You may wonder why the hell I'm replying to my own post. I could reply to every response to my post and response to that... but this is easier. Also, whoever moderated my original post as "Troll" is a complete moron. It wasn't a troll--that should be obvious. If you didn't like it, or thought it was poorly written, well, that's what "Overrated" is for. Disagreeing with the slashdot political party line is not the same as trolling. Read the moderator guidelines.
First of all, note that I flagged half my message as a rant. That means you have to use a bit of creativity or thought to flesh out the argument--it isn't intended to be a complete philisophical proof of my views on the issue.
For instance, somebody made the witty observation, "How can you impose democracy?". That's pretty simple: ensure the elections are fair and there's no cheating/intimidating going on.
Someone else pointed out that not every third-world country is starving because of bad leadership. Of course not, I was making a generalization. What I said is true of most but not all third-world countries. Do I need to explicitly state that it's a generalization? Most of the time, when people discuss such things, they're speaking in generalizations, because including every specific case would be impossible.
Someone else pointed out that we'll never get an answer to the "are we alone" question unless we find ET. True, but the longer we look with no result, the more we learn about the parameters on intelligent life. If we were to learn that Earth-type planets are plentiful, but didn't find any ETs, that might tell us that intelligent civilizations usually destroy themselves. That would be a very valuable lesson (nice not to have to learn it the hard way).
To the poster of the meta-rant: it wasn't a textbook response--all my own (sleep-deprived) thoughts, thank you:-) Calling things "textbook" and "mind-numbingly obvious" is a cheap tactic to get out of presenting an actual argument. Please read my other post in this topic, and the article. The telescope has many purposes besides SETI (one of which may be to detect Earth-bound meteors). If contacting other civilizations and saving humanity from death a la dinosaur aren't the UN's thing, whose mandate are they? The US's? (because that's who these kind of tasks usually get dumped on). Before you flame me for that, let me say that I'm not American. I just don't subscribe to the school of thought that assumes the world's problems are the United States' fault because the US is successful.
To the person who said parrots, elephants, and dolphins are intelligent: yes, they are smarter than [insert unpopular group here], but not really at the human level. Except for dolphins (obligatory reference to Douglas Adams). All they have to do is eat and have sex...:-)
To the person who said going in with an army is extreme: I don't know you, so I can't say for sure, but you sound very much like those hypocrits who decry military action and propose peaceful alternatives, then accuse the US of killing 200 children a day in Iraq or whatever with trade sanctions. The only acceptable method of effecting change to people like you seems to be sitting outside evil country X's embassy while chanting "Kumbaya". Can you really justify waiting a decade for some non-military method to begin to work while tens of thousands of people are dying? And about the undermining of foreign coutries: I am by no means justifying it, but it mostly happened as part of the Cold War. I think the CIA's days of messing with two-bit governments are over. We now have to deal with the aftermath, and whining about how it got that way won't help.
To the person blaming everything on evil "rich" countries holding third-world debt. You are free to pay off someone else's debt if you choose--have you helped them at all?\ Nobody made them buy weapons from us. If I spent all my money buying guns, then filed for bankrupcy and expected not to have to pay back the $1000 I owed you, you would rightly call me an idiot and an asshole. Only idiot/asshole governments would get a country into such a situation, hence the need to fix the government.
To the person who pointed out that there are homeless and starving people in every country, including the US. Yes, and throwing more money at them won't make the problem go away. If you took all the money the US spends on social assistance and social programs, and just gave it to poor people, there wouldn't be a single person in the US below the poverty line. Now explain to me why there's still a poverty problem, and how more money would make that problem go away. I don't know how to fix it, but I do know more money is not the answer. We might as well spend the cash on something that has a hope of succeeding.
For everyone out there who bashes the UN for trying to get involved in SETI:
Who better than the UN to represent humanity when we first make contact with another (or perhaps "an") intelligent species? Isn't part of the UN's mandate to bring everyone together for peaceful and meaningful discussions? Why shouldn't that include ETs?
Also, the project has a heck of a lot of other goals. I'm not sure if asteroid detection is one of them, but, if it is, it's worth considering that a decent-sized asteroid hitting Earth would make full-scale nuclear war look like wet firecrackers...
The dinosaurs died because they didn't have a space program.
***RANT***
I'm so sick of hearing the "when people are starving in country Z, how can we justify spending Y on X" argument. People are starving because their governments are fucked up. You can spend all the money you want on foreign aid, but it will just go to feeding the military and lining the pockets of the dictators in those countries.
The only real solution would be to go in with an army, kill/imprison the dictators, impose a democratic government, occupy the country for the 20 years it took for things to settle down, and then hope that they got their shit together. A hell of a lot of people--both us and them--would die in the effort.
Would you give your life for that? ***/RANT***
That being said, money spent on SETI is NOT wasted. It advances our society as a whole by answering an incredibly deep question about our universe: are we alone?
