Access rights are NOT ownership. [snip] I own my CDs and DVD's. They're mine and I can do with them as I wish. Not so with "access rights".
The thing that you seem to be misunderstanding is that, although you own the CD/DVD, you do not own the CONTENT of the CD/DVD. You never have, and (given the way the copyright laws are bending) you never will.
I don't buy movies, I buy DVDs. I don't buy music, I buy CDs.
This is exactly right. You own the plastic, but Disney/Sony/whoever owns the bits.
Actually, the bits are owned by the public, and the public, in turn, grants control over the access rights to them to these big greedy companies. Information that is known to the public belongs to the public (that's us, btw), copyright is our way of thanking the creators/discoverers of the information for their work. The fact that the public is choosing more and more often to withdraw those (intentionally temporary) rights is evidence, not of a lawless public, but of illegitimate laws that fail to represent the will of the people. In fact, part of the process of obtaining a copyright is to place a copy of the work into a public trust, in order to ensure that people are able to freely exercise their natural right to make copies of it after their voluntary period of abstinence is over.
We own the bits, we buy the plastic, and we loan out the right to put the bits on plastic.
I have read your comments, considered your arguments, and changed my mind. The theory that we all consume more potential energy than we need and that some of us excrete the unused portion while others retain it as fat makes sense to me. I still think it likely that some people, for various reasons, have stronger drives to consume calories than others, but now I will take potential differences in digestive systems into account whenever I consider the issue of weight modulation.
People seldom admit it, but they do listen to what you have to say and it does affect their judgment.
Oh, I prefer not to pay for the content at all. I mean, I make charitable donations to open-source software projects sometimes, but I feel no obligation to pay for anything that is made public.
Look at it this way: someone goes to the park and drops something on the ground. I walk by later and decide to pick it up. If it's valuable (like "content") then I keep it, if it isn't (like annoying advertising) then I put it in the trash. In both cases the original possessor of the object relinquished control as soon as they dropped it, and in both cases my reaction to it was perfectly reasonable and responsible. The way I see it, people who patronize businesses that display annoying advertising are subsidizing the pollution of what was once a much more attractive and useful resource, so I encourage everyone to obtain and install ad blockers.
As for advertisers and content providers: the world is changing fast and you will have to work hard and be creative in order to keep up with it. It seems very likely that online content will become available more and more through subscription based aggregation services that will pay for a portion of content creation. Advertising is slowly becoming more targeted,less intrusive and more effective. I am eagerly awaiting the day when I turn off my ad blocker because it is filtering out opportunities that are interesting and valuable to me. Perhaps someday I will actually pay for access to the portion of the data contained in today's ads that is actually of interest to me.
1) The people who fall for this won't actually learn until they're actually stung, not just an email that says it is from a government agency
Hey, that gives me an idea: if people won't learn unless they're stung then sting them. Don't just make it illegal to send spam, make it illegal to respond to it. Then law enforcement could send a ticket instead of just a "stern letter". I think that would pretty well destroy the spam business model.
In a little tribe everyone knows everyone else's business. Today, people I know nothing about know all kinds of stuff about my business. To the extent that knowledge is power these strangers have a great deal of power over me (and hundreds of millions, if not billions of people like me) that is not reciprocal. That is both unprecedented in human history and very scary. It doesn't seem like a problem right now because it's not being overtly abused, but we're gonna be a very unhappy planet the next time someone decides to eradicate a huge swath of "undesirables" of one sort or another and they have this kind of information at their fingertips.
Wikipedia is not a primary source. There is nothing wrong with not being a primary source if you are honest about what you're doing and you cite the sources that you use.
To use Wikipedia for research: First read the article to get a general feel for the subject. Then grab all of the citations for the article. Consider repeating this process with some related Wikipedia articles. When you are finished you will have a good starting point for your research -- you will not yet have done any research, nor will you be ready to do research, but you will be getting pretty close to ready.
The next step will be to look at the sources you got from Wikipedia and scan their bibliographies. Take note of the authors and institutions that produce works with titles that look interesting or that you see often. Doing this takes you backwards through the chain of other people's research. To go forwards in time you need to find works that include citations to the sources you've already found. Citeseer is a good resource for this. Again, take note of titles that you see frequently or are of particular relevance to your topic. Since the sources you obtain from Wikipedia are likely to be relatively young it makes sense to work backward through a generation or two of bibliographies before working forward again through something like Citeseer. While you are doing this only keep track of the sources that you think will be really valuable.
You can use the names of authors and institutions to jump out of the chain of citations if you feel you need a broader spectrum of sources. For a little while this process will be fun and interesting as you discover the community of people who share your interest in the subject you wish to research. The moment it gets boring you can stop and start your research.
Research is just getting credible answers to a related set of questions. You can't cite Wikipedia, but you can cite any source that they do. You can also use sources that they don't: like yourself, or anyone you interview. You don't have to read all of your source material during the course of your research; instead you skim through it picking out the pieces that are relevant to your topic (reading the parts that aren't is called "taking a break"). Take notes on what your questions are, what the answers seem to be and where you got your information. Continue this process until you have come to some satisfying conclusions that you feel confidant you can support. That's research.
Having done research you can easily change the Wikipedia pertaining to your subject. Simply write a paper based on your research (with proper citations of course), publish it, and then cite it as the source for the change you want to make. Oh, "publish" can mean "stick it on a website somewhere".
