XML sucks, HTTPS was never as good as SHTTP, we don't have much experience with HTML5 yet so we don't have a good feel for its limitations. IPv6 certainly won't be the final word in network protocols. Plenty of room for more new programming languages, since coding is still awkward and painful. I learned of an interesting one called Racket just last month. Perl 6 is still being developed. The latest revision to C/C++ just came out last year. Code reuse is still incredibly messy, and languages still mostly reinvent the wheel, recreating libraries natively because it's still too hard to call library functions written in a different language. Java is especially bad there. The whole OOP thing with CORBA, and marshaling or serializing, never really caught on, and we still use an awful lot of plain old C library code with wrappers. We could really, really use a good standard for creating and interfacing with library code. And SWIG? Bleh, major code bloat. Imagine what it would take to persuade OS developers to migrate away from C to a better language. C is old, but some still use Fortran and even Cobol. On the hardware side, we're still stuck with all kinds of legacy ugliness going all the way back to the original PC design. Be glad they at least anticipated there could be more than one operating system, and designed the hard drive I/O routines to work with partitions.
"Real" AI and space travel is sexy. But there's a great deal of more mundane work to do. It won't be glamorous but it will be a big help.
In many cases it's the other way around. The grad student comes up with the ideas, and the professor goes along for the ride. In my case, he suggested an area. Then I came up with all the ideas, including one he initially dismissed because he didn't think it would work. I coded it, and showed him it did in fact work. And I put together a rough draft and gave it to him. He rewrote it, expressing the ideas ten times better than I had. He dug up some stock software for another part of the work. He thought of another way to check the results and did that too, finding that it all checked out.
We could go into more details of who contributed what, but why? So some bean counter can decide who gets to keep their job? Because the only thing that matters is whose ideas they were? I have no problem with adding other names to my work if it helps them keep their jobs and I feel they're worthy and they haven't tried to cheat me somehow. Fight bad, oversimplified criteria with creativity. Show them that their metric is stupid. Still, one should be careful. The pressure can be too much and some will stoop unethical means to pump up their stats. It's still too easy to be victimized by the desperate.
Something else that might make Australia reconsider is if other countries rush to hire these scientists. Probably there are some bad ones in the lot, but most may be good. Australia has already done all the work of vetting them and now wants to throw that away.
Why are Odysseys so expensive? I tried to pick one up used, but simply could not find one for what I considered a good price. Ended up going with an MPV. MPV's are okay, when you know what to watch for. Mainly, you can't just replace the timing belt every 60k miles, you should also replace all the bearings on the pulleys for the timing belt every other time. It's such a common problem that auto parts stores have special kits for that.
There is good value in small cars. The American public has really fallen hard for bigness, and views little cars and their owners with blind universal contempt. I find the best deals are domestics that were actually built by an Asian manufacturer. Don't get a Ford Escort made by Ford, they really are junk. Had an '88 1/2 Escort for a while, and learned they simply didn't engineer anything to last. Clutch failed every 50k miles, ball joints were too small and wore out after 70k miles, the ignition system was screwy, the O-rings used for the A/C leaked, and the plastic bumpers turned brittle and cracked at the slightest pressure after a mere 5 years. Even the headlight switch wore out. And once, the steering failed. Toyota ball joints are twice the size. But the Ford Festiva, made by Kia, was actually decent quality-- decent, mind you, not top notch. The Geo Prism is really a Toyota Corolla, and was a great way to get Toyota quality at Chevy prices. The Geo/Chevy Metro is really a Suzuki Swift, another decent quality little car. One of the biggest problems with buying these used is that always the previous owner didn't feel they were worth treating right.
Sorry to hear you're so cynical. Do you suppose I have only leached and never contributed? I have published work for which I have never received one damn cent. It was good work but it's insufficient quantity to win a research position. I don't expect I'll ever see any money. And that's fine. Yet the publisher has the gall to erect a paywall to try to collect money for themselves in exchange for copies of my and others' work, and never pass any of it on to us. Technically, I can't distribute copies of my own work because I had to agree to transfer the copyrights to this publisher in exchange for the privilege of being published. You and I have the misfortune to be working in this industry before better compensation methods are developed. We still don't have them in place.
feel free to send me examples of folks who put together small software packages that could be copied without limit and made any money.
There's the Humble Indie Bundle. You already mentioned Red Hat. There are many other Linux and FreeBSD distros. Mozilla. MySQL. Xiph's audio and video codecs, Ogg Vorbis and Ogg Theora. GNU software. LibreOffice. There's a whole world of libre software, as I'm sure you fully realize. Many of these are charities, in a legal sense. Yet even charities have to do business and marketing, and bring in some money somehow, and these all do. You may argue that the people behind these did not make any money. Maybe not directly, and not much, but they nevertheless profited and prospered. They earned a reputation. Consider how universities work. A professor doesn't get anything directly for publishing research. No money from readers or publishers, and often no patents and so no income from licensing fees. What a professor gets is a job at a university.
Yes, I know one of the more effective curbs on piracy is service. As in, the typical MMORPG needs bandwidth and server farms that most people cannot realistically afford, so the vendor can get the users to pay for subscriptions. That's not quite the same as cloud computing, but it's close. Businesses can't count on that for much longer. 10 years from now, Internet connections that are 100x faster may be common, as well as server class hardware that fits in a shoe box and costs less than a tank of gas. Will be easy for anyone to run their own service at that point.
You're the ones who are lost in space. As has been repeated many, many times: copying is not stealing. Maybe it's illegal, but if so, it's a different crime, just like vandalism is a different crime. As long as so many of you have difficulty with this basic fact, we can't move on. You refuse to see copying in any other light.
