Short-termist, for the most part: politicians give incentives that are economically stupid, because they want to be able to advertise how many jobs they've brought to Texas in their next reelection campaign.
Licensing issues I suspect, "the E-meter is intended for use only in Church-sanctioned auditing sessions". Though perhaps this could be worked around in a loophole if the CIA were to merge itself as a branch of Scientology and declare all its facilities churches...
I suspect you're thinking of the AGPL, not the GPLv3.
However, that's sort of the point, and other businesses use it precisely for those reasons. For example, Launchpad licenses their software-project-hosting software as AGPL, because they don't want a competitor to be able to take their software, make proprietary changes to it, and then not share back the changes. Competitors are of course free to write their own, separate software.
The main thing I don't get with the angst is why it's directed specifically against the GPL, not all software that isn't BSD-licensed. The GPL offers some conditions under which you can modify software without negotiating a separate license agreement with the copyright holder. It doesn't remove any freedoms you previously had, since the default license is "all rights reserved".
That's also a good way to ensure that you actually know what your money is doing. There are a lot of hare-brained NGO schemes out there, with people wanting to "save the world" in ways that often produce unintended consequences (like American food aid putting African farmers out of business). Like with the advice to "invest in what you know", imo it's better to donate to things that you understand.
There's some truth to that, but there are also transaction costs, principal-agent problems, unsavory things hidden by black boxes, bureaucracy, and various other such problems. When you give a non-profit organization $100, they may do a wide range of things. The best case is that they optimally use it in exactly the manner you would've preferred. But since you aren't actually there to see they do, it's hard to be sure. They might divert an unnecessarily large amount of it to staff salaries, travel, perks, PR, or even "fees" paid to local officials in some parts of the world. They also may or may not actually be improving whatever situation they claim to improve, or be basing their work on good science.
That's definitely one hard limit, but I believe the open question is whether there are other minimum bounds for a black hole formed through stellar collapse, which may be higher than the Chandrasekhar limit. The Chandrasekhar limit is the maximum size of a white dwarf, but there may be other ways of preventing collapse into a black hole at higher masses; for example, the TOV limit that governs neutron star formation.
Given the broad overreach [pdf] of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act to count violations of Terms of Service agreements as "unauthorized access" (i.e. "hacking"), it be a criminal offense for UMG to violate Google's rules on how its piracy filters are to be used?
Replying to myself: it appears that the minimum is related to the Tolman–Oppenheimer–Volkoff limit for the maximum mass of a neutron star, which isn't known to great accuracy. Wikipedia cites a 1996 journal article with an estimate of "approximately 1.5 to 3.0 solar masses".
There have been a bunch of claims of black holes roughly in the range 3-4x solar masses, some subsequently revised upwards (this one made some news in 2008, and there are some other candidates as well). The "normal" range for stellar black holes is roughly 3-30x solar masses, according to current understanding.
Anyone have a link to a good explanation of the current estimated values for a minimum? My understanding is that there isn't really a theoretical physical minimum (black holes can exist at any size), but that there's a mass level beneath which astrophysicists consider it very unlikely that conditions would have really existed to produce a black hole through stellar collapse of a star. But I can't seem to find a solid estimate of what that number is, just these sorts of indirect references to 3x being "close" to the minimum (looking at Google Books, I find an old textbook that also mentions 3.2x as "just above" the theoretical minimum, but doesn't elaborate).
Deceptive advertising past some threshold is illegal, but yes, the bar has been set pretty high, so that you have to come pretty close to outright lying to trigger it.
I suppose we could break it down into two questions:
1. Is using social-network data to evaluate creditworthiness actually accurate?
2. If it is accurate, do we think doing so is a good or bad thing?
Your point is about #1, but I think probably there is a way, given good enough statistical analysis, to extract a good predictive signal, so the real long-term question is not whether it works, but whether we should let it be used.
I have no large-scale study, but my anecdotal information on those kinds of schemes is that they can have the opposite problem in large companies: rather than promoting uncooperative individual greed, they instead promote a sort of feeling that, "well, as one peon I can't possibly move the needle on this gigantic corporation". People then get demotivated when their bonus depends on things totally divorced from what they actually do, e.g. you do a great job in IT this year, but your bonus goes down because you work for an oil company and the price of oil went down, something you don't have any control over even remotely.
Interesting that one can put "reasonable time-place-and-manner" restrictions on public assembly to petition for redress of grievances, but not on commercial advertising...
Weird, it's showing the Kindle edition for me as $12.77, which is cheaper than any used paper copy. Is Amazon pricing differently by customer profile and/or location?
That's true for used books (since you can't buy used on Kindle), but tends not to affect best-seller lists, because people have short attention spans, and best-seller lists tend to be dominated by new releases.
Slashdot Mirror
As a programmer, something about the way this conditional logic is specified makes me twitch.
Short-termist, for the most part: politicians give incentives that are economically stupid, because they want to be able to advertise how many jobs they've brought to Texas in their next reelection campaign.
Depends on how much of that was actually paid for by Texas with "incentives" to bring the plant, I suppose.
