Regarding your first point, it's circumscribed in what I said. Only the truly passionate will spend whatever leisure time they have honing their skills, therefore becoming good writers. That doesn't mean that every writer will be good, but, on the whole, we'll have better literature. Most crappy celebrity novels and biographies would be immediately off the table, since they are merely cash-ins on someone's fame. Half-hearted sequels that do not live up to the original would also not see the light of day. And yes, I would say exactly the same about movies. All Michael Bay movies could vanish from history today and the human race would be better for it.
Software is an entirely different beast, though, and I'm not such why you'd touch on it. It's more akin to language itself than to novels. Companies need custom software like newspapers need custom texts - hence the existence of journalists. New hardware needs new software, too. While it can be used as a purely creative medium, it's in itself a way to command machinery. It's not only a matter of volume, it's a matter of what the works you currently have available do for you. Once you get to a certain point, you see that most stories have been told before - and well told at that. Pretty much all of our so-called creative arts is redundancy. The same old stories, the same old literary devices, the same even older emotions being evoked. Obviously there is an infinite number of combinations and, while that's a weird concept to allude to, I'm not against "evolving" literature. But it should be left for people who are passionate, who want to tell a story or say something because they feel the need for it, because they want to express something, not because it's commercially viable. Those are the only ones stepping on new ground, anyway. The rest is perfectly disposable, even when quite successful.
In the absence of income from their work, there will be no professional writers. Period.
But would that be a bad thing? If you walk into a bookstore (do they still exist?) and look around you, you'll see plenty of professional writers. Most of them are crap, though (citation, if needed: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mO8F1HJjzkA ), and even the good ones are derivative to a degree you wouldn't expect (check tvtropes). Most good writers really want to write. Need to. If you take out profit as a motivation, we'll still have new books. Better books, probably, because then only truly passionate people will write. Even if we banished writing altogether, we'd still have so many great classics that we could spent our whole lives reading only amazing, ageless books that have already been written.
It's good that writers can live off their work (even if I usually don't agree with society as to which ones should), but it was never exactly a requirement, not even before the internet made publishers superfluous.
Of course they don't get it right either. They call it "piracy" when the proper name is "non-commercial copyright infringement". You can make pretty much the same points you have made and the issue sparks lots of different even-sided debates, but calling it "stealing" is simply plain wrong - at best, an incredibly bad metaphor, at worst, a farcical plea for the emotions of disgust the work invoke -, regardless of the concept of "lost sales". There's a name for such activity and that one is simply not it. It's akin to calling smoking "arson" or something equally nonsensical.
That name has always bugged me. Wouldn't you expect a Trojan to be something that covertly carries a multitude of soldiers to the inside of the gates and then releases them? That's the absolute last thing you want from a condom.
On the plus side, though, in 3+ years, if current progress is maintained, a low-end 10xxx(?) will perform roughly as well as a high-end 4xxx, so it'll probably be cheap to get OpenCL support while maintaining you current computing prowess. Though 5xxx and 6xxx are only the first series to be supported. Personally, I believe they will backtrack at least to 3xxx models later on.
Population density, education, culture and a lot of other things matter more than gun control. That doesn't ean gun control doesn't matter. For statistics to be relevant, you'd have to take a state that just implemented stricter gun control and look at homicides by firearm before and after. Looking at completely different beasts isn't a very enlightening comparison unless you count all the states/countries, divide them in groups of strong and weak gun control and crunch the numbers.
I can't speak for him, but mine was induced by Russell's In Praise of Idleness, from 1935. He said everyone had to halve their work hours - that'd solve unemployment and people would be happier and more productive, both at work and by investing leisure time in socially meaningful personal projects. Very insightful. But when you combine this with the ever cresent automation of work, the solution is to keep cutting back hours until all you can do is punch your card, breathe once and leave. Thus work would be no longer necessary. It'd ge a good transition, too, because right now we have diminishing employment and quality of life instead of work hours.
