Sure , some people in agencies will abuse their power occasionally, thats human nature.
That's dangerously naive. Given the opportunity and an incentive to do so -- avoiding imprisonment, keeping one's job, making some money -- most people will abuse their power most of the time. The default behavior for human beings is short-term self-service. Ethics and long-term thinking are learned behaviors that require an extensive social and legal reinforcement framework to maintain.
While the language used would increase the budget, the algorithms used will very quickly swamp any language gains.
I get so tired of hearing this nonsense go unchallenged. If, for a given task, there is a fastest known algorithm, it's almost always going to run much faster in a compiled language than an interpreted language, period. The idea that one can simply change algorithms to get better performance only applies when a better algorithm is known, and even then, it's still highly likely to run faster in a compiled language.
The exceptions are largely those cases where the bulk of the computation utilizes a highly optimized compiled routine in the interpreter. The reason it's so hard to beat the performance of the major interpreted languages on regular expression matching is that their regex engines are generally written in carefully tuned C.
This isn't to say that a compiled language is always the right tool for the job. Often, it is more cost-effective to spend less expensive programmer time on a project and throw the necessary hardware at it, but sometimes this is not possible or practical, as when one is coding for a resource-constrained platform. Also, over a long enough period of time, the cost of maintaining the hardware will eventually exceed the cost programming a more efficient solution. (With power-hungry PC servers, this point comes sooner than most people would expect, but generally not within the same quarter as the hardware allocation is made, so the accountants are blissfully oblivious to it.)
The long and the short of it is that, all other things being equal, most compiled languages are substantially faster than interpreted languages, often by an order of magnitude. Interpreted languages exist as a concession to the scarcity and cost of programmer time, not because one can always (or even often) magically pull a better algorithm out of one's hat and match the performance of compiled code.
People who want a "kid-safe" Internet should create a G-rated TLD for their material and block everything else. Having an adult-only TLD is just asking for trouble. I am reminded of the effort in the 80's spearheaded by Tipper Gore to label record albums. It started with profanity and sex, and before long, they we're trying to put "occult" warnings on anything that deviated from (their version of) orthodox Christianity. Ghettoization always leads to extermination.
It's high time we called out the censors for using children as human shields.
In general, I agree -- most Floyd songs don't work when pried out of their context, though there are exceptions. And certainly, EMI deserved the spanking that they, for once, got.
That said, every time I hear someone talk about "artistic integrity", I reach for my revolver. It's one of those bullshit art industry marketing terms like "authenticity" that doesn't actually mean anything. My experience of a work of art is internal to me. Sometimes I give a shit about what the artist was thinking, and sometimes I don't. Except for live performance art, once a work of art is done, the artist's role is done; all future action takes place in the senses and thoughts of the audience. If an audience member likes one panel of a triptych and doesn't care for the other two, why should they be bound by the artist's intent if they want to hang a print of just one panel?
The cult of the artist has acquired too many trappings of the religious cults of which it is an imitation. If I'm not going to kneel before God, then you can rest assured that Roger Waters isn't going to get a tip of the hat, either.
Every time this comes up, someone makes the observation that most apps aren't written to take advantage of multiple cores. That is, indeed true, but unless you're running MS-DOS, there's more to it. On the average Windows and Linux desktop installations, there can easily be twenty or so processes running before you start your first end-user application, and most users tend to have more than one app running at a time. While there is no substitute for purpose-built multi-threaded programs, it's not like those six cores will be sitting idle, especially under Windows, where you could throw an entire core or two at the OS and another couple at the two or three resident antivirus/malware programs that you need to have running to compensate for Windows' broken security model.
Granted, a lot of end-user apps spend most of their time sleeping, waiting for user input, but a sleeping process runs just as well on one core as on six. For users whose programs are actually doing something most of the time, multiple applications can take advantage of the additional cores even if they are themselves not multithreaded.
TFA attributes this to "anonymous community action".
