If America wants schools that can teach kids to compete and get good scores in standardized tests, they need to import the entire school's staff, from the top, to all the teachers, from Asia. Then you can see what difference it will make to the kids.
Actually, from what you're saying, it would make much more sense to import the parents (and their hard effort / strong academic motivation) from Asia... The main problem seems to be the culture/parents, not the academic establishment.
I have a lot of responsibilities as well as interests besides gaming. It has been over 10 years since I could, say, spend a whole weekend diving through a Final Fantasy title. I love the epic game style, 60 hour game? yes please. But please, let me play it in 120 30 minute increments and feel good about it.
Sorry, but can't do that. If that happens it means you will consume your game at a much slower pace, and therefore won't buy version 3 of the same title next fall (after buying all DLC and expansions and version 2, of course). Why, you may even enjoy your game, rather than rush to the end...
I don't care how technical you want to get about the definition of theft, depriving someone of money is wrong.
If someone creates and sells a software that replaces Photoshop, it will also deprive Adobe of money. It is not the act of depriving someone of (potential) money that is wrong (although it may be illegal). You don't have a "natural" right to force someone to give you money, you know, although you may convince the state to grant you that benefit.
Intelectual/Imaginary Property is a fiction. It may be a useful fiction, but as with all fictions, once you try to extend it and to treat it as reality, it breaks and loses much of its usefulness.
According to the newspapers, the successful attempt was on the carrying bag for the media (which I assume carries the data required). It seems lack of physical security still can happen, but the media is supposedly cryptographically signed, so replacing it would be hard in any case.
Another thing is that you are still usually leaking DNS queries to your ISP, which may even return false results if you're being censored in China or something and they still see what sites you're visiting.
I believe you don't leak DNS queries if you use tor like a SOCKS proxy (therefore proxying the DNS queries). Although the exit note could mess with your DNS queries if you do so (a hard security trade-off, to be sure).
Now if they promise not to 'include it' in future patches that would be swell. I might actually considering trying it.
Yeah, that really stopped people from buying World of Warcraft.
Notice that the WoW Warden is much less intrusive than GameGuard (it even allows for playing WoW on Linux using wine, which means it is very much standards compliant). Big difference here.
That's... pathetic. I have 50 megabit fiber (in Japan) and I've downloaded 5-gigabyte files in minutes before.
I don't have fiber - I have hybrid cable, but I can achieve the download speeds you mention. However, we are talking about uploads, and most ISPs prefer to sell grossly assymetric connections (don't know about Japan but where I live, although I can get 100Mbps download using fiber, it only achieves 10MBps upload on the more expensive option - and 2 MBps on the cheapest).
Umm, an hour of downtime doesn't mean your data is gone. I'll also echo earlier comments -- locally hosted email generally has more problems, as no company but the largest enterprise has the same magnitude of IT equipment and experience as Google.
I've never really understood why so many Slashdotters have this attitude about hosted services. Perhaps they are local IT folks for smaller companies, and fear for their jobs?
Could be in part that.
Another explanation is that most that work as local IT folks (for any kind of business) know that when anything breaks, its always considered their fault (they are the people-facing shields, not the actual service providers elsewhere). And everything anything remote "breaks", or suffers any kind of troubles THEY will know it (because people will complain to them). Therefore, they both consider remote services less reliable than the average person (they know about more outages) as well as consider them less flexible (they can fix local problems, but are impotent to fix remote ones).
You know, after the Roman Republic turned into the Empire (with the attendant loss of freedoms), it survived for over 400 years. And we're nowhere near that point - no US presidents are ex-generals who conquered Washington, D.C. with their troops.
This is not the end.
Just a little history lesson... the loss of freedoms that happened in Rome happened in fact a little before the transition to Empire (Sulla, the civil wars, etc.) And in fact the plebe was just as oppressed before as after (only the aristocrats were really moved in the transition since the Roman Senate was never nowhere near democratic, not even by the poor Athenian standards)
What they want is for Google to boost their PageRank to where it would be with the Google linklove, without wanting Google's linklove. Which seems like a perfectly unreasonable demand to me.
