Yes, you could theoretically use that to learn about those things. But computers don't bring in resources that aren't currently in a geographic location. Those are protected by people with guns. That's what people often forget: education is great and all, but without hard physical resources that education is useless.
I'm all for education, but these people need education and resources. In fact, most people will tell you that having more resources makes it simpler to learn, because less time is spent trying to survive and is therefore available to learn. The current state of many "poor" countries is that there is an immediate tradeoff between "hrm, should I study for an hour or spend an hour protecting the few vegetable plants I have from rodents or theives?"
I think that there is a necessary balance between education and the resources to mobilize that education. Education itself doesn't do anything unless it somehow brings in resources that aren't available in these areas.
So, great - these folks will have an education program. Now how do we get them raw materials and factories to construct an infrastructure without having the local warlords or whomever steal or destroy them and avoid the rest of the international community saying "hey quit being a bully state!"?
Remember, again, that most world problems today aren't technical, but political.
This is either a pretty good troll, or one extremely misinformed person.
The book to which this AC is referring says no such thing. In fact, it says quite the opposite. (It just says that, handled irresponsibly, there are not-so-pleasant consequences. Which shouldn't be surprising, since handling anything irresponsibly - even low-cost computers - typically has not-so-pleasant consequences). After all, isn't one of the big controversies over OLPC / XO the "fear" that the technology will be used irresponsibly?
But, of course, this is Slashdot, where Misinformation and Assumptions Rule.
Well, it appears I'm uninformed, because I wrote it that way. The article isn't very clear about what the suit is about - and I admit I didn't read the case filing - but if the suit is about "they didn't offer the source code to BusyBox and we couldn't find where they are making that source available, and then we asked them to make it available and they didn't" that's a different suit than "they are using BusyBox but they aren't making all the source to everything on their hardware available". So, I was trying to cover most of the bases.
So, while yes, I understand that the GPL is about ensuring that GPL'd source is always available (which is really interesting because it puts archiving responsibility with anyone that distributes the good rather than on the author. Not to say that's bad, just interesting.) I think the more tricky points here are about what it will do to the related works (aggregates, etc.)
(By the way, there's a vast difference between photocopying a Stephen King novel - which is not a utility by the way - and including, say, a PNG decoder module in my graphics program. My graphics program isn't "derivative" of the decoder, it just "uses" it. A "derivative" of a PNG decoder would be a PNG decoder that does other stuff too - like, say, use the PNG code to compress audio instead of video, or an optimized PNG decoder. That's a subtle difference that I think is often lost and why we have the LGPL which is more often confused than the GPL.)
I think this will be an interesting suit. Without knowing all the details, it sounds like the situation may be:
Monsoon built a box, and put the BusyBox software on it, and uses the BusyBox software as a "black box" utility package.
Now, the question is: are the things that use BusyBox derivative of BusyBox or not? It doesn't make sense that Monsoon could be sued because it's not distributing the source code for BusyBox, because the product offered is not "BusyBox" - besides that, BusyBox source can presumably be found wherever it is that Monsoon got it.
Does use of BusyBox by Monsoon mean that every bit of Monsoon's other code has to be released as well? This is the sticky point, and my guess is this is what is going to be fought. I think there's a strong case, as well: if I write "Hello, world" that runs on Linux, is that a derivative work? I don't think anyone would consider it to be so. I would bet that if Monsoon can demonstrate that they are just using BusyBox out of convenience and not because it is crucial to their software, the worst that will happen is that they will have to replace the BusyBox with some other code. I don't think they can be forced to release their source code. That said, I don't know that they'd have to stop and wait in the meantime anyway - if they are just using BusyBox "off the shelf", as the hypothetical "hello world" just uses Linux or whatever "off the shelf" then I don't think there would be an issue. I guess the question then is, if I write "hello world" for Linux, and with my hello world distribute Linux as well, does that mean I have to release the source to "hello world"?
That's the question I'm fairly certain people are going to see here.
I think what the Linux distro people keep forgetting is that the average United States computer user sees something named "Wubi+Kubuntu" and thinks "I'm not supporting any of that foreign nonsense!".
The one exception is probably the Wii, because it is a single syllable and has derogatory connotations.
