Right. The less matter means less mass, less volume, and increased value.
No matter what you say, I consider it to have a decreased value, and will never, ever buy an ebook that costs the same or more as a physical book.
Okay, so to most users a search function in a Harry Potter book increases its value more than it would in a reference book. Okay, I'll accept that. The digital copy has more value than the dead-tree version.:)
Depends on for what use. For me, search is better than no search, but the loss of the physical media still outweighs that benefit.
My evaluation is something like: The content is worth 10 points, the physical media is 30, an ebook being searchable is 0 to 10 depending on content type. DRM is -10 points and guarantees no sale. Personally I think since I paid for the information already, a physical book should come with an ebook for free.
Heh. No, you're not. You're buying information. They use matter to deliver it.
Whatever. The matter is still an added cost over plain information, so removing the matter should cost less than information on its own.
Some people would also argue that the physical book format has its own value, beyond providing some media for the information.
So it becomes a question of total value. Does a Harry Potter book benefit from searching?
Actually it would. Some people like trivia. Others want to find a specific quote, or find evidence about whether Harry talks more often to Ginny or Hermione, and so on.
Scripting? Uh, yes. Value++.
IMO there are better formats for things like that than a book (whether in physical or electronic form). If you search it often it should be more like a database. A set of man pages, a long FAQ, perhaps. Having a PDF is more inconvenient than those because it's not as searchable as something with a properly made index. If you search in a PDF of a C manual for printf you'll probably find more than 50 random appearances of it in the examples, before you find the function's complete description.
That's why Perl has perldoc and the "-f" and "-q" arguments to it.
No, it's not. You're buying information, not matter.
I'm buying information + matter. Matter has to cost something since it needs to be made, stored, and transported. Therefore removing the matter should reduce price.
The digital one has more value.
Disagree. In the general sense, a physical book has more value. It doesn't have batteries that run out, has no DRM (huge increase in value for me), can be lent and borrowed, and doesn't depend on third parties to keep working.
The way I understand it, the interest in this is because you could have an aircraft with monitoring/transmission equipment in the sky for months. So instead of dealing with the latency of a satellite in geostationary orbit, you could be talking to a relay flying at a much lower altitude. It's also much cheaper, and easier to upgrade and replace.
Now of course it won't be 100% perfect, but that doesn't mean it can't be very useful. For things that service a specific area it should be possible to calculate the maximum payload and battery size needed, based on the currents in the area.
1: Noticeably better price, but without sacrificing reliability. An average HDD in the enterprise has 1 million hours MTBF with constant reads/writes. A SSD should be similar, or perhaps a lot more because there are no moving parts.
It's a tradeoff. Reliability needs redundancy, and redundancy costs money. So either take the financial hit, or wait until the reliable devices get cheap enough.
2: An archival grade SSD that can hold data for hundreds, if not thousands of years before so many electrons escape the cells to make a 1 or a zero impossible to tell apart. I don't know any media that can last for more than 10 years reliably. Yes, maybe a CD-R or two may last that long, but it is more of a matter of luck than anything else.
I think it's early for that still. SSDs are too expensive to be used for archiving stuff. Their strength is performance. For archiving there's tape.
3: SSDs using a different port than SATA. Perhaps have it interface as a direct PCI-E device with a custom bus to add more SSD capacity in a similar form factor to RAM DIMMs.
Exists, in several versions. Like PCI-e cards that take DIMMs, and SSDs too.
4: A SSD drive built onto the motherboard. This way, a laptop can be a bit thinner due to not worrying about a 2.5" drive.
Exists as well I think.
8: Put some flash onto a tape format, so a tape can be encrypted with one key, but the flash storage on the tape would store an access list of who can unlock the tape's master key. This way, a passphrase, a smart card, and a PGP/gpg key on someone's machine all work to recover data from a tape.
10: A standardized full disk encryption format. This way, I insert a flash disk into my camera or phone, enter a password, and it can read/write to that. Then, put it into my computer, type the passphrase, copy the data. If the flash disk is stolen, the data is protected unless the attacker can yank the key out of the computer or phone's memory (a lot harder feat than just picking up an accidentally lost flash drive.)
