to produce HD-DVD devices and disks without obtaining license. Only act as a certification agency.
;-).
This will allow cheap HD-DVD devices and disks to be made in China and dumped into the US market. These will be used by people wanting to rip, burn, and trade the BlueRay DVDs available in the market. That would be sweet revenge
There is a huge market potential for HD-DVD in backups.
-anandsr
The articles on this site are wrong on so many levels.
So it is true that the XO (the OLPC laptop) costs around 4 times the monthly salary of a teacher in rural areas. But how much that matters when the aim is not to just teach them to read and write but to impart them a good education.
I don't know how many people from India would like to teach their children in Government schools. I know I will not. The question is why won't anybody want to teach their children in government schools.
The answer is that the schools impart pathetic education. They literally kill any talent that the children may have. They are the reason why we have an education divide in India. Children from poor families have no hope for ever getting out of the cycle. The relatively richer people have much better education.
I will give you a different scale to ponder. India has a population of 1 billion. There will be at least 100 million children that need to be educated. Assuming that you want to give good education to these children, comparable to what the rich get. The good schools have a teacher to student ratio of 1:20 at lower levels and 1:30 at higher levels. That will mean that you need 4 million teachers. You will also need to provide good salaries to them to attract teachers that have the same level of education and capabilities as the good schools. You will have to pay a minimum of of 10000Rs in the cities and 5000Rs in the rural areas, not the pathetic 2000Rs that is given to them.
The other question is how will you get 4 million decent teachers when there are so many more paying jobs in the country, for well educated people.
XO is not an attempt to provide education to children with no money. It is an attempt to provide a simple way for the poor but interested children to have a decent education. You cannot do it through teachers. You will never find enough. The internet is a very good teacher. It can help the interested children to learn more than their teachers know.
The XO is not for the famished children. Those children do need security, water, etc more. But they are not the only ones.
It is for children from lower middle class background that cannot afford a good education and must rely on what the teachers at
government schools provide. The XO can augment the education that they get in schools. The fact is that their current teachers haven't had any decent education. They don't know enough. They are not good teachers. You can read how teachers are torturing their students. These news items are now coming almost daily. All these are not from good expensive schools but government schools.
The XO can allow the children to read themselves. To know what their teachers don't know, and would not even be interested in knowing. It can provide access to the Wikipedia, to online books, even if they cannot afford the books. XO also has enough features to bring out their creativity.
You must think that these children should only learn enough to become clerks or even lower. But why shouldn't they have a better education, that brings out their creativity.
I have not studied in government school either, but my brother had the misfortune of attending such a school for a couple of years. That is a reason why I think that for the poor people the XO is the only way out.
Another problem is that the Indian government is not even interested in education. Its not an issue that wins votes. I don't expect them to ever get XO in India.
BTW I will be buying one for my son, when it is available in India. It is a wonderful machine. I hope that other people in my community buy them too. They are great for children to communicate and be creative. My son is just 4 years but loves computers a lot. I am afraid of giving a normal laptop to him. He may break it, and they are too expensive. The XO is virtually indestructible and can be used by children.
I pity you. You have so much hate. I guess nobody ever loved you.
The reasoning goes like this.
1) The universe cools down and a vast amount of protons and electrons are generated.
2) These combine to form hydrogen.
3) The universe is still very small but expanding very rapidly.
4) The uncertainty principle makes sure that there are some pockets with very high density (comparatively speaking).
5) Some high density regions develop enough gravity to pull in lots of other hydrogen.
6) Everything does not fall straight it goes in circles like planets don't fall directly towards the sun.
7) The hydrogen clouds are so huge that they contain enough matter to create galaxies.
8) The cloud revolves around its center falling inward.
9) The center does not glow like the sun because of the immense amount of matter. It actually reaches the black hole stage with a very negligible star phase.
10) This is the super-massive black hole at the galactic center. Lighter matter then spreads out because of interactions with heavier matter falling in. The heavier matter eventually becomes a part of the black hole at the center.