Of which there might be more if someone would be thoughtful enough to publicly post the IP addresses of the command and control nodes of major botnets on a regular basis.
The whole beauty of the Jet pack was that it was something you carried with you, perhaps even under your sport coat, then, suddenly, you throw your coat off, ignite your rocket, and you are saved, and probably with a hot chick in your arms.
The problem there is that a small jetpack capable of carrying a human being for long flights in Earth's gravity is physically impossible. No conventional fuel has sufficient energy density, and even if there were tiny megawatt fusion reactors, that doesn't relieve you of the need to carry reaction mass. (Tiny megawatt fusion reactors could conceivably power an actual tiny jet engine, however, but you still have to figure out how to deal with the noise and waste heat.)
The good news is that once we do have tiny megawatt fusion reactors, you shouldn't have any trouble catching a ride to the moon or Mars, where the lower gravity would make jetpacks practical. The bad news is that even then, engaging in high speed extreme sports with a tiny megawatt fusion reactor strapped to your back will still be an incredibly dumb thing to do.
Microsoft has staked any open source credibility that it has on Novell's SUSE distribution.
I hate to break it to the author of TFA, but Microsoft does not have, never had, and never will have "any open source credibility". I'm sure there are people dumb enough to think that the Microsoft-Novell deal had any beneficial effects whatsoever for FOSS, but none of those people matter because they already bankrupted themselves in a series of repeat sales of the Brooklyn fucking Bridge.
Have we really reached the point where someone can wave around a huge wad of cash and say that night is day and everyone just nods and smiles? Even people who aren't getting any of the cash? Really?
Hm, lemme see. On the one hand, I have the essentially medieval technology of the physical key and keychain. Since I'm not a landlord or building maintenance worker, my keychain is of a manageable size. It only costs a few bucks, works with all of my existing locks, and you'd have to be a decent pickpocket to steal it from me. On the other hand, I have the proposed iPhone key function. It's a bit bigger than my keychain, costs a couple hundred bucks and involves a monthly fee in excess of my likely lifetime expenditure on traditional keys, requires daily charging, won't work with any of my existing locks, and a would-be thief only needs to steal my data.
What's not to like here? I mean, besides all of it.
It is funny that you say this with some sarcasm, like you are somehow "sticking it to them" by taking them up on their offer. They give content, you give nothing back. You stop visiting... and, how exactly is that bad for them?
I'm not sure the idea is to "stick it to them" here. The content that they have is simply not sufficiently valuable to the OP to deal with the ads, so he/she is okay with not visiting the site anymore. Other people may feel differently and put up with the ads. That's just the way a free market works.
Speaking only for myself, there is almost no content on the web that I am willing to endure obtrusive advertising to see. The only significant exception that comes to mind is Wikipedia, which I frankly wish would at least run Google ads so Jimmy Wales would stop holding his hand out for donations all the time. (I usually do donate during WP donation drives, just as I did for my local PBS station back when I watched TV.) That said, I suspect I'm not alone in this. There's a whole lot of sites that I visit that I wouldn't bother with if if I had to deal with lots of ads or if they had paywalls. All the web has done is make it easy for people to publish content to a global audience. Creating content that entices people to actually pay for it hasn't gotten any easier.
It's not like this is unique to the web. When I walk into a store, I don't always buy something. And when I do buy something, it is one product (or a few products) from the thousands or tens of thousands of products in the store. If I had to pay an entry fee just to get into the store, or if every last salesperson on duty interrupts me at least once (this means you, RadioShack) to try to sell me something I'm not remotely interested in, odds are good that I'm not going to visit very often. Unless you're selling necessities like medical care, food, or cars, you just can't get away with annoying the hell out of every customer. Light entertainment -- which is, in the end, what Ars Technica provides -- just isn't worth it.
