Agreed. To further the cause of 'not flaming about units', I put an entirely unrelated question to the currently assembled geekery: how would you go about building one of these on, say, half the budget? Can it be done? (Anyone answering "Why bother? Just buy 'x' and be done with it." have missed the point and will be required to sit in the corner and think about what they've done).
A moderately effective stopgap, perhaps, but having to nuke all your phone data because you were pulled over for something that may or may not have been a traffic violation is hardly an acceptable state of affairs.
Apologies for the double reply, but a more succinct way of stating my case has come to mind; I think you might even agree with me! Just go through the laws, find any explicit mention of "religious groups", and replace with something like "non-profit community groups". Everyone's protected equally, faith and non-faith alike.
Looks like I may have misused the word 'secular', and for that I apologise - I'd evidently been misled by common usage.
I find it rather unfair that you seem to have disregarded my final paragraph, though. Do you really not see the difference between a teacher with a belief, and a teacher teaching a belief, or of a school set up by a group of people with a particular belief compared to a school set up to teach the principles of that belief (to the necessary exclusion of other beliefs)? I wouldn't want an 'atheist faith school' set up any more than I want to see any other, I want schools to give as even and neutral an education as possible, rather than be set up to push any agenda, even one I agree with. Most of the time, belief shouldn't come up at all; when it does, each belief system, and none, should get equal weight, that's all I ask. Of course I don't want to prevent religious groups from setting up schools, and I don't want to shut down the ones that exist, I just want them to operate under exactly the same rules regarding curriculum, pupil intake, and so forth as any other community group - I'm asking for simple equality here, not the pro-atheist campaign you seem to have pinned on me. The concept of faith schools, and, more specifically, of "a Christian school" or "a Muslim school" is very different to "a school run by Muslims" or "a school run by Christians" - we obviously differ widely in our opinions, but do you not see how the former gives the faith groups special status compared to non-faith groups, when all I ask is that they be placed under a single 'community group' heading?
Hereditary peers are a bad idea in my opinion, so are spiritual ones. The existence of one doesn't negate the problem of the other. And, for the fourth time, I don't want to explicitly exclude religious groups. I want to include them on the same footing as non-religious community groups. That's all. If they want to automatically appoint people from as a representative sample of the community then that's fine by me (at least in this context), and I wouldn't much care what religion they happened to be, because of course religious people are part of our community. I really don't see how you got from my statement of "All I ask is that religions be held to precisely the same standard as any other community organisation, no more, no less." to your suggestion that "...ensuring parts of the community have a voice seems far more important than what you'd like to do: ensure parts of the community do not have a voice.". Incidentally, I'm all for your idea of populating the Lords by random appointment - sounds like a bloody good plan to me!
Not to mention that the majority of people wanting to read the paper itself (rather than the abstract and BBC summary) are likely to have institutional access anyway.
The precise nature of the legal protections for religion varies, of course, so anything either of us says on that front is going to be local. In the UK, a country far more secular than the US, religions have special status within the education system compared to other non-profit community organisations, and some church leaders receive a measure of automatic political power. That goes far, far beyond freedom of speech and belief, and well into government sponsorship of religion, in my opinion.
You're absolutely correct about people being able to say and believe what they like, and that we have no right to 'freedom from speech'; I actually made a clarification to my original post to that effect.
I strongly disagree with your last paragraph, though. All I ask is that religions be held to precisely the same standard as any other community organisation, no more, no less. People's right to religious belief should be protected as much as their right to political belief; again no more, no less. As for removing a person from his job just because of his religion, I'd be absolutely furious if that happened - just because I strongly disagree with someone's belief, doesn't mean I'm so short sighted as to ignore the importance of protecting freedom for everybody. If his religion happened to be interfering with his ability to teach science effectively then that's a quite different matter, and again I'd apply the simple test of "would it be acceptable for non-religious reasons?"; if he's telling people that God holds molecules together with tiny strands of angel hair, or if he's telling them that the four humours explain all of medical science, he should be fired for incompetence. That's not a matter of belief, though, that's a matter of letting one's belief interfere with the satisfactory performance of one's job.