IDE has support for password protection. I don't think anything stops the disk from encrypting the data, and since it's part of the standard modern hardware should support it. Laptops have options for this in the BIOS.
Nobody said anything about digging holes, or setting up fires. There exist natural regions of hot and cold air in the atmosphere that gliders take advantage of.
LVM snapshots work on a block level and don't care about the filesystem. A snapshot of any data in a logical volume should work fine, even if it's not a recognized filesystem.
A nice use for this is using a read/write snapshot to try different strategies for recovering a broken filesystem.
Is it really that simple? Why is biological diversity important? I mean if you fallow Darwinian logic won't there eventually only be one species? Survival of the fittest and all
Uhh, no?
Just for a start, flying, living in the water, living on the ground, living on the equator and living on the poles all involve different tradeoffs. Any species maximizes something at the cost of sacrificing something else. What does "fittest" refer to? The environment. And it happens to vary widely over the planet.
And if there was only a species left, what would it eat?
Yeah, "accidents happen", but since BP knew 11 months ago that something wasn't working properly, it's completely inexcusable that they didn't fix it.
If it was a completely unforseen accident that nobody saw coming and that they didn't have a reasonable way to detect, then I would accept they could have an excuse. But in this case they knew perfectly well it was screwed up, and still chose to ignore the problem.
Atheists dont have the answer either because a lot of atheists don't promote any form of ethics whatsoever and appear to be amoral, which is part of the reason why atheism never catches on to the mainstream.
Atheism has no dogma that explains any such thing. As a result we're free to have mutually incompatible morality system. But that's nothing new, after all most religions are incompatible on some level with each other, or even within their own branches.
I base my morality on the lack of harm to other people. Self-harm, while not really a good thing is acceptable so long nobody else is harmed as well. That means that I for instance disagree with the existence of all victimless crimes, even if I personally find the behavior disgusting, as I think that tastefulness and morality are separate things.
How do you determine a right and wrong action? Using a decision tree, using a pro vs con list, using a type of math that most people have no knowledge up. People want a convenient list, a code to live by and when it's not given to them by God they go crazy. They'll die to protect this code just as many Americans would die protecting the Constitution.
I do not think I like this idea. You'll have the same old holy wars, for the same old stupid reasons. Hundreds of years from now nobody will remember the reasons and context for the old prohibitions. They'll become sacred and not open to discussion, even after the purpose for which they were made is no longer needed. For instance, is incest still wrong if improved science can guarantee that the child won't have any problems because of it?
I think that such things discourage thinking too much, and we don't need any more of that. A proper scientific morality IMO would start with a good education made to get people to use their brains properly. If most of the population was able to think logically, a few extremists wouldn't be such a big problem.
The actual point of debate isn't really important. The point is, how do you debate anything related to the religion in question with a "true believer"?
In my opinion, you don't. Not in the usual sense of it.
A true believer is unlikely to change their opinion regardless of how convincing your argument is. There's too much at stake, and too much stacked up against you. I think the best outcome you can achieve is to plant seeds of doubt, that combined with various problems, inconsistencies, etc might at some later point cause a change in opinion.
The question is, is the oppression of women in a society acceptable because it is "normal" for that society? At one time it was "normal" in our society to keep slaves from Africa. Even though I have a great deal of respect for what the men of that time were able to accomplish, I also do not understand how men of conscience were able to participate in that practice, and it does affect my view of them.
I'm not saying that such things are good and just, but just that it's unreasonable to hold people from centuries past to a modern moral standard. Certainly back then there would have been people who wondered whether such things were really just, but you can't expect that every person who had anything worthy to contribute would also be hundreds of years morally ahead of their contemporaries, and no person can fight to right everything that is wrong in their eyes.
I'm sure that in 200 years from now, we'll also look morally depraved for one reason or another.
How do you debate the question of, for example, whether or not Muhammed was in fact a pedophile with a group of people that have blind faith in their prophet?
IMO (as an atheist), this particular subject is unimportant.
At the time he lived it was a normal behavior in his society. And bringing it up accounts to little more than an ad hominem attack. If that's enough to discredit him, then the same thing can be done for any other person from the past you agree with. At the very least, they're likely to have been sexist, racist, homophobes or child abusers (as in physical punishment) by modern standards.
