Governments need to relax regulations on locking-in apprentices to their sponsoring employer.
In the United States, indentured servitude was outlawed a long time ago for good reason. No one is allowed to sign away their basic rights or force others to do the same. In that case the disease would be worse than the cure.
If you want to set up an apprenticeship situation, have the master and apprentice work for a contracting company, not directly for the serviced company, and make sure the pay scales with the growing capabilities of the apprentice. That way you can lock in the contracts with the good companies based on the quality of your work. And companies that do not do apprenticing will not be able to supply as many people at the same cost, since their pay base will be significantly hire (everyone will be high-paid).
What scientists should really do is.... Understand that judging groups of people is as a rule wrong. It is called bigotry.
That's beside the point.
What scientists should really do is to have an open mind and determine the validity (or lack thereof) of something through experiment (even if a thought experiment) before dismissing it.
My personal opinion is that astrology is a classic causation vs. correlation problem from ancient times. I find it entirely plausible that the presence or absence of certain foods, airborne particles, pathogens, and other environmental triggers during specific parts of pregnancy and a child's first year of life could have significant impact on their psyche. And in ancient times, before refrigeration, fast shipping, preservatives, germ theory, etc., I also find it entirely plausible that when aggregated these things could cause average large-scale changes in disposition.
Now, since time of year was often measured by astronomical phenomena, someone took the correlation of births during particular times of year and the stellar formations of that time of year and confused that with causation.
Yes, I meant a month. Oops. It's still a reasonable deal.
Re:Verizon and high pressure tactics
on
Verizon, Fiber Or Die?
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
I'm no lover of Verizon, but FiOS beats everything. It's insanely better than DSL and noticeably faster than cable modems. It's not the cheapest way to hook up to the internet, but my combination all-you-can-talk phone, basic television, and 20/5 internet is $105/year (and that's not an introductory rate), so it's not bad. And downloading the 2.1GB iPhone SDK in less than 20 minutes or uploading my kids' movies to their great grandmother is what it's about.
I guess it helps my cognitive dissonance that I've been around the block enough times that I've been screwed by all the companies. My favorite story about our cable company was when they held on to our checks for 2 weeks then charged us late fees. So we switch to direct-debit (yeah, young and naive at the time). Anyway, they DEBIT our accounts 2 WEEKS LATE then DEBIT the late fees as well. So while Verizon is evil, they don't seem any eviler than any of the others to me.
Your straw-man argument that if it doesn't deny someone else use of it, it isn't "stealing" is against the definition of "steal". Look up the definition of "steal". If you have bits sent to you that someone else has to pay to transmit in a way that circumvents that person's compensation, you're stealing.
The only part of the Java API that is worse than the Apple SDK is the GUI part. If Sun completely threw out Swing and started again from scratch (or Mac Java developers used Rococoa) it would be brilliant. Java's support for everything else-- from multithreading to data structures-- makes Objective-C look like the 30-year-old grampa it is.
And Java is extremely fast-- almost certainly faster than Objective-C, which suffers from the worst of both worlds in performance: static compilation and extremely dynamic linking. These days, dynamic compilation (which has available to it runtime and usage statistics) can optimize much more efficiently than static, leading to higher performance code. And Objective-C's extreme approach to dynamic linking means almost nothing can be inlined or statically optimized across message/function boundaries.
Finally, the iPhone/Touch has some specific hardware to help make Java fast. Apple's just ignoring it. But Java on the iPhone using Apple's GUI library would be extremely cool.
i am merely asking you to consider the anthropocentric nature of the big bang theory.
Perhaps I didn't make my point clear. My point was that for 99.9999% of human existence, humans have considered the universe unknowably big and in a steady-state. Even when religions gave the universe a beginning, they generally assumed it was created from whole cloth and set into a relatively static system. Thus, I'm not sure how you can assert that a theory created recently and still not wholly accepted by some laymen is inherently anthropomorphic. If humans tend towards anthropomorphisms, as they seem to, you would have thought that a big bang-like theory would have predominated mythology and common thought.
Finally, many many humans don't actually believe they're going to completely cease to exist when they die, and others still don't believe this is their first incarnation. Thus, to claim that the big bang is in any way anthropomorphic is to be very narrow-minded in your anthropology.
Why are there no substantial restrictions on the ownership of bows, crossbows, or even powered repeating crossbows? (the last is very fun to shoot)...and why ARE there restrictions on dynamite, hand grenades, C4, crates of fertilizer, sarin gas, and nuclear bombs? After all, the 2nd amendment doesn't mention "guns", just "Arms". (It's funny how many people forget that the 2nd amendment actually doesn't use the word "gun" at all, but does use the phrase "well-regulated".)
the universe is endless, in time and space. there, i said it.
