It seems the clearest way out of the dilemma (change for the better, but not too much) would be to make./ skinnable by allowing users to select one of several stylesheets. This is old technology, and now that./ is effectively stylable, I don't know why they haven't pursued this option. Instead of picking the best in a contest, they could make available the best from each category (e.g., most radical departure, cleanest, most conservative).
See, what's got people bothered here is that it wasn't five minutes of fun. It was five minutes of grade school humour wrapped around a one paragraph's worth of python info, all for the purpose of driving Google ad revenue and Amazon click-thrus.
The whole editorial function of./ is to ensure a certain level of quality, and presumably a lack of outright traffic-scamming. The article sucked pus-weepy donkey balls, and so did the editing that put it on the front page.
Linux as a kernel is sufficiently mature that the problems Linus is spending time on are management and scalability problems--organizing the large-scale kernel hacking effort and dealing with massively parallel processing.
I'd like to see Linus say "I've done a monolithic kernel and proven its success. Now I'm going to build a performant microkernel and see what all the fuss is about." He could hand over Linux kernel development to the senior crew that's already taking care of the major modules, and try something else.
Essentially, it would be cool for someone like Linus, with his incredibly strong practical engineering bent, to do again what he did with Linux: semi-clean-sheet a new kernel that meets his performance requirements, but is designed around different strategies for achieving what every OS tries to achieve.
I bet that, in two or three years, he would recant his earlier dismissal of microkernels and say that there's actually some interesting stuff there, and along the way solve some of the perennial complaints that slashdotters always bring up whenever microkernels are mentioned. In his heart of hearts, I'm sure Linus has some legacy issues with the current kernel design that he'd love to jettison, but can't without massively re-organizing the existing architecture, in which too many interested parties are already involved.
And he could put Stallman and the HURD boys to shame *again*, which is a twofer:)
You're a loon, and I feel safer in laughing at you now that I've actually watched that mockumentary you linked. Now, if you told me the sky was blue, I'd look up to check.
Dude: The person to whom you're responding, Cranberry King, thinks that 12 families rule the world, suppressing free energy research that was captured from ass-probing aliens. The subtler points of remoting software and hacker practices are lost on him.
Take a look at A Tale In The Desert to see what one guy can accomplish on his own, then do the math: ~1,500 subscribers paying $13.95/month means around $250,000 a year. Total costs are a five-figure server, but amortized over several years, and bandwidth/colocation costs, leaving over $100,000 a year (probably over $150,000) salary for the owner/developer.
That's what you can do on your own, by yourself, setting your own working hours and developing a game in which you're genuinely interested developing, without killing yourself and without tolerating 'suits'.
At this point, they can't say they've invested 10 years in it. What they've done is spend the last 10 years on 3-4 failed projects, and one (bearing a superficial resemblence to a design doc that's ten years old) that may see the light of day.
Now that game budgets are approaching the budgets and crew sizes of smaller Hollywood productions, why not look to movie studios for the organizing methodology for bringing in a multi-million dollar production requiring immense creative input on-time and on-budget? The budget-busting fiascos we hear about aren't common, they're the product of big stars/directors/producers with too little studio control. The more common case is a fairly rigorous process that moves through well-defined stages with constant oversight, without ever becoming what we call a death march; the end result is a solid financial vehicle that makes money for the investors and also produces creative content that can be judged on how it works as a piece of art.
It's also a system that rewards talent and money-making ability with money.
You want to make a multi-million dollar game? Hire a movie executive to run the process rather than a 30 year old EA graduate who thinks 90 hour weeks are normal.
To say that evolution requires an insane amount of chance to occur is to misunderstand the mechanism by which evolution is currently thought to occur. I understand why you would say this, since superficially it appears that evolution says that 100 dice were rolled, and they all came up sixes. To carry the analogy out, natural selection is like rolling 100 dice, setting aside all the ones that came up sixes, and rerolling the remaining dice, continually removing the sixes and rerolling until no dice are left. Thus, over enough rolls, they all end up sixes, with no more than normal chances for any dice to come up six.
Okay, it's not a great analogy, but it's a fair illustration of the idea.
