You know, "hundreds of billions of dollars worth of tablets, smartphones, set-top boxes, etc. with H.264 hardware support" will be rendered obsolete regardless.
That said, I do think this move will hurt users more than anyone else. needs to be as neutral as , i.e. support the common formats out there.
Web developers are a lazy breed. They'll most likely serve the same h.264 in a flash fallback.
That would be great, but IIRC they were almost ignored at the polls last time...you don't go from a fringe party getting a negligible number of votes to winning an election in just a few years.
Oh, I dunno. During the election 2005, a party (Junilistan) that hardly registered in the polls in the previous national election (I'm not even sure they existed at the time) got elected into the European Parliament. Remember: we don't have a winner-takes-all system. Sweden generally has high voter participation in national elections (ca 80%), but participation is much lower in elections for the EP. This lowers the bar for getting elected significantly. It is certainly not impossible for the Pirate Party to get elected.
Having said that, the Pirates have some competition in the opposition against the FRA law. Yesterday, the environmental party (who have consistently opposed the law) and Sweden's biggest party, the social democrats (who will probably try to get some form of light version of the law passed later on), promised to overturn the law if they win the next national election.
Yes, politics is certainly very interesting in Sweden right now. I was cynically convinced that people would give up when the law passed. On the contrary. Even the old media is still on it, publishing something new almost every day.
This bill was originally created by the previous Social Democrat administration (which was supported by the Green Party and the Left Party)
You make it sound as if the Green and Left parties supported that particular bill. They did not. The Green Party (maybe the Left as well) explicitly did not approve of any kind of surveillance. The support you are talking about is their support when the Social Democrats formed government after the 2002 election. They did not have a majority on their own, so they needed the other parties approval.
And let's not overstate that support. The Green Party threatened to let the right block form government if the Social Democrats didn't include them in the government. In the end, they folded, and the Social Democrats formed government on their own. But it's not like they were best friends.
I agree that it's unlikely that the Social Democrats will move to revoke this new law. I believe the best chance is if the left block wins the next election (2010), and the Green Party takes a lot of votes, forcing the Social Democrats to play nice with them. The Pirate Party is too much of a long shot. They would have to get more than six times as many votes as they did in 2006 just to get a seat in the parliament.
"Here's a gift of a book; but you can only read it if you use LED lights." "Here's a gift of a cat; but you can only have it if you'll eat it." "Here's a gift of a some money, but you must spend it upon me."
...or "Here's a gift of a cat; but you can only have it if you promise not to kill it." "Here's a gift of some money, but you mustn't spend it on drugs." "Here's your driver's license, but you can only keep it if you don't drive drunk."
There are lots of examples where conditions are set on the individual for the good of us all. The GPL is one such example.
Option A will reinforce a reasonable business model that will benefit the industry, the artist, and you.
Option B will reverse the progress that has been made.
I'm not sure that I agree on this. Yes, major labels selling DRM-free music is probably a reasonable business model. But I'm not convinced that Option B is the regression you make it out to be. There is other progress to be made as well. DRM-free music solves a number of problems related to the restrictions on using your music. It doesn't address the problem that strong copyright poses for remixing/producing in a read-write culture (in Larry Lessigs words).
Illegal downloading by a large portion of society may well force politicians to rethink copyright. I'm not saying it necessarily will - only that it could. I live in Sweden, and in the months leading up to our last election, there was a lot of talk about illegal downloading. Several of the major political parties expressed the view that making an activity so many were engaging in illegal, was absurd and could threaten people's respect for the law.
All I'm saying is, if people continue to download their music from p2p services, it's not necessarily all bad news. That said, having all major labels offer DRM-free music is very good news, though, and I hope they are rewarded for it.
"4. Since you used the Big Bang, I'm only going to assume that you believe in evolution. So during this great expanse of time, do the monkeys ever evolve (and thus become smarter/specialized)?"
Well, if we allow for evolution, then evidently it does not require infinite time, since at least one monkey already typed out the collected works of Shakespeare. He didn't have a typewriter, though.
