explains why cryptographers don't believe that DRM works
While I fully agree that DRM isn't foolproof, I disagree that DRM doesn't work. The reason DRM is being implemented is not to prevent all piracy ever - simply put, that's impossible - but rather to prevent common, casual piracy among low-skilled users.
That is a common misconception. When DVD CSS (the DRM on DVDs) came out, they claimed it was to stop piracy. That was a joke - it only took the effort of one pirate to strip out the DRM and create an unencrypted file, and from then on the movie becomes available to pirates, and "casual", "low-skilled" pirates started copying *those* unencrypted fils, not the original DVDs. All these pirates needed to know was how to copy files - they didn't need any special "hacking" skills.
Moreover, not only did CSS not stop DVD piracy, movie producer started to use it to limit users with things that have nothing to do with copying - for example region coding (you cannot play a movie you bought legally in another country) and unskippable ads (in some places in the video, fast-forward did not work). And who didn't have to suffer this crap? Of course, the pirates. The pirates - either copying files over bittorrent or buying a DVD from some pirate DVD manufacturer - will get a DVD without all that crap. What a wonderful business move.
It's gotten to the point where the first thing I do after getting a DVD is to rip it to an unencrypted file, delete the silly "FBI warning" and ads, and save that file. I don't need my children to see FBI warnings and ads before watching a movie I paid for. Nothing in "copyright" law allows the copyright holder to force me to watch this crap - any more than book manufacturers can force me to read the first page of the book every time I want to read it.
If JPEG finally implemented DRM, then more people would switch.
You are missing the point... Even if JPEG implements DRM, it doesn't force you to use DRM on the photos you create. You can still take photos, draw images, etc., and not enable DRM on them. So people who currently create JPEGs can continue to use them and don't need to "switch". The problem with DRM is when other people put them on the images they send you. E.g., you browse some website and you see there a DRMed JPEG. How can you "switch" to PNG here?? You didn't create this JPEG, someone else did it, and they did so deliberately.
What users can do, however, is to not even try to get their content from the official publisher (because it uses some annoying DRM) but rather get the same content from a "pirate" which broke this DRM and converted the content to a more useful format. This is what people have been doing for years for video. I, for example, never use actual DVDs any more (my living-room "DVD player" is stash away in the attic) - I always rip my DVDs to an unencrypted ".vob" file before watching them, and avoid all sorts of region locks, mandatory ads, and other crap the publisher thought he could force on me in the pretense of "copyright".
But what you miss is your own admittance that it only worked for a few volunteers, not a whole society. You also seem to ignore your own admission that they collapsed after a brief period of time (in the grand scheme of history.)
According to the Wikipedia article, at its peak, 129,000 people lived in several hundred Kibbutzim - these were not just "a few volunteers". But you're right about the collapse. But in any case, it was a more interesting and realistic experiment in human nature than the fictional experiment on creating the Star Trek universe;-)
But it did work very well, for many decades. And people actually liked it, and were proud of it - it's not like they were forced to be there. Yes, it stopped working now (the Kibbutz article on Wikipedia is tedious, but the "Decline" section is very interesting), but it did work quite well when it did. And it was nothing like Soviet Russia which at the same time experimented with the same ideals but using different methods - and different outcomes (in Soviet Russia, people were murderd, starved and tortured. None of this happened in the Kibbutz).
That's an interesting thought experiment but since we do not and never will live in such a post-scarcity society it is ultimately meaningless. Some form of money is going to be a necessity for the foreseeable future. There simply is no scenario whereby we would have access to every possible resource we would need without some for of currency making the economy work.
There is a difference between "need" and "want". It is conceivable that what we need will be available freely - food, lodging, etc. - but if people want more than what they got, the troubles begin (and scarcity will return). For example, imagine one random member of the Star Ship enterprise. He gets a room, food, entertainment, security - all for free. But what if one day he decides he wants his quarters to be twice the size he now has? *that* resource is scarce. What if one day he decides he wants to replicate 10 tons of gold, just because he likes gold, but the replicator capacity is limited? What if one day he wants other Enterprise employees to become his servants - but these people have better things to do? If he wants any of that, he will need money (or some futuristic equivalent). The only solution is for people to stop wanting what they don't have. It seems the Star Trek guys got this solved - I never saw anyone on this series wanting anything...
Yes, it was tried, and it worked, in Israel - it was called the Kibbutz (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kibbutz).
