I think I get what you're saying. A dodgy standard can be a pain in the arse, especially if everyone does the sheep thing and follows it.
Problem is that at a certain point of technological maturity a standard really is necessary, otherwise you get vendor lockin and all the associated grief. However, if the standard is formalised much before that time it won't be able to keep up with a still-high change, and probably won't be much good. The trick is either waiting til the right moment or being willing to modify the standard later.
Actually, $1.2bn is apparently less than 1% of the cost of building a city.
And regards the whole freedom thing: I thought that what triggered off this governmental flamewar in the first place was the United States' blocking of the proposed.xxx domain? The UN members only started to get worried when it became clear that the US was willing to throw its political weight around online.
I seriously doubt this will help China repress its people further in any major way, because this will not give it direct control over any non-top-level domain name, or the content of the site thereof. The worst it could do is have Taiwan's TLD reassigned or similar mischief, but it still wouldn't be able to touch the individual sites. It probably won't even be able to touch the other TLDs either - I'd expect them to delegate control of the individual TLDs to the relevant countries, as with the current system.
If you feel your government is the best one for maintaining freedom online, that's cool - you've got the entire.us TLD to play around in. If you feel that your government - which from the outside looks to be getting less freedom-friendly by the minute - should be able to use the internet, the most powerful collaborative tool currently available, as a political lever then I'm afraid I must disagree.
I've been working on a Topics In Analysis problem sheet for most of the day. I spent a decent chunk of the remainder discovering that in a couple of weeks I have 5 supervisions inside of 3 days (each of which requires about 20 hours of hardcore work beforehand just to avoid pissing off the supervisor). I'm quite tired and moderately stressed. And taking the piss out of idiots like this makes me feel that all the brainhoning is somehow worthwhile...
Allowing murder in society makes it much harder for stable organisations to form, as you never know when key members will get topped. This means that specialisation, the key to economic success, is harder to achieve and sustain. This damages the economy.
And the fact that it's so short, sweet and self-explanatory is why we see the same taboo against killing people without due warning cropping up worldwide.
I'm pretty sure that having a diverse selection of distros is a good thing. It means that there are many strategies being tried simultaneously, and thus more room for growth of computer science as a whole. It may be bad for any individual distribution, or even bad for Linux in general, but overall I think it's worth the added complexity.
Of course, once an area has stabilised and no new ideas are cropping up, then we can start to standardise stuff without doing damage.
Remember, Microsoft is patenting parts of their next Office format, and refuses to support OpenDoc. Good luck converting when the only company allowed to use your input format won't touch your output format with a bargepole.
I think you missed my point slightly. Here's an approximate quote from my lecturer: "Now, back last year, we taught you that fluid going down a pipe looks like this [draws a diagram]. That's completely wrong. No fluid ever flowed like that."
The Fluid Dynamics I was talking about wasn't just lacking in applicability, it was completely misleading as to the true behaviour of fluids. If you want the specifics, it was along the lines of: second year FD teaches that a fluid can flow in a uniform fashion down a pipe - every bit going at the same speed. Third year FD teaches that that can't happen cos viscosity (friction) stops the fluid dead at the wall of the pipe. The second year version was a complete lie - but it was a necessary simplification if they didn't want us to get confused and bored and start skipping lectures.
Again, the Set Theory I was talking about wasn't just useless for applied mathematicians - I'm a pure mathmo myself, so I find plenty of use for that sort of stuff - it was actively wrong in places. I'm afraid this time I can't remember the specifics (that was first year and I haven't had the third year course yet) but I can remember being horribly disillusioned when, while proudly spouting off to my third-year friends, I was kindly informed that the theory I was relying on was only true in about half the variants of Set Theory floating around.
We all lie to students. How's a rainbow formed? Well, raindrops refract light, y'see, so... why doesn't it smudge out in a disgusting blur? How does a braincell behave? Well, you draw a bunch of lines going into the cell, and a bunch of lines coming out, and assign a matrix to your "cell" to estimate the level of synaptic firing. Shame it doesn't work like that in real life. I'm currently doing an entire course that reformulates Quantum Mechanics in a pretty way, and I'm feeling slightly depressed cos I know we throw most of it away when we hit Quantum Field Theory next year.
There are a lot of examples of bull out there. Many of them have beneficial side-effects because they allow you to construct a mental framework of what's going on that you can then graft information onto. Eventually the original framework may be trashed, but the process will be slow enough that you can avoid having to rebuild your intuition as to how the system behaves from scratch. I'd tend to place these pictures in that class.
