1) Everything that can be digitized, will be pirated. People just don't believe in copyright any more. The law, RIAA, etc can either like it - or stand in front of the stampede yelling "stop", and be stomped into mush. There is no third option. DRM will fail. Legislating will fail. Sueing will fail. Whining will fail. People just don't care, and they're willing to play the odds.
2) The presence of freebies need not wipe out sales, in fact it can drive sales. I know I have bought music albums because I heard the song for free, and books because I read them in the library and wanted my own. Provided the price is plausible, people prefer a pretty, professional hardcopy to a hackish ugly computer-file.
You speak like this was your money they were spending. NASA is, X-Prize isn't. They've explicitly disallowed state help or funding. It's the contenders' own money and they can spend it however they please, including on things you consider frivolous. Likewise they can risk their own lives, who the hell are you to tell them not to?
Oh, and space flight isn't an end in itself (except to tourists and adventurers), but nor is it only there for some dry academic's miserly conception of "genuine science". It's a tool towards the real end: colonizing the solar system, then the stars. If you think differently, you underestimate the wanderlust and expansion-instinct which are natural to the human species.
To give up and go home would be uneconomic. Building a suborbital hopper isn't cheap. Gotta commercialize it, to pay the bills. Tourists first, then superfast intercontinental travel. That means commodity parts, spaceports, refuel/repair infrastructure. All of which will help when they announce the prize for LEO...
I mean, this was the seventies, all those culture changes, people might suddenly get entirely different ideas from seeing a huge cylindrical object labeled "black prince".
Now maybe it's just me, but I suspect that this will have web designers gnashing their teeth like nothing else. You can't specify what the form looks like, just "this is a thing wherein you pick one from the following items". All your pixel perfect graphics will be garbled when you design with xforms and the browser takes it upon itself to render a picklist instead of a set of radio buttons, or some such.
This stuff is all solving an extremely transient problem (weak displays on phones and handhelds - you think they'll still be that bad in five years?) by making everyone else suffer.
"Good UI design" as conventionally taught is overwhelmingly biased towards lusers. For some apps (eg: office suites), this makes sense. They're interchangeable programs used by interchangeable employees.
But, for apps that are extremely "vertical" (heavily used by a very small, elite group of users) a whole different set of design principles is sensible. Essentially: make the common things fast, make the rare things possible, and then get the hell out of the way. Being nicey-nice to the uninitiated does NOT figure on the priority list. RTFM.
Blender, obviously, falls into the latter category.
Yanno, this could already be practised easily enough by such "evil corporate types" as, say, Joe, the guy who owns and runs the shop from which you buy your coffee. Since you and he often chat at the till, he knows that you're really into gourmet coffee, and so's the wife, so he gives you a slight discount on coffee. He knows he'll turn a profit anyway on sheer quantity, and it's both a friendly gesture and a good way of keeping you loyal.
Oh no, "price discrimination"! Cue wailing and gnashing of teeth by varous commies and other procrustean egalitarians.
Now suppose this "price discrimination" became more widespread. Busineses don't give away free money, especially big ones. If they cut the price of something, it wil be for a reason. Mostly what they're paying for is reduced risk. Businesses have to set aside money against contingent risks such as overstocking. When they give you a reduced price, it's most likely because they can reduce their risk if you're a customer. Since you always buy coffee, the risk of overstocking goes down. Scale this up to the economy as a whole, and companies waste less money, can use more, and the economy benefits as does anyone seeking a job, etc.
"Price discrimination" this way already exists, but mostly it's geographic. Live in a neighborhood of thugs, and you carry the cost of their depredations, via raised local prices.
...I just do it via persuasion rather than force. Make no mistake, voting is force. N times removed via proxies, but when you vote something and it becomes law (or emplaces lawmakers) then people may be killed or jailed or have their property stolen because of your vote. Almost certainly they will be robbed ("taxed") to pay for it.
My refusal is both principle and pragmatism: you cannot win a battle by playing within the rules-sandpit your enemy defines. It is not apathy to refuse to participate in the prescribed "political process", especially when one takes part in the real political process: changing people's opinions, one at a time if necessary.
