If America will stop its racist persecution of persons descended from Siberians who came over the land bridge, and give back the land we stole
Some people have this weird idea that something that happened 500 some years ago is a little different than something that happened less than 40 years ago. Also, last I checked American Indians were all full citizens of the US (though sadly it took until the early 20th century for this to happen). Most palestinians living in the occupied territories are NOT Israel citizens.
Humans have used animals in warfare for thousands of years. What do you think cavalry are? The use of an animal, or something resembling an animal is not what's referred to as "biological warfare".
Biological warfare refers to using viruses, bacteria, and other infectious agents. What people call "biological warfare" is really germ warfare. There's a distinct natural line of using replicating biological agents that needs to be crossed for this to turn into germ warefare. Since these are simply just robots (although small robots) that contain no biological agents, this isn't getting anywhere near germ/biological warfare.
Skype just works. Very, very few people care that it's closed, as evidenced by its adoption rate.
They'll start caring when they can't reach someone with a different VoIP provider. Communication requires open standards, not proprietary ones. If you want to work over a NAT, use IAX2.
Skype.. the propritary, we don't speak any accepted standard VoIP provider. They might as well be AOL or Compuserve before they realised that this "internet thing" meant they had to use SMTP for email.
Google on the other hand has standardized on an open standard for VoIP (Jingle), and has said they'll support SIP at some future point (currently the most widely supported VoIP standard).
The people claiming this will fail all seem to miss the market this is aimed at. It's obviously not intended to compete with the high-end, or even middle of the road graphics processor. Those boards require gobs of VERY fast video memory. My guess is this thing is aimed at a space between the on-board video (which are really just 2-d chips) and the full 3-d graphics card. Anyone buying this has no intention of buying a super-duper
With Vista coming out soon, PC-makers are going to want a low-cost 3-d accelerated solution to be able to run some (or maybe all) of the eye-candy that comes with vista.
The concept of "original" only exists when there is imperfect copying. Sure someone can buy a copy of a Picaso painting but that doesn't decrease the value of the original or the creator of the original.
What if you could copy a Picaso painting down to the quantum level, such that it was completely indistiguishable from the "original" (by any current or future technologies). If you can't tell the "original" from a "copy", the two concepts break down. Are you trying to tell me that the "original" version of a piece of software is somehow better than a "copy"? The concept of original and copy don't make any sense in the realm of digital information. Uniqueness however, still stands.
I expect in a world where anything can be copied that you choose to copy, value will come from uniqueness. Designers will still be able to create new virtual crap, they'll just get limited value out of selling copies of something. The value will come from being able to create something unique. Sure the buyer could copy it however many times he/she likes, but that would diminish the value of it (since they wanted to be unique).
I don't know how much they need, or even what that question really means (software isn't like apples where it's all the same and you order it by the pound). My guess is there's going to be requests for software to do Thing X, or if only Program Z had feature Y. That's no different than how people use software right now. B) Part of the point of the project is to create a new technologically-literate generation. If we write all the software for them, what incentive is there for them to build up their own coding skills?
Simply a false premise. What incentive has there been in the past for programmers of a younger generation, since presumably the old generation has written all the software that the young generation wants? The idea that we shouldn't create software for other people because they won't want to make software for themselves makes about as much sense as saying that we shouldn't invent anything because it'll remove the incentive for other people to invent things. The need for software increases with the creation of new software, not decreases.
I also kind of doubt that this machine will have all the libraries needed for a development environment to produce new applications for this machine. Flash space costs money, and the budget for this thing is quite low. Maybe someone can create a development environment for it that'll fit on the flash, (but have more limited resourced). but wait.. that might require developers to actually have access to the laptop. C) The developed world is acculturated to a particular tradition of code and interface design which is -- at best -- suboptimal. If we write apps for them, they will come from that same tradition and we will acculturate them to our suboptimal model.
