IMO, RP British (aka BBC British) is no more difficult to understand than RP American. Needless to say the difference between standard British and Cockney is huge. While most British that I have met do drop their 'r's at the end of many words, and, in anything but Queen's English even more consonants are dropped or replaced with glottal stops, the British do pronounce their vowels more 'correctly' than Americans.
I can vouch for the fact that many foreign speakers do find non-regional (RP) American accents (common in the midwest and California) easier to understand than most British accents they have heard. While this may have something to do with American media being all-pervasive, I think New World languages just sound more like they are spelled. New Worlders like to simplify things. Think of Canadian French or Columbian Spanish vs. the original European versions. Chilean Spanish, Cuban Spanish, and certain regional American accents are very difficult to understand. Of course these langauges started in Europe. So I think the European versions should be the only truly 'correct' ones.
They're smart for doing it, but it's damn annoying that we have to put up with it.
Fair enough. The morons working at the USPTO are just as much at fault. But they will lose some customers over this kind of nonsense. I for one will avoid buying from them whenever possible. The one-click patent was bad enough, but these rat bastards were just getting started. I've had enough. They are not the only site for books, music, and movies. I'd like to see a geek boycott of Amazon. Hopefully a more effective one than the Adobe boycott during the whole Sklyarov incident. Those of us who feel that Amazon is abusing the patent system can at least vote with our dollars.
What kind of property did you say? 'Intellectual' property is a contradiction in terms. You can't own an idea. Although you are free to try.
I think it's just sour grapes from those people that didn't think of
Patenting an obvious idea like this does not serve the public good in any way and neither amazon.com nor Bezos as any 'right' to it whatsoever. Can anyone seriously argue that Amazon would not have developed the system if they knew they coudn't patent it? Bullshit. This is not like a pharmaceutical corp looking for a return on the investment of billions in drug research. Recommendations based on past purchases is not some kind of 'invention'. It is just a marketing idea for frack sake.
and I am sure someone will use it to invalidate this dumb patent.
How optimistic of you. While you are making predictions, care to predict who exactly is going to do this? I have a prediction of my own: this patent will stand and the other uses of the concept (like audioscrobbler) will be sued into submission. Or maybe just disappear even before getting sued. I think a well-drafted warning letter will suffice.
For example, most online retailers have blurbs saying "customers who bought this product also bought these..." and give a list.
Prior art is based on the date of the application, not the date the patent is granted. You will have to dig a bit deeper than that.
Does anyone remember a research 'game' which was sort of like Pacman but with real motivation. IIRC, the Pacman character was programmed to seek pleasure and avoid pain. Certain pellets were considered positive reinforcements and others were considered negative reinforcements. It ended up having some almost spooky emergent behavior, like hiding in a corner if there were too many negative reinforcement pellets. It seemed to develop responses almost like fear. Stuff like that. I can't recall the details unfortunately. I think it was done as a university project or something, maybe in the late 80s. The idea of generating unpredictable emergent behavior from a relatively simple computer program has stayed with me.
I think that will be the next stage of computer characters: to make them unpredictable even for the programmers. Rule-based learning can get you somewhat complex behavior, but it is all predictable. What we need is genuine example-based learning. So that the resulting behavior would be impossible for anyone to predict and constantly changing and evolving. Of course I am thinking along the lines of various neural network, connectionist architectures. Their unpredictability is generally considered a downside, but for a game the black box aspect seems perfect.
Yup. I liked Black and White. It was my first and only RTS game. But it was really a Molyneux hybrid RTS/virtual pet game. I cannot remember a game that was so hyped pre-release. Molyneux even had an interview on NPR IIRC. For a video game! It was hyped as a whole new concept in gaming. In reality I couldn't even finish it until a patch was released. It was very buggy. It was hyped as revolutionary and I guess it was. Sort of. A nice blend of different gaming types. And the only game where you literally play a god and get to train a virtual pet which is also worshipped. Also I'm not sure if any game had used gestures before. With so much complexity I guess it's not surprising that there was a lot of bug squashing. To their credit I think they did a pretty good job with the patch releases.
Most people complained about the micromanagement and the resulting tedium. It did kind of resemble work, but of a less offensive variety than the FedEx delivery quests of certain RPGs. I loved the virtual pet aspect, the use of gestures, the wolves and poisoning the grain. Lots of fun stuff to do. It was easy to get carried away training your creature. Made me think I should just step away from the computer and buy a real dog or maybe an AIBO. I hated the two sidekicks though. Seemed like a feature for the kiddies.
