For this post I define "property" as "that which is subject to an exclusive right".
Compulsory licensing is a more difficult question. In theory it might be a good thing, but in practice I am wary of requiring anyone to surrender the control they have of their work by law
In Slashdot's home country, the owner of an exclusive right in a particular property, be it land or a work of authorship, has a Fifth Amendment right to "just compensation" for public use of the property. Constitutionally, a work can enter the eminent domain before it enters the public domain, and "control" doesn't enter into it. Once an author has been compensated enough to cover the cost of producing a work plus enough profit to cover the uncertainty of its becoming popular, what is the use of "control" anyway, other than in preventing competition?
without also providing real enforcement of their rights at government expense.
In Slashdot's home country, there are already criminal penalties for commercial infringement of copyright on a substantial scale.
Good luck for someone who's just beginning to learn how to program to learn how to root an iPod touch, iPhone, or iPad. And even on a device that runs Android, a root often means a full wipe.
in case of Android PPC's, you got full linux distro and compilers at your fingertips, literally.
You are referring to things like the "GNURoot Debian" and "XSDL" apps, right?
No sympathy for iPhone people, you bought into the walled garden.
If a child received an iPod touch, iPhone, or iPad as a gift from parents or other relatives, how exactly did he or she "buy in"?
Another issue is how do I pay my neighbor kid to mow my lawn with a credit card?
Paypal?
That won't work. From the PayPal TOS: "For an individual to open a U.S. PayPal account and use the PayPal services, you must be a resident of the United States or one of its territories and at least 18 years old, or the age of majority in your state of residence."
Gift cards?
But how would a child make change for an unopened $50 gift card, or even quickly verify that a particular gift card contains the balance the buyer claims it to contain?
[Neighbor kid] gets one of those Square card readers and plugs ut into his iPhone.
That won't work. Square's TOS states: "You represent and warrant to us that: (a) you are at least eighteen (18) years of age". This means the only Square thing a child can buy for an iPhone is a Final Fantasy game.
Discriminates against the poor! Too poor to put $1 in a credit union account to get a debit card? What cash?
How about "too young"?
Children are excluded by definition from official definitions of the unbanked because they often are prohibited from holding a bank or credit union account in their own name. But children feel the same practical problems as the unbanked. Even 18-year-olds may not yet have a utility bill in their own name to establish their identity for purposes of "Know Your Customer" regulations that banks and credit unions are obligated to follow. This means a child would end up spending 10 percent extra on Visa gift card issuance fees in order to buy anything else.
3. Businesses will raise prices to cover higher costs. They already take plastic.
Children who mow lawns or watch your younger children do not take plastic. Lawn care and babysitting are among the few jobs available to children under 16 under applicable child labor laws.
Anecdotal evidence is great for proving the possibility of something, I agree. It's not so great for proving how common a particular situation is, as jellomizer was attempting to do with "In general I have found they are more".
I think OneHundredAndTen was trying to insinuate that the use of the word "evidence" in the name of "anecdotal evidence" is a misnomer for the weight that it ought to carry.
Would you prefer an 8:9 aspect ratio, 12% taller than it is wide? If so, take your 16:9 display and snap a window to fill half of it. That's one advantage of a laptop over a tablet: split screen is a standard window management feature.
Getting people to buy their very first PC is also agonizingly difficult now. How do you talk someone into investing in this big clunky box when their PPC does everything the big clunky box does?
Four words: Advanced Placement Computer Science. Phones traditionally haven't been very useful for learning programming. Even when docked to a Bluetooth keyboard and HDMI monitor, their security models are hostile to compilers.
It's also true that nobody but gamers, artists, and hobbyists actually needs to own a PC anymore.
The flip side of this is that with PC component prices rising due to lack of economies of scale, the sticker shock of needing a PC might end up dissuading someone who gets buy with a phone and a tablet from becoming a gamer, artist, or hobbyist in the first place.
There's no technical reason why a modern phone couldn't connect to an hdmi display and bluetooth keyboard/mouse and do everything that your 2007 desktop can.
Other than that emulation of an x86 executable on an ARM processor is slower than running it natively on an x86-64 processor.
Turns out that good readers of substantially phonetic languages start with sounding-out (Phonics-style).
This works for languages that are at least roughly morphophonemic, such as English. But how do readers start out in a language that doesn't write short vowels (like Hebrew or Arabic) or writes morpheme symbols descended from abstracted hieroglyphs (like Chinese)?
Tested a year or so later (if they haven't been re-exposed to the second language meanwhile) those taught by the Grammatical Method had a significant skill loss, while those taught by the Audiolingual Method were unable to emit any sentence they hadn't encountered in class.
What happens when students do grammatical method for a semester and audiolingual for the other semester?
That's part of why I hate videos that don't make use of the advantages of the medium. If you just want to explain and not show, let me read it. It's faster.
