Hang on, the GP's meaning about rootkits is unclear. I took it to mean that rootkits aren't an issue because respectable businesses understand they are a big no-no, and don't try to employ them. But maybe you're right, and he's trying to say that for most people having a rootkit on your machine is no big deal.
As to the other part, about people not buying CDs anymore, I cite a Special Report in the Economist a few years back (sorry, don't recall which issue exactly) that mentioned how a survey of young people's musical tastes went. At the end, to thank the participants, they offered free CDs. They were shocked that the young participants did not want CDs, even for free! Shows a cartoon of an unhappy music executive offering the top CD from a dusty, cobwebbed stack.
No, no, the best way to strike back is to make a counterproposal. Propose that copyright be eliminated. Call it the "Freedom of Knowledge Amendment", and in this document revoke copyright and patents. Currently, not even the Pirate Party goes that far, advocating reform rather than elimination. But if such a proposal gained some traction, it would confuse and scare Big Media like nothing since Napster. They might even adopt the tactics of McCarthy's Un-American Activities Committee to fight it. After all, they think libre software and entertainment is positively Communist.
I think the psychological problem is "fear of loss", to irrational levels, in combination with fear of the unknown. People are so afraid of losing what they think they have, that often they won't make a trade that is clearly to their benefit especially when it is uncertain how large the benefit is or if there's a small chance it will result in a small loss. It's also why theft is such a heinous crime.
Note I said "think they have" rather than "have". In this case, the media moguls have tried very hard to frame copying as no different than stealing, and ideas as no different than real property, to engage people's strong negative emotions towards theft. Convince the public that some activity is theft, and you've gone a long ways towards censuring that activity.
When I saw Star Trek as a child, I found Spock by far the creepiest character. The whole idea that all emotions were bad didn't feel right, so to speak. This however certainly fits the scientific mind set of the 1960's, which preferred to ignore emotions as unscientific, and too easily dismissed them as dangerous relics of our savage, barbaric, animal heritage, soon to evolve away as humanity became more sophisticated. And there are plenty of senselessly destructive emotions such as spite. But what about love, friendship, caring, empathy, trust, and sacrifice? These are good emotions. Many people who lack such feelings become infamous for acts that are shocking in their callous disregard for others. There was no telling what sort of monstrous act Spock might find perfectly logical. One of the most chilling lines was from Mirror Mirror, in which Spock protested that terrorizing was only logical, as the empire's unity depended on it.
Another bit of Star Trek dialogue of interest comes from I, Mudd, near the start. Kirk and Spock quickly figure out that Mudd had to depart some place rapidly because he infringed on the intellectual property of a people who have "no sense of humor". What strikes me about that is the assumption that copyright is somehow a universal principle. Yeah, Hollywood wishes! Sometimes they hint that money is obsolete (in The Neutral Zone, Ralph Offenhouse is told money doesn't mean anything anymore when he wants to know how his investments have done), but intellectual property is alive and well! Since noticing that one in I, Mudd, I've observed Hollywood is not at all shy or subtle about shoving propaganda about intellectual property into their shows here and there.
Software development times are extremely variable. It all depends on how much good quality reusable existing code and tools were found or known about beforehand.
How long it would take to write an Office Suite using no tools, environments, or libraries newer than what we had in 1984? No Linux, no Windows, no MacIntosh, just one of the many DOSes. Probably have to be C, Pascal, or some kind of BASIC, and that only if performance wasn't an issue. Otherwise, it would have to be assembler. C++ existed then, but was too new to have much support. No mouse either. It would run on an 80x25 text screen, unless the developer had the time and energy to make a graphical interface.
Wish more people would not take this kind of stuff lying down. Especially in cases where the business is not a monopoly. For instance, I don't understand why anyone still banks at Bank of America. They don't have a monopoly, far from it, and they treat their customers like wolves treat cattle. And why does anyone pay for cable TV? Can't be for the absence of ads!
Cutting the land line doesn't help save money, not while the price of cell phone service remains outrageous. Internet service and phone service should have fallen well below $20 per month years ago. Over the years, hardware prices have dropped dramatically, but somehow these service providers have been unable to pass any of that savings on to customers. MMORPGs have been forced to offer alternatives to the crazy $10 per month kinds of plans. We have sub $100 laptops such as the Raspberry Pi. We even won the right to keep our phone numbers. Why can't we have $5 per month phone service and broadband Internet service?
The question is whether this quantum computer is a fake. Does it have 512 qbits, or zero and their simulated annealing actually was computed classically, whether or not the experimenters realized that? 512 qbits is such a fantastic leap forward that that alone calls into doubt their whole story.
All this reminds me of an SBIR I saw some 10 years ago. The military wanted quantum data compression. They didn't want just an algorithm, mind, they wanted a working machine. But a working quantum computer alone wasn't good enough for them, had to do data compression or they wouldn't award any money to the small business. It's as if they wanted faster than light travel so they could use it for golfing trips to Mars, or cold fusion to power the coffee pots on their ships. Another time I saw a story on the news about the military studying the possibility of teleportation, Star Trek style. Made me wonder who writes these SBIRs. I also wondered if the SBIRs had only recently gotten that stupid, like, say, shortly after George W. Bush came to power.
One problem with Star Trek style teleportation is that if it is possible at all, it would be ridiculously easy to just create a copy of the object, and stop there rather than go on to all the trouble of erasing the original to make it seem as if teleportation occurred. Every single time a crewman "teleports" they are actually being copied and the original killed off. The 19th century saw lots of claims of perpetual motion, and even today we still have cranks trying to do it. In the late 20th century, we had infinite data compression and cold fusion to name just 2. Currently, some fools' favorite area of effort might be DRM and coypright enforcement. Perhaps quantum computing will turn out to be the fool's errand of the next few decades.
For me, drivers are more important than hardware. The difference in speed between the flaky, wonky proprietary drivers and the fairly steady but dog slow open source drivers are on the order of 10x.
They still aren't competing for the Linux market. I have older low end stuff, an AMD machine (Phenom II with an HD 5450), and an Intel+Nvidia machine (Core 2 Quad Q6600 with a GeForce 8500GT that I recently replaced with a fanless GT 610), and in neither can I get satisfactory Linux support. The proprietary driver on the Nvidia box has the best performance. Next best is the AMD box with the open source driver. (I haven't tried Catalyst, so I don't know how good AMD can be.) The Nouveau driver is horrible for 3D acceleration. ATI/AMD has repeatedly promised they would help open source drivers use the full potential of their hardware, but thus far they haven't delivered. NVidia has flat out refused to help, and has tried to claim that keeping their proprietary driver up to date is being supportive of open source.
Hearing that Intel has turned over a new leaf, and that their recent integrated graphics offerings, the HD 4000s and 3000s, actually have some decent performance, with decent support in open source drivers, in contrast to the miserable performance of everything they've offered since the start of the new millenium, I decided to give them a try. Intel's HD 4000 with the open source driver blows away AMD's HD 5450 with the open source driver. It's not competitive with high end graphics cards, but it is good enough to do 3D graphics at 1920x1280 at a frame rate that while not by any means smooth isn't too intolerably jerky, maybe about 10 frames per sec.
Doubtles there is plenty of lying, but I think you're too cynical.
I've been looking into the losing sides of conflicts, and disasters, trying to see what is typical of human behavior in such stressful situations. And here we see a lot of second guessing, attempts at self justifications and at shifting the blame, and coverups. Most people just aren't honest when honesty requires admitting that maybe they screwed up, or expected too much. Not surprising, I suppose.
Some examples. In the US Civil War, Lee took full responsibility for the loss at Gettysburg, saying that he asked more of his men than they could deliver, and offering to resign. In contrast, Jefferson Davis and General Joseph Johnston constantly bickered over each other's decisions and expectations. Davis was very disappointed that Johnston did not attack to try to lift the siege of Vicksburg, accusing Johnston of not being aggressive enough. Later, Johnston defended Georgia against Sherman, slowly retreating until they had reached Atlanta, whereupon Davis relieved Johnston. The new commander, Hood, could not save Atlanta either, and lost a great number of men in reckless assaults trying to do so. One thing that struck me about this was that Davis seemed near delusional about the Confederacy's capabilities and chances. But both talked as if the war wasn't all but hopeless, as if a change of strategy, style or character in the other could have lead to a Confederate victory, and blame for the eventual Confederate loss could therefore be laid squarely at the feet of some or all of the leaders, instead of the enormous imbalance in power between the 2 sides. But such an acknowledgement would only mean that the blame could be pushed back further, to the people who started the whole war, who should have realized it wasn't winnable. Sherman made this point, trying to tell the southerners that given the strengths of the 2 sides, they were crazy for trying to rebel, and it would only lead to the devastation of the South, as indeed happened. Hitler's attitude as revealed in his final message in which he blamed the German people for not trying hard enough and for not being worthy of him, was similar.