There is a bit of a story behind the ultra-hyped AI aspect of the game. Molyneux talked a lot about neural networks and connectionist AI pre-release but actually didn't end up using it. They tried it, but the creatures didn't seem as convincing. So they dumped it in favor of something they thought worked better. Fair enough, but I felt kind of ripped off when I read about that. I wanted to believe that my virtual ape was actually learning what I taught him in an unpredictable, non-scripted sort of way. I never did try Creature Isle. I heard the AI was supposed to have been tweaked a bit. I can't wait for Black and White part deux which is in alpha stage right now.
Why don't you just admit that you were talking out of your arse? I know what I am talking about because I have experienced it. Arguing over exactly how many points my IQ dropped isn't going to change that. Why don't you cite some references, smart guy. I had to reply because you are just spreading misinformation due to obvious ignorance. Or maybe you are a young kid who heard it somewhere. If brain injury causes 'dead' areas of the brain that show up in testing, then at least give a few more details about how you know that. As well as to how you know that brain injury doesn't cause any congitive impairment.
Here's a link. MTBI or mild traumatic brain injury is a common result of automobile accidents and bicycle accidents. It results in relatively obvious cognitive impairments as I described.
Isn't this a proof for the (non) existence of the soul?
There is already no evidence for the religious concept of the 'soul'. If you are trying to convince a believer, don't bother. They do not believe based on evidence. The belief in magical, invisible, undetectable, but all-powerful entities is not based on science or anything resembling scientific, logical thinking. It is based on fairy tales usually 'learned' at an age before most humans are able to think critically. If you really want to convince a believer you will need to use a powerful emotional argument, not an evidence-based logical one. Their belief system is such that blind faith, especially in the face of contradictory evidence is considered a great virtue.
Brain damage is measured in dead areas of the brain, not by cognitive tests.
No. You are wrong. 'Dead' areas of the brain? Where do you guys come up with stuff like this? For humans at least there are standardized tests used by neuro-physiologists to estimate cognitive impairment from brain injury. I suffered such impairment about 5 years ago and took the tests. There are huge correlations between brain damage and what is commonly referred to as IQ or intelligence. Memory is affected the most. Followed by things like attention span and organizational ability. My IQ dropped by like 50 points after my bicycle accident. My MRIs and CAT scans were normal. There was no physical, visible, evidence of brain injury, but it was there nonetheless.
The problem is that there is no money in overbuilding.
Tell that to RCN. Not only did they add their own cables to the existing ones in the Boston area, but they added their own phone lines as well. They decided to compete with two existing 'monopolies'. They seem to be doing well as far as I can tell. In the Boston area we have 3 broadband ISPs: RCN, Comcast, and Verizon. Both RCN and Verizon offer local telephone service as well. Whether that has reduced prices is another question of course. It definitely adds some real competition though. I recently told RCN that I was going to switch to Comcast and they responded by upgrading my cable modem config file to allow for (theoretical) higher download speeds. I remember when RCN first started building around here. I liked how it seemed to directly contradict my old microeconomics professor about so called 'natural' monopolies. Someone at RCN decided to try the 'impossible'.
I would just like to point out that not everyone agrees with you on that. I happen to think that information is precisely what a novel is. It is a bunch of words on a page. Each word conveys a meaning in some natural language. The meanings of these words can be stored as bits in a data file, often as ASCII code. The skill or difficulty in creating the data does not change the fact that it is still essentially just data or information. In fact that is the main argument for it needing copyright protection: because copying information is so easy to do. It wants to be free. It tends to escape all attempts to control it once it has been released into the world.
Perhaps, but Firefox users can "fix-it" by using an extension called NoScript
Thank you. I just installed it. Although I already preferred firefox, I have also been using IE due to its javascript whitelisting functionality that I so much wanted to see in Firefox. I would like to have seen this basic security measure in the main client. But hopefully this will be good enough. Now I truly feel safe running Firefox. Goodbye IE.
much like the US, Australia, Canada, and many other English-speaking countries.
You forgot Hong Kong. Being a British colony does not guarantee widespread English ability. That is not to say that educated Indians do not speak English well. I have never been to India. So I have no idea. It is widely taught in school there, but that is also no guarantee. Japan is proof of that.
