Oh, why do I do this to myself? I noticed £160 in the blurb and my first thought was "I wonder how much of the comment section is blaming this on Trump?". I should have just ignored the thread.
As to the tax bill, if I may be so direct, you're whining about the working class, and you are in college. If you are in college and are not studying a marketable skill and you don't have a rich family to support you, you are making poor life choices. You don't mention working. Did you pay anything in taxes last year? How much do you expect your taxes to increase by? I'm going to out on a limb and guess that you were not previously itemizing your massive property tax bill if you're a student.
So, can you offer some explanation of how this tax bill is going to negatively impact you?
This seems a bit unnecessary since there's enough demand to keep Geeksphone sold out.
Maybe those aren't getting into the hands of developers, but given that the phones are definitely sub-par for someone who just wants the latest and greatest, I would expect most are going to the people they are intended for.
I gave up on reading Phoronix because they report on nothing but benchmarks when those are very uninteresting from a Linux perspective unless things fall way behind. There are plenty of non-Linux sites benchmarking hardware. What we need in a Linux review site is someone focuesed on compatibility, stability and ease of configuration.
You need to either make the filter whitelist of approved sites with a librarian able to add things on the fly, or don't even waste your time because the kids will be spending their days searching for porn sites that you haven't yet blocked.
If it's a computer lab dedicated to research and approved uses, then whitelist. If it's computers for general use, where they can check email, there's no excuse for blocking. Partly this is about the age of the students -- I'd expect younger kids to be on whitelist only, while in high school, they've already got live streaming hardcore porn on their smartphones.
If this is accurate, it's an even worse situation than right now.
The fact that the patent office is granting obvious patents, or patents "it's a good idea to do this" rather than "this is a good way to do something" is the problem.
The patent system is designed to promote innovation. It does so by allowing people to exploit an invention without the overhead of trying to keep it secret. If this becomes the policy, then if you come up with innovation, you need to keep it secret, because it is only protected by trade secret.
There's a large (and to me, obvious) difference between something like the one click patent ("if we let people order with only one click, we can make lots of money") and RSA (a specific method of doing public key cryptography). The criteria should be that a patent must clearly specify a *method* of doing something, which would be non-obvious to someone skilled in the art who was confronted by the problem of "how should I do this".
First of all, the mother isn't suing Sony saying that EQ caused her son to kill himself. So you can stop the speculation on whether she'll win, because it isn't an issue.
Second, Everquest is addictive. Not chemically addictive, but neither is marijuana, which is the perfect comparison.
Smoking pot makes you not really care about the world. You smoke a bowl and just sit around doing anything. No sense of "I should be doing something productive" or "hmm...sitting around here playing video games isn't really that fun, maybe I should go see what my friends are up to".
It's exactly the same thing with Everquest, except it works in a different way. You log on, you play the game, and you accomplish things in the game. You gain a level, or you get some new item, and that makes you feel like you've accomplished something. And you have. Getting to a high level in Everquest takes hard work and long hours. And because it takes the same sort of qualities that real accomplishments take to achieve, it seems like you're being productive.
To summarize: pot makes you do nothing but smoke pot because you don't care about accomplishing anything. EQ makes you do nothing by play EQ because it seems like you're accomplishing stuff.
Success in Everquest is a lot easier than in the real world. There's no random setbacks, your sword won't suddenly break, you can't get fired from your job, some dot com isn't going to collapse right after promoting you, and so on. It gives you a chance to socialize with people without the hassle of actually making friends.
Everquest is a perfectly fine diversion, but it's very very easy to get caught up in it and it become more than a diversion. What'll I do tonight? Well, I could go out to a club, have a few drinks...but...maybe I won't have a good time. I'll just play Everquest. Anyway, I started playing Everquest a lot while I was unemployed. Why not, since I didn't have anything else I needed to do? But the thing is that that sense of accomplishment from the game keeps you from being motivated to go accomplish anything in real life, so I'm quitting at least until I have my real life more in order.
