How many OOo CDs do you see at your local PC shop?
Wouldn't it be great if google started giving these out at supermarkets and sending them out in the mail? I'd bet that would really piss off Microsoft. They could put it on AOL CDs if they wind up buying them, too.
Imagine a world where the vast majority of skilled people live effectively forever. What opportunity will there be for the young, if the elders have had a centuries-long head start?
Speaking from an economics standpoint, there will always be people who need things, they are called consumers. In order for consumers to acquire the things that they need, they must produce things that others need, etc... Perhaps one day there will be a small subset of humanity that can produce enough goods and services to supply the whole, if that were to happen, then it wouldn't matter much if everybody had a job or not. People would just get what they wanted. The worst that would happen in that case is that there would be a dramatic surplus of goods.
The other scenario is that there are not enough producers to supply the world's population, in which case there should be boatloads of opportunity for the young to succeed. They need only learn how and what to do to provide themselves with the goods they desire. In any case, so far this has not been an issue - even as the average life expectancy has more than doubled from what it once was.
How could we possibly provide the resources necessary to feed an effectively undying yet still growing population? Would famine become the determiner or longevity?
Resources would likely determine the maximum stable population size. Any more than the maximum and people would start dying, any less and the population would grow. It stands to reason that at some point, it will become necessary for people to stop having offspring. But then, people produce offspring for a variety of reasons, many of which are unplanned, and some of which are psychologically related to leaving a piece of themselves behind after they have died. Once people stop dying, I expect there to be less of a driving force behind having children. Government subsidized (or incentives for) sterilization are also quite likely.
Can the human brain retain the sheer volume of information and experience achievable in a millennia of living? Would we forget the past, or become unable to learn the future?
I would be happy with a 10-20 year memory span. Phase the old useless info out and the new info in. Personality changes quite a bit over time, and I can't say that I remember much from even 5 years ago - just a few select memories here and there that I have some emotional attachment to, the rest gets filled in from facts and records when I see them. The current research suggests that memories are not stored like data, but rather reconstructed from cues. People have even been quite easily tricked into having false memories by mere suggestion. I would hazard to guess that memory would not be any more of an issue than it is today.
Would longer-lived decision makers take longer-term factors into account? Would humanity be more inclined to space travel if time were no longer the limiting factor?
At some point, I would imagine that people would look to space travel to acquire more resources and allow for more population and culture. The earth is getting pretty crowded with so many people falling under so few governments. I'd expect that as instant communication and cheap and quick transportation become increasingly available, that the notion of nationality and local law will begin to collapse and the world will slowly enter into the control of one or two governing agencies. When that happens, people will look to colonize space to set up their own independent societies.
I DO think that video games need a rating system and sales limitations, though they should at least make it consistent with the movie industry which is pretty much the same issue.
I might me mistaken about CA, but where I live, movie ratings are voluntarily enforced and not compulsory, which in my opinion is a good thing - I wouldn't want to require every movie made to have a rating because that would create the opportunity for one organization to oversee the rating process who, in turn, could really take advantage of people's pockets with the blessing of the law.
Besides that, the criteria for movie ratings were devised by the people doing the ratings and not necessarily with any scientific data behind them. What should be adequate evidence for making the determination that a 13 year old should be able to see the content of a particular movie, but not a 12 year old? I hate playing the magic numbers game, and I despise even more the notion that a child's mental development can be stunted, harmed, or in any way endangered by exposure to facts about the world and human nature.
My children will be able to watch and observe just about anything they want (except for trashy reality TV and sensationalistic news media programs - PBS and NPR all the way - HBO is fine too), but you can be damned sure that I will be keeping tabs on the things that they do see, and even surer that I will instill within them a sense of what is and is not appropriate behavior.
