Depending on how quickly the ice shelves in Antarctica basically dissolve, there could be a huge rise in global ocean levels within a period of weeks. It could happen (almost) overnight.
Humans will move but they have a lot of baggage invested on the current coasts. A rapid rise in ocean levels will produce a huge strain on infrastructure. That was my point throughout my original post. At this point in time, we all have a huge amount of infrastructure built up with the world as it is. Coastlines move, much bigger problem nowadays as opposed to even 300 years ago.
Farms will take a while to regain full productivity when they move to newly fertile ground. If the current breadbaskets start to fail, there will be lag time where food production falls. And that means famine.
The reason that informed people are worried about global warming is not a fear that all life on Earth will die if it gets too hot. It is really freaking hard to destroy Earth. What gets informed people (i.e. people not being spoon-fed tripe from cable news and alarmist media outlets) scared is that the global warming induces climate change and that climate change and associated events can have a severe impact on human civilization.
An obvious example is that melting ice caps will raise ocean levels; a large portion of human civilization is centered on coastal cities that will be flooded by raised ocean levels, and thus global warming can have a huge impact on society and humans in general. A more non-obvious effect is that climates with large "breadbaskets" may change, thereby significantly reducing the amount of food that can be produced there; considering that many people are already starving in the world, any reduction in food production will lead to many deaths. Also consider that increased temperatures lead to a wider variability in weather, leading to more damaging hurricanes or blizzards.
Those are changes that should be feared because there is no way that human civilization can weather those changes in a graceful manner. Any of those changes will bring about massive need for change (especially if coastal cities get flooded; the huge increase in refugees would overload the infrastructure of any region they relocate too); adapting to avoid these calamities is not currently feasible or would take too long before the effects are projected to be felt. Solutions to anthropogenic climate change (ACC) are predicated on the belief that 1) human output of CO2 is having an effect on the global CO2 levels and thus the global climate in a way that is adverse to human civilization and 2) that reducing the anthropogenic component of climate change will make it easier to deal with any climate change that happens naturally.
Looking at this objectively, it is true that we as a civilization are fucked if the climate changes dramatically. Individuals will most likely survive, and probably in good number considering the wide variety of climates humans already successfully live in. However, the infrastructure that everyone takes for granted could be obliterated by severe change. It obviously needs to be fortified and I couldn't agree more with you about that. However, those changes cannot be enacted and implementing in a short timescale because they are radical changes (our infrastructure is pretty damn rickety). The idea of mitigating the effect of ACC is by doing so, we are buying ourselves more time to implement the changes necessary to ensure that our infrastructure survives. Decentralizing power generation (which "going green" with windmills or other non-fossil fuel burning power generation techniques) both reduces the impact of ACC and fortifies the infrastructure.
So really, I don't buy that reducing ACC is a bad thing, and I don't think that it's a farce to hold people responsible for their actions when their actions impact the lives of other people. I mean, good, exemplar democracies like the US of A have been FORCING people to alter their lifestyles for over 100 years: polygamy is outlawed, as are various psychotropic drugs; the Eisenhower Interstate system realized a radical change in lifestyle (the rise of the exurbs, the fall of trains, etc. Every decision from a governing body has the effect of radically altering lifestyles; that doesn't make all governing bodies communistic or socialistic.
You know, you just agreed with me while saying you didn't. My point was that most people ("neurotic workaholics" as you aptly named them not included) are not interested in maximizing income. That is to say, most people are interested in only working so many hours a week; certainly they could work more, but they do not want to. Possibly from an economic point of view they are "losing money" by not working 80 hour work weeks, but I think that they are optimizing between having the money they need for things they need/want and having time to enjoy friends, family, gadgets (for the/. crowd), etc.
If you could work for $100/hr and you work for $75/hr, you are losing money. However, I think in the world of common sense, choosing to not work does not mean you are losing money, and that is why I do not think that free time can be given a rational dollar value unless that value is $0.
I, too, believe that quality time with friends is worth more than money (because, I would guess, like me, you are not hurting for cash). However, if, after you have finished work for the day, you go out with friends for two hours, would the cost still be $700 + cost, just the cost of going out? I say this because you have chosen to stop working; you aren't working less to spend time with your friends. The technicalities of opportunity cost aside, I don't consider it losing money when I choose to not work extra. It seems economists would differ...but maybe I'm not so sad about that.
