Yah, the proof of this is the very phenomena the poster is bemoaning.
If people cared enough about the loss of dynamic range to switch to vinyl as a result then they would care enough not to purchase the CDs that sacrificed dynamic range for a cheap loudness trick.
He is just pointing out that in fact you can take the same master recording and bump up the volume level before recording it on a record. He isn't disputing that this will be worse.
In other words there is exactly the same temptation for record manufacturers to bump up the volume on their products as well.
Trusted computing also enables a real market in CPU time. You can sell your spare processor cycles since the trusted machine can attest to the fact that this really was the result of the code you sent out. Similarly to have software agents that run on unknown people's servers this would be necessary.
It would also be useful to implement true ecash schemes and in allowing true p2p based virtual worlds/games with safegaurds against cheating.
In short the technology offers a lot more promise than mere security and eventually it is a good thing for everyone to have. In fact I think it potentially offers more benefits for a stable OS like linux than windows. You can't blame the technology for the fact that some idiots would have us use it for DRM or other customer control. The correct response is to embrace trusted computing and reject DRM...but in the real world perhaps it is better if we wait a bit longer for TC until the RIAA and other groups are forced to learn that selling music unprotected is the way to go.
This is a troubling policy. Frequently trademarked expressions are the only short common way to reference a particular organization. If that organization can block the use of that trademark in advertisements it can control a great deal of what is said about it. Sure individual blogs can do what they want as long as it is legal but even with the internet if you want your message to reach the people who aren't already believers you need a way to reach out to large numbers that don't regularly visit any site who will express your view for free and that means advertising.
One is tempted to blame google in this situation but I'm not really sure what else they could do. When they have sold keywords that were close to a trademark even when the ad itself contained no trademark they came in for a lot of criticism and even lawsuits. Moreover, I would guess (but can't be sure) that they would be at risk of being sued for trademark infringement if they allowed ads to keep running that were engaging in genuinely misleading usage.
Now you might think that google should just let ads like this one run but not ads that use the trademark for competitive advantage. However, not only would this be difficult and expensive it seems likely that google would be forced to rule on tough close choices not to mention keeping having experts in trademark law from all the countries the ad is going to run in examine the use. It would probably be better at this point for them to make an exception for political speech but this still doesn't solve all the difficulties. A much better solution would be to seek an international treaty on trademarks that lets intermediate companies like google step out of the way and requires any legal action to be brought directly against the advertiser.
It isn't like google is never biased. Their policy (or at least their TOS last time I looked) on what custom buttons for their toolbar they will put into their gallery is pretty bad. It lets you post search buttons for sites that advocate gun control but not for sites that advocate gun possession (presumably like the NRA). Still if they are telling the truth here I don't know if this is really one.
I doubt it. You trust the people to take the votes away somewhere and count them up. You probably don't have a clue who does the counting, where it is done, or how the counting machines work. I sure as hell don't.
The system we have now is just as non-transparent as all the good voting systems. The only real difference is that you are familiar and comfortable with one and not the other. That will change in time. Once various clever crypto systems become more familiar people won't need to look inside anymore than they need to know where their votes are counted. They will trust the assurances of people who do know that it all works.
Hell, with the right kind of homeomorphic encryption you can even verify that your vote was correctly counted, verify that it was included in the count correctly and pretty much see (with the help of a program) that everything went down as planned. Once people find this sort of computer aided crypto stuff more comfortabe it will be even more transparent than it is now.
Do you remember all the people who said they would never use ATMs b/c you didn't know how it worked and you didn't have a person there to be sure things didn't fuck up? Don't see many anymore.
No, the electoral college has important value besides merely respecting states rights. Hell, once we abandoned real electors and sworn electors were selected by popular vote arguably the electoral college does more to hurt state local interests than help since there is no need to fuss with states that are clearly in one column or the other.
The real benefit of the electoral college is to blunt the tendency of incomplete turn out to encourage extreme views. Notice that there are two ways to win elections: A) increase the percentage of people voting who choose you B) increase the percentage or people who want you who actually vote. We saw B used to great effect by Rove in recent elections but it's impact is somewhat blunted by the electoral college.
With the electoral college it doesn't matter how many extra votes you get out in a strong red/blue state it still counts the same. What matters is whether you can carry the moderate states. Thus there is less incentive to take extreme positions motivating turn out in the states that strongly support you and more to take the sorts of positions that will win in the moderate states. Sure there are still partisans of both stripes in every state but a republican in ohio isn't the same thing as a republican in Wyoming.
In my opinion the original founders were right and we should go back to a REAL electoral college.
As much as I don't like alot of the things that MS has done, and I dislike their corporate tactics but (for the most part) their OS is an honest attempt to solve the hard problem of remaining backward compatible while delievering a good GUI/OS. I might not buy Vista but it's no (extra) reason to hate on MS that they weren't able to deliver an elegant solution to this hard problem.
