I always have heard that CEO's and other directors gets higher pay because they do job of many
Nope, they get higher pay because their actions make more of a difference to the overall profitability of a company. Look at what Carly Fiorina did to HP or Steve Jobs did to Apple to see how much of a difference a CEO can make in either direction. The difference between a good engineer and a bad engineer is a lot less to a typical company's bottom line. The problem is that Carly got paid over $20m for almost destroying the company, so the incentives are completely wrong. Do a bad job and you make a lot of money, do a good job and you make a crazy amount of money.
A few ways. The simplest one is that those people provided that person's email address. If multiple people did, they can look at mutual friends. They can use their tracking cookie to see which public Facebook pages the new person has visited, including groups (and assume that they know members of those groups). They can do the same thing for any site with a like button - if the site is related to some event or club, then they can assume that you know people who are in that club.
You can infer a huge amount of information with a little bit of pattern recognition and fuzzy matching. Facebook just has to be approximately correct, and the sheep will happily fill in the blanks for them...
In other words, not using Facebook means social isolation
Oh shit, you mean standing up for your ideals might involve some mild inconvenience? Well fuck that!
That's not a particularly worthwhile tradeoff
But if three or four of you do it then your other friends will not be able to rely on Facebook for communication within the group. So they'll start using other mechanisms, and eventually Facebook just fades into the background as 'that thing I can use for communicating with a few of my friends' and their usage starts to drop too and Facebook becomes a passing fad, rather than a dominant communication mechanism. Or you can just say 'well everyone else is doing it' (which, after all, was such a good excuse every other time it was used) and sign up.
This machine is the spiritual successor to the BBC Micro. I have here the BBC Micro User Guide, which has hand-drawn circuit diagrams in the back. In comparison, this board is very complicated. In comparison to anything modern, it's pretty simple.
Slashdot has become an RSS feed for the Raspberry Pi blog
Yes, how dare a site that claims to be 'news of nerds' cover a project to build a cheap computer designed to be interesting for school-aged nerds to play with? I demand more Apple stories, and political news!
I wrote an article (for a now-defunct tech news startup) predicting almost exactly this model, being built on top of the existing iChat voice / video architecture so you'd get free calls to Mac users and other iPhone users and only pay when calling a POTS number. I wondered in the article if it there was enough WiFi coverage for it to be able to compete with real mobile phones, even including some kind of mesh networking (which would impact the battery life). Then the iPhone came out and was a conventional phone. Good to know in hindsight that I was able to predict was Steve Jobs was thinking, even if I failed to predict what he did.
Back when I was young, I pirated some games, and I bought others. When I graduated, got a real job, and had some spending cash available, I stopped pirating games, and was a big purchaser. Between 2003 and 2005, I bought a lot of PC games. Then they drove me away from the PC and between 2005 and 2010
I was pretty much the same, up until:
I bought a lot of console games
I just stopped buying them altogether and got my gaming fix from Flash games and playing older games. In the last year, I've spent more on games from gog.com (redownload as often as you want, no DRM, nothing stopping me playing them in DOSBox or WINE other than limitations of DOSBox or WINE...) than I did in the five years before combined. Hopefully GOG will become sufficiently profitable that the rest of the industry will realise that treating your customers well encourages them to part with their money. I think I still have half a dozen games that I've bought from GOG that I haven't had time to play (or even got around to downloading) yet.
It's not really an idea unique to Ayn Rand. The Catholic Church, Nazi and Communist parties all used it before she did. In Nineteen Eighty-Four, the party knew you were guilty and so did you, the question was only what you were guilty of and how serious it was.
See, this is what is wrong with American politics. The grandparent said don't vote for the Democrats or Republicans, vote for a third party. To which you reply 'the Democrats are just as bad'. It's as if the idea of doing anything other than voting for the Red or Blue team is so alien to American voters that it won't penetrate their brains.
Why not? In 2008, Obama spent $7.39 per vote. McCain spent $5.78. As with every recent US Presidental election, the winner was the one who spent the most. $7.39 per voter really isn't that much. If you can convince voters to spend $10 on getting a president who works for the people, then you can outspend both parties. If you can persuade 5% of the electorate to give $100, then that's enough (based on past performance) to buy 50% of the popular vote...
