I don't know what other manufacturers are doing, but I've decided to stay away from Mazda. You can't get independent manuals for newer Mazdas. For instance, there is no Chilton's or Haynes manual for about $20 for MPVs newer than 1993. Apparently, if they try to write a manual, Mazda will sue them for infringement. Mazda is pushing you to pay them $100 plus for their official manuals.
The real killer though, was what it took to do a simple spark plug replacement on their 6 cyl engine. Ought to take 15 minutes or less. Instead, have to remove everything down to the intake manifold to reach the back 3. And, without a manual to consult, had to do a lot of visual examination and trial and error to figure out how to take it apart. Took a full day. This is made even more difficult by the small hood opening that's become standard on minivans. It's so much labor that service shops charge $1000.
If all the car companies are locking up their manuals, then what? Doesn't help to avoid Mazda only to run into the same problem everywhere else. Complain to the government, and hope they sue for collusion? Or, pass this "right to repair" law.
For some parts, chrome isn't worth the trouble. Go with stainless steel.
That's what I found out when I needed new brake pistons for the disc brakes on my 60's era car. The originals were nickel chrome plated ("hard" chrome, as opposed to the "soft" chrome used on shiny bumpers), and the plating was coming off, exposing the steel underneath, which was rusting and making the brakes stick. First thought was to get them redone, but as you say, no one chromes such things anymore. No reason to. Stainless steel is cheaper and better.
It would help considerably to keep discussions honest, instead of trying to hide behind complexity. Perhaps new businesses should be granted different tax treatment. Maybe a deal like the one you outlined is in the public interest. It's hard enough to tell when all the available facts and analysis are known and in the open. But when good information is not available, and even being deliberately hidden, it's hard to discuss the merits. Everyone is forced to make more guesses, and decisions are inevitably less good. More than that, there are definitely better forums for such discussions than the proverbial smoky back room.
Needless complexity costs us all. It opens the door wide for corruption. Everyone has reasons why their business is special and therefore deserves some kind of break. Inevitably, many of the ones who don't have a good reason obtain a break anyway, and the public never hears about it. Gets buried under a mountain of details designed to deter digging. In exchange for special tax treatment, local politicians get some kind of favor, perhaps a kickback disguised as a campaign contribution, a cushy job for a son, or the inside track on a contract. You know very well that's the kind of favoritism that would never pass muster if it saw the light of day. It's the sort of thing that if put to a vote, would lose by a huge margin of the 90% to 10% sort. Even if there are no back room deals going on, governments have to hire more accountants and related professionals to track all this excessive complexity. Special deals can also lead to even bigger swings in revenue. One year they're rolling in revenue, and the next year they're facing bankruptcy. Hard enough dealing with huge swings in property values, without adding in even more volatility to the revenue stream.
We, the people, didn't spend all this money to raise and educate you to have you end up dying should you suffer some minor, easily curable medical problem. What do you suppose will happen if, say, you're injured in an automobile accident, perhaps a broken bone? We will treat it promptly. We won't hold up treatment to check your insurance, credit rating, bank account, employment status or anything else like that. We will not let it fester, making treatment more expensive, or recovery longer and less certain. We won't spend valuable minutes shoving a price list in your face. Hurt people are in no condition to bargain for medical care.
You already are covered, even if you don't understand it. Emergency rooms cannot turn you away for lack of insurance, if you have a genuinely life threatening problem. Since such is the case, let's stop fooling ourselves about it. Medical care ought not to be handled like a commodity good. Shopping for medical care is not like shopping for groceries. We are prompt with emergency situations, but we are woefully laggard with less immediate problems. Many people have no choice but to let such problems fester until they are an emergency. This costs us all greatly. And after treatment, we really screw it up. We treat former patients as if they had a choice and knew the prices beforehand. Medical providers are among the quickest to turn a debt over to a slimy debt collector.
Businesses go way beyond tax avoidance. They bargain with local governments for tax breaks in exchange for locating there. Is that unfair? Maybe, maybe not. Is it against the public interest? Absolutely! Their interests do not always diverge from the public interest, but very often they do.
Businesses go further than that. They lobby for favorable laws, favorable spending, tax treatment etc. Look how hard Amazon fought against paying sales taxes. Amazon even tried to force the issue by shutting down all facilities in those states that tried to collect, to punish them. What's the difference between what they do and bribing? Perhaps just semantics. At any rate, it's all gone too far. They take the profits, and stick the rest of us with the bills. If Amazon won't pay tax, then they can remove their sorry asses from my state and good riddance. Don't let the door hit your butts on the way out, Amazon. We don't need those kind of businesses.
No doubt that banks, shopping malls and developers have more say in, for instance, road and street planning and traffic light placement and timing than any mere representative of the public, such as a city planner or mayor. And it's obvious they have no vision. They think only of themselves. Running a business is hard. They're looking for every edge, and they purposely disregard all other considerations. Social good be damned, except insofar as that's good for business. How should the lights be timed to drive the most people to their stores? They actually prefer badly timed lights on the idea that the more time people spend in front of their stores, the better business will be. And taxes? They care little if a city is driven to its knees because they got too good a deal on taxes, bargained too hard and sharply, and snookered the representatives of the moment. They feel no responsibility whatsoever for that. The cities are there for them, providing transportation, water, sewage, electricity, law enforcement, emergency services, and of course, customers. How quickly the police jump when business whistles! That overzealousness has lead to many embarrassing incidents over the years, things like the police being called to harass bank customers who wanted to close their accounts and weren't doing anything wrong, and border agents confiscating prescription medicines. But they sure aren't there for their cities. Indeed, they have the gall to whine that we aren't friendly enough to business. Joe Consumer can pay for the police and all the rest, but that's not enough, not for them.
Indeed. If I buy a book or a DVD or a file, I expect I can damn well can give it away if I want to. Some people give gifts for birthdays or Christmas. (Maybe the GP doesn't believe in Christmas.) Or, I can sell or trade it to a used book store. Not my fault if it ends up being uploaded. Doesn't Mr. Fisher get any rights from the First-sale doctrine, regardless of what the seller may try to claim about content being licensed, not sold?
Mr. Fisher has many more defenses. What if a friend or a hacker used his computer, copied his porn collection, and uploaded it? What if Mr. Fisher donated his computer to charity or a friend, and didn't erase the hard drive? Or burglars could have broken into his house and taken his computer, or just copied his files. Or, maybe he took his computer in for servicing by the Geek Squad, who have been known to keep copies of porn that they find on customers' computers. Maybe he transferred the file to his super small, portable iThing, and it was stolen by a pick-pocket, or he left it in a bar. Even if there's evidence that the upload came from an IP address he was assigned, that doesn't prove he did it. Only takes one Sony rootkit to open up a computer. Worse, no action at all can endanger a computer. All you have to do is run Windows and miss some crucial patch from Microsoft. Even if you are diligent with the patching, you can still be compromised, because no one can get patches out quickly enough. There are many, many ways a copyrighted file could have been copied, with or without the buyer's knowledge or consent.
This court case would seem to appoint buyers as guardians of every copyrighted item ever bought. Given how difficult it is to secure data, this strikes me as an unreasonable burden. Will the law deputize us too? Can we use lethal force to stop any burglar we see making off with our iPhones?
No good deed goes unpunished. Someone actually paid for some content, and this lawsuit is his reward. We ought to make this into a lesson for the copyright holders. Never buy content. Let them go out of business. They deserve to, for suing their own customers. But, there is another way.
