I loved the film (ID4) and still do. It is a modern-day swashbuckler.
The one technical goof that really bothers me in the film is the idea that the aliens needed to bounce a count-down signal off of our satellites in order to synchronize their watches for the moment of attack. They've developed inter-stellar space travel, energy shields, massive weapons and yet somehow they can't keep their clocks synched up for a couple of days? And even if we were to believe that they had a severe clock drift problem, what's the problem with destroying Washington DC several milliseconds before or after destroying Moscow?
So let's say the head alien is all OCD and needs the attacks synched to the millisecond. Why don't they just have their synchronizing signal count up like normal human beings do, and have some pre-arranged count for when the attack begins, like: "We attack at 16:00 hours on July 4th UTC". That way, they can change plans in case of an emergency and they don't have to start their stupid count-down thing all over again, just change the time/date of the attack.
Heck, we had clock syncing technology down pat back in good ole WWII. Just look at any of the movies where there was a commando mission. Those guys were always synching up their watches right before the mission.
But still, I love the movie. I don't watch it to see accurate depictions of technology, I watch it because of the emotions the story evokes in me.
When I write a piece of open source code, that takes a bit of my time too and is sometimes boring. By RMS's logic, I should charge each user some sort of nuissance fee so that my time is better spent on more "productive pursuits" or somesuch. Hrmmmmm...
Your false analogy actually helps make RMS's points more clear.
In the photo situation, RMS is asking for a small donation in compensation for his time spent performing the photo op. It is a one-time fee proportional to the amount of his time used. The proper analogy to this in the software business is "work for hire" where a software engineer is paid for his time to write the software and then the person the hired him gets to use the code as he will. RMS has publicly stated that he used this sort of employment to support himself during some of the earlier parts of his software career.
In the software situation you describe, a "nuisance fee" from each user is not proportional to the time spent by the developer in writing the software. In the photo scenario this is analogous, not to the one-time donation RMS requests, but to charging every viewer of the photo a small "nuisance fee".
RMS is being very consistent with his views here.
I really don't know if it was intentional or not, but this request for donations he made is acting like a GPL koan, allowing RMS to teach about the GPL through his own actions that at first seem paradoxical. My guess is that it is not intentional per-se, instead, I think he is acting consistently within his own sense of integrity and these little teaching stories just pop out every now and then without an explicit intention to teach on his part.
I noticed the smile in your subject line indicating that perhaps you only meant your post to be a joke. Whether your post was a joke or not, it was essentially anti-RMS, anti-GPL, anti-FOSS FUD. We already have enough of that from people how don't know any better, there is no need for more of the same from people who do.
Give the winner a $4500 laptop they can use to host their own "web design" web site and then provide a zillion links to that site and convert his/her brand new lappy into a pile of smoldering plastic and metal.
If the slashdotting is intense enough maybe we can also burn down the lucky winner's house or apartment.
Well, I rise up every morning at a quarter to eight Some woman who's my wife tells me not to be late I kiss the kids goodbye, I can't remember their names And week after week, it's always the same
And it's Ho, boys, can't you code it, and program it right Nothing ever happens in the life of mine I'm hauling up the data on the Xerox line
Then it's code in the data, give the keyboard a punch Then cross-correlate and break for some lunch Correlate, tabulate, process and screen Program, printout, regress to the mean
Then it's home again, eat again, watch some TV Make love to my woman at ten-fifty-three I dream the same dream when I'm sleeping at night I'm soaring over hills like an eagle in flight
Someday I'm gonna give up all the buttons and things I'll punch that time clock till it can't ring Burn up my necktie and set myself free Cause no one's gonna fold, bend or mutilate me.
Wow, I'm just surprised that the discussion isn't centered on "Is this even f-ing patentable?!"
Rolfwind,
Once you hang out here for a while you will realize that the only patent articles we get are about patents for amazingly obvious "inventions".
We are no longer surprised or shocked at obvious patents since they are the norm here. What would be truly shocking would be an article about a patent that was not obvious. But I don't think that's possible because it appears that either:
There are no more non-obvious ideas left, or
The patent office has a rule forbidding patents for non-obvious ideas.
funny, pilots have dealt with the support seam down the middle of the windscreen on Piper and other aircraft for tens of years without a problem.