Your politicians are bought and sold, but for far smaller sums than you seem to imagine.
And it's added for a good reason. A lot of publishing companies (including movie and record publishing companies) had geographically-limited distribution contracts, and this started to bite them hard in the last decade as Internet-based distribution became common, and even as Internet-ordering with worldwide shipping started to happen. They're now starting to realise that they don't want to accidentally limit themselves. For example, that new volcanic island that we read about last week? Maybe someone will move there and it won't be covered by existing contracts. Maybe in a couple of decades (well within current copyright terms) Virgin Galactic will set up an orbital hotel - you don't want to suddenly realise you don't have distribution rights to make films and music available in the rooms, not when you have a very rich captive audience...
There's no way to stop a user from retaining a copy of the file without yet *another* level of some nasty DRM
How is this any different from used CDs? There's nothing stopping you from copying the CD and then selling it. In fact, there's nothing stopping you from just downloading the music and skipping the buying step altogether except the idea that you need to own a license to the music, and that license is what they are selling, the file itself is largely irrelevant.
No. The hint is in the name: copyright, i.e. the (exclusive) right to make copies of a work. The copyright owner has the right to make copies. When you buy a CD, you may get (either implicitly or explicitly, depending on your jurisdiction) the right to make a single backup copy and the right to copy portions of it into the memory of a playback device as required to listen to it, but you don't get the right to make arbitrary copies. Whether you sell the copy or give it away makes no difference. When you buy a track online, a copy is created, but by someone who is authorised by the copyright holder to make copies.
It's going to be an interesting legal case because (practically) every 'move' operation on a computer is really a copy-and-delete-the-original operation, so the idea of selling the original doesn't really make sense because the original was an ephemeral copy in your network stack - the version on your hard disk is a copy of that, the version on your media player or on a backup disk is a copy of the copy.
You do realize that Valve made Portal and Valve runs Steam, yes?
So? He bought it in a box, but when he tried to install it found that the box is really just a gift certificate for a game tied to an online ID.
That's why you need to install steam the same as you need to install Origin to run an EA game. It's their distribution system just like iTunes.
No, actually it's why the last Valve game I bought was the original Half Life. They might think being their customer means that they get to control how I use the game that I purchased, but I disagree. Other people seem to be happy with it, so they stay in business, but I'm not going to help them (and no, I'm not going to pirate their stuff either - if they don't want to make it available in a form that I want to buy then I'll spend my money on something else).
he seems to have forgotten that during the Tom Baker era, the show was a bunch of miniseries. Much longer than a movie
Actually, they were about movie length. They were 4 or 6 short episodes, each of which contained a fairly long title sequence and the last couple of minutes from the previous week. If you remove the titles and the overlap between episodes, you end up with one and a half to two hours of show.
Don't forget the gay sex scenes, which are RTD's trademark and get shoehorned into every single thing he's made, irrespective of whether it actually makes sense to the story or whether sex scenes (between people of any orientation) are appropriate thematically. For some strange reason, he's actually proud of this when he's interviewed. Torchwood made it to, what, episode 3 before they had alien lesbians? And then finally admitted it had no plan with the episode 'kiss kiss, bang bank', the only episode of any show I've seen where the title was a complete and accurate summary of the entire episode.
The problem with Miracle Day was that they had a great idea for a British TV series and tried to turn it into a US series, so they had to add some filler episodes. The original draft was for six episodes, as I recall. The US network said that they couldn't do a series that short, so they extended it to ten. That just doesn't work. You can't take a story and then stretch it out to be twice as long. The one thing that might have worked was doing 5 hour-long episodes for the UK and showing them as 10 45-minute episodes in the USA (30 minutes, plus the obligatory recap because American TV viewers seem unable to remember what happened last week, plus adverts). If they'd started from scratch with the aim to make a ten-episode series, it might have worked.
