This is brilliant. Grouping a government agency's responsibilities by abstract task we're attempting to accomplish really is a better idea than grouping them by the mechanisms used to achieve the end - especially since those mechanisms inevitably change over time.
Welcome to the real world. One man's fair is another man's cheating.
You realize, of course, by this logic if you grow a years worth of food, and I steal it... well, tough luck for you. My 'fair' is your 'cheating'. Of course, if you come and kill me for it, well, tough luck for me.
We have a civilization so that sensible rules that promote equity can exist and be encouraged. Inequitable use of the commons is, simply, unfair. You can call it 'fair' all you want because there is no rule against it right now, but that doesn't make it more equitable. That just makes you an opportunistic douchebag.
You have upkeep on a house, you have to keep renewing your lease on the domain. The value of a house can fluctuate based on it's surrounding neighborhood and location. The value of a domain can fluctuate based on the market and companies it can be related to.
That would be really convincing if the cost of the domain name registration was, in fact, an actual cost. It's so small as to be a non-existent factor. Further, I think you're stretching really far to connect house value fluctuations to domain name fluctuations. I guarantee that Google.com is worth more to Google than to anyone else. This is simply not true when talking about housing prices.
How is www.chosenwebsitename.com commonly held?
The space of domain names is limited, because they cannot be created. There are a discreet number. That makes it a commonly held resource, with 'property rights' that we're sort of making up out of thin air. It's actually not surprising that the first pass was less than equitable.
P.S. Read the Tragedy of the Commons. It's basic political philosophy; if you don't understand it then your wild assertions about what is 'enlightened' only make you look uneducated.
This is the only point to which I would concede, except that I was careful to use the term "invest". Investments by nature can carry costs, more commonly referred to as "risks". In housing, you carry the risk of a recession, or housing prices dropping, as well you pay into it every year in the form of taxes. In domains, you continue paying into that domain, at the risk of receiving nothing back. Ever.
Yeah, I run the risk every day when going to work that I will be hit by a bus. But I get a lot of money to do go anyway, and do some other things besides. Would I call my job 'risky'? Probably not. Likewise, buying up domain names for very, very small amounts of money and selling them for far, far more is not that risky. That's why so many people do it. The risk+work is not commensurate to the reward; a pretty sure sign somethings not equitable.
But, then, you're clearly not interested in equity. In the first, you're interested in believing that you're part of some sort of privileged class that gets to act like douchebags because, well, they can. In the second, you're interested in defending this as right and just. I can help you with neither of these problems, as they're self involved delusions that refuse to see what the cost to other people is.
The problem here is that it's almost always more profitable to buy the domain from the jerkface than it is to not have it. Given that, even if they're cutting into your profits by being a parasite, they're still viable. Thus is the way with all successful parasites.
You're making the assumption, of course, that 'getting there with the money first' is a totally fair and equitable process. That no one starts out with more of this stuff than anyone else. Which, of course, is entirely wrong.
But you then have the poor taste to go ahead and exaggerate what someone would do in each of three cases for what you see as a totally inoffensive action. Nevermind that each of these three cases is entirely different. With real estate you have to continue to put money into it to maintain value. With stocks, you both get money out (with dividends), but are allowing others to use the money you put in to actually do something productive. You also stand to lose value there. With internet domains, neither of these situations apply.
In fact, a closer - and I dare say more logical - analogy would be the renting of a room, not the buying of a house. No one cares if you rent a room, or what you do in it - perfectly legit. Of course, if you sublet the room, most leases will state you can only sublet it for the amount of money you're renting it for, if you can do so at all. Why are internet domains any different?
You're arguing that someone who happens to have money at the creation of a new commonly held resource has all the rights to that resource. That they get to profit all they want off that resource without ever paying back into the communal holding. That is, directly, harmful to society.
You should be careful, by the way. Just because we say 'buy' a domain, that does not mean in actuality 'buy'. It means 'lease'. Because we say 'buy', you should not confuse it with 'buying a house'. The two are not equivalent. If you want to debunk someone's logic, you should be careful to use proper logic yourself.
In truth, I made no recommendation of having anyone dictate - or even imply - what the legitimate use of a business is. Rather, I suggested that, like post office boxes, domain names be treated as a rental from an institutional body. That you can sell the domain name, but that any cost you charge above the rental fee also goes to the institutional body. Basically, you can 'buy' and squat on a domain as long as you want - if you keep paying the fee - but you can't profit from it, any more than you could profit from reselling post office boxes.
By the by, two notes. First, $4M is pocket change to a country. Less than pocket change. Secondly, whenever someone brings up the phrase 'slippery slope', even when they're using it correctly, most people, myself included, discount what they're saying. Sure, 'slippery slopes' exist, but if you can't lay out the chain of logical events that leads from x policy to y problem, waving your hands and saying 'slippery slope' isn't much of a replacement.
There used to be a time "real" land was just as plentiful as domain names.. and we did just fine.
But some people did more 'fine' than others. Specifically those people who started out with the means to buy and 'work' large swathes of land, who could then turn it over for ever larger amounts of money. There is some value in this - even if it's not an entirely equitable arrangement for those people who start with less - but that value is not seen on the internet.
