Personally, I think we are about to enter an entirely new (and unfortunate) age, where newspapers adopt the same model that scientific journals adopt: demand payment from universities and large institutions, deny access to anyone not affiliated with such institutions.
You seem to imply that newspapers have the ability to produce valuable, good quality, unbiased news and opinion pieces. They can sometimes do that (eg Watergate), but mostly they're just crap.
The net has exposed the lack of quality, hidden agendas and general buffoonery of the supposedly "serious" news media (of any political alignment). That poor quality has been in place for decades but only now are we seeing it for what it is. Until they improve that quality, get out from under the yoke of interruptive advertising and oligopoly control, most people will not be prepared to pay for the slush that masquerades as "news". I took last week's copy of The Sunday Times and cut out every article that wasn't about some individual's personal opinions, or what they had for lunch, or whether they might do something if they got enough votes. I had about 10 column inches left from the entire main newspaper that was of any substance. And even then I had no ability to verify it. Basically, almost none of the paper was news, most of it was speculation, inconsequential human interest crap and goats cheese salad recipes.
News is now a form of middle-class entertainment about as consequential to participatory society as watching Avatar or baking apple strudel. I can't think of a single time it's had any discernible impact on my life outside giving me racing tips or making me laugh.
better quality reporting, unbiased facts, well thought-out and researched opinion pieces instead of regurgitated press releases.
Good luck with that!
Basically, there are no mechanisms currently present in the news media to improve those things at all. The race for ad-viewing eyeballs and the pressure to conform to a handful of super-owners with delusions of grandeur (well, Murdoch anyway - and he controls about 60% of all news) means the race to the bottom is assured. That's the situation for now at least until some massive disruptive event takes place to reverse it.
Very wise. However, consider this: the iPhone and the iPod had games to change. That is, before the iPod, if you'd asked Joe Sixpack what an MP3 player was for, he'd have given you a simple answer as to what the "game" was there: playing music, on your own, donwloading stuff onto it. Simple. Same with the iPhone: what's a smartphone for? Making calls, reading the manual about other "features" that you hardly ever use. All very well established games. All a bit geeky and rather boring to Joe Sixpack. Sales (at least of MP£ players) bore his out. Then boof! Apple changed all their with their magic Apple magic.
The same is NOT true of iPad. Joe sixpack (and everyone else for that matter) has no idea what the game is with a "tablet." Is it a laptop? Is it for movies? Games? What?
No game to change = no revolution. The iPad will be like Apple TV: a nice idea, it just won't go anywhere (or somebody else will get there instead).
any changes to copyright law need to be made by Parliament, not sneaked in through the back door with technological restrictions.
Well yes, but the depressing thing is that what's being discussed by Ofcom is a set of contract terms between the broadcaster, their audience and the content providers. Copyright law will not (can cannot) be changed by this, the rights holders will still be the rights holders, etc. The crucial point is that in almost all jurisdictions on earth, contract beats copyright, so in this debate copyright might seem like the the issue, but it's not.
approach to fighting spam. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)
( ) Spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses (x) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected ( ) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money ( ) It is defenseless against brute force attacks (x) It will stop spam for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it (x) Users of email will not put up with it ( ) Microsoft will not put up with it ( ) The police will not put up with it ( ) Requires too much cooperation from spammers (x) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once (x) Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers ( ) Spammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists ( ) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business
Specifically, your plan fails to account for
( ) Laws expressly prohibiting it (x) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email (x) Open relays in foreign countries ( ) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses ( ) Asshats (x) Jurisdictional problems (x) Unpopularity of weird new taxes ( ) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money (x) Huge existing software investment in SMTP (x) Susceptibility of protocols other than SMTP to attack ( ) Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email ( ) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes ( ) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches (x) Extreme profitability of spam (x) Joe jobs and/or identity theft ( ) Technically illiterate politicians ( ) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers ( ) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves ( ) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering ( ) Outlook
and the following philosophical objections may also apply:
(x) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever been shown practical ( ) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable ( ) SMTP headers should not be the subject of legislation ( ) Blacklists suck ( ) Whitelists suck ( ) We should be able to talk about Viagra without being censored ( ) Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud ( ) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks (x) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually (x) Sending email should be free ( ) Why should we have to trust you and your servers? ( ) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses ( ) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem ( ) Temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome ( ) I don't want the government reading my email ( ) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough
Furthermore, this is what I think about you:
(x) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work. ( ) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it. ( ) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your house down!