I don't know about Switzerland, but Sweden (#2 on the list) does have a lot of heavy industry (mining, steel industry, paper industry etc). Another challenge for swedish emissions are the large distances (relative to population size), meaning long transportations of goods are necessary. I was honestly surprised to find the country at the number 2 spot.
Of course GPD/ton-of-CO2 is an imperfect measure. But it's not a meaningless measure. Compare the positions of countries with structurally similar economies and you'll find some have better efficiency than others. That should make you want to look more closely to see if there are lessons to be learned.
> but I maximize a window to hide the clutter behind it as well
You can reduce clutter behind a window by hiding all other applications, using the shortcut option-command-H. Of course, this also hides minimized apps in the dock, so it's kind of overkill for just reducing clutter.
Since the article is about things that should be changed for Leopard, one could add that the virtual desktop that is to be included in 10.5 may be a good way to reduce clutter as well.
> For the system to be clearly unsustainable, one would need to believe that people would > undermine a system that is delivering them a rising standard of living. It would seem unlikely > that they would do so in any sort of broad, universal way.
Well, take a look at what's happening in China right now. The poor are not generally getting any poorer in absolute terms, but inequalities are zooming. So they fit the pattern we are talking about. This year, the number of uprisings and riots in China measured in the tens of thousands. It's not what you would call stable.
I don't think observation is going to tell you that people are satisfied with small improvements when they can see how they are left behind by people (and in China, regions) getting massive wealth.
If it's "clearly unsustainable" or not remains to be seen, I guess.
> his main economic contributions was his exposition of "Pareto's Law" of income distribution.
Income distributions are not constant over time or between countries. The Gini coefficient measures the size of income inequalities, and it certainly varies between countries.
It's true that Pareto did work on income inequalities. But his findings were not consistent with this "law" you cite. From the Wikipedia on Pareto Index: "In fact, Pareto's data on British income taxes in his Cours d'économie politique indicates that about 30% of the population had only about 70% of the income."
The Pareto Principle does suggest a 80-20 rule of thumb. This is, however, not a prediction, merely a statement that this will be a common observation.
"existing models of the future cease to give reliable or accurate answers"
The premise of this definition is that models of the future give reliable or accurate answers at present. What are the models they talk about? Special futurist models? Do these really give reliable or accurate answers today? Or do they mean all models of human behaviour, i.e. most models of the social sciences? Supply & demand will no longer determine price?
If the models are found not to be good predictors of behaviour, they will be modified or replaced. You know... sort of like how it works right now? If patterns in human behaviour start changing rapidly because of rapidly evolving superhuman intelligence, then sure, our ability to model that behaviour will go out the window. But then, we wont be doing the modeling, superhuman intelligences will. I don't see why the emergence of superhuman intelligence would have to lead to a singularity.
I believe the models will cope. Not "existing models", but tomorrow's models.
Finally in OSX you can as a minimum read your windows files(can't write to NTFS, but can write to FAT), in Windows you can't see any of your mac files. This becomes tiresome quickly.
It would be stupid of Apple not to include an HFS+ driver for Windows on the driver CD. I've seen several, and some of them are bound to be open source.
If this isn't included, it will quickly become one of the obligatory First Downloads after installation.
I'm not sure I'd want a scholarship created in my name as a result of spending $0.99 on some song. I can imagine people getting the scholarship asking "so who was he?"... wow, what an amazing accomplishment to be remembered for.
So, the guy won $10000 to spend at the iTMS. Resale of DRMed music is... a little tricky (which is actually one of my main problems with DRM). But there was talk of Apple selling iPods directly through iTunes Music Store, and resale of iPods isn't really a problem... If he's able to spend the $10000 on iPods, he should be able to get most of that money back through ebay. I certainly would:)
225,000 votes is a LOT of votes. Does anyone know what the 18-30 male voting record is in terms of actually making it to the ballot box to vote?
Sweden has relatively high voter participation, at least in the parliamentary elections.
This page shows that it has dropped from around 90% down closer to 80%, sadly.
