He questions just how much effort agencies take to reduce false positives when it comes to DMCA notices.
I think the answer is absolutely no effort at all. Here is a notorious example where a busybody associated with a professional writes' association sent out a slew of automated DMCA notices, including some totally erroneous ones that caused authors' work to be taken down after they had intentionally put it up. Actually, they appeared to the service providers to be DMCA notices, but the guy who sent them out now claims that they weren't; this is because a real DMCA notice is supposed to be sent under penalty of perjury.
I experienced one of these myself recently. I've written some books that are under CC licenses, and various people have (totally legally) posted copies of them on Scribd. I got an email from Scribd saying that they got a DMCA takedown notice from a publisher for one of my books. Turns out that some contracted in SF hired by the publisher issued the notice without checking carefully. Apparently the title was similar to one of their books. They didn't bother checking the name of the author. So they're going after me for violating the copyright on my own book. Great. I called the contractor in SF, and they said, "Oops, never mind." So theoretically they've exposed themselves to prosecution for perjury. If I called the DA in San Francisco or in my own jurisdiction and asked them to prosecute, what do you think the chances are that they'd do it? Zero, I'd guess.
I wonder if anything the EFF can do about this in the courts. It really sucks.
TFA claims: "In many of these markets, the $15 to $25 price differential compared to Windows XP makes all the difference." I have a really hard time believing that anyone who has the $400 to buy a netbook will decide to save $20 by buying one without Linux and then installing a pirated copy of Windows. Installing any OS on a laptop is a total pain, and often results in a system with all kinds of problems, like power management and sound that don't work. This is completely different from the situation we used to have about 4 years ago when Fry's was selling desktop Linux boxes for $200, while the cheapest Windows box they sold was $450. Sure, for a 55% discount, a lot of people are going to be willing to do their own install of a pirated OS. A ton of that definitely happened back then, and AFAICT that's actually why Fry's stopped selling cheap Linux machines; people would botch the Windows install and then try to return the computer.
If I was really going to believe this article, I'd need to know what the country is that is bringing the average up to 32% -- by buying significantly *more* than 32% of their netbooks with Linux. TFA says it isn't China. Several Australian slashdotters says it's not Australia. Are there massive Linux sales in India, for example? Seems unlikely, given that most of the Indian tech support people I've talked to don't even seem to understand what Linux is.
Another thing I'd need to see in order to believe this article is independent confirmation of the price differential in this mystery country. It's very rare in in the US for Linux machines to sell for significantly less than comparable Windows machines. This is partly because OEMs get huge amounts of money from software houses for loading their crapware onto Windows boxes, and this offsets most or all of the cost of Windows.
If you are going to wipe the OS to install your own distro, then it doesn't make a great deal of difference what the original operating system is. Any cost savings for having Linux seem to be offset by the premium of buying such a rare beast.
I just don't want to put money in Microsoft's pocket for an OS that I have no intention of using. That would mean caving in to the worst kind of abusive monopoly.
Just another example of why the industry is moving to BSD-style licenses.
Your source for this fact?
Face it, the GPL is dead
It doesn't matter to me what "the industry" does. "The industry" can do whatever it wants, and it has no effect on my ability to run open-source software on my own machine.
CPAN's user interface is definitely very 1994:-) Perl programmers seem to accept it, but it seems pretty silly to me the way it makes you hit enter 37 times to accept all the defaults.
Bloating textbooks has just made it harder for those interested in the subject to wade through the crap.
Adding more to already bloated textbooks won't help. I should start a movement for smaller books.
I'm also a college professor, and I agree about textbook bloat. The problem is that the college textbook market is a very strange kind of market -- really, it should be referred to as a "market," with scare quotes. The people who pick the textbook are different from the people who buy the textbook, so you get all kinds of perverse incentives. Publishers know that they will never lose an adoption because a book had too much material, but they may very well lose one because it didn't cover a topic that a particular professor wants.
The solution, in my opinion, is to ditch the traditional for-profit model of textbook publishing. See my sig for a catalog containing hundreds of free textbooks.
Could you point me to some examples of libraries that you use in Perl but could not find in Ruby?