It hovers around Rs.45 to a dollar and Rs.52 to a Euro. Even if the wages do rise the net effect in terms of dollar would be far less
How do you figure that? What does the exchange rate have to do with anything? You could say the same thing about Australian or Canadian dollars to US dollars or US dollars to Pounds Sterling. Exchange rates are meaningless in this context. And it's not just currency. Ten miles is a larger distance than ten kilometers, but the distance between two points doesn't change just because you change units.
It is very difficult to prove that a particular thing is right or wrong ethically/morally. Not many philosophers even try it. And I am not aware of any that have succeeded. I think it is mostly based on our own individual feelings. It's all about our emotions. What do the majority of people feel to be fair, to be right and wrong.
To most of us I think it seems unjust to pick someone else's pocket, take their wallet and buy stuff with their cash and credit cards etc. To some extent it's the whole 'do unto others' golden rule thing (not the one about the rich ruling). Those of us with empathy would feel bad for the person from whom we stole. We took away something of theirs in what seems like a very unfair way. The same would be true of hitting them or killing them etc. We wouldn't want someone else to do it to us. How could injuring someone else (except maybe as revenge) ever seem fair and just? So various societies tend to make laws against this. Private ownership is a construct that most (but not all) societies deem useful.
Copyright is somewhat different. It seems that many of us just don't feel that it is wrong. I have never felt guilty about copying software because I realized that the creator would never even know about it. I do not feel like I have hurt him or deprived him of anything. That's the inherent problem (discussed by Neal Stephenson in his excellent essay) with software. It is all too easy to copy any kind of information or data. That makes it kind of impractical to sell. Once the secret recipe or whatever gets into the world people can tell others about it etc. This is the sense in which information really does 'want' to be free. It is so difficult to control.
It is also hard for me to feel bad about photocopying a library book or taking a photo of a painting for instance. I would like for artists and programmers to make money, but I am not personally preventing them from doing so by not giving any to them. If I weren't so poor and there were convenient ways of donating money to my favorite programmers and artists I would certainly do so. To thank them and encourage them to produce more. I have actually done this in the past when I had a bit more money. I sent one of my favorite music artists some money directly. I would like to see more opportunities for fans to be able to donate directly to artists, authors, and programmers. Unfortunately the tragedy of the commons comes into play here. It's like voting. No one individual matters. It is only large groups that have any effect.
Having said all this, I do feel that copyrights for a limited amount of time are a useful construct whether the data is in bits or natural language. Certainly copying something in order to sell it seems quite unfair. But I have problems with any actual laws against copying for personal use. How can you prosecute someone for just copying information that you chose to release into the world? It would be like trying to 'own' an idea or a certain phrase just because you invented it and prevent any others from using it without your permission. Trying to artificially control information like that seems wrong to me. So I don't see any easy answers to this. Unbreakable copy protection would seem to solve the problem of trying to sell data, but that may not be possible.
Can you imagine how much money Nero would have if every other person didn't have a dodgy copy?
Not a good example. Nero is typically bundled with burners for free. Also, if cracked versions of Nero were not available, I am confident that excellent freeware versions of same would have been produced. Anyway, copying something isn't the same as taking something. This is true in the physical world as well as the virtual world of bits. Both are illegal but they are very different sorts of crimes and require somewhat different reasoning to support the laws against them. If someone steals something from you, you really do lose the ability to make use of it.
You seem to be missing the point. Frankly I could care less about this one house. The point is now that this precedent has been set, and the constitution has effectively been reworded, what happens the day after tommorow. To any land developers or local governments who were worried about any constitutional barriers to their land grab plans, this is the ultimate dinner bell. Come and get it!
This sounds like the closest thing you have to an actual argument. You may not be able to read code, but lots of people can. There are also people who can read Japanese, Swahili, French, and even Catalan. The purpose of these rather complex symbolic systems is to 'communicate' (look it up).
However the usual intended recipient of the communication (aka 'program') is not a human being, but a machine that humans have created, called a 'CPU'. Some people would like to 'own' certain ways of telling it what to do so that others cannot tell it to do similar things. These people are usually quite rich and would like to get even richer. These people happen to be the only ones who can afford to actually use the system in their favor. A fact which they are not unaware of. Note that this is not a bug but a feature.
I mean, we get paid a lot of money to do shoddy work
Speak for yourself. I don't do shoddy work. Maybe you should have become a patent lawyer instead of learning Visual Basic. Those of us who actually understand what writing code is all about understand precisely why it is inappropriate to patent it. To us, it is completely obvious that code is a form of (usually written) communication, albeit with a non-human machine known as a 'CPU'.
