Unenforceable. Who sets how much it worth? it also has huge implications for undermining long-term financial health of projects and properties.
A better solution would be shorter copyright terms attached to renewal-with-conditions. Say, everything gets an automatic ten years when it is created. After that it can be renewed in ten year increments for a moderate fee, up to a maximum or 50 years or something. As part of the renewal process a high quality copy or representation must be provided to the copyright office, to be made available (probably for a moderate fee again) after the copyright has expired.
So, as long as the creators are actively profiting off their creation they can keep on controlling it. Once it is no longer in active use it falls into public domain, with a high quality copy available.
The top Canadian tax bracket is 29% federally and between 10% and 21% provincially.
On top of that there are a few employment insurance type things and most provinces have a sales tax but even with everything the top brackets absolutly max out around 60%. And that is before any deductions. In Alberta it maxes out around 45%.
We just spend our money better. No for-profit medical industry and a significantly reduced for-profit insurance industry means our cash goes a lot further.
This person does not speak for us. Harper is... uncomfortably far right for many Canadians. And yet still sits to the left of Obama on many issues. He only appears deranged and extreme compared to our regular variety of center-left or outright left politician.
Well, no, he is a little deranged all on his own. But still, we'll take him over damn near anyone you could send us in return. Should only be another election or two before his party collapses on itself and we can move on.
If anyone went through with this kind of thing they SHOULD be charged by the power sent. It is, after all, taking that much power to charge your device. The wastage is your problem for being too lazy to plug in your phone.
And please, although the Chinese government is very corrupt, it is not more corrupt than US government or US corporations.
It's very fashionable to overstate the problems of the US. Even with all it's problems it remains one of the most successful systems in the world on any number of levels.
That said, the rampant corruption on China isn't the kind that will interfere with things like building a supercomputer. Quite the opposite in fact. Need a neighborhood demolished or workers expropriated? No problem.
Where as the much smaller level of corruption in the US is almost precisely targeted to screw these kinds of projects. Congressman can't tack on some random spending for their district? Screw over the whole project just to build a reputation so everyone bends over next time.
Apple and Microsoft couldn't give a flying fuck about the average person figuring out the full range of possibilities that computers offer. Any more than the head of Maytag stay up at night with nightmares of everyone suddenly deciding to become washing machine mechanics in their spare time.
There is no conspiracy. There is no great shadow hovering above and preventing people from waking up to what their computer can do. Most of them have a pretty good idea of what computers can do. They often don't have the vocabulary or means to make it happen, but if you have ever dealt with a user figuring out a new task they tend to have a very realistic idea of what is possible (at least in the abstract) and then once they figure out their new thing that go back to ignoring everything else.
Because there is an opportunity cost to computers. And most people don't enjoy paying that cost. They get far more enjoyment out of playing in a local baseball league or building model trains or learning to cook or take dance lessons or just watching movies with friends.
Every single possible roadblock could be removed and the vast majority of the population would not care and could not be made to care. Because they are busy doing more interesting (to them) things. And for people who are already interested in computers there are no roadblocks worth speaking of.
If you are claiming that only "tech geeks" could possibly appreciate unrestricted freedom of choice, that is interesting.
Entirely depends on what strings come attached to that freedom of choice. If you can come up with a system that preserves perfect freedom while still being completely curated and secure you will be the first.
If the choice is between a large and expansive walled garden and having to be able to second guess and verify the software that is advertised that is always going to be an easy choice for most people. The real world has proven that a large set of people can not tell scams and malware and sketchy knock-off software from good options, and it's a lot like money markets. Bad money pushes the good money out.
You can look at a piece of software and make an instant call about its quality that is going to be right 99% of the time. I can. Anyone who reads Slashdot (or knows what OS version their phone has) can. My grandmother can not. And the grandparents and purely functional users outnumber the rest of us by several orders of magnitude.
And you know what? The right choice for you or me can be absolutely the wrong choice for them.