However, after some consideration, I don't think we'll be able to make it. We would require more guts than we have historically demonstrated to set such events in motion and I don't see how the economy could flow organically to such a state from where it is now. Instead, we'll keep creating infinitely scalable jobs that do not cater to the basic needs and serve no purpose other than organizing and disputing vast sums of wealth. So maybe in the future every human will be a lawyer, stock broker, politician etc, working for fully automated megacorps. Fashion is a good bet, too.
Energy prices will still be expensive, though. I don't think it will ever be free because we have physical limitation not only on ways to get it, but also on ways to radiate it from Earth. And that's what may keep scarcity around until the end of our days, if we don't dial down the population growth.
I can't speak for him, but mine was induced by Russell's In Praise of Idleness, from 1935. He said everyone had to halve their hour of work - that'd solve unemployment and people would be happier and more productive, both at work and by investing leisure time in socially meaningful personal projects. Very insightful. But when you combine this with the ever cresent automation of work, the solution is to keep cutting back hours until all you can do is punch your card, breathe once and leave. Thus work would be no longer necessary. It'd ge a good transition, too, because right now we have diminishing employment and quality of life instead of work hours.
However, after some consideration, I don't think we'll be able to make it. We would require more guts than we have historically demonstrated to set such events in motion and I don't see how the economy could flow organically to such a state from where it is now. Instead, we'll keep creating infinitely scalable jobs that do not cater to the basic needs and serve no purpose other than organizing and disputing vast sums of wealth. So maybe in the future every human will be a lawyer, stock broker, politician etc, working for fully automated megacorps. Fashion is a good bet, too.
Energy prices will still be expensive, though. I don't think it will ever be free because we have physical limitation not only on ways to get it, but also on ways to radiate it from Earth. And that's what may keep scarcity around until the end of our days, if we don't dial down the population growth.
You touch on an interesting point, there, while talking about what Google provides. Not that I'm defending tax avoidance here (though it is a very predictable problem of a highly globalized world on which companies view countries as service providers that compete amongst themselves in price), but Google has a rather immaterial product - search.
Their data centers may be hosted on the US, but they could easily be anywhere else and it wouldn't make a difference. Considering they mostly rely on copyleft products like Android, Chrome (well, Chromium) and whatnot, what they derive from the US typical stance of strong IP laws is vastly diminished. Even more so when you consider they are more often on the receiving end of the IP suits they are involved in. Their use of roads (the quintessential "free with taxes" benefit) is pretty limited, since their analog, internet cables, is privately funded (correct me if I'm wrong, here, I don't know that much about US governmental funding of comm infrastructure) and they are even rolling out their own fiber.
Obviously they use roads indirectly, and a lot, and they benefit from it, as they use and benefit from a lot of other governmental services - Google probably wouldn't ever be on an anarchist wasteland -, but the more digital a company is, the less they tend to, and that's my point. The internet is in itself sort of an anaschist wasteland, and it is getting increasingly easier for companies to move there. So it will soon start to be viewed as competition to lots of countries. If an independent, international monetary unit is ever created and widely accepted, then taxing anything that happens on the internet, like subscriptions for services or even small scale sales, will be a nightmare.
Assange is a self righteous annoying prick who treats women like hand towels
Do you mean he drowns his sexual partners or - worse - he doesn't ever wash his sexually abused hand towels? I'm confus... wait, what does that say about you and your use of hand towels? Dude, there's such a thing called tissue paper. It's disposable, so you don't have to worry about washing it (not that you do, apparently, but put it this way - your visitors don't have to worry about drying their hands) and it works better as a metaphor in this case.
How do you use a patent "defensively"? It's like a gun: virtually useless in stopping other bullets, but it can protect you in a firefight by forcing your opponent to worry about not exposing himself to your bullets, and thus adopting a less efficient offensive behaviour. Of course, if your opponent knows you're not going to shoot back, then your gun is entirely useless in aiding your survival. And Microsoft has picked on lots of Android vendors for the last two years with litigation (is it HTC that ended up having to pay them a fee for every device sold?), so I don't see your point.
