"I wish I had more insight into this "chinese holiday" thing though. I get the impression they take it a lot more seriously than we're giving them credit for. I see a lot of the chinese stores going on holiday all at once, it's obviously a widespread thing, maybe that five day vacation is their unwind time for the rest of the year in the sweatshop?"
Try this BBC video, "China's 'left behind' children growing up without parents" (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-19787240).
From the accompanying text: "For many people in China, the mid-autumn festival and National Day holiday, falling within days of each other this year, means a week off work and a chance to spend time with friends and family."
I'm not sure if this is the same holiday the workers are striking over. But this could be a hint that Chinese workers do take their holidays seriously. If you're underpaid and you know you're underpaid, a day or two with your loved ones would be Mastercard priceless. After all, they're one of the reasons you left the farm.
The practical application of this procedure is probably some way off. If perfected for humans, it could become the ultimate fertility treatment. So long as you have a body, you can have a baby. Surrogate mothers probably needed though.
As of now, it's interesting research that won't interest vain but rich pet owners. You aren't producing a time-shifted twin of the older organism. But if the egg/sperm cells produced are healthy, you might well produce an artifical hermaphrodite where the father and mother are the same.
Maybe in the future gay and lesbian couples can become the full biological parents of their own children without resort to a third-party donor or surrogate.
No need to wait. I have a quantum computer right here in my pocket. It's called a coin. You want eight possible states? Add three more nodes. It's highly efficient for answering life's toughest questions. And if I don't like the answer I can try again.
Like SOPA and ACTA, this Orwellian-sounding Cybercrime "Prevention" Act is an omnibus law, a law that regulates many activities that have little in relation to each other. An omnibus law is the easiest way for someone to sneak in some really bad prohibitions among the few good ones.
This is no different from enacting a law that has provisions both for riots and street demonstrations that merely disrupt traffic. To gain support, a proponent of such a law will focus on the anti-riot portion of the law, while playing down the fact that it can also be used on people who are merely holding a demonstration without a permit, which has been held up by red tape.
Does the law have good parts? I'm sure it does. It'll surely save some of the children, even if it damns quite a few adults to jail.
A side effect of having an omnibus law is that it forces the oppositors to focus merely on the worst parts. So maybe the "online" libel part is the worst because it affects the most number of clueless Facebook users? But what about the provisions on online surveillance? Never mind that, let's get rid of the "libel" part first, then we can think about the online spying, which can be used against those dangerous "terrorists" anyway. One small step for freedom, one giant leap for Big Brother.
I don't know about libel suits against the traditonal media, which have their own legal teams. "Online" libel produces the same chilling effect as the mass legal action that targets online "copyright" violators. It turns the legal system into a class action suit in reverse. One party is able to sue dozens or even thousands of others.
The idea isn't to "See you in court, honey" but to threaten enough people into submission. After all how many Joe orJane Blows can afford the services of a good lawyer? Or maybe Joe is happily middle-class, but can he afford the hassle of attending a hearing when he's not a corporate hydra but just one person who can only take so many days off from his job before he's fired?
When the scheme spreads to copycat countries. From TFA:
"The Government hopes the identity system will form the basis of a universally-recognised online authentication process for commercial transactions on the Internet, boosting the economy and strengthening Britain's position as a leader in e-commerce."
Here's one thing I hope the UK doesn't export like deep-fried Mars bars.
Maybe I'm browsing the project site wrong, but all I saw were about a dozen photographs? None show images of naked humans that can at least give a hint of what a human looks without the environmental protection suit. Photos of couples having sex and babies can also explain the nature of human reproduction. We're not androids that just rolled off the some fab lab.
It's not in the patent or article, but one use I see for a wearable watch is to serve as the trackpad for the AR glasses, or in other words, a wearable wireless computer "mouse". If I understand the GooGlass design correctly, navigation is either via voice or by fiddling some controls place behind the left or right ear piece of the glasses. A wristwatch should provide more finger surface besides being a gadget in its own right. Control GooGlass via the wristwatch should be technically more feasible than a AR gesture-based system where you control GooGlass by clicking directly at the icons you see projected in front of you.
