If you're comparing a point-and-shoot camera to an old SLR and don't like the response time, the simple answer is to get a DSLR and make it a fair comparision. They start in the $500 range...
I bought my SLR for $100 at Sears. It worked great and produced beautiful pictures for two decades. I'm not coughing up $500 for a camera. Guess that makes me an old fart.:-)
Every digital camera I've ever used has had a 100+ ms delay between pressing the shutter button and the picture actually being taken. This sucks compared to the "instant" response of a circa 1980 SLR (well, actually compared to every film camera ever made).
I don't need more pixels--give me a camera that's usable.
I sure as hell wouldn't want to ride in an airplane running Josh's avionics software, but if I was on a plane that was plummeting to earth due to avionics problems and Josh was on board, he might be the best candidate to try to save the plane.
I don't like the MPAA or the RIAA, but that's not why we download music or movies without paying for them. We do that because we can and it's cheaper than paying for it.
I don't download (because of the current legal exposure, and because much of MPAA/RIAA content isn't worth my time), but back when I did, it was never about it being cheaper. I would gladly pay significant sums of money for good content offered the way I want to view it. The *AA companies simply don't offer this, are not interested in offering this, and are more interested in suing their customers than figuring out how to offer it.
please also consider my valuable contribution to this discussion:
Elephants are large land mammals of the order Proboscidea and the family Elephantidae. There are three living species: the African Bush Elephant, the African Forest Elephant and the Asian Elephant (also known as the Indian Elephant). Other species have become extinct since the last ice age, the Mammoths, dwarf forms of which may have survived as late as 2,000 BC,[1] being the best-known of these. They were once classified along with other thick skinned animals in a now invalid order, Pachydermata.
Elephants are the largest land animals.[2] The elephant's gestation period is 22 months, the longest of any land animal. At birth it is common for an elephant calf to weigh 120 kilograms (260 lb). They typically live for 50 to 70 years, but the oldest recorded elephant lived for 82 years.[3] The largest elephant ever recorded was shot in Angola in 1956. This male weighed about 12,000 kilograms (26,000 lb),[4] with a shoulder height of 4.2 metres (14 ft), a metre (yard) taller than the average male African elephant.[5] The smallest elephants, about the size of a calf or a large pig, were a prehistoric species that lived on the island of Crete during the Pleistocene epoch.[6]
The elephant has appeared in cultures across the world. They are a symbol of wisdom in Asian cultures and are famed for their memory and intelligence, where they are thought to be on par with cetaceans[7] and hominids.[8] Aristotle once said the elephant was "the beast which passeth all others in wit and mind"[9]. The word "elephant" has its origins in the Greek á¼ÎÎÏαÏ, meaning "ivory" or "elephant".[10]
Healthy adult elephants have no natural predators[11], although lions may take calves or weak individuals.[12][13] They are, however, increasingly threatened by human intrusion and poaching. Once numbering in the millions, the African elephant population has dwindled to between 470,000 and 690,000 individuals according to a March 2007 estimate.[14] While the elephant is a protected species worldwide, with restrictions in place on capture, domestic use, and trade in products such as ivory, CITES reopening of "one time" ivory stock sales, has resulted in increased poaching. Certain African nations report a decrease of their elephant populations by as much as two-thirds, and populations in certain protected areas are in danger of being eliminated[15] Since recent poaching has increased by as much as 45%, the current population is unknown (2008).[16] Contents [hide]
* 1 Taxonomy and evolution
o 1.1 African Elephant
o 1.2 Asian Elephant
* 2 Physical characteristics
o 2.1 Trunk
o 2.2 Tusks
o 2.3 Teeth
o 2.4 Skin
o 2.5 Legs and feet
o 2.6 Ears
* 3 Biology and behavior
o 3.1 Social behavior
o 3.2 Intelligence
o 3.3 Senses
o 3.4 Self-awareness
o 3.5 Communication
o 3.6 Diet
I don't understand the concentration on teachers as being a group that would be improved by merit pay. Many if not most professions have no merit pay, or only a modest token:
Programmers that are 10x more productive than average are lucky to make 1.5x average salary.
CEOs get huge paychecks regardless of poor performance.
