It's when you call it a photograph that the numbers suddenly stops being a number and becomes a protected work of art.
The photographer adds value to the information with composition, the right filters, camera settings, post production etc. Capturing a scene well is an art, and valuable in the sense that people are willing to pay professional photographers for their work. And not just for being there and making random happy snaps either; good photographers get paid more than bad ones for a reason.
With that said: I fully agree with GP that copyright should be considered an artificial monopoly rather than a natural right. However I think the photographer is within his rights in this case (even if he's a bit of a dick for exerting it). My issue with copyright is not the scope of the monopoly (like being allowed to demand money for republication of works), but the duration. I think copyright should be severely limited in time, perhaps with a seriously expensive option to renew copyright on valuable IP, but otherwise ending after 20 or so years or upon the author's death.
The same deal doesn't mean the same tax breaks for small businesses, it means no tax breaks for anyone. In general it's good to encourage both small and large businesses to set up shop in your community, and that does mean different things for small businesses than it does for large ones, but let's have clear rules about that rather than leave it open for negotiation. Because not everyone benefits when a large company sets up shop with the help of generous tax breaks, there will always be others, large and small, who have to compete with them. Give ALL large businesses a break on property tax, and give ALL small businesses an exemption when the burden far outweighs the benefit.
That’s a common argument for such tax breaks. However if you add up the investments of small businesses and the amount of people they employ, you’ll arrive at much larger figure than that without any of the tax breaks. Small businesses already have a hard time competing with the big boys simply because of economies of scale and such, it’s hardly fair to put them at a disadvantage tax-wise. Collectively they bring the same and more to the table, and they deserve the same in return.
Of course the cold hard truth is that small businesses will not move if you tax them harder and harder, not until you tax them out of business. Large businesses can and will, or they use the threat of the loss of a great many jobs to get those taxes repealed for them.
Armadillo had plans for reusable rockets, but did they ever build one? IIRC much of their focus was on lander designs.
Maybe you were thinking of Blue Origin, who did fly, land, and relaunch a reusable 1st stage (they were the first who succeeded in soft landing one), but at the moment they are playing in a different league (suborbital flight), with their rocket capable of launching a payload into orbit not expected before 2020.
Then you misunderstand. The sentiment being that a start would be to “get rid of the left”, in the sense of holding them up as the keepers of all that is holy and true in matters of climate change. Not even the GP AC took that statement literally, but did infer that the left is somehow synonymous with the solution to climate change. That is what I addressed. So lighten up.
Much as I disapprove of the tone of aliquis' contribution, I agree with the sentiment. We very much do need to get our shit together... and that means we do not have time for bullshit feel-good measures or false solutions, and a lot of those are coming from the left, at least where I am at. They seem to hate solutions that don't hurt. They love to go after cars, for instance. Should we implement their proposal to severely curb and/or tax the use of cars for personal transportation, with an enormous impact on our lives and our economy, for a projected 5% reduction in CO2 emissions... when there are much bigger and cheaper gains to be had elsewhere? No, for them the automobile remains the symbol of individual wastefulness, and it is first and foremost in any of their plans.
If they had their way, our country and sea would now be filled with windmills... the first-gen kind that are already end-of-life and are now being torn down because they are inefficient and far too expensive to maintain. And perhaps we do need new nukes, at least for a while. Ask the French how to do this. And while the world is moving towards gas, we are moving away from it, with a plan to have all houses heated electrically in a few decades, while we don't really even know how to do that efficiently yet. This will come at a massive cost to homeowners... if we can even find enough people to do the necessary work. Yeah, we need to do this eventually, but (like with these windmills), a more gradual shift is better since you get to develop the technology as you go along.
The few sensible measures proposed by the left were: subsidies on solar to encourage development and adoption, and the push to phase out coal plants in favour of gas and renewables. The latter proposal was sadly fought succesfully by the "idiot right", who greenlit brand new coal plants which were thankfully cancelled just before completion. Recently our left and right got together to come up with an energy agreement, and sadly again it's a whole lot of nothing. The left got their symbolic wins they were after, and the right to got keep a few dirty things, so it's all largely symbolic. We have the Paris agreement, what we now need is to translate that into a sensible and realistic long term energy transition policy. That won't be forthcoming anytime soon, I suspect, not until the right and the left shape up and get smart.
