Which isn't bad but I think the focus is doing better. All of my driving is stop/go. Longest stretch is maybe a mile or so at 50mph. I have yet to do a long hwy drive, i'm doing one in two weeks to syracuse [from Ottawa] so that should tell me how that's doing. I expect at least 35-40MPG on that trip.
Yeah that's all good and stuff for the 0.5% of the population that actually live next to work. For the rest of us, "biking" to work means 30 to 60 mins of biking. Which in places like Canada isn't the smartest of moves unless you're really really into it. I'd love to be able to bike 10 mins and be at work. Except for me biking to work is 30-35 mins, in traffic [re: busy roads]. And in -25C weather isn't the most accomodating of things to do.
How about a more useful "solution" and promote mass transit? I wouldn't mind taking a bus to work since it's one less thing for me to worry about.
23MPG in the city? Or mostly HWY? My average speed in to work is about 35MPH. The focus has a 2L 4cyl engine that gets around 160 horse power at 5000 RPM.
It doesn't always make sense though [but yeah most of the time it does]. For example, if you have two sets of lights. And the first goes green first. You may say "oh why not just get up to moving speed and coast to the next." But that means traffic behind you can't get through the first intersection and you're denying their right of way.
What I do is hit the limit [and nothing more] then when I'm reasonably close [e.g. twice the breaking distance or so] I then start to coast.
Of course, if there is nobody behind me I'll just take my time from the start. But you always have to be aware of what's around you.
I drive a Ford Focus 2007 sedan and in the first couple weeks I had the car I drove fairly sporty [e.g. speed limit all the time no coasting] and got about 13L/100Km in the city. I've spent the last week and a bit driving more carefully, that is, coasting to stops, using cruise control whenever possible, not accelerating as quickly to the next redlight. When I filled up yesterday I purchased 15L of fuel for 154Km of distance. or about 10L/100Km.
In yankee, I'm getting 23.6MPG now instead of 18.2MPG (both in city) for a boost of 29.7% more MPG. I still do the speed limit, I'm just not as heavy on the gas. And when I hit the speed limit I use cruise control where possible. I also don't keep constant speed when there is a red up ahead. Usually I'm doing 20-30 kph under the limit by time I have to brake. If this could be helped via a computer I'm all for it.
Obviously my "study" isn't really comprehensive. But given that i do the same 14Km route every day there aren't a lot of variables in the mix.
So if someone links to a site from Slashdot, no-one's going to read it because the site will expect you to pay them $20 up front for 2000 page views that you're never going to use?
I suggest you read up how AP and Reuters works. Do you pay $20 for each article in a printed newspaper?
Christ almighty you can't be this stupid. Honestly.
Hello captain extremism! I'm Tom. please to meet you!
First off, if the site can't make it's case for getting you to pay them, why would you pay them? So no, you wouldn't give $20 to every random site you hit.
Do you, buy everything you see in a store? No? Didn't think so.
As for the price, well how about this, it's one cent [or whatever] to buy a page of content [e.g. a news article]. Reloads/etc being free since most users wouldn't reload the page 1000s of times anyways.
Whatever, point is not every site is the same and not all pricing models apply universally. For highly interactive sites where the concept of static pages doesn't exist, it could be a flat fee or whatever, who knows.
Point is, there are ways to generate subscriber income.
I think that's part of the problem though. there are hundreds of relatively shotty websites. You have to use a dozen sites just to get what you want. Like I read slashdot and fark to get the wacky tech/other news. If there was one good site that did both I wouldn't need to pay $20/mo for two sites now would I?
And you don't need to CHARGE micropayments, you just account for them. E.g. I give you $20 and it's good for [say] 2000 page views. Sure each page only costs me a cent, but you're not actually doing a transaction for it. But the point is, we've grown accustomed to things just being free which is not really how the world works.
Not everything is paid for by ads. Why people just assume everything on the net should be free is beyond me.
Suppose slashdot was running into cash problems. If the service was actually of any value people would pay to support it. If subscribers don't meet the budget they'd have to scale back or fold.
Point is. You don't need advertising revenue to run a website. you need to provide a service people want to spend money on. Just LIKE ANY OTHER BUSINESS.
By your logic we shouldn't stop drug sales either. Someone else will sell them anyways.
Point is, just because you look good doesn't mean you're a good actor. And if we didn't condition society to enjoy appearances over substance there *would be* a market for real acting/music/art abilities.
