Many people don't know that "decimated" means to kill 1/10 of the opposition.
Technically, it means to kill 1/10 of your own. It was a punishment levied against Roman legions for shameful performance. Bad enough to give the whole legion a resounding kick in the pants, but not so bad as to actually put the legion out of commission.
Actually a very fitting analogy for Microsoft v. OSS when you think about it...
The population of the prairie provinces is almost exactly 5 million right now, most of it much more than 100 miles from the border. (Apparently there's not much draw toward North Dakota...) In fact, the largest city in the Canadian Prairies (Edmonton) is also the the most northern major city, and the furthest major city from the U.S. border.
By not using OS X, you negate the main factor behind buying a Mac in the first place - and in so doing significantly reduce its value when compared with equivilently priced PC hardware.
Only if you also throw out your OS X restore disk.
I see a lot of pokes at the Bush administration, and how it was using WMD as an excuse to get "OIL". Seriously folks, if that was the case, wouldn't you expect the OIL prices to go DOWN?
Why would you think that global power politics has anything to do with consumer prices in the midwest?
U.S. oil interests have nothing to do with what Joe Consumer pays for gas, but with (a) whose currency is used to purchase bulk crude, (b) whose ass countries have to kiss to get a hold of sufficient quantities of that currency, (c) which corporations control the international trade in oil, and (d) ensuring that the oil producers understand who's the boss as we pass the world oil production peak.
None of that changes one whit if you're paying $2 or even $20 a gallon in Kansas.
Interstellar travel suffers from its own version of Moore's Law. The first ships will be damn slow, but they will increase in speed fairly steadily as we become more comfortable with the technology. The problem is, the new ships will blow past the old ships en route, and the first ones to leave will be the last ones to arrive. An interstellar travel time of ~100 years would be making pretty good time for an early mission to somewhere in the local neighbourhood. If you could get a five-fold speed increase in say 25 years of development back here on Earth (a very modest rate of development, IMO), then you could expect the planet would be explored at least 50 years before you got there, which gives enough time for settlement, expansion, and several waves of colonists in even faster ships.
In other words, by the time the first explorers (that's you) arrive, there will already be 150 Starbucks franchises on the planet, the planet will be launching its own missions to further stars, and you will be turned back at the spaceport for not having the right Visas in your passport.
In fact, no matter how long you wait for a faster interstellar drive, a mission launched a short time after yours will arrive a short time sooner than yours. This will remain true until some physical limitation starts capping speeds, or until the travel time becomes small compared to the time between incremental improvements in drive speed.
The same is true for unmanned probes, unfortunately.
IP is not as real as money. Money is rivalrous even when intangible, whereas ideas are never rivalrous. A thief can deprive you and your bank account of money. He cannot deprive you of your ideas, even if he threatens you with a gun -- even if he tries to pay you for them. That is why ideas are not the same as physical property, no matter how much we want them to be.
"IP theft" is a euphemism for unauthorized copying. But theft is fundamentally different from copying - one deprives, the other does not. To claim that copying and theft warrant exactly the same treatment under the law is absurd. If you are an athlete who invents a new, superior technique, should those rival athletes who copy your technique go to jail? If you are a musician who uses a 5-note sequence that has been used before, should you go to prison for it? If you code up a new program that violates an obscure software patent, do you belong in prison?
So if I spend millions of dollars producing a non-tangeable product I should not be entitled to the same protection of a company spending millions of dollars producing a tangeable product?
No, and it's not some airy-fairy ideology or opinion. It's simply the law. Producers of tangible property are protected by criminal theft laws. Producers of intangible property are not, and they have to resort to civil law to enforce their IP claims.
I'm not saying that IP should be free or that producers of ideas should not be compensated for it. All I'm saying is that IP is not real property in economic theory nor under the law. That just the way it is, not the way I think it should be. Insisting on equating IP to real property is factually wrong. Whether it is morally wrong is another question, but you can't begin to give that question due consideration if you don't fully understand the issue to begin with.
It is not our property - we did not make it, we have ZERO say. [snip] I can't see why this concept is so hard to grasp? [snip] I am just trying to figure out why people have a problem with someone setting a price that they want on their property.
