Provision of last-mile services are not commercially viable, virtually every network of this type has been built with government funds.. If such a network comes under private ownership it will always be a monopoly because it isn't commercially viable to build any competing infrastructure.
Such infrastructure should always have remained controlled by a non profit wholesale provider, and let third parties brand and offer services to end users.
I think it's true that this project isn't commercially viable. For the "non profit wholesale provider", the question is how much of the building costs they will be able to recoup through the wholesale charges. Closing down the competing Telstra network will presumably allow higher charges than would otherwise have been the case. My experience with other government enterprises, e.g., electricity, is not entirely positive, since they tend to operate inefficiently and simply pass on the costs via large annual price hikes. Without competition (except for mobile networks), will that happen on the fibre network too?
Not trolling here, but since when is its mankind's responsibility to save every variety of every species of animal on the planet? I know that we have been responsible for the extinction of many species, but does that now make us responsible for stopping extinction altogether? Huge swaths of species went extinct long before man even came along, and so it seems pretty clear that it's part of the natural order. So are we now supposed to completely stop that natural process out of some sense of guilt (because we have arrogantly decided that we're not part of the natural order)?
I'm not saying we should just go out an hunt every species we feel like to extinction, or poison the water whenever we feel like it. That would be neither responsible nor wise. But I am saying that it's not our responsibility to save every species in the world that happens to exist now, not our place to end "extinction" itself as a process.
Because it's a favourite food fish? If humanity can't even be bothered protecting that, what hope is there for any other living thing on the planet?
Originally Interzone was given a grant by the Western Australian goverment of $500k, so this has blown up very big on the news there,
The Western Australian government deserves what it gets, if it can't figure out how to make its state an attractive place to do business and needs to resort to this kind of payoff.
My experience is that it's best to take a loss as soon as you realise that you are in a losing situation. The longer you leave it, the larger the loss will get.
However, there are constantly things like this were Google seems to be standing behind its principle of "Don't be evil". I hope that they never forget it.
I think there's a difference between "doing no evil," and deciding that they don't want to police the Internet for specific countries. I have a feeling that while their words say one thing, this has less to do with their mantra than the simple fact that they have better things to waste their time doing than the bidding of Australia's ridiculous government.
In this case the pragmatic option is also less evil, if we assume that filtering is inherently evil. If the politicians go further and demand by law that Google apply these filters, Google would have the better option of ceasing to make youtube available in Australia at all.
I think it would be more useful to require a license to be an executive of a software company. You can do a lot more damage in that position than as a random Internet user, as Craig Mundie demonstrates once again.
I think CC0 is more liberal than the ISC license. It's basically putting the work in the public domain, but without the legal ambiguities of what "public domain" means internationally.
Atheism is a religion. Atheism has everything in common with other religions. Set beliefs, morality, purpose in life, etc. Agnosticism is not a religion because it has no definite beliefs, morality or purpose. Atheism does.
How does atheism give morality, purpose in life, etc.?
A pretty accurate summary. I wrote a few articles for Wikipedia, went back a few months later to check them out. What I typically found was dozens of edits, most of them making an insignificant change, but occasionally doing significant damage. I could have improved the revised articles by reverting them to my originals! Design by committee strikes again.
Go to a mainstream bookstore and pick up a copy of one of Mark Twain's books and look at the copyright notice.
I don't think they would be claiming copyright just for the scanning and proofreading. More likely they have added a few pages of introduction over which they can claim copyright. As far as I know it would be fraudulent for them to claim copyright over somebody else's text otherwise.
Actually there is no evidence that there was ever any land animals whatsoever in NZ except for lizards, insects and spiders. Unless you count flightless birds.
I think the usual claim is no mammals except for bats. There were other animals that you didn't mention, such as worms and centipedes.
And how are we going to develop a more competent populace when we keep cutting funding for public education?
Actually the amount we're spending per student is going up. So the real question is how are we going to create a more competent populace when all we do is keep throwing money at the problem?
The obvious solution would be to outsource education to a cheaper and better educated country.
I don't agree. Real progress can be made with one person obsessing over an idea. A committee would only serve to retard progress. The memresistor story is a perfect example.
The concept of "self" is probably just a consequence of holding a sufficiently detailed model of reality - one that must include the self.
That's one of the reasons why I think EU sucks - they really like making regulations for every thing possible, which is not my idea of free society.
I agree with you on that: freedom in society is probably inversely proportional to the number of regulations, although the scope of the regulations is also important. I don't know how many places outside the EU are any better however.
But an interesting question is whether you can have a free society when you have companies that can enforce monopolies. Without government interference, would Microsoft have been able to obtain a practically 100% monopoly over vast ranges of software by now? There would have been nothing to stop them eliminating most hardware that didn't restrict itself to Windows, and they would have "embraced and extended" every Internet protocol. After that it would be easy for them to require approval for any software that runs on Windows, and eliminate anything that competes with their own products.
In 1998 the power was cut off for 5 weeks to the central area of Auckland, the largest city in New Zealand. I wasn't there to witness it in person, but I heard it did cause a certain amount of inconvenience.
Free software is surely capital in an economic sense, but from a capitalist point of view it may seem worthless. It can't be traded and there's rarely any profit in creating it.
Slashdot Mirror
Agreed. You can use CC0 to effectively release to the public domain via a Creative Commons licence. Then infringements aren't an issue.
Provision of last-mile services are not commercially viable, virtually every network of this type has been built with government funds.. If such a network comes under private ownership it will always be a monopoly because it isn't commercially viable to build any competing infrastructure. Such infrastructure should always have remained controlled by a non profit wholesale provider, and let third parties brand and offer services to end users.