Copying is good! We all benefit from easy copying. But some of you have bought into the dream that you might create something of value yourself, and think you need copyright to protect your valuable work from exploitation. You're so afraid you might miss out on some profit you deserve, you'd strangle all creativity and ignore huge, huge savings just to prevent that possibility. Many also significantly overvalue their work, and feel that those who disagree with their valuation are just robbers, trying to lowball them. You think no one would pay if they didn't have to, that strong protections, harsh laws, and force is the only way to make it work, and that force can make it work. Yet no force can make it work. The current copyright system functions somewhat because there are lots of people who could pirate but choose not to. In other words, they didn't have to pay, but they did. They were not forced. There is another way, and it's called patronage. But you can't believe patronage could work. You believe in copyright, despite the many ways in which it is broken, but you won't give patronage a chance. You think if only we got serious and really clamped down on piracy with even harsher laws, more invasive surveillance, and harder locks, we could make copyright work. Except that can't be done. Even if all that could be put in place, it still would not stop piracy. The cloud is not a silver bullet that can fix all these problems either. There isn't anything that can. We'll all have to continue suffering with this costly, dysfunctional system.
Here on Earth, we obey the laws of nature. You cannot reasonably regulate copying. Copy protection simply does not work. Only has to be cracked once, and protection is always cracked. Software producers have been trying copy protection schemes for more than 30 years, and not one has remained uncracked, not even for long enough to wring all the value out of initial sales.
The sad truth is that it's so very believable that the Heartland Institute would say such stupid anti science things. That's the reputation they have. It's so bad it doesn't matter much whether the documents are real or fake.
That they're anxious to disavow such statements is something. The public still has a healthy respect for science despite the damage these highly politicized think tanks have done, and they know it. So I find it quite easy to believe that they're also lying about the documents not being theirs.
Some time ago, I participated in a contest to see who could write the shortest Pong game in x86 assembler. Of course entries used BIOS calls and ran on the text screen. The winner's entry was 50 bytes. Got about 30 entries in all, averaging somewhere around 75 bytes.
I rather liked the magic system. Magic power comes in 3 varieties: The One Power divided into male and female parts, and "True" Power from the evil side which is so dangerous it's not used much and doesn't play much of a role. Each magic user has some mysterious upper limit on the amount of power they can wield, and it varies greatly by individual. Most people are of course unable to use any magic at all.
There's not much to say of the general plot. Very stock fantasy in many ways, which becomes very tiresome thanks to the length. At the start of the series, the past is a lost golden age of much greater power and knowledge than the present, the male part of the One Power is tainted since the end of that Age of Wonders, male mages are rare and not trusted, and are cut off from the power if the women catch them. 3 boys (really, just 1 boy, the Dragon Reborn who can wield more of the One Power than anyone else), and 2 girls from a completely ordinary village rise to become the great heroes who will save the world, spending the rest of the series running all over the world fighting evil and treachery sometimes by bluffing but usually by applying superior force, and collecting power, followers, knowledge, advice, scars, and honors, and trying to get the dozens of kingdoms to pull together and cooperate to fight evil with the favored method for accomplishing that last being to have the monarchs swear obedience or in the case of queens, love to the Dragon Reborn.
If a company can get away with gouging, it's because they have no competition.
One reason a company would engage in dumping is to get rid of competition.
If a company can fix prices, then they don't have real competition.
Markets are like sports. They need rules and referees. That's not curtailing their freedom, that's providing structure so the game can be played at all. We as a society have an interest in holding these competitions, and keeping contests as fair and non-destructive as practical. No dirty pool! Otherwise, why not hire hitmen to bash your opponents' knees, or poison your competitors players and employees, or any number of other dirty tricks?
And performance will always matter. C was deliberately left unsafe because that extra 10% or so of performance gained from not checking array bounds mattered. Safety still takes a back seat to performance today, or we'd all be using SELinux or equivalent. Didn't help that MS confused the issue with Vista and Windows Genuine Advantage, mixing "safety for users" with "safety for MS against pirating users". True, many users are saddled with virus checkers that make Windows computers run very slowly for the first 15 minutes, after which the experience improves to slow. And nobody likes that. Nobody likes knowing their computer could be a lot faster if not for that necessary evil. Computers are still for the most part unable to boot up instantly, another source of complaints about the general slowness of computers. The GUI had to offer a lot to compensate users for the massive performance hit-- it's one of the few performance killers that was accepted. For that matter, the OS itself was once suspect. Were the services of an OS worth the speed hit, or was it better to run on bare metal? That's been pretty well settled in favor of the OS, particularly with parallelism and speed increases reducing the OS overhead to nearly nothing.
So we are to trade "up" from native apps to dog slow, interpreted web based apps? Maybe the cloud will be like the GUI, offering enough compensation to be worth the loss in performance? I doubt it, especially since it's possible to have the advantages of the cloud (primarily data persistence, and more capacity) and the speeds of native apps at the same time.
I wonder if that might be a workable way forward. Companies are always changing their employment contracts anyway. Might make for a cleaner break, rather than attempting to change an existing contract. Quit and take a week or two of unpaid vacation, then hire back on, making sure to cross out all the objectionable requirements in the new contract. This is only if there is a mutual liking and respect, and this is seen as the most convenient way to address the IP concerns. And if there's not much to be lost on the years of service angle.
In any case, contracts can have quite a bit of bluff and bluster. They ask for things they should not ask for, and that cannot be enforced in court. If you never question or fight it, if you believe in it and meekly hand over everything, they could score a huge steal at your expense. You may be able to ignore those terms. Go ahead with your private projects, keeping them apart from the employer, and put the onus on them to sue. If they even notice the extracurricular work, they may very well realize that part of their contract is garbage and that they can't win a suit, and will have the sense not to try it. Even if they try it, win or lose they may alienate the best of their other workers. Could cost them more than a victory is worth.
Such hair splitting doesn't matter if we take things a step further: abolish all patents. Or at the least gut the patent system by getting the government out of the business of granting these monopolies and trying to enforce them, something a true conservative should support wholeheartedly. A patent was never supposed to be for just an idea. None of math, equations, software, facts of nature were ever supposed to be patentable. An idea had to be embodied in a physical device.