Personally, one of my turn-offs to some OSS software like OpenOffice.org is that it has '.org' in its name, and it's abbreviation is "OO.o" which looks like a mal-formed price of $0.00, or the thing that certain knight kept saying when trying to say 'Ni'.
Windows doesn't sell on technical merit, it sells on marketing. Apple at least has some technical merit, and fantastic marketing. Linux has technical merit, but really needs some marketing people...That, and remember the confusion of "What version of Office do you have? 'Internet explorer' or 'Windows95'" nonsense and extend that to "What distro of Linux do you have?" (RPMs or apt-get? huh?)
and the conservatives stick to the one they chose first, even if it turns out to be the wrong one.
Well, that's a different issue entirely...(In my opinion, which I happen to think is correct, things are true or not regardless of my opinion on them.)
Except it's not petrol, it's diesel. If you were running nice fuel-efficient modern diesels, you'd be using about 1/6th the fuel of the wheezy gutless petrols you have now.
Dude! Where can I get these diesel engines with 6 times the fuel economy of my gasoline car? (By the way, my car gets about 36 mpg - gasoline - on the highway...)
There is no unit, though, as its a measure of entropy.
Eh, well, the unit of entropy is actually "energy per temperature"*, so there are physical units associated with it. Of course, that's physical entropy, and I don't know that it's the same as "information entropy." If they're different, then I blame the folks that overload technical words.
That said, I always thought "random" simply meant "the next outcome is not predictable based on all previous measurements." Therefore the measure of "random" would be based on probability that the next outcome can be predicted based on the previous measurements. I'd say in this case that "completely nonrandom" would be "the next outcome can always be predicted based on previous measurements" and "completely random" would be "zero probability of predicting the next outcome based on previous measurements."
In that sense, it's probably not possible for anything to be either completely random or completely nonrandom, because there is always a finite probability of getting a correct guess, and it's probably impossible to distinguish a guess from looking at previous measurements.
*from dS = dQ/T where S is entropy, Q is energy, and T is temperature (or, better yet, (Boltzmann's constant)*(multiplicity of the system)). I can't remember from Shannon's paper the exact method he used to compute "entropy", but I'm pretty sure it's not "change in energy per unit temperature". Come to think of it, my guess is Shannon's entropy is simply the multiplicity of the system normalized by Boltzmann's constant so the units dissappear (multiplicity doesn't have units). Those crazy non-physical scientists! *grin*
I can't seem to find anywhere which defines "fact" as the latter definitions you mentioned. Google doesn't think so anyway: all theirs seem to indicate 'truth' as a prerequisite (one of them says "possible to be evaluated as being true or false." and that's about as close to your definitions as I could get.
Liability causes high cost to entry to healthcare, so there is not sufficient increase in supply to bring prices down. Insurance allows costs to remain high because it distributes a cost of services used by a small fraction of the population across the entire population - this means the actual demand of the service is no longer related to its price, so traditional economics don't hold very well. What you end up with is a twisted relationship between people who pay insurance but don't get services, people who pay insurance and get services, and people who don't pay insurance but get services. People who don't pay insurance and don't get services are not exempt from the complication: there are always incidental effects related to the benefits to society to having health care for everyone. Also, even if you or your employer is not directly paying for insurance, if you (or your employer) purchase any product or service out there you are still paying for insurance in the form of higher prices for those goods and services (unless you live in a completely closed community like in The Village or something).
It's interesting that a quote from an article about the law itself from its supporter Leyland Yee says "They fought efforts to publicize their rating system because they thought it would impact sales, and now they're again putting their profit margins over the rights of parents and the well-being of children."
The thing that gets me is he (and probably others) think that not having warning labels somehow infringes on the rights of individuals, in this case parents, to make an informed decision about purchases. Personally, I don't see how having a label or not having a label has anything to do with rights. Warning labels may fall into the realm of product liability, but I don't think that really applies to any form of intellectual property. The concept that certain ideas can be harmful is a very dangerous one; my opinion is that the only times certain ideas are harmful is if they are implemented, not if they are discussed or considered.
