1. Labels start gouging customers. 2. Customers turn pirates. 3. Third party offers a service that doesn't gouge customers (the stage where Spotify currently is). 4. Pirates turn customers. 5. Labels notice that most people are paying for music. 6. Rince and repeat.
Pretty much. Those taking the worst beating on Spotify though are the fringe artists, because they offer one price per stream even though the niche might be willing to pay more and if you're not on Spotify you'll miss most the market so it's meet the new boss, same as the old boss. For the life of me I can't understand why artists didn't organize some form of non-profit client where you could plug in subscriptions like repositories on Linux. Some could be free. Some could be paid. You could co-operate on hosting or roll your own. You could cooperate on billing or roll your own. Artists would be free to organize how they want and offer any music package they like. Now it's the Spotify deal, take it or leave it.
That's pretty clear. They are allowed to make temporary changes to audio or video content during transmission for private home viewing, provided only that they are modifying an authorized copy. It sounds to me (IANAL) like they have a very strong case.
Among the three exclusive rights of copyright holders are reproduction, distribution and creating derivative works. This modifies the last right, but not the two previous ones. Those who create the DVD have a license under the reproduction right, as a buyer you have none. Obviously they can't buy a DVD and set up a TV broadcast of it. So the argument is that VidAngel is not doing distribution from them to the user, it's the user watching their own copy under fair use. That argument has been tried many ways with remote antennas/CDs/DVDs/DVRs and been pretty universally rejected.
You can use a DVR, but the cable network can't offer a DVR service without permission from the copyright holders. You can put up an antenna on your roof, but they can't put up one on their roof and offer a rebroadcast service. You can put up an MP3 jukebox, but they can't buy CDs for you and offer a jukebox service. Legally it's not the user doing it, it's your company doing it as a service for the user. You can't loan their fair use rights to deliver your service.
VidAngel is trying to "backport" the permission to create censored copies to give them permission to distribute, but it doesn't work that way. Obviously making a legal transformation like say a parody on top of a pirate copy doesn't make it legal, you can't fix distribution/reproduction rights problems by transforming it. The section you quote only protects the transformation of an authorized source, that is an in-flight copy which has been legally created. But if you need distribution rights to create that ephemeral copy it's not authorized and the section void, it doesn't grant rights you lack. That the source is legal is necessary but not sufficient, having a legal copy doesn't give you distribution rights. So when you sum up their legal strategy it's:
I watched such a drama unfold before me. It turned out that those seated were in the wrong theatre.
I actually had this happen on an airplane. We board plane, staff starts counting then counting again but we're four passengers too many. Is anybody not going to the destination? Silence. It's free seating so there's no double booking of seats. So they start going through the passenger list with name calling - very fun with 100+ seats. So mid-way someone comes from the gate asking for four passengers by name, they're present. And they're on the wrong plane, they leave so finally we can take off.
I got the rest of the story by a woman on the airport bus venting over the phone. They had boarded the plane, but it was grounded by mechanical problems. Then when finally the new flight was ready to depart, four passengers were missing. Since they were already boarded they didn't scan the boarding card the second time so they don't know who is missing. They can't take off with luggage without the passengers, so they finished the whole 100+ seat name call. So they were about to unload all the cargo to find those passengers' luggage which would take even more time, when finally the four showed up. The other passengers were not amused.
I assume that somewhere in the middle there a manager heard that two planes had to delay departure because of headcount issues and figured out they must be related. Apparently the ticket validation wasn't locked to a particular flight, so they managed to get on our plane even though they didn't belong. It was all domestic and of course everybody's been through security, so it wasn't really a risk. It probably hadn't been a problem before, except when these two planes were going to the same place with only a few minutes time difference and those four goofballs mixed it up. And they caught it, so no big deal. But those four people managed to delay two full flights quite a bit.
Long distance it might occasionally happen, on popular routes I haven't seen it in ages. Mostly they've structured it so that business travelers have flexible tickets, a certain percentage will always arrive early to the airport and wish to re-book to an earlier flight. If it's full tough luck wait for your scheduled departure, if there are no-shows they'll fill it up. That way they keep the planes full without any risk of overbooking any other than the last plane - which probably won't sell out anyway.
It's pretty clear certain age groups get more into accidents than others: it's because they're not really mature enough to be good drivers, even after years of driving experience.
I don't think they're intellectually incapable as such, I have the impression that most drove responsibly alone. Pretty much all the really reckless driving I saw was showing off or egging each other on and nobody had the social maturity to stand up and be the uncool party pooper. I think it takes most people well into their 20s to get that self-confidence to stand your ground.
