Market cap is to company's real worth as photoshopped magazine covers are to original models' beauty: a somewhat good reference but not really that reliable. Otherwise, analysts wouldn't ever care about reading the company balance to make their decisions... and they do (HFT aside, of course).
Of course, diagnosing it 5-10 years ago wasn't so easy because the technology wasn't up to par. Of course, there are things this robot won't still be able to diagnose because they are outside its known ruleset. Was your point that taking a load out of already overworked doctors is a bad idea?
Sorry for nitpicking but it is either mean or average. If that country's average income is $20k/mo you can still have 60% of the population below that amount (or more). If its mean income is $20k/mo... hell, I'm moving there ASAP (I mean, getting $240k a year? Here in Spain the mean income is under $25k _per year_;)
Yup, something like that. It just happens that the manager of a desalination plant here in Spain was talking on TV about the process and they turned 3,8g/l salt water into desalinated water and 4,3g/l salt water that got back to the sea. I guess they might be able to desalinate a bit more but the pressure needed might be too much for the osmotic membrane to withstand (that and they don't want to kill the local sea wildlife either).
I won't comment on the cold fusion side of it. I guess you need a bit more than a desalination membrante to achieve it.
Actually, you don't really get many NaCl molecules in water (until you reach saturation, but then they drop to the bottom) but Na+ and Cl- ions surrounded by water molecules. As such, individual water molecules can go through the right-size holes while water surrounded ions can't (since they would have to "let go" of the water molecules surrounding them).
I don't see any violence in my comment, sorry. And I am still interested in knowing the source of that $34k average salary statement.
Besides, his point is somewhat ambiguous:
If you were principled you'd boycott BT, but we all know that's not going to be the response -- it'll just be more whining about information wanting to be free, all the while feeding more cash to the people that are hostile to you, and withholding all the money from the people the make the content.
What does boycotting BT have to do with information wanting to be free? AFAIK the "information-wants-to-be-free-whiners" argument is comonly used to criticize P2P advocates and the like, not people using one ISP or other.
Amazing, professional musicians average about $34k a year
I would like to see a reference that backs that number... or the median salary. Then again you seem to consider the session musicians not be professionals, even though they get paid for the sessions, which probably skews your statistics.
By the way, Lady Gaga and Justin Bieber are statistically insignificant.
I'm a sound designer and I make my living working on movies. When movie revenues go down, they don't fire the actors and the directors, they sit pretty, they aren't dispensable.
Become an actor or director then. But remember, once again, that there are actually very few actors or directors that make it big (once again, statistically insignificant when considering the whole actor or director population).
IMO this is not a problem of spectrum availability: you already have providers sharing much more limited resources like electricity distribution networks or the rail system (in the UK).
As such, you would only need to have a common wireless network that routed each user's packets to his chosen provider.
Of course, you are free to choose the license better suited to your needs for software you develop. But SFC and whoever won't sue your users without authorization from you. Besides, what is the "soft" way to protect the GPL?
As a manager, if you are worried about using GPL software you need to get some concepts clear: GPL lets you use the software however you want to, it only cares about what you must do if you give someone a binary copy of the program. So you don't have to really worry unless your software is derived from GPL software: unless you have built a new version of busybox with extra options you only need to provide the code to the binary version of busybox you are already providing in your product. And basically the same goes for the rest of the software as long as your own software doesn't rely "too much" (libraries and the like) on GPL software.
Their being digital doesn't matter. The physical copy is subject to physical constraints of scarcity (for example, it can be removed from its owner's possession), the virtual item isn't. Seeing them both subject to physical scarcity is illogical (unfortunately, law can be illogical at times).
You are equating different things: a paper copy of a novel is a piece of physical property. The novel itself isn't a piece of physical property, as demonstrated by the fact that it can be copied (on physical media as paper for example).
Files, as pieces of magnetized ferrite on a disk, are physical things and you can complain about their not being available, because you lost your copy of those files when you lost access to that magnetized ferrite.
Besides, copyright advocates don't complain about their intellectual property "disappearing" (at least usually): they complain about there being too many "unauthorized" copies of it laying about.