If all we ever manage to accomplish as a species is to pollute the planet and feed ourselves for a while before the next big comet hits, well, we just plain suck. If we never pass on parts of our knowledge or culture to other civilizations, is there any point to our existence as a species?
Imagine if someone had told Columbus he was an asshole for going off on his little trip when people were starving in Europe. Exploration is vital to the advancement of human society. (Please don't get anal on me and point out how so-and-so actually discovered North America first, or how Columbus was really looking for the North-West passage to the nearest Indo-Chinese Fusion Cuisine restaurant--it's irrelevant).
I have probably just been trolled here, but what the hell, it's late, I don't care.
I hate to get nitpicky here, but the statement I made, "No other property can be given away without loss by the owner," refers only to other (non-information) property. I did not explicitly say that information could always be given away without any cost to the owner. Rather, I said that if you give away information, you always still have it, which is a different thing. You're reading something in to my argument that I didn't actually say or intend to say.
That being said, it's worth clarifying the difference between information that is valuable only for reselling to others (i.e., music, movies, art, etc.), and information which has intrinsic value to the creator (i.e. credit card numbers, bomb-building secrets, business plans, etc.) The former is generally protected by IP laws, while the latter is usually just kept really, really secret. I was talking about the former type of information. I should have clarified that in my argument.
The reason I said communism doesn't work is because the USSR fell after 70 years of western economic pressure. Or rather, perhaps I should have said "communism is even more broken than capitalism". Capitalism out-competed communism.
Take a look at some Asian country that recently (20 -40 years ago) went capitalist, and you'll probably see a booming economy (current recession notwithstanding). Ethopia is screwed up because it's been screwed up for a very long time, and that takes a while to fix. Also, calling yourself "capitalist" does not automatically give you a McDonald's on every corner and a booming economy. It takes time and effort. Look how long it took the US to get where it's at.
I'd like to point out the reason the USSR made the biggest effort is because they fought on both sides of the war. If they'd chosen the right side in the first place (or if the French hadn't been so fucking stupid with the Maginot Line, or....) Germany would never have gotten as far as they did.
By the way, when was the last time you listened to music produced in a communist country? Right... Capitalism usually means that some people get the gold, some get the shit. Communism has everyone getting equal amounts of shit... Capitalism still sucks, but it sucks less...
We're getting off-topic here, so please email me if you want to continue this.
"Information wants to be free" really should be "Informations can be free." No other property can be given away without loss by the owner. You give away a physical thing, you don't have it any more. You give away information, you've still got it.
What Napster has done is encourage others to break the law. Is the law just? Depends on whether it's right to create artificial scarcity of information (i.e., copyright). How do we determine what's right? Look at the consequences of making it legal versus making it illegal.
Case 1 (copyright): Copyright exists so that information can be shoehorned into traditional economic systems that are based upon scarcity, supply and demand, etc. If copyright is enforced, it's business as usual. If it's poorly enforced, you get the chaos that's happening now in society (a Bad Thing, since it discourages content creation and encourages the lawyers). How to enforce copyright in the *gag* "information age" is the big problem.
Case 2 (no copyright): Without copyright, traditional economic systems fail, and information creators are not rewarded. Thus, production of information decreases. This is a Bad Thing. The only solution is to find an alternate economic system. Just as a quick reminder, communism doesn't work, and all those other cool-sounding systems (street performers' protocol, etc.) haven't been tested in a large-scale economy. There's nothing that's known to work.
In other words, behind door A, we have chaos and uncertainty, and behind door B we have uncertainty and chaos.
I personally would like to see a system where all artists get accounts on PayPal or something like that, and we can just donate whatever we feel like for each MP3 we download (preferably off of the artist's high-speed, high-quality site). Of course, people will rationalize their way into not paying: "they're already rich", "musicians get all the chicks", "they suck too much to deserve to get paid for this MP3 that I'm keeping"... Nobody really knows if enough people will pay to make it worth while for artists. And before you start yelling about indie bands giving away their work, remember that a lot of them are doing that to build a fan base so they can start charging for it.
Finally, remember that what's right and wrong (and legal) is decided, to some extent, by society. Copyright is currently part of our social contract. For it to be right to ignore copyright would require a fundamental shift in the public viewpoint. This shift seems to have already begun, but it hasn't happened yet.
Do we have to abide by copyright until such a shift happens, or are we morally justified in ignoring copyright since we are leading the charge into this new economics of information? That's the real question.
Re:It's ironic as hell that a Mac user said it.
on
Is UNIX An OS?
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· Score: 5
Oh, Christ, more of the anti-Mac bias (or is it just anti-!Linux bias?) evident so often on Slashdot... As someone who's programmed for the Mac OS, yes, there are a lot of stupid things about it, but it also has the best UI around.