All of that is very true and improvements definitely can be made; however, I am fairly sure that the large company could have found a way to either compensate the students directly or indirectly and I am certain that the business could have found a way to continue maintenance of the project they were using. On the issue of compensation: most if not all open source projects have a contact email and if the business were serious about continuing to use the software, they could have contacted the devs and offered money to continue maintenance. To extend that, the company could have contacted the devs and offered compensation (though money or references before the devs even stopped maintaining the project.
There are definitely avenues by which even open source devs can be compensated without asking for it. What I wish would improve is overall human consideration. It would have been great for your big company to have just gone out and offered the devs money because they were extracting value from the devs' work. It was possible for that to happen, and if the company had, the project might still be maintained...
Your unwillingness to entertain the specifics is why you didn't get the lawyer analogy; I am stymied why my calculation (which agrees with your $30/hr calculation) was deemed worthless though. However, I worked my calculation out in full, whereas you seemingly pulled numbers out of thin air. Moving on, I will reiterate why the lawyer analogy was fair and I will again try to show you why your idea of "Billable Hours Applied to Free Time" is just wrong.
In your previous post, you stated that, even when not working, the concept of billable hours still applies. That is how you derived all of the costs of developing OSS. However, if how much you make per hour to do your job is how much every hour of your day is worth, which is what you are implying, then any two hours of a lawyer's time not spend lawyering costs him $700. That is the equivalent of you saying that "For someone making $X/yr, their time is worth $Y an hour." What is insane is saying that every hour of yours is worth $Y. Only the hours you are doing your job are worth $Y. Any hour in which you would not ordinarily be working is not worth money; there is no conversion. If no one will pay you for what you are doing, then your time spent doing it is not worth any money. I brought up dinner as an example of how ridiculous your idea was; I am glad that you agree that it is ridiculous.
My argument is that anything you do in your free time does not have an inherent monetary worth. If you enjoy writing code and decide to write code for your own purposes, that has no inherent value. If you want to write code for yourself, you cannot be expected to be paid for it. But that is, underneath all the blustering, what you seem to be expecting. I was not calling for you to do your job for free; I was calling for you to expect to do things you do for yourself for free. To rewrite one of your phrases so it has some truth: "Every hour I spend in front of my computer writing code COULD have a value." If you need/want something and you write it for yourself on your own time, it did not cost you anything and it has no inherent monetary value. If you can convince someone to pay you for the fruits of your labors, then it has monetary value.
From my previous analysis, there are roughly 78 waking hours a week that are not spent doing a 40-hour/wk job. That extra time in everybody's day is their own. If you decide to spend that flying a kite, your time is worth the enjoyment you derive from the kite flying. If you decide to write code, your time is worth the satisfaction you derived from coding and any money you could derive from the fair market price of the code you produced. If you spent 15 hours writing a new Notepad, do you think you're entitled to $450? Do you think you will ever see $450? No, not if you're a reasonable person. It is very true that you could have spent the time making more money, but what I was trying to say before is that many people don't want more money than they want more time to do what they want; a corollary to that is that some people find hacking on a software project fun.
People who do OSS *donate* the product of their time and for high quality code, that is not free. For a new Notepad, it is free. The point I tried to make before was that most people who do OSS and don't get paid contribute *for fun* not because they want to donate something. Just because you are a greedy bastard who feels that everything coming from the tips of your fingers is cashmoney does not mean that others are the same. That is also why those people contribute to OSS and you don't.
Also, seeing how this has tied up some of your precious $30/hour time in front of your computer, you can forward me my bill.
I hear the "Time is Money" argument a lot and in most cases it is complete BS. Your analysis assumes that said hobbyist programmer is working on their project instead of working for pay (i.e. only 40 hours a week is worked on both work and the software project). The math is $60000/yr / (40 hrs/wk * 52 wks/yr) = $28/hr. However, even though I work 40 hours a week, that leaves 128 hours of that week left unfilled. Assuming 8 hours of sleep a night, that is 78 hours of awake time that I am not working. That is a lot of time. In fact, it is almost twice another full 40-hour work week. So a six month OSS project, worked on only in spare "hobby" time costs...$0.
