Specifically, this allows someone to confirm how another person voted
I have heard this several times, and don't understand it. The whole point of a paper receipt is so that you can do a manual recount latter on to see if the machines are correct. Who cares if the machine can print out the same thing it is displaying on the screen, that doesn't help at all to verify that it is working correctly. The reason the people verify that the paper is the same as on the screen is to verify that the paper is correct, in case it is used for a recount. So the paper would have to stay at the voting place to be of any use at all.
Secondly, there is no reason the paper receipt would have to link the vote to the voter, indeed it should not. It would be nice if the electronic record of the vote could be linked to the paper ballot using some ID, but there is no reason for either of those to be linked to the voter.
Receipts do not compromise any sort of privacy whatsoever.
I do like the old-tech method. Put an X next to the person on paper.
The best method that I have heard of is the inverse of the electronic voting machines with reciepts. Voters fill in a scan-tron ballot. Then, within the privacy of their voting booth, they would scan the form and a machine would display their vote to double check that the ballot was readable and that they had not made a mistake. This machine would not be connected to the network or count their vote in anyway to prevent user errors from messing up the count.(Think about what happens when a fast food employee makes a mistake, and what they have to do to correct it. Now think about someone who has never used the voting machine making a mistake and needing to correct it, or worse needing to get a volenteer to correct it potentially violating their voting privacy) If the vote displayed is correct they deposit the ballot in a voting box (also in the privacy of their booth). Otherwise they correct it, or if necisarry dispose of the incorrect ballot and start over, and rescan until it is good. Another nice feature is that absentee ballots could be identical to other ballots.
It is more user-error proof than any other method I have seen. The technology is well-proven, secure, and familiar to voters and volenteers. There is no more room for fraud than anything else I have seen. Very efficent to count and recount, and can be recounted by hand if necisarry. And less expensive than what diebold et all are offering.
This just says that the brain has more to do with our personality than say, our arm. It does nothing to answer the philisophical question of whether our self is purely physical.
Of course this is not a question whose answer can be found, which is why it is in the realm of philosophy and not science. If your personal philosophy is that all the world operates according to laws (and/or randomness) then that is fine. But there are other valid philosophical points of view.
We know this for sure because identical twins have identical DNA, and are not identical people. So even the small differences in environment which identical twins were exposed to led them to be different people.
Internet/Electronics: Just because us nerds made technology easy enough for the general population to use does not mean that the general population is nerds. Technology has always progressed and there have always been people who push technological development and those who simply use the results. When the general population can design these technologies then you can talk.
Video Games: This has never been limited to nerds. When the nintendo came out, all the kids wanted one not just the nerds. I have a friend that works at a game store and he says the worst part about it is that half the people that come in are the stupid jocks with the "this game is cool cause you kill people" mentality. The only video gaming that have been specific to nerds are MUDs, and for that matter, pen-and-paper roll playing as well. So the popularity of MMRPG's is a step in that direction, although the potential for creativity is much less than MUDs and other role-playing games. Fantasy goes along the same lines. Everyone likes a good adventure, only geeks build entire worlds in their imagination.
Comic Books: Again, in my dad's time, all the boys liked comic books. What makes you a comic book geek is knowing every single aspect of every single comic, to the point where you are more in touch with the comic book universe and more capable of spotting plot inconsistencies than the creator himself. Diddo for star wars, star trek. Plenty of non-geeks watch those shows. Only the geeks worshiped them:)
The whole bit about how nerds are succesfull after high school has also always been true. And nerds are still treated the same way in high school as they have always been. The only change in that dynamic, which he barely mentioned, is the new goth, freak, punk groups that have grown staring around the late 70's. They tend to be more nerd-friendly than the popular people.
But yeah nothing he said indicated any sort of signicicant change.
What is the sudden obsession with "upgrading" our current voting systems by the next election regardles of whether the new systems are better that what we already have? I recently wrote a letter to my senator and state representitives and the main thing I emphasized is that we should not upgrade unless all of the below are demonstratably true:
1) The new system must be at least as reliable in recording and talling votes as the current system. 2) The new system must be at least as secure from fraud as the current system. 3) The new system must be no more prone to user error (by voters or election volenteers) as the current system. 4) It is also preferable that the new system be more time, labor, and cost efficient although those considerations are all supeceded by the previous ones.
