You know...an unrestricted internet is what we started out with, and that un-restriction is what allowed it to grow and thrive in such a short period of time (look at the vast difference between about say 1993 and 2013).
Or just because it's better, cars have always been heavily regulated but that didn't stop them replacing the horse and buggy in a relatively short time. Neither extreme with anarchy/free nor totalitarian/unfree sound like an ideal society to me, it is too simple to say more freedom is good and less freedom is bad. Should a bus company be free to decide that black people should ride in the back? Should we just drop all workplace health and safety regulations and just trust that workers will refuse to work under unsafe conditions? There's good kinds of free and there's bad kinds of free because it is also the ability for those with money, power, guns or a majority to abuse, discriminate and exploit those who don't have any choice or just many equally bad choices. In particular you see this anti-libertarian streak here whenever a big corporation tramples the little guy.
Today the police can with a warrant search my apartment, open my mail, listen to my phone calls. The average person can't tell but the police could with a warrant for the subscription info and a search find out who is hiding behind this alias. Is it an explicit goal to remove that possibility? That is to say, if it were possible to make the walls, doors and windows of my apartment invincible with an unbreakable lock that needs a key combination that would have to be pried from my mind in violation of the 5th amendment would that be a good thing? That instead of letters we'd send small, invincible safes? Make it impossible to listen in for anybody for any reason? Because this is the reality with full disk encryption, public key messaging, encrypted communication and enough proxy layers nobody can make heads or tails of it.
Perhaps it is a technical inevitability, but that doesn't really say anything about whether it's good or bad. It's certainly very much binary, those "special powers" we give the police and courts don't have much of an effect anymore since it's technically impossible but on the other hand going to the other extreme and opening it up is like demanding everyone live in glass houses, free for everyone to see everything. Neither of those options really seem palatable to the average person, yes they want digital freedom but not digital anarchy. And yes there is a difference just like between a free country and anarchy, it's just a lot harder to implement in a world of 0s and 1s.
There's nothing about the theory of evolution that implies the presence or absence of any god or gods.
Seriously? Sure it does nothing to prove or disprove the existence of divine beings in general, but it very clearly and directly contradicts the creation mythos as described in the Bible in all but the most liberal "it's all an analogy for God creating the world" interpretation. The existence of God (or Allah or Yahweh or whatever) is a metaphysical question far beyond the real of science, but all the religious texts like the Bible, Koran etc. make many real world claims that can be scientifically tested unless you use either the allegory loophole (anything written here need not be literal, but the religion as a whole is still true) or the metaphysical loophole (the dinosaur bones are put there by the Creator himself as a test of faith, the good book is right even when all evidence suggests it is wrong).
In any case, if you wanted reason instead of belief you didn't even have to go to evolution and all the controversy there. Go check out how many "Young Earth" geologists there are, even the most introductory textbook will wildly contradict any notion that earth is 6000 years old. In short, the only two reasons that allow people to hold such beliefs are blinding ignorance or unconditional faith, neither of which anyone could easily change. At least these days even the most religious diehards seem to finally accept that Earth is not flat nor the center of the universe, maybe in another 500 years we'll get rid of that silly "young earth" idea too. I think people would be far more open to evolution if you got them to accept that earth is millions of years old first, to some it seems easier to imagine we lived together with dinosaurs than just how long ago 65 million years is.
Most skills have some marginal crossover benefits, the question is rather what is the opportunity cost in time. Do you become a better programmer by learning a bit of law or more programming? Does the lawyer become a better lawyer by learning a bit of programming or more legal theory and case study? You need the width of knowledge to work with others, but you also need the depth to really know your stuff. Or rather I feel it's the other way around, if all you know is IT I can have a business-to-IT translator give you work but if you don't have any in-depth skill then you're almost usable to lots of things, but only almost. And if you got width and depth, well you're probably too busy even though you'd be perfect for my project too. It's a team sport, make the players you have exploit their strengths because you'll never get around to fixing all the weaknesses.
Idea is interesting, but it doesn't work under the current copyright law. The fact that anyone is downloading any material does not make that an infringement. "Making available" or sharing the copyrighted work is the only infringement that is a violation. In your case, only the server that hosts the file might be infringing on the copyright, not the people downloading.
Which law would that be? Not US law, not the way US courts rule. source:
We agree that plaintiffs have shown that Napster users infringe at least two of the copyright holders' exclusive rights: the rights of reproduction, 106(1); and distribution, 106(3). Napster users who upload file names to the search index for others to copy violate plaintiffs' distribution rights. Napster users who download files containing copyrighted music violate plaintiffs' reproduction rights.
In fact, it is far more debatable if "making available" is an infringement without proving actual instances of distribution.
I think you will find the robot manufacturing industry are in general held liable. Same with the fancy brain of your car or most medical equipment, the only things that get away wtih no liability are those that manipulate just bits and bytes and not real world objects. It just doesn't come free, I'd say most software, operating systems and hardware runs "good enough" for being COTS components that I mix and match as I please. If you want something certified to work and take the liability for it they'll want to control that stack very, very tightly.
That's quite frankly not something I see the value in. The likely outcome is that only vertical stacks like say the iPad offer liability protection, while your average application can't and won't take liability for any bugs in Microsoft's OS, your hardware's hardware drivers or whatever third-party libraries they use. Avionics doesn't get very far without an company like Airbus or Boeing on top taking the responsibility for the whole stack and the choices of airplane models are extremely limited, is that really a good model for computers?
