The most exciting part of this to me is "full-spectrum light." One of my biggest pet peeves about human populated areas (and there are a lot) is the orange glow of street lights. They create an obnoxious orange glow everywhere - even the sky turns bright orange. Also, they cause all other color to be washed out.
I think that many of Apple's strategies prove that Steve Jobs and Bill Gates are very similar businessmen. The fact that Steve Jobs wanted to close the hardware *and* the software almost makes me happy that Bill won. Almost.
That's a cool idea, but if it actually happened I would be really bothered. I know this is sad, but I would rather my money go to the RIAA than lawyers/insurance salesmen. At least the RIAA uses its funding to pay for publicity and recording time for its artists, and there's a halfway decent chance some artists will see some of the money.
The main difference between lawsuit insurance and paying off the RIAA is the first contributes nothing to society, while the latter at least attempts to.
"Please note that they're not strapping bombs to themselves and running into cafes or government buildings - they're taking a legal action in a desperate request for help."
Why would you even say that? You accuse people here of subtly claiming "Jews are evil," but your comment seems to be a backhanded way of saying "at least they aren't like the Arabs and strapping bombs to themselves!" I don't mean to put words in your mouth, but what else could you have possibly meant?
And I think it is irrelevant whether citizens are violent when their government has a *huge* standing army and spends 10% of its GDP on defense. They don't need to take any violent action when their taxes are supposed to be protecting them (unlike Palestine). I'm not being anti-Israel, I'm just saying your implicit comparison of Israel to Palestine isn't fair.
That is probably largely true, but most bit torrent programs seed to at least a 1:1 ratio by default; many seed more. As long as the average person seeds close to a 1:1 ratio, most of the corporation's costs are defrayed.
"You made the assumption that I had a 4750Mhz CPU"
You made the assumption that to be 10x faster, a CPU needs to run at 10x the speed. The top Intel CPU on this chart is 3200 Mhz, and is 10x faster than the bottom (2800 Mhz).
Remember - Moore's law is about transistor density, not transistor speed.
On #2 I was going to say unrecompressed, but I found this unnecessary. As far as ripping DVDs are concerned, I believe it is fairly standard to call an unrecompressed DVD uncompressed. Everyone knows DVD uses some lossy compression, but at those levels it is very difficult to find artifacts. Move to a 1.4 gig mpeg4 and I can personally see artifacts in action scenes on my big TV. It is a result of the way mpeg4 movies compresses neighboring frames.
An HD movie at the compression most commonly used on blu-ray/hd-dvd runs around 25-50 gigs. Going much less than that can create artifacts that are noticeable on a TV larger than 30 inches. I don't see people dealing with these file sizes anytime in the next five years. Even uncompressed ripped DVD movies (which run around 5-10 gigs each) are not commonly downloaded because of their massive size, more than five years after DVD became mainstream.
"Wouldn't he profit more if he could sell the 5 core processors all at $600 and make a separate 2 core processor for the price of $200 and sell it for $400?"
Economy of scale says not necessarily. If you can build a factory that only builds one product, you can make it incredibly efficient. One possibility under this plan would be to intelligently disable cores. For example, let's say there is some failure rate in each core. The chips with high failure rates can have the failed cores disabled, and the company can still turn a profit (this ignores the lame renting idea).
I know graphics cards manufacturers do this - they disable pipelines and lower the clock rate in their cards that have high failure rates, and then sell it as a cheaper model.
I have always associated FOSS with libertarians instead of liberals - I think your post is good evidence of this (read through your points, most are arguments for libertarianism). Sadly though, I don't think this appeals to a lot of people who view both as theoretical pipe-dreams.
Regardless, I think FOSS and politics aren't really related. Yes, most FOSS proponents tend to be libertarian, but that is irrelevant to converting most people over. It's really as easy as explaining (or better yet showing) the advantages.
"Why is it that only non-Free developers are giving us new kinds of games like Spore?"
Because a game like spore takes decades of man-hours to do right, and most open source developers have full-time jobs. When you pay for software - especially games - you're usually paying for a lot of thought and time from the developers/artists.
