The system basically worked here, the offended party was able to use the system to address his grievance. Let's not forget that for all our bluster about liberty and freedom there are some places where a real politically-motivated detainment could have meant death or worse.
Yes, but to me the real point to keep in mind is that since 9/11, we've been on the slippery slope toward becoming one of those bad places you're describing. And let's also remember that the whole reason Guantanamo exists is so that some parties will not be able to use the system to address their grievances.
I have a recurring alert in my calendar to donate $100 every July 1 to the ACLU, PO box 96265, Washington, DC 20090-6265. I hope everyone here who's posting about what a great victory this was will do something similar. (Note that contributions to the ACLU are not tax-deductible because they use more than a certain % of their money for lobbying.)
What I really love about the ACLU is that even though they're basically a bunch of liberal Democrats, they take cases strictly on what they perceive as the case's legal importance for civil liberties. Most people associated with the ACLU probably think Ron Paul is the antichrist, but they took this case because it was a good, important case.
Three cheers for Steve Bierfeldt! Most people are sheep, and wouldn't even think of standing up to authority like this. Of those who aren't sheep, very few would do it despite the inconvenience of missing your flight and the implicit threat of going to jail in a country that no longer thinks it's necessary to give people trials. Listen to the audio he recorded on his iPhone. The TSA guys are cussing at him, and then you hear a loud noise that sounds like someone pounding on a desk. You can hear the stress in Bierfeldt's voice, but he's not backing down just because it's a psychologically intimidating situation. I consider Steve Bierfeldt to be a hero.
Have you tried this extension?: Old Location Bar 1.8
Hallelujah! That's exactly what I was looking for! Thanks!!! The behavior that I really hated the most was that it would try to complete URLs for me based on the text of web pages, rather than based on URLs. That was really annoying. Until now, I had never been able to find any way to change that behavior.
Yes. It's about:config, then set "browser.urlbar.maxRichResults" to ZERO. Simple enough?
Nope, I already knew about that setting, and it actually doesn't turn off the awesombar's behavior. Here are the two configuration settings that I know of that I've already applied:
user_pref("browser.urlbar.maxRichResults",4);// only show 4 matches when typing in url bar user_pref("browser.urlbar.matchBehavior",2);// only match at word boundaries when typing in url bar
With these settings, I still don't get back the pre-awesomebar behavior. When I type in a partial URL, it still shows me matches based on the text of the web page, not just the URL.
You can disable it entirely (the functionality not just the look) in FF3.5, so what exactly is your problem with me using it?
I spent a lot of time learning how to disable it as much as possible in firefox 3.0. It was a huge time-sink, and I still didn't succeed in disabling it entirely. So that in itself is a problem: there is functionality that a lot of people wanted to disable, and hated so much that they were willing to work hard to disable it, but they couldn't disable it. This reminds me of the situation with IE on Windows. A lot of people put a lot of effort into figuring out how to remove IE from Windows. Basically it's impossible to completely remove it. I think any unbiased observer would agree that this is a bad thing.
Are you saying that as of firefox 3.5 it is now possible (which it wasn't in 3.0) to easily and completely disable the awesome bar? If so then (a) please tell me how to do it, and (b) the fact that it's such a well-kept secret how to remove it shows that there is a problem with loading this much bloat into the browser.
I think there are at least two arguments that show that free will is not a trivial matter of definition as Landsburg apparently claims.
(1) Psychologists and neurologists have shown that people's explanations for their own actions can be wrong. E.g., you can have situations (with split-brain patients, for example) where they perform some voluntary action that they don't know the reasons for, and when you ask them why they did it, they give a made-up explanation that they themselves believe. To me, this suggests that it may be useful to consider free will as a psychological sensation similar to color or musical pitch, in which case it's a nontrivial phenomenon with a scientific explanation -- not a "yes/no" question that is a trivial matter of definition.
(2) Another argument is that the structure of Einstein's theory of general relativity is such that you have perfectly valid solutions to the field equations in which there are closed timelike curves (CTCs). A CTC means that you can have events A, B, and C, where A causes B, B causes C, and C causes A. We don't know if there are any realistic conditions in our universe under which they would exist (hence the chronology protection conjecture), but they're not logically or mathematically impossible. If a human being passes around such a CTC, you can get all kinds of paradoxes, e.g., older-me warns younger-me to avoid going around the CTC. Here is a nice summary of this kind of stuff: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/time-travel-phys/ . Basically you have a situation where there is a physics question (are CTCs possible, and if so, how would they work?), where one of the strongest arguments available is based on the assumption of free will (the feeling that older-me can *choose* freely to warn younger-me away from the CTC). Again, there is no clearcut, trivial answer; free will comes up as one aspect of a more general, unsolved problem of how causality works. Some physical calculations suggest that there is nothing paradoxical about CTCs; see the stuff about the billiard balls in the link above.
To be perfectly honest, why use LuLu in the first place? There are plenty of cheaper "Print on Demand" (POD) publishers, including Amazon's Booksurge, which lists books on Amazon. I can't see why authors would accept traditional publisher & distributor markups (typically >40% of the retail price) and then add a retailer markup, all for the privilege of selling a book electronically or via POD on LuLu! Find a cheaper POD publisher and sell it yourself, or if a sales page and distributor access are vital, then use Booksurge or an equivalent, not Lulu.
First off, we have two approaches: letting someone else handle sales and distribution, or handling those things yourself. I've done both, and I definitely never want to go back to handling orders myself. It's a huge amount of work, way out of proportion to the possible profits.
So now let's talk about the options if you want someone else to handle sales and distribution.