Interesting question. Okay, here's the list of all the CPAN modules that I routinely install on a system I'm going to use:
CDDB_get, Term::ReadLine, Term::ReadLine::Gnu, Term::ANSIColor, Term::ReadKey, Curses, Mail::Sort, Net::DNS, Net::DNS::Resolver, Mail::Address, Mail::RFC822::Address, Mail::Sendmail, Digest::SHA1, Data::Dumper, XML::Parser, XML::Simple, Data::Dumper, Time::HiRes, RTF::Tokenizer, RTF::TEXT::Converter, Clone, Term::ReadKey, Date::Calc, Digest::SHA1, Digest::Whirlpool, Tk
A quick, casual sampling in RAA and RubyForge shows that indeed, a lot of these are also available in ruby. It's a little hard to tell, however, how to really compare. Some problems with comparisons: (1) I think some modules, e.g., Clone, are probably not necessary in Ruby; (2) it would be time-consuming to go through and find out what functionality was equivalent to what in all these cases; (3) there's no quick and easy way to compare quality; and (4) if I'm writing software for other people to use on linux, it makes it much more convenient for them if it's widely packaged by various linux distributions. Just as a random example, at one time I wrote a perl app that depended on two CPAN modules called Audio::Data and Audio::Play. Turned out that was a big mistake. The quality of the code was very poor, the author stopped supporting them, and there were portability issues. So I could have pointed to those two modules and said, "Look, perl supports this!," but actually it would have been misleading.
I like python OK. I've used it as a teaching language. I haven't written much nontrivial code of my own in python. The impression I get is that since it's younger than perl, its implementation isn't quite as solid, and its libraries aren't quite as complete. As a language matures, the rate at which old code breaks decreases; I think perl is futher along than python in that regard. For some of the applications I'm interested in, like CGI apps, perl seems to have better libraries and documentation, since it's been in use for those applications for a longer time.
I do most of my coding in perl 5. Perl 5's implementation is rock-solid, and CPAN has an absolutely fantastic selection of useful modules for perl 5.
If I was going to change to something other than perl 5, I would need some motivation. The clearest motivation I can see is that OOP in perl 5 is ugly and bolted on.
With that motivation, I have dabbled in ruby enough to write one nontrivial app. The thing is, perl 5 still beats the heck out of ruby in terms of implementation and libraries. As an example of this, in my ruby app I wanted to use some regex features that were not available in ruby 1.8, so I ended up using ruby 1.9. But ruby 1.9, and its regex engine, are relatively raw and buggy, and I ended up having serious problems that I had to work around. (Yes, I submitted a bug report. No, it hasn't been fixed yet.)
AFAICT, the main advantage of perl 6 over perl 5 is the same as ruby's main advantage over perl 5: OOP is implemented in a nicer way. The thing is, the disadvantages are even more magnified, because it's so raw and incomplete.
My current reaction to the situation is to plan on continuing to code in perl 5 until, say, 2015, and then check back to see how much ruby and perl 6 have improved by then.
The author of TFA seems somewhat confused and inexperienced.
"Most of the variables in CRAP are one or two letters long. Originally, this was due to the memory constraints involved when programmers first designed and built the system." This is not particularly plausible. C is a compiled language, so using long variable names has no effect on the amount of memory used at run-time. It would also have been more or less a non-issue in terms of RAM used at compile-time. C only dates back to 1972, and didn't start to get popular until ca. 1980. By that time, using long variable names would have had a pretty negligible effect on RAM used by the compiler in proportion to total available RAM. And in any case, if compiles are taking too long, you just break up your files into smaller parts.
He uses this code "for(ss = s->ss; ss; ss = ss->ss);" as an example of bad code: "For those of you that are interested, the line traverses a linked-list of sources and sub-sources to process the values inside. But it took a good deal of research to figure that out, because there were no comments and the variable names, well, suck." Well, I read that and said to myself, "It's traversing a linked list." I think what's really going on here is that the author is probably a programmer who learned to program relatively recently with C++ and Java (he says in TFA that those are the languages he's used to), and he's used to doing things with big OOP libraries. The culture he's been inculcated in is one in which you never have to understand how a linked list is actually implemented, because you just use a library for it. To anyone who's actually implemented a linked list in a language that uses pointers, it is fairly obvious what this code does. It shouldn't take "a good deal of research" to figure it out.