ID gets ridiculed by science because it acts like science without being truly scientific. It fails the basic test of falsifiability that the empirical method requires. Positing an intelligent designer is like adding a wild card: To answer the question "why is that like that?" one ultimately ends up saying "because the designer made it so." All the examples of irreducible complexity (like eyes or the bombardier beetle) get plausibly explained or demonstrated in intermediate forms, contrary to the claims of those scientists pushing ID. The IDers point to the lack of an explanation for a particular form as evidence of a "the designer made it so" explanation. Logically, though, absence of evidence for a contrary explanation is not evidence for a particular explanation.
Unfortunately, they're not suing people for downloading, they're suing people for sharing (i.e., facilitating copyright infringement). Having legitimate copies of the music isn't a defence.
You misunderstood my point. You're right that a corporation can handle six figures in legal fees much more easily than an individual. It's for exactly that reason that $3,750 is not an excessive settlement to pay, compared to six figures, for an individual.
For an individual faced with a six figure lawsuit, $3,750 is virtually a get out of jail free card.
Well, that's exactly the issue. Speeding tickets are handled comparatively smoothly: The cops accept bail, you represent yourself in traffic court, the judge orders a fine, and you work it out with a court system designed to handle municipal fines in a variety of ways.
If the RIAA actually sued Cassie, it would immediately trigger thousands of dollars in court costs, and she would need a lawyer who would charge several hundred just to get up to speed on her case. Then he'd want to see if a negotiated settlement were possible, which would require meetings and telephone calls adding a couple more thousand to his bill. The settlement would then be higher because the RIAA would have to have a lawyer involved on their end. Even minor actions that end up in court cost thousands in lawyer's fees. An actual trial like others have gone through with the RIAA incurs tens of thousands in lawyers fees, and it's not hard to get into six figures if it drags on.
I say this as someone who was legal liaison at a manufacturer that went through several lawsuits. I handled the legal bill every month, and we spent six figures a year at least just handling normal, run of the mill legal actions that all companies face. In comparison to that, $3,750 is certainly not excessive.
That number was probably arrived at by an accountant calculating 1) the administrative costs of running the settlement center, 2) the number of people who would pay up at what price, and 3) the costs of taking those people to court to get more.
Basically, someone put together a huge spreadsheet saying that the RIAA will get the max dollars for their efforts by offering everyone a $3,750 settlement fee.
"Permanently damage their life"? By taking a semester off school to work to pay off a liability you voluntarily incurred? Nonsense.
Look at it another way: Your daughter comes to you and tearfully confesses that she got nailed by the RIAA and they're demanding $3,750. You don't have that cash to give her. What do you say? "Well, sweetie, looks like you'll need to take a semester off school and earn some money to pay off that debt."
Why is it wrong when the RIAA does it but not when you do it? It's a reasonable suggestion, neutral of context. It seems obnoxious only because it's being suggested from a position of power, but her vulnerable position is of her own making, and the RIAA could be much, much bigger assholes about it. When you lose in court, the judge doesn't offer a six month repayment plan, he says "see the clerk on the way out to give him a check."
I didn't suggest she sell a kidney. I was pointing out that the responsibility for paying is hers, however she chooses to get the money to do so.
As for longer payment terms, she put herself at their mercy, and they're under no obligation to offer or accept a settlement. They're being (relatively) nice about it for their own reasons--I'm sure their collection rate increases with the amount of flexibility they offer. But fundamentally, legally, they could demand payment immediately, or simply go to court and bankrupt her.
I have zero sympathy for an MIT student who voluntarily incurred this liability. She should count her blessings. Honestly, people get screwed much harder, much less voluntarily than this every day. Our collective outrage is wasted on someone who just had to have the latest Death Cab for Cutie single.
There's nothing wrong with them suggesting anything. Their suggestions have no force, notwithstanding your italics, and if she can come up with the cash elsewhere, the RIAA has no ability (or reason) to do anything about it.