There is a limit to miniaturization. If you don't realize that, then pause for a moment and think how hard it would be to browse the internet using a device that is 1 inch x 1 inch. There is a limit, believe me.
There's a limit to interfaces, not the insides. In the future, you might very well "dock" your smart phone and have all the processing power most people would care to have with a tablet/laptop/desktop interface. We now have gigahertz processors, gigabytes of RAM and many gigabytes of storage in a phone factor, what more will the average person want?
And that's really why the story question is misguided. The underlying architecture has nothing to do with the ISA; Intel can build whatever they want and throw an x86 decoder frontend on it and have a suitable x86 CPU. Killing the x86 ISA doesn't do anything for Intel or their customers.
The biggest clue that it isn't holding Intel back is that if it did, they could offer a "native" micro-op programming mode as well for beyond-assembler optimization. A lot of people seem to think that Intel would intentionally drive around 30 years with the hand brake on, it just doesn't make any kind of sense.
If nobody reads the damn thing, how can it be profitable? And if it isn't profitable, why are they distributing it?
When somebody calls you, do you know if they found your number in the phone directory? Do you know how many people saw your ad in the phone directory? No, and you don't have comparable numbers it just looked like good value for your money. Here in Norway it was printed for every household until a big reservation campaign in 2007 - almost nobody was aware of the possibility, throwing it in the trash - with the result that the White Pages was shut down in 2009 - as in it wasn't even printed at all anymore, the Yellow Pages in 2012 and the local directory is still on life support unless you've reserved against it with a sticker against unsolicited marketing on your mailbox.
People have Internet on their PCs, on their phones and for the odd case where you don't have either you can call a number locating service for a small fee so nobody misses it. I don't think anybody realized just how few were reading it, I mean yes the online services have been available for a long time but they always sort of expected somebody like the elderly to use it. But then I rather see why they try to choose other ways than reading the smallest readable print possible to cram more numbers into fewer pages, it might be simple to understand but it was hardly friendly for the vision impaired. Maybe we're a bit ahead of the curve here but I think you too might find the same in retrospect.
I'm guessing that they're running an elaborate experiment to see just what one has to do to ruin a distro thoroughly and completely. Otherwise, none of this makes any sense.
Microsoft is trying to be a copycat of Apple, Ubuntu is trying to be a copycat of Google. Google scrapped everything but the kernel and wrote all new code - you can tell by the Apache 2.0 license, no GPL userspace code, Ubuntu is now trying to do the same wanting to go head to head with Android not realizing a house cat can't hunt the same way and the same pray a lion does. But then they're used to being a 1% company in a 99% Win/Mac world, maybe they'll manage being a 1% company in an Android/iOS world too. In any case if they head off to chase mobiles/tablets there's not really much to lose since the GPL presence there is ~0% (outside the kernel in Android) so why not? If they succeed great, if not... well the OSS community is not really worse off than before.
I still wear a watch, old habit perhaps but it's also just a glance away when I'm in a hurry to catch the bus or whatever. With the current trend of smartphones growing to 4-5 inches they're soon approaching mini tablets at 7 inches, maybe people feel they want something smaller and more convenient again? I don't know, but I think you're being far to pessimist. If Apple can provide me with something that's more convenient because it's on my wrist than in my pocket, maybe something smaller that complements the smartphone then I might potentially be in the market for that. It could also be a total wash, like all the "smart" watches on the market now but I'd like to see what they can offer before I'll so readily dismiss it.
This database is effectively a big profiling system that is designed to trap kids who don't feel that achieving is the most important thing in the world. How a kid feels about school really doesn't place any bearing on how they do in life overall, a kid that hates school can become an engineer well kids that love school end up drug addicts ( The "school lovers" I knew ).
And a lot of kids and teens have huge swings growing up because they spent so much time living up to someone else's expectations and aspirations, particularly their parents or peers. Grades, sports, career, partying, whatever and the longer it goes on the harder the pendulum swings. You're really a B pupil but your parents won't take less than an A pupil so you're forced to study, study, study until you burn out and drop to a D student. Or maybe more relevant to Slashdot, the other kids hate nerds and so you intentionally underachieve to fit it. Or maybe just want to party hard and not give a fuck and not be mommy's little angel anymore. Most people need some kind of rebellion where they make their own choices, just to test the "well what if I don't do like [mom/dad/teacher/friends/family] wants me to".
Isn't this how most companies work? In order to get anything done, you form an ad-hoc group of capable people to work on a project. Seems to me the only difference is that in a normal company that group then has to figure out how to outflank the management hierarchy in order to complete the project, whereas this model skips that step.
The difference is that games don't really care much about the past or the future, what the prequel did and what the sequel might do is practically irrelevant, you build a new game, ship it, support it, scrap it. Meanwhile most other companies are working on version X+1 of their software that they'd like to upgrade from version X or X-1 and move in the right direction for X+2 with most code surviving from one version to another, upgrade paths and existing behavior must be preserved and so on. Yes you still have new development teams but they're much more constricted than what an ad hoc game development group can come up with simply because it's fun to play. I just don't see regular software working all that well with Valve's model.
They are now updating the B side computer so it can manage the mission while they work on the primary. I wonder why this is not something that is kept up to date anyway. I can see keeping B an update or two behind A to prevent a single programming error taking both of them down. But after you are satisfied with A's software load, why keep B so far back-level that transition takes so much time. And since the computers are said to be identical, why the desire to move back to A?