Pretty much. Ars Technica's approach here is to ask people to do something they dislike so Ars can make money. What they're finding out is that a substantial number of people dislike the ads more than they like the content, and if push comes to shove, they're willing to give up the content along with the ads. If your business model consists of haranguing your users and telling them that if they don't do something unpleasant, they'll be sorry, you have become rather embarrassingly detached from reality and should probably look for something else to do. It's 2010, fer chrissakes. You'd think that by now people would have figured out that, at least on the web, popular does not equal profitable, and any business "plan" that involves attracting lots of non-paying spectators and making money from their mere presence is likely to crater.
Not that I would advocate any such thing, but it should would be nice if someone would use one of the many security holes in IE6 to quietly and automatically upgrade all IE6 installations to IE8.
I don't know about you, but I don't give a wet crap what the default theme looks like. Regardless of operating system, the defaults last just long enough for me to figure out how to change them to what I like. The only time I'm turned off by the defaults is when I can't change them. About the only graphics change in Ubuntu I'd care about is better support for a broader range of graphics cards.
Mind you, if the change makes Ubuntu appeal more to the kind of people who think desktop color schemes make a difference in how professional they are, great. I'm just not one of those people, and I rather suspect most self-selected Linux users aren't, either.
This will be a novelty and one I look forward to enjoying it as such. But nothing more. No more a replacement for music than grand pianos were replaced by early synthesizers. You might be able to convince me at some point it will suffice (like a live piano performance may employ an electric piano) but I dare say the parameters are far too many and far too complicated.
It's worth noting that virtually nothing in the Top 40 employs a grand piano, and Rachmaninoff has never charted. And that, ultimately, is all the music industry cares about. If it gets played on the radio and sells CDs or downloads, that's all that matters. And it's not like there aren't plenty of real human artists with marginal skills and little talent making plenty of money for the music industry, so it's rather questionable whether the bulk of music consumers would care (or even be able to tell) if an entirely synthetic "performer" didn't achieve virtuoso-level performance.
So while I think your objections are, at present, quite valid -- though I am skeptical that there is anything humans will be able to do better than machines in the long run -- they're also quite irrelevant as far as popular music goes. Conversely, even a superhuman electronic musician is unlikely to affect the fine art end of the spectrum because the customers there go to live performances to hear real humans or buy recordings of them by preference.
I'm not sure I'd go as far as to say that people have a duty to disobey laws they disagree with; that's just a recipe for anarchism. In certain extreme cases, like hiding your Jewish neighbors from the SS, sure, but over some silly county housing codes? As George Carlin famously noted once, half the population is of below average intelligence. Are you sure you want to rile up the kind of person who thinks turn signals are stupid?
That said, it's plainly a dumb law, and I hope the homeowners prevail. Knowing OC, though, I wouldn't hold my breath.
I'm actually referring to the Second Law of Thermodynamics. And no, value isn't limited like energy, but that's because value is imaginary, that is, the value of a thing is just an idea in a human mind. All that's necessary for something to be infinitely valuable or completely valueless is for people to decide that it is so. That said, the value of the things we need to survive tends to be rather more closely tied to its usefulness and availability, similar to the economic notion of supply and demand, at least as it applies to necessities rather than luxuries.
In material terms, Earth is a closed system. In terms of energy, it is open only to solar radiation, which at present we cannot utilize efficiently enough to eliminate our dependence on purely local, finite sources of energy. Everything we make increases local entropy, which manifests as less available energy resources and less useful matter in the form of waste products that can only be reused through the input of additional local energy. Modern capitalism is essentially industrial consumer capitalism, which is predicated on an ever-increasing population consuming ever-increasing quantities of goods and services. With our current technology, local entropy increases faster than it can be decreased via offplanet energy input -- currently solar, but presumably eventually off-planet fuels for fusion reactors. Obviously, more advanced technology would change the ratio of consumption to available resources, but we're not there yet and apparently not in much of a hurry to get there.