To some degree you can change what's cool so the herd mentality doesn't do it, smoking is now uncool. Wearing a condom is perhaps not cool, but insisting you wear one is much more accepted than before and you're not a slut for protecting yourself from STDs either. But I think you have to work very hard to make driving really fast be uncool for 18yo boys...
I think part of the problem is that people get spread too thin. When you have 500 friends, you really have no friends. Exclusive time and confidentiality disappears. It's not the frequency of contact that makes friendship, it's the depth.
I think it quite quickly sorts into tiers anyway, because in the real world you're only one place at a time. If you hang out with group A of friends on the weekends, you're not hanging out with group B. Or for that matter how you balance friends/family/partner/self-time, obviously if you have a wife and kids you don't have the same time as when you were single but there's still a large degree of choice. I can feel it on something so trivial as when we're playing a four player online co-op game, who's first to be asked and who's just backup if the others are unavailable.
Everybody else you're really just an observer and not part of their lives. I don't want to undersell Facebook either because I understand the feeling of taking parts in your grandkids' lives without actually being physically present, but when it comes to creating real bonds of friendship and family you have to be there and really interact with them. Even when we're just alone together, like when my buddy and I go out flying our drones we each fly our own drone but it's a shared experience. If I did it and posted on my Facebook and he did it and posted on his Facebook it wouldn't be the same at all.
Did those "listening systems" include computers with freshly installed without permission Windows 10 sending home recordings of their owners going "What the hell is this shit? I didn't agree to this!"?
Probably? With everything else Win10 does I'd be very surprised if they don't report back that users did a rollback to the OS they had before. If it's immediately as you're asked to agree to the Win10 EULA it's a pretty strong sign the customer just went WTF what is this, I don't want it.
We spend a ton on roadways now using basically the same construction materials and techniques we've used for 75 years and we're bitching that solar roads won't last. Well no shit, fucking cars would't last long either if we built them like we did in 1950, either, yet we say we can't build a better road? Maybe we're not trying.
If it costs 5x to make something that lasts 2x as long we could, but it wouldn't make sense. This is literally where the rubber meets the road, the rubber is going to wear out. The road is going to wear out. Re-paving is just standard maintenance like switching tires every so many miles.
When you put it that way, it sounds plenty... really who watches 45 shows? Personally I feel there's only so much time I want to passively waste as a couch potato and there's no shortage of decent-ish shows to fill the time. I think Netflix found the same, good catalog or bad catalog we end up taking our fill from the best of what's available.
But they have one important thing: A use for a crippled self-driving car. You could imagine the first generation of SDCs being perfect and drive anywhere on any road under any conditions. I very much doubt it, extremely few projects manage a "big bang" transition. But say you have a taxi service and you know that this particular downtown ride is all mapped out, well marked pre-tested roads and the sun is shining on dry asphalt, let's send our self-driving service. Everything else outside that box you get a human driver. Eventually the box grows and grows and by virtue of having the biggest and thus most available fleet and as the market explodes as you get a taxi service much closer to cost-of-driving prices and more flexible than public transport you become the Amazon of modern transportation. Okay maybe a little optimistic...
People posting on slashdot should really not complain about lost productivity.
People complaining about people being so effective and/or frugal that they have leisure time instead of working 24x7 should have their head examined. Hampering productivity like you need to dig this with a spoon instead of a shovel or a bulldozer is a waste. Using the bulldozer so you can go home and "waste" your time playing games is a feature, not a bug. Unless you're a sociopath CEO trying to extract more profit from your employees so you can buy a bigger yacht.
The opensource x.org initiatives, while many of the issues above are now resolved, will never be performant in the way nVidia is and lead to the creation of alternative graphical backends like Wayland, which, are trying to resolve these issues for 'good' opensource citizens
Wayland is not in any meaningful way an alternative to the nVidia driver. It basically says you do the rendering, I'll do the compositing. For say full-screen games that means it's dumped straight to the display buffer while doing practically nothing. Right now the nVidia driver doesn't know how to play nice with Wayland but patches are coming, when it does it'll still do 99% of the heavy lifting.
You can only win the lottery if you buy a ticket. Buying lottery tickets is pretty stupid. So people that win lotteries tend to be stupid people that make poor choices. You would see much better outcomes if the lotteries winnings were assigned randomly.
So if we assume that intelligence isn't something you can change. You know you're not all that bright. You dropped out of school to work minimum wage. You have a dead end job. You have credit card debt and no savings. You live paycheck to paycheck. Life sucks and you don't really have any means to turn it around, I don't blame people like that for needing a little hope here and now. And if you know you're in the lower half you don't challenge people to a game of wits because you lose. Everyone from the smartest to the stupidest have an equal chance to win the lottery, maybe that's the best they can hope for. Even I do it occasionally for the fantasy, I just need the one lottery ticket though to know I'm in there and have a foolish daydream of hitting a huge jackpot. It's less make-believe than playing games on my computer, and I do that....
