Clearly Google is doing this for their own good, not for the public's. They stand to profit (adverts, cut on book sales) from valuable IP that they don't own. It may be covered by fair use, it may not be.
Understand it's a gamble. If they lose the court case they will have to stop the projet and compensate copyright holders a little, but it won't come to much relative to Google's wealth. If they make a good case and win it they will be in a great position.
What Google is doing certainly benefits the public relative to the status quo, I wish them luck but I'd be really surprised if their gamble pays off.
Sorry I haven't mod points for you, this is the best analysis of the situation I've read so far.
Re:Focus on Artificial life
on
The Los Alamos Bug
·
· Score: 2, Informative
No they didn't. Crick and Watson got shown one of the pictures of DNA X-ray diffraction pattern Franklin had made (the best one) by one of her co-worker, Maurice Wilkins. Together with the work they had done on their own, C&W were able to deduce the structure. Without that picture it would have taken them longer, and potentially someone else would have found the structure before them, for example Linus Pauling in the USA, who was well on his way.
Now all three of Crick, Watson and Wilkins were awarded the Nobel prize in Medicine that year, when Wilkins honestly had done little more in this area than show Watson & Crick the crucial photo by Franklin. This goes to show that this particular picture was pretty damn important.
Franklin didn't get the Nobel because she was unfortunately dead by then, due to ovarian cancer she probably contracted as a result of continuous exposure to X-Rays during her work. Her name was later besmirched
Thanks for replying but still no fact in your reply;-)
> Yes. I know you see it that way. I see it as "wise spending" and > "making to most out of a crappy task that's hard to avoid." I just > wish really did result in some money flowing into the US instead of > the other way around.
Read the linked article, it does. Aid is a geopolitical tool, it doesn't result in actual help or the US losing any money, on the contrary.
The US uses foreign "aid" to further US dominance (other rich countries do the exact same thing BTW). Less aid would result in less dominance. You should be happy!
That way, ignorant but voting left wing citizen can be somewhat reassured that the US does its bit to "help the world" and be at peace with their government on this issue.
In addition ignorant right citizens can complain all day long that the reason things are working so poorly in the old US of A is that they spends too many billions in "aid", that the US is too generous and the world is full of ungrateful bastards.
It would be funny to watch if it weren't so tragic.
> The point is I completely disagree with your pre-assumed axiom > that things should be fair and even across national boundaries, > or that the rich are required to help the poor. That's working > against natural selection, IMHO.
I think it's wonderful to speak about natural selection when one is on the rich and presumably selected side. You being relatively (or perhaps absolutely) rich has almost certainly nothing to do with nature, i.e your set of gifts but with chance, i.e., where you were born.
The rich are not required to help the poor but it is a winning strategy for them to do so. It helps them stay rich and in control! Selfish unthinking rich people tend to end up with a revolution on their hands. Think Marie-Antoinette.
If you just want to do that sure, Excel will do fine. However I've been in many business settings when the available data needed to be massaged a little more, e.g. find averages, medians, extrapolate to next year, find a model that fits, explain away a few outliers, etc.
Quickly Excel is no longer up to the task. If you want to do real statistics you need to be careful with Excel too.
Many people think that basic stats are easy to understand and their data is simple to manipulate. Nothing could be further from the truth.
The West has actually over centuries taken way more out of Africa that it ever returned, and the trend is continuing to this day. The case can be made that European colonialist countries created a giant big mess in Africa over a long time period, and the effects of this are still being felt up to this day.
African countries' economy tend to have a large pre-industrial component. What they need most is a way to compete on the global market in a fair and equitable fashion. This means stopping farmers subsidies in Europe and the US.
Aid is not what they need most in fact (outside of disaster relief, like everywhere else in the world).
Right, how about some facts again, rather than easy cut-and-dried witticisms?
Do you know that today foreign aid is mostly used as a tool to force poorer nations to implement the policies (e.g on energy) that the rich nations want, and that more money flows from the poor nations to the rich than the other way around?
And let's not forget cancelling the US farmer subsidies, which do cost billions too (way more in fact), so that agricultural societies in Africa and elsewhere can actually sell their food at a competitive price AND market their way out of poverty?