Even lowly waiters can expect maybe an extra 10% for outstanding service.
The "problem" is not so much that we don't want to pay for excellence as that we're very unwilling to not pay for poor performance. In my 20+ year career, I have never seen someone fired for not doing their job adequately. When I see a CEO that runs his company over a cliff standing on the corner begging for nickels, I'll know we've made some progress. Until then, we need to support our teachers rather than using them as an ideological punching bag.
You can pay teachers all you want, but it wont inspire students to learn and retain knowledge. Only parents/peers/culture can do that.
If you don't think a teacher can inspire students, you've never had a good teacher, let alone a great one.
I have had several inspiring teachers, and there is absolutely no doubt in my mind that their talent and dedication was not motivated by pay. Teachers need better pay--not to inspire them, but so that more people who would be good teachers can reasonably contemplate doing so.
Whats wrong with "After a file is closed, its synced to disk"?!?
That's what happens now--it's just that "after" might be "quite a while after". If you're doing this after the file is closed, though, it's all a race anyway--the only question is how wide the window of evil is.
If you want it to be right, you need a synchronous call. That's what fsync and friends are for.
Once the application calls close() the data is out of its hands. The application shouldn't be required to take another step to ensure that the storage systems have correctly handled the data.
I think calling close() should give me a piece of bacon, but unfortunately POSIX doesn't specify that either.
As for "correct handling", though, it's far from clear that the correct thing to do on close() is to immediately flush the data to disk. There are a lot of times when this would be inappropriate.
The fact that Bell was able to patent his invention means that (1) he was able to profit from it, and (2) his invention was fully disclosed and available to the rest of humanity.
In this situation (and perhaps most), it appears that Bell and many others were working on this and the discovery was inevitable. Thus, Bell won the lottery, but this fact probably provided no gain for society at all. Even the disclosure parts sounds pretty useless--since it was a discovery whose time had come, it would have popped into common knowledge quite rapidly.
If you gave up all your worldly possessions and gave them to charity to feed the hungry you could save hundreds of lives.
MURDERER!
This wouldn't constitute murder because there is no intent to kill. Nonetheless, I think the larger point you are driving at is essentially correct. Peter Singer has an excellent NYT essay on this subject. If you really want to read a philosopher's in-depth analysis, see Peter Unger's book Living High and Letting Die.
If one is responsible for acting and for not acting, then can you ever do the "right" thing? Perhaps things are not so black and white?
Yes, I think you can do the right thing, to the best of your ability under conditions of uncertainty. Many times it's difficult to know what the best thing is, of course. And, as you say, things are not black and white, in the sense that all of the different courses of action sit on a continuum of goodness, each generally better than some and worse than others.
I don't fault Bush et al for choosing what appears in hindsight to be a poor course of action. I fault them for apparently not caring in the first place whether their actions were anywhere close to ethical or good for their country. Many people say Carter was a bad President, but I'll take someone who cares over someone who's good at getting people to follow any day of the week.
No offense, but stuff it. The US does not set out to kill as many people as possible.
I certainly hope not. But unfortunately what one "set out to do" isn't what counts. What counts is what actually happens, especially when it was a forseeable result of one's actions. "I didn't mean to" is okay for children, but not so good for adults.
91,060 - 99,433 is the complete total for civilian deaths in Iraq.
No, actually it's the number of documented deaths. That is, it's actually only a lower bound. The true number is certainly higher. No one knows how much higher. It would seem that there has been a studied effort by the governments involved not to determine the true number of men, women, and children killed.
But having a hundred thousand people die due to being killed by their own people (#1 cause) and accidental deaths during live fire
If these people would still have been alive had the US not acted, the US bears a responsibility. It might be true that this was the best of the available alternatives, but this case has not been seriously made at this point. "It's not our fault" is a pretty pathetic substitute.
This is the equivallent of telling a rape victim to lay back and enjoy it.
Inflamatory but not apropos. Rather it's the equivalent of telling a rape victim not to find the attacker's high school yearbook and kill everyone in it (except of course for the attacker himself).
If you're going to be effective, you have to figure out what action is actually going to have the desired effect. Just attacking some country because you like the idea doesn't cut it.
