You're right that we're both only guessing, but I've tried to make my numbers conservative.
More importantly, I'd say that the burden of proof rests with the ones who claim that an illegal activity that goes against the express wishes of the undisputed owners of the material is actually in their best interests. They're in the wrong in two different ways (both legally and in the fact that they're possessing something they didn't pay for, no matter what the law says about it), and their argument is self-serving ("Yeah, I want it without paying for it, but you somehow turn a profit anyway!"). So I'll be skeptical about their argument until I see harder numbers.
As for the RIAA's profits, what business are they of the file traders? Lost revenue is lost revenue; you don't get to walk out of Bill Gates' house with some teaspoons just because he's got more money than you do. Again, that argument is suspiciously self-serving, and looks for all the world like you've decided what you want and will look for rationalizations after the fact.
It may only be because they sue people that they make record profits. If the RIAA were to say one day, "We've decided to give up on the file-sharing thing. Go ahead and copy it; we don't care and we won't sue," how much additional money will they lose? How many people are currently buying albums at least in part because they fear the wrath of the RIAA?
I cannot say conclusively that file trading is actually bad for the RIAA. I'm willing to hear evidence on the assertion. But until I hear something more than speculation, it seems to me that one should err on the side of both law and morals. Most moralities would suggest that if you have something that the owner wants you to pay for, and has gone to some effort to prevent you from taking it for free, and you have it anyway, your conscience should be twigging you. Telling yourself that "maybe it's in their best interests anyway!" shouldn't quiet that voice.
You're right to point out the irony, and it would be interesting to have somebody actually gather the numbers I'm positing. I'm not sure who would do it, however; the RIAA would much rather spew their obviously bogus numbers, especially since Congress seems content to accept them.
Still, there is a difference. I'm proposing bare minimum numbers to say, "At least this much damage is done; that damage is real". Any benefit from the "free advertising" is extremely hard to quantify, and I haven't seen anybody take even a stab at it.
You'd have to subtract out the fact that many people are seeking things they've already heard about from the RIAA's advertising. Nobody is "discovering" Britney Spears when they download it. So it's doing little good for the major artists.
P2Ps aren't really recommendation services, so I think there's less "free advertising" going on than some think. But some P2Ps let you browse the rest of a sharer's files, so you could say, "Gee, I like this, what else does this guy like?" and then discover an artist you didn't know. That would be where the win is. I haven't even got the vaguest idea what that number might be, however.
It seems to me that the difference between murder and manslaughter is precisely where copyright infringement meets theft: intent. Manslaughter is murder without intent; copyright infringement isn't theft, but the intent is the same: to possess a thing for which you did not pay. It's not theft in that the owner isn't deprived of the thing, but a thief is generally more interested in possessing himself than in depriving the owner. A true thief knows he is depriving the owner, and the copyright infringer knows he is not, but the intent to own something without paying the price is the reason why I don't much care what it's called.
My 1% is a guess. It could be 10%. It could be.1%. I'd be surprised if it were significantly lower than that; it seems unlikely that not even one person in a thousand who is willing to download a file would have been willing to buy it for the $10 to $20 that a CD/DVD costs. So the idea is that we're talking about a rough order of magnitude: at least thousands of dollars in sales "lost".
That's not the inflated RIAA figure where every download represents a lost sale, but it shows that even if you don't go that far, we're still talking about considerable money if the technology didn't exist. (For example, if they'd made it harder to rip CDs when they first designed them, but they didn't figure on either cheap CD-ROMs or iPods.)
I'm not convinced that the RIAA is conspiring to shut down music distribution channels. As far as I can tell, they've shown no interest in preventing non-RIAA bands from distributing their music on their web sites, either free or for pay. It seems to me that they have a valid interest in preventing their music from being copied, and it's not necessary to hypothesize a conspiracy when simply protecting their legal interests is sufficient to explain their behavior.
It may well be that the "free advertising" you get by sharing music compensates, or more than compensates, for the lost sales. I'm not convinced without hard numbers. More to the point, even if you could show me that they were net making money from the word-of-mouth advertising of P2P distribution, it could be that some people eventually buy the album only because they fear the legal retribution of the RIAA. If the RIAA were to push any less hard, would they lose sales to people who felt that the RIAA had given them carte blanche to copy files?
Maybe they're after quality, as you suggest. But I'm not an audiophile and I can't hear the difference between a 128kbit rip and a 192kbit rip. That's because I'm listening to them on the cheap headphones that came with my player, and I suspect a lot of other people are, too.
I don't have hard numbers either way, and until somebody can give me serious data I err on the side of the letter of the law. Your example of Borland, while possibly true, is also very self-serving. I tend to assign lower credibility to arguments like that. If you want to justify an illegal activity that on the face of it harms me as being in my best interests, you'd better have serious data to back it up.