When are you "satisfied" with software like this? Imagine something comes as slow corruption or only occurs when a certain counter overflows or whatever, you don't want to be caught in a race against time to save the system before the B computer dies too. Which is probably the reason why they want to move it back to the A computer, if it can't run there then they don't have a backup anymore. It's better for them with a slightly reduced system with backup than a B computer running with no backup. It does them no good to sit on the ground and say "well, we've figured out how what happened and how we could have fixed it" after you've lost contact, then it's game over. You don't run it in "if it breaks, we're done here" mode unless you really, absolutely must.
Now this is domination. And this is starting to look like domination. Looks like embedded still has a way to go, though Linux overall looks healthier than ever.
You are thief. If I pay you an hourly wage and you goof off (...) because they are committed and work very hard to make sure all goals are achieved and not quit at 5:01.
Ah, the perfect american style of management, I own you every second of work and if you go home at 5 PM sharp despite working all day then I'm still a bad employee because it's my fault that your ridiculous goals aren't met. I'm so glad I don't live in the US, either you can pay me by the hour and if you want me to work overtime you can pay me time and a half, or you can pay me for performance and butt out of my time management. You want performance even though I'm on the clock? Then give me a performance bonus or I'll be just as slow as the guy in the next cubicle who does less and is paid the same, I'm not particularly interested in your management positions and with enough years of experience on my resume I can probably get a suitably senior position at some other company anyway. The whole "work hard now and be rewarded later" is for young naive fools.
Oh yes and I've worked a bit with Indians, not Chinese though and while some of them are very bright many of them have simply perfected the technique of looking busy. Much like the Americans who stay 10-12 hours at work to show how much work they're doing it's mostly for show, I'm not worried anyone will replace me on actual performance and luckily there's companies that care more about that than showmanship. But I guess in this respect US managers and Indians catering to US management style deserve each other. Now I try not to really goof off at work but sometimes I've found it effective to take a five minute distraction when I feel heavy-headed and that I'm not really finding the best solutions instead of working two hours on a design only to find out it wasn't all that smart. Many not so great choices now have so much piled on top they'll never be undone.
The changes in monthly updates (probably for all software used at a desk) will fit in a medium sized email.
Most people use only a very small part of the functionality of Office, 90% is common and 10% special but what those 10% are varies from person to person. But when you add up all the changes to those 10%s and put them into an email then you have something with a very high noise-to-signal ratio for most people. Nobody will actually bother to read it, then they're doing that critical end-of-month/quarter/year thing and it doesn't work and shit hits the fan. I don't think you realize how many oddball routines exist that aren't learned, they're just followed like a recipe. Do this, push that, check this, save result here. When any part of that fails the button-pusher you set to do that job - because the competent people have plenty other things to do - can't do it, things stop.
MY guns are "designed" to protect my family from said nutjob hell bent on ending my life and raping my wife. If YOU happen to tell a legal firearms owner that they own a device designed to "kill people", well it's no damn wonder you're getting an odd look. I'd look at a homicidal maniac in an odd way too. They're the only other people on this earth who have that mentality, and go out and prove it.
In other words you do keep the gun for killing people, in self-defense. It might not be its design, but it's your purpose with it. The gun is a good equalizer in that it doesn't matter who fires it, but it doesn't change the imbalance between attacker and defender. Unless you catch him by surprise - in which case he probably wanted to steal a few valuables not kill or rape anyone - they have the choice of time, place, body armor and weaponry and you whatever you happen to be carrying. And usually they'll be more trigger happy than you are, since they know they're the bad guy and not some drunk SOB who picked the wrong driveway and is going to flee the scene afterwards anyway.
I don't know about you, but if anyone wanted to kill me they could practically do it anywhere, just walk up to me at the grocery store and I wouldn't even know what hit me. That I could defend myself against that by putting a gun on my hip is just a delusion. My best defense against your average burglar or robber killing me is making sure they don't have guns, it wouldn't keep something like an assassin from killing me but then the answer still wouldn't be a gun, it'd be armored cars and a safe room. They'll know who I am, but I won't know who or where they are. I'd have to defend all angles, they just need to find one unprotected angle. It's not an equal game by any stretch of the imagination.
As an aside, I'll note that something doesn't have to be illegal for it to be ethically questionable. "Not forbidden by law" and "not wrong" are categories that generally have some mutual overlap, but should not be conflated. From a technical standpoint, I believe sociologists and psychologists refer to individuals who define their personal morality solely by what is or is not illegal as "assholes".
I think if you find a person who'd always obey every law regardless of his own personal feelings in the matter because he accepts the majority's decision in this matter, even though he would not be discovered nor punished for it then you have a better man than most. That would among other things exclude:
a) Any person who has ever used any illegal substance b) Any person who has ever violated copyright c) Any person who has been speeding d) Any person who has spread libel or slander about anybody e) Any person who has ever threatened, harassed or used illegal force against anyone f) Any person who has stolen, defrauded, embezzled or in any way illegally acquired anything
In fact, I'm pretty sure every asshole I've met their moral compass has been more like "Can I get away with it?", which is another thing entirely. And I'm not really sure you could call that morality, it's only a cost-benefit analysis based on the reward versus the punishment, not about doing the right thing at all.
Critical mass and a lack of companies that indirectly make money off it. The kernel is free but Red Hat makes money selling service and support, Webkit and the web browsers are free but Google makes money selling web services - or giving them away and making ad revenue, same thing. Who makes money off Open/LibreOffice? The StarOffice business model never really worked for Sun and Oracle simply killed it outright. The Linux distros a little bit maybe, but desktop Linux has never been a moneymaker. On Apple's products you've got other choices, Google wants to push Google Docs, there's other apps for Android and there's no Android port anyway.