Time is not money. The work week is (nominally) 40 hours because if you start to work more than that regularly, there are many ill effects (increased stress, poor health, INSANITY). In the scenario outlined in the GP, the OSS project is a hobby: it is something that a person can do in their spare time, when they feel like it etc. It doesn't cut into their yearly income because they would not be making more money if they were not doing it; it does not cost $20,000 unless you assign some sort of billable rate to that person. Using that reasoning and the fact that the average billing rate for lawyers is roughly $350, a nice fancy 2-hour dinner for a lawyer costs $700 plus whatever the restaurant charges.
Free software is still a great deal for a hobbyist developer because they are doing it for fun and they derive satisfaction and joy out of doing it. For professional OSS devs, it is still a great deal because they already tend to be paid by big companies. That entire post is how any big-ass-backwards blue chip company sees OSS: those companies don't get open source and obviously neither do you.
I didn't watch the video, but, at least on iPhone, a pinch does zoom out while a reverse pinch (start with your fingers touching and spread) zooms in. I don't know if Microsoft got it backwards...maybe that's how their getting around Apple's patents: by making everything completely unintuitive.
This is no different than any webcam. The fact that it is built-in and constantly connected physically is a problem, but it can easily be disabled.
A short applescript could be make that would enable/disable the iSight with the click of a button. Hella easier than having to unplug a USB cable...less wasted motion and lord knows I hate having to do anything physical because I post on slashdot.
Step away from the tinfoil, man. Are you a little concerned that people can study your online habits because you broadcast that information over the World Wide Web? A webcam is a useful thing, and all useful things can be used or abused; that's a fact of life and there's no getting around it. So either put up with some security concerns or live your life in a padded room (though, admittedly, this will only mitigate security risks, not eliminate them...)
Freezing state is sufficient: communications with external devices are not required for the running of the computer itself. Freezing state is the same as using hibernation, but instead of having to write the data in memory to disk...the memory is non-volatile, so it doesn't need to be moved to the hard disk. A computer will not be ready for use instantaneously, while communications are reestablished with the external devices (just like a computer coming out of hibernation), but that takes very little time.
It happens though. It is a reality; I have not found a phone with a physical keyboard that does not begin to degrade in quality after about 6 months of light web browsing and fairly heavy texting. There are many people proclaiming the superiority of the physical keyboard, but none of them ever mention this. Tactile feedback is nice, but oftentimes, phone keyboards invade into a territory I call tactile resistance.
While some physical phone keyboards are nice, and that tactile feedback is great for some, I find that after even moderate use, the keys start to get sticky. This has happened to every phone I have had; it happens regularly to others I know that use their keyboards a lot, especially for texting. At that point, when it is physically hard to move the keys to do what you want them to do (and when the input becomes flaky as well), the iPhone keyboard would be an improvement even if the keys were only a centimeter square.
Despite this trend, I have never heard a proponent of physical keyboard ever discuss having this problem; I find this hard to believe as the more heavily a keyboard is used, the harder it gets to use, in my experience. Do you find this is the case? As your keyboard ages, does it become harder to type? Do you have a care regimen for it? I'm not trying to be a smart-ass, as this is honestly something that has bugged me.
Cognitive circuits are not emotions! Conflicting emotions, which is what you are talking about, do NOT trigger the ACC. Additionally, the ACC is not the only center involved. I have tried to set this notion of your to rights three times. You're out.
The part of the brain that doesn't want to delete the file would be different than the part of the brain that goes "OH SHIT! I didn't want to do that." Just like I said before: there errors here are a subset. The ACC does not activate in the instance of internal conflict; it activates when two cognitive circuits are competing and offering two different answers. I was not ever talking about internal conflicts (i.e. having conflicting desires, duties etc). I was talking about internal cognitive processes that were conflicting; this exists on a much lower level.
But there are some subset of errors that are known to be errors when they are performed. Your analysis is for a certain type of error that, realistically, can't be predicted. So why bother. Here's the usage scenario for this type of "error" prediction...
