Wich prove the point, anybody working for a company that is tolerant of an IT team that is IE6 dependent for its intranet deserve to have a shitty internet experience at least at work...
During the great Famine Ireland exported food to Britain, not because it was the best way to make money for the farmers but because it was useful for the political programs of the absentee owners. (who where not guilty of the various issues related to illness and weather, but who didn't even care to make the maximum of money).
Many jobs have been created in Ireland, but many of them are "non wealth creating jobs" (patents atorneys are "useful" but do not create the wealth they are "protecting" (and they are only really useful because of other patent atorneys)..
And it is true that the EUcrats do not have jurisdiction to manage local laws, and this is a key issue in the building of europe (not that they would probably do a good job of it, but tax differences and free markets are creating a situation where small countries can attract companies with very law taxes while leaving the other countries with having to provide the infrastructure to host the real workers.
Now of course Ireland is finding out that their "gift" of money taken from other european countries to US companies is not bringing enough money to pay their infrastructure....
Ireland was/is used by US companies as a tax dodge mechanisme using intellectual properties shenanigans, the number of jobs created is negligible compared to the quantity of tax money lost by all European Union countries. The reason the EUcrats backed off is that basically they understand zilch about economy and are listening to the lobbyist of the same companies who have actually created the problem.
nobody is perfect:-) personally I do not like the iPhone for all kinds or reasons, but although my teen son accepted one as a gift from his granfather I did not decide to disown him:-)
and "you" probably drive a car with proprietary "car"matics, "eeeviill"...
Let's than Stephen Fry for what support he gives, and try to explain issues to anybody who'd listen when possible..
I had once to convince my accountant that calculating the VAT on a set of items and then summing the VAT(s) was the same as summing the values of the items and calculating the VAT on the sum..
a*(b+c) == a*b+a*c was not part of her training (apparently)
and no she didn't mention rounding errors.... so no surprise...
But of course they should use CALC or even better R:-)
Well, my first reactio was similar, but living in a 3rd world country where access to book is diffucult and "piracy" normal (including on books) I think he might be "righter" than we think.
Currently there are "roughtly" 1 billion people living in countries where the majority reads at least "some" and 5 billion who live in counties where only a minority reads. (nb: of course india, china, etc have great literature, and la hogera in santa cruz is trying very hard to get good interesting local writers to the local market, but the realitly is that the wast majority of people in emerging countries do not read for "fun", they read if they are ordered to by their employers...., because: If you are poor and a "cheap low quality pirated book" cost 4 to 5 hours of work you will not offer 100 hours of work every year to your child, so the child will not connect "reading with fun" (exept the statistical "lucky" one outlier)).
Moreover there is little avaiability of recent outside book (a hard cover foreign book can cost about 50% of a basic montly salary). So execpt the pirated copies of some blockbusters made popular by pirated copies of foreign movies, you do not read recent foreign books (softcover classics are about the end of it).
But "everybody" has access to computers (mostly of course in cyber cafés) and most students use pirated PDF's of school books, not just because they cannot affort the 30..40$+ * 10..20 they would need, but because: Amazon do not deliver in many 3rd world countries and other providers can take up to 2 month to get the book to you (assuming you have an internationally valid credit card) and the local bookshop are not very efficient (or just would not bother because they know you will hassle them when they ask 3..4 time the "amazon" price because they have to pay: the book, the transport the customs (40%)..
So ebooks are the best way to get books to these 5B people
And in 10..15 years we might see that 80% of the population reads about 50% with a 90/10 cut for ebooks and 20% will have a 30/70 cut because they only use it for brain sugar and techno books, but at the end ===> more ebooks than books, and more "influence"
> if there is a market for it, you can be sure someone will build a modern machine to do it better That would only be true if the market for the end product would be big enough to create a market for the tools.