If you plan to write your congressperson, I suggest doing it in a nicely typed or laser-printed letter, written politely and logically. Emails are easy to dispatch, and staffers apparently treat them with the same disdain. The more effort you put into your communication, the more weight it's given. 100 envelopes have a lot more impact than 1,000 emails.
jjohnson, do you work for RIAA as a PR representative?
Because all I see out of you and your slashdot logs is RIAA smoothovers.
First, someone please mod the parent up so that people can see the dialogue chain.
No, I don't work for the RIAA, or the music or entertainment industry, in any capacity. I'm not in PR, either, or IP/copyright law, or any field that's self-interested in the outcome of the RIAA's tactics.
I think the music industry and the RIAA are being monumentally stupid about P2P and downloading, and that these lawsuits are a moronic way of poisoning the fanbase that supports them. The only answer to this, however, is commercial pressure by that fanbase--don't buy DRMed CDs, don't buy music from labels supporting the RIAA, write your congressmen, write letters to the editor, publicize the idiocy of it.
However, I'm endlessly disgusted by the pissing and moaning on here about the unfairness of the RIAA's tactics. The blatantly misleading headline on this story is the cherry on the sundae. The RIAA is perfectly within their legal rights to do what they're doing, and to bitch about getting caught and the hardship that imposes is the height of hypocrisy. Right or wrong, downloading is breaking the law, and doing so incurs legal liability. Downloading is not civil disobedience, it's freeloading. If the music industry had any brains they'd parlay that extensive freeloading into exposure for value added content and free marketing for young artists. But until they start doing that, downloaders are simply breaking the law and getting off easy, in legal terms, to what they could be.
Slashdot Mirror
It seems the clearest way out of the dilemma (change for the better, but not too much) would be to make ./ skinnable by allowing users to select one of several stylesheets. This is old technology, and now that ./ is effectively stylable, I don't know why they haven't pursued this option. Instead of picking the best in a contest, they could make available the best from each category (e.g., most radical departure, cleanest, most conservative).
It's an incremental improvement in the look. Big deal. It's nice, but for this he gets a laptop?
Perhaps the problem here is editorial: Taco and the gang couldn't stomach a more radical departure from the old standby.
See, what's got people bothered here is that it wasn't five minutes of fun. It was five minutes of grade school humour wrapped around a one paragraph's worth of python info, all for the purpose of driving Google ad revenue and Amazon click-thrus.
./ is to ensure a certain level of quality, and presumably a lack of outright traffic-scamming. The article sucked pus-weepy donkey balls, and so did the editing that put it on the front page.
The whole editorial function of
Linux as a kernel is sufficiently mature that the problems Linus is spending time on are management and scalability problems--organizing the large-scale kernel hacking effort and dealing with massively parallel processing.
:)
I'd like to see Linus say "I've done a monolithic kernel and proven its success. Now I'm going to build a performant microkernel and see what all the fuss is about." He could hand over Linux kernel development to the senior crew that's already taking care of the major modules, and try something else.
Essentially, it would be cool for someone like Linus, with his incredibly strong practical engineering bent, to do again what he did with Linux: semi-clean-sheet a new kernel that meets his performance requirements, but is designed around different strategies for achieving what every OS tries to achieve.
I bet that, in two or three years, he would recant his earlier dismissal of microkernels and say that there's actually some interesting stuff there, and along the way solve some of the perennial complaints that slashdotters always bring up whenever microkernels are mentioned. In his heart of hearts, I'm sure Linus has some legacy issues with the current kernel design that he'd love to jettison, but can't without massively re-organizing the existing architecture, in which too many interested parties are already involved.
And he could put Stallman and the HURD boys to shame *again*, which is a twofer
Bwahahahahah!
You're a loon, and I feel safer in laughing at you now that I've actually watched that mockumentary you linked. Now, if you told me the sky was blue, I'd look up to check.
Dude: The person to whom you're responding, Cranberry King, thinks that 12 families rule the world, suppressing free energy research that was captured from ass-probing aliens. The subtler points of remoting software and hacker practices are lost on him.
Take a look at A Tale In The Desert to see what one guy can accomplish on his own, then do the math: ~1,500 subscribers paying $13.95/month means around $250,000 a year. Total costs are a five-figure server, but amortized over several years, and bandwidth/colocation costs, leaving over $100,000 a year (probably over $150,000) salary for the owner/developer.