Comparison to other laws and punishments is not helpful. The legal system isn't coherent and just because a punishment is out of line with other punishments doesn't make this one excessive; it could just as easily be that some others are too lenient. You can easily find other even more egregious examples, especially in the case of drug laws. (Some terribly high percentage of prisoners is in for simple marijuana possession if urban legend is to be believed.)
Part of the reason is that punishment serves many different purposes: rehabilitation, restitution, vengeance, deterrence. Any punishment is a mixture, depending on what they want to accomplish. Deterrence is particularly strong in this case: they're going to able to track down very few offenders, so they "amortize" the punitive aspect to try to scare others off.
There's also the notion that the punishment should fit the damage done. Arguably, the damage done by sharing movies and CDs is very high. If 1% of the people who downloaded a movie would have bought it, that can easily be 10,000 people. If the studio nets ten bucks on each sale, that's $100,000 in damage. (I don't care if you wish to call the crime "infringement" or "theft" or "piracy"; I'm trying to figure out economic losses. And unless you have some hard numbers for your argument that the studios are benefitting from your free advertising, please start a different thread.)
Such a crime would be "grand theft" if it were theft, and three years is not an unusual punishment for the crime of grand theft. As I said, it may not be classified as theft, but it's a case where damage is arguably done, and done to the tune of a whole bunch of money.
As the title suggests, I'm just playing devil's advoctate here. The criminals at Enron will get only slightly more jail time for the far greater, far more concrete damage they did. Compared to that tracking down file sharers is an immense waste of time, money, and jail space. I'm just not a fan of the common Slashdot "if it's not nailed down it's mine, and if I can break the copy protection it's not nailed down" argument, and we'll see how many of those respond before I get modded to negative infinity.
I've had massive problems with my Verizon DSL. Some sort of noise on the line that happens every single night, but it's fine in the day. It's obviously some sort of problem up the line, perhaps crosstalk, but they've shown no interest in helping me track it down. I was going to cancel it tonight.
I was about to bail on Verizon DSL and try cable, but cable's more expensive. So I'm going to see if I can get it on one of the other dry pairs that go into my house and see if that helps.
A good lesson for them to learn, though I would point out that the WSJ differential is 4, not 10. My guess is they wouldn't sell twice as many subscriptions at half the price. Still, that would put the price of an album on iTunes at $3-$4, not $10.
Even at that I'm not convinced that it would hold for the *AAs. The WSJ has a targeted, affluent market that would pay for convenience and timeliness. People don't share WSJ articles on P2P networks because not enough people want them, and those who do are more willing to pay for them. I'm sure there's a lot of cut-and-paste forwarding, and I wonder how much that cuts into sales. Perhaps some of those forwardees end up subscribing, because with news, timelineness is of the essense. P2P songs, on the other hand, will wait for a bit, and many of those downloads don't turn into album sales.
But we're discussing sales, not P2P, and the *AAs are already doing that in several venues, via iTunes and Real and Microsoft.
I do wonder about the numbers in the article. Are the costs of news gathering divided between the online and print editions? No matter what you do it still costs money to gather news and advertise your product. If the online sales get "free" content from the print division then their profitability numbers are dubious.
I wish I could find the reference, but Arthur C. Clarke once wrote a short story proposing precisely this. He was writing about a footrace, and it ended with racers naked, like in the first mrathon. I believe he revisited the idea in The hammer of God, but I think he did it the first time before anybody actually landed on the moon.
You lose heat by radiation, but space suits have elaborate cooling systems, since there's no atmosphere to wick away your body heat, and that's most of what you use on earth. Sadly, the exact heat-flow math (including sweat, which would still evaporate, or at least sublime) is beyond me.
Clarke said you could go out naked, except that your feet would get really, really cold. The character in the story warms his feet by starlight (really just getting them off the ground).
You'd have to be pretty careful with breathing, since you wouldn't have the usual 1 atmosphere of external pressure helping you exhale. (Space suits, conversely, are pressure suits and restore some of that 1 atmosphere.) I'm sure it's some function of keeping the partial pressures of oxygen in the right place, but again, that's more math than I want to do.
But you'd probably want to pressurize your head. There is intra-ocular pressure; it probably wouldn't pop but might be uncomfortable. Even if you pressurized the squishy bits in your head, you could have burst blood vessels in the skin; it's like a giant all-over hickey. It would depend on the way the heart adjusted pressure to the lack of resistance you get from the atmosphere.
So that's the interested-layman answer. I hope you can get a better one from an actual physicist.
Journalists have a rule that anything between quotation marks has to be an exact quote. You're not even allowed to correct the grammar or make irrelevant changes to help it fit into your sentence better. That is, if your subject says, "I like tapioca", you're not allowed to write, "Bob says that he 'likes tapioca.'" There are a few things you can do, like using editor's brackets and asking them to verify a rephrased quote, but in general if it appears in quotes (and not in brackets) it had better be exactly what they said.
