I have long described both MMO gaming and Facebook social games as being a "well-padded Skinner box" for their staggered/random reward system. Do you see any possibility for anything else to eventually replace this model?
Is this is the end stage for the ownership of ideas: that just as there is no longer "public land" in the sense that every piece of land has an owner (even if it is the government), every idea will need an owner?
But when you buy software, you aren't usually buying the software, but rather a license to use the software
What dirty, dirty, lies! I can tell you for a fact* that I have never once personally licensed software despite purchasing several valid copies. I have four reasons for saying this:
— First, having a debugger installed on my PC means I can modify the installer [while running] to show no EULA at all, so further proof is required I have agreed to whatever blatherskite the software publisher is trying to push.
— Second, I have never been presented the EULA terms before paying for software, so all claims the transaction was not a sale occur ex post facto.
— Third, I have never given my money directly to the software publisher, but to a retailer such as GameStop, Amazon, or Best Buy, so the publisher becomes a "third party" to this transaction and lacks any legal standing to decide its' status.
— Finally, because US copyright law allows me to make copies as "an essential step in the utilization of the computer program" and one copy as a backup (see Title 17 section 117), I have a pre-existing right to install the software; the typical EULA therefore grants no quid pro quo to me and therefore is contractually void.
Disclaimer: This is not legal advice, I am not your lawyer, and in fact I am not a lawyer at all! I do play one on... I mean, work with them every day, and several of them have agreed that the above arguments are strong enough that certain other people would lose sleep at night should I ever find cause to argue them in a courtroom.
[[*: This is hyperbole, really, although I suppose you could say it is "pending legal review". I don't feel the need to go beyond what copyright law permits... and that's pretty much what a typical EULA asks anyway. Until there's sufficient harm in the divergence between my interpretation and the demands in the EULA for any software I have purchased, I have no reason for me to actually test these arguments in a court of law. So far I've skirted this by avoiding really problematic publishers, but I fear the day of testing is fast approaching.]]
Your code will never "fail" when you cover all bases with restarts; and
It's fast to write from specification, so you get big props as a get-'er-done type.
Third, nobody else can debug it because they can't figure out what is being done in even a simple one-liner like "(eq TODAY (cdr (car *LIFE*)))".
Finally, nobody can be hired to replace you because all the schools don't teach the basics of data structure and code flow analysis but the grammar of the latest "l33t"ness in this year's dialect of VB-dot-net-sharp-plus-plus.
Another option would be to hold all bonuses in escrow for some defined period (I would suggest at least 5 years). At the end of that period, the bonus may be claimed.
This would work at least as well for stock based bonuses for CxO level officers; now they have a direct financial incentive to ensure the company will shine just as well after they leave as they do shine up the numbers for next quarter.
The problem with those averages is that it divided on a completely arbitrary line (every year ending in a 0). Either single very large spikes in either direction, or events occurring on 7 or 14 year cycles, could pull the "average" numbers used for each 10 year span. A quick analysis appears to show some sort of ~30 year period cycles occurring (1880-1919 cluster around a small range, as do 1930-1979), and both longer or shorter cycles are practically guaranteed.
What I do not see adequately discussed is the prospect of very long, multi-century cycles longer than our temperature records: a cycle of (say) volcanic activity which extends for 800-1000 years could easily fit the "small" deviations in the Holocene paleoclimate records, and would coincide with the current warming period. (Even closer historically, the "little ice age" - the last big dip in the thick black line on that chart - occurs right at the start of our temperature records. Even cycles of a small as 300 years would be completely occluded by the brevity of our direct records.)
The fact the "average" global temperature for each of the past 10 years top the records list does not change the temperatures over that time span. I reference that list because it is the most convenient source for the numbers, and because it shows I am not "cherry picking" favorable data. Certainly, the peak temperatures list will prove global warming is occuring, but does not by itself prove anthropogenic causes.
The 1990 IPCC reports on climate predicted a 0.3 degree change per decade with increasing emissions. The latest report (2007) predicts a similar trend line (stated as 2-6 degrees per century), so I have to wonder: how long would we need to deviate from these predictions before it becomes significant? 10 years (as we have)? 15? 20? 50?
1/15th of the total historical measurement period is certainly statistically significant. However, as we entered the 1990s (as we approached these peak temperatures), the IPCC "consensus" predicted a 0.3 degree change per decade. The latest report (2007) predicts a similar minimum (stated as 2-6 degrees per century), so my question is: how long would we need to deviate from these predictions before it becomes statistically significant? 1/10th the predictive period (10 years) or 1/15th (another 5)?