Precisely. And that doesn't even assume that google probably trusts more the link data it gets from its own sites (which it controls) over the one from the public at large (therefore again boosting web search rank for the sites that are cited in google news or indeed, any google generated content...
They accuse Google of dropping them out of their search results (or at least lowering their pagerank) if they ask Google to remove their articles from Google News. So the accusation is abuse of a dominant position.
As far as the newspapers are concerned, news search and web search are separate business, but I doubt google should be forced to folllow the same definition. Abuse of dominant position requires one to have monopoly power (granted, google has it on web search and plausibly also on news search) but also deliberately using that power to somehow hinder competitors. I am not sure that google should be required to keep newspapers on one index while removing it from other or to prevent changes on one index to be reflected on another (why should a company be required to keep completed isolated indexes?).
I want to know where these "computer ID numbers" all of a sudden appeared from because if they are MAC or IP addresses, either can be spoofed easily.
Well, most computers have a CPUID nowadays. You remember, the ones that were supposed not to be used for identification against the user but to help e-commerce more secure. Yep.
Of course, also not incredibaly hard to disable, at least on current motherboards.
The data would be anonymous, but serious repeat infringers would be tracked down through their computer ID numbers.
This must be some definition of the word 'anonymous' that I was not previously aware of.
The correct term would be pseudonymous, I guess. It is not directly personably identifiable information, but stands for it. Idealy it would not be reversible by itself, but could allow for identification upon further downloads. Think of a one-way hash.
the language (and the associated tools) are available
it has all of the fundamentals of programming (looping, flow control, data structures, variables, etc)
and it grabs their interest
who cares what languages they learn? If they enjoy it and it allows them to learn how to program why should it matter what language they start out with?
Well, I do have some experience (more than 20 years, actually) in teaching programming. I would agree that ANY language can be used to teach programming, but it DOES MATTER which one is used. The reason is, people will go to (and only learn) what's easier to use on each language.
On most (all?) languages, all the components are available for people to learn effective programming, but on some of them, the constructs people will use most are not enough to create a full understanding of programming. You create "paper programmers" that can solve (mostly by boilerplate copying) easy or familiar problems, but cannot think outside using those "pre-built" tools. Sure, you can ignore some constructs and just teach the basic components, but then, why are you using that particular language?
Another question to consider is the "initial steps" required to start doing something. On many languages (and mostly on "powerfull" programming languages), to be able to create something requires either the use of specialized IDEs that take you away from the actual code or lots and lots of complex syntax that is hard to explain to a neophyte other than saying "its required, you'll learn about it later". Neither is ideal.
AFAIK, it looks like a moodle plugin to allow the use of the "live" services in Moodle, including to allow single sign in.
Obviously this is to help locking the users since early on to MS services. Not evil in itself (and I suppose that either google has the same thing or is thinking in doing the same). But it mostly benefits MS, not Moodle.
Now is the time to pass a bill requiring that all the digital goods encumbered by DRM should be made available without such restrictions (and free of charge) to those who bought them.
Since even RIAA acknowledges that DRM is dead, there should be no objections to such a common sense measure, right?
The idea of delaying the RTS release to 10.10 instead of 10.4 may not be the best one (although I can see the advantages of Ubuntu/Debian release synch).
The RTS is supported 3 years on the desktop,so if they make the next RTS 10.10, it will mean that the orgs that are running RTS will have just 6 months to upgrade to next RTS before the previous is EOLed. I know most people don't really care about that, but for large deployments, to force that kind of change schedule is not really nice.
DRM is a restriction but sadly its a reality that most publishers and authors would want it.
