That's specifically the reason why my uncle (for example) was forced to switch by my grandparents tying his left hand behind his back.
OMG. My grandma, a leftie, told me the same anecdote. I half-believed her (she had Alzheimer after all), but after reading you I think she told the whole truth. I guess it's true that we are living in the most peaceful times of humanity, and as little as 50 years ago the world was more of a shithole than today.
The implication being that DRM somehow encumbers piracy. The simple fact is it is completely ineffectual at slowing piracy down.
That's actually wrong. It indeed slows initial piracy spreading. Numbers, sadly, are in the industry and not in academia.
You can find pirated copies of every piece of music, video, and publication you want despite the draconian DRM that is so prevalent in the industry.
That's a popular confusion about the purpose of DRM schemes. Here's the real deal: the purpose is to slow down initial piracy enough to make a profit from people who would choose the pirated, free version if they can find it. People willing to pay only $0 will pay exactly that. Fans will pay you nicely regardless of DRM. The group that DRM targets is the big crowd that can pay your price, but won't give you a dime if they can get it for free.
I recall the people behind "The Witcher" put DRM on their files and removed it after the product was delivered. Other people won't bother, but they can do it with exactly the same results in their profits. Because, indeed, DRM is not a piracy-stopper but an initial-piracy-slower.
Hi! I program DRMs for a living, among other things. buddyglass is correct: the extra sales are going to be from the extra platforms that now can use those eBooks. The "DRM Infrastructure" is trivial for authors and publishers, I'd not dare to call it "Infrastructure" at all. Also, costs are usually insignificant: you usually protect an entire work, not individual copies.
"Ultra Intelligent Electronic Agent"? What the hell *that* means?
There's nothing "Ultra Intelligent" in this kind of systems. My team built an equivalent to Siri, but oriented to web tasks. Believe me, there was little intelligence behind it. Most of the work is actually learning and relating tasks to sets of actions (this is grunt work and crowdsourcing produces great results at low cost). The conversation part is a no-brainer. If you provide a context, it's an even stupider agent: I trust it with my users and passwords so it can do boring/repetitive tasks I taught it to perform, and I never have to give him any additional context data unless my password has expired. And surprise surprise, there's no supercomputer involved.
These agents will never replace Google because they do different things. I wonder what Burrus was smoking when he wrote TFA...
Oh boy, I thought I had suppressed those memories. It's an awful and tedious place to work, I grant you that. Maybe not so much with flowers, but lettuces and strawberries were boring as hell.
Still, even if I hate those past days, I can say I produced something of real, unquestionable value. Anecdotally, all the girls I dated liked that, even though I'm an engineer, I had a menial job once.
At a minimum publicly funded research should be available to the public for free.
Agreed.
Ideally journals themselves would be replaced with a decentralized Web based system where anyone can publish and peers can freely review all the articles. Academic journals should be replaced with something akin to blogs much as newspapers have.
This would lead to an ugly mess... It's not bad enough that we throw faeces to each other, now we'll make it easier. The advantage of highly-centralised systems is that the consensus and the state of the art are self-evident, so why discard those advantages?
One in five macs where people chose to install antivirus software have (inactive) Windows malware. [...] the sample group is not really representative.
It's true that this applies to all Macs that have an antivirus, but I'll answer your claim of not being representative with a healthy [Citation needed].
There are americans that would love call center work. It beats a lot of other bad jobs.
You obviously never worked in a call center before. It doesn't have a high rotation for nothing. Angry customers, toilet breaks, lousy wages, depression, et c.
That's a half-truth. While gender [im]balance hasn't been found to have any consistent effect on productivity or decision making, it does have the benefit of balancing the disparity between men and women's incomes, which is a desired political outcome. This is a nice paying line of work after all...
Have you never, ever, thought that computers have a mind of their own, especially when trying to fix a stubborn bug? Have you never, ever, experienced a heisenbug and thought for a second that there's someone (let's call them PC elves) flipping randomly an obscure boolean variable and enjoying your misfortune? Not even a hint of that feeling? If that's the case, either you've never programmed or you aren't human.
I don't agree. After all, it was parents under/not vaccinating their kids what got them killed. Moreover, it'll have consequences for other kids if they can't be vaccinated for whatever reason, so it's not a personal/familiar issue. Refusing vaccination on principle is, therefore, negligent behaviour.
The government has many failures, but at least it can transcend individual's selfishness and ignorance.
Originally, the first copyright laws were about publication + 14 years.
