Even if they quadruple my taxes, it's still far cheaper than what I owe for my education + the interest I have to pay. Only a complete fool thinks the USA system is better than elsewhere. Paying 4X my current taxes for 40 years will be cheaper than my student loans.
Quadrupling the typical American college graduate's taxes would be > 100%. i.e., 31% tax bracket + state + local + property + sales tax + fees...
One writes a song, but it turns out that a long enough stretch of the song is substantially similar to another existing song's hook. Copyright infringement operates on a strict liability basis, not recklessness.
That's not what he's asking. You're describing copyright infringement of a music's composition, i.e., its sheet music. The original authors of "Rum and Coca-Cola" (1940s) lost a copyright lawsuit because they (allegedly) stole a calypso melody. Obviously there was no sampling then. If the music itself (i.e., the sheet music) is sufficiently similar, you've violated someone's copyright.
The parent was talking about sampling. Sampling is always a violation if you don't get permission. It's possible to accidentally infringe someone's copyright if you hear a song while walking through an airport and later use the melody as a basis of your own song. Then it's somewhat of a judgment call and how similar, how long, etc. play a role. But if you take a sample from recorded music and use it in your song, it's incontestably infringing, even if it's only a half second (contrary to internet myth, there is no magic "three seconds or less").
Difference between copying "source" (sheet music) and compiled form (ripping someone's CD and using the mp3 in your own music).
...by all accounts, iOS 4 is a huge battery hog on the 3GS. Some have said that without doing any wi-fi, you'll be lucky to get 3 hours. Add in network usage and you're at less than two hours. That's without phone calls. So...kinda sucks to have a 3GS.
Re:The iPhone and finally walk and chew gum!
on
iOS 4 Releases Today
·
· Score: 0, Offtopic
I can't wait to see all the new stuff that I had on my Android phone a year and a half ago.
I'm laughing because this funny and obvious joke was somehow marked Flamebait. "Oh no! He insulted Steve! Mod him down!" they cried as the pitchfork-wielding crowd surged forward...
The Windows logo instantly makes me feel like I'm at work. Seeing it on the front of my phone everytime I pick it up would sap a tiny percentage of the joy from my day everytime I picked the thing up. And why? For branding? They can't just put a stylized picture of a house, or a rounded square ( I've never heard of anyone being confused by the non-specific design on the iPhone's ONLY BUTTON )... a circle... a triangle... Maybe no icon at all! I want my technology to look like it was sent from an alient future, or dug up from an alien past... with mystic runes and shit. After Mickey Mouse, the Windows logo is the least mystical goddamn rune on earth.
Your inner monologue is so interesting to the rest of us.
The government could finally start belonging to people eventually.
I hope not. "The people" have never been fit to govern themselves. The reason the US has worked to date is that our republican system allows a crude meritocracy to function (those with more money have more influence.) I would say that as democracy has expanded, the position of the US has declined.
...for those trying to defend the scientific method saying that a pseudoscience "cannot possibly work" because "there aren't any known methods through which it could operate".
The way to disprove a non-effect is by showing it indistinguishable from chance. Not by declaring that we can't think of any possible explanations.
This is how we proved that the beating of tom-toms restored the sun after an eclipse.
In my experience most Oracle installs run on HP/UX, but i admit it's TelCo-centric
I highly doubt that...simple evidence being that HP-UX is always the last platform a new version of Oracle RDBMS is released for. Every new RDBMS is usually released for Linux first, then or at the same time on Solaris, then Windows, then AIX, and finally HP-UX at some point.
Oracle loves Linux. They push it hard, and use it extensively (exclusively?) in their internal servers. Solaris is one of those "well, we got this for free" things. They will continue to support it because of the big Sun/Oracle install base, but the mindshare at Oracle is in Linux.
This has happened five times thus far (post-ENIAC):
Mainframe to MS-DOS
MS-DOS to Client/Server
Client/Server to Windows
What are you talking about? That's not even chronologically correct.
Client/Server predates MS-DOS. And no one moved any code from the mainframe to MS-DOS. I doubt seriously any significant application was ported to it. Seriously...lots of people moved from mainframe to iSeries or other minicomputer systems, or perhaps to Unix.
