My wife took a couple years off when my daughter was born. We could (barely) afford that because more than half of our income was from me. While she was taking time off, I found a new job that almost doubled my pay, in a city four hours away. For double the pay, we moved. Now I make four times as much as my wife.
The next time we consider a move, suppose we can go to city A and increase my wife's income by 25% ($7,000 increase) or we can move to city B and increase my income by by 25% ($30,000 increase). Which will we do? Obviously we'd take the $30,000, increasing my income. And she would start over with a new employer. If our daughter got sick and one of us had to stay home with her for six months, should my wife quit her job (costing us $14,000) or should I quit for six months (costing us $60,000)? Right now we can afford to send one of us to school. The same sort of calculation applies - me getting my masters degree will increase our income by $30,000/year or so.
Every decision we make about whose career takes priority logically prioritizes the career that provides most of our income. Because she makes less, and therefore has less of an impact our budget, it'll always be logical prioritize my career, compounding the difference. It's a self-perpetuating cycle. The more one parrner makes relative to the other, the more important it becomes to protect and enhance the higher income. That's perfectly okay with my wife and I - it helps OUR budget to increase OUR income.
Logically, we temper that and make sure she has some marketable skills only in case something happens to me. If I die or have a major head injury she'll need to be able to earn an income in a couple years, after the insurance runs out. So our plan is that if I should die, she'll finish school while living off the insurance money.
Obviously the airline handled this poorly. Having said that:
> telling a plane full of people that your convenience as the company who took their money is more important than theirs is colossally stupid.... > The only possible acceptable answer for **someone** in the decision making chain to have made there was "our customers come before us".
The crew was needed to fly another plane with 500 customers on it. So the airline's choice was between these two:
A) Inconvenience four passengers on this flight, by rescheduling them on the next flight. B) Greatly inconvenience 500 passengers on the other flight - and they won't all fit on the next flight out.
Customers of the airline were best served by getting four of them off that flight, though that should have been done by offering them $1,200 each. (I understand three people took the offer at $800, they needed one more.)
Also, in this case the watermarks on the images provide a pretty strong hint that the are professionally produced photos and the owner cares about their copyright. The editors / moderators would have seen the watermarks before approving the submission.
> Time is needed to be made aware of infringing content, to make a judgment as to whether or not the content actually is infringing, and to take appropriate action.
In this case, Live Journal posts submissions after a team of editors / moderators have reviewed and approved submissions. They actively approved it before it was published on the site, and would have seen the watermarks on the images.
There are many images on the web, and tons of source code, for which I don't know the license. Therefore I don't use them, since I don't know whether I'm allowed to or not. (Or I first find out what the license is, such as by asking.) That's the general rule - if you don't know whether you are allowed to use some content in a particular way, either find out, or don't use it. As a general rule, that's more or less reasonable.
If the editor of a newspaper doesn't know the license status of a particular image, they generally won't run that image in their newspaper. If an editor / moderator of a web site doesn't know if an image is licensed for the site's use, they CAN simply not allow the image to be posted to the site - they are already approving or rejecting the posting anyway. The legitimate question is "given the exact wording of the law (DMCA) as applied to the particular site in question, do the editors/moderators have a role similar to the editor of a newspaper?" (Again, as defined by the particular wording of the law.) This case isn't about the concept in general, but about the particulars of this specific case.
People who volunteer to be editors / moderators may indeed be unable to effectively serve as editors. In that case, perhaps if the site wants editors, they should pay editors, or else not have them. It's been known since at least 1997 when I started doing web sites professionally that weak moderation / editing is risky. Once you have staff deciding what should be posted, you start to become responsible for those decisions. (Including unpaid staff).
>> There's not much to worry about from the DMCA unless the terrorists are committing copyright infringement. > nothing near so bad as copyright infringement.
DMCA stands for Digital Millennium COPYRIGHT Act. It specifies the procedure service providers must follow to have safe harbor from copyright claims. So GP is absolutely correct, beheadings don't come under the Copyright Act. Terrorism falls under different laws.
Agreed. It seems we've gotten over a hump going from machine learning etc being a research area to where it's now usable for real-world applications. However, it's currently usable only for specialists. A major breakthrough will be when it's abstracted and packaged to be usable by ordinary developers.