Parents who have turned their children over to the television, computer, and daycare centers of the world and neglecting basic nutrition.
Good point. Isn't it a bit of a leap to observe an increase in rickets and tie that to gaming? If the kids weren't getting enough minerals/vitamins, would those who also played basketball all week get rickets too? Obviously, I've not RTFA, but this seems more like an irrational attack on gaming than anything else.
So the newspapers are finally realizing what Slashdotters have known for 10 years -- nobody RTFAs.
Heh.
Thing is, we don't know know how many people do the same with printed newspapers. I know I probably skim the headlines on at least half of the (paid) newspapers I buy. But of late I have begun to realise that most if now all "news" you read is next to meaningless anyway.
Now, the question becomes, will they charge a fair price, or will they pull a record company move, and try to charge the same for a physical and a digital product?
No. That's irrelevant, at least in the long term. The question in fact is will they provide content that people are actually willing to pay for?
I think that in the case of what are laughingly referred to as "quality newspapers", the race to the bottom has been won. By all of them. I think what may now be happening is that people like us (well, OK, me) have woken up to what the Internet has exposed: that "quality news" is nothing of the kind. Bias, ridiculous spin, pressure to meet deadlines, and general lack of journalistic integrity in order to keep big advertisers and other vested interests sweet, has been festering in news outlets for years. We just didn't realise until the net came along.
In charging for content online, if newspapers manage to throw off the shackles that have bound them for a generation or more, then we're all going to benefit. I just don't hold out much hope of that because they've gone so far away from what they're supposed to be doing that they've utterly lost sight of it. Reading the "news" these days is just a way of killing time with idle crappy chattering by people who don't care about truth, or balance, or anything really. Just money. Next time you read a paper, ask yourself if anything you are reading seems in any way useful or relevant or even remotely reliable. You might find a couple of paragraphs that qualify among the thousands of "Obama waves from helicopter, pledges change" and "[insert issue] may happen in months, says totallyunreliablesource." etc. etc. yeach whatever. Really, I may as well just play WoW instead for all the value it imparts to my life on planet earth.
The way I see it, all OpenShot has to do is not crash every 10 minutes and it'll be light years ahead of the competition.
That's exactly the way I see it too. I'd love to quickly knock out some titles and clip some of the boring parts off a bunch of videos I've made of things like kids parties and snowball fights n'stuff, but the thought of having to swear loudly over my machine for hours on end is just too demoralising.
I'm playing with OpenShot right now. So far, so good. Sure, the tool bar icons all disappear when you re-size a window, but compared to totally crashing out that's nothing. Only been using it for about 30mins so far though, so we'll see.
There are just so many different special cases like leap years/seconds and corner cases like converting from one timezone to another in the middle of daylight savings time change in or both of those timezones. Somebody ought to write a paper, or even a book, on all the stuff you have to watch out for.
In just about any language (C, Java,.NET, Perl, PHP, SQL...) there are (built-in) libraries available that do time correctly. If you're unsure on how to store time, Unix epoch is just about the simplest way to store it (it's a freakin' integer), it's universally recognizable and accepted and very easy to calculate with and if you need more precision just make it a floating point number and add numbers after the comma.
It's human nature. You're a coder. You're writing code all day, solving problems, come up with solutions, you have pride in your work and you like to do it. Using somebody else's code to handle the thorny (and fun!) issue of dates is, well, no fun. So you don't do it. You roll your own.
And you screw it up.
If I had a fiver for every time I've been boggle-eyed seeing people sinking valuable time into writing complex bespoke solutions to issues that could be handled by just calling a couple of methods on an totally common, free library I'd be a rich man by now. Don't get me wrong, I'm not calling all coders retards - they're just proud.