I've just started on the Navier-Stokes equations, Reynolds numbers and the other nuts and bolts of viscous flow in my Maths degree course. Turns out that last year's Fluid Dynamics course (Euler's equation, Bernoulli etc) was about 50% complete bull. But the bull was necessary to keep us awake and interested long enough to get to the good stuff. Same with almost every science or maths class I've ever taken (the "set theory" we did in First Year being the classic example). Same with this art.
The company I did intern work for over the summer received a lot of.pdfs. Problem was, their internal resume-searcher system (need a contractor with skill x? Just search for it. Very handy) could only read text, doc, rtf and (I think) html.
I spent a couple of hours figuring out a system to handle this (hey, I was cheap labour). I ended up using the trial download of this system which worked very well. The bonus was that it has a command line interface so it was easy to do a vbs wrapper to recurse through the folder-full-of-resumes looking for pdfs. It's a very good litte program, at least til someone writes the necessary filters for koconverter. (And no, I'm not affiliated with this company).
Anyway, the point I intended to make is that there are good reasons for companies to be unhappy with pdfs that are completely separate from the standardisation thing.
I'd strongly suspect that most of these commoners just love whatever comes with the box. Which in almost all cases (thank you Mr Monopoly) would be Windows.
To justify your statement you'd need to test two groups of people with Linux and Windows respectively, neither group having touched a computer in their life. I don't believe such a test has ever been done on a suitably large scale.
Mathematicians prove stuff. Scientists just demonstrate that the evidence appears to suggest stuff. The latter is of course a lot more tentative and prone to change. So the situation you mention could easily come up if the scientists kept finding new sources of data to evaluate or new implications of their existing models to test, both of which have been occurring as the computing and mathematical fields of human endeavour have flourished.
In science, there's no right or wrong answer - there's only "best answer with the data we have".
Firstly, with software patents and the DMCA and all that crap, it's possible for a company to restrict the ability of its competition to function fully (play MP3, read MSOffice formats etc). No-one is going to buy nonfunctional software so no proper competition exists.
Secondly, most people don't have the knowhow to, say, realise that whilst variants of Linux may be less user-friendly than variants of Windows, the former tends to be more stable. They just use whatever comes with the PC. Even the major executives will tend to just go with whatever the rest of the market is using. Again, no proper competition.
I think the answer is probably not legislation - that'll just inevitably shut out small developers. Rather, if I were government (perish the thought) I'd set up a certification scheme to measure the extent to which companies are willing to stand behind their products. The Debian Foundation, Ubuntu and other groups just using the GPL would get a Bronze - they don't stand behind their products, although those repackaging said products might. Microsoft would also get a bronze with their current EULA (great reading if you're ever bored). Red Hat or SuSE might approach the celebrated Gold standard - I don't know what terms they sell their services under.
Any obvious holes with this? I'm open to having the shit ripped out of it if anyone feels like it.
When a freemail provider is responsible for all its client actions unless it can refer to the actual person that is the client that has setup that mailbox, the problem effectively has ended.
Along with any chance of {political/economic/actual} survival for hoping-to-be-anonymous whistleblowers.
that they've done the QT thing and made sure they have copyright to their entire codebase (not hard if, as they claim, the FOSS community hasn't been contributing much). Then they can take their codebase, add to it and rerelease under a closed license. You're right that they can't do anything about the stuff that's already in the open tho.
This is only a dodgy strategy if anyone *has* been contributing, and didn't turn their copyrights over to TNS. Anyone gonna put their hand up here?
Imagine ten people putting in 1 hour each every day on the project. They put in one hour of work, but because they share the end results they get nine hours of "other peoples work" for free. It sounds unfair: get nine hours of work for doing one hour. But it obviously is not.
That's the payoff. It's always been the payoff, that and whatever can be made from packaged distribution. Donations are a nice icing to the cake, but anyone who uses Linux or Firefox or OpenOffice or Apache in their day to day life has no call to turn up the guilt level if they don't get sent any.
If I'm reading them right, a Club With Nail In [tm], when applied to the head of a copyright infringer, could equally be considered a technical prevention measure, and hence selling hard hats should be illegal.
Before anyone comments: this analogy works because the above commentary seems to suggest that a regional encoding system which would coincidentally block some pirated games from being played should be considered a copy protection measure on that basis. Which seems kind of tangential to the actual purpose of the chip, as with the CWNI [tm].
I stopped buying the RIAA's stuff a while ago (mostly I just donate to independents these days). Sadly, they're still in business. The problem appears to relate to the world's large population of Britney-Spears-addicted sheeple. I have yet to figure out a solution that doesn't involve at least a little genocide.
Slashdot Mirror
It is if, for example, valuable medicines can't get through.
Different country, different laws. Or at least different wording thereof.
I think I get what you're saying. A dodgy standard can be a pain in the arse, especially if everyone does the sheep thing and follows it.