If you truly believe that the software development world is poisoned, then I'd suggest learning from our mistakes rather than letting someone else start over from scratch and either make the same mistakes over, make the same mistakes we've already learned to not make, or make entirely different mistakes. Experience is always going to be better than no experience (all things being equal).
There is plenty of genuine debate going on and opportunity for journalistic and political "balance" in covering it
I've no doubt that journalists could do an excellent job at explaining this (and some do). But that would assume that the majority of journalism and media is about informing people. It's not. The media outlets are very clearly about selling eyeballs. What do you think would sell more eyeballs, an honest discussion about what we really know about global warming (it's happening, it's caused by us, we're not sure how large of an effect it'll have). Or examining the extreme positions? "Global Warming May Reach Tipping Point Soon!", or even "Global Warming is Big Fraud Created by Lefties!" sure will sell a lot more eyeballs to advertisers than "Will Average Global Temperature rise.4c or 2c over the next 30 years?".
What is causing it, however, is another matter... some say there is proof that humans are causing it, others will say it's merely circumstantial.
The difference is that the people who say that humans are causing it are climate scientists (and have evidence to support the claims), and the others (including this guy in the frickin telegraph) aren't. I guess I tend to believe scientists who've actually been educated on this matter rather than a journalist who think's he's real smart.
It's kind of like the evolution vs creationism argument. The people who claim that evolution is real are scientists (and have evidence to support those claims). The people who claim that it's not aren't scientists (or at best aren't scientists who study evolutionary biology), and have no real evidence that evolution doesn't exist.
The point being that if you're going to judge anything based on "some people think this, others think that", you'll never reach any conclusions since there's ALWAYS some nut who's not honestly looking at the data, misunderstands something, or is just a plain old liar. Right now there's a bunch of dangerous nutjobs who claim HIV doesn't cause AIDS.
I'm sure if you looked hard enough you could find some people that don't believe in heliocentric theory (that is the earth and planets revolving around the sun) that could contruct some complicated arguments against it that most people don't understand, but at the same time sound convincing. Does that mean that helio-centric theory is wrong? No, it just means that science often requires extra knowledge to understand it.
Many people have suggested a one-for-two or one-for-three, but the people behind the project have consistently stated that this will not happen.
If that's true, it's the first dumb decision I've heard come out of this project. Bill Gates stated that the major cost of the laptop would be software. In the absence of open source developers, he's right. There's some ability to take software for existing high-lowered linux machines, but it certainly won't be as good without developers being able to run it on the actual machine.
There is a good possibility that current versions have significant changes. Which is exactly what the software producers will claim when any issues are brought up that people find.
"That bug has been fixed in the release version. What you have is beta software never intended to be used in an election". Or "That vulnerability could never happen because of safeguards that exist in other parts of the system we won't tell you about".
Or worse, pundits will just claim: "We have no way of knowing if the version released on the internet wasn't modified by someone else before release".
I guess my question is, how do you expect the release of this software will help change anything? Since you can't be certain about the validity of the source or what's been changed, what use is it? Conclusions based on questionable evidence become questionable.
Just something to think about, since I'm sure the spin machines will be in high gear to minimize any impact of anything that's found. Just be prepared for the usual responses.
I'll respond to your lame attempt to be clever after you explain how you misconfigured Slashdot to post your comment.
What? I don't know how to configure anything. That's too "technological" for me. I just expect people to know exactly my intentions without me communicating them in any way whatsoever. Since you read my previous post, I expect you know my default position of not allowing access to read my posts unless I give explicit permission (Which I DO NOT!). Expect the law to come breaking down your door soon.
My problem is that they do not make the public part of their database - the part that was contributed by 1000s of users - freely available to the public.
Excuse me, but that statement is at worst wrong, and at best extremely misleading.
As others have pointed out, CDDB DID make all the data that was entered in before they became a private company freely available.
Maybe you're referring to the service of providing CD lookups? Why should they be obligated to privide that for free, as they're the ones that wrote the software that provided it? They still made all the publically created information freely available, so what's the issue here?