Apple is probably in a much better position to end Microsoft's reign over the desktop, if it decides to release a generic OSX for the white box market. Sure, Apple's Mac sales are going to take an irreversible hit. But if gadget-type computers are the way forward, then Apple could conceivably deliver the coup de grace that would effectively remove a competitor from the picture.
The only problem would be the lack of a native office suite to replace MS Office, but if Apple can afford to release a half-baked home-brewed maps app, it can well afford to hijack and polish an existing second-tier office suite like OpenOffice, which unlike its GPL'd LibreOffice fork is available under a license that would allow Apple to close-source it.
"Microsoft and Android will have to fight a serious uphill battle against iPad. I have an iPad and love it to read material but as content creator (Even simple emails), it sucks. The market is wide open to fill the content creation gap."
I think it's the other way around. Unless it gets the patent courts on its side, Apple will have a serious battle maintaining its marketshare against the CheapPad or CheapTab makers. It might not seem obvious in the upmarket that's the US of A, but in other parts of the world, a person's second computing experience, after his soon-to-be-smartphone, will be on a non-Apple book-sized device.
Barring some price-PADding because of some adverse IP ruling, the price on tablets will go down to the cost of its parts. Moreover, tablets will be or are already being subsidized by large content or access companies eager to give away the keys to their walled garden: the better to lock up their costumers. At the moment, the darling of these companies is Android OS because it's as "free" as secondhand smoke in a bar. But if Microsoft decides to bite the bullet and "give away" Win 8, they can take a serious bite on the tablet market.
Unless it becomes too greedy for its onw good, Microsoft has a better chance of succeeding in the tablet and smartphone market than Apple has of maintaining its market share. A few years from now, Apple will be back to its status as the preferred gadget of the fashionable girls and boys.
The corruption is at worst a symptom of a larger problem. China appears to be suffering from the same problems experienced by Japan on its way to surpassing the US as an economic superpower. Now, that didn't happen, did it? Japan faltered because for the longest time Japan was virtually a one-party state. Now look at that other "great" one-party state, the Soviet Union.
There are otther factors of course, such as Japan's graying population, a problem that China is also facing because of its ill-conceived one-child policy. But even minor, public policy differences produce an incentive to search for solutions different from the accepted orthodoxy.
Monopolies aren't good, whether it's a company or a state party. China most likely wont' surpass the US as a superpower. Both may well go into a state of decline and be surpassed a third country with enough sense not to nurture economic or political monopolies that breed both corruption and stagnation.
The guy's basically a marketing manager. You might be the smartest person in company, but if a glorified salesman is all you are, you can easily be cloned. The exception is if you developed enough good connections OUTSIDE the company that you can take a shitload of the client base if they fire you. I don't think this is the case with Facebook users, fake or otherwise.
Of course, marketing types get paid more than the typical engineer if the product is successful. But if you want a more stable job, it's better to be the craftsman working at the product, than the pretty face selling it at the counter.
"After all, reporting a car accident with multiple injuries is just as important as delivering the latest cricket scores."
Is that how things are in India? Most countries have a "911" number or its equivalent that's either free or costs much less than a regualr call. So if there's a serious accident that's the number you call.
I think you're undervaluing the power of part-time collective action. Take for example, Wikipedia.
To produce a conventional encyclopedia you need to hire a large editorial staff and pay numerous experts a decent amount to write the articles. But with thousands of people contributing and mutually editing each other in a more or less freely editiable online encyclopeida, you lose the need for a large staff and numerous contributors. With advances in computer automation, you could theoretically reduce your staff to a small team of programmers.
This method can be translated to the invention and manufacture of tangible things. How? By allowing for incremental improvements to existing designs and products whose blueprints have been made freely available or "open-sourced", what we might call "open" hardware.
The value of patents as an incentive for innovation decreases and even disappears altogether once you already have a substantial body of technology that thousands or even millions of people can improve incrementally. In time these thousands of incremental improvements translate into a giant leap in technology. In the presence of patents, incremental improvements can only be done by paying a "creative" tax to the patent holder, a barrier that reduces the number of makers.
