Re:Sourceforge / Savannah / Debian SF/ GForge HUH?
on
Debian's Own SourceForge
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· Score: 2, Informative
Savannah - a sourceforge 2.5 installation, i dont think its distributed really, or actively developed. it was just a successful minor clean up so it would run of the sf codebase.
I'm not a Savannah developer, just someone who has a project hosted by savannah, but I've been impressed with them so far. Savannah may be based on SF 2.5 (I don't know) but I have seen many bugfixes, and some very useful improvements recently, like searchable mailing list archives. The developers are busy of course, but they at least plan to add new features like downloadable web logs and statistics.
it is primarily for use by gnu developers.
Currently Savannah has more non-gnu than gnu projects now. Maybe its original purpose was to help GNU developers, but it's not primarily used by them now.
Network security is an example of a market externality: if an intruder gains access to one network, attacks can be launched against other networks. These attacks often hurt the recipient of the attack, and not the originally cracked network.
As a result, it seems that basic economics predicts that companies will not, of their own volition, spend sufficient effort and money to secure their networks. In cases like this government intervention can often make everyone better off (compare environmental regulation). Let's at least consider the possibility that the government does something besides make people's lives hard for no reason.
Rosy future taken for granted too soon
on
Cringely on P2P
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· Score: 1
Cringely writes:
And that will only start to change when the first really big artists jumps from old media to new, trading 15 percent of $30 times 100,000 copies for 100 percent of $0.50 times 1 million copies.
and generally implies that the only obstacle to some utopian situation are entrenched reactionary forces like the RIAA and MPAA, and perhaps some convenient micropayment system.
But things are not that clear! If the cost of songs does reach the marginal cost of distribution (i.e. approx $0.0001) then why will one million people give $0.50 to an artist? Why not just download it for free? True, some people will support artists out of charity, but charity has its limits. Why give a dollar to some artist or open source programmer when you can give it to a starving/homeless person instead? Or to put it a different way, if charity is too weak to cure homelessness and hunger, where the moral issues are striking and straightforward, why do we think it is strong enough to channel an adequate amount of money into media projects?
I think it's important we take a hard look at post-P2P economics, and try to figure out how expensive high-quality projects can still be completed. Personally I like some expensive movies, like The Matrix for instance, and think it would be a shame if they are no longer possible in the future.
Lab spokesman James Rickman says small sections at the bottom of the canyon, formerly known as Technical Area 10, were used from the 1940s until 1961 as test sites by scientists studying explosions.
Rickman says it's not really that there's a risk, but the lab wanted to point that out.
So apparently that area is not particularly dangerous. However, the LANL reports found some areas with a quarterly doses of about 300mrem. At that rate it wouldn't take long to accumulate a total dose of multiple rems, which starts getting dangerous (5 rem is some legal cutoff I believe). Hopefully those areas aren't inhabited..
Trade that is welcomed by both parties is not bad. Just because third party interlopers feel the need to stamp and huff about it, it doesn't mean that it should be done away with.
And if your child was trying to chew on nails / [something pointy] for fun, would you let it find out for itself if it was harmful, or would you suggest a few alternatives for it?
Your comparison to children is telling, because your argument, like many anti-trade arguments, rests on paternalism. It's common for first worlders to assume that they know better than the democratic governments elected by the people they are trying to help, or even the people themselves. Surprise, intelligence isn't limited to the rich. Poor people are often perfectly capable of evaluating the pros and cons of their own choices.
There was a kid I knew in high school that could find cube roots for eight digit numbers nearly instantly...John, my autistic friend in high school, hadn't dedicated the hardware to anything in particular, but he still had it available. He was lacking in a lot of things, but sheer processing power and memory he had in spades.
Hate to break it to you, but finding the cube roots of perfect cubes isn't nearly as hard as it seems, and is a trick "Human Calculators" use in performance for that reason.
For instance, when a 3 digit number is cubed, the last digit determines the last digit of the cube: 1 -> 1 2 -> 8 3 -> 7 4 -> 4 5 -> 5 6 -> 6 7 -> 3 8 -> 2 9 -> 9
So finding the last digit is a piece of cake. There are other tricks for finding the other two digits. Use them all and the next time someone asks you for the cube root of 81746504 you can answer "434" right away. Probably your friend had a lot less "linear processing power" than it seemed, and maybe not much more than average.
Slashdot Mirror
Network security is an example of a market externality: if an intruder gains access to one network, attacks can be launched against other networks. These attacks often hurt the recipient of the attack, and not the originally cracked network.
As a result, it seems that basic economics predicts that companies will not, of their own volition, spend sufficient effort and money to secure their networks. In cases like this government intervention can often make everyone better off (compare environmental regulation). Let's at least consider the possibility that the government does something besides make people's lives hard for no reason.
But things are not that clear! If the cost of songs does reach the marginal cost of distribution (i.e. approx $0.0001) then why will one million people give $0.50 to an artist? Why not just download it for free? True, some people will support artists out of charity, but charity has its limits. Why give a dollar to some artist or open source programmer when you can give it to a starving/homeless person instead? Or to put it a different way, if charity is too weak to cure homelessness and hunger, where the moral issues are striking and straightforward, why do we think it is strong enough to channel an adequate amount of money into media projects?
I think it's important we take a hard look at post-P2P economics, and try to figure out how expensive high-quality projects can still be completed. Personally I like some expensive movies, like The Matrix for instance, and think it would be a shame if they are no longer possible in the future.
There was a kid I knew in high school that could find cube roots for eight digit numbers nearly instantly...John, my autistic friend in high school, hadn't dedicated the hardware to anything in particular, but he still had it available. He was lacking in a lot of things, but sheer processing power and memory he had in spades.
Hate to break it to you, but finding the cube roots of perfect cubes isn't nearly as hard as it seems, and is a trick "Human Calculators" use in performance for that reason.
For instance, when a 3 digit number is cubed, the last digit determines the last digit of the cube:
1 -> 1
2 -> 8
3 -> 7
4 -> 4
5 -> 5
6 -> 6
7 -> 3
8 -> 2
9 -> 9
So finding the last digit is a piece of cake. There are other tricks for finding the other two digits. Use them all and the next time someone asks you for the cube root of 81746504 you can answer "434" right away. Probably your friend had a lot less "linear processing power" than it seemed, and maybe not much more than average.