In short, we sooner or later run out of adequate supplies of usable energy and everything grinds to a halt. Things become quite unpleasant well before then as demand outpaces supply. That intermediate period of increasing scarcity is actually desirable if you've got necessities to sell, though everyone gets screwed in the final crunch. You can see this in the ever-increasing cost of land as there is less and less land available for more and more people to live in. In economic terms, that means that value is being created, but in real physical terms, there is actually less utility per each person's share of the goods.
What we're doing now is basically what we've done with every initially abundant resource -- the cheap land of the wild west, the buffalo, dammable rivers, oil, etc. As the selling and re-selling goes on, the economic value increases but the underlying real energy and matter is constantly degraded. Worse, the increasing economic value depends on and encourages accelerated increases in entropy. As the imaginary value asymptotically approaches infinity, the practical utility decreases proportionally. The last gallon of gasoline will be unimaginably expensive, but your car won't go any further with it than the much cheaper gasoline of ten years before.
All of this is moot, of course, if we make it off-planet. It's a huge universe, inexhaustible even by voracious human standards. But at present, we're stuck on a small planet which is for all current practical purposes a closed system, and we can't even visit the moon. Our current economic system is predicated on a state of affairs that does not presently exist. And that's basically what I meant by my earlier offhand remark.
...but given the fortuitous context, I have to trigger Godwin's Law here.
If it means shorter lines at the supermarket, a quarter of Germans would be happy to have a chip implanted under their skin.
It would have meant shorter lines at Auschwitz, too.
Honestly, I'm not altogether opposed to implants, though I'm much more interested in stuff that's not yet possible, like having a fully-functional computing environment directly interfaced to my nervous system with all the usual transhumanist trimmings. But even there, before the first implant goes in, much less millions of them, we need a comprehensive legal framework to define how the state and private organizations can interface with implants and what they can do with the data gleaned thereby. Sure, it'd be handy to not have to bother with carrying a wallet and its contents anymore, but not at the expense of having the state and various corporations tracking my every move without due process of law, or giving police free rein to use some kind of personal kill switch like the ones they envision for automobiles.
In short, technology is just power, and power is morally neutral. It's what you do with it that counts, and if you don't take great care in ensuring that its uses are not malign, malign people will be drawn to it like flies to shit. And given the way that law enforcement agencies like to pitch their power grabs to national legislatures, if we don't establish some clear boundaries now with trivial implants, some future FBI director will be sitting in front of Congress, arguing that -- in the name of fighting drugs/pedophiles/terrorists or whatever new bogeyman they come up with -- law enforcement needs unrestrained access to the latest non-trivial implants just like they've had all along with trivial ID chips. And they'll get what they ask for and abuse it, because that's what they always do.
I think you just described the business model for the entire American economy.
Ssssshhh. Haven't you figured out the Slashdot moderation system yet? Point that out about an individual bastard like Darl McBride, and you get a +5 Insightful. Point out that people like Darl McBride are the rule rather than the exception, and the local libertarian/free-market-utopian mod squad buries you as -1 (Flamebait|Offtopic|Troll). And God help you if you drag out the big guns and point out that the underlying theory of modern capitalism involves multiple violations of the Second Law. No one will ever hear from you again.
No, not the SCO business model. I mean the Darl McBride business model, which is to swindle investors into believing that he can accomplish something in the long run, pocketing as much money as he can, and moving on to the next busload of Wall Street suckers. As long as it keeps incrementing the value in his bank account fast enough, he'll keep doing it. Short of marooning him on a desert planet somewhere -- which entails its own risks -- there's not a lot anyone can do to keep him from grabbing the occasional headline with his latest antics.
Just be thankful that he isn't working that business model at the same scale as AIG, Bank of America, or Citibank.
All three will be marginalized by the ARM onslaught. Within 10 years, smartphone will be the personal computing device, AMD and Intel processors will power the cloud.
