Wow, more than 100 posts already and still 90% of posters obviously did not grasp the (rather) simple concept. I've seen a number of completely irrelevant objections:
The law would never pass : That's one of the best feature in this idea. No need for a new law. The recipient already has the right to block incoming messages. You know, when your phone rings, you won't go to jail if you don't take the call.
Spammers will never accept this : Of course not, but nobody asks them! Using this kind of solution is YOUR decision; you don't have to ask anybody's permission, especially spammers.
Widespread adoption will never occur : So what? This system will work for me even if I'm the only user. It's not one of those things that require a critical mass of users to be useful.
This will not completely eradicate spam : Frankly, I don't care. If it prevents spam sent to me, it's good enough.
5 cents to read spam is not worth it : You're missing the point. This is not about making money, it's about discouraging spammers. No spammer will ever send you an email if it costs him 5 cents. And the price is not for making you actually read the spam, it's only for allowing it to reach your inbox. In the very unlikely case a spammer actually pays, just delete the message as usual.
So please, read the article. The idea may not be completely new (email stamp) but the details address most obvious objections.
One problem I can think of is still pending : what happens if the sender is also equiped with a similar system? Will we see payment notices bouncing back and forth between both ends without ever reaching an inbox? I guess a solution would be to automatically whitelist any address you've sent an email to, if only for 1 hour.
Now, the really funny part is that ALL of the above (including subject line) is the exact post I submitted on Dec 10, in reply to an article about the same research by the same researcher. We're discovering the notion of meta-dupe: it's a dupe slashdot story with dupe replies. By the way, my original post was modded +5 informative. If this one gets modded +5 too, we will achieve uber-meta-dupe status: the exact same story, with the exact same comment, with the exact same moderation. Perpetual motion, sorta...
OSDN outsources slashdot editing to its subscribers base. These happy few will have the privilege of beta testing dupes, broken links and poor spelling and grammar. They will also be the sole beneficiaries of the prestigious first post award as well as the (somewhat less prestigious) AYBABTU, ISR and Beowulf Cluster awards.
Well I hope you can understand that many times in the past I have given links. I neglect to mention links because I don't want to be forced into defending them - it is a waste of time and results in going around in circles. Well, I missed the previous discussions, so this does not help me. Also, once I have been provided with a relevant source of information, I don't need you (or anyone else) anymore in order to make my own opinion.
with a cursory search of google you can find a whole range of resources You mentioned yourself earlier in this thread that some (most?) creationists are more or less religious bigots. You hint that you belong to "rational" creationists. I don't think Google will do the sorting and I don't want to spend hours finding diamonds among the muck. I guess that you have already done that work, so please do me a favor and help me save some time.
I can link you to a book I have heard is good but have not personally read. Here it is if you like [amazon.com] I'd prefer a book that you HAVE read. Also, this book seems to poke holes into evolution far more than it advocates any competing theory. So it does not answer the initial question of what is it that you believe.
You know, many people feel that evolution is incomplete or even wrong in some parts, even though they buy the basics. Bashing evolution is useful only if it brings a better alternative. Your personal beliefs (earth is +/- 6,000 years old) are very hard to swallow. I'm willing to keep my mind open, but only if I see something worthwile to prove it. If I don't, I'll just store it in the "highly unlikely and unsupported" folder.
Your behaviour is puzzling. You immediately post a link to a site that bashes Scientology, but seem very reluctant to post anything that would describe and support rational creationism. This sounds suspicious. Basically, what you say amounts to: "I am no mystic, I have solid facts and experiments to support my beliefs; but you'll have to take my word for this since I have no time and you are too dumb".
Actually, you're achieving the exact opposing goal. I think ANY rational person has mental alarms ringing all over as soon as he identifies this pattern. So your choice is simple. Either you describe and support your views, or you lose all credibility.
Actually, the fundamental question about any technological/scientific advance is whether it is a creation or a discovery. There's a kind of philosophical debate among mathematicians : Do they actually invent anything or do they merely find stuff that always existed and was just waiting for someone to stumble upon it?
In a way, math theorems are "just" the logical (mechanical?) consequence of a relatively small number of axioms. Theoretically, one could feed the axioms into a computer and have it derive "automatically" all possible theorems from these axioms. On the other hand, the tree of possibilities is so vast that human input (insight, genius?) is critical to identify the one path that will lead to the desired result.
Back to the topic, it seems to me that genome sequencing looks more like "finding" than "inventing". But that's just MHO.
But when was the last time you downloaded anything other than copyrighted material from a P2P system?
Is pr0n copyrighted?
Re:Insights?
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F'd Companies
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· Score: 2, Insightful
In my book, guys who manage to draw multi-billion revenues from big businesses on a recurring basis qualify as "serious business type".
Now, you obviously consider that their services are not worth the money they're charging (and I'm not far from agreeing with you here). But that's a completely different point.
WebVan anyone? They burnt through $1 billion (yes, that is 1,000 millions) and were headed by Accenture's former CEO... Talk about "serious business types"...
with some stupid errors like saying developers code with UML
Uninformed errors, maybe. Or blatant, significant, major errors. Whatever. But why stupid? Do you really need to be arrogant and insulting? Yet another "1337" syndrom, I guess. Sigh...
Repeat after me 50 times, I'll put it in a language you can understand: Knowledge!=Intelligence Ignorance!=Stupidity
You know, one thing I've noticed is that many people tend to have a erroneous perception of the complexity of their jobs. I mean, after working (or studying) in a given field for a couple of years, you start forgetting how much you know and understand it. Many tasks seem utterly moronic to you even though a very bright specialist in another field would be completely helpless in front of them.
The reasons are many. Language: read any doc in any field and you'll see countless acronyms, names, references that an outsider has no chance to understand. Mindset/methodology: in each field, there's a "best practice" way to present problems and solve them; and you get (grok) it only through experience. Information: every field (not only IT) is evolving quickly and most people don't know where to look for useful info; in many cases, they don't even realize that information is available.
