Lots of people gave Vista a bad rep because -- get this -- they didn't know how to use their damned computers!
Sorry dude. That never works as an excuse when some Linux interface baffles the average user, so I don't see why it should let Microsoft off the hook here.
Besides which, these same people knew how to use XP just fine by and large, so you're not talking about naive users baffled by computers in general. The complainers, on the whole tended to be seasoned Windows users who didn't get on with the new O/S. That's got to be a black mark, however you look at it.
It wouldn't be so bad, but (in technical terms, at least), user interfaces are what Microsoft do well. I don't have a good word to say about MS on the whole, but aside from two or three glaring exceptions, they do seem to have a knack for making things accessible to the less technical end of the user spectrum. So when someone tells me that if they couldn't even get that part right, I have to wonder what horrors lurk elsewhere.
I think they can afford it. MS still has a monopoly on providing OSes for home and buisness users, and even a fail like Vista did not make a dent into that monopoly. Another fail might, but I'm not so sure.
Mmmm... I don't think they're quite as bulletproof as you suggest. The thing that's been preserving MS' monopoly, post-Vista, is the fact that XP users have been refusing to upgrade. As any MS apologist, and they'll tell you that Vista's biggest competitor is XP.
But they're not going to offer XP forever. And at that point in time, a bad release on the scale of Vista or WinME could prove catastrophic.
Also, I don't think it's quite true to say Vista didn't dent the MS monopoly. They've been losing market share lately. Not by a lot, and mainly to Apple, but they've been shedding users. With Macs currently enjoying the cool factor, and with some Linux distros getting increasingly accessible to the non-geek user, another big fail could accelerate that trend considerably.
Well, except that in this case, the extra features are just features which allow people to share files with their peers more easily. This is of use to pirates, but could be of use to others too. I know that I make my own music files and video files and like to be able to share them with the world. So, it's more like building a car with fast braking and acceleration and doors which are easy to open and close. Sure, those are all useful to bank robbers, but they're nice features for non-bank robbers too.
Mind, for that to really work, we'd need to live in a world where something like 99.9% of all fast car journeys are used to rob banks, and the remaining 1% were used by people who wanted to get their shopping in a hurry.
Now, for some of the cases we've seen, like the Grokster case, you ad copy example is right on. Clearly Grokster went out of their way to promote the idea that their product could be used for piracy and this is why the courts ruled against them
I thought I read somewhere that this had been advertised as a piracy tool. That said, I can't find anything to back that up now I come to look, so I may have had my wires crossed.
Don't get me wrong, I don't think its a good idea to outlaw filesharing software. It won't work, for one thing, and its likely to be the thin edge of a rather nasty wedge if it does happen. I just wasn't entirely convinced by the metaphor.
To use a metaphor, if some particular car brand became a favorite of bank robbers, it would be ridiculous to go after the makers of that car.
I think I'll play Devil's Advocate: Suppose someone made a car with bulletproof bodywork, a battering ram, and forward-mounted oxy-acetylene cutting torches. And then marketed it at people who "wanted to make some out-of-hours withdrawals from their local bank". Sure, you could use it to get the weekly shopping in, but you'd have a hard time arguing that such was the intention behind the vehicle.
That would seem to be closer to the mark in this case.
When did an open-source Java become useable: before or after Microsoft came with open-source C#?
Well, a published standard and a half-hearted covenant not to sue isn't really equivalent in my book to releasing the source code under an OSI approved licence, which I don't believe they've done as yet. And Mono doesn't really count, not being Microsoft's code to release. Unless you know something about Miguel that the rest of us don't.
So, I guess that would make it "after". If at all.
Hold down the "alt" key and you can scroll to the button.
I think that's the problem in a nutshell, really.
It's not so much that you need kludgey workarounds like that to workaround stubborn interface bugs - you get that in Windows, too. The big difference is that in Windows the kludgey workarounds have become so well known that they're pretty much part of everyday usage, and almost everyone knows about them. (The extreme example is control-alt-delete).
If so, a large part of the problem should go away as the userbase gets larger and the workaround set passes into wider awareness.
Almost certainly not. The sales price will be whatever the seller thinks the market will bear. I suppose
you could market a game as "this software is half price, because when it installs we rootkit your computer",
but I don't think anyone's been insane enough to try that.
The trouble is that if the DRM isn't part of the advertised "feature" set, then the vendor is most likely
hoping no-one will notice the DRM (probably the wisest strategy if you do indeed use it), which means there's no
reason to lower the price.
