Prices here in Norway: Uncapped 5 Mbps ADSL: Around $50 Uncapped 60/60 fiber: Around $90
Okay quite a bit more than you're paying but Norway is in general an extremely expensive country overall, an average full time salary is $75k so by our standards it's cheap. And I once downloaded a 500GB torrent, it really is uncapped. And this country has a population density of 13/km^2 as opposed to India with 368/km^2, delivering broadband there should be much much cheaper. I honestly wouldn't worry it seems mostly like a US problem, all of Europe is constantly upgrading. For example here's from an article I recently read on Britain:
BT said that 7 million premises are now on its fibre network, and this year that number will grow to 10 million. The ultimate target is two-thirds of the UK by the end of 2014.
Oh and they'll also triple top speed from 100 Mbps to 300 Mbps. Any new apartment block or any new housing field is wired with fiber and it's being retrofitted to a lot of old housing too. It's not a question of whether it's the future, but how long it'll take.
4700 Mbit/s = 4.7 Gbit/s, how's that a record? The Gathering here in Norway had a 200 Gbit/s Internet Connection, topping Dreamhack in Sweden's 120 Gbit/s. Maybe it's some silly 4.7 Gbit over cable, but that's like the wold's fastest subcompact. And for all of us that have fiber to the home, yeah we know it's just what equipment you put on both ends. The cable itself could probably pull 100 Gbit/s with the right equipment.
Same with a lot of computer and electronics repair, in the old days they actually repaired them like replacing a bad chip or capacitor or welded a bad connection. Then they were replacing whole cards instead of components and eventually mostly replaced the whole box. They went from highly skilled jobs to simple manual labor to glorified delivery boys. It doesn't even matter if they are repairable, it just isn't worth a skilled person's time to look at cheap, small electronics anymore. Even warranty repairs are becoming more and more warranty replacements, it's not worth it to fix one item compared to increasing the capacity of the production line to produce some replacements.
And it's *always* cheaper to in-source (provided you can find the appropriate resources). You can either do it yourself, or you can pay someone their cost, which could be your cost, plus 20% or more overhead and profit. So outsourcing costs you a minimum of 20% more than doing it in house. But all the consultants swear it's better to outsource - to their company. That's like hiring the Fox and Co security company to guard the hen house.
By that logic, you'd never need anything like suppliers, partners or subcontractors, it'd be cheaper to do everything yourself right down to making the PC all the way from mining silicates. Supporting your basic desktop is not something unique to your company and there's typically economics of scale. I doubt you need exactly twice the IT staff to double from 200 to 400 users. For an outsourcing company that might be increasing the desktops under management from 10,200 to 10,400 instead, they can do it for less because of economics of scale.
Just to take one very obvious example of non-core activity at least here in Norway a lot of the big companies use one of the same two-three big cafeteria operators. Why? Bigger quantities of food both in purchasing and in preparation, better redundancy in kitchens and serving staff and all the overhead is spread across more customers. By far most companies would prefer to simply hire in a company that's specialized on doing exactly that if there's a reasonable number of suppliers they could switch between. When to take the total cost of doing it in house, it just isn't worth it to most companies.
It's the concept of passively sitting on a idea and then trying to extort money from anyone who actually brings a product to market that stifles innovation and acts against the interests of society. If I had my way, the patent system would be use-it-or-lose-it. If you don't make a genuine effort to utilize a patent, you'd have to sell it (not license it) to someone who will or it would become void.
That's fine if your patent is a full end-user product. But say I invent a new kind of spark plug for your car, it won't come into production until you get a major contract. If nobody jumps at the idea, are you going to lose it instantly? Is it good enough if I have a prototype? Then the patent trolls would just collect prototypes like they collect their patents, with no genuine attempt to sell the prototype. Very quickly you can end up in a situation where the only ones who can put patents into production are those who already are incumbents in the industry already.
You can only eliminate poverty through BOTH a general increase in wealth AND an even(ish) distribution of it. Capitalism has a fundamental failure because it does a decent job at building total wealth, then fails because it doesn't distribute it. Vice-versa for socialism.
Not to mention that regardless of what certain socialists seem to think, there should be wage differences. If you're smart and you work hard, then of course you should make more than one that's a stupid slacker. "From each according to ability, to each according to his need" says that if that's all you had the ability to do you're good no matter if it in absolute terms was much less. Fuck that, if he can produce so little then so should I. If you want to be the brain surgeon instead of the burger flipper, go for it. But if you can't make it I'm not sorry the burger flipper earns less. The way they define relative poverty there's no way that it could or should be eliminated.
Also, note the end date of the libertarian policy. Quite a while before the invention of the social safety net. What happened in between, hmm? Now, what is happening now, with social safety nets in Europe? What is to stop it from happening here in the US?
The problem is not the safety nets it's that whole countries have pushed expenses ahead of them through budget deficits and public debt. Like if your parents got a college fund and a car by their parents, but now they're so far underwater on mortgages and credit card debt they're bumming you for money instead. The safety net is based on a few people falling and many people catching you, but they built a bridge into thin air and now everyone is coming in for a hard landing all at once. If they'd just taken the cutbacks as they were needed to balance the budget the security nets would have held fine.
