Yeah, they would certainly use it as an excuse to jack up prices. They'd complain that government meddling only hurts the consumer and raise prices through the roof to ensure that that's the case.
I do think that the internet should be considered a basic utility and that internet access should be guaranteed like water and electricity; however, I think that the right to online access ends at e-mail and Slashdot. 100 Mb/s is nice, but I'd say 1 Mb/s would be more appropriate for a mandated rate goal.
Porting a game is an enormous undertaking. Writing a game to be cross-platform from the get-go by using openGL might be an option but video drivers aren't the only problem, Linux has big problems regarding consistent audio frameworks across all distributions. Games work well under Windows because Windows is inherently monolithic whereas Linux is inherently modular. The monolithic nature of the Windows API cuts costs by guaranteeing that a game will work on every Windows machine (excepting odd circumstances and anything too old for the current DirectX).
The marvelous thing about Linux is the modularity; complex tasks are handled by simple, effective tools that are appropriately strung together. It's the modularity as much as the openness that defines Linux. It's that modularity leads to very difficult game development. Reducing the ecosystem of tools and configurations to a canonical (ha ha) set might make game development viable on Linux, but would be the antithesis of the Linux philosophy.
Absolutely right. The author seems to be making the argument a lack of pay implies a lack of skill.
From the article:
According to Cowan, who is now a Security Program Manager for Windows, “the scientific conclusion of Sardonix is that auditing is both demanding of high skill and tedious, and so karma/reputation/good will is not enough to motivate people to do it. You must pay them to do it, precisely as Microsoft does.
The author is right that the "many eyeballs" scheme needs skilled eyeballs to work, but assumes that the only way to get good people on a project is by paying them. It seems odd that an article that tries so hard to provide a compelling argument makes such a poorly backed assumption. It's certainly true that good people need to be payed, but they can be paid to work on free software or write free software in their spare time; both cases have many examples.
Oh, of course. In any non-trivial piece of software it's extremely difficult to write code that is robust against absolutely any input. Ideally, all programs would be formally verified to be bug free, but practically that's an intractable task. Luckily, I don't intend to ever write code that will be used by 100000000's of users (unless I get around to trying to contribute to an open-source project in my spare time...help squash a few more bugs in the battle).
That's simply not true. Proper, bug-free code should fail gracefully in the event of odd user behavior. It may be that random mashing of the keyboard will give the user some unexpected results but it should never cause the program to go into a state that it was not designed to go into, such as trying to access 0x00000000.
I wish summary articles were written so that most people could understand the terms used.
The trouble is that 10^-27 isn't a tremendously intuitive number. Even being extremely familiar with scientific notation, the magnitude is so small that it really defies any intuitive sense of scale. GeV may not be nearly as familiar as kg but eV (electron volts) are an appropriate unit when dealing with particle energies and so are used in most articles regarding accelerators. Given the choice, I would take eV so that people who are following the progress of the LHC and Tevatron colliders can compare between articles.
I'm surprised I had to scroll down so far before I hit a recommendation to use TeX. I would agree that it's the only way to effectively take notes on a math-oriented course and, if you're a grad student, has the benefit of getting a start on material that can be used in your thesis. I still use a pen and paper, but if a course had enough content that was relevant to my thesis I would definitely go for LaTeX.
Protocols of quantum energy teleportation (QET), while retaining causality and local energy conservation, enable the transportation of energy from a subsystem of a many-body quantum system to a distant subsystem by local operations and classical communication through ground-state entanglement.
There's an important line in there: while retaining [...] local energy conservation. What lies at the heart of the proposal is that the measurement devices add or remove energy from the system that they are measuring. The energy is in no way removed from one location and given to another, spatially distant, location. What happens, is that a measurement device at one location gains energy from the quantum system and, based on the outcome of that measurement, the measurement device at the second location can be configured to lose energy into the quantum system at that location.