Systems like this coax order out of chaos. In this case it supports the rise of credibility out of mere opinion. It's the kind of thing that makes the Internet so amazingly powerful.
Air travel is an industry where the pricing simply makes no sense. The person sitting next to you on a flight may have paid $500 more or less than you did, for no reason.
But there is a reason, and a very good one that most travelers benefit from: we can't afford to pay the average price of a ticket. The travel industry uses very sophisticated techniques to ensure that their wealthiest customers pay enough to subsidize the rest of us. By doing that they keep enough planes in the air to be attractively convenient to the customers who pay the bills, and they can take advantage of economies of scale.
Is this a reflection of middle America's concerns?
Sadly, it's a reflection that middle America isn't concerned.
Middle America shouldn't need to be concerned and shouldn't be able to do anything about it anyway. This is basic stuff defined by the constitution. The only legal option any Senator or Representative (or President) had was to vote against it. One of the things we elect these people to do is to tell us: "no, you can't have that. It's against the law." The rule of law is supposed to put some things out of the reach of politics. It's the primary thing that allows us to even HAVE politics.
Have I lost my mind? Are there really so few other people who see something obviously, glaringly wrong here? I don't understand why any old random person couldn't just stand up and say a few simple things like: "This is America, we don't torture people here." and instantly become wildly popular if only because they're saying something that is both familiar and wildly different than what other politicians are saying. I thought we were supposed to be willing to die for our freedom. Why are we letting the terrorists scare us into throwing it away? Why not punish them by refusing to be scared? That would be the American thing to do. It seems to me that we lost the Iraqi war at Abu Ghraib. That Guantanamo Bay is a direct affront to our own values. That we're destroying the airline industry by making it such a pain in the ass to travel. That going deeply into debt with China isn't really a very good idea. That having people in prison uses up prosperity and having them at work creates it. That feelings of hate and anger are bad foundations for public policy. Am I in such a small minority that no politician could hope to gain any support by saying these things? To me none of this seems extreme. I could imagine anyone at any point in the political spectrum agreeing with it, and I honestly expected to be seeing politicians rising to power by now just by pointing it out.
It's like there was this family heirloom vase that got smashed onto the floor. Complaining about FISA is like picking up one of the shards and saying, "Oh no, a chip has come off the vase!".
So, does anyone know someone that they admire and trust? Someone who they'd be willing to follow as a political leader? Maybe if we could find good leaders, long before the big media election season starts, we could leverage the best aspects of online social networking to make them prominent enough to challenge candidates who are backed by entrenched power. If we can suppress astroturfing and spam here, then maybe we could provide a political forum where it is also suppressed. We know some things now about how to extract wisdom from crowds instead of mob-rule. We have markets, peer review and (rolls eyes) even karma. Maybe if we could get people saying things here that are interesting, relevant and credible, people would stop by to listen. Maybe if there was some hope that the best plans would be implemented by the most competent people, then the drivel being peddled on TV these days wouldn't seem so palatable. Once people get the sense that their voices could actually get heard it will be impossible to get them to shut up, and if they could magnify the power of their voices by delegating their say to the most articulate carriers of their message then... well, that would be representative democracy wouldn't it.
Maybe we should fork the government, create a new branch for the development of political leadership and let the market decide. After all, if software can be free, why can't politics?
There is no need to choose between one restriction or the other. The Linux kernel should always be free and there should always be enough free software to available to assemble a respectable, even superior, distro, but that's very different from saying that every distro "should" be assembled completely from free software. In fact, a good argument could be made that such a restriction would, in itself, make the software less than "free". Even the GPL tolerates coexistence with closed software, if somewhat begrudgingly and with the view that it is "lesser".
For any given commodity there are clusters of customers who share a common set of interests and tastes. Whenever such a cluster reaches sufficient size and stability it will support it's own customized version of that commodity. So long as there is a sufficiently large and stable community of people who support pure OSS the market (if it's a free market) will provide at least one, and probably several, pure OSS distros. But as long as that group of people is not representative of the entire market there will also be distros that are not pure OSS. It would be foolish to hope or strive for any other arrangement.
The gov't ought to exercise eminent domain over the entire internet infrastructure and run it as a minimally regulated public service just like they do roads. Net Neutrality is a perfect example of why: it's totally stupid from a technical point of view because different kinds of usage require different kinds of QOS, but it's absolutely necessary from an economic perspective because otherwise the telcos are incented to act in direct opposition to the needs of the consumer.
The "invisible hand" of the free market only works in cases where the market is actually free. The telecommunications industry is bubbling over with natural monopolies and will therefore never, ever, work to benefit consumers as long as it is regulated by the open market.
I know, I know, the government is notoriously bad at running things -- except where the job they do is just fine in which case nobody notices. Again, the system works a lot better when the people doing a job get paid more when they please the end consumer and less when they fail. People who regulate an industry should never be allowed to make money _in_ that industry -- just like we don't allow criminals to become judges.
Anyway, the point is, the free market is the wrong tool for controlling monopolistic enterprises and socialism is the right one. It's not a matter of philosophy, it's more about looking at which direction various forces tend to push things and harnessing the force that pushes in the direction you want to go. In this case our favorite force tends to push in the wrong direction, so we really ought to consider hitching our fate to a different one this time.