How much extra would you pay to regain those privledges?
It seems as though a lot of people choose to regain those rights by installing cracks. I guess that makes the market rate fairly close to zero.
From the viewpoint of the student, it seems to me to be a uniformly bad deal.
Yes, practical knowledge that will actually help you get a job after you graduate is clearly a bad deal!
Well, of course. If you're not teaching the specifics of MS Visual Studio 2009, then all you can possibly do is spend all day discussing
how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. I mean, it's not like there's a middle ground or anything, is it?
first: there is no time - education doesn't pay the bills, jobs do
I'm not suggesting that we shouldn't produce graduates with the necessary knowledge to get a job in industry. I'm just saying that it is entirely possible to
achieve this without concentrating almost entirely on vendor specific software packages.
I am also suggesting that it's somewhat unwise to let industry dictate the packages we teach at university, since the demands of the private sector have more to do with
keeping their competition at bay then they do with producing good software engineers.
second: innovation is, as oddly as it may seem, speeding up
That doesn't seem odd at all. I've heard it said that there are more researchers alive today than in all of history put together. Added to that we have
communications frameworks that could only have been dreamt of 50 years ago. If innovation was not speeding up, I would be horrified.#
However, I think you have some work to do to demonstrate that this speed up is due to universities increasingly teaching their courses entirely in terms of Microsoft This, and Cisco That. I would say that this is occurring despite this trend.
third: finally, it's the alumn obligation to look up for extentions and new toolsets if one feels that his/hers education was driven towards something not so useful or is becoming obsolete
Which still doesn't make it a good idea to teach fragile skillsets that depend upon packages that maybe obsolete in the near future.
I understand that with the new ground-level knowledge available, one would require at least 10 years studying solo just to get a larger glimpse of how things got to where they are.
Right. I'm not proposing that we start with the theory of agriculture and Iron Ore smelting, and work up to electricity, valve driven computers, and finally modern a IT infrastructure. I am saying however that a graduate who understand algorithms and design patterns and has experience of three or four programming languages and two or three operating systems is going to be able to adapt much faster to changing circumstances than one trained entirely with what industry thought they wanted 12 months before the student started his degree.
Solving academical problems is neat, necessary for the development of new/innovative technologies, but to expect that every gradute will become a scientist/academic/professor/researcher is counter-productive.
On the other hand, if all they want is to be a MSCE, then they'd do much better to go on a course to train MSCEs and leave the universities to address the broader picture.
Universities should be more than drunken, residential training courses for technology leaders.
semantics. any university that doesn't offer the link between academic knowledge and practical use is a poor choice.
It's not so much a question of practicality vs. impracticality. It's a question of how we're training people to function.
The old idea of a university was to give someone a good set of background data and techniques, and then to teach them
to to solve problems, and how to express themselves with clarity and precision. The idea being that if your graduates have that
much, then they can learn what else they need from there on. It's an approach that's worked fairly well, historically.
The new vision of universities is that you train a person, really very narrowly to do a specific job, using a specific toolset.
This has the possible advantage that you have a deeper understanding of Ubersoft Visual Fubar at graduation time. The downside is
that, particularly in the software industry, things change so fast that Ubersoft Visual Fubar may be obsolete tech three years after
you graduate, and you then have precious little grounding to start learning something else.
The new vision of what a university should be is very popular with industry, since it lets them push training costs
onto the employee, and allows software houses to prevent students getting the more than most cursory exposure to
competing products and techniques.
From the viewpoint of the student, it seems to me to be a uniformly bad deal.
I would feel like a fucking dove if I understood universities like you do.
What you do in your free time is entirely your own business, sir.
I think the best formulation would be "Humans tend to freely share information, unless it's private. And they tend to share other people's private information even more."
Hell, some people have it so bad, they can't even keep quiet about their own private information. Exhibit A, m'lud: Facebook.
Wait, we still talk about linux here? I though the "Politics" category replaced it in 2000 and it never got resurrected.
mmm... I don't see politics as necessarily inconsistent with Slashdot's core interests. I'm just waiting for the day that folks around here
give up on polarising the goods and evils of society between the two major parties, and start drawing up a Geek Manifesto.
What point would that be? I believe that his point was that DRM/whatever will fail because of the natural tendency of humans to spread information
Not quite what I intended to convey. I think that DRM will fail because you have to distribute the key with the ciphertext. It's inherently insecure, because sooner or later someone is going to find out where the key is hidden. And people are getting good at finding the keys.