You're absolutely right, they don't do a particularly good job of promoting copyright reform or bringing the laws regarding religion into question, but I don't think they're an embarrassment to either cause. I'm happy enough for more voices on the side of the issues that I happen to agree with, whether or not they're doing it in the best possible manner.
Just to clarify, in case anyone gets the wrong end of the stick: I'm of the firm opinion that everyone should be able to say and believe absolutely what the hell they like, and those rights should be protected indiscriminately for all, but the problems start occurring when you offer religious organisations tax breaks, exemptions from laws applied to other organisations, and so forth.
Just to clarify, in case anyone gets the wrong end of the stick: I'm of the firm opinion that everyone should be able to say and believe absolutely what the hell they like, and those rights should be protected indiscriminately for all, but the problems start occurring when you offer religious organisations tax breaks, exemptions from laws applied to other organisations, and so forth.
As I mentioned in a post above, if you think their opinions on sharing are ridiculous, then it makes an excellent statement on the problems with allowing religion to be a protected class. Religion is something that a group of people happen to believe - you can't give special treatment to certain types of belief without discriminating against those who do not subscribe to those particular types.
Even if you think their opinions are ridiculous (and I agree that they go a bit far, but to be honest crazy extremes on our side of the argument help to counter the crazy extremes on the other), it makes an equally good statement on the absurdity of giving religions (which, pretty much by definition, consist of the collective beliefs of a bunch of people) protected status. I'd challenge anyone to come up with a generic legal definition that encompasses major and minor world religions, without showing favouritism, but still excludes these guys.
I think you've missed the point. It's not to say that their overall profitability is that high, but that the margin on the physical product alone is, meaning that manufacturing efficiency and actual product improvement (something that many people would consider to have value) are largely unimportant to them, whereas improved marketing is everything. Which goes back to the article's point that all we'll be left with when the current bubble bursts is the ability to market really really well.
Honestly I'm not sure I agree, but your conjecture that they spend a lot on marketing, promos, sponsorships and so forth actually reinforces that point - it certainly doesn't refute what the GP post was saying.
While you may be right about the psychological issues, they are overlaid by more distinctly practical ones. I can start a moderately large website with nothing but good ideas and $100 worth of hosting; a musical prodigy (or a tone-deaf teenager) can be heard by millions of people simply with a webcam, a mic, and a YouTube account.
If I have a brilliant manufacturing idea I have little choice other than to lay down thousands on machinery and materials, and since I don't have said thousands lying around, that means I need investment, which means aversion to risk, which means killing many of the radical ideas that might really be something special. It's not always the case, and rapid prototyping/on-demand manufacturing is helping, but there are still orders of magnitude between the start-up costs of an 'information' business compared to a physical one (assuming that you've got the skills in the field yourself, rather than needing to buy them in from outside).
It's why we're seeing billionaires coming from nowhere in the tech field - near-zero barrier to entry means the market decides (for better or worse) fairly directly on the products that survive. In manufacturing, the gatekeepers with the capital have their say long before the consumer does.
One of the reasons this will probably work well is that Facebook has the advantage of not being in the data centre business per se. They use data centres, sure, but they don't sell them, which means they have nothing to fear from competitors copying their good ideas. Major hosting companies would quite likely be more reluctant to say "here's our great new idea, any ideas on how to improve it?", because they have much more to lose if someone comes along, works out an improvement, and then implements it for themselves rather than passing it back to the community.
Well I can only reasonably comment on the quality of a system with which I am personally familiar. That said, if it's working in one country with a (very broadly) similar culture and economy to the US, there's a fair chance that it could be implemented well in the states as well. It doesn't matter how many countries have managed to screw it up: it can be done (more or less) right, and that's what matters.
I agree with you, but in general there is the question of whether or not it should be legal for large companies to require 'abusive' contracts; "just turn down the job" is a luxury people may not have. The 'slippery slope' conclusion is that everyone starts requiring them, meaning that you either have to remain in your job however crappy it becomes or you're unemployable in any industry using your skill set, at least for 'x' months, and you end up flipping burgers. Realistically, though, non-competes are generally the domain of high level executives who have plenty of other options and, more than likely, enough cash to take time off if they feel the need. As long as it stays that way, I see no problem.
