One of them is a quilting list for pete's sake with like 50 people on it, and 35 of them are on AOL.
I think you should have read TFA. It is obvious that you did not; the article says that AOL will only be charging volume senders. A mailing list with 35 or even 100 people on it would not qualify as people that this article applies to.
Slashdot, please keep the FUD to a minimum!:(
Re:D programming
on
Beyond Java
·
· Score: 5, Funny
Don't mod parent funny! D is a serious programming language with many benefits. It has been around a long time and it's a shame no one has picked it up yet.
Do you have some credible reason for thinking that it's fake?
Trials don't work that way. Do you think they should?
You think people are guilty until proven innocent? That's absurd.
You're really not helping the anti-RIAA side, you know.
It's a type of humor called irony. I'm taking the RIAA's position, which you seem to think is legitimate, then extending it to circumstances far beyond those in which the original position was considered. The result is absurdity, which I pointed out.
The RIAA is not a law enforcement agency. As pointed out in this other comment, the "evidence" is simply screenshots of Kazaa showing the user's shares. Twoscreenshots is enough evidence to file a suit against somebody? A fucking screenshot is evidence in a trial??
If I were the defendant I'd file a counter-suit that the RIAA headquarters is sharing some of my copyright music, then fabricate hundreds of screenshots allegedly "demonstrating" these copyright violations. Hell, I might as well make it kiddie porn! Then I could get the RIAA executives sent to jail for breaking criminal law instead of tort law.
As a wise person once said, a witty screenshot proves nothing. Well, something like that. What is America coming to?
"It is highly likely that within the next year, we will see at least one publicized major case of unencrypted data loss from a portable device. Afterward, a lot of companies will ban such devices"
No need for "afterward". Most companies that are extremely interested in protecting data (such as a large.com in Seattle for which I have worked) have banned such devices for years. No media may be used to transport company data except that which is explicitly allowed. In addition, no computer wireless devices of any sort (keyboard, mouse) may be used on company machines for security reasons. I'm sure that there are a lot of other similar rules, too, and all for good reason.
It doesn't take a smart company to figure out that you don't want Billing.mdb on a floppy. USB is really no different.:)
If the human race was largely wiped out by an epidemic like bird flu because patents prevented rational preparation for the worst, I doubt our decendents living in crippled civilations would look back with pride on our worship of intellectual property, realizing that they were just "unlucky", and that on the whole, patents are "pro-science".
I find your ideas intriguing and wish to subscribe to your newsletter. No, but seriously...
I agree with you that under the letter of the law RE: patents such a scenario is plausible. However, you and I both know that were such a threat to menace on a global (or even territorial) scale, governments would probably appropriate the technology under some sort of "eminent domain" law. Obviously no one wants thousands of people suffering or dying only so some monopoly can have its profits.
*However*, what you are pointing out are solely problems and exceptions. What's your solution? Getting rid of patents (and copyright, by the same extension) seems to be worse than your pandemic scenario.
I do not think people claim that patents exist to increase the efficiency of the market. In fact, it could be very pursuasively argued that they lead to a less efficient market, at least for a short period of time.
Patents are granted for a similar reason to copyright: to promote the science and arts. How can creating inefficient monopolies do this, you ask? Easy: incentives. There are two important parts to the incentives that benefit society overall.
Let's say you're a business. You're reasonably sure that with $1.5 billion USD and 5 years of time you could have an AIDS vaccine. Most of the cost of these medicines is in the *research*, not the production of the actual serum. Without patent protection, once you have a serum, tens of companies around the world will analyze it and duplicate it in short time. They will undercut your price, since they don't have that $1.5B investment to pay off. As a result, businesses will not undertake such endeavors because market efficiency will make them unprofitable! Is that the world you want? Patents allow risky investments to pay off.
The other alternative is to attempt to keep all research & developments closely guarded secrets. Now, perhaps one medical company distributes the SARS vaccine, AIDS, and avian flu. Nobody else knows how the stuff works or how to produce it. Development as a whole in society slows because, if you want to make money, you can't share your scientific developments with anyone. Every company must invent the wheel over and over again, because they cannot work together. Is *that* the world you want? Patents induce monopolies to share their research.