Once upon a time, to write programs for a particular CPU, you had to know about the details of that particular CPU hardware, its registers and all that, and write in the appropriate asssembly language. Later, you could write software in C - not only did you not need to understand the details of the CPU in order to write software that uses the CPU, but the same C code will run on different CPU architectures. This is because the people who do know the details of the CPU hardware wrapped that in an abstraction layer. Similar for GPUs. Once upon a time, graphics programming required fully understanding the details of the particular graphics hardware in use. Now, general developers can work with hardware accelerated graphics as ordinary objects C#, courtesy of DirectX.
It feels like machine learning is now mostly at the "write in assembly" stage, you have to thoroughly understand how the thing works in order to use it. There are some developer-friendly libraries, like Intel's machine vision library. One day we'll have a full suite of developer-friendly libraries. We'll be able to call Pattern Finder and Pattern Matcher and have them find and match patterns, without knowing or caring HOW it matches patterns. Hopefully it'll be at least as easy as how Perl programmers use regular expressions all day, without having a clue how the regex engine works internally.
A pull *on* (public) Github, as opposed to *from* Github.
Suppose you have a copy of the Linux kernel of your Github. You are distributing the kernel. When you pull from my Github to your Github, everyone else can then get the code from your Github - you're distributing whatever was pulled from mine - but you've never seen it. You're distributing code you've never seen.
Suppose you work at Bosch working on in-car entertainment systems. You make some contributions to Android auto, and you do so via Github. Bosch is now distributing Android auto. If Android Auto were GPLv3, that would mean Bosch would lose their patent rights to anything that *anyone* puts into Android Auto, because Bosch is distributing Android Auto.
Suppose some other group at Bosch 2000 miles away is doing work related to autonomous vehicles. That group has nothing to do with Android Auto. They have patented some cool invention related to autonomous vehicles. As a competitor, all I need to do to nullify that patent is submit some infringing code to Android Auto. As soon as you (working for Bosch) update your Github, you're distributing Android Auto, all of it, including the infringing code. Bosch distributing infringing code plus GPLv3 means Bosch loses their patent rights.
While what you said may be true, it doesn't solve the issue. I used to work at Texas A&M. A&M is known for having probably the best veterinary school in the country. Because it's the best, the vet school gets four times as many applicants than they have spots available - 75% of applicants are declined. In 2015 the vet school accepted 114 women and 24 men. (114 of the 138 accepted are women - can't complain about that, under your criterion.) http://vetmed.tamu.edu/dvm/fut...
Also, A&M has a vocational school component, which is where I used to work. That department trains a thousand firefighters every year and doesn't turn down any applicants. All females who apply and pay the fee are accepted, as are all males. I don't have the numbers handy for the fire school, so let' suppose it is: 980 male applicants, all accepted 20 female applicants, all accepted
We can add the fire school and vet school together to get the numbers for the entire university (for the moment we pretend there are no other departments): 134 women accepted 1004 men accepted
Again that makes it look like they discriminate against women, though in reality for the competitive admissions (the vet school), almost all accepted applicants are women.
* When all depertments are included, Texas A&M actually admits more women than men. That makes it a great place to meet women, if you're a young guy.
Btw one way to reduce the patent risk is to allow employees to post code on their personal Github, registered under their personal email address rather than their @company.com address. The risk applies only to companies who make code publicly available - if individual employees don't have patents, they don't risk losing their patents. I did that at my last job. I personally had GPLv3 code on my personal Github, and was careful to avoid any mention of my employer when distributing GPLv3 code (I don't personally have any patents to worry about). However that does transfer some other risks to them, if the code happens to violate copywrite or something.
If GPLv3 included a patent license for anything your company contributes, that would work okay for many companies. I could recommend contributing to GPLv3 projects if that were the case.
However, as was pointed out when the the language of GPLv3 was being drafted, the actual text of the license is far broader than that, and arguably allows anyone to "steal" *any* patents owned by a company that contributes to a large project, including patents that have nothing to do with whatever the company contributed. Stallman is aware of this issue and decided not to address it. Therefore I and many others have to recommend that large companies especially be careful to *not* distribute any GPLv3 with contributions, via Github or any other method. The problem is that by simply doing a *pull* on Github, you're giving up patent rights to anything in the code you pulled, code which you've never seen, including patents from a different division of your company, which you aren't personally aware of.
I forgot the footnote. I don't remember for sure if the competitive program was nursing, or something else. The interesting bit to me is that *every* department admitted a higher percentage of women, but they got sued by the feds because the university as a whole admitted a higher percentage of men. That seems like a mathematical paradox at first, so I was paying attention to the math, not which department it was.
