B&N collapsing would be good for independents since it would leave the market open for them. Then you would have the businesses that are responsive to local needs that you desire. So, it could be a very positive thing. Why worry about it.
This is another case where Linux could be a niche. You would think Linux would be perfect for old computers, that this would be a market niche they could capitalize on. You would be wrong. Unfortunately Linux breaks its driver compatability WITH EVERY RELEASE. They absolutely refuse backward compatability. They also on an irrational whim deleted XAA and dozens of drivers for older cards. The mentality of Linux devs seems to be that no one would ever want to use a computer that is older than three years and everyone should have the latest and greatest $1000 workstation. Not only does this make life hell for hardware manufacturers that would want to provide a driver but also means Linux shoots itself in the foot by neglecting a prime market segment due to the arrogant mentality of some developers. The lack of backward compatibility and cross compatability with Windows (with Wine thinking 40% compatibility is "adequate") remains Linux biggest barriers to adoption.
You would think Linux would be perfect for old computers, that this would be a market niche they could capitalize on. You would be wrong. Unfortunately Linux breaks its driver compatability WITH EVERY RELEASE. They also on an irrational whim deleted XAA and dozens of drivers for older cards. The mentality of Linux devs seems to be that no one would ever want to use a computer that is older than three years and everyone should have the latest and greatest $1000 workstation.
I was about to say that with Linux this wouldn't happen. But then I remebered that X.org had deleted dozens of video drivers when they decided on an irrational whim to delete all of the XAA code which turned a huge number of older computers into boat anchors. Linux systems developers seem to think you should need the latest Intel GPU made within the last 3 years. Whoops.
I thought he might consider it to be some eternal monument to himself. Being out in space, it could be orbiting there for a very long time, maybe a billion years or so. Somewhat like the Moon landing sites which are historical monuments. Maybe future travellers will be able to visit them, but the whole area will be cordened off and they will have to look down from an observation deck, so everything can be preserved exactly as it was when Apollo astronauts left, footprints and all.
It is amazing what Musk has done. Still, Rocket technology, isnt exactly the most sustainable thing, when you consider the amount of resources which are used. Its also, kind of low tech, we are talking explosions and so on here. What would really be an advance is an anti-gravity electromagnetic drive of some kind powered by clean energy extracted from the aether without the use of dirty nuclear and fossil fuels. Pull that off and then I will be REALLY impressed.
The argument for C was always that its "close to hardware". But its not really. It exposes you to the full dangers of having no bounds checking or pointer safety, but for this you dont get things like :
Being able to introspect and alter the stack (useful for backend for languages that allow stack manipulation) Partial compilation (useful for homoiconic languages) Information on the vector locations of machine code for single lines of C code (useful for self modifying code and homoiconic languages using C as a backend) Information on the layout of data structures (for interfacing C to other high end languages) Being able to programmatically control and manage symbol linkage
This makes C useless as a target backend for implementing higher end languages with various kinds of stack introspection and homiconic models, in a cross platform manner.
For a "low level" language, it exposes you to the full risks of low level without giving you full low level access to program state and introspection into the programs internals. A pretty lousy deal.
I have developed languages that are homoiconic and require stack manipulation and the need to be able to call into C libraries, and looked into C as a backend target because its the most cross platform target to avoid having to write a compiler for every machine language, and its basically totally useless because of the lack of the features. It makes as well, linking to C libraries from languages like Python unnecessarily complex due to the lack of any maps of the data structures.
The drug parks in Europe helped reduce the black market where drugs are marketed to new users thus helping put them out of business.
By trying to go down the war on drugs path again we are repeating all the same mistakes again. rather than criminalize the drug we should instead address underlying cultural and social problems that are leading to their use, like the very poor moral exemplars coming from hollywood, the lack of virtue, morality and ethics in our mainstream culture as promoted by Lady Gaga, Britney Spears, etc. and the manner in which many communities have been rendered rustbelts by disasterous trade and offshoring policies which devastated many communiites, causing people to turn to drugs to relieve their pain. If we help people living fulfilling happy lives and promote a family values culture of stable marriage and so on, and teach the youth morality, virtue, and to cherish adn respect their country rather than the moral depravity and debasement of the present mass media and the constant villification of this country, the drug use will go down.
