Yep, as I said its still possible that something will come out of it. Just highly unlikely.
Of course as others have mentioned, the spinoffs are often incentive enough to consider the ridiculous scientific experiments. Countless things have been derived from and developed based on technology invented for the space and nuclear programs back around the middle of last century even though none of us are running around with personal reactors or living on the moon.
Similarly, development of the LHC produced a lot of research into high capacity computing and data distribution. That's certainly a potential benefit to the future given that data consumption doesn't seem to be slowing down any time soon. I'm sure development of the JWST, not to mention many of the other space projects both NASA and commercial, have continual development in things like material sciences.
But the actual goal of both projects.. That part is much harder to fathom being useful in any sort of near future. Exoplanets (short of actually finding alien life) are interesting but ultimately meaningless to us. Yay we might come up with some ideas about what happened here on Earth 4 billion years ago. Not especially relevant to anything that exists on the planet today beyond pure curiosity.
LHC results turning into practical applications are a little more plausible, but require development of technology that can provide us with Higgs-scale energies at a small fraction of the cost and size requirements of the LHC itself. Certainly closer than a million year journey through the stars, but probably not something we'll see in our lifetimes and probably not for a couple hundred years at best (barring a massive fluke discovery that can jump our energy production a few orders of magnitude in a short time frame.)
you can predict the utility of as-yet-undiscovered science.
To an extent, you can. I mean there's always the risk that your prediction is wrong (and you'd never even know it,) but you can make some probabilistic arguments given the enormous energy and cost the LHC requires. I mean confirming the Higgs does exactly what? Makes Peter Higgs the happiest dude on the planet for sure, and makes a lot of scientists everywhere pretty pleased that their work seems to not be complete bunk..
But in terms of real-world applicability? We're going to need a heck of a lot better batteries before 125 GeV systems are common place even in large installations such as military projects. So even if we could find a use for a Higgs, a "practical" use is a hell of a long way off.
Similar for space research. What good does it do us to find a potentially habitable planet 100,000 light years away? Unless FTL travel is discovered and becomes practical itself, putting people on a ship and firing them off on a journey of probably more like a million years or more (since we don't exactly move at light speed) will arrive with a population wholly unsuited to living on Earth never mind something "Earth-like" since a million years is plenty of time for evolution to make us into something completely different (and we'd have evolved towards living on a space ship rather than living on a planet.)
Now I'm a big fan of science. I can't wait to see what happens when the LHC ramps up to full and the James Webb telescope starts returning images and the such, but I am under little delusion that we'll find anything practical from either endeavor -- the cost, energy and (in terms of space) time scales are just way too far beyond daily life at this point. That's not to say its impossible (maybe the LHC will produce a controllable mini black hole!) But its highly highly unlikely.
So if you can build the world with just two particles
If you look at string theory, there is only one "particle" -- the string. Maybe 2 if you consider open and closed strings as separate types of particle, but they're not any sort of equivalent to a positive and negative pair like you've suggested.
why are there 61?...62?... 63.... 64...
Because there are. There were hundreds before the quark model came into play which re-defined all of those mesons and bosons into just three quarks (later expanded to the six we know today.) And before that all the billions upon billions of things we see in the natural world got re-defined as combinations of around 100 elements and so on.
There's a very good chance that once we find a solid direction out of the standard model, whether string theory or otherwise, we'll see a similar re-definition of the current particle zoo as combinations of a smaller set of even more fundamental building blocks.
Or of course, there could just be 62 "things" out there. As Niels deGrasse Tyson said in some interview I can't otherwise remember.. "the universe is under no obligation to make sense to you."
dare I speak this heresy?
I don't know, is that what comes out of your ass?;)
It's just a broken model.
This is well known. In particular, it breaks down when you add gravitational singularities, and that's a much much bigger problem than either the number of particles or other "ugly" things like fine-tuning, which can all be wrapped up under the anthropologic principle (ie: that is, there's no fundamental reason for it, we just see things as they are because if they were different, we wouldn't be here to see them.)
I mean most scientists don't like the anthropologic principle because it amounts to "nothing more to do," but its a viable option in many cases if we truly decide that we can't possibly delve any further in some direction or other.
Gravity's incompatibilty on the other hand cannot fall into this category because its not just an observable (like the fine structure constant for example,) but an entire theory in its own right (General Relativity,) which has stood the test of time almost as well as the standard model, so the chances that its "wrong" are extremely slim -- but because of the incompatibility between QM and GR, they both absolutely must be the limit of some even more fundamental theory that ties the two together.
Quantum mechanically speaking, any interaction is an "observation." To be more precise, any interaction forms an entanglement, some of which we can detect with careful enough machinery.
