If all they needed to do was reproduce than exponential growth would make a few centuries a quite reasonable estimate. Unfortunately, they need to acquire the material out of which to grow, and that's going to slow things down A LOT. After the low hanging fruit is picked, then they need to go to distant locations to get materials, and probably expend a lot of energy (and radiate it away) to get it back to the building site. I expect that this would necessitate disassembling any planets for materials...if that would suffice.
Alternatively, if you assume that these aliens can somehow conjure matter out of nothing, then it's a reasonable time frame. I, however, find that too tough a bite to swallow.
You don't understand how much matter is required for a Dyson Sphere. (Not that I think a real Dyson Sphere is a realistic plausibility...it's dynamicly unstable. Nearly as bad as the RingWorld.)
What I consider much more likely is a Topopolis (sometimes called Cosmic Spaghetti). Loops of mile diameter tubes that are flexible enough to spin for gravity. You don't make a complete orbit with any one strand, but you have LOTS of them a very slightly different orbital distances and at slightly different angles. And it would still take so much matter to cause the star to dim that you'd probably need to eat the planets. (First you scavenge any atmosphere and then you build a catapult on the surface.) But doing this in only centuries boggles the mind...even with nano-machinery. (Which isn't the kind of magic most people seem to imagine. Remember, life is nano-machinery. We might be able to do a bit better with careful design using a wider palette of minerals, but there turn out to be LOTS of problems with things like friction and surface tension, so don't expect multiple orders of magnitude of improvement in most things. Computation, though, may be an exception.)
If they were moving it, they would need to be moving it towards the star to explain the observations, not towards us.
OTOH, he already said that Infrared observations had eliminated that option. I believe he was a bit to glib there, however, as generally infrared observations are only done at a few wavelengths, and if they were building a macro-scale structure they probably have nano-scale heat scavengers, which would result in the radiation being emitted in the long infrared, which is not usually observed. (Observing ANY infrared at long distance is already quite difficult. Usually it requires something like liquid helium coolants.)
That said, alien megastructures would be an extremely unexpected finding, and would need stronger evidence to be accepted.
But I have a big problem with this that's unrelated to the price. The "trusted person" that you specify means trusted by the police, not by the requestor, or by anyone who would count as an impartial investigator. I do not believe that the films should be in police custody, but should instead be held by a totally independent agency. And that the police should be able to impose only reasonable conditions on the release of the information. And that "reasonable" should not be determined by the police department, but either by an independent agency or by the courts. (Preferably a quick decision by the holding agency, biased slightlyin favor of release appealable to the courts by either party, with the appealer bearing the court costs.)
Interesting, I hadn't factored film length in, and I already thought the price which quite excessive what not exorbitant. That reduces it a lot. So perhaps it only a trifle steep (i.e., less than twice what I think it should cost...with a large variance).
What he's saying is that they can't be trusted to not use that as an excuse to censor the film, even if it never happened. (If you can't look, you don't know it didn't happen.)
If we look as past analogous circumstances, this is a valid concern. This doesn't mean that it can't be dealt with, but it means that if you don't deal with it, you are likely to be unhappy with the results. And while I think $200/hour is unreasonable, I also think that a reasonable fee might be $50-$100/hour. (OTOH, I also think that the police should NOT be the custodians of the films. They have too much incentive to alter or destroy or lose any incriminating evidence. And there need to be multiple safeguards in place to prevent that from the time the uniform is put on until the the records are deemed irrelevant by an independent assessor.)
It's true that the garbage journalism has always heavily outweighed the quality journalism. It's also true that there have been periods in the past that were either worse or nearly as bad as the current state of events.
OTOH, it's also true that quality journalism is usually only recognized retrospectively. Some exceptions are "the muckrakers", like Upton Sinclair (The Jungle) and, at a much later date, Racheal Carlson (Silent Spring). Currently there seems to be almost no memory of prior quality journalism, which *is* a change that is probably attributable to a combination of TV and the Internet. When people are drowning in information, they tend to set their filters too tight, so weak signals are lost.