Licensing issues I suspect, "the E-meter is intended for use only in Church-sanctioned auditing sessions". Though perhaps this could be worked around in a loophole if the CIA were to merge itself as a branch of Scientology and declare all its facilities churches...
I suspect you're thinking of the AGPL, not the GPLv3.
However, that's sort of the point, and other businesses use it precisely for those reasons. For example, Launchpad licenses their software-project-hosting software as AGPL, because they don't want a competitor to be able to take their software, make proprietary changes to it, and then not share back the changes. Competitors are of course free to write their own, separate software.
The main thing I don't get with the angst is why it's directed specifically against the GPL, not all software that isn't BSD-licensed. The GPL offers some conditions under which you can modify software without negotiating a separate license agreement with the copyright holder. It doesn't remove any freedoms you previously had, since the default license is "all rights reserved".
That's also a good way to ensure that you actually know what your money is doing. There are a lot of hare-brained NGO schemes out there, with people wanting to "save the world" in ways that often produce unintended consequences (like American food aid putting African farmers out of business). Like with the advice to "invest in what you know", imo it's better to donate to things that you understand.
There's some truth to that, but there are also transaction costs, principal-agent problems, unsavory things hidden by black boxes, bureaucracy, and various other such problems. When you give a non-profit organization $100, they may do a wide range of things. The best case is that they optimally use it in exactly the manner you would've preferred. But since you aren't actually there to see they do, it's hard to be sure. They might divert an unnecessarily large amount of it to staff salaries, travel, perks, PR, or even "fees" paid to local officials in some parts of the world. They also may or may not actually be improving whatever situation they claim to improve, or be basing their work on good science.
That's definitely one hard limit, but I believe the open question is whether there are other minimum bounds for a black hole formed through stellar collapse, which may be higher than the Chandrasekhar limit. The Chandrasekhar limit is the maximum size of a white dwarf, but there may be other ways of preventing collapse into a black hole at higher masses; for example, the TOV limit that governs neutron star formation.
Given the broad overreach [pdf] of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act to count violations of Terms of Service agreements as "unauthorized access" (i.e. "hacking"), it be a criminal offense for UMG to violate Google's rules on how its piracy filters are to be used?
Replying to myself: it appears that the minimum is related to the Tolman–Oppenheimer–Volkoff limit for the maximum mass of a neutron star, which isn't known to great accuracy. Wikipedia cites a 1996 journal article with an estimate of "approximately 1.5 to 3.0 solar masses".
There have been a bunch of claims of black holes roughly in the range 3-4x solar masses, some subsequently revised upwards (this one made some news in 2008, and there are some other candidates as well). The "normal" range for stellar black holes is roughly 3-30x solar masses, according to current understanding.
Anyone have a link to a good explanation of the current estimated values for a minimum? My understanding is that there isn't really a theoretical physical minimum (black holes can exist at any size), but that there's a mass level beneath which astrophysicists consider it very unlikely that conditions would have really existed to produce a black hole through stellar collapse of a star. But I can't seem to find a solid estimate of what that number is, just these sorts of indirect references to 3x being "close" to the minimum (looking at Google Books, I find an old textbook that also mentions 3.2x as "just above" the theoretical minimum, but doesn't elaborate).
Or perhaps with an ice-cream sandwich maker, to mention the Slashdot article two stories prior to this one...
Deceptive advertising past some threshold is illegal, but yes, the bar has been set pretty high, so that you have to come pretty close to outright lying to trigger it.
Among Greeks, probably best known for one of his less-blockbuster books, 1997's The Parthenon Marbles: The Case for Reunification .
I suppose we could break it down into two questions:
1. Is using social-network data to evaluate creditworthiness actually accurate?
2. If it is accurate, do we think doing so is a good or bad thing?
Your point is about #1, but I think probably there is a way, given good enough statistical analysis, to extract a good predictive signal, so the real long-term question is not whether it works, but whether we should let it be used.
I have no large-scale study, but my anecdotal information on those kinds of schemes is that they can have the opposite problem in large companies: rather than promoting uncooperative individual greed, they instead promote a sort of feeling that, "well, as one peon I can't possibly move the needle on this gigantic corporation". People then get demotivated when their bonus depends on things totally divorced from what they actually do, e.g. you do a great job in IT this year, but your bonus goes down because you work for an oil company and the price of oil went down, something you don't have any control over even remotely.
Sounds like academia, actually. It's all about impact factor, citation count, and grant dollars these days...
you do realize that "Anonymous" is just any person who calls themselves that, right?
Interesting that one can put "reasonable time-place-and-manner" restrictions on public assembly to petition for redress of grievances, but not on commercial advertising...
I cannot think of a better use of taxpayer money.
There is at least one false statement in your post, fwiw.
How many bureaucrats does it take to run a shell script?
Hah, so this means it'll bring the U.S. into the civilized world of... having commercial-loudness standards that nobody follows.
Weird, it's showing the Kindle edition for me as $12.77, which is cheaper than any used paper copy. Is Amazon pricing differently by customer profile and/or location?
That's true for used books (since you can't buy used on Kindle), but tends not to affect best-seller lists, because people have short attention spans, and best-seller lists tend to be dominated by new releases.