The point I was making about the human urge to share information is that it runs counter to the way we think about physical property,
and that makes it very hard to buy and sell data as if it were a physical commodity. Hence the social engineering effort:
if data behaves more like real property, maybe we'll start thinking of it in those terms. Then, perhaps, the rights holders will be able to
make some headway on the behavioural side of the problem, and get people to actually stop sharing stuff in the first place.
Because until they can do that, DRM is a bit like to treating decapitation with sticking plasters.
The reason I don't think the scheme is going to work, is because people will just share the non-DRM versions. As they do now.
And because of that, I don't think the social engineering is going to work. In which case I doubt people will stop file-sharing.
Actually, I don't think the social engineering is going to work because I think the urge to trade songs and stories and jokes and techniques is wired too strongly into the human firmware. But even if I'm wrong, I still don't think the DRM will hold long enough to make a difference.
Still, it's a creative approach to the problem, and you have to admire the lateral thinking involved.
I believe his point is valid, but for the fact that his formulation was overly broad.
Well, yeah. It was a generalisation, and generalisations pretty much always have exceptions. But as you say, I don't think it impacted on the point I was trying to make.
Your statement most definitely doesn't apply to private information.
I think perhaps you mean it ought not to apply to private information. However, that does not in fact seem to be the case. As Ben Franklin put it "three can keep a secret, if two of them are dead". The urge to disseminate information is pretty damn strong in people.
To be sure, there is also a counter current in the human psyche - but it seems clear to me that the tendency to share is dominant by far.
Not exactly. Your statement most definitely doesn't apply to private information. Or else what would we talk about the other half of the time on Slashdot?
Linux is private information? When did that happen?
Social engineering. They want to change the way in which we understand data.
Currently we tend to think of any sort of information as something to be shared freely. It's what we as a species do. I think that tendency to swap data among ourselves is what led us to amass the information that makes up our present culture and technology. It's a pretty basic thing in human beings.
But it's a pain to monetize data on that model. It didn't matter when distributing the data was expensive, since you could charge for the distribution. So as distribution costs for data approach zero, the challenge for the media cartels has always been to reframe our understanding of data, so that we think of it in the same terms as a car or a house. I believe that's why the term "intellectual property" was coined in the first place.
The trouble is it didn't work. It turns out that if you take a tune and try and rebrand it as some sort of household accessory, people still treat it as a song. So this is the logical next step: make that song behave more like real property, and see of that shifts people's thinking.
I can't see it helping myself. It's DRM, and it's always going to fundamentally, inherently insecure. But you can see where they're going with the idea.
'exclusivity arrangements promote competition and innovation.'
I'm coming to the conclusion that "competition and innovation" can only mean for "keeps the board in cocaine and blowjobs". From the number of times we see
anti-competitive and anti-innovative measures hailed as promoting those same qualities, it seems clear that they can't mean it literally.
By this stage, I think "cocaine and blowjobs" is about the only credible interpretation remaining.
"God of the Gaps" isn't about fixing a scientific theory. It's about fundamentalists who want to ascribe God an active and necessary role in running the Universe, because by requiring a God to make the universe work it aids in their arguments that God must exist.
I did some reading on this one, and I concede the point.
While not (necessarily) operating under the blindness of dogma, I feel this case is somewhat similar. Find an area that science has not yet ruled to be strictly deterministic, and point to that and say that's where free will lives.
Well, personally, I'm not saying anything lives anywhere. I'm not even asserting the existence of free will, at least not in the new-age fuzzy cosmic destiny sense of things. I do believe in free will in the sense of "we are more than mere puppets of meat, our actions entirely determined by forces beyond our ken", and I think I made a fairly rational case for that belief.
I'm definitely not asserting that free will "lives" in QM. It's just that I can't see anywhere else in physics where any element of subjectivity is acknowledged, except in the phrase "experimenter error". So if we're going to resolve the meat-puppet problem, then QM looks like our only starting point.
Think of it this way: Instead of opening the box and checking on the cat to see if it was alive or dead, imagine you had a monitor attached to the cat that checked its heart rate
Maybe this is because I'm a coder rather than a physicist, but I always think of this in terms of lazy evaluation. Nothing collapses until the results are needed to determine something, and then that state collapses, and all those that it depends on. So, the electrodes on the cat don't collapse the waveform: until someone looks at the readout, the readout too is in a state of superposition. It's when someone looks at the readout, that state collapses, which requires the collapse the state of the cat - so that has to happen before the readout state can collapse.
