Well, dismissing the definition of what is natural and what is not, we as a species are indeed destroying many habitats, causing directly or indirectly the extinction of some species. Sure it is absurd to accuse humanity of every extinction but the fact that many biologist consider that we are in a mass-extinction period should point out toward human responsibility : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extinction#Mass_extinctions
Evolution is not an excuse, species usually become extinct and make room for different ones. There they become extinct to be replace by the same homo sapiens over and over.
I think it is sound to say that humans can be considered out of the evolution game by now. Our weakest individuals are not left to die and the extension of our possibilities and of our population is now caused at 99.99% by technology rather than natural evolution.
You know, I am also hit by amazement when people like that make important decisions based on partial knowledge and bad analogies about how software works, but I think it is making the exact same mistake to think that a one day crash course will tell you all the provisions that are necessary before making a judgement in business law. To understand how international companies are organized, what a claim is and is not, who can make that, what constitutes an infraction, and so on. Saying you can tell in one day what to do when a lawyer says "objection" is like saying you can teach in one day what to do when a software crashes.
Instead, begin gather volunteers to fulfill a mission of the government you fell qualified to fill and begin to accept donations. Optionally in bitcoins
Same happened in France not so long ago.
The problem is that Google is not authorized to display the pure output of an algorithm because it might return links to copyrighted works but now that they have to do that they become responsible for everything that they let slip.
And you know the most funny part of that ? Adobe is not even aware that it is working this way ! Shareholders do not realize that they are at the mercy of a dumb manager that will one day decide that the next versions of Photoshop will require a constant net access for DRM purpose.
And the solution is in labellings. Google should control "Android" or "Android phone" as a trademark and only deliver it to the people who accept some compatibility specifications, and sue the people who call their phones "android phones" or their OS "android" without implementing those specs.
Preferring to close the sources indicates some more malevolent ideas.
Because software patents are not legal where I live (you insensitive clod!) and because the last time I read the French legislation, I got this strange feeling that a source code is not a copyrightable entity in France.
Dear Congress,
I don't know this IP thing you are talking about, it would be nice to have a nice definition about what constitutes a copy, a transformed work, a derivative work, an original work, if possible by using the very convenient notions that information science brought us during the last century.
Please understand that as they are today, "IP" objects only exist within the range of the reality distortion field of big lawyers teams. Us, computer scientists, have no way to objectively discern between an information that is protected by free speech and an information that is subject to "IP laws".
Truly,
A concerned computer scientist that would love to be able to do his damn job without having to refer to a legal team.
Why do we tolerate military officers being punished for giving orders contrary to the orders they received ?
Why do we tolerate people being punished for lying into court ?
Why are some companies held accountable over their declarations ?
Freedom of speech is a slight misnomer. The freedom exists to transmit information. Any information. That is the intent. But in some case people are required to transmit information accurately (the officer's case), or to authenticate an information they have (court and companies example).
In the case of the 'fire !' shouted in the theatre, no one forbids to say there was a fire in this specific theatre at this specific time.
The sound I get from people living in Tokyo is exactly that : "stop consider us as victims, we want life to come back to normal, let's have business as usual". Of course I guess that the mood is different in the Sendai region.
The Curie couples are often depicted as people dedicated to science and nothing else. They really saw that as the enrichment of human knowledge and apparently never tried to monetize their discovery.
It is too bad that this kind of dedication in the research field is obscured by IP discussions.
On these issues, there are no right and wrongs, there are just two teams of lawyers and lobbyists trying to disrupt each other's reality distortion bubble.
As the summary mentions, music transfers occur all the time. If the music industry want to tax or license transfers, let's define precisely in technical term what constitutes a transfer, and let's work around that.
Or just live in Europe (no, UK isn't really there) and forget about software patents : they are illegal there and despite the EUPO giving them anyway for a fee, they have never been tested in court.
Most of them are defensive patents for companies that wish to sell software in US or Japan.
And there lies your choice.
You can follow Lessig's path. Fighting corruption by the rules, trying to create a framework where corruption is harder.
Or you can follow Assange's way and assume that corruption can't be solved but that "off the record" agreements must be made harder.
But deflation makes banks who offer saving accounts useless to regular people. So it won't happen and be branded as an univocally wrong thing for the economy when such an hypothesis will be brought up.
