Digital music and possibly digital content in general is not on the list. So it is irrelevant, whether the song is copied on Allofmp3's servers or elsewhere - it is not distribution if no CDs, DVDs or VHSs are distributed.
They pay to the Russian Organization for Multimedia and Digital Systems in a way radio stations pay for the rights to broadcast the music. This, they claim, is legal and it very well might be. The artists can get paid from ROMS via their labels if those are represented in Russia.
I don't understand, is it just incompetence or is there a global anti-space conspiracy... Russian government and the space agency did exactly the same with Mir. No transparency, few solid arguments, no impartial studies. Just an arbitrary final decision - "Dump it into the ocean". A useful tool destroyed for no apparent reason at all.
There have already been a few negative comments in the thread about the computerised bear. I guess the people reviling this idea have not see Steven Spielberg's Artificial Intelligence. The animatronic teddy bear, who asserts `I am not a toy,' was probably the film's most endearing character (see him in this photo) and immensely natural and loveable in his role.
Say what you want, but if you are so hopelessly blind to the future to not realise that toys WILL change as technology improves, then I have nothing but pity and disdain for you. If you don't think that infusing child's toys with love and compassion is good, then you will probably be a terrible parent. If you don't think that a fuzzy artificially intelligent childhood friend is a good thing, then I wonder what kind of dark and emotionally deprived childhood you had yourself.
I don't care that MS Office costs a few hundred bucks for several reasons.
1) I pirated it. 2) The last time I needed to print a good looking business-plan for my client, the printing services alone costed about 250$ (the parchment paper is expensive, you know). MS Word allows me to easily produce professional-looking documents, with a transparent transition from doing a rough draft, soliciting comments, restructuring the document, designing the layout, formatting everything and then making final changes right before printing. All in the same application. All in the same document. When you need an office productivity suite to do important stuff, it is of absolutely no consequence how much does it cost (as long as it's below 1000$). If I were making a budgeting decision in any company, I would make sure that advanced Office users have MS Office installed, even if the competing product is "almost as good" and free.
I am not saying OpenOffice is useless. People who need a 100% GPL desktop environment need it. People, who don't really need an office suite, but just need to type letters and stuff, can use OO.o (or any office application, for that matter). I even concur that in a few years OO.o may surpass MS Office in terms of features, ease of use, stability and everything else. But right now if you need a professional tool for your job, you need Microsoft Office Professional.
Seriously, has anyone read the FA? It's absolutely clear that in those cases described by the CNN journalist employees were not fired because they disclosed sensitive information or badmouthed the company. They were absolutely within their rights to disclose those facts (Apples shipped to MS campus, Google relocation policy) or make those photos (in the plane). Such facts are routinely discussed with friends over dinner, with spouses, with colleagues from other departments, etc.
The firing were absolutely random and arbitrary. The manager didn't like it and thought it "could reflect negatively" on the company. Guess what, fucktard, your decision to fire a competent employee reflects on your company much worse.
Yes, in the capitalist shithole known as the USA workers have very few rights and most companies can fire them at will. But 1) it doesn't make it right to fire people, 2) it is stupid to fire competent people for no valid reason, and 3) the USA is still a capitalist shithole.
That's correct, but you miss the point (just like 90% of all posters in this thread) of the project. It's not to create amazing robosaurus. It's to showcase the technology. Over the next few years it will gradually start being used. Soon (in 10 years or so) we will have many robots that we saw and read about in sci-fi. In 20 years robots will be perfected (including humanoid robots) to the level of Bicentennial Man and I, Robot.
People are so shortsighted, it's scary. They will pretend that all these robots are either useless toys or an elaborate scam, until a dog robot bites them in the ass or a cluebot hits them with a stick. But it doesn't have to be that way - all the information that we need to draw up a decent foresight is available. Please, people, get serious. Read Manna or another book to get some understanding of what robots mean to us, humans.
It's pathetic, out of 13 comments rated 3+ only 2 are serious. The rest are lame jokes.
While spelling errors are a marginally useful indicator of intelligence, they are not reliable. I know how to spell, but I sometimes mix up "phi" and "phy" in physics and philosophy. Sorry for that. And English is not my native language, if that can be an excuse.
Does "they" include people who can't spell? Simmer down, man.