In the former case, patents allow developing this $1.5B AIDS vaccine to make smart business sense because you *know* you'll earn it back. In the latter case, scientific progress as a whole in the world is improved because, once someone has that AIDS vaccine, they must publish a specification of how it works (that's the patent) in order to protect their business. Then, everyone else can learn from their techniques and perhaps a different group applies it to cancer.
That is a world I am happy with. Businesses may undertake science, earn profit from research, and everyone else learns their results and methods.
Now, whether the patent office is correctly granting patents is an entirely separate issue. Patents should be granted justly, not frivolously. But that does not mean the idea of patents is broken. Perhaps you may wish to suggest shorter patent lifespans, higher burden of proof, etc.
But, to their credit, that is an extremely hard problem to solve. In many other areas of software engineering, where you "solve" a problem once, the solution is much easier because it is just a technical limitation to be overcome. Spam is different, however, because you're fighting against other people all who have strong financial incentives to defeat your system.
I'd still say "don't promise what you can't deliver", though. As some critics have pointed out, failure to do that just may be a systemic problem at Microsoft right now. Hopefully there will be some internal accountability for this one.
Either way, I would hate to be a network admin for Blizzard atm.
I'd much rather be a Blizzard network admin than admins of the dead-or-dying site you linked to! At least Blizzard saw it coming! Sheesh. 07:30 CST and their server is already melting into a puddle.
IANAD, but I am a med student. People are always worried about "viruses from space" coming to destroy us because our immune systems "won't be able to handle it". This is a crock of bullshit. Our immune systems are extremely effective at handling any foreign substances. The dangerous ones are those that have specifically evolved to trick our immune systems. The body (through an extremely complex & inefficient process) can generate antibodies to practically any pathogen.
Though, the grandparent may have a point that diseases of the future may have evolved (like HIV family viruses have) to trick our immune systems. Observe, however, that the most effective parasites do not kill their hosts. All the viruses that kill us are viruses *we* wipe out. There are thousands of bacteria living in our stomachs and viruses elsewhere in our bodies with which we have established harmony (most of the time).
Maybe there is an emergency room precedent that allows the doctor to decide when there is no other viable option.
Yes, there is. If a doctor believes that a medical procedure is necessary to save a patient's life, he may perform it in ER when he might otherwise need family consent. I think the criterion is a consensus among some number of other doctors and department heads.
The probability of success should be dramatically higher before it should be tried on humans... probably 99.9%, at least.
The probability of success would indeed be likely much higher on its own if the procedure was solely suspending and re-animating. That is not the procedure, however.
The procedure they are testing is within the context of existing, severe damage to the body. There is no way to expect a procedure to work 99.9% of times when already (say) 25% of the patients are going to die anyway. This is a procedure you're only going to use if a person is losing so much blood that their heart will stop pumping before they make it into surgery.
Suspended animation is not a separate and distinct procedure that is independent of the injuries; even if the procedure itself were perfect, complications can cause problems. It's merely a way to buy time.
that because you can save so many more, you should be allowed to condemn people that don't fit into your success curve
Ideally, as with every medical procedure that happens in an ambulance, someone's best judgment determines whether applying the procedure actually raises the chance of survival. No one is suggesting that this be used on everyone (e.g., "Uh oh, broken clavicle, better put him in suspended animation!") -- only on people whose chances are likely to be improved.
Every decision a doctor makes, whether to operate or not, etc. is all based on guessing whether the procedure will do more good than harm. This is no different.
90% on pigs, that could be 80% on humans, maybe not. but still, 90% is not the very best...I think they should first work a little more on it then ask us humans.
The purpose of their proposed clinical trials is to give patients who will almost surely die with conventional methods some limited hope with this "experiment". Yes, perhaps it only has a 90% success rate, but modern medicine has no effective techniques to handle catastrophic blood loss, such as in car accidents and other traumas.
The purpose of asking for these medical trials is to bring the chance of survival up from maybe 5% with conventional techniques to something higher.
