Technically, the data side of the metal layer has pits and lands. The other side, if you want to call it the top, gets the label on it.
Having to polish CDs/DVDs is kind of like having to pick insects out of your relays so that you stop getting random errors. A completely archaic way of storing data. Magneto-optical media came in a nice case that probably made it cost a little more than a floppy disk to manufacture. My guess is that when the media companies heard that CDs would have lossless digital quality forever, they panicked and ditched cartridges that would last forever in favor of naked optical media that would die after a few months or years of use on average.
Stick a better anti-scratch coating on the data side of CDs (and DVDs), and they'll be much better than just cutting the pits and lands more accurately.
Unless you manually prove all the basic results of set theory for yourself (as well as philosophically agreeing that zf is a good choice of a set theory) and then build mathematics from it and derive formal languages from that, you probably shouldn't trust any code on any computer. Even then you can't trust the hardware, or even the wetware in your head.
I was just explaining how to bootstrap a compiler, not the finer points of epistemology.
Re:You can't win if you don't play
on
Linked In Or Out?
·
· Score: 1
No offence but the world is in recession. Nice one dickhead. Finally the attitude that there are employers begging for people to work is gone!
Good luck to the employers trying to sell goods and services to a bunch of unemployed people. The recession hurts everyone, and if anything it will cause a rise in union membership and new labor laws if only to ensure that people are employed at sufficient wages to buy things.
What if they need one of those pesky algorithms for that?
Look up bootstrapping. Most modern compilers can compile themselves using a stage or two of simpler compilers, built with either an existing compiler, an assembler, or maybe some hand written machine code. All the important parts of the compiler (parser, optimizer, etc.) can be written in the same language that the compiler can compile.
Sure, fences I understand. Stepping onto someone's lawn because there's trash on the sidewalk or to pass people on a busy street is not trespassing. Driving down a road in the country with poor road signs and rural delivery makes it hard to find the right place that you're looking for. Pulling into someone's driveway and asking if they are the person you're looking for can not reasonably be considered trespassing. How else would people visit a person with "no trespassing" signs for the first time?
You are in the minority. Loss of revenue to piracy is a real problem and trying to justify piracy by saying that you ended up buying the product later isn't an excuse.
There is a fixed number of dollars in the economy that can be spent on entertainment. Once this money is spent, there is no physical way for the media companies to make more money. For instance, I buy and rent movies and buy music. I might spend $250 to $500 a year, and I would never spend more than that because I simply don't have enough money to do so. However, I have a cost deferred Internet connection (I pay for it primarily for web browsing and remote backups) that I can also use to get media for free. Clearly, the free media is an added value to me, at no realized loss to anyone else. I would not spend more money in a year if I could not pirate, I would just do something else with my time. What is practically or ethically wrong with this?
There is already more media and music available than I could ever listen to in a standard lifetime. In 95 years, there will *still* be that much media, so what will future generations do to support artists when a lifetime of entertainment hits the public domain? Copyright is inherently unsustainable in the information age. We just haven't hit the tipping point yet, and it has been slightly forestalled by the silly copyright extension acts. Yes, I realize there will always be "new" media that will be able to be sold for a profit simply because of novelty, but that will continue to make up a smaller percentage of the total number of works available, and especially a smaller percentage of the *quality* works available.
Thank you for registering at slashdot. Your password is kitten6apple. Please write it down. If you wish to change it, click HERE. There will be a 10 second delay enforced between login attempts and a 10 minute delay after 3 failed login attempts.
That makes denial of service trivial, since usernames are visible everywhere. Don't like twitter? Just try to sign in to his account three times every 10 minutes with a script. On the other hand, maybe it is a good idea...
The way most other machines work? What about my 35mm camera? When I take a picture, it needs to be developed and printed, with great care taken not to expose the film to light.
Heh. When I take pictures with my camera, they magically show up on my computer when I plug it in. Dragging an example of nearly antiquated technology into a debate about the greatness of the status quo is, to say the least, amusing.
This can easily be emulated in any normal file system.
And the point of Phantom is that it doesn't need to be emulated, no matter how the program is written.