Because some people have figured out that intellectual property is not property. It is non-rivalrous, can be reproduced at negligible cost, and it cannot be stolen (ie. you cannot be criminally convicted for theft of IP). In other words it has none of the characteristics of real property.
IP is a legal monopoly on ideas, which is enforced through contracts and civil law (ie. license agreements). Only businessmen attempting to invent a market by means of a false scarcity call it "property".
See here if you're really trying to figure this out.
Until something else comes close to the power of mh, I see no reason to change.
Funny, because I switched from mh to the Moz suite after trying and failing to find a gui mh client that could handle html and mime well. exmh didn't cut it anymore, mahogany was too buggy, and after that I gave up. But I still have a soft spot for mh and would go back if I could. It really is the One True Way for handling mail.
As an amateur who does B&W film, I totally agree with what you're saying.
But as a web professional who does digital, I just find that it's all irrelevant. I'm always blowing down, not up. I still need professional results with regard to lighting, color, composition, etc. But if the picture goes beyond 3 inches at 100dpi, it's BIG. I've come across some pretty cheap-ass cameras that produce images of good enough quality for production work in this area.
And while I'm griping about print photographers and their strange resolution requirements, I had to supply a headshot of myself for reproduction in a print program recently. I went back and forth with the graphics "pros" trying to get them a photo of sufficiently high resolution and quality for their requirements, but they were never satisfied. But when I saw the final program, it was printed on cheap newsprint with a low-quality screen, and the headshots were 1.5cm high! That's worse than the web! For crying out loud, people, know your medium! If you're working with shite, you don't need 8 megapixel images!
Given that ham radio predates computer hacking by half a century, I'd say the split has always existed. Commonalities in the two cultures have drawn it together in some ways, but they never merged.
My grandfather was "radio hacking" in the 1920s. He told a funny story where he "accidentally" took out a commercial transmission while playing with some homemade hardware as a teen. Sounds a little like website defacing to me, but 80 years before the computer kids were doing it. His hobby grew to the point where he was hired as the communications engineer for a huge mining and resources company that had to manage communication lines right into the Arctic. By 1937 he had developed a portable voice radio that could be carried and used in bush camps by operators who didn't know morse code - arguably the first walkie-talkie. Sounds a little like the early PCs to me, but 40 years before the computer kids were doing it. His employer donated his services to the war effort in 1939, and he modified the walkie talkie into a military tool that filtered out battle noises and had signal scrambling to prevent eavesdropping. Sounds like error correcting, encrypted communications to me, but 50 years before the computer kids were doing it.
So yeah, there are similarities, but the hams were there way before we were. Most of the hams who pioneered the field are now dead and gone, whereas most of the computer pioneers are alive and well, and still debating who gets credit for what. The links between the fields that are obvious now only came about after many decades of convergence.
fixing the interface would be very small work since the base system already works.
Heh heh heh... [insert reference to The Inmates are Running the Asylum, here]
Apple usually gets it closer to right but expect MS to shoot back since they already have the base tech in there. They just need to get off their asses and give it a useful interface.
Apple is the R&D wing of Microsoft, so by waiting for Spotlight to come out, they are doing just that.
Actually, the Roman alphabet did not have a letter for the TH sound, so middle English writers borrowed a rune (thorn) that looked like a Y. In an early standardization war, writers and printers tried to use existing Latin letters to avoid this special exception; some replaced the rune with an actual Y, while others went with a digraph, TH.
Which is a long-winded way of saying that we still use thou - we just spell it 'you'. And we still use ye, we just spell it 'the'. (Not to be confused with 'thee'.)
I have close to 10 terabytes of disk space available on our local computing cluster for a particle physics experiment, and it's mostly used for rotating data on and off of tapes because it can only hold a small slice of the most recent year's data set at a time. The experiment has been running since the late 1980s, so there's a lot of archived data filling thousands of 8mm and DLT tapes in boxes and cabinets, and generally getting in peoples' way. And that's just the data worth keeping - I work for a rare decay experiment, so for every interesting event worth keeping, there are millions that have been thrown out. And for the millions that have been kept, only a handful (as in less than 10) are actually the ones you were looking for in the first place.
It's called a network PC... it was tried, it failed. It's rumored to be making a comeback but people want to own things... not rent them, and here I would classify software as a thing.