The equivalent of Lulu at Booksurge would be their CreateSpace program.
If you google on "lulu createspace," you'll get a ton of side-by-side comparisons. Each company has its advantages. CreateSpace's cost per book is somewhat lower, but they don't offer as many cheap shipping options. I have a bunch of illustrated textbooks that are formatted as 8.5x11, and CreateSpace doesn't offer that trim size. It would be a huge amount of work to reformat all my books to a smaller trim size, and anyway I chose 8.5x11 intentionally, because the books are a free-information project, and I want people to be able to conveniently download the PDF and print the book themselves. Therefore CreateSpace isn't an option for me. There are a whole bunch of specific reasons why one might be more appropriate than the other for a particular author.
Re "I can't see why authors would accept traditional publisher & distributor markups (typically >40% of the retail price) and then add a retailer markup, all for the privilege of selling a book electronically or via POD on LuLu!" -- I don't think your analysis really makes sense here. When a customer buys a book on lulu, these "markups" you're referring to are not separate categories. And in any case, it doesn't make sense to refer to a "publisher markup." In a traditional publishing setup, the publisher provides editorial, production, warehousing,... The money they take isn't a "markup," in the sense of something charged by a middleman who doesn't add any value.
still very friendly toward free information
on
Lulu Introduces DRM
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· Score: 2, Informative
I've been using lulu for several years now. As with most long-term relationships, there are some things I like and others that drive me crazy. In general, however, their positive attitude toward free information is one of the big pluses. They were founded by a former Red Hat guy. They have always offered CC licenses as an explicit option in the menus when you set up your book in their web interface. Also, if you set your own royalty to zero, they do not take their usual cut. (This is what I do, because I'm a college professor, and I feel that taking a royalty raises uncomfortable conflict of interest issues, since I'm using my books in my own classes.) After reading TFA, I updated one of my books to see what the deal was. I have always had my books set so that people can buy printed copies (with zero royalty to me) or just download them for free in PDF format. When I updated my book I got a page like this:
Download Makes your content available as a download Sell My Download Base Price $ 1.49
The base price covers file hosting, bandwidth, and credit card transaction costs.
*
My Revenue $ Please enter a number between 0.00 and 999999.99 Lulu $ 0.00
Lulu's commission (20% of the total profit) Learn more about the Lulu commission
*
Price $ Please enter a number between 0.00 and 999999.99 Give My Download Away For Free To account for hosting and transaction costs, we had to add a base price of $1.49 if you collect a creator revenue. However, if you want to give your download away for free, Lulu will waive this base price.
If you look way down at the bottom under "Give My Download Away For Free," you'll see that they are not going to charge money unless I do. Here is the book, as updated today. You can still download it without paying any money.
I do feel that DRM is evil. I'm not happy that lulu is supporting it. However, their over-all support for free information seems to me to be a lot better than you'd expect from Random Corporation, Inc.
For the record, here are the things I like and dislike about lulu:
Likes: They are the only POD or vanity publisher I know of that will let you set up and sell your book with zero initial cost. They handle all of the shipping and order processing, which was a huge hassle for me when I was doing it myself. They are relatively friendly toward free information.
Dislikes: They have a business model sort of similar to Paypal, i.e., it is absolutely impossible to get a Lulu employee to talk to you on the phone, and very difficult to communicate with one in any other way, either. I have had repeated technical issues with them before, where the printer they subcontracted out to couldn't output a book that had outputted successfully for a long time before with other subcontractors; lulu wasn't willing/able to help me figure out a workaround, although I eventually figured it out myself. College bookstores have reported problems to me where lulu sent them bogus bills ($700 for books that FedEx tracking showed were shipped to someone's house in a different state), and made it an incredible hassle to straighten out the problem.
Maybe you could clarify your requirements. You say "something which requires a separate amp, speakers and PC in each room and requires a keyboard to control is right out." Which of those things do you have to avoid? You certainly can't avoid speakers. When you say you don't want an amp, do you mean you don't want any amp at all, or you just don't want one the size of a traditional stereo amp? If you don't want any amp at all, then you're going to have to run speaker cables around the house, and that's that. When you say you don't want a separate amp, speakers, and PC in each room, do you really mean you just don't want a PC in each room? What kind of audio quality do you need? If all you want is the ability to play some tunes while you're cleaning the bathroom, then a portable music player would probably do the job.
I'm currently running OpenWRT+Gargoyle on my linksys wrt54g. The reason I picked OpenWRT and Gargoyle was that at the time they seemed to be pretty much the only options if you wanted a fully free-as-in-speech OS and interface on your router. However, Gargoyle is pretty feature-poor.
From a cursory look at the links, I'm still left with some questions. (1) Are these systems really usable and debugged at this point, or are they just proof-of-concept mockups, or early alphas or something? (2) I don't know what RouterStation is, or what Ubiquiti is. Are these general-purpose interfaces that could run on my linksys hardware, or are they specialized to certain hardware?
Therefore devloping a solution to "distracted driving" will reduce deaths from "distracted driving". In spite of the fact that we don't actually see any increase in deaths due to the causes of "distracted driving" (texting, cellphones, etc.
So, again, what is the problem that we're trying to solve?
Correlation doesn't imply causation. Lack of correlation doesn't imply lack of causation.
Good point. By the same logic, I think we ought to do away with vaccinations, since deaths from measles, mumps, and rubella are extremely low these days. Deaths from heart disease are also much lower than they were in the 1950's, so I think we can safely stop worrying about smoking and obesity as well.
This is actually just the latest in a series of measurements of this type. Since the Nature paper isn't free online, people may want to look at this similar paper from earlier this year that is available.