I would call the seam a "realistic feature":-)
I have to disagree with you here unless the flight sim has head sensors so that when I move my head back and forth the views shift on the monitors. Otherwise, this is only a "realistic feature" for a situation where the pilot's head is clamped into a fixed position and can't move relative to the seam.
Bob,
We all miss keys on occasion but some of us go back and proofread what we've written and try to fix our mistakes out of curtesy and respect for our reader(s).
This is especially important when there is a typo in a proper name such as Pasadena. You know it is Pasadena and the people at Cal-Tech know it is Pasadena but it makes you appear somewhat arrogant and self-centered when you seem to assume that everyone in the world (who reads Slashdot) knows that Cal-Tech is actually located in Pasadena.
Someone simply and politely corrects your mistake and instead of thanking them, you respond sarcastically. I hope some of your teachers at MIT are reading this because you are not putting their school in a good light.
Microsoft: We're willing to wipe the slate clean, give you a fresh start. All that we're asking in return is your cooperation in bringing a known terrorist to justice.
Linux User: Yeah. Well, that sounds like a pretty good deal. But I think I may have a better one. How about, I give you the finger...
[He does] ... and you give me my phone call.
The early SONY miniDisc player/recorders (mine cost $800) self destructed after about a year and a day even if they were not used frequently. SONY used the wrong kind of glue to put the head on or something like that and the damned things became unusable after about a year because the head sagged and lost alignment.
Stallman: Digital Restrictions Management, and Treacherous Computing. Don't use the enemy's propaganda terms, every time you use those terms you are supporting the enemy.
[...]
Stallman: I think Treacherous Computing should be illegal. But I don't know how we're going to convince governments to actually do that because governments mostly are not very democratic anymore. They mostly are the pro-consuls of the mega corporations, their job is to keep us in line under the rule of the empire. That's why they run for office, they get into office, they do what the emperor -- the emperor being the mega corporations -- tells them to do, and their job is explaining to us why they can't do what we want them to do. It's very very sad and once in a while somebody has enough courage to refuse to obey, somebody like [sounds like Hugo Chavez].
I think the real reason is that the religious right still have way more than their fair share of influence.
They think pornography is evil and needs to be outlawed entirely. They think allowing an xxx top level domain would be condoning pornography and it would thus impede their plans for a total ban.
I always thought the Patriot Act was named after the Patriot Missile which won fame for its performance in the first Gulf War for never hitting its intended target.
As long as prices can go down as well as up, I'm confident that market forces will eventually reveal the right set of models. And I'm even more sure they will confirm that no one model is right for everyone and every song.
You raised some good points and almost had me fooled until I got to your last paragraph.
The article was about a government investigation into possible monopolistic price-fixing in the online music industry. Your point seems to be that variable prices are a good thing assuming market forces are at work and there is no monopolistic price-fixing.
The music industry in America is controlled by a monopoly called the RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America). Their monopolistic power has been increased by obscenely repeated extensions to the duration of copyright protection handed down by our corporate owned Congress.
Are you claiming that despite this obvious monopoly and despite all of their monopolistic practices in the past, there has been some magic wand passed over the Internet so their monopolistic power won't be used there? Or are you claiming that since market forces are magically at work on the Internet, there is no need for this government investigation? Or are you making the circular argument that market forces are working because you've assumed that market forces are working?
Even if we ignore assumptions about market forces, some of the particulars of your argument are not well thought out. Here is an example: you say:
... but below [$.49/track] the transaction costs of credit card processing and the like start to loom large...
If someone were to offer to sell me legal, good quality music at say $.10/per track, I'd be willing to give them a small deposit (say $5 or $10) so that they only have to charge my credit card after every 50 or 100 downloads. This solutions actually cuts down the credit
card overhead by a factor of 5 or 10. I find it hard to accept you as a credible proponent of "long tail math" when your recommended price points ignore such obvious and simple solutions.
I agree in theory that variable prices in a free market could be a good thing. But I strongly disagree with your (perhaps unstated) assumption that our current system is a free market. The obscene copyright laws and the RIAA's iron-fisted monopolistic control make it anything but.
