"A lot of Slashdotters are American and the term isn't really used in the USA, probably since prostitution is illegal in most parts of the country (excepting Nevada but not Las Vegas city). So terms that "legitimize" it are less likely to be used."
Thats probably the difference then. In the UK, being paid for having sex is not illegal, although some of the other aspects of working as a prostitute are.
Can't quite understand it, myself. Why would the US make prostitution illegal? It's just supply and demand. Is that not "the genius of capitalism".
If you can take knees off those who cheat, then why don't you just take the knees of those who do not. Then you can just take their cash straight away and not have to mess around with all those cards and stuff.
My own feeling is that I can't see the point getting physical about a game. If you want a fight (and, heaven knows, it keeps you warm in winter), then just have a fight. Why worry about the game?
You should do what we do have done with football. In the UK, we've managed to cleverly tie football to religion. That way, if you can't disagree about the rules of the game, you can have a punch up over transubstantiation or some such.
Religion is great. The rules are wonderfully, er, interpretable.
It's a game people. If you ain't enjoying it, don't play.
Phil
ps actually, perhaps we linked religion to football rather than vice versa. Never got this bit clear in my mind.
The thing is that all of these, you can catch if you know what you are doing. With modded games, someone else has to catch.
You're right about swapping letters. I used to win at monopoly, because I had a trust worthy face, always used to be banker, and would palm 500's out when ever I passed go.
I think he has a great future in front of him. As we are continually told, life is a competition. The point is to win and not to winge about how it wasn't fair when you loose.
Besides which, it is only a game that we are talking about. If you are worried about people cheating, I would suggest chess or scrabble. Much harder to cheat at these.
Actually, the TV license authority is not strictly governmental.
I do agree somewhat with your point though. I don't have a TV, so have a pile of these letters also. I think that the current model is daft -- 98% of households do have a TV, so this is clearly a daft way of collecting money. General taxation would work so much better, or a tax on the sale of equipment.
My own worry, of course, is what happens if they put TV cards into laptops routinely as happened with wireless. Of course, many people don't use broadcast cards at the moment, but they may do eventually. I may find myself unable to buy a machine without such, and get hit with the TV license after all.
No, the current government is a right wing cabal:-)
I agree with your point actually; I was trying to say much the same -- there are signs all around of us of a police state arising, but when it is discussed it generally seems to be speed cameras that come out. I find this depressing; not least, because I like speed cameras. I'm a cyclist and the roads are much better now.
Well, no, they won't have to start from scratch. They can fork cdrecord, which is what they have done.
Free software licenses are not repudiable; once you have released software under one it cannot be removed. You can change the license of future versions but the old one will be there.
Of course, someone might have to start from scratch in understanding the old code, but thats a different issue.
In general, when people say England is a police state, it's preparatory to a diatribe against either a) speed cameras or b) immigration.
Holding people without charge for years, shooting unarmed civilians or searching people for having beards or being Asian is fine, of course, and a necessary response to terrorism.
I'd like to say that such people can be safely ignored as the sad lunatics that they are. But, sadly, they are becoming more of a political force now than they have been for years.
"your basic break and enter guys don't use these tools because rocks through windows are just as convinient. Being caught in possesion of these tools would arouse suspicion. Better to be caught with nothing."
But noisy. Also, leaves evidence of what has happened, which might be noticed during the burglary.
In general, people come into the back of the house, force their way in. Then they leave via the front door, as it much easier to ship goods out this way.
To which the answer is GET MORTICE LOCKS GUYS. They have heavy operation, and harder to pick anyway and do not freely open from the inside. This way even if burglars get in, they have to smash their way out as well, increasing the chance of them getting caught.
I can't be bothered to read Nature and Science these days. The damn articles are so long and hard to read. I mean, have you any idea at all how busy I am? How am I supposed to do any science if I spend all my days reading papers.
NYTimes is reporting a new discovery. However, because neither their journalists couldn't be bothered to understand or imaginatively report the discovery, they have instead decided to simplify it to the point that it appears to be exactly the same as something that biologists. It's hoped that in future, reporting will improve. This could revolutionise newspapers to the point where they are actually useful.
However, 95% of experiements look exactly the same as all the others. The reality is that science is becoming more industrial, there is huge amount of knowledge around and it has to be represented in a computationally amenable form.
The question with EXPO is not whether the basic idea of representing science in this way is sensible, but whether they have choosen the right level of abstraction at the right time. As it stands, their work allows you to model high level concepts of experimental design; this is great, because it's very generic. But it only allows you to search or structure data according to this high level of abstraction. For everything else, you need something lower. And, of course, there are many ontologies around like this for representing all sorts of knowledge.