I had never seen it before, either, and I had the same reaction as you ("Huh?") to the term "Google word search definition". But I found it _is_ there, just very small and easy to miss.
I see. I originally tried it for the word "fermion," and no such button popped up. Apparently "retch" is in their dictionary, and "fermion" isn't. Wiktionary has both words, so based on this very small sample, it looks to me like google's dictionary is not very complete compared to Wiktionary.
Am I the only one to have the following three reactions?
I remember answers.com solely as one of those annoying sites that mirror's Wikipedia's content, polluting search results with fifty copies of the same WP article. It astonishes me to find out that Google has ever been associated with one of these things; they all strike me as sleazy attempts to sop up some ad revenue without actually making any positive contribution of their own. I would have expected Google to try to filter out such things, not to be associated with them.
Huh? What is a "Google word search definition?" Okay, click through to the LA times blog, which say, "Previously, the 'definition' button at the top right of all Google searches for words would direct users to entries on the Wikipedia-like Answers.com site. Now those links go to Google Dictionary, a less colorful, less cluttered interface." Double huh? Never noticed such a thing before. I did two Google searches on dictionary words just now, and neither one came up with a "'definition' button at the top right." I've never noticed one in the past, and I'm not seeing one now.
Aparently the OP doesn't know what a thesaurus is.
>> "a single academic paper from 1979 -- especially not when it's electronic, so the marginal cost of distribution per copy is essentially zero."
> "This probably isn't true in this case: unless they're popular, single academic papers from 1979 are likely to have few readers, and you might be the only person to pay the cost of translating said paper over to an electronic format."
But my statement was about the marginal cost of distribution per copy.
Their optimal profit is obtained at a certain price, regardless of the initial cost of conversion. Of course, they may be making an emotional decision rather than a rational one: "We spent $30 to convert this article, and dammit, we're not going to let anyone have it for a price that doesn't recover our cost... even if that means nobody buys it, and we don't get any money at all, and it hurts our bottom line."
What I don't understand is paywalls that seem to have been erected without any sane business model in mind. For instance, here is a physics paper that I needed to look up today. It describes a particle-physics experiment from 1979 that, as a side benefit, ended up producing one of the classic high-precision tests of special relativity. I teach at a community college, so we don't have scientific journals at the library. My wife teaches at a university, so she has electronic access to journals, but the access to this particular publisher's journal only goes back to 1995. So I find the article online, behind a paywall, and I'm all set to pay $10 for a copy, just to avoid the hassle of going to a university library and photocopying it. I click through on the link to buy a copy, and they want $31.50. That's just crazy. Since the price was insane, it motivated me to get in the car, drive 20 minutes to a university library, and find the article down in the basement stacks where they put old journals.
To me, this seems like totally irrational behavior on the part of the publisher. For any product you want to sell, there has to be a price that optimizes your profit. Price it too high, and you don't get enough volume. Price it too low, and you get volume, but not enough of a profit margin. I simply can't believe that $31.50 is the sane, profit-optimizing price for a single academic paper from 1979 -- especially not when it's electronic, so the marginal cost of distribution per copy is essentially zero. My guess is that some of these traditional print publishers simply have their heads in the sand. They believe that the advent of digital music has decimated the music business, so the lesson they take home is that anything digital is like dog poop -- don't touch it, or something bad will happen to you and your business.
Why is this news? The victim showed a judge a blackmail letter. In that situation, of course a judge is going to sign documents forcing people with relevant information to disclose it to the police and/or DA.
In my experience, bugs are a bigger problem than documentation. All the computers in my household (mine, wife's, two young kids') run Linux. I'm the only one who's a Linux power user. My wife has only started using Linux this year. My kids have basically had no big problems with lack of documentation. E.g., my older daughter, who is really into art, was highly motivated to learn gimp. I handed her a book on gimp, but she never opened it. She just preferred to google for tutorials.