I'm just amazed that so few people in this discussion can understand the difference between information, and a service that provides that information in a nice way. I don't know the licensing/copyright for wikipedia operates, but for the sake of argument assume that the following scenario is perfectly legal: Would you be all pissed off if they took the information in wikipedia, polished it up a bit, and created printed textbooks or e-books for schools?
I just don't understand how people can be perfectly fine with a company like Redhat that takes open source contributions of thousands of developers, packages it nicely and supports it, and charges a fee for that. But when Gracenote does basically the same thing they're deemed "unethical".
People can never get back the hundreds (thousands?) of hours of data-entry effort they invested, and will now need to reinvest in another service.
Why would they need to re-invest it when the information is (and has been for years) freely available for anyone to use (and I'm assuming FreeDB did exactly that). There's more to this than the information itself.
There's the sofware that was created by CDDB, but that belongs to CDDB and only certain versions of it were released under the GPL. The main complaint people seem to have is essentially "You made money off of our work, and we don't like that.". My response to that is "welcome to freedom". Freedom doesn't mean others only get to do things with your work that you gave away that you like. AFAIK CDDB never made any claims that they'd always provide the service for free, never go commercial, etc. If people really had a problem with what CDDB might do with their work, then they shouldn't have contributed, or found some other service that puts more restrictions on what can be done with the collective work.
It's fairly obvious that you have no ethical or legal right to use a service that has been misconfigured to give you access, against the intent of the owner. It's irrelevant that the misconfiguration happens to be a factory default.
I'm so glad I've finally found someone that shares my opinion! I have the same problem with this new webserver I set up for my own use. I get all pissed off when people visit MY webserver without specifically asking permission from me. These bastards are using MY bandwidth, and I didn't even tell them they could use MY server! Sure, I've posted links all over the internet to the website, but that's just to make it easier for me. Why do people click on those links when I didn't tell them it's OK to do so? Some joker even told me he DIDN'T click on the link, his browser did! He claims some weirdo software program did it for him that pre-cache's content to speed up browsing. Maybe I should sue the people who make that caching software, or have them all arrested.
People have suggested I turn on this whole password thing, but I don't know how to set up that up. Plus I hate typing in passwords.
I've gone to court about it even. For some strange reason the judge just started laughing and laughing at me though. It was hard for him to even bang the gavel and dismiss my lawsuit because he was laughing so hard.
(Oh, by the way I hope you didn't read any of this post since I didn't give any explicit permission for you to do so, including this sentence). If you did, expect a lawsuit to follow.
Why is it so many people on Slashdot only seem to care about the "free as in beer" definition of free? Business guys LOVE the freedom definition of free. Why do you think they like free trade so much? Freedom gives you flexibility, and business tends to thrive on flexibility since you can easily adapt and aren't stuck in one path. Most businesses would love to be free from the lock-in of proprietary software. Most of them just can't do it though because the headlock is too tight, or there's no open source alternative.
Strangely enough, I agree completely. People in this discussion seem to assume that anyone making money off something freely contributed by the community is in the wrong. They also can't seem to seperate the service of providing CD lookups from the information they contributed.
I will say that Gracenote sure didn't win any friends by suddenly switching to a paid model without warning. I won't even call it unethical behaviour, since they weren't under any obligation to provide the service. It does seem like kind of a dick move though as they knew there was a lot of software that relied on CDDB. All business relies on relationships, so this move by Gracenote was basically shooting themselves in the foot.
In my neighborhood, a bunch of parents got together recently and donated a bunch of money to upgrade a schoolyard playground beyond what the local government would have put there by default.
The analogy breaks down because information can be copied, but money can't. Also money is a fluid resource that can buy other resources.
It's be more like your community got together and bought sand, tires, playground equipment, etc to build a playground. A private company decided to donate land to put the playground on, and pays other people to install all the equipment and maintain the playground. Later on the company decides to charge for usage of the playground, but also gives you back all the sand, tires, and playground equipment, etc that you contributed. (This is some strange world where sand, tires, and playground equipment can be copied perfectly).
