'Getting criminals off the streets' is a term used to make people think that politicians are actually doing something to prevent crime when a new prison is built, or when cops are added to the force. In truth, in the long run, the only things that will reduce the crime rate are education and economic equalization.
There is actually another way. That is by reducing the number of activities which are defined as "crimes".
You can track someone you know who's out and about. Say, a political opponent, for instance. Or track a special kind of person, like college girls in miniskirts, most likely.
Even in cases where it might actually be possible to identify actual criminals (and or terrorists) all the evidence is that left to their own devices people operating such cameras will either prefer to track political opponents who are harmful only to those in power. Or use them as a source of ammusment, which includes the looking at "pretty girls". It's unlikely that they will care much about tracking, let alone catching, the likes of some idiot who thinks it's a good idea to release dangerous animals... About the only way of avoiding this would be to have random members of the public able to act as supervisors. As well as being able to immediatly communicate "What do you think you are doing?", "Oi, pondlife, you are ment to be looking for people who endanger the public, not women with big breasts", etc.
It may give you warm fuzzy feelings of a benevolent all-seeing eye, but it's nothing more than a tool putting the many under the thumbs of the few.
It dosn't help that often these "few" are a bunch of proven liers who constantly claim that they are trustworthy and are only doing it to protect people. In the worst of cases a sucessful "terrorist attack" can actually be in the interests of "authorities". It gives them a bigger budget and AFAIK nobody was fired over 911 or 7/7...
I dunno why people feel they have an inherent right to privacy on a public street. I think that governments have every right to put cameras out in public places if they so choose.
The problem is that these same governments are often composed of complete hypocrits. e.g. police officers who object to members of the public filming them.
The difference is that the PowerEdge line is servers. You can't install crapware on a server. Any admin (I would hope) would promptly wipe the drive anyway and start over from scratch if you included anything close to crapware (or even if you didn't, just because they wanted to do everything from scratch). You can't compare the pricing on their servers to the pricing on their desktop machines, because they serve entirely different purposes, and entirely different markets.
In quite a few corporate environments if may not matter if the machine in question is a "server" or a "desktop". The first thing that happens to it when it arrives is that it is connected to a network and the appropriate set of software installed, without every running whatever the OEM has bothered to install. Effectivly OEM installs can be "crapware" by definition.
Re:Piracy is marker of immature market
on
Piracy Economics
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· Score: 1
With XP Pro Corporate Edition, you only need to throw in a legit looking key and Windows will install, but you can't get windows updates unless you go out and find a WGA enabler every time they change WGA.
Or you can use alternatives such as AutoPatcher or windizupdate.com. Which can in some situations be better than the oficial windows update...
I mean really, does anyone think that making people safer is the actual purpose of these programs?
Especially given that way these cameras have a habit of breaking down when terrorists (be they "suicide bombers" or the Metropolitan Police) decide to attack Londoners.
I know, I know, never ascribe to malice what can be adequately explained by stupidity, but millions of cameras, everyone photographed hundreds of times a day... Come on, who can believe that is about anything but control of society.
Control through fear. Since, as the Stasi discovered, such mass surveillance is utterly useless for most practical purposes. Even in cases where the people operating the cameras are not those who actually need to be spied upon in the first place.
If somebody has to develop in-house software, they don't want to have to re-invent the wheel. They want to concentrate on the unique needs of their employer. So open source provides a huge code base to work from, rather than start from scratch or depend on the behavior of closed-source proprietary systems.
With proprietary code there is also the issue of needing (expensive) lawyers if they want to reuse existing code or even if they need to hack a way around a bug (which might be forbidden by an EULA) even just working out how an EULA applies when using an external contractor.
If somebody has to develop in-house software, they don't want to have to re-invent the wheel. They want to concentrate on the unique needs of their employer. So open source provides a huge code base to work from, rather than start from scratch or depend on the behavior of closed-source proprietary systems.
Even "giving" code back has few costs and many potential advantages. From the possibility of getting debugged/improved/optimised to the simple fact that if it finds it's way into an existing project someone else will make sure it still works several versions down the line.
How else do you sell software? Do you charge the first guy $1million and everyone else pays $1.50? That's retarded!
Not if the first customer (or group of customers) have paid you that specifically to create the a program or package of programs to do a specific task they require. If this costs you significently less than $1million to do then they have cause to complain about being overcharged. If doing this costs more than $1million then the customer got a bargin and you have no business sense. Note that most software still tends to be written/adapted to fit a specific case. The issues tend to come from pretending that software is a secondary (manufacturing) industry, when it better fits with a tertiary (service) model with the slight quirk that duplication is trivial.
