true ! For -comfortably- spending the night, you do want some foodstuffs, and preferably something warmer than a t-shirt. bonuspoints for a sleepingbag.
Noncompetes amount to refusing someone to work at all, and is thus nonenforcable without compensation in most sane jurisdictions, certainly here in Scandinavia.
Anything else would be nuts: if a company can fire you, AND prevent you from taking work with one of their competitors (or becoming one yourself), then in essence, you're barred from taking the work you're likely to know best (i.e. the work you're doing now)
Torture is wrong. Even if the people you torture are thought to belong to a group guilty of horrendous crimes.
And it's not only wrong: it's counterproductive. One of the main advantages of our side, is that we've fairly unquestionably got the moral upper hand. We need that. Coming in as an invading foreign army is a bad starting-point for building relations and trust with the locals. It is almost impossible to get rid of a plan-clothed guerilla-army that has popular support among the locals.
Stuff like gitmo, destroys that. It also erodes public support for the effort in USA and elsewhere.
Put bluntly; torturing prisoners makes it LESS likely that the objectives will be achieved, not more.
Competition in basic infrastructure is difficult. Partly because barriers to entry are sky-high, and partly because frankly, you don't -need- 5 independent twisted-pair coppercables coming into your house. (and installing 5 would cost more than installing 1)
There's a reason multiple competing local-road-companies isn't a practical or clever idea. To a certain degree, that's also true for telecom-infrastructure. (yes, putting 5 cables is more practical than making 5 parallell roads, but it's nevertheless a substantial extra-cost)
My preference would actually be one local-loop-company that is regulated, and barred from offering anything EXCEPT the local loop. And N other companies who can compete, unregulated, about offering services for your local-loop.
You'd *have* to deal with the local-loop-guys, much like today. But you'd have a free choice of ISP, and barriers to entry in that market would be substantially lowered.
As long as inflation + growth is more than debt-growth, you can indeed play that game forever. IF that can generally stay true indefinitely, is an entirely different question.
But regardless of this, if a nations debt, in nominal dollars grew 3% from last years value, but the dollar experienced 2% inflation and the economy of the nation in question had a real (i.e. inflation-adjusted) growth of 2%.
Then the nation has less of a debt-problem than they did last year, despite the fact that the debt grew.
If inflation+growth outstrips interest, there's not really a NEED to ever pay a loan back though. Because the relevant and interesting figure is debt as percentage of GDP, not debt in absolute numbers.
For USA though, debt as percentage of GDP has ALSO been rising, and that is indeed a worrisome trend, one that either needs to stop, or inevitably at some point, shit hits the fan.
Most people don't suggest PURE solar, with enough batteries for the lows. And they -certainly- don't suggest BOTH buying batteries AND connecting to the grid, that'd be just plain dumb.
Solar and other variable and uncontrollable sources, work best when combined in a heterogenous mix. Some of the times that have no sun, do have wind and vice versa. hydropower is probably the best renewable source for those occasions when there's a peak in demand and not enough from the other sources.
The way to go is to take whatever you can currently get from the sun and the wind, then fill in what's missing with for example hydropower.
Technically (perhaps) true, but irrelevant to the practical argument, which was that the price of a Open Source product in the free will tend to gravitate towards zero rapidly, because even if you sell the first copy, the recipient is free to copy and give it on for free.
Even -if- a Open Source license that required aggregation or modification was in force, that would not change the essentials of the argument. Okay, so I distribute the thing as a.tgz containing the original program plus a copy of Gnu Hello. Or I modify a single -comment- in the program, and distribute the 'modified' program.
But fine, technically such demands are restrictions. So you're right, technically: One cannot nessecarily copy it without ANY restrictions, but one CAN copy it without any MEANINGFUL restrictions.
If we're talking of the practical results of the rule though, the two statements are identical. If I have a copy of a open source program, I *can* give you, and everyone else, a copy at zero cost. Whether or not I need to run a single wget and a single tar command before doing that, doesn't really change the fundamentals of the situation.
The question has a larger context. The parent of snowgirls claim was "if you pay for an open source (as OSI defines it) product, you are allowed to copy and give it away at no cost." which she disagreed with, claiming there could be Open Source licenses which do prevent you from doing that.
Which is factually incorrect. If a program is Open Source (any license that qualifies), you CAN infact "copy and give it away at no cost". Yes, it's technically possible you might have to include some random other program when you give it away, to make it an aggregate. But notice that there's no requirement that you have -written- this other program. I.e. I can include a copy of GNU hello, and be good to go.