The article talks about testing "some theories" of quantum gravity. AFAIK the only theory of quantum gravity that makes anything like a prediction that could be tested in this way is loop quantum gravity (LQG). The two leading contenders for a theory of quantum gravity are LQG and string theory. String theory essentially assumes a background of flat spacetime (plus an xtra 6 rolled-up dimensions), so I don't think it's capable of addressing the issue of whether spacetime is frothy at the Planck scale. LQG doesn't assume a background of flat spacetime, and in fact one of the main research programs in LQG is focused on showing that flat spacetime can emerge as a solution to LQG in the appropriate limit. LQG unambiguously predicts that the vacuum is dispersive, i.e., that the speed of light depends on the energy of the photon. However, LQG does not unambiguously predict the exact form of the energy-dependence. The possible form that is usually assumed in order to evaluate observational tests is |v/c-1|~(E/E_P)^n, where v is the speed of the photon, c is the speed of cause and effect in relativity (often referred to as the speed of light), E is the energy of the photon, E_P is the Planck energy, and n=1 or 2. Previous observations, such as the one in the arxiv paper I linked to above, have pretty much ruled out n=1, so if LQG is right, we'd presumably have to have n=2. Some people have been saying that LQG is ruled out by these measurements, but I don't think that's really correct, it's just constrained by them. Here is a paper by LQG researchers discussing the empirical tests, and they don't seem to be saying "OK, we give up." It's actually very exciting for people in quantum gravity to have observations that even have some chance of disproving a theory (or some version of a theory); the whole field is a dead end if it can never be tested by experiment.
In a broader sense, the holographic principle gives strong, model-independent reasons for believing that spacetime is probably discrete, not continuous, at the Planck scale. Otherwise it's hard to imagine how there could be an upper bound on the information content of a given region of space. And any theory in which spacetime is discrete at the Planck scale will naturally give a dispersive vacuum. Therefore I'd say that either (a) we should eventually observe dispersion of the vacuum once the observations get sensitive enough, or (b) the holographic principle is telling us something that we don't yet understand.
Two good popular-level books that get into this kind of thing are Three Roads to Quantum Gravity by Smolen, and The Black Hole War by Susskind. Because Smolen and Susskind represent very different points of view on quantum gravity, anything that both books agree on is probably correct.
and spend $60,000 (plus interest, so probably closer to $100,000), say, to get a Masters in Science, and then you think you will only make 40,000-60,000/yr
Grad students in PhD programs in STEM fields (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics, the areas discussed in TFA) almost never pay anything to go to grad school. The school covers their tuition, and they also get paid as TAs and RAs (enough to live on). Even in the worst case, where you're doing a terminal master's and can't get a tution waiver, TA, or RA, you're not necessarily going to need to spend $60k for a 2-year program. Grad student fees at UC Berkeley are $11k/year for residents. The rest of the costs would depend on your living situation. E.g., if you have a spouse who can pay the rent, you may not have any other costs at all.
In the physical sciences, very few people enroll in a terminal master's program, mainly because it's kind of useless. It doesn't qualify you to do research or university-level teaching, and it's not needed for almost anything besides research. The main exception I know of is that a lot of K-12 teachers do go back to school to get master's degrees, and they do it because they perceive it as being well worthwhile monetarily (contradicting your argument).
I don't know where you got the 40-60k income figure. I teach physics at a community college, which is not exactly the most prestigious or lucrative gig, and I get paid about twice that. (I have a PhD, not a master's.) 40k might be about right as a starting salary for someone who got a master's in math and then went into K-12 teaching (depends on rural vs urban, etc.). But by the time you have significant seniority, it would be a lot higher than that.
why some websites aren't entirely safe or appropriate for the work environment (Facebook apps, MySpace, remote access apps, proxies, etc),
Okay, I'll bite. Do facebook and myspace fall in the unsafe category, or are they just inappropriate? Obviously you don't want employees spending all their time at their desks screwing around with facebook, because you want them to be doing useful work. But if there's some actual security vulnerability that is opened up when a user simply goes to a web page with a certain flash or javascript app on it, then that sounds to me more like a problem with the browser you've chosen or the way you've chosen to configure it.
One of the thing that makes me tune out IT's messages at my workplace is that their pronouncements often don't demonstrate an appropriate sense of proportion. For example, they were trying to get a rule instituted that would make it a firing offense to do a variety of things with your computer -- one of which was plugging in a flash drive. (No, I don't work at the CIA. I work at a community college.) If you tell people that their computer can get a virus if they do any of a long list of things, then probably (a) they're not going to believe you, or (b) they're going to decide the list is so long that it's not practical to comply with it. It's like telling kids that beer, marijuana, and heroin are all in the same category. Once they find out you lied about marijuana, they'll just go ahead and try heroin as well.
We've been seeing tons and tons of articles like this recently on slashdot. There's a consistent anti-vaccine slant on all of them. I'm guessing that there's some small group of antivaccine crazies who are active on the firehose, and they consistently vote up each other's stories.
Go do a search on Newegg. Biggest they've got is 256GB, of those, the cheapest is $595. You can get several terabytes for that price with a magnetic hard drives.
Yeah, but a lot of people don't need terabytes worth of storage. I just built a machine for my wife with a 64 Gb SSD, which cost $180. She's currently only using about 25% of the space. The good thing is that the machine is really fast on some tasks she does that require a lot of hard-disk access.
Unions, even though they are a product of free association, also threaten libertarians ability to exploit others, and so you will never find a libertarian who is pro union, even though, according to their ideals, they should be.