You have of course all the companies producing MS Office documents who'd be interested in offering a cheaper solution but their customers probably have other solutions forcing them to go MS anyway. And really at the bottom of the ladder there are those who'd like a cheaper alternative to MS Office, but then they're usually on a tight budget and not interested in hiring people to fix software way outside their core business. Now if you could unseat Microsoft then yes I suppose they'd all together would be enough, but none of these are really rocking the chair as it is. To put it a little cynically, there's plenty money in being Microsoft but there's not so much money in replacing it with a free and open standard, then nobody really makes much money off basic office documents.
But then Microsoft was not in competition with ASUS, it's the good old fashioned "don't mess with our business and we won't mess with yours". Steam's relationship is more similar to Microsoft's launch of Surface, the OEMs are basically being told Microsoft has a long term plan to supply the hardware themselves and boot them from the market. That's not a message they can accept, nor can Steam accept Microsoft's pushing of the Windows Store which is a very direct competitor to the Steam Store. Mac, Linux, the "Steam Box" and the market power they have to bring Windows customers with them are Valve's bail-out plan, and I can't imagine them giving up on it without a massive pay-off by Microsoft.
Sure, right now it doesn't seem very intimidating because there's so far AAA games, but in an all-out war imagine the incentives Steam could give to make people port, like a one-time prize for supporting new games, porting old games or a higher cut of sales made on non-Windows platforms. How about the ability to bundle the Steam box with "gift certificates" for games to boost sales? They don't want to launch the war because the more time they have to prepare the better positioned they'll be, but I'm quite sure they're preparing for one. Unless Microsoft steps away from the aspirations to be like Apple there will be major clashes in the next few years.
It's a fair comparison in many cases. If you go to buy "insurance" and your pre-existing condition is lung cancer, the house has burned down and the car is totaled.
My pre-existing condition is to have a mild case of asthma - occasionally I take some very weak meds for it and I've completed two half-marathons so I'm not exactly a wheezing geezer, but my insurance in case of accident or disease (on top of universal health care) specifically exempts anything and everything lung-related. It's more like they refuse to insure any chassis damage if it has a dented fender.
It's also stupid to use "insurance" to cover the costs of routine physicals, contraceptives or pregnancies. That's not "insurance", it's pre-payment and subsidy for costs which are totally expected.
I bet there's a lot of women who'd disagree with you that the pregnancy was not at all expected, lol. If it's completely routine check-ups I agree, but even for rather mundane consultations there's a level of "insurance" involved, it lowers the threshold of actually going to the doctor if you're sick. I talk to a friend in the US, he's pretty pissed because he blew $750 in health costs on essentially nothing... but next time maybe it isn't a false alarm, but I'm not so sure he'll go.
There's a lot of myths on universal healthcare in the US, the biggest one is that it's all free so go nuts. Trust me, doctors are good at telling the people who are frivolously wasting their time to stop and they still have to pay their copay. They also don't hand you things unless you have a real, medical need for them. The whole process is generally slow and annoying enough that nobody with a real need would "lose" things. And people don't generally act more reckless and get themselves ill or injured just because healthcare will pick up the bill, most people value their health and those that don't you probably find among your coworkers in your risk pool too.
Doctors are - if you take away all that insurance crap - actually not bad at prioritizing medical needs. They know doctors and procedures and medications are all limited resources and mostly make a genuine effort to make sure those who it the most gets it, and with a more sane legal climate you also don't have to overtreat patients or risk crazy malpractice lawsuits. Slightly off topic but it's very hard to match economic and medical incentives, I was at a seminar recently about a doctor who for about $2400 in gravel and volunteer work reduced the cost of femur fractures by about $400000. But the county paid, the state hospital saved so the economic incentive for the county was to let it happen.
Since your genetic markup doesn't change (except for stray mutations but AFAIK not that spread to every cell in your body - single sperm cells are different) the question is can you pay off $1000 over your whole life and medical history? With every advance likely to come 10-50 years down the road? A quick search came up with this from Employer Health Benefits 2012 Annual Survey: The average premium for single coverage in 2012 is $468 per month or $5,615 per year. So over 70 years (probably some of them on a family plan, offset by paying for a family plan) you're likely to spend $400k on health plans.
That means you have to improve efficiency by 0.25%, either by simple prevention, earlier detection, finding the right diagnosis earlier, better treatment before we get to all the possibilities of genetic medicine and it will pay off. Not in the US of course, where they'll drop you like a hot potato and/or pocket the savings themselves, but in other countries with universal healthcare lifetime costs are on the same order. I just did the math here in Norway and to DNA sequence everyone would be 25-30% of one year's healthcare budget. If I divide by an average lifespan of about 80 then about 0.33% of the healthcare of a lifespan. That doesn't sound like an unreachable goal to me.
You can be professional without being neither the pushover or the sociopath jerk. The same way you as an employer can be professional without working yourself to death at the manager's whim or being a BOFH. In fact neither of those really score many points for professionalism in my book.
Slashdot Mirror
You know...an unrestricted internet is what we started out with, and that un-restriction is what allowed it to grow and thrive in such a short period of time (look at the vast difference between about say 1993 and 2013).