Hmm...with Microsoft trying to sell a half way decent operating system to home users, and AOL having a browser that could be used to build a complete GUI, when should we expect AOL to start shipping a "consumer" operating system?
1. That's what lawyers are for. The "test before it matters" is taking it down to a lawyer versed in the law and asking if it will hold up. In this case, however, the lawyer says, "maybe".
2. Have Congress clear it up. They can pass an addition to copyright law that, e.g., clears up whether a contract can be binding if the software is free.
I just thought I'd interject something that someone else may be able to twist relevence out of. The human body can time actions much more finely than the average error in neuron firing time. That is, if sending a pulse down your arm to release the baseball takes 25 +/- 5 ms, a person may very well be able to release the ball at some point with accuracy of +/- 1 ms. This is because we don't just use a single neuron firing to do the release, but several, and release when a threshhold is reached (adding independent variables reduces the variance).
And, of course, the idea of actually waiting until you hear from your arm "I'm in the right position" to send the "release now" command is just way too slow. Like hundreds of milliseconds.
I think there's something here about us being able to cope with a wide variety of delays, so long as they are consistent. Designing a game? It may be worth slowing down the average response time to half, if it reduces the variability of the response time.
In fact, that applies to designing pretty much anything.
What jackass marked legal analysis from someone who doesn't even know what the term is "insightful"? Am I misunderstanding that term? I thought it meant that the posting displayed some innovative thinking, originality, and was interesting in that it pushed thinking in a different direction. I was unaware that the term meant "inaccurately regurgitating arguments made by someone else".
Now, now, don't jump down his throat too soon. Current environmentalist dogma is that no new technology should be deployed until it is absolutely proven safe (the "precautionary principle"). Can any of you actually *prove* there are not adverse environmental effects of increased nitrogen levels? Saying, "any idiot can see that there aren't", while true, still isn't absolute *proof*.
It seems to me like there would be a problem in that you still need to impart that 17k mph orbital speed to whatever you lift up. Since the elevator car just lifts straight up, the acceleration would come out of the inertia of the elevator itself, which would slow it down over time, causing it to smack into the earth at hypersonic speeds, destroying civilization as we know it.
(before you question the physics, do this: put on your socks, go in the kitchen, spin around with your arms out. bring them in. watch self speed up. extend. watch self slow down)
Am I missing anything? Do current plans just call for having a rocket on the station to keep it at the right velocity? How would it work with lateral forces on the cable itself?
I was looking at the list for 805, and man, I just can't remember. All the names sound the same. It's a total formula. Scientific term, or something from some fantasy novel, or reference to computers. Damned if I know. I couldn't remember the name of the Dominion, but I remembered Trent Lillehaugen's unusual name. Sadly, I didn't make it on there. I suppose I should run it through a script to get the right years and then maybe I'll see more. In any case, my BBS, the Restaurant at the End of the Universe, didn't make it. I can't even submit it for inclusion, 'cause I don't remember the phone number.
I don't buy shit like that. Yeah, symbolism of the umbilical getting cut works, but are we to believe that Clarke went through the trouble to say, okay, I need a name for someone who walks a tightrope. Hmm...look for something good in another language? Seiltaenzer doesn't sound good. Hmm...string, chasm, abyss, fall,...I know, I'll make the last nine letters of his name an anagram for "alk on rope".
I think you have to just leave that one as a coincidence.
Right now, though, I'm reading that paper you linked to, and I'm kicking myself for so obviously missing it. I wonder if maybe I haven't seen the movie since I read Zarathustra for the first time.
At least Clinton just let things go on without furthering or decreasing our rights. It seems that we now have a president that wants to decrease our personal rights even further. Go figure.
I'm sorry. Remind me: who was it who signed the DMCA again? I can't seem to remember. Starts with a C or a K I think.
