that's what i'm saying. most people here in the U.S. are still stuck with 1~8 Mbps asymmetric residential connections, meanwhile people in Japan and South Korea are upgrading from 100 Mbps to 1 Gbps symmetric bandwidth FttH for about $56 USD. meanwhile, what Comcast arrogantly refers to as their "wideband" service offers only 50 Mbps and costs $150/month.
i think the first thing we need to do is catch up on wired broadband infrastructure. internet usage is only going to increase, and bandwidth demand will continue to skyrocket as more and more bandwidth-intensive applications come into popular usage. the disparity in per-Mbps cost of internet bandwidth between countries, not to mention the lack of FttH/symmetric service availability is quickly creating a gap between the nations with the most advanced communications infrastructure and the nations being reamed by incompetent/corrupt Telecoms & ISPs.
after the dearth in bandwidth is addressed via wired infrastructure, the next step would be to roll out municipal WiFi/WiMax as last-mile solutions to provide ubiquitous wireless broadband access. right now mobile broadband services offered by telecoms are way too unreasonably priced to be accessible/practical for general use. this is in stark contrast with public wireless networks, which are of great benefit to everyone.
first off, i highly doubt that the average copper thief is going to have access to a metal foundry where they can melt their stolen copper. what's more likely to happen is that after they've collected a few hundred lbs of material they'll try to offload it to a scrap metal dealer immediately. professional thieves don't like to hold onto stolen property. and twenty-thousand-dollars worth of copper is going to be much harder to hide than twenty-thousand-dollars worth of gold or diamonds.
secondly, if law enforcement can use metallurgic analysis to determine the exact batch of bullets a particular round came from, then i'm sure they could apply the same techniques to other metals. so even if the copper thieves had an underground metal foundry to melt down the copper they stole, there'd still be evidence of where it came from. and it's got nothing to do with each atom having a fingerprint.
no, no, no. you have it all wrong. don't you know that piracy is theft? now that hundreds of thousands of Chinese internet cafes are no longer pirating windows and stealing tens of millions of dollars from Microsoft, their quarterly profits will surely skyrocket as a result.
after all, the BSA would never lie about the losses caused by piracy. if software pirates are actually stealing money from businesses, then surely any reduction in piracy will necessarily translate into economic gains by the industry. that is, of course, unless they made up their figures for financial losses based on the specious reasoning that not buying software from a company is equal to stealing from them.
interesting. i'd never heard of these flash media filesystems before. i wonder how they compare to conventional filesystems, or why they weren't used in the Linux.com SSD benchmarks.
from these graphs it seems like ext3 performs quite well on SSD. but i can't find any benchmarks comparing any of the filesystems you listed. i did, however, come across this PDF released by Samsung, which shows some pretty interesting benchmark results for ext2, ext3, ext4, reiserfs, xfs, btrfs and nilfs. and in these tests nilfs comes out on top in almost all of the tests.
i'm surprise you guys can even get that far. i've never had a "lucid dream" in the sense that i knew i was dreaming and could control what happens in the dream (i always wake up just as i start suspecting that i might be dreaming. i think it's because i get too excited when i realize i'm in a dream.)
however, i did have one really bizarre dream experience (after spending a week tripping on acid, shrooms, AMT, 2C-E, and doing ether and nitrous) where i had a false awakening and was in a semi-asleep/semi-awake hypnagogic state. i think i actually did sit up in my bed and even opened my eyes, but i was still dreaming with my eyes open. in my dream i'd just woken up and saw a friend walk past the window. i tried to take out my cellphone to call him, but i couldn't read the digits on my phone or even make out the buttons. i remember being really frustrated, and then slowly i woke up for real and realized that my phone was still sitting on the dresser. it was really confusing the say the least.
in any case, not being able to read numbers or words--whether in a book, a digital clock, or a keypad--has always been a recurring characteristic of my dreams. i couldn't even imagine trying to do homework in a dream.
hrm, i don't know that SSD has gained enough widespread adoption for a mainstream filesystem to be optimized for solid state rather than mechanical rotational storage. however, you do raise an interesting point. perhaps a new filesystem can be designed from the ground up optimized for SSD. whoever gets into this area of development right now will have a huge lead on competitors when SSD storage solutions finally achieve price parity with spinning media.
well, i believe the NSERC is a Canadian organization, so i'm assuming Canadian laws apply in this case. however, you might still be right. what i was referring to is how things should work in theory. but as NASA's recent selling of their patents and technologies to private corporations has shown, public research isn't always made freely available to the public. in that case, there's really no justification for an academic institution appropriating research patents/copyrights, and that research should not have received any kind of public funding.
the Bayh-Dole Act is especially disturbing in the context of medical research. i think this is another example of corporate interests being put ahead of public good.
actually, i've always had a hunch that pushing really hard when you're taking a dump could be bad for you. my circulatory system isn't that great to begin with. sometimes when i stand up and stretch my arms/legs/back really hard and sit back down, i'll get really lightheaded, to the point where i actually feel like i'm going to black out--my ears will start ringing, my vision gets dim, and sometimes i even start losing my sense of balance. it feels almost like being on nitrous, except that it goes away a little bit faster (~10-15 seconds instead of 1-2 minutes), and afterwards i usually feel a little nauseous. but yea, i've abuse a lot of stimulants in the past, and i don't really exercise much these days. the last thing i need is to give myself an aneurysm trying to take a shit.
