While I agree that Murdoch is being stupid, your analogy is somewhat flawed.
In the case of news, the merchandise IS the message. Many people read nothing more than the headlines. For many news articles, the synopsis often carries 90% of the value of the article; the rest is reactions and analysis that an astute reader could provide without help.
Murdoch believes that if people are reading the headlines at his site, many will feel they've gotten everything, and not buy a subscription. He knows he'll lose some people who click through, but he's betting that enough people will decide to actually pay him instead.
I think he's wrong; he over-values his merchandise. But he's the zillionaire and I'm not.
Re:Didn't you ever get told to share?
on
The Big Questions
·
· Score: 1
Very astute: it's the argument that's flawed, not the point the argument intends to make.
I disagree that "master and slave" is any more accurate as a description than "parent and child", at least for a democratic government. For totalitarian governments, it's quite apt, but in democracies, the government is not a permanent privileged class of individuals. So both analogies are somewhat flawed in that regard.
If we must analogize, I'd say that "roommates" is the better term: equals who must figure out how much of their liberty to cede in the interest of being able to live together. Both comfort and efficiency are to be taken into account, even though they're often contradictory goals. They create rules for themselves, and some mechanism to enforce them, but there's an immense amount of latitude. "Government" as dedicated, nominally neutral arbiter is one way, but not the only way; the various ways have advantages and disadvantages.
Re:Didn't you ever get told to share?
on
The Big Questions
·
· Score: 1
I think libertarians would argue that libertarians are somewhat like greedy children. Galt's Gulch, the libertarian nirvana, is supposed to be a "utopia of greed".
If their greed manifests itself childishly, say the libertarians, it will be its own punishment. They're proud of their enlightened self-interest.
if brake of one car automatically brakes all following cars, there is no great danger.
That's kind of a big "if". In theory, it works out great. In practice, it takes only one car to malfunction to cause vast damage.
There's also the fact that you can't rely on braking to be perfect: any piece of junk on the road or worn tire has the potential to interfere with one car, with domino effects to every car behind it.
Except that with this system, they don't need to be jammed. If everybody in the train presses the accelerator at once, knowing that the car in front of them will as well, everybody gets to move. You're not as limited by the following distance required by an unpredictable human driver and the unpredictable circumstances ahead.
Reducing inter-car distance reduces the amount of road you need because you put more cars on the same amount of pavement, and the same highway functions as a much larger road. But it only works if you get the humans out of the loop.
Of course it also provides opportunities for truly spectacular failures.
Didn't you ever get told to share?
on
The Big Questions
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
I have never, ever, heard a parent say to a child that it's okay to forcibly take toys away from other children who have more toys than you do.
Really? I have. They go to the parent and say, "That child has all of the toys and it's not fair." Frequently, the parent will agree, and if it's a child they have some control over (such as a sibling, or if the parent is babysitting) they will redistribute the toys.
They may couch it as a suggestion to "share", but they're not really planning on respecting the child's preference not to share. They will use force to overcome whatever "right" the child may have to those toys, regardless of whether the child has "earned" them. Because a parent's force is overwhelming compared to the child's, the use of force comes without violence much of the time. But it's force nonetheless, and it's the child ultimately exerting it, through the parents.
The blame falls on the lurid headline over at Wired, which completely mischaracterizes the actual article. But it's Slashdot's fault for repeating it both in the headline here and in the summary.
We should stop putting value on the work of those who make money from money, from paper instruments, rather we should value money for goods.
Easier said than done. If you do, people stop giving loans, which is the most straightforward way of making money from money. That means no new small businesses, no student loans, no mortgages.
Right now, one of the most interesting ideas in improving life in poor countries is precisely to introduce making money from money. Small loans, with interest, help create vital services. The interest helps fund the continuation as some projects fail.
Capitalism is not the automatic win that the "laissez-faire" crowd presents it as; the problems are real and do not fix themselves (at least not without harming vast numbers of innocent people in the process). But neither is it the automatic evil socialists imagine it to be.
Google has access to much better data, continually updated and not limited to the the memory you can cram into the device. It can also throw a lot more compute power at each routing problem (and share results between users, reducing the cost).
But for that reason it has to remain on the server, and isn't nearly as convenient as having the out-of-date, less complete data right there on the device.
Only because everybody got tired. Bring it up in conversation, and people will continue to laugh.
As I once read on/., first build a bridge out of that material that can span a 40,000 millimeter ditch on campus. Then we can start worrying how we're going to use it to build something 40,000 kilometers straight up.