My first purchase at CC was a remaindered Compaq Contura Aero 4/25. It was a 486sx (no h/w fp) mini laptop that could barely run X (black and white with 16 grey levels), and excellent battery life. Despite it's limitations, it's probably my favorite among the laptops I've owned. (I'm typing this on a Dell Inspiron 1420, which is superior in most ways, but has a shorter battery life and today's cheap design with little sharp plastic edges sticking out everywhere.)
After 1995, unfortunately, everything I've bought at CC (mostly Sony stuff) ended up being of poor quality...
I really do feel your last paragraph is apples to oranges. You're just talking about moving from one method of selling copyrighted material to another method.
Taken at that level of detail, yes, I agree with you--the analogy doesn't work.
I had in mind the bigger picture, though. In a sufficiently complex system, sometimes the result of a change can be quite paradoxical. Who would have thought that Hollywood could make more money by encouraging people to rent movies or tape them off the TV, instead of buying them?
I agree that N=2 doesn't say much. Re Word/Excel, I'll say that I've never contacted MS for help either--in my case it's because I'm sure, based on the accounts of others, that no help will be forthcoming.
I'm most familiar with PowerPoint vs OO Presentation. I'm not really a "power user", but they seem quite equivalent to me.
No one can really say what will happen, I agree, but I don't think we should necessarily assume it will be bad. Hollywood fought VCRs and movie rentals tooth and nail for years, for fear that it would destroy their business. When it finally happened, though, we see that it's been a major source of income and probably saved many thousands of industry jobs.
My wife just had surgery this month, so I've been thinking about this some. I was a little surprised to see while looking up the address of the surgeon's office that Google had a number of user reviews on him--some good and mostly bad. Looking closely at them, I'd say that at least half were worthless (the authors were obviously unreasonable or ignorant), while the other half were of little value simply because they were unsubstantiated and there was no evidence that the author was in any way qualified to judge.
I certainly agree that "nice" and "skilled" are two different things at best loosely correlated. A big problem in medicine, as with a great many other fields, is that there is little objective, public information that one can use to make judgements. Probably our grad school admission exams (GRE, MCAT, etc.) are the last time any of us has been seriously vetted, and even those scores are not public information. (And furthermore, test scores would presumably have only a medium correlation with ultimate quality.)
There is objective evidence that as a group doctors in the US leave something to be desired. There was a recent NEJM study that indicated that in general they're only getting treatment about half right (as judged by expert scorers). In another study, adding a simple surgery checklist (the WHO checklist) cut patient fatalities in half. This would seem to indicate that medical quality is a lot more haphazard than we'd like to believe.
I think those are good points--abolishing copyright would dramatically change things and a lot of planning and accommodation would have to take place to limit the short-term pains involved.
Considering the long-term, though, it's less obvious whether there would really be dramatic differences. I don't know how you make your living, but my twenty-plus year career has consisted entirely of either writing bespoke software or generally installing/managing/herding/fixing software (all kinds: bespoke, mass-market commercial, GPL, and Open Source). As best as I can imagine, none of that work would have been disrupted at all by abolishing copyright, because the software in question wasn't really that valuable in itself--it only became valuable because I was there to make it work in the situation at hand.
I have also made contributions to various GPL and Open Source projects. I did not do so with monetary compensation in mind, and I believe I would still have done so if copyright had previously been abolished. So, no change there.
In the early years of computing, copyright arguably had little affect on the field, and yet much software got written.
No doubt though many people would be affected. I suspect that a certain amount of software would be funded by groups and consortia that needed the software to exist. Beyond that, I'd be happy to see the government also fund general software at a certain level.
I'm not necessarily saying that all of this would be painless. Like the situations with health insurance and drug legalization, however, the status quo is simply not working, and I think we have to bite the bullet and look for changes.
First, I don't think you've read many of his comments over the years.
I would hardly presume to speak for him, but your assumption is false.
No copyright would not level the playing field.
My point was that if the three options are (1) code under GPL, (2) code under BSD, (3) copyright is abolished, the BSD option clearly leads to the least level playing field.