To summarise: you are saying physical and virtual items are the same when they aren't and saynig not having access to some data with having "too many copies" of it around is the same when it isn't. <sarcasm>Will you try showing that black and white are the same too?</sarcasm>
people are much more willing to respect convention when they are not beaten over the head with it.
My (anecdotical, of coure) experience is that people not willing to respect language convention aren't usually willing to do it in any case. It's the ones willing to listen to a suggestion I'm interested in.
It's even worse. IIRC, current atomic clocks are now so precise that stacking one on top of the other (say 20cm distance) is enough to make them start drifting due to the different gravitational field strength.
Suppose the hacker in question was _so good_, that they managed to write their tools and enabling hacks, such that the only bandwidth 'stolen', was known, with scientific and engineering accuracy, to have gone completely unused. Now that's a very, very big IF. But from skimming these comments, it does sound like this guy may have known the technical nature of the network even better than those who owned and operated it. In that hypothetical, his infraction seems about as ethically dubious as the seemingly less (by your expression) malicious copyright violation of getting a free copy of that tv episode you paid itunes for.
_If_ the bandwidth was really unused I certainly would have no problem with his using it. But it would seem the software this guy's company developed was designed to clone other user access information, which would most certainly cause connection problems, as that usually happens when having repeated MACs or IPs in the same network.
Not directly related, but it seems the ISPs could have worked in some better kind of security in their authentication protocols, which would have probably defeated any easy attempt to break it.
By using research without paying for it, you aren't piggybacking on another person's discoveries, you're using up the limited* funding in the field.
On the contrary, you are actually not using up the funding in the field. You would be, though, if you had to replicate research already done once and again. That's why researchers consider publishing your research a good thing: they get information quite more cheaply than if they had to research everything on their own and they may also get validation/refutation of their own research.
..you are lowering the return on investment for every other researcher.
Only, perhaps, if you don't share back. But if you don't share back you will get sidelined.
...investors do need to calculate just how much return they will see from the research projects they are funding.
Weren't we talking about ROI for other _researchers_? Investors putting money into research and looking at ROI means they don't care about research but its products... and will probably keep research results secret anyway.
Obvious troll, but I'll bite: the bits that you receive through my connection detract from the bits that I can receive through my connection for bandwidth is a physical world entity.
OTOH, the bits that you copy from me don't disappear from my hard disk by your copying, for information is being a virtual world entity.
By "undo-ing" this awful thing, they would pretending like it never happened.
Erm... no, sorry, it doesn't work like that. If you are found guilty, sentenced and later acquited for some reason (trial errors, being proven innocent, etc.) nothing disappears. Reversing the sentence on Turing doesn't automatically make the original sentence disappear, it doesn't make the petition to reverse that sentencing disappear, and it doesn't make the reversal disappear. Nothing would vanish in a cloud of smoke. Of course this make the comparison to dismantling Nazi concentration camps tenuous at best as no information would actually be lost.
What they see as rewriting history I consider righting a wrong, and righting a wrong after the wronged one's death may not do much for him, but it does a non-negligible bit for us living ones (at least it stands as an example of willingness to do the right thing).
No unified configuration system for computer settings, devices and system services. E.g. distro A sets up networking using these utilities, outputting certain settings residing in certain file system locations, distro B sets up everything differently. This drives most users mad.
Do most users use several distributions at the same time? Because it is the same problem as dealing with Windows 2000, XP, Vista and 7, or MacOS 9 and X, mind you. It is a problem we technical users have to deal with, not your standard user who, by the way, ends up doing the same thing everybody does: ask about their particular version of Windows and get particular answers about that version. Well, I'm fibbing a bit: the standard user often doesn't even know what Windows version is installed. I have lost count of the times I have read at a forum or heard/asked in real life: "what Windows version do you have" only to get a randomish answer like Windows 2003 (because they have Office 2003 installed) or Office 7 (because they have Windows 7 installed).
No unified installer across all distros. Consider RPM, deb, portage, tar.gz, sources, etc. It adds a cost for software development.
Does it? And having to install extra microsoft packages that don't come bundled with the software doesn't? (I'm looking at you, MSXML 6 and you too,.NET version X). No, Windows does have similar problems, and developers have to make do the same way. The main difference is you will probably only need to set up a compile chain for the formats you want to support, which is mostly a one time cost (and a cheap one at that).