ARM may well come to dominate personal computing, but it sure won't be via the smartphone. No one is going to edit long word processor documents on their phone, much less edit spreadsheets, write code, or do much else that qualifies as actual work. And it's not because they don't already -- in many cases -- have enough processor power; it's because they don't have full-sized keyboards and monitors. I'll grant that it's possible that phones or PDAs of the future might well attach to full-featured I/O devices, but by themselves, no.
The cloud, too, has some significant limits that it will be difficult if not actually impossible to overcome. Security is a major issue, arguably theoretically resolvable, but trusting your critical data to an outside company to whom you are, at best, a large customer is not.
Maybe it's just me, but I have the distinct feeling that ten or twenty years down the road, input devices like this will be featured in "What Were They Thinking?"-type articles on slow news days.
Of course, those articles will be about five characters long, so as not to tax the attention span of a reading public for whom 140 characters is a feature-length article.
Yes, this was a stupid decision, but before everyone jumps all over the artist, consider that the man is 85 years old and is a US citizen, which means that he's likely to have serious health problems but not to have adequate health insurance. He might very well be a greedy prima donna, but he might also just be sick and desperate.
As far as the fair use issue goes, it is my personal opinion that one ought to be able to photograph everything that is in public view and to profit therefrom. Unfortunately, that is just my personal opinion, and the laws and their interpretation can and probably do differ. Of course, if I got to make the laws, most of the crap that arouses outrage on Slashdot wouldn't be an issue, but there would probably be endless bitching about the difficulty of the math, logic, and statistics sections of the voter qualification test...
Slashdot Mirror
Sure , some people in agencies will abuse their power occasionally, thats human nature.
That's dangerously naive. Given the opportunity and an incentive to do so -- avoiding imprisonment, keeping one's job, making some money -- most people will abuse their power most of the time. The default behavior for human beings is short-term self-service. Ethics and long-term thinking are learned behaviors that require an extensive social and legal reinforcement framework to maintain.
This is really a bad idea.
Welcome to the always exciting and perpetually almost ready for prime-time world of biometrics.
While the language used would increase the budget, the algorithms used will very quickly swamp any language gains.
I get so tired of hearing this nonsense go unchallenged. If, for a given task, there is a fastest known algorithm, it's almost always going to run much faster in a compiled language than an interpreted language, period. The idea that one can simply change algorithms to get better performance only applies when a better algorithm is known, and even then, it's still highly likely to run faster in a compiled language.
The exceptions are largely those cases where the bulk of the computation utilizes a highly optimized compiled routine in the interpreter. The reason it's so hard to beat the performance of the major interpreted languages on regular expression matching is that their regex engines are generally written in carefully tuned C.
This isn't to say that a compiled language is always the right tool for the job. Often, it is more cost-effective to spend less expensive programmer time on a project and throw the necessary hardware at it, but sometimes this is not possible or practical, as when one is coding for a resource-constrained platform. Also, over a long enough period of time, the cost of maintaining the hardware will eventually exceed the cost programming a more efficient solution. (With power-hungry PC servers, this point comes sooner than most people would expect, but generally not within the same quarter as the hardware allocation is made, so the accountants are blissfully oblivious to it.)
The long and the short of it is that, all other things being equal, most compiled languages are substantially faster than interpreted languages, often by an order of magnitude. Interpreted languages exist as a concession to the scarcity and cost of programmer time, not because one can always (or even often) magically pull a better algorithm out of one's hat and match the performance of compiled code.
People who want a "kid-safe" Internet should create a G-rated TLD for their material and block everything else. Having an adult-only TLD is just asking for trouble. I am reminded of the effort in the 80's spearheaded by Tipper Gore to label record albums. It started with profanity and sex, and before long, they we're trying to put "occult" warnings on anything that deviated from (their version of) orthodox Christianity. Ghettoization always leads to extermination.
It's high time we called out the censors for using children as human shields.
In general, I agree -- most Floyd songs don't work when pried out of their context, though there are exceptions. And certainly, EMI deserved the spanking that they, for once, got.