Overall voter participation among males in the 1998 elections were 82% (83% for women). Participation in the group you ask about, males between 18 and 30, is a little lower, according to this table, it seems to be about 75%. Still, not too shabby.
Both pages are in Swedish, but it's mostly numbers.:)
> Most countries require citizenship. I'd imagine that citizenship would at least have some basic language requirements.
Yes, citizenship is required for voting in the national parliamentary elections, but there are no language tests or anything like that in order to become a Swedish citizen. And what's more, you are not required to be a citizen of Sweden in order to vote in the regional elections. (Of course, getting into regional politics wont help this particular party, since the issues are national or global.)
Their page states that there are between 800 000 and 1 100 000 file sharers in Sweden, and that they need approximately 225 000 votes to break the 4% barrier needed to get into the parliament. Given these numbers, I'd be very surprised if they got even 1% of the vote. First of all, not all of the file sharers are 18 or older, and thus not able to vote. Second, there is a strong tendency to not want to "throw your vote away" by voting for a party that doesn't make the 4% barrier (you might compare this to the situation in the US where votes for Nader were considered by some as lost votes for Gore in 2000). But most of all, they are taking an extreme position, one hardly shared by all file sharers. I consider myself as much more critical of IP laws than the mainstream, but I would have to think long and hard about actually abolishing IP law.
Also, I don't want to vote for a party that has no position on any of the other issues I consider much more important. The issue of intellectual property rights, in my opinion, is best viewed as a means to an end in other areas, like in education and in research.
funny thing about investing in infrastructure... We had a guest lecturer about the Chinese economy at my school, and we started discussing different ways of developing rural areas, and someone suggested investing in infrastructure, in order to help develop the area.
Our lecturer then told us about a project where the Chinese government had done just that. They built roads out into an area that hardly had any decent roads. But the result was that the people picked up their stuff and left. Moved to the nearest urban area. They couldn't before, but with the new roads, moving away was made cheaper. And this left the area even more difficult to develop.
Now, the lesson here isn't that you shouldn't invest in infrastructure. It's rather that you should focus on developing people, instead of areas. And this "miracle laptop" may be just as good a way of developing people as better infrastructure.
> Maybe we should start all over and assign petitioners speakable > but meaningless made up words, and let them rebrand themselves > with their totally exclusive name.
I don't believe the author is ignoring the cost of the first copy. He is explicitly discussing alternative ways for the producer of recouping this cost.
Under the present system of IP rights, the producer is given the opportunity to be the price setter, and thus pick a higher price than the marginal cost of the copy (monopoly pricing). This is in fact a system that "ignore[s] the production cost of the first copy". The producer is reimbursed for the costs associated with the first copy, contingent on the sale of the subsequent copies.
The article argues that there are alternative reimbursement schemes. Ones that are in fact based on the actual cost of the first copy, letting subsequent copies be distributed at the price of marginal cost.
If costs are not contingent on the number of copies sold (or distributed), then why should revenues be based on that?
> If you stub your toe on a rock, you might well "punish" the rock by hitting it.
And if you stab your toe on another person, you will probably not "punish" him/her, because you realize he/she is a human being, and you will have to take it out on some inanimate object.
My point being that, yes, we do anthropomorphize, but only to a certain extent. The lesson that objects should be made to act like human beings isn't so clear cut.
I agree. I have an ibook, and there are at most four cables sticking out of it. Power, which I don't expect to get rid of. Mouse, which is fine (and I even have the option of going with a bluetooth mouse). Audio, plugged into the stereo.. I really don't like having this one. And finally the printer once in a while when I have a document I want to print.
This device would let me eliminate the need for two of these cables (and one of the remaining two, the mouse, has a cable by choice). This truly sounds like a great device. I'm seriously thinking of buying one, despite being on a students budget and already having an access point. Too bad it doesn't act as a 3-4 port switch also, then I could sell my old AP....
Now, it would be very interersting if they put wireless into the iPod and making it talk to this device, since it would more or less become the remote control to the stereo others here asked for. It would be a batterydrain of course, but then again, I would be in my home, so I could recharge it if necessary.