However, I DO hate people like this woman. There is a large segment of the population that feels inadequate and stupid when they can't use a computer and lashes out blaming whoever wrote the software. I fucking hate those people.
If you aren't good with computers that's fine. If you don't like a piece of software because it frustrates you then don't buy it (or return it) but it's pretty inexcusable to take it out on other people because you feel inadequate.
This is just patently false. Sentience merely refers to the fact that you have experiences, i.e., that it feels like something to be you. Almost certainly it feels like something to be a dog or a cow just as much as it does a human (they feel pain etc..) and surely children at the age of 4 have experiences. Some people even remember shit from back then (though not clinching proof). Don't make up facts to support the conclusions you like.
Ultimately the problem with the above argument is that it's not an argument at all. It's a way to manipulate your emotions and make you feel sad about something. It doesn't tell you anything about the relative merits of getting an not getting an abortion. I mean fuck with the right sort of sad story you can make people feel sorry for a fucking roomba (robot vaccuum) but that hardly shows that we shouldn't just throw the roomba out in the trash.
In my opinion the only philosophically consistant answer to the abortion question is to admit that there is nothing *fundamentally* different between killing a living fetus and choosing not to create one. Indeed there is nothing *fundamentally* wrong about even murder. What makes murder wrong is the fact that murders cause lots of other people suffering (friends, family of the victim) and create fear (I might be murdered too) and generally disrupt the social order. So long as society draw some bright line distinction about where it believes life begins and refuses to kill things on the wrong side of that distinction that's fine. The question is just where to draw the line. Since in general the psychological benefits to women of allowing them to have abortions as well as the benefits to society from not having unwanted children outweigh the suffering of people who feel sorry for fetuses birth is probably the best place to draw the line.
I know this is way offtopic but it just annoys me when people advance arguments they couldn't possibly really believe just to defend the result they want. Especially when I agree with the result.
Symmetric multiprocessing, or SMP, is a multiprocessor computer architecture where two or more identical processors are connected to a single shared main memory. Most common multiprocessor systems today use an SMP architecture.
SMP systems allow any processor to work on any task no matter where the data for that task are located in memory; with proper operating system support, SMP systems can easily move tasks between processors to balance the workload efficiently.
SMP refers to the fact that all the processors are identical and share the same memory (in contrast to NUMA designs like multi-chip Opteron systems). However, I've seen more and more people refering to cache coherent NUMA designs like multi-core opteron and the upcoming CSI based intel systems as SMP systems which, while a stretch of the definition, is at least reasonable.
Suggesting that SMP has anything to do with having an even number of processors is just DUMB. It may be the case that SMP systems usually have an even number of cores (I don't know) but that's not what the writeup or article seem to be saying.
Not that James Rigney died, I'm sure his family will miss him, but that someone else will finish the last book. Ohh and you **can't** doubt that it will be released, it's worth too much money to the publisher.
I mean I too have the feeling that somehow it doesn't 'count' if you hear someone else's end to the story but why? Sure you might say they didn't have the original vision but why should it matter? Maybe their vision of the ending is better. It's not like there aren't plenty of authors who give an unsatisfying ending where you (an amatuer) are sure you could have done better so why shouldn't you believe the expert responsible for finishing it up won't be just as good as whoever wrote them originally?
Luckily I think in this situation enough info was communicated to make this a non-issue. Though I've never gotten past book 9 or so.
I actually doubt that they have a legal case. Moreover, the slashdot/opensource/etc community should be strongly opposed to any court ruling which would ban this sort of behavior.
The relevant part of the license is the following:
You may not exercise any of the rights granted to You in Section 3 above in any manner that is primarily intended for or directed toward commercial advantage or private monetary compensation. The exchange of the Work for other copyrighted works by means of digital file-sharing or otherwise shall not be considered to be intended for or directed toward commercial advantage or private monetary compensation, provided there is no payment of any monetary compensation in connection with the exchange of copyrighted works.
For starters I don't like this wording at all. It grants a right that is conditioned on the intent of the entity exercising the license which makes it horribly vague. Now obviously this passage prohibits the sale of the material (e.g. give me five bucks I'll give you this content) but what this means for other uses (like advertising) is extremely problematic. Moreover, it would be very very harmful if the courts read this license to prohibit the use of the material in a way that lets one gain commercial benefits because of the mere interest and popularity of the work.