In principle, why wouldn't they want it? It increases their control over the work at the expense of the public, who is (mostly) ignorant they aren't buying the same thing when they buy a DRM infected work than when they buy something DRM-free. The only way to defeat DRM really is to educate people that something "bought" that uses DRM is not really bought, just rented at the whim of the publisher (and people will value it accordingly). "Selling" goods using DRM is really false advertising.
That's not quite true, pirates are much more likely to win than that. It's a matter of will, and if you get enough people cracking the protection schemes quickly enough at launch, DRM will eventually go away. DRM is about control and profit, if the schemes are broken fast enough there's definitely a question of why spend many thousands of dollars locking something down that'll be cracked within a few weeks. Sure it does help with sales initially, but you're typically having to sell a hell of a lot of copies in order to break even and it does put one at a competitive disadvantage to those that don't need to sell those extra copies.
Not to mention the fact that there's a surprising number of people that don't pirate software that doesn't have DRM incorporated into it.
It just will give the publishers reasons to create business models where most of the profit is extracted from users while the DRM hasn't been cracked yet (or if it has, the work is not sufficiently disseminated to most users to be able to access it) all the while decrying the "evil pirates". I would assume it will still be (financially, at least on the short term) better for those publishers to follow that path than to adapt their business models to a world where the competition is must greater (because you must fight all the other works at near zero cost).
Until the Copyright Term Extension Act is rescinded, I consider all media produced by "artists" affiliated with the companies/guilds/unions that bought the law, to be free.
So, how will you feel when someone else considers anything you produce to be free?
Free to make copies of? I would assume he feels OK with that.
I don't think piracy is their main concern here. I believe this may be a (somewhat misguided) idea to get a subscription of SCII players, like they got used with WoW. Sure, they said they would allow all bought copies to play on bnet, but they haven't precluded some options (like e.g. a subscription allows you to have pre-made groups, or bigger battles, or something like that). If people buy the game and don't log on bnet, some carrots and sticks will be missing on their options.
Perhaps "liberal" refers to freedom in some countries. But in the United States, it has come to mean "socialist" since the New Deal. And in order to support socialist ideals like universal health care, many socialist regimes limit the personal freedom to experiment with substances such as cannabis.
Stangely enough, I believe drug-offense laws are much more prevalent in conservative-led countries (like the US), not the socialist-inclined (and less still in social-democrat - in the European tradition - countries - see, e.g. The Netherlands). They are much more liable to limit personal freedom on the economic level, though.
we need to be careful that politicians do not get talked into putting legislation in place that, in the end, ends up looking stupid.
or even worse, introduces new problems without solving the intended ones.
Trouble is, some of the new problems it introduces (namely overbearing policing of actions online, bordering on a police state) are not usually seen as problems by the politicians (at least those in power or which hope to achieve it soon), but rather goals that they date not describe publicly...
Self-replying, I know, but I just thought of something else.
According to TFS, Office fails to load ODF files created by any other application. If those files are compliant with ODF standards, the blame for this lies squarely on Microsoft. They fail to open standards-compliant ODF files.
Conversely, if the files produced by MS Office are valid standards-compliant ODF files (which they may be according to the letter of the standard) we should also blame the other apps if they fail to use them, isn't so? They will also fail to open standards-compliant ODF files.
Then there's the burden on the copyright holder. Presently, the bar for copyrighting a work is very low. Basically, the work is copyrighted at the time of creation. This is a good thing. It means that anyone willing to create a work for the benefit of society and/or themselves can do so without any extra effort or onerous paperwork. This not only encourages contribution, it makes copyrighting as we know it today possible. If authors had to submit documents every year for everything they held copyright on, it would be an insurmountable task for many. Just about any written word put on paper (or screen) by a company is copyrighted. The average company wouldn't be able to keep up with this, let alone websites, blog authors, independent artists, research firms, record labels, and even regular Slashdot posters.
And if that works would lose copyright protection, why precisely would that be a problem ?