Well, the paper trail is only useful if it's actually examined which suggests that only the paper should be used to tally the votes. In reality you could drive down the chances of undetected fraud by randomly challenging a relatively small percentage of the electronic votes -- the same way that manufacturers will test a sampling of a batch for defects as a way of verifying the quality of the whole batch.
Paper can be dangerous though. If you keep track of the order in which the voters arrive then you can correlate votes to people. When that happens vote tampering becomes a simple matter of extortion or bribery.
The only way a voting system can be trusted by the public is if the process of the (secret) ballots leaving the voter's possession, being mixed into the larger community of ballots, and subsequently counted, can be easily observed by anyone who is curious enough to do so. It might be reasonable to use computers to mark the ballots in order to ensure that they are legible, but once they are used to count or store the ballots it becomes impossible for a casual observer to tell what's happened to them.
The only thing worse is vote by mail where the very entry point into the process is open to duress and fraud.
These methods violate the most basic principals of free and open elections. Whether they are abused or not, their very openness to abuse severely damages our ability to believe that our representatives in government have been duly elected.
Nobody is proposing to do DRM that depends on machine clocks. Simply releasing the decryption key after a period of time is quite easy.
Considering that the time period under discussion is several decades long, that would depend entirely upon a company maintaining those keys, not losing those keys and still being available to release those keys after all those years.
Yeah, all those years. That's right near the core of the problem. The current term on copyrights is that they overcompensate copyright holders (too often distributors who have extorted copyright privileges from the artists they purportedly "serve") for providing access to the protected works. Copyright is a special privilege granted by society as a means of rewarding artists. It is meant to be a temporary artificial restriction on the natural right of people to communicate information to each other and its sole purpose is to allow market forces to determine and deliver just compensation for the labor of producing and delivering a work into the public domain. In other words it is an exercise of the publics right to reward artists and inventors. It is not an exercise of a creators right to control their creation: such a right has never existed and efforts to create one seem both counter-productive and ultimately doomed to failure. The model of intellectual property as a wealth generating asset is not of benefit to society as a whole. In fact, it is a dangerous misrepresentation. Knowledge must be continually retransmitted or it becomes lost. Even recordings last only as long as the key to their recovery is known.
So I think that DRM should be viewed as a threat to the public domain. If it is to be used as a means of securing copyright protections it seems reasonable to withhold that protection for any work until a non-DRMed version of it is put into publicly held escrow and made available to anyone who petitions for fair-use access to it. The right of the inventor to be compensated for their labor should always be conditioned on the public's ability to make use of its result.
Any time you start throwing regulations at something, you make it harder for everyone to compete.
Sounds nice, but is completely unsubstantiated. There are in fact many regulations whose sole function is to allow competition where otherwise there could be no competition. The most obvious of these are our anti-trust laws.
You also make it much easier for the government to start sliding in taxes here and there.
That is just false. The existence of regulation is unrelated to the government's ability to tax. Taxation is not relevant to the discussion.
And I'm sorry but anything that those patent-happy companies want for the internet is probably NOT a good thing to
begin with. Microsoft and Amazon would patent the keyboard if they could
This is an ad hominem attack. The merits of the amendment are unrelated to the parties that support it. It would be useful to bring those companies up if you were going to show how their interests are in conflict with ours and then show how the proposed amendment furthered those interests to our detriment. But you did not do that. Instead you brought up patents which are irrelevant to this discussion.
Just because Cnet and/. toss Republican on there doesn't automatically mean it's a terrible thing that this bill went down in flames. Don't subscribe to a political party because of a title or animal. Do your own research and come to your own conclusions.
Yes, exactly. You should do research, discover facts and use them to support your conclusions. Your post contained no information and your every argument relied on a logical fallacy. What amazes me is that this was modded "insightful"... multiple times. We do all know that "insightful" and "ignorant" are different things, right? Even if you agree with the main thrust of a post doesn't mean that it's "insightful". "insightful" means to discover deeper truths within a body of facts than is immediately obvious by using superior reasoning skills, while "ignorant" means to base your conclusions on faulty reasoning or bad information. This post was decidedly ignorant.
Each person who agrees to this reinforces it and causes the pressure on the rest of us to do the same to increase. People have a moral obligation to refuse to do this stuff because when they don't they drag the rest of us that much closer to slavery right along with them. Seriously people, say "no" now when all you stand to lose is your job.
Why would the labels want to find more bands? They profit from scarcity. They only need enough bands to cover the market. Any more than that and they'd be competing with themselves.
Actually when you see similar stuff like this comming out so close together it's not a matter of copying, it's a matter of multiple companies working on the same thing at the same time. The one that appears first is the one that is 'finished' first. Patent fanaticism aside, most of these ideas are "obvious" to practitioners in the field. When one of these companies comes out with something that doesn't show up on other sites for several months then we'll be seeing evidence of an idea being copied. In the meantime we've got a lot of smart minds trying to solve a similar set of problems with a similar set of tools and, not very surprisingly, coming up with a lot of similar solutions.
The copying of ideas will happen, but it will be the best of the details that will be duplicated, not the big ideas. This is a result of competition and is a good thing. The surest way to become a loser in this game is to be too proud to adopt your competitors' best ideas. The winners will be the ones who do the best job of integrating the best ideas. Except if there's just one winner. Then the competition, innovation and fun are all over.
