Wouldn't it create even more atmosphere if you had to shine torches at the display to be able to see it? And anyone wanting to read an e-book under their covers with a torch could still do it
Hopefully this will fail the new obviousness criteria; note that it is still just an application. Basically, they are combining existing technologies in their obvious functionality: methods to change configuration information and display various information to vehicle operators.
I don't see any innovation here at all; they are combining elements and the result is the expected result for combining those elements.
This was my thought as well; I suppose it depends on how the system determines "order in which you vote". I've never personally used anything but a paper ballot that is read by a scanner (yay for "backwards" states), but the way it works everywhere I've been is:
1. You come in, they simply highlight your name in the Big Book of Names and give you a ballot. I don't even think they write down the ballot number next to your name in the book. 2. You go fill out the ballot and stick it in the machine.
If that's true, then there shouldn't be any issue of inflation (at least ISK inflation) in the universe, so it seems the premise of avoiding inflation in that particular economy is a non-starter.
However, I'd question the fact that there are more currency sinks than sources, because if that were the case then there would be rampant deflation. While there may be more types of sink than types of source, it sounds to me like the system is fairly balanced as far as entire money supply goes.
The interesting thing would be to see if the insurance rates are actually done like real insurance; for instance, if every single person blew their ship up at the same time, would the system just pay everyone or would it default because there isn't enough cover? (Remember, insurance should use income from lots of people to pay for a low-likelihood event.) If the EVE insurance system always pays out the full amount, and the payout amount is greater than the value of the thing lost, then you could scam the system by simply pulling out a policy, blowing the ship up, collecting for a profit, rinse, repeat. (I only played EVE for about 2 months about 2 years ago, so can't remember the details of insurance).
Maybe the first step towards keeping inflation stable is making sure developers aren't allowed to create epic/rare items repeatedly.
Umm...that really wouldn't affect inflation at all. Remember that inflation, simply stated is, "The nominal cost of all goods and services increases over time." Note the very important terms nominal and all. If the price of a single good (say, Telurian Apples) increases, this could just be because the demand for those items went up or whatever. The only way the price of all goods can go up is if the growth in money supply out-paces the growth in actual goods and services. A key of inflation is that not only do prices go up, but wages also go up. If all prices go up and wages fall (or stay the same), that's called a shortage, and while prices increase the overall economy doesn't grow because more money isn't there to follow it around (usually this is called "stagflation").
So, the ways to solve inflation in a game are actually easier than in real life, because presumably in a game environment the computer managing the economy knows exactly how much wealth is present in the system. If a ship gets blown up, that's a loss in wealth, and the system can extract currency from the system to compensate for this (basically, make it more expensive to buy some goods on the market, and then don't have the system "purchase" goods again to replace the currency units).
If you build a new ship, then the "System" will note that additional wealth and be willing to inject more currency into the marketplace.
The markets mechanism is already in place; it can keep inflation at bay by artificially keeping prices on "low-end" commodities low, so that new participants in the system aren't forced to pay inflated prices for those commodities (it can do this by always offering resources at low prices; alternatively, the system market could always offer crazy high prices for base commodities to artificially increase the "wages" for newcomers so they are on par with everyone else.) From some of the other posts, it seems this does take place to some extent, though not quite correctly (caps on mineral prices aren't the way to do this - the prices need to fluctuate accordingly).
If you want to see a *really* screwed up, inflationary economy, look at the economies of the original WoW servers; that economy does not have any market balance forces to eat up the supply of goods (the way to fix that would be to have NPC controlled auction offerings to help keep prices in check, or for NPC vendors to change their prices based on rate of exchange). Simply stated, there is no current mechanism in that game to check the economy because there is no mechanism to absorb the ever-increasing amount of cash in the game.
So, to summarize: Inflation shouldn't be an issue in EVE, because it has the "central bank" mechanism through the markets that can mediate it, if it was used properly. Systems like WoW, however, cannot avoid inflation because there is no mechanism to moderate the cash in the system.
What's the point of bringing it up in an election debate? Aside from educational funding, stance on evolution really isn't even on my radar for politicians.
If I was going to ask a question, I'd ask "How will you calm the media down from distracting issues like evolution and focus on real issues for which governmental action is appropriate?"