This holds true in every field, not only scientific or technical fields. It's true in finance, sales, marketing, journalism, politics, you name it. That's the reason why it's so hard to make different kind of people to work together (like R&D and marketing). Very few people are able to reduce the level of previous expertise needed to (really) understand what they are talking about.
One illustration: My field is finance, i guess most people on/. are proficient in CS/CE. Many threads on/. are totally obscure to me. Sometimes, I don't even know what is the subject. Yet, I'm often appalled by the complete lack of understanding of financial basics of the/. crowd. One example? The RIAA/P2P "debate". How many times have I read "reasonable" arguments like "A CD costs $1 to burn and the majors charge 20 bucks. They are overpricing!!!"? Yet a quick look on yahoo! finance will provide you with most majors' annual reports and you'll see that their operational profit (whoops, I do it myself, do you know what operational profit is?) represent around 5% of their sales. Does this mean that a CD costs $19 to be brought to the store? No, of course. First, the 20 bucks is not the major's revenue it's the retailer's revenue, and he keeps a margin. Then, there's sales tax in most states. Then there are fixed costs, investments that are not proportionnal to the number of CDs you sell. Then there's price elasticity: volume increases if prices decrease. Then there's competition etc... Sounds complex? It's not. For me, it's like 6th grade common sense. Yet, many educated and clever people (though unfamiliar with accounting/finance) suck at that.
It's the same with programming. I want to code something, what should I do? Wow, lots of questions come to my mind. Which langage, which platform, which IDE, which compiler, which database? How do I use any of these things? What do these words really mean in the first place? What is their syntax? Should I write the whole thing or use an existing GUI? Which one? Does this question even make sense? I'm confident that I could do it eventually if I commit enough time. It's not worth it!!! It's far more efficient if I outsource that task to a tech-savvy person.
To conclude: No, everybody is not a developer. And even in the future, most people won't ever do something that you would call developping. The problem goes far beyond GUIs and user-friendliness. You just grossly under-estimate the amount of investment needed to develop even the simplest piece of code.
OTOH, in Europe, we don't have to pay gazillions to Hollywood in order to fake a moon landing just because serious professionals with years of training have overextended themselves;-)
After all, Christianity itself is merely one of the few socially acceptible cults.
Hey Dude, take a breath. These guys are trying to clone human beings at a time when the technology is obviously in its infancy. And they don't seem to have ANY moral or ethics issues. Do you really think it's the best time to serve us your "religion=cult" crap?
They say the satellite carries a Ka-band transponder. This basically means it sends and receives data at 2GB/s. If the sat is geostat, 4 to 6 will be enough to cover the whole planet. If it's lower orbit, you'll need a whole network of them. Now, you can purchase a satellite dish and router and be online at 2GB/s speeds anywhere. Lag is about 1/3 sec for geostats, much lower for low orbits.
You have 2 types of routers: One-way (price tag around $500); you dl at 2GB/s and use plain ol' copper narrowband for upload. It's convenient for basic internet use (surfing, emailing...) but your upspeed is too slow for P2P or online gaming. Two-way routers are far more expensive (around $5,000 with dish) but it gives you superfast (can reach 8GB/s) connection, even if you're in the middle of nowhere.
Near the end of the MSNBC article:"Once we have the master performance captured," Gaeta explains, "we can actually use it to create an event, like a martial-arts fight. But it could be anything."
Wow, I hope that Reeves, Moss, Fishburn, Weaving and the others read their contracts VERY carefully. If they didn't, their next movies will be shot without them. A weird idea : movie stars replaced by their own virtual persona...
But not as much as the knee jerk reactions to this "only 4 in the last 10 years" crap. Everybody is explaining that the reason why creativity has been so poor recently is that society has become fascist / communist / atheist / ruled by lawyers / ruled by M$ / ruled by unions / ruled by big business / ruled by journalists / democrat / republican / liberal... Come on, this is just a completely subjective list established by some journalists who obviously don't know what they are talking about.
These are supposed to be major business innovations and we have pure anecdotal stuff (Pampers, LCDs, Viagra, Prozac), pure financial markets stuff (junk bonds, discount brokerage, index funds...), hard science/medecine discoveries (automated sequencing machine, tomography, thorazine...). And they miss ERP, the software license (at a time when only hardware had a perceived value) etc...
Anyone (even me) can come up with a similar list. Theirs is no truer than mine. So please don't use that list as a fact to support a political agenda.
Enough is enough! How many times will we have to read this kind of self-reassuring crap? We have all the ingredients of dishonest rhetorics in this article:
The Robin Hood syndrom : The poor are good, the rich are bad. So any behaviour is morally justified as long as it hurts the rich. It often comes with the implicit idea that if it hurts the rich, it benefits the poor. RIAA are rich, RIAA fights file sharing so file sharing is good for the poor and is a Good Thing (TM).
The "he did it first" syndrom : We're just responding to a prior agression from the recording industry. They charge $17 per CD! This is offensive and they deserve retaliation.
The "let's decide for them" syndrom : This one is amazing. Tim is so clever that he knows what is good for record companies better than them. My daughter now owns more CDs than I have collected in a lifetime of less exploratory listening. or (...)even if the RIAA fails to see the opportunity. The funny thing is that Tim contradicts himself the next page:File sharing networks don't threaten book, music, or film publishing. They threaten existing publishers. Who are you Tim, who are WE to decide for other people what's best for them?
Inaccurate analogies : electronic distribution works for IT books so it should work for music. Yet he mentions specifics in book publishing that render the analogy useless But the entire package--not to mention the convenience of a paper copy, and the aesthetic pleasure of the strongly branded packaging--is only available in print. Reading a 500-pages book on my laptop is VERY inconvenient, but I just have to plug my PC to my stereo to enjoy the full experience. Another example of this trick is in the analogy with cable TV. Did it ever occur to you, Tim, that the ONLY reason why I'm paying 20 bucks a month for cable is that I CANNOT get the same thing for free?