In this particular instance - video games - the parent always has the right to watch the games their child plays, as well as the right to take that game away from the child (well, I'm sure some people would argue against that right, but I think that's a valid parental responsibility - and therefore they have to have the right to do it. If you take away that parental 'right', then parents must also be indemnified for the actions of their children (because they don't have the right to 'interfere' in their child's life), and I don't see many courts wanting to tackle that issue. In fact, I don't think I want to live in a society that would do such a thing.)
Indeed. The problem is the poor use of the term "computing power".
Sending spam is a trivial problem to make parallel: the more nodes you have, the more you can do per unit time.
Most "hard" computer programs are not so easy to make parallel, because they require communication between the nodes. Sending spam doesn't require much information to be sent between the nodes to send more spam. The key is that while spam-bot-nets do require address information to be shuffled around, and the contents of email, the spam bots can continue to send spam when they are waiting for updated information. "Hard" distributed problems mean that nodes will stall waiting for information from other nodes.
So, while there is a sheer amount of computing power from one standpoint, that power isn't really useful for anything meaningful - it's just useful for sending spam.
Given the current mechanism used to communicate between computers, there is a point of diminishing returns with regard to the size of the network: once you get too big for "hard" problems, adding more nodes slows you down rather than speeds you up because the communications bandwidth between the nodes is limited.
There's nothing preventing a battery pack composed of individual smaller batteries,
That's a reasonable initial assumption, but given what I know about batteries this isn't always feasible. One of the main issues with "modern" rechargeable batteries is that they require some fairly substantial integration effort - it's not like the current button cells or even "standard" sizes where you can just stack cells together; I'm pretty sure there has to be more integration effort than that. My evidence is the current state of the batteries: the suspicions are that the integration of the components in current Li-based batteries is the problem.
In order to come up with a "standard" cell which can be swapped out inside some custom casing is actually quite inefficient: you add extra packaging to each cell as well as in the casing to put them together, and you have to have additional checks to make sure if you combine cells of brand X and Y together they don't interact poorly (current alkaline batteries are bad enough if you mix and match!).
I still don't think that battery manufacturers are milking things as much as people thing - I think the problem is that the people who abuse their batteries and have to replace them frequently are the vocal folks, so that's all you hear. I have never known anyone personally that has had to replace a battery on any mobile device within two years, and I have never personally known anyone to have to replace a laptop battery. That said, the sample that is "people I know" are generally conscious of good technical practices.
That said, if technical development gets us less expensive, longer-lasting, more fool-resistant batteries that's great. As it is, I'm satisfied with the current state of technology for my needs, and I think that if we just educated people on technology we'd be better off in the long run. (That's a different discussion entirely - we're growing an entire generation of people that "just expect things to work" without knowing how to make them work. That's more scary to me than all the off-shoring, terrorism, natural disasters/climate issues, and whatever else is actually in the mainstream media.)
Legislate that LiIon batteries must use standardized battery format and be consumer changeable.
So basically, you're advocating the "one size fits none" approach to batteries?
While I understand the idea here - the ubiquity of things like AA, AAA, C, D, etc. batteries is testament to that - legislating a technical configuration in my mind is always a bad thing. Legislation should just say "this is what the [product] must do," not "This is what the product should be." Otherwise you get strange issues like when hybrid cars came out, because the EPA regulations mandated that if the city fuel economy was indeed actually higher than the highway, you could only write the highway for both (that law has now been modified, but at some notable cost to society).
I would rather allow OEMs to be able to package cells in whatever form factor and styling they wish for custom devices like laptops - the visual appearance alone between laptops from different manufacturers should be a good indication of why a mandated standard battery pack would not be good - it would actually prevent innovation if the battery pack became a limiting design factor. The simplest example: you can't have a dimension smaller than the smallest dimension of the mandated battery packs.
Programming is an "industry" or "manufacturing" job since it produces a final, tangible product (a program).
Actually, the jury is still out on this one, and most people consider programming to, in fact, be a service job.
The ultimate question is this: is a program real wealth or is it just something that has value? A piece of food or a building is real wealth in that it is something which can be used to directly keep a person alive or directly change matter/energy. The value of a piece of wealth may change, but its inherent utility does not (if we neglect things like aging and falling apart). A 1000 square foot house will still be a 1000 square foot house whether people are willing to pay $50000 or $500000 for it. An apple is still an apple regardless of its price.