There are many factors that affect these things. Asking for a raise is one factor among many.
The government once sued a university for gender discrimination because they accepted a significantly higher percentage of male students than female. It was a pretty clear case, they accepted something like 60% of male applicants and 40% of female applicants. Here's the weird thing - every department at the school accepted a higher rate of female students. For any given program at the school, women were *more* likely to be accepted than men. At first, that might seem mathematically impossible. Here's how it happened:
The school's crown jewel was its very highly regarded nursing* program. It had some other departments too, but the school was known for the nursing program. The nursing program had a lot more applicants than the available slots. Most people who applied to the nursing program weren't accepted. Also, most people who applied for the nursing program were female.
Therefore, most women weren't accepted, even though the nursing program and every other program at the school were biased toward admitting a higher percentage of female applicants than male applicants. Males just didn't tend to apply for the nursing program as much, and that was the program that had the most competitive admissions.
The point in my post was about opposing sides, represented to by opposing lobbyists. The post I replied to suggested "we the people" should be a lobby, hiring lobbyists. My point is that we do - thing is, since "we the people disagree", we are opposing lobbies, we hire opposing lobbyists.
I don't think people argue too much about excessive bail or speedy trial, so those would be very bad examples.
They are indeed politicians, funded by those who benefit from this law. As the summary mentions, it looked like there was a chance the law would be changed, but it wasn't because the citizens don't care strongly enough about this issue. It's not going to change any significant number of votes.
Technically, they aren't *hypocrites*, they know it's bad law. A hypocrite would *say* they believe free markets work better than rule by bureaucrat, but not actually believe that. I'm sure these lawmakers believe what they say on that point. They also know who their donors are.
> Anyone is free to use this idea to found a Kickstarter-like company aimed t achieving this goal. I claim no ownership, nor credit. GO DO IT!
Great idea! I think our group's first issue should be that laws should respect our Constitutional freedoms. Maybe the most clear-cut example, so a good one to start with, is the second amendment. "The right to bear arms shall not be infringed" is pretty clear, and the people who wrote those words also wrote quite a bit about what those words mean, so it's pretty clear. "Bear arms" is what they had just done defeating the British army. They did so as militias, about which they wrote "the militia is the whole people". So there is a good place for us to start.
Perhaps you disagree. Perhaps you think we should start by passing laws that pretend the Constitution doesn't exist, or that Washington bureaucrats should "interpret" the Constitution to mean the opposite of what it says. We can start TWO Kickstarter projects. We'll call the pro-Constitution one the "National Rifle Association" and the anti-Constitution one "Americans for Responsible Solutions".
What you "take no credit for inventing" are called lobbies. The EFF is a lobby, they employ people called lobbyists. PETA and MADD are lobbies. They advocate for ("buy politicians for") the issues their members care about.
> could up-end the intrinsic corporate dominance that the Citizens United decision has resulted in since the ruling
Can you tell me what difference you saw, exactly, between 2002 and 2008? McCain-Feingold was passed in 2002, effective for the 2004 elections, and struck down in 2008 by the Citizens United ruling, which said that you ARE free to donate to the EFF, the ACLU, or other group of your choice in order to make your voice heard on political issues. In other words, rather than just standing on a street corner yelling, you can cooperate with other citizens to make a film expressing your political opinion. That was true from the founding of the country until 2002, so what great improvement did you see from 2002-2008 when groups like EFF and ACLU couldn't legally advocate during the peak of the election season?
I know, I know, if you get your news from certain comedians, you've heard the joke about "corporations are people". Yes, a corporation can be sued in court, a corporation can be regulated by law, etc. If Ford sells you a dangerous car, you might want to sue someone. Rather than finding which employee made the bad weld, you can sue the corporation, the corporation is a legal person. That's actually the definition of a corporation - a cooperative group treated as a legal person, so they can be sued, regulated, etc.
That concept was created by the ancient Romans. When an aqueduct needed to be built, rather than seperately hiring a thousand stone masons, the Roman Senate contacted with a group of stone masons, called corporation, to build the aqueduct. Citizen's United didn't create the corporation as a legal person, Cicero did, and Pope Innocent IV popularized it outside of Rome. SCOTUS simply noticed it, once again (for upteenth time).