I like the idea behind EXPO, but I am unconvinced that the world is ready for this yet. Biologists are getting used to representing small parts of their knowledge in relatively loose formalisms; I think EXPO is too much to expect at the moment. But the world is moving this way, no question about it.
You're being too negative about things; we don't have to define an ontological representation for everything in the entire world, for the ontology to have use.
If we can help to define standards for some part of knowledge then we have helped the world a little bit, which is a better place than we started off.
As for how we do it, well, there is lots of experience around the world at doing this. Check out the Dewey Decimal system, or the Library of Congress classification. If you want something bit, then SNOMED might be an example. Or the Gene Ontology. Or, if you are feeling brave, even Cyc.
If you worry about disambiguation of every word ever, then you are going to get depressed. If you just worry about part of the world, then you too could be like me, getting on quite happily using semantic web technology, as part of the solution, to some of the worlds problems.
No, the source has easily available for ages. I think it's part of the standard download. I've used it a number of times.
There used to be a standard download for the platform (ie the VM and tooling, rather than just the java libraries). Never used that, even when I had it, so I don't know if you can still get this.
The problem is that "open source" is not enough. The ability to redistribute was what makes Java a total pain in the ass, not tjh
The libraries can't be straightforwardly open sourced and included on any JVM. The core java libraries are not written totally in Java, but have lots of native code; those parts of the code which depend on native code differs between JVM's.
Bottom line; Java code is portable between JVM's, but the library isn't written in Java.
"attemping to hide attempts to restrict developers"
RMS can be accused of many things, but rarely attempting to hide things. He's always been active about describing his reasons.
The GPL is about politics. It always has been. So has GNU. This is what it is for. FSF is attempting to change the way that an industry worth billions behaves. How can this not be about politics?
Linus' postion is also about poltics, but a different sort of politics.
It's entirely reasonable to argue that the FSF position has the wrong sort of politics, or a political position that you don't agree with, but to criticise it for having a political position, per se, always seems nonsensical to me.
I've always argued that windows is far better than linux, because it's not going to fragment in the way linux does. It's a huge problem. You write an app for linux and you can never tell what their system is going to be like. They could be on redhat, or ubuntu, or any of the popular distros.
With windows, it's nice and clear. Either they are in 2000. Or XP (Home or Business). Or Vista. That is Vista home. Or home premium. Or business. Or richer business edition.
The same notion exists in the UK. The police can not enter your property for search without a warrant. On the other hand, for example, if the police see someone, for example, being strangled through a window of a private property, they can enter immediately without warrant, and can use force to do so. Obviously, the police could use any thing they saw as evidence of assault later on. If they discovered drugs in the property, though, it would be much harder to prosecute for possession.
All of which is not the point; the TV license people are not police. Like many court appointed officers, they actually has some abilities that the police do not; balifs can force entry without suspicion of crime, for example, to seize property.
There are many legal differences between the US and the UK, but the two systems are still surprisingly close.
I suspect that the police do not need a warrant to enter a property in the US, if they have strong reason to suspect that a crime is being actively commisioned inside the property.
The TV licensening people only enter when they detect a TV playing inside. There are a number of "agents of the state" which can enter without warrant as it happens. Balifs are the other obvious example.
As for the "outcry" in the US, this is true, there would be. That is because the US has an outcry at any notion which involves the concept of levying a tax. You can try to convince me that what you are worried about is the civil liberties; however, since as a non US citizen, I can now be arrest, tried and executed with trial, representation or even my consulate being informed while in the US, I'm not sure that you are going to succeed.
"Yeah, except that's the No True Scotsman fallacy"
Yes, which is why I objected to it's original use.
Your points about California may be correct; actually I have no idea at all. I was trying to make a general point and the world is much larger than California. The privitisation of the energy market in the UK has lead to a drop in surplus generating capacity, as with many other countries in Europe. So it seems a feature.
Insurance is not about planning for emergencies. It's alliviating the effects of emergencies post-hoc.
The electricity market in various countries is relatively free, although, obviously, it depends on the country. Of course, it's not totally free. Like any industry which requires substantial infrastructure inside a city, then it's not possible to be completely so. Water, roads, even radio/cell broadcasts, are always going to require some degree of government involvement, or they will tend toward natural monopoly.