No, the worst patents can do is prevent them from becoming teenage parents, which most would say is a good effect. Patents are 20 years from filing right now. Assuming you file on the day you implant the egg, that means the patent expires around the kid's sophomore year of college.
I want to build my own roads. Or, more correctly, I want building roads to be handled by the market. I don't really have any plans of going out and learning to pour asphalt or anything myself. If we were in early soviet Russia, and having this argument, would you tell me "all you libertarians who want to grow your own food, raise your hands"? Or maybe in modern northern europe, you could say "all you libertarians who want to pay for supporting the church out of your own pocket, raise your hands"?
Imagine, next thing I may be advocating private provision of health care, or of education. Both of which, I might add, are provided much better by the market than by government.
Remember, this is a government by, for, and of the people. The government has no needs. People have needs that are difficult to meet through means other than by government. Don't confuse the means (government) with the end (a free, productive society).
Pardon me, but where did I say it was alright to pirate software? Let me rephrase what I said in terms simple enough for you to comprehend:
A companies revenue if there were no piracy would be lower than the total of their revenue with piracy and the loss estimated by multiplying the revenue per license by the number of pirate copies. This is because not everyone who finds the software worth using at zero cost will find it worth using at $250.
If I read that Adobe was about to unveil a new perfect copy protection scheme that would make it impossible for anyone to pirate Photoshop, I would buy stock in Jasc Software, makers of Paintshop Pro. Why? Because many people who would prefer to use Photoshop at a cost of zero to Paint Shop Pro at a cost of $79 would prefer Paint Shop Pro at $79 to Photoshop at $479.
You also show a lack of understanding of basic economics when you say a license is worth $X to Microsoft. It is not. A license is "worth" only what they can sell it for. Since Microsoft can "produce" an additional license at very low cost (under $10 for office), they would be perfectly willing to sell to everyone to whom office is worth more than $10. Except for one little detail: they cannot use perfectly discrimintory pricing. So they do the best they can, and will probably be able to come closer when they go to subscription based licensing.
As for my communist propaganda, I'm a card-carrying libertarian. But I learned my economics in a classroom, not from press releases.
Whether piracy is good or bad from an pragmatic standpoint depends on details I'm not competent to find or interpret. I think it's probably bad, because it reduces competition. From a moral standpoint, I have no problem with copyrights, because they can arise from voluntary agreements among all concerned parties.
Your argument is flawed even if the argument you ascribe to me is correct. This is because printing counterfeit money deflates the value of everyone else's money. Pirating software, if you cannot buy it at a price less than what it is worth to you, and there are no substitutes, takes no value from anyone.
This is just like Microsoft claiming that since X home users pirate their software that they charge Y for, they are "losing" $XY. This is complete BS, though, because just as a home user isn't going to pay $500 for office, most people are not going to pay money to download ringtones.
They're about $1000 american. Of course, that's the price in other countries. I imagine it's proportional to lawyers per capita, so figure about $1200 US.
It's not possible to absorb enough nitrogen at sea level to get the bends. What people tend to forget is that going 30 ft down is 2 atmospheres. Going 70 ft down is 3 atmospheres. You can't really get the bends going from 30ft to sea level, even if you stay down there a long time, so I don't think going from 1 atmosphere to.75 atmosphere could do it.
Hmm...I've never had my ears pop on an elevator before, though.
"you have nothing to worry about. the elevator will float up 3000ft on high powered magnets, with nothing supporting you if the power goes out, then slide into a recess in so that the elevator below you, travelling upward at 50kph, can safely pass us by while we let people off"
All I can say is, please at least make that thing look sturdy. And don't have any of those "permit expires, Nov 7, 1994" papers you see all over Berkeley's elevators.
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I can't seem to find anything explaining how the test works. Is it just measuring forces on balls with different densities or something?