The fact is that on the world scene just as in Western society the rich make the rules. They draft the laws, they have the police, the army and the resources. The poor just try to survive from year to year. Yes they take advantage of the few crumbs that the rich leave on the table from time to time to make themselves feel somewhat better, but on average the poor get raped almost every time.
You are getting into holier-than-thou territory here. Are you such an international expert on development that you can afford to make such statements without even trying to back them up with a few facts?
Remember that those states that are at the very bottom of the GDP/person ranking are among those that have been exploited the most by the West during and after the colonialist period, not to mention racked by war, disease, famine and natural disasters.
In fact the thinking has been going at the World Bank for some years that debt relief is the best way forward, to the point that world renowned Marxist-Trostysk-Leninist way way wayyyy to the left of the left (not) Paul Wolfvowitz, our new president of the WB, has taken upon himself to implement this idea and recently succeeded.
The idea is that those poorest states certainly have made mistakes in the past but that there is absolutely no reason why the new generations in those states should continue to pay forever for them, since they are already given a raw deal to start with.
If you think about it the same reasoning goes for welfare, to the point that even in one the most conservative and market driven economy on the planet, when decision makers sat down and thought about possible solutions, no one came up with a better solution.
You can't continue punishing people for mistakes they haven't commited forever. Doing so is inhuman and counterproductive.
Now, now, X has gotten a whole lot better since 1992, you can breathe now.
First you can still run the exact same software as you could back then, unchanged (perhaps recompiled?). All these xterms, twm, xeyes and whatnot. Yes this is good.
Second if you want to move into the 21st century, you can, and you have even a choice between Gnome and KDE. Both offer a consistent user interface with modern features such as 3D/OpenGL, antialiased fonts, real cut-and-paste, drag-and-drop etc. One could easily make the case that the MacOS/X interface is not nearly as consistent as KDE for instance (aqua/carbon, brushmetal apps, etc), let alone the Windows GUI.
Moreover it's completely Free, a feature that neither Windows nor OS/X are likely to implement soon.
> assuming that poisoning actually causes any harm, if it doesn't then you have no > right to restrict me, animals do not have rights.
Poisoning by definition causes harm. Animals that get harmed by noxious substances eventually and inevitably find their way into people. Look up Minamata.
> Children have absolutely no place in society. Don't get me started on that.
Really? please do get started, what do you mean exactly?
> If the monopoly was gained legitimately and without the aid of > coercion (aided by government or not) then the government should butt out.
How do you ascertain that? by fiat or by trial?
> But whatever government involvement is justifiable in society it is not a > blank cheque to tyranny.
Do you really think libertarians have a kind of monopoly on this opinion?
This solution works if the king doesn't interfere, however it is not guarantee to work if he does.
Since the king listened to the prisoner talking, he knows who the counter is.
The king can "erase" up to k countings by flipping the cup upside down after each non-counter. Since all non-counters flip the cup right side up at most once, the counter can only reach n-k. Conversely the king can flip the cup right side up up to k times just before the counter, and so the count can reach n+k.
Under this circumstance, when will the counter decide time is up ?
The UN is, at its heart, only a forum. Like in every forum, including online ones, you've got posturing and trolling going on.
You can't expect a forum to have any credibility, however its members put together might.
To get anything done in the UN you need to have the approval of all the moderators, i.e. each and everyone of the members of the security council. Since the US is one of them, if the US don't approve, any amount of screaming bloody murder at the UN will achieve precisely nothing.
It's not that the UN lacks credibility, it's only that to progress at the UN requires unanimity.
I'm not so sure about the "more disposable income" bit when everything is taken into account. For example even though most US workers do get some kind of health insurance, they still have to pay to go to the doctor and buy medicine, they have to save for retirement, real estate can be more expensive, they have to worry about the price of higher education for their kids, school starts later (hence way more day-care costs), etc.
My own experience with a family with young kids (they are sick all the frikking time) is that it is easier to live even near a European capital on one single middle-class income than in some areas in the US with two typical tech industry salaries.