My post was about piracy and it's effect on the torpid and witless publishing industry. In talking about a "proper job" I was labouring my point. I wasn't trying to mean that non-writing jobs are any more real than any other. What I meant was that good books will get written (and MAYBE even published by the Disneyfied money-grubbing publishing industry) no matter what. The promise of an extra 50K a year never did squat to motivate the likes of Edgar Allen Poe.
But what about the harm to books and to the confidence of new authors happening RIGHT NOW.... what do we do BEFORE we have a system of direct compensation in place?
Oh, Cry me a river. Really - if 80% of all the authors producing today simply stopped, would anyone notice? This hugely precious literary ecosystem you seem to speak of doesn't and has never existed - it's a figment of a money-grubbing, Disneyfied publishing industry.
Ever been in the fiction section of a bookshop in the last 75 years? Almost all of what's on the shelves is deriviative garbage published by a miniscule number of gatekeepers desperate to reproduce the last blockbuster than sold more than 10,000. JK Rowling?? Without too much subjectivity, JK Rowlings books are complete shit! Fiction publication is like music publication: for every vapid block-buster there are literally thousands of similar works (some arguably far better) that barely sell much over a couple of thousand copies in their entire print runs despite ridiculous marketing efforts.
Meanwhile, really worthwhile books will always get written because the energies of art and intellectual freedom will always far outweigh trivial economic consideration. For one thing, what do you think authors did before the perpetual copyright we have today? Do nobody bother to write books before 1850?
The time is ripe for change. Piracy will decimate the money-grubbing, Disneyfied publishing industry and not a moment too soon. Don't fancy making tuppence from your pipsqueak idea for a murder mystery? Get a proper job!
Stuff you can charge 200% over the cost of production is even more interesting. As long as most of the world doesn't have access to high-speed Internet connections or have the knowledge to make use of them distribution is going to be where the big bucks are.
The Folio Society does exactly what you are describing. They sell extremely high quality bound and (often originally) illustrated, often public domain works for vast sums. Doesn't seem to be the most popular or successful business model in the world, but it pays for a few people's food I bet.
Very few people can build a solid attachment to a culture that's perpetually two years old.
Bingo - which is why I oppose long copyright terms.
I think publishers also want to hang on to works for hundreds of years because of the "ruby in the dust" effect. Since it costs them nothing to keep a work under copyright, if the long tail effect means that it suddenly becomes popular again a long time later (stand by for the resurgence of works by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, for example*) then they can let the money roll in rather than see it all go to other people. Of course, in the case of sound recordings and some other works, the original media won't last more than about 50 years anyway before all known copies vanish through age.
* - Sherlock Holmes is not in the public domain until 2023. Ah, the estate of Conan Doyle. How lovely to have a nice fat income from the works of your great, great grandfather for no other reason than the sheer accident of your birth.
I get 150KB/s downloads out in Manassas in Virginia with AT&T 3G.
Wha?? Is anyone in the UK reading this and thinking what I'm thinking? I've got an iPhone 3GS and download speeds are ridiculously slow all the time no matter where you are (I live and work in London).
This post reminded me to ask somebody else about this - O2's 3G seems to go at about the same speed as my 14.4K modem did in 1996. Is that other people's experience too?
The ONLY reason I can see for their obsessiveness with blocking porn is that it can be used as the basis for developing the technology and infrastructure necessary to block whatever it is they want.
Bingo. It's exactly the same with child porn in the West. Never mind that the actual number of paedophiles is minuscule and the chances of children being actually harmed are even tinier, governments find it incredibly easy to start spending bazillions on technology to stop it because those that sign off the budgets think that the same technologies will be easy to use for "other things" (and usually they're right).
Consider also that it's all self-perpetuating too: for anyone in power to actually oppose measures seen as eradicating evil scourges would be to pretty much sign their own political death warrant. Control = power = control = more power until everything is banned and nothing is permitted. In fact maybe the only difference between the Chinese and the West is that the Chinese are just a few steps ahead of us in this game.
