I'm at a loss as to why your post was modded insightful.
- "It's no surprise that the military customers would require a lower ruggedness spec than civilian users. " - "Civilian usage, OTOH, requires a device that is durable and lasts for years and can be used in any environment. They don't need great processing power, they just need something that can run their dedicated apps well enough."
I'm guessing your perception of military laptop usage to be something out of "Hackers?"
We're talking about 2 different aspects of what are called moral rights. I agree in the assertion that one should not be able to fraudulently claim that a work was someone else's, per your example. But that falls under, well, fraud. What I'm talking about is the notion that Tolkien could prevent such a work, even if I don't attribute it to him, based on his "ownership" of the ideas.
Here Google did something that was pretty clearly covered under the Fair Use exception to US copyright law, but were opposed based on the fact that they used the artists style - to honor him, no less. In addition, the European concept of an artists moral rights does not include the ability to transfer those rights, which has HUGE implications for the concept of work for hire.
The concept of an artist's "moral" rights to his work assumes within it that art id somehow different than other forms of endeavor. Especially the visual arts. And it works against the proliferation of art, not for it. A strict interpretation would mean that, once an artist comes up with something innovative (which I would argue is an impossibility in itself), that artist now controls EVERYTHING having to do with that "innovation" - in perpetuity. So in that sense, copyright is irrelevant - Walt Disney, or his estate, can dictate how Mickey Mouse gets used based on artistic integrity, not commercial loss. And who is the only arbiter of an artist's integrity? That would be the artist himself.
"On page 2 of the article, the authors nicely summarize the cost of cracking longer and longer passwords. Once passwords start incorporating special characters (per SPEC), the cost shoots sky high even for relatively short passwords (i.e. $10MM+ for a 9 character password, $1BN for a 10-character password, the US national debt for a 12-character password)."
Ok, here's a question. Does the benefit of special characters in passwords derive from their actual use or in the expansion of the possible character set? If the possible character set includes the special characters, must they then be used in order to gain the advantage?
I ask because I always thought that "formula's" for strong passwords actually weakened them. First, because of human factors - make it too complex and everyone defaults to "Password-1", "Password-2", etc. But second, if the rules narrow down the possible contents of a password, doesn't that make it easier to crack? For instance, my current favorite is "Minimum X, maximum Y characters, must have an upper case, lower case, number, and symbol" So now the potential solution includes those rules as well - for instance, in a password X characters long, the maximum number of lower case letters is X-3. Doesn't that make the solution easier than if the character choice is wide open? I'm not trying to be a smartass, just increasing my knowledge.
"There is also the fact that we are talking here about the moral rights of an author. No one on Slashdot has ever advocated getting away with that. Here, perversely enough, copyrights allow some subsidiary right holders (those who have paid to distribute the work and those who have inherited the profits of it due to the original author) to mess with the moral rights of the author."
You haven't been reading my posts, then. "Moral" rights are a joke, a perverse extension of the idea that the word "artist" should be capitalized. They lead directly from the idea behind long copyrights - not only does the author get to make money past his lifetime, he maintains some control over the work forever. So even if some miracle happens and the copyright actually DOES run out on Disney's version of Snow White, they can still stop me from putting out a pornographic version - not because I'm making money, but because I would be sullying their "artistic vision".
It's like the original formulation of Godwin's law: once an organization faces problems by immediately forming a committee, no further solutions are possible.
Way to miss the point. You seem to be saying that, since wind doesn't satisfy the definition of base generation, it therefore must be peak. Well guess what - it doesn't satisfy the definition of peak, either! You are trying to stuff wind and solar into a model that doesn't have room for it.
You are sabotaging your own position by offering a "simple" solution. As long as various advocates continue to insist that "Solution A" is simple and easy, you will always be subject to rejection when it turns out that it's NOT simple and easy. If you focus on defending the idea that solar and wind are "baseload" or "peak", your general argument - that we should adopt these technologies - gets stopped butt cold.
Either show me how major wind and solar installations can fit into the US distribution as it exists today, or grow a pair and give us the bad news about how we need to change the way the grid works.
"(I graduated one of the nation's top journalism schools, and saw this firsthand.) This mindset is what has the newsroom in the grip of death."
Thank you. I'd friend you if I thought it meant anything.
I agree that people WILL pay for "the facts" - that's why I mentioned the AP/Reuters model. While I may agree that the WSJ fits as well, there are may who view it as hopelessly biased - conservatively, that is.
