That's no good. This puts a very hard cap on what even the top, most "succesful" content creators can earn. When you sell services, you are selling your time. You only have so many hours in a day, and you can only reasonably charge so much for an hour of your time. The musician can't go perform a concert every time someone somewhere in the world wants to hear his song. But why shouldn't he receive some compensation when they do? He created it with his own time, energy, and risk. He had the opportunity cost of plying a different trade, and took a risk to spend his time creating his art. I know this is/. and IP of any sort is bad, but I'll take my chances posting this.;-)
The intended purpose of copyright (and patents) is to provide incentive to artists and inventors to take risks and create. Your approach would have it that inventors can't profit directly off their inventions, they simply have to use that to make a name for themselves as consultants. Sorry, but where's the incentive to invent? And once you have a name - as the best will - where's the incentive to continnue innovating? I'm doing just fine as a consultant without having invented Linux or any other big open-source innovation. Spending my time inventing something that would "make a name for" myself isn't going to seriously impact my income - and it's definitely not going to pay for the time it took me to invent it.
The fact that we don't want to live in mud huts (or Soviet-style poverty) is why it is "so expensive" to live in the Western world. Communism attempted to equate everyone as equals. How well did THAT work out?
And besides, expensive is relative - if you make more you can spend more - it's all about the ratio of income to expense.
My old Sony VAIO never got as hot as my MacBook Pro does, and it is something that should be considered.
How important is heat, really? Assuming that the machine has been engineered sufficiently well to prevent the processor from melting down, I think it's a minor consideration at most. I agree that my MBP can get hot, and I knew that from reviews before I bought it. But I never even considered not buying one because of the heat, and I can't imagine that heat is a serioius consideration to 99.9% of laptop buyers. And no consideration at all to desktop buyers (and in server rooms where it is a consideration... they'll have an A/C system anyway).
I doubt Intel is going to lose any customers because their chip gets too hot.
Isn't the same true of *all* new media formats? It's a chicken-and-the-egg problem.
Some don't make it (Beta, Laserdisc, anyone?), some do (CD, DVD, cassette tape, VHS). Nobody serious ever *ostensibly* releases a new format just for the sake of having a new format - there are always new purported gains with a new format, which are what generate the excitement.
But either way, *somebody* has to be a pioneer and stick their necks out in hopes of adoption by others. Otherwise nothing would ever improve.
It's a question of $/KB storage. Right now there's a perfectly viable backup media: another hard drive. External USB hard drives seem to run about $1/GB right now. Dunno what the pricing on a DVD burner is - less certainly when you figure in the swapping of media - but what you lose by paying less is the ability to have the whole drive on one piece of media.
Back when CD-ROM *readers* were new I think average hard drive space was maybe 200MB? Well even a rev 1 CDR held 600+, which was plenty, but while CD-ROM readers were starting to hit the retail market, CD burners were so expensive that only companies could afford them. My point? There was a viable storage media back then too that could hold a whole hard drive worth of data. It was just not cost effective compared with a second hard drive.
Many futurists foresee humanity leaving behind biology and joining with hardware and machine bodies
No knock on Ray Kurzweil, but I think it's a bit short-sighted (when looking to the longer-term future) to consider biology and hardware (or electronics, chemistry, mechanics...) as different. At the molecular level, these things all merge into one combined field. And we're going to have to get to that level (i.e. true nanotech) before any of this can really happen to the extent that we're discussing (moving humans to machine bodies...)
The way I see it, the current related scientific fields are approaching that same happy nanotech place from different directions. Biologists are taking natural machines, and working downward, trying to reduce natural "machines" into smaller and smaller components. Electrical and Mechanical engineers are working on ways to build smaller and smaller devices from "scratch." Chemists & physicists work from the bottom-up, taking individual molecules and trying to combine them into larger useful forms.
Why do we have to have a story every time a bug is fixed in IE or Firefox...?
Because Slashdorks like ourselves keep reading them and posting comments. You can bet if people stopped reading & commenting, the editors would stop posting these stories.