This has proven problematic, since many ideas that used to require physical mechanisms can now be realized entirely in software. One such kind of idea is any kind of clock. We should have swung away from patents altogether as this problem became clearer. Instead vested interests, not least patent lawyers, have pushed the system in the opposite direction. Now patents are granted on the most ridiculously vague and broad basic concepts, and we have defensive patenting, cross licensing, patent trolling, "business method" and "look and feel" patents. All of these are uses that do more harm than good, and take us ever further from the purpose of these artificial monopolies. For centuries, statesmen have been uncertain about the effectiveness of these IP systems. Now we know enough to confirm their doubts.
As I've said before, deaths are not a good measure of safety. You should use something that measures all the losses, like the amount of insurance and damage claims paid out, costs of emergency and medical work, compensation for land lost to contamination, and that sort of thing. The total cost of the Fukushima accident is well above $100 billion, and may be around $300 billion. It's very roughly $60 billion for the land that has to be abandoned for decades and perhaps centuries. It's at least $15 billion to decommission the plant. TEPCO may have to pay out $130 billion in claims. By some measures, 1 human life is worth about $5 million. Which puts a natural disaster such as Hurricane Andrew, at 39 deaths, as only $195 million in damages, when it is really $26.5 billion. You will vastly underestimate the costs of nuclear accidents when using only number of deaths as a measure.
The only notorious exaggeration going on here is the absolutely incredible blindness towards the potential and actual damage implicit in statements like "nuclear is safer than x because there have been fewer deaths."
Put the speakers on a hard surface, not on carpet or hanging in the air.
This worked especially well on the subwoofer of my cheap 5.1 surround sound system. Had it resting on a carpeted floor, where it sounded weak and unclear. Stuck a scrap of plywood (about 3'x2') underneath it, and that really improved the bass. Can feel the plywood vibrating when you put a finger on it. Same idea really helped an old boombox sound much better. Quite a difference in quality between holding it in the air and letting it rest on a table or countertop. Just guessing, but I suspect high end speakers are engineered not to be so leaky and will not benefit much from that kind of help.
I don't see the summary like that at all. We all know the MAFIAA is reactionary, brutal, and flat wrong. They thoroughly deserve that reputation. They earned it by suing thousands of ordinary people, in an attempt to terrorize us all into giving up the Internet. And by trying to impose DRM on the public. The Sony BMG Root Kit fiasco alone is enough to condemn them, but they've tried much more than that. And they earned their reputation still more by bribing and suborning our legislators into supporting their insane vision, and attempting to hide what they do. Their motives in trying to keep ACTA secret are painfully obvious. They've shown no regard whatever for the damage they've done to the public and artists, while screaming very loudly and selfishly about the supposed damage done to them. At the very least, holding back public libraries from going digital costs us all huge amounts of money in maintaining, housing and tracking "dead tree" copies. Yet the damage they've done is as nothing to the damage they would do if they could.
No, it isn't bias to call it like it is. I don't feel there's much left to debate except the details of what will replace copyright, and so what'd I'd like to do is move on to that, not keep rehashing this controversy that's become almost as fake as the controversy between Creationism and Evolution. They of course refuse to admit it and want to keep it alive, to "teach the controversy", and they have some success because there are a lot of uninformed people who haven't heard or thought much about the issue. Moving on, how can we once and for all end this threat to our freedoms? Shut down this attitude so hard that anyone who ever again dares to raise it will find themselves sidelined in the same way that flat-earthers and other kooks are? A "Freedom of Knowledge" constitutional amendment perhaps?
Most times, it seems so capricious why anyone (ok, why any man) gets rejected. Stephen Hawking doesn't understand it. Everything sounds great online, you correspond for weeks, and then in the first face to face meeting she kills the relationship. She won't say why. Maybe she can't, if the real reason is something biological. He didn't smell different or musky enough. Or he's not tall enough. Or she's no gold digger, not consciously, yet the car he pulled up in was too cheap, small, and old. Or she's testing him with mind games, wants to see if he can figure out when no means no, and when no doesn't really mean no, maybe looking for persistence from him, seeing in that an indication that he is serious. What does "let's just be friends" really mean? Or despite professing a desire for a smart man, she didn't really mean that, and actually wants the big dumb infatuated ox who is easy for her to manipulate and mentally dominate.
Really baffling is seeing what some women choose. She rejects a bunch of great guys and ends up going with a total cad, the most shallow, superficial, lying, hypocritical loser and fool available, the kind of guy who abuses women and cheats even as he preaches about morality. You know, guys like Newt Gingrich except without the wealth and power. Well, maybe he has cute interns working for him as well as money, power, and fame. Maybe it's because she's selling herself short, doesn't believe she deserves better. Sometimes she comes to her senses, and can't understand herself why she ever dated or married a guy like that.
I also wonder if the larger climate makes dating even harder. There are too many people in the world. It's too hard to raise children and maintain the high standard of living people have grown to like. Women are more independent than ever, don't need any man. And employers subtly pressure women not to have children, as that would of course take them away from work. Queen Victoria found the biology of it all icky and disgusting. Didn't like the "horror" of breastfeeding. Maybe she was merely ahead of her time? What's with calling sex "the nasty"?
The only way I've ever been able to make much sense of it all is through a biological view. We're even more enslaved to our hormones than we realize. Men's lot is to ask and ask and ask, and be rejected almost every time but not quite, and the reason why it's like that is the biological fact that the effort of producing offspring falls almost entirely on women.
Open drivers with 3D acceleration and good performance is what's still missing in Linux.
I'd buy all my video cards from whichever vendor has that. But none of them do. Not Nvidia, not AMD/ATI, and certainly not Intel or any of the others who have the additional problem that even if they had a great open source driver it wouldn't help because their graphics hardware performs so poorly. 2 years ago, I heard ATI was going to open up, and so my newest computer is an AMD with ATI graphics. But they haven't delivered. Still have to use the binary blobs to get 3D acceleration. I keep hoping someone else will enter the market.
All those things you mentioned-- shoplifting, burglary, littering, etc-- involve physical items, cause harm, are difficult to hide, and take effort. They are not the same as copying. Copying occurs every time anyone speaks to more than 1 person. Every instant that light shines on an object produces many images of that object. Radio and TV stations can broadcast information to a wide audience because that's the way the universe works. Trying to control copying is like trying to make water flow uphill.