The software that I use most on a daily basis is Slashdot, followed by Google. So we are already there, my friend, but most people haven't realized it yet.
Sure... you can *try* to sell your old hardware, but I don't think too many people are in the market for my old 386-33... Hell, i helped a buddy move the other weekend, and he couldn't GIVE me his old Parallel port flatbed scanner...
You can legally claim 30% depreciation per year in Canada on computer hardware ( ie. computers lose half their value in 2 years, a somewhat different formulation of Moore's law). So in 1993 or so, you could have resold your 386-33 for close to $1000 (which is real money in my house). Today, 14 years later, it's legal value for tax purposes is about $15. That's less than 1% of the original price, which puts it firmly into the "trash" column, but does not invalidate the grandparent's point.
I think the grandparent's point is that depreciation rate for software is close to infinite with the licensing and resale restrictions, and forced upgrades. Which means that as soon as you've opened the packaging, it's effectively worthless. In which case, why is anyone surprised that people pirate it?
(D) Programmers indirectly constrain the input, but then the code is reused or extended beyond its original use, and the old assumptions about input constraints are no longer valid. (Eg. 8-character filenames, 32-bit native word size, etc...)
(E) Programmers don't bother because it's garbage code that does a one-off task and will never see service in a production environment, and then they get hired at another job, and their garbage code is put into production because "it seems to work".
(F) Because they use a strong array processing language that can do automatic array bounds checking with a compiler switch, so why bother? And then someone further down the chain forgets to include the bounds checking switch and runs it with no safeguards.
A moonbase seems like a good idea until you actually crunch the numbers. The main problem is that nothing originates from the moon, and never will until you have a sustainable productive population living there (your "fully functional industrialised moon base"). Until that problem is solved, everything launched from the moon is ultimately coming from the earth anyway, in which case it's a stupid waste of energy to drop it into the moon's gravity well part way along the trip. Might as well launch from earth orbit - same environmental hazards, much closer to home, smaller delta-V to reach other planets, spaceships don't have to be built to stand up to lunar gravity, and you can use the moon as a slingshot for extra propulsion.
Of course, once we can run a settlement on the moon that is productive enough to build and launch a Mars mission (keeping in mind that we can't even do that on Earth yet), then things change. But only slightly. It's still only a profitable enterprise for the Moon-people (Lunans?). If you live on the moon, and want to go to Mars, you're in luck - you can do it cheaper than the Earthlings can. But if you live on Earth, the moon is still a pointless stop-over. It's like flying New York to L.A., with a stop-over in Australia.
But let's just say for the hell of it that we're past all that, and we've got a moon city that can build and launch interplanetary voyages. There are two more issues that come to the fore:
if we can build a moon city starting from earth-launched resources, then we can do the same with Mars. The journey to Mars is harder, but the place itself is more hospitable. So once we've built our Moon city, there is really no point in using it as a spaceport to Mars. We're probably already on Mars, using the same technology.
Given (1), the Lunans are left in a position of competing for the Earth-system-to-Mars-system interplanetary transport. The Lunans have a much lower launch cost, so they are very competitive on that score, but only if the stuff being shipped originates from the moon. But if the Lunans can produce it from scratch on the moon, then the Martians can surely do the same. And if the Lunans can't produce it from scratch, then you're importing crap from Earth and doing the whole Australian stop-over thing again.
Ultimately the whole idea only becomes feasible if the moon somehow becomes a sovereign entity with its own specialized science and technology base, and a monopoly on whatever useful technologies spring from that. Then and only then will anybody have a valid economic argument to go to the moon. But how do you get to that point if there is no valid economic argument to lay the stepping stones to get there?
Slashdot Mirror
Technically, it means to kill 1/10 of your own. It was a punishment levied against Roman legions for shameful performance. Bad enough to give the whole legion a resounding kick in the pants, but not so bad as to actually put the legion out of commission.
Actually a very fitting analogy for Microsoft v. OSS when you think about it...
Your post would be much easier to understand if your sig came first.
The population of the prairie provinces is almost exactly 5 million right now, most of it much more than 100 miles from the border. (Apparently there's not much draw toward North Dakota...) In fact, the largest city in the Canadian Prairies (Edmonton) is also the the most northern major city, and the furthest major city from the U.S. border.