I know it's not exactly mainstream thinking, but I'm not aware of anything that rules the model out. But as I already said, I'm getting out of my depth here, and I may well be talking utter twaddle.
Personally, I think that sooner or later, physics is going to have to come to terms with the fact that conciousness exists and affects the objective world.
Well it definitely does, as long as you don't mean by somehow manipulating the operation of the laws of the universe, but rather by taking deliberate action to use the laws of the universe to achieve some desired effect.:)
Well, that's the crux of it really. Suppose I decide to scratch my nose in 30 seconds time. How does that purely subjective decision translate itself into the nerve impulse that contracts the muscle fibers needed to implement the action? At some point information passes from a purely subjective realm to the objective world.
And it seems to me that this is essentially the same problem that led to the Copenhagen Interpretation. Up until that point, you could pretty much define physics as "that which was not subjective". Then we get a mathematical model of the universe, supported by experiment, which on the face of it suggested that it was not possible to fully understand objective reality without taking subjectivity into account, Unsurprisingly, there was nearly a revolt in physics circles. The Copenhagen Interpretation - that the equations just work and do not represent any real world properties was only barely less heretical, I suspect, but it was adopted as the lesser of the two evils.
I think Bohr and Heisenberg were avoiding the issue then, and I think that sooner or later, physics is going to have to confront the matter.
You can point to that remaining gap and say that's where consciousness
I don't like the idea of taking some poorly understood part of the universe, speculating that "consciousness" might be involved because it isn't explicitly excluded by current understanding, and saying that's where free will lies.
Put like that, I'd have to agree. On the other hand, I don't see a problem with speculating that consciousness might be involved. Given that human awareness is well accepted phenomena, I can't see how it's any different from speculating on the involvement of quarks, or gravitation waves.
And given that as a legitimate speculation, I don't think it's unreasonable to propose that if free will should in fact exist (and I have my reservations on that point) then this is the likely mechanism.
It sounds like wishful thinking to me, or a variant of the "God of the gaps".
As I understand it the God of the Gaps argument is along the lines of "I have a wonderful scientific theory that explains absolutely everything, with a few small exceptions, such as how birds fly and why apples fall to earth. However, I can resolve these apparent problems by asserting that God directly intervenes in the physical universe to manifest all phenomena not directly accounted for my my theory. Therefore my theory is perfect". There's an obvious fallacy there.
I don't think that applies in this case, however. I don't think anyone is proposing the direct intervention of an entity that cannot be show to exist in order to account for the theory's flaws. Rather, we're speculating that an admittedly subjective phenomenon which everyone experiences on a more-or-less continual basis may in fact be bound up with one term in the underlying equations for which there is at present no agreed real-world counterpart.
Similarly, if your belief in free will is dependent on being able to point to the unknown and say "the source of free will lies there", then what happens when we figure that part out and it doesn't?
The same thing that happens when any scientific theory is disproven. If a theory that explains how birds fly is discredited, we don't abandon the notion of birdflight. Nor is it bad science to look for a better explanation in such a case.
There's a real question of what constitutes measurement, but it's not really a matter of consciousness. We can and have conducted experiments where the time of the collapse of a wave function, as measured by instrumentation, must have necessarily preceded the observation by an observer, i.e. when the ruler was placed on the desk, not when a human eye looks at it.
I'll admit that I'm getting a little out of my depth here, but isn't this the Schrodinger's Cat case? The cat may have died three weeks ago, but it remains alive and dead in the box until someone bothers to find out which is, in fact, the case. The time of the event is not necessarily the time of the waveform's collapse. Or is that too simplistic?
Well part of my point was that even a non-deterministic universe still doesn't mean you have free will. The model of waveform collapse as a truly random event is non-deterministic, but no more conducive to causing "free will" than a deterministic universe.
Well yeah, non-determinism is (I suspect) a necessary but not a sufficient condition. On the other hand, I'd have the same problem with a purely random universe as with a purely mechanical one: both of them reduce people to marionettes, jerked around the world by forces entirely outside their control. That wouldn't be so bad, but it reduces the human mind to a mechanism with the sole function of generating illusions to make the it appear as though the persons actions were the result of conscious intent. I have problems with that, in that I can't see how or why such a thing could arise.