"Observer" is a terrible choice of phrasing that's unfortunately too far stuck to be changed at this point, but it doesn't necessarily mean an actual sentient being (human or otherwise.) And really, that should be fairly obvious since almost all of our "observations" are done by computers and other machinery and just plastered on a screen whether we're watching the screen at the time or not. Its not like there is, has ever been, or likely will ever be, anyone on the planet that can directly observe say a beta decay with their own senses in any meaningful way.
If you'd rather suffer lack of security updates because you can't cope with any non-Windows GUI then - aside from being a pretty lame attempt at an excuse - you're only stuck because you choose to be.
Yes. New interfaces can be learned. Its just a pain in the ass and requires a hell of a lot of time, patience and retraining. I've run on Linux before. It was alright, but I do too much non-Linux stuff to make it worth the effort. MacOS kills me though.
They're typically not a pain in the ass... So what specifically do you find so difficult about VMs?
Having to start them up every time you want to do something is a pain in the ass. Think "annoying" more than "difficult." Well, unless you need to do something non-standard and then they can be difficult depending on what you need to do.
If you really need those games then dual boot into Windows 10 just for games and nothing else.
Again, a right pain in the ass. And assumes you know how to setup a dual boot system (I personally do, but there's a vast majority of the population who wouldn't even know what the term means never mind how to make it happen.)
What specific problem are you talking about that has been "pushed"?
The fact that you're running Windows. Windows is still Windows, even in a VM, and has all of the same issues that Windows on hardware has.
I specifically said a "sanitized VM" give it only access to things it absolutely needs and only do the things you absolutely need Windows for, that eliminates almost all of the issues.
Except all of the other issues I've mentioned about this being annoying as fuck to deal with and not exactly easy for a layperson to setup in the first place.
all just completely hopeless and everybody should just do what Microsoft says
No.. I'm just saying that there are costs to the alternatives as well. Its not just "MS evil everyone else good!" Apple in particular I don't trust any more than I trust Microsoft -- even ignoring the other issues like their horrid UI. Hell even with Linux you have to know and trust your distro a good amount before you can claim with any conviction that they aren't also doing similar things.
I'm providing solutions, you're making excuses
You've only provided one solution -- "just use something else" without any regard to the potential downsides of switching. I have no problem with people switching away from Windows (well, to Linux at least) but I do have a problem if they decide to switch without considering both the positive AND negative consequences.
my advice is predicated on a willingness to go to even the slightest effort to mitigate some of the bad things in Windows.
No, your advice is predicated on a blind hatred for MS without regard to the fact that the alternatives also have negatives and almost all companies are going to screw you if you let them, not just MS.
Obviously somebody does, or that site wouldn't exist at all and we wouldn't be reading this article.
That said, the issue is far bigger than just the one site that happened to have a news story written about them. Google's quick boxes pull data from lots of sites and any of them that are relying on traffic from Google to survive will be having the same problem.
This is the sticky part. Google can't show it to you quicker or easier, except by pulling it from this guy's site. If that guy's site didn't exist (and presuming no equivalents are out there that Google could scrape instead,) then that information would be neither quick nor easy to obtain.
The whole "can't copyright facts" thing makes for a bit of a problem area for anyone who's trying to gather and curate facts -- their job is not zero worth and yet they can't claim any ownership over their work.
Not that I want to see copyright expanded (there's already far too much of that as it stands) but I definitely can see why people who do this kind of curation work would feel like they're getting the shaft.
Its not entirely hypocritical though, depending on how you want to phrase it. If you're looking at something like "copyright shouldn't be a thing" then sure, this seems a bit of a mixed bag.
But the more proper interpretation to pull would be "big guys shouldn't be allowed to shit all over little guys."
Napster doesn't really fall into that category. While some people disagree that copyright infringement should be illegal, few disagree that it is. And Napster was big enough to be not really be a "little guy" even though they were tiny compared to the RIAA.
I mean of course people were annoyed when Napster got shut down because free music is free and their service was far far better than any legal alternatives prior to iTunes, but its a rare person who would claim Napster wasn't in the wrong under the law, even if they don't agree with the law itself.
I think in this type of case, there's a bigger problem: If you go after Google for a TOS violation, their answer will be "fine, we won't use [ie: index] your site anymore at all."
That's probably a bigger hit to most websites than leaving things as they are and having Google scrape your data.
I'm not sure there's an easy way out of this for small companies like this one, particularly if (as other posters have noted) the information is primarily factual and thus not copyrightable. Leaving it alone doesn't fix anything and going after Google just gets you delisted entirely.
About all they could do is raise a stink and hope that enough public outcry will convince Google to try and improve the situation out of the goodness of their hearts. Maybe count each display of the scraped info as a click towards the site's ads or something. And I mean you never know, Google still hasn't fallen entirely to the dark side yet.. its possible that they might decide to be nice even if they aren't strictly required to do so.
