The problem isn't in the idea of subsidizing hybrids. It's in the political system trying to implement it. Hybrids would be an important stepping stone and deserve a good subsidy.
A logical idea: Kick in the subsidy at something like 20% alternative. For each percent the alternative fuel supplies less than 100%, the companies get half a percent of the subsidy they'd be getting for 100% alternative. That way they get some money for moving in the right direction, but they get twice as much money when they make the last 1% jump.
You're right that you can forget how to type on qwerty. How long it takes can vary widely based on usage patterns.
As a Dvorak user, I like to think that I've come up with an interesting solution (though certainly imperfect). Every keyboard I have to use in public always seems to be the flat, traditional style qwerty keyboard. My home keyboard is a natural keyboard using Dvorak. After a month or two getting used to Dvorak on the natural, I discovered that I could get myself to subconsciously switch between Dvorak and qwerty when i switched between natural and flat keyboards, based on its feel under my hands. At this point, I've been using Dvorak for about 2 1/2 years. I can switch pretty comfortably and accurately between the two styles, and the initial stumbling around when switching has gone away virtually completely.
This association of keyboard layout with keyboard shape does have its problems. I do have to use qwerty on a natural keyboard occasionally, and it really throws me off. Fortunately, this doesn't happen often for me.
during the many other recessions that have occured, CD sales didn't even slowdown (the growth rate in sales continued to increase, in fact.)
But you have to consider that this is the first recession in the US since CDs became the primary media for the mainstream market. The last time we had a real recession was about 1991-92. I don't have the market data, but I can say that no one in my family had a CD player until 1994, and I think that was about the time many people adopted it. Saying CDs haven't been hurt by recessions in the past is a moot point. If you can say the same thing for music record sales dating back to the 1920s or something like that, you'd have a point.
The backlash is not at all comparable. The Boston Port Act virtually destroyed the economy of an entire state, which included many innocent, neutral people at the time, and placed the state directly under military rule, making a military confrontation leading to a 7-year war virtually inevitable. Not to mention the fact that that war gave independence to a country whose principles have had a profound influence on the modern world. Comparing that to bankrupting a small unprofitable company is laughable. Napster condoned illegal trading; Massachusetts as a whole didn't necessarily.
I believe in greatly shortening the time length of intellectual property rights and making those rights serve the people better, but please... get your history right.
It's true that much of Hancock's money was inherited, and that tea drinking overall dropped, but it would be naive to say that Hancock wasn't looking after profits. I'm sure he was wise enough not to live solely off of inheritance. The tea business wasn't very profitable, but it did allow him to diversify a little while supporting his political interests. Plus there would be plenty of business potential once the East India Company's legal monopoly was removed. Obviously, it didn't work out great for him in the end- I would guess the shipping side of his business was hit heavily by the British Navy along with everyone else's.
I'm not saying it was all about money, but it wasn't totally about taxation without representation either. Just because a bunch of Founding Fathers died broke doesn't mean they weren't seeking profits in the process. When the protesting and smuggling began in the 1760s, most weren't expecting a devastating war followed by a poorly conceived government (Articles of Confederation). Few expected to die broke (or insanely wealthy, just somewhere in the middle). (BTW, the one who most clearly expected a fight for independence from the beginning is the one who now has a beer brand named after him.)
England wasn't just imposing the taxes because the colonies had no choice, either. They had just financed the French & Indian War and expected the colonies to pay their share. They were used to higher tea taxes in Britain. They were used to treating colonies as much less than equals. (Franklin observed this in Ireland at the time.) Demanding representation, to them, seemed outrageous, silly, and maybe somewhat surprising. England imposed the taxes, not just because of power, but because it didn't understand the colonial view. Probably not totally unlike the RIAA today, in that respect.
I like your idea about putting together a large voting bloc, but let's be realistic. It's not going to happen because the money isn't there, and most don't have the enthusiasm for it. If someone were organizing such a bloc and had a fair amount of support, I'd gladly chip in $1000 right now, even though I'm a poor college student. But the truth is that we have a better chance in Congress and the courts.
Guess how they managed to sustain a boycott? By smuggling to provide a cheaper source of tea than the East India Company.
Guess who bankrolled the Sons of Liberty? John Hancock, one of the leading tea smugglers in the colonies, and considered the richest man in Massachusetts.
