In fact, there are many things that a union-like/guild-like would bring to the profession. We need those, and we'll invent a name for what it is later (preferably a recursive acronym) :
- An ethical code of conduct (yes, it is a benefit to be able to refuse unethical orders)
- A lobbying power (because EFF could do with a little help, having professional explain why forbidding crypto or wireshark is a bad idea)
- A guaranteed standard in job contracts.
- A measurable political and economical weight.
A good game designer need one less person in the team : the javascript specialist. It gives both good and bad designers occasions to create games.
I think the most obvious ease brought by AJAX and browsers is not cited : it makes multi-player games and online content easier to do, it abstracts completely the network protocols. Now, serving a thousand AJAX request is not the same as serving a thousand UDP socket connections (the former uses more resources) but I think that this could create a new niche of (non-massive) multi-player online games.
2b. It is legal to put cameras everywhere
3b. Journalists do that a lot
4b. Journalists realize that they have the right to take pictures in public places and that a lot of politicians spend time in public places in various companies
5b. Any politician that is out of the cameras eyes must be hiding something or having a secret meeting, or is afraid of being under public scrutiny
6b. Public cameras get banned or at least finally open a true debate on these things.
I have no problem about putting cameras in public spaces, as long as:
- Anyone can consult the video archives
- It is legal to wear a mask or concealing clothes in public places (think burkha)
- Roads, transit systems allow anonymous movements or some lanes are not considered "public" (hence it is illegal to watch the ID of the cars going there)
Well, as a (presumably) computer-savvy person, continue to say to any reader of the WSJ that you know that they are not doing their journalistic job correctly. Tell them how confusing caching and prioritization is akin to confusing a company in a bankruptcy state with a company making negative profits and that they should have another information source for technology. It could even make them question the journalists' work in economic matters.
I'll paraphrase : I'll agree to forbid anonymity the day that stupidity will be forbidden as well and rationality will be mandatory for debate.
I like Slashdot's position on this : you can be anonymous, that makes you a coward, that automatically gives a bit less visibility and credence to your affirmations, but it is not sufficient to make them invalid.
And this belief, as well as the lack of power of the mob is why it remains uninformed and uneducated. Switzerland has a system akin to "mob decisions": 50 000 signatures on a petition make a referendum, a yes at the referendum makes a new law. It is notorious that with a GDP per capita and a life expectancy higher than USA's (world's 6th and 7th) it can only be failing.
a research group in Kyoto Prefecture has succeeded in processing and displaying optically received images directly from the human brain.
Images you acquire optically follow a very different path from dreams or "mind pictures". The former aren't really detailled pictures, they are visual concepts that cannot be cast into a bitmap without interpretation. If we were to talk about the last dream you have made of a human, I could convince you that their hairs were of one or either color using suggestion techniques.
I think that one thing we can forget about with SSD is file fragmentation. The contiguity of data will be far less of a problem with the negligible latency times of these new disks.
What else ? I don't think we will lose the file-tree metaphor as it is a nice way to organize data. Maybe the changes will be at a higher level : making a lot of small files should be more manageable now. Reading and writing 100+ files simultaneously will not be insane anymore so maybe this will create some new good practices.
Well, administrating a company was considered a good enough proof of managerial and administrator skills even if a company is very different from a government agency. The result was that government agencies were managed like private companies. Now this man will probably manage a government agency like an educational and scientific institution. This will be different, that is sure, but how is this worse ?
Having scientific skills and administration skills are not mutually exclusive. Being incompetent as a scientific and as an administrator are not either.
In fact, being a scientist gives him a political edge : when a politician supports an energy policy while having only a partial understanding of the underlying problems, one can question his ethics, his agenda, his reasons and he'll elude, he'll retort and counter-attack. When a scientist supports an energy policy, he is more likely to defend his opinion with facts (a scientist's job) and less likely to hide an agenda behind vague factoids (a politician's job (among other things, ok))
If you want to take a stand and not pay for music that is your prerogative and I can support that. What is harder to support is the ideal that you shouldn't have to support the creator of a work and still have full access to said work. If you don't want to pay for a Renoir, you are welcome to paint your own copy for your own enjoyment. If you don't want to pay for someone else's music, you are welcome to record it yourself and listen to your own recording.
