I thought he was more than a bit evasive when it came to any of the operational questions relating to editors
What is the issue? You didn't even say what the issue is, you just said his answers (which ones?) are disappointing. I bet if we ask you to point out a concrete and ongoing abuse of editing privileges, with links to the relevant article and its history, you will disappear just like so many trolls before you.
If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him.
You can tell your relation that the main flaw in her thinking is that she presumes herself 100% legal. The basic reason NOT to allow the government to collect this data is that everyone breaks the law all the time, simply because the law is so complicated, and sometimes unjust (oppressive). Anyone who has private communications exposed becomes a low-hanging fruit for the prosecutors. The public does not benefit from prosecution under irrelevant and/or unjust laws, and the negative outcome is huge: more abuse of power, and a slide towards a police state.
So what? How much time do criminals need (who, by the way, are disorganized to the extreme, even the organized part of them) to learn to use, manufacture, and distribute digital lockpicks? Probably years before they can leverage this hack on a noticeable scale. And years of time is what we will give them if we don't publish security research NOW and MAKE the vendors to repair vulnerabilities. Because let's face it: security is an afterthought, and more often no-thought to proprietary software vendors.
This looks like a nasty problem. IANAP, but just keeping the thing straight while firing would be a challenge. I think the future is with something like a railgun, though. On the Moon or in space, any place without air resistance, one can go to the final destination in one push, with 0 fuel needed to obtain the launch velocity. And very long railguns will be great for firing humans with g for acceleration.
People really should not be allowed to teach until they have at least 10 non-teaching years (full time, paid) of experience in the area they want to teach.
May be useful for vocational schools, where a particular trade is taught, but what does this mean for sciences? What would full time, paid experience in theoretical physics look like? Math? Computer science? Keeping in mind that the difference between programming an computer science is like that between writing a novel and methodically studying 1000 novels written by others. Understanding the nature and the laws of computation is not at all the same as churning out java script snippets, and no amount of coding alone will make one a computer scientist. A theoretical computer scientist, OTOH, does not have to know programming at all: she can produce a major impact with nothing but math.
The only meaningful prerequisite for teaching fundamental science is doing research, which is what many graduate students do. And doing fundamental research is quite different from the full time, paid experience. For starters, it requires leisure, and nothing specific can be expected to come out of it.
I am just paraphrasing the research. If you want an unsubstantiated claim, look no further than your own post, where you fail to identify a single weak point in my argument.
every other company in the world can undercut their price by simply manufacturing the drug after it's been developed
No they can't. Not if the competitors also have to go through the same rigorous and very costly process of testing their version of the drug for efficacy and safety. So they need to set up their factories to make the drug, and then test the output. Depending on the type of the drug and the quality of their manufacturing process, it may take months or even years, and by the time they are ready to put it on the shelves, the inventor will firmly assume the leading position on the market. This is the first mover advantage, and it by itself will result in continuing drug research.
I also do not understand what your point is. I am all for spending tax money on research, which should include medical and pharmacological research. Then we can finally have cheap drugs and procedures invented that deal with grave public health issues such as cancer, viral infections, antibiotic-resistant bacteria, and what have you. Government-funded research will be about 50% cheaper to the public, since it will happen in the open, in full cooperation with the scientific community at large, and no one will spend a single dollar on marketing. And the first mover will take care of all the mood drugs and symptom relievers.
Of course not. But it gets worse. There is no way to point out any such instance of innovation, software or hardware, without getting into pointless "could haves". And all the economic research done so far fails to show that the level of patent protection correlates (not necessarily linearly) with the rate of innovation. So IMHO, it is not very helpful to divide patents into "hardware" and "software" (other than to showcase a particular area where patents are REALLY nasty). Most laws don't make this distinction.
And so my favorite argument against all patents these days goes like this: patents are supposed to do at least one of these two things in order to be useful to the public: either (1) they provide an incentive to invent things, build them, and bring them to the market, or (2) they provide an assurance that descriptions of inventions are eventually published and are freely accessible by the public.
(2) Publishing used to be costly, but since we have the Internet, where the costs of publishing are near zero, no one needs to be recouped for this task anymore. All devices should come with full specs anyway, or at least consumers should firmly demand that. If it becomes unprofitable to sell black boxes, either due to legislative restrictions or due to the consumers' awareness, then all companies will be on the same playing field, and none will refuse to spend a tiny sum needed to publish the specs they already have.
(1) With patents, only the patent holder and its closest allies are capable of manufacturing, and improving on a product for N years. Moreover, the patent itself gives them a clear incentive NOT to improve on a product for N years, because the research costs money, and the patent shields them from competition. Additionally, the patent itself gives them a clear incentive NOT to manufacture enough product for everyone who would buy it, as long as keeping the price artificially high maximizes their revenue (see anti-cancer drugs in USA). Without patents, things WILL be co-invented by first movers, and then the entire world can start manufacturing and improving on them. How can anyone think that patents improve the rate of innovation is beyond me.