11) Normally it becomes a nearly circular disk.
The only weird thing (for me) is that it does not start out as a sphere but as a strip (I believe not a thin strip).
Disclaimer: IANAAP.
"after you do the math it works out that if you don't have supersymmetry you need precisely 26 dimensions to fit what we observe, with supersymmetry you only need 10 or 11, the 11th unique to M-theory seems to explain phenomenae predicted by the 5 major string theories common a few years ago."
The only problem being that SuperSymmetry is not observed in reality. But still nobody talks that 10/11 dimensions are actually not allowed and string theory will need 26 dimensions.
Why is nobody working on finding M-Theory? Seems like some grants problem.
"except that we have observed objects in the universe that seem to have wrenched dark matter out into the open, free of most of the visible matter."
Except that MOND predicts Rotation Curves in Galaxies pretty well. Why should Dark Matter try to align itself the way MOND predicts? Isn't it a very big and problematic fine tuning problem.
Ofcourse there maybe dark matter at the Cluster level. I am not against dark matter. I am just against its having no degrees of freedom, and being Cold. Any Cold matter affected by gravity must clump. And Clumps must be seen more easily, near our galaxy.
"space is in fact expanding, not only that but the expansion is accellerating over time"
That is a fact, and nothing not even Standard theory explains why. That was the GPs contention.
"we have a few years or less before we can start really testing some of the predictions of quantum gravity and string theory in general"
Not in General, rather in particular. Quantum Gravity is the general thing. I don't know if we have any predictions for quantum gravity yet. I had thought that we were not even at that stage. At least LQG people don't claim that they can predict anything. For predicting anything you must first explain somethings that are happening around us. SuperSymmetry has already failed as it doesn't exist for the particles that are observed. No amount of it's working on unobserved particles will help it. It should have worked for all particles to have been valid.
MOND predicts Galactic Rotation curves very well. That is all there is to it. It is a law not unlike Kepler's laws and must be explained by any gravitational theory, just like Newtonian theory did for Kepler's Laws. It doesn't work very well on larger than galactic scales and the real underlying theory may behave differently at larger scales. There are known problems at Cluster scales.
String theory on the other hand is just a mathematical framework which tries to build reality from a single basic structure 'string'. The Mathematics requires many dimensions (or variables) to become consistent. The real problem with the theory is that there have been no significant successes in relating its results to reality. Some of its predictions like Super Symmetry which looked very appealing have been proved to be false. Recently it has been determined that there are infinite number of string theories, some of which can be used to model bits of reality, but never all by the same theory. This is a big problem. Now String Theorists say that all string theories are part of a superset which they call M-Theory. The real funny thing about M-theory is that nobody knows what it is. And even more interesting is that nobody is working on it. It is expected to reveal itself at some time in the future when the time is right. So String theory is now in a state of working on other problems while waiting for the revelation.
On a positive side String Theory has given some very powerful mathematical tools to physicists for probing the Unified Gravity problem. LQG has benefited a lot from these tools. I wish that String Theory was termed as a mathematical theory instead of a physical one.
Its only a one time cost anyway. As the interface documents can be provided along with the software on the CD. Open Source software generally comes along with the interface document, the code itself. You cannot beat it, with documents. In my opinion there should be a monopoly tax a hefty one for a company that does not provide all interfaces. Basically a monopoly already has enough benefits from economies of scale that it shouldn't have the benefit of thwarting competition. A non-monopoly should be able to thwart competition, to survive or kill itself due to too much such anti-consumer measures. Being a monopoly means that the consumer has no choice, which means that competitors need all help to create choice. This requires preventing anti-competitive measures like preventing inter-working solution from third parties.
The thing is that you cannot own ideas the same way as you own a physical object. For a physical object you have paid for everything that was needed to build it. But the same is not true for ideas. Ideas like objects don't arise from thin air. They are based on some raw materials.