There's more to the matter than immediate audio quality - lossy formats are always a poor choice for archival, since the loss is magnified (and the achievable compression is often reduced) when moving from one to another. Maybe MP3 is stable enough that we needn't worry about that, but I'm not sure I'd bet on it. Once you've got a FLAC file, you can produce any subsequent format from it without any concern about conversion losses. It's the same reason that archiving photos as JPEGs is a bad idea, even if they're high enough quality to appear perfect in normal viewing - once you've lost the data, you can't get it back, and it might turn out that there are interesting and unexpected things to be done with those RAW files further down the line.
Having had more experience than I would like with the UK's health system, I can say that the average standard of care is pretty good. Not amazing, but perfectly sufficient to make people healthy and keep them relatively comfortable while doing so. While I am generally mistrustful of the government, I honestly can't see how siphoning public money via private, for-profit healthcare companies could possibly lead to a better value service than administrating the healthcare directly. Not to mention the fact that, in the UK, if you aren't happy with the NHS (which costs less per capita in taxes than the US system), you can always pay for American-style private healthcare at your own expense - difference is, that's an option here (and, IMO, an unnecessary one) whereas it's a requirement in the US.
Aside from the fact that (as others have mentioned) it's good for households with multiple heavy users, there's also a chicken and egg problem here; legal download services to make use of this speed won't come along until the speed is already available, whereas the response of the illegal market is near-instant. Back when everyone was on dial-up, you could've said that 512Kbit/s DSL would encourage more people to use Napster, and maybe it did, but it also made services like the iTunes store viable; the move from 512Kb/s to 10Mb/s might have encouraged more torrenting of large files, but it also made Netflix viable in the first place; so it goes on, and this move may well make it easier to download Blu-Ray rips, but it'll also make Steam installs a lot more painless, as well as smoothing out the bumps in Dropbox-style cloud data storage. I'd bet it'll push forward some services we haven't even thought of yet, too - technology has a habit of doing that.
Slashdot Mirror
Agreed. To further the cause of 'not flaming about units', I put an entirely unrelated question to the currently assembled geekery: how would you go about building one of these on, say, half the budget? Can it be done? (Anyone answering "Why bother? Just buy 'x' and be done with it." have missed the point and will be required to sit in the corner and think about what they've done).
A moderately effective stopgap, perhaps, but having to nuke all your phone data because you were pulled over for something that may or may not have been a traffic violation is hardly an acceptable state of affairs.
Apologies for the double reply, but a more succinct way of stating my case has come to mind; I think you might even agree with me! Just go through the laws, find any explicit mention of "religious groups", and replace with something like "non-profit community groups". Everyone's protected equally, faith and non-faith alike.
Looks like I may have misused the word 'secular', and for that I apologise - I'd evidently been misled by common usage.
I find it rather unfair that you seem to have disregarded my final paragraph, though. Do you really not see the difference between a teacher with a belief, and a teacher teaching a belief, or of a school set up by a group of people with a particular belief compared to a school set up to teach the principles of that belief (to the necessary exclusion of other beliefs)? I wouldn't want an 'atheist faith school' set up any more than I want to see any other, I want schools to give as even and neutral an education as possible, rather than be set up to push any agenda, even one I agree with. Most of the time, belief shouldn't come up at all; when it does, each belief system, and none, should get equal weight, that's all I ask. Of course I don't want to prevent religious groups from setting up schools, and I don't want to shut down the ones that exist, I just want them to operate under exactly the same rules regarding curriculum, pupil intake, and so forth as any other community group - I'm asking for simple equality here, not the pro-atheist campaign you seem to have pinned on me. The concept of faith schools, and, more specifically, of "a Christian school" or "a Muslim school" is very different to "a school run by Muslims" or "a school run by Christians" - we obviously differ widely in our opinions, but do you not see how the former gives the faith groups special status compared to non-faith groups, when all I ask is that they be placed under a single 'community group' heading?