In other words disposable income in Europe may really be disposable whereas there are lots of hidden costs in at least some areas in the US.
It's not something one can figure out by comparing figures, one really has to make the effort of living in various conditions and compare.
20 years ago, in 1985, my computer could only run one program at a time, and 32kB mattered because I only got 128kB in it.
Now my computer may have 2000 the same amount of memory, but runs approximately 1000 processes at the same time. Therefore it would piss me off greatly if each and every one of them required 100MB to run.
That's why I appreciate my small daemons to only require 32kB or so and I generally hate programs which require a different, separate JVM to run. This is also why writing everything in Java is not a great idea.
Personnally I don't think your scenario is very realistic.
In this situation the RIAA would simply refuse, pull out all CDs from all WallMarts and that would be it. People would simply go somewhere else to buy their CDs.
The adversarial system's underlying assumption is that the trial decides whether the plaintiff is a victim or not, and to what degree. If they are the victim gets compensated, otherwise the defendant gets away scott free, end of story.
Here it didn't work very well because some of the plaintiffs in the class action were not actually victims.
However there is no doubt here that Microsoft sold an "operating system" (here used very loosely...) that had a major defect. That there was a way not to trigger the defect by being careful not to use a particular feature should not have mattered. People still paid good money for the feature and didn't get it.
Probably some of the non-victims in the trial *wanted* to use the compression feature but couldn't because friends or co-workers warned them not to use it.
Then Microsoft wanted to charge for the update that fixed the problem. It's exactly like a bait and switch, and Microsoft should not have been able to get away with this, on a technicality. There were *actual* victims in the class action who did not get compensated.
So clearly in this instance the adversarial system didn't work.
> We will never run out of oil because we'll switch to something else first.
Sure, like what? nuclear fission for your car? Nuclear fusion for your house (always 20 years away)? Sure, no worries.
One thing people always forget in the old thread "we switched from horsecarts to automobiles without a problem" was that there *were* lots of problems. The 19th century, that of the switch, was ripe with revolutions, wars, common people working extremely hard, pollution, short lives, etc etc etc. Sure it was probably livable if you had money. In other words it was a time of change.
What we have now is an incredibly long period of continued peace by history's standards. When oil starts to become a bit more expensive, sure you'll see alternative sources of energy being put to use, but you'll see more worldwide unrest, for example when China realizes that it *needs* to take control of the Middle East oil grounds for its continued growth. Will the US and Europe let it take control? Hmm. Then we'll talk about non-virtual WMDs for sure.
Maybe humanity will survive, and then another era of relative peace and quiet will be ushered, and the world will view the switch era like we view the WWI period now, but I wouldn't necessarily bet on it.
Maybe they've found a way to block the light better and they may have a blacker pixel, but does it mean you can have suddenly very dark features on screen and very bright ones and they are both visible at the same time.
A better measure of screen quality might be the number of perceptibly different grey levels this screen is capable of delivering, AND the ratio between the darkest and the brightest of them. I suspect most humans would have a hard time differencing screens that can do more than about 200 levels.
1- Heavy 2- Slow 3- Annoying (think file transfers if you want to work on something else, and you definitely want to work on something else than a $500 laptop) 4- Expensive ($500/year is more like it). 5- Unreliable (see above) 6- Not available where I live. Think 1000 Euros instead. See also expensive.
Think also backups, system maintenance, viruse (if windows) etc.
It would be great to work at home on my large dual screen Linux box (which cost me less than $500 in Euros, thanks to recup) and on my other large dual screen linux box at work without having to transfer files through several layers of firewall both ways.
Slashdot Mirror
Clearly Google is doing this for their own good, not for the public's. They stand to profit (adverts, cut on book sales) from valuable IP that they don't own. It may be covered by fair use, it may not be.
Understand it's a gamble. If they lose the court case they will have to stop the projet and compensate copyright holders a little, but it won't come to much relative to Google's wealth. If they make a good case and win it they will be in a great position.
What Google is doing certainly benefits the public relative to the status quo, I wish them luck but I'd be really surprised if their gamble pays off.
Sorry I haven't mod points for you, this is the best analysis of the situation I've read so far.
