This has almost nothing to do with limiting copyright, quite the opposite. It is more of an example of what things would be like without copyright. Try to make a good copy of the Mona Lisa. Museums often don't allow you to bring a camera with a tripod to the museum, and for exactly this reason. They have the original copy, and have no good protection of copies being made.
Which is even more true for self-commenting code. It is easy to update comments, a bit harder to change the name of a variable throughout the whole program.
Strange, but in this case I think that the german law is in the right and google should change (and many other sites, such as adsense should too)
Web sites today collect much too much data on users. This data could easily fall into the wrong hands, and you have no control over who collects what, and who stores what. And, for every trick you find for web sites not to track you, new tricks are invented to continue to do so. Once it was enough to turn off cookies. Today you also need noscript, and betterPrivacy. And you lose much of the functions of sites when you enable these addons. If it was the law that you can't collect potentially private data, sites would find ways to have full functionality without tracking the users.
Another point is opt out vs. opt in. It is true that users can "opt out" by doing the above mentioned steps, but it is quite hard to keep yourself informed about all the steps necessary, and the average grandmother will not take them. This tracking should be opt out so that you don't need to be an expert to not be tracked.
A last point is the collection of really private data - cross referencing your browsing habits with your e-mail, and other interactions. Google currently says that they are not doing it, but allow themselves to do it. I think again google should comply and say what type of cross-referencing they will never do.
What are examples where tracking could be harmful? Reading up on certain medical problems on the web, looking for a new job when you don't want your employer to know about it. Obtaining tools to break DRM, or just reading up on how to do that. Expressing your political views on a website (think of how that was misused in nazi germany, the gdr, or during the McCarthy era). How dangerous was it for iranians to browse the web recently? It could have been much worse.
"If antivirus protectors could collect data from machines and users, including geographic location, social networking information, type of operating system, installed programs and configurations" Malware writers and credit card phishers would have an immensely easier time.
It is quite mindboggling how bad this idea is. Cookies are not bad enough for you, eh?
You and and the guy who replied to you are exactly right. If you let them, they will of course compete on the "cool factor". But why should you let them. If they want to compete for cool-factor, they should become a cell-phone manufacturer.
Once they can't compete for cool-factor, they'll have to compete for price, coverage, service. Well, or getting monopolies...
[If people where commenting that I don't know what I'm talking about before, now I really am just going wild - but hey, this IS/.]
Since time is part of the universe, the universe did not start to exist when time began. Existence of the universe and time have nothing to do with one another.
My personal view is that you can think of many many possible universes. (and there are even more you can't think of). Of all these, only ours seems to exist. Why do we think this one does exist, and the other ones we aren't really sure about? Because we exist in it, and we observe it. So, why does our universe exist? Because we are in it. Actually, that is the only evidence we have that it exists. And, a not logically following conclusion from all of that is that if any of these other virtual universes holds things "sufficiently similar to us", who "claim to observe their universe", then their universe, for them, also exists.
As far as I understand, according to general relativity (and we know something is wrong with GR), time has to start at the singularity of the Big Bang. I don't have a good reference for the source of my info on this -- different talks in different places, but this seems to have a good summary: http://www.hawking.org.uk/index.php/lectures/62
But I realized now that I mixed up a pet peeve of mine with something that doesn't have to do with it.
The problem I had was with people who answer to the statement: "time started at the big bang" with the question: "but what was before that"? Since our experience states that there must be something before anything.
And, general relativity states that time started at the big bang. So I just followed he logic saying that if time started at the big bang, then the question of what was before the big bang has no meaning.
But, general relativity doesn't have exclusivity on the big bang. A better theory might say that the universe expanded from something that was not a singularity, or maybe was a singularity through which timelines can pass, or something else that I/we don't understand yet, and then there would be a meaning to the question what was before the big bang.
I was wrong. An observation might tell us about the structure of the big bang, to cause us to conclude that there was indeed something before the big bang.
(So only according to GR there is no meaning to the question)
You are right. It could be that it is more like a question about what could have caused the big bang, or why did the big bang happen. Or if there was something that could effect HOW the big bang happened.
Even then, causality and time are so closely related....
"One may say that time had a beginning at the big bang, in the sense that earlier times simply would not be defined." [Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time (New York: Bantam, 1988), pp. 8-9.]
Obviously, taken out of context.
But, in this "hammer time" (I never heard that phrase), which direction would an egg break to little pieces? Which direction would entropy increase? Is there an answer to this, otherwise, I have a hard time telling what is before, and what is after.