I can't help thinking that you are some bored kid on summer vacation who just wants to argue. It doesn't sound like you have really given much thought to this issue. I have yet to hear any kind of even remotely convincing argument in favor of software patents, but you could at least make an effort.
You would've patented the concept of a book, but you would copyright the story in the book.
If it were allowed, you could just as easily patent the story idea.
The patent shouldn't be able to prevent amateur/small business from competing.
Why not? In practice that is the only 'benefit' of software patents.
You shouldn't be able to patent something obvious, something non-unique, or something that isn't a mechanism.
Why not? In any case, software is not a 'mechanism' either. It's just a set of instructions that a mechanism could use to do something. It's like saying to a robot, "lift right leg". How software could be seen as anything other than a simple set of instructions is beyond me. How anyone could argue that a set of written or verbal instructions should be patentable is also beyond my ability to comprehend. If you can patent software you should definitely be able to patent aspects of natural langauge use as well. Software is just a form of communication.
Now we see the problem. It is because of the "choking alogrithm".
No it's not. If anything choking helps your download speed. Why? Because if it weren't for choking algorithms everyone would be limiting their upload bandwidth. And Total Swarm Upload equals Total Swarm Download at all times (obviously). In Emule for instance I tend to limit my UL bandwidth to no more than 20 kbytes/sec. I do that because uploading at full speed doesn't offer me much benefit. But with BT I have found that my download speed is directly proportional to my UL speed. In my experience, I can only download at about twice the speed that I upload. My cable provider limits my UL speed to 800 kbps or around 85 kbytes/sec. So my max BT download speed is almost never more than around 160-170 kbytes/sec. I am not suggesting that there is any such precise ratio, just that the choking algorithms maximize download bandwidth by rewarding those who contribute the most upload bandwidth. AFAIK it is the only P2P protocol that does this so directly. Is it just a coincidence that it is the fastest one as well? To me, this is strong evidence that rewarding UL bandwidth with DL bandwidth is highly beneficial in any p2p network.
What is really slowing you down is those rat bastard ISPs that refuse to offer more symmetrical connections. The fastest connection my cable provider offers is 800 kbps 10 mbps down. If ISPs would start recognizing p2p as a valid use of their services maybe we would start to see 3 mbit up 7 mbit down or even truly symmetric connections like 5 mbit up and 5 mbit down. Now that would be truly revolutionary. If they want to prevent web servers they could just block outgoing port 80 as my ISP already does. Anyway blame the ISPs for your slow torrent downloads (when comparing against FTP, HTTP, and Usenet at least). That is what is limiting them.
Whereas Avalanche gives me images of a brief, violent wall of unmanageable stuff, which squashes you then stops.
Based on my experience, that is a pretty accurate description. If I release a file on BT it tends to stay downloadable for at most a month before all the seeds disappear and the leeches no longer have a complete copy. But if I release it on ed2k (for instance) it can often stay downloadable for 6 to 12 months before it is no longer downloadable. But BT is fast. In terms of speed nothing can touch it. It is often as much as 10 times faster than Emule.
I think the name Avalanche is just fine. What I'm not sure of is whether adding PAR2 type error correction tech is worthwhile. I think only (real world) testing can truly determine that. The only advantage I could see offhand would be in allowing a torrent to stay alive longer. Even if it adds an extra week or two to the torrent availability it could be worthwhile. I think the fact that superseeding works at all shows that the basic algorithms have significant room for improvement.
Yes but, if your vote is not even recorded there is no way for them to fight over your vote. Even if they both suck at least they will dance for you to get your vote.
So what? How is this supposed to help against corporations purchasing legislation? North Americans should start talking in terms of going around these sleazy politicians with campaign contribution reform etc. It should be illegal for corporations to 'donate' any money to politicians. While it will still occur under the table it would at least increase the risk of such activities if these bribes resulted in lengthy prison sentences for everyone in the transaction. Laws should not be available for purchase. At any price. Period. That is the problem. And voter turnout has nothing to do with it. In this case it is even worse in a sense because American corporations have managed to buy Canadian laws. That's the power of money for you.
