Yes, sorry if I didn't spell that out, but that's what I intended when I spoke of patents being "for the common good". The purpose was to encourage science and innovation for the sake of the common good, and not so much to provide profit to inventors solely for the sake of the inventor's ability to profit.
I don't care one bit if the banks invested so much of their capital into inflated mortgage loans. That's their problem for not making _sound_ investments. They freaking have _economists_ working in those high-rise offices.
And I think this is the problem with the federal government bailing out big-business. They have people whose entire job it is to figure this shit out, calculate the risks, and make informed decisions. I don't understand how the same people who will talk about the need for a free market also endorse corporate bail-outs.
These companies have no problem taking people's money when a bad decision is made. If I use my credit card to buy into some get-rich-quick scheme and I lose my money, the bank doesn't let me off the hook. But when they invest their money in get-rich-quick schemes, they want my money to bail them out. If I download a damn song I might face hundreds of thousands of dollars for copyright infringement.
Screw it. Heads should be rolling in banks if they fucked up and used patented technology without a license. If the government doesn't like this patent system that can significantly harm our economy for something stupid, then they should reform it. It's not as though no one saw this sort of thing coming. But if they're in favor of the patent system, then let the free market handle it. Don't steal my money.
Patents are supposed to encourage inventors to invent. The means of encouragement is by rewarding them with financial benefit, but that reward is not the end goal.
Patents are supposed to benefit the common good. That's their only purpose. Now that they recognize one case (in many) where patents are crippling productivity, harming the economy, and working against the common good, they do nothing to address the problem of people abusing the patent system. Instead, they take more money from the people, harming the common good further, in order to bail out banks.
"That got yanked a while ago, and it's an irritating functionality loss."
Huh? I still have my (still functional) 2nd. Generation iPod. I have been syncing iPods with iTunes for a long time and I can assure you that "feature" was never in iTunes.
I may be wrong, but my best recollection is that iTunes did allow you to copy songs from an iPod to your library when the iPod was first released, but was quickly dropped due to pressure from the record industry. We're talking about 1st-gen iPods here, more than 5 years ago.
So I guess it's an issue of what you consider to be "a while ago". If Windows XP and OSX 10.0 were released "a while ago", then Apple allowed you to copy songs from your iPod "a while ago" too. However, it hasn't been the case for several years now.
The problem with solving poverty is that it costs money; investing money in things that will give no return is bad business. Unless we are willing to sacrifice things will never change.
I'm not sure I agree with all this. I don't know if we could ever "end poverty" even if we were able to give everyone a million dollars. "Poverty" is not such a simple issue. However, making a strong sustainable business *is* good business. Impoverishing your clients so that they won't be able to buy things in the future is bad business. Unfortunately, right now we're encouraging people to build flash-in-the-pan get-rich-quick businesses.
I mean, some moron comes up with MySpace (which is completely worthless) and makes a bazillion dollars, but the average person can barely afford to live. That's bad economics.
I don't think it's fair to criticize by saying, "he has waited until he has all this money to speak up". Sometimes you need the experience of having made money before you really understand that money isn't everything. Sometimes you need a certain level of wealth and comfort before you can stop thinking about how to ensure your future and start thinking about what you want to do with your life, how you want to help others, etc.
However, I do see something to be critical of. While BG is off being all super-humanitarian, Microsoft is busy screwing everyone over, including their own customers, and engaging in unethical business practices. If BG wants to take the moral high ground, he should start by cleaning up his own company.
The freedom of speech is the freedom to speak out against your government. The freedom for search and seizure and from self-incrimination and from cruel or unusual government is to prevent the government from going after dissidents. Quartering soldiers in people's houses puts those soldiers in a position to observe people's behavior and report anyone who isn't a "loyal citizen".
I'm not saying all of these freedoms are about making sure one side wins when it comes to all-out war. I'm saying they guarantee the legal right of the people to plot against the government, to work against those in charge, and to build an opposition to the government while the government is still in place and enforcing the laws. There's nothing that could be written into the Constitution to protect the people when it comes to all-out war or an authoritarian government breaks from the rule of law.
Yes, I agree. And it's not just that we don't want people to be defining what appropriate speech is. There's also the problem where sometimes prohibiting someone from voicing a viewpoint gives the impression that the viewpoint scares you because it's true.