Yes, I would cite a 23-year-old model, when it only makes 20 to 30 year predictions. After all, wouldn't it be intellectually dishonest to keep changing the "accurate" model [the one needing to be challenged] before any of your predictions can be tested?
What's your source on say there has been no temperature increase in the last 10 years?
Would you believe... NOAA?
Wikipedia's list of hottest years is penultimately sourced from the NOAA. 2001-2010 all make that list, with a maximum difference over this span of only 0.13 degrees Celsius (2005 / 2008 are listed as hottest and coolest, respectively). In order for this to be "increasing", your measuring equipment must have a error rate below 0.13 degree Celsius. A search on their page finds that the NOAA's official equipment manuals gives an optimum [minimum] error range of 0.166 degrees Celsius [listed as 0.3 degrees Fahrenheit]. I don't challenge their numbers, but their accuracy figures says the last decade has seen — within the accuracy of the measuring equipment — no change in average temperature.
About 12 years ago there was one extremely hot year, so in 2009 you could use the "10 years" argument and show a flat average line... here we are in 2011 and warming has continued
OK, let's ignore any dates in the 20th century. Take a look at Wikipedia's list of hottest years (penultimately sourced from the US NOAA). The maximum difference over this single decade is only 0.13 degrees Celsius (2008 / 2005).
In order for this to be reliable warming, you would have to measure with an error rate better than 0.13 degree Celsius. Given that the NOAA's official equipment guide gives in the specifications an optimum error range of 0.166 degrees Celsius [listed as 0.3 degrees Fahrenheit], I find it hard to believe any such argument at all. If your measured change is within the error range of your equipment, is it not more honest to grant this no statistical weight?
Are you sure that filter works when 70% of high school graduates go to college? In addition, if your only purpose is to show an "ability to read boring material and then write the necessary boring reports", why doesn't HS qualify for that?
(I know the article I point to mentions initial enrollment, not graduation statistics, but remember: this is an article on an education bubble. Just because someone fails to finish their degree does not mean that the loans evaporate. If you are right, and HR's "college education" requirement is needlessly shunting people into lower-paying jobs, that just makes the loan problem worse.)
I can't speak for the grandparent, but I would suspect he's pointing to this part of your original message:
Google needs to put their foot down and at least come up with a set of minimal standards that require manufacturers to comply with them for the platforms own good.
Google does have minimal standards. The problem you have is they are *very* minimal standards: think MS-DOS versus Vista. If your application needs a higher support, you can use the Manifest file to mark a minimum operating system version or hardware requirements. Also, the Intents system is a generic way to pass messages and requests (web pages, draft email, etc) without knowing what programs are on the device or selected as default.
While I would agree that on the user side the lack of standardization might hurt, for developers it's not as bad as you are trying to make it out to be.
Perhaps a new open social network site, hosted and linked across many ISP's, with open source code with clear locked into client agreements with pre-defined and limited revenue methods can be created. A place where clients and service providers can safely mix, all absent "They trust me, Dumb fucks".
I'd be interested to compare calendars -- I also have a "fun geek holidays" calendar in google. (It's fully public, and that's the exact title, if anyone here wants to use it as well.) Towel Day is included, naturally.
The "shrinking middle class" is shrinking because almost everybody is moving up, not down.
Okay, call me a pedant for saying this, but assuming your yardstick is real purchasing power (and not just a specific numeric income), a "shrinking middle class" implies people being moved to both extremes, not in one direction, right? After all, if everyone was "moving up", the median would be moving up with them.
You seem to share Hawking's delusion that more intelligence is an inevitable part of the progression of an intelligent species. Alas, there really doesn't seem to be much evidence for that.
As long as you think of intelligence as "that which is measured by a IQ test", then yes. However, if you think of intelligence as being the entire spectrum of mental activity (including such other, non– or poorly–tested factors such as memory building or new concept synthesis) then our current pace of technological change is indeed a evolutionary force pushing for greater intelligence.
Our grandfathers could hold a job for 50 years and not have a single tool used change in that time period; yet today, office workers have their tools [PC software] change in varying ways every three to four years. Mental adaptiveness is still being selected for (just in different ways than before).
Part of the reason I work is to try to make sure my kids are reasonably well set-up in life..... If they couldn't inherit those benefits then I'd do something easier for less pay.
Fabulous, except that outside of the "creative industry" fields (music, literature, and movies), you stop "working" when you die and no longer reap new income. Are you stating that unless you produce the types of creative works I list above, your estate cannot benefit after your death? (Say, from financial investments you made during your lifetime.)
I'm not stating that copyright terms should end with the author's life, but I have a very hard time seeing any cogent argument for allowing this one field of endeavor to enriching the heirs of producers when no other field gets similar benefits, even ones equally "creative" like scientific discovery.