No one should ever give up their privacy to pay for a movie, whether or not it's porn. If Mr. Fisher had used a prepaid credit card with no or fake info, he would be safe from this nonsense. What should he do now? Maybe too late for this one, but he could "accidentally" lose his credit card, then claim thieves used it to buy the porn.
Such privacy preserving payment methods aren't as convenient as they could be, but they do exist. From what I've read, you can buy a prepaid credit card with cash. You may have to give a name and address, because many merchants will use that information to verify that the card hasn't been stolen. But, the personal information does not have to be real. It only has to match with the name and address you use with the online merchant. Privacy advocates particularly recommend this Simon Card. Of course to preserve your privacy you shouldn't buy the prepaid card online, have to go to a store where you can buy it with cash.
Very serious, huh? What measures did you take to ensure safety? What I mean is, that code review and testing to the umpteenth level will never uncover every problem. If you aren't doing formal verification, proving that the software is designed correctly and works correctly, you aren't being as serious about it as you could and perhaps should be.
And such application checking cannot address systemic problems. For instance, if the code is in C/C++, one can make a real mess with pointers, memory leaks, buffer overruns, and the like. The language lends itself to those kinds of problems. We now have tools like Valgrind to catch some of that, but still, can't depend on those tools to catch everything. A language such as Java makes some of those problems impossible. Some kinds of memory leaks can't happen with automatic garbage collection. Java also tries to simplify pointers by hiding them. Then, need I comment about the use of Windows (WinCE, maybe?) as a platform? I saw that fundamental problem with the military. They wanted security, but they wanted their shiny Windows. So they insisted that Windows be made secure, rather than accept that they ought to switch to Linux (slightly better), or SELinux (a bit better yet), OpenBSD, or go all the way and dig up a formally verified microkernel, like perhaps QNX. Did you consider such things, or did you try to push ahead with inferior tools?
The infamous Therac-25 was an extreme example of bad engineering. Sanity checks of the outputs is always a good idea, but they removed that, to save money. The saddest part is they didn't even do a good job of analyzing whether removing those sanity checks saved any money. If they had, they would have realized the savings was so small it was less than the costs of the changes to the software. They made a number of other utterly boneheaded and incompetent decisions, such as hiring bad programmers. Some of the stuff in the Therac-25 software would easily make The Daily WTF.
You don't understand swarm intelligence. You can make a good decision with extremely little information. Nothing wrong with deciding before the 1st debate. And, I have plenty of information, from past experience. Parties do have brands, platforms, and planks. They don't completely change every election. In 2000, I was asking myself if it mattered that W. wasn't too smart, because he was wise enough to surround himself with what seemed a savvy and competent team. At that time, Cheney was an unknown to me. But by 2003, I decided that Republicans were unworthy to hold office because they embraced stupidity as a virtue. Until that changes, and I see no evidence that it has, no one should vote for them. I'm not real keen on the Democrats-- neither major party has done enough to clean up Wall Street. We have problems with corrupt crony capitalism. But the Republicans have descended into dangerously delusional "anti thinking". Who knows what fake problem they'll blow the treasury on next, should they gain control again? It might well be another military adventure, this time into Iran, over nuclear weapons. Whatever it is, it will be a heck of a distraction. Let those Wall Street crooks steal everything and run the economy into the dirt again, we've got bigger things to worry about!
Republicans sent us charging into Iraq, at great expense, over Weapons of Mass Destruction that turned out not to be. Now the best they have to offer on that point is a conspiracy theory idea that the WMDs must have been smuggled out to Syria. Yeah, right. Can't we find out for sure? Of course we can. Not that it matters. No matter how hard we look, some will always say we just didn't look hard enough. More than that, going to war was an incredibly stupid idea regardless. We were at war in Afghanistan. Just from a purely practical angle, you don't start another war when you are already in one. Then, it cost us trillions of dollars. It didn't really solve anything. Yet today, the neocons aren't completely disgraced, and still have some ears. I have no faith whatsoever in the Republican's much vaunted fiscal prudence after that disastrous waste of money known as the War of Choice.
But that's not the worst of it. I have not forgotten or forgiven the Republicans for denying that we have a global climate issue, or for interfering with stem cell research, or going all moralistic over someone like Terri Schiavo, as if her family had inferior morals and couldn't be trusted to explore every option and decide what was best. Demeaning and insulting. It's the same story with the abortion issue. Then there's the bungled response to Hurricane Katrina. And, have you heard about that lying idiot George Deutsch, who received an appointment in the Bush administration and used it to suppress climate research and at the same time inject a bit of Creationist dogma into scientific papers? Now the party has officially admitted that the climate issue is real, and that we are causing it. However, many of their supporters and members have ignored that shift, and are still vehemently denying it, using the most pathetically contrived, transparently bad reasoning to support their position. Drill, baby, drill! They don't even have a reason why any other course of action would supposedly wreck the economy. They just accept that proposition unthinkingly. Some even went so far as to say that we should show some contrition for being so mean to poor British Petroleum over that oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. Stuff happens, y'know?
But climate denial is only one symptom of the root problem: Most Republicans have no understanding of or respect for basic facts and logic. As I said, they've embraced stupidity. For that very good reason, 9 out of 10 scientists are opposed to Republicans. That ought to be reason enough for anyone to vote against the Republicans. But it isn't. To these people, scientists are just another partisan group, same as police officers, steel workers, farmers, or small business owners. Scient
This isn't just government. People who run businesses and make hiring decisions have all kinds of weird ideas and hangups about what makes a good employee. You are considered not good employee material if you've been out of work for more than 6 months, or your age, appearance, or dress doesn't conform to their startlingly narrow standards, or your attitude isn't just so, or your credit rating is too low or perhaps too high which means you might be able to walk out on them without losing your car and house, and more. The experience and currently employed catch-22 seems especially unfair. Can't get experience without a job, and can't get a job without experience. They also want to know if you have children and how old they are, so they can discriminate against women with young children, and for men with young children as long as the men are married not divorced. They want the very hardest driven workers they can find, the sort of persons who can be persuaded or bullied into working extreme hours, figuring that counts for more than ability. A candidate who seems a little desperate may have better chances. There's still racism, sexism, and anti-intellectualism. It always amazes me the way educational accomplishments are often dismissed out of hand or even held up as a negative. There's a great amount of subjectivity injected into these decisions.
As if applying bad criteria to hiring decisions isn't enough, there's also favoritism and gaming of employment. Too often they don't even try to hire whoever is best according to the pseudo rational criteria they love so. Or there isn't even an opening, they're just going through the motions to cover something or harvest resumes.
But you didn't overlook security! You had video cameras in every room of the house, feeding live video directly to the local police stations and your headquarters. Admittedly, there were a few problems and instances of abuse-- some homeowners briefly locked out of their own homes when the automatic locks malfunctioned, a few rogue employees caught downloading the feeds from the cameras in the shower stalls whenever in use by homeowners' children, and sales of occupancy information that regrettably ended up in the hands of burglars who wanted to know when everyone was away and knew just how to temporarily disable the cameras-- but these were minor issues that were sternly and proactively handled. Those cameras caught hundreds of homeowners attempting to watch pirated content on their HDTVs, and shut them down before they could break any laws. Would be a real shame to have any homeowner convicted of copyright infringement.