I think this makes sense because these are expressions rather than tangible objects. if I borrow a book from the library and make photocopies of it, than return it to the library, my copy of the book was not *materially* stolen from the library. Only the ideas were copied.
The solution is obvious. Move the repository to many other source hosting services outside of the US. Post the tar of repository on the various file sharing services. If the database contains data from WoW, then delete the database from GitHub and put the code back up on GitHub. Not that hard to figure out. Then people can get the database from the file sharing services or the non-US source repositories.
Ive thought about this too. If something is no longer being sold then the copyright should automatically expire. The point of copyright is to allow a copyright owner to make a profit from the work. However, if they are no longer selling the work, there is no point any more. The copyright should expire. Maybe there should be a provision to allow the copyright to be revived if they do start publishing it again. But, I am also for a 30 year copyright term for a corporate copyright or life of the author for a living person copyright. No more perpetual copyrights
It does not sound like a valid copyright case to me. Copyright does not cover names and tables in a database are such. Its particularly egregious because it contains no proprietary WoW code, a clean room effort.
MP3s tend to have inferior sound quality to a CD. It is noticeable. The heavy compression throws out a lot of data. You have lossless formats such as FLAC or Wavpac which never caught on. Wavpack is nice because you can split the file into a lossy file you can copy to a device and an additional smaller file that contains additional data for lossless play. As others have mentioned the decline of CD has other problems relating to DRM. Will audiophiles keep CDs alive. Lets hope so.
There was a resurgence in record sales due to perceived characteristics of that platform, hopefully audiophiles will also keep the CD alive in a similar manner.
The other factor in all of this is that there is not much, I would say, no music that comes out of Hollywood these days that even warrants a poorly encoded MP3, not to mention CD, since such music is not worth listening to at all. Nearly all mass market music produced out of hollywood belongs in the trash, or the recycle bin directory to make room for more valuable data. Of course, there is still older music such as classical music, jazz, beatles etc where the use of CDs is still very important for people being able to get a quality recording of such masterpieces.
Some have said vinyl doesnt have the same nostalgia of CD. But the fact is CD has long been an audiophile choice because of the high fidelity and the resistance to mechanical abrasion and wear. A stamped CD will last for decades of continuous use whereas a record will suffer from wear and tear. Remember that audiophiles have invested big bucks, we are talking a thousand dollars, in high end CD players such as Pioneer Elite and Marantz for high end CD play. Even on an el cheapo $30 player, the difference in CD quality from vinyl and MP3 is real and noticeable. You dont get the same dynamic range and the same lossless, artifact free play back from an MP3 to drive your tweeters and subwoofers.
This study concerns non-ionizing radiation. Bananas relate to ionizing. So its comparing apples to oranges and would be a bad comparison. Non-ionizing != safe. There are thermal effects of it. An example is UV radiation from the sun.
I think we should eliminate college requirements for most jobs and instead train people quickly in apprenticeships and through self study so that we can train people in a few months rather than years it takes for college. I can tell you we dont need to send people to college for 4 years to train computer programmers or whatever. In addition to this due to automation we will not need low skill labor any more and the remaining jobs will be in short supply. We should stop all immigration, period, end of story, Then we can retrain our own citizens to do these kinds of jobs.
Does Seamonkey sandbox Flash like Chrome does (like Chrome even sandboxes its own content). You think you are being secure but the fact is I bet using seamonkey or palemoon you are actually much worse off than you are with Chrome.