Instead of shunning children and shielding them from the reality of the world as though it were some monstrous and heinous place the sight of which could shatter their blissfully unaware mind (and children do know a lot more than we think they do) I would choose to encourage them to make peace with the world the way it is at an early age and put the things that they see and learn into perspective with frequent personal and philosophical discussions. In short - I will spend more time talking with my children and guiding the development of their character and less time blaming the rest of the world for the way they turn out. As a parent, you have the most influence, control, and power over the way your child develops. If the cost is too much to bear (for a single working class parent) and you must neglect your child in this way, then perhaps the state should step in and regulate YOU instead of your child.
Children are responsibilities, no one is denying that. But the responsibility should lie with the parent and not with the state, the ultimate control over the shaping of your child's character should reside with you as the parent. To suggest otherwise is to start down the slippery path of government sponsored thought control begun at the earliest possible age.
In that case, perhaps there should also be an ignore button for the bartender, so that he can just stop getting "doorbelled" by the chimps. But rather than employing this in a bar situation, I'd much rather see buttons at every table in every resturaunt I dine in.
If they like that feature, they must love it when you show them how opera can scale not only text, but images and everything else as well. The page zooms fully with the option to smooth pixelated images if desired. That was my favorite feature ever - sold me on opera, but then I fell in love with Safari. Maybe someday Apple will include it as well.
With that logic, though, overlooking the purpose of the key, it should be legal for me to generate and feed the program false keys. It isn't.
The law regarding that point has nothing to do with the doctrine of first sale. It sounds more like a complaint to me than an argument that first sale no longer applies to DRM'ed ebooks.
First sale doctrine still applies. No one is forcing the student to give back what they paid for if it is a physical disk. What happens, however, is that the disk is then useless unless the author provides a service to any other person every 5 months or so furnishing them with a new key, which in turn expires in 5 months, that will let them use the product. You keep the disk, but pay for the activation service. The product is not a book, per se, but a program that displays encrypted text. Part of that programs behavior is to check for a key. No key, no dice. It sucks, but there is less of a legal challenge than you have stated. Nevertheless, courts don't always rule on law, but often on intuition and DRM ebooks may move an activist judge.
Re:Stallman was right up to this point ...
on
Textbooks With EULAs
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· Score: 4, Interesting
It is a legitimate concern and one worth worrying about, but I don't see the major media conglomerates getting very far with it. The reason being that authors and publishers don't have to DRM their works in the same way that software publishers don't have to implement DRM and authentication systems in their products. Some companies invariably do such things, but for every one of these another free, open source, or other such somewhat more desirable contender tends to either pop-up or have already existed.
What surprises me most, really, is that I have never come across a repository of free textbooks available in some standard electronic form - say PDF. If there were enough such books available and written by reputable professors there would be a movement towards making them the standard texts in classrooms.
This is not as implausible as it may seem. There are many cases in which authors have released print versions of their text alongside or after having released electronic versions. In the majority of cases, the freely available electronic text bolsters sales of the print version. Also, e-texts can be revised and distributed easier. With a wiki dedicated to errata and addendums, the e-text could supplement the print version as being up to date and an indisposable reference in some cases. The author, in turn, gets free editing and peer review.
Finally, the success of other free software projects at the university level suggests to me that a free text-book program would be quite welcome. The students would certainly put quite a bit of pressure on the university and its faculty to implement it regardless.
Non-profit does not mean that they don't make money. It just means that whatever money they make goes into paying salaries and stuff and not to expansion.
Then it's the prequel to the prequel. Negative I, II and III. I don't know, maybe Darth Vader discovers time travel.
I think that I'd rather see a prequil trilogy to the first three than a sequel to the last three. There are a lot of questions that the third film raises. I would very much enjoy seeing that filled in. I won't go into details because of possible spoilers, but the sithlord's master seems pretty interesting and the lineage of apprenticeship seems to have some rather interesting implications...
Would *I* pay more than $1-$2 dollars for an old NES game?
