A $0.99 "flashlight" app that does nothing but turn the screen white seems like a dubious inclusion in the "500+" claim.
It's surprisingly useful if you're ever poking around behind desks. It's also approximately 5 lines of code; there are multiple free versions for jailbroken iPhones. Unfortunately one result of Apple restricting development and charging for keys is that users will get nickel-and-dimed for apps that would normally be free.
Either we live in a constitutional republic, or we live in a nation ruled by 645 privileged nobles (535 reps, 100 senators, 9 judges and a president) who are not bound by anything other than what they agree upon.
Clearly the latter is the case. The problem is that the left (who I completely agree with on this issue) really has very little credibility as defenders of the Constitution. For decades they've been advocating large expansions of government power unsupported by the Constitution, and when they bother to justify it at all they come up with ridiculous pretexts like "interstate commerce". Hopefully some of them are realizing that when you grant effectively unlimited power to politicians, it's frequently going to be used in ways that you disapprove of.
Successful anti-aging therapies would *save* tremendous amounts of money, because we would no longer be spending trillions to (try and generally fail to) treat aging-related diseases.
Whether aging is a "disease" is a question of semantics. Whether it needs to be treated is a matter of policy, and I'd argue the answer is unequivocally yes. The effects of aging substantially degrade the quality of life for billions of people, and we spend trillions of dollars in ultimately futile attempts to fight its symptoms.
I want to see this team of academics write some code that will beat a human at *No-Limit* Hold'em. Or maybe *Pot-Limit* Omaha. NEVER going to happen.
It's certainly harder, but I wouldn't say never. In some scenarios it might not be too hard to beat an average human, like having the AI buy in short and try to get all in preflop or on the flop.
I don't care how well such a program is coded... it will absolutely buckle under the pressure of a professional who constantly bets half his stack on nothing.
Maniacs who do that "constantly" are easy to beat, just call with hands that are on average better than theirs. An AI with halfway decent opponent modeling should be able to adjust to that pretty quickly.
The mini is a joke $599.00 for a 1.83GHz cpu, 1gb of ram, 80 gb hd and a cdwr/dvd add $200 to get a 2.0GHz cpu, 120GB hd and a DVDWR. A $799.00 system with 1gb of ram a POS gma 950 video?
That's not bad for an ultra-SFF. Of course it sucks if you compare it to a standard desktop.
Yeah, and don't get me started on those morons trying to cure cancer.
Even if it ends up being "necessary" for us to die, it would still be a huge improvement to cure aging anyway and instead implement a system like Logan's Run. You'd get 100 years of good health and much reduced medical costs.
Can you actually imagine out of touch elderly people who are fit enough to actually implement their old fashioned, crotchety notions?
That assumes that if aging were cured, "old" people would still be "old fashioned", which is far from clear. Why do the elderly often resist new ideas today? I figure it's either due to physical changes in the brain, or it's a rational decision that the time invested in learning new stuff wouldn't be worth it since they don't expect to be around much longer. Anti-aging treatments would address both those points.
If aging is no longer a killer and supposing people aren't automatically neutered, would the fact that human life is devalued
Huh? If anything it becomes more valuable. It would mean that a murderer had deprived his victim of centuries of life or more, instead of decades.
Resolution degredation is sufficent enough solution to this, if you need to make a 8 minute HD video mashup out of 2 4 minutes videos and keep the 1080p, maybe there should be licensing of the material invovled?
Or maybe not. It depends on the specific circumstances, and no conceivable DRM scheme can make that determination accurately.
Double alternatively, you could have software allow not only a choice of resolution degredation, but also a ratio test where some fraction of a work is considered fair use, and above that amount isn't.
That's only one aspect of whether an excerpt qualifies as fair use; such a system would have a large number of false positives and/or negatives.
The need is undeniable. To deny it is an act of faith.
I deny it based on history. We've gotten along perfectly well for centuries without trashing real property rights in order to enforce artificial scarcity in intellectual property.
There is never anything moral about choosing poverty over wealth.
Absolutely, and DRM is an assault on my property rights and thus my wealth.
If you are a developer who can write code well enough to produce a oss application; odds are, you could do that same thing and earn money.
A flaw here is that hobbyist developers don't want to "write code" generically, they want to write code in a domain that they find interesting. If you have spare time, you can probably get paid to write CRUD webapps or integrate legacy systems with buggy interfaces. But I'd much rather play around with ray tracers or image analyzers or game AIs, which are harder to get paid for.
(I believe this is also why OSS has a sometimes-deserved reputation of being user-unfriendly. Writing documentation and trying to handle dozens of edge cases in users' configurations generally isn't fun).
