I think what you just said is the best argument in favor of piracy that I've seen: not that artists can survive in the presence of piracy, but if it takes draconian legislation and enforcement to ensure their survival, do we really want it?
Seriously, Britney Spears is cool and all, but is it really worth reducing our general freedoms and stuff to protect her ability to make lots of money?
There are plenty of local bands who are willing to sing in the local pub on a for-fun amateur basis. They're not Britney, but they're fun to listen to, and you may even meet some cute rock chick while you're there watching.
Well, Wired is written by people working very hard to make some money out of grabbing people's attention to their writing, so I will take what they say with a pinch of salt.
Wikipedia is I feel, despite what people say, a fairly reliable source of unbiased information on the whole. That's what I feel anyway.
The wikipedia article: - seems to me to assert that Metallica took Napster to court over their music - does not it seems to me to provide either assertions, speculation, or evidence to support the notion that there was a correlating drop in popularity in their music after they did that
If you could find some fairly solid proof to back your assertion, and demonstrate a causal link, then it would likely be fairly easy, easier anyway, to convince Bono et al to back down.
In China, I have home internet, through ADSL, and we each have *external* ip addresses! Basically, we connect to the wifi point using wifi, and then use ppp over ethernet to connect to the isp's modem, and get an external address.
Well, I agree with a lot that you say, but I am a little more philosophic about it I think.
The way I see it is: democracy, representative democracy, was created by the rich people to motivate the poorer people to create. Yes, I think it is that way around, at least partially.
And compared to all the other possible ways for rich people to motivate poorer people to create, it's one of the better ones I feel, for both sets of people. The rich people get highly creative people to be strongly motivated.
And living in such a society for a poorer, creative person, creative in the sense of 'creating engineering projects' I mean, is not such a bad deal. Fairly comfortable I think.
But I do not think it is 'handed down by god'. I feel it is just the way things happen to be right now.
You might enjoy my story 'Feudal Future', where I predict that computers will cause a concentration of power in the hands of ultimately just a few small families, before the inevitable power inversion, and the computers taking over. And the computers are not going to do us any favors I don't think, but that's another story, and not this one;-)
Not so. At least, not on it's own. Search warrants are to collect evidence. So you could be arrested for thinking 'That was a fun murder yesterday!', since that might be interpreted as strong evidence for having physically carried out a murder yesterday. That doesn't directly mean that thinking something is the crime, although inevitably it might become one. It is two distinct things though: a crime, and evidence of having committed a crime.
You're kidding me right? I mean, I had an A500, and it was cool. I learned 68000 Assembler, and attempted to make a spinning cube; and I hacked the startup floppy to boot up really quickly, since I crashed the system so often every time I missed out a '#' from an instruction, and it was fun.
Today we have: - python - C and C++ come as standard, and they're *fast* - you can just apt-get whatever you want - internet, really fast - massive communities of people doing whatever you want, chat with whoever you want about some obscure aspect of programming and so on
Hell, you can even find Amiga communities today (this article), which is something I craved for in the days when the closest I had to am 'Amiga community' was going to the paper shop to buy the latest issue of 'Amiga Format'.
To be fair, China has 5 times as many people as the US. At assymptote, if China and America income per individual is the same, then China has 5 times as much spending power, in aggregate.
Now, you could mention that Europe has a lot of people too, but American and China both have something that Europe doesn't, and it's not the Eiffel Tower, it is: a common, unified culture, a common unified communications protocol.
Europe is like the Tower of Babel.
Specifically, if you create a software company in America, to produce a 3d game let's say, you can hire the *best* graphics programmer out of 250 million people.
If you do that in France, the selection pool is a mere 60 million people. Your company is straight away at a disadvantage.
China's selection pool is 1.2 *billion*. That's a lot of people, and if we suppose that our standards of living and education are going to asymptotically approach each other over time, then Chinese companies will naturally have a huge and increasing advantage from this respect.
Of course, this is only one part of many issues, there are many other issues out there which blunt this analysis and temper it. I guess my point is: it's perhaps normal and inevitable that China's economic power can gradually increase and eclipse that of the West, as long as China doesn't do anything silly. Perhaps, *even* if they do something 'silly'.