SciPY already exists - we don't need two open source solutions for the same thing. Octave fills a huge niche for people who have matlab programs and want to run/modify them for free. Matlab syntax may be terrible, but it has been a standard in so many scientific and engineering fields for so long, you won't be able to replace it by wishing you could. Instead, we should just offer these people a reasonable alternative, and develop sciPY separately.
It's a little hard to put the importance of the transistor into perspective. One way of looking at it is about 3 billion transistors are made worldwide - a second. Imagine how different the world would be if these transistors were still made manually with vacuum tubes (or not made at all.)
While you read this post, about 20 transistors were manufactured for every person in the world.
Your vision of the perfect world is my hell. Sometimes I want to pay to see real art, not watch some crap full of advertising. The mentality that everything should be free has only served the purposes of big corporations who can afford to plaster anything and everything with advertisements, and in the process take over creative control. Artists should not literally starve, and corporations should stay out of art, so I completely back copyright if it protects the quality of art.
When you look at the low average salaries of a typical musician or Hollywood writer (or even at the negative profits of the big studios that back them), you'll realize that people who create actual IP don't make a whole lot. I blame this on the increasing mentality that art should be free, because someone else can pay for it. Artists have always needed monetary aid, and being a patron of the arts has really fallen out of favor.
Yeah, you are right - I think I meant to argue that you can't cite Wikipedia/Britannica because they contain no original research. I wrongly assumed that secondary source = no original research. Sorry about that:/
I feel like I already said this in a comment you replied to, but I'll repeat it for emphasis - you aren't supposed to cite Wikipedia because it is a secondary source, not because it isn't peer reviewed. Britannica should not be cited either, despite the fact that it may be peer reviewed.
Peer review (in the academic sense) in an encyclopedia is unnecessary. An encyclopedia is there to summarize dependable primary sources. The only thing that needs to be checked is if they summarize those sources completely, accurately, and in an unbiased manner.
Wikipedia articles are peer reviewed, but using a different definition - it is not the academic journal version of peer review. In Wikipedia, a peer review is when people who have a lot of experience writing articles judge an article - not experts of a field judging the content of an article. They will check that facts are referenced, primary sources are accurate and correspond to the article's content, and that bias is minimized. IMO this is the best kind of peer review for an encyclopedia, because experts are not free of bias. By keeping an encyclopedia as only a summarization of primary sources, it maintains a certain independence. Therefore, I think Wikipedia's peer review does the job quite well (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Peer_review).
Citizendium utilizes an example of the academic version of peer review, in which experts in a field have more control over an article than the masses. The fundamental problem with this (ignoring the fact that not many actual experts want to go through the trouble of signing up) is that it gives total control to a small number of people from a specific background (academics). If you want to add a defense of Israel in an Israel vs Palestine article, you may have to deal with a Professor in Middle East politics who happens to have written his dissertation defending Palestine. While Wikipedia's article may be a constantly changing mess, Citizendium's version is *designed to be biased*. This is why I like Wikipedia's version of peer review more - the content is not judged, the article is.
I think you miss the point of your own argument. Yes, it is common knowledge that you can't reference Wikipedia, but I don't think you correctly argue why.
To make it clear, Wikipedia is a peer reviewed reference. It is *often* either correct, or so obviously wrong (i.e. vandalized) that it does not matter. Most people who argue it is biased don't realize anyone can hit the "edit" or "discussion" button on the top. This is all irrelvant in the academic world, hoever. You do not reference a secondary source - ever. You don't reference Britannica, you don't reference Wikipedia. If you want to reference something, you should find the original source, to avoid any sort of introduced bias or misinformation.
The less channels of information you go through, the better - this is the primary reason why you should never reference Wikipedia. As far as Jimmy Wales' original point? Yes, I think students should use Wikipedia because it is an excellent secondary source. At the same time, students should learn the shortcomings of secondary sources as well as Wikipedia's shortcomings specifically.
This mentality is the problem with the justice system in general - jail should not be about retribution. How is an incompetent spammer who spams people about something no one buys (e.g. pogs) any less guilty than a successful one (a viagra spammer)?