You might argue that copying causes harm to the authors, but you can't prove it. You can't prove that someone who made a copy would have paid for a copy if they could not make one for free. In fact, we know that many people would not pay. Simple law of supply and demand. And you can't prove that their actions did not in fact lead to more sales because of the unintentional endorsement and advertising.
That definition of harm is too broad. Under that interpretation, every time someone walks instead of drives, that harms the oil companies, auto manufacturers, road construction contractors, and anyone else connected to transportation. If you shop at WalMart, you harm KMart. If you eat at McDonalds, you harm Kentucky Fried Chicken. If you cook your own food, you harm both restaurants. If you skip a meal, you harm the restaurants and the grocery stores. Similarly, whenever art is borrowed from a public library or bought used, that could be interpreted as harmful to the authors. So this cannot be the meaning of harm. If no one lost anything that they didn't already have, no harm is done! The act of copying does not cause a loss of anything already in someone's possession.
What makes piracy right is the laws of nature, not any irrelevant facts about the age of the typical copied item. Which you don't know in any case. You're just guessing that most pirated stuff is new.
How do you propose to enforce the existing model? To forcibly stop people from copying? You can't. No one can stop it. Or do you seriously expect a big enough majority to agree with the bankrupt morality that copying is bad? If you're counting on that, forget it. We have seen how good sharing is for everyone, and we're not going to give that up.
I suppose your next point is the "starving artists" wheeze. How can artists make any money without copyright, you ask as if there's no other conceivable way of compensating them. There is another way. It's called patronage, and it has worked in the past, and still works now. And you forget that most artists do rather poorly under copyright, what with Hollywood Accounting and demands that in exchange for next to nothing, authors have to transfer all their rights away. It's not just artists that get screwed by copyright, it's all of us every time some rights holder abuses these rights to shut down competition, censor others, hold a valuable public resource hostage, or sit on great work of art.
You hate the new UI? I love it! More screen space devoted to web pages instead of interface. Chrome may have started this trend, but Firefox is keeping up.
I used to use addons to do the things newer versions of Firefox now do much better. Tried autohide addons for the menu bar and status bar, and they worked but not flawlessly. Settled on an addon that put the entire menu on a button next to the URL bar-- worked better than the menu autohide. Now I don't have to install any of that anymore. Another thing I always do is enable "small icons". And now the lowest hanging fruit for more screen space is the window manager. Title bars and scroll bars waste space. That sort of thing is pretty important on small screens.
The main reason to stick with 3.6 is memory footprint. Version 9 is unusably slow when you have only 128M RAM. Am wondering how much 10 improved.
I thought the same thing. Offense is the best defense.
But we have wide disagreements. Most people want to reform the system, not radically change it. Most reform ideas involve shortening copyright and patent durations, and scaling back what can be patented and copyrighted. I don't believe that will really solve the problem. We would still attempt to treat abundance as if it was scarce. Reform would be like reducing prison terms from 75 years to 14 years for crimes that shouldn't be crimes at all.
We need a system that defaults to acceptance, not denial. Having to get permission to so much as think, for fear of stepping on millions of "rights" and "costing" others their just earnings is a huge burden. We have no choice but to trample upon these so called rights in order to create more works, and hope that no one sues us. For many, that hope has been in vain. Free software such as Linux has been threatened this way many times, and will be threatened again. Even if the trolls never win any of these lawsuits, merely having to defend a project in court is so costly that the trolls may succeed in killing it anyway.
A workable replacement system about has to be patronage, which we could do so much better than it has been done in past centuries.
To change systems requires a constitutional amendment in the US. Proposing an "Information Amendment" and actually seeing it get some traction would be just the thing to really scare Big Media. Of course it should be a serious effort, worthy of being in the Constitution should it actually be ratified. I've worked out a starting point for such an amendment. Almost the first thing it says is that copyright can no longer be enforced.
I wonder. I think many politicians cynically play the media companies for suckers. Happy to go along with their ridiculous proposals in exchange for huge campaign contributions, knowing full well that if they're passed and not struck down, mere laws can't stop copying. They may even be counting on the bills never making it into law. But if they do, their lawyer buddies get more work. And the laws fail in their objective, and the media companies stubbornly refuse to comprehend reality, and come running again with more cash. Seems Big Media is very reliable that way.
He's just another fanboy pining for the glory days.
That's not how I read him. Now Zubrin, who he mentioned, is unreasonably anxious to get out there. Why should we visit Mars? To show the world it's possible? To research the place? And if the latter, why send people instead of more robots? Only reason to send people is as a prelude to the ultimate goal of colonization, which we're a long ways from being able to do. If we can't colonize Antarctica, which at least has breathable air, we sure can't colonize Mars. We have plenty of deserts we are currently unable to utilize much. At this point, we really cannot even just visit Mars, as we did the moon. It's a nice dream, but it is just a dream. And I see that he realizes all this.
I've spoken with Zubrin, and I asked him why the rush, why not wait 50 years or a century for technological improvements to make a Mars visit easier? He didn't want to wait, he felt our current capabilities were enough that we could do it now. And therefore we should. We should go "while we are young" is what he said. How romantic. But romance won't get us to Mars, and sure isn't a justification for trying.
This is not a technically hard problem. The way they did it in that story you linked was terrible. Perhaps the simplest way to solve it is to have the system generate part or all of every password, instead of letting (or making?) users create their own passwords. Naturally, the system is programmed to make sure its part is unique.
However, that solution might not be so good from a social point of view. I thought a half and half approach might work. The user makes their own password, however weak, and the system adds to it. And rather than a short string of gibberish, the system picks a few real words and short numbers to add to the password, something like "smith0001", which is easier for a person to remember, though writing it down is not discouraged. (Why did we ever have any system that limited passwords to no more than 8 characters, which forces the use of hard to remember gibberish to achieve strength?) A scheme like what I outlined could scale to millions of accounts without collision problems.
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Low hanging fruit has been picked? Not hardly!