I liked the Radagast sequence. Tolkien never gave us enough Wizard lore, so this was a welcome addition, especially since it told a tale of Necromancer. I agree about the action scenes though: way overdone. There is but one battle in the whole book that should have been made cinematic: the battle of 5 armies. Everything else should have been much more low key. Leave the special effects, but geez, use them with finesse.
One thing that comes to mind is special deals with advertisers that are keyed off the individual user name.
The OP wants to sell a technical magazine. A magazine with ads is not a technical magazine, it's a catalog. Anyone selling a technical magazine with ads is a liar and a scam artist, as they have a clear conflict of interest. They always lie in the articles, since that's what the advertisers want, and therefore they lie when they say it's "technical". If the OP wanted to sell a technical product catalog, he should have said so.
It's a little different producing a magazine than doing free-lance writing or blogging. The magazine has staffers to buy, office space, equipment to buy, etc.
For the third time, I don't expect them to work for free, just like I don't expect Wikipedia staff and servers to work for free.
When someone distributes the magazine w/o permission the magazine loses the revenue that allows it to exist, and the magazine content disappears.
Which is why I suggested giving an explicit permission to distribute. The OP wanted to reduce or eliminate piracy, and I described a way. If the magazine is available freely and is supported by donations, then redistribution by third parties can only increase the revenue.
I do do this with my own writing, but this is besides the point. I don't ask the OP to work for free, I am just asking not to scam the readers. If the magazine is interesting, then the OP will get paid. If the magazine is crap, the proper action is to make it better or quit, not to abuse the customers.
Exactly. If the OP wants to be respectful toward the readers, delivering an online magazine is very simple. Remove ads, put everything online under CC-BY-SA (https, no paywall, no login required to read), create a downloadable pdf for offline viewers, and start a donation drive. I promise you near-zero effective piracy rate. There will be sites with exact copies, but no one will use them or link to them because they will have ads, and your site will actually be the most convenient source. If you can't get enough in donations, then no one wants your magazine, and you should probably diversify your business.
To add to that, I think the society is quite ready for an effective violence marker (may be too ready), and will know exactly what to do with the highest scores: police, athletics, and army recruiters will be lining up to get them. Who knows, may be in the future we'll have genetic castes with individuals looking as different as ants do today, each being specialized in a different human activity. (My caste would look a cross between a giant brain and a snail, and would devote itself to goofing off.)
There needs to be fines for false DMCA notices like this.
By saying this, you are tacitly defending censorship and the worst kind of monopolies: on ideas. There shouldn't be a legal way to censor the art on the Internet in the first place!
Actually, to answer their question, there is an excellent and an extremely light-weight anti-virus called fdisk, which will completely disable Windows and other malware that comes with it in a matter of seconds, while at the same time preparing the disk for a GNU/Linux OS.
Linux is a very big and a very mature project, with a long record of technical excellence. Rookie developers may get hurt by it, but it can hardly get hurt by turning away rookie developers. The beautiful thing about the free software, though, is the sheer number of interesting projects where everyone is your friend, simply because there's so much to be done. And one day, some of these projects may become bigger than Linux, and then you'll be very happy you got a chance to contribute to them.
Linus has an extremely high standard, and will not bend or break that standard for anyone.
I hope you don't mean software quality, which includes stability and security, because he broke that standard when he accepted closed source blobs into the kernel. And he definitely did it for someone: the non-free software vendors. (I didn't think this was a big deal until I found out that graphics and network firmware has direct memory access.) For all I know, he has a very high coding standard for the code he writes himself, and I wish he would apply it to his kernel.
Can you point out a free OR open-source implementation of a phone-home BIOS on a laptop? No. No one can, as there ain't one. And a closed-cource security feature is a scam, plain and simple. I'd stay away from laptops that HAVE that feature, even if "deactivated" (how would you know?) by default.
Worse or better, that is subjective and highly personal. When we talk about millions of people, though, the magnitude of evil and oppression is about the same.
For example everyone spies on everyone-else's diplomatic missions, but everyone also pretends that no such thing ever happens.
Snowden's "crime" wasn't revealing the secrets to the whatever government (you are right, they knew already). It is the American public that was supposed to stay in the dark.
Sheremetyevo, Russia, is far safer for him than most places on Earth, especially Hong Kong. Putin (or any Russian leader) will NEVER extradite a US whistle-blower charged as a spy, because this is such a face-slap to US, with all their speeches on freedom of expression. US, OTOH, will NEVER even dream of sending marines or drones there, and will be forced to act through diplomatic channels.