Try reading some comments here, then. They'll explain how allowing people to purchase things more easily, if they choose to, will destroy free software and the whole western civilization.
I'm sorry to be overly blunt, but that is asnine. Ubuntu is integrating an app store to its DE, that's all. It's a convenience every other major OS already has (Windows, Android, OSX, iOS etc), only made a bit more convenient by not requiring you to open the store app. It's not the end of the world. As long as they stay firmly based on Debian, strenghtening Ubuntu strenghtens Linux and open source as a whole. The more market/mind share it gets, the better driver support we get, more attention from developers and so on.
So I wish Ubuntu lots of success. If I dislike a particular feature, I can either deactivate it in Ubuntu, use a different DE, jump ship to their source, Debian, directly, or a derivative that doesn't implement those functions, like Mint. I can even roll my own flavor of Ubuntu, since the source is public. Such plethora of alternatives is exactly what free/open software is all about and people bitching that Ubuntu is "turning their backs on open software" don't seem to understand it at all.
You don't even have to go that far - you can deactivate it through Unity itself, no need to drop to the "scary" CLI. Ubuntu could have avoided the negative response by implementing a ballot like the Windows web browser selector (only for real) either during the installation or for every new user.
Slashdot Mirror
I, too, yearn for what was lost.
Works perfectly with dsound and directmusic. Graphics also don't get corrupted if you emulate a virtual desktop.
Regarding your first point, it's circumscribed in what I said. Only the truly passionate will spend whatever leisure time they have honing their skills, therefore becoming good writers. That doesn't mean that every writer will be good, but, on the whole, we'll have better literature. Most crappy celebrity novels and biographies would be immediately off the table, since they are merely cash-ins on someone's fame. Half-hearted sequels that do not live up to the original would also not see the light of day. And yes, I would say exactly the same about movies. All Michael Bay movies could vanish from history today and the human race would be better for it.
Software is an entirely different beast, though, and I'm not such why you'd touch on it. It's more akin to language itself than to novels. Companies need custom software like newspapers need custom texts - hence the existence of journalists. New hardware needs new software, too. While it can be used as a purely creative medium, it's in itself a way to command machinery. It's not only a matter of volume, it's a matter of what the works you currently have available do for you. Once you get to a certain point, you see that most stories have been told before - and well told at that. Pretty much all of our so-called creative arts is redundancy. The same old stories, the same old literary devices, the same even older emotions being evoked. Obviously there is an infinite number of combinations and, while that's a weird concept to allude to, I'm not against "evolving" literature. But it should be left for people who are passionate, who want to tell a story or say something because they feel the need for it, because they want to express something, not because it's commercially viable. Those are the only ones stepping on new ground, anyway. The rest is perfectly disposable, even when quite successful.
In the absence of income from their work, there will be no professional writers. Period.
But would that be a bad thing? If you walk into a bookstore (do they still exist?) and look around you, you'll see plenty of professional writers. Most of them are crap, though (citation, if needed: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mO8F1HJjzkA ), and even the good ones are derivative to a degree you wouldn't expect (check tvtropes). Most good writers really want to write. Need to. If you take out profit as a motivation, we'll still have new books. Better books, probably, because then only truly passionate people will write. Even if we banished writing altogether, we'd still have so many great classics that we could spent our whole lives reading only amazing, ageless books that have already been written.
It's good that writers can live off their work (even if I usually don't agree with society as to which ones should), but it was never exactly a requirement, not even before the internet made publishers superfluous.