You're a bit peaved, but obviously you can still move the playground elsewhere as you still own everything you put into it. You and your neighbors find some inexpensive land next door and put all the playground equipment in yourself on the weekends.
This is really a lesson for people that assume relationships that don't exist.
Because I thought that I am submitting my data to the public.
And you did submit it to the public, as the information is still available. Is this not true? But suddenly, that public resource turned private - I could not use it freely as before.
There's a difference between the information you submitted, and the service to provide that information to your music player. It's your error in not seperating those two different things. You seemed to assume an agreement that never existed based upon some idea of "we're all in this together", but CDDB never actually said they'd provide. The real world doesn't work like that. If you want those kind of re-assurances they should be backed up by a legal agreement so no one is confused and assumes a relationship that doesn't exist.
Are you equally pissed off that Redhat decided to stop supporting the free (as in beer) versions of Redhat Linux? It's basically the same situation, since Centos has since popped up providing free as in beer copies and updates to what's essentially RHEL. It is as if I gave a dollar to a public project - say a server to run slashdot on, thinking that if everybody contributed a dollar to that resource, then the public will have a resource - slashdot will have a fast server.
It's really nothing like that at all. You provided a resource to a company, and the company then went public and gave back all the resources that were given to them freely to anyone that wanted it. The problem with your analogy is you can't copy money, but you can copy information.
Home locks are pickable so that police and locksmiths can open them.
Nonsense. Home locks are pickable because it's cheaper to produce pickable locks, and for most people that security is sufficient. Sure you could pick the lock if you had the right skills or the right equipment, but inexpensive locks are about keeping people honest, not about absolute security.
The rest of your post I agree with. If you don't secure your wireless access, it's essentially an open invitation for anyone to use it. Software is configured these days to actively seek out a wireless device to connect to. If you don't want people to use it, lock it up.
Yes it was a guess at the cost. I took the build out cost of an office space and cut it in a quarter.
Office space? What does building office space have to do with building solar power? Plastic wouldn't be a good option since if you put it in a dessert it would get scratched up very quickly
The article actually talked about plastic, so either they're not thinking about putting it in a sandy desert, or they've got some solution to the scratch problem (perhaps thin coatings).
Man the solar faithful are out in power today. Notice I didn't say it was a bad plan. I didn't it wouldn't work. I said it might work in southeastern California, Arizona, Nevada, and south west Texas. All places with a lot of cheap land and sunlight
My main problem is you just made up a cost out of thin air to justify how it was economically infeasible. That's basically just nonsense. Sure 2 square miles of anything isn't going to be cheap to build. But there's a big difference between a billion dollars, and 100 million dollars. A billion dollars is probbably too expensive and risky for most companies to risk. 100 million dollars is really nothing. The real costs are probbably somewhere in-between.
Let's just say that it costs a super cheap 20$ a square foot. The cost of the mirrors alone would be $1,115,136,000.
Wow. I can make up numbers too. Let's assume it was a "super cheap" $2 a square foot. That's only $115 million. Oh wait, let's assume it's only.20 a square foot, that's only 11.5 million dollars.
Rather than pulling numbers out of your ass, maybe you should have real estimates of what it costs to make a plastic mirror. Considering you can make wood flooring for.68 a square foot, I'd say $20 a square foot for some plastic mirror material is totally ridiculous. Beyond that I have no idea how much it'd cost, but I don't think anyone would be talking about this seriously if it cost a billion dollars to just create the mirrors.
I thought the moon was made of earths crust (mostly rock composed of silicon and oxygen), which doesn't contain a large amount of iron. The earths core is largely made out of iron, which is electrically conductive and able to generate a magnetic field. I'd think it'd be difficult to generate a magnetic field without the ability to conduct electricity.
So, the abscence of a magnetic field may only indicate the moon has a rocky (but possibly liquid) core.
