While I agree with your post in general, the marsupial argument is not very strong, since there are marsupials that live outside of Australia. For example, opossums live in North America. According to the wikipedia entry on marsupials, there are also many marsupials in South and Central America.
I agree. I've been watching this season, and while I like some parts of the stories, I just don't like how the Doctor in particular is written. I don't enjoy this season nearly as much as I did the previous 4 seasons.
I'm fine with the Amy Pond character. I don't really like Matt Smith as the Doctor, but I am trying to keep an open mind. It's hard to separate how his character is written from how he is playing the role.
I would expect some of the indictments are of the "you didn't follow the site terms of use" wire fraud variety, the main thing that jumped out at me from the article as illegal was this:
According to the indictment, Lowson and Kirsch interviewed former employees of online ticket vendors to determine what measures they took to thwart automated buying and also obtained source code, in some cases through hacking.
Emphasis mine. It would seem to me that acquiring copyrighted source code either via buying it illegitimately or taking a copy via hacking is something that most of us can agree is and should be illegal.
I agree with this, but in practice I have found that it can lead to a lot of bug fixing if you don't have a complete understanding of what valid input looks like. For instance, in one project I was validating some input that should've been user names. I initially allowed for two groups of letters separated by space characters. Later I found out that some people had multi-part first names or last names that had spaces in them, so I had to account for multiple groups of letters. Later, I found out that some names have punctuation in them like . or ' or -. Eventually it got to the point where I was even allowing () because the name field was being used to distinguish between different people with the same name.
The lesson I learned from this is that if you don't have to interpret the data, you are better off just escaping any special characters and working with it that way. Aside from limiting the maintenance you may have to go through, it allows the users to enter whatever they want without arbitrary restrictions on characters.
I was taking you seriously until I got to this. There may be something called "high-speed dial-up", I don't know, but even at the fastest speeds, dial-up is not "high-speed" for any reasonable definition.
I'm not sure that I understand you completely here, because of the phrasing and double negatives, but are you saying that you can get a dial-up connection without government subsidy? Dial-up requires a phone line, which in some areas is subsidized by the Universal Service Fee. Even though we pay this fee to the phone company instead of the government and pay via phone bill instead of taxes, the fee was set up by the government and is basically a subsidy of phone service by everyone who has a phone (ie, almost everyone).
I got the impression from the route they showed that the ship wasn't traveling straight out from the source, it appeared to zig-zag around a bit. That could make up the extra distance.
Plus, how do we know how big the universe is? My understanding is that we only know how large the visible universe is, which is restricted by the speed of light and the length of time since the big bang. If space expanded faster than the speed of light following the big bang, how would we know how much space is out there?
My gripe was not so much with the hatch closing problem as with a few other things.
First, why did the point of origin for the 9 symbol address have to be Earth's symbol? They weren't on Earth, and they weren't using the Earth gate. There has been no indication that stargate addresses are relative to the point of origin throughout the rest of the series, in fact, there is some evidence that the addresses are absolute (for short time scales). The only way the 9 symbol address makes sense is if it is some kind of special code instead of a gate address. After all, the ship is moving around all the time, so normally it's gate address would also be changing all the time too.
Second, if no one has been on the ship since it was launched, why are the CO2 scrubbers full of gunk? What's been causing CO2 in the air that needed to be scrubbed out?
Third, if the air has been leaking out of the ship since it was damaged, where is the new air coming from?
Possibly a fourth, didn't the ship that had the Asgard technology on it escape back to earth? I don't remember which ship that was, but you'd think that they would have upgraded the shields an weapons on the Hammond by now. If so, it should've had no problem taking on 3 Goa'uld motherships.
That said, I'll still watch the show for a few more episodes, at least. I'm looking forward to the explanation they come up with for how the ship can travel faster than light without using hyperspace.
I don't have any official source for this, but just from watching the show, it seems like anything requires a little bit of a "push" to move through the gate. I suppose if the wind was blowing directly to the gate they could get some fresh air. The problem is, they are in another galaxy and don't know any of the gate addresses for that galaxy. I don't even know how they are going to get back to the ship after they arrive on the planet in the next episode. How do they know the symbols to use to get back to the ship?
SciFi.com also has the episodes of Stargate Universe online after they air. That's where I watched the premiere, since my DVR was apparently recording two other things when it aired.
The real question is, will Microsoft bother to put IE CDs at retail next to the Windows 7 boxes? If they do, will the IE CDs be free? Free with purchase of Windows 7? Or will MS charge a nominal fee to cover the cost of pressing and distribution (and small profit for the retailer). I can't imagine they'd charge anything more than that for IE or risk handing over marketshare to competing browsers who might take the opportunity to put their own CDs on retail shelves as cheaply as possible.