I think it's true that this project isn't commercially viable. For the "non profit wholesale provider", the question is how much of the building costs they will be able to recoup through the wholesale charges. Closing down the competing Telstra network will presumably allow higher charges than would otherwise have been the case. My experience with other government enterprises, e.g., electricity, is not entirely positive, since they tend to operate inefficiently and simply pass on the costs via large annual price hikes. Without competition (except for mobile networks), will that happen on the fibre network too?
Not trolling here, but since when is its mankind's responsibility to save every variety of every species of animal on the planet? I know that we have been responsible for the extinction of many species, but does that now make us responsible for stopping extinction altogether? Huge swaths of species went extinct long before man even came along, and so it seems pretty clear that it's part of the natural order. So are we now supposed to completely stop that natural process out of some sense of guilt (because we have arrogantly decided that we're not part of the natural order)?
I'm not saying we should just go out an hunt every species we feel like to extinction, or poison the water whenever we feel like it. That would be neither responsible nor wise. But I am saying that it's not our responsibility to save every species in the world that happens to exist now, not our place to end "extinction" itself as a process.
Because it's a favourite food fish? If humanity can't even be bothered protecting that, what hope is there for any other living thing on the planet?
Couldn't we see Chinese competitors put them all out of business at some point?
Originally Interzone was given a grant by the Western Australian goverment of $500k, so this has blown up very big on the news there,
The Western Australian government deserves what it gets, if it can't figure out how to make its state an attractive place to do business and needs to resort to this kind of payoff.
My experience is that it's best to take a loss as soon as you realise that you are in a losing situation. The longer you leave it, the larger the loss will get.
However, there are constantly things like this were Google seems to be standing behind its principle of "Don't be evil". I hope that they never forget it.
I think there's a difference between "doing no evil," and deciding that they don't want to police the Internet for specific countries. I have a feeling that while their words say one thing, this has less to do with their mantra than the simple fact that they have better things to waste their time doing than the bidding of Australia's ridiculous government.
In this case the pragmatic option is also less evil, if we assume that filtering is inherently evil. If the politicians go further and demand by law that Google apply these filters, Google would have the better option of ceasing to make youtube available in Australia at all.
Everyone would ditch Windows/IE within a year....
The typical Windows user will put up with any crap at all before they abandon Windows. Microsoft have been taking advantage of this since Windows 3.1.
I think it would be more useful to require a license to be an executive of a software company. You can do a lot more damage in that position than as a random Internet user, as Craig Mundie demonstrates once again.
I think CC0 is more liberal than the ISC license. It's basically putting the work in the public domain, but without the legal ambiguities of what "public domain" means internationally.
Atheism is a religion. Atheism has everything in common with other religions. Set beliefs, morality, purpose in life, etc. Agnosticism is not a religion because it has no definite beliefs, morality or purpose. Atheism does.
How does atheism give morality, purpose in life, etc.?
A pretty accurate summary. I wrote a few articles for Wikipedia, went back a few months later to check them out. What I typically found was dozens of edits, most of them making an insignificant change, but occasionally doing significant damage. I could have improved the revised articles by reverting them to my originals! Design by committee strikes again.
Go to a mainstream bookstore and pick up a copy of one of Mark Twain's books and look at the copyright notice.
I don't think they would be claiming copyright just for the scanning and proofreading. More likely they have added a few pages of introduction over which they can claim copyright. As far as I know it would be fraudulent for them to claim copyright over somebody else's text otherwise.
Actually there is no evidence that there was ever any land animals whatsoever in NZ except for lizards, insects and spiders. Unless you count flightless birds.
I think the usual claim is no mammals except for bats. There were other animals that you didn't mention, such as worms and centipedes.
And how are we going to develop a more competent populace when we keep cutting funding for public education? Actually the amount we're spending per student is going up. So the real question is how are we going to create a more competent populace when all we do is keep throwing money at the problem?
The obvious solution would be to outsource education to a cheaper and better educated country.
If it works with half the components missing, why not omit the other half too? It worked in Permutation City.
If it was my birthday, I know how it would turn out - a drunken trashing of a Microsoft shop. Could be the best birthday ever :D
I don't agree. Real progress can be made with one person obsessing over an idea. A committee would only serve to retard progress. The memresistor story is a perfect example. The concept of "self" is probably just a consequence of holding a sufficiently detailed model of reality - one that must include the self.
I don't know, with a 10,000 write limit If my brain was made of memristors I'd be terribly mortified.
Try not to be so indecisive.
I agree with you on that: freedom in society is probably inversely proportional to the number of regulations, although the scope of the regulations is also important. I don't know how many places outside the EU are any better however.
But an interesting question is whether you can have a free society when you have companies that can enforce monopolies. Without government interference, would Microsoft have been able to obtain a practically 100% monopoly over vast ranges of software by now? There would have been nothing to stop them eliminating most hardware that didn't restrict itself to Windows, and they would have "embraced and extended" every Internet protocol. After that it would be easy for them to require approval for any software that runs on Windows, and eliminate anything that competes with their own products.
it is estimated that will take between 20,000 and 40,000 terabytes of data for one internet service provider to store this data for 1 year.
Well, it will certainly be easy to ferret out any important data in that dataset, huh
Oh, I was going to say that this database is just begging to be destroyed by a coordinated flooding effort. But perhaps it will destroy itself.
1998 Auckland power crisis
I think it has more New Zealanders, too.
The licence itself promises that it won't be revoked: "Affirmer hereby overtly, fully, permanently, irrevocably and unconditionally ..."
Free software is surely capital in an economic sense, but from a capitalist point of view it may seem worthless. It can't be traded and there's rarely any profit in creating it.