There's more to GPL/OSS than pure psychological benefits. While it may make me feel good to use OSS, if my company decides to go GPL, we also gain the benefit of being able to use all the other GPL code out there. There's the trade. It's just not monetary.
Actually it is monetary, given that the alternative is likely to paying money (one way or another) to gain the functionality you get as standard with OSS.
The programmers are paid exclusive of the GPL work they do in most cases. Yes, there are some exceptions, but in those cases where developers are paid to work on free code, the term market does not apply to the code.
There are also plenty of people payed to work on (and "hack") proprietary software. The real reason the term "market" dosn't apply is that the results are not distributed to any third party (except in situations such as the sale of the entire company).
As an addendum, there's some software that I just don't see becoming open source anytime soon, such as games.
But there might well be good reasons for having "game engines" as OSS.
But, I feel as though the days of critical software being closed-source are numbered. (I'm referring to critical system libraries, the operating system itself, etc.) I also feel as though closed-document formats will become a thing of the past.
Note that the actual data may well still be proprietary, but you own it.
I want to unlock my machines from any single vendor, dammit! A lot of folks feel the same way. This is just one more reason OSS is A Good Thing.
In many other areas of business being tied to a specific supplier is often considered a bad thing. It's not exactly uncommon for a business to have people who's specific job is to ensure that this dosn't happen. In the typical business computers and software perform functions akin to plumbing, HVAC, etc.
Wiki died the day that intrest groups found it and realized they could sway public opinion by marginalizing a site which supposedly has accurate information.
The problem with interest groups is not only do they typically have a lot of time and resources they also tend to have a strong tendency to monopolise the issue in question. Sometimes to the point where they appear incapable of actually rationally defending their position, whilst having almost stereotypical strawmen and ad hominum responses. (Zionists and Feminists must qualify as "textbook examples"...)
They copied his blog? That's copyright infringement - and that's against the law. It's no different to walking into a store and stealing a CD.
In quite a few places the former is a much more serious crime than the latter. Even to the point where people can get a longer prison sentence for downloading a CD than armed robbery of a CD store.
This makes sure that your browser looks like one that's using JS, so it won't fail any "JavaScript is required to view this page!" asshattery, but you'll still be able to retain control of your browser.
This is the basic paradigm of the web, the browser always has the final say!
Breeder reactors can extend this significantly; it's referring to only current mining methods; there is far more that can be extracted with increased effort; thorium can be bred into fuel and there's way more thorium than uranium.
There's also decommisioned nuclear weapons which could potentially be used as fuel.
the waste product is well sand, alumna sand to be exact, slightly more valuable than silica sand, but its sand, unless you want to call it garnet dust that sounds more valuable.
It would actually be alumina sand (probably fine sand) contaminated with gallium (and probably gallium oxide).
maybe you'd be so kind as to explain why Al+HOH -AlO + H2 is so much better than the old fashioned 2(Na + HOH)- 2NaOH + H2?
Sodium hydroxide is probably more valuable than alumina. Both are potentially harmful, though for different reasons.
Aluminum that doesn't oxide coat would present serious fire hazards, one inoppertune spark and instant thermite
It's only thermite if there is iron oxide to hand otherwise it would be a flamable/explosive metal hazard.
Because plants and algae use a significant portion of their solar power to do things like growing and reproducing, which reduce their efficiency. A purely electro-mechanical production system would be more reliable and more consistent, at least.
You also need to factor in maintanance and building new machines into the cost of this "electro-mechanical production system". Whereas the "inefficiency" involved in plants takes care of this.
Gasoline is about a fifth of a pound per mile you drive, so that isn't terribly far off. Although carrying 300 pounds of aluminum to your car would be more difficult than pumping 13 gallons of gasoline
The metal mixture is only part of what you need. In addition you need to carry an appropriate quantity of water.
It takes an incredible amount of energy to convert it back to aluminum, not to mention the process of creating aluminum from alumina oxide requires the reaction of a carbon anode which generates carbon dioxide. Also, the electrolysis has to occur at high temperatures which are probably generated with coal.
IIRC the heat comes from the large electrical current. Though coal might be used as the source of carbon to manufacture the anodes.