Profit was not the sole motivator, but it was a factor. If you want a source, find the nearest U.S. history textbook. Mine's not handy at the moment, or I'd give you a title. For what little it's worth, there's a fictionalized account called Rise To Rebellion by Jeff Shaara that is both very entertaining and very accurate on the known details.
You're certainly not the first on slashdot to support restricting IP rights to individuals only. On the surface it sounds like a great idea, restricting corporate rights and influence, and I once supported it myself. But what good will it do?
Think it through. Individuals generally don't have the resources to publish or manufacture their work for profit, and most IP is work for hire. So what will they do? License it out, of course. And the works for hire? What will the license terms be? The employer financing development will want and probably get an exclusive license from the individual. If the license isn't exclusive, it certainly won't make any business sense for the employer. That's just what aspect. There are other scenarios to consider like job-hopping and wrongful termination.
I think what we really need is a shorter timelimit that will stay in effect- even if that means passing a constitutional amendment so that the corporations can't afford to buy a longer time. There are other ways we'll have to use to break the Content Cartels stranglehold on entertainment copyrights.
1. Acknowledge the fact that fair use rights cannot co-exist with effective technological means of copy prevention. Technology cannot and will never be able to accurately determine whether the user has a fair use right to make a copy. Fair use does not place an inherent limit on the number of copies I may make, limit me to using them on only certain machines, or require me to identify myself. When making a purchase, I do not imply my consent to have information about myself or my purchases tracked in any form. Citizens (we are more than consumers!) will not stand for any limitations on fair use rights.
2. Acknowledge that the Constitution intends copyright and intellectual property laws to benefit the people in general and not the IP holders. It is for this reason that copyrights must have a time limit. A restoration of this time limit to a reasonable length such as the original 14 years is long past due. With its present length, copyrights are detrimental to society. Much of the culture and information in this country is privately owned. Virtually all printed publications, music, and media created in my lifetime and my parents' lifetimes (and since I'm only in my 20s, my grandparents' as well) are restricted because of IP ownership. Although I don't have any numbers to back this up, I can assure you that this is over 90% of surviving media and 99.99% of the media commonly used and experienced in our country today. Our culture is effectively under private ownership.
3. Repeal the DMCA. For/., this is enough said.
4. Protect the rights of citizens with a bill similar to that proposed by digitalconsumer.org.
5. Acknowledge that the battle being waged between the computer and content industries is akin to printing presses vs. scribes and should not be interfered with.
I wish the article had been more detailed on this point. Are they 100% planning to "drive" over water to make the trip, or is that ability just a safety precaution?
Sounds to me like, by your theory, all physics professors bright enough and interested enough to build and test a time machine should disappear from our timeline. They should leave a trail of mugshots on the backs of milk cartons. (A professor jumping attempting to jump into our timeline instead of out would also cause a branch from our main trunk, I believe.)
Can we just make my entire physics department disappear, please?
The question shouldn't be "Is it the flavor of the day?" but "Is it useful for teaching the basics?" Java is one example that falls in both categories. Does.NET? I don't know enough about.NET to really say.
What I do know is that C#'s ability to allow pointers and memory management without requiring that they be used could allow more flexibility for professors to introduce concepts whenever they want to. Not that it's worth the expense of moving to Microsoft software....
The original ruling came in the early 1920's, IIRC a few years before the first radio-broadcasted game, let alone TV. I could see it described as local exhibitions then, even if the argument itself was nonsense. But now, and when the Supreme Court upheld it in the early 1990s, national TV deals should've made the whole argument a moot point.
If that really was the original reasoning for the exemption, why in the world did the Supreme Court let it stand?
Re:They broke MS Proxy server compatibility
on
Mozilla 0.9.9 Released
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Not sure if it's related, but read the release notes. There is mention of workarounds to some proxy problems.
"Having said that, I find Perens' editorial weak in substance or facts, starting from the first paragraph where he uses the public square "commons" as a parallel with GPLd software, which is ironic if you really think about: The commons was merely where you did you trade, trading cucumbers for gold pendants, and horses for a gaggle of geese -> The idea is that everyone has different skills and focuses, and commerce is how we all live full lives."