Only if you also throw out your OS X restore disk.
You'd think that Google would know about version numbers.
Why would you think that global power politics has anything to do with consumer prices in the midwest?
U.S. oil interests have nothing to do with what Joe Consumer pays for gas, but with (a) whose currency is used to purchase bulk crude, (b) whose ass countries have to kiss to get a hold of sufficient quantities of that currency, (c) which corporations control the international trade in oil, and (d) ensuring that the oil producers understand who's the boss as we pass the world oil production peak.
None of that changes one whit if you're paying $2 or even $20 a gallon in Kansas.
I'd say anyone who didn't feel somewhat stressed looking at these pics is the one who is slightly ghoulish.
In other words, by the time the first explorers (that's you) arrive, there will already be 150 Starbucks franchises on the planet, the planet will be launching its own missions to further stars, and you will be turned back at the spaceport for not having the right Visas in your passport.
In fact, no matter how long you wait for a faster interstellar drive, a mission launched a short time after yours will arrive a short time sooner than yours. This will remain true until some physical limitation starts capping speeds, or until the travel time becomes small compared to the time between incremental improvements in drive speed.
The same is true for unmanned probes, unfortunately.
"IP theft" is a euphemism for unauthorized copying. But theft is fundamentally different from copying - one deprives, the other does not. To claim that copying and theft warrant exactly the same treatment under the law is absurd. If you are an athlete who invents a new, superior technique, should those rival athletes who copy your technique go to jail? If you are a musician who uses a 5-note sequence that has been used before, should you go to prison for it? If you code up a new program that violates an obscure software patent, do you belong in prison?
No, and it's not some airy-fairy ideology or opinion. It's simply the law. Producers of tangible property are protected by criminal theft laws. Producers of intangible property are not, and they have to resort to civil law to enforce their IP claims.
I'm not saying that IP should be free or that producers of ideas should not be compensated for it. All I'm saying is that IP is not real property in economic theory nor under the law. That just the way it is, not the way I think it should be. Insisting on equating IP to real property is factually wrong. Whether it is morally wrong is another question, but you can't begin to give that question due consideration if you don't fully understand the issue to begin with.
Because some people have figured out that intellectual property is not property. It is non-rivalrous, can be reproduced at negligible cost, and it cannot be stolen (ie. you cannot be criminally convicted for theft of IP). In other words it has none of the characteristics of real property.
IP is a legal monopoly on ideas, which is enforced through contracts and civil law (ie. license agreements). Only businessmen attempting to invent a market by means of a false scarcity call it "property".
See here if you're really trying to figure this out.
Funny, because I switched from mh to the Moz suite after trying and failing to find a gui mh client that could handle html and mime well. exmh didn't cut it anymore, mahogany was too buggy, and after that I gave up. But I still have a soft spot for mh and would go back if I could. It really is the One True Way for handling mail.
But as a web professional who does digital, I just find that it's all irrelevant. I'm always blowing down, not up. I still need professional results with regard to lighting, color, composition, etc. But if the picture goes beyond 3 inches at 100dpi, it's BIG. I've come across some pretty cheap-ass cameras that produce images of good enough quality for production work in this area.
And while I'm griping about print photographers and their strange resolution requirements, I had to supply a headshot of myself for reproduction in a print program recently. I went back and forth with the graphics "pros" trying to get them a photo of sufficiently high resolution and quality for their requirements, but they were never satisfied. But when I saw the final program, it was printed on cheap newsprint with a low-quality screen, and the headshots were 1.5cm high! That's worse than the web! For crying out loud, people, know your medium! If you're working with shite, you don't need 8 megapixel images!
My grandfather was "radio hacking" in the 1920s. He told a funny story where he "accidentally" took out a commercial transmission while playing with some homemade hardware as a teen. Sounds a little like website defacing to me, but 80 years before the computer kids were doing it. His hobby grew to the point where he was hired as the communications engineer for a huge mining and resources company that had to manage communication lines right into the Arctic. By 1937 he had developed a portable voice radio that could be carried and used in bush camps by operators who didn't know morse code - arguably the first walkie-talkie. Sounds a little like the early PCs to me, but 40 years before the computer kids were doing it. His employer donated his services to the war effort in 1939, and he modified the walkie talkie into a military tool that filtered out battle noises and had signal scrambling to prevent eavesdropping. Sounds like error correcting, encrypted communications to me, but 50 years before the computer kids were doing it.