It's not just the intensity but also how that energy is generated. Norway is comparable to the USA, however hydro makes up for 105% of their energy needs (they export some of it). USA is still rather heavy on coal, whereas many European countries have already made the switch to gas. Look at the CO2 emissions per capita, the USA is way up there, with almost twice the emissions of Belgium and much of the rest of western Europe, and 4 times Sweden's...
they invested in an implementation of a long existing idea obviously
And what was the more expensive part: coming up with the idea, or putting it into practice? Sure, plenty of research into this has already been done by others, but it's not like SpaceX just copied the blueprints from a couple of research papers, they had to do the hard engineering themselves in order to build the first LEO-capable reusable 1st stage.
Also, SpaceX doesn't do space tourism. They do commercial launches for a variety of customers.
Doing anything hard... like reliably landing, refurbishing and relaunching a first stage?
Everybody is in a position to “ride the last 50 years of R&D” as you put it, yet only SpaceX went the way of saving costs by reusing rockets. And it’s not like the likes of Boeing and Energya are still bleeding and suffering for doing that R&D in the first place, those are sunk costs by now, there’s no “decades of liabilities” as you argue in your other post. What the hell does that even mean?
One would expect the banks to have told FB to go to so much hell. However, don't count on it
There are new EU rules forcing banks to share customers' financial data with 3rd parties if said customer asks for it. For instance, to give your accountant access to your data so they can process everything automatically without your involvement. Which is great... except that while banks were pissed of about having to enable 3rd parties to offer financial services this way, they weren't above freely interpreting those rules and entertaining ideas about monetizing data (aggregated or anonymized) themselves by selling it to 3rd parties. ING famously floated such an idea which backfired rather badly: when asked, fully 70% of respondents said they'd switch to a different bank if the data sharing trial would go ahead. They thought better of it, but even so I'm appalled that this idea wasn't shot in the back of the head and buried in the first internal meeting it came up in.
You'd be surprised. Indian people buy stuff to show off as well; what may be different is the stuff they buy to show off with and how much they spend on that. I deal with a good many Indians; granted these are the more affluent expats, but they invariably carry a late model iPhone or upmarket Android device.
Exactly. Heh, my friend's kid learned to read at age 4 because it helped him playing Minecraft. Motivation is an incredible catalyst for learning, and good teachers can provide it. One teacher at my school got whole classrooms interested in traditionally boring subjects like grammar, etymology and even poetry. Students of one physics teacher were often found in the physics lab during a free hour, doing experiments instead of smoking joints in the stairwell. Think of what those teachers have contributed to the generations who passed through their classrooms. And our school (being a Montessori school) encouraged this: classrooms were made available to students if no scheduled class was taking place, mostly without adult supervision (exceptions being the physics and chemistry labs, the workshop, and the music room, but not the brand new and expensive computer lab).
However, providing motivation is not the same thing as just letting them find their own way. Some schools try this and let kids set their own curriculum. A surprising but telling outcome of an interview conducted with kids at one of those schools was the common remark: "Some more structure would be nice". Kids need to be motivated but they also need (and want) to be guided.
I don't think that proponents of personalized learning are proposing to replace hands-on activities with computers, like replacing shop class with Minecraft. But you can still put a computer in that class, to give kids a wide range of projects to choose from, as well as to provide hints when they get stuck at a certain stage. All things the teacher can do as well or better... but not for 25 individual kids each doing the project that interests them the most. That's where the computer comes in. And computers could be used to add hands-on experience to theoretical classes. There's this great little bridge builder game that has you build increasingly complex bridges, then tests them and shows the stresses in each part, something nice for physics class. And kids could learn a thing or two from playing Kerbal Space Program that they'll never pick up from books or in the classroom.
The problem isn't computers in schools, but that we haven't really figured out how to use them effectively. Personalized Learning is a great concept that addresses the problem of children's motivation as well as individual interests and ability to learn, and it's one where computers could be of great help. But computers should not a replacement for teachers, or even for classroom learning. Every learning professional will tell you that "the classroom sucks", but replacing it with individualized e-learning courses only means that those kids are now also deprived of whatever social stimuli they used to pick up in the classroom. Also, have you ever seen a good e-learning module? Be honest now...
