Uh-huh. Right, if you were to get a cent on every bottle, the bottle would go up in price by a cent. No-one's richer.
There's a fixed amount of money in the pot -- it's a question of when and where it gets distributed. You presumably have a stable job. You are paid monthly, come rain or shine. The author doesn't get that stable paycheque -- he is essentially gambling his labour value against the market. Your attitude seems to be that no-one's allowed to win the bet, but I'm guessing you're happy for people to lose the bet though -- you wouldn't propose funding any old hack a living wage for a book that's not worth reading, would you?
A Lemming-driven PC mentality? But Lemmings was ported to all the major platforms of the day. Personally, if Lemmings was going to drive the uptake of any platform, it wasn't the PC: the 2-player mode was only available on the Amiga.
Now excuse me -- I must write to Sony demanding that they license the Lemmings franchise to gog.com . I want to play Lemmings!!!!!
Have you not heard of subatomic thermo-fissional macro theory? Thermal concretisation by quantum friandisation of bendy quark string polarisation? Heat-induced temporal flux? Well neither have I, but the aliens may well have.
Yes there are. Local fusion, because you collect it close to source, and at a controlled rate. You can't slow your star, and you're setting up the collectors a quarter of a light hour away.
It's not that we feel profit is evil, but that profit-centric capitalism devalues all social goods that offer no profit. EG. I wouldn't mind hospitals profiting from treatment if it didn't mean that unprofitable patients end up dieing of easily treatable diseases.
Probably, but the issue is whether it's worth looking.
...and the answer is "probably not". A single purpose two-year search is stupid. The proper answer is to shove the signature into the list of things that computers automatically search for when analysing the skies and let the computer search from now until Type II civilisation kingdom come.
Energy and matter are interchangable. The plan is constantly gaining matter and energy from space (sunlight, starlight, cosmic rays, meteorites) and is also constantly losing matter and energy to space (evaporation of the upper atmosphere, radiated heat, leaked radio waves).
The amount of energy+matter in the universe is constant, but the amount on any given planet is constantly changing.
I'm also confused as to how you can judge the likely frequency of light when you don't know what their building the friggin' thing out of. I mean, if they're advanced enough to collect and build the materials to make an inconceivably large solar array in space, maybe they'll be able to work out an even more efficient means of gathering light and reabsorbing any waste heat -- ie no leakage. (Heck, even a Sterling engine would be pretty efficient when there's a massive solar collector on one side and cold, black vacuum on the other.)
If this is true, you must be cautioned with "correlation is not causation". I am inclined to believe that "an average organic apple" may taste better than "an average normal apple". However, I doubt whether this would be a direct consequence of the growing process, but rather the result of the farmer's choice of crop variety.
The most productive crops in terms of volume are often bland, tasteless and of poor nutritional value. I would expect that organic farmers are less inclined to use such crops and would pick superior varieties to cultivate.
I am taller, fitter and more intelligent than my forebearers. I am told that this is because of improved nutrition (meaning more efficient growth) and improved medicine and sanitation (meaning less energy wasted fighting disease). I would assume, therefore, that I would taste nicer. A free-range chicken tastes nicer than a battery chicken because it is healthier, so a healthier me should taste better.
Modern pesticides are just medicine for plants. Modern plant feeds are improved nutrition. So a non-organic Cox's Pippin apple should theoretically be healthier in and of itself than an organic one. Hence more nutritional and tastier. Worse for the environment? Perhaps. But to claim they're better tasting AND more nutritional AND better for the environment all at once strikes me as unlikely, and frankly illogical.
And if you don't believe me, consider that the soviets used radioactive emitters in the cultivation of farm crops. Totally against every single principle of organic farming, but it made the crops all-round better. It wasn't about Incredible Hulk-like superpowers, it was just that it killed off any bacteria living in the seed, awaiting germination. Disease-free, the plants' energies were directed on growing. Perhaps all farming should work that way...?
Just be glad you weren't Spanish and unemployed. The Spanish police don't like protestors. And neither do the US police, for that matter, so don't go assuming it's an us vs them thing. I'm sure there are very nice policemen in parts of the states, but where there's more work to do, they're unhappy and overworked. In the Costa Del Sol, they're unhappy and overworked. An unhappy, overworked policeman sees anyone who makes more work as the enemy. I had my pocket picked a lot further north in a relatively small city, outside of high tourist season, and the police were very helpful despite my limited Spanish (all I needed was a crime number, though, and that was only to get the phone company to retrieve the number on my prepaid mobile).
