I'm interested in your comment about the cinema ticket. Cinemas on US side of the pond must work differently. Over here in the UK they do check the ticket before you can go into the movie. There is a good reason though. The ticket desks are in an open foyer area where anyone can go with or without a ticket. I actualy find that it's quite a nice relaxed way to do things.
I'm not arguing that the cache isn't sometimes useful I am saying that Google has taken without asking. They have assumed that content producers want their content cached. Some of us would rather it wasn't. I know that meta tags can be added to stop Google caching the page but that isn't really the point.
What you are suggesting is that the author of a work relinquishes the right to stop publishing a work once it has been published once. The article in the Guardian you mention is owned by the Guardian. Surely you support their right to no longer publish it if they choose not to? It may be of some worth to "the people" but does that give them the right to reproduce it without paying for it? Would you say that is it accetable to photocopy a book because it is hard to get hold of?
As for using it as a means to by-pass filtering - again it's useful but I don't think that's a reason to allow widespread copying of other peoples work.
My biggest gripe with the system is that I make money from the work I produce. Not a lot but some. That money comes from adverts on the pages. The cached version of the pages don't show as many adverts or adverts that are as well targeted ergo I make less money from the same content and can do very little about it.
Do you expect the author of a book to go round to everyone with a printing press and tell them he would rather they didn't reprint his book? Copyright assumes that copying is not allowed unless permission is given. What you are suggesting is the total opposite. It's like running a firewall with default allow and then individually blocking the bad guys totally back-to-front.
I know that I'm not the only producer of content that is fed up with the way search engines (Google in particular) can get away with republishing our work and not paying for it. I 110% support fair use and I think a little context snippet with the search result constitutes fair use. I don't, however, feel that caching an entire page and allowing people to view it constitues fair use. In the RW (and I know normally RW analogies don't work very well but I think they do here) it would be the equivalent of reproducing an entire article from a magazine or news paper. I am 100% certain you would be sued if you tried that.
The only two arguments people who support caching seem to be able to give is that: 1) Google makes it clear that it is not the producer of the content 2) It's good for "humanity" because if the site goes down the content is still accessible. As for the first - I don't care if they attribute it to me they didn't write it and I didn't give them permission to publish it. The second is just laughable - it is a defence that could be used to just take any and all work off producers.
You think that's bad wait till you hear this... (it's worth pointing out that I've had very limited interations with the JSA people as I've fortunately been in work pretty much full time - the stories I have about them are from my partner who for one reason or another has had to sign on a couple of times).
Anyway, on with the story, my partner has a PhD in chemistry so when she went down to claim JSA last year it wasn't with much hope of actually finding a job through the JC. I was just starting a business so we were both out of work and the few quid a week from JSA would have been really useful. Well, it was basically a disaster from word go. She was unable to claim JSA because she had been out of work for 1 month in the seemingly arbitary 18 months assesment period. The fact that she had been paying a great deal of NI for the 4 years previous to that made no odds - that one month stopped her from drawing any benifit at all. The only thing that she could claim was having the JC pay the minimum NI contributions. We couldn't believe it. The one time we really needed a little help from the state that we had been paying money into hand over fist for years and they completely let us down.
From there it went from bad to laughable. They were totally unprepared for anyone that had qualifications and the assessor was next to useless. Dispite actually telling my partner that they wouldn't have any jobs suitable she require my partner to look through the all the job adverts. At one point she suggested my partner take one of a number of jobs that require no qualifications. The funniest part was the second visit. On the first one my partner was given a booklet to record what jobs she applied for. She took back a complete booklet on the second visit and asked for another. Apparently the assessors jaw hit the ground - the booklet was supposed to last for at least two months and most people never fill one. Dispite it being clear that my parner was really looking hard for a job they still made her waste one morning every two weeks going to the job centre.