Actually, that was the assumption of science, as well, until no one could come up with any scientific theory that allowed it, and the only theories that matched the data seemed to specifically not allow it. So go back in time 200 years or so any you'll have a lot of agreement. Then some Olbers dude started all kinds of trouble by asking why night was dark...
No. There is nothing wrong with visiting a publicly available URL. No exceptions.
At one point Yahoo had a security hole where they had an authentication service that accepted "nextURL" as one of the parameters. It was fairly easy to devise a URL that would direct the user to a valid Yahoo authentication page, then on success refer the user to an alternate phishing site that told the user the password was entered incorrectly and prompted for it "again". Of course, the second time the phishers got the username and password. Just because something is "just a URL" doesn't mean it isn't hacking or that it shouldn't be illegal to use.
Just because you see someone accidentally leave something sitting on a park bench it doesn't mean it's moral, ethical, or possibly even legal to pick it up and walk away.
With software, as you said, you can have copyright on the source ("blueprints") AND executables.
It's a subtle point, but you can't have a patent on either the source or executables, only the ideas/mechanism they express.
Software *is* a fundamentally different construct than anything that came before it, and it's going to break a lot of these "software is the only thing that..." comparisons. It doesn't make any sense to be to allow someone to patent physical mechanisms but not software that has just as much complexity, innovation, and inter-dependent parts as that physical mechanism. Why is physicality so valued as to deserve patents when software is not?
I agree that a careful look should be taken at "obviousness". I also think that as the software industry (which only reached most consumers within the last 15 years or so-- so the first-generation patents are sometimes just expiring) and the internet industry (which is well within it's 1st generation patent frenzy) mature, the problem of "obviousness" will dissipate somewhat as all the low-hanging patents expire. In the meantime, I hope Congress doesn't take a "think of the children!" style reactionary response and throw the baby out with the bathwater. If we want someone in a garage to be able to create the next great thing, we really need software patents on true innovation, while preventing the minefield of software patents on the chaff.
I was questioning the argument of "X amount of money is okay, because if you could afford Y amount of money on something else, this means you also have X amount of money that you should spend on this".
As stated, it's true the argument does not logically follow. However, if X Y, and the utility bought for X is very high, then as a practical matter the argument DOES make sense. The iPhone SDK program (which you can join completely free to hack around with) gives you training videos, world-class tools, simulators, examples, documentation, etc. Then to publish all the apps you want to for free costs $99 (plus 30% of revenues, which doesn't matter for free software). That's insanely cheap. Any other mobile/embedded program will cost you at least an order of magnitude more, if not two or three orders of magnitude.
Yes MSDN is nice to have but it is not in any way a requirement for developing and selling apps on windows.
True, but what you get for the iPhone SDK is more than worth the $99, and I was comparing what you get in other companies' more expensive programs to make that point. It's true that having the lowest bar set at a flat $99 for all the apps you can publish is still more than most desktop SDKs (although far, far less than most mobile SDKs).
I was referring to subscription-based accounting, not a subscription service. Does Sony account for the entire PSP revenue at the time of sale, or do they defer revenue and ammortize it monthly? If the latter, SOx doesn't apply if they offer major updates.
give me a break... MSDN costs a lot more than $99. Almost everyone charges more. You will spend 10x that much to join the program for the blackberry. $99 to join the program, get all the tools, simulator, docs, dev videos, hosting, update service, etc. I know it's a common sentiment on slashdot that everyone should get everything for free and everyone (else) should work without pay to give you everything you want free, but the attitude is getting tiresome.
And are you sure that Sony doesn't do subscription accounting for PSP revenue, like Apple does for the AppleTV and iPhone?
I agree that Apple charging $20 rather than $5 is not because of SOx, but I honestly don't know that SOx isn't the reason they have to charge something.
$99 per developer to publish as many software titles as you want for free *is* low money. If you can't afford a $99 developer program, you probably can't afford the $399 device to test it on or the computer to host it, or the food to eat while you code...
If I'm not missing something, it should take about 48 hours of concentrated blog reading to find a couple of REALLY good definitions of what should not be given a patent.
I'd go so far as to say dozens. Maybe a hundred. I think that's part of the problem.
I don't know if I'm biased (I'm in the CMU camp), but I think that's one of the big differences between the MIT vs CMU approach. At CMU, CS was created as an offshoot of the math dept, while at MIT it was an engineering discipline. I think they've converged a bit, but there's still adifference in approach there.