Patents should be reserved for fields where we don't have enough technology to build upon, such as fusion reactors, space elevators, or practical immortality. I don't mind the inventors of technologies in these fields becoming richer than Larry Ellison. But please abolish patents for round corners and multiple fingers.
Okay, they've done some crazy shit in the past. But like you said, all religions and ideologies, even nominally peaceful ones, have done terrible things in the name of their beliefs, possibly with the exception of the Jains (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jainism)
"The CGI on this movie still looks like VFX animation and not realistic. It looks fake. Camera tracking is good, modelling seems ok, but lighting and animation aren't."
Maybe a movie with such a ridiculous plot isn't meant to be realistic? Unrequited love brings the world to ruin but in the end love still saves the day. Really?
Take a look at the mango juice the black sniper sips. It should have been easy enough to turn the carton in something that resembles a real world brand instead it looks like a generic stage prop simply labeled MANGO, the project code name. Look also at the retro pixelated font used for the text output on the computer terminals. If this were a realistic movie set in a future where virtual reality has become a reality, you'd expect something at least as crystal as Apple's vaunted retina display. There's also that large button that turns red and displays "ERROR!!!" when something goes wrong, a sure sign that this is comic sci-fi.
So yes the stylistic look appears to be deliberate. You can see examples of such CGI unrealism mostly in fantasy movies like Lord of the Rings, but Tears of Steel isn't exactly straight-up hard sci-fi.
No, Dotcom is as evil as any other dotcom millionaire. Getting rich from basically selling nothing has to be a scam. This goes for the guys running Facebook, Google, or even pre-dotcom Microsoft. None of them has been threatened with serious jail time or had their assets "frozen" or confiscated.
"However, compared to RMS, Linus is a real gentleman."
In public, yes. We've heard enough "horror stories" about RMS losing his cool at some public event, while most photos and videos I've seen of Linus show him with an idiotic smile plastered on his face, a seemingly really fun guy to be with. The problem is Linus tends to "write" out his mind. Read RMS's angstiest writings. He never calls anyone batshit moronic, although he's called the members of Congress, "congresscritters".
And why pick on Mormons, who've never, as far as I can tell, been known to blow up people they disagree with?
I hope you're just saying that for rhetorical effect. Because like the US Brazil is a federal republic. Read TFA. It says this was a local court case, not an action of the federal government.
The analogy I'd use would be some US state carrying out the death penalty on a person convicted in a controversial case by a local court. Would you blame Obama for the man's death? Unless there's a clear reason to see the case as "rigged" against the convict, it would do more harm than good to the US justice system for the federal government to overrule state laws.
"Is Switzerland considered a socialist nation?"
First, I doubt whether Switzerland's opinion matters when the country's not even a member of the European Union.
Second, what makes you think that copyright is inherently capitalist that having liberal copy laws makes that country socialist? Copyright is neither socialist nor capitalist. In fact, copyright is closer to feudalism than to either econo-political systems. Copyright dates from the time when absolute monarchs would grant subjects what a monopoly on certain fields. Perhaps a knight would gain control, if not ownership, of some tracts of lands in exchange for serving in the king's army. Notice how copyright and patent holders are supposed to receive "royalties"?
Copyright, or at least the version that says "All rights reserved", is one idea that should have gone out with the divine right of kings.
"Some people have mentioned "backups" as an analogy. While partially true, when you come to talk about backing up the repository (for centralised version control), you'll get the inevitable why backup backups?"
So what's wrong with having "multiple" backups? There's no need to go into more sophisticated non-IT analogies when a backup is the one thing any responsible administrator should have as a matter of policy.
Want something more sophisticated? Tell him/her that's it's a backup would multiple levels of undo. "Undo" or Ctrl-Z is a familiar enough concept.
Leave the details to your fellow techies. Or you'll suffer the fate of those climate scientists who don't get a good press because they're so subtle with their description of what's happening to the weather.
Not being a chip expert, the following made me think twice over whether some dextrous East Asian factory workers used tweezers to lay out the circuits of each and every chip rolling down the assembly line:
"Hand-made chips are very rare nowadays, with Chipworks reporting that it hasn't seen a non-Intel hand-made chip for 'years.'"