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I thought he was more than a bit evasive when it came to any of the operational questions relating to editors
What is the issue? You didn't even say what the issue is, you just said his answers (which ones?) are disappointing. I bet if we ask you to point out a concrete and ongoing abuse of editing privileges, with links to the relevant article and its history, you will disappear just like so many trolls before you.
If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him.
You can tell your relation that the main flaw in her thinking is that she presumes herself 100% legal. The basic reason NOT to allow the government to collect this data is that everyone breaks the law all the time, simply because the law is so complicated, and sometimes unjust (oppressive). Anyone who has private communications exposed becomes a low-hanging fruit for the prosecutors. The public does not benefit from prosecution under irrelevant and/or unjust laws, and the negative outcome is huge: more abuse of power, and a slide towards a police state.
So what? How much time do criminals need (who, by the way, are disorganized to the extreme, even the organized part of them) to learn to use, manufacture, and distribute digital lockpicks? Probably years before they can leverage this hack on a noticeable scale. And years of time is what we will give them if we don't publish security research NOW and MAKE the vendors to repair vulnerabilities. Because let's face it: security is an afterthought, and more often no-thought to proprietary software vendors.
This looks like a nasty problem. IANAP, but just keeping the thing straight while firing would be a challenge. I think the future is with something like a railgun, though. On the Moon or in space, any place without air resistance, one can go to the final destination in one push, with 0 fuel needed to obtain the launch velocity. And very long railguns will be great for firing humans with g for acceleration.
People really should not be allowed to teach until they have at least 10 non-teaching years (full time, paid) of experience in the area they want to teach.
May be useful for vocational schools, where a particular trade is taught, but what does this mean for sciences? What would full time, paid experience in theoretical physics look like? Math? Computer science? Keeping in mind that the difference between programming an computer science is like that between writing a novel and methodically studying 1000 novels written by others. Understanding the nature and the laws of computation is not at all the same as churning out java script snippets, and no amount of coding alone will make one a computer scientist. A theoretical computer scientist, OTOH, does not have to know programming at all: she can produce a major impact with nothing but math.
The only meaningful prerequisite for teaching fundamental science is doing research, which is what many graduate students do. And doing fundamental research is quite different from the full time, paid experience. For starters, it requires leisure, and nothing specific can be expected to come out of it.
Except that NSA and its contractors sleep on a giant pile of porn they've made by hacking into people's phones and computers.
I am just paraphrasing the research. If you want an unsubstantiated claim, look no further than your own post, where you fail to identify a single weak point in my argument.
every other company in the world can undercut their price by simply manufacturing the drug after it's been developed
No they can't. Not if the competitors also have to go through the same rigorous and very costly process of testing their version of the drug for efficacy and safety. So they need to set up their factories to make the drug, and then test the output. Depending on the type of the drug and the quality of their manufacturing process, it may take months or even years, and by the time they are ready to put it on the shelves, the inventor will firmly assume the leading position on the market. This is the first mover advantage, and it by itself will result in continuing drug research.
I also do not understand what your point is. I am all for spending tax money on research, which should include medical and pharmacological research. Then we can finally have cheap drugs and procedures invented that deal with grave public health issues such as cancer, viral infections, antibiotic-resistant bacteria, and what have you. Government-funded research will be about 50% cheaper to the public, since it will happen in the open, in full cooperation with the scientific community at large, and no one will spend a single dollar on marketing. And the first mover will take care of all the mood drugs and symptom relievers.
Of course not. But it gets worse. There is no way to point out any such instance of innovation, software or hardware, without getting into pointless "could haves". And all the economic research done so far fails to show that the level of patent protection correlates (not necessarily linearly) with the rate of innovation. So IMHO, it is not very helpful to divide patents into "hardware" and "software" (other than to showcase a particular area where patents are REALLY nasty). Most laws don't make this distinction.
And so my favorite argument against all patents these days goes like this: patents are supposed to do at least one of these two things in order to be useful to the public: either (1) they provide an incentive to invent things, build them, and bring them to the market, or (2) they provide an assurance that descriptions of inventions are eventually published and are freely accessible by the public.
(2) Publishing used to be costly, but since we have the Internet, where the costs of publishing are near zero, no one needs to be recouped for this task anymore. All devices should come with full specs anyway, or at least consumers should firmly demand that. If it becomes unprofitable to sell black boxes, either due to legislative restrictions or due to the consumers' awareness, then all companies will be on the same playing field, and none will refuse to spend a tiny sum needed to publish the specs they already have.
(1) With patents, only the patent holder and its closest allies are capable of manufacturing, and improving on a product for N years. Moreover, the patent itself gives them a clear incentive NOT to improve on a product for N years, because the research costs money, and the patent shields them from competition. Additionally, the patent itself gives them a clear incentive NOT to manufacture enough product for everyone who would buy it, as long as keeping the price artificially high maximizes their revenue (see anti-cancer drugs in USA). Without patents, things WILL be co-invented by first movers, and then the entire world can start manufacturing and improving on them. How can anyone think that patents improve the rate of innovation is beyond me.