Right. But recruiters trolling for interview candidates for a new job have requirements like "5-8 years experience" not requirements like "previous held title of Senior Software Engineer." Someone who comes in with 2 years and that title is going to be considered as someone with 2 years of experience.
I'm not supporting the way recruiters filter people, as there are people with 2 years that can contribute far more than some with 8, but that's the way it is. Inflated titles don't go very far.
Just goes to show how little a title really means. You do the same work, you get the same pay... why would your boss care if you wanna call yourself Senior Software Engineer or Chief Kahuna of The Southeast Cubicle? Talk about a cheap motivator...
I can see how having a camera phone can be problematic for government workers/contractors, but obviously phone manufacturers are not considering this group of individuals. And why you ask? Because the phones we got in American are not driven by manufacturers, but by carriers.
Phone manufacturers aren't considering this group of individuals because there aren't enough of them to comprise a significant market segment. Financially speaking, they don't matter.
Sure, the carriers would like anything put on the phones that might encourage a user to use more minutes/bandwidth, but they too are driven by market demand. If there was a significant demand for phones-sans-cameras, you can bet there would be some on the market.
how the system works in Europe and why it's so much better
Don't even *make* me get out my flag and start waving it at you.:-P
Slashbots that think the proper attire is one specialized device for each function needed (one mp3 player, one phone, one pda, one digicam...)?
Well I think the point is that the cameras built into phones - even with much-touted improvements - are still pretty crappy cameras in the grand scheme & so you *still* need to have a seperate digicam along with the phone. Why have one in the phone? If the phone's camera were good enough to be a primary camera then I agree with you - why have two devices when you could just carry one.
This of course is because people respond to higher MP counts in the same way they like "bling".
Just like processor MHz when buying computer systems. It's a rough guide to speed, but there are other (often more important) factors. But it's so much easier to rate & quantize things when you can just pick a number and say bigger is better.
Dunno if this will reduce spam at all - but if this provides a more effective way to filter the good stuff from the spam, then we don't *have* to reduce spam. The whole point in reducing spam (from the user's perspective - not the ISP's) isn't to reduce spam, per se, but to more easily find and read the good email.
I'm a Mac user myself, and I know macs are supposed to be the shiznit for graphics... but I still haven't found a drawing program I like as much as Visio.
I also find that I have to switch over to my windows box for some of my development & testing. In particular, there are very few mobile device simulators that run on non-Windows platforms. Basic WTKs are it.
Not, useless debt building toys that are made to fight a cold war enemy, long gone.
<cynicism> Debt-building toys aren't useless to those who are making this program happen. They are helping this LANL research push a research and personal branding effort (what better way to promote his book about giant lasers?) They are also bringing $ and "jobs" to any number of contractors actually building this system, which brings votes to their respective congressmen.
So, while they may be useless to fight current enemies, and debt-building, I doubt they're useless to those who are actually pushing the program. </cynicism>
Whose going to build their nuclear weapon onto a missle delivery system if they know we can shoot it down?
Well, nobody. That's the point - one less delivery vector to worry about. We're still going to have to worry about suitcase nukes either way, but with this deterrent in place, we can take the bandwidth we used to spend worrying about missiles and use that to worry more about suitcase bombs.
Well there are a lot more areas where data mining is useful than just mining for consumer habits. People are freaking out about mining of personal information - ChoicePoint, Locate Plus, Lexus Nexus, to name a few examples - the article is discussing the lack of data mining in science and actually claims that data mining is commonplace in business.
A snippet from the article:
the tools taken as routine in business are being overlooked in academia
I can't see anybody getting upset about scientific data mining.
Sending junk faxes costs money too - much more, I suspect, than email spam. Unless you happen to be in the fax-spammer's area code (if so, just go over & break his knees), there's a long-distance call involved in sending you that fax.