I believe you missed the point of the commons analogy. Yes, the commons benefitted the community by encouraging commerce. But where did it come from? Wasn't it land, didn't it have previous ownership in many cases (referring to the Old World, not the US where the gov. set it aside at the beginning)? Couldn't someone have profitted off that land by keeping it private? Yes. But by making it available to everyone, they gave everyone a common ground from which everyone could profit much more than they had before, including the previous owners. Does that mean that it would be beneficial for everyone to make their land a public commons? No, a lot of land needs to stay private to give people possessions to profit from.
So why did people benefit from the commons? It made it possible to enter business without needing the overhead of buying land and building a store, which few could afford. You had a shortcut to having a simple store so you could focus on making your product and making progress.
Now here's how it applies to technology these days: There are many things that programmers have been repeatedly doing for 30 years in competition with one another or as building blocks to other things they wanted to do. No progress is made when work is duplicated. If you want to make progress, you need things to build on freely, things you can change and tweak to fit with your goals. You're not going to get a better operating system by building off of Windows unless MS hires you. As programmers, we're not going to make or improve many things if we have to go back and rewrite fundamental parts of, say, an operating system every time we want to improve on the OS. If you're not making much progress, you're going to inevitably find yourself competing on cost and margins against many other related products, and you're likely to lose out. Having something to build off of lets you work more on the cutting edge where it's easier to distinguish a product with revolutionary ideas.
Like with the commons, not all software should be free. You need to make your profits on the cutting edge to subsidize giving away old tech, if you're in it for the money. But software companies abandon old software after a few years anyway. Why not use that old tech to increase the intellectual commons?
Is open source the best way to do this? Probably not; short term copyrights (like the 14 years originally in the law) seem like the best, assuming the code gets released when the copyright expires. Sometimes I wonder if companies like Disney created the need for open source software with their demands for eternal residual profits for squashing competition....
Look, I'm as much of an idealist as most/.ers, but get real. Be was continually running in the red, and giving away all their code when they could sell it would've gotten their butts dragged to court by their creditors. Be wasn't designed like Linux, which is robust but benefits greatly from contracting out knowledgable support staff.
No, but I think that's what I should get to use for calculating it. The RIAA's (not MPAA) product is not really the music but its medium (CD, packaging etc.). The music is only licensed from the musicians, IIRC. Doesn't that mean if I steal the music without the CD I'm stealing from the musicians and not the RIAA, so I'm not responsible for the RIAA's loss? Oh yeah, that's right, the RIAA happens to have a monopoly on traditional means of distribution, don't they? I cost them money without stealing from them.
BTW, with a $25 minimum claim for civil court cases and at the $0.0023 / song rate, I believe you could pirate 10,000 songs before the amount of harm can be deemed high enough to warrant a civil suit.
IIRC, the Pentium 4's hyper-pipeline has 2 stages dedicated to driving the signals across the chip for that reason. A comparison here [slashdot.org] suggests this Itanium will be more than twice as big as the current iteration of P4. I wonder if they'll try to compensate or simply make raising clock speed a lower priority?
just a 5 minute shot? that would be realy disapointing since he has the power to save another crew member simple by stoping time and such....to much cool power to play with to just make a cameo.
Which is why he has just a 5 minute cameo. A lot of people hated it enough when he saved the ship regularly, let alone able to resolve the entire movie plot with a word. I liked Wesley despite the way he was nearly ruined, but if Wesley goes with the crew after the wedding scene I'll walk out (unless he has relinquished the powers). You can't logically develop and sustain a plot when a character can instantly resolve it at any moment.
Nonetheless I'm eager to see Wesley again. Does he have some interesting journeys to share with us? Has he given up his powers after many, many "years" of time travel? Has he decided to settle down and lead a normal life? Where is the Traveller who introduced him to "new planes of existence"? Has he had contact with Dr. Crusher and the crew or is he dropping in uninvited? Will there be an explanation for his changed appearance? (Wil Wheaton is no longer a teenager, obviously.)
I don't buy into the bad reviews I've seen floating around. I can't wait.
Slashdot Mirror
Simple. 1. The average person doesn't know or understand. 2. Most people can't afford the legal cost of defending civil disobedience now.
The problem isn't in the idea of subsidizing hybrids. It's in the political system trying to implement it. Hybrids would be an important stepping stone and deserve a good subsidy.