What's really important in an OS depends on what you're using it for. Using the current Mac OS for a server would be just plain stupid (which is probably why my company is doing it), just like making an average user use Linux+fvwm would also be stupid. (Dodging rocks thrown by Gnome fanatics) Linux and Unix simply don't have a good GUI yet. The Mac OS does, and has for a very long time. Just as Unix has been refined and polished with time, so has the Mac UI. Understand and accept that, and you'll make the step from zealot to rational human being.
That being said, you missed the point of the article completely. The author is using the changes in the computer world's landscape (move towards personal computers from mainframes) to make what may appear to be a purely symmantic distinction. His real point is that there's now more to an OS than just a good kernel and some utilities.
GUI will make or break you for the average user. They don't care if their apps don't crash if they can't launch them in the first place. Apple understands this, and has filled Mac OS X with Ooey GUI Goodness (tm). For the rest of us (no, not them, us with the clue), OS X just happens to have a very solid foundation. They've also started an effort to clean up the mess of dissimilar config files that is/etc. XML-formatted property lists... Drool...
I used to have a semi-open cubicle near the door to my office (and the pop machine). There was constant traffic, and it was very hard to focus. Now I have an office, and it's far better. I'm significantly more productive, and enjoy working more. I wouldn't work for a company that tried to shoehorn programmers into "open-office" bullshit. Coding requires long periods of uninterrupted concentration, and that simply can't happen if sales people are pestering you every five minutes.
On a side note, flourescent lights can be really nice if you get those "full-spectrum" bulbs instead of the traditional, cheap, crappy ones.
I live in Canada, and thus am outside the scope of DMCA and the judge's ruling. Would it be helpful if I developed a Linux utility that undoes CSS?
Not that it should matter, but I use LinuxPPC, so the two commercial LinuxDVD players underdevelopment won't work on my system (since I'm assuming they'll be x86 binary-only). This gives me a very good and reasonable motivation to create such a tool.
My impression always was that the speed problem with the G4 was due to Motorola, not any inherent problems with AltiVec.
I use a G4 at work, and AltiVec is *very* nice for certain tasks. SoundJam MP takes advantage of it, and can encode MP3s at up t 10x (haven't verified that myself). AltiVec is also used for some of the cool effects in Aqua (like maybe the "Genie" effect).
IANAHE (I Am Not A Hardware Engineer), but I don't see why a few vector processing units would prevent a chip from reaching speeds > 500 MHz. If only IBM and Motorola would pool their technology, we might see 1GHz G5s with AltiVec soon... Maybe Jobs will kick their respective asses a bit, and it will happen...
I live in BC, and I've played Soldier of Fortune, so this is particularly relevant to me.
I've seen lots of movies that were a lot more graphic than SoF and got a lesser rating from the BC Film Classification Board. I'm sure this is due to political pressure from various groups, not any real logical or consistent decision by the film board.
One question, though. Why was SoF ever even submitted to or looked at by the Film Classification Board? Smells like political foul play. Guess that's what one should expect in a province where unions run the government.
How can you patent a 'look'? That's all a GUI really is, different ways of visually presenting information, along with some widgets the user can click on to do stuff. It might be possible to protect a really novel UI element under "trade dress" (same thing Apple used to go after iMac rip-off makers), but I doubt it for tabbed palettes.
And what about the prior art? Other people have been using tabs in UI for a long time. Is the idea of putting them in a palette novel? Hardly.
What happens if everyone starts patenting UI elements? Every company will have to develop its own, unique UI, and the result will be a total usability mess, with absolutely no UI consistency.
I'm working on a project for my company which involves tabbed dialogs. Is that covered by the Adobe patent? Or just tabbed palettes?
This is just making me depressed... Stupid software patents are the perfect example of what happens when both governments and corporations are corrupt (which happens when the populace becomes stupid and apathetic).
You're mostly right. Both sides are trying to convince the court their interpretation is right. BUT the defendants are also saying, "and if it's not that way, it's unconstitutional!"
There are a few snags in the defendants' case, though. They claim that there is no proof DeCSS has been used for piracy... Yeah, right... Of course, there are also legitimate uses. I, for one, downloaded it to read the source and learn about encryption--I don't even have a DVD player.
But then, none of this affects me, since I'm in Canada (*smirk*).
Oceans of methane or ethane? Could that be used as rocket fuel, possibly after breaking it down into hydrogen gas and carbon? Of course, a hydrogen fueled rocket would also require oxygen (unless you're using fusion)...
Anybody know what the boiling point of methane is? Titan must be pretty damn cold...
I'm considering helping in the development of a Mac Gnutella port or starting a Mac OS X Gnutella port. The main thing holding me back is the question of whether it's really the right thing to do. No matter how evil the recording industry is, artists don't get a dime from Gnutella/Napster/Freenet/Blocks. They do from the recording industry, even if it's not very much.