Probably because physical mail fraud has been on the books a long time and creates a literal paper trail that can be investigated.
This is true, but email fraud comes predigitised, and ripe for datamining. Collect enough examples, and the crime effectively solves itself. Once the system's hoovered up a couple of hundred matching examples, get a court order for IP addresses and you know what cybercaffs they use -- or if you're lucky they use wifi and are operating from public hotspots and you can grab a MAC address.
Or even you wait until you've got enough evidence for "beyond reasonable doubt" of continued conspiracy, then your computer flags up a potential sting when the next email comes through, and you grab the guys.
Seriously, a computer solves the crime, and the police's results improve no end. And some of the scummiest opportunists get banged up. Everyone's a winner.
Yes, but this spammer used the same name, the same profile pic and the same message every time. Even a computer should be able to tell the bot had failed the Turing test....
I wasn't really sure exactly what a "wire transfer" was -- to me, as a UK citizen, a bank-account-to-bank-account transfer is called a "bank transfer". I always assumed "wire transfer" was just Western Union and the like, but a quick look on wikipedia tells me that they're both accepted under the umbrella of "wire transfer". I'll stick to "bank transfer" personally for a bank-to-bank action.
The big problem with cyber crime is the lack of long-term storage of complaints. I got a scam email from Spain, claiming to be from a friend stranded in Madrid without a passport. I sent it on to the Guardia Civil. They sent me back a bunch of guidelines on not being scammed online.
Now, I didn't expect my single little failed fraud attempt to merit individual investigation. I had hoped that they would put it on file, and use it as supporting evidence for conspiracy in a larger case later on, but no-one tracks these things.
A group I frequent on Facebook was getting spammed for weeks by the same person advertising loans (in USD, in a group about a Scottish pub meetup). Every day, they'd get reported, and the message deleted. But even Facebook didn't seem to bother to track the individual complaints and spot the pattern.
So yes, review sites should be able to spot the pattern, but they won't. Because that costs money, and the internet is for cheapskates.
Exactly. A kid shouldn't be able to walk in and see a 30 foot deep pool of water without the presence of a trained lifeguard and the availability of a suitable sized flotation device.
Actually, before the internet hit the mainstream we were only really familiar with spoken US English -- not that many of us read in US English. Reading US English still often jars a little with me, and though you don't normally notice it in plain written prose, it can be quite marked when you're watching a film subtitled in US English. Even little things like a single L in "traveling" can be enough to break the flow of reading for me.
And as always, there is nothing more expensive than something that government supposedly gives you "for free".
Nonsense. Privatisation of public services always ends up costing more. Electricity, water, gas, phones, buses, trains -- they all cost more in total now that they're private enterprises. Education is cheaper overall in countries where the government pays. Healthcare is cheaper where the government pays. Your ideology may disagree, but reality trumps ideology.
In which case, you're shooting your own argument in the head. Very rarely can a professor afford to set aside the time to write a book start to finish, full-time, because very rarely can they command a serious advance from the publisher. The state is offering a lump-sum payment, so (in theory at least) these books should be better, thanks to a better opportunity to focus on the work at hand.
Many professors still use texts just because the company providing the text gives them a teacher's manual and course work so they don't have to do as much work. It's hard to provide those resources in an open-source book.
Really? Do you genuinely think the sales/revenue model changes the fundamental nature of the book? Does the act that governor signed specify books without teachers manuals? And does dispensing with closed-copyright make it A) harder or B) easier for teachers to share tutorial sheets derived from book content? Answers on a postcard to "dept of the bloody obvious"....
Urm... are you referring to the proceedings related to the "Unix" trademark or the proceedings claiming infringement of copyright on source code? Neither provides a useful analogue to this situation, so I'll assume there must have been another one I wasn't aware of....
Tell what to the people running Khan Academy? As far as I'm aware, Sal has never claimed that his personal choice to work pro bono is something everyone should adhere to. Some people are well-enough off to be able to work for free, others aren't. I got a free jar of jam from my landlord -- does that mean everyone else should be willing to make jam for free?
So experts can't be dyslexic, or foreign, or even just normal human beings who make normal performance errors when writing in an informal situation?
If a high-energy physicist accidentally says "I's" once instead of "I'm" while eating a burger, should we suspend his license to operate a particle accelerator?