... the fleecing of Californians was mostly during
Clinton.
Wrong. I was living in California during this time and even though things started to get bad while Clinton was just about to leave office, they got much worse and stayed worse after Bush became president. It is not called the "2000 California Energy Crisis" but rather the "2000 -- 2001 California Energy Crisis".
A simple
Google(California Enron) will get you lots of information, almost all of which contradicts your statement. Similarly a
Google(Bush California price caps) will show you that starting before the inauguration and lasting until at least the end of May, 2001, Bush refused to impose price caps to stop the gouging.
"We will not take any action that makes California's problems worse and that's why I oppose price caps,"
-- George Bush, May 29, 2001
President-elect Bush bluntly rejected yesterday the electricity price caps desperately sought by Gov. Gray Davis, calling them "a short-term delay of a needed solution."
Bush, in his first direct comments on California's rolling blackouts, whose repercussions are beginning to cascade beyond the state's borders, blamed the problem on California's "flawed" deregulation legislation, which he said the state has to fix.
"I have read where some propose price controls," Bush told the Associated Press. "I'm against price controls."
It's called cognitive disonance, simply, the ability to keep two contradictory ideas in your head at the same time without causing problems.
As the word disonance suggests and as the Wikipedia article you linked to describes,
cognitive disonance is all about the problems caused by keeping two contradictory ideas in your head at the same time.
The term you are describing is
doublethink as mentioned already by an AC.
From the Wikipedia article:
... doublethink is the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them...
Yes, the term was coined in George Orwell's book 1984 and yes the book 1984 is about a dystopian future with a totalitarian state modeled on Hitler's** Germany and Stalin's Russia.
Your serial killer analogy is not valid and causes you to miss the larger point.
IANAL, but I know that a valid defense for a crime is if the crime is for the greater good of society. Committing a crime by blowing the whistle on fraudulent elections is very much different from committing a crime to get evidence to convict a single person (such as a serial killer).
Certainly it would be good for society to have a serial killer locked up if he is guilty. But it's not good enough to make committing a crime to get evidence against him/her legal. As others have pointed out, if this were so then no one would be able to get a fair trial. Certainly the right to a fair trial trumps illegally obtaining evidence against a suspect.
But the balance of priorities changes when the original crime is something much worse than murder, rape, or mayhem committed against one or more individuals. For example, election fraud is much worse. If people are able to steal elections and illegally put into the legislative and executive branches candidates of their choice, then it is trivial for them to also gain control of the judicial branch.
When that happens, there is no rule of law and no one gets a fair trail, certainly not the people who committed the election fraud. They get off scot free.
Blowing the whistle on crimes against society that threaten the rule of law (such as election fraud) is qualitatively and quantitatively different from illegally gathering evidence against an individual suspected of a crime against individuals.
Contrary to your assertion via false analogy, our system must protect the whistle blowers in order to maintain the rule of law.
Bush's largest campaign contributor for the 2000 Election was Enron. After the election Enron was illegally fleecing the good citizens of the State of California (who voted overwhelmingly against Bush). Bush refused to let the federal regulatory agency step in and do its job to prevent the illegal price gouging.
If all of America was powered by breeder reactors, we could fulfill current energy demands for over a hundred years by running them off the nuclear waste we have in storage right now. Isn't nuclear power cool?
And as an added benefit, when a tiny fraction of the plutonium used in the fuel cycle of these breeders is pilfered and used to make bombs that blow up a few of our cities it will reduce our demand for energy.
Power too cheap to meter and conservation! What's not to like?
At the end of the 20th century, no reprocessing of fuel occurred in the United States because of environmental, health, and safety concerns, and the concern that plutonium-239 could be used illegally for the manufacture of weapons.
It's one thing to negotiate legitimate demands and another to humor a bunch of megalomaniacs with a death-cultish belief in virgins in paradise. Sorry, but I'm not willing to play along with their historical fantasies, let them isolate themselves and arm themselves to the teeth and then nuke us all one day.
You seem to imply that since one man (Osama) had at one point presented extreme demands, it is therefore worthless to negotiate with any Muslim.