Sorry for the spite. And no, it doesn't include people who can't spell. Only people who ignore the inevitability of societal and technological changes.
Well, I think that people who have friends, partners and acquaintances all over the world, people who can discuss scientific, technological, social, political and philosophical questions with hundreds of thousands of other people all around the world, are actually quite social. More social than someone, whose circle of friends is limited to wife, children, ten co-workers in his department and a few neighbours.
Yes, it would be nice if one could go to a coffee shop on the spur of the moment, meet 20 friends there with similar interests and have a nice friendly chat with them. Sadly, this is not feasible, you can't be very social in real life, but you can easily have lots of contacts online, because the transaction costs are so much lower.
And on your larger point, I value things according to how useful they are to me and I suggest you do the same. I have 90$ 4.1 speakers, but I can't use them much (too loud, and I live in an apartment building). I also have 25$ headphones, which I regularly use and value at least as much (may be more) than the speaker set.
Your attitude towards money is common (in the USA), but is absolutely stupid and 100% wrong. Involving money doesn't suddenly make all wrongs right.
There is nothing wrong with giving specific implicit permissions to certain categories of state employees. The need for search warrants exists not because your house is sacrosanct, but because without such a rule we risk moving towards a police state.
If there is a rule that a TV Licensing guy may enter to check the TV connection, this doesn't create any real danger for civil rights. And if you really value your privacy so much (or are doing something illegal that you don't want anyone to know about), just pay the license fee.
But you would never be able to cite the wikipedia as a reliable source in a school paper...well, maybe in high school, or if your prof didn't really know what it was.
You are simply incapable of seeing the future. It's bad for you, but it's not abnormal. At any given moment most people are dead wrong about the future. If you asked people in 1990 whether Internet will be important, 99% would say it won't. If you asked people in 1900 whether planes are likely to carry hundreds of millions of people each year, 100% would say they aren't. Nevertheless, after some time passed, the percentage of people answering "yes" has increased to something around 100%. The same happens all the time. Take any technology that will be BIG in 2020 and ask people about it. Most will say that it's nonsense and will never be done. And they will all be wrong.
No, it isn't. It's just that with advanced technology many people have the luxury of being ignorant and still living well. The problem is not in technology, the problem is bad education systems, lack of constitutional protection for the right to learn and not recognizing that the society is responsible for personal development of its members.
The point of "free" Wi-Fi is precisely that, which you don't see - make people, who'd rather drink and watch TV all day, interested in reading, socialising other people, finding some hobbies and generally becoming better human beings.
By your reasoning public libraries are useless too and should all be closed.
for the average person, I'm not sure it's so clear cut The average person is a slug, a fucking tapeworm, a bacteria with the nucleus eaten by extremely virulent mutant mold. Average person doesn't know that there is nitrogen in the air they breath, doesn't know what a radio frequency is, doesn't know the amount of text data in the open web, doesn't know jack shit.
The decision on whether free Wi-Fi is good should not be made by "average" people, because the only thing they have plenty of is stupidity. Average people are phisically (neurophisiologically) incapable of realising the importance of Internet in 2015. They are total fucking clueless morons and should die a painful death right now, all of them...
Phew. I feel better now. Anyway, Internet will only get more important than it currently is. By 2020 your brain will be connected to Internet via a direct BCI link. Your mind will constantly send and recieve information and data to and from Internet. Having free global ubiquitous wireless access is not simply important, it is vital for the continuing progress of the human race.
A "necessary utility" my ass. Wireless internet will soon be more important than the running water in your house, but you have your head so deep in your intestines that you can only blabber helplessly about "preventing government waste" and "harnessesing the efficieny of a private corporation". You are a fucking moron yourself and don't delude yourself into thinking that you belong to "the technocratic elite". You don't, you are just the average clueless idiot, nothing more.
Or use the PDA version (pure black on white HTML with nice blue links) for superior readability, nostalgia factor and reading comfort. It took me a while to realise what was the fuzz about the new colour scheme for it.slashdot.org (IIRC), because to me all subsections look a very nice shade of pure white.:)
Seriously, I flinch every time I follow a link to slashdot that takes me to a static page rendered with the fugly Slashdot look. Luckily, clicking on "Change" instantly recreates the page in comfortable and fashionable black on white.