If people are just shifting from buying to renting, you would see a matching increase in rentals to the decline in purchases - but the purchasing decline is much greater.
We did see an increase in renting: Netflix didn't exist a decade ago. Renting ramped up, and then leveled off as the market saturated.
What I was proposing is that maybe the trend of stopping buying movies lagged the rental trend because it took people time to realize that owning movies wasn't gratifying. Presumably they rented some and bought others, and are now dropping the latter.
I don't know if this is the case or not; it's just another hypothesis for the data.
Or it implies that people are changing their habits. Netflix means not just renting movies, but being able to get it on... well, not a moment's notice, but a few days' notice.
I think that's something it took people time to realize: they were buying movies and just not ever watching them again, or only once in a rare while. You have to give up some control over your movie supply to get there.
Many movies are worth seeing (if only for two hours of mindlessness) but very few are worth owning. That has always been the case, but I suspect it's only recently that people have realized it. That could account for falling sales but not falling rentals.
It's not necessarily a bad thing. Yes, sometimes it cuts off new and creative ideas. Often, those are bad ideas, and everybody else is doing it the regular way for a reason.
This is especially true when a business is getting outside of its domain. If you're the best bottle-maker or book-binder on the block, do that. But your accounting and web site is almost certain to be identical to any other businesses, and crafting roll-your-own accounting or web management software specialized to your thing is quite likely the wrong thing.
Not always, but I've found too many businesses err on the Not Invented Here side.
First, build a bridge that goes 40,000 millimeters across a ditch on a college campus out of this material. Then we can start to discuss how we're going to build 40,000 kilometers of it straight up.
I thought it was particularly hilarious when the last Libertarian candidate for President had to disclaim a lot of what he'd campaigned for previously (on gay marriage, drug laws, and the USA PATRIOT act, among others) in order to even come close to a more properly 'l'ibertarian position. And it still wasn't all that close.
Bizarrely, the closest any major political group comes to 'l'ibertarianism is the Blue Dog Democrats, but supporting them also gives support to the left-wing elements of the Democratic party.
Real 'l'ibertarian conservatives are up for grabs in the next election, and neither party seems to be paying them more than lip service.
> no more lobbying by Microsoft or bribes from RIAA.
Or by your favorite environmental group, community group, or your personal special interest (e.g. guns, either for or against)
The evil that other people's lobbying does is obvious, but the good your own does is often overlooked. People do talk to Congressmen, and that's where they get information from. Eliminate the power of groups to do it collectively, and the only people with access will be the individuals who have money.
I was speaking ironically. Edward III isn't even Henry IV part 1. But it's about on par with Richard II, though it hasn't got anything to compare to the John of Gaunt "Royal throne of kings" speech.
R&J is better than it's usually given credit for. Shallow adaptations have made it seem like a shallow play, and high school English teachers usually completely miss the pint in an attempt to make it "relevant". It's really quite well-written and far more interesting than that. The Luhrman version isn't a perfect adaptation, but it's got a lot of great insights.
Richard III should be seen more often. It's the best of the histories. Its length is a bit daunting, but edit it down a bit, and it's just chock-full of fantastic material. The Ian McKellen version is a little over-edited but it's a great introduction to the play, and he's brilliant in it.
Getting access to the play was easy: admission was a penny. They most certainly did go to each other's works and steal phrases from each other. Shakespeare clearly cribbed from Marlowe, among others.
They stole stories from each other all the time. Stories were considered common property. Trying to protect them would seem as absurd as many Slashdotters consider software patents.
But they were fairly protective of the play as a whole. There was just one master copy, and each actor would get a copy literally of his lines, plus the cue that came before each. Saved copying expenses (it's not like they had a xerox) and also protected the plays. And those cue sheets were treated as secrets.
Eventually the play would be published (and performed without royalties), but Edward III was published fairly early in Shakespeare's career, and it would be hard to gather up enough material from the previously printed plays to make up a new one attributable to Shakespeare.
Attribution is more art than science, and attempts to do it with software are pretty controversial. Just because this software agrees with the experts this time doesn't fill me with confidence about the software.
I've looked at it myself, and it definitely fits in with Shakespeare's other early history plays. But it's not his best work. It has a few genuinely good scenes, and it deserves to be studied with the rest of the canon, but it's not exactly Hamlet or Richard III. I doubt most people will ever see it.
This play has been widely attributed to Shakespeare by Shakespeare scholars for some time. It already appears in the Oxford Complete Works, the New Cambridge Shakespeare, and (my favorite) the Riverside Shakespeare.