It really doesn't matter how much I 'work' a domain name. It will always be more valuable to me than it will be to anyone else. If Google sold google.com (just the domain name) to IAmRussianBrideAdAgency, you can bet that while there would be an initial high flow of traffic seemingly interested in Russian Brides, but value would flee from that domain name like rats from a sinking ship as people realized that google was no longer at google.com.
I think the solution is pretty simple; you can sell a domain name to someone else for at most the time-adjusted value of all the dollars you've paid the registration company. Anything extra goes to that registration company, who gets to keep reasonable operating costs. The rest goes into a fund for internet development or research or somesuch.
Without getting all commie, people who have a lot of money, or opportunity, or options, always whine "It's nothing personal, just business." When you have the option to buy domains and sell them for 100x-1000x the price, why wouldn't you? Legally, of course, it's totally legit. Ethically, it's totally not. And I'll tell you why.
When you buy a piece of land, the law assumes that you are doing your bit to maintain and develop that land. In fact, most property law revolves around that idea of having to put work into it. You pay taxes on it, and you are generally expected to be doing something to maintain it's value. When a property falls into total - or dangerous - disrepair, they come to you with the fines. If your sidewalk is hazardous, you can get sued. This is all considered the price of ownership.
With domains, there is no such cost associated. In fact, all that buying up domains does is suck money from actual wealth-generating sectors of the economy. If I start a business called AwesomeWorldChangingWidgets, I can't get that domain if you're squatting on it without first paying you way more for that domain than you did. Now, if you were society at large, and that additional value was being spread across those people who help to bring value to the domain name itself (such as the internet routers, the municipalities that maintain fiber, ICANN, or any of the host of other sectors that make the Internet viable), that would be fair. But you're just taking the money and running: you're taking the money for someone else's work.
The only complaint anyone ever has with capitalism is the 'I got here first' problem. When you start out with resources others didn't have a fair opportunity at, and then exchange them for disproportionately large sums of money, you're playing into this. Yes, it makes your life easier, but you've only helped yourself - and at the expense of literally everyone else. That makes you unethical.
In short; it doesn't. If there is some marker that, logically, makes a thing unethical, then it's reasonable to make rules against it. But right now we deal with the difference between sex and violence like we used to deal with the difference in races; sure, one is sex and the other is just violence, and it happens that we're comfortable with violence, but not sex. But how much of that comfort is the result of exposure, and not the supposed underlying 'betterness' of it? Arguably, depiction of sex ought to be more acceptable, as it has little to do, in general, with hurting people - something that is clearly unethical.
If there was a good case to be made against the depiction of child molestation (and, given that it's a real problem, I'm not sure there is), then one might make policy against it. One might also make policy if it is decided that increasing the exposure to such things encourages it - but if that is the case, then we ought to seriously examine violence. And greed. And a host of other human sins that we readily portray, even glorify, but have no policy against.
But then, I come from a stance wherein I think that the safety of civilization comes from it's consistency in treatment of citizens. Inconsistency leads to injustice, which in turn spawns injustice - because if you can't count on the system to protect you, how can the system count on you to support it?
Child exploitation depicted in Manga is no more ok than person on person violence depicted in literally any TV show is. The fact is that in the United States we get very crazy about certain types of inhuman, unethical or immoral behavior and totally ignore others.
Since I'm not willing to ban the depiction of all human violence, I find it unethical to ban the depiction of (however monstrous) human lust. How about you? Do you feel that the depiction or examination of a depiction of any immoral act is cause for legal recourse?
It always fascinates me, the way grown men retreat to...
Wait, wait, wait... stop right there. That's one assumption too many. Who says anyone here is a grown man? And if they happen to be so foolish, I challenge them to cite evidence... evidence sufficient to counter 99.97% of all/. posts ever.
It is easier for a corporation to change their filtration practices than it is for the subset of individuals who break CFL bulbs to clean them up.
That a brief exposure to concentrated mercury does more harm to you as an (adult) individual than constant blanket pollution of diffuse mercury in the environment.
Corporations are not willing to change. They want less regulation, not more. They don't have a natural impulse to guard individual welfare.
Mercury exposure is not super dangerous to adults. It's not good, but the biggest problem with mercury is when it's in your food and stunts the brain growth of children.
The real question is; if most people agree that CFLs are the better way to go, why is it that you disagree? Is it because of legitimate concerns, or is some part of your identity bound up in some aspect of your objection?
Or do you really think we can get somewhere without taking one step at a time?
Actually, most geeks are under the faith-based assumption that at some point, this is entirely possible. That Transporter Pads or Jump Drives or simple Teleportation is merely a question of time. It is so inculcated our geek culture that certain things will simply come easy once the elegant solution appears, as if by magic. Further, I think it affects how we view most problems.
Take environmentalism. Clearly the solution is greener products; things that will fit into a sustainable economy. But it's a binary clause; if your entire product can be green, then it should be. Otherwise, who are you fooling!? There is no sense of bootstrapping, of having to replace pieces as you can.
