I would not immediately assume that moving it somewhere else will increase uptime; it puts uptime requirements on the Internet link(s) instead of on the server or software setup. Unless the present setup is quite unreliable or he has a surprisingly good link, I think that would likely be a worse problem.
Now, the idea that you can't afford multiple server nodes: Servers can be very, very cheap. For my home server I use an Acer Revo 3600 I paid 200 euro for; the closest available today seems to be http://www.amazon.com/Acer-VN281-2G-320-Linex/dp/B005WUXW1C (at about $220 including shipping.) Assuming you don't have a license cost problem, this allows you to create a cluster for a very low cost.
Apart from that, I'd analyse what your costs are for a failure, and what the odds of a failure are, and whether your tinkering increase or decrease the odds. I'd assume the odds were fairly small to start with; in that case, it may not make any sense to tinker with the setup to create something that is supposed to be more available. I've easily had several years of uptime on single systems; introducing complexity makes that harder, and if you lack the experience with how to deal with these systems, that's likely to increase the risk. (What happens if somebody start your failover by mistake? What happens if both instances are running? etc)
For your particular use case, it sounds like I'd rather have a good alternative system for handling it if your system fails (pen and paper sounds good), and try to beef up the single machine - place it somewhere it won't have dust, vibration and heat problems, use multiple network cards to avoid risk of cable failure, use reliable disks & RAID, have a good UPS with monitoring, etc.
Minor correction: Six months, not two years (though two years some places). And not in Germany (yet). But yeah, it sucks - I don't trust the logs not to be abused.
"Each patent is a restriction on all humanity except the one who was granted exclusive ownership."
For each patent, the patentee PAID a significant amount of money to give YOU an accurate description (the patent) of exactly how the invention works
I have a couple of nice bridges for sale: One in Brooklyn (a neo-Gothic style bridge; it's a suspension/cable-stay hybrid bridge with granite pillars), and another one in San Francisco (a classical steel suspension bridge from 1933, painted a bright orange, and inspiration for many later bridges). The former has *no road tolls* applied, and the latter has low tolls (down to $3). These can be raised, and there's a nice income opportunity. The bridges are also designated as historical landmarks, so you have a separate income stream available by charging tourists for pictures and guided tours.
Of course, given the above descriptions you could easily copy them yourselves without having to invent anything, but I know that since you got the descriptions from me, you'd never do that.
It's not entirely clear that they're good for whoever holds them. IBM is the largest patent holder in the world; a statistical sample all by itself. One of the high up guys in IBM[1] claimed patents where 10x more valuable to IBM as defense against other companies suing them compared to licensing revenues. Another way to look at this is that if 10% of patents transfer to non-practicing entities (patent trolls), then patents are a net negative for IBM.
And this ignore all indirect costs of patents on society that hit IBM indirectly.
[1] Lead patent attorney or CFO or similar; it was credited when I originally read about this, but I don't remember the name or exact source.
The point is that the owner of copyright should be free to dictate the terms under which others can access that content. There's no ethical or moral argument that really holds water to contradict that.
I disagree with that. If the work has influence on a person, that person has a moral interest in it.
Let's start with a simple ethical hypothetical, just to demonstrate that there exists situations where your dictum fails completely:
Postulate a religion based on an obscure science fiction book; say, Roger MacBride Allen's Torch of Honor. (We've already got that kind of thing going on with Scientology.) Say they consider the book so important that they will kill those that can't answer questions about it - and their families. Say this religion gets significant in an area. Say Rober MacBride Allen choose to raise the price of a copy of the book from $8 to $200000 because he finds that's the price that's likely to make him the most money.
I postulate that it would ethical for a parent to get hold of a pirate copy of the book to protect their children.
"But that's completely made up!" I hear you say. Yes. That's not at issue. The issue is that we can construct situations where it is ethical to use a work in violation of the terms a copyright owners wants to dictate, because the copyright holder is behaving unreasonably.
So the question up for debate is "What are these situations, and does any of the common pirate copying fit with such a situation?"
For what I need, I'm probably going to install Unix (FreeBSD or Linux) on it and be paying an extra $1000 or so primarily for a better trackpad and an easier to connect/disconnect power supply chord - and that is worth it to me.
I've just got to say, holy fuck!
I usually have a computer for 3 to 5 years; let's say four years on average. That's less than 70 cents a day. I use it for a fair bit of time every day, and I immediately appreciate a better trackpad (and regularly appreciate slot loading as opposed to tray loading DVD; forgot that annoyance point). I also am more likely to move to a better spot (more ergonomically wise) if there's no hassle with the power supply cord, and I'm less likely to get the machine damaged or trip from the power supply cord with the better connection.
All in all, it's worth 70 cents a day to me. If I was extremely money constrained in general, it might not be - but I have a comfortable income and having the computer I spend a lot of time on be comfortable to me is worth it.