Hereditary peers are a bad idea in my opinion, so are spiritual ones. The existence of one doesn't negate the problem of the other. And, for the fourth time, I don't want to explicitly exclude religious groups. I want to include them on the same footing as non-religious community groups. That's all. If they want to automatically appoint people from as a representative sample of the community then that's fine by me (at least in this context), and I wouldn't much care what religion they happened to be, because of course religious people are part of our community. I really don't see how you got from my statement of "All I ask is that religions be held to precisely the same standard as any other community organisation, no more, no less." to your suggestion that "...ensuring parts of the community have a voice seems far more important than what you'd like to do: ensure parts of the community do not have a voice.". Incidentally, I'm all for your idea of populating the Lords by random appointment - sounds like a bloody good plan to me!
Not to mention that the majority of people wanting to read the paper itself (rather than the abstract and BBC summary) are likely to have institutional access anyway.
The precise nature of the legal protections for religion varies, of course, so anything either of us says on that front is going to be local. In the UK, a country far more secular than the US, religions have special status within the education system compared to other non-profit community organisations, and some church leaders receive a measure of automatic political power. That goes far, far beyond freedom of speech and belief, and well into government sponsorship of religion, in my opinion.
You're absolutely correct about people being able to say and believe what they like, and that we have no right to 'freedom from speech'; I actually made a clarification to my original post to that effect.
I strongly disagree with your last paragraph, though. All I ask is that religions be held to precisely the same standard as any other community organisation, no more, no less. People's right to religious belief should be protected as much as their right to political belief; again no more, no less. As for removing a person from his job just because of his religion, I'd be absolutely furious if that happened - just because I strongly disagree with someone's belief, doesn't mean I'm so short sighted as to ignore the importance of protecting freedom for everybody. If his religion happened to be interfering with his ability to teach science effectively then that's a quite different matter, and again I'd apply the simple test of "would it be acceptable for non-religious reasons?"; if he's telling people that God holds molecules together with tiny strands of angel hair, or if he's telling them that the four humours explain all of medical science, he should be fired for incompetence. That's not a matter of belief, though, that's a matter of letting one's belief interfere with the satisfactory performance of one's job.
You're absolutely right, they don't do a particularly good job of promoting copyright reform or bringing the laws regarding religion into question, but I don't think they're an embarrassment to either cause. I'm happy enough for more voices on the side of the issues that I happen to agree with, whether or not they're doing it in the best possible manner.
Just to clarify, in case anyone gets the wrong end of the stick: I'm of the firm opinion that everyone should be able to say and believe absolutely what the hell they like, and those rights should be protected indiscriminately for all, but the problems start occurring when you offer religious organisations tax breaks, exemptions from laws applied to other organisations, and so forth.
Just to clarify, in case anyone gets the wrong end of the stick: I'm of the firm opinion that everyone should be able to say and believe absolutely what the hell they like, and those rights should be protected indiscriminately for all, but the problems start occurring when you offer religious organisations tax breaks, exemptions from laws applied to other organisations, and so forth.
Their intent may or may not have been greed, but the fact remains that their point does raise the questions I suggested, intentionally or otherwise.
As I mentioned in a post above, if you think their opinions on sharing are ridiculous, then it makes an excellent statement on the problems with allowing religion to be a protected class. Religion is something that a group of people happen to believe - you can't give special treatment to certain types of belief without discriminating against those who do not subscribe to those particular types.
Even if you think their opinions are ridiculous (and I agree that they go a bit far, but to be honest crazy extremes on our side of the argument help to counter the crazy extremes on the other), it makes an equally good statement on the absurdity of giving religions (which, pretty much by definition, consist of the collective beliefs of a bunch of people) protected status. I'd challenge anyone to come up with a generic legal definition that encompasses major and minor world religions, without showing favouritism, but still excludes these guys.
I know I'M certainly not smart enough to understand its intracacies at any rate.
None of us are, I'm sure. Which is probably why the people paid to analyse it get a hit rate worse than random chance...
I think you've missed the point. It's not to say that their overall profitability is that high, but that the margin on the physical product alone is, meaning that manufacturing efficiency and actual product improvement (something that many people would consider to have value) are largely unimportant to them, whereas improved marketing is everything. Which goes back to the article's point that all we'll be left with when the current bubble bursts is the ability to market really really well.
Honestly I'm not sure I agree, but your conjecture that they spend a lot on marketing, promos, sponsorships and so forth actually reinforces that point - it certainly doesn't refute what the GP post was saying.