You are using a computer, and you are presented with a dialog to either delete a file or cancel the dialog. You do not want to delete the file, but you click the delete button anyway. In your brain, before your finger clicks the mouse button (because the neural and muscular circuits responsible for setting that in motion take some time), you know you made an error, but you are already committed to the action and cannot stop it. A machine monitoring your brain will know you do not mean the input you are providing and will therefore disregard it, saving your file.
If you want to be ornery about something, be ornery with the vagueness of the headline...but then again, the headline is just about as vague and sensational as all/. (and even regular news) headlines.
But seriously, the effect is still there in those first 10 minutes. Any psychological test that lasts an hour (and they all do, or at least seem to, anyway) really fatigues your mind. I haven't read any psychology papers, and I don't know if psychologists correct for this in their data analysis but they definitely should.
Parent makes sense intuitively, but there are parts of the brain that are very sensitive to conflict; the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) is one of these.
If you have ever take part of a Stroop test, your ACC has been activated. In a Stroop test, the word for a color is printed in a different color i.e. the word green is shown in the color red. A participant is asked to say either the word or the color. As the speed of doing these discriminations increases, so do errors; interestingly, cognizance of errors is nearly instantaneous, however. You know that you made an error, even before the neural circuitry committed to speaking the words has finished forming the words.
The ACC becomes more active in Stroop tests because Stroop tests cause conflicts in two neural circuits. The ACC arbitrates these circuits. Therefore, an increase in ACC activity (which will happen in advance of the error occurring) correlates with an increase in likelihood of mistakes...more in-depth research and some algorithms (I haven't RTFA) means that an error can be predicted, but of course, not with 100% success.
This will get buried beneath other replies but maybe you will get something out of this:
Chaos' technical name is "Sensitive Dependence on Initial Conditions." Any time a model is constructed, initial conditions must be fed into it before it is used in a simulation; those initial conditions are based on measurements and are therefore not infinitely precise, nor completely accurate. In certain systems, like weather, a small perturbation in the initial conditions causes a drastic change in the output. These systems are informally called Chaotic, but, in reality, they are just as deterministic as any other system because for a given input they give the same output.
Weather is, after all, still just modeled by a set of equations; in fact, a passable model can be constructed with something like only 8 or 9 equations.
I would still say it is a right. The part of the quote I did not include did not apply to the clause stating that it is not an infringement to use a copyrighted work for a few uses. Indeed, at every trial, you do need to prove that what you used was fair use; but that is because you have an innate right to fair use, but not to any other type of use unless you reach an agreement with the copyright holder. The court's decision on whether a copyright was infringed hinges on whether the use was fair because fair use is protected explicitly by the Copyright Act, making it a right.
The affirmative defense of fair use is like the affirmative defense of self-defense: you have a right to it, but you still need to prove that your actions were justified. Also, I never said that fair use was only a right; my point was that it is also a defense because it is right.
I am no lawyer, and definitely not a judge, but the applicable section of the Copyright Act clearly states
...the fair use of a copyrighted work, including such use by reproduction in copies or phonorecords or by any other means specified by that section, for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research, is not an infringement of copyright.
That makes it pretty clear that fair use of a copyrighted work is a right because it protects the fair user from being held liable for copyright infringement. Naturally, fair use is also a defense against a claim of copyright infringement. My point in the previous post, which I suppose could have been more clearly indicated with this example, was that if you are sued for copyright infringement, you will not be held liable for infringement if you can demonstrate fair use (using fair use as a defense) because you have the right to fairly use copyrighted works, as explained in the above passage of the Copyright Act.
Also, you invoke fair use as a defense when accused of infringing; the Copyright Act makes it clear that fair use does not constitute an infringement. The Copyright Act gave a number of exclusive rights to the holder of a copyright; the fair use doctrine says that those exclusive rights cannot infringe every citizen's right to use the copyright works for "criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research." So, I don't know who came up with the idea that fair use is only a defense because you only invoke it when accusing of infringing, but it's stupid. Additionally, you only invoke your first amendment rights when accused of breaking the law; does that mean that the rights guaranteed by the first amendment are only defenses?
Fair use is only a defense because it is a right. Just as the Copyright Act gives creators of creative works rights (such as a monopoly on distribution), it gives the people observing* those creative works rights too. If fair use were not a right, then the fair use defense would not prevail. Though a strict definition for what constitutes fair use is not set anywhere (and must be proven at each trial), those people observing the copyrighted work have the right to use it fairly.
