Unlike RMS, you people have short memory. Kazaa the company was quite sleazy, especially towards the end. Kazaa the program installed various malware onto users computer, without notification or opt-out. For example spyware Cydoor and hijacker New.net, as well as many others. Read it up on Wikipedia.
Hehe, good one. Sadly I don't currently have any mod points.
Re:Sensationalist Journalism?
on
A Flu Pandemic?
·
· Score: 1
Can someone explain wat this "we are due for one" thing is about? Isn't this like saying that if zero hasn't appeared for 100 turns of the Roulette wheel then we are due for an appearance of zero very soon?
The big company will only be able to make a modest profit, because every other company can print the book, too. Market forces will push the price down to just a little above printing cost, maybe 20% of what the book would cost in the current system.
Since people save so much on buying the book, and since they know the author is not paid, they will be willing to make donations. I think we need a setup that encourages donations. Maybe set up a central donation system where every author is registered and make it mandatory for everyone to have a donation account and to donate at least 10 bucks per year. Also make it public who donates how much - nobody likes to be seen as a cheapskate.
Wouldn't you be able to get the aluminium back from the aluminium oxide? Of course that would require energy, but maybe not much more than the gas that the car saved.
So, we would still need as much energy as before, probably even some more because some energy is always lost in transition. But in exchange we could get cars that are clean (unlike conventional cars) and safe (unlike hydrogen-powered cars).
Parasites altering their host's behaviour is not news in and of itself.
Indeed not. Why do you think you got to cough when you have a cold? Answer: bacteria which make their host cough have a better chance to be spread around, therefore selection has favored them.
Or maybe they simply don't believe it's going to work. Thirty years ago I (yes I am that old) I learned in highschool that fission was still thirty years away. Now they say it's fifty.
I have as little sympathy for Greenpeace as for those who call Greenpeace extremists (hey, why not terrorists?), but neither do I trust any scientist who asks for thirteen billion dollars in exchange for promising results in 50 years.
Piracy helping the economy?
on
Star Wars Sickout
·
· Score: 1, Insightful
So, when piracy finally makes the production of movies unfeasible, the economy will actually profit! How about that, MPAA?
You misunderstand me. I would never dream of defending the nebulous calculations which the *AA use for arriving at the damage done by filesharing. In fact, I do not believe that filesharing is doing any damage at all. I am just arguing that material damage and physical injury are not fundamentally incommensurable.
Your second point (is it ok to kill someone and then fill out a one million dollar check for the damage) is valid. It is important to understand in which situations such a conversion is applicable. Most people would not agree to be killed for a million dollars, so such an exchange would be unfair for the person being killed and the government cannot permit it. On the other hand, the government should permit the operation of a company which randomly kills one person per year if the benefit of this permission is larger than one million per year. This permission is not unfair to anyone, because the risk for each individual person is very low.
As for your last point, stealing a dollar from the poor does create more misery than stealing a dollar from the rich, but everyone is equal before the law and hence both acts carry the same penalty. As Anatole France puts it, "The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread." This is a long-standing principle which is probably hard to change.
A life is worth more than every movie ever made; any punishment for copyright violation that includes jail time is out of proportion.
As a consequence no film whose making runs a non-zero risk of killing someone should ever be produced, right? Also, punishing ordinary theft with prison time is always out of proportion?
Your thinking is based on the popular error, that a human life should be valued higher than any finite amount of money.
Government continually has to make trade-offs between saving lives and improving efficiency. Surely you would not approve of speed limits so low that nobody can be killed in a car crash? But how can one find the point of balance when the weight on one side equals infinity? If you postulate that the value of a life isa infinite, you cannot have a consistent theory of economics and hence, rational decision-making becomes impossible.
So, how does one value a life? Of course, we cannot simply ask a man, how much money he wants for his life, as that would again give us infinity. Instead we must ask what the compensation for a (small) risk to one's life should be and extrapolate from that. For example, if Joe is prepared to run a one percent risk of losing his life in exchange for a gain of ten thousand dollars, then we should value Joe's life as (at most) one million dollars.