Why is it ok to patent something physical, but not ok to patent software? I have never understood the distinction.
Well, at least in the USA, if the "thing" being patented is something a human being could do (with an extreme surplus of time and infinite paper and pencils) then it is an abstract idea and explicitly excluded from protection. This is why, for instance, you can't patent raw mathematics like calculus.
And specifically, because computers see all software as "raw mathematics" at the hardware level, software should be excluded from patenst. [Or put another way: human beings are a 1 centi-hertz CPU, and US legal precedent excludes any activity they perform unaided from patenting.]
When did regular people decide that they were qualified to second guess the experts, WITHOUT having put in the decades of work and received a degree which might indicate they are capable of contributing to knowledge?
In the eighth grade, when I was told that an argument that could be summed up as "Respect my authority!" with no factual backing was a fallacy.
Even if we hit a magic button and the 5km-wide rock turned into free-flying dust, that dust still weighs the same as the full asteroid, still has the same kinetic energy, and will still impart every bit as much energy into the atmosphere.
Not to rain on your armageddon parade, but if you turn a 5KM-wide rock into dust, it will safely dissipate into the atmosphere. Atmospheric braking is a function of the surface area — a cloud of particles has many millions of times the surface area of a solid of equal mass — so I would expect huge clouds of particles to be perfectly safe, with not even a crater to worry about.
And to back this mental experiment with hard facts, have you not heard of Coronal Mass Ejections?
Do you have a single example of someone having law enforcement smash down their door over the type of fair use activities that you've described?
How quickly we do forget -- Dimitri Skylarov was arrested for enabling the sort of fair use activities described. Note also that "Sklyarov was being arrested for something that was perfectly legal in his jurisdiction" (Russia at the time having no anti-circumvention laws).
I see the ACTA as an attempt by the Global Powers to make the "decryption loophole" disappear - after all, if it's illegal to make circumvention tools anywhere, the Sklyarov arrest was a perfect execution of justice.
In my opinion, the missing uninstall button is a Firefox problem. How could they let you install software and list it as is installed software, but provide no method to uninstall?
Simple. Go to your FF address bar and type file:///C: then click on Program Files. You will be faced with a long list of software that FF is claiming is installed on your system, but can't just uninstall.
What a textbook example of a strawman argument! Firefox was not intended to manage software installed to "C:\Program Files\" and presumably was not used to install any of these programs (Firefox itself excepted). What the GP is complaining about is the ability of add-ins for Firefox to disable the internal Firefox un-installation command. If you had followed the previousstories, you'd know that already.
Maybe you also think that all the viruses and rootkits and trojans Windows gets from the web is a Firefox problem too?
When a virus, rootkit, trojan or other form of malware gets installed due to a flaw in the design of Firefox, then that flaw is a problem Firefox should address. However, this is such a small percentage of the above listed programs that your question can be answered "no" with reasonable levels of honesty.
Actually Mono fills a niche not satisfied by any other language on Linux.
C# brings functional programming to the masses,...
Clearly you have a different definition of what a language must have to be considered a 'functional programming' language.
If all it takes to make a programming language "functional" is exposing a lambda function, C++ (with the right libraries) is a functional programming language...
The problem, as I see it, is that the schools teach for testability: it's easy to confirm that you have loaded a student's heads with facts (like who was elected president in 1972, or the molecular weight of radioactive elemental carbon) when instead they should spend more time teaching the harder to measure, yet infinitely essential, logic skills that would let them apply said facts.
Or, as my pun-infested brain likes to think of it: Schools should be teaching the trivium, not trivia.
Slashdot Mirror
I have long described both MMO gaming and Facebook social games as being a "well-padded Skinner box" for their staggered/random reward system. Do you see any possibility for anything else to eventually replace this model?
Is this is the end stage for the ownership of ideas: that just as there is no longer "public land" in the sense that every piece of land has an owner (even if it is the government), every idea will need an owner?
What dirty, dirty, lies! I can tell you for a fact* that I have never once personally licensed software despite purchasing several valid copies. I have four reasons for saying this:
— First, having a debugger installed on my PC means I can modify the installer [while running] to show no EULA at all, so further proof is required I have agreed to whatever blatherskite the software publisher is trying to push.
— Second, I have never been presented the EULA terms before paying for software, so all claims the transaction was not a sale occur ex post facto.
— Third, I have never given my money directly to the software publisher, but to a retailer such as GameStop, Amazon, or Best Buy, so the publisher becomes a "third party" to this transaction and lacks any legal standing to decide its' status.