Problem is that at a certain point of technological maturity a standard really is necessary, otherwise you get vendor lockin and all the associated grief. However, if the standard is formalised much before that time it won't be able to keep up with a still-high change, and probably won't be much good. The trick is either waiting til the right moment or being willing to modify the standard later.
Actually, $1.2bn is apparently less than 1% of the cost of building a city.
.xxx domain? The UN members only started to get worried when it became clear that the US was willing to throw its political weight around online.
.us TLD to play around in. If you feel that your government - which from the outside looks to be getting less freedom-friendly by the minute - should be able to use the internet, the most powerful collaborative tool currently available, as a political lever then I'm afraid I must disagree.
And regards the whole freedom thing: I thought that what triggered off this governmental flamewar in the first place was the United States' blocking of the proposed
I seriously doubt this will help China repress its people further in any major way, because this will not give it direct control over any non-top-level domain name, or the content of the site thereof. The worst it could do is have Taiwan's TLD reassigned or similar mischief, but it still wouldn't be able to touch the individual sites. It probably won't even be able to touch the other TLDs either - I'd expect them to delegate control of the individual TLDs to the relevant countries, as with the current system.
If you feel your government is the best one for maintaining freedom online, that's cool - you've got the entire
Why don't we just set up the "Free Jon Lech Johansen" fund now? Will save time later.
Didn't work for the biotech patents, ain't gonna work here.
I've been working on a Topics In Analysis problem sheet for most of the day. I spent a decent chunk of the remainder discovering that in a couple of weeks I have 5 supervisions inside of 3 days (each of which requires about 20 hours of hardcore work beforehand just to avoid pissing off the supervisor). I'm quite tired and moderately stressed. And taking the piss out of idiots like this makes me feel that all the brainhoning is somehow worthwhile...
Allowing murder in society makes it much harder for stable organisations to form, as you never know when key members will get topped. This means that specialisation, the key to economic success, is harder to achieve and sustain. This damages the economy.
And the fact that it's so short, sweet and self-explanatory is why we see the same taboo against killing people without due warning cropping up worldwide.
I'm pretty sure that having a diverse selection of distros is a good thing. It means that there are many strategies being tried simultaneously, and thus more room for growth of computer science as a whole. It may be bad for any individual distribution, or even bad for Linux in general, but overall I think it's worth the added complexity.
Of course, once an area has stabilised and no new ideas are cropping up, then we can start to standardise stuff without doing damage.
Then buy a standard newspaper - much more cost-effective
Remember, Microsoft is patenting parts of their next Office format, and refuses to support OpenDoc. Good luck converting when the only company allowed to use your input format won't touch your output format with a bargepole.
I think you missed my point slightly. Here's an approximate quote from my lecturer: "Now, back last year, we taught you that fluid going down a pipe looks like this [draws a diagram]. That's completely wrong. No fluid ever flowed like that."
The Fluid Dynamics I was talking about wasn't just lacking in applicability, it was completely misleading as to the true behaviour of fluids. If you want the specifics, it was along the lines of: second year FD teaches that a fluid can flow in a uniform fashion down a pipe - every bit going at the same speed. Third year FD teaches that that can't happen cos viscosity (friction) stops the fluid dead at the wall of the pipe. The second year version was a complete lie - but it was a necessary simplification if they didn't want us to get confused and bored and start skipping lectures.
Again, the Set Theory I was talking about wasn't just useless for applied mathematicians - I'm a pure mathmo myself, so I find plenty of use for that sort of stuff - it was actively wrong in places. I'm afraid this time I can't remember the specifics (that was first year and I haven't had the third year course yet) but I can remember being horribly disillusioned when, while proudly spouting off to my third-year friends, I was kindly informed that the theory I was relying on was only true in about half the variants of Set Theory floating around.
We all lie to students. How's a rainbow formed? Well, raindrops refract light, y'see, so... why doesn't it smudge out in a disgusting blur? How does a braincell behave? Well, you draw a bunch of lines going into the cell, and a bunch of lines coming out, and assign a matrix to your "cell" to estimate the level of synaptic firing. Shame it doesn't work like that in real life. I'm currently doing an entire course that reformulates Quantum Mechanics in a pretty way, and I'm feeling slightly depressed cos I know we throw most of it away when we hit Quantum Field Theory next year.
There are a lot of examples of bull out there. Many of them have beneficial side-effects because they allow you to construct a mental framework of what's going on that you can then graft information onto. Eventually the original framework may be trashed, but the process will be slow enough that you can avoid having to rebuild your intuition as to how the system behaves from scratch. I'd tend to place these pictures in that class.