"They do sell millions to customers each quarter that fulfills their needs as some people want an Ultrabook"
Of course some people want them - the same way some people want a pair of Jimmy Choos when a $50 pair of shoes would do the same job. Its a fashion item for rich fashion victims. Most people who buy an ultrabook probably couldn't even spell ethernet port much less tell you what one is. But its sooo shiny and sleak and preeeetty.... *drool*
"I would venture to say that few of them judge you while you judge them."
Oh I feel so guilty judging people on a forum. Whatever next, subjective opinions?
I know a bunch of people that has these, all of which can deal with networks fairly well (including one who wrote one of the first major books on IPv6, almost a decade ago.)
They've got different priorities than you and me, but they clearly know what they are getting and do a conscious choice around it. My laptops are a MacBook Pro for work and a Lenovo for home use; I prefer the increased memory and screen size on the MacBook Pro compared to the easier-to-carry form factor of the ultralights. I'll probably switch from the Lenovo to a Mac Book Pro for my next home machine; the ergonomics of the hardware on the Lenovo is a bit clunky compared to the MacBook Pro. For what I need, I'm probably going to install Unix (FreeBSD or Linux) on it and be paying an extra $1000 or so primarily for a better trackpad and an easier to connect/disconnect power supply chord - and that is worth it to me. (I'm happy that it looks a less clunky as well, but that's not something I'd pay extra for, or I'd not have gotten the Lenovo in the first place.)
Apple chose to invest in the BSD codebase because they could do this, and would likely otherwise have gone a completely different route (e.g, licensing vxWorks as a base.) So having Apple contribute all changes back was not in the cards.
Apart from that, I'm fairly sure FreeBSD was offered re-licensing on most Apple code for integration back into FreeBSD if we were interested (mail to a private mailing list); lack of takeup on this seemed to be that nobody on the FreeBSD side had the spare capacity to deal with all of this rather than Apple not being willing to give us code.
There was and is a ton of merge work that could be done for FreeBSD; NetBSD and OpenBSD had lots of worthwhile changes at the time, and nobody really bothered to merge most of those either. I did some effort on NetBSD/OpenBSD merging, and wrote some infrastructure, but never actually submitted much based on it. Darwin just showed up as one more source of changes to merge; one that had about as many worthwhile changes, but a bit more hassle license wise (need to send an email to get a license release to avoid contaminating.)
So, this is mostly boils down to infrastructure, code/project organization, and manpower - there's no grand licensing issue involved.
This is a good "Put up or shut up" moment for BSD. For all the whining I hear about "Viral" and "Anti Business" licenses the various *BSD projects sure do have a meager adoption (Buisness, home, free or otherwise) compared to their GPL counterparts (Linux). I think an aggressive, forward looking BSD project would be great to have.
Granted, not all the most popular open source projects have "Viral" licenses (Eg - Most Apache foundation projects), but maybe.. Just maybe Linux's success is in part due to the GPL.
Some people feel the GPL is stealing something that they're somehow entitled too. In reality, it's more of an exchange. You give up the ability to have a certain business model, and in return you get the collective work of everyone else who's made the same agreement. You give up exclusive control of your source in return for a world-class, flexible, free, operating system with widespread uses. For free. With a BSD style license you're able to opt out of that "collective work" provision. You can take, but you don't have to give. As a result, the project does not grow.
This is based on assumptions that don't hold water.
In particular, the primary assumption is that a significant fraction of contributions to GPLed projects come from companies that are forced to give these contributions, and that would not give these contributions if they could avoid it (as in BSD).
My impression (from having participated in BSD development and followed Linux development) is that contributions in this area is actually a larger fraction of development on the BSD side of the fence: Embedded systems companies take the BSD codebase and develop something proprietary with it, and give back the parts that aren't crucial. And logically, it would make sense: If a company feels they need to have proprietary parts, they don't touch the GPLed codebase at all; they just use either BSD or one of the proprietary microkernels.
What *does* affect contributions to BSDs is this myth of exploitation. The GPL has a very effective propaganda preface about "preserving freedom of users", incidentally ignoring that part of this preservation of users' freedom comes by denying some of those that could be users of the codebase the ability to become users. (Look at all the BSD users through Mac OS X.) This myth and propaganda clearly influence some developers.
It's probably in your long-term interest for the project to grow. I think the success of Linux proves this.
Yes.
However, the success of Linux has other possible sources than the license:
The source code control system and project management led to "distributions", which allows rapid parallel experimentation.
Distributions lead to more source code flow back and forth than different operating systems with distinct version control systems
The Linux project structure made the project have a much more softly sloping "insider/outsider" distinction; the BSD structure with core team / committers / general public makes it harder to involve people, on a psychological level. (Everybody thinks things are the responsibility of the next inner circle, and then the core team think development is the responsibility of the community at large.) This led to easier recruiting on the Linux side.
There are inherent size limits for communities at particular engagement levels (email overload); having multiple communities, in the form of multiple distributions, alleviate this.
The initial bad support for low end hardware in the BSDs set a disparity in the numbers of users, and there are first mover advantages. People especially select relatively similar operating systems based on whether the operating systems run on the hardware they have, and with more people more drivers get written.