Of course, you can always look at deregulated markets, and say "but they don't work because they are not REALLY free". But this covers most markets, which reduces the bounds for discussion.
It's a nice idea, but oil and petrol will be available for a long time. The problem is one of stability of supply. If the oil is available, then it becomes uneconomic to shift to supply anything else. This is fine, of course, until the oil becomes unavailable in the short term; we can't just switch to wind power overnight.
If you want an example of this, you can look at the various electricity utilities since they became deregulated in the first flush of neo-con fervour. Since that time the amount of spare generation capacity has been dropping year on year.
The free market is not always good at emergency planning. This is why we have an army, rather that just letting an invisible hand provide one when the enemy invades.
Anyone with any economics background would have known that decades ago.
Yes, we drive carriages on the road, in exactly the same way that you drive highs down your highways, while ensuring that you keep your frees onto the freeway.
A dual carriageway is a road which is not a motorway which has a physical divider (ie not just a white line painted on the road) between vehicles heading in different directions. A single carriageway is a road which just has the white line.
There are different regulations and speed limits on the two. Unless told other wise you can travel at 70 down a dual carriageway, but only 60 down a single. (Actually, it also depends on the kind of vehicle--minibus can only go 50 on a single, 60 on a dual).
But the US uses more fuel per capita than most countries (it beaten by Australia and the Canadian Inuit states).
The US is almost certainly not leading the world in renewable energy reuse; this would almost certainly be one of the extremely poor african countries.
We are probably not going to run out of fossil fuels--Iraq sits of a lot of oil, there is an enourmous amount of (currently unviable) fuel in the Canadian oil shale, China has vast coal reserves.
So, actually, the problem is that what we are doing to the weather. Still, you can sit there and say "what we do is not going to change much". Not worrying about things, and assuming that it is someone elses problem is always a constructive solution.
BTW, this is not US bashing. You are currently the worst, but will not hold this banner for ever, and the rest (including my own, the UK) are pretty crap.
Slashdot Mirror
"A lot of Slashdotters are American and the term isn't really used in the USA, probably since prostitution is illegal in most parts of the country (excepting Nevada but not Las Vegas city). So terms that "legitimize" it are less likely to be used."
Thats probably the difference then. In the UK, being paid for having sex is not illegal, although some of the other aspects of working as a prostitute are.
Can't quite understand it, myself. Why would the US make prostitution illegal? It's just supply and demand. Is that not "the genius of capitalism".
Phil
If you can take knees off those who cheat, then why don't you just take the knees
of those who do not. Then you can just take their cash straight away and not
have to mess around with all those cards and stuff.
My own feeling is that I can't see the point getting physical about a game. If
you want a fight (and, heaven knows, it keeps you warm in winter), then just have
a fight. Why worry about the game?
You should do what we do have done with football. In the UK, we've managed to
cleverly tie football to religion. That way, if you can't disagree about the
rules of the game, you can have a punch up over transubstantiation or some such.
Religion is great. The rules are wonderfully, er, interpretable.
It's a game people. If you ain't enjoying it, don't play.
Phil
ps actually, perhaps we linked religion to football rather than vice versa. Never
got this bit clear in my mind.
The thing is that all of these, you can catch if you know what you are
doing. With modded games, someone else has to catch.
You're right about swapping letters. I used to win at monopoly, because
I had a trust worthy face, always used to be banker, and would palm 500's
out when ever I passed go.
Ah, halycion days.
I think he has a great future in front of him. As we are continually told, life
is a competition. The point is to win and not to winge about how it wasn't fair
when you loose.
Besides which, it is only a game that we are talking about. If you are worried about people cheating, I would suggest chess or scrabble. Much harder to cheat at these.
Phil
Actually, the TV license authority is not strictly governmental.
I do agree somewhat with your point though. I don't have a TV, so have a pile of
these letters also. I think that the current model is daft -- 98% of households
do have a TV, so this is clearly a daft way of collecting money. General taxation
would work so much better, or a tax on the sale of equipment.
My own worry, of course, is what happens if they put TV cards into laptops
routinely as happened with wireless. Of course, many people don't use broadcast cards
at the moment, but they may do eventually. I may find myself unable to buy a machine
without such, and get hit with the TV license after all.
Phil
No, the current government is a right wing cabal:-)
I agree with your point actually; I was trying to say much the same -- there are signs all around of us of a police state arising, but when it is discussed it generally seems to be speed cameras that come out. I find this depressing; not least, because I like speed cameras. I'm a cyclist and the roads are much better now.