In fact, the first copyright laws (dunno how it's translated, something like "Statute of Queen Anne") stated publication + 14 years + 14 years if the author wished to renew it (he had to be alive). At least one paper points to a life expectancy in England in 1710 (the year it was passed), of ~52 years around, but 70 was not uncommon. Assuming the author wrote it when he was 20, it covers more than half of the author's remaining lifetime, and could even cover it entirely.
The equivalent today would be 22 years, which can be extended for 22 more years if the author is still alive. This, however, doesn't deal with corporations, which are essentially immortal.
I heard of complaints like that, albeit infrequently. The bottom line of this article seems to be: "damned if you do, damned if you don't".
IMHO, there's a liiiiiiittle bit of truth in these people's complaint. Even though surveys point to between 2% and 3% of GLBT people, there's a "gay wave" in videogames (as I humorously put it) and suddenly they are all potentially bisexuals. Let's take Dragon Age: What are the odds of two bisexuals in a party of 8 (the dog and the golem don't count) ? I like that, when I wanted to, I was able to play a gay character, but this is getting out of hands... I have enough gay friends to know this is more reality-breaking than a mass-effect generator.
Blowing peoples brains out with assault weapons is absolutely not natural.
Well, they don't use assault weapons because they can't build it, but you'll be surprised to know a few interesting things:
(a) Dolphins kill for pleasure.
(b) Cats kill for fun and to show off, even playing with their prey (this torture-like behaviour is also present in killer whales and other hominids).
(c) Chimpanzees are so territorial they will form gangs and go killing the invaders in cold blood. A biologist told me they would pursue a competing pack for days in order to kill them, even when they have abandoned their territory. Moreover, Wikipedia just taught me that "Chimpanzees also engage in targeted hunting of lower order primates such as the red colobus [...] and use the meat from these kills as a "social tool" within their community", mainly bonding. Finally, chimpanzees, both male and female, kill the infants of their packs.
(d) Female hamsters cannibalise their newborn progeny if they feel threatened.
Have you ever participated in a census? Each and every answer (even your gender!) is what you're willing to tell, yet it doesn't "shoot a big hole" on every survey.
In fact, the results are aligned with a few extra surveys I've read about: a few say 1%, a few others say 5%... Unless you have a way to measure "Likelihood of being LGBT and willing to lie about it" and "Likelihood of being heterosexual and willing to lie about it", ~2% is as good as it gets.
The difference between you and me is that I do not believe that something is true. I go after the facts and do experiments to see if it's true or not true.
Really? The difference between you and me is that, while we both believe plenty of things are true, I recognise those beliefs as such.
Much of what you know about the world is constructed from beliefs. Or am I to trust that you:
(a) built a Josephson injunction and did an experiment to measure the elementary charge constant,
(b) performed double-blind tests to assess the effectiveness of an aspirin pill,
(c) assembled a particle accelerator and measured the mass of the muon and
(d) observed either evolution or DNA in laboratory conditions?
You believe the scientific method is the best way to reason and gain knowledge about the world (or are you an Epistemologist in disguise and know why it's the best way against other methods?). You believe the constants that some Physicists handed down are precise and accurate. Moreover, you believe most of these scientists can be trusted, and that the consensus is, in practical terms, the "real deal". You also believe, non-surprisingly, that your beliefs are the correct ones. Both you and religious people lack the capabilities to verify stuff for themselves, yet you arbitrarily get to be high on the pedestal.
Reality is not reality because you believe it or not, it just is.
I don't find it convincing, but the prevalent interpretation of quantum mechanics (i.e. the Copenhagen Interpretation) argues that there isn't an objective reality: it's a meaningless thing unless you measure it. This lead to Einstein's Moon argument: if you aren't measuring the Moon, then whether it exists or not is irrelevant. Which is, of course, stupid because there is a Moon even if you don't measure it (you'll see it in a couple of hours). There's a whole lot of scientists that doubt reality just "is", as you wrote.
That, and the little bit about Obama, really tells how things get done in Capitol Hill. It's a deal between big players and nothing more. For him, "the Internet" is a very vocal, unpredictable and uncompromising big player. Lawrence Lessig had a point, methinks...
Slashdot Mirror
Did you read the article?
You must be new here...
That's specifically the reason why my uncle (for example) was forced to switch by my grandparents tying his left hand behind his back.
OMG. My grandma, a leftie, told me the same anecdote. I half-believed her (she had Alzheimer after all), but after reading you I think she told the whole truth. I guess it's true that we are living in the most peaceful times of humanity, and as little as 50 years ago the world was more of a shithole than today.