The number of "serendipitous successes", that is work that is a unexpected success and whose authors benefit from copyright rewards after must surely be a lot smaller than the number of "orphan" works that would benefit society to access. I myself, although a published author, would very much agree to a copyright statute that would require active management to keep the copyright monopoly on reproduction of owns work.
Slashdot Mirror
If America wants schools that can teach kids to compete and get good scores in standardized tests, they need to import the entire school's staff, from the top, to all the teachers, from Asia. Then you can see what difference it will make to the kids.
Actually, from what you're saying, it would make much more sense to import the parents (and their hard effort / strong academic motivation) from Asia... The main problem seems to be the culture/parents, not the academic establishment.
I have a lot of responsibilities as well as interests besides gaming. It has been over 10 years since I could, say, spend a whole weekend diving through a Final Fantasy title. I love the epic game style, 60 hour game? yes please. But please, let me play it in 120 30 minute increments and feel good about it.
Sorry, but can't do that. If that happens it means you will consume your game at a much slower pace, and therefore won't buy version 3 of the same title next fall (after buying all DLC and expansions and version 2, of course). Why, you may even enjoy your game, rather than rush to the end...
I don't care how technical you want to get about the definition of theft, depriving someone of money is wrong.
If someone creates and sells a software that replaces Photoshop, it will also deprive Adobe of money. It is not the act of depriving someone of (potential) money that is wrong (although it may be illegal). You don't have a "natural" right to force someone to give you money, you know, although you may convince the state to grant you that benefit.
Intelectual/Imaginary Property is a fiction. It may be a useful fiction, but as with all fictions, once you try to extend it and to treat it as reality, it breaks and loses much of its usefulness.
According to the newspapers, the successful attempt was on the carrying bag for the media (which I assume carries the data required). It seems lack of physical security still can happen, but the media is supposedly cryptographically signed, so replacing it would be hard in any case.
Another thing is that you are still usually leaking DNS queries to your ISP, which may even return false results if you're being censored in China or something and they still see what sites you're visiting.
I believe you don't leak DNS queries if you use tor like a SOCKS proxy (therefore proxying the DNS queries). Although the exit note could mess with your DNS queries if you do so (a hard security trade-off, to be sure).
Now if they promise not to 'include it' in future patches that would be swell. I might actually considering trying it.
Yeah, that really stopped people from buying World of Warcraft.
Notice that the WoW Warden is much less intrusive than GameGuard (it even allows for playing WoW on Linux using wine, which means it is very much standards compliant). Big difference here.
That's... pathetic. I have 50 megabit fiber (in Japan) and I've downloaded 5-gigabyte files in minutes before.
I don't have fiber - I have hybrid cable, but I can achieve the download speeds you mention. However, we are talking about uploads, and most ISPs prefer to sell grossly assymetric connections (don't know about Japan but where I live, although I can get 100Mbps download using fiber, it only achieves 10MBps upload on the more expensive option - and 2 MBps on the cheapest).
Umm, an hour of downtime doesn't mean your data is gone. I'll also echo earlier comments -- locally hosted email generally has more problems, as no company but the largest enterprise has the same magnitude of IT equipment and experience as Google.
I've never really understood why so many Slashdotters have this attitude about hosted services. Perhaps they are local IT folks for smaller companies, and fear for their jobs?
Could be in part that. Another explanation is that most that work as local IT folks (for any kind of business) know that when anything breaks, its always considered their fault (they are the people-facing shields, not the actual service providers elsewhere). And everything anything remote "breaks", or suffers any kind of troubles THEY will know it (because people will complain to them). Therefore, they both consider remote services less reliable than the average person (they know about more outages) as well as consider them less flexible (they can fix local problems, but are impotent to fix remote ones).
You know, after the Roman Republic turned into the Empire (with the attendant loss of freedoms), it survived for over 400 years. And we're nowhere near that point - no US presidents are ex-generals who conquered Washington, D.C. with their troops.
