No, not in terms of energy efficiency. If you have a displacement hull that is not travelling faster than it's hull speed (a theoretical maximum speed for a hull that is not planing, directly related to the waterline length) then the hull is effectively riding its own wave, and there is very little drag at all. If you carry a lot of wait through the air you have to use a lot of energy just to keep that weight up in the air. With a boat the displaced water supports that weight, and you only have to use energy to move that mass horizontally.
About 5 or 10 years ago in New Zealand they started operating some larger and faster cataraman ferrys between the north and south islands. The ferrys travel for most of their journey through an area called the Marlborough Sounds, which is mostly national park, and an area of great beauty, and value in terms of tourism and conservation. Recently there has been a lot of controversy over their operation as it was found that the wake from these boatswas doing real damage to shorelines in the sounds, i.e. basically destroying the habitat of all those small cratures that live right on the edge of the water. I'm not sure how exactly long these boats are, but on the order of about 100 metres I would guess. So large fast boats can have serious environmental consequences, especially in coastal waters.
Obviously this would be an extra burden on the ISP's but studies have shown that people will generally be prepared to pay slightly more for a service on a fixed rate, than on a metered one. So although I can see that it would be a huge pain to administer, if it was working correctly you should be able to make a profit out of the system at the end.
The problem, as far as I can see, is how do ISP's compete under this system? Either all ISP's have access to <u>all</u> content and compete on the basis of price and economies of scale (you ould probably eventually only have one or two huge ISP's) OR you have content 'holes' depending on what ISP you subscribed to. Under the current system this would probably mean DNS black holes, and I think it would be a serious downside to have a system that would encourage these to proliferate.
Your missing the point, the charge is made for your dialup access, or ADSL connection or whatever, not for actual page accesses. If a search engine hits the page the only potential beneficiary is the copyright holder, and they are paid indirectly (by the ISP.) Search engines may distort 'chargeable' page hit counts to some degree, but I would think that in terms of number of hits for any given page, search engines would be a very small percentage, and the effects would be negligible. but would still be something to be worked out between copyright holders and ISP's anyway.
I just visited Ireland for Christmas (my sister-in-law is Irish) and they seem to get a lot of things right. Over the past few years they have been steadily removing certain taxes, and reducing others (Ireland used to have a large black market economy, but people are declaring more and more as the taxes get less onerous.) They also have a history of rebellion against all forms of authority, mostly due to having been ruled for some periods in their history by their neighbours the English.
A story related to me when I was there was of a barrier placed across a street to stop commuter traffic using it as shortcut. (Ireland's economy has been booming over the past 10 - 15 years, largely because of a strong IT industry, and population growth plus lots of new cars has put a strain on their roads.) Each time it was put up someone would go down with their jeep and pull it out again. That kind of attitude is one of the best safeguards against tyranny. Governments enforce stupid laws because it becomes easy to do so. If it's difficult to enforce laws they will concentrate on the ones that matter.
What about fuel cells for power? I vaguely remebe reading somewhere that they can theoretically make these small enough to fit into mobile phones and palmtops etc. Think of topping up your cellphone with a thimbleful of alcohol and running it for two months.
I know the so-called "terminator gene" gets very bad press, and rightly so for it's possible economic (mis)uses. What people don't seem to see though, is that it's potentially a very useful brake on other potentially harmful genetic modifications. If you design some hypothetical pest resistant rice say, and then you find that it kills all insects in an area (or has some other terrible environmental consequences) the potential for disaster might be mitigated, if you could guarantee that that strain would be gone in one generation. I don't think controlling the spread of seeds/pollen etc. by mechanical or chemical means is very reliable.
Do you believe that the fact that email is more informal means that they require more monitoring? If we applied that policy to phone calls, which are just as informal in nature, then companies should be monitoring every phone call an employee makes in case they, "say something inappropriate."
What if I use a web interface to something like hotmail to send personal email? Is the company still liable because I've accessed my webmail on a company workstation?