Slashdot Mirror
IMO, RP British (aka BBC British) is no more difficult to understand than RP American. Needless to say the difference between standard British and Cockney is huge. While most British that I have met do drop their 'r's at the end of many words, and, in anything but Queen's English even more consonants are dropped or replaced with glottal stops, the British do pronounce their vowels more 'correctly' than Americans.
I can vouch for the fact that many foreign speakers do find non-regional (RP) American accents (common in the midwest and California) easier to understand than most British accents they have heard. While this may have something to do with American media being all-pervasive, I think New World languages just sound more like they are spelled. New Worlders like to simplify things. Think of Canadian French or Columbian Spanish vs. the original European versions. Chilean Spanish, Cuban Spanish, and certain regional American accents are very difficult to understand. Of course these langauges started in Europe. So I think the European versions should be the only truly 'correct' ones.
They're smart for doing it, but it's damn annoying that we have to put up with it.
Fair enough. The morons working at the USPTO are just as much at fault. But they will lose some customers over this kind of nonsense. I for one will avoid buying from them whenever possible. The one-click patent was bad enough, but these rat bastards were just getting started. I've had enough. They are not the only site for books, music, and movies. I'd like to see a geek boycott of Amazon. Hopefully a more effective one than the Adobe boycott during the whole Sklyarov incident. Those of us who feel that Amazon is abusing the patent system can at least vote with our dollars.
other types of intellectual property
What kind of property did you say? 'Intellectual' property is a contradiction in terms. You can't own an idea. Although you are free to try.
I think it's just sour grapes from those people that didn't think of
Patenting an obvious idea like this does not serve the public good in any way and neither amazon.com nor Bezos as any 'right' to it whatsoever. Can anyone seriously argue that Amazon would not have developed the system if they knew they coudn't patent it? Bullshit. This is not like a pharmaceutical corp looking for a return on the investment of billions in drug research. Recommendations based on past purchases is not some kind of 'invention'. It is just a marketing idea for frack sake.
U2 has an album called "How to build an atomic bomb". Not a smart purchase if big brother is watching.
and I am sure someone will use it to invalidate this dumb patent.
How optimistic of you. While you are making predictions, care to predict who exactly is going to do this? I have a prediction of my own: this patent will stand and the other uses of the concept (like audioscrobbler) will be sued into submission. Or maybe just disappear even before getting sued. I think a well-drafted warning letter will suffice.
For example, most online retailers have blurbs saying "customers who bought this product also bought these..." and give a list.
Prior art is based on the date of the application, not the date the patent is granted. You will have to dig a bit deeper than that.
Does anyone remember a research 'game' which was sort of like Pacman but with real motivation. IIRC, the Pacman character was programmed to seek pleasure and avoid pain. Certain pellets were considered positive reinforcements and others were considered negative reinforcements. It ended up having some almost spooky emergent behavior, like hiding in a corner if there were too many negative reinforcement pellets. It seemed to develop responses almost like fear. Stuff like that. I can't recall the details unfortunately. I think it was done as a university project or something, maybe in the late 80s. The idea of generating unpredictable emergent behavior from a relatively simple computer program has stayed with me.
I think that will be the next stage of computer characters: to make them unpredictable even for the programmers. Rule-based learning can get you somewhat complex behavior, but it is all predictable. What we need is genuine example-based learning. So that the resulting behavior would be impossible for anyone to predict and constantly changing and evolving. Of course I am thinking along the lines of various neural network, connectionist architectures. Their unpredictability is generally considered a downside, but for a game the black box aspect seems perfect.
Yup. I liked Black and White. It was my first and only RTS game. But it was really a Molyneux hybrid RTS/virtual pet game. I cannot remember a game that was so hyped pre-release. Molyneux even had an interview on NPR IIRC. For a video game! It was hyped as a whole new concept in gaming. In reality I couldn't even finish it until a patch was released. It was very buggy. It was hyped as revolutionary and I guess it was. Sort of. A nice blend of different gaming types. And the only game where you literally play a god and get to train a virtual pet which is also worshipped. Also I'm not sure if any game had used gestures before. With so much complexity I guess it's not surprising that there was a lot of bug squashing. To their credit I think they did a pretty good job with the patch releases.
Most people complained about the micromanagement and the resulting tedium. It did kind of resemble work, but of a less offensive variety than the FedEx delivery quests of certain RPGs. I loved the virtual pet aspect, the use of gestures, the wolves and poisoning the grain. Lots of fun stuff to do. It was easy to get carried away training your creature. Made me think I should just step away from the computer and buy a real dog or maybe an AIBO. I hated the two sidekicks though. Seemed like a feature for the kiddies.