Many distros' repositories do not contain all available open source software. User should never be bothered with using./configure && make && make installer. It should be possible to install any software by downloading a package and double clicking it (yes, like in Windows, but probably prompting for user/administrator password).
First of all: don't use them then. I'm not going to use Dyne:bolic for my everyday needs because it is a multimedia production oriented distribution. And most distributions have a way to ask for those packages to be included. No, you probably won't have it available today, but you still have a chance. Good luck with Agfa (no, we don't even have the communication protocol documents for that scanner any more), ATI/AMD (no, we don't have that card in our generic driver because it is a laptop one and the OEM didn't want us to put it in) and many others.
Applications development is a major PITA. Different distros can use a) different libraries versions b) different compiler flags c) different compilers. This leads to an exponential escalation of number of problems.
So do different versions of Windows. Remember the "compatibility modes"? Windows 7 has even a "Vista compatibility mode". Now how is that for ease of application development? Besides, at Linux you can at least usually have different library versions side by side. Good luck with that in Linux.
Linux is a hell for ISP/ISV support personnel. Within an organization you can force a single distro on anyone, that cannot be accomplished when your clients have freedom to choose.
Ha! Come back when you have spent some time supporting five Windows versions at the same time. See if you can "force" your users to use just one version unless you live in the most tightly controlled organization.
You can't have different versions of the same system and have polish. It is a chimera, an utopic ideal that doesn't hold up to the harsh light of reality. You can have polish on a version (e.g., Windows 7 or Ubuntu 11.10) but you just _can't_ have it all over the place. You don't have it with Windows, you don't have it with Linux, you don't have it with MacOS and I highly doubt you can have it with BSDs eithe
Its really simple friend, to get the level of polish required to make Linux work on the desktop, where suzy the checkout girl won't have to learn bash or how to navigate a CLI when things break, where frankly things WON'T break in the first place, is gonna cost north of a hundred million easy
It's even simpler. Kids from 6 years old up, hospital workers, administration workers are using Linux in Spain by the thousands and they have no problems. Your Suzy checkout girl doesn't _want_ to change from what she knows. I can understand that, even if I find it annoying.
And if you need over a hundred million (I'll assume dollars) to get that "polish" I hope you don't work as a programmer. It's being done once and again for much less.
Slashdot Mirror
Market cap is to company's real worth as photoshopped magazine covers are to original models' beauty: a somewhat good reference but not really that reliable. Otherwise, analysts wouldn't ever care about reading the company balance to make their decisions... and they do (HFT aside, of course).
Keep your subtle dodging, I'll keep shooting your head ;)
You didn't dodge well enough... oh, you wrote "to", not "with".
Of course, diagnosing it 5-10 years ago wasn't so easy because the technology wasn't up to par. Of course, there are things this robot won't still be able to diagnose because they are outside its known ruleset. Was your point that taking a load out of already overworked doctors is a bad idea?
...where the mean average income...
Sorry for nitpicking but it is either mean or average. If that country's average income is $20k/mo you can still have 60% of the population below that amount (or more). If its mean income is $20k/mo... hell, I'm moving there ASAP (I mean, getting $240k a year? Here in Spain the mean income is under $25k _per year_ ;)
I won't comment on the cold fusion side of it. I guess you need a bit more than a desalination membrante to achieve it.
Actually, you don't really get many NaCl molecules in water (until you reach saturation, but then they drop to the bottom) but Na+ and Cl- ions surrounded by water molecules. As such, individual water molecules can go through the right-size holes while water surrounded ions can't (since they would have to "let go" of the water molecules surrounding them).
Besides, his point is somewhat ambiguous:
If you were principled you'd boycott BT, but we all know that's not going to be the response -- it'll just be more whining about information wanting to be free, all the while feeding more cash to the people that are hostile to you, and withholding all the money from the people the make the content.
What does boycotting BT have to do with information wanting to be free? AFAIK the "information-wants-to-be-free-whiners" argument is comonly used to criticize P2P advocates and the like, not people using one ISP or other.
Amazing, professional musicians average about $34k a year
I would like to see a reference that backs that number... or the median salary. Then again you seem to consider the session musicians not be professionals, even though they get paid for the sessions, which probably skews your statistics.
