I would have suggested it's more due to their requirement for eBay auctions and their lack of monthly fee for credit card processing. I live(d) in the UK, where interbank transfers are free (and, recently, have been upgraded so that most clear within a few hours) yet all eBay sales and purchases that I make, as well as payments to some smaller companies, require PayPal. I know they suck, and I always transfer money out within 24 hours, but there is definitely a level of lock-in. Using Google checkout exclusively (the only similar service I've noticed in the UK) would automatically preclude eBay sales, and that's a very lucrative market to drop; when I was selling computers in quantity, I considered it worth the risk. For now PayPal are a necessary evil for many, and I don't see that changing unless eBay are forced to drop the requirement for sellers to accept them.
Interesting link - I'm taking a look at some of their free library now, and if they turn out to be halfway readable I'll certainly throw a few dollars their way.
For the moment, though, I'm just hoping that their writing is better than their web design...
You also need compatibility with the particular DRM scheme attached to those library EPUBs, but it is fairly widely supported (and one of the main things that swayed me to the nook rather than the kindle). Loaned books, especially free ones, strike me as one of the few valid uses of DRM I've seen. I haven't actually found an online library that lends them out yet, so the scheme might be limited (rather anachronistically) to bricks-and-mortar libraries that one is a member of (if so, does anyone have a convenient list of participants?).
In any case, more competition (and continued support for some kind of standards, DRM notwithstanding) is always a good thing. The Sony devices seem a bit overpriced to me, but then the full touchscreen might be a killer feature for some.
I more or less agree with your first two paragraphs (except your referring to 'all muslims' rather than 'a vocal minority of muslims' going apeshit), but I can't get my head around the whole 'ground zero mosque' issue. I'd be interested to hear a bit more of your opinion on it, actually.
I'm the last person to suggest giving any special rights to religious groups, but as I see it a few people are thinking of putting in a building with a restaurant, a prayer room, a gym, and a few other bits and pieces (I honestly don't know what the precise necessities are to define it as a mosque). They want to put it a few blocks over from ground zero, in a building that does not in any way resemble a traditional mosque architecturally. New York is densely populated, people need space to go about their business, it seems like a reasonable enough proposal to me.
Having said that... 80mph, 150mph. How much time are you really saving? I mean, how often do you do Berlin to Frankfurt, and wouldn't you rather use an ICE instead? At least you get to relax and do something other than stare at motorway.
Fair point, but then a lot of the comparisons are actually being made to the US - relatively low speed limits, very large distances and no high-speed rail network to speak of.
The article mentions exactly that - they say that the modern computer driven machines don't produce lace of the same quality.
I don't doubt that we could build modern machines to emulate the Victorian ones perfectly, but it's quite possibly cheaper to just keep the old ones going for such a niche product, especially when the current computer-driven machines apparently make lace 'good enough' for most purposes.
My bad, that sentence should've contained "in my opinion" somewhere. I thought the 'public good' argument was somewhat implicit from the end of the post, but I guess I was unclear.
I entirely agree with you that the authors' wishes are generally irrelevant (except to the extent that those wishes impact the creation of future works). My opinion pretty much mirrors yours, I just happen to be of the opinion that 15-20 years, as it was originally, would serve the public good fairly well.
Being paid for your own work over a period of about 15-20 years, with reasonable allowance for other work inspired by it, is a completely fair expectation.
Keeping your grandparent's work under lock and key almost a century after it was created, however, is asshattery of the highest order and does nothing for the public good, nor does it encourage new work.
Absolutely - there would definitely be drawbacks, and it'd be necessary to export something that isn't drawn from the site (skills/services/electrical power) in order to fund the importation of general supplies.
That second article is excellent - it's good that the professor has found a way to make a stand without hurting the students; they're stuck with the system, and giving a relatively low grade in a system where high grades are the norm does hurt them, even if it is just the sign of a potentially broken setup.
The one thing I would wonder about, though, is the comment about comparing grades between universities, not just within a university - as the article says, most Harvard students would easily be getting As at state universities. Should a Harvard C be worth a mediocre university A, or should Harvard continue to give most students As because they are, in fact, doing better than most students in the country?
I've often thought it's a shame that it's so difficult for a group to set up their own country, actually. I can see that it's considered safer for the established nations to just say no, but it does strike me as odd how little the issue is even considered.
Buy a big hunk of land that near enough nobody's living on, maybe in Texas or Australia, sign a few treaties promising not to harbour North Korean missiles or anything like that, maybe add a good-faith clause to further compensate the original land owning nation with a cut of taxes for a decade or two, and you've got somewhere to found your state. All the (exceedingly complicated) issues of governance, taxation and so on are down to whatever consortium is running the whole setup.