But I *don't* think it's a matter of economics. I think it's a matter of "it's easier to generate garbage than quality" and "information overload". When people were hungry for news they not only tended to trust it more, they tended to think about it more. This doesn't happen when you're checking your e-mail every 5 minutes. (Or twitter, or facebook...supply your favorite noisy media channel.)
If I had a strong belief in the benevolent intentions of MicroSoft then those conditions would be reasonable.
Actually, my opinions don't matter, as I'm not likely to work on a JavaScript compiler, but if they did then I would be strongly disinclined to work on THIS one. Where MicroSoft is concerned I *almost* would consider a GPL license to be sufficient protection.
It sounds as if they may be making a marginal improvement. Not with any of the major things that caused me to drop Gnome as my desktop, but still and improvement. Of course, that's PR that I'm listening to, and the actuality is as yet unknown. (And will stay unknown by me, as they aren't fixing any of that things that caused me to consider them totally broken.)
P.S.: I preferred KDE3 over Gnome2, and Gnome2 over KDE4, and KDE4 over Gnome3. KDE4 has gotten a lot better. Nobody seems to be saying that about Gnome3. (And Trinity wasn't as good as KDE3, because too many of the applications didn't work well anymore. This is probably due to a change in the applications...but it affects how well the entire system works.)
IIRC, when I heard of the Gnome3 tweak tool a year or so ago (or whenever Gnome3 started being pushed at people) it was explicitly stated that the tweaks were temporary, and would be disabled in a future version. As I believed them, I stopped seriously considering Gnome3 as a potential desktop. If even resizing windows requires using the tweak tool, this sounds like an excellent decision on my part.
FWIW, I have no idea what Gnome3 currently looks like. Nobody's been singing its praises, though. And during development I discovered that the screen shots they showed as samples were not adequate reflections of the horrible actuality. Perhaps they've improved things...but nobody's been saying so.
a) No, companies should not be off the hook for selling to the US government in violation of US law. Now show that that happened.
b) The law that Cisco is charged with violating dates back to at least the early 1950's. And it is a specific US law, which doesn't apply to the US government (though it arguably should).
No, the CEO and the board do NOT have a corporate shield. The corporate shield protects the minority stockholders. There is, however, a very strong legal tradition that the board and CEO not be charged for the crimes they have knowingly committed. Occasionally they will allow some lesser worker of the corporation to be charged and convicted as a scapegoat. Often that person was also guilty of the same crimes, but to convict both him and those of his superiors who ordered the illegal action would lead to conspiracy charges, and nobody wants to charge the CEO of a major corporation with conspiracy.
The law is two things: 1) The stuff it actually says, and 2) The way that stuff is actually interpreted and applied.
That's odd. I though all serious jihadists used coded messages sent in clear text over the gaming talk channels.
(Actually, if I recall correctly, they tend to use unencrypted text and unencrypted phone messages. At least that's what reports have said appears to have happened in both Paris and New York.)
There's something in what you say, but when you say "Linux guys tend to put everything valuables in a safe hidden 2 feet underground with the sophisticated security system. Even then if police physically have access that's when the self destruct kicks in." you're really talking about the OpenBSD guys.
Sorry, that battle has been lost. And there wasn't even malice involved, just headline writers in search of something that would really grab people, and a movie producer who probably had no idea what either a bit or a byte was.
For a similar event, the other day I happened to discover that one of my friends had no idea that vixen meant "female fox". It's useless to try to recover the older meaning.
For that matter, when is the last time you knew of hacker used to mean someone who built crude furniture with an axe?
That's not the corporate shield. The corporate shield protects minority stockholders (I think less than 10% of the stock) from liability. The executives, board, and majority stockholders are protected by the much simpler approach of nobody caring to prosecute them.