That's what you can do on your own, by yourself, setting your own working hours and developing a game in which you're genuinely interested developing, without killing yourself and without tolerating 'suits'.
At this point, they can't say they've invested 10 years in it. What they've done is spend the last 10 years on 3-4 failed projects, and one (bearing a superficial resemblence to a design doc that's ten years old) that may see the light of day.
Now that game budgets are approaching the budgets and crew sizes of smaller Hollywood productions, why not look to movie studios for the organizing methodology for bringing in a multi-million dollar production requiring immense creative input on-time and on-budget? The budget-busting fiascos we hear about aren't common, they're the product of big stars/directors/producers with too little studio control. The more common case is a fairly rigorous process that moves through well-defined stages with constant oversight, without ever becoming what we call a death march; the end result is a solid financial vehicle that makes money for the investors and also produces creative content that can be judged on how it works as a piece of art.
It's also a system that rewards talent and money-making ability with money.
You want to make a multi-million dollar game? Hire a movie executive to run the process rather than a 30 year old EA graduate who thinks 90 hour weeks are normal.
Thank you for the apology.
To say that evolution requires an insane amount of chance to occur is to misunderstand the mechanism by which evolution is currently thought to occur. I understand why you would say this, since superficially it appears that evolution says that 100 dice were rolled, and they all came up sixes. To carry the analogy out, natural selection is like rolling 100 dice, setting aside all the ones that came up sixes, and rerolling the remaining dice, continually removing the sixes and rerolling until no dice are left. Thus, over enough rolls, they all end up sixes, with no more than normal chances for any dice to come up six.
Okay, it's not a great analogy, but it's a fair illustration of the idea.
ID gets ridiculed by science because it acts like science without being truly scientific. It fails the basic test of falsifiability that the empirical method requires. Positing an intelligent designer is like adding a wild card: To answer the question "why is that like that?" one ultimately ends up saying "because the designer made it so." All the examples of irreducible complexity (like eyes or the bombardier beetle) get plausibly explained or demonstrated in intermediate forms, contrary to the claims of those scientists pushing ID. The IDers point to the lack of an explanation for a particular form as evidence of a "the designer made it so" explanation. Logically, though, absence of evidence for a contrary explanation is not evidence for a particular explanation.
Darwin was a devout Christian at the time he developed the theory of Evolution. You're starting with a lie.
I installed FC5 on an old X600 Thinkpad, and it runs great for me, even running KDE. It installed clean and I've seen nothing broken in it yet.
What do you think is broken on it?
If greed isn't part of the equation, then you're not an occupant of Earth, you're a frickin' alien.
BTW, do you think the students who downloaded the music for free rather than pay for the CD aren't being greedy?
Unfortunately, they're not suing people for downloading, they're suing people for sharing (i.e., facilitating copyright infringement). Having legitimate copies of the music isn't a defence.
The last thing you said is one of the few sensible things anyone in this thread has said.
The name of the logical fallacy you're committing is tu quoque, literally meaning "you, also". Put more proverbially, "two wrongs don't make a right."
You misunderstood my point. You're right that a corporation can handle six figures in legal fees much more easily than an individual. It's for exactly that reason that $3,750 is not an excessive settlement to pay, compared to six figures, for an individual.
For an individual faced with a six figure lawsuit, $3,750 is virtually a get out of jail free card.
Well, that's exactly the issue. Speeding tickets are handled comparatively smoothly: The cops accept bail, you represent yourself in traffic court, the judge orders a fine, and you work it out with a court system designed to handle municipal fines in a variety of ways.
If the RIAA actually sued Cassie, it would immediately trigger thousands of dollars in court costs, and she would need a lawyer who would charge several hundred just to get up to speed on her case. Then he'd want to see if a negotiated settlement were possible, which would require meetings and telephone calls adding a couple more thousand to his bill. The settlement would then be higher because the RIAA would have to have a lawyer involved on their end. Even minor actions that end up in court cost thousands in lawyer's fees. An actual trial like others have gone through with the RIAA incurs tens of thousands in lawyers fees, and it's not hard to get into six figures if it drags on.