Slashdot Mirror
If you're comparing a point-and-shoot camera to an old SLR and don't like the response time, the simple answer is to get a DSLR and make it a fair comparision. They start in the $500 range...
I bought my SLR for $100 at Sears. It worked great and produced beautiful pictures for two decades. I'm not coughing up $500 for a camera. Guess that makes me an old fart. :-)
Every digital camera I've ever used has had a 100+ ms delay between pressing the shutter button and the picture actually being taken. This sucks compared to the "instant" response of a circa 1980 SLR (well, actually compared to every film camera ever made).
I don't need more pixels--give me a camera that's usable.
I sure as hell wouldn't want to ride in an airplane running Josh's avionics software, but if I was on a plane that was plummeting to earth due to avionics problems and Josh was on board, he might be the best candidate to try to save the plane.
I don't like the MPAA or the RIAA, but that's not why we download music or movies without paying for them. We do that because we can and it's cheaper than paying for it.
I don't download (because of the current legal exposure, and because much of MPAA/RIAA content isn't worth my time), but back when I did, it was never about it being cheaper. I would gladly pay significant sums of money for good content offered the way I want to view it. The *AA companies simply don't offer this, are not interested in offering this, and are more interested in suing their customers than figuring out how to offer it.
please also consider my valuable contribution to this discussion:
Elephants are large land mammals of the order Proboscidea and the family Elephantidae. There are three living species: the African Bush Elephant, the African Forest Elephant and the Asian Elephant (also known as the Indian Elephant). Other species have become extinct since the last ice age, the Mammoths, dwarf forms of which may have survived as late as 2,000 BC,[1] being the best-known of these. They were once classified along with other thick skinned animals in a now invalid order, Pachydermata.
Elephants are the largest land animals.[2] The elephant's gestation period is 22 months, the longest of any land animal. At birth it is common for an elephant calf to weigh 120 kilograms (260 lb). They typically live for 50 to 70 years, but the oldest recorded elephant lived for 82 years.[3] The largest elephant ever recorded was shot in Angola in 1956. This male weighed about 12,000 kilograms (26,000 lb),[4] with a shoulder height of 4.2 metres (14 ft), a metre (yard) taller than the average male African elephant.[5] The smallest elephants, about the size of a calf or a large pig, were a prehistoric species that lived on the island of Crete during the Pleistocene epoch.[6]
The elephant has appeared in cultures across the world. They are a symbol of wisdom in Asian cultures and are famed for their memory and intelligence, where they are thought to be on par with cetaceans[7] and hominids.[8] Aristotle once said the elephant was "the beast which passeth all others in wit and mind"[9]. The word "elephant" has its origins in the Greek á¼ÎÎÏαÏ, meaning "ivory" or "elephant".[10]
Healthy adult elephants have no natural predators[11], although lions may take calves or weak individuals.[12][13] They are, however, increasingly threatened by human intrusion and poaching. Once numbering in the millions, the African elephant population has dwindled to between 470,000 and 690,000 individuals according to a March 2007 estimate.[14] While the elephant is a protected species worldwide, with restrictions in place on capture, domestic use, and trade in products such as ivory, CITES reopening of "one time" ivory stock sales, has resulted in increased poaching. Certain African nations report a decrease of their elephant populations by as much as two-thirds, and populations in certain protected areas are in danger of being eliminated[15] Since recent poaching has increased by as much as 45%, the current population is unknown (2008).[16]
Contents
[hide]
* 1 Taxonomy and evolution
o 1.1 African Elephant
o 1.2 Asian Elephant
* 2 Physical characteristics
o 2.1 Trunk
o 2.2 Tusks
o 2.3 Teeth
o 2.4 Skin
o 2.5 Legs and feet
o 2.6 Ears
* 3 Biology and behavior
o 3.1 Social behavior
o 3.2 Intelligence
o 3.3 Senses
o 3.4 Self-awareness
o 3.5 Communication
o 3.6 Diet
...or at least a super-Gopher.
I think I saw that guy in Caddyshack...