"I will not have a system at home to connect through."
Then get one if you're concerned about your privacy. Really, are your bank details not worth ten or twelve bucks a month for a virtual server somewhere?
I don't understand what the hell is going in modern society that we suddenly think there are hoards of paedophiles everywhere. The only thing that might have changed in the last 50 years is that child porn may be more accessible now that it was before, but child porn doesn't make people into paedophiles any more than Kylie Minogue makes people homosexual.
I would (sort of) understand it if this was just a stupid legislative thing - ie making laws to ban child porn in order to get more powers to spy on ordinary people, etc. but the thing is that the general public seem to be obsessed by it over the past 10 years.
Today is by 43rd birthday. As I played with my 9 year old son, I thought about what my life was like when I was his age. The first thing that struck me was that (were it not for the rain here in London), he'd be out playing in the streets with his mates, not in some kind of house arrest situation where he has to have at least one parent with him at all times when he leaves the house.
It's fucking sad. And it makes me angry that politicians pander to irrelevant crap like child porn and paedophiles. Yes, paedophiles exist, and so does child porn, but the NUMBER of paedophiles hasn't increased, has it? If it has, nobody's saying why. And even if it has, then the effect of 0.00001% of the population having a predilection for children is frankly irrelevant compared to dangers such as traffic accidents, non-sexual abuse, violence and murder, which - incidentally - hasn't increased either!
I have no problem with you deleting spam articles, but I do have a problem (as I've experienced myself) of helping to maintain articles on obscure pop-culture subjects over a long period of time that suddenly get nominated for speedy deletion because some deletionist decides that article is about a "neologism" (what is Wikipedia if it is not about documenting contemporary culture?), or that it contains too many links to "commercial" sites (it's hard to discuss a commercial concept without linking to commercial sites). Both of these have "rules" that they cite to support their case. And who wrote or edited those rules? You guessed it!
So I would say there are two types of deletionist: ones like you, who police abuses of wikipedia like spam articles, and the kind of deletionist that has decided that Wikipedia should be more "encyclopedic", which for them basically means deleting everything that you would not have been taught about in school in pre-1950's USA. That sort is the bad sort.
On page 173 (softback edition) of Nicholas Negroponte's "Being Digital" he makes what for him is a pretty confident prediction:
“I think videocassette rental stores will go out of business in less than ten years.”
The book was published in 1995. Viacom was looking to sell Blockbuster in 2004, but so far the rental market is fairly good. Maybe this might just get Negroponte's prediction to squeak in if we include DVD rentals and cable?
I love Negroponte. He once replied "About ten million dollars" when asked by a TSA official what the value of his laptop was before it passed through an x-ray.
I recently sent an e-mail to a local radio station after they read a news item stating that, so far this year, 12 people have died from the swine flu in my state. I sent them a letter because that's all that the news item said. It did not mention that about 1600 die of the regular old influenza every year. With all the hysteria about this issue I think some perspective is very badly needed. It's just piss-poor journalism to report a raw figure with no context like this.
It also has something to do with the piss-poor state of people's understanding of statistics in general. Your story is a classic example of how society needs to put a lot more emphasis on education when it comes to stats. I'd even put forward a "law" of information theory regarding this: the actionable value of data increases by the amount of its supporting data. So in this example, saying that 12 people have died of swine flu has a value of 0 (it has no context so it's meaningless). Saying that 1600 die of regular flu every year increases its value by 1, saying that last year 2500 people died of regular flu increases it by +1 again, saying that flue deaths this century have averaged 0.007% of that of the annual rate 100 years ago increases it +1 again, etc.
Slashdot Mirror
Personally, I think we are about to enter an entirely new (and unfortunate) age, where newspapers adopt the same model that scientific journals adopt: demand payment from universities and large institutions, deny access to anyone not affiliated with such institutions.
You seem to imply that newspapers have the ability to produce valuable, good quality, unbiased news and opinion pieces. They can sometimes do that (eg Watergate), but mostly they're just crap.
