I really liked the cliffs notes version that was a discussion several days back when it first happened. That commentary seemed well informed but perhaps a bit biased. It will be interesting to see the difference between that and what REALLY happened
True story, the other day as I took my mother and elderly grandmother to the airport we proceed to get a skycap to carry the multiple (ie more than my mom and elderly grandma can carry) suitcases. The skycap, a young lady, comes up and starts to load our bags onto her cart. She asks, "What airline?" We respond, "American." She then proceeds to gruffly unload our bags from her cart and walk away. Naturally, I ask "WTF?" She says, "The people for American are over there." Whereby I have to go and flag down another set of Skycaps who ask "What Airline?" to check if I got the right people.
Skycapping is undoubtedly a union job. It would be against union rules for the ones working the continental area to help someone to the American sections and take that groups tip. Also, that would mean the continental people would have to walk a little bit farther than they are supposed to.
This is in great contrast to other countries i've been to where the baggers (they are not actually skycaps) who are definately NOT union have to just about fight eachother to carry your bags. If they don't carry bags, they don't eat... that's customer service, having 12 guys race over to you to help you out. THAT is what's bad about unions, they are out for their own interests, and customer service lacks.
Apply this to the IT field, imagine if the Union price for desiging a website were $40,000 dollars. Because of union rules, you have to pay $40,000 dollars for a website, or you aren't getting one built for you by the pros. Imagine if you are not a large corporation and can't design a site on your own (yes, i know even trained monkeys can make websites... but bear with me) you are stuck coming up with that cash, or hiring sub-par people to do it... not a good proposition in the internet economy.
Customer service sucks in union houses. Compitition is non-existant. Union workers are encouraged to do only X amount of work, no more, no less. Seniority is an issue. Which is absurd in the IT field. The oldest guys (not in all cases, but most) in the IT field are the most obsolete. Also, at the rate IT folks change jobs, seniority is retarded. In IT it's stupid to base rank on anything other than merit and it's especially stupid to do it based on HOW LONG you've been there.
For those reasons and many others it would be shooting ourselves in the foot to unionize.
slashdot is an international site, please show a bit more respect for the scientific achievements of other nations.
Well, maybe if other nations would show more respect by kindly not calling us Yanks they would be better respected by us.
Also, a less patronizing tone would serve the purposes of your post better. The way it's written it looks like you are just trying to be a pompous arrogant 'my country is more refined than yours' prick. If you toned it down some maybe you could get across the message that we shouldn't have such a US-centric outlook. Otherwise, it's just a troll.
As a sidenote, electricity was discovered not invented. If you really were a 'Lord' you should probably know that. But I don't remember if a good education was required with lordship. To be honest I really have no idea how those silly hereditary titles work.
The stakes were high for Rambus...... Analyst estimated Rambus coupld reap as much as $1 billion in royalty payments, retroactive over the past decade, if it was successful in its case againt Inifineon.
Damn right they're going to appeal, I sure as hell would if it meant a quick payoff of ONE BILLION DOLLARS.
Now whether they are right or not is another matter...
The late blight of potato (aka the Irish Potato Famine) wiped out the potato crops in Ireland for precisely that reason, all the potatos were virtually identical. As they really should be, as a potato farmer, who wants their crop to have sixteen different varieties of potatos?
As for humans, we SHOULD want species diversity, diversity is a good thing scientifically (as oppossed to the ACLU racial equality, we're better for our diversity arguement, which is also valid).
BUT, there is a great deal of diversity built into our genome. If genetic mods like this (if they were to affect nuclear DNA as well as mitochondrial DNA) are carried out only on the offspring of those treated, then species diversity is built into the equation, since each parent will pass on most of their (diverse) genes and only have some mods. Even if the number of mods becomes extensive and not just 'some' the parents still pass on enough 'uniqueness' that species diversity shouldn't be an issue for thousands of years... by which time we'll be smarter than for that to be a problem. (Well, i hope)
Source code has copyright protection. It's impossible to patent everything, so instead coders copyright their source. This means that there is some element of expression there or it couldn't be copyrighted.
A piece of source code is a living breathing work. It has subtleties, nuances and exclamations just like any book. As you can tell one author from another by their style of writing, so can you distinguish coders. My for loops will look different than your for loops. I may use an array while you may use one of a hundred different data structures. Coders have a language of their own to express things. That's all. Writers use English, Spanish, Russian or Swahili or Klingon to express themselves, coders may use C, C++, PERL, JAVA, FORTAN to do it. It's still expression, it's still a reflection of the coder's experience, talent, and abilities. Most people don't read source code for leisure. But there is a distinct segment that do. (Namely us... for the most part) And the way i express my solution to a problem should be my right. And thus should be protected by the government.