You hit upon the other point that has me torn about these hiring practices. We live very well in the US, and we could do fine with quite a bit less. To me, the American Dream seems a load of marketing propaganda meant to convince us all to buy ever larger houses. It's nuts at a time when families are smaller than ever and technology has miniaturized so many things, that so many of us seem to feel we must have a house that is bigger than the neighbors', instead of big enough for our needs. My parents had 3 shelves devoted to encyclopedias that are hopelessly cumbersome next to Wikipedia. They still have whole book cases full of old magazine issues. I'd like to replace them all with copies of the back issues on DVD, or even better, access to online copies. They also have a grand piano that hasn't been in tune for at least 25 years. The piano is a huge waste of space compared to a keyboard that never needs tuning, takes a fraction of the space, and does so much more than a piano can do. The flat screen TV takes way less space than the old CRT. A CD player was a little smaller than a record player, but that was only the start. Now we can obtain digital copies of the entire vinyl record collection and store it all on one music player that fits in your palm. And so on. Thankfully, they don't have another waste of space known as the grandfather clock.
So, yes, we can certainly lighten the load. Nevertheless, employers are cheating. We have agreements, and they are dodging their end of the deal. If Americans ought to adjust to a lower, or seemingly lower standard of living, is trampling upon the law the way to get there?
If it was so obvious, then there wouldn't be arguments over this, would there?
That's a typical fallback position of the "teach the controversy" stripe. The entertainment industry has done much to confuse the public, manufacturing this controversy over intellectual property. Yes there are arguments over it. Does that mean the issue is unclear? Not necessarily. In a way, I'm glad they've pushed the issue as much as they have, as it has ultimately cleared up many people's confusion. The more they push notions such as unskippable commercials, the more they show everyone how radical and nutty their positions are. The RIAA was voted the "Worst Company in America" in 2007, for good reason. See this. Over the years, I've seen a steady lessening in support for intellectual property rights. Every time a Sony pulls a rootkit stunt, or a TurboTax tries a boot sector mod that endangers people's data, or an RIAA member threatens an ordinary citizen for alleged copyright infringement, or Microsoft arrogates to itself the right to judge whether you are engaging in piracy and gets it spectacularly wrong as they did in Vista and with raids by the BSA, they convince a few more people to look at alternatives.
At the heart, this issue is whether a privileged few should be handed, by fiat, the power to impose a levy upon knowledge, backed by the full force of the government and law. And we already know the answer is no. If it were possible to control knowledge enough to make such toll collection workable, it would be very, very bad for society. Our technological advancement would grind to a halt. Thankfully, it isn't possible to control knowledge to that extent.
You could argue that's not the issue, and that the supporters of intellectual property aren't trying to go that far, that they are only trying to make sure authors are paid for their efforts. Oh no, they constantly try for the moon. They hardly trouble to make suggestions that are sane and reasonable. They do not have the moral right to do all these terrible things to prop up this system of compensation for authors. They should put their efforts towards setting up new business models, instead of trying to terrorize the public in a futile effort to maintain the unmaintainable. Like the Spanish Inquisition, they've gone too far, and more and more, the public is seeing that.
We have many different crimes, and while many of them are a form of theft, many are not: vandalism, assault and battery, speeding, rape, slander and libel, reckless endangerment, public urination, indecent exposure, trespassing, loitering, littering, jaywalking, and so on.
There are many different ways to view and treat data: ghostwriting, covering, plagiarism, and copyright infringement are some, but not all. Harrison's My Sweet Lord lead to an infamously long court case that concluded Harrison did not intentionally plagiarize He's So Fine. Another more recent case was the accusation that Men At Work's Land Down Under used a 1932 children's song Kookaburra. To really steal a song, you would have to take credit for having written it, without permission of the actual authors, and in such a way that the public believes you. Very difficult, but not impossible. What has happened is a massive theft of songs from the public domain by retroactively extending copyright. Songs that you used to have the right to freely copy and reuse were removed from the public domain. Another trick is taking some song from the public domain and making a new recording of it or even just a new arrangement with only one tiny change, copyrighting that, and going after people who use the original. Accuse them of copying your version instead of the original, and make them prove they didn't. Even though it is perfectly legal for everyone to use the public domain original, the threat is enough to effectively take the song out of the public domain. Sheet music vendors are always cooking up new arrangements to justify charging for copies of music that has long been out of copyright. If you aren't doing any of that, you aren't stealing songs.
With all these subtleties, why are you so hot to conflate copying and stealing? They are manifestly not at all the same.
Yes, and the public is far too accepting of their high handedness, and too credulous of their propaganda. It's amazing what the public takes lying down: speed traps, parking meters, red light cameras, outrageous bank fees, obnoxious high pressure debt collection practices, reversed or ignored cancellations of monthly services and subscriptions (AOL did a lot of that), slamming, cramming, pages and pages of fine print, purposely confusing terms and fees, surveillance, and more.
Many local businesses are members of a local Lion's Club. How entirely too appropriate that they think of themselves as strong, ruthless predators, apart and above the rest of society. It's a basic misunderstanding of how and why we humans became the dominant animal on Earth. We got there through cooperation. Superior weaponry is only a manifestation of that, it's cooperative effort that fostered the discovery and scientific and technical advancements that enabled us to create the weaponry, the ability to move much faster, and ever more subtle methods handling the environment.
If the public woke up, this court would be shut down, and the robber barons responsible for its creation would be facing numerous lawsuits themselves.
Rather than adapt to changing technology, many print magazines opted to cut costs by cheapening the content, and catering to the dumbing down of the public. You don't need to wait for hindsight to know that's a bad idea. I've seen many a restaurant go the same way. Try to cut costs so much that the quality of the food suffers, and end up going out of business even faster as customers run away. US News and World Report tried to replace much news with Top 100 lists. I suppose those are cheaper to produce than real news, but they simply aren't that useful or interesting though they did make a big deal over the Top 100 universities with difficult to credit claims that the schools cared so much about it that they were all striving to improve their rankings in the magazine. Recently, US News went under and moved all their remaining subscribers to Time. I wouldn't be surprised if Time died in the near future.
Another bad idea is screwing with subscription models. Used to be that you'd get a renewal notice. Now, many magazines and newspapers are pushing the highly annoying automatic renewal with of course automatic charges, trotting out very lame and pathetically contrived reasoning that everyone is doing it, it's for our convenience so that we won't miss a single precious issue, and we asked for it, etc. Condescending and insulting. And clingy and desperate. Not qualities that inspire confidence in their journalism. Just this year, Reader's Digest made automatic renewal the default method, though at least it is optional. I quit the local newspaper when they wouldn't offer any subscription that didn't include automatic renewal.
Science News tried a bit better approach. They changed from a weekly to a biweekly to cut postage costs. It's a start, but ultimately, magazines must move entirely online. The cost difference alone dictates this move. But there is more. Online archives are far better than a shelf full of old issues. Much easier to search, and saves hugely on space. Dead tree is dying. Whenever I have moved, one thing that I did not lug with me were magazine collections.
You can blame that one on the drama peddlers. Interviewing rational Christians would be boring. They sell a lot more newspapers by seeking out the kooks and covering them. They might hold a book burning in which they throw scientific textbooks about evolution into the flames. Makes for great copy.
more software for the taking without having to pay someone for a copy of it.
No one pays for a copy of software any more.
And then you make this leap:
Long live not having to pay someone for their efforts!
On the contrary, we feel that creators deserve compensation for their efforts. Yes, many people do pirate and pay nothing. Many would pay something if it was possible, but often it is not, and that's the fault of industry. We disagree with the business model, that is, copyright and charging for each copy as the means of compensation.