The subset of the culture that subscribes heavily to this stance tends to be against refactoring code, and for simply writing programs wholesale by themselves in their attic. They're against good test procedures and using older technologies because they're not shiny enough. Ironically, they're also the sorts who probably haven't written their own libraries - or even approached the idea. They buy most of their stuff, because whatever their realm of expertise, it's limited in scope. Fix plumbing? Hell no! Drill something, or saw something? What is the point - something you pay for is clearly going to be better, and in the end that arbitrary sense of idealistic quality is all that matters.
I hope that as we move forward we get more geeks like you, value_added, who recognize that it's not about suddenly being in Nirvana. It's about constantly changing the little bits that are pain points once any better solution becomes available, rather than holding out for some mythical day brought about in some opaque fashion wherein everything is just right of it's own accord.
In the end it's simple economics; the time-value of progress suggests that a little 'money' or 'value' now, and a little later, and a little later will yield a total greater value than a simple lump sum at the end.
I'm going to go ahead and note that most courses cover Big-O by using sorting algorithms as examples. If you don't understand the sorting algorithm, can you really be expected to understand how the Big-O is different?
Parroting quicksort is useless. But learning to write a sorting algorithm is a gateway to very fundamentally useful topics, such as recursion. It's not so much that the particular example (sort) is useful, it's that it teaches tricky but fundamentally useful ways of thinking.
The time and dollars necessary as well as the loss in income just wouldn't permit that to happen.
Then you're thinking inside a box you've clearly been well-trained to inhabit.
Working in higher education for nearly a decade has taught me that I am not the only one. In fact, people that think like you do are way in the minority these days.
Simply because someone is in the minority doesn't mean they're wrong. In fact, effectively all correct notions started out being held only by a minority. A good education would have taught this. But your education seems to have stopped at some point, because you're under the delusion that government and education are businesses, in the traditional sense of utilizing capital to generate profit. In fact, these two types of institutions generally realize 'profit' as something very different from money or resources. Namely, having a population of people who don't believe that all true notions spring fully-formed into the heads of an entire populace.
There is no doubt that more knowledge will be pushed over the internet, rather than in person. But what this article, and you I think, are missing is that there is more to understanding than simple knowledge. Hopefully the savings in terms of capital that electronic resources and tools can provide will be spent on developing understanding, rather than on simply spending less capital.
*shrug* I'm not convinced that Java is all that more complicated or time-consuming for the developer. And since 1.6, with annotations and generics, I'm not sure that the complaint about inflexibility is really there.
Suffice to say, I don't think that Python is the crystal clear choice. On the other hand, I'm not sure the differences are significant - so it probably is up to your coding (team's?) preference and style.
While your two links are interesting, I think you have to do more work to make your point. Can you cite why those links prove the superiority of Python? And what specifically do you mean by 'rewrite the bible'?
Regarding efficiency, I give you this. The relevant sentence: "I decided to redo several of the tests with updated versions of Python (2.5) and the JDK (Java 6). And indeed, my suspicions were confirmed: Java has made huge speed improvements, and is now faster than Python in almost all cases."
a) Our broadcasting power is quite a bit more powerful now.
b) While transmissions do disperse, and are thus correspondingly harder to read, that does not mean that they're impossible. Just harder - you'd need better equipment of some sort, be it telescopes or computers to interpolate data, or something else entirely. The point still stands; alien civilizations are unlikely not to have contacted us because it's to hard to get to us. Chances are they haven't contacted us because it just hasn't been a physical likelihood yet - and that due to distance.
One of the nice things about the universe is that it's actually pretty hard to hide phenomenon. We, for instance, have been making no attempt to not blatantly broadcast our location and existence - while the sample size is small, do you really think any other civilization is going to have their first thought upon discovering radio waves be "Damn, better be careful about using lest an impossibly distant alien race finds out where we are!"?
No, far more likely is that if there is life out there, it's simply far enough away (or, correspondingly, too young) that we haven't had the chance to see any evidence of them. But to assume that 'if there is life, of course they see us', is entirely illogical.
Please explain to me, why the only item from his list of stuff he owns that he can't sell on second hand are his DRM protected games?
Ah, but this isn't true. We buy lots of things that we have no expectation of being able to resell it. If our hypothetical person X buys a cup of coffee, walks into his office and is fired - can he sell the cup of coffee? It would be rare circumstance in which he could.
Anything personalized falls into this category; I don't want to buy your business cards off you, your nameplate, any of that. I might spend a lot of money on a portrait of my family, but there isn't going to be much chance anyone is going to buy that from me. One can buy cell phone service plans, house insurance, food, gourmet food, rose bulbs, club memberships, magazines - never with the thought that these things will be able to be traded in for something else if your circumstance changes.
Now, the fact that you can't resell something naturally reduces it's value to you, and in turn should reduce it's market price, ceterus paribus. But there is nothing inherently wrong with creating a product (or service) that is not resellable. It is only your expectation that is suggesting otherwise. But that should simply be reflected in price, not a moralistic rant against the whole idea.
