I've been asking that forever. The frightening thing is that many of the prestige universities (Harvard, Yale, etc.) have no economic need to charge for tuition at all--the growth of their endowment is enough to cover all of their operating expenses. Despite that, they charge $30k/year for tuition...
I myself went to a public university with all expenses paid, and I'm now a fully-funded grad student in a top-five EE program. I think that more and more of America's best and brightest will discover that this is a much smarter way to get a university education.
IIRC, the BSD/System V issue has already been settled by the U.S. judicial system, so you shouldn't have to worry about buying a license from SCO if you switch to BSD.
Compared to the average college physics textbook, the three-volume Feynman Lectures are a bargain. And any one of the volumes in the Feynman Lectures is likely to contain more physical insight than the other standard introductory physics textbooks put together.
Copyright holders can trade or do whatever else they want to do with their own music.
By implication, by willfully putting their content on a P2P network, is a copyright holder implicitly granting a license to that content? If not, could EULAs be rewritten such that anyone who holds the copyright and puts that content on the network is granting a license for users of that network to access that content? In any case, the notion of making content available on a P2P network and then suing people for downloading that content seems a lot like entrapment to me...
Ah, but it is spoken by two of the planet's three most populous countries.
That statement is misleading. According to 2002 population statistics, China's population (1.28 billion) is almost equal to the population of India (1.04 billion) and the United States (280 million) combined. Furthermore, the population of the rest of the top 10 (Indonesia, Brazil, Pakistan, Russia, Bangladesh, Nigeria, and Japan) adds up to almost a billion people, most of whom do not speak English. Thus ths statement that "Most of the world does not speak English" is more meaningful than "Two of the planet's three most populous countries speak English."
I would give more weight to cummulative statistic of campaign money donated in an election year than to a partial statistic for a non-election year, but that might just be me. Here's two reasons off the top of head that I think the 2003 statistic could be unreliable or even misleading: 1) What's the point of donating campaign money when there's no campaigning going on ? 2) 2003 isn't over yet...maybe the recording industry likes to buy^H^H^Hassist politicians towards the end of the calendar year.
The non-apocryphal version of the story is that Rolls Royce wanted to make the turbine blades of their jet engines out of ceramics, since ceramics can be stronger than metal at high temperature. However, because all ceramics (AFAIK) tend to be brittle, the turbine blades failed spectacularly at the bird test, shattering on impact and annihilating the rest of the engine.
You'll buy them eventually? Yeah, right, how many people actually do this? Sure, a handful of people do, but I'd argue that the vast majority don't, they just take and take and use the excuses above to justify their taking.
Actually this is probably the crux of why copyright infringement via P2P has gotten so big. The primary market of the RIAA consists of teenagers and young adults. Yet this market (especially teenagers and college students) tends not to have a lot of disposable income. Thus the only way for them to acquire all the music they want in the short term is to get it through other channels like P2P.
One other thing to note is that copyright infringement of music is not a new phenomenon by any means. Ten or twenty years ago, you could infringe copyrights by copying and trading music on tape. CD burners, MP3's, and P2P are the same concept made better, cheaper, and faster. The fundament reason large-scale copyright infringement exists is because there is a significant difference in the amount of money people are willing to pay for music and the amount of money the RIAA currently charges for it, and large-scale copyright infringement will not go away until the supply and demand curves meet.
I hope that the naivete espoused in the parent post is feigned, but the horrible argument construction suggests that the poster might actually be that ignorant, so I feel compelled to respond.
That is just stupid of them. This would kill p2p networks; I say this because they are going after only the people that shares. But not after the people that download. Well if no one shares then there will be nothing to download.
Duh...the RIAA has no reason to want P2P networks to survive and every reason to want them to collapse. As a practical matter, it makes sense for the RIAA to go after people who share rather than people who download because it does more damage with less work.
I donâ(TM)t think that if one uses p2p networks correctly that there is a major problem. When I used napster I did download some music. After downloading some songs I would either delete them if I did not like them. Or I ended up going out and getting the CD because I like what they had to offer. Now that I do not have napster anymore, I have stopped buying CDs. RIAA you only hurt yourself by trying to kill P2P file sharing networks.
I agree that the try-before-you-buy use of P2P is probably beneficial to the RIAA, whether they realize it or not, but large, entrenched organizations like the RIAA tend to be afraid of things outside their control that could potentially force them to change the way they do things.
If you knew the exact state of every particle in your physical system, you could easily predict when a particular part will fail in advance.