The only way I can think of to get around this without paying some fees to someone is to set up your own dialers in each area code, connected via internet, and send out that way - similar to an old-school ISP setup (only outgoing instead of receiving calls). Sure there are monthly costs, but those costs won't scale with the number of faxes sent (aside from having to add additional phone lines for heavy volume). I wonder how the numbers work out...
Interesting about the audit clauses, but what about gov't agencies with sensitive data? I guess they'd wrangle out of an audit by crying national security, etc.
The FSF Europe is alarmed by the prospect that customers who request a base systems would risk a visit from Microsoft's investigators.
Anyone with some knowledge of EU law... why would these "investigators" be allowed in the front door of any business? I can tell you the type of reception they'd receive at my company's front door. They obviously wouldn't be allowed in to audit our systems - and I can't imagine they would have any legal recourse for it without some sort of subpoena, which would require some substantive evidence.
The colleges can't block them out - there's no direct contact between the students' PCs and any RIAA-controlled servers (well maybe if an RIAA employee is on a p2p network posing as a user - but they don't necessarily sit at RIAA HQ to do that). The problem is, the RIAA bullies/subpoenas/asks ISPs to give out IP addresses that are known or suspected to have downloaded illegal content from sharing networks, etc.
A better approach might be for the colleges to block access to file sharing networks - although this is pretty tough to do if it's true peer-to-peer. I think they'd have to actually sniff packets and try to determine when someone is using protocols from the major file-sharing platforms. Obviously, huge privacy issues here as well as cutting online freedom in order to protect the students.
The real answer is probably going to have to be a "soft" one. Educate students, enact university-level policies to help protected students legally, etc.
"Other objections are simply incorrect. The company has, for example, claimed that in one case we sent a reviewer material that did not come from any Britannica publication."
That - right there is Brittanica getting desperate & flailing around attempting to attack anyone who criticizes them.
I agree with you overall, but I think this is a valid complaint by Britannica! They're being attacked for inaccuracies in text they didn't write?
Slashdot Mirror
That's no good. This puts a very hard cap on what even the top, most "succesful" content creators can earn. When you sell services, you are selling your time. You only have so many hours in a day, and you can only reasonably charge so much for an hour of your time. The musician can't go perform a concert every time someone somewhere in the world wants to hear his song. But why shouldn't he receive some compensation when they do? He created it with his own time, energy, and risk. He had the opportunity cost of plying a different trade, and took a risk to spend his time creating his art. I know this is /. and IP of any sort is bad, but I'll take my chances posting this. ;-)
The intended purpose of copyright (and patents) is to provide incentive to artists and inventors to take risks and create. Your approach would have it that inventors can't profit directly off their inventions, they simply have to use that to make a name for themselves as consultants. Sorry, but where's the incentive to invent? And once you have a name - as the best will - where's the incentive to continnue innovating? I'm doing just fine as a consultant without having invented Linux or any other big open-source innovation. Spending my time inventing something that would "make a name for" myself isn't going to seriously impact my income - and it's definitely not going to pay for the time it took me to invent it.
I'll take my IP, thank you very much.
The fact that we don't want to live in mud huts (or Soviet-style poverty) is why it is "so expensive" to live in the Western world. Communism attempted to equate everyone as equals. How well did THAT work out?
And besides, expensive is relative - if you make more you can spend more - it's all about the ratio of income to expense.
My old Sony VAIO never got as hot as my MacBook Pro does, and it is something that should be considered.
How important is heat, really? Assuming that the machine has been engineered sufficiently well to prevent the processor from melting down, I think it's a minor consideration at most. I agree that my MBP can get hot, and I knew that from reviews before I bought it. But I never even considered not buying one because of the heat, and I can't imagine that heat is a serioius consideration to 99.9% of laptop buyers. And no consideration at all to desktop buyers (and in server rooms where it is a consideration... they'll have an A/C system anyway).
I doubt Intel is going to lose any customers because their chip gets too hot.
Isn't the same true of *all* new media formats? It's a chicken-and-the-egg problem.