Or just because it's better, cars have always been heavily regulated but that didn't stop them replacing the horse and buggy in a relatively short time. Neither extreme with anarchy/free nor totalitarian/unfree sound like an ideal society to me, it is too simple to say more freedom is good and less freedom is bad. Should a bus company be free to decide that black people should ride in the back? Should we just drop all workplace health and safety regulations and just trust that workers will refuse to work under unsafe conditions? There's good kinds of free and there's bad kinds of free because it is also the ability for those with money, power, guns or a majority to abuse, discriminate and exploit those who don't have any choice or just many equally bad choices. In particular you see this anti-libertarian streak here whenever a big corporation tramples the little guy.
Today the police can with a warrant search my apartment, open my mail, listen to my phone calls. The average person can't tell but the police could with a warrant for the subscription info and a search find out who is hiding behind this alias. Is it an explicit goal to remove that possibility? That is to say, if it were possible to make the walls, doors and windows of my apartment invincible with an unbreakable lock that needs a key combination that would have to be pried from my mind in violation of the 5th amendment would that be a good thing? That instead of letters we'd send small, invincible safes? Make it impossible to listen in for anybody for any reason? Because this is the reality with full disk encryption, public key messaging, encrypted communication and enough proxy layers nobody can make heads or tails of it.
Perhaps it is a technical inevitability, but that doesn't really say anything about whether it's good or bad. It's certainly very much binary, those "special powers" we give the police and courts don't have much of an effect anymore since it's technically impossible but on the other hand going to the other extreme and opening it up is like demanding everyone live in glass houses, free for everyone to see everything. Neither of those options really seem palatable to the average person, yes they want digital freedom but not digital anarchy. And yes there is a difference just like between a free country and anarchy, it's just a lot harder to implement in a world of 0s and 1s.
There's nothing about the theory of evolution that implies the presence or absence of any god or gods.
Seriously? Sure it does nothing to prove or disprove the existence of divine beings in general, but it very clearly and directly contradicts the creation mythos as described in the Bible in all but the most liberal "it's all an analogy for God creating the world" interpretation. The existence of God (or Allah or Yahweh or whatever) is a metaphysical question far beyond the real of science, but all the religious texts like the Bible, Koran etc. make many real world claims that can be scientifically tested unless you use either the allegory loophole (anything written here need not be literal, but the religion as a whole is still true) or the metaphysical loophole (the dinosaur bones are put there by the Creator himself as a test of faith, the good book is right even when all evidence suggests it is wrong).
In any case, if you wanted reason instead of belief you didn't even have to go to evolution and all the controversy there. Go check out how many "Young Earth" geologists there are, even the most introductory textbook will wildly contradict any notion that earth is 6000 years old. In short, the only two reasons that allow people to hold such beliefs are blinding ignorance or unconditional faith, neither of which anyone could easily change. At least these days even the most religious diehards seem to finally accept that Earth is not flat nor the center of the universe, maybe in another 500 years we'll get rid of that silly "young earth" idea too. I think people would be far more open to evolution if you got them to accept that earth is millions of years old first, to some it seems easier to imagine we lived together with dinosaurs than just how long ago 65 million years is.
Most skills have some marginal crossover benefits, the question is rather what is the opportunity cost in time. Do you become a better programmer by learning a bit of law or more programming? Does the lawyer become a better lawyer by learning a bit of programming or more legal theory and case study? You need the width of knowledge to work with others, but you also need the depth to really know your stuff. Or rather I feel it's the other way around, if all you know is IT I can have a business-to-IT translator give you work but if you don't have any in-depth skill then you're almost usable to lots of things, but only almost. And if you got width and depth, well you're probably too busy even though you'd be perfect for my project too. It's a team sport, make the players you have exploit their strengths because you'll never get around to fixing all the weaknesses.
Idea is interesting, but it doesn't work under the current copyright law. The fact that anyone is downloading any material does not make that an infringement. "Making available" or sharing the copyrighted work is the only infringement that is a violation. In your case, only the server that hosts the file might be infringing on the copyright, not the people downloading.
Which law would that be? Not US law, not the way US courts rule. source:
We agree that plaintiffs have shown that Napster users infringe at least two of the copyright holders' exclusive rights: the rights of reproduction, 106(1); and distribution, 106(3). Napster users who upload file names to the search index for others to copy violate plaintiffs' distribution rights. Napster users who download files containing copyrighted music violate plaintiffs' reproduction rights.
In fact, it is far more debatable if "making available" is an infringement without proving actual instances of distribution.
I think you will find the robot manufacturing industry are in general held liable. Same with the fancy brain of your car or most medical equipment, the only things that get away wtih no liability are those that manipulate just bits and bytes and not real world objects. It just doesn't come free, I'd say most software, operating systems and hardware runs "good enough" for being COTS components that I mix and match as I please. If you want something certified to work and take the liability for it they'll want to control that stack very, very tightly.
That's quite frankly not something I see the value in. The likely outcome is that only vertical stacks like say the iPad offer liability protection, while your average application can't and won't take liability for any bugs in Microsoft's OS, your hardware's hardware drivers or whatever third-party libraries they use. Avionics doesn't get very far without an company like Airbus or Boeing on top taking the responsibility for the whole stack and the choices of airplane models are extremely limited, is that really a good model for computers?
There is a limit to miniaturization. If you don't realize that, then pause for a moment and think how hard it would be to browse the internet using a device that is 1 inch x 1 inch. There is a limit, believe me.
