Google isn't making the pages itself, it is just serving up the ads. As far as google is concerned, these pages are just like any other customers, except that (as stated in the article) google goes out of its way to remove sites from its ad program if there is a suspicion of trademark infringment.
The EFF will get publicity an order of magnitude greater than they currently have. Then maybe will see a lot of people saying, "What else does this group that just saved my ass stand for?"
I can't think of any other area of news that is dominated by rumor and speculation the way tech news seems to be. Is there just not enough going on?
I heartily agree with you on this. Cringely and Dvorak have their own columns. If I wanted to read them, I'd have them bookmarked and I'd check periodically. I don't, and I don't, so please slashdot, let us filter.
not a liability. Google in the past has been willing to buy companies with a quality product. Bill this to investors as how they can get their money back in a few years.
When they say, "Google would copy it," you say, "as soon as there's the slightest rumor of that, we offer to sell to them. If the product area stays below google's radar, we make money. If it doesn't, then we make our product good enough that they'd be better off buying us." An acquisition is generally a much more likely exit strategy than an IPO anyways.
Furthermore, every good idea doesn't have to be a new company. If you want to make something, and you think google is in a better position to do it, go pitch it to google and get hired. There is as much opportunity for entrepreneurial skill within companies as there is in starting new ones.
Re:The problem of nerve impulse conduction
on
An Alternate Human
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
This happens because you have so much blood flowing through your brain. Your brain doesn't need cooling. It's not a friggin processor. Why do you think you have hair on your head? It's to insulate all of the blood carrying oxygen to your brain so it doesn't leak off as much heat.
It doesn't matter how we spend the money, only that it gets spent on something, and as long as that something came from inside the country.
Wow. I can see consumerist education has really taken root. Believe it or not, it is not your public duty to buy more stuff.
Suppose the government spent all of its money paying people to dig holes and fill them back in. It's spending, and its certainly spending within this country, but it clearly isn't good for the economy. Why do you think that is?
Spending doesn't boost an economy. Useful production does. Spending only has a positive effect on the economy to the extend that it promotes useful production. For more information on this, look up Opportunity Costs. Also, if you are concerned about spending money on American goods as opposed to others, may I suggest that you read up on the Ricardian theory of International Trade.
In order to boost an economy, people need to buy things, and last time I checked, free open source software was *free*.
NOT TRUE! In order to boost an economy, people need to PRODUCE things.
For most market transactions, it happens that if someone is going to produce things someone has to be willing to buy them, which is where your confusion comes from. However, if someone makes useful stuff and gives it away for free, that is as beneficial for the economy as if someone produces the same amount of stuff and sells it all. In fact, the former situation may even be MORE beneficial to the economy if you take into account wealth distribution in addition to GDP, since the free stuff will probably be more equitably distributed.
Why is an owl more important than a logger's family?
It is most likely very easy for the logger to find other work.
Why is old-growth forest more important than a parking lot?... Redwood forest? That shit would look really good as a new deck.
Old growth forests are beautiful. They have the capacity to inspire. They smell like you wouldn't believe. There are other places much less valuable to society to build your parking lot, or to get the wood for your deck. Would you knock down St. Peter's to build a parking lot?
Why are we worried about dolphins?
A lot of people spend money to go on boat tours for the chance of seeing dolphins in the wild. This happens just about everywhere in the pacific that cruise ships stop. That should give you some indication that they valuable to society in general.
Poverty in Africa? Fuck them! We have poverty in America.
Apparantly you've never heard of diminishing returns. An investment in Africa could fulfill basic needs for an order of magnitude more people than the same investment in America. Some of us don't subscribe to the belief that American lives are worth more than others.
Cows? Good for boots and steaks; and milk's ok too.
I eat cow too, and go hiking in boots made of cow.
In the rest of your points you seem to want to destroy things without getting anything useful out of them, so I'm going to assume you aren't trying to go anywhere with those.
The general standard for wikipedia has been that the topic needs to be well enough known that there is reliable verifiable information available on the subject. All the articles in Wikipedia should at least have the potential to only contain true and researched information. Otherwise it isn't an encyclopedia.
I don't understand. If they have an issue with people using the full capacity of their purchased lines, why don't they charge based on how much capacity you use?
Watching the kid's every move might be practical when they are 8, but 13? Not even the best parent is going to have their kid under their supervision at all times, and moreover, I don't think they should.
Military spending has historically been a big positive for the economy, as long as debt is properly managed.
Wrong. An expense is an expense is an expense. Whether that spending is a positive or negative for the economy depends entirely on the value that the goods and services purchased provide. Don't think of spending in terms of creating jobs or any of the other economic hogwash that occupies media coverage of the economy. Think of it like this: The economy has a certain amount of productive capability. With our spending we choose how that productive capability is allocated. If we spend wisely we will get good results. Period. The idea of "creating jobs" was created by politicians to justify pork.
You have to compare military spending to everything else that could have possibly been purchased with that money to assess whether it is a positive thing. I leave you with a quote from president Eisenhower:
Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.