I can agree with that. I would only add that I consider the Internet a public place and that once something is published there, it should be considered available for copy and modification. I am doing computer science. It is called "informatique" in French : science information. Copying, modifying, transmitting information is what it is made for. These operations are almost free. Information creation is the choking point, the valuable step. The current (or can we say "former" already ?) distribution system tries to cash out on the copy system. That is, IMHO, a big error for a sustainable system in today's world.
No jobs are set in stone, neither because you or anyone else says so. Only what we collectively (the market) vote so with our money. That rockstars are a passing fad is a nice proposition. You can say the same about blacksmiths, buggy whip manufacturers, and hopefully pretty soon, sys admins.
In the XIXth century, in my country, button makers were organized as a powerful guild that controlled prices. A clever tailor invented a system that, only with pieces of cloth, allows to close a shirt without buttons. Button makers tried to lobby in order to forbid this. I see this as an anti-progressive stance (you are free to not call that 'evil' as I do)
Agreed, sysadmin is a job that could disappear in the next few years (not sure it will happen, but well). I think it would be immoral for them to write buggy softwares and virus just so that they can stay in business.
RIAA (or SACEM, in my case) does force a choice to me that neither I, nor the artist wants : they force me to buy music only packaged with a lot of fluff I don't need : physical supports, covers, DRMs, marketing, etc... My choice has effectively been between playing their game or not listening to music anymore. I don't know where in my post I gave the idea that I condoned pirating music, I condoned listening for music for free. It is not yet illegal and there are now more possibilities to do that: radio, webradio, deezer, last.fm, all do that fairly well. Why are they successful ? Because nowadays, people don't feel like paying for music.
Maybe I didn't phrase that correctly. Artists have the right to make money from their work, they just are not entitled to enforce a way of making money this way. They don't have the right to prevent an evolution that will bring change to the way people enjoy music. And it just happens that today, they can't force people to buy disc in order to enjoy their music
I still believe that being an artist is not a job. The job you are looking for is entertainer. Creating art is a different piece of work that won't have you making something of value every month. Feel free to fill this with an entertainer job but this job changes a lot with time and a big part of it is adaptation to the changes.
About the rock stars : their particularity is that, unlike an opera diva, or a virtuoso violinist, they have a very big audience. Their money is (was ?) made through record sales. Given an international success, one (studio) performance could lead to a huge monetary return. That is the accident. That is the passing fad and that is what **AA are fighting to preserve. I still believe that the fortune of the most wealthy modern singers are without historical precedents. According to a quick Google Search, Michael Jackson would have close to a billion dollars of assets, Madonna would have even more than that, according to another source. There have been rich artists in the past, but not at this scale.
I don't have a right to my neighbours car... and you know what I won't be taking it for a joy ride no matter how well it would work for me.
That is a good example. By going for a ride you would make the car unavailable, maybe break it, use fuel, etc... When listening to someone's songs, well, we are talking about is something like hurting your neighbor by reading his car's number (but then, again, the car analogies only go so far)
And if we are to continue this conversation please refrain on the name calling.
That's what I thought at first. Then I read the full letter. I have a hard time believing that someone who actually installed and tried linux in college would believe it was illegal. If the teacher thought it was some sort of install party for pirated versions of windows, well she was right in what she did and was just ignorant of the facts but then she goes on to say that she understand what linux is, to have tried and installed it. How could she be uninformed to the point of saying that no software is free and that linux is illegal ?
Any artist who would be on the streets through lost revenue in his/her sale and fears it should simply not be trying to earn a living through music.
You are supposed to make music because you like to do it, not as a full-time job. The multi-millionaires rock stars didn't exist before the invention of disc records and probably won't exist after that. That was more of an accident. Artists don't have a right to make money from their art, it just happened to work well. I don't have the right to listen freely to their music, it just happens to work well.
You can't pay money to Intel, AMD, ATI, Dell or Microsoft without buying some hardware to Asian manufacturers because this is their business model to have manufactures in Asia. In today's world, it is hard to stimulate one country's economy without stimulating another one. There are some fields where it is possible (construction, restaurants...) but most are tied to foreign manufacturers.
Note that if giving job to China is an issue, one could prefer Taiwanese makers. I believe the difference is more important than it seems : one is a democracy, the other is not.
Slashdot Mirror
I even find it awkward that no popular linux distribution checks and proposes security updates at bootup.