The thing to take away is that no energy is lost or gained at either location. Instead, the measurement devices at each location gain or lose energy to compensate changes in the energy of the system. This proposal is in no way a method to teleport energy in the intuitive sense; the total energy of the quantum system and measurement device at each end is conserved. The notion that measuring a system changes the energy of the state is very fundamental in quantum mechanics and is well understood. Honestly, there's nothing particularly new about it and the paper doesn't appear to be written to be submitted to a major journal.
This reinforces my opinion that people need to stop submitting papers they find on arXiv, especially single-author papers.
To make it worse, he has no excuse. The music industry does, they were the first to miss the boat on digital content. The movie industry should have caught on, but somehow didn't. The publishers should really have been able to figure it out; they had fair warning and opportunity and, seemingly, just couldn't connect the dots.
Big Content screwed up and is on the way out no matter how much they complain. Books are absolutely here to stay, but the profit model is shifting. Hopefully the huge economies of scale afforded by e-Books will allow the authors to profit more than under the current model. In any case, Amazon is sure to come out on top for the near future.
It depends on the e-mail. You receive 2 demerits for each grammatical error; if you rack up 8, it's a suspension. You now have 2 for failing to begin a sentence with a capital letter. Of course, use of "cuz" (because) or "u" (you) will result in the immediate loss of the license and posting a lolcat is punishable by a maximum of 10 years in prison.
the skill set required for someone to get a Ph.D in any given field has very little correlation with the skillsets required for such tasks as dressing oneself, attending to personal hygeine, or speaking in coherent sentences
That's utterly false. Only the most Mickey-Mouse universities would award a Ph.D to someone who couldn't effectively write a dissertation or academic paper. The ability to effectively communicate is critical for academics and they are, in general, very well-spoken individuals who can clearly express ideas both within and outside their area of expertise. Good scientific writing requires clear, concise and understandable grammar.
Don't get me wrong, I have a long list of complaints about locking users out of the systems they buy, but the iP* (Phone, Pod, Pad) aren't intended as general-purpose computing devices and aren't really suitable for learning to tinker with code. OS X is much less restricted. I think that Apple's exclusion of simple development software from base installs is more a reflection of computing coming into the mainstream than a real change in the ideology in Apple management. People don't want to have to tinker at the command line anymore (except/.ers) but development tools and learning tools still exist and they can be installed on a MacBook.
Right. The iPod and (I think) the iPad are communications tools; they would be miserable development packages no matter what software was loaded onto them.
As for teaching tinkering to kids, I think that the situation has changed from when we (most of us) were young. Computers were as new to parents as they were to kids and there was more expectation that you had to use a command line to get things to work. The whole environment promoted either tinkering or giving up on the whole experience. Now that computers have more advanced interfaces and parents (often) know how to use them there need to be new sets of learning tools for kids.
Lego had an excellent, intuitive, graphical programming interface for programming their Lego brick robots; I imagine that by now it's even more advanced. Programming is a great exercise for kids and there are more and more accessible tools out there to make it possible. Now that more accessible tools exist, we should help kids embrace them rather than think it's such a shame that they don't have an Apple ][e because it was way more l33t than what's out there now. I'd love to see more open-source graphical languages designed for kids to learn programming.
Perhaps I'm being to generous to the EFF lawyers, but it looks like they're using the $400,000 as a deterrent to rights-violating fraudulent DMCA take-downs. Sure, padding their pockets is a great side-effect, but a large financial slap in the face to online rights abusers is well within the stated mission goal of the EFF. I don't much like the thought of indie musicians getting hit upside the head with half a million dollar lawyer's fees, but the cause of stemming the flow of indiscriminate DMCA notices may be worth the risk.
I think a judge should be able to weigh the ability of defendant to pay against the abuse of the DMCA. A record label that has repeated violated the spirit of the DMCA and shows no signs of stopping is a good candidate for a full lawyers fee; hopefully a more reasonable agreement could be reached if the notice was a one time accident. There is some discretion within such rulings.