Here's an idea I hit upon a while back that I think could / would work very well and solve all our problems. This idea is a little UK centric at the moment but it would work everywhere. If you find yourself out of work in the UK you can sign on for the jod seekers allowance (as long as you jump through all the right hoops etc etc yadda yadda). To do this you have to go to the Job Centre. One of the conditions of getting job seekers allowance is that you apply for a certain number of jobs and generally that you spend time looking for jobs at the Job Centre. The problem is that "Job Centre" is all but a dirty phrase in the UK and no "professional" will go near the place. This means that there are _no_ professional jobs listed ever. If you want a professional job you are stuck with scouring the papers and numerous bad jobs websites populated by head hunters. As we all know this takes an age and often means good jobs get missed. I would like to see a new law brought in that _all_ jobs _must_ be advertised in the Job Centre regardless of what the job entails. An employer is free to advertise the job elsewhere as well and do whatever they please it simply must be listed at the Job Centre. There are a number of reasons why I would completely support this legislation 1)it completely insane that we fund Job Centres throughout the country that are not servicing the needs of a huge portion of the population 2)it would give everyone a place where they can find a job 3)it would simplify fnding a job and hopefully as a result this would cut down the number of unemployed or at least the time people spend unemployed 4)it would probably have the side effect of removing many of the fly by night head hunters. I am interested to hear people thoughts on this idea both positive and negative. I might pass it on to our local MP as well even though I don't like the guy.
It certainly was a very strange game. I seem to remember the graphics were exceptional to the time as well. One of the rooms was all mirrored surfaces IIRC which was something I hadn't seen outside ray traced scenes before. I though the weird landscape really worked well though and gave the game something that most don't have. I certainly enjoyed it way back then.
Perhaps that's because in the world of Internet searching they are little more than bootnotes themselves. I don't know what it is like on other sites but on my main site 90%+ of the people that find the site via a search do so using Google. The other search engines just aren't in the same league.
I agree with your arguments for the most part but I feel a large amount of the front loading on good is because people have come to understand that they will never get the item for free (or for very little money) so they go an get it as soon as they can. There will always be some front loading because a good many people must have the new thing right away but saying a copyright term of 2 to 3 years is good enough because of front loading doesn't follow. I would certainly wait that period of time for a good film to become free. I already wait over a year for some films on DVD because they drop dramatically in price. I'm a year to two behind most people when it comes to films but I don't really care (I have no friends to talk to about them anyway;o)). I would argue for copyright terms to be in the 10 to 20 year region.
I agree with you 100% here 2 or 3 years is a stupidly short copyright term. The ideal copyright term is one in which the producer of the item has their costs covered plus makes a good enough profit that they want to contiune producing. The problem with that system is that the time to profit varies with the work. The copyright system also shouldn't be abused so that even a poor work will always make money eventually by simply never coming out of copyright - in other words there has to be a defined limit. Personally I think somewhere in the 10 to 30 years area is about right. I would work it like this: if you want free copyright you get ten years, for a small payment you get 20 years for a fairly large payment you get 30 years. Movie studios would always pay the thousands of pounds required to protect a movie for 30 years. An artist would pay the tens to low hundreds to protect their work for 20 years (perhaps base the cost on the estimated total earnings from the piece or simply have categories). Self publishers would be able to continue getting free copyright but just for 10 years. It gives them some protection but not too much. Anyone willing to wait 10 years for a work to become free probably wouldn't have bought it anyway.
Maybe the figures are a little off but I don't think the idea is flawed. Perhaps at 10 years to each figure. Tweak the prices etc. I think it would work and it would be a much better system than we are currently using.
It's good to see Governments taking Linux seriously but it seems pretty clear to me why UNIX lost out in the first place: money. Windows was (and I would say still is) the better product and it's dirt cheap if you are installing thousands of copies and are an educational establishment. If open source / UNIX is to take back some of those installs it needs to become a lot simpler to use. I love my Debian box and wouldn't give it up for the world but I spend 10 times as long making it work than I do on my Windows install. In fact, I don't remember the last time I had to fix anything on my Windows install - it just works. I admit that if it (hardware mainly) doesn't work straight away under Windows it probably never will but the time I have spent trying to get poor supported hardware working under Linux... well lets just not go there.
I certainly understand where you are coming from there. I felt their Linux support was very poor considering the number of clients they would be likely to get. I realize that the total number of Linux installs is tiny compared to Windows but they are run by people that historically are interested in this sort of thing. At a minimum I think they should have given it a primative GUI and made packages for all common distros (no.deb as usual).