What more can they do to shut up the nay-sayers who keep crying that the big bad wolf is going to sue us if we use Mono?
Those who think it's a trap will always believe the only reason it hasn't snapped is too small a catch. As long as people shun Mono, Microsoft will not sue. When people are committed, Microsoft will sue. I don't think you can win that argument. That said, my impression is that most companies are bastards when they're the top dog. It's only when they're the underdog they want grand alliances, standards and interoperability. So the only way to win is to abandon old allies as they abandon us and support the new underdog.
I can't really imagine my house becoming very "smart" with every light bulb doing its own thing. I'd rather pair it with a hub so I could manage all my devices from there. That way the devices themselves would be more shielded and it would be the central point to update everything from. Kinda like active directory/domain administrator but for my IoT network instead of Windows PCs.
How are you going to make it that nobody is in a bad relationship, loses their job, has a catastrophic medical event that significantly impacts their daily lives, and nobody experiences inconsolable grief over someone close to them dying? (...) And if you tell someone to "just pull yourself out of it", you deserve it when they punch you in the face.
At the danger of sounding like a cheap self-help book, only you can change how you feel. I'm not saying it's the solution to those with really grave problems, but most everybody else just need perspective. Whenever I'm feeling miserable and want to wallow in self-pity I take a look at BBC News for someone who's really in a shithole and had fate really kick them in the nuts like in Aleppo right now. And then my problems don't quite seem like the worst thing that's ever happened to anybody anymore, in fact I often end up feeling almost like I've cried wolf for no reason.
Aside from this, some lucky logic-chopper is going to have the unenviable task of explaining why existing, more or less universally accepted, 'fire-and-forget' missiles and other similar hardware that gets its activation command from a human; but thereafter guides itself to target without external intervention, isn't a killbot; but the more drone-shaped hardware that gets its initial activation command from a human; but thereafter guides itself to target without external intervention, is a killbot.
I think there difference between a killbot and other systems is that it makes its own target selection, as in what are legitimate targets and how, where and when do you engage them. If the soldiers got their hands up and are waving the white flag they're not legitimate targets even if they wear the enemy's uniform. Will the software consider that they have hostages or human shields? People are going to die, it's not unreasonable to demand a human has to take responsibility for each individual decision. The obvious exceptions are defensive countermeasures to incoming fire where sub-human response time is necessary.
I don't think it's enough to just do this second hand through an algorithm that decides who lives and who dies, there will never be a perfect algorithm that covers every situation. It won't make war pretty. It won't necessarily spare civilians. Bombing Hiroshima and Nagasaki was very much a human decision, because somebody justified it as necessary. If he'd just pushed a button and had a drone deliver the nuke wouldn't make it a kill bot in my eyes, it didn't make the decision. Analysis and suggestions are one thing, but if we can't stomach the choices we make we shouldn't take humans out of the equation to make it easier on ourselves.
If you use a third-party library that has a bug in it, you'll be exposed to the same bugs that everybody else using that library are. On the other hand, if you go at it alone, your implementation will have bugs of its own.
But the value of the target will be proportional too, the value of compromising "every server using OpenSSL" is huge compared to a custom hack that only works for your little company because of your home grown library. It's no doubt that the main reason you use libraries is because of resource constraints, not security. If you're small enough to not matter, spending a man year re-implementing what's already done is a no-go. If you have the resources to seriously consider going it alone you're probably big enough to matter hacking just your company has value in itself.
And if you try to skimp on the resources for doing it what's far more likely to happen in practice is that you get the worst of both worlds, your developers get "inspired" by public code and you get copy-pasta code with the same vulnerabilities but without the maintenance and fixes, so your stale code is vulnerable long after the public code is fixed. That's actually much worse because the fix will usually lead to post-hoc exploit code to hack companies that don't have good update policies and the odds of your copied code being updated is slim and none.
Proper managers can manage this. It makes sense, it's about time.
Even "proper managers" aren't telepathic. I know that what I do doesn't produce results in any predictable fashion. Sometimes I'm stumped, sometimes I'm working down dead ends, sometimes I'm running a maze with no exit, sometimes I spend forever tracking down a bug I missed while other times I'm just blazing through. Even if I'm asked to do roughly the same again subtle differences often throw estimates totally out of whack. In the long run my bad beat story will wear thin that these assignments aren't harder than the last ones and I'm not just missing the punchline, it's actually me shirking and slacking. But really I think I got a lot of leeway to fool my manager if I was the cheating kind and just wanted my pay check.