I'm registered to vote as a member of the Libertarian party in California. I usually vote the straight Libertarian party line (although I did vote for Obama). I'm very much pro-union. My grandfather was a labor organizer. I'm a union member myself. I have never crossed a picket line and never will.
Libertarians are actually a pretty varied lot. You seem to have us stereotyped as the right-wing wackos for whom the Republican party wasn't conservative enough. Those exist, but the other flavors exist as well, e.g., ponytailed hippie types who want to legalize marijuana and prostitution. I went to one party gathering (actually the only such event I've ever been lured to) where two people spoke, one right after the other; the first was rapidly anti-immigrant, while the second wanted to open up the border with Mexico 100% so that you wouldn't even need a passport to cross, and anybody could work on either side of the border.
The Wall Street Journal's story says that the plan will allow people to buy FROM iTunes and Amazon.
Which is too bad, because more competition would have been really helpful, especially for linux users. I currently buy my music on amazon, but their linux support is extremely buggy. To buy an album (as opposed to individual songs), you have to use a special downloader app they provide. To their credit, they do provide a linux version, but their whole setup is just lame and buggy. When I've called with problems, the Indian tech support people always claimed that there's no support for anything but Windows and IE (even though amazon's web site offers specific information and software for linux). Right now, amazon probably has zero incentive to improve the situation. But if there was someone else willing to sell music to linux users, amazon would probably say to themselves, "Hey, linux users may only be 0.5% of our customers, but 0.5% is still millions of dollars, and now that we've got competition we should really get our act together."
Also, although I buy my music in mp3 format, a lot of people prefer less lossy formats. Right now, your only option is iTunes if you don't want mp3. Geographical restrictions are another issue that would probably get fixed if there were more competition.
I download my Nvidia drivers from the Archlinux package repository. How many Linux users manually download them from Nvidia? The 0.5 percentage could be a big understatement...
In addition to reason #1 that you supplied...
#2: I won't be counted in their percentage because when it was time to buy a video card for the linux box I built last week, I made sure to buy a card from ATI, which has a vigorous program of openly documenting their drivers and trying to make open-source drivers available.
#3: And in general, if I have a mobo with onboard video, I don't bother buying an external video card. Why would I bother? 3-d graphics support on linux sucks, I don't want binary blobs on my computer if I can avoid it, and for 2-d, the onboard video is usually fine.
So there are lots of good reasons for linux users not to be showing up in nvidia's download statistics -- and probably not contributing to their bottom line, either.
The first link is to a lame, short, not very interesting blog post. The second link is to the full article (in English) in Der Spiegel.
The Der Spiegel article criticizes the traditional publishing industry for price fixing (with some help from government), but it uncritically parrots the traditional music industry's party line about copyright violation, and then uncritically makes the analogy with books. It assumes that copyright-violating sharing of music is wholly to blame for the fact that the music industry isn't as profitable as it would like to be be, without mentioning the possibility that people were unhappy with the choices the music industry was putting out, and unhappy with being expected to pay $16 for a CD that only had 2 or 3 good tracks on it. It also never mentions DRM.
In general, I don't think it's a good idea to lump together all kinds of books as if they were the same. Selling a Dan Brown book in hardcover is different from selling it as a mass market paperback, which in turn is different from selling a used copy, which is also different from borrowing a copy from a friend or from the public library. Copyrighted e-books are different from public-domain e-books, and then there are copyrighted books whose authors have intentionally made them free online (see my sig). There is a huge difference between a college textbook and other types of books; prices of college textbooks have gone up much faster than inflation in recent decades, and that's happened because the people who made the textbook selection decisions were the professors, while the people who had to pay were the students.
Most published authors don't make much money from most kinds of books. Never have and never will. What the traditional publishers would like to see is a world in which that continues to be the case, but DRM on e-books makes it impossible for people to buy used books, share books with friends, or borrow books from the public library.
The logical and simpler solution is to increase the price of electricity and/or gasoline, to reflect the real cost of the commodity, through taxes.
I don't know about the politics of Finland, but here in the U.S. this is essentially what Al Gore tried to do with the carbon tax. He failed. Pretty much every economist agrees with you and Al Gore, but it's just not going to happen in the U.S. People in the U.S. are used to having cheap energy. They don't realize that when we were at the top of the recent spike in gas prices, we were still paying less than most people throughout most of the world. Sometimes in politics you have to do what's possible, rather than what would theoretically be optimal.
There is also a question of the effect that these two alternative policies would have on rich people and poor people. When energy prices go up, either through taxation or through market mechanisms, it really hits poor people hard. A lot of poor people in the U.S. drive a long way to work. On the other hand, a law mandating higher efficiencies for gigantic TVs will have no economic effect on poor people, who don't own gigantic TVs. Of course all of this could be decoupled. You could tax energy while messing around with other areas of tax policy so that it didn't constitude a net loss for poor people and a net gain for rich people. But our political system isn't very good about decoupling issues like these.
What does bother me is the fact that the Government is going to mandate that I switch to crappy ass light bulbs that take half a minute to come up to full brightness [...]
I don't know where you get your compact fluorescents, but mine come on immediately, and I don't notice any delay before they're at full brigtness. Maybe you just need to buy newer ones that have the latest high-tech solid-state ballasts.
[...] and will contaminate my house with mercury if dropped.