The same is true of fully-automatic rifles or lumps of uranium-235. When things can be used "for good or ill"
The same is true for non-automatic rifles, automobiles, kitchen knives, etc. I could think of a million other readily available houshold items that can be used for good or ill. Hell, your toothbrush can be used as a weapon if you know how to do it.
Is toothbrush ownership to be regulated?
You could probably strangle someone with dental floss, should all dental hygiene products be regulated?
Or is that arguement just a little bit ridiculous?
For our REAL important stuff, ie. the news headlines, the government records, the architectural plans, the engineering diagrams, these will be backed up into continually updating databases, as these bases come to outgrow the system they are on (and degrade) they will be moved to newer systems. The IMPORTANT STUFF will never be lost.
Our own personal e-mail correspondence, and bank records and that... well, simple answer, it won't be saved. Nor really, should it. I'm not an important person, no historian will EVER care to read the crap that flows in my inbox. Surely, the DeMedici's were worthwhile subjects to read their mail, but certainly not I... or probably anyone else except the top.001% of the population... Bill Gates, Linus, the President... those type of people.
In 10,000 years or so when people look back the 2001, they will know plenty. But only the important stuff. And that's all they would care about, afterall they would have 10,000 years of other crap to sift through without having to read the chain-mail jokes that my girlfriend sends me.
I am pretty disappointed with the UO development team. They have great ideas and mediocre follow-through. They come up with something great, then write the code half-assed for it, then come out with something else that's great and throw all their efforts into that, forgetting that in a living game such as UO you need to continually support the game concept and idea. They came out with factions, forgot about it, then came out with veteran rewards, pulled the plug on it, then turned their attention to Third Dawn (which, BTW is kinda crappy).
I only wish they would stick with something long enough to get it together right!
I brought up the Shakespeare point, and i will defend it thus:
If i had to pay money to read Shakespeare, I wouldn't. If i had to pay money to look at a painting by Picasso, I wouldn't.
I consider myself fairly enlightened. I enjoy such things as Shakespeare and Picasso. But if someone were to demand outrageous prices for the priveledge of viewing them, i wouldn't put up with it. If this were the case, nobody would.
I by no means advocate an 'open writing' process where patches come and go and it's a collaborative process. That's ridiculous!
Well said, brother. I guess it shows that you study English...:)
Your point, also, is excellent.
Could you imagine if everyone had to pay $150 dollars to read Shakespeare or Chaucer? What would happen if all art and literature were bound by the shackles of 'the artists right to make a living' as the pro-RIAA advocates always say. This right lasts for 70 years after the artist's death. Where's the sense in that?
The fact that art can be monopolized at all is detestible. Whether in source code, in music or in literature!
To get Cosmos-1 into Earth orbit, the spacecraft will be loaded into a modified intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) of Russian design, called the Volna.The ICBM will be launched from a Russian submarine in the Barents Sea.
Why would they resort to doing this? It seems more costly since water launched rockets need additional equipment to exit the water properly and renting out a russian sub can't be that cheap. And i'm no rocket scientist but i can't think of any technical plus for a sub based launch. Any ideas?
In case you forgot your high school physics teach
on
How Solar Sails Work
·
· Score: 1
Acceleration (a) = F/M
Is Newton's 2nd Law for those of you who forgot what you learned in high school. It's amazing that even after all the high tech progress and all the major advances in theoretical physics, we are STILL using the good old formula F=MA.
I've installed BearShare on my Win98 box at home. It runs well over a cable connection. This is my observation of the software:
Big device for trading pr0n
It has the reputation for being the successor of Napster. And it's a great Gnutella client, but what i'm actually seeing (since it displays all the queries that people are sending) is that people are requesting almost nothing but porn.
Don't get me wrong, you can still get whatever music you might desire, but i see it all as being completely overshadowed by the VAST amount of porn that is going through.
Wow, it that the first time a big shot at MS has admitted to reading/.??
Well, maybe he didn't admit to reading it, but at least he knew it existed. One of his advisors must read then! Our influence spreads thus.... *evil grin*
I don't know how to fix a car, but i know when it isn't running properly. Are saying that when your mechanic bungles a job that you aren't going to complain about it? Sure as hell you are.
Some people, in fact most of even/. readers couldn't make a better browser on their own, but we know when things are broken. Why is it that so bad when we complain about that?