Software is an admittedly difficult-to-classify area, because in one sense software is indeed a tool: it allows fast computation for design, or accurate control of machinery. In another sense, though, software itself is a unique type of good in that it is not economically scarce: once a particular bit of software is created, there are no practical physical limitations on the number of simultaneous uses of that software. This is the argument against considering software to be wealth.
I think the best way to divide "service" from "not service" is: is the result of the activity new wealth, or just shifting around of wealth? I understand that services create value, but that is different than wealth. Manufacturing and agriculture definitely create wealth; programming may or may not depending on how you look at it. Everything else is clearly a service, because it just shifts the wealth of manufacturing and agriculture around.
My take on the matter is simply this: I cannot eat a haircut, nor will readily-available newsfeeds keep the cold winter air away. An economy must produce wealth to survive; just providing services means that you're just a slave to whomever does in fact produce the actual wealth.
Hrm. What's suddenly very unclear here is the difference between a 'license' and a 'contract'. I'm fairly clear on what constitutes a contract: exchange of consideration and all that. A license, however, seems to be very different - it's almost like a bizarre form of contract, where party A will let party B behave in some way given certain conditions, but without an exchange of consideration. The odd thing is that I'm thinking (again, this is kind of thinking out loud here) it appears that there is some implicit consideration exchanged in a 'license': that is, the thing of value is whatever is being licensed. I suppose the question is what party B gives back to party A in that situation, and that's probably where the difference between 'contracts' and 'licenses' lies.
In instances where someone pays for a license, does that implicitly turn the agreement into a contract because there was an exchange of consideration with terms? From the little I know of contract law, I think it does, and calling it a 'license' instead of a 'contract' is just confusing things with terminology.
I've done some quick looking for the difference between a license and a contract and I can't really find anything that's a definitive discussion on the matter.
Slashdot Mirror
Wow, I thought you were going to quote the entire They Might Be Giants song there for a second...
I've got to agree with you there - Star Wreck was a great find.
Yes, you could theoretically use that to learn about those things. But computers don't bring in resources that aren't currently in a geographic location. Those are protected by people with guns. That's what people often forget: education is great and all, but without hard physical resources that education is useless.
I'm all for education, but these people need education and resources. In fact, most people will tell you that having more resources makes it simpler to learn, because less time is spent trying to survive and is therefore available to learn. The current state of many "poor" countries is that there is an immediate tradeoff between "hrm, should I study for an hour or spend an hour protecting the few vegetable plants I have from rodents or theives?"
I think that there is a necessary balance between education and the resources to mobilize that education. Education itself doesn't do anything unless it somehow brings in resources that aren't available in these areas.
So, great - these folks will have an education program. Now how do we get them raw materials and factories to construct an infrastructure without having the local warlords or whomever steal or destroy them and avoid the rest of the international community saying "hey quit being a bully state!"?
Remember, again, that most world problems today aren't technical, but political.
This is either a pretty good troll, or one extremely misinformed person.
The book to which this AC is referring says no such thing. In fact, it says quite the opposite. (It just says that, handled irresponsibly, there are not-so-pleasant consequences. Which shouldn't be surprising, since handling anything irresponsibly - even low-cost computers - typically has not-so-pleasant consequences). After all, isn't one of the big controversies over OLPC / XO the "fear" that the technology will be used irresponsibly?
But, of course, this is Slashdot, where Misinformation and Assumptions Rule.
Well, it appears I'm uninformed, because I wrote it that way. The article isn't very clear about what the suit is about - and I admit I didn't read the case filing - but if the suit is about "they didn't offer the source code to BusyBox and we couldn't find where they are making that source available, and then we asked them to make it available and they didn't" that's a different suit than "they are using BusyBox but they aren't making all the source to everything on their hardware available". So, I was trying to cover most of the bases.
So, while yes, I understand that the GPL is about ensuring that GPL'd source is always available (which is really interesting because it puts archiving responsibility with anyone that distributes the good rather than on the author. Not to say that's bad, just interesting.) I think the more tricky points here are about what it will do to the related works (aggregates, etc.)