The article mentions the question of who provided funding for Psystar and that the answers should come out in the bankruptcy. It will be interesting to see if the Microsoft, etc. conspiracy rumors around Psystar are validated.
It occurs to me that Apple is facing a problem with these clone makers that is similar to the problem the content industries are facing with piracy. Some fraction (obviously not all) of people who pirate content do it because they want the content but can't get it the way that they want (on the device of their choice, for example). People who buy from the Apple clone makers have a similar motivation. They want OS X, but Apple won't provide it on the type of computer that they want.
I can't help but wonder if the solution for Apple and the content industries is similar. Give people willing to pay for your product what they want. I'm not suggesting that Apple should support OS X on random PCs, nor that they should sanction the clone manufacturers, but that they should expand their line of hardware to offer more choices to consumers instead of trying to force people into the few options Apple currently provides. That might take some support away from the clone makers and make Apple more money as well. Certainly they're not going to make much money suing these companies into the ground.
Flash drives aren't more convenient when you want to play a movie off of it and you don't have anything hooked up to the TV that has USB.
On the subject of price, you can currently get a DVD-R or even DVD-RW that will hold 4 GB for much less than you can buy a 4 GB flash drive. Even if patent licensing pushed costs to double for DVD-R and DVD-RW, they would still be cheaper than flash drives. The article only mentions Iomega and Memorex. We don't know if other major companies are licensing Toshiba's patents or not. If other major companies that produce DVD-R and DVD-RW are licensing the patents, it seems likely that prices aren't going to go up much, if at all.
The US still has plenty of nuclear warheads that could be retired and their plutonium used for this purpose, unless for some reason the fuel has degraded.
President Obama has suggested additional reductions in nuclear arms held by the US and Russia, so perhaps the plutonium from those could be used.
Or perhaps NASA could adapt their generators to use plutonium 239, which they could get from a Fast Breeder reactor, if we ever build one.
Yeah, it's a low-tech version. Pretty soon they'll be having regular checks on these "potential" criminals and asking if they can look around their houses...without a warrant, of course. Although the way things are going, in a few years getting a search warrant may be as simple as "fill the address in the blank here, sign and date here".
New *proprietary* software will require DRM-enabled hardware. New open source software most likely will not care. If DRM becomes a government mandate and you want to use Windoze to do anything, then yes, you will need DRM hardware.
Even if you assume that their patent should still be valid, I actually looked at their patent and it mentions pulling up data from a remote computer using a keypad and punching in numbers. It didn't say anything about a pointing device or the links being represented graphically. This is just another ludicrous patent dispute.:P
Well, I know that this is supposed to be for asking questions of Mr. Lessig, but since I don't see any messages from him, and this message interests me, I'm going to reply.
I think the idea that money has to be invested so land can be "prepared" for recreation is ludicrous. Most land is fine for recreation just the way it is. No person had to "prepare" it for recreation. If everyone who uses the land follows the old boy scout motto of leaving your campsite as clean or cleaner than you found it, the land will remain preserved just fine for future generations. It's only when people are sloppy and lazy, and litter and destroy the land that money has to be invested to clean it up. Sorry, sore spot for me.
As to the music label idea, people can make money from music without a label, and people will always make music, even if there is no money to be made from it. Maybe it wouldn't be their full-time job, and there would be fewer full-time bands, but I don't think that would prevent people from making music, and from those who are good at it from making some money at it. Especially since the net now allows people to advertise and sell things much easier, I don't think it's too far out to say that in a world without record labels people would sell CD's online and ship them out themselves.
Assignments for classes are almost always boring, to a certain extent. They can be interesting in that you are doing something that you've never done before, but you have very limited leeway for creativity in your programming in assignments. Also, you're pressed for time to get it done and working. My advice is to ignore those people who immediately tell you to get out of CS if you're bored. My advice to you is this: evaluate how often you program something for yourself. Have you ever written a program for yourself? When was the last time you had an idea for a program you wanted to write for yourself, or for others on your own time? Do you feel bored when you are able to program for yourself, unbounded by the constraints of time or requirements? If you enjoy programming for yourself, then I don't think you've lost any of your enthusiasm for CS, you're just burned out with schoolwork.
Luckily for me, I have an internship at a company where they let me be creative in my programming and where deadline pressures aren't too high and I don't have to deal with budget issues. When I have a project at work that I get interested in, I'd much rather be at work than in class.
The other thing I've learned is that time is everything. To hell with a good design if you have to get it out the door tomorrow -- there simply isn't time. The whole software industry is like this.
Unfortunately. It'd be nice if making software was more like art, where you could take time to produce a product you can be proud of. And people wonder why software these days is flash-bang crap.