There is a bit of a story behind the ultra-hyped AI aspect of the game. Molyneux talked a lot about neural networks and connectionist AI pre-release but actually didn't end up using it. They tried it, but the creatures didn't seem as convincing. So they dumped it in favor of something they thought worked better. Fair enough, but I felt kind of ripped off when I read about that. I wanted to believe that my virtual ape was actually learning what I taught him in an unpredictable, non-scripted sort of way. I never did try Creature Isle. I heard the AI was supposed to have been tweaked a bit. I can't wait for Black and White part deux which is in alpha stage right now.
Why don't you just admit that you were talking out of your arse? I know what I am talking about because I have experienced it. Arguing over exactly how many points my IQ dropped isn't going to change that. Why don't you cite some references, smart guy. I had to reply because you are just spreading misinformation due to obvious ignorance. Or maybe you are a young kid who heard it somewhere. If brain injury causes 'dead' areas of the brain that show up in testing, then at least give a few more details about how you know that. As well as to how you know that brain injury doesn't cause any congitive impairment.
Here's a link. MTBI or mild traumatic brain injury is a common result of automobile accidents and bicycle accidents. It results in relatively obvious cognitive impairments as I described.
Isn't this a proof for the (non) existence of the soul?
There is already no evidence for the religious concept of the 'soul'. If you are trying to convince a believer, don't bother. They do not believe based on evidence. The belief in magical, invisible, undetectable, but all-powerful entities is not based on science or anything resembling scientific, logical thinking. It is based on fairy tales usually 'learned' at an age before most humans are able to think critically. If you really want to convince a believer you will need to use a powerful emotional argument, not an evidence-based logical one. Their belief system is such that blind faith, especially in the face of contradictory evidence is considered a great virtue.
Brain damage is measured in dead areas of the brain, not by cognitive tests.
No. You are wrong. 'Dead' areas of the brain? Where do you guys come up with stuff like this? For humans at least there are standardized tests used by neuro-physiologists to estimate cognitive impairment from brain injury. I suffered such impairment about 5 years ago and took the tests. There are huge correlations between brain damage and what is commonly referred to as IQ or intelligence. Memory is affected the most. Followed by things like attention span and organizational ability. My IQ dropped by like 50 points after my bicycle accident. My MRIs and CAT scans were normal. There was no physical, visible, evidence of brain injury, but it was there nonetheless.
The problem is that there is no money in overbuilding.
Tell that to RCN. Not only did they add their own cables to the existing ones in the Boston area, but they added their own phone lines as well. They decided to compete with two existing 'monopolies'. They seem to be doing well as far as I can tell. In the Boston area we have 3 broadband ISPs: RCN, Comcast, and Verizon. Both RCN and Verizon offer local telephone service as well. Whether that has reduced prices is another question of course. It definitely adds some real competition though. I recently told RCN that I was going to switch to Comcast and they responded by upgrading my cable modem config file to allow for (theoretical) higher download speeds. I remember when RCN first started building around here. I liked how it seemed to directly contradict my old microeconomics professor about so called 'natural' monopolies. Someone at RCN decided to try the 'impossible'.
But a novel is not information
I would just like to point out that not everyone agrees with you on that. I happen to think that information is precisely what a novel is. It is a bunch of words on a page. Each word conveys a meaning in some natural language. The meanings of these words can be stored as bits in a data file, often as ASCII code. The skill or difficulty in creating the data does not change the fact that it is still essentially just data or information. In fact that is the main argument for it needing copyright protection: because copying information is so easy to do. It wants to be free. It tends to escape all attempts to control it once it has been released into the world.
Perhaps, but Firefox users can "fix-it" by using an extension called NoScript
Thank you. I just installed it. Although I already preferred firefox, I have also been using IE due to its javascript whitelisting functionality that I so much wanted to see in Firefox. I would like to have seen this basic security measure in the main client. But hopefully this will be good enough. Now I truly feel safe running Firefox. Goodbye IE.
much like the US, Australia, Canada, and many other English-speaking countries.
You forgot Hong Kong. Being a British colony does not guarantee widespread English ability. That is not to say that educated Indians do not speak English well. I have never been to India. So I have no idea. It is widely taught in school there, but that is also no guarantee. Japan is proof of that.