I question whether the net should be truly neutral. Favoring Skype and game traffic for short latency wouldn't have much impact on the bandwidth available to streaming content but would certainly improve the quality of gaming and chatting. It seems to me that integrating a packet priority request into the TCP/IP protocol could work. Games and Skype could be given a high priority, browsing medium and torrents low. People who browse and torrent at the same time (or for some reason game and torrent) would have good reason not to override the default priorities. Anyone downloading GBs of data at high priorities by hacking the default settings could be noticed quickly sanctioned appropriately for being a**holes. It would relieve ISPs of excuses for throttling (or at least make the throttling more transparent and remove the need for privacy-invading deep packet inspection).
The key would be to integrate it into an open standard. I imagine the idea has already been put forth before, but it strikes me that it will be increasing important to have some priority control as the number of latency critical applications as well as streaming content size increases. It would essentially be an open implementation of the "power boost" that some ISPs offer but rely on user-side requests to sort out priorities. Of course, I have no real knowledge of the TCP/IP protocol so I have no idea if it's feasible or even if it's already implemented.
The voters want more services, more freedoms, less violence and no taxes; don't listen to them. Upholding the law, even when it's un-popular, is the right thing to do. I'm deliberately playing the devil's advocate a bit here (I too think that the damages awarded are unfair) but it should be pointed out that the article cites a source from p2pnet and is perhaps not the most unbiased interpretation of the law.
The law must be balanced to accommodate the rights of all parties involved, even if they're a**holes (Big Content). Don't get me wrong, I do hold that the damages are excessive, I just feel that the rights of "the voters" must be balanced with the rights of Big Content and p2pnet may not be a particularly balanced source.
In one respect, that's certainly true; that is what they're selling for revenue. What the reader is paying to read, however, is also a product (and is of fine quality). The trick is that ad revenues online are an odd thing.
The price to deliver the content is very low and has enormous economies of scale but the revenue per copy is painfully low. They need to attract a very large user base to make ad revenues economical or charge a smaller user base directly. I think that only the former option is viable for an organisation the size of the NYT but a fee system will crush that option.
My feeling is that the price-per-view for online ads will increase as credible online content becomes more prolific and the economies of scale will be sufficient to sustain high revenues (case-in-point: Google). The profit model is only viable for a very large user base or very low operating costs. The NYT has huge operating costs and doesn't, at the moment, have the user base to sustain it.
You say that as if they're offering a public service and the management is trying to skim a little of the top for themselves. The fact is, they're a publicly traded company (or are owned by one) and have a responsibility to the share-holders to make as much money as possible. Why would you ever expect a company to not make the most money possible within the confines of ethical business practice?
The question is simply whether an online pay system will work. The product is certainly of high quality but ad revenues seem to work better online.
How long before HTML5/SVG next-generation browsers [...] completely supplant Flash and Silverlight/Moonlight?"
I can't offer any informed opinion on that, but I can say that Flash and Silverlight/Moonlight will go down kicking and screaming. Much like the IE6 optimized websites that will continue to use them for many years to come.
Usually a trip to the author's website will serve to get you pdf generated from the same source sent to the journal. If not, e-mail the author; they love it when people read their work.
I think that's correct. You can generate a pdf of the exact article that the journal has and distribute it freely because you retain the rights to the content. The exact formatting, however, is copyrighted exclusively by the journal so you can't distribute the pdf you get from their website.
No, copyright transfer is very odd for journals. The author retains the right to print the article for personal distribution (you can always find a pdf on the author's website) and distribution of pre-prints is fine. I believe that the journal does hold the copyright, but certain exceptions are included in the transfer paperwork so there's no breach of copyright. Furthermore, images can be usually copied with consent of the author, not the journal (except art supplied by the journal, such as covers).
You can't make a copy of the journal article, but the author can make one for you and send it to you. It's an odd system, but journals are very concerned about their "impact factor," the average number of times that an article in that journal gets cited by other articles. Free distribution of articles helps get citations, which increases the impact factor. Journals just don't want people to freely copy the entire contents of the journal. In any case, they make most of their money by selling site subscriptions to universities.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, they would certainly use it as an excuse to jack up prices. They'd complain that government meddling only hurts the consumer and raise prices through the roof to ensure that that's the case.