Same reason we're using Intel's 80386 architecture, IBM's BIOS, and Arab numerals: it's a common protocol that is in use worldwide. Be thankful for that, it might not last;-) Though, there's a reasonable chance that it will to be honest. Doesn't mean we're all American though;-)
Yes, I'm a strong believer in strong intelligence. I have less faith in staying for very long in reservations though...
Whilst we cannot realistically imagine computers that are intelligent - they will likely be not just quantitatively different, but also qualitatively different, like dogs and humans - we can look the other way: what might we look like to the computers?
Like ants I think. We are not at war with the ants. We do not hate them. We are mildly curious about them. If there's a colony of ants at the bottom of our garden, under a tree, we might leave them there.
But there's not so much space for ants in cities. I don't think we actively orchestrate their destruction en masse, or have a war with them, but there is not much space for them.
I think that computer AI is Pandora's Box, and it's a box I want to see open, curiosity killed the cat and all that, but at the same time I think that they are the next stage of evolution, and we, like the dinosaurs, will only be preserved for so long. Well, maybe we would preserve dinosaurs in a reservation, they are big and scary looking, interesting to us. Maybe we'd even conserve a few ants, if the others were already all dead.
But just a few of them, or maybe just their dna, and perform experiments on them occasionally:-P
Errrr, this is probably all quite off-topic:-P Bye-bye what karma I had:-P
Yes, also: if some intern was fixing a problem with your code, and they were sitting next to you, what sort of things would you have to explain to them in order for them to understand and fix your code, and not just dis' it to their boss and tell their boss what a load of crap your code is?
I often imagine I'm explaining to an intern how the code works when I write my comments. I assume they understand the language, the libraries and stuff - they can just Google that stuff - but what does this class do? why? Target audience.
The other possible target audience is myself in a year's time.
To be honest, the longer I code, the more these target audiences converge on writing the same set of comments;-) since I've learned how much one forgets when one comes back to the same code two years later.
True, but no-one (few people?) enjoys debugging other people's work. They'd rather be writing their own green-field implementation using the latest cool technologies,.Net 3 or.Net 4, or Ruby, or Python 2.6 or whatever. Who wants to be debugging some COBOL stuff, or something written in C? Answer: very few people.
So, when people are debugging other people's code, they (we) often would rather choose to dis' the other person's code, write it off as unmaintainable crap, so that we can justify it being replaced by something 'beautiful', using modern technos.
But we can't ethically justify that, since, well, it's more expensive, and time-consuming to write it from fresh than just to maintain the old stuff for another few years.
But we'll look for any excuse we can to make it more 'ethical' to justify that, and someone's comments, or lack of comments, are fertile ground for such 'justification'.
So, when it's our own code that is being ripped apart by some intern who'd rather write their own code, the easier it is for the intern to understand the code, and understand our comments, the fewer excuses for said intern to bash our code, and the easier it is to fix the issue, and move onto something more interesting for them. It's win, win: they fix the problem quicker, and our code doesn't get dissed. Hopefully. Not so much anyway...
You know, in the future, we'll be able to buy 'Mars Lander kits' from the local model store, outfit them with a tiny nano-camera, and launch them from our back-yard.
That will be awesome.
Of course, this prediction is probably up there with flying cars:-P but one can always dream.
I have an EEEPc 901, 9 inch screen, as my main (only) pc for 12 months now, using it about 8 hours a day.
On this tiny pc, I can: - compile SpringRTS, write AIs in Java for it, run Eclipse in parallel, and mysql or postgres - run Eclipse + Glassfish - run apache + php + postgres/mysql - watch videos - use chat, Skype, email, read slashdot - run VirtualBox, run multiple OSes in parallel - read books
If I need a bit of extra juice, I can just ssh into Amazon EC2, for trivial amounts of money.
It weighs the same as a book, it's always with me, at all times. It's awesome.
Yes, because an anti-virus scanner running on a single computer uses negligible resources, and a service that scanned people's computers remotely would scale wonderfully and make a huge zero-cost profit:-P
To be fair, this can be partially seen as a reflection of market demands.
In China, there are many electronics buildings, with several floors of tiny family-run stores selling resistors, capacitors, op-amps, and so on.
The floors are structured like this: - ground floor, mobile phones, and more mobile phones. This is where most people go - second floor, computer accessories: portable hard drives and so on - third floor: electronics: resistors, capacitors and so on
Why sell a thousand resistors for a couple of dollars, making a margin of what 10 cents?... when you can sell a mobile phone and plan for several hundred dollars, with a markup of half that?