Slashdot Mirror
If America will stop its racist persecution of persons descended from Siberians who came over the land bridge, and give back the land we stole
Some people have this weird idea that something that happened 500 some years ago is a little different than something that happened less than 40 years ago. Also, last I checked American Indians were all full citizens of the US (though sadly it took until the early 20th century for this to happen). Most palestinians living in the occupied territories are NOT Israel citizens.
Humans have used animals in warfare for thousands of years. What do you think cavalry are? The use of an animal, or something resembling an animal is not what's referred to as "biological warfare".
Biological warfare refers to using viruses, bacteria, and other infectious agents. What people call "biological warfare" is really germ warfare. There's a distinct natural line of using replicating biological agents that needs to be crossed for this to turn into germ warefare. Since these are simply just robots (although small robots) that contain no biological agents, this isn't getting anywhere near germ/biological warfare.
Skype just works. Very, very few people care that it's closed, as evidenced by its adoption rate.
They'll start caring when they can't reach someone with a different VoIP provider. Communication requires open standards, not proprietary ones. If you want to work over a NAT, use IAX2.
Skype.. the propritary, we don't speak any accepted standard VoIP provider. They might as well be AOL or Compuserve before they realised that this "internet thing" meant they had to use SMTP for email.
Google on the other hand has standardized on an open standard for VoIP (Jingle), and has said they'll support SIP at some future point (currently the most widely supported VoIP standard).
The people claiming this will fail all seem to miss the market this is aimed at. It's obviously not intended to compete with the high-end, or even middle of the road graphics processor. Those boards require gobs of VERY fast video memory. My guess is this thing is aimed at a space between the on-board video (which are really just 2-d chips) and the full 3-d graphics card. Anyone buying this has no intention of buying a super-duper
With Vista coming out soon, PC-makers are going to want a low-cost 3-d accelerated solution to be able to run some (or maybe all) of the eye-candy that comes with vista.
This comment is too long. Can someone give me an executive summary?
Boo-ya! No one reads anything but the summary. We've proven this.
The interesting stuff is the original.
The concept of "original" only exists when there is imperfect copying.
Sure someone can buy a copy of a Picaso painting but that doesn't decrease the value of the original or the creator of the original.
What if you could copy a Picaso painting down to the quantum level, such that it was completely indistiguishable from the "original" (by any current or future technologies). If you can't tell the "original" from a "copy", the two concepts break down. Are you trying to tell me that the "original" version of a piece of software is somehow better than a "copy"? The concept of original and copy don't make any sense in the realm of digital information. Uniqueness however, still stands.
I expect in a world where anything can be copied that you choose to copy, value will come from uniqueness. Designers will still be able to create new virtual crap, they'll just get limited value out of selling copies of something. The value will come from being able to create something unique. Sure the buyer could copy it however many times he/she likes, but that would diminish the value of it (since they wanted to be unique).
I'm sure I too will be labled a global warming denier.
Check.
A) How much software do they need?
I don't know how much they need, or even what that question really means (software isn't like apples where it's all the same and you order it by the pound). My guess is there's going to be requests for software to do Thing X, or if only Program Z had feature Y. That's no different than how people use software right now.
B) Part of the point of the project is to create a new technologically-literate generation. If we write all the software for them, what incentive is there for them to build up their own coding skills?
Simply a false premise. What incentive has there been in the past for programmers of a younger generation, since presumably the old generation has written all the software that the young generation wants? The idea that we shouldn't create software for other people because they won't want to make software for themselves makes about as much sense as saying that we shouldn't invent anything because it'll remove the incentive for other people to invent things. The need for software increases with the creation of new software, not decreases.
I also kind of doubt that this machine will have all the libraries needed for a development environment to produce new applications for this machine. Flash space costs money, and the budget for this thing is quite low. Maybe someone can create a development environment for it that'll fit on the flash, (but have more limited resourced). but wait.. that might require developers to actually have access to the laptop.