Part of keeping the system honest is verifying that yes, I've actually put the time in and worked on it. The trouble is that some managers confuse metrics that say you've done something with metrics that say you've done something useful. Like lines of code, commits, keyboard activity and so on they're all trivially "produced" if you want them to, they're really just a fallback if you're not delivering results. And even they can be gouged, I've heard stories of outsourced workers that appear to be frantically "working" by opening and scrolling through files and looking busy but really just pretending. Dilbert has quite a few of these, how to look like you're doing work. It works in PHB companies.
Agreed, fixing population growth is the only permanent solution to our environmental footprint because otherwise the "greener" we get we'll just grow to be 10 billion, 20 billion, 50 billion and so on until no matter how green we are individually the sheer number of straws on the camel's back will break it. That said, how much environmental impact we make is not insignificant - unfiltered pollution and unchecked use of toxic materials could easily be the difference between a sustainable population of 100 million and 100 billion.
So yes, I think it's a valuable point. But if you're using it as a blocker in that there's no point discussing anything else until we got population growth under control it's an excuse. Not least of which because we mostly have, it's not a population boom anymore because the birth numbers - which are the only thing that ultimately matters - are slowing down. Average children per woman was 5 in 1964 and less than 2.5 now with a replacement population of about 2.1, so from almost +3 to less than +0.4 on a downward trend.
We will be 10 billion-ish because of the fill-up effect of the population pyramid equalizing and the continuing advances in medical science, but nothing like in the past. But the pressing issue is whether the planet can sustain 10 billion people polluting as much as the worst of us or whether we're already past the sustainable limit. If we are we either need to downsize the population a lot - unlikely in the short term, at least - or we need to get so much greener that 10 billion is sustainable. It's certainly not harder than the other option.
P.S. I think the expansion is often far more resource consuming than the mere continuation, like we build houses and roads and as long as roughly the same number of people live there we just need to maintain them and slowly repair/replace them as necessary. If we're growing though we need to make new houses and new roads because in the game of musical chairs there's eventually some people left over that can't fit in what we already have. That in itself is a good reason to limit growth, it's more sustainable to carry on than to constantly expand, which means you constantly have to take resources from somewhere new.
It may have been stolen, but it wasn't stolen from NASA. NASA gave it away. It was later stolen from a museum, then recovered by the police.
They could have transferred ownership, but isn't that unusual? I thought most such items were formally loaners even if they're casually referred to as donated and permanently on display. There's quite clear precedent here though, if something of yours is seized and forfeited it's lost. Doesn't matter if it was a theft, lease or a loan, it doesn't matter if you never knew it happened. I remember one case from civil forfeiture, they rented a sail boat and had got caught smuggling, boat was seized and sold before the owners knew. It was accepted as fact that they ran a rental agency and had no involvement in the smuggling attempt.
Did the owners get their boat back? Nope. Did they get compensated? Nope. They can only sue the jailbirds for the loss, the boat is now legally somebody else's property. So if they don't want to have one rule for NASA and one rule for everyone else, this is how it must be. When nobody contested the seizure, it was forfeited. At that point it stopped being whoever's property it was before and became the government's legal property, free of all history. And then it was lawfully sold. Is that "fair"? No, but it's how all police auctions work.
Pretty amazing if you ask me. Though, I think Linux would still be strictly a hacker's OS if it weren't for commercial interests and money.
Well yeah, but not like when you hire people to write closed source software. Mostly it's people that have volunteered lots of work on it already that get funded to quit their day job, which means you have few people that are there just for the paycheck.
If the probability of dying any given year becomes 47/99369 from age 25 and onwards, then the probability of being not alive (i.e. dead) at age 250 is (1-47/99369) * (250-25) ~= 89.9%, plus whatever probability of dying one accumulated before turning 25. That does not make the life expectancy ~2114 years. Your math is broken.
No, the math fail is yours, it's (1-47/99369) ^ (250-25) ~= 89.9% chance to be alive not dead. If you take the sum of the power series from zero to infinity you'll find the answer is 99369/47 = 2114 or the mean life expectancy. Note that the median life expectancy will only be about 1500, but you will have a very long tail with no drop-off. P.S. One point I forgot to add, a significant number of these are suicides. If those are more related to personality than circumstances and trends toward zero we might actually live many centuries longer.
If you eliminate aging, the average life expectancy would jump from about 80 years to about 250 years even if everyone had the same probability of dying each year as a 25 year old does.
You must be refering to some third world country or you're off by an order of magnitude. Here in Norway 47/99369 die at age 25, starting from 100000 people at birth. That would make life expectancy about 99369/47 = ~2114 years.