Here's my vision of how it works. The wire services partly adopt the Google model: users can sign up for a free subscription, and they get the feed in the raw. With that feed comes links to various blogs/opinion sites - they pay to get their link there.. Other sites can link to the wire service article, and they can get paid by the click. Or some other arrangement. So if I want to just get "Shit blowed up, 25 dead" I get right to it.
If Joe Blow can charge people to hear his opinions of what happened, more power to him. But since opinions are like assholes, there's always some available for free. Of course, access to some highly skilled assholes is still worth a LOT of money. But then there's issues of morality, legality...
Wait - when did I stop talking about journalists and start talking about prostitutes?
"You're talking about columnists, not reporters. They are different."
Really? Because the best I can tell, the only difference is that columnists are upfront about injecting their opinions into theior writing , and journalists pretend that they don't - sometimes even to themselves.
I think the meme that everyone is having such trouble shaking off is the idea of "objective" news. While I would argue that there has never been such an animal, the future definitely belongs to viewpoint-specific publications. There may well be a market for the AP/Reuters news service model, but after that I just don't see the rest surviving.
"But using the same names and situations pretending that the author would have so wished is unethical and immoral."
Who is pretending that? I see no statements to the effect that the estate is following up on Asimov's last wishes or somesuch. No one believes, not is the estate pretending, that this was some "unfinished work" of Asimov's. Most of the indignation I see is based on the idea that Asimov did NOT want sequels published, and that those desires of his have weight even after he is dead. But aren't authors supposed to LOSE the right to that control after a limited period of time?
You're trying to separate the ideas of artistic control from financial control. Can't be done, at least not in any practical sense.
The delicious irony is the wailing about "author's intent" and bemoaning someone other than the original author covering the same ground coming from a group that would gladly see copyright curtailed so that EVERYONE would be free to butcher an author's vision after a period of time.
"The news sucks, but it's not journalists fault, because corporations pay our salaries and we have to do what they want. But if the Government pays our salaries, we'll be free to do what we want."
If there was any more evidence need that journalism is NOT a "profession", there it is.
"Else we'll have the situation with Boscovs which was bailed-out, but after examining the store, I think should have died."
Holy shit. There's a name I never expected to see in Slashdot. I grew up in the Reading, PA area and was unaware they got a "bailout" per se, although I know the just went TU again and have been bought back by the Boscov family.
No, my favorite example is Chrysler. The company died long ago; a government bailout resurrected them to a zombie status. Daimler tried bringing them back to like and were nearly killed themselves. Then a private capital group tried - ditto. And now Fiat is discovering that rescuing it is "more difficult than they expected". Ya think?!
The original Chrysler bailout damaged the US economy in countless ways, from delaying the inevitable contraction of the auto industry (and so making it more damaging when it did happen), to fostering the acceptance of faux "quality" (remember the K car and the "5/50" warrantee that was pretty much a sham?), to the beginning of the "minivan", which started the trend to people buying more cargo capacity than they ever needed and rooted the "need bigger" theme deep in American domestic culture.
You are still thinking too low level. "The IT people Obama brought in with him?" Do you really think he has his own Geek Squad? He brought in the WH Chief of Staff, and that was the end of that (for him at least).
Yes, Obama definitely has a different ideology than Bush did. But I don't know how that applied to Open Source. For instance, you say that "previous administrations... were ideologically opposed to open source." Really? I can't remember it being mentioned in any official context AT ALL, much less negatively.
And drawing a direct equivalence along the lines of "liberal:Open Source::conservative:proprietary" is not necessarily valid. There's only a small, small set of people that make an ideological distinction between Libre software and Free Beer software - a lot of them just happen to hang out on/.. But for the vast majority, software is a tool. Some aspects of the tool may have ideological ramifications - for instance, when I went to buy a new floor jack to work on my car, I tried to buy one made in America. But in the end, whatever I bought, it's most important trait is it's usefulness as a tool.
The Obama Administration is certainly ideologically different than the Bush Administration (although I believe less so than his supporters think). But that doesn't mean it applies to all aspects of everything the Administration touches. I'm glad Drupal scored a win - let's just not read too much into it, shall we?
Win95. I believe that the original install CD had a utility to create floppies for a full install. Do that on your main machine, install Win95 on the laptop, then download what you need. I know it sounds stupid, but I'm guessing that Win95 will recognize all of your hardware and actually get you on line faster than trying to sort out the linux drivers for the hardware. Then do a dual boot install and keep Win95 until you get the linux install hashed out - it will beat downloading stuff on your main machine and then copying it to floppies.