They might think they've made a breakthrough with this crystal clear non reflecting glass, but I just don't see it.
That's because of the breaking-through part.
The implication being that DRM somehow encumbers piracy. The simple fact is it is completely ineffectual at slowing piracy down.
That's actually wrong. It indeed slows initial piracy spreading. Numbers, sadly, are in the industry and not in academia.
You can find pirated copies of every piece of music, video, and publication you want despite the draconian DRM that is so prevalent in the industry.
That's a popular confusion about the purpose of DRM schemes. Here's the real deal: the purpose is to slow down initial piracy enough to make a profit from people who would choose the pirated, free version if they can find it. People willing to pay only $0 will pay exactly that. Fans will pay you nicely regardless of DRM. The group that DRM targets is the big crowd that can pay your price, but won't give you a dime if they can get it for free.
I recall the people behind "The Witcher" put DRM on their files and removed it after the product was delivered. Other people won't bother, but they can do it with exactly the same results in their profits. Because, indeed, DRM is not a piracy-stopper but an initial-piracy-slower.
I expect some karma flak now...
Hi! I program DRMs for a living, among other things. buddyglass is correct: the extra sales are going to be from the extra platforms that now can use those eBooks. The "DRM Infrastructure" is trivial for authors and publishers, I'd not dare to call it "Infrastructure" at all. Also, costs are usually insignificant: you usually protect an entire work, not individual copies.
"Ultra Intelligent Electronic Agent"? What the hell *that* means?
There's nothing "Ultra Intelligent" in this kind of systems. My team built an equivalent to Siri, but oriented to web tasks. Believe me, there was little intelligence behind it. Most of the work is actually learning and relating tasks to sets of actions (this is grunt work and crowdsourcing produces great results at low cost). The conversation part is a no-brainer. If you provide a context, it's an even stupider agent: I trust it with my users and passwords so it can do boring/repetitive tasks I taught it to perform, and I never have to give him any additional context data unless my password has expired. And surprise surprise, there's no supercomputer involved.
These agents will never replace Google because they do different things. I wonder what Burrus was smoking when he wrote TFA...
Oh boy, I thought I had suppressed those memories. It's an awful and tedious place to work, I grant you that. Maybe not so much with flowers, but lettuces and strawberries were boring as hell.
Still, even if I hate those past days, I can say I produced something of real, unquestionable value. Anecdotally, all the girls I dated liked that, even though I'm an engineer, I had a menial job once.
At a minimum publicly funded research should be available to the public for free.
Agreed.
Ideally journals themselves would be replaced with a decentralized Web based system where anyone can publish and peers can freely review all the articles. Academic journals should be replaced with something akin to blogs much as newspapers have.
This would lead to an ugly mess... It's not bad enough that we throw faeces to each other, now we'll make it easier. The advantage of highly-centralised systems is that the consensus and the state of the art are self-evident, so why discard those advantages?
One in five macs where people chose to install antivirus software have (inactive) Windows malware. [...] the sample group is not really representative.
It's true that this applies to all Macs that have an antivirus, but I'll answer your claim of not being representative with a healthy [Citation needed].
There are americans that would love call center work. It beats a lot of other bad jobs.
You obviously never worked in a call center before. It doesn't have a high rotation for nothing. Angry customers, toilet breaks, lousy wages, depression, et c.
That's pretty cold to send a termination email and not bother including their name in the message.
Better yet, how about a human being giving the bad news?
That's a half-truth. While gender [im]balance hasn't been found to have any consistent effect on productivity or decision making, it does have the benefit of balancing the disparity between men and women's incomes, which is a desired political outcome. This is a nice paying line of work after all...
Wouldn't it just be cheaper to not treat workers like shit?
Maybe just talking to them would do the trick.
Have you never, ever, thought that computers have a mind of their own, especially when trying to fix a stubborn bug? Have you never, ever, experienced a heisenbug and thought for a second that there's someone (let's call them PC elves) flipping randomly an obscure boolean variable and enjoying your misfortune? Not even a hint of that feeling? If that's the case, either you've never programmed or you aren't human.
I don't agree. After all, it was parents under/not vaccinating their kids what got them killed. Moreover, it'll have consequences for other kids if they can't be vaccinated for whatever reason, so it's not a personal/familiar issue. Refusing vaccination on principle is, therefore, negligent behaviour.
The government has many failures, but at least it can transcend individual's selfishness and ignorance.
3) Executed the plan
And the little fella!