So I slap the wrist of The Register for screwing up, and further for putting the retraction AFTER the advertisement (though I don't know if that was deliberate or not.) Both Slashdot and the poster also screwed up, but The Reg is the one who really blew it, IMHO.
Would I love it if Slashdot took responsibility? Sure. But I'm not going to expect it, so I live with it. I haven't got any "force" to apply except voting with my feet, and I like Slashdot too much (warts and all) to do that.
The article actually is about Linus Torvalds defending proprietary file formats. It's just that he's talking about a different format from the almost-made-up quote.
I say "almost made up" because it's got a grain of truth. The original quote is:
"Larry is perfectly fine with somebody writing a free replacement...What Larry is not fine with, is somebody writing a free replacement by just reverse-engineering what he did."
The made-up quote has the same gist, even if it's critically wrong in (a) the file format, and (b) the fact that Linus is talking about somebody else's beliefs, not his own. This gist, however, is clear that Linus believes roughly the same thing:
"It says: 'Get off my coat-tails, you free-loader'. And I can't really argue against that."
So I'd say the score is:
Headline: 1 point (for being accurate) Summary: -2 points (for repeating a false quote without the retraction) Submitter's final score: STFU
Slashdot: -2 point (for not verifying the quote) Slashdot: +1 point (for the retraction on the front page) Slashdot: +.5 point (for posting an article that's kind of interesting with an accurate headline despite a bad summary and bad editing) Slashdot's final score: try to do better next time
Register: -2 points (for making up the quote) Register: -1 point (for putting the retraction after the advertisement) Register's final score: Really stupid, but they're usually reliable, so I'll let them off with a warning.
Unfortunately, you can't assume that submitters will shape up. Trolls can troll the slashdot editors just as easily as they can troll the rest of us. But unlike ordinary posts, they don't get modded down once somebody discovers an obvious mistake. They don't disappear off the front page; the best we can hope for is a retraction.
So what do I recommend? Nothing, really. The editors, if they wish, could work a lot harder to verify the summaries, and Slashdot would be somewhat more valuable. Or they can continue to do what they do and trust their readers to figure it out. If they do, I'll keep doing what I do, and treating each Slashdot article with a serious grain of salt until I read the original source. Which is OK with me; I get what I pay for.
Sad that in this case it comes from an actual quote from The Register, a reputable news source. They made it easy to take the quote out of context, and that's bad writing. I'd expect to see this from J. Random Blogger and repeated on Slashdot, and I'm disappointed to see it in The Register.
It is cold, sensible british and misses the italian fire that tony danza and whats her name brought to the original.
"What's her name" is Judith Light. The funny thing is I saw her onstage doing Ibsen's Hedda Gabler and she was extraordinary; truly moving. The lights came up on her and she utterly owned the stage just standing there. Somehow you just don't expect that from somebody who used to do a forgetabble (but not forgotten) sitcom with Tony Danza.
They're usually on spams. You know, the kind that wants you to think that citicorp.biz is the Citicorp web site and therefore you should give them your password and credit card. (As far as I can tell there is no citicorp.biz, actually, but you get the idea.)
Actually, I see it most often on business cards from extremely small businesses. The kind where FooCorp has taken the.com name but some local consultant thought that FooCorp would be a cool name. Not fraudulent, but just a latecomer.
Like another poster said, I never give personal info to a.biz web site if I can help it, and if dice.com and hotjobs.com want to open dice.jobs and hot.jobs, go ahead, but when I need to I'll go through the dot-com domain.
I can't give you a rational argument for criminalizing spam that you don't already know, but I can explain the sentence a bit.
I suspect that the real reason for the stiff sentence in this case is deterrence. He's being punished not just for his sins, but for the sins of everybody else who spams, to let them know that the law is real and that there will be serious punishment for getting caught.
Everybody who continued to spam after the law was put in effect wasn't merely being annoying: he was deliberately and consciously doing something illegal. Whether it should be illegal or not, he was flouting a law designed to reduce vast quantities of annoyance, as well as forcing people to spend large amounts of money and time fighting that annoyance.
So I agree that the punishment doesn't fit the crime (and you're hardly the only one to say that here on Slashdot.) Nor am I a huge fan of "making an example" of somebody; it seems a violation of the eighth amendment forbidding "cruel and unusual punishment".
With a bit of luck this is the harshest sentence ever to be handed down. That "luck" would be a bunch of spammers say, "Whoa, we've got to get out of this business". It won't be enough, but if it results in half as much spam I'll be half as annoyed, and I won't be crying any particular tears for this guy while it happens.