Established businesses have sought to abuse this model to not pass on any savings whatsoever from technology driving down the cost of creating a copy to near zero. When the CD was first created, they set the price at $15 per album (LPs were about half that at the time), and promised that as production costs came down, they would pass some of that savings on to us. That never happened. Even as stacks of blank CD-Rs dived under $0.25 per disk, albums were still about $15, and to add to the insult, 90% of it was filler material to appease fans who really only wanted the one good song on the album. And then we hear that the industry cheats the very artists we're trying to support! As if that wasn't enough, they've tried to terrorize us all with lawsuits and police raids, attempted to infect our computers with viruses (Sony rootkit, you know), annoyed us with DRM that goes too far, pushed extreme laws that trample upon our freedoms (ACTA, SOPA, PIPA, DMCA, and more) and extended copyright to ludicrous lengths, and when they couldn't get their way by force, resorted to laughably bad propaganda. And they still think that preserving copyright justifies all their anti-social efforts and extremism. It took distribution of music in the mp3 format to break their schemes and force them to stop wasting money on things like all the elaborate anti-theft measures such as the oversized packaging and sensors for their precious disks, to say nothing of the disks themselves. They deserve to go out of business.
I had thought that anyone with the genius to make a better file system would surely find an acceptable way to solve domestic problems. Why didn't he simply get a divorce? And that's why at first I thought he didn't do it. Instead, like Lisa Nowak, he served himself up as another example that even the brightest and presumably best among us can still lose it, and kick all sense of morality and civilized behavior to the curb. Temporary insanity doesn't explain it, nor does unstable teenage emotions. It's nearly as bad as if a Nobel Peace Prize winner were to go postal. There were more problems than marital discord, but those still do not constitute acceptable excuses. Money was a big issue. One way for any one person to get that far with a file system project is to obsess over it to the point that nothing else matters, and the obsession becomes another issue. Yet there were many acceptable ways to resolve all the issues. He could have lived more modestly, to ease the money problems. That's easier than most Americans are willing to admit. Instead, they prefer to work their rear ends off, and even contemplate doing some crime, for the sake of social status.
Assuming there's any merit in doing so, any group that wants to continue development ought to fork the project to get away from the name.
I've driven a 39 hp car, on freeways and busy city streets, and it's not as bad as you're making out. 0-60 mph in 30 seconds, top speed is 80 mph, and I've done 80 mph just to try to stay with the traffic on the freeway. Break that down a bit, and it's 0-50 in 18 seconds, and 50-60 in 12 seconds. With only 37hp, your top speed may be 75 mph. Depends greatly on the aerodynamics. It could possibly have a much higher top speed than 80 mph if the aero is good.
Yes, it is slow, and no you are not going to keep up with the jackrabbits. You can beat the loaded truck, as those typically need a full minute to get to 60 mph, but nothing else. You'll think about whether the entrance ramp to the freeway is long enough. You won't have any power to spare for A/C. But it gets you from A to B, and excepting the people who measure status by the size of their cars and engines (most Americans), that's the most important feature of any car.
Those aren't the worst problems. The southern US is a terrible place for any form of transport other than the almighty car.
We've had rapid population growth for 30 plus years now, and the cities were expanded without much planning. Developers threw up a bunch of houses in new sprawling suburbs, then left the problem of the inadequate infrastructure for the new residents to figure out. So we end up with 10000 people being served by a single narrow 2 lane country road that rapidly deteriorates under all the new traffic. Those roads are far and away the most dangerous I've ever seen to drive. Ruts, potholes, faint or no lines, road construction with confusing and poorly marked lane shifts, detours, and patches of gravel, drivers on side streets ready to seize the smallest opening to get on the road, new businesses with extravagant lighting that shines in drivers' faces at night, and of course wall to wall traffic with plenty of heavy, poorly maintained trucks. Taking a bike on those is suicide.
How is it that a microkernel is "one overriding idea" but a monolithic kernel somehow is not?
Torvalds says that message passing is the problem with a microkernel approach. But there is also message passing in a monolithic kernel. It may be done in shared memory and informally without explicit mention in the code, but it's still message passing. Perhaps the formalized methods that have to be used in a microkernel architecture are cumbersome, but is that a shortcoming of the idea, or only of the implementation?
Another criticism of microkernels is that they are slower. They have more overhead. This is also not an inherent problem of the design. Modern microkernels can be and are just as fast.
I think a microkernel architecture is a useful modularization. Separate hardware drivers from core kernel functionality. Kernels should concentrate only on communication, juggling processes, and managing memory, CPUs, and other resources. Something else that wasn't mentioned at all is formal verification. Being able to prove that a critical piece of software has no bugs can be a very good thing. Microkernels are small enough that such proofs are possible. There is no way to do that with the monster monolithic kernels we use now. Instead, we have become accustomed to running software that almost certainly has many hidden flaws, and living with the consequences whenever a flaw causes a problem. We've accepted this as a necessary evil even for cases where we don't have to.
You doubt that content creators can be compensated by any other system? Really?
Universities use a form of patronage. It has its problems-- for instance, the notorious Publish or Perish pressure pushes researchers towards quantity rather than quality-- but it does produce research. And it is not welfare, nor is it for those of poor skill, quite the opposite. We need some place for deep thinkers to work, and business is poor at providing a suitable environment for that.
The academic model would be terrible for private business
Would it? How do you know that? And do not talk as if currently used business models are the best we can do. They have big problems, such as a tendency to evolve towards exploitative monopolies which must be constantly guarded against by anti-trust watchdogs, extreme shortsightedness that sacrifices the future for immediate profit, and a narrow viewpoint that sees everything through the lens of products and property rights no matter how wildly inappropriate such a view may be. The private bookstore is an excellent example of this. More and more, we're seeing that trying to treat data as if it is a scarce resource does not work.
The bricks and mortar bookstore is doomed. They have huge overhead in their preferred methods of storage and distribution that is becoming harder to support and justify. A new paperback is now approaching $10 per copy at a time that digital copies can be had for $1, and in time, free. I used to shop at bookstores a lot. Now I may go once a year if that. The last time I set foot inside a bookstore was 2 months ago, and it was only to use up a gift card I'd received. Even used bookstores aren't much of a deal compared to digital.
There are many other ways to compensate authors. Patronage is a big one, with many, many variations that we have as yet barely explored. It is not charity. Patrons expect something they can personally enjoy in return. Then there are endorsements and advertising. For musicians, there are concerts. Another avenue of compensation that is not used as much as it could be is merchandising. For instance, Asimov's Foundation series is popular, but I have not heard there are such things as t-shirts, coffee mugs, action toys, and the like for the Foundation. Why not? It's only partly because there isn't enough of a market. It's also because the process of getting the rights to do such a thing is too cumbersome.
What's with all the capitalist venom that stories like this bring out? It's scary how religiously these trolls espouse the dogma and supposed supreme goodness of an ownership society. They're very noisy, as if they're insecure. In a dog eat dog world, they think they can be, if not the top dogs, at least the plutocrats' poodles, rather than the next item on the menu. They seem to think if they put on a good enough act of devotion to these poisonous principles, they will not be skewered and roasted over the grill this time around. Suckers.
And you come along with a nutty conspiracy theory idea to add to the pile of manure? Cash in how?? You can't comprehend that money isn't everything? Stop poodling for the plutocrats!
The world has not moved on from the FSF, far from it. They have yet to arrive, and, judging from the vitriol here, want to fall back even further.