Gross generalization : also called proof by example or drawing long-term trends from 2 (or even one) data points. My 19 year-old daughter dls gigs of mp3 and still buys CD. Thus (implied) everybody does the same. My daughter discovers some unknown artists thanks to Kazaa. Thus (implied) the main impact of file sharing on the industry is to unearth excellent artists from obscurity. First, notice that everything is implied. Second, even if Tim's daughter doesn't dl Britney Spear, I would bet that most of the shared mp3's are stuff that you could find in mainstream stores. Anyone has data on this?
Outright lie : Online file sharing is the work of enthusiasts who are trading their music because there is no legitimate alternative. Because buying a CD is not a legitimate alternative?
Plain ol' mistakes : Tim reduces the role of the music industry to mere publishing. He's completely missing (or hiding?) the fact that they're also producers. The publisher selects and markets content as Tim describes. The producer funds and actually contributes to the content by guiding the artists. Listen to most artists' very first albums; those which are reëdited after they get famous. I've got Bowie's and Genesis' first songs. They're crap. Well, not complete crap; when you know their later work you can hear some of their talent. But it's more or less some watered-down Beatles. What happened is that these guys were discovered by talented producers who saw their uniqueness and helped them to develop it. How can file sharing replace these people?
Most arguments I read in favor of file sharing can more or less be reduced to "I do what I can, not what I should". We often see the conjunction of bad resoning based on wrong assumptions. The most commonly accepted assumption is "the music industry overprices CDs". It's just plain wrong. Comparing the $17 price of a CD in stores to the $1 cost of burning it doesn't make more sense than comparing the $17 price of a T-bone in a restaurant to the $1 cost of the meat and potatoes to the farmer. Check record companies' income statements. You'll realize that their operating profit is between 5% and 10% of sales. Some even lose money. They don't make 10 bucks on each CD but less than 1. Where does the money go? To store owners; to advertising; to fund bands which never sell a CD; to pay employees who search for young talents, sign them, help them; to pay for recording equipment; to pay taxes, rents etc... I don't know this industry specifics enough to give more details but you get the point. I'm not trying to make you cry on record companies. I'm not saying they are angels. I think any artist on the verge of signing with a major should be very cautious and get a good lawyer if (s)he doesn't want to get screwed. But the bare fact remains: CDs are NOT overpriced.
Now back to file-sharing. I believe that this technology can greatly improve the efficiency of music distribution, i.e. all the part priorly addressed by retailers and publishers. I would not be surprised if a form of electronic distribution took a large chunk of the market in the not so distant future. I've got no problem with that. It's innovation, progress, ordinary course of business, whatever you chose to call it. The problem IMHO is that the current form of electronic distribution violates copyright. And copyright is the only protection known to permit the ones in the production part (artists, producers,...) to get a (fair) chunk of revenue. And the bullshit about increasing music sales through better diffusion is just that : bullshit. It may be true, but nobody knows for sure. The funny thing (and the thing that many people chose to ignore) is that nothing in the law currently prevents artists and/or producers to forfeit their copyright, release their work freely over the web and expect that they recoup that through increased sales!!! Despite the common "conspiration theory" view of a market in the hands of a few majors, there are truckloads of independant producers/publishers around. Some are going the "free as is speech" way but most aren't. If the wishful thinkers are right, then the producers who go the file sharing way will flourish and the market will shift this way.
But I fail to see the moral justification in a bunch of spoiled kids just taking what they can against the wishes of all those who contributed to bring it to them and calling it justice. I have already downloaded mp3s and I'm not very proud of it. There are reasons why I did this (availability, convenience, price...) but they are just explanations, not excuses. Call me hypocrit if you wish, for doing things I so strongly advocate against. Yet, I'd rather acknowledge my wrongdoings than fall into self-complacency.
The other (bigger) stumbling block is the lack of a micropayment system. Put that in place, and lots of people will join a pay-to-email system. Without it, the system doesn't work at all.
I agree with you on this one. This is THE stumbling block, far more than widespread adoption. The automatic request for payment can be as descriptive as I want. Even if nobody knows about this system, it won't be a big hurdle to legitimate senders if they can easily attach their payment. Actually, the request for payment could be the best tool of diffusion of the system. Think "viral marketing". Imagine receiving an auto reply saying : "In order to protect myself against spam, I have implemented the following...[description]... You can find more about this service or subscribe by clicking this link..."
Wow, more than 100 posts already and still 90% of posters obviously did not grasp the (rather) simple concept. I've seen a number of completely irrelevant objections:
The law would never pass: That's one of the best feature in this idea. No need for a new law. The recipient already has the right to block incoming messages. You know, when your phone rings, you won't go to jail if you don't take the call.
Spammers will never accept this: Of course not, but nobody asks them! Using this kind of solution is YOUR decision; you don't have to ask anybody's permission, especially spammers.
Widespread adoption will never occur: So what? This system will work for me even if I'm the only user. It's not one of those things that require a critical mass of users to be useful.
This will not completely eradicate spam: Frankly, I don't care. If it prevents spam sent to me, it's good enough.
5 cents to read spam is not worth it: You're missing the point. This is not about making money, it's about discouraging spammers. No spammer will ever send you an email if it costs him 5 cents. And the price is not for making you actually read the spam, it's only for allowing it to reach your inbox. In the very unlikely case a spammer actually pays, just delete the message as usual.
So please, read the article. The idea may not be completely new (email stamp) but the details address most obvious objections.
One problem I can think of is still pending : what happens if the sender is also equiped with a similar system? Will we see payment notices bouncing back and forth between both ends without ever reaching an inbox? I guess a solution would be to automatically whitelist any address you've sent an email to, if only for 1 hour.