I'm not saying the documentation situation is heavenly, but the bigger problem is bugs. For instance, my wife is not able to get the Line In sound input to work with Audacity so that she can digitize her old Who and Dylan LPs. It's not a documentation problem. It used to work, but it just seems to be broken on the current version of Ubuntu. On my own linux box, the sound output level always goes to zero every time I log in. I raise it, and then 15 minutes later it lowers itself again. Yes, I've reported the bug. When I hit a web page with a java applet, firefox crashes. Again, it's a bug, not a documentation issue. All of my family's current usability problems have to do with bugs, not lack of documentation.
I've spent a month in Ecuador, and in my experience, the OP is focusing on the wrong problem. Backpacking in South America means being around a lot of people who make less money in a year than you make in a week. On this trip, I had a pair of prescription sunglasses and a pair of nice gore-tex hiking boots, and they constantly made me the focus of attention from people who wanted to know how much they cost, etc. One time coming down a trail in the Andes, I passed a kid who looked like he was about 12, chopping bananas with a machete. He said, "Dime los lentos," meaning "Give me the glasses." I just increased my hiking speed, and it turned out that he didn't hack me to death. So carrying a netbook in this social environment does bring up a whole bunch of issues about being victimized, but they aren't issues with having your PayPal password stolen, they're issues with getting mugged by someone who wants your computer, which is worth more than they make make in several months. My advice is not to bring the netbook. If you're worried about keyloggers in internet cafes, bring a bootable CD.
Absolutely. What makes me especially excited about trying G-WAN is that whenever it crashes I'll have the extra fun of figuring out whether the reason it crashed was because my own C code crashed, or because the code in his web server crashed. But wait, there's more! Adding to this really enjoyable programming problem will be the extra challenge that comes with the fact that his code is closed source, so if the crash occurs inside his code, I'll be able to get in there with a debugger and spend an afternoon figuring out what happened and whether there's any way to change the data my code gives to his code so that his code won't crash crash. I can see many really enjoyable weekends ahead of me in my parents' basement, with a bowl of nachos and a liter jug of root beer. Good times!
She started trying to cancel it within two weeks.
It took over 3 months before they would actually cancel it, and that was like pulling teeth with tweezers.
She must have sent 20 emails and spent 40 hours on the phone trying to get them to cancel.
There's absolutely no reason to go to that amount of hassle over something like this. Just call the credit card company, explain the situation (fraudulent recurring charges), have them change your credit card number, and ask them to issue you a new card with a new number. Problem solved.
The purpose of SF isn't fortune-telling. As with any commercial, genre fiction, its main purpose is to entertain, and it may also have some secondary purposes like social commentary, examination of philosophical issues, etc.
The huge change in SF since I first started reading it in the 70's is that these days, movie/TV SF is a gigantic, popular commercial enterprise, utterly dwarfing written SF. Also, a lot of the commercial activity in written SF these days revolves around stuff like Star Trek and Star Wars novels, novels written in the Dune universe, etc.; there didn't used to be such a clear division between highbrow and lowbrow SF. Among teenagers, there is much less of a focus nowadays on non-series written SF. If you look at the young adult section in a book store, you'll see very little real SF; you'll mainly see fantasy. I think part of what's going on is that girls seem to buy a lot more books than boys, and they seem (on the average) more interested in fantasy (e.g., the Twilight books) than in core SF.
Another change in the last couple of decades is that distribution channels have changed. You don't see SF magazines and paperbacks on wire-rack shelves in the drugstore any more. As in all of publishing, there has been a tendency for books to go out of print more quickly, so that it's even harder than before for novelists to make a living by writing. You'd be surprised how few of the SF authors whose books you see on the shelves at Barnes and Noble pay the rent by writing. The magazines are also much less influential than they used to be.
The onboard clocks run slower (and thus need to be corrected) because, for the satellites to be in a geostationary orbit at that altitude (IOW, to keep the same angular velocity than Earth), they need a linear velocity that's much faster than Earth's.
This is incorrect. The satellites are not geostationary. Also, the gravitational time dilation effect is stronger than the special-relativistic time dilation due to motion, so the net effect is that the clocks run faster. Here is a discussion of the physics. The clocks are tuned to 10.22999999543 MHz, which is perceived on earth's surface as 10.23 MHz.