Suppose for instance a bunch of documentation is released under this licensce for some open source software. If any use requiring the license that is motivated by commercial advantage even if the compensation is only indirect is bared then IBM would be barred from paying some of it's employees from adding to the documentation on the wiki. Sure the result of their action is just to help the project like anyone else but they motivation is to gain commercial advantage by improving documentation for their customers (along with everyone else) and they had to use the license to make the modifications (derivative work). Nor could any such project be hosted on google code or take advantage of google's summer of code. After all google's motivation in both projects is to elevate their corporate image and thus give them a competitive advantage. Hell, even contributing to the project to impress your boss or to learn how to write/code so you can get a better job would be banned.
Of course you could try to weasel about the meaning of the word "primarily intended" to avoid these consequences but then companies like this could do the same. If you get to weasel on this word they can simply weasel and say something like "yes we want to make profit but our primary intention is just to provide a commercially stable distribution mechanism for this product and that requires being a profitable company." There just isn't any good way to distinguish using the copyright to draw page views which draw ad revenue from using the copyright to look good so you draw customers without explicit language in the license to make this distinction. You can't make the license mean "whatever I find objectionable is off limits."
Ultimately I think we are all better off if the non-commercial aspect of this license is interpreted narrowly, i.e, it stops you from charging admission to a play you are putting on with this material, putting it on a CD and charging for that CD or other direct exchanges of value for the work. As for what you do in situations like this one, you don't whine about it.
I understand the motivation for not wanting people to charge for your work or to otherwise turn your work into a commercial product but that's not what's happening here. Intuitively (though not legally) this company isn't behaving much differently than google (or slashdot in hosting our comments). They are aren't suggesting that the content isn't free or making sure you have to pay them for the work. They are just making a profit in return for hosting the material. If you don't like the ads the obvious solution is to set up an ad free alternative.
While I'm sure there are some interesting algorithms that can be used to manage hot spots and the like the shared world problem is only secondarily a tech problem.
The problem is a design resources and player density problem. The whole reason that players want to play on the same server is socialization but this runs the risk of everyone wanting to be in the same place. While crowds may make it self-controlling in some sense it will scuttle the feel of the small shop in the woods or tiny forest town if it is filled with 1000 adventurers. Worse it will just be frustrating because new shops and new services won't be built by people responding to the market and the difficulty of moving an avatar around compared to walking will be further frustrating.
Ultimately the real problem is that a good virtual world will have a certain optimal number of people per area. The price of running WoW if every server had to be replaced by an equivalent amount of NEW content would be stupendous. You can't just duplicate earlier content since that ruins the story and context. Worse it isn't even clear that with unlimited resources it is doable. After all the fifteenth lord of the underworld or whatever starts to get old. A world with too many ultimate locations gets silly.
It seems pretty obvious how pay stubs could contain private information. In addition to the salary they include information about deductions taken (from the withholding) that implicitly gives info about financial situation. Not to mention the possibility they include social security numbers, employee ID information or even deductions due to wage garnishment (lawsuit/divorce).
No, the people involved didn't give the best explanations but that's probably because they (wisely) decided to act before consulting their law books extensively. The right reason for asking these be taken down is for privacy concerns. As far as public employee salaries being public I'm not so sure it doesn't have a bunch of exceptions. I thought that in CA they exempted some employees (including police officers) recently but maybe I am misremembering.
In any case while I think there is some interest in having employee salaries available to the public (with exceptions when it is important for negotiations) I think it is reasonable to keep the pay stubs themselves offline unless they are carefully blacked out. This is exactly the reason FOIA requests exist and are reviewed before the info is published. At the very least given the permanent harm if IDs are stolen and the transitory harm if the people have to put the post back up in two days acting quickly doesn't seem so bad here.
And this is from someone who is pretty damn absolutist about free speech. I have some qualms with blackmail laws and right of publicity but given that the law wouldn't demand people be allowed to post a private employees full payroll info I don't see much harm in taking these down until things are figured out.
Obviously it's stupid to dismiss this guy as a crackpot.
However, I think people have a reasonable point in that even the most promising technologies only have a small chance of making it to market. There are just so many different possible ways that we might choose to improve on current storage requirements that any particular option is low likelihood. This is how Moore's law and the like continue to work even while individual projects have failures or bumps.
This having been said I don't see the motivation for the hate on this as being vaporware. It's just another possible way we might develop disk drives in the future being pursued by a clever researcher. *I* happen to find this interesting even though it will likely not be the way we do storage in the future.
I suspect sooner or later someone is going to get sued for blocking firefox under the americans with disability act. After all there has to be *some* disability out there that firefox makes it easier to work around.
"Fuck Islam" is no more hate speech than "Fuck Creationists" or "Fuck Republicans". They both are ways to express strong rejection of a certain belief system. Merely because people label their beliefs religious doesn't magically make them immune from criticism.