I realize your post was trying to be funny and it certainly succeeded in a way. But I've noticed that/.ers are too often way out of proportion when they mention business figures. So I take this opportunity to give some basic financial data and analysis about Walmart. My goal is only to give the/. community an order of magnitude of how much money commercial entities actually make out of their customers. All the following figures come from Walmart's 2002 annual report (available on their site, investors information) and are expressed in $Bn:
Sales 217.8 Gross profit 46.2 (21% of sales) Net profit 6.7 (3% of sales)
So, when you say that the cost of their merchandises is 25% of the price they charge, you're pretty much off target since the actual figure is 79%. And profit is not 45% but a mere 3%.
Now, if you check other huge corps, you'll notice that net profit represents between -5% (yes MINUS) and +10% of sales in most cases. So the conspiracy theory about corps robbing their customers by overpricing their products should be taken with a grain of salt.
Interestingly enough (and I'm sure you/.ers will appreciate this), I can think of one company clearly out of this profitability range. The name is Microsoft of course and their net profit is a whopping 27% of sales.
I've reread "I, Robot" recently, and IMHO the two great strenghts of the books are:
- The pretty deep analysis of the interactions between the 3 laws of robotics. Hollywood's track record in butchering anything subtle or complex in a sci-fi novel is amazing. Think about "The minority report". Dick's original idea is that knowing the future changes it. In the movie, it becomes a boring story about free will. Think about the recent "planet of the apes" or "screamers". It's sad but Hollywood's tendancy is to reduce sci-fi to eye-candy and bland plots.
- The unusual, unnerving, yet strangely attaching character of Dr. Susan Calvin. She's central to the stories as she bridges the gap between robots and humans. I know Will Smith has a lot of talent, but I don't think he can play her role effectively. She's supposed to be plain, cold, arrogant and inflexible. I don't know of any American actress who matches this description. So her character will most probably disappear or its importance be greatly diminished.
So basically, we should expect a poor crime plot (not too complex, Joe Sixpack must understand); we'll see scores of nicely rendered robots joking with Will Smith. And maybe a couple blaster gun fights. So sad...
I don't think the DoD distributes very much of the software it writes, so why should it care if it uses GPL code? It shouldn't care! But let the FUD fly!
Don't you think defense contractors distribute the software they write to DoD? Now, are they allowed to care?
AFAIK, Amazon is VERY anxious to convince the investors community that it's doing a good work at reducing costs and improving the bottom line.
Now, put yourself in their shoes for a while. If market conditions (that you don't have any impact on) reduce your IT bill, wouldn't you want to take some credit from it? What is better for Amazon's stock? Tell analysts : "Lower than expected telco costs reduced our IT bill by 17 millions." Or tell them : "We have done an outstanding job of switching OSs. This and lowered telco costs allowed us to reduce the IT bill by 17 millions."
Not convinced? Here's another. Reduced telco costs is a one-shot, non-recurring saving; next quarter or next year, the market will swing back and the price will increase (well, it's not that simple but you get the idea). OTOH, switching to Linux yields recurring savings. Now Amazon only needs 54 millions to run its IT. Analysts will now integrate these savings in their estimates for each future quarter.
I'm not saying that switching to Linux did not generate any savings, just that it's in Amazon's best interest to emphasize its impact. The Linux community should welcome the fact that a visible company has switched to Linux, not take this as a proof that Linux actually reduces costs so dramatically.
Well, I could have posted this countless times before; this basically applies to most discussions about the respective strengths/weaknesses of open source (free) vs closed.
Sanger's article is well written and makes a number of very good points but I couldn't shake an unnerving feeling: Why does he claim that he will put Britannica out of business?
And more generally, I keep reading posts on/. or elsewhere claiming that Linux will kill MS, ***SQL will kill Oracle and so on. Though I recognize the benefits of these claims in motivating troops or getting momentum and coverage, I feel that they are immature and short-sighted.
My understanding is that closed and open source are very different "methods of development" that yield very different products addressing very different needs. I am not a technologist (actually I'm more of a business guy) but from my experience, I think I can quickly sum up the plusses and minuses of each "method of development":
Open source plusses
- robust
- reliable
- standard and adaptative
- constantly improving
Open source minusses
- designed for coders
- no respect of deadlines
- never completed
Closed source plusses
- designed for users
- meets deadlines
Closed source minusses
- unrelialable
- hard to maintain / upgrade
Of course, these are generalities and could (will) not apply to any specific situation. I could also add a few plusses or minusses to each method but you get the idea.
I think that each method addresses a different segment of the market and I would not be surprised if in 10 years, both worlds coexist peacefully. Many people in the open source field are starting to realize that. A very interesting discussion about "Why Linux will never make it to the mass-market?" (or something along these lines) took place on/. the other day. Some guy essentially said that Linux would never reach mass-market acceptance before it was half as user-friendly as Win is; another one said that he didn't even care.
Back to Nupedia and Wikipedia, Sanger makes a pretty convincing description of what these projects could become when (if) they reach critical mass, but I think he misses a point about what it takes to create a good encyclopedia.
Writing a good encyclopedia is not only about getting the largest number of the best writers submitting the largest number of the best articles. It is also about coherence, completeness and absolute accuracy.
Benevolent writers will offer articles on their pet subjects, but how do you find a writer for a specific article if nobody is voluntary? All articles will probably improve in quality over time, but at a given time won't lots of articles still be bug-ridden?
Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that these projects are dommed or will never meet a significant success. I do think, though, that Nupedia and Wikipedia will eventually be dramatically different from Britannica and will fill dramatically different needs.
Adopting this perspective, I think that open source advocates should commit less resources in religious wars and more in thinking about what needs they want to address and which market they are targetting.
I will fight for the right to be right
How do ET aim at a moving target?
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· Score: 3
ok, let's assume ET is 100 light years away. While the laser beam travels, earth revolves around the sun and the sun itself moves within the milky way. Of course aliens could compute the movements and target where earth will (should) be when the beam reachs us. But chances are that gravity wells would slightly bend the path or dust clouds would slow the light. Again truly superior aliens could take all of this into account. But reliance on such a huge collection of initial conditions would make the system pretty chaotic.
What do you think?