I once built a b-tree mapped record system on top of an NTFS file system that behaved in this way so that even if the service process crashed and had to be restarted no data would ever be lost as long as the disk could be read or written because no data was stored "in memory" waiting for a write.
You had to write a queuing system just to get behavior that would be the default in a persistent object operating system.
the deletion became permanent as soon as it passed out of the one-step undo buffer. With a traditional load/save system like that of a PC, on the other hand, I can commit an object to the file system (Ctrl+S) or roll it back to the last commit (Ctrl+W Alt+D) when I know the object is in a known good state.
Yeah, but if you delete a file it's gone. That's one level less of Undo than the Newton had, apparently. What the Newton lacked was just a temporary trash area for things that were deleted, but might need to be recovered. That's even easier to implement in a persistent object based file system; just put a reference to the object in the "trash" and delete the main reference, but the trash will hold on to the original until the reference in the trash is deleted. Much like a hard link in Unix, but with the entire state of the object referenced, not just a set of files. Or in other words, fixing the problem on the Newton is much, much easier. Just make the Undo log a few actions longer by keeping more object references. My guess is that the limitation was due to memory usage.
but the one person has no incentive to provide that product if nobody will pay for it
Unless, of course, they need it themselves. That's the entire philosophy of free software.
I think that as time goes on productivity will rise to the point where you can produce the whole planet's physical needs with a 90% unemployment rate. What do you do then? Everybody else can only make intellectual products (entertainment, software, etc). Those people need to have resources - so unless you have communism of some kind they need to be able to sell their products.
You kind of answered your own question there; at a 90% unemployment rate it's obvious that socialism will be providing resources for 90% of the people. Those 90% will have plenty of time to devote to producing intellectual works with the resources they're given.
The ultimate extreme is a world in which robots are stronger and "smarter" than humans (let's argue that they are non-sentient to simplify the ethics involved). Nobody is employed, because nobody can compete in this world. Everybody could live in luxury cared for by robots, but nobody can actually afford to buy a robot, since nobody has any money at all. How does this society work.
Assuming the robots can build other robots, it's pretty simple in a democracy; a scheme for dividing up the Earth's natural resources (hopefully with thought given to sustainability) is voted on, accepted, and the robots start building things (including more robots) for people according to the resources they've been allocated. At a minimum, providing everyone with two robots (to repair each other) would be sufficient, as long as everyone owned enough property to grow their own food and make their own toys and houses.
Your analogy is just as flawed as that of stealing from a grocery store.
Software, unlike groceries from any source, has an immense up-front development cost, and in many cases a substantial ongoing cost (several posters have mentioned the huge number of support calls they receive from countries where their software isn't even sold...) Those costs represent a major investment. Selling the software is how you get a return on that investment.
So it's *exactly* like having your normal corn plants pollinated with Monsanto genes from a neighbor's field and then eating the cobs that grow?
China is well known for using corporate (and other) espionage to further their political agenda. Hooking into company systems to exfiltrate any possibly valuable data is far too common.
Not unlike the United States, the Soviets, the Israelis, etc.
Even if a company mandates Pure licensed Software, that does nothing to prevent local espionage. The Chinese government probably has insiders in the company if it's worth anything, anyway.
If reverse engineering and unlimited copying were completely legal, the GPL would just be the default state of things. Removing obfuscation on code is pretty easy, pirates do it all the time. So is disassembly and reverse engineering. If it was legal, there would simply be no way to release proprietary software, short of massive NDAs and other explicit legal contracts. All other copyrighted/patented/trademarked things are easy to reproduce in fully functional form.
What is ridiculous is the tolerance the government seems to have for IP abuse.
No more ridiculous than the artificial limit of supply imposed on things that have a nearly zero cost of reproduction.
Slashdot Mirror
Technically, the data side of the metal layer has pits and lands. The other side, if you want to call it the top, gets the label on it.
Having to polish CDs/DVDs is kind of like having to pick insects out of your relays so that you stop getting random errors. A completely archaic way of storing data. Magneto-optical media came in a nice case that probably made it cost a little more than a floppy disk to manufacture. My guess is that when the media companies heard that CDs would have lossless digital quality forever, they panicked and ditched cartridges that would last forever in favor of naked optical media that would die after a few months or years of use on average.