No they didn't. Crick and Watson got shown one of the pictures of DNA X-ray diffraction pattern Franklin had made (the best one) by one of her co-worker, Maurice Wilkins. Together with the work they had done on their own, C&W were able to deduce the structure. Without that picture it would have taken them longer, and potentially someone else would have found the structure before them, for example Linus Pauling in the USA, who was well on his way.
Now all three of Crick, Watson and Wilkins were awarded the Nobel prize in Medicine that year, when Wilkins honestly had done little more in this area than show Watson & Crick the crucial photo by Franklin. This goes to show that this particular picture was pretty damn important.
Franklin didn't get the Nobel because she was unfortunately dead by then, due to ovarian cancer she probably contracted as a result of continuous exposure to X-Rays during her work. Her name was later besmirched
Thanks for replying but still no fact in your reply ;-)
> Yes. I know you see it that way. I see it as "wise spending" and
> "making to most out of a crappy task that's hard to avoid." I just
> wish really did result in some money flowing into the US instead of
> the other way around.
Read the linked article, it does. Aid is a geopolitical tool, it doesn't result in actual help or the US losing any money, on the contrary.
The US uses foreign "aid" to further US dominance (other rich countries do the exact same thing BTW). Less aid would result in less dominance. You should be happy!
That way, ignorant but voting left wing citizen can be somewhat reassured that the US does its bit to "help the world" and be at peace with their government on this issue.
In addition ignorant right citizens can complain all day long that the reason things are working so poorly in the old US of A is that they spends too many billions in "aid", that the US is too generous and the world is full of ungrateful bastards.
It would be funny to watch if it weren't so tragic.
> The point is I completely disagree with your pre-assumed axiom
> that things should be fair and even across national boundaries,
> or that the rich are required to help the poor. That's working
> against natural selection, IMHO.
I think it's wonderful to speak about natural selection when one is on the rich and presumably selected side. You being relatively (or perhaps absolutely) rich has almost certainly nothing to do with nature, i.e your set of gifts but with chance, i.e., where you were born.
The rich are not required to help the poor but it is a winning strategy for them to do so. It helps them stay rich and in control! Selfish unthinking rich people tend to end up with a revolution on their hands. Think Marie-Antoinette.
If you just want to do that sure, Excel will do fine. However I've been in many business settings when the available data needed to be massaged a little more, e.g. find averages, medians, extrapolate to next year, find a model that fits, explain away a few outliers, etc.
Quickly Excel is no longer up to the task. If you want to do real statistics you need to be careful with Excel too.
Many people think that basic stats are easy to understand and their data is simple to manipulate. Nothing could be further from the truth.
The West has actually over centuries taken way more out of Africa that it ever returned, and the trend is continuing to this day. The case can be made that European colonialist countries created a giant big mess in Africa over a long time period, and the effects of this are still being felt up to this day.
African countries' economy tend to have a large pre-industrial component. What they need most is a way to compete on the global market in a fair and equitable fashion. This means stopping farmers subsidies in Europe and the US.
Aid is not what they need most in fact (outside of disaster relief, like everywhere else in the world).
Right, how about some facts again, rather than easy cut-and-dried witticisms?
Do you know that today foreign aid is mostly used as a tool to force poorer nations to implement the policies (e.g on energy) that the rich nations want, and that more money flows from the poor nations to the rich than the other way around?
And let's not forget cancelling the US farmer subsidies, which do cost billions too (way more in fact), so that agricultural societies in Africa and elsewhere can actually sell their food at a competitive price AND market their way out of poverty?
The fact is that on the world scene just as in Western society the rich make the rules. They draft the laws, they have the police, the army and the resources. The poor just try to survive from year to year. Yes they take advantage of the few crumbs that the rich leave on the table from time to time to make themselves feel somewhat better, but on average the poor get raped almost every time.
The West needs education too.
Best.
You are getting into holier-than-thou territory here. Are you such an international expert on development that you can afford to make such statements without even trying to back them up with a few facts?