In an ideal world that would be a good idea, but from a pragmatic point of view, that is a very bad way of looking at things. OO programming is, for good or bad, a very common occurrence in the IT industry. If you just want to work in a lab, that is fine to ignore it, but almost always in the industry, your architectural decisions will have to take into account a few shortcomings of the existing code base. Making a theoretically good architecture but that is unimplementable due to limitations of the tools is maybe a worthwhile attitude in research, but certainly not in the industry.
I do wonder if a minor "tweak" (at least in the early days) would be to have a "tax" applied to unspent mined bitcoins?
That could be implentable in a future release. It would require every node to agree on running that new software otherwise a fork would happen. It would be doable to destroy money, which would have the same effect as redistributing it.
I've installed the "official" version, but I still can't quite see what the reason for an "average" user is to use bc. They will have to convert their local currency to bc, buy/sell/trade using bc, and then convert back to their local currency to pay taxes or buy things that are only offered in the "official" currency.
The idea is that if there are things to sell for BTCs, there are things to buy too. I think it is an ideal currency for dematerialized goods : web assistance, software development, artistic creation, etc... An economy that we would like to see appear and that we stopped believing that it could come from the major "IP" law firms.
The other problem is if a large company (Google, a bank, government etc) decides to use bitcoin, but with a different chain - this could make the current chain pretty useless.
I think it will probably happen. But tell me, is slashdot useless since Digg and reddit appeared ? Is Gentoo unusable since the success of Ubuntu ? Several crypto-currencies can coexist.
There is also the problem that I've seen mentioned about "illegal" content that might get embedded in the chain - potentially then everyone running a client would then be in possession of this material.
The chain is made of numbers and informations. The last time a chain of numbers was declared illegal, hilarity ensued. But actually, that exactly with this kind of events that bitcoin was designed : you cannot shut it down easily as long as you authorize private encrypted networks in a country.
Slashdot Mirror
That's well OVER 9000 !
Well, dismissing the definition of what is natural and what is not, we as a species are indeed destroying many habitats, causing directly or indirectly the extinction of some species. Sure it is absurd to accuse humanity of every extinction but the fact that many biologist consider that we are in a mass-extinction period should point out toward human responsibility : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extinction#Mass_extinctions
Evolution is not an excuse, species usually become extinct and make room for different ones. There they become extinct to be replace by the same homo sapiens over and over.
I think it is sound to say that humans can be considered out of the evolution game by now. Our weakest individuals are not left to die and the extension of our possibilities and of our population is now caused at 99.99% by technology rather than natural evolution.
You know, I am also hit by amazement when people like that make important decisions based on partial knowledge and bad analogies about how software works, but I think it is making the exact same mistake to think that a one day crash course will tell you all the provisions that are necessary before making a judgement in business law. To understand how international companies are organized, what a claim is and is not, who can make that, what constitutes an infraction, and so on. Saying you can tell in one day what to do when a lawyer says "objection" is like saying you can teach in one day what to do when a software crashes.
Instead, begin gather volunteers to fulfill a mission of the government you fell qualified to fill and begin to accept donations. Optionally in bitcoins
Well, if you use md5 you may as well store them in plaintext indeed.
The Catholic Church as a religious organization has a long history of trying to find and understand the truth, theologically.
That is like rooting for democracy, fascistically.
Same happened in France not so long ago.
The problem is that Google is not authorized to display the pure output of an algorithm because it might return links to copyrighted works but now that they have to do that they become responsible for everything that they let slip.
And you know the most funny part of that ? Adobe is not even aware that it is working this way ! Shareholders do not realize that they are at the mercy of a dumb manager that will one day decide that the next versions of Photoshop will require a constant net access for DRM purpose.
And the solution is in labellings. Google should control "Android" or "Android phone" as a trademark and only deliver it to the people who accept some compatibility specifications, and sue the people who call their phones "android phones" or their OS "android" without implementing those specs.
Preferring to close the sources indicates some more malevolent ideas.
Because software patents are not legal where I live (you insensitive clod!) and because the last time I read the French legislation, I got this strange feeling that a source code is not a copyrightable entity in France.
Dear Congress,
I don't know this IP thing you are talking about, it would be nice to have a nice definition about what constitutes a copy, a transformed work, a derivative work, an original work, if possible by using the very convenient notions that information science brought us during the last century.
Please understand that as they are today, "IP" objects only exist within the range of the reality distortion field of big lawyers teams. Us, computer scientists, have no way to objectively discern between an information that is protected by free speech and an information that is subject to "IP laws".