Personally, I think that sooner or later, physics is going to have to come to term
You could try to rely on a seriously weird and unlikely interpretation of QM which is basically a pun (measurement -> observation -> observer -> sentient observer), but then you're using the concept of sentience/free will influencing quantum events to explain how sentience/free will is possible in the first place.
Or maybe just pointing out that there's room for free will in the quantum model. I know the idea is unpopular among physicists, but I didn't think anything had emerged that made it significantly less likely than any other interpretation.
There's also a real question of what constitutes "measurement" in the absence of conciousness. You can placing a ruler on a desk to measure a line, but in the absence of intention and perception, there's nothing to distinguish such an occurrence from any other collision between two pieces of wood.
I have free will because as far as I can tell I exercise it.
Good call:) Personally, I think free will and determinism are merely useful models of reality. Determinism works well if you're designing an engine. Free will works better for things on a personal and social level. I suspect neither is entirely true in objective terms.
The trick, of course, is to use the worldview best suited to the task at hand.
They're very different in places (every new version of THHGTTG needs to contradict all others, a tradition that even the recent mediocre movie continued), and stand very well on their own.
That was the problem really. More precisely, the tone and pacing of the latter books as completely different. The lost that madcap, gag-a-minute feel, and the style would have been far better fitted for Dirk Gently, but I guess Dirk just didn't sell the way HHTG did.
The other problem was that the later books were, in comparison to the early stuff at least, almost devoid of ideas. I mean look at "So long and thanks for all the fish". Dolphins, Wonko the Sane, Gods Final Message and about eight chapters of padding disguised as Arthur's relationship with Fenchurch. DNA burned off more (and better) ideas in the first half of the first radio show.
Well, assuming that the standard is complete with no areas left as implementation decisions, and that they all use the same resonance frequency, and all the participants conform fully to the proposal, and that no-one decides to add some sort of proprietary encrypted handshaking protocol on the charging cycle (purely in the interests of security, of course).
Otherwise, you could well end up with ten plates to charge ten devices, which would be a bit of a step back.
The thing to remember is that in all probability, for every company which has someone championing the standard, there is also a division within that company that makes most of its money from selling overpriced replacements for proprietary cables. So it's reasonable to suppose that some people are going to work to undermine this, right from the start.
OK, tin-foil hat stuff, I know. The point I'm trying to make is let's not get too caught up in all the enthusiasm.
All they have to do is take a disc from a working, prototype system; use it to generate an image in whatever format their production lines require; and upload it to the shop floor.
You're not going persuade me that any of the above presents Dell with a non-trivial problem. Not given the nature of their core business.
Slashdot Mirror
Sorry dude. That never works as an excuse when some Linux interface baffles the average user, so I don't see why it should let Microsoft off the hook here.
Besides which, these same people knew how to use XP just fine by and large, so you're not talking about naive users baffled by computers in general. The complainers, on the whole tended to be seasoned Windows users who didn't get on with the new O/S. That's got to be a black mark, however you look at it.
It wouldn't be so bad, but (in technical terms, at least), user interfaces are what Microsoft do well. I don't have a good word to say about MS on the whole, but aside from two or three glaring exceptions, they do seem to have a knack for making things accessible to the less technical end of the user spectrum. So when someone tells me that if they couldn't even get that part right, I have to wonder what horrors lurk elsewhere.
Mmmm... I don't think they're quite as bulletproof as you suggest. The thing that's been preserving MS' monopoly, post-Vista, is the fact that XP users have been refusing to upgrade. As any MS apologist, and they'll tell you that Vista's biggest competitor is XP.
But they're not going to offer XP forever. And at that point in time, a bad release on the scale of Vista or WinME could prove catastrophic.
Also, I don't think it's quite true to say Vista didn't dent the MS monopoly. They've been losing market share lately. Not by a lot, and mainly to Apple, but they've been shedding users. With Macs currently enjoying the cool factor, and with some Linux distros getting increasingly accessible to the non-geek user, another big fail could accelerate that trend considerably.
That seems fair enough. I think I must have been crankier than usual, last night.
Doesn't matter whether they do or they don't. Their argument is bogus either way. Why bother evaluating terms beyond those necessary?
I quite agree.
Just for a second, suppose AT&T have got a point. That still wouldn't turn Net Neutrality a bad idea.
This is just a corporate level ad-hominem attack: Google are hypocrites, therefore they are Wrong, and their ideas are all Bad.