It's just better to let people make fools of themselves spouting the worst things they want, and letting people make up their own minds.
The real point of the Bill of Rights, in case you don't know, was to allow the people of the United States the ability to revolt in case the government turned bad. Seriously, that's what the Bill of Rights was about: preventing the government from quelling a general rebellion.
If you don't believe me, go back and reread the amendments in this light. During the American Revolution, the British government made laws about who could meet with whom. The made it illegal for people to have guns. They quartered soldiers in people's houses. They searched whoever and whatever they wanted. Bla bla bla... the point is that the British government did every one of those things with the intent of quelling rebelling and keeping people in line.
So the point was largely the writers of the Constitution saying, "Remember everything we went through to get free from Britain? Let's make sure that if our own government ever gets as bad as that, they won't legally be able to stop us from rebelling against it like we rebelled against England."
#1 - The Time Capsule. Haven't we had wireless NAS's since 802.11 became a standard?
The point isn't that it's just a NAS, but it's a NAS that supports Time Machine. I hope they'll start supporting Time Machine use on external drives hooked to the 802.11n Airport device, but at least it's a start.
#4 - The MacBook Air. It's really just a masturbation toy for the rich gadget hound
If you're a helpdesk guy supporting Macs, the first thing you should do is install OSX on an external USB drive. If you're having any software problems, you plug in your external drive, boot from it, and do whatever you need to do. If you're really smart, you'll keep a working image on the external drive (using Carbon Copy Cloner or I think now you can even do it with the Disk Utility). that way, if the system is really hosed, you back up the user's files, reapply the image from the external drive, copy the files back, and you're done.
Weight is a big one, IMO. You'd think 5-6 pounds is light enough, until you have that 5-6 pounds strapped to your back while you run around from place to place, pretty much every day.
For those of us who carry around a laptop pretty much everywhere, shaving a pound or two off the weight sounds great.
You're right to bring up the idea of deterrence. Anyone security expert worth their salt will tell you that security is really all about deterrence. You can't make something impossible to access, and even if you could, the only way to completely secure it is to disallow all access, even to the owner. Otherwise, the owner could inadvertently give access to someone else.
So the purpose of security measures is to make it difficult to get unauthorized access, risky to attempt to gain unauthorized access, and very likely to get caught if you do gain unauthorized access. That's all. However, a good DRM scheme has to be transparent to the authorized user, meaning it has to be simple to get access, without risk to gain access, and unlikely to suffer bad consequences from getting access. Therefore it's just incompatible with the idea of security. You don't secure things against authorized access.
Seems to me that with Microsoft trying to push everyone to OOXML, the old "doc" and "xls" formats are the obsolete and depreciated formats, even if MS won't officially say so.
Of course, there is the outside chance that if a lot of programmers find themselves unemployed, they might decide to spend some portion of their now-excessive free time participating in the OSS community.
But here's the way in which FOSS is particularly recession-proof: If your average proprietary software vendor gets hit hard by the recession, they could go out of business and take their source code with them. If you're that company's customer, then the possibility of updates and support would disappear. When it comes to FOSS, that's not really possible. The project might dry up and support might disappear, but if there's money to be made updating and supporting that software, some other programmers can take up working on the project again.
I've used that plugin, and it's not all it's cracked up to be. At least when I installed it, it didn't associate ODF files with Microsoft Office, and it didn't list the files in the normal "open" dialog. Instead you had to use a specific button to import them.
I kinda mostly works, but I wouldn't particularly recommend it to people.
Good point. It's no good trying to push an alternate solution on people who are happy with their current system. Wait for it.
At some point, someone will get an ODF file. At that point, you can say, "Oh, you don't have OpenOffice? It can read ODT and DOC files." When they ask how much it costs, hit them with the news that it's free. You're more likely to get a convert than if you go to a happy Word user and try to explain that they should switch for ideological reasons.
Being eager to convert people make you seem desperate, like you're selling something that you assume people won't want. When you approach with the hard-sell, it puts people off. It's probably better to seem semi-indifferent. Or better yet, shocked: "You don't use [Firefox|OpenOffice|VLC]? What's wrong with you? It solves all your problems, plus it's free."
I don't know about hemp, but according to the summary:
The study found that switchgrass ethanol can deliver around 540 percent of the energy used to produce it, as opposed to corn ethanol which can only yield around 24 percent.