I did not present a preference for electronic in general (all systems are electronic to some extent - almost no one hand counts all the votes any more), except to point out the poor implementation of many upcomming systems, and that the most complex solution is very often not the best. It is absolute foolishness to switch to something worse than what we have today.
What the hell is so bad about copyrights? Okay, I create a work. It's not a physical creation, but rather an intellectual work. A book, a piece of music, a new recipe. It's a product of my own effort, and it's uniquely my own.
Ah, here is the sticklying point. The work is not uniquely your own. While some of the value of the work came from you, it is inspired, influenced, or flat out derived from prior work. So in a fair system, if you are going to demand ownership of this work you must first strike a deal with all the people whose work contributed to it - all the authors you have read that influenced your style, all the scientists and futurists who came up with the ideas your imaginary world is built on, all the originators of the phrases and manners of speech which you employ, all the hundreds of people that have refined a recipe through out time. However, this would not only be extremely tedious and hamper creative works, it is imposible. It is simply not how our brains work. We can't possibly keep a bibliography of everything that enters our mind. So if you can't give credit to the particular people that the ideas originally came from you should give credit to society in general.
If taken as an issue of fairness, the question is how much of the work should be credited to you and how much should be credited to society. One might argue that the value that a single person adds could never exceed the vast cultural (or technical in the case of OSS) wealth that he draws from in his lifetime. So he would still be indebted to society even if every work he produced was given back to society. However quantifying value in a situation like this is very difficult, which is why it is much better to look at copyright as an artificial tool to maximise the creation of works.
This is something that needs to be reinforced when talking about copyright. Because a lot of people are understandably sympathetic to the idea that things you create are your own, especially here in the US where much emphasis is put on the individual. We must be remined that the works we create are not uniquely our own, but are a contribution to the wealth of cultural knowledge from which we draw.
Yep, and you may also be able to order things off the apple store and get the educational discount. See here , or just go to the apple store and click on the education link in the left column.
It's surprising how many Christians don't read the New Testament (or Old, for that matter).
Here is the more common scenario in my experience (with Catholics, Baptists, non-denominational and other): While they read the bible, they start doing only do so years after forming their docterine, and then when the bible seems to contradict what they have learned they think that the bible itself is contradictory. They then ask someone more knowledgeable then them who provides some complicated tedium of doctorine, and reasures them that as long as they remember X, that the confusing details are not as important, and that even learned people like themselves have difficulty understanding the mysteries of the bible. This satisfies them but now they think that the bible is complicated, and are thus discouraged from reading it and are inclined to just read the "good" parts and breeze over the stuff that contradicts what they already "know". And eventually they become the "wise" person and the cycle starts again. In this way the bible becomes supplementary to some cultural teaching X, which often isn't biblical.
Note to moderators: this post is not off topic. Responding to what someone wrote is never off topic. No need to waste your mod points modding this up or down when it will already only be seen by those following the thread.
JH) The EOL was due to the split, if we didn't EOL, we'd have three distros. I think companies sized right to support their focus can find a market. For us to continue RHL support would either mean not delivering on our enterprise line or our commitment to Fedora. Or both.
This didn't really answer the question, because the whole reason they started Fedora was to take RHL's place when they discontinued it. The interviewer should of followed up with the question - "So why did you decide to split in the first place?"
This is a perfect example of why the Apple DRM is bad. Not because it's terms are unreasonable, but because it is proprietary.
I am not about to invest hundreds of dollars into a music collection when my continued enjoyment of that music is up to the whim of a single company to decide which products they produce or allow to be produced. I will not rent music at the same price that I can buy it, and if they sell me music then it should be in a format that any manufacturer is able to decode. DVD's are bad enough, but at least we know what the limitations are on who can licence it.
Re:Building a mod inside a level editor...
on
NYT on Game Mods
·
· Score: 4, Funny
hehe, only on slashdot could Mohammed Al-Sahaf be considered informative.
This is an interesting idea, one that I hadn't thought of. I am glad that additional methods of paying developers is becomming popular. But it does have it's problems.