I reckon AT&T must be getting desperate if they're scraping this far down into the bottom of the barrel.
Mind, for that to really work, we'd need to live in a world where something like 99.9% of all fast car journeys are used to rob banks, and the remaining 1% were used by people who wanted to get their shopping in a hurry.
I thought I read somewhere that this had been advertised as a piracy tool. That said, I can't find anything to back that up now I come to look, so I may have had my wires crossed.
Don't get me wrong, I don't think its a good idea to outlaw filesharing software. It won't work, for one thing, and its likely to be the thin edge of a rather nasty wedge if it does happen. I just wasn't entirely convinced by the metaphor.
I think I'll play Devil's Advocate: Suppose someone made a car with bulletproof bodywork, a battering ram, and forward-mounted oxy-acetylene cutting torches. And then marketed it at people who "wanted to make some out-of-hours withdrawals from their local bank". Sure, you could use it to get the weekly shopping in, but you'd have a hard time arguing that such was the intention behind the vehicle.
That would seem to be closer to the mark in this case.
Well, a published standard and a half-hearted covenant not to sue isn't really equivalent in my book to releasing the source code under an OSI approved licence, which I don't believe they've done as yet. And Mono doesn't really count, not being Microsoft's code to release. Unless you know something about Miguel that the rest of us don't.
So, I guess that would make it "after". If at all.
I think that's the problem in a nutshell, really.
It's not so much that you need kludgey workarounds like that to workaround stubborn interface bugs - you get that in Windows, too. The big difference is that in Windows the kludgey workarounds have become so well known that they're pretty much part of everyday usage, and almost everyone knows about them. (The extreme example is control-alt-delete).
If so, a large part of the problem should go away as the userbase gets larger and the workaround set passes into wider awareness.
Yes, but it's probably just a one-off trough.
Almost certainly not. The sales price will be whatever the seller thinks the market will bear. I suppose you could market a game as "this software is half price, because when it installs we rootkit your computer", but I don't think anyone's been insane enough to try that.
The trouble is that if the DRM isn't part of the advertised "feature" set, then the vendor is most likely hoping no-one will notice the DRM (probably the wisest strategy if you do indeed use it), which means there's no reason to lower the price.
It seems as though a lot of people choose to regain those rights by installing cracks. I guess that makes the market rate fairly close to zero.
Well, of course. If you're not teaching the specifics of MS Visual Studio 2009, then all you can possibly do is spend all day discussing how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. I mean, it's not like there's a middle ground or anything, is it?
I'm not suggesting that we shouldn't produce graduates with the necessary knowledge to get a job in industry. I'm just saying that it is entirely possible to achieve this without concentrating almost entirely on vendor specific software packages.
I am also suggesting that it's somewhat unwise to let industry dictate the packages we teach at university, since the demands of the private sector have more to do with keeping their competition at bay then they do with producing good software engineers.
It's not so much a question of practicality vs. impracticality. It's a question of how we're training people to function. The old idea of a university was to give someone a good set of background data and techniques, and then to teach them to to solve problems, and how to express themselves with clarity and precision. The idea being that if your graduates have that much, then they can learn what else they need from there on. It's an approach that's worked fairly well, historically.
The new vision of universities is that you train a person, really very narrowly to do a specific job, using a specific toolset. This has the possible advantage that you have a deeper understanding of Ubersoft Visual Fubar at graduation time. The downside is that, particularly in the software industry, things change so fast that Ubersoft Visual Fubar may be obsolete tech three years after you graduate, and you then have precious little grounding to start learning something else.
The new vision of what a university should be is very popular with industry, since it lets them push training costs onto the employee, and allows software houses to prevent students getting the more than most cursory exposure to competing products and techniques.
From the viewpoint of the student, it seems to me to be a uniformly bad deal.
What you do in your free time is entirely your own business, sir.
Hell, some people have it so bad, they can't even keep quiet about their own private information. Exhibit A, m'lud: Facebook.
mmm... I don't see politics as necessarily inconsistent with Slashdot's core interests. I'm just waiting for the day that folks around here give up on polarising the goods and evils of society between the two major parties, and start drawing up a Geek Manifesto.
Not quite what I intended to convey. I think that DRM will fail because you have to distribute the key with the ciphertext. It's inherently insecure, because sooner or later someone is going to find out where the key is hidden. And people are getting good at finding the keys.