Really? Please do show me where it's been so mortally debunked.
http://torrentfreak.com/piracy-is-not-theft-111104/
Of course they don't get it right either. They call it "piracy" when the proper name is "non-commercial copyright infringement". You can make pretty much the same points you have made and the issue sparks lots of different even-sided debates, but calling it "stealing" is simply plain wrong - at best, an incredibly bad metaphor, at worst, a farcical plea for the emotions of disgust the work invoke -, regardless of the concept of "lost sales". There's a name for such activity and that one is simply not it. It's akin to calling smoking "arson" or something equally nonsensical.
And whenever I post on this subject I get modded to -1 by Nokia fanboys.
Nokia fanboys? +1 funny!
That name has always bugged me. Wouldn't you expect a Trojan to be something that covertly carries a multitude of soldiers to the inside of the gates and then releases them? That's the absolute last thing you want from a condom.
On the plus side, though, in 3+ years, if current progress is maintained, a low-end 10xxx(?) will perform roughly as well as a high-end 4xxx, so it'll probably be cheap to get OpenCL support while maintaining you current computing prowess. Though 5xxx and 6xxx are only the first series to be supported. Personally, I believe they will backtrack at least to 3xxx models later on.
But it still stands that if you want the most out of the card, the official drivers are still the only way to go.
And Windows. Fglrx's performance isn't that great when compared to Catalyst for Windows of competing Nvidia products.
Population density, education, culture and a lot of other things matter more than gun control. That doesn't ean gun control doesn't matter. For statistics to be relevant, you'd have to take a state that just implemented stricter gun control and look at homicides by firearm before and after. Looking at completely different beasts isn't a very enlightening comparison unless you count all the states/countries, divide them in groups of strong and weak gun control and crunch the numbers.
I can't speak for him, but mine was induced by Russell's In Praise of Idleness, from 1935. He said everyone had to halve their work hours - that'd solve unemployment and people would be happier and more productive, both at work and by investing leisure time in socially meaningful personal projects. Very insightful. But when you combine this with the ever cresent automation of work, the solution is to keep cutting back hours until all you can do is punch your card, breathe once and leave. Thus work would be no longer necessary. It'd ge a good transition, too, because right now we have diminishing employment and quality of life instead of work hours.
However, after some consideration, I don't think we'll be able to make it. We would require more guts than we have historically demonstrated to set such events in motion and I don't see how the economy could flow organically to such a state from where it is now. Instead, we'll keep creating infinitely scalable jobs that do not cater to the basic needs and serve no purpose other than organizing and disputing vast sums of wealth. So maybe in the future every human will be a lawyer, stock broker, politician etc, working for fully automated megacorps. Fashion is a good bet, too.
Energy prices will still be expensive, though. I don't think it will ever be free because we have physical limitation not only on ways to get it, but also on ways to radiate it from Earth. And that's what may keep scarcity around until the end of our days, if we don't dial down the population growth.
I can't speak for him, but mine was induced by Russell's In Praise of Idleness, from 1935. He said everyone had to halve their hour of work - that'd solve unemployment and people would be happier and more productive, both at work and by investing leisure time in socially meaningful personal projects. Very insightful. But when you combine this with the ever cresent automation of work, the solution is to keep cutting back hours until all you can do is punch your card, breathe once and leave. Thus work would be no longer necessary. It'd ge a good transition, too, because right now we have diminishing employment and quality of life instead of work hours.
However, after some consideration, I don't think we'll be able to make it. We would require more guts than we have historically demonstrated to set such events in motion and I don't see how the economy could flow organically to such a state from where it is now. Instead, we'll keep creating infinitely scalable jobs that do not cater to the basic needs and serve no purpose other than organizing and disputing vast sums of wealth. So maybe in the future every human will be a lawyer, stock broker, politician etc, working for fully automated megacorps. Fashion is a good bet, too.
Energy prices will still be expensive, though. I don't think it will ever be free because we have physical limitation not only on ways to get it, but also on ways to radiate it from Earth. And that's what may keep scarcity around until the end of our days, if we don't dial down the population growth.