That said, every time I hear someone talk about "artistic integrity", I reach for my revolver. It's one of those bullshit art industry marketing terms like "authenticity" that doesn't actually mean anything. My experience of a work of art is internal to me. Sometimes I give a shit about what the artist was thinking, and sometimes I don't. Except for live performance art, once a work of art is done, the artist's role is done; all future action takes place in the senses and thoughts of the audience. If an audience member likes one panel of a triptych and doesn't care for the other two, why should they be bound by the artist's intent if they want to hang a print of just one panel?
The cult of the artist has acquired too many trappings of the religious cults of which it is an imitation. If I'm not going to kneel before God, then you can rest assured that Roger Waters isn't going to get a tip of the hat, either.
Every time this comes up, someone makes the observation that most apps aren't written to take advantage of multiple cores. That is, indeed true, but unless you're running MS-DOS, there's more to it. On the average Windows and Linux desktop installations, there can easily be twenty or so processes running before you start your first end-user application, and most users tend to have more than one app running at a time. While there is no substitute for purpose-built multi-threaded programs, it's not like those six cores will be sitting idle, especially under Windows, where you could throw an entire core or two at the OS and another couple at the two or three resident antivirus/malware programs that you need to have running to compensate for Windows' broken security model.
Granted, a lot of end-user apps spend most of their time sleeping, waiting for user input, but a sleeping process runs just as well on one core as on six. For users whose programs are actually doing something most of the time, multiple applications can take advantage of the additional cores even if they are themselves not multithreaded.
TFA attributes this to "anonymous community action".
Of which there might be more if someone would be thoughtful enough to publicly post the IP addresses of the command and control nodes of major botnets on a regular basis.
The whole beauty of the Jet pack was that it was something you carried with you, perhaps even under your sport coat, then, suddenly, you throw your coat off, ignite your rocket, and you are saved, and probably with a hot chick in your arms.
The problem there is that a small jetpack capable of carrying a human being for long flights in Earth's gravity is physically impossible. No conventional fuel has sufficient energy density, and even if there were tiny megawatt fusion reactors, that doesn't relieve you of the need to carry reaction mass. (Tiny megawatt fusion reactors could conceivably power an actual tiny jet engine, however, but you still have to figure out how to deal with the noise and waste heat.)
The good news is that once we do have tiny megawatt fusion reactors, you shouldn't have any trouble catching a ride to the moon or Mars, where the lower gravity would make jetpacks practical. The bad news is that even then, engaging in high speed extreme sports with a tiny megawatt fusion reactor strapped to your back will still be an incredibly dumb thing to do.
Microsoft has staked any open source credibility that it has on Novell's SUSE distribution.
I hate to break it to the author of TFA, but Microsoft does not have, never had, and never will have "any open source credibility". I'm sure there are people dumb enough to think that the Microsoft-Novell deal had any beneficial effects whatsoever for FOSS, but none of those people matter because they already bankrupted themselves in a series of repeat sales of the Brooklyn fucking Bridge.
Have we really reached the point where someone can wave around a huge wad of cash and say that night is day and everyone just nods and smiles? Even people who aren't getting any of the cash? Really?
Hm, lemme see. On the one hand, I have the essentially medieval technology of the physical key and keychain. Since I'm not a landlord or building maintenance worker, my keychain is of a manageable size. It only costs a few bucks, works with all of my existing locks, and you'd have to be a decent pickpocket to steal it from me. On the other hand, I have the proposed iPhone key function. It's a bit bigger than my keychain, costs a couple hundred bucks and involves a monthly fee in excess of my likely lifetime expenditure on traditional keys, requires daily charging, won't work with any of my existing locks, and a would-be thief only needs to steal my data.
What's not to like here? I mean, besides all of it.
It is funny that you say this with some sarcasm, like you are somehow "sticking it to them" by taking them up on their offer. They give content, you give nothing back. You stop visiting... and, how exactly is that bad for them?
