The problem Microsoft has always had (at least, from the early '90s onwards) is that they spend a vast amount on MSR and then only take a tiny fraction of the output and produce products.
I think you're looking at the situation from the wrong perspective. I suspect that the primary purpose of MSR is not to produce products, but rather to prevent competitors from producing products based on similar ideas via patents. This is basically Microsoft staking its IP flag in as many places as possible in the intellectual landscape. Apple does the same thing except that they plant their IP flags each step of the way to an actual product.
Why is this comment +4 "Interesting"? You're comparing average salaries across a nation to salaries within a particular city. (A great city, by the way; I love Munich.) If you want to do a comparison, try this.
I was thinking this as well. I see this patent as having less to do with copyright and everything to do with a simple money grab by the inventor. Publishers are applauding it now because their kneejerk reaction is to applaud anything that claims to be some form of DRM. But when the celebration is over and the champagne has run dry, what do they gain from a DRM scheme that requires them to pay licensing fees to this guy to use? I think this patent doesn't mean what the publishers think it does.
From the perspective of government, a highly educated workforce is a double-edged sword. On one hand, it can lead to a stronger economy and higher tax revenue, but on the other hand, a highly educated workforce is harder to control.
But, given that students are willing to pay tens of thousands per year to go to college in the first place, a few hundreds dollars in books hardly make a big difference.
Yes, but the majority of those tens of thousands will be covered by some combination of big loans, grants, or parents and will be paid back over a period of years. The cost of textbooks are felt much sooner; their costs come out of the fun and booze budget.
I would say that the only part of calculus that can be learned at a low educational level is taking derivatives. Taking derivatives of elemental functions involves little more than substitution. Anyone with a solid grasp of highschool algebra can do that. However, things get quite a bit more complicated when you start talking indefinite integrals and even limits. Complex pattern matching is involved even with seemingly simple indefinite integrals and will require a good understanding of trigonometry -- a skill even someone very good at algebra could be lacking. Proving derivative formulas with limits is similarly nontrivial; at a minimum you need to be good with algebraic manipulations involving rational functions. You and most slashdot readers probably found it easy but that's because you were already independently interested in math and was skilled enough to do a lot of algebraic manipulations in your head. In the US, at least, that is obviously the exception rather than rule. The reason calculus is taught last in highschool, if at all, is because in order to do anything nontrivial with calculus requires a solid foundation with algebra, trigonometry and perhaps geometry. Considering that students struggle with algebra and trigonometry alone, what chance do they have of understanding something that builds on top of it?
If it was about theft then why did I see items stored within a glass case with clamshell packaging? You'd think the case would be enough of a theft deterrent.
I'm not sure that there is an appropriate human analogue for this. For one thing, it is debatable whether your example of taking a tooth of a child under anesthesia is cruel. Unethical because you've violated human principles of self-determination and control of one's own body but probably not cruel. However, doing the operation to a human without anesthesia would be cruel. Whether something is cruel or not depends on the ability of the subject to feel pain; this is part of the definition of "cruel".
I think your problem is that you think the harm that is done to the insect is greater than the educational benefit to the experimenter. The degree to which means can justify ends has been debated by philosophers for centuries.
+1 Informative. You win the prize for actually addressing most of the arguments in the article. Too bad I don't have mod points. And in answer to your question about who the "New Boss" is, I think it has to be Apple, Amazon, Facebook and Google. I can only infer this from the following quote:
On one hand it doesn’t bother me because the “new boss” doesn’t really tell me what kind of songs to write or who should mix my record. But on the other hand I’m a little disturbed at how dependent I am on these tech behemoths to pursue my craft. In fact it is nigh impossible for me to pursue my craft without enriching Apple, Amazon, Facebook and Google.
Okay, that's fine. Amazon, Google, Apple and Facebook(?) control most of the legal music distribution. But then he later claims:
The New Boss wants to take ALL of your songs, past present and future and pay you nothing.