but getting back on topic, the article doesn't really give much info about what this device actually does. it seems to be more about this Long Blondes guy rather than the technology behind the glove. is it mechanical? is it electrically powered? is it like an exoskeleton strength-multiplier, or does it just create resistance to strengthen your hand?
well, obviously they can't claim rights to code that they didn't fund the development of. that doesn't seem like what the University's policy is.
the lesson here isn't to not sign anything you don't agree with (that's just common sense), but rather don't do public research if you're not comfortable with doing public research.
the NSERC seems to be a government institution, so all research that they fund is by definition public research. naturally, academic research is going to remain in the control of the academic institution where it was conducted. this is done in order to keep publicly funded research free and open to everyone in the spirit of academic openness and to facilitate scientific collaboration. you can't accept government funding and then turn around and decide you don't want anyone else to have access to your research. it's not fair to taxpayers for them to foot the bill for proprietary research that is not made available to the public.
in the context of software development, i would expect the university to release the source code under some kind of open source license. if it's a BSD license then the developer who wrote the code should still be able to commercialize his software if he wants to. he has every right to make money off of his code. he just doesn't have the right to accept research funding from taxpayers and then renege on the agreement to make the research/source code public. besides, it would really hinder scientific/technological progress if all public/academic research were tied down with patents and copyrights. waiting 15-20 years after a scientific breakthrough is made before another researcher can build upon it is just impractical.
it's really no different from being paid to do software development for a commercial company. if your employer pays you to develop the software, you can't expect to retain the rights to the code you just sold to them. i mean, what are they paying you for?
$140/month for 20 Mbps is a little steep (particularly for home users), even if it's symmetric bandwidth; not to mention the fact that such plans aren't offered in most areas.
i would hardly call getting a leased-line in a residential area "fairly easy to do" when we have virtually no FttH deployment (1-2%, i think). even Comcast's self-proclaimed "wideband" service that's 50 Mbps for $150/month is still ridiculously overpriced and available in very few areas. in comparison, Japan's already upgrading from their current 100 Mbps home broadband connections to 1 Gbps; and, yes, it's all symmetric.
but we should have known where broadband was headed as soon as DSL first supplanted dial-up and major ISPs like Verizon tried to limit their residential DSL service to one computer per connection, forbidding the use of internet-sharing NAT routers. i think even now residential broadband subscribers are still prohibited from running any kind of internet server, which is why symmetric bandwidth is not offered to residential subscribers.
not to mention viruses, which exhibit certain characteristics of biological life, but aren't considered truly alive by the scientific community.
and even amongst accepted biological lifeforms there are different levels of sentience/intelligence/consciousness. in this respect plant life is little more than a biological machine. and someone who is brain-dead and in a persistent vegetative state isn't really any more alive than a plant. someone who is brain dead is for all intents and purposes dead, but their body can still be kept alive using life-support systems.
so there certainly is a spectrum of life/death, rather than simply two discrete categories.
i'm glad that i'm not the only who actually pronounces it as "S-Q-L" instead of "sequel."
i don't know why, but i've always thought it was weird to call MySQL "my sequel" or to say "sequel code," though i guess that's how most people in the industry pronounce it. and i've always just pronounced PostgreSQL post-greh S-Q-L, but apparently the developers called it post-gres Q-L according to Wikipedia and this mp3 clip on the official PostgreSQL site.
true communism has nothing to do with a stalinist dictatorship. marxist philosophy proposes an egalitarian society without socioeconomic inequality. that clearly did not exist in stalinist Russia, as party members still had much more wealth and power than the average worker. and contrary to what many Americans believe, a communist economy does not preclude a democratic government. if you only have a single "strongman" or a non-democratically-elected "committee" making political decisions, then that's a dictatorship or oligarchy. a communist society by definition needs to be democratically run by the working class.
true communism has only really be achieved on a small scale in experimental communes. the basic idea of communism is of putting social cooperation ahead of competitive self-interests. this ideal is illustrated in the creation of local farming co-ops, in which everyone in the community works together to achieve a shared interest--providing food for the community. everyone contributes what they can to the farming efforts, and in this way everyone gets to eat for free, and no one starves. likewise, an open source project enlists the help of the community to develop the software. everyone contributes what they can, and their collective efforts result in free software than everyone can use/modify/distribute.
the difference between a free market economy and communist economy isn't freedom to do what you want. the difference is competition vs. cooperation. a socialist society doesn't have to be a dictatorship. just because health care and education are socialized doesn't mean people have any less freedom. arguably you have more freedom in a communist/socialist society because what you're free to do isn't limited by what you can "afford." that means that if i'm interested in computer science, and my grades are good enough, then i'm free to study CS. this stands in contrast with a purely free market education system, where if i'm not born into a privileged background, i can't afford to go college and pursue the career i want, just because i can't afford it.
sorry to burst your bubble, but open source development is essentially communism. there's no free market at work here. it's the collective efforts of the open source community that drives development. it's not the invisible hand of the free market that's writing code and submitting patches. most open source developers are not motivated by profit, but instead donate their time to open source projects either out of altruism, a sense of community, or simply the love of writing code.
the free market has more relevance to closed/proprietary software, which users actually have to pay money for, and is supported entirely by commercial profits. how does Linux fit a free market model when Linus Torvalds and Richard Stallman both intended Linux and GNU, respectively, as collaborative development efforts that anyone could freely use, modify, and distribute?