Like I said, though, the current land-owning countries would never allow it, however good a case could be put forward.
This really doesn't surprise me - AT&T are already putting some pretty insane restrictions on their mobile data pricing. Apparently they charge an extra $20/month (over and above the actual data charge) for the privilege of using your 2GB data allowance through your phone or laptop rather than just your phone. I'm guessing it's pretty easy to work around, but seriously, WTF? It's the exact same data allowance in either case, so what possible justification is there for the vast price difference?
Perhaps, but then maybe the Authors Guild learned the meaning of the Streisand effect from going up against Amazon, and they're a bit more hesitant this time around. They may have 'won', but was the bad publicity worth it?
It's quite conceivable (although demonstrative of naivety on the Guild's part) that they thought nobody would care about a corporate dispute over copyright interpretation, or even that they were absolutely in the right and most people would side with them. Seeing the backlash from sites like this could have cautioned them against making the same mistake twice.
I was thinking the exact same thing - it's not like we're feeding it all into a fusion plant and leaving none for later generations, they just might have to expend the energy to recapture and re-purify it.
A reasonable appraisal - I assume you were suggesting that Occam's razor points to #5, but out of interest, how do you think the subsequent withdrawal of the charges affects the landscape?
Overselling is a necessity if we want sensible prices - I won't reiterate the whole argument here, but Dreamhost explained it pretty well.
What should be banned is the rampant false advertising that we see now. If my household is using the 50Mbps connection to download around 200GB/month then we want an oversold connection - no point in paying for the tens of terabytes more that we're not using. The ISPs, however, should be required to state clearly what the limitations of the connections are - if they're selling 'unlimited' then I sure as hell want unlimited, however impractical that may be on the prices they're charging.
Beyond that, sensible limits (two standard deviations from the mean, perhaps?), reasonable per GB charges or voluntary throttling or cutoff over the monthly limit, and a rolling three month average to calculate whether or not you've gone past your allocation would all be beneficial for both the customers and for the ISPs reputation.
Ah well. We can dream. Or try to get investment to set up our own ISP, with blackjack and hookers.
I think the GP's point was that there clearly can't be any errors, because even a single bit would be very noticeable, thus the signal coming out of all the cables is identical and any claims of 'subtle differences' are bullshit.
Various revisions of CSS and Javascript, as well as HTML5 in the newest browsers.
Although I'm ambivalent about the whole 'browser as a surrogate OS' direction that we seem to be taking, there are a few web apps that I consider essential to my day-to-day use (Google maps is perhaps the best example). You just couldn't have achieved that kind of responsive interface with older tech.
Sure, notation is abstract and can be changed, but it's still standardised for a reason. If I started using the word 'chicken' to describe that four wheeled thing you drive to work in, it'd take you a while to understand what I was on about, and you might draw some erroneous conclusions in the mean time. In general, brackets serve to contain elements of the equation and signify the order in they are treated - empty brackets should therefore logically denote zero. Sure, it's trivial for us to realise that the notation was non-standard and they were intended to signify a variable, but that's because most of us here have been dealing with simple algebra for decades.
Nobody's making you work for the companies advertising through the Mechanical Turk service. The job description and rate of pay are clearly provided up front. Either you consider it worth your time or you don't do it - seems fair to me.
I've had much the same experience. Sure, there were bad teachers in all subjects, but in general they at least knew their field much better than their pupils, and there were also some very good teachers in most areas - the same couldn't be said for ICT (as it was called in school). When the top 20% or so of a class of 15 year olds know significantly more about the subject than their teacher, something is seriously wrong. If the teachers don't understand the fundamentals then there's no chance of them being able to teach the good stuff. I certainly wouldn't want to learn calculus from someone who could barely handle multiplication.
Maybe it's improved in the (few) years since I left, but I don't hold out that much hope. The worst thing was that one of my old IT teachers was quite literally one of the least intelligent people I've ever met - not only was he entirely incompetent at his job, he could barely hold a useful conversation; I can't possibly imagine that he would've got a job teaching anything else, simply because there would always be someone better to fill his place. I understand that there are many jobs in IT that seem more attractive than teaching, but surely that goes for maths, or chemistry, or whatever, too. Those subjects aren't left with the absolute dregs, so why is it accepted in IT?
But why bother taking the time and effort to structure a PowerPoint like that when handwriting provides an appropriate pace by itself?
If you really need to make the exact lecture material downloadable (rather than just adding references to supporting sections of the textbook or course notes), do the handwriting on a tablet and make the files available afterwards.