The Kibbutz, a form of town popular in the twentieth century in Israel, were small towns where all the inhabitants worked together on some shared infrastructure, mostly agricultural (fields, cows, etc.) just like the Star Fleet guys worked together on their ship. Everyone had a role in the Kibbutz just like on the starship Enterprise: One person's role could be to milk the cows, while a second person grows wheat, a third cooks dinner for the first two, and a fourth would take care of the first three's children. No money was changed hand between any of these individuals. The kibbutz also had shared cars, collectively owned houses, etc. This arrangement worked pretty well for a long time, and did not involve any state coersion (unlike in the communist USSR) - people genuinely wanted to be part of their Kibbutz, and if they didn't, they were free to leave.
The Kibbutz lost its popularity as the economy in the rest of Israel improved, and people (rightly) started to feel that perhaps they could have better living conditions by making money outside the Kibbutz, and people started to leave, or worse - started to want to divide the Kibbutz's income unequally among them. At that point, the Kibbutz died. It still exists nominally, but not in spirit.
Agreed: Caddies are good. Easy to handle, and protected by default. I wish, especially, that game consoles would adopt them (because game discs are expensive and essentially impossible to usefully duplicate)
The problem here is, of course, disks you cannot duplicate. Not the lack of caddies.
After my children's DVDs were often scratched and destroyed I started duplicating them and letting the kids watch the duplicates. The DVD industry would have you think that by duplicating a DVD I'm a pirate. They are idiots - the real pirates don't duplicate CDs they already bought - they download from the 'net, and never bother with DVDs...
They claim it runs a JVM, but the source code of this JVM is nowhere to be found. Where is it?
It runs any unmodified Linux JVM. You don't need any special JVM source code - just take OpenJDK from any Linux distribution, or Oracle's JVM, and run it inside OSv.
Palm's handwriting innovation wasn't technological. It was psychological. They managed to convince consumers that it was cool and hip to learn to write in a way that the device could interpret. That made the technical aspect much more manageable.
It wasn't just "cool and hip" to use Palm's new writing style - it was also fast and more reliable - e.g., when writing A just write an upside-down V and don't write the middle line.
I remember a conference I attended in 1999, where for 3 days I sat and wrote notes on my Palm V. Palm's writing technique was very fast, very convenient (the device was very small, and I could write without looking at the screen all the time - which you can't do on today's smartphones) and also - after 3 days of writing, I still had half my battery left!
I wish that Palm would have continued to build devices and operating systems...
It's not that I don't do my own laundry, it's that I have kids, meaning there's so much laundry to do, there's rarely a situation when the machine isn't fully loaded. Moreover, if the machine *is* half-loaded, my washing machine automatically uses less water. If I put more things in, it uses more water. There's no magic and no free lunches here.
Another good question - if the bags are filled with dangerous bacteria (like TFA claims), is it a good idea to wash my children's cloths with it?:-)
BTW, most of the reusable bags I have are made out of some strange kind of cloth that I'd really hesitate to wash in a machine (the person who started this thread suggested hand-wash, which is what annoyed me). And many reusable bags here also have some sort of cardboard bottom, which definitely cannot be washed (although it can be thrown away, I guess, it isn't essential).
So basically, you're saying that to avoid having a plastic bag blow on your tree once in a blue moon, you'd rather enslave yourself to washing reusable bags? And you continue to want reusable bags even if it's not clear that washing (using electricity, water and soap) doesn't hurt the environment more? And you continue to want reusable bags even if you're told that people do reuse even plastic bags (assuming they aren't completely crappy)? And you continue to want reusable bags even if they cause food poisoning - rarely, but still measurably?
All of this sounds to me like reusable bags is a religion, not anything related to logic or science. Ok, so you're saying that this is a common religion only outside the USA, but it nevertheless sounds like a religion.
On what planet do people actually have time to hand-wash a dozen bags each week? Not on mine... So nobody I know ever washes these things. When they *look* dirty (which might be too late) people throw them away.
Even when you use a reusable bag, the sensible thing to do with certain kinds of food - especially uncooked meat - is to put them in a plastic bag. This plastic bag will protect the reusable bag, your car, and your fridge, from being contaminated.
In any case, this whole ban on plastic bags is nothing short of idiocy. Plastic bags *are* reusable, and people (e.g., me) do reuse them all the time, for anything from collecting garbage, carrying wet clothes from the pool, collecting dog excrement or cat litter, etc., etc. If people won't have these bags from the supermarket, they would buy them anyway. Heck, when was the last time you saw anyone throwing away plastic shopping bags, without reusing them first?