The net has exposed the lack of quality, hidden agendas and general buffoonery of the supposedly "serious" news media (of any political alignment). That poor quality has been in place for decades but only now are we seeing it for what it is. Until they improve that quality, get out from under the yoke of interruptive advertising and oligopoly control, most people will not be prepared to pay for the slush that masquerades as "news". I took last week's copy of The Sunday Times and cut out every article that wasn't about some individual's personal opinions, or what they had for lunch, or whether they might do something if they got enough votes. I had about 10 column inches left from the entire main newspaper that was of any substance. And even then I had no ability to verify it. Basically, almost none of the paper was news, most of it was speculation, inconsequential human interest crap and goats cheese salad recipes.
News is now a form of middle-class entertainment about as consequential to participatory society as watching Avatar or baking apple strudel. I can't think of a single time it's had any discernible impact on my life outside giving me racing tips or making me laugh.
better quality reporting, unbiased facts, well thought-out and researched opinion pieces instead of regurgitated press releases.
Good luck with that!
Basically, there are no mechanisms currently present in the news media to improve those things at all. The race for ad-viewing eyeballs and the pressure to conform to a handful of super-owners with delusions of grandeur (well, Murdoch anyway - and he controls about 60% of all news) means the race to the bottom is assured. That's the situation for now at least until some massive disruptive event takes place to reverse it.
I prefer to take the 'wait and see' approach.
Very wise. However, consider this: the iPhone and the iPod had games to change. That is, before the iPod, if you'd asked Joe Sixpack what an MP3 player was for, he'd have given you a simple answer as to what the "game" was there: playing music, on your own, donwloading stuff onto it. Simple. Same with the iPhone: what's a smartphone for? Making calls, reading the manual about other "features" that you hardly ever use. All very well established games. All a bit geeky and rather boring to Joe Sixpack. Sales (at least of MP£ players) bore his out. Then boof! Apple changed all their with their magic Apple magic.
The same is NOT true of iPad. Joe sixpack (and everyone else for that matter) has no idea what the game is with a "tablet." Is it a laptop? Is it for movies? Games? What?
No game to change = no revolution. The iPad will be like Apple TV: a nice idea, it just won't go anywhere (or somebody else will get there instead).
Which means no hulu.com, espn360.com or fancast.com. Somehow Mr. Jobs is touting this as a feature.
HTML 5, baby, HTML 5.
any changes to copyright law need to be made by Parliament, not sneaked in through the back door with technological restrictions.
Well yes, but the depressing thing is that what's being discussed by Ofcom is a set of contract terms between the broadcaster, their audience and the content providers. Copyright law will not (can cannot) be changed by this, the rights holders will still be the rights holders, etc. The crucial point is that in almost all jurisdictions on earth, contract beats copyright, so in this debate copyright might seem like the the issue, but it's not.
If we paid each other (say a penny or 1/10th of a penny), obviously the spam problem would be solved. (though some can charge nothing if they want)
Your post advocates a
( ) technical ( ) legislative (x) market-based ( ) vigilante
approach to fighting spam. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)
( ) Spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses
(x) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected
( ) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money
( ) It is defenseless against brute force attacks
(x) It will stop spam for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it
(x) Users of email will not put up with it
( ) Microsoft will not put up with it
( ) The police will not put up with it
( ) Requires too much cooperation from spammers
(x) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
(x) Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers
( ) Spammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists
( ) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business
Specifically, your plan fails to account for
( ) Laws expressly prohibiting it
(x) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email
(x) Open relays in foreign countries
( ) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses
( ) Asshats
(x) Jurisdictional problems
(x) Unpopularity of weird new taxes
( ) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money
(x) Huge existing software investment in SMTP
(x) Susceptibility of protocols other than SMTP to attack
( ) Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email
( ) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes
( ) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches
(x) Extreme profitability of spam
(x) Joe jobs and/or identity theft
( ) Technically illiterate politicians
( ) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers
( ) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves
( ) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering
( ) Outlook
and the following philosophical objections may also apply:
(x) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever been shown practical
( ) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable
( ) SMTP headers should not be the subject of legislation
( ) Blacklists suck
( ) Whitelists suck
( ) We should be able to talk about Viagra without being censored
( ) Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud
( ) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks
(x) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually
(x) Sending email should be free
( ) Why should we have to trust you and your servers?
( ) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses
( ) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem
( ) Temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome
( ) I don't want the government reading my email
( ) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough
Furthermore, this is what I think about you:
(x) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work.
( ) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it.
( ) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your house down!
Parents who have turned their children over to the television, computer, and daycare centers of the world and neglecting basic nutrition.
Good point. Isn't it a bit of a leap to observe an increase in rickets and tie that to gaming? If the kids weren't getting enough minerals/vitamins, would those who also played basketball all week get rickets too? Obviously, I've not RTFA, but this seems more like an irrational attack on gaming than anything else.
So the newspapers are finally realizing what Slashdotters have known for 10 years -- nobody RTFAs.
Heh.
Thing is, we don't know know how many people do the same with printed newspapers. I know I probably skim the headlines on at least half of the (paid) newspapers I buy. But of late I have begun to realise that most if now all "news" you read is next to meaningless anyway.
Now, the question becomes, will they charge a fair price, or will they pull a record company move, and try to charge the same for a physical and a digital product?
No. That's irrelevant, at least in the long term. The question in fact is will they provide content that people are actually willing to pay for?
I think that in the case of what are laughingly referred to as "quality newspapers", the race to the bottom has been won. By all of them. I think what may now be happening is that people like us (well, OK, me) have woken up to what the Internet has exposed: that "quality news" is nothing of the kind. Bias, ridiculous spin, pressure to meet deadlines, and general lack of journalistic integrity in order to keep big advertisers and other vested interests sweet, has been festering in news outlets for years. We just didn't realise until the net came along.
In charging for content online, if newspapers manage to throw off the shackles that have bound them for a generation or more, then we're all going to benefit. I just don't hold out much hope of that because they've gone so far away from what they're supposed to be doing that they've utterly lost sight of it. Reading the "news" these days is just a way of killing time with idle crappy chattering by people who don't care about truth, or balance, or anything really. Just money. Next time you read a paper, ask yourself if anything you are reading seems in any way useful or relevant or even remotely reliable. You might find a couple of paragraphs that qualify among the thousands of "Obama waves from helicopter, pledges change" and "[insert issue] may happen in months, says totallyunreliablesource." etc. etc. yeach whatever. Really, I may as well just play WoW instead for all the value it imparts to my life on planet earth.
The way I see it, all OpenShot has to do is not crash every 10 minutes and it'll be light years ahead of the competition.
That's exactly the way I see it too. I'd love to quickly knock out some titles and clip some of the boring parts off a bunch of videos I've made of things like kids parties and snowball fights n'stuff, but the thought of having to swear loudly over my machine for hours on end is just too demoralising.
I'm playing with OpenShot right now. So far, so good. Sure, the tool bar icons all disappear when you re-size a window, but compared to totally crashing out that's nothing. Only been using it for about 30mins so far though, so we'll see.
There are just so many different special cases like leap years/seconds and corner cases like converting from one timezone to another in the middle of daylight savings time change in or both of those timezones. Somebody ought to write a paper, or even a book, on all the stuff you have to watch out for.
Eh? Isn't that was tzdata is for?
In just about any language (C, Java, .NET, Perl, PHP, SQL...) there are (built-in) libraries available that do time correctly. If you're unsure on how to store time, Unix epoch is just about the simplest way to store it (it's a freakin' integer), it's universally recognizable and accepted and very easy to calculate with and if you need more precision just make it a floating point number and add numbers after the comma.
It's human nature. You're a coder. You're writing code all day, solving problems, come up with solutions, you have pride in your work and you like to do it. Using somebody else's code to handle the thorny (and fun!) issue of dates is, well, no fun. So you don't do it. You roll your own.
And you screw it up.
