That's the same thing. How much carbon dioxide should we be emitting? In a perfect world, zero, but we can't do that, so ultimately governments decide how many credits to make available in a somewhat arbitrary manner. Controlling supply is controlling price.
Sure, of course it's not possible to get this exactly right, but you don't need to. You only need to make the products of companies that emit carbon more expensive. Trying to figure out how much more expensive is what this is all about - the current "state of the art" is carbon credits, the prices of which are set by politicians in response to lobbying. Having them set by the courts is only a minor improvement, but it is still an improvement. You can take into account 'increased risk' with some fancy formulas if you like, or you can say something like "you have a 1 in N chance of having to pay for this disaster" - the effect in terms of raising prices would be the same.
the IS NO COST to emitting carbon that anyone can quantify as yet
Sure there is. Just make an organization liable for the costs of climate-change related damage relative to the amount of CO2 it directly emits. You already have to buy carbon credits if you emit CO2 so we have a registry of who emits and how much. This way, the cost is amortized over the whole economy, increasing our ability to manage it (via general price increases).
For instance, let's say that mosquitos start moving up into Europe and spreading various nasty diseases. The health insurance claims for these events can be claimed back from the economy as a whole by suing the CO2 emitters in a class action suit. The details of whether a particular problem was caused or the risk increased by climate change can be thrashed out by the courts. I sense some scepticism in your remarks over whether climate change is real - that's OK, you can believe what you want, but I suspect when put in a court any such defence would have a hard time in the face of a nearly unlimited supply of expert witnesses. The CO2 emitters would be forced to try and calculate the risk to the environment from what they do based on what they believe and the advice their experts give them, and would then pass that on to their customers, thus the "true cost" of climate change would ripple through the economy.
This has benefit over the rather artificial carbon credits market, in that the "cost" of emitting a ton of CO2 is - as you rightly point out - basically pulled out of somebodies arse right now. What's more, they were deliberately set low enough to not have any impact on existing businesses, so instead of bringing about real change they just brought extra democracy. The idea of using markets to take action is the right one, but the "risk premium" needs to be priced into everyday goods.
I just made this scheme up off the top of my head. There are several key objections I can anticipate. The first is that climate change seems likely to kill a lot of people via disease/drought/etc, if indeed it's not doing so already, and how can you price a human life? Well, it is possible, but only in various untasteful ways. I don't think this one is solvable, nor should it detract from the scheme - the market is a tool and we need it to serve us now, to reach our end goals.
The second is that it would be inflationary if enacted globally, at once, because it would lead to a round of general price increases which would then in turn cause more borrowing by those without the spare cashflow to absorb it (ie, most people these days), thus inflating the money supply. This is especially true of essentials like oil (let's ignore peak oil for now). Inflation in the presence of a general price increase is not inevitable assuming you define inflation as an increase in the size of the money supply - that's an artifact of the fractional reserve. Replacing the fractional reserve with something less prone to inflation is certainly a good idea. But, if you suppress inflation (eg, by going to a Robertson/Huber type money supply), a general price increase makes us all poorer. That's more or less inevitable though - we would simply be paying what other people less able to pay (because they just lost their food supply/health/whatever) would be paying anyway, but everyone pays a small amount now instead of watching and saying "I hope that never happens to me". It's not a different concept to insurance in fact, but it's not optional, because climate change affects everyone.
The third is that it requires everybody to act more or less in concert. Unfortunately the "race to the bottom" is a general problem with regulating business and should not discourage us from working together to do so.
There are probably more problems with this scheme, but it does have the advantage that carbon emission is priced "naturally" and integrated into the sticker price of things like a unit of electricity - if you can get yourself out of the CO2 emitters game by replacing your electricity usage with solar or wind (or even nuclear!) then you are no longer liable for potentially huge disaster-relief costs, thus you can lower your prices, gaining an advantage over your competitors.