While it's true that the strength of Linux is that will always belong to everybody, it's also true that most people are only ever going to buy (or download for free) an off-the-shelf linux distribution from one of half a dozen commercial companies. This means potential fragmentation and several incompatible versions of linux, or possibly one or two "Linuxsoft" super-companies that get to decide the future direction of Linux in the same way that we hate M$ for doing with Windows.
I would argue that some kind of semi-official standards setting body would be a good thing, therefore, as it gives the Linux community a forum to discuss the standards it would like to see in Linux. Remember the GPL means that people will always be free to ignore the standard if they want to, and if enough people ignore it, it won't be standard anymore. This acts as a constraint on any standards body as well, they are accountable to the Linux community in this manner.
I've just started work in a new job where everybody works off laptops and most people don't seem to have a permanent desk... You can just turn up and plonk yourself at any table and plug into a power point and network connection. I guess it has its advantages, but I tend to move into a desk and personalise it, acquire some books to stack on it and spread bits of paper with scribbled notes around to show that it's mine. I feel a bit rootless.
If it's copyright on the actual content delivered that you are worried about, I think this is conceptually and morally similar to copywriting a work of art. Let's say that someone say to themselves, "I like the general layout and function of the Slashdot website, I bet I could put together a website from scratch that was pretty similar, but make a profit from it." Is this very different from someone saying, "I really like the music of Metallica, I bet I could put together a band playing the same sort of heavy metal, and get just as rich." We might slate the band for being derivative, and they might or might not get rich, but at what point is it reasonable for Metallica to sue them for being derivative? (I should point out here that this is a completely hypothetical analogy, I've never heard that Metallica have done anything remotely similar to this. No offense James, Lars, et al.) However might point is that if someone rips off the form of something but does all the engineering themselves, I don't think they can be accused of stealing something - all art is built on the work of earlier artists. Nobody creates in a vacuum. If someone were to get hold of the server-side scripts however, and modify them without releasing them, that would obviously be a different matter. I don't know how the GPL covers things like server-side scripting. Client-side scripting might be a bit of grey area. In summary I guess I'd like to say if someone rips off your ideas, they are paying you the ultimate compliment. If you didn't want people to use them, you shouldn't have put them out there in the first place.
If I can paraphrase you, you're saying that the tax you pay is already (at least in part) charitable in that subsidises social welfare etc. Another option is to find a charity that you think already does good work and make regualr donations - a sort of voluntary tax if you like, but you get to decide what proportion goes where. I make regular donations to Greenpeace, mainly because I suspect that people are going to run out of earth before the earth runs out of people.
Do products like Junkbuster and Guidescope actually attempt to load these URL's? It would intuitively seem easier to code them not even to try the URL if it is in the blockable list.
He probably won't be happy to hear that he has sent people the open source way, as one the axes that he likes to grind is that open source software is not the same as his beloved free software.
Speaking of useful links, this site is one of my favourites. It means I can cut and paste the header and body of a spam into a box and press a button. Hey presto, header automatically parsed, and an automatically generated complaint I can send to the abuse@ addresses of any dodgy-looking ISP's.
Let people put their name against it, and be immortal forever. BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!! Seriously, the real motivation for contributing to any open source project has always been to be able to say, "I did that and now everybody's using it."
You're absolutely right, documentation is always the first casualty of bug fixing. The trick is to make it easy to for programmers to keep documentation up to date. I would like to see something like the javadoc tool for Linux source, that would make it easy to keep a low level technical and system knowledge base up to date and which could be used as a reliable reference for people writing higher-level "new user" documentation.
Betamax actually came before VHS, and was technically superior. VHS became the standard due to marketing and oversupply, once all the videos on the shelves were in VHS there was no point in buying anything but a VHS recorder. I think this is a bad example to support your argument, as it is an example of marketing triumphing over usability.
Slashdot Mirror
No, not in terms of energy efficiency. If you have a displacement hull that is not travelling faster than it's hull speed (a theoretical maximum speed for a hull that is not planing, directly related to the waterline length) then the hull is effectively riding its own wave, and there is very little drag at all. If you carry a lot of wait through the air you have to use a lot of energy just to keep that weight up in the air. With a boat the displaced water supports that weight, and you only have to use energy to move that mass horizontally.