(By the way, there's a vast difference between photocopying a Stephen King novel - which is not a utility by the way - and including, say, a PNG decoder module in my graphics program. My graphics program isn't "derivative" of the decoder, it just "uses" it. A "derivative" of a PNG decoder would be a PNG decoder that does other stuff too - like, say, use the PNG code to compress audio instead of video, or an optimized PNG decoder. That's a subtle difference that I think is often lost and why we have the LGPL which is more often confused than the GPL.)
I think this will be an interesting suit. Without knowing all the details, it sounds like the situation may be:
Monsoon built a box, and put the BusyBox software on it, and uses the BusyBox software as a "black box" utility package.
Now, the question is: are the things that use BusyBox derivative of BusyBox or not? It doesn't make sense that Monsoon could be sued because it's not distributing the source code for BusyBox, because the product offered is not "BusyBox" - besides that, BusyBox source can presumably be found wherever it is that Monsoon got it.
Does use of BusyBox by Monsoon mean that every bit of Monsoon's other code has to be released as well? This is the sticky point, and my guess is this is what is going to be fought. I think there's a strong case, as well: if I write "Hello, world" that runs on Linux, is that a derivative work? I don't think anyone would consider it to be so. I would bet that if Monsoon can demonstrate that they are just using BusyBox out of convenience and not because it is crucial to their software, the worst that will happen is that they will have to replace the BusyBox with some other code. I don't think they can be forced to release their source code. That said, I don't know that they'd have to stop and wait in the meantime anyway - if they are just using BusyBox "off the shelf", as the hypothetical "hello world" just uses Linux or whatever "off the shelf" then I don't think there would be an issue. I guess the question then is, if I write "hello world" for Linux, and with my hello world distribute Linux as well, does that mean I have to release the source to "hello world"?
That's the question I'm fairly certain people are going to see here.
You forgot the category into which I fall, which is "Still disappointed at Bungie for defecting to Microsoft."
I think what the Linux distro people keep forgetting is that the average United States computer user sees something named "Wubi+Kubuntu" and thinks "I'm not supporting any of that foreign nonsense!".
The one exception is probably the Wii, because it is a single syllable and has derogatory connotations.
Personally, one of my turn-offs to some OSS software like OpenOffice.org is that it has '.org' in its name, and it's abbreviation is "OO.o" which looks like a mal-formed price of $0.00, or the thing that certain knight kept saying when trying to say 'Ni'.
Windows doesn't sell on technical merit, it sells on marketing. Apple at least has some technical merit, and fantastic marketing. Linux has technical merit, but really needs some marketing people...That, and remember the confusion of "What version of Office do you have? 'Internet explorer' or 'Windows95'" nonsense and extend that to "What distro of Linux do you have?" (RPMs or apt-get? huh?)
Well, that's a different issue entirely...(In my opinion, which I happen to think is correct, things are true or not regardless of my opinion on them.)
See my sig.
Dude! Where can I get these diesel engines with 6 times the fuel economy of my gasoline car? (By the way, my car gets about 36 mpg - gasoline - on the highway...)
...Seriously...
Yeah, I can tell what it's intended to say, but it still doesn't mean I'd accept stuff like that. It's almost as bad as text-message writing.
Eh, well, the unit of entropy is actually "energy per temperature"*, so there are physical units associated with it. Of course, that's physical entropy, and I don't know that it's the same as "information entropy." If they're different, then I blame the folks that overload technical words.
That said, I always thought "random" simply meant "the next outcome is not predictable based on all previous measurements." Therefore the measure of "random" would be based on probability that the next outcome can be predicted based on the previous measurements. I'd say in this case that "completely nonrandom" would be "the next outcome can always be predicted based on previous measurements" and "completely random" would be "zero probability of predicting the next outcome based on previous measurements."
In that sense, it's probably not possible for anything to be either completely random or completely nonrandom, because there is always a finite probability of getting a correct guess, and it's probably impossible to distinguish a guess from looking at previous measurements.