Of course, one arrives at different values for each life with this method. Since law, culture and religion require that each life should be treated as equally valuable, it seems appropriate to simply take the average, or perhaps the median.
If you have followed me to this point, you understand that it is both necessary and possible to determine a conversion factor between lives and dollars (and I would say that one million is about right). So treating someone who steals a million dollars like a murderer is not wrong.
A different way of arriving at the same conclusion is to reflect that a loss of one million dollars is enough to destroy the livelihood of maybe 5-10 families. Surely this creates an amount of anguish comparable to a murder.
If you took number theory or some high level mathematics courses and never heard about Srinivasa Ramanujan it would be akin to studying relativistic physics and never hearing about Albert Einstein
Not true. I am a math PhD, but none of my profs ever mentioned Ramanujan to me. Hofstadter's Gödel-Escher-Bach devotes a chapter to Ramanujan, as do several other other popular science books, but it is more for the good story than for his actual merits.
Becoming a grandmaster requires talent and guidance. Ramanujan had great talent but no proper guidance and as a result the product of his tragic life is mostly curiosities and anecdotes. He has some good results, but there is no comparison between him and people like Pierre Fermat or Albert Einstein who single-handedly created new branches of science.
All these calculations about the number of possible positions don't mean a thing. Towers of Hanoi has 3^64 positions and yet it can be solved in about 5 lines of code.
A chess player may know how to mate with knight+bishop+king vs. king. That does not mean he has remembered the roughly 10 million different positions in which the four pieces can be arranged on the board.
Many, many games have been solved. The solution nearly always comes from better insights and improved methods, not from Moore's law.
The number of potential moves grows way faster then in chess
Which is a problem, but not the main one. The real advantage of computer chess over computer go is the relative ease with which the leaves of the search tree (e.g. all positions after n moves) can be evaluated statically. In chess you can perform excellent static evaluation by counting material, mobility, king safety and maybe a few other features. In Go, static evaluation is considered difficult for an expert, let alone a computer.
It is not an achievement to solve an NP-complete problem. Many of them are trivial to solve by brute force. The challenge is to write an efficient (i.e. polynomial time) algorithm for solving them. Most experts believe this is not possible, but since there is no mathematical proof of impossibility, it might be. Also there is no need to do "a few" of them. An efficient algorithm to solve one NP-complete problem can be easily modified to efficiently solve any other.
May we assume you are following your own advice? Whenever you are about to buy a luxury good you stop yourself and donate the money to the poor instead?
Seriously, do you accost people queueing at the office box and ask them to give their movie money to tsunami aid? If it is ok to pay $10 for a movie, why can't I donate $10 towards the next startrek without being attacked by do-gooders such as yourself?
Your perception about P2P being mostly proprietary is incorrect. Open Source has all but taken over the field. The dominating players are emule/Kad and Bittorrent, both of which are GPL'd. The best Gnutella clients (Limewire, Shareaza) are also open source. So is DC++, the leading client for DirectConnect. And BitTorrent/Azureus, of course.
The proprietary developers such as Napster/KazaA/Morpheus/Aimster were quicker to get into the fray because they believed there would be big dollars. By now, all the proprietary stuff is either dead or dying.
Slashdot Mirror
and everything is fair in war (within the Geneva convention, of course).
In particular, every act of piracy, hacking and cracking is fair fighting against the media companies. Nobody should have any qualms about it.
Unlike RMS, you people have short memory. Kazaa the company was quite sleazy, especially towards the end. Kazaa the program installed various malware onto users computer, without notification or opt-out. For example spyware Cydoor and hijacker New.net, as well as many others. Read it up on Wikipedia.
Hehe, good one. Sadly I don't currently have any mod points.
Can someone explain wat this "we are due for one" thing is about? Isn't this like saying that if zero hasn't appeared for 100 turns of the Roulette wheel then we are due for an appearance of zero very soon?
