Maybe they just catch and jail a higher proportion of their criminals? If the people being sent to gaol are actually criminals, and not political criminals, then it isn't really "the opposite" of freedom.
The statistics by themselves don't really say enough.
But there was no definiative point when it changed. OK, after our (English) civil war and the monarchy had less power when they returned, but that was 1651. Parliment went from being a temporary body to being a permanent one.
Still predates the US govenment by a long way.
We have had monarchy and parliment for a long time, and power has gradually gone from one to the other. At what point do you draw the line?
They are trying to stop the spread of Americansim into France to hold onto their own language and culture. To help this they want to preserve their written works and make them available, so people don't just have lots of stuff in English available.
The only European countries that speaks English are Britain and Ireland. France isn't in a "sea of English", it's part of Europe, it's in a sea of French, German, Spanish, Italian and a whole load more.
According to french.about.com 113 million people speak it fluently on a regular basis. It is the second most widely taught second language after English.
It is the official language of France; Bénin; Burkina Faso; Central African Republic; Congo (Democratic Republic of); Congo (Republic of); Côte d'Ivoire; Gabon; Guinea; Luxembourg; Mali; Monaco; Niger; Sénégal; Togo; the Canadian province of Québec; and the Swiss districts of Vaud, Neuchâtel, Genève; Jura; French Guiana, Guadeloupe, Martinique, Réunion; French Polynesia, New Caledonia, Wallis and Futuna, French southern and Antarctic lands.
It's the co-official language of Belgium, Burundi, Cameroon, Canada, Chad, Comoros Islands, Djibouti, Equatorial Guinea, Haiti (the two official languages are French and French Creole), Madagascar, Rwanda, Seychelles, Switzerland, and Vanuatu.
I'm not French, but I certainly respect a country for trying to keep their own cultural identity. Sometimes that get a bit carried away with the language thing, but it doesn't seem to be hurting them. Remember, English is taught in their schools from a young age, and lots of French people speak really good English.
Nothing in the article suggests each library will keep their digital versions separate. If they were, there wouldn't be much need of the different libraries to cooperate.
These libraries are going to do the same thing as Google but with their works, work that Google had no current plans to digitise. It's already going to take the 10 years to do the stuff they are planning.
So the choices are, Google digitises some works and put them on line, or Google digitises some works and puts them on line, and the European Libraries also digitise some different works and put them on line.
How is the second choice possibly standing in the way of progress? Why is it a bad thing if someone other than Google do it? I like Google, and use it a lot, but I'd rather see this sort of data stored by libraries than a private company.
If you are really bugged that it is not all in one place, it won't take long for someone to write an interface to search both. You get similar things for search engines now.
If you buy stuff you are a consumer. Now, you are a citizen as well, but in context of your relationship with companies selling stuff you are a consumer or a customer.
The original idea was for every citizen to be a yeoman farmer. We would already grow and harvest all the food we needed to eat on land we owned with our own tools and guns. Once elevated from the slavery of needing someone else to make the food on our plate, a cultured and gentile society would form.
The founders seemed to have been some pretty bright people, so I have trouble believing they would have such a dumb idea. Throughout human history people have specialised and traded, economic reality leads to it, and some specialised jobs require full time commitment. It makes no sense for everyone to be a farmer, much better to let the people good at farming do it and trade.
Since farming is such hard and time consuming work (until mechanisation) then only way you can develop culture and sciences is if you have people who aren't spending all their time doing it. Although maybe the vision was the slaves do it, so the actual citizens have plenty of time.
The corporate industrial way doesn't have to be better at putting people in power, it succeeds because it can make more stuff, and people love stuff. Also, it just grows out of a relatively free society, the only way to stop it is stop people's freedoms to choose how they work, to employee people and to trade.
I guess at its most basic the argument about economics is that people have to eat. It is all very well to have a strong ethical position, but people like to have a job and feed their family. How ethical is putting lots of people out of work? How does that compare to what they are doing?
While nobody would object to, say, putting secret police out of work or concentration camp guards, the claim people writing closed source software are unethical is a bit much for some people.
I'd also note that a major reason for the North's victory over the South and the Allies over the Axis was a stronger economy. They may have gone to war partly for moral reasons, but they didn't triumph becuase of them, but for military and economic ones (unless you beleive their is some fundemental rule of the universe that the good guys always win, and they weren't that good).