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Uh-huh. Right, if you were to get a cent on every bottle, the bottle would go up in price by a cent. No-one's richer.
There's a fixed amount of money in the pot -- it's a question of when and where it gets distributed. You presumably have a stable job. You are paid monthly, come rain or shine. The author doesn't get that stable paycheque -- he is essentially gambling his labour value against the market. Your attitude seems to be that no-one's allowed to win the bet, but I'm guessing you're happy for people to lose the bet though -- you wouldn't propose funding any old hack a living wage for a book that's not worth reading, would you?
A Lemming-driven PC mentality? But Lemmings was ported to all the major platforms of the day. Personally, if Lemmings was going to drive the uptake of any platform, it wasn't the PC: the 2-player mode was only available on the Amiga. Now excuse me -- I must write to Sony demanding that they license the Lemmings franchise to gog.com . I want to play Lemmings!!!!!
Have you not heard of subatomic thermo-fissional macro theory? Thermal concretisation by quantum friandisation of bendy quark string polarisation? Heat-induced temporal flux? Well neither have I, but the aliens may well have.
It's just a shame they were expecting parrots to hatch....
Yes there are. Local fusion, because you collect it close to source, and at a controlled rate. You can't slow your star, and you're setting up the collectors a quarter of a light hour away.
It's not that we feel profit is evil, but that profit-centric capitalism devalues all social goods that offer no profit. EG. I wouldn't mind hospitals profiting from treatment if it didn't mean that unprofitable patients end up dieing of easily treatable diseases.
Probably, but the issue is whether it's worth looking.
...and the answer is "probably not". A single purpose two-year search is stupid. The proper answer is to shove the signature into the list of things that computers automatically search for when analysing the skies and let the computer search from now until Type II civilisation kingdom come.
Energy and matter are interchangable. The plan is constantly gaining matter and energy from space (sunlight, starlight, cosmic rays, meteorites) and is also constantly losing matter and energy to space (evaporation of the upper atmosphere, radiated heat, leaked radio waves). The amount of energy+matter in the universe is constant, but the amount on any given planet is constantly changing.
I'm also confused as to how you can judge the likely frequency of light when you don't know what their building the friggin' thing out of. I mean, if they're advanced enough to collect and build the materials to make an inconceivably large solar array in space, maybe they'll be able to work out an even more efficient means of gathering light and reabsorbing any waste heat -- ie no leakage. (Heck, even a Sterling engine would be pretty efficient when there's a massive solar collector on one side and cold, black vacuum on the other.)
What does GF mean? Girlfriend? I'm a /.er, you insensitive clod!
(And maybe I should have explicitly mentioned cannibalism, because that's what I was thinking of.)
If this is true, you must be cautioned with "correlation is not causation". I am inclined to believe that "an average organic apple" may taste better than "an average normal apple". However, I doubt whether this would be a direct consequence of the growing process, but rather the result of the farmer's choice of crop variety.
The most productive crops in terms of volume are often bland, tasteless and of poor nutritional value. I would expect that organic farmers are less inclined to use such crops and would pick superior varieties to cultivate.
I am taller, fitter and more intelligent than my forebearers. I am told that this is because of improved nutrition (meaning more efficient growth) and improved medicine and sanitation (meaning less energy wasted fighting disease). I would assume, therefore, that I would taste nicer. A free-range chicken tastes nicer than a battery chicken because it is healthier, so a healthier me should taste better.
Modern pesticides are just medicine for plants. Modern plant feeds are improved nutrition. So a non-organic Cox's Pippin apple should theoretically be healthier in and of itself than an organic one. Hence more nutritional and tastier. Worse for the environment? Perhaps. But to claim they're better tasting AND more nutritional AND better for the environment all at once strikes me as unlikely, and frankly illogical.
And if you don't believe me, consider that the soviets used radioactive emitters in the cultivation of farm crops. Totally against every single principle of organic farming, but it made the crops all-round better. It wasn't about Incredible Hulk-like superpowers, it was just that it killed off any bacteria living in the seed, awaiting germination. Disease-free, the plants' energies were directed on growing. Perhaps all farming should work that way...?
Just be glad you weren't Spanish and unemployed. The Spanish police don't like protestors. And neither do the US police, for that matter, so don't go assuming it's an us vs them thing. I'm sure there are very nice policemen in parts of the states, but where there's more work to do, they're unhappy and overworked. In the Costa Del Sol, they're unhappy and overworked. An unhappy, overworked policeman sees anyone who makes more work as the enemy. I had my pocket picked a lot further north in a relatively small city, outside of high tourist season, and the police were very helpful despite my limited Spanish (all I needed was a crime number, though, and that was only to get the phone company to retrieve the number on my prepaid mobile).