The article does mention that folks will generally feel obligated buy something
When I was a child, McDonalds used to have big signs saying "No Loitering". I asked my parents what this meant, and they told me that in high-priced restaurants, cafes, etc., it is customary for someone to sit for hours talking over a meal (we didn't have laptops then...), while in McDonalds you're supposed to eat quickly and leave. When has this changed? Can't the McDonalds operators call the police on you if you sit there for hours?
I've been using Red Hat's linux distributions for 14 years, since I first switched my aging Slackware installation to Redhat 5.2. Since then, I've been upgrading or installing every new Redhat/Fedora release that came out. The last few upgrades, to F15, F16 and F17 were a real pain - on every release the upgrade failed in the middle, or succeeded and left me with half the system not running and I needed to spend a whole day on fixing things (a person with less experience would just give up and switch to a different distribution...). But the upgrade to F18 (with the new "fedup" tool) was surprisingly smooth. The upgrade just worked, and when the new system came up, everything just worked... A few annoying new bugs (like the new gphoto2 suddenly not working correctly, but that's not Fedora's fault) but nothing serious. So if anything, F18 was the first time in years that I did *not* consider switch to Ubuntu right after the upgrade.
Fedora 18 features an installer that is rewritten and redesigned from the ground up. It replaces the old 13+ year old installer from previous versions of Fedora. You can learn more about it at the new installer informational page on the Fedora wiki.
That's 13+ years of refinement. There was very little that was wrong with it.
Really? As someone who installed/upgraded about 26 versions of Redhat and Fedora over the last 13 years, I can tell you, there was plenty wrong with it. The most obvious gaping hole was that while a package (out of the 2000 packages on the list) was installing, the whole thing froze. Usually this wasn't a big problem, but in rare cases where one of the 2000 packages had a script bug (and this happened SEVERAL times over the last 13 years), the whole installation froze, and there was nothing you could do about it - you wouldn't even know about it because the display blanked, and that's it. At least after a rewrite they used a normal GUI framework, where while running a package's script, the event loop continues to run, and the GUI still works.
Trends show that it's just a random spike in C's index, which is pretty much gone now.
It doesn't look like a "random spike to me" - quite the contrary - the trend graph appears to show that C's popularity has hardly changed in the last decade (going up and down between 15% and 20%), while Java's popularity sunk in the last decade (from 27% to 17%) and C++ also showing a steady decline (from 17% to 10%). Perhaps a "random spike" caused C to surpass Java this year, but the trend is obvious - Java will soon be dethroned.
The summary, as well as the article, contains the sentence "Israel is to attempt, again, to pass a bill...". Another way to phrase it is: "The bill did *not* pass last time, and may end up not passing again.". Sounds less sinister, doesn't it? And non-news....
In other words., unlike some other countries (most notably the U.S.) where laws for taking down Websites have passed and have been used, laws outlawing various behaviors that have nothing to do with copying as "copyright circumvention", laws allowing people to be banished from the Internet have passed etc., - none of this crap exists in Israel. So if anything, the Internet freedom situation is *better* in Israel than in most countries.
While he makes some interesting points, I think he misunderstands the spam issue, and why his users, especially free users, rightly marked his mail as "spam":
If I look at spam I get, some of it is "random" spam. E.g., someone I never heard of trying to sell me viagra, or asking me to help smuggle $10,000,000 he stole while being the president of his country. But a growing percentage of the spam are people who confused a one-time business relationship with my desire to read all about them and their products for the next 20 years. E.g., I'm constantly getting mails from a particular hotel I once stayed at, mails from some company I once bought from, etc. People *hate* that, and it doesn't really help that they once used your services - they still hate the spam.
But why did free users complain more? That's easy: Every paying user remembered you and your service, and most of them "forgave" the one time "thank you mail" (but be warned, they won't so easily forgive repeated annoyances). From the free users, a lot of them probably don't even remember what service you provided them. Heck, it is possible that half of them never even fully used (e.g., didn't even complete a card) or didn't enjoy your service, and you don't know that. These people have no recollection who you are, and thought that even a "thank you" letter was an outright spam.
What should you do about the spam thing next time? Don't make the "I want to get mails" checkbox hidden in some long form and default to on. You have two options - either make it default to "off" (so only people who REALLY want to get your mails will get them, but be warned that few people will actually want that), or, if you want it to default to "on" make a very very clear screen which basically says "I'm giving you this service for free, in exchange for the right to mail you in the future. If you do not agree, or would consider such mails to be spam, please do not use this service.".
Like 'cat' for concatenate, or vi for what exactly?
