I was getting ready to gripe about onerous EULA terms, so I started looking around for the actual text and found... nothing? I wasn't asked to accept a license agreement when installing the player, and I don't even see a license file anywhere.
Is it possible that Adobe actually did something really good here?
You know, it's funny. *I* had a miserable experience with a Toshiba laptop and customer support (and CompUSA). So I vowed two things: never again CompUSA, and never again Toshiba laptops. I picked up an HP laptop (Pavilion dv4100) at Staples, and I've had a much, much better experience with that laptop and that store.
I guess I shouldn't extrapolate too much based on two data points, but for now HP and Staples have my business.
The minute they provided him with any resource to work on it (work time, computer, etc...) it became theirs.
I'm not so sure. If I take the source code for GCC, and make an improvement to it on a state-owned computer, does the state suddenly own the copyright on all of GCC? That seems analogous to me. (I don't know if the issue is affected by the fact that the same human was doing both the state-funded work and the private-citizen work on the code.)
Maybe the state has a fair claim to the code that was developed on its time/resources, and the trooper has claim to all the rest of the code? If so, then it seems to me that anyone wanting to use the combined code can only do so in a way that's compatible with both parties' licensing.
BUT... If either party was the first to claim a license that affected derived works (GPL, for instance), than I think that might get stickier. For instance, if the first scrap of code was developed at the state, then (depending on the state, I suspect) the code is public domain. If the trooper then added to that code on his own time, and GPL'ed it, he introduced two issues: he didn't have the authority to GPL the code that was already in the public domain, but he DID successfully put the GPL n code that he introduced at home. So if he then added on to that GPL'ed code on state time, he was theoretically acting as a state employee who violated the GPL, since as a state employee (I'm guessing) he doesn't have the authority to release code under the GPL.
Messy stuff. I'm guessing the best resolution is an amicable one, for instance having the trooper dual-license his code. Otherwise we might in the end a piece of software built from fragments that were illicitly combined, and the overall package isn't licensable.
(All of the following is wild speculation, so please don't think I'm saying it with a sanctimonious voice...)
I think the general issue here is we have a clash of epistemologies. Science says "X", and the fundamentalist in the original post claims that the Bible says, "not X".
This isn't necessarily a debate about science; it's a debate about the truthfulness of a scientific claim. Your (and many people's) takes on it is that science is the only valid way justify a belief about the physical world. The fundamentalist is saying, no, there are other additional ways to know truth about the physical world, so the science must be wrong.
I think the fundamentalist and scientists might be arguing different issues in the first place anyway. (Bummer - no time to finish post. Oh well - at least I made one point. TTYL.)
Science will let you keep going further, until we reach some limit of exploration. That limit may be technical or theoretical, but it's always a temporary limit to be overcome so that science can progress further.
My guess is that most intellectual disciplines, including science and theology, have some questions related to their underpinnings the the discipline itself cannot answer.
Debating the issues only works after people have been taught to think critically, and the fundamental problem with these fundamentalists is that they're trying to prevent that from happening in the first place.
I'm not so sure, on two counts. First, learning by working with examples is a lot more motivating. I'd much rather consider issues of authority claims, how to handle experts whose topics you don't have the time to understand, etc. with an issue of real concern than with a dead issue. At least the outcome of this debate matters. Motivating students to care about a issue like critical thinking can be tough, and this is a pretty fiery topic to engage at least some of them.
As far as fundamentalists trying to prevent critical thinking, I wonder if you're over-generalizing from some yokels you've met to the whole theology of fundamentalism. I think your real beef may be with dogmatism, which certainly is an element of fundamentalism. But it's possible to hold fundamentalist beliefs (i.e. the Bible is the inspired word of God) without overly relying on dogma to hold that belief. And I think we need to be honest: any beliefs we hold, even those regarding the epistemic respectability of science, eventually are justified by a dogma if you as the question "why?" with enough repetitions.
The problem isn't in saying that "global warming is only a theory;" the problem is elevating the words of the Bible to the same status. Whatever the Bible says is not a theory no matter how much someone might believe in it, because it's not scientific.