It is extremely rare in real-world scenarios that producing more units gives you less profit per unit. In fact, almost always, the marginal cost per unit decreases, which combined with a fixed price results in increased marginal profit.
Marginal cost decreases as production level increases because of two reasons:
Suppliers are almost always willing to give you bulk discounts on your materials. (This is because of #2, actually, but it's a marginal cost to you)
Your fixed costs, which do not vary per unit in the short-term (renting a factory costs you the same whether you run it 24 hours a day or 12) are ameliorated over the revenue of more units sold.
Anyway, I don't want to get too technical, but the point is that almost always when you produce more units, the cost per unit decreases which results in greater profit for a given price-point.
Let's say that you can sell 1,000 units for $100 profit per unit ($100,000) or 1,500 units for $50 profit per unit ($75,000). Selling those additional units looses you money.
Why would this happen? Those don't seem like realistic values for long-term production. (Obviously, in the very short-term you could "overproduce" and pay your workers overtime, etc. to rise about your normal capacity, which could result in that scenario, but that is not relevant for long-term. In the long-term you would buy more factories, hire more workers, etc. rather than work the existing ones overtime.)
You are misrepresenting the case. If you are really interested in the details, you can read more about it yourself. I'll post a relevant portion of the case, which is an advertisement (placed by the defendant) for the videos on question:
"Sassy Sylphs" will blow your mind so completely you'll be begging for mercy.
Just look at what we have in this incredible tape: about 14 girls between the ages of 11 and 17 showing so much panty and ass you'll get dizzy. There are panties showing under shorts and under dresses and skirts; there are boobs galore and T-back (thong) bathing suits on girls as young as 15 that are so revealing it's almost like seeing them naked (some say even better).
I think that speaks for itself. Child pornography laws are not just about exposed skin; they're around to prevent the exploitation of children in which Knox was very obviously (and self-admittedly) involved.
It was decided in the case that facts themselves cannot be copyrightable, but some sort of collection, if novel, can be. From the article:
It is a long-standing principle of United States copyright law that "information" is not copyrightable, O'Connor notes, but "collections" of information can be. Rural claimed a collection copyright in its directory. The court clarified that the intent of copyright law was not, as claimed by Rural and some lower courts, to reward the efforts of persons collecting information, but rather "to promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts" (U.S. Const. 1.8.8), that is, to encourage creative expression.
Since facts are purely copied from the world around us, O'Connor concludes, "the sine qua non of copyright is originality". However, the standard for creativity is extremely low. It need not be novel, rather it only needs to possess a "spark" or "minimal degree" of creativity to be protected by copyright.
n regard to collections of facts, O'Connor states that copyright can only apply to the creative aspects of collection: the creative choice of what data to include or exclude, the order and style in which the information is presented, etc., but not on the information itself.
With respect to this precedent I hardly see how anyone could claim that factual statistics about players should be subject copyright. But, hey, law does seem to follow big business interests in the US.
Perhaps once it becomes standard that pretty much everything is tagged with RFID, maybe I'll be able to use Google House to find that sock I lost a year ago! I know it's here somewhere...
I should point out, and I know this is the fault of the grandparent not the parent, that the word is "naiveté", prounounced "naive-tay". There is no such word as "naivety". How would you pronounce it, anyway? "Naive-uh-tee"?
The naiveté of such a suggestion almost makes me laugh:)
It still takes the same amount of thrust (or, I should say, just force) to ride the elevator up to geosynchronous orbit as with any other system. The advantage of the elevator is that you don't need to also lift your fuel with you; it's transmitted as electricity through the elevator (or as a laser beam or some other system).
But, a space elevator is definitely not a "free ride" into space. There will always be gravity to overcome, and that takes energy.
A cursory review of the literature leads your statements to be fatally incorrect. Crime rates are in fact lower in the US than in many European countries.
Burglary rates for Scotland, Austria, and England and Wales are reported as higher for the entire period of 1980 through 2000. For England and Wales, this difference is as much as 50% higher crime rate per capita than the US after 1993.