Libertarians believe that bankers will behave when they're accountable to their customers, rather than to the regulators who have failed spectacularly for all of the 20th and this portion of the 21st century.
Yes, because prior to 20th and 21st century regulation, all bankers and financial institutions were paragons of moral virtue, constantly worried about developing a poor reputation that would destroy their customer base. Oh, wait, that's not it at all! The reason so much banking regulation was introduced in the 20th century is that the entire financial sector is traditionally a magnet for scum an villainy of epic proportions.
Libertarians believe that companies who "doctor" their drugs will fail by popular opinion. Instead, we in the USA rely on the FDA to protect us. It seems that they've been doing OK, but they've definitely been slower than their EU counterparts in approving therapies. Would we be better off without the FDA, or the semi-protected NBME?
Yes, because every single person has a the means to completely replicate the entire FDA in our basements. As soon as a new drug is introduced we will know is if is any good by how well it does in "public opinion".
. ..And if the two biggest companies in a field colluded, in a Libertarian society, they wouldn't be able to collude for long. Number three would wipe its' arse with their remains, in very short order.
Yes, because when two companies collude, a plucky young start-up is instantly bestowed with the capital and physical infrastructure to take them on by the capitalist fairy-godmother. Against all history and example.
Too many of the people I work with are real shitheads for me to believe that the government works on the behalf of its citizens.
Governments are not perfect, but they do exist with the explicit mandate of working for the good of their citizens rather than their own profit. And in any sane set-up it is infinitely easier to put the fear of god (or at least of the electorate) into a politician than it is to directly keep the corporations in line. Even in the not-particularly-sane setup the US uses the government is an easier target for the populous to influence than most corporations.
The reason most libertarianism is easy to dismiss as magical thinking is that it requires everyone to think magically for it to work. Specifically, this weird assertion than as soon as all the regulation is removed, everyone will magically exist in a state of perfect information and understanding of all industries and services that they come in contact with. New drug hits the market? Consumers are magically able to evaluate it and reward or punish the drug company appropriately. Utility is charging for an essential service? Consumers are able to fully understand the entire supply and logistics chain to determine if they are being gouged or not. And if they are being gouged they are magically granted a duplicate utility with complete infrastructure with which to show the evil gouger the error of their ways.
All this despite the fact that at no point in history, under any conditions, has it ever worked out this way. Ever. At any scale above small-village reputation economy it completely falls apart.
Idealistic libertarianism works a hell of a lot like idealistic communism. If only you completely ignore all human nature and rely on everyone to behave exactly as the system predicts they should for the overall greater good they both work great.
A couple big problems with this. Mostly due to the required low-ish orbit of any space station.
First, the ISS and the astronauts and equipment on it are not actually in zero-gravity. They are in free-fall. They are all orbiting the earth in very similar, but not perfectly identical, orbits. That's why equipment and such can drift away from where it is released. This actually causes some tidal stresses for large objects separated by distance such as the ISS panels and main structure. God knows what kinds of additional stresses would be introduced if you tried to spin the whole damn thing within that kind of frame of reference.
Second, any space station in an accessible orbit is low enough that it experiences atmospheric drag. Not a lot, but enough that the ISS needs to be boosted a couple times a year in order to keep its orbit from degrading. Left on its own it would come back down to earth in fairly short order. It would be way harder to boost spinning objects accurately.
For these kinds of problems to be minimized the station would need to be in a much higher orbit. MUCH higher. High enough that accessing it becomes non-trivially harder and more expensive. Every station trip would be as costly and risky as the Hubble repair mission was.
Until their neighbors declared that, due to their majority on the local School Board, evolution, history, a large chunk of geology, and set theory will no longer be taught. And all children will have a compulsory christian values class. And if you have a problem with it you are free to set up a completely separate school system on your own. And a separate medical system. Heck, unless you are willing to do things all their way you are 'free' to personally replicate all of western society yourself.
For given values of 'free' a 'free society' ceases to be a society at all.