More recently, the Northeast blackout of 2003 has been fairly well documented, but there are some features of it that remain, well, dark. I recall a report that noted that during the blackout, allergies everywhere cleared up. Some years later when I tried to hunt this report down, I couldn't find it. Only thing I was able to turn up was a report about asthma, not allergies. Maybe I misremembered? But that's just the sort of information industries are so notorious for trying to suppress. They've done it over and over, with asbestos, bisphenol A, nicotine, radium, and lead. "Doubt is our product". Fukushima also featured a lot of lying and covering of asses. The propaganda is so pervasive, I suspect toxic chemicals and pollution have a lot more to do with our current obesity epidemic and other health problems than the public realizes. The public has been fooled into buying our laziness, bad dietary choices, and bad genes as the major and perhaps sole reasons for the obesity. All the easier, as there is a lot of evidence pointing that way. And now a new culprit has come to light, the bacteria in our guts. But when this is all over, I imagine future histories of the late 20th and early 21st centuries will finger the explosion in indiscriminate use of novel chemicals as the reason behind a lot of our current troubles, just as we now know that lead poisoning played a large part in the fall of the Roman Empire.
Both the briber and the recipient (if the bribe was accepted), are guilty. We absolutely should bash Apple, and Exxon, GE, Amazon, and the rest of these tax dodging cheaters. If successful, it will make our society fairer.
That also includes propaganda organs masquerading as charities deserving of non-profit status. The current furor over the IRS's alleged partisanship in singling out Tea Party groups for a harder look does not take into consideration that they are overwhelmingly the ones trying to break those rules. The left didn't try that on anything like the scale the right did, so of course IRS investigations could seem biased. The hard right is not very bright, and really seems to have difficulty understanding that what they tried is wrong. They don't understand the difference between science and propaganda, and behave as if the end justifies the means. Cheating and lying is seemingly okay with them, and indeed is rationalized away as not cheating and lying as long as it's for a cause they favor, such as banning abortion and denying that there is mankind caused climate change. The ultimate refusal to acknowledge responsibility for anything is the total cop out "it's God's will". Yes, a pregnancy from a rape is God's intent, as is climate change, war, market crashes, nuclear accidents, and oil spills. "Stuff happens". All that could even be divine punishment for allowing homosexuals to marry.
The Republican Party has sunk to an unholy alliance of radical social conservatives of limited intelligence, and cunning but ultimately foolish and corrupt business interests who find those idiots useful whenever they want to employ the bullshit tactics of doubt and denial to suppress scientific or legal investigations which might hurt their profits, even though it would benefit us all, including them, to have dangers illuminated rather than denied. The contradictions have become ever more ridiculous, with them screaming about the supposed need to Balance the Budget, but refusing to even consider two major ways of doing so, which is to Raise Taxes or Cut Military Spending. Instead, the budget is to be balanced by cutting back on the policing of the rich.
On the contrary, it may be perfectly legal, even in the US. Lists of phone numbers and addresses, voting records of public servants, and other facts or assemblies of facts cannot be copyrighted. Even interpretations of historic events could be quotes of material that is no longer under copyright. A purely factual history book could quite possibly contain no copyrightable information. If on the other hand mere recountings of history are copyrightable, one wonders whether the authors stepped on others' copyrights. The historic information came from somewhere.
But all that is a minor point. Likely the history book has recent thinking of scholars about the deeper meanings of the historic events covered. If not, and there wasn't any copyrightable material in the draft, we can be pretty sure that the publisher added some no matter how inaccurate or irrelevant, to cover this exact situation.
The important part of this matter is that knowledge of history should be freely available to all citizens. If they don't have a copyleft history book, they should make one.
That's only when everything is in good condition. Lot of house fires are started by degraded wiring. Anything that thins the conductive material or loosens a connection can increase the resistance at that spot so it will get hot enough to start a fire the next time someone uses a power hungry device such as a vacuum cleaner. As long as there's nothing flammable nearby, it may not cause any harm, but if this wiring is in a couch, could be a serious problem.
All kinds of things can degrade the wiring. Ants, especially fire ants and now these crazy ants can chew the insulation, and build nests. I've seen an outlet stop working because the home's foundation had cracked, and shifted the walls enough to pull the wires out of the receptacles on the outlet. Also, builders almost always do the cheapest, shoddy electrical work code and inspectors allow them to get away with. Fortunately code is pretty strict these days, but it wasn't always. Then there's the do-it-yourself home owner who is completely ignorant of code and decides to add some extra lighting or a ceiling fan. Must watch out for older homes. One will find circuit breakers that were poorly designed (Stab-Lok models, for instance), outlets that were never properly grounded or that are near sinks and bathtubs and lacking GFI, and wiring run sideways through the walls or that has no slack or is too close to something else such as a fireplace's chimney.
If we want to wire up furniture, it will take some effort to do it safely. We've dealt with safety by simply keeping electricity away from flammable material and water.
you are completely divorcing any value from the actual creation of the artwork
By saying that the created works have no inherent value...
No, that is not what I said. Your arguments assume that the best way to realize the value of works of art is to control copying, and therefore anyone who says copying should be unregulated must not want to compensate artists fairly for their art. But the premise is wrong. (You claim that I insulted your intelligence. By making such a bad fallacious argument like the above, you demonstrate that if your intelligence was insulted, you deserved it. A good deal of what you wrote is based on that argument, and it is all immediately made moot as soon as it is realized the argument is fatally flawed.) Regulating copying is not necessary to compensate artists. Indeed, we have seen it is a poor way. I want artists to be compensated! But I also realize that life has many other priorities, and that a compensation method that is fair to artists should not utilized if it is unfair to everyone else, and if there are better ways. Copyright is unfair to the public, and there are better ways. Also, it is highly important to keep in mind another implication in that argument, which is that copying can be regulated. But can it? No! Not any more.
The entertainment industry has a long history of fighting every innovation, and losing, and then seeing their business grow far more than it would have had they won. AM radio brought music to many people who would never have heard it otherwise, turning many of them into fans, yet the industry tried to kill it. I believe that pattern will repeat in this instance. As copyright as we know it dies, the business of producing art will not shrink, it will expand! By trying so hard to maintain and expand copyright, these rights holders are actually hurting their own business. Pirates and technology are artists' best friends. It is these rights holders who are the enemies. They hurt art when they sue artists' customers and fans, and stoop to such despicable lows as trying to terrorize and extort the entire body public with shady legal trickery, bribe lawmakers, and attempt to evade public discourse by negotiating treaties in secret. With a track record like that, it is little wonder that they show no scruples towards the artists either, cheating the very people they claim to be fighting for so often that there's a name for it: Hollywood Accounting.
...you'd be able to control how the book was copied
There you go again, expanding what copyright does. No, artists should not get to dictate what use others make of their works, not even how it shall be copied. I realize they can try to demand all kinds of things of publishers, from the editing right down to the font and paper quality, but I think they shouldn't have any say in that, unless of course they'd like to print copies themselves. We specifically state a number of exceptions, such as that anyone may make a parody, or write as negative a review as they wish, or may quote small parts of it ("fair use"), but that's a negative way to go about it. This has de facto meant that anything not specifically allowed defaults to forbidden, as it is too costly to ask a court to rule on every tiny variation. And so, for instance, blind people aren't allowed to have a device read a book to them. That's crazy. I really don't see why we should hang on to this tradition of exclusive publishing either. Mostly, while a work is under copyright only one publisher at a time gets to publish editions, for no real good reason. So long as the artists are compensated, what does it matter who prints copies? Why shouldn't 2 or more printers be able to print copies of a book? Why do they have to get the author's permission?
You are confused on a number of points. Copyright is only a means by which artists are encouraged to produce art. A lot of people are still convinced that there is no other way and that without copyright artists will starve and we'll have no more art. That is of course hysterical nonsense. There are many other ways. Patronage is a big one that is centuries old. You express grave doubts that patronage can be effective. I think you ought to give it another chance, rather than continue to cling to copyright which has so obviously failed in so many ways. With our greatly enhanced ability to communicate, we, the people, should be able to do patronage far, far better than it ever was done in Mozart's day, and we are. The Humble Bundles are a form of patronage. There's also merchandizing and endorsements, public performances, contests with money prizes, and, one you mentioned, work for hire. Kickstarter is work for hire distributed amongst many payees.