Nothing is ever definitive in this line of work, so it's interesting to have the software weigh in on it. But I don't think any scholars would be changing their minds if it didn't.
I obviously haven't used this device yet, but the e-ink screens I've seen so far have refresh rates far, far too low to be suitable for general applications. It's getting better, but is still only suitable for certain applications.
> the way the public internet was designed to work.
The internet was designed to be flexible. Nothing in the protocols precludes non-neutrality, and there are already instances where ISPs favor some over others. Before the ultra-high-speed Tier 1s became ubiquitous, you ended up with non-neutral access based on who your ISP decided to connect to.
They just wanted to expand it further, prompting calls for a legislative solution. Legislative solutions to the Internet tend to fail. If you want something solved, you set up the protocols to enforce it. And the Internet Protocol was designed precisely to allow different subnets to have different policies to the greatest degree possible.
Maybe the world would be better off with a net neutrality law, but that's far from obvious, and it's not the way the Internet was designed.
Wow, that was remarkable. It took until about halfway through before I was getting more than a tiny fraction of it, though I can see how you'd spin up to that fast.
It's actually really good to know that blind listeners do handle that. My specialty is reading the chess column in the paper. Game transcripts and analyses are extremely information dense. I've never met any of the actual people who listen to it (for all I know there aren't any, though I gather people do miss it when I'm away) and so I get little feedback on what works.
Because it's so dense I tend to let some passages go fairly quickly; it still takes upwards of a half-hour to read what would take less than half that for plain text. Of course I still have to speak very clearly, especially since it's difficult to hear the difference between "b5" and "d5" without over-enunciating, and it makes a huge difference.
Personally, I translate e-books to high-speed audio (about 500 wpm), rather than reading,
That's interesting. I'd like to hear more about that.
I do some reading for the blind, and I wonder if I'm going to be replaced with a machine some day. I wouldn't have expected it to be soon. (This is volunteer work, and I wouldn't mind being replaced to free up time for something else.)
I'm sure the machine can't quite match my facility for interpretation, but I couldn't match 500 wpm. Is it good enough for the purposes you put it to?
Slashdot Mirror
HDMI's signaling is basically a single DVI link, and isn't rated to push anything past 1920x1200
And just to complete the thought: the Mini DiplayPort goes to 2560x1600 and goes up to 8.64 Gbits/second. That's about twice as fast as the HDMI 1.2.
HDMI 1.3 is actually comparable to Mini DisplayPort, with very similar specifications in terms of bandwidth.
While I agree that Murdoch is being stupid, your analogy is somewhat flawed.
In the case of news, the merchandise IS the message. Many people read nothing more than the headlines. For many news articles, the synopsis often carries 90% of the value of the article; the rest is reactions and analysis that an astute reader could provide without help.
Murdoch believes that if people are reading the headlines at his site, many will feel they've gotten everything, and not buy a subscription. He knows he'll lose some people who click through, but he's betting that enough people will decide to actually pay him instead.
I think he's wrong; he over-values his merchandise. But he's the zillionaire and I'm not.
Very astute: it's the argument that's flawed, not the point the argument intends to make.
I disagree that "master and slave" is any more accurate as a description than "parent and child", at least for a democratic government. For totalitarian governments, it's quite apt, but in democracies, the government is not a permanent privileged class of individuals. So both analogies are somewhat flawed in that regard.
If we must analogize, I'd say that "roommates" is the better term: equals who must figure out how much of their liberty to cede in the interest of being able to live together. Both comfort and efficiency are to be taken into account, even though they're often contradictory goals. They create rules for themselves, and some mechanism to enforce them, but there's an immense amount of latitude. "Government" as dedicated, nominally neutral arbiter is one way, but not the only way; the various ways have advantages and disadvantages.
I think libertarians would argue that libertarians are somewhat like greedy children. Galt's Gulch, the libertarian nirvana, is supposed to be a "utopia of greed".
If their greed manifests itself childishly, say the libertarians, it will be its own punishment. They're proud of their enlightened self-interest.
if brake of one car automatically brakes all following cars, there is no great danger.
That's kind of a big "if". In theory, it works out great. In practice, it takes only one car to malfunction to cause vast damage.
There's also the fact that you can't rely on braking to be perfect: any piece of junk on the road or worn tire has the potential to interfere with one car, with domino effects to every car behind it.
Except that with this system, they don't need to be jammed. If everybody in the train presses the accelerator at once, knowing that the car in front of them will as well, everybody gets to move. You're not as limited by the following distance required by an unpredictable human driver and the unpredictable circumstances ahead.