I think many people upload videos to YouTube instead of posting text articles on their own websites because YouTube has a right column listing recommended related videos, and they anticipate that their videos might appear in the right column of popular videos by other uploaders. What's the counterpart to YouTube for text articles, including an automatically generated list of recommended articles from multiple authors?
God, you're one of those people who uses single letter variable names and think it saves time, aren't you?
The MOS 6502 processor has single-letter register names (A, X, Y, P, and S), and the most commonly used C compiler distributed as free software isn't nearly as good at optimizing as even an average assembly language programmer. Thus coding directly in assembly language can save a lot of CPU time. And if a variable fits in the X or Y register, I might add a comment to the effect:
; here, X is the actor ID and Y is the animation frame number
Any variable that spills out to the local variable area on zero page gets a more descriptive name, such as ceiling_ht or mapsrc.
A physical computer resembles a linear bounded automaton (LBA), or a Turing machine with tape length proportional to input length, more than it does a general Turing machine. Though halting is not provable for a Turing machine, it is provable for an LBA.
Or people trying to debug something over Skype screen sharing, with voice and screencast one way and voice the other way. (This has happened a couple times for me.)
As a Safari user, are you willing to pay extra for Safari support so that each web developer can afford a Mac on which to test a site in Safari in addition to the computer he already uses?
So someone uses something that isn't approved yet which would break functionality when Slashdot wouldn't accept anyway. That makes no sense.
As of step 4, the new code points would have been approved, just not yet blacklisted on hypothetical Slashdot-with-Unicode (HSWU). I guess we disagree on whether HSWU would use a blacklist or a whitelist.
[Windows Phone Store is] the only mobile app store that I bother with these days because there's too much competition on the others and the users treat games as disposable as tissues
Have you considered PlayStation Store (for PlayStation Vita) or Nintendo eShop (for Nintendo 3DS)?
Apple has quite a viable alternative, and if they introduced a few Macs in the $500 range, they'd be good to go.
I don't know what country you're posting from, but as of today, a Mac mini is $499. I'm aware that doesn't include a monitor, but let's say $514 if you reuse your living room HDTV as a monitor and source a keyboard and mouse from Goodwill.
Slashdot Mirror
For this post I define "property" as "that which is subject to an exclusive right".
Compulsory licensing is a more difficult question. In theory it might be a good thing, but in practice I am wary of requiring anyone to surrender the control they have of their work by law
In Slashdot's home country, the owner of an exclusive right in a particular property, be it land or a work of authorship, has a Fifth Amendment right to "just compensation" for public use of the property. Constitutionally, a work can enter the eminent domain before it enters the public domain, and "control" doesn't enter into it. Once an author has been compensated enough to cover the cost of producing a work plus enough profit to cover the uncertainty of its becoming popular, what is the use of "control" anyway, other than in preventing competition?
without also providing real enforcement of their rights at government expense.
In Slashdot's home country, there are already criminal penalties for commercial infringement of copyright on a substantial scale.
Google thinks a person has a circle of friends in meatspace, at least one of whom owns another cellular phone.
In the case of PPC's, root the thing and boom
Good luck for someone who's just beginning to learn how to program to learn how to root an iPod touch, iPhone, or iPad. And even on a device that runs Android, a root often means a full wipe.
in case of Android PPC's, you got full linux distro and compilers at your fingertips, literally.
You are referring to things like the "GNURoot Debian" and "XSDL" apps, right?
No sympathy for iPhone people, you bought into the walled garden.
If a child received an iPod touch, iPhone, or iPad as a gift from parents or other relatives, how exactly did he or she "buy in"?
PayPal, Apple Pay, etc all have person to person "wire" transfers
For adults, not for children. Read their terms of service.
Another issue is how do I pay my neighbor kid to mow my lawn with a credit card?
Paypal?
That won't work. From the PayPal TOS: "For an individual to open a U.S. PayPal account and use the PayPal services, you must be a resident of the United States or one of its territories and at least 18 years old, or the age of majority in your state of residence."
Gift cards?
But how would a child make change for an unopened $50 gift card, or even quickly verify that a particular gift card contains the balance the buyer claims it to contain?
[Neighbor kid] gets one of those Square card readers and plugs ut into his iPhone.
That won't work. Square's TOS states: "You represent and warrant to us that: (a) you are at least eighteen (18) years of age". This means the only Square thing a child can buy for an iPhone is a Final Fantasy game.
Discriminates against the poor!
Too poor to put $1 in a credit union account to get a debit card? What cash?
How about "too young"?
Children are excluded by definition from official definitions of the unbanked because they often are prohibited from holding a bank or credit union account in their own name. But children feel the same practical problems as the unbanked. Even 18-year-olds may not yet have a utility bill in their own name to establish their identity for purposes of "Know Your Customer" regulations that banks and credit unions are obligated to follow. This means a child would end up spending 10 percent extra on Visa gift card issuance fees in order to buy anything else.
3. Businesses will raise prices to cover higher costs.
They already take plastic.