"Denmark has relatively modest average wind speeds in the range of 4.9-5.6 metres a second measured at 10 m height. Onshore wind resources are highest in the Western part of the country, and on the Eastern islands with coastlines facing South or West. The country has very large offshore wind resources, and large areas of sea territory with a shallow water depth of 5-15 m, where siting is most feasible. These sites offer higher wind speeds, in the range of roughly 8.5-9.0 m/s at 50 m height.[6] There have been no major problems from wind variability, although there is a temporary problem resulting from the connection of a large bloc of wind power from offshore wind farms to a single point on a weak section of the transmission network.[7]
Denmark is connected by transmission line to other European countries and therefore it does not need to install additional peak-load plant to balance its wind power. Instead, it purchases additional power from its neighbours when necessary. With some strengthening of the grid, Denmark plans to increase wind's share even further.[8]"
Cool. Good for them - they are geographically and politically fortunate.
What about everyone else whose entire country doesn't lie within 50 miles of the North Sea?
I repeat (again) that I am not suggesting that wind and solar be written off. I am only pointing out that there are issues with implementation that are either being ignored or glossed over by those who promote renewables as this facile solution that is only being held back by entrenched interests and public stupidity.
"that figure may rise to 20% by 2020. 0.0001% of British land to produce that amount of electricity" so 0.0005% of British land is enough. seeing that the UK is relatively densely populated, I think we can assume there is enough land. and then we have also the seas left..."
Hmmm.
Per Wikipedia, the land area of the entire island of Great Britain is 216,777 sq km. One ten thousandth of a percent of that is 0.217 sq km. That's a square of land.466 km/side. Are you seriously claiming that you could provide 20% of Britain's power via windmills? That's not even a the size of a very large warehouse.
Maybe when they say ""These things are very small really, at the base," they mean the area of the actual pole on which they sit. Because everyone knows you can fit windmills on land the same way you put cigarettes in a pack.
Either their numbers are off by a couple of decimal places, or they are not counting access roads, the actual footprint of the blades, switchgear, etc. But what you are definitely forgetting is that the value of land can have very little to do with rational measurements. From your link:
"There is a wind farm in the Isle of Lewis that is being proposed at the moment, that the RSPB are opposing because it may impact migratory routes.
"We do not support that application, because we think a wind farm may not be suitable for that particular location."
Now add up the rest of the migratory paths, the scenic views, the airport takeoff and landing zones, the farmers taht just won't sell, and there's not so much land available after all.
Slashdot Mirror
"if we have learned anything in the past, just because it works in a simulation doesn't mean it will work in reality, more or less in Zero G."
'Cause everyone knows the moon has no gravitational pull...
I'm at a loss as to why your post was modded insightful.
- "It's no surprise that the military customers would require a lower ruggedness spec than civilian users. "
- "Civilian usage, OTOH, requires a device that is durable and lasts for years and can be used in any environment. They don't need great processing power, they just need something that can run their dedicated apps well enough."
I'm guessing your perception of military laptop usage to be something out of "Hackers?"
We're talking about 2 different aspects of what are called moral rights. I agree in the assertion that one should not be able to fraudulently claim that a work was someone else's, per your example. But that falls under, well, fraud. What I'm talking about is the notion that Tolkien could prevent such a work, even if I don't attribute it to him, based on his "ownership" of the ideas.
For instance, http://freedomforip.org/2006/04/23/google-violates-moral-rights-of-artist-joan-miro/
Here Google did something that was pretty clearly covered under the Fair Use exception to US copyright law, but were opposed based on the fact that they used the artists style - to honor him, no less. In addition, the European concept of an artists moral rights does not include the ability to transfer those rights, which has HUGE implications for the concept of work for hire.
The concept of an artist's "moral" rights to his work assumes within it that art id somehow different than other forms of endeavor. Especially the visual arts. And it works against the proliferation of art, not for it. A strict interpretation would mean that, once an artist comes up with something innovative (which I would argue is an impossibility in itself), that artist now controls EVERYTHING having to do with that "innovation" - in perpetuity. So in that sense, copyright is irrelevant - Walt Disney, or his estate, can dictate how Mickey Mouse gets used based on artistic integrity, not commercial loss. And who is the only arbiter of an artist's integrity? That would be the artist himself.
"On page 2 of the article, the authors nicely summarize the cost of cracking longer and longer passwords. Once passwords start incorporating special characters (per SPEC), the cost shoots sky high even for relatively short passwords (i.e. $10MM+ for a 9 character password, $1BN for a 10-character password, the US national debt for a 12-character password)."
Ok, here's a question. Does the benefit of special characters in passwords derive from their actual use or in the expansion of the possible character set? If the possible character set includes the special characters, must they then be used in order to gain the advantage?