And after a spammer stole so much from society, why is even more being stolen from the taxpayer to give him an admittedly longer sentence in jail?
If humans are no longer alive, this system is useless regardless of coal because there is no one to replant the seeds in their natural regions.
If the only problem is coal, seeds can probably survive in the natural ambient temperature (when you buy a packet of seeds, they are not refrigerated) for long enough that humans can build a new cooling system.
With high quality open source encoders (I can't tell the difference between a 192 kbps LAME-encoded MP3 and the original CD with my Sennheiser HD-595s) and low CPU decoding requirements (OGG uses about 50% more CPU than MP3 on my setup), I think MP3 is a perfect compromise. As long as I can encode and decode my format for free (regardless of *inconsequential* legal concerns) I support MP3s.
Like the vast majority of people out there, I just want to listen to music without worrying about the politics of it. I know some people on Slashdot have a problem with this, but I'll never understand why those people want to tell me how to listen to my own music.
The key to science, by its very foundations, is admitting that you can observe the centimeters but only make theories on the kilometers (however confident you are of experimental data). I wrote an entire term paper in high school on how the dinosaurs went extinct from an asteroid impact, and listed so much evidence that I came away from the experience completely confident of the theory. Recently I was reading some science news on the extinction event, and was amazed to find that scientists are actually less confident of that theory then they were when I wrote my paper. In other words, my confidence in the current scientific theory was misplaced. It was a valuable lesson - question everything that science teaches us. I now consider myself much more informed about scientific theories; by educating myself about opposing views, I can argue about the issue much more effectively.
As far as I'm concerned, a scientist claiming that he *knows* what happens at the kilometer level as *fact* is wrong - almost in the same category as Christians who "know" how the Universe formed because a book told them. Both display ignorance of how science works.
Slashdot Mirror
The most exciting part of this to me is "full-spectrum light." One of my biggest pet peeves about human populated areas (and there are a lot) is the orange glow of street lights. They create an obnoxious orange glow everywhere - even the sky turns bright orange. Also, they cause all other color to be washed out.
I think that many of Apple's strategies prove that Steve Jobs and Bill Gates are very similar businessmen. The fact that Steve Jobs wanted to close the hardware *and* the software almost makes me happy that Bill won. Almost.
That's a cool idea, but if it actually happened I would be really bothered. I know this is sad, but I would rather my money go to the RIAA than lawyers/insurance salesmen. At least the RIAA uses its funding to pay for publicity and recording time for its artists, and there's a halfway decent chance some artists will see some of the money.
The main difference between lawsuit insurance and paying off the RIAA is the first contributes nothing to society, while the latter at least attempts to.
"Please note that they're not strapping bombs to themselves and running into cafes or government buildings - they're taking a legal action in a desperate request for help."
Why would you even say that? You accuse people here of subtly claiming "Jews are evil," but your comment seems to be a backhanded way of saying "at least they aren't like the Arabs and strapping bombs to themselves!" I don't mean to put words in your mouth, but what else could you have possibly meant?
And I think it is irrelevant whether citizens are violent when their government has a *huge* standing army and spends 10% of its GDP on defense. They don't need to take any violent action when their taxes are supposed to be protecting them (unlike Palestine). I'm not being anti-Israel, I'm just saying your implicit comparison of Israel to Palestine isn't fair.
That is probably largely true, but most bit torrent programs seed to at least a 1:1 ratio by default; many seed more. As long as the average person seeds close to a 1:1 ratio, most of the corporation's costs are defrayed.
"You made the assumption that I had a 4750Mhz CPU"
You made the assumption that to be 10x faster, a CPU needs to run at 10x the speed. The top Intel CPU on this chart is 3200 Mhz, and is 10x faster than the bottom (2800 Mhz).
Remember - Moore's law is about transistor density, not transistor speed.