Are we (Terrans) currently able to target a laser beam on a planet 1, 10, 100 light years away?
Slashdot Mirror
Wow, more than 100 posts already and still 90% of posters obviously did not grasp the (rather) simple concept. I've seen a number of completely irrelevant objections:
The law would never pass : That's one of the best feature in this idea. No need for a new law. The recipient already has the right to block incoming messages. You know, when your phone rings, you won't go to jail if you don't take the call.
Spammers will never accept this : Of course not, but nobody asks them! Using this kind of solution is YOUR decision; you don't have to ask anybody's permission, especially spammers.
Widespread adoption will never occur : So what? This system will work for me even if I'm the only user. It's not one of those things that require a critical mass of users to be useful.
This will not completely eradicate spam : Frankly, I don't care. If it prevents spam sent to me, it's good enough.
5 cents to read spam is not worth it : You're missing the point. This is not about making money, it's about discouraging spammers. No spammer will ever send you an email if it costs him 5 cents. And the price is not for making you actually read the spam, it's only for allowing it to reach your inbox. In the very unlikely case a spammer actually pays, just delete the message as usual.
So please, read the article. The idea may not be completely new (email stamp) but the details address most obvious objections.
One problem I can think of is still pending : what happens if the sender is also equiped with a similar system? Will we see payment notices bouncing back and forth between both ends without ever reaching an inbox? I guess a solution would be to automatically whitelist any address you've sent an email to, if only for 1 hour.
Now, the really funny part is that ALL of the above (including subject line) is the exact post I submitted on Dec 10, in reply to an article about the same research by the same researcher.
We're discovering the notion of meta-dupe: it's a dupe slashdot story with dupe replies. By the way, my original post was modded +5 informative. If this one gets modded +5 too, we will achieve uber-meta-dupe status: the exact same story, with the exact same comment, with the exact same moderation. Perpetual motion, sorta...
OSDN outsources slashdot editing to its subscribers base. These happy few will have the privilege of beta testing dupes, broken links and poor spelling and grammar. They will also be the sole beneficiaries of the prestigious first post award as well as the (somewhat less prestigious) AYBABTU, ISR and Beowulf Cluster awards.
Must find my credit card, quick!
...Taco wins easily with an astounding 94 mn delay before reposting that exact same story.
I'm impressed...
Well I hope you can understand that many times in the past I have given links. I neglect to mention links because I don't want to be forced into defending them - it is a waste of time and results in going around in circles.
Well, I missed the previous discussions, so this does not help me. Also, once I have been provided with a relevant source of information, I don't need you (or anyone else) anymore in order to make my own opinion.
with a cursory search of google you can find a whole range of resources
You mentioned yourself earlier in this thread that some (most?) creationists are more or less religious bigots. You hint that you belong to "rational" creationists. I don't think Google will do the sorting and I don't want to spend hours finding diamonds among the muck. I guess that you have already done that work, so please do me a favor and help me save some time.
I can link you to a book I have heard is good but have not personally read. Here it is if you like [amazon.com]
I'd prefer a book that you HAVE read. Also, this book seems to poke holes into evolution far more than it advocates any competing theory. So it does not answer the initial question of what is it that you believe.
You know, many people feel that evolution is incomplete or even wrong in some parts, even though they buy the basics. Bashing evolution is useful only if it brings a better alternative. Your personal beliefs (earth is +/- 6,000 years old) are very hard to swallow. I'm willing to keep my mind open, but only if I see something worthwile to prove it. If I don't, I'll just store it in the "highly unlikely and unsupported" folder.
Your behaviour is puzzling. You immediately post a link to a site that bashes Scientology, but seem very reluctant to post anything that would describe and support rational creationism. This sounds suspicious. Basically, what you say amounts to: "I am no mystic, I have solid facts and experiments to support my beliefs; but you'll have to take my word for this since I have no time and you are too dumb".
Actually, you're achieving the exact opposing goal. I think ANY rational person has mental alarms ringing all over as soon as he identifies this pattern. So your choice is simple. Either you describe and support your views, or you lose all credibility.
Actually, the fundamental question about any technological/scientific advance is whether it is a creation or a discovery. There's a kind of philosophical debate among mathematicians : Do they actually invent anything or do they merely find stuff that always existed and was just waiting for someone to stumble upon it?
In a way, math theorems are "just" the logical (mechanical?) consequence of a relatively small number of axioms. Theoretically, one could feed the axioms into a computer and have it derive "automatically" all possible theorems from these axioms.
On the other hand, the tree of possibilities is so vast that human input (insight, genius?) is critical to identify the one path that will lead to the desired result.
Back to the topic, it seems to me that genome sequencing looks more like "finding" than "inventing". But that's just MHO.
But when was the last time you downloaded anything other than copyrighted material from a P2P system?
Is pr0n copyrighted?
In my book, guys who manage to draw multi-billion revenues from big businesses on a recurring basis qualify as "serious business type".
Now, you obviously consider that their services are not worth the money they're charging (and I'm not far from agreeing with you here). But that's a completely different point.
WebVan anyone?
They burnt through $1 billion (yes, that is 1,000 millions) and were headed by Accenture's former CEO... Talk about "serious business types"...
with some stupid errors like saying developers code with UML
:
Uninformed errors, maybe. Or blatant, significant, major errors. Whatever. But why stupid? Do you really need to be arrogant and insulting? Yet another "1337" syndrom, I guess. Sigh...
Repeat after me 50 times, I'll put it in a language you can understand
Knowledge!=Intelligence
Ignorance!=Stupidity
You know, one thing I've noticed is that many people tend to have a erroneous perception of the complexity of their jobs. I mean, after working (or studying) in a given field for a couple of years, you start forgetting how much you know and understand it. Many tasks seem utterly moronic to you even though a very bright specialist in another field would be completely helpless in front of them.