My guess it would be far more efficient to just continue using the alumina that is efficiently mined and transported in bulk than to try recycling the byproduct from each vehicle. The gallium might be much rarer, I don't know.
You'd need to separate the gallium in order to recycle. Most likely in practice you'd end up mixing with mined alumina at a smelter, but you still need to transport...
It's not a closed system because it requires energy to recycle the aluminum and gallium.
It takes quite a lot of energy to to convert aluminium oxide back to metalic aluminium.
Also, it's still not terribly efficient, since it requires 1 lb of aluminum per mile you drive.
There isn't much difference in mass between the "fully charged" and "fully discharged" state of the fuel. But unlike a battery you can't recharge it in situe.
So again - why do some artists think they ought to do work once, then collect checks in perpetuity?
Their work might not be entirely original in the first place. A fairly common activity is to take an existing story, poem or song and alter it in some way to be more accessible for a contempoary audience. Of course Grimm's Fairy Tales, Shakespear's plays and The Book of One Thousand and One Nights are now likely to be reworked themselves.
I have an answer for that, but I would love to hear from someone who thinks it doesn't involve "cheap lazy selfish narcissistic assholes who don't understand that their work is not nearly as original as they think it is."
"Egotistical" probably belongs in there somewhere too.
You know, you're right. Reduce the composer's copyright to 50 years as well.
Or maybe even reduce both to 10-15 years.
Also, this is akin to me turning round to an ex employer and saying "you're still using that script I wrote, pay me more money for doing that".
Is there anywhere where this would actually work...
It's a bullshit argument, they've had 50 years to rake it in and that should be enough.
Which is longer than most people's working lives. Why can't these people do what most other people have to do and put some of their earnings into a pension fund? This sounds like a job for Penn and Teller.
Compare this to a novelist, who often spends YEARS of his life on a single novel. Can't exactly sell out football stadiums full of fans to watch you carefully develop characters and fine-tune the same passages over a period of months. If a novelist isn't making money from the sales of his novel, he's probably not making money off it, period.
How is this novelist managing to live whilst they are spending several years writing their first novel? Especially if they are a "he" given that the population of able bodied adults supported by someone else tends to be mostly women.
Slashdot Mirror
Do you find the number of cops on the street alarming and unsettling?
Quite a few of the people who find this number "alarming and unsettling" would actually like to see more uniformed police "on the streets".
'Getting criminals off the streets' is a term used to make people think that politicians are actually doing something to prevent crime when a new prison is built, or when cops are added to the force. In truth, in the long run, the only things that will reduce the crime rate are education and economic equalization.
There is actually another way. That is by reducing the number of activities which are defined as "crimes".
You can track someone you know who's out and about. Say, a political opponent, for instance. Or track a special kind of person, like college girls in miniskirts, most likely.
Even in cases where it might actually be possible to identify actual criminals (and or terrorists) all the evidence is that left to their own devices people operating such cameras will either prefer to track political opponents who are harmful only to those in power. Or use them as a source of ammusment, which includes the looking at "pretty girls". It's unlikely that they will care much about tracking, let alone catching, the likes of some idiot who thinks it's a good idea to release dangerous animals...
About the only way of avoiding this would be to have random members of the public able to act as supervisors. As well as being able to immediatly communicate "What do you think you are doing?", "Oi, pondlife, you are ment to be looking for people who endanger the public, not women with big breasts", etc.
It may give you warm fuzzy feelings of a benevolent all-seeing eye, but it's nothing more than a tool putting the many under the thumbs of the few.
It dosn't help that often these "few" are a bunch of proven liers who constantly claim that they are trustworthy and are only doing it to protect people. In the worst of cases a sucessful "terrorist attack" can actually be in the interests of "authorities". It gives them a bigger budget and AFAIK nobody was fired over 911 or 7/7...
I dunno why people feel they have an inherent right to privacy on a public street. I think that governments have every right to put cameras out in public places if they so choose.
The problem is that these same governments are often composed of complete hypocrits. e.g. police officers who object to members of the public filming them.
The difference is that the PowerEdge line is servers. You can't install crapware on a server. Any admin (I would hope) would promptly wipe the drive anyway and start over from scratch if you included anything close to crapware (or even if you didn't, just because they wanted to do everything from scratch). You can't compare the pricing on their servers to the pricing on their desktop machines, because they serve entirely different purposes, and entirely different markets.
In quite a few corporate environments if may not matter if the machine in question is a "server" or a "desktop". The first thing that happens to it when it arrives is that it is connected to a network and the appropriate set of software installed, without every running whatever the OEM has bothered to install. Effectivly OEM installs can be "crapware" by definition.