There's a limit to interfaces, not the insides. In the future, you might very well "dock" your smart phone and have all the processing power most people would care to have with a tablet/laptop/desktop interface. We now have gigahertz processors, gigabytes of RAM and many gigabytes of storage in a phone factor, what more will the average person want?
And that's really why the story question is misguided. The underlying architecture has nothing to do with the ISA; Intel can build whatever they want and throw an x86 decoder frontend on it and have a suitable x86 CPU. Killing the x86 ISA doesn't do anything for Intel or their customers.
The biggest clue that it isn't holding Intel back is that if it did, they could offer a "native" micro-op programming mode as well for beyond-assembler optimization. A lot of people seem to think that Intel would intentionally drive around 30 years with the hand brake on, it just doesn't make any kind of sense.
If nobody reads the damn thing, how can it be profitable? And if it isn't profitable, why are they distributing it?
When somebody calls you, do you know if they found your number in the phone directory? Do you know how many people saw your ad in the phone directory? No, and you don't have comparable numbers it just looked like good value for your money. Here in Norway it was printed for every household until a big reservation campaign in 2007 - almost nobody was aware of the possibility, throwing it in the trash - with the result that the White Pages was shut down in 2009 - as in it wasn't even printed at all anymore, the Yellow Pages in 2012 and the local directory is still on life support unless you've reserved against it with a sticker against unsolicited marketing on your mailbox.
People have Internet on their PCs, on their phones and for the odd case where you don't have either you can call a number locating service for a small fee so nobody misses it. I don't think anybody realized just how few were reading it, I mean yes the online services have been available for a long time but they always sort of expected somebody like the elderly to use it. But then I rather see why they try to choose other ways than reading the smallest readable print possible to cram more numbers into fewer pages, it might be simple to understand but it was hardly friendly for the vision impaired. Maybe we're a bit ahead of the curve here but I think you too might find the same in retrospect.
I'm guessing that they're running an elaborate experiment to see just what one has to do to ruin a distro thoroughly and completely. Otherwise, none of this makes any sense.
Microsoft is trying to be a copycat of Apple, Ubuntu is trying to be a copycat of Google. Google scrapped everything but the kernel and wrote all new code - you can tell by the Apache 2.0 license, no GPL userspace code, Ubuntu is now trying to do the same wanting to go head to head with Android not realizing a house cat can't hunt the same way and the same pray a lion does. But then they're used to being a 1% company in a 99% Win/Mac world, maybe they'll manage being a 1% company in an Android/iOS world too. In any case if they head off to chase mobiles/tablets there's not really much to lose since the GPL presence there is ~0% (outside the kernel in Android) so why not? If they succeed great, if not... well the OSS community is not really worse off than before.
I still wear a watch, old habit perhaps but it's also just a glance away when I'm in a hurry to catch the bus or whatever. With the current trend of smartphones growing to 4-5 inches they're soon approaching mini tablets at 7 inches, maybe people feel they want something smaller and more convenient again? I don't know, but I think you're being far to pessimist. If Apple can provide me with something that's more convenient because it's on my wrist than in my pocket, maybe something smaller that complements the smartphone then I might potentially be in the market for that. It could also be a total wash, like all the "smart" watches on the market now but I'd like to see what they can offer before I'll so readily dismiss it.
No one is going to dress up as a cardinal and sneak into the Sistine Chapel.
Challenge accepted!
You sir, are a god among slashdotters. Too bad nobody will see this.
This database is effectively a big profiling system that is designed to trap kids who don't feel that achieving is the most important thing in the world. How a kid feels about school really doesn't place any bearing on how they do in life overall, a kid that hates school can become an engineer well kids that love school end up drug addicts ( The "school lovers" I knew ).
And a lot of kids and teens have huge swings growing up because they spent so much time living up to someone else's expectations and aspirations, particularly their parents or peers. Grades, sports, career, partying, whatever and the longer it goes on the harder the pendulum swings. You're really a B pupil but your parents won't take less than an A pupil so you're forced to study, study, study until you burn out and drop to a D student. Or maybe more relevant to Slashdot, the other kids hate nerds and so you intentionally underachieve to fit it. Or maybe just want to party hard and not give a fuck and not be mommy's little angel anymore. Most people need some kind of rebellion where they make their own choices, just to test the "well what if I don't do like [mom/dad/teacher/friends/family] wants me to".
Isn't this how most companies work? In order to get anything done, you form an ad-hoc group of capable people to work on a project. Seems to me the only difference is that in a normal company that group then has to figure out how to outflank the management hierarchy in order to complete the project, whereas this model skips that step.
The difference is that games don't really care much about the past or the future, what the prequel did and what the sequel might do is practically irrelevant, you build a new game, ship it, support it, scrap it. Meanwhile most other companies are working on version X+1 of their software that they'd like to upgrade from version X or X-1 and move in the right direction for X+2 with most code surviving from one version to another, upgrade paths and existing behavior must be preserved and so on. Yes you still have new development teams but they're much more constricted than what an ad hoc game development group can come up with simply because it's fun to play. I just don't see regular software working all that well with Valve's model.
They are now updating the B side computer so it can manage the mission while they work on the primary. I wonder why this is not something that is kept up to date anyway. I can see keeping B an update or two behind A to prevent a single programming error taking both of them down. But after you are satisfied with A's software load, why keep B so far back-level that transition takes so much time. And since the computers are said to be identical, why the desire to move back to A?