Children who mow lawns or watch your younger children do not take plastic. Lawn care and babysitting are among the few jobs available to children under 16 under applicable child labor laws.
Anecdotal evidence is great for proving the possibility of something, I agree. It's not so great for proving how common a particular situation is, as jellomizer was attempting to do with "In general I have found they are more".
I think OneHundredAndTen was trying to insinuate that the use of the word "evidence" in the name of "anecdotal evidence" is a misnomer for the weight that it ought to carry.
You can skip out on 1 and 2 by buying a refurbished ThinkPad with GNU/Linux from Technoethical.
Would you prefer an 8:9 aspect ratio, 12% taller than it is wide? If so, take your 16:9 display and snap a window to fill half of it. That's one advantage of a laptop over a tablet: split screen is a standard window management feature.
Not to mention Macs and iPads, which use part of the FreeBSD userland.
Getting people to buy their very first PC is also agonizingly difficult now. How do you talk someone into investing in this big clunky box when their PPC does everything the big clunky box does?
Four words: Advanced Placement Computer Science. Phones traditionally haven't been very useful for learning programming. Even when docked to a Bluetooth keyboard and HDMI monitor, their security models are hostile to compilers.
It's also true that nobody but gamers, artists, and hobbyists actually needs to own a PC anymore.
The flip side of this is that with PC component prices rising due to lack of economies of scale, the sticker shock of needing a PC might end up dissuading someone who gets buy with a phone and a tablet from becoming a gamer, artist, or hobbyist in the first place.
There's no technical reason why a modern phone couldn't connect to an hdmi display and bluetooth keyboard/mouse and do everything that your 2007 desktop can.
Other than that emulation of an x86 executable on an ARM processor is slower than running it natively on an x86-64 processor.
Turns out that good readers of substantially phonetic languages start with sounding-out (Phonics-style).
This works for languages that are at least roughly morphophonemic, such as English. But how do readers start out in a language that doesn't write short vowels (like Hebrew or Arabic) or writes morpheme symbols descended from abstracted hieroglyphs (like Chinese)?
Tested a year or so later (if they haven't been re-exposed to the second language meanwhile) those taught by the Grammatical Method had a significant skill loss, while those taught by the Audiolingual Method were unable to emit any sentence they hadn't encountered in class.
What happens when students do grammatical method for a semester and audiolingual for the other semester?
That's part of why I hate videos that don't make use of the advantages of the medium. If you just want to explain and not show, let me read it. It's faster.
I think many people upload videos to YouTube instead of posting text articles on their own websites because YouTube has a right column listing recommended related videos, and they anticipate that their videos might appear in the right column of popular videos by other uploaders. What's the counterpart to YouTube for text articles, including an automatically generated list of recommended articles from multiple authors?
God, you're one of those people who uses single letter variable names and think it saves time, aren't you?
The MOS 6502 processor has single-letter register names (A, X, Y, P, and S), and the most commonly used C compiler distributed as free software isn't nearly as good at optimizing as even an average assembly language programmer. Thus coding directly in assembly language can save a lot of CPU time. And if a variable fits in the X or Y register, I might add a comment to the effect:
Any variable that spills out to the local variable area on zero page gets a more descriptive name, such as ceiling_ht or mapsrc.
how do you handle the halting problem?
By punting and saying "Out of memory".
A physical computer resembles a linear bounded automaton (LBA), or a Turing machine with tape length proportional to input length, more than it does a general Turing machine. Though halting is not provable for a Turing machine, it is provable for an LBA.
What competent programmer converts the abstraction of code to ENGLISH to grok it?
Programmers for the Pick operating system, which used a query language called ENGLISH.
Or people trying to debug something over Skype screen sharing, with voice and screencast one way and voice the other way. (This has happened a couple times for me.)
As a Safari user, are you willing to pay extra for Safari support so that each web developer can afford a Mac on which to test a site in Safari in addition to the computer he already uses?
So someone uses something that isn't approved yet which would break functionality when Slashdot wouldn't accept anyway. That makes no sense.
As of step 4, the new code points would have been approved, just not yet blacklisted on hypothetical Slashdot-with-Unicode (HSWU). I guess we disagree on whether HSWU would use a blacklist or a whitelist.
[Windows Phone Store is] the only mobile app store that I bother with these days because there's too much competition on the others and the users treat games as disposable as tissues
Have you considered PlayStation Store (for PlayStation Vita) or Nintendo eShop (for Nintendo 3DS)?
Apple has quite a viable alternative, and if they introduced a few Macs in the $500 range, they'd be good to go.
I don't know what country you're posting from, but as of today, a Mac mini is $499. I'm aware that doesn't include a monitor, but let's say $514 if you reuse your living room HDTV as a monitor and source a keyboard and mouse from Goodwill.
Corporate e-mail on a corporate computer where all settings are locked down.
Still doesn't explain why your corporation lets the email determine what font is loaded off disk, parsed, and then used.