I think a much better rebuttal would be made by attacking his actual teachings, and not a behavior that conformed to the society of the time.
The cars won't appear there overnight. They'll be bought gradually, and be mostly charged at night, when the grid has spare capacity. As the load grows, the places with least spare capacity left will be upgraded first. You don't have to do an "overhaul the entire US" project. And why would it need a stimulus? If people are spending more on electricity, that's where the funding for the infrastructure should come from.
I think it's not only uncontroversial, but hardly could be otherwise. You couldn't live in an unpredictable world. We predict things all the time. Like that when we walk forward we'll actually move in the intended direction, and that when a bear is running straight at you it'll probably catch you soon enough, if you don't find a way of getting away.
The only reason we dare take a step forward is because we have a reasonable certainty that a wall won't suddenly materialize out of nowhere right in front of our nose. If reality isn't predictable, then taking any kind of decision becomes impossible, and having a brain is pointless.
A partly predictable reality works just fine though. You can decide whether to step out of your house when you have information like "When raining, people who go outside sometimes get struck by lightning". Even if the reasons are obscure, and the underlying mechanisms unknown, there's still something useful you can do with information like that.
I don't think reality needs to be objective though. We get by just fine by working from out subjective perception. For instance you can describe a flower as being yellow. An insect will see something different. And in fact any possible perception of color is equally valid because color is something that only exists in our mind. But so long there's consistency to that subjective interpretation we can make use of it.
If you mean, take the current situation, substract copyright and change nothing else then yes, that would be true.
What I think Stallman really wants is not how things are right now, or how things are right now minus copyright, but something like: how things are right now, minus copyright, plus copyleft for everything.
The current, copyright way is: "I made this, and I own it". You release a book/movie/song and say "this is mine, I dictate how it can be used".
Substracting copyright you get something like: "I made this. But I don't care what you do with it". You release a book/movie/song, but then place no limits on it. It can be copied, reprinted, sampled, sold, whatever. I can take your book/song, wrap it in a DRMed format, and sell it.
But how about a third option? Something like "This is un-ownable". You release your book/movie/song but the society says that books don't have an owner. The content of the book belongs to the society itself, and none may place a restriction on it. Any book written is automatically included in a public library, it always is legal to copy, and it is illegal to attempt to lay any claim on it, and to try to prevent copying.
Think of it like a piece of public land, like a forest. Nobody really owns it. Anybody may pass through. There are conditions set on the usage, like "you must leave everything like it was when you came in". It's a communal good and can't be rented, sold, set fire to, etc.
I think there's somewhere a tribe that operates under an idea somewhat similar to this: the knowledge you have in your head isn't your. It's what you picked up from other people, plus for instance, some divine inspiration. Your creations then are for the most part picked up from other sources, and your own contribution is considered to be so insignificant that it doesn't give you any right to assert any control over the results. For the same reason, nobody else has any right to restrict it either.
A modern society among those lines would be something like: there's no copyright. Any product made must have complete schematics and source code available to anybody who asks, at no cost, or at most the price of duplication. DRM, anti-copy mechanisms and obfuscation are illegal. Patents are inexistent.
You don't think that executing him for bribery might make the next guy to think if it's worth accepting one?
While in general I oppose the death penalty, IMO if anybody at all is to be executed, it should be the people in the ruling positions. Their decisions affect millions of people. So their actions should be closely monitored, and important failures ruthlessly punished.
I've taken photos of my food twice: Once when I thought it'd be something spectacularly large, and once when trying to capture the preparation of "fireball icecream". I think it makes sense to give it a try when you think it's going to be something memorable. It took me maybe 30 seconds both times.
But it never occured to me to actually set up a tripod at a restaurant. It just seems like an awkward thing to do, especially in a place where somebody else could run into it. Besides being an inconsiderate thing to do, high end camera equipment and food don't mix very well, and restaurants have a lot of it.
Wind and tidal power I personally think we are being just as short-sighted about as we were with oil. Sure, a few hundred wind generators isn't a problem, or a few tidal generators in the gulf stream is no big deal, but what about when you get tens of thousands of them? What is that going to do to the weather along the wind/water routes, and what will it do to the ecosystems?