By the way, Lady Gaga and Justin Bieber are statistically insignificant.
I'm a sound designer and I make my living working on movies. When movie revenues go down, they don't fire the actors and the directors, they sit pretty, they aren't dispensable.
Become an actor or director then. But remember, once again, that there are actually very few actors or directors that make it big (once again, statistically insignificant when considering the whole actor or director population).
As such, you would only need to have a common wireless network that routed each user's packets to his chosen provider.
Having a siamese mother (intercranial, not intracraneal, meaning there are at least two craniums involved) is an interesting case, hole or no hole.
As a manager, if you are worried about using GPL software you need to get some concepts clear: GPL lets you use the software however you want to, it only cares about what you must do if you give someone a binary copy of the program. So you don't have to really worry unless your software is derived from GPL software: unless you have built a new version of busybox with extra options you only need to provide the code to the binary version of busybox you are already providing in your product. And basically the same goes for the rest of the software as long as your own software doesn't rely "too much" (libraries and the like) on GPL software.
Their being digital doesn't matter. The physical copy is subject to physical constraints of scarcity (for example, it can be removed from its owner's possession), the virtual item isn't. Seeing them both subject to physical scarcity is illogical (unfortunately, law can be illogical at times).
Files, as pieces of magnetized ferrite on a disk, are physical things and you can complain about their not being available, because you lost your copy of those files when you lost access to that magnetized ferrite.
Besides, copyright advocates don't complain about their intellectual property "disappearing" (at least usually): they complain about there being too many "unauthorized" copies of it laying about.
To summarise: you are saying physical and virtual items are the same when they aren't and saynig not having access to some data with having "too many copies" of it around is the same when it isn't. <sarcasm>Will you try showing that black and white are the same too?</sarcasm>
people are much more willing to respect convention when they are not beaten over the head with it.
My (anecdotical, of coure) experience is that people not willing to respect language convention aren't usually willing to do it in any case. It's the ones willing to listen to a suggestion I'm interested in.
Aliquot (proportional) wasn't a surprise to me either. It is a mostly legal term, though.
It's even worse. IIRC, current atomic clocks are now so precise that stacking one on top of the other (say 20cm distance) is enough to make them start drifting due to the different gravitational field strength.
Suppose the hacker in question was _so good_, that they managed to write their tools and enabling hacks, such that the only bandwidth 'stolen', was known, with scientific and engineering accuracy, to have gone completely unused. Now that's a very, very big IF. But from skimming these comments, it does sound like this guy may have known the technical nature of the network even better than those who owned and operated it. In that hypothetical, his infraction seems about as ethically dubious as the seemingly less (by your expression) malicious copyright violation of getting a free copy of that tv episode you paid itunes for.
_If_ the bandwidth was really unused I certainly would have no problem with his using it. But it would seem the software this guy's company developed was designed to clone other user access information, which would most certainly cause connection problems, as that usually happens when having repeated MACs or IPs in the same network.
Not directly related, but it seems the ISPs could have worked in some better kind of security in their authentication protocols, which would have probably defeated any easy attempt to break it.
By using research without paying for it, you aren't piggybacking on another person's discoveries, you're using up the limited* funding in the field.
On the contrary, you are actually not using up the funding in the field. You would be, though, if you had to replicate research already done once and again. That's why researchers consider publishing your research a good thing: they get information quite more cheaply than if they had to research everything on their own and they may also get validation/refutation of their own research.
..you are lowering the return on investment for every other researcher.
Only, perhaps, if you don't share back. But if you don't share back you will get sidelined.
...investors do need to calculate just how much return they will see from the research projects they are funding.
Weren't we talking about ROI for other _researchers_? Investors putting money into research and looking at ROI means they don't care about research but its products... and will probably keep research results secret anyway.
OTOH, the bits that you copy from me don't disappear from my hard disk by your copying, for information is being a virtual world entity.
Perhaps you meant drunken driving?
Only none of your reasons for acquittal apply here.
My point is that a reversal doesn't wipe history as the previous poster argued. The examples I wrote about are just that, examples.
By "undo-ing" this awful thing, they would pretending like it never happened.