It is also non-essential, it doesn't provide anything that the game could work perfectly well with without in contrast to specific processor requirements, or API versions.
That is an assumption on your part. Networking back-ends can be complicated; maybe Steam provides an actual component that is most realistically hosted with them. I'm not saying this is the case, but it's not an unreasonable possibility given the ability to save ones games remotely, and so on. They've added capabilities, not just taken them away. For that matter, I see the Steam client as essential to get at what they're offering - painless updates, ability to load up my games anywhere, ability to browse a bunch of games from home, regardless of many other distinctions between them.
Where did your use of the phrasing "sell [a] game 'on'" come from? It's odd.
A game that requires x thing - in this case Steam - is not really a new thing. Games require the Windows operating system at times. Or Direct X version 47. Or 'at least an Intel 486 Processor'. Or a CD ROM drive. Or some other game - unless expansions don't count? From an abstract perspective the complaint that you need something 'extra' doesn't hold much water. The extra thing has changed, but how does that inherently make a difference? Why does this thing cause a problem and not some other thing.
Second Hand Markets. Ok, so you're saying you want to buy a game for some period of time, and then sell it, recouping some money. How is that different from a 'service'? And if the game were to simply drop in cost, would that mean your complaint here would go away?
Frankly, I don't see the sentiment of "DRM should not in any way inconvenience the user" as being particularly salient. The world is inconveniencing. Why don't I get all games ever made now, in the past or in the future, in my head right now? It's inconvenient that I don't. Hell, that I have to work to pay for games - second hand or not - is inconvenient. The world is full of limitations. There may be a way around this one, but on the other hand there is an opportunity cost for everything, and being sad that there that is true is like being sad we don't all get what we wish for, and a pony.
Right now, the opportunity cost derives from the fact that developers need to retain some ability to pay for food. Or buy other games. It's sort of a headache for the rest of us... but if you're willing to pay for the game at a certain price, where exactly are your rights getting trampled? You even seem to be implying you'd eventually offload a game - so why are you worried about when Steam goes away as a company?
(Never mind the irony that you're both advocating this and complaining about it.)
My point is this; we're entering a new way of looking at property. Treating it as a physical item is becoming increasingly silly. Second hand markets are a reflection of the limits of physical items; I'm only going to be able to make so many tables. There are simply only so many trees in the world, and they become increasingly expensive the more I use. Eventually people will only be able to afford second hand tables. This does not hold for data. Data is no more expensive to send across the internet the 6 billionth time (total population of the Earth) than it is the first. If anything, it's cheaper.
So your complaint really seems to be; why can't you get a price reduction because you don't want to buy the game 'forever'? Am I wrong?
...as a company that's destroying people's legal right to sell on games second hand...
I love that people who rail against having to pay some arbitrary price to the developers of a game immediately turn around and claim they have a right to resell their copy of the game. Despite Steam, you have the option to buy games in a box, and furthermore you have the option to buy them second hand.
What you are failing to grok is that the cost for these options are increasingly not based on the intrinsic value of the physical item. (Which is ridiculous in this case because we're just talking about data.) The value you're getting is the ease at which you get at what you want.
I'm not a fan of DRM, but I think Steam has come up with an imperfect but workable solution. What I would love to see is for someone (and believe you me I'm working on a variant of this idea) to attack what the real problem is; namely that Steam has controlled the source. They have a superior method by which to deliver the product, but presently if you want that you have to go through them.
So, what is the product? The product (service?) is the personal use of games on any system you choose to install them on, combined with the ability to get them whenever you want (assuming net connection), and (and this is important) the ability to seamlessly connect into a social networking utility whose interface is constant throughout those games.
The Steam client is a beautiful illustration of what the end result should be; but what you're quibbling with, and what this whole discussion is about, is how the internals work. What you want is a service that can deliver the data and track what rights you have to it based on your identity - which can be worked out via another service. There is no reason that you have only one delivery service... and I don't mean 'Steam' and 'Greenhouse' per se. I only want to install one client. Rather, I mean that that client ought to be able to connect to either. It ought to be able to get my identity information (what I've bought) from any (valid) source I identify. And it ought to be able to network me across not only games delivered through different providers but also also social networks delivered through different providers.
In short; stop griping that it doesn't work like it used to. When humans came down from the trees they left off with the tail. Yeah, it sucks not being able to hold a banana with your tail, but we got over it. The key is to figure out how we can allow those normal market forces to work on what is the superior technical solution. Which requires a refining of that solution. At that point your money complaints will evaporate.
However, for the love of all that is good, lay off with the arguments that one person's quest for profit is evil, but yours is somehow sanctified.
I think you have a great point here; most workplaces don't have much idea how to effectively use highly-academically-trained individuals. Most workplaces expect a high-school educated person; they know their 'letters and numbers', and the jobs are geared towards that entry level as a result. However, when you have people who are capable of higher-level thinking, most jobs simply don't know how to integrate them effectively.
That doesn't mean buy them a plane ticket for Rome, of course, but it does mean treating them as something more than one more drone.