— Finally, because US copyright law allows me to make copies as "an essential step in the utilization of the computer program" and one copy as a backup (see Title 17 section 117), I have a pre-existing right to install the software; the typical EULA therefore grants no quid pro quo to me and therefore is contractually void.
Disclaimer: This is not legal advice, I am not your lawyer, and in fact I am not a lawyer at all! I do play one on ... I mean, work with them every day, and several of them have agreed that the above arguments are strong enough that certain other people would lose sleep at night should I ever find cause to argue them in a courtroom.
[[*: This is hyperbole, really, although I suppose you could say it is "pending legal review". I don't feel the need to go beyond what copyright law permits... and that's pretty much what a typical EULA asks anyway. Until there's sufficient harm in the divergence between my interpretation and the demands in the EULA for any software I have purchased, I have no reason for me to actually test these arguments in a court of law. So far I've skirted this by avoiding really problematic publishers, but I fear the day of testing is fast approaching.]]
Another option would be to hold all bonuses in escrow for some defined period (I would suggest at least 5 years). At the end of that period, the bonus may be claimed.
This would work at least as well for stock based bonuses for CxO level officers; now they have a direct financial incentive to ensure the company will shine just as well after they leave as they do shine up the numbers for next quarter.
The problem with those averages is that it divided on a completely arbitrary line (every year ending in a 0). Either single very large spikes in either direction, or events occurring on 7 or 14 year cycles, could pull the "average" numbers used for each 10 year span. A quick analysis appears to show some sort of ~30 year period cycles occurring (1880-1919 cluster around a small range, as do 1930-1979), and both longer or shorter cycles are practically guaranteed. What I do not see adequately discussed is the prospect of very long, multi-century cycles longer than our temperature records: a cycle of (say) volcanic activity which extends for 800-1000 years could easily fit the "small" deviations in the Holocene paleoclimate records, and would coincide with the current warming period. (Even closer historically, the "little ice age" - the last big dip in the thick black line on that chart - occurs right at the start of our temperature records. Even cycles of a small as 300 years would be completely occluded by the brevity of our direct records.)
The 1990 IPCC reports on climate predicted a 0.3 degree change per decade with increasing emissions. The latest report (2007) predicts a similar trend line (stated as 2-6 degrees per century), so I have to wonder: how long would we need to deviate from these predictions before it becomes significant? 10 years (as we have)? 15? 20? 50?
1/15th of the total historical measurement period is certainly statistically significant. However, as we entered the 1990s (as we approached these peak temperatures), the IPCC "consensus" predicted a 0.3 degree change per decade. The latest report (2007) predicts a similar minimum (stated as 2-6 degrees per century), so my question is: how long would we need to deviate from these predictions before it becomes statistically significant? 1/10th the predictive period (10 years) or 1/15th (another 5)?
Yes, I would cite a 23-year-old model, when it only makes 20 to 30 year predictions. After all, wouldn't it be intellectually dishonest to keep changing the "accurate" model [the one needing to be challenged] before any of your predictions can be tested?
Would you believe... NOAA?
Wikipedia's list of hottest years is penultimately sourced from the NOAA. 2001-2010 all make that list, with a maximum difference over this span of only 0.13 degrees Celsius (2005 / 2008 are listed as hottest and coolest, respectively). In order for this to be "increasing", your measuring equipment must have a error rate below 0.13 degree Celsius. A search on their page finds that the NOAA's official equipment manuals gives an optimum [minimum] error range of 0.166 degrees Celsius [listed as 0.3 degrees Fahrenheit]. I don't challenge their numbers, but their accuracy figures says the last decade has seen — within the accuracy of the measuring equipment — no change in average temperature.
OK, let's ignore any dates in the 20th century. Take a look at Wikipedia's list of hottest years (penultimately sourced from the US NOAA). The maximum difference over this single decade is only 0.13 degrees Celsius (2008 / 2005).
In order for this to be reliable warming, you would have to measure with an error rate better than 0.13 degree Celsius. Given that the NOAA's official equipment guide gives in the specifications an optimum error range of 0.166 degrees Celsius [listed as 0.3 degrees Fahrenheit], I find it hard to believe any such argument at all. If your measured change is within the error range of your equipment, is it not more honest to grant this no statistical weight?
Are you sure that filter works when 70% of high school graduates go to college? In addition, if your only purpose is to show an "ability to read boring material and then write the necessary boring reports", why doesn't HS qualify for that? (I know the article I point to mentions initial enrollment, not graduation statistics, but remember: this is an article on an education bubble. Just because someone fails to finish their degree does not mean that the loans evaporate. If you are right, and HR's "college education" requirement is needlessly shunting people into lower-paying jobs, that just makes the loan problem worse.)
