To say that something is too expensive to avoid may be an understatement. "Expense" at some point may become more than what is available to us. If you don't think the the global warming is real, then consider the fact that it has already began. The habitats or north pole's animals are already shrinking because the ice is thinning. The Gulf stream is already shaky. And yet we do nothing to address it. The changes we need to make in our society are too overwhelming to implement and no politician wants to be a spoil sport that says that the party is over and its time to go back to work. If we drastically reduce our energy consumption it will mean drastically reducing our living standards -- less living space, less food, crappier food, crappy public transportation instead of comfortable no-one-touches-me cars, etc. Of course, all of these already exit in the inner cities of today. The inner cities which are, in effect, governed by war lords. The inner city will not all of a sudden consume the entire planet. Rather all rural areas will empty up because of the expensive gas prices and the cities will not be able to afford services because they will be gradually becoming more expensive. The key word is gradually. Because that is how the change will occur.
And if you think that watching the outside temperature is not such a big deal when going out, try having to decide whether to go out by watching the UV index. This is already the reality in southern Peru. Even in Lima the UV index today is 11. By comparision in Miami it is 3 and in New Jersey it is 1. And the further you get south in Peru the worse it gets. This is not a doomsday scenario for the future. It is the reality of today.
The guy starts out the article explaining why he is not trying to be constructive. What can he say that is constructive? What can you tell an incurable cancer patient that is constructive?
Yes, it will disruptive... I think that is pretty much the point the guy was making. Right now because of a monopoly on distribution music labels have the ability to charge monopoly tax and get away with pushing a subpar product. Once they loose that monopoly the deadwood will fall off. The only ones who will remain will be the talented performers and they will enjoy upper-middle class or lower rich class life-style instead of the super-rich lifestyle. Less of societies money will be spent on ingratiating egos and more on progress. Only those who are into the music for the love of it will be tempted to take it up... all these are not absolutes they are just tendencies in certain directions. Of course, tendencies in certain directions is all you can talk about when you talk about economics, anyway. The music industry will suffer, but that won't neccessarily reduce the quality of music. Again, the only people who will even bother to try to become a musician will be the people with obvious talent and love of music. True competition will emerge. We'll all benefit.... except of course the beauracrats who currently can live off picking off the cream of the crop and subsidising with YOUR MONEY all the garbage becase they just don't know better.
There is no mention of obvious environmental impact. Obviously, warming the ocean floor on large scale will disturb the ecosystem balance. Does anyone know if they research how localized the impact will be? Before anyone says that I am huffing and puffing, the equivalent of this for humans would be like having a permanent unlabeled source of constant fire somewhere in the middle of a populated region.
everyone is a criminal is the most sure way to keep the despotism of "order". We all break speeding laws. Most people have broken drug control laws. Millions of people consume "illegal" copies of entertainment media. Police state is only possible if most citizens are in one way or another criminal. So the logic that the law is ridiculous seems almost to contradict the set course of modern society. How will the aussies keep the populas in line?
Let's not pretend that any ISP actually has a choice of cutting off MS users. I think what is more telling here is that MS is not yet a media company. Media companies are the ones from whom we expect a statement that only the producers of products (i.e. the artists) should have a choice as to how the product is used and that the consumers of products (i.e. listeners, watchers of movies, etc.) should not have such choice. MS is still a traditional company, so they can only muscle their partners on how their product gets packaged. MS does not yet control the message -- only the media. I am not saying that they are not trying, but I am saying that since they are not a media company yet, they still have to worry about consumer rights.
Actually, the "audit" can be very simple.... The total volume of all.exe files on Windows platforms and the total volume of executable files. Yes, we all know this is a braindead solution, but on a logarithmic scale this is a pretty good ball park estimate of the amount of software installed on a particular machine.... So are we now looking at explosion of network terminals in TN? All software resides in on place on the server?:)
is how this can possibly work. You can always ship your device with firmware that complies with the law. But if you wink-wink don't protect your firmware with tampering in any way, it will be very quickly hacked to remove any protection. There is no realistic way to stop a company from shipping a device that people with a tiny-bit of competence (i.e. being able to update their firmware) cannot use to circumvent drm. And since the people with some degree of competence are presumably the ones recording and distributing all these television shows (with commercials taken out), then what is to stop them? These sword/shield wars between "pirates" and content providers will enventually get resolved through technical inovation one way or another. The law will change nothing.
