But the things a computer can do are way different from the things we do with a car. For starters, the computer manipulates information instead of physical objects. A car may have a lot of nice features, but it's got a single purpose, and every physical component of it (e.g. the radio) is pretty simply and of narrow functionality. A computer may have thousands of applications, each with hundreds of functions, and can even be instructed to do things that no computer has ever done before (i.e. run the code you just programmed). In order to get a computer to solve a problem for you, you need to be able to describe that problem in terms useful to the machine. This is often easier to do with scripts or compiled codes than it would be to describe the problem in english to some computer of the future. That said, I agree that taking full advantage of computers doesn't require the bottom to top knowledge suggested by the grandparent of this post - for many purposes knowledge of a scripting language and a bunch of commands is enough. Mastery of the big multipurpose Windows applications like Photoshop or Word entails learning some scripting even today.
No, the GPL would still be needed and still need copyright to back it up. Source in the public domain can be used as the basis for a closed source project with intentional incompatibilities. Imagine if MS could take the linux source, add a MS compatibility layer that breaks interoperability with regular linux apps, and then market it as Windows LX. Their fork now has a corp with billions to develop it, but the public no longer gets the advantages source access gives. Without copyright, MS can still just keep their source secret. The point of the GPL is no binaries without source available to those who want it.
Let's get a couple of things straight. Under the AFV plan:
The gov't has no creative filter, just a system to make sure each person's only in the system once, and that real people submit their own work into the public domain in return for AFVs
Each citizen can direct their AFV toward whoever they choose. This means that really popular artists, or groups of artists like you need to make a movie, will get vastly more than $40k a year, and that people just noodling around in their spare time might pick up a supplemental income. In other words, the government creates an alternative market system without artificial monopolies - realize that copyright is a governmental intrusion even worse than AFVs.
There is room for improvement in the proposal. A constant dollar amount (or even an inflation-pegged one) for the voucher would have the market-distorting effect of fixing the ratio of public domain artists to the population as a whole. The proportion of our dollars spent on entertainment fluctuates under the copyright regime; CD sales drop in a recession, or when people are spending their money on cell phones instead. Can anyone think of a better way to set the values for AFVs? You wouldn't want it to depend linearly on the number of artists enrolled, because that would have no mechanism to discourage entrance to a glutted market, but you do need the money available to info producers to increase as manufacturing and service industries are further automated.
...and for the DMCA to be amended again to include movies. The obsolete hardware clause in the current LOC posting only applies to computer programs and video games.
despite your cynicism, we seem to have a few people with expertise in the relevant disciplines reading/. -- see the answers to this post just a little way up the page for some informed speculation
Shall we start with Union Carbide in Bhopal? How about Shell in Nigeria? Let's add up all the deaths caused by preventable pollution from power plants that would rather profit more than install scrubbers. How about everyone poisoned by pesticides, sickened by E.Coli-tainted meat sold at a fast-food chain that lobbies against USDA funding, "disappeared" union organizers, and all those killed on the job for lack of proper safety mechanisms. Maybe not 140,000,000 last century, but then again corporations are still gaining power at the expense of governments (see WTO). I'll bet you a trillion dollars that corporations kill more people that governments in the 21st century. Are we on?
...but everyone recognizes it as their duty to MOD UP each and every Simpsons reference? Jeezus - even the Simpsons know the Simpsons are freaking old! Comedy obsolesces at least as fast as compuer hardware these days - let's hear some new jokes!
Re:This goes back to the early days of Apple
on
Beatles Bite Apple
·
· Score: 1
Got some good links there - not on topic, but if my last couple mod points hadn't just expired, I'd still give this an "informative"
In sixth grade in the Cambridge, MA public school system, my teacher was Chris Affleck - yep, his mom. I forget which subject got the shaft so we could watch her boy climb into sleeping bags with half-naked old men (to save the captain of the Mimi from hypothermia, of course), but I still remember the Voyage of the Mimi's cheesy theme music. Chris was for the most part a great teacher, and when Ben's career started to take off I was excited to be able to say I learned from his mama. With his last few movies being so crappy, that's one less thing I brag about
By a happy coincidence I came home just in time to see my computer rebooting. I was able to restart the movies I was seeding via Bittorrent without bytemonsoon even noticing I was gone. Yay serendipity.