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I don't know what other manufacturers are doing, but I've decided to stay away from Mazda. You can't get independent manuals for newer Mazdas. For instance, there is no Chilton's or Haynes manual for about $20 for MPVs newer than 1993. Apparently, if they try to write a manual, Mazda will sue them for infringement. Mazda is pushing you to pay them $100 plus for their official manuals.
The real killer though, was what it took to do a simple spark plug replacement on their 6 cyl engine. Ought to take 15 minutes or less. Instead, have to remove everything down to the intake manifold to reach the back 3. And, without a manual to consult, had to do a lot of visual examination and trial and error to figure out how to take it apart. Took a full day. This is made even more difficult by the small hood opening that's become standard on minivans. It's so much labor that service shops charge $1000.
If all the car companies are locking up their manuals, then what? Doesn't help to avoid Mazda only to run into the same problem everywhere else. Complain to the government, and hope they sue for collusion? Or, pass this "right to repair" law.
For some parts, chrome isn't worth the trouble. Go with stainless steel.
That's what I found out when I needed new brake pistons for the disc brakes on my 60's era car. The originals were nickel chrome plated ("hard" chrome, as opposed to the "soft" chrome used on shiny bumpers), and the plating was coming off, exposing the steel underneath, which was rusting and making the brakes stick. First thought was to get them redone, but as you say, no one chromes such things anymore. No reason to. Stainless steel is cheaper and better.
It would help considerably to keep discussions honest, instead of trying to hide behind complexity. Perhaps new businesses should be granted different tax treatment. Maybe a deal like the one you outlined is in the public interest. It's hard enough to tell when all the available facts and analysis are known and in the open. But when good information is not available, and even being deliberately hidden, it's hard to discuss the merits. Everyone is forced to make more guesses, and decisions are inevitably less good. More than that, there are definitely better forums for such discussions than the proverbial smoky back room.
Needless complexity costs us all. It opens the door wide for corruption. Everyone has reasons why their business is special and therefore deserves some kind of break. Inevitably, many of the ones who don't have a good reason obtain a break anyway, and the public never hears about it. Gets buried under a mountain of details designed to deter digging. In exchange for special tax treatment, local politicians get some kind of favor, perhaps a kickback disguised as a campaign contribution, a cushy job for a son, or the inside track on a contract. You know very well that's the kind of favoritism that would never pass muster if it saw the light of day. It's the sort of thing that if put to a vote, would lose by a huge margin of the 90% to 10% sort. Even if there are no back room deals going on, governments have to hire more accountants and related professionals to track all this excessive complexity. Special deals can also lead to even bigger swings in revenue. One year they're rolling in revenue, and the next year they're facing bankruptcy. Hard enough dealing with huge swings in property values, without adding in even more volatility to the revenue stream.
We, the people, didn't spend all this money to raise and educate you to have you end up dying should you suffer some minor, easily curable medical problem. What do you suppose will happen if, say, you're injured in an automobile accident, perhaps a broken bone? We will treat it promptly. We won't hold up treatment to check your insurance, credit rating, bank account, employment status or anything else like that. We will not let it fester, making treatment more expensive, or recovery longer and less certain. We won't spend valuable minutes shoving a price list in your face. Hurt people are in no condition to bargain for medical care.
You already are covered, even if you don't understand it. Emergency rooms cannot turn you away for lack of insurance, if you have a genuinely life threatening problem. Since such is the case, let's stop fooling ourselves about it. Medical care ought not to be handled like a commodity good. Shopping for medical care is not like shopping for groceries. We are prompt with emergency situations, but we are woefully laggard with less immediate problems. Many people have no choice but to let such problems fester until they are an emergency. This costs us all greatly. And after treatment, we really screw it up. We treat former patients as if they had a choice and knew the prices beforehand. Medical providers are among the quickest to turn a debt over to a slimy debt collector.
Businesses go way beyond tax avoidance. They bargain with local governments for tax breaks in exchange for locating there. Is that unfair? Maybe, maybe not. Is it against the public interest? Absolutely! Their interests do not always diverge from the public interest, but very often they do.
Businesses go further than that. They lobby for favorable laws, favorable spending, tax treatment etc. Look how hard Amazon fought against paying sales taxes. Amazon even tried to force the issue by shutting down all facilities in those states that tried to collect, to punish them. What's the difference between what they do and bribing? Perhaps just semantics. At any rate, it's all gone too far. They take the profits, and stick the rest of us with the bills. If Amazon won't pay tax, then they can remove their sorry asses from my state and good riddance. Don't let the door hit your butts on the way out, Amazon. We don't need those kind of businesses.
No doubt that banks, shopping malls and developers have more say in, for instance, road and street planning and traffic light placement and timing than any mere representative of the public, such as a city planner or mayor. And it's obvious they have no vision. They think only of themselves. Running a business is hard. They're looking for every edge, and they purposely disregard all other considerations. Social good be damned, except insofar as that's good for business. How should the lights be timed to drive the most people to their stores? They actually prefer badly timed lights on the idea that the more time people spend in front of their stores, the better business will be. And taxes? They care little if a city is driven to its knees because they got too good a deal on taxes, bargained too hard and sharply, and snookered the representatives of the moment. They feel no responsibility whatsoever for that. The cities are there for them, providing transportation, water, sewage, electricity, law enforcement, emergency services, and of course, customers. How quickly the police jump when business whistles! That overzealousness has lead to many embarrassing incidents over the years, things like the police being called to harass bank customers who wanted to close their accounts and weren't doing anything wrong, and border agents confiscating prescription medicines. But they sure aren't there for their cities. Indeed, they have the gall to whine that we aren't friendly enough to business. Joe Consumer can pay for the police and all the rest, but that's not enough, not for them.
Indeed. If I buy a book or a DVD or a file, I expect I can damn well can give it away if I want to. Some people give gifts for birthdays or Christmas. (Maybe the GP doesn't believe in Christmas.) Or, I can sell or trade it to a used book store. Not my fault if it ends up being uploaded. Doesn't Mr. Fisher get any rights from the First-sale doctrine, regardless of what the seller may try to claim about content being licensed, not sold?
Mr. Fisher has many more defenses. What if a friend or a hacker used his computer, copied his porn collection, and uploaded it? What if Mr. Fisher donated his computer to charity or a friend, and didn't erase the hard drive? Or burglars could have broken into his house and taken his computer, or just copied his files. Or, maybe he took his computer in for servicing by the Geek Squad, who have been known to keep copies of porn that they find on customers' computers. Maybe he transferred the file to his super small, portable iThing, and it was stolen by a pick-pocket, or he left it in a bar. Even if there's evidence that the upload came from an IP address he was assigned, that doesn't prove he did it. Only takes one Sony rootkit to open up a computer. Worse, no action at all can endanger a computer. All you have to do is run Windows and miss some crucial patch from Microsoft. Even if you are diligent with the patching, you can still be compromised, because no one can get patches out quickly enough. There are many, many ways a copyrighted file could have been copied, with or without the buyer's knowledge or consent.
This court case would seem to appoint buyers as guardians of every copyrighted item ever bought. Given how difficult it is to secure data, this strikes me as an unreasonable burden. Will the law deputize us too? Can we use lethal force to stop any burglar we see making off with our iPhones?
No good deed goes unpunished. Someone actually paid for some content, and this lawsuit is his reward. We ought to make this into a lesson for the copyright holders. Never buy content. Let them go out of business. They deserve to, for suing their own customers. But, there is another way.