Linux and Mac are only viable if: - You can stand their interfaces. Linux is configurable enough that its probably OK but macOS is a bloody nightmare to use when you're used to Windows.
- You can configure it. Applies mostly to Linux in order to deal with #1 since Apple's UI design motto is basically "do it our way or fuck you." This is not really an easy chore and requires some fairly strong computer skills if you want anything beyond the defaults.
- You don't require any software that runs only on Windows. Yeah VMs work but they start getting into the previous point of requiring computer skills. Plus they're typically a pain in the ass and always at least a little bit slower compared to running applications natively. Never mind if you're into games that don't have Mac ports (and Linux gaming is still barely worth talking about..)
- And even if you set up the VM, all you've done is push the problem from the hardware to the virtual hardware -- you're still running Windows on that VM and unless you're running a clean image every time you start the VM, you've got all of the same problems (and of course doing the clean image plan has its own massive problems in terms of convenience.)
- And then forgetting all of that, you have to rely on your replacement OS to not be just as bad. Looking at macOS in particular for this point. Apple may be crusading to avoid having to give your data to the government, but they sure as hell aren't taking the "just don't collect it in the first place" route.
This works a lot better in an open source world where there's a small core team (maybe even one person) that does all the final review and integration, plus typically a (public) alpha/beta/RC phase and the ability to say "sorry it was an alpha.. we'll try to fix it but the data loss is your problem" if it screws up. And if you're not happy with the latest RC you push it off by a week or two.
In a business environment, the first is sometimes true. If you're lucky. Frequently though the integration is "we need a new version out by Thursday no matter what! Oh and we need this list of 47 breaking bugs fixed before release!" Not enough time to do those fixes never mind test them? Tough. And of course such dictates are handed down by management and are to be taken as if they were God's commandments.
Sure, you can find places where they're willing to put off releases in order to add some polish, but in many if not most cases the business decisions outweigh the technical decisions. If you have a major customer expecting a release on Friday then there damned well better be one ready to go by EOD Thursday come hell or high water. The consequences of it fucking up in a couple months are less important than the consequences of pissing them off this week.
No, but as the GP mathed out, its pretty meaningless in relative to an entire country. And spread over 4 years no less. The proper comparison is whether or not 0.00018 cents is meaningless to me (it is.)
I think savings is important wherever you can find it.
Agreed.
they can ignore wasteful spending on a small scale.
So having government transparency is wasteful to you? Sure this is a small drop in the transparency bucket but its still something they let us know before that they no longer will be. And just like every thousandth of a penny counts (apparently,) so does every bit of truth we can wring out of the government -- especially under Trump who seems to like lying to the people even when he's got absolutely no reason to do so.
I hear nothing but negative talk about pretty much any decision the guy makes in office
Because he makes basically nothing but bad decisions. Even his best decisions are questionable depending on your brand of ethics.
I see no value in making visitor logs immediately available for anybody who decided to visit the White House
Good for you. That doesn't mean nobody else sees value in it. And of course while I personally give few to no craps about who visited the White House, we get back to the issue of transparency -- its just one more thing they're hiding from the people.
There's also the fact that they're talking about teenagers. If you haven't quelled this problem long before 13 then either you've messed up as a parent and you probably need outside help, or your kid has an actual mental issue and you probably need outside help. Either way, its not likely something you'll be able to handle on your own, much as that's sometimes hard to admit to yourself.
This isn't a 6 year old throwing a tantrum once in a while. This is a young adult showing the same addictive behaviors as an alcoholic or drug abuser -- or for a more obviously similar problem, a gambling addict.
There's a pretty big difference: In your world, the company simply can't ask period. In the real world, they can ask but the employee is free to say no.
The two are only equivalent if all employees say no all the time, or if the employer would be otherwise unable to restrain themselves from disciplining people for asserting their rights.
"Secret" in terms of product features usually just implies "not explicitly announced." Its a totally different usage of the word than you would use it when discussing encryption or state secrets or something like that.
Perhaps a bit of an abuse of language, but its hardly a new one nor would most people confuse the two usages to any great degree unless they were intentionally trying to take it out of context in order to make some logical fallacy of an argument (remember: copyright infringement is only piracy if you wear an eye patch while downloading! Right!? That'll hold up in court!)
Pfft. Removing features and making things harder to use has been the definition of "new and improved" in computers basically since the internet got popular and "lowest common denominator" became the target demographic of choice for basically all programs and websites. Can't really blame Kodi for following the trend (though of course it would have been nice if they'd bucked it instead..)
My guess is more along the lines of "our lawyers received a scary letter from the MPAA saying they will sue us for $gazillions and tie us up in court for so long that we'll be broke even if we win."
"Sort of".. Starting with pocket edition, it was clear that they considered that statement to only apply to the core Minecraft product. With the Win10 version being built off of the Xbox version rather than the original Java version, its likely that it also would fall under the category of "not really the same product so that statement doesn't apply."