C) The developed world is acculturated to a particular tradition of code and interface design which is -- at best -- suboptimal. If we write apps for them, they will come from that same tradition and we will acculturate them to our suboptimal model.
If you truly believe that the software development world is poisoned, then I'd suggest learning from our mistakes rather than letting someone else start over from scratch and either make the same mistakes over, make the same mistakes we've already learned to not make, or make entirely different mistakes. Experience is always going to be better than no experience (all things being equal).
There is plenty of genuine debate going on and opportunity for journalistic and political "balance" in covering it
I've no doubt that journalists could do an excellent job at explaining this (and some do). But that would assume that the majority of journalism and media is about informing people. It's not. The media outlets are very clearly about selling eyeballs. What do you think would sell more eyeballs, an honest discussion about what we really know about global warming (it's happening, it's caused by us, we're not sure how large of an effect it'll have). Or examining the extreme positions? "Global Warming May Reach Tipping Point Soon!", or even "Global Warming is Big Fraud Created by Lefties!" sure will sell a lot more eyeballs to advertisers than "Will Average Global Temperature rise
What is causing it, however, is another matter... some say there is proof that humans are causing it, others will say it's merely circumstantial.
The difference is that the people who say that humans are causing it are climate scientists (and have evidence to support the claims), and the others (including this guy in the frickin telegraph) aren't. I guess I tend to believe scientists who've actually been educated on this matter rather than a journalist who think's he's real smart.
It's kind of like the evolution vs creationism argument. The people who claim that evolution is real are scientists (and have evidence to support those claims). The people who claim that it's not aren't scientists (or at best aren't scientists who study evolutionary biology), and have no real evidence that evolution doesn't exist.
The point being that if you're going to judge anything based on "some people think this, others think that", you'll never reach any conclusions since there's ALWAYS some nut who's not honestly looking at the data, misunderstands something, or is just a plain old liar. Right now there's a bunch of dangerous nutjobs who claim HIV doesn't cause AIDS.
I'm sure if you looked hard enough you could find some people that don't believe in heliocentric theory (that is the earth and planets revolving around the sun) that could contruct some complicated arguments against it that most people don't understand, but at the same time sound convincing. Does that mean that helio-centric theory is wrong? No, it just means that science often requires extra knowledge to understand it.
Many people have suggested a one-for-two or one-for-three, but the people behind the project have consistently stated that this will not happen.
If that's true, it's the first dumb decision I've heard come out of this project. Bill Gates stated that the major cost of the laptop would be software. In the absence of open source developers, he's right. There's some ability to take software for existing high-lowered linux machines, but it certainly won't be as good without developers being able to run it on the actual machine.
There is a good possibility that current versions have significant changes.
Which is exactly what the software producers will claim when any issues are brought up that people find.
"That bug has been fixed in the release version. What you have is beta software never intended to be used in an election". Or "That vulnerability could never happen because of safeguards that exist in other parts of the system we won't tell you about".
Or worse, pundits will just claim:
"We have no way of knowing if the version released on the internet wasn't modified by someone else before release".
I guess my question is, how do you expect the release of this software will help change anything? Since you can't be certain about the validity of the source or what's been changed, what use is it? Conclusions based on questionable evidence become questionable.
Just something to think about, since I'm sure the spin machines will be in high gear to minimize any impact of anything that's found. Just be prepared for the usual responses.
I'll respond to your lame attempt to be clever after you explain how you misconfigured Slashdot to post your comment.
What? I don't know how to configure anything. That's too "technological" for me. I just expect people to know exactly my intentions without me communicating them in any way whatsoever. Since you read my previous post, I expect you know my default position of not allowing access to read my posts unless I give explicit permission (Which I DO NOT!). Expect the law to come breaking down your door soon.
My problem is that they do not make the public part of their database - the part that was contributed by 1000s of users - freely available to the public.
Excuse me, but that statement is at worst wrong, and at best extremely misleading.