Some don't make it (Beta, Laserdisc, anyone?), some do (CD, DVD, cassette tape, VHS). Nobody serious ever *ostensibly* releases a new format just for the sake of having a new format - there are always new purported gains with a new format, which are what generate the excitement.
But either way, *somebody* has to be a pioneer and stick their necks out in hopes of adoption by others. Otherwise nothing would ever improve.
It's a question of $/KB storage. Right now there's a perfectly viable backup media: another hard drive. External USB hard drives seem to run about $1/GB right now. Dunno what the pricing on a DVD burner is - less certainly when you figure in the swapping of media - but what you lose by paying less is the ability to have the whole drive on one piece of media.
Back when CD-ROM *readers* were new I think average hard drive space was maybe 200MB? Well even a rev 1 CDR held 600+, which was plenty, but while CD-ROM readers were starting to hit the retail market, CD burners were so expensive that only companies could afford them. My point? There was a viable storage media back then too that could hold a whole hard drive worth of data. It was just not cost effective compared with a second hard drive.
Many futurists foresee humanity leaving behind biology and joining with hardware and machine bodies
No knock on Ray Kurzweil, but I think it's a bit short-sighted (when looking to the longer-term future) to consider biology and hardware (or electronics, chemistry, mechanics...) as different. At the molecular level, these things all merge into one combined field. And we're going to have to get to that level (i.e. true nanotech) before any of this can really happen to the extent that we're discussing (moving humans to machine bodies...)
The way I see it, the current related scientific fields are approaching that same happy nanotech place from different directions. Biologists are taking natural machines, and working downward, trying to reduce natural "machines" into smaller and smaller components. Electrical and Mechanical engineers are working on ways to build smaller and smaller devices from "scratch." Chemists & physicists work from the bottom-up, taking individual molecules and trying to combine them into larger useful forms.
Why do we have to have a story every time a bug is fixed in IE or Firefox...?
Because Slashdorks like ourselves keep reading them and posting comments. You can bet if people stopped reading & commenting, the editors would stop posting these stories.
Right. But recruiters trolling for interview candidates for a new job have requirements like "5-8 years experience" not requirements like "previous held title of Senior Software Engineer." Someone who comes in with 2 years and that title is going to be considered as someone with 2 years of experience.
I'm not supporting the way recruiters filter people, as there are people with 2 years that can contribute far more than some with 8, but that's the way it is. Inflated titles don't go very far.
Just goes to show how little a title really means. You do the same work, you get the same pay... why would your boss care if you wanna call yourself Senior Software Engineer or Chief Kahuna of The Southeast Cubicle? Talk about a cheap motivator...
I can see how having a camera phone can be problematic for government workers/contractors, but obviously phone manufacturers are not considering this group of individuals. And why you ask? Because the phones we got in American are not driven by manufacturers, but by carriers.
:-P
Phone manufacturers aren't considering this group of individuals because there aren't enough of them to comprise a significant market segment. Financially speaking, they don't matter.
Sure, the carriers would like anything put on the phones that might encourage a user to use more minutes/bandwidth, but they too are driven by market demand. If there was a significant demand for phones-sans-cameras, you can bet there would be some on the market.
how the system works in Europe and why it's so much better
Don't even *make* me get out my flag and start waving it at you.
Slashbots that think the proper attire is one specialized device for each function needed (one mp3 player, one phone, one pda, one digicam...)?
Well I think the point is that the cameras built into phones - even with much-touted improvements - are still pretty crappy cameras in the grand scheme & so you *still* need to have a seperate digicam along with the phone. Why have one in the phone? If the phone's camera were good enough to be a primary camera then I agree with you - why have two devices when you could just carry one.
This of course is because people respond to higher MP counts in the same way they like "bling".
Just like processor MHz when buying computer systems. It's a rough guide to speed, but there are other (often more important) factors. But it's so much easier to rate & quantize things when you can just pick a number and say bigger is better.
Dunno if this will reduce spam at all - but if this provides a more effective way to filter the good stuff from the spam, then we don't *have* to reduce spam. The whole point in reducing spam (from the user's perspective - not the ISP's) isn't to reduce spam, per se, but to more easily find and read the good email.