You, like many others, are also stretching what copyright does. It is simply what its name says it is, the "right" to make copies. That right is totally artificial, requiring constant and very expensive enforcement by our governments to work at all. Even so, it would have no chance whatsoever of working were it not for the majority of people believing that it is only fair to compensate artists, and mostly accepting the system we have in place for doing so. But the more these trolls abuse the system, the greater that public awareness rises that copyright has big problems. It's too late to save copyright, not that we would want to anyway. Copyright isn't dead yet, but it will be in another few generations.
Copyright is only the right to make copies. It is not a defense against plagiarism, a preventer of fraud and cheating, or a guardian of privacy. Further, the kind of rights that a Hollywood studio negotiates in order to turn a book into a movie is totally different than the kind they'd like to deny to private individuals who just want to make a backup copy or do a time or format shift, whatever conflation the media trolls try to make. We should use different names for these different things. Your examples about the lawyer drawing up a will for you or a musician composing music for your wedding that you then take (doesn't matter whether it's by copying or outright theft of the original media) without paying are not violations of copyright, they are violations of other things such as labor laws and contracts. Suppose you called a plumber who fixed your plumbing and then you refused to pay? Suppose you saw a doctor, got treated, and whether or not the treatment was successful, you refused to pay? (Maybe your medical problem was too difficult to fix in a 15 minute office visit, and all the doctor could do was identify the problem and send you to on to appropriate specialists.) Suppose you're a programmer and your employer fires you and refuses to pay you for the work you did during the last month you were with them, claiming it was no good and so they shouldn't have to pay? That's the same sort of thing as not paying the lawyer or musician in your examples, and is covered under other laws. Copyright is hardly the only thing holding society together!
Your next example, about the young, unknown artist who sells 2 copies, and then can't sell any more because there are free copies available, merely illustrates that copyright is a broken business model. The young artist will simply have to use a different business model, that's all. Stop crying over this and face it, copyright does not work. Certainly we should not go to the lengths required to make copyright work in spite of natural law. DRM is such an abysmal failure that it is a farce. Consider that a public library can buy just one copy of a work, and then loan it out to dozens of people. A used book and record store does much the same. Even if you think banning used bookstores and shutting all our public libraries is necessary for the sake of copyright, friends can still swap books, CDs, flash drives, and the like in private quite easily. That makes for hundreds of people who got to consume a work without paying, something you seem to find morally repugnant. But it is entirely legal. And good.
Analogy? I don't see any analogy, I see only a point, and a not very relevant one at that.
You made a point, a good point, about stealing. But this is a case about copying, not stealing. Copying is not stealing no matter how many times others try to equate the 2 actions. Don't fall for these sleazy media companies ongoing efforts to confuse the public on this. Don't talk of this matter as if it is or could be some form of theft, you just help these media trolls when you do.
Nor should copying be considered some heinous crime. It isn't. It shouldn't even be considered a petty infraction. Speeding, one of the lightest infractions on the books, is a more serious offense as it can endanger lives. But copying? Not only should copying not be considered an offense at all, it should be encouraged because it is a huge social good. It is sharing of knowledge, the "standing on the shoulders of giants", that put humanity at the top of the animal kingdom, not sheer intelligence alone. These media trolls want to set themselves up as the gatekeepers through which all sharing must occur, and to collect heavy tolls. It's very nearly as bad as selling the "rights" to breathable air to private interests, and forcing everyone to pay for their air. You benefit from fresh air, so you should pay for it, right? Don't fall for their propaganda and allow them to further muck up our society with their attempts to control all information.
Yes, and the crap they put you through is a big reason I don't buy from dealers any more than I can help. You can't learn much about the cars from the salespeople. Even when they know anything (which isn't often), they can't be trusted to tell it straight. You have to research the cars yourself beforehand. The salesperson is useless. Then when you finally think the price is settled and you're ready to buy is when they mention some extra conditions they should have mentioned at the outset. They know you don't want to walk out and have all the time you spent looking and haggling go to waste, and they try to take advantage of that. Scumbags. Worth keeping the old car another few years to put that off as long as possible.
I can't believe car dealerships can continue to operate the way they have. It's horribly wasteful, and nearly universally loathed. I'm looking forward to seeing the entire commissioned sales system fade into history, and am only disappointed that it hasn't happened yet.
Why not a solid sphere? It doesn't have to be rigid. It could be a big balloon that the solar wind and light keeps inflated.
As depicted in STNG, the Dyson Sphere Scotty was trapped in was solid and rigid. Niven's Ringworld is also a solid, rigid structure. That's the kind I was thinking of. Seems we go for the massive construction of solid, hard, rigid materials. Almost all our buildings are like this, with exceptions such as the Metrodome's roof being notable because they are so unusual.
The farmer didn't manufacture any replicas. The seeds did that themselves. At most, he provided a suitable environment.
Reproduction is a fundamental ability of life. For a government to grant any petty little private organization monopoly power over such a basic function is insane. Plus, how can this be enforced? Just when there's beginning to be some cracks in the total waste of time and money known as the War on Drugs, this comes up. Are we going to retrain marijuana specialists to test food crops? Let drug users out of our jails and replace them with farmers? I don't want my tax dollars wasted on such efforts.
If NASA is guilty of pandering, the media and public are as guilty of demanding it. Star Trek is science fantasy, in that everything depends on FTL travel, which as far as we know is impossible. It is actually very pedestrian that a show like Star Trek would be an American Manifest Destiny fantasy projected into space. Our heroes dash about the galaxy, in a ridiculously physical, hands on style of exploration that is just like the exploration of the New World and Africa by European adventurers. You have to send an Away team to the surface of the planet, and watch how some guy in a red shirt loses his life in an encounter with hostile natives, aliens, deadly substances, or whatever, so you can figure what to do next. You just can't explore a place properly any other way.
Without FTL, the entire premise would be impossible. We'd have to explore with awesomely powerful telescopes, and robotic missions spanning thousands of years. Our TV show writers would have a heck of a time struggling to make that interesting. Then too, not much is said of the point of all this poking of our noses into every corner of the galaxy. What's it all for? To Seek Out Life, yes, but why and most especially why in that manner, by physically visiting in an FTL capable ship? Only so that it can be exploited in some fashion by the evil, greedy following wave of people who will move in the moment the heroes move on! They only wait a little, so that the heroes can better pretend the Prime Directive isn't a sick joke. Of course there is the danger of the opposite happening, as the Borg threaten to do. Europeans of the 1500s were never going to leave the entire New World untouched and pristine, turning it into a giant nature preserve, even if such a notion had occurred to them. If today there were more newly discovered lands we could reach and use, we would and to pretend otherwise is just fooling ourselves. We haven't changed that much! Just as our history glosses over much of our conquests of natives, so Star Trek doesn't grapple much with the implications of exploration. A mere visit is indeed enough to make the Prime Directive impossible to uphold.
As for what our future holds, Dyson refused to speculate much, not that the one question sort of about it did more than glance upon the subject. A pity. We likely will stay right here on Earth for tens of thousands of years, and our advances will be much more subtle than the mere colonization and harnessing of new lands on alien worlds. We will become smarter and wiser. We may make ourselves into cyborgs, and not the ghoulish, creepy Borg of STNG, but more like various comic superheroes such as Wolverine. Or perhaps we will become more like a giant ant colony on a mental level, a super organism like Asimov's Gaia, constantly communicating. While that is happening, maybe we will colonize Mars, and maybe not. The directions we go also depend greatly on what we want to do. Right now, the idea of colonizing Mars has a powerful appeal, but it may not sound so thrilling by the 25th century.
Many years ago, I once spent a Saturday trying to make the Catalan solids out of wood, using cheap tilt vises, a homemade rotary table, and a poor man's milling machine (an end mill in a cheap drill press that couldn't hold it steady). Didn't get very far-- the tools simply didn't have the precision needed to do a good job. Even though we economized too much on the tools, they were still ridiculously expensive. Why did I try that way? I was following my father's vision of how such a thing should be done, and machinery was what he grew up with. Another Saturday, I used a different approach of making a paper model and filling the interior with epoxy. This worked much better but still had problems. For one, epoxy has a shelf life. It will not harden properly if it is too old, and this was. Another is that epoxy generates heat when it is curing, and this was a large enough mass to become almost too hot to touch. I don't know if an even larger mass could get hot enough to cause real problems such as fires and melting, but it was something to keep in mind. Then my father wanted to employ number punches to number the sides, as if hardened epoxy was just as malleable as metal. To satisfy him, I tried it, and of course the epoxy shattered. Today, those shapes would be a trivial job for a 3D printer.