With headhunter bounties 'success' is easy to measure - did they bring person in, and is he alive if required. Software is not so easy. Often times Linus and other maintainers will turn down patches because they are ugly, even though they work. The reason for this is that clean code saves more time in the long run than you would save banging something together quickly. However with software bounties people would be inticed to bang something together quickly so they can submit it before anyone else. Then the poor maintainers are stuck having to make the subjective decision of wether it is worth the bounty. Concidering how much strife has been caused by disagreements on code with nothing on the line but ego, imagine what could happen when money enters the equation.
Another way to get the same effect is if the bounty holder just paid one of the current developers, who has proven himself, to write the code. Alot of people already do this - and while it may not have the romance of bounties, it does have the added benifits of less conflict and knowing that you have a paycheck coming for the work you are doing.
Still bounties are a cool idea if for nothing other than the romantic aspects. I could see a bounty being the deciding factor between "I might get around to contributing a patch to them someday" to "cool, I'll get on that tonight". I could also see it being the deciding factor between "I'll donate money to that project someday" to "Argh I hate this bug, I'm putting up a bounty". It would certainly add some spice as long as people treated it as fun and didn't get too bent out of shape.
hehe. Back when I was reading up on biofuels, they kept mentioning GM soybeans and what not. I assumed that General Motors had their own specially designed soybeans that were good for biodiesel. Took forever before I realized that GM meant Genetically Modified.
So now I read this article and wonder why Microsoft's security guy has had his genes modified. I figure he is bio-paladiumed so MS can be certian the information he knows is secure:)
Yeah, thats what I got out of the article - that it was just the threshold that they use internally to determine who's worth looking at and who isn't. Actually I am surprised that they even published the number, as that will just tell spammers how far they can go before they get caught. All the places I've worked at that had limits on what you could do on the internet never told internal triggers that would set off an investigation. That way you knew you were being watched, but didn't know how to keep from being caught, so the only safe action was to not do the things the company didn't want you to do.
Everyone should have 12 fingers! I mean really base ten is such a pain in the ass. People natually work well with common divisions and multiples of things, like half an hour, 1/3 a cup etc. Look at all the natually developed measuremnent units: 360 degrees, 24 hours / day, 60 minutes per hour, 12 inches per foot. All nicely divisable by all sorts of numbers. But ten is divisible by what, 2 and 5. Like that sucks. Think about how cool it would be if all the common fractions had simple decimal notations as well. In base 12: 1/4 =.3, 1/3 =.4 1/2 =.6 etc. None of this infinite repeating digit crap.
Oh, and every time you hear about alien sightings they have 6 fingers on each hand. Is it a coincidence that those base-12 civlilizations are advanced enough to cross the galaxy, while we base-10'ers are still groveling in the dirt? I think not!
Forget metric - it is cumbersome in its ten-ness. And imperial is out of sync with our numbering system. What we need is a base-12 metric system. And it all begins with genetically engineered 12-fingered children! Who's with me?
Sounds good to me. In all the examples given the books ended up with people who will really enjoy them, as oppossed to the normal clearence sale method where people often just grab something random that looks like it might be interesting, and half the time it just ends up in the dumpster or used book store anyway. On top of that the library makes some money which helps it make more books freely available to the public.
There is the rare case where someone local will really want a book, so perhaps they could be given first preference, but all in all it sounds like a win-win to me.
No this is still a bad law, like the DCMA, which both give blanket rights to priviledged minority (thus taking away rights from the majority) and then provide a few exceptions to keep it from being completely unreasonable. One of the general problem with laws like this is that congress will never think of all the ways that people will misuse this law, and thus will never be able to come up with enough exceptions. If you were to create a law like this at all (which I don't think you should because even the 'legitimate' uses of the law are questionable), you should not give someone blanket power and than enumerate the areas where it does not apply. That is entirely backwards. Instead you should enumerate the few areas where they do have power and then declare everything else not specifically listed as off bounds. The writers of the constitution spelled out the powers of the federal government this way; why are we being more generous when spelling out the powers of the corporations?
No, it would be a good thing. It has always been the position of the FSF that software hoarding is unethical, and that software copyright should be abolished. The GPL is a mid-term tool used to prevent people from restricting the use (/modification/distribution) of GPL'd software.