Even without that, the possibility of viruses makes me shiver.
and CowboyNeal is my pope
In fact, there are many things that a union-like/guild-like would bring to the profession. We need those, and we'll invent a name for what it is later (preferably a recursive acronym) :
- An ethical code of conduct (yes, it is a benefit to be able to refuse unethical orders)
- A lobbying power (because EFF could do with a little help, having professional explain why forbidding crypto or wireshark is a bad idea)
- A guaranteed standard in job contracts.
- A measurable political and economical weight.
A good game designer need one less person in the team : the javascript specialist. It gives both good and bad designers occasions to create games.
I think the most obvious ease brought by AJAX and browsers is not cited : it makes multi-player games and online content easier to do, it abstracts completely the network protocols. Now, serving a thousand AJAX request is not the same as serving a thousand UDP socket connections (the former uses more resources) but I think that this could create a new niche of (non-massive) multi-player online games.
In the town of Virgin, Utah it is legally mandated that every household that can legally have a firearm must have one.
You don't see too many terrorists (*) there. QED.
(*) For some values of "terrorists".
2b. It is legal to put cameras everywhere
:
3b. Journalists do that a lot
4b. Journalists realize that they have the right to take pictures in public places and that a lot of politicians spend time in public places in various companies
5b. Any politician that is out of the cameras eyes must be hiding something or having a secret meeting, or is afraid of being under public scrutiny
6b. Public cameras get banned or at least finally open a true debate on these things.
I have no problem about putting cameras in public spaces, as long as
- Anyone can consult the video archives
- It is legal to wear a mask or concealing clothes in public places (think burkha)
- Roads, transit systems allow anonymous movements or some lanes are not considered "public" (hence it is illegal to watch the ID of the cars going there)
Well, as a (presumably) computer-savvy person, continue to say to any reader of the WSJ that you know that they are not doing their journalistic job correctly. Tell them how confusing caching and prioritization is akin to confusing a company in a bankruptcy state with a company making negative profits and that they should have another information source for technology. It could even make them question the journalists' work in economic matters.
I'm glad that Slashdot restores the truth with accurate headlines
I'll paraphrase : I'll agree to forbid anonymity the day that stupidity will be forbidden as well and rationality will be mandatory for debate.
I like Slashdot's position on this : you can be anonymous, that makes you a coward, that automatically gives a bit less visibility and credence to your affirmations, but it is not sufficient to make them invalid.
And this belief, as well as the lack of power of the mob is why it remains uninformed and uneducated. Switzerland has a system akin to "mob decisions": 50 000 signatures on a petition make a referendum, a yes at the referendum makes a new law. It is notorious that with a GDP per capita and a life expectancy higher than USA's (world's 6th and 7th) it can only be failing.
a research group in Kyoto Prefecture has succeeded in processing and displaying optically received images directly from the human brain.
Images you acquire optically follow a very different path from dreams or "mind pictures". The former aren't really detailled pictures, they are visual concepts that cannot be cast into a bitmap without interpretation. If we were to talk about the last dream you have made of a human, I could convince you that their hairs were of one or either color using suggestion techniques.
I think that one thing we can forget about with SSD is file fragmentation. The contiguity of data will be far less of a problem with the negligible latency times of these new disks.
What else ? I don't think we will lose the file-tree metaphor as it is a nice way to organize data. Maybe the changes will be at a higher level : making a lot of small files should be more manageable now. Reading and writing 100+ files simultaneously will not be insane anymore so maybe this will create some new good practices.
Well, administrating a company was considered a good enough proof of managerial and administrator skills even if a company is very different from a government agency. The result was that government agencies were managed like private companies. Now this man will probably manage a government agency like an educational and scientific institution. This will be different, that is sure, but how is this worse ?
Having scientific skills and administration skills are not mutually exclusive. Being incompetent as a scientific and as an administrator are not either.
In fact, being a scientist gives him a political edge : when a politician supports an energy policy while having only a partial understanding of the underlying problems, one can question his ethics, his agenda, his reasons and he'll elude, he'll retort and counter-attack. When a scientist supports an energy policy, he is more likely to defend his opinion with facts (a scientist's job) and less likely to hide an agenda behind vague factoids (a politician's job (among other things, ok))
If you want to take a stand and not pay for music that is your prerogative and I can support that. What is harder to support is the ideal that you shouldn't have to support the creator of a work and still have full access to said work. If you don't want to pay for a Renoir, you are welcome to paint your own copy for your own enjoyment. If you don't want to pay for someone else's music, you are welcome to record it yourself and listen to your own recording.