This means that corn gets you negative amounts of fuel (you'll use more farming it than you'll get out of farming it), while switchgrass gets you fuel.
The only reason corn has been chosen as the main crop for getting ethanol in the US is because of the strong cron lobby. It really isn't a feasible energy *source*, since it uses more energy than it produces.
That list is very, VERY good in my opinion, if obvious (but not so obvious to HR people).
I don't know... the whole "seems smart" thing seems obvious enough. There aren't many jobs where "seems rather unintelligent" is counted as a positive.
Yeah, I don't buy it either. Apple has shown a willingness to allow discounted music, but have rejected "variable pricing" when it meant that popular singles would have a $2 price.
I still think it's odd, and have commented about it on Slashdot before. Even while making these deals with Amazon, record execs were complaining about Apple on the grounds that their prices were too low and their DRM was too loose. What's the goal of the Amazon deals in this context?
I've heard the theory that the goal is to drive Apple out of the music business, or at least sap their momentum. Later, when the record companies have regained more control, they'll raise prices and put DRM back on files. I don't buy it. It's too stupid of a plan. You can't have your customers get accustomed $.80 MP3s and then throw them back into a world of $2 DRMed WMAs. Trying to do it would be the last nail in the coffin of the record industry.
So does anyone know what the hell is going on here?
2) It's in MP3. I think non-DRM's AAC files are fine, but MP3's are more desirable.
I'm not sure I agree with this. I guess it depends on what system you're using, and whether you have problems playing Apple's AAC files. However, all things considered, AACs are supposed to have slightly better quality sound, and the format is slightly more "free". Not much more "free", but with MP3s, the store has to pay a patent licensing fee for every song sold/distributed. For AAC, they only have to pay a licensing fee for selling encoders/decoders.
I don't think it's a big deal either way, but I think people have some weird notion that MP3s are "standard" and "normal" while AAC is "some weird Apple format".
AFAIK, the purpose of the ACID tests were basically to demonstrate a specific set of rendering bugs, supposedly bugs chosen because they were common complaints of web developers. So the purpose wasn't to test standards compliance, but to give browser developers a target to hit in order to help web developers with some of their more common problems.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, sorry if I didn't spell that out, but that's what I intended when I spoke of patents being "for the common good". The purpose was to encourage science and innovation for the sake of the common good, and not so much to provide profit to inventors solely for the sake of the inventor's ability to profit.
I don't care one bit if the banks invested so much of their capital into inflated mortgage loans. That's their problem for not making _sound_ investments. They freaking have _economists_ working in those high-rise offices.
And I think this is the problem with the federal government bailing out big-business. They have people whose entire job it is to figure this shit out, calculate the risks, and make informed decisions. I don't understand how the same people who will talk about the need for a free market also endorse corporate bail-outs.
These companies have no problem taking people's money when a bad decision is made. If I use my credit card to buy into some get-rich-quick scheme and I lose my money, the bank doesn't let me off the hook. But when they invest their money in get-rich-quick schemes, they want my money to bail them out. If I download a damn song I might face hundreds of thousands of dollars for copyright infringement.
Screw it. Heads should be rolling in banks if they fucked up and used patented technology without a license. If the government doesn't like this patent system that can significantly harm our economy for something stupid, then they should reform it. It's not as though no one saw this sort of thing coming. But if they're in favor of the patent system, then let the free market handle it. Don't steal my money.
Patents are supposed to encourage inventors to invent. The means of encouragement is by rewarding them with financial benefit, but that reward is not the end goal.
WTF?
Patents are supposed to benefit the common good. That's their only purpose. Now that they recognize one case (in many) where patents are crippling productivity, harming the economy, and working against the common good, they do nothing to address the problem of people abusing the patent system. Instead, they take more money from the people, harming the common good further, in order to bail out banks.
That is completely absurd.
I may be wrong, but my best recollection is that iTunes did allow you to copy songs from an iPod to your library when the iPod was first released, but was quickly dropped due to pressure from the record industry. We're talking about 1st-gen iPods here, more than 5 years ago.
So I guess it's an issue of what you consider to be "a while ago". If Windows XP and OSX 10.0 were released "a while ago", then Apple allowed you to copy songs from your iPod "a while ago" too. However, it hasn't been the case for several years now.