Linux started with a reliance on binary packages for upgrades, while the BSDs started with a reliance on the ports system and building from source for upgrades. While source
This is often said. But I think a citation is needed. The reason representatives vote on laws is because that is the only efficient way (or was when the system was invented) to represent the public. Representatives are elected by the majority. If they vote with the their electorate, then it's still mob rule. If they don't then they've betrayed them.
I have a different opinion on what's a betrayal.
When I vote for a politician, I'm electing somebody to represent me - to hopefully vote the way I would have voted if I'd been perfectly informed and perfectly ethical. I hope the representative will vote *better* than I would, and that they will follow their own conscience. I feel it more of a betrayal if they vote to please me than if they vote different with what I believe.
Add PS3 Other OS removal. In my opinion, that was effectively theft - they advertised Other OS and then removed it. I'm boycotting Sony on the basis of this; the rest are not really malicious (the CD/DRM issue is bad, butthere was not intentional and deliberate harm, just intentional and deliberate intrusion and risk addition.)
The PS3 Other OS removal, on the other hand, is clearly, intentionally malicious. I did not get hurt by it - but I still boycott. I refuse to do business with a company that intentionally hurt their customers.
I use a duvet (comforter in US English, I think) or a plain blanket, depending on what climate and time of year it is; so my view of "made properly" is probably different than yours. It's basically an organized way of putting the duvet/blanket. I find it annoying when I come to hotels and have to rip it all up.
What I wanted to communicate was that it isn't necessarily a waste to tidy even if you're not having guests over - some of us like to have things tidy because we find it pleasant in itself, not to demonstrate to others. (And I'm not claiming that I always have it tidy even if I'd like to - I would prefer to have it tidy without having to make it tidy;)
To be honest, if the choice was between the current *AA or no new art, I think I would go with no new art.
That is one of the most profoundly stupid remarks I have seen on slashdot this year, and I browse at -1
I'm not the original poster, but let me try a rephrase of it:
Between the rights that are eroding due to *AA attempting to protect copyrighted mass distributed entertainment, and the production of new copyrighted mass distributed entertainment, I'd rather give up the production of new entertainment than the rights.
The system is rigged to prevent any change by average people and you know it. Money buys you access, access buys you laws. Period.
It is rigged. How do you think it got that way?
By a problem in the design of the US election system combined with having a large country. The primary problem in the design is that there's a first-past-the-post election system combined with simple plurality voting. This leads to very heavy strategic voting ("Don't vote for a third party or your vote is wasted") locking in a bi-partisan situation (and, through "Attitudes follows behavior", mentality). A secondary problem is the use of campaign contributions for the main thrust of political campaigning; this leads to politicians being dependent on contributors to make the cut.
This means that for areas where people do not strongly care, the parties will not risk offending the contributors, as that may lead to the loss of the next election.
Having a large country strongly compounds that. If you have a country of three million people, an industry can spend 2 million in lobbying to do something that takes one dollar from each citizen, and make a million - 50% return on investment. In a country with 300 million, they can spend 200 million for the same law and get the same return on investment.
An individual citizen's relative voice scales the opposite way.
This makes a 100x difference in size into a 10,000x difference in relative influence. There's a couple of factors that bring these relative factors back a little bit - primarily, the time of politicians are limited, so you can't apply 100x more lobbying expense effectively in convincing people, and people get demotivated by being such a small cog, so the people that *do* have motivation have more access than they proportionally should. Also, much of the money goes to advertising, and that has some proportionality to the number of people reached; though there is a large fixed base.
But overall, these things taken together makes it hard to get influence. Things have to really enrage people to get them blocked if there's "bipartisan support".
Because people didn't care.
People didn't care because they feel like they have no chance of actually changing things - and unless there's work to fix the system, they're often right.
Is it beyond all hope? Depends. What are you going to do to change it?
Oh, right. Nothing.
I try to convince people that they need to hit the hydra at the base: Election reform. By informing people about it. (I can't vote in the US, and my care for the US internal politics is to a large degree compassion - I think the US people deserve a system of government that isn't unduly influenced by corporations.)
They should care about your product because they take pride in their work, because they have personal integrity around the things they have taken on. This is a product of your selection of partners.
They should care about your product because you've communicated to them in a way that show that they're important and you care and your product is important - building loyalty to both you and the product. This is a product of your communication after you've hired them.
I'd guess most of the western world, and possibly some of the non-western world. On the intentional homicides per capita list on Wikipedia, US is on the 26th place of 59 entries. Compared to population, there's 8.5x more homicides in the US than in Austria. However, the numbers are likely worse when it comes to billionaire risk: In Norway (where I'm originally from, 2nd spot on the list), almost all homicides are crimes of passion inside family; in the US, there's more criminally related homicides, a risk I'd expect to be increased for billionaires.
The rental market in the US is approximately $7.5 billion per year. If we assume $3 per rental average (Redbox is $1.25), and 1.5 people that watch the movie that's 75 billion seconds per year. Or 2376 years per year - but round down to 2000, we don't have more precision than that anyway.