I don't know, but they are going for roughly $5 a piece in stores like EBWorld and Gamestop, with some classic titles reaching $25. A dollar seems right for me, though - they could adopt the iTunes model. As far as backups go, though. I wouldn't be surprised if a purchase was locked to a particular console and upon its deletion, the server keeps track of which consoles downloaded that particular title and just reserved it upon demand. Likewise, downloads will probably be DRMed into subservience only to one particular console and so there will likely be no way to put standard ROMs onto the console. In fact, the ROMs might even be transcoded into the Revolution's native format so that there is no emulator required.
The root of the issue is what they define exposing yourself. If you are just taking a leak in public that's "public urination". If you are blatantly fondling yourself (i.e. individuals taped at a particular I-94 rest stops in Minnesota) in public it's a little different.
I want to know why the world is so offended at the sight of nudity. I mean, sure it would be creepy to see some guy waving that thing at you. It'd make me think he had other problems or could be dangerous - but why the hell can't we walk around naked? I've never understood it. People don't like, sure, but that seems to be an artifact of the way that they were raised more than an artifact of anything inherently wrong with nudity. There are, after all, many nudist colonies - and say what you will about them, they don't seem to be all too harmful to themselves. As such, shouldn't it be the burden of the offended party to 'get over it' in the same way that it is their burden to 'get over it' in the face of protected (but offensive) speech? Someone enlighten me, but please no fat/old/fugly arguments.
It's technically infesable and actually attaching a tracking device to a person, like a tagged animal, would involve so much legal fighting that it would probably end up in the US Supreme court.
And they'd have to do a good job engineering it, because the first thing I'd do if I were tagged is go scuba diving, right down to 100 ft. Radio waves don't travel well through water, so I'd likely blip off the screen, and at those pressures, I'd be surprised if the device didn't spring a leak. Come to think of it, that'd be a pretty good place to have the device removed. Any security alert feature wouldn't be able to phone home in those conditions either.
Offer what the others don't, and offer it at a good price. It doesn't have to be the lowest.
Tell me about it. Whatever happened to the 8-out at a time for $40 plan? That is ideal for my summer vacations - I hate watching TV, but boy can I burn through a season of Deep Space 9 or Sex and the City in a couple of days. Now the best they can do is 3-out at a time, but it's not quite enough to meet my needs as well as the rest of my family who wants to rent actual movies.
I can't wait until they have a legal torrent-like distribution service and I can buy episodes of my favorite show for a dollar or so a piece. That will seriously rock.
Doesn't dvdshrink have the ability to cut chapters from the disc that it copies? If this were advertised as a feature for removing material that one finds objectionable, wouldn't that make dvdshrink legal as well?
Why don't we try to make the system really boot faster instead?
Three points:
First, the people who are doing this don't necessarily have the technical knowledge to make the system boot faster. Everyone has their specialties and interests. This is what would make them happy and they in turn are interested in sharing it with you. Don't like it? Don't use it. Why are you posting on slashdot when you could be making the system boot faster? See how that works? It doesn't sound like such a good argument now, does it?
Second, users take time to enter in information like logins and passwords. While they are doing this, the system can be processing other stuff and making the system come up. When the user and the system are working in parallel, things actually do get done faster.
Lastly, there is the fairness principle. It doesn't really matter which half of the candy bar is 'bigger' when sharing it so long as one person breaks and the other chooses. Each person feels that they haven't been ripped off without regard to actual physical realities. To this end, if the system feels faster, then why should I complain? It is the user experience that is being made to improve. What else really matters?
You know the topic is STARWARS when all the trolling is rated "informative" or "insightful"...
Here, here. It's not as if the original series is being remade again and rife with retconning (retroactive continuities). He's making an original contribution and if you don't want to watch it, then just don't. I may not have liked Ep 1 very much, and I am a bit skeptical about many of the changes to the original trilogy (while loathing others), but I am very interested in new series. There is a definite dearth of quality science fiction on television and we should be jumping at the prospect of getting more.
The Family Entertainment and Copyright Act of 2005 (HR357) also would permit technologies that allow users to skip objectionable content in movies viewed at home.