So Microsoft is admitting that you do need super-human abilities to keep Microsoft's crap from bombing out.
The problem with solving poverty is that it costs money; investing money in things that will give no return is bad business. Unless we are willing to sacrifice things will never change.
I'm not sure I agree with all this. I don't know if we could ever "end poverty" even if we were able to give everyone a million dollars. "Poverty" is not such a simple issue. However, making a strong sustainable business *is* good business. Impoverishing your clients so that they won't be able to buy things in the future is bad business. Unfortunately, right now we're encouraging people to build flash-in-the-pan get-rich-quick businesses.
I mean, some moron comes up with MySpace (which is completely worthless) and makes a bazillion dollars, but the average person can barely afford to live. That's bad economics.
I don't think it's fair to criticize by saying, "he has waited until he has all this money to speak up". Sometimes you need the experience of having made money before you really understand that money isn't everything. Sometimes you need a certain level of wealth and comfort before you can stop thinking about how to ensure your future and start thinking about what you want to do with your life, how you want to help others, etc.
However, I do see something to be critical of. While BG is off being all super-humanitarian, Microsoft is busy screwing everyone over, including their own customers, and engaging in unethical business practices. If BG wants to take the moral high ground, he should start by cleaning up his own company.
The freedom of speech is the freedom to speak out against your government. The freedom for search and seizure and from self-incrimination and from cruel or unusual government is to prevent the government from going after dissidents. Quartering soldiers in people's houses puts those soldiers in a position to observe people's behavior and report anyone who isn't a "loyal citizen".
I'm not saying all of these freedoms are about making sure one side wins when it comes to all-out war. I'm saying they guarantee the legal right of the people to plot against the government, to work against those in charge, and to build an opposition to the government while the government is still in place and enforcing the laws. There's nothing that could be written into the Constitution to protect the people when it comes to all-out war or an authoritarian government breaks from the rule of law.
Yes, I agree. And it's not just that we don't want people to be defining what appropriate speech is. There's also the problem where sometimes prohibiting someone from voicing a viewpoint gives the impression that the viewpoint scares you because it's true.
It's just better to let people make fools of themselves spouting the worst things they want, and letting people make up their own minds.
The real point of the Bill of Rights, in case you don't know, was to allow the people of the United States the ability to revolt in case the government turned bad. Seriously, that's what the Bill of Rights was about: preventing the government from quelling a general rebellion.
If you don't believe me, go back and reread the amendments in this light. During the American Revolution, the British government made laws about who could meet with whom. The made it illegal for people to have guns. They quartered soldiers in people's houses. They searched whoever and whatever they wanted. Bla bla bla... the point is that the British government did every one of those things with the intent of quelling rebelling and keeping people in line.
So the point was largely the writers of the Constitution saying, "Remember everything we went through to get free from Britain? Let's make sure that if our own government ever gets as bad as that, they won't legally be able to stop us from rebelling against it like we rebelled against England."
Humans are not in danger until AI can make a site as awesome as the Pactionary.
#1 - The Time Capsule. Haven't we had wireless NAS's since 802.11 became a standard?
The point isn't that it's just a NAS, but it's a NAS that supports Time Machine. I hope they'll start supporting Time Machine use on external drives hooked to the 802.11n Airport device, but at least it's a start.
#4 - The MacBook Air. It's really just a masturbation toy for the rich gadget hound
Yeah, so...?
If you're a helpdesk guy supporting Macs, the first thing you should do is install OSX on an external USB drive. If you're having any software problems, you plug in your external drive, boot from it, and do whatever you need to do. If you're really smart, you'll keep a working image on the external drive (using Carbon Copy Cloner or I think now you can even do it with the Disk Utility). that way, if the system is really hosed, you back up the user's files, reapply the image from the external drive, copy the files back, and you're done.
Weight is a big one, IMO. You'd think 5-6 pounds is light enough, until you have that 5-6 pounds strapped to your back while you run around from place to place, pretty much every day.
For those of us who carry around a laptop pretty much everywhere, shaving a pound or two off the weight sounds great.
You're right to bring up the idea of deterrence. Anyone security expert worth their salt will tell you that security is really all about deterrence. You can't make something impossible to access, and even if you could, the only way to completely secure it is to disallow all access, even to the owner. Otherwise, the owner could inadvertently give access to someone else.