Oh, why do I do this to myself? I noticed £160 in the blurb and my first thought was "I wonder how much of the comment section is blaming this on Trump?". I should have just ignored the thread.
As to the tax bill, if I may be so direct, you're whining about the working class, and you are in college. If you are in college and are not studying a marketable skill and you don't have a rich family to support you, you are making poor life choices. You don't mention working. Did you pay anything in taxes last year? How much do you expect your taxes to increase by? I'm going to out on a limb and guess that you were not previously itemizing your massive property tax bill if you're a student.
So, can you offer some explanation of how this tax bill is going to negatively impact you?
This seems a bit unnecessary since there's enough demand to keep Geeksphone sold out.
Maybe those aren't getting into the hands of developers, but given that the phones are definitely sub-par for someone who just wants the latest and greatest, I would expect most are going to the people they are intended for.
I gave up on reading Phoronix because they report on nothing but benchmarks when those are very uninteresting from a Linux perspective unless things fall way behind. There are plenty of non-Linux sites benchmarking hardware. What we need in a Linux review site is someone focuesed on compatibility, stability and ease of configuration.
You need to either make the filter whitelist of approved sites with a librarian able to add things on the fly, or don't even waste your time because the kids will be spending their days searching for porn sites that you haven't yet blocked.
If it's a computer lab dedicated to research and approved uses, then whitelist. If it's computers for general use, where they can check email, there's no excuse for blocking. Partly this is about the age of the students -- I'd expect younger kids to be on whitelist only, while in high school, they've already got live streaming hardcore porn on their smartphones.
If this is accurate, it's an even worse situation than right now.
The fact that the patent office is granting obvious patents, or patents "it's a good idea to do this" rather than "this is a good way to do something" is the problem.
The patent system is designed to promote innovation. It does so by allowing people to exploit an invention without the overhead of trying to keep it secret. If this becomes the policy, then if you come up with innovation, you need to keep it secret, because it is only protected by trade secret.
There's a large (and to me, obvious) difference between something like the one click patent ("if we let people order with only one click, we can make lots of money") and RSA (a specific method of doing public key cryptography). The criteria should be that a patent must clearly specify a *method* of doing something, which would be non-obvious to someone skilled in the art who was confronted by the problem of "how should I do this".
First of all, the mother isn't suing Sony saying that EQ caused her son to kill himself. So you can stop the speculation on whether she'll win, because it isn't an issue.
Second, Everquest is addictive. Not chemically addictive, but neither is marijuana, which is the perfect comparison.
Smoking pot makes you not really care about the world. You smoke a bowl and just sit around doing anything. No sense of "I should be doing something productive" or "hmm...sitting around here playing video games isn't really that fun, maybe I should go see what my friends are up to".
It's exactly the same thing with Everquest, except it works in a different way. You log on, you play the game, and you accomplish things in the game. You gain a level, or you get some new item, and that makes you feel like you've accomplished something. And you have. Getting to a high level in Everquest takes hard work and long hours. And because it takes the same sort of qualities that real accomplishments take to achieve, it seems like you're being productive.
To summarize: pot makes you do nothing but smoke pot because you don't care about accomplishing anything. EQ makes you do nothing by play EQ because it seems like you're accomplishing stuff.
Success in Everquest is a lot easier than in the real world. There's no random setbacks, your sword won't suddenly break, you can't get fired from your job, some dot com isn't going to collapse right after promoting you, and so on. It gives you a chance to socialize with people without the hassle of actually making friends.
Everquest is a perfectly fine diversion, but it's very very easy to get caught up in it and it become more than a diversion. What'll I do tonight? Well, I could go out to a club, have a few drinks...but...maybe I won't have a good time. I'll just play Everquest. Anyway, I started playing Everquest a lot while I was unemployed. Why not, since I didn't have anything else I needed to do? But the thing is that that sense of accomplishment from the game keeps you from being motivated to go accomplish anything in real life, so I'm quitting at least until I have my real life more in order.