I find the previews and commercials to be objectionable, actually. I usually put the disc in and leave the TV off for the first 10 mins or so while I make popcorn or some other food. By the time I get back to sit down, the menu is up.
EB was the only place I could go to buy and sell used PC games. Gamestop doesn't do that, for whatever (presumably political) reasons. Now where am I to go? (Don't say ebay, it's not the same).
In fact, anyone who distributes GPL software in binary form is obligated to distribute the source, whether or not they've made modifications to the source.
I thought that the requirement was only to make the source available, not to distribute it. That could be accomplished with so much as a link to the official website, no?
Slashdot Mirror
Wouldn't it be great if google started giving these out at supermarkets and sending them out in the mail? I'd bet that would really piss off Microsoft. They could put it on AOL CDs if they wind up buying them, too.
Imagine a world where the vast majority of skilled people live effectively forever. What opportunity will there be for the young, if the elders have had a centuries-long head start?
Speaking from an economics standpoint, there will always be people who need things, they are called consumers. In order for consumers to acquire the things that they need, they must produce things that others need, etc... Perhaps one day there will be a small subset of humanity that can produce enough goods and services to supply the whole, if that were to happen, then it wouldn't matter much if everybody had a job or not. People would just get what they wanted. The worst that would happen in that case is that there would be a dramatic surplus of goods.
The other scenario is that there are not enough producers to supply the world's population, in which case there should be boatloads of opportunity for the young to succeed. They need only learn how and what to do to provide themselves with the goods they desire. In any case, so far this has not been an issue - even as the average life expectancy has more than doubled from what it once was.
How could we possibly provide the resources necessary to feed an effectively undying yet still growing population? Would famine become the determiner or longevity?
Resources would likely determine the maximum stable population size. Any more than the maximum and people would start dying, any less and the population would grow. It stands to reason that at some point, it will become necessary for people to stop having offspring. But then, people produce offspring for a variety of reasons, many of which are unplanned, and some of which are psychologically related to leaving a piece of themselves behind after they have died. Once people stop dying, I expect there to be less of a driving force behind having children. Government subsidized (or incentives for) sterilization are also quite likely.
Can the human brain retain the sheer volume of information and experience achievable in a millennia of living? Would we forget the past, or become unable to learn the future?
I would be happy with a 10-20 year memory span. Phase the old useless info out and the new info in. Personality changes quite a bit over time, and I can't say that I remember much from even 5 years ago - just a few select memories here and there that I have some emotional attachment to, the rest gets filled in from facts and records when I see them. The current research suggests that memories are not stored like data, but rather reconstructed from cues. People have even been quite easily tricked into having false memories by mere suggestion. I would hazard to guess that memory would not be any more of an issue than it is today.
Would longer-lived decision makers take longer-term factors into account? Would humanity be more inclined to space travel if time were no longer the limiting factor?
At some point, I would imagine that people would look to space travel to acquire more resources and allow for more population and culture. The earth is getting pretty crowded with so many people falling under so few governments. I'd expect that as instant communication and cheap and quick transportation become increasingly available, that the notion of nationality and local law will begin to collapse and the world will slowly enter into the control of one or two governing agencies. When that happens, people will look to colonize space to set up their own independent societies.
I might me mistaken about CA, but where I live, movie ratings are voluntarily enforced and not compulsory, which in my opinion is a good thing - I wouldn't want to require every movie made to have a rating because that would create the opportunity for one organization to oversee the rating process who, in turn, could really take advantage of people's pockets with the blessing of the law.
Besides that, the criteria for movie ratings were devised by the people doing the ratings and not necessarily with any scientific data behind them. What should be adequate evidence for making the determination that a 13 year old should be able to see the content of a particular movie, but not a 12 year old? I hate playing the magic numbers game, and I despise even more the notion that a child's mental development can be stunted, harmed, or in any way endangered by exposure to facts about the world and human nature.