Static and dynamic typing are orthogonal to strong and weak typing. Statically typed languages have their type integrity constraints checked at compile-time. Dynamically typed languages do at least some type checking at run-time, usually because resolving a given object's type is undecidable (until it is decided by actually running the code).
Quoting at +2. Examples of each combination: Static/strong: Java Static/weak: C Dynamic/strong: Python Dynamic/weak: Perl
Dynamic typing where you can create new identifiers implicitly is pretty scary to me.
A lot of it is just what you're used to. Are you "scared" of the pointer manipulation tricks you can do in C?
I'm not even sure what Python offers over the dozens of other languages that preceded it.
Succinctness, which is not to be confused with terseness and unreadability (for that, see Perl). If I need to create a list with two objects it's just [a,b] rather than a mess of ArrayList and Object[] line noise. If I want to specify a callback I just pass the function, rather than constructing elaborate Executor interfaces and inner classes. More than any other language I've used, Python gets out of my way and lets me focus on the actual problem I'm trying to solve rather than constantly interrupting my train of thought to keep the compiler happy.
We'd be much much better off without them, paying doctors and hospitals directly.
Right. In every other sector of the economy, we understand that insurance is meant to cover major losses, not routine services and minor expenses. Auto insurance doesn't cover oil changes; if it did they'd probably cost $100. Yet when it comes to health care we've developed the idea that nobody should ever pay for anything. Not only do we not pay doctors directly, in most cases we don't even pay for the insurance directly, instead getting it for "free" through employers. That destroys any semblance of pricing signals and removes any incentives to control cost. (Not to mention doubly screwing people who lose their jobs).
Buying a DVD with OS X on it does not necessarily give you the right to make an additional copy of the OS on your computer's hardware. Only Apple has that right to make a copy and if you want to make use of it, legally, there is a lot of support for you needing some sort of a license from Apple.
Nope, 17 USC 117. You don't need a license to run software any more than you need a license to make a "copy" of the words in a book in your retina.
No, we do not have to reduce consumption. I see this fallacious argument everywhere.
For an annoyingly large portion of environmentalists, "reducing consumption" (i.e. radically changing our lifestyles) is the *goal*, not just a possible solution.
The first thing I thought of when I read the summary was 'lazy coders' when garbage collection was cited as a driving factor.
It's not laziness, it's a recognition that developer time is finite, and it's often much better to focus on improving actual functionality rather than poring over the details of memory management. Are C developers lazy because they let the compiler do the dirty work of register allocation?
Closed source benefits *some* developers and harms others. If Apache were to vanish, developers selling web servers would benefit, but web application developers would suffer.
Copyright is not free market capitalism, but a restriction on capitalism designed, originally, to benefit society as a whole. OSS is capitalism trying to route around the damage of our current, absurdly anti-capitalist copyright laws.
Well said. In free markets, prices tend to approach marginal costs. The marginal cost of software is essentially zero. The "correct" way to handle software (or drugs or other IP) is to get paid for the scarce act of creation, not the non-scarce copies. But we don't know how to do that, so instead we use copyright as a kludge to create artificial scarcity. It was an ok solution for a while, but now it's been throughly corrupted by special interests.
He too showed powers and abilities which we call "supernatural". He demonstrated power over nature and even of death itself.
According to reports of exceptionally dubious reliability. There are reports of the Trojan War too, and Troy actually existed, but I'm not going to start praying to Poseidon. (That would make Baal quite upset, and nobody wants that).
For every single piece of evidence evolutionists bring up, a smart creationists can re-interpret that so called evidence to support what the Bible records.
Yes, they are quite accomplished liars.
NOBODY has ever demonstrated that information can come from *any* other source than a mind.
Define "information". Which has more, a solid black image or a random arrangement of black and white pixels? Does a snowflake contain more or less information than the molecules from which it formed?
Slashdot Mirror
A $0.99 "flashlight" app that does nothing but turn the screen white seems like a dubious inclusion in the "500+" claim.
It's surprisingly useful if you're ever poking around behind desks. It's also approximately 5 lines of code; there are multiple free versions for jailbroken iPhones. Unfortunately one result of Apple restricting development and charging for keys is that users will get nickel-and-dimed for apps that would normally be free.
Either we live in a constitutional republic, or we live in a nation ruled by 645 privileged nobles (535 reps, 100 senators, 9 judges and a president) who are not bound by anything other than what they agree upon.