No one should ever give up their privacy to pay for a movie, whether or not it's porn. If Mr. Fisher had used a prepaid credit card with no or fake info, he would be safe from this nonsense. What should he do now? Maybe too late for this one, but he could "accidentally" lose his credit card, then claim thieves used it to buy the porn.
Such privacy preserving payment methods aren't as convenient as they could be, but they do exist. From what I've read, you can buy a prepaid credit card with cash. You may have to give a name and address, because many merchants will use that information to verify that the card hasn't been stolen. But, the personal information does not have to be real. It only has to match with the name and address you use with the online merchant. Privacy advocates particularly recommend this Simon Card. Of course to preserve your privacy you shouldn't buy the prepaid card online, have to go to a store where you can buy it with cash.
Very serious, huh? What measures did you take to ensure safety? What I mean is, that code review and testing to the umpteenth level will never uncover every problem. If you aren't doing formal verification, proving that the software is designed correctly and works correctly, you aren't being as serious about it as you could and perhaps should be.
And such application checking cannot address systemic problems. For instance, if the code is in C/C++, one can make a real mess with pointers, memory leaks, buffer overruns, and the like. The language lends itself to those kinds of problems. We now have tools like Valgrind to catch some of that, but still, can't depend on those tools to catch everything. A language such as Java makes some of those problems impossible. Some kinds of memory leaks can't happen with automatic garbage collection. Java also tries to simplify pointers by hiding them. Then, need I comment about the use of Windows (WinCE, maybe?) as a platform? I saw that fundamental problem with the military. They wanted security, but they wanted their shiny Windows. So they insisted that Windows be made secure, rather than accept that they ought to switch to Linux (slightly better), or SELinux (a bit better yet), OpenBSD, or go all the way and dig up a formally verified microkernel, like perhaps QNX. Did you consider such things, or did you try to push ahead with inferior tools?
The infamous Therac-25 was an extreme example of bad engineering. Sanity checks of the outputs is always a good idea, but they removed that, to save money. The saddest part is they didn't even do a good job of analyzing whether removing those sanity checks saved any money. If they had, they would have realized the savings was so small it was less than the costs of the changes to the software. They made a number of other utterly boneheaded and incompetent decisions, such as hiring bad programmers. Some of the stuff in the Therac-25 software would easily make The Daily WTF.
You don't understand swarm intelligence. You can make a good decision with extremely little information. Nothing wrong with deciding before the 1st debate. And, I have plenty of information, from past experience. Parties do have brands, platforms, and planks. They don't completely change every election. In 2000, I was asking myself if it mattered that W. wasn't too smart, because he was wise enough to surround himself with what seemed a savvy and competent team. At that time, Cheney was an unknown to me. But by 2003, I decided that Republicans were unworthy to hold office because they embraced stupidity as a virtue. Until that changes, and I see no evidence that it has, no one should vote for them. I'm not real keen on the Democrats-- neither major party has done enough to clean up Wall Street. We have problems with corrupt crony capitalism. But the Republicans have descended into dangerously delusional "anti thinking". Who knows what fake problem they'll blow the treasury on next, should they gain control again? It might well be another military adventure, this time into Iran, over nuclear weapons. Whatever it is, it will be a heck of a distraction. Let those Wall Street crooks steal everything and run the economy into the dirt again, we've got bigger things to worry about!
Republicans sent us charging into Iraq, at great expense, over Weapons of Mass Destruction that turned out not to be. Now the best they have to offer on that point is a conspiracy theory idea that the WMDs must have been smuggled out to Syria. Yeah, right. Can't we find out for sure? Of course we can. Not that it matters. No matter how hard we look, some will always say we just didn't look hard enough. More than that, going to war was an incredibly stupid idea regardless. We were at war in Afghanistan. Just from a purely practical angle, you don't start another war when you are already in one. Then, it cost us trillions of dollars. It didn't really solve anything. Yet today, the neocons aren't completely disgraced, and still have some ears. I have no faith whatsoever in the Republican's much vaunted fiscal prudence after that disastrous waste of money known as the War of Choice.
But that's not the worst of it. I have not forgotten or forgiven the Republicans for denying that we have a global climate issue, or for interfering with stem cell research, or going all moralistic over someone like Terri Schiavo, as if her family had inferior morals and couldn't be trusted to explore every option and decide what was best. Demeaning and insulting. It's the same story with the abortion issue. Then there's the bungled response to Hurricane Katrina. And, have you heard about that lying idiot George Deutsch, who received an appointment in the Bush administration and used it to suppress climate research and at the same time inject a bit of Creationist dogma into scientific papers? Now the party has officially admitted that the climate issue is real, and that we are causing it. However, many of their supporters and members have ignored that shift, and are still vehemently denying it, using the most pathetically contrived, transparently bad reasoning to support their position. Drill, baby, drill! They don't even have a reason why any other course of action would supposedly wreck the economy. They just accept that proposition unthinkingly. Some even went so far as to say that we should show some contrition for being so mean to poor British Petroleum over that oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. Stuff happens, y'know?
But climate denial is only one symptom of the root problem: Most Republicans have no understanding of or respect for basic facts and logic. As I said, they've embraced stupidity. For that very good reason, 9 out of 10 scientists are opposed to Republicans. That ought to be reason enough for anyone to vote against the Republicans. But it isn't. To these people, scientists are just another partisan group, same as police officers, steel workers, farmers, or small business owners. Scient
This isn't just government. People who run businesses and make hiring decisions have all kinds of weird ideas and hangups about what makes a good employee. You are considered not good employee material if you've been out of work for more than 6 months, or your age, appearance, or dress doesn't conform to their startlingly narrow standards, or your attitude isn't just so, or your credit rating is too low or perhaps too high which means you might be able to walk out on them without losing your car and house, and more. The experience and currently employed catch-22 seems especially unfair. Can't get experience without a job, and can't get a job without experience. They also want to know if you have children and how old they are, so they can discriminate against women with young children, and for men with young children as long as the men are married not divorced. They want the very hardest driven workers they can find, the sort of persons who can be persuaded or bullied into working extreme hours, figuring that counts for more than ability. A candidate who seems a little desperate may have better chances. There's still racism, sexism, and anti-intellectualism. It always amazes me the way educational accomplishments are often dismissed out of hand or even held up as a negative. There's a great amount of subjectivity injected into these decisions.
As if applying bad criteria to hiring decisions isn't enough, there's also favoritism and gaming of employment. Too often they don't even try to hire whoever is best according to the pseudo rational criteria they love so. Or there isn't even an opening, they're just going through the motions to cover something or harvest resumes.
But you didn't overlook security! You had video cameras in every room of the house, feeding live video directly to the local police stations and your headquarters. Admittedly, there were a few problems and instances of abuse-- some homeowners briefly locked out of their own homes when the automatic locks malfunctioned, a few rogue employees caught downloading the feeds from the cameras in the shower stalls whenever in use by homeowners' children, and sales of occupancy information that regrettably ended up in the hands of burglars who wanted to know when everyone was away and knew just how to temporarily disable the cameras-- but these were minor issues that were sternly and proactively handled. Those cameras caught hundreds of homeowners attempting to watch pirated content on their HDTVs, and shut them down before they could break any laws. Would be a real shame to have any homeowner convicted of copyright infringement.
Yes, you had security covered!