I've just started on the Navier-Stokes equations, Reynolds numbers and the other nuts and bolts of viscous flow in my Maths degree course. Turns out that last year's Fluid Dynamics course (Euler's equation, Bernoulli etc) was about 50% complete bull. But the bull was necessary to keep us awake and interested long enough to get to the good stuff. Same with almost every science or maths class I've ever taken (the "set theory" we did in First Year being the classic example). Same with this art.
The company I did intern work for over the summer received a lot of .pdfs. Problem was, their internal resume-searcher system (need a contractor with skill x? Just search for it. Very handy) could only read text, doc, rtf and (I think) html.
I spent a couple of hours figuring out a system to handle this (hey, I was cheap labour). I ended up using the trial download of this system which worked very well. The bonus was that it has a command line interface so it was easy to do a vbs wrapper to recurse through the folder-full-of-resumes looking for pdfs. It's a very good litte program, at least til someone writes the necessary filters for koconverter. (And no, I'm not affiliated with this company).
Anyway, the point I intended to make is that there are good reasons for companies to be unhappy with pdfs that are completely separate from the standardisation thing.
you freakin pinko's
I have never actually heard the word "pinko" used in serious conversation. My life is now complete.
I'd strongly suspect that most of these commoners just love whatever comes with the box. Which in almost all cases (thank you Mr Monopoly) would be Windows.
To justify your statement you'd need to test two groups of people with Linux and Windows respectively, neither group having touched a computer in their life. I don't believe such a test has ever been done on a suitably large scale.
I'm a Whitespace user myself, you insensitive clod!
Mathematicians prove stuff. Scientists just demonstrate that the evidence appears to suggest stuff. The latter is of course a lot more tentative and prone to change. So the situation you mention could easily come up if the scientists kept finding new sources of data to evaluate or new implications of their existing models to test, both of which have been occurring as the computing and mathematical fields of human endeavour have flourished.
In science, there's no right or wrong answer - there's only "best answer with the data we have".
Firstly, with software patents and the DMCA and all that crap, it's possible for a company to restrict the ability of its competition to function fully (play MP3, read MSOffice formats etc). No-one is going to buy nonfunctional software so no proper competition exists.
Secondly, most people don't have the knowhow to, say, realise that whilst variants of Linux may be less user-friendly than variants of Windows, the former tends to be more stable. They just use whatever comes with the PC. Even the major executives will tend to just go with whatever the rest of the market is using. Again, no proper competition.
I think the answer is probably not legislation - that'll just inevitably shut out small developers. Rather, if I were government (perish the thought) I'd set up a certification scheme to measure the extent to which companies are willing to stand behind their products. The Debian Foundation, Ubuntu and other groups just using the GPL would get a Bronze - they don't stand behind their products, although those repackaging said products might. Microsoft would also get a bronze with their current EULA (great reading if you're ever bored). Red Hat or SuSE might approach the celebrated Gold standard - I don't know what terms they sell their services under.
Any obvious holes with this? I'm open to having the shit ripped out of it if anyone feels like it.
The moon is, of course, a satellite, despite the fact that (according to google) it's only marginally smaller than pluto.
When a freemail provider is responsible for all its client actions unless it can refer to the actual person that is the client that has setup that mailbox, the problem effectively has ended.
Along with any chance of {political/economic/actual} survival for hoping-to-be-anonymous whistleblowers.
that they've done the QT thing and made sure they have copyright to their entire codebase (not hard if, as they claim, the FOSS community hasn't been contributing much). Then they can take their codebase, add to it and rerelease under a closed license. You're right that they can't do anything about the stuff that's already in the open tho.
This is only a dodgy strategy if anyone *has* been contributing, and didn't turn their copyrights over to TNS. Anyone gonna put their hand up here?
Imagine ten people putting in 1 hour each every day on the project. They put in one hour of work, but because they share the end results they get nine hours of "other peoples work" for free. It sounds unfair: get nine hours of work for doing one hour. But it obviously is not.
That's the payoff. It's always been the payoff, that and whatever can be made from packaged distribution. Donations are a nice icing to the cake, but anyone who uses Linux or Firefox or OpenOffice or Apache in their day to day life has no call to turn up the guilt level if they don't get sent any.
If I'm reading them right, a Club With Nail In [tm], when applied to the head of a copyright infringer, could equally be considered a technical prevention measure, and hence selling hard hats should be illegal.
Before anyone comments: this analogy works because the above commentary seems to suggest that a regional encoding system which would coincidentally block some pirated games from being played should be considered a copy protection measure on that basis. Which seems kind of tangential to the actual purpose of the chip, as with the CWNI [tm].
I stopped buying the RIAA's stuff a while ago (mostly I just donate to independents these days). Sadly, they're still in business. The problem appears to relate to the world's large population of Britney-Spears-addicted sheeple. I have yet to figure out a solution that doesn't involve at least a little genocide.