This climate prediction group has been going around 2 years. All that has happened is they have managed to talk the BBC into some free advertising. I tried running the software but I found that it caused localized warming especially around my CPU.
Either US or Oz or anywhere else for that matter (I'm from the UK) I meant society globally or certainly at least the westernized bits of it seem to have some strange values. It doesn't surprise me that GTA was banned in Australia but I'll bet there are a lot of similar games that aren't. I'm against censorship in general but I think it's about time we had some official sanctioned game ratings with more teeth. When the graphics were poor it was fair enough to have no ratings or industry imposed rates but modern games are getting to the point where some of the content is quite disturbing.
So it's ok to "promote" shooting people, running people down and using / abusing prostitutes (GTA and plenty of others) but it's not ok to "promote" tagging a wall. Hmmmm we have a very weird society.
I wouldn't worry about not having enough coal. Estimates put it at way beyond 200 years supply and that's without even going to look for deep deposits. Gas is certainly running low but we can make gas from coal and oil. Oil is intermediate. There is actually quite a lot of oil. What people are worrying about is the lack of readily accessible oil that is clean. A huge amount of dirty oil is known about but not economically viable at the moment. The oil is dirty because its contaminated with silion dioxide (sand) which would play havoc with the inside of your car and is quite difficult to remove from the feedstock.
Ok, I'm convinced that just a plain old gun isn't going to be much use getting things into space. But what about building a massive electromotive gun on the top of a mountian. Imagine building a 1 km high coil gun at 15000 feet. The atmosphere is thinner and the long barrel would allow for slower acceleration or higher muzzle velocity. I admit that it is still a very difficult thing to build but is it really harder than a 62,000km rope and a perfect climber. Of course a gun wouldn't be suitable for launching everything but it might be cheap enough long term to be worth it.
I have to agree with the GP it feels to me like the ribbon is the more difficult part but I agree there is nothing trivial about the climber. I have two problems with the space elevator idea though: how quickly can we put stuff in space and how much will it cost. If it takes 6 months to get something into space it may end up being cheaper to use conventional methods especially if only one or two climbers can operate at a time.
Personally I'm surprised no one has tried just shooting things into space. I remember reading something about a modified howitzer that was able to all but shoot things into low earth orbit. I realize that true escape velocity is beyond our reach but we only to get things a bit fo the way up. If we designed launch vehicles that could be fired the first 200 km and then use solid rockets to get the rest of the way maybe we could dramatically cut launch costs.
Ok so there's a bit more interest than I thought there was:o). I realize that the brain is incredibly complex and it must be a truely daunting task to try and figure out how it works. I think what I was trying to get across is that we are still, AFAIK, a very long way from being able to point to a bit of the brain that contains a given piece of information.
For example if I look at an image and remember it, AFAIK, we can say in what area that memory is recorded in but not how it is recorded (encoded) or which neurons are recording it. Are we even close to knowing the answers to questions like this?
If they were willing to pay enough I'm sure you would find quite a few people that would stick electrodes in their brain. You would never get it past an ethics committee though I suspect. In fact you would probably even find a few people that would do it for free. If the risks were minimal I might even consider it if the price was right - especially if they weren't going to mess with a really important bit of my brain like sight.
Can you really gather that much information from a single electrode in a single location? I would have thought this would be of pretty limited benifit. Still I'm not a neuroscientists - maybe it's going to give stacks of data.
I can't believe we still know so little about how the brain works actually. It feels like all our attempts to understand it (PET, MRI, electrodes, etc), while amazing, as still at the caveman stage of development e.g. hit it with a rock until it does something. I would have thought there would have been far more interest into researching how the brain functions.
Why don't they just use one of the hundreds of backdoors that everyone else uses? Seems to me M$ are already complying with this request several times over.
[puts on flame suit] This is going to be controversial I know but has anyone tried developing a real game in Java? (by real I mean something that you don't play on a mobile phone) I realize that the GCing could be problematic but it is possible to minimize or even eliminate that problem. Other than that I think the language is probably fast enough now and I would have thought that the lower development time would encourage games houses. Perhaps it's simply that the tools aren't there for Java yet (maybe they never will be). Any thoughts?