From the contents of your post, I see you are aware that if we were to just release software into the public domain, modifications could then legally become propietary. So instead we it release under the GPL which prevents that from happening. But if there was no legal basis for restricting software - if all software was pubic domain, then there would be no need for the GPL. Copyleft is only necisarry because of the existence of copyright.
Looking at your post I noticed one major difference between it and the parent. All of your examples related to people tasking you with things to do. His post had to do with back and forth discussions between peers. That is the critical difference. I could imagine that if the only reason that people contacted me was to give me more work, IM would be very annoying. That is what ticket queues were created for (and email also works fine for smaller uses, where the 'customers' only have one person to contact to get their problem fixed).
However, when working on team development projects, having IM open to discuss things with the other developers while we are working saves a ton of time. It is much faster than walking down to their office and back, more interactive than email, and in all the settings I've seen it is less intrusive than a telephone call or office visit, as it is not considered rude to ignore the IM window until you've finished the task at hand.
I think Pagerank and similar algorithms worked just fine when blogs came along - they correctly signaled a potential trend away from historical media control patterns to a new way of disseminating information - particularly political information
They also indicated a trend in how information is presented, from logically grouped chunks of info to chronological stream of thought. Blogs may be the most convienient way to get your thoughts down, but they are the most inconvienient method of presenting information for people to actually read. I don't want the most relevent results on google to be a list of blogs where I have to go through and sift through a bunch of rambling about wars and kitties to find what I was looking for. Furthermore, there are tons of resources that provide information in more convienient formats than blogs, the most usefull of which are not created by major media. If anything this new balence will help bring those quality sites even closer to the top rather than being drown out by blogs and people intentionally trying to improve thier ranking not their content (mostly major media and advertisers).
Blogs are nice if there is someone whose opinion you respect, and you want to check in and peruse what they think about random things. They are not usefull for finding specific information, and the purpose of a search engine is help you find specific information.
Slashdot Mirror
Specifically, this allows someone to confirm how another person voted
I have heard this several times, and don't understand it. The whole point of a paper receipt is so that you can do a manual recount latter on to see if the machines are correct. Who cares if the machine can print out the same thing it is displaying on the screen, that doesn't help at all to verify that it is working correctly. The reason the people verify that the paper is the same as on the screen is to verify that the paper is correct, in case it is used for a recount. So the paper would have to stay at the voting place to be of any use at all.
Secondly, there is no reason the paper receipt would have to link the vote to the voter, indeed it should not. It would be nice if the electronic record of the vote could be linked to the paper ballot using some ID, but there is no reason for either of those to be linked to the voter.
Receipts do not compromise any sort of privacy whatsoever.
I do like the old-tech method. Put an X next to the person on paper.
The best method that I have heard of is the inverse of the electronic voting machines with reciepts. Voters fill in a scan-tron ballot. Then, within the privacy of their voting booth, they would scan the form and a machine would display their vote to double check that the ballot was readable and that they had not made a mistake. This machine would not be connected to the network or count their vote in anyway to prevent user errors from messing up the count.(Think about what happens when a fast food employee makes a mistake, and what they have to do to correct it. Now think about someone who has never used the voting machine making a mistake and needing to correct it, or worse needing to get a volenteer to correct it potentially violating their voting privacy) If the vote displayed is correct they deposit the ballot in a voting box (also in the privacy of their booth). Otherwise they correct it, or if necisarry dispose of the incorrect ballot and start over, and rescan until it is good. Another nice feature is that absentee ballots could be identical to other ballots.
It is more user-error proof than any other method I have seen. The technology is well-proven, secure, and familiar to voters and volenteers. There is no more room for fraud than anything else I have seen. Very efficent to count and recount, and can be recounted by hand if necisarry. And less expensive than what diebold et all are offering.
This just says that the brain has more to do with our personality than say, our arm. It does nothing to answer the philisophical question of whether our self is purely physical.
Of course this is not a question whose answer can be found, which is why it is in the realm of philosophy and not science. If your personal philosophy is that all the world operates according to laws (and/or randomness) then that is fine. But there are other valid philosophical points of view.
how do you know this for sure?