In any case, the job of not killing children's' willingness to learn and keeping education universal and affordable at the same time, is not a simple one!
You don't need to pay tuition and attend classes to study physics or electronics either. Unless you don't want to have to start from scratch. If you sit down and discuss human problems and solutions for a bit, I am sure you can come up with useful insights... that other thinkers already came up with a few millennia ago. Studying philosophy, history, psychology and anthropology is surely going to be of help when you set out to deal with this stuff.
However I agree that some of these fields, at least at certain institutions, have devolved into an unpleasant and altogether useless echo chamber. Sociology has to be one of the worst offenders: if teachers and student in an academic faculty are unwilling to discuss certain problems or opinions with you, and instead tell you that you're not allowed to voice or even have those opinions, then you know it's time to get out of there and leave them to their own devices. The only problem is that their world view is leaking into society at large, like some sort of hilarious but toxic religion.
The sharpest programmers I've worked with almost all started programming before they graduated high school. They went on to do a variety of majors, a few doing CS, most of them mathematics, EE, physics or chemistry. Point is, they combined a solid grounding in science and mathematics with a passion for programming. I know a few great programmers who are largely self-taught without the benefit of a degree in a related field, but they are very rare.
For some time, CS majors might not have been the best choice for programmers, but not for the reasons mentioned in that CIO magazine, but because the IT job market was red hot, and CS drew in many students without a real passion for the subject.
It explains nicely why the profession is in such a sorry state. And while it sounds like the author of that article doesn't know the first thing about programming himself, it would appear that he is in academia teaching CS (from a remark at the end of the article). That makes it even sadder.
Blockchain != cryptocurrency, especially in corporate applications. Even those banks who are experimenting with coins like Ripple to manage settlements will come to their senses, and understand that they are completely out of their gourds using a cryptocurrency (of which half is owned by the founders) for this purpose. They may end up using blockchain technology to implement distributed trust and immutability, but they have no need for a coin.
As for retailers accepting BTC, there is very little upside there for either the merchant or the customer, unless that customer is someone who happens to already hold a decent amount of them. Another more efficient and stable cryptocurrency may eventually rise to become a widely accepted means of payment for the masses, but it won't be BTC and it won't be in the next 5 years. I'm willing to stake a good bottle of Scotch on that.
I'm not very surprised that corporations are cooling on the notion of "using blockchain". I work on innovation in a reasonably large entity, and if I would have gotten a Dogecoin for every time someone said "we are planning to do an experiment with Blockchain" or "Should we do something with cryptocurrencty?", I'd be able to retire by now. By the way, the best way to silence those idiots is to ask: "What?". What should we do with cryptocurrency, what is your blockchain experiment? No one is able to give a concrete answer to that, or propose something that couldn't be handled just as well or better with a database.
How do ISPs "contribute" to piracy, and by that I mean that they do something that aids or enables piracy specifically, instead of just providing a conduit to anything and anyone? By the same token: how have ISPs profited from piracy specifically... do they charge extra for Torrent traffic or something? That is not at all the same thing as "refusing to take measures", the latter should only be actionable if the ISPs are actually responsible for curtailing piracy. Or are the cops now going to send my speeding tickets to the authority responsible for our highways as well, because they "refuse to take measures" to make me slow down?
I do own an iPhone. And use Apple chargers to power other USB stuff, or charge the phone from a non Apple charger using the lightning cable. You still need the special cable but the chargers are pretty much interchangable.
I for one am quite happy with my pile of USB chargers. Because before those were the norm, every phone would come with its own proprietary charger, which often weren't interchangable between different phones even from the same brand. Now, if a charger breaks (it happens), just get another from the pile. And they are useful for powering other stuff like Pi's.
About those storage and wall batteries: That Tesla Wall thing isn't cheap as it uses just about the most expensive type of batteries on the market. Wouldn't it be a lot more economical to use cheaper but bulkier batteries, since space and weight are much less of an issue in that application?
Slashdot Mirror
a Sanrio facehugger
Yeah, thanks for the fresh nightmare fuel...
It's when you call it a photograph that the numbers suddenly stops being a number and becomes a protected work of art.