*from dS = dQ/T where S is entropy, Q is energy, and T is temperature (or, better yet, (Boltzmann's constant)*(multiplicity of the system)). I can't remember from Shannon's paper the exact method he used to compute "entropy", but I'm pretty sure it's not "change in energy per unit temperature". Come to think of it, my guess is Shannon's entropy is simply the multiplicity of the system normalized by Boltzmann's constant so the units dissappear (multiplicity doesn't have units). Those crazy non-physical scientists! *grin*
I can't seem to find anywhere which defines "fact" as the latter definitions you mentioned. Google doesn't think so anyway: all theirs seem to indicate 'truth' as a prerequisite (one of them says "possible to be evaluated as being true or false." and that's about as close to your definitions as I could get.
I'm pretty sure that for something to be called a 'fact' it has to have the property of being true.
I'm deeply disturbed that there are people out there who think that 'fact' can be used to describe something that isn't true.
Two words explain both these phenomena:
Insurance
Liability
Liability causes high cost to entry to healthcare, so there is not sufficient increase in supply to bring prices down. Insurance allows costs to remain high because it distributes a cost of services used by a small fraction of the population across the entire population - this means the actual demand of the service is no longer related to its price, so traditional economics don't hold very well. What you end up with is a twisted relationship between people who pay insurance but don't get services, people who pay insurance and get services, and people who don't pay insurance but get services. People who don't pay insurance and don't get services are not exempt from the complication: there are always incidental effects related to the benefits to society to having health care for everyone. Also, even if you or your employer is not directly paying for insurance, if you (or your employer) purchase any product or service out there you are still paying for insurance in the form of higher prices for those goods and services (unless you live in a completely closed community like in The Village or something).
*grin*
(Glad to see someone's paying attention!)
It's interesting that a quote from an article about the law itself from its supporter Leyland Yee says "They fought efforts to publicize their rating system because they thought it would impact sales, and now they're again putting their profit margins over the rights of parents and the well-being of children."
The thing that gets me is he (and probably others) think that not having warning labels somehow infringes on the rights of individuals, in this case parents, to make an informed decision about purchases. Personally, I don't see how having a label or not having a label has anything to do with rights. Warning labels may fall into the realm of product liability, but I don't think that really applies to any form of intellectual property. The concept that certain ideas can be harmful is a very dangerous one; my opinion is that the only times certain ideas are harmful is if they are implemented, not if they are discussed or considered.
In this particular instance - video games - the parent always has the right to watch the games their child plays, as well as the right to take that game away from the child (well, I'm sure some people would argue against that right, but I think that's a valid parental responsibility - and therefore they have to have the right to do it. If you take away that parental 'right', then parents must also be indemnified for the actions of their children (because they don't have the right to 'interfere' in their child's life), and I don't see many courts wanting to tackle that issue. In fact, I don't think I want to live in a society that would do such a thing.)
Indeed. The problem is the poor use of the term "computing power".
Sending spam is a trivial problem to make parallel: the more nodes you have, the more you can do per unit time.
Most "hard" computer programs are not so easy to make parallel, because they require communication between the nodes. Sending spam doesn't require much information to be sent between the nodes to send more spam. The key is that while spam-bot-nets do require address information to be shuffled around, and the contents of email, the spam bots can continue to send spam when they are waiting for updated information. "Hard" distributed problems mean that nodes will stall waiting for information from other nodes.
So, while there is a sheer amount of computing power from one standpoint, that power isn't really useful for anything meaningful - it's just useful for sending spam.
Given the current mechanism used to communicate between computers, there is a point of diminishing returns with regard to the size of the network: once you get too big for "hard" problems, adding more nodes slows you down rather than speeds you up because the communications bandwidth between the nodes is limited.
That's a reasonable initial assumption, but given what I know about batteries this isn't always feasible. One of the main issues with "modern" rechargeable batteries is that they require some fairly substantial integration effort - it's not like the current button cells or even "standard" sizes where you can just stack cells together; I'm pretty sure there has to be more integration effort than that. My evidence is the current state of the batteries: the suspicions are that the integration of the components in current Li-based batteries is the problem.
In order to come up with a "standard" cell which can be swapped out inside some custom casing is actually quite inefficient: you add extra packaging to each cell as well as in the casing to put them together, and you have to have additional checks to make sure if you combine cells of brand X and Y together they don't interact poorly (current alkaline batteries are bad enough if you mix and match!).