Phil
Well, no, they won't have to start from scratch. They can fork cdrecord, which is what they have done.
Free software licenses are not repudiable; once you have released software under one it cannot be removed. You can change the license of future versions but the old one will be there.
Of course, someone might have to start from scratch in understanding the old code, but thats a different issue.
Phil
In general, when people say England is a police state, it's preparatory to a diatribe against either a) speed cameras or b) immigration.
Holding people without charge for years, shooting unarmed civilians or searching people for having beards or being Asian is fine, of course, and a necessary response to terrorism.
I'd like to say that such people can be safely ignored as the sad lunatics that they are. But, sadly, they are becoming more of a political force now than they have been for years.
Phil
"your basic break and enter guys don't use these tools because rocks through windows are just as convinient. Being caught in possesion of these tools would arouse suspicion. Better to be caught with nothing."
But noisy. Also, leaves evidence of what has happened, which might be noticed during the burglary.
In general, people come into the back of the house, force their way in. Then they leave via the front door, as it much easier to ship goods out this way.
To which the answer is GET MORTICE LOCKS GUYS. They have heavy operation, and harder to pick anyway
and do not freely open from the inside. This way even if burglars get in, they have to smash their
way out as well, increasing the chance of them getting caught.
Belts and braces.
Phil
Pah.
I can't be bothered to read Nature and Science these days. The damn articles are so long and hard to read. I mean, have you any idea at all how busy I am? How am I supposed to do any science if I spend all my days reading papers.
Phil
NYTimes is reporting a new discovery. However, because neither their journalists couldn't be bothered to understand or imaginatively report the discovery, they have instead decided to simplify it to the point that it appears to be exactly the same as something that biologists. It's hoped that in future, reporting will improve. This could revolutionise newspapers to the point where they are actually useful.
Phil
However, 95% of experiements look exactly the same as all the others.
The reality is that science is becoming more industrial, there is
huge amount of knowledge around and it has to be represented in a
computationally amenable form.
The question with EXPO is not whether the basic idea of representing
science in this way is sensible, but whether they have choosen the right
level of abstraction at the right time. As it stands, their work allows you
to model high level concepts of experimental design; this is great, because
it's very generic. But it only allows you to search or structure data according
to this high level of abstraction. For everything else, you need something
lower. And, of course, there are many ontologies around like this for
representing all sorts of knowledge.
I like the idea behind EXPO, but I am unconvinced that the world is ready for
this yet. Biologists are getting used to representing small parts of their
knowledge in relatively loose formalisms; I think EXPO is too much to expect
at the moment. But the world is moving this way, no question about it.
Phil
You're being too negative about things; we don't have to define an ontological representation for everything in the entire world, for the ontology to have use.
If we can help to define standards for some part of knowledge then we have helped the world a little bit, which is a better place than we started off.
As for how we do it, well, there is lots of experience around the world at doing this. Check out the Dewey Decimal system, or the Library of Congress classification. If you want something bit, then SNOMED might be an example. Or the Gene Ontology. Or, if you are feeling brave, even Cyc.
If you worry about disambiguation of every word ever, then you are going to get depressed. If you just worry about part of the world, then you too could be like me, getting on quite happily using semantic web technology, as part of the solution, to some of the worlds problems.
Perhaps, I just lack in ambition.
Phil
No, the source has easily available for ages. I think it's part of the standard download. I've used it a number of times.
There used to be a standard download for the platform (ie the VM and tooling, rather than just the java libraries). Never used that, even when I had it, so I don't know if you can still get this.
The problem is that "open source" is not enough. The ability to redistribute was what makes Java a total pain in the ass, not tjh
The libraries can't be straightforwardly open sourced and included on any JVM. The core java libraries are not written totally in Java, but have lots of native code; those parts of the code which depend on native code differs between JVM's.
Bottom line; Java code is portable between JVM's, but the library isn't written in Java.
Phil
"attemping to hide attempts to restrict developers"
RMS can be accused of many things, but rarely attempting to hide things. He's
always been active about describing his reasons.
The GPL is about politics. It always has been. So has GNU. This is what it is
for. FSF is attempting to change the way that an industry worth billions behaves.
How can this not be about politics?
Linus' postion is also about poltics, but a different sort of politics.
It's entirely reasonable to argue that the FSF position has the wrong sort
of politics, or a political position that you don't agree with, but to
criticise it for having a political position, per se, always seems nonsensical
to me.
Phil
I've always argued that windows is far better than linux, because it's not
going to fragment in the way linux does. It's a huge problem. You write an
app for linux and you can never tell what their system is going to be like.