Or they may just move offshore, or use zombies, or hide better, etc. Hell, to avoid this law you need only move out of Virginia. But I suspect that at least a few spammers will decide that it's not profitable enough to risk jail now that jail is a very real possibility, and that's a few billion fewer spams we'll receive.
Has anybody tried to redirect windowsupdate.microsoft.com? That could potentially install malware at massive privilege levels and therefore impossible to remove. And it's done automatically.
That's the reason I don't auto-update. I'll let it download the software but I'm waiting a few days before installing it. Hopefully in the intervening time somebody would say, "For the love of God please don't install update #77439245!"
And whose problem is it if they are trying to charge money for something other will do for free?
Oh, it's definitely their problem. When you want money to do something, you'll always get out-competed by somebody who'll do it for free. Basic economics.
Except...
Except that Linus picked Bitkeeper for a reason. Presumably he picked it because it was good. I'll go even further to venture that it was good at least in part because they paid a bunch of guys to write the software, rather than waiting for other people to do it out of the goodness of their hearts. When you pay people they do the non-fun parts of the software, like maintenance and UIs and fixing those last little bugs that always take forever.
As long as free software exists, more power to those who wish to participate. I participate myself. But my mortgage is paid by the guys who want the exclusive rights to my software, guys who would go out of business right fast if a free alternative appeared. At least, if that alternative were as good as what I do. If some guy does for free what I do, wow. Power, buddy.
Linus will presumably go to his second-favorite free software, unless Bitkeeper is so good that he'll pay to keep using it. Or more to the point, if the free software requires so much extra work from him that he'd be better off paying Bitkeeper, he may well choose to stay there. More basic economics.
I feel exactly the same way. I do use the "Things They Left Out" extension to limit flashing ads to 1 cycle, which leds advertisers have a shot at me but I limit how annoying they can be.
I've noticed the layer-based popups, and I'm afraid I may have to download adblock to get rid of them. That would annoy me, because I don't mind, say, the ads that come with Slashdot. It seems a small price to pay for a nifty free web site. That is, as long as they don't make it impossible to read the site itself by distracting me with flashing.
I have found that there are few more accurate predictors of a failed trend than an appearance in Wired before it actually takes off. (Wired is much better when the thing has already taken off; its ability to accurately predict things that happened yesterday approaches 50%.)
Java has a bias towards Solaris (because that's what Sun sells) and Windows (because that's the cheap-readily-available-desktop). Which is too bad, because I've found that Java is far more useful as a server-side application than on the client side, so treating Linux like a bastard stepchild is inappropriate.
Which make OS X the favorite of only very few. It's got a hard road ahead with respect to Java. Macintosh has long been known as a favorite for client-side, user-facing apps, so even though its Mach kernel is super-duper for a lot of things it doesn't have the pentration that Linux does (which runs on cheapo hardware and is free itself).
So I'd love to see Apple make Java a top-of-the-line system, because it would be great to have an OS X box for Java developers: all the solid user feel of a Mac with the flexibility of a Unix.
This is all true, but as software developers we tend to use the word "language" loosely to mean, "The syntax, the compiler, the libraries, and the execution environment." So while a language can't be inherently faster than another, some languages have highly efficient, readily available implementations, and others don't.
That's a matter only of constant speedup, assuming that the implementation is competent, and therefore theoretically swamped by the complexity of the algorithm. But if you've implemented the same algorithm using both systems, a constant speedup of 10 is an order-of-magnitude speed improvement. Even with the really, really fast computers we use today that makes a difference to a lot of applications. (And I've used plenty of languages where could get a 10x improvement by switching to a better language.)
In this case there isn't even a single Java environment; there are numerous JVMs out there and I hope they tested several of them before writing the article. (I doubt it, but that's a whole different story.) You're probably not going to get a 10x difference, but 2x wouldn't be uncommon for certain applications.
So you're using the terminology correctly and everybody else is using it wrong. They should talk about the "Java system" or "Java environment" rather than Java language. But I think nearly everybody reading the article knew what was meant.
Has anybody got a link to an actual newspaper article on the subject? While bloggers and advocacy sites can break news stories, they're also full of innuendo, rumor, and things blown way out of proportion.
I prefer to get my news from some organization without an axe to grind.
When I looked yesterday the joke appeared to be the rather weak gag that an article titled "information does not exist" gave a blank page or 404. I think that was just server failure.
The gag itself is back up now. And it concludes with:
I definitely second that. I didn't think of adding New Scientist because I read it online. I put it on the spectrum somewhere between Science News and Scientific American (and well this side of Popular Science.)
I actually like printed media; I find it a lot easier to read than online. I didn't realize New Scientist was only a buck an issue. I'm subscribing.
Slashdot Mirror
You're right that we're both only guessing, but I've tried to make my numbers conservative.
