I agree that there's probably 30% of the population that RMS has done nothing to help, at least as of yet. However, for the other 70%, if you buy anything online, shop anywhere that uses *nix based systems for billing or inventory or order tracking or, well, anything, then he has probably saved you a good bit of money. Even if your vendor doesn't use *any* Free software, or any Open Source software, he has certainly benefited drastically from his software vendor having to compete with Free alternatives. Not just because they're free, but because they're well built.
Hell, if he uses only Windows systems, he has still probably benefited dramatically from MS having to compete with Free alternatives.
For that other 30%, the only reason RMS hasn't impacted their lives is that computer hardware isn't cheap enough yet. When hardware gets cheap enough, even farmers in Africa will benefit from seeing all the market prices for their goods, getting PhD level research information on best practices for farming their particular type of land, and all the other benefits that come from internet and computing power access.
Find me a computer system that hasn't been significantly impacted by the presence of Free software, or find me the businesses that don't use software. Then I'll retort by pointing out how that computer system was in fact impacted, or how that business uses services of ten other businesses that do use software.
The problem is not for you, or me. The problem is my sister, who is very pretty, getting followed and harassed by cops. The problem is that guy who mouthed off to some cop and pissed him off, who now gets followed around and booked for violations that everyone does all the time, but are selectively enforced. (Do you drive the speed limit all the time? Always use signals? Stop completely at all stop signs?)
But, really, your ethos is just wrong. It doesn't matter whether I can give examples of how it harms someone for the police to gain the ability to search and track us without due process. There is always a way it will be abused, whether some guy involved in a lame slashdot conversation can think of it or not. The framers of the constitution gave us a fourth amendment for a reason.
The situation is exactly the opposite of what it should be... as the government gets more power, we need more transparency into what govt officials do; they don't need more transparency into what we do.
Terrorism, blah blah blah. The attitude that we have the moral mandate to peek on what everyone's doing and control it is what motivates the terrorists. (I am not by any means justifying terrorism; I'm being practical about what to do about it.) Ratcheting up imaginary security is a paranoid and counterproductive response. There are real things we can do to increase security, and I think we're doing some of them, but most things we do increase the illusion of security for people who haven't really thought about it. And really, what is the impact of terrorism? Smallpox and nuclear bombs are something to be worried about. Plastic explosives aren't going to kill enough people often enough to be worth worrying about. Buckle your seatbelt and exercise for 30 minutes every day if you are worried about your health and longevity. Lobby for your government to dismantle nuclear weapons, put radiation detectors on all of the ways in & out of the country, stockpile smallpox vaccine, and stop biological weapons research wherever possible.
Just don't promote x-raying travellers and putting cameras that only cops can use all over our city streets. (Public cameras that are available to all I have no beef with, mostly because in the long run it's unavoidable.)
Original poster != guy you replied to
on
McVoy Strikes Back
·
· Score: 1
The original poster doesn't necessarily have the bad attitude, just the guy to whom you replied.
Here's what I think: google will use their web accelerator's ability to see every click you make from a web page to automatically rate sites. Links you click get rated higher, when you hang out on the page longer the rating is even higher.
A tamper proof ratings system is pretty easy, if you can assign a unique ID to the rater and you have enough raters. You can look for people who rate things consistently with each other and clump them together. It should be pretty easy to cull out "diseased" clumps that rate only a few sites up and ignore all others. It would be really hard to build a rating spoofer that presented enough unique ids to Google, with each ID rating in a smart enough way, that the spoofer would affect the ratings Google can get from millions of people browsing through the WA.
You can even give people pageranks that are based on their personal preferences + the preferences of other people in their clump. Think of left-handed and right-handed whuffie a la Corey Doctorow.
Google, if you haven't thought of this already, I want a job;-)
But running over people, driving into businesses, etc. in a ground car is just as easy or easier than flying into restricted airspace would be in the flying car. The only difference is that driving into restricted airspace is a *novel* bad thing that's easy to do.
There are tons of situations right now where the consequences of an action are all out of proportion with the action - walking into traffic, pulling the trigger of a gun, driving into oncoming traffic - the only difference here is that it's new.
That's not to say that we shouldn't keep trying to make bad things hard to do, but let's understand what we're griping about.
I've written GPLed code. I've protested what the RIAA and MPAA have done. I'll tell you why on both counts.
I write GPLed code as a step towards making someone else's life better. I like writing software, the code I GPL I would be writing anyway, and making it GPL doesn't harm me in the least. I make it GPL instead of BSD or public domain because I want to see the amount of freely available software increase as rapidly as possible, and I think the GPL promotes that.