If you want code that can be readily understood you need something other than coding conventions. Coding conventions only make the code all look the same. You can get almost all of the benefit (without most of the arguments) by saying only that each file must be written with the same coding convention throughout. The code will get prettier and prettier with tighter conventions and developers will waste less time reformatting each others code. But it won't do a thing to make your project more understandable.
For that you need an understandable design and the best advice I've ever seen for that is in Eric Evens' "Domain Driven Design" http://domaindrivendesign.org/. The advice there will work for both Agile and non-Agile projects and its core themes are pretty much unavoidable truths about how to write code for a project that is also written about the project: use language that comes from the projects domain, insulate code from each domain or sub-domain from the rest of the world, keep each method at the same level of abstraction (that's big) and make implicit concepts explicit, to name a few. The key is for your developers to consider themselves to be authors and to strive to keep each little piece of code they write on-topic. Not only will it be easier for new developers to come up to speed but the code will work a heck of a lot better too.
Avoid writing any comments that have to be changed when the code changes. Act as if the people who will maintain the code will never update the comments. It's not that they never will, if they're any good at all they always will, but in a lot of environments it doesn't. Comments that have to be changed with the code make the code harder to maintain because of the volume of change that has to be made. They make changes more error prone for the same reason -- the bigger the change the bigger the chance that something will go wrong. Furthermore your compiler will never complain when the comments aren't updated and faulty comments will never cause a test to fail.
Source code can be very expressive and that expressive power ought to be leveraged to its maximum extent before being augmented by comments. At that point it should be augmented by comments, but those comments should be all about things that can't be expressed in the code like exactly where I can go to read about the algorithm you are using (title, author, revision, page number, URL -- be specific), implicit preconditions, class comments describing their single responsibility, non-obvious side-effects, the reason for some complicated piece of code (only when the code itself really can't be made simple -- like for a profiler driven optimization for instance), your email address. Anything that I as a maintainer could possibly need to know that I can't find out by studying the code should be in a comment somewhere. And nothing else should be. The information that can only go into a commment is too valuable to be obfuscated by other gratuitous comments.
Here is a theory:
large scale outsourcers are guilty of treason. Indict 'em, try 'em, convict 'em, sentence 'em, and hang 'em. Publicly.
Here's another theory:
Accept lower pay so that American companies won't outsource.
Or how about this theory:
Open new businesses in developing nations where talented workers can be hired locally for lower wages than can be had in the first world.
Here's the deal: the wages in developing nations like India and China are going to go up and the wages in developed nations, especially the United States are going to go down. It's not going to be pleasant for those of us who have gotten used to high wages, but if we are truly as deserving and innovative as we've been telling ourselves we are all these years then we'll adapt, otherwise I suppose we can fight it until it overwhelms us.
The lesson from the tragedy in New Orleans is that fighting certain changes only makes them happen at a later time and in a more dramatic fashion. If we accept the inevitable then we can work with it and utimately profit from it. Developed nations can afford to import the best and brightest from developing nations, for instance. Sure those people will displace less talented and more highly paid native workers, but they will also make native companies more competitive in the global market. It's far better to give jobs to imported talent than it is to lose the opportunity to employ anyone at all. Developed nations also have more cash on hand to spend on education and on infrastructure, like public transportation, that will make it easier for their people to compete by being able to offer a higher degree of skill at a lower rate of pay.
The way to win this game is to make outsourcing undesirable, not illegal. This is really the same argument that slashdotters make about the entertainment industry: new technology has changed the basic nature of the market, the thing to do is to bid farewell to easy profits and develop a leaner business model that fits the new environment, not enact laws that artificially protect the status quo.
It will be interesting to see if technology geeks are really smarter than the entertainment industry or if we're really just all talk.
You people don't give RMS and GNU enough credit. Without GNU, GNU/Linux is just a kernel.
The problem I have with this is that a kernal is an operating system while a big bag of really useful tools isn't. From a practical standpoint: GNU's not UNIX, but Linux is. A sharp distinction between what is and is not considered to be an operating system could serve us very well. For instance, if a clearer distinction were made between the OS and the programs that run on top of it it would have been a lot easier to break the M$ monopoly via legal means: make 'em break out the kernal and sell it on it's own. I think that the fact that M$ was able to make the argument that their browser is part of their OS is a real problem.
But I doubt that Stallman is fighting this battle in order to win it. I think that he's doing it as a way to publicize GNU. Seems to be working too.
What makes you think that most parents are qualified to be teachers? In all subjects?
What would make me think that I'm not? Teaching children is a basic human function. I can give my children fifteen times as much attention during school hours as a teacher can give each of his thirty students during the day. Plus I have mornings and evenings. Plus I have years and years worth of personal experience with these particular children. There's no possible way any teacher, no matter how well trained or experienced, could come close to being as qualified to teach my children anything as I am.
Even if I don't know a subject well I can teach it very effectively by learning it alongside my child.
Even if parents were, somehow, unqualified to teach children it's not like children won't learn on their own. About the only way to keep a child from learning would be to lock them into some kind of uninteresting environment, make them sit still and prevent them from following their own curiosity. In that case you'd need special qualifications just to maintain order, much less teach them anything.