The issue for all the "handicraft" is that it is difficult to find good tools, before dwelving into IT I was a copersmith sculptor, and I still do some work now and then. But most of my tools are inherited, second hand, self made,... not because "them good olde times..." and not because a good (or even a half way ok) artisan/artist cannot live from his/her craft, but just because there are not enough of them, and unfortunatelly a hammer is not something you need to change every three years... So "no market for the tools"...
The other issue is that the "powers that be" do not recognize the artisan market as a real "business", although it is still the largest in the world as a whole, but since it is absolutelly framented it is easier to ignore than to support.
So it is seen as a craft where people who are "not so smart as in able to be a manager"... a french politician said recently, (meaning well) that we should recognize that there is not only the "intelligence of the mind" but also the "intelligence of the hands"...
Unfortunatelly this is utter bulshit, you need to be smart to make a good artist/artisan/craftsperson and you need to want to have an education, because you will not learn for example 3 thousand years of stone cutting in tree easy lessons while browsing youtube.
So we need: smart people who will maybe bring the "fab at home" movement to the next level and be able to create tools for people who just need one exemplar. Smart people who see value un creating beautiful quality with their hand (and brain)
And smart clients who will see value in buying something that will last centuries instead of days..
As for the "hero" of the fine article, let's hope he will post on some "steampunk" forums:-)
And in fine, I pledge that if I see on anybodies resumé: 1..2 years of Jacquard Punch Card Programming I'll hire him/her just for the hell of it, and because I'm sure that this person would be able to "really" learn OpenGL or what ever, and not just some magic incantations...
Before giving return on investments patents cost you all they can... And defining "inventing it" is impossible.
The patent troll can easily tell you that they help the small inventor who does not have the money to protect his/her investment by buying the patents and making them fructify, and that without them the poor small inventor would always be eaten by the evil big company.
So StemCells should not be punished specifically it is the nature of scorpions to poison whatever they can if it passes near enought. The issue is specifically the US government's support and influence of IP and the way it lets the scorpions loose...
Not necessarily even very smart people can say things that are clearly false.. The fact that the patents is junk can be only "proven" by winning the suit the patent troll is imposing on you. So you just spend money for years and then looses in many cases. And you need to provide prior art on all the various aspects of the patent, and prove it was published, etc...
And you are not allowed to shoot the troll...
so you might win, and then you would only win at most the cost of the suit, not real punitive damage, moreover in the case of a troll, even one trillion $ would be useless, since the troll is not doing anything, so it just disolves after the suit.
1) The assesor of the value of a patent have an interest to accept any patents because it makes money for them 2) the non profit loophole is useless, because the non profit entity could not do anything with the results, not even give it away for free, the only thing they could do is to give it to the "holder(s)"
moreover defining what is non profit and for profit is in practice impossible 3) in all case the guy with much money for it's lawyers and nothing to looses wins (i.e. patent trolls)
to make the system "kind of work", you would need to have the patent organisations do two things -1) garanty with their own money the validity of the patent (so if they misses some prior art they are punished), and the damage they might be paying should be put immediatly in escrow
to make sure that they cannot just try to wiggle out of it. -2) It should define an uniform licence price that apply to all, so that the usage of the patented tech is anonymous (otherwise the patent holder has a free market research based on it's competitors numbers) then another entity should be managing the payments of the IP.
This would limit the most horrible issues of patents, but it would still pour concrete in the wheels and make research and dev. much more expensive than it needs to be.
There is no excuse for patents, it is like feodalism, it had it's time and represented progress under some specific constraints. Now it is just bad in all situations.
Actually in retrospect fighting against software patents was an error, we tried to demonstrate how software was different, well it does not matter, the issue is not software it is all complex systems that is anything worthwhile doing today.
So patents are bad in healthcase, agriculture, software,... well everyware....
we need a revolution/boston tea party/magna charta/you name it against patents....
The English version of the ITS wikipedia entry claims that there are still a couple of machines running ITS.... Anybody knows where ? I miss my MIT-AI ITS account;-)
Some people are actually good in management, but being bad in coding is not a prerequisite, nor guaranties to be good in management.