This is an epistemic issue: what's a more reliable source of truth? I'm agnostic and I've wrestled with this one for quite a while. My current take on it is that while there may be some self-proclaimed Christians who have little justification for their faith in God, there are some I've met who seem to have pretty decent justification, either based on personal experiences or by philosophical judgments on the matter. These people can sometimes be fundamentalist, but because they have strong justifications for their conclusions I don't think they're dogmatic. So for these people, when science (which isn't a perfect system, and does IMHO involve a lot of subjectivity in how it's typically practiced) and religion collide, they may have good warrant to choose the religious conclusions on the matter.
Let me put it this way: the whole point of science is to teach skepticism, systematic investigation, and logic. When these
I thought the point of science (for most people, anyway) was to discover truths about the physical world, no? Teaching skepticism, systematic investigation, and logic is a helpful means to that end, but teaching those things isn't (at least to me)
the goal.
assholes try to tell kids that the Bible has the same status as scientific theories, they're making a direct attack on those principles. Skepticism is not faith, investigation is not dogma, and logic is not irrationality, yet these people are trying to damage the children by brainwashing them into confusing the two!
I guess what I'm confused about is that you're advocating skepticism in the scientific process, but you're attacking a group of people specifically because they're expressing skepticism. Note that they didn't say, "global warming cannot be taught" (I think, anyway). Is there some reason you don't think having the kids study the debate is a good idea in this case?
Kids are often surprisingly smart, if you just tell them the real deal. A critical missing element of public education is teaching kids to adjudicate competing claims. This topic is a wonderful opportunity to teach science, civics, critical thinking, and world religions in a single issue, without being dry.
It would be a shame for us to simply demand that the school board decide that global warming is the truth, and miss a great teaching opportunity. I hope we don't do that.
a majority of Americans would prefer to earn $100,000 while everyone else earns $85,000, rather than earning $110,000 while everyone else earns $200,000.
On a purely historical note, this sounds very much like a claim made by the ancient Greek historian, Herodotus. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herodotus. IIRC, he figured that a basic cause of human motivation was the discontent caused by envy of one's neighbors.
... results in greater civil unrest, which will often manifest as violence and other criminal activity (looting, etc).
That's totally correct according to my experience. The other night, the Russians had a war that lasted too long, and like even the people in Minsk rioted, and they totally trashed the temple. Man, Civ III is awesome...
DRM is a major factor in my disinterest in buying HD-related products, from sets to players to disks. And it's not that I'm generally a scofflaw: I willing pay licensing fees for my music and movies. The reason I avoid DRM-infected products and content is that they don't let me fully exercise my fair-use freedoms (backup, time-shifting, etc.)
So I'm thrilled that the studios and hardware people are having a rough time of this. I doubt that they'll ever say, "DRM is preventing an resolution to the format wars", but at this point I pretty much just want DRM pushers to suffer.
How did we get to the point where vendors get to dictate how we cancel a subscription, and where if we have a billing dispute it's our problem rather than the vendors' ?
I'm just thinking out loud about how we can get out of this hell...
Maybe we should have a small number of standardized commercial interaction types, similarly to the way we strive for a small set of standardized OSS licenses? Each standardzied interaction type would specify response times, techniques for dealing with various operations (cancellation, billing dispute, etc.) Because they were standardized and few, customers could fairly easily have foreknowledge of details before beginning a transaction. For example:
Standard "Pro-rated Continuing Charge Transaction" - Customer is billed $ X each month, on the first day of the following month. Customer is charged for any day that the transaction remained active. Cancellations may be ordered by calling xxx-yyy-zzzz during the following days/hours:...
Another option is having trusted third parties similar to PayPal. I.e., all billing, subscriptions, cancellations etc. occur through this third party, who in some way is strongly incented to remain unbiased. That is, they have no incentive to make cancellation difficult, overbill, etc.
Even if the lifespan is 10x less than the thought experiment suggests, that's still about 3-4x the warranty length of today's consumer level hard drives.
I would agree, but I'm not sure you see a point I'm making. I don't think it makes sense to talk about a drive having a single, specific "lifetime". If I'm right that the number of usable sectors will gradually (but with increasing speed) decrease over time, then we shouldn't talk about a drive's "lifetime". Instead we should maybe talk about things like, "How long until at 20% of the sectors have failed?".