True, but the $1 Indian screeners aren't held to any sort of legal standard, Google gives them a boilerplate list of things to screen because they don't want it on their service and the cost and quality of that is purely a business decision. Then you can take the quick and easy route saying "porn is whatever we decide is porn" even if doesn't perfectly matches what the penal code thinks is porn and they're free to err on the safe side and there's no liability if they happen to let a video that's against their guidelines but not the law slip by. If on the other hand you make this some sort of mandatory prescreening required by the law or the courts to help prevent copyright infringement then censoring speech that is legal under the first amendment would be a pretty blatant violation of the uploader's rights and they could risk liability for screwing it up.
Then you have to equally carefully not censor anything protected by fair use or otherwise by the first amendment, meaning each case would in fact be a little micro-trial. That's not something a $1 screener in India is qualified to do, hell it's not something even a US layman is qualified to do. Maybe a judge is a little excessive but yes, a screening that doesn't amount to censorship would be very very expensive. Of course the MAFIAA are civil organizations and not the government, but I very much doubt you can blackmail Google into making such a system without getting the law involved.
If you start letting judges making up laws, what sort of law shall we have? Easy: You get Kangaroo Courts where the laws are made up to fit the ends of the Court.
I think you got it backwards, it's the people who write the contracts who'll be making law because they decide what kangaroo court to hear it in. The real law and the real court system will still exist, you've just lost your right to get your contract dispute heard there. This is the rule of law signing off and handing over the reins to the corporations, all that's lacking for a Star Wars moment is thunderous applause.
I really do not see what Linus's problem is with the GPL3.
Linus is primarily a developer, he wants to see the improvements Tivo has done, study them and if they're good enough roll them back into his own project. The GPLv2 fulfills his requirements and then he primarily wants it used - if it's used in locked down tivos, cell phones, tablets, set top boxes, embedded boxes or other appliances that's not a big concern for him, but if all those backed out plus a wave of fud it'd hurt his project. The FSFs agenda of user-modifiable software is not his agenda, he just wants the source code. Apparently that's the common opinion among the core Linux developers, they were pretty unanimously behind Linus on this one.
And 3"x5" is not too big at all. I've had wallets bigger than that.
I prefer a smaller one but my dad has one about that size, but it's bendable because it only has cash, plastic cards and various papers. A rigid 5" screen phone sounds uncomfortably large to me, I've seen some one here with a 4.3" phone and already that is starting to look odd and uncomfortable to hold, like you're talking into a mini-tablet or something. I don't think a phone that size is going to go mainstream at least.
How in hell can you blame them for selling WHAT EVERYONE BUYS; every time they offer an ultrafine display (like the three I listed), it makes very few sales, because ALMOST NOBODY will actually pay a premium for better displays. Unless and until Apple, or someone equally awesome at marketing, tells them they need it.
I had a 15.4" 1920x1200 Windows laptop and it was a love/hate relationship because of all the crappy applications that didn't deal with high PPI well. Many people simply gave up and wanted a "normal" screen instead. There's quite a few things to not like about Apple but they didn't just throw the retina display out there, they told the developers to jump and they jumped. Almost all my iPhone/iPad apps are now high PPI-aware and if they're not they get scaled to double size so they look normal. I'd love to have a 4K screen, but only if I can use it without a magnifier glass...
they are plain and simple guidelines that even children can understand: don't hurt others, don't kill, don't steal, don't etc. If a kid asks "why not?" we don't have to say "because God said not to" anymore
The "should" part is all well and nice, but if your wallet is gone and nobody's seen the thief well then there's no justice for you. The thief knows he got away with it and he doesn't have to face justice. Maybe I'm a pessimist but if there was no law, no police, no justice system of any sort I'm thinking it'd be more like Somalia than Kumbaya land. I think we all know that even in civilized society a lot of guilty men walk free, because they were never convicted or even a suspect. The carrot and whip is the only thing keeping them at bay, and if you believe in God then heaven and hell seems like a bit bigger than jail time. Funny you should mention children, because we have our own little children's version of that. Let me quote:
He's making a list, Checking it twice; Gonna find out who's naughty or nice. Santa Claus is coming to town Santa Claus is coming to town Santa Claus is coming to town
He sees you when you're sleeping He knows when you're awake He knows if you've been bad or good So be good for goodness sake
I guess you'd better hook them young on the belief that someone always knows if they've been naughty or nice. Funny how people think they leave all their "childish" beliefs behind then think exactly the same about Jesus.
The Nazis were stopped because they blatantly violated (nearly) everyone's rules of Universal Human Rights -- so much so that many of their own detested it.