These exotic terranes, which are rock that originally were part of other continents, are a pretty common occurrence. Most of the eastern seaboard of the US was once part of Africa or South America. Large parts of Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, Virginia, Delaware, New Jersey, New York, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Massachussets, New Hampshire, Maine Nova Scotia and Newfoundland contain African rocks. The contact between African and North American rocks runs through New York, Its called Cameron's Line. A large long piece of Africa called Avalonia broke off, drifted across the ocean and lodged on North America 400 million years ago. Florida and Louisiana was seperately added by the collisions that formed Pangea, it remained on the North American side when the split occured.
$8 an hour is almost as bad as free, at that rate you cant afford many basics like proper healthcare. They are slave wage, non-maintenance wages. Most of these people only survive because they are loaded up with welfare programs so basically that low wage employee you subsidize anyway with tax money. You could never dig yourself out of the hole your in because you cant accumulate any savings to use as leverage.
As for automation, what we need to do is reduce the barriers to retraining and help train people for new jobs through apprenticeship rather than college. This allows people to have satisfaction of earning money right away and would allow people to earn while they learn. Only 10% of the population needs to go to college. Colleges have 70% drop out rates in many cases, so its not a pathway to success, a pathway to failure for most people. College is becoming outdated because you can learn on your own for very low cost because information has become so widely available. Certificates like A+ are another possibility for self learning. So a combination of self learning, and apprenticeships.
Automation will allow us to raise the minimum wage drastically and with the vastly greater productivity, what we can do is simply reduce the work week to spread the remaining work among more people. This means people work less for the same or more money. People will still make money, they will just work a few hours a week and will have far more free time.
Javascript is needed for things like games or or dynamic content, like a chat room. We've been down this road before. Leave it out and you get Java and Flash plugins that are closed source and have much worse security which everyone installs anyway.
It seems to me that there should be a register flag that can turn off various types of CPU optimization features explicitly. Then the user can do decide if the optimization on or off. Make a bunch of switches to turn on and off different types of optimization in the CPU.
GM etc just have more technical resources to back these things up, so they can use their existing technology and supply chains rather than having to build everything from scratch.
The big problem with electric cars is that its not sustainable however, and will not scale to large usage, because the batteries consume so many rare earth metals. The idea that electric cars are environmental is such an outrageous idea, its a joke. When you consider the effects of mining and how it is depleting non-renewable resources, its just ridiculous. Many of the batteries will end up in landfills like alkalines and other rechargeables because people just dont give a damn that they are throwing away their childrens future when they dont recycle these materials and there is no requirement that they have to do so. It should be illegal to toss any electronics in the garbage and instead it should be sent for metal recycling. But getting this done is like herding cats.
Its similar to the idea of Hydrogen cars. Hydrogen was perhaps worse, because to make hydrogen you have to split water with electrolysis. However inevitably a lot of the hydrogen will escape, not being bound to oxygen, it will float up into the atmosphere and drift into space. Theres a reason why hydrogen and helium are so hard to find because they are too light to be held down by gravity. So essentially, your burning up water and releasing it into space. You have to consider the long term effects of this over many millions of years because short term thinking has gotten us into trouble with how we think about other resources. The idea that a Mars civilization burned up its water in such a manner has been a subject of sci-fi but its a plausible scenario. The same problem exists with hydrogen fed fission reactors and hydrogen rockets. When you launch a hydrogen rocket your basically losing some earths water supply to space. This is why we need to rethink the idea of hydrogen rockets and look into something else before we consider any kind of large scale space colonization, and also how these colonies will exist without sapping earths supply of resources such as water and oxygen which may seem abundant but are actually finite. Leakage from space craft would result in cumulative running losses of oxygen hydrogen and so on into space steadily depleting the earth ecosystem of these vital gasses. There needs to be an international convention against removing oxygen or hydrogen from the earth ecosystem.
Much of Musks ideas are based on technologies that are barely possible at the small scale but disastrously unsustainable at the large scale.
Slashdot Mirror
B&N collapsing would be good for independents since it would leave the market open for them. Then you would have the businesses that are responsive to local needs that you desire. So, it could be a very positive thing. Why worry about it.