That said I think you need people like RMS on the more extreme edge, becuase it pulls the centre ground of the debate in that direction. Someone needs to voice the ideas so we can discuss them, even if people end up disagreeing.
Assuming parents are actually any good, they care about their children. If their 15 year old is, say, spending 8 hours a day on a MMORPG it really is going to effect them.
Now hopefully parents will have discussed with their child why certain behaviours are bad, but lets face it teenagers are not know for being rational. Even given perfectly good reasons teenagers may very well ignore them, or agree with their parents to shut them up and then do it anyway.
Not that a bit of teenage rebellion is necessarily a bad thing, or I'm advocating not questioning authority (it certainly seems to need it more and more these days). However, rebellion = good is way to simplistic. It's great some kids who were failed by the education system went on to be successful (and not just in a financial sense) but most kids involved in social unacceptable behaviour aren't misunderstood creative types. Most people involved in "lock-hacking" are criminals.
If parents want to put some sensible limits on their kids behaviour, and talk to their kids about why, this is usually because they care, and is a good thing. Like anything it seems this tool can be both used well and abused.
Oh, and the US military built the net, hackers just moved in afterwards.
You say that is if the two are mutually contradictory. Sci-fi stories (as oppssed to space fantasy and action with sci-fi effects) often make commentary on modern day events or attitudes. Nothing stops it being sci-fi and political satire at the same time.
The moment you start using medicine you are basically giving up on natural selection. It is pretty much impossible to have along with a civilised society.
Lots of Slashdotters user Google, so news of a new Google feature is useful news. I know I'm interested in it.
As for one sided, every Google story these days has people bitching and moaning about how they are doing other things when search could be improved, how they are taking control of the internet and how the info they have could be abused. It you just read/. it would be pretty damn impossible not to realise not everyone like Google.
Problem is most criticisms I've seen tend to be on a par with the insane ramblings of Google watch. I can understand why some people choose not to use Google, but it's hard to find a coherent argument why Google is bad in general.
There is plenty of alternate search engines, new services, web email, desktop search, on-line maps and just about anything else Google has.
If Google starts doing things its users don't like (its customer are the people who advertise on Google, not the users), they will switch. It costs nothing to type in a different web address to get an alternate service (although changing email addresses can be a pain).
Of course completion and alternatives are always good things. Google can't really lock in its users, all it can do is keep making its services more attractive than the competitors.
No non-profit groups is ever going to be competing in these areas, they cost too much money.
. People who discover it think they are really deep at first and seem to like to show off on web forums because it cannot be disproved.
Yes, you can't disprove solipism, all your information about the universe comes from your interpretation of sensory data by your brain from your body. There is no external source you can go to for verification.
It is a practical and philosophical dead end though. You can babble about how you need to understand your consciousness to understand the universe, but the people doing that actual science will come up with theories that actually explain things and are actually useful.
I'll take thier understanding over your wafling any day.
How it was at the very begging directly effects how it is now. The scientific benefit of understanding anything is pretty much understanding it. It may or may not help in other areas of science, but the purpose of science is to understand things.
As for practical knowledge, who knows? Maybe one day knowledge gained here will help with something practical. If we limited scientific research based on that, we wouldn't have a lot less research.
I think the one that makes most sense is that some people now interpret the description as resulting in something like what they believe alien ships (as opposed to 'UFOs' which are often quite mundane) would look like.
You could interpret the description into something like you believe a flying saucer to be, but it isn't the only interpretation, or the only way people think alien space ships are. Claiming this description is 'exactly' like that of a UFO seems a massive reach to me.
So you can add
or
(E) Ezekiel saw something and wrote a confusing description of it, that modern people with the concept of a stereotypical flying saucer interpret as being that, but that interpretation may well be wrong.
If I was using Occam's razor, I know where it would lead me.
Fan films don't prove anything can work as a commercial TV series, even if they are actually any good.
Fans don't make their own original stuff, because they aren't all likely to care about something one of them made up in the same way. Plus someone is going to have to come up with the new vision, and other people are somehow going to have to find out about it.
Using a pre-existing setting means everyone already knows about it and likes it and wants to be involved, and hopefully won't argue to much about it.
Re:The question every firefox user is asking
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Opera 8 Released
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· Score: 1
Are they as easy to use? I like adblock becasue I can just right click on the offending object and add it straight to my block list right there. Does Opera offer anything as user friendly?