So he's saying that Amazon, Google, Apple and Facebook want to take his songs and pay him nothing? That doesn't follow from his own data since toward the end, he complains about Apple getting a 30% cut of music sells on iTunes. Notwithstanding the fact that that is a lower cut than retailers were getting before digital distribution (40%), if he doesn't like Apple getting 30% then he needs to complain to his "old boss" the record labels since they're the ones that negotiated this payment breakdown. And for somebody who claims to be some uber-geek, he shows an astonishing ignorance of the way technical systems like Amazon or iTunes work. He is dismayed that Apple gets a 30% cut of music sells, because he thinks this is so much higher than the hosting/infrastructure costs of selling on iTunes but since when has the costs of a service been tied to its price? I'm not saying 30% is right -- I have no idea what Apple's cut should be -- but if you're going to play the game about costs of production versus market price then I can turn that argument around and ask why he thinks $15.99 is a fair price for a cd that oftentimes only has one song that people care about?
In the end, he ends on a hyperbolic, grossly exaggerating note, implying that Amazon, Google, and Apple are basically just freeloaders, deserving no credit for their IP and their work:
My only explanation is that there is just something fundamentally wrong with how many in the tech industry look at the world. They are deluded somehow. Freaks.
Taking no risk and paying nothing to the content creators is built into the collective psyche of the Tech industry. They do not value content. They only see THEIR services as valuable. They are the Masters of the Universe. They bring all that is good. Content magically appears on their blessed networks.
Because no one ever took any risks or spent any money or intellectual capital to build Google, Amazon or Apple. If those like David don't like the "new boss" so much then I would challenge them to lobby the "old boss" to make its own digital music store. Any takers?
1. Honda, Toyota, Kia, et al, have a temporary spike in demand. They increase prices to dampen demand.
One little nitpick: they don't raise prices to dampen demand. They raise prices to exploit demand. You can never have enough demand for a product as long as people aren't satisfying their demand by theft or piracy.
LOL! (I don't use "LOL" unless I really did laugh out loud but this was the funniest comment I've read today.) Sometimes it seems like you guys have these comments queued up!
Just get some probes on Europa already! If you want to find extraterrestrial life, that is your best hope, probably by a wide margin. Unlike Mars, where we'd be lucky to find single-celled organisms, Europa seems to harbor the possibility of multicelluar life, in my non-expert opinion (although the Wikipedia article pooh-poohs this). I think the discovery of life on Europa would rekindle interest in human space exploration since some biologists is going to want to go there in person with a specimen jar. We might even find a monolith or two on there somewhere!
"Alligators complain that birds will not nest in their jaws. Cites discriminatory nesting practices." Damn near makes me ashamed to be American that officials AND COMPANIES here are that stupid and absolutely clueless. The irony of this almost requires no further comment.
I'll buy them tomorrow if they have a decent SDK and are priced below $1000. The question is not what Google can/will do with them but what I as a developer can do with them.
A smartphone-powered robot with wires protuding? Somebody got scared over that? I mean, has there ever been a bomb that didn't have fucking wires exposed? I hope they remembered to cut the red wire first when defusing this toy. Or was it the white wire? Well, we may as well ban all electronics since they all have wires inside of them. This has nothing to do with terrorism and everything to do with us becoming a terror-stricken and easily frightened society. Our fears and risk-aversion are all out of proportion to the actual statistical risk of harm from bombs and terrorism.
Why be a douche about it? For one thing, you didn't even address the question. He did not ask: "Wow, this is neato! How can we apply this methodology to protecting starships?!!" He was asking about the use of magnetism in general to protect spacecraft from radiation. This is by no means a silly question or one steeped in ignorance. Instead, you went on a long tangent about the unsuitability of transient magnet fields and EM pulses -- relevant to the article but irrelevant to the question. I didn't even read your whole reply until I had read some of the responses to it. The problem was not with GP's question but rather with you.
The only reason I'm replying to this is because your post was one of the worst, most arrogant replies I've ever read on Slashdot. And that's saying a lot. Contrary to popular opinion, most scientists are quite humble when dealing with questions from the public. Humility gets instilled in you when everything you say is subject to scrutiny by equally or more knowledgeable peers. Your comment is more suggestive of a physics grad student rather than someone who has spent years working as a scientist.
This is not necessarily a counter-argument to the claim that the warm season is due to climate change. Climate change may be the root cause of the double whammy. A convergence that would normally occur under other circumstances may be occurring now due to climate change:
climate change --> double whammy La Nina/Arctic Oscillation --> record warm season
Was the convergence of La Nina and Arctic Oscillation explainable due to natural causes?