It's very fast at handling large numbers of very small files (at least, this is what they claim, I never tried it for myself). It also has some rather funky design changes from a normal filing system, like eliminating the file/directory duality (ie, you can read and write to a directory as you would a file). The basic design is described in a document on the namesys.com website - the end goal is about "namespace unification", in a Plan9-esque manner. You should read the white papers, they aren't all that heavy and the man - criminal or not - clearly has thought about the design of computer systems in a great deal of detail. His thinking around namespace design has certainly influenced my own.
I love TOD and read it a lot, but I don't see how that can be a concern. I don't know about the doubling time for tritium but we don't use oil to make electricity in Europe or the US, so how long it takes to ramp up fusion is more or less unrelated to oil supplies.
Sub-prime collapse is a very recent thing, in the last few months. Inflation of the dollar to pay for Iraq is a much longer-term policy. Inflation has been called the "hidden tax" because you don't feel it coming out of your pocket in the same way you do with regular taxes where there's paperwork and such, but nonetheless, it's a value transfer from you to the government. Bush has been using this "hidden tax" very heavily in recent years.
It's a fact that M3 is no longer published by the Fed. They claim it is "no longer useful" or something ridiculous like that, but the timing is rather suspicious - it's well known that the dollar has been massively inflated to pay for the war in Iraq (just look at the Federal budget deficit). The AC doesn't provide references it's true, but just Google "fed m3" to get the gory details. Then compare the reconstructed M3 for the US to other countries like UK or Switzerland. You'll find that the less allied to the US they are, in general, the more slowly their money supply increases. It's a bad trend.
Yes, there is. If people didn't get paid relative to popularity, then how do you decide how much a particular thing is worth? These debates get to the heart of what "value" is and how the creation of it should be rewarded. How much is a particular "piece" of "content" worth? $10? $100? $1000? If JK Rowling had been paid $100 per Harry Potter book max, do you think she'd have written seven of them? Yet these books (and movies) have brought immense entertainment value to our society, which is a fancy way to say, lots of people enjoyed them.
Yes, it's DRM on subscription, but solving that problem is really outside Microsofts scope. Believe me, NO software company wants to waste time writing and defending DRM software. They do it because the alternative is not being able to sell stuff, and in some cases (like video games) there is no equivalent of the open source model to fill in the gaps with alternative revenue streams.
Seriously. DRM is just a time and money sink. It's necessary because it pays for itself many times over, when done correctly (note: a cracked drm that requires exotic and annoying workarounds will still fulfil its goal). If everybody could be trusted to buy the things they use, it wouldn't be necessary, and the time spent on it would be spent on improving the product instead. But we don't live in such a world.
If we had an economic model in which anybody could copy to their hearts content, and the content creators still got paid commensurate to their products popularity - then you wouldn't need DRM. But it's pretty hard to imagine how that'd work.
+1 to that. Live is really well done, and for me it was the primary reason I got an XBox Live. I have some friends back in my home country, and playing XBL games with them is a good way to keep in touch. There's tons of demos to download, and the XBL Arcade basically solves the party game niche I was considering a Wii for. I'm a big Nintendo fan, and own a DS, but the Wii doesn't have a comparable online experience (and even if it did, it doesn't have my friends on it...)
Well, no, it didn't last, but that was mostly a business/marketing issue. StarForce was, if anything, too successful. Too successful because their stuff did actually work, in that when integrated well, it could be months (as you observe) for a crack to be posted. Well, after 6 months of no crack, most people who want the game will have bought it. You might lose the long tail, but dems da breaks. It will be marketed by the DRM companies as a success.
This didn't go down well with a lot of people who were used to getting games for free, as you might imagine! I guess many of us will remember the anti-StarForce campaign that eventually resulted in Ubisoft withdrawing their usage of it in favour of a less tainted brand. The campaign mostly revolved around the allegation that StarForce could break CD drives or cause other nasty technical problems. It wouldn't entirely surprise me if that were true, because these programs do a lot of very bizarre and nasty tricks in order to find emulated CD drives.