I'm almost tempted to actually submit a patch or three, it's getting that good.
Is that right? It's true, i'm basing that statement on the recent big release. But I was SOOO disappointed with it that i had sworn off mozilla... well, at least until they would get their act together, i'm glad to hear you say that they did that sooner than i would have ever expected.
This is a wonderful opportunity for Netscape to release something that doesn't suck. And by being the least sucky browser, recapture some of the market.
Of course, I don't honestly think they HAVE the resources or ability to make their browser suck less than IE, especially within just the next month or so while this would still be a big deal. But it would be neat.
Well, i doubt there's that many/. readers that ever WOULD buy a country CD, and i doubt anybody who is a country fan (the actual cowboy-hat wearing, rodeo going types) will not buy the CD just because it has some copy protection on it. Well, unless that stops them from copying it to 8-track so they can play it in their truck.:)
Everyone seems to be sort of dancing around the real issue here. Protecting children or being good parents, home schooling or public education.
The real issue is good old CENSORHIP.
The right for people to express themselves MUST BE sacrosanct. If you go widdling away at it, allowing the freedom to speak your mind to be diminished little by little, before long you will not have ANY right to speech.
Rights, historically, are not taken away all at once. If the 1900s US had been suddenly confronted with the laws of the US in 2001, the people would revolt! There would have been mass outrage followed by revolution. Since there's a gradual process of revoking your rights, you don't even notice what you've lost.
If filtering software becomes commonplace in librarys, how long before it becomes commonplace at your workplace? How long before it ships in the latest version of Windows and is built into RedHat? How long will it take before the BOOKS in the libraries are censored, pages with half of Michelangelo's works clipped out because they show naked cherubs? How long before anything denouncing the government or large corporations or religion is banned? How long before people are excommunicated (or stoned or tortured) for reading the banned books? How much would they have to push us before we fight back?
This can happen, it has happened throughout the world many times in history. It's happened in France and Germany and Russia among many others. It's happening right now in many parts of the world. Don't think that just having the first ammendment is enough to protect your rights, it's not. It can happen to us.
It's too bad that education is the only way to prevent the erosion of rights. It takes education in history, politics and humanities to really appreciate just how vital free speech is. And, of course, living in a country such as ours people do NOT get that education, they take free speech for granted and can't possibly hope to be responsible in protecting it. They would just as soon put up with laws allowing net filtering. It's sad really. Worse, since we all have to live with what the majority will put up with.
I guess my question then is: how do the free/open source supporters who support music piracy reconcile this apparent ethical inconsistency.
Here's how:
Free/open source supporters believe that information wants to be free. Better, has to be free. Most GPLs only ask that you keep the credit for the work in the source files, but you don't really have to. Nobody strips the artist and title tags off thier MP3's. In a lot of people's opinions, this is the same thing. The artist gets the credit for their work. Just like a GPL. There is no inconsistency, there is, in fact great consistency.
The 0's and 1's that are computer code, graphics, movies, and yes, music aren't owned by anyone. Sequences of 0's and 1's aren't owned by anyone, even if they add up to Dr Dre's latest hit. The same is true of open source software(if you excuse the transition from binary to ascii). I don't see how you would think that is hipocracy, that is perfectly congrouous.
OF COURSE it's not a religion! That's the whole point!
If it WERE a real religion, this wouldn't be so nearly satisfying to us geeks. It's the fact that it's completely fabricated that makes it so exquisite.
Then there's the sci-fi connection, what geek wouldn't want an element of everyone's favorite sci-fi flick as part of some country's official census results?
Slashdot Mirror
Mesquite, Texas? Why in Mesquite, Texas? And while we're at it...where the hell is Mesquite, Texas?
I really liked the cliffs notes version that was a discussion several days back when it first happened. That commentary seemed well informed but perhaps a bit biased. It will be interesting to see the difference between that and what REALLY happened
It's been beaten to death on /. but the stupid patent laws have to go! This is at least a step in the right direction. I hope the trend continues.
Skycapping is undoubtedly a union job. It would be against union rules for the ones working the continental area to help someone to the American sections and take that groups tip. Also, that would mean the continental people would have to walk a little bit farther than they are supposed to.
This is in great contrast to other countries i've been to where the baggers (they are not actually skycaps) who are definately NOT union have to just about fight eachother to carry your bags. If they don't carry bags, they don't eat... that's customer service, having 12 guys race over to you to help you out. THAT is what's bad about unions, they are out for their own interests, and customer service lacks.