Reducing inter-car distance reduces the amount of road you need because you put more cars on the same amount of pavement, and the same highway functions as a much larger road. But it only works if you get the humans out of the loop.
Of course it also provides opportunities for truly spectacular failures.
I have never, ever, heard a parent say to a child that it's okay to forcibly take toys away from other children who have more toys than you do.
Really? I have. They go to the parent and say, "That child has all of the toys and it's not fair." Frequently, the parent will agree, and if it's a child they have some control over (such as a sibling, or if the parent is babysitting) they will redistribute the toys.
They may couch it as a suggestion to "share", but they're not really planning on respecting the child's preference not to share. They will use force to overcome whatever "right" the child may have to those toys, regardless of whether the child has "earned" them. Because a parent's force is overwhelming compared to the child's, the use of force comes without violence much of the time. But it's force nonetheless, and it's the child ultimately exerting it, through the parents.
The blame falls on the lurid headline over at Wired, which completely mischaracterizes the actual article. But it's Slashdot's fault for repeating it both in the headline here and in the summary.
For shame.
We should stop putting value on the work of those who make money from money, from paper instruments, rather we should value money for goods.
Easier said than done. If you do, people stop giving loans, which is the most straightforward way of making money from money. That means no new small businesses, no student loans, no mortgages.
Right now, one of the most interesting ideas in improving life in poor countries is precisely to introduce making money from money. Small loans, with interest, help create vital services. The interest helps fund the continuation as some projects fail.
Capitalism is not the automatic win that the "laissez-faire" crowd presents it as; the problems are real and do not fix themselves (at least not without harming vast numbers of innocent people in the process). But neither is it the automatic evil socialists imagine it to be.
I've observed the same thing.
Google has access to much better data, continually updated and not limited to the the memory you can cram into the device. It can also throw a lot more compute power at each routing problem (and share results between users, reducing the cost).
But for that reason it has to remain on the server, and isn't nearly as convenient as having the out-of-date, less complete data right there on the device.
Well, the laughing seems to have died down.
Only because everybody got tired. Bring it up in conversation, and people will continue to laugh.
As I once read on /., first build a bridge out of that material that can span a 40,000 millimeter ditch on campus. Then we can start worrying how we're going to use it to build something 40,000 kilometers straight up.
... four years between missions?
They pick up considerably after that; the first manned mission is the following year.
If people are just shifting from buying to renting, you would see a matching increase in rentals to the decline in purchases - but the purchasing decline is much greater.
We did see an increase in renting: Netflix didn't exist a decade ago. Renting ramped up, and then leveled off as the market saturated.
What I was proposing is that maybe the trend of stopping buying movies lagged the rental trend because it took people time to realize that owning movies wasn't gratifying. Presumably they rented some and bought others, and are now dropping the latter.
I don't know if this is the case or not; it's just another hypothesis for the data.
Or it implies that people are changing their habits. Netflix means not just renting movies, but being able to get it on ... well, not a moment's notice, but a few days' notice.
I think that's something it took people time to realize: they were buying movies and just not ever watching them again, or only once in a rare while. You have to give up some control over your movie supply to get there.
Many movies are worth seeing (if only for two hours of mindlessness) but very few are worth owning. That has always been the case, but I suspect it's only recently that people have realized it. That could account for falling sales but not falling rentals.
It's not necessarily a bad thing. Yes, sometimes it cuts off new and creative ideas. Often, those are bad ideas, and everybody else is doing it the regular way for a reason.
This is especially true when a business is getting outside of its domain. If you're the best bottle-maker or book-binder on the block, do that. But your accounting and web site is almost certain to be identical to any other businesses, and crafting roll-your-own accounting or web management software specialized to your thing is quite likely the wrong thing.
Not always, but I've found too many businesses err on the Not Invented Here side.
Or, as I read here on Slashdot once:
First, build a bridge that goes 40,000 millimeters across a ditch on a college campus out of this material. Then we can start to discuss how we're going to build 40,000 kilometers of it straight up.
I thought it was particularly hilarious when the last Libertarian candidate for President had to disclaim a lot of what he'd campaigned for previously (on gay marriage, drug laws, and the USA PATRIOT act, among others) in order to even come close to a more properly 'l'ibertarian position. And it still wasn't all that close.
Bizarrely, the closest any major political group comes to 'l'ibertarianism is the Blue Dog Democrats, but supporting them also gives support to the left-wing elements of the Democratic party.
Real 'l'ibertarian conservatives are up for grabs in the next election, and neither party seems to be paying them more than lip service.
