The cold logic can be better though, if you know what you actually want to optimize. Humans often make decisions that don't do what they claim they want, e.g. minimizing civilian casualties.
This is actually getting fairly close to just ignoring copyright and seeing it more directly as a matter of rewarding creators for their work. Copyright exists to "promote the progress of science and useful arts", and insofar as the way it works in the current world leads to some of these weird results, one solution is what you propose: ignore the legal rules of copyright, and instead try to honestly think of how to allocate your money to benefit the creators. However, this requires a level of honesty that I'm not sure will work in the aggregate. Will people really take the $50 they would've spent on used games, and instead pirate the old games while spending $50 on new stuff? Or will they just keep the $50?
Some of the more progressive aspects of the music scene have been encouraging a shift in that direction, though. From their perspective, it's better for the artist if you pirate their back catalog and pay $50 for a concert ticket and shirt; than if you pick up $50 worth of used CDs on eBay, or in some cases even new from their label (for artists with particularly bad contracts).
Is there any evidence that telecomm companies can successfully manage large-scale, long-term innovative projects? The only examples I can think of are from quasi-governmental firms, like AT&T Bell Labs in its monopoly heyday.
The problem is that it isn't necessarily good for the companies, or at least their managers/CEOs. Keeping everyone buying the same crappy, overpriced service indefinitely is better for them---but worse for everyone else.
If you're against sedentary activities in general, the list is surely much longer than videogames and DVDs. How about, say, books? Or televisions? Or board games?
When logged in at least, it'd be nice if I could accumulate a personal blocklist that's blocked on all my searches. In some areas I keep ended up rediscovering the same SEO'd crap sites, and I'd like to just cut them out of my results for good.
That's a very idealized view of markets that few modern economists hold, though. It basically assumes that all participants in markets are negligible in size relative to the overall market, so their actions can't effect it. That's not true with very large corporations that control a substantial percentage of a market. That's one reason companies merge, not just for economies of scale, but because small companies are at a disadvantage when weight is being thrown around; size gives much greater market power, which can include the power to control prices and contracts to some extent.
That's one reason that, when dealing with large companies, industries with lots of small companies often see defensive consolidation: if you're up against a set of very large auto companies, your rag-tag bunch of parts suppliers can probably negotiate a better deal if you merge into a large parts-supply conglomerate that can throw its weight around more equally.
Labor unions are basically the same defensive consolidation, where a bunch of independent labor-sellers join up to form a labor-selling corporation.
The "overhead" I meant (and admittedly was imprecise about) was mostly the overhead of implementing the parallel execution, not of the parallelization itself. Things like spawning threads, managing work queues, blocking on futures, etc., all take time, and it takes a very smart compiler to only use them in cases where the parallelizing win outweighs the bookkeeping overhead.
Yeah that's fair; I kind of quickly read your post (despite it being only one sentence; hey this is Slashdot!) so mistook it for the generic "FP means you get parallelization for free!" pipe dream.:)
Yeah, I agree that even if the programmer has to specify parallelism, having immutable data structures makes a lot of things easier to think about. The main trend that still seems to be in the process of being shaken out is to what extent STM will be the magic bullet some people are proposing it to be, and to what extent it can be "good enough" as a concurrency model even in non-functional languages (e.g. a lot of people are pushing STM in C/C++).
And I heard functional languages like Lisp/Haskell are good at these multi-core tasks, is that true?
It is true, because they privilege immutable data structures which are safe to access concurrently.
Only partly true. Even in pure functional languages like Haskell, the functional-programming dream of automatic parallelization is nowhere near here yet; in theory the compiler could just run a bunch of thunks of code in parallel, or speculatively, or whatever it wants, but in practice the overhead of figuring out which are worth splitting up has doomed all the efforts so far. It does make some kinds of programmer-specific parallelism easier; probably the most interesting experiments in that direction, IMO, is Clojure's concurrency primitives (Clojure's a Lisp-derived language with immutable data types, targeting the JVM).
Lisp, FWIW, doesn't necessarily privilege immutable data structures, and isn't even necessarily used in a functional-programming style; "Lisp" without qualifiers often means Common Lisp, in which it's very common to use mutable data structures and imperative code.
Slashdot is kind of an in-between case, though; when the editors post a story by submitters, it's sort of formatted as if they're "quoting" the submitters, but it's not quite like quoting a book or speech or something. It's expected that when submitting a piece to a site with editors (assume for the sake of argument we can call Slashdot editors that), that your text might be, well, edited before publication. The Economist, for example, edits letters to the editor before publication for style and brevity, without using ellipses to indicate where they removed text.
They have repeatedly and willfully violated the laws of multiple countries, have been fined multiple billions of dollars, and that has not deterred them as they continue to violate those laws. That means breaking them up into multiple competing companies, with the products decoupled from each other, is the only real remaining remedy with teeth.