"vi" is short of "visual". First there was "ed", the, you guessed it, "editor". But "ed" was a real pain to use, because you wouldn't see what you were actually editing (if you ever used ed, you'd know what I mean). So the "visual" editor "vi" was invented.
No, the GP was actually right - in this kind of competition, prices go *up*, not down. Why? Because the situation today is that the law requires companies like Netflix to beg and bargain for content from the different movie studios and distribution companies. As Netflix and DirecTV and others compete, each will try to get "better" movies, "exclusive" movies, and so on, allowing the movie producers to *increase* the prices they charge these companies. Consumer will get higher prices and fewer choices - because some of the content you wish to see was made "exclusive" to the streaming company you don't use...
The only solution I see is to make laws or regulations allowing any company to broadcast *any* movie or show, for a predetermined (by the rights holder) price. Even better (but perhaps this is too idealistic) would be that the price for any movie will be the same. A similar situation exists in the radio business - radio stations can play any piece of music they want providing they pay royalties - and individual radio stations do not have to deal and bargain with rights holders to play each different song.
The second question in the same article was more interesting, or rather, the "UPDATE" to it. A doctor asks whether it is ethical to sign on a convict mom's petition to delay her jail sentence for a couple of weeks while her child undergoes from surgery. Then, the UPDATE says, that the dad lost his medical insurance, so the surgery was cancelled. God, am I the only one seeing the irony in this? A doctor is worried whether or not it is ethical to send mail to a judge on his patient's behalf (hmm, why wouldn't it?) and at the same time isn't at all worried about the ethical consequences of not treating his child patient who needs surgery (according to his decision), just because her dad lost his job while waiting for the surgery. Disgusting.
In other news from 1980, programming toolkits are dominating the programming landscape.
Programmers have discovered that they can amass great profits by using easily accessible "programming toolkits", which are now used in the majority of the software in the wild. These toolkits include compilers (no longer does the programmer need to remember all these geeky hex codes!), libraries (and idiot can now use the quicksort algorithm without reading Knuth!), and kernels (you don't need to know anything about IO or virtual memory to program!).
All these freightening developments are opening the doors to more programmers who would likely otherwise lack the required technical expertise to succeed in the programming underground.
The Talmud (basically, the Jewish law codex) contains an interesting discussion about this. Consider one man dropping a pot from the top floor of a building, and before the pot hits the ground, a man walking in the street hit it with a stick and breaks it. Now, who is responsible for the vase breaking? The man on the ground actually broke it, but even if he didn't, it would have broken a second later when it hit the ground. Similarly, when somebody fills a house with so many explosives they can no longer be gently disarmed, he already caused it to be destroyed. The fact it has not yet been destroyed, and the actual destruction will be caused a bit later (perhaps by a policeman lighting a match) doesn't change the fact that it was the tenant who started the inevitable destruction, not the police.
Most commenters in this discussion badmouth the traffic cops, and speeding laws, because they assume that these laws suck in South Africa, just like they suck in their own country like the USA or the UK and so on.
But in fact, when I visited South Africa, I was suprised to see that the situation is actually different - and better - in South Africa; In much of the rest of the world, speed limits are relatively arbitrary. E.g., the speed limit used to be 50 miles per hour throughout the US (although this changed somewhat in recent years), and is 90 km per hour in highways throughout Israel. Since modern cars can easily go much more than that, drivers have gotten used to break the speed laws all the time, and (rightly) feel the cops are pigs (to use the original poster's terms) and are out to get them - not to catch criminals.
But in South Africa, my experience (from driving along and around the N2 for about a week) is that the speed limit on the highway is *not* arbitrary. Every few miles, the speed limit changes depending on actual road conditions - sometimes when the road is bad, it is just 90 km/h, but in good stretches, it becomes 120km/h. My feeling in South Africa was that indeed, someone who goes over the posted speed limit is really doing something wrong. It is really dangerous to go over 120, and when the speed limit says 90, you would really be stupid to do over 90 because there is a real reason why this limit, and not 120, was posted.
When the speed limits make sense, and only criminals and crazy drivers break them, why would you want to fight a system to catch those criminals and crazy drivers?
So all the people badmouthing South Africa on this thread - better learn from South Africa (at least on this issue...) instead of just assuming that everything is wrong in that country.
This is actually not true. I've often been downloading TV series and movies from the 60's, 70's and 80's, things I would never see on today's Television channels but bittorrent allows me to watch. Think of any tv show you liked as a child (or your father liked as a child), be it Star Trek (the original series), Little House on the Prairie or whatever - and you can watch it on bittorrent.