Re:A case study of why software patents are needed
on
Opera 8 Released
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· Score: 1
The thing that amazed me about tabbed browsing is non-browser programs were going it for years before hand, and it took so long for web browsers to have it.
I wouldn't think doing something pre-existing, but in a browser is anymore patent worthy than doing something pre-existing but on the internet.
If Opera continues to invest in R&D it will continue to innovate, and continue to be ahead of the competition (I use Firefox, but Opera does seem to always be ahead innovation wise). Hence the pay off for R&D.
So R&D is a continual process giving continual results. It seems rather unreasonable to expect one R&D development to just keep paying for ever (or the patent duration). That would seem to me more harmful to technological advance as you can just rest on your laurels as it were.
Re:it's not just about the user experience
on
Opera 8 Released
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· Score: 1
Sure, firefox may quote user/download statistics: but just how many of them have resulted in cash back into the business?
Er none, Firefox open source software is made by the non-profit Mozilla foundattion. It's aim isn't to make money, but a good open source browser.
How many episodes would 3.1 million make? A quick Google tells me its about 1.6 million per episode, so about two. So it isn't going to be much of an impact when looking at making a new series.
They can monopolize Trek because they own the rights, that simple. This is true for just about every creative endeavour these days. Indeed, it's rather the point of copyright to grant a limited time monopoly (although you can argue the limited time part has been effectively removed, and the rights holders are often not the creators).
In some ways it is easy to make a bigger hard drive, or at least once you have made it, get people to use it. They just install and off they go.
Removable media suffers from the problem it isn't much use unless a lot of people use it. People aren't going to switch to slightly better media, requiring buying new recorders/players, suffering from the stuff you record not being compatible with most people's players for a while and so on. Removable storage will always lag because of this.
So while we can make removable media much better than current DVDs, they aren't better enough yet to get people to switch. Floppy disks to CDs to DVDs were all big jumps in storage, and now DVDs are big enough for most people, most of the time.
The music industry already gets paid for the download. The compnay (like Apple) have an agreement with the record lables, and a cut of the download goes to them.
Further, how is buying a blank CD like a download? Itsn't the download more like buying a pre-recorded CD? The download is a purchase, so why would they need compensation for a "non-purchase".
This is like wanting 40% gross on non-blank CDs, when they already get money from them.
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe they just catch and jail a higher proportion of their criminals? If the people being sent to gaol are actually criminals, and not political criminals, then it isn't really "the opposite" of freedom.
The statistics by themselves don't really say enough.
I assume they will just pass a law requiring companies supplying voice over IP calls to make them tappable.
But there was no definiative point when it changed. OK, after our (English) civil war and the monarchy had less power when they returned, but that was 1651. Parliment went from being a temporary body to being a permanent one.
Still predates the US govenment by a long way.
We have had monarchy and parliment for a long time, and power has gradually gone from one to the other. At what point do you draw the line?
They are trying to stop the spread of Americansim into France to hold onto their own language and culture. To help this they want to preserve their written works and make them available, so people don't just have lots of stuff in English available.
So in fact the effort is to do both.
The only European countries that speaks English are Britain and Ireland. France isn't in a "sea of English", it's part of Europe, it's in a sea of French, German, Spanish, Italian and a whole load more.
According to french.about.com 113 million people speak it fluently on a regular basis. It is the second most widely taught second language after English.
It is the official language of France; Bénin; Burkina Faso; Central African Republic; Congo (Democratic Republic of); Congo (Republic of); Côte d'Ivoire; Gabon; Guinea; Luxembourg; Mali; Monaco; Niger; Sénégal; Togo; the Canadian province of Québec; and the Swiss districts of Vaud, Neuchâtel, Genève; Jura; French Guiana, Guadeloupe, Martinique, Réunion; French Polynesia, New Caledonia, Wallis and Futuna, French southern and Antarctic lands.
It's the co-official language of Belgium, Burundi, Cameroon, Canada, Chad, Comoros Islands, Djibouti, Equatorial Guinea, Haiti (the two official languages are French and French Creole), Madagascar, Rwanda, Seychelles, Switzerland, and Vanuatu.
I'm not French, but I certainly respect a country for trying to keep their own cultural identity. Sometimes that get a bit carried away with the language thing, but it doesn't seem to be hurting them. Remember, English is taught in their schools from a young age, and lots of French people speak really good English.
Nothing in the article suggests each library will keep their digital versions separate. If they were, there wouldn't be much need of the different libraries to cooperate.