> I don't see anyone benefiting from this regulation other than entrenched dealership
Car dealers bought these laws, mostly in the 1940s through 1960s. The excuse to the public was basically "car manufacturers are large corporations, and therefore bad". It doesn't make a lot of sense, but few voters cared enough to think about it, and to be quite frank, you generally *need* a good argument to get Democrat voters to accept a law against the big o' corporation versus the "little guy" car dealer. Even though the "little guys" have tens of millions of dollars EACH. (These laws were mostly passed by Democrat legislatures).
Fyi these laws were passed mostly by Democrats, in the 1940s through 1960s. The pitch to the public was against the big bad auto companies, GM, Ford, and Chrysler. Of course there were plenty of campaign contributions from auto dealers, who didn't want to be cut out of the action. Still today auto dealers are significant players in state and local politics.
A law is struck down when it's overridden by a higher law. When two laws conflict, a court must decide which one controls. Mostly you hear about it in the popular press when a state or federal statute conflicts with the supreme law of the land, the Constitution. It can also be a state law overriding a city ordinance, or a federal law overriding a state one.
An appointed judge can't, and shouldn't, write the law themselves because they don't like the law written by the elected legislature. What a judge does in these cases is take note, and rule, that some higher law overrides a lower one.
> Not to detract from your excellent points, but the hardware does matter. The lack of ports, ludicrously low max memory
That's a good counterpoint. "Ludicrously low max memory" is of course a problem for some people. Once you've achieved the specs of "modern workstation", the details don't matter so much - 99% of the time, if 512GB is enough, 256GB is also enough. Maxing out at 64GB is too low, though, even with memory compression.
> to exploit network effects to bootstrap themselves into a monopoly
Network effects (or more properly two-sided markets in this case) work exactly the opposite of what you're suggesting. Network effects work 100% to the advantage of the INCUMBENTS, and a monopoly would create a nearly impenetrable network, not the other way around. You can't "bootstrap" into an established market with network effects. On the contrary, network effects are a BARRIER to entry to established markets - the buyers are all on Zillow and Craigslist, so it would be irrational for any landlord to contract with this new company.
Facebook has the network effect BECAUSE it had the mmonopoly. Even mighty Google and Microsoft can't successfully enter that market because the network effect keeps new entrants OUT.
There are of course many, many places to find rentals. Different venues provide different value to the renter - Zillow is was useful when I was renting because their map of properties that fit my criteria was helpful. One local locator (a knowledgeable person) was able to suggest properties that fit what I wanted for requirements that aren't on Zillow.
Renters will only use this new platform if it provides them done benefit, some value. If it doesn't, renters will continue to use other existing services that do create some value for them.
> Just run it in the OS it wants to run in on the iron.
Sometimes that certainly makes sense. Sometimes that would be really inconvenient and provide no benefit at all.
> Well any emulation/virtualization/whatever will slow things down. How much varies, but even in the best case scenario, there's a performance penalty.
That's not true. There is no measurable performance penalty for any application that's waiting on hardware such as the GPU or waiting on an external resource, typically over the network. As a stupid simple example, consider curl. Downloading a 100MB file over a 10Mbps connection will take 100 seconds, whether you're running on bare metal or three levels of virtualization deep.
If the CPU is sitting around waiting for the GPU to process the data, it doesn't matter if the CPU waits 10% "slower". A GPU-bound application will run just as fast whether the CPU is virtualized with PCI passthrough or not - it's not waiting on the CPU anyway.
Performance is all about the bottleneck. If the application is slowed because it's waiting on the CPU, it doesn't matter how fast the disk is. If the application spends it's time waiting on the network, it doesn't matter how fast the CPU is, etc. The only component that matters for performance is the component that's at ~100% utilization. (Ignoring for a moment trading disk and RAM via caching and paging).
> if consumers gave them a choice: release DRM free, or go out of business
If I had four hooves and a horn, I'd be a unicorn. 99.9% of Hollywood's paying customers (the people they care about) don't know what DRM *is*.
Of the maybe one in a thousand customers who even know what DRM is, maybe half of those will take it unlawfully *regardless*, they aren't going to pay $5 for the movie (their share of the production costs) *no matter what*. So you're left with maybe 0.05% of customers who know and care about DRM, and who will maybe pay for a non-DRM copy. The studios aren't going to make such important decisions based on less than one tenth of one percent of the market.