Apply this to the IT field, imagine if the Union price for desiging a website were $40,000 dollars. Because of union rules, you have to pay $40,000 dollars for a website, or you aren't getting one built for you by the pros. Imagine if you are not a large corporation and can't design a site on your own (yes, i know even trained monkeys can make websites... but bear with me) you are stuck coming up with that cash, or hiring sub-par people to do it... not a good proposition in the internet economy.
Customer service sucks in union houses. Compitition is non-existant. Union workers are encouraged to do only X amount of work, no more, no less. Seniority is an issue. Which is absurd in the IT field. The oldest guys (not in all cases, but most) in the IT field are the most obsolete. Also, at the rate IT folks change jobs, seniority is retarded. In IT it's stupid to base rank on anything other than merit and it's especially stupid to do it based on HOW LONG you've been there.
For those reasons and many others it would be shooting ourselves in the foot to unionize.
*steps down from soapbox*
Well, maybe if other nations would show more respect by kindly not calling us Yanks they would be better respected by us.
Also, a less patronizing tone would serve the purposes of your post better. The way it's written it looks like you are just trying to be a pompous arrogant 'my country is more refined than yours' prick. If you toned it down some maybe you could get across the message that we shouldn't have such a US-centric outlook. Otherwise, it's just a troll.
As a sidenote, electricity was discovered not invented. If you really were a 'Lord' you should probably know that. But I don't remember if a good education was required with lordship. To be honest I really have no idea how those silly hereditary titles work.
Damn right they're going to appeal, I sure as hell would if it meant a quick payoff of ONE BILLION DOLLARS.
Now whether they are right or not is another matter...
As for humans, we SHOULD want species diversity, diversity is a good thing scientifically (as oppossed to the ACLU racial equality, we're better for our diversity arguement, which is also valid).
BUT, there is a great deal of diversity built into our genome. If genetic mods like this (if they were to affect nuclear DNA as well as mitochondrial DNA) are carried out only on the offspring of those treated, then species diversity is built into the equation, since each parent will pass on most of their (diverse) genes and only have some mods. Even if the number of mods becomes extensive and not just 'some' the parents still pass on enough 'uniqueness' that species diversity shouldn't be an issue for thousands of years... by which time we'll be smarter than for that to be a problem. (Well, i hope)
I bet most people missed that Simpson's reference.... that's funny as hell. Very clever.
A piece of source code is a living breathing work. It has subtleties, nuances and exclamations just like any book. As you can tell one author from another by their style of writing, so can you distinguish coders. My for loops will look different than your for loops. I may use an array while you may use one of a hundred different data structures. Coders have a language of their own to express things. That's all. Writers use English, Spanish, Russian or Swahili or Klingon to express themselves, coders may use C, C++, PERL, JAVA, FORTAN to do it. It's still expression, it's still a reflection of the coder's experience, talent, and abilities. Most people don't read source code for leisure. But there is a distinct segment that do. (Namely us... for the most part) And the way i express my solution to a problem should be my right. And thus should be protected by the government.
The same is true for non-automatic rifles, automobiles, kitchen knives, etc. I could think of a million other readily available houshold items that can be used for good or ill. Hell, your toothbrush can be used as a weapon if you know how to do it.
Is toothbrush ownership to be regulated?
You could probably strangle someone with dental floss, should all dental hygiene products be regulated?
Or is that arguement just a little bit ridiculous?
Our own personal e-mail correspondence, and bank records and that... well, simple answer, it won't be saved. Nor really, should it. I'm not an important person, no historian will EVER care to read the crap that flows in my inbox. Surely, the DeMedici's were worthwhile subjects to read their mail, but certainly not I... or probably anyone else except the top .001% of the population... Bill Gates, Linus, the President... those type of people.
In 10,000 years or so when people look back the 2001, they will know plenty. But only the important stuff. And that's all they would care about, afterall they would have 10,000 years of other crap to sift through without having to read the chain-mail jokes that my girlfriend sends me.
I only wish they would stick with something long enough to get it together right!
If i had to pay money to read Shakespeare, I wouldn't. If i had to pay money to look at a painting by Picasso, I wouldn't.
I consider myself fairly enlightened. I enjoy such things as Shakespeare and Picasso. But if someone were to demand outrageous prices for the priveledge of viewing them, i wouldn't put up with it. If this were the case, nobody would.
I by no means advocate an 'open writing' process where patches come and go and it's a collaborative process. That's ridiculous!
Your point, also, is excellent.