I do think that the internet should be considered a basic utility and that internet access should be guaranteed like water and electricity; however, I think that the right to online access ends at e-mail and Slashdot. 100 Mb/s is nice, but I'd say 1 Mb/s would be more appropriate for a mandated rate goal.
Porting a game is an enormous undertaking. Writing a game to be cross-platform from the get-go by using openGL might be an option but video drivers aren't the only problem, Linux has big problems regarding consistent audio frameworks across all distributions. Games work well under Windows because Windows is inherently monolithic whereas Linux is inherently modular. The monolithic nature of the Windows API cuts costs by guaranteeing that a game will work on every Windows machine (excepting odd circumstances and anything too old for the current DirectX).
The marvelous thing about Linux is the modularity; complex tasks are handled by simple, effective tools that are appropriately strung together. It's the modularity as much as the openness that defines Linux. It's that modularity leads to very difficult game development. Reducing the ecosystem of tools and configurations to a canonical (ha ha) set might make game development viable on Linux, but would be the antithesis of the Linux philosophy.
Presumably Microsoft employees do look at the source code but some days I have my doubts. (I'm kidding of course)
Absolutely right. The author seems to be making the argument a lack of pay implies a lack of skill.
From the article:
According to Cowan, who is now a Security Program Manager for Windows, “the scientific conclusion of Sardonix is that auditing is both demanding of high skill and tedious, and so karma/reputation/good will is not enough to motivate people to do it. You must pay them to do it, precisely as Microsoft does.
The author is right that the "many eyeballs" scheme needs skilled eyeballs to work, but assumes that the only way to get good people on a project is by paying them. It seems odd that an article that tries so hard to provide a compelling argument makes such a poorly backed assumption. It's certainly true that good people need to be payed, but they can be paid to work on free software or write free software in their spare time; both cases have many examples.
Oh, of course. In any non-trivial piece of software it's extremely difficult to write code that is robust against absolutely any input. Ideally, all programs would be formally verified to be bug free, but practically that's an intractable task. Luckily, I don't intend to ever write code that will be used by 100000000's of users (unless I get around to trying to contribute to an open-source project in my spare time...help squash a few more bugs in the battle).
That's simply not true. Proper, bug-free code should fail gracefully in the event of odd user behavior. It may be that random mashing of the keyboard will give the user some unexpected results but it should never cause the program to go into a state that it was not designed to go into, such as trying to access 0x00000000.
I wish summary articles were written so that most people could understand the terms used.
The trouble is that 10^-27 isn't a tremendously intuitive number. Even being extremely familiar with scientific notation, the magnitude is so small that it really defies any intuitive sense of scale. GeV may not be nearly as familiar as kg but eV (electron volts) are an appropriate unit when dealing with particle energies and so are used in most articles regarding accelerators. Given the choice, I would take eV so that people who are following the progress of the LHC and Tevatron colliders can compare between articles.
I'm not allowed to view a site that doesn't appear to be breaking any laws.
You haven't read /b/, have you?
I'm surprised I had to scroll down so far before I hit a recommendation to use TeX. I would agree that it's the only way to effectively take notes on a math-oriented course and, if you're a grad student, has the benefit of getting a start on material that can be used in your thesis. I still use a pen and paper, but if a course had enough content that was relevant to my thesis I would definitely go for LaTeX.
From the abstract of the article:
Protocols of quantum energy teleportation (QET), while retaining causality and local energy conservation, enable the transportation of energy from a subsystem of a many-body quantum system to a distant subsystem by local operations and classical communication through ground-state entanglement.
There's an important line in there: while retaining [...] local energy conservation. What lies at the heart of the proposal is that the measurement devices add or remove energy from the system that they are measuring. The energy is in no way removed from one location and given to another, spatially distant, location. What happens, is that a measurement device at one location gains energy from the quantum system and, based on the outcome of that measurement, the measurement device at the second location can be configured to lose energy into the quantum system at that location.