The point? If I had spent those Saturdays playing computer games, no one would have thought anything of it. But when I mentioned this use of a Saturday, I got a lot of strange looks, and a few queries about why I had "wasted" my time so. My brother warned his fiancee, who dislikes nerds, that I was likely to show off those polyhedrons. It was almost as if I had contracted a contagious disease, the way people acted about the whole thing. Nice when your own brother inoculates his circle against your weirdness, so that they all know to keep their distance and not give you any opportunities to bore the hell out of them and show off how nerdy you really are.
You don't know what specifically Jobs and Gates were discussing about yachts. If it was ways of fitting the ship for cleanup of oil spills, plastics, or other pollution, or for some sort of science like ocean or hydrothermal vent research, or as a test bed for Internet communication over vast expanses of empty ocean (think how that could benefit the Pirate Bay), I would not call that a waste of time. And even if it was none of that, it likely was something of some use. I hardly think Jobs and Gates would have discussed the sort of crass, trashy thing a moronic joker like Donald Trump would do, such as solid gold plumbing fixtures which serves no good purpose, as it is only to inspire jealousy by rubbing in how incredibly filthy rich the owner is, and that only works on fellow fools.
systemd is against the UNIX philosophy of making many tools that each do one simple thing well, rather than a few tools that each do many things. (The Linux kernel also violates this principle. Just read what Tannenbaum has to say on the matter if you want more.) And it shows.
Consider how systemd handles logging. Instead of cat/var/log/messages.log and all the tools we have for handling text, things like grep, awk, sed, vi and emacs, have to run this "journalctl" command, which I had to find out about by nagging people and poking around. I know documentation is for wimps, but please. A web page listing SystemV and BSD methods of system administration, important files, initialization processes and such, side by side with the new systemd equivalents, would have been most helpful. Judging from the slowness of journalctl at retrieving relatively new messages, I thought that they might be stored in some sort of compressed format. I do not know how systemd handles logging, and that's a knock against it right there. Surely it must store logs in some file, somewhere on the system. This location is not mentioned in the journalctl man page. With some digging, I turned up/var/log/journal/someobfuscateddirname/ for the location. The "file" command showed that system.journal is a FoxPro file! And, no, it's not compressed, it's binary, and it takes a while to query. Maybe using a database file format is a good idea, but (assuming the file utility correctly identified the file type) why FoxPro? FoxPro is still proprietary. We have Berkeley DB, MongoDB (and other NoSQL DBs), and even heavy duty stuff like MariaDB (MySQL), and Postgres, but the systemd designers chose FoxPro?! What did they do in journalctl, include a FoxPro engine?
What was said to me was not actually STFU, it was: "The last paragraph of your post was unnecessary as it's a rant and the issues you raised were covered multiple times already." Which sure sounds like STFU to me.
This story strikes me as unusual. I don't see what the big deal is about Crunchbang. What have they done to deserve special mention in a Slashdot story, and really set themselves apart from the hundreds of other distros? I keep an eye open for light weight desktop environments. Currently use LXDE with Openbox, as that seems lighter than XFCE, but under Arch Linux, not Crunchbang.
As for forums, I have found the Arch forums to be a mixed bag. Mostly good stuff. But they have more than one rude elitist posting in there. Was having difficulty with an Arch distro for a Beagleboard computer, and posted about the problems I encountered.
One problem was a chicken and egg issue with putting a boot loader on the flash drive. They had not provided an x86 binary installer, so I tried various ways of installing it, including cross compiling the installer myself. It apparently compiled successfully, but it didn't work. The fact I was even messing with a Beagleboard ought to clue a person in that I'm no noob, but I was still told I was an idiot for wasting all that time with cross compiling. It was just supposed to magically work, and I was doing something wrong, he didn't know what, but he just knew it had to be something stupid. I suppose they deleted the thread because it embarrassed them, as when I went back for another look for what little helpful info it had, I found it was gone. Another time I asked why Arch had moved to systemd, questioning whether it was a good idea. I was told to STFU, the decision had already been made, and wasn't going to be unmade.
I'm moving away from Arch, mainly because of systemd, though the rude responses gave me an extra push. Haven't settled on another distro yet, and am using Lubuntu for now.
You talk like you believe in the MPAA's sobriety, good sense, and sincerity. Their expertise is in movies, not technology. Just because they use a lot of technology does not mean they really understand it. Those among them who do understand the hopelessness of DRM ever fulfilling its stated purpose actually have ulterior motives, such as driving Netflix out of business. And people like you are the "useful idiots" for believing their stupid propaganda.
The MPAA can contractually require that water flow uphill and the sun rise in the west all they like, it's not happening. We should not heed their demands that we all make worthless changes, to prop up their stupidly dark vision of how they think the universe should work, but does not. The way reality actually works is much nicer than their vision. You can be sure that if Netflix agrees to anything, they will include an out so that they will not be sued when DRM fails again.
No. There is preparation time. These days, if you just casually stroll into a programming contest without reading up on the idosyncracies of whatever scoring system they're using, and without training for it, you will be owned. Won't matter if you are a good programmer. I have won programming contests, but this was in the days when Pascal was the leading language.
Years later, Top Coder showed up. I competed just once, and did poorly. In part this was because on Top Coder, other contestants can challenge your solutions. If it doesn't work, they score points and you lose them. In contrast, in all previous contests I was in, there was no penalty for trying at least once and being wrong, so you may as well send in whatever you have. (There was a penalty if you got it wrong several times before getting it right, but trying at least once is free.) That's what I did for one of the problems. To make it a little worse, in Top Coder the other contestants get to see when you submitted. The idea about challenging is that the challenger is supposed to have looked at the code, but these challengers did not do that. They only checked that the code was submitted at the last minute, and decided on that basis to challenge. Easy points for them. The veterans know how to work the system. Not knowing about wrinkles like that costs you in these contests. I decided right there that these contests were silly, and have not competed since.
It also seems so many of these "contests" are just thinly veiled attempts to use people. The sponsor gets a bunch of code, some of it hoped to be of real use and value, sorted by the evaluation system. The winner gets a cheesy little prize. Or perhaps a big prize. The other dozens of contestants get nothing.
If there are so very few issues worth voting on, perhaps you could give us a list?
As to why Americans fear and hate Socialism, many of us have been thoroughly indoctrinated about the supposed evils of it. It's called "moral hazard". Socialism leads to welfare queens, to lazy deadbeats who just lie about doing nothing constructive (such as posting on Slashdot?) because they don't have to work, they need only collect the next welfare check.
Sure makes the emacs vs vi wars look petty. This is a religious dispute between the believers in greedy capitalism, who think such forces lead to the best balance of highest possible quality at reasonable expense, in all endeavors, and everyone else.
The greedy capitalists think that if you aren't sweating and stressing over your job and the money it provides to feed your hungry children, not to mention your house and car payments, fearing that the loss of your job will ruin your career so that you will never be able to find another, then you aren't motivated enough to really help a capitalist endeavor succeed. They pressure you to put yourself on the hook with none too subtle hints, couched in plausibly deniable talk of "team spirit" and "dedication" and "commitment". The coworker who buys a new car gets all kinds of praise for, in essence, being such a good wage slave/capitalist consumer. If that doesn't do the trick, managers reveal a few personal details about their choices in housing and transportation, to set an example, and encourage a little bit of "keeping up with the Joneses" envy. If that still doesn't work, they remove the people who aren't falling for it, as those sort set a bad example. Makes for a good object lesson for the survivors of the layoff. Extreme balances on credit cards, massive house payments, and other such horrible burdens become, in this whacked out world, bragging rights. The savvy worker therefore has to appear to toe the party line, while carefully holding back in ways that do not show, because sometimes one ends up stuck under a boss who doesn't know when to quit pushing, and the only healthy alternative the worker has is to leave.
Naturally, they're afraid of open source, readily equating it with Socialism and even (gasp!) Communism, which they have feared for decades. They don't understand the motivations behind open source, and therefore don't trust it. They've been told that open source fits just fine with capitalism (and it does!), but they can't believe that. I think that attitude more than anything, this dogmatic belief in the holiness of wealth and ownership, has propped the likes of Microsoft up beyond all reasonable objective assessment of the true value of their offerings.