Learning process involves iteration. Finding new contexts in which to iterate can be very useful. So finding a new environment into which to stick all these chemical reactions knowledge could be a good way to memorize it. So stop being so harsh on the original poster. He could learn a lot of the reactions just by making his diagram. And if he creates a pretty context in the process, he will also remember the result of his work -- a pretty pictures in which everything fits together. And,
of course, this is exactly what one would hope for when trying to memorize a large chunk of information.
The article says that the software hides the identity of the chip from
BIOS. It also says that the chip has the cache disabled. Is the cache
present and disabled? Does that mean the software also enables the cache? That would be too cool.
No society can ignore its most competent people for too long. For way
too long we've been looking down on the people who are genuily dedicated
to what they do. This sounds like a "management" word -- I know. But
geek is really a term used for people who love what they do and who are good
at it. Naturally they are very competent. This is almost darwinian. If a society
persistantly ignores the merit of the most accomplished it is headed for destruction.
Maybe we are finally waking up from this nihilism?
Nothing to see here... you know... first the computer-aided traslation that
sounds computerized then ceramic armor. Next the clone army?
And you always wondered why they sound so goofy in those helmets, didn't you?
Math is an a priori research. That is its fact-discovery is based on assumptions that may or may not reflect reality. Usually, as a matter of fact, they do not reflect but rather approximate reality. Whereas science is an a posteori method of fact discovery. That it is fact discovery based on facts that are observed (vs assumed as in math).
Computer science as such is actually neither math nor science. It is an engineering endeavor. Because it is concerned not so much with discovery of either laws of nature or the conclusions from assumptions as it is with construction of complex stable structures from already discovered facts.
While one can argue that any reasearch requires some amount of discovery of unknown, it is the relative amount of discovery vs construction that generally makes the distinction between engineering vs scientific disciplines.
But c'mon. You always have to consider the scenario where you become too successful. Unless you are trying to address a niche audience, you are trying to write a popularly successful product. And if you become too successful, the owner of the host operating system always has the option of changing the operating system enough to break your open product and making a duplicate product of their own. So you cannot claim to have crated a solution to a lot of peoples' problem by creating an open source product for a closed-source operating system.
MS desperately wants a win. Reports are comming from everywhere on how they are loosing ground to Google. So they figure they beat their chest about the market they think they own -- systems software.
How long before these will replace cars as personal
transportation devices? Are we going to have to
start getting licensed on how to use them just so that
we wouldn't "run into each other" at 35mph?
First of all, you missed the point there. The articles that the author would write would be free to be read. But her effort to "prettify" the articles into books distributed for general public would never happen.
Second of all, Letting someone own a copy of your work does not and should not take away from you the right to be the sole person distributing or copying your work. Books are not software. You can't claim that you need to make a "back up" copy of a book. Third of all, Google is both copying and asking the libraries to distribute a copied version to them. After all, if Google copies a book and then another patron checks the same book out, then for one purchased copy of the book 2 physically separate entities are able to access and read the book. So you have a situation of one sale and multiple simultaneous users or readers. If this is not distribution, I don't know what is. And finally, you missed the point with sales as well. The fact that some books reported more sales does not mean that more information became available to the society at large. I was not arguing that authors would make less money. I was arguing that this would turn off some of the authors from spending time of their life on writing. Not because they would not become wealthy from it, but because they would not have control over who is allowed to copy their work. Yes, I do mean copy -- not distribute. And you still don't seem to understand that some people will be turned of from creating things if they are not allowed to say that what is created is theirs to sell under any terms they please. And as a result certain usefull things will not be created. I am not saying that they will be turned off from it because it will not be profitable, but because their ego will not allow them to keep what is theirs -- rightfully theirs. Whether you like it or not, we are in a transition period where the copyright laws will not become irrelevant not because they are outdated but because those who make content want to have complete control over what you can do with it. And they will seize that control through technical means -- be it DRM or whatever else becomes available. The people who release their works for free as a promotion for their paid works are a non-sequitor in this argument. They would release them with or without the copyright laws. It is the people who wish to put monetary value on any use of their creations that will drive this process. And if they loose, they will withdraw from the society the fruits of their labors and thereby leave it with less value.