How did it work for you? 1080p extracts would be somewhat lower than the recommended resolution for 123D, and it's not worth breaking out a 4k camera (and associated workflow) for this.
I know the one you are talking about (but forget its name off the top of my head) and it's great if your object fits with their tracking pad.
But you can get good results even with something like SynthEyes.
Shiny is a problem. Spray paint can be your friend there.
I'm always confused why none of the free/open projects have followed the path of extracting objects from video tracking vs photos. I've had pro software for years now that will pull a point cloud off a video. And because you can use frame comparison and use some minor manual tweaks to tell the software when any given point should be ignored for a couple frames it greatly reduces problems caused by shine, reflections and occlusion.
Restricting advertising isn't going to do any good.
It's illegal to advertise any prescription drug in Canada. Makes a huge difference. Also makes US television commercials seem unwatchable by comparison. A full third of them seem to be for drugs.
Sure they find it satisfying enough to keep doing it. That's why most of them do it professionally. The point is that these volunteer projects don't scale well. It's easy (at least if you are active in the film community) to scare up a free pro crew for a weekend project. With a little work and an interesting idea you can get a dedicated group for a few weekends, or convince people to take a week off work.
But that only works because they have real full time jobs doing this. You can't say 'hey that went great. Everyone should quit their jobs and do more of this until we all run out of cash and starve to death.'
Small scale 'free' professional productions do not scale. At all.
And right now it's powering the USA's space program too. Without the shuttles, it is currently the only man-rated launch vehicle operating.You want to get to the ISS? You're going up in a Soyuz
There's deathtraps and then deathtraps. Something that would be lethal going 60 mph on a highway could realistically never have the opportunity for a high speed collision if it is used on crowded streets. Depends on your market and conditions.
Can a system that is not secure (and thus can't be trusted) ever really be considered either truly free or stable?
'Freedom' for a professional programmer would represent a very different thing than 'freedom' for a political dissident who wants to be able to trust their computer.
If freedom requires that everyone be an expert programmer who can (and has the time to) audit every piece of code they run then we need a more useful definition for digital 'freedom' as well as 'responsibility'.
I am not expected to be a professional mechanic in order to drive a car, and no one sane would suggest I should need to be. Rather, cars are manufactured in such a way that they are expected to be inherently reliable to operate.
there has been some pretty fierce efforts against bitcoin which might also influence the stagnation of what I consider a great system.
Of course stagnation is setting in. Bitcoins have a fixed supply and thus are a deflationary currency. They were designed that way. It's one of the biggest reasons all the economists snickered when they debuted. Deflationary currencies always result in hording, which is never a desirable feature for a currency system.
So it's been interesting to watch the competing pressures. The natural tendency for a fixed supply currency to rise versus the growing realization that they are backed by nothing but the promises of a bunch of guys with servers.
Creative and others had products that beat the iPod, both before and after the iPod's launch. In contrast to the iPod of the time, my old Zen Micro played more formats of music, supported music stores that had legal DRM-free music, received and recorded FM radio, allowed playlist editing on the device, had a user-replaceable battery, etc. etc.
I had a Creative before (and for a while after) the iPod came out. It was only good when measured against the next option, which was burning mp3s to CD and using a portable CD player that supported them. Yeah, sure, it played more formats than the iPod. Hell, it played more formats than my iPhone probably does. But once you finished reading the box it wasn't very good at actually performing it's intended function. Loading music sucked. Sorting and organizing music sucked. Browsing music sucked. It just sucked less than the competition. And then suddenly the competition got better.
The explanation is the reality distortion field, not the inferiority of the competition.
What reality distortion field? When the iPod came out (and for several years after) Apple was viewed about the same way RIM is right now. Dead on its feet and only valuable for the IP. The iPod was probably the most mocked product launch of its time.
Slashdot Mirror
So... you want a macbook air?
Yes, the dimensions are slightly different, but it does come with a UNIX pre-installed.
Apple isn't perfect, but they are the only company that has focused on high end hardware instead of racing to the bottom of every market.