I'm happy to view, and sometimes click on, a few reasonably inoffensive ads per site. Where I get annoyed is when they're unfriendly to readers. Either they plaster the site so densely that the real content is taking up an unreasonably small proportion of the screen; or they try to slip in ads where you'll accidentally click on them thinking they were navigation elements; or they have obnoxious animated graphics, video, or sound.
I've personally made some effort to resist just throwing in the towel and blocking everything, because I really want to punish specifically the annoying purveyors of ads, not everyone with ad-supported content. For a few years I managed it just by refusing to visit sites with annoying ads; I can do without cnn.com, and can visit news.bbc.co.uk instead (better news, too). But it's gotten progressively worse, so I recently installed AdBlock, but without a default filterset; I add rules for particularly egregious ads as I encounter them. This is tedious, though.
I personally would welcome some easier way to say that I'm okay with a few text ads in the sidebar, but I'm going to block anything that goes beyond that. I don't think this particular proposal is the solution, though--- nothing prevents site owners here from asking for an exemption even though they do have egregiously annoying ads.
I don't mind the new tack at all, the action was pretty good, etc. But parts of it felt really painfully un-subtle, in a Hollywood summer-blockbuster way (which is what it was, I suppose). The buddy-comedy elements were sort of over the top, and at times they pretty much bludgeoned you with whatever point they wanted you to get, going so far as to basically speak it into the camera, like with the "aww, this is where a lifelong friendship begins!!!"
I agree as far as the majority of games go, but there are some games that do try to use games as a medium for provoking thought and representing ideas, sometimes while still be interesting to play. Chris Crawford's Balance of Power (1985) is a pretty good example, I think, a game about Cold-War brinksmanship that wasn't just a wargame, but also aimed to illustrate some features of the Cold War and brinksmanship through its gameplay.
More recently, there's been a collection of much smaller games, usually Flash on the web, trying to say something about serious issues. They're mostly smaller because the current niche with the most legs seems to be games that respond in a timely fashion to current events. So, for example, in the wake of the 2006 E Coli spinach scare, an indie game studio came out with Bacteria Salad, a farm-simulation game that makes some points about the tradeoffs in small vs. large farms. And in the wake of the Kerry "don't tase me, bro" incident, another indie designer made a game about how people do, or could, respond to police brutality.
The book Persuasive Games: The Expressive Power of Videogames (2007) has some decent coverage of the subject, about half an overview of games that already do include some actual expressive content, and half a manifesto of sorts that more games ought to, if the medium wants to have an impact in society besides entertainment.
There are a number of frontends to dosbox for managing and launching installed apps. Obviously the apps themselves are no more or less GUI than the originals (sort of the whole point), but you don't have to start them from the command line if you don't want to.
That's because France's "reputation for socialism" is not nearly as accurate as either American liberals or American conservatives would have you believe (for different reasons). It's not quite Italy, but there is a strong cabal of large French corporations with significant control over the economy and influence in government.
And on other matters, it's not all that socialist, either. Hell, its healthcare system is largely privatized: there is officially universal coverage, but it's limited enough that the vast majority of the population also purchases private health insurance.
Although it doesn't seem to be the dominant position, some libertarians are also anti-corporation; for example, Milton Friedman thought corporations were actually incompatible with free-market capitalism.
It depends on how the law's written. It's certainly possible to write one that grants un-waivable rights to sue only to people who purchase products. Of course, this would still leave sellers of GPL software (like Red Hat) liable, but not coders who give stuff away free on the internet.
In this case it was lying to Congress, so the body capable of enforcing sanctions would be Congress itself, which would have to cite the RIAA's representative for contempt of Congress. I'll let you guess what the chances of them doing so are.
I agree, but only to a certain extent. It's certainly reasonable to ask those who create forks to choose a different name rather than distributing using exactly the original name. However, it's not unreasonable, I don't think, for the fork to use some derived name that BOTH 1) makes clear it is not the original project; but 2) makes clear that it is derived from the original project. For example, the principal GNU Emacs fork is named XEmacs. Would it really be better for us all if GNU had taken a hard line on that and forced Lucid to choose a name for their fork that didn't contain the word "emacs" within it at all?
So, sure, it's fine in my book if Mozilla doesn't want a modified Firefox to be called just "Firefox". Maybe more distinction than Emacs/XEmacs is also reasonable; e.g. a GtkFirefox or something could imply that it's an official GTK version. But they seem to want to take this to the extent of trademark law, and not even allow derived names that are clearly distinguished, like DebianFox or something. I don't see how that really fits within free-software culture.
Slashdot Mirror
What's the alternate solution? Yes, all large centralized organizations are bad. But I generally find that private-sector ones are the worst.
The cold logic can be better though, if you know what you actually want to optimize. Humans often make decisions that don't do what they claim they want, e.g. minimizing civilian casualties.