Clearly the latter is the case. The problem is that the left (who I completely agree with on this issue) really has very little credibility as defenders of the Constitution. For decades they've been advocating large expansions of government power unsupported by the Constitution, and when they bother to justify it at all they come up with ridiculous pretexts like "interstate commerce". Hopefully some of them are realizing that when you grant effectively unlimited power to politicians, it's frequently going to be used in ways that you disapprove of.
Successful anti-aging therapies would *save* tremendous amounts of money, because we would no longer be spending trillions to (try and generally fail to) treat aging-related diseases.
Whether aging is a "disease" is a question of semantics. Whether it needs to be treated is a matter of policy, and I'd argue the answer is unequivocally yes. The effects of aging substantially degrade the quality of life for billions of people, and we spend trillions of dollars in ultimately futile attempts to fight its symptoms.
I want to see this team of academics write some code that will beat a human at *No-Limit* Hold'em. Or maybe *Pot-Limit* Omaha. NEVER going to happen.
It's certainly harder, but I wouldn't say never. In some scenarios it might not be too hard to beat an average human, like having the AI buy in short and try to get all in preflop or on the flop.
I don't care how well such a program is coded... it will absolutely buckle under the pressure of a professional who constantly bets half his stack on nothing.
Maniacs who do that "constantly" are easy to beat, just call with hands that are on average better than theirs. An AI with halfway decent opponent modeling should be able to adjust to that pretty quickly.
The mini is a joke $599.00 for a 1.83GHz cpu, 1gb of ram, 80 gb hd and a cdwr/dvd add $200 to get a 2.0GHz cpu, 120GB hd and a DVDWR. A $799.00 system with 1gb of ram a POS gma 950 video?
That's not bad for an ultra-SFF. Of course it sucks if you compare it to a standard desktop.
Why the hell are people so afraid of death?
Why are you still here?
That said, why could anybody possibly think that this is going to be a good idea?
Because aging is painful and expensive.
Likely, this will end up being an extremely expensive procedure that's given to the top elites
Which will never become available to everyone else, unlike every other technological and medical advancement?
Can we please start working on making the quality of life good for everyone
Sure. And aging is a key detractor from quality of life for everyone.
Yeah, and don't get me started on those morons trying to cure cancer.
Even if it ends up being "necessary" for us to die, it would still be a huge improvement to cure aging anyway and instead implement a system like Logan's Run. You'd get 100 years of good health and much reduced medical costs.
Can you actually imagine out of touch elderly people who are fit enough to actually implement their old fashioned, crotchety notions?
That assumes that if aging were cured, "old" people would still be "old fashioned", which is far from clear. Why do the elderly often resist new ideas today? I figure it's either due to physical changes in the brain, or it's a rational decision that the time invested in learning new stuff wouldn't be worth it since they don't expect to be around much longer. Anti-aging treatments would address both those points.
If aging is no longer a killer and supposing people aren't automatically neutered, would the fact that human life is devalued
Huh? If anything it becomes more valuable. It would mean that a murderer had deprived his victim of centuries of life or more, instead of decades.
Harper and his ilk are cut from the same cloth as the Bush Whitehouse, and its not surprising at all that we we got stuck with our own DMCA clone.
While there are plenty of reasons to condemn the Bush Administration, the DMCA isn't one of them seeing as how it was passed in 1998.
Resolution degredation is sufficent enough solution to this, if you need to make a 8 minute HD video mashup out of 2 4 minutes videos and keep the 1080p, maybe there should be licensing of the material invovled?
Or maybe not. It depends on the specific circumstances, and no conceivable DRM scheme can make that determination accurately.
Double alternatively, you could have software allow not only a choice of resolution degredation, but also a ratio test where some fraction of a work is considered fair use, and above that amount isn't.
That's only one aspect of whether an excerpt qualifies as fair use; such a system would have a large number of false positives and/or negatives.
The need is undeniable. To deny it is an act of faith.
I deny it based on history. We've gotten along perfectly well for centuries without trashing real property rights in order to enforce artificial scarcity in intellectual property.
There is never anything moral about choosing poverty over wealth.
Absolutely, and DRM is an assault on my property rights and thus my wealth.
And no silicon-based entity could possibly be graceful or elegant?
If you are a developer who can write code well enough to produce a oss application; odds are, you could do that same thing and earn money.
A flaw here is that hobbyist developers don't want to "write code" generically, they want to write code in a domain that they find interesting. If you have spare time, you can probably get paid to write CRUD webapps or integrate legacy systems with buggy interfaces. But I'd much rather play around with ray tracers or image analyzers or game AIs, which are harder to get paid for.
(I believe this is also why OSS has a sometimes-deserved reputation of being user-unfriendly. Writing documentation and trying to handle dozens of edge cases in users' configurations generally isn't fun).