Now, what's wrong with the RIAA and MPAA trying to enforce their copyright? If it were that simple, nothing. But I'll tell you what... these guys have successfully lobbied to take the vast majority of what would be in the public domain, a part of common culture expected to be commonly available, and made it their private property. Companies like Disney are founded on public domain material - Grimm's Fairy Tales, Pinnochio, Sleeping Beauty, you name it. They didn't pay a dime for those stories, stories that someone else wrote and the culture validated, because those stories had passed into the public domain.
Since then, Disney and other MPAA companies have successfully lobbied a 28 year copyright period into *120 years*. They go back and lobby for another 20 years every time their oldest works, the ones they built on public domain material, are about to fall out of copyright. This is no less than organized crime - bribes given to lawmakers to steal our culture from us. That's item 1.
The MPAA and RIAA are working very hard to make general computing illegal. A general computer is fantastically useful - it has transformed the lives of billions. Open systems based on simple principles can yield unbounded potential. The internet is a new testament to that fact, if the prior success of general computers weren't enough. But the MPAA and RIAA believe that general computing is a danger to their revenue, since it allows copying without flaw any information you have available to you. So the MPAA and RIAA, whose members' revenue is a fraction of that of the computing industry, but who control access to public attention and famous figures, lobby governments continually to make computers without DRM illegal. Have no doubts about it, mandatory DRM *will* cripple your computer. It *will* end up in a place where all of your personal information is available to "reputable" companies, where use of programs written by "unreputable" companies will be illegal to run, and where government sanctioned monopolies will charge exorbitant fees to vendors so they can release programs that actually run under DRM. You will see programs that cost money each time you use them, and more money to use them in more sophisticated ways. And using them in innovative ways that the creator never thought of? This will be simple impossible. This is the future if mandatory DRM is allowed to pass. That's item 2.
Finally, the penalties for copying the mass marketed tripe they produce are ludicrous. Charging 10 times the value of the illegally copied goods might be reasonable, both as a penalty and to account for the offenders that you can't catch. But the penalties are 100s or 1000s of times the cost to buy legal copies in stores. The penalties are totally disproportionate to the offense. That's item 3, minor as it may be in comparison to the other two.
That's why some of us get outraged when organized criminals call us communists for happily giving away our works, and name people who copy material that should have been part of the common culture after brigands of the sea who rape, murder and steal.
You can build a 3D environment interactively in Squeak, then program it to do stuff. This takes all of maybe 10 or 20 minutes, once you get the hang of it, and it shouldn't take you more than an hour at home to get the hang of it.
I should point out that I had an issue with an exception when I tried to "pop" the 2D fish I drew into a 3D shape. If you have the same issue, I can send you the solution upon request. If I remember correctly, someone forgot to "^ self" at the end of one of their methods in a recent code update. Email me at bobbymartin2@NgOmSaPiAlM.com (extract the upper case letters to get a valid email address).
You realized how intuitive *relativity* is?!?
on
Blink, Take 2
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· Score: 1
Relativity doesn't relate *at all* to the way the universe behaves in an everyday way. Relativity (beyond the "duh" level of pointing out that one inertial frame of reference is as good as another) is completely non-intuitive; that's the point. Now, relativity should have been obvious, or at least obvious as something to test, once people figured out that light appeared to be going the same speed regardless of the relative speed of the source, but that's totally different from intuitive.
I'm assuming you're talking about special relativity here (the vastly simpler version). It specifies how distances literally shorten in the direction of motion, faster moving objects are more massive than slower moving, and clocks slow on moving objects. (Of course, all of this is talking about relative motion.) You're saying that's intuitive? On what basis?
Offhand, it occurs to me that parasites (virii, bacteria, protozoa) have a special environment that may lend itself to asexual reproduction. They have limited movement in their environment; they have particular chemical wars they're constantly fighting; they fool the host body into doing things to help them. Perhaps sexual reproduction doesn't work very well with one or more of the constraints they live under. Well, virii probably don't really fall into this category. I think they're asexual by their RNA nature.
In particular, the lack of freedom of motion seems like it would be bad for sexual reproduction. It would be easy to get a restricted local breeding population that would result in frequent reinforcement of bad recessives.
The benefit of sexual reproduction seems obvious to me... a gene that is good for the organism under rare environmental conditions can be recessive and rare. That way it can continue to live in a population without expressing during the times that it isn't useful, and then when it's needed there are a few individuals expressing it who can survive the unorthodox environment. This would be useful for getting through ice ages, periodic invasion by some kind of disease, etc.