You can't yet prove that the new software is insecure. I'll admit that that's the way I'd bet, but be less certain. What you can prove is that the new software is extremely invasive and assumes lack of privacy (in certain new ways).
Apple may not force updates, but they've follows MS' lead before, but they have in the past mislabeled breaking functional updates as security updates. I don't know if they've done it in the last decade, as I've stopped using Apple devices that connect to the net.
When I decided to check the options for "get with the times" back around 1998, I started reading EULAs. Amazingly I soon switched to Linux (with a stopover at Apple) despite Linux not having a decent word processor. It was still the correct decision. Since around 2000 I haven't regretted it once.
It took a bit longer to convince my wife, since she wouldn't read the EULAs, and also needed music score editing software (which still stinks on Linux unless you're a programmer). There were also problems when she was trying to sync sounds with cel animation. It was easier on the Apple. Apple fixed that, though, by updating their system in a way that broke the usability of the software we had bought. (Don't misunderstand. She was talking about animations for use by or with grade school children with the animation being adapted for the particular child. So it wasn't anything fancy. Sometimes html sound and gif animation was good enough.)
IIUC they did, eventually, get a trademark on Windows. The only problem was it was in Luxemborg or Belgium or some such. (The significant point is that English wasn't spoken there.) This happened during their campaign against Lindows, before they gave up and bought the rights, but now nobody else can sell software globally with the tern windows in its name. They could still sell it in the US, and probably all of the UK and Commonwealth...though I'm not sure. It's possible the Luxemborgian (or Belgian, or whatever) trademark prevents it being sold in other EU member countries, like Britain.
FWIW, in 2 years things won't bother to advertise that they communicate over the internet. You won't find out until you read the documentation after you buy it. And they'll either be wireless, or they won't work right without an internet connection.
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If all they needed to do was reproduce than exponential growth would make a few centuries a quite reasonable estimate. Unfortunately, they need to acquire the material out of which to grow, and that's going to slow things down A LOT. After the low hanging fruit is picked, then they need to go to distant locations to get materials, and probably expend a lot of energy (and radiate it away) to get it back to the building site. I expect that this would necessitate disassembling any planets for materials...if that would suffice.
Alternatively, if you assume that these aliens can somehow conjure matter out of nothing, then it's a reasonable time frame. I, however, find that too tough a bite to swallow.
You don't understand how much matter is required for a Dyson Sphere. (Not that I think a real Dyson Sphere is a realistic plausibility...it's dynamicly unstable. Nearly as bad as the RingWorld.)
What I consider much more likely is a Topopolis (sometimes called Cosmic Spaghetti). Loops of mile diameter tubes that are flexible enough to spin for gravity. You don't make a complete orbit with any one strand, but you have LOTS of them a very slightly different orbital distances and at slightly different angles. And it would still take so much matter to cause the star to dim that you'd probably need to eat the planets. (First you scavenge any atmosphere and then you build a catapult on the surface.) But doing this in only centuries boggles the mind...even with nano-machinery. (Which isn't the kind of magic most people seem to imagine. Remember, life is nano-machinery. We might be able to do a bit better with careful design using a wider palette of minerals, but there turn out to be LOTS of problems with things like friction and surface tension, so don't expect multiple orders of magnitude of improvement in most things. Computation, though, may be an exception.)
If they were moving it, they would need to be moving it towards the star to explain the observations, not towards us.
OTOH, he already said that Infrared observations had eliminated that option. I believe he was a bit to glib there, however, as generally infrared observations are only done at a few wavelengths, and if they were building a macro-scale structure they probably have nano-scale heat scavengers, which would result in the radiation being emitted in the long infrared, which is not usually observed. (Observing ANY infrared at long distance is already quite difficult. Usually it requires something like liquid helium coolants.)
That said, alien megastructures would be an extremely unexpected finding, and would need stronger evidence to be accepted.