Slashdot Mirror
Hang on, the GP's meaning about rootkits is unclear. I took it to mean that rootkits aren't an issue because respectable businesses understand they are a big no-no, and don't try to employ them. But maybe you're right, and he's trying to say that for most people having a rootkit on your machine is no big deal.
As to the other part, about people not buying CDs anymore, I cite a Special Report in the Economist a few years back (sorry, don't recall which issue exactly) that mentioned how a survey of young people's musical tastes went. At the end, to thank the participants, they offered free CDs. They were shocked that the young participants did not want CDs, even for free! Shows a cartoon of an unhappy music executive offering the top CD from a dusty, cobwebbed stack.
No, no, the best way to strike back is to make a counterproposal. Propose that copyright be eliminated. Call it the "Freedom of Knowledge Amendment", and in this document revoke copyright and patents. Currently, not even the Pirate Party goes that far, advocating reform rather than elimination. But if such a proposal gained some traction, it would confuse and scare Big Media like nothing since Napster. They might even adopt the tactics of McCarthy's Un-American Activities Committee to fight it. After all, they think libre software and entertainment is positively Communist.
I think the psychological problem is "fear of loss", to irrational levels, in combination with fear of the unknown. People are so afraid of losing what they think they have, that often they won't make a trade that is clearly to their benefit especially when it is uncertain how large the benefit is or if there's a small chance it will result in a small loss. It's also why theft is such a heinous crime.
Note I said "think they have" rather than "have". In this case, the media moguls have tried very hard to frame copying as no different than stealing, and ideas as no different than real property, to engage people's strong negative emotions towards theft. Convince the public that some activity is theft, and you've gone a long ways towards censuring that activity.
When I saw Star Trek as a child, I found Spock by far the creepiest character. The whole idea that all emotions were bad didn't feel right, so to speak. This however certainly fits the scientific mind set of the 1960's, which preferred to ignore emotions as unscientific, and too easily dismissed them as dangerous relics of our savage, barbaric, animal heritage, soon to evolve away as humanity became more sophisticated. And there are plenty of senselessly destructive emotions such as spite. But what about love, friendship, caring, empathy, trust, and sacrifice? These are good emotions. Many people who lack such feelings become infamous for acts that are shocking in their callous disregard for others. There was no telling what sort of monstrous act Spock might find perfectly logical. One of the most chilling lines was from Mirror Mirror, in which Spock protested that terrorizing was only logical, as the empire's unity depended on it.
Another bit of Star Trek dialogue of interest comes from I, Mudd, near the start. Kirk and Spock quickly figure out that Mudd had to depart some place rapidly because he infringed on the intellectual property of a people who have "no sense of humor". What strikes me about that is the assumption that copyright is somehow a universal principle. Yeah, Hollywood wishes! Sometimes they hint that money is obsolete (in The Neutral Zone, Ralph Offenhouse is told money doesn't mean anything anymore when he wants to know how his investments have done), but intellectual property is alive and well! Since noticing that one in I, Mudd, I've observed Hollywood is not at all shy or subtle about shoving propaganda about intellectual property into their shows here and there.
Software development times are extremely variable. It all depends on how much good quality reusable existing code and tools were found or known about beforehand.
How long it would take to write an Office Suite using no tools, environments, or libraries newer than what we had in 1984? No Linux, no Windows, no MacIntosh, just one of the many DOSes. Probably have to be C, Pascal, or some kind of BASIC, and that only if performance wasn't an issue. Otherwise, it would have to be assembler. C++ existed then, but was too new to have much support. No mouse either. It would run on an 80x25 text screen, unless the developer had the time and energy to make a graphical interface.
Wish more people would not take this kind of stuff lying down. Especially in cases where the business is not a monopoly. For instance, I don't understand why anyone still banks at Bank of America. They don't have a monopoly, far from it, and they treat their customers like wolves treat cattle. And why does anyone pay for cable TV? Can't be for the absence of ads!
Cutting the land line doesn't help save money, not while the price of cell phone service remains outrageous. Internet service and phone service should have fallen well below $20 per month years ago. Over the years, hardware prices have dropped dramatically, but somehow these service providers have been unable to pass any of that savings on to customers. MMORPGs have been forced to offer alternatives to the crazy $10 per month kinds of plans. We have sub $100 laptops such as the Raspberry Pi. We even won the right to keep our phone numbers. Why can't we have $5 per month phone service and broadband Internet service?
The question is whether this quantum computer is a fake. Does it have 512 qbits, or zero and their simulated annealing actually was computed classically, whether or not the experimenters realized that? 512 qbits is such a fantastic leap forward that that alone calls into doubt their whole story.
All this reminds me of an SBIR I saw some 10 years ago. The military wanted quantum data compression. They didn't want just an algorithm, mind, they wanted a working machine. But a working quantum computer alone wasn't good enough for them, had to do data compression or they wouldn't award any money to the small business. It's as if they wanted faster than light travel so they could use it for golfing trips to Mars, or cold fusion to power the coffee pots on their ships. Another time I saw a story on the news about the military studying the possibility of teleportation, Star Trek style. Made me wonder who writes these SBIRs. I also wondered if the SBIRs had only recently gotten that stupid, like, say, shortly after George W. Bush came to power.
One problem with Star Trek style teleportation is that if it is possible at all, it would be ridiculously easy to just create a copy of the object, and stop there rather than go on to all the trouble of erasing the original to make it seem as if teleportation occurred. Every single time a crewman "teleports" they are actually being copied and the original killed off. The 19th century saw lots of claims of perpetual motion, and even today we still have cranks trying to do it. In the late 20th century, we had infinite data compression and cold fusion to name just 2. Currently, some fools' favorite area of effort might be DRM and coypright enforcement. Perhaps quantum computing will turn out to be the fool's errand of the next few decades.
For me, drivers are more important than hardware. The difference in speed between the flaky, wonky proprietary drivers and the fairly steady but dog slow open source drivers are on the order of 10x.
They still aren't competing for the Linux market. I have older low end stuff, an AMD machine (Phenom II with an HD 5450), and an Intel+Nvidia machine (Core 2 Quad Q6600 with a GeForce 8500GT that I recently replaced with a fanless GT 610), and in neither can I get satisfactory Linux support. The proprietary driver on the Nvidia box has the best performance. Next best is the AMD box with the open source driver. (I haven't tried Catalyst, so I don't know how good AMD can be.) The Nouveau driver is horrible for 3D acceleration. ATI/AMD has repeatedly promised they would help open source drivers use the full potential of their hardware, but thus far they haven't delivered. NVidia has flat out refused to help, and has tried to claim that keeping their proprietary driver up to date is being supportive of open source.
Hearing that Intel has turned over a new leaf, and that their recent integrated graphics offerings, the HD 4000s and 3000s, actually have some decent performance, with decent support in open source drivers, in contrast to the miserable performance of everything they've offered since the start of the new millenium, I decided to give them a try. Intel's HD 4000 with the open source driver blows away AMD's HD 5450 with the open source driver. It's not competitive with high end graphics cards, but it is good enough to do 3D graphics at 1920x1280 at a frame rate that while not by any means smooth isn't too intolerably jerky, maybe about 10 frames per sec.
Doubtles there is plenty of lying, but I think you're too cynical.
I've been looking into the losing sides of conflicts, and disasters, trying to see what is typical of human behavior in such stressful situations. And here we see a lot of second guessing, attempts at self justifications and at shifting the blame, and coverups. Most people just aren't honest when honesty requires admitting that maybe they screwed up, or expected too much. Not surprising, I suppose.
Some examples. In the US Civil War, Lee took full responsibility for the loss at Gettysburg, saying that he asked more of his men than they could deliver, and offering to resign. In contrast, Jefferson Davis and General Joseph Johnston constantly bickered over each other's decisions and expectations. Davis was very disappointed that Johnston did not attack to try to lift the siege of Vicksburg, accusing Johnston of not being aggressive enough. Later, Johnston defended Georgia against Sherman, slowly retreating until they had reached Atlanta, whereupon Davis relieved Johnston. The new commander, Hood, could not save Atlanta either, and lost a great number of men in reckless assaults trying to do so. One thing that struck me about this was that Davis seemed near delusional about the Confederacy's capabilities and chances. But both talked as if the war wasn't all but hopeless, as if a change of strategy, style or character in the other could have lead to a Confederate victory, and blame for the eventual Confederate loss could therefore be laid squarely at the feet of some or all of the leaders, instead of the enormous imbalance in power between the 2 sides. But such an acknowledgement would only mean that the blame could be pushed back further, to the people who started the whole war, who should have realized it wasn't winnable. Sherman made this point, trying to tell the southerners that given the strengths of the 2 sides, they were crazy for trying to rebel, and it would only lead to the devastation of the South, as indeed happened. Hitler's attitude as revealed in his final message in which he blamed the German people for not trying hard enough and for not being worthy of him, was similar.