It's still not. Science doesn't require you to believe it. Creation Science isn't science because it doesn't meet the definition of science.
Genesis may very well be 100% accurate and true-- if so, that simply means that science cannot describe the origin of man or the universe, not that Genesis is science. However, since the scientific method has come up with a very self-consistent system which describes most experiments very well, it's worthy of being taught in school.
I'm not against Genesis being taught in school either, as long as it's in Social Studies, Comparative Religion, or even Literary Studies. It's simply not science.
My own view? Genesis is how God describes creation to a young child. Our species did not have the context to have the big bang and computational biology thrown at it when Genesis was written. So things get vastly simplified. "Let there be light"... sounds like a big bang. Hey, maybe the Garden of Eden was an alien genetic lab protected by laser turrets ("swords of fire that can point in all directions"). I don't know. The point is, the species is older now and believing in childhood myths isn't necessary anymore. Just MHO.
That's not what I've observed. Whenever anyone changes lanes, the person in front of whom the driver has merged has to slow a little to maintain a safe following distance. This causes a ripple on that lane and slows it down below the speed it was at. The more people switching lanes, the slower the road gets. People who weave back and forth between lanes are as bad for traffic as the morons driving slow in the left lane.
I used to have a friend who insisted that no matter what, driving the speed limit was the safest thing to do. Besides his blinding faith in government correctness, it bothered me because he was causing slowdowns while increasing danger. The safest speed to drive is the median speed of everyone driving around you.
The iPhone didn't change the face of the cell phone market.
The actual evidence contradicts your random opinions. According to Google and other web tracking sites, iPhone users search and browse the web between 2 and 10 times more than any other type of smart phone. That sounds like a game-changer to me.
I bought the iPod Touch because I didn't need a new phone, but even that is a game-changer. Until you carry it around for a few days you don't realize how much you'd use it.
As I understood it, their strategy was to claim vague infringement then try to uncover actual infringement in the discovery process when IBM was forced to turn over all their source code. Normally "fishing" like this is frowned upon, but they seemed to have gotten away with it. When they STILL couldn't come up with any infringement, I think, is when the judge started really limiting their shenanigans, though.
Slashdot Mirror
Governments need to relax regulations on locking-in apprentices to their sponsoring employer.
In the United States, indentured servitude was outlawed a long time ago for good reason. No one is allowed to sign away their basic rights or force others to do the same. In that case the disease would be worse than the cure.
If you want to set up an apprenticeship situation, have the master and apprentice work for a contracting company, not directly for the serviced company, and make sure the pay scales with the growing capabilities of the apprentice. That way you can lock in the contracts with the good companies based on the quality of your work. And companies that do not do apprenticing will not be able to supply as many people at the same cost, since their pay base will be significantly hire (everyone will be high-paid).
What scientists should really do is.... Understand that judging groups of people is as a rule wrong. It is called bigotry.
That's beside the point.
What scientists should really do is to have an open mind and determine the validity (or lack thereof) of something through experiment (even if a thought experiment) before dismissing it.
My personal opinion is that astrology is a classic causation vs. correlation problem from ancient times. I find it entirely plausible that the presence or absence of certain foods, airborne particles, pathogens, and other environmental triggers during specific parts of pregnancy and a child's first year of life could have significant impact on their psyche. And in ancient times, before refrigeration, fast shipping, preservatives, germ theory, etc., I also find it entirely plausible that when aggregated these things could cause average large-scale changes in disposition.
Now, since time of year was often measured by astronomical phenomena, someone took the correlation of births during particular times of year and the stellar formations of that time of year and confused that with causation.
Yes, I meant a month. Oops. It's still a reasonable deal.
I'm no lover of Verizon, but FiOS beats everything. It's insanely better than DSL and noticeably faster than cable modems. It's not the cheapest way to hook up to the internet, but my combination all-you-can-talk phone, basic television, and 20/5 internet is $105/year (and that's not an introductory rate), so it's not bad. And downloading the 2.1GB iPhone SDK in less than 20 minutes or uploading my kids' movies to their great grandmother is what it's about.
I guess it helps my cognitive dissonance that I've been around the block enough times that I've been screwed by all the companies. My favorite story about our cable company was when they held on to our checks for 2 weeks then charged us late fees. So we switch to direct-debit (yeah, young and naive at the time). Anyway, they DEBIT our accounts 2 WEEKS LATE then DEBIT the late fees as well. So while Verizon is evil, they don't seem any eviler than any of the others to me.