...and I have a good reason not to: I don't believe in mob rule (aka "democracy"). Nobody has the right to vote away other people's property, liberty, or life. Two people can't rightly steal from or kill one person; likewise neither can two billion. Majority is no excuse.
Not everyone who doesn't vote is just being "apathetic".
The organ shortage is caused by the stupid socialist-egalitarian idea that you should not be able to sell organs, nor should you be able to buy them. Just as socialism in agriculture and retail brought food queues, socialism in medicine brings organ queues.
So, how to fix it?
First, stop preventing people from selling on the open market their own live-donatable organs (eg: kidneys) or bodystuffs (eg: sperm, eggs, blood).
Second, stop preventing the body of the deceased being treated as hereditable property. Allowed the choice between being buried intact, or giving an extra financial boost to their loved ones, many people would happily put their organs up for sale. Just as with any other property, the disposition of the body should, in the absence of a will, be up to the next of kin.
Third, stop preventing people from bidding on the open market to buy organs from donors.
I say "stop preventing" very deliberately here. The problem is not what people should be "allowed" to do, as if the default were slavery. The problem is the state acting as though it owned your body, live and, especially, dead. It steals the opton to make a personal gain, and then scratches its head at the shortage of people willing to give freebies. It should just get the hell out of the way. Then, normal market forces will expand donorship - and provide a natural incentive for companies to develop cloned in-vitro organs.
Needless to say, every "solution" that is based on forcing donors will fail dismally. People will opt for cremation, or travel abroad to die. Nobody loves a thief, and especially not a grave-robber.
This is not a troll. This is not flamebait. I mean every word.
Wonderful. Right up until you pull a wheelie, and the frame shatters and spits you from anus to esophagus. Yegads, but that's a big splinter you've got there, son!
It would be a very, very silly idea to put your journal on flash. It's a small block of space that gets repeatedly written and rewritten by lots of small changes, pretty much every time any file changes. Precisely the usage pattern that would wear down a flash chip in the shortest time.
The only sensible places to put a journal are (1) on (fast) magnetic media (2) on battery backed RAM.
The negotiation I was referring to, was the old hostages-in-a-plane doctrine of "talk calmly and persuade the bad guys to land and give themselves up".
It's easier on the short-of-brains to refight the last war. Anyone sensible knows the "hijack and crash" trick won't work twice. It was dependent upon a preference for negotiation, which no longer exists.
Oh, and they fail to grasp: flight sim experience might as easily save a plane, as doom it. What if some nutter shoots the flight crew? A flight trained passenger could save everybody's necks.
If recycling is unprofitable, what does that mean? It means that economic effort is being poured into it, poured down the drain and gone. That effort converts into energy use, resource use, time use, ingenuity use. With actual useful resource returns from recycling nowhere near 100%, are good resources being poured after bad?
Green-minded people seem IMO seldom to think that far.
E-gold and Goldmoney are almost infinitely splittable. E-gold, denominated in ounces, lets you put six digits to the right of the decimal. That's three hundredths of a cent.
I admit I don't grok why so many people like eclipse. I use and know netbeans, I tried eclipse and my initial experience was:
- it's confusing as hell
- you have to play in its own sandbox of "projects", no easy way to just mount directories the way NB does it.
- it was slower than NB. Admittedly I'm limited to the GTK compile of eclipse and my machine has a half-gig of memory. but I was getting flicker just moving the text cursor in the edit window, and even NB isn't that slow.
- it has a squillion dependencies, and requires a bleeding-edge version of GTK. NB meanwhile can boot on any box that can run a modern JDK.
- I found it less intuitive. Can't just casually browse into a file on the file tree and see its methods, copy and paste them between classes, etc. Can't use the same mechanism to browse inside a mounted jarfile. And so forth.
So, o eclipse users, enlighten me, what is the good stuff about your favourite IDE?
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Look at it this way:
- The enemies of linux "invest" in SCO.
- SCO loses dismally, and suffers.
