How does it make sense to ban a functional technology? I prefer the light given off by an incandescent bulb. If it uses more energy, it's my prerogative to pay for it. I don't see why the government should have a hand in deciding what kind of bulb I buy. The free market should dictate that.
It makes sense because with a government-guaranteed demand for CFL, producers are going to
spend more on producing exactly the temperature the consumer wants, because the know
they will be bought. That's free market for you.
How the hell is this a factor? Its not like if you get an eBook you suddenly can't use a library. If you buy an eBook reader - guess what? - the thousands of books for free at the library are still there!
Not true. If the proponents of eBooks had it their way, over time normal books would be phased out. And once no one remembers how great it was to borrow from thousands of books for a flat rate, it becomes much easier to have libraries outlawed. Do not think I'm joking - publishers would love to see that happen.
From the article, they claim, "...Snow told investigating agents that she and Dooley were standing in the driveway on November 8 and "taking turns shining the laser around watching the tracers in the sky.""
If they are telling the truth, then this was a horrible accident.
Assuming they didn't hear an approaching helicopter, which is kind of hard to believe.
If you include behaviour-changing changes into publicly distributed code without re-testing it, then that is MOST DEFINITELYa QA problem. As in, "no QA at all".
Basic research often has no short term value that we can see. A hundred years ago a couple of guys tried to measure our speed through the "ether". They found that there was no ether. This lead to the idea that light must travel at the same speed no matter what reference frame you're in. This (and a few other things) lead to the ideas of quantum physics. This ultimately lead to several inventions already with many more on the way.
I hereby nominate this last line for understatement of the month.
There have been attempts to reform German spelling, and they have not entirely caught on. This is despite a few advantages that attempt has over any potential English spelling reform: 1) There are recognized organizations responsible for the language, at least officially, and they got together in a big conference, agreed upon it, and got all the relevant governments to agree; and 2) the reform was relatively minor, not nearly as enormous a deviation from established spelling norms as these proposed English reforms.
Part of the reason why both experts and laypeople are unenthusiastic about the reform is that it is too minor. Originally, it was supposed to abolish capitalization of nouns (German is the only language in the world doing this), and things like the weird German letter, ß. But instead it ended up just fussing about with the capitalization of adjectives, some of which are now capitalized where they weren't and vice versa; and ß has been replaced by ss in some contexts but not in others. In both cases the new rules are arguably more difficult to follow than before. All this was the result of years of compromise between the German-speaking countries involved (yes, there is more than one).
Or when you click on a tab, it doesn't "release" fast enough, and start moving the tab around?
Why do GUIs behave that way anyway? I mean, why should the action behind a widget be triggered by releasing my finger instead of by pressing it?
Every physical button in the world is triggered by press events (except perhaps landmines... but I may just have been watching too many war movies), so GUI buttons should do the same thing - it would occasion the least surprise, and completely eliminate this problem even on the slowest machine.
But no, all GUI toolkits I know wait for the release event, and some even suppress the action unless you release in the exact same place where you pressed. Is there an arcane usability reason why I'm supposed to prefer the unintuitive behaviour? Is it just in case I should change my mind in the split second before releasing? I would gladly give up that capability to be able to perform faster clicks.
1. There can be no algorithm that can compress every stream by a constant factor, let alone by 25. Whoever says otherwise is mistaken or lying.
2. Achievable compression depends on the nature of the input material. Big files (music, movies) these days are already compressed by their respective codecs, so they compress really badly.
3. While there are algorithms that, on average, compress better than others, usually this is paid for by running slower, often much, much slower.
Or... if you still like the artists but hate the RIAA, buy the CD used. No more money goes back to the RIAA and you still have the CD.
This is such a misconception. Buying used CDs contributes to a demand for them. This makes people more inclined to buy new CDs, since they can be resold relatively easily. Just consider how much more willing people are nowadays to buy the latest gadget of the year, just because they know they can offload it on eBay next year with no trouble.