More importantly, I'd say that the burden of proof rests with the ones who claim that an illegal activity that goes against the express wishes of the undisputed owners of the material is actually in their best interests. They're in the wrong in two different ways (both legally and in the fact that they're possessing something they didn't pay for, no matter what the law says about it), and their argument is self-serving ("Yeah, I want it without paying for it, but you somehow turn a profit anyway!"). So I'll be skeptical about their argument until I see harder numbers.
As for the RIAA's profits, what business are they of the file traders? Lost revenue is lost revenue; you don't get to walk out of Bill Gates' house with some teaspoons just because he's got more money than you do. Again, that argument is suspiciously self-serving, and looks for all the world like you've decided what you want and will look for rationalizations after the fact.
It may only be because they sue people that they make record profits. If the RIAA were to say one day, "We've decided to give up on the file-sharing thing. Go ahead and copy it; we don't care and we won't sue," how much additional money will they lose? How many people are currently buying albums at least in part because they fear the wrath of the RIAA?
I cannot say conclusively that file trading is actually bad for the RIAA. I'm willing to hear evidence on the assertion. But until I hear something more than speculation, it seems to me that one should err on the side of both law and morals. Most moralities would suggest that if you have something that the owner wants you to pay for, and has gone to some effort to prevent you from taking it for free, and you have it anyway, your conscience should be twigging you. Telling yourself that "maybe it's in their best interests anyway!" shouldn't quiet that voice.
You're right to point out the irony, and it would be interesting to have somebody actually gather the numbers I'm positing. I'm not sure who would do it, however; the RIAA would much rather spew their obviously bogus numbers, especially since Congress seems content to accept them.
Still, there is a difference. I'm proposing bare minimum numbers to say, "At least this much damage is done; that damage is real". Any benefit from the "free advertising" is extremely hard to quantify, and I haven't seen anybody take even a stab at it.
You'd have to subtract out the fact that many people are seeking things they've already heard about from the RIAA's advertising. Nobody is "discovering" Britney Spears when they download it. So it's doing little good for the major artists.
P2Ps aren't really recommendation services, so I think there's less "free advertising" going on than some think. But some P2Ps let you browse the rest of a sharer's files, so you could say, "Gee, I like this, what else does this guy like?" and then discover an artist you didn't know. That would be where the win is. I haven't even got the vaguest idea what that number might be, however.
It seems to me that the difference between murder and manslaughter is precisely where copyright infringement meets theft: intent. Manslaughter is murder without intent; copyright infringement isn't theft, but the intent is the same: to possess a thing for which you did not pay. It's not theft in that the owner isn't deprived of the thing, but a thief is generally more interested in possessing himself than in depriving the owner. A true thief knows he is depriving the owner, and the copyright infringer knows he is not, but the intent to own something without paying the price is the reason why I don't much care what it's called.
My 1% is a guess. It could be 10%. It could be .1%. I'd be surprised if it were significantly lower than that; it seems unlikely that not even one person in a thousand who is willing to download a file would have been willing to buy it for the $10 to $20 that a CD/DVD costs. So the idea is that we're talking about a rough order of magnitude: at least thousands of dollars in sales "lost".
That's not the inflated RIAA figure where every download represents a lost sale, but it shows that even if you don't go that far, we're still talking about considerable money if the technology didn't exist. (For example, if they'd made it harder to rip CDs when they first designed them, but they didn't figure on either cheap CD-ROMs or iPods.)
I'm not convinced that the RIAA is conspiring to shut down music distribution channels. As far as I can tell, they've shown no interest in preventing non-RIAA bands from distributing their music on their web sites, either free or for pay. It seems to me that they have a valid interest in preventing their music from being copied, and it's not necessary to hypothesize a conspiracy when simply protecting their legal interests is sufficient to explain their behavior.
It may well be that the "free advertising" you get by sharing music compensates, or more than compensates, for the lost sales. I'm not convinced without hard numbers. More to the point, even if you could show me that they were net making money from the word-of-mouth advertising of P2P distribution, it could be that some people eventually buy the album only because they fear the legal retribution of the RIAA. If the RIAA were to push any less hard, would they lose sales to people who felt that the RIAA had given them carte blanche to copy files?
Maybe they're after quality, as you suggest. But I'm not an audiophile and I can't hear the difference between a 128kbit rip and a 192kbit rip. That's because I'm listening to them on the cheap headphones that came with my player, and I suspect a lot of other people are, too.
I don't have hard numbers either way, and until somebody can give me serious data I err on the side of the letter of the law. Your example of Borland, while possibly true, is also very self-serving. I tend to assign lower credibility to arguments like that. If you want to justify an illegal activity that on the face of it harms me as being in my best interests, you'd better have serious data to back it up.
I'm not convinced that it's excessive.