Slashdot Mirror
From TFS:
While I fully agree that DRM isn't foolproof, I disagree that DRM doesn't work. The reason DRM is being implemented is not to prevent all piracy ever - simply put, that's impossible - but rather to prevent common, casual piracy among low-skilled users.
That is a common misconception. When DVD CSS (the DRM on DVDs) came out, they claimed it was to stop piracy. That was a joke - it only took the effort of one pirate to strip out the DRM and create an unencrypted file, and from then on the movie becomes available to pirates, and "casual", "low-skilled" pirates started copying *those* unencrypted fils, not the original DVDs. All these pirates needed to know was how to copy files - they didn't need any special "hacking" skills.
Moreover, not only did CSS not stop DVD piracy, movie producer started to use it to limit users with things that have nothing to do with copying - for example region coding (you cannot play a movie you bought legally in another country) and unskippable ads (in some places in the video, fast-forward did not work). And who didn't have to suffer this crap? Of course, the pirates. The pirates - either copying files over bittorrent or buying a DVD from some pirate DVD manufacturer - will get a DVD without all that crap. What a wonderful business move.
It's gotten to the point where the first thing I do after getting a DVD is to rip it to an unencrypted file, delete the silly "FBI warning" and ads, and save that file. I don't need my children to see FBI warnings and ads before watching a movie I paid for. Nothing in "copyright" law allows the copyright holder to force me to watch this crap - any more than book manufacturers can force me to read the first page of the book every time I want to read it.
If JPEG finally implemented DRM, then more people would switch.
You are missing the point... Even if JPEG implements DRM, it doesn't force you to use DRM on the photos you create. You can still take photos, draw images, etc., and not enable DRM on them. So people who currently create JPEGs can continue to use them and don't need to "switch". The problem with DRM is when other people put them on the images they send you. E.g., you browse some website and you see there a DRMed JPEG. How can you "switch" to PNG here?? You didn't create this JPEG, someone else did it, and they did so deliberately.
What users can do, however, is to not even try to get their content from the official publisher (because it uses some annoying DRM) but rather get the same content from a "pirate" which broke this DRM and converted the content to a more useful format. This is what people have been doing for years for video. I, for example, never use actual DVDs any more (my living-room "DVD player" is stash away in the attic) - I always rip my DVDs to an unencrypted ".vob" file before watching them, and avoid all sorts of region locks, mandatory ads, and other crap the publisher thought he could force on me in the pretense of "copyright".
But what you miss is your own admittance that it only worked for a few volunteers, not a whole society. You also seem to ignore your own admission that they collapsed after a brief period of time (in the grand scheme of history.)
According to the Wikipedia article, at its peak, 129,000 people lived in several hundred Kibbutzim - these were not just "a few volunteers". But you're right about the collapse. But in any case, it was a more interesting and realistic experiment in human nature than the fictional experiment on creating the Star Trek universe ;-)
No it didn't
" At that point, the Kibbutz died"
But it did work very well, for many decades. And people actually liked it, and were proud of it - it's not like they were forced to be there.
Yes, it stopped working now (the Kibbutz article on Wikipedia is tedious, but the "Decline" section is very interesting), but it did work quite well when it did. And it was nothing like Soviet Russia which at the same time experimented with the same ideals but using different methods - and different outcomes (in Soviet Russia, people were murderd, starved and tortured. None of this happened in the Kibbutz).
That's an interesting thought experiment but since we do not and never will live in such a post-scarcity society it is ultimately meaningless. Some form of money is going to be a necessity for the foreseeable future. There simply is no scenario whereby we would have access to every possible resource we would need without some for of currency making the economy work.
There is a difference between "need" and "want". It is conceivable that what we need will be available freely - food, lodging, etc. - but if people want more than what they got, the troubles begin (and scarcity will return). For example, imagine one random member of the Star Ship enterprise. He gets a room, food, entertainment, security - all for free. But what if one day he decides he wants his quarters to be twice the size he now has? *that* resource is scarce. What if one day he decides he wants to replicate 10 tons of gold, just because he likes gold, but the replicator capacity is limited? What if one day he wants other Enterprise employees to become his servants - but these people have better things to do? If he wants any of that, he will need money (or some futuristic equivalent). The only solution is for people to stop wanting what they don't have. It seems the Star Trek guys got this solved - I never saw anyone on this series wanting anything...
Yes, it was tried, and it worked, in Israel - it was called the Kibbutz (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kibbutz).