So, please tell me, do you picture this happening in the US? The way the US is going it wouldn't surprise me that shit like this has happened in the 20th century, but I doubt very much stuff like this happened *under the full protection of the law* before FDR times.
Did you read the case the grandparent cited? Kelo v. City of New London upheld (at the supreme court level) the right of the state to use eminent domain laws to transfer ownership of land between private parties. This ruling means that any use that can possibly be justified - however vaguely - as serving the public interest is legal according to the fifth amendment.
If your argument is that the USA has a bit of paper that protects your rights, but doesn't enforce it, and is therefore good, then I think you won't find many supporters...
The Apache license (as well as BSD licenses) make no requirement that the source be provided, so they're not really "free software" licenses in the "freedom" sense
They're basically just free-as-in-beer distribution licenses; you can share the binaries all you want, but you can't really change them, because nobody is obligated to give you the source to go with those binaries
And how did they create those binaries? By compiling the source code, which was Apache or BSD licensed. The derived work may be proprietary, but the ASL or BSDL code it open.
The GPL only applies between two parties (three if you count the copyright holder). When Google distributes the code (source or binary) to Samsung, then they are required to also give a copy of the source to Samsung. If they do this, rather than provide an offer good for three years to provide the source later, then Google has no further GPL-related obligations. If you receive a Samsung device containing GPL'd code supplied to them by Google, then Samsung, not Google, is responsible for providing the source to you.
And if you see a clause like that in the contract, you refuse to sign. Owning anything you create that is related to your work is fine. Owning anything you create while on company time is fine. Trying to own anything else is evil. If you encounter any response other than 'our lawyers are a bit paranoid, I'll get a new copy of the contract with that clause amended for you' is a good reason to run away and never do business with that company.
Slashdot Mirror
I always have heard that CEO's and other directors gets higher pay because they do job of many
Nope, they get higher pay because their actions make more of a difference to the overall profitability of a company. Look at what Carly Fiorina did to HP or Steve Jobs did to Apple to see how much of a difference a CEO can make in either direction. The difference between a good engineer and a bad engineer is a lot less to a typical company's bottom line. The problem is that Carly got paid over $20m for almost destroying the company, so the incentives are completely wrong. Do a bad job and you make a lot of money, do a good job and you make a crazy amount of money.
A few ways. The simplest one is that those people provided that person's email address. If multiple people did, they can look at mutual friends. They can use their tracking cookie to see which public Facebook pages the new person has visited, including groups (and assume that they know members of those groups). They can do the same thing for any site with a like button - if the site is related to some event or club, then they can assume that you know people who are in that club.
You can infer a huge amount of information with a little bit of pattern recognition and fuzzy matching. Facebook just has to be approximately correct, and the sheep will happily fill in the blanks for them...
In other words, not using Facebook means social isolation
Oh shit, you mean standing up for your ideals might involve some mild inconvenience? Well fuck that!
That's not a particularly worthwhile tradeoff
But if three or four of you do it then your other friends will not be able to rely on Facebook for communication within the group. So they'll start using other mechanisms, and eventually Facebook just fades into the background as 'that thing I can use for communicating with a few of my friends' and their usage starts to drop too and Facebook becomes a passing fad, rather than a dominant communication mechanism. Or you can just say 'well everyone else is doing it' (which, after all, was such a good excuse every other time it was used) and sign up.
This machine is the spiritual successor to the BBC Micro. I have here the BBC Micro User Guide, which has hand-drawn circuit diagrams in the back. In comparison, this board is very complicated. In comparison to anything modern, it's pretty simple.
Slashdot has become an RSS feed for the Raspberry Pi blog
Yes, how dare a site that claims to be 'news of nerds' cover a project to build a cheap computer designed to be interesting for school-aged nerds to play with? I demand more Apple stories, and political news!
I wrote an article (for a now-defunct tech news startup) predicting almost exactly this model, being built on top of the existing iChat voice / video architecture so you'd get free calls to Mac users and other iPhone users and only pay when calling a POTS number. I wondered in the article if it there was enough WiFi coverage for it to be able to compete with real mobile phones, even including some kind of mesh networking (which would impact the battery life). Then the iPhone came out and was a conventional phone. Good to know in hindsight that I was able to predict was Steve Jobs was thinking, even if I failed to predict what he did.