The thing to take away is that no energy is lost or gained at either location. Instead, the measurement devices at each location gain or lose energy to compensate changes in the energy of the system. This proposal is in no way a method to teleport energy in the intuitive sense; the total energy of the quantum system and measurement device at each end is conserved. The notion that measuring a system changes the energy of the state is very fundamental in quantum mechanics and is well understood. Honestly, there's nothing particularly new about it and the paper doesn't appear to be written to be submitted to a major journal.
This reinforces my opinion that people need to stop submitting papers they find on arXiv, especially single-author papers.
To make it worse, he has no excuse. The music industry does, they were the first to miss the boat on digital content. The movie industry should have caught on, but somehow didn't. The publishers should really have been able to figure it out; they had fair warning and opportunity and, seemingly, just couldn't connect the dots.
Big Content screwed up and is on the way out no matter how much they complain. Books are absolutely here to stay, but the profit model is shifting. Hopefully the huge economies of scale afforded by e-Books will allow the authors to profit more than under the current model. In any case, Amazon is sure to come out on top for the near future.
It depends on the e-mail. You receive 2 demerits for each grammatical error; if you rack up 8, it's a suspension. You now have 2 for failing to begin a sentence with a capital letter. Of course, use of "cuz" (because) or "u" (you) will result in the immediate loss of the license and posting a lolcat is punishable by a maximum of 10 years in prison.
I agree. Posting a link to a third-hand source should get you a demerit on your internet licence.
the skill set required for someone to get a Ph.D in any given field has very little correlation with the skillsets required for such tasks as dressing oneself, attending to personal hygeine, or speaking in coherent sentences
That's utterly false. Only the most Mickey-Mouse universities would award a Ph.D to someone who couldn't effectively write a dissertation or academic paper. The ability to effectively communicate is critical for academics and they are, in general, very well-spoken individuals who can clearly express ideas both within and outside their area of expertise. Good scientific writing requires clear, concise and understandable grammar.
Gud luck gettn' funding w/ bad grammar ;-)
Don't get me wrong, I have a long list of complaints about locking users out of the systems they buy, but the iP* (Phone, Pod, Pad) aren't intended as general-purpose computing devices and aren't really suitable for learning to tinker with code. OS X is much less restricted. I think that Apple's exclusion of simple development software from base installs is more a reflection of computing coming into the mainstream than a real change in the ideology in Apple management. People don't want to have to tinker at the command line anymore (except /.ers) but development tools and learning tools still exist and they can be installed on a MacBook.
Right. The iPod and (I think) the iPad are communications tools; they would be miserable development packages no matter what software was loaded onto them.
As for teaching tinkering to kids, I think that the situation has changed from when we (most of us) were young. Computers were as new to parents as they were to kids and there was more expectation that you had to use a command line to get things to work. The whole environment promoted either tinkering or giving up on the whole experience. Now that computers have more advanced interfaces and parents (often) know how to use them there need to be new sets of learning tools for kids.
Lego had an excellent, intuitive, graphical programming interface for programming their Lego brick robots; I imagine that by now it's even more advanced. Programming is a great exercise for kids and there are more and more accessible tools out there to make it possible. Now that more accessible tools exist, we should help kids embrace them rather than think it's such a shame that they don't have an Apple ][e because it was way more l33t than what's out there now. I'd love to see more open-source graphical languages designed for kids to learn programming.
Perhaps I'm being to generous to the EFF lawyers, but it looks like they're using the $400,000 as a deterrent to rights-violating fraudulent DMCA take-downs. Sure, padding their pockets is a great side-effect, but a large financial slap in the face to online rights abusers is well within the stated mission goal of the EFF. I don't much like the thought of indie musicians getting hit upside the head with half a million dollar lawyer's fees, but the cause of stemming the flow of indiscriminate DMCA notices may be worth the risk.
I think a judge should be able to weigh the ability of defendant to pay against the abuse of the DMCA. A record label that has repeated violated the spirit of the DMCA and shows no signs of stopping is a good candidate for a full lawyers fee; hopefully a more reasonable agreement could be reached if the notice was a one time accident. There is some discretion within such rulings.