- By extension so do the enemies of linux.
- Rejoicing ensues as the bad-guys are slapped down en masse.
1) Everything that can be digitized, will be pirated. People just don't believe in copyright any more. The law, RIAA, etc can either like it - or stand in front of the stampede yelling "stop", and be stomped into mush. There is no third option. DRM will fail. Legislating will fail. Sueing will fail. Whining will fail. People just don't care, and they're willing to play the odds.
2) The presence of freebies need not wipe out sales, in fact it can drive sales. I know I have bought music albums because I heard the song for free, and books because I read them in the library and wanted my own. Provided the price is plausible, people prefer a pretty, professional hardcopy to a hackish ugly computer-file.
You speak like this was your money they were spending. NASA is, X-Prize isn't. They've explicitly disallowed state help or funding. It's the contenders' own money and they can spend it however they please, including on things you consider frivolous. Likewise they can risk their own lives, who the hell are you to tell them not to?
Oh, and space flight isn't an end in itself (except to tourists and adventurers), but nor is it only there for some dry academic's miserly conception of "genuine science". It's a tool towards the real end: colonizing the solar system, then the stars. If you think differently, you underestimate the wanderlust and expansion-instinct which are natural to the human species.
To give up and go home would be uneconomic. Building a suborbital hopper isn't cheap. Gotta commercialize it, to pay the bills. Tourists first, then superfast intercontinental travel. That means commodity parts, spaceports, refuel/repair infrastructure. All of which will help when they announce the prize for LEO...
I mean, this was the seventies, all those culture changes, people might suddenly get entirely different ideas from seeing a huge cylindrical object labeled "black prince".
Now maybe it's just me, but I suspect that this will have web designers gnashing their teeth like nothing else. You can't specify what the form looks like, just "this is a thing wherein you pick one from the following items". All your pixel perfect graphics will be garbled when you design with xforms and the browser takes it upon itself to render a picklist instead of a set of radio buttons, or some such.
This stuff is all solving an extremely transient problem (weak displays on phones and handhelds - you think they'll still be that bad in five years?) by making everyone else suffer.
"Good UI design" as conventionally taught is overwhelmingly biased towards lusers. For some apps (eg: office suites), this makes sense. They're interchangeable programs used by interchangeable employees.
But, for apps that are extremely "vertical" (heavily used by a very small, elite group of users) a whole different set of design principles is sensible. Essentially: make the common things fast, make the rare things possible, and then get the hell out of the way. Being nicey-nice to the uninitiated does NOT figure on the priority list. RTFM.
Blender, obviously, falls into the latter category.
Require payment of damages - in the game's own virtual currency, "gold pieces" or whatever.
Yanno, this could already be practised easily enough by such "evil corporate types" as, say, Joe, the guy who owns and runs the shop from which you buy your coffee. Since you and he often chat at the till, he knows that you're really into gourmet coffee, and so's the wife, so he gives you a slight discount on coffee. He knows he'll turn a profit anyway on sheer quantity, and it's both a friendly gesture and a good way of keeping you loyal.
Oh no, "price discrimination"! Cue wailing and gnashing of teeth by varous commies and other procrustean egalitarians.
Now suppose this "price discrimination" became more widespread. Busineses don't give away free money, especially big ones. If they cut the price of something, it wil be for a reason. Mostly what they're paying for is reduced risk. Businesses have to set aside money against contingent risks such as overstocking. When they give you a reduced price, it's most likely because they can reduce their risk if you're a customer. Since you always buy coffee, the risk of overstocking goes down. Scale this up to the economy as a whole, and companies waste less money, can use more, and the economy benefits as does anyone seeking a job, etc.
"Price discrimination" this way already exists, but mostly it's geographic. Live in a neighborhood of thugs, and you carry the cost of their depredations, via raised local prices.
...I just do it via persuasion rather than force. Make no mistake, voting is force. N times removed via proxies, but when you vote something and it becomes law (or emplaces lawmakers) then people may be killed or jailed or have their property stolen because of your vote. Almost certainly they will be robbed ("taxed") to pay for it.
