Actually, why would you need extra rings? Simply put your habitats on spokes a little further in or further out from the main ring, and extend them as far as your materials can handle. Just keep the center of gravity in a stable orbit.
The problem with Ringworld is that for the centripital force to produce "artificial" gravity, the Ringworld would have to be spinning much faster than the rate of its it's orbital revolution. No material that we can conceive of has the tensile strength to hold it together. At least, that's what I read somewhere.
Which still does not refute the fact that property is still the most efficient way of resolving the problem of scarce resources. Who decides who gets to use what? Isn't a person using a resource stealing from everyone with an alternate use for that resource?
Now, of course, there is no scarcity in "intellectual property", which is why one can claim a right to copy information freely, despite what governments and corporations would rather them believe. I think the optimal solution to this problem is to index all people who dismiss intellectual property. They would be able to mooch all they want, but they can't expect any of their own output to be protected from copying.
Similar indexes could be created for patents, trade secrets, various types of contracts such as NDAs and shrink-wrap licenses.
For example, I support copyright and a limited use of patents, but I think the concept of trade secrets and any contract that negates first sale rights is bogus. I must respect copyright, or otherwise I risk having everyone else treat my own copyrighted works as public domain. By the same token, I can't expect people keep any secrets I tell them because I myself don't respect NDAs and trade secrets. I would have very little credibility with the "contracts are absolute" crowd, but I'd still respect their copyrights, and they'd respect mine, lest I and the people who think like I do start mooching their stuff when they become hypocrites.
The world would become very complex place, with everyone tracking the consistency of everyone else's behavior with the rights they claim, but with adequate computing technology, say 10-20 years from now, I think it is feasible. I think the end result would be something very much like what we have now, where people respect laws and contracts that are reasonable, and break those that aren't. Only in the future you won't be fined or jailed for having different opinions than the government on what is reasonable.
Do you think the college punk isn't just as capable of writing simple scripts?
Now, when you've got implement a web application that must support a thousand simultanesous users, operate with several legacy databases, uses shared memory and is multi-threaded, who you gonna hire? None of this is theoretical, but you bet your ass you'll want somebody who understands concurrency and efficiency, as well as good software engineering practices. Do you really think your typical employer is as capable as teaching these things as a good college?
Here's a good litmus test for all those "school is a waste of time" people: how many of you would've known what these two are talking about when you first entered the workforce? How many even now?
My advice to anyone: if you can afford to go to college, DO IT! Sure, you think you're smart, you think you can make good money right out of high school, and you think you don't need college, right?
WRONG! Because not matter how much of a waste you think college is, it is the only time in your life where you will have oodles of free time to work on the things that directly reflect your interests. Do you think its any coincidence that most of the stuff on freshmeat is the work of bored college students? Or that most open source projects, before the hype started, were started by people in college or working for a college?
Sure, you can learn programming on the job. But you're always going to have the pressure of the bottom line dictating what you need to know and how long have to learn it. You're never going to have the luxary to learn things the right way. And unless you like spending all your waking time in front of a computer or textbook, you're never going to have the time or the patience to learn the more theoretical apsects of computer science. This is the stuff that seperates the MCSE's from the kernel hackers.
I didn't see many of the schools in the top 50 as being schools with large athletic programs.
Georgia Tech, UNC, Duke, Wake Forest? I'm sure there's more but I'm ignorant of everything but the ACC. Actually, it almost looks like this is a quirk of southern and midwestern schools. I guess us hicks like our sports.
You'd think if we really valued skilled immigrants, we wouldn't use the H1-B visa to subject them to the whims of their employer. Rather than all this smoke and mirrors about a labor shortage, lets remove the requirements that say an immigrant has to stay with their sponser or be deported. After all, the worker is still in the market and filling those badly need jobs, and a skilled worker should have no problem paying the fees of the immigration bureaucracy.
Out gosh, then they'd have to pay them the market wage, which of course will naturally rise in a supply shortage. Corporations want it both ways: the free market to reduce costs (and get away with shit they wouldn't otherwise), but they want a tightly regulated market (in their favor) of immigrant workers.