Not sure about tidal, but wind? It would have to be built to really enormous amounts.
Of course a wind turbine puts an obstacle in the wind's way, and extracts energy from it. But so does every single building on the planet, and there's the heck of a lot of those. They absorb enormous amounts of energy, and don't even do anything useful with it.
"Well, at least it's better than in bumfuckistan" is a justification for complacency. Don't wait for it to get worse, do some work and help make it better.
At least you guys -have- minority parties. Good luck finding a single person in the US congress that isn't a republican or democrat (or an 'independent' who votes 99.999% with one of the 2 parties).
So are you trying to do something about it, or just complain about it online?
The grandparent is setting an excellent example here.
You can't tell the difference, assuming of course that the RGB phosphors are evenly matched with your cones.
Take for instance printers. We have CMYK precisely because C+M+Y doesn't equal to black, as the inks aren't perfect. I think some sort of muddy brown actually results. So a black ink is needed to fix that imperfection. There exist printers with 6 ink colors as well, because that still doesn't make it perfect.
I think better monitors would be a good thing, but I'm more interested in a higher bit depth. Real life has quite a few things that you can see just fine, but which are challenging to photograph and can't be accurately reproduced on a monitor.
Slashdot Mirror
No matter what you say, I consider it to have a decreased value, and will never, ever buy an ebook that costs the same or more as a physical book.
Depends on for what use. For me, search is better than no search, but the loss of the physical media still outweighs that benefit.
My evaluation is something like: The content is worth 10 points, the physical media is 30, an ebook being searchable is 0 to 10 depending on content type. DRM is -10 points and guarantees no sale. Personally I think since I paid for the information already, a physical book should come with an ebook for free.
Whatever. The matter is still an added cost over plain information, so removing the matter should cost less than information on its own.
Some people would also argue that the physical book format has its own value, beyond providing some media for the information.
Actually it would. Some people like trivia. Others want to find a specific quote, or find evidence about whether Harry talks more often to Ginny or Hermione, and so on.
IMO there are better formats for things like that than a book (whether in physical or electronic form). If you search it often it should be more like a database. A set of man pages, a long FAQ, perhaps. Having a PDF is more inconvenient than those because it's not as searchable as something with a properly made index. If you search in a PDF of a C manual for printf you'll probably find more than 50 random appearances of it in the examples, before you find the function's complete description.
That's why Perl has perldoc and the "-f" and "-q" arguments to it.
I'm buying information + matter. Matter has to cost something since it needs to be made, stored, and transported. Therefore removing the matter should reduce price.
Disagree. In the general sense, a physical book has more value. It doesn't have batteries that run out, has no DRM (huge increase in value for me), can be lent and borrowed, and doesn't depend on third parties to keep working.
The way I understand it, the interest in this is because you could have an aircraft with monitoring/transmission equipment in the sky for months. So instead of dealing with the latency of a satellite in geostationary orbit, you could be talking to a relay flying at a much lower altitude. It's also much cheaper, and easier to upgrade and replace.
Now of course it won't be 100% perfect, but that doesn't mean it can't be very useful. For things that service a specific area it should be possible to calculate the maximum payload and battery size needed, based on the currents in the area.
Some of those are very predictable and have a stable position
But that's why it has a solar panel and batteries, so that it's not limited to finding the right current.
It's a tradeoff. Reliability needs redundancy, and redundancy costs money. So either take the financial hit, or wait until the reliable devices get cheap enough.
I think it's early for that still. SSDs are too expensive to be used for archiving stuff. Their strength is performance. For archiving there's tape.
Exists, in several versions. Like PCI-e cards that take DIMMs, and SSDs too.
Exists as well I think.
LTO already includes a chip for metadata and stuff like that.
IDE has support for password protection. I don't think anything stops the disk from encrypting the data, and since it's part of the standard modern hardware should support it. Laptops have options for this in the BIOS.
Thermal != geothermal.
Nobody said anything about digging holes, or setting up fires. There exist natural regions of hot and cold air in the atmosphere that gliders take advantage of.