*(Aside: those people are not 'consuming' because the work is not diminished in any way by the act of observing)
Slashdot Mirror
Depending on how quickly the ice shelves in Antarctica basically dissolve, there could be a huge rise in global ocean levels within a period of weeks. It could happen (almost) overnight.
Humans will move but they have a lot of baggage invested on the current coasts. A rapid rise in ocean levels will produce a huge strain on infrastructure. That was my point throughout my original post. At this point in time, we all have a huge amount of infrastructure built up with the world as it is. Coastlines move, much bigger problem nowadays as opposed to even 300 years ago.
Farms will take a while to regain full productivity when they move to newly fertile ground. If the current breadbaskets start to fail, there will be lag time where food production falls. And that means famine.
The reason that informed people are worried about global warming is not a fear that all life on Earth will die if it gets too hot. It is really freaking hard to destroy Earth. What gets informed people (i.e. people not being spoon-fed tripe from cable news and alarmist media outlets) scared is that the global warming induces climate change and that climate change and associated events can have a severe impact on human civilization.
An obvious example is that melting ice caps will raise ocean levels; a large portion of human civilization is centered on coastal cities that will be flooded by raised ocean levels, and thus global warming can have a huge impact on society and humans in general. A more non-obvious effect is that climates with large "breadbaskets" may change, thereby significantly reducing the amount of food that can be produced there; considering that many people are already starving in the world, any reduction in food production will lead to many deaths. Also consider that increased temperatures lead to a wider variability in weather, leading to more damaging hurricanes or blizzards.
Those are changes that should be feared because there is no way that human civilization can weather those changes in a graceful manner. Any of those changes will bring about massive need for change (especially if coastal cities get flooded; the huge increase in refugees would overload the infrastructure of any region they relocate too); adapting to avoid these calamities is not currently feasible or would take too long before the effects are projected to be felt. Solutions to anthropogenic climate change (ACC) are predicated on the belief that 1) human output of CO2 is having an effect on the global CO2 levels and thus the global climate in a way that is adverse to human civilization and 2) that reducing the anthropogenic component of climate change will make it easier to deal with any climate change that happens naturally.
Looking at this objectively, it is true that we as a civilization are fucked if the climate changes dramatically. Individuals will most likely survive, and probably in good number considering the wide variety of climates humans already successfully live in. However, the infrastructure that everyone takes for granted could be obliterated by severe change. It obviously needs to be fortified and I couldn't agree more with you about that. However, those changes cannot be enacted and implementing in a short timescale because they are radical changes (our infrastructure is pretty damn rickety). The idea of mitigating the effect of ACC is by doing so, we are buying ourselves more time to implement the changes necessary to ensure that our infrastructure survives. Decentralizing power generation (which "going green" with windmills or other non-fossil fuel burning power generation techniques) both reduces the impact of ACC and fortifies the infrastructure.
So really, I don't buy that reducing ACC is a bad thing, and I don't think that it's a farce to hold people responsible for their actions when their actions impact the lives of other people. I mean, good, exemplar democracies like the US of A have been FORCING people to alter their lifestyles for over 100 years: polygamy is outlawed, as are various psychotropic drugs; the Eisenhower Interstate system realized a radical change in lifestyle (the rise of the exurbs, the fall of trains, etc. Every decision from a governing body has the effect of radically altering lifestyles; that doesn't make all governing bodies communistic or socialistic.
You know, you just agreed with me while saying you didn't. My point was that most people ("neurotic workaholics" as you aptly named them not included) are not interested in maximizing income. That is to say, most people are interested in only working so many hours a week; certainly they could work more, but they do not want to. Possibly from an economic point of view they are "losing money" by not working 80 hour work weeks, but I think that they are optimizing between having the money they need for things they need/want and having time to enjoy friends, family, gadgets (for the /. crowd), etc.
If you could work for $100/hr and you work for $75/hr, you are losing money. However, I think in the world of common sense, choosing to not work does not mean you are losing money, and that is why I do not think that free time can be given a rational dollar value unless that value is $0.
