Question â" how would a lending library work without DRM? Subscribe for one month, download a thousand books, cancel, and keep the books?
That's pretty much how it already is with ebook libraries that use Amazon or Adobe's DRM solution. From discussions on pirate ebook communities, I've seen that it's already common for pirates to buy a temporary subscription to a service, download everything through some clever scripting, break the DRM, upload to a pirate site, and let their temporary subscription lapse. Considering how trivial it is to break the DRM on these books, it really is only the honour system keeping people paying.
A decade ago, nerds sometimes posited that in the future, connectivity will be so fast, RAM/storage space so large, and processors so powerful that the world might just switch to lossless formats. Here we are in 2014 still trying to trim a couple of percentage points off JPEG file sizes, and web designers still advise keeping images under 100k each or so.
Even if the computers have no network connectivity, their screens and keystrokes may spied on through a Tempest attack by an adversary in the vicinity. Buying typewriters may be cheaper than Tempest shielding.
In US law it has long been recognized that private letters between two living people cannot be published without consent. Only a paraphrase can be published. It's perfectly reasonable to hold that this extends to private photos taken between two parties on the understanding that these will stay published. Case law hasn't been settled yet, and state legislatures are only beginning to take up the matter, so it's not so simple as you make it out to be.
...where they will offer $1 an hour to watch a whole day worth of content. American users will then be puzzled by tags of third-world origin such as "man-wins-ten-lakh-dollars" and "woman-removes-petticoats".
Somehow, the US made it through a foreign invasion, a Civil War, WWI, WWII, the Cold War, and absolutely massive social upheaval without requiring people to remove clothing to enter into courts of law. But a few jackasses drive airplanes into some buildings and it's goodbye liberty, hello 'safety'.
Metal detectors at the entrance of many state and federal buildings predates 9/11. In any event, if you look at how much violence there was against judges in the 19th century, one would have to assume that if people had metal detector technology at the time, they would have used them.
You are getting your PIs (incl. SD and powersupply) very cheap
The Pi can be powered by any old USB phone charger, and I suspect that many people have a drawer-full. As for the SD, I already had one in an old camera I don't use any more. Those are not real hassles in buying a Pi. Only the case required me to go out of the way to get it.
Care to recommend a cheap gigabit router with OpenWRT support? The cheapest gigabit router I could find when my ISP upgraded my connection was 70€, so the same price as one of those more expensive hobbyist boards I mentioned. What I am really holding out for is a gigabit device around 35€.
I've thought about buying a second or third Raspberry Pi (I'm happy with the first, an XBMC media center) to act as an independent, always-on Bittorrent device and web server, as my ISP now offers gigabit ethernet with no throttling or caps. However, the Raspberry Pi's network speeds are slow to take advantage of gigabit ethernet: the ethernet has to share the USB bus with everything else connected to the device so you get less than 100mbit. Last time I looked, the hobbyist boards with gigabit ethernet were twice the price of a Pi.
Generally very badly, with no understanding of what you said and therefore isn't going to replace human translators anytime soon.
Human translators are already being replaced massively. A lot of the company-internal texts that used to be our bread and butter are now just being put through Google Translate, because companies just don't want to pay for an expensive human worker, and they are willing to accept somewhat lower quality as long as it's free. Ditto for product manuals from low-margin technology makers.
Sure, human beings are still hired to translate things for public consumption where prestige is important, such as books, press releases, and advertising campaigns, but with the march of technology I expect some of those contexts to disappear too, and soon.
When I said "the Balkans", I was thinking about countries after Bulgaria. Turkey does a lot of trade with Albania, Kosovo, Macedonia and Bosnia, but rail in that area is usually less efficient than truck.
Turkish drivers and their unions do not want to pay. Instead they cause incidents daily, run cars off the road, and kill people, violate required rest periods etc...
Stereotyping everyone on the basis of a minority of bad apples isn't fair. I live in Romania, and I hitchhike across Bulgaria to Turkey (or go to Serbia first and then cross Bulgaria to Turkey) a couple of times every year, and I can't say that my Turkish drivers have been worse than anyone else. They've all obeyed the tachograph and stop when they are required to (which can be frustrating for a hitchhiker who wants to keep moving), and in the summer when all trucks must stop during the day so as to not damage the hot, soft asphalt, they pull into one of their innumerable little roadside Turkish cafés that remind me of merchant colonies of old.