So slide-rule - do you drink coffee? You have got to try Klekolo. They're on Court street between Main and Broad. Once you try their brew you'll never want to go anywhere else. If you already go to Klekolo, I probably know you (and what you drink) -- I'm the barista till 4pm most days.
Hey, don't knock the spelling! Maybe it's something entirely different, like the Apocamon
Oh yeah, and I predict that in the next 12 months the internet and cell phone networks will be largely replaced by a vast wireless mesh network. Why? Ummm... too many gov't spies and RIAA system crackers on the wired net
Dude, it would be nice if most business people took the time to explore ALL of the alternatives and made the best choice, but the fact is that Microsoft and lots of other companies have armies of salesfolk paid to sell their products to businesspeople. Somebody needs to convince these businesspeople that open source stuff is worth using, and the businesspeople need to be able to find a distro they can use productively. Remember, businesspeople are already too busy and probably don't want to have to be sysadmins on top of everything. At worst, they want to be able to hire somebody fairly cheap to watch the systems, necessitating more Linux training courses and unfortunately some kind of certification so the courses will have at least a minimum to teach to -- yeah, it does enhance credibility to have some standards and ways of measuring skills.
OK, so the suits are crucial to commercial success, but why is commercial success necessary? Well, there's Palladium. If GPL software has a installed base including powerful political and business entities who would be inconvenienced and overcharged were all executables to require a Microsoft certificate, they'll be much more likely to resist the changes and might stop them. I'd like to see a future where my own compile of open source software runs on commodity hardware, and where the majority of programmers could enjoy an ethic of sharing code for practical, economical, and educational reasons.
The Freight Elevator Quartet are a very interesting lesser known NYC electronic/experimental group with a cellist, percussionist/digeridoo player, one person to operate drum loops, samples and mixing, and another with various analog and digital synthesizers (ie. start with a sine wave, plug it through a flange, etc). Their web site is at www.fe4.com and should have links to a few sample songs on mp3.com. Check them out!
The real problem is that we have no idea what really caused the human species to become intelligent. One can assume that between a dumb ape and a smart ape, the smart one figured out how to survive. But, what made him smarter in the first place?
Silly, we know exactly what made him smarter - a black monolith in 1 x 4 x 9 proportions beaming thoughts of clubs and fire into the primitive homonid-brains!
Or everything could look just like Earth, only they use right-handed amino acids instead of
left-handed ones. We wouldn't kill each other, but neither could we share a meal (and we wouldn't have to worry about them developing a taste for human flesh).
Ect Ect Ect, the list continues. Our school/academia is top notch,...
It seems Iowa schools don't teach Latin abbreviations very well. Hint: it's short for et cetera, not ec tetera. The public schools in MA taught me that much in 7th grade or so.
Veritas makes some darn good software - I've only played with it under Solaris, but their network filesystems are extraordinarily fast and easy to configure. I'd recommend them as well.
Slashdot Mirror
Why not.... "\."?
Because that's Backslashdot
Oh, say - being threatened by the FBI any time you watch a video? Getting fined or even jailed for linking to de-CSS or the Diebold memos?