Unenforceable. Who sets how much it worth? it also has huge implications for undermining long-term financial health of projects and properties.
A better solution would be shorter copyright terms attached to renewal-with-conditions. Say, everything gets an automatic ten years when it is created. After that it can be renewed in ten year increments for a moderate fee, up to a maximum or 50 years or something. As part of the renewal process a high quality copy or representation must be provided to the copyright office, to be made available (probably for a moderate fee again) after the copyright has expired.
So, as long as the creators are actively profiting off their creation they can keep on controlling it. Once it is no longer in active use it falls into public domain, with a high quality copy available.
The top Canadian tax bracket is 29% federally and between 10% and 21% provincially.
On top of that there are a few employment insurance type things and most provinces have a sales tax but even with everything the top brackets absolutly max out around 60%. And that is before any deductions. In Alberta it maxes out around 45%.
We just spend our money better. No for-profit medical industry and a significantly reduced for-profit insurance industry means our cash goes a lot further.
This person does not speak for us. Harper is... uncomfortably far right for many Canadians. And yet still sits to the left of Obama on many issues. He only appears deranged and extreme compared to our regular variety of center-left or outright left politician.
Well, no, he is a little deranged all on his own. But still, we'll take him over damn near anyone you could send us in return. Should only be another election or two before his party collapses on itself and we can move on.
And they already have it compromised, so what would be the point?
If anyone went through with this kind of thing they SHOULD be charged by the power sent. It is, after all, taking that much power to charge your device. The wastage is your problem for being too lazy to plug in your phone.
And please, although the Chinese government is very corrupt, it is not more corrupt than US government or US corporations.
It's very fashionable to overstate the problems of the US. Even with all it's problems it remains one of the most successful systems in the world on any number of levels.
That said, the rampant corruption on China isn't the kind that will interfere with things like building a supercomputer. Quite the opposite in fact. Need a neighborhood demolished or workers expropriated? No problem.
Where as the much smaller level of corruption in the US is almost precisely targeted to screw these kinds of projects. Congressman can't tack on some random spending for their district? Screw over the whole project just to build a reputation so everyone bends over next time.
Apple and Microsoft couldn't give a flying fuck about the average person figuring out the full range of possibilities that computers offer. Any more than the head of Maytag stay up at night with nightmares of everyone suddenly deciding to become washing machine mechanics in their spare time.
There is no conspiracy. There is no great shadow hovering above and preventing people from waking up to what their computer can do. Most of them have a pretty good idea of what computers can do. They often don't have the vocabulary or means to make it happen, but if you have ever dealt with a user figuring out a new task they tend to have a very realistic idea of what is possible (at least in the abstract) and then once they figure out their new thing that go back to ignoring everything else.
Because there is an opportunity cost to computers. And most people don't enjoy paying that cost. They get far more enjoyment out of playing in a local baseball league or building model trains or learning to cook or take dance lessons or just watching movies with friends.
Every single possible roadblock could be removed and the vast majority of the population would not care and could not be made to care. Because they are busy doing more interesting (to them) things. And for people who are already interested in computers there are no roadblocks worth speaking of.
If you are claiming that only "tech geeks" could possibly appreciate unrestricted freedom of choice, that is interesting.
Entirely depends on what strings come attached to that freedom of choice. If you can come up with a system that preserves perfect freedom while still being completely curated and secure you will be the first.
If the choice is between a large and expansive walled garden and having to be able to second guess and verify the software that is advertised that is always going to be an easy choice for most people. The real world has proven that a large set of people can not tell scams and malware and sketchy knock-off software from good options, and it's a lot like money markets. Bad money pushes the good money out.
You can look at a piece of software and make an instant call about its quality that is going to be right 99% of the time. I can. Anyone who reads Slashdot (or knows what OS version their phone has) can. My grandmother can not. And the grandparents and purely functional users outnumber the rest of us by several orders of magnitude.
And you know what? The right choice for you or me can be absolutely the wrong choice for them.
Nope. Wrong.