For example a chair is made up of wood, some nails, you also have to use some tools to build it. You can rent the tools and pay for the raw materials. This way you have paid for everything that goes into making the chair. The same is not true of an idea. Lets take an example of music. Can music be created in a vacuum? No. It needs the octave. It needs the knowledge of several instruments. When you make music, you need to have some grounding into music. Have you paid for all those things? No. So how can you claim exclusive rights to music that you did not created in vacuum.
I am not against copyright. Musicians do need to obtain some benefit from their work. But the music should go back to the public domain from where you had taken your inspiration. There is also the point that a popular piece should not allow a person to rest on his/her laurels and not need to produce anything. When the rest of the people have to toil daily for their food, why should authors and musicians be singled out as the privileged class and have to work for creating only one good piece. I would prefer if the musicians are forced to keep on creating things, for their food like the rest of us. The authors are forced to keep writing books for putting food on their table.
The copyright and patents should be defined in such a way that it does not defeat their purpose. Copyright was created to prevent anybody to make money off of authors work without paying anything to the authors. Patents were created to give an incentive to inventors so that they would show their ideas to everybody, and not keep them secret.
I don't know why trade secrets are afforded any kind of protections at all. This is a great mystery to me. Trade secrets when exposed should stay exposed, and government should do nothing about it. Why have trade secrets and not apply for patents? Nowadays what is happening is that people are applying for patents on obvious things for preventing startups from competing and keeping secret non-obvious things. Exactly things that we don't want.
I would like to point out that your quote says that there is a negative impact on TRADITIONAL sales. The study just says that the Recording Industry is seeing a negative impact because they are stuck in a traditional sales model. They should start doing non-DRM internet sales, which are easier than the P2P network, like iTunes.
You are missing the fact that the only reason that Recording Companies are seeing small negative impact due to file sharing is because they are not providing an easy way to the people to get their stuff. People should not be punished for the incompetence of Dinosaurs.
I think you are wrong. I believe that its never possible to write the best code in the first attempt. This means that it is better to always develop in a prototyping mode. It gets you running faster, and that helps you understand how it should actually be done. Later when you know how it should be implemented then move out your most experienced developer from the main code and give him/her the task to re-implement it while also supporting the older one. Since the person already knows the system inside out he will be able to develop it much faster. But again make the new one also a prototype. Because you never know where this new design may let you take it. Also if you try to make a polished software it may take away too much resources and make it a liability.
This doesn't mean that the software itself can be written in an ugly way. It doesn't really take too much time to write the code decently. Just don't spend too much time including all the features that you think you will need in the future. Just implement as many as you think you need now.
Most successful open source products work the same way. They focus on the present, and will do a rewrite in the future.
Many of the medicines have a specific smell. Some are colored, and I am talking of the liquid variety. They also sometimes use powders. I don't believe in Homeopathy completely. But some homeopathy doctors are good at some specific medicines. And I use Homeopathy when I know that Modern medicine does not have any cure for it. For example Rheumatoid Arthritis. The only real solution is to remove the cap when there is no improvement with various medicines which are not guaranteed to work. A Homeopathy doctor in our city specializes in Arthritis treatments. He gives one special medicine which is a dark brown liquid, and it works. He did give us the composition of it, and the ingredients are found in Homeopathy shops. My wife could not move when she had got it. With this doctors treatment she could get up within a month. Afterwards sometimes she would get hardened nodes but a couple of days of the treatment would solve it. Now she has been free from it for a few years.
MOD Parent up.
This is really very important to not lose track of what is an observed phenomena and what is an "inferred" phenomena, based on current theories to explain other observations.
Similarly Big Bang is not an Observed Phenomena, but expansion of the universe is an observed phenomena, which along with other phenomena predict a Big Bang.
To put this in perspective even Dark Matter and Dark Energy are not observed phenomena, they are simply inferred to explain galactic and extra galactic rotation curves, and accelerating cosmic expansion respectively.
There are so many inferred phenomena that it is quite possible to get convinced of the inferred phenomena as if it was an observed phenomena.
What are you talking about. The problem here is that tj is ignoring the replies received from the server because they are sent over multicast. While Vista expects only broadcast. This is simply a failure of Vista to apply this rule.