And frankly I find the notion that only A list actors can make a movie offensive. I just finished watching "Children of Men" which aside from Clive Owen [or whatever his name is] the rest of the characters are not A listers. Yet it's still a good movie.
Shows wouldn't need so much financing if they didn't pay the few star actors hundreds of thousands of dollars per episode. You look at a show like Seinfeld or that one with that annoying long island guy, and it's basically 98% of the budget for 3 or 4 actors/producers, and 2% for the rest of the cast, crew, production, sets, distribution, licenses, etc.
And frankly, I wouldn't mind advertising if they followed a few rules
1. I'm not 3 years old, I can do basic arithmetic and think for myself. Stop trying to convince me what a wonderful deal it is. 2. Playing the same ad 300 times per hour will not make me want to buy it 3. Just because you can advertise it doesn't mean people will buy it [re: car ads during hockey games]. 4. Fine print is annoying, it makes you look like you have things to hide.
They talk at the end about a star 7500 LY away that might "go supernova soon." It should probably be pointed out that it could have already gone supernova 6000 years ago and we'd not know about it.
I guess they should say "might see if it went supernova soon."
Rogers tries that too. It costs me $55 a month for this stupid cell. If I have a year left on my term and don't want a phone anymore, it's actually cheaper to pay the $200 cancellation fee than 12*55 for the year. I had to cancel a friends cell that I had on my plan once and they tried to argue it was smarter to keep it. I broke out the times table on them and showed that not paying $300 extra for a phone I wouldn't use is smarter.
That being said, they totally abuse the terms anyways. They tried to slap me with the fee on a phone I bought outright [e.g. no contract]. To add insult to injury the phone was locked to the carrier even though I paid the full price.
Lesson to be learned. Only buy unlocked phones, and only use pay as you go unless you really need a phone.
Yeah but that's neither illegal or immoral. As a society we allow and tolerate adults drinking, even, gasp, for recreation.
It'd be like the teacher having a blog talking about her sex life. Are we now to disallow teachers from copulation as well? Well we don't let kids vote either. So teachers shouldn't vote. And most kids can't drive. Therefore no driving, etc...
In the software world, if you take a public domain program, compile it, stamp a copyright on it, you can't claim a violation if someone else takes the same source and builds it themselves.
Same in music. If I take a Handel piece and play it, I can copyright my performance. But if someone else plays the piece, they too can copyright their performance.
As for being able to copyright music, I'd say there is a strong need for that. Much like software, good music is hard to come by and write. There wouldn't be an incentive for professional musicians if they couldn't make a living off it [not like people are willing to just subsidize their living...].
Sadly we can't make the distinction between what is worthy of protection. I think quite a bit of "pop culture" music is just annoying rehashes of last weeks music. That shit shouldn't be played, let alone copyrighted as they shouldn't have an incentive to produce crap, play it a zillion times and brainwash people into thinking it's an acceptable norm.
Everything that is new is old. If only truly new and 100% original works were copyrightable nothing would be copyrightable.
You're saying that if I take a table from [say] an NIST crypto spec, then wrap it in 100K lines of my own code, I can't copyright the entire package?
Well, I have yet to see a book which is 100% in its own language with it's own grammar, style, lingo, etc... So by your logic no books should have copyright status.
That's a lie. We don't remember shit all about our history lessons. I just know what a poppy is.
That said, yes, they do paint a picture, but I remember learning about internment camps and our refusal to take in jewish refugees. Not all of canadian history classes are painted rosy.
Granted, but part of the problem with MSFT is they have a vested interest in pandering to morons. Most individuals aren't totally stupid, and certainly feeding that cycle will be a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Maybe if Linux or another UNIX was the commonplace desktop we could expect our users to be a bit more intelligent about their security.
Essentially MSFT makes money by calling their users stupid and selling them software to make the bad scary computer go away. Which is, oddly enough, also why OSS users tend to look down upon MSFT users.
Um, you can only get extradited for violating a law within their territory. If you hosted your software in China, or helped distribute within China, that's another story.
It's just like how the USA had more severe crypto export laws than Canada. Us Cannucks can give out crypto relatively easily [then and now] without regard to the yanks.
This guy was being pursued because he distributed the breaks within the states [most likely]. I disagree with the extradition but the likely reason for it is because of the distribution within America [well that and corporate malfeasants].