Good point. A well-written money management app would implement its own widget toolkit, graphing engine, database backend, network stack, C library, and floating point handler. After all, why leverage the work of thousands of others when you can re-write it all, poorly, yourself?
You have something of a point -- but when the developers themselves explicitly use words like "nightmare" and "even with apt-get, some packages may still need to be installed manually", re-use has definitely been taken too far.
When you know how to spot it, it become blatantly obvious: product identifiers become non-words or just short strings of digits so the manufacturer's name will again become part of product mentions. Auto manufacturers have known this for decades. Remember when the "Legend" and "Vigor" brands disappeared in favor of the "Acura TL" and "Acura RL?" Acura learned form what BMW, Mercedes, and others knew for years. You don't drive a 323i or a C350, you drive a BMW 323i or a Mercedes C350. Only when in-context do the models become shortened to their simple model names or series/class name. Now Intel's following this path.
Except that they are simultaneously dropping the ubiquitous "Intel inside" in favor of "Leap ahead", so they are decreasing our exposure to the company name.
No, it is not reasonable, because the world changes.
Some people write books to make money. Some people write books because it satisfies them personally. Back when book copying was infeasibly expensive, both of them had an incentive for continuing to write. Now that copying has become feasibly cheap, those that write only for the money have less of an incentive, and that is as should be (cue Heinlein quote).
Establishing artificial restrictions on copying in order to prop up a failed incentive is ultimately wasteful.
The original article was on Google's potential use as a tool for ferreting out "private" information. Hence, Mr. Schmidt's "private" information would seem to be relevant as a compelling example of the problem.
No it bloody isn't. If you want to raise awareness about the dangers of handguns, you write that someone could commit crimes with a legally obtained handgun. You might even go so far as to obtain one legally, just to make your point. However, you would not go out and actually shoot anybody in order to spice up your stupid article!
Make up your mind - either making personal information available on the web is bad, in that case you should not hypocritically do it yourself. Or else it isn't, but then there wouldn't be much point to raising the question in the first place.
Bach was paid, throughout his career, to maintain an orderly music environment in whatever church, court etc. was paying his lunch at the time. Since it was customary for all musicians to compose music of their own, he often did so, but those were not the primary terms of any contract he ever entered. (He was, in fact, rebuked for playing accompaniments that were too audacious and complicated to actually accompany someone's singing, or producing works that were altogether too difficult for the intended performers.) He did write an almost incredible number of weekly cantatas for several years running while in Leipzig, but after too many lost battles with the philistines of the city council, he more or less stopped doing them and relied mostly on repeat performances or other composer's works. This was never a cause for complaint about him, although there was a lot of other complaint.
(Mozart was contractually employed to produce original music, but only part-time, and in the end not at all, which is why he died in poverty. Of course, today he would be a multi-millionaire just from the royalties of the G Major Serenade. Beethoven was the first composer to sustain himself by organizing his own public concerts, and even then it was not only his own works that were played.)
I think the parallel to software is rather neat: Bach was paid to perform music for church services (provide support), not for composing it (develop software). If he did create this huge body of original work it was because he liked doing it (and possibly because locating and copying some other work would arguably have been just as much work as penning a new one, at least to him). Oh, and nobody in their right mind would have thought of forbidding him to perform the same work somewhere else later (take software with you when you are fired). The only thing he couldn't have done was to dedicate a piece to one prince, then to another (re-license software that you have already explicitly sold the rights to).
More and more I think that theories in physics are nothing more than successive approximations and we'll never know the true nature of existence.
Actually it's like this in science generally.
"Progress in science does not consist of replacing a wrong theory with a correct theory, it is about replacing a theory that is wrong with one that is more subtly wrong." (somebody whose name escapes me at the moment, probably Asimov)
Any explanation of the world that purports to give the exact truth immediately is religion, not science.