So she's nitpicking.
For all practical purposes, a Open Source program that you have received -- CAN be copied and given away at no cost. Depending on how you read the rules, you MIGHT have to do some token action in addition, but that's a point that's not really important for the overall argument.
Can I give it away for free, or do I need to do 30 seconds of work and THEN I can give it away for free. That's a distinction without any substance.
There cannot be a counterexample, not if you use the conventional definition of "Open Source". The two common definitions for that, is the one from the Open Source Initiative, which states as one of the 4 freedoms that must be guaranteed for a license to qualify as open source that: (and I quote)
"The license shall not restrict any party from selling or giving away the software as a component of an aggregate software distribution containing programs from several different sources. The license shall not require a royalty or other fee for such sale."
You can look at FSFs definition of "Free Software" if it suits you better, but it says the same thing, though in more words.
The freedom to redistribute, is one of the central freedoms in Open Source. If that freedom is limited, for example by insistence that you -must- charge for such redistribution, the software in question, does not qualify as Open Source. (nor as Free Software)
No. Because the average band who never makes it -- loses a lot less money than the average band who -does- make it earns.
Lots of bands have invested $10K - $100K, and ended up never making it back (nevermind being able to make a decent living from it), but the average artist or band that does make it, earns a lot more than that. (they pretty much have to, afterall if your band is 4 people, you're going to need at the very least $200K/year just to be able to reasonably live from the music, and if you can't do that, arguably you haven't "made it")
Re:I Disagree with Some Parts of This Article
on
The End of Free
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· Score: 1
Yeah. And that's ridicolously expensive, not close to free at all.
At my normal hourly rate, 20 minutes is worth aproximately $30 (after taxes), and the same goes for my wife.
If we watch a 2 hour movie with ads, it tend to have like half an hour of ads - the time wasted in advertising has a value of aproximately $100. Some of the breaks can be used for going to the toilet or suchlike, so it's not -quite- that bad in practice, but even if half the breaks are spent doing other stuff, you're still looking at a $50 loss.
$50 for a single movie, can not be described as "free", in any way shape or form. Advertising is a fantastically inefficient way of financing something.
Rather than the two of us waste an hour for ads, it's a lot more efficient for me to work 15 minutes longer, and buy the DVD.
He is discussing his copyrighted work. The two concepts are not the same, infact they are not even similar in any sense I can think of. So meaning one, and naming the other, serves no purpose other than to muddle the waters.
This particular muddle, pretending that an expression or an idea can be "property" is particularily popular among those who would like the law to extend the same rights as it does for property.
Unlike property - ideas and expressions can be copied effortlessly. Unlike property, control of an idea or expression EXPIRES, after a certain (currently way too long) time. Unlike property, I can take your idea, without depriving you of it.
He is -not- discussing his "property". He *is* discussing his copyrigthed work.
The point isn't that this is better than todays HTTPS, with a certificate.
The point is that this would be better than what literally 99% of all websites have today, which is no encryption whatsoever.
The need to have a expensive certificate AND a private ip-address, is a significant barrier, the point is to remove this barrier. Diffie-Hellman encryption-only does not require any extra ip, nor any certificate. It has no barriers to entry similar to todays https.
You can do self-signed, but then people get big scary warnings and end up (erronously) believing that self-signed https is worse than plain-old http.
We should keep https with certificates -- for those sitest that need it, and can afford the overhead in dealing with ip-adresses and certificates.
No, I mean with no certificate whatsoever. The thing is, public-key encryption is slow and has other limitations, so it's not used for the actual transfer anyway, instead it's used only to exchange randomly created one-time session-keys. The rest of the transfer is then transfered using conventional encryption and this session-key.
There are easier ways to agree on a session-key over a possibly-eavesdropped channel. Diffie Hellman is the most well-known and the simplest to understand, but there exists many others.
The advantage is simple setup: No need for a certificate, no need for a separate ip-address for each virtual host. (the latter is needed because the server needs to know WHICH certificate to present, if there is no such thing, the problem disappears.)
The need for either buying expensive certificates, OR get scary warnings in browesers, currently ensure that 99% of all websites are unencrypted. If zero extra setup, and zero extra costs where required, chances would be better at getting a larger part of the web encrypted, which would be an advantage.
Yeah. But one can do secure encryption -without- the certs. I'm beginning to think it's a mistake to not have this mode also available:
Plain, unencrypted http.
