Sorry you had to waste so much time writing what you thought was a clever analogy. You see, food != databits. food is physically scarce and requires a lot of time & energy to create and distribute new instances; data is not. It makes sense to pay for a physically scarce object; it does not make sense to pay for artificial scarcity.
Capitalism works best in environments of actual scarcity; it has to be perverted to work with abundance.
Uh, except with Suprnova there's none of that old ratio or banner-clicking bullshit, and the password-required trackers are clearly marked with a big gold icon so you can avoid those annoying "members only" clubs.
If you bother to sign up at one of those registration-required tracker sites, what you'll usually find is some kid begging for paypal donations for his l33t server with fewer torrents than available publicly.
For some reason your comment was moderated insightful instead of funny.
Either the mods are crack-smoking, stock-owning sympathizers of "The Man" and "The System", or, the mods are... just on crack.:)
(Anyway, don't assume that everyone who's over 30 and working for some soulless corporation has been assimilated into the boring status quo. Rocking the boat is great fun (especially if you can afford to, like Justin can))
You really want to build a second elevator a few dozen miles away and use it to return the elevator cars back down.
We'd want to build multiple elevators all around the equator anyway, but here's a thought on the up/down balancing: most traffic would be outbound, so if the climbers/cars could be built cheaply enough and were made to be self-collapsable, then you could send up hundreds of them before bringing them back in one load for re-use. You *could* also just send them back via normal re-entry if a shield was sent up. And if the climbers could be made truly cheap (as would be the case in a "carbon" economy with ultra-cheap manufacturing), then you might not want to return them at all and reuse the matter in orbit later.
It's a strange commodity that makes you lose rights to your own work if you attempt to incorporate it.
Sorry, but I'm not in the camp that thinks the GPL is somehow bad because it lets you stand on the shoulders of giants while requiring you to do the same (if you distribute). You're not losing any "rights" by not being able to exploit the commons.
Arthur C. Clark -- the guy who invented the idea of the geosync satellite -- said of the space elevator not too long ago, that "Itll be built 10 years after everybody stops laughing and I think they have stopped laughing." Here's to hoping that exponential progress in molecular nanotech makes his estimate a not-so-idealistic one.
I can't help but think about all the political hurdles that'll delay the space elevator more than any technical setbacks. And then I get to thinking about how slow and unromantic a space elevator ascent would be compared to the exciting phallic-rocket launch. Still, the space elevator is about the only way to eventually get launch costs below a dollar per pound; chemical rockets are too energy-wasteful to ever reach that point.
had Andromeda been GPL, that then he would have paid. Do you really believe that?
I dunno. I'm one of those people who's donated more money (and time/code/bugsreports) to open projects than the sum of all closed products.
btw, I noticed the "stream of conscience" text at the bottom of your turnstyle mainpage - you don't happen to have experience getting higher rankings in search engines do you? want to sell me your SEO services, or, a product that will 'analyze' my site instead?:)
From the perspective of anyone who depends on writing software to make a living, it is an especially obnoxious proprietary license.
Funny - I make my living by writing, integrating and providing valueadd support for BSD & GPL'd solutions (mostly web-based).
Most software is a commodity now so it's just the reality of the situation that providing services around opensource is more efficient than the ol' model of selling a piece of shrinked-wrapped artificial scarcity, or a license for same.
Maybe you could refute his claims instead of just being pissed about the attitude.
Does your code break easily when modified? Closed or open that's a turnoff and you'd get the same hostility except it'd be more along the lines of "I replaced with another 'product'".
Right, but in the US they can get you like they did Napster: with "contributory copyright infringement" if you knowingly maintain a central index of pointers to infringing bits. The INDUCE act would make it even easier to crackdown (IN the U.S.).
Still, it's an unwinnable game of whack-a-mole. Even with more draconian international laws, and pervasive "Trusted Computing" on the "Secure Internet", it will still be possible for information to flow freely on overnets and via wireless.
I just knew that when I viewed the comments for this story that at least half of them would be lame jokes about the 'nerd' not getting the alllllll-important poontang. All hail the genetically "successful" horny primates with no time for thinking!
We logged your HTTP POST packet enroute to slashdot.org as it hopped across our "PATRIOT2 blackboxes", which are installed at the border of most ISPs, as required by anti-terrorism law.
Your IP is 149.101.1.32 and our reverse records indicate that your name and address is none other than... oh, sorry, we didn't know it was you Sir. Excuse the intrusion and consider your logs erased for "national security" reasons.
Sincerely,
Stormtrooper #98562
New World Order, SubFloor 145
Actually, a lot of the firefox extensions *do* or can take care of most of those issues.