Also, from TFS it sounds like this would be more of a place to download pre-built adventure maps and the like. So even if they add it to the core Java version rather than just the Win10/PE versions, as long as the vanilla version is still a free upgrade, it hasn't really broken Notch's promise any more than not having a free Realms server breaks it -- its an outside service that just happens to have an in-game UI to use it.
What this will mean for mods and the such is a bit up for grabs, as other posters have brought up already since mods would effectively be in direct competition with these new (not-free) downloads. They could just leave it be in the same way that they didn't try to snuff out private servers when Realms was introduced.. or they could go total war on modders.. or anywhere in between really we'll just have to wait and see what tack they take on that question.
Wireless beats wired in one significant area: Cost. Not having to obtain right-of-ways (which is not always easy nor cheap) and not having to lay, monitor and maintain hundreds or thousands of miles of cable is an enormous savings. Throw in portability advantage and wireless is a pretty easy sell over wired.
Sure if you're extremely security conscious, you probably don't want wireless (but then you probably don't want to be using a public ISP at all..) For the rest of us, as long as the data isn't being transmitted raw we're probably safe enough (the ISP and the government can just pull the data from their end anyway.. they don't need to hack the airwaves.)
As for the bandwidth.. yes its a finite resource, but we're nowhere near exhausting it yet. There's lots of bandwidth out there that's assigned to stupid things from decades ago that could easily be repurposed if the owners relinquished their claims (whether voluntarily or by the government simply confiscating it.) We've seen a few blocks go up on auction in the past several years and there's plenty more out there waiting to be used when the demand starts justifying the cost of going through the repurposing procedures.
And of course bandwidth is also a shared resource from a geographic perspective. That is, you only need enough to satisfy the most densely populated area.
Yep. Governments trying to run companies are usually pretty bad at it.
The problem in this case, and why municipal broadband seems like such a great idea is because monopolies are even worse at it.
Where governments are usually mismanaged due to incompetence, monopolies have a habit of being actively malicious in order to squeeze every last cent out of their customers while providing as little service above "slightly better than not having it at all" as they can get away with.
The free market only works when there's competition. Any market controlled by a monopoly or even a small enough oligopoly can never really be free in the economic sense.
Company: "We don't want to have to compete" Politician: "But that's your job" Company: "Here's $100k for your 'campaign' if you make it go away" Politician: "Sold"
Now in many cases its not really that nefarious. Quite often the local government promised one company or another a local monopoly because it was the only way to get internet access at all -- this was way back in the days when the internet was fresh and new and nobody would have really thought to just build their own, either due to lack of expertise, lack of interest or lack of available funds. Or all three.
As those contracts expire, we'll probably see more push for municipal broadband. Of course a lot of those local governments will also just renew their contracts because keeping the status quo is easier than actually doing something (especially when there's that green grease on the palms.)
Innovation is also slowing as established corporations play the regulation games.
Yes, the damned government trying to prevent another Thalidomide disaster. It should be up to each customer to do all of the research and clinical trials needed to prove a drug safe for themselves! I mean that's a thing any random dummy on the street should be able to to do right? The US only avoided the Thalidomide disaster because the government saw what was happening in other countries and told the corporations "hell no!"
The US actually has an excellent health care system, it just happens to be one that many can't afford
You should have ended the sentence there. Somebody has to pay for the clinical trials and other hoops that new drugs have to go through, and if its not the manufacturer then its you. And not always with money. How many people "paid" for Thalidomide with their childrens' life?
then it will have a healthcare system that serves all, poorly
I personally prefer a healthcare system that can help 90% of everyone's problems than one that can help 99% of the 1% and just lets everyone else suffer and die. Especially since I'm nowhere close to the 1%.
It takes a special kind of person to think that stuff posted on Facebook isn't visible to Facebook. I mean I know there's lots of dumb people out there (and they all voted apparently, just to throw in an offtopic Trump dig) but I'm not sure I believe enough people to be so dumb that a wide consensus would assume that Facebook is somehow magical and doesn't store the data on its site.
And its not exactly a great step up from that to have read the news basically any time in the past half decade and known that pretty much everything you post anywhere is being read and used for advertisements (and government databases, but those they try to hide as best they can..)
Companies: "Lets screw the people for profit!" People: "That sounds bad" Old FCC: "Companies, you aren't allowed to do that!" Companies: "But we waaaaannnttt to" Old FCC: "Tough" New FCC: "Psych! You're allowed to do it after all, but can you please pinky swear that you won't? There's no way you'd ever go back on a pinky swear right?" People: "MAGA!MAGA!MAGA!"
Slashdot Mirror
Yep, as I said its still possible that something will come out of it. Just highly unlikely.