It hovers around Rs.45 to a dollar and Rs.52 to a Euro. Even if the wages do rise the net effect in terms of dollar would be far less
How do you figure that? What does the exchange rate have to do with anything? You could say the same thing about Australian or Canadian dollars to US dollars or US dollars to Pounds Sterling. Exchange rates are meaningless in this context. And it's not just currency. Ten miles is a larger distance than ten kilometers, but the distance between two points doesn't change just because you change units.
It is very difficult to prove that a particular thing is right or wrong ethically/morally. Not many philosophers even try it. And I am not aware of any that have succeeded. I think it is mostly based on our own individual feelings. It's all about our emotions. What do the majority of people feel to be fair, to be right and wrong.
To most of us I think it seems unjust to pick someone else's pocket, take their wallet and buy stuff with their cash and credit cards etc. To some extent it's the whole 'do unto others' golden rule thing (not the one about the rich ruling). Those of us with empathy would feel bad for the person from whom we stole. We took away something of theirs in what seems like a very unfair way. The same would be true of hitting them or killing them etc. We wouldn't want someone else to do it to us. How could injuring someone else (except maybe as revenge) ever seem fair and just? So various societies tend to make laws against this. Private ownership is a construct that most (but not all) societies deem useful.
Copyright is somewhat different. It seems that many of us just don't feel that it is wrong. I have never felt guilty about copying software because I realized that the creator would never even know about it. I do not feel like I have hurt him or deprived him of anything. That's the inherent problem (discussed by Neal Stephenson in his excellent essay) with software. It is all too easy to copy any kind of information or data. That makes it kind of impractical to sell. Once the secret recipe or whatever gets into the world people can tell others about it etc. This is the sense in which information really does 'want' to be free. It is so difficult to control.
It is also hard for me to feel bad about photocopying a library book or taking a photo of a painting for instance. I would like for artists and programmers to make money, but I am not personally preventing them from doing so by not giving any to them. If I weren't so poor and there were convenient ways of donating money to my favorite programmers and artists I would certainly do so. To thank them and encourage them to produce more. I have actually done this in the past when I had a bit more money. I sent one of my favorite music artists some money directly. I would like to see more opportunities for fans to be able to donate directly to artists, authors, and programmers. Unfortunately the tragedy of the commons comes into play here. It's like voting. No one individual matters. It is only large groups that have any effect.
Having said all this, I do feel that copyrights for a limited amount of time are a useful construct whether the data is in bits or natural language. Certainly copying something in order to sell it seems quite unfair. But I have problems with any actual laws against copying for personal use. How can you prosecute someone for just copying information that you chose to release into the world? It would be like trying to 'own' an idea or a certain phrase just because you invented it and prevent any others from using it without your permission. Trying to artificially control information like that seems wrong to me. So I don't see any easy answers to this. Unbreakable copy protection would seem to solve the problem of trying to sell data, but that may not be possible.
Can you imagine how much money Nero would have if every other person didn't have a dodgy copy?
Not a good example. Nero is typically bundled with burners for free. Also, if cracked versions of Nero were not available, I am confident that excellent freeware versions of same would have been produced. Anyway, copying something isn't the same as taking something. This is true in the physical world as well as the virtual world of bits. Both are illegal but they are very different sorts of crimes and require somewhat different reasoning to support the laws against them. If someone steals something from you, you really do lose the ability to make use of it.
I'm sure they can find somewhere to live.
You seem to be missing the point. Frankly I could care less about this one house. The point is now that this precedent has been set, and the constitution has effectively been reworded, what happens the day after tommorow. To any land developers or local governments who were worried about any constitutional barriers to their land grab plans, this is the ultimate dinner bell. Come and get it!
Sure the businesses are acting in self interest,
In the same sense that a pickpocket or burglar is acting in his self interest.
You don't sit down and read a piece of software.
This sounds like the closest thing you have to an actual argument. You may not be able to read code, but lots of people can. There are also people who can read Japanese, Swahili, French, and even Catalan. The purpose of these rather complex symbolic systems is to 'communicate' (look it up).
However the usual intended recipient of the communication (aka 'program') is not a human being, but a machine that humans have created, called a 'CPU'. Some people would like to 'own' certain ways of telling it what to do so that others cannot tell it to do similar things. These people are usually quite rich and would like to get even richer. These people happen to be the only ones who can afford to actually use the system in their favor. A fact which they are not unaware of. Note that this is not a bug but a feature.