He has been trying to prove some kind of handedness in all his papers. One look at his list of papers will give an overwhelming feeling of him being a crackpot.
Actually he put his video in public domain. You should only use some form of Creative Commons License, and include it as the first frame of the Video. This will make anybody think twice before using your video without allowing the same courtesy to you. If everybody did that, we would simply find that these stealing ***** need to change their policies.
But ofcourse everybody will need to do this, a very difficult job indeed. We need to have a movement for it. We need it to become as popular as the Free/Open Software movement.
"Downloading's a bit different in that you don't need to have the original to download an MP3. The vast majority of downloaders don't have the originals. Ergo, lost profits."
I will grant you that the vast majority of downloaders don't have the originals. But I will not grant you lost profits. There are several reasons why people download illegally and very few of them would actually mean a lost sale.
1) Lots of times people are just trying out new music to see how well it goes. There are seldom ways to listen to the other tracks on the CD which did not catch the fancy of the RIAA. Also mostly CDs contain only one or two good songs and many people cannot justify the expense of buying the whole CD. This is a lost sale only because there is no respectable singles service.
2) Other times it is simply not available, because RIAA is not fast enough to provide it in the shelves, or in some countries. This would not be a lost sale if RIAA had provided a respectable download site. These people normally do buy the music when eventually it becomes available, unless they get bored with the music by the time it is released.
3) In some cases the downloader is a music junky who has already spent all his money procuring music and still cannot get enough and resorts to downloading. This is definitely not a lost sale, because the person cannot buy any more music.
4) Majority don't have music as their prime motivator, and just listen to it as a passtime. They are not able to justify buying the music at the current exorbitant prices. These is a lost sale only because the cost of music is too high. For some people the cost will always be too high, for them it is not a lost sale as they will never buy music anyway.
5) There are others in countries where it is quite difficult to obtain the music that they want, and have no other option but to download. These are not lost sales, because the currency is not fully convertible in many countries and will remain so for the foreseeable future.
6) There are many people who find downloading music more convenient then driving out to the store. This is the biggest group and they will buy if provided with a convenient download option. A website which holds a huge collection of songs. You see why ipod is so popular.
7) Lastly people do not find downloading music as stealing, and no amount of propaganda will change that. It is like telling them that it is illegal to share books with each other. Actually the trouble is that people find sharing good. It may be good for people but it is not good for Artists. Unfortunately the scenario has changed too fast and the education has not changed fast enough. Otherwise the better option would have been to start early and teach children that sharing is bad. Show how sharing with others leads to misery. "The Right to Read" would be a nice example they need more stories like that, obviously with the opposite slant.
Actually RIAA is digging its own grave by not providing people with what they want. They think that their customers are thieves and actually wouldn't want to pay for their music. I don't know about you but I don't like to be treated so shabbily. Fortunately, I don't really care about music too much (that too old Bollywood variety, which nobody listens). So I don't really have to put up with the shabby treatment of RIAA.
You mean that I have a MS Windows copy, which I bought with my PC, now I can sell it on eBay and say that I don't agree with the license which prohibits from selling it.
I know in this case the EULA may be suspect, but still I cannot just disagree with the license and break it. The license must be invalid to be clear of any wrong doing.
I agree that censorship can be done by private entities. Like in the case of Slashdot, it can censor the speech on this forum, and it will be called censorship. Even though slashdot is not very powerful, it still can censor.
But what Walmart does with music or videos should not be termed censorship, because it is not stopping you from going out and buying music from other stores. It is also not stopping you from playing music from other stores in their stores. If they start to stop people from singing those lyrics in their stores then it will be censorship. But I think most non-adult stores will object to something like that, causing censorship.
The actual term is Bowdlerization of music, which is very different from censorship, as it creates a different version along with the original. It is like a parody, but with a different intent. But it doesn't stop the other version. I do think that it is subverting the original lyrics as they don't advertise the modified nature of the music prominently.