While I disagree with the extradition, your example is not quite the same. He broke copy protection schemes and promoted [allegedly] the copyright violation of software on a global scale. That he did it from Australia is what bothers me. Can't the aussie courts deal with this?
That you can get prison time for it bothers me as well. I can see a fine and probation [maybe be denied a computer for a short period], but being locked up is hardly productive, especially for a very non-violent crime.
I want you to read a magnetic tape or vinyl without a machine. Oh can't? Therefore music shouldn't be copyrightable.
As for software coming with the source... I've been using computers since I was a wee lad [re: 1985 on] and I don't recall any commercial programs from office tools [pagemaker, clarisworks, etc] to video games [apache, beyond dark castle, etc...] coming with the source. In fact, they were very much closed source proprietary applications.
Maybe in the 60s and 70s when programs were still trivial and hard to distribute they were given out in source form. But I think it's safe to say the norm from the 80s on was not to give out the source.
And just because some people abuse copyright with DRM doesn't mean we should all lose it's protection. I write software libraries for a living. When we license our code to people they have full use of the code they paid for [no DRM preventing debugging, analysis, etc]. So people should be able to just copy and give out the code I write and not pay for it? But I work in a specialty field of cryptography. If folk like me can't earn some coin, who do you suppose is going to write commercial cryptography in the future?
I agree that DRM shouldn't be used to violate fair use rights. I disagree that because some people choose to do this we should all lose the protection of copyright.
Feeding the system which robs people of ambition and actual results doesn't really help society. Sure it's easier to "play the game" but is it worth it?
I can't speak about all fields, but from what I saw in the crypto field there are a lot of irrelevant trivial "results" published every year. Clearly a result of "publish or perish" from grad students [and their profs trying to bolster a career record].
If your results [or text] are truly noteworthy they'll stand on their own even in a non "published" format. Better yet, negotiations with journals to relinquish online publication rights would mean that it's about the results not the names.
Slashdot Mirror
Which isn't bad but I think the focus is doing better. All of my driving is stop/go. Longest stretch is maybe a mile or so at 50mph. I have yet to do a long hwy drive, i'm doing one in two weeks to syracuse [from Ottawa] so that should tell me how that's doing. I expect at least 35-40MPG on that trip.
Tom
Yeah that's all good and stuff for the 0.5% of the population that actually live next to work. For the rest of us, "biking" to work means 30 to 60 mins of biking. Which in places like Canada isn't the smartest of moves unless you're really really into it. I'd love to be able to bike 10 mins and be at work. Except for me biking to work is 30-35 mins, in traffic [re: busy roads]. And in -25C weather isn't the most accomodating of things to do.
How about a more useful "solution" and promote mass transit? I wouldn't mind taking a bus to work since it's one less thing for me to worry about.
Tom
23MPG in the city? Or mostly HWY? My average speed in to work is about 35MPH. The focus has a 2L 4cyl engine that gets around 160 horse power at 5000 RPM.
Tom
It doesn't always make sense though [but yeah most of the time it does]. For example, if you have two sets of lights. And the first goes green first. You may say "oh why not just get up to moving speed and coast to the next." But that means traffic behind you can't get through the first intersection and you're denying their right of way.
What I do is hit the limit [and nothing more] then when I'm reasonably close [e.g. twice the breaking distance or so] I then start to coast.
Of course, if there is nobody behind me I'll just take my time from the start. But you always have to be aware of what's around you.
Tom
I drive a Ford Focus 2007 sedan and in the first couple weeks I had the car I drove fairly sporty [e.g. speed limit all the time no coasting] and got about 13L/100Km in the city. I've spent the last week and a bit driving more carefully, that is, coasting to stops, using cruise control whenever possible, not accelerating as quickly to the next redlight. When I filled up yesterday I purchased 15L of fuel for 154Km of distance. or about 10L/100Km.
In yankee, I'm getting 23.6MPG now instead of 18.2MPG (both in city) for a boost of 29.7% more MPG. I still do the speed limit, I'm just not as heavy on the gas. And when I hit the speed limit I use cruise control where possible. I also don't keep constant speed when there is a red up ahead. Usually I'm doing 20-30 kph under the limit by time I have to brake. If this could be helped via a computer I'm all for it.
Obviously my "study" isn't really comprehensive. But given that i do the same 14Km route every day there aren't a lot of variables in the mix.
Tom
So if someone links to a site from Slashdot, no-one's going to read it because the site will expect you to pay them $20 up front for 2000 page views that you're never going to use?