This is an interesting theory. But you better know that this is the case. And not guess it. Because Kinko's is loosing A LOT of potential business here. And lawsuits in the hopes of a settlment are a poker game. You would bluff (ie, raise the stakes by bringing a lawsuit without merit) only if you believe the other party is bluffing as well (i.e. has no leg to stand on or has no means to defend the lawsuit). This is NOT the case with a large corporation like Kinko's. Any action they take must be assumed to be based on careful legal research of what is legal. Should a meritless lawsuit be brought against them, it must be assumed that they will the means and the will to litigate it to protect their business. Since they are willing to forgo so much revenue, it must be assumed that they find it indefensible in court. And I have to add that this is rightfully so.
Believe you me, if I wrote a book, I would not want anyone who baught it to make any copy of it. No matter how well-intentioned or how inocuous they they think their copying is. If I were an author and I found my books often-copied, I would certainly stop writing and start doing something else with my life. This is not the same as taking ideas or quoting or anything of the kind. The only reason you are defending them is because this is the slashdot knee-jerk reaction. "All information must be free". Well, if you make information free, you might reduce the payoff for producing new information. And some the people making the choice of producing or not producing information will make the choice not to produce it because they want more control over the time of their lives that they invest into creating a product.
The end result will be less information produced. I know that your counterargument is that some of the people creating information will make more money, but they would be the ones who don't mind lack of control over the end product of their efforts. So they would be writing whether they were well-paid or not, well-recognized or not, etc.
Let me give you an example. Let's say you have a research scientist. She publishes papers on regular basis. But understanding these papers requires a high degree of discipline. Since they are published for general consumption, anyone can copy them. But she has no incentive to polish them up and invest time into making them digestable by the less-initiated into her specific field of science. And under the copyright regime proposed by the "information must be free" crowd, she never will polish them up. The information contained in those papers is already free. But if she wants to maximize sales of the information she has to offer, she will go through great lengths to polish it up and break into bits and pieces that can be related through more-recognized ideas to the concepts that the general population is already familiar with.
Don't be so quick to defend anyone's write to take something that belongs to others for free. This will almost certainly leave everyone
with less incentive to produce things of value and will thus leave the society with less valuable things available to it.
If you are allowed to make copies of any book you own, then why
does Kinko's refuse to assist you in it? Why do they further
claim that their refusal is based on near-certainty of lawsuits if they do assist in copying copyrighted works? If you are right, wouldn't that make Kinko's lawyers wrong?
Of course they are copying. They can't search through a book without first having the whole thing in some form of electronic storage. Even if they put it in that storage once just to creat some sort of index of it and erasing the book after that. It is still copying it. And they search through books. Which means they must first make an electronic copy of every book. And they do it without first getting an author's permission. This is a blatant violation of the copyright. First sale has nothing to do with it. Just because you bought a book does not mean you can make copies of it. You can't Xerox it, you can't scan it, you can't distribute excercies out of a text book for "educational purposes". You can't do anything that makes it possible for multiple people to use the book without first purchasing one copy of the book per one simultaneous user. It is mirky whether they actually distribute it. I would say that they at the very least are borderline case on this one. I am willing to let the courts decide on this one. But make no mistake - they are illegally and blatantly violating authors' copyrights just by copying -- their alleged good intentions notwithstanding.
Actually the fact that they allow multiple simultaneous users to search the book for only one copy of the printed book already constitutes distribution. They are not just quoting. They are also, in some electronic form, allowing multiple people to randomly access the content of the book for only one purchased copy.
So what I stated was NOT a falsehood. It was a possibly a strech (in the case of distributing) and certainly a truth (in the case of copying).