The full, entire time of 2000 people. That's what ICE Director John Morton and his pals destroy to stroke their egos.
You're confusing a factual observation about the world (A leads to people doing B) with a moral argument (A makes doing B OK). Placing diamond rings on a publicly accessible tray outside your jewelry shop leads to people stealing them; this don't make stealing them them OK. It also indicates that placing diamond rings on a public accessible tray outside your jewelry shop is unwise if you're optimizing for low amounts of theft.
Let me start with saying that I don't pirate - but I disagree with your conclusions anyway.
Same thing applies to Slashdot. Threads of this exact nature pop up every 2 months or so for the last 10 years -- and the point they're trying to make is still incorrect.
The media owners have every right to choose their business model.
As long as they don't have a monopoly and don't collude to restrict consumer choice or set prices, that is.
Oh, they *do* have monopolies, granted by the government, and *do* collude? Then they've violated their end of the bargain.
The customer has every right to purchase, or not to purchase.
You don't want to spend 10 bucks on Avengers in a regular theater -- the MPAA cannot make you spend those 10 bucks. They can't make you spend 16 bucks to watch it in 3D either. They can't force you to buy the DVD or BluRay. They can't force you to rent it. You have every right to disagree with their terms, and not give them your business. But you don't have the right to obtain their media on terms they did not agree to.
You guys are simply discussing the wrong thing. The profitability of Avengers is 100% immaterial. The producer could choose to sell at 10x the price, or 1/100th (and take a loss). Their media, their choice. You choose to buy or not to buy (which is how you regulate their choice).
Let me rephrase: "You choose to participate or not participate in culture (which is how you regulate their choice.)"
This is a cost that's not reasonable for most people to take; it cuts off their references and ability to communicate.
As part of culture, the media is partially owned collectively by the culture, and partially owned by the people that produced it. This was recognized in the original constitutional basis for US copyright:
To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.
(Emphasis mine).
Piracy is theft no matter how you dress it up.
DRM is theft no matter how you dress it up; theft from the commons.
Piracy is copyright infringement. It is a violation of rights granted by law, like battery is a violation of rights granted by law. But it isn't theft.
Also, I believe most piracy involve no loss to the original rightsholder - most piracy is performed by mass pirates, who would not have the financial capacity to buy more than a very small fraction of whatever they pirate in the first place, and most things they pirate they never get around to looking at, and would not have bought if it had any noticeable cost at all.
I am saying that the unqualified term "democracy" technically refers to any system of government where the power comes from the people through voting. In popular usage, it generally refers to a representative democracy with limitations to who gets to vote. The term for what you're talking about is something like "direct democracy with unlimited participation", and it is sometimes called an "ideal democracy". Trying to redefine "democracy" to deflect criticism of the US system is (A) debating semantics, and (B) debating semantics incorrectly, and (C) choosing a definition that, in addition to being in violation of current and historical norms, is fairly much useless, and as a such is unlikely to be adopted more generally.
This misuse of the term seems to have become common over the last five years; I don't know where you all take it from, is there some kind of book or curriculum that has this misunderstanding in it, or is it some subculture that has the misunderstanding?
Where did *you* get your idea that "the US is a republic, not a democracy"?
According to a movie buff friend of mine, Hollywood have a historical cycle, and have gone through it a number of times (and I'm repeating this from memory): They start producing original stuff on low budgets. People are happy with this, and goes to the movies. Then, as time goes by, they increase the budgets, and try for more and more "safe" content, so lots more sequels. People get less happy, and overall goes to the movies less. Hollywood sees the market shrink, and starts trying to go even safer - more sequels, more "safe" formula, less broad investment, but more expensive sequels. People get really bored with movies, goes much less - and Hollywood gives up making money on the safe productions, and try a few experimental low budget movies. Some of these make money, so Hollywood plays a bit more - and the amount of people going to the movies go up again, and the cycle has started anew.
When I talked to my friend about this, we were hitting the tail end of that cycle (ie, lots of followups, few original movies, lower sales) when the movie studios were complaining most about piracy hurting them, a few years ago.
I don't know if this is true - I'm not that much of a movie buff, I can't really look at how things change from year to year and correlate that to profits - but it seems reasonable.
With your definition of "democracy", nobody has democracy. You're beating up a straw man; to use the Wikipedia divisons, a republic is a legislative system, while democracy is a power source.
In this context, the quote is perfectly apt - it says that the power source in politics changed from the people (democracy) to money (acquired through capitalism, generally with perverted markets).