They could be on redhat, or ubuntu, or any of the popular distros.
With windows, it's nice and clear. Either they are in 2000. Or XP (Home or
Business). Or Vista. That is Vista home. Or home premium. Or business.
Or richer business edition.
Think I'm going to buy a mac.
Phil
The same notion exists in the UK. The police can not enter your property for search
without a warrant. On the other hand, for example, if the police see someone, for example,
being strangled through a window of a private property, they can enter immediately
without warrant, and can use force to do so. Obviously, the police could use any thing
they saw as evidence of assault later on. If they discovered drugs in the property, though,
it would be much harder to prosecute for possession.
All of which is not the point; the TV license people are not police. Like many court
appointed officers, they actually has some abilities that the police do not; balifs
can force entry without suspicion of crime, for example, to seize property.
There are many legal differences between the US and the UK, but the two systems are
still surprisingly close.
Phil
I suspect that the police do not need a warrant to enter a property
in the US, if they have strong reason to suspect that a crime is being
actively commisioned inside the property.
The TV licensening people only enter when they detect a TV playing
inside. There are a number of "agents of the state" which can enter
without warrant as it happens. Balifs are the other obvious example.
As for the "outcry" in the US, this is true, there would be. That is because
the US has an outcry at any notion which involves the concept of
levying a tax. You can try to convince me that what you are worried
about is the civil liberties; however, since as a non US citizen, I can
now be arrest, tried and executed with trial, representation or
even my consulate being informed while in the US, I'm not sure that you
are going to succeed.
Phil
"Yeah, except that's the No True Scotsman fallacy"
Yes, which is why I objected to it's original use.
Your points about California may be correct; actually I have no idea
at all. I was trying to make a general point and the world is much
larger than California. The privitisation of the energy market
in the UK has lead to a drop in surplus generating capacity, as with
many other countries in Europe. So it seems a feature.
Phil
Insurance is not about planning for emergencies. It's alliviating the effects of
emergencies post-hoc.
The electricity market in various countries is relatively free, although, obviously,
it depends on the country. Of course, it's not totally free. Like any industry
which requires substantial infrastructure inside a city, then it's not possible
to be completely so. Water, roads, even radio/cell broadcasts, are always going to
require some degree of government involvement, or they will tend toward natural
monopoly.
Of course, you can always look at deregulated markets, and say "but they don't work
because they are not REALLY free". But this covers most markets, which reduces the
bounds for discussion.
Phil
It's a nice idea, but oil and petrol will be available for a long time. The
problem is one of stability of supply. If the oil is available, then it becomes
uneconomic to shift to supply anything else. This is fine, of course, until
the oil becomes unavailable in the short term; we can't just switch to wind
power overnight.
If you want an example of this, you can look at the various electricity
utilities since they became deregulated in the first flush of neo-con fervour.
Since that time the amount of spare generation capacity has been dropping year
on year.
The free market is not always good at emergency planning. This is why we have an army,
rather that just letting an invisible hand provide one when the enemy invades.
Anyone with any economics background would have known that decades ago.
Phil
Yes, we drive carriages on the road, in exactly the same way that you drive highs
down your highways, while ensuring that you keep your frees onto the freeway.
A dual carriageway is a road which is not a motorway which has a physical divider
(ie not just a white line painted on the road) between vehicles heading in different
directions. A single carriageway is a road which just has the white line.
There are different regulations and speed limits on the two. Unless told other wise
you can travel at 70 down a dual carriageway, but only 60 down a single. (Actually,
it also depends on the kind of vehicle--minibus can only go 50 on a single, 60 on a dual).
Phil
This system looks at white lines in the rear view mirror.
Isn't this likely to cause carnage the first time you hit
a contraflow system.
Phil
But the US uses more fuel per capita than most countries (it beaten by Australia
and the Canadian Inuit states).
The US is almost certainly not leading the world in renewable energy reuse; this
would almost certainly be one of the extremely poor african countries.
We are probably not going to run out of fossil fuels--Iraq sits of a lot of oil, there is an enourmous amount of (currently unviable) fuel in the Canadian oil shale, China has vast coal reserves.
So, actually, the problem is that what we are doing to the weather. Still, you can sit there and say "what we do is not going to change much". Not worrying about things, and assuming that it is someone elses problem is always a constructive solution.
BTW, this is not US bashing. You are currently the worst, but will not hold this banner for ever, and the rest (including my own, the UK) are pretty crap.
Phil