A logical idea: Kick in the subsidy at something like 20% alternative. For each percent the alternative fuel supplies less than 100%, the companies get half a percent of the subsidy they'd be getting for 100% alternative. That way they get some money for moving in the right direction, but they get twice as much money when they make the last 1% jump.
Would that ever pass Congress? Of course not.
You're right that you can forget how to type on qwerty. How long it takes can vary widely based on usage patterns.
As a Dvorak user, I like to think that I've come up with an interesting solution (though certainly imperfect). Every keyboard I have to use in public always seems to be the flat, traditional style qwerty keyboard. My home keyboard is a natural keyboard using Dvorak. After a month or two getting used to Dvorak on the natural, I discovered that I could get myself to subconsciously switch between Dvorak and qwerty when i switched between natural and flat keyboards, based on its feel under my hands. At this point, I've been using Dvorak for about 2 1/2 years. I can switch pretty comfortably and accurately between the two styles, and the initial stumbling around when switching has gone away virtually completely.
This association of keyboard layout with keyboard shape does have its problems. I do have to use qwerty on a natural keyboard occasionally, and it really throws me off. Fortunately, this doesn't happen often for me.
during the many other recessions that have occured, CD sales didn't even slowdown (the growth rate in sales continued to increase, in fact.) But you have to consider that this is the first recession in the US since CDs became the primary media for the mainstream market. The last time we had a real recession was about 1991-92. I don't have the market data, but I can say that no one in my family had a CD player until 1994, and I think that was about the time many people adopted it. Saying CDs haven't been hurt by recessions in the past is a moot point. If you can say the same thing for music record sales dating back to the 1920s or something like that, you'd have a point.
The backlash is not at all comparable. The Boston Port Act virtually destroyed the economy of an entire state, which included many innocent, neutral people at the time, and placed the state directly under military rule, making a military confrontation leading to a 7-year war virtually inevitable. Not to mention the fact that that war gave independence to a country whose principles have had a profound influence on the modern world. Comparing that to bankrupting a small unprofitable company is laughable. Napster condoned illegal trading; Massachusetts as a whole didn't necessarily.
I believe in greatly shortening the time length of intellectual property rights and making those rights serve the people better, but please... get your history right.
It's true that much of Hancock's money was inherited, and that tea drinking overall dropped, but it would be naive to say that Hancock wasn't looking after profits. I'm sure he was wise enough not to live solely off of inheritance. The tea business wasn't very profitable, but it did allow him to diversify a little while supporting his political interests. Plus there would be plenty of business potential once the East India Company's legal monopoly was removed. Obviously, it didn't work out great for him in the end- I would guess the shipping side of his business was hit heavily by the British Navy along with everyone else's.
I'm not saying it was all about money, but it wasn't totally about taxation without representation either. Just because a bunch of Founding Fathers died broke doesn't mean they weren't seeking profits in the process. When the protesting and smuggling began in the 1760s, most weren't expecting a devastating war followed by a poorly conceived government (Articles of Confederation). Few expected to die broke (or insanely wealthy, just somewhere in the middle). (BTW, the one who most clearly expected a fight for independence from the beginning is the one who now has a beer brand named after him.)
England wasn't just imposing the taxes because the colonies had no choice, either. They had just financed the French & Indian War and expected the colonies to pay their share. They were used to higher tea taxes in Britain. They were used to treating colonies as much less than equals. (Franklin observed this in Ireland at the time.) Demanding representation, to them, seemed outrageous, silly, and maybe somewhat surprising. England imposed the taxes, not just because of power, but because it didn't understand the colonial view. Probably not totally unlike the RIAA today, in that respect.
I like your idea about putting together a large voting bloc, but let's be realistic. It's not going to happen because the money isn't there, and most don't have the enthusiasm for it. If someone were organizing such a bloc and had a fair amount of support, I'd gladly chip in $1000 right now, even though I'm a poor college student. But the truth is that we have a better chance in Congress and the courts.
Guess how they managed to sustain a boycott? By smuggling to provide a cheaper source of tea than the East India Company.
Guess who bankrolled the Sons of Liberty? John Hancock, one of the leading tea smugglers in the colonies, and considered the richest man in Massachusetts.