No, homeschoolers are fighting a downhill battle when it comes to educating their children. It's actually being able to have an adult in the household that's available all day long to do the schooling that is a challenge. Homeschooling is a luxury and not everyone can afford it.
My mother, not so shortly after opening my very first box of legos, noticed an odd light coming in from an adjoining room. She investigated and discovered that the first light of dawn had crept in and caught her unawares. There is a segment of the population that is just easily enthralled by the creative opportunities that Legos provide. It has nothing at all to do with age. In fact, I'm asking my mom for Legos Mindstorms for my 40th birthday. I just hope that I get a chance to play with them between the time she's ready to give them up and the time my five year old finds out about them.
"loose bowels" is the first association I come to when trying to interpret "loose" where a "lose" should be. It's kind of gross. "let loose" comes up next which only makes it worse.
Slashdot Mirror
Access rights are NOT ownership. [snip] I own my CDs and DVD's. They're mine and I can do with them as I wish. Not so with "access rights".
The thing that you seem to be misunderstanding is that, although you own the CD/DVD, you do not own the CONTENT of the CD/DVD. You never have, and (given the way the copyright laws are bending) you never will.
I don't buy movies, I buy DVDs. I don't buy music, I buy CDs.
This is exactly right. You own the plastic, but Disney/Sony/whoever owns the bits.
Actually, the bits are owned by the public, and the public, in turn, grants control over the access rights to them to these big greedy companies. Information that is known to the public belongs to the public (that's us, btw), copyright is our way of thanking the creators/discoverers of the information for their work. The fact that the public is choosing more and more often to withdraw those (intentionally temporary) rights is evidence, not of a lawless public, but of illegitimate laws that fail to represent the will of the people. In fact, part of the process of obtaining a copyright is to place a copy of the work into a public trust, in order to ensure that people are able to freely exercise their natural right to make copies of it after their voluntary period of abstinence is over.
We own the bits, we buy the plastic, and we loan out the right to put the bits on plastic.
I have read your comments, considered your arguments, and changed my mind. The theory that we all consume more potential energy than we need and that some of us excrete the unused portion while others retain it as fat makes sense to me. I still think it likely that some people, for various reasons, have stronger drives to consume calories than others, but now I will take potential differences in digestive systems into account whenever I consider the issue of weight modulation.
People seldom admit it, but they do listen to what you have to say and it does affect their judgment.
Oh, I prefer not to pay for the content at all. I mean, I make charitable donations to open-source software projects sometimes, but I feel no obligation to pay for anything that is made public.
Look at it this way: someone goes to the park and drops something on the ground. I walk by later and decide to pick it up. If it's valuable (like "content") then I keep it, if it isn't (like annoying advertising) then I put it in the trash. In both cases the original possessor of the object relinquished control as soon as they dropped it, and in both cases my reaction to it was perfectly reasonable and responsible. The way I see it, people who patronize businesses that display annoying advertising are subsidizing the pollution of what was once a much more attractive and useful resource, so I encourage everyone to obtain and install ad blockers.
As for advertisers and content providers: the world is changing fast and you will have to work hard and be creative in order to keep up with it. It seems very likely that online content will become available more and more through subscription based aggregation services that will pay for a portion of content creation. Advertising is slowly becoming more targeted,less intrusive and more effective. I am eagerly awaiting the day when I turn off my ad blocker because it is filtering out opportunities that are interesting and valuable to me. Perhaps someday I will actually pay for access to the portion of the data contained in today's ads that is actually of interest to me.
1) The people who fall for this won't actually learn until they're actually stung, not just an email that says it is from a government agency
Hey, that gives me an idea: if people won't learn unless they're stung then sting them. Don't just make it illegal to send spam, make it illegal to respond to it. Then law enforcement could send a ticket instead of just a "stern letter". I think that would pretty well destroy the spam business model.
In a little tribe everyone knows everyone else's business. Today, people I know nothing about know all kinds of stuff about my business. To the extent that knowledge is power these strangers have a great deal of power over me (and hundreds of millions, if not billions of people like me) that is not reciprocal. That is both unprecedented in human history and very scary. It doesn't seem like a problem right now because it's not being overtly abused, but we're gonna be a very unhappy planet the next time someone decides to eradicate a huge swath of "undesirables" of one sort or another and they have this kind of information at their fingertips.
Wikipedia is not a primary source. There is nothing wrong with not being a primary source if you are honest about what you're doing and you cite the sources that you use.
To use Wikipedia for research:
First read the article to get a general feel for the subject. Then grab all of the citations for the article. Consider repeating this process with some related Wikipedia articles. When you are finished you will have a good starting point for your research -- you will not yet have done any research, nor will you be ready to do research, but you will be getting pretty close to ready.
The next step will be to look at the sources you got from Wikipedia and scan their bibliographies. Take note of the authors and institutions that produce works with titles that look interesting or that you see often. Doing this takes you backwards through the chain of other people's research. To go forwards in time you need to find works that include citations to the sources you've already found. Citeseer is a good resource for this. Again, take note of titles that you see frequently or are of particular relevance to your topic. Since the sources you obtain from Wikipedia are likely to be relatively young it makes sense to work backward through a generation or two of bibliographies before working forward again through something like Citeseer. While you are doing this only keep track of the sources that you think will be really valuable.