The problem is that you can't know the exact state of every particle in your physical system--Heisenberg proved that.
What do I do if I'm a critical program and some other mp3 player or something ate up all the memory?
If it's truly a critical program (like, say, the navigation software for the spacecraft), why are you running a frivolous program like an MP3 player alongside it?
What do I do if I protected the memory in the first place, but my ram location got hit by a gamma ray or something? How do I detect that?
With error-correcting codes, you can tell when a bit has been flipped due to cosmic rays or electrical noise. There's a slight speed penalty, but the increased reliability far outweighs it.
I would agree with the statement that in general purpose software (e.g. Microsoft Windows), there are too many possible configurations and states to be able to test them all. (That doesn't make me any less upset when Windows crashes on me.) But for specialized applications like controlling a spacecraft, you should be able to test all possible states, and you can even incorporate error-checking to keep hardware glitches from disrupting the proper operation of the software.
The scary thing is that the cell phone users are just about as likely to get in an accident as someone who downs a fifth of Jack Daniels--this was proven by a study that was published in the New England Journal of Medicine in 1997.
All you need is a pair of blank, 1.44MB floppies and these directions.
Oh, well. I have a ultra-modern portable that doesn't ship with a floppy drive. Easy? Not for me.
You are misinterpreting that statement. Having a pair of blank 1.44MB floppies for making boot disks is a sufficient, but not a necessary, condition for installing FreeBSD.
Software errors didn't just cause problems with the Mars landers--they caused a total loss of the spacecraft. We are just lucky that we made those errors before attempting a manned mission to Mars.
Regarding the losses of the two space shuttles, it is hardly fair to compare hardware failure to software failure. The physical behavior of a mechanical system is not deterministic--stress something hard enough and it will break, and it is impossible to predict when a particular part will fail in advance. You can do lots of testing to get a sense of when, on average, a part will fail under certain conditions, and you can design and engineer as best as possible for something to work even if a part fails, but parts will fail and sometimes hardware failures are irrecoverable.
Software, on the other hand, is completely deterministic. With error-checking and proper testing, it is possible, at least in principle, to write software that will not fail. Software failure that results in loss of life is simply inexcusable.
Where did you get your free television and electricity? Just because you don't get a separate bill for television service doesn't mean that you don't pay for it in some other way.
I fail to see how emergency broadcasting makes television a necessity. What does broadcast television do that some combination of cable television, radio, and emergency sirens couldn't?
But, at least in a democracy, if access to the broadcast channels is made available to any subset of the populace then access to it for the general populace becomes a necessity for the preservation of democratic principles....there are large portions of our population who choose to receive all of their information about policy and issues through television programming. It's an important medium; one we can't afford to lose. To cut them off merely adds more influence to the entrenched interests.
I would argue the reverse. Since television networks are entrenched interests, and because the barriers to entering television broadcasting are so high, broadcast television is a fantastic propaganda tool for entrenched interests. Enabling a powerful few to control public opinion potentially enables them to undermine the democratic process.
Television lends itself to broadcast distribution because one source is providing the same content to many receivers. Internet users generally want different content at any given time, so Internet service does not mesh very well with broadcast distribution.
No, there are no birds at that altitude, but we're talking about projectiles hitting the shuttle at a particular relative speed--altitude is irrelevant. My point is that if airliners are designed to survive a 500 mph collision with a relatively soft object (bird, foam, etc.), the space shuttle certainly should have been as well.
For the reason that airliner windshields and engines are tested for collisions with birds around 500 mph, I am surprised that a piece of foam of equivalent mass would cause significant damage to the space shuttle. NASA cannot assume that the airspace above the shuttle launch will be perfectly clear, and there is some probability that the shuttle will tag some poor seagull on its way up. Thus the windshield and the leading edges of the wings and rudder should have been tested for damage with collision with relatively soft objects (birds, foam, etc.) at 500 mph.
I lugged my laptop to campus to see if it worked any better on the wireless network, but it doesn't.
Do you still have binaries for the client you wrote? It would be interesting to compare how well it localizes compared to Trepia (plus it's a competition that's almost impossible to lose:-p).
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I've been asking that forever. The frightening thing is that many of the prestige universities (Harvard, Yale, etc.) have no economic need to charge for tuition at all--the growth of their endowment is enough to cover all of their operating expenses. Despite that, they charge $30k/year for tuition...
I myself went to a public university with all expenses paid, and I'm now a fully-funded grad student in a top-five EE program. I think that more and more of America's best and brightest will discover that this is a much smarter way to get a university education.
