Making hardware companies pay fees for acts which may or may not be committed by people they cannot control is nothing more than a government subsidy to a private enterprise. The media companies have a reputation for screwing the artist and screwing the public. Now they want to screw other private businesses with a preemptive restraint of trade.
I sat let's make the media companies pay for all the actual and potential hearing loss that comes from listening to too loud music. That ought to bankrupt them pretty quick. Let's hear their arguments against that! Rediculous as that is, it's exactly what they think they can do to everyone else.
While it's good to see NASA seriously looking into returning to the Moon, I think the money would be better spend in focusing on sending robotic missions. Not only would it be more cost effective, but it could have just as great a scientific return, and would spur the development of a technology that would have huge spin off benefits here on earth.
I'm also all for a more agressive effort to explore Mars robotically. But the idea of sending humans there so soon seems very foolish to me. Why? There's little benefit to having people do the exploring, when an advanced robot could do the job better, safer, and faster.
For better or worse, logs are a cultural sign of the times. Now instead of just 15 minutes of fame, you can be accessable to the world 24-7 with your own personal blog. Of course, that's 27-7 divided by 800 million, but still....
There was a time when "I Love Lucy" was min driviling, mindless entertainment (or for the Lucy fans, substitute "Gilligan's Island"). Now it's an important cultural icon. Who knows if, in the fullness of time, what Suzy did last night will be a simple embarrassment or a social revelation.
What would be really nice is some AI capability in the search engine that takes info from your personal profile and uses it to construct a rating of significance according to your own values. That might even be a reason to actually have a profile.
Since when do companies want to play nice? In a capatalistic free market economy, especially one driven by the need for short term profits such as ours, playing nice is corporate suicide. Open source standards will only be pushed by the large industry movers when it is in their immediate best interest to exploit the efforts of other, smaller companies. I don't see that as being realistic today.
The utopian ideals of open source standards is a wonderful fiction, and I wish society valued long term profits and communal gain over individual engrandizement, but it's not realistic, at least not here and not now. For this reason, I suspect open source will remain a small anomoly and not a standard or some time to come.
I hope they find some really big frickin' diamonds on Mars, because otherwise all they're likely to find is dirt, and the trucking costs getting it back here are gonna kill 'em.
Bad science? More likely bad reporting. The public likes their news in small, easilly digested sound bites, but something as complex as environmental policy issues don't fit that template. So one scientific paper says the ozone hole isn't as big as before (even if the previous case was a record breaker) and the press says that things are recovering. That's just misleading.
What we need are better educated reporters. And a better educated public. But I'm not holding my breath for that, no matter how polluted the air is.
They're pricing spaceflight like gasoline now, to the thousandth of a cent? Well, for a hundred buck hop to LA, I can live with stupid marketing tricks.
Right. It is only pseudo-educational. If it can record music, that will be it's dominant use, almost certainly. And that's just a distraction, not anything that will help kids learn.
Yet Americans continue to think that they are automatically number one in everything. The man on the street still believes that we Americans are the smartest, strongest, and most capable people in the world. Mostly that's a delusion supported by ignorance, as the typical American knows very little about what's going on in the world outside of the US.
Certainly any American is capable of being the best, and is more likely to acheive that given good opportunities and education, and a culture that values whatever endeavor they choose. For science and technology, that's just not valued much by our culture. Americans like entertainment and instant gratification, and think the more of that they have the better they will be.
The only concern that I would have with this is in the future, will the fences be removed? I could only immagine some poor farmer in nebraska being stalked and eaten by a tiger.
Fences? What fences?
1) Import endangered animals to North American parks. 2) Wait for the public to becme bored with the idea. 3) Sell hunting licenses and safari junkets. 4) Profit!!!
Keep your hands off my reference library
on
Textbooks With EULAs
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
I refer back to more than a few of my old textbooks regularly. (Do others?) Even if the same information is available online, I know exactly where to look in my familiar textbooks, and my old notes are often helpful too. I'd hate for all that to be lost.
Even though textbooks are frightfully expensive, the loss of personal history isn't worth 33% off. Even though some information becomes obsolete, basic principles have lasting value. To me, these EULAs are only an admission that the product being purchased doesn't have lasting value. I think that's more true about the publishing executives and lawyers who come up with these ideas than it is about the books themselves.
Society is a collection of individuals, and when taken as a collective has different operational requirements than the individuals do. The needs of the society are often in conflict with the needs of it's constituants. I might desire to have as much of (if not most of or all of) the money/women/power as possible, but if I accomplish that to excess society as a whole suffers. Yet if society inhibits my desires too much, again society suffers as people become nonproductive. And there's no acceptable standard of what excess is either. Even with completely healthy individuals, a liberal society has these conflicts. A hive or dictatorship maximizes one variant of societal success at the expense of individuals. It can go the other way to, into anarchy or uncooperative isolationism. Either extreme is bad. Very bad.