Why should you?
You've laid waste to their country, now you're going to take everything valuable as well? That's some liberation indeed.
LVM snapshots work on a block level and don't care about the filesystem. A snapshot of any data in a logical volume should work fine, even if it's not a recognized filesystem.
A nice use for this is using a read/write snapshot to try different strategies for recovering a broken filesystem.
Uhh, no?
Just for a start, flying, living in the water, living on the ground, living on the equator and living on the poles all involve different tradeoffs. Any species maximizes something at the cost of sacrificing something else. What does "fittest" refer to? The environment. And it happens to vary widely over the planet.
And if there was only a species left, what would it eat?
Bullshit.
Yeah, "accidents happen", but since BP knew 11 months ago that something wasn't working properly, it's completely inexcusable that they didn't fix it.
If it was a completely unforseen accident that nobody saw coming and that they didn't have a reasonable way to detect, then I would accept they could have an excuse. But in this case they knew perfectly well it was screwed up, and still chose to ignore the problem.
Atheism has no dogma that explains any such thing. As a result we're free to have mutually incompatible morality system. But that's nothing new, after all most religions are incompatible on some level with each other, or even within their own branches.
I base my morality on the lack of harm to other people. Self-harm, while not really a good thing is acceptable so long nobody else is harmed as well. That means that I for instance disagree with the existence of all victimless crimes, even if I personally find the behavior disgusting, as I think that tastefulness and morality are separate things.
I do not think I like this idea. You'll have the same old holy wars, for the same old stupid reasons. Hundreds of years from now nobody will remember the reasons and context for the old prohibitions. They'll become sacred and not open to discussion, even after the purpose for which they were made is no longer needed. For instance, is incest still wrong if improved science can guarantee that the child won't have any problems because of it?
I think that such things discourage thinking too much, and we don't need any more of that. A proper scientific morality IMO would start with a good education made to get people to use their brains properly. If most of the population was able to think logically, a few extremists wouldn't be such a big problem.
Why? Can't a religion be wrong?
Are you going to for instance hold that opinion for members of a religion that involves human sacrifice?
In my opinion, you don't. Not in the usual sense of it.
A true believer is unlikely to change their opinion regardless of how convincing your argument is. There's too much at stake, and too much stacked up against you. I think the best outcome you can achieve is to plant seeds of doubt, that combined with various problems, inconsistencies, etc might at some later point cause a change in opinion.
I'm not saying that such things are good and just, but just that it's unreasonable to hold people from centuries past to a modern moral standard. Certainly back then there would have been people who wondered whether such things were really just, but you can't expect that every person who had anything worthy to contribute would also be hundreds of years morally ahead of their contemporaries, and no person can fight to right everything that is wrong in their eyes.
I'm sure that in 200 years from now, we'll also look morally depraved for one reason or another.
IMO (as an atheist), this particular subject is unimportant.
At the time he lived it was a normal behavior in his society. And bringing it up accounts to little more than an ad hominem attack. If that's enough to discredit him, then the same thing can be done for any other person from the past you agree with. At the very least, they're likely to have been sexist, racist, homophobes or child abusers (as in physical punishment) by modern standards.
I think a much better rebuttal would be made by attacking his actual teachings, and not a behavior that conformed to the society of the time.
So?
The cars won't appear there overnight. They'll be bought gradually, and be mostly charged at night, when the grid has spare capacity. As the load grows, the places with least spare capacity left will be upgraded first. You don't have to do an "overhaul the entire US" project. And why would it need a stimulus? If people are spending more on electricity, that's where the funding for the infrastructure should come from.
I think it's not only uncontroversial, but hardly could be otherwise. You couldn't live in an unpredictable world. We predict things all the time. Like that when we walk forward we'll actually move in the intended direction, and that when a bear is running straight at you it'll probably catch you soon enough, if you don't find a way of getting away.
The only reason we dare take a step forward is because we have a reasonable certainty that a wall won't suddenly materialize out of nowhere right in front of our nose. If reality isn't predictable, then taking any kind of decision becomes impossible, and having a brain is pointless.