It's not about just plotting trends. This is what people that deny man-made causes for climate-change often fail to grasp. The issue at hand is about understanding the way systems respond to inputs. If we were able to understand from a pure physics perspective the natural causes for a global climate and if the current climate is inconsistent with our expectation than the difference is likely due to human activity. You don't need a hundred years of data to know that applying a lit match to a piece of wood will probably set it on fire -- you just have to understand the way wood responds to fire.
The question is whether we understand the mechanics of natural causes of earth climate as well as the greenhouse gasses/pollutants that man is creating. I don't know, but I have no reason to doubt a priori the scientific consensus on this matter. It certainly seems plausible to me that humans are having some influence on climate; after all, we have a very large footprint on earth.
See, this is the problem with stereotypes. There is nothing ironic at all about a Chinese person complaining about piracy because we don't know if the people complaining about piracy are the same people who are pirating. It might be true and you may think it is true but until you establish that, a Chinese person complaining about piracy shouldn't be ironic in itself. We all like to be treated as individuals when negative presumptions are concerned. It's like saying that it is ironic that an American is complaining about torture in another country. I can condemn torture anywhere I see it -- regardless of whether my own country is doing it -- because I'm not the one doing the torturing. My own behavior is consistent.
Now, you may rightly argue that it is ironic that someone is demanding justice when piracy hurts them personally but remains silent when someone else is the victim of piracy. If this is the case, then we are all guilty of this type of irony. It is so common, maybe 'irony' is not the appropriate word. Maybe we're all just hypocrites to some extent.
Exactly. Why this post is modded +3 and the GP is at +5 is beyond me. Especially since the answer is so obvious. I tether my phone to my laptop and barely use 500MB a month. This is a fraction of what I know people use that stream Pandora and youtube music through local phone apps. I think the fact that he tethered should be inadmissible evidence in a court case about throttling. AT&T's only recourse in regards to tethering is to terminate his contract.
It depends on how much the pirates intend to download. If you're just downloading one item then one half day to download it doesn't make much difference. But if you wanted to pirate Windows 7 Ultimate, Photoshop, and gigabytes of high definition movies then having to wait days to satisfy your need isn't going to cut it. Only casual pirates would tolerate slow download speeds when much faster alternatives exist to get the content. Throttling decreases the amount pirated per unit time.
I'm not one of those people who scoff at scientific research that confirms what they already "knew" but I'm not all that surprised by this. If you think about what physicists and other scientists actually do, at its core, it must reduce to some combination of constraint satisfaction, tree search or some other statistical search or optimization, all of which are NP-Hard in the worst case. Another prominent method that physicists use on some level, is probabilistic inference, which is also NP-Hard. Unless the knowledge comes from a supernatural insight, the quest to find a better physical model of reality must be subject to the same fundamental constraints that any other optimization problem is.
I don't see how this abuse is more likely today than in 1995. Not saying it isn't, though.
wasting enormous amounts of memory, disk space and bandwidth on trivial tasks,
This needs some detail. A lot of systems today simply have to use more resources simply because they are actually doing more under the covers than similar systems did in 1995, even if the user interface doesn't look that different to the end user. At the very least, they'll have to suffer under the bit of bloat that it takes to make them more secure and for good error handling.
using layer upon layer of badly structured APIs
Badly structured APIs are bad no matter how you look at it but there is no free lunch here. Unless the core problem you are trying to solve directly involves computer hardware, I don't see how you can avoid wading through the layers of abstraction. Either you're dealing with those abstractions yourself with your own code or you're using someone else's framework or API that already bridges those layers. Admittedly, it is hard to avoid bloat when the industry standardizes around a small number of large frameworks and libraries that try to satisfy everyone's needs.
and on top of that a browser with an interpreted language running software we use daily (like gmail).
A very small fraction of the code for gmail runs client side.
But I don't know that that is necessarily true. How does being able to hand-optimizing ASM help you do anything but optimize certain types of algorithms for a particular CPU and memory architecture? Does it make you better at finding the right software abstraction to tackle a business problem? Does it make your code less likely to have errors? More secure?
Slashdot Mirror
why isn't there a chair throwing game on Android or IOS?
Chair Ninja?