The big company will only be able to make a modest profit, because every other company can print the book, too. Market forces will push the price down to just a little above printing cost, maybe 20% of what the book would cost in the current system.
Since people save so much on buying the book, and since they know the author is not paid, they will be willing to make donations. I think we need a setup that encourages donations. Maybe set up a central donation system where every author is registered and make it mandatory for everyone to have a donation account and to donate at least 10 bucks per year. Also make it public who donates how much - nobody likes to be seen as a cheapskate.
Wouldn't you be able to get the aluminium back from the aluminium oxide? Of course that would require
energy, but maybe not much more than the gas that the car saved.
So, we would still need as much energy as before, probably even some more because some energy is always
lost in transition. But in exchange we could get cars that are clean (unlike conventional cars) and safe
(unlike hydrogen-powered cars).
that the bear probably is, in fact, a penguin
Parasites altering their host's behaviour is not news in and of itself.
Indeed not. Why do you think you got to cough when you have a cold? Answer: bacteria which make their host cough have a better chance to be spread around, therefore selection has favored them.
Or maybe they simply don't believe it's going to work. Thirty years ago I (yes I am that old) I learned in highschool that fission was still thirty years away. Now they say it's fifty.
I have as little sympathy for Greenpeace as for those who call Greenpeace extremists (hey, why not terrorists?), but neither do I trust any scientist who asks for thirteen billion dollars in exchange for promising results in 50 years.
So, when piracy finally makes the production of movies unfeasible, the economy will actually profit! How about that, MPAA?
Their the ones learning
And Microsoft's grammar checker is the best!
Defending individuals who donate their work to the public - good
Defending pigopolists who screw consumers, cheat artists and bribe politicians - bad
Please mod down parent post, it is a troll.
You misunderstand me. I would never dream of defending the nebulous calculations which the *AA use for arriving at the damage done by filesharing. In fact, I do not believe that filesharing is doing any damage at all. I am just arguing that material damage and physical injury are not fundamentally incommensurable.
Your second point (is it ok to kill someone and then fill out a one million dollar check for the damage) is valid. It is important to understand in which situations such a conversion is applicable. Most people would not agree to be killed for a million dollars, so such an exchange would be unfair for the person being killed and the government cannot permit it. On the other hand, the government should permit the operation of a company which randomly kills one person per year if the benefit of this permission is larger than one million per year. This permission is not unfair to anyone, because the risk for each individual person is very low.
As for your last point, stealing a dollar from the poor does create more misery than stealing a dollar from the rich, but everyone is equal before the law and hence both acts carry the same penalty. As Anatole France puts it, "The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread." This is a long-standing principle which is probably hard to change.
A life is worth more than every movie ever made; any punishment for copyright violation that includes jail time is out of proportion.
As a consequence no film whose making runs a non-zero risk of killing someone should ever be produced, right? Also, punishing ordinary theft with prison time is always out of proportion?
Your thinking is based on the popular error, that a human life should be valued higher than any finite amount of money.
Government continually has to make trade-offs between saving lives and improving efficiency. Surely you would not approve of speed limits so low that nobody can be killed in a car crash? But how can one find the point of balance when the weight on one side equals infinity? If you postulate that the value of a life isa infinite, you cannot have a consistent theory of economics and hence, rational decision-making becomes impossible.
So, how does one value a life? Of course, we cannot simply ask a man, how much money he wants for his life, as that would again give us infinity. Instead we must ask what the compensation for a (small) risk to one's life should be and extrapolate from that. For example, if Joe is prepared to run a one percent risk of losing his life in exchange for a gain of ten thousand dollars, then we should value Joe's life as (at most) one million dollars.
Of course, one arrives at different values for each life with this method. Since law, culture and religion require that each life should be treated as equally valuable, it seems appropriate to simply take the average, or perhaps the median.