Slashdot Mirror
It makes sense because with a government-guaranteed demand for CFL, producers are going to spend more on producing exactly the temperature the consumer wants, because the know they will be bought. That's free market for you.
How the hell is this a factor? Its not like if you get an eBook you suddenly can't use a library. If you buy an eBook reader - guess what? - the thousands of books for free at the library are still there!
Not true. If the proponents of eBooks had it their way, over time normal books would be phased out.
And once no one remembers how great it was to borrow from thousands of books for a flat rate,
it becomes much easier to have libraries outlawed. Do not think I'm joking - publishers would love
to see that happen.
From the article, they claim, "...Snow told investigating agents that she and Dooley were standing in the driveway on November 8 and "taking turns shining the laser around watching the tracers in the sky.""
If they are telling the truth, then this was a horrible accident.
Assuming they didn't hear an approaching helicopter, which is kind of hard to believe.
I wonder if there have ever been any research on whether self proclaimed audiophiles REALLY have magical hearing.
There has. They don't. They don't care. You won't convince them. Just let it go.
If you include behaviour-changing changes into publicly distributed code
without re-testing it, then that is MOST DEFINITELYa QA problem.
As in, "no QA at all".
[ ] You understand what `implement' means.
Some of the Bard's work was based on the work of other artists.
Actually, 35 of his 36 plays reuse plots from previously published works.
Disadvantages:
Paper pile. But need only until election is confirmed.
Dude, that is actually the single greatest advantage.
I hereby nominate this last line for understatement of the month.
There have been attempts to reform German spelling, and they have not entirely caught on. This is despite a few advantages that attempt has over any potential English spelling reform: 1) There are recognized organizations responsible for the language, at least officially, and they got together in a big conference, agreed upon it, and got all the relevant governments to agree; and 2) the reform was relatively minor, not nearly as enormous a deviation from established spelling norms as these proposed English reforms.
Part of the reason why both experts and laypeople are unenthusiastic about the reform is that it is too minor. Originally, it was supposed to abolish capitalization of nouns (German is the only language in the world doing this), and things like the weird German letter, ß.
But instead it ended up just fussing about with the capitalization of adjectives, some of which are now capitalized where they weren't and vice versa; and ß has been replaced by ss in some contexts but not in others. In both cases the new rules are arguably more difficult to follow than before. All this was the result of years of compromise between the German-speaking countries involved (yes, there is more than one).
Or when you click on a tab, it doesn't "release" fast enough, and start moving the tab around?
Why do GUIs behave that way anyway? I mean, why should the action behind a widget be triggered by releasing my finger instead of by pressing it?
Every physical button in the world is triggered by press events (except perhaps landmines... but I may just have been watching too many war movies), so GUI buttons should do the same thing - it would occasion the least surprise, and completely eliminate this problem even on the slowest machine.
But no, all GUI toolkits I know wait for the release event, and some even suppress the action unless you release in the exact same place where you pressed. Is there an arcane usability reason why I'm supposed to prefer the unintuitive behaviour? Is it just in case I should change my mind in the split second before releasing? I would gladly give up that capability to be able to perform faster clicks.
1. There can be no algorithm that can compress every stream by a constant factor, let alone by 25. Whoever says otherwise is mistaken or lying.
2. Achievable compression depends on the nature of the input material. Big files (music, movies) these days are already compressed by their respective codecs, so they compress really badly.
3. While there are algorithms that, on average, compress better than others, usually this is paid for by running slower, often much, much slower.
Mmmmmmh, salt.
Or... if you still like the artists but hate the RIAA, buy the CD used. No more money goes back to the RIAA and you still have the CD.
This is such a misconception. Buying used CDs contributes to a demand for them. This makes people more inclined to buy new CDs, since they can be resold relatively easily. Just consider how much more willing people are nowadays to buy the latest gadget of the year, just because they know they can offload it on eBay next year with no trouble.
Sorry, buying used CDs is not the answer.