When are you "satisfied" with software like this? Imagine something comes as slow corruption or only occurs when a certain counter overflows or whatever, you don't want to be caught in a race against time to save the system before the B computer dies too. Which is probably the reason why they want to move it back to the A computer, if it can't run there then they don't have a backup anymore. It's better for them with a slightly reduced system with backup than a B computer running with no backup. It does them no good to sit on the ground and say "well, we've figured out how what happened and how we could have fixed it" after you've lost contact, then it's game over. You don't run it in "if it breaks, we're done here" mode unless you really, absolutely must.
Now this is domination. And this is starting to look like domination. Looks like embedded still has a way to go, though Linux overall looks healthier than ever.
You are thief. If I pay you an hourly wage and you goof off (...) because they are committed and work very hard to make sure all goals are achieved and not quit at 5:01.
Ah, the perfect american style of management, I own you every second of work and if you go home at 5 PM sharp despite working all day then I'm still a bad employee because it's my fault that your ridiculous goals aren't met. I'm so glad I don't live in the US, either you can pay me by the hour and if you want me to work overtime you can pay me time and a half, or you can pay me for performance and butt out of my time management. You want performance even though I'm on the clock? Then give me a performance bonus or I'll be just as slow as the guy in the next cubicle who does less and is paid the same, I'm not particularly interested in your management positions and with enough years of experience on my resume I can probably get a suitably senior position at some other company anyway. The whole "work hard now and be rewarded later" is for young naive fools.
Oh yes and I've worked a bit with Indians, not Chinese though and while some of them are very bright many of them have simply perfected the technique of looking busy. Much like the Americans who stay 10-12 hours at work to show how much work they're doing it's mostly for show, I'm not worried anyone will replace me on actual performance and luckily there's companies that care more about that than showmanship. But I guess in this respect US managers and Indians catering to US management style deserve each other. Now I try not to really goof off at work but sometimes I've found it effective to take a five minute distraction when I feel heavy-headed and that I'm not really finding the best solutions instead of working two hours on a design only to find out it wasn't all that smart. Many not so great choices now have so much piled on top they'll never be undone.
The changes in monthly updates (probably for all software used at a desk) will fit in a medium sized email.
Most people use only a very small part of the functionality of Office, 90% is common and 10% special but what those 10% are varies from person to person. But when you add up all the changes to those 10%s and put them into an email then you have something with a very high noise-to-signal ratio for most people. Nobody will actually bother to read it, then they're doing that critical end-of-month/quarter/year thing and it doesn't work and shit hits the fan. I don't think you realize how many oddball routines exist that aren't learned, they're just followed like a recipe. Do this, push that, check this, save result here. When any part of that fails the button-pusher you set to do that job - because the competent people have plenty other things to do - can't do it, things stop.
MY guns are "designed" to protect my family from said nutjob hell bent on ending my life and raping my wife. If YOU happen to tell a legal firearms owner that they own a device designed to "kill people", well it's no damn wonder you're getting an odd look. I'd look at a homicidal maniac in an odd way too. They're the only other people on this earth who have that mentality, and go out and prove it.
In other words you do keep the gun for killing people, in self-defense. It might not be its design, but it's your purpose with it. The gun is a good equalizer in that it doesn't matter who fires it, but it doesn't change the imbalance between attacker and defender. Unless you catch him by surprise - in which case he probably wanted to steal a few valuables not kill or rape anyone - they have the choice of time, place, body armor and weaponry and you whatever you happen to be carrying. And usually they'll be more trigger happy than you are, since they know they're the bad guy and not some drunk SOB who picked the wrong driveway and is going to flee the scene afterwards anyway.
I don't know about you, but if anyone wanted to kill me they could practically do it anywhere, just walk up to me at the grocery store and I wouldn't even know what hit me. That I could defend myself against that by putting a gun on my hip is just a delusion. My best defense against your average burglar or robber killing me is making sure they don't have guns, it wouldn't keep something like an assassin from killing me but then the answer still wouldn't be a gun, it'd be armored cars and a safe room. They'll know who I am, but I won't know who or where they are. I'd have to defend all angles, they just need to find one unprotected angle. It's not an equal game by any stretch of the imagination.
As an aside, I'll note that something doesn't have to be illegal for it to be ethically questionable. "Not forbidden by law" and "not wrong" are categories that generally have some mutual overlap, but should not be conflated. From a technical standpoint, I believe sociologists and psychologists refer to individuals who define their personal morality solely by what is or is not illegal as "assholes".
I think if you find a person who'd always obey every law regardless of his own personal feelings in the matter because he accepts the majority's decision in this matter, even though he would not be discovered nor punished for it then you have a better man than most. That would among other things exclude:
a) Any person who has ever used any illegal substance
b) Any person who has ever violated copyright
c) Any person who has been speeding
d) Any person who has spread libel or slander about anybody
e) Any person who has ever threatened, harassed or used illegal force against anyone
f) Any person who has stolen, defrauded, embezzled or in any way illegally acquired anything
In fact, I'm pretty sure every asshole I've met their moral compass has been more like "Can I get away with it?", which is another thing entirely. And I'm not really sure you could call that morality, it's only a cost-benefit analysis based on the reward versus the punishment, not about doing the right thing at all.
Critical mass and a lack of companies that indirectly make money off it. The kernel is free but Red Hat makes money selling service and support, Webkit and the web browsers are free but Google makes money selling web services - or giving them away and making ad revenue, same thing. Who makes money off Open/LibreOffice? The StarOffice business model never really worked for Sun and Oracle simply killed it outright. The Linux distros a little bit maybe, but desktop Linux has never been a moneymaker. On Apple's products you've got other choices, Google wants to push Google Docs, there's other apps for Android and there's no Android port anyway.