XML sucks, HTTPS was never as good as SHTTP, we don't have much experience with HTML5 yet so we don't have a good feel for its limitations. IPv6 certainly won't be the final word in network protocols. Plenty of room for more new programming languages, since coding is still awkward and painful. I learned of an interesting one called Racket just last month. Perl 6 is still being developed. The latest revision to C/C++ just came out last year. Code reuse is still incredibly messy, and languages still mostly reinvent the wheel, recreating libraries natively because it's still too hard to call library functions written in a different language. Java is especially bad there. The whole OOP thing with CORBA, and marshaling or serializing, never really caught on, and we still use an awful lot of plain old C library code with wrappers. We could really, really use a good standard for creating and interfacing with library code. And SWIG? Bleh, major code bloat. Imagine what it would take to persuade OS developers to migrate away from C to a better language. C is old, but some still use Fortran and even Cobol. On the hardware side, we're still stuck with all kinds of legacy ugliness going all the way back to the original PC design. Be glad they at least anticipated there could be more than one operating system, and designed the hard drive I/O routines to work with partitions.
"Real" AI and space travel is sexy. But there's a great deal of more mundane work to do. It won't be glamorous but it will be a big help.
In many cases it's the other way around. The grad student comes up with the ideas, and the professor goes along for the ride. In my case, he suggested an area. Then I came up with all the ideas, including one he initially dismissed because he didn't think it would work. I coded it, and showed him it did in fact work. And I put together a rough draft and gave it to him. He rewrote it, expressing the ideas ten times better than I had. He dug up some stock software for another part of the work. He thought of another way to check the results and did that too, finding that it all checked out.
We could go into more details of who contributed what, but why? So some bean counter can decide who gets to keep their job? Because the only thing that matters is whose ideas they were? I have no problem with adding other names to my work if it helps them keep their jobs and I feel they're worthy and they haven't tried to cheat me somehow. Fight bad, oversimplified criteria with creativity. Show them that their metric is stupid. Still, one should be careful. The pressure can be too much and some will stoop unethical means to pump up their stats. It's still too easy to be victimized by the desperate.
Something else that might make Australia reconsider is if other countries rush to hire these scientists. Probably there are some bad ones in the lot, but most may be good. Australia has already done all the work of vetting them and now wants to throw that away.
Why are Odysseys so expensive? I tried to pick one up used, but simply could not find one for what I considered a good price. Ended up going with an MPV. MPV's are okay, when you know what to watch for. Mainly, you can't just replace the timing belt every 60k miles, you should also replace all the bearings on the pulleys for the timing belt every other time. It's such a common problem that auto parts stores have special kits for that.
There is good value in small cars. The American public has really fallen hard for bigness, and views little cars and their owners with blind universal contempt. I find the best deals are domestics that were actually built by an Asian manufacturer. Don't get a Ford Escort made by Ford, they really are junk. Had an '88 1/2 Escort for a while, and learned they simply didn't engineer anything to last. Clutch failed every 50k miles, ball joints were too small and wore out after 70k miles, the ignition system was screwy, the O-rings used for the A/C leaked, and the plastic bumpers turned brittle and cracked at the slightest pressure after a mere 5 years. Even the headlight switch wore out. And once, the steering failed. Toyota ball joints are twice the size. But the Ford Festiva, made by Kia, was actually decent quality-- decent, mind you, not top notch. The Geo Prism is really a Toyota Corolla, and was a great way to get Toyota quality at Chevy prices. The Geo/Chevy Metro is really a Suzuki Swift, another decent quality little car. One of the biggest problems with buying these used is that always the previous owner didn't feel they were worth treating right.
Sorry to hear you're so cynical. Do you suppose I have only leached and never contributed? I have published work for which I have never received one damn cent. It was good work but it's insufficient quantity to win a research position. I don't expect I'll ever see any money. And that's fine. Yet the publisher has the gall to erect a paywall to try to collect money for themselves in exchange for copies of my and others' work, and never pass any of it on to us. Technically, I can't distribute copies of my own work because I had to agree to transfer the copyrights to this publisher in exchange for the privilege of being published. You and I have the misfortune to be working in this industry before better compensation methods are developed. We still don't have them in place.
feel free to send me examples of folks who put together small software packages that could be copied without limit and made any money.
There's the Humble Indie Bundle. You already mentioned Red Hat. There are many other Linux and FreeBSD distros. Mozilla. MySQL. Xiph's audio and video codecs, Ogg Vorbis and Ogg Theora. GNU software. LibreOffice. There's a whole world of libre software, as I'm sure you fully realize. Many of these are charities, in a legal sense. Yet even charities have to do business and marketing, and bring in some money somehow, and these all do. You may argue that the people behind these did not make any money. Maybe not directly, and not much, but they nevertheless profited and prospered. They earned a reputation. Consider how universities work. A professor doesn't get anything directly for publishing research. No money from readers or publishers, and often no patents and so no income from licensing fees. What a professor gets is a job at a university.
Yes, I know one of the more effective curbs on piracy is service. As in, the typical MMORPG needs bandwidth and server farms that most people cannot realistically afford, so the vendor can get the users to pay for subscriptions. That's not quite the same as cloud computing, but it's close. Businesses can't count on that for much longer. 10 years from now, Internet connections that are 100x faster may be common, as well as server class hardware that fits in a shoe box and costs less than a tank of gas. Will be easy for anyone to run their own service at that point.
You're the ones who are lost in space. As has been repeated many, many times: copying is not stealing. Maybe it's illegal, but if so, it's a different crime, just like vandalism is a different crime. As long as so many of you have difficulty with this basic fact, we can't move on. You refuse to see copying in any other light.