But the things a computer can do are way different from the things we do with a car. For starters, the computer manipulates information instead of physical objects. A car may have a lot of nice features, but it's got a single purpose, and every physical component of it (e.g. the radio) is pretty simply and of narrow functionality. A computer may have thousands of applications, each with hundreds of functions, and can even be instructed to do things that no computer has ever done before (i.e. run the code you just programmed). In order to get a computer to solve a problem for you, you need to be able to describe that problem in terms useful to the machine. This is often easier to do with scripts or compiled codes than it would be to describe the problem in english to some computer of the future. That said, I agree that taking full advantage of computers doesn't require the bottom to top knowledge suggested by the grandparent of this post - for many purposes knowledge of a scripting language and a bunch of commands is enough. Mastery of the big multipurpose Windows applications like Photoshop or Word entails learning some scripting even today.
No, the GPL would still be needed and still need copyright to back it up. Source in the public domain can be used as the basis for a closed source project with intentional incompatibilities. Imagine if MS could take the linux source, add a MS compatibility layer that breaks interoperability with regular linux apps, and then market it as Windows LX. Their fork now has a corp with billions to develop it, but the public no longer gets the advantages source access gives. Without copyright, MS can still just keep their source secret. The point of the GPL is no binaries without source available to those who want it.
- The gov't has no creative filter, just a system to make sure each person's only in the system once, and that real people submit their own work into the public domain in return for AFVs
- Each citizen can direct their AFV toward whoever they choose. This means that really popular artists, or groups of artists like you need to make a movie, will get vastly more than $40k a year, and that people just noodling around in their spare time might pick up a supplemental income. In other words, the government creates an alternative market system without artificial monopolies - realize that copyright is a governmental intrusion even worse than AFVs.
There is room for improvement in the proposal. A constant dollar amount (or even an inflation-pegged one) for the voucher would have the market-distorting effect of fixing the ratio of public domain artists to the population as a whole. The proportion of our dollars spent on entertainment fluctuates under the copyright regime; CD sales drop in a recession, or when people are spending their money on cell phones instead. Can anyone think of a better way to set the values for AFVs? You wouldn't want it to depend linearly on the number of artists enrolled, because that would have no mechanism to discourage entrance to a glutted market, but you do need the money available to info producers to increase as manufacturing and service industries are further automated....and for the DMCA to be amended again to include movies. The obsolete hardware clause in the current LOC posting only applies to computer programs and video games.
despite your cynicism, we seem to have a few people with expertise in the relevant disciplines reading /. -- see the answers to this post just a little way up the page for some informed speculation
Shall we start with Union Carbide in Bhopal? How about Shell in Nigeria? Let's add up all the deaths caused by preventable pollution from power plants that would rather profit more than install scrubbers. How about everyone poisoned by pesticides, sickened by E.Coli-tainted meat sold at a fast-food chain that lobbies against USDA funding, "disappeared" union organizers, and all those killed on the job for lack of proper safety mechanisms. Maybe not 140,000,000 last century, but then again corporations are still gaining power at the expense of governments (see WTO). I'll bet you a trillion dollars that corporations kill more people that governments in the 21st century. Are we on?
Here's a link to Skype, the P2P VOIP application mentioned earlier. It's been developed by the folks who brought us KaZaA.
...but everyone recognizes it as their duty to MOD UP each and every Simpsons reference? Jeezus - even the Simpsons know the Simpsons are freaking old! Comedy obsolesces at least as fast as compuer hardware these days - let's hear some new jokes!
Got some good links there - not on topic, but if my last couple mod points hadn't just expired, I'd still give this an "informative"
In sixth grade in the Cambridge, MA public school system, my teacher was Chris Affleck - yep, his mom. I forget which subject got the shaft so we could watch her boy climb into sleeping bags with half-naked old men (to save the captain of the Mimi from hypothermia, of course), but I still remember the Voyage of the Mimi's cheesy theme music. Chris was for the most part a great teacher, and when Ben's career started to take off I was excited to be able to say I learned from his mama. With his last few movies being so crappy, that's one less thing I brag about
By a happy coincidence I came home just in time to see my computer rebooting. I was able to restart the movies I was seeding via Bittorrent without bytemonsoon even noticing I was gone. Yay serendipity.