exactly. the argument espoused in this article is fundamentally flawed. in fact, it reads like it was written by an industry mouthpiece for the sole purpose of demonizing P2P users without absolutely no regard to logic or reality.
first off, as you said, it's impossible for the "download fiends" to actually use more than their share of bandwidth. if i have a 56K dial-up connection, there's no way for me to just decide, "hrmmm, this isn't fast enough for me. i think i'll be a dick and download at 9 Mbps by stealing bandwidth from my neighbors."
secondly, the author seems to be suggesting that everyone should use, or have access to, the exact same amount of bandwidth regardless of what they paid for, and that this level of bandwidth is decided by how much he personally uses/needs. well, that's very convenient for him and the ISPs. most of us are paying for 3+ Mbps connections, some people are paying for much more than that, but i guess we should all only be allowed to use 1~3% of the bandwidth we paid for because that's how much the author needs for his daily web surfing, e-mail, and posting of shitty articles on the web.
but why stop there? why not divide up internet bandwidth evenly between all 6.6 billion people around the globe. total global broadband internet bandwidth was estimated by Cisco to be 5,372 petabytes per month in 2008. divided up between 6.6 billion people means we all get a 0.00265869476 Mbps connection--that's each person's 'fair share' of internet bandwidth. of course, we would all have faster internet connections if it weren't for those darn greedy business/enterprise internet subscribers.
internet bandwidth isn't a fixed commodity, or a limited natural resource. technology has always been driven by consumer demand, and broadband internet is no different. it's bandwidth-intensive applications like P2P, streaming-video/audio, enterprise applications, etc. that create the push for infrastructure upgrades and ever-increasing connection speeds/network capacities. it's idiotic to accuse "power users" or "downloaders" of destroying the internet or stealing other people's bandwidth. it's even more idiotic to think that everyone should use as little bandwidth as you do, as there's always going to be a someone who uses even less bandwidth. artificially manipulating internet usage while overselling more and more is what's going to cause broadband connection quality to continue to decrease. meanwhile, there are ISPs in Japan and Korea who are doing the exact opposite by increasing network capacity and connection speeds to meet the growing demand. perhaps if ISPs in the U.S. and Canada focused on making technological progress rather than opposing it, we'd be rolling out 1 Gbps symmetric broadband connections too, rather than fussing over people actually using their 3-4 Mbps connections.
well, one thing i have to give Sirius Satellite Radio credit for is breaking the Clear Channel monopoly and being somewhat indie-friendly. it's pretty much impossible for indie labels to get any kind of exposure through traditional media channels like TV or radio. until Sirius came along the best you could hope to do is send out tons of promo CDs to different college radio stations, and if you're lucky, they won't all end up in the used bin at the local record shop. every thing else pretty much follows the Top-40 format controlled by the Clear Channel/radio promoters cartel. payola is still alive and well today, and if you don't have to money to pay for spins, your music's not going on the air. at least with the Sirius network indie bands have a chance of getting some air time. one of our bands was even interviewed on one of Sirus' metal channels.
but i completely agree with you on internet radio. the internet has really changed the game when it comes music promotion, distribution, and marketing. the internet has been a huge boon of indie content producers of all sorts, whether you're a writer, a filmmaker, an artist, or a musician. and it's poised to undo decades of corporate consolidation of the media. unlike TV, terrestrial radio, and satellite radio, the internet is an open public network. online content distribution isn't controlled by a handful of corporations. in fact, there's no longer even a discrete division between broadcaster and viewer/listener. the internet allows indie musicians/artists/filmmakers/artists to completely bypass traditional distribution channels that have been tightly guarded by the RIAA/Big Four.
the only thing standing in the way of streaming internet radio replacing conventional radio is the lack of ubiquitous wireless access. it's the same thing that stands in the way of wireless VoIP replacing traditional cellular carriers. that's why municipal WiFi/WiMax is so important. once public wireless internet access becomes a part of basic infrastructure (as it's already in the gradual process of becoming) proprietary/closed communications networks like radio/TV/cellular networks/etc. will quickly become anachronisms.
well, is it still the creator/publisher's market if the book is no longer in print? if their book is in print and you chose to pirate rather than buy used, then yes, you are depreciating the market value of the used book, which has a direct influence on the market value & demand of the new book.
however, if the book is out of print, then the publisher/author have already sold their entire stock of books. the market value of the used books are of no consequence to the copyright holders. they have already made all the money that they can (or are willing to) make on that IP.
in this case, i think the question would be, whether or not piracy impinges on the rights of non-copyright-holders. in other words, do you have a moral obligation to compensate a used book salesman for enjoying a book that they happen to be selling a used copy of. personally i think the answer is "no."
i will admit, i hadn't thought of those other possibilities, and i'm glad you brought those to my attention.
however, it's hard to strike a fine balance between usability and security. and if you make users choose between the two, most will choose usability. that is why i like having file extensions, as it provides usability without significant compromises to security. you could use file icons to indicate file type to the user, but then you would have to disable custom or embedded icons. now, this may be acceptable in a business environment, but custom program icons are a basic aesthetic feature that most consumers have come to expect. and aside from aesthetics, easily distinguishable program icons also significantly enhance usability.