I don't understand the concentration on teachers as being a group that would be improved by merit pay. Many if not most professions have no merit pay, or only a modest token:
The "problem" is not so much that we don't want to pay for excellence as that we're very unwilling to not pay for poor performance. In my 20+ year career, I have never seen someone fired for not doing their job adequately. When I see a CEO that runs his company over a cliff standing on the corner begging for nickels, I'll know we've made some progress. Until then, we need to support our teachers rather than using them as an ideological punching bag.
If you don't think a teacher can inspire students, you've never had a good teacher, let alone a great one.
I have had several inspiring teachers, and there is absolutely no doubt in my mind that their talent and dedication was not motivated by pay. Teachers need better pay--not to inspire them, but so that more people who would be good teachers can reasonably contemplate doing so.
Whats wrong with "After a file is closed, its synced to disk"?!?
That's what happens now--it's just that "after" might be "quite a while after". If you're doing this after the file is closed, though, it's all a race anyway--the only question is how wide the window of evil is.
If you want it to be right, you need a synchronous call. That's what fsync and friends are for.
Once the application calls close() the data is out of its hands. The application shouldn't be required to take another step to ensure that the storage systems have correctly handled the data.
I think calling close() should give me a piece of bacon, but unfortunately POSIX doesn't specify that either.
As for "correct handling", though, it's far from clear that the correct thing to do on close() is to immediately flush the data to disk. There are a lot of times when this would be inappropriate.
and definitely don't hire to write safety-critical software...
new electric bass boat, the Chevy Fibrillator ...
The fact that Bell was able to patent his invention means that (1) he was able to profit from it, and (2) his invention was fully disclosed and available to the rest of humanity.
In this situation (and perhaps most), it appears that Bell and many others were working on this and the discovery was inevitable. Thus, Bell won the lottery, but this fact probably provided no gain for society at all. Even the disclosure parts sounds pretty useless--since it was a discovery whose time had come, it would have popped into common knowledge quite rapidly.
If you gave up all your worldly possessions and gave them to charity to feed the hungry you could save hundreds of lives.
MURDERER!
This wouldn't constitute murder because there is no intent to kill. Nonetheless, I think the larger point you are driving at is essentially correct. Peter Singer has an excellent NYT essay on this subject. If you really want to read a philosopher's in-depth analysis, see Peter Unger's book Living High and Letting Die.
ANALOGY FAIL
If one is responsible for acting and for not acting, then can you ever do the "right" thing? Perhaps things are not so black and white?
Yes, I think you can do the right thing, to the best of your ability under conditions of uncertainty. Many times it's difficult to know what the best thing is, of course. And, as you say, things are not black and white, in the sense that all of the different courses of action sit on a continuum of goodness, each generally better than some and worse than others.
I don't fault Bush et al for choosing what appears in hindsight to be a poor course of action. I fault them for apparently not caring in the first place whether their actions were anywhere close to ethical or good for their country. Many people say Carter was a bad President, but I'll take someone who cares over someone who's good at getting people to follow any day of the week.
No offense, but stuff it. The US does not set out to kill as many people as possible.
I certainly hope not. But unfortunately what one "set out to do" isn't what counts. What counts is what actually happens, especially when it was a forseeable result of one's actions. "I didn't mean to" is okay for children, but not so good for adults.
91,060 - 99,433 is the complete total for civilian deaths in Iraq.
No, actually it's the number of documented deaths. That is, it's actually only a lower bound. The true number is certainly higher. No one knows how much higher. It would seem that there has been a studied effort by the governments involved not to determine the true number of men, women, and children killed.
But having a hundred thousand people die due to being killed by their own people (#1 cause) and accidental deaths during live fire
If these people would still have been alive had the US not acted, the US bears a responsibility. It might be true that this was the best of the available alternatives, but this case has not been seriously made at this point. "It's not our fault" is a pretty pathetic substitute.
This is the equivallent of telling a rape victim to lay back and enjoy it.
Inflamatory but not apropos. Rather it's the equivalent of telling a rape victim not to find the attacker's high school yearbook and kill everyone in it (except of course for the attacker himself).
If you're going to be effective, you have to figure out what action is actually going to have the desired effect. Just attacking some country because you like the idea doesn't cut it.
SONY sucks... You should have realized that 10 yrs ago.