I'm not sure how asexual reproduction could provide this.
Of course, I'm no biologist - my degree is in physics & math. I read "The Selfish Gene" by Dawkins, though;-)
It was kicking my ass for the first 15 games, then I started beating it. I stopped at 30 games, but my win % was about 40% to its 20%, so I would have had to lose 6 and tie the other 4 for it to beat me over 40 games.
Transformers aren't just a matter of "lots of electricity running through a coil" - it is alternating current in a coil inducing alternating current in another properly positioned coil. It doesn't have to be "a lot" of electricity. As the magnetic field collapses it produces current, and the alternating current produces a continuing collapsing field.
Transformers are very efficient at transferring power - your house is powered by a transformer taking power from the main line. What he's probably thinking of is the fact that transformers can change the voltage from the source to the target coil. So you may have e.g. 1000 volts in your powered coil and end up with 50 volts in the target coil, but voltage is not power - wattage is power, which is voltage times amperage. Again, transformers are effective at tranferring power.
Lots of studies suggest that some EM fields cause cancer, but I've never heard of any strong correlation as he suggests.
Given the total lack of correct information in the rest of the post, I doubt anything he has to say about the efficiency or dangers of Tesla's techniques.
Space and time are not the same thing. Not even in relativity - they're not completely interchangable. Either the space dimensions or the time one (which one depends on if you use quaternions or normal imaginary numbers) is non-real and the other is real. I.e. one subtracts from the interval between events and the other adds.
There is no such thing as intellectual property. There is copyright law, trademark law, and patent law. Ideas are not property. We have some laws that are supposed to encourage advancement of human knowledge or prevent product misrepresentation. These laws let people have a monopoly on distributing ideas, but they are not property laws.
So the age at which you hit 50% chance of death (in this screwy immortal nuclear decay-like situation) is totally dependent on the chance of surviving each year, just not at all in the way that he implies. He predicted the 1000 years based on the.001 death rate; he just did it wrong. It happens to be in the right ballpark, but it demonstrates he doesn't understand what he's talking about.
Slashdot Mirror
If you can't process or retain any visual information, you're blind. Why does it matter if it's a low level or high level failure?
I agree that there's probably 30% of the population that RMS has done nothing to help, at least as of yet. However, for the other 70%, if you buy anything online, shop anywhere that uses *nix based systems for billing or inventory or order tracking or, well, anything, then he has probably saved you a good bit of money. Even if your vendor doesn't use *any* Free software, or any Open Source software, he has certainly benefited drastically from his software vendor having to compete with Free alternatives. Not just because they're free, but because they're well built.
Hell, if he uses only Windows systems, he has still probably benefited dramatically from MS having to compete with Free alternatives.
For that other 30%, the only reason RMS hasn't impacted their lives is that computer hardware isn't cheap enough yet. When hardware gets cheap enough, even farmers in Africa will benefit from seeing all the market prices for their goods, getting PhD level research information on best practices for farming their particular type of land, and all the other benefits that come from internet and computing power access.
Find me a computer system that hasn't been significantly impacted by the presence of Free software, or find me the businesses that don't use software. Then I'll retort by pointing out how that computer system was in fact impacted, or how that business uses services of ten other businesses that do use software.
Richard Stallman might disagree with you.
en tea
The problem is not for you, or me. The problem is my sister, who is very pretty, getting followed and harassed by cops. The problem is that guy who mouthed off to some cop and pissed him off, who now gets followed around and booked for violations that everyone does all the time, but are selectively enforced. (Do you drive the speed limit all the time? Always use signals? Stop completely at all stop signs?)
But, really, your ethos is just wrong. It doesn't matter whether I can give examples of how it harms someone for the police to gain the ability to search and track us without due process. There is always a way it will be abused, whether some guy involved in a lame slashdot conversation can think of it or not. The framers of the constitution gave us a fourth amendment for a reason.
The situation is exactly the opposite of what it should be... as the government gets more power, we need more transparency into what govt officials do; they don't need more transparency into what we do.