You have of course all the companies producing MS Office documents who'd be interested in offering a cheaper solution but their customers probably have other solutions forcing them to go MS anyway. And really at the bottom of the ladder there are those who'd like a cheaper alternative to MS Office, but then they're usually on a tight budget and not interested in hiring people to fix software way outside their core business. Now if you could unseat Microsoft then yes I suppose they'd all together would be enough, but none of these are really rocking the chair as it is. To put it a little cynically, there's plenty money in being Microsoft but there's not so much money in replacing it with a free and open standard, then nobody really makes much money off basic office documents.
But then Microsoft was not in competition with ASUS, it's the good old fashioned "don't mess with our business and we won't mess with yours". Steam's relationship is more similar to Microsoft's launch of Surface, the OEMs are basically being told Microsoft has a long term plan to supply the hardware themselves and boot them from the market. That's not a message they can accept, nor can Steam accept Microsoft's pushing of the Windows Store which is a very direct competitor to the Steam Store. Mac, Linux, the "Steam Box" and the market power they have to bring Windows customers with them are Valve's bail-out plan, and I can't imagine them giving up on it without a massive pay-off by Microsoft.
Sure, right now it doesn't seem very intimidating because there's so far AAA games, but in an all-out war imagine the incentives Steam could give to make people port, like a one-time prize for supporting new games, porting old games or a higher cut of sales made on non-Windows platforms. How about the ability to bundle the Steam box with "gift certificates" for games to boost sales? They don't want to launch the war because the more time they have to prepare the better positioned they'll be, but I'm quite sure they're preparing for one. Unless Microsoft steps away from the aspirations to be like Apple there will be major clashes in the next few years.
Not a bad showing for Linux, all things considered. The top variant of Linux is nearly tied with Windows 8.
That's a wildly misleading statement, since it doesn't include 90%+ of the Windows 8 sales:
Windows 8 64 bit: 8.89%
Windows 8: 0.74%
Ubuntu 12.10 64 bit: 0.71%
It's a fair comparison in many cases. If you go to buy "insurance" and your pre-existing condition is lung cancer, the house has burned down and the car is totaled.
My pre-existing condition is to have a mild case of asthma - occasionally I take some very weak meds for it and I've completed two half-marathons so I'm not exactly a wheezing geezer, but my insurance in case of accident or disease (on top of universal health care) specifically exempts anything and everything lung-related. It's more like they refuse to insure any chassis damage if it has a dented fender.
It's also stupid to use "insurance" to cover the costs of routine physicals, contraceptives or pregnancies. That's not "insurance", it's pre-payment and subsidy for costs which are totally expected.
I bet there's a lot of women who'd disagree with you that the pregnancy was not at all expected, lol. If it's completely routine check-ups I agree, but even for rather mundane consultations there's a level of "insurance" involved, it lowers the threshold of actually going to the doctor if you're sick. I talk to a friend in the US, he's pretty pissed because he blew $750 in health costs on essentially nothing... but next time maybe it isn't a false alarm, but I'm not so sure he'll go.
There's a lot of myths on universal healthcare in the US, the biggest one is that it's all free so go nuts. Trust me, doctors are good at telling the people who are frivolously wasting their time to stop and they still have to pay their copay. They also don't hand you things unless you have a real, medical need for them. The whole process is generally slow and annoying enough that nobody with a real need would "lose" things. And people don't generally act more reckless and get themselves ill or injured just because healthcare will pick up the bill, most people value their health and those that don't you probably find among your coworkers in your risk pool too.
Doctors are - if you take away all that insurance crap - actually not bad at prioritizing medical needs. They know doctors and procedures and medications are all limited resources and mostly make a genuine effort to make sure those who it the most gets it, and with a more sane legal climate you also don't have to overtreat patients or risk crazy malpractice lawsuits. Slightly off topic but it's very hard to match economic and medical incentives, I was at a seminar recently about a doctor who for about $2400 in gravel and volunteer work reduced the cost of femur fractures by about $400000. But the county paid, the state hospital saved so the economic incentive for the county was to let it happen.
Since your genetic markup doesn't change (except for stray mutations but AFAIK not that spread to every cell in your body - single sperm cells are different) the question is can you pay off $1000 over your whole life and medical history? With every advance likely to come 10-50 years down the road? A quick search came up with this from Employer Health Benefits 2012 Annual Survey: The average premium for single coverage in 2012 is $468 per month or $5,615 per year. So over 70 years (probably some of them on a family plan, offset by paying for a family plan) you're likely to spend $400k on health plans.
That means you have to improve efficiency by 0.25%, either by simple prevention, earlier detection, finding the right diagnosis earlier, better treatment before we get to all the possibilities of genetic medicine and it will pay off. Not in the US of course, where they'll drop you like a hot potato and/or pocket the savings themselves, but in other countries with universal healthcare lifetime costs are on the same order. I just did the math here in Norway and to DNA sequence everyone would be 25-30% of one year's healthcare budget. If I divide by an average lifespan of about 80 then about 0.33% of the healthcare of a lifespan. That doesn't sound like an unreachable goal to me.
You can be professional without being neither the pushover or the sociopath jerk. The same way you as an employer can be professional without working yourself to death at the manager's whim or being a BOFH. In fact neither of those really score many points for professionalism in my book.