The Nazis were stopped because they picked a fight with everyone in sight and bit over more than even they could chew, internal resistance was not a major issue until long after they had lost the critical battles of the war. Had Hitler stopped in May 1941, consolidated his forces and concentrated on blockading the UK while holding against the Soviets - who'd be totally crazy to attack - things would be very different. The US like to play up their part in WWII but the Nazis took 80% of the casualties on the Eastern Front, not the Western. Around ten million Soviet soldiers died in desperate defense of Moscow, Stalingrad and the oil fields to the south as well as an extremely harsh winter, that's what broke the Nazi army. You'd be surprised to know how many like racism as long as they're the superior race, and the inferior were quickly silenced.
Maybe it's different where you live but I don't perceive most religious people as scared. Most of them just want some sort of direction or purpose in life, something that gives meaning beyond eat, sleep, fuck and die. Someone to praise for the good things, pray for help with the bad things, that God has some sort of mission for them here on Earth not just an afterlife. And I don't mean that you have to go out and convert people, but to try living a life without sin and asking for forgiveness for your sins is a mission in itself. It's not that unlike sports, nobody tell me that in the greater meaning of things football "makes sense" - it's just an arbitrary set of rules we've turned into a game. But then we can play by those rules, we have some sort of measuring stick that says this was a good play and this was a bad play. Religion does that for your whole life, my life is now not just different than yours but it's now better than yours.
Science is great but it's also empty, there's nothing in physics or chemistry or biology that give any sort of purpose to life. There's no values, no ethics, it can perfectly describe what a bullet will do if you pull the trigger but there's nothing telling you if you should or shouldn't do it. Okay you can say evolution "wants" you to reproduce but that's not really true, it doesn't care if you don't. Why should it or how could it, it's only a game of numbers. There's humanism but it really only covers your interaction with other human beings and it mostly boils down to reciprocity because nobody wants to be treated as less than average but there's really no penalty for taking advantage of others if you can. Religion tends to be divine both in matters of fact and matters of law, there's no "getting away with murder" with an omniscient God. Seeing human courts sometimes failing miserably, I can see the appeal I just can't buy into the fantasy.
Well, Occam's Razor favor's the simplest explanation...
Evolutionist (courtesy of wikipedia):
Evolution is the process of change in all forms of life over generations, and evolutionary biology is the study of how evolution occurs. The biodiversity of life evolves by means of mutations, genetic drift and natural selection. The process of natural selection is based on three conditions. First, all individuals are supplied with hereditary material in the form of genes that are received from their parents, then passed on to their offspring. Second, organisms tend to produce more offspring than the environment can support. Third, there are variations among offspring as a consequence of either the introduction of new genes via random changes called mutations or reshuffling of existing genes during sexual reproduction. When these three conditions hold true, natural selection will occur. This means individuals will not have equal chances of reproductive success. Some individuals have a higher degree of fitness, a measure of success based on high numbers of surviving offspring. Traits that result in organisms being better adapted to their living conditions become more common in descendant populations. For this reason, populations will never remain exactly the same over successive generations. The forces of evolution are most evident when populations become isolated, either through geographic distance or by mechanisms that prevent genetic exchange. Over time, isolated populations can branch off into new species.
Bible literalist / creationist:
God, our all-powerful creator.
Besides, it's a general principle not a scientific fact, sometimes the answer is not the obvious one. You can't use it to say you're right and they're wrong.
And given sufficient liberal interpretation, Nostradamus isn't wrong he's just.... vague. A lot of the things in the Bible don't have and won't ever have any basis in fact. Take for example Noah's ark and that the flood covered all the mountains, no never was there a 8850 meter high flood all over the world. Not even the dinosaur killer created that kind of tidal wave, and besides there was no wave just unending rain. Oh and don't forget Noah must have traveled the world collecting everything from elephants to polar bears to penguins, because all other life perished. Fair enough, some parts of religion like souls and afterlife and whatnot are beyond science, but pretty much all religious text make plenty real-world claims that can be tested. Most of them fail pretty miserably.
To be honest, I'd not have a big problem with Webkit becoming the reference implementation for HTML. For one it's trying pretty hard to stick to the standard and if all else fails you can look at the code to see what the hell it's doing. Comparing that to IEs black box layout where I've been doing pixel-by-pixel adjustments waiting for the one pixel to turn my entire layout into monkey barf isn't even on the same planet. As long as they don't fall into the "yeah this is wrong but we can't fix it because that'd break too many sites" crap. Fix it and the crappy web developers who've relied on buggy and incorrect behavior will have to fix their shit, I don't have a problem with that.
Of course on the other hand developing and testing medicines and treatments is expensive, somebody has to pay for it and the US health system seems to be stuck with the bill.
If you'd like to believe healthcare is so expensive in the US because so much of it goes to medical R&D go ahead, but I don't think that has much to do with reality. It pays for a lot of health insurance companies, lawyers, drug marketing and a ton of CYA tests and procedures as well as payola all around, of course yes on a global scale the US is a rich country and buys many expensive drugs but not more than expected. What you do have is some incredibly wealthy people which may advance the state of the art in the best care money can buy, which can have trickle-down effects into general healthcare, but not the 99%. They just have an inefficient and expensive system.
That nothing happens is not a case of 'there was no problem' it is a case of 'almost all shit got fixed'.