With XP Pro Corporate Edition, you only need to throw in a legit looking key and Windows will install, but you can't get windows updates unless you go out and find a WGA enabler every time they change WGA.
Or you can use alternatives such as AutoPatcher or windizupdate.com. Which can in some situations be better than the oficial windows update...
I mean really, does anyone think that making people safer is the actual purpose of these programs?
Especially given that way these cameras have a habit of breaking down when terrorists (be they "suicide bombers" or the Metropolitan Police) decide to attack Londoners.
I know, I know, never ascribe to malice what can be adequately explained by stupidity, but millions of cameras, everyone photographed hundreds of times a day... Come on, who can believe that is about anything but control of society.
Control through fear. Since, as the Stasi discovered, such mass surveillance is utterly useless for most practical purposes. Even in cases where the people operating the cameras are not those who actually need to be spied upon in the first place.
If somebody has to develop in-house software, they don't want to have to re-invent the wheel. They want to concentrate on the unique needs of their employer. So open source provides a huge code base to work from, rather than start from scratch or depend on the behavior of closed-source proprietary systems.
With proprietary code there is also the issue of needing (expensive) lawyers if they want to reuse existing code or even if they need to hack a way around a bug (which might be forbidden by an EULA) even just working out how an EULA applies when using an external contractor.
If somebody has to develop in-house software, they don't want to have to re-invent the wheel. They want to concentrate on the unique needs of their employer. So open source provides a huge code base to work from, rather than start from scratch or depend on the behavior of closed-source proprietary systems.
Even "giving" code back has few costs and many potential advantages. From the possibility of getting debugged/improved/optimised to the simple fact that if it finds it's way into an existing project someone else will make sure it still works several versions down the line.
How else do you sell software? Do you charge the first guy $1million and everyone else pays $1.50? That's retarded!
Not if the first customer (or group of customers) have paid you that specifically to create the a program or package of programs to do a specific task they require. If this costs you significently less than $1million to do then they have cause to complain about being overcharged. If doing this costs more than $1million then the customer got a bargin and you have no business sense.
Note that most software still tends to be written/adapted to fit a specific case. The issues tend to come from pretending that software is a secondary (manufacturing) industry, when it better fits with a tertiary (service) model with the slight quirk that duplication is trivial.
There's more to GPL/OSS than pure psychological benefits. While it may make me feel good to use OSS, if my company decides to go GPL, we also gain the benefit of being able to use all the other GPL code out there. There's the trade. It's just not monetary.
Actually it is monetary, given that the alternative is likely to paying money (one way or another) to gain the functionality you get as standard with OSS.
The programmers are paid exclusive of the GPL work they do in most cases. Yes, there are some exceptions, but in those cases where developers are paid to work on free code, the term market does not apply to the code.
There are also plenty of people payed to work on (and "hack") proprietary software. The real reason the term "market" dosn't apply is that the results are not distributed to any third party (except in situations such as the sale of the entire company).
As an addendum, there's some software that I just don't see becoming open source anytime soon, such as games.
But there might well be good reasons for having "game engines" as OSS.
But, I feel as though the days of critical software being closed-source are numbered. (I'm referring to critical system libraries, the operating system itself, etc.) I also feel as though closed-document formats will become a thing of the past.
Note that the actual data may well still be proprietary, but you own it.
I want to unlock my machines from any single vendor, dammit! A lot of folks feel the same way. This is just one more reason OSS is A Good Thing.
In many other areas of business being tied to a specific supplier is often considered a bad thing. It's not exactly uncommon for a business to have people who's specific job is to ensure that this dosn't happen. In the typical business computers and software perform functions akin to plumbing, HVAC, etc.
Wiki died the day that intrest groups found it and realized they could sway public opinion by marginalizing a site which supposedly has accurate information.
The problem with interest groups is not only do they typically have a lot of time and resources they also tend to have a strong tendency to monopolise the issue in question. Sometimes to the point where they appear incapable of actually rationally defending their position, whilst having almost stereotypical strawmen and ad hominum responses. (Zionists and Feminists must qualify as "textbook examples"...)
They copied his blog? That's copyright infringement - and that's against the law. It's no different to walking into a store and stealing a CD.
In quite a few places the former is a much more serious crime than the latter. Even to the point where people can get a longer prison sentence for downloading a CD than armed robbery of a CD store.