(a) Liquid mercury is harmless unless ingested. (b) If you drop one, sweep it up. (c) The amount of mercury in one bulb is a few milligrams. That's small compared to a mercury thermometer, but I don't hear you complaining about mercury thermometers. (d) The wikipedia article shows that the environmental aspect of this is FUD: "In areas with coal-fired power stations, the use of CFLs saves on mercury emissions when compared to the use of incandescent bulbs. This is due to the reduced electrical power demand, reducing in turn the amount of mercury released by coal as it is burned.[43][44]. In the United States, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency estimated that if all 270 million compact fluorescent lamps sold in 2007 were sent to landfill sites, that this would represent around 0.13 tons, or 0.1% of all U.S. emissions of mercury (around 104 tons) that year.[45]"
If you want to oppose government regulation on general political principles, that's one thing, but please don't oppose it based on FUD.
As an added bonus, there isn't a single CFL made in the United States. There are still incandescent bulbs produced here. Thank you Uncle Sam, for removing my choice to support American jobs and ensuring that even more of our money leaves the country and goes to China.
How about being a little more consistent here? If you use energy-inefficient technologies, it affects my life with pollution and global warming. If you think you have a god-given right to do that, then essentially you're saying you think you have a god-given right to have me subsidize the hidden costs of your lifestyle. In other words, you want a government subsidy. So on the one hand, you seem to be all fired up about how evil government regulation is, but then you turn around and say that you want government subsidies for your polluting lifestyle, and government subsidies for obsolete US industries that can't adapt to new technologies.
For instance, I wrote a physics textbook, which is open-source
No you didn't. I didn't compose an open source song, and that guy over there didn't make open source blueberry jam.
I don't understand your point. It is open source. The source code is in latex format. Latex is a Turing-complete programming language, which people use as a format for writing documents. You can download the source code of my book here (scroll down to the bottom of the page). The source code is under a copyleft license (CC-BY-SA). So I would say that that makes the book an open-source book by any reasonable definition of open source.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, but to me the real point to keep in mind is that since 9/11, we've been on the slippery slope toward becoming one of those bad places you're describing. And let's also remember that the whole reason Guantanamo exists is so that some parties will not be able to use the system to address their grievances.
I have a recurring alert in my calendar to donate $100 every July 1 to the ACLU, PO box 96265, Washington, DC 20090-6265. I hope everyone here who's posting about what a great victory this was will do something similar. (Note that contributions to the ACLU are not tax-deductible because they use more than a certain % of their money for lobbying.)
What I really love about the ACLU is that even though they're basically a bunch of liberal Democrats, they take cases strictly on what they perceive as the case's legal importance for civil liberties. Most people associated with the ACLU probably think Ron Paul is the antichrist, but they took this case because it was a good, important case.
Three cheers for Steve Bierfeldt! Most people are sheep, and wouldn't even think of standing up to authority like this. Of those who aren't sheep, very few would do it despite the inconvenience of missing your flight and the implicit threat of going to jail in a country that no longer thinks it's necessary to give people trials. Listen to the audio he recorded on his iPhone. The TSA guys are cussing at him, and then you hear a loud noise that sounds like someone pounding on a desk. You can hear the stress in Bierfeldt's voice, but he's not backing down just because it's a psychologically intimidating situation. I consider Steve Bierfeldt to be a hero.
Hallelujah! That's exactly what I was looking for! Thanks!!! The behavior that I really hated the most was that it would try to complete URLs for me based on the text of web pages, rather than based on URLs. That was really annoying. Until now, I had never been able to find any way to change that behavior.
Nope, I already knew about that setting, and it actually doesn't turn off the awesombar's behavior. Here are the two configuration settings that I know of that I've already applied:
With these settings, I still don't get back the pre-awesomebar behavior. When I type in a partial URL, it still shows me matches based on the text of the web page, not just the URL.
I spent a lot of time learning how to disable it as much as possible in firefox 3.0. It was a huge time-sink, and I still didn't succeed in disabling it entirely. So that in itself is a problem: there is functionality that a lot of people wanted to disable, and hated so much that they were willing to work hard to disable it, but they couldn't disable it. This reminds me of the situation with IE on Windows. A lot of people put a lot of effort into figuring out how to remove IE from Windows. Basically it's impossible to completely remove it. I think any unbiased observer would agree that this is a bad thing.
Are you saying that as of firefox 3.5 it is now possible (which it wasn't in 3.0) to easily and completely disable the awesome bar? If so then (a) please tell me how to do it, and (b) the fact that it's such a well-kept secret how to remove it shows that there is a problem with loading this much bloat into the browser.
I think there are at least two arguments that show that free will is not a trivial matter of definition as Landsburg apparently claims.
(1) Psychologists and neurologists have shown that people's explanations for their own actions can be wrong. E.g., you can have situations (with split-brain patients, for example) where they perform some voluntary action that they don't know the reasons for, and when you ask them why they did it, they give a made-up explanation that they themselves believe. To me, this suggests that it may be useful to consider free will as a psychological sensation similar to color or musical pitch, in which case it's a nontrivial phenomenon with a scientific explanation -- not a "yes/no" question that is a trivial matter of definition.
(2) Another argument is that the structure of Einstein's theory of general relativity is such that you have perfectly valid solutions to the field equations in which there are closed timelike curves (CTCs). A CTC means that you can have events A, B, and C, where A causes B, B causes C, and C causes A. We don't know if there are any realistic conditions in our universe under which they would exist (hence the chronology protection conjecture), but they're not logically or mathematically impossible. If a human being passes around such a CTC, you can get all kinds of paradoxes, e.g., older-me warns younger-me to avoid going around the CTC. Here is a nice summary of this kind of stuff: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/time-travel-phys/ . Basically you have a situation where there is a physics question (are CTCs possible, and if so, how would they work?), where one of the strongest arguments available is based on the assumption of free will (the feeling that older-me can *choose* freely to warn younger-me away from the CTC). Again, there is no clearcut, trivial answer; free will comes up as one aspect of a more general, unsolved problem of how causality works. Some physical calculations suggest that there is nothing paradoxical about CTCs; see the stuff about the billiard balls in the link above.