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I'm interested in your comment about the cinema ticket. Cinemas on US side of the pond must work differently. Over here in the UK they do check the ticket before you can go into the movie. There is a good reason though. The ticket desks are in an open foyer area where anyone can go with or without a ticket. I actualy find that it's quite a nice relaxed way to do things.
I'm not arguing that the cache isn't sometimes useful I am saying that Google has taken without asking. They have assumed that content producers want their content cached. Some of us would rather it wasn't. I know that meta tags can be added to stop Google caching the page but that isn't really the point.
What you are suggesting is that the author of a work relinquishes the right to stop publishing a work once it has been published once. The article in the Guardian you mention is owned by the Guardian. Surely you support their right to no longer publish it if they choose not to? It may be of some worth to "the people" but does that give them the right to reproduce it without paying for it? Would you say that is it accetable to photocopy a book because it is hard to get hold of?
As for using it as a means to by-pass filtering - again it's useful but I don't think that's a reason to allow widespread copying of other peoples work.
My biggest gripe with the system is that I make money from the work I produce. Not a lot but some. That money comes from adverts on the pages. The cached version of the pages don't show as many adverts or adverts that are as well targeted ergo I make less money from the same content and can do very little about it.
Do you expect the author of a book to go round to everyone with a printing press and tell them he would rather they didn't reprint his book? Copyright assumes that copying is not allowed unless permission is given. What you are suggesting is the total opposite. It's like running a firewall with default allow and then individually blocking the bad guys totally back-to-front.
I know that I'm not the only producer of content that is fed up with the way search engines (Google in particular) can get away with republishing our work and not paying for it. I 110% support fair use and I think a little context snippet with the search result constitutes fair use. I don't, however, feel that caching an entire page and allowing people to view it constitues fair use. In the RW (and I know normally RW analogies don't work very well but I think they do here) it would be the equivalent of reproducing an entire article from a magazine or news paper. I am 100% certain you would be sued if you tried that.
The only two arguments people who support caching seem to be able to give is that: 1) Google makes it clear that it is not the producer of the content 2) It's good for "humanity" because if the site goes down the content is still accessible. As for the first - I don't care if they attribute it to me they didn't write it and I didn't give them permission to publish it. The second is just laughable - it is a defence that could be used to just take any and all work off producers.
You think that's bad wait till you hear this... (it's worth pointing out that I've had very limited interations with the JSA people as I've fortunately been in work pretty much full time - the stories I have about them are from my partner who for one reason or another has had to sign on a couple of times).
Anyway, on with the story, my partner has a PhD in chemistry so when she went down to claim JSA last year it wasn't with much hope of actually finding a job through the JC. I was just starting a business so we were both out of work and the few quid a week from JSA would have been really useful. Well, it was basically a disaster from word go. She was unable to claim JSA because she had been out of work for 1 month in the seemingly arbitary 18 months assesment period. The fact that she had been paying a great deal of NI for the 4 years previous to that made no odds - that one month stopped her from drawing any benifit at all. The only thing that she could claim was having the JC pay the minimum NI contributions. We couldn't believe it. The one time we really needed a little help from the state that we had been paying money into hand over fist for years and they completely let us down.
From there it went from bad to laughable. They were totally unprepared for anyone that had qualifications and the assessor was next to useless. Dispite actually telling my partner that they wouldn't have any jobs suitable she require my partner to look through the all the job adverts. At one point she suggested my partner take one of a number of jobs that require no qualifications. The funniest part was the second visit. On the first one my partner was given a booklet to record what jobs she applied for. She took back a complete booklet on the second visit and asked for another. Apparently the assessors jaw hit the ground - the booklet was supposed to last for at least two months and most people never fill one. Dispite it being clear that my parner was really looking hard for a job they still made her waste one morning every two weeks going to the job centre.