What we need is a site where we can download MP3s for reasonable micropayments ($.20 - $1.00), with half the cash going to the artists. Piracy will die down because it's not worth the hassle to save $.20. People also don't really want to rip off artists, and it will be a lot harder to rationalize when you know every pirated MP3 is money out of the artists' pockets.
OK, this is totally OT, but I have no other way of contacting this AC.
Why do you keep reposting this mangled version of a message I posted about a month ago? It's not funny, relevant, or inflammatory. Even I'm not pissed off, I just don't understand whether you're a misguided troll or are suffering from some bizarre variant of the Slashdot virus (the "this is more infomative" one).
If someone would just put up a site where you can buy MP3s (no SDMI crap) at $.20 - $1.00 each, with half of that going to the artist, this whole thing would cease to be an issue. You could download MP3s at whatever bitrate you wanted, they'd always be well-encoded, and you wouldn't have to waste time searching. Best of all, you'd get that warm, fuzzy feeling from knowing you're actually supporting the artists (and not just the RIAA). Everybody's happy, except maybe the RIAA.
When you live in a small town or other remote place, you're making a choice to do without some amenities of big cities... Having to pay a bit more for FedEx pickup doesn't seem unreasonable. What does seem wrong is expecting city-dwellers to subsidize you so you don't have to drive to Denver.
Before you flame my ass, I used to live on a small (~10,000 people) island. There are a lot of perks, and a few drawbacks. It's a choice.
Just so this isn't completely OT, I'd like to point out that the Canadian government already has a system by which every Canadian can get a secure electronic mailbox (they're almost paranoid about the security--they snail-mail you your user ID and password in seperate envelopes). You can use it for bills or other forms of communication email isn't secure enough for...
First of all, Courney Love gave a very intelligent speech about music, MP3s, and how the recording industry is the real pirate. Reading it made me think Katz isn't too far off the mark in this case (wow! a first!:-)
The solution? A site where you can buy plain old MP3s (no copy protection or wierd proprietary format crap) at whatever bitrate you want for a reasonable cost ($.20 - $1.00 a track). Throw in a few sample tracks... Artists always get half the take. Simple as that.
Sure, there will still be piracy, but most people really don't want to screw over artists, and would really prefer to get MP3s they know are well encoded. The convenience+conscience factor will win out if the price is reasonable.
Why haven't I gone out and started musicvana.net (instead of whining a la Katz)? It would take a lot of capital to pull it off, and I don't have the connections. If you do, or know someone who does, please contact me. I have a bunch more ideas for such a venture.
I interviewed with CSE so I know a bit about them (nothing classified or secret, since ended up taking a different job).
Aside from all the current NSA-type stuff, the CSE is also working on a public-key infrastructure for use by Canadian citizens. I believe this work is being done in partnership with Xcert. Cool stuff...
A guy I know wrote a program that cataloged all the MP3s shared via Windows File Sharing on the campus ResNet and presented a web-based search engine. The nice thing about it was you could download directly through the search engine, even if you were on a platform that didn't support Windows File Sharing.
Of course, having one big server of any kind will get you into Napster-style trouble...
...that even in our "new" economy, the people who get rewarded most handsomely aren't the people who innovate (i.e., Shawn), but the people who already have the bucks (his uncle).
Shawn wrote Napster to facilitate free and open sharing of music (and perhaps other forms of information). I suspect that to him, and most Napster users, Napster is (or was, at least) a revolutionary program and an idea, not just a company.
It's sad to see how Napster (the company) has corrupted this idea, and turned it into nothing more than a hypocritical attempt to steal profits from the recording industry.
I do plan to do something about this... When I get the chance, I'm going to help port Gnutella to other platforms (already started helping with the Mac port--I may do a Mac OS X port, too).
Not that I'm particularly worried about cell-phone radiation, but headsets don't necessarily help. Aside from the potential for increased risk of hip-cancer:-), a lot of phones don't properly isolate the headset from the transmission components of the phone, so the headset just acts as an antenna. I think I even remember reading that some headsets increase the amount of radiation your head gets. Of course, it is non-ionizing radiation, and is probably far less harmful than the constant onslaught of muons, gamma rays, and other high-energy radiation we're constantly bombarded with from above...
There's soon going to be a big outcry about second-hand cell phone radiation from people who wouldn't understand the inverse-square law if it bit them in the ass. This is the problem with having a general public that doesn't understand anything more complex than a channel changer (I'm probably giving too much credit--I'd bet the majority of people don't know how to use their VCR remote to get rid of the flashing 12:00). These are the people I'm going to chase down the street with my cell phone:-)
Slashdot Mirror
Hmm... I don't know where they got that one-monitor limitation crap from. Mac OS X DP 4 runs fine with 2 monitors (one on a Twin Turbo 128 PCI card).