You know, I used to create things I thought were cool, and think I was performing some essential task for society.
Then I took a break, and looked around, and realized that when I didn't do some specific task, other people would do it instead, and they'd often do it better than me: better designed, better documented, better marketed, more elegant, more beautiful.
Who's to say that if Compaq hadn't done that, either someone else wouldn't have done the exact same thing, or someone else wouldn't have done something similar, *but better*?
There's a lot of crappy stuff in bioses (chs and all that stuff), and in x86 architecture in general. As for any other architecture of course. Still, the point is: maybe if Compaq hadn't cloned the IBM bios, someone else would have made some other architecture into the commodity architecture of choice for the next twenty years, and maybe it would have been better in some subtle way?
This seems dangerously close to issues with Wittgenstein's thoughts on categorization, or more explicitly: let's say you determine that the liver cannot for some reason survive more than 60 minutes of being less than 35 degrees celsius, but then what next? - what if you transplant the liver with an artificial liver? Does the rat still contain the essential characteristics of 'rattiness'? - what if the rat is spectactularly fat, and so it takes longer for the liver to go below that temperature? Does that mean the rat is no longer a rat? - or long fur? - etc...
A generally accepted way to 'prove' negative hypotheses is to prove them at a specific statistical certainty level, eg 99% or 99.9%. This has obvious flaws, but it's generally useful, as long as one keeps in mind its limitations, eg the file drawer problem, publication bias http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Misuse_of_statistics
Slashdot Mirror
wow, after Googling, the necrotizing fasciitis looks pretty scary... fairly rare though, 500 cases a year?
I think what you just said is the best argument in favor of piracy that I've seen: not that artists can survive in the presence of piracy, but if it takes draconian legislation and enforcement to ensure their survival, do we really want it?
Seriously, Britney Spears is cool and all, but is it really worth reducing our general freedoms and stuff to protect her ability to make lots of money?
There are plenty of local bands who are willing to sing in the local pub on a for-fun amateur basis. They're not Britney, but they're fun to listen to, and you may even meet some cute rock chick while you're there watching.
Thanks.
Well, Wired is written by people working very hard to make some money out of grabbing people's attention to their writing, so I will take what they say with a pinch of salt.
Wikipedia is I feel, despite what people say, a fairly reliable source of unbiased information on the whole. That's what I feel anyway.
The wikipedia article:
- seems to me to assert that Metallica took Napster to court over their music
- does not it seems to me to provide either assertions, speculation, or evidence to support the notion that there was a correlating drop in popularity in their music after they did that
If you could find some fairly solid proof to back your assertion, and demonstrate a causal link, then it would likely be fairly easy, easier anyway, to convince Bono et al to back down.
In China, I have home internet, through ADSL, and we each have *external* ip addresses! Basically, we connect to the wifi point using wifi, and then use ppp over ethernet to connect to the isp's modem, and get an external address.
Pretty nice...
Citation?
To save anyone else from having to Google, BOFH means 'bastard operator from Hell'.
Actually that should read, 'to boost my karma' :-P
Well, I agree with a lot that you say, but I am a little more philosophic about it I think.
The way I see it is: democracy, representative democracy, was created by the rich people to motivate the poorer people to create. Yes, I think it is that way around, at least partially.
And compared to all the other possible ways for rich people to motivate poorer people to create, it's one of the better ones I feel, for both sets of people. The rich people get highly creative people to be strongly motivated.
And living in such a society for a poorer, creative person, creative in the sense of 'creating engineering projects' I mean, is not such a bad deal. Fairly comfortable I think.
But I do not think it is 'handed down by god'. I feel it is just the way things happen to be right now.
You might enjoy my story 'Feudal Future', where I predict that computers will cause a concentration of power in the hands of ultimately just a few small families, before the inevitable power inversion, and the computers taking over. And the computers are not going to do us any favors I don't think, but that's another story, and not this one ;-)
Feudal Future
> Then thoughtcrime would become a reality.
Not so. At least, not on it's own. Search warrants are to collect evidence. So you could be arrested for thinking 'That was a fun murder yesterday!', since that might be interpreted as strong evidence for having physically carried out a murder yesterday. That doesn't directly mean that thinking something is the crime, although inevitably it might become one. It is two distinct things though: a crime, and evidence of having committed a crime.