The GP post said:
There will always be nutter prepared to [blow themselves up] for their cause... but the nutters need a support network. A support network involves money and people.
It was clear to me that the GP was suggesting negotiation, not with the most extreme nutters (such as Osama), but rather with more moderate (or less extreme) people who represent the views of the very much larger group of people in the support network.
If we were to actually follow the logic you propose and judge a group or a people by the most extreme views expressed within that group then all negotiation and diplomacy would instantly cease because there are extreme nutters in every group.
Funny thing, if we change just a few words in your paragraph that I quoted above:
s/virgins in paradise/money and power/
we arrive at something worthy of the nutter Osama and is probably pretty close to the pep talks given to suicide bombers.
Slashdot Mirror
The one technical goof that really bothers me in the film is the idea that the aliens needed to bounce a count-down signal off of our satellites in order to synchronize their watches for the moment of attack. They've developed inter-stellar space travel, energy shields, massive weapons and yet somehow they can't keep their clocks synched up for a couple of days? And even if we were to believe that they had a severe clock drift problem, what's the problem with destroying Washington DC several milliseconds before or after destroying Moscow?
So let's say the head alien is all OCD and needs the attacks synched to the millisecond. Why don't they just have their synchronizing signal count up like normal human beings do, and have some pre-arranged count for when the attack begins, like: "We attack at 16:00 hours on July 4th UTC". That way, they can change plans in case of an emergency and they don't have to start their stupid count-down thing all over again, just change the time/date of the attack.
Heck, we had clock syncing technology down pat back in good ole WWII. Just look at any of the movies where there was a commando mission. Those guys were always synching up their watches right before the mission.
But still, I love the movie. I don't watch it to see accurate depictions of technology, I watch it because of the emotions the story evokes in me.
In the photo situation, RMS is asking for a small donation in compensation for his time spent performing the photo op. It is a one-time fee proportional to the amount of his time used. The proper analogy to this in the software business is "work for hire" where a software engineer is paid for his time to write the software and then the person the hired him gets to use the code as he will. RMS has publicly stated that he used this sort of employment to support himself during some of the earlier parts of his software career.
In the software situation you describe, a "nuisance fee" from each user is not proportional to the time spent by the developer in writing the software. In the photo scenario this is analogous, not to the one-time donation RMS requests, but to charging every viewer of the photo a small "nuisance fee".
RMS is being very consistent with his views here. I really don't know if it was intentional or not, but this request for donations he made is acting like a GPL koan, allowing RMS to teach about the GPL through his own actions that at first seem paradoxical. My guess is that it is not intentional per-se, instead, I think he is acting consistently within his own sense of integrity and these little teaching stories just pop out every now and then without an explicit intention to teach on his part.
I noticed the smile in your subject line indicating that perhaps you only meant your post to be a joke. Whether your post was a joke or not, it was essentially anti-RMS, anti-GPL, anti-FOSS FUD. We already have enough of that from people how don't know any better, there is no need for more of the same from people who do.
If the slashdotting is intense enough maybe we can also burn down the lucky winner's house or apartment.
Once you hang out here for a while you will realize that the only patent articles we get are about patents for amazingly obvious "inventions".
We are no longer surprised or shocked at obvious patents since they are the norm here. What would be truly shocking would be an article about a patent that was not obvious. But I don't think that's possible because it appears that either:
Welcome to Slashdot.
We all miss keys on occasion but some of us go back and proofread what we've written and try to fix our mistakes out of curtesy and respect for our reader(s).
This is especially important when there is a typo in a proper name such as Pasadena. You know it is Pasadena and the people at Cal-Tech know it is Pasadena but it makes you appear somewhat arrogant and self-centered when you seem to assume that everyone in the world (who reads Slashdot) knows that Cal-Tech is actually located in Pasadena.
Someone simply and politely corrects your mistake and instead of thanking them, you respond sarcastically. I hope some of your teachers at MIT are reading this because you are not putting their school in a good light.
Linux User: Yeah. Well, that sounds like a pretty good deal. But I think I may have a better one. How about, I give you the finger ...
... and you give me my phone call.