First off, we have two approaches: letting someone else handle sales and distribution, or handling those things yourself. I've done both, and I definitely never want to go back to handling orders myself. It's a huge amount of work, way out of proportion to the possible profits.
So now let's talk about the options if you want someone else to handle sales and distribution. The equivalent of Lulu at Booksurge would be their CreateSpace program. If you google on "lulu createspace," you'll get a ton of side-by-side comparisons. Each company has its advantages. CreateSpace's cost per book is somewhat lower, but they don't offer as many cheap shipping options. I have a bunch of illustrated textbooks that are formatted as 8.5x11, and CreateSpace doesn't offer that trim size. It would be a huge amount of work to reformat all my books to a smaller trim size, and anyway I chose 8.5x11 intentionally, because the books are a free-information project, and I want people to be able to conveniently download the PDF and print the book themselves. Therefore CreateSpace isn't an option for me. There are a whole bunch of specific reasons why one might be more appropriate than the other for a particular author.
Re "I can't see why authors would accept traditional publisher & distributor markups (typically >40% of the retail price) and then add a retailer markup, all for the privilege of selling a book electronically or via POD on LuLu!" -- I don't think your analysis really makes sense here. When a customer buys a book on lulu, these "markups" you're referring to are not separate categories. And in any case, it doesn't make sense to refer to a "publisher markup." In a traditional publishing setup, the publisher provides editorial, production, warehousing, ... The money they take isn't a "markup," in the sense of something charged by a middleman who doesn't add any value.
I've been using lulu for several years now. As with most long-term relationships, there are some things I like and others that drive me crazy. In general, however, their positive attitude toward free information is one of the big pluses. They were founded by a former Red Hat guy. They have always offered CC licenses as an explicit option in the menus when you set up your book in their web interface. Also, if you set your own royalty to zero, they do not take their usual cut. (This is what I do, because I'm a college professor, and I feel that taking a royalty raises uncomfortable conflict of interest issues, since I'm using my books in my own classes.) After reading TFA, I updated one of my books to see what the deal was. I have always had my books set so that people can buy printed copies (with zero royalty to me) or just download them for free in PDF format. When I updated my book I got a page like this:
If you look way down at the bottom under "Give My Download Away For Free," you'll see that they are not going to charge money unless I do. Here is the book, as updated today. You can still download it without paying any money.
I do feel that DRM is evil. I'm not happy that lulu is supporting it. However, their over-all support for free information seems to me to be a lot better than you'd expect from Random Corporation, Inc.
For the record, here are the things I like and dislike about lulu:
Likes: They are the only POD or vanity publisher I know of that will let you set up and sell your book with zero initial cost. They handle all of the shipping and order processing, which was a huge hassle for me when I was doing it myself. They are relatively friendly toward free information.
Dislikes: They have a business model sort of similar to Paypal, i.e., it is absolutely impossible to get a Lulu employee to talk to you on the phone, and very difficult to communicate with one in any other way, either. I have had repeated technical issues with them before, where the printer they subcontracted out to couldn't output a book that had outputted successfully for a long time before with other subcontractors; lulu wasn't willing/able to help me figure out a workaround, although I eventually figured it out myself. College bookstores have reported problems to me where lulu sent them bogus bills ($700 for books that FedEx tracking showed were shipped to someone's house in a different state), and made it an incredible hassle to straighten out the problem.
Maybe you could clarify your requirements. You say "something which requires a separate amp, speakers and PC in each room and requires a keyboard to control is right out." Which of those things do you have to avoid? You certainly can't avoid speakers. When you say you don't want an amp, do you mean you don't want any amp at all, or you just don't want one the size of a traditional stereo amp? If you don't want any amp at all, then you're going to have to run speaker cables around the house, and that's that. When you say you don't want a separate amp, speakers, and PC in each room, do you really mean you just don't want a PC in each room? What kind of audio quality do you need? If all you want is the ability to play some tunes while you're cleaning the bathroom, then a portable music player would probably do the job.
I'm currently running OpenWRT+Gargoyle on my linksys wrt54g. The reason I picked OpenWRT and Gargoyle was that at the time they seemed to be pretty much the only options if you wanted a fully free-as-in-speech OS and interface on your router. However, Gargoyle is pretty feature-poor.
From a cursory look at the links, I'm still left with some questions. (1) Are these systems really usable and debugged at this point, or are they just proof-of-concept mockups, or early alphas or something? (2) I don't know what RouterStation is, or what Ubiquiti is. Are these general-purpose interfaces that could run on my linksys hardware, or are they specialized to certain hardware?
Correlation doesn't imply causation. Lack of correlation doesn't imply lack of causation.
Good point. By the same logic, I think we ought to do away with vaccinations, since deaths from measles, mumps, and rubella are extremely low these days. Deaths from heart disease are also much lower than they were in the 1950's, so I think we can safely stop worrying about smoking and obesity as well.
First I've heard of this. Citation, please?
I know that Doctorow was one of CC's early adopters. I've never heard that he was involved in the creation of the license.
IMO Cory Doctorow is good writer, but an absolute genius at self-promotion.
This is actually just the latest in a series of measurements of this type. Since the Nature paper isn't free online, people may want to look at this similar paper from earlier this year that is available.