You hit upon the other point that has me torn about these hiring practices. We live very well in the US, and we could do fine with quite a bit less. To me, the American Dream seems a load of marketing propaganda meant to convince us all to buy ever larger houses. It's nuts at a time when families are smaller than ever and technology has miniaturized so many things, that so many of us seem to feel we must have a house that is bigger than the neighbors', instead of big enough for our needs. My parents had 3 shelves devoted to encyclopedias that are hopelessly cumbersome next to Wikipedia. They still have whole book cases full of old magazine issues. I'd like to replace them all with copies of the back issues on DVD, or even better, access to online copies. They also have a grand piano that hasn't been in tune for at least 25 years. The piano is a huge waste of space compared to a keyboard that never needs tuning, takes a fraction of the space, and does so much more than a piano can do. The flat screen TV takes way less space than the old CRT. A CD player was a little smaller than a record player, but that was only the start. Now we can obtain digital copies of the entire vinyl record collection and store it all on one music player that fits in your palm. And so on. Thankfully, they don't have another waste of space known as the grandfather clock.
So, yes, we can certainly lighten the load. Nevertheless, employers are cheating. We have agreements, and they are dodging their end of the deal. If Americans ought to adjust to a lower, or seemingly lower standard of living, is trampling upon the law the way to get there?
If it was so obvious, then there wouldn't be arguments over this, would there?
That's a typical fallback position of the "teach the controversy" stripe. The entertainment industry has done much to confuse the public, manufacturing this controversy over intellectual property. Yes there are arguments over it. Does that mean the issue is unclear? Not necessarily. In a way, I'm glad they've pushed the issue as much as they have, as it has ultimately cleared up many people's confusion. The more they push notions such as unskippable commercials, the more they show everyone how radical and nutty their positions are. The RIAA was voted the "Worst Company in America" in 2007, for good reason. See this. Over the years, I've seen a steady lessening in support for intellectual property rights. Every time a Sony pulls a rootkit stunt, or a TurboTax tries a boot sector mod that endangers people's data, or an RIAA member threatens an ordinary citizen for alleged copyright infringement, or Microsoft arrogates to itself the right to judge whether you are engaging in piracy and gets it spectacularly wrong as they did in Vista and with raids by the BSA, they convince a few more people to look at alternatives.
At the heart, this issue is whether a privileged few should be handed, by fiat, the power to impose a levy upon knowledge, backed by the full force of the government and law. And we already know the answer is no. If it were possible to control knowledge enough to make such toll collection workable, it would be very, very bad for society. Our technological advancement would grind to a halt. Thankfully, it isn't possible to control knowledge to that extent.
You could argue that's not the issue, and that the supporters of intellectual property aren't trying to go that far, that they are only trying to make sure authors are paid for their efforts. Oh no, they constantly try for the moon. They hardly trouble to make suggestions that are sane and reasonable. They do not have the moral right to do all these terrible things to prop up this system of compensation for authors. They should put their efforts towards setting up new business models, instead of trying to terrorize the public in a futile effort to maintain the unmaintainable. Like the Spanish Inquisition, they've gone too far, and more and more, the public is seeing that.
We have many different crimes, and while many of them are a form of theft, many are not: vandalism, assault and battery, speeding, rape, slander and libel, reckless endangerment, public urination, indecent exposure, trespassing, loitering, littering, jaywalking, and so on.
There are many different ways to view and treat data: ghostwriting, covering, plagiarism, and copyright infringement are some, but not all. Harrison's My Sweet Lord lead to an infamously long court case that concluded Harrison did not intentionally plagiarize He's So Fine. Another more recent case was the accusation that Men At Work's Land Down Under used a 1932 children's song Kookaburra. To really steal a song, you would have to take credit for having written it, without permission of the actual authors, and in such a way that the public believes you. Very difficult, but not impossible. What has happened is a massive theft of songs from the public domain by retroactively extending copyright. Songs that you used to have the right to freely copy and reuse were removed from the public domain. Another trick is taking some song from the public domain and making a new recording of it or even just a new arrangement with only one tiny change, copyrighting that, and going after people who use the original. Accuse them of copying your version instead of the original, and make them prove they didn't. Even though it is perfectly legal for everyone to use the public domain original, the threat is enough to effectively take the song out of the public domain. Sheet music vendors are always cooking up new arrangements to justify charging for copies of music that has long been out of copyright. If you aren't doing any of that, you aren't stealing songs.
With all these subtleties, why are you so hot to conflate copying and stealing? They are manifestly not at all the same.
I'm sorry to say, I had never even heard of the man until this story.
Yes, and the public is far too accepting of their high handedness, and too credulous of their propaganda. It's amazing what the public takes lying down: speed traps, parking meters, red light cameras, outrageous bank fees, obnoxious high pressure debt collection practices, reversed or ignored cancellations of monthly services and subscriptions (AOL did a lot of that), slamming, cramming, pages and pages of fine print, purposely confusing terms and fees, surveillance, and more.
Many local businesses are members of a local Lion's Club. How entirely too appropriate that they think of themselves as strong, ruthless predators, apart and above the rest of society. It's a basic misunderstanding of how and why we humans became the dominant animal on Earth. We got there through cooperation. Superior weaponry is only a manifestation of that, it's cooperative effort that fostered the discovery and scientific and technical advancements that enabled us to create the weaponry, the ability to move much faster, and ever more subtle methods handling the environment.
If the public woke up, this court would be shut down, and the robber barons responsible for its creation would be facing numerous lawsuits themselves.
Rather than adapt to changing technology, many print magazines opted to cut costs by cheapening the content, and catering to the dumbing down of the public. You don't need to wait for hindsight to know that's a bad idea. I've seen many a restaurant go the same way. Try to cut costs so much that the quality of the food suffers, and end up going out of business even faster as customers run away. US News and World Report tried to replace much news with Top 100 lists. I suppose those are cheaper to produce than real news, but they simply aren't that useful or interesting though they did make a big deal over the Top 100 universities with difficult to credit claims that the schools cared so much about it that they were all striving to improve their rankings in the magazine. Recently, US News went under and moved all their remaining subscribers to Time. I wouldn't be surprised if Time died in the near future.
Another bad idea is screwing with subscription models. Used to be that you'd get a renewal notice. Now, many magazines and newspapers are pushing the highly annoying automatic renewal with of course automatic charges, trotting out very lame and pathetically contrived reasoning that everyone is doing it, it's for our convenience so that we won't miss a single precious issue, and we asked for it, etc. Condescending and insulting. And clingy and desperate. Not qualities that inspire confidence in their journalism. Just this year, Reader's Digest made automatic renewal the default method, though at least it is optional. I quit the local newspaper when they wouldn't offer any subscription that didn't include automatic renewal.
Science News tried a bit better approach. They changed from a weekly to a biweekly to cut postage costs. It's a start, but ultimately, magazines must move entirely online. The cost difference alone dictates this move. But there is more. Online archives are far better than a shelf full of old issues. Much easier to search, and saves hugely on space. Dead tree is dying. Whenever I have moved, one thing that I did not lug with me were magazine collections.
You can blame that one on the drama peddlers. Interviewing rational Christians would be boring. They sell a lot more newspapers by seeking out the kooks and covering them. They might hold a book burning in which they throw scientific textbooks about evolution into the flames. Makes for great copy.
Wrong. I'll fix it for you.
more software for the taking without having to pay someone for a copy of it.
No one pays for a copy of software any more.
And then you make this leap:
Long live not having to pay someone for their efforts!
On the contrary, we feel that creators deserve compensation for their efforts. Yes, many people do pirate and pay nothing. Many would pay something if it was possible, but often it is not, and that's the fault of industry. We disagree with the business model, that is, copyright and charging for each copy as the means of compensation.