I'm really not sure about that... Personal computers didn't become popular because there was a nice small set of useful applications. They became popular because they were extensible and there were tons of useful software from third-party developers (developers. developers!).
It was brutally easy to design a light-weight barebones desktop OS. In fact, Linux was that OS since 2000 at least. While there still isn't an OSS Word-killer, there were many "basic wordprocessors". But the truth is that noone wants a barebones desktop, no matter whether it's based on Linux or on web-apps. The success of webmail doesn't prove that webapps are the way to go, it just shows that in these very special circumstances web-based e-mail applications have a number of strong advantages.
Desktop OSes will rule for a decade at least. And though some convergence with webapps is inevitable, it won't be as simple and straightforward as a migration to a web interface.
But why do the employees need strong passwords? You can just set all servers up against brute-force password picking (increasing delays between each successive attempt). Then anything which isn't "god" or "123" would be fine.
Well, Sony always had uber-sexy Vaio laptops that made people drool for as long as Apple's Powerbooks. And many other manufacturers have great designs. as well. For instance, LG has nice looking laptops and Fujitsu has some beautiful slate TabletPCs.
Apple has a very strong brand. They can make a white plastic box, slap a logo on it and it will sell. I am not saying that they don't have great design, just that they are only marginally better than designs from other manufacturers. But Apples are perceived to be much more stylish, because Apple is... "different".
Good point. I wonder if I will be able to sue True.com if my date is not as beautiful as that Claudia Schiffer photo that she posted. Would it be possible to argue that True.com implied that the information provided in the database is veryfied? Or may be Yahoo! Personals can buy a few lawmakers and pass a law that would require True.com to post a 38 point magenta disclaimer that your date may end up being "AN UGLY BIATCH" or "A TRANNY PEDO" or "A CANINE".
The best temperature for drinking coffee is about 60 degrees. At this temperature you can drink the coffee and not worry about scalding your mouth and the throat. Some companies serve coffee at 90+ degrees, which is unfit for consumption. If you drink one sip of that coffee, you will immediately harm youself and will need medical attention. If you will force yourself to drink the whole cup of 90+ degrees hot coffee, you may die or at least require a throat transplant.
It's not just this site that is slanted, is the whole damn world media. Check out 10x10, whcih is supposed to be a good representation of the media. It's all boring shit that has almost no perceptible relevance to most human beings. Nobody knows about Kenya because media doesn't concern itself with giving people the complex picture of what is happening in the world is why.
Actually, life is not shorter, it's longer than most people think. As is obvious to transhumanists, the present generation is likely to live forever. Considering this, how much sense does it make to waste the precious years of your humanity on working? What difference would that make to you in 200 years? That's what people should be thinking about, not whether the job is screwing their personal lifes.
Quit the job if you are not making the difference in the world.
There is no reason to keep working unless you are absolutely extatic about what you are doing. This is, of course, subject to two assumptions:
1) You are very intelligent and would have no problem finding a job in a week 2) You don't feel like you must constantly waste your money on better car, larger house, wife and kids
Work should be abolished, it's an abomination and people (intelligent people) should not have jobs, this is degrading and boring.
I found it much more rewarding to just do whatever I happen to enjoy right now and quit soon after I stop enjoying it. I quit a job in a small investment bank when I decided I'd rather not work overtime to finish urgent projects. Went to study for a year. After a while I found that I enjoy small short-term projects most, where I do something new, learn new things, challenge myself and then move on.
And since I don't feel obliged to engage in rampant consumerism, I always have more money than I need and can afford slacking when I want to.
Despite coming from Sun, the project is almost completely useless and goes in the wrong direction.
What they claim is efficient way to organise the workspace in 3D is a big fat lie. It's just an ugly and useless hack that doesn't even have the "wow" factor.
There are proven GUI technologies that work. These are 1) Expose 2) Virtual desktops, which you can switch between 3) Smoothly scrollable desktop, preferably with a zoom feature.
If someone implemented these (rather simple) ideas in one window manager, that would be almost a perfect environment, without any need for 3D (other than to use the 3D card acceleration and for cool visual effects). It doesn't make sense to rotate windows or workspaces, when you can zoom and scroll.
Slashdot Mirror
BTW, John Lennon's music is public domain in Russia, as is every other work made before 1973. Does that mean John Lennon risks starving to death too?