About 5 or 10 years ago in New Zealand they started operating some larger and faster cataraman ferrys between the north and south islands. The ferrys travel for most of their journey through an area called the Marlborough Sounds, which is mostly national park, and an area of great beauty, and value in terms of tourism and conservation. Recently there has been a lot of controversy over their operation as it was found that the wake from these boatswas doing real damage to shorelines in the sounds, i.e. basically destroying the habitat of all those small cratures that live right on the edge of the water. I'm not sure how exactly long these boats are, but on the order of about 100 metres I would guess. So large fast boats can have serious environmental consequences, especially in coastal waters.
Obviously this would be an extra burden on the ISP's but studies have shown that people will generally be prepared to pay slightly more for a service on a fixed rate, than on a metered one. So although I can see that it would be a huge pain to administer, if it was working correctly you should be able to make a profit out of the system at the end.
The problem, as far as I can see, is how do ISP's compete under this system? Either all ISP's have access to <u>all</u> content and compete on the basis of price and economies of scale (you ould probably eventually only have one or two huge ISP's) OR you have content 'holes' depending on what ISP you subscribed to. Under the current system this would probably mean DNS black holes, and I think it would be a serious downside to have a system that would encourage these to proliferate.
Your missing the point, the charge is made for your dialup access, or ADSL connection or whatever, not for actual page accesses. If a search engine hits the page the only potential beneficiary is the copyright holder, and they are paid indirectly (by the ISP.) Search engines may distort 'chargeable' page hit counts to some degree, but I would think that in terms of number of hits for any given page, search engines would be a very small percentage, and the effects would be negligible. but would still be something to be worked out between copyright holders and ISP's anyway.
I just visited Ireland for Christmas (my sister-in-law is Irish) and they seem to get a lot of things right. Over the past few years they have been steadily removing certain taxes, and reducing others (Ireland used to have a large black market economy, but people are declaring more and more as the taxes get less onerous.) They also have a history of rebellion against all forms of authority, mostly due to having been ruled for some periods in their history by their neighbours the English.
A story related to me when I was there was of a barrier placed across a street to stop commuter traffic using it as shortcut. (Ireland's economy has been booming over the past 10 - 15 years, largely because of a strong IT industry, and population growth plus lots of new cars has put a strain on their roads.) Each time it was put up someone would go down with their jeep and pull it out again. That kind of attitude is one of the best safeguards against tyranny. Governments enforce stupid laws because it becomes easy to do so. If it's difficult to enforce laws they will concentrate on the ones that matter.
What about fuel cells for power? I vaguely remebe reading somewhere that they can theoretically make these small enough to fit into mobile phones and palmtops etc. Think of topping up your cellphone with a thimbleful of alcohol and running it for two months.
I know the so-called "terminator gene" gets very bad press, and rightly so for it's possible economic (mis)uses. What people don't seem to see though, is that it's potentially a very useful brake on other potentially harmful genetic modifications. If you design some hypothetical pest resistant rice say, and then you find that it kills all insects in an area (or has some other terrible environmental consequences) the potential for disaster might be mitigated, if you could guarantee that that strain would be gone in one generation. I don't think controlling the spread of seeds/pollen etc. by mechanical or chemical means is very reliable.
How about .hack?
:-)
Do you believe that the fact that email is more informal means that they require more monitoring? If we applied that policy to phone calls, which are just as informal in nature, then companies should be monitoring every phone call an employee makes in case they, "say something inappropriate."
What if I use a web interface to something like hotmail to send personal email? Is the company still liable because I've accessed my webmail on a company workstation?
While it's true that the strength of Linux is that will always belong to everybody, it's also true that most people are only ever going to buy (or download for free) an off-the-shelf linux distribution from one of half a dozen commercial companies. This means potential fragmentation and several incompatible versions of linux, or possibly one or two "Linuxsoft" super-companies that get to decide the future direction of Linux in the same way that we hate M$ for doing with Windows.
I would argue that some kind of semi-official standards setting body would be a good thing, therefore, as it gives the Linux community a forum to discuss the standards it would like to see in Linux. Remember the GPL means that people will always be free to ignore the standard if they want to, and if enough people ignore it, it won't be standard anymore. This acts as a constraint on any standards body as well, they are accountable to the Linux community in this manner.