Sorry, game over. This could effectively kill price-finding bots, as the only way to determine a price is to establish an identity. And every user's price won't be that of the bot's. Add to the fact that many companies are trying to make price finding bots illegal, and legislation intended to give copyright status to databases of facts could very well make price lists the "property" of that particular vendor, and you've got the formula where supply and demand are history, and the only thing that influences prices is how much you can spend.
You trust Amazon's "list" prices, which are basically MSRPs? They're usually inflated, and sometimes completely bogus.
And do you think their profiling isn't necessarily going to reflect political beliefs, or things you've never bought? They're probably drawing correlations from every purchase made buy everybody. Political texts will tend to be priced according to the disposible income of their typical adherants.
This technology is evil. You think you can still comparison shop, right? Guess again. If vendors start sharing databases, and outlaw autonomous robots from retreiving price lists, there will be no such thing market price. Prices will fluctuate wildly because they are now so arbitrary. Things will be priced on how much you're willing to spend, not according to supply and demand. Make one bad purchasing desicion, and could be pegged as a sucker and always get stuck with the higher prices.
The analogy doesn't quite hold, because the price of a car is negotiable, and people don't generally buy cars from the same dealership several times a month, so they can't really get effective profiling information.
This business model, as you describe it*, should die, and we should encourage its death every time it rears its ugly head.
It is a promotional scam for vendor lock-in. You're getting nothing for free, you're paying for the device in the fees to the service. If you aren't allowed to use the device except for the service, then device is uselss in any other context, so it is an outright lie to claim that the device is free, as it is being leased as a part of the serivce.
Why is this evil? Because there is no compelling reason to do business this way, except as a technique to trick the gullible into signing long-term service contracts, thus locking them in a payment schedule and a particular hardware vendor and service provider.
An honest open market approach is to sell or rent the devices that can operate with one of many services providers via open standards. You get a choice for the device, a choice in the service provider, and a lower barrier to entry for both device manufactuers and service providers. The costs are up front, not hidden behind marketroid double-talk, and will be cheaper in the long run.
[*] I always thought loss-leader meant you sold under cost initially to gain market share, then set a reasonable price once you're established. Neither the CueCat or FreePC really fit this model.
Um, if a userland program can take down the machine through normal operation, its the kernel's fault for letting it happen.
And if third party applications that work fine in NT/98 break in 2k, it is not the applications' fault unless they are using undocumented functions, functions deprecated in 2k, or using the API incorrectly. Seeing as how Microsoft applications use undocumented functions out the wazoo, and the Win32 API is sloppy crap, the only real thing you can blame third parties for is not reading the new documentation.
Indeed. I've learned that some people are so self-absorbed with their own perceived superiority that they act like nitwits thinking they're making some kind of profound point.
No one condemed you, though one response was a bit sarcastic. In fact, both responses were helpful enough to provide you with a map. Their motives were to educate you, not condem you. You are the self-righteous fool sneering at the innocently gullible.
Weird. I thought I was the only one who gets queasy at the thought of embalming It's so disgustingly morbid, turning a person's body into prop with a bunch of chemicals. And cremation seems so wasteful.
I think one of the nicest ways of being disposed of, aside from organ donation and training medical students, is to be chopped up and fed to animals at a petting zoo. Who cares about worms and bacteria, I want to feed cute fuzzy animals!
I did not say the games were fixed, I said they IOC had fixed games. Actually they looked the other way when the fixing was discovered, but it amounts to the same thing.
You're the one clinging to myths. You hold the image of the teamsters up like some sort of epitome of union corruption, when you probably don't know jack about any of it.
My father is in a metal workers union. It provided my health insurance when I was a child. It supported him and trained him at a time when the economy was shit and half the union was out of work. His company is not union controlled, but the company actually prefers union workers, because they are the most responsible and well trained.
If the cognative dissonance is too much for you, think of a union as a firm that sells skilled labor, blue collar consulting, if you will. Like any accumulation of power, it can be abused and twist the market to its own purposes, as evidenced by the teamsters and others. But it is no different than the activities of a thousand coporations.
The International Olympic Committe is nothing more than a crime syndicate under the guise of a non-profit organization. They take bribes during the city selection process, they have fixed events, they've co-opted the word Olympic and bully anyone who has a legitimate use of that name. They bend over for powerful nations like China when they force the democratic Republic of China, better known as Taiwan, to play as "Chinese Taipei" and under a generic Olympic flag.