My children will be able to watch and observe just about anything they want (except for trashy reality TV and sensationalistic news media programs - PBS and NPR all the way - HBO is fine too), but you can be damned sure that I will be keeping tabs on the things that they do see, and even surer that I will instill within them a sense of what is and is not appropriate behavior.
Instead of shunning children and shielding them from the reality of the world as though it were some monstrous and heinous place the sight of which could shatter their blissfully unaware mind (and children do know a lot more than we think they do) I would choose to encourage them to make peace with the world the way it is at an early age and put the things that they see and learn into perspective with frequent personal and philosophical discussions. In short - I will spend more time talking with my children and guiding the development of their character and less time blaming the rest of the world for the way they turn out. As a parent, you have the most influence, control, and power over the way your child develops. If the cost is too much to bear (for a single working class parent) and you must neglect your child in this way, then perhaps the state should step in and regulate YOU instead of your child.
Children are responsibilities, no one is denying that. But the responsibility should lie with the parent and not with the state, the ultimate control over the shaping of your child's character should reside with you as the parent. To suggest otherwise is to start down the slippery path of government sponsored thought control begun at the earliest possible age.
In that case, perhaps there should also be an ignore button for the bartender, so that he can just stop getting "doorbelled" by the chimps. But rather than employing this in a bar situation, I'd much rather see buttons at every table in every resturaunt I dine in.
If they like that feature, they must love it when you show them how opera can scale not only text, but images and everything else as well. The page zooms fully with the option to smooth pixelated images if desired. That was my favorite feature ever - sold me on opera, but then I fell in love with Safari. Maybe someday Apple will include it as well.
The law regarding that point has nothing to do with the doctrine of first sale. It sounds more like a complaint to me than an argument that first sale no longer applies to DRM'ed ebooks.
First sale doctrine still applies. No one is forcing the student to give back what they paid for if it is a physical disk. What happens, however, is that the disk is then useless unless the author provides a service to any other person every 5 months or so furnishing them with a new key, which in turn expires in 5 months, that will let them use the product. You keep the disk, but pay for the activation service. The product is not a book, per se, but a program that displays encrypted text. Part of that programs behavior is to check for a key. No key, no dice. It sucks, but there is less of a legal challenge than you have stated. Nevertheless, courts don't always rule on law, but often on intuition and DRM ebooks may move an activist judge.
What surprises me most, really, is that I have never come across a repository of free textbooks available in some standard electronic form - say PDF. If there were enough such books available and written by reputable professors there would be a movement towards making them the standard texts in classrooms.
This is not as implausible as it may seem. There are many cases in which authors have released print versions of their text alongside or after having released electronic versions. In the majority of cases, the freely available electronic text bolsters sales of the print version. Also, e-texts can be revised and distributed easier. With a wiki dedicated to errata and addendums, the e-text could supplement the print version as being up to date and an indisposable reference in some cases. The author, in turn, gets free editing and peer review.
Finally, the success of other free software projects at the university level suggests to me that a free text-book program would be quite welcome. The students would certainly put quite a bit of pressure on the university and its faculty to implement it regardless.
Anyone know if something like this exists?
Non-profit does not mean that they don't make money. It just means that whatever money they make goes into paying salaries and stuff and not to expansion.
I think that I'd rather see a prequil trilogy to the first three than a sequel to the last three. There are a lot of questions that the third film raises. I would very much enjoy seeing that filled in. I won't go into details because of possible spoilers, but the sithlord's master seems pretty interesting and the lineage of apprenticeship seems to have some rather interesting implications...
I don't know, but they are going for roughly $5 a piece in stores like EBWorld and Gamestop, with some classic titles reaching $25. A dollar seems right for me, though - they could adopt the iTunes model. As far as backups go, though. I wouldn't be surprised if a purchase was locked to a particular console and upon its deletion, the server keeps track of which consoles downloaded that particular title and just reserved it upon demand. Likewise, downloads will probably be DRMed into subservience only to one particular console and so there will likely be no way to put standard ROMs onto the console. In fact, the ROMs might even be transcoded into the Revolution's native format so that there is no emulator required.