Well, I guess I haven't actually bought any of their stuff since around 2000 or so...
My first purchase at CC was a remaindered Compaq Contura Aero 4/25. It was a 486sx (no h/w fp) mini laptop that could barely run X (black and white with 16 grey levels), and excellent battery life. Despite it's limitations, it's probably my favorite among the laptops I've owned. (I'm typing this on a Dell Inspiron 1420, which is superior in most ways, but has a shorter battery life and today's cheap design with little sharp plastic edges sticking out everywhere.)
After 1995, unfortunately, everything I've bought at CC (mostly Sony stuff) ended up being of poor quality...
I really do feel your last paragraph is apples to oranges. You're just talking about moving from one method of selling copyrighted material to another method.
Taken at that level of detail, yes, I agree with you--the analogy doesn't work.
I had in mind the bigger picture, though. In a sufficiently complex system, sometimes the result of a change can be quite paradoxical. Who would have thought that Hollywood could make more money by encouraging people to rent movies or tape them off the TV, instead of buying them?
I agree that N=2 doesn't say much. Re Word/Excel, I'll say that I've never contacted MS for help either--in my case it's because I'm sure, based on the accounts of others, that no help will be forthcoming.
I'm most familiar with PowerPoint vs OO Presentation. I'm not really a "power user", but they seem quite equivalent to me.
No one can really say what will happen, I agree, but I don't think we should necessarily assume it will be bad. Hollywood fought VCRs and movie rentals tooth and nail for years, for fear that it would destroy their business. When it finally happened, though, we see that it's been a major source of income and probably saved many thousands of industry jobs.
My wife just had surgery this month, so I've been thinking about this some. I was a little surprised to see while looking up the address of the surgeon's office that Google had a number of user reviews on him--some good and mostly bad. Looking closely at them, I'd say that at least half were worthless (the authors were obviously unreasonable or ignorant), while the other half were of little value simply because they were unsubstantiated and there was no evidence that the author was in any way qualified to judge.
I certainly agree that "nice" and "skilled" are two different things at best loosely correlated. A big problem in medicine, as with a great many other fields, is that there is little objective, public information that one can use to make judgements. Probably our grad school admission exams (GRE, MCAT, etc.) are the last time any of us has been seriously vetted, and even those scores are not public information. (And furthermore, test scores would presumably have only a medium correlation with ultimate quality.)
There is objective evidence that as a group doctors in the US leave something to be desired. There was a recent NEJM study that indicated that in general they're only getting treatment about half right (as judged by expert scorers). In another study, adding a simple surgery checklist (the WHO checklist) cut patient fatalities in half. This would seem to indicate that medical quality is a lot more haphazard than we'd like to believe.
I think those are good points--abolishing copyright would dramatically change things and a lot of planning and accommodation would have to take place to limit the short-term pains involved.
Considering the long-term, though, it's less obvious whether there would really be dramatic differences. I don't know how you make your living, but my twenty-plus year career has consisted entirely of either writing bespoke software or generally installing/managing/herding/fixing software (all kinds: bespoke, mass-market commercial, GPL, and Open Source). As best as I can imagine, none of that work would have been disrupted at all by abolishing copyright, because the software in question wasn't really that valuable in itself--it only became valuable because I was there to make it work in the situation at hand.
I have also made contributions to various GPL and Open Source projects. I did not do so with monetary compensation in mind, and I believe I would still have done so if copyright had previously been abolished. So, no change there.
In the early years of computing, copyright arguably had little affect on the field, and yet much software got written.
No doubt though many people would be affected. I suspect that a certain amount of software would be funded by groups and consortia that needed the software to exist. Beyond that, I'd be happy to see the government also fund general software at a certain level.
I'm not necessarily saying that all of this would be painless. Like the situations with health insurance and drug legalization, however, the status quo is simply not working, and I think we have to bite the bullet and look for changes.
First, I don't think you've read many of his comments over the years.
I would hardly presume to speak for him, but your assumption is false.
No copyright would not level the playing field.
My point was that if the three options are (1) code under GPL, (2) code under BSD, (3) copyright is abolished, the BSD option clearly leads to the least level playing field.