Slashdot Mirror
My wife took a couple years off when my daughter was born. We could (barely) afford that because more than half of our income was from me. While she was taking time off, I found a new job that almost doubled my pay, in a city four hours away. For double the pay, we moved. Now I make four times as much as my wife.
The next time we consider a move, suppose we can go to city A and increase my wife's income by 25% ($7,000 increase) or we can move to city B and increase my income by by 25% ($30,000 increase). Which will we do? Obviously we'd take the $30,000, increasing my income. And she would start over with a new employer. If our daughter got sick and one of us had to stay home with her for six months, should my wife quit her job (costing us $14,000) or should I quit for six months (costing us $60,000)? Right now we can afford to send one of us to school. The same sort of calculation applies - me getting my masters degree will increase our income by $30,000/year or so.
Every decision we make about whose career takes priority logically prioritizes the career that provides most of our income. Because she makes less, and therefore has less of an impact our budget, it'll always be logical prioritize my career, compounding the difference. It's a self-perpetuating cycle. The more one parrner makes relative to the other, the more important it becomes to protect and enhance the higher income. That's perfectly okay with my wife and I - it helps OUR budget to increase OUR income.
Logically, we temper that and make sure she has some marketable skills only in case something happens to me. If I die or have a major head injury she'll need to be able to earn an income in a couple years, after the insurance runs out. So our plan is that if I should die, she'll finish school while living off the insurance money.
Obviously the airline handled this poorly. Having said that:
> telling a plane full of people that your convenience as the company who took their money is more important than theirs is colossally stupid. ...
> The only possible acceptable answer for **someone** in the decision making chain to have made there was "our customers come before us".
The crew was needed to fly another plane with 500 customers on it. So the airline's choice was between these two:
A) Inconvenience four passengers on this flight, by rescheduling them on the next flight.
B) Greatly inconvenience 500 passengers on the other flight - and they won't all fit on the next flight out.
Customers of the airline were best served by getting four of them off that flight, though that should have been done by offering them $1,200 each. (I understand three people took the offer at $800, they needed one more.)
Also, in this case the watermarks on the images provide a pretty strong hint that the are professionally produced photos and the owner cares about their copyright. The editors / moderators would have seen the watermarks before approving the submission.
> Time is needed to be made aware of infringing content, to make a judgment as to whether or not the content actually is infringing, and to take appropriate action.
In this case, Live Journal posts submissions after a team of editors / moderators have reviewed and approved submissions. They actively approved it before it was published on the site, and would have seen the watermarks on the images.
There are many images on the web, and tons of source code, for which I don't know the license. Therefore I don't use them, since I don't know whether I'm allowed to or not. (Or I first find out what the license is, such as by asking.) That's the general rule - if you don't know whether you are allowed to use some content in a particular way, either find out, or don't use it. As a general rule, that's more or less reasonable.
If the editor of a newspaper doesn't know the license status of a particular image, they generally won't run that image in their newspaper. If an editor / moderator of a web site doesn't know if an image is licensed for the site's use, they CAN simply not allow the image to be posted to the site - they are already approving or rejecting the posting anyway. The legitimate question is "given the exact wording of the law (DMCA) as applied to the particular site in question, do the editors/moderators have a role similar to the editor of a newspaper?" (Again, as defined by the particular wording of the law.) This case isn't about the concept in general, but about the particulars of this specific case.
People who volunteer to be editors / moderators may indeed be unable to effectively serve as editors. In that case, perhaps if the site wants editors, they should pay editors, or else not have them. It's been known since at least 1997 when I started doing web sites professionally that weak moderation / editing is risky. Once you have staff deciding what should be posted, you start to become responsible for those decisions. (Including unpaid staff).
>> There's not much to worry about from the DMCA unless the terrorists are committing copyright infringement.
> nothing near so bad as copyright infringement.
DMCA stands for Digital Millennium COPYRIGHT Act. It specifies the procedure service providers must follow to have safe harbor from copyright claims. So GP is absolutely correct, beheadings don't come under the Copyright Act. Terrorism falls under different laws.
Agreed. It seems we've gotten over a hump going from machine learning etc being a research area to where it's now usable for real-world applications. However, it's currently usable only for specialists. A major breakthrough will be when it's abstracted and packaged to be usable by ordinary developers.
