I think on the timeline of: A - Copyrighted, B - Copyright expired, C - Copyright extended by new law, violations of copyright between B and C are protected by ex post facto considerations, but copyright violations after time C are in violation of the law passed at that time, and therefore no longer ex post facto.
On a less sarcastic note, I think that perpetual copyright can be a very good thing. Start with "free" copyright for 15 or 20 years, but then, if a work is profitable at that time, charge a nominal fee to extend the copyright for another 5 years - so, if something were written and copyrighted in 1995, it would be protected to say 2015, and if you're still making money on it - register an extension on the copyright, for a fee. You're making money on the work, obviously it's worth it. For works that aren't profitable, they become public domain within a reasonable time frame.
So, to get to perpetual copyright and true value to society, every additional 5 year extension costs 5x as much as the one before it. $1000 for years 20-25, $5000 more to get to 30, $25,000 more to get to 35, $125,000 to get to 40, etc. If a work is still profitable at 70 years post-authorship, surely the benefactors should be sharing a significant portion ($2B) of the profits back to the society that protects their copyright?
I'd say that Saudi Arabia doesn't much care whether or not shale gets shut down, they can produce oil for less so they are doing that to gain market share. They don't value the oil in the ground and they don't value the distant (beyond 2040) future, so they're looking to maximize their income today. Any hardship on other oil producers, the ecology, or the future is incidental - of no concern to the decision makers who will be long dead when those imagined problems might happen.
Absolutely, and keep some awareness while the GPS catches reflections off of trees and tall buildings and tells you to take stupid turns. If you are on Highway 1 and you get a spontaneous request to "turn right onto Highway 1" - obviously, you just ignore that one.
I think GPS is great for "first time" travel, especially into complex situations like downtown areas. But, if you aren't doing the mental navigation work while listening for the GPS prompts, then, yeah, you're setting yourself up.
So, back in the old days, we'd pull "MapQuest" maps to go places and once in awhile get directions to a State Park that took a bunch of little turns before "entering" and then put you on something like "Hog wallow trail..." we used to follow those just for fun, but it was pretty obvious that they weren't our final destination.
I have worked with two "principles" who got tens of millions in VC investment, both of them were ~40 years old, in good health and of youthful appearance when it happened. Five years after "round A" both of them looked ~60 years old and had some serious tales of woe. One got a multi-million payoff after about 10 years, the other got a check for $0.01, but the personal costs of the VC money were equally high for both.
What I read in the article seemed to be a case of not knowing the specifics of the companies being named, but rather attributing generalities to them. Of course, the article is correct in the specifics regarding what the Apache organization is, how RedHat operates, etc. But... at some point in the past, there have been business models selling Apache support - nothing that's going to generate an attractive 100:1 ROI, so that's why the VCs yawn. Also, they speak of open source models which allow authors to retain control over derivative works, and while OSI is strictly against this, there are other models (like Creative Commons variants) that do specify this.
So, what I see is VCs who have "a little knowledge" spouting it in association with oblique references to specific companies and models that don't really match up at all, but it's all "that open source stuff" to them... People getting pedantic with deep knowledge and concrete specifics need to understand that VCs take your areas of interest a lot less seriously than you do. Just because they control hundreds of millions of investment dollars doesn't make them super-human, and in-fact that concern of the big money in some ways reduces their capacity to understand and even care about other issues.
VCs who miss the point of open source shouldn't fund it
False, absolutely false. VCs view investing like a trip to the casino: bet on 20 longshots, hope to manage at least 1 of the 20 to a 100:1 win. Overall ROI: 500%
Fundamental understanding of the technology behind the business is not required - estimating its chances in the marketplace is.
Anybody who is seeking VC funding and also believes that the VCs will help them further some ideological agenda is either completely misguided, or attempting to further the ideological agenda that "greed is good."
The alternatives are basically to either attempt to repair the SourceForge brand by stopping doing the wrong things, or say to hell with it - crank it up for maximal short term cash output and pump those resources into a new brand that doesn't do the wrong things from the start.
Personally, I think the SourceForge brand is worth saving. Perhaps after several years of good behavior, the people who had grown to hate it might give up their grudges.
So, I'm thrilled that the open source GL driver is finally deemed useable - how's its stability? I've had quite a bit of experience with legacy OpenGL code that "works fine" on NVIDIA drivers having not only rendering problems, but actual crash in the driver problems with Mesa.
I think what they are saying is that the problem children are in some degree drawn to the "bad" games, but that the games don't make the problem children, nor make them worse.
So, yeah, if you've got a random school full of kids, the ones with the visibly violent interests, be that metal, comic books, rock 'n roll, video games, or whatever, will have _statistically_ more problems later, but it's not a judgement in and of itself, and the lack of visibly violent interests is in no way a guarantee of good behavior in the future.