Profit was not the sole motivator, but it was a factor. If you want a source, find the nearest U.S. history textbook. Mine's not handy at the moment, or I'd give you a title. For what little it's worth, there's a fictionalized account called Rise To Rebellion by Jeff Shaara that is both very entertaining and very accurate on the known details.
If the "process" generates a "virtual object", that's covered as well.
No wonder corporations love "object-oriented programming."
You're certainly not the first on slashdot to support restricting IP rights to individuals only. On the surface it sounds like a great idea, restricting corporate rights and influence, and I once supported it myself. But what good will it do?
Think it through. Individuals generally don't have the resources to publish or manufacture their work for profit, and most IP is work for hire. So what will they do? License it out, of course. And the works for hire? What will the license terms be? The employer financing development will want and probably get an exclusive license from the individual. If the license isn't exclusive, it certainly won't make any business sense for the employer. That's just what aspect. There are other scenarios to consider like job-hopping and wrongful termination.
I think what we really need is a shorter timelimit that will stay in effect- even if that means passing a constitutional amendment so that the corporations can't afford to buy a longer time. There are other ways we'll have to use to break the Content Cartels stranglehold on entertainment copyrights.
1. Acknowledge the fact that fair use rights cannot co-exist with effective technological means of copy prevention. Technology cannot and will never be able to accurately determine whether the user has a fair use right to make a copy. Fair use does not place an inherent limit on the number of copies I may make, limit me to using them on only certain machines, or require me to identify myself. When making a purchase, I do not imply my consent to have information about myself or my purchases tracked in any form. Citizens (we are more than consumers!) will not stand for any limitations on fair use rights.
/., this is enough said.
2. Acknowledge that the Constitution intends copyright and intellectual property laws to benefit the people in general and not the IP holders. It is for this reason that copyrights must have a time limit. A restoration of this time limit to a reasonable length such as the original 14 years is long past due. With its present length, copyrights are detrimental to society. Much of the culture and information in this country is privately owned. Virtually all printed publications, music, and media created in my lifetime and my parents' lifetimes (and since I'm only in my 20s, my grandparents' as well) are restricted because of IP ownership. Although I don't have any numbers to back this up, I can assure you that this is over 90% of surviving media and 99.99% of the media commonly used and experienced in our country today. Our culture is effectively under private ownership.
3. Repeal the DMCA. For
4. Protect the rights of citizens with a bill similar to that proposed by digitalconsumer.org.
5. Acknowledge that the battle being waged between the computer and content industries is akin to printing presses vs. scribes and should not be interfered with.
http://members.truepath.com/objective/propaganda.h tml
Says it all, doesn't it?
Too bad the links in the slashdot story are broken. The blurb seems to incorrectly imply that IBM was responsible, not NEC.
"Nobody who has to ask what a yacht costs has any business owning one." -J.P. Morgan
Why else do you think a company with expensive products like Cray's would avoid posting prices online?
I wish the article had been more detailed on this point. Are they 100% planning to "drive" over water to make the trip, or is that ability just a safety precaution?
Sounds to me like, by your theory, all physics professors bright enough and interested enough to build and test a time machine should disappear from our timeline. They should leave a trail of mugshots on the backs of milk cartons. (A professor jumping attempting to jump into our timeline instead of out would also cause a branch from our main trunk, I believe.)
Can we just make my entire physics department disappear, please?
The mainstream media picks this one up, and AMD and nVidia deny everything. Secretly they like the idea and swap stocks.
The question shouldn't be "Is it the flavor of the day?" but "Is it useful for teaching the basics?" Java is one example that falls in both categories. Does .NET? I don't know enough about .NET to really say.
What I do know is that C#'s ability to allow pointers and memory management without requiring that they be used could allow more flexibility for professors to introduce concepts whenever they want to. Not that it's worth the expense of moving to Microsoft software....
The cat's eating the Playstation 6! Bad kitty!
The original ruling came in the early 1920's, IIRC a few years before the first radio-broadcasted game, let alone TV. I could see it described as local exhibitions then, even if the argument itself was nonsense. But now, and when the Supreme Court upheld it in the early 1990s, national TV deals should've made the whole argument a moot point.
If that really was the original reasoning for the exemption, why in the world did the Supreme Court let it stand?
Not sure if it's related, but read the release notes. There is mention of workarounds to some proxy problems.