The Kibbutz, a form of town popular in the twentieth century in Israel, were small towns where all the inhabitants worked together on some shared infrastructure, mostly agricultural (fields, cows, etc.) just like the Star Fleet guys worked together on their ship. Everyone had a role in the Kibbutz just like on the starship Enterprise: One person's role could be to milk the cows, while a second person grows wheat, a third cooks dinner for the first two, and a fourth would take care of the first three's children. No money was changed hand between any of these individuals. The kibbutz also had shared cars, collectively owned houses, etc. This arrangement worked pretty well for a long time, and did not involve any state coersion (unlike in the communist USSR) - people genuinely wanted to be part of their Kibbutz, and if they didn't, they were free to leave.
The Kibbutz lost its popularity as the economy in the rest of Israel improved, and people (rightly) started to feel that perhaps they could have better living conditions by making money outside the Kibbutz, and people started to leave, or worse - started to want to divide the Kibbutz's income unequally among them. At that point, the Kibbutz died. It still exists nominally, but not in spirit.
Agreed: Caddies are good. Easy to handle, and protected by default. I wish, especially, that game consoles would adopt them (because game discs are expensive and essentially impossible to usefully duplicate)
The problem here is, of course, disks you cannot duplicate. Not the lack of caddies.
After my children's DVDs were often scratched and destroyed I started duplicating them and letting the kids watch the duplicates. The DVD industry would have you think that by duplicating a DVD I'm a pirate. They are idiots - the real pirates don't duplicate CDs they already bought - they download from the 'net, and never bother with DVDs...
They claim it runs a JVM, but the source code of this JVM is nowhere to be found. Where is it?
It runs any unmodified Linux JVM. You don't need any special JVM source code - just take OpenJDK from any Linux distribution, or Oracle's JVM, and run it inside OSv.
Palm's handwriting innovation wasn't technological. It was psychological. They managed to convince consumers that it was cool and hip to learn to write in a way that the device could interpret. That made the technical aspect much more manageable.
It wasn't just "cool and hip" to use Palm's new writing style - it was also fast and more reliable - e.g., when writing A just write an upside-down V and don't write the middle line.
I remember a conference I attended in 1999, where for 3 days I sat and wrote notes on my Palm V. Palm's writing technique was very fast, very convenient (the device was very small, and I could write without looking at the screen all the time - which you can't do on today's smartphones) and also - after 3 days of writing, I still had half my battery left!
I wish that Palm would have continued to build devices and operating systems...
It's not that I don't do my own laundry, it's that I have kids, meaning there's so much laundry to do, there's rarely a situation when the machine isn't fully loaded.
Moreover, if the machine *is* half-loaded, my washing machine automatically uses less water. If I put more things in, it uses more water. There's no magic and no free lunches here.
Another good question - if the bags are filled with dangerous bacteria (like TFA claims), is it a good idea to wash my children's cloths with it? :-)
BTW, most of the reusable bags I have are made out of some strange kind of cloth that I'd really hesitate to wash in a machine (the person who started this thread suggested hand-wash, which is what annoyed me). And many reusable bags here also have some sort of cardboard bottom, which definitely cannot be washed (although it can be thrown away, I guess, it isn't essential).
So basically, you're saying that to avoid having a plastic bag blow on your tree once in a blue moon, you'd rather enslave yourself to washing reusable bags?
And you continue to want reusable bags even if it's not clear that washing (using electricity, water and soap) doesn't hurt the environment more?
And you continue to want reusable bags even if you're told that people do reuse even plastic bags (assuming they aren't completely crappy)?
And you continue to want reusable bags even if they cause food poisoning - rarely, but still measurably?
All of this sounds to me like reusable bags is a religion, not anything related to logic or science.
Ok, so you're saying that this is a common religion only outside the USA, but it nevertheless sounds like a religion.
On what planet do people actually have time to hand-wash a dozen bags each week? Not on mine... So nobody I know ever washes these things. When they *look* dirty (which might be too late) people throw them away.
Even when you use a reusable bag, the sensible thing to do with certain kinds of food - especially uncooked meat - is to put them in a plastic bag. This plastic bag will protect the reusable bag, your car, and your fridge, from being contaminated.
In any case, this whole ban on plastic bags is nothing short of idiocy. Plastic bags *are* reusable, and people (e.g., me) do reuse them all the time, for anything from collecting garbage, carrying wet clothes from the pool, collecting dog excrement or cat litter, etc., etc. If people won't have these bags from the supermarket, they would buy them anyway. Heck, when was the last time you saw anyone throwing away plastic shopping bags, without reusing them first?