If you are an Amazon third party seller they charge outrageous fees that eats into your margin. Its not so great .
This is another case where Linux could be a niche. You would think Linux would be perfect for old computers, that this would be a market niche they could capitalize on. You would be wrong. Unfortunately Linux breaks its driver compatability WITH EVERY RELEASE. They absolutely refuse backward compatability. They also on an irrational whim deleted XAA and dozens of drivers for older cards. The mentality of Linux devs seems to be that no one would ever want to use a computer that is older than three years and everyone should have the latest and greatest $1000 workstation. Not only does this make life hell for hardware manufacturers that would want to provide a driver but also means Linux shoots itself in the foot by neglecting a prime market segment due to the arrogant mentality of some developers. The lack of backward compatibility and cross compatability with Windows (with Wine thinking 40% compatibility is "adequate") remains Linux biggest barriers to adoption.
OK, I was overexaggerating a bit. If you go further back like ones from 2002 or before I think you'll have more problems
You would think Linux would be perfect for old computers, that this would be a market niche they could capitalize on. You would be wrong. Unfortunately Linux breaks its driver compatability WITH EVERY RELEASE. They also on an irrational whim deleted XAA and dozens of drivers for older cards. The mentality of Linux devs seems to be that no one would ever want to use a computer that is older than three years and everyone should have the latest and greatest $1000 workstation.
I was about to say that with Linux this wouldn't happen. But then I remebered that X.org had deleted dozens of video drivers when they decided on an irrational whim to delete all of the XAA code which turned a huge number of older computers into boat anchors. Linux systems developers seem to think you should need the latest Intel GPU made within the last 3 years. Whoops.
I thought he might consider it to be some eternal monument to himself. Being out in space, it could be orbiting there for a very long time, maybe a billion years or so. Somewhat like the Moon landing sites which are historical monuments. Maybe future travellers will be able to visit them, but the whole area will be cordened off and they will have to look down from an observation deck, so everything can be preserved exactly as it was when Apollo astronauts left, footprints and all.
It is amazing what Musk has done. Still, Rocket technology, isnt exactly the most sustainable thing, when you consider the amount of resources which are used. Its also, kind of low tech, we are talking explosions and so on here. What would really be an advance is an anti-gravity electromagnetic drive of some kind powered by clean energy extracted from the aether without the use of dirty nuclear and fossil fuels. Pull that off and then I will be REALLY impressed.
The argument for C was always that its "close to hardware". But its not really. It exposes you to the full dangers of having no bounds checking or pointer safety, but for this you dont get things like :
Being able to introspect and alter the stack (useful for backend for languages that allow stack manipulation)
Partial compilation (useful for homoiconic languages)
Information on the vector locations of machine code for single lines of C code (useful for self modifying code and homoiconic languages using C as a backend)
Information on the layout of data structures (for interfacing C to other high end languages)
Being able to programmatically control and manage symbol linkage
This makes C useless as a target backend for implementing higher end languages with various kinds of stack introspection and homiconic models, in a cross platform manner.
For a "low level" language, it exposes you to the full risks of low level without giving you full low level access to program state and introspection into the programs internals. A pretty lousy deal.
I have developed languages that are homoiconic and require stack manipulation and the need to be able to call into C libraries, and looked into C as a backend target because its the most cross platform target to avoid having to write a compiler for every machine language, and its basically totally useless because of the lack of the features. It makes as well, linking to C libraries from languages like Python unnecessarily complex due to the lack of any maps of the data structures.
The drug parks in Europe helped reduce the black market where drugs are marketed to new users thus helping put them out of business.