Erm... no, sorry, it doesn't work like that. If you are found guilty, sentenced and later acquited for some reason (trial errors, being proven innocent, etc.) nothing disappears. Reversing the sentence on Turing doesn't automatically make the original sentence disappear, it doesn't make the petition to reverse that sentencing disappear, and it doesn't make the reversal disappear. Nothing would vanish in a cloud of smoke. Of course this make the comparison to dismantling Nazi concentration camps tenuous at best as no information would actually be lost.
What they see as rewriting history I consider righting a wrong, and righting a wrong after the wronged one's death may not do much for him, but it does a non-negligible bit for us living ones (at least it stands as an example of willingness to do the right thing).
No unified configuration system for computer settings, devices and system services. E.g. distro A sets up networking using these utilities, outputting certain settings residing in certain file system locations, distro B sets up everything differently. This drives most users mad.
Do most users use several distributions at the same time? Because it is the same problem as dealing with Windows 2000, XP, Vista and 7, or MacOS 9 and X, mind you. It is a problem we technical users have to deal with, not your standard user who, by the way, ends up doing the same thing everybody does: ask about their particular version of Windows and get particular answers about that version. Well, I'm fibbing a bit: the standard user often doesn't even know what Windows version is installed. I have lost count of the times I have read at a forum or heard/asked in real life: "what Windows version do you have" only to get a randomish answer like Windows 2003 (because they have Office 2003 installed) or Office 7 (because they have Windows 7 installed).
No unified installer across all distros. Consider RPM, deb, portage, tar.gz, sources, etc. It adds a cost for software development.
Does it? And having to install extra microsoft packages that don't come bundled with the software doesn't? (I'm looking at you, MSXML 6 and you too, .NET version X). No, Windows does have similar problems, and developers have to make do the same way. The main difference is you will probably only need to set up a compile chain for the formats you want to support, which is mostly a one time cost (and a cheap one at that).
Many distros' repositories do not contain all available open source software. User should never be bothered with using ./configure && make && make installer. It should be possible to install any software by downloading a package and double clicking it (yes, like in Windows, but probably prompting for user/administrator password).
First of all: don't use them then. I'm not going to use Dyne:bolic for my everyday needs because it is a multimedia production oriented distribution. And most distributions have a way to ask for those packages to be included. No, you probably won't have it available today, but you still have a chance. Good luck with Agfa (no, we don't even have the communication protocol documents for that scanner any more), ATI/AMD (no, we don't have that card in our generic driver because it is a laptop one and the OEM didn't want us to put it in) and many others.
Applications development is a major PITA. Different distros can use a) different libraries versions b) different compiler flags c) different compilers. This leads to an exponential escalation of number of problems.
So do different versions of Windows. Remember the "compatibility modes"? Windows 7 has even a "Vista compatibility mode". Now how is that for ease of application development? Besides, at Linux you can at least usually have different library versions side by side. Good luck with that in Linux.
Linux is a hell for ISP/ISV support personnel. Within an organization you can force a single distro on anyone, that cannot be accomplished when your clients have freedom to choose.
Ha! Come back when you have spent some time supporting five Windows versions at the same time. See if you can "force" your users to use just one version unless you live in the most tightly controlled organization.
You can't have different versions of the same system and have polish. It is a chimera, an utopic ideal that doesn't hold up to the harsh light of reality. You can have polish on a version (e.g., Windows 7 or Ubuntu 11.10) but you just _can't_ have it all over the place. You don't have it with Windows, you don't have it with Linux, you don't have it with MacOS and I highly doubt you can have it with BSDs eithe
Its really simple friend, to get the level of polish required to make Linux work on the desktop, where suzy the checkout girl won't have to learn bash or how to navigate a CLI when things break, where frankly things WON'T break in the first place, is gonna cost north of a hundred million easy
It's even simpler. Kids from 6 years old up, hospital workers, administration workers are using Linux in Spain by the thousands and they have no problems. Your Suzy checkout girl doesn't _want_ to change from what she knows. I can understand that, even if I find it annoying.
And if you need over a hundred million (I'll assume dollars) to get that "polish" I hope you don't work as a programmer. It's being done once and again for much less.