I've long thought that a "web of trust" would be far more practical than any crypto-blockchain crap... but nobody thought they could buy illegal drugs and get away with it in a "web of trust" model, so it hasn't had Bitcoin's adoption rate.
The thing I notice most consistently in economic discussion is the lack of agreement over virtually everything, except that fact that the people running things don't really know what they are doing.
Mild inflation - keeping currency availability constant on a per-capita basis as population grows - might be considered a desirable economic stability target. Whether or not population growth is desirable is probably leaving the field of economics and getting into (bigger, more important?) questions of ecology and balance of power between nations.
In reality, a certain degree of uncertainty has always been present in western economies, communism as implemented in the USSR did remove a great deal of uncertainty (fixed rents and food costs), but that didn't do great things for the economy overall. It did provide people with a very different perspective on life and a great deal of security that they could at least depend on their sucky old building, unreliable heat and bad food to always be there for them - but in that implementation improving one's own standard of living was almost impossible to achieve, so most people didn't bother to try and things stagnated/deteriorated while the west moved forward.
Deflation is essentially the pyramid scheme that everyone is posting about.
In a deflationary currency, people who hoard the currency gain value over time. If you get in at the beginning and hold large quantities for a long time, then you've got a tremendous value advantage over later starting players.
If you notice, no _real_ currency stays deflationary for long - the rich already have too many ways to get richer, they don't need deflationary currency to give them another advantage.
Credit cards are backed by the legal system, with liability limits, fraud protections, etc. They have their flaws and identity theft is more than a minor nuisance, but Bitcoin is still a "wild west" currency. If you leave your monetary value in Bitcoin for more than a few minutes, you are taking a far greater actual risk than using a traditional credit card. Which then means that you need to transfer your value into Bitcoin just before making a transaction and then then receiver of Bitcoin needs to transfer their value out of Bitcoin shortly after receiving it - both of these transfers are using traditional electronic banking methods that could have been used to make the transaction in the first place.
If you're worried about fraud against your bank account, set up one for "less than trustworthy online dealings" that only has as much money in it as you need to conduct a day's business - that's just as secure a "firewall" as using Bitcoin for your risk-facing transactions.
I really like the "anonymous currency" sales aspect that helped get Bitcoin adopted. At best, Bitcoin gives its users security through obscurity - people don't understand how it works, so they think it's untraceable. The very nature of digital currency - especially the no double-spend provisions - make it traceable by design, far more so than cash, precious metals, and even unmarked gemstones. Due to their long history, the traditional currencies have better developed traceability schemes, but when someone really puts their mind to developing the methodology (and really, this is just a matter of convincing the courts that the method constitutes proof beyond a reasonable doubt), tracking down and proving the identities behind bitcoin transactions will be more forensically certain than fingerprinting or DNA evidence.
And, yes, there are some techniques that users can try to use to try to further obfuscate their identity, but the fact remains, the blockchain is publically available, every transaction ever made is recorded, decipherable, and you can bet already archived by law enforcement.
Concorde was too expensive to succeed in the market - even people who could afford it and were flying routes that Concorde also flew just didn't care enough about the time to spend the money. If you could get them there at trans-sonic speeds, 60 minutes NY-London for Concorde prices, then you might have gotten more interest, but the difference between 6 or 7 hours and 3 or 4 just wasn't enough to tempt enough people - with pre-boarding prep and ground transit, either option basically consumed a full day.
Today's computing is entering a period of snappy 4K resolution displays, faster boot times (about damn time, too), and WYSIWYG word processing with less than paper flipping lag (at least for some office software suites.) I'm not sure why cheap/fast flash storage capacities are still climbing past 32GB for $10 (not sure what the need is), but I'm not complaining.
No, a lot of applications don't scale well across multiple cores / CPUs.
In 2016 they don't. But as chips evolve the applications will as well.
That's what they said in 2006, when CPU clock speeds essentially hit the wall.
Mainstream CPUs started going multi-core back then. Some things parallelize quite well, and the tools are making it easier for them to do so today, but there's still a lot of sequential crunching to do for a lot of jobs. We're not likely to see a 1000 core 200MHz chip out-performing a 2 core 2GHz chip for "average desktop applications" anytime soon.
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You must be using Kubuntu or some other amateurish distro.
KDE 5 on OpenSuse Leap is rock solid. I haven't had any crashes, stalling or any other bug.
I'll take the flamebait... if a distro is usable in it's default, as installed, configuration does that make it amateurish?