The phrase "hand-made chips" is misleading because it gives the impression that, similar to the way motherboards are still assembled by hand, the production of CPUs involve human fingers coming into direct contact with the silicon.
Instead of teams of wondrous elves etching the microscopic pathways of electrons, we are treated to the less remarkable, but still impressive revelation that most chip designs are automatically spit out by high level chip design software.
"Today's handheld device is the mainframe of years past."
Isn't it more like today's handheld is the supercomputer of decades past? A mainfarme excels in crunching databases, while a supercomputer excels at doing "tasks" faster than even the typical liquid nitrogen-cooled desktop.
Note that I'm using "task" in not in the computer sense of "multitasking", but int the human sense of an activity that a single user might want a computer to perform, like solving a complex equation or modeling a hurricane. While the difference isn't absolute, a mainframe would be more multi-user oriented than a supercomputer.
Typical use cases for supercomputers are in the field of visualization. That's why we get these jokes about future Windows version requiring a supercomputer to boot. So comparison with a supercomputer, rather than a mainframe, is more apt, especially for graphically lush gadgets such as smartphones.
Maybe it's time to restrict patents to fields that need real innovation. In many fields, patents have simply added unnecessary overhead to the cost of production. Patents for a fusion reactor or a better rocket engine might be necessary to protect the huge investments necessary to engineer and build prototypes. But are patents necessary for product design elements that anyone with a little knowhow can produce with off-the-shell CAD software?
"The citizens of Eichberg now have a mayor whose agenda has nothing to do roads, sewers, public safety, or any of the other unsexy issues that municipal officials deal with. He does care about copyright reform â" an issue in which a mayor has no say at all."
This is Switzerland, not some Third World country where a road is more pothole than concrete. So maybe the local voters don't care that much about roads and sewers because they're in a good enough condition?
Remember that a government isn't all elected "politicians". In most well-run democratic countries, the government consists mostly of bureaucrats that can run the state or local unit even if there's a political deadlock where there's no legally elected leader but only a caretaker who may or may not have been elected. So basically you'll have a local "Pirate" politician setting "policies" for local bureacrats to put into practice.
Slashdot Mirror
"I wish I had more insight into this "chinese holiday" thing though. I get the impression they take it a lot more seriously than we're giving them credit for. I see a lot of the chinese stores going on holiday all at once, it's obviously a widespread thing, maybe that five day vacation is their unwind time for the rest of the year in the sweatshop?"
Try this BBC video, "China's 'left behind' children growing up without parents" (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-19787240).
From the accompanying text: "For many people in China, the mid-autumn festival and National Day holiday, falling within days of each other this year, means a week off work and a chance to spend time with friends and family."
I'm not sure if this is the same holiday the workers are striking over. But this could be a hint that Chinese workers do take their holidays seriously. If you're underpaid and you know you're underpaid, a day or two with your loved ones would be Mastercard priceless. After all, they're one of the reasons you left the farm.
The practical application of this procedure is probably some way off. If perfected for humans, it could become the ultimate fertility treatment. So long as you have a body, you can have a baby. Surrogate mothers probably needed though.
As of now, it's interesting research that won't interest vain but rich pet owners. You aren't producing a time-shifted twin of the older organism. But if the egg/sperm cells produced are healthy, you might well produce an artifical hermaphrodite where the father and mother are the same.
Maybe in the future gay and lesbian couples can become the full biological parents of their own children without resort to a third-party donor or surrogate.
No need to wait. I have a quantum computer right here in my pocket. It's called a coin. You want eight possible states? Add three more nodes. It's highly efficient for answering life's toughest questions. And if I don't like the answer I can try again.
Like SOPA and ACTA, this Orwellian-sounding Cybercrime "Prevention" Act is an omnibus law, a law that regulates many activities that have little in relation to each other. An omnibus law is the easiest way for someone to sneak in some really bad prohibitions among the few good ones.
This is no different from enacting a law that has provisions both for riots and street demonstrations that merely disrupt traffic. To gain support, a proponent of such a law will focus on the anti-riot portion of the law, while playing down the fact that it can also be used on people who are merely holding a demonstration without a permit, which has been held up by red tape.
Does the law have good parts? I'm sure it does. It'll surely save some of the children, even if it damns quite a few adults to jail.