Slashdot Mirror
You know, "hundreds of billions of dollars worth of tablets, smartphones, set-top boxes, etc. with H.264 hardware support" will be rendered obsolete regardless.
That said, I do think this move will hurt users more than anyone else. needs to be as neutral as , i.e. support the common formats out there.
Web developers are a lazy breed. They'll most likely serve the same h.264 in a flash fallback.
That would be great, but IIRC they were almost ignored at the polls last time...you don't go from a fringe party getting a negligible number of votes to winning an election in just a few years.
Oh, I dunno. During the election 2005, a party (Junilistan) that hardly registered in the polls in the previous national election (I'm not even sure they existed at the time) got elected into the European Parliament. Remember: we don't have a winner-takes-all system.
Sweden generally has high voter participation in national elections (ca 80%), but participation is much lower in elections for the EP. This lowers the bar for getting elected significantly. It is certainly not impossible for the Pirate Party to get elected.
Having said that, the Pirates have some competition in the opposition against the FRA law. Yesterday, the environmental party (who have consistently opposed the law) and Sweden's biggest party, the social democrats (who will probably try to get some form of light version of the law passed later on), promised to overturn the law if they win the next national election.
Yes, politics is certainly very interesting in Sweden right now. I was cynically convinced that people would give up when the law passed. On the contrary. Even the old media is still on it, publishing something new almost every day.
This bill was originally created by the previous Social Democrat administration (which was supported by the Green Party and the Left Party)
You make it sound as if the Green and Left parties supported that particular bill. They did not. The Green Party (maybe the Left as well) explicitly did not approve of any kind of surveillance. The support you are talking about is their support when the Social Democrats formed government after the 2002 election. They did not have a majority on their own, so they needed the other parties approval.And let's not overstate that support. The Green Party threatened to let the right block form government if the Social Democrats didn't include them in the government. In the end, they folded, and the Social Democrats formed government on their own. But it's not like they were best friends.
I agree that it's unlikely that the Social Democrats will move to revoke this new law. I believe the best chance is if the left block wins the next election (2010), and the Green Party takes a lot of votes, forcing the Social Democrats to play nice with them. The Pirate Party is too much of a long shot. They would have to get more than six times as many votes as they did in 2006 just to get a seat in the parliament.
...or "Here's a gift of a cat; but you can only have it if you promise not to kill it." "Here's a gift of some money, but you mustn't spend it on drugs." "Here's your driver's license, but you can only keep it if you don't drive drunk.""Here's a gift of a book; but you can only read it if you use LED lights." "Here's a gift of a cat; but you can only have it if you'll eat it." "Here's a gift of a some money, but you must spend it upon me."
There are lots of examples where conditions are set on the individual for the good of us all. The GPL is one such example.
I'm not sure that I agree on this. Yes, major labels selling DRM-free music is probably a reasonable business model. But I'm not convinced that Option B is the regression you make it out to be. There is other progress to be made as well. DRM-free music solves a number of problems related to the restrictions on using your music. It doesn't address the problem that strong copyright poses for remixing/producing in a read-write culture (in Larry Lessigs words).
Illegal downloading by a large portion of society may well force politicians to rethink copyright. I'm not saying it necessarily will - only that it could. I live in Sweden, and in the months leading up to our last election, there was a lot of talk about illegal downloading. Several of the major political parties expressed the view that making an activity so many were engaging in illegal, was absurd and could threaten people's respect for the law.
All I'm saying is, if people continue to download their music from p2p services, it's not necessarily all bad news. That said, having all major labels offer DRM-free music is very good news, though, and I hope they are rewarded for it.
"4. Since you used the Big Bang, I'm only going to assume that you believe in evolution. So during this great expanse of time, do the monkeys ever evolve (and thus become smarter/specialized)?"
Well, if we allow for evolution, then evidently it does not require infinite time, since at least one monkey already typed out the collected works of Shakespeare. He didn't have a typewriter, though.
I don't know about Switzerland, but Sweden (#2 on the list) does have a lot of heavy industry (mining, steel industry, paper industry etc). Another challenge for swedish emissions are the large distances (relative to population size), meaning long transportations of goods are necessary.