A partly predictable reality works just fine though. You can decide whether to step out of your house when you have information like "When raining, people who go outside sometimes get struck by lightning". Even if the reasons are obscure, and the underlying mechanisms unknown, there's still something useful you can do with information like that.
I don't think reality needs to be objective though. We get by just fine by working from out subjective perception. For instance you can describe a flower as being yellow. An insect will see something different. And in fact any possible perception of color is equally valid because color is something that only exists in our mind. But so long there's consistency to that subjective interpretation we can make use of it.
Depends on what you mean by "without copyright".
If you mean, take the current situation, substract copyright and change nothing else then yes, that would be true.
What I think Stallman really wants is not how things are right now, or how things are right now minus copyright, but something like: how things are right now, minus copyright, plus copyleft for everything.
The current, copyright way is: "I made this, and I own it". You release a book/movie/song and say "this is mine, I dictate how it can be used".
Substracting copyright you get something like: "I made this. But I don't care what you do with it". You release a book/movie/song, but then place no limits on it. It can be copied, reprinted, sampled, sold, whatever. I can take your book/song, wrap it in a DRMed format, and sell it.
But how about a third option? Something like "This is un-ownable". You release your book/movie/song but the society says that books don't have an owner. The content of the book belongs to the society itself, and none may place a restriction on it. Any book written is automatically included in a public library, it always is legal to copy, and it is illegal to attempt to lay any claim on it, and to try to prevent copying.
Think of it like a piece of public land, like a forest. Nobody really owns it. Anybody may pass through. There are conditions set on the usage, like "you must leave everything like it was when you came in". It's a communal good and can't be rented, sold, set fire to, etc.
I think there's somewhere a tribe that operates under an idea somewhat similar to this: the knowledge you have in your head isn't your. It's what you picked up from other people, plus for instance, some divine inspiration. Your creations then are for the most part picked up from other sources, and your own contribution is considered to be so insignificant that it doesn't give you any right to assert any control over the results. For the same reason, nobody else has any right to restrict it either.
A modern society among those lines would be something like: there's no copyright. Any product made must have complete schematics and source code available to anybody who asks, at no cost, or at most the price of duplication. DRM, anti-copy mechanisms and obfuscation are illegal. Patents are inexistent.
You don't think that executing him for bribery might make the next guy to think if it's worth accepting one?
While in general I oppose the death penalty, IMO if anybody at all is to be executed, it should be the people in the ruling positions. Their decisions affect millions of people. So their actions should be closely monitored, and important failures ruthlessly punished.
I've taken photos of my food twice: Once when I thought it'd be something spectacularly large, and once when trying to capture the preparation of "fireball icecream". I think it makes sense to give it a try when you think it's going to be something memorable. It took me maybe 30 seconds both times.
But it never occured to me to actually set up a tripod at a restaurant. It just seems like an awkward thing to do, especially in a place where somebody else could run into it. Besides being an inconsiderate thing to do, high end camera equipment and food don't mix very well, and restaurants have a lot of it.
Not sure about tidal, but wind? It would have to be built to really enormous amounts.
Of course a wind turbine puts an obstacle in the wind's way, and extracts energy from it. But so does every single building on the planet, and there's the heck of a lot of those. They absorb enormous amounts of energy, and don't even do anything useful with it.
Awesome, good luck with that. I'm a member of my local one.
No, that's the wrong way to see it.
"Well, at least it's better than in bumfuckistan" is a justification for complacency. Don't wait for it to get worse, do some work and help make it better.
So are you trying to do something about it, or just complain about it online?
The grandparent is setting an excellent example here.
You can't tell the difference, assuming of course that the RGB phosphors are evenly matched with your cones.
Take for instance printers. We have CMYK precisely because C+M+Y doesn't equal to black, as the inks aren't perfect. I think some sort of muddy brown actually results. So a black ink is needed to fix that imperfection. There exist printers with 6 ink colors as well, because that still doesn't make it perfect.
I think better monitors would be a good thing, but I'm more interested in a higher bit depth. Real life has quite a few things that you can see just fine, but which are challenging to photograph and can't be accurately reproduced on a monitor.
Hello,
You certainly don't speak for me. I prefer working with Mono precisely for that reason.