A side effect of having an omnibus law is that it forces the oppositors to focus merely on the worst parts. So maybe the "online" libel part is the worst because it affects the most number of clueless Facebook users? But what about the provisions on online surveillance? Never mind that, let's get rid of the "libel" part first, then we can think about the online spying, which can be used against those dangerous "terrorists" anyway. One small step for freedom, one giant leap for Big Brother.
I don't know about libel suits against the traditonal media, which have their own legal teams. "Online" libel produces the same chilling effect as the mass legal action that targets online "copyright" violators. It turns the legal system into a class action suit in reverse. One party is able to sue dozens or even thousands of others.
The idea isn't to "See you in court, honey" but to threaten enough people into submission. After all how many Joe orJane Blows can afford the services of a good lawyer? Or maybe Joe is happily middle-class, but can he afford the hassle of attending a hearing when he's not a corporate hydra but just one person who can only take so many days off from his job before he's fired?
When the scheme spreads to copycat countries. From TFA:
"The Government hopes the identity system will form the basis of a universally-recognised online authentication process for commercial transactions on the Internet, boosting the economy and strengthening Britain's position as a leader in e-commerce."
Here's one thing I hope the UK doesn't export like deep-fried Mars bars.
Maybe I'm browsing the project site wrong, but all I saw were about a dozen photographs? None show images of naked humans that can at least give a hint of what a human looks without the environmental protection suit. Photos of couples having sex and babies can also explain the nature of human reproduction. We're not androids that just rolled off the some fab lab.
It's not in the patent or article, but one use I see for a wearable watch is to serve as the trackpad for the AR glasses, or in other words, a wearable wireless computer "mouse". If I understand the GooGlass design correctly, navigation is either via voice or by fiddling some controls place behind the left or right ear piece of the glasses. A wristwatch should provide more finger surface besides being a gadget in its own right. Control GooGlass via the wristwatch should be technically more feasible than a AR gesture-based system where you control GooGlass by clicking directly at the icons you see projected in front of you.
Apple is probably in a much better position to end Microsoft's reign over the desktop, if it decides to release a generic OSX for the white box market. Sure, Apple's Mac sales are going to take an irreversible hit. But if gadget-type computers are the way forward, then Apple could conceivably deliver the coup de grace that would effectively remove a competitor from the picture.
The only problem would be the lack of a native office suite to replace MS Office, but if Apple can afford to release a half-baked home-brewed maps app, it can well afford to hijack and polish an existing second-tier office suite like OpenOffice, which unlike its GPL'd LibreOffice fork is available under a license that would allow Apple to close-source it.
"Microsoft and Android will have to fight a serious uphill battle against iPad. I have an iPad and love it to read material but as content creator (Even simple emails), it sucks. The market is wide open to fill the content creation gap."
I think it's the other way around. Unless it gets the patent courts on its side, Apple will have a serious battle maintaining its marketshare against the CheapPad or CheapTab makers. It might not seem obvious in the upmarket that's the US of A, but in other parts of the world, a person's second computing experience, after his soon-to-be-smartphone, will be on a non-Apple book-sized device.
Barring some price-PADding because of some adverse IP ruling, the price on tablets will go down to the cost of its parts. Moreover, tablets will be or are already being subsidized by large content or access companies eager to give away the keys to their walled garden: the better to lock up their costumers. At the moment, the darling of these companies is Android OS because it's as "free" as secondhand smoke in a bar. But if Microsoft decides to bite the bullet and "give away" Win 8, they can take a serious bite on the tablet market.
Unless it becomes too greedy for its onw good, Microsoft has a better chance of succeeding in the tablet and smartphone market than Apple has of maintaining its market share. A few years from now, Apple will be back to its status as the preferred gadget of the fashionable girls and boys.
The corruption is at worst a symptom of a larger problem. China appears to be suffering from the same problems experienced by Japan on its way to surpassing the US as an economic superpower. Now, that didn't happen, did it? Japan faltered because for the longest time Japan was virtually a one-party state. Now look at that other "great" one-party state, the Soviet Union.