Your straw-man argument that if it doesn't deny someone else use of it, it isn't "stealing" is against the definition of "steal". Look up the definition of "steal". If you have bits sent to you that someone else has to pay to transmit in a way that circumvents that person's compensation, you're stealing.
I can see you're wholly unfamiliar with Java.
The only part of the Java API that is worse than the Apple SDK is the GUI part. If Sun completely threw out Swing and started again from scratch (or Mac Java developers used Rococoa) it would be brilliant. Java's support for everything else-- from multithreading to data structures-- makes Objective-C look like the 30-year-old grampa it is.
And Java is extremely fast-- almost certainly faster than Objective-C, which suffers from the worst of both worlds in performance: static compilation and extremely dynamic linking. These days, dynamic compilation (which has available to it runtime and usage statistics) can optimize much more efficiently than static, leading to higher performance code. And Objective-C's extreme approach to dynamic linking means almost nothing can be inlined or statically optimized across message/function boundaries.
Finally, the iPhone/Touch has some specific hardware to help make Java fast. Apple's just ignoring it. But Java on the iPhone using Apple's GUI library would be extremely cool.
i am merely asking you to consider the anthropocentric nature of the big bang theory.
Perhaps I didn't make my point clear. My point was that for 99.9999% of human existence, humans have considered the universe unknowably big and in a steady-state. Even when religions gave the universe a beginning, they generally assumed it was created from whole cloth and set into a relatively static system. Thus, I'm not sure how you can assert that a theory created recently and still not wholly accepted by some laymen is inherently anthropomorphic. If humans tend towards anthropomorphisms, as they seem to, you would have thought that a big bang-like theory would have predominated mythology and common thought.
Finally, many many humans don't actually believe they're going to completely cease to exist when they die, and others still don't believe this is their first incarnation. Thus, to claim that the big bang is in any way anthropomorphic is to be very narrow-minded in your anthropology.
Why are there no substantial restrictions on the ownership of bows, crossbows, or even powered repeating crossbows? (the last is very fun to shoot) ...and why ARE there restrictions on dynamite, hand grenades, C4, crates of fertilizer, sarin gas, and nuclear bombs? After all, the 2nd amendment doesn't mention "guns", just "Arms". (It's funny how many people forget that the 2nd amendment actually doesn't use the word "gun" at all, but does use the phrase "well-regulated".)
the universe is endless, in time and space. there, i said it.
Actually, that was the assumption of science, as well, until no one could come up with any scientific theory that allowed it, and the only theories that matched the data seemed to specifically not allow it. So go back in time 200 years or so any you'll have a lot of agreement. Then some Olbers dude started all kinds of trouble by asking why night was dark...
No. There is nothing wrong with visiting a publicly available URL. No exceptions.
At one point Yahoo had a security hole where they had an authentication service that accepted "nextURL" as one of the parameters. It was fairly easy to devise a URL that would direct the user to a valid Yahoo authentication page, then on success refer the user to an alternate phishing site that told the user the password was entered incorrectly and prompted for it "again". Of course, the second time the phishers got the username and password. Just because something is "just a URL" doesn't mean it isn't hacking or that it shouldn't be illegal to use.
Just because you see someone accidentally leave something sitting on a park bench it doesn't mean it's moral, ethical, or possibly even legal to pick it up and walk away.
With software, as you said, you can have copyright on the source ("blueprints") AND executables.
It's a subtle point, but you can't have a patent on either the source or executables, only the ideas/mechanism they express.
Software *is* a fundamentally different construct than anything that came before it, and it's going to break a lot of these "software is the only thing that..." comparisons. It doesn't make any sense to be to allow someone to patent physical mechanisms but not software that has just as much complexity, innovation, and inter-dependent parts as that physical mechanism. Why is physicality so valued as to deserve patents when software is not?
I agree that a careful look should be taken at "obviousness". I also think that as the software industry (which only reached most consumers within the last 15 years or so-- so the first-generation patents are sometimes just expiring) and the internet industry (which is well within it's 1st generation patent frenzy) mature, the problem of "obviousness" will dissipate somewhat as all the low-hanging patents expire. In the meantime, I hope Congress doesn't take a "think of the children!" style reactionary response and throw the baby out with the bathwater. If we want someone in a garage to be able to create the next great thing, we really need software patents on true innovation, while preventing the minefield of software patents on the chaff.
Should have previewed... I meant "if X << Y"
I was questioning the argument of "X amount of money is okay, because if you could afford Y amount of money on something else, this means you also have X amount of money that you should spend on this".