You may wonder why the hell I'm replying to my own post. I could reply to every response to my post and response to that... but this is easier. Also, whoever moderated my original post as "Troll" is a complete moron. It wasn't a troll--that should be obvious. If you didn't like it, or thought it was poorly written, well, that's what "Overrated" is for. Disagreeing with the slashdot political party line is not the same as trolling. Read the moderator guidelines.
:-) Calling things "textbook" and "mind-numbingly obvious" is a cheap tactic to get out of presenting an actual argument. Please read my other post in this topic, and the article. The telescope has many purposes besides SETI (one of which may be to detect Earth-bound meteors). If contacting other civilizations and saving humanity from death a la dinosaur aren't the UN's thing, whose mandate are they? The US's? (because that's who these kind of tasks usually get dumped on). Before you flame me for that, let me say that I'm not American. I just don't subscribe to the school of thought that assumes the world's problems are the United States' fault because the US is successful.
:-)
First of all, note that I flagged half my message as a rant. That means you have to use a bit of creativity or thought to flesh out the argument--it isn't intended to be a complete philisophical proof of my views on the issue.
For instance, somebody made the witty observation, "How can you impose democracy?". That's pretty simple: ensure the elections are fair and there's no cheating/intimidating going on.
Someone else pointed out that not every third-world country is starving because of bad leadership. Of course not, I was making a generalization. What I said is true of most but not all third-world countries. Do I need to explicitly state that it's a generalization? Most of the time, when people discuss such things, they're speaking in generalizations, because including every specific case would be impossible.
Someone else pointed out that we'll never get an answer to the "are we alone" question unless we find ET. True, but the longer we look with no result, the more we learn about the parameters on intelligent life. If we were to learn that Earth-type planets are plentiful, but didn't find any ETs, that might tell us that intelligent civilizations usually destroy themselves. That would be a very valuable lesson (nice not to have to learn it the hard way).
To the poster of the meta-rant: it wasn't a textbook response--all my own (sleep-deprived) thoughts, thank you
To the person who said parrots, elephants, and dolphins are intelligent: yes, they are smarter than [insert unpopular group here], but not really at the human level. Except for dolphins (obligatory reference to Douglas Adams). All they have to do is eat and have sex...
To the person who said going in with an army is extreme: I don't know you, so I can't say for sure, but you sound very much like those hypocrits who decry military action and propose peaceful alternatives, then accuse the US of killing 200 children a day in Iraq or whatever with trade sanctions. The only acceptable method of effecting change to people like you seems to be sitting outside evil country X's embassy while chanting "Kumbaya". Can you really justify waiting a decade for some non-military method to begin to work while tens of thousands of people are dying? And about the undermining of foreign coutries: I am by no means justifying it, but it mostly happened as part of the Cold War. I think the CIA's days of messing with two-bit governments are over. We now have to deal with the aftermath, and whining about how it got that way won't help.
To the person blaming everything on evil "rich" countries holding third-world debt. You are free to pay off someone else's debt if you choose--have you helped them at all?\ Nobody made them buy weapons from us. If I spent all my money buying guns, then filed for bankrupcy and expected not to have to pay back the $1000 I owed you, you would rightly call me an idiot and an asshole. Only idiot/asshole governments would get a country into such a situation, hence the need to fix the government.
To the person who pointed out that there are homeless and starving people in every country, including the US. Yes, and throwing more money at them won't make the problem go away. If you took all the money the US spends on social assistance and social programs, and just gave it to poor people, there wouldn't be a single person in the US below the poverty line. Now explain to me why there's still a poverty problem, and how more money would make that problem go away. I don't know how to fix it, but I do know more money is not the answer. We might as well spend the cash on something that has a hope of succeeding.
For everyone out there who bashes the UN for trying to get involved in SETI:
Who better than the UN to represent humanity when we first make contact with another (or perhaps "an") intelligent species? Isn't part of the UN's mandate to bring everyone together for peaceful and meaningful discussions? Why shouldn't that include ETs?
Also, the project has a heck of a lot of other goals. I'm not sure if asteroid detection is one of them, but, if it is, it's worth considering that a decent-sized asteroid hitting Earth would make full-scale nuclear war look like wet firecrackers...
The dinosaurs died because they didn't have a space program.
***RANT***
I'm so sick of hearing the "when people are starving in country Z, how can we justify spending Y on X" argument. People are starving because their governments are fucked up. You can spend all the money you want on foreign aid, but it will just go to feeding the military and lining the pockets of the dictators in those countries.
The only real solution would be to go in with an army, kill/imprison the dictators, impose a democratic government, occupy the country for the 20 years it took for things to settle down, and then hope that they got their shit together. A hell of a lot of people--both us and them--would die in the effort.
Would you give your life for that?
***/RANT***
That being said, money spent on SETI is NOT wasted. It advances our society as a whole by answering an incredibly deep question about our universe: are we alone?