Slashdot Mirror
To say that something is too expensive to avoid may be an understatement. "Expense" at some point may become more than what is available to us. If you don't think the the global warming is real, then consider the fact that it has already began. The habitats or north pole's animals are already shrinking because the ice is thinning. The Gulf stream is already shaky. And yet we do nothing to address it. The changes we need to make in our society are too overwhelming to implement and no politician wants to be a spoil sport that says that the party is over and its time to go back to work. If we drastically reduce our energy consumption it will mean drastically reducing our living standards -- less living space, less food, crappier food, crappy public transportation instead of comfortable no-one-touches-me cars, etc. Of course, all of these already exit in the inner cities of today. The inner cities which are, in effect, governed by war lords. The inner city will not all of a sudden consume the entire planet. Rather all rural areas will empty up because of the expensive gas prices and the cities will not be able to afford services because they will be gradually becoming more expensive. The key word is gradually. Because that is how the change will occur.
And if you think that watching the outside temperature is not such a big deal when going out, try having to decide whether to go out by watching the UV index. This is already the reality in southern Peru. Even in Lima the UV index today is 11. By comparision in Miami it is 3 and in New Jersey it is 1. And the further you get south in Peru the worse it gets. This is not a doomsday scenario for the future. It is the reality of today.
The guy starts out the article explaining why he is not trying to be constructive. What can he say that is constructive? What can you tell an incurable cancer patient that is constructive?Yes, it will disruptive... I think that is pretty much the point the guy was making. Right now because of a monopoly on distribution music labels have the ability to charge monopoly tax and get away with pushing a subpar product. Once they loose that monopoly the deadwood will fall off. The only ones who will remain will be the talented performers and they will enjoy upper-middle class or lower rich class life-style instead of the super-rich lifestyle. Less of societies money will be spent on ingratiating egos and more on progress. Only those who are into the music for the love of it will be tempted to take it up... all these are not absolutes they are just tendencies in certain directions. Of course, tendencies in certain directions is all you can talk about when you talk about economics, anyway. The music industry will suffer, but that won't neccessarily reduce the quality of music. Again, the only people who will even bother to try to become a musician will be the people with obvious talent and love of music. True competition will emerge. We'll all benefit.... except of course the beauracrats who currently can live off picking off the cream of the crop and subsidising with YOUR MONEY all the garbage becase they just don't know better.
Power plants are hardly unlabeled. They are surrounded by walls and such... So humans can't just walk into fire that these power plants generate.
There is no mention of obvious environmental impact. Obviously, warming the ocean floor on large scale will disturb the ecosystem balance. Does anyone know if they research how localized the impact will be? Before anyone says that I am huffing and puffing, the equivalent of this for humans would be like having a permanent unlabeled source of constant fire somewhere in the middle of a populated region.
Posting as objectivist anonymously? :)
Yes, yes, this is offtopic. But I just couldn't help myself.
everyone is a criminal is the most sure way to keep the despotism of "order". We all break speeding laws. Most people have broken drug control laws. Millions of people consume "illegal" copies of entertainment media. Police state is only possible if most citizens are in one way or another criminal. So the logic that the law is ridiculous seems almost to contradict the set course of modern society. How will the aussies keep the populas in line?
Have them share a group? They can always share files by allowing complete group permissions, can they not? If that is all they want to do.
Let's not pretend that any ISP actually has a choice of cutting off MS users. I think what is more telling here is that MS is not yet a media company. Media companies are the ones from whom we expect a statement that only the producers of products (i.e. the artists) should have a choice as to how the product is used and that the consumers of products (i.e. listeners, watchers of movies, etc.) should not have such choice. MS is still a traditional company, so they can only muscle their partners on how their product gets packaged. MS does not yet control the message -- only the media. I am not saying that they are not trying, but I am saying that since they are not a media company yet, they still have to worry about consumer rights.
Actually, the "audit" can be very simple.... The total volume of all .exe files on Windows platforms and the total volume of executable files. Yes, we all know this is a braindead solution, but on a logarithmic scale this is a pretty good ball park estimate of the amount of software installed on a particular machine.... So are we now looking at explosion of network terminals in TN? All software resides in on place on the server? :)
is how this can possibly work. You can always ship your device with firmware that complies with the law. But if you wink-wink don't protect your firmware with tampering in any way, it will be very quickly hacked to remove any protection. There is no realistic way to stop a company from shipping a device that people with a tiny-bit of competence (i.e. being able to update their firmware) cannot use to circumvent drm. And since the people with some degree of competence are presumably the ones recording and distributing all these television shows (with commercials taken out), then what is to stop them? These sword/shield wars between "pirates" and content providers will enventually get resolved through technical inovation one way or another. The law will change nothing.