This is not the end.
Just a little history lesson... the loss of freedoms that happened in Rome happened in fact a little before the transition to Empire (Sulla, the civil wars, etc.) And in fact the plebe was just as oppressed before as after (only the aristocrats were really moved in the transition since the Roman Senate was never nowhere near democratic, not even by the poor Athenian standards)
What they want is for Google to boost their PageRank to where it would be with the Google linklove, without wanting Google's linklove. Which seems like a perfectly unreasonable demand to me.
Precisely. And that doesn't even assume that google probably trusts more the link data it gets from its own sites (which it controls) over the one from the public at large (therefore again boosting web search rank for the sites that are cited in google news or indeed, any google generated content...
They accuse Google of dropping them out of their search results (or at least lowering their pagerank) if they ask Google to remove their articles from Google News. So the accusation is abuse of a dominant position.
As far as the newspapers are concerned, news search and web search are separate business, but I doubt google should be forced to folllow the same definition. Abuse of dominant position requires one to have monopoly power (granted, google has it on web search and plausibly also on news search) but also deliberately using that power to somehow hinder competitors. I am not sure that google should be required to keep newspapers on one index while removing it from other or to prevent changes on one index to be reflected on another (why should a company be required to keep completed isolated indexes?).
I want to know where these "computer ID numbers" all of a sudden appeared from because if they are MAC or IP addresses, either can be spoofed easily.
Well, most computers have a CPUID nowadays. You remember, the ones that were supposed not to be used for identification against the user but to help e-commerce more secure. Yep. Of course, also not incredibaly hard to disable, at least on current motherboards.
The data would be anonymous, but serious repeat infringers would be tracked down through their computer ID numbers.
This must be some definition of the word 'anonymous' that I was not previously aware of.
The correct term would be pseudonymous, I guess. It is not directly personably identifiable information, but stands for it. Idealy it would not be reversible by itself, but could allow for identification upon further downloads. Think of a one-way hash.
>
As long as:
who cares what languages they learn? If they enjoy it and it allows them to learn how to program why should it matter what language they start out with?
Well, I do have some experience (more than 20 years, actually) in teaching programming. I would agree that ANY language can be used to teach programming, but it DOES MATTER which one is used. The reason is, people will go to (and only learn) what's easier to use on each language. On most (all?) languages, all the components are available for people to learn effective programming, but on some of them, the constructs people will use most are not enough to create a full understanding of programming. You create "paper programmers" that can solve (mostly by boilerplate copying) easy or familiar problems, but cannot think outside using those "pre-built" tools. Sure, you can ignore some constructs and just teach the basic components, but then, why are you using that particular language?
Another question to consider is the "initial steps" required to start doing something. On many languages (and mostly on "powerfull" programming languages), to be able to create something requires either the use of specialized IDEs that take you away from the actual code or lots and lots of complex syntax that is hard to explain to a neophyte other than saying "its required, you'll learn about it later". Neither is ideal.
Obviously this is to help locking the users since early on to MS services. Not evil in itself (and I suppose that either google has the same thing or is thinking in doing the same). But it mostly benefits MS, not Moodle.
Since even RIAA acknowledges that DRM is dead, there should be no objections to such a common sense measure, right?
The RTS is supported 3 years on the desktop,so if they make the next RTS 10.10, it will mean that the orgs that are running RTS will have just 6 months to upgrade to next RTS before the previous is EOLed. I know most people don't really care about that, but for large deployments, to force that kind of change schedule is not really nice.
DRM is a restriction but sadly its a reality that most publishers and authors would want it.
In principle, why wouldn't they want it? It increases their control over the work at the expense of the public, who is (mostly) ignorant they aren't buying the same thing when they buy a DRM infected work than when they buy something DRM-free. The only way to defeat DRM really is to educate people that something "bought" that uses DRM is not really bought, just rented at the whim of the publisher (and people will value it accordingly). "Selling" goods using DRM is really false advertising.