Digital music and possibly digital content in general is not on the list. So it is irrelevant, whether the song is copied on Allofmp3's servers or elsewhere - it is not distribution if no CDs, DVDs or VHSs are distributed.
They pay to the Russian Organization for Multimedia and Digital Systems in a way radio stations pay for the rights to broadcast the music. This, they claim, is legal and it very well might be. The artists can get paid from ROMS via their labels if those are represented in Russia.
I don't understand, is it just incompetence or is there a global anti-space conspiracy... Russian government and the space agency did exactly the same with Mir. No transparency, few solid arguments, no impartial studies. Just an arbitrary final decision - "Dump it into the ocean". A useful tool destroyed for no apparent reason at all.
There have already been a few negative comments in the thread about the computerised bear. I guess the people reviling this idea have not see Steven Spielberg's Artificial Intelligence. The animatronic teddy bear, who asserts `I am not a toy,' was probably the film's most endearing character (see him in this photo) and immensely natural and loveable in his role.
Say what you want, but if you are so hopelessly blind to the future to not realise that toys WILL change as technology improves, then I have nothing but pity and disdain for you. If you don't think that infusing child's toys with love and compassion is good, then you will probably be a terrible parent. If you don't think that a fuzzy artificially intelligent childhood friend is a good thing, then I wonder what kind of dark and emotionally deprived childhood you had yourself.
I don't care that MS Office costs a few hundred bucks for several reasons.
1) I pirated it.
2) The last time I needed to print a good looking business-plan for my client, the printing services alone costed about 250$ (the parchment paper is expensive, you know). MS Word allows me to easily produce professional-looking documents, with a transparent transition from doing a rough draft, soliciting comments, restructuring the document, designing the layout, formatting everything and then making final changes right before printing. All in the same application. All in the same document. When you need an office productivity suite to do important stuff, it is of absolutely no consequence how much does it cost (as long as it's below 1000$). If I were making a budgeting decision in any company, I would make sure that advanced Office users have MS Office installed, even if the competing product is "almost as good" and free.
I am not saying OpenOffice is useless. People who need a 100% GPL desktop environment need it. People, who don't really need an office suite, but just need to type letters and stuff, can use OO.o (or any office application, for that matter). I even concur that in a few years OO.o may surpass MS Office in terms of features, ease of use, stability and everything else. But right now if you need a professional tool for your job, you need Microsoft Office Professional.
Seriously, has anyone read the FA? It's absolutely clear that in those cases described by the CNN journalist employees were not fired because they disclosed sensitive information or badmouthed the company. They were absolutely within their rights to disclose those facts (Apples shipped to MS campus, Google relocation policy) or make those photos (in the plane). Such facts are routinely discussed with friends over dinner, with spouses, with colleagues from other departments, etc.
The firing were absolutely random and arbitrary. The manager didn't like it and thought it "could reflect negatively" on the company. Guess what, fucktard, your decision to fire a competent employee reflects on your company much worse.
Yes, in the capitalist shithole known as the USA workers have very few rights and most companies can fire them at will. But 1) it doesn't make it right to fire people, 2) it is stupid to fire competent people for no valid reason, and 3) the USA is still a capitalist shithole.
That's correct, but you miss the point (just like 90% of all posters in this thread) of the project. It's not to create amazing robosaurus. It's to showcase the technology. Over the next few years it will gradually start being used. Soon (in 10 years or so) we will have many robots that we saw and read about in sci-fi. In 20 years robots will be perfected (including humanoid robots) to the level of Bicentennial Man and I, Robot.
People are so shortsighted, it's scary. They will pretend that all these robots are either useless toys or an elaborate scam, until a dog robot bites them in the ass or a cluebot hits them with a stick. But it doesn't have to be that way - all the information that we need to draw up a decent foresight is available. Please, people, get serious. Read Manna or another book to get some understanding of what robots mean to us, humans.
It's pathetic, out of 13 comments rated 3+ only 2 are serious. The rest are lame jokes.
Check your spelling there, genius.
While spelling errors are a marginally useful indicator of intelligence, they are not reliable. I know how to spell, but I sometimes mix up "phi" and "phy" in physics and philosophy. Sorry for that. And English is not my native language, if that can be an excuse.
Does "they" include people who can't spell? Simmer down, man.