Slashdot Mirror
I would have suggested it's more due to their requirement for eBay auctions and their lack of monthly fee for credit card processing. I live(d) in the UK, where interbank transfers are free (and, recently, have been upgraded so that most clear within a few hours) yet all eBay sales and purchases that I make, as well as payments to some smaller companies, require PayPal. I know they suck, and I always transfer money out within 24 hours, but there is definitely a level of lock-in. Using Google checkout exclusively (the only similar service I've noticed in the UK) would automatically preclude eBay sales, and that's a very lucrative market to drop; when I was selling computers in quantity, I considered it worth the risk. For now PayPal are a necessary evil for many, and I don't see that changing unless eBay are forced to drop the requirement for sellers to accept them.
Interesting link - I'm taking a look at some of their free library now, and if they turn out to be halfway readable I'll certainly throw a few dollars their way.
For the moment, though, I'm just hoping that their writing is better than their web design...
You also need compatibility with the particular DRM scheme attached to those library EPUBs, but it is fairly widely supported (and one of the main things that swayed me to the nook rather than the kindle). Loaned books, especially free ones, strike me as one of the few valid uses of DRM I've seen. I haven't actually found an online library that lends them out yet, so the scheme might be limited (rather anachronistically) to bricks-and-mortar libraries that one is a member of (if so, does anyone have a convenient list of participants?).
In any case, more competition (and continued support for some kind of standards, DRM notwithstanding) is always a good thing. The Sony devices seem a bit overpriced to me, but then the full touchscreen might be a killer feature for some.
I more or less agree with your first two paragraphs (except your referring to 'all muslims' rather than 'a vocal minority of muslims' going apeshit), but I can't get my head around the whole 'ground zero mosque' issue. I'd be interested to hear a bit more of your opinion on it, actually.
I'm the last person to suggest giving any special rights to religious groups, but as I see it a few people are thinking of putting in a building with a restaurant, a prayer room, a gym, and a few other bits and pieces (I honestly don't know what the precise necessities are to define it as a mosque). They want to put it a few blocks over from ground zero, in a building that does not in any way resemble a traditional mosque architecturally. New York is densely populated, people need space to go about their business, it seems like a reasonable enough proposal to me.
Having said that... 80mph, 150mph. How much time are you really saving? I mean, how often do you do Berlin to Frankfurt, and wouldn't you rather use an ICE instead? At least you get to relax and do something other than stare at motorway.
Fair point, but then a lot of the comparisons are actually being made to the US - relatively low speed limits, very large distances and no high-speed rail network to speak of.
The article mentions exactly that - they say that the modern computer driven machines don't produce lace of the same quality.
I don't doubt that we could build modern machines to emulate the Victorian ones perfectly, but it's quite possibly cheaper to just keep the old ones going for such a niche product, especially when the current computer-driven machines apparently make lace 'good enough' for most purposes.
My bad, that sentence should've contained "in my opinion" somewhere. I thought the 'public good' argument was somewhat implicit from the end of the post, but I guess I was unclear.
I entirely agree with you that the authors' wishes are generally irrelevant (except to the extent that those wishes impact the creation of future works). My opinion pretty much mirrors yours, I just happen to be of the opinion that 15-20 years, as it was originally, would serve the public good fairly well.
Being paid for your own work over a period of about 15-20 years, with reasonable allowance for other work inspired by it, is a completely fair expectation.
Keeping your grandparent's work under lock and key almost a century after it was created, however, is asshattery of the highest order and does nothing for the public good, nor does it encourage new work.
Absolutely - there would definitely be drawbacks, and it'd be necessary to export something that isn't drawn from the site (skills/services/electrical power) in order to fund the importation of general supplies.
That second article is excellent - it's good that the professor has found a way to make a stand without hurting the students; they're stuck with the system, and giving a relatively low grade in a system where high grades are the norm does hurt them, even if it is just the sign of a potentially broken setup.
The one thing I would wonder about, though, is the comment about comparing grades between universities, not just within a university - as the article says, most Harvard students would easily be getting As at state universities. Should a Harvard C be worth a mediocre university A, or should Harvard continue to give most students As because they are, in fact, doing better than most students in the country?
I've often thought it's a shame that it's so difficult for a group to set up their own country, actually. I can see that it's considered safer for the established nations to just say no, but it does strike me as odd how little the issue is even considered.
Buy a big hunk of land that near enough nobody's living on, maybe in Texas or Australia, sign a few treaties promising not to harbour North Korean missiles or anything like that, maybe add a good-faith clause to further compensate the original land owning nation with a cut of taxes for a decade or two, and you've got somewhere to found your state. All the (exceedingly complicated) issues of governance, taxation and so on are down to whatever consortium is running the whole setup.
Like I said, though, the current land-owning countries would never allow it, however good a case could be put forward.