Slashdot Mirror
This is brilliant. Grouping a government agency's responsibilities by abstract task we're attempting to accomplish really is a better idea than grouping them by the mechanisms used to achieve the end - especially since those mechanisms inevitably change over time.
Welcome to the real world. One man's fair is another man's cheating.
You realize, of course, by this logic if you grow a years worth of food, and I steal it... well, tough luck for you. My 'fair' is your 'cheating'. Of course, if you come and kill me for it, well, tough luck for me.
We have a civilization so that sensible rules that promote equity can exist and be encouraged. Inequitable use of the commons is, simply, unfair. You can call it 'fair' all you want because there is no rule against it right now, but that doesn't make it more equitable. That just makes you an opportunistic douchebag.
You have upkeep on a house, you have to keep renewing your lease on the domain. The value of a house can fluctuate based on it's surrounding neighborhood and location. The value of a domain can fluctuate based on the market and companies it can be related to.
That would be really convincing if the cost of the domain name registration was, in fact, an actual cost. It's so small as to be a non-existent factor. Further, I think you're stretching really far to connect house value fluctuations to domain name fluctuations. I guarantee that Google.com is worth more to Google than to anyone else. This is simply not true when talking about housing prices.
How is www.chosenwebsitename.com commonly held?
The space of domain names is limited, because they cannot be created. There are a discreet number. That makes it a commonly held resource, with 'property rights' that we're sort of making up out of thin air. It's actually not surprising that the first pass was less than equitable.
P.S. Read the Tragedy of the Commons. It's basic political philosophy; if you don't understand it then your wild assertions about what is 'enlightened' only make you look uneducated.
This is the only point to which I would concede, except that I was careful to use the term "invest". Investments by nature can carry costs, more commonly referred to as "risks". In housing, you carry the risk of a recession, or housing prices dropping, as well you pay into it every year in the form of taxes. In domains, you continue paying into that domain, at the risk of receiving nothing back. Ever.
Yeah, I run the risk every day when going to work that I will be hit by a bus. But I get a lot of money to do go anyway, and do some other things besides. Would I call my job 'risky'? Probably not. Likewise, buying up domain names for very, very small amounts of money and selling them for far, far more is not that risky. That's why so many people do it. The risk+work is not commensurate to the reward; a pretty sure sign somethings not equitable.
But, then, you're clearly not interested in equity. In the first, you're interested in believing that you're part of some sort of privileged class that gets to act like douchebags because, well, they can. In the second, you're interested in defending this as right and just. I can help you with neither of these problems, as they're self involved delusions that refuse to see what the cost to other people is.
The problem here is that it's almost always more profitable to buy the domain from the jerkface than it is to not have it. Given that, even if they're cutting into your profits by being a parasite, they're still viable. Thus is the way with all successful parasites.
You're making the assumption, of course, that 'getting there with the money first' is a totally fair and equitable process. That no one starts out with more of this stuff than anyone else. Which, of course, is entirely wrong.
But you then have the poor taste to go ahead and exaggerate what someone would do in each of three cases for what you see as a totally inoffensive action. Nevermind that each of these three cases is entirely different. With real estate you have to continue to put money into it to maintain value. With stocks, you both get money out (with dividends), but are allowing others to use the money you put in to actually do something productive. You also stand to lose value there. With internet domains, neither of these situations apply.
In fact, a closer - and I dare say more logical - analogy would be the renting of a room, not the buying of a house. No one cares if you rent a room, or what you do in it - perfectly legit. Of course, if you sublet the room, most leases will state you can only sublet it for the amount of money you're renting it for, if you can do so at all. Why are internet domains any different?
You're arguing that someone who happens to have money at the creation of a new commonly held resource has all the rights to that resource. That they get to profit all they want off that resource without ever paying back into the communal holding. That is, directly, harmful to society.
You should be careful, by the way. Just because we say 'buy' a domain, that does not mean in actuality 'buy'. It means 'lease'. Because we say 'buy', you should not confuse it with 'buying a house'. The two are not equivalent. If you want to debunk someone's logic, you should be careful to use proper logic yourself.
In truth, I made no recommendation of having anyone dictate - or even imply - what the legitimate use of a business is. Rather, I suggested that, like post office boxes, domain names be treated as a rental from an institutional body. That you can sell the domain name, but that any cost you charge above the rental fee also goes to the institutional body. Basically, you can 'buy' and squat on a domain as long as you want - if you keep paying the fee - but you can't profit from it, any more than you could profit from reselling post office boxes.
By the by, two notes. First, $4M is pocket change to a country. Less than pocket change. Secondly, whenever someone brings up the phrase 'slippery slope', even when they're using it correctly, most people, myself included, discount what they're saying. Sure, 'slippery slopes' exist, but if you can't lay out the chain of logical events that leads from x policy to y problem, waving your hands and saying 'slippery slope' isn't much of a replacement.
There used to be a time "real" land was just as plentiful as domain names.. and we did just fine.