You can use the names of authors and institutions to jump out of the chain of citations if you feel you need a broader spectrum of sources. For a little while this process will be fun and interesting as you discover the community of people who share your interest in the subject you wish to research. The moment it gets boring you can stop and start your research.
Research is just getting credible answers to a related set of questions. You can't cite Wikipedia, but you can cite any source that they do. You can also use sources that they don't: like yourself, or anyone you interview. You don't have to read all of your source material during the course of your research; instead you skim through it picking out the pieces that are relevant to your topic (reading the parts that aren't is called "taking a break"). Take notes on what your questions are, what the answers seem to be and where you got your information. Continue this process until you have come to some satisfying conclusions that you feel confidant you can support. That's research.
Having done research you can easily change the Wikipedia pertaining to your subject. Simply write a paper based on your research (with proper citations of course), publish it, and then cite it as the source for the change you want to make. Oh, "publish" can mean "stick it on a website somewhere".
Systems like this coax order out of chaos. In this case it supports the rise of credibility out of mere opinion. It's the kind of thing that makes the Internet so amazingly powerful.
Air travel is an industry where the pricing simply makes no sense. The person sitting next to you on a flight may have paid $500 more or less than you did, for no reason.
But there is a reason, and a very good one that most travelers benefit from: we can't afford to pay the average price of a ticket. The travel industry uses very sophisticated techniques to ensure that their wealthiest customers pay enough to subsidize the rest of us. By doing that they keep enough planes in the air to be attractively convenient to the customers who pay the bills, and they can take advantage of economies of scale.
Is this a reflection of middle America's concerns?
Sadly, it's a reflection that middle America isn't concerned.
Middle America shouldn't need to be concerned and shouldn't be able to do anything about it anyway. This is basic stuff defined by the constitution. The only legal option any Senator or Representative (or President) had was to vote against it. One of the things we elect these people to do is to tell us: "no, you can't have that. It's against the law." The rule of law is supposed to put some things out of the reach of politics. It's the primary thing that allows us to even HAVE politics.
Have I lost my mind? Are there really so few other people who see something obviously, glaringly wrong here? I don't understand why any old random person couldn't just stand up and say a few simple things like: "This is America, we don't torture people here." and instantly become wildly popular if only because they're saying something that is both familiar and wildly different than what other politicians are saying. I thought we were supposed to be willing to die for our freedom. Why are we letting the terrorists scare us into throwing it away? Why not punish them by refusing to be scared? That would be the American thing to do. It seems to me that we lost the Iraqi war at Abu Ghraib. That Guantanamo Bay is a direct affront to our own values. That we're destroying the airline industry by making it such a pain in the ass to travel. That going deeply into debt with China isn't really a very good idea. That having people in prison uses up prosperity and having them at work creates it. That feelings of hate and anger are bad foundations for public policy. Am I in such a small minority that no politician could hope to gain any support by saying these things? To me none of this seems extreme. I could imagine anyone at any point in the political spectrum agreeing with it, and I honestly expected to be seeing politicians rising to power by now just by pointing it out.
It's like there was this family heirloom vase that got smashed onto the floor. Complaining about FISA is like picking up one of the shards and saying, "Oh no, a chip has come off the vase!".
So, does anyone know someone that they admire and trust? Someone who they'd be willing to follow as a political leader? Maybe if we could find good leaders, long before the big media election season starts, we could leverage the best aspects of online social networking to make them prominent enough to challenge candidates who are backed by entrenched power. If we can suppress astroturfing and spam here, then maybe we could provide a political forum where it is also suppressed. We know some things now about how to extract wisdom from crowds instead of mob-rule. We have markets, peer review and (rolls eyes) even karma. Maybe if we could get people saying things here that are interesting, relevant and credible, people would stop by to listen. Maybe if there was some hope that the best plans would be implemented by the most competent people, then the drivel being peddled on TV these days wouldn't seem so palatable. Once people get the sense that their voices could actually get heard it will be impossible to get them to shut up, and if they could magnify the power of their voices by delegating their say to the most articulate carriers of their message then... well, that would be representative democracy wouldn't it.
Maybe we should fork the government, create a new branch for the development of political leadership and let the market decide. After all, if software can be free, why can't politics?
There is no need to choose between one restriction or the other. The Linux kernel should always be free and there should always be enough free software to available to assemble a respectable, even superior, distro, but that's very different from saying that every distro "should" be assembled completely from free software. In fact, a good argument could be made that such a restriction would, in itself, make the software less than "free". Even the GPL tolerates coexistence with closed software, if somewhat begrudgingly and with the view that it is "lesser".
For any given commodity there are clusters of customers who share a common set of interests and tastes. Whenever such a cluster reaches sufficient size and stability it will support it's own customized version of that commodity. So long as there is a sufficiently large and stable community of people who support pure OSS the market (if it's a free market) will provide at least one, and probably several, pure OSS distros. But as long as that group of people is not representative of the entire market there will also be distros that are not pure OSS. It would be foolish to hope or strive for any other arrangement.
The gov't ought to exercise eminent domain over the entire internet infrastructure and run it as a minimally regulated public service just like they do roads. Net Neutrality is a perfect example of why: it's totally stupid from a technical point of view because different kinds of usage require different kinds of QOS, but it's absolutely necessary from an economic perspective because otherwise the telcos are incented to act in direct opposition to the needs of the consumer.