There are still places in Europe where trucks are an important form of transporting goods. For example, the route from Poland up the Baltic countries is badly served by rail, so every day there are many hundreds of trucks on the Via Baltica. A lot of trade between Turkey and the Balkans also proceeds along routes that are better served by trucks than rail.
Re:Where will this truckers work?
on
Autonomous Trucking
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· Score: 4, Interesting
It's not just that out-of-work truckers must look for skilled positions, but rather that skilled people have had to get work as truckers.
I'm an avid hitchhiker, travelling some 20 thousand kilometres a year mostly around Europe, and so I regularly meet truckers who are bored on their routine journeys and want someone to chat with. Early on I had to overcome my stereotype, fostered by films and television shows set mainly in the US, that truckers are blue-collar slobs. A lot of truck drivers in Eastern Europe are educated people (e.g. geologists, electronics engineers, ) who only turned to truck driving because it was one of the only reliable jobs in the economic downturn of the 1990s. One of my most recent drivers had a degree in chemistry but decided that life in a lab wasn't for him, and in his poor country driving for a foreign-owned logistics company was better pay anyway.
While Europe does have expanding waistlines and plenty of people get plump as they age, I cannot imagine an epidemic of morbid obesity like in the United States. Soft drinks and highly processed foods are more expensive here than in the United States, and in many countries there is sufficient momentum to get "fat taxes" passed on soft drinks and fast food.
And I don't think people would stand for it socially. I often go to the Deep South where I have family, and so many people are morbidly obese that no one bats an eye any more, and if you did confront people about their weight, they would say "Oh, uh, it must be a thyroid problem". In Europe, people tend to be more aware that thyroid problems are fairly uncommon and controllable by medication.
My observation consisted of two parts which you have erroneously conflated. When it comes to professional devs, shops may nonetheless continue to work with Python 2 even if major libs are ported to Python 3, because Python 2 is what they are used to and those major libs will continue to support Python 2 for years to come.
The second paragraph represented only my experience as a casual Python user. Yes, big-name libraries have been converted, but there are still loads of smaller apps and libraries that appeal to hobbyists that are Python 2-only and will remain so until someone outright forks them away from their current, Python 3-hostile administrators.
Wrong been using python3.x for ~12months. some people don't like change and prefer to whine - meanwhile in the real world people like me get on with it - Quietly.
I'm not a professional developer, but I do meet a lot of Python devs, and I always ask them which version of Python their shop is developing for. The answer so far has always been Python 2, often Python 2.5 or Python 2.6.
Recently I wanted to write up a new application for something since existing ones don't fit my particular needs, and do it in Python 3 since I prefer its Unicode handling, but virtually all the libraries I could think to use were still Python 2 only, and a look at the mailing lists showed that these libraries' developers were positively hostile to Python 3 ("if you want to start a Python 3 fork, fine, but you'll get zero recognition or help from me").
Anecdotal? Sure. But still enough to get one down.
Does anyone else feel like the methods or goals of "meditation" has changed over time? In an earlier, pre-industrial world meditation was forcing oneself to stay at rest without latching on to any information-bearing stimuli. Today, I personally am so addicted to the constant stimulation of high-speed internet or television, the ability to constantly jump from one thing to another, that just sitting through a long film or reading dense modernist literature requires the same amount of self-control.
Whereas the historical Buddha meditated by going out into the wilderness and sitting still for some long span of time, meditation for our descendents might be putting down the smartphone and focusing on just one thing for a while.
Russia does not have the luxury of wide open boarders or just accepting a vast culture of drink... drugs, health issues...
The tragedy of Russia is that Russia is indeed deeply affected by these ills and much of the population is unwilling to face it, preferring instead to complain about other countries. I travel widely in Russia for linguistic/ethnographic fieldwork in Russia, and I am aghast at not just the widespread alcoholism (a perennial ill) but the widespread heroin abuse as well. You have poor village men stealing out of their wives' purses so they can get their next fix. Of course, they can't steal much because there just isn't so much money around, so the quality of the drug is crap, and needle sharing is common, which leads to the spread of HIV.