Comparison to other laws and punishments is not helpful. The legal system isn't coherent and just because a punishment is out of line with other punishments doesn't make this one excessive; it could just as easily be that some others are too lenient. You can easily find other even more egregious examples, especially in the case of drug laws. (Some terribly high percentage of prisoners is in for simple marijuana possession if urban legend is to be believed.)
Part of the reason is that punishment serves many different purposes: rehabilitation, restitution, vengeance, deterrence. Any punishment is a mixture, depending on what they want to accomplish. Deterrence is particularly strong in this case: they're going to able to track down very few offenders, so they "amortize" the punitive aspect to try to scare others off.
There's also the notion that the punishment should fit the damage done. Arguably, the damage done by sharing movies and CDs is very high. If 1% of the people who downloaded a movie would have bought it, that can easily be 10,000 people. If the studio nets ten bucks on each sale, that's $100,000 in damage. (I don't care if you wish to call the crime "infringement" or "theft" or "piracy"; I'm trying to figure out economic losses. And unless you have some hard numbers for your argument that the studios are benefitting from your free advertising, please start a different thread.)
Such a crime would be "grand theft" if it were theft, and three years is not an unusual punishment for the crime of grand theft. As I said, it may not be classified as theft, but it's a case where damage is arguably done, and done to the tune of a whole bunch of money.
As the title suggests, I'm just playing devil's advoctate here. The criminals at Enron will get only slightly more jail time for the far greater, far more concrete damage they did. Compared to that tracking down file sharers is an immense waste of time, money, and jail space. I'm just not a fan of the common Slashdot "if it's not nailed down it's mine, and if I can break the copy protection it's not nailed down" argument, and we'll see how many of those respond before I get modded to negative infinity.
I've had massive problems with my Verizon DSL. Some sort of noise on the line that happens every single night, but it's fine in the day. It's obviously some sort of problem up the line, perhaps crosstalk, but they've shown no interest in helping me track it down. I was going to cancel it tonight.
I was about to bail on Verizon DSL and try cable, but cable's more expensive. So I'm going to see if I can get it on one of the other dry pairs that go into my house and see if that helps.
How close can you maneuver a plane to downtown Chicago? The school may have a private airstrip but I don't think Morton's does.
A good lesson for them to learn, though I would point out that the WSJ differential is 4, not 10. My guess is they wouldn't sell twice as many subscriptions at half the price. Still, that would put the price of an album on iTunes at $3-$4, not $10.
Even at that I'm not convinced that it would hold for the *AAs. The WSJ has a targeted, affluent market that would pay for convenience and timeliness. People don't share WSJ articles on P2P networks because not enough people want them, and those who do are more willing to pay for them. I'm sure there's a lot of cut-and-paste forwarding, and I wonder how much that cuts into sales. Perhaps some of those forwardees end up subscribing, because with news, timelineness is of the essense. P2P songs, on the other hand, will wait for a bit, and many of those downloads don't turn into album sales.
But we're discussing sales, not P2P, and the *AAs are already doing that in several venues, via iTunes and Real and Microsoft.
I do wonder about the numbers in the article. Are the costs of news gathering divided between the online and print editions? No matter what you do it still costs money to gather news and advertise your product. If the online sales get "free" content from the print division then their profitability numbers are dubious.
I wish I could find the reference, but Arthur C. Clarke once wrote a short story proposing precisely this. He was writing about a footrace, and it ended with racers naked, like in the first mrathon. I believe he revisited the idea in The hammer of God, but I think he did it the first time before anybody actually landed on the moon.
You lose heat by radiation, but space suits have elaborate cooling systems, since there's no atmosphere to wick away your body heat, and that's most of what you use on earth. Sadly, the exact heat-flow math (including sweat, which would still evaporate, or at least sublime) is beyond me.
Clarke said you could go out naked, except that your feet would get really, really cold. The character in the story warms his feet by starlight (really just getting them off the ground).
You'd have to be pretty careful with breathing, since you wouldn't have the usual 1 atmosphere of external pressure helping you exhale. (Space suits, conversely, are pressure suits and restore some of that 1 atmosphere.) I'm sure it's some function of keeping the partial pressures of oxygen in the right place, but again, that's more math than I want to do.
But you'd probably want to pressurize your head. There is intra-ocular pressure; it probably wouldn't pop but might be uncomfortable. Even if you pressurized the squishy bits in your head, you could have burst blood vessels in the skin; it's like a giant all-over hickey. It would depend on the way the heart adjusted pressure to the lack of resistance you get from the atmosphere.
So that's the interested-layman answer. I hope you can get a better one from an actual physicist.
Last week's Economist uses almost exactly the same tactic
Which article? I missed it. (I've only had a chance to skim the latest issue.)
I can't really argue against that.