also, the problem with using separate commands for "run" and "open" is that, generally, users expect to perform the default action for a particular file type on double click, regardless of what file type it is. for an audio file it might be "play", or "queue to playlist", and for an image file or text document it'd be "open" in the default editor, and for an executable one would expected it to be "run." i think if the interface gives a clear (and accurate) indication of file type then it's really not necessary to require different actions for "open" and "run" commands. this can be achieved either with visible file extensions, or by putting an executable in bold as you mentioned. though using an execute bit that's off by default might be a prudent policy.
another thing i'd like to point out is that file extensions make searching for specific file types much easier (well, in theory at least; the Windows XP's built-in search feature is absolutely worthless) since you can type something like "*.css" to find all CSS files in a directory. i'm not sure how else you can handle such searches in an intuitive manner.
exactly. we need to shape our laws to conform with our sense of ethics, not shape our ethics to conform with our existing laws.
i think this is a very interesting moral dilemma.
since the book is out of print, there's really no way of paying the author/publisher for a copy of the text. even if you buy a book used, the copyright holder doesn't see a cent of it. it's not like if the used book store sells out of their stock they'll order another shipment of that text from the publisher.
legally you'd be violating the author or publisher's copyright. but your decision won't make a difference to anyone except you and the used book salesman if you decide to buy a used copy. however, there's no ethical obligation for you to purchase your copy of the text from the used books salesman on Amazon.
personally, i don't see anything wrong with downloading a pirated copy in this situation, just seed the torrent until you have at least a 1:1 ratio. you're not hurting anyone financially or otherwise. but if you really want to support the author, you can look up his address or PO Box and mail him some money.
on Windows i can see the file extension of every file on my hard drive. i determine the file type based on the same attribute that my shell does. if i get a file attachment or am browsing a directory, i can immediately distinguish executables from non-executables. if i'm looking for a PNG image, i just look for the appropriate icon and the.png extension, and i can double click on the icon and open the image without the possibility of accidentally running a malicious executable.
however, on a lot of people's Windows systems they have explorer configured to hide known extensions. so the shell still uses file extensions to determine file format, but they're now relying solely on the file icon to indirectly determine file type. but since executable files can have embedded icons, it's very easy for an attacker to give a file a deceptive name and icon, disguising a virus or trojan as an image or text document.
sure, the user could right-click on the file and select "Properties" to look at the "Type of file:" field. however, doing this for every single file you want to examine is very tedious and time-consuming. most people simply aren't going to go through that kind of hassle. imagine if you have to examine a directory with 100 images in it. are you going to open the properties dialog 100 times, once for each and every file?
using meta data or magic number to determine file format would have the same drawback. how would you determine the format of a file at a glance using meta data? you wouldn't have a safe/accurate and intuitive means of determining file type.
just think of Wikipedia as a reflection of the social intelligence and cultural health (or is it social health and cultural intelligence?) of a society.
if a society is healthy, and its population consists of relatively intelligent, mature, unselfish individuals, then a Wikipedia-type knowledge repository would be a great success and a very useful cultural tool. on the other hand, if a society is plagued by social issues resulting in a large population of emotionally-dysfunctional sociopaths, then the signal-to-noise ratio might be very low due to there being more trolls than legitimate users.
a Wikipedia-type site probably wouldn't work very well in a society dominated by greed and the selfish pursuit of personal financial interests either, as you'd probably have more spam ads than legitimate edits. likewise, a society dominated by a culture of anti-intellectualism might result in a collaborative knowledgebase full of misinformation.
all things considered, Wikipedia has been a relatively big success. sure, there's the odd troll, misinformation or spam edit, but one doesn't have to "remain forever on guard after making technically complex contributions." there are enough relatively intelligent and well-intentioned users to drown out the noise from idiots/assholes. most users try to keep an eye open for bad edits, whether intentional or unintentional, and make corrections when appropriate. and as long as everyone does that, the burden of "guarding" the integrity of the information on Wikipedia gets distributed between millions of users, meaning each user has to do very little to maintain the quality of the site.
according to the comments FTA, the phrase "pre-war German espionage code" is referring to the age of the encryption algorithm being used, not when it was used in the photo:
Thiago: It's not meant to be Americentric: Duquesne entered German service in February 1939, and I'm willing to bet that the cipher in question dates back earlier than that, based on what I know of wartime crypto history. As I recall, at the time (1939-1941) the high-level military and diplomatic traffic was encrypted with Enigma machines, and everything else used codes that dated back to the early 1930s, or before (and were fairly easily broken by, e.g., Bletchley Park.)
Hence, "pre-war", as opposed to a later, military, war-time code.
if my local community wants to spend money to improve our public school system, and we bring a petition to city council to raise funding for our local high/middle/elementary school, or perhaps even to raise property taxes to do so, how is that robbery?
whether tax dollars are ultimately spent on defense does not determine whether it is justified or not. what matters is whether those tax dollars are spent on things that serve public interest. and since taxation is ultimately just a means of funding government, the legitimacy of a particular government is what determines the legitimacy of its system of taxation. that's why "taxation without representation" is considered undemocratic and unjust use of government power.
lastly, taxation is not taking money out of your pocket by force. taxes under a legitimate democratic government is a civic obligation. in a democratic society, every citizen enters into a social contract to shared the financial burden of funding their government. if you want to use the public road system, have access to emergency services, and enjoy other public resources, then you are implicitly agreeing to following certain laws, including tax laws.
if you are unhappy about how tax dollars are spent or collected, then you can voice your concern at the appropriate level of government. or, you can simply leave. but no one is taking money from your pocket by force any more than a shop keeper is taking money from you by force when he charges you for your purchase.