Don't believe me. Check the figures yourself. I should also point out that these figures come from a UK authority, not another "American urban legend".
It's a false assumption you are making that predation is necessary for evolution. A simple explanation is that intelligence allows us to survive better in other ways, such as:
Making clothing, to survive temperature extremes.
Hunting other creatures for food.
Crafting tools for the above two.
Learning and transmitting knowledge ("The green berries are poison") that is not innate
There are plenty of other reasons beyond those that you suggest. No creatures alive today hunt humans for food, although many kill us for other reasons.
Slashdot Mirror
One of them is a quilting list for pete's sake with like 50 people on it, and 35 of them are on AOL.
:(
I think you should have read TFA. It is obvious that you did not; the article says that AOL will only be charging volume senders. A mailing list with 35 or even 100 people on it would not qualify as people that this article applies to.
Slashdot, please keep the FUD to a minimum!
Don't mod parent funny! D is a serious programming language with many benefits. It has been around a long time and it's a shame no one has picked it up yet.
Do you have some credible reason for thinking that it's fake?
Trials don't work that way. Do you think they should?
You think people are guilty until proven innocent? That's absurd.
You're really not helping the anti-RIAA side, you know.
It's a type of humor called irony. I'm taking the RIAA's position, which you seem to think is legitimate, then extending it to circumstances far beyond those in which the original position was considered. The result is absurdity, which I pointed out.
You have heard of humor before, right?
The RIAA is not a law enforcement agency. As pointed out in this other comment, the "evidence" is simply screenshots of Kazaa showing the user's shares. Two screenshots is enough evidence to file a suit against somebody? A fucking screenshot is evidence in a trial??
If I were the defendant I'd file a counter-suit that the RIAA headquarters is sharing some of my copyright music, then fabricate hundreds of screenshots allegedly "demonstrating" these copyright violations. Hell, I might as well make it kiddie porn! Then I could get the RIAA executives sent to jail for breaking criminal law instead of tort law.
As a wise person once said, a witty screenshot proves nothing. Well, something like that. What is America coming to?
"It is highly likely that within the next year, we will see at least one publicized major case of unencrypted data loss from a portable device. Afterward, a lot of companies will ban such devices"
.com in Seattle for which I have worked) have banned such devices for years. No media may be used to transport company data except that which is explicitly allowed. In addition, no computer wireless devices of any sort (keyboard, mouse) may be used on company machines for security reasons. I'm sure that there are a lot of other similar rules, too, and all for good reason.
:)
No need for "afterward". Most companies that are extremely interested in protecting data (such as a large
It doesn't take a smart company to figure out that you don't want Billing.mdb on a floppy. USB is really no different.
If the human race was largely wiped out by an epidemic like bird flu because patents prevented rational preparation for the worst, I doubt our decendents living in crippled civilations would look back with pride on our worship of intellectual property, realizing that they were just "unlucky", and that on the whole, patents are "pro-science".
I find your ideas intriguing and wish to subscribe to your newsletter. No, but seriously...
I agree with you that under the letter of the law RE: patents such a scenario is plausible. However, you and I both know that were such a threat to menace on a global (or even territorial) scale, governments would probably appropriate the technology under some sort of "eminent domain" law. Obviously no one wants thousands of people suffering or dying only so some monopoly can have its profits.
*However*, what you are pointing out are solely problems and exceptions. What's your solution? Getting rid of patents (and copyright, by the same extension) seems to be worse than your pandemic scenario.
I do not think people claim that patents exist to increase the efficiency of the market. In fact, it could be very pursuasively argued that they lead to a less efficient market, at least for a short period of time.
Patents are granted for a similar reason to copyright: to promote the science and arts. How can creating inefficient monopolies do this, you ask? Easy: incentives. There are two important parts to the incentives that benefit society overall.
Let's say you're a business. You're reasonably sure that with $1.5 billion USD and 5 years of time you could have an AIDS vaccine. Most of the cost of these medicines is in the *research*, not the production of the actual serum. Without patent protection, once you have a serum, tens of companies around the world will analyze it and duplicate it in short time. They will undercut your price, since they don't have that $1.5B investment to pay off. As a result, businesses will not undertake such endeavors because market efficiency will make them unprofitable! Is that the world you want? Patents allow risky investments to pay off.