I liked the Radagast sequence. Tolkien never gave us enough Wizard lore, so this was a welcome addition, especially since it told a tale of Necromancer. I agree about the action scenes though: way overdone. There is but one battle in the whole book that should have been made cinematic: the battle of 5 armies. Everything else should have been much more low key. Leave the special effects, but geez, use them with finesse.
One thing that comes to mind is special deals with advertisers that are keyed off the individual user name.
The OP wants to sell a technical magazine. A magazine with ads is not a technical magazine, it's a catalog. Anyone selling a technical magazine with ads is a liar and a scam artist, as they have a clear conflict of interest. They always lie in the articles, since that's what the advertisers want, and therefore they lie when they say it's "technical". If the OP wanted to sell a technical product catalog, he should have said so.
It's a little different producing a magazine than doing free-lance writing or blogging. The magazine has staffers to buy, office space, equipment to buy, etc.
For the third time, I don't expect them to work for free, just like I don't expect Wikipedia staff and servers to work for free.
When someone distributes the magazine w/o permission the magazine loses the revenue that allows it to exist, and the magazine content disappears.
Which is why I suggested giving an explicit permission to distribute. The OP wanted to reduce or eliminate piracy, and I described a way. If the magazine is available freely and is supported by donations, then redistribution by third parties can only increase the revenue.
I do do this with my own writing, but this is besides the point. I don't ask the OP to work for free, I am just asking not to scam the readers. If the magazine is interesting, then the OP will get paid. If the magazine is crap, the proper action is to make it better or quit, not to abuse the customers.
Exactly. If the OP wants to be respectful toward the readers, delivering an online magazine is very simple. Remove ads, put everything online under CC-BY-SA (https, no paywall, no login required to read), create a downloadable pdf for offline viewers, and start a donation drive. I promise you near-zero effective piracy rate. There will be sites with exact copies, but no one will use them or link to them because they will have ads, and your site will actually be the most convenient source. If you can't get enough in donations, then no one wants your magazine, and you should probably diversify your business.
To add to that, I think the society is quite ready for an effective violence marker (may be too ready), and will know exactly what to do with the highest scores: police, athletics, and army recruiters will be lining up to get them. Who knows, may be in the future we'll have genetic castes with individuals looking as different as ants do today, each being specialized in a different human activity. (My caste would look a cross between a giant brain and a snail, and would devote itself to goofing off.)
40% offtopic and 30% troll? Would you give Linus a blowjob too? How about countering my statement with a cogent argument?
There needs to be fines for false DMCA notices like this.
By saying this, you are tacitly defending censorship and the worst kind of monopolies: on ideas. There shouldn't be a legal way to censor the art on the Internet in the first place!
Actually, to answer their question, there is an excellent and an extremely light-weight anti-virus called fdisk, which will completely disable Windows and other malware that comes with it in a matter of seconds, while at the same time preparing the disk for a GNU/Linux OS.
Linux is a very big and a very mature project, with a long record of technical excellence. Rookie developers may get hurt by it, but it can hardly get hurt by turning away rookie developers. The beautiful thing about the free software, though, is the sheer number of interesting projects where everyone is your friend, simply because there's so much to be done. And one day, some of these projects may become bigger than Linux, and then you'll be very happy you got a chance to contribute to them.
Linus has an extremely high standard, and will not bend or break that standard for anyone.
I hope you don't mean software quality, which includes stability and security, because he broke that standard when he accepted closed source blobs into the kernel. And he definitely did it for someone: the non-free software vendors. (I didn't think this was a big deal until I found out that graphics and network firmware has direct memory access.) For all I know, he has a very high coding standard for the code he writes himself, and I wish he would apply it to his kernel.
I wasn't arguing with you, more like adding on.
Can you point out a free OR open-source implementation of a phone-home BIOS on a laptop? No. No one can, as there ain't one. And a closed-cource security feature is a scam, plain and simple. I'd stay away from laptops that HAVE that feature, even if "deactivated" (how would you know?) by default.
Worse or better, that is subjective and highly personal. When we talk about millions of people, though, the magnitude of evil and oppression is about the same.
For example everyone spies on everyone-else's diplomatic missions, but everyone also pretends that no such thing ever happens.
Snowden's "crime" wasn't revealing the secrets to the whatever government (you are right, they knew already). It is the American public that was supposed to stay in the dark.
Sheremetyevo, Russia, is far safer for him than most places on Earth, especially Hong Kong. Putin (or any Russian leader) will NEVER extradite a US whistle-blower charged as a spy, because this is such a face-slap to US, with all their speeches on freedom of expression. US, OTOH, will NEVER even dream of sending marines or drones there, and will be forced to act through diplomatic channels.