Truly,
A concerned computer scientist that would love to be able to do his damn job without having to refer to a legal team.
It is called freedom of cult and freedom of speech. None of them being things the Catholic Church ever managed to adapt to.
Why do we tolerate military officers being punished for giving orders contrary to the orders they received ?
Why do we tolerate people being punished for lying into court ?
Why are some companies held accountable over their declarations ?
Freedom of speech is a slight misnomer. The freedom exists to transmit information. Any information. That is the intent. But in some case people are required to transmit information accurately (the officer's case), or to authenticate an information they have (court and companies example).
In the case of the 'fire !' shouted in the theatre, no one forbids to say there was a fire in this specific theatre at this specific time.
The sound I get from people living in Tokyo is exactly that : "stop consider us as victims, we want life to come back to normal, let's have business as usual". Of course I guess that the mood is different in the Sendai region.
The Curie couples are often depicted as people dedicated to science and nothing else. They really saw that as the enrichment of human knowledge and apparently never tried to monetize their discovery.
It is too bad that this kind of dedication in the research field is obscured by IP discussions.
On these issues, there are no right and wrongs, there are just two teams of lawyers and lobbyists trying to disrupt each other's reality distortion bubble.
As the summary mentions, music transfers occur all the time. If the music industry want to tax or license transfers, let's define precisely in technical term what constitutes a transfer, and let's work around that.
But isn't there a law in US against that sort of thing ? Please enlight a puzzled foreigner...
Or just live in Europe (no, UK isn't really there) and forget about software patents : they are illegal there and despite the EUPO giving them anyway for a fee, they have never been tested in court.
Most of them are defensive patents for companies that wish to sell software in US or Japan.
Which will only stay true if we manage to solve this IP laws madness before it is too late.
And there lies your choice.
You can follow Lessig's path. Fighting corruption by the rules, trying to create a framework where corruption is harder.
Or you can follow Assange's way and assume that corruption can't be solved but that "off the record" agreements must be made harder.
But deflation makes banks who offer saving accounts useless to regular people. So it won't happen and be branded as an univocally wrong thing for the economy when such an hypothesis will be brought up.
Payment in bitcoins ?
In an ideal world that would be a good idea, but from a pragmatic point of view, that is a very bad way of looking at things. OO programming is, for good or bad, a very common occurrence in the IT industry. If you just want to work in a lab, that is fine to ignore it, but almost always in the industry, your architectural decisions will have to take into account a few shortcomings of the existing code base. Making a theoretically good architecture but that is unimplementable due to limitations of the tools is maybe a worthwhile attitude in research, but certainly not in the industry.
Most hotmail users do not know what HTTPS is. This move effetively disables cryptography for 90% of the users.
Is that offer open to anyone, or just the parent?
Just to the parent, I am not that rich :-) But someone does give 0.05 BTC to whoever asks for it : https://freebitcoins.appspot.com/
I do wonder if a minor "tweak" (at least in the early days) would be to have a "tax" applied to unspent mined bitcoins?
That could be implentable in a future release. It would require every node to agree on running that new software otherwise a fork would happen. It would be doable to destroy money, which would have the same effect as redistributing it.
I've installed the "official" version, but I still can't quite see what the reason for an "average" user is to use bc. They will have to convert their local currency to bc, buy/sell/trade using bc, and then convert back to their local currency to pay taxes or buy things that are only offered in the "official" currency.
The idea is that if there are things to sell for BTCs, there are things to buy too. I think it is an ideal currency for dematerialized goods : web assistance, software development, artistic creation, etc... An economy that we would like to see appear and that we stopped believing that it could come from the major "IP" law firms.
The other problem is if a large company (Google, a bank, government etc) decides to use bitcoin, but with a different chain - this could make the current chain pretty useless.
I think it will probably happen. But tell me, is slashdot useless since Digg and reddit appeared ? Is Gentoo unusable since the success of Ubuntu ? Several crypto-currencies can coexist.
There is also the problem that I've seen mentioned about "illegal" content that might get embedded in the chain - potentially then everyone running a client would then be in possession of this material.
The chain is made of numbers and informations. The last time a chain of numbers was declared illegal, hilarity ensued. But actually, that exactly with this kind of events that bitcoin was designed : you cannot shut it down easily as long as you authorize private encrypted networks in a country.