Journalists have a rule that anything between quotation marks has to be an exact quote. You're not even allowed to correct the grammar or make irrelevant changes to help it fit into your sentence better. That is, if your subject says, "I like tapioca", you're not allowed to write, "Bob says that he 'likes tapioca.'" There are a few things you can do, like using editor's brackets and asking them to verify a rephrased quote, but in general if it appears in quotes (and not in brackets) it had better be exactly what they said.
So I slap the wrist of The Register for screwing up, and further for putting the retraction AFTER the advertisement (though I don't know if that was deliberate or not.) Both Slashdot and the poster also screwed up, but The Reg is the one who really blew it, IMHO.
Would I love it if Slashdot took responsibility? Sure. But I'm not going to expect it, so I live with it. I haven't got any "force" to apply except voting with my feet, and I like Slashdot too much (warts and all) to do that.
The article actually is about Linus Torvalds defending proprietary file formats. It's just that he's talking about a different format from the almost-made-up quote.
I say "almost made up" because it's got a grain of truth. The original quote is:
"Larry is perfectly fine with somebody writing a free replacement...What Larry is not fine with, is somebody writing a free replacement by just reverse-engineering what he did."
The made-up quote has the same gist, even if it's critically wrong in (a) the file format, and (b) the fact that Linus is talking about somebody else's beliefs, not his own. This gist, however, is clear that Linus believes roughly the same thing:
"It says: 'Get off my coat-tails, you free-loader'. And I can't really argue against that."
So I'd say the score is:
Headline: 1 point (for being accurate)
Summary: -2 points (for repeating a false quote without the retraction)
Submitter's final score: STFU
Slashdot: -2 point (for not verifying the quote)
Slashdot: +1 point (for the retraction on the front page)
Slashdot: +.5 point (for posting an article that's kind of interesting with an accurate headline despite a bad summary and bad editing)
Slashdot's final score: try to do better next time
Register: -2 points (for making up the quote)
Register: -1 point (for putting the retraction after the advertisement)
Register's final score: Really stupid, but they're usually reliable, so I'll let them off with a warning.
Unfortunately, you can't assume that submitters will shape up. Trolls can troll the slashdot editors just as easily as they can troll the rest of us. But unlike ordinary posts, they don't get modded down once somebody discovers an obvious mistake. They don't disappear off the front page; the best we can hope for is a retraction.
So what do I recommend? Nothing, really. The editors, if they wish, could work a lot harder to verify the summaries, and Slashdot would be somewhat more valuable. Or they can continue to do what they do and trust their readers to figure it out. If they do, I'll keep doing what I do, and treating each Slashdot article with a serious grain of salt until I read the original source. Which is OK with me; I get what I pay for.
Sad that in this case it comes from an actual quote from The Register, a reputable news source. They made it easy to take the quote out of context, and that's bad writing. I'd expect to see this from J. Random Blogger and repeated on Slashdot, and I'm disappointed to see it in The Register.
It is cold, sensible british and misses the italian fire that tony danza and whats her name brought to the original.
"What's her name" is Judith Light. The funny thing is I saw her onstage doing Ibsen's Hedda Gabler and she was extraordinary; truly moving. The lights came up on her and she utterly owned the stage just standing there. Somehow you just don't expect that from somebody who used to do a forgetabble (but not forgotten) sitcom with Tony Danza.
They're usually on spams. You know, the kind that wants you to think that citicorp.biz is the Citicorp web site and therefore you should give them your password and credit card. (As far as I can tell there is no citicorp.biz, actually, but you get the idea.)
.com name but some local consultant thought that FooCorp would be a cool name. Not fraudulent, but just a latecomer.
.biz web site if I can help it, and if dice.com and hotjobs.com want to open dice.jobs and hot.jobs, go ahead, but when I need to I'll go through the dot-com domain.
Actually, I see it most often on business cards from extremely small businesses. The kind where FooCorp has taken the
Like another poster said, I never give personal info to a
I can't give you a rational argument for criminalizing spam that you don't already know, but I can explain the sentence a bit.
I suspect that the real reason for the stiff sentence in this case is deterrence. He's being punished not just for his sins, but for the sins of everybody else who spams, to let them know that the law is real and that there will be serious punishment for getting caught.
Everybody who continued to spam after the law was put in effect wasn't merely being annoying: he was deliberately and consciously doing something illegal. Whether it should be illegal or not, he was flouting a law designed to reduce vast quantities of annoyance, as well as forcing people to spend large amounts of money and time fighting that annoyance.
So I agree that the punishment doesn't fit the crime (and you're hardly the only one to say that here on Slashdot.) Nor am I a huge fan of "making an example" of somebody; it seems a violation of the eighth amendment forbidding "cruel and unusual punishment".
With a bit of luck this is the harshest sentence ever to be handed down. That "luck" would be a bunch of spammers say, "Whoa, we've got to get out of this business". It won't be enough, but if it results in half as much spam I'll be half as annoyed, and I won't be crying any particular tears for this guy while it happens.