When I say I bought a house or a car. I have spent money to acquire the rights to the brick mortar, iron, labour everything that goes into the building of this house or car. There has been a transaction between the previous owner and me which says that the transaction was fair.
Now when you say that you have written a piece of work. Can you say that you have paid back for every piece of information that you used to produce that work. You cannot. There are literally millions of small pieces of information that goes into creating that work. It is true that a lot of creativity and effort goes into producing that work, but it is still built on a large amount of information that had required a lot of creativity, and effort. You never did pay for these pieces of information. You just used it and now you are trying to steal when you try to deny the right of those creators and their survivors (ie the public) to also enjoy the fruits of your labour, as you did theirs.
I am not against copyright, as long as it is copyright and not some kind of stupid "intellectual" property right. Copyright has a stated purpose, which is to allow creators to gain some payment for their efforts. But it is only that. Trying to make it into a perpetually owned property is an attempt to steal from the public domain. The same goes for patents, but the problem is less severe there.
In light of the above, copyright should be very limited in time, and scope. It should give some inalienable rights, such as attribution. But commercial rights should be severely curtailed. I believe, to just commercialize a product you should be required to register your work at the copyright office stating your intention to benefit from it, and providing a copy for its library. The right to benefit from it should be only for a very limited time, like 5 years (from the point of registration) allowing for one extension of another 5 years. Anything more in the Internet age is stupid and excessive. Works owned by Corporations should not be allowed to have an extension, that will make it more difficult for corporations to steal from the artists.
Everybody should be required to earn their living, and artists or RIAA/MPAA should not be above it. This means that no perpetually milking the only good thing that you produced.
There is a deeper meaning to the following quote by Newton which some people will never have the humility to understand.
"If I have seen a little further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants."
I agree with you and your analogy.
;-). So the law goes in the other way. It actually encourages you to keep your source closed. So we have to first reach a stage where people consider it neutral, just like the whaling enterprise. I believe we are quite far from that stage.
:-(. I am more concerned with my well being on a short term basis.
But the problem is that it goes no further in convincing a guy, who doesn't see it as immoral.
See if the whaler wouldn't mind driving the whales into extinction he wouldn't care.
The problem is that there will be a time when the whales are going to be extinct at that time he will be out of job. So it would make sense to plan for now and give up whaling. But it is just a question of how driven the whaler is.
I would take a stronger analogy. Why is killing another person wrong. Is it morally wrong? It depends on the person doing the killing. The murderer may think that the other person has no right to live because of some reason, and since it is morally wrong for the person to live, so it is his right^W duty to kill him. No amount of convincing the guy will help. But since killing affects a lot of people directly in a very bad way, so this has been traditionally considered a bad enough thing to be made a criminal offense with very stiff penalties. But in the case of whaling there are no laws, as it does not affect many people directly.
Now if we come back to our original question. Releasing closed source code is immoral because it tries to create an artificial scarcity which is not economically beneficial for the general population. It is not the way for global prosperity. But the problem is it does not affect people directly. It only affects people doing the immoral thing directly in a good way
I agree with Stallman, but I see that he is much ahead of all of us. I have also been creating closed source software, but I guess I am not too concerned with morality
I am sure they are not immune to it. And when something can crash it will ;-).
We will eventually have micro-fusion devices in a couple of thousand years ;-).
;-). This should not be impossible, by merging our brains with Machines. Ofcourse the problem may be recalling old information, but we will eventually learn to throw away or store offsite non-useful data. At this point exploration will not require generational ships for breeding, but only for a society.
That is a pre-requisite for intersteller travel. At that point there will be no energy problems.
We should also have found a way to live forever in the next couple of thousand years
We may also be able to convert humans into information, but I don't know if uncertainty principle will allow that. Assuming that we could then we could first send information to human conversion devices at sub-light speed, then establish repeaters on the way at every light-hour/light-day or so and once the infra-structure is ready then you can send your clones to the far off planet for colonization.
I think that the first two are inevitable, the third may be possible, and FTL will not be possible.