I'm a Mac user myself, and I know macs are supposed to be the shiznit for graphics... but I still haven't found a drawing program I like as much as Visio.
I also find that I have to switch over to my windows box for some of my development & testing. In particular, there are very few mobile device simulators that run on non-Windows platforms. Basic WTKs are it.
Not, useless debt building toys that are made to fight a cold war enemy, long gone.
<cynicism>
Debt-building toys aren't useless to those who are making this program happen. They are helping this LANL research push a research and personal branding effort (what better way to promote his book about giant lasers?) They are also bringing $ and "jobs" to any number of contractors actually building this system, which brings votes to their respective congressmen.
So, while they may be useless to fight current enemies, and debt-building, I doubt they're useless to those who are actually pushing the program.
</cynicism>
Whose going to build their nuclear weapon onto a missle delivery system if they know we can shoot it down?
Well, nobody. That's the point - one less delivery vector to worry about. We're still going to have to worry about suitcase nukes either way, but with this deterrent in place, we can take the bandwidth we used to spend worrying about missiles and use that to worry more about suitcase bombs.
Well there are a lot more areas where data mining is useful than just mining for consumer habits. People are freaking out about mining of personal information - ChoicePoint, Locate Plus, Lexus Nexus, to name a few examples - the article is discussing the lack of data mining in science and actually claims that data mining is commonplace in business.
A snippet from the article:
the tools taken as routine in business are being overlooked in academia
I can't see anybody getting upset about scientific data mining.
Local hard drive search? Spotlight should do the trick for me...
Sending junk faxes costs money too - much more, I suspect, than email spam. Unless you happen to be in the fax-spammer's area code (if so, just go over & break his knees), there's a long-distance call involved in sending you that fax.
The only way I can think of to get around this without paying some fees to someone is to set up your own dialers in each area code, connected via internet, and send out that way - similar to an old-school ISP setup (only outgoing instead of receiving calls). Sure there are monthly costs, but those costs won't scale with the number of faxes sent (aside from having to add additional phone lines for heavy volume). I wonder how the numbers work out...
Interesting about the audit clauses, but what about gov't agencies with sensitive data? I guess they'd wrangle out of an audit by crying national security, etc.
No, I haven't. Do they have a legal recourse? Or some sort of leverage to strongarm a company or individual into cooperating?
The FSF Europe is alarmed by the prospect that customers who request a base systems would risk a visit from Microsoft's investigators.
Anyone with some knowledge of EU law... why would these "investigators" be allowed in the front door of any business? I can tell you the type of reception they'd receive at my company's front door. They obviously wouldn't be allowed in to audit our systems - and I can't imagine they would have any legal recourse for it without some sort of subpoena, which would require some substantive evidence.
I agree with last post - why is this flamebait?
The colleges can't block them out - there's no direct contact between the students' PCs and any RIAA-controlled servers (well maybe if an RIAA employee is on a p2p network posing as a user - but they don't necessarily sit at RIAA HQ to do that). The problem is, the RIAA bullies/subpoenas/asks ISPs to give out IP addresses that are known or suspected to have downloaded illegal content from sharing networks, etc.
A better approach might be for the colleges to block access to file sharing networks - although this is pretty tough to do if it's true peer-to-peer. I think they'd have to actually sniff packets and try to determine when someone is using protocols from the major file-sharing platforms. Obviously, huge privacy issues here as well as cutting online freedom in order to protect the students.
The real answer is probably going to have to be a "soft" one. Educate students, enact university-level policies to help protected students legally, etc.
"Other objections are simply incorrect. The company has, for example, claimed that in one case we sent a reviewer material that did not come from any Britannica publication."
That - right there is Brittanica getting desperate & flailing around attempting to attack anyone who criticizes them.
I agree with you overall, but I think this is a valid complaint by Britannica! They're being attacked for inaccuracies in text they didn't write?
> that's unpossible!
It's perfectly cromulent.