So yeah, there are similarities, but the hams were there way before we were. Most of the hams who pioneered the field are now dead and gone, whereas most of the computer pioneers are alive and well, and still debating who gets credit for what. The links between the fields that are obvious now only came about after many decades of convergence.
fixing the interface would be very small work since the base system already works.
Heh heh heh... [insert reference to The Inmates are Running the Asylum, here]
Apple usually gets it closer to right but expect MS to shoot back since they already have the base tech in there. They just need to get off their asses and give it a useful interface.
Apple is the R&D wing of Microsoft, so by waiting for Spotlight to come out, they are doing just that.
Which is a long-winded way of saying that we still use thou - we just spell it 'you'. And we still use ye, we just spell it 'the'. (Not to be confused with 'thee'.)
None of this explains the word 'thy', however.
No, but tritium is.
The software that I use most on a daily basis is Slashdot, followed by Google. So we are already there, my friend, but most people haven't realized it yet.
Correction: that would be 14 years after purchase, not 14 years after 1993, of course.
You can legally claim 30% depreciation per year in Canada on computer hardware ( ie. computers lose half their value in 2 years, a somewhat different formulation of Moore's law). So in 1993 or so, you could have resold your 386-33 for close to $1000 (which is real money in my house). Today, 14 years later, it's legal value for tax purposes is about $15. That's less than 1% of the original price, which puts it firmly into the "trash" column, but does not invalidate the grandparent's point.
I think the grandparent's point is that depreciation rate for software is close to infinite with the licensing and resale restrictions, and forced upgrades. Which means that as soon as you've opened the packaging, it's effectively worthless. In which case, why is anyone surprised that people pirate it?
(E) Programmers don't bother because it's garbage code that does a one-off task and will never see service in a production environment, and then they get hired at another job, and their garbage code is put into production because "it seems to work".
(F) Because they use a strong array processing language that can do automatic array bounds checking with a compiler switch, so why bother? And then someone further down the chain forgets to include the bounds checking switch and runs it with no safeguards.
(G) Laziness.
(I) Ignorance.
(H) Stupidity.
Wow. It does absolutely nothing. And absolutely everything. There is no spoon.
My world has been rocked.
Why on earth are environmentalists opposed to an observatory? I mean astronomers not only like clear air, they even think light is pollution!
Of course, once we can run a settlement on the moon that is productive enough to build and launch a Mars mission (keeping in mind that we can't even do that on Earth yet), then things change. But only slightly. It's still only a profitable enterprise for the Moon-people (Lunans?). If you live on the moon, and want to go to Mars, you're in luck - you can do it cheaper than the Earthlings can. But if you live on Earth, the moon is still a pointless stop-over. It's like flying New York to L.A., with a stop-over in Australia.
But let's just say for the hell of it that we're past all that, and we've got a moon city that can build and launch interplanetary voyages. There are two more issues that come to the fore:
- if we can build a moon city starting from earth-launched resources, then we can do the same with Mars. The journey to Mars is harder, but the place itself is more hospitable. So once we've built our Moon city, there is really no point in using it as a spaceport to Mars. We're probably already on Mars, using the same technology.
- Given (1), the Lunans are left in a position of competing for the Earth-system-to-Mars-system interplanetary transport. The Lunans have a much lower launch cost, so they are very competitive on that score, but only if the stuff being shipped originates from the moon. But if the Lunans can produce it from scratch on the moon, then the Martians can surely do the same. And if the Lunans can't produce it from scratch, then you're importing crap from Earth and doing the whole Australian stop-over thing again.
Ultimately the whole idea only becomes feasible if the moon somehow becomes a sovereign entity with its own specialized science and technology base, and a monopoly on whatever useful technologies spring from that. Then and only then will anybody have a valid economic argument to go to the moon. But how do you get to that point if there is no valid economic argument to lay the stepping stones to get there?