Sorry. It isn't a hypothesis. It is something that should be true or false by definition. Like you can't test if a circle has a start and an end. It could be that I am babbling out of the wrong part of my anatomy, and I certainly should have said something like: "if I understand what the big bang is supposed to be, its geometry, then time began at the big bang..." How do you test the hypothesis that there was no date at which 13 became a prime number?
And, I didn't mean to say anything against the spacecraft! It will certainly teach us a lot about the big bang, and whether it happened or not, and probably teach us many things that we didn't expect. And it can probably also teach us much about what time is.
Why is it so hard for people to understand that there is no "before the big bang"? Time was created at the big bang. There is no "before time began". Before time, there is no before. A bit like there was no spelling bee champion 65 million years ago. Maybe very little like that. Or maybe a bit like asking what is west of the moon. Hmmm... ok, very little like that, too. How about like asking at what date 13 became a prime number? Yes, more like that. You get the gist. Time is part of our universe. The big bang created the universe, space and time together. If there was no big bang, then maybe there was something before whatever was then. But if there was a big bang, there was nothing before that.
Besides, IMHO...corporate tax is useless, it is just a hidden tax on the consumer, since a corporation just passes this off onto the consumer as part of their cost of a product.
In general, I disagree with you completely. In this case, though, the disagreement is much easier to resolve. The price of windows/office, etc. Has nothing to do with the production cost, and has only to do with how much the consumer is willing to pay. There is also no competition to drive the price to "production cost".
The prices of most things have little to do with cost of production, and only to do with how much the consumer is willing to pay for them. This is especially true for monopoly-type items, such as movies, windows (OS), either because of lack of competition, or because of irreplacability. A good example is texting (see link to nytimes article somewhere above). Under such conditions, increasing cost of production has nothing to do with increased prices. Though a preception of an increase of production cost might cause the consumer to be willing to pay more. This can be achieved through campaigns, e.g. publishing an article about increased cost to widely read websites.
There seem to be some very simple reasons for this move by cheap airlines:
1. As the article states, Ryanair would like to charge customers for travel insurance, hotel, car rental, visa card, etc. etc. Anyone who ever bought a ticket on Ryanair should know what a labyrinth it is to try to get "just a ticket" and nothing else.
2. I would guess this is the real reason, but I can't be sure. Airlines would really really like to individualize fare prices. It would be really cool for them to know how much YOU are willing to pay for a ticket, and then give you your individual price curve. Other, similar tricks are already used: for example, cheap airlines offer tickets for 0 euro (+taxes), but the return trip costs double. If people buy their flights through other sites, no individualized cookies are possible. Airlines don't actually want to have you fly on their plane, they want to sell you the seat for as much as possible...
The article is about Ryanair. Rayanair has never been about business travelers. Ryanair and easyJet et al, the main players in this debacle are the other side of your story - they, too are the reason for "regular airlines'" decline in europe.
I'm just basing this on information available on wikipedia, but....
a lightning strike does not contain that much energy. Enough to power a 100W bulb for 2 months. It seems that the highest strike rates are on the order of 100 strikes/km^2 per year. Since the surface area of the earth is 5*10^8 km^2, we get at max 5*10^10 strikes per year, enough to power 10 bulbs for each person on earth per year...
I've had opportunities to buy CDs at shows, and I have to tell you that I never would, and never did, buy a CD for $20. I did buy several for $10. I don't care if its signed by Jimmy Hendrix, I don't care if it is made of solid gold. I just want the music! If it is sold for $20, I feel like the artists are trying to take advantage or the situation (and I understand from your text you indeed are). When I walk out of a show I feel I bonded with the artists. You know when they say "thank you all for coming to see us today" - I believe them. I feel that they are grateful for me coming to listen to them, for listening to their art. I feel we are closer after the show. And I feel hurt when you try to take advantage of this for a few bucks. But that's just me. No, I bet that's not just me.
Slashdot Mirror
They should have thought of this before Al Gore funded the internet. Now the cat is out of the bag. Wikileaks isn't a person, but a principle.
This has almost nothing to do with limiting copyright, quite the opposite. It is more of an example of what things would be like without copyright. Try to make a good copy of the Mona Lisa. Museums often don't allow you to bring a camera with a tripod to the museum, and for exactly this reason. They have the original copy, and have no good protection of copies being made.