Nonetheless, two facts stick in my mind. One is that the company making StarForce offered significant cash rewards to anybody who could send them a machine that was broken in the way being described. AFAIK nobody ever claimed the prize (instead the claims about what broke started shifting). The other is an interesting post from an UbiSoft employee defending their copy protection on the forums. In it they gave a statistical breakdown of the problems reported to their tech support center. As UbiSoft make some very popular games, they had a sample size big enough to be meaningful here.
They found that something like 0.1% of the problems reported to them were tracable to StarForce, and of that 0.1%, about 20% were people who had in fact attempted to crack the game and then had the balls to ask for tech support when it didn't work. That sounds absurd, but when I worked for a commercial software company, we also saw people trying to get (free!) tech support using pirated copies of the program. The rest were mostly people who mistyped their CD Key, or actually did experience blue screens/crashes etc, but their numbers were low enough to be more or less what you'd expect from a population of Windows machines.
Now it's a complex story, and I don't doubt that some people saw very bad problems with StarForce. But I'll take hard statistics derived from 500,000 samples over anecdotes I read from anti-DRM bloggers any day.
These guys are clearly Like Us, and it's to be commended that they rolled up their sleeves and got stuck in. But from reading the article I got the impression they need to sharpen up their business skills a lot. For all the bitching you see about how evil ISPs are on Slashdot, this article demonstrates nicely why they are that way. Some good quotes:
Then came the first bills. Damien and Wilton found themselves immediately in debt to the wholesaler. The DSL subscribers had an unexpected thirst for data; the Wireless Nomad administrators had not set up their pricing scheme with these kind of numbers on mind.
No shit they used a lot of data. A small, new ISP run by a couple of guys that's offering unlimited data access for a flat rate? That must have attracted torrent users like bees to honey. They blame video traffic later, but everytime I talk to an ISP employee about where their bandwidth goes, the answer is always "p2p, everything else" in that order. How did they not see this coming? Did they really think existing ISPs impose caps and throttles because they were told to last time they communed with Beazulbub? I won't even comment on using credit cards to pay business costs....
First, it's tough. People like brand names, even for ISPs, and they don't trust small providers to stay in business or to solve their tech support problems.
Stories like this indicate why people might think that way.
The idea is that a wireless router a few houses down from the main DSL link could relay the signal to another router even further down the block, and so on. If this worked properly, it could reduce the needed number of DSL circuits and could lower prices for all the co-op owners.
Unfortunately, this was one of those not-quite-ready-for-primetime ideas, and it failed to live up to expectations..... [on WiMax] Obviously, throwing open a DSL link to hundreds of simultaneous users invites total meltdown, but Fox suggests keeping the distance down and charging users a few bucks a months for access.
I like their courage in trying to shake up the ISP market like this, but a cold, realistic assessment of why existing ISPs are the way they are would probably have helped.
The prophets of 1970 said:
-We would be out of oil by now
No, what was actually said was that in the year 2000 oil production would peak and then start to decline. That's not the same as "oil running out" - indeed, oil will probably never run out. Production rates will get so low however that we might as well have run out. This prediction was made by a petroleum geologist working for Shell, and was based on extrapolation of trends and observed decline rates in existing fields.
Well, oil production didn't peak in 2000. I guess that means it'll never peak! Oh, wait. Shortly after his prediction, the world went through the oil shocks of the late 70s and 80s, which if you plot the production graph pushed the peak date forward by about 7 years. That means if you adjust Hubberts prediction for the oil shocks, production should be levelling off about now. Is it? Well, yes.
Not convinced about that myself. The Y-Combinator companies seem to be mostly cookie-cutter "let's take this well worn problem, and do it in Rails!" type ventures. Wake me up when one has a truly new idea, executes well, and gets big. Until then it's basically riding on Grahams name.
Did you actually read that report? In my humble opinion, it was basically some guys opinion dressed up as a scientific study. There was no repeatable methodology and the author didn't even bother to fully fill out the matrix. Go read the comments on the story you linked to, if you want to get more detailed commentary.