That's not quite true, pirates are much more likely to win than that. It's a matter of will, and if you get enough people cracking the protection schemes quickly enough at launch, DRM will eventually go away. DRM is about control and profit, if the schemes are broken fast enough there's definitely a question of why spend many thousands of dollars locking something down that'll be cracked within a few weeks. Sure it does help with sales initially, but you're typically having to sell a hell of a lot of copies in order to break even and it does put one at a competitive disadvantage to those that don't need to sell those extra copies. Not to mention the fact that there's a surprising number of people that don't pirate software that doesn't have DRM incorporated into it.
It just will give the publishers reasons to create business models where most of the profit is extracted from users while the DRM hasn't been cracked yet (or if it has, the work is not sufficiently disseminated to most users to be able to access it) all the while decrying the "evil pirates". I would assume it will still be (financially, at least on the short term) better for those publishers to follow that path than to adapt their business models to a world where the competition is must greater (because you must fight all the other works at near zero cost).
Until the Copyright Term Extension Act is rescinded, I consider all media produced by "artists" affiliated with the companies/guilds/unions that bought the law, to be free.
So, how will you feel when someone else considers anything you produce to be free?
Free to make copies of? I would assume he feels OK with that.
I don't think piracy is their main concern here. I believe this may be a (somewhat misguided) idea to get a subscription of SCII players, like they got used with WoW. Sure, they said they would allow all bought copies to play on bnet, but they haven't precluded some options (like e.g. a subscription allows you to have pre-made groups, or bigger battles, or something like that). If people buy the game and don't log on bnet, some carrots and sticks will be missing on their options.
Perhaps "liberal" refers to freedom in some countries. But in the United States, it has come to mean "socialist" since the New Deal. And in order to support socialist ideals like universal health care, many socialist regimes limit the personal freedom to experiment with substances such as cannabis.
Stangely enough, I believe drug-offense laws are much more prevalent in conservative-led countries (like the US), not the socialist-inclined (and less still in social-democrat - in the European tradition - countries - see, e.g. The Netherlands). They are much more liable to limit personal freedom on the economic level, though.
we need to be careful that politicians do not get talked into putting legislation in place that, in the end, ends up looking stupid.
or even worse, introduces new problems without solving the intended ones.
Trouble is, some of the new problems it introduces (namely overbearing policing of actions online, bordering on a police state) are not usually seen as problems by the politicians (at least those in power or which hope to achieve it soon), but rather goals that they date not describe publicly...
Self-replying, I know, but I just thought of something else.
According to TFS, Office fails to load ODF files created by any other application. If those files are compliant with ODF standards, the blame for this lies squarely on Microsoft. They fail to open standards-compliant ODF files.
Conversely, if the files produced by MS Office are valid standards-compliant ODF files (which they may be according to the letter of the standard) we should also blame the other apps if they fail to use them, isn't so? They will also fail to open standards-compliant ODF files.
Then there's the burden on the copyright holder. Presently, the bar for copyrighting a work is very low. Basically, the work is copyrighted at the time of creation. This is a good thing. It means that anyone willing to create a work for the benefit of society and/or themselves can do so without any extra effort or onerous paperwork. This not only encourages contribution, it makes copyrighting as we know it today possible. If authors had to submit documents every year for everything they held copyright on, it would be an insurmountable task for many. Just about any written word put on paper (or screen) by a company is copyrighted. The average company wouldn't be able to keep up with this, let alone websites, blog authors, independent artists, research firms, record labels, and even regular Slashdot posters.
And if that works would lose copyright protection, why precisely would that be a problem ? The number of "serendipitous successes", that is work that is a unexpected success and whose authors benefit from copyright rewards after must surely be a lot smaller than the number of "orphan" works that would benefit society to access. I myself, although a published author, would very much agree to a copyright statute that would require active management to keep the copyright monopoly on reproduction of owns work.