We know this for sure because identical twins have identical DNA, and are not identical people. So even the small differences in environment which identical twins were exposed to led them to be different people.
Your point on biodiversity is correct.
Internet/Electronics:
:)
Just because us nerds made technology easy enough for the general population to use does not mean that the general population is nerds. Technology has always progressed and there have always been people who push technological development and those who simply use the results. When the general population can design these technologies then you can talk.
Video Games:
This has never been limited to nerds. When the nintendo came out, all the kids wanted one not just the nerds. I have a friend that works at a game store and he says the worst part about it is that half the people that come in are the stupid jocks with the "this game is cool cause you kill people" mentality. The only video gaming that have been specific to nerds are MUDs, and for that matter, pen-and-paper roll playing as well. So the popularity of MMRPG's is a step in that direction, although the potential for creativity is much less than MUDs and other role-playing games. Fantasy goes along the same lines. Everyone likes a good adventure, only geeks build entire worlds in their imagination.
Comic Books:
Again, in my dad's time, all the boys liked comic books. What makes you a comic book geek is knowing every single aspect of every single comic, to the point where you are more in touch with the comic book universe and more capable of spotting plot inconsistencies than the creator himself. Diddo for star wars, star trek. Plenty of non-geeks watch those shows. Only the geeks worshiped them
The whole bit about how nerds are succesfull after high school has also always been true. And nerds are still treated the same way in high school as they have always been. The only change in that dynamic, which he barely mentioned, is the new goth, freak, punk groups that have grown staring around the late 70's. They tend to be more nerd-friendly than the popular people.
But yeah nothing he said indicated any sort of signicicant change.
What is the sudden obsession with "upgrading" our current voting systems by the next election regardles of whether the new systems are better that what we already have? I recently wrote a letter to my senator and state representitives and the main thing I emphasized is that we should not upgrade unless all of the below are demonstratably true:
1) The new system must be at least as reliable in recording and talling votes as the current system.
2) The new system must be at least as secure from fraud as the current system.
3) The new system must be no more prone to user error (by voters or election volenteers) as the current system.
4) It is also preferable that the new system be more time, labor, and cost efficient although those considerations are all supeceded by the previous ones.
I did not present a preference for electronic in general (all systems are electronic to some extent - almost no one hand counts all the votes any more), except to point out the poor implementation of many upcomming systems, and that the most complex solution is very often not the best. It is absolute foolishness to switch to something worse than what we have today.
What the hell is so bad about copyrights? Okay, I create a work. It's not a physical creation, but rather an intellectual work. A book, a piece of music, a new recipe. It's a product of my own effort, and it's uniquely my own.
Ah, here is the sticklying point. The work is not uniquely your own. While some of the value of the work came from you, it is inspired, influenced, or flat out derived from prior work. So in a fair system, if you are going to demand ownership of this work you must first strike a deal with all the people whose work contributed to it - all the authors you have read that influenced your style, all the scientists and futurists who came up with the ideas your imaginary world is built on, all the originators of the phrases and manners of speech which you employ, all the hundreds of people that have refined a recipe through out time. However, this would not only be extremely tedious and hamper creative works, it is imposible. It is simply not how our brains work. We can't possibly keep a bibliography of everything that enters our mind. So if you can't give credit to the particular people that the ideas originally came from you should give credit to society in general.
If taken as an issue of fairness, the question is how much of the work should be credited to you and how much should be credited to society. One might argue that the value that a single person adds could never exceed the vast cultural (or technical in the case of OSS) wealth that he draws from in his lifetime. So he would still be indebted to society even if every work he produced was given back to society. However quantifying value in a situation like this is very difficult, which is why it is much better to look at copyright as an artificial tool to maximise the creation of works.
This is something that needs to be reinforced when talking about copyright. Because a lot of people are understandably sympathetic to the idea that things you create are your own, especially here in the US where much emphasis is put on the individual. We must be remined that the works we create are not uniquely our own, but are a contribution to the wealth of cultural knowledge from which we draw.
Yep, and you may also be able to order things off the apple store and get the educational discount. See here , or just go to the apple store and click on the education link in the left column.
It's surprising how many Christians don't read the New Testament (or Old, for that matter).