Slashdot Mirror
While I agree with your post in general, the marsupial argument is not very strong, since there are marsupials that live outside of Australia. For example, opossums live in North America. According to the wikipedia entry on marsupials, there are also many marsupials in South and Central America.
I agree. I've been watching this season, and while I like some parts of the stories, I just don't like how the Doctor in particular is written. I don't enjoy this season nearly as much as I did the previous 4 seasons.
I'm fine with the Amy Pond character. I don't really like Matt Smith as the Doctor, but I am trying to keep an open mind. It's hard to separate how his character is written from how he is playing the role.
That you should hate your father and your mother.
I'm pretty sure that the Bible doesn't say that.
Emphasis mine. It would seem to me that acquiring copyrighted source code either via buying it illegitimately or taking a copy via hacking is something that most of us can agree is and should be illegal.
I agree with this, but in practice I have found that it can lead to a lot of bug fixing if you don't have a complete understanding of what valid input looks like. For instance, in one project I was validating some input that should've been user names. I initially allowed for two groups of letters separated by space characters. Later I found out that some people had multi-part first names or last names that had spaces in them, so I had to account for multiple groups of letters. Later, I found out that some names have punctuation in them like . or ' or -. Eventually it got to the point where I was even allowing () because the name field was being used to distinguish between different people with the same name.
The lesson I learned from this is that if you don't have to interpret the data, you are better off just escaping any special characters and working with it that way. Aside from limiting the maintenance you may have to go through, it allows the users to enter whatever they want without arbitrary restrictions on characters.
It will be a better world where people are not scared of this new fangled idea of letting others access your information.
high-speed dial-up (without government's subsidy)
I was taking you seriously until I got to this. There may be something called "high-speed dial-up", I don't know, but even at the fastest speeds, dial-up is not "high-speed" for any reasonable definition.
I'm not sure that I understand you completely here, because of the phrasing and double negatives, but are you saying that you can get a dial-up connection without government subsidy? Dial-up requires a phone line, which in some areas is subsidized by the Universal Service Fee. Even though we pay this fee to the phone company instead of the government and pay via phone bill instead of taxes, the fee was set up by the government and is basically a subsidy of phone service by everyone who has a phone (ie, almost everyone).
I got the impression from the route they showed that the ship wasn't traveling straight out from the source, it appeared to zig-zag around a bit. That could make up the extra distance.
Plus, how do we know how big the universe is? My understanding is that we only know how large the visible universe is, which is restricted by the speed of light and the length of time since the big bang. If space expanded faster than the speed of light following the big bang, how would we know how much space is out there?
My gripe was not so much with the hatch closing problem as with a few other things.
First, why did the point of origin for the 9 symbol address have to be Earth's symbol? They weren't on Earth, and they weren't using the Earth gate. There has been no indication that stargate addresses are relative to the point of origin throughout the rest of the series, in fact, there is some evidence that the addresses are absolute (for short time scales). The only way the 9 symbol address makes sense is if it is some kind of special code instead of a gate address. After all, the ship is moving around all the time, so normally it's gate address would also be changing all the time too.
Second, if no one has been on the ship since it was launched, why are the CO2 scrubbers full of gunk? What's been causing CO2 in the air that needed to be scrubbed out?
Third, if the air has been leaking out of the ship since it was damaged, where is the new air coming from?
Possibly a fourth, didn't the ship that had the Asgard technology on it escape back to earth? I don't remember which ship that was, but you'd think that they would have upgraded the shields an weapons on the Hammond by now. If so, it should've had no problem taking on 3 Goa'uld motherships.
That said, I'll still watch the show for a few more episodes, at least. I'm looking forward to the explanation they come up with for how the ship can travel faster than light without using hyperspace.
I don't have any official source for this, but just from watching the show, it seems like anything requires a little bit of a "push" to move through the gate. I suppose if the wind was blowing directly to the gate they could get some fresh air. The problem is, they are in another galaxy and don't know any of the gate addresses for that galaxy. I don't even know how they are going to get back to the ship after they arrive on the planet in the next episode. How do they know the symbols to use to get back to the ship?
SciFi.com also has the episodes of Stargate Universe online after they air. That's where I watched the premiere, since my DVR was apparently recording two other things when it aired.
The real question is, will Microsoft bother to put IE CDs at retail next to the Windows 7 boxes? If they do, will the IE CDs be free? Free with purchase of Windows 7? Or will MS charge a nominal fee to cover the cost of pressing and distribution (and small profit for the retailer). I can't imagine they'd charge anything more than that for IE or risk handing over marketshare to competing browsers who might take the opportunity to put their own CDs on retail shelves as cheaply as possible.