The point I was making about the human urge to share information is that it runs counter to the way we think about physical property, and that makes it very hard to buy and sell data as if it were a physical commodity. Hence the social engineering effort: if data behaves more like real property, maybe we'll start thinking of it in those terms. Then, perhaps, the rights holders will be able to make some headway on the behavioural side of the problem, and get people to actually stop sharing stuff in the first place. Because until they can do that, DRM is a bit like to treating decapitation with sticking plasters.
The reason I don't think the scheme is going to work, is because people will just share the non-DRM versions. As they do now. And because of that, I don't think the social engineering is going to work. In which case I doubt people will stop file-sharing.
Actually, I don't think the social engineering is going to work because I think the urge to trade songs and stories and jokes and techniques is wired too strongly into the human firmware. But even if I'm wrong, I still don't think the DRM will hold long enough to make a difference.
Still, it's a creative approach to the problem, and you have to admire the lateral thinking involved.
Well, yeah. It was a generalisation, and generalisations pretty much always have exceptions. But as you say, I don't think it impacted on the point I was trying to make.
I think perhaps you mean it ought not to apply to private information. However, that does not in fact seem to be the case. As Ben Franklin put it "three can keep a secret, if two of them are dead". The urge to disseminate information is pretty damn strong in people.
To be sure, there is also a counter current in the human psyche - but it seems clear to me that the tendency to share is dominant by far.
Linux is private information? When did that happen?
Social engineering. They want to change the way in which we understand data.
Currently we tend to think of any sort of information as something to be shared freely. It's what we as a species do. I think that tendency to swap data among ourselves is what led us to amass the information that makes up our present culture and technology. It's a pretty basic thing in human beings.
But it's a pain to monetize data on that model. It didn't matter when distributing the data was expensive, since you could charge for the distribution. So as distribution costs for data approach zero, the challenge for the media cartels has always been to reframe our understanding of data, so that we think of it in the same terms as a car or a house. I believe that's why the term "intellectual property" was coined in the first place.
The trouble is it didn't work. It turns out that if you take a tune and try and rebrand it as some sort of household accessory, people still treat it as a song. So this is the logical next step: make that song behave more like real property, and see of that shifts people's thinking.
I can't see it helping myself. It's DRM, and it's always going to fundamentally, inherently insecure. But you can see where they're going with the idea.
I'm coming to the conclusion that "competition and innovation" can only mean for "keeps the board in cocaine and blowjobs". From the number of times we see anti-competitive and anti-innovative measures hailed as promoting those same qualities, it seems clear that they can't mean it literally.
By this stage, I think "cocaine and blowjobs" is about the only credible interpretation remaining.
I did some reading on this one, and I concede the point.
Well, personally, I'm not saying anything lives anywhere. I'm not even asserting the existence of free will, at least not in the new-age fuzzy cosmic destiny sense of things. I do believe in free will in the sense of "we are more than mere puppets of meat, our actions entirely determined by forces beyond our ken", and I think I made a fairly rational case for that belief.
I'm definitely not asserting that free will "lives" in QM. It's just that I can't see anywhere else in physics where any element of subjectivity is acknowledged, except in the phrase "experimenter error". So if we're going to resolve the meat-puppet problem, then QM looks like our only starting point.
Maybe this is because I'm a coder rather than a physicist, but I always think of this in terms of lazy evaluation. Nothing collapses until the results are needed to determine something, and then that state collapses, and all those that it depends on. So, the electrodes on the cat don't collapse the waveform: until someone looks at the readout, the readout too is in a state of superposition. It's when someone looks at the readout, that state collapses, which requires the collapse the state of the cat - so that has to happen before the readout state can collapse.
I know it's not exactly mainstream thinking, but I'm not aware of anything that rules the model out. But as I already said, I'm getting out of my depth here, and I may well be talking utter twaddle.
Well, that's the crux of it really. Suppose I decide to scratch my nose in 30 seconds time. How does that purely subjective decision translate itself into the nerve impulse that contracts the muscle fibers needed to implement the action? At some point information passes from a purely subjective realm to the objective world.
And it seems to me that this is essentially the same problem that led to the Copenhagen Interpretation. Up until that point, you could pretty much define physics as "that which was not subjective". Then we get a mathematical model of the universe, supported by experiment, which on the face of it suggested that it was not possible to fully understand objective reality without taking subjectivity into account, Unsurprisingly, there was nearly a revolt in physics circles. The Copenhagen Interpretation - that the equations just work and do not represent any real world properties was only barely less heretical, I suspect, but it was adopted as the lesser of the two evils.