Encrypted, but not verified -- secure against passive listening, but not against MITM, no certificate needed, not even a self-signed-one. (a self-signed certificate is pointless anyway, it's a digital document saying "I'm mr X, honest, because I say so", which is a null statement really)
Makes sense, they're pretty silly anyways. Because conditions vary a LOT, so what's perfectly sane on a dry summer road with good tires, would be utter insanity on ice, or even on wet autumn leaves. Okay, so the recommendations are supposed to mean "by good conditions", but still.
There's more of them in Norway than in Germany, but they're not terribly common.
True, it's culturally very different. In Germany "30mph advised" means "it'd take WET ice and summer-tires to make this curve dangerous in 70mph", whereas in parts of Norway, "30 mph advised" means "if you enter this curve in 50mph, you're unlikely to exit it in one piece"
Actually, I'd be more likely to agree that all religions are, at the core, about power and influence. Frequently they're tools whereby a tiny elite try to influence and control a large flock of sheep.
True. But installation and area and transport and many other components of the price, are independent of efficiency. So if you could make and install a 50% efficient solar-cell for less than twice the price of a 25% one, you'd have a win.
But sure, twice-as-effective ten-times-as-expensive isn't interesting.
Actually, the unchecked ones doesn't even need to exist.
There's a 1/6 chance of tossing a 6. But it's nevertheless POSSIBLE to toss 6 three times in a row, despite odds of 200:1 doing so doesn't magically require that someone else misses out on the 6es either.
If there -was- 100 elections, 10 suspicious, and 90 unsuspicious, and you opted to randomly check 10 of them, the odds of ending up checking PRECISELY the 10 suspicious ones are very low. (10/100 * 9/99 * 8/98.... 1/91 = 1:17310000000000)
If -that- happened, you'd be right to be suspicious.
"odd thing happened, allthough it should only happen 10% of the times" isn't very suspicious.
"odd thing happened, that should only happen 0.0000000000017% of the time" -is- a lot more suspicious, despite the POSSIBILITY of pure randomness.
Slashdot Mirror
true ! For -comfortably- spending the night, you do want some foodstuffs, and preferably something warmer than a t-shirt. bonuspoints for a sleepingbag.
good advice -- though the amount of food you need to "spend the night" is zero.
Going without food for 1, 2, or 3 days is hardly life-threathening, not even close. Now water, is an entirely different thing.
Noncompetes amount to refusing someone to work at all, and is thus nonenforcable without compensation in most sane jurisdictions, certainly here in Scandinavia. Anything else would be nuts: if a company can fire you, AND prevent you from taking work with one of their competitors (or becoming one yourself), then in essence, you're barred from taking the work you're likely to know best (i.e. the work you're doing now)
Two wrongs, doesn't make a right.
Torture is wrong. Even if the people you torture are thought to belong to a group guilty of horrendous crimes.
And it's not only wrong: it's counterproductive. One of the main advantages of our side, is that we've fairly unquestionably got the moral upper hand. We need that. Coming in as an invading foreign army is a bad starting-point for building relations and trust with the locals. It is almost impossible to get rid of a plan-clothed guerilla-army that has popular support among the locals.
Stuff like gitmo, destroys that. It also erodes public support for the effort in USA and elsewhere.
Put bluntly; torturing prisoners makes it LESS likely that the objectives will be achieved, not more.
Indeed. Infact Flickr is already (in it's entirety) blocked in for example Iran.
Competition in basic infrastructure is difficult. Partly because barriers to entry are sky-high, and partly because frankly, you don't -need- 5 independent twisted-pair coppercables coming into your house. (and installing 5 would cost more than installing 1)
There's a reason multiple competing local-road-companies isn't a practical or clever idea. To a certain degree, that's also true for telecom-infrastructure. (yes, putting 5 cables is more practical than making 5 parallell roads, but it's nevertheless a substantial extra-cost)
My preference would actually be one local-loop-company that is regulated, and barred from offering anything EXCEPT the local loop. And N other companies who can compete, unregulated, about offering services for your local-loop.
You'd *have* to deal with the local-loop-guys, much like today. But you'd have a free choice of ISP, and barriers to entry in that market would be substantially lowered.
As long as inflation + growth is more than debt-growth, you can indeed play that game forever. IF that can generally stay true indefinitely, is an entirely different question.
But regardless of this, if a nations debt, in nominal dollars grew 3% from last years value, but the dollar experienced 2% inflation and the economy of the nation in question had a real (i.e. inflation-adjusted) growth of 2%.
Then the nation has less of a debt-problem than they did last year, despite the fact that the debt grew.