Let's hope they get it right for Kubuntu 16.04
I think on the timeline of: A - Copyrighted, B - Copyright expired, C - Copyright extended by new law, violations of copyright between B and C are protected by ex post facto considerations, but copyright violations after time C are in violation of the law passed at that time, and therefore no longer ex post facto.
On a less sarcastic note, I think that perpetual copyright can be a very good thing. Start with "free" copyright for 15 or 20 years, but then, if a work is profitable at that time, charge a nominal fee to extend the copyright for another 5 years - so, if something were written and copyrighted in 1995, it would be protected to say 2015, and if you're still making money on it - register an extension on the copyright, for a fee. You're making money on the work, obviously it's worth it. For works that aren't profitable, they become public domain within a reasonable time frame.
So, to get to perpetual copyright and true value to society, every additional 5 year extension costs 5x as much as the one before it. $1000 for years 20-25, $5000 more to get to 30, $25,000 more to get to 35, $125,000 to get to 40, etc. If a work is still profitable at 70 years post-authorship, surely the benefactors should be sharing a significant portion ($2B) of the profits back to the society that protects their copyright?
I'd say that Saudi Arabia doesn't much care whether or not shale gets shut down, they can produce oil for less so they are doing that to gain market share. They don't value the oil in the ground and they don't value the distant (beyond 2040) future, so they're looking to maximize their income today. Any hardship on other oil producers, the ecology, or the future is incidental - of no concern to the decision makers who will be long dead when those imagined problems might happen.
Yep, I'd advise a re-screening of RoboCop 2014 for you...
Good man, I top-posted the same sentiment.
This has been thoroughly covered by great thinkers of the past: Doomsday Device
Absolutely, and keep some awareness while the GPS catches reflections off of trees and tall buildings and tells you to take stupid turns. If you are on Highway 1 and you get a spontaneous request to "turn right onto Highway 1" - obviously, you just ignore that one.
I think GPS is great for "first time" travel, especially into complex situations like downtown areas. But, if you aren't doing the mental navigation work while listening for the GPS prompts, then, yeah, you're setting yourself up.
So, back in the old days, we'd pull "MapQuest" maps to go places and once in awhile get directions to a State Park that took a bunch of little turns before "entering" and then put you on something like "Hog wallow trail..." we used to follow those just for fun, but it was pretty obvious that they weren't our final destination.
I have worked with two "principles" who got tens of millions in VC investment, both of them were ~40 years old, in good health and of youthful appearance when it happened. Five years after "round A" both of them looked ~60 years old and had some serious tales of woe. One got a multi-million payoff after about 10 years, the other got a check for $0.01, but the personal costs of the VC money were equally high for both.
What I read in the article seemed to be a case of not knowing the specifics of the companies being named, but rather attributing generalities to them. Of course, the article is correct in the specifics regarding what the Apache organization is, how RedHat operates, etc. But... at some point in the past, there have been business models selling Apache support - nothing that's going to generate an attractive 100:1 ROI, so that's why the VCs yawn. Also, they speak of open source models which allow authors to retain control over derivative works, and while OSI is strictly against this, there are other models (like Creative Commons variants) that do specify this.
So, what I see is VCs who have "a little knowledge" spouting it in association with oblique references to specific companies and models that don't really match up at all, but it's all "that open source stuff" to them... People getting pedantic with deep knowledge and concrete specifics need to understand that VCs take your areas of interest a lot less seriously than you do. Just because they control hundreds of millions of investment dollars doesn't make them super-human, and in-fact that concern of the big money in some ways reduces their capacity to understand and even care about other issues.
VCs who miss the point of open source shouldn't fund it
False, absolutely false. VCs view investing like a trip to the casino: bet on 20 longshots, hope to manage at least 1 of the 20 to a 100:1 win. Overall ROI: 500%
Fundamental understanding of the technology behind the business is not required - estimating its chances in the marketplace is.
Anybody who is seeking VC funding and also believes that the VCs will help them further some ideological agenda is either completely misguided, or attempting to further the ideological agenda that "greed is good."
Those restrictions sound 100% reasonable for all outdoor flight, period
Until you start talking about tiny stuff like this...
http://www.onagofly.com/
The alternatives are basically to either attempt to repair the SourceForge brand by stopping doing the wrong things, or say to hell with it - crank it up for maximal short term cash output and pump those resources into a new brand that doesn't do the wrong things from the start.
Personally, I think the SourceForge brand is worth saving. Perhaps after several years of good behavior, the people who had grown to hate it might give up their grudges.
So, I'm thrilled that the open source GL driver is finally deemed useable - how's its stability? I've had quite a bit of experience with legacy OpenGL code that "works fine" on NVIDIA drivers having not only rendering problems, but actual crash in the driver problems with Mesa.