There are otther factors of course, such as Japan's graying population, a problem that China is also facing because of its ill-conceived one-child policy. But even minor, public policy differences produce an incentive to search for solutions different from the accepted orthodoxy.
Monopolies aren't good, whether it's a company or a state party. China most likely wont' surpass the US as a superpower. Both may well go into a state of decline and be surpassed a third country with enough sense not to nurture economic or political monopolies that breed both corruption and stagnation.
The guy's basically a marketing manager. You might be the smartest person in company, but if a glorified salesman is all you are, you can easily be cloned. The exception is if you developed enough good connections OUTSIDE the company that you can take a shitload of the client base if they fire you. I don't think this is the case with Facebook users, fake or otherwise.
Of course, marketing types get paid more than the typical engineer if the product is successful. But if you want a more stable job, it's better to be the craftsman working at the product, than the pretty face selling it at the counter.
"After all, reporting a car accident with multiple injuries is just as important as delivering the latest cricket scores."
Is that how things are in India? Most countries have a "911" number or its equivalent that's either free or costs much less than a regualr call. So if there's a serious accident that's the number you call.
I think you're undervaluing the power of part-time collective action. Take for example, Wikipedia.
To produce a conventional encyclopedia you need to hire a large editorial staff and pay numerous experts a decent amount to write the articles. But with thousands of people contributing and mutually editing each other in a more or less freely editiable online encyclopeida, you lose the need for a large staff and numerous contributors. With advances in computer automation, you could theoretically reduce your staff to a small team of programmers.
This method can be translated to the invention and manufacture of tangible things. How? By allowing for incremental improvements to existing designs and products whose blueprints have been made freely available or "open-sourced", what we might call "open" hardware.
The value of patents as an incentive for innovation decreases and even disappears altogether once you already have a substantial body of technology that thousands or even millions of people can improve incrementally. In time these thousands of incremental improvements translate into a giant leap in technology. In the presence of patents, incremental improvements can only be done by paying a "creative" tax to the patent holder, a barrier that reduces the number of makers.
Patents should be reserved for fields where we don't have enough technology to build upon, such as fusion reactors, space elevators, or practical immortality. I don't mind the inventors of technologies in these fields becoming richer than Larry Ellison. But please abolish patents for round corners and multiple fingers.
Okay, they've done some crazy shit in the past. But like you said, all religions and ideologies, even nominally peaceful ones, have done terrible things in the name of their beliefs, possibly with the exception of the Jains (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jainism)
"The CGI on this movie still looks like VFX animation and not realistic. It looks fake. Camera tracking is good, modelling seems ok, but lighting and animation aren't."
Maybe a movie with such a ridiculous plot isn't meant to be realistic? Unrequited love brings the world to ruin but in the end love still saves the day. Really?
Take a look at the mango juice the black sniper sips. It should have been easy enough to turn the carton in something that resembles a real world brand instead it looks like a generic stage prop simply labeled MANGO, the project code name. Look also at the retro pixelated font used for the text output on the computer terminals. If this were a realistic movie set in a future where virtual reality has become a reality, you'd expect something at least as crystal as Apple's vaunted retina display. There's also that large button that turns red and displays "ERROR!!!" when something goes wrong, a sure sign that this is comic sci-fi.
So yes the stylistic look appears to be deliberate. You can see examples of such CGI unrealism mostly in fantasy movies like Lord of the Rings, but Tears of Steel isn't exactly straight-up hard sci-fi.
No, Dotcom is as evil as any other dotcom millionaire. Getting rich from basically selling nothing has to be a scam. This goes for the guys running Facebook, Google, or even pre-dotcom Microsoft. None of them has been threatened with serious jail time or had their assets "frozen" or confiscated.
"However, compared to RMS, Linus is a real gentleman."
In public, yes. We've heard enough "horror stories" about RMS losing his cool at some public event, while most photos and videos I've seen of Linus show him with an idiotic smile plastered on his face, a seemingly really fun guy to be with. The problem is Linus tends to "write" out his mind. Read RMS's angstiest writings. He never calls anyone batshit moronic, although he's called the members of Congress, "congresscritters".
And why pick on Mormons, who've never, as far as I can tell, been known to blow up people they disagree with?