I was honestly surprised to find the country at the number 2 spot.
Of course GPD/ton-of-CO2 is an imperfect measure. But it's not a meaningless measure. Compare the positions of countries with structurally similar economies and you'll find some have better efficiency than others. That should make you want to look more closely to see if there are lessons to be learned.
> but I maximize a window to hide the clutter behind it as well
You can reduce clutter behind a window by hiding all other applications, using the shortcut option-command-H. Of course, this also hides minimized apps in the dock, so it's kind of overkill for just reducing clutter.
Since the article is about things that should be changed for Leopard, one could add that the virtual desktop that is to be included in 10.5 may be a good way to reduce clutter as well.
> For the system to be clearly unsustainable, one would need to believe that people would
> undermine a system that is delivering them a rising standard of living. It would seem unlikely
> that they would do so in any sort of broad, universal way.
Well, take a look at what's happening in China right now. The poor are not generally getting any poorer in absolute terms, but inequalities are zooming. So they fit the pattern we are talking about. This year, the number of uprisings and riots in China measured in the tens of thousands. It's not what you would call stable.
I don't think observation is going to tell you that people are satisfied with small improvements when they can see how they are left behind by people (and in China, regions) getting massive wealth.
If it's "clearly unsustainable" or not remains to be seen, I guess.
- Martin
> his main economic contributions was his exposition of "Pareto's Law" of income distribution.
Income distributions are not constant over time or between countries. The Gini coefficient measures the size of income inequalities, and it certainly varies between countries.
It's true that Pareto did work on income inequalities. But his findings were not consistent with this "law" you cite. From the Wikipedia on Pareto Index:
"In fact, Pareto's data on British income taxes in his Cours d'économie politique indicates that about 30% of the population had only about 70% of the income."
The Pareto Principle does suggest a 80-20 rule of thumb. This is, however, not a prediction, merely a statement that this will be a common observation.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vilfredo_Pareto
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_index
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto's_law
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gini_coefficient
- Martin
This connection between stem cells and cancer is touched upon in the TED talk with Eva Vertes, a young researcher. Very interesting stuff.
The video is available at the TEDTalks webpage. Look for Eva Vertes.
http://www.ted.com/tedtalks/
"existing models of the future cease to give reliable or accurate answers"
The premise of this definition is that models of the future give reliable or accurate answers at present. What are the models they talk about? Special futurist models? Do these really give reliable or accurate answers today? Or do they mean all models of human behaviour, i.e. most models of the social sciences? Supply & demand will no longer determine price?
If the models are found not to be good predictors of behaviour, they will be modified or replaced. You know... sort of like how it works right now?
If patterns in human behaviour start changing rapidly because of rapidly evolving superhuman intelligence, then sure, our ability to model that behaviour will go out the window. But then, we wont be doing the modeling, superhuman intelligences will. I don't see why the emergence of superhuman intelligence would have to lead to a singularity.
I believe the models will cope. Not "existing models", but tomorrow's models.
I'm not sure I'd want a scholarship created in my name as a result of spending $0.99 on some song. I can imagine people getting the scholarship asking "so who was he?"... wow, what an amazing accomplishment to be remembered for.
So, the guy won $10000 to spend at the iTMS. Resale of DRMed music is... a little tricky (which is actually one of my main problems with DRM). But there was talk of Apple selling iPods directly through iTunes Music Store, and resale of iPods isn't really a problem... :)
If he's able to spend the $10000 on iPods, he should be able to get most of that money back through ebay.
I certainly would
since a viking would be the swedish equivalent to pirates, the answer is mead!
225,000 votes is a LOT of votes. Does anyone know what the 18-30 male voting record is in terms of actually making it to the ballot box to vote?
:)
Sweden has relatively high voter participation, at least in the parliamentary elections. This page shows that it has dropped from around 90% down closer to 80%, sadly.
Overall voter participation among males in the 1998 elections were 82% (83% for women). Participation in the group you ask about, males between 18 and 30, is a little lower, according to this table, it seems to be about 75%. Still, not too shabby. Both pages are in Swedish, but it's mostly numbers.