Pity the music industry is wasting their money on lawyers to harass professors instead of making quality music.
Hint: The lawyers made more money today than has been donated in flowers.
Congratulations on discovering that money can be treated as a commodity in barter, and is not merely a mechanism for product consumption.
I think you meant a Facebook group claiming to own all Facebook groups that do not own themselves.
Stick a better anti-scratch coating on the data side of CDs
(and DVDs), and they'll be much better than just cutting the pits and lands more accurately.
Unless you manually prove all the basic results of set theory for yourself (as well as philosophically agreeing that zf is a good choice of a set theory) and then build mathematics from it and derive formal languages from that, you probably shouldn't trust any code on any computer. Even then you can't trust the hardware, or even the wetware in your head.
I was just explaining how to bootstrap a compiler, not the finer points of epistemology.
No offence but the world is in recession. Nice one dickhead. Finally the attitude that there are employers begging for people to work is gone!
Good luck to the employers trying to sell goods and services to a bunch of unemployed people. The recession hurts everyone, and if anything it will cause a rise in union membership and new labor laws if only to ensure that people are employed at sufficient wages to buy things.
What if they need one of those pesky algorithms for that?
Look up bootstrapping. Most modern compilers can compile themselves using a stage or two of simpler compilers, built with either an existing compiler, an assembler, or maybe some hand written machine code. All the important parts of the compiler (parser, optimizer, etc.) can be written in the same language that the compiler can compile.
Sure, fences I understand. Stepping onto someone's lawn because there's trash on the sidewalk or to pass people on a busy street is not trespassing. Driving down a road in the country with poor road signs and rural delivery makes it hard to find the right place that you're looking for. Pulling into someone's driveway and asking if they are the person you're looking for can not reasonably be considered trespassing. How else would people visit a person with "no trespassing" signs for the first time?
A violent response to trespassing is uncalled for. If someone started shooting at me while I was driving/walking, I would shoot back.
You are in the minority. Loss of revenue to piracy is a real problem and trying to justify piracy by saying that you ended up buying the product later isn't an excuse.
There is a fixed number of dollars in the economy that can be spent on entertainment. Once this money is spent, there is no physical way for the media companies to make more money. For instance, I buy and rent movies and buy music. I might spend $250 to $500 a year, and I would never spend more than that because I simply don't have enough money to do so. However, I have a cost deferred Internet connection (I pay for it primarily for web browsing and remote backups) that I can also use to get media for free. Clearly, the free media is an added value to me, at no realized loss to anyone else. I would not spend more money in a year if I could not pirate, I would just do something else with my time. What is practically or ethically wrong with this?
There is already more media and music available than I could ever listen to in a standard lifetime. In 95 years, there will *still* be that much media, so what will future generations do to support artists when a lifetime of entertainment hits the public domain? Copyright is inherently unsustainable in the information age. We just haven't hit the tipping point yet, and it has been slightly forestalled by the silly copyright extension acts. Yes, I realize there will always be "new" media that will be able to be sold for a profit simply because of novelty, but that will continue to make up a smaller percentage of the total number of works available, and especially a smaller percentage of the *quality* works available.
Microsoft is full of hot air, and it's easily demonstrable.
Thank you for registering at slashdot. Your password is kitten6apple. Please write it down. If you wish to change it, click HERE. There will be a 10 second delay enforced between login attempts and a 10 minute delay after 3 failed login attempts.
That makes denial of service trivial, since usernames are visible everywhere. Don't like twitter? Just try to sign in to his account three times every 10 minutes with a script. On the other hand, maybe it is a good idea...
If all computers were 64 bit and had at least 500-1000GB of non-volatile fast RAM, computers could do exactly what Grandma wanted.
Oh, like SSD or carbon nanotube non-volatile fast RAM?
The way most other machines work? What about my 35mm camera? When I take a picture, it needs to be developed and printed, with great care taken not to expose the film to light.
Heh. When I take pictures with my camera, they magically show up on my computer when I plug it in. Dragging an example of nearly antiquated technology into a debate about the greatness of the status quo is, to say the least, amusing.
This can easily be emulated in any normal file system.
And the point of Phantom is that it doesn't need to be emulated, no matter how the program is written.