Now that is a question I want to hear politicians answer!
And that is my point exactly. Certain things are fitting for human-readable form. Instructions for drawing borders and selecting a font are not appropriate for human readable forms, unless you're actually telling a person to draw a border or pick a font (reading a document that says "font Serif 32 bold" doesn't do me any good when I can't see the result of that instruction! It might as well just say "Graphical Formatting Information Deleted" and I'd be fine with that).
I do like your idea of having a conversion to human-readable form; that would preserve some of that "useful" information, but in the form of presentation rather than the form of instruction (the latter is what XML-like things are; not human-readable even though it "looks" that way, to my mind...)
...but what's wrong with asking people to see the ads that support the work. If you don't, the reporter doesn't get paid and the news dries up.
If these guys aren't getting the compensation they desire for the work they produce, then let them stop producing the work. Let it dry up; there's obviously not the paid demand they thought for the product.
Using the law to artificially prop up an activity for which there is not enough paid demand is just asking for trouble in the long run.
Note that the "paid" aspect of the demand is important. Pretending that there is demand for something when people aren't willing to pay means the demand is actually very low, because you can't say there is or is not demand for something that is free.
Some things that people think are "free" aren't. Take, for instance, clean air. It's not really free, because people are willing to sacrifice something to get clean air.
If "news" or "music" is really in demand, than people will sacrifice something to get it. Since there is a large portion of the population not willing to sacrifice money to get those things, the demand isn't really there. It's more like people are saying "hey cool this thing fell in my lap, I'm going to use it." It's like a gift rather than something they pay for.
(I do realize that even with music, etc. in today's market people are actually "paying" for downloads for which they do not pay money: They are paying in units of "risk of getting caught" which are currently valued far lower than the currency units used to otherwise obtain that music / software / movie / whatever. Throw that one on the currencies exchange market - and be enlightened!)
The problem with this is there isn't enough incentive for the end-user to do this; the individual savings are likely too small.
This means that somehow the incentive needs to be placed on the manufacturers to eliminate the "wall wart waste", but that's a very difficult logistical problem: not enough houses already have DC supply, and there is no standard DC supply, so how would you make your parts? The potential reward is not currently high enough for the investment risk involved in this type of thing.
The only way you could do this would be to start manufacturing devices with a standard DC interface as well as converters to current AC supplies. Then you'd get on with some of the homebuilders or home retrofit groups to add wires that match that standard interface.
The real problem there is that to do this effectively you'd have to get a consortium of home appliance manufacturers to all use the standard, and figure out a way to get that as a cost save and/or profit builder for them. Otherwise it's never going to fly. And the only way to get a consortium to do this is probably with legislation, because why would companies want their razor to be interchangeable with the power supply for their competitors'?
Like most problems in today's world, the technology exists to solve the problem; it's just politics (and/or commercial interests) which get in the way.
Hrm. There's also the opposite method which in theory could work but never will on paper:
You can start accepting less payment for everything you do, and make sure you can still get by. This will lower the cost of all the goods based on your efforts, so that will make US goods more competitive in the world market. Cool!
Oh, wait, that doesn't work like that, does it...why don't other people lower their prices if I lower mine again?
Yes, I was stretching the use of the term. Basically, (and the other poster above didn't comment on this one, though someone further down in the main thread did) I was going along the lines of "when nobody owns a common resource, it tends to get abused." I suppose it was too much of a stretch, without being explicit, to say "if there is no central 'owner' of software, software loses accountability." Which is basically the tragedy of the commons - without vested direct interest there is abuse. (I admit, quite often I'm not as clear in my analogies as I should be.)
Sure, with software (as another poster below noted) there is usually vested interest, so people/companies will be hired if they can meet the needs, regardless of the fact that software is "open" or "closed."
I can't recall if I've seen this around but: if nobody "owns" software, is it subject to tragedy of the commons?
There are probably arguments either way, but because software isn't a scarce commodity I don't know how that old idea applies.