It is easy for people in Moscow and Saint-Petersburg to pretend that everything is fine and that Russia is somehow avoiding "foreign" problems, but in fact the rest of the country is going to hell and its a damn shame. There's so much potential in Russia and yet the population is doomed by this neglect.
Even if Schmidt's visit were illegal, Americans who get caught having been to Cuba (which usually doesn't happen unless one is stupid and talks about their holiday to all and sundry) typically only pay a large fine, they don't serve jail time.
Stanford has all their classes online, as do many universities.
See my reply above. In any event, they may have all their lectures online, but that is only a part of an education. The other part, readings, are not necessarily available to the general public. If you want to get any recent consensus in a field, you need access to e.g. JSTOR, which is not freely available to the public (some people are lucky enough to have a public library with an institutional subscription, but not all).
No, not a "top notch" education at all. In my own field one very quickly tires of talking with dilettantes who have "educated themselves", because they have a view of the things decades out of date. They can't read the journals they need to stay up to date because these are closed-access. Furthermore, other publications are easy to get within a university network, but may not circulate out to public libraries under inter-library loan.
I work with two branches of linguistics. The present consensus was essentially reached in the early 1990s, but is still not represented online in freely-available resources: you need access to university holdings. Now, there are sometimes ways for laymen to get access to some of this information (inter-library loan, a JSTOR subscription), but not everyone in North America or Europe is so fortunate, and it would come at such great expense that you are better off establishing some kind of status at a university anyway. Furthermore, so much of the information, whether publically available or limited to universities, is not in English and probably won't be available in English for some years more.
There were a couple of researchers who thought it would be nice if Wikipedia reflected the state-of-the-art instead of outdated views from half a century ago that dilettantes had put up, but they quickly abandoned Wikipedia after being dissatisfied with its editing climate.
I've heard the same complaints from fellow academics in fields from anthropology to mathematics. You can keep on thinking you have access to everything you might possibly want, but you simply have no idea how much you are missing.
Learning for learning's sake is great, but frankly that can be done in your spare time without getting in debt for tens of thousands of dollars.
Not all university libraries are open to the general public, and there are still a number of fields where you cannot get an up-to-date view of the basics online: you need books, and they are expensive books that typically only libraries can afford. Advances are moving at such a pace -- and academic publishers have raised their prices to such a level -- that it is unreasonable to expect the man on the street to "educate himself" like might have been possible in the 1950s.
Thanks for the serious response. It baffles me that it's now commonplace for people to question the wisdom of e.g. transporting Fiji Water or frozen foods around the world instead of encouraging local production and consumption, but few pause to consider the carbon cost of other consumer items in our modern world.
Slashdot Mirror
That's pretty much how it already is with ebook libraries that use Amazon or Adobe's DRM solution. From discussions on pirate ebook communities, I've seen that it's already common for pirates to buy a temporary subscription to a service, download everything through some clever scripting, break the DRM, upload to a pirate site, and let their temporary subscription lapse. Considering how trivial it is to break the DRM on these books, it really is only the honour system keeping people paying.
A decade ago, nerds sometimes posited that in the future, connectivity will be so fast, RAM/storage space so large, and processors so powerful that the world might just switch to lossless formats. Here we are in 2014 still trying to trim a couple of percentage points off JPEG file sizes, and web designers still advise keeping images under 100k each or so.
Even if the computers have no network connectivity, their screens and keystrokes may spied on through a Tempest attack by an adversary in the vicinity. Buying typewriters may be cheaper than Tempest shielding.
In US law it has long been recognized that private letters between two living people cannot be published without consent. Only a paraphrase can be published. It's perfectly reasonable to hold that this extends to private photos taken between two parties on the understanding that these will stay published. Case law hasn't been settled yet, and state legislatures are only beginning to take up the matter, so it's not so simple as you make it out to be.
Not to mention that high-performing metro systems worldwide are highly unionized.
Metal detectors at the entrance of many state and federal buildings predates 9/11. In any event, if you look at how much violence there was against judges in the 19th century, one would have to assume that if people had metal detector technology at the time, they would have used them.