I suggest as the only solution to this conumdrum the development of a massive quantum computer to treat collective social institutions as one big linear programming problem. Then situations can be arranged behind the scenes so people are "led" to "freely" make the best choices that maximize their own and society's benefit.
There's nothing special about information as a resource or a consummable in society. Information doesn't "want" anything, either to be publically free or to be propriatarilly highly valued. It is the people and societies who might make use of that information who have those desires. And this presumes all people are intelligent, well informed and involved, hopefully benevolent too. Deviate from this ideal, and things break down. Introduce truly sick or insane people, and the situation gets totally foobarred.
There's no good answer. My advice, for what it's worth (not much)... Just try to do the best you can with an impossible situation, and don't let anyone get too much power.
Then why isn't there a bigger market for people selling motherboards, or PCs with no operating system on them? If there's a demand, it should be profitable for someone to supply it. If it's not profitable, there isn't the demand. If there isn't the demand, it's not what people want.
I am not, repeat not, exhonorating Microsoft from their well deserved association with evil. However, there are social benefits to the monolithic way computing power is presented through Windows. Despite all it's hassles and inadequacies, there are large masses of people who would not use computers were it not for Windows. People who can't program their VCR, and for whom anything beyond turning a key in their car is way too technical, can spend money over the internet because AOL runs under Windows. Talk about Loki joining up with Satan if you wish, but that's what the public values. In a society where third basemen are more valuable than brain surgeons, and the only Fields Medal they care about is the lawnmower blade that trims the fifty yard line, the culture rewards what the culture most values. Bill is the uberlord of an evil empire because he provides a benefit that society wants, and the ultimate proof of it is in his bank account. That benefit should be factored into these equations as well, but it never is. Sure, I think most computer power is wasted playing solitaire, or downloading music that I personally don't like, but who am I to judge? Those are benefits that shouldn't be dismissed out of hand, and the mass market made up of the common little people wouldn't be there without Windows.
Where does this eight minute figure come from? How reliable is it, and how dependent on environment and corporate culture is it?
All the distractions can be managed by being turned off except at designated intervals. Now if we could only cut down on the hours of pointless meetings.
I have VoIP, and I'm happy with it. I've gotten rid of my land lines as a needless expense. I might have gotten rid of it anyway, as it's simply more money than it's worth. Maybe I prefer email over voice mail. I do also have cell phones, which are very common.
I pay for the things that I choose to pay for, and bristle at being told that I have to buy things that I don't want and don't need. Don't you?
It's an individuals choice to determine their own needs, and perform their own cost vs. risk analysis. Do I need a land line 911 service when I have cell phones? Can I accept the risk that my VoIP won't work when the power goes out and I forgot to charge the cell phones? Do I have to have homeowners insurance on my house that's all paid off? Should I get the maximum auto insurance or is minimum coverage acceptable? These should be my decisions, and not the government's.
No one is legally obligated to have any phone service in their homes. No one is obligated to have one and only one communications link. The law is inadquate to handle the complexity of today's communications technology environment. The FCC is out of line (pun intened) on this one.
HP ink cartridges have always been too expensive. Way too expensive. I stopped buying their printers because of that. Also, the way they clean the heads by spraying ink into a tray on powerup limits the life of the printer. On my HP3820, this resulted in a column of hard ink that grew so tall it jammed the head (of course, I only discovered this after destructively disassembling the printer). I hope they have an improved method of cleaning the new print heads.
For now, I'll stick with my Cannon printer, which I'm happy with. But I want a wider format printer, and in my price range HP is the only game in town. I hope these improvments work their way across the product line in time.
While I'm all for increasing the use of robots in space, I don't think the cousin robot could do this job (nor could a human). Yes, a robot inspector would be a good thing. But the tiles are each custom made to the particular geometry of the ship where they are placed, and they cannot be manufactured in place. The shuttle couldn't carry up spares for each and every tile. Nor can most other problems be repaired in space. You can't slap a little epoxy over a hole when it needs to withstand the heat of reentry. Such repair jobs would only contaminate the tiles and prevent them from working.
As for a few extra meals, I think it would take more than that to maintain seven people in the hostile environment of space for who knows how long.
Of course, if this suit is allowed to proceed, doesn't that also open her up to suits by her clients for all the predictions she made that didn't work out perfectly? 3oo million probably won't be enough for her to pay all the suits she'll lose if the courts determine astrology is legally valid and binding.
Slashdot Mirror
Making hardware companies pay fees for acts which may or may not be committed by people they cannot control is nothing more than a government subsidy to a private enterprise. The media companies have a reputation for screwing the artist and screwing the public. Now they want to screw other private businesses with a preemptive restraint of trade.