On #2 I was going to say unrecompressed, but I found this unnecessary. As far as ripping DVDs are concerned, I believe it is fairly standard to call an unrecompressed DVD uncompressed. Everyone knows DVD uses some lossy compression, but at those levels it is very difficult to find artifacts. Move to a 1.4 gig mpeg4 and I can personally see artifacts in action scenes on my big TV. It is a result of the way mpeg4 movies compresses neighboring frames.
An HD movie at the compression most commonly used on blu-ray/hd-dvd runs around 25-50 gigs. Going much less than that can create artifacts that are noticeable on a TV larger than 30 inches. I don't see people dealing with these file sizes anytime in the next five years. Even uncompressed ripped DVD movies (which run around 5-10 gigs each) are not commonly downloaded because of their massive size, more than five years after DVD became mainstream.
"Wouldn't he profit more if he could sell the 5 core processors all at $600 and make a separate 2 core processor for the price of $200 and sell it for $400?"
Economy of scale says not necessarily. If you can build a factory that only builds one product, you can make it incredibly efficient. One possibility under this plan would be to intelligently disable cores. For example, let's say there is some failure rate in each core. The chips with high failure rates can have the failed cores disabled, and the company can still turn a profit (this ignores the lame renting idea).
I know graphics cards manufacturers do this - they disable pipelines and lower the clock rate in their cards that have high failure rates, and then sell it as a cheaper model.
I have always associated FOSS with libertarians instead of liberals - I think your post is good evidence of this (read through your points, most are arguments for libertarianism). Sadly though, I don't think this appeals to a lot of people who view both as theoretical pipe-dreams.
Regardless, I think FOSS and politics aren't really related. Yes, most FOSS proponents tend to be libertarian, but that is irrelevant to converting most people over. It's really as easy as explaining (or better yet showing) the advantages.
"Why is it that only non-Free developers are giving us new kinds of games like Spore?"
Because a game like spore takes decades of man-hours to do right, and most open source developers have full-time jobs. When you pay for software - especially games - you're usually paying for a lot of thought and time from the developers/artists.
CDs are 27 year old technology, but it is still trivial to play anything on them; I don't understand the concern over obsolesce of digital formats.
Funny thing is, the sentence is about a person whose job (hobby?) is to look for errors in grammar.
Look at his correction of this textbook:
http://www-math.mit.edu/~sipser/itoc-errs2.1.html
SciPY already exists - we don't need two open source solutions for the same thing. Octave fills a huge niche for people who have matlab programs and want to run/modify them for free. Matlab syntax may be terrible, but it has been a standard in so many scientific and engineering fields for so long, you won't be able to replace it by wishing you could. Instead, we should just offer these people a reasonable alternative, and develop sciPY separately.
It's a little hard to put the importance of the transistor into perspective. One way of looking at it is about 3 billion transistors are made worldwide - a second. Imagine how different the world would be if these transistors were still made manually with vacuum tubes (or not made at all.)
While you read this post, about 20 transistors were manufactured for every person in the world.
Your vision of the perfect world is my hell. Sometimes I want to pay to see real art, not watch some crap full of advertising. The mentality that everything should be free has only served the purposes of big corporations who can afford to plaster anything and everything with advertisements, and in the process take over creative control. Artists should not literally starve, and corporations should stay out of art, so I completely back copyright if it protects the quality of art.
When you look at the low average salaries of a typical musician or Hollywood writer (or even at the negative profits of the big studios that back them), you'll realize that people who create actual IP don't make a whole lot. I blame this on the increasing mentality that art should be free, because someone else can pay for it. Artists have always needed monetary aid, and being a patron of the arts has really fallen out of favor.
That the first person who makes a predictable Al Gore joke be taken out and shot ;)
Yeah, you are right - I think I meant to argue that you can't cite Wikipedia/Britannica because they contain no original research. I wrongly assumed that secondary source = no original research. Sorry about that :/
I feel like I already said this in a comment you replied to, but I'll repeat it for emphasis - you aren't supposed to cite Wikipedia because it is a secondary source, not because it isn't peer reviewed. Britannica should not be cited either, despite the fact that it may be peer reviewed.