Could you imagine if everyone had to pay $150 dollars to read Shakespeare or Chaucer? What would happen if all art and literature were bound by the shackles of 'the artists right to make a living' as the pro-RIAA advocates always say. This right lasts for 70 years after the artist's death. Where's the sense in that?
The fact that art can be monopolized at all is detestible. Whether in source code, in music or in literature!
Why would they resort to doing this? It seems more costly since water launched rockets need additional equipment to exit the water properly and renting out a russian sub can't be that cheap. And i'm no rocket scientist but i can't think of any technical plus for a sub based launch. Any ideas?
Is Newton's 2nd Law for those of you who forgot what you learned in high school. It's amazing that even after all the high tech progress and all the major advances in theoretical physics, we are STILL using the good old formula F=MA.
It's Beautiful!!
Big device for trading pr0n
It has the reputation for being the successor of Napster. And it's a great Gnutella client, but what i'm actually seeing (since it displays all the queries that people are sending) is that people are requesting almost nothing but porn.
Don't get me wrong, you can still get whatever music you might desire, but i see it all as being completely overshadowed by the VAST amount of porn that is going through.
Well, maybe he didn't admit to reading it, but at least he knew it existed. One of his advisors must read then! Our influence spreads thus.... *evil grin*
Some people, in fact most of even /. readers couldn't make a better browser on their own, but we know when things are broken. Why is it that so bad when we complain about that?
Is that right? It's true, i'm basing that statement on the recent big release. But I was SOOO disappointed with it that i had sworn off mozilla... well, at least until they would get their act together, i'm glad to hear you say that they did that sooner than i would have ever expected.
Of course, I don't honestly think they HAVE the resources or ability to make their browser suck less than IE, especially within just the next month or so while this would still be a big deal. But it would be neat.
Well, i doubt there's that many /. readers that ever WOULD buy a country CD, and i doubt anybody who is a country fan (the actual cowboy-hat wearing, rodeo going types) will not buy the CD just because it has some copy protection on it. Well, unless that stops them from copying it to 8-track so they can play it in their truck. :)
The real issue is good old CENSORHIP.
The right for people to express themselves MUST BE sacrosanct. If you go widdling away at it, allowing the freedom to speak your mind to be diminished little by little, before long you will not have ANY right to speech.
Rights, historically, are not taken away all at once. If the 1900s US had been suddenly confronted with the laws of the US in 2001, the people would revolt! There would have been mass outrage followed by revolution. Since there's a gradual process of revoking your rights, you don't even notice what you've lost.
If filtering software becomes commonplace in librarys, how long before it becomes commonplace at your workplace? How long before it ships in the latest version of Windows and is built into RedHat? How long will it take before the BOOKS in the libraries are censored, pages with half of Michelangelo's works clipped out because they show naked cherubs? How long before anything denouncing the government or large corporations or religion is banned? How long before people are excommunicated (or stoned or tortured) for reading the banned books? How much would they have to push us before we fight back?
This can happen, it has happened throughout the world many times in history. It's happened in France and Germany and Russia among many others. It's happening right now in many parts of the world. Don't think that just having the first ammendment is enough to protect your rights, it's not. It can happen to us.
It's too bad that education is the only way to prevent the erosion of rights. It takes education in history, politics and humanities to really appreciate just how vital free speech is. And, of course, living in a country such as ours people do NOT get that education, they take free speech for granted and can't possibly hope to be responsible in protecting it. They would just as soon put up with laws allowing net filtering. It's sad really. Worse, since we all have to live with what the majority will put up with.
Here's how:
Free/open source supporters believe that information wants to be free. Better, has to be free. Most GPLs only ask that you keep the credit for the work in the source files, but you don't really have to. Nobody strips the artist and title tags off thier MP3's. In a lot of people's opinions, this is the same thing. The artist gets the credit for their work. Just like a GPL. There is no inconsistency, there is, in fact great consistency.The 0's and 1's that are computer code, graphics, movies, and yes, music aren't owned by anyone. Sequences of 0's and 1's aren't owned by anyone, even if they add up to Dr Dre's latest hit. The same is true of open source software(if you excuse the transition from binary to ascii). I don't see how you would think that is hipocracy, that is perfectly congrouous.
If it WERE a real religion, this wouldn't be so nearly satisfying to us geeks. It's the fact that it's completely fabricated that makes it so exquisite.
Then there's the sci-fi connection, what geek wouldn't want an element of everyone's favorite sci-fi flick as part of some country's official census results?