Life arose on Earth sometime in the first few hundred million years after the young planet had cooled to the point that it could support water-based organisms on its surface. The early emergence of life on Earth has been taken as evidence that the probability of abiogenesis is high, if starting from young Earth-like conditions. We revisit this argument quantitatively in a Bayesian statistical framework. By constructing a simple model of the probability of abiogenesis, we calculate a Bayesian estimate of its posterior probability, given the data that life emerged fairly early in Earth’s history and that, billions of years later, curious creatures noted this fact and considered its implications. We find that, given only this very limited empirical information, the choice of Bayesian prior for the abiogenesis probability parameter has a dominant influence on the computed posterior probability. Although terrestrial life's early emergence provides evidence that life might be abundant in the universe if early-Earth-like conditions are common, the evidence is inconclusive and indeed is consistent with an arbitrarily low intrinsic probability of abiogenesis for plausible uninformative priors. Finding a single case of life arising independently of our lineage (on Earth, elsewhere in the solar system, or on an extrasolar planet) would provide much stronger evidence that abiogenesis is not extremely rare in the universe.
Sure. There's reasons to be very careful about these prions. However, according to all the information we have, the handling in this case was following the very careful rules, and it was just a mutation.
Slashdot Mirror
I would not immediately assume that moving it somewhere else will increase uptime; it puts uptime requirements on the Internet link(s) instead of on the server or software setup. Unless the present setup is quite unreliable or he has a surprisingly good link, I think that would likely be a worse problem.
Now, the idea that you can't afford multiple server nodes: Servers can be very, very cheap. For my home server I use an Acer Revo 3600 I paid 200 euro for; the closest available today seems to be http://www.amazon.com/Acer-VN281-2G-320-Linex/dp/B005WUXW1C (at about $220 including shipping.) Assuming you don't have a license cost problem, this allows you to create a cluster for a very low cost.
Apart from that, I'd analyse what your costs are for a failure, and what the odds of a failure are, and whether your tinkering increase or decrease the odds. I'd assume the odds were fairly small to start with; in that case, it may not make any sense to tinker with the setup to create something that is supposed to be more available. I've easily had several years of uptime on single systems; introducing complexity makes that harder, and if you lack the experience with how to deal with these systems, that's likely to increase the risk. (What happens if somebody start your failover by mistake? What happens if both instances are running? etc)
For your particular use case, it sounds like I'd rather have a good alternative system for handling it if your system fails (pen and paper sounds good), and try to beef up the single machine - place it somewhere it won't have dust, vibration and heat problems, use multiple network cards to avoid risk of cable failure, use reliable disks & RAID, have a good UPS with monitoring, etc.
Minor correction: Six months, not two years (though two years some places). And not in Germany (yet). But yeah, it sucks - I don't trust the logs not to be abused.
"Each patent is a restriction on all humanity except the one who was granted exclusive ownership."
For each patent, the patentee PAID a significant amount of money to give YOU an accurate description (the patent) of exactly how the invention works
I have a couple of nice bridges for sale: One in Brooklyn (a neo-Gothic style bridge; it's a suspension/cable-stay hybrid bridge with granite pillars), and another one in San Francisco (a classical steel suspension bridge from 1933, painted a bright orange, and inspiration for many later bridges). The former has *no road tolls* applied, and the latter has low tolls (down to $3). These can be raised, and there's a nice income opportunity. The bridges are also designated as historical landmarks, so you have a separate income stream available by charging tourists for pictures and guided tours.
Of course, given the above descriptions you could easily copy them yourselves without having to invent anything, but I know that since you got the descriptions from me, you'd never do that.
What's your best offer?
Eivind.
It's not entirely clear that they're good for whoever holds them. IBM is the largest patent holder in the world; a statistical sample all by itself. One of the high up guys in IBM[1] claimed patents where 10x more valuable to IBM as defense against other companies suing them compared to licensing revenues. Another way to look at this is that if 10% of patents transfer to non-practicing entities (patent trolls), then patents are a net negative for IBM.
And this ignore all indirect costs of patents on society that hit IBM indirectly.
[1] Lead patent attorney or CFO or similar; it was credited when I originally read about this, but I don't remember the name or exact source.
The point is that the owner of copyright should be free to dictate the terms under which others can access that content. There's no ethical or moral argument that really holds water to contradict that.
I disagree with that. If the work has influence on a person, that person has a moral interest in it.
Let's start with a simple ethical hypothetical, just to demonstrate that there exists situations where your dictum fails completely:
Postulate a religion based on an obscure science fiction book; say, Roger MacBride Allen's Torch of Honor. (We've already got that kind of thing going on with Scientology.) Say they consider the book so important that they will kill those that can't answer questions about it - and their families. Say this religion gets significant in an area. Say Rober MacBride Allen choose to raise the price of a copy of the book from $8 to $200000 because he finds that's the price that's likely to make him the most money.
I postulate that it would ethical for a parent to get hold of a pirate copy of the book to protect their children.
"But that's completely made up!" I hear you say. Yes. That's not at issue. The issue is that we can construct situations where it is ethical to use a work in violation of the terms a copyright owners wants to dictate, because the copyright holder is behaving unreasonably.
So the question up for debate is "What are these situations, and does any of the common pirate copying fit with such a situation?"
For what I need, I'm probably going to install Unix (FreeBSD or Linux) on it and be paying an extra $1000 or so primarily for a better trackpad and an easier to connect/disconnect power supply chord - and that is worth it to me.