This makes sure that your browser looks like one that's using JS, so it won't fail any "JavaScript is required to view this page!" asshattery, but you'll still be able to retain control of your browser.
This is the basic paradigm of the web, the browser always has the final say!
Breeder reactors can extend this significantly; it's referring to only current mining methods; there is far more that can be extracted with increased effort; thorium can be bred into fuel and there's way more thorium than uranium.
There's also decommisioned nuclear weapons which could potentially be used as fuel.
Is that why aluminum and tin recycling are the only profitable recycling ventures?
This involves taking metal and simply melting it. Rather than extracting metal from a chemical compound.
the waste product is well sand, alumna sand to be exact, slightly more valuable than silica sand, but its sand, unless you want to call it garnet dust that sounds more valuable.
It would actually be alumina sand (probably fine sand) contaminated with gallium (and probably gallium oxide).
maybe you'd be so kind as to explain why Al+HOH -AlO + H2 is so much better than the old fashioned 2(Na + HOH)- 2NaOH + H2?
Sodium hydroxide is probably more valuable than alumina. Both are potentially harmful, though for different reasons.
Aluminum that doesn't oxide coat would present serious fire hazards, one inoppertune spark and instant thermite
It's only thermite if there is iron oxide to hand otherwise it would be a flamable/explosive metal hazard.
Because plants and algae use a significant portion of their solar power to do things like growing and reproducing, which reduce their efficiency. A purely electro-mechanical production system would be more reliable and more consistent, at least.
You also need to factor in maintanance and building new machines into the cost of this "electro-mechanical production system". Whereas the "inefficiency" involved in plants takes care of this.
Gasoline is about a fifth of a pound per mile you drive, so that isn't terribly far off. Although carrying 300 pounds of aluminum to your car would be more difficult than pumping 13 gallons of gasoline
The metal mixture is only part of what you need. In addition you need to carry an appropriate quantity of water.
It takes an incredible amount of energy to convert it back to aluminum, not to mention the process of creating aluminum from alumina oxide requires the reaction of a carbon anode which generates carbon dioxide. Also, the electrolysis has to occur at high temperatures which are probably generated with coal.
IIRC the heat comes from the large electrical current. Though coal might be used as the source of carbon to manufacture the anodes.
My guess it would be far more efficient to just continue using the alumina that is efficiently mined and transported in bulk than to try recycling the byproduct from each vehicle. The gallium might be much rarer, I don't know.
You'd need to separate the gallium in order to recycle. Most likely in practice you'd end up mixing with mined alumina at a smelter, but you still need to transport...
It's not a closed system because it requires energy to recycle the aluminum and gallium.
It takes quite a lot of energy to to convert aluminium oxide back to metalic aluminium.
Also, it's still not terribly efficient, since it requires 1 lb of aluminum per mile you drive.
There isn't much difference in mass between the "fully charged" and "fully discharged" state of the fuel. But unlike a battery you can't recharge it in situe.
So again - why do some artists think they ought to do work once, then collect checks in perpetuity?
Their work might not be entirely original in the first place. A fairly common activity is to take an existing story, poem or song and alter it in some way to be more accessible for a contempoary audience. Of course Grimm's Fairy Tales, Shakespear's plays and The Book of One Thousand and One Nights are now likely to be reworked themselves.
I have an answer for that, but I would love to hear from someone who thinks it doesn't involve "cheap lazy selfish narcissistic assholes who don't understand that their work is not nearly as original as they think it is."
"Egotistical" probably belongs in there somewhere too.
You know, you're right. Reduce the composer's copyright to 50 years as well.
Or maybe even reduce both to 10-15 years.
Also, this is akin to me turning round to an ex employer and saying "you're still using that script I wrote, pay me more money for doing that".
Is there anywhere where this would actually work...
It's a bullshit argument, they've had 50 years to rake it in and that should be enough.
Which is longer than most people's working lives. Why can't these people do what most other people have to do and put some of their earnings into a pension fund? This sounds like a job for Penn and Teller.
Compare this to a novelist, who often spends YEARS of his life on a single novel. Can't exactly sell out football stadiums full of fans to watch you carefully develop characters and fine-tune the same passages over a period of months. If a novelist isn't making money from the sales of his novel, he's probably not making money off it, period.
How is this novelist managing to live whilst they are spending several years writing their first novel? Especially if they are a "he" given that the population of able bodied adults supported by someone else tends to be mostly women.