Everybody remembers the famous 3 Laws of Robotics.
Nobody seems to remember that the stories were about how they failed over and over due to unintended consequences and and loopholes, for example robots are able to break them if they don't know they're doing so.
Chrome doesn't have H.264 not because they're unable to implement it, but because it has patent issues. Microsoft implementing the codec doesn't remove the patent issues.
Besides, it's a WMP plugin. I don't expect to see Linux support.
Well, people with a sense of humility probably don't start a lot of things like Wikileaks. I mean, it's the hell of a bold move, with the implicit statement "I know what's wrong with the world (lack of transparency) and I will do something about it". It's not very humble.
Probably not switching just yet, unless I happen to break it soon. But I figure it's time to start looking at what else is out there.
I think I'll wait to see if that MeeGo device works out. It sounds like support for it within Nokia won't be great, but if it works well enough and gets a community it could be worth getting anyway.
That only works if nobody else has plentiful enough reserves to sell cheaper.
Bumping the prices right now would be unprofitable. There are other suppliers. And sitting on the oil isn't economical as there is infrastructure and people to pay.
But, a strategy of trying to outlast everybody else would pay off awesomely. For that they'd have to pretend everything is still fine, but try to avoid increasing the extraction rate as much as possible, hoping other people will run out first.
So you clearly have absolutely no clue how DNS works...
Sure I do
Its already distributed, but like most things, in order to be useful there has to be some sort of hierarchy so everyone knows how to find everyone else.
It's distributed but centralized. I may control the authoritative server for example.com, but for the query to get this far it first has to ask a root server where is the DNS server for.com, and then the DNS server for example.com. That is a centralized part of the system, very much controllable by the government.
I'm suggesting replacing it with a P2P system, and keeping the rest the same. This way, you don't need to run any new services. You'd just submit your authoritative server's address to the P2P network instead of the registar, and keep running your DNS server exactly like before.
It's time for a peer to peer DNS system that doesn't have an easily controllable central server.
I'm thinking perhaps a mix could be used. P2P for the replacement of the root servers, and the rest of the system kept the way it currently is. The root servers are what all this is targeted at anyway.
Figuring out how to deal with collisions and attempts at impersonation will be tricky though. Certs can be used, but the CAs reintroduce he same problem.
I see a mention of the anime on every story of the sort, so finally I bought the first two DVDs.
Unfortunately, somewhat of a disappointment. The garbage collection and space stuff is amazingly well done, but what spoils it is the characters.
Space garbage collection doesn't provide for that much plot material, so the show is about the interactions between characters. And in this team, there are two bosses with a room temperature IQ, and an incredibly preachy main character. Some episodes manage to be incredibly annoying.
On the other hand, there are some very good ones as well and reviews seem to suggest I might like the rest of the series more.
And I didn't. All I own is PCs running Linux, and a N900, running Linux.
But the point still stands: my not buying of a console doesn't matter much in the end, as there's too little competition. If at some point it becomes impossible to buy a PC without this kind of restrictions, what would you recommend, leaving modern society and living in a hut?
Sure, you'll miss out on an ultra-exclusive game, but is it really so important that you have that particular game on your own legal terms?
No. What is important to me is the idea of that I absolutely own and control the things I paid for. Just voting with my dollars won't do, because I believe this is owed to me by virtue of having paid for the product, whatever the product that might be. As a result, currently I won't buy, but on a longer term I will support legislation that shifts people in my favour.
And I don't, but this gets hard when there are only a few options are available and all of them have the same terms.
The "don't buy it" solution works when talking about a commodity and when you know where the product is coming from. If you're buying nails, there are probably hundreds for suppliers. For consoles there's just a few, and all of them have annoying policies. It comes down to choosing the least evil in the best case.
For other things, you can't not buy from a supplier. For example it turns out gas gets mixed somewhere before getting shipped to a station, so you can't not buy from BP.
Unfortunately consoles are a very high tech expensive good, and as such only huge companies can realistically compete in the field. That drastically limits the amount of competition and insulates the companies from consequences. That's why we need to resort to laws that limit the damage.
I get you, I really do. But your anger is directed at the wrong point.
No it isn't.
The law might permit this disgusting behavior, but Sony in no way is obligated to actually do it. It's their choice to be assholes, as well as it's their choice to use restrictive licensing, and thus it's entirely their fault.
Nah, there's a lot of stuff that could be there but isn't. Go check any anime related wiki and compare with the Wikipedia version. With anything but main characters, the difference gets more dramatic.