Here's an idea I hit upon a while back that I think could / would work very well and solve all our problems. This idea is a little UK centric at the moment but it would work everywhere. If you find yourself out of work in the UK you can sign on for the jod seekers allowance (as long as you jump through all the right hoops etc etc yadda yadda). To do this you have to go to the Job Centre. One of the conditions of getting job seekers allowance is that you apply for a certain number of jobs and generally that you spend time looking for jobs at the Job Centre. The problem is that "Job Centre" is all but a dirty phrase in the UK and no "professional" will go near the place. This means that there are _no_ professional jobs listed ever. If you want a professional job you are stuck with scouring the papers and numerous bad jobs websites populated by head hunters. As we all know this takes an age and often means good jobs get missed. I would like to see a new law brought in that _all_ jobs _must_ be advertised in the Job Centre regardless of what the job entails. An employer is free to advertise the job elsewhere as well and do whatever they please it simply must be listed at the Job Centre. There are a number of reasons why I would completely support this legislation 1)it completely insane that we fund Job Centres throughout the country that are not servicing the needs of a huge portion of the population 2)it would give everyone a place where they can find a job 3)it would simplify fnding a job and hopefully as a result this would cut down the number of unemployed or at least the time people spend unemployed 4)it would probably have the side effect of removing many of the fly by night head hunters. I am interested to hear people thoughts on this idea both positive and negative. I might pass it on to our local MP as well even though I don't like the guy.
It certainly was a very strange game. I seem to remember the graphics were exceptional to the time as well. One of the rooms was all mirrored surfaces IIRC which was something I hadn't seen outside ray traced scenes before. I though the weird landscape really worked well though and gave the game something that most don't have. I certainly enjoyed it way back then.
Perhaps that's because in the world of Internet searching they are little more than bootnotes themselves. I don't know what it is like on other sites but on my main site 90%+ of the people that find the site via a search do so using Google. The other search engines just aren't in the same league.
I agree with your arguments for the most part but I feel a large amount of the front loading on good is because people have come to understand that they will never get the item for free (or for very little money) so they go an get it as soon as they can. There will always be some front loading because a good many people must have the new thing right away but saying a copyright term of 2 to 3 years is good enough because of front loading doesn't follow. I would certainly wait that period of time for a good film to become free. I already wait over a year for some films on DVD because they drop dramatically in price. I'm a year to two behind most people when it comes to films but I don't really care (I have no friends to talk to about them anyway ;o)). I would argue for copyright terms to be in the 10 to 20 year region.
I agree with you 100% here 2 or 3 years is a stupidly short copyright term. The ideal copyright term is one in which the producer of the item has their costs covered plus makes a good enough profit that they want to contiune producing. The problem with that system is that the time to profit varies with the work. The copyright system also shouldn't be abused so that even a poor work will always make money eventually by simply never coming out of copyright - in other words there has to be a defined limit. Personally I think somewhere in the 10 to 30 years area is about right. I would work it like this: if you want free copyright you get ten years, for a small payment you get 20 years for a fairly large payment you get 30 years. Movie studios would always pay the thousands of pounds required to protect a movie for 30 years. An artist would pay the tens to low hundreds to protect their work for 20 years (perhaps base the cost on the estimated total earnings from the piece or simply have categories). Self publishers would be able to continue getting free copyright but just for 10 years. It gives them some protection but not too much. Anyone willing to wait 10 years for a work to become free probably wouldn't have bought it anyway.
Maybe the figures are a little off but I don't think the idea is flawed. Perhaps at 10 years to each figure. Tweak the prices etc. I think it would work and it would be a much better system than we are currently using.
It's good to see Governments taking Linux seriously but it seems pretty clear to me why UNIX lost out in the first place: money. Windows was (and I would say still is) the better product and it's dirt cheap if you are installing thousands of copies and are an educational establishment. If open source / UNIX is to take back some of those installs it needs to become a lot simpler to use. I love my Debian box and wouldn't give it up for the world but I spend 10 times as long making it work than I do on my Windows install. In fact, I don't remember the last time I had to fix anything on my Windows install - it just works. I admit that if it (hardware mainly) doesn't work straight away under Windows it probably never will but the time I have spent trying to get poor supported hardware working under Linux... well lets just not go there.
I keep mine on my zero point energy generator. I would recommend you get one too - I've heard those cold fusion devices can be dangerous.
I certainly understand where you are coming from there. I felt their Linux support was very poor considering the number of clients they would be likely to get. I realize that the total number of Linux installs is tiny compared to Windows but they are run by people that historically are interested in this sort of thing. At a minimum I think they should have given it a primative GUI and made packages for all common distros (no .deb as usual).