I can't speak for the grandparent, but I would suspect he's pointing to this part of your original message:
Google does have minimal standards. The problem you have is they are *very* minimal standards: think MS-DOS versus Vista. If your application needs a higher support, you can use the Manifest file to mark a minimum operating system version or hardware requirements. Also, the Intents system is a generic way to pass messages and requests (web pages, draft email, etc) without knowing what programs are on the device or selected as default.
While I would agree that on the user side the lack of standardization might hurt, for developers it's not as bad as you are trying to make it out to be.
You mean like the Diaspora Project?
I'd be interested to compare calendars -- I also have a "fun geek holidays" calendar in google. (It's fully public, and that's the exact title, if anyone here wants to use it as well.) Towel Day is included, naturally.
Okay, call me a pedant for saying this, but assuming your yardstick is real purchasing power (and not just a specific numeric income), a "shrinking middle class" implies people being moved to both extremes, not in one direction, right? After all, if everyone was "moving up", the median would be moving up with them.
As long as you think of intelligence as "that which is measured by a IQ test", then yes. However, if you think of intelligence as being the entire spectrum of mental activity (including such other, non– or poorly–tested factors such as memory building or new concept synthesis) then our current pace of technological change is indeed a evolutionary force pushing for greater intelligence.
Our grandfathers could hold a job for 50 years and not have a single tool used change in that time period; yet today, office workers have their tools [PC software] change in varying ways every three to four years. Mental adaptiveness is still being selected for (just in different ways than before).
Fabulous, except that outside of the "creative industry" fields (music, literature, and movies), you stop "working" when you die and no longer reap new income. Are you stating that unless you produce the types of creative works I list above, your estate cannot benefit after your death? (Say, from financial investments you made during your lifetime.)
I'm not stating that copyright terms should end with the author's life, but I have a very hard time seeing any cogent argument for allowing this one field of endeavor to enriching the heirs of producers when no other field gets similar benefits, even ones equally "creative" like scientific discovery.
Well, at least in the USA, if the "thing" being patented is something a human being could do (with an extreme surplus of time and infinite paper and pencils) then it is an abstract idea and explicitly excluded from protection. This is why, for instance, you can't patent raw mathematics like calculus.
And specifically, because computers see all software as "raw mathematics" at the hardware level, software should be excluded from patenst. [Or put another way: human beings are a 1 centi-hertz CPU, and US legal precedent excludes any activity they perform unaided from patenting.]
In the eighth grade, when I was told that an argument that could be summed up as "Respect my authority!" with no factual backing was a fallacy.
Not to rain on your armageddon parade, but if you turn a 5KM-wide rock into dust, it will safely dissipate into the atmosphere. Atmospheric braking is a function of the surface area — a cloud of particles has many millions of times the surface area of a solid of equal mass — so I would expect huge clouds of particles to be perfectly safe, with not even a crater to worry about.
And to back this mental experiment with hard facts, have you not heard of Coronal Mass Ejections?
How quickly we do forget -- Dimitri Skylarov was arrested for enabling the sort of fair use activities described. Note also that "Sklyarov was being arrested for something that was perfectly legal in his jurisdiction" (Russia at the time having no anti-circumvention laws).
I see the ACTA as an attempt by the Global Powers to make the "decryption loophole" disappear - after all, if it's illegal to make circumvention tools anywhere, the Sklyarov arrest was a perfect execution of justice.
What a textbook example of a strawman argument! Firefox was not intended to manage software installed to "C:\Program Files\" and presumably was not used to install any of these programs (Firefox itself excepted). What the GP is complaining about is the ability of add-ins for Firefox to disable the internal Firefox un-installation command. If you had followed the previous stories, you'd know that already.
When a virus, rootkit, trojan or other form of malware gets installed due to a flaw in the design of Firefox, then that flaw is a problem Firefox should address. However, this is such a small percentage of the above listed programs that your question can be answered "no" with reasonable levels of honesty.
Clearly you have a different definition of what a language must have to be considered a 'functional programming' language. If all it takes to make a programming language "functional" is exposing a lambda function, C++ (with the right libraries) is a functional programming language...
...and I'm a chimpanzee.
The problem, as I see it, is that the schools teach for testability: it's easy to confirm that you have loaded a student's heads with facts (like who was elected president in 1972, or the molecular weight of radioactive elemental carbon) when instead they should spend more time teaching the harder to measure, yet infinitely essential, logic skills that would let them apply said facts.
Or, as my pun-infested brain likes to think of it: Schools should be teaching the trivium, not trivia.