However, I still use Opera over FireFox for a shrinking number of reasons:
Opera has always been MUCH FASTER on any windows or linux system I've tried it on; especially when flipping forward/backward through pages with mousebutton rockers. And, before anyone suggest it, yes, Opera is still faster even after optimizing FireFox's "network.http.pipelining" and other settings.
The SessionSaver extension for FireFox isn't nearly as robust as Opera's. When opera crashes I've NEVER failed to get all my tabs back. SessionSaver is still very buggy. e.g. if FireFox is closed while a popup is active, firefox's session won't be restored.
Opera is MUCH MUCH FASTER than any other browser. Did I mention that Opera was snappy already?
I primarily use FireFox for webdevelopment because of its standards compliance, and its awesome "Web Developer" extension.
You think Walmart would have all their eggs in one basket? All that data has got to be replicated elsewhere... although, being that Walmart is such a pennypinching bastard, maybe they cheaped out on that and only have those onsite tape backups.
The hard part is keeping all those disks spinning when you start pushing MTBF limits
So hire a monkey to sit in front of the rack. Condition him to hotswap a new hot spare when a red light & alarm goes off. If he replaces the drive before the old RAID hotspare gets rebuilt, he gets a treat; if not, a ZZZZZzzaaaappp!:)
In my experience I've lost most of data because of hardware failure (including floppy&CD bitrot); accidents are a distant second.
My worst screwup in memory was years ago and relatively minor:
# gcc final_project.c -o final_project.c
The previously built 'final_project' executable was missing, so when I used careless tab completion to compile again, it overwrote my source. Lost a few weeks of work:(
Needless to say, I've since learned to love Makefiles, RAID 1 mirroring on the desktop, and offsite backups. I'm still waiting to get bitten by a stray 'rm -rf' though.:)
If product placement gets bad enough, you can bet your ass that the DVR's worth having will also have the ability to download dynamic edit files off the net that can overlay/blur/cut-out the annoying branding. It's not THAT hard to do, and only one person or "release group" has to do it in order to make it available to millions.
Suddenly all the annoying "FedEx" boxes in Castaway, for example, become barely noticable "Acme" refs, saving you from being mentally engineered like consumer cattle.
I grew up in a medium-small town, but have lived in the big apple for about 10 years. I don't know about you, but I definitely feel like I have more privacy in the city as a STRANGER among strangers VS a small town where everybody's business is known.
It's quite liberating to be able to be car-free in the city. The suburban "american dream" with a status-symbol car and a useless lawn is BS. We need to counter that spawl with smarter New Urbanism.
Answer: Not in time enough to matter. Oil production will almost certainly peak faster than any alternative energy & conservation can pick up the slack.
There are other types -- but I still haven't heard of the magic bullet.
You forgot to mention Zero Point Energy, man -- it's like really cool, dude: you simply tap into the massive free energy rift in the 18th dimension!
I'm working on this in my "lab" right now, but don't tell anyone... I don't want the men in black to disappear me for endangering the big-oil power elite! The truth is out there.
they have to give to charity to make up for the sins of their success. even though they create most of the jobs and most of the wealth
Hello Dumbass Republican,
Would you rather that the righteous wealthy few be allowed to continue concentrating obscene wealth, giving little to nothing back from the society it exploited it from, until it gets to the point that the less fortunate revolt and tear down your little gated communities? It's a balancing act. You can't expect to make yourself sucessful in a society without giving back progressivly MORE.
(The more you have, the less you need, but usually the more you have, the greedier you were in the first place to aquire and secure that stash, and are hence less willing to share the spoils. I'm no hypocrite either. e.g. I stand to inherit lots of money, but I'm not so greedy as to think that the "death tax" is unfair.)
Slashdot Mirror
Capitalism works best in environments of actual scarcity; it has to be perverted to work with abundance.
--
(I wouldn't. In fact, I'm going to go burn a U.S. flag now, because the flag symbolizes the freedom to do just that. :)
--
If you bother to sign up at one of those registration-required tracker sites, what you'll usually find is some kid begging for paypal donations for his l33t server with fewer torrents than available publicly.
--
Either the mods are crack-smoking, stock-owning sympathizers of "The Man" and "The System", or, the mods are... just on crack. :)
(Anyway, don't assume that everyone who's over 30 and working for some soulless corporation has been assimilated into the boring status quo. Rocking the boat is great fun (especially if you can afford to, like Justin can))
--
We'd want to build multiple elevators all around the equator anyway, but here's a thought on the up/down balancing: most traffic would be outbound, so if the climbers/cars could be built cheaply enough and were made to be self-collapsable, then you could send up hundreds of them before bringing them back in one load for re-use. You *could* also just send them back via normal re-entry if a shield was sent up. And if the climbers could be made truly cheap (as would be the case in a "carbon" economy with ultra-cheap manufacturing), then you might not want to return them at all and reuse the matter in orbit later.