If all we ever manage to accomplish as a species is to pollute the planet and feed ourselves for a while before the next big comet hits, well, we just plain suck. If we never pass on parts of our knowledge or culture to other civilizations, is there any point to our existence as a species?
Imagine if someone had told Columbus he was an asshole for going off on his little trip when people were starving in Europe. Exploration is vital to the advancement of human society. (Please don't get anal on me and point out how so-and-so actually discovered North America first, or how Columbus was really looking for the North-West passage to the nearest Indo-Chinese Fusion Cuisine restaurant--it's irrelevant).
I have probably just been trolled here, but what the hell, it's late, I don't care.
I hate to get nitpicky here, but the statement I made, "No other property can be given away without loss by the owner," refers only to other (non-information) property. I did not explicitly say that information could always be given away without any cost to the owner. Rather, I said that if you give away information, you always still have it, which is a different thing. You're reading something in to my argument that I didn't actually say or intend to say.
That being said, it's worth clarifying the difference between information that is valuable only for reselling to others (i.e., music, movies, art, etc.), and information which has intrinsic value to the creator (i.e. credit card numbers, bomb-building secrets, business plans, etc.) The former is generally protected by IP laws, while the latter is usually just kept really, really secret. I was talking about the former type of information. I should have clarified that in my argument.
The reason I said communism doesn't work is because the USSR fell after 70 years of western economic pressure. Or rather, perhaps I should have said "communism is even more broken than capitalism". Capitalism out-competed communism.
Take a look at some Asian country that recently (20 -40 years ago) went capitalist, and you'll probably see a booming economy (current recession notwithstanding). Ethopia is screwed up because it's been screwed up for a very long time, and that takes a while to fix. Also, calling yourself "capitalist" does not automatically give you a McDonald's on every corner and a booming economy. It takes time and effort. Look how long it took the US to get where it's at.
I'd like to point out the reason the USSR made the biggest effort is because they fought on both sides of the war. If they'd chosen the right side in the first place (or if the French hadn't been so fucking stupid with the Maginot Line, or....) Germany would never have gotten as far as they did.
By the way, when was the last time you listened to music produced in a communist country? Right... Capitalism usually means that some people get the gold, some get the shit. Communism has everyone getting equal amounts of shit... Capitalism still sucks, but it sucks less...
We're getting off-topic here, so please email me if you want to continue this.
"Information wants to be free" really should be "Informations can be free." No other property can be given away without loss by the owner. You give away a physical thing, you don't have it any more. You give away information, you've still got it.
What Napster has done is encourage others to break the law. Is the law just? Depends on whether it's right to create artificial scarcity of information (i.e., copyright). How do we determine what's right? Look at the consequences of making it legal versus making it illegal.
Case 1 (copyright): Copyright exists so that information can be shoehorned into traditional economic systems that are based upon scarcity, supply and demand, etc. If copyright is enforced, it's business as usual. If it's poorly enforced, you get the chaos that's happening now in society (a Bad Thing, since it discourages content creation and encourages the lawyers). How to enforce copyright in the *gag* "information age" is the big problem.
Case 2 (no copyright): Without copyright, traditional economic systems fail, and information creators are not rewarded. Thus, production of information decreases. This is a Bad Thing. The only solution is to find an alternate economic system. Just as a quick reminder, communism doesn't work, and all those other cool-sounding systems (street performers' protocol, etc.) haven't been tested in a large-scale economy. There's nothing that's known to work.
In other words, behind door A, we have chaos and uncertainty, and behind door B we have uncertainty and chaos.
I personally would like to see a system where all artists get accounts on PayPal or something like that, and we can just donate whatever we feel like for each MP3 we download (preferably off of the artist's high-speed, high-quality site). Of course, people will rationalize their way into not paying: "they're already rich", "musicians get all the chicks", "they suck too much to deserve to get paid for this MP3 that I'm keeping"... Nobody really knows if enough people will pay to make it worth while for artists. And before you start yelling about indie bands giving away their work, remember that a lot of them are doing that to build a fan base so they can start charging for it.
Finally, remember that what's right and wrong (and legal) is decided, to some extent, by society. Copyright is currently part of our social contract. For it to be right to ignore copyright would require a fundamental shift in the public viewpoint. This shift seems to have already begun, but it hasn't happened yet.
Do we have to abide by copyright until such a shift happens, or are we morally justified in ignoring copyright since we are leading the charge into this new economics of information? That's the real question.
Oh, Christ, more of the anti-Mac bias (or is it just anti-!Linux bias?) evident so often on Slashdot... As someone who's programmed for the Mac OS, yes, there are a lot of stupid things about it, but it also has the best UI around.
/etc. XML-formatted property lists... Drool...