Here is the more common scenario in my experience (with Catholics, Baptists, non-denominational and other): While they read the bible, they start doing only do so years after forming their docterine, and then when the bible seems to contradict what they have learned they think that the bible itself is contradictory. They then ask someone more knowledgeable then them who provides some complicated tedium of doctorine, and reasures them that as long as they remember X, that the confusing details are not as important, and that even learned people like themselves have difficulty understanding the mysteries of the bible. This satisfies them but now they think that the bible is complicated, and are thus discouraged from reading it and are inclined to just read the "good" parts and breeze over the stuff that contradicts what they already "know". And eventually they become the "wise" person and the cycle starts again. In this way the bible becomes supplementary to some cultural teaching X, which often isn't biblical.
Note to moderators: this post is not off topic. Responding to what someone wrote is never off topic. No need to waste your mod points modding this up or down when it will already only be seen by those following the thread.
JH) The EOL was due to the split, if we didn't EOL, we'd have three distros. I think companies sized right to support their focus can find a market. For us to continue RHL support would either mean not delivering on our enterprise line or our commitment to Fedora. Or both.
This didn't really answer the question, because the whole reason they started Fedora was to take RHL's place when they discontinued it. The interviewer should of followed up with the question - "So why did you decide to split in the first place?"
This is a perfect example of why the Apple DRM is bad. Not because it's terms are unreasonable, but because it is proprietary.
I am not about to invest hundreds of dollars into a music collection when my continued enjoyment of that music is up to the whim of a single company to decide which products they produce or allow to be produced. I will not rent music at the same price that I can buy it, and if they sell me music then it should be in a format that any manufacturer is able to decode. DVD's are bad enough, but at least we know what the limitations are on who can licence it.
hehe, only on slashdot could Mohammed Al-Sahaf be considered informative.
more evidence that HP is trying to go out of business.
Sweet, you have it easy. We can just cut off your three pinkies!
This is an interesting idea, one that I hadn't thought of. I am glad that additional methods of paying developers is becomming popular. But it does have it's problems.
With headhunter bounties 'success' is easy to measure - did they bring person in, and is he alive if required. Software is not so easy. Often times Linus and other maintainers will turn down patches because they are ugly, even though they work. The reason for this is that clean code saves more time in the long run than you would save banging something together quickly. However with software bounties people would be inticed to bang something together quickly so they can submit it before anyone else. Then the poor maintainers are stuck having to make the subjective decision of wether it is worth the bounty. Concidering how much strife has been caused by disagreements on code with nothing on the line but ego, imagine what could happen when money enters the equation.
Another way to get the same effect is if the bounty holder just paid one of the current developers, who has proven himself, to write the code. Alot of people already do this - and while it may not have the romance of bounties, it does have the added benifits of less conflict and knowing that you have a paycheck coming for the work you are doing.
Still bounties are a cool idea if for nothing other than the romantic aspects. I could see a bounty being the deciding factor between "I might get around to contributing a patch to them someday" to "cool, I'll get on that tonight". I could also see it being the deciding factor between "I'll donate money to that project someday" to "Argh I hate this bug, I'm putting up a bounty". It would certainly add some spice as long as people treated it as fun and didn't get too bent out of shape.
hehe. Back when I was reading up on biofuels, they kept mentioning GM soybeans and what not. I assumed that General Motors had their own specially designed soybeans that were good for biodiesel. Took forever before I realized that GM meant Genetically Modified.
:)
So now I read this article and wonder why Microsoft's security guy has had his genes modified. I figure he is bio-paladiumed so MS can be certian the information he knows is secure
Yeah, thats what I got out of the article - that it was just the threshold that they use internally to determine who's worth looking at and who isn't. Actually I am surprised that they even published the number, as that will just tell spammers how far they can go before they get caught. All the places I've worked at that had limits on what you could do on the internet never told internal triggers that would set off an investigation. That way you knew you were being watched, but didn't know how to keep from being caught, so the only safe action was to not do the things the company didn't want you to do.