Of course the money comes or would come from my pocket, first of all because I was regularly paying the salaries of the teams. And as a "consumer" I'm paying for the products that are built using IT (more or less everything at some level), so if IT is expensively done, I (we all) pay. Well "agile" programmers have a strong tendency to present themselves as "perfect and inviolate", of course the irritation is only temporary, sooner or latter reality will check back in...
Cool so only people that are not so good in doing what the group is doing (coding) should have an opportunity to manage (and the pay raise it implies).. that is very "agile" indeed...
can I show a speeding ticket instead of a velocity graph ?
Cats are obviously much smarter than Dogs, not only where they able to show very little use, so they will not loose their time working for us, but they show a capacity to domesticate us cf: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/8147566.stm
Great idea, it would certainly encourage all other "bad guys" to accept interviews with the medias...
Reporters do not shoot their informant, that is the way it works...
You could just as well ask clinton why did he not just shoot the "dear leader" in N Korea when he met him.... (ok so he'd die, the US Hostage also, but no price is too high ? oups of course there would be that little issue with being a suicide something getting a bad press recently..)
a) Try to be interested in what she likes, and try to convince her that what you do is interesting (so you increase the overlap), there is a big movement on "using literary content for new games" so you should at least have something to discuss.
b) do you tend to nag ? is she nagging you for this or that... ? it will get worse, deal with it (by running away fast if necessary....)
c) make sure that you both have a geographical zone in your place of living where the other is totally forbidden to comment (if you can't do not marry)
d) try to be nice to each other, which often means : NOT doing anything (if she likes to cook, in most cases cooking yourself is a way to make her wash the dishes, or criticize her meals this is "not nice") (works both way obviously)..
You could try to find a Version 2 of Coherent, this would give you an Unix V7 look alike:-) Not extremely useful, but "interesting":-) (ahem, no newfangled X11 stuff, obviously...)
I live in Paris, Wich has a couple of millions of people living there, is about 20miles wide "intra muros" and much larger with the suburbs. And I'm happy not to have a car...
So banning cars from intra muros, seems not such a far out idea..
Actually putting a high enough levy on driving inside paris would be a good idea.. Of course it would "help" rich people, but if the levy is used to improve the public transportation, the trade of would be quite interesting..
Anybody using Windows has forfeited any right s/he had on privacy, data ownership or anything else on his or her PC anyway.
He has also signed to make sure that the machine is virus prone.
Moreover by his/her choice s/he has stated loud and clear that "convenience" trump "human rights".. And that they have no technical competencies...
So it makes sence that CMU adds it's own virus to make sure that the machine stays clean, and keeps the network safe.
If you do care about your private data you do not use Windows... Now if they would put non GPL code and closed source "spys" in the Andrew Linux, that would be a scandal (BTW they give you the option to use another Linux, Andrew Linux is for non technically oriented people (apparently)).
Using Windows and complaining about privacy is akin to insist on using a Hummer and complain about polution...
So IMHO the only issue is that they didn't provide a policy forcing windows users to wear the cilice (hairshirt), this would certainly improve network stability:-)
At least there is some consolation in the fact that having done something stupid in your past, will drive away the idiots... At least the ones who believe that you couldn't possibly evolve, and that what you did at 18 defines what you'll be able to do at 30 away.
Of course it does help if you also did a couple of interesting stuff in the interim....
Slashdot Mirror
Wich prove the point, anybody working for a company that is tolerant of an IT team that is IE6 dependent for its intranet deserve to have a shitty internet experience at least at work...
During the great Famine Ireland exported food to Britain, not because it was the best way to make money for the farmers but because it was useful for the political programs of the absentee owners.
(who where not guilty of the various issues related to illness and weather, but who didn't even care to make the maximum of money).
Many jobs have been created in Ireland, but many of them are "non wealth creating jobs" (patents atorneys are "useful" but do not create the wealth they are "protecting" (and they are only really useful because of other patent atorneys)..