The photographer adds value to the information with composition, the right filters, camera settings, post production etc. Capturing a scene well is an art, and valuable in the sense that people are willing to pay professional photographers for their work. And not just for being there and making random happy snaps either; good photographers get paid more than bad ones for a reason.
With that said: I fully agree with GP that copyright should be considered an artificial monopoly rather than a natural right. However I think the photographer is within his rights in this case (even if he's a bit of a dick for exerting it). My issue with copyright is not the scope of the monopoly (like being allowed to demand money for republication of works), but the duration. I think copyright should be severely limited in time, perhaps with a seriously expensive option to renew copyright on valuable IP, but otherwise ending after 20 or so years or upon the author's death.
The same deal doesn't mean the same tax breaks for small businesses, it means no tax breaks for anyone. In general it's good to encourage both small and large businesses to set up shop in your community, and that does mean different things for small businesses than it does for large ones, but let's have clear rules about that rather than leave it open for negotiation. Because not everyone benefits when a large company sets up shop with the help of generous tax breaks, there will always be others, large and small, who have to compete with them. Give ALL large businesses a break on property tax, and give ALL small businesses an exemption when the burden far outweighs the benefit.
That’s a common argument for such tax breaks. However if you add up the investments of small businesses and the amount of people they employ, you’ll arrive at much larger figure than that without any of the tax breaks. Small businesses already have a hard time competing with the big boys simply because of economies of scale and such, it’s hardly fair to put them at a disadvantage tax-wise. Collectively they bring the same and more to the table, and they deserve the same in return.
Of course the cold hard truth is that small businesses will not move if you tax them harder and harder, not until you tax them out of business. Large businesses can and will, or they use the threat of the loss of a great many jobs to get those taxes repealed for them.
Armadillo had plans for reusable rockets, but did they ever build one? IIRC much of their focus was on lander designs.
Maybe you were thinking of Blue Origin, who did fly, land, and relaunch a reusable 1st stage (they were the first who succeeded in soft landing one), but at the moment they are playing in a different league (suborbital flight), with their rocket capable of launching a payload into orbit not expected before 2020.
Then you misunderstand. The sentiment being that a start would be to “get rid of the left”, in the sense of holding them up as the keepers of all that is holy and true in matters of climate change. Not even the GP AC took that statement literally, but did infer that the left is somehow synonymous with the solution to climate change. That is what I addressed. So lighten up.
You also need to look at carbon capture
Isn't that included in the emission stats?
Much as I disapprove of the tone of aliquis' contribution, I agree with the sentiment. We very much do need to get our shit together... and that means we do not have time for bullshit feel-good measures or false solutions, and a lot of those are coming from the left, at least where I am at. They seem to hate solutions that don't hurt. They love to go after cars, for instance. Should we implement their proposal to severely curb and/or tax the use of cars for personal transportation, with an enormous impact on our lives and our economy, for a projected 5% reduction in CO2 emissions... when there are much bigger and cheaper gains to be had elsewhere? No, for them the automobile remains the symbol of individual wastefulness, and it is first and foremost in any of their plans.
If they had their way, our country and sea would now be filled with windmills... the first-gen kind that are already end-of-life and are now being torn down because they are inefficient and far too expensive to maintain. And perhaps we do need new nukes, at least for a while. Ask the French how to do this. And while the world is moving towards gas, we are moving away from it, with a plan to have all houses heated electrically in a few decades, while we don't really even know how to do that efficiently yet. This will come at a massive cost to homeowners... if we can even find enough people to do the necessary work. Yeah, we need to do this eventually, but (like with these windmills), a more gradual shift is better since you get to develop the technology as you go along.
The few sensible measures proposed by the left were: subsidies on solar to encourage development and adoption, and the push to phase out coal plants in favour of gas and renewables. The latter proposal was sadly fought succesfully by the "idiot right", who greenlit brand new coal plants which were thankfully cancelled just before completion. Recently our left and right got together to come up with an energy agreement, and sadly again it's a whole lot of nothing. The left got their symbolic wins they were after, and the right to got keep a few dirty things, so it's all largely symbolic. We have the Paris agreement, what we now need is to translate that into a sensible and realistic long term energy transition policy. That won't be forthcoming anytime soon, I suspect, not until the right and the left shape up and get smart.