Back when I was young, I pirated some games, and I bought others. When I graduated, got a real job, and had some spending cash available, I stopped pirating games, and was a big purchaser. Between 2003 and 2005, I bought a lot of PC games. Then they drove me away from the PC and between 2005 and 2010
I was pretty much the same, up until:
I bought a lot of console games
I just stopped buying them altogether and got my gaming fix from Flash games and playing older games. In the last year, I've spent more on games from gog.com (redownload as often as you want, no DRM, nothing stopping me playing them in DOSBox or WINE other than limitations of DOSBox or WINE...) than I did in the five years before combined. Hopefully GOG will become sufficiently profitable that the rest of the industry will realise that treating your customers well encourages them to part with their money. I think I still have half a dozen games that I've bought from GOG that I haven't had time to play (or even got around to downloading) yet.
From your post, I can tell you haven't watched much Torchwood. For which I envy you...
It's not really an idea unique to Ayn Rand. The Catholic Church, Nazi and Communist parties all used it before she did. In Nineteen Eighty-Four, the party knew you were guilty and so did you, the question was only what you were guilty of and how serious it was.
See, this is what is wrong with American politics. The grandparent said don't vote for the Democrats or Republicans, vote for a third party. To which you reply 'the Democrats are just as bad'. It's as if the idea of doing anything other than voting for the Red or Blue team is so alien to American voters that it won't penetrate their brains.
Why not? In 2008, Obama spent $7.39 per vote. McCain spent $5.78. As with every recent US Presidental election, the winner was the one who spent the most. $7.39 per voter really isn't that much. If you can convince voters to spend $10 on getting a president who works for the people, then you can outspend both parties. If you can persuade 5% of the electorate to give $100, then that's enough (based on past performance) to buy 50% of the popular vote...
Your politicians are bought and sold, but for far smaller sums than you seem to imagine.
Largely because it wants a constitutionally limited government in the same way that the confederate states wanted states rights...
And it's added for a good reason. A lot of publishing companies (including movie and record publishing companies) had geographically-limited distribution contracts, and this started to bite them hard in the last decade as Internet-based distribution became common, and even as Internet-ordering with worldwide shipping started to happen. They're now starting to realise that they don't want to accidentally limit themselves. For example, that new volcanic island that we read about last week? Maybe someone will move there and it won't be covered by existing contracts. Maybe in a couple of decades (well within current copyright terms) Virgin Galactic will set up an orbital hotel - you don't want to suddenly realise you don't have distribution rights to make films and music available in the rooms, not when you have a very rich captive audience...
There's no way to stop a user from retaining a copy of the file without yet *another* level of some nasty DRM
How is this any different from used CDs? There's nothing stopping you from copying the CD and then selling it. In fact, there's nothing stopping you from just downloading the music and skipping the buying step altogether except the idea that you need to own a license to the music, and that license is what they are selling, the file itself is largely irrelevant.
No. The hint is in the name: copyright, i.e. the (exclusive) right to make copies of a work. The copyright owner has the right to make copies. When you buy a CD, you may get (either implicitly or explicitly, depending on your jurisdiction) the right to make a single backup copy and the right to copy portions of it into the memory of a playback device as required to listen to it, but you don't get the right to make arbitrary copies. Whether you sell the copy or give it away makes no difference. When you buy a track online, a copy is created, but by someone who is authorised by the copyright holder to make copies.
It's going to be an interesting legal case because (practically) every 'move' operation on a computer is really a copy-and-delete-the-original operation, so the idea of selling the original doesn't really make sense because the original was an ephemeral copy in your network stack - the version on your hard disk is a copy of that, the version on your media player or on a backup disk is a copy of the copy.
You do realize that Valve made Portal and Valve runs Steam, yes?
So? He bought it in a box, but when he tried to install it found that the box is really just a gift certificate for a game tied to an online ID.