My refusal is both principle and pragmatism: you cannot win a battle by playing within the rules-sandpit your enemy defines. It is not apathy to refuse to participate in the prescribed "political process", especially when one takes part in the real political process: changing people's opinions, one at a time if necessary.
...and I have a good reason not to: I don't believe in mob rule (aka "democracy"). Nobody has the right to vote away other people's property, liberty, or life. Two people can't rightly steal from or kill one person; likewise neither can two billion. Majority is no excuse.
Not everyone who doesn't vote is just being "apathetic".
The apprentice types morse, referring to a guide for each letter.
The journeyman types morse fluently from memory.
The master codes perl in morse.
So, how to fix it?
- Third, stop preventing people from bidding on the open market to buy organs from donors.
I say "stop preventing" very deliberately here. The problem is not what people should be "allowed" to do, as if the default were slavery. The problem is the state acting as though it owned your body, live and, especially, dead. It steals the opton to make a personal gain, and then scratches its head at the shortage of people willing to give freebies. It should just get the hell out of the way. Then, normal market forces will expand donorship - and provide a natural incentive for companies to develop cloned in-vitro organs.Needless to say, every "solution" that is based on forcing donors will fail dismally. People will opt for cremation, or travel abroad to die. Nobody loves a thief, and especially not a grave-robber.
This is not a troll. This is not flamebait. I mean every word.
I'll download it.
Bittorrent is your friend...
Wonderful. Right up until you pull a wheelie, and the frame shatters and spits you from anus to esophagus. Yegads, but that's a big splinter you've got there, son!
It would be a very, very silly idea to put your journal on flash. It's a small block of space that gets repeatedly written and rewritten by lots of small changes, pretty much every time any file changes. Precisely the usage pattern that would wear down a flash chip in the shortest time.
The only sensible places to put a journal are (1) on (fast) magnetic media (2) on battery backed RAM.
You wouldn't happen to have a URL from which one can obtain "convertfs", would you? Google is stumped.
...but it's against the rules in the new one to notice.
The negotiation I was referring to, was the old hostages-in-a-plane doctrine of "talk calmly and persuade the bad guys to land and give themselves up".
The post-911 equivalent is "hit them with a SAM".
It's easier on the short-of-brains to refight the last war. Anyone sensible knows the "hijack and crash" trick won't work twice. It was dependent upon a preference for negotiation, which no longer exists.
Oh, and they fail to grasp: flight sim experience might as easily save a plane, as doom it. What if some nutter shoots the flight crew? A flight trained passenger could save everybody's necks.
...or is Moz revving through point-one releases awfully fast, and for not much gain? Why for example is this release not numbered 1.4.1?
If recycling is unprofitable, what does that mean? It means that economic effort is being poured into it, poured down the drain and gone. That effort converts into energy use, resource use, time use, ingenuity use. With actual useful resource returns from recycling nowhere near 100%, are good resources being poured after bad?
Green-minded people seem IMO seldom to think that far.
E-gold and Goldmoney are almost infinitely splittable. E-gold, denominated in ounces, lets you put six digits to the right of the decimal. That's three hundredths of a cent.
I admit I don't grok why so many people like eclipse. I use and know netbeans, I tried eclipse and my initial experience was:
- it's confusing as hell
- you have to play in its own sandbox of "projects", no easy way to just mount directories the way NB does it.
- it was slower than NB. Admittedly I'm limited to the GTK compile of eclipse and my machine has a half-gig of memory. but I was getting flicker just moving the text cursor in the edit window, and even NB isn't that slow.
- it has a squillion dependencies, and requires a bleeding-edge version of GTK. NB meanwhile can boot on any box that can run a modern JDK.
- I found it less intuitive. Can't just casually browse into a file on the file tree and see its methods, copy and paste them between classes, etc. Can't use the same mechanism to browse inside a mounted jarfile. And so forth.
So, o eclipse users, enlighten me, what is the good stuff about your favourite IDE?
... is a fundamental human right.
YOUR property
YOUR money
YOUR business and nobody else's.