If I had a fiver for every time I've been boggle-eyed seeing people sinking valuable time into writing complex bespoke solutions to issues that could be handled by just calling a couple of methods on an totally common, free library I'd be a rich man by now. Don't get me wrong, I'm not calling all coders retards - they're just proud.
Good point, well made.
I take back all I said about JK Rowling, it's irrelevant to my main point. Sorry.
OK redact all I said about JK Rowling - it's not worth the effort to defend.
I take it you agree with everything else I said though.
My apologies.
My post was about piracy and it's effect on the torpid and witless publishing industry. In talking about a "proper job" I was labouring my point. I wasn't trying to mean that non-writing jobs are any more real than any other. What I meant was that good books will get written (and MAYBE even published by the Disneyfied money-grubbing publishing industry) no matter what. The promise of an extra 50K a year never did squat to motivate the likes of Edgar Allen Poe.
But what about the harm to books and to the confidence of new authors happening RIGHT NOW.... what do we do BEFORE we have a system of direct compensation in place?
Oh, Cry me a river. Really - if 80% of all the authors producing today simply stopped, would anyone notice? This hugely precious literary ecosystem you seem to speak of doesn't and has never existed - it's a figment of a money-grubbing, Disneyfied publishing industry.
Ever been in the fiction section of a bookshop in the last 75 years? Almost all of what's on the shelves is deriviative garbage published by a miniscule number of gatekeepers desperate to reproduce the last blockbuster than sold more than 10,000. JK Rowling?? Without too much subjectivity, JK Rowlings books are complete shit! Fiction publication is like music publication: for every vapid block-buster there are literally thousands of similar works (some arguably far better) that barely sell much over a couple of thousand copies in their entire print runs despite ridiculous marketing efforts.
Meanwhile, really worthwhile books will always get written because the energies of art and intellectual freedom will always far outweigh trivial economic consideration. For one thing, what do you think authors did before the perpetual copyright we have today? Do nobody bother to write books before 1850?
The time is ripe for change. Piracy will decimate the money-grubbing, Disneyfied publishing industry and not a moment too soon. Don't fancy making tuppence from your pipsqueak idea for a murder mystery? Get a proper job!
Stuff you can charge 200% over the cost of production is even more interesting. As long as most of the world doesn't have access to high-speed Internet connections or have the knowledge to make use of them distribution is going to be where the big bucks are.
The Folio Society does exactly what you are describing. They sell extremely high quality bound and (often originally) illustrated, often public domain works for vast sums. Doesn't seem to be the most popular or successful business model in the world, but it pays for a few people's food I bet.
Very few people can build a solid attachment to a culture that's perpetually two years old.
Bingo - which is why I oppose long copyright terms.
I think publishers also want to hang on to works for hundreds of years because of the "ruby in the dust" effect. Since it costs them nothing to keep a work under copyright, if the long tail effect means that it suddenly becomes popular again a long time later (stand by for the resurgence of works by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, for example*) then they can let the money roll in rather than see it all go to other people. Of course, in the case of sound recordings and some other works, the original media won't last more than about 50 years anyway before all known copies vanish through age.
* - Sherlock Holmes is not in the public domain until 2023. Ah, the estate of Conan Doyle. How lovely to have a nice fat income from the works of your great, great grandfather for no other reason than the sheer accident of your birth.
I get 150KB/s downloads out in Manassas in Virginia with AT&T 3G.
Wha?? Is anyone in the UK reading this and thinking what I'm thinking? I've got an iPhone 3GS and download speeds are ridiculously slow all the time no matter where you are (I live and work in London).
This post reminded me to ask somebody else about this - O2's 3G seems to go at about the same speed as my 14.4K modem did in 1996. Is that other people's experience too?
The ONLY reason I can see for their obsessiveness with blocking porn is that it can be used as the basis for developing the technology and infrastructure necessary to block whatever it is they want.
Bingo. It's exactly the same with child porn in the West. Never mind that the actual number of paedophiles is minuscule and the chances of children being actually harmed are even tinier, governments find it incredibly easy to start spending bazillions on technology to stop it because those that sign off the budgets think that the same technologies will be easy to use for "other things" (and usually they're right).