/. are proficient in CS/CE. Many threads on /. are totally obscure to me. Sometimes, I don't even know what is the subject. Yet, I'm often appalled by the complete lack of understanding of financial basics of the /. crowd. One example? The RIAA/P2P "debate". How many times have I read "reasonable" arguments like "A CD costs $1 to burn and the majors charge 20 bucks. They are overpricing!!!"? Yet a quick look on yahoo! finance will provide you with most majors' annual reports and you'll see that their operational profit (whoops, I do it myself, do you know what operational profit is?) represent around 5% of their sales. Does this mean that a CD costs $19 to be brought to the store? No, of course. First, the 20 bucks is not the major's revenue it's the retailer's revenue, and he keeps a margin. Then, there's sales tax in most states. Then there are fixed costs, investments that are not proportionnal to the number of CDs you sell. Then there's price elasticity: volume increases if prices decrease. Then there's competition etc... Sounds complex? It's not. For me, it's like 6th grade common sense. Yet, many educated and clever people (though unfamiliar with accounting/finance) suck at that.
The reasons are many. Language: read any doc in any field and you'll see countless acronyms, names, references that an outsider has no chance to understand. Mindset/methodology: in each field, there's a "best practice" way to present problems and solve them; and you get (grok) it only through experience. Information: every field (not only IT) is evolving quickly and most people don't know where to look for useful info; in many cases, they don't even realize that information is available.
This holds true in every field, not only scientific or technical fields. It's true in finance, sales, marketing, journalism, politics, you name it. That's the reason why it's so hard to make different kind of people to work together (like R&D and marketing). Very few people are able to reduce the level of previous expertise needed to (really) understand what they are talking about.
One illustration: My field is finance, i guess most people on
It's the same with programming. I want to code something, what should I do? Wow, lots of questions come to my mind. Which langage, which platform, which IDE, which compiler, which database? How do I use any of these things? What do these words really mean in the first place? What is their syntax? Should I write the whole thing or use an existing GUI? Which one? Does this question even make sense? I'm confident that I could do it eventually if I commit enough time. It's not worth it!!! It's far more efficient if I outsource that task to a tech-savvy person.
To conclude: No, everybody is not a developer. And even in the future, most people won't ever do something that you would call developping. The problem goes far beyond GUIs and user-friendliness. You just grossly under-estimate the amount of investment needed to develop even the simplest piece of code.
OTOH, in Europe, we don't have to pay gazillions to Hollywood in order to fake a moon landing just because serious professionals with years of training have overextended themselves ;-)
After all, Christianity itself is merely one of the few socially acceptible cults.
Hey Dude, take a breath. These guys are trying to clone human beings at a time when the technology is obviously in its infancy. And they don't seem to have ANY moral or ethics issues. Do you really think it's the best time to serve us your "religion=cult" crap?
They say the satellite carries a Ka-band transponder. This basically means it sends and receives data at 2GB/s. If the sat is geostat, 4 to 6 will be enough to cover the whole planet. If it's lower orbit, you'll need a whole network of them. Now, you can purchase a satellite dish and router and be online at 2GB/s speeds anywhere. Lag is about 1/3 sec for geostats, much lower for low orbits.
You have 2 types of routers: One-way (price tag around $500); you dl at 2GB/s and use plain ol' copper narrowband for upload. It's convenient for basic internet use (surfing, emailing...) but your upspeed is too slow for P2P or online gaming. Two-way routers are far more expensive (around $5,000 with dish) but it gives you superfast (can reach 8GB/s) connection, even if you're in the middle of nowhere.
Near the end of the MSNBC article :"Once we have the master performance captured," Gaeta explains, "we can actually use it to create an event, like a martial-arts fight. But it could be anything."
Wow, I hope that Reeves, Moss, Fishburn, Weaving and the others read their contracts VERY carefully. If they didn't, their next movies will be shot without them. A weird idea : movie stars replaced by their own virtual persona...
But not as much as the knee jerk reactions to this "only 4 in the last 10 years" crap. Everybody is explaining that the reason why creativity has been so poor recently is that society has become fascist / communist / atheist / ruled by lawyers / ruled by M$ / ruled by unions / ruled by big business / ruled by journalists / democrat / republican / liberal... Come on, this is just a completely subjective list established by some journalists who obviously don't know what they are talking about.
These are supposed to be major business innovations and we have pure anecdotal stuff (Pampers, LCDs, Viagra, Prozac), pure financial markets stuff (junk bonds, discount brokerage, index funds...), hard science/medecine discoveries (automated sequencing machine, tomography, thorazine...). And they miss ERP, the software license (at a time when only hardware had a perceived value) etc...
Anyone (even me) can come up with a similar list. Theirs is no truer than mine. So please don't use that list as a fact to support a political agenda.
Enough is enough! How many times will we have to read this kind of self-reassuring crap? We have all the ingredients of dishonest rhetorics in this article :
:File sharing networks don't threaten book, music, or film publishing. They threaten existing publishers. Who are you Tim, who are WE to decide for other people what's best for them?
The Robin Hood syndrom : The poor are good, the rich are bad. So any behaviour is morally justified as long as it hurts the rich. It often comes with the implicit idea that if it hurts the rich, it benefits the poor. RIAA are rich, RIAA fights file sharing so file sharing is good for the poor and is a Good Thing (TM).
The "he did it first" syndrom : We're just responding to a prior agression from the recording industry. They charge $17 per CD! This is offensive and they deserve retaliation.
The "let's decide for them" syndrom : This one is amazing. Tim is so clever that he knows what is good for record companies better than them. My daughter now owns more CDs than I have collected in a lifetime of less exploratory listening. or (...)even if the RIAA fails to see the opportunity. The funny thing is that Tim contradicts himself the next page
Inaccurate analogies : electronic distribution works for IT books so it should work for music. Yet he mentions specifics in book publishing that render the analogy useless But the entire package--not to mention the convenience of a paper copy, and the aesthetic pleasure of the strongly branded packaging--is only available in print. Reading a 500-pages book on my laptop is VERY inconvenient, but I just have to plug my PC to my stereo to enjoy the full experience. Another example of this trick is in the analogy with cable TV. Did it ever occur to you, Tim, that the ONLY reason why I'm paying 20 bucks a month for cable is that I CANNOT get the same thing for free?