Of course as others have mentioned, the spinoffs are often incentive enough to consider the ridiculous scientific experiments. Countless things have been derived from and developed based on technology invented for the space and nuclear programs back around the middle of last century even though none of us are running around with personal reactors or living on the moon.
Similarly, development of the LHC produced a lot of research into high capacity computing and data distribution. That's certainly a potential benefit to the future given that data consumption doesn't seem to be slowing down any time soon. I'm sure development of the JWST, not to mention many of the other space projects both NASA and commercial, have continual development in things like material sciences.
But the actual goal of both projects.. That part is much harder to fathom being useful in any sort of near future. Exoplanets (short of actually finding alien life) are interesting but ultimately meaningless to us. Yay we might come up with some ideas about what happened here on Earth 4 billion years ago. Not especially relevant to anything that exists on the planet today beyond pure curiosity.
LHC results turning into practical applications are a little more plausible, but require development of technology that can provide us with Higgs-scale energies at a small fraction of the cost and size requirements of the LHC itself. Certainly closer than a million year journey through the stars, but probably not something we'll see in our lifetimes and probably not for a couple hundred years at best (barring a massive fluke discovery that can jump our energy production a few orders of magnitude in a short time frame.)
you can predict the utility of as-yet-undiscovered science.
To an extent, you can. I mean there's always the risk that your prediction is wrong (and you'd never even know it,) but you can make some probabilistic arguments given the enormous energy and cost the LHC requires. I mean confirming the Higgs does exactly what? Makes Peter Higgs the happiest dude on the planet for sure, and makes a lot of scientists everywhere pretty pleased that their work seems to not be complete bunk..
But in terms of real-world applicability? We're going to need a heck of a lot better batteries before 125 GeV systems are common place even in large installations such as military projects. So even if we could find a use for a Higgs, a "practical" use is a hell of a long way off.
Similar for space research. What good does it do us to find a potentially habitable planet 100,000 light years away? Unless FTL travel is discovered and becomes practical itself, putting people on a ship and firing them off on a journey of probably more like a million years or more (since we don't exactly move at light speed) will arrive with a population wholly unsuited to living on Earth never mind something "Earth-like" since a million years is plenty of time for evolution to make us into something completely different (and we'd have evolved towards living on a space ship rather than living on a planet.)
Now I'm a big fan of science. I can't wait to see what happens when the LHC ramps up to full and the James Webb telescope starts returning images and the such, but I am under little delusion that we'll find anything practical from either endeavor -- the cost, energy and (in terms of space) time scales are just way too far beyond daily life at this point. That's not to say its impossible (maybe the LHC will produce a controllable mini black hole!) But its highly highly unlikely.
So if you can build the world with just two particles
If you look at string theory, there is only one "particle" -- the string. Maybe 2 if you consider open and closed strings as separate types of particle, but they're not any sort of equivalent to a positive and negative pair like you've suggested.
why are there 61?...62?... 63.... 64...
Because there are. There were hundreds before the quark model came into play which re-defined all of those mesons and bosons into just three quarks (later expanded to the six we know today.) And before that all the billions upon billions of things we see in the natural world got re-defined as combinations of around 100 elements and so on.
There's a very good chance that once we find a solid direction out of the standard model, whether string theory or otherwise, we'll see a similar re-definition of the current particle zoo as combinations of a smaller set of even more fundamental building blocks.
Or of course, there could just be 62 "things" out there. As Niels deGrasse Tyson said in some interview I can't otherwise remember.. "the universe is under no obligation to make sense to you."
dare I speak this heresy?
I don't know, is that what comes out of your ass? ;)
It's just a broken model.
This is well known. In particular, it breaks down when you add gravitational singularities, and that's a much much bigger problem than either the number of particles or other "ugly" things like fine-tuning, which can all be wrapped up under the anthropologic principle (ie: that is, there's no fundamental reason for it, we just see things as they are because if they were different, we wouldn't be here to see them.)
I mean most scientists don't like the anthropologic principle because it amounts to "nothing more to do," but its a viable option in many cases if we truly decide that we can't possibly delve any further in some direction or other.
Gravity's incompatibilty on the other hand cannot fall into this category because its not just an observable (like the fine structure constant for example,) but an entire theory in its own right (General Relativity,) which has stood the test of time almost as well as the standard model, so the chances that its "wrong" are extremely slim -- but because of the incompatibility between QM and GR, they both absolutely must be the limit of some even more fundamental theory that ties the two together.
Quantum mechanically speaking, any interaction is an "observation." To be more precise, any interaction forms an entanglement, some of which we can detect with careful enough machinery.