The article mentions the question of who provided funding for Psystar and that the answers should come out in the bankruptcy. It will be interesting to see if the Microsoft, etc. conspiracy rumors around Psystar are validated.
It occurs to me that Apple is facing a problem with these clone makers that is similar to the problem the content industries are facing with piracy. Some fraction (obviously not all) of people who pirate content do it because they want the content but can't get it the way that they want (on the device of their choice, for example). People who buy from the Apple clone makers have a similar motivation. They want OS X, but Apple won't provide it on the type of computer that they want.
I can't help but wonder if the solution for Apple and the content industries is similar. Give people willing to pay for your product what they want. I'm not suggesting that Apple should support OS X on random PCs, nor that they should sanction the clone manufacturers, but that they should expand their line of hardware to offer more choices to consumers instead of trying to force people into the few options Apple currently provides. That might take some support away from the clone makers and make Apple more money as well. Certainly they're not going to make much money suing these companies into the ground.
Flash drives aren't more convenient when you want to play a movie off of it and you don't have anything hooked up to the TV that has USB.
On the subject of price, you can currently get a DVD-R or even DVD-RW that will hold 4 GB for much less than you can buy a 4 GB flash drive. Even if patent licensing pushed costs to double for DVD-R and DVD-RW, they would still be cheaper than flash drives. The article only mentions Iomega and Memorex. We don't know if other major companies are licensing Toshiba's patents or not. If other major companies that produce DVD-R and DVD-RW are licensing the patents, it seems likely that prices aren't going to go up much, if at all.
The US still has plenty of nuclear warheads that could be retired and their plutonium used for this purpose, unless for some reason the fuel has degraded.
President Obama has suggested additional reductions in nuclear arms held by the US and Russia, so perhaps the plutonium from those could be used.
Or perhaps NASA could adapt their generators to use plutonium 239, which they could get from a Fast Breeder reactor, if we ever build one.
Yeah, it's a low-tech version. Pretty soon they'll be having regular checks on these "potential" criminals and asking if they can look around their houses...without a warrant, of course. Although the way things are going, in a few years getting a search warrant may be as simple as "fill the address in the blank here, sign and date here".
New *proprietary* software will require DRM-enabled hardware. New open source software most likely will not care. If DRM becomes a government mandate and you want to use Windoze to do anything, then yes, you will need DRM hardware.
Even if you assume that their patent should still be valid, I actually looked at their patent and it mentions pulling up data from a remote computer using a keypad and punching in numbers. It didn't say anything about a pointing device or the links being represented graphically. This is just another ludicrous patent dispute. :P
Well, I know that this is supposed to be for asking questions of Mr. Lessig, but since I don't see any messages from him, and this message interests me, I'm going to reply.
I think the idea that money has to be invested so land can be "prepared" for recreation is ludicrous. Most land is fine for recreation just the way it is. No person had to "prepare" it for recreation. If everyone who uses the land follows the old boy scout motto of leaving your campsite as clean or cleaner than you found it, the land will remain preserved just fine for future generations. It's only when people are sloppy and lazy, and litter and destroy the land that money has to be invested to clean it up. Sorry, sore spot for me.
As to the music label idea, people can make money from music without a label, and people will always make music, even if there is no money to be made from it. Maybe it wouldn't be their full-time job, and there would be fewer full-time bands, but I don't think that would prevent people from making music, and from those who are good at it from making some money at it. Especially since the net now allows people to advertise and sell things much easier, I don't think it's too far out to say that in a world without record labels people would sell CD's online and ship them out themselves.
Assignments for classes are almost always boring, to a certain extent. They can be interesting in that you are doing something that you've never done before, but you have very limited leeway for creativity in your programming in assignments. Also, you're pressed for time to get it done and working. My advice is to ignore those people who immediately tell you to get out of CS if you're bored. My advice to you is this: evaluate how often you program something for yourself. Have you ever written a program for yourself? When was the last time you had an idea for a program you wanted to write for yourself, or for others on your own time? Do you feel bored when you are able to program for yourself, unbounded by the constraints of time or requirements? If you enjoy programming for yourself, then I don't think you've lost any of your enthusiasm for CS, you're just burned out with schoolwork.
Luckily for me, I have an internship at a company where they let me be creative in my programming and where deadline pressures aren't too high and I don't have to deal with budget issues. When I have a project at work that I get interested in, I'd much rather be at work than in class.
The other thing I've learned is that time is everything. To hell with a good design if you have to get it out the door tomorrow -- there simply isn't time. The whole software industry is like this.
Unfortunately. It'd be nice if making software was more like art, where you could take time to produce a product you can be proud of. And people wonder why software these days is flash-bang crap.