This world in arms is not spending money alone.
It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.
The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities.
It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population.
It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals.
It is some 50 miles of concrete highway.
We pay for a single fighter with a half million bushels of wheat.
We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people.
This, I repeat, is the best way of life to be found on the road the world has been taking.
This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron."
When you are modifying a commercial game you already have a captive audience awaiting your content and willing to play it. This isn't true if you strike out on your own.
Within 5 minutes I've input my class schedule for the semester, my exam schedule, invited all of my friends to Google Calendar and given them access to view mine, imported all US holidays into my calendar, and if I had a sports team that I really cared about, I could have imported their schedule too.
This is an amazing app. The way it separates different calendars in the UI is ingenious. I hope enough people start using things like this that more public calendars become available. I'd like to be able to import schedules for concerts in the area, etc. This thing certainly deserves to catch on.
The two games I play most often at the moment are Natural Selection (awesome FPS/RTS hybrid for Half-Life 1) and Dystopia (think cyberpunk team fortress for Half-Life 2.) I paid for neither of them. Both were made by amateur teams and are the two most fun games I've played online. This is something that can't be done on a console. I was even impressed enough with Natural Selection that I put a hell of a lot of time into making a map for it. This is also not possible on a console.
If you want to passively enjoy your games then consoles are fine, but half of the fun of games, I think, is building on them yourself and enjoying what others have built on them.
I currently live in Pittsburgh, PA and formerly lived in Cincinnati, OH. I've travelled a bit around the country and generally found that the degree of necessity of cars is directly proportional to how recently the area was built.
That's not entirely true though. You can compress random data, but only given two assumptions:
The data has a non-uniform probability distribution.
You know that distribution.
The trick behind designing compression algorithms is coming up with intuitions about the probability distributions of useful classes of real data, and then coming up with computationally tractible ways of exploiting them.
Guess what? It is IMPOSSIBLE to create a generic compression algorithm. Gzip operates by doing exactly what you mention: operating on a particular set of data: that being data with some exploitable redundancy. There are plenty of files that will get bigger when you give them to Gzip.
Entropy coders work by making assumptions about the probability distribution of the data they recieve. They assume they are working on a set of data in which certain types of data are more likely than others, so they store those more compactly, but as a result they HAVE to store others less compactly. No matter how you slice it, you can not store more than 2^n unique strings in n bits. The only gains you can make are by assuming that you aren't going to be dealing with all possible strings, and compacting the ones that you care about.
That may have actually been what you meant, but I really didn't want anyone reading that to get the impression that there was something magical about entropy that made it a different approach than narrowing the set of data you are storing. The two are fundamentally the same thing.
If there is NO monetary incentive for your art as you claim, could that be because it isn't very good and no one wants it?
Secondly, not all art is individual self expression whose object is for people to experience it for its own sake. There is a substantial industry of technical artists (medical illustrators, scientific illustrators) that require the meager protections that copyright law provides them to avoid being completely exploited by the publishing companies that contract with them for their work.
Slashdot Mirror
Google isn't making the pages itself, it is just serving up the ads. As far as google is concerned, these pages are just like any other customers, except that (as stated in the article) google goes out of its way to remove sites from its ad program if there is a suspicion of trademark infringment.
The EFF will get publicity an order of magnitude greater than they currently have. Then maybe will see a lot of people saying, "What else does this group that just saved my ass stand for?"
. . . should indicate that a lot of us don't want to see articles like that on slashdot anymore.
I can't think of any other area of news that is dominated by rumor and speculation the way tech news seems to be. Is there just not enough going on?
I heartily agree with you on this. Cringely and Dvorak have their own columns. If I wanted to read them, I'd have them bookmarked and I'd check periodically. I don't, and I don't, so please slashdot, let us filter.
not a liability. Google in the past has been willing to buy companies with a quality product. Bill this to investors as how they can get their money back in a few years.
When they say, "Google would copy it," you say, "as soon as there's the slightest rumor of that, we offer to sell to them. If the product area stays below google's radar, we make money. If it doesn't, then we make our product good enough that they'd be better off buying us." An acquisition is generally a much more likely exit strategy than an IPO anyways.
Furthermore, every good idea doesn't have to be a new company. If you want to make something, and you think google is in a better position to do it, go pitch it to google and get hired. There is as much opportunity for entrepreneurial skill within companies as there is in starting new ones.
This happens because you have so much blood flowing through your brain. Your brain doesn't need cooling. It's not a friggin processor. Why do you think you have hair on your head? It's to insulate all of the blood carrying oxygen to your brain so it doesn't leak off as much heat.
It doesn't matter how we spend the money, only that it gets spent on something, and as long as that something came from inside the country.
Wow. I can see consumerist education has really taken root. Believe it or not, it is not your public duty to buy more stuff.
Suppose the government spent all of its money paying people to dig holes and fill them back in. It's spending, and its certainly spending within this country, but it clearly isn't good for the economy. Why do you think that is?