What makes you think Windows isn't client/server? Or the Web? Or Mobile? They're all client/server. For that matter, there were plenty of pre-Windows MS-DOS-based/-era client/server apps, e.g. Novell.
luckily we qualified for R&D grants from Innovation Norway, several years in a row, which helped quite a bit. It gave us the required time to make the base framework very solid and well-thought out.
Well, yes, if the government gives you money, why not spend it? Free money really skews the ROI.
Do not meddle in the affairs of sysadmins, for they are subtle, and quick to anger.
Wow - is that the worst sig on Slashdot or what?
"Do not meddle in the affairs of sysadmins, for they are subtle..." The sysadmins or their affairs? And why would subtle affairs (or subtle sysadmins) be either significant or threatening? Oh my God, he's...he's...SUBTLE! RUN!
"..and quick to anger." Angry affairs? Angry sysadmins?
And to top it off, your URL points to a slimey affiliate site that promotes "Free Advertising System" and "Copy the Super Affiliates".
Keeping with the tiered content delivery model for a moment (theater -> DVD -> home), I really think piracy has very little impact at tier one (theater). 90% of people who'll go see a movie do not have the technical know-how to find a torrent, download it, convert it, burn it to a DVD-R, etc. Of those that could, only a small percent think it's worth the effort, will take the (admittedly small) legal risk, and are willing to accept the reduced quality. Not all will give up the "going to the movies" experience (for what it's worth). Of those that do go through the work, not all of them would have paid to see it in theaters anyway.
Once it hits DVD, it is a lot more universally available and in identical quality. But even there, the vast majority of people who watch DVDs don't have the knowhow to rip a DVD and put it on their iPod or a DVD-R. Of some large number of those that do, they're people who rented the DVD from Netflix or wherever and copy it to keep a copy for themselves, so the studio has got one bite at the apple.
Piracy is hugely important in the third world, because pirated DVDs are sold openly in markets. In the US, I think it's hugely overstated for movies.
Personally, I'm in favor of this. Vast numbers of sex offenders and other criminals would be swiftly caught and punished. Oh wait, this is America - well, they'd be caught anyway. It's a privacy-vs-justice tradeoff I'm willing to make.
However, there is a much larger question here...who the frack cares what a college student has to say?
In other news, my barber thinks 9/11 was a conspiracy by the Bush administration. New York Times, I expect to see an editorial written by him published soon.
BTW, what's with the editorial "yes, you heard that right" - as if this is a completely shocking idea that hasn't been proposed about a hundred times.
I disagree that the environmental movement or acceptance of it came from the big blue marble pictures. Environmentalism was alive and well in the modern sense before 1969 ("Silent Spring" was published in 1962).
I would say that the space program pics (and the deep field pics, etc.) make for some open-mouth wowing by those who see them. However, 90%+ of humanity have not (I doubt 75% of Americans have) and the vast majority of humans would not grasp the significance of, say, the Hubble deep field photos.
The statement that we were in contact with extra-terrestrial life would be understood far more universally. But it would be unifying/revolutionary only if it was non-abstract. Seeing an alien, reading correspondence, etc. is non-abstract. A message sent that we think our grandkids might possibly be able to reply to is too abstract.
Second, the commenter I replied to was suggesting that many "petty squabbles" would be put to an end and there would be a general uniting on humanity. If we discovered a wormhole in the asteroid belt with an advanced civilization (good or ill) on the other side of it, then yes, I agree. But sending radio postcards? No, not enough.
I'm not saying there would be NO impact, just that it would not be revolutionary.
I think your expectations are too high. Discovering that life exists elsewhere would change nothing. If we discovered life close enough that we would interact with it beyond sending multi-year radio postcards, then perhaps. But the likeliest scenario is that we'll pick up some stray signals from a civilization so far away that at best we'll be able to send messages and hope our children can read their responses.
That is not going to change anything.
To take one admittedly flawed example - Marco Polo came back to 14th century Italy and told stories of an advanced civilization "far away" but close enough to reach out to. Nothing changed.
At best, a SETI discovery will result in some ThinkGeek T-shirts of the signal.
You miss the point of the Fermi Paradox entirely. Given that humans have only been in existence on earth for 200K Years, why is it that no aliens have colonised Earth *before* we got here? It would take only one expansionist alien culture to exist in the billions of years the galaxy has existed before us and the Earth and the entire galaxy would have been well and truely colonized already.
I mean some relatively straight-forward extrapolations of humans shows *us* colonizing the galaxy in a few million years.