"Observer" is a terrible choice of phrasing that's unfortunately too far stuck to be changed at this point, but it doesn't necessarily mean an actual sentient being (human or otherwise.) And really, that should be fairly obvious since almost all of our "observations" are done by computers and other machinery and just plastered on a screen whether we're watching the screen at the time or not. Its not like there is, has ever been, or likely will ever be, anyone on the planet that can directly observe say a beta decay with their own senses in any meaningful way.
If you'd rather suffer lack of security updates because you can't cope with any non-Windows GUI then - aside from being a pretty lame attempt at an excuse - you're only stuck because you choose to be.
Yes. New interfaces can be learned. Its just a pain in the ass and requires a hell of a lot of time, patience and retraining. I've run on Linux before. It was alright, but I do too much non-Linux stuff to make it worth the effort. MacOS kills me though.
They're typically not a pain in the ass ... So what specifically do you find so difficult about VMs?
Having to start them up every time you want to do something is a pain in the ass. Think "annoying" more than "difficult." Well, unless you need to do something non-standard and then they can be difficult depending on what you need to do.
If you really need those games then dual boot into Windows 10 just for games and nothing else.
Again, a right pain in the ass. And assumes you know how to setup a dual boot system (I personally do, but there's a vast majority of the population who wouldn't even know what the term means never mind how to make it happen.)
What specific problem are you talking about that has been "pushed"?
The fact that you're running Windows. Windows is still Windows, even in a VM, and has all of the same issues that Windows on hardware has.
I specifically said a "sanitized VM" give it only access to things it absolutely needs and only do the things you absolutely need Windows for, that eliminates almost all of the issues.
Except all of the other issues I've mentioned about this being annoying as fuck to deal with and not exactly easy for a layperson to setup in the first place.
all just completely hopeless and everybody should just do what Microsoft says
No.. I'm just saying that there are costs to the alternatives as well. Its not just "MS evil everyone else good!" Apple in particular I don't trust any more than I trust Microsoft -- even ignoring the other issues like their horrid UI. Hell even with Linux you have to know and trust your distro a good amount before you can claim with any conviction that they aren't also doing similar things.
I'm providing solutions, you're making excuses
You've only provided one solution -- "just use something else" without any regard to the potential downsides of switching. I have no problem with people switching away from Windows (well, to Linux at least) but I do have a problem if they decide to switch without considering both the positive AND negative consequences.
my advice is predicated on a willingness to go to even the slightest effort to mitigate some of the bad things in Windows.
No, your advice is predicated on a blind hatred for MS without regard to the fact that the alternatives also have negatives and almost all companies are going to screw you if you let them, not just MS.
Obviously somebody does, or that site wouldn't exist at all and we wouldn't be reading this article.
That said, the issue is far bigger than just the one site that happened to have a news story written about them. Google's quick boxes pull data from lots of sites and any of them that are relying on traffic from Google to survive will be having the same problem.
Google can show you quicker and easier
This is the sticky part. Google can't show it to you quicker or easier, except by pulling it from this guy's site. If that guy's site didn't exist (and presuming no equivalents are out there that Google could scrape instead,) then that information would be neither quick nor easy to obtain.
The whole "can't copyright facts" thing makes for a bit of a problem area for anyone who's trying to gather and curate facts -- their job is not zero worth and yet they can't claim any ownership over their work.
Not that I want to see copyright expanded (there's already far too much of that as it stands) but I definitely can see why people who do this kind of curation work would feel like they're getting the shaft.
Evil, n: Things we choose not to do.
Its not entirely hypocritical though, depending on how you want to phrase it. If you're looking at something like "copyright shouldn't be a thing" then sure, this seems a bit of a mixed bag.
But the more proper interpretation to pull would be "big guys shouldn't be allowed to shit all over little guys."
Napster doesn't really fall into that category. While some people disagree that copyright infringement should be illegal, few disagree that it is. And Napster was big enough to be not really be a "little guy" even though they were tiny compared to the RIAA.
I mean of course people were annoyed when Napster got shut down because free music is free and their service was far far better than any legal alternatives prior to iTunes, but its a rare person who would claim Napster wasn't in the wrong under the law, even if they don't agree with the law itself.
I think in this type of case, there's a bigger problem: If you go after Google for a TOS violation, their answer will be "fine, we won't use [ie: index] your site anymore at all."
That's probably a bigger hit to most websites than leaving things as they are and having Google scrape your data.
I'm not sure there's an easy way out of this for small companies like this one, particularly if (as other posters have noted) the information is primarily factual and thus not copyrightable. Leaving it alone doesn't fix anything and going after Google just gets you delisted entirely.
About all they could do is raise a stink and hope that enough public outcry will convince Google to try and improve the situation out of the goodness of their hearts. Maybe count each display of the scraped info as a click towards the site's ads or something. And I mean you never know, Google still hasn't fallen entirely to the dark side yet.. its possible that they might decide to be nice even if they aren't strictly required to do so.