As others have pointed out, CDDB DID make all the data that was entered in before they became a private company freely available.
Maybe you're referring to the service of providing CD lookups? Why should they be obligated to privide that for free, as they're the ones that wrote the software that provided it? They still made all the publically created information freely available, so what's the issue here?
I'm just amazed that so few people in this discussion can understand the difference between information, and a service that provides that information in a nice way. I don't know the licensing/copyright for wikipedia operates, but for the sake of argument assume that the following scenario is perfectly legal: Would you be all pissed off if they took the information in wikipedia, polished it up a bit, and created printed textbooks or e-books for schools?
I just don't understand how people can be perfectly fine with a company like Redhat that takes open source contributions of thousands of developers, packages it nicely and supports it, and charges a fee for that. But when Gracenote does basically the same thing they're deemed "unethical".
People can never get back the hundreds (thousands?) of hours of data-entry effort they invested, and will now need to reinvest in another service.
Why would they need to re-invest it when the information is (and has been for years) freely available for anyone to use (and I'm assuming FreeDB did exactly that).
There's more to this than the information itself.
There's the sofware that was created by CDDB, but that belongs to CDDB and only certain versions of it were released under the GPL. The main complaint people seem to have is essentially "You made money off of our work, and we don't like that.". My response to that is "welcome to freedom". Freedom doesn't mean others only get to do things with your work that you gave away that you like. AFAIK CDDB never made any claims that they'd always provide the service for free, never go commercial, etc. If people really had a problem with what CDDB might do with their work, then they shouldn't have contributed, or found some other service that puts more restrictions on what can be done with the collective work.
It's fairly obvious that you have no ethical or legal right to use a service that has been misconfigured to give you access, against the intent of the owner. It's irrelevant that the misconfiguration happens to be a factory default.
I'm so glad I've finally found someone that shares my opinion! I have the same problem with this new webserver I set up for my own use. I get all pissed off when people visit MY webserver without specifically asking permission from me. These bastards are using MY bandwidth, and I didn't even tell them they could use MY server! Sure, I've posted links all over the internet to the website, but that's just to make it easier for me. Why do people click on those links when I didn't tell them it's OK to do so? Some joker even told me he DIDN'T click on the link, his browser did! He claims some weirdo software program did it for him that pre-cache's content to speed up browsing. Maybe I should sue the people who make that caching software, or have them all arrested.
People have suggested I turn on this whole password thing, but I don't know how to set up that up. Plus I hate typing in passwords.
I've gone to court about it even. For some strange reason the judge just started laughing and laughing at me though. It was hard for him to even bang the gavel and dismiss my lawsuit because he was laughing so hard.
(Oh, by the way I hope you didn't read any of this post since I didn't give any explicit permission for you to do so, including this sentence). If you did, expect a lawsuit to follow.
Why is it so many people on Slashdot only seem to care about the "free as in beer" definition of free? Business guys LOVE the freedom definition of free. Why do you think they like free trade so much? Freedom gives you flexibility, and business tends to thrive on flexibility since you can easily adapt and aren't stuck in one path. Most businesses would love to be free from the lock-in of proprietary software. Most of them just can't do it though because the headlock is too tight, or there's no open source alternative.
Strangely enough, I agree completely. People in this discussion seem to assume that anyone making money off something freely contributed by the community is in the wrong. They also can't seem to seperate the service of providing CD lookups from the information they contributed.
I will say that Gracenote sure didn't win any friends by suddenly switching to a paid model without warning. I won't even call it unethical behaviour, since they weren't under any obligation to provide the service. It does seem like kind of a dick move though as they knew there was a lot of software that relied on CDDB. All business relies on relationships, so this move by Gracenote was basically shooting themselves in the foot.
In my neighborhood, a bunch of parents got together recently and donated a bunch of money to upgrade a schoolyard playground beyond what the local government would have put there by default.
The analogy breaks down because information can be copied, but money can't. Also money is a fluid resource that can buy other resources.