Consider also that it's all self-perpetuating too: for anyone in power to actually oppose measures seen as eradicating evil scourges would be to pretty much sign their own political death warrant. Control = power = control = more power until everything is banned and nothing is permitted. In fact maybe the only difference between the Chinese and the West is that the Chinese are just a few steps ahead of us in this game.
"I will not have a system at home to connect through."
Then get one if you're concerned about your privacy. Really, are your bank details not worth ten or twelve bucks a month for a virtual server somewhere?
I don't understand what the hell is going in modern society that we suddenly think there are hoards of paedophiles everywhere. The only thing that might have changed in the last 50 years is that child porn may be more accessible now that it was before, but child porn doesn't make people into paedophiles any more than Kylie Minogue makes people homosexual.
I would (sort of) understand it if this was just a stupid legislative thing - ie making laws to ban child porn in order to get more powers to spy on ordinary people, etc. but the thing is that the general public seem to be obsessed by it over the past 10 years.
Today is by 43rd birthday. As I played with my 9 year old son, I thought about what my life was like when I was his age. The first thing that struck me was that (were it not for the rain here in London), he'd be out playing in the streets with his mates, not in some kind of house arrest situation where he has to have at least one parent with him at all times when he leaves the house.
It's fucking sad. And it makes me angry that politicians pander to irrelevant crap like child porn and paedophiles. Yes, paedophiles exist, and so does child porn, but the NUMBER of paedophiles hasn't increased, has it? If it has, nobody's saying why. And even if it has, then the effect of 0.00001% of the population having a predilection for children is frankly irrelevant compared to dangers such as traffic accidents, non-sexual abuse, violence and murder, which - incidentally - hasn't increased either!
What the hell is going on???
I have no problem with you deleting spam articles, but I do have a problem (as I've experienced myself) of helping to maintain articles on obscure pop-culture subjects over a long period of time that suddenly get nominated for speedy deletion because some deletionist decides that article is about a "neologism" (what is Wikipedia if it is not about documenting contemporary culture?), or that it contains too many links to "commercial" sites (it's hard to discuss a commercial concept without linking to commercial sites). Both of these have "rules" that they cite to support their case. And who wrote or edited those rules? You guessed it!
So I would say there are two types of deletionist: ones like you, who police abuses of wikipedia like spam articles, and the kind of deletionist that has decided that Wikipedia should be more "encyclopedic", which for them basically means deleting everything that you would not have been taught about in school in pre-1950's USA. That sort is the bad sort.
On page 173 (softback edition) of Nicholas Negroponte's "Being Digital" he makes what for him is a pretty confident prediction:
“I think videocassette rental stores will go out of business in less than ten years.”
The book was published in 1995. Viacom was looking to sell Blockbuster in 2004, but so far the rental market is fairly good. Maybe this might just get Negroponte's prediction to squeak in if we include DVD rentals and cable?
I love Negroponte. He once replied "About ten million dollars" when asked by a TSA official what the value of his laptop was before it passed through an x-ray.
I recently sent an e-mail to a local radio station after they read a news item stating that, so far this year, 12 people have died from the swine flu in my state. I sent them a letter because that's all that the news item said. It did not mention that about 1600 die of the regular old influenza every year. With all the hysteria about this issue I think some perspective is very badly needed. It's just piss-poor journalism to report a raw figure with no context like this.
It also has something to do with the piss-poor state of people's understanding of statistics in general. Your story is a classic example of how society needs to put a lot more emphasis on education when it comes to stats. I'd even put forward a "law" of information theory regarding this: the actionable value of data increases by the amount of its supporting data. So in this example, saying that 12 people have died of swine flu has a value of 0 (it has no context so it's meaningless). Saying that 1600 die of regular flu every year increases its value by 1, saying that last year 2500 people died of regular flu increases it by +1 again, saying that flue deaths this century have averaged 0.007% of that of the annual rate 100 years ago increases it +1 again, etc.