Spending doesn't boost an economy. Useful production does. Spending only has a positive effect on the economy to the extend that it promotes useful production. For more information on this, look up Opportunity Costs. Also, if you are concerned about spending money on American goods as opposed to others, may I suggest that you read up on the Ricardian theory of International Trade.
In order to boost an economy, people need to buy things, and last time I checked, free open source software was *free*.
NOT TRUE! In order to boost an economy, people need to PRODUCE things.
For most market transactions, it happens that if someone is going to produce things someone has to be willing to buy them, which is where your confusion comes from. However, if someone makes useful stuff and gives it away for free, that is as beneficial for the economy as if someone produces the same amount of stuff and sells it all. In fact, the former situation may even be MORE beneficial to the economy if you take into account wealth distribution in addition to GDP, since the free stuff will probably be more equitably distributed.
In the rest of your points you seem to want to destroy things without getting anything useful out of them, so I'm going to assume you aren't trying to go anywhere with those.
The general standard for wikipedia has been that the topic needs to be well enough known that there is reliable verifiable information available on the subject. All the articles in Wikipedia should at least have the potential to only contain true and researched information. Otherwise it isn't an encyclopedia.
I don't understand. If they have an issue with people using the full capacity of their purchased lines, why don't they charge based on how much capacity you use?
Somebody clarify how this is news.
Well, I personally found the video pretty entertaining. Do you need another reason?
And do you intend on never leaving your house?
Watching the kid's every move might be practical when they are 8, but 13? Not even the best parent is going to have their kid under their supervision at all times, and moreover, I don't think they should.
Did they decide to stop uploading the high frequency components of those jpegs or something?
I don't think we could possibly fuck up the earth so much that it would be less suitable for life than Mars.
Mod parent up.
Wrong. An expense is an expense is an expense. Whether that spending is a positive or negative for the economy depends entirely on the value that the goods and services purchased provide. Don't think of spending in terms of creating jobs or any of the other economic hogwash that occupies media coverage of the economy. Think of it like this: The economy has a certain amount of productive capability. With our spending we choose how that productive capability is allocated. If we spend wisely we will get good results. Period. The idea of "creating jobs" was created by politicians to justify pork.
You have to compare military spending to everything else that could have possibly been purchased with that money to assess whether it is a positive thing. I leave you with a quote from president Eisenhower:
When you are modifying a commercial game you already have a captive audience awaiting your content and willing to play it. This isn't true if you strike out on your own.
Within 5 minutes I've input my class schedule for the semester, my exam schedule, invited all of my friends to Google Calendar and given them access to view mine, imported all US holidays into my calendar, and if I had a sports team that I really cared about, I could have imported their schedule too.
This is an amazing app. The way it separates different calendars in the UI is ingenious. I hope enough people start using things like this that more public calendars become available. I'd like to be able to import schedules for concerts in the area, etc. This thing certainly deserves to catch on.
The two games I play most often at the moment are Natural Selection (awesome FPS/RTS hybrid for Half-Life 1) and Dystopia (think cyberpunk team fortress for Half-Life 2.) I paid for neither of them. Both were made by amateur teams and are the two most fun games I've played online. This is something that can't be done on a console. I was even impressed enough with Natural Selection that I put a hell of a lot of time into making a map for it. This is also not possible on a console.
If you want to passively enjoy your games then consoles are fine, but half of the fun of games, I think, is building on them yourself and enjoying what others have built on them.
I currently live in Pittsburgh, PA and formerly lived in Cincinnati, OH. I've travelled a bit around the country and generally found that the degree of necessity of cars is directly proportional to how recently the area was built.
That's not entirely true though. You can compress random data, but only given two assumptions:
The data has a non-uniform probability distribution.
You know that distribution.
The trick behind designing compression algorithms is coming up with intuitions about the probability distributions of useful classes of real data, and then coming up with computationally tractible ways of exploiting them.
Guess what? It is IMPOSSIBLE to create a generic compression algorithm. Gzip operates by doing exactly what you mention: operating on a particular set of data: that being data with some exploitable redundancy. There are plenty of files that will get bigger when you give them to Gzip.
Entropy coders work by making assumptions about the probability distribution of the data they recieve. They assume they are working on a set of data in which certain types of data are more likely than others, so they store those more compactly, but as a result they HAVE to store others less compactly. No matter how you slice it, you can not store more than 2^n unique strings in n bits. The only gains you can make are by assuming that you aren't going to be dealing with all possible strings, and compacting the ones that you care about.
That may have actually been what you meant, but I really didn't want anyone reading that to get the impression that there was something magical about entropy that made it a different approach than narrowing the set of data you are storing. The two are fundamentally the same thing.
If there is NO monetary incentive for your art as you claim, could that be because it isn't very good and no one wants it?
Secondly, not all art is individual self expression whose object is for people to experience it for its own sake. There is a substantial industry of technical artists (medical illustrators, scientific illustrators) that require the meager protections that copyright law provides them to avoid being completely exploited by the publishing companies that contract with them for their work.
I'd love to see copyright terms enter the public debate at some point, but there are definitely more pressing issues.