I mean, we get paid a lot of money to do shoddy work
Speak for yourself. I don't do shoddy work. Maybe you should have become a patent lawyer instead of learning Visual Basic. Those of us who actually understand what writing code is all about understand precisely why it is inappropriate to patent it. To us, it is completely obvious that code is a form of (usually written) communication, albeit with a non-human machine known as a 'CPU'.
I can't help thinking that you are some bored kid on summer vacation who just wants to argue. It doesn't sound like you have really given much thought to this issue. I have yet to hear any kind of even remotely convincing argument in favor of software patents, but you could at least make an effort.
You would've patented the concept of a book, but you would copyright the story in the book.
If it were allowed, you could just as easily patent the story idea.
The patent shouldn't be able to prevent amateur/small business from competing.
Why not? In practice that is the only 'benefit' of software patents.
You shouldn't be able to patent something obvious, something non-unique, or something that isn't a mechanism.
Why not? In any case, software is not a 'mechanism' either. It's just a set of instructions that a mechanism could use to do something. It's like saying to a robot, "lift right leg". How software could be seen as anything other than a simple set of instructions is beyond me. How anyone could argue that a set of written or verbal instructions should be patentable is also beyond my ability to comprehend. If you can patent software you should definitely be able to patent aspects of natural langauge use as well. Software is just a form of communication.
Now we see the problem. It is because of the "choking alogrithm".
No it's not. If anything choking helps your download speed. Why? Because if it weren't for choking algorithms everyone would be limiting their upload bandwidth. And Total Swarm Upload equals Total Swarm Download at all times (obviously). In Emule for instance I tend to limit my UL bandwidth to no more than 20 kbytes/sec. I do that because uploading at full speed doesn't offer me much benefit. But with BT I have found that my download speed is directly proportional to my UL speed. In my experience, I can only download at about twice the speed that I upload. My cable provider limits my UL speed to 800 kbps or around 85 kbytes/sec. So my max BT download speed is almost never more than around 160-170 kbytes/sec. I am not suggesting that there is any such precise ratio, just that the choking algorithms maximize download bandwidth by rewarding those who contribute the most upload bandwidth. AFAIK it is the only P2P protocol that does this so directly. Is it just a coincidence that it is the fastest one as well? To me, this is strong evidence that rewarding UL bandwidth with DL bandwidth is highly beneficial in any p2p network.
What is really slowing you down is those rat bastard ISPs that refuse to offer more symmetrical connections. The fastest connection my cable provider offers is 800 kbps 10 mbps down. If ISPs would start recognizing p2p as a valid use of their services maybe we would start to see 3 mbit up 7 mbit down or even truly symmetric connections like 5 mbit up and 5 mbit down. Now that would be truly revolutionary. If they want to prevent web servers they could just block outgoing port 80 as my ISP already does. Anyway blame the ISPs for your slow torrent downloads (when comparing against FTP, HTTP, and Usenet at least). That is what is limiting them.
Whereas Avalanche gives me images of a brief, violent wall of unmanageable stuff, which squashes you then stops.
Based on my experience, that is a pretty accurate description. If I release a file on BT it tends to stay downloadable for at most a month before all the seeds disappear and the leeches no longer have a complete copy. But if I release it on ed2k (for instance) it can often stay downloadable for 6 to 12 months before it is no longer downloadable. But BT is fast. In terms of speed nothing can touch it. It is often as much as 10 times faster than Emule.
I think the name Avalanche is just fine. What I'm not sure of is whether adding PAR2 type error correction tech is worthwhile. I think only (real world) testing can truly determine that. The only advantage I could see offhand would be in allowing a torrent to stay alive longer. Even if it adds an extra week or two to the torrent availability it could be worthwhile. I think the fact that superseeding works at all shows that the basic algorithms have significant room for improvement.
Yes but, if your vote is not even recorded there is no way for them to fight over your vote. Even if they both suck at least they will dance for you to get your vote.
So what? How is this supposed to help against corporations purchasing legislation? North Americans should start talking in terms of going around these sleazy politicians with campaign contribution reform etc. It should be illegal for corporations to 'donate' any money to politicians. While it will still occur under the table it would at least increase the risk of such activities if these bribes resulted in lengthy prison sentences for everyone in the transaction. Laws should not be available for purchase. At any price. Period. That is the problem. And voter turnout has nothing to do with it. In this case it is even worse in a sense because American corporations have managed to buy Canadian laws. That's the power of money for you.