This really doesn't surprise me - AT&T are already putting some pretty insane restrictions on their mobile data pricing. Apparently they charge an extra $20/month (over and above the actual data charge) for the privilege of using your 2GB data allowance through your phone or laptop rather than just your phone. I'm guessing it's pretty easy to work around, but seriously, WTF? It's the exact same data allowance in either case, so what possible justification is there for the vast price difference?
Where's that '-1: WTF' mod when I need it.
Perhaps, but then maybe the Authors Guild learned the meaning of the Streisand effect from going up against Amazon, and they're a bit more hesitant this time around. They may have 'won', but was the bad publicity worth it?
It's quite conceivable (although demonstrative of naivety on the Guild's part) that they thought nobody would care about a corporate dispute over copyright interpretation, or even that they were absolutely in the right and most people would side with them. Seeing the backlash from sites like this could have cautioned them against making the same mistake twice.
I was thinking the exact same thing - it's not like we're feeding it all into a fusion plant and leaving none for later generations, they just might have to expend the energy to recapture and re-purify it.
A reasonable appraisal - I assume you were suggesting that Occam's razor points to #5, but out of interest, how do you think the subsequent withdrawal of the charges affects the landscape?
I didn't think Reiser had any enemies with a motive for framing him, though?
Overselling is a necessity if we want sensible prices - I won't reiterate the whole argument here, but Dreamhost explained it pretty well.
What should be banned is the rampant false advertising that we see now. If my household is using the 50Mbps connection to download around 200GB/month then we want an oversold connection - no point in paying for the tens of terabytes more that we're not using. The ISPs, however, should be required to state clearly what the limitations of the connections are - if they're selling 'unlimited' then I sure as hell want unlimited, however impractical that may be on the prices they're charging.
Beyond that, sensible limits (two standard deviations from the mean, perhaps?), reasonable per GB charges or voluntary throttling or cutoff over the monthly limit, and a rolling three month average to calculate whether or not you've gone past your allocation would all be beneficial for both the customers and for the ISPs reputation.
Ah well. We can dream. Or try to get investment to set up our own ISP, with blackjack and hookers.
I think the GP's point was that there clearly can't be any errors, because even a single bit would be very noticeable, thus the signal coming out of all the cables is identical and any claims of 'subtle differences' are bullshit.
Various revisions of CSS and Javascript, as well as HTML5 in the newest browsers.
Although I'm ambivalent about the whole 'browser as a surrogate OS' direction that we seem to be taking, there are a few web apps that I consider essential to my day-to-day use (Google maps is perhaps the best example). You just couldn't have achieved that kind of responsive interface with older tech.
Sure, notation is abstract and can be changed, but it's still standardised for a reason. If I started using the word 'chicken' to describe that four wheeled thing you drive to work in, it'd take you a while to understand what I was on about, and you might draw some erroneous conclusions in the mean time. In general, brackets serve to contain elements of the equation and signify the order in they are treated - empty brackets should therefore logically denote zero. Sure, it's trivial for us to realise that the notation was non-standard and they were intended to signify a variable, but that's because most of us here have been dealing with simple algebra for decades.
Nobody's making you work for the companies advertising through the Mechanical Turk service. The job description and rate of pay are clearly provided up front. Either you consider it worth your time or you don't do it - seems fair to me.
Why use TrueCrypt with OS X when you can do the same thing with built-in Disk Utility?
Cross platform compatibility, source code which can be inspected, and a choice of ciphers and other security options.
I've had much the same experience. Sure, there were bad teachers in all subjects, but in general they at least knew their field much better than their pupils, and there were also some very good teachers in most areas - the same couldn't be said for ICT (as it was called in school). When the top 20% or so of a class of 15 year olds know significantly more about the subject than their teacher, something is seriously wrong. If the teachers don't understand the fundamentals then there's no chance of them being able to teach the good stuff. I certainly wouldn't want to learn calculus from someone who could barely handle multiplication.
Maybe it's improved in the (few) years since I left, but I don't hold out that much hope. The worst thing was that one of my old IT teachers was quite literally one of the least intelligent people I've ever met - not only was he entirely incompetent at his job, he could barely hold a useful conversation; I can't possibly imagine that he would've got a job teaching anything else, simply because there would always be someone better to fill his place. I understand that there are many jobs in IT that seem more attractive than teaching, but surely that goes for maths, or chemistry, or whatever, too. Those subjects aren't left with the absolute dregs, so why is it accepted in IT?
But why bother taking the time and effort to structure a PowerPoint like that when handwriting provides an appropriate pace by itself?
If you really need to make the exact lecture material downloadable (rather than just adding references to supporting sections of the textbook or course notes), do the handwriting on a tablet and make the files available afterwards.