I'm assuming you work in the mail room?
Am I to believe you are a lawyer, who cannot even spell ridiculous?
Hmm...with Microsoft trying to sell a half way decent operating system to home users, and AOL having a browser that could be used to build a complete GUI, when should we expect AOL to start shipping a "consumer" operating system?
Two answers:
1. That's what lawyers are for. The "test before it matters" is taking it down to a lawyer versed in the law and asking if it will hold up. In this case, however, the lawyer says, "maybe".
2. Have Congress clear it up. They can pass an addition to copyright law that, e.g., clears up whether a contract can be binding if the software is free.
I just thought I'd interject something that someone else may be able to twist relevence out of. The human body can time actions much more finely than the average error in neuron firing time. That is, if sending a pulse down your arm to release the baseball takes 25 +/- 5 ms, a person may very well be able to release the ball at some point with accuracy of +/- 1 ms. This is because we don't just use a single neuron firing to do the release, but several, and release when a threshhold is reached (adding independent variables reduces the variance).
And, of course, the idea of actually waiting until you hear from your arm "I'm in the right position" to send the "release now" command is just way too slow. Like hundreds of milliseconds.
I think there's something here about us being able to cope with a wide variety of delays, so long as they are consistent. Designing a game? It may be worth slowing down the average response time to half, if it reduces the variability of the response time.
In fact, that applies to designing pretty much anything.
What jackass marked legal analysis from someone who doesn't even know what the term is "insightful"? Am I misunderstanding that term? I thought it meant that the posting displayed some innovative thinking, originality, and was interesting in that it pushed thinking in a different direction. I was unaware that the term meant "inaccurately regurgitating arguments made by someone else".
Now, now, don't jump down his throat too soon. Current environmentalist dogma is that no new technology should be deployed until it is absolutely proven safe (the "precautionary principle"). Can any of you actually *prove* there are not adverse environmental effects of increased nitrogen levels? Saying, "any idiot can see that there aren't", while true, still isn't absolute *proof*.
It seems to me like there would be a problem in that you still need to impart that 17k mph orbital speed to whatever you lift up. Since the elevator car just lifts straight up, the acceleration would come out of the inertia of the elevator itself, which would slow it down over time, causing it to smack into the earth at hypersonic speeds, destroying civilization as we know it.
(before you question the physics, do this: put on your socks, go in the kitchen, spin around with your arms out. bring them in. watch self speed up. extend. watch self slow down)
Am I missing anything? Do current plans just call for having a rocket on the station to keep it at the right velocity? How would it work with lateral forces on the cable itself?
As long as people can remain civil in a time of disaster
Hahahaha. For a moment there, I thought you were serious.
I was looking at the list for 805, and man, I just can't remember. All the names sound the same. It's a total formula. Scientific term, or something from some fantasy novel, or reference to computers. Damned if I know. I couldn't remember the name of the Dominion, but I remembered Trent Lillehaugen's unusual name. Sadly, I didn't make it on there. I suppose I should run it through a script to get the right years and then maybe I'll see more. In any case, my BBS, the Restaurant at the End of the Universe, didn't make it. I can't even submit it for inclusion, 'cause I don't remember the phone number.
I don't buy shit like that. Yeah, symbolism of the umbilical getting cut works, but are we to believe that Clarke went through the trouble to say, okay, I need a name for someone who walks a tightrope. Hmm...look for something good in another language? Seiltaenzer doesn't sound good. Hmm...string, chasm, abyss, fall, ...I know, I'll make the last nine letters of his name an anagram for "alk on rope".
I think you have to just leave that one as a coincidence.
Right now, though, I'm reading that paper you linked to, and I'm kicking myself for so obviously missing it. I wonder if maybe I haven't seen the movie since I read Zarathustra for the first time.
At least Clinton just let things go on without furthering or decreasing our rights. It seems that we now have a president that wants to decrease our personal rights even further. Go figure.