...assuming some sort of FTL travel, which is a pretty far-fetched extrapolation.
If you encrypt your drive using a one time pad then, yes, it is encrypted and safe for all time and is provably unreadable without someone having the key. Of course, if it's a 1TB drive, then you need a 1TB key, and you can only use it once...
From the article: "...it’s a tedious exercise in impedance-matching, requiring lots of time spent grubbing around in poorly-written manuals that tell you everything the code already told you (because it was generated with JavaDoc or Rdoc or whatever), and none of the high-level stuff that you actually need to be told."
Ah, so the real problem is poor documentation.
I work all day in a programming language written by one of the biggest software companies in the world. The documentation is complete, detailed, and accurate. For large things, there's an accompanying "concepts" doc. While I have (very rarely) run into something that needs clarification in some sort of corner case, I've never come across any part of their language, libraries, or objects that wasn't thoroughly documented, with examples.
On the other hand, I don't think I've ever come across an open source product that had barest minimum of documentation. What does exist is typically out of date (and observations of such are met with "read the changelog!" - lame). There's certainly nothing that explains the major concepts in the code - at best, there's some guide to functions or objects, and usually that only because it can be autogenerated. Sometimes there are examples - though more typically, a few mini examples are the only documentation.
Documentation writing sucks. Programmers don't enjoy it. It's highly amusing to me that the two areas that are the least fun for programmers - GUI design and documentation - are the two worst parts of open source projects.
BTW, in the 80s, programmers were excited about OOP because it promised rich object libraries. Someone would create objects to do X and we'd never have to code X again - no one, ever! And now everyone complains programming is just stringing together libraries.
Computer hardware has only been incrementally improving since the 1970s (look at how early PCs are nearly identical to PCs of today in terms of the sort of hardware they use).
I love watching those old shows on TV Land and seeing their wireless networks, solid state drives, flat panel monitors, and RAID arrays.
Our American-made vehicles are nearly identical to what we had in the 1950s.
I love watching Happy Days reruns and seeing their fuel injection, airbags, antilock brakes, satellite radios, and mp3 players.
Slashdot Mirror
Even if they quadruple my taxes, it's still far cheaper than what I owe for my education + the interest I have to pay. Only a complete fool thinks the USA system is better than elsewhere. Paying 4X my current taxes for 40 years will be cheaper than my student loans.
Quadrupling the typical American college graduate's taxes would be > 100%. i.e., 31% tax bracket + state + local + property + sales tax + fees...
How do you "accidentally" sample something ?
One writes a song, but it turns out that a long enough stretch of the song is substantially similar to another existing song's hook. Copyright infringement operates on a strict liability basis, not recklessness.
That's not what he's asking. You're describing copyright infringement of a music's composition, i.e., its sheet music. The original authors of "Rum and Coca-Cola" (1940s) lost a copyright lawsuit because they (allegedly) stole a calypso melody. Obviously there was no sampling then. If the music itself (i.e., the sheet music) is sufficiently similar, you've violated someone's copyright.
The parent was talking about sampling. Sampling is always a violation if you don't get permission. It's possible to accidentally infringe someone's copyright if you hear a song while walking through an airport and later use the melody as a basis of your own song. Then it's somewhat of a judgment call and how similar, how long, etc. play a role. But if you take a sample from recorded music and use it in your song, it's incontestably infringing, even if it's only a half second (contrary to internet myth, there is no magic "three seconds or less").
Difference between copying "source" (sheet music) and compiled form (ripping someone's CD and using the mp3 in your own music).
I will raise a stink about it, contact the BBB,
Oooooooh! Not the BBB!
Seriously, 99.999% of consumers will never, ever check with the BBB, which is itself quite powerless.
...by all accounts, iOS 4 is a huge battery hog on the 3GS. Some have said that without doing any wi-fi, you'll be lucky to get 3 hours. Add in network usage and you're at less than two hours. That's without phone calls. So...kinda sucks to have a 3GS.
I can't wait to see all the new stuff that I had on my Android phone a year and a half ago.
I'm laughing because this funny and obvious joke was somehow marked Flamebait. "Oh no! He insulted Steve! Mod him down!" they cried as the pitchfork-wielding crowd surged forward...