Original post sounded to me like a positioning system can't be made unless it somehow uses GR/SR... Obvious counterexample would be the old LORAN system, which doesn't need GR/SR corrections because the transmitters are stationary instead of orbiting. GR/SR is an annoyance to work around, not an inherent part of location determination.
Sure, nothing to argue with here. Similarly, Ohm's law is an annoyance to work around if you want electric light, not an inherent part of lighting your house. If you're happy with gas lights, you don't need to know Ohm's law.
GPS doesn't calculate position by using GR/SR, it uses time-of-flight to numerous known locations at a known time (downloaded ephemeris, and all the clocks theoretically have the same time). I'm 80 ms from sat 22, 10 ms from sat 15, and 75 ms from sat 19 that means I'm right here (vast simplification) So, GR/SR is not "how it works" or even "needed to work". The onboard clocks don't tick the same rate as ground clocks, so without correcting the satellite clocks, those times of flight would be wrong.
No, here you're simply confused. You're talking about "known locations" and "known time," and you seem to be assuming that those can be "known" according to Newtonian physics. They can't. The whole point of relativity is that time and space don't work the way you seem to think they do.
What argument are you trying to make? Are you saying that it would have been easier to build the system without understanding why it behaved the way it did?
What I think is really cool about GPS is that without Einstein's theory of general relativity, it wouldn't work. For example, the atomic clocks aboard the satellites run faster because they're higher up in the Earth's gravitational field, and when you're higher in a gravitational field, time flows more quickly. If they didn't compensate for this effect (and a bunch of others), the system wouldn't work at all. Of course you can still find kooks on the internet who think that relativity is all wrong, and have mathematical proofs to that effect. I wonder if those people refrain from using GPS?
The EFF is also a great organization to donate money to, and there's a lot of overlap between what they do and the kind of things the ACLU does, e.g., with telecom immunity. Of course if you're not pro-choice, you wouldn't want to donate to the ACLU. It makes a lot of sense to me that the ACLU is putting a lot of energy into the abortion issue, simply because it's an issue that is being fought like crazy in lots of different states.
Slashdot Mirror
I think the answer is absolutely no effort at all. Here is a notorious example where a busybody associated with a professional writes' association sent out a slew of automated DMCA notices, including some totally erroneous ones that caused authors' work to be taken down after they had intentionally put it up. Actually, they appeared to the service providers to be DMCA notices, but the guy who sent them out now claims that they weren't; this is because a real DMCA notice is supposed to be sent under penalty of perjury.
I experienced one of these myself recently. I've written some books that are under CC licenses, and various people have (totally legally) posted copies of them on Scribd. I got an email from Scribd saying that they got a DMCA takedown notice from a publisher for one of my books. Turns out that some contracted in SF hired by the publisher issued the notice without checking carefully. Apparently the title was similar to one of their books. They didn't bother checking the name of the author. So they're going after me for violating the copyright on my own book. Great. I called the contractor in SF, and they said, "Oops, never mind." So theoretically they've exposed themselves to prosecution for perjury. If I called the DA in San Francisco or in my own jurisdiction and asked them to prosecute, what do you think the chances are that they'd do it? Zero, I'd guess.
I wonder if anything the EFF can do about this in the courts. It really sucks.
TFA claims: "In many of these markets, the $15 to $25 price differential compared to Windows XP makes all the difference." I have a really hard time believing that anyone who has the $400 to buy a netbook will decide to save $20 by buying one without Linux and then installing a pirated copy of Windows. Installing any OS on a laptop is a total pain, and often results in a system with all kinds of problems, like power management and sound that don't work. This is completely different from the situation we used to have about 4 years ago when Fry's was selling desktop Linux boxes for $200, while the cheapest Windows box they sold was $450. Sure, for a 55% discount, a lot of people are going to be willing to do their own install of a pirated OS. A ton of that definitely happened back then, and AFAICT that's actually why Fry's stopped selling cheap Linux machines; people would botch the Windows install and then try to return the computer.