Peer review (in the academic sense) in an encyclopedia is unnecessary. An encyclopedia is there to summarize dependable primary sources. The only thing that needs to be checked is if they summarize those sources completely, accurately, and in an unbiased manner.
Wikipedia articles are peer reviewed, but using a different definition - it is not the academic journal version of peer review. In Wikipedia, a peer review is when people who have a lot of experience writing articles judge an article - not experts of a field judging the content of an article. They will check that facts are referenced, primary sources are accurate and correspond to the article's content, and that bias is minimized. IMO this is the best kind of peer review for an encyclopedia, because experts are not free of bias. By keeping an encyclopedia as only a summarization of primary sources, it maintains a certain independence. Therefore, I think Wikipedia's peer review does the job quite well (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Peer_review).
Citizendium utilizes an example of the academic version of peer review, in which experts in a field have more control over an article than the masses. The fundamental problem with this (ignoring the fact that not many actual experts want to go through the trouble of signing up) is that it gives total control to a small number of people from a specific background (academics). If you want to add a defense of Israel in an Israel vs Palestine article, you may have to deal with a Professor in Middle East politics who happens to have written his dissertation defending Palestine. While Wikipedia's article may be a constantly changing mess, Citizendium's version is *designed to be biased*. This is why I like Wikipedia's version of peer review more - the content is not judged, the article is.
I think you miss the point of your own argument. Yes, it is common knowledge that you can't reference Wikipedia, but I don't think you correctly argue why.
To make it clear, Wikipedia is a peer reviewed reference. It is *often* either correct, or so obviously wrong (i.e. vandalized) that it does not matter. Most people who argue it is biased don't realize anyone can hit the "edit" or "discussion" button on the top. This is all irrelvant in the academic world, hoever. You do not reference a secondary source - ever. You don't reference Britannica, you don't reference Wikipedia. If you want to reference something, you should find the original source, to avoid any sort of introduced bias or misinformation.
The less channels of information you go through, the better - this is the primary reason why you should never reference Wikipedia. As far as Jimmy Wales' original point? Yes, I think students should use Wikipedia because it is an excellent secondary source. At the same time, students should learn the shortcomings of secondary sources as well as Wikipedia's shortcomings specifically.
This mentality is the problem with the justice system in general - jail should not be about retribution. How is an incompetent spammer who spams people about something no one buys (e.g. pogs) any less guilty than a successful one (a viagra spammer)?
And after a spammer stole so much from society, why is even more being stolen from the taxpayer to give him an admittedly longer sentence in jail?
If humans are no longer alive, this system is useless regardless of coal because there is no one to replant the seeds in their natural regions.
If the only problem is coal, seeds can probably survive in the natural ambient temperature (when you buy a packet of seeds, they are not refrigerated) for long enough that humans can build a new cooling system.
With high quality open source encoders (I can't tell the difference between a 192 kbps LAME-encoded MP3 and the original CD with my Sennheiser HD-595s) and low CPU decoding requirements (OGG uses about 50% more CPU than MP3 on my setup), I think MP3 is a perfect compromise. As long as I can encode and decode my format for free (regardless of *inconsequential* legal concerns) I support MP3s.
Like the vast majority of people out there, I just want to listen to music without worrying about the politics of it. I know some people on Slashdot have a problem with this, but I'll never understand why those people want to tell me how to listen to my own music.
The key to science, by its very foundations, is admitting that you can observe the centimeters but only make theories on the kilometers (however confident you are of experimental data). I wrote an entire term paper in high school on how the dinosaurs went extinct from an asteroid impact, and listed so much evidence that I came away from the experience completely confident of the theory. Recently I was reading some science news on the extinction event, and was amazed to find that scientists are actually less confident of that theory then they were when I wrote my paper. In other words, my confidence in the current scientific theory was misplaced. It was a valuable lesson - question everything that science teaches us. I now consider myself much more informed about scientific theories; by educating myself about opposing views, I can argue about the issue much more effectively.
As far as I'm concerned, a scientist claiming that he *knows* what happens at the kilometer level as *fact* is wrong - almost in the same category as Christians who "know" how the Universe formed because a book told them. Both display ignorance of how science works.