I sat let's make the media companies pay for all the actual and potential hearing loss that comes from listening to too loud music. That ought to bankrupt them pretty quick. Let's hear their arguments against that! Rediculous as that is, it's exactly what they think they can do to everyone else.
While it's good to see NASA seriously looking into returning to the Moon, I think the money would be better spend in focusing on sending robotic missions. Not only would it be more cost effective, but it could have just as great a scientific return, and would spur the development of a technology that would have huge spin off benefits here on earth.
I'm also all for a more agressive effort to explore Mars robotically. But the idea of sending humans there so soon seems very foolish to me. Why? There's little benefit to having people do the exploring, when an advanced robot could do the job better, safer, and faster.
For better or worse, logs are a cultural sign of the times. Now instead of just 15 minutes of fame, you can be accessable to the world 24-7 with your own personal blog. Of course, that's 27-7 divided by 800 million, but still....
There was a time when "I Love Lucy" was min driviling, mindless entertainment (or for the Lucy fans, substitute "Gilligan's Island"). Now it's an important cultural icon. Who knows if, in the fullness of time, what Suzy did last night will be a simple embarrassment or a social revelation.
What would be really nice is some AI capability in the search engine that takes info from your personal profile and uses it to construct a rating of significance according to your own values. That might even be a reason to actually have a profile.
Since when do companies want to play nice? In a capatalistic free market economy, especially one driven by the need for short term profits such as ours, playing nice is corporate suicide. Open source standards will only be pushed by the large industry movers when it is in their immediate best interest to exploit the efforts of other, smaller companies. I don't see that as being realistic today.
The utopian ideals of open source standards is a wonderful fiction, and I wish society valued long term profits and communal gain over individual engrandizement, but it's not realistic, at least not here and not now. For this reason, I suspect open source will remain a small anomoly and not a standard or some time to come.
I hope they find some really big frickin' diamonds on Mars, because otherwise all they're likely to find is dirt, and the trucking costs getting it back here are gonna kill 'em.
Bad science? More likely bad reporting. The public likes their news in small, easilly digested sound bites, but something as complex as environmental policy issues don't fit that template. So one scientific paper says the ozone hole isn't as big as before (even if the previous case was a record breaker) and the press says that things are recovering. That's just misleading.
What we need are better educated reporters. And a better educated public. But I'm not holding my breath for that, no matter how polluted the air is.
Oops, I mean thousandths of a dollar.
I gotta stop posting early in the morning. So embarrassing making a stupid mistake while responding to someone else's stupid mistake.
They're pricing spaceflight like gasoline now, to the thousandth of a cent? Well, for a hundred buck hop to LA, I can live with stupid marketing tricks.
Right. It is only pseudo-educational. If it can record music, that will be it's dominant use, almost certainly. And that's just a distraction, not anything that will help kids learn.
Yet Americans continue to think that they are automatically number one in everything. The man on the street still believes that we Americans are the smartest, strongest, and most capable people in the world. Mostly that's a delusion supported by ignorance, as the typical American knows very little about what's going on in the world outside of the US.
Certainly any American is capable of being the best, and is more likely to acheive that given good opportunities and education, and a culture that values whatever endeavor they choose. For science and technology, that's just not valued much by our culture. Americans like entertainment and instant gratification, and think the more of that they have the better they will be.
I fear for our future.
The only concern that I would have with this is in the future, will the fences be removed? I could only immagine some poor farmer in nebraska being stalked and eaten by a tiger. Fences? What fences?
1) Import endangered animals to North American parks.
2) Wait for the public to becme bored with the idea.
3) Sell hunting licenses and safari junkets.
4) Profit!!!
The future is not what it used to be.
I refer back to more than a few of my old textbooks regularly. (Do others?) Even if the same information is available online, I know exactly where to look in my familiar textbooks, and my old notes are often helpful too. I'd hate for all that to be lost.
Even though textbooks are frightfully expensive, the loss of personal history isn't worth 33% off. Even though some information becomes obsolete, basic principles have lasting value. To me, these EULAs are only an admission that the product being purchased doesn't have lasting value. I think that's more true about the publishing executives and lawyers who come up with these ideas than it is about the books themselves.
Society is a collection of individuals, and when taken as a collective has different operational requirements than the individuals do. The needs of the society are often in conflict with the needs of it's constituants. I might desire to have as much of (if not most of or all of) the money/women/power as possible, but if I accomplish that to excess society as a whole suffers. Yet if society inhibits my desires too much, again society suffers as people become nonproductive. And there's no acceptable standard of what excess is either. Even with completely healthy individuals, a liberal society has these conflicts. A hive or dictatorship maximizes one variant of societal success at the expense of individuals. It can go the other way to, into anarchy or uncooperative isolationism. Either extreme is bad. Very bad.