Wikipedia to the rescue:
``The
EFI is one of the pieces of the framework necessary to implement Trusted Computing.''
Encouraging someone to commit suicide is equivalent to killing him.
I think the word you are looking for is related.
Good point. A well-written money management app would implement its own widget toolkit, graphing engine, database backend, network stack, C library, and floating point handler. After all, why leverage the work of thousands of others when you can re-write it all, poorly, yourself?
You have something of a point -- but when the developers themselves explicitly use words like "nightmare" and "even with apt-get, some packages may still need to be installed manually", re-use has definitely been taken too far.
When you know how to spot it, it become blatantly obvious: product identifiers become non-words or just short strings of digits so the manufacturer's name will again become part of product mentions. Auto manufacturers have known this for decades. Remember when the "Legend" and "Vigor" brands disappeared in favor of the "Acura TL" and "Acura RL?" Acura learned form what BMW, Mercedes, and others knew for years. You don't drive a 323i or a C350, you drive a BMW 323i or a Mercedes C350. Only when in-context do the models become shortened to their simple model names or series/class name. Now Intel's following this path.
Except that they are simultaneously dropping the ubiquitous "Intel inside" in favor of "Leap ahead", so they are decreasing our exposure to the company name.
No, it is not reasonable, because the world changes.
Some people write books to make money. Some people write books because
it satisfies them personally. Back when book copying was infeasibly
expensive, both of them had an incentive for continuing to write. Now
that copying has become feasibly cheap, those that write only for the
money have less of an incentive, and that is as should be (cue
Heinlein quote).
Establishing artificial restrictions on copying in order to prop up a
failed incentive is ultimately wasteful.
Make up your mind - either making personal information available on the web is bad, in that case you should not hypocritically do it yourself. Or else it isn't, but then there wouldn't be much point to raising the question in the first place.
Desmond Bagley: The Enemy. His best book by rather a long margin.
95% is recordings from my local classical music radio station.
5% comes from rips of my own CDs.
Needless to say, most of the CDs that I buy lately, I buy because I first heard extracts on the radio and liked them...
Not true.
Bach was paid, throughout his career, to maintain an orderly music
environment in whatever church, court etc. was paying his lunch at the
time. Since it was customary for all musicians to compose music of
their own, he often did so, but those were not the primary terms of
any contract he ever entered. (He was, in fact, rebuked for playing
accompaniments that were too audacious and complicated to actually
accompany someone's singing, or producing works that were altogether
too difficult for the intended performers.) He did write an almost
incredible number of weekly cantatas for several years running while
in Leipzig, but after too many lost battles with the philistines of
the city council, he more or less stopped doing them and relied mostly
on repeat performances or other composer's works. This was never a
cause for complaint about him, although there was a lot of other
complaint.
(Mozart was contractually employed to produce original music, but only
part-time, and in the end not at all, which is why he died in poverty.
Of course, today he would be a multi-millionaire just from the
royalties of the G Major Serenade. Beethoven was the first composer to
sustain himself by organizing his own public concerts, and even then
it was not only his own works that were played.)
I think the parallel to software is rather neat: Bach was paid to
perform music for church services (provide support), not for composing
it (develop software). If he did create this huge body of original
work it was because he liked doing it (and possibly because locating
and copying some other work would arguably have been just as much work
as penning a new one, at least to him). Oh, and nobody in their right
mind would have thought of forbidding him to perform the same work
somewhere else later (take software with you when you are fired). The
only thing he couldn't have done was to dedicate a piece to one
prince, then to another (re-license software that you have already
explicitly sold the rights to).
More and more I think that theories in physics are nothing more than successive approximations and we'll never know the true nature of existence.
Actually it's like this in science generally.
"Progress in science does not consist of replacing a wrong theory with a correct theory, it is about replacing a theory that is wrong with one that is more subtly wrong." (somebody whose name escapes me at the moment, probably Asimov)
Any explanation of the world that purports to give the exact truth immediately is religion, not science.