Gross generalization : also called proof by example or drawing long-term trends from 2 (or even one) data points. My 19 year-old daughter dls gigs of mp3 and still buys CD. Thus (implied) everybody does the same. My daughter discovers some unknown artists thanks to Kazaa. Thus (implied) the main impact of file sharing on the industry is to unearth excellent artists from obscurity. First, notice that everything is implied. Second, even if Tim's daughter doesn't dl Britney Spear, I would bet that most of the shared mp3's are stuff that you could find in mainstream stores. Anyone has data on this?
Outright lie : Online file sharing is the work of enthusiasts who are trading their music because there is no legitimate alternative. Because buying a CD is not a legitimate alternative?
Plain ol' mistakes : Tim reduces the role of the music industry to mere publishing. He's completely missing (or hiding?) the fact that they're also producers. The publisher selects and markets content as Tim describes. The producer funds and actually contributes to the content by guiding the artists. Listen to most artists' very first albums; those which are reëdited after they get famous. I've got Bowie's and Genesis' first songs. They're crap. Well, not complete crap; when you know their later work you can hear some of their talent. But it's more or less some watered-down Beatles. What happened is that these guys were discovered by talented producers who saw their uniqueness and helped them to develop it. How can file sharing replace these people?
Most arguments I read in favor of file sharing can more or less be reduced to "I do what I can, not what I should". We often see the conjunction of bad resoning based on wrong assumptions. The most commonly accepted assumption is "the music industry overprices CDs". It's just plain wrong. Comparing the $17 price of a CD in stores to the $1 cost of burning it doesn't make more sense than comparing the $17 price of a T-bone in a restaurant to the $1 cost of the meat and potatoes to the farmer. Check record companies' income statements. You'll realize that their operating profit is between 5% and 10% of sales. Some even lose money. They don't make 10 bucks on each CD but less than 1. Where does the money go? To store owners; to advertising; to fund bands which never sell a CD; to pay employees who search for young talents, sign them, help them; to pay for recording equipment; to pay taxes, rents etc... I don't know this industry specifics enough to give more details but you get the point. I'm not trying to make you cry on record companies. I'm not saying they are angels. I think any artist on the verge of signing with a major should be very cautious and get a good lawyer if (s)he doesn't want to get screwed. But the bare fact remains: CDs are NOT overpriced.
Now back to file-sharing. I believe that this technology can greatly improve the efficiency of music distribution, i.e. all the part priorly addressed by retailers and publishers. I would not be surprised if a form of electronic distribution took a large chunk of the market in the not so distant future. I've got no problem with that. It's innovation, progress, ordinary course of business, whatever you chose to call it. The problem IMHO is that the current form of electronic distribution violates copyright. And copyright is the only protection known to permit the ones in the production part (artists, producers,...) to get a (fair) chunk of revenue. And the bullshit about increasing music sales through better diffusion is just that : bullshit. It may be true, but nobody knows for sure. The funny thing (and the thing that many people chose to ignore) is that nothing in the law currently prevents artists and/or producers to forfeit their copyright, release their work freely over the web and expect that they recoup that through increased sales!!! Despite the common "conspiration theory" view of a market in the hands of a few majors, there are truckloads of independant producers/publishers around. Some are going the "free as is speech" way but most aren't. If the wishful thinkers are right, then the producers who go the file sharing way will flourish and the market will shift this way.
But I fail to see the moral justification in a bunch of spoiled kids just taking what they can against the wishes of all those who contributed to bring it to them and calling it justice. I have already downloaded mp3s and I'm not very proud of it. There are reasons why I did this (availability, convenience, price...) but they are just explanations, not excuses. Call me hypocrit if you wish, for doing things I so strongly advocate against. Yet, I'd rather acknowledge my wrongdoings than fall into self-complacency.
The other (bigger) stumbling block is the lack of a micropayment system. Put that in place, and lots of people will join a pay-to-email system. Without it, the system doesn't work at all.
I agree with you on this one. This is THE stumbling block, far more than widespread adoption. The automatic request for payment can be as descriptive as I want. Even if nobody knows about this system, it won't be a big hurdle to legitimate senders if they can easily attach their payment. Actually, the request for payment could be the best tool of diffusion of the system. Think "viral marketing". Imagine receiving an auto reply saying : "In order to protect myself against spam, I have implemented the following...[description]... You can find more about this service or subscribe by clicking this link..."
Wow, more than 100 posts already and still 90% of posters obviously did not grasp the (rather) simple concept. I've seen a number of completely irrelevant objections:
: That's one of the best feature in this idea. No need for a new law. The recipient already has the right to block incoming messages. You know, when your phone rings, you won't go to jail if you don't take the call.
: Of course not, but nobody asks them! Using this kind of solution is YOUR decision; you don't have to ask anybody's permission, especially spammers.
: So what? This system will work for me even if I'm the only user. It's not one of those things that require a critical mass of users to be useful.
: Frankly, I don't care. If it prevents spam sent to me, it's good enough.
: You're missing the point. This is not about making money, it's about discouraging spammers. No spammer will ever send you an email if it costs him 5 cents. And the price is not for making you actually read the spam, it's only for allowing it to reach your inbox. In the very unlikely case a spammer actually pays, just delete the message as usual.
The law would never pass
Spammers will never accept this
Widespread adoption will never occur
This will not completely eradicate spam
5 cents to read spam is not worth it
So please, read the article. The idea may not be completely new (email stamp) but the details address most obvious objections.
One problem I can think of is still pending : what happens if the sender is also equiped with a similar system? Will we see payment notices bouncing back and forth between both ends without ever reaching an inbox? I guess a solution would be to automatically whitelist any address you've sent an email to, if only for 1 hour.