The article talks about testing "some theories" of quantum gravity. AFAIK the only theory of quantum gravity that makes anything like a prediction that could be tested in this way is loop quantum gravity (LQG). The two leading contenders for a theory of quantum gravity are LQG and string theory. String theory essentially assumes a background of flat spacetime (plus an xtra 6 rolled-up dimensions), so I don't think it's capable of addressing the issue of whether spacetime is frothy at the Planck scale. LQG doesn't assume a background of flat spacetime, and in fact one of the main research programs in LQG is focused on showing that flat spacetime can emerge as a solution to LQG in the appropriate limit. LQG unambiguously predicts that the vacuum is dispersive, i.e., that the speed of light depends on the energy of the photon. However, LQG does not unambiguously predict the exact form of the energy-dependence. The possible form that is usually assumed in order to evaluate observational tests is |v/c-1|~(E/E_P)^n, where v is the speed of the photon, c is the speed of cause and effect in relativity (often referred to as the speed of light), E is the energy of the photon, E_P is the Planck energy, and n=1 or 2. Previous observations, such as the one in the arxiv paper I linked to above, have pretty much ruled out n=1, so if LQG is right, we'd presumably have to have n=2. Some people have been saying that LQG is ruled out by these measurements, but I don't think that's really correct, it's just constrained by them. Here is a paper by LQG researchers discussing the empirical tests, and they don't seem to be saying "OK, we give up." It's actually very exciting for people in quantum gravity to have observations that even have some chance of disproving a theory (or some version of a theory); the whole field is a dead end if it can never be tested by experiment.
In a broader sense, the holographic principle gives strong, model-independent reasons for believing that spacetime is probably discrete, not continuous, at the Planck scale. Otherwise it's hard to imagine how there could be an upper bound on the information content of a given region of space. And any theory in which spacetime is discrete at the Planck scale will naturally give a dispersive vacuum. Therefore I'd say that either (a) we should eventually observe dispersion of the vacuum once the observations get sensitive enough, or (b) the holographic principle is telling us something that we don't yet understand.
Two good popular-level books that get into this kind of thing are Three Roads to Quantum Gravity by Smolen, and The Black Hole War by Susskind. Because Smolen and Susskind represent very different points of view on quantum gravity, anything that both books agree on is probably correct.
Grad students in PhD programs in STEM fields (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics, the areas discussed in TFA) almost never pay anything to go to grad school. The school covers their tuition, and they also get paid as TAs and RAs (enough to live on). Even in the worst case, where you're doing a terminal master's and can't get a tution waiver, TA, or RA, you're not necessarily going to need to spend $60k for a 2-year program. Grad student fees at UC Berkeley are $11k/year for residents. The rest of the costs would depend on your living situation. E.g., if you have a spouse who can pay the rent, you may not have any other costs at all.
In the physical sciences, very few people enroll in a terminal master's program, mainly because it's kind of useless. It doesn't qualify you to do research or university-level teaching, and it's not needed for almost anything besides research. The main exception I know of is that a lot of K-12 teachers do go back to school to get master's degrees, and they do it because they perceive it as being well worthwhile monetarily (contradicting your argument).
I don't know where you got the 40-60k income figure. I teach physics at a community college, which is not exactly the most prestigious or lucrative gig, and I get paid about twice that. (I have a PhD, not a master's.) 40k might be about right as a starting salary for someone who got a master's in math and then went into K-12 teaching (depends on rural vs urban, etc.). But by the time you have significant seniority, it would be a lot higher than that.
Okay, I'll bite. Do facebook and myspace fall in the unsafe category, or are they just inappropriate? Obviously you don't want employees spending all their time at their desks screwing around with facebook, because you want them to be doing useful work. But if there's some actual security vulnerability that is opened up when a user simply goes to a web page with a certain flash or javascript app on it, then that sounds to me more like a problem with the browser you've chosen or the way you've chosen to configure it.
One of the thing that makes me tune out IT's messages at my workplace is that their pronouncements often don't demonstrate an appropriate sense of proportion. For example, they were trying to get a rule instituted that would make it a firing offense to do a variety of things with your computer -- one of which was plugging in a flash drive. (No, I don't work at the CIA. I work at a community college.) If you tell people that their computer can get a virus if they do any of a long list of things, then probably (a) they're not going to believe you, or (b) they're going to decide the list is so long that it's not practical to comply with it. It's like telling kids that beer, marijuana, and heroin are all in the same category. Once they find out you lied about marijuana, they'll just go ahead and try heroin as well.
We've been seeing tons and tons of articles like this recently on slashdot. There's a consistent anti-vaccine slant on all of them. I'm guessing that there's some small group of antivaccine crazies who are active on the firehose, and they consistently vote up each other's stories.
Yeah, but a lot of people don't need terabytes worth of storage. I just built a machine for my wife with a 64 Gb SSD, which cost $180. She's currently only using about 25% of the space. The good thing is that the machine is really fast on some tasks she does that require a lot of hard-disk access.
I'm registered to vote as a member of the Libertarian party in California. I usually vote the straight Libertarian party line (although I did vote for Obama). I'm very much pro-union. My grandfather was a labor organizer. I'm a union member myself. I have never crossed a picket line and never will.
Libertarians are actually a pretty varied lot. You seem to have us stereotyped as the right-wing wackos for whom the Republican party wasn't conservative enough. Those exist, but the other flavors exist as well, e.g., ponytailed hippie types who want to legalize marijuana and prostitution. I went to one party gathering (actually the only such event I've ever been lured to) where two people spoke, one right after the other; the first was rapidly anti-immigrant, while the second wanted to open up the border with Mexico 100% so that you wouldn't even need a passport to cross, and anybody could work on either side of the border.