Yeah, I remember the journalists trying to find examples of stuff that didn't work on 1.1.2000 and they found peanuts. In retrospect I think we could have fixed just the critical systems and delivered a "good enough" solution for considerably less, but I guess it was better to err on the safe side.
I rarely socialize with coworkers outside the office, I have "real" friends. (real in quotation marks to distinguish them from those "friends" some people have through work who are really just people they hang out with because it's convenient).
Well, many of the people I am friends with are people that at some point was convenient to hang with, be it friends of friends, school mates, fellow students, sports team etc. so why not coworkers? When you're chatting at the lunch table you've already passed many barriers compared to making friends with a random stranger. Of course hopefully you have old friends as well but people drift apart and move away or get too busy with girlfriends and family so if you're not replenishing your social network it's likely to fade away. Sitting at home alone you've lost at least one avenue.
Half of your post is about the economy of it which is a good point, but the other half is projecting on everyone else. Why are there people living in the coldest parts of Siberia when they could move to the tropics? Why do people live on Pitcairn Island thousands of kilometers from civilization? Why do people want to battle their way to the poles or the top of Mount Everest? Not everybody wants it easy. Not everybody wants it comfortable. As long as we send the right people they will thrive because it's the challenge and the difficulty of surviving that drives them.
Weed out the romantics and idealists, let them live a few months in simulation and I think 99.9% would freak at the idea of the rest of their life being that way. Hell, even if the right kind of type to go is one in a million there's still 300 of them just in the US alone. You might not understand them, you might not share their point of view but they are there, and they're really just waiting for a space base mission to ask. That really is not the problem.
We wouldn't get anything out of it, except things we could have gotten for a tiny fraction of the cost here on Earth! Spin-off technologies? That's like saying we should burn huge piles of money to stay warm in the winter. It's bureaucratic buzzword talk for "only 99% wasteful!".
Well for one we'd have to make a really sustainable, closed ecosystem based on renewable energy. We couldn't go around polluting and making landfills and it wouldn't have oil. Sure you can't say it's strictly necessary that we do it in space but than there's no cheating, no shortcuts. A lot of that would probably have spin-offs to make us more sustainable here on Earth too. And I'd consider a first base a trial run for trying to bootstrap a colony and by colony I mean a situation where each added person adds more self-sufficiency than cost. It'll probably be a running expense but we can't afford an accumulating expense that only gets bigger and bigger then more people go.
* Distribution and communication are nearly free via the internet. No need to print vinyl or CDs or anything. Just put the damn file on the internet.
That was true for a little while, but now the game has changed and people want streaming services. And unlike the tunes you used to download from iTunes and Amazon and rip from CDs and download over the net, the streaming services don't work well together. Either you are on Spotify (+ own MP3s) or you're for example on WiMP (+ own MP3s), a big streaming service here in Norway but there's no way to make a seamless playlist with songs from both services. There's different apps, different synching, different offline modes not to mention if you got both you're double paying for a lot of music. So people want one service to be their one-stop shop for music, and once one service has a dominating position it exploits that to maximize its own profit.
If they sold CDs, you could sell CDs. If they sold MP3s, you could sell MP3s. But you can't sell streaming like you'd add another repository to your linux distro, your music won't ever integrate with whatever other streaming service they have. The only way you're going to a first class citizen is to be on the customer's preferred service but the services will pay small time artists shit. So you get the wonderful choice of no customers because you're not on Spotify or no margins because you are on Spotify. Since profit is volume * margin you get the wonderful choice of 0*x or x*0 in profits, but the result is pretty much the same. Most likely you're going to bend over and let Spotify take all the money for the music, hoping you can get some fame and live performances while they profit.
Of course we're never going to run out of people who'll pick up an instrument in their spare time or the odd playboy who can afford to play without income. But even the best of talent gets better if they get to practice and refine their talent all day. Of course there's no right to be paid, if we don't feel it's worth paying for then we won't. But that is not the same as to say that it doesn't matter because others will take their place, any more than amateur football teams could replace NFL. Sure, somebody would still play football but it wouldn't be on nearly the same level. Even for the people that can't and won't quit their day job making a little cash on the side or covering expenses in part or full is an incentive to keep playing. Or to not stop playing and get more work if the money is tight, to put it that way.
recorded music is your advertising and you should be making money on live performances from the real fans
Which kinda defeats the purpose of having fans from all over the Internet, there's many many bands that won't come to my little corner of the world and you'd have to be a pretty big fan to travel very far just to go to a concert. And even then they still only get one ticket. And maybe that one weekend they are there it doesn't work because you got another important event. You can't live off just a handful of fanatic fans who'll go to any length to see you.
just like almost every line of business these days. break even or lose on 90% of your customers and make your profit on the rest. something like 4% of dropboxe's customers pay them, yet they make A LOT of money
Where the analogy breaks down is that it's easy for everyone who wants to get dropbox's paid service to do so. With a live performance there's probably 4% that'd pay and 4% that easily could go (remember anywhere you hold a concert is where >99.9% of the earth's population doesn't live) for a total of 0.16% that actually came and paid.