More precisely the concept of hate speech is incoherent. It is impossible to at once give a definition of hate speech that makes it clear why it is significantly worse than things like "Fuck Republicans" but yet also makes it obvious that the things termed hate speech, e.g., "Fuck Islam", qualify.
I agree that speech that involves the phrase "Fuck Islam" is more likely to be motivated by thoughtless prejudice than other sorts of speech but mere correlation doesn't get you very far. There is going to be a correlation between "Do you accept Jesus Christ as your personal savior" and ignorant prejudice as well but this doesn't make the statement of evangelical beliefs hate speech.
A religious belief is a belief like any other and it's explicit rejection of evidence or proof doesn't means if anything it deserves less protection from criticism than our other beliefs not more. Of course we need to combat hate directed against the people who are muslim, christian or whatever. The fact that they believe something stupid doesn't warrant hating them, most of us believe some stupid shit. However, the way to do this isn't to treat phrases criticizing the belief differently than phrases criticizing conservatism. That just encourages people.
I'm sad to see google giving in a situation that is obviously a matter of fair use.
However, unless the wire services are getting a fairly substantial *percentage* of the ad revenue they are the ones who are ending up as the losers. Sure had google merely licensed the content it would have been a victory for the wire services but the whole original detection bit is a stroke of genius. It may look like a nice gesture but the net effect will be to greatly reduce the value newspapers get from hosting wire service stories on their sites and thus reduce the number of clients for the wire services.
One can't reasonably deny the importance of incentivizing content production and that means we need to pay our artists somehow. Now I think the current copyright system has *huge* inefficencies. It stops people from using the content they purchased in the ways they want, it restricts derivitive works, it stops people from using content they can't track down the copyright holder. In short it sucks.
Now it's an unfortunate fact about human nature that if you don't punish people for crime they tend to do it. If you don't like the RIAA or similar organizations suing filesharers nor do you like ISPs restricting their ability to share what do you to make sure that content producers are incentivized to produce? If people can share music and movies without consequence eventually even the people who now insist on buying the works they like will stop. Sure there will be a long list of justifications and explanations (ohh, I didn't like it that much, why should I pay when everyone else isn't, I'd pay if they just made it easier) but no one is going to want to be the sucker paying for their music when no one else is doing so. This leaves you in a bind so what are you going to do.
In my opinion the right answer is much like a broadband access fee but more extreme. Content producers ought to be compensated by the government proportionally to the popularity (and perhaps surveys indicating need/appreciation) in return for putting their work in the public domain (in that country). Sure there are inefficiencies in this scheme but much less than in the current situation. No one is denied content because they can't afford it no one is barred from making derivative works. The scheme proposed here isn't anywhere near this but it seems a good first step.
What I want to know is if it is smart enough to distinguish edits that correct spelling and grammar mistakes from those that change content.
In particular I'm worried that the system will undervalue the information from people whose edits are frequently cleaned up by others even if that content is left unchanged.
Ohh I agree completely with you about the need to be suspicious of MS. Of course submitting the MS-PL to the OSI is a move on their part to sell more software, probably by encouraging more open source programmers/users to move to their platforms rather than going to linux.
I just don't think any of this has any relevance to the current issue. Yes, redhat, IBM and all the other open source vendors ought to be watching out for MS (not that they are all good either) and the FSF might want to make strategic moves to counter whatever MS is doing. However, the OSI's job is to judge their license to see if it meets open source standards and if it does approve it and whatever the motivations it's better to have MS releasing open source code than not.
To clarify I'm reacting against the attitude displayed in the linked article. I have no idea whether this truly captures the attitudes or complains of the people mentioned or the OSI.
Also I agree that there are genuine issues with the MS license that make it problematic to use. I fully support attempts by the OSI to work with MS on these issues but these problems don't mean it isn't an open source license, only that it could be a better licences. Naturally I hope MS can be persuaded to change the terms but I think reacting negatively rather than praising their (limited) step in the right direction of seeking OSI approval makes them less likely to change.
I don't like MS much but I have to say I'm on their side in this matter. They are submitting licensees for approval not asking OSI to support or approve of their broader business model. OSI needs to present itself as an impartial organization that will render fair objective verdicts about whether a license counts as open source whoever submits that license.
Besides, I think it creates all the wrong incentives when we give MS shit for improving its relation with open source. Admittedly maybe I'm a bit influenced here by this post by Miguel de Icaza's blog but I do get the sense that MS is being treated worse just because they are MS. Of course it's only natural for people in the open source community to want to get back at MS when they can given how MS is treating them but in the long run I think giving them grief over their attempts to open source stuff just contributes to the perception in MS that open source software is a fanatical rabid anti-capitalist movement not reasonable people making software they can work with and make compromises to.
I at least just really liked the idea of role playing a character who was a sword nerd, i.e., traveled to the best swordfighting schools etc.. etc..