Linux and Mac are only viable if:
- You can stand their interfaces. Linux is configurable enough that its probably OK but macOS is a bloody nightmare to use when you're used to Windows.
- You can configure it. Applies mostly to Linux in order to deal with #1 since Apple's UI design motto is basically "do it our way or fuck you." This is not really an easy chore and requires some fairly strong computer skills if you want anything beyond the defaults.
- You don't require any software that runs only on Windows. Yeah VMs work but they start getting into the previous point of requiring computer skills. Plus they're typically a pain in the ass and always at least a little bit slower compared to running applications natively. Never mind if you're into games that don't have Mac ports (and Linux gaming is still barely worth talking about..)
- And even if you set up the VM, all you've done is push the problem from the hardware to the virtual hardware -- you're still running Windows on that VM and unless you're running a clean image every time you start the VM, you've got all of the same problems (and of course doing the clean image plan has its own massive problems in terms of convenience.)
- And then forgetting all of that, you have to rely on your replacement OS to not be just as bad. Looking at macOS in particular for this point. Apple may be crusading to avoid having to give your data to the government, but they sure as hell aren't taking the "just don't collect it in the first place" route.
This works a lot better in an open source world where there's a small core team (maybe even one person) that does all the final review and integration, plus typically a (public) alpha/beta/RC phase and the ability to say "sorry it was an alpha.. we'll try to fix it but the data loss is your problem" if it screws up. And if you're not happy with the latest RC you push it off by a week or two.
In a business environment, the first is sometimes true. If you're lucky. Frequently though the integration is "we need a new version out by Thursday no matter what! Oh and we need this list of 47 breaking bugs fixed before release!" Not enough time to do those fixes never mind test them? Tough. And of course such dictates are handed down by management and are to be taken as if they were God's commandments.
Sure, you can find places where they're willing to put off releases in order to add some polish, but in many if not most cases the business decisions outweigh the technical decisions. If you have a major customer expecting a release on Friday then there damned well better be one ready to go by EOD Thursday come hell or high water. The consequences of it fucking up in a couple months are less important than the consequences of pissing them off this week.
Oh, so $70,000 is meaningless to you?
No, but as the GP mathed out, its pretty meaningless in relative to an entire country. And spread over 4 years no less. The proper comparison is whether or not 0.00018 cents is meaningless to me (it is.)
I think savings is important wherever you can find it.
Agreed.
they can ignore wasteful spending on a small scale.
So having government transparency is wasteful to you? Sure this is a small drop in the transparency bucket but its still something they let us know before that they no longer will be. And just like every thousandth of a penny counts (apparently,) so does every bit of truth we can wring out of the government -- especially under Trump who seems to like lying to the people even when he's got absolutely no reason to do so.
I hear nothing but negative talk about pretty much any decision the guy makes in office
Because he makes basically nothing but bad decisions. Even his best decisions are questionable depending on your brand of ethics.
I see no value in making visitor logs immediately available for anybody who decided to visit the White House
Good for you. That doesn't mean nobody else sees value in it. And of course while I personally give few to no craps about who visited the White House, we get back to the issue of transparency -- its just one more thing they're hiding from the people.
There's also the fact that they're talking about teenagers. If you haven't quelled this problem long before 13 then either you've messed up as a parent and you probably need outside help, or your kid has an actual mental issue and you probably need outside help. Either way, its not likely something you'll be able to handle on your own, much as that's sometimes hard to admit to yourself.
This isn't a 6 year old throwing a tantrum once in a while. This is a young adult showing the same addictive behaviors as an alcoholic or drug abuser -- or for a more obviously similar problem, a gambling addict.
There's a pretty big difference: In your world, the company simply can't ask period. In the real world, they can ask but the employee is free to say no.
The two are only equivalent if all employees say no all the time, or if the employer would be otherwise unable to restrain themselves from disciplining people for asserting their rights.
"Secret" in terms of product features usually just implies "not explicitly announced." Its a totally different usage of the word than you would use it when discussing encryption or state secrets or something like that.
Perhaps a bit of an abuse of language, but its hardly a new one nor would most people confuse the two usages to any great degree unless they were intentionally trying to take it out of context in order to make some logical fallacy of an argument (remember: copyright infringement is only piracy if you wear an eye patch while downloading! Right!? That'll hold up in court!)
Pfft. Removing features and making things harder to use has been the definition of "new and improved" in computers basically since the internet got popular and "lowest common denominator" became the target demographic of choice for basically all programs and websites. Can't really blame Kodi for following the trend (though of course it would have been nice if they'd bucked it instead..)
My guess is more along the lines of "our lawyers received a scary letter from the MPAA saying they will sue us for $gazillions and tie us up in court for so long that we'll be broke even if we win."