Terrorism, blah blah blah. The attitude that we have the moral mandate to peek on what everyone's doing and control it is what motivates the terrorists. (I am not by any means justifying terrorism; I'm being practical about what to do about it.) Ratcheting up imaginary security is a paranoid and counterproductive response. There are real things we can do to increase security, and I think we're doing some of them, but most things we do increase the illusion of security for people who haven't really thought about it. And really, what is the impact of terrorism? Smallpox and nuclear bombs are something to be worried about. Plastic explosives aren't going to kill enough people often enough to be worth worrying about. Buckle your seatbelt and exercise for 30 minutes every day if you are worried about your health and longevity. Lobby for your government to dismantle nuclear weapons, put radiation detectors on all of the ways in & out of the country, stockpile smallpox vaccine, and stop biological weapons research wherever possible.
Just don't promote x-raying travellers and putting cameras that only cops can use all over our city streets. (Public cameras that are available to all I have no beef with, mostly because in the long run it's unavoidable.)
The original poster doesn't necessarily have the bad attitude, just the guy to whom you replied.
Here's what I think: google will use their web accelerator's ability to see every click you make from a web page to automatically rate sites. Links you click get rated higher, when you hang out on the page longer the rating is even higher.
;-)
A tamper proof ratings system is pretty easy, if you can assign a unique ID to the rater and you have enough raters. You can look for people who rate things consistently with each other and clump them together. It should be pretty easy to cull out "diseased" clumps that rate only a few sites up and ignore all others. It would be really hard to build a rating spoofer that presented enough unique ids to Google, with each ID rating in a smart enough way, that the spoofer would affect the ratings Google can get from millions of people browsing through the WA.
You can even give people pageranks that are based on their personal preferences + the preferences of other people in their clump. Think of left-handed and right-handed whuffie a la Corey Doctorow.
Google, if you haven't thought of this already, I want a job
OBEY OBEY OBEY
But running over people, driving into businesses, etc. in a ground car is just as easy or easier than flying into restricted airspace would be in the flying car. The only difference is that driving into restricted airspace is a *novel* bad thing that's easy to do.
There are tons of situations right now where the consequences of an action are all out of proportion with the action - walking into traffic, pulling the trigger of a gun, driving into oncoming traffic - the only difference here is that it's new.
That's not to say that we shouldn't keep trying to make bad things hard to do, but let's understand what we're griping about.
I've written GPLed code. I've protested what the RIAA and MPAA have done. I'll tell you why on both counts.
I write GPLed code as a step towards making someone else's life better. I like writing software, the code I GPL I would be writing anyway, and making it GPL doesn't harm me in the least. I make it GPL instead of BSD or public domain because I want to see the amount of freely available software increase as rapidly as possible, and I think the GPL promotes that.
Now, what's wrong with the RIAA and MPAA trying to enforce their copyright? If it were that simple, nothing. But I'll tell you what... these guys have successfully lobbied to take the vast majority of what would be in the public domain, a part of common culture expected to be commonly available, and made it their private property. Companies like Disney are founded on public domain material - Grimm's Fairy Tales, Pinnochio, Sleeping Beauty, you name it. They didn't pay a dime for those stories, stories that someone else wrote and the culture validated, because those stories had passed into the public domain.
Since then, Disney and other MPAA companies have successfully lobbied a 28 year copyright period into *120 years*. They go back and lobby for another 20 years every time their oldest works, the ones they built on public domain material, are about to fall out of copyright. This is no less than organized crime - bribes given to lawmakers to steal our culture from us. That's item 1.
The MPAA and RIAA are working very hard to make general computing illegal. A general computer is fantastically useful - it has transformed the lives of billions. Open systems based on simple principles can yield unbounded potential. The internet is a new testament to that fact, if the prior success of general computers weren't enough. But the MPAA and RIAA believe that general computing is a danger to their revenue, since it allows copying without flaw any information you have available to you. So the MPAA and RIAA, whose members' revenue is a fraction of that of the computing industry, but who control access to public attention and famous figures, lobby governments continually to make computers without DRM illegal. Have no doubts about it, mandatory DRM *will* cripple your computer. It *will* end up in a place where all of your personal information is available to "reputable" companies, where use of programs written by "unreputable" companies will be illegal to run, and where government sanctioned monopolies will charge exorbitant fees to vendors so they can release programs that actually run under DRM. You will see programs that cost money each time you use them, and more money to use them in more sophisticated ways. And using them in innovative ways that the creator never thought of? This will be simple impossible. This is the future if mandatory DRM is allowed to pass. That's item 2.
Finally, the penalties for copying the mass marketed tripe they produce are ludicrous. Charging 10 times the value of the illegally copied goods might be reasonable, both as a penalty and to account for the offenders that you can't catch. But the penalties are 100s or 1000s of times the cost to buy legal copies in stores. The penalties are totally disproportionate to the offense. That's item 3, minor as it may be in comparison to the other two.