These libraries are going to do the same thing as Google but with their works, work that Google had no current plans to digitise. It's already going to take the 10 years to do the stuff they are planning.
So the choices are, Google digitises some works and put them on line, or Google digitises some works and puts them on line, and the European Libraries also digitise some different works and put them on line.
How is the second choice possibly standing in the way of progress? Why is it a bad thing if someone other than Google do it? I like Google, and use it a lot, but I'd rather see this sort of data stored by libraries than a private company.
If you are really bugged that it is not all in one place, it won't take long for someone to write an interface to search both. You get similar things for search engines now.
If you buy stuff you are a consumer. Now, you are a citizen as well, but in context of your relationship with companies selling stuff you are a consumer or a customer.
Don't like it? Don't buy anything.
The original idea was for every citizen to be a yeoman farmer. We would already grow and harvest all the food we needed to eat on land we owned with our own tools and guns. Once elevated from the slavery of needing someone else to make the food on our plate, a cultured and gentile society would form.
The founders seemed to have been some pretty bright people, so I have trouble believing they would have such a dumb idea. Throughout human history people have specialised and traded, economic reality leads to it, and some specialised jobs require full time commitment. It makes no sense for everyone to be a farmer, much better to let the people good at farming do it and trade.
Since farming is such hard and time consuming work (until mechanisation) then only way you can develop culture and sciences is if you have people who aren't spending all their time doing it. Although maybe the vision was the slaves do it, so the actual citizens have plenty of time.
The corporate industrial way doesn't have to be better at putting people in power, it succeeds because it can make more stuff, and people love stuff. Also, it just grows out of a relatively free society, the only way to stop it is stop people's freedoms to choose how they work, to employee people and to trade.
I guess at its most basic the argument about economics is that people have to eat. It is all very well to have a strong ethical position, but people like to have a job and feed their family. How ethical is putting lots of people out of work? How does that compare to what they are doing?
While nobody would object to, say, putting secret police out of work or concentration camp guards, the claim people writing closed source software are unethical is a bit much for some people.
I'd also note that a major reason for the North's victory over the South and the Allies over the Axis was a stronger economy. They may have gone to war partly for moral reasons, but they didn't triumph becuase of them, but for military and economic ones (unless you beleive their is some fundemental rule of the universe that the good guys always win, and they weren't that good).
That said I think you need people like RMS on the more extreme edge, becuase it pulls the centre ground of the debate in that direction. Someone needs to voice the ideas so we can discuss them, even if people end up disagreeing.
Assuming parents are actually any good, they care about their children. If their 15 year old is, say, spending 8 hours a day on a MMORPG it really is going to effect them.
Now hopefully parents will have discussed with their child why certain behaviours are bad, but lets face it teenagers are not know for being rational. Even given perfectly good reasons teenagers may very well ignore them, or agree with their parents to shut them up and then do it anyway.
Not that a bit of teenage rebellion is necessarily a bad thing, or I'm advocating not questioning authority (it certainly seems to need it more and more these days). However, rebellion = good is way to simplistic. It's great some kids who were failed by the education system went on to be successful (and not just in a financial sense) but most kids involved in social unacceptable behaviour aren't misunderstood creative types. Most people involved in "lock-hacking" are criminals.
If parents want to put some sensible limits on their kids behaviour, and talk to their kids about why, this is usually because they care, and is a good thing. Like anything it seems this tool can be both used well and abused.
Oh, and the US military built the net, hackers just moved in afterwards.
And of course children, especially teens, are always reasonable and when given a good reason not to do something will always take heed, right?
You say that is if the two are mutually contradictory. Sci-fi stories (as oppssed to space fantasy and action with sci-fi effects) often make commentary on modern day events or attitudes. Nothing stops it being sci-fi and political satire at the same time.
The moment you start using medicine you are basically giving up on natural selection. It is pretty much impossible to have along with a civilised society.
Lots of Slashdotters user Google, so news of a new Google feature is useful news. I know I'm interested in it.
As for one sided, every Google story these days has people bitching and moaning about how they are doing other things when search could be improved, how they are taking control of the internet and how the info they have could be abused. It you just read /. it would be pretty damn impossible not to realise not everyone like Google.
Problem is most criticisms I've seen tend to be on a par with the insane ramblings of Google watch. I can understand why some people choose not to use Google, but it's hard to find a coherent argument why Google is bad in general.
There is plenty of alternate search engines, new services, web email, desktop search, on-line maps and just about anything else Google has.