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that's what i'm saying. most people here in the U.S. are still stuck with 1~8 Mbps asymmetric residential connections, meanwhile people in Japan and South Korea are upgrading from 100 Mbps to 1 Gbps symmetric bandwidth FttH for about $56 USD. meanwhile, what Comcast arrogantly refers to as their "wideband" service offers only 50 Mbps and costs $150/month.
i think the first thing we need to do is catch up on wired broadband infrastructure. internet usage is only going to increase, and bandwidth demand will continue to skyrocket as more and more bandwidth-intensive applications come into popular usage. the disparity in per-Mbps cost of internet bandwidth between countries, not to mention the lack of FttH/symmetric service availability is quickly creating a gap between the nations with the most advanced communications infrastructure and the nations being reamed by incompetent/corrupt Telecoms & ISPs.
after the dearth in bandwidth is addressed via wired infrastructure, the next step would be to roll out municipal WiFi/WiMax as last-mile solutions to provide ubiquitous wireless broadband access. right now mobile broadband services offered by telecoms are way too unreasonably priced to be accessible/practical for general use. this is in stark contrast with public wireless networks, which are of great benefit to everyone.
first off, i highly doubt that the average copper thief is going to have access to a metal foundry where they can melt their stolen copper. what's more likely to happen is that after they've collected a few hundred lbs of material they'll try to offload it to a scrap metal dealer immediately. professional thieves don't like to hold onto stolen property. and twenty-thousand-dollars worth of copper is going to be much harder to hide than twenty-thousand-dollars worth of gold or diamonds.
secondly, if law enforcement can use metallurgic analysis to determine the exact batch of bullets a particular round came from, then i'm sure they could apply the same techniques to other metals. so even if the copper thieves had an underground metal foundry to melt down the copper they stole, there'd still be evidence of where it came from. and it's got nothing to do with each atom having a fingerprint.
no, no, no. you have it all wrong. don't you know that piracy is theft? now that hundreds of thousands of Chinese internet cafes are no longer pirating windows and stealing tens of millions of dollars from Microsoft, their quarterly profits will surely skyrocket as a result.
after all, the BSA would never lie about the losses caused by piracy. if software pirates are actually stealing money from businesses, then surely any reduction in piracy will necessarily translate into economic gains by the industry. that is, of course, unless they made up their figures for financial losses based on the specious reasoning that not buying software from a company is equal to stealing from them.
interesting. i'd never heard of these flash media filesystems before. i wonder how they compare to conventional filesystems, or why they weren't used in the Linux.com SSD benchmarks.
from these graphs it seems like ext3 performs quite well on SSD. but i can't find any benchmarks comparing any of the filesystems you listed. i did, however, come across this PDF released by Samsung, which shows some pretty interesting benchmark results for ext2, ext3, ext4, reiserfs, xfs, btrfs and nilfs. and in these tests nilfs comes out on top in almost all of the tests.
i'm surprise you guys can even get that far. i've never had a "lucid dream" in the sense that i knew i was dreaming and could control what happens in the dream (i always wake up just as i start suspecting that i might be dreaming. i think it's because i get too excited when i realize i'm in a dream.)
however, i did have one really bizarre dream experience (after spending a week tripping on acid, shrooms, AMT, 2C-E, and doing ether and nitrous) where i had a false awakening and was in a semi-asleep/semi-awake hypnagogic state. i think i actually did sit up in my bed and even opened my eyes, but i was still dreaming with my eyes open. in my dream i'd just woken up and saw a friend walk past the window. i tried to take out my cellphone to call him, but i couldn't read the digits on my phone or even make out the buttons. i remember being really frustrated, and then slowly i woke up for real and realized that my phone was still sitting on the dresser. it was really confusing the say the least.
in any case, not being able to read numbers or words--whether in a book, a digital clock, or a keypad--has always been a recurring characteristic of my dreams. i couldn't even imagine trying to do homework in a dream.
hrm, i don't know that SSD has gained enough widespread adoption for a mainstream filesystem to be optimized for solid state rather than mechanical rotational storage. however, you do raise an interesting point. perhaps a new filesystem can be designed from the ground up optimized for SSD. whoever gets into this area of development right now will have a huge lead on competitors when SSD storage solutions finally achieve price parity with spinning media.
well, i believe the NSERC is a Canadian organization, so i'm assuming Canadian laws apply in this case. however, you might still be right. what i was referring to is how things should work in theory. but as NASA's recent selling of their patents and technologies to private corporations has shown, public research isn't always made freely available to the public. in that case, there's really no justification for an academic institution appropriating research patents/copyrights, and that research should not have received any kind of public funding.
the Bayh-Dole Act is especially disturbing in the context of medical research. i think this is another example of corporate interests being put ahead of public good.
you learn something new everyday...
actually, i've always had a hunch that pushing really hard when you're taking a dump could be bad for you. my circulatory system isn't that great to begin with. sometimes when i stand up and stretch my arms/legs/back really hard and sit back down, i'll get really lightheaded, to the point where i actually feel like i'm going to black out--my ears will start ringing, my vision gets dim, and sometimes i even start losing my sense of balance. it feels almost like being on nitrous, except that it goes away a little bit faster (~10-15 seconds instead of 1-2 minutes), and afterwards i usually feel a little nauseous. but yea, i've abuse a lot of stimulants in the past, and i don't really exercise much these days. the last thing i need is to give myself an aneurysm trying to take a shit.