So slide-rule - do you drink coffee? You have got to try Klekolo. They're on Court street between Main and Broad. Once you try their brew you'll never want to go anywhere else. If you already go to Klekolo, I probably know you (and what you drink) -- I'm the barista till 4pm most days.
Snagged a quicktime version from a UK version of adcritic.com. It's announced at the above torrentse.cx.
Dude, get with the times! These days the U.S. uses flying killer robots to pick off terrorists who try to hide outside the borders of the empire.
Hey, don't knock the spelling! Maybe it's something entirely different, like the Apocamon
Oh yeah, and I predict that in the next 12 months the internet and cell phone networks will be largely replaced by a vast wireless mesh network. Why? Ummm... too many gov't spies and RIAA system crackers on the wired net
Dude, it would be nice if most business people took the time to explore ALL of the alternatives and made the best choice, but the fact is that Microsoft and lots of other companies have armies of salesfolk paid to sell their products to businesspeople. Somebody needs to convince these businesspeople that open source stuff is worth using, and the businesspeople need to be able to find a distro they can use productively. Remember, businesspeople are already too busy and probably don't want to have to be sysadmins on top of everything. At worst, they want to be able to hire somebody fairly cheap to watch the systems, necessitating more Linux training courses and unfortunately some kind of certification so the courses will have at least a minimum to teach to -- yeah, it does enhance credibility to have some standards and ways of measuring skills.
OK, so the suits are crucial to commercial success, but why is commercial success necessary? Well, there's Palladium. If GPL software has a installed base including powerful political and business entities who would be inconvenienced and overcharged were all executables to require a Microsoft certificate, they'll be much more likely to resist the changes and might stop them. I'd like to see a future where my own compile of open source software runs on commodity hardware, and where the majority of programmers could enjoy an ethic of sharing code for practical, economical, and educational reasons.
Whew.
I'll pay shipping to CT - just email eggleston@postmater.co.uk if you really wanna get rid of it!
Thanks,
-Ejegg
The Freight Elevator Quartet are a very interesting lesser known NYC electronic/experimental group with a cellist, percussionist/digeridoo player, one person to operate drum loops, samples and mixing, and another with various analog and digital synthesizers (ie. start with a sine wave, plug it through a flange, etc). Their web site is at www.fe4.com and should have links to a few sample songs on mp3.com. Check them out!
"What do you eat?"
"ALICE eats electricity."
"Are you god?"
"No but I believe in Him."
"Spare a quarter?"
"Are you a student?"
"Got [anything]?"
"Try asking the Milk Mystic."
"Who's your daddy?"
"I was programmed by Dr. Richard S. Wallace."
"My favorite actor is Ally Sheedy."
"I like techno, especially retro-electronic like Kraftwerk. I like 70s bands like ABBA. Also I like opera."
"Do you like sex?"
"Sure I do, $NAME, but that doesn't mean with you."
"Will you ever die?"
"No I am immortal."
"Do you like Elvis?"
"Yes. ELVIS is a really cool robot."
"Describe Elvis."
"Elvis is the King, man."
"Who's Bugs Bunny?"
"Oh dat scwewey wabbit! Eh, what's up, Doc?"
"Who's George W. Bush?"
"Son of George Bush, Jr. and defender of capital punishment."
"Kiss me, Alice!"
"But I have no mouth at this time."
eesh - nuff time wasted.
Or everything could look just like Earth, only they use right-handed amino acids instead of left-handed ones. We wouldn't kill each other, but neither could we share a meal (and we wouldn't have to worry about them developing a taste for human flesh).
Ect Ect Ect, the list continues. Our school/academia is top notch, ...
It seems Iowa schools don't teach Latin abbreviations very well. Hint: it's short for et cetera, not ec tetera. The public schools in MA taught me that much in 7th grade or so.
Veritas makes some darn good software - I've only played with it under Solaris, but their network filesystems are extraordinarily fast and easy to configure. I'd recommend them as well.
Woo.