But some people did more 'fine' than others. Specifically those people who started out with the means to buy and 'work' large swathes of land, who could then turn it over for ever larger amounts of money. There is some value in this - even if it's not an entirely equitable arrangement for those people who start with less - but that value is not seen on the internet.
It really doesn't matter how much I 'work' a domain name. It will always be more valuable to me than it will be to anyone else. If Google sold google.com (just the domain name) to IAmRussianBrideAdAgency, you can bet that while there would be an initial high flow of traffic seemingly interested in Russian Brides, but value would flee from that domain name like rats from a sinking ship as people realized that google was no longer at google.com.
I think the solution is pretty simple; you can sell a domain name to someone else for at most the time-adjusted value of all the dollars you've paid the registration company. Anything extra goes to that registration company, who gets to keep reasonable operating costs. The rest goes into a fund for internet development or research or somesuch.
Without getting all commie, people who have a lot of money, or opportunity, or options, always whine "It's nothing personal, just business." When you have the option to buy domains and sell them for 100x-1000x the price, why wouldn't you? Legally, of course, it's totally legit. Ethically, it's totally not. And I'll tell you why.
When you buy a piece of land, the law assumes that you are doing your bit to maintain and develop that land. In fact, most property law revolves around that idea of having to put work into it. You pay taxes on it, and you are generally expected to be doing something to maintain it's value. When a property falls into total - or dangerous - disrepair, they come to you with the fines. If your sidewalk is hazardous, you can get sued. This is all considered the price of ownership.
With domains, there is no such cost associated. In fact, all that buying up domains does is suck money from actual wealth-generating sectors of the economy. If I start a business called AwesomeWorldChangingWidgets, I can't get that domain if you're squatting on it without first paying you way more for that domain than you did. Now, if you were society at large, and that additional value was being spread across those people who help to bring value to the domain name itself (such as the internet routers, the municipalities that maintain fiber, ICANN, or any of the host of other sectors that make the Internet viable), that would be fair. But you're just taking the money and running: you're taking the money for someone else's work.
The only complaint anyone ever has with capitalism is the 'I got here first' problem. When you start out with resources others didn't have a fair opportunity at, and then exchange them for disproportionately large sums of money, you're playing into this. Yes, it makes your life easier, but you've only helped yourself - and at the expense of literally everyone else. That makes you unethical.
In short; it doesn't. If there is some marker that, logically, makes a thing unethical, then it's reasonable to make rules against it. But right now we deal with the difference between sex and violence like we used to deal with the difference in races; sure, one is sex and the other is just violence, and it happens that we're comfortable with violence, but not sex. But how much of that comfort is the result of exposure, and not the supposed underlying 'betterness' of it? Arguably, depiction of sex ought to be more acceptable, as it has little to do, in general, with hurting people - something that is clearly unethical.
If there was a good case to be made against the depiction of child molestation (and, given that it's a real problem, I'm not sure there is), then one might make policy against it. One might also make policy if it is decided that increasing the exposure to such things encourages it - but if that is the case, then we ought to seriously examine violence. And greed. And a host of other human sins that we readily portray, even glorify, but have no policy against.
But then, I come from a stance wherein I think that the safety of civilization comes from it's consistency in treatment of citizens. Inconsistency leads to injustice, which in turn spawns injustice - because if you can't count on the system to protect you, how can the system count on you to support it?
Child exploitation depicted in Manga is no more ok than person on person violence depicted in literally any TV show is. The fact is that in the United States we get very crazy about certain types of inhuman, unethical or immoral behavior and totally ignore others.
Since I'm not willing to ban the depiction of all human violence, I find it unethical to ban the depiction of (however monstrous) human lust. How about you? Do you feel that the depiction or examination of a depiction of any immoral act is cause for legal recourse?
The ad right below this article is an ad for Scientology. WTF /.?
It always fascinates me, the way grown men retreat to ...
Wait, wait, wait... stop right there. That's one assumption too many. Who says anyone here is a grown man? And if they happen to be so foolish, I challenge them to cite evidence... evidence sufficient to counter 99.97% of all /. posts ever.
Assumptions you make:
Corporations are not willing to change. They want less regulation, not more. They don't have a natural impulse to guard individual welfare.
Mercury exposure is not super dangerous to adults. It's not good, but the biggest problem with mercury is when it's in your food and stunts the brain growth of children.
The real question is; if most people agree that CFLs are the better way to go, why is it that you disagree? Is it because of legitimate concerns, or is some part of your identity bound up in some aspect of your objection?
Or do you really think we can get somewhere without taking one step at a time?
Actually, most geeks are under the faith-based assumption that at some point, this is entirely possible. That Transporter Pads or Jump Drives or simple Teleportation is merely a question of time. It is so inculcated our geek culture that certain things will simply come easy once the elegant solution appears, as if by magic. Further, I think it affects how we view most problems.
Take environmentalism. Clearly the solution is greener products; things that will fit into a sustainable economy. But it's a binary clause; if your entire product can be green, then it should be. Otherwise, who are you fooling!? There is no sense of bootstrapping, of having to replace pieces as you can.