I once built a b-tree mapped record system on top of an NTFS file system that behaved in this way so that even if the service process crashed and had to be restarted no data would ever be lost as long as the disk could be read or written because no data was stored "in memory" waiting for a write.
You had to write a queuing system just to get behavior that would be the default in a persistent object operating system.
One word: versioning. Or maybe two words: versioning and snapshots.
And backups.
the deletion became permanent as soon as it passed out of the one-step undo buffer. With a traditional load/save system like that of a PC, on the other hand, I can commit an object to the file system (Ctrl+S) or roll it back to the last commit (Ctrl+W Alt+D) when I know the object is in a known good state.
Yeah, but if you delete a file it's gone. That's one level less of Undo than the Newton had, apparently. What the Newton lacked was just a temporary trash area for things that were deleted, but might need to be recovered. That's even easier to implement in a persistent object based file system; just put a reference to the object in the "trash" and delete the main reference, but the trash will hold on to the original until the reference in the trash is deleted. Much like a hard link in Unix, but with the entire state of the object referenced, not just a set of files. Or in other words, fixing the problem on the Newton is much, much easier. Just make the Undo log a few actions longer by keeping more object references. My guess is that the limitation was due to memory usage.
but the one person has no incentive to provide that product if nobody will pay for it
Unless, of course, they need it themselves. That's the entire philosophy of free software.
I think that as time goes on productivity will rise to the point where you can produce the whole planet's physical needs with a 90% unemployment rate. What do you do then? Everybody else can only make intellectual products (entertainment, software, etc). Those people need to have resources - so unless you have communism of some kind they need to be able to sell their products.
You kind of answered your own question there; at a 90% unemployment rate it's obvious that socialism will be providing resources for 90% of the people. Those 90% will have plenty of time to devote to producing intellectual works with the resources they're given.
The ultimate extreme is a world in which robots are stronger and "smarter" than humans (let's argue that they are non-sentient to simplify the ethics involved). Nobody is employed, because nobody can compete in this world. Everybody could live in luxury cared for by robots, but nobody can actually afford to buy a robot, since nobody has any money at all. How does this society work.
Assuming the robots can build other robots, it's pretty simple in a democracy; a scheme for dividing up the Earth's natural resources (hopefully with thought given to sustainability) is voted on, accepted, and the robots start building things (including more robots) for people according to the resources they've been allocated. At a minimum, providing everyone with two robots (to repair each other) would be sufficient, as long as everyone owned enough property to grow their own food and make their own toys and houses.
Since copyright is not depriving you of any inalienable rights
Yeah, who needs that free speech thing.
Your analogy is just as flawed as that of stealing from a grocery store.
Software, unlike groceries from any source, has an immense up-front development cost, and in many cases a substantial ongoing cost (several posters have mentioned the huge number of support calls they receive from countries where their software isn't even sold...) Those costs represent a major investment. Selling the software is how you get a return on that investment.
So it's *exactly* like having your normal corn plants pollinated with Monsanto genes from a neighbor's field and then eating the cobs that grow?
China is well known for using corporate (and other) espionage to further their political agenda. Hooking into company systems to exfiltrate any possibly valuable data is far too common.
Not unlike the United States, the Soviets, the Israelis, etc.
Even if a company mandates Pure licensed Software, that does nothing to prevent local espionage. The Chinese government probably has insiders in the company if it's worth anything, anyway.
Probability 0 and 1, respectively.
IP laws are the reason the GPL works.
If reverse engineering and unlimited copying were completely legal, the GPL would just be the default state of things. Removing obfuscation on code is pretty easy, pirates do it all the time. So is disassembly and reverse engineering. If it was legal, there would simply be no way to release proprietary software, short of massive NDAs and other explicit legal contracts. All other copyrighted/patented/trademarked things are easy to reproduce in fully functional form.
What is ridiculous is the tolerance the government seems to have for IP abuse.
No more ridiculous than the artificial limit of supply imposed on things that have a nearly zero cost of reproduction.
The vast majority of Internet noobs are barely able to cobble together a correct English sentence. How well do you expect that to work?
How well would it work for improving the quality of messages on the Internet? Very well, I'd wager.