Copying is good! We all benefit from easy copying. But some of you have bought into the dream that you might create something of value yourself, and think you need copyright to protect your valuable work from exploitation. You're so afraid you might miss out on some profit you deserve, you'd strangle all creativity and ignore huge, huge savings just to prevent that possibility. Many also significantly overvalue their work, and feel that those who disagree with their valuation are just robbers, trying to lowball them. You think no one would pay if they didn't have to, that strong protections, harsh laws, and force is the only way to make it work, and that force can make it work. Yet no force can make it work. The current copyright system functions somewhat because there are lots of people who could pirate but choose not to. In other words, they didn't have to pay, but they did. They were not forced. There is another way, and it's called patronage. But you can't believe patronage could work. You believe in copyright, despite the many ways in which it is broken, but you won't give patronage a chance. You think if only we got serious and really clamped down on piracy with even harsher laws, more invasive surveillance, and harder locks, we could make copyright work. Except that can't be done. Even if all that could be put in place, it still would not stop piracy. The cloud is not a silver bullet that can fix all these problems either. There isn't anything that can. We'll all have to continue suffering with this costly, dysfunctional system.
Here on Earth, we obey the laws of nature. You cannot reasonably regulate copying. Copy protection simply does not work. Only has to be cracked once, and protection is always cracked. Software producers have been trying copy protection schemes for more than 30 years, and not one has remained uncracked, not even for long enough to wring all the value out of initial sales.
The sad truth is that it's so very believable that the Heartland Institute would say such stupid anti science things. That's the reputation they have. It's so bad it doesn't matter much whether the documents are real or fake.
That they're anxious to disavow such statements is something. The public still has a healthy respect for science despite the damage these highly politicized think tanks have done, and they know it. So I find it quite easy to believe that they're also lying about the documents not being theirs.
Some time ago, I participated in a contest to see who could write the shortest Pong game in x86 assembler. Of course entries used BIOS calls and ran on the text screen. The winner's entry was 50 bytes. Got about 30 entries in all, averaging somewhere around 75 bytes.
I rather liked the magic system. Magic power comes in 3 varieties: The One Power divided into male and female parts, and "True" Power from the evil side which is so dangerous it's not used much and doesn't play much of a role. Each magic user has some mysterious upper limit on the amount of power they can wield, and it varies greatly by individual. Most people are of course unable to use any magic at all.
There's not much to say of the general plot. Very stock fantasy in many ways, which becomes very tiresome thanks to the length. At the start of the series, the past is a lost golden age of much greater power and knowledge than the present, the male part of the One Power is tainted since the end of that Age of Wonders, male mages are rare and not trusted, and are cut off from the power if the women catch them. 3 boys (really, just 1 boy, the Dragon Reborn who can wield more of the One Power than anyone else), and 2 girls from a completely ordinary village rise to become the great heroes who will save the world, spending the rest of the series running all over the world fighting evil and treachery sometimes by bluffing but usually by applying superior force, and collecting power, followers, knowledge, advice, scars, and honors, and trying to get the dozens of kingdoms to pull together and cooperate to fight evil with the favored method for accomplishing that last being to have the monarchs swear obedience or in the case of queens, love to the Dragon Reborn.
If a company can get away with gouging, it's because they have no competition.
One reason a company would engage in dumping is to get rid of competition.
If a company can fix prices, then they don't have real competition.
Markets are like sports. They need rules and referees. That's not curtailing their freedom, that's providing structure so the game can be played at all. We as a society have an interest in holding these competitions, and keeping contests as fair and non-destructive as practical. No dirty pool! Otherwise, why not hire hitmen to bash your opponents' knees, or poison your competitors players and employees, or any number of other dirty tricks?
And performance will always matter. C was deliberately left unsafe because that extra 10% or so of performance gained from not checking array bounds mattered. Safety still takes a back seat to performance today, or we'd all be using SELinux or equivalent. Didn't help that MS confused the issue with Vista and Windows Genuine Advantage, mixing "safety for users" with "safety for MS against pirating users". True, many users are saddled with virus checkers that make Windows computers run very slowly for the first 15 minutes, after which the experience improves to slow. And nobody likes that. Nobody likes knowing their computer could be a lot faster if not for that necessary evil. Computers are still for the most part unable to boot up instantly, another source of complaints about the general slowness of computers. The GUI had to offer a lot to compensate users for the massive performance hit-- it's one of the few performance killers that was accepted. For that matter, the OS itself was once suspect. Were the services of an OS worth the speed hit, or was it better to run on bare metal? That's been pretty well settled in favor of the OS, particularly with parallelism and speed increases reducing the OS overhead to nearly nothing.
So we are to trade "up" from native apps to dog slow, interpreted web based apps? Maybe the cloud will be like the GUI, offering enough compensation to be worth the loss in performance? I doubt it, especially since it's possible to have the advantages of the cloud (primarily data persistence, and more capacity) and the speeds of native apps at the same time.
I wonder if that might be a workable way forward. Companies are always changing their employment contracts anyway. Might make for a cleaner break, rather than attempting to change an existing contract. Quit and take a week or two of unpaid vacation, then hire back on, making sure to cross out all the objectionable requirements in the new contract. This is only if there is a mutual liking and respect, and this is seen as the most convenient way to address the IP concerns. And if there's not much to be lost on the years of service angle.
In any case, contracts can have quite a bit of bluff and bluster. They ask for things they should not ask for, and that cannot be enforced in court. If you never question or fight it, if you believe in it and meekly hand over everything, they could score a huge steal at your expense. You may be able to ignore those terms. Go ahead with your private projects, keeping them apart from the employer, and put the onus on them to sue. If they even notice the extracurricular work, they may very well realize that part of their contract is garbage and that they can't win a suit, and will have the sense not to try it. Even if they try it, win or lose they may alienate the best of their other workers. Could cost them more than a victory is worth.
Such hair splitting doesn't matter if we take things a step further: abolish all patents. Or at the least gut the patent system by getting the government out of the business of granting these monopolies and trying to enforce them, something a true conservative should support wholeheartedly. A patent was never supposed to be for just an idea. None of math, equations, software, facts of nature were ever supposed to be patentable. An idea had to be embodied in a physical device.
This has proven problematic, since many ideas that used to require physical mechanisms can now be realized entirely in software. One such kind of idea is any kind of clock. We should have swung away from patents altogether as this problem became clearer. Instead vested interests, not least patent lawyers, have pushed the system in the opposite direction. Now patents are granted on the most ridiculously vague and broad basic concepts, and we have defensive patenting, cross licensing, patent trolling, "business method" and "look and feel" patents. All of these are uses that do more harm than good, and take us ever further from the purpose of these artificial monopolies. For centuries, statesmen have been uncertain about the effectiveness of these IP systems. Now we know enough to confirm their doubts.