The Windows logo instantly makes me feel like I'm at work. Seeing it on the front of my phone everytime I pick it up would sap a tiny percentage of the joy from my day everytime I picked the thing up. And why? For branding? They can't just put a stylized picture of a house, or a rounded square ( I've never heard of anyone being confused by the non-specific design on the iPhone's ONLY BUTTON )... a circle... a triangle... Maybe no icon at all! I want my technology to look like it was sent from an alient future, or dug up from an alien past... with mystic runes and shit. After Mickey Mouse, the Windows logo is the least mystical goddamn rune on earth.
Your inner monologue is so interesting to the rest of us.
> ...the fact that I'm using a web browser is kind of enough.
Real browsers can do more than "http://". "file://", for example. Or "ftp://". Or "gopher://".
But, alas, not archie://
The government could finally start belonging to people eventually.
I hope not. "The people" have never been fit to govern themselves. The reason the US has worked to date is that our republican system allows a crude meritocracy to function (those with more money have more influence.) I would say that as democracy has expanded, the position of the US has declined.
...for those trying to defend the scientific method saying that a pseudoscience "cannot possibly work" because "there aren't any known methods through which it could operate".
The way to disprove a non-effect is by showing it indistinguishable from chance. Not by declaring that we can't think of any possible explanations.
This is how we proved that the beating of tom-toms restored the sun after an eclipse.
In my experience most Oracle installs run on HP/UX, but i admit it's TelCo-centric
I highly doubt that...simple evidence being that HP-UX is always the last platform a new version of Oracle RDBMS is released for. Every new RDBMS is usually released for Linux first, then or at the same time on Solaris, then Windows, then AIX, and finally HP-UX at some point.
Oracle loves Linux. They push it hard, and use it extensively (exclusively?) in their internal servers. Solaris is one of those "well, we got this for free" things. They will continue to support it because of the big Sun/Oracle install base, but the mindshare at Oracle is in Linux.
This has happened five times thus far (post-ENIAC):
What are you talking about? That's not even chronologically correct.
Client/Server predates MS-DOS. And no one moved any code from the mainframe to MS-DOS. I doubt seriously any significant application was ported to it. Seriously...lots of people moved from mainframe to iSeries or other minicomputer systems, or perhaps to Unix.
What makes you think Windows isn't client/server? Or the Web? Or Mobile? They're all client/server. For that matter, there were plenty of pre-Windows MS-DOS-based/-era client/server apps, e.g. Novell.
luckily we qualified for R&D grants from Innovation Norway, several years in a row, which helped quite a bit. It gave us the required time to make the base framework very solid and well-thought out.
Well, yes, if the government gives you money, why not spend it? Free money really skews the ROI.
Things you write in Flash do not work on all browsers. They only work on browsers that have the Flash plug-in.
But at least it exists. We still have 12 years to wait for HTML5
Do not meddle in the affairs of sysadmins, for they are subtle, and quick to anger.
Wow - is that the worst sig on Slashdot or what?
Keeping with the tiered content delivery model for a moment (theater -> DVD -> home), I really think piracy has very little impact at tier one (theater). 90% of people who'll go see a movie do not have the technical know-how to find a torrent, download it, convert it, burn it to a DVD-R, etc. Of those that could, only a small percent think it's worth the effort, will take the (admittedly small) legal risk, and are willing to accept the reduced quality. Not all will give up the "going to the movies" experience (for what it's worth). Of those that do go through the work, not all of them would have paid to see it in theaters anyway.
Once it hits DVD, it is a lot more universally available and in identical quality. But even there, the vast majority of people who watch DVDs don't have the knowhow to rip a DVD and put it on their iPod or a DVD-R. Of some large number of those that do, they're people who rented the DVD from Netflix or wherever and copy it to keep a copy for themselves, so the studio has got one bite at the apple.
Piracy is hugely important in the third world, because pirated DVDs are sold openly in markets. In the US, I think it's hugely overstated for movies.
Personally, I'm in favor of this. Vast numbers of sex offenders and other criminals would be swiftly caught and punished. Oh wait, this is America - well, they'd be caught anyway. It's a privacy-vs-justice tradeoff I'm willing to make.
However, there is a much larger question here...who the frack cares what a college student has to say?
In other news, my barber thinks 9/11 was a conspiracy by the Bush administration. New York Times, I expect to see an editorial written by him published soon.
BTW, what's with the editorial "yes, you heard that right" - as if this is a completely shocking idea that hasn't been proposed about a hundred times.