What's really important in an OS depends on what you're using it for. Using the current Mac OS for a server would be just plain stupid (which is probably why my company is doing it), just like making an average user use Linux+fvwm would also be stupid. (Dodging rocks thrown by Gnome fanatics) Linux and Unix simply don't have a good GUI yet. The Mac OS does, and has for a very long time. Just as Unix has been refined and polished with time, so has the Mac UI. Understand and accept that, and you'll make the step from zealot to rational human being.
That being said, you missed the point of the article completely. The author is using the changes in the computer world's landscape (move towards personal computers from mainframes) to make what may appear to be a purely symmantic distinction. His real point is that there's now more to an OS than just a good kernel and some utilities.
GUI will make or break you for the average user. They don't care if their apps don't crash if they can't launch them in the first place. Apple understands this, and has filled Mac OS X with Ooey GUI Goodness (tm). For the rest of us (no, not them, us with the clue), OS X just happens to have a very solid foundation. They've also started an effort to clean up the mess of dissimilar config files that is
... is the mythical snake that bites its own tail...
The RIAA is suing mp3board, who is suing AOL as a responsible third-party, who owns Time-Warner, who is a member of the RIAA...
(desired) Net Result: The RIAA sues itself out of existance, taking the AOL-Time-Warner monster out with it...
I used to have a semi-open cubicle near the door to my office (and the pop machine). There was constant traffic, and it was very hard to focus. Now I have an office, and it's far better. I'm significantly more productive, and enjoy working more. I wouldn't work for a company that tried to shoehorn programmers into "open-office" bullshit. Coding requires long periods of uninterrupted concentration, and that simply can't happen if sales people are pestering you every five minutes.
On a side note, flourescent lights can be really nice if you get those "full-spectrum" bulbs instead of the traditional, cheap, crappy ones.
I live in Canada, and thus am outside the scope of DMCA and the judge's ruling. Would it be helpful if I developed a Linux utility that undoes CSS?
Not that it should matter, but I use LinuxPPC, so the two commercial LinuxDVD players underdevelopment won't work on my system (since I'm assuming they'll be x86 binary-only). This gives me a very good and reasonable motivation to create such a tool.
My impression always was that the speed problem with the G4 was due to Motorola, not any inherent problems with AltiVec.
I use a G4 at work, and AltiVec is *very* nice for certain tasks. SoundJam MP takes advantage of it, and can encode MP3s at up t 10x (haven't verified that myself). AltiVec is also used for some of the cool effects in Aqua (like maybe the "Genie" effect).
IANAHE (I Am Not A Hardware Engineer), but I don't see why a few vector processing units would prevent a chip from reaching speeds > 500 MHz. If only IBM and Motorola would pool their technology, we might see 1GHz G5s with AltiVec soon... Maybe Jobs will kick their respective asses a bit, and it will happen...
I live in BC, and I've played Soldier of Fortune, so this is particularly relevant to me.
I've seen lots of movies that were a lot more graphic than SoF and got a lesser rating from the BC Film Classification Board. I'm sure this is due to political pressure from various groups, not any real logical or consistent decision by the film board.
One question, though. Why was SoF ever even submitted to or looked at by the Film Classification Board? Smells like political foul play. Guess that's what one should expect in a province where unions run the government.
How can you patent a 'look'? That's all a GUI really is, different ways of visually presenting information, along with some widgets the user can click on to do stuff. It might be possible to protect a really novel UI element under "trade dress" (same thing Apple used to go after iMac rip-off makers), but I doubt it for tabbed palettes.
And what about the prior art? Other people have been using tabs in UI for a long time. Is the idea of putting them in a palette novel? Hardly.
What happens if everyone starts patenting UI elements? Every company will have to develop its own, unique UI, and the result will be a total usability mess, with absolutely no UI consistency.
I'm working on a project for my company which involves tabbed dialogs. Is that covered by the Adobe patent? Or just tabbed palettes?
This is just making me depressed... Stupid software patents are the perfect example of what happens when both governments and corporations are corrupt (which happens when the populace becomes stupid and apathetic).
You're mostly right. Both sides are trying to convince the court their interpretation is right. BUT the defendants are also saying, "and if it's not that way, it's unconstitutional!"
There are a few snags in the defendants' case, though. They claim that there is no proof DeCSS has been used for piracy... Yeah, right... Of course, there are also legitimate uses. I, for one, downloaded it to read the source and learn about encryption--I don't even have a DVD player.
But then, none of this affects me, since I'm in Canada (*smirk*).
Oceans of methane or ethane? Could that be used as rocket fuel, possibly after breaking it down into hydrogen gas and carbon? Of course, a hydrogen fueled rocket would also require oxygen (unless you're using fusion)...
Anybody know what the boiling point of methane is? Titan must be pretty damn cold...