If inflation+growth outstrips interest, there's not really a NEED to ever pay a loan back though. Because the relevant and interesting figure is debt as percentage of GDP, not debt in absolute numbers.
For USA though, debt as percentage of GDP has ALSO been rising, and that is indeed a worrisome trend, one that either needs to stop, or inevitably at some point, shit hits the fan.
Most people don't suggest PURE solar, with enough batteries for the lows. And they -certainly- don't suggest BOTH buying batteries AND connecting to the grid, that'd be just plain dumb.
Solar and other variable and uncontrollable sources, work best when combined in a heterogenous mix. Some of the times that have no sun, do have wind and vice versa. hydropower is probably the best renewable source for those occasions when there's a peak in demand and not enough from the other sources.
The way to go is to take whatever you can currently get from the sun and the wind, then fill in what's missing with for example hydropower.
Almost correct.
It may be their "job" to push for a world, skewed towards the people they represent.
In practice, they tend to end up pushing for a world skewed towards THEMSELVES.
The RIAA might claim to work for musicians. In actuality, they work for the RIAA first, for record-labels second, and for musicians a distant third.
Technically (perhaps) true, but irrelevant to the practical argument, which was that the price of a Open Source product in the free will tend to gravitate towards zero rapidly, because even if you sell the first copy, the recipient is free to copy and give it on for free.
Even -if- a Open Source license that required aggregation or modification was in force, that would not change the essentials of the argument. Okay, so I distribute the thing as a .tgz containing the original program plus a copy of Gnu Hello. Or I modify a single -comment- in the program, and distribute the 'modified' program.
But fine, technically such demands are restrictions. So you're right, technically: One cannot nessecarily copy it without ANY restrictions, but one CAN copy it without any MEANINGFUL restrictions.
If we're talking of the practical results of the rule though, the two statements are identical. If I have a copy of a open source program, I *can* give you, and everyone else, a copy at zero cost. Whether or not I need to run a single wget and a single tar command before doing that, doesn't really change the fundamentals of the situation.
The question has a larger context. The parent of snowgirls claim was "if you pay for an open source (as OSI defines it) product, you are allowed to copy and give it away at no cost." which she disagreed with, claiming there could be Open Source licenses which do prevent you from doing that.
Which is factually incorrect. If a program is Open Source (any license that qualifies), you CAN infact "copy and give it away at no cost". Yes, it's technically possible you might have to include some random other program when you give it away, to make it an aggregate. But notice that there's no requirement that you have -written- this other program. I.e. I can include a copy of GNU hello, and be good to go.
So she's nitpicking.
For all practical purposes, a Open Source program that you have received -- CAN be copied and given away at no cost. Depending on how you read the rules, you MIGHT have to do some token action in addition, but that's a point that's not really important for the overall argument.
Can I give it away for free, or do I need to do 30 seconds of work and THEN I can give it away for free. That's a distinction without any substance.
http://opensource.org/docs/osd
Requirement #1 is "Free Redistribution", i.e. that you have the freedom to, without limitation, redistribute the software.
Would you like ketchup with that ?
There cannot be a counterexample, not if you use the conventional definition of "Open Source". The two common definitions for that, is the one from the Open Source Initiative, which states as one of the 4 freedoms that must be guaranteed for a license to qualify as open source that: (and I quote)
"The license shall not restrict any party from selling or giving away the software as a component of an aggregate software distribution containing programs from several different sources. The license shall not require a royalty or other fee for such sale."
You can look at FSFs definition of "Free Software" if it suits you better, but it says the same thing, though in more words.
The freedom to redistribute, is one of the central freedoms in Open Source. If that freedom is limited, for example by insistence that you -must- charge for such redistribution, the software in question, does not qualify as Open Source. (nor as Free Software)
No. Because the average band who never makes it -- loses a lot less money than the average band who -does- make it earns.
Lots of bands have invested $10K - $100K, and ended up never making it back (nevermind being able to make a decent living from it), but the average artist or band that does make it, earns a lot more than that. (they pretty much have to, afterall if your band is 4 people, you're going to need at the very least $200K/year just to be able to reasonably live from the music, and if you can't do that, arguably you haven't "made it")
Yeah. And that's ridicolously expensive, not close to free at all.
At my normal hourly rate, 20 minutes is worth aproximately $30 (after taxes), and the same goes for my wife.
If we watch a 2 hour movie with ads, it tend to have like half an hour of ads - the time wasted in advertising has a value of aproximately $100. Some of the breaks can be used for going to the toilet or suchlike, so it's not -quite- that bad in practice, but even if half the breaks are spent doing other stuff, you're still looking at a $50 loss.