It's be more like your community got together and bought sand, tires, playground equipment, etc to build a playground. A private company decided to donate land to put the playground on, and pays other people to install all the equipment and maintain the playground. Later on the company decides to charge for usage of the playground, but also gives you back all the sand, tires, and playground equipment, etc that you contributed. (This is some strange world where sand, tires, and playground equipment can be copied perfectly).
You're a bit peaved, but obviously you can still move the playground elsewhere as you still own everything you put into it. You and your neighbors find some inexpensive land next door and put all the playground equipment in yourself on the weekends.
This is really a lesson for people that assume relationships that don't exist.
Because I thought that I am submitting my data to the public.
And you did submit it to the public, as the information is still available. Is this not true?
But suddenly, that public resource turned private - I could not use it freely as before.
There's a difference between the information you submitted, and the service to provide that information to your music player. It's your error in not seperating those two different things. You seemed to assume an agreement that never existed based upon some idea of "we're all in this together", but CDDB never actually said they'd provide. The real world doesn't work like that. If you want those kind of re-assurances they should be backed up by a legal agreement so no one is confused and assumes a relationship that doesn't exist.
Are you equally pissed off that Redhat decided to stop supporting the free (as in beer) versions of Redhat Linux? It's basically the same situation, since Centos has since popped up providing free as in beer copies and updates to what's essentially RHEL.
It is as if I gave a dollar to a public project - say a server to run slashdot on, thinking that if everybody contributed a dollar to that resource, then the public will have a resource - slashdot will have a fast server.
It's really nothing like that at all. You provided a resource to a company, and the company then went public and gave back all the resources that were given to them freely to anyone that wanted it. The problem with your analogy is you can't copy money, but you can copy information.
Home locks are pickable so that police and locksmiths can open them.
Nonsense. Home locks are pickable because it's cheaper to produce pickable locks, and for most people that security is sufficient. Sure you could pick the lock if you had the right skills or the right equipment, but inexpensive locks are about keeping people honest, not about absolute security.
The rest of your post I agree with. If you don't secure your wireless access, it's essentially an open invitation for anyone to use it. Software is configured these days to actively seek out a wireless device to connect to. If you don't want people to use it, lock it up.
Yes it was a guess at the cost. I took the build out cost of an office space and cut it in a quarter.
Office space? What does building office space have to do with building solar power?
Plastic wouldn't be a good option since if you put it in a dessert it would get scratched up very quickly
The article actually talked about plastic, so either they're not thinking about putting it in a sandy desert, or they've got some solution to the scratch problem (perhaps thin coatings).
Man the solar faithful are out in power today. Notice I didn't say it was a bad plan. I didn't it wouldn't work. I said it might work in southeastern California, Arizona, Nevada, and south west Texas. All places with a lot of cheap land and sunlight
My main problem is you just made up a cost out of thin air to justify how it was economically infeasible. That's basically just nonsense. Sure 2 square miles of anything isn't going to be cheap to build. But there's a big difference between a billion dollars, and 100 million dollars. A billion dollars is probbably too expensive and risky for most companies to risk. 100 million dollars is really nothing. The real costs are probbably somewhere in-between.
Let's just say that it costs a super cheap 20$ a square foot. The cost of the mirrors alone would be $1,115,136,000.
Wow. I can make up numbers too. Let's assume it was a "super cheap" $2 a square foot. That's only
$115 million. Oh wait, let's assume it's only
Rather than pulling numbers out of your ass, maybe you should have real estimates of what it costs to make a plastic mirror. Considering you can make wood flooring for
I thought the moon was made of earths crust (mostly rock composed of silicon and oxygen), which doesn't contain a large amount of iron. The earths core is largely made out of iron, which is electrically conductive and able to generate a magnetic field. I'd think it'd be difficult to generate a magnetic field without the ability to conduct electricity.
So, the abscence of a magnetic field may only indicate the moon has a rocky (but possibly liquid) core.