Established businesses have sought to abuse this model to not pass on any savings whatsoever from technology driving down the cost of creating a copy to near zero. When the CD was first created, they set the price at $15 per album (LPs were about half that at the time), and promised that as production costs came down, they would pass some of that savings on to us. That never happened. Even as stacks of blank CD-Rs dived under $0.25 per disk, albums were still about $15, and to add to the insult, 90% of it was filler material to appease fans who really only wanted the one good song on the album. And then we hear that the industry cheats the very artists we're trying to support! As if that wasn't enough, they've tried to terrorize us all with lawsuits and police raids, attempted to infect our computers with viruses (Sony rootkit, you know), annoyed us with DRM that goes too far, pushed extreme laws that trample upon our freedoms (ACTA, SOPA, PIPA, DMCA, and more) and extended copyright to ludicrous lengths, and when they couldn't get their way by force, resorted to laughably bad propaganda. And they still think that preserving copyright justifies all their anti-social efforts and extremism. It took distribution of music in the mp3 format to break their schemes and force them to stop wasting money on things like all the elaborate anti-theft measures such as the oversized packaging and sensors for their precious disks, to say nothing of the disks themselves. They deserve to go out of business.
And you want to apologize for them?
I'm still kinda surprised Hans actually did it
I had thought that anyone with the genius to make a better file system would surely find an acceptable way to solve domestic problems. Why didn't he simply get a divorce? And that's why at first I thought he didn't do it. Instead, like Lisa Nowak, he served himself up as another example that even the brightest and presumably best among us can still lose it, and kick all sense of morality and civilized behavior to the curb. Temporary insanity doesn't explain it, nor does unstable teenage emotions. It's nearly as bad as if a Nobel Peace Prize winner were to go postal. There were more problems than marital discord, but those still do not constitute acceptable excuses. Money was a big issue. One way for any one person to get that far with a file system project is to obsess over it to the point that nothing else matters, and the obsession becomes another issue. Yet there were many acceptable ways to resolve all the issues. He could have lived more modestly, to ease the money problems. That's easier than most Americans are willing to admit. Instead, they prefer to work their rear ends off, and even contemplate doing some crime, for the sake of social status.
Assuming there's any merit in doing so, any group that wants to continue development ought to fork the project to get away from the name.
I've driven a 39 hp car, on freeways and busy city streets, and it's not as bad as you're making out. 0-60 mph in 30 seconds, top speed is 80 mph, and I've done 80 mph just to try to stay with the traffic on the freeway. Break that down a bit, and it's 0-50 in 18 seconds, and 50-60 in 12 seconds. With only 37hp, your top speed may be 75 mph. Depends greatly on the aerodynamics. It could possibly have a much higher top speed than 80 mph if the aero is good.
Yes, it is slow, and no you are not going to keep up with the jackrabbits. You can beat the loaded truck, as those typically need a full minute to get to 60 mph, but nothing else. You'll think about whether the entrance ramp to the freeway is long enough. You won't have any power to spare for A/C. But it gets you from A to B, and excepting the people who measure status by the size of their cars and engines (most Americans), that's the most important feature of any car.
Those aren't the worst problems. The southern US is a terrible place for any form of transport other than the almighty car.
We've had rapid population growth for 30 plus years now, and the cities were expanded without much planning. Developers threw up a bunch of houses in new sprawling suburbs, then left the problem of the inadequate infrastructure for the new residents to figure out. So we end up with 10000 people being served by a single narrow 2 lane country road that rapidly deteriorates under all the new traffic. Those roads are far and away the most dangerous I've ever seen to drive. Ruts, potholes, faint or no lines, road construction with confusing and poorly marked lane shifts, detours, and patches of gravel, drivers on side streets ready to seize the smallest opening to get on the road, new businesses with extravagant lighting that shines in drivers' faces at night, and of course wall to wall traffic with plenty of heavy, poorly maintained trucks. Taking a bike on those is suicide.
How is it that a microkernel is "one overriding idea" but a monolithic kernel somehow is not?
Torvalds says that message passing is the problem with a microkernel approach. But there is also message passing in a monolithic kernel. It may be done in shared memory and informally without explicit mention in the code, but it's still message passing. Perhaps the formalized methods that have to be used in a microkernel architecture are cumbersome, but is that a shortcoming of the idea, or only of the implementation?
Another criticism of microkernels is that they are slower. They have more overhead. This is also not an inherent problem of the design. Modern microkernels can be and are just as fast.
I think a microkernel architecture is a useful modularization. Separate hardware drivers from core kernel functionality. Kernels should concentrate only on communication, juggling processes, and managing memory, CPUs, and other resources. Something else that wasn't mentioned at all is formal verification. Being able to prove that a critical piece of software has no bugs can be a very good thing. Microkernels are small enough that such proofs are possible. There is no way to do that with the monster monolithic kernels we use now. Instead, we have become accustomed to running software that almost certainly has many hidden flaws, and living with the consequences whenever a flaw causes a problem. We've accepted this as a necessary evil even for cases where we don't have to.
You doubt that content creators can be compensated by any other system? Really?
Universities use a form of patronage. It has its problems-- for instance, the notorious Publish or Perish pressure pushes researchers towards quantity rather than quality-- but it does produce research. And it is not welfare, nor is it for those of poor skill, quite the opposite. We need some place for deep thinkers to work, and business is poor at providing a suitable environment for that.
The academic model would be terrible for private business
Would it? How do you know that? And do not talk as if currently used business models are the best we can do. They have big problems, such as a tendency to evolve towards exploitative monopolies which must be constantly guarded against by anti-trust watchdogs, extreme shortsightedness that sacrifices the future for immediate profit, and a narrow viewpoint that sees everything through the lens of products and property rights no matter how wildly inappropriate such a view may be. The private bookstore is an excellent example of this. More and more, we're seeing that trying to treat data as if it is a scarce resource does not work.
The bricks and mortar bookstore is doomed. They have huge overhead in their preferred methods of storage and distribution that is becoming harder to support and justify. A new paperback is now approaching $10 per copy at a time that digital copies can be had for $1, and in time, free. I used to shop at bookstores a lot. Now I may go once a year if that. The last time I set foot inside a bookstore was 2 months ago, and it was only to use up a gift card I'd received. Even used bookstores aren't much of a deal compared to digital.
There are many other ways to compensate authors. Patronage is a big one, with many, many variations that we have as yet barely explored. It is not charity. Patrons expect something they can personally enjoy in return. Then there are endorsements and advertising. For musicians, there are concerts. Another avenue of compensation that is not used as much as it could be is merchandising. For instance, Asimov's Foundation series is popular, but I have not heard there are such things as t-shirts, coffee mugs, action toys, and the like for the Foundation. Why not? It's only partly because there isn't enough of a market. It's also because the process of getting the rights to do such a thing is too cumbersome.
What's with all the capitalist venom that stories like this bring out? It's scary how religiously these trolls espouse the dogma and supposed supreme goodness of an ownership society. They're very noisy, as if they're insecure. In a dog eat dog world, they think they can be, if not the top dogs, at least the plutocrats' poodles, rather than the next item on the menu. They seem to think if they put on a good enough act of devotion to these poisonous principles, they will not be skewered and roasted over the grill this time around. Suckers.
And you come along with a nutty conspiracy theory idea to add to the pile of manure? Cash in how?? You can't comprehend that money isn't everything? Stop poodling for the plutocrats!
The world has not moved on from the FSF, far from it. They have yet to arrive, and, judging from the vitriol here, want to fall back even further.