Learning process involves iteration. Finding new contexts in which to iterate can be very useful. So finding a new environment into which to stick all these chemical reactions knowledge could be a good way to memorize it. So stop being so harsh on the original poster. He could learn a lot of the reactions just by making his diagram. And if he creates a pretty context in the process, he will also remember the result of his work -- a pretty pictures in which everything fits together. And, of course, this is exactly what one would hope for when trying to memorize a large chunk of information.
The article says that the software hides the identity of the chip from BIOS. It also says that the chip has the cache disabled. Is the cache present and disabled? Does that mean the software also enables the cache? That would be too cool.
No society can ignore its most competent people for too long. For way too long we've been looking down on the people who are genuily dedicated to what they do. This sounds like a "management" word -- I know. But geek is really a term used for people who love what they do and who are good at it. Naturally they are very competent. This is almost darwinian. If a society persistantly ignores the merit of the most accomplished it is headed for destruction. Maybe we are finally waking up from this nihilism?
Nothing to see here... you know... first the computer-aided traslation that sounds computerized then ceramic armor. Next the clone army? And you always wondered why they sound so goofy in those helmets, didn't you?
in the next few days. The SFN just started in Washington.
MIT does offer online courses. They are not for credit though. But they have videos of many lecture courses online. Quite good, too.
Let the flame wars begin....
Math is an a priori research. That is its fact-discovery is based on assumptions that may or may not reflect reality. Usually, as a matter of fact, they do not reflect but rather approximate reality. Whereas science is an a posteori method of fact discovery. That it is fact discovery based on facts that are observed (vs assumed as in math).
Computer science as such is actually neither math nor science. It is an engineering endeavor. Because it is concerned not so much with discovery of either laws of nature or the conclusions from assumptions as it is with construction of complex stable structures from already discovered facts.
While one can argue that any reasearch requires some amount of discovery of unknown, it is the relative amount of discovery vs construction that generally makes the distinction between engineering vs scientific disciplines.
But c'mon. You always have to consider the scenario where you become too successful. Unless you are trying to address a niche audience, you are trying to write a popularly successful product. And if you become too successful, the owner of the host operating system always has the option of changing the operating system enough to break your open product and making a duplicate product of their own. So you cannot claim to have crated a solution to a lot of peoples' problem by creating an open source product for a closed-source operating system.
MS desperately wants a win. Reports are comming from everywhere on how they are loosing ground to Google. So they figure they beat their chest about the market they think they own -- systems software.
How long before these will replace cars as personal transportation devices? Are we going to have to start getting licensed on how to use them just so that we wouldn't "run into each other" at 35mph?
I thought a more recent... and still more widely spread would be Win 98. http://www.compfused.com/directlink/849/
First of all, you missed the point there. The articles that the author would write would be free to be read. But her effort to "prettify" the articles into books distributed for general public would never happen. Second of all, Letting someone own a copy of your work does not and should not take away from you the right to be the sole person distributing or copying your work. Books are not software. You can't claim that you need to make a "back up" copy of a book. Third of all, Google is both copying and asking the libraries to distribute a copied version to them. After all, if Google copies a book and then another patron checks the same book out, then for one purchased copy of the book 2 physically separate entities are able to access and read the book. So you have a situation of one sale and multiple simultaneous users or readers. If this is not distribution, I don't know what is. And finally, you missed the point with sales as well. The fact that some books reported more sales does not mean that more information became available to the society at large. I was not arguing that authors would make less money. I was arguing that this would turn off some of the authors from spending time of their life on writing. Not because they would not become wealthy from it, but because they would not have control over who is allowed to copy their work. Yes, I do mean copy -- not distribute. And you still don't seem to understand that some people will be turned of from creating things if they are not allowed to say that what is created is theirs to sell under any terms they please. And as a result certain usefull things will not be created. I am not saying that they will be turned off from it because it will not be profitable, but because their ego will not allow them to keep what is theirs -- rightfully theirs. Whether you like it or not, we are in a transition period where the copyright laws will not become irrelevant not because they are outdated but because those who make content want to have complete control over what you can do with it. And they will seize that control through technical means -- be it DRM or whatever else becomes available. The people who release their works for free as a promotion for their paid works are a non-sequitor in this argument. They would release them with or without the copyright laws. It is the people who wish to put monetary value on any use of their creations that will drive this process. And if they loose, they will withdraw from the society the fruits of their labors and thereby leave it with less value.