Slashdot Mirror
1. Labels start gouging customers.
2. Customers turn pirates.
3. Third party offers a service that doesn't gouge customers (the stage where Spotify currently is).
4. Pirates turn customers.
5. Labels notice that most people are paying for music.
6. Rince and repeat.
Pretty much. Those taking the worst beating on Spotify though are the fringe artists, because they offer one price per stream even though the niche might be willing to pay more and if you're not on Spotify you'll miss most the market so it's meet the new boss, same as the old boss. For the life of me I can't understand why artists didn't organize some form of non-profit client where you could plug in subscriptions like repositories on Linux. Some could be free. Some could be paid. You could co-operate on hosting or roll your own. You could cooperate on billing or roll your own. Artists would be free to organize how they want and offer any music package they like. Now it's the Spotify deal, take it or leave it.
That's pretty clear. They are allowed to make temporary changes to audio or video content during transmission for private home viewing, provided only that they are modifying an authorized copy. It sounds to me (IANAL) like they have a very strong case.
Among the three exclusive rights of copyright holders are reproduction, distribution and creating derivative works. This modifies the last right, but not the two previous ones. Those who create the DVD have a license under the reproduction right, as a buyer you have none. Obviously they can't buy a DVD and set up a TV broadcast of it. So the argument is that VidAngel is not doing distribution from them to the user, it's the user watching their own copy under fair use. That argument has been tried many ways with remote antennas/CDs/DVDs/DVRs and been pretty universally rejected.
You can use a DVR, but the cable network can't offer a DVR service without permission from the copyright holders. You can put up an antenna on your roof, but they can't put up one on their roof and offer a rebroadcast service. You can put up an MP3 jukebox, but they can't buy CDs for you and offer a jukebox service. Legally it's not the user doing it, it's your company doing it as a service for the user. You can't loan their fair use rights to deliver your service.
VidAngel is trying to "backport" the permission to create censored copies to give them permission to distribute, but it doesn't work that way. Obviously making a legal transformation like say a parody on top of a pirate copy doesn't make it legal, you can't fix distribution/reproduction rights problems by transforming it. The section you quote only protects the transformation of an authorized source, that is an in-flight copy which has been legally created. But if you need distribution rights to create that ephemeral copy it's not authorized and the section void, it doesn't grant rights you lack. That the source is legal is necessary but not sufficient, having a legal copy doesn't give you distribution rights. So when you sum up their legal strategy it's:
Legal source: Check.
Legal distribution: Chewbacca defense.
Legal transformation: Check.
I watched such a drama unfold before me. It turned out that those seated were in the wrong theatre.
I actually had this happen on an airplane. We board plane, staff starts counting then counting again but we're four passengers too many. Is anybody not going to the destination? Silence. It's free seating so there's no double booking of seats. So they start going through the passenger list with name calling - very fun with 100+ seats. So mid-way someone comes from the gate asking for four passengers by name, they're present. And they're on the wrong plane, they leave so finally we can take off.
I got the rest of the story by a woman on the airport bus venting over the phone. They had boarded the plane, but it was grounded by mechanical problems. Then when finally the new flight was ready to depart, four passengers were missing. Since they were already boarded they didn't scan the boarding card the second time so they don't know who is missing. They can't take off with luggage without the passengers, so they finished the whole 100+ seat name call. So they were about to unload all the cargo to find those passengers' luggage which would take even more time, when finally the four showed up. The other passengers were not amused.
I assume that somewhere in the middle there a manager heard that two planes had to delay departure because of headcount issues and figured out they must be related. Apparently the ticket validation wasn't locked to a particular flight, so they managed to get on our plane even though they didn't belong. It was all domestic and of course everybody's been through security, so it wasn't really a risk. It probably hadn't been a problem before, except when these two planes were going to the same place with only a few minutes time difference and those four goofballs mixed it up. And they caught it, so no big deal. But those four people managed to delay two full flights quite a bit.
Long distance it might occasionally happen, on popular routes I haven't seen it in ages. Mostly they've structured it so that business travelers have flexible tickets, a certain percentage will always arrive early to the airport and wish to re-book to an earlier flight. If it's full tough luck wait for your scheduled departure, if there are no-shows they'll fill it up. That way they keep the planes full without any risk of overbooking any other than the last plane - which probably won't sell out anyway.
It's pretty clear certain age groups get more into accidents than others: it's because they're not really mature enough to be good drivers, even after years of driving experience.
I don't think they're intellectually incapable as such, I have the impression that most drove responsibly alone. Pretty much all the really reckless driving I saw was showing off or egging each other on and nobody had the social maturity to stand up and be the uncool party pooper. I think it takes most people well into their 20s to get that self-confidence to stand your ground.