The Olympics have very little to do with athletics or international goodwill. That's how it is sold, but of course, it is all about selling things, isn't it? It's about sponsership, marketing, and product placement. It's about political favors, one-upsmanship, and propoganda. Do yourself a favor and have nothing to do with this scam.
If you publish something in an environment where you've got no right to stop people from appropriating it for their own uses, you've got no one to blame but yourself. In other words, no one put a gun to your head and made you publish it, so quit whining.
If you publish something under a license that permits derivative works, don't complain when derivative works actually happen, even when they make more money or earn more attention than your works.
A corollary to the the first two: When the legal framework permits dervative works for the purpose of criticism and parody, don't whine when someone uses those rights to successfully counter your opinions or propoganda.
When you try to claim ownership of something so vague as "look and feel", don't be suprised when people shrug you off as a possesive control freak. There are clearly optimum design patterns for user interfaces, and none of them require such an investment to implement to merit copyright or trademark status. One can own words, one can own images, one can even one an expression of an algorithm, but to claim ownership of a particular nesting of <table> elements is absurd.
That is an excellant idea. Better yet, change your address, phone number, etc. to that of a member of the offending company. Don't go for the CEO, like Bezos, because they usually have flunkies to deal with that sort of thing. Find the name of a mid-level manager in the marketing department, someone who isn't going to be rich enough to ignore his mailbox but is still responsible for the evil which you will send back.
Because of the USB cradle. It says they have a serial cradle in the works, but is still MS-only. Actually, the accessories page lists Windows 95 on both cradles. Hmm...
Anyways, any operating system should able to write to a serial port. If they don't support Win95 or MacOS, it simply means they are too lazy or too incompetent to write portable software.
Palm supports Linux, indirectly, by cooperating with the developers of the Palm-targetted gcc and the Linux Palm utilities, and have taken the Palm emulator (including the Linux port) under their wing.
Handspring actually promotes the palm-targetted gcc under Windows for those who don't want to use CodeWarrior, though, like Palm, I don't think they officially support Linux conduits. But that's ok, we have this and this, and I'd rather our stuff be open source anyways. I wonder how Sony will react when someone reverse-engineers their cradle protocol...
The idea that market behavior is an adequate inducement for companies to behave ethically is the real problem. Your boycott won't make a damn bit of difference if most people don't care enough to go without or are too dependant on the products in question, or in the case MPAA and RIAA, buy off the government through lobbying. A corporation's goal is to maximize profits through any means it can get away with. The most effective way to change what they can get away with as at the polls, not the checkout counter.
Actually, it's even worse than that. The aliens in Star Trek play directly upon cultural stereotypes or archtypes.
Vulcans = the scientific rationalist, taken to an absurd extreme. They're what a 19th century Romantic might think of the scientist.
Klingons = the warrior ethic, with elements borrowed from primitive cultures all over earth, (though I see a lot feudal Japan and "Hollywood" Apache in them. And don't forget the Cold War projection of the Russians on the old show.)
Ferangi = the greedy merchant, and it seems to derive from a negative Jewish stereotype (I swear every Ferangi reminds me of the character from _The Merchant of Venice_)
Borg = the collective mentality in general taken to an absurd extreme (which I bet causes a lot cognative dissonance in some people, because Star Trek is so very liberal. Its not unlike Bradbury with _Farheneight 451_ or Vonnegut with "Harrison Bergman", or Orwell with _1984_).
Romulans/Cardassians = the machievalian schemer. The Romulans seemed to represent the Chinese to Russian Klingons on the old show, playing both enemies against each other. The new stuff expands this, with both Romulans and Cardassians engaed in plots, assassinations, factionalisation, infighting, etc. It borrows a lot from European history.
Bayjorans (sp?) = Religious fanaticism under an oppressive regieme. Take your pick.
Slashdot Mirror
No, that's exactly what I'm talking about. *g*
Actually, why would you need extra rings? Simply put your habitats on spokes a little further in or further out from the main ring, and extend them as far as your materials can handle. Just keep the center of gravity in a stable orbit.