While you may be right about the psychological issues, they are overlaid by more distinctly practical ones. I can start a moderately large website with nothing but good ideas and $100 worth of hosting; a musical prodigy (or a tone-deaf teenager) can be heard by millions of people simply with a webcam, a mic, and a YouTube account.
If I have a brilliant manufacturing idea I have little choice other than to lay down thousands on machinery and materials, and since I don't have said thousands lying around, that means I need investment, which means aversion to risk, which means killing many of the radical ideas that might really be something special. It's not always the case, and rapid prototyping/on-demand manufacturing is helping, but there are still orders of magnitude between the start-up costs of an 'information' business compared to a physical one (assuming that you've got the skills in the field yourself, rather than needing to buy them in from outside).
It's why we're seeing billionaires coming from nowhere in the tech field - near-zero barrier to entry means the market decides (for better or worse) fairly directly on the products that survive. In manufacturing, the gatekeepers with the capital have their say long before the consumer does.
One of the reasons this will probably work well is that Facebook has the advantage of not being in the data centre business per se. They use data centres, sure, but they don't sell them, which means they have nothing to fear from competitors copying their good ideas. Major hosting companies would quite likely be more reluctant to say "here's our great new idea, any ideas on how to improve it?", because they have much more to lose if someone comes along, works out an improvement, and then implements it for themselves rather than passing it back to the community.
Here.
Well I can only reasonably comment on the quality of a system with which I am personally familiar. That said, if it's working in one country with a (very broadly) similar culture and economy to the US, there's a fair chance that it could be implemented well in the states as well. It doesn't matter how many countries have managed to screw it up: it can be done (more or less) right, and that's what matters.
I agree with you, but in general there is the question of whether or not it should be legal for large companies to require 'abusive' contracts; "just turn down the job" is a luxury people may not have. The 'slippery slope' conclusion is that everyone starts requiring them, meaning that you either have to remain in your job however crappy it becomes or you're unemployable in any industry using your skill set, at least for 'x' months, and you end up flipping burgers. Realistically, though, non-competes are generally the domain of high level executives who have plenty of other options and, more than likely, enough cash to take time off if they feel the need. As long as it stays that way, I see no problem.
There's more to the matter than immediate audio quality - lossy formats are always a poor choice for archival, since the loss is magnified (and the achievable compression is often reduced) when moving from one to another. Maybe MP3 is stable enough that we needn't worry about that, but I'm not sure I'd bet on it. Once you've got a FLAC file, you can produce any subsequent format from it without any concern about conversion losses. It's the same reason that archiving photos as JPEGs is a bad idea, even if they're high enough quality to appear perfect in normal viewing - once you've lost the data, you can't get it back, and it might turn out that there are interesting and unexpected things to be done with those RAW files further down the line.
A true geek finds a workaround!
Having had more experience than I would like with the UK's health system, I can say that the average standard of care is pretty good. Not amazing, but perfectly sufficient to make people healthy and keep them relatively comfortable while doing so. While I am generally mistrustful of the government, I honestly can't see how siphoning public money via private, for-profit healthcare companies could possibly lead to a better value service than administrating the healthcare directly. Not to mention the fact that, in the UK, if you aren't happy with the NHS (which costs less per capita in taxes than the US system), you can always pay for American-style private healthcare at your own expense - difference is, that's an option here (and, IMO, an unnecessary one) whereas it's a requirement in the US.
Well played. That's one of the best analogies I've seen in a while.
Aside from the fact that (as others have mentioned) it's good for households with multiple heavy users, there's also a chicken and egg problem here; legal download services to make use of this speed won't come along until the speed is already available, whereas the response of the illegal market is near-instant. Back when everyone was on dial-up, you could've said that 512Kbit/s DSL would encourage more people to use Napster, and maybe it did, but it also made services like the iTunes store viable; the move from 512Kb/s to 10Mb/s might have encouraged more torrenting of large files, but it also made Netflix viable in the first place; so it goes on, and this move may well make it easier to download Blu-Ray rips, but it'll also make Steam installs a lot more painless, as well as smoothing out the bumps in Dropbox-style cloud data storage. I'd bet it'll push forward some services we haven't even thought of yet, too - technology has a habit of doing that.
Screw that, we'll just put it on the credit card.