If I was really going to believe this article, I'd need to know what the country is that is bringing the average up to 32% -- by buying significantly *more* than 32% of their netbooks with Linux. TFA says it isn't China. Several Australian slashdotters says it's not Australia. Are there massive Linux sales in India, for example? Seems unlikely, given that most of the Indian tech support people I've talked to don't even seem to understand what Linux is.
Another thing I'd need to see in order to believe this article is independent confirmation of the price differential in this mystery country. It's very rare in in the US for Linux machines to sell for significantly less than comparable Windows machines. This is partly because OEMs get huge amounts of money from software houses for loading their crapware onto Windows boxes, and this offsets most or all of the cost of Windows.
I just don't want to put money in Microsoft's pocket for an OS that I have no intention of using. That would mean caving in to the worst kind of abusive monopoly.
Your source for this fact?
It doesn't matter to me what "the industry" does. "The industry" can do whatever it wants, and it has no effect on my ability to run open-source software on my own machine.
Extra points for red-baiting.
CPAN's user interface is definitely very 1994 :-) Perl programmers seem to accept it, but it seems pretty silly to me the way it makes you hit enter 37 times to accept all the defaults.
I'm also a college professor, and I agree about textbook bloat. The problem is that the college textbook market is a very strange kind of market -- really, it should be referred to as a "market," with scare quotes. The people who pick the textbook are different from the people who buy the textbook, so you get all kinds of perverse incentives. Publishers know that they will never lose an adoption because a book had too much material, but they may very well lose one because it didn't cover a topic that a particular professor wants.
The solution, in my opinion, is to ditch the traditional for-profit model of textbook publishing. See my sig for a catalog containing hundreds of free textbooks.
Interesting question. Okay, here's the list of all the CPAN modules that I routinely install on a system I'm going to use: CDDB_get, Term::ReadLine, Term::ReadLine::Gnu, Term::ANSIColor, Term::ReadKey, Curses, Mail::Sort, Net::DNS, Net::DNS::Resolver, Mail::Address, Mail::RFC822::Address, Mail::Sendmail, Digest::SHA1, Data::Dumper, XML::Parser, XML::Simple, Data::Dumper, Time::HiRes, RTF::Tokenizer, RTF::TEXT::Converter, Clone, Term::ReadKey, Date::Calc, Digest::SHA1, Digest::Whirlpool, Tk
A quick, casual sampling in RAA and RubyForge shows that indeed, a lot of these are also available in ruby. It's a little hard to tell, however, how to really compare. Some problems with comparisons: (1) I think some modules, e.g., Clone, are probably not necessary in Ruby; (2) it would be time-consuming to go through and find out what functionality was equivalent to what in all these cases; (3) there's no quick and easy way to compare quality; and (4) if I'm writing software for other people to use on linux, it makes it much more convenient for them if it's widely packaged by various linux distributions. Just as a random example, at one time I wrote a perl app that depended on two CPAN modules called Audio::Data and Audio::Play. Turned out that was a big mistake. The quality of the code was very poor, the author stopped supporting them, and there were portability issues. So I could have pointed to those two modules and said, "Look, perl supports this!," but actually it would have been misleading.
I like python OK. I've used it as a teaching language. I haven't written much nontrivial code of my own in python. The impression I get is that since it's younger than perl, its implementation isn't quite as solid, and its libraries aren't quite as complete. As a language matures, the rate at which old code breaks decreases; I think perl is futher along than python in that regard. For some of the applications I'm interested in, like CGI apps, perl seems to have better libraries and documentation, since it's been in use for those applications for a longer time.
I do most of my coding in perl 5. Perl 5's implementation is rock-solid, and CPAN has an absolutely fantastic selection of useful modules for perl 5.
If I was going to change to something other than perl 5, I would need some motivation. The clearest motivation I can see is that OOP in perl 5 is ugly and bolted on.
With that motivation, I have dabbled in ruby enough to write one nontrivial app. The thing is, perl 5 still beats the heck out of ruby in terms of implementation and libraries. As an example of this, in my ruby app I wanted to use some regex features that were not available in ruby 1.8, so I ended up using ruby 1.9. But ruby 1.9, and its regex engine, are relatively raw and buggy, and I ended up having serious problems that I had to work around. (Yes, I submitted a bug report. No, it hasn't been fixed yet.)