Remember that those states that are at the very bottom of the GDP/person ranking are among those that have been exploited the most by the West during and after the colonialist period, not to mention racked by war, disease, famine and natural disasters.
In fact the thinking has been going at the World Bank for some years that debt relief is the best way forward, to the point that world renowned Marxist-Trostysk-Leninist way way wayyyy to the left of the left (not) Paul Wolfvowitz, our new president of the WB, has taken upon himself to implement this idea and recently succeeded.
The idea is that those poorest states certainly have made mistakes in the past but that there is absolutely no reason why the new generations in those states should continue to pay forever for them, since they are already given a raw deal to start with.
If you think about it the same reasoning goes for welfare, to the point that even in one the most conservative and market driven economy on the planet, when decision makers sat down and thought about possible solutions, no one came up with a better solution.
You can't continue punishing people for mistakes they haven't commited forever. Doing so is inhuman and counterproductive.
Best.
Now, now, X has gotten a whole lot better since 1992, you can breathe now.
First you can still run the exact same software as you could back then, unchanged (perhaps recompiled?). All these xterms, twm, xeyes and whatnot. Yes this is good.
Second if you want to move into the 21st century, you can, and you have even a choice between Gnome and KDE. Both offer a consistent user interface with modern features such as 3D/OpenGL, antialiased fonts, real cut-and-paste, drag-and-drop etc. One could easily make the case that the MacOS/X interface is not nearly as consistent as KDE for instance (aqua/carbon, brushmetal apps, etc), let alone the Windows GUI.
Moreover it's completely Free, a feature that neither Windows nor OS/X are likely to implement soon.
Your ideas are intriguing:
> assuming that poisoning actually causes any harm, if it doesn't then you have no
> right to restrict me, animals do not have rights.
Poisoning by definition causes harm. Animals that get harmed by noxious substances eventually and inevitably find their way into people. Look up Minamata.
> Children have absolutely no place in society. Don't get me started on that.
Really? please do get started, what do you mean exactly?
> If the monopoly was gained legitimately and without the aid of
> coercion (aided by government or not) then the government should butt out.
How do you ascertain that? by fiat or by trial?
> But whatever government involvement is justifiable in society it is not a
> blank cheque to tyranny.
Do you really think libertarians have a kind of monopoly on this opinion?
This is confusing,
This solution works if the king doesn't interfere, however it is not guarantee to work if he does.
Since the king listened to the prisoner talking, he knows who the counter is.
The king can "erase" up to k countings by flipping the cup upside down after each non-counter. Since all non-counters flip the cup right side up at most once, the counter can only reach n-k. Conversely the king can flip the cup right side up up to k times just before the counter, and so the count can reach n+k.
Under this circumstance, when will the counter decide time is up ?
The foil wouldn't word work because the king can only flip the cup a fixed and known number of times.
ASCII art:
/ / /\ / /
.
Think out of the box...
o----o----o--.
|\
| \ /
o o o
| \
|
o o o
| /
|
|
For a detailed, if perhaps flawed argument along these lines, read "the emperor's new clothes", by R. Penrose.
As with many things in molecular biology, this is a neat story but probably not quite correct.
See for example the entry on introns.
OK, where can I find a basic new 20GB mp3 player for $150 ?
They're all over $200 wherever I've looked.
The UN is, at its heart, only a forum. Like in every forum, including online ones, you've got posturing and trolling going on.
You can't expect a forum to have any credibility, however its members put together might.
To get anything done in the UN you need to have the approval of all the moderators, i.e. each and everyone of the members of the security council. Since the US is one of them, if the US don't approve, any amount of screaming bloody murder at the UN will achieve precisely nothing.
It's not that the UN lacks credibility, it's only that to progress at the UN requires unanimity.
Yes, peace. Compare the 60 years since 1945 with the 60 years before 1945 for instance.
Continuous war and chaos. You can take the 60 years before that too if you prefer, same thing.
You can take all the reigns of all the kings & queen of the second millenium. Continuous wars & empire building of various sorts.
Or you can take the first millenium if you want. Same thing. The Roman empire? Just an enormously long continous bloody war.