It's not just the intensity but also how that energy is generated. Norway is comparable to the USA, however hydro makes up for 105% of their energy needs (they export some of it). USA is still rather heavy on coal, whereas many European countries have already made the switch to gas. Look at the CO2 emissions per capita, the USA is way up there, with almost twice the emissions of Belgium and much of the rest of western Europe, and 4 times Sweden's...
they invested in an implementation of a long existing idea obviously
And what was the more expensive part: coming up with the idea, or putting it into practice? Sure, plenty of research into this has already been done by others, but it's not like SpaceX just copied the blueprints from a couple of research papers, they had to do the hard engineering themselves in order to build the first LEO-capable reusable 1st stage.
Also, SpaceX doesn't do space tourism. They do commercial launches for a variety of customers.
Doing anything hard... like reliably landing, refurbishing and relaunching a first stage?
Everybody is in a position to “ride the last 50 years of R&D” as you put it, yet only SpaceX went the way of saving costs by reusing rockets. And it’s not like the likes of Boeing and Energya are still bleeding and suffering for doing that R&D in the first place, those are sunk costs by now, there’s no “decades of liabilities” as you argue in your other post. What the hell does that even mean?
One would expect the banks to have told FB to go to so much hell. However, don't count on it
There are new EU rules forcing banks to share customers' financial data with 3rd parties if said customer asks for it. For instance, to give your accountant access to your data so they can process everything automatically without your involvement. Which is great... except that while banks were pissed of about having to enable 3rd parties to offer financial services this way, they weren't above freely interpreting those rules and entertaining ideas about monetizing data (aggregated or anonymized) themselves by selling it to 3rd parties. ING famously floated such an idea which backfired rather badly: when asked, fully 70% of respondents said they'd switch to a different bank if the data sharing trial would go ahead. They thought better of it, but even so I'm appalled that this idea wasn't shot in the back of the head and buried in the first internal meeting it came up in.
whore off all their biometric data to a bunch of psychopaths
Is that something I missed in Apple's quarterly report?
You'd be surprised. Indian people buy stuff to show off as well; what may be different is the stuff they buy to show off with and how much they spend on that. I deal with a good many Indians; granted these are the more affluent expats, but they invariably carry a late model iPhone or upmarket Android device.
Exactly. Heh, my friend's kid learned to read at age 4 because it helped him playing Minecraft. Motivation is an incredible catalyst for learning, and good teachers can provide it. One teacher at my school got whole classrooms interested in traditionally boring subjects like grammar, etymology and even poetry. Students of one physics teacher were often found in the physics lab during a free hour, doing experiments instead of smoking joints in the stairwell. Think of what those teachers have contributed to the generations who passed through their classrooms. And our school (being a Montessori school) encouraged this: classrooms were made available to students if no scheduled class was taking place, mostly without adult supervision (exceptions being the physics and chemistry labs, the workshop, and the music room, but not the brand new and expensive computer lab).
However, providing motivation is not the same thing as just letting them find their own way. Some schools try this and let kids set their own curriculum. A surprising but telling outcome of an interview conducted with kids at one of those schools was the common remark: "Some more structure would be nice". Kids need to be motivated but they also need (and want) to be guided.
I don't think that proponents of personalized learning are proposing to replace hands-on activities with computers, like replacing shop class with Minecraft. But you can still put a computer in that class, to give kids a wide range of projects to choose from, as well as to provide hints when they get stuck at a certain stage. All things the teacher can do as well or better... but not for 25 individual kids each doing the project that interests them the most. That's where the computer comes in. And computers could be used to add hands-on experience to theoretical classes. There's this great little bridge builder game that has you build increasingly complex bridges, then tests them and shows the stresses in each part, something nice for physics class. And kids could learn a thing or two from playing Kerbal Space Program that they'll never pick up from books or in the classroom.
The problem isn't computers in schools, but that we haven't really figured out how to use them effectively. Personalized Learning is a great concept that addresses the problem of children's motivation as well as individual interests and ability to learn, and it's one where computers could be of great help. But computers should not a replacement for teachers, or even for classroom learning. Every learning professional will tell you that "the classroom sucks", but replacing it with individualized e-learning courses only means that those kids are now also deprived of whatever social stimuli they used to pick up in the classroom. Also, have you ever seen a good e-learning module? Be honest now...