AFAICT, the main advantage of perl 6 over perl 5 is the same as ruby's main advantage over perl 5: OOP is implemented in a nicer way. The thing is, the disadvantages are even more magnified, because it's so raw and incomplete.
My current reaction to the situation is to plan on continuing to code in perl 5 until, say, 2015, and then check back to see how much ruby and perl 6 have improved by then.
The author of TFA seems somewhat confused and inexperienced.
I see. I originally tried it for the word "fermion," and no such button popped up. Apparently "retch" is in their dictionary, and "fermion" isn't. Wiktionary has both words, so based on this very small sample, it looks to me like google's dictionary is not very complete compared to Wiktionary.
Am I the only one to have the following three reactions?
But my statement was about the marginal cost of distribution per copy.
Their optimal profit is obtained at a certain price, regardless of the initial cost of conversion. Of course, they may be making an emotional decision rather than a rational one: "We spent $30 to convert this article, and dammit, we're not going to let anyone have it for a price that doesn't recover our cost ... even if that means nobody buys it, and we don't get any money at all, and it hurts our bottom line."
What I don't understand is paywalls that seem to have been erected without any sane business model in mind. For instance, here is a physics paper that I needed to look up today. It describes a particle-physics experiment from 1979 that, as a side benefit, ended up producing one of the classic high-precision tests of special relativity. I teach at a community college, so we don't have scientific journals at the library. My wife teaches at a university, so she has electronic access to journals, but the access to this particular publisher's journal only goes back to 1995. So I find the article online, behind a paywall, and I'm all set to pay $10 for a copy, just to avoid the hassle of going to a university library and photocopying it. I click through on the link to buy a copy, and they want $31.50. That's just crazy. Since the price was insane, it motivated me to get in the car, drive 20 minutes to a university library, and find the article down in the basement stacks where they put old journals.
To me, this seems like totally irrational behavior on the part of the publisher. For any product you want to sell, there has to be a price that optimizes your profit. Price it too high, and you don't get enough volume. Price it too low, and you get volume, but not enough of a profit margin. I simply can't believe that $31.50 is the sane, profit-optimizing price for a single academic paper from 1979 -- especially not when it's electronic, so the marginal cost of distribution per copy is essentially zero. My guess is that some of these traditional print publishers simply have their heads in the sand. They believe that the advent of digital music has decimated the music business, so the lesson they take home is that anything digital is like dog poop -- don't touch it, or something bad will happen to you and your business.
Why is this news? The victim showed a judge a blackmail letter. In that situation, of course a judge is going to sign documents forcing people with relevant information to disclose it to the police and/or DA.
In my experience, bugs are a bigger problem than documentation. All the computers in my household (mine, wife's, two young kids') run Linux. I'm the only one who's a Linux power user. My wife has only started using Linux this year. My kids have basically had no big problems with lack of documentation. E.g., my older daughter, who is really into art, was highly motivated to learn gimp. I handed her a book on gimp, but she never opened it. She just preferred to google for tutorials.
I'm not saying the documentation situation is heavenly, but the bigger problem is bugs. For instance, my wife is not able to get the Line In sound input to work with Audacity so that she can digitize her old Who and Dylan LPs. It's not a documentation problem. It used to work, but it just seems to be broken on the current version of Ubuntu. On my own linux box, the sound output level always goes to zero every time I log in. I raise it, and then 15 minutes later it lowers itself again. Yes, I've reported the bug. When I hit a web page with a java applet, firefox crashes. Again, it's a bug, not a documentation issue. All of my family's current usability problems have to do with bugs, not lack of documentation.
I've spent a month in Ecuador, and in my experience, the OP is focusing on the wrong problem. Backpacking in South America means being around a lot of people who make less money in a year than you make in a week. On this trip, I had a pair of prescription sunglasses and a pair of nice gore-tex hiking boots, and they constantly made me the focus of attention from people who wanted to know how much they cost, etc. One time coming down a trail in the Andes, I passed a kid who looked like he was about 12, chopping bananas with a machete. He said, "Dime los lentos," meaning "Give me the glasses." I just increased my hiking speed, and it turned out that he didn't hack me to death. So carrying a netbook in this social environment does bring up a whole bunch of issues about being victimized, but they aren't issues with having your PayPal password stolen, they're issues with getting mugged by someone who wants your computer, which is worth more than they make make in several months. My advice is not to bring the netbook. If you're worried about keyloggers in internet cafes, bring a bootable CD.