Once upon a time, to write programs for a particular CPU, you had to know about the details of that particular CPU hardware, its registers and all that, and write in the appropriate asssembly language. Later, you could write software in C - not only did you not need to understand the details of the CPU in order to write software that uses the CPU, but the same C code will run on different CPU architectures. This is because the people who do know the details of the CPU hardware wrapped that in an abstraction layer. Similar for GPUs. Once upon a time, graphics programming required fully understanding the details of the particular graphics hardware in use. Now, general developers can work with hardware accelerated graphics as ordinary objects C#, courtesy of DirectX.
It feels like machine learning is now mostly at the "write in assembly" stage, you have to thoroughly understand how the thing works in order to use it. There are some developer-friendly libraries, like Intel's machine vision library. One day we'll have a full suite of developer-friendly libraries. We'll be able to call Pattern Finder and Pattern Matcher and have them find and match patterns, without knowing or caring HOW it matches patterns. Hopefully it'll be at least as easy as how Perl programmers use regular expressions all day, without having a clue how the regex engine works internally.
A pull *on* (public) Github, as opposed to *from* Github.
Suppose you have a copy of the Linux kernel of your Github. You are distributing the kernel. When you pull from my Github to your Github, everyone else can then get the code from your Github - you're distributing whatever was pulled from mine - but you've never seen it. You're distributing code you've never seen.
Suppose you work at Bosch working on in-car entertainment systems. You make some contributions to Android auto, and you do so via Github. Bosch is now distributing Android auto. If Android Auto were GPLv3, that would mean Bosch would lose their patent rights to anything that *anyone* puts into Android Auto, because Bosch is distributing Android Auto.
Suppose some other group at Bosch 2000 miles away is doing work related to autonomous vehicles. That group has nothing to do with Android Auto. They have patented some cool invention related to autonomous vehicles. As a competitor, all I need to do to nullify that patent is submit some infringing code to Android Auto. As soon as you (working for Bosch) update your Github, you're distributing Android Auto, all of it, including the infringing code. Bosch distributing infringing code plus GPLv3 means Bosch loses their patent rights.
While what you said may be true, it doesn't solve the issue. I used to work at Texas A&M. A&M is known for having probably the best veterinary school in the country. Because it's the best, the vet school gets four times as many applicants than they have spots available - 75% of applicants are declined. In 2015 the vet school accepted
114 women and 24 men. (114 of the 138 accepted are women - can't complain about that, under your criterion.)
http://vetmed.tamu.edu/dvm/fut...
Also, A&M has a vocational school component, which is where I used to work. That department trains a thousand firefighters every year and doesn't turn down any applicants. All females who apply and pay the fee are accepted, as are all males. I don't have the numbers handy for the fire school, so let' suppose it is:
980 male applicants, all accepted
20 female applicants, all accepted
We can add the fire school and vet school together to get the numbers for the entire university (for the moment we pretend there are no other departments):
134 women accepted
1004 men accepted
Again that makes it look like they discriminate against women, though in reality for the competitive admissions (the vet school), almost all accepted applicants are women.
* When all depertments are included, Texas A&M actually admits more women than men. That makes it a great place to meet women, if you're a young guy.
Btw one way to reduce the patent risk is to allow employees to post code on their personal Github, registered under their personal email address rather than their @company.com address. The risk applies only to companies who make code publicly available - if individual employees don't have patents, they don't risk losing their patents. I did that at my last job. I personally had GPLv3 code on my personal Github, and was careful to avoid any mention of my employer when distributing GPLv3 code (I don't personally have any patents to worry about). However that does transfer some other risks to them, if the code happens to violate copywrite or something.
If GPLv3 included a patent license for anything your company contributes, that would work okay for many companies. I could recommend contributing to GPLv3 projects if that were the case.
However, as was pointed out when the the language of GPLv3 was being drafted, the actual text of the license is far broader than that, and arguably allows anyone to "steal" *any* patents owned by a company that contributes to a large project, including patents that have nothing to do with whatever the company contributed. Stallman is aware of this issue and decided not to address it. Therefore I and many others have to recommend that large companies especially be careful to *not* distribute any GPLv3 with contributions, via Github or any other method. The problem is that by simply doing a *pull* on Github, you're giving up patent rights to anything in the code you pulled, code which you've never seen, including patents from a different division of your company, which you aren't personally aware of.
Suppose
I forgot the footnote. I don't remember for sure if the competitive program was nursing, or something else. The interesting bit to me is that *every* department admitted a higher percentage of women, but they got sued by the feds because the university as a whole admitted a higher percentage of men. That seems like a mathematical paradox at first, so I was paying attention to the math, not which department it was.