If you have followed me to this point, you understand that it is both necessary and possible to determine a conversion factor between lives and dollars (and I would say that one million is about right). So treating someone who steals a million dollars like a murderer is not wrong.
A different way of arriving at the same conclusion is to reflect that a loss of one million dollars is enough to destroy the livelihood of maybe 5-10 families. Surely this creates an amount of anguish comparable to a murder.
If you took number theory or some high level mathematics courses and never heard about Srinivasa Ramanujan it would be akin to studying relativistic physics and never hearing about Albert Einstein
Not true. I am a math PhD, but none of my profs ever mentioned Ramanujan to me. Hofstadter's Gödel-Escher-Bach devotes a chapter to Ramanujan, as do several other other popular science books, but it is more for the good story than for his actual merits.
Becoming a grandmaster requires talent and guidance. Ramanujan had great talent but no proper guidance and as a result the product of his tragic life is mostly curiosities and anecdotes. He has some good results, but there is no comparison between him and people like Pierre Fermat or Albert Einstein who single-handedly created new branches of science.
ed2k://|file|Programming%20Ruby%20-%20The%20Pragma tic%20Programmer'S%20Guide.pdf|7491572|59793DF3282 626A33AEB6391F2E30557|/l ey,.The.Pragmatic.Program mer.From.Journeyman.to.Master.(1999);.OCR.6.0.Shar eConnector.pdf|1515792|B2A7E4D264DCA55042256C88AAE 739D4|/n g%202003% 20Pragmatic.pdf|1255364|4BC75FDA513D94961713299EC8 767D3E|/
ed2k://|file|Addison-Wes
ed2k://|file|Junit%20Java%20Unit%20Testi
Actually, it was Mobilix which was considered too similar to Obelix. Still very bad, but not as far out as you make it appear.
All these calculations about the number of possible positions don't mean a thing. Towers of Hanoi has 3^64 positions and yet it can be solved in about 5 lines of code.
A chess player may know how to mate with knight+bishop+king vs. king. That does not mean he has remembered the roughly 10 million different positions in which the four pieces can be arranged on the board.
Many, many games have been solved. The solution nearly always comes from better insights and improved methods, not from Moore's law.
The number of potential moves grows way faster then in chess
Which is a problem, but not the main one. The real advantage of computer chess over computer go is the relative ease with which the leaves of the search tree (e.g. all positions after n moves) can be evaluated statically. In chess you can perform excellent static evaluation by counting material, mobility, king safety and maybe a few other features. In Go, static evaluation is considered difficult for an expert, let alone a computer.
It is not an achievement to solve an NP-complete problem. Many of them are trivial to solve by brute force. The challenge is to write an efficient (i.e. polynomial time) algorithm for solving them. Most experts believe this is not possible, but since there is no mathematical proof of impossibility, it might be. Also there is no need to do "a few" of them. An efficient algorithm to solve one NP-complete problem can be easily modified to efficiently solve any other.
the couch potatoes put together several billions of tsunami aid. Not charitable enough for you?
May we assume you are following your own advice? Whenever you are about to buy a luxury good you stop yourself and donate the money to the poor instead?
Seriously, do you accost people queueing at the office box and ask them to give their movie money to tsunami aid? If it is ok to pay $10 for a movie, why can't I donate $10 towards the next startrek without being attacked by do-gooders such as yourself?
It looks like bye-bye kazaa. It will soon join Napster (The real one, not roxio)
Both of them, let's hope.
Stealing is bad
Sharing is good
----------------------
Sharing is not stealing
Your perception about P2P being mostly proprietary is incorrect. Open Source has all but taken over the field. The dominating players are emule/Kad and Bittorrent, both of which are GPL'd. The best Gnutella clients (Limewire, Shareaza) are also open source. So is DC++, the leading client for DirectConnect. And BitTorrent/Azureus, of course.
The proprietary developers such as Napster/KazaA/Morpheus/Aimster were quicker to get into the fray because they believed there would be big dollars. By now, all the proprietary stuff is either dead or dying.