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Prices here in Norway:
Uncapped 5 Mbps ADSL: Around $50
Uncapped 60/60 fiber: Around $90
Okay quite a bit more than you're paying but Norway is in general an extremely expensive country overall, an average full time salary is $75k so by our standards it's cheap. And I once downloaded a 500GB torrent, it really is uncapped. And this country has a population density of 13/km^2 as opposed to India with 368/km^2, delivering broadband there should be much much cheaper. I honestly wouldn't worry it seems mostly like a US problem, all of Europe is constantly upgrading. For example here's from an article I recently read on Britain:
BT said that 7 million premises are now on its fibre network, and this year that number will grow to 10 million. The ultimate target is two-thirds of the UK by the end of 2014.
Oh and they'll also triple top speed from 100 Mbps to 300 Mbps. Any new apartment block or any new housing field is wired with fiber and it's being retrofitted to a lot of old housing too. It's not a question of whether it's the future, but how long it'll take.
4700 Mbit/s = 4.7 Gbit/s, how's that a record? The Gathering here in Norway had a 200 Gbit/s Internet Connection, topping Dreamhack in Sweden's 120 Gbit/s. Maybe it's some silly 4.7 Gbit over cable, but that's like the wold's fastest subcompact. And for all of us that have fiber to the home, yeah we know it's just what equipment you put on both ends. The cable itself could probably pull 100 Gbit/s with the right equipment.
Same with a lot of computer and electronics repair, in the old days they actually repaired them like replacing a bad chip or capacitor or welded a bad connection. Then they were replacing whole cards instead of components and eventually mostly replaced the whole box. They went from highly skilled jobs to simple manual labor to glorified delivery boys. It doesn't even matter if they are repairable, it just isn't worth a skilled person's time to look at cheap, small electronics anymore. Even warranty repairs are becoming more and more warranty replacements, it's not worth it to fix one item compared to increasing the capacity of the production line to produce some replacements.
And it's *always* cheaper to in-source (provided you can find the appropriate resources). You can either do it yourself, or you can pay someone their cost, which could be your cost, plus 20% or more overhead and profit. So outsourcing costs you a minimum of 20% more than doing it in house. But all the consultants swear it's better to outsource - to their company. That's like hiring the Fox and Co security company to guard the hen house.
By that logic, you'd never need anything like suppliers, partners or subcontractors, it'd be cheaper to do everything yourself right down to making the PC all the way from mining silicates. Supporting your basic desktop is not something unique to your company and there's typically economics of scale. I doubt you need exactly twice the IT staff to double from 200 to 400 users. For an outsourcing company that might be increasing the desktops under management from 10,200 to 10,400 instead, they can do it for less because of economics of scale.
Just to take one very obvious example of non-core activity at least here in Norway a lot of the big companies use one of the same two-three big cafeteria operators. Why? Bigger quantities of food both in purchasing and in preparation, better redundancy in kitchens and serving staff and all the overhead is spread across more customers. By far most companies would prefer to simply hire in a company that's specialized on doing exactly that if there's a reasonable number of suppliers they could switch between. When to take the total cost of doing it in house, it just isn't worth it to most companies.
It's the concept of passively sitting on a idea and then trying to extort money from anyone who actually brings a product to market that stifles innovation and acts against the interests of society. If I had my way, the patent system would be use-it-or-lose-it. If you don't make a genuine effort to utilize a patent, you'd have to sell it (not license it) to someone who will or it would become void.
That's fine if your patent is a full end-user product. But say I invent a new kind of spark plug for your car, it won't come into production until you get a major contract. If nobody jumps at the idea, are you going to lose it instantly? Is it good enough if I have a prototype? Then the patent trolls would just collect prototypes like they collect their patents, with no genuine attempt to sell the prototype. Very quickly you can end up in a situation where the only ones who can put patents into production are those who already are incumbents in the industry already.
You can only eliminate poverty through BOTH a general increase in wealth AND an even(ish) distribution of it. Capitalism has a fundamental failure because it does a decent job at building total wealth, then fails because it doesn't distribute it. Vice-versa for socialism.
Not to mention that regardless of what certain socialists seem to think, there should be wage differences. If you're smart and you work hard, then of course you should make more than one that's a stupid slacker. "From each according to ability, to each according to his need" says that if that's all you had the ability to do you're good no matter if it in absolute terms was much less. Fuck that, if he can produce so little then so should I. If you want to be the brain surgeon instead of the burger flipper, go for it. But if you can't make it I'm not sorry the burger flipper earns less. The way they define relative poverty there's no way that it could or should be eliminated.
Also, note the end date of the libertarian policy. Quite a while before the invention of the social safety net. What happened in between, hmm? Now, what is happening now, with social safety nets in Europe? What is to stop it from happening here in the US?
The problem is not the safety nets it's that whole countries have pushed expenses ahead of them through budget deficits and public debt. Like if your parents got a college fund and a car by their parents, but now they're so far underwater on mortgages and credit card debt they're bumming you for money instead. The safety net is based on a few people falling and many people catching you, but they built a bridge into thin air and now everyone is coming in for a hard landing all at once. If they'd just taken the cutbacks as they were needed to balance the budget the security nets would have held fine.