> no more lobbying by Microsoft or bribes from RIAA.
Or by your favorite environmental group, community group, or your personal special interest (e.g. guns, either for or against)
The evil that other people's lobbying does is obvious, but the good your own does is often overlooked. People do talk to Congressmen, and that's where they get information from. Eliminate the power of groups to do it collectively, and the only people with access will be the individuals who have money.
I was speaking ironically. Edward III isn't even Henry IV part 1. But it's about on par with Richard II, though it hasn't got anything to compare to the John of Gaunt "Royal throne of kings" speech.
R&J is better than it's usually given credit for. Shallow adaptations have made it seem like a shallow play, and high school English teachers usually completely miss the pint in an attempt to make it "relevant". It's really quite well-written and far more interesting than that. The Luhrman version isn't a perfect adaptation, but it's got a lot of great insights.
Richard III should be seen more often. It's the best of the histories. Its length is a bit daunting, but edit it down a bit, and it's just chock-full of fantastic material. The Ian McKellen version is a little over-edited but it's a great introduction to the play, and he's brilliant in it.
Getting access to the play was easy: admission was a penny. They most certainly did go to each other's works and steal phrases from each other. Shakespeare clearly cribbed from Marlowe, among others.
They stole stories from each other all the time. Stories were considered common property. Trying to protect them would seem as absurd as many Slashdotters consider software patents.
But they were fairly protective of the play as a whole. There was just one master copy, and each actor would get a copy literally of his lines, plus the cue that came before each. Saved copying expenses (it's not like they had a xerox) and also protected the plays. And those cue sheets were treated as secrets.
Eventually the play would be published (and performed without royalties), but Edward III was published fairly early in Shakespeare's career, and it would be hard to gather up enough material from the previously printed plays to make up a new one attributable to Shakespeare.
Attribution is more art than science, and attempts to do it with software are pretty controversial. Just because this software agrees with the experts this time doesn't fill me with confidence about the software.
I've looked at it myself, and it definitely fits in with Shakespeare's other early history plays. But it's not his best work. It has a few genuinely good scenes, and it deserves to be studied with the rest of the canon, but it's not exactly Hamlet or Richard III. I doubt most people will ever see it.
This play has been widely attributed to Shakespeare by Shakespeare scholars for some time. It already appears in the Oxford Complete Works, the New Cambridge Shakespeare, and (my favorite) the Riverside Shakespeare.
Nothing is ever definitive in this line of work, so it's interesting to have the software weigh in on it. But I don't think any scholars would be changing their minds if it didn't.
I obviously haven't used this device yet, but the e-ink screens I've seen so far have refresh rates far, far too low to be suitable for general applications. It's getting better, but is still only suitable for certain applications.
> the way the public internet was designed to work.
The internet was designed to be flexible. Nothing in the protocols precludes non-neutrality, and there are already instances where ISPs favor some over others. Before the ultra-high-speed Tier 1s became ubiquitous, you ended up with non-neutral access based on who your ISP decided to connect to.
They just wanted to expand it further, prompting calls for a legislative solution. Legislative solutions to the Internet tend to fail. If you want something solved, you set up the protocols to enforce it. And the Internet Protocol was designed precisely to allow different subnets to have different policies to the greatest degree possible.
Maybe the world would be better off with a net neutrality law, but that's far from obvious, and it's not the way the Internet was designed.
Wow, that was remarkable. It took until about halfway through before I was getting more than a tiny fraction of it, though I can see how you'd spin up to that fast.
It's actually really good to know that blind listeners do handle that. My specialty is reading the chess column in the paper. Game transcripts and analyses are extremely information dense. I've never met any of the actual people who listen to it (for all I know there aren't any, though I gather people do miss it when I'm away) and so I get little feedback on what works.
Because it's so dense I tend to let some passages go fairly quickly; it still takes upwards of a half-hour to read what would take less than half that for plain text. Of course I still have to speak very clearly, especially since it's difficult to hear the difference between "b5" and "d5" without over-enunciating, and it makes a huge difference.
Personally, I translate e-books to high-speed audio (about 500 wpm), rather than reading,
That's interesting. I'd like to hear more about that.
I do some reading for the blind, and I wonder if I'm going to be replaced with a machine some day. I wouldn't have expected it to be soon. (This is volunteer work, and I wouldn't mind being replaced to free up time for something else.)
I'm sure the machine can't quite match my facility for interpretation, but I couldn't match 500 wpm. Is it good enough for the purposes you put it to?