If Google starts doing things its users don't like (its customer are the people who advertise on Google, not the users), they will switch. It costs nothing to type in a different web address to get an alternate service (although changing email addresses can be a pain).
Of course completion and alternatives are always good things. Google can't really lock in its users, all it can do is keep making its services more attractive than the competitors.
No non-profit groups is ever going to be competing in these areas, they cost too much money.
You are spouting Solipsism
. People who discover it think they are really deep at first and seem to like to show off on web forums because it cannot be disproved.Yes, you can't disprove solipism, all your information about the universe comes from your interpretation of sensory data by your brain from your body. There is no external source you can go to for verification.
It is a practical and philosophical dead end though. You can babble about how you need to understand your consciousness to understand the universe, but the people doing that actual science will come up with theories that actually explain things and are actually useful.
I'll take thier understanding over your wafling any day.
How it was at the very begging directly effects how it is now. The scientific benefit of understanding anything is pretty much understanding it. It may or may not help in other areas of science, but the purpose of science is to understand things.
As for practical knowledge, who knows? Maybe one day knowledge gained here will help with something practical. If we limited scientific research based on that, we wouldn't have a lot less research.
I think the one that makes most sense is that some people now interpret the description as resulting in something like what they believe alien ships (as opposed to 'UFOs' which are often quite mundane) would look like.
You could interpret the description into something like you believe a flying saucer to be, but it isn't the only interpretation, or the only way people think alien space ships are. Claiming this description is 'exactly' like that of a UFO seems a massive reach to me.
So you can add
or
(E) Ezekiel saw something and wrote a confusing description of it, that modern people with the concept of a stereotypical flying saucer interpret as being that, but that interpretation may well be wrong.If I was using Occam's razor, I know where it would lead me.
Fan films don't prove anything can work as a commercial TV series, even if they are actually any good.
Fans don't make their own original stuff, because they aren't all likely to care about something one of them made up in the same way. Plus someone is going to have to come up with the new vision, and other people are somehow going to have to find out about it.
Using a pre-existing setting means everyone already knows about it and likes it and wants to be involved, and hopefully won't argue to much about it.
Are they as easy to use? I like adblock becasue I can just right click on the offending object and add it straight to my block list right there. Does Opera offer anything as user friendly?
The thing that amazed me about tabbed browsing is non-browser programs were going it for years before hand, and it took so long for web browsers to have it.
I wouldn't think doing something pre-existing, but in a browser is anymore patent worthy than doing something pre-existing but on the internet.
If Opera continues to invest in R&D it will continue to innovate, and continue to be ahead of the competition (I use Firefox, but Opera does seem to always be ahead innovation wise). Hence the pay off for R&D.
So R&D is a continual process giving continual results. It seems rather unreasonable to expect one R&D development to just keep paying for ever (or the patent duration). That would seem to me more harmful to technological advance as you can just rest on your laurels as it were.
Sure, firefox may quote user/download statistics: but just how many of them have resulted in cash back into the business?
Er none, Firefox open source software is made by the non-profit Mozilla foundattion. It's aim isn't to make money, but a good open source browser.
How many episodes would 3.1 million make? A quick Google tells me its about 1.6 million per episode, so about two. So it isn't going to be much of an impact when looking at making a new series.
They can monopolize Trek because they own the rights, that simple. This is true for just about every creative endeavour these days. Indeed, it's rather the point of copyright to grant a limited time monopoly (although you can argue the limited time part has been effectively removed, and the rights holders are often not the creators).
In some ways it is easy to make a bigger hard drive, or at least once you have made it, get people to use it. They just install and off they go.
Removable media suffers from the problem it isn't much use unless a lot of people use it. People aren't going to switch to slightly better media, requiring buying new recorders/players, suffering from the stuff you record not being compatible with most people's players for a while and so on. Removable storage will always lag because of this.
So while we can make removable media much better than current DVDs, they aren't better enough yet to get people to switch. Floppy disks to CDs to DVDs were all big jumps in storage, and now DVDs are big enough for most people, most of the time.
The music industry already gets paid for the download. The compnay (like Apple) have an agreement with the record lables, and a cut of the download goes to them.
Further, how is buying a blank CD like a download? Itsn't the download more like buying a pre-recorded CD? The download is a purchase, so why would they need compensation for a "non-purchase".
This is like wanting 40% gross on non-blank CDs, when they already get money from them.