But I have a big problem with this that's unrelated to the price. The "trusted person" that you specify means trusted by the police, not by the requestor, or by anyone who would count as an impartial investigator. I do not believe that the films should be in police custody, but should instead be held by a totally independent agency. And that the police should be able to impose only reasonable conditions on the release of the information. And that "reasonable" should not be determined by the police department, but either by an independent agency or by the courts. (Preferably a quick decision by the holding agency, biased slightlyin favor of release appealable to the courts by either party, with the appealer bearing the court costs.)
Interesting, I hadn't factored film length in, and I already thought the price which quite excessive what not exorbitant. That reduces it a lot. So perhaps it only a trifle steep (i.e., less than twice what I think it should cost...with a large variance).
What he's saying is that they can't be trusted to not use that as an excuse to censor the film, even if it never happened. (If you can't look, you don't know it didn't happen.)
If we look as past analogous circumstances, this is a valid concern. This doesn't mean that it can't be dealt with, but it means that if you don't deal with it, you are likely to be unhappy with the results. And while I think $200/hour is unreasonable, I also think that a reasonable fee might be $50-$100/hour. (OTOH, I also think that the police should NOT be the custodians of the films. They have too much incentive to alter or destroy or lose any incriminating evidence. And there need to be multiple safeguards in place to prevent that from the time the uniform is put on until the the records are deemed irrelevant by an independent assessor.)
It's true that the garbage journalism has always heavily outweighed the quality journalism. It's also true that there have been periods in the past that were either worse or nearly as bad as the current state of events.
OTOH, it's also true that quality journalism is usually only recognized retrospectively. Some exceptions are "the muckrakers", like Upton Sinclair (The Jungle) and, at a much later date, Racheal Carlson (Silent Spring). Currently there seems to be almost no memory of prior quality journalism, which *is* a change that is probably attributable to a combination of TV and the Internet. When people are drowning in information, they tend to set their filters too tight, so weak signals are lost.
But I *don't* think it's a matter of economics. I think it's a matter of "it's easier to generate garbage than quality" and "information overload". When people were hungry for news they not only tended to trust it more, they tended to think about it more. This doesn't happen when you're checking your e-mail every 5 minutes. (Or twitter, or facebook...supply your favorite noisy media channel.)
Only if there's a copyright assignment provision, which I wasn't even considering granting to MS.
If I had a strong belief in the benevolent intentions of MicroSoft then those conditions would be reasonable.
Actually, my opinions don't matter, as I'm not likely to work on a JavaScript compiler, but if they did then I would be strongly disinclined to work on THIS one. Where MicroSoft is concerned I *almost* would consider a GPL license to be sufficient protection.
It sounds as if they may be making a marginal improvement. Not with any of the major things that caused me to drop Gnome as my desktop, but still and improvement. Of course, that's PR that I'm listening to, and the actuality is as yet unknown. (And will stay unknown by me, as they aren't fixing any of that things that caused me to consider them totally broken.)
P.S.: I preferred KDE3 over Gnome2, and Gnome2 over KDE4, and KDE4 over Gnome3. KDE4 has gotten a lot better. Nobody seems to be saying that about Gnome3. (And Trinity wasn't as good as KDE3, because too many of the applications didn't work well anymore. This is probably due to a change in the applications...but it affects how well the entire system works.)
IIRC, when I heard of the Gnome3 tweak tool a year or so ago (or whenever Gnome3 started being pushed at people) it was explicitly stated that the tweaks were temporary, and would be disabled in a future version. As I believed them, I stopped seriously considering Gnome3 as a potential desktop. If even resizing windows requires using the tweak tool, this sounds like an excellent decision on my part.
FWIW, I have no idea what Gnome3 currently looks like. Nobody's been singing its praises, though. And during development I discovered that the screen shots they showed as samples were not adequate reflections of the horrible actuality. Perhaps they've improved things...but nobody's been saying so.
a) No, companies should not be off the hook for selling to the US government in violation of US law. Now show that that happened.
b) The law that Cisco is charged with violating dates back to at least the early 1950's. And it is a specific US law, which doesn't apply to the US government (though it arguably should).