I ask because I always thought that "formula's" for strong passwords actually weakened them. First, because of human factors - make it too complex and everyone defaults to "Password-1", "Password-2", etc. But second, if the rules narrow down the possible contents of a password, doesn't that make it easier to crack? For instance, my current favorite is "Minimum X, maximum Y characters, must have an upper case, lower case, number, and symbol" So now the potential solution includes those rules as well - for instance, in a password X characters long, the maximum number of lower case letters is X-3. Doesn't that make the solution easier than if the character choice is wide open? I'm not trying to be a smartass, just increasing my knowledge.
That's because you didn't use enough. You forgot all the "e"'s and "i"'s.
And no, it doesn't matter if it doesn't make grammatical sense - this is a band name we're talking about here.
"There is also the fact that we are talking here about the moral rights of an author. No one on Slashdot has ever advocated getting away with that. Here, perversely enough, copyrights allow some subsidiary right holders (those who have paid to distribute the work and those who have inherited the profits of it due to the original author) to mess with the moral rights of the author."
You haven't been reading my posts, then. "Moral" rights are a joke, a perverse extension of the idea that the word "artist" should be capitalized. They lead directly from the idea behind long copyrights - not only does the author get to make money past his lifetime, he maintains some control over the work forever. So even if some miracle happens and the copyright actually DOES run out on Disney's version of Snow White, they can still stop me from putting out a pornographic version - not because I'm making money, but because I would be sullying their "artistic vision".
Oh, look - a J school grad bitter that he can't be Woodward or Bernstein. Isn't that cute?
And a new band name was coined.
Better add some umlauts, though.
It's like the original formulation of Godwin's law: once an organization faces problems by immediately forming a committee, no further solutions are possible.
ebay & skype w/o source code
Way to miss the point. You seem to be saying that, since wind doesn't satisfy the definition of base generation, it therefore must be peak. Well guess what - it doesn't satisfy the definition of peak, either! You are trying to stuff wind and solar into a model that doesn't have room for it.
You are sabotaging your own position by offering a "simple" solution. As long as various advocates continue to insist that "Solution A" is simple and easy, you will always be subject to rejection when it turns out that it's NOT simple and easy. If you focus on defending the idea that solar and wind are "baseload" or "peak", your general argument - that we should adopt these technologies - gets stopped butt cold.
Either show me how major wind and solar installations can fit into the US distribution as it exists today, or grow a pair and give us the bad news about how we need to change the way the grid works.
"(I graduated one of the nation's top journalism schools, and saw this firsthand.) This mindset is what has the newsroom in the grip of death."
Thank you. I'd friend you if I thought it meant anything.
I agree that people WILL pay for "the facts" - that's why I mentioned the AP/Reuters model. While I may agree that the WSJ fits as well, there are may who view it as hopelessly biased - conservatively, that is.
Here's my vision of how it works. The wire services partly adopt the Google model: users can sign up for a free subscription, and they get the feed in the raw. With that feed comes links to various blogs/opinion sites - they pay to get their link there.. Other sites can link to the wire service article, and they can get paid by the click. Or some other arrangement. So if I want to just get "Shit blowed up, 25 dead" I get right to it.
If Joe Blow can charge people to hear his opinions of what happened, more power to him. But since opinions are like assholes, there's always some available for free. Of course, access to some highly skilled assholes is still worth a LOT of money. But then there's issues of morality, legality...
Wait - when did I stop talking about journalists and start talking about prostitutes?
Or did I?
"You're talking about columnists, not reporters. They are different."
Really? Because the best I can tell, the only difference is that columnists are upfront about injecting their opinions into theior writing , and journalists pretend that they don't - sometimes even to themselves.
I think the meme that everyone is having such trouble shaking off is the idea of "objective" news. While I would argue that there has never been such an animal, the future definitely belongs to viewpoint-specific publications. There may well be a market for the AP/Reuters news service model, but after that I just don't see the rest surviving.
"What do the goats eat once they've finished the kudzu? "
Make "goats" the object of the verb "eat" and you have your answer.
I believe the only thing that has changed is the people and the rhetoric.
"But using the same names and situations pretending that the author would have so wished is unethical and immoral."
Who is pretending that? I see no statements to the effect that the estate is following up on Asimov's last wishes or somesuch. No one believes, not is the estate pretending, that this was some "unfinished work" of Asimov's. Most of the indignation I see is based on the idea that Asimov did NOT want sequels published, and that those desires of his have weight even after he is dead. But aren't authors supposed to LOSE the right to that control after a limited period of time?