[He does]
They think pornography is evil and needs to be outlawed entirely. They think allowing an xxx top level domain would be condoning pornography and it would thus impede their plans for a total ban.
With virtually no cost for this storage, they can make a killing charging $0.15/Gig/month.
640 terabytes should be enough for anybody.
The article was about a government investigation into possible monopolistic price-fixing in the online music industry. Your point seems to be that variable prices are a good thing assuming market forces are at work and there is no monopolistic price-fixing.
The music industry in America is controlled by a monopoly called the RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America). Their monopolistic power has been increased by obscenely repeated extensions to the duration of copyright protection handed down by our corporate owned Congress.
Are you claiming that despite this obvious monopoly and despite all of their monopolistic practices in the past, there has been some magic wand passed over the Internet so their monopolistic power won't be used there? Or are you claiming that since market forces are magically at work on the Internet, there is no need for this government investigation? Or are you making the circular argument that market forces are working because you've assumed that market forces are working?
Even if we ignore assumptions about market forces, some of the particulars of your argument are not well thought out. Here is an example: you say:
If someone were to offer to sell me legal, good quality music at say $.10/per track, I'd be willing to give them a small deposit (say $5 or $10) so that they only have to charge my credit card after every 50 or 100 downloads. This solutions actually cuts down the credit card overhead by a factor of 5 or 10. I find it hard to accept you as a credible proponent of "long tail math" when your recommended price points ignore such obvious and simple solutions.I agree in theory that variable prices in a free market could be a good thing. But I strongly disagree with your (perhaps unstated) assumption that our current system is a free market. The obscene copyright laws and the RIAA's iron-fisted monopolistic control make it anything but.
A simple Google(California Enron) will get you lots of information, almost all of which contradicts your statement. Similarly a Google(Bush California price caps) will show you that starting before the inauguration and lasting until at least the end of May, 2001, Bush refused to impose price caps to stop the gouging.
For Bush's earlier take on the problem, take a look at this reprint of a San Francisco Chronicle article that states:Finally take a look a what CBS News had to say:
If anything, instead of embellishing (as you suggest), I was probably understating the problem.The term you are describing is doublethink as mentioned already by an AC. From the Wikipedia article:
Yes, the term was coined in George Orwell's book 1984 and yes the book 1984 is about a dystopian future with a totalitarian state modeled on Hitler's** Germany and Stalin's Russia.**Oops. Goodwin on me. Get used to it.
IANAL, but I know that a valid defense for a crime is if the crime is for the greater good of society. Committing a crime by blowing the whistle on fraudulent elections is very much different from committing a crime to get evidence to convict a single person (such as a serial killer).
Certainly it would be good for society to have a serial killer locked up if he is guilty. But it's not good enough to make committing a crime to get evidence against him/her legal. As others have pointed out, if this were so then no one would be able to get a fair trial. Certainly the right to a fair trial trumps illegally obtaining evidence against a suspect.
But the balance of priorities changes when the original crime is something much worse than murder, rape, or mayhem committed against one or more individuals. For example, election fraud is much worse. If people are able to steal elections and illegally put into the legislative and executive branches candidates of their choice, then it is trivial for them to also gain control of the judicial branch.
When that happens, there is no rule of law and no one gets a fair trail, certainly not the people who committed the election fraud. They get off scot free.
Blowing the whistle on crimes against society that threaten the rule of law (such as election fraud) is qualitatively and quantitatively different from illegally gathering evidence against an individual suspected of a crime against individuals.
Contrary to your assertion via false analogy, our system must protect the whistle blowers in order to maintain the rule of law.
Power too cheap to meter and conservation! What's not to like?
From Encarta:
The GP post said:
It was clear to me that the GP was suggesting negotiation, not with the most extreme nutters (such as Osama), but rather with more moderate (or less extreme) people who represent the views of the very much larger group of people in the support network.If we were to actually follow the logic you propose and judge a group or a people by the most extreme views expressed within that group then all negotiation and diplomacy would instantly cease because there are extreme nutters in every group.
Funny thing, if we change just a few words in your paragraph that I quoted above:
we arrive at something worthy of the nutter Osama and is probably pretty close to the pep talks given to suicide bombers.There are extreme nutters on all sides.