The problem Microsoft has always had (at least, from the early '90s onwards) is that they spend a vast amount on MSR and then only take a tiny fraction of the output and produce products.
I think you're looking at the situation from the wrong perspective. I suspect that the primary purpose of MSR is not to produce products, but rather to prevent competitors from producing products based on similar ideas via patents. This is basically Microsoft staking its IP flag in as many places as possible in the intellectual landscape. Apple does the same thing except that they plant their IP flags each step of the way to an actual product.
Why is this comment +4 "Interesting"? You're comparing average salaries across a nation to salaries within a particular city. (A great city, by the way; I love Munich.) If you want to do a comparison, try this.
I was thinking this as well. I see this patent as having less to do with copyright and everything to do with a simple money grab by the inventor. Publishers are applauding it now because their kneejerk reaction is to applaud anything that claims to be some form of DRM. But when the celebration is over and the champagne has run dry, what do they gain from a DRM scheme that requires them to pay licensing fees to this guy to use? I think this patent doesn't mean what the publishers think it does.
From the perspective of government, a highly educated workforce is a double-edged sword. On one hand, it can lead to a stronger economy and higher tax revenue, but on the other hand, a highly educated workforce is harder to control.
But, given that students are willing to pay tens of thousands per year to go to college in the first place, a few hundreds dollars in books hardly make a big difference.
Yes, but the majority of those tens of thousands will be covered by some combination of big loans, grants, or parents and will be paid back over a period of years. The cost of textbooks are felt much sooner; their costs come out of the fun and booze budget.
I would say that the only part of calculus that can be learned at a low educational level is taking derivatives. Taking derivatives of elemental functions involves little more than substitution. Anyone with a solid grasp of highschool algebra can do that. However, things get quite a bit more complicated when you start talking indefinite integrals and even limits. Complex pattern matching is involved even with seemingly simple indefinite integrals and will require a good understanding of trigonometry -- a skill even someone very good at algebra could be lacking. Proving derivative formulas with limits is similarly nontrivial; at a minimum you need to be good with algebraic manipulations involving rational functions. You and most slashdot readers probably found it easy but that's because you were already independently interested in math and was skilled enough to do a lot of algebraic manipulations in your head. In the US, at least, that is obviously the exception rather than rule. The reason calculus is taught last in highschool, if at all, is because in order to do anything nontrivial with calculus requires a solid foundation with algebra, trigonometry and perhaps geometry. Considering that students struggle with algebra and trigonometry alone, what chance do they have of understanding something that builds on top of it?
If it was about theft then why did I see items stored within a glass case with clamshell packaging? You'd think the case would be enough of a theft deterrent.
I'm not sure that there is an appropriate human analogue for this. For one thing, it is debatable whether your example of taking a tooth of a child under anesthesia is cruel. Unethical because you've violated human principles of self-determination and control of one's own body but probably not cruel. However, doing the operation to a human without anesthesia would be cruel. Whether something is cruel or not depends on the ability of the subject to feel pain; this is part of the definition of "cruel".
I think your problem is that you think the harm that is done to the insect is greater than the educational benefit to the experimenter. The degree to which means can justify ends has been debated by philosophers for centuries.
+1 Informative. You win the prize for actually addressing most of the arguments in the article. Too bad I don't have mod points. And in answer to your question about who the "New Boss" is, I think it has to be Apple, Amazon, Facebook and Google. I can only infer this from the following quote:
On one hand it doesn’t bother me because the “new boss” doesn’t really tell me what kind of songs to write or who should mix my record. But on the other hand I’m a little disturbed at how dependent I am on these tech behemoths to pursue my craft. In fact it is nigh impossible for me to pursue my craft without enriching Apple, Amazon, Facebook and Google.
Okay, that's fine. Amazon, Google, Apple and Facebook(?) control most of the legal music distribution. But then he later claims:
The New Boss wants to take ALL of your songs, past present and future and pay you nothing.