Sorry for the spite. And no, it doesn't include people who can't spell. Only people who ignore the inevitability of societal and technological changes.
Well, I think that people who have friends, partners and acquaintances all over the world, people who can discuss scientific, technological, social, political and philosophical questions with hundreds of thousands of other people all around the world, are actually quite social. More social than someone, whose circle of friends is limited to wife, children, ten co-workers in his department and a few neighbours.
Yes, it would be nice if one could go to a coffee shop on the spur of the moment, meet 20 friends there with similar interests and have a nice friendly chat with them. Sadly, this is not feasible, you can't be very social in real life, but you can easily have lots of contacts online, because the transaction costs are so much lower.
And on your larger point, I value things according to how useful they are to me and I suggest you do the same. I have 90$ 4.1 speakers, but I can't use them much (too loud, and I live in an apartment building). I also have 25$ headphones, which I regularly use and value at least as much (may be more) than the speaker set.
Your attitude towards money is common (in the USA), but is absolutely stupid and 100% wrong. Involving money doesn't suddenly make all wrongs right.
There is nothing wrong with giving specific implicit permissions to certain categories of state employees. The need for search warrants exists not because your house is sacrosanct, but because without such a rule we risk moving towards a police state.
If there is a rule that a TV Licensing guy may enter to check the TV connection, this doesn't create any real danger for civil rights. And if you really value your privacy so much (or are doing something illegal that you don't want anyone to know about), just pay the license fee.
But you would never be able to cite the wikipedia as a reliable source in a school paper...well, maybe in high school, or if your prof didn't really know what it was.
Wikipedia as an academic source - a small list of academic works citing Wikipedia as a source.
You are simply incapable of seeing the future. It's bad for you, but it's not abnormal. At any given moment most people are dead wrong about the future. If you asked people in 1990 whether Internet will be important, 99% would say it won't. If you asked people in 1900 whether planes are likely to carry hundreds of millions of people each year, 100% would say they aren't. Nevertheless, after some time passed, the percentage of people answering "yes" has increased to something around 100%. The same happens all the time. Take any technology that will be BIG in 2020 and ask people about it. Most will say that it's nonsense and will never be done. And they will all be wrong.
No, it isn't. It's just that with advanced technology many people have the luxury of being ignorant and still living well. The problem is not in technology, the problem is bad education systems, lack of constitutional protection for the right to learn and not recognizing that the society is responsible for personal development of its members.
The point of "free" Wi-Fi is precisely that, which you don't see - make people, who'd rather drink and watch TV all day, interested in reading, socialising other people, finding some hobbies and generally becoming better human beings.
By your reasoning public libraries are useless too and should all be closed.
for the average person, I'm not sure it's so clear cut
The average person is a slug, a fucking tapeworm, a bacteria with the nucleus eaten by extremely virulent mutant mold. Average person doesn't know that there is nitrogen in the air they breath, doesn't know what a radio frequency is, doesn't know the amount of text data in the open web, doesn't know jack shit.
The decision on whether free Wi-Fi is good should not be made by "average" people, because the only thing they have plenty of is stupidity. Average people are phisically (neurophisiologically) incapable of realising the importance of Internet in 2015. They are total fucking clueless morons and should die a painful death right now, all of them...
Phew. I feel better now. Anyway, Internet will only get more important than it currently is. By 2020 your brain will be connected to Internet via a direct BCI link. Your mind will constantly send and recieve information and data to and from Internet. Having free global ubiquitous wireless access is not simply important, it is vital for the continuing progress of the human race.
A "necessary utility" my ass. Wireless internet will soon be more important than the running water in your house, but you have your head so deep in your intestines that you can only blabber helplessly about "preventing government waste" and "harnessesing the efficieny of a private corporation". You are a fucking moron yourself and don't delude yourself into thinking that you belong to "the technocratic elite". You don't, you are just the average clueless idiot, nothing more.
Or use the PDA version (pure black on white HTML with nice blue links) for superior readability, nostalgia factor and reading comfort. It took me a while to realise what was the fuzz about the new colour scheme for it.slashdot.org (IIRC), because to me all subsections look a very nice shade of pure white. :)
Seriously, I flinch every time I follow a link to slashdot that takes me to a static page rendered with the fugly Slashdot look. Luckily, clicking on "Change" instantly recreates the page in comfortable and fashionable black on white.