I would suspect that as long as there are enough people willing and able to create new software and / or modify what's out there the issues would be minimized. The big problem I see with no "owners" of software is that ensuring you had "the real deal" would be difficult, because there's nobody to go after for "shoddy" software. Essentially, without an owner there is no responsibility. This could be detrimental, because it would mean that every organization that wants to use software would then have to hire competent software folks to evaluate and analyze the software, or make it all proprietary in the first place.
Sure the local crowd here on/. is capable of evaluating most small projects, but in an environment that really relies on software as a tool, you can't "guess" that it will do what you want, and having the luxury (yes it's a luxury) of a software "owner" on which to place responsibility is probably a good thing.
Having software so "open" that responsibility cannot be assigned is actually a bad thing.
Now, the balance between those two concepts - responsibility and freedom - is a tricky one to be sure. At the very least, I agree that software should be "open" in the sense that you should be able to change what you have locally to do whatever you want; responsibility only comes in when you distribute those changes to others (or the use of modified bits can affect others).
That's my point exactly: Nobody "gives" you rights; they can only place restrictions on your activity. I like your terminology that the military/police protect your "rights" from compromise (basically, they ideally stand in the way of people trying to prevent you from exercising your rights). I will allow that the policing agencies also enforce restrictions as well...so they are kind of a double-edged sword.
Put another way: you can always do whatever you want as long as there is nobody around that is capable of stopping you from doing it and you have the necessary resources available.
The way I see it, "rights" are the things that, if someone is trying to get you to stop doing, the government will step in to allow you to do it anyway.
[2] You don't have to pay taxes to have rights. Children, people who are unemployed, homemakers, and many other classes of people may not pay taxes but still have these rights.
No, but you do have to have someone willing and able to uphold those rights. They're called the military and/or police, and taxes pay for those organizations. While certain individuals may not pay, someone does.
Or you can try and uphold them yourself, but I'm guessing the guys that pay for the military and police have more firepower than you. "Rights" don't mean anything if you can't uphold them.
Everything boils down to force: either the threat or actual use.
If nobody's actually trying to attack you it doesn't mean you're safe; it just means you don't have anyone attacking you (kind of like computer security).
The loss of freedom comes inherently with the handing off of the responsibility to the government. Sure, in this case it's a "small" loss because the V-chip is just a more complicated "off" switch. But it's saying that "hey government we want you to give us tools because we're too lazy to educate our children" and any time you give responsibility to the government it corresponds with a loss of freedom.
The only way to increase freedom (in a political sense) is to also accept more responsibility.
The issue with the super V-chip is this: folks are wanting to make the government (specifically the FCC) responsible for providing mechanisms to filter content. The result of this is that people will therefore have fewer freedoms in choosing their methods of filtering content. The sneaky thing is it looks like the super V-chip is adding a new way of filtering content, but it's actually a restriction in a different direction: it means that the freedom of upstarts to create new content devices is reduced because they are now subject to more constraints.
Loss of freedom is often not directly related to the change in responsibility, but it is always there.
That said, the existence or not of a super V-chip is kind of irrelevant; the underlying issues are really that of parent-child relationship integrity, education, and exchange of freedom and responsibility.
This technology is all overkill anyway, and here's why:
To view content, you have to physically have access to a device that can display the content. As a parent, you should be able to remove that physical access for all 'locally controlled' devices; you can't prevent them from watching a friend's phone or whatever regardless of V-chips or whatever.
There is this thing called an 'off switch' and, failing that, circuit breakers.
You don't want them to have a phone, don't give them money to buy one. If they're old enough to get a job to afford their own, then they should already have the capacity to handle whatever content they can obtain anyway.
To me, these laws just take away responsibility and, with it, freedom from the general populace.
It's not about the 'name' it's about what the certificate represents: Compliance with a specified set of tests.
That's actually very valuable and it isn't just the name, because it means that if you have an application that relies on the functionality proven by those tests, then you're good.
That's the whole point of standards and standardizing bodies. You want a gallon to be a gallon (US or UK, just be consistent!), a kilogram to be a kilogram, a UNIX to be a UNIX. Testing isn't free, so instead of relying on volunteers to do testing it looks like IBM, Apple, Sun, HP, and Fujitsu paid some guys calling themselves the Open Group to do some verification and certify that some standards are met. I don't see a lot of controversy there.