To some degree you can change what's cool so the herd mentality doesn't do it, smoking is now uncool. Wearing a condom is perhaps not cool, but insisting you wear one is much more accepted than before and you're not a slut for protecting yourself from STDs either. But I think you have to work very hard to make driving really fast be uncool for 18yo boys...
Based on the roundness of your face and the profit margin. They don't care about your health.
I think part of the problem is that people get spread too thin. When you have 500 friends, you really have no friends. Exclusive time and confidentiality disappears. It's not the frequency of contact that makes friendship, it's the depth.
I think it quite quickly sorts into tiers anyway, because in the real world you're only one place at a time. If you hang out with group A of friends on the weekends, you're not hanging out with group B. Or for that matter how you balance friends/family/partner/self-time, obviously if you have a wife and kids you don't have the same time as when you were single but there's still a large degree of choice. I can feel it on something so trivial as when we're playing a four player online co-op game, who's first to be asked and who's just backup if the others are unavailable.
Everybody else you're really just an observer and not part of their lives. I don't want to undersell Facebook either because I understand the feeling of taking parts in your grandkids' lives without actually being physically present, but when it comes to creating real bonds of friendship and family you have to be there and really interact with them. Even when we're just alone together, like when my buddy and I go out flying our drones we each fly our own drone but it's a shared experience. If I did it and posted on my Facebook and he did it and posted on his Facebook it wouldn't be the same at all.
Did those "listening systems" include computers with freshly installed without permission Windows 10 sending home recordings of their owners going "What the hell is this shit? I didn't agree to this!"?
Probably? With everything else Win10 does I'd be very surprised if they don't report back that users did a rollback to the OS they had before. If it's immediately as you're asked to agree to the Win10 EULA it's a pretty strong sign the customer just went WTF what is this, I don't want it.
We spend a ton on roadways now using basically the same construction materials and techniques we've used for 75 years and we're bitching that solar roads won't last. Well no shit, fucking cars would't last long either if we built them like we did in 1950, either, yet we say we can't build a better road? Maybe we're not trying.
If it costs 5x to make something that lasts 2x as long we could, but it wouldn't make sense. This is literally where the rubber meets the road, the rubber is going to wear out. The road is going to wear out. Re-paving is just standard maintenance like switching tires every so many miles.
When you put it that way, it sounds plenty... really who watches 45 shows? Personally I feel there's only so much time I want to passively waste as a couch potato and there's no shortage of decent-ish shows to fill the time. I think Netflix found the same, good catalog or bad catalog we end up taking our fill from the best of what's available.
But they have one important thing: A use for a crippled self-driving car. You could imagine the first generation of SDCs being perfect and drive anywhere on any road under any conditions. I very much doubt it, extremely few projects manage a "big bang" transition. But say you have a taxi service and you know that this particular downtown ride is all mapped out, well marked pre-tested roads and the sun is shining on dry asphalt, let's send our self-driving service. Everything else outside that box you get a human driver. Eventually the box grows and grows and by virtue of having the biggest and thus most available fleet and as the market explodes as you get a taxi service much closer to cost-of-driving prices and more flexible than public transport you become the Amazon of modern transportation. Okay maybe a little optimistic...
People posting on slashdot should really not complain about lost productivity.
People complaining about people being so effective and/or frugal that they have leisure time instead of working 24x7 should have their head examined. Hampering productivity like you need to dig this with a spoon instead of a shovel or a bulldozer is a waste. Using the bulldozer so you can go home and "waste" your time playing games is a feature, not a bug. Unless you're a sociopath CEO trying to extract more profit from your employees so you can buy a bigger yacht.
The opensource x.org initiatives, while many of the issues above are now resolved, will never be performant in the way nVidia is and lead to the creation of alternative graphical backends like Wayland, which, are trying to resolve these issues for 'good' opensource citizens
Wayland is not in any meaningful way an alternative to the nVidia driver. It basically says you do the rendering, I'll do the compositing. For say full-screen games that means it's dumped straight to the display buffer while doing practically nothing. Right now the nVidia driver doesn't know how to play nice with Wayland but patches are coming, when it does it'll still do 99% of the heavy lifting.
You can only win the lottery if you buy a ticket. Buying lottery tickets is pretty stupid. So people that win lotteries tend to be stupid people that make poor choices. You would see much better outcomes if the lotteries winnings were assigned randomly.
So if we assume that intelligence isn't something you can change. You know you're not all that bright. You dropped out of school to work minimum wage. You have a dead end job. You have credit card debt and no savings. You live paycheck to paycheck. Life sucks and you don't really have any means to turn it around, I don't blame people like that for needing a little hope here and now. And if you know you're in the lower half you don't challenge people to a game of wits because you lose. Everyone from the smartest to the stupidest have an equal chance to win the lottery, maybe that's the best they can hope for. Even I do it occasionally for the fantasy, I just need the one lottery ticket though to know I'm in there and have a foolish daydream of hitting a huge jackpot. It's less make-believe than playing games on my computer, and I do that....