$50 for a single movie, can not be described as "free", in any way shape or form. Advertising is a fantastically inefficient way of financing something.
Rather than the two of us waste an hour for ads, it's a lot more efficient for me to work 15 minutes longer, and buy the DVD.
He's not discussing "his property".
He is discussing his copyrighted work. The two concepts are not the same, infact they are not even similar in any sense I can think of. So meaning one, and naming the other, serves no purpose other than to muddle the waters.
This particular muddle, pretending that an expression or an idea can be "property" is particularily popular among those who would like the law to extend the same rights as it does for property.
Unlike property - ideas and expressions can be copied effortlessly. Unlike property, control of an idea or expression EXPIRES, after a certain (currently way too long) time. Unlike property, I can take your idea, without depriving you of it.
He is -not- discussing his "property". He *is* discussing his copyrigthed work.
The point isn't that this is better than todays HTTPS, with a certificate.
The point is that this would be better than what literally 99% of all websites have today, which is no encryption whatsoever.
The need to have a expensive certificate AND a private ip-address, is a significant barrier, the point is to remove this barrier. Diffie-Hellman encryption-only does not require any extra ip, nor any certificate. It has no barriers to entry similar to todays https.
You can do self-signed, but then people get big scary warnings and end up (erronously) believing that self-signed https is worse than plain-old http.
We should keep https with certificates -- for those sitest that need it, and can afford the overhead in dealing with ip-adresses and certificates.
No, I mean with no certificate whatsoever. The thing is, public-key encryption is slow and has other limitations, so it's not used for the actual transfer anyway, instead it's used only to exchange randomly created one-time session-keys. The rest of the transfer is then transfered using conventional encryption and this session-key.
There are easier ways to agree on a session-key over a possibly-eavesdropped channel. Diffie Hellman is the most well-known and the simplest to understand, but there exists many others.
The advantage is simple setup: No need for a certificate, no need for a separate ip-address for each virtual host. (the latter is needed because the server needs to know WHICH certificate to present, if there is no such thing, the problem disappears.)
The need for either buying expensive certificates, OR get scary warnings in browesers, currently ensure that 99% of all websites are unencrypted. If zero extra setup, and zero extra costs where required, chances would be better at getting a larger part of the web encrypted, which would be an advantage.
Yeah. But one can do secure encryption -without- the certs. I'm beginning to think it's a mistake to not have this mode also available:
Plain, unencrypted http.
Encrypted, but not verified -- secure against passive listening, but not against MITM, no certificate needed, not even a self-signed-one. (a self-signed certificate is pointless anyway, it's a digital document saying "I'm mr X, honest, because I say so", which is a null statement really)
Verified, with a certificate, like todays https.
Makes sense, they're pretty silly anyways. Because conditions vary a LOT, so what's perfectly sane on a dry summer road with good tires, would be utter insanity on ice, or even on wet autumn leaves. Okay, so the recommendations are supposed to mean "by good conditions", but still.
There's more of them in Norway than in Germany, but they're not terribly common.
True, it's culturally very different. In Germany "30mph advised" means "it'd take WET ice and summer-tires to make this curve dangerous in 70mph", whereas in parts of Norway, "30 mph advised" means "if you enter this curve in 50mph, you're unlikely to exit it in one piece"
Actually, I'd be more likely to agree that all religions are, at the core, about power and influence. Frequently they're tools whereby a tiny elite try to influence and control a large flock of sheep.
True. But installation and area and transport and many other components of the price, are independent of efficiency. So if you could make and install a 50% efficient solar-cell for less than twice the price of a 25% one, you'd have a win.
But sure, twice-as-effective ten-times-as-expensive isn't interesting.
Actually, the unchecked ones doesn't even need to exist.
There's a 1/6 chance of tossing a 6. But it's nevertheless POSSIBLE to toss 6 three times in a row, despite odds of 200:1 doing so doesn't magically require that someone else misses out on the 6es either.
If there -was- 100 elections, 10 suspicious, and 90 unsuspicious, and you opted to randomly check 10 of them, the odds of ending up checking PRECISELY the 10 suspicious ones are very low. (10/100 * 9/99 * 8/98 .... 1/91 = 1:17310000000000)
If -that- happened, you'd be right to be suspicious.
"odd thing happened, allthough it should only happen 10% of the times" isn't very suspicious.
"odd thing happened, that should only happen 0.0000000000017% of the time" -is- a lot more suspicious, despite the POSSIBILITY of pure randomness.