I, too, believe that quality time with friends is worth more than money (because, I would guess, like me, you are not hurting for cash). However, if, after you have finished work for the day, you go out with friends for two hours, would the cost still be $700 + cost, just the cost of going out? I say this because you have chosen to stop working; you aren't working less to spend time with your friends. The technicalities of opportunity cost aside, I don't consider it losing money when I choose to not work extra. It seems economists would differ...but maybe I'm not so sad about that.
All of that is very true and improvements definitely can be made; however, I am fairly sure that the large company could have found a way to either compensate the students directly or indirectly and I am certain that the business could have found a way to continue maintenance of the project they were using. On the issue of compensation: most if not all open source projects have a contact email and if the business were serious about continuing to use the software, they could have contacted the devs and offered money to continue maintenance. To extend that, the company could have contacted the devs and offered compensation (though money or references before the devs even stopped maintaining the project.
There are definitely avenues by which even open source devs can be compensated without asking for it. What I wish would improve is overall human consideration. It would have been great for your big company to have just gone out and offered the devs money because they were extracting value from the devs' work. It was possible for that to happen, and if the company had, the project might still be maintained...
Your unwillingness to entertain the specifics is why you didn't get the lawyer analogy; I am stymied why my calculation (which agrees with your $30/hr calculation) was deemed worthless though. However, I worked my calculation out in full, whereas you seemingly pulled numbers out of thin air. Moving on, I will reiterate why the lawyer analogy was fair and I will again try to show you why your idea of "Billable Hours Applied to Free Time" is just wrong.
In your previous post, you stated that, even when not working, the concept of billable hours still applies. That is how you derived all of the costs of developing OSS. However, if how much you make per hour to do your job is how much every hour of your day is worth, which is what you are implying, then any two hours of a lawyer's time not spend lawyering costs him $700. That is the equivalent of you saying that "For someone making $X/yr, their time is worth $Y an hour." What is insane is saying that every hour of yours is worth $Y. Only the hours you are doing your job are worth $Y. Any hour in which you would not ordinarily be working is not worth money; there is no conversion. If no one will pay you for what you are doing, then your time spent doing it is not worth any money. I brought up dinner as an example of how ridiculous your idea was; I am glad that you agree that it is ridiculous.
My argument is that anything you do in your free time does not have an inherent monetary worth. If you enjoy writing code and decide to write code for your own purposes, that has no inherent value. If you want to write code for yourself, you cannot be expected to be paid for it. But that is, underneath all the blustering, what you seem to be expecting. I was not calling for you to do your job for free; I was calling for you to expect to do things you do for yourself for free. To rewrite one of your phrases so it has some truth: "Every hour I spend in front of my computer writing code COULD have a value." If you need/want something and you write it for yourself on your own time, it did not cost you anything and it has no inherent monetary value. If you can convince someone to pay you for the fruits of your labors, then it has monetary value.
From my previous analysis, there are roughly 78 waking hours a week that are not spent doing a 40-hour/wk job. That extra time in everybody's day is their own. If you decide to spend that flying a kite, your time is worth the enjoyment you derive from the kite flying. If you decide to write code, your time is worth the satisfaction you derived from coding and any money you could derive from the fair market price of the code you produced. If you spent 15 hours writing a new Notepad, do you think you're entitled to $450? Do you think you will ever see $450? No, not if you're a reasonable person. It is very true that you could have spent the time making more money, but what I was trying to say before is that many people don't want more money than they want more time to do what they want; a corollary to that is that some people find hacking on a software project fun.
People who do OSS *donate* the product of their time and for high quality code, that is not free. For a new Notepad, it is free. The point I tried to make before was that most people who do OSS and don't get paid contribute *for fun* not because they want to donate something. Just because you are a greedy bastard who feels that everything coming from the tips of your fingers is cashmoney does not mean that others are the same. That is also why those people contribute to OSS and you don't.
Also, seeing how this has tied up some of your precious $30/hour time in front of your computer, you can forward me my bill.
I hear the "Time is Money" argument a lot and in most cases it is complete BS. Your analysis assumes that said hobbyist programmer is working on their project instead of working for pay (i.e. only 40 hours a week is worked on both work and the software project). The math is $60000/yr / (40 hrs/wk * 52 wks/yr) = $28/hr. However, even though I work 40 hours a week, that leaves 128 hours of that week left unfilled. Assuming 8 hours of sleep a night, that is 78 hours of awake time that I am not working. That is a lot of time. In fact, it is almost twice another full 40-hour work week. So a six month OSS project, worked on only in spare "hobby" time costs...$0.