The Pi can be powered by any old USB phone charger, and I suspect that many people have a drawer-full. As for the SD, I already had one in an old camera I don't use any more. Those are not real hassles in buying a Pi. Only the case required me to go out of the way to get it.
Care to recommend a cheap gigabit router with OpenWRT support? The cheapest gigabit router I could find when my ISP upgraded my connection was 70€, so the same price as one of those more expensive hobbyist boards I mentioned. What I am really holding out for is a gigabit device around 35€.
I've thought about buying a second or third Raspberry Pi (I'm happy with the first, an XBMC media center) to act as an independent, always-on Bittorrent device and web server, as my ISP now offers gigabit ethernet with no throttling or caps. However, the Raspberry Pi's network speeds are slow to take advantage of gigabit ethernet: the ethernet has to share the USB bus with everything else connected to the device so you get less than 100mbit. Last time I looked, the hobbyist boards with gigabit ethernet were twice the price of a Pi.
Human translators are already being replaced massively. A lot of the company-internal texts that used to be our bread and butter are now just being put through Google Translate, because companies just don't want to pay for an expensive human worker, and they are willing to accept somewhat lower quality as long as it's free. Ditto for product manuals from low-margin technology makers.
Sure, human beings are still hired to translate things for public consumption where prestige is important, such as books, press releases, and advertising campaigns, but with the march of technology I expect some of those contexts to disappear too, and soon.
When I said "the Balkans", I was thinking about countries after Bulgaria. Turkey does a lot of trade with Albania, Kosovo, Macedonia and Bosnia, but rail in that area is usually less efficient than truck.
Stereotyping everyone on the basis of a minority of bad apples isn't fair. I live in Romania, and I hitchhike across Bulgaria to Turkey (or go to Serbia first and then cross Bulgaria to Turkey) a couple of times every year, and I can't say that my Turkish drivers have been worse than anyone else. They've all obeyed the tachograph and stop when they are required to (which can be frustrating for a hitchhiker who wants to keep moving), and in the summer when all trucks must stop during the day so as to not damage the hot, soft asphalt, they pull into one of their innumerable little roadside Turkish cafés that remind me of merchant colonies of old.
There are still places in Europe where trucks are an important form of transporting goods. For example, the route from Poland up the Baltic countries is badly served by rail, so every day there are many hundreds of trucks on the Via Baltica. A lot of trade between Turkey and the Balkans also proceeds along routes that are better served by trucks than rail.
It's not just that out-of-work truckers must look for skilled positions, but rather that skilled people have had to get work as truckers.
I'm an avid hitchhiker, travelling some 20 thousand kilometres a year mostly around Europe, and so I regularly meet truckers who are bored on their routine journeys and want someone to chat with. Early on I had to overcome my stereotype, fostered by films and television shows set mainly in the US, that truckers are blue-collar slobs. A lot of truck drivers in Eastern Europe are educated people (e.g. geologists, electronics engineers, ) who only turned to truck driving because it was one of the only reliable jobs in the economic downturn of the 1990s. One of my most recent drivers had a degree in chemistry but decided that life in a lab wasn't for him, and in his poor country driving for a foreign-owned logistics company was better pay anyway.
While Europe does have expanding waistlines and plenty of people get plump as they age, I cannot imagine an epidemic of morbid obesity like in the United States. Soft drinks and highly processed foods are more expensive here than in the United States, and in many countries there is sufficient momentum to get "fat taxes" passed on soft drinks and fast food.
And I don't think people would stand for it socially. I often go to the Deep South where I have family, and so many people are morbidly obese that no one bats an eye any more, and if you did confront people about their weight, they would say "Oh, uh, it must be a thyroid problem". In Europe, people tend to be more aware that thyroid problems are fairly uncommon and controllable by medication.
My observation consisted of two parts which you have erroneously conflated. When it comes to professional devs, shops may nonetheless continue to work with Python 2 even if major libs are ported to Python 3, because Python 2 is what they are used to and those major libs will continue to support Python 2 for years to come.
The second paragraph represented only my experience as a casual Python user. Yes, big-name libraries have been converted, but there are still loads of smaller apps and libraries that appeal to hobbyists that are Python 2-only and will remain so until someone outright forks them away from their current, Python 3-hostile administrators.