That's why you need to install steam the same as you need to install Origin to run an EA game. It's their distribution system just like iTunes.
No, actually it's why the last Valve game I bought was the original Half Life. They might think being their customer means that they get to control how I use the game that I purchased, but I disagree. Other people seem to be happy with it, so they stay in business, but I'm not going to help them (and no, I'm not going to pirate their stuff either - if they don't want to make it available in a form that I want to buy then I'll spend my money on something else).
64k, even with government benefits would be on the very low side for a PhD in science or a qualified pilot of jet aircraft
You get to go into space.
You get paid to go into space.
You get paid to fly a rocket into space.
You get paid to play with cool technology and fly a rocket into space.
I have a PhD, and I'd do it for rent + food.
To be fair to the Americans, the British films were pretty bad too...
he seems to have forgotten that during the Tom Baker era, the show was a bunch of miniseries. Much longer than a movie
Actually, they were about movie length. They were 4 or 6 short episodes, each of which contained a fairly long title sequence and the last couple of minutes from the previous week. If you remove the titles and the overlap between episodes, you end up with one and a half to two hours of show.
Don't forget the gay sex scenes, which are RTD's trademark and get shoehorned into every single thing he's made, irrespective of whether it actually makes sense to the story or whether sex scenes (between people of any orientation) are appropriate thematically. For some strange reason, he's actually proud of this when he's interviewed. Torchwood made it to, what, episode 3 before they had alien lesbians? And then finally admitted it had no plan with the episode 'kiss kiss, bang bank', the only episode of any show I've seen where the title was a complete and accurate summary of the entire episode.
The problem with Miracle Day was that they had a great idea for a British TV series and tried to turn it into a US series, so they had to add some filler episodes. The original draft was for six episodes, as I recall. The US network said that they couldn't do a series that short, so they extended it to ten. That just doesn't work. You can't take a story and then stretch it out to be twice as long. The one thing that might have worked was doing 5 hour-long episodes for the UK and showing them as 10 45-minute episodes in the USA (30 minutes, plus the obligatory recap because American TV viewers seem unable to remember what happened last week, plus adverts). If they'd started from scratch with the aim to make a ten-episode series, it might have worked.
So, please tell me, do you picture this happening in the US? The way the US is going it wouldn't surprise me that shit like this has happened in the 20th century, but I doubt very much stuff like this happened *under the full protection of the law* before FDR times.
Did you read the case the grandparent cited? Kelo v. City of New London upheld (at the supreme court level) the right of the state to use eminent domain laws to transfer ownership of land between private parties. This ruling means that any use that can possibly be justified - however vaguely - as serving the public interest is legal according to the fifth amendment.
If your argument is that the USA has a bit of paper that protects your rights, but doesn't enforce it, and is therefore good, then I think you won't find many supporters...
The Apache license (as well as BSD licenses) make no requirement that the source be provided, so they're not really "free software" licenses in the "freedom" sense
The Free Software Foundation appears to disagree with you.
They're certainly not opensource licenses since they make no requirement that the source be open
The Open Source Initiative appears to disagree with you.
They're basically just free-as-in-beer distribution licenses; you can share the binaries all you want, but you can't really change them, because nobody is obligated to give you the source to go with those binaries
And how did they create those binaries? By compiling the source code, which was Apache or BSD licensed. The derived work may be proprietary, but the ASL or BSDL code it open.
The GPL only applies between two parties (three if you count the copyright holder). When Google distributes the code (source or binary) to Samsung, then they are required to also give a copy of the source to Samsung. If they do this, rather than provide an offer good for three years to provide the source later, then Google has no further GPL-related obligations. If you receive a Samsung device containing GPL'd code supplied to them by Google, then Samsung, not Google, is responsible for providing the source to you.
And if you see a clause like that in the contract, you refuse to sign. Owning anything you create that is related to your work is fine. Owning anything you create while on company time is fine. Trying to own anything else is evil. If you encounter any response other than 'our lawyers are a bit paranoid, I'll get a new copy of the contract with that clause amended for you' is a good reason to run away and never do business with that company.