The subset of the culture that subscribes heavily to this stance tends to be against refactoring code, and for simply writing programs wholesale by themselves in their attic. They're against good test procedures and using older technologies because they're not shiny enough. Ironically, they're also the sorts who probably haven't written their own libraries - or even approached the idea. They buy most of their stuff, because whatever their realm of expertise, it's limited in scope. Fix plumbing? Hell no! Drill something, or saw something? What is the point - something you pay for is clearly going to be better, and in the end that arbitrary sense of idealistic quality is all that matters.
I hope that as we move forward we get more geeks like you, value_added, who recognize that it's not about suddenly being in Nirvana. It's about constantly changing the little bits that are pain points once any better solution becomes available, rather than holding out for some mythical day brought about in some opaque fashion wherein everything is just right of it's own accord.
In the end it's simple economics; the time-value of progress suggests that a little 'money' or 'value' now, and a little later, and a little later will yield a total greater value than a simple lump sum at the end.
I'm going to go ahead and note that most courses cover Big-O by using sorting algorithms as examples. If you don't understand the sorting algorithm, can you really be expected to understand how the Big-O is different?
Parroting quicksort is useless. But learning to write a sorting algorithm is a gateway to very fundamentally useful topics, such as recursion. It's not so much that the particular example (sort) is useful, it's that it teaches tricky but fundamentally useful ways of thinking.
The time and dollars necessary as well as the loss in income just wouldn't permit that to happen.
Then you're thinking inside a box you've clearly been well-trained to inhabit.
Working in higher education for nearly a decade has taught me that I am not the only one. In fact, people that think like you do are way in the minority these days.
Simply because someone is in the minority doesn't mean they're wrong. In fact, effectively all correct notions started out being held only by a minority. A good education would have taught this. But your education seems to have stopped at some point, because you're under the delusion that government and education are businesses, in the traditional sense of utilizing capital to generate profit. In fact, these two types of institutions generally realize 'profit' as something very different from money or resources. Namely, having a population of people who don't believe that all true notions spring fully-formed into the heads of an entire populace.
There is no doubt that more knowledge will be pushed over the internet, rather than in person. But what this article, and you I think, are missing is that there is more to understanding than simple knowledge. Hopefully the savings in terms of capital that electronic resources and tools can provide will be spent on developing understanding, rather than on simply spending less capital.
*shrug* I'm not convinced that Java is all that more complicated or time-consuming for the developer. And since 1.6, with annotations and generics, I'm not sure that the complaint about inflexibility is really there.
Suffice to say, I don't think that Python is the crystal clear choice. On the other hand, I'm not sure the differences are significant - so it probably is up to your coding (team's?) preference and style.
While your two links are interesting, I think you have to do more work to make your point. Can you cite why those links prove the superiority of Python? And what specifically do you mean by 'rewrite the bible'?
Regarding efficiency, I give you this. The relevant sentence: "I decided to redo several of the tests with updated versions of Python (2.5) and the JDK (Java 6). And indeed, my suspicions were confirmed: Java has made huge speed improvements, and is now faster than Python in almost all cases."
a) Our broadcasting power is quite a bit more powerful now.
b) While transmissions do disperse, and are thus correspondingly harder to read, that does not mean that they're impossible. Just harder - you'd need better equipment of some sort, be it telescopes or computers to interpolate data, or something else entirely. The point still stands; alien civilizations are unlikely not to have contacted us because it's to hard to get to us. Chances are they haven't contacted us because it just hasn't been a physical likelihood yet - and that due to distance.
One of the nice things about the universe is that it's actually pretty hard to hide phenomenon. We, for instance, have been making no attempt to not blatantly broadcast our location and existence - while the sample size is small, do you really think any other civilization is going to have their first thought upon discovering radio waves be "Damn, better be careful about using lest an impossibly distant alien race finds out where we are!"?
No, far more likely is that if there is life out there, it's simply far enough away (or, correspondingly, too young) that we haven't had the chance to see any evidence of them. But to assume that 'if there is life, of course they see us', is entirely illogical.
Please explain to me, why the only item from his list of stuff he owns that he can't sell on second hand are his DRM protected games?
Ah, but this isn't true. We buy lots of things that we have no expectation of being able to resell it. If our hypothetical person X buys a cup of coffee, walks into his office and is fired - can he sell the cup of coffee? It would be rare circumstance in which he could.
Anything personalized falls into this category; I don't want to buy your business cards off you, your nameplate, any of that. I might spend a lot of money on a portrait of my family, but there isn't going to be much chance anyone is going to buy that from me. One can buy cell phone service plans, house insurance, food, gourmet food, rose bulbs, club memberships, magazines - never with the thought that these things will be able to be traded in for something else if your circumstance changes.
Now, the fact that you can't resell something naturally reduces it's value to you, and in turn should reduce it's market price, ceterus paribus. But there is nothing inherently wrong with creating a product (or service) that is not resellable. It is only your expectation that is suggesting otherwise. But that should simply be reflected in price, not a moralistic rant against the whole idea.
It is also non-essential, it doesn't provide anything that the game could work perfectly well with without in contrast to specific processor requirements, or API versions.