By trying to go down the war on drugs path again we are repeating all the same mistakes again. rather than criminalize the drug we should instead address underlying cultural and social problems that are leading to their use, like the very poor moral exemplars coming from hollywood, the lack of virtue, morality and ethics in our mainstream culture as promoted by Lady Gaga, Britney Spears, etc. and the manner in which many communities have been rendered rustbelts by disasterous trade and offshoring policies which devastated many communiites, causing people to turn to drugs to relieve their pain. If we help people living fulfilling happy lives and promote a family values culture of stable marriage and so on, and teach the youth morality, virtue, and to cherish adn respect their country rather than the moral depravity and debasement of the present mass media and the constant villification of this country, the drug use will go down.
I think this makes sense because these are expressions rather than tangible objects. if I borrow a book from the library and make photocopies of it, than return it to the library, my copy of the book was not *materially* stolen from the library. Only the ideas were copied.
You got things backwards there, I think
The solution is obvious. Move the repository to many other source hosting services outside of the US. Post the tar of repository on the various file sharing services. If the database contains data from WoW, then delete the database from GitHub and put the code back up on GitHub. Not that hard to figure out. Then people can get the database from the file sharing services or the non-US source repositories.
Ive thought about this too. If something is no longer being sold then the copyright should automatically expire. The point of copyright is to allow a copyright owner to make a profit from the work. However, if they are no longer selling the work, there is no point any more. The copyright should expire. Maybe there should be a provision to allow the copyright to be revived if they do start publishing it again. But, I am also for a 30 year copyright term for a corporate copyright or life of the author for a living person copyright. No more perpetual copyrights
It does not sound like a valid copyright case to me. Copyright does not cover names and tables in a database are such. Its particularly egregious because it contains no proprietary WoW code, a clean room effort.
Why not host it outside the US then? its not like the only code hosting services are in the US.
MP3s tend to have inferior sound quality to a CD. It is noticeable. The heavy compression throws out a lot of data. You have lossless formats such as FLAC or Wavpac which never caught on. Wavpack is nice because you can split the file into a lossy file you can copy to a device and an additional smaller file that contains additional data for lossless play. As others have mentioned the decline of CD has other problems relating to DRM. Will audiophiles keep CDs alive. Lets hope so.
There was a resurgence in record sales due to perceived characteristics of that platform, hopefully audiophiles will also keep the CD alive in a similar manner.
The other factor in all of this is that there is not much, I would say, no music that comes out of Hollywood these days that even warrants a poorly encoded MP3, not to mention CD, since such music is not worth listening to at all. Nearly all mass market music produced out of hollywood belongs in the trash, or the recycle bin directory to make room for more valuable data. Of course, there is still older music such as classical music, jazz, beatles etc where the use of CDs is still very important for people being able to get a quality recording of such masterpieces.
Some have said vinyl doesnt have the same nostalgia of CD. But the fact is CD has long been an audiophile choice because of the high fidelity and the resistance to mechanical abrasion and wear. A stamped CD will last for decades of continuous use whereas a record will suffer from wear and tear. Remember that audiophiles have invested big bucks, we are talking a thousand dollars, in high end CD players such as Pioneer Elite and Marantz for high end CD play. Even on an el cheapo $30 player, the difference in CD quality from vinyl and MP3 is real and noticeable. You dont get the same dynamic range and the same lossless, artifact free play back from an MP3 to drive your tweeters and subwoofers.
This study concerns non-ionizing radiation. Bananas relate to ionizing. So its comparing apples to oranges and would be a bad comparison. Non-ionizing != safe. There are thermal effects of it. An example is UV radiation from the sun.
I think we should eliminate college requirements for most jobs and instead train people quickly in apprenticeships and through self study so that we can train people in a few months rather than years it takes for college. I can tell you we dont need to send people to college for 4 years to train computer programmers or whatever. In addition to this due to automation we will not need low skill labor any more and the remaining jobs will be in short supply. We should stop all immigration, period, end of story, Then we can retrain our own citizens to do these kinds of jobs.
Does Seamonkey sandbox Flash like Chrome does (like Chrome even sandboxes its own content). You think you are being secure but the fact is I bet using seamonkey or palemoon you are actually much worse off than you are with Chrome.