Time is not money. The work week is (nominally) 40 hours because if you start to work more than that regularly, there are many ill effects (increased stress, poor health, INSANITY). In the scenario outlined in the GP, the OSS project is a hobby: it is something that a person can do in their spare time, when they feel like it etc. It doesn't cut into their yearly income because they would not be making more money if they were not doing it; it does not cost $20,000 unless you assign some sort of billable rate to that person. Using that reasoning and the fact that the average billing rate for lawyers is roughly $350, a nice fancy 2-hour dinner for a lawyer costs $700 plus whatever the restaurant charges.
Free software is still a great deal for a hobbyist developer because they are doing it for fun and they derive satisfaction and joy out of doing it. For professional OSS devs, it is still a great deal because they already tend to be paid by big companies. That entire post is how any big-ass-backwards blue chip company sees OSS: those companies don't get open source and obviously neither do you.
I know I get demerits for actually reading the article, but he did indeed correct his algorithm because the graph is directed.
I didn't watch the video, but, at least on iPhone, a pinch does zoom out while a reverse pinch (start with your fingers touching and spread) zooms in. I don't know if Microsoft got it backwards...maybe that's how their getting around Apple's patents: by making everything completely unintuitive.
This is no different than any webcam. The fact that it is built-in and constantly connected physically is a problem, but it can easily be disabled.
A short applescript could be make that would enable/disable the iSight with the click of a button. Hella easier than having to unplug a USB cable...less wasted motion and lord knows I hate having to do anything physical because I post on slashdot.
Step away from the tinfoil, man. Are you a little concerned that people can study your online habits because you broadcast that information over the World Wide Web? A webcam is a useful thing, and all useful things can be used or abused; that's a fact of life and there's no getting around it. So either put up with some security concerns or live your life in a padded room (though, admittedly, this will only mitigate security risks, not eliminate them...)
Freezing state is sufficient: communications with external devices are not required for the running of the computer itself. Freezing state is the same as using hibernation, but instead of having to write the data in memory to disk...the memory is non-volatile, so it doesn't need to be moved to the hard disk. A computer will not be ready for use instantaneously, while communications are reestablished with the external devices (just like a computer coming out of hibernation), but that takes very little time.
It happens though. It is a reality; I have not found a phone with a physical keyboard that does not begin to degrade in quality after about 6 months of light web browsing and fairly heavy texting. There are many people proclaiming the superiority of the physical keyboard, but none of them ever mention this. Tactile feedback is nice, but oftentimes, phone keyboards invade into a territory I call tactile resistance.
While some physical phone keyboards are nice, and that tactile feedback is great for some, I find that after even moderate use, the keys start to get sticky. This has happened to every phone I have had; it happens regularly to others I know that use their keyboards a lot, especially for texting. At that point, when it is physically hard to move the keys to do what you want them to do (and when the input becomes flaky as well), the iPhone keyboard would be an improvement even if the keys were only a centimeter square.
Despite this trend, I have never heard a proponent of physical keyboard ever discuss having this problem; I find this hard to believe as the more heavily a keyboard is used, the harder it gets to use, in my experience. Do you find this is the case? As your keyboard ages, does it become harder to type? Do you have a care regimen for it? I'm not trying to be a smart-ass, as this is honestly something that has bugged me.
Cognitive circuits are not emotions! Conflicting emotions, which is what you are talking about, do NOT trigger the ACC. Additionally, the ACC is not the only center involved. I have tried to set this notion of your to rights three times. You're out.
It is not made up! Just go see the movie Stupor Stroopers.
The part of the brain that doesn't want to delete the file would be different than the part of the brain that goes "OH SHIT! I didn't want to do that." Just like I said before: there errors here are a subset. The ACC does not activate in the instance of internal conflict; it activates when two cognitive circuits are competing and offering two different answers. I was not ever talking about internal conflicts (i.e. having conflicting desires, duties etc). I was talking about internal cognitive processes that were conflicting; this exists on a much lower level.