This is an interesting theory. But you better know that this is the case. And not guess it. Because Kinko's is loosing A LOT of potential business here. And lawsuits in the hopes of a settlment are a poker game. You would bluff (ie, raise the stakes by bringing a lawsuit without merit) only if you believe the other party is bluffing as well (i.e. has no leg to stand on or has no means to defend the lawsuit). This is NOT the case with a large corporation like Kinko's. Any action they take must be assumed to be based on careful legal research of what is legal. Should a meritless lawsuit be brought against them, it must be assumed that they will the means and the will to litigate it to protect their business. Since they are willing to forgo so much revenue, it must be assumed that they find it indefensible in court. And I have to add that this is rightfully so. Believe you me, if I wrote a book, I would not want anyone who baught it to make any copy of it. No matter how well-intentioned or how inocuous they they think their copying is. If I were an author and I found my books often-copied, I would certainly stop writing and start doing something else with my life. This is not the same as taking ideas or quoting or anything of the kind. The only reason you are defending them is because this is the slashdot knee-jerk reaction. "All information must be free". Well, if you make information free, you might reduce the payoff for producing new information. And some the people making the choice of producing or not producing information will make the choice not to produce it because they want more control over the time of their lives that they invest into creating a product. The end result will be less information produced. I know that your counterargument is that some of the people creating information will make more money, but they would be the ones who don't mind lack of control over the end product of their efforts. So they would be writing whether they were well-paid or not, well-recognized or not, etc.
Let me give you an example. Let's say you have a research scientist. She publishes papers on regular basis. But understanding these papers requires a high degree of discipline. Since they are published for general consumption, anyone can copy them. But she has no incentive to polish them up and invest time into making them digestable by the less-initiated into her specific field of science. And under the copyright regime proposed by the "information must be free" crowd, she never will polish them up. The information contained in those papers is already free. But if she wants to maximize sales of the information she has to offer, she will go through great lengths to polish it up and break into bits and pieces that can be related through more-recognized ideas to the concepts that the general population is already familiar with.
Don't be so quick to defend anyone's write to take something that belongs to others for free. This will almost certainly leave everyone with less incentive to produce things of value and will thus leave the society with less valuable things available to it.
If you are allowed to make copies of any book you own, then why does Kinko's refuse to assist you in it? Why do they further claim that their refusal is based on near-certainty of lawsuits if they do assist in copying copyrighted works? If you are right, wouldn't that make Kinko's lawyers wrong?
Of course they are copying. They can't search through a book without first having the whole thing in some form of electronic storage. Even if they put it in that storage once just to creat some sort of index of it and erasing the book after that. It is still copying it. And they search through books. Which means they must first make an electronic copy of every book. And they do it without first getting an author's permission. This is a blatant violation of the copyright. First sale has nothing to do with it. Just because you bought a book does not mean you can make copies of it. You can't Xerox it, you can't scan it, you can't distribute excercies out of a text book for "educational purposes". You can't do anything that makes it possible for multiple people to use the book without first purchasing one copy of the book per one simultaneous user. It is mirky whether they actually distribute it. I would say that they at the very least are borderline case on this one. I am willing to let the courts decide on this one. But make no mistake - they are illegally and blatantly violating authors' copyrights just by copying -- their alleged good intentions notwithstanding.
Actually the fact that they allow multiple simultaneous users to search the book for only one copy of the printed book already constitutes distribution. They are not just quoting. They are also, in some electronic form, allowing multiple people to randomly access the content of the book for only one purchased copy.
So what I stated was NOT a falsehood. It was a possibly a strech (in the case of distributing) and certainly a truth (in the case of copying).