I've just got to say, holy fuck!
I usually have a computer for 3 to 5 years; let's say four years on average. That's less than 70 cents a day. I use it for a fair bit of time every day, and I immediately appreciate a better trackpad (and regularly appreciate slot loading as opposed to tray loading DVD; forgot that annoyance point). I also am more likely to move to a better spot (more ergonomically wise) if there's no hassle with the power supply cord, and I'm less likely to get the machine damaged or trip from the power supply cord with the better connection.
All in all, it's worth 70 cents a day to me. If I was extremely money constrained in general, it might not be - but I have a comfortable income and having the computer I spend a lot of time on be comfortable to me is worth it.
"They do sell millions to customers each quarter that fulfills their needs as some people want an Ultrabook"
Of course some people want them - the same way some people want a pair of Jimmy Choos when a $50 pair of shoes would do the same job. Its a fashion item for rich fashion victims. Most people who buy an ultrabook probably couldn't even spell ethernet port much less tell you what one is. But its sooo shiny and sleak and preeeetty .... *drool*
"I would venture to say that few of them judge you while you judge them."
Oh I feel so guilty judging people on a forum. Whatever next, subjective opinions?
I know a bunch of people that has these, all of which can deal with networks fairly well (including one who wrote one of the first major books on IPv6, almost a decade ago.)
They've got different priorities than you and me, but they clearly know what they are getting and do a conscious choice around it. My laptops are a MacBook Pro for work and a Lenovo for home use; I prefer the increased memory and screen size on the MacBook Pro compared to the easier-to-carry form factor of the ultralights. I'll probably switch from the Lenovo to a Mac Book Pro for my next home machine; the ergonomics of the hardware on the Lenovo is a bit clunky compared to the MacBook Pro. For what I need, I'm probably going to install Unix (FreeBSD or Linux) on it and be paying an extra $1000 or so primarily for a better trackpad and an easier to connect/disconnect power supply chord - and that is worth it to me. (I'm happy that it looks a less clunky as well, but that's not something I'd pay extra for, or I'd not have gotten the Lenovo in the first place.)
Apple chose to invest in the BSD codebase because they could do this, and would likely otherwise have gone a completely different route (e.g, licensing vxWorks as a base.) So having Apple contribute all changes back was not in the cards.
Apart from that, I'm fairly sure FreeBSD was offered re-licensing on most Apple code for integration back into FreeBSD if we were interested (mail to a private mailing list); lack of takeup on this seemed to be that nobody on the FreeBSD side had the spare capacity to deal with all of this rather than Apple not being willing to give us code.
There was and is a ton of merge work that could be done for FreeBSD; NetBSD and OpenBSD had lots of worthwhile changes at the time, and nobody really bothered to merge most of those either. I did some effort on NetBSD/OpenBSD merging, and wrote some infrastructure, but never actually submitted much based on it. Darwin just showed up as one more source of changes to merge; one that had about as many worthwhile changes, but a bit more hassle license wise (need to send an email to get a license release to avoid contaminating.)
So, this is mostly boils down to infrastructure, code/project organization, and manpower - there's no grand licensing issue involved.
This is a good "Put up or shut up" moment for BSD. For all the whining I hear about "Viral" and "Anti Business" licenses the various *BSD projects sure do have a meager adoption (Buisness, home, free or otherwise) compared to their GPL counterparts (Linux). I think an aggressive, forward looking BSD project would be great to have.
Granted, not all the most popular open source projects have "Viral" licenses (Eg - Most Apache foundation projects), but maybe.. Just maybe Linux's success is in part due to the GPL.
Some people feel the GPL is stealing something that they're somehow entitled too. In reality, it's more of an exchange. You give up the ability to have a certain business model, and in return you get the collective work of everyone else who's made the same agreement. You give up exclusive control of your source in return for a world-class, flexible, free, operating system with widespread uses. For free. With a BSD style license you're able to opt out of that "collective work" provision. You can take, but you don't have to give. As a result, the project does not grow.
This is based on assumptions that don't hold water.
In particular, the primary assumption is that a significant fraction of contributions to GPLed projects come from companies that are forced to give these contributions, and that would not give these contributions if they could avoid it (as in BSD).
My impression (from having participated in BSD development and followed Linux development) is that contributions in this area is actually a larger fraction of development on the BSD side of the fence: Embedded systems companies take the BSD codebase and develop something proprietary with it, and give back the parts that aren't crucial. And logically, it would make sense: If a company feels they need to have proprietary parts, they don't touch the GPLed codebase at all; they just use either BSD or one of the proprietary microkernels.
What *does* affect contributions to BSDs is this myth of exploitation. The GPL has a very effective propaganda preface about "preserving freedom of users", incidentally ignoring that part of this preservation of users' freedom comes by denying some of those that could be users of the codebase the ability to become users. (Look at all the BSD users through Mac OS X.) This myth and propaganda clearly influence some developers.
It's probably in your long-term interest for the project to grow. I think the success of Linux proves this.