2 failures in 30 opportunities is a tragically bad failure rate. Even one failure in 30 is tragically bad. 1 failure in 30 is no better than a failure rate of 1 in 10 to a 95% confidence (if actual defect rate is 1 in 10, odds of 1 failure in 30 chances is 95%). If the actual defect rate is one in 100, the odds of one failure in 30 chances is only 26%.
So, even though you think 1 in 30 is "good", it's horrendously bad. What you want is a real defect rate of around 1 per 10,000 or so, which would only have a 0.3% chance of seeing 1 defect in 30 units.
Neither the summary nor the FA did a great job of summarizing the issues.
I agree to some extent. Notably the test specified in the article is "open a game and then sit there without hitting the keyboard." In my mind, this means the game isn't responding to any I/O, so gets pushed to the background, so adding more tasks just means it gets 1/tasks timeslices. Seems reasonable. I'm not sure why the CFS would keep the game running more often than SD if there was no I/O. An interesting comparison would be to see not only the FPS/CPU usage for the game but also for the "loop" tasks. (Those tasks also are not I/O bound.)
Fundamentally I think the name CFS is a little bit odd - how does one define "fair"? In fact, I probably don't want my scheduler to be fair at all - I want it to run the stuff I want fast, and the other stuff it can run slow. That's not very fair.
So, I would say there is not enough information given in the article to tell exactly why the systems had different FPS performance for different schedulers - just looking at that number doesn't tell how it's splitting the time among all the processes.
the best identity theft protection would be not letting identities get stolen in the first place
Actually, I would have to say that the best identity theft protection is to make it so your "identity" is not required for anything important. That way, if it gets "stolen" then it doesn't even matter.
(The quotes around those select words are because identity can't really be stolen - credentials that instruct people to allow access to restricted resources or activities may be misused and cause all kinds of difficulty. Identity can't be stolen, just faked, but that's getting a bit pedantic. As CWRU is also my alma mater (class of 2000) you should have some idea of the type of pedantry of which I'm capable).
Yes, but take away "the law" and what really prevents a person from making a copy?
If I copy, (yes, this is a dead horse) the original copy remains; nothing is diminished and society has more copies of whatever. If I steal then the original is no longer available - I have removed the resource from some other place.
The fundamental arguing point is whether things like "vested rights" are legitimate scarce goods or not: because there is nothing in the physical universe which actually makes them scarce; the scarcity is by social agreement only.
The balance of the system is this: if I don't get compensation for generating new ideas, regardless of who or how many people copy them, I will stop generating those ideas and do something else.
The problem with the current system is that it is capable of limiting innovation. Not so much in copyright but in patents, the patents are often so broad as to prevent all reasonable means of solving the same problem; this means that innovation is halted and resources are wasted because of artificial constructs. In an effort to attempt to guarantee "research cost recovery" the system - likely inadvertently - limits innovation in a like field because there are sometimes no ways to work around a patent.
That's really the fundamental problem - things like music or video I don't really care about - the real value there, in my opinion, is in live performances anyway (which cannot be copied).
Anyway, another basic point I have is that yes, we have a current set of laws, but nobody has ever said that the current law is "correct". That, however, is politics; I try to keep things as technical as I can...
The question is, do I deserve compensation for translating the work into a foreign language when I didn't do that translation?
The way I see it, the translator created a new actual work by changing the language. Sure it has the same story or whatever as the original, but the value that guy added is the translation, not the idea.
That's why I said the things of value are the creation of new ideas, the means to distribute them, and the ability to use them. The ideas themselves are not very valuable, so copying them - I don't care. I only start caring when I don't have a job because someone said they performed work that I actually did and they get hired instead of me.
If I want to make money off publishing my ideas, that's a different story. Think of it this way: people don't pay money for the ideas in a book, they pay for a book because that's how they get "access" to the ideas. Regarding research: the "idea" probably exists in the physical universe but it's hard to get at, so people pay for the expediency in getting at it - not the idea itself.
With the "communications age" or whatever we're in now, people will pay for network access or whatever to get at ideas; they won't pay for the ideas themselves. Yeah, you may think there's no difference, but I'd disagree. That's not saying either of us is correct; these are all opinions anyway.