However, it ruins the whole roleplaying aspect if your fighter who is supposed to be intelligent and dedicated to becoming a master of the art finds himself always inferior to huge burly tanks.
Exactly what I'm saying is that I think the rules need to be changed when they interfere with my roleplaying. Especially when what one wants to roleplay is a fairly common archetype.
Slashdot Mirror
Yah, the proof of this is the very phenomena the poster is bemoaning.
If people cared enough about the loss of dynamic range to switch to vinyl as a result then they would care enough not to purchase the CDs that sacrificed dynamic range for a cheap loudness trick.
How are you disagreeing.
He is just pointing out that in fact you can take the same master recording and bump up the volume level before recording it on a record. He isn't disputing that this will be worse.
In other words there is exactly the same temptation for record manufacturers to bump up the volume on their products as well.
Trusted computing also enables a real market in CPU time. You can sell your spare processor cycles since the trusted machine can attest to the fact that this really was the result of the code you sent out. Similarly to have software agents that run on unknown people's servers this would be necessary.
It would also be useful to implement true ecash schemes and in allowing true p2p based virtual worlds/games with safegaurds against cheating.
In short the technology offers a lot more promise than mere security and eventually it is a good thing for everyone to have. In fact I think it potentially offers more benefits for a stable OS like linux than windows. You can't blame the technology for the fact that some idiots would have us use it for DRM or other customer control. The correct response is to embrace trusted computing and reject DRM...but in the real world perhaps it is better if we wait a bit longer for TC until the RIAA and other groups are forced to learn that selling music unprotected is the way to go.
This is a troubling policy. Frequently trademarked expressions are the only short common way to reference a particular organization. If that organization can block the use of that trademark in advertisements it can control a great deal of what is said about it. Sure individual blogs can do what they want as long as it is legal but even with the internet if you want your message to reach the people who aren't already believers you need a way to reach out to large numbers that don't regularly visit any site who will express your view for free and that means advertising.
One is tempted to blame google in this situation but I'm not really sure what else they could do. When they have sold keywords that were close to a trademark even when the ad itself contained no trademark they came in for a lot of criticism and even lawsuits. Moreover, I would guess (but can't be sure) that they would be at risk of being sued for trademark infringement if they allowed ads to keep running that were engaging in genuinely misleading usage.
Now you might think that google should just let ads like this one run but not ads that use the trademark for competitive advantage. However, not only would this be difficult and expensive it seems likely that google would be forced to rule on tough close choices not to mention keeping having experts in trademark law from all the countries the ad is going to run in examine the use. It would probably be better at this point for them to make an exception for political speech but this still doesn't solve all the difficulties. A much better solution would be to seek an international treaty on trademarks that lets intermediate companies like google step out of the way and requires any legal action to be brought directly against the advertiser.
It isn't like google is never biased. Their policy (or at least their TOS last time I looked) on what custom buttons for their toolbar they will put into their gallery is pretty bad. It lets you post search buttons for sites that advocate gun control but not for sites that advocate gun possession (presumably like the NRA). Still if they are telling the truth here I don't know if this is really one.
I doubt it. You trust the people to take the votes away somewhere and count them up. You probably don't have a clue who does the counting, where it is done, or how the counting machines work. I sure as hell don't.
The system we have now is just as non-transparent as all the good voting systems. The only real difference is that you are familiar and comfortable with one and not the other. That will change in time. Once various clever crypto systems become more familiar people won't need to look inside anymore than they need to know where their votes are counted. They will trust the assurances of people who do know that it all works.
Hell, with the right kind of homeomorphic encryption you can even verify that your vote was correctly counted, verify that it was included in the count correctly and pretty much see (with the help of a program) that everything went down as planned. Once people find this sort of computer aided crypto stuff more comfortabe it will be even more transparent than it is now.
Do you remember all the people who said they would never use ATMs b/c you didn't know how it worked and you didn't have a person there to be sure things didn't fuck up? Don't see many anymore.
No, the electoral college has important value besides merely respecting states rights. Hell, once we abandoned real electors and sworn electors were selected by popular vote arguably the electoral college does more to hurt state local interests than help since there is no need to fuss with states that are clearly in one column or the other.
The real benefit of the electoral college is to blunt the tendency of incomplete turn out to encourage extreme views. Notice that there are two ways to win elections: A) increase the percentage of people voting who choose you B) increase the percentage or people who want you who actually vote. We saw B used to great effect by Rove in recent elections but it's impact is somewhat blunted by the electoral college.
With the electoral college it doesn't matter how many extra votes you get out in a strong red/blue state it still counts the same. What matters is whether you can carry the moderate states. Thus there is less incentive to take extreme positions motivating turn out in the states that strongly support you and more to take the sorts of positions that will win in the moderate states. Sure there are still partisans of both stripes in every state but a republican in ohio isn't the same thing as a republican in Wyoming.