So he's saying that Amazon, Google, Apple and Facebook want to take his songs and pay him nothing? That doesn't follow from his own data since toward the end, he complains about Apple getting a 30% cut of music sells on iTunes. Notwithstanding the fact that that is a lower cut than retailers were getting before digital distribution (40%), if he doesn't like Apple getting 30% then he needs to complain to his "old boss" the record labels since they're the ones that negotiated this payment breakdown. And for somebody who claims to be some uber-geek, he shows an astonishing ignorance of the way technical systems like Amazon or iTunes work. He is dismayed that Apple gets a 30% cut of music sells, because he thinks this is so much higher than the hosting/infrastructure costs of selling on iTunes but since when has the costs of a service been tied to its price? I'm not saying 30% is right -- I have no idea what Apple's cut should be -- but if you're going to play the game about costs of production versus market price then I can turn that argument around and ask why he thinks $15.99 is a fair price for a cd that oftentimes only has one song that people care about?
In the end, he ends on a hyperbolic, grossly exaggerating note, implying that Amazon, Google, and Apple are basically just freeloaders, deserving no credit for their IP and their work:
My only explanation is that there is just something fundamentally wrong with how many in the tech industry look at the world. They are deluded somehow. Freaks.
Taking no risk and paying nothing to the content creators is built into the collective psyche of the Tech industry. They do not value content. They only see THEIR services as valuable. They are the Masters of the Universe. They bring all that is good. Content magically appears on their blessed networks.
Because no one ever took any risks or spent any money or intellectual capital to build Google, Amazon or Apple. If those like David don't like the "new boss" so much then I would challenge them to lobby the "old boss" to make its own digital music store. Any takers?
1. Honda, Toyota, Kia, et al, have a temporary spike in demand. They increase prices to dampen demand.
One little nitpick: they don't raise prices to dampen demand. They raise prices to exploit demand. You can never have enough demand for a product as long as people aren't satisfying their demand by theft or piracy.
LOL! (I don't use "LOL" unless I really did laugh out loud but this was the funniest comment I've read today.) Sometimes it seems like you guys have these comments queued up!
Just get some probes on Europa already! If you want to find extraterrestrial life, that is your best hope, probably by a wide margin. Unlike Mars, where we'd be lucky to find single-celled organisms, Europa seems to harbor the possibility of multicelluar life, in my non-expert opinion (although the Wikipedia article pooh-poohs this). I think the discovery of life on Europa would rekindle interest in human space exploration since some biologists is going to want to go there in person with a specimen jar. We might even find a monolith or two on there somewhere!
"Alligators complain that birds will not nest in their jaws. Cites discriminatory nesting practices." Damn near makes me ashamed to be American that officials AND COMPANIES here are that stupid and absolutely clueless. The irony of this almost requires no further comment.
I'll buy them tomorrow if they have a decent SDK and are priced below $1000. The question is not what Google can/will do with them but what I as a developer can do with them.
A smartphone-powered robot with wires protuding? Somebody got scared over that? I mean, has there ever been a bomb that didn't have fucking wires exposed? I hope they remembered to cut the red wire first when defusing this toy. Or was it the white wire? Well, we may as well ban all electronics since they all have wires inside of them. This has nothing to do with terrorism and everything to do with us becoming a terror-stricken and easily frightened society. Our fears and risk-aversion are all out of proportion to the actual statistical risk of harm from bombs and terrorism.
Why be a douche about it? For one thing, you didn't even address the question. He did not ask: "Wow, this is neato! How can we apply this methodology to protecting starships?!!" He was asking about the use of magnetism in general to protect spacecraft from radiation. This is by no means a silly question or one steeped in ignorance. Instead, you went on a long tangent about the unsuitability of transient magnet fields and EM pulses -- relevant to the article but irrelevant to the question. I didn't even read your whole reply until I had read some of the responses to it. The problem was not with GP's question but rather with you.
The only reason I'm replying to this is because your post was one of the worst, most arrogant replies I've ever read on Slashdot. And that's saying a lot. Contrary to popular opinion, most scientists are quite humble when dealing with questions from the public. Humility gets instilled in you when everything you say is subject to scrutiny by equally or more knowledgeable peers. Your comment is more suggestive of a physics grad student rather than someone who has spent years working as a scientist.
This is not necessarily a counter-argument to the claim that the warm season is due to climate change. Climate change may be the root cause of the double whammy. A convergence that would normally occur under other circumstances may be occurring now due to climate change:
climate change --> double whammy La Nina/Arctic Oscillation --> record warm season
Was the convergence of La Nina and Arctic Oscillation explainable due to natural causes?