I'm sorry. Remind me: who was it who signed the DMCA again? I can't seem to remember. Starts with a C or a K I think.
No, the worst patents can do is prevent them from becoming teenage parents, which most would say is a good effect. Patents are 20 years from filing right now. Assuming you file on the day you implant the egg, that means the patent expires around the kid's sophomore year of college.
I want to build my own roads. Or, more correctly, I want building roads to be handled by the market. I don't really have any plans of going out and learning to pour asphalt or anything myself. If we were in early soviet Russia, and having this argument, would you tell me "all you libertarians who want to grow your own food, raise your hands"? Or maybe in modern northern europe, you could say "all you libertarians who want to pay for supporting the church out of your own pocket, raise your hands"?
Imagine, next thing I may be advocating private provision of health care, or of education. Both of which, I might add, are provided much better by the market than by government.
Remember, this is a government by, for, and of the people. The government has no needs. People have needs that are difficult to meet through means other than by government. Don't confuse the means (government) with the end (a free, productive society).
Pardon me, but where did I say it was alright to pirate software? Let me rephrase what I said in terms simple enough for you to comprehend:
A companies revenue if there were no piracy would be lower than the total of their revenue with piracy and the loss estimated by multiplying the revenue per license by the number of pirate copies. This is because not everyone who finds the software worth using at zero cost will find it worth using at $250.
If I read that Adobe was about to unveil a new perfect copy protection scheme that would make it impossible for anyone to pirate Photoshop, I would buy stock in Jasc Software, makers of Paintshop Pro. Why? Because many people who would prefer to use Photoshop at a cost of zero to Paint Shop Pro at a cost of $79 would prefer Paint Shop Pro at $79 to Photoshop at $479.
You also show a lack of understanding of basic economics when you say a license is worth $X to Microsoft. It is not. A license is "worth" only what they can sell it for. Since Microsoft can "produce" an additional license at very low cost (under $10 for office), they would be perfectly willing to sell to everyone to whom office is worth more than $10. Except for one little detail: they cannot use perfectly discrimintory pricing. So they do the best they can, and will probably be able to come closer when they go to subscription based licensing.
As for my communist propaganda, I'm a card-carrying libertarian. But I learned my economics in a classroom, not from press releases.
Whether piracy is good or bad from an pragmatic standpoint depends on details I'm not competent to find or interpret. I think it's probably bad, because it reduces competition. From a moral standpoint, I have no problem with copyrights, because they can arise from voluntary agreements among all concerned parties.
Your argument is flawed even if the argument you ascribe to me is correct. This is because printing counterfeit money deflates the value of everyone else's money. Pirating software, if you cannot buy it at a price less than what it is worth to you, and there are no substitutes, takes no value from anyone.
This is just like Microsoft claiming that since X home users pirate their software that they charge Y for, they are "losing" $XY. This is complete BS, though, because just as a home user isn't going to pay $500 for office, most people are not going to pay money to download ringtones.
They're about $1000 american. Of course, that's the price in other countries. I imagine it's proportional to lawyers per capita, so figure about $1200 US.
It's not possible to absorb enough nitrogen at sea level to get the bends. What people tend to forget is that going 30 ft down is 2 atmospheres. Going 70 ft down is 3 atmospheres. You can't really get the bends going from 30ft to sea level, even if you stay down there a long time, so I don't think going from 1 atmosphere to .75 atmosphere could do it.
Hmm...I've never had my ears pop on an elevator before, though.
"you have nothing to worry about. the elevator will float up 3000ft on high powered magnets, with nothing supporting you if the power goes out, then slide into a recess in so that the elevator below you, travelling upward at 50kph, can safely pass us by while we let people off"
All I can say is, please at least make that thing look sturdy. And don't have any of those "permit expires, Nov 7, 1994" papers you see all over Berkeley's elevators.