I realize your post was trying to be funny and it certainly succeeded in a way. But I've noticed that /.ers are too often way out of proportion when they mention business figures. So I take this opportunity to give some basic financial data and analysis about Walmart. My goal is only to give the /. community an order of magnitude of how much money commercial entities actually make out of their customers. All the following figures come from Walmart's 2002 annual report (available on their site, investors information) and are expressed in $Bn:
/.ers will appreciate this), I can think of one company clearly out of this profitability range. The name is Microsoft of course and their net profit is a whopping 27% of sales.
Sales 217.8
Gross profit 46.2 (21% of sales)
Net profit 6.7 (3% of sales)
So, when you say that the cost of their merchandises is 25% of the price they charge, you're pretty much off target since the actual figure is 79%. And profit is not 45% but a mere 3%.
Now, if you check other huge corps, you'll notice that net profit represents between -5% (yes MINUS) and +10% of sales in most cases. So the conspiracy theory about corps robbing their customers by overpricing their products should be taken with a grain of salt.
Interestingly enough (and I'm sure you
I've reread "I, Robot" recently, and IMHO the two great strenghts of the books are:
- The pretty deep analysis of the interactions between the 3 laws of robotics. Hollywood's track record in butchering anything subtle or complex in a sci-fi novel is amazing. Think about "The minority report". Dick's original idea is that knowing the future changes it. In the movie, it becomes a boring story about free will. Think about the recent "planet of the apes" or "screamers". It's sad but Hollywood's tendancy is to reduce sci-fi to eye-candy and bland plots.
- The unusual, unnerving, yet strangely attaching character of Dr. Susan Calvin. She's central to the stories as she bridges the gap between robots and humans. I know Will Smith has a lot of talent, but I don't think he can play her role effectively. She's supposed to be plain, cold, arrogant and inflexible. I don't know of any American actress who matches this description. So her character will most probably disappear or its importance be greatly diminished.
So basically, we should expect a poor crime plot (not too complex, Joe Sixpack must understand); we'll see scores of nicely rendered robots joking with Will Smith. And maybe a couple blaster gun fights. So sad...
I don't think the DoD distributes very much of the software it writes, so why should it care if it uses GPL code? It shouldn't care! But let the FUD fly!
Don't you think defense contractors distribute the software they write to DoD? Now, are they allowed to care?
Might not be as minor as you think.
AFAIK, Amazon is VERY anxious to convince the investors community that it's doing a good work at reducing costs and improving the bottom line.
Now, put yourself in their shoes for a while. If market conditions (that you don't have any impact on) reduce your IT bill, wouldn't you want to take some credit from it? What is better for Amazon's stock? Tell analysts : "Lower than expected telco costs reduced our IT bill by 17 millions." Or tell them : "We have done an outstanding job of switching OSs. This and lowered telco costs allowed us to reduce the IT bill by 17 millions."
Not convinced? Here's another. Reduced telco costs is a one-shot, non-recurring saving; next quarter or next year, the market will swing back and the price will increase (well, it's not that simple but you get the idea). OTOH, switching to Linux yields recurring savings. Now Amazon only needs 54 millions to run its IT. Analysts will now integrate these savings in their estimates for each future quarter.
I'm not saying that switching to Linux did not generate any savings, just that it's in Amazon's best interest to emphasize its impact. The Linux community should welcome the fact that a visible company has switched to Linux, not take this as a proof that Linux actually reduces costs so dramatically.
Just my 2c.
Well, I could have posted this countless times before; this basically applies to most discussions about the respective strengths/weaknesses of open source (free) vs closed.
Sanger's article is well written and makes a number of very good points but I couldn't shake an unnerving feeling:
Why does he claim that he will put Britannica out of business?
And more generally, I keep reading posts on
My understanding is that closed and open source are very different "methods of development" that yield very different products addressing very different needs. I am not a technologist (actually I'm more of a business guy) but from my experience, I think I can quickly sum up the plusses and minuses of each "method of development"
Open source plusses
- robust
- reliable
- standard and adaptative
- constantly improving
Open source minusses
- designed for coders
- no respect of deadlines
- never completed
Closed source plusses
- designed for users
- meets deadlines
Closed source minusses
- unrelialable
- hard to maintain / upgrade
Of course, these are generalities and could (will) not apply to any specific situation. I could also add a few plusses or minusses to each method but you get the idea.
I think that each method addresses a different segment of the market and I would not be surprised if in 10 years, both worlds coexist peacefully. Many people in the open source field are starting to realize that. A very interesting discussion about "Why Linux will never make it to the mass-market?" (or something along these lines) took place on
Back to Nupedia and Wikipedia, Sanger makes a pretty convincing description of what these projects could become when (if) they reach critical mass, but I think he misses a point about what it takes to create a good encyclopedia.
Writing a good encyclopedia is not only about getting the largest number of the best writers submitting the largest number of the best articles. It is also about coherence, completeness and absolute accuracy.
Benevolent writers will offer articles on their pet subjects, but how do you find a writer for a specific article if nobody is voluntary? All articles will probably improve in quality over time, but at a given time won't lots of articles still be bug-ridden?
Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that these projects are dommed or will never meet a significant success. I do think, though, that Nupedia and Wikipedia will eventually be dramatically different from Britannica and will fill dramatically different needs.
Adopting this perspective, I think that open source advocates should commit less resources in religious wars and more in thinking about what needs they want to address and which market they are targetting.
I will fight for the right to be right
ok, let's assume ET is 100 light years away. While the laser beam travels, earth revolves around the sun and the sun itself moves within the milky way. Of course aliens could compute the movements and target where earth will (should) be when the beam reachs us. But chances are that gravity wells would slightly bend the path or dust clouds would slow the light. Again truly superior aliens could take all of this into account. But reliance on such a huge collection of initial conditions would make the system pretty chaotic.
What do you think?
Are we (Terrans) currently able to target a laser beam on a planet 1, 10, 100 light years away?
I will fight for the right to be right