I'm not so sure about the "more disposable income" bit when everything is taken into account. For example even though most US workers do get some kind of health insurance, they still have to pay to go to the doctor and buy medicine, they have to save for retirement, real estate can be more expensive, they have to worry about the price of higher education for their kids, school starts later (hence way more day-care costs), etc.
My own experience with a family with young kids (they are sick all the frikking time) is that it is easier to live even near a European capital on one single middle-class income than in some areas in the US with two typical tech industry salaries.
In other words disposable income in Europe may really be disposable whereas there are lots of hidden costs in at least some areas in the US.
It's not something one can figure out by comparing figures, one really has to make the effort of living in various conditions and compare.
20 years ago, in 1985, my computer could only run one program at a time, and 32kB mattered because I only got 128kB in it.
Now my computer may have 2000 the same amount of memory, but runs approximately 1000 processes at the same time. Therefore it would piss me off greatly if each and every one of them required 100MB to run.
That's why I appreciate my small daemons to only require 32kB or so and I generally hate programs which require a different, separate JVM to run. This is also why writing everything in Java is not a great idea.
Personnally I don't think your scenario is very realistic.
In this situation the RIAA would simply refuse, pull out all CDs from all WallMarts and that would be it. People would simply go somewhere else to buy their CDs.
The adversarial system's underlying assumption is that the trial decides whether the plaintiff is a victim or not, and to what degree. If they are the victim gets compensated, otherwise the defendant gets away scott free, end of story.
Here it didn't work very well because some of the plaintiffs in the class action were not actually victims.
However there is no doubt here that Microsoft sold an "operating system" (here used very loosely...) that had a major defect. That there was a way not to trigger the defect by being careful not to use a particular feature should not have mattered. People still paid good money for the feature and didn't get it.
Probably some of the non-victims in the trial *wanted* to use the compression feature but couldn't because friends or co-workers warned them not to use it.
Then Microsoft wanted to charge for the update that fixed the problem. It's exactly like a bait and switch, and Microsoft should not have been able to get away with this, on a technicality. There were *actual* victims in the class action who did not get compensated.
So clearly in this instance the adversarial system didn't work.
Old old argument
> We will never run out of oil because we'll switch to something else first.
Sure, like what? nuclear fission for your car? Nuclear fusion for your house (always 20 years away)? Sure, no worries.
One thing people always forget in the old thread "we switched from horsecarts to automobiles without a problem" was that there *were* lots of problems. The 19th century, that of the switch, was ripe with revolutions, wars, common people working extremely hard, pollution, short lives, etc etc etc. Sure it was probably livable if you had money. In other words it was a time of change.
What we have now is an incredibly long period of continued peace by history's standards. When oil starts to become a bit more expensive, sure you'll see alternative sources of energy being put to use, but you'll see more worldwide unrest, for example when China realizes that it *needs* to take control of the Middle East oil grounds for its continued growth. Will the US and Europe let it take control? Hmm. Then we'll talk about non-virtual WMDs for sure.
Maybe humanity will survive, and then another era of relative peace and quiet will be ushered, and the world will view the switch era like we view the WWI period now, but I wouldn't necessarily bet on it.
Sure, precicely.
Maybe they've found a way to block the light better and they may have a blacker pixel, but does it mean you can have suddenly very dark features on screen and very bright ones and they are both visible at the same time.
A better measure of screen quality might be the number of perceptibly different grey levels this screen is capable of delivering, AND the ratio between the darkest and the brightest of them. I suspect most humans would have a hard time differencing screens that can do more than about 200 levels.
$500 laptops are, in no particular order
1- Heavy
2- Slow
3- Annoying (think file transfers if you want to work on something else, and you definitely want to work on something else than a $500 laptop)
4- Expensive ($500/year is more like it).
5- Unreliable (see above)
6- Not available where I live. Think 1000 Euros instead. See also expensive.
Think also backups, system maintenance, viruse (if windows) etc.
It would be great to work at home on my large dual screen Linux box (which cost me less than $500 in Euros, thanks to recup) and on my other large dual screen linux box at work without having to transfer files through several layers of firewall both ways.
I could show up at clients with no backpack on.
It could work.