I can agree with that. I would only add that I consider the Internet a public place and that once something is published there, it should be considered available for copy and modification. I am doing computer science. It is called "informatique" in French : science information. Copying, modifying, transmitting information is what it is made for. These operations are almost free. Information creation is the choking point, the valuable step. The current (or can we say "former" already ?) distribution system tries to cash out on the copy system. That is, IMHO, a big error for a sustainable system in today's world.
No jobs are set in stone, neither because you or anyone else says so. Only what we collectively (the market) vote so with our money. That rockstars are a passing fad is a nice proposition. You can say the same about blacksmiths, buggy whip manufacturers, and hopefully pretty soon, sys admins.
In the XIXth century, in my country, button makers were organized as a powerful guild that controlled prices. A clever tailor invented a system that, only with pieces of cloth, allows to close a shirt without buttons. Button makers tried to lobby in order to forbid this. I see this as an anti-progressive stance (you are free to not call that 'evil' as I do)
Agreed, sysadmin is a job that could disappear in the next few years (not sure it will happen, but well). I think it would be immoral for them to write buggy softwares and virus just so that they can stay in business.
RIAA (or SACEM, in my case) does force a choice to me that neither I, nor the artist wants : they force me to buy music only packaged with a lot of fluff I don't need : physical supports, covers, DRMs, marketing, etc... My choice has effectively been between playing their game or not listening to music anymore. I don't know where in my post I gave the idea that I condoned pirating music, I condoned listening for music for free. It is not yet illegal and there are now more possibilities to do that: radio, webradio, deezer, last.fm, all do that fairly well. Why are they successful ? Because nowadays, people don't feel like paying for music.
I still believe that being an artist is not a job. The job you are looking for is entertainer. Creating art is a different piece of work that won't have you making something of value every month. Feel free to fill this with an entertainer job but this job changes a lot with time and a big part of it is adaptation to the changes.
About the rock stars : their particularity is that, unlike an opera diva, or a virtuoso violinist, they have a very big audience. Their money is (was ?) made through record sales. Given an international success, one (studio) performance could lead to a huge monetary return. That is the accident. That is the passing fad and that is what **AA are fighting to preserve. I still believe that the fortune of the most wealthy modern singers are without historical precedents. According to a quick Google Search, Michael Jackson would have close to a billion dollars of assets, Madonna would have even more than that, according to another source. There have been rich artists in the past, but not at this scale.
I don't have a right to my neighbours car... and you know what I won't be taking it for a joy ride no matter how well it would work for me.
That is a good example. By going for a ride you would make the car unavailable, maybe break it, use fuel, etc... When listening to someone's songs, well, we are talking about is something like hurting your neighbor by reading his car's number (but then, again, the car analogies only go so far)
And if we are to continue this conversation please refrain on the name calling.
That's what I thought at first. Then I read the full letter. I have a hard time believing that someone who actually installed and tried linux in college would believe it was illegal. If the teacher thought it was some sort of install party for pirated versions of windows, well she was right in what she did and was just ignorant of the facts but then she goes on to say that she understand what linux is, to have tried and installed it. How could she be uninformed to the point of saying that no software is free and that linux is illegal ?
He also put the date of his novel at 3000 A.D.
Any artist who would be on the streets through lost revenue in his/her sale and fears it should simply not be trying to earn a living through music.
You are supposed to make music because you like to do it, not as a full-time job. The multi-millionaires rock stars didn't exist before the invention of disc records and probably won't exist after that. That was more of an accident. Artists don't have a right to make money from their art, it just happened to work well. I don't have the right to listen freely to their music, it just happens to work well.
They don't fear terrorists, they fear rioters.
GPS and GSM is the first thing countries like China cut off when a riot occur.
Reminds me of the cigar-smoking baby in "Who framed Roger Rabbit ?". I guess we could get him to testify about these issues...
You can't pay money to Intel, AMD, ATI, Dell or Microsoft without buying some hardware to Asian manufacturers because this is their business model to have manufactures in Asia. In today's world, it is hard to stimulate one country's economy without stimulating another one. There are some fields where it is possible (construction, restaurants...) but most are tied to foreign manufacturers.
Note that if giving job to China is an issue, one could prefer Taiwanese makers. I believe the difference is more important than it seems : one is a democracy, the other is not.
The same was true during the alcohol prohibition. Yet, it changed.