Static and dynamic typing are orthogonal to strong and weak typing. Statically typed languages have their type integrity constraints checked at compile-time. Dynamically typed languages do at least some type checking at run-time, usually because resolving a given object's type is undecidable (until it is decided by actually running the code).
Quoting at +2. Examples of each combination:
Static/strong: Java
Static/weak: C
Dynamic/strong: Python
Dynamic/weak: Perl
Dynamic typing where you can create new identifiers implicitly is pretty scary to me.
A lot of it is just what you're used to. Are you "scared" of the pointer manipulation tricks you can do in C?
I'm not even sure what Python offers over the dozens of other languages that preceded it.
Succinctness, which is not to be confused with terseness and unreadability (for that, see Perl). If I need to create a list with two objects it's just [a,b] rather than a mess of ArrayList and Object[] line noise. If I want to specify a callback I just pass the function, rather than constructing elaborate Executor interfaces and inner classes. More than any other language I've used, Python gets out of my way and lets me focus on the actual problem I'm trying to solve rather than constantly interrupting my train of thought to keep the compiler happy.
Also, generators are fantastic.
We'd be much much better off without them, paying doctors and hospitals directly.
Right. In every other sector of the economy, we understand that insurance is meant to cover major losses, not routine services and minor expenses. Auto insurance doesn't cover oil changes; if it did they'd probably cost $100. Yet when it comes to health care we've developed the idea that nobody should ever pay for anything. Not only do we not pay doctors directly, in most cases we don't even pay for the insurance directly, instead getting it for "free" through employers. That destroys any semblance of pricing signals and removes any incentives to control cost. (Not to mention doubly screwing people who lose their jobs).
the slippery slope doesn't exist. in any argument. on any topic.
Yes it does. Or do you actually think the PATRIOT Act is only used against "terrorists"?
Buying a DVD with OS X on it does not necessarily give you the right to make an additional copy of the OS on your computer's hardware. Only Apple has that right to make a copy and if you want to make use of it, legally, there is a lot of support for you needing some sort of a license from Apple.
Nope, 17 USC 117. You don't need a license to run software any more than you need a license to make a "copy" of the words in a book in your retina.
No, we do not have to reduce consumption. I see this fallacious argument everywhere.
For an annoyingly large portion of environmentalists, "reducing consumption" (i.e. radically changing our lifestyles) is the *goal*, not just a possible solution.
There are many ways to do good deeds. Giving away software isn't one of them.
Really.
$ telnet www.mercycorps.org 80
Trying 207.189.99.69...
HConnected to www.mercycorps.org.
Escape character is '^]'.
HEAD / HTTP/1.0
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Mon, 28 Apr 2008 04:58:01 GMT
Server: Apache/2.0.52 (CentOS)
The first thing I thought of when I read the summary was 'lazy coders' when garbage collection was cited as a driving factor.
It's not laziness, it's a recognition that developer time is finite, and it's often much better to focus on improving actual functionality rather than poring over the details of memory management. Are C developers lazy because they let the compiler do the dirty work of register allocation?
Basically closed source benefits developers. OSS benefits users.
Closed source benefits *some* developers and harms others. If Apache were to vanish, developers selling web servers would benefit, but web application developers would suffer.
Copyright is not free market capitalism, but a restriction on capitalism designed, originally, to benefit society as a whole. OSS is capitalism trying to route around the damage of our current, absurdly anti-capitalist copyright laws.
Well said. In free markets, prices tend to approach marginal costs. The marginal cost of software is essentially zero. The "correct" way to handle software (or drugs or other IP) is to get paid for the scarce act of creation, not the non-scarce copies. But we don't know how to do that, so instead we use copyright as a kludge to create artificial scarcity. It was an ok solution for a while, but now it's been throughly corrupted by special interests.
When will Congress learn that manipulating the economy never has the desired effects.
The desired effect is to buy votes from farmers and campaign contributions from ADM, for which ethanol works quite well.
He too showed powers and abilities which we call "supernatural". He demonstrated power over nature and even of death itself.
According to reports of exceptionally dubious reliability. There are reports of the Trojan War too, and Troy actually existed, but I'm not going to start praying to Poseidon. (That would make Baal quite upset, and nobody wants that).
For every single piece of evidence evolutionists bring up, a smart creationists can re-interpret that so called evidence to support what the Bible records.
Yes, they are quite accomplished liars.
NOBODY has ever demonstrated that information can come from *any* other source than a mind.
Define "information". Which has more, a solid black image or a random arrangement of black and white pixels? Does a snowflake contain more or less information than the molecules from which it formed?