Incidentally, I say this as a very biased person. I work for Google, on Google Maps. As per usual, what's written here is my own opinion and not that of my employers. I won't comment on the Google vs Microsoft debate - it's not my place to do so - but I'd like to say that I've seen first hand (and participated in) the very strict procedures we have in place to protect peoples privacy.
For instance, I'm one of the very few people who have Maps logs access (ie, I can see cookies and IP addresses), and that's only because I work directly with the servers on a day-to-day basis and do abuse handling as part of my job. The vast majority of Maps developers have no logs access at all. I have to periodically rejustify my access, I'm not allowed to track any individual cookie or IP address for longer than 24 hours, my own usage of the logs is recorded and audited, I'm not allowed to take the logs out of their secure holding area and am not allowed to give logs in non-scrubbed form to anybody else. Violating these rules is grounds for instant termination. Contrast this with ISPs which sell clickstream data on the open market.
I'm not trying to make any statement of policy or anything, because that's not my job, but if end-user privacy is going to be a deciding factor in which maps product to use, hopefully now you have more insight into how seriously we treat end user data (what I described applies to all Google products by the way).
The other questionable use of statistics here is the fact that the percentage of solved crimes hardly varies at all - they're comparing a clear up rate of 22% to 25% and then looking at the number of cameras. Such a small difference in clearup rate could easily be noise, and regardless of that, how many times do politicians have to be told - correlation does not imply causation. Perhaps these boroughs have the same sized police force for different number of crimes? Seems more likely to me, as police forces aren't liquid - their size doesn't fluctuate from month to month to handle changing crime rates. Any such changes are very slow, but gangs can move in and out very fast, especially in London.
The reason they look increasingly extremist is because the FSF tends to make up policies and rules which bind GCC development in order to avoid the theoretical risk of making GPL violations easier. As compiler technology advances these restrictions have become increasingly burdensome, in particular, several of the technical advantages of LLVM are things the GCC team would have liked to do but RMS nixed because it would have made it too easy to circumvent the license.
That's nonsense. You're mixing up currency fluctuations with inflation. Go use the handy inflation calculator courtesy of Uncle Sam to find out that $100 in 2002 has the same buying power as $115 today. Now, you can argue about how governments calculate inflation or even what inflation is, but it's definitely not that high.
Fact is the OLPC missed its $100 target a long time ago. There were a couple of "sacred cows" that were enormously expensive resource wise and which they raised the specs to accomodate instead of sacrificing them. I'm talking about Gecko and Python - both of which gobble resources, especially memory, like there's no tomorrow. They already doubled the memory capacity of the laptop and who knows how the final thing will perform, they're still making major changes to the hardware. There are lighter tools that could have been used, but some of them are proprietary or ugly so they were cast aside (for instance, WebKit/Opera and C++).
The time you waste trying to create some copy-protection and losing the arms race with the pirates (which you will lose) is time you could have spent making your product better.
It's quite possible to prove that copy protection is a net financial win, incidentally. The copy protection vendors know perfectly well that a game or app will be cracked eventually, but especially for games by the time it's done not many people are buying it anyway.
I read the "OOXML defective by design" thing, and then I read Miguels rebuttal of it. To be honest, I found them both interesting, but I thought the rebuttal was pretty strong. In particular the comparison to ODF is interesting. If what Miguel says about it is true (and I don't see any reason why it wouldn't be, seeing as he employs a ton of OO.org hackers) then OOXML is indeed a "superb spec" compared to ODF - which apparently devotes only 14 pages to formula definitions (!!!).
A lot of people have mentioned the "MS Excel Date bug". As Miguel points out below, this bug is not a Microsoft error, it came from Lotus 1-2-3 and perhaps Lotus implemented it to be compatible with an even earlier spreadsheet. Now, you can argue that this bug should be "fixed" and such arguments are pretty common on Slashdot, where academic correctness is often valued above practical concerns like backwards compatibility. But in practice the hard, boring work of "upgrading" all the existing stuff that depends on that bug is ignored... presumably somebody else will do it. If 90% of the spreadsheets actually out there, you know, getting shit done in companies and other organisations.... if they all assume a buggy date format, you'd have to be insane to want to fix that bug. Go right ahead and encode it into the specification. After all, I'd much rather have a useful specification that is ugly than an academic, ivory tower spec that is beautiful but irrelevant.