As I've said before, deaths are not a good measure of safety. You should use something that measures all the losses, like the amount of insurance and damage claims paid out, costs of emergency and medical work, compensation for land lost to contamination, and that sort of thing. The total cost of the Fukushima accident is well above $100 billion, and may be around $300 billion. It's very roughly $60 billion for the land that has to be abandoned for decades and perhaps centuries. It's at least $15 billion to decommission the plant. TEPCO may have to pay out $130 billion in claims. By some measures, 1 human life is worth about $5 million. Which puts a natural disaster such as Hurricane Andrew, at 39 deaths, as only $195 million in damages, when it is really $26.5 billion. You will vastly underestimate the costs of nuclear accidents when using only number of deaths as a measure.
The only notorious exaggeration going on here is the absolutely incredible blindness towards the potential and actual damage implicit in statements like "nuclear is safer than x because there have been fewer deaths."
I prefer neither one. Quit talking as if filthy old coal is the only alternative to nuclear.
Wind, water, and sun. And a bit of geothermal. And efficiency. That's where we should be going.
Put the speakers on a hard surface, not on carpet or hanging in the air.
This worked especially well on the subwoofer of my cheap 5.1 surround sound system. Had it resting on a carpeted floor, where it sounded weak and unclear. Stuck a scrap of plywood (about 3'x2') underneath it, and that really improved the bass. Can feel the plywood vibrating when you put a finger on it. Same idea really helped an old boombox sound much better. Quite a difference in quality between holding it in the air and letting it rest on a table or countertop. Just guessing, but I suspect high end speakers are engineered not to be so leaky and will not benefit much from that kind of help.
I don't see the summary like that at all. We all know the MAFIAA is reactionary, brutal, and flat wrong. They thoroughly deserve that reputation. They earned it by suing thousands of ordinary people, in an attempt to terrorize us all into giving up the Internet. And by trying to impose DRM on the public. The Sony BMG Root Kit fiasco alone is enough to condemn them, but they've tried much more than that. And they earned their reputation still more by bribing and suborning our legislators into supporting their insane vision, and attempting to hide what they do. Their motives in trying to keep ACTA secret are painfully obvious. They've shown no regard whatever for the damage they've done to the public and artists, while screaming very loudly and selfishly about the supposed damage done to them. At the very least, holding back public libraries from going digital costs us all huge amounts of money in maintaining, housing and tracking "dead tree" copies. Yet the damage they've done is as nothing to the damage they would do if they could.
No, it isn't bias to call it like it is. I don't feel there's much left to debate except the details of what will replace copyright, and so what'd I'd like to do is move on to that, not keep rehashing this controversy that's become almost as fake as the controversy between Creationism and Evolution. They of course refuse to admit it and want to keep it alive, to "teach the controversy", and they have some success because there are a lot of uninformed people who haven't heard or thought much about the issue. Moving on, how can we once and for all end this threat to our freedoms? Shut down this attitude so hard that anyone who ever again dares to raise it will find themselves sidelined in the same way that flat-earthers and other kooks are? A "Freedom of Knowledge" constitutional amendment perhaps?
Most times, it seems so capricious why anyone (ok, why any man) gets rejected. Stephen Hawking doesn't understand it. Everything sounds great online, you correspond for weeks, and then in the first face to face meeting she kills the relationship. She won't say why. Maybe she can't, if the real reason is something biological. He didn't smell different or musky enough. Or he's not tall enough. Or she's no gold digger, not consciously, yet the car he pulled up in was too cheap, small, and old. Or she's testing him with mind games, wants to see if he can figure out when no means no, and when no doesn't really mean no, maybe looking for persistence from him, seeing in that an indication that he is serious. What does "let's just be friends" really mean? Or despite professing a desire for a smart man, she didn't really mean that, and actually wants the big dumb infatuated ox who is easy for her to manipulate and mentally dominate.
Really baffling is seeing what some women choose. She rejects a bunch of great guys and ends up going with a total cad, the most shallow, superficial, lying, hypocritical loser and fool available, the kind of guy who abuses women and cheats even as he preaches about morality. You know, guys like Newt Gingrich except without the wealth and power. Well, maybe he has cute interns working for him as well as money, power, and fame. Maybe it's because she's selling herself short, doesn't believe she deserves better. Sometimes she comes to her senses, and can't understand herself why she ever dated or married a guy like that.
I also wonder if the larger climate makes dating even harder. There are too many people in the world. It's too hard to raise children and maintain the high standard of living people have grown to like. Women are more independent than ever, don't need any man. And employers subtly pressure women not to have children, as that would of course take them away from work. Queen Victoria found the biology of it all icky and disgusting. Didn't like the "horror" of breastfeeding. Maybe she was merely ahead of her time? What's with calling sex "the nasty"?
The only way I've ever been able to make much sense of it all is through a biological view. We're even more enslaved to our hormones than we realize. Men's lot is to ask and ask and ask, and be rejected almost every time but not quite, and the reason why it's like that is the biological fact that the effort of producing offspring falls almost entirely on women.
Open drivers with 3D acceleration and good performance is what's still missing in Linux.
I'd buy all my video cards from whichever vendor has that. But none of them do. Not Nvidia, not AMD/ATI, and certainly not Intel or any of the others who have the additional problem that even if they had a great open source driver it wouldn't help because their graphics hardware performs so poorly. 2 years ago, I heard ATI was going to open up, and so my newest computer is an AMD with ATI graphics. But they haven't delivered. Still have to use the binary blobs to get 3D acceleration. I keep hoping someone else will enter the market.
All those things you mentioned-- shoplifting, burglary, littering, etc-- involve physical items, cause harm, are difficult to hide, and take effort. They are not the same as copying. Copying occurs every time anyone speaks to more than 1 person. Every instant that light shines on an object produces many images of that object. Radio and TV stations can broadcast information to a wide audience because that's the way the universe works. Trying to control copying is like trying to make water flow uphill.