Libertarians believe that bankers will behave when they're accountable to their customers, rather than to the regulators who have failed spectacularly for all of the 20th and this portion of the 21st century.
Yes, because prior to 20th and 21st century regulation, all bankers and financial institutions were paragons of moral virtue, constantly worried about developing a poor reputation that would destroy their customer base. Oh, wait, that's not it at all! The reason so much banking regulation was introduced in the 20th century is that the entire financial sector is traditionally a magnet for scum an villainy of epic proportions.
Libertarians believe that companies who "doctor" their drugs will fail by popular opinion. Instead, we in the USA rely on the FDA to protect us. It seems that they've been doing OK, but they've definitely been slower than their EU counterparts in approving therapies. Would we be better off without the FDA, or the semi-protected NBME?
Yes, because every single person has a the means to completely replicate the entire FDA in our basements. As soon as a new drug is introduced we will know is if is any good by how well it does in "public opinion".
. . .And if the two biggest companies in a field colluded, in a Libertarian society, they wouldn't be able to collude for long. Number three would wipe its' arse with their remains, in very short order.
Yes, because when two companies collude, a plucky young start-up is instantly bestowed with the capital and physical infrastructure to take them on by the capitalist fairy-godmother. Against all history and example.
Too many of the people I work with are real shitheads for me to believe that the government works on the behalf of its citizens.
Governments are not perfect, but they do exist with the explicit mandate of working for the good of their citizens rather than their own profit. And in any sane set-up it is infinitely easier to put the fear of god (or at least of the electorate) into a politician than it is to directly keep the corporations in line. Even in the not-particularly-sane setup the US uses the government is an easier target for the populous to influence than most corporations.
The reason most libertarianism is easy to dismiss as magical thinking is that it requires everyone to think magically for it to work. Specifically, this weird assertion than as soon as all the regulation is removed, everyone will magically exist in a state of perfect information and understanding of all industries and services that they come in contact with. New drug hits the market? Consumers are magically able to evaluate it and reward or punish the drug company appropriately. Utility is charging for an essential service? Consumers are able to fully understand the entire supply and logistics chain to determine if they are being gouged or not. And if they are being gouged they are magically granted a duplicate utility with complete infrastructure with which to show the evil gouger the error of their ways.
All this despite the fact that at no point in history, under any conditions, has it ever worked out this way. Ever. At any scale above small-village reputation economy it completely falls apart.
Idealistic libertarianism works a hell of a lot like idealistic communism. If only you completely ignore all human nature and rely on everyone to behave exactly as the system predicts they should for the overall greater good they both work great.
A couple big problems with this. Mostly due to the required low-ish orbit of any space station.
First, the ISS and the astronauts and equipment on it are not actually in zero-gravity. They are in free-fall. They are all orbiting the earth in very similar, but not perfectly identical, orbits. That's why equipment and such can drift away from where it is released. This actually causes some tidal stresses for large objects separated by distance such as the ISS panels and main structure. God knows what kinds of additional stresses would be introduced if you tried to spin the whole damn thing within that kind of frame of reference.
Second, any space station in an accessible orbit is low enough that it experiences atmospheric drag. Not a lot, but enough that the ISS needs to be boosted a couple times a year in order to keep its orbit from degrading. Left on its own it would come back down to earth in fairly short order. It would be way harder to boost spinning objects accurately.
For these kinds of problems to be minimized the station would need to be in a much higher orbit. MUCH higher. High enough that accessing it becomes non-trivially harder and more expensive. Every station trip would be as costly and risky as the Hubble repair mission was.
Until their neighbors declared that, due to their majority on the local School Board, evolution, history, a large chunk of geology, and set theory will no longer be taught. And all children will have a compulsory christian values class. And if you have a problem with it you are free to set up a completely separate school system on your own. And a separate medical system. Heck, unless you are willing to do things all their way you are 'free' to personally replicate all of western society yourself.
For given values of 'free' a 'free society' ceases to be a society at all.