Slashdot Mirror
Is that an English torch or an American torch?
Hopefully this will fail the new obviousness criteria; note that it is still just an application. Basically, they are combining existing technologies in their obvious functionality: methods to change configuration information and display various information to vehicle operators.
I don't see any innovation here at all; they are combining elements and the result is the expected result for combining those elements.
This was my thought as well; I suppose it depends on how the system determines "order in which you vote". I've never personally used anything but a paper ballot that is read by a scanner (yay for "backwards" states), but the way it works everywhere I've been is:
1. You come in, they simply highlight your name in the Big Book of Names and give you a ballot. I don't even think they write down the ballot number next to your name in the book.
2. You go fill out the ballot and stick it in the machine.
That's it. No timestamps, nothing.
If that's true, then there shouldn't be any issue of inflation (at least ISK inflation) in the universe, so it seems the premise of avoiding inflation in that particular economy is a non-starter.
However, I'd question the fact that there are more currency sinks than sources, because if that were the case then there would be rampant deflation. While there may be more types of sink than types of source, it sounds to me like the system is fairly balanced as far as entire money supply goes.
The interesting thing would be to see if the insurance rates are actually done like real insurance; for instance, if every single person blew their ship up at the same time, would the system just pay everyone or would it default because there isn't enough cover? (Remember, insurance should use income from lots of people to pay for a low-likelihood event.) If the EVE insurance system always pays out the full amount, and the payout amount is greater than the value of the thing lost, then you could scam the system by simply pulling out a policy, blowing the ship up, collecting for a profit, rinse, repeat. (I only played EVE for about 2 months about 2 years ago, so can't remember the details of insurance).
Umm...that really wouldn't affect inflation at all. Remember that inflation, simply stated is, "The nominal cost of all goods and services increases over time." Note the very important terms nominal and all. If the price of a single good (say, Telurian Apples) increases, this could just be because the demand for those items went up or whatever. The only way the price of all goods can go up is if the growth in money supply out-paces the growth in actual goods and services. A key of inflation is that not only do prices go up, but wages also go up. If all prices go up and wages fall (or stay the same), that's called a shortage, and while prices increase the overall economy doesn't grow because more money isn't there to follow it around (usually this is called "stagflation").
So, the ways to solve inflation in a game are actually easier than in real life, because presumably in a game environment the computer managing the economy knows exactly how much wealth is present in the system. If a ship gets blown up, that's a loss in wealth, and the system can extract currency from the system to compensate for this (basically, make it more expensive to buy some goods on the market, and then don't have the system "purchase" goods again to replace the currency units).
If you build a new ship, then the "System" will note that additional wealth and be willing to inject more currency into the marketplace.
The markets mechanism is already in place; it can keep inflation at bay by artificially keeping prices on "low-end" commodities low, so that new participants in the system aren't forced to pay inflated prices for those commodities (it can do this by always offering resources at low prices; alternatively, the system market could always offer crazy high prices for base commodities to artificially increase the "wages" for newcomers so they are on par with everyone else.) From some of the other posts, it seems this does take place to some extent, though not quite correctly (caps on mineral prices aren't the way to do this - the prices need to fluctuate accordingly).
If you want to see a *really* screwed up, inflationary economy, look at the economies of the original WoW servers; that economy does not have any market balance forces to eat up the supply of goods (the way to fix that would be to have NPC controlled auction offerings to help keep prices in check, or for NPC vendors to change their prices based on rate of exchange). Simply stated, there is no current mechanism in that game to check the economy because there is no mechanism to absorb the ever-increasing amount of cash in the game.
So, to summarize: Inflation shouldn't be an issue in EVE, because it has the "central bank" mechanism through the markets that can mediate it, if it was used properly. Systems like WoW, however, cannot avoid inflation because there is no mechanism to moderate the cash in the system.
What's the point of bringing it up in an election debate? Aside from educational funding, stance on evolution really isn't even on my radar for politicians.
If I was going to ask a question, I'd ask "How will you calm the media down from distracting issues like evolution and focus on real issues for which governmental action is appropriate?"
Now that is a question I want to hear politicians answer!