The other alternative is to attempt to keep all research & developments closely guarded secrets. Now, perhaps one medical company distributes the SARS vaccine, AIDS, and avian flu. Nobody else knows how the stuff works or how to produce it. Development as a whole in society slows because, if you want to make money, you can't share your scientific developments with anyone. Every company must invent the wheel over and over again, because they cannot work together. Is *that* the world you want? Patents induce monopolies to share their research.
In the former case, patents allow developing this $1.5B AIDS vaccine to make smart business sense because you *know* you'll earn it back. In the latter case, scientific progress as a whole in the world is improved because, once someone has that AIDS vaccine, they must publish a specification of how it works (that's the patent) in order to protect their business. Then, everyone else can learn from their techniques and perhaps a different group applies it to cancer.
That is a world I am happy with. Businesses may undertake science, earn profit from research, and everyone else learns their results and methods.
Now, whether the patent office is correctly granting patents is an entirely separate issue. Patents should be granted justly, not frivolously. But that does not mean the idea of patents is broken. Perhaps you may wish to suggest shorter patent lifespans, higher burden of proof, etc.
I'll climb onboard once it's free and less addicting than heroin.
:)
I've tried them both.
You're better off with the heroin
No.
But, to their credit, that is an extremely hard problem to solve. In many other areas of software engineering, where you "solve" a problem once, the solution is much easier because it is just a technical limitation to be overcome. Spam is different, however, because you're fighting against other people all who have strong financial incentives to defeat your system.
I'd still say "don't promise what you can't deliver", though. As some critics have pointed out, failure to do that just may be a systemic problem at Microsoft right now. Hopefully there will be some internal accountability for this one.
Either way, I would hate to be a network admin for Blizzard atm.
. php
I'd much rather be a Blizzard network admin than admins of the dead-or-dying site you linked to! At least Blizzard saw it coming! Sheesh. 07:30 CST and their server is already melting into a puddle.
Coral cache links:
http://www.karashur.net.nyud.net:8090/mmorpg/
http://www.karashur.net.nyud.net:8090/aq_wow_pics
Yes! Mod parent up!
IANAD, but I am a med student. People are always worried about "viruses from space" coming to destroy us because our immune systems "won't be able to handle it". This is a crock of bullshit. Our immune systems are extremely effective at handling any foreign substances. The dangerous ones are those that have specifically evolved to trick our immune systems. The body (through an extremely complex & inefficient process) can generate antibodies to practically any pathogen.
Though, the grandparent may have a point that diseases of the future may have evolved (like HIV family viruses have) to trick our immune systems. Observe, however, that the most effective parasites do not kill their hosts. All the viruses that kill us are viruses *we* wipe out. There are thousands of bacteria living in our stomachs and viruses elsewhere in our bodies with which we have established harmony (most of the time).
"What could possibly go wrong?"
Maybe there is an emergency room precedent that allows the doctor to decide when there is no other viable option.
:)
Yes, there is. If a doctor believes that a medical procedure is necessary to save a patient's life, he may perform it in ER when he might otherwise need family consent. I think the criterion is a consensus among some number of other doctors and department heads.
Or maybe I just saw that on "ER"
The probability of success should be dramatically higher before it should be tried on humans... probably 99.9%, at least.
The probability of success would indeed be likely much higher on its own if the procedure was solely suspending and re-animating. That is not the procedure, however.
The procedure they are testing is within the context of existing, severe damage to the body. There is no way to expect a procedure to work 99.9% of times when already (say) 25% of the patients are going to die anyway. This is a procedure you're only going to use if a person is losing so much blood that their heart will stop pumping before they make it into surgery.