Slashdot Mirror
That's the same thing. How much carbon dioxide should we be emitting? In a perfect world, zero, but we can't do that, so ultimately governments decide how many credits to make available in a somewhat arbitrary manner. Controlling supply is controlling price.
Sure, of course it's not possible to get this exactly right, but you don't need to. You only need to make the products of companies that emit carbon more expensive. Trying to figure out how much more expensive is what this is all about - the current "state of the art" is carbon credits, the prices of which are set by politicians in response to lobbying. Having them set by the courts is only a minor improvement, but it is still an improvement. You can take into account 'increased risk' with some fancy formulas if you like, or you can say something like "you have a 1 in N chance of having to pay for this disaster" - the effect in terms of raising prices would be the same.
extra bureaucracy
Sure there is. Just make an organization liable for the costs of climate-change related damage relative to the amount of CO2 it directly emits. You already have to buy carbon credits if you emit CO2 so we have a registry of who emits and how much. This way, the cost is amortized over the whole economy, increasing our ability to manage it (via general price increases).
For instance, let's say that mosquitos start moving up into Europe and spreading various nasty diseases. The health insurance claims for these events can be claimed back from the economy as a whole by suing the CO2 emitters in a class action suit. The details of whether a particular problem was caused or the risk increased by climate change can be thrashed out by the courts. I sense some scepticism in your remarks over whether climate change is real - that's OK, you can believe what you want, but I suspect when put in a court any such defence would have a hard time in the face of a nearly unlimited supply of expert witnesses. The CO2 emitters would be forced to try and calculate the risk to the environment from what they do based on what they believe and the advice their experts give them, and would then pass that on to their customers, thus the "true cost" of climate change would ripple through the economy.
This has benefit over the rather artificial carbon credits market, in that the "cost" of emitting a ton of CO2 is - as you rightly point out - basically pulled out of somebodies arse right now. What's more, they were deliberately set low enough to not have any impact on existing businesses, so instead of bringing about real change they just brought extra democracy. The idea of using markets to take action is the right one, but the "risk premium" needs to be priced into everyday goods.
I just made this scheme up off the top of my head. There are several key objections I can anticipate. The first is that climate change seems likely to kill a lot of people via disease/drought/etc, if indeed it's not doing so already, and how can you price a human life? Well, it is possible, but only in various untasteful ways. I don't think this one is solvable, nor should it detract from the scheme - the market is a tool and we need it to serve us now, to reach our end goals.
The second is that it would be inflationary if enacted globally, at once, because it would lead to a round of general price increases which would then in turn cause more borrowing by those without the spare cashflow to absorb it (ie, most people these days), thus inflating the money supply. This is especially true of essentials like oil (let's ignore peak oil for now). Inflation in the presence of a general price increase is not inevitable assuming you define inflation as an increase in the size of the money supply - that's an artifact of the fractional reserve. Replacing the fractional reserve with something less prone to inflation is certainly a good idea. But, if you suppress inflation (eg, by going to a Robertson/Huber type money supply), a general price increase makes us all poorer. That's more or less inevitable though - we would simply be paying what other people less able to pay (because they just lost their food supply/health/whatever) would be paying anyway, but everyone pays a small amount now instead of watching and saying "I hope that never happens to me". It's not a different concept to insurance in fact, but it's not optional, because climate change affects everyone.
The third is that it requires everybody to act more or less in concert. Unfortunately the "race to the bottom" is a general problem with regulating business and should not discourage us from working together to do so.