And that is my point exactly. Certain things are fitting for human-readable form. Instructions for drawing borders and selecting a font are not appropriate for human readable forms, unless you're actually telling a person to draw a border or pick a font (reading a document that says "font Serif 32 bold" doesn't do me any good when I can't see the result of that instruction! It might as well just say "Graphical Formatting Information Deleted" and I'd be fine with that).
I do like your idea of having a conversion to human-readable form; that would preserve some of that "useful" information, but in the form of presentation rather than the form of instruction (the latter is what XML-like things are; not human-readable even though it "looks" that way, to my mind...)
If these guys aren't getting the compensation they desire for the work they produce, then let them stop producing the work. Let it dry up; there's obviously not the paid demand they thought for the product.
Using the law to artificially prop up an activity for which there is not enough paid demand is just asking for trouble in the long run.
Note that the "paid" aspect of the demand is important. Pretending that there is demand for something when people aren't willing to pay means the demand is actually very low, because you can't say there is or is not demand for something that is free.
Some things that people think are "free" aren't. Take, for instance, clean air. It's not really free, because people are willing to sacrifice something to get clean air.
If "news" or "music" is really in demand, than people will sacrifice something to get it. Since there is a large portion of the population not willing to sacrifice money to get those things, the demand isn't really there. It's more like people are saying "hey cool this thing fell in my lap, I'm going to use it." It's like a gift rather than something they pay for.
(I do realize that even with music, etc. in today's market people are actually "paying" for downloads for which they do not pay money: They are paying in units of "risk of getting caught" which are currently valued far lower than the currency units used to otherwise obtain that music / software / movie / whatever. Throw that one on the currencies exchange market - and be enlightened!)
Why is "human readable" an important aspect of document formats? Are MP3s human readable? What about video?
I think if you get rid of that single caveat, I'd be all over an "open" format.
I don't know why it bothers me so much that people think that formats have to be human readable - I think that's an unnecessary restriction.
The problem with this is there isn't enough incentive for the end-user to do this; the individual savings are likely too small.
This means that somehow the incentive needs to be placed on the manufacturers to eliminate the "wall wart waste", but that's a very difficult logistical problem: not enough houses already have DC supply, and there is no standard DC supply, so how would you make your parts? The potential reward is not currently high enough for the investment risk involved in this type of thing.
The only way you could do this would be to start manufacturing devices with a standard DC interface as well as converters to current AC supplies. Then you'd get on with some of the homebuilders or home retrofit groups to add wires that match that standard interface.
The real problem there is that to do this effectively you'd have to get a consortium of home appliance manufacturers to all use the standard, and figure out a way to get that as a cost save and/or profit builder for them. Otherwise it's never going to fly. And the only way to get a consortium to do this is probably with legislation, because why would companies want their razor to be interchangeable with the power supply for their competitors'?
Like most problems in today's world, the technology exists to solve the problem; it's just politics (and/or commercial interests) which get in the way.
Oi, this gives new meaning to the already troubled phrase "Freak gasoline fight accident."
Hrm. There's also the opposite method which in theory could work but never will on paper:
You can start accepting less payment for everything you do, and make sure you can still get by. This will lower the cost of all the goods based on your efforts, so that will make US goods more competitive in the world market. Cool!
Oh, wait, that doesn't work like that, does it...why don't other people lower their prices if I lower mine again?
Yes, I was stretching the use of the term. Basically, (and the other poster above didn't comment on this one, though someone further down in the main thread did) I was going along the lines of "when nobody owns a common resource, it tends to get abused." I suppose it was too much of a stretch, without being explicit, to say "if there is no central 'owner' of software, software loses accountability." Which is basically the tragedy of the commons - without vested direct interest there is abuse. (I admit, quite often I'm not as clear in my analogies as I should be.)
Sure, with software (as another poster below noted) there is usually vested interest, so people/companies will be hired if they can meet the needs, regardless of the fact that software is "open" or "closed."
I can't recall if I've seen this around but: if nobody "owns" software, is it subject to tragedy of the commons?
There are probably arguments either way, but because software isn't a scarce commodity I don't know how that old idea applies.