"Sort of".. Starting with pocket edition, it was clear that they considered that statement to only apply to the core Minecraft product. With the Win10 version being built off of the Xbox version rather than the original Java version, its likely that it also would fall under the category of "not really the same product so that statement doesn't apply."
Also, from TFS it sounds like this would be more of a place to download pre-built adventure maps and the like. So even if they add it to the core Java version rather than just the Win10/PE versions, as long as the vanilla version is still a free upgrade, it hasn't really broken Notch's promise any more than not having a free Realms server breaks it -- its an outside service that just happens to have an in-game UI to use it.
What this will mean for mods and the such is a bit up for grabs, as other posters have brought up already since mods would effectively be in direct competition with these new (not-free) downloads. They could just leave it be in the same way that they didn't try to snuff out private servers when Realms was introduced.. or they could go total war on modders.. or anywhere in between really we'll just have to wait and see what tack they take on that question.
Wireless beats wired in one significant area: Cost. Not having to obtain right-of-ways (which is not always easy nor cheap) and not having to lay, monitor and maintain hundreds or thousands of miles of cable is an enormous savings. Throw in portability advantage and wireless is a pretty easy sell over wired.
Sure if you're extremely security conscious, you probably don't want wireless (but then you probably don't want to be using a public ISP at all..) For the rest of us, as long as the data isn't being transmitted raw we're probably safe enough (the ISP and the government can just pull the data from their end anyway.. they don't need to hack the airwaves.)
As for the bandwidth.. yes its a finite resource, but we're nowhere near exhausting it yet. There's lots of bandwidth out there that's assigned to stupid things from decades ago that could easily be repurposed if the owners relinquished their claims (whether voluntarily or by the government simply confiscating it.) We've seen a few blocks go up on auction in the past several years and there's plenty more out there waiting to be used when the demand starts justifying the cost of going through the repurposing procedures.
And of course bandwidth is also a shared resource from a geographic perspective. That is, you only need enough to satisfy the most densely populated area.
Yep. Governments trying to run companies are usually pretty bad at it.
The problem in this case, and why municipal broadband seems like such a great idea is because monopolies are even worse at it.
Where governments are usually mismanaged due to incompetence, monopolies have a habit of being actively malicious in order to squeeze every last cent out of their customers while providing as little service above "slightly better than not having it at all" as they can get away with.
The free market only works when there's competition. Any market controlled by a monopoly or even a small enough oligopoly can never really be free in the economic sense.
Generally speaking, this happens as follows:
Company: "We don't want to have to compete"
Politician: "But that's your job"
Company: "Here's $100k for your 'campaign' if you make it go away"
Politician: "Sold"
Now in many cases its not really that nefarious. Quite often the local government promised one company or another a local monopoly because it was the only way to get internet access at all -- this was way back in the days when the internet was fresh and new and nobody would have really thought to just build their own, either due to lack of expertise, lack of interest or lack of available funds. Or all three.
As those contracts expire, we'll probably see more push for municipal broadband. Of course a lot of those local governments will also just renew their contracts because keeping the status quo is easier than actually doing something (especially when there's that green grease on the palms.)
Innovation is also slowing as established corporations play the regulation games.
Yes, the damned government trying to prevent another Thalidomide disaster. It should be up to each customer to do all of the research and clinical trials needed to prove a drug safe for themselves! I mean that's a thing any random dummy on the street should be able to to do right? The US only avoided the Thalidomide disaster because the government saw what was happening in other countries and told the corporations "hell no!"
The US actually has an excellent health care system, it just happens to be one that many can't afford
You should have ended the sentence there. Somebody has to pay for the clinical trials and other hoops that new drugs have to go through, and if its not the manufacturer then its you. And not always with money. How many people "paid" for Thalidomide with their childrens' life?
then it will have a healthcare system that serves all, poorly
I personally prefer a healthcare system that can help 90% of everyone's problems than one that can help 99% of the 1% and just lets everyone else suffer and die. Especially since I'm nowhere close to the 1%.
It takes a special kind of person to think that stuff posted on Facebook isn't visible to Facebook. I mean I know there's lots of dumb people out there (and they all voted apparently, just to throw in an offtopic Trump dig) but I'm not sure I believe enough people to be so dumb that a wide consensus would assume that Facebook is somehow magical and doesn't store the data on its site.
And its not exactly a great step up from that to have read the news basically any time in the past half decade and known that pretty much everything you post anywhere is being read and used for advertisements (and government databases, but those they try to hide as best they can..)
Companies: "Lets screw the people for profit!"
People: "That sounds bad"
Old FCC: "Companies, you aren't allowed to do that!"
Companies: "But we waaaaannnttt to"
Old FCC: "Tough"
New FCC: "Psych! You're allowed to do it after all, but can you please pinky swear that you won't? There's no way you'd ever go back on a pinky swear right?"
People: "MAGA!MAGA!MAGA!"