I suggest you read up how AP and Reuters works. Do you pay $20 for each article in a printed newspaper?
Christ almighty you can't be this stupid. Honestly.
Tom
Hello captain extremism! I'm Tom. please to meet you!
First off, if the site can't make it's case for getting you to pay them, why would you pay them? So no, you wouldn't give $20 to every random site you hit.
Do you, buy everything you see in a store? No? Didn't think so.
As for the price, well how about this, it's one cent [or whatever] to buy a page of content [e.g. a news article]. Reloads/etc being free since most users wouldn't reload the page 1000s of times anyways.
Whatever, point is not every site is the same and not all pricing models apply universally. For highly interactive sites where the concept of static pages doesn't exist, it could be a flat fee or whatever, who knows.
Point is, there are ways to generate subscriber income.
You offer some links as free and the rest as paying users only. Fark does that already in case you didn't notice.
Tom
I think that's part of the problem though. there are hundreds of relatively shotty websites. You have to use a dozen sites just to get what you want. Like I read slashdot and fark to get the wacky tech/other news. If there was one good site that did both I wouldn't need to pay $20/mo for two sites now would I?
And you don't need to CHARGE micropayments, you just account for them. E.g. I give you $20 and it's good for [say] 2000 page views. Sure each page only costs me a cent, but you're not actually doing a transaction for it. But the point is, we've grown accustomed to things just being free which is not really how the world works.
Tom
Not everything is paid for by ads. Why people just assume everything on the net should be free is beyond me.
Suppose slashdot was running into cash problems. If the service was actually of any value people would pay to support it. If subscribers don't meet the budget they'd have to scale back or fold.
Point is. You don't need advertising revenue to run a website. you need to provide a service people want to spend money on. Just LIKE ANY OTHER BUSINESS.
Tom
By your logic we shouldn't stop drug sales either. Someone else will sell them anyways.
Point is, just because you look good doesn't mean you're a good actor. And if we didn't condition society to enjoy appearances over substance there *would be* a market for real acting/music/art abilities.
And frankly I find the notion that only A list actors can make a movie offensive. I just finished watching "Children of Men" which aside from Clive Owen [or whatever his name is] the rest of the characters are not A listers. Yet it's still a good movie.
Tom
Shows wouldn't need so much financing if they didn't pay the few star actors hundreds of thousands of dollars per episode. You look at a show like Seinfeld or that one with that annoying long island guy, and it's basically 98% of the budget for 3 or 4 actors/producers, and 2% for the rest of the cast, crew, production, sets, distribution, licenses, etc.
And frankly, I wouldn't mind advertising if they followed a few rules
1. I'm not 3 years old, I can do basic arithmetic and think for myself. Stop trying to convince me what a wonderful deal it is.
2. Playing the same ad 300 times per hour will not make me want to buy it
3. Just because you can advertise it doesn't mean people will buy it [re: car ads during hockey games].
4. Fine print is annoying, it makes you look like you have things to hide.
Tom
They talk at the end about a star 7500 LY away that might "go supernova soon." It should probably be pointed out that it could have already gone supernova 6000 years ago and we'd not know about it.
I guess they should say "might see if it went supernova soon."
Tom
You know you can cancel early right?
Rogers tries that too. It costs me $55 a month for this stupid cell. If I have a year left on my term and don't want a phone anymore, it's actually cheaper to pay the $200 cancellation fee than 12*55 for the year. I had to cancel a friends cell that I had on my plan once and they tried to argue it was smarter to keep it. I broke out the times table on them and showed that not paying $300 extra for a phone I wouldn't use is smarter.
That being said, they totally abuse the terms anyways. They tried to slap me with the fee on a phone I bought outright [e.g. no contract]. To add insult to injury the phone was locked to the carrier even though I paid the full price.
Lesson to be learned. Only buy unlocked phones, and only use pay as you go unless you really need a phone.
Yeah but that's neither illegal or immoral. As a society we allow and tolerate adults drinking, even, gasp, for recreation.
It'd be like the teacher having a blog talking about her sex life. Are we now to disallow teachers from copulation as well? Well we don't let kids vote either. So teachers shouldn't vote. And most kids can't drive. Therefore no driving, etc...
TEACHERS ARE NOT [supposed to be] KIDS!
Tom
27 now, 2 years ago ... that makes her? 16? 33? ooooh gosh this is hard...
How is it promoting underage drinking if she was 4 years older than the legal age requirement?