> Most countries require citizenship. I'd imagine that citizenship would at least have some basic language requirements.
Yes, citizenship is required for voting in the national parliamentary elections, but there are no language tests or anything like that in order to become a Swedish citizen. And what's more, you are not required to be a citizen of Sweden in order to vote in the regional elections. (Of course, getting into regional politics wont help this particular party, since the issues are national or global.)
Their page states that there are between 800 000 and 1 100 000 file sharers in Sweden, and that they need approximately 225 000 votes to break the 4% barrier needed to get into the parliament. Given these numbers, I'd be very surprised if they got even 1% of the vote.
First of all, not all of the file sharers are 18 or older, and thus not able to vote. Second, there is a strong tendency to not want to "throw your vote away" by voting for a party that doesn't make the 4% barrier (you might compare this to the situation in the US where votes for Nader were considered by some as lost votes for Gore in 2000).
But most of all, they are taking an extreme position, one hardly shared by all file sharers. I consider myself as much more critical of IP laws than the mainstream, but I would have to think long and hard about actually abolishing IP law.
Also, I don't want to vote for a party that has no position on any of the other issues I consider much more important. The issue of intellectual property rights, in my opinion, is best viewed as a means to an end in other areas, like in education and in research.
funny thing about investing in infrastructure...
We had a guest lecturer about the Chinese economy at my school, and we started discussing different ways of developing rural areas, and someone suggested investing in infrastructure, in order to help develop the area.
Our lecturer then told us about a project where the Chinese government had done just that. They built roads out into an area that hardly had any decent roads. But the result was that the people picked up their stuff and left. Moved to the nearest urban area. They couldn't before, but with the new roads, moving away was made cheaper. And this left the area even more difficult to develop.
Now, the lesson here isn't that you shouldn't invest in infrastructure. It's rather that you should focus on developing people, instead of areas. And this "miracle laptop" may be just as good a way of developing people as better infrastructure.
> Maybe we should start all over and assign petitioners speakable
;)
> but meaningless made up words, and let them rebrand themselves
> with their totally exclusive name.
well, it worked for google
I don't believe the author is ignoring the cost of the first copy. He is explicitly discussing alternative ways for the producer of recouping this cost.
Under the present system of IP rights, the producer is given the opportunity to be the price setter, and thus pick a higher price than the marginal cost of the copy (monopoly pricing). This is in fact a system that "ignore[s] the production cost of the first copy". The producer is reimbursed for the costs associated with the first copy, contingent on the sale of the subsequent copies.
The article argues that there are alternative reimbursement schemes. Ones that are in fact based on the actual cost of the first copy, letting subsequent copies be distributed at the price of marginal cost.
If costs are not contingent on the number of copies sold (or distributed), then why should revenues be based on that?
> If you stub your toe on a rock, you might well "punish" the rock by hitting it.
And if you stab your toe on another person, you will probably not "punish" him/her, because you realize he/she is a human being, and you will have to take it out on some inanimate object.
My point being that, yes, we do anthropomorphize, but only to a certain extent. The lesson that objects should be made to act like human beings isn't so clear cut.
I agree. I have an ibook, and there are at most four cables sticking out of it. Power, which I don't expect to get rid of. Mouse, which is fine (and I even have the option of going with a bluetooth mouse). Audio, plugged into the stereo.. I really don't like having this one. And finally the printer once in a while when I have a document I want to print.
This device would let me eliminate the need for two of these cables (and one of the remaining two, the mouse, has a cable by choice). This truly sounds like a great device. I'm seriously thinking of buying one, despite being on a students budget and already having an access point. Too bad it doesn't act as a 3-4 port switch also, then I could sell my old AP....
Now, it would be very interersting if they put wireless into the iPod and making it talk to this device, since it would more or less become the remote control to the stereo others here asked for.
It would be a batterydrain of course, but then again, I would be in my home, so I could recharge it if necessary.
Too late, that question has already been answered.
And they both also work in Safari (1.2). Nice work :)