In my opinion the original founders were right and we should go back to a REAL electoral college.
If the only concern is non-intentional errors introduced by hardware (or software) then a simple hash should be effective.
As much as I don't like alot of the things that MS has done, and I dislike their corporate tactics but (for the most part) their OS is an honest attempt to solve the hard problem of remaining backward compatible while delievering a good GUI/OS. I might not buy Vista but it's no (extra) reason to hate on MS that they weren't able to deliver an elegant solution to this hard problem.
However, I DO hate people like this woman. There is a large segment of the population that feels inadequate and stupid when they can't use a computer and lashes out blaming whoever wrote the software. I fucking hate those people.
If you aren't good with computers that's fine. If you don't like a piece of software because it frustrates you then don't buy it (or return it) but it's pretty inexcusable to take it out on other people because you feel inadequate.
That's almost certainly because that is a fully integer calculation rather than a floating point calculation.
This is just patently false. Sentience merely refers to the fact that you have experiences, i.e., that it feels like something to be you. Almost certainly it feels like something to be a dog or a cow just as much as it does a human (they feel pain etc..) and surely children at the age of 4 have experiences. Some people even remember shit from back then (though not clinching proof). Don't make up facts to support the conclusions you like.
Ultimately the problem with the above argument is that it's not an argument at all. It's a way to manipulate your emotions and make you feel sad about something. It doesn't tell you anything about the relative merits of getting an not getting an abortion. I mean fuck with the right sort of sad story you can make people feel sorry for a fucking roomba (robot vaccuum) but that hardly shows that we shouldn't just throw the roomba out in the trash.
In my opinion the only philosophically consistant answer to the abortion question is to admit that there is nothing *fundamentally* different between killing a living fetus and choosing not to create one. Indeed there is nothing *fundamentally* wrong about even murder. What makes murder wrong is the fact that murders cause lots of other people suffering (friends, family of the victim) and create fear (I might be murdered too) and generally disrupt the social order. So long as society draw some bright line distinction about where it believes life begins and refuses to kill things on the wrong side of that distinction that's fine. The question is just where to draw the line. Since in general the psychological benefits to women of allowing them to have abortions as well as the benefits to society from not having unwanted children outweigh the suffering of people who feel sorry for fetuses birth is probably the best place to draw the line.
I know this is way offtopic but it just annoys me when people advance arguments they couldn't possibly really believe just to defend the result they want. Especially when I agree with the result.
SMP refers to the fact that all the processors are identical and share the same memory (in contrast to NUMA designs like multi-chip Opteron systems). However, I've seen more and more people refering to cache coherent NUMA designs like multi-core opteron and the upcoming CSI based intel systems as SMP systems which, while a stretch of the definition, is at least reasonable.
Suggesting that SMP has anything to do with having an even number of processors is just DUMB. It may be the case that SMP systems usually have an even number of cores (I don't know) but that's not what the writeup or article seem to be saying.
Not that James Rigney died, I'm sure his family will miss him, but that someone else will finish the last book. Ohh and you **can't** doubt that it will be released, it's worth too much money to the publisher.
I mean I too have the feeling that somehow it doesn't 'count' if you hear someone else's end to the story but why? Sure you might say they didn't have the original vision but why should it matter? Maybe their vision of the ending is better. It's not like there aren't plenty of authors who give an unsatisfying ending where you (an amatuer) are sure you could have done better so why shouldn't you believe the expert responsible for finishing it up won't be just as good as whoever wrote them originally?
Luckily I think in this situation enough info was communicated to make this a non-issue. Though I've never gotten past book 9 or so.
The relevant part of the license is the following:
For starters I don't like this wording at all. It grants a right that is conditioned on the intent of the entity exercising the license which makes it horribly vague. Now obviously this passage prohibits the sale of the material (e.g. give me five bucks I'll give you this content) but what this means for other uses (like advertising) is extremely problematic. Moreover, it would be very very harmful if the courts read this license to prohibit the use of the material in a way that lets one gain commercial benefits because of the mere interest and popularity of the work.
Suppose for instance a bunch of documentation is released under this licensce for some open source software. If any use requiring the license that is motivated by commercial advantage even if the compensation is only indirect is bared then IBM would be barred from paying some of it's employees from adding to the documentation on the wiki. Sure the result of their action is just to help the project like anyone else but they motivation is to gain commercial advantage by improving documentation for their customers (along with everyone else) and they had to use the license to make the modifications (derivative work). Nor could any such project be hosted on google code or take advantage of google's summer of code. After all google's motivation in both projects is to elevate their corporate image and thus give them a competitive advantage. Hell, even contributing to the project to impress your boss or to learn how to write/code so you can get a better job would be banned.