There are many factors that affect these things. Asking for a raise is one factor among many.
The government once sued a university for gender discrimination because they accepted a significantly higher percentage of male students than female. It was a pretty clear case, they accepted something like 60% of male applicants and 40% of female applicants. Here's the weird thing - every department at the school accepted a higher rate of female students. For any given program at the school, women were *more* likely to be accepted than men. At first, that might seem mathematically impossible. Here's how it happened:
The school's crown jewel was its very highly regarded nursing* program. It had some other departments too, but the school was known for the nursing program. The nursing program had a lot more applicants than the available slots. Most people who applied to the nursing program weren't accepted. Also, most people who applied for the nursing program were female.
Therefore, most women weren't accepted, even though the nursing program and every other program at the school were biased toward admitting a higher percentage of female applicants than male applicants. Males just didn't tend to apply for the nursing program as much, and that was the program that had the most competitive admissions.
Statistics are strange sometimes.
The point in my post was about opposing sides, represented to by opposing lobbyists. The post I replied to suggested "we the people" should be a lobby, hiring lobbyists. My point is that we do - thing is, since "we the people disagree", we are opposing lobbies, we hire opposing lobbyists.
I don't think people argue too much about excessive bail or speedy trial, so those would be very bad examples.
They are indeed politicians, funded by those who benefit from this law. As the summary mentions, it looked like there was a chance the law would be changed, but it wasn't because the citizens don't care strongly enough about this issue. It's not going to change any significant number of votes.
Technically, they aren't *hypocrites*, they know it's bad law. A hypocrite would *say* they believe free markets work better than rule by bureaucrat, but not actually believe that. I'm sure these lawmakers believe what they say on that point. They also know who their donors are.
> Anyone is free to use this idea to found a Kickstarter-like company aimed t achieving this goal. I claim no ownership, nor credit. GO DO IT!
Great idea! I think our group's first issue should be that laws should respect our Constitutional freedoms. Maybe the most clear-cut example, so a good one to start with, is the second amendment. "The right to bear arms shall not be infringed" is pretty clear, and the people who wrote those words also wrote quite a bit about what those words mean, so it's pretty clear. "Bear arms" is what they had just done defeating the British army. They did so as militias, about which they wrote "the militia is the whole people". So there is a good place for us to start.
Perhaps you disagree. Perhaps you think we should start by passing laws that pretend the Constitution doesn't exist, or that Washington bureaucrats should "interpret" the Constitution to mean the opposite of what it says. We can start TWO Kickstarter projects. We'll call the pro-Constitution one the "National Rifle Association" and the anti-Constitution one "Americans for Responsible Solutions".
What you "take no credit for inventing" are called lobbies. The EFF is a lobby, they employ people called lobbyists. PETA and MADD are lobbies. They advocate for ("buy politicians for") the issues their members care about.
> could up-end the intrinsic corporate dominance that the Citizens United decision has resulted in since the ruling
Can you tell me what difference you saw, exactly, between 2002 and 2008? McCain-Feingold was passed in 2002, effective for the 2004 elections, and struck down in 2008 by the Citizens United ruling, which said that you ARE free to donate to the EFF, the ACLU, or other group of your choice in order to make your voice heard on political issues. In other words, rather than just standing on a street corner yelling, you can cooperate with other citizens to make a film expressing your political opinion. That was true from the founding of the country until 2002, so what great improvement did you see from 2002-2008 when groups like EFF and ACLU couldn't legally advocate during the peak of the election season?
I know, I know, if you get your news from certain comedians, you've heard the joke about "corporations are people". Yes, a corporation can be sued in court, a corporation can be regulated by law, etc. If Ford sells you a dangerous car, you might want to sue someone. Rather than finding which employee made the bad weld, you can sue the corporation, the corporation is a legal person. That's actually the definition of a corporation - a cooperative group treated as a legal person, so they can be sued, regulated, etc.
That concept was created by the ancient Romans. When an aqueduct needed to be built, rather than seperately hiring a thousand stone masons, the Roman Senate contacted with a group of stone masons, called corporation, to build the aqueduct. Citizen's United didn't create the corporation as a legal person, Cicero did, and Pope Innocent IV popularized it outside of Rome. SCOTUS simply noticed it, once again (for upteenth time).