I still don't think that battery manufacturers are milking things as much as people thing - I think the problem is that the people who abuse their batteries and have to replace them frequently are the vocal folks, so that's all you hear. I have never known anyone personally that has had to replace a battery on any mobile device within two years, and I have never personally known anyone to have to replace a laptop battery. That said, the sample that is "people I know" are generally conscious of good technical practices.
That said, if technical development gets us less expensive, longer-lasting, more fool-resistant batteries that's great. As it is, I'm satisfied with the current state of technology for my needs, and I think that if we just educated people on technology we'd be better off in the long run. (That's a different discussion entirely - we're growing an entire generation of people that "just expect things to work" without knowing how to make them work. That's more scary to me than all the off-shoring, terrorism, natural disasters/climate issues, and whatever else is actually in the mainstream media.)
So basically, you're advocating the "one size fits none" approach to batteries?
While I understand the idea here - the ubiquity of things like AA, AAA, C, D, etc. batteries is testament to that - legislating a technical configuration in my mind is always a bad thing. Legislation should just say "this is what the [product] must do," not "This is what the product should be." Otherwise you get strange issues like when hybrid cars came out, because the EPA regulations mandated that if the city fuel economy was indeed actually higher than the highway, you could only write the highway for both (that law has now been modified, but at some notable cost to society).
I would rather allow OEMs to be able to package cells in whatever form factor and styling they wish for custom devices like laptops - the visual appearance alone between laptops from different manufacturers should be a good indication of why a mandated standard battery pack would not be good - it would actually prevent innovation if the battery pack became a limiting design factor. The simplest example: you can't have a dimension smaller than the smallest dimension of the mandated battery packs.
Actually, the jury is still out on this one, and most people consider programming to, in fact, be a service job.
The ultimate question is this: is a program real wealth or is it just something that has value? A piece of food or a building is real wealth in that it is something which can be used to directly keep a person alive or directly change matter/energy. The value of a piece of wealth may change, but its inherent utility does not (if we neglect things like aging and falling apart). A 1000 square foot house will still be a 1000 square foot house whether people are willing to pay $50000 or $500000 for it. An apple is still an apple regardless of its price.
Software is an admittedly difficult-to-classify area, because in one sense software is indeed a tool: it allows fast computation for design, or accurate control of machinery. In another sense, though, software itself is a unique type of good in that it is not economically scarce: once a particular bit of software is created, there are no practical physical limitations on the number of simultaneous uses of that software. This is the argument against considering software to be wealth.
I think the best way to divide "service" from "not service" is: is the result of the activity new wealth, or just shifting around of wealth? I understand that services create value, but that is different than wealth. Manufacturing and agriculture definitely create wealth; programming may or may not depending on how you look at it. Everything else is clearly a service, because it just shifts the wealth of manufacturing and agriculture around.
My take on the matter is simply this: I cannot eat a haircut, nor will readily-available newsfeeds keep the cold winter air away. An economy must produce wealth to survive; just providing services means that you're just a slave to whomever does in fact produce the actual wealth.
Hrm. What's suddenly very unclear here is the difference between a 'license' and a 'contract'. I'm fairly clear on what constitutes a contract: exchange of consideration and all that. A license, however, seems to be very different - it's almost like a bizarre form of contract, where party A will let party B behave in some way given certain conditions, but without an exchange of consideration. The odd thing is that I'm thinking (again, this is kind of thinking out loud here) it appears that there is some implicit consideration exchanged in a 'license': that is, the thing of value is whatever is being licensed. I suppose the question is what party B gives back to party A in that situation, and that's probably where the difference between 'contracts' and 'licenses' lies.
In instances where someone pays for a license, does that implicitly turn the agreement into a contract because there was an exchange of consideration with terms? From the little I know of contract law, I think it does, and calling it a 'license' instead of a 'contract' is just confusing things with terminology.
I've done some quick looking for the difference between a license and a contract and I can't really find anything that's a definitive discussion on the matter.
Eh, insert "is actually" between "but" and "very" in my original post.....
That's what I figured, but it's much more fun to visualize the version of torch which relies on highly exothermic chemical reactions :-)