Of course you could try to weasel about the meaning of the word "primarily intended" to avoid these consequences but then companies like this could do the same. If you get to weasel on this word they can simply weasel and say something like "yes we want to make profit but our primary intention is just to provide a commercially stable distribution mechanism for this product and that requires being a profitable company." There just isn't any good way to distinguish using the copyright to draw page views which draw ad revenue from using the copyright to look good so you draw customers without explicit language in the license to make this distinction. You can't make the license mean "whatever I find objectionable is off limits."
Ultimately I think we are all better off if the non-commercial aspect of this license is interpreted narrowly, i.e, it stops you from charging admission to a play you are putting on with this material, putting it on a CD and charging for that CD or other direct exchanges of value for the work. As for what you do in situations like this one, you don't whine about it.
I understand the motivation for not wanting people to charge for your work or to otherwise turn your work into a commercial product but that's not what's happening here. Intuitively (though not legally) this company isn't behaving much differently than google (or slashdot in hosting our comments). They are aren't suggesting that the content isn't free or making sure you have to pay them for the work. They are just making a profit in return for hosting the material. If you don't like the ads the obvious solution is to set up an ad free alternative.
While I'm sure there are some interesting algorithms that can be used to manage hot spots and the like the shared world problem is only secondarily a tech problem.
The problem is a design resources and player density problem. The whole reason that players want to play on the same server is socialization but this runs the risk of everyone wanting to be in the same place. While crowds may make it self-controlling in some sense it will scuttle the feel of the small shop in the woods or tiny forest town if it is filled with 1000 adventurers. Worse it will just be frustrating because new shops and new services won't be built by people responding to the market and the difficulty of moving an avatar around compared to walking will be further frustrating.
Ultimately the real problem is that a good virtual world will have a certain optimal number of people per area. The price of running WoW if every server had to be replaced by an equivalent amount of NEW content would be stupendous. You can't just duplicate earlier content since that ruins the story and context. Worse it isn't even clear that with unlimited resources it is doable. After all the fifteenth lord of the underworld or whatever starts to get old. A world with too many ultimate locations gets silly.
It seems pretty obvious how pay stubs could contain private information. In addition to the salary they include information about deductions taken (from the withholding) that implicitly gives info about financial situation. Not to mention the possibility they include social security numbers, employee ID information or even deductions due to wage garnishment (lawsuit/divorce).
No, the people involved didn't give the best explanations but that's probably because they (wisely) decided to act before consulting their law books extensively. The right reason for asking these be taken down is for privacy concerns. As far as public employee salaries being public I'm not so sure it doesn't have a bunch of exceptions. I thought that in CA they exempted some employees (including police officers) recently but maybe I am misremembering.
In any case while I think there is some interest in having employee salaries available to the public (with exceptions when it is important for negotiations) I think it is reasonable to keep the pay stubs themselves offline unless they are carefully blacked out. This is exactly the reason FOIA requests exist and are reviewed before the info is published. At the very least given the permanent harm if IDs are stolen and the transitory harm if the people have to put the post back up in two days acting quickly doesn't seem so bad here.
And this is from someone who is pretty damn absolutist about free speech. I have some qualms with blackmail laws and right of publicity but given that the law wouldn't demand people be allowed to post a private employees full payroll info I don't see much harm in taking these down until things are figured out.
Obviously it's stupid to dismiss this guy as a crackpot.
However, I think people have a reasonable point in that even the most promising technologies only have a small chance of making it to market. There are just so many different possible ways that we might choose to improve on current storage requirements that any particular option is low likelihood. This is how Moore's law and the like continue to work even while individual projects have failures or bumps.
This having been said I don't see the motivation for the hate on this as being vaporware. It's just another possible way we might develop disk drives in the future being pursued by a clever researcher. *I* happen to find this interesting even though it will likely not be the way we do storage in the future.
I suspect sooner or later someone is going to get sued for blocking firefox under the americans with disability act. After all there has to be *some* disability out there that firefox makes it easier to work around.
"Fuck Islam" is no more hate speech than "Fuck Creationists" or "Fuck Republicans". They both are ways to express strong rejection of a certain belief system. Merely because people label their beliefs religious doesn't magically make them immune from criticism.
More precisely the concept of hate speech is incoherent. It is impossible to at once give a definition of hate speech that makes it clear why it is significantly worse than things like "Fuck Republicans" but yet also makes it obvious that the things termed hate speech, e.g., "Fuck Islam", qualify.
I agree that speech that involves the phrase "Fuck Islam" is more likely to be motivated by thoughtless prejudice than other sorts of speech but mere correlation doesn't get you very far. There is going to be a correlation between "Do you accept Jesus Christ as your personal savior" and ignorant prejudice as well but this doesn't make the statement of evangelical beliefs hate speech.