This isn't retroactive. That law's been on the books since the 1950's, or maybe the 40's.
No, the CEO and the board do NOT have a corporate shield. The corporate shield protects the minority stockholders. There is, however, a very strong legal tradition that the board and CEO not be charged for the crimes they have knowingly committed. Occasionally they will allow some lesser worker of the corporation to be charged and convicted as a scapegoat. Often that person was also guilty of the same crimes, but to convict both him and those of his superiors who ordered the illegal action would lead to conspiracy charges, and nobody wants to charge the CEO of a major corporation with conspiracy.
The law is two things:
1) The stuff it actually says, and
2) The way that stuff is actually interpreted and applied.
That's odd. I though all serious jihadists used coded messages sent in clear text over the gaming talk channels.
(Actually, if I recall correctly, they tend to use unencrypted text and unencrypted phone messages. At least that's what reports have said appears to have happened in both Paris and New York.)
There's something in what you say, but when you say "Linux guys tend to put everything valuables in a safe hidden 2 feet underground with the sophisticated security system. Even then if police physically have access that's when the self destruct kicks in." you're really talking about the OpenBSD guys.
Sorry, that battle has been lost. And there wasn't even malice involved, just headline writers in search of something that would really grab people, and a movie producer who probably had no idea what either a bit or a byte was.
For a similar event, the other day I happened to discover that one of my friends had no idea that vixen meant "female fox". It's useless to try to recover the older meaning.
For that matter, when is the last time you knew of hacker used to mean someone who built crude furniture with an axe?
That's not the corporate shield. The corporate shield protects minority stockholders (I think less than 10% of the stock) from liability. The executives, board, and majority stockholders are protected by the much simpler approach of nobody caring to prosecute them.
You can't yet prove that the new software is insecure. I'll admit that that's the way I'd bet, but be less certain. What you can prove is that the new software is extremely invasive and assumes lack of privacy (in certain new ways).
Apple may not force updates, but they've follows MS' lead before, but they have in the past mislabeled breaking functional updates as security updates. I don't know if they've done it in the last decade, as I've stopped using Apple devices that connect to the net.
I think he's talking about the cost to replace packages bought from 3rd parties.
When I decided to check the options for "get with the times" back around 1998, I started reading EULAs. Amazingly I soon switched to Linux (with a stopover at Apple) despite Linux not having a decent word processor. It was still the correct decision. Since around 2000 I haven't regretted it once.
It took a bit longer to convince my wife, since she wouldn't read the EULAs, and also needed music score editing software (which still stinks on Linux unless you're a programmer). There were also problems when she was trying to sync sounds with cel animation. It was easier on the Apple. Apple fixed that, though, by updating their system in a way that broke the usability of the software we had bought. (Don't misunderstand. She was talking about animations for use by or with grade school children with the animation being adapted for the particular child. So it wasn't anything fancy. Sometimes html sound and gif animation was good enough.)
IIUC they did, eventually, get a trademark on Windows. The only problem was it was in Luxemborg or Belgium or some such. (The significant point is that English wasn't spoken there.) This happened during their campaign against Lindows, before they gave up and bought the rights, but now nobody else can sell software globally with the tern windows in its name. They could still sell it in the US, and probably all of the UK and Commonwealth...though I'm not sure. It's possible the Luxemborgian (or Belgian, or whatever) trademark prevents it being sold in other EU member countries, like Britain.
OMiGawd...yes! How times have changed, eh.
Read anything about the new large screen TVs?
FWIW, in 2 years things won't bother to advertise that they communicate over the internet. You won't find out until you read the documentation after you buy it. And they'll either be wireless, or they won't work right without an internet connection.