What more can they do to shut up the nay-sayers who keep crying that the big bad wolf is going to sue us if we use Mono?
Those who think it's a trap will always believe the only reason it hasn't snapped is too small a catch. As long as people shun Mono, Microsoft will not sue. When people are committed, Microsoft will sue. I don't think you can win that argument. That said, my impression is that most companies are bastards when they're the top dog. It's only when they're the underdog they want grand alliances, standards and interoperability. So the only way to win is to abandon old allies as they abandon us and support the new underdog.
I can't really imagine my house becoming very "smart" with every light bulb doing its own thing. I'd rather pair it with a hub so I could manage all my devices from there. That way the devices themselves would be more shielded and it would be the central point to update everything from. Kinda like active directory/domain administrator but for my IoT network instead of Windows PCs.
How are you going to make it that nobody is in a bad relationship, loses their job, has a catastrophic medical event that significantly impacts their daily lives, and nobody experiences inconsolable grief over someone close to them dying? (...) And if you tell someone to "just pull yourself out of it", you deserve it when they punch you in the face.
At the danger of sounding like a cheap self-help book, only you can change how you feel. I'm not saying it's the solution to those with really grave problems, but most everybody else just need perspective. Whenever I'm feeling miserable and want to wallow in self-pity I take a look at BBC News for someone who's really in a shithole and had fate really kick them in the nuts like in Aleppo right now. And then my problems don't quite seem like the worst thing that's ever happened to anybody anymore, in fact I often end up feeling almost like I've cried wolf for no reason.
Aside from this, some lucky logic-chopper is going to have the unenviable task of explaining why existing, more or less universally accepted, 'fire-and-forget' missiles and other similar hardware that gets its activation command from a human; but thereafter guides itself to target without external intervention, isn't a killbot; but the more drone-shaped hardware that gets its initial activation command from a human; but thereafter guides itself to target without external intervention, is a killbot.
I think there difference between a killbot and other systems is that it makes its own target selection, as in what are legitimate targets and how, where and when do you engage them. If the soldiers got their hands up and are waving the white flag they're not legitimate targets even if they wear the enemy's uniform. Will the software consider that they have hostages or human shields? People are going to die, it's not unreasonable to demand a human has to take responsibility for each individual decision. The obvious exceptions are defensive countermeasures to incoming fire where sub-human response time is necessary.
I don't think it's enough to just do this second hand through an algorithm that decides who lives and who dies, there will never be a perfect algorithm that covers every situation. It won't make war pretty. It won't necessarily spare civilians. Bombing Hiroshima and Nagasaki was very much a human decision, because somebody justified it as necessary. If he'd just pushed a button and had a drone deliver the nuke wouldn't make it a kill bot in my eyes, it didn't make the decision. Analysis and suggestions are one thing, but if we can't stomach the choices we make we shouldn't take humans out of the equation to make it easier on ourselves.
If you use a third-party library that has a bug in it, you'll be exposed to the same bugs that everybody else using that library are. On the other hand, if you go at it alone, your implementation will have bugs of its own.
But the value of the target will be proportional too, the value of compromising "every server using OpenSSL" is huge compared to a custom hack that only works for your little company because of your home grown library. It's no doubt that the main reason you use libraries is because of resource constraints, not security. If you're small enough to not matter, spending a man year re-implementing what's already done is a no-go. If you have the resources to seriously consider going it alone you're probably big enough to matter hacking just your company has value in itself.
And if you try to skimp on the resources for doing it what's far more likely to happen in practice is that you get the worst of both worlds, your developers get "inspired" by public code and you get copy-pasta code with the same vulnerabilities but without the maintenance and fixes, so your stale code is vulnerable long after the public code is fixed. That's actually much worse because the fix will usually lead to post-hoc exploit code to hack companies that don't have good update policies and the odds of your copied code being updated is slim and none.
Proper managers can manage this. It makes sense, it's about time.
Even "proper managers" aren't telepathic. I know that what I do doesn't produce results in any predictable fashion. Sometimes I'm stumped, sometimes I'm working down dead ends, sometimes I'm running a maze with no exit, sometimes I spend forever tracking down a bug I missed while other times I'm just blazing through. Even if I'm asked to do roughly the same again subtle differences often throw estimates totally out of whack. In the long run my bad beat story will wear thin that these assignments aren't harder than the last ones and I'm not just missing the punchline, it's actually me shirking and slacking. But really I think I got a lot of leeway to fool my manager if I was the cheating kind and just wanted my pay check.