Humans aren't actually better at it than robots; humans are notoriously bad at estimating conditional probabilities.
This is actually getting fairly close to just ignoring copyright and seeing it more directly as a matter of rewarding creators for their work. Copyright exists to "promote the progress of science and useful arts", and insofar as the way it works in the current world leads to some of these weird results, one solution is what you propose: ignore the legal rules of copyright, and instead try to honestly think of how to allocate your money to benefit the creators. However, this requires a level of honesty that I'm not sure will work in the aggregate. Will people really take the $50 they would've spent on used games, and instead pirate the old games while spending $50 on new stuff? Or will they just keep the $50?
Some of the more progressive aspects of the music scene have been encouraging a shift in that direction, though. From their perspective, it's better for the artist if you pirate their back catalog and pay $50 for a concert ticket and shirt; than if you pick up $50 worth of used CDs on eBay, or in some cases even new from their label (for artists with particularly bad contracts).
They also have control over adding features to CUDA relatively rapidly as hardware gains new capabilities, which they can't easily do with OpenCL.
Is there any evidence that telecomm companies can successfully manage large-scale, long-term innovative projects? The only examples I can think of are from quasi-governmental firms, like AT&T Bell Labs in its monopoly heyday.
The problem is that it isn't necessarily good for the companies, or at least their managers/CEOs. Keeping everyone buying the same crappy, overpriced service indefinitely is better for them---but worse for everyone else.
If you're against sedentary activities in general, the list is surely much longer than videogames and DVDs. How about, say, books? Or televisions? Or board games?
When logged in at least, it'd be nice if I could accumulate a personal blocklist that's blocked on all my searches. In some areas I keep ended up rediscovering the same SEO'd crap sites, and I'd like to just cut them out of my results for good.
Google has presented limited context-aware results for years if you request them, e.g. search for "define: word" or "185 usd in euros".
That's a very idealized view of markets that few modern economists hold, though. It basically assumes that all participants in markets are negligible in size relative to the overall market, so their actions can't effect it. That's not true with very large corporations that control a substantial percentage of a market. That's one reason companies merge, not just for economies of scale, but because small companies are at a disadvantage when weight is being thrown around; size gives much greater market power, which can include the power to control prices and contracts to some extent.
That's one reason that, when dealing with large companies, industries with lots of small companies often see defensive consolidation: if you're up against a set of very large auto companies, your rag-tag bunch of parts suppliers can probably negotiate a better deal if you merge into a large parts-supply conglomerate that can throw its weight around more equally.
Labor unions are basically the same defensive consolidation, where a bunch of independent labor-sellers join up to form a labor-selling corporation.
Depends on the broker and the bonds; stuff sold through InterNotes, for example, can be bought in single $1,000 increments, e.g. through Fidelity.
The "overhead" I meant (and admittedly was imprecise about) was mostly the overhead of implementing the parallel execution, not of the parallelization itself. Things like spawning threads, managing work queues, blocking on futures, etc., all take time, and it takes a very smart compiler to only use them in cases where the parallelizing win outweighs the bookkeeping overhead.
Yeah that's fair; I kind of quickly read your post (despite it being only one sentence; hey this is Slashdot!) so mistook it for the generic "FP means you get parallelization for free!" pipe dream. :)
Yeah, I agree that even if the programmer has to specify parallelism, having immutable data structures makes a lot of things easier to think about. The main trend that still seems to be in the process of being shaken out is to what extent STM will be the magic bullet some people are proposing it to be, and to what extent it can be "good enough" as a concurrency model even in non-functional languages (e.g. a lot of people are pushing STM in C/C++).
Only partly true. Even in pure functional languages like Haskell, the functional-programming dream of automatic parallelization is nowhere near here yet; in theory the compiler could just run a bunch of thunks of code in parallel, or speculatively, or whatever it wants, but in practice the overhead of figuring out which are worth splitting up has doomed all the efforts so far. It does make some kinds of programmer-specific parallelism easier; probably the most interesting experiments in that direction, IMO, is Clojure's concurrency primitives (Clojure's a Lisp-derived language with immutable data types, targeting the JVM).
Lisp, FWIW, doesn't necessarily privilege immutable data structures, and isn't even necessarily used in a functional-programming style; "Lisp" without qualifiers often means Common Lisp, in which it's very common to use mutable data structures and imperative code.
Slashdot is kind of an in-between case, though; when the editors post a story by submitters, it's sort of formatted as if they're "quoting" the submitters, but it's not quite like quoting a book or speech or something. It's expected that when submitting a piece to a site with editors (assume for the sake of argument we can call Slashdot editors that), that your text might be, well, edited before publication. The Economist, for example, edits letters to the editor before publication for style and brevity, without using ellipses to indicate where they removed text.