It's not about just plotting trends. This is what people that deny man-made causes for climate-change often fail to grasp. The issue at hand is about understanding the way systems respond to inputs. If we were able to understand from a pure physics perspective the natural causes for a global climate and if the current climate is inconsistent with our expectation than the difference is likely due to human activity. You don't need a hundred years of data to know that applying a lit match to a piece of wood will probably set it on fire -- you just have to understand the way wood responds to fire.
The question is whether we understand the mechanics of natural causes of earth climate as well as the greenhouse gasses/pollutants that man is creating. I don't know, but I have no reason to doubt a priori the scientific consensus on this matter. It certainly seems plausible to me that humans are having some influence on climate; after all, we have a very large footprint on earth.
See, this is the problem with stereotypes. There is nothing ironic at all about a Chinese person complaining about piracy because we don't know if the people complaining about piracy are the same people who are pirating. It might be true and you may think it is true but until you establish that, a Chinese person complaining about piracy shouldn't be ironic in itself. We all like to be treated as individuals when negative presumptions are concerned. It's like saying that it is ironic that an American is complaining about torture in another country. I can condemn torture anywhere I see it -- regardless of whether my own country is doing it -- because I'm not the one doing the torturing. My own behavior is consistent.
Now, you may rightly argue that it is ironic that someone is demanding justice when piracy hurts them personally but remains silent when someone else is the victim of piracy. If this is the case, then we are all guilty of this type of irony. It is so common, maybe 'irony' is not the appropriate word. Maybe we're all just hypocrites to some extent.
Exactly. Why this post is modded +3 and the GP is at +5 is beyond me. Especially since the answer is so obvious. I tether my phone to my laptop and barely use 500MB a month. This is a fraction of what I know people use that stream Pandora and youtube music through local phone apps. I think the fact that he tethered should be inadmissible evidence in a court case about throttling. AT&T's only recourse in regards to tethering is to terminate his contract.
It depends on how much the pirates intend to download. If you're just downloading one item then one half day to download it doesn't make much difference. But if you wanted to pirate Windows 7 Ultimate, Photoshop, and gigabytes of high definition movies then having to wait days to satisfy your need isn't going to cut it. Only casual pirates would tolerate slow download speeds when much faster alternatives exist to get the content. Throttling decreases the amount pirated per unit time.
I'm not one of those people who scoff at scientific research that confirms what they already "knew" but I'm not all that surprised by this. If you think about what physicists and other scientists actually do, at its core, it must reduce to some combination of constraint satisfaction, tree search or some other statistical search or optimization, all of which are NP-Hard in the worst case. Another prominent method that physicists use on some level, is probabilistic inference, which is also NP-Hard. Unless the knowledge comes from a supernatural insight, the quest to find a better physical model of reality must be subject to the same fundamental constraints that any other optimization problem is.
Such as using unsuitable or bad algorithms,
I don't see how this abuse is more likely today than in 1995. Not saying it isn't, though.
wasting enormous amounts of memory, disk space and bandwidth on trivial tasks,
This needs some detail. A lot of systems today simply have to use more resources simply because they are actually doing more under the covers than similar systems did in 1995, even if the user interface doesn't look that different to the end user. At the very least, they'll have to suffer under the bit of bloat that it takes to make them more secure and for good error handling.
using layer upon layer of badly structured APIs
Badly structured APIs are bad no matter how you look at it but there is no free lunch here. Unless the core problem you are trying to solve directly involves computer hardware, I don't see how you can avoid wading through the layers of abstraction. Either you're dealing with those abstractions yourself with your own code or you're using someone else's framework or API that already bridges those layers. Admittedly, it is hard to avoid bloat when the industry standardizes around a small number of large frameworks and libraries that try to satisfy everyone's needs.
and on top of that a browser with an interpreted language running software we use daily (like gmail).
A very small fraction of the code for gmail runs client side.
But I don't know that that is necessarily true. How does being able to hand-optimizing ASM help you do anything but optimize certain types of algorithms for a particular CPU and memory architecture? Does it make you better at finding the right software abstraction to tackle a business problem? Does it make your code less likely to have errors? More secure?
Except in the few cases, attempting to optimize ASM is best left to the compile. This is one case where a little knowledge can cause more harm than no knowledge.