Some people aren't greedy bastards and want to serve the public good... :-p
Amen, brotha! ;-)
IIRC, the BSD/System V issue has already been settled by the U.S. judicial system, so you shouldn't have to worry about buying a license from SCO if you switch to BSD.
Compared to the average college physics textbook, the three-volume Feynman Lectures are a bargain. And any one of the volumes in the Feynman Lectures is likely to contain more physical insight than the other standard introductory physics textbooks put together.
I would give more weight to cummulative statistic of campaign money donated in an election year than to a partial statistic for a non-election year, but that might just be me. Here's two reasons off the top of head that I think the 2003 statistic could be unreliable or even misleading: 1) What's the point of donating campaign money when there's no campaigning going on ? 2) 2003 isn't over yet...maybe the recording industry likes to buy^H^H^Hassist politicians towards the end of the calendar year.
The non-apocryphal version of the story is that Rolls Royce wanted to make the turbine blades of their jet engines out of ceramics, since ceramics can be stronger than metal at high temperature. However, because all ceramics (AFAIK) tend to be brittle, the turbine blades failed spectacularly at the bird test, shattering on impact and annihilating the rest of the engine.
One other thing to note is that copyright infringement of music is not a new phenomenon by any means. Ten or twenty years ago, you could infringe copyrights by copying and trading music on tape. CD burners, MP3's, and P2P are the same concept made better, cheaper, and faster. The fundament reason large-scale copyright infringement exists is because there is a significant difference in the amount of money people are willing to pay for music and the amount of money the RIAA currently charges for it, and large-scale copyright infringement will not go away until the supply and demand curves meet.
I would agree with the statement that in general purpose software (e.g. Microsoft Windows), there are too many possible configurations and states to be able to test them all. (That doesn't make me any less upset when Windows crashes on me.) But for specialized applications like controlling a spacecraft, you should be able to test all possible states, and you can even incorporate error-checking to keep hardware glitches from disrupting the proper operation of the software.
The scary thing is that the cell phone users are just about as likely to get in an accident as someone who downs a fifth of Jack Daniels--this was proven by a study that was published in the New England Journal of Medicine in 1997.
Books would be much prettier... ;-)
Software errors didn't just cause problems with the Mars landers--they caused a total loss of the spacecraft. We are just lucky that we made those errors before attempting a manned mission to Mars.
Regarding the losses of the two space shuttles, it is hardly fair to compare hardware failure to software failure. The physical behavior of a mechanical system is not deterministic--stress something hard enough and it will break, and it is impossible to predict when a particular part will fail in advance. You can do lots of testing to get a sense of when, on average, a part will fail under certain conditions, and you can design and engineer as best as possible for something to work even if a part fails, but parts will fail and sometimes hardware failures are irrecoverable.
Software, on the other hand, is completely deterministic. With error-checking and proper testing, it is possible, at least in principle, to write software that will not fail. Software failure that results in loss of life is simply inexcusable.
Where did you get your free television and electricity? Just because you don't get a separate bill for television service doesn't mean that you don't pay for it in some other way.
I fail to see how emergency broadcasting makes television a necessity. What does broadcast television do that some combination of cable television, radio, and emergency sirens couldn't?
Television lends itself to broadcast distribution because one source is providing the same content to many receivers. Internet users generally want different content at any given time, so Internet service does not mesh very well with broadcast distribution.
Since when did access to television programming become a necessity?
The joke is an urban legend, but bird-testing airplane engines and canopies is not, as your snopes.com link so conveniently explains.
No, there are no birds at that altitude, but we're talking about projectiles hitting the shuttle at a particular relative speed--altitude is irrelevant. My point is that if airliners are designed to survive a 500 mph collision with a relatively soft object (bird, foam, etc.), the space shuttle certainly should have been as well.
For the reason that airliner windshields and engines are tested for collisions with birds around 500 mph, I am surprised that a piece of foam of equivalent mass would cause significant damage to the space shuttle. NASA cannot assume that the airspace above the shuttle launch will be perfectly clear, and there is some probability that the shuttle will tag some poor seagull on its way up. Thus the windshield and the leading edges of the wings and rudder should have been tested for damage with collision with relatively soft objects (birds, foam, etc.) at 500 mph.
I lugged my laptop to campus to see if it worked any better on the wireless network, but it doesn't.
:-p).
Do you still have binaries for the client you wrote? It would be interesting to compare how well it localizes compared to Trepia (plus it's a competition that's almost impossible to lose