This climate prediction group has been going around 2 years. All that has happened is they have managed to talk the BBC into some free advertising. I tried running the software but I found that it caused localized warming especially around my CPU.
Ok, that passed me by. I thought it was still a volantry rating system in the UK.
Either US or Oz or anywhere else for that matter (I'm from the UK) I meant society globally or certainly at least the westernized bits of it seem to have some strange values. It doesn't surprise me that GTA was banned in Australia but I'll bet there are a lot of similar games that aren't. I'm against censorship in general but I think it's about time we had some official sanctioned game ratings with more teeth. When the graphics were poor it was fair enough to have no ratings or industry imposed rates but modern games are getting to the point where some of the content is quite disturbing.
So it's ok to "promote" shooting people, running people down and using / abusing prostitutes (GTA and plenty of others) but it's not ok to "promote" tagging a wall. Hmmmm we have a very weird society.
I wouldn't worry about not having enough coal. Estimates put it at way beyond 200 years supply and that's without even going to look for deep deposits. Gas is certainly running low but we can make gas from coal and oil. Oil is intermediate. There is actually quite a lot of oil. What people are worrying about is the lack of readily accessible oil that is clean. A huge amount of dirty oil is known about but not economically viable at the moment. The oil is dirty because its contaminated with silion dioxide (sand) which would play havoc with the inside of your car and is quite difficult to remove from the feedstock.
Ok, I'm convinced that just a plain old gun isn't going to be much use getting things into space. But what about building a massive electromotive gun on the top of a mountian. Imagine building a 1 km high coil gun at 15000 feet. The atmosphere is thinner and the long barrel would allow for slower acceleration or higher muzzle velocity. I admit that it is still a very difficult thing to build but is it really harder than a 62,000km rope and a perfect climber. Of course a gun wouldn't be suitable for launching everything but it might be cheap enough long term to be worth it.
I have to agree with the GP it feels to me like the ribbon is the more difficult part but I agree there is nothing trivial about the climber. I have two problems with the space elevator idea though: how quickly can we put stuff in space and how much will it cost. If it takes 6 months to get something into space it may end up being cheaper to use conventional methods especially if only one or two climbers can operate at a time.
Personally I'm surprised no one has tried just shooting things into space. I remember reading something about a modified howitzer that was able to all but shoot things into low earth orbit. I realize that true escape velocity is beyond our reach but we only to get things a bit fo the way up. If we designed launch vehicles that could be fired the first 200 km and then use solid rockets to get the rest of the way maybe we could dramatically cut launch costs.
Ok so there's a bit more interest than I thought there was :o). I realize that the brain is incredibly complex and it must be a truely daunting task to try and figure out how it works. I think what I was trying to get across is that we are still, AFAIK, a very long way from being able to point to a bit of the brain that contains a given piece of information.
For example if I look at an image and remember it, AFAIK, we can say in what area that memory is recorded in but not how it is recorded (encoded) or which neurons are recording it. Are we even close to knowing the answers to questions like this?
If they were willing to pay enough I'm sure you would find quite a few people that would stick electrodes in their brain. You would never get it past an ethics committee though I suspect. In fact you would probably even find a few people that would do it for free. If the risks were minimal I might even consider it if the price was right - especially if they weren't going to mess with a really important bit of my brain like sight.
Can you really gather that much information from a single electrode in a single location? I would have thought this would be of pretty limited benifit. Still I'm not a neuroscientists - maybe it's going to give stacks of data.
I can't believe we still know so little about how the brain works actually. It feels like all our attempts to understand it (PET, MRI, electrodes, etc), while amazing, as still at the caveman stage of development e.g. hit it with a rock until it does something. I would have thought there would have been far more interest into researching how the brain functions.
Why don't they just use one of the hundreds of backdoors that everyone else uses? Seems to me M$ are already complying with this request several times over.
[puts on flame suit] This is going to be controversial I know but has anyone tried developing a real game in Java? (by real I mean something that you don't play on a mobile phone) I realize that the GCing could be problematic but it is possible to minimize or even eliminate that problem. Other than that I think the language is probably fast enough now and I would have thought that the lower development time would encourage games houses. Perhaps it's simply that the tools aren't there for Java yet (maybe they never will be). Any thoughts?