Tom
In the software world, if you take a public domain program, compile it, stamp a copyright on it, you can't claim a violation if someone else takes the same source and builds it themselves.
Same in music. If I take a Handel piece and play it, I can copyright my performance. But if someone else plays the piece, they too can copyright their performance.
As for being able to copyright music, I'd say there is a strong need for that. Much like software, good music is hard to come by and write. There wouldn't be an incentive for professional musicians if they couldn't make a living off it [not like people are willing to just subsidize their living...].
Sadly we can't make the distinction between what is worthy of protection. I think quite a bit of "pop culture" music is just annoying rehashes of last weeks music. That shit shouldn't be played, let alone copyrighted as they shouldn't have an incentive to produce crap, play it a zillion times and brainwash people into thinking it's an acceptable norm.
Tom
Everything that is new is old. If only truly new and 100% original works were copyrightable nothing would be copyrightable.
You're saying that if I take a table from [say] an NIST crypto spec, then wrap it in 100K lines of my own code, I can't copyright the entire package?
Well, I have yet to see a book which is 100% in its own language with it's own grammar, style, lingo, etc... So by your logic no books should have copyright status.
Tom
That's a lie. We don't remember shit all about our history lessons. I just know what a poppy is.
That said, yes, they do paint a picture, but I remember learning about internment camps and our refusal to take in jewish refugees. Not all of canadian history classes are painted rosy.
Tom
No, that's we're not blatantly paranoid and knee-jerk reactionaries.
Also that we remember our histories lessons, and that a "red poppy looking flower" is probably A POPPY!!!
Tom
Granted, but part of the problem with MSFT is they have a vested interest in pandering to morons. Most individuals aren't totally stupid, and certainly feeding that cycle will be a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Maybe if Linux or another UNIX was the commonplace desktop we could expect our users to be a bit more intelligent about their security.
Essentially MSFT makes money by calling their users stupid and selling them software to make the bad scary computer go away. Which is, oddly enough, also why OSS users tend to look down upon MSFT users.
Tom
Um, you can only get extradited for violating a law within their territory. If you hosted your software in China, or helped distribute within China, that's another story.
It's just like how the USA had more severe crypto export laws than Canada. Us Cannucks can give out crypto relatively easily [then and now] without regard to the yanks.
This guy was being pursued because he distributed the breaks within the states [most likely]. I disagree with the extradition but the likely reason for it is because of the distribution within America [well that and corporate malfeasants].
Tom
While I disagree with the extradition, your example is not quite the same. He broke copy protection schemes and promoted [allegedly] the copyright violation of software on a global scale. That he did it from Australia is what bothers me. Can't the aussie courts deal with this?
That you can get prison time for it bothers me as well. I can see a fine and probation [maybe be denied a computer for a short period], but being locked up is hardly productive, especially for a very non-violent crime.
Tom
I want you to read a magnetic tape or vinyl without a machine. Oh can't? Therefore music shouldn't be copyrightable.
As for software coming with the source... I've been using computers since I was a wee lad [re: 1985 on] and I don't recall any commercial programs from office tools [pagemaker, clarisworks, etc] to video games [apache, beyond dark castle, etc...] coming with the source. In fact, they were very much closed source proprietary applications.
Maybe in the 60s and 70s when programs were still trivial and hard to distribute they were given out in source form. But I think it's safe to say the norm from the 80s on was not to give out the source.
And just because some people abuse copyright with DRM doesn't mean we should all lose it's protection. I write software libraries for a living. When we license our code to people they have full use of the code they paid for [no DRM preventing debugging, analysis, etc]. So people should be able to just copy and give out the code I write and not pay for it? But I work in a specialty field of cryptography. If folk like me can't earn some coin, who do you suppose is going to write commercial cryptography in the future?
I agree that DRM shouldn't be used to violate fair use rights. I disagree that because some people choose to do this we should all lose the protection of copyright.
Tom
Feeding the system which robs people of ambition and actual results doesn't really help society. Sure it's easier to "play the game" but is it worth it?
I can't speak about all fields, but from what I saw in the crypto field there are a lot of irrelevant trivial "results" published every year. Clearly a result of "publish or perish" from grad students [and their profs trying to bolster a career record].
If your results [or text] are truly noteworthy they'll stand on their own even in a non "published" format. Better yet, negotiations with journals to relinquish online publication rights would mean that it's about the results not the names.
Tom