Now that might seem like a silly subject, and it is a silly subject. But there's a lot of that stuff migrating to other wikis. And while stuff like that isn't as important as say, WWII, my lunch conversations are more likely to include the Ginyu Force (wikipedia version), than Josef Mengele.
The reason for the difference isn't that the article would be empty, or that it's badly written. Apparently it's that somebody got upset that the article on Pikachu got longer than whatever subject they care about, and the solution to that is removing perfectly well written content from the disliked page, instead of finding something to add to the one they care about. I find that quite bizarre.
Actually, there's no longer a page per Pokemon and that's precisely part of what's wrong with it. A lot of stuff got trimmed by people under the weird delusion that it somehow will get Wikipedia to be a "Real Encyclopedia". But it will never be one due to the way it's made. And in doing so they removed a lot of valuable stuff that wasn't present in any paper encyclopedia, which was precisely what made it so awesome to me.
I like the idea of compiling all of mankind's knowledge about everything much better. Including Pokemon, though I don't really care for it.
Ah, Slashdot!: Where no creative idea is too good to be voiced without being shot down by a dozen technical objections before it can even take flight.
Space flight was achieved by addressing technical objections, not by ignoring them and pretending "creativity" is all there is to it.
So for instance, if your creative idea requires a 20km high tower made of solid unobtainium, then you have a problem, until you actually succeed at coming up with a material with the required properties.
The OP's idea is speculative, but could be a good way of saving fuel in the first few seconds of rocket flight. But if the general community of engineers has the kind of attitude on display around here, I doubt anyone will even bother to do the calculations.
You're proposing the idea, it's your job to prove it can be done. So go provide some calculations.
Well, and in that case why put the limit on country borders? Does your system of ethics also apply to states, cities and families?
Is it for instance unethical to open an office in a different city or state, or to give a job to somebody who isn't a family member?
Rob Peter to pay Paul. Great deal for anyone named Paul.
But I'm not from either China or the US, so from my point of view you're just suggesting robbing Paul to pay Peter. I don't see why one is morally better than the other.
Right, and those things don't exist or don't matter when they happen somewhere other than your country?
I want to clarify, are ethics problems solvable only locally, or they can be solved globally?
If they are local, how will you resolve the inevitable conflict? Let's say you're an unbiased and just judge who gains nothing either way. The US side argues they should have the help desk, while the Indian side argues they should have it. Both make exactly the same argument you did, listing jobs, retirement plans and health insurance. Who should be chosen and why?
If they are global, what is your reasoning to giving priority to your country?
So it's not ethical because it inconveniences people near you?
I don't think you're really taking about ethics. You're talking about the position that's most advantageous to take. But that wasn't the question that was asked.
A business, which manga and anime production are very much, is into it for the money, not for some philosophical goal of obtaining a 1 viewer to 1 buyer ratio at any cost.
So if ignoring piracy makes more money then a good business would ignore the piracy and make more money.
so what? Whether it's good or bad, it's still copyright infringement. The most this study could argue for is to encourage copyright holders to ignore piracy. It does not provide an excuse, or even a rationalization, for piracy. If you're looking for an ethical out, this isn't it.
Well, and why is it a bad thing? In my view, the main reason why piracy could be said to be morally wrong is that it economically harms the people who make the anime. If however it turns out it benefits them, then there's no harm and for me without harm there's no moral wrong. There's your ethical rationalization.
It's used on most of the sites I visit. Like the homepage I've used for 5+ years and is almost nothing but GIFs - http://isp.netscape.com./ There are a lot of GIFs in other locations as well, all free of patent restrictions and just as open as PNG codec.
At the time of GIF the whole thing with patents was a fairly new problem, which appeared quite late. And most Linux distros worked around by simply making uncompressed GIFs. It's not exactly comparable to video.
Also I guess the stats vary, but for me it's PNG everywhere.
That's true, but listener tests show people can't hear the difference between 48k AACplus and ~1400k lossless CD. Hence the term "CD quality". Perhaps I should have added the word 'perceived' to clarify? In any case, neither MP3 or Theora can match it. They sound like ___ compared to a 48k AACplus stream.
Got some test results? I found an AAC+ stream at 48k and wasn't that impressed. Sure it sounds decent, but there still seems to be something missing.
Also, of course Theora can't match it. Theora is a video codec, audio is encoded in Vorbis.
That's true but it looks almost as crappy as MPEG2.
I've seen it on youtube for instance, and I can't really tell the difference. If you know of a good comparison site, do tell. I linked to one, and it seems to win in some cases and lose in others. Overall to me it averages to about the same.