--
--
Sorry, but I'm not in the camp that thinks the GPL is somehow bad because it lets you stand on the shoulders of giants while requiring you to do the same (if you distribute). You're not losing any "rights" by not being able to exploit the commons.
--
I can't help but think about all the political hurdles that'll delay the space elevator more than any technical setbacks. And then I get to thinking about how slow and unromantic a space elevator ascent would be compared to the exciting phallic-rocket launch. Still, the space elevator is about the only way to eventually get launch costs below a dollar per pound; chemical rockets are too energy-wasteful to ever reach that point.
--
I dunno. I'm one of those people who's donated more money (and time/code/bugsreports) to open projects than the sum of all closed products.
btw, I noticed the "stream of conscience" text at the bottom of your turnstyle mainpage - you don't happen to have experience getting higher rankings in search engines do you? want to sell me your SEO services, or, a product that will 'analyze' my site instead? :)
--
Funny - I make my living by writing, integrating and providing valueadd support for BSD & GPL'd solutions (mostly web-based).
Most software is a commodity now so it's just the reality of the situation that providing services around opensource is more efficient than the ol' model of selling a piece of shrinked-wrapped artificial scarcity, or a license for same.
--
Does your code break easily when modified? Closed or open that's a turnoff and you'd get the same hostility except it'd be more along the lines of "I replaced with another 'product'".
--
Still, it's an unwinnable game of whack-a-mole. Even with more draconian international laws, and pervasive "Trusted Computing" on the "Secure Internet", it will still be possible for information to flow freely on overnets and via wireless.
--
--
We logged your HTTP POST packet enroute to slashdot.org as it hopped across our "PATRIOT2 blackboxes", which are installed at the border of most ISPs, as required by anti-terrorism law.
Your IP is 149.101.1.32 and our reverse records indicate that your name and address is none other than ... oh, sorry, we didn't know it was you Sir. Excuse the intrusion and consider your logs erased for "national security" reasons.
Sincerely,
Stormtrooper #98562
New World Order, SubFloor 145
--
However, I still use Opera over FireFox for a shrinking number of reasons:
I primarily use FireFox for webdevelopment because of its standards compliance, and its awesome "Web Developer" extension.
--
--
So hire a monkey to sit in front of the rack. Condition him to hotswap a new hot spare when a red light & alarm goes off. If he replaces the drive before the old RAID hotspare gets rebuilt, he gets a treat; if not, a ZZZZZzzaaaappp! :)
--
My worst screwup in memory was years ago and relatively minor:
# gcc final_project.c -o final_project.c
The previously built 'final_project' executable was missing, so when I used careless tab completion to compile again, it overwrote my source. Lost a few weeks of work :(
Needless to say, I've since learned to love Makefiles, RAID 1 mirroring on the desktop, and offsite backups. I'm still waiting to get bitten by a stray 'rm -rf' though. :)
--
Ali G.? Is that you? It is, innit?
--
If product placement gets bad enough, you can bet your ass that the DVR's worth having will also have the ability to download dynamic edit files off the net that can overlay/blur/cut-out the annoying branding. It's not THAT hard to do, and only one person or "release group" has to do it in order to make it available to millions.
Suddenly all the annoying "FedEx" boxes in Castaway, for example, become barely noticable "Acme" refs, saving you from being mentally engineered like consumer cattle.
--
It's quite liberating to be able to be car-free in the city. The suburban "american dream" with a status-symbol car and a useless lawn is BS. We need to counter that spawl with smarter New Urbanism.
--
--
You forgot to mention Zero Point Energy , man -- it's like really cool, dude: you simply tap into the massive free energy rift in the 18th dimension!
I'm working on this in my "lab" right now, but don't tell anyone... I don't want the men in black to disappear me for endangering the big-oil power elite! The truth is out there.
--
--
Hello Dumbass Republican,
Would you rather that the righteous wealthy few be allowed to continue concentrating obscene wealth, giving little to nothing back from the society it exploited it from, until it gets to the point that the less fortunate revolt and tear down your little gated communities? It's a balancing act. You can't expect to make yourself sucessful in a society without giving back progressivly MORE.
(The more you have, the less you need, but usually the more you have, the greedier you were in the first place to aquire and secure that stash, and are hence less willing to share the spoils. I'm no hypocrite either. e.g. I stand to inherit lots of money, but I'm not so greedy as to think that the "death tax" is unfair.)
--