And it is true that the EUcrats do not have jurisdiction to manage local laws, and this is a key issue in the building of europe (not that they would probably do a good job of it, but tax differences and free markets are creating a situation where small countries can attract companies with very law taxes while leaving the other countries with having to provide the infrastructure to host the real workers.
Now of course Ireland is finding out that their "gift" of money taken from other european countries to US companies is not bringing enough money to pay their infrastructure....
Ireland was/is used by US companies as a tax dodge mechanisme using intellectual properties shenanigans, the number of jobs created is negligible compared to the quantity of tax money lost by all European Union countries.
The reason the EUcrats backed off is that basically they understand zilch about economy and are listening to the lobbyist of the same companies who have actually created the problem.
It is a potato famine setup...
nobody is perfect :-) :-)
personally I do not like the iPhone for all kinds or reasons, but although my teen son accepted one as a gift from his granfather I did not decide to disown him
and "you" probably drive a car with proprietary "car"matics, "eeeviill"...
Let's than Stephen Fry for what support he gives, and try to explain issues to anybody who'd listen when possible..
but latter i'm busy right now :-)
I had once to convince my accountant that calculating the VAT on a set of items and then summing the VAT(s) was the same as summing the values of the items and calculating the VAT on the sum..
a*(b+c) == a*b+a*c was not part of her training (apparently)
and no she didn't mention rounding errors.... so no surprise...
But of course they should use CALC or even better R :-)
Well, my first reactio was similar, but living in a 3rd world country where access to book is diffucult and "piracy" normal (including on books) I think he might be "righter" than we think.
Currently there are "roughtly" 1 billion people living in countries where the majority reads at least "some" and 5 billion who live in counties where only a minority reads.
(nb: of course india, china, etc have great literature, and la hogera in santa cruz is trying very hard to get good interesting local writers to the local market, but the realitly is that the wast majority of people in emerging countries do not read for "fun", they read if they are ordered to by their employers...., because:
If you are poor and a "cheap low quality pirated book" cost 4 to 5 hours of work you will not offer 100 hours of work every year to your child, so the child will not connect "reading with fun" (exept the statistical "lucky" one outlier)).
Moreover there is little avaiability of recent outside book (a hard cover foreign book can cost about 50% of a basic montly salary).
So execpt the pirated copies of some blockbusters made popular by pirated copies of foreign movies, you do not read recent foreign books (softcover classics are about the end of it).
But "everybody" has access to computers (mostly of course in cyber cafés)
and most students use pirated PDF's of school books, not just because they cannot affort the 30..40$+ * 10..20 they would need, but because:
Amazon do not deliver in many 3rd world countries
and other providers can take up to 2 month to get the book to you (assuming you have an internationally valid credit card)
and the local bookshop are not very efficient (or just would not bother because they know you will hassle them when they ask 3..4 time the "amazon" price because they have to pay: the book, the transport the customs (40%)..
So ebooks are the best way to get books to these 5B people
And in 10..15 years we might see that 80% of the population reads about 50% with a 90/10 cut for ebooks and 20% will have a 30/70 cut because they only use it for brain sugar and techno books, but at the end ===> more ebooks than books, and more "influence"
> if there is a market for it, you can be sure someone will build a modern machine to do it better
That would only be true if the market for the end product would be big enough to create a market for the tools.
The issue for all the "handicraft" is that it is difficult to find good tools, before dwelving into IT I was a copersmith sculptor, and I still do some work now and then. ... not because "them good olde times..." and not because a good (or even a half way ok) artisan/artist cannot live from his/her craft, but just because there are not enough of them, and unfortunatelly a hammer is not something you need to change every three years...
But most of my tools are inherited, second hand, self made,
So "no market for the tools"...
The other issue is that the "powers that be" do not recognize the artisan market as a real "business", although it is still the largest in the world as a whole, but since it is absolutelly framented it is easier to ignore than to support.