You might argue that copying causes harm to the authors, but you can't prove it. You can't prove that someone who made a copy would have paid for a copy if they could not make one for free. In fact, we know that many people would not pay. Simple law of supply and demand. And you can't prove that their actions did not in fact lead to more sales because of the unintentional endorsement and advertising.
That definition of harm is too broad. Under that interpretation, every time someone walks instead of drives, that harms the oil companies, auto manufacturers, road construction contractors, and anyone else connected to transportation. If you shop at WalMart, you harm KMart. If you eat at McDonalds, you harm Kentucky Fried Chicken. If you cook your own food, you harm both restaurants. If you skip a meal, you harm the restaurants and the grocery stores. Similarly, whenever art is borrowed from a public library or bought used, that could be interpreted as harmful to the authors. So this cannot be the meaning of harm. If no one lost anything that they didn't already have, no harm is done! The act of copying does not cause a loss of anything already in someone's possession.
What makes piracy right is the laws of nature, not any irrelevant facts about the age of the typical copied item. Which you don't know in any case. You're just guessing that most pirated stuff is new.
How do you propose to enforce the existing model? To forcibly stop people from copying? You can't. No one can stop it. Or do you seriously expect a big enough majority to agree with the bankrupt morality that copying is bad? If you're counting on that, forget it. We have seen how good sharing is for everyone, and we're not going to give that up.
I suppose your next point is the "starving artists" wheeze. How can artists make any money without copyright, you ask as if there's no other conceivable way of compensating them. There is another way. It's called patronage, and it has worked in the past, and still works now. And you forget that most artists do rather poorly under copyright, what with Hollywood Accounting and demands that in exchange for next to nothing, authors have to transfer all their rights away. It's not just artists that get screwed by copyright, it's all of us every time some rights holder abuses these rights to shut down competition, censor others, hold a valuable public resource hostage, or sit on great work of art.
You hate the new UI? I love it! More screen space devoted to web pages instead of interface. Chrome may have started this trend, but Firefox is keeping up.
I used to use addons to do the things newer versions of Firefox now do much better. Tried autohide addons for the menu bar and status bar, and they worked but not flawlessly. Settled on an addon that put the entire menu on a button next to the URL bar-- worked better than the menu autohide. Now I don't have to install any of that anymore. Another thing I always do is enable "small icons". And now the lowest hanging fruit for more screen space is the window manager. Title bars and scroll bars waste space. That sort of thing is pretty important on small screens.
The main reason to stick with 3.6 is memory footprint. Version 9 is unusably slow when you have only 128M RAM. Am wondering how much 10 improved.
I thought the same thing. Offense is the best defense.
But we have wide disagreements. Most people want to reform the system, not radically change it. Most reform ideas involve shortening copyright and patent durations, and scaling back what can be patented and copyrighted. I don't believe that will really solve the problem. We would still attempt to treat abundance as if it was scarce. Reform would be like reducing prison terms from 75 years to 14 years for crimes that shouldn't be crimes at all.
We need a system that defaults to acceptance, not denial. Having to get permission to so much as think, for fear of stepping on millions of "rights" and "costing" others their just earnings is a huge burden. We have no choice but to trample upon these so called rights in order to create more works, and hope that no one sues us. For many, that hope has been in vain. Free software such as Linux has been threatened this way many times, and will be threatened again. Even if the trolls never win any of these lawsuits, merely having to defend a project in court is so costly that the trolls may succeed in killing it anyway.
A workable replacement system about has to be patronage, which we could do so much better than it has been done in past centuries.
To change systems requires a constitutional amendment in the US. Proposing an "Information Amendment" and actually seeing it get some traction would be just the thing to really scare Big Media. Of course it should be a serious effort, worthy of being in the Constitution should it actually be ratified. I've worked out a starting point for such an amendment. Almost the first thing it says is that copyright can no longer be enforced.
I wonder. I think many politicians cynically play the media companies for suckers. Happy to go along with their ridiculous proposals in exchange for huge campaign contributions, knowing full well that if they're passed and not struck down, mere laws can't stop copying. They may even be counting on the bills never making it into law. But if they do, their lawyer buddies get more work. And the laws fail in their objective, and the media companies stubbornly refuse to comprehend reality, and come running again with more cash. Seems Big Media is very reliable that way.
He's just another fanboy pining for the glory days.
That's not how I read him. Now Zubrin, who he mentioned, is unreasonably anxious to get out there. Why should we visit Mars? To show the world it's possible? To research the place? And if the latter, why send people instead of more robots? Only reason to send people is as a prelude to the ultimate goal of colonization, which we're a long ways from being able to do. If we can't colonize Antarctica, which at least has breathable air, we sure can't colonize Mars. We have plenty of deserts we are currently unable to utilize much. At this point, we really cannot even just visit Mars, as we did the moon. It's a nice dream, but it is just a dream. And I see that he realizes all this.
I've spoken with Zubrin, and I asked him why the rush, why not wait 50 years or a century for technological improvements to make a Mars visit easier? He didn't want to wait, he felt our current capabilities were enough that we could do it now. And therefore we should. We should go "while we are young" is what he said. How romantic. But romance won't get us to Mars, and sure isn't a justification for trying.
This is not a technically hard problem. The way they did it in that story you linked was terrible. Perhaps the simplest way to solve it is to have the system generate part or all of every password, instead of letting (or making?) users create their own passwords. Naturally, the system is programmed to make sure its part is unique.
However, that solution might not be so good from a social point of view. I thought a half and half approach might work. The user makes their own password, however weak, and the system adds to it. And rather than a short string of gibberish, the system picks a few real words and short numbers to add to the password, something like "smith0001", which is easier for a person to remember, though writing it down is not discouraged. (Why did we ever have any system that limited passwords to no more than 8 characters, which forces the use of hard to remember gibberish to achieve strength?) A scheme like what I outlined could scale to millions of accounts without collision problems.