I simply don't want to use an inferior codec, okay? Am I allowed to make my OWN fucking choice??? (Apparently not, and thus I got modded "idiiot".)
I don't see how your "OWN fucking choice" involves telling other people what they ought to use. Nobody is saying it should be illegal for you to download an H.264 player or anything like that.
The web should standarize on WebM so that absolutely everybody who wants to can implement it without dealing with royalty payments, and if somebody especially likes paying licensing fees, they can go download a player/encoder for that. There's your choice.
Slashdot Mirror
Why would I want Steam on Linux? Hell will freeze over before I'll install that.
What I do want is a proper package repository.
Everybody remembers the famous 3 Laws of Robotics.
Nobody seems to remember that the stories were about how they failed over and over due to unintended consequences and and loopholes, for example robots are able to break them if they don't know they're doing so.
Now I just hope I can find a phone I can run it on. I'm not sure I like how Android works all that much.
Same problem also exists with people. I don't necessarily want people to track me down all over the web. Easy fix though:
Randomly generated password for each.
Chrome doesn't have H.264 not because they're unable to implement it, but because it has patent issues. Microsoft implementing the codec doesn't remove the patent issues.
Besides, it's a WMP plugin. I don't expect to see Linux support.
Citation needed
Well, people with a sense of humility probably don't start a lot of things like Wikileaks. I mean, it's the hell of a bold move, with the implicit statement "I know what's wrong with the world (lack of transparency) and I will do something about it". It's not very humble.
Probably not switching just yet, unless I happen to break it soon. But I figure it's time to start looking at what else is out there.
I think I'll wait to see if that MeeGo device works out. It sounds like support for it within Nokia won't be great, but if it works well enough and gets a community it could be worth getting anyway.
I really liked the N900, but from the looks of it that may not be going anywhere anymore.
So, what's a good Android phone? I'd like one as open as possible, with good hardware specs and a hardware keyboard.
That only works if nobody else has plentiful enough reserves to sell cheaper.
Bumping the prices right now would be unprofitable. There are other suppliers. And sitting on the oil isn't economical as there is infrastructure and people to pay.
But, a strategy of trying to outlast everybody else would pay off awesomely. For that they'd have to pretend everything is still fine, but try to avoid increasing the extraction rate as much as possible, hoping other people will run out first.
Sure I do
It's distributed but centralized. I may control the authoritative server for example.com, but for the query to get this far it first has to ask a root server where is the DNS server for .com, and then the DNS server for example.com. That is a centralized part of the system, very much controllable by the government.
I'm suggesting replacing it with a P2P system, and keeping the rest the same. This way, you don't need to run any new services. You'd just submit your authoritative server's address to the P2P network instead of the registar, and keep running your DNS server exactly like before.
It's time for a peer to peer DNS system that doesn't have an easily controllable central server.
I'm thinking perhaps a mix could be used. P2P for the replacement of the root servers, and the rest of the system kept the way it currently is. The root servers are what all this is targeted at anyway.
Figuring out how to deal with collisions and attempts at impersonation will be tricky though. Certs can be used, but the CAs reintroduce he same problem.
I see a mention of the anime on every story of the sort, so finally I bought the first two DVDs.
Unfortunately, somewhat of a disappointment. The garbage collection and space stuff is amazingly well done, but what spoils it is the characters.
Space garbage collection doesn't provide for that much plot material, so the show is about the interactions between characters. And in this team, there are two bosses with a room temperature IQ, and an incredibly preachy main character. Some episodes manage to be incredibly annoying.
On the other hand, there are some very good ones as well and reviews seem to suggest I might like the rest of the series more.
And I didn't. All I own is PCs running Linux, and a N900, running Linux.
But the point still stands: my not buying of a console doesn't matter much in the end, as there's too little competition. If at some point it becomes impossible to buy a PC without this kind of restrictions, what would you recommend, leaving modern society and living in a hut?
No. What is important to me is the idea of that I absolutely own and control the things I paid for. Just voting with my dollars won't do, because I believe this is owed to me by virtue of having paid for the product, whatever the product that might be. As a result, currently I won't buy, but on a longer term I will support legislation that shifts people in my favour.
And I don't, but this gets hard when there are only a few options are available and all of them have the same terms.
The "don't buy it" solution works when talking about a commodity and when you know where the product is coming from. If you're buying nails, there are probably hundreds for suppliers. For consoles there's just a few, and all of them have annoying policies. It comes down to choosing the least evil in the best case.