So the purpose of security measures is to make it difficult to get unauthorized access, risky to attempt to gain unauthorized access, and very likely to get caught if you do gain unauthorized access. That's all. However, a good DRM scheme has to be transparent to the authorized user, meaning it has to be simple to get access, without risk to gain access, and unlikely to suffer bad consequences from getting access. Therefore it's just incompatible with the idea of security. You don't secure things against authorized access.
Seems to me that with Microsoft trying to push everyone to OOXML, the old "doc" and "xls" formats are the obsolete and depreciated formats, even if MS won't officially say so.
Of course, there is the outside chance that if a lot of programmers find themselves unemployed, they might decide to spend some portion of their now-excessive free time participating in the OSS community.
But here's the way in which FOSS is particularly recession-proof: If your average proprietary software vendor gets hit hard by the recession, they could go out of business and take their source code with them. If you're that company's customer, then the possibility of updates and support would disappear. When it comes to FOSS, that's not really possible. The project might dry up and support might disappear, but if there's money to be made updating and supporting that software, some other programmers can take up working on the project again.
I've used that plugin, and it's not all it's cracked up to be. At least when I installed it, it didn't associate ODF files with Microsoft Office, and it didn't list the files in the normal "open" dialog. Instead you had to use a specific button to import them.
I kinda mostly works, but I wouldn't particularly recommend it to people.
Good point. It's no good trying to push an alternate solution on people who are happy with their current system. Wait for it.
At some point, someone will get an ODF file. At that point, you can say, "Oh, you don't have OpenOffice? It can read ODT and DOC files." When they ask how much it costs, hit them with the news that it's free. You're more likely to get a convert than if you go to a happy Word user and try to explain that they should switch for ideological reasons.
Being eager to convert people make you seem desperate, like you're selling something that you assume people won't want. When you approach with the hard-sell, it puts people off. It's probably better to seem semi-indifferent. Or better yet, shocked: "You don't use [Firefox|OpenOffice|VLC]? What's wrong with you? It solves all your problems, plus it's free."
This means that corn gets you negative amounts of fuel (you'll use more farming it than you'll get out of farming it), while switchgrass gets you fuel.
The only reason corn has been chosen as the main crop for getting ethanol in the US is because of the strong cron lobby. It really isn't a feasible energy *source*, since it uses more energy than it produces.
That list is very, VERY good in my opinion, if obvious (but not so obvious to HR people).
I don't know... the whole "seems smart" thing seems obvious enough. There aren't many jobs where "seems rather unintelligent" is counted as a positive.
Yeah, I don't buy it either. Apple has shown a willingness to allow discounted music, but have rejected "variable pricing" when it meant that popular singles would have a $2 price.
I still think it's odd, and have commented about it on Slashdot before. Even while making these deals with Amazon, record execs were complaining about Apple on the grounds that their prices were too low and their DRM was too loose. What's the goal of the Amazon deals in this context?
I've heard the theory that the goal is to drive Apple out of the music business, or at least sap their momentum. Later, when the record companies have regained more control, they'll raise prices and put DRM back on files. I don't buy it. It's too stupid of a plan. You can't have your customers get accustomed $.80 MP3s and then throw them back into a world of $2 DRMed WMAs. Trying to do it would be the last nail in the coffin of the record industry.
So does anyone know what the hell is going on here?
2) It's in MP3. I think non-DRM's AAC files are fine, but MP3's are more desirable.
I'm not sure I agree with this. I guess it depends on what system you're using, and whether you have problems playing Apple's AAC files. However, all things considered, AACs are supposed to have slightly better quality sound, and the format is slightly more "free". Not much more "free", but with MP3s, the store has to pay a patent licensing fee for every song sold/distributed. For AAC, they only have to pay a licensing fee for selling encoders/decoders.
I don't think it's a big deal either way, but I think people have some weird notion that MP3s are "standard" and "normal" while AAC is "some weird Apple format".
AFAIK, the purpose of the ACID tests were basically to demonstrate a specific set of rendering bugs, supposedly bugs chosen because they were common complaints of web developers. So the purpose wasn't to test standards compliance, but to give browser developers a target to hit in order to help web developers with some of their more common problems.