The "invisible hand" of the free market only works in cases where the market is actually free. The telecommunications industry is bubbling over with natural monopolies and will therefore never, ever, work to benefit consumers as long as it is regulated by the open market.
I know, I know, the government is notoriously bad at running things -- except where the job they do is just fine in which case nobody notices. Again, the system works a lot better when the people doing a job get paid more when they please the end consumer and less when they fail. People who regulate an industry should never be allowed to make money _in_ that industry -- just like we don't allow criminals to become judges.
Anyway, the point is, the free market is the wrong tool for controlling monopolistic enterprises and socialism is the right one. It's not a matter of philosophy, it's more about looking at which direction various forces tend to push things and harnessing the force that pushes in the direction you want to go. In this case our favorite force tends to push in the wrong direction, so we really ought to consider hitching our fate to a different one this time.
Well, the paper trail is only useful if it's actually examined which suggests that only the paper should be used to tally the votes. In reality you could drive down the chances of undetected fraud by randomly challenging a relatively small percentage of the electronic votes -- the same way that manufacturers will test a sampling of a batch for defects as a way of verifying the quality of the whole batch.
Paper can be dangerous though. If you keep track of the order in which the voters arrive then you can correlate votes to people. When that happens vote tampering becomes a simple matter of extortion or bribery.
Don't even get me started on vote-by-mail...
The only way a voting system can be trusted by the public is if the process of the (secret) ballots leaving the voter's possession, being mixed into the larger community of ballots, and subsequently counted, can be easily observed by anyone who is curious enough to do so. It might be reasonable to use computers to mark the ballots in order to ensure that they are legible, but once they are used to count or store the ballots it becomes impossible for a casual observer to tell what's happened to them.
The only thing worse is vote by mail where the very entry point into the process is open to duress and fraud.
These methods violate the most basic principals of free and open elections. Whether they are abused or not, their very openness to abuse severely damages our ability to believe that our representatives in government have been duly elected.
Sounds nice, but is completely unsubstantiated. There are in fact many regulations whose sole function is to allow competition where otherwise there could be no competition. The most obvious of these are our anti-trust laws.
You also make it much easier for the government to start sliding in taxes here and there.
That is just false. The existence of regulation is unrelated to the government's ability to tax. Taxation is not relevant to the discussion.
And I'm sorry but anything that those patent-happy companies want for the internet is probably NOT a good thing to begin with. Microsoft and Amazon would patent the keyboard if they could
This is an ad hominem attack. The merits of the amendment are unrelated to the parties that support it. It would be useful to bring those companies up if you were going to show how their interests are in conflict with ours and then show how the proposed amendment furthered those interests to our detriment. But you did not do that. Instead you brought up patents which are irrelevant to this discussion.
Just because Cnet and /. toss Republican on there doesn't automatically mean it's a terrible thing that this bill went down in flames. Don't subscribe to a political party because of a title or animal. Do your own research and come to your own conclusions.
Yes, exactly. You should do research, discover facts and use them to support your conclusions. Your post contained no information and your every argument relied on a logical fallacy. What amazes me is that this was modded "insightful"... multiple times. We do all know that "insightful" and "ignorant" are different things, right? Even if you agree with the main thrust of a post doesn't mean that it's "insightful". "insightful" means to discover deeper truths within a body of facts than is immediately obvious by using superior reasoning skills, while "ignorant" means to base your conclusions on faulty reasoning or bad information. This post was decidedly ignorant.
Each person who agrees to this reinforces it and causes the pressure on the rest of us to do the same to increase. People have a moral obligation to refuse to do this stuff because when they don't they drag the rest of us that much closer to slavery right along with them. Seriously people, say "no" now when all you stand to lose is your job.
Why would the labels want to find more bands? They profit from scarcity. They only need enough bands to cover the market. Any more than that and they'd be competing with themselves.
Actually when you see similar stuff like this comming out so close together it's not a matter of copying, it's a matter of multiple companies working on the same thing at the same time. The one that appears first is the one that is 'finished' first. Patent fanaticism aside, most of these ideas are "obvious" to practitioners in the field. When one of these companies comes out with something that doesn't show up on other sites for several months then we'll be seeing evidence of an idea being copied. In the meantime we've got a lot of smart minds trying to solve a similar set of problems with a similar set of tools and, not very surprisingly, coming up with a lot of similar solutions.
The copying of ideas will happen, but it will be the best of the details that will be duplicated, not the big ideas. This is a result of competition and is a good thing. The surest way to become a loser in this game is to be too proud to adopt your competitors' best ideas. The winners will be the ones who do the best job of integrating the best ideas. Except if there's just one winner. Then the competition, innovation and fun are all over.
If you want code that can be readily understood you need something other than coding conventions. Coding conventions only make the code all look the same. You can get almost all of the benefit (without most of the arguments) by saying only that each file must be written with the same coding convention throughout. The code will get prettier and prettier with tighter conventions and developers will waste less time reformatting each others code. But it won't do a thing to make your project more understandable.