The article does mention that folks will generally feel obligated buy something
When I was a child, McDonalds used to have big signs saying "No Loitering". I asked my parents what this meant, and they told me that in high-priced restaurants, cafes, etc., it is customary for someone to sit for hours talking over a meal (we didn't have laptops then...), while in McDonalds you're supposed to eat quickly and leave.
When has this changed? Can't the McDonalds operators call the police on you if you sit there for hours?
I've been using Red Hat's linux distributions for 14 years, since I first switched my aging Slackware installation to Redhat 5.2. Since then, I've been upgrading or installing every new Redhat/Fedora release that came out.
The last few upgrades, to F15, F16 and F17 were a real pain - on every release the upgrade failed in the middle, or succeeded and left me with half the system not running and I needed to spend a whole day on fixing things (a person with less experience would just give up and switch to a different distribution...).
But the upgrade to F18 (with the new "fedup" tool) was surprisingly smooth. The upgrade just worked, and when the new system came up, everything just worked... A few annoying new bugs (like the new gphoto2 suddenly not working correctly, but that's not Fedora's fault) but nothing serious.
So if anything, F18 was the first time in years that I did *not* consider switch to Ubuntu right after the upgrade.
Fedora 18 features an installer that is rewritten and redesigned from the ground up. It replaces the old 13+ year old installer from previous versions of Fedora. You can learn more about it at the new installer informational page on the Fedora wiki.
That's 13+ years of refinement. There was very little that was wrong with it.
Really? As someone who installed/upgraded about 26 versions of Redhat and Fedora over the last 13 years, I can tell you, there was plenty wrong with it. The most obvious gaping hole was that while a package (out of the 2000 packages on the list) was installing, the whole thing froze. Usually this wasn't a big problem, but in rare cases where one of the 2000 packages had a script bug (and this happened SEVERAL times over the last 13 years), the whole installation froze, and there was nothing you could do about it - you wouldn't even know about it because the display blanked, and that's it. At least after a rewrite they used a normal GUI framework, where while running a package's script, the event loop continues to run, and the GUI still works.
Premature celebration much?
....
Trends show that it's just a random spike in C's index, which is pretty much gone now.
It doesn't look like a "random spike to me" - quite the contrary - the trend graph appears to show that C's popularity has hardly changed in the last decade (going up and down between 15% and 20%), while Java's popularity sunk in the last decade (from 27% to 17%) and C++ also showing a steady decline (from 17% to 10%). Perhaps a "random spike" caused C to surpass Java this year, but the trend is obvious - Java will soon be dethroned.
The summary, as well as the article, contains the sentence "Israel is to attempt, again, to pass a bill ...".
Another way to phrase it is: "The bill did *not* pass last time, and may end up not passing again.".
Sounds less sinister, doesn't it? And non-news....
In other words., unlike some other countries (most notably the U.S.) where laws for taking down Websites have passed and have been used, laws outlawing various behaviors that have nothing to do with copying as "copyright circumvention", laws allowing people to be banished from the Internet have passed etc., - none of this crap exists in Israel. So if anything, the Internet freedom situation is *better* in Israel than in most countries.
While he makes some interesting points, I think he misunderstands the spam issue, and why his users, especially free users, rightly marked his mail as "spam":
If I look at spam I get, some of it is "random" spam. E.g., someone I never heard of trying to sell me viagra, or asking me to help smuggle $10,000,000 he stole while being the president of his country. But a growing percentage of the spam are people who confused a one-time business relationship with my desire to read all about them and their products for the next 20 years. E.g., I'm constantly getting mails from a particular hotel I once stayed at, mails from some company I once bought from, etc. People *hate* that, and it doesn't really help that they once used your services - they still hate the spam.
But why did free users complain more? That's easy: Every paying user remembered you and your service, and most of them "forgave" the one time "thank you mail" (but be warned, they won't so easily forgive repeated annoyances). From the free users, a lot of them probably don't even remember what service you provided them. Heck, it is possible that half of them never even fully used (e.g., didn't even complete a card) or didn't enjoy your service, and you don't know that. These people have no recollection who you are, and thought that even a "thank you" letter was an outright spam.
What should you do about the spam thing next time? Don't make the "I want to get mails" checkbox hidden in some long form and default to on. You have two options - either make it default to "off" (so only people who REALLY want to get your mails will get them, but be warned that few people will actually want that), or, if you want it to default to "on" make a very very clear screen which basically says "I'm giving you this service for free, in exchange for the right to mail you in the future. If you do not agree, or would consider such mails to be spam, please do not use this service.".
Like 'cat' for concatenate, or vi for what exactly?
"vi" is short of "visual".