More recently, the Northeast blackout of 2003 has been fairly well documented, but there are some features of it that remain, well, dark. I recall a report that noted that during the blackout, allergies everywhere cleared up. Some years later when I tried to hunt this report down, I couldn't find it. Only thing I was able to turn up was a report about asthma, not allergies. Maybe I misremembered? But that's just the sort of information industries are so notorious for trying to suppress. They've done it over and over, with asbestos, bisphenol A, nicotine, radium, and lead. "Doubt is our product". Fukushima also featured a lot of lying and covering of asses. The propaganda is so pervasive, I suspect toxic chemicals and pollution have a lot more to do with our current obesity epidemic and other health problems than the public realizes. The public has been fooled into buying our laziness, bad dietary choices, and bad genes as the major and perhaps sole reasons for the obesity. All the easier, as there is a lot of evidence pointing that way. And now a new culprit has come to light, the bacteria in our guts. But when this is all over, I imagine future histories of the late 20th and early 21st centuries will finger the explosion in indiscriminate use of novel chemicals as the reason behind a lot of our current troubles, just as we now know that lead poisoning played a large part in the fall of the Roman Empire.
Both the briber and the recipient (if the bribe was accepted), are guilty. We absolutely should bash Apple, and Exxon, GE, Amazon, and the rest of these tax dodging cheaters. If successful, it will make our society fairer.
That also includes propaganda organs masquerading as charities deserving of non-profit status. The current furor over the IRS's alleged partisanship in singling out Tea Party groups for a harder look does not take into consideration that they are overwhelmingly the ones trying to break those rules. The left didn't try that on anything like the scale the right did, so of course IRS investigations could seem biased. The hard right is not very bright, and really seems to have difficulty understanding that what they tried is wrong. They don't understand the difference between science and propaganda, and behave as if the end justifies the means. Cheating and lying is seemingly okay with them, and indeed is rationalized away as not cheating and lying as long as it's for a cause they favor, such as banning abortion and denying that there is mankind caused climate change. The ultimate refusal to acknowledge responsibility for anything is the total cop out "it's God's will". Yes, a pregnancy from a rape is God's intent, as is climate change, war, market crashes, nuclear accidents, and oil spills. "Stuff happens". All that could even be divine punishment for allowing homosexuals to marry.
The Republican Party has sunk to an unholy alliance of radical social conservatives of limited intelligence, and cunning but ultimately foolish and corrupt business interests who find those idiots useful whenever they want to employ the bullshit tactics of doubt and denial to suppress scientific or legal investigations which might hurt their profits, even though it would benefit us all, including them, to have dangers illuminated rather than denied. The contradictions have become ever more ridiculous, with them screaming about the supposed need to Balance the Budget, but refusing to even consider two major ways of doing so, which is to Raise Taxes or Cut Military Spending. Instead, the budget is to be balanced by cutting back on the policing of the rich.
On the contrary, it may be perfectly legal, even in the US. Lists of phone numbers and addresses, voting records of public servants, and other facts or assemblies of facts cannot be copyrighted. Even interpretations of historic events could be quotes of material that is no longer under copyright. A purely factual history book could quite possibly contain no copyrightable information. If on the other hand mere recountings of history are copyrightable, one wonders whether the authors stepped on others' copyrights. The historic information came from somewhere.
But all that is a minor point. Likely the history book has recent thinking of scholars about the deeper meanings of the historic events covered. If not, and there wasn't any copyrightable material in the draft, we can be pretty sure that the publisher added some no matter how inaccurate or irrelevant, to cover this exact situation.
The important part of this matter is that knowledge of history should be freely available to all citizens. If they don't have a copyleft history book, they should make one.
That's only when everything is in good condition. Lot of house fires are started by degraded wiring. Anything that thins the conductive material or loosens a connection can increase the resistance at that spot so it will get hot enough to start a fire the next time someone uses a power hungry device such as a vacuum cleaner. As long as there's nothing flammable nearby, it may not cause any harm, but if this wiring is in a couch, could be a serious problem.
All kinds of things can degrade the wiring. Ants, especially fire ants and now these crazy ants can chew the insulation, and build nests. I've seen an outlet stop working because the home's foundation had cracked, and shifted the walls enough to pull the wires out of the receptacles on the outlet. Also, builders almost always do the cheapest, shoddy electrical work code and inspectors allow them to get away with. Fortunately code is pretty strict these days, but it wasn't always. Then there's the do-it-yourself home owner who is completely ignorant of code and decides to add some extra lighting or a ceiling fan. Must watch out for older homes. One will find circuit breakers that were poorly designed (Stab-Lok models, for instance), outlets that were never properly grounded or that are near sinks and bathtubs and lacking GFI, and wiring run sideways through the walls or that has no slack or is too close to something else such as a fireplace's chimney.
If we want to wire up furniture, it will take some effort to do it safely. We've dealt with safety by simply keeping electricity away from flammable material and water.
you are completely divorcing any value from the actual creation of the artwork
By saying that the created works have no inherent value...
No, that is not what I said. Your arguments assume that the best way to realize the value of works of art is to control copying, and therefore anyone who says copying should be unregulated must not want to compensate artists fairly for their art. But the premise is wrong. (You claim that I insulted your intelligence. By making such a bad fallacious argument like the above, you demonstrate that if your intelligence was insulted, you deserved it. A good deal of what you wrote is based on that argument, and it is all immediately made moot as soon as it is realized the argument is fatally flawed.) Regulating copying is not necessary to compensate artists. Indeed, we have seen it is a poor way. I want artists to be compensated! But I also realize that life has many other priorities, and that a compensation method that is fair to artists should not utilized if it is unfair to everyone else, and if there are better ways. Copyright is unfair to the public, and there are better ways. Also, it is highly important to keep in mind another implication in that argument, which is that copying can be regulated. But can it? No! Not any more.
The entertainment industry has a long history of fighting every innovation, and losing, and then seeing their business grow far more than it would have had they won. AM radio brought music to many people who would never have heard it otherwise, turning many of them into fans, yet the industry tried to kill it. I believe that pattern will repeat in this instance. As copyright as we know it dies, the business of producing art will not shrink, it will expand! By trying so hard to maintain and expand copyright, these rights holders are actually hurting their own business. Pirates and technology are artists' best friends. It is these rights holders who are the enemies. They hurt art when they sue artists' customers and fans, and stoop to such despicable lows as trying to terrorize and extort the entire body public with shady legal trickery, bribe lawmakers, and attempt to evade public discourse by negotiating treaties in secret. With a track record like that, it is little wonder that they show no scruples towards the artists either, cheating the very people they claim to be fighting for so often that there's a name for it: Hollywood Accounting.
...you'd be able to control how the book was copied
There you go again, expanding what copyright does. No, artists should not get to dictate what use others make of their works, not even how it shall be copied. I realize they can try to demand all kinds of things of publishers, from the editing right down to the font and paper quality, but I think they shouldn't have any say in that, unless of course they'd like to print copies themselves. We specifically state a number of exceptions, such as that anyone may make a parody, or write as negative a review as they wish, or may quote small parts of it ("fair use"), but that's a negative way to go about it. This has de facto meant that anything not specifically allowed defaults to forbidden, as it is too costly to ask a court to rule on every tiny variation. And so, for instance, blind people aren't allowed to have a device read a book to them. That's crazy. I really don't see why we should hang on to this tradition of exclusive publishing either. Mostly, while a work is under copyright only one publisher at a time gets to publish editions, for no real good reason. So long as the artists are compensated, what does it matter who prints copies? Why shouldn't 2 or more printers be able to print copies of a book? Why do they have to get the author's permission?
You are confused on a number of points. Copyright is only a means by which artists are encouraged to produce art. A lot of people are still convinced that there is no other way and that without copyright artists will starve and we'll have no more art. That is of course hysterical nonsense. There are many other ways. Patronage is a big one that is centuries old. You express grave doubts that patronage can be effective. I think you ought to give it another chance, rather than continue to cling to copyright which has so obviously failed in so many ways. With our greatly enhanced ability to communicate, we, the people, should be able to do patronage far, far better than it ever was done in Mozart's day, and we are. The Humble Bundles are a form of patronage. There's also merchandizing and endorsements, public performances, contests with money prizes, and, one you mentioned, work for hire. Kickstarter is work for hire distributed amongst many payees.