Adopt ISO 8601 and you won't have to wait.
I disagree that the environmental movement or acceptance of it came from the big blue marble pictures. Environmentalism was alive and well in the modern sense before 1969 ("Silent Spring" was published in 1962).
I would say that the space program pics (and the deep field pics, etc.) make for some open-mouth wowing by those who see them. However, 90%+ of humanity have not (I doubt 75% of Americans have) and the vast majority of humans would not grasp the significance of, say, the Hubble deep field photos.
The statement that we were in contact with extra-terrestrial life would be understood far more universally. But it would be unifying/revolutionary only if it was non-abstract. Seeing an alien, reading correspondence, etc. is non-abstract. A message sent that we think our grandkids might possibly be able to reply to is too abstract.
Second, the commenter I replied to was suggesting that many "petty squabbles" would be put to an end and there would be a general uniting on humanity. If we discovered a wormhole in the asteroid belt with an advanced civilization (good or ill) on the other side of it, then yes, I agree. But sending radio postcards? No, not enough.
I'm not saying there would be NO impact, just that it would not be revolutionary.
I think your expectations are too high. Discovering that life exists elsewhere would change nothing. If we discovered life close enough that we would interact with it beyond sending multi-year radio postcards, then perhaps. But the likeliest scenario is that we'll pick up some stray signals from a civilization so far away that at best we'll be able to send messages and hope our children can read their responses.
That is not going to change anything.
To take one admittedly flawed example - Marco Polo came back to 14th century Italy and told stories of an advanced civilization "far away" but close enough to reach out to. Nothing changed.
At best, a SETI discovery will result in some ThinkGeek T-shirts of the signal.
You miss the point of the Fermi Paradox entirely. Given that humans have only been in existence on earth for 200K Years, why is it that no aliens have colonised Earth *before* we got here? It would take only one expansionist alien culture to exist in the billions of years the galaxy has existed before us and the Earth and the entire galaxy would have been well and truely colonized already.
I mean some relatively straight-forward extrapolations of humans shows *us* colonizing the galaxy in a few million years.
...assuming some sort of FTL travel, which is a pretty far-fetched extrapolation.
If you encrypt your drive using a one time pad then, yes, it is encrypted and safe for all time and is provably unreadable without someone having the key. Of course, if it's a 1TB drive, then you need a 1TB key, and you can only use it once...
This is a preview of what will happen someday when Ubisoft goes bankrupt and you still want to play AC2.
You are assuming an even distribution of people. You can toss out the north 80% of Canada's land area and only loose 5% of their population.
Is "loose" the Canadian spelling for "lose"?
From the article: "...it’s a tedious exercise in impedance-matching, requiring lots of time spent grubbing around in poorly-written manuals that tell you everything the code already told you (because it was generated with JavaDoc or Rdoc or whatever), and none of the high-level stuff that you actually need to be told."
Ah, so the real problem is poor documentation.
I work all day in a programming language written by one of the biggest software companies in the world. The documentation is complete, detailed, and accurate. For large things, there's an accompanying "concepts" doc. While I have (very rarely) run into something that needs clarification in some sort of corner case, I've never come across any part of their language, libraries, or objects that wasn't thoroughly documented, with examples.
On the other hand, I don't think I've ever come across an open source product that had barest minimum of documentation. What does exist is typically out of date (and observations of such are met with "read the changelog!" - lame). There's certainly nothing that explains the major concepts in the code - at best, there's some guide to functions or objects, and usually that only because it can be autogenerated. Sometimes there are examples - though more typically, a few mini examples are the only documentation.
Documentation writing sucks. Programmers don't enjoy it. It's highly amusing to me that the two areas that are the least fun for programmers - GUI design and documentation - are the two worst parts of open source projects.
BTW, in the 80s, programmers were excited about OOP because it promised rich object libraries. Someone would create objects to do X and we'd never have to code X again - no one, ever! And now everyone complains programming is just stringing together libraries.
Computer hardware has only been incrementally improving since the 1970s (look at how early PCs are nearly identical to PCs of today in terms of the sort of hardware they use).
I love watching those old shows on TV Land and seeing their wireless networks, solid state drives, flat panel monitors, and RAID arrays.
Our American-made vehicles are nearly identical to what we had in the 1950s.
I love watching Happy Days reruns and seeing their fuel injection, airbags, antilock brakes, satellite radios, and mp3 players.