Yes.
However, the success of Linux has other possible sources than the license:
This is often said. But I think a citation is needed. The reason representatives vote on laws is because that is the only efficient way (or was when the system was invented) to represent the public. Representatives are elected by the majority. If they vote with the their electorate, then it's still mob rule. If they don't then they've betrayed them.
I have a different opinion on what's a betrayal.
When I vote for a politician, I'm electing somebody to represent me - to hopefully vote the way I would have voted if I'd been perfectly informed and perfectly ethical. I hope the representative will vote *better* than I would, and that they will follow their own conscience. I feel it more of a betrayal if they vote to please me than if they vote different with what I believe.
Add PS3 Other OS removal. In my opinion, that was effectively theft - they advertised Other OS and then removed it. I'm boycotting Sony on the basis of this; the rest are not really malicious (the CD/DRM issue is bad, butthere was not intentional and deliberate harm, just intentional and deliberate intrusion and risk addition.)
The PS3 Other OS removal, on the other hand, is clearly, intentionally malicious. I did not get hurt by it - but I still boycott. I refuse to do business with a company that intentionally hurt their customers.
I use a duvet (comforter in US English, I think) or a plain blanket, depending on what climate and time of year it is; so my view of "made properly" is probably different than yours. It's basically an organized way of putting the duvet/blanket. I find it annoying when I come to hotels and have to rip it all up.
What I wanted to communicate was that it isn't necessarily a waste to tidy even if you're not having guests over - some of us like to have things tidy because we find it pleasant in itself, not to demonstrate to others. (And I'm not claiming that I always have it tidy even if I'd like to - I would prefer to have it tidy without having to make it tidy ;)
Eivind.
If APPEARANCE is the only reason, then it can wait until the guests drop by, and THEN I will make it. Not before.
I like having things look tidy at home. It makes it easier to find things when I need to, and overall is more mentally relaxing.
To be honest, if the choice was between the current *AA or no new art, I think I would go with no new art.
That is one of the most profoundly stupid remarks I have seen on slashdot this year, and I browse at -1
I'm not the original poster, but let me try a rephrase of it:
Between the rights that are eroding due to *AA attempting to protect copyrighted mass distributed entertainment, and the production of new copyrighted mass distributed entertainment, I'd rather give up the production of new entertainment than the rights.
Does that make more sense to you?
Eivind.
The system is rigged to prevent any change by average people and you know it. Money buys you access, access buys you laws. Period.
It is rigged. How do you think it got that way?
By a problem in the design of the US election system combined with having a large country. The primary problem in the design is that there's a first-past-the-post election system combined with simple plurality voting. This leads to very heavy strategic voting ("Don't vote for a third party or your vote is wasted") locking in a bi-partisan situation (and, through "Attitudes follows behavior", mentality). A secondary problem is the use of campaign contributions for the main thrust of political campaigning; this leads to politicians being dependent on contributors to make the cut.
This means that for areas where people do not strongly care, the parties will not risk offending the contributors, as that may lead to the loss of the next election.
Having a large country strongly compounds that. If you have a country of three million people, an industry can spend 2 million in lobbying to do something that takes one dollar from each citizen, and make a million - 50% return on investment. In a country with 300 million, they can spend 200 million for the same law and get the same return on investment.
An individual citizen's relative voice scales the opposite way.
This makes a 100x difference in size into a 10,000x difference in relative influence. There's a couple of factors that bring these relative factors back a little bit - primarily, the time of politicians are limited, so you can't apply 100x more lobbying expense effectively in convincing people, and people get demotivated by being such a small cog, so the people that *do* have motivation have more access than they proportionally should. Also, much of the money goes to advertising, and that has some proportionality to the number of people reached; though there is a large fixed base.
But overall, these things taken together makes it hard to get influence. Things have to really enrage people to get them blocked if there's "bipartisan support".
Because people didn't care.
People didn't care because they feel like they have no chance of actually changing things - and unless there's work to fix the system, they're often right.
Is it beyond all hope? Depends. What are you going to do to change it?
Oh, right. Nothing.
I try to convince people that they need to hit the hydra at the base: Election reform. By informing people about it. (I can't vote in the US, and my care for the US internal politics is to a large degree compassion - I think the US people deserve a system of government that isn't unduly influenced by corporations.)
They should care about your product because they take pride in their work, because they have personal integrity around the things they have taken on. This is a product of your selection of partners.
They should care about your product because you've communicated to them in a way that show that they're important and you care and your product is important - building loyalty to both you and the product. This is a product of your communication after you've hired them.
I'd guess most of the western world, and possibly some of the non-western world. On the intentional homicides per capita list on Wikipedia, US is on the 26th place of 59 entries. Compared to population, there's 8.5x more homicides in the US than in Austria. However, the numbers are likely worse when it comes to billionaire risk: In Norway (where I'm originally from, 2nd spot on the list), almost all homicides are crimes of passion inside family; in the US, there's more criminally related homicides, a risk I'd expect to be increased for billionaires.