"Having said that, I find Perens' editorial weak in substance or facts, starting from the first paragraph where he uses the public square "commons" as a parallel with GPLd software, which is ironic if you really think about: The commons was merely where you did you trade, trading cucumbers for gold pendants, and horses for a gaggle of geese -> The idea is that everyone has different skills and focuses, and commerce is how we all live full lives."
I believe you missed the point of the commons analogy. Yes, the commons benefitted the community by encouraging commerce. But where did it come from? Wasn't it land, didn't it have previous ownership in many cases (referring to the Old World, not the US where the gov. set it aside at the beginning)? Couldn't someone have profitted off that land by keeping it private? Yes. But by making it available to everyone, they gave everyone a common ground from which everyone could profit much more than they had before, including the previous owners. Does that mean that it would be beneficial for everyone to make their land a public commons? No, a lot of land needs to stay private to give people possessions to profit from.
So why did people benefit from the commons? It made it possible to enter business without needing the overhead of buying land and building a store, which few could afford. You had a shortcut to having a simple store so you could focus on making your product and making progress.
Now here's how it applies to technology these days: There are many things that programmers have been repeatedly doing for 30 years in competition with one another or as building blocks to other things they wanted to do. No progress is made when work is duplicated. If you want to make progress, you need things to build on freely, things you can change and tweak to fit with your goals. You're not going to get a better operating system by building off of Windows unless MS hires you. As programmers, we're not going to make or improve many things if we have to go back and rewrite fundamental parts of, say, an operating system every time we want to improve on the OS. If you're not making much progress, you're going to inevitably find yourself competing on cost and margins against many other related products, and you're likely to lose out. Having something to build off of lets you work more on the cutting edge where it's easier to distinguish a product with revolutionary ideas.
Like with the commons, not all software should be free. You need to make your profits on the cutting edge to subsidize giving away old tech, if you're in it for the money. But software companies abandon old software after a few years anyway. Why not use that old tech to increase the intellectual commons?
Is open source the best way to do this? Probably not; short term copyrights (like the 14 years originally in the law) seem like the best, assuming the code gets released when the copyright expires. Sometimes I wonder if companies like Disney created the need for open source software with their demands for eternal residual profits for squashing competition....
In the end, it's about progress, not money.
Look, I'm as much of an idealist as most /.ers, but get real. Be was continually running in the red, and giving away all their code when they could sell it would've gotten their butts dragged to court by their creditors. Be wasn't designed like Linux, which is robust but benefits greatly from contracting out knowledgable support staff.
No, but I think that's what I should get to use for calculating it. The RIAA's (not MPAA) product is not really the music but its medium (CD, packaging etc.). The music is only licensed from the musicians, IIRC. Doesn't that mean if I steal the music without the CD I'm stealing from the musicians and not the RIAA, so I'm not responsible for the RIAA's loss? Oh yeah, that's right, the RIAA happens to have a monopoly on traditional means of distribution, don't they? I cost them money without stealing from them.
BTW, with a $25 minimum claim for civil court cases and at the $0.0023 / song rate, I believe you could pirate 10,000 songs before the amount of harm can be deemed high enough to warrant a civil suit.
IIRC, the Pentium 4's hyper-pipeline has 2 stages dedicated to driving the signals across the chip for that reason. A comparison here [slashdot.org] suggests this Itanium will be more than twice as big as the current iteration of P4. I wonder if they'll try to compensate or simply make raising clock speed a lower priority?
Which is why he has just a 5 minute cameo. A lot of people hated it enough when he saved the ship regularly, let alone able to resolve the entire movie plot with a word. I liked Wesley despite the way he was nearly ruined, but if Wesley goes with the crew after the wedding scene I'll walk out (unless he has relinquished the powers). You can't logically develop and sustain a plot when a character can instantly resolve it at any moment.
Nonetheless I'm eager to see Wesley again. Does he have some interesting journeys to share with us? Has he given up his powers after many, many "years" of time travel? Has he decided to settle down and lead a normal life? Where is the Traveller who introduced him to "new planes of existence"? Has he had contact with Dr. Crusher and the crew or is he dropping in uninvited? Will there be an explanation for his changed appearance? (Wil Wheaton is no longer a teenager, obviously.)
I don't buy into the bad reviews I've seen floating around. I can't wait.