In any case, the job of not killing children's' willingness to learn and keeping education universal and affordable at the same time, is not a simple one!
You don't need to pay tuition and attend classes to study physics or electronics either. Unless you don't want to have to start from scratch. If you sit down and discuss human problems and solutions for a bit, I am sure you can come up with useful insights... that other thinkers already came up with a few millennia ago. Studying philosophy, history, psychology and anthropology is surely going to be of help when you set out to deal with this stuff.
However I agree that some of these fields, at least at certain institutions, have devolved into an unpleasant and altogether useless echo chamber. Sociology has to be one of the worst offenders: if teachers and student in an academic faculty are unwilling to discuss certain problems or opinions with you, and instead tell you that you're not allowed to voice or even have those opinions, then you know it's time to get out of there and leave them to their own devices. The only problem is that their world view is leaking into society at large, like some sort of hilarious but toxic religion.
The sharpest programmers I've worked with almost all started programming before they graduated high school. They went on to do a variety of majors, a few doing CS, most of them mathematics, EE, physics or chemistry. Point is, they combined a solid grounding in science and mathematics with a passion for programming. I know a few great programmers who are largely self-taught without the benefit of a degree in a related field, but they are very rare.
For some time, CS majors might not have been the best choice for programmers, but not for the reasons mentioned in that CIO magazine, but because the IT job market was red hot, and CS drew in many students without a real passion for the subject.
It explains nicely why the profession is in such a sorry state. And while it sounds like the author of that article doesn't know the first thing about programming himself, it would appear that he is in academia teaching CS (from a remark at the end of the article). That makes it even sadder.
Blockchain != cryptocurrency, especially in corporate applications. Even those banks who are experimenting with coins like Ripple to manage settlements will come to their senses, and understand that they are completely out of their gourds using a cryptocurrency (of which half is owned by the founders) for this purpose. They may end up using blockchain technology to implement distributed trust and immutability, but they have no need for a coin.
As for retailers accepting BTC, there is very little upside there for either the merchant or the customer, unless that customer is someone who happens to already hold a decent amount of them. Another more efficient and stable cryptocurrency may eventually rise to become a widely accepted means of payment for the masses, but it won't be BTC and it won't be in the next 5 years. I'm willing to stake a good bottle of Scotch on that.
I'm not very surprised that corporations are cooling on the notion of "using blockchain". I work on innovation in a reasonably large entity, and if I would have gotten a Dogecoin for every time someone said "we are planning to do an experiment with Blockchain" or "Should we do something with cryptocurrencty?", I'd be able to retire by now. By the way, the best way to silence those idiots is to ask: "What?". What should we do with cryptocurrency, what is your blockchain experiment? No one is able to give a concrete answer to that, or propose something that couldn't be handled just as well or better with a database.
How do ISPs "contribute" to piracy, and by that I mean that they do something that aids or enables piracy specifically, instead of just providing a conduit to anything and anyone? By the same token: how have ISPs profited from piracy specifically... do they charge extra for Torrent traffic or something? That is not at all the same thing as "refusing to take measures", the latter should only be actionable if the ISPs are actually responsible for curtailing piracy. Or are the cops now going to send my speeding tickets to the authority responsible for our highways as well, because they "refuse to take measures" to make me slow down?
I do own an iPhone. And use Apple chargers to power other USB stuff, or charge the phone from a non Apple charger using the lightning cable. You still need the special cable but the chargers are pretty much interchangable.
I for one am quite happy with my pile of USB chargers. Because before those were the norm, every phone would come with its own proprietary charger, which often weren't interchangable between different phones even from the same brand. Now, if a charger breaks (it happens), just get another from the pile. And they are useful for powering other stuff like Pi's.
About those storage and wall batteries: That Tesla Wall thing isn't cheap as it uses just about the most expensive type of batteries on the market. Wouldn't it be a lot more economical to use cheaper but bulkier batteries, since space and weight are much less of an issue in that application?
Also, what's with the promises? Why isn't this a law?