That's why some of us get outraged when organized criminals call us communists for happily giving away our works, and name people who copy material that should have been part of the common culture after brigands of the sea who rape, murder and steal.
See the Wonderland 3D Fishbowl Tutorial for Squeak. You really owe it to yourself.
I should point out that I had an issue with an exception when I tried to "pop" the 2D fish I drew into a 3D shape. If you have the same issue, I can send you the solution upon request. If I remember correctly, someone forgot to "^ self" at the end of one of their methods in a recent code update. Email me at bobbymartin2@NgOmSaPiAlM.com (extract the upper case letters to get a valid email address).
Relativity doesn't relate *at all* to the way the universe behaves in an everyday way. Relativity (beyond the "duh" level of pointing out that one inertial frame of reference is as good as another) is completely non-intuitive; that's the point. Now, relativity should have been obvious, or at least obvious as something to test, once people figured out that light appeared to be going the same speed regardless of the relative speed of the source, but that's totally different from intuitive.
I'm assuming you're talking about special relativity here (the vastly simpler version). It specifies how distances literally shorten in the direction of motion, faster moving objects are more massive than slower moving, and clocks slow on moving objects. (Of course, all of this is talking about relative motion.) You're saying that's intuitive? On what basis?
A public company is legally obligated to do everything reasonable to maximize profits. A private company can serve other interests if it likes.
Offhand, it occurs to me that parasites (virii, bacteria, protozoa) have a special environment that may lend itself to asexual reproduction. They have limited movement in their environment; they have particular chemical wars they're constantly fighting; they fool the host body into doing things to help them. Perhaps sexual reproduction doesn't work very well with one or more of the constraints they live under. Well, virii probably don't really fall into this category. I think they're asexual by their RNA nature.
;-)
In particular, the lack of freedom of motion seems like it would be bad for sexual reproduction. It would be easy to get a restricted local breeding population that would result in frequent reinforcement of bad recessives.
The benefit of sexual reproduction seems obvious to me... a gene that is good for the organism under rare environmental conditions can be recessive and rare. That way it can continue to live in a population without expressing during the times that it isn't useful, and then when it's needed there are a few individuals expressing it who can survive the unorthodox environment. This would be useful for getting through ice ages, periodic invasion by some kind of disease, etc.
I'm not sure how asexual reproduction could provide this.
Of course, I'm no biologist - my degree is in physics & math. I read "The Selfish Gene" by Dawkins, though
Wow, that was fantastically helpful! Now I know that all of your views are supported by trustworthy resources that you have personally researched.
Thanks!
Thanks!!
to support that assertion so that you actually deserve your +informative mod?
Thanks
It was kicking my ass for the first 15 games, then I started beating it. I stopped at 30 games, but my win % was about 40% to its 20%, so I would have had to lose 6 and tie the other 4 for it to beat me over 40 games.
Transformers aren't just a matter of "lots of electricity running through a coil" - it is alternating current in a coil inducing alternating current in another properly positioned coil. It doesn't have to be "a lot" of electricity. As the magnetic field collapses it produces current, and the alternating current produces a continuing collapsing field.
Transformers are very efficient at transferring power - your house is powered by a transformer taking power from the main line. What he's probably thinking of is the fact that transformers can change the voltage from the source to the target coil. So you may have e.g. 1000 volts in your powered coil and end up with 50 volts in the target coil, but voltage is not power - wattage is power, which is voltage times amperage. Again, transformers are effective at tranferring power.
Lots of studies suggest that some EM fields cause cancer, but I've never heard of any strong correlation as he suggests.
Given the total lack of correct information in the rest of the post, I doubt anything he has to say about the efficiency or dangers of Tesla's techniques.
Space and time are not the same thing. Not even in relativity - they're not completely interchangable. Either the space dimensions or the time one (which one depends on if you use quaternions or normal imaginary numbers) is non-real and the other is real. I.e. one subtracts from the interval between events and the other adds.
It's space-time, not space.
There is no such thing as intellectual property. There is copyright law, trademark law, and patent law. Ideas are not property. We have some laws that are supposed to encourage advancement of human knowledge or prevent product misrepresentation. These laws let people have a monopoly on distributing ideas, but they are not property laws.
"It's not okay to write badly in a business setting; at least not in inter-business communication."
;-)
Your semicolon should be a comma. The second part can't stand on its own as a sentence.
Provide a link or stfu, you racist propogandist.