I would suspect that as long as there are enough people willing and able to create new software and / or modify what's out there the issues would be minimized. The big problem I see with no "owners" of software is that ensuring you had "the real deal" would be difficult, because there's nobody to go after for "shoddy" software. Essentially, without an owner there is no responsibility. This could be detrimental, because it would mean that every organization that wants to use software would then have to hire competent software folks to evaluate and analyze the software, or make it all proprietary in the first place.
Sure the local crowd here on /. is capable of evaluating most small projects, but in an environment that really relies on software as a tool, you can't "guess" that it will do what you want, and having the luxury (yes it's a luxury) of a software "owner" on which to place responsibility is probably a good thing.
Having software so "open" that responsibility cannot be assigned is actually a bad thing.
Now, the balance between those two concepts - responsibility and freedom - is a tricky one to be sure. At the very least, I agree that software should be "open" in the sense that you should be able to change what you have locally to do whatever you want; responsibility only comes in when you distribute those changes to others (or the use of modified bits can affect others).
That's my point exactly: Nobody "gives" you rights; they can only place restrictions on your activity. I like your terminology that the military/police protect your "rights" from compromise (basically, they ideally stand in the way of people trying to prevent you from exercising your rights). I will allow that the policing agencies also enforce restrictions as well...so they are kind of a double-edged sword.
Put another way: you can always do whatever you want as long as there is nobody around that is capable of stopping you from doing it and you have the necessary resources available.
The way I see it, "rights" are the things that, if someone is trying to get you to stop doing, the government will step in to allow you to do it anyway.
No, but you do have to have someone willing and able to uphold those rights. They're called the military and/or police, and taxes pay for those organizations. While certain individuals may not pay, someone does.
Or you can try and uphold them yourself, but I'm guessing the guys that pay for the military and police have more firepower than you. "Rights" don't mean anything if you can't uphold them.
Everything boils down to force: either the threat or actual use.
If nobody's actually trying to attack you it doesn't mean you're safe; it just means you don't have anyone attacking you (kind of like computer security).
The loss of freedom comes inherently with the handing off of the responsibility to the government. Sure, in this case it's a "small" loss because the V-chip is just a more complicated "off" switch. But it's saying that "hey government we want you to give us tools because we're too lazy to educate our children" and any time you give responsibility to the government it corresponds with a loss of freedom.
The only way to increase freedom (in a political sense) is to also accept more responsibility.
The issue with the super V-chip is this: folks are wanting to make the government (specifically the FCC) responsible for providing mechanisms to filter content. The result of this is that people will therefore have fewer freedoms in choosing their methods of filtering content. The sneaky thing is it looks like the super V-chip is adding a new way of filtering content, but it's actually a restriction in a different direction: it means that the freedom of upstarts to create new content devices is reduced because they are now subject to more constraints.
Loss of freedom is often not directly related to the change in responsibility, but it is always there.
That said, the existence or not of a super V-chip is kind of irrelevant; the underlying issues are really that of parent-child relationship integrity, education, and exchange of freedom and responsibility.
This technology is all overkill anyway, and here's why:
To view content, you have to physically have access to a device that can display the content. As a parent, you should be able to remove that physical access for all 'locally controlled' devices; you can't prevent them from watching a friend's phone or whatever regardless of V-chips or whatever.
There is this thing called an 'off switch' and, failing that, circuit breakers.
You don't want them to have a phone, don't give them money to buy one. If they're old enough to get a job to afford their own, then they should already have the capacity to handle whatever content they can obtain anyway.
To me, these laws just take away responsibility and, with it, freedom from the general populace.
It's not about the 'name' it's about what the certificate represents: Compliance with a specified set of tests.
That's actually very valuable and it isn't just the name, because it means that if you have an application that relies on the functionality proven by those tests, then you're good.
That's the whole point of standards and standardizing bodies. You want a gallon to be a gallon (US or UK, just be consistent!), a kilogram to be a kilogram, a UNIX to be a UNIX. Testing isn't free, so instead of relying on volunteers to do testing it looks like IBM, Apple, Sun, HP, and Fujitsu paid some guys calling themselves the Open Group to do some verification and certify that some standards are met. I don't see a lot of controversy there.