I say this as someone who was legal liaison at a manufacturer that went through several lawsuits. I handled the legal bill every month, and we spent six figures a year at least just handling normal, run of the mill legal actions that all companies face. In comparison to that, $3,750 is certainly not excessive.
Pay us $3750 (what is it about that number?)
That number was probably arrived at by an accountant calculating 1) the administrative costs of running the settlement center, 2) the number of people who would pay up at what price, and 3) the costs of taking those people to court to get more.
Basically, someone put together a huge spreadsheet saying that the RIAA will get the max dollars for their efforts by offering everyone a $3,750 settlement fee.
"Permanently damage their life"? By taking a semester off school to work to pay off a liability you voluntarily incurred? Nonsense.
Look at it another way: Your daughter comes to you and tearfully confesses that she got nailed by the RIAA and they're demanding $3,750. You don't have that cash to give her. What do you say? "Well, sweetie, looks like you'll need to take a semester off school and earn some money to pay off that debt."
Why is it wrong when the RIAA does it but not when you do it? It's a reasonable suggestion, neutral of context. It seems obnoxious only because it's being suggested from a position of power, but her vulnerable position is of her own making, and the RIAA could be much, much bigger assholes about it. When you lose in court, the judge doesn't offer a six month repayment plan, he says "see the clerk on the way out to give him a check."
I didn't suggest she sell a kidney. I was pointing out that the responsibility for paying is hers, however she chooses to get the money to do so.
As for longer payment terms, she put herself at their mercy, and they're under no obligation to offer or accept a settlement. They're being (relatively) nice about it for their own reasons--I'm sure their collection rate increases with the amount of flexibility they offer. But fundamentally, legally, they could demand payment immediately, or simply go to court and bankrupt her.
I have zero sympathy for an MIT student who voluntarily incurred this liability. She should count her blessings. Honestly, people get screwed much harder, much less voluntarily than this every day. Our collective outrage is wasted on someone who just had to have the latest Death Cab for Cutie single.
There's nothing wrong with them suggesting anything. Their suggestions have no force, notwithstanding your italics, and if she can come up with the cash elsewhere, the RIAA has no ability (or reason) to do anything about it.
If you plan to write your congressperson, I suggest doing it in a nicely typed or laser-printed letter, written politely and logically. Emails are easy to dispatch, and staffers apparently treat them with the same disdain. The more effort you put into your communication, the more weight it's given. 100 envelopes have a lot more impact than 1,000 emails.
jjohnson, do you work for RIAA as a PR representative?
Because all I see out of you and your slashdot logs is RIAA smoothovers.
First, someone please mod the parent up so that people can see the dialogue chain.
No, I don't work for the RIAA, or the music or entertainment industry, in any capacity. I'm not in PR, either, or IP/copyright law, or any field that's self-interested in the outcome of the RIAA's tactics.
I think the music industry and the RIAA are being monumentally stupid about P2P and downloading, and that these lawsuits are a moronic way of poisoning the fanbase that supports them. The only answer to this, however, is commercial pressure by that fanbase--don't buy DRMed CDs, don't buy music from labels supporting the RIAA, write your congressmen, write letters to the editor, publicize the idiocy of it.
However, I'm endlessly disgusted by the pissing and moaning on here about the unfairness of the RIAA's tactics. The blatantly misleading headline on this story is the cherry on the sundae. The RIAA is perfectly within their legal rights to do what they're doing, and to bitch about getting caught and the hardship that imposes is the height of hypocrisy. Right or wrong, downloading is breaking the law, and doing so incurs legal liability. Downloading is not civil disobedience, it's freeloading. If the music industry had any brains they'd parlay that extensive freeloading into exposure for value added content and free marketing for young artists. But until they start doing that, downloaders are simply breaking the law and getting off easy, in legal terms, to what they could be.
How is $3,750 an excessive settlement amount (not a fine), considering that a lawyer appearing in court on her behalf for one day incurs that fee?