There are probably more problems with this scheme, but it does have the advantage that carbon emission is priced "naturally" and integrated into the sticker price of things like a unit of electricity - if you can get yourself out of the CO2 emitters game by replacing your electricity usage with solar or wind (or even nuclear!) then you are no longer liable for potentially huge disaster-relief costs, thus you can lower your prices, gaining an advantage over your competitors.
It's very fast at handling large numbers of very small files (at least, this is what they claim, I never tried it for myself). It also has some rather funky design changes from a normal filing system, like eliminating the file/directory duality (ie, you can read and write to a directory as you would a file). The basic design is described in a document on the namesys.com website - the end goal is about "namespace unification", in a Plan9-esque manner. You should read the white papers, they aren't all that heavy and the man - criminal or not - clearly has thought about the design of computer systems in a great deal of detail. His thinking around namespace design has certainly influenced my own.
I love TOD and read it a lot, but I don't see how that can be a concern. I don't know about the doubling time for tritium but we don't use oil to make electricity in Europe or the US, so how long it takes to ramp up fusion is more or less unrelated to oil supplies.
Well? Is it? They might not donate money but they donate 24/7 spectrum to the Reps propaganda, which has to be worth quite a lot ...
Sub-prime collapse is a very recent thing, in the last few months. Inflation of the dollar to pay for Iraq is a much longer-term policy. Inflation has been called the "hidden tax" because you don't feel it coming out of your pocket in the same way you do with regular taxes where there's paperwork and such, but nonetheless, it's a value transfer from you to the government. Bush has been using this "hidden tax" very heavily in recent years.
It's a fact that M3 is no longer published by the Fed. They claim it is "no longer useful" or something ridiculous like that, but the timing is rather suspicious - it's well known that the dollar has been massively inflated to pay for the war in Iraq (just look at the Federal budget deficit). The AC doesn't provide references it's true, but just Google "fed m3" to get the gory details. Then compare the reconstructed M3 for the US to other countries like UK or Switzerland. You'll find that the less allied to the US they are, in general, the more slowly their money supply increases. It's a bad trend.
Yes, there is. If people didn't get paid relative to popularity, then how do you decide how much a particular thing is worth? These debates get to the heart of what "value" is and how the creation of it should be rewarded. How much is a particular "piece" of "content" worth? $10? $100? $1000? If JK Rowling had been paid $100 per Harry Potter book max, do you think she'd have written seven of them? Yet these books (and movies) have brought immense entertainment value to our society, which is a fancy way to say, lots of people enjoyed them.
Yes, it's DRM on subscription, but solving that problem is really outside Microsofts scope. Believe me, NO software company wants to waste time writing and defending DRM software. They do it because the alternative is not being able to sell stuff, and in some cases (like video games) there is no equivalent of the open source model to fill in the gaps with alternative revenue streams.
Seriously. DRM is just a time and money sink. It's necessary because it pays for itself many times over, when done correctly (note: a cracked drm that requires exotic and annoying workarounds will still fulfil its goal). If everybody could be trusted to buy the things they use, it wouldn't be necessary, and the time spent on it would be spent on improving the product instead. But we don't live in such a world.
If we had an economic model in which anybody could copy to their hearts content, and the content creators still got paid commensurate to their products popularity - then you wouldn't need DRM. But it's pretty hard to imagine how that'd work.
+1 to that. Live is really well done, and for me it was the primary reason I got an XBox Live. I have some friends back in my home country, and playing XBL games with them is a good way to keep in touch. There's tons of demos to download, and the XBL Arcade basically solves the party game niche I was considering a Wii for. I'm a big Nintendo fan, and own a DS, but the Wii doesn't have a comparable online experience (and even if it did, it doesn't have my friends on it ...)
Those rules don't seem unreasonable to me. How else are they going to find out what is causing the problems, assuming they were real?
Well, no, it didn't last, but that was mostly a business/marketing issue. StarForce was, if anything, too successful. Too successful because their stuff did actually work, in that when integrated well, it could be months (as you observe) for a crack to be posted. Well, after 6 months of no crack, most people who want the game will have bought it. You might lose the long tail, but dems da breaks. It will be marketed by the DRM companies as a success.