The problem with Ringworld is that for the centripital force to produce "artificial" gravity, the Ringworld would have to be spinning much faster than the rate of its it's orbital revolution. No material that we can conceive of has the tensile strength to hold it together. At least, that's what I read somewhere.
Which still does not refute the fact that property is still the most efficient way of resolving the problem of scarce resources. Who decides who gets to use what? Isn't a person using a resource stealing from everyone with an alternate use for that resource?
Now, of course, there is no scarcity in "intellectual property", which is why one can claim a right to copy information freely, despite what governments and corporations would rather them believe. I think the optimal solution to this problem is to index all people who dismiss intellectual property. They would be able to mooch all they want, but they can't expect any of their own output to be protected from copying.
Similar indexes could be created for patents, trade secrets, various types of contracts such as NDAs and shrink-wrap licenses.
For example, I support copyright and a limited use of patents, but I think the concept of trade secrets and any contract that negates first sale rights is bogus. I must respect copyright, or otherwise I risk having everyone else treat my own copyrighted works as public domain. By the same token, I can't expect people keep any secrets I tell them because I myself don't respect NDAs and trade secrets. I would have very little credibility with the "contracts are absolute" crowd, but I'd still respect their copyrights, and they'd respect mine, lest I and the people who think like I do start mooching their stuff when they become hypocrites.
The world would become very complex place, with everyone tracking the consistency of everyone else's behavior with the rights they claim, but with adequate computing technology, say 10-20 years from now, I think it is feasible. I think the end result would be something very much like what we have now, where people respect laws and contracts that are reasonable, and break those that aren't. Only in the future you won't be fined or jailed for having different opinions than the government on what is reasonable.
Do you think the college punk isn't just as capable of writing simple scripts?
Now, when you've got implement a web application that must support a thousand simultanesous users, operate with several legacy databases, uses shared memory and is multi-threaded, who you gonna hire? None of this is theoretical, but you bet your ass you'll want somebody who understands concurrency and efficiency, as well as good software engineering practices. Do you really think your typical employer is as capable as teaching these things as a good college?
Here's a good litmus test for all those "school is a waste of time" people: how many of you would've known what these two are talking about when you first entered the workforce? How many even now?
My advice to anyone: if you can afford to go to college, DO IT! Sure, you think you're smart, you think you can make good money right out of high school, and you think you don't need college, right?
WRONG! Because not matter how much of a waste you think college is, it is the only time in your life where you will have oodles of free time to work on the things that directly reflect your interests. Do you think its any coincidence that most of the stuff on freshmeat is the work of bored college students? Or that most open source projects, before the hype started, were started by people in college or working for a college?
Sure, you can learn programming on the job. But you're always going to have the pressure of the bottom line dictating what you need to know and how long have to learn it. You're never going to have the luxary to learn things the right way. And unless you like spending all your waking time in front of a computer or textbook, you're never going to have the time or the patience to learn the more theoretical apsects of computer science. This is the stuff that seperates the MCSE's from the kernel hackers.
I didn't see many of the schools in the top 50 as being schools with large athletic programs.
Georgia Tech, UNC, Duke, Wake Forest? I'm sure there's more but I'm ignorant of everything but the ACC. Actually, it almost looks like this is a quirk of southern and midwestern schools. I guess us hicks like our sports.
You'd think if we really valued skilled immigrants, we wouldn't use the H1-B visa to subject them to the whims of their employer. Rather than all this smoke and mirrors about a labor shortage, lets remove the requirements that say an immigrant has to stay with their sponser or be deported. After all, the worker is still in the market and filling those badly need jobs, and a skilled worker should have no problem paying the fees of the immigration bureaucracy.
Out gosh, then they'd have to pay them the market wage, which of course will naturally rise in a supply shortage. Corporations want it both ways: the free market to reduce costs (and get away with shit they wouldn't otherwise), but they want a tightly regulated market (in their favor) of immigrant workers.
Sorry, game over. This could effectively kill price-finding bots, as the only way to determine a price is to establish an identity. And every user's price won't be that of the bot's. Add to the fact that many companies are trying to make price finding bots illegal, and legislation intended to give copyright status to databases of facts could very well make price lists the "property" of that particular vendor, and you've got the formula where supply and demand are history, and the only thing that influences prices is how much you can spend.