Or they may just move offshore, or use zombies, or hide better, etc. Hell, to avoid this law you need only move out of Virginia. But I suspect that at least a few spammers will decide that it's not profitable enough to risk jail now that jail is a very real possibility, and that's a few billion fewer spams we'll receive.
Has anybody tried to redirect windowsupdate.microsoft.com? That could potentially install malware at massive privilege levels and therefore impossible to remove. And it's done automatically.
That's the reason I don't auto-update. I'll let it download the software but I'm waiting a few days before installing it. Hopefully in the intervening time somebody would say, "For the love of God please don't install update #77439245!"
And whose problem is it if they are trying to charge money for something other will do for free?
Oh, it's definitely their problem. When you want money to do something, you'll always get out-competed by somebody who'll do it for free. Basic economics.
Except...
Except that Linus picked Bitkeeper for a reason. Presumably he picked it because it was good. I'll go even further to venture that it was good at least in part because they paid a bunch of guys to write the software, rather than waiting for other people to do it out of the goodness of their hearts. When you pay people they do the non-fun parts of the software, like maintenance and UIs and fixing those last little bugs that always take forever.
As long as free software exists, more power to those who wish to participate. I participate myself. But my mortgage is paid by the guys who want the exclusive rights to my software, guys who would go out of business right fast if a free alternative appeared. At least, if that alternative were as good as what I do. If some guy does for free what I do, wow. Power, buddy.
Linus will presumably go to his second-favorite free software, unless Bitkeeper is so good that he'll pay to keep using it. Or more to the point, if the free software requires so much extra work from him that he'd be better off paying Bitkeeper, he may well choose to stay there. More basic economics.
I feel exactly the same way. I do use the "Things They Left Out" extension to limit flashing ads to 1 cycle, which leds advertisers have a shot at me but I limit how annoying they can be.
I've noticed the layer-based popups, and I'm afraid I may have to download adblock to get rid of them. That would annoy me, because I don't mind, say, the ads that come with Slashdot. It seems a small price to pay for a nifty free web site. That is, as long as they don't make it impossible to read the site itself by distracting me with flashing.
I have found that there are few more accurate predictors of a failed trend than an appearance in Wired before it actually takes off. (Wired is much better when the thing has already taken off; its ability to accurately predict things that happened yesterday approaches 50%.)
Java has a bias towards Solaris (because that's what Sun sells) and Windows (because that's the cheap-readily-available-desktop). Which is too bad, because I've found that Java is far more useful as a server-side application than on the client side, so treating Linux like a bastard stepchild is inappropriate.
Which make OS X the favorite of only very few. It's got a hard road ahead with respect to Java. Macintosh has long been known as a favorite for client-side, user-facing apps, so even though its Mach kernel is super-duper for a lot of things it doesn't have the pentration that Linux does (which runs on cheapo hardware and is free itself).
So I'd love to see Apple make Java a top-of-the-line system, because it would be great to have an OS X box for Java developers: all the solid user feel of a Mac with the flexibility of a Unix.
This is all true, but as software developers we tend to use the word "language" loosely to mean, "The syntax, the compiler, the libraries, and the execution environment." So while a language can't be inherently faster than another, some languages have highly efficient, readily available implementations, and others don't.
That's a matter only of constant speedup, assuming that the implementation is competent, and therefore theoretically swamped by the complexity of the algorithm. But if you've implemented the same algorithm using both systems, a constant speedup of 10 is an order-of-magnitude speed improvement. Even with the really, really fast computers we use today that makes a difference to a lot of applications. (And I've used plenty of languages where could get a 10x improvement by switching to a better language.)
In this case there isn't even a single Java environment; there are numerous JVMs out there and I hope they tested several of them before writing the article. (I doubt it, but that's a whole different story.) You're probably not going to get a 10x difference, but 2x wouldn't be uncommon for certain applications.
So you're using the terminology correctly and everybody else is using it wrong. They should talk about the "Java system" or "Java environment" rather than Java language. But I think nearly everybody reading the article knew what was meant.
Has anybody got a link to an actual newspaper article on the subject? While bloggers and advocacy sites can break news stories, they're also full of innuendo, rumor, and things blown way out of proportion.
I prefer to get my news from some organization without an axe to grind.
When I looked yesterday the joke appeared to be the rather weak gag that an article titled "information does not exist" gave a blank page or 404. I think that was just server failure.
The gag itself is back up now. And it concludes with:
The full text article is available for purchase
$41.62
It's worth clicking on the "Add to cart" button.
I definitely second that. I didn't think of adding New Scientist because I read it online. I put it on the spectrum somewhere between Science News and Scientific American (and well this side of Popular Science.)
I actually like printed media; I find it a lot easier to read than online. I didn't realize New Scientist was only a buck an issue. I'm subscribing.