I think Bohr and Heisenberg were avoiding the issue then, and I think that sooner or later, physics is going to have to confront the matter.
Put like that, I'd have to agree. On the other hand, I don't see a problem with speculating that consciousness might be involved. Given that human awareness is well accepted phenomena, I can't see how it's any different from speculating on the involvement of quarks, or gravitation waves.
And given that as a legitimate speculation, I don't think it's unreasonable to propose that if free will should in fact exist (and I have my reservations on that point) then this is the likely mechanism.
As I understand it the God of the Gaps argument is along the lines of "I have a wonderful scientific theory that explains absolutely everything, with a few small exceptions, such as how birds fly and why apples fall to earth. However, I can resolve these apparent problems by asserting that God directly intervenes in the physical universe to manifest all phenomena not directly accounted for my my theory. Therefore my theory is perfect". There's an obvious fallacy there.
I don't think that applies in this case, however. I don't think anyone is proposing the direct intervention of an entity that cannot be show to exist in order to account for the theory's flaws. Rather, we're speculating that an admittedly subjective phenomenon which everyone experiences on a more-or-less continual basis may in fact be bound up with one term in the underlying equations for which there is at present no agreed real-world counterpart.
The same thing that happens when any scientific theory is disproven. If a theory that explains how birds fly is discredited, we don't abandon the notion of birdflight. Nor is it bad science to look for a better explanation in such a case.
I'll admit that I'm getting a little out of my depth here, but isn't this the Schrodinger's Cat case? The cat may have died three weeks ago, but it remains alive and dead in the box until someone bothers to find out which is, in fact, the case. The time of the event is not necessarily the time of the waveform's collapse. Or is that too simplistic?
Well yeah, non-determinism is (I suspect) a necessary but not a sufficient condition. On the other hand, I'd have the same problem with a purely random universe as with a purely mechanical one: both of them reduce people to marionettes, jerked around the world by forces entirely outside their control. That wouldn't be so bad, but it reduces the human mind to a mechanism with the sole function of generating illusions to make the it appear as though the persons actions were the result of conscious intent. I have problems with that, in that I can't see how or why such a thing could arise.
Personally, I think that sooner or later, physics is going to have to come to term
Interesting subject.
Or maybe just pointing out that there's room for free will in the quantum model. I know the idea is unpopular among physicists, but I didn't think anything had emerged that made it significantly less likely than any other interpretation.
There's also a real question of what constitutes "measurement" in the absence of conciousness. You can placing a ruler on a desk to measure a line, but in the absence of intention and perception, there's nothing to distinguish such an occurrence from any other collision between two pieces of wood.
Good call :) Personally, I think free will and determinism are merely useful models of reality. Determinism works well if you're designing an engine. Free will works better for things on a personal and social level. I suspect neither is entirely true in objective terms.
The trick, of course, is to use the worldview best suited to the task at hand.
That was the problem really. More precisely, the tone and pacing of the latter books as completely different. The lost that madcap, gag-a-minute feel, and the style would have been far better fitted for Dirk Gently, but I guess Dirk just didn't sell the way HHTG did.
The other problem was that the later books were, in comparison to the early stuff at least, almost devoid of ideas. I mean look at "So long and thanks for all the fish". Dolphins, Wonko the Sane, Gods Final Message and about eight chapters of padding disguised as Arthur's relationship with Fenchurch. DNA burned off more (and better) ideas in the first half of the first radio show.
Well, assuming that the standard is complete with no areas left as implementation decisions, and that they all use the same resonance frequency, and all the participants conform fully to the proposal, and that no-one decides to add some sort of proprietary encrypted handshaking protocol on the charging cycle (purely in the interests of security, of course).
Otherwise, you could well end up with ten plates to charge ten devices, which would be a bit of a step back.
The thing to remember is that in all probability, for every company which has someone championing the standard, there is also a division within that company that makes most of its money from selling overpriced replacements for proprietary cables. So it's reasonable to suppose that some people are going to work to undermine this, right from the start.
OK, tin-foil hat stuff, I know. The point I'm trying to make is let's not get too caught up in all the enthusiasm.
They do however breathe.
All they have to do is take a disc from a working, prototype system; use it to generate an image in whatever format their production lines require; and upload it to the shop floor.
You're not going persuade me that any of the above presents Dell with a non-trivial problem. Not given the nature of their core business.