For other things, you can't not buy from a supplier. For example it turns out gas gets mixed somewhere before getting shipped to a station, so you can't not buy from BP.
Unfortunately consoles are a very high tech expensive good, and as such only huge companies can realistically compete in the field. That drastically limits the amount of competition and insulates the companies from consequences. That's why we need to resort to laws that limit the damage.
No it isn't.
The law might permit this disgusting behavior, but Sony in no way is obligated to actually do it. It's their choice to be assholes, as well as it's their choice to use restrictive licensing, and thus it's entirely their fault.
Nah, there's a lot of stuff that could be there but isn't. Go check any anime related wiki and compare with the Wikipedia version. With anything but main characters, the difference gets more dramatic.
Now that might seem like a silly subject, and it is a silly subject. But there's a lot of that stuff migrating to other wikis. And while stuff like that isn't as important as say, WWII, my lunch conversations are more likely to include the Ginyu Force (wikipedia version), than Josef Mengele.
The reason for the difference isn't that the article would be empty, or that it's badly written. Apparently it's that somebody got upset that the article on Pikachu got longer than whatever subject they care about, and the solution to that is removing perfectly well written content from the disliked page, instead of finding something to add to the one they care about. I find that quite bizarre.
Actually, there's no longer a page per Pokemon and that's precisely part of what's wrong with it. A lot of stuff got trimmed by people under the weird delusion that it somehow will get Wikipedia to be a "Real Encyclopedia". But it will never be one due to the way it's made. And in doing so they removed a lot of valuable stuff that wasn't present in any paper encyclopedia, which was precisely what made it so awesome to me.
I like the idea of compiling all of mankind's knowledge about everything much better. Including Pokemon, though I don't really care for it.
Space flight was achieved by addressing technical objections, not by ignoring them and pretending "creativity" is all there is to it.
So for instance, if your creative idea requires a 20km high tower made of solid unobtainium, then you have a problem, until you actually succeed at coming up with a material with the required properties.
You're proposing the idea, it's your job to prove it can be done. So go provide some calculations.
The only problem is that we are actually discussing ethics. What people are actually doing isn't the question.
Well, and in that case why put the limit on country borders? Does your system of ethics also apply to states, cities and families?
Is it for instance unethical to open an office in a different city or state, or to give a job to somebody who isn't a family member?
But I'm not from either China or the US, so from my point of view you're just suggesting robbing Paul to pay Peter. I don't see why one is morally better than the other.
Right, and those things don't exist or don't matter when they happen somewhere other than your country?
I want to clarify, are ethics problems solvable only locally, or they can be solved globally?
If they are local, how will you resolve the inevitable conflict? Let's say you're an unbiased and just judge who gains nothing either way. The US side argues they should have the help desk, while the Indian side argues they should have it. Both make exactly the same argument you did, listing jobs, retirement plans and health insurance. Who should be chosen and why?
If they are global, what is your reasoning to giving priority to your country?
So it's not ethical because it inconveniences people near you?
I don't think you're really taking about ethics. You're talking about the position that's most advantageous to take. But that wasn't the question that was asked.
You're looking at it the wrong way, I think.
A business, which manga and anime production are very much, is into it for the money, not for some philosophical goal of obtaining a 1 viewer to 1 buyer ratio at any cost.
So if ignoring piracy makes more money then a good business would ignore the piracy and make more money.
Well, and why is it a bad thing? In my view, the main reason why piracy could be said to be morally wrong is that it economically harms the people who make the anime. If however it turns out it benefits them, then there's no harm and for me without harm there's no moral wrong. There's your ethical rationalization.
At the time of GIF the whole thing with patents was a fairly new problem, which appeared quite late. And most Linux distros worked around by simply making uncompressed GIFs. It's not exactly comparable to video.
Also I guess the stats vary, but for me it's PNG everywhere.
Got some test results? I found an AAC+ stream at 48k and wasn't that impressed. Sure it sounds decent, but there still seems to be something missing.
Also, of course Theora can't match it. Theora is a video codec, audio is encoded in Vorbis.
I've seen it on youtube for instance, and I can't really tell the difference. If you know of a good comparison site, do tell. I linked to one, and it seems to win in some cases and lose in others. Overall to me it averages to about the same.
I don't see how your "OWN fucking choice" involves telling other people what they ought to use. Nobody is saying it should be illegal for you to download an H.264 player or anything like that.
The web should standarize on WebM so that absolutely everybody who wants to can implement it without dealing with royalty payments, and if somebody especially likes paying licensing fees, they can go download a player/encoder for that. There's your choice.