It's efficient all right, at raping the consumer.
You trust Amazon's "list" prices, which are basically MSRPs? They're usually inflated, and sometimes completely bogus.
And do you think their profiling isn't necessarily going to reflect political beliefs, or things you've never bought? They're probably drawing correlations from every purchase made buy everybody. Political texts will tend to be priced according to the disposible income of their typical adherants.
This technology is evil. You think you can still comparison shop, right? Guess again. If vendors start sharing databases, and outlaw autonomous robots from retreiving price lists, there will be no such thing market price. Prices will fluctuate wildly because they are now so arbitrary. Things will be priced on how much you're willing to spend, not according to supply and demand. Make one bad purchasing desicion, and could be pegged as a sucker and always get stuck with the higher prices.
The analogy doesn't quite hold, because the price of a car is negotiable, and people don't generally buy cars from the same dealership several times a month, so they can't really get effective profiling information.
Sure that wasn't from a Greg Egan book?
Speaking of Pham Nuwen, I've been wanting to get business cards made up with the title "Programmer at Arms".
This business model, as you describe it*, should die, and we should encourage its death every time it rears its ugly head.
It is a promotional scam for vendor lock-in. You're getting nothing for free, you're paying for the device in the fees to the service. If you aren't allowed to use the device except for the service, then device is uselss in any other context, so it is an outright lie to claim that the device is free, as it is being leased as a part of the serivce.
Why is this evil? Because there is no compelling reason to do business this way, except as a technique to trick the gullible into signing long-term service contracts, thus locking them in a payment schedule and a particular hardware vendor and service provider.
An honest open market approach is to sell or rent the devices that can operate with one of many services providers via open standards. You get a choice for the device, a choice in the service provider, and a lower barrier to entry for both device manufactuers and service providers. The costs are up front, not hidden behind marketroid double-talk, and will be cheaper in the long run.
[*] I always thought loss-leader meant you sold under cost initially to gain market share, then set a reasonable price once you're established. Neither the CueCat or FreePC really fit this model.
Um, if a userland program can take down the machine through normal operation, its the kernel's fault for letting it happen.
And if third party applications that work fine in NT/98 break in 2k, it is not the applications' fault unless they are using undocumented functions, functions deprecated in 2k, or using the API incorrectly. Seeing as how Microsoft applications use undocumented functions out the wazoo, and the Win32 API is sloppy crap, the only real thing you can blame third parties for is not reading the new documentation.
Indeed. I've learned that some people are so self-absorbed with their own perceived superiority that they act like nitwits thinking they're making some kind of profound point.
No one condemed you, though one response was a bit sarcastic. In fact, both responses were helpful enough to provide you with a map. Their motives were to educate you, not condem you. You are the self-righteous fool sneering at the innocently gullible.
Let's hope not, but we've all seen what can happen in the name of "science".
You mean like vaccines, organ transplants, blood transfusions, and cures to crippling diseases?
Hey everyone, let's play Mad-Libs! Complete this sentence: We've all seen what can happen in the name of [abstract noun]!
Weird. I thought I was the only one who gets queasy at the thought of embalming It's so disgustingly morbid, turning a person's body into prop with a bunch of chemicals. And cremation seems so wasteful.
I think one of the nicest ways of being disposed of, aside from organ donation and training medical students, is to be chopped up and fed to animals at a petting zoo. Who cares about worms and bacteria, I want to feed cute fuzzy animals!
I did not say the games were fixed, I said they IOC had fixed games. Actually they looked the other way when the fixing was discovered, but it amounts to the same thing.
http://ajennings.8m.com/boxing.htm
You're the one clinging to myths. You hold the image of the teamsters up like some sort of epitome of union corruption, when you probably don't know jack about any of it.
My father is in a metal workers union. It provided my health insurance when I was a child. It supported him and trained him at a time when the economy was shit and half the union was out of work. His company is not union controlled, but the company actually prefers union workers, because they are the most responsible and well trained.
If the cognative dissonance is too much for you, think of a union as a firm that sells skilled labor, blue collar consulting, if you will. Like any accumulation of power, it can be abused and twist the market to its own purposes, as evidenced by the teamsters and others. But it is no different than the activities of a thousand coporations.