I suggest as the only solution to this conumdrum the development of a massive quantum computer to treat collective social institutions as one big linear programming problem. Then situations can be arranged behind the scenes so people are "led" to "freely" make the best choices that maximize their own and society's benefit.
There's nothing special about information as a resource or a consummable in society. Information doesn't "want" anything, either to be publically free or to be propriatarilly highly valued. It is the people and societies who might make use of that information who have those desires. And this presumes all people are intelligent, well informed and involved, hopefully benevolent too. Deviate from this ideal, and things break down. Introduce truly sick or insane people, and the situation gets totally foobarred.
There's no good answer. My advice, for what it's worth (not much)... Just try to do the best you can with an impossible situation, and don't let anyone get too much power.
Then why isn't there a bigger market for people selling motherboards, or PCs with no operating system on them? If there's a demand, it should be profitable for someone to supply it. If it's not profitable, there isn't the demand. If there isn't the demand, it's not what people want.
I am not, repeat not, exhonorating Microsoft from their well deserved association with evil. However, there are social benefits to the monolithic way computing power is presented through Windows. Despite all it's hassles and inadequacies, there are large masses of people who would not use computers were it not for Windows. People who can't program their VCR, and for whom anything beyond turning a key in their car is way too technical, can spend money over the internet because AOL runs under Windows. Talk about Loki joining up with Satan if you wish, but that's what the public values. In a society where third basemen are more valuable than brain surgeons, and the only Fields Medal they care about is the lawnmower blade that trims the fifty yard line, the culture rewards what the culture most values. Bill is the uberlord of an evil empire because he provides a benefit that society wants, and the ultimate proof of it is in his bank account. That benefit should be factored into these equations as well, but it never is. Sure, I think most computer power is wasted playing solitaire, or downloading music that I personally don't like, but who am I to judge? Those are benefits that shouldn't be dismissed out of hand, and the mass market made up of the common little people wouldn't be there without Windows.
Where does this eight minute figure come from? How reliable is it, and how dependent on environment and corporate culture is it?
All the distractions can be managed by being turned off except at designated intervals. Now if we could only cut down on the hours of pointless meetings.
I have VoIP, and I'm happy with it. I've gotten rid of my land lines as a needless expense. I might have gotten rid of it anyway, as it's simply more money than it's worth. Maybe I prefer email over voice mail. I do also have cell phones, which are very common.
I pay for the things that I choose to pay for, and bristle at being told that I have to buy things that I don't want and don't need. Don't you?
It's an individuals choice to determine their own needs, and perform their own cost vs. risk analysis. Do I need a land line 911 service when I have cell phones? Can I accept the risk that my VoIP won't work when the power goes out and I forgot to charge the cell phones? Do I have to have homeowners insurance on my house that's all paid off? Should I get the maximum auto insurance or is minimum coverage acceptable? These should be my decisions, and not the government's.
No one is legally obligated to have any phone service in their homes. No one is obligated to have one and only one communications link. The law is inadquate to handle the complexity of today's communications technology environment. The FCC is out of line (pun intened) on this one.
HP ink cartridges have always been too expensive. Way too expensive. I stopped buying their printers because of that. Also, the way they clean the heads by spraying ink into a tray on powerup limits the life of the printer. On my HP3820, this resulted in a column of hard ink that grew so tall it jammed the head (of course, I only discovered this after destructively disassembling the printer). I hope they have an improved method of cleaning the new print heads.
For now, I'll stick with my Cannon printer, which I'm happy with. But I want a wider format printer, and in my price range HP is the only game in town. I hope these improvments work their way across the product line in time.
Since when is a twelve inch screen from three feet considered big?
Sometimes, size does matter. This sounds like a disappointment in the making.
While I'm all for increasing the use of robots in space, I don't think the cousin robot could do this job (nor could a human). Yes, a robot inspector would be a good thing. But the tiles are each custom made to the particular geometry of the ship where they are placed, and they cannot be manufactured in place. The shuttle couldn't carry up spares for each and every tile. Nor can most other problems be repaired in space. You can't slap a little epoxy over a hole when it needs to withstand the heat of reentry. Such repair jobs would only contaminate the tiles and prevent them from working.
As for a few extra meals, I think it would take more than that to maintain seven people in the hostile environment of space for who knows how long.
Gee, I hope none of those cameras they've installed on the shuttle itself come loose and hit anything.
Where is Stanislaw Lem when you need him?
Of course, if this suit is allowed to proceed, doesn't that also open her up to suits by her clients for all the predictions she made that didn't work out perfectly? 3oo million probably won't be enough for her to pay all the suits she'll lose if the courts determine astrology is legally valid and binding.