You're kidding me right? I mean, I had an A500, and it was cool. I learned 68000 Assembler, and attempted to make a spinning cube; and I hacked the startup floppy to boot up really quickly, since I crashed the system so often every time I missed out a '#' from an instruction, and it was fun.
Today we have:
- python
- C and C++ come as standard, and they're *fast*
- you can just apt-get whatever you want
- internet, really fast
- massive communities of people doing whatever you want, chat with whoever you want about some obscure aspect of programming and so on
Hell, you can even find Amiga communities today (this article), which is something I craved for in the days when the closest I had to am 'Amiga community' was going to the paper shop to buy the latest issue of 'Amiga Format'.
It's I feel just a blip, a slight regression in an overall trend.
Also, as China's production moves up the food-chain to embrace and extend higher technology goods, the cost of shipping goes down.
An EeePc costs I think about the same in any country in the world, not including import tariffs, to within 20% or so.
To be fair, China has 5 times as many people as the US. At assymptote, if China and America income per individual is the same, then China has 5 times as much spending power, in aggregate.
Now, you could mention that Europe has a lot of people too, but American and China both have something that Europe doesn't, and it's not the Eiffel Tower, it is: a common, unified culture, a common unified communications protocol.
Europe is like the Tower of Babel.
Specifically, if you create a software company in America, to produce a 3d game let's say, you can hire the *best* graphics programmer out of 250 million people.
If you do that in France, the selection pool is a mere 60 million people. Your company is straight away at a disadvantage.
China's selection pool is 1.2 *billion*. That's a lot of people, and if we suppose that our standards of living and education are going to asymptotically approach each other over time, then Chinese companies will naturally have a huge and increasing advantage from this respect.
Of course, this is only one part of many issues, there are many other issues out there which blunt this analysis and temper it. I guess my point is: it's perhaps normal and inevitable that China's economic power can gradually increase and eclipse that of the West, as long as China doesn't do anything silly. Perhaps, *even* if they do something 'silly'.
Careful though, because these thoughts are the first step towards protectionism, which is arguably the first step towards war.
Of course these issues are complicated, compromises are usually good, but still, I thought I'd just throw this point in the mix.
Actually you can start the process with any fast neutron source, including a particle accelerator. You don't need blocks of plutonium lying around.
Yes, because there are sooo many opensource accounting and hr packages available :-P
Same reason we're using Intel's 80386 architecture, IBM's BIOS, and Arab numerals: it's a common protocol that is in use worldwide. Be thankful for that, it might not last ;-) Though, there's a reasonable chance that it will to be honest. Doesn't mean we're all American though ;-)
Yes, I'm a strong believer in strong intelligence. I have less faith in staying for very long in reservations though...
Whilst we cannot realistically imagine computers that are intelligent - they will likely be not just quantitatively different, but also qualitatively different, like dogs and humans - we can look the other way: what might we look like to the computers?
Like ants I think. We are not at war with the ants. We do not hate them. We are mildly curious about them. If there's a colony of ants at the bottom of our garden, under a tree, we might leave them there.
But there's not so much space for ants in cities. I don't think we actively orchestrate their destruction en masse, or have a war with them, but there is not much space for them.
I think that computer AI is Pandora's Box, and it's a box I want to see open, curiosity killed the cat and all that, but at the same time I think that they are the next stage of evolution, and we, like the dinosaurs, will only be preserved for so long. Well, maybe we would preserve dinosaurs in a reservation, they are big and scary looking, interesting to us. Maybe we'd even conserve a few ants, if the others were already all dead.
But just a few of them, or maybe just their dna, and perform experiments on them occasionally :-P
Errrr, this is probably all quite off-topic :-P Bye-bye what karma I had :-P
> as you live in one of the rotating Hab modules that act as a human reservation
Hey, I don't know who you are, but I think this is exactly what will happen too. At least for a while...
Yes, also: if some intern was fixing a problem with your code, and they were sitting next to you, what sort of things would you have to explain to them in order for them to understand and fix your code, and not just dis' it to their boss and tell their boss what a load of crap your code is?
I often imagine I'm explaining to an intern how the code works when I write my comments. I assume they understand the language, the libraries and stuff - they can just Google that stuff - but what does this class do? why? Target audience.