I think what they are saying is that the problem children are in some degree drawn to the "bad" games, but that the games don't make the problem children, nor make them worse.
So, yeah, if you've got a random school full of kids, the ones with the visibly violent interests, be that metal, comic books, rock 'n roll, video games, or whatever, will have _statistically_ more problems later, but it's not a judgement in and of itself, and the lack of visibly violent interests is in no way a guarantee of good behavior in the future.
I've long thought that a "web of trust" would be far more practical than any crypto-blockchain crap... but nobody thought they could buy illegal drugs and get away with it in a "web of trust" model, so it hasn't had Bitcoin's adoption rate.
The thing I notice most consistently in economic discussion is the lack of agreement over virtually everything, except that fact that the people running things don't really know what they are doing.
Mild inflation - keeping currency availability constant on a per-capita basis as population grows - might be considered a desirable economic stability target. Whether or not population growth is desirable is probably leaving the field of economics and getting into (bigger, more important?) questions of ecology and balance of power between nations.
In reality, a certain degree of uncertainty has always been present in western economies, communism as implemented in the USSR did remove a great deal of uncertainty (fixed rents and food costs), but that didn't do great things for the economy overall. It did provide people with a very different perspective on life and a great deal of security that they could at least depend on their sucky old building, unreliable heat and bad food to always be there for them - but in that implementation improving one's own standard of living was almost impossible to achieve, so most people didn't bother to try and things stagnated/deteriorated while the west moved forward.
Deflation is essentially the pyramid scheme that everyone is posting about.
In a deflationary currency, people who hoard the currency gain value over time. If you get in at the beginning and hold large quantities for a long time, then you've got a tremendous value advantage over later starting players.
If you notice, no _real_ currency stays deflationary for long - the rich already have too many ways to get richer, they don't need deflationary currency to give them another advantage.
Credit cards are backed by the legal system, with liability limits, fraud protections, etc. They have their flaws and identity theft is more than a minor nuisance, but Bitcoin is still a "wild west" currency. If you leave your monetary value in Bitcoin for more than a few minutes, you are taking a far greater actual risk than using a traditional credit card. Which then means that you need to transfer your value into Bitcoin just before making a transaction and then then receiver of Bitcoin needs to transfer their value out of Bitcoin shortly after receiving it - both of these transfers are using traditional electronic banking methods that could have been used to make the transaction in the first place.
If you're worried about fraud against your bank account, set up one for "less than trustworthy online dealings" that only has as much money in it as you need to conduct a day's business - that's just as secure a "firewall" as using Bitcoin for your risk-facing transactions.
I really like the "anonymous currency" sales aspect that helped get Bitcoin adopted. At best, Bitcoin gives its users security through obscurity - people don't understand how it works, so they think it's untraceable. The very nature of digital currency - especially the no double-spend provisions - make it traceable by design, far more so than cash, precious metals, and even unmarked gemstones. Due to their long history, the traditional currencies have better developed traceability schemes, but when someone really puts their mind to developing the methodology (and really, this is just a matter of convincing the courts that the method constitutes proof beyond a reasonable doubt), tracking down and proving the identities behind bitcoin transactions will be more forensically certain than fingerprinting or DNA evidence.
And, yes, there are some techniques that users can try to use to try to further obfuscate their identity, but the fact remains, the blockchain is publically available, every transaction ever made is recorded, decipherable, and you can bet already archived by law enforcement.
And, in my opinion, worthy of a 4000 BTC prize, not 4000 USD.
Concorde was too expensive to succeed in the market - even people who could afford it and were flying routes that Concorde also flew just didn't care enough about the time to spend the money. If you could get them there at trans-sonic speeds, 60 minutes NY-London for Concorde prices, then you might have gotten more interest, but the difference between 6 or 7 hours and 3 or 4 just wasn't enough to tempt enough people - with pre-boarding prep and ground transit, either option basically consumed a full day.
Today's computing is entering a period of snappy 4K resolution displays, faster boot times (about damn time, too), and WYSIWYG word processing with less than paper flipping lag (at least for some office software suites.) I'm not sure why cheap/fast flash storage capacities are still climbing past 32GB for $10 (not sure what the need is), but I'm not complaining.
No, a lot of applications don't scale well across multiple cores / CPUs.
In 2016 they don't. But as chips evolve the applications will as well.
That's what they said in 2006, when CPU clock speeds essentially hit the wall.
Mainstream CPUs started going multi-core back then. Some things parallelize quite well, and the tools are making it easier for them to do so today, but there's still a lot of sequential crunching to do for a lot of jobs. We're not likely to see a 1000 core 200MHz chip out-performing a 2 core 2GHz chip for "average desktop applications" anytime soon.