> I don't see anyone benefiting from this regulation other than entrenched dealership
Car dealers bought these laws, mostly in the 1940s through 1960s. The excuse to the public was basically "car manufacturers are large corporations, and therefore bad". It doesn't make a lot of sense, but few voters cared enough to think about it, and to be quite frank, you generally *need* a good argument to get Democrat voters to accept a law against the big o' corporation versus the "little guy" car dealer. Even though the "little guys" have tens of millions of dollars EACH. (These laws were mostly passed by Democrat legislatures).
Fyi these laws were passed mostly by Democrats, in the 1940s through 1960s. The pitch to the public was against the big bad auto companies, GM, Ford, and Chrysler. Of course there were plenty of campaign contributions from auto dealers, who didn't want to be cut out of the action. Still today auto dealers are significant players in state and local politics.
A law is struck down when it's overridden by a higher law. When two laws conflict, a court must decide which one controls. Mostly you hear about it in the popular press when a state or federal statute conflicts with the supreme law of the land, the Constitution. It can also be a state law overriding a city ordinance, or a federal law overriding a state one.
An appointed judge can't, and shouldn't, write the law themselves because they don't like the law written by the elected legislature. What a judge does in these cases is take note, and rule, that some higher law overrides a lower one.
I didn't check the other two you mentioned, but Myspace amd Facebook both lanuched in 2004.
> Not to detract from your excellent points, but the hardware does matter. The lack of ports, ludicrously low max memory
That's a good counterpoint. "Ludicrously low max memory" is of course a problem for some people. Once you've achieved the specs of "modern workstation", the details don't matter so much - 99% of the time, if 512GB is enough, 256GB is also enough. Maxing out at 64GB is too low, though, even with memory compression.
> to exploit network effects to bootstrap themselves into a monopoly
Network effects (or more properly two-sided markets in this case) work exactly the opposite of what you're suggesting. Network effects work 100% to the advantage of the INCUMBENTS, and a monopoly would create a nearly impenetrable network, not the other way around. You can't "bootstrap" into an established market with network effects. On the contrary, network effects are a BARRIER to entry to established markets - the buyers are all on Zillow and Craigslist, so it would be irrational for any landlord to contract with this new company.
Facebook has the network effect BECAUSE it had the mmonopoly. Even mighty Google and Microsoft can't successfully enter that market because the network effect keeps new entrants OUT.
There are of course many, many places to find rentals. Different venues provide different value to the renter - Zillow is was useful when I was renting because their map of properties that fit my criteria was helpful. One local locator (a knowledgeable person) was able to suggest properties that fit what I wanted for requirements that aren't on Zillow.
Renters will only use this new platform if it provides them done benefit, some value. If it doesn't, renters will continue to use other existing services that do create some value for them.
> Just run it in the OS it wants to run in on the iron.
Sometimes that certainly makes sense. Sometimes that would be really inconvenient and provide no benefit at all.
> Well any emulation/virtualization/whatever will slow things down. How much varies, but even in the best case scenario, there's a performance penalty.
That's not true. There is no measurable performance penalty for any application that's waiting on hardware such as the GPU or waiting on an external resource, typically over the network. As a stupid simple example, consider curl. Downloading a 100MB file over a 10Mbps connection will take 100 seconds, whether you're running on bare metal or three levels of virtualization deep.
If the CPU is sitting around waiting for the GPU to process the data, it doesn't matter if the CPU waits 10% "slower". A GPU-bound application will run just as fast whether the CPU is virtualized with PCI passthrough or not - it's not waiting on the CPU anyway.
Performance is all about the bottleneck. If the application is slowed because it's waiting on the CPU, it doesn't matter how fast the disk is. If the application spends it's time waiting on the network, it doesn't matter how fast the CPU is, etc. The only component that matters for performance is the component that's at ~100% utilization. (Ignoring for a moment trading disk and RAM via caching and paging).
> if consumers gave them a choice: release DRM free, or go out of business
If I had four hooves and a horn, I'd be a unicorn. 99.9% of Hollywood's paying customers (the people they care about) don't know what DRM *is*.
Of the maybe one in a thousand customers who even know what DRM is, maybe half of those will take it unlawfully *regardless*, they aren't going to pay $5 for the movie (their share of the production costs) *no matter what*. So you're left with maybe 0.05% of customers who know and care about DRM, and who will maybe pay for a non-DRM copy. The studios aren't going to make such important decisions based on less than one tenth of one percent of the market.