The other possible target audience is myself in a year's time.
To be honest, the longer I code, the more these target audiences converge on writing the same set of comments ;-) since I've learned how much one forgets when one comes back to the same code two years later.
> Well that's not in the least psychotic.
True, but no-one (few people?) enjoys debugging other people's work. They'd rather be writing their own green-field implementation using the latest cool technologies, .Net 3 or .Net 4, or Ruby, or Python 2.6 or whatever. Who wants to be debugging some COBOL stuff, or something written in C? Answer: very few people.
So, when people are debugging other people's code, they (we) often would rather choose to dis' the other person's code, write it off as unmaintainable crap, so that we can justify it being replaced by something 'beautiful', using modern technos.
But we can't ethically justify that, since, well, it's more expensive, and time-consuming to write it from fresh than just to maintain the old stuff for another few years.
But we'll look for any excuse we can to make it more 'ethical' to justify that, and someone's comments, or lack of comments, are fertile ground for such 'justification'.
So, when it's our own code that is being ripped apart by some intern who'd rather write their own code, the easier it is for the intern to understand the code, and understand our comments, the fewer excuses for said intern to bash our code, and the easier it is to fix the issue, and move onto something more interesting for them. It's win, win: they fix the problem quicker, and our code doesn't get dissed. Hopefully. Not so much anyway...
You know, in the future, we'll be able to buy 'Mars Lander kits' from the local model store, outfit them with a tiny nano-camera, and launch them from our back-yard.
That will be awesome.
Of course, this prediction is probably up there with flying cars :-P but one can always dream.
I have an EEEPc 901, 9 inch screen, as my main (only) pc for 12 months now, using it about 8 hours a day.
On this tiny pc, I can:
- compile SpringRTS, write AIs in Java for it, run Eclipse in parallel, and mysql or postgres
- run Eclipse + Glassfish
- run apache + php + postgres/mysql
- watch videos
- use chat, Skype, email, read slashdot
- run VirtualBox, run multiple OSes in parallel
- read books
If I need a bit of extra juice, I can just ssh into Amazon EC2, for trivial amounts of money.
It weighs the same as a book, it's always with me, at all times. It's awesome.
Yes, because an anti-virus scanner running on a single computer uses negligible resources, and a service that scanned people's computers remotely would scale wonderfully and make a huge zero-cost profit :-P
To be fair, this can be partially seen as a reflection of market demands.
In China, there are many electronics buildings, with several floors of tiny family-run stores selling resistors, capacitors, op-amps, and so on.
The floors are structured like this:
- ground floor, mobile phones, and more mobile phones. This is where most people go
- second floor, computer accessories: portable hard drives and so on
- third floor: electronics: resistors, capacitors and so on
Why sell a thousand resistors for a couple of dollars, making a margin of what 10 cents? ... when you can sell a mobile phone and plan for several hundred dollars, with a markup of half that?
You know, I used to create things I thought were cool, and think I was performing some essential task for society.
Then I took a break, and looked around, and realized that when I didn't do some specific task, other people would do it instead, and they'd often do it better than me: better designed, better documented, better marketed, more elegant, more beautiful.
Who's to say that if Compaq hadn't done that, either someone else wouldn't have done the exact same thing, or someone else wouldn't have done something similar, *but better*?
There's a lot of crappy stuff in bioses (chs and all that stuff), and in x86 architecture in general. As for any other architecture of course. Still, the point is: maybe if Compaq hadn't cloned the IBM bios, someone else would have made some other architecture into the commodity architecture of choice for the next twenty years, and maybe it would have been better in some subtle way?
This seems dangerously close to issues with Wittgenstein's thoughts on categorization, or more explicitly: let's say you determine that the liver cannot for some reason survive more than 60 minutes of being less than 35 degrees celsius, but then what next? ...
- what if you transplant the liver with an artificial liver? Does the rat still contain the essential characteristics of 'rattiness'?
- what if the rat is spectactularly fat, and so it takes longer for the liver to go below that temperature? Does that mean the rat is no longer a rat?
- or long fur?
- etc
A generally accepted way to 'prove' negative hypotheses is to prove them at a specific statistical certainty level, eg 99% or 99.9%. This has obvious flaws, but it's generally useful, as long as one keeps in mind its limitations, eg the file drawer problem, publication bias http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Misuse_of_statistics