I'm really not sure about that... Personal computers didn't become popular because there was a nice small set of useful applications. They became popular because they were extensible and there were tons of useful software from third-party developers (developers. developers!).
It was brutally easy to design a light-weight barebones desktop OS. In fact, Linux was that OS since 2000 at least. While there still isn't an OSS Word-killer, there were many "basic wordprocessors". But the truth is that noone wants a barebones desktop, no matter whether it's based on Linux or on web-apps. The success of webmail doesn't prove that webapps are the way to go, it just shows that in these very special circumstances web-based e-mail applications have a number of strong advantages.
Desktop OSes will rule for a decade at least. And though some convergence with webapps is inevitable, it won't be as simple and straightforward as a migration to a web interface.
But why do the employees need strong passwords? You can just set all servers up against brute-force password picking (increasing delays between each successive attempt). Then anything which isn't "god" or "123" would be fine.
Well, Sony always had uber-sexy Vaio laptops that made people drool for as long as Apple's Powerbooks. And many other manufacturers have great designs. as well. For instance, LG has nice looking laptops and Fujitsu has some beautiful slate TabletPCs.
Apple has a very strong brand. They can make a white plastic box, slap a logo on it and it will sell. I am not saying that they don't have great design, just that they are only marginally better than designs from other manufacturers. But Apples are perceived to be much more stylish, because Apple is... "different".
Good point. I wonder if I will be able to sue True.com if my date is not as beautiful as that Claudia Schiffer photo that she posted. Would it be possible to argue that True.com implied that the information provided in the database is veryfied? Or may be Yahoo! Personals can buy a few lawmakers and pass a law that would require True.com to post a 38 point magenta disclaimer that your date may end up being "AN UGLY BIATCH" or "A TRANNY PEDO" or "A CANINE".
The best temperature for drinking coffee is about 60 degrees. At this temperature you can drink the coffee and not worry about scalding your mouth and the throat. Some companies serve coffee at 90+ degrees, which is unfit for consumption. If you drink one sip of that coffee, you will immediately harm youself and will need medical attention. If you will force yourself to drink the whole cup of 90+ degrees hot coffee, you may die or at least require a throat transplant.
It's not just this site that is slanted, is the whole damn world media. Check out 10x10, whcih is supposed to be a good representation of the media. It's all boring shit that has almost no perceptible relevance to most human beings. Nobody knows about Kenya because media doesn't concern itself with giving people the complex picture of what is happening in the world is why.
Actually, life is not shorter, it's longer than most people think. As is obvious to transhumanists, the present generation is likely to live forever. Considering this, how much sense does it make to waste the precious years of your humanity on working? What difference would that make to you in 200 years? That's what people should be thinking about, not whether the job is screwing their personal lifes.
Quit the job if you are not making the difference in the world.
There is no reason to keep working unless you are absolutely extatic about what you are doing. This is, of course, subject to two assumptions:
1) You are very intelligent and would have no problem finding a job in a week
2) You don't feel like you must constantly waste your money on better car, larger house, wife and kids
Work should be abolished, it's an abomination and people (intelligent people) should not have jobs, this is degrading and boring.
I found it much more rewarding to just do whatever I happen to enjoy right now and quit soon after I stop enjoying it. I quit a job in a small investment bank when I decided I'd rather not work overtime to finish urgent projects. Went to study for a year. After a while I found that I enjoy small short-term projects most, where I do something new, learn new things, challenge myself and then move on.
And since I don't feel obliged to engage in rampant consumerism, I always have more money than I need and can afford slacking when I want to.
Despite coming from Sun, the project is almost completely useless and goes in the wrong direction.
What they claim is efficient way to organise the workspace in 3D is a big fat lie. It's just an ugly and useless hack that doesn't even have the "wow" factor.
There are proven GUI technologies that work. These are
1) Expose
2) Virtual desktops, which you can switch between
3) Smoothly scrollable desktop, preferably with a zoom feature.
If someone implemented these (rather simple) ideas in one window manager, that would be almost a perfect environment, without any need for 3D (other than to use the 3D card acceleration and for cool visual effects). It doesn't make sense to rotate windows or workspaces, when you can zoom and scroll.