This didn't go down well with a lot of people who were used to getting games for free, as you might imagine! I guess many of us will remember the anti-StarForce campaign that eventually resulted in Ubisoft withdrawing their usage of it in favour of a less tainted brand. The campaign mostly revolved around the allegation that StarForce could break CD drives or cause other nasty technical problems. It wouldn't entirely surprise me if that were true, because these programs do a lot of very bizarre and nasty tricks in order to find emulated CD drives.
Nonetheless, two facts stick in my mind. One is that the company making StarForce offered significant cash rewards to anybody who could send them a machine that was broken in the way being described. AFAIK nobody ever claimed the prize (instead the claims about what broke started shifting). The other is an interesting post from an UbiSoft employee defending their copy protection on the forums. In it they gave a statistical breakdown of the problems reported to their tech support center. As UbiSoft make some very popular games, they had a sample size big enough to be meaningful here.
They found that something like 0.1% of the problems reported to them were tracable to StarForce, and of that 0.1%, about 20% were people who had in fact attempted to crack the game and then had the balls to ask for tech support when it didn't work. That sounds absurd, but when I worked for a commercial software company, we also saw people trying to get (free!) tech support using pirated copies of the program. The rest were mostly people who mistyped their CD Key, or actually did experience blue screens/crashes etc, but their numbers were low enough to be more or less what you'd expect from a population of Windows machines.
Now it's a complex story, and I don't doubt that some people saw very bad problems with StarForce. But I'll take hard statistics derived from 500,000 samples over anecdotes I read from anti-DRM bloggers any day.
These guys are clearly Like Us, and it's to be commended that they rolled up their sleeves and got stuck in. But from reading the article I got the impression they need to sharpen up their business skills a lot. For all the bitching you see about how evil ISPs are on Slashdot, this article demonstrates nicely why they are that way. Some good quotes:
No shit they used a lot of data. A small, new ISP run by a couple of guys that's offering unlimited data access for a flat rate? That must have attracted torrent users like bees to honey. They blame video traffic later, but everytime I talk to an ISP employee about where their bandwidth goes, the answer is always "p2p, everything else" in that order. How did they not see this coming? Did they really think existing ISPs impose caps and throttles because they were told to last time they communed with Beazulbub? I won't even comment on using credit cards to pay business costs ....
Stories like this indicate why people might think that way.I like their courage in trying to shake up the ISP market like this, but a cold, realistic assessment of why existing ISPs are the way they are would probably have helped.
No, what was actually said was that in the year 2000 oil production would peak and then start to decline. That's not the same as "oil running out" - indeed, oil will probably never run out. Production rates will get so low however that we might as well have run out. This prediction was made by a petroleum geologist working for Shell, and was based on extrapolation of trends and observed decline rates in existing fields.
Well, oil production didn't peak in 2000. I guess that means it'll never peak! Oh, wait. Shortly after his prediction, the world went through the oil shocks of the late 70s and 80s, which if you plot the production graph pushed the peak date forward by about 7 years. That means if you adjust Hubberts prediction for the oil shocks, production should be levelling off about now. Is it? Well, yes.
Not convinced about that myself. The Y-Combinator companies seem to be mostly cookie-cutter "let's take this well worn problem, and do it in Rails!" type ventures. Wake me up when one has a truly new idea, executes well, and gets big. Until then it's basically riding on Grahams name.
Did you actually read that report? In my humble opinion, it was basically some guys opinion dressed up as a scientific study. There was no repeatable methodology and the author didn't even bother to fully fill out the matrix. Go read the comments on the story you linked to, if you want to get more detailed commentary.
Incidentally, I say this as a very biased person. I work for Google, on Google Maps. As per usual, what's written here is my own opinion and not that of my employers. I won't comment on the Google vs Microsoft debate - it's not my place to do so - but I'd like to say that I've seen first hand (and participated in) the very strict procedures we have in place to protect peoples privacy.