I question whether the net should be truly neutral. Favoring Skype and game traffic for short latency wouldn't have much impact on the bandwidth available to streaming content but would certainly improve the quality of gaming and chatting. It seems to me that integrating a packet priority request into the TCP/IP protocol could work. Games and Skype could be given a high priority, browsing medium and torrents low. People who browse and torrent at the same time (or for some reason game and torrent) would have good reason not to override the default priorities. Anyone downloading GBs of data at high priorities by hacking the default settings could be noticed quickly sanctioned appropriately for being a**holes. It would relieve ISPs of excuses for throttling (or at least make the throttling more transparent and remove the need for privacy-invading deep packet inspection).
The key would be to integrate it into an open standard. I imagine the idea has already been put forth before, but it strikes me that it will be increasing important to have some priority control as the number of latency critical applications as well as streaming content size increases. It would essentially be an open implementation of the "power boost" that some ISPs offer but rely on user-side requests to sort out priorities. Of course, I have no real knowledge of the TCP/IP protocol so I have no idea if it's feasible or even if it's already implemented.
The voters want more services, more freedoms, less violence and no taxes; don't listen to them. Upholding the law, even when it's un-popular, is the right thing to do. I'm deliberately playing the devil's advocate a bit here (I too think that the damages awarded are unfair) but it should be pointed out that the article cites a source from p2pnet and is perhaps not the most unbiased interpretation of the law.
The law must be balanced to accommodate the rights of all parties involved, even if they're a**holes (Big Content). Don't get me wrong, I do hold that the damages are excessive, I just feel that the rights of "the voters" must be balanced with the rights of Big Content and p2pnet may not be a particularly balanced source.
In one respect, that's certainly true; that is what they're selling for revenue. What the reader is paying to read, however, is also a product (and is of fine quality). The trick is that ad revenues online are an odd thing.
The price to deliver the content is very low and has enormous economies of scale but the revenue per copy is painfully low. They need to attract a very large user base to make ad revenues economical or charge a smaller user base directly. I think that only the former option is viable for an organisation the size of the NYT but a fee system will crush that option.
My feeling is that the price-per-view for online ads will increase as credible online content becomes more prolific and the economies of scale will be sufficient to sustain high revenues (case-in-point: Google). The profit model is only viable for a very large user base or very low operating costs. The NYT has huge operating costs and doesn't, at the moment, have the user base to sustain it.
If they don't it will be pretty greedy.
You say that as if they're offering a public service and the management is trying to skim a little of the top for themselves. The fact is, they're a publicly traded company (or are owned by one) and have a responsibility to the share-holders to make as much money as possible. Why would you ever expect a company to not make the most money possible within the confines of ethical business practice?
The question is simply whether an online pay system will work. The product is certainly of high quality but ad revenues seem to work better online.
How long before HTML5/SVG next-generation browsers [...] completely supplant Flash and Silverlight/Moonlight?"
I can't offer any informed opinion on that, but I can say that Flash and Silverlight/Moonlight will go down kicking and screaming. Much like the IE6 optimized websites that will continue to use them for many years to come.
Usually a trip to the author's website will serve to get you pdf generated from the same source sent to the journal. If not, e-mail the author; they love it when people read their work.
I think that's correct. You can generate a pdf of the exact article that the journal has and distribute it freely because you retain the rights to the content. The exact formatting, however, is copyrighted exclusively by the journal so you can't distribute the pdf you get from their website.
No, copyright transfer is very odd for journals. The author retains the right to print the article for personal distribution (you can always find a pdf on the author's website) and distribution of pre-prints is fine. I believe that the journal does hold the copyright, but certain exceptions are included in the transfer paperwork so there's no breach of copyright. Furthermore, images can be usually copied with consent of the author, not the journal (except art supplied by the journal, such as covers).
You can't make a copy of the journal article, but the author can make one for you and send it to you. It's an odd system, but journals are very concerned about their "impact factor," the average number of times that an article in that journal gets cited by other articles. Free distribution of articles helps get citations, which increases the impact factor. Journals just don't want people to freely copy the entire contents of the journal. In any case, they make most of their money by selling site subscriptions to universities.