but getting back on topic, the article doesn't really give much info about what this device actually does. it seems to be more about this Long Blondes guy rather than the technology behind the glove. is it mechanical? is it electrically powered? is it like an exoskeleton strength-multiplier, or does it just create resistance to strengthen your hand?
well, obviously they can't claim rights to code that they didn't fund the development of. that doesn't seem like what the University's policy is.
the lesson here isn't to not sign anything you don't agree with (that's just common sense), but rather don't do public research if you're not comfortable with doing public research.
the NSERC seems to be a government institution, so all research that they fund is by definition public research. naturally, academic research is going to remain in the control of the academic institution where it was conducted. this is done in order to keep publicly funded research free and open to everyone in the spirit of academic openness and to facilitate scientific collaboration. you can't accept government funding and then turn around and decide you don't want anyone else to have access to your research. it's not fair to taxpayers for them to foot the bill for proprietary research that is not made available to the public.
in the context of software development, i would expect the university to release the source code under some kind of open source license. if it's a BSD license then the developer who wrote the code should still be able to commercialize his software if he wants to. he has every right to make money off of his code. he just doesn't have the right to accept research funding from taxpayers and then renege on the agreement to make the research/source code public. besides, it would really hinder scientific/technological progress if all public/academic research were tied down with patents and copyrights. waiting 15-20 years after a scientific breakthrough is made before another researcher can build upon it is just impractical.
it's really no different from being paid to do software development for a commercial company. if your employer pays you to develop the software, you can't expect to retain the rights to the code you just sold to them. i mean, what are they paying you for?
$140/month for 20 Mbps is a little steep (particularly for home users), even if it's symmetric bandwidth; not to mention the fact that such plans aren't offered in most areas.
i would hardly call getting a leased-line in a residential area "fairly easy to do" when we have virtually no FttH deployment (1-2%, i think). even Comcast's self-proclaimed "wideband" service that's 50 Mbps for $150/month is still ridiculously overpriced and available in very few areas. in comparison, Japan's already upgrading from their current 100 Mbps home broadband connections to 1 Gbps; and, yes, it's all symmetric.
but we should have known where broadband was headed as soon as DSL first supplanted dial-up and major ISPs like Verizon tried to limit their residential DSL service to one computer per connection, forbidding the use of internet-sharing NAT routers. i think even now residential broadband subscribers are still prohibited from running any kind of internet server, which is why symmetric bandwidth is not offered to residential subscribers.
not to mention viruses, which exhibit certain characteristics of biological life, but aren't considered truly alive by the scientific community.
and even amongst accepted biological lifeforms there are different levels of sentience/intelligence/consciousness. in this respect plant life is little more than a biological machine. and someone who is brain-dead and in a persistent vegetative state isn't really any more alive than a plant. someone who is brain dead is for all intents and purposes dead, but their body can still be kept alive using life-support systems.
so there certainly is a spectrum of life/death, rather than simply two discrete categories.
do a google search for "Wim Delvoye x-ray"...
i'm glad that i'm not the only who actually pronounces it as "S-Q-L" instead of "sequel."
i don't know why, but i've always thought it was weird to call MySQL "my sequel" or to say "sequel code," though i guess that's how most people in the industry pronounce it. and i've always just pronounced PostgreSQL post-greh S-Q-L, but apparently the developers called it post-gres Q-L according to Wikipedia and this mp3 clip on the official PostgreSQL site.
now if i can just figure out how to pronounce "Bjarne Stroustrup..."
true communism has nothing to do with a stalinist dictatorship. marxist philosophy proposes an egalitarian society without socioeconomic inequality. that clearly did not exist in stalinist Russia, as party members still had much more wealth and power than the average worker. and contrary to what many Americans believe, a communist economy does not preclude a democratic government. if you only have a single "strongman" or a non-democratically-elected "committee" making political decisions, then that's a dictatorship or oligarchy. a communist society by definition needs to be democratically run by the working class.
true communism has only really be achieved on a small scale in experimental communes. the basic idea of communism is of putting social cooperation ahead of competitive self-interests. this ideal is illustrated in the creation of local farming co-ops, in which everyone in the community works together to achieve a shared interest--providing food for the community. everyone contributes what they can to the farming efforts, and in this way everyone gets to eat for free, and no one starves. likewise, an open source project enlists the help of the community to develop the software. everyone contributes what they can, and their collective efforts result in free software than everyone can use/modify/distribute.
the difference between a free market economy and communist economy isn't freedom to do what you want. the difference is competition vs. cooperation. a socialist society doesn't have to be a dictatorship. just because health care and education are socialized doesn't mean people have any less freedom. arguably you have more freedom in a communist/socialist society because what you're free to do isn't limited by what you can "afford." that means that if i'm interested in computer science, and my grades are good enough, then i'm free to study CS. this stands in contrast with a purely free market education system, where if i'm not born into a privileged background, i can't afford to go college and pursue the career i want, just because i can't afford it.
sorry to burst your bubble, but open source development is essentially communism. there's no free market at work here. it's the collective efforts of the open source community that drives development. it's not the invisible hand of the free market that's writing code and submitting patches. most open source developers are not motivated by profit, but instead donate their time to open source projects either out of altruism, a sense of community, or simply the love of writing code.