For that you need an understandable design and the best advice I've ever seen for that is in Eric Evens' "Domain Driven Design" http://domaindrivendesign.org/. The advice there will work for both Agile and non-Agile projects and its core themes are pretty much unavoidable truths about how to write code for a project that is also written about the project: use language that comes from the projects domain, insulate code from each domain or sub-domain from the rest of the world, keep each method at the same level of abstraction (that's big) and make implicit concepts explicit, to name a few. The key is for your developers to consider themselves to be authors and to strive to keep each little piece of code they write on-topic. Not only will it be easier for new developers to come up to speed but the code will work a heck of a lot better too.
Avoid writing any comments that have to be changed when the code changes. Act as if the people who will maintain the code will never update the comments. It's not that they never will, if they're any good at all they always will, but in a lot of environments it doesn't. Comments that have to be changed with the code make the code harder to maintain because of the volume of change that has to be made. They make changes more error prone for the same reason -- the bigger the change the bigger the chance that something will go wrong. Furthermore your compiler will never complain when the comments aren't updated and faulty comments will never cause a test to fail.
Source code can be very expressive and that expressive power ought to be leveraged to its maximum extent before being augmented by comments. At that point it should be augmented by comments, but those comments should be all about things that can't be expressed in the code like exactly where I can go to read about the algorithm you are using (title, author, revision, page number, URL -- be specific), implicit preconditions, class comments describing their single responsibility, non-obvious side-effects, the reason for some complicated piece of code (only when the code itself really can't be made simple -- like for a profiler driven optimization for instance), your email address. Anything that I as a maintainer could possibly need to know that I can't find out by studying the code should be in a comment somewhere. And nothing else should be. The information that can only go into a commment is too valuable to be obfuscated by other gratuitous comments.
large scale outsourcers are guilty of treason. Indict 'em, try 'em, convict 'em, sentence 'em, and hang 'em. Publicly.
Here's another theory:
Accept lower pay so that American companies won't outsource.
Or how about this theory:
Open new businesses in developing nations where talented workers can be hired locally for lower wages than can be had in the first world.
Here's the deal: the wages in developing nations like India and China are going to go up and the wages in developed nations, especially the United States are going to go down. It's not going to be pleasant for those of us who have gotten used to high wages, but if we are truly as deserving and innovative as we've been telling ourselves we are all these years then we'll adapt, otherwise I suppose we can fight it until it overwhelms us.
The lesson from the tragedy in New Orleans is that fighting certain changes only makes them happen at a later time and in a more dramatic fashion. If we accept the inevitable then we can work with it and utimately profit from it. Developed nations can afford to import the best and brightest from developing nations, for instance. Sure those people will displace less talented and more highly paid native workers, but they will also make native companies more competitive in the global market. It's far better to give jobs to imported talent than it is to lose the opportunity to employ anyone at all. Developed nations also have more cash on hand to spend on education and on infrastructure, like public transportation, that will make it easier for their people to compete by being able to offer a higher degree of skill at a lower rate of pay.
The way to win this game is to make outsourcing undesirable, not illegal. This is really the same argument that slashdotters make about the entertainment industry: new technology has changed the basic nature of the market, the thing to do is to bid farewell to easy profits and develop a leaner business model that fits the new environment, not enact laws that artificially protect the status quo.
It will be interesting to see if technology geeks are really smarter than the entertainment industry or if we're really just all talk.
The problem I have with this is that a kernal is an operating system while a big bag of really useful tools isn't. From a practical standpoint: GNU's not UNIX, but Linux is. A sharp distinction between what is and is not considered to be an operating system could serve us very well. For instance, if a clearer distinction were made between the OS and the programs that run on top of it it would have been a lot easier to break the M$ monopoly via legal means: make 'em break out the kernal and sell it on it's own. I think that the fact that M$ was able to make the argument that their browser is part of their OS is a real problem. But I doubt that Stallman is fighting this battle in order to win it. I think that he's doing it as a way to publicize GNU. Seems to be working too.
What would make me think that I'm not? Teaching children is a basic human function. I can give my children fifteen times as much attention during school hours as a teacher can give each of his thirty students during the day. Plus I have mornings and evenings. Plus I have years and years worth of personal experience with these particular children. There's no possible way any teacher, no matter how well trained or experienced, could come close to being as qualified to teach my children anything as I am.
Even if I don't know a subject well I can teach it very effectively by learning it alongside my child.
Even if parents were, somehow, unqualified to teach children it's not like children won't learn on their own. About the only way to keep a child from learning would be to lock them into some kind of uninteresting environment, make them sit still and prevent them from following their own curiosity. In that case you'd need special qualifications just to maintain order, much less teach them anything.
No, homeschoolers are fighting a downhill battle when it comes to educating their children. It's actually being able to have an adult in the household that's available all day long to do the schooling that is a challenge. Homeschooling is a luxury and not everyone can afford it.
My mother, not so shortly after opening my very first box of legos, noticed an odd light coming in from an adjoining room. She investigated and discovered that the first light of dawn had crept in and caught her unawares. There is a segment of the population that is just easily enthralled by the creative opportunities that Legos provide. It has nothing at all to do with age. In fact, I'm asking my mom for Legos Mindstorms for my 40th birthday. I just hope that I get a chance to play with them between the time she's ready to give them up and the time my five year old finds out about them.
"loose bowels" is the first association I come to when trying to interpret "loose" where a "lose" should be. It's kind of gross. "let loose" comes up next which only makes it worse.
OMG, you live in Reston Virginia don't you.