True, but the $1 Indian screeners aren't held to any sort of legal standard, Google gives them a boilerplate list of things to screen because they don't want it on their service and the cost and quality of that is purely a business decision. Then you can take the quick and easy route saying "porn is whatever we decide is porn" even if doesn't perfectly matches what the penal code thinks is porn and they're free to err on the safe side and there's no liability if they happen to let a video that's against their guidelines but not the law slip by. If on the other hand you make this some sort of mandatory prescreening required by the law or the courts to help prevent copyright infringement then censoring speech that is legal under the first amendment would be a pretty blatant violation of the uploader's rights and they could risk liability for screwing it up.
Then you have to equally carefully not censor anything protected by fair use or otherwise by the first amendment, meaning each case would in fact be a little micro-trial. That's not something a $1 screener in India is qualified to do, hell it's not something even a US layman is qualified to do. Maybe a judge is a little excessive but yes, a screening that doesn't amount to censorship would be very very expensive. Of course the MAFIAA are civil organizations and not the government, but I very much doubt you can blackmail Google into making such a system without getting the law involved.
If you start letting judges making up laws, what sort of law shall we have? Easy: You get Kangaroo Courts where the laws are made up to fit the ends of the Court.
I think you got it backwards, it's the people who write the contracts who'll be making law because they decide what kangaroo court to hear it in. The real law and the real court system will still exist, you've just lost your right to get your contract dispute heard there. This is the rule of law signing off and handing over the reins to the corporations, all that's lacking for a Star Wars moment is thunderous applause.
I really do not see what Linus's problem is with the GPL3.
Linus is primarily a developer, he wants to see the improvements Tivo has done, study them and if they're good enough roll them back into his own project. The GPLv2 fulfills his requirements and then he primarily wants it used - if it's used in locked down tivos, cell phones, tablets, set top boxes, embedded boxes or other appliances that's not a big concern for him, but if all those backed out plus a wave of fud it'd hurt his project. The FSFs agenda of user-modifiable software is not his agenda, he just wants the source code. Apparently that's the common opinion among the core Linux developers, they were pretty unanimously behind Linus on this one.
And 3"x5" is not too big at all. I've had wallets bigger than that.
I prefer a smaller one but my dad has one about that size, but it's bendable because it only has cash, plastic cards and various papers. A rigid 5" screen phone sounds uncomfortably large to me, I've seen some one here with a 4.3" phone and already that is starting to look odd and uncomfortable to hold, like you're talking into a mini-tablet or something. I don't think a phone that size is going to go mainstream at least.
How in hell can you blame them for selling WHAT EVERYONE BUYS; every time they offer an ultrafine display (like the three I listed), it makes very few sales, because ALMOST NOBODY will actually pay a premium for better displays. Unless and until Apple, or someone equally awesome at marketing, tells them they need it.
I had a 15.4" 1920x1200 Windows laptop and it was a love/hate relationship because of all the crappy applications that didn't deal with high PPI well. Many people simply gave up and wanted a "normal" screen instead. There's quite a few things to not like about Apple but they didn't just throw the retina display out there, they told the developers to jump and they jumped. Almost all my iPhone/iPad apps are now high PPI-aware and if they're not they get scaled to double size so they look normal. I'd love to have a 4K screen, but only if I can use it without a magnifier glass...
they are plain and simple guidelines that even children can understand: don't hurt others, don't kill, don't steal, don't etc. If a kid asks "why not?" we don't have to say "because God said not to" anymore
The "should" part is all well and nice, but if your wallet is gone and nobody's seen the thief well then there's no justice for you. The thief knows he got away with it and he doesn't have to face justice. Maybe I'm a pessimist but if there was no law, no police, no justice system of any sort I'm thinking it'd be more like Somalia than Kumbaya land. I think we all know that even in civilized society a lot of guilty men walk free, because they were never convicted or even a suspect. The carrot and whip is the only thing keeping them at bay, and if you believe in God then heaven and hell seems like a bit bigger than jail time. Funny you should mention children, because we have our own little children's version of that. Let me quote:
He's making a list,
Checking it twice;
Gonna find out who's naughty or nice.
Santa Claus is coming to town
Santa Claus is coming to town
Santa Claus is coming to town
He sees you when you're sleeping
He knows when you're awake
He knows if you've been bad or good
So be good for goodness sake
I guess you'd better hook them young on the belief that someone always knows if they've been naughty or nice. Funny how people think they leave all their "childish" beliefs behind then think exactly the same about Jesus.
The Nazis were stopped because they blatantly violated (nearly) everyone's rules of Universal Human Rights -- so much so that many of their own detested it.