So, with 2 million writes per sector, you have to write 3200 MB * 2E6 = 6.4E9 MB before the drive fails.
Actually I don't think your statistical reasoning is quite right here. Here's why:
You're assuming that all sectors will fail after the same number of write (2,000,000). So in your model, the drive entirely works, and then at a certain point the sector writes start failing one after another until the drive is toast.
Suppose each sector has some number of writes after which it will fail, and you know the writes-until-failure number for each sector. Then what we'll see isn't the entire drive working, and then the entire drive failing. Instead we'll see the number of usable sectors in the drive decay as more writes occur. It may be something like an exponential decay, since having fewer sectors over which to perform wear leveling will lead to each of the remaining sectors getting written to more often.
Conventional wisdom / rumor is that these non-volatile memories have a limited number of write cycles before they fail. I still haven't heard anyone explain why that wouldn't be a problem for these drives. Anyone?
The second something that tries to play off one of these signing statements goes to court, does anybody really, honestly believe that they would hold any legal water?
First of all, you might never find out your mail was opened, so you may not even know to file a suit. And if you knew it was opened, the state secrets doctrine might be invoked during any lawsuit you brought against the administration.
Slashdot Mirror
I was getting ready to gripe about onerous EULA terms, so I started looking around for the actual text and found... nothing? I wasn't asked to accept a license agreement when installing the player, and I don't even see a license file anywhere.
Is it possible that Adobe actually did something really good here?
You know, it's funny. *I* had a miserable experience with a Toshiba laptop and customer support (and CompUSA). So I vowed two things: never again CompUSA, and never again Toshiba laptops. I picked up an HP laptop (Pavilion dv4100) at Staples, and I've had a much, much better experience with that laptop and that store.
I guess I shouldn't extrapolate too much based on two data points, but for now HP and Staples have my business.
Maybe the state has a fair claim to the code that was developed on its time/resources, and the trooper has claim to all the rest of the code? If so, then it seems to me that anyone wanting to use the combined code can only do so in a way that's compatible with both parties' licensing.
BUT... If either party was the first to claim a license that affected derived works (GPL, for instance), than I think that might get stickier. For instance, if the first scrap of code was developed at the state, then (depending on the state, I suspect) the code is public domain. If the trooper then added to that code on his own time, and GPL'ed it, he introduced two issues: he didn't have the authority to GPL the code that was already in the public domain, but he DID successfully put the GPL n code that he introduced at home. So if he then added on to that GPL'ed code on state time, he was theoretically acting as a state employee who violated the GPL, since as a state employee (I'm guessing) he doesn't have the authority to release code under the GPL.
Messy stuff. I'm guessing the best resolution is an amicable one, for instance having the trooper dual-license his code. Otherwise we might in the end a piece of software built from fragments that were illicitly combined, and the overall package isn't licensable.
(All of the following is wild speculation, so please don't think I'm saying it with a sanctimonious voice...)
I think the general issue here is we have a clash of epistemologies. Science says "X", and the fundamentalist in the original post claims that the Bible says, "not X".
This isn't necessarily a debate about science; it's a debate about the truthfulness of a scientific claim. Your (and many people's) takes on it is that science is the only valid way justify a belief about the physical world. The fundamentalist is saying, no, there are other additional ways to know truth about the physical world, so the science must be wrong.
I think the fundamentalist and scientists might be arguing different issues in the first place anyway. (Bummer - no time to finish post. Oh well - at least I made one point. TTYL.)
My guess is that most intellectual disciplines, including science and theology, have some questions related to their underpinnings the the discipline itself cannot answer.
As far as fundamentalists trying to prevent critical thinking, I wonder if you're over-generalizing from some yokels you've met to the whole theology of fundamentalism. I think your real beef may be with dogmatism, which certainly is an element of fundamentalism. But it's possible to hold fundamentalist beliefs (i.e. the Bible is the inspired word of God) without overly relying on dogma to hold that belief. And I think we need to be honest: any beliefs we hold, even those regarding the epistemic respectability of science, eventually are justified by a dogma if you as the question "why?" with enough repetitions.