So it is seen as a craft where people who are "not so smart as in able to be a manager"... a french politician said recently, (meaning well) that we should recognize that there is not only the "intelligence of the mind" but also the "intelligence of the hands"...
Unfortunatelly this is utter bulshit, you need to be smart to make a good artist/artisan/craftsperson and you need to want to have an education, because you will not learn for example 3 thousand years of stone cutting in tree easy lessons while browsing youtube.
So we need: smart people who will maybe bring the "fab at home" movement to the next level and be able to create tools for people who just need one exemplar.
Smart people who see value un creating beautiful quality with their hand (and brain)
And smart clients who will see value in buying something that will last centuries instead of days..
As for the "hero" of the fine article, let's hope he will post on some "steampunk" forums :-)
And in fine, I pledge that if I see on anybodies resumé: 1..2 years of Jacquard Punch Card Programming I'll hire him/her just for the hell of it, and because I'm sure that this person would be able to "really" learn OpenGL or what ever, and not just some magic incantations...
Before giving return on investments patents cost you all they can...
And defining "inventing it" is impossible.
The patent troll can easily tell you that they help the small inventor who does not have the money to protect his/her investment by buying the patents and making them fructify, and that without them the poor small inventor would always be eaten by the evil big company.
So StemCells should not be punished specifically it is the nature of scorpions to poison whatever they can if it passes near enought.
The issue is specifically the US government's support and influence of IP and the way it lets the scorpions loose...
Not necessarily even very smart people can say things that are clearly false..
The fact that the patents is junk can be only "proven" by winning the suit the patent troll is imposing on you.
So you just spend money for years and then looses in many cases.
And you need to provide prior art on all the various aspects of the patent, and prove it was published, etc...
And you are not allowed to shoot the troll...
so you might win, and then you would only win at most the cost of the suit, not real punitive damage, moreover in the case of a troll, even one trillion $ would be useless, since the troll is not doing anything, so it just disolves after the suit.
It cannot really be fixed.
1) The assesor of the value of a patent have an interest to accept any patents because it makes money for them
2) the non profit loophole is useless, because the non profit entity could not do anything with the results, not even give it away for free, the only thing they could do is to give it to the "holder(s)"
moreover defining what is non profit and for profit is in practice impossible
3) in all case the guy with much money for it's lawyers and nothing to looses wins (i.e. patent trolls)
to make the system "kind of work", you would need to have the patent organisations do two things
-1) garanty with their own money the validity of the patent (so if they misses some prior art they are punished), and the damage they might be paying should be put immediatly in escrow
to make sure that they cannot just try to wiggle out of it.
-2) It should define an uniform licence price that apply to all, so that the usage of the patented tech is anonymous (otherwise the patent holder has a free market research based on it's competitors numbers)
then another entity should be managing the payments of the IP.
This would limit the most horrible issues of patents, but it would still pour concrete in the wheels and make research and dev. much more expensive than it needs to be.
So: repeat after me: patents are bad...
There is no excuse for patents, it is like feodalism, it had it's time and represented progress under some specific constraints.
Now it is just bad in all situations.
Actually in retrospect fighting against software patents was an error, we tried to demonstrate how software was different, well it does not matter, the issue is not software it is all complex systems
that is anything worthwhile doing today.
So patents are bad in healthcase, agriculture, software, ... well everyware....
we need a revolution/boston tea party/magna charta/you name it against patents....
You might want to look at/listen to this video, it's called silent volcano, and yes it is more for "occidental" viewer, but it is interesting.
As in "may you live interesting lives..."
The English version of the ITS wikipedia entry claims that there are still a couple of machines running ITS.... ;-)
Anybody knows where ? I miss my MIT-AI ITS account
It not, ... check out http://www.poppyfields.net/filks/00117.html
Cheers :-)
Doctor Strange against the Beagle Boys !
And Donald Duck will go rafting with wolverine...
And of course "Moovies": Xmens the clueless episode !!!