For instance, I'm one of the very few people who have Maps logs access (ie, I can see cookies and IP addresses), and that's only because I work directly with the servers on a day-to-day basis and do abuse handling as part of my job. The vast majority of Maps developers have no logs access at all. I have to periodically rejustify my access, I'm not allowed to track any individual cookie or IP address for longer than 24 hours, my own usage of the logs is recorded and audited, I'm not allowed to take the logs out of their secure holding area and am not allowed to give logs in non-scrubbed form to anybody else. Violating these rules is grounds for instant termination. Contrast this with ISPs which sell clickstream data on the open market.
I'm not trying to make any statement of policy or anything, because that's not my job, but if end-user privacy is going to be a deciding factor in which maps product to use, hopefully now you have more insight into how seriously we treat end user data (what I described applies to all Google products by the way).
The other questionable use of statistics here is the fact that the percentage of solved crimes hardly varies at all - they're comparing a clear up rate of 22% to 25% and then looking at the number of cameras. Such a small difference in clearup rate could easily be noise, and regardless of that, how many times do politicians have to be told - correlation does not imply causation. Perhaps these boroughs have the same sized police force for different number of crimes? Seems more likely to me, as police forces aren't liquid - their size doesn't fluctuate from month to month to handle changing crime rates. Any such changes are very slow, but gangs can move in and out very fast, especially in London.
See Miss Teen South Carolina.
The reason they look increasingly extremist is because the FSF tends to make up policies and rules which bind GCC development in order to avoid the theoretical risk of making GPL violations easier. As compiler technology advances these restrictions have become increasingly burdensome, in particular, several of the technical advantages of LLVM are things the GCC team would have liked to do but RMS nixed because it would have made it too easy to circumvent the license.
Sorry, that should read major changes to the software
That's nonsense. You're mixing up currency fluctuations with inflation. Go use the handy inflation calculator courtesy of Uncle Sam to find out that $100 in 2002 has the same buying power as $115 today. Now, you can argue about how governments calculate inflation or even what inflation is, but it's definitely not that high.
Fact is the OLPC missed its $100 target a long time ago. There were a couple of "sacred cows" that were enormously expensive resource wise and which they raised the specs to accomodate instead of sacrificing them. I'm talking about Gecko and Python - both of which gobble resources, especially memory, like there's no tomorrow. They already doubled the memory capacity of the laptop and who knows how the final thing will perform, they're still making major changes to the hardware. There are lighter tools that could have been used, but some of them are proprietary or ugly so they were cast aside (for instance, WebKit/Opera and C++).
It's quite possible to prove that copy protection is a net financial win, incidentally. The copy protection vendors know perfectly well that a game or app will be cracked eventually, but especially for games by the time it's done not many people are buying it anyway.
And this is different to ODF how?
I read the "OOXML defective by design" thing, and then I read Miguels rebuttal of it. To be honest, I found them both interesting, but I thought the rebuttal was pretty strong. In particular the comparison to ODF is interesting. If what Miguel says about it is true (and I don't see any reason why it wouldn't be, seeing as he employs a ton of OO.org hackers) then OOXML is indeed a "superb spec" compared to ODF - which apparently devotes only 14 pages to formula definitions (!!!).
A lot of people have mentioned the "MS Excel Date bug". As Miguel points out below, this bug is not a Microsoft error, it came from Lotus 1-2-3 and perhaps Lotus implemented it to be compatible with an even earlier spreadsheet. Now, you can argue that this bug should be "fixed" and such arguments are pretty common on Slashdot, where academic correctness is often valued above practical concerns like backwards compatibility. But in practice the hard, boring work of "upgrading" all the existing stuff that depends on that bug is ignored ... presumably somebody else will do it. If 90% of the spreadsheets actually out there, you know, getting shit done in companies and other organisations .... if they all assume a buggy date format, you'd have to be insane to want to fix that bug. Go right ahead and encode it into the specification. After all, I'd much rather have a useful specification that is ugly than an academic, ivory tower spec that is beautiful but irrelevant.