An occasional programmer thinks he is better at programming than people who don't program at all? Isn't this a truism?
How did it work for you? 1080p extracts would be somewhat lower than the recommended resolution for 123D, and it's not worth breaking out a 4k camera (and associated workflow) for this.
I know the one you are talking about (but forget its name off the top of my head) and it's great if your object fits with their tracking pad.
But you can get good results even with something like SynthEyes.
Shiny is a problem. Spray paint can be your friend there.
I'm always confused why none of the free/open projects have followed the path of extracting objects from video tracking vs photos. I've had pro software for years now that will pull a point cloud off a video. And because you can use frame comparison and use some minor manual tweaks to tell the software when any given point should be ignored for a couple frames it greatly reduces problems caused by shine, reflections and occlusion.
More accurately, it builds a 3D model from a lot of photos.
Restricting advertising isn't going to do any good.
It's illegal to advertise any prescription drug in Canada. Makes a huge difference. Also makes US television commercials seem unwatchable by comparison. A full third of them seem to be for drugs.
Sure there is. General>Network and top of the page is enable/disable 3G
Sure they find it satisfying enough to keep doing it. That's why most of them do it professionally. The point is that these volunteer projects don't scale well. It's easy (at least if you are active in the film community) to scare up a free pro crew for a weekend project. With a little work and an interesting idea you can get a dedicated group for a few weekends, or convince people to take a week off work.
But that only works because they have real full time jobs doing this. You can't say 'hey that went great. Everyone should quit their jobs and do more of this until we all run out of cash and starve to death.'
Small scale 'free' professional productions do not scale. At all.
And right now it's powering the USA's space program too. Without the shuttles, it is currently the only man-rated launch vehicle operating.You want to get to the ISS? You're going up in a Soyuz
There's deathtraps and then deathtraps. Something that would be lethal going 60 mph on a highway could realistically never have the opportunity for a high speed collision if it is used on crowded streets. Depends on your market and conditions.
Can a system that is not secure (and thus can't be trusted) ever really be considered either truly free or stable?
'Freedom' for a professional programmer would represent a very different thing than 'freedom' for a political dissident who wants to be able to trust their computer.
If freedom requires that everyone be an expert programmer who can (and has the time to) audit every piece of code they run then we need a more useful definition for digital 'freedom' as well as 'responsibility'.
I am not expected to be a professional mechanic in order to drive a car, and no one sane would suggest I should need to be. Rather, cars are manufactured in such a way that they are expected to be inherently reliable to operate.
there has been some pretty fierce efforts against bitcoin which might also influence the stagnation of what I consider a great system.
Of course stagnation is setting in. Bitcoins have a fixed supply and thus are a deflationary currency. They were designed that way. It's one of the biggest reasons all the economists snickered when they debuted. Deflationary currencies always result in hording, which is never a desirable feature for a currency system.
So it's been interesting to watch the competing pressures. The natural tendency for a fixed supply currency to rise versus the growing realization that they are backed by nothing but the promises of a bunch of guys with servers.
Creative and others had products that beat the iPod, both before and after the iPod's launch. In contrast to the iPod of the time, my old Zen Micro played more formats of music, supported music stores that had legal DRM-free music, received and recorded FM radio, allowed playlist editing on the device, had a user-replaceable battery, etc. etc.
I had a Creative before (and for a while after) the iPod came out. It was only good when measured against the next option, which was burning mp3s to CD and using a portable CD player that supported them. Yeah, sure, it played more formats than the iPod. Hell, it played more formats than my iPhone probably does. But once you finished reading the box it wasn't very good at actually performing it's intended function. Loading music sucked. Sorting and organizing music sucked. Browsing music sucked. It just sucked less than the competition. And then suddenly the competition got better.
The explanation is the reality distortion field, not the inferiority of the competition.
What reality distortion field? When the iPod came out (and for several years after) Apple was viewed about the same way RIM is right now. Dead on its feet and only valuable for the IP. The iPod was probably the most mocked product launch of its time.