What benefits are there to running Darwin on x86 as opposed to Linux or any other BSD?
Maybe it will go something like music -> music videos -> movies? One can only hope...
I've got a Mac ;-)
Ok, so the virus thing is a minor threat, but seriously - I live within an acceptable level of risk, all things considered.
I want to know why the world is so offended at the sight of nudity. I mean, sure it would be creepy to see some guy waving that thing at you. It'd make me think he had other problems or could be dangerous - but why the hell can't we walk around naked? I've never understood it. People don't like, sure, but that seems to be an artifact of the way that they were raised more than an artifact of anything inherently wrong with nudity. There are, after all, many nudist colonies - and say what you will about them, they don't seem to be all too harmful to themselves. As such, shouldn't it be the burden of the offended party to 'get over it' in the same way that it is their burden to 'get over it' in the face of protected (but offensive) speech? Someone enlighten me, but please no fat/old/fugly arguments.
And they'd have to do a good job engineering it, because the first thing I'd do if I were tagged is go scuba diving, right down to 100 ft. Radio waves don't travel well through water, so I'd likely blip off the screen, and at those pressures, I'd be surprised if the device didn't spring a leak. Come to think of it, that'd be a pretty good place to have the device removed. Any security alert feature wouldn't be able to phone home in those conditions either.
Wow, I looked on the web page after having cancelled my account, I guess that page was for free trials only. Neato - thanks.
Tell me about it. Whatever happened to the 8-out at a time for $40 plan? That is ideal for my summer vacations - I hate watching TV, but boy can I burn through a season of Deep Space 9 or Sex and the City in a couple of days. Now the best they can do is 3-out at a time, but it's not quite enough to meet my needs as well as the rest of my family who wants to rent actual movies.
I can't wait until they have a legal torrent-like distribution service and I can buy episodes of my favorite show for a dollar or so a piece. That will seriously rock.
Doesn't dvdshrink have the ability to cut chapters from the disc that it copies? If this were advertised as a feature for removing material that one finds objectionable, wouldn't that make dvdshrink legal as well?
Three points:
First, the people who are doing this don't necessarily have the technical knowledge to make the system boot faster. Everyone has their specialties and interests. This is what would make them happy and they in turn are interested in sharing it with you. Don't like it? Don't use it. Why are you posting on slashdot when you could be making the system boot faster? See how that works? It doesn't sound like such a good argument now, does it?
Second, users take time to enter in information like logins and passwords. While they are doing this, the system can be processing other stuff and making the system come up. When the user and the system are working in parallel, things actually do get done faster.
Lastly, there is the fairness principle. It doesn't really matter which half of the candy bar is 'bigger' when sharing it so long as one person breaks and the other chooses. Each person feels that they haven't been ripped off without regard to actual physical realities. To this end, if the system feels faster, then why should I complain? It is the user experience that is being made to improve. What else really matters?
Here, here. It's not as if the original series is being remade again and rife with retconning (retroactive continuities). He's making an original contribution and if you don't want to watch it, then just don't. I may not have liked Ep 1 very much, and I am a bit skeptical about many of the changes to the original trilogy (while loathing others), but I am very interested in new series. There is a definite dearth of quality science fiction on television and we should be jumping at the prospect of getting more.
I find the previews and commercials to be objectionable, actually. I usually put the disc in and leave the TV off for the first 10 mins or so while I make popcorn or some other food. By the time I get back to sit down, the menu is up.
Yes, I am that stubborn. No, really.
EB was the only place I could go to buy and sell used PC games. Gamestop doesn't do that, for whatever (presumably political) reasons. Now where am I to go? (Don't say ebay, it's not the same).
I thought that the requirement was only to make the source available, not to distribute it. That could be accomplished with so much as a link to the official website, no?
...open source music? I wonder if it was released with a Creative Commons license.