You're trying to separate the ideas of artistic control from financial control. Can't be done, at least not in any practical sense.
The delicious irony is the wailing about "author's intent" and bemoaning someone other than the original author covering the same ground coming from a group that would gladly see copyright curtailed so that EVERYONE would be free to butcher an author's vision after a period of time.
The irony in your sig is stunning.
Yes, I especially like the logic:
"The news sucks, but it's not journalists fault, because corporations pay our salaries and we have to do what they want. But if the Government pays our salaries, we'll be free to do what we want."
If there was any more evidence need that journalism is NOT a "profession", there it is.
"Else we'll have the situation with Boscovs which was bailed-out, but after examining the store, I think should have died."
Holy shit. There's a name I never expected to see in Slashdot. I grew up in the Reading, PA area and was unaware they got a "bailout" per se, although I know the just went TU again and have been bought back by the Boscov family.
No, my favorite example is Chrysler. The company died long ago; a government bailout resurrected them to a zombie status. Daimler tried bringing them back to like and were nearly killed themselves. Then a private capital group tried - ditto. And now Fiat is discovering that rescuing it is "more difficult than they expected". Ya think?!
The original Chrysler bailout damaged the US economy in countless ways, from delaying the inevitable contraction of the auto industry (and so making it more damaging when it did happen), to fostering the acceptance of faux "quality" (remember the K car and the "5/50" warrantee that was pretty much a sham?), to the beginning of the "minivan", which started the trend to people buying more cargo capacity than they ever needed and rooted the "need bigger" theme deep in American domestic culture.
You are still thinking too low level. "The IT people Obama brought in with him?" Do you really think he has his own Geek Squad? He brought in the WH Chief of Staff, and that was the end of that (for him at least).
Yes, Obama definitely has a different ideology than Bush did. But I don't know how that applied to Open Source. For instance, you say that "previous administrations ... were ideologically opposed to open source." Really? I can't remember it being mentioned in any official context AT ALL, much less negatively.
And drawing a direct equivalence along the lines of "liberal:Open Source::conservative:proprietary" is not necessarily valid. There's only a small, small set of people that make an ideological distinction between Libre software and Free Beer software - a lot of them just happen to hang out on /.. But for the vast majority, software is a tool. Some aspects of the tool may have ideological ramifications - for instance, when I went to buy a new floor jack to work on my car, I tried to buy one made in America. But in the end, whatever I bought, it's most important trait is it's usefulness as a tool.
The Obama Administration is certainly ideologically different than the Bush Administration (although I believe less so than his supporters think). But that doesn't mean it applies to all aspects of everything the Administration touches. I'm glad Drupal scored a win - let's just not read too much into it, shall we?
Win95. I believe that the original install CD had a utility to create floppies for a full install. Do that on your main machine, install Win95 on the laptop, then download what you need. I know it sounds stupid, but I'm guessing that Win95 will recognize all of your hardware and actually get you on line faster than trying to sort out the linux drivers for the hardware. Then do a dual boot install and keep Win95 until you get the linux install hashed out - it will beat downloading stuff on your main machine and then copying it to floppies.
Cool. Good for them - they are geographically and politically fortunate.
What about everyone else whose entire country doesn't lie within 50 miles of the North Sea?
I repeat (again) that I am not suggesting that wind and solar be written off. I am only pointing out that there are issues with implementation that are either being ignored or glossed over by those who promote renewables as this facile solution that is only being held back by entrenched interests and public stupidity.
"that figure may rise to 20% by 2020. 0.0001% of British land to produce that amount of electricity" so 0.0005% of British land is enough. seeing that the UK is relatively densely populated, I think we can assume there is enough land. and then we have also the seas left ..."
Hmmm.
Per Wikipedia, the land area of the entire island of Great Britain is 216,777 sq km. One ten thousandth of a percent of that is 0.217 sq km. That's a square of land .466 km/side. Are you seriously claiming that you could provide 20% of Britain's power via windmills? That's not even a the size of a very large warehouse.
Maybe when they say ""These things are very small really, at the base," they mean the area of the actual pole on which they sit. Because everyone knows you can fit windmills on land the same way you put cigarettes in a pack.
Either their numbers are off by a couple of decimal places, or they are not counting access roads, the actual footprint of the blades, switchgear, etc. But what you are definitely forgetting is that the value of land can have very little to do with rational measurements. From your link:
Now add up the rest of the migratory paths, the scenic views, the airport takeoff and landing zones, the farmers taht just won't sell, and there's not so much land available after all.