You, like many others, are also stretching what copyright does. It is simply what its name says it is, the "right" to make copies. That right is totally artificial, requiring constant and very expensive enforcement by our governments to work at all. Even so, it would have no chance whatsoever of working were it not for the majority of people believing that it is only fair to compensate artists, and mostly accepting the system we have in place for doing so. But the more these trolls abuse the system, the greater that public awareness rises that copyright has big problems. It's too late to save copyright, not that we would want to anyway. Copyright isn't dead yet, but it will be in another few generations.
Copyright is only the right to make copies. It is not a defense against plagiarism, a preventer of fraud and cheating, or a guardian of privacy. Further, the kind of rights that a Hollywood studio negotiates in order to turn a book into a movie is totally different than the kind they'd like to deny to private individuals who just want to make a backup copy or do a time or format shift, whatever conflation the media trolls try to make. We should use different names for these different things. Your examples about the lawyer drawing up a will for you or a musician composing music for your wedding that you then take (doesn't matter whether it's by copying or outright theft of the original media) without paying are not violations of copyright, they are violations of other things such as labor laws and contracts. Suppose you called a plumber who fixed your plumbing and then you refused to pay? Suppose you saw a doctor, got treated, and whether or not the treatment was successful, you refused to pay? (Maybe your medical problem was too difficult to fix in a 15 minute office visit, and all the doctor could do was identify the problem and send you to on to appropriate specialists.) Suppose you're a programmer and your employer fires you and refuses to pay you for the work you did during the last month you were with them, claiming it was no good and so they shouldn't have to pay? That's the same sort of thing as not paying the lawyer or musician in your examples, and is covered under other laws. Copyright is hardly the only thing holding society together!
Your next example, about the young, unknown artist who sells 2 copies, and then can't sell any more because there are free copies available, merely illustrates that copyright is a broken business model. The young artist will simply have to use a different business model, that's all. Stop crying over this and face it, copyright does not work. Certainly we should not go to the lengths required to make copyright work in spite of natural law. DRM is such an abysmal failure that it is a farce. Consider that a public library can buy just one copy of a work, and then loan it out to dozens of people. A used book and record store does much the same. Even if you think banning used bookstores and shutting all our public libraries is necessary for the sake of copyright, friends can still swap books, CDs, flash drives, and the like in private quite easily. That makes for hundreds of people who got to consume a work without paying, something you seem to find morally repugnant. But it is entirely legal. And good.
Analogy? I don't see any analogy, I see only a point, and a not very relevant one at that.
You made a point, a good point, about stealing. But this is a case about copying, not stealing. Copying is not stealing no matter how many times others try to equate the 2 actions. Don't fall for these sleazy media companies ongoing efforts to confuse the public on this. Don't talk of this matter as if it is or could be some form of theft, you just help these media trolls when you do.
Nor should copying be considered some heinous crime. It isn't. It shouldn't even be considered a petty infraction. Speeding, one of the lightest infractions on the books, is a more serious offense as it can endanger lives. But copying? Not only should copying not be considered an offense at all, it should be encouraged because it is a huge social good. It is sharing of knowledge, the "standing on the shoulders of giants", that put humanity at the top of the animal kingdom, not sheer intelligence alone. These media trolls want to set themselves up as the gatekeepers through which all sharing must occur, and to collect heavy tolls. It's very nearly as bad as selling the "rights" to breathable air to private interests, and forcing everyone to pay for their air. You benefit from fresh air, so you should pay for it, right? Don't fall for their propaganda and allow them to further muck up our society with their attempts to control all information.
Yes, and the crap they put you through is a big reason I don't buy from dealers any more than I can help. You can't learn much about the cars from the salespeople. Even when they know anything (which isn't often), they can't be trusted to tell it straight. You have to research the cars yourself beforehand. The salesperson is useless. Then when you finally think the price is settled and you're ready to buy is when they mention some extra conditions they should have mentioned at the outset. They know you don't want to walk out and have all the time you spent looking and haggling go to waste, and they try to take advantage of that. Scumbags. Worth keeping the old car another few years to put that off as long as possible.
I can't believe car dealerships can continue to operate the way they have. It's horribly wasteful, and nearly universally loathed. I'm looking forward to seeing the entire commissioned sales system fade into history, and am only disappointed that it hasn't happened yet.
Why not a solid sphere? It doesn't have to be rigid. It could be a big balloon that the solar wind and light keeps inflated.
As depicted in STNG, the Dyson Sphere Scotty was trapped in was solid and rigid. Niven's Ringworld is also a solid, rigid structure. That's the kind I was thinking of. Seems we go for the massive construction of solid, hard, rigid materials. Almost all our buildings are like this, with exceptions such as the Metrodome's roof being notable because they are so unusual.
The farmer didn't manufacture any replicas. The seeds did that themselves. At most, he provided a suitable environment.
Reproduction is a fundamental ability of life. For a government to grant any petty little private organization monopoly power over such a basic function is insane. Plus, how can this be enforced? Just when there's beginning to be some cracks in the total waste of time and money known as the War on Drugs, this comes up. Are we going to retrain marijuana specialists to test food crops? Let drug users out of our jails and replace them with farmers? I don't want my tax dollars wasted on such efforts.
Is not a Dyson Sphere also grandiose hype?
If NASA is guilty of pandering, the media and public are as guilty of demanding it. Star Trek is science fantasy, in that everything depends on FTL travel, which as far as we know is impossible. It is actually very pedestrian that a show like Star Trek would be an American Manifest Destiny fantasy projected into space. Our heroes dash about the galaxy, in a ridiculously physical, hands on style of exploration that is just like the exploration of the New World and Africa by European adventurers. You have to send an Away team to the surface of the planet, and watch how some guy in a red shirt loses his life in an encounter with hostile natives, aliens, deadly substances, or whatever, so you can figure what to do next. You just can't explore a place properly any other way.
Without FTL, the entire premise would be impossible. We'd have to explore with awesomely powerful telescopes, and robotic missions spanning thousands of years. Our TV show writers would have a heck of a time struggling to make that interesting. Then too, not much is said of the point of all this poking of our noses into every corner of the galaxy. What's it all for? To Seek Out Life, yes, but why and most especially why in that manner, by physically visiting in an FTL capable ship? Only so that it can be exploited in some fashion by the evil, greedy following wave of people who will move in the moment the heroes move on! They only wait a little, so that the heroes can better pretend the Prime Directive isn't a sick joke. Of course there is the danger of the opposite happening, as the Borg threaten to do. Europeans of the 1500s were never going to leave the entire New World untouched and pristine, turning it into a giant nature preserve, even if such a notion had occurred to them. If today there were more newly discovered lands we could reach and use, we would and to pretend otherwise is just fooling ourselves. We haven't changed that much! Just as our history glosses over much of our conquests of natives, so Star Trek doesn't grapple much with the implications of exploration. A mere visit is indeed enough to make the Prime Directive impossible to uphold.
As for what our future holds, Dyson refused to speculate much, not that the one question sort of about it did more than glance upon the subject. A pity. We likely will stay right here on Earth for tens of thousands of years, and our advances will be much more subtle than the mere colonization and harnessing of new lands on alien worlds. We will become smarter and wiser. We may make ourselves into cyborgs, and not the ghoulish, creepy Borg of STNG, but more like various comic superheroes such as Wolverine. Or perhaps we will become more like a giant ant colony on a mental level, a super organism like Asimov's Gaia, constantly communicating. While that is happening, maybe we will colonize Mars, and maybe not. The directions we go also depend greatly on what we want to do. Right now, the idea of colonizing Mars has a powerful appeal, but it may not sound so thrilling by the 25th century.
Many years ago, I once spent a Saturday trying to make the Catalan solids out of wood, using cheap tilt vises, a homemade rotary table, and a poor man's milling machine (an end mill in a cheap drill press that couldn't hold it steady). Didn't get very far-- the tools simply didn't have the precision needed to do a good job. Even though we economized too much on the tools, they were still ridiculously expensive. Why did I try that way? I was following my father's vision of how such a thing should be done, and machinery was what he grew up with. Another Saturday, I used a different approach of making a paper model and filling the interior with epoxy. This worked much better but still had problems. For one, epoxy has a shelf life. It will not harden properly if it is too old, and this was. Another is that epoxy generates heat when it is curing, and this was a large enough mass to become almost too hot to touch. I don't know if an even larger mass could get hot enough to cause real problems such as fires and melting, but it was something to keep in mind. Then my father wanted to employ number punches to number the sides, as if hardened epoxy was just as malleable as metal. To satisfy him, I tried it, and of course the epoxy shattered. Today, those shapes would be a trivial job for a 3D printer.