Which is too bad, because more competition would have been really helpful, especially for linux users. I currently buy my music on amazon, but their linux support is extremely buggy. To buy an album (as opposed to individual songs), you have to use a special downloader app they provide. To their credit, they do provide a linux version, but their whole setup is just lame and buggy. When I've called with problems, the Indian tech support people always claimed that there's no support for anything but Windows and IE (even though amazon's web site offers specific information and software for linux). Right now, amazon probably has zero incentive to improve the situation. But if there was someone else willing to sell music to linux users, amazon would probably say to themselves, "Hey, linux users may only be 0.5% of our customers, but 0.5% is still millions of dollars, and now that we've got competition we should really get our act together."
Also, although I buy my music in mp3 format, a lot of people prefer less lossy formats. Right now, your only option is iTunes if you don't want mp3. Geographical restrictions are another issue that would probably get fixed if there were more competition.
In addition to reason #1 that you supplied...
#2: I won't be counted in their percentage because when it was time to buy a video card for the linux box I built last week, I made sure to buy a card from ATI, which has a vigorous program of openly documenting their drivers and trying to make open-source drivers available.
#3: And in general, if I have a mobo with onboard video, I don't bother buying an external video card. Why would I bother? 3-d graphics support on linux sucks, I don't want binary blobs on my computer if I can avoid it, and for 2-d, the onboard video is usually fine.
So there are lots of good reasons for linux users not to be showing up in nvidia's download statistics -- and probably not contributing to their bottom line, either.
The first link is to a lame, short, not very interesting blog post. The second link is to the full article (in English) in Der Spiegel.
The Der Spiegel article criticizes the traditional publishing industry for price fixing (with some help from government), but it uncritically parrots the traditional music industry's party line about copyright violation, and then uncritically makes the analogy with books. It assumes that copyright-violating sharing of music is wholly to blame for the fact that the music industry isn't as profitable as it would like to be be, without mentioning the possibility that people were unhappy with the choices the music industry was putting out, and unhappy with being expected to pay $16 for a CD that only had 2 or 3 good tracks on it. It also never mentions DRM.
In general, I don't think it's a good idea to lump together all kinds of books as if they were the same. Selling a Dan Brown book in hardcover is different from selling it as a mass market paperback, which in turn is different from selling a used copy, which is also different from borrowing a copy from a friend or from the public library. Copyrighted e-books are different from public-domain e-books, and then there are copyrighted books whose authors have intentionally made them free online (see my sig). There is a huge difference between a college textbook and other types of books; prices of college textbooks have gone up much faster than inflation in recent decades, and that's happened because the people who made the textbook selection decisions were the professors, while the people who had to pay were the students.
Most published authors don't make much money from most kinds of books. Never have and never will. What the traditional publishers would like to see is a world in which that continues to be the case, but DRM on e-books makes it impossible for people to buy used books, share books with friends, or borrow books from the public library.
I don't know about the politics of Finland, but here in the U.S. this is essentially what Al Gore tried to do with the carbon tax. He failed. Pretty much every economist agrees with you and Al Gore, but it's just not going to happen in the U.S. People in the U.S. are used to having cheap energy. They don't realize that when we were at the top of the recent spike in gas prices, we were still paying less than most people throughout most of the world. Sometimes in politics you have to do what's possible, rather than what would theoretically be optimal.
There is also a question of the effect that these two alternative policies would have on rich people and poor people. When energy prices go up, either through taxation or through market mechanisms, it really hits poor people hard. A lot of poor people in the U.S. drive a long way to work. On the other hand, a law mandating higher efficiencies for gigantic TVs will have no economic effect on poor people, who don't own gigantic TVs. Of course all of this could be decoupled. You could tax energy while messing around with other areas of tax policy so that it didn't constitude a net loss for poor people and a net gain for rich people. But our political system isn't very good about decoupling issues like these.
I don't know where you get your compact fluorescents, but mine come on immediately, and I don't notice any delay before they're at full brigtness. Maybe you just need to buy newer ones that have the latest high-tech solid-state ballasts.
(a) Liquid mercury is harmless unless ingested. (b) If you drop one, sweep it up. (c) The amount of mercury in one bulb is a few milligrams. That's small compared to a mercury thermometer, but I don't hear you complaining about mercury thermometers. (d) The wikipedia article shows that the environmental aspect of this is FUD: "In areas with coal-fired power stations, the use of CFLs saves on mercury emissions when compared to the use of incandescent bulbs. This is due to the reduced electrical power demand, reducing in turn the amount of mercury released by coal as it is burned.[43][44]. In the United States, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency estimated that if all 270 million compact fluorescent lamps sold in 2007 were sent to landfill sites, that this would represent around 0.13 tons, or 0.1% of all U.S. emissions of mercury (around 104 tons) that year.[45]"
If you want to oppose government regulation on general political principles, that's one thing, but please don't oppose it based on FUD.
How about being a little more consistent here? If you use energy-inefficient technologies, it affects my life with pollution and global warming. If you think you have a god-given right to do that, then essentially you're saying you think you have a god-given right to have me subsidize the hidden costs of your lifestyle. In other words, you want a government subsidy. So on the one hand, you seem to be all fired up about how evil government regulation is, but then you turn around and say that you want government subsidies for your polluting lifestyle, and government subsidies for obsolete US industries that can't adapt to new technologies.
I don't understand your point. It is open source. The source code is in latex format. Latex is a Turing-complete programming language, which people use as a format for writing documents. You can download the source code of my book here (scroll down to the bottom of the page). The source code is under a copyleft license (CC-BY-SA). So I would say that that makes the book an open-source book by any reasonable definition of open source.