I'm not a professional developer, but I do meet a lot of Python devs, and I always ask them which version of Python their shop is developing for. The answer so far has always been Python 2, often Python 2.5 or Python 2.6.
Recently I wanted to write up a new application for something since existing ones don't fit my particular needs, and do it in Python 3 since I prefer its Unicode handling, but virtually all the libraries I could think to use were still Python 2 only, and a look at the mailing lists showed that these libraries' developers were positively hostile to Python 3 ("if you want to start a Python 3 fork, fine, but you'll get zero recognition or help from me").
Anecdotal? Sure. But still enough to get one down.
Does anyone else feel like the methods or goals of "meditation" has changed over time? In an earlier, pre-industrial world meditation was forcing oneself to stay at rest without latching on to any information-bearing stimuli. Today, I personally am so addicted to the constant stimulation of high-speed internet or television, the ability to constantly jump from one thing to another, that just sitting through a long film or reading dense modernist literature requires the same amount of self-control.
Whereas the historical Buddha meditated by going out into the wilderness and sitting still for some long span of time, meditation for our descendents might be putting down the smartphone and focusing on just one thing for a while.
The tragedy of Russia is that Russia is indeed deeply affected by these ills and much of the population is unwilling to face it, preferring instead to complain about other countries. I travel widely in Russia for linguistic/ethnographic fieldwork in Russia, and I am aghast at not just the widespread alcoholism (a perennial ill) but the widespread heroin abuse as well. You have poor village men stealing out of their wives' purses so they can get their next fix. Of course, they can't steal much because there just isn't so much money around, so the quality of the drug is crap, and needle sharing is common, which leads to the spread of HIV.
It is easy for people in Moscow and Saint-Petersburg to pretend that everything is fine and that Russia is somehow avoiding "foreign" problems, but in fact the rest of the country is going to hell and its a damn shame. There's so much potential in Russia and yet the population is doomed by this neglect.
Even if Schmidt's visit were illegal, Americans who get caught having been to Cuba (which usually doesn't happen unless one is stupid and talks about their holiday to all and sundry) typically only pay a large fine, they don't serve jail time.
See my reply above. In any event, they may have all their lectures online, but that is only a part of an education. The other part, readings, are not necessarily available to the general public. If you want to get any recent consensus in a field, you need access to e.g. JSTOR, which is not freely available to the public (some people are lucky enough to have a public library with an institutional subscription, but not all).
No, not a "top notch" education at all. In my own field one very quickly tires of talking with dilettantes who have "educated themselves", because they have a view of the things decades out of date. They can't read the journals they need to stay up to date because these are closed-access. Furthermore, other publications are easy to get within a university network, but may not circulate out to public libraries under inter-library loan.
I work with two branches of linguistics. The present consensus was essentially reached in the early 1990s, but is still not represented online in freely-available resources: you need access to university holdings. Now, there are sometimes ways for laymen to get access to some of this information (inter-library loan, a JSTOR subscription), but not everyone in North America or Europe is so fortunate, and it would come at such great expense that you are better off establishing some kind of status at a university anyway. Furthermore, so much of the information, whether publically available or limited to universities, is not in English and probably won't be available in English for some years more.
There were a couple of researchers who thought it would be nice if Wikipedia reflected the state-of-the-art instead of outdated views from half a century ago that dilettantes had put up, but they quickly abandoned Wikipedia after being dissatisfied with its editing climate.
I've heard the same complaints from fellow academics in fields from anthropology to mathematics. You can keep on thinking you have access to everything you might possibly want, but you simply have no idea how much you are missing.
Not all university libraries are open to the general public, and there are still a number of fields where you cannot get an up-to-date view of the basics online: you need books, and they are expensive books that typically only libraries can afford. Advances are moving at such a pace -- and academic publishers have raised their prices to such a level -- that it is unreasonable to expect the man on the street to "educate himself" like might have been possible in the 1950s.
Thanks for the serious response. It baffles me that it's now commonplace for people to question the wisdom of e.g. transporting Fiji Water or frozen foods around the world instead of encouraging local production and consumption, but few pause to consider the carbon cost of other consumer items in our modern world.