Suspended animation is not a separate and distinct procedure that is independent of the injuries; even if the procedure itself were perfect, complications can cause problems. It's merely a way to buy time.
that because you can save so many more, you should be allowed to condemn people that don't fit into your success curve
Ideally, as with every medical procedure that happens in an ambulance, someone's best judgment determines whether applying the procedure actually raises the chance of survival. No one is suggesting that this be used on everyone (e.g., "Uh oh, broken clavicle, better put him in suspended animation!") -- only on people whose chances are likely to be improved.
Every decision a doctor makes, whether to operate or not, etc. is all based on guessing whether the procedure will do more good than harm. This is no different.
90% on pigs, that could be 80% on humans, maybe not. but still, 90% is not the very best...I think they should first work a little more on it then ask us humans.
The purpose of their proposed clinical trials is to give patients who will almost surely die with conventional methods some limited hope with this "experiment". Yes, perhaps it only has a 90% success rate, but modern medicine has no effective techniques to handle catastrophic blood loss, such as in car accidents and other traumas.
The purpose of asking for these medical trials is to bring the chance of survival up from maybe 5% with conventional techniques to something higher.
Marginal cost decreases as production level increases because of two reasons:
- Suppliers are almost always willing to give you bulk discounts on your materials. (This is because of #2, actually, but it's a marginal cost to you)
- Your fixed costs, which do not vary per unit in the short-term (renting a factory costs you the same whether you run it 24 hours a day or 12) are ameliorated over the revenue of more units sold.
Anyway, I don't want to get too technical, but the point is that almost always when you produce more units, the cost per unit decreases which results in greater profit for a given price-point.Let's say that you can sell 1,000 units for $100 profit per unit ($100,000) or 1,500 units for $50 profit per unit ($75,000). Selling those additional units looses you money.
Why would this happen? Those don't seem like realistic values for long-term production. (Obviously, in the very short-term you could "overproduce" and pay your workers overtime, etc. to rise about your normal capacity, which could result in that scenario, but that is not relevant for long-term. In the long-term you would buy more factories, hire more workers, etc. rather than work the existing ones overtime.)
I think that speaks for itself. Child pornography laws are not just about exposed skin; they're around to prevent the exploitation of children in which Knox was very obviously (and self-admittedly) involved.
It was decided in the case that facts themselves cannot be copyrightable, but some sort of collection, if novel, can be. From the article:
With respect to this precedent I hardly see how anyone could claim that factual statistics about players should be subject copyright. But, hey, law does seem to follow big business interests in the US.
Perhaps once it becomes standard that pretty much everything is tagged with RFID, maybe I'll be able to use Google House to find that sock I lost a year ago! I know it's here somewhere...
Goatse.cx has been shut down. You just get an error page about policy violations now. (Don't believe me? Check for yourself!)
Imagine that. A Slashdot post linking to Goatse and *not* being a troll! =)
They have, however, relocated to goatse.ca.
I should point out, and I know this is the fault of the grandparent not the parent, that the word is "naiveté", prounounced "naive-tay". There is no such word as "naivety". How would you pronounce it, anyway? "Naive-uh-tee"?
:)
The naiveté of such a suggestion almost makes me laugh
It still takes the same amount of thrust (or, I should say, just force) to ride the elevator up to geosynchronous orbit as with any other system. The advantage of the elevator is that you don't need to also lift your fuel with you; it's transmitted as electricity through the elevator (or as a laser beam or some other system).
But, a space elevator is definitely not a "free ride" into space. There will always be gravity to overcome, and that takes energy.
A cursory review of the literature leads your statements to be fatally incorrect. Crime rates are in fact lower in the US than in many European countries.
Burglary rates for Scotland, Austria, and England and Wales are reported as higher for the entire period of 1980 through 2000. For England and Wales, this difference is as much as 50% higher crime rate per capita than the US after 1993.
Don't believe me. Check the figures yourself. I should also point out that these figures come from a UK authority, not another "American urban legend".
There are plenty of other reasons beyond those that you suggest. No creatures alive today hunt humans for food, although many kill us for other reasons.
Another thing to consider is I am sure the genes that effected intelligence had an even greated impact since humans stay in communities.
Genes might "affect" intelligence, but they don't "effect" intelligence. There's a difference. They're both verbs, but "affect" is the one you want.