Which is even more true for self-commenting code. It is easy to update comments, a bit harder to change the name of a variable throughout the whole program.
#define TWO (3.4)
Strange, but in this case I think that the german law is in the right and google should change (and many other sites, such as adsense should too)
Web sites today collect much too much data on users. This data could easily fall into the wrong hands, and you have no control over who collects what, and who stores what. And, for every trick you find for web sites not to track you, new tricks are invented to continue to do so. Once it was enough to turn off cookies. Today you also need noscript, and betterPrivacy. And you lose much of the functions of sites when you enable these addons. If it was the law that you can't collect potentially private data, sites would find ways to have full functionality without tracking the users.
Another point is opt out vs. opt in. It is true that users can "opt out" by doing the above mentioned steps, but it is quite hard to keep yourself informed about all the steps necessary, and the average grandmother will not take them. This tracking should be opt out so that you don't need to be an expert to not be tracked.
A last point is the collection of really private data - cross referencing your browsing habits with your e-mail, and other interactions. Google currently says that they are not doing it, but allow themselves to do it. I think again google should comply and say what type of cross-referencing they will never do.
What are examples where tracking could be harmful? Reading up on certain medical problems on the web, looking for a new job when you don't want your employer to know about it. Obtaining tools to break DRM, or just reading up on how to do that. Expressing your political views on a website (think of how that was misused in nazi germany, the gdr, or during the McCarthy era). How dangerous was it for iranians to browse the web recently? It could have been much worse.
come on Google, do no evil!
"If antivirus protectors could collect data from machines and users, including geographic location, social networking information, type of operating system, installed programs and configurations"
Malware writers and credit card phishers would have an immensely easier time.
It is quite mindboggling how bad this idea is. Cookies are not bad enough for you, eh?
You must never have tried to reconstruct a damaged tgz file to suggest that.
Try it. It's fun. gzip doesn't uphold byte boundaries.
You and and the guy who replied to you are exactly right. If you let them, they will of course compete on the "cool factor". But why should you let them. If they want to compete for cool-factor, they should become a cell-phone manufacturer.
Once they can't compete for cool-factor, they'll have to compete for price, coverage, service. Well, or getting monopolies...
Yes! That is much better.
One good analogy is much better than three bad ones.
[If people where commenting that I don't know what I'm talking about before, now I really am just going wild - but hey, this IS /.]
Since time is part of the universe, the universe did not start to exist when time began. Existence of the universe and time have nothing to do with one another.
My personal view is that you can think of many many possible universes. (and there are even more you can't think of). Of all these, only ours seems to exist. Why do we think this one does exist, and the other ones we aren't really sure about? Because we exist in it, and we observe it. So, why does our universe exist? Because we are in it. Actually, that is the only evidence we have that it exists. And, a not logically following conclusion from all of that is that if any of these other virtual universes holds things "sufficiently similar to us", who "claim to observe their universe", then their universe, for them, also exists.
Now find how one can try to test this hogwash.
As far as I understand, according to general relativity (and we know something is wrong with GR), time has to start at the singularity of the Big Bang.
I don't have a good reference for the source of my info on this -- different talks in different places, but this seems to have a good summary:
http://www.hawking.org.uk/index.php/lectures/62
But I realized now that I mixed up a pet peeve of mine with something that doesn't have to do with it.
The problem I had was with people who answer to the statement: "time started at the big bang" with the question: "but what was before that"?
Since our experience states that there must be something before anything.
And, general relativity states that time started at the big bang. So I just followed he logic saying that if time started at the big bang, then the question of what was before the big bang has no meaning.
But, general relativity doesn't have exclusivity on the big bang. A better theory might say that the universe expanded from something that was not a singularity, or maybe was a singularity through which timelines can pass, or something else that I/we don't understand yet, and then there would be a meaning to the question what was before the big bang.
I was wrong. An observation might tell us about the structure of the big bang, to cause us to conclude that there was indeed something before the big bang.
(So only according to GR there is no meaning to the question)
You are right. It could be that it is more like a question about what could have caused the big bang, or why did the big bang happen. Or if there was something that could effect HOW the big bang happened.
Even then, causality and time are so closely related....
Why not? I can learn so much if I do.
"One may say that time had a beginning at the big bang, in the sense that earlier times simply would not be defined."
[Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time (New York: Bantam, 1988), pp. 8-9.]
Obviously, taken out of context.
But, in this "hammer time" (I never heard that phrase), which direction would an egg break to little pieces? Which direction would entropy increase? Is there an answer to this, otherwise, I have a hard time telling what is before, and what is after.