These exotic terranes, which are rock that originally were part of other continents, are a pretty common occurrence. Most of the eastern seaboard of the US was once part of Africa or South America. Large parts of Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, Virginia, Delaware, New Jersey, New York, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Massachussets, New Hampshire, Maine Nova Scotia and Newfoundland contain African rocks. The contact between African and North American rocks runs through New York, Its called Cameron's Line. A large long piece of Africa called Avalonia broke off, drifted across the ocean and lodged on North America 400 million years ago. Florida and Louisiana was seperately added by the collisions that formed Pangea, it remained on the North American side when the split occured.
$8 an hour is almost as bad as free, at that rate you cant afford many basics like proper healthcare. They are slave wage, non-maintenance wages. Most of these people only survive because they are loaded up with welfare programs so basically that low wage employee you subsidize anyway with tax money. You could never dig yourself out of the hole your in because you cant accumulate any savings to use as leverage.
As for automation, what we need to do is reduce the barriers to retraining and help train people for new jobs through apprenticeship rather than college. This allows people to have satisfaction of earning money right away and would allow people to earn while they learn. Only 10% of the population needs to go to college. Colleges have 70% drop out rates in many cases, so its not a pathway to success, a pathway to failure for most people. College is becoming outdated because you can learn on your own for very low cost because information has become so widely available. Certificates like A+ are another possibility for self learning. So a combination of self learning, and apprenticeships.
Automation will allow us to raise the minimum wage drastically and with the vastly greater productivity, what we can do is simply reduce the work week to spread the remaining work among more people. This means people work less for the same or more money. People will still make money, they will just work a few hours a week and will have far more free time.
Javascript is needed for things like games or or dynamic content, like a chat room. We've been down this road before. Leave it out and you get Java and Flash plugins that are closed source and have much worse security which everyone installs anyway.
It seems to me that there should be a register flag that can turn off various types of CPU optimization features explicitly. Then the user can do decide if the optimization on or off. Make a bunch of switches to turn on and off different types of optimization in the CPU.
GM etc just have more technical resources to back these things up, so they can use their existing technology and supply chains rather than having to build everything from scratch.
The big problem with electric cars is that its not sustainable however, and will not scale to large usage, because the batteries consume so many rare earth metals. The idea that electric cars are environmental is such an outrageous idea, its a joke. When you consider the effects of mining and how it is depleting non-renewable resources, its just ridiculous. Many of the batteries will end up in landfills like alkalines and other rechargeables because people just dont give a damn that they are throwing away their childrens future when they dont recycle these materials and there is no requirement that they have to do so. It should be illegal to toss any electronics in the garbage and instead it should be sent for metal recycling. But getting this done is like herding cats.
Its similar to the idea of Hydrogen cars. Hydrogen was perhaps worse, because to make hydrogen you have to split water with electrolysis. However inevitably a lot of the hydrogen will escape, not being bound to oxygen, it will float up into the atmosphere and drift into space. Theres a reason why hydrogen and helium are so hard to find because they are too light to be held down by gravity. So essentially, your burning up water and releasing it into space. You have to consider the long term effects of this over many millions of years because short term thinking has gotten us into trouble with how we think about other resources. The idea that a Mars civilization burned up its water in such a manner has been a subject of sci-fi but its a plausible scenario. The same problem exists with hydrogen fed fission reactors and hydrogen rockets. When you launch a hydrogen rocket your basically losing some earths water supply to space. This is why we need to rethink the idea of hydrogen rockets and look into something else before we consider any kind of large scale space colonization, and also how these colonies will exist without sapping earths supply of resources such as water and oxygen which may seem abundant but are actually finite. Leakage from space craft would result in cumulative running losses of oxygen hydrogen and so on into space steadily depleting the earth ecosystem of these vital gasses. There needs to be an international convention against removing oxygen or hydrogen from the earth ecosystem.
Much of Musks ideas are based on technologies that are barely possible at the small scale but disastrously unsustainable at the large scale.