the free market has more relevance to closed/proprietary software, which users actually have to pay money for, and is supported entirely by commercial profits. how does Linux fit a free market model when Linus Torvalds and Richard Stallman both intended Linux and GNU, respectively, as collaborative development efforts that anyone could freely use, modify, and distribute?
exactly. the argument espoused in this article is fundamentally flawed. in fact, it reads like it was written by an industry mouthpiece for the sole purpose of demonizing P2P users without absolutely no regard to logic or reality.
first off, as you said, it's impossible for the "download fiends" to actually use more than their share of bandwidth. if i have a 56K dial-up connection, there's no way for me to just decide, "hrmmm, this isn't fast enough for me. i think i'll be a dick and download at 9 Mbps by stealing bandwidth from my neighbors."
secondly, the author seems to be suggesting that everyone should use, or have access to, the exact same amount of bandwidth regardless of what they paid for, and that this level of bandwidth is decided by how much he personally uses/needs. well, that's very convenient for him and the ISPs. most of us are paying for 3+ Mbps connections, some people are paying for much more than that, but i guess we should all only be allowed to use 1~3% of the bandwidth we paid for because that's how much the author needs for his daily web surfing, e-mail, and posting of shitty articles on the web.
but why stop there? why not divide up internet bandwidth evenly between all 6.6 billion people around the globe. total global broadband internet bandwidth was estimated by Cisco to be 5,372 petabytes per month in 2008. divided up between 6.6 billion people means we all get a 0.00265869476 Mbps connection--that's each person's 'fair share' of internet bandwidth. of course, we would all have faster internet connections if it weren't for those darn greedy business/enterprise internet subscribers.
internet bandwidth isn't a fixed commodity, or a limited natural resource. technology has always been driven by consumer demand, and broadband internet is no different. it's bandwidth-intensive applications like P2P, streaming-video/audio, enterprise applications, etc. that create the push for infrastructure upgrades and ever-increasing connection speeds/network capacities. it's idiotic to accuse "power users" or "downloaders" of destroying the internet or stealing other people's bandwidth. it's even more idiotic to think that everyone should use as little bandwidth as you do, as there's always going to be a someone who uses even less bandwidth. artificially manipulating internet usage while overselling more and more is what's going to cause broadband connection quality to continue to decrease. meanwhile, there are ISPs in Japan and Korea who are doing the exact opposite by increasing network capacity and connection speeds to meet the growing demand. perhaps if ISPs in the U.S. and Canada focused on making technological progress rather than opposing it, we'd be rolling out 1 Gbps symmetric broadband connections too, rather than fussing over people actually using their 3-4 Mbps connections.
well, one thing i have to give Sirius Satellite Radio credit for is breaking the Clear Channel monopoly and being somewhat indie-friendly. it's pretty much impossible for indie labels to get any kind of exposure through traditional media channels like TV or radio. until Sirius came along the best you could hope to do is send out tons of promo CDs to different college radio stations, and if you're lucky, they won't all end up in the used bin at the local record shop. every thing else pretty much follows the Top-40 format controlled by the Clear Channel/radio promoters cartel. payola is still alive and well today, and if you don't have to money to pay for spins, your music's not going on the air. at least with the Sirius network indie bands have a chance of getting some air time. one of our bands was even interviewed on one of Sirus' metal channels.
but i completely agree with you on internet radio. the internet has really changed the game when it comes music promotion, distribution, and marketing. the internet has been a huge boon of indie content producers of all sorts, whether you're a writer, a filmmaker, an artist, or a musician. and it's poised to undo decades of corporate consolidation of the media. unlike TV, terrestrial radio, and satellite radio, the internet is an open public network. online content distribution isn't controlled by a handful of corporations. in fact, there's no longer even a discrete division between broadcaster and viewer/listener. the internet allows indie musicians/artists/filmmakers/artists to completely bypass traditional distribution channels that have been tightly guarded by the RIAA/Big Four.
the only thing standing in the way of streaming internet radio replacing conventional radio is the lack of ubiquitous wireless access. it's the same thing that stands in the way of wireless VoIP replacing traditional cellular carriers. that's why municipal WiFi/WiMax is so important. once public wireless internet access becomes a part of basic infrastructure (as it's already in the gradual process of becoming) proprietary/closed communications networks like radio/TV/cellular networks/etc. will quickly become anachronisms.
well, is it still the creator/publisher's market if the book is no longer in print? if their book is in print and you chose to pirate rather than buy used, then yes, you are depreciating the market value of the used book, which has a direct influence on the market value & demand of the new book.
however, if the book is out of print, then the publisher/author have already sold their entire stock of books. the market value of the used books are of no consequence to the copyright holders. they have already made all the money that they can (or are willing to) make on that IP.
in this case, i think the question would be, whether or not piracy impinges on the rights of non-copyright-holders. in other words, do you have a moral obligation to compensate a used book salesman for enjoying a book that they happen to be selling a used copy of. personally i think the answer is "no."
i will admit, i hadn't thought of those other possibilities, and i'm glad you brought those to my attention.
however, it's hard to strike a fine balance between usability and security. and if you make users choose between the two, most will choose usability. that is why i like having file extensions, as it provides usability without significant compromises to security. you could use file icons to indicate file type to the user, but then you would have to disable custom or embedded icons. now, this may be acceptable in a business environment, but custom program icons are a basic aesthetic feature that most consumers have come to expect. and aside from aesthetics, easily distinguishable program icons also significantly enhance usability.