Probably because physical mail fraud has been on the books a long time and creates a literal paper trail that can be investigated.
This is true, but email fraud comes predigitised, and ripe for datamining. Collect enough examples, and the crime effectively solves itself. Once the system's hoovered up a couple of hundred matching examples, get a court order for IP addresses and you know what cybercaffs they use -- or if you're lucky they use wifi and are operating from public hotspots and you can grab a MAC address.
Or even you wait until you've got enough evidence for "beyond reasonable doubt" of continued conspiracy, then your computer flags up a potential sting when the next email comes through, and you grab the guys.
Seriously, a computer solves the crime, and the police's results improve no end. And some of the scummiest opportunists get banged up. Everyone's a winner.
Yes, but this spammer used the same name, the same profile pic and the same message every time. Even a computer should be able to tell the bot had failed the Turing test....
I wasn't really sure exactly what a "wire transfer" was -- to me, as a UK citizen, a bank-account-to-bank-account transfer is called a "bank transfer". I always assumed "wire transfer" was just Western Union and the like, but a quick look on wikipedia tells me that they're both accepted under the umbrella of "wire transfer". I'll stick to "bank transfer" personally for a bank-to-bank action.
The big problem with cyber crime is the lack of long-term storage of complaints. I got a scam email from Spain, claiming to be from a friend stranded in Madrid without a passport. I sent it on to the Guardia Civil. They sent me back a bunch of guidelines on not being scammed online.
Now, I didn't expect my single little failed fraud attempt to merit individual investigation. I had hoped that they would put it on file, and use it as supporting evidence for conspiracy in a larger case later on, but no-one tracks these things.
A group I frequent on Facebook was getting spammed for weeks by the same person advertising loans (in USD, in a group about a Scottish pub meetup). Every day, they'd get reported, and the message deleted. But even Facebook didn't seem to bother to track the individual complaints and spot the pattern.
So yes, review sites should be able to spot the pattern, but they won't. Because that costs money, and the internet is for cheapskates.
Exactly. A kid shouldn't be able to walk in and see a 30 foot deep pool of water without the presence of a trained lifeguard and the availability of a suitable sized flotation device.
Actually, before the internet hit the mainstream we were only really familiar with spoken US English -- not that many of us read in US English. Reading US English still often jars a little with me, and though you don't normally notice it in plain written prose, it can be quite marked when you're watching a film subtitled in US English. Even little things like a single L in "traveling" can be enough to break the flow of reading for me.
And as always, there is nothing more expensive than something that government supposedly gives you "for free".
Nonsense. Privatisation of public services always ends up costing more. Electricity, water, gas, phones, buses, trains -- they all cost more in total now that they're private enterprises. Education is cheaper overall in countries where the government pays. Healthcare is cheaper where the government pays. Your ideology may disagree, but reality trumps ideology.
In which case, you're shooting your own argument in the head. Very rarely can a professor afford to set aside the time to write a book start to finish, full-time, because very rarely can they command a serious advance from the publisher. The state is offering a lump-sum payment, so (in theory at least) these books should be better, thanks to a better opportunity to focus on the work at hand.
I know that many of /. readers have never really tried to create highly quality production level content, but it is really hard to do.
Oh please. $200 for a trig textbook? Oftentimes, there aren't even any major changes. These prices are indefensible.
But he wasn't defending the retail price of current textbooks -- he was defending the public funding for the new initiative.
Urm... are you referring to the proceedings related to the "Unix" trademark or the proceedings claiming infringement of copyright on source code? Neither provides a useful analogue to this situation, so I'll assume there must have been another one I wasn't aware of....
Tell what to the people running Khan Academy? As far as I'm aware, Sal has never claimed that his personal choice to work pro bono is something everyone should adhere to. Some people are well-enough off to be able to work for free, others aren't. I got a free jar of jam from my landlord -- does that mean everyone else should be willing to make jam for free?
So experts can't be dyslexic, or foreign, or even just normal human beings who make normal performance errors when writing in an informal situation?
If a high-energy physicist accidentally says "I's" once instead of "I'm" while eating a burger, should we suspend his license to operate a particle accelerator?