I'm saying there is nothing "before" a space-time singularity...
But, yes, I certainly don't grasp it.
Sorry. It isn't a hypothesis. It is something that should be true or false by definition. Like you can't test if a circle has a start and an end. It could be that I am babbling out of the wrong part of my anatomy, and I certainly should have said something like: "if I understand what the big bang is supposed to be, its geometry, then time began at the big bang..."
How do you test the hypothesis that there was no date at which 13 became a prime number?
And, I didn't mean to say anything against the spacecraft! It will certainly teach us a lot about the big bang, and whether it happened or not, and probably teach us many things that we didn't expect. And it can probably also teach us much about what time is.
Why is it so hard for people to understand that there is no "before the big bang"? Time was created at the big bang. There is no "before time began". Before time, there is no before. A bit like there was no spelling bee champion 65 million years ago. Maybe very little like that. Or maybe a bit like asking what is west of the moon. Hmmm... ok, very little like that, too. How about like asking at what date 13 became a prime number? Yes, more like that. You get the gist. Time is part of our universe. The big bang created the universe, space and time together.
If there was no big bang, then maybe there was something before whatever was then. But if there was a big bang, there was nothing before that.
Ahhhh! Those were the days.....
Vic 20 was 1 MHz, BBC micro was 2. (Otherwise the Vic 20 would have been faster than the C64....) Finally C128 had 2MHz
That's 'cause after billions of years of mountains in their way, there's no jet stream where the mountains are.
What do you expect?
Seriously, though, here: http://www.project-himalaya.com/dispatches/2004/i04-broad-peak/k2-jet.jpg
jet stream over K2.
And mountains...
----
My ID is prime base 21, is yours?
In general, I disagree with you completely. In this case, though, the disagreement is much easier to resolve. The price of windows/office, etc. Has nothing to do with the production cost, and has only to do with how much the consumer is willing to pay. There is also no competition to drive the price to "production cost".
The prices of most things have little to do with cost of production, and only to do with how much the consumer is willing to pay for them.
This is especially true for monopoly-type items, such as movies, windows (OS), either because of lack of competition, or because of irreplacability. A good example is texting (see link to nytimes article somewhere above). Under such conditions, increasing cost of production has nothing to do with increased prices. Though a preception of an increase of production cost might cause the consumer to be willing to pay more. This can be achieved through campaigns, e.g. publishing an article about increased cost to widely read websites.
There seem to be some very simple reasons for this move by cheap airlines:
1. As the article states, Ryanair would like to charge customers for travel insurance, hotel, car rental, visa card, etc. etc. Anyone who ever bought a ticket on Ryanair should know what a labyrinth it is to try to get "just a ticket" and nothing else.
2. I would guess this is the real reason, but I can't be sure. Airlines would really really like to individualize fare prices. It would be really cool for them to know how much YOU are willing to pay for a ticket, and then give you your individual price curve. Other, similar tricks are already used: for example, cheap airlines offer tickets for 0 euro (+taxes), but the return trip costs double. If people buy their flights through other sites, no individualized cookies are possible. Airlines don't actually want to have you fly on their plane, they want to sell you the seat for as much as possible...
The article is about Ryanair. Rayanair has never been about business travelers. Ryanair and easyJet et al, the main players in this debacle are the other side of your story - they, too are the reason for "regular airlines'" decline in europe.
I'm just basing this on information available on wikipedia, but....
a lightning strike does not contain that much energy. Enough to power a 100W bulb for 2 months.
It seems that the highest strike rates are on the order of 100 strikes/km^2 per year.
Since the surface area of the earth is 5*10^8 km^2, we get at max 5*10^10 strikes per year, enough to power
10 bulbs for each person on earth per year...
I've had opportunities to buy CDs at shows, and I have to tell you that I never would, and never did, buy a CD for $20. I did buy several for $10. I don't care if its signed by Jimmy Hendrix, I don't care if it is made of solid gold. I just want the music! If it is sold for $20, I feel like the artists are trying to take advantage or the situation (and I understand from your text you indeed are). When I walk out of a show I feel I bonded with the artists. You know when they say "thank you all for coming to see us today" - I believe them. I feel that they are grateful for me coming to listen to them, for listening to their art. I feel we are closer after the show. And I feel hurt when you try to take advantage of this for a few bucks.
But that's just me. No, I bet that's not just me.