That is an assumption on your part. Networking back-ends can be complicated; maybe Steam provides an actual component that is most realistically hosted with them. I'm not saying this is the case, but it's not an unreasonable possibility given the ability to save ones games remotely, and so on. They've added capabilities, not just taken them away. For that matter, I see the Steam client as essential to get at what they're offering - painless updates, ability to load up my games anywhere, ability to browse a bunch of games from home, regardless of many other distinctions between them.
Where did your use of the phrasing "sell [a] game 'on'" come from? It's odd.
A game that requires x thing - in this case Steam - is not really a new thing. Games require the Windows operating system at times. Or Direct X version 47. Or 'at least an Intel 486 Processor'. Or a CD ROM drive. Or some other game - unless expansions don't count? From an abstract perspective the complaint that you need something 'extra' doesn't hold much water. The extra thing has changed, but how does that inherently make a difference? Why does this thing cause a problem and not some other thing.
Second Hand Markets. Ok, so you're saying you want to buy a game for some period of time, and then sell it, recouping some money. How is that different from a 'service'? And if the game were to simply drop in cost, would that mean your complaint here would go away?
Frankly, I don't see the sentiment of "DRM should not in any way inconvenience the user" as being particularly salient. The world is inconveniencing. Why don't I get all games ever made now, in the past or in the future, in my head right now? It's inconvenient that I don't. Hell, that I have to work to pay for games - second hand or not - is inconvenient. The world is full of limitations. There may be a way around this one, but on the other hand there is an opportunity cost for everything, and being sad that there that is true is like being sad we don't all get what we wish for, and a pony.
Right now, the opportunity cost derives from the fact that developers need to retain some ability to pay for food. Or buy other games. It's sort of a headache for the rest of us... but if you're willing to pay for the game at a certain price, where exactly are your rights getting trampled? You even seem to be implying you'd eventually offload a game - so why are you worried about when Steam goes away as a company?
(Never mind the irony that you're both advocating this and complaining about it.)
My point is this; we're entering a new way of looking at property. Treating it as a physical item is becoming increasingly silly. Second hand markets are a reflection of the limits of physical items; I'm only going to be able to make so many tables. There are simply only so many trees in the world, and they become increasingly expensive the more I use. Eventually people will only be able to afford second hand tables. This does not hold for data. Data is no more expensive to send across the internet the 6 billionth time (total population of the Earth) than it is the first. If anything, it's cheaper.
So your complaint really seems to be; why can't you get a price reduction because you don't want to buy the game 'forever'? Am I wrong?
...as a company that's destroying people's legal right to sell on games second hand...
I love that people who rail against having to pay some arbitrary price to the developers of a game immediately turn around and claim they have a right to resell their copy of the game. Despite Steam, you have the option to buy games in a box, and furthermore you have the option to buy them second hand.
What you are failing to grok is that the cost for these options are increasingly not based on the intrinsic value of the physical item. (Which is ridiculous in this case because we're just talking about data.) The value you're getting is the ease at which you get at what you want.
I'm not a fan of DRM, but I think Steam has come up with an imperfect but workable solution. What I would love to see is for someone (and believe you me I'm working on a variant of this idea) to attack what the real problem is; namely that Steam has controlled the source. They have a superior method by which to deliver the product, but presently if you want that you have to go through them.
So, what is the product? The product (service?) is the personal use of games on any system you choose to install them on, combined with the ability to get them whenever you want (assuming net connection), and (and this is important) the ability to seamlessly connect into a social networking utility whose interface is constant throughout those games.
The Steam client is a beautiful illustration of what the end result should be; but what you're quibbling with, and what this whole discussion is about, is how the internals work. What you want is a service that can deliver the data and track what rights you have to it based on your identity - which can be worked out via another service. There is no reason that you have only one delivery service... and I don't mean 'Steam' and 'Greenhouse' per se. I only want to install one client. Rather, I mean that that client ought to be able to connect to either. It ought to be able to get my identity information (what I've bought) from any (valid) source I identify. And it ought to be able to network me across not only games delivered through different providers but also also social networks delivered through different providers.
In short; stop griping that it doesn't work like it used to. When humans came down from the trees they left off with the tail. Yeah, it sucks not being able to hold a banana with your tail, but we got over it. The key is to figure out how we can allow those normal market forces to work on what is the superior technical solution. Which requires a refining of that solution. At that point your money complaints will evaporate.
However, for the love of all that is good, lay off with the arguments that one person's quest for profit is evil, but yours is somehow sanctified.
I think you have a great point here; most workplaces don't have much idea how to effectively use highly-academically-trained individuals. Most workplaces expect a high-school educated person; they know their 'letters and numbers', and the jobs are geared towards that entry level as a result. However, when you have people who are capable of higher-level thinking, most jobs simply don't know how to integrate them effectively.
That doesn't mean buy them a plane ticket for Rome, of course, but it does mean treating them as something more than one more drone.
That being said, the author is not really responsible for billions of dollars of mistakes, the programmers are.
Null References Don't Kill People... Programmers Kill People.