And Marvel theamed movies will always end "cute"
Somehow this does not seem a good news
Some people are actually good in management, but being bad in coding is not a prerequisite, nor guaranties to be good in management.
Of course the money comes or would come from my pocket, first of all because I was regularly paying the salaries of the teams. And as a "consumer" I'm paying for the products that are built using IT (more or less everything at some level), so if IT is expensively done, I (we all) pay.
Well "agile" programmers have a strong tendency to present themselves as "perfect and inviolate", of course the irritation is only temporary, sooner or latter reality will check back in...
Cool so only people that are not so good in doing what the group is doing (coding) should have an opportunity to manage (and the pay raise it implies)..
that is very "agile" indeed...
can I show a speeding ticket instead of a velocity graph ?
Agile does not work, it is a way to pretend having a method behind the fact that after each 3 week "sprint" you are between one and four week late.
Inherently Agile is supposed to enable "small" teams, and be "cheap" but has too many roles to implement in a small team...
I you see a "black belt agile scrummaster" check your wallet and run away.
Cats are obviously much smarter than Dogs, not only where they able to show very little use, so they will not loose their time working for us, but they show a capacity to domesticate us cf: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/8147566.stm
So apparently they have learned the most :-)
Great idea, it would certainly encourage all other "bad guys" to accept interviews with the medias...
Reporters do not shoot their informant, that is the way it works...
You could just as well ask clinton why did he not just shoot the "dear leader" in N Korea when he met him....
(ok so he'd die, the US Hostage also, but no price is too high ? oups of course there would be that little issue with being a suicide something getting a bad press recently..)
a) Try to be interested in what she likes, and try to convince her that what you do is interesting (so you increase the overlap), there is a big movement on "using literary content for new games" so you should at least have something to discuss.
b) do you tend to nag ? is she nagging you for this or that... ? it will get worse, deal with it (by running away fast if necessary....)
c) make sure that you both have a geographical zone in your place of living where the other is totally forbidden to comment (if you can't do not marry)
d) try to be nice to each other, which often means : NOT doing anything (if she likes to cook, in most cases cooking yourself is a way to make her wash the dishes, or criticize her meals this is "not nice") (works both way obviously)..
e) speak about "it"...
Good Luck
you'll need it.... (just teasing, we all need it)
You could try to find a Version 2 of Coherent, this would give you an Unix V7 look alike :-) :-)
Not extremely useful, but "interesting"
(ahem, no newfangled X11 stuff, obviously...)
I live in Paris, Wich has a couple of millions of people living there, is about 20miles wide "intra muros" and much larger with the suburbs.
And I'm happy not to have a car...
So banning cars from intra muros, seems not such a far out idea..
Actually putting a high enough levy on driving inside paris would be a good idea..
Of course it would "help" rich people, but if the levy is used to improve the public transportation, the trade of would be quite interesting..
Anybody using Windows has forfeited any right s/he had on privacy, data ownership or anything else on his or her PC anyway.
He has also signed to make sure that the machine is virus prone.
Moreover by his/her choice s/he has stated loud and clear that "convenience" trump "human rights"..
And that they have no technical competencies...
So it makes sence that CMU adds it's own virus to make sure that the machine stays clean, and keeps the network safe.
If you do care about your private data you do not use Windows...
Now if they would put non GPL code and closed source "spys" in the Andrew Linux, that would be a scandal (BTW they give you the option to use another Linux, Andrew Linux is for non technically oriented people (apparently)).
Using Windows and complaining about privacy is akin to insist on using a Hummer and complain about polution...
So IMHO the only issue is that they didn't provide a policy forcing windows users to wear the cilice (hairshirt), this would certainly improve network stability :-)
At least there is some consolation in the fact that having done something stupid in your past, will drive away the idiots...
At least the ones who believe that you couldn't possibly evolve, and that what you did at 18 defines what you'll be able to do at 30 away.
Of course it does help if you also did a couple of interesting stuff in the interim....