Absolutely. What makes me especially excited about trying G-WAN is that whenever it crashes I'll have the extra fun of figuring out whether the reason it crashed was because my own C code crashed, or because the code in his web server crashed. But wait, there's more! Adding to this really enjoyable programming problem will be the extra challenge that comes with the fact that his code is closed source, so if the crash occurs inside his code, I'll be able to get in there with a debugger and spend an afternoon figuring out what happened and whether there's any way to change the data my code gives to his code so that his code won't crash crash. I can see many really enjoyable weekends ahead of me in my parents' basement, with a bowl of nachos and a liter jug of root beer. Good times!
There's absolutely no reason to go to that amount of hassle over something like this. Just call the credit card company, explain the situation (fraudulent recurring charges), have them change your credit card number, and ask them to issue you a new card with a new number. Problem solved.
The purpose of SF isn't fortune-telling. As with any commercial, genre fiction, its main purpose is to entertain, and it may also have some secondary purposes like social commentary, examination of philosophical issues, etc.
The huge change in SF since I first started reading it in the 70's is that these days, movie/TV SF is a gigantic, popular commercial enterprise, utterly dwarfing written SF. Also, a lot of the commercial activity in written SF these days revolves around stuff like Star Trek and Star Wars novels, novels written in the Dune universe, etc.; there didn't used to be such a clear division between highbrow and lowbrow SF. Among teenagers, there is much less of a focus nowadays on non-series written SF. If you look at the young adult section in a book store, you'll see very little real SF; you'll mainly see fantasy. I think part of what's going on is that girls seem to buy a lot more books than boys, and they seem (on the average) more interested in fantasy (e.g., the Twilight books) than in core SF.
Another change in the last couple of decades is that distribution channels have changed. You don't see SF magazines and paperbacks on wire-rack shelves in the drugstore any more. As in all of publishing, there has been a tendency for books to go out of print more quickly, so that it's even harder than before for novelists to make a living by writing. You'd be surprised how few of the SF authors whose books you see on the shelves at Barnes and Noble pay the rent by writing. The magazines are also much less influential than they used to be.
This is incorrect. The satellites are not geostationary. Also, the gravitational time dilation effect is stronger than the special-relativistic time dilation due to motion, so the net effect is that the clocks run faster. Here is a discussion of the physics. The clocks are tuned to 10.22999999543 MHz, which is perceived on earth's surface as 10.23 MHz.
Sure, nothing to argue with here. Similarly, Ohm's law is an annoyance to work around if you want electric light, not an inherent part of lighting your house. If you're happy with gas lights, you don't need to know Ohm's law.
No, here you're simply confused. You're talking about "known locations" and "known time," and you seem to be assuming that those can be "known" according to Newtonian physics. They can't. The whole point of relativity is that time and space don't work the way you seem to think they do.
What argument are you trying to make? Are you saying that it would have been easier to build the system without understanding why it behaved the way it did?
What I think is really cool about GPS is that without Einstein's theory of general relativity, it wouldn't work. For example, the atomic clocks aboard the satellites run faster because they're higher up in the Earth's gravitational field, and when you're higher in a gravitational field, time flows more quickly. If they didn't compensate for this effect (and a bunch of others), the system wouldn't work at all. Of course you can still find kooks on the internet who think that relativity is all wrong, and have mathematical proofs to that effect. I wonder if those people refrain from using GPS?
The EFF is also a great organization to donate money to, and there's a lot of overlap between what they do and the kind of things the ACLU does, e.g., with telecom immunity. Of course if you're not pro-choice, you wouldn't want to donate to the ACLU. It makes a lot of sense to me that the ACLU is putting a lot of energy into the abortion issue, simply because it's an issue that is being fought like crazy in lots of different states.