They have repeatedly and willfully violated the laws of multiple countries, have been fined multiple billions of dollars, and that has not deterred them as they continue to violate those laws. That means breaking them up into multiple competing companies, with the products decoupled from each other, is the only real remaining remedy with teeth.
I'm happy to view, and sometimes click on, a few reasonably inoffensive ads per site. Where I get annoyed is when they're unfriendly to readers. Either they plaster the site so densely that the real content is taking up an unreasonably small proportion of the screen; or they try to slip in ads where you'll accidentally click on them thinking they were navigation elements; or they have obnoxious animated graphics, video, or sound.
I've personally made some effort to resist just throwing in the towel and blocking everything, because I really want to punish specifically the annoying purveyors of ads, not everyone with ad-supported content. For a few years I managed it just by refusing to visit sites with annoying ads; I can do without cnn.com, and can visit news.bbc.co.uk instead (better news, too). But it's gotten progressively worse, so I recently installed AdBlock, but without a default filterset; I add rules for particularly egregious ads as I encounter them. This is tedious, though.
I personally would welcome some easier way to say that I'm okay with a few text ads in the sidebar, but I'm going to block anything that goes beyond that. I don't think this particular proposal is the solution, though--- nothing prevents site owners here from asking for an exemption even though they do have egregiously annoying ads.
I don't mind the new tack at all, the action was pretty good, etc. But parts of it felt really painfully un-subtle, in a Hollywood summer-blockbuster way (which is what it was, I suppose). The buddy-comedy elements were sort of over the top, and at times they pretty much bludgeoned you with whatever point they wanted you to get, going so far as to basically speak it into the camera, like with the "aww, this is where a lifelong friendship begins!!!"
I agree as far as the majority of games go, but there are some games that do try to use games as a medium for provoking thought and representing ideas, sometimes while still be interesting to play. Chris Crawford's Balance of Power (1985) is a pretty good example, I think, a game about Cold-War brinksmanship that wasn't just a wargame, but also aimed to illustrate some features of the Cold War and brinksmanship through its gameplay.
More recently, there's been a collection of much smaller games, usually Flash on the web, trying to say something about serious issues. They're mostly smaller because the current niche with the most legs seems to be games that respond in a timely fashion to current events. So, for example, in the wake of the 2006 E Coli spinach scare, an indie game studio came out with Bacteria Salad, a farm-simulation game that makes some points about the tradeoffs in small vs. large farms. And in the wake of the Kerry "don't tase me, bro" incident, another indie designer made a game about how people do, or could, respond to police brutality.
The book Persuasive Games: The Expressive Power of Videogames (2007) has some decent coverage of the subject, about half an overview of games that already do include some actual expressive content, and half a manifesto of sorts that more games ought to, if the medium wants to have an impact in society besides entertainment.
There are a number of frontends to dosbox for managing and launching installed apps. Obviously the apps themselves are no more or less GUI than the originals (sort of the whole point), but you don't have to start them from the command line if you don't want to.
That's because France's "reputation for socialism" is not nearly as accurate as either American liberals or American conservatives would have you believe (for different reasons). It's not quite Italy, but there is a strong cabal of large French corporations with significant control over the economy and influence in government.
And on other matters, it's not all that socialist, either. Hell, its healthcare system is largely privatized: there is officially universal coverage, but it's limited enough that the vast majority of the population also purchases private health insurance.
Although it doesn't seem to be the dominant position, some libertarians are also anti-corporation; for example, Milton Friedman thought corporations were actually incompatible with free-market capitalism.
It depends on how the law's written. It's certainly possible to write one that grants un-waivable rights to sue only to people who purchase products. Of course, this would still leave sellers of GPL software (like Red Hat) liable, but not coders who give stuff away free on the internet.
In this case it was lying to Congress, so the body capable of enforcing sanctions would be Congress itself, which would have to cite the RIAA's representative for contempt of Congress. I'll let you guess what the chances of them doing so are.
I agree, but only to a certain extent. It's certainly reasonable to ask those who create forks to choose a different name rather than distributing using exactly the original name. However, it's not unreasonable, I don't think, for the fork to use some derived name that BOTH 1) makes clear it is not the original project; but 2) makes clear that it is derived from the original project. For example, the principal GNU Emacs fork is named XEmacs. Would it really be better for us all if GNU had taken a hard line on that and forced Lucid to choose a name for their fork that didn't contain the word "emacs" within it at all?
So, sure, it's fine in my book if Mozilla doesn't want a modified Firefox to be called just "Firefox". Maybe more distinction than Emacs/XEmacs is also reasonable; e.g. a GtkFirefox or something could imply that it's an official GTK version. But they seem to want to take this to the extent of trademark law, and not even allow derived names that are clearly distinguished, like DebianFox or something. I don't see how that really fits within free-software culture.