also, the problem with using separate commands for "run" and "open" is that, generally, users expect to perform the default action for a particular file type on double click, regardless of what file type it is. for an audio file it might be "play", or "queue to playlist", and for an image file or text document it'd be "open" in the default editor, and for an executable one would expected it to be "run." i think if the interface gives a clear (and accurate) indication of file type then it's really not necessary to require different actions for "open" and "run" commands. this can be achieved either with visible file extensions, or by putting an executable in bold as you mentioned. though using an execute bit that's off by default might be a prudent policy.
another thing i'd like to point out is that file extensions make searching for specific file types much easier (well, in theory at least; the Windows XP's built-in search feature is absolutely worthless) since you can type something like "*.css" to find all CSS files in a directory. i'm not sure how else you can handle such searches in an intuitive manner.
exactly. we need to shape our laws to conform with our sense of ethics, not shape our ethics to conform with our existing laws.
i think this is a very interesting moral dilemma.
since the book is out of print, there's really no way of paying the author/publisher for a copy of the text. even if you buy a book used, the copyright holder doesn't see a cent of it. it's not like if the used book store sells out of their stock they'll order another shipment of that text from the publisher.
legally you'd be violating the author or publisher's copyright. but your decision won't make a difference to anyone except you and the used book salesman if you decide to buy a used copy. however, there's no ethical obligation for you to purchase your copy of the text from the used books salesman on Amazon.
personally, i don't see anything wrong with downloading a pirated copy in this situation, just seed the torrent until you have at least a 1:1 ratio. you're not hurting anyone financially or otherwise. but if you really want to support the author, you can look up his address or PO Box and mail him some money.
on Windows i can see the file extension of every file on my hard drive. i determine the file type based on the same attribute that my shell does. if i get a file attachment or am browsing a directory, i can immediately distinguish executables from non-executables. if i'm looking for a PNG image, i just look for the appropriate icon and the .png extension, and i can double click on the icon and open the image without the possibility of accidentally running a malicious executable.
however, on a lot of people's Windows systems they have explorer configured to hide known extensions. so the shell still uses file extensions to determine file format, but they're now relying solely on the file icon to indirectly determine file type. but since executable files can have embedded icons, it's very easy for an attacker to give a file a deceptive name and icon, disguising a virus or trojan as an image or text document.
sure, the user could right-click on the file and select "Properties" to look at the "Type of file:" field. however, doing this for every single file you want to examine is very tedious and time-consuming. most people simply aren't going to go through that kind of hassle. imagine if you have to examine a directory with 100 images in it. are you going to open the properties dialog 100 times, once for each and every file?
using meta data or magic number to determine file format would have the same drawback. how would you determine the format of a file at a glance using meta data? you wouldn't have a safe/accurate and intuitive means of determining file type.
just think of Wikipedia as a reflection of the social intelligence and cultural health (or is it social health and cultural intelligence?) of a society.
if a society is healthy, and its population consists of relatively intelligent, mature, unselfish individuals, then a Wikipedia-type knowledge repository would be a great success and a very useful cultural tool. on the other hand, if a society is plagued by social issues resulting in a large population of emotionally-dysfunctional sociopaths, then the signal-to-noise ratio might be very low due to there being more trolls than legitimate users.
a Wikipedia-type site probably wouldn't work very well in a society dominated by greed and the selfish pursuit of personal financial interests either, as you'd probably have more spam ads than legitimate edits. likewise, a society dominated by a culture of anti-intellectualism might result in a collaborative knowledgebase full of misinformation.
all things considered, Wikipedia has been a relatively big success. sure, there's the odd troll, misinformation or spam edit, but one doesn't have to "remain forever on guard after making technically complex contributions." there are enough relatively intelligent and well-intentioned users to drown out the noise from idiots/assholes. most users try to keep an eye open for bad edits, whether intentional or unintentional, and make corrections when appropriate. and as long as everyone does that, the burden of "guarding" the integrity of the information on Wikipedia gets distributed between millions of users, meaning each user has to do very little to maintain the quality of the site.
according to the comments FTA, the phrase "pre-war German espionage code" is referring to the age of the encryption algorithm being used, not when it was used in the photo:
speaking of which, here's a screen shot of an early pre alpha build of the Folding@Home client.
if my local community wants to spend money to improve our public school system, and we bring a petition to city council to raise funding for our local high/middle/elementary school, or perhaps even to raise property taxes to do so, how is that robbery?
whether tax dollars are ultimately spent on defense does not determine whether it is justified or not. what matters is whether those tax dollars are spent on things that serve public interest. and since taxation is ultimately just a means of funding government, the legitimacy of a particular government is what determines the legitimacy of its system of taxation. that's why "taxation without representation" is considered undemocratic and unjust use of government power.
lastly, taxation is not taking money out of your pocket by force. taxes under a legitimate democratic government is a civic obligation. in a democratic society, every citizen enters into a social contract to shared the financial burden of funding their government. if you want to use the public road system, have access to emergency services, and enjoy other public resources, then you are implicitly agreeing to following certain laws, including tax laws.
if you are unhappy about how tax dollars are spent or collected, then you can voice your concern at the appropriate level of government. or, you can simply leave. but no one is taking money from your pocket by force any more than a shop keeper is taking money from you by force when he charges you for your purchase.