At least you can see plastic. We've been talking about graphene for years and I still haven't even heard of a product that uses it.
Originally, the first copyright laws were about publication + 14 years.
In fact, the first copyright laws (dunno how it's translated, something like "Statute of Queen Anne") stated publication + 14 years + 14 years if the author wished to renew it (he had to be alive). At least one paper points to a life expectancy in England in 1710 (the year it was passed), of ~52 years around, but 70 was not uncommon. Assuming the author wrote it when he was 20, it covers more than half of the author's remaining lifetime, and could even cover it entirely.
The equivalent today would be 22 years, which can be extended for 22 more years if the author is still alive. This, however, doesn't deal with corporations, which are essentially immortal.
I heard of complaints like that, albeit infrequently. The bottom line of this article seems to be: "damned if you do, damned if you don't".
IMHO, there's a liiiiiiittle bit of truth in these people's complaint. Even though surveys point to between 2% and 3% of GLBT people, there's a "gay wave" in videogames (as I humorously put it) and suddenly they are all potentially bisexuals. Let's take Dragon Age: What are the odds of two bisexuals in a party of 8 (the dog and the golem don't count) ? I like that, when I wanted to, I was able to play a gay character, but this is getting out of hands... I have enough gay friends to know this is more reality-breaking than a mass-effect generator.
Blowing peoples brains out with assault weapons is absolutely not natural.
Well, they don't use assault weapons because they can't build it, but you'll be surprised to know a few interesting things:
(a) Dolphins kill for pleasure.
(b) Cats kill for fun and to show off, even playing with their prey (this torture-like behaviour is also present in killer whales and other hominids).
(c) Chimpanzees are so territorial they will form gangs and go killing the invaders in cold blood. A biologist told me they would pursue a competing pack for days in order to kill them, even when they have abandoned their territory. Moreover, Wikipedia just taught me that "Chimpanzees also engage in targeted hunting of lower order primates such as the red colobus [...] and use the meat from these kills as a "social tool" within their community", mainly bonding. Finally, chimpanzees, both male and female, kill the infants of their packs.
(d) Female hamsters cannibalise their newborn progeny if they feel threatened.
Have you ever participated in a census? Each and every answer (even your gender!) is what you're willing to tell, yet it doesn't "shoot a big hole" on every survey.
In fact, the results are aligned with a few extra surveys I've read about: a few say 1%, a few others say 5%... Unless you have a way to measure "Likelihood of being LGBT and willing to lie about it" and "Likelihood of being heterosexual and willing to lie about it", ~2% is as good as it gets.
The difference between you and me is that I do not believe that something is true. I go after the facts and do experiments to see if it's true or not true.
Really? The difference between you and me is that, while we both believe plenty of things are true, I recognise those beliefs as such.
Much of what you know about the world is constructed from beliefs. Or am I to trust that you:
(a) built a Josephson injunction and did an experiment to measure the elementary charge constant,
(b) performed double-blind tests to assess the effectiveness of an aspirin pill,
(c) assembled a particle accelerator and measured the mass of the muon and
(d) observed either evolution or DNA in laboratory conditions?
You believe the scientific method is the best way to reason and gain knowledge about the world (or are you an Epistemologist in disguise and know why it's the best way against other methods?). You believe the constants that some Physicists handed down are precise and accurate. Moreover, you believe most of these scientists can be trusted, and that the consensus is, in practical terms, the "real deal". You also believe, non-surprisingly, that your beliefs are the correct ones. Both you and religious people lack the capabilities to verify stuff for themselves, yet you arbitrarily get to be high on the pedestal.
Reality is not reality because you believe it or not, it just is.
I don't find it convincing, but the prevalent interpretation of quantum mechanics (i.e. the Copenhagen Interpretation) argues that there isn't an objective reality: it's a meaningless thing unless you measure it. This lead to Einstein's Moon argument: if you aren't measuring the Moon, then whether it exists or not is irrelevant. Which is, of course, stupid because there is a Moon even if you don't measure it (you'll see it in a couple of hours). There's a whole lot of scientists that doubt reality just "is", as you wrote.
That, and the little bit about Obama, really tells how things get done in Capitol Hill. It's a deal between big players and nothing more. For him, "the Internet" is a very vocal, unpredictable and uncompromising big player. Lawrence Lessig had a point, methinks...
Yes! I knew someone would write a comment on that sentence. IANAEE, but I know resistors release heat when a current passes through them.
Apparently, the infra-sound stuff is real. At least one film tried to exploit this effect.