The point? If I had spent those Saturdays playing computer games, no one would have thought anything of it. But when I mentioned this use of a Saturday, I got a lot of strange looks, and a few queries about why I had "wasted" my time so. My brother warned his fiancee, who dislikes nerds, that I was likely to show off those polyhedrons. It was almost as if I had contracted a contagious disease, the way people acted about the whole thing. Nice when your own brother inoculates his circle against your weirdness, so that they all know to keep their distance and not give you any opportunities to bore the hell out of them and show off how nerdy you really are.
You don't know what specifically Jobs and Gates were discussing about yachts. If it was ways of fitting the ship for cleanup of oil spills, plastics, or other pollution, or for some sort of science like ocean or hydrothermal vent research, or as a test bed for Internet communication over vast expanses of empty ocean (think how that could benefit the Pirate Bay), I would not call that a waste of time. And even if it was none of that, it likely was something of some use. I hardly think Jobs and Gates would have discussed the sort of crass, trashy thing a moronic joker like Donald Trump would do, such as solid gold plumbing fixtures which serves no good purpose, as it is only to inspire jealousy by rubbing in how incredibly filthy rich the owner is, and that only works on fellow fools.
systemd is against the UNIX philosophy of making many tools that each do one simple thing well, rather than a few tools that each do many things. (The Linux kernel also violates this principle. Just read what Tannenbaum has to say on the matter if you want more.) And it shows.
Consider how systemd handles logging. Instead of cat /var/log/messages.log and all the tools we have for handling text, things like grep, awk, sed, vi and emacs, have to run this "journalctl" command, which I had to find out about by nagging people and poking around. I know documentation is for wimps, but please. A web page listing SystemV and BSD methods of system administration, important files, initialization processes and such, side by side with the new systemd equivalents, would have been most helpful. Judging from the slowness of journalctl at retrieving relatively new messages, I thought that they might be stored in some sort of compressed format. I do not know how systemd handles logging, and that's a knock against it right there. Surely it must store logs in some file, somewhere on the system. This location is not mentioned in the journalctl man page. With some digging, I turned up /var/log/journal/someobfuscateddirname/ for the location. The "file" command showed that system.journal is a FoxPro file! And, no, it's not compressed, it's binary, and it takes a while to query. Maybe using a database file format is a good idea, but (assuming the file utility correctly identified the file type) why FoxPro? FoxPro is still proprietary. We have Berkeley DB, MongoDB (and other NoSQL DBs), and even heavy duty stuff like MariaDB (MySQL), and Postgres, but the systemd designers chose FoxPro?! What did they do in journalctl, include a FoxPro engine?
What was said to me was not actually STFU, it was: "The last paragraph of your post was unnecessary as it's a rant and the issues you raised were covered multiple times already." Which sure sounds like STFU to me.
This story strikes me as unusual. I don't see what the big deal is about Crunchbang. What have they done to deserve special mention in a Slashdot story, and really set themselves apart from the hundreds of other distros? I keep an eye open for light weight desktop environments. Currently use LXDE with Openbox, as that seems lighter than XFCE, but under Arch Linux, not Crunchbang.
As for forums, I have found the Arch forums to be a mixed bag. Mostly good stuff. But they have more than one rude elitist posting in there. Was having difficulty with an Arch distro for a Beagleboard computer, and posted about the problems I encountered.
One problem was a chicken and egg issue with putting a boot loader on the flash drive. They had not provided an x86 binary installer, so I tried various ways of installing it, including cross compiling the installer myself. It apparently compiled successfully, but it didn't work. The fact I was even messing with a Beagleboard ought to clue a person in that I'm no noob, but I was still told I was an idiot for wasting all that time with cross compiling. It was just supposed to magically work, and I was doing something wrong, he didn't know what, but he just knew it had to be something stupid. I suppose they deleted the thread because it embarrassed them, as when I went back for another look for what little helpful info it had, I found it was gone. Another time I asked why Arch had moved to systemd, questioning whether it was a good idea. I was told to STFU, the decision had already been made, and wasn't going to be unmade.
I'm moving away from Arch, mainly because of systemd, though the rude responses gave me an extra push. Haven't settled on another distro yet, and am using Lubuntu for now.
You talk like you believe in the MPAA's sobriety, good sense, and sincerity. Their expertise is in movies, not technology. Just because they use a lot of technology does not mean they really understand it. Those among them who do understand the hopelessness of DRM ever fulfilling its stated purpose actually have ulterior motives, such as driving Netflix out of business. And people like you are the "useful idiots" for believing their stupid propaganda.
The MPAA can contractually require that water flow uphill and the sun rise in the west all they like, it's not happening. We should not heed their demands that we all make worthless changes, to prop up their stupidly dark vision of how they think the universe should work, but does not. The way reality actually works is much nicer than their vision. You can be sure that if Netflix agrees to anything, they will include an out so that they will not be sued when DRM fails again.
No. There is preparation time. These days, if you just casually stroll into a programming contest without reading up on the idosyncracies of whatever scoring system they're using, and without training for it, you will be owned. Won't matter if you are a good programmer. I have won programming contests, but this was in the days when Pascal was the leading language.
Years later, Top Coder showed up. I competed just once, and did poorly. In part this was because on Top Coder, other contestants can challenge your solutions. If it doesn't work, they score points and you lose them. In contrast, in all previous contests I was in, there was no penalty for trying at least once and being wrong, so you may as well send in whatever you have. (There was a penalty if you got it wrong several times before getting it right, but trying at least once is free.) That's what I did for one of the problems. To make it a little worse, in Top Coder the other contestants get to see when you submitted. The idea about challenging is that the challenger is supposed to have looked at the code, but these challengers did not do that. They only checked that the code was submitted at the last minute, and decided on that basis to challenge. Easy points for them. The veterans know how to work the system. Not knowing about wrinkles like that costs you in these contests. I decided right there that these contests were silly, and have not competed since.
It also seems so many of these "contests" are just thinly veiled attempts to use people. The sponsor gets a bunch of code, some of it hoped to be of real use and value, sorted by the evaluation system. The winner gets a cheesy little prize. Or perhaps a big prize. The other dozens of contestants get nothing.
Social responsibility, ever heard of it?
If there are so very few issues worth voting on, perhaps you could give us a list?
As to why Americans fear and hate Socialism, many of us have been thoroughly indoctrinated about the supposed evils of it. It's called "moral hazard". Socialism leads to welfare queens, to lazy deadbeats who just lie about doing nothing constructive (such as posting on Slashdot?) because they don't have to work, they need only collect the next welfare check.
Sure makes the emacs vs vi wars look petty. This is a religious dispute between the believers in greedy capitalism, who think such forces lead to the best balance of highest possible quality at reasonable expense, in all endeavors, and everyone else.
The greedy capitalists think that if you aren't sweating and stressing over your job and the money it provides to feed your hungry children, not to mention your house and car payments, fearing that the loss of your job will ruin your career so that you will never be able to find another, then you aren't motivated enough to really help a capitalist endeavor succeed. They pressure you to put yourself on the hook with none too subtle hints, couched in plausibly deniable talk of "team spirit" and "dedication" and "commitment". The coworker who buys a new car gets all kinds of praise for, in essence, being such a good wage slave/capitalist consumer. If that doesn't do the trick, managers reveal a few personal details about their choices in housing and transportation, to set an example, and encourage a little bit of "keeping up with the Joneses" envy. If that still doesn't work, they remove the people who aren't falling for it, as those sort set a bad example. Makes for a good object lesson for the survivors of the layoff. Extreme balances on credit cards, massive house payments, and other such horrible burdens become, in this whacked out world, bragging rights. The savvy worker therefore has to appear to toe the party line, while carefully holding back in ways that do not show, because sometimes one ends up stuck under a boss who doesn't know when to quit pushing, and the only healthy alternative the worker has is to leave.
Naturally, they're afraid of open source, readily equating it with Socialism and even (gasp!) Communism, which they have feared for decades. They don't understand the motivations behind open source, and therefore don't trust it. They've been told that open source fits just fine with capitalism (and it does!), but they can't believe that. I think that attitude more than anything, this dogmatic belief in the holiness of wealth and ownership, has propped the likes of Microsoft up beyond all reasonable objective assessment of the true value of their offerings.