The Nazis were stopped because they picked a fight with everyone in sight and bit over more than even they could chew, internal resistance was not a major issue until long after they had lost the critical battles of the war. Had Hitler stopped in May 1941, consolidated his forces and concentrated on blockading the UK while holding against the Soviets - who'd be totally crazy to attack - things would be very different. The US like to play up their part in WWII but the Nazis took 80% of the casualties on the Eastern Front, not the Western. Around ten million Soviet soldiers died in desperate defense of Moscow, Stalingrad and the oil fields to the south as well as an extremely harsh winter, that's what broke the Nazi army. You'd be surprised to know how many like racism as long as they're the superior race, and the inferior were quickly silenced.
Maybe it's different where you live but I don't perceive most religious people as scared. Most of them just want some sort of direction or purpose in life, something that gives meaning beyond eat, sleep, fuck and die. Someone to praise for the good things, pray for help with the bad things, that God has some sort of mission for them here on Earth not just an afterlife. And I don't mean that you have to go out and convert people, but to try living a life without sin and asking for forgiveness for your sins is a mission in itself. It's not that unlike sports, nobody tell me that in the greater meaning of things football "makes sense" - it's just an arbitrary set of rules we've turned into a game. But then we can play by those rules, we have some sort of measuring stick that says this was a good play and this was a bad play. Religion does that for your whole life, my life is now not just different than yours but it's now better than yours.
Science is great but it's also empty, there's nothing in physics or chemistry or biology that give any sort of purpose to life. There's no values, no ethics, it can perfectly describe what a bullet will do if you pull the trigger but there's nothing telling you if you should or shouldn't do it. Okay you can say evolution "wants" you to reproduce but that's not really true, it doesn't care if you don't. Why should it or how could it, it's only a game of numbers. There's humanism but it really only covers your interaction with other human beings and it mostly boils down to reciprocity because nobody wants to be treated as less than average but there's really no penalty for taking advantage of others if you can. Religion tends to be divine both in matters of fact and matters of law, there's no "getting away with murder" with an omniscient God. Seeing human courts sometimes failing miserably, I can see the appeal I just can't buy into the fantasy.
Well, Occam's Razor favor's the simplest explanation...
Evolutionist (courtesy of wikipedia):
Evolution is the process of change in all forms of life over generations, and evolutionary biology is the study of how evolution occurs. The biodiversity of life evolves by means of mutations, genetic drift and natural selection. The process of natural selection is based on three conditions. First, all individuals are supplied with hereditary material in the form of genes that are received from their parents, then passed on to their offspring. Second, organisms tend to produce more offspring than the environment can support. Third, there are variations among offspring as a consequence of either the introduction of new genes via random changes called mutations or reshuffling of existing genes during sexual reproduction. When these three conditions hold true, natural selection will occur. This means individuals will not have equal chances of reproductive success. Some individuals have a higher degree of fitness, a measure of success based on high numbers of surviving offspring. Traits that result in organisms being better adapted to their living conditions become more common in descendant populations. For this reason, populations will never remain exactly the same over successive generations. The forces of evolution are most evident when populations become isolated, either through geographic distance or by mechanisms that prevent genetic exchange. Over time, isolated populations can branch off into new species.
Bible literalist / creationist:
God, our all-powerful creator.
Besides, it's a general principle not a scientific fact, sometimes the answer is not the obvious one. You can't use it to say you're right and they're wrong.
And given sufficient liberal interpretation, Nostradamus isn't wrong he's just.... vague. A lot of the things in the Bible don't have and won't ever have any basis in fact. Take for example Noah's ark and that the flood covered all the mountains, no never was there a 8850 meter high flood all over the world. Not even the dinosaur killer created that kind of tidal wave, and besides there was no wave just unending rain. Oh and don't forget Noah must have traveled the world collecting everything from elephants to polar bears to penguins, because all other life perished. Fair enough, some parts of religion like souls and afterlife and whatnot are beyond science, but pretty much all religious text make plenty real-world claims that can be tested. Most of them fail pretty miserably.
To be honest, I'd not have a big problem with Webkit becoming the reference implementation for HTML. For one it's trying pretty hard to stick to the standard and if all else fails you can look at the code to see what the hell it's doing. Comparing that to IEs black box layout where I've been doing pixel-by-pixel adjustments waiting for the one pixel to turn my entire layout into monkey barf isn't even on the same planet. As long as they don't fall into the "yeah this is wrong but we can't fix it because that'd break too many sites" crap. Fix it and the crappy web developers who've relied on buggy and incorrect behavior will have to fix their shit, I don't have a problem with that.
Of course on the other hand developing and testing medicines and treatments is expensive, somebody has to pay for it and the US health system seems to be stuck with the bill.
If you'd like to believe healthcare is so expensive in the US because so much of it goes to medical R&D go ahead, but I don't think that has much to do with reality. It pays for a lot of health insurance companies, lawyers, drug marketing and a ton of CYA tests and procedures as well as payola all around, of course yes on a global scale the US is a rich country and buys many expensive drugs but not more than expected. What you do have is some incredibly wealthy people which may advance the state of the art in the best care money can buy, which can have trickle-down effects into general healthcare, but not the 99%. They just have an inefficient and expensive system.
That nothing happens is not a case of 'there was no problem' it is a case of 'almost all shit got fixed'.