"But Brazil decided to take hostages any way."
I hope you're just saying that for rhetorical effect. Because like the US Brazil is a federal republic. Read TFA. It says this was a local court case, not an action of the federal government.
The analogy I'd use would be some US state carrying out the death penalty on a person convicted in a controversial case by a local court. Would you blame Obama for the man's death? Unless there's a clear reason to see the case as "rigged" against the convict, it would do more harm than good to the US justice system for the federal government to overrule state laws.
"Is Switzerland considered a socialist nation?" First, I doubt whether Switzerland's opinion matters when the country's not even a member of the European Union. Second, what makes you think that copyright is inherently capitalist that having liberal copy laws makes that country socialist? Copyright is neither socialist nor capitalist. In fact, copyright is closer to feudalism than to either econo-political systems. Copyright dates from the time when absolute monarchs would grant subjects what a monopoly on certain fields. Perhaps a knight would gain control, if not ownership, of some tracts of lands in exchange for serving in the king's army. Notice how copyright and patent holders are supposed to receive "royalties"? Copyright, or at least the version that says "All rights reserved", is one idea that should have gone out with the divine right of kings.
"Some people have mentioned "backups" as an analogy. While partially true, when you come to talk about backing up the repository (for centralised version control), you'll get the inevitable why backup backups?"
So what's wrong with having "multiple" backups? There's no need to go into more sophisticated non-IT analogies when a backup is the one thing any responsible administrator should have as a matter of policy.
Want something more sophisticated? Tell him/her that's it's a backup would multiple levels of undo. "Undo" or Ctrl-Z is a familiar enough concept.
Leave the details to your fellow techies. Or you'll suffer the fate of those climate scientists who don't get a good press because they're so subtle with their description of what's happening to the weather.
Not being a chip expert, the following made me think twice over whether some dextrous East Asian factory workers used tweezers to lay out the circuits of each and every chip rolling down the assembly line:
"Hand-made chips are very rare nowadays, with Chipworks reporting that it hasn't seen a non-Intel hand-made chip for 'years.'"
The phrase "hand-made chips" is misleading because it gives the impression that, similar to the way motherboards are still assembled by hand, the production of CPUs involve human fingers coming into direct contact with the silicon.
Instead of teams of wondrous elves etching the microscopic pathways of electrons, we are treated to the less remarkable, but still impressive revelation that most chip designs are automatically spit out by high level chip design software.
"Today's handheld device is the mainframe of years past."
Isn't it more like today's handheld is the supercomputer of decades past? A mainfarme excels in crunching databases, while a supercomputer excels at doing "tasks" faster than even the typical liquid nitrogen-cooled desktop.
Note that I'm using "task" in not in the computer sense of "multitasking", but int the human sense of an activity that a single user might want a computer to perform, like solving a complex equation or modeling a hurricane. While the difference isn't absolute, a mainframe would be more multi-user oriented than a supercomputer.
Typical use cases for supercomputers are in the field of visualization. That's why we get these jokes about future Windows version requiring a supercomputer to boot. So comparison with a supercomputer, rather than a mainframe, is more apt, especially for graphically lush gadgets such as smartphones.
Maybe it's time to restrict patents to fields that need real innovation. In many fields, patents have simply added unnecessary overhead to the cost of production. Patents for a fusion reactor or a better rocket engine might be necessary to protect the huge investments necessary to engineer and build prototypes. But are patents necessary for product design elements that anyone with a little knowhow can produce with off-the-shell CAD software?
"The citizens of Eichberg now have a mayor whose agenda has nothing to do roads, sewers, public safety, or any of the other unsexy issues that municipal officials deal with. He does care about copyright reform â" an issue in which a mayor has no say at all."
This is Switzerland, not some Third World country where a road is more pothole than concrete. So maybe the local voters don't care that much about roads and sewers because they're in a good enough condition?
Remember that a government isn't all elected "politicians". In most well-run democratic countries, the government consists mostly of bureaucrats that can run the state or local unit even if there's a political deadlock where there's no legally elected leader but only a caretaker who may or may not have been elected. So basically you'll have a local "Pirate" politician setting "policies" for local bureacrats to put into practice.