You touch on an interesting point, there, while talking about what Google provides. Not that I'm defending tax avoidance here (though it is a very predictable problem of a highly globalized world on which companies view countries as service providers that compete amongst themselves in price), but Google has a rather immaterial product - search.
Their data centers may be hosted on the US, but they could easily be anywhere else and it wouldn't make a difference. Considering they mostly rely on copyleft products like Android, Chrome (well, Chromium) and whatnot, what they derive from the US typical stance of strong IP laws is vastly diminished. Even more so when you consider they are more often on the receiving end of the IP suits they are involved in. Their use of roads (the quintessential "free with taxes" benefit) is pretty limited, since their analog, internet cables, is privately funded (correct me if I'm wrong, here, I don't know that much about US governmental funding of comm infrastructure) and they are even rolling out their own fiber.
Obviously they use roads indirectly, and a lot, and they benefit from it, as they use and benefit from a lot of other governmental services - Google probably wouldn't ever be on an anarchist wasteland -, but the more digital a company is, the less they tend to, and that's my point. The internet is in itself sort of an anaschist wasteland, and it is getting increasingly easier for companies to move there. So it will soon start to be viewed as competition to lots of countries. If an independent, international monetary unit is ever created and widely accepted, then taxing anything that happens on the internet, like subscriptions for services or even small scale sales, will be a nightmare.
Assange is a self righteous annoying prick who treats women like hand towels
Do you mean he drowns his sexual partners or - worse - he doesn't ever wash his sexually abused hand towels? I'm confus... wait, what does that say about you and your use of hand towels? Dude, there's such a thing called tissue paper. It's disposable, so you don't have to worry about washing it (not that you do, apparently, but put it this way - your visitors don't have to worry about drying their hands) and it works better as a metaphor in this case.
How do you use a patent "defensively"? It's like a gun: virtually useless in stopping other bullets, but it can protect you in a firefight by forcing your opponent to worry about not exposing himself to your bullets, and thus adopting a less efficient offensive behaviour. Of course, if your opponent knows you're not going to shoot back, then your gun is entirely useless in aiding your survival. And Microsoft has picked on lots of Android vendors for the last two years with litigation (is it HTC that ended up having to pay them a fee for every device sold?), so I don't see your point.
Ah, not the new /. at all, just the old /. readers.
Try reading some comments here, then. They'll explain how allowing people to purchase things more easily, if they choose to, will destroy free software and the whole western civilization.
I'm sorry to be overly blunt, but that is asnine. Ubuntu is integrating an app store to its DE, that's all. It's a convenience every other major OS already has (Windows, Android, OSX, iOS etc), only made a bit more convenient by not requiring you to open the store app. It's not the end of the world. As long as they stay firmly based on Debian, strenghtening Ubuntu strenghtens Linux and open source as a whole. The more market/mind share it gets, the better driver support we get, more attention from developers and so on.
So I wish Ubuntu lots of success. If I dislike a particular feature, I can either deactivate it in Ubuntu, use a different DE, jump ship to their source, Debian, directly, or a derivative that doesn't implement those functions, like Mint. I can even roll my own flavor of Ubuntu, since the source is public. Such plethora of alternatives is exactly what free/open software is all about and people bitching that Ubuntu is "turning their backs on open software" don't seem to understand it at all.
Both. There are separate editions.
You don't even have to go that far - you can deactivate it through Unity itself, no need to drop to the "scary" CLI. Ubuntu could have avoided the negative response by implementing a ballot like the Windows web browser selector (only for real) either during the installation or for every new user.
True, you can do that with pretty much every great historical figure. See:
Churchill - racist.
Thomas Jefferson - racist.
Hitler - so-so painter.
Does playing Mario count? Or watching unimaginative porn?
Buy counterfeited chinese crap. It's the only way to avoid the lawyer tax.
What, they actually sold a Surface?
and stealing sales from Wintel ultrabooks doesn't really help Microsoft or Intel.
The Surface Pro IS Wintel.