First there was "ed", the, you guessed it, "editor". But "ed" was a real pain to use, because you wouldn't see what you were actually editing (if you ever used ed, you'd know what I mean). So the "visual" editor "vi" was invented.
No, the GP was actually right - in this kind of competition, prices go *up*, not down.
Why?
Because the situation today is that the law requires companies like Netflix to beg and bargain for content from the different movie studios and distribution companies. As Netflix and DirecTV and others compete, each will try to get "better" movies, "exclusive" movies, and so on, allowing the movie producers to *increase* the prices they charge these companies. Consumer will get higher prices and fewer choices - because some of the content you wish to see was made "exclusive" to the streaming company you don't use...
The only solution I see is to make laws or regulations allowing any company to broadcast *any* movie or show, for a predetermined (by the rights holder) price. Even better (but perhaps this is too idealistic) would be that the price for any movie will be the same. A similar situation exists in the radio business - radio stations can play any piece of music they want providing they pay royalties - and individual radio stations do not have to deal and bargain with rights holders to play each different song.
The second question in the same article was more interesting, or rather, the "UPDATE" to it.
A doctor asks whether it is ethical to sign on a convict mom's petition to delay her jail sentence for a couple of weeks while her child undergoes from surgery.
Then, the UPDATE says, that the dad lost his medical insurance, so the surgery was cancelled.
God, am I the only one seeing the irony in this?
A doctor is worried whether or not it is ethical to send mail to a judge on his patient's behalf (hmm, why wouldn't it?) and at the same time isn't at all worried about the ethical consequences of not treating his child patient who needs surgery (according to his decision), just because her dad lost his job while waiting for the surgery.
Disgusting.
In other news from 1980, programming toolkits are dominating the programming landscape.
Programmers have discovered that they can amass great profits by using easily accessible "programming toolkits", which are now used in the majority of the software in the wild. These toolkits include compilers (no longer does the programmer need to remember all these geeky hex codes!), libraries (and idiot can now use the quicksort algorithm without reading Knuth!), and kernels (you don't need to know anything about IO or virtual memory to program!).
All these freightening developments are opening the doors to more programmers who would likely otherwise lack the required technical expertise to succeed in the programming underground.
The Talmud (basically, the Jewish law codex) contains an interesting discussion about this. Consider one man dropping a pot from the top floor of a building, and before the pot hits the ground, a man walking in the street hit it with a stick and breaks it. Now, who is responsible for the vase breaking? The man on the ground actually broke it, but even if he didn't, it would have broken a second later when it hit the ground.
Similarly, when somebody fills a house with so many explosives they can no longer be gently disarmed, he already caused it to be destroyed. The fact it has not yet been destroyed, and the actual destruction will be caused a bit later (perhaps by a policeman lighting a match) doesn't change the fact that it was the tenant who started the inevitable destruction, not the police.
Most commenters in this discussion badmouth the traffic cops, and speeding laws, because they assume that these laws suck in South Africa, just like they suck in their own country like the USA or the UK and so on.
But in fact, when I visited South Africa, I was suprised to see that the situation is actually different - and better - in South Africa; In much of the rest of the world, speed limits are relatively arbitrary. E.g., the speed limit used to be 50 miles per hour throughout the US (although this changed somewhat in recent years), and is 90 km per hour in highways throughout Israel. Since modern cars can easily go much more than that, drivers have gotten used to break the speed laws all the time, and (rightly) feel the cops are pigs (to use the original poster's terms) and are out to get them - not to catch criminals.
But in South Africa, my experience (from driving along and around the N2 for about a week) is that the speed limit on the highway is *not* arbitrary. Every few miles, the speed limit changes depending on actual road conditions - sometimes when the road is bad, it is just 90 km/h, but in good stretches, it becomes 120km/h. My feeling in South Africa was that indeed, someone who goes over the posted speed limit is really doing something wrong. It is really dangerous to go over 120, and when the speed limit says 90, you would really be stupid to do over 90 because there is a real reason why this limit, and not 120, was posted.
When the speed limits make sense, and only criminals and crazy drivers break them, why would you want to fight a system to catch those criminals and crazy drivers?
So all the people badmouthing South Africa on this thread - better learn from South Africa (at least on this issue...) instead of just assuming that everything is wrong in that country.
This is actually not true. I've often been downloading TV series and movies from the 60's, 70's and 80's, things I would never see on today's Television channels but bittorrent allows me to watch. Think of any tv show you liked as a child (or your father liked as a child), be it Star Trek (the original series), Little House on the Prairie or whatever - and you can watch it on bittorrent.