20 seconds per movie seen.
The rental market in the US is approximately $7.5 billion per year. If we assume $3 per rental average (Redbox is $1.25), and 1.5 people that watch the movie that's 75 billion seconds per year. Or 2376 years per year - but round down to 2000, we don't have more precision than that anyway.
The full, entire time of 2000 people. That's what ICE Director John Morton and his pals destroy to stroke their egos.
Eivind.
You're confusing a factual observation about the world (A leads to people doing B) with a moral argument (A makes doing B OK). Placing diamond rings on a publicly accessible tray outside your jewelry shop leads to people stealing them; this don't make stealing them them OK. It also indicates that placing diamond rings on a public accessible tray outside your jewelry shop is unwise if you're optimizing for low amounts of theft.
Let me start with saying that I don't pirate - but I disagree with your conclusions anyway.
Same thing applies to Slashdot. Threads of this exact nature pop up every 2 months or so for the last 10 years -- and the point they're trying to make is still incorrect.
The media owners have every right to choose their business model.
As long as they don't have a monopoly and don't collude to restrict consumer choice or set prices, that is.
Oh, they *do* have monopolies, granted by the government, and *do* collude? Then they've violated their end of the bargain.
The customer has every right to purchase, or not to purchase.
You don't want to spend 10 bucks on Avengers in a regular theater -- the MPAA cannot make you spend those 10 bucks. They can't make you spend 16 bucks to watch it in 3D either. They can't force you to buy the DVD or BluRay. They can't force you to rent it. You have every right to disagree with their terms, and not give them your business. But you don't have the right to obtain their media on terms they did not agree to.
You guys are simply discussing the wrong thing. The profitability of Avengers is 100% immaterial. The producer could choose to sell at 10x the price, or 1/100th (and take a loss). Their media, their choice. You choose to buy or not to buy (which is how you regulate their choice).
Let me rephrase: "You choose to participate or not participate in culture (which is how you regulate their choice.)"
This is a cost that's not reasonable for most people to take; it cuts off their references and ability to communicate.
As part of culture, the media is partially owned collectively by the culture, and partially owned by the people that produced it. This was recognized in the original constitutional basis for US copyright:
To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.
(Emphasis mine).
Piracy is theft no matter how you dress it up.
DRM is theft no matter how you dress it up; theft from the commons.
Piracy is copyright infringement. It is a violation of rights granted by law, like battery is a violation of rights granted by law. But it isn't theft.
Also, I believe most piracy involve no loss to the original rightsholder - most piracy is performed by mass pirates, who would not have the financial capacity to buy more than a very small fraction of whatever they pirate in the first place, and most things they pirate they never get around to looking at, and would not have bought if it had any noticeable cost at all.
I am saying that the unqualified term "democracy" technically refers to any system of government where the power comes from the people through voting. In popular usage, it generally refers to a representative democracy with limitations to who gets to vote. The term for what you're talking about is something like "direct democracy with unlimited participation", and it is sometimes called an "ideal democracy". Trying to redefine "democracy" to deflect criticism of the US system is (A) debating semantics, and (B) debating semantics incorrectly, and (C) choosing a definition that, in addition to being in violation of current and historical norms, is fairly much useless, and as a such is unlikely to be adopted more generally.
This misuse of the term seems to have become common over the last five years; I don't know where you all take it from, is there some kind of book or curriculum that has this misunderstanding in it, or is it some subculture that has the misunderstanding?
Where did *you* get your idea that "the US is a republic, not a democracy"?
Eivind.
According to a movie buff friend of mine, Hollywood have a historical cycle, and have gone through it a number of times (and I'm repeating this from memory): They start producing original stuff on low budgets. People are happy with this, and goes to the movies. Then, as time goes by, they increase the budgets, and try for more and more "safe" content, so lots more sequels. People get less happy, and overall goes to the movies less. Hollywood sees the market shrink, and starts trying to go even safer - more sequels, more "safe" formula, less broad investment, but more expensive sequels. People get really bored with movies, goes much less - and Hollywood gives up making money on the safe productions, and try a few experimental low budget movies. Some of these make money, so Hollywood plays a bit more - and the amount of people going to the movies go up again, and the cycle has started anew.
When I talked to my friend about this, we were hitting the tail end of that cycle (ie, lots of followups, few original movies, lower sales) when the movie studios were complaining most about piracy hurting them, a few years ago.
I don't know if this is true - I'm not that much of a movie buff, I can't really look at how things change from year to year and correlate that to profits - but it seems reasonable.
With your definition of "democracy", nobody has democracy. You're beating up a straw man; to use the Wikipedia divisons, a republic is a legislative system, while democracy is a power source.
In this context, the quote is perfectly apt - it says that the power source in politics changed from the people (democracy) to money (acquired through capitalism, generally with perverted markets).
Their article is at PNAS (with an accessible preprint on Arxiv.org and has the following abstract:
Sure. There's reasons to be very careful about these prions. However, according to all the information we have, the handling in this case was following the very careful rules, and it was just a mutation.