A religious belief is a belief like any other and it's explicit rejection of evidence or proof doesn't means if anything it deserves less protection from criticism than our other beliefs not more. Of course we need to combat hate directed against the people who are muslim, christian or whatever. The fact that they believe something stupid doesn't warrant hating them, most of us believe some stupid shit. However, the way to do this isn't to treat phrases criticizing the belief differently than phrases criticizing conservatism. That just encourages people.
I'm sad to see google giving in a situation that is obviously a matter of fair use.
However, unless the wire services are getting a fairly substantial *percentage* of the ad revenue they are the ones who are ending up as the losers. Sure had google merely licensed the content it would have been a victory for the wire services but the whole original detection bit is a stroke of genius. It may look like a nice gesture but the net effect will be to greatly reduce the value newspapers get from hosting wire service stories on their sites and thus reduce the number of clients for the wire services.
One can't reasonably deny the importance of incentivizing content production and that means we need to pay our artists somehow. Now I think the current copyright system has *huge* inefficencies. It stops people from using the content they purchased in the ways they want, it restricts derivitive works, it stops people from using content they can't track down the copyright holder. In short it sucks.
Now it's an unfortunate fact about human nature that if you don't punish people for crime they tend to do it. If you don't like the RIAA or similar organizations suing filesharers nor do you like ISPs restricting their ability to share what do you to make sure that content producers are incentivized to produce? If people can share music and movies without consequence eventually even the people who now insist on buying the works they like will stop. Sure there will be a long list of justifications and explanations (ohh, I didn't like it that much, why should I pay when everyone else isn't, I'd pay if they just made it easier) but no one is going to want to be the sucker paying for their music when no one else is doing so. This leaves you in a bind so what are you going to do.
In my opinion the right answer is much like a broadband access fee but more extreme. Content producers ought to be compensated by the government proportionally to the popularity (and perhaps surveys indicating need/appreciation) in return for putting their work in the public domain (in that country). Sure there are inefficiencies in this scheme but much less than in the current situation. No one is denied content because they can't afford it no one is barred from making derivative works. The scheme proposed here isn't anywhere near this but it seems a good first step.
What I want to know is if it is smart enough to distinguish edits that correct spelling and grammar mistakes from those that change content.
In particular I'm worried that the system will undervalue the information from people whose edits are frequently cleaned up by others even if that content is left unchanged.
Ohh I agree completely with you about the need to be suspicious of MS. Of course submitting the MS-PL to the OSI is a move on their part to sell more software, probably by encouraging more open source programmers/users to move to their platforms rather than going to linux.
I just don't think any of this has any relevance to the current issue. Yes, redhat, IBM and all the other open source vendors ought to be watching out for MS (not that they are all good either) and the FSF might want to make strategic moves to counter whatever MS is doing. However, the OSI's job is to judge their license to see if it meets open source standards and if it does approve it and whatever the motivations it's better to have MS releasing open source code than not.
To clarify I'm reacting against the attitude displayed in the linked article. I have no idea whether this truly captures the attitudes or complains of the people mentioned or the OSI.
Also I agree that there are genuine issues with the MS license that make it problematic to use. I fully support attempts by the OSI to work with MS on these issues but these problems don't mean it isn't an open source license, only that it could be a better licences. Naturally I hope MS can be persuaded to change the terms but I think reacting negatively rather than praising their (limited) step in the right direction of seeking OSI approval makes them less likely to change.
I don't like MS much but I have to say I'm on their side in this matter. They are submitting licensees for approval not asking OSI to support or approve of their broader business model. OSI needs to present itself as an impartial organization that will render fair objective verdicts about whether a license counts as open source whoever submits that license.
Besides, I think it creates all the wrong incentives when we give MS shit for improving its relation with open source. Admittedly maybe I'm a bit influenced here by this post by Miguel de Icaza's blog but I do get the sense that MS is being treated worse just because they are MS. Of course it's only natural for people in the open source community to want to get back at MS when they can given how MS is treating them but in the long run I think giving them grief over their attempts to open source stuff just contributes to the perception in MS that open source software is a fanatical rabid anti-capitalist movement not reasonable people making software they can work with and make compromises to.
I at least just really liked the idea of role playing a character who was a sword nerd, i.e., traveled to the best swordfighting schools etc.. etc..
However, it ruins the whole roleplaying aspect if your fighter who is supposed to be intelligent and dedicated to becoming a master of the art finds himself always inferior to huge burly tanks.
Exactly what I'm saying is that I think the rules need to be changed when they interfere with my roleplaying. Especially when what one wants to roleplay is a fairly common archetype.