The International Olympic Committe is nothing more than a crime syndicate under the guise of a non-profit organization. They take bribes during the city selection process, they have fixed events, they've co-opted the word Olympic and bully anyone who has a legitimate use of that name. They bend over for powerful nations like China when they force the democratic Republic of China, better known as Taiwan, to play as "Chinese Taipei" and under a generic Olympic flag.
The Olympics have very little to do with athletics or international goodwill. That's how it is sold, but of course, it is all about selling things, isn't it? It's about sponsership, marketing, and product placement. It's about political favors, one-upsmanship, and propoganda. Do yourself a favor and have nothing to do with this scam.
Something to think about, isn't it?
No, not really.
If you publish something in an environment where you've got no right to stop people from appropriating it for their own uses, you've got no one to blame but yourself. In other words, no one put a gun to your head and made you publish it, so quit whining.
If you publish something under a license that permits derivative works, don't complain when derivative works actually happen, even when they make more money or earn more attention than your works.
A corollary to the the first two: When the legal framework permits dervative works for the purpose of criticism and parody, don't whine when someone uses those rights to successfully counter your opinions or propoganda.
When you try to claim ownership of something so vague as "look and feel", don't be suprised when people shrug you off as a possesive control freak. There are clearly optimum design patterns for user interfaces, and none of them require such an investment to implement to merit copyright or trademark status. One can own words, one can own images, one can even one an expression of an algorithm, but to claim ownership of a particular nesting of <table> elements is absurd.
That is an excellant idea. Better yet, change your address, phone number, etc. to that of a member of the offending company. Don't go for the CEO, like Bezos, because they usually have flunkies to deal with that sort of thing. Find the name of a mid-level manager in the marketing department, someone who isn't going to be rich enough to ignore his mailbox but is still responsible for the evil which you will send back.
Because of the USB cradle. It says they have a serial cradle in the works, but is still MS-only. Actually, the accessories page lists Windows 95 on both cradles. Hmm...
Anyways, any operating system should able to write to a serial port. If they don't support Win95 or MacOS, it simply means they are too lazy or too incompetent to write portable software.
Palm supports Linux, indirectly, by cooperating with the developers of the Palm-targetted gcc and the Linux Palm utilities, and have taken the Palm emulator (including the Linux port) under their wing.
Handspring actually promotes the palm-targetted gcc under Windows for those who don't want to use CodeWarrior, though, like Palm, I don't think they officially support Linux conduits. But that's ok, we have this and this, and I'd rather our stuff be open source anyways. I wonder how Sony will react when someone reverse-engineers their cradle protocol...
The idea that market behavior is an adequate inducement for companies to behave ethically is the real problem. Your boycott won't make a damn bit of difference if most people don't care enough to go without or are too dependant on the products in question, or in the case MPAA and RIAA, buy off the government through lobbying. A corporation's goal is to maximize profits through any means it can get away with. The most effective way to change what they can get away with as at the polls, not the checkout counter.
Actually, it's even worse than that. The aliens in Star Trek play directly upon cultural stereotypes or archtypes.
Vulcans = the scientific rationalist, taken to an absurd extreme. They're what a 19th century Romantic might think of the scientist.
Klingons = the warrior ethic, with elements borrowed from primitive cultures all over earth, (though I see a lot feudal Japan and "Hollywood" Apache in them. And don't forget the Cold War projection of the Russians on the old show.)
Ferangi = the greedy merchant, and it seems to derive from a negative Jewish stereotype (I swear every Ferangi reminds me of the character from _The Merchant of Venice_)
Borg = the collective mentality in general taken to an absurd extreme (which I bet causes a lot cognative dissonance in some people, because Star Trek is so very liberal. Its not unlike Bradbury with _Farheneight 451_ or Vonnegut with "Harrison Bergman", or Orwell with _1984_).
Romulans/Cardassians = the machievalian schemer. The Romulans seemed to represent the Chinese to Russian Klingons on the old show, playing both enemies against each other. The new stuff expands this, with both Romulans and Cardassians engaed in plots, assassinations, factionalisation, infighting, etc. It borrows a lot from European history.
Bayjorans (sp?) = Religious fanaticism under an oppressive regieme. Take your pick.