I've just started work in a new job where everybody works off laptops and most people don't seem to have a permanent desk... You can just turn up and plonk yourself at any table and plug into a power point and network connection. I guess it has its advantages, but I tend to move into a desk and personalise it, acquire some books to stack on it and spread bits of paper with scribbled notes around to show that it's mine. I feel a bit rootless.
If it's copyright on the actual content delivered that you are worried about, I think this is conceptually and morally similar to copywriting a work of art. Let's say that someone say to themselves, "I like the general layout and function of the Slashdot website, I bet I could put together a website from scratch that was pretty similar, but make a profit from it." Is this very different from someone saying, "I really like the music of Metallica, I bet I could put together a band playing the same sort of heavy metal, and get just as rich."
We might slate the band for being derivative, and they might or might not get rich, but at what point is it reasonable for Metallica to sue them for being derivative? (I should point out here that this is a completely hypothetical analogy, I've never heard that Metallica have done anything remotely similar to this. No offense James, Lars, et al.)
However might point is that if someone rips off the form of something but does all the engineering themselves, I don't think they can be accused of stealing something - all art is built on the work of earlier artists. Nobody creates in a vacuum.
If someone were to get hold of the server-side scripts however, and modify them without releasing them, that would obviously be a different matter. I don't know how the GPL covers things like server-side scripting. Client-side scripting might be a bit of grey area.
In summary I guess I'd like to say if someone rips off your ideas, they are paying you the ultimate compliment. If you didn't want people to use them, you shouldn't have put them out there in the first place.
If I can paraphrase you, you're saying that the tax you pay is already (at least in part) charitable in that subsidises social welfare etc.
Another option is to find a charity that you think already does good work and make regualr donations - a sort of voluntary tax if you like, but you get to decide what proportion goes where.
I make regular donations to Greenpeace, mainly because I suspect that people are going to run out of earth before the earth runs out of people.
Do products like Junkbuster and Guidescope actually attempt to load these URL's? It would intuitively seem easier to code them not even to try the URL if it is in the blockable list.
correct, search for "Junkbuster junkbstr.exe"
I'm sure backline must have a well-considered argument to back up his/her proposition. I'd love to hear it.
It would ensure that people charged a reasonable price for their software though, just to make it easier to buy it than to pirate it.
He probably won't be happy to hear that he has sent people the open source way, as one the axes that he likes to grind is that open source software is not the same as his beloved free software.
Speaking of useful links, this site is one of my favourites. It means I can cut and paste the header and body of a spam into a box and press a button. Hey presto, header automatically parsed, and an automatically generated complaint I can send to the abuse@ addresses of any dodgy-looking ISP's.
Let people put their name against it, and be immortal forever.
BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!!
Seriously, the real motivation for contributing to any open source project has always been to be able to say, "I did that and now everybody's using it."
You're absolutely right, documentation is always the first casualty of bug fixing. The trick is to make it easy to for programmers to keep documentation up to date.
I would like to see something like the javadoc tool for Linux source, that would make it easy to keep a low level technical and system knowledge base up to date and which could be used as a reliable reference for people writing higher-level "new user" documentation.
It's worth having a look at what your java code is doing - and select your implementation of it with care. http://ww w.volano.com/report.html</A> will give you a good comparison of a few of the brands out there. I was working on a project using a java front end to an informix db at my last job, and one problem that I vaguely recollect was something like all reads on hashtables being synchronous, i.e. only one thread could read from it at a time. Those sorts of things can produce severe bottlenecks. I think IBM provide some fairly good runtime analysis tools with their jikes compiler for free, have a look around their <A href="http://www10.software.ibm.com/developer/open source/jikes/project/index.html">site</A >.
Wouldn't that be the 9 in-continents?
Betamax actually came before VHS, and was technically superior. VHS became the standard due to marketing and oversupply, once all the videos on the shelves were in VHS there was no point in buying anything but a VHS recorder. I think this is a bad example to support your argument, as it is an example of marketing triumphing over usability.