Yeah, I remember the journalists trying to find examples of stuff that didn't work on 1.1.2000 and they found peanuts. In retrospect I think we could have fixed just the critical systems and delivered a "good enough" solution for considerably less, but I guess it was better to err on the safe side.
I rarely socialize with coworkers outside the office, I have "real" friends. (real in quotation marks to distinguish them from those "friends" some people have through work who are really just people they hang out with because it's convenient).
Well, many of the people I am friends with are people that at some point was convenient to hang with, be it friends of friends, school mates, fellow students, sports team etc. so why not coworkers? When you're chatting at the lunch table you've already passed many barriers compared to making friends with a random stranger. Of course hopefully you have old friends as well but people drift apart and move away or get too busy with girlfriends and family so if you're not replenishing your social network it's likely to fade away. Sitting at home alone you've lost at least one avenue.
Half of your post is about the economy of it which is a good point, but the other half is projecting on everyone else. Why are there people living in the coldest parts of Siberia when they could move to the tropics? Why do people live on Pitcairn Island thousands of kilometers from civilization? Why do people want to battle their way to the poles or the top of Mount Everest? Not everybody wants it easy. Not everybody wants it comfortable. As long as we send the right people they will thrive because it's the challenge and the difficulty of surviving that drives them.
Weed out the romantics and idealists, let them live a few months in simulation and I think 99.9% would freak at the idea of the rest of their life being that way. Hell, even if the right kind of type to go is one in a million there's still 300 of them just in the US alone. You might not understand them, you might not share their point of view but they are there, and they're really just waiting for a space base mission to ask. That really is not the problem.
We wouldn't get anything out of it, except things we could have gotten for a tiny fraction of the cost here on Earth! Spin-off technologies? That's like saying we should burn huge piles of money to stay warm in the winter. It's bureaucratic buzzword talk for "only 99% wasteful!".
Well for one we'd have to make a really sustainable, closed ecosystem based on renewable energy. We couldn't go around polluting and making landfills and it wouldn't have oil. Sure you can't say it's strictly necessary that we do it in space but than there's no cheating, no shortcuts. A lot of that would probably have spin-offs to make us more sustainable here on Earth too. And I'd consider a first base a trial run for trying to bootstrap a colony and by colony I mean a situation where each added person adds more self-sufficiency than cost. It'll probably be a running expense but we can't afford an accumulating expense that only gets bigger and bigger then more people go.
* Distribution and communication are nearly free via the internet. No need to print vinyl or CDs or anything. Just put the damn file on the internet.
That was true for a little while, but now the game has changed and people want streaming services. And unlike the tunes you used to download from iTunes and Amazon and rip from CDs and download over the net, the streaming services don't work well together. Either you are on Spotify (+ own MP3s) or you're for example on WiMP (+ own MP3s), a big streaming service here in Norway but there's no way to make a seamless playlist with songs from both services. There's different apps, different synching, different offline modes not to mention if you got both you're double paying for a lot of music. So people want one service to be their one-stop shop for music, and once one service has a dominating position it exploits that to maximize its own profit.
If they sold CDs, you could sell CDs. If they sold MP3s, you could sell MP3s. But you can't sell streaming like you'd add another repository to your linux distro, your music won't ever integrate with whatever other streaming service they have. The only way you're going to a first class citizen is to be on the customer's preferred service but the services will pay small time artists shit. So you get the wonderful choice of no customers because you're not on Spotify or no margins because you are on Spotify. Since profit is volume * margin you get the wonderful choice of 0*x or x*0 in profits, but the result is pretty much the same. Most likely you're going to bend over and let Spotify take all the money for the music, hoping you can get some fame and live performances while they profit.
Of course we're never going to run out of people who'll pick up an instrument in their spare time or the odd playboy who can afford to play without income. But even the best of talent gets better if they get to practice and refine their talent all day. Of course there's no right to be paid, if we don't feel it's worth paying for then we won't. But that is not the same as to say that it doesn't matter because others will take their place, any more than amateur football teams could replace NFL. Sure, somebody would still play football but it wouldn't be on nearly the same level. Even for the people that can't and won't quit their day job making a little cash on the side or covering expenses in part or full is an incentive to keep playing. Or to not stop playing and get more work if the money is tight, to put it that way.
recorded music is your advertising and you should be making money on live performances from the real fans
Which kinda defeats the purpose of having fans from all over the Internet, there's many many bands that won't come to my little corner of the world and you'd have to be a pretty big fan to travel very far just to go to a concert. And even then they still only get one ticket. And maybe that one weekend they are there it doesn't work because you got another important event. You can't live off just a handful of fanatic fans who'll go to any length to see you.
just like almost every line of business these days. break even or lose on 90% of your customers and make your profit on the rest. something like 4% of dropboxe's customers pay them, yet they make A LOT of money
Where the analogy breaks down is that it's easy for everyone who wants to get dropbox's paid service to do so. With a live performance there's probably 4% that'd pay and 4% that easily could go (remember anywhere you hold a concert is where >99.9% of the earth's population doesn't live) for a total of 0.16% that actually came and paid.