But there are some subset of errors that are known to be errors when they are performed. Your analysis is for a certain type of error that, realistically, can't be predicted. So why bother. Here's the usage scenario for this type of "error" prediction...
/. (and even regular news) headlines.
You are using a computer, and you are presented with a dialog to either delete a file or cancel the dialog. You do not want to delete the file, but you click the delete button anyway. In your brain, before your finger clicks the mouse button (because the neural and muscular circuits responsible for setting that in motion take some time), you know you made an error, but you are already committed to the action and cannot stop it. A machine monitoring your brain will know you do not mean the input you are providing and will therefore disregard it, saving your file.
If you want to be ornery about something, be ornery with the vagueness of the headline...but then again, the headline is just about as vague and sensational as all
Yeah, /. does the same thing for me...
But seriously, the effect is still there in those first 10 minutes. Any psychological test that lasts an hour (and they all do, or at least seem to, anyway) really fatigues your mind. I haven't read any psychology papers, and I don't know if psychologists correct for this in their data analysis but they definitely should.
Who cares about ACC games? The only games I care about are Big 10...
;-)
That said, I vote for an increase of TLAs
Parent makes sense intuitively, but there are parts of the brain that are very sensitive to conflict; the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) is one of these.
If you have ever take part of a Stroop test, your ACC has been activated. In a Stroop test, the word for a color is printed in a different color i.e. the word green is shown in the color red. A participant is asked to say either the word or the color. As the speed of doing these discriminations increases, so do errors; interestingly, cognizance of errors is nearly instantaneous, however. You know that you made an error, even before the neural circuitry committed to speaking the words has finished forming the words.
The ACC becomes more active in Stroop tests because Stroop tests cause conflicts in two neural circuits. The ACC arbitrates these circuits. Therefore, an increase in ACC activity (which will happen in advance of the error occurring) correlates with an increase in likelihood of mistakes...more in-depth research and some algorithms (I haven't RTFA) means that an error can be predicted, but of course, not with 100% success.
This will get buried beneath other replies but maybe you will get something out of this:
Chaos' technical name is "Sensitive Dependence on Initial Conditions." Any time a model is constructed, initial conditions must be fed into it before it is used in a simulation; those initial conditions are based on measurements and are therefore not infinitely precise, nor completely accurate. In certain systems, like weather, a small perturbation in the initial conditions causes a drastic change in the output. These systems are informally called Chaotic, but, in reality, they are just as deterministic as any other system because for a given input they give the same output.
Weather is, after all, still just modeled by a set of equations; in fact, a passable model can be constructed with something like only 8 or 9 equations.
That will never work. It's missing the vital '???' step...
I would still say it is a right. The part of the quote I did not include did not apply to the clause stating that it is not an infringement to use a copyrighted work for a few uses. Indeed, at every trial, you do need to prove that what you used was fair use; but that is because you have an innate right to fair use, but not to any other type of use unless you reach an agreement with the copyright holder. The court's decision on whether a copyright was infringed hinges on whether the use was fair because fair use is protected explicitly by the Copyright Act, making it a right.
The affirmative defense of fair use is like the affirmative defense of self-defense: you have a right to it, but you still need to prove that your actions were justified. Also, I never said that fair use was only a right; my point was that it is also a defense because it is right.
Also, you invoke fair use as a defense when accused of infringing; the Copyright Act makes it clear that fair use does not constitute an infringement. The Copyright Act gave a number of exclusive rights to the holder of a copyright; the fair use doctrine says that those exclusive rights cannot infringe every citizen's right to use the copyright works for "criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research." So, I don't know who came up with the idea that fair use is only a defense because you only invoke it when accusing of infringing, but it's stupid. Additionally, you only invoke your first amendment rights when accused of breaking the law; does that mean that the rights guaranteed by the first amendment are only defenses?
Fair use is only a defense because it is a right. Just as the Copyright Act gives creators of creative works rights (such as a monopoly on distribution), it gives the people observing* those creative works rights too. If fair use were not a right, then the fair use defense would not prevail. Though a strict definition for what constitutes fair use is not set anywhere (and must be proven at each trial), those people observing the copyrighted work have the right to use it fairly.
*(Aside: those people are not 'consuming' because the work is not diminished in any way by the act of observing)