Everyone should have 12 fingers! I mean really base ten is such a pain in the ass. People natually work well with common divisions and multiples of things, like half an hour, 1/3 a cup etc. Look at all the natually developed measuremnent units: 360 degrees, 24 hours / day, 60 minutes per hour, 12 inches per foot. All nicely divisable by all sorts of numbers. But ten is divisible by what, 2 and 5. Like that sucks. Think about how cool it would be if all the common fractions had simple decimal notations as well. In base 12: 1/4 = .3, 1/3 = .4 1/2 = .6 etc. None of this infinite repeating digit crap.
Oh, and every time you hear about alien sightings they have 6 fingers on each hand. Is it a coincidence that those base-12 civlilizations are advanced enough to cross the galaxy, while we base-10'ers are still groveling in the dirt? I think not!
Forget metric - it is cumbersome in its ten-ness. And imperial is out of sync with our numbering system. What we need is a base-12 metric system. And it all begins with genetically engineered 12-fingered children! Who's with me?
Sounds good to me. In all the examples given the books ended up with people who will really enjoy them, as oppossed to the normal clearence sale method where people often just grab something random that looks like it might be interesting, and half the time it just ends up in the dumpster or used book store anyway. On top of that the library makes some money which helps it make more books freely available to the public.
There is the rare case where someone local will really want a book, so perhaps they could be given first preference, but all in all it sounds like a win-win to me.
No this is still a bad law, like the DCMA, which both give blanket rights to priviledged minority (thus taking away rights from the majority) and then provide a few exceptions to keep it from being completely unreasonable. One of the general problem with laws like this is that congress will never think of all the ways that people will misuse this law, and thus will never be able to come up with enough exceptions. If you were to create a law like this at all (which I don't think you should because even the 'legitimate' uses of the law are questionable), you should not give someone blanket power and than enumerate the areas where it does not apply. That is entirely backwards. Instead you should enumerate the few areas where they do have power and then declare everything else not specifically listed as off bounds. The writers of the constitution spelled out the powers of the federal government this way; why are we being more generous when spelling out the powers of the corporations?
No, it would be a good thing. It has always been the position of the FSF that software hoarding is unethical, and that software copyright should be abolished. The GPL is a mid-term tool used to prevent people from restricting the use (/modification/distribution) of GPL'd software.
From the contents of your post, I see you are aware that if we were to just release software into the public domain, modifications could then legally become propietary. So instead we it release under the GPL which prevents that from happening. But if there was no legal basis for restricting software - if all software was pubic domain, then there would be no need for the GPL. Copyleft is only necisarry because of the existence of copyright.
Well since they made it here before we made it to Vega that would make them a more advanced civilization, no? :)
PS. sorry about the bad version of this post. I even previewed it, grr.
Well since they made it here before we made it to Vega that would make them a more civilization, no? :)
Looking at your post I noticed one major difference between it and the parent. All of your examples related to people tasking you with things to do. His post had to do with back and forth discussions between peers. That is the critical difference. I could imagine that if the only reason that people contacted me was to give me more work, IM would be very annoying. That is what ticket queues were created for (and email also works fine for smaller uses, where the 'customers' only have one person to contact to get their problem fixed).
However, when working on team development projects, having IM open to discuss things with the other developers while we are working saves a ton of time. It is much faster than walking down to their office and back, more interactive than email, and in all the settings I've seen it is less intrusive than a telephone call or office visit, as it is not considered rude to ignore the IM window until you've finished the task at hand.
Because we all know that elvis was an alien robot.
I think Pagerank and similar algorithms worked just fine when blogs came along - they correctly signaled a potential trend away from historical media control patterns to a new way of disseminating information - particularly political information
They also indicated a trend in how information is presented, from logically grouped chunks of info to chronological stream of thought. Blogs may be the most convienient way to get your thoughts down, but they are the most inconvienient method of presenting information for people to actually read. I don't want the most relevent results on google to be a list of blogs where I have to go through and sift through a bunch of rambling about wars and kitties to find what I was looking for. Furthermore, there are tons of resources that provide information in more convienient formats than blogs, the most usefull of which are not created by major media. If anything this new balence will help bring those quality sites even closer to the top rather than being drown out by blogs and people intentionally trying to improve thier ranking not their content (mostly major media and advertisers).
Blogs are nice if there is someone whose opinion you respect, and you want to check in and peruse what they think about random things. They are not usefull for finding specific information, and the purpose of a search engine is help you find specific information.