2 failures in 30 opportunities is a tragically bad failure rate. Even one failure in 30 is tragically bad. 1 failure in 30 is no better than a failure rate of 1 in 10 to a 95% confidence (if actual defect rate is 1 in 10, odds of 1 failure in 30 chances is 95%). If the actual defect rate is one in 100, the odds of one failure in 30 chances is only 26%.
So, even though you think 1 in 30 is "good", it's horrendously bad. What you want is a real defect rate of around 1 per 10,000 or so, which would only have a 0.3% chance of seeing 1 defect in 30 units.
I agree to some extent. Notably the test specified in the article is "open a game and then sit there without hitting the keyboard." In my mind, this means the game isn't responding to any I/O, so gets pushed to the background, so adding more tasks just means it gets 1/tasks timeslices. Seems reasonable. I'm not sure why the CFS would keep the game running more often than SD if there was no I/O. An interesting comparison would be to see not only the FPS/CPU usage for the game but also for the "loop" tasks. (Those tasks also are not I/O bound.)
Fundamentally I think the name CFS is a little bit odd - how does one define "fair"? In fact, I probably don't want my scheduler to be fair at all - I want it to run the stuff I want fast, and the other stuff it can run slow. That's not very fair.
So, I would say there is not enough information given in the article to tell exactly why the systems had different FPS performance for different schedulers - just looking at that number doesn't tell how it's splitting the time among all the processes.
Actually, I would have to say that the best identity theft protection is to make it so your "identity" is not required for anything important. That way, if it gets "stolen" then it doesn't even matter.
(The quotes around those select words are because identity can't really be stolen - credentials that instruct people to allow access to restricted resources or activities may be misused and cause all kinds of difficulty. Identity can't be stolen, just faked, but that's getting a bit pedantic. As CWRU is also my alma mater (class of 2000) you should have some idea of the type of pedantry of which I'm capable).
For some reason this reminds me of an old two-dimensional simulation package from high school called Interactive Physics:
Warning - Forces are large! [Stop] [Continue]
Continue!
Warning - Accelerations are large! [Stop] [Continue].
Continue!
*Stuff flies every-which-way*
Yes, but take away "the law" and what really prevents a person from making a copy?
If I copy, (yes, this is a dead horse) the original copy remains; nothing is diminished and society has more copies of whatever. If I steal then the original is no longer available - I have removed the resource from some other place.
The fundamental arguing point is whether things like "vested rights" are legitimate scarce goods or not: because there is nothing in the physical universe which actually makes them scarce; the scarcity is by social agreement only.
The balance of the system is this: if I don't get compensation for generating new ideas, regardless of who or how many people copy them, I will stop generating those ideas and do something else.
The problem with the current system is that it is capable of limiting innovation. Not so much in copyright but in patents, the patents are often so broad as to prevent all reasonable means of solving the same problem; this means that innovation is halted and resources are wasted because of artificial constructs. In an effort to attempt to guarantee "research cost recovery" the system - likely inadvertently - limits innovation in a like field because there are sometimes no ways to work around a patent.
That's really the fundamental problem - things like music or video I don't really care about - the real value there, in my opinion, is in live performances anyway (which cannot be copied).
Anyway, another basic point I have is that yes, we have a current set of laws, but nobody has ever said that the current law is "correct". That, however, is politics; I try to keep things as technical as I can...
The question is, do I deserve compensation for translating the work into a foreign language when I didn't do that translation?
The way I see it, the translator created a new actual work by changing the language. Sure it has the same story or whatever as the original, but the value that guy added is the translation, not the idea.
That's why I said the things of value are the creation of new ideas, the means to distribute them, and the ability to use them. The ideas themselves are not very valuable, so copying them - I don't care. I only start caring when I don't have a job because someone said they performed work that I actually did and they get hired instead of me.
If I want to make money off publishing my ideas, that's a different story. Think of it this way: people don't pay money for the ideas in a book, they pay for a book because that's how they get "access" to the ideas. Regarding research: the "idea" probably exists in the physical universe but it's hard to get at, so people pay for the expediency in getting at it - not the idea itself.
With the "communications age" or whatever we're in now, people will pay for network access or whatever to get at ideas; they won't pay for the ideas themselves. Yeah, you may think there's no difference, but I'd disagree. That's not saying either of us is correct; these are all opinions anyway.