Part of keeping the system honest is verifying that yes, I've actually put the time in and worked on it. The trouble is that some managers confuse metrics that say you've done something with metrics that say you've done something useful. Like lines of code, commits, keyboard activity and so on they're all trivially "produced" if you want them to, they're really just a fallback if you're not delivering results. And even they can be gouged, I've heard stories of outsourced workers that appear to be frantically "working" by opening and scrolling through files and looking busy but really just pretending. Dilbert has quite a few of these, how to look like you're doing work. It works in PHB companies.
Agreed, fixing population growth is the only permanent solution to our environmental footprint because otherwise the "greener" we get we'll just grow to be 10 billion, 20 billion, 50 billion and so on until no matter how green we are individually the sheer number of straws on the camel's back will break it. That said, how much environmental impact we make is not insignificant - unfiltered pollution and unchecked use of toxic materials could easily be the difference between a sustainable population of 100 million and 100 billion.
So yes, I think it's a valuable point. But if you're using it as a blocker in that there's no point discussing anything else until we got population growth under control it's an excuse. Not least of which because we mostly have, it's not a population boom anymore because the birth numbers - which are the only thing that ultimately matters - are slowing down. Average children per woman was 5 in 1964 and less than 2.5 now with a replacement population of about 2.1, so from almost +3 to less than +0.4 on a downward trend.
We will be 10 billion-ish because of the fill-up effect of the population pyramid equalizing and the continuing advances in medical science, but nothing like in the past. But the pressing issue is whether the planet can sustain 10 billion people polluting as much as the worst of us or whether we're already past the sustainable limit. If we are we either need to downsize the population a lot - unlikely in the short term, at least - or we need to get so much greener that 10 billion is sustainable. It's certainly not harder than the other option.
P.S. I think the expansion is often far more resource consuming than the mere continuation, like we build houses and roads and as long as roughly the same number of people live there we just need to maintain them and slowly repair/replace them as necessary. If we're growing though we need to make new houses and new roads because in the game of musical chairs there's eventually some people left over that can't fit in what we already have. That in itself is a good reason to limit growth, it's more sustainable to carry on than to constantly expand, which means you constantly have to take resources from somewhere new.
It may have been stolen, but it wasn't stolen from NASA. NASA gave it away. It was later stolen from a museum, then recovered by the police.
They could have transferred ownership, but isn't that unusual? I thought most such items were formally loaners even if they're casually referred to as donated and permanently on display. There's quite clear precedent here though, if something of yours is seized and forfeited it's lost. Doesn't matter if it was a theft, lease or a loan, it doesn't matter if you never knew it happened. I remember one case from civil forfeiture, they rented a sail boat and had got caught smuggling, boat was seized and sold before the owners knew. It was accepted as fact that they ran a rental agency and had no involvement in the smuggling attempt.
Did the owners get their boat back? Nope. Did they get compensated? Nope. They can only sue the jailbirds for the loss, the boat is now legally somebody else's property. So if they don't want to have one rule for NASA and one rule for everyone else, this is how it must be. When nobody contested the seizure, it was forfeited. At that point it stopped being whoever's property it was before and became the government's legal property, free of all history. And then it was lawfully sold. Is that "fair"? No, but it's how all police auctions work.
Pretty amazing if you ask me. Though, I think Linux would still be strictly a hacker's OS if it weren't for commercial interests and money.
Well yeah, but not like when you hire people to write closed source software. Mostly it's people that have volunteered lots of work on it already that get funded to quit their day job, which means you have few people that are there just for the paycheck.
If the probability of dying any given year becomes 47/99369 from age 25 and onwards, then the probability of being not alive (i.e. dead) at age 250 is (1-47/99369) * (250-25) ~= 89.9%, plus whatever probability of dying one accumulated before turning 25. That does not make the life expectancy ~2114 years. Your math is broken.
No, the math fail is yours, it's (1-47/99369) ^ (250-25) ~= 89.9% chance to be alive not dead. If you take the sum of the power series from zero to infinity you'll find the answer is 99369/47 = 2114 or the mean life expectancy. Note that the median life expectancy will only be about 1500, but you will have a very long tail with no drop-off. P.S. One point I forgot to add, a significant number of these are suicides. If those are more related to personality than circumstances and trends toward zero we might actually live many centuries longer.
If you eliminate aging, the average life expectancy would jump from about 80 years to about 250 years even if everyone had the same probability of dying each year as a 25 year old does.
You must be refering to some third world country or you're off by an order of magnitude. Here in Norway 47/99369 die at age 25, starting from 100000 people at birth. That would make life expectancy about 99369/47 = ~2114 years.