As stated, it's true the argument does not logically follow. However, if X Y, and the utility bought for X is very high, then as a practical matter the argument DOES make sense. The iPhone SDK program (which you can join completely free to hack around with) gives you training videos, world-class tools, simulators, examples, documentation, etc. Then to publish all the apps you want to for free costs $99 (plus 30% of revenues, which doesn't matter for free software). That's insanely cheap. Any other mobile/embedded program will cost you at least an order of magnitude more, if not two or three orders of magnitude.
Yes MSDN is nice to have but it is not in any way a requirement for developing and selling apps on windows.
True, but what you get for the iPhone SDK is more than worth the $99, and I was comparing what you get in other companies' more expensive programs to make that point. It's true that having the lowest bar set at a flat $99 for all the apps you can publish is still more than most desktop SDKs (although far, far less than most mobile SDKs).
I was referring to subscription-based accounting, not a subscription service. Does Sony account for the entire PSP revenue at the time of sale, or do they defer revenue and ammortize it monthly? If the latter, SOx doesn't apply if they offer major updates.
give me a break... MSDN costs a lot more than $99. Almost everyone charges more. You will spend 10x that much to join the program for the blackberry. $99 to join the program, get all the tools, simulator, docs, dev videos, hosting, update service, etc. I know it's a common sentiment on slashdot that everyone should get everything for free and everyone (else) should work without pay to give you everything you want free, but the attitude is getting tiresome.
And are you sure that Sony doesn't do subscription accounting for PSP revenue, like Apple does for the AppleTV and iPhone?
I agree that Apple charging $20 rather than $5 is not because of SOx, but I honestly don't know that SOx isn't the reason they have to charge something.
$99 per developer to publish as many software titles as you want for free *is* low money. If you can't afford a $99 developer program, you probably can't afford the $399 device to test it on or the computer to host it, or the food to eat while you code...
If I'm not missing something, it should take about 48 hours of concentrated blog reading to find a couple of REALLY good definitions of what should not be given a patent.
I'd go so far as to say dozens. Maybe a hundred. I think that's part of the problem.
I don't know if I'm biased (I'm in the CMU camp), but I think that's one of the big differences between the MIT vs CMU approach. At CMU, CS was created as an offshoot of the math dept, while at MIT it was an engineering discipline. I think they've converged a bit, but there's still adifference in approach there.
I believe Creation Science really is science
It's still not. Science doesn't require you to believe it. Creation Science isn't science because it doesn't meet the definition of science.
Genesis may very well be 100% accurate and true-- if so, that simply means that science cannot describe the origin of man or the universe, not that Genesis is science. However, since the scientific method has come up with a very self-consistent system which describes most experiments very well, it's worthy of being taught in school.
I'm not against Genesis being taught in school either, as long as it's in Social Studies, Comparative Religion, or even Literary Studies. It's simply not science.
My own view? Genesis is how God describes creation to a young child. Our species did not have the context to have the big bang and computational biology thrown at it when Genesis was written. So things get vastly simplified. "Let there be light"... sounds like a big bang. Hey, maybe the Garden of Eden was an alien genetic lab protected by laser turrets ("swords of fire that can point in all directions"). I don't know. The point is, the species is older now and believing in childhood myths isn't necessary anymore. Just MHO.
That's not what I've observed. Whenever anyone changes lanes, the person in front of whom the driver has merged has to slow a little to maintain a safe following distance. This causes a ripple on that lane and slows it down below the speed it was at. The more people switching lanes, the slower the road gets. People who weave back and forth between lanes are as bad for traffic as the morons driving slow in the left lane.
I used to have a friend who insisted that no matter what, driving the speed limit was the safest thing to do. Besides his blinding faith in government correctness, it bothered me because he was causing slowdowns while increasing danger. The safest speed to drive is the median speed of everyone driving around you.
PS3s and Sony Bravia TVs
Both of which are also excellent, high-quality increasingly popular pieces of equipment.
The iPhone didn't change the face of the cell phone market.
The actual evidence contradicts your random opinions. According to Google and other web tracking sites, iPhone users search and browse the web between 2 and 10 times more than any other type of smart phone. That sounds like a game-changer to me.
I bought the iPod Touch because I didn't need a new phone, but even that is a game-changer. Until you carry it around for a few days you don't realize how much you'd use it.
As I understood it, their strategy was to claim vague infringement then try to uncover actual infringement in the discovery process when IBM was forced to turn over all their source code. Normally "fishing" like this is frowned upon, but they seemed to have gotten away with it. When they STILL couldn't come up with any infringement, I think, is when the judge started really limiting their shenanigans, though.