I'm considering helping in the development of a Mac Gnutella port or starting a Mac OS X Gnutella port. The main thing holding me back is the question of whether it's really the right thing to do. No matter how evil the recording industry is, artists don't get a dime from Gnutella/Napster/Freenet/Blocks. They do from the recording industry, even if it's not very much.
What we need is a site where we can download MP3s for reasonable micropayments ($.20 - $1.00), with half the cash going to the artists. Piracy will die down because it's not worth the hassle to save $.20. People also don't really want to rip off artists, and it will be a lot harder to rationalize when you know every pirated MP3 is money out of the artists' pockets.
OK, this is totally OT, but I have no other way of contacting this AC.
Why do you keep reposting this mangled version of a message I posted about a month ago? It's not funny, relevant, or inflammatory. Even I'm not pissed off, I just don't understand whether you're a misguided troll or are suffering from some bizarre variant of the Slashdot virus (the "this is more infomative" one).
Is this happening to anyone else?
If someone would just put up a site where you can buy MP3s (no SDMI crap) at $.20 - $1.00 each, with half of that going to the artist, this whole thing would cease to be an issue. You could download MP3s at whatever bitrate you wanted, they'd always be well-encoded, and you wouldn't have to waste time searching. Best of all, you'd get that warm, fuzzy feeling from knowing you're actually supporting the artists (and not just the RIAA). Everybody's happy, except maybe the RIAA.
When you live in a small town or other remote place, you're making a choice to do without some amenities of big cities... Having to pay a bit more for FedEx pickup doesn't seem unreasonable. What does seem wrong is expecting city-dwellers to subsidize you so you don't have to drive to Denver.
Before you flame my ass, I used to live on a small (~10,000 people) island. There are a lot of perks, and a few drawbacks. It's a choice.
Just so this isn't completely OT, I'd like to point out that the Canadian government already has a system by which every Canadian can get a secure electronic mailbox (they're almost paranoid about the security--they snail-mail you your user ID and password in seperate envelopes). You can use it for bills or other forms of communication email isn't secure enough for...
First of all, Courney Love gave a very intelligent speech about music, MP3s, and how the recording industry is the real pirate. Reading it made me think Katz isn't too far off the mark in this case (wow! a first! :-)
The solution? A site where you can buy plain old MP3s (no copy protection or wierd proprietary format crap) at whatever bitrate you want for a reasonable cost ($.20 - $1.00 a track). Throw in a few sample tracks... Artists always get half the take. Simple as that.
Sure, there will still be piracy, but most people really don't want to screw over artists, and would really prefer to get MP3s they know are well encoded. The convenience+conscience factor will win out if the price is reasonable.
Why haven't I gone out and started musicvana.net (instead of whining a la Katz)? It would take a lot of capital to pull it off, and I don't have the connections. If you do, or know someone who does, please contact me. I have a bunch more ideas for such a venture.
I interviewed with CSE so I know a bit about them (nothing classified or secret, since ended up taking a different job).
Aside from all the current NSA-type stuff, the CSE is also working on a public-key infrastructure for use by Canadian citizens. I believe this work is being done in partnership with Xcert. Cool stuff...
A guy I know wrote a program that cataloged all the MP3s shared via Windows File Sharing on the campus ResNet and presented a web-based search engine. The nice thing about it was you could download directly through the search engine, even if you were on a platform that didn't support Windows File Sharing.
Of course, having one big server of any kind will get you into Napster-style trouble...
...that even in our "new" economy, the people who get rewarded most handsomely aren't the people who innovate (i.e., Shawn), but the people who already have the bucks (his uncle).
Shawn wrote Napster to facilitate free and open sharing of music (and perhaps other forms of information). I suspect that to him, and most Napster users, Napster is (or was, at least) a revolutionary program and an idea, not just a company.
It's sad to see how Napster (the company) has corrupted this idea, and turned it into nothing more than a hypocritical attempt to steal profits from the recording industry.
I do plan to do something about this... When I get the chance, I'm going to help port Gnutella to other platforms (already started helping with the Mac port--I may do a Mac OS X port, too).
Not that I'm particularly worried about cell-phone radiation, but headsets don't necessarily help. Aside from the potential for increased risk of hip-cancer :-), a lot of phones don't properly isolate the headset from the transmission components of the phone, so the headset just acts as an antenna. I think I even remember reading that some headsets increase the amount of radiation your head gets. Of course, it is non-ionizing radiation, and is probably far less harmful than the constant onslaught of muons, gamma rays, and other high-energy radiation we're constantly bombarded with from above...
:-)
There's soon going to be a big outcry about second-hand cell phone radiation from people who wouldn't understand the inverse-square law if it bit them in the ass. This is the problem with having a general public that doesn't understand anything more complex than a channel changer (I'm probably giving too much credit--I'd bet the majority of people don't know how to use their VCR remote to get rid of the flashing 12:00). These are the people I'm going to chase down the street with my cell phone