This is an epistemic issue: what's a more reliable source of truth? I'm agnostic and I've wrestled with this one for quite a while. My current take on it is that while there may be some self-proclaimed Christians who have little justification for their faith in God, there are some I've met who seem to have pretty decent justification, either based on personal experiences or by philosophical judgments on the matter. These people can sometimes be fundamentalist, but because they have strong justifications for their conclusions I don't think they're dogmatic. So for these people, when science (which isn't a perfect system, and does IMHO involve a lot of subjectivity in how it's typically practiced) and religion collide, they may have good warrant to choose the religious conclusions on the matter.
I thought the point of science (for most people, anyway) was to discover truths about the physical world, no? Teaching skepticism, systematic investigation, and logic is a helpful means to that end, but teaching those things isn't (at least to me) the goal. I guess what I'm confused about is that you're advocating skepticism in the scientific process, but you're attacking a group of people specifically because they're expressing skepticism. Note that they didn't say, "global warming cannot be taught" (I think, anyway). Is there some reason you don't think having the kids study the debate is a good idea in this case?Kids are often surprisingly smart, if you just tell them the real deal. A critical missing element of public education is teaching kids to adjudicate competing claims. This topic is a wonderful opportunity to teach science, civics, critical thinking, and world religions in a single issue, without being dry.
It would be a shame for us to simply demand that the school board decide that global warming is the truth, and miss a great teaching opportunity. I hope we don't do that.
Even their charitable foundation has to backpedal on the previously stated scope of its projects because of complexity.
DRM is a major factor in my disinterest in buying HD-related products, from sets to players to disks. And it's not that I'm generally a scofflaw: I willing pay licensing fees for my music and movies. The reason I avoid DRM-infected products and content is that they don't let me fully exercise my fair-use freedoms (backup, time-shifting, etc.)
So I'm thrilled that the studios and hardware people are having a rough time of this. I doubt that they'll ever say, "DRM is preventing an resolution to the format wars", but at this point I pretty much just want DRM pushers to suffer.
Make it part of the critical path in music DRM. Then you know it's not secure.
Not sure about the flip-side, though.
Yes, it does. You now have good reason to believe these people aren't actual Christians.
How did we get to the point where vendors get to dictate how we cancel a subscription, and where if we have a billing dispute it's our problem rather than the vendors' ?
...
I'm just thinking out loud about how we can get out of this hell...
Maybe we should have a small number of standardized commercial interaction types, similarly to the way we strive for a small set of standardized OSS licenses? Each standardzied interaction type would specify response times, techniques for dealing with various operations (cancellation, billing dispute, etc.) Because they were standardized and few, customers could fairly easily have foreknowledge of details before beginning a transaction. For example:
Standard "Pro-rated Continuing Charge Transaction" - Customer is billed $ X each month, on the first day of the following month. Customer is charged for any day that the transaction remained active. Cancellations may be ordered by calling xxx-yyy-zzzz during the following days/hours:
Another option is having trusted third parties similar to PayPal. I.e., all billing, subscriptions, cancellations etc. occur through this third party, who in some way is strongly incented to remain unbiased. That is, they have no incentive to make cancellation difficult, overbill, etc.
Any ideas?
I would agree, but I'm not sure you see a point I'm making. I don't think it makes sense to talk about a drive having a single, specific "lifetime". If I'm right that the number of usable sectors will gradually (but with increasing speed) decrease over time, then we shouldn't talk about a drive's "lifetime". Instead we should maybe talk about things like, "How long until at 20% of the sectors have failed?".
Actually I don't think your statistical reasoning is quite right here. Here's why:
You're assuming that all sectors will fail after the same number of write (2,000,000). So in your model, the drive entirely works, and then at a certain point the sector writes start failing one after another until the drive is toast.
Suppose each sector has some number of writes after which it will fail, and you know the writes-until-failure number for each sector. Then what we'll see isn't the entire drive working, and then the entire drive failing. Instead we'll see the number of usable sectors in the drive decay as more writes occur. It may be something like an exponential decay, since having fewer sectors over which to perform wear leveling will lead to each of the remaining sectors getting written to more often.
Conventional wisdom / rumor is that these non-volatile memories have a limited number of write cycles before they fail. I still haven't heard anyone explain why that wouldn't be a problem for these drives. Anyone?
For months thedailywtf.com has seemed down to me. Are you sure it still works?