I'm not sure the idea is to "stick it to them" here. The content that they have is simply not sufficiently valuable to the OP to deal with the ads, so he/she is okay with not visiting the site anymore. Other people may feel differently and put up with the ads. That's just the way a free market works.
Speaking only for myself, there is almost no content on the web that I am willing to endure obtrusive advertising to see. The only significant exception that comes to mind is Wikipedia, which I frankly wish would at least run Google ads so Jimmy Wales would stop holding his hand out for donations all the time. (I usually do donate during WP donation drives, just as I did for my local PBS station back when I watched TV.) That said, I suspect I'm not alone in this. There's a whole lot of sites that I visit that I wouldn't bother with if if I had to deal with lots of ads or if they had paywalls. All the web has done is make it easy for people to publish content to a global audience. Creating content that entices people to actually pay for it hasn't gotten any easier.
It's not like this is unique to the web. When I walk into a store, I don't always buy something. And when I do buy something, it is one product (or a few products) from the thousands or tens of thousands of products in the store. If I had to pay an entry fee just to get into the store, or if every last salesperson on duty interrupts me at least once (this means you, RadioShack) to try to sell me something I'm not remotely interested in, odds are good that I'm not going to visit very often. Unless you're selling necessities like medical care, food, or cars, you just can't get away with annoying the hell out of every customer. Light entertainment -- which is, in the end, what Ars Technica provides -- just isn't worth it.
Ok, your terms are acceptable. See ya.
Pretty much. Ars Technica's approach here is to ask people to do something they dislike so Ars can make money. What they're finding out is that a substantial number of people dislike the ads more than they like the content, and if push comes to shove, they're willing to give up the content along with the ads. If your business model consists of haranguing your users and telling them that if they don't do something unpleasant, they'll be sorry, you have become rather embarrassingly detached from reality and should probably look for something else to do. It's 2010, fer chrissakes. You'd think that by now people would have figured out that, at least on the web, popular does not equal profitable, and any business "plan" that involves attracting lots of non-paying spectators and making money from their mere presence is likely to crater.
Not that I would advocate any such thing, but it should would be nice if someone would use one of the many security holes in IE6 to quietly and automatically upgrade all IE6 installations to IE8.
My first question is what happens when you brush against someone in a crowded place or bump your arm against an inanimate object?
This long-term repetition is a hallmark of symbolic communication and a sign of modern human thinking, say the team.
So that explains the constant duplicate Slashdot stories!
I don't know about you, but I don't give a wet crap what the default theme looks like. Regardless of operating system, the defaults last just long enough for me to figure out how to change them to what I like. The only time I'm turned off by the defaults is when I can't change them. About the only graphics change in Ubuntu I'd care about is better support for a broader range of graphics cards.
Mind you, if the change makes Ubuntu appeal more to the kind of people who think desktop color schemes make a difference in how professional they are, great. I'm just not one of those people, and I rather suspect most self-selected Linux users aren't, either.
This will be a novelty and one I look forward to enjoying it as such. But nothing more. No more a replacement for music than grand pianos were replaced by early synthesizers. You might be able to convince me at some point it will suffice (like a live piano performance may employ an electric piano) but I dare say the parameters are far too many and far too complicated.
It's worth noting that virtually nothing in the Top 40 employs a grand piano, and Rachmaninoff has never charted. And that, ultimately, is all the music industry cares about. If it gets played on the radio and sells CDs or downloads, that's all that matters. And it's not like there aren't plenty of real human artists with marginal skills and little talent making plenty of money for the music industry, so it's rather questionable whether the bulk of music consumers would care (or even be able to tell) if an entirely synthetic "performer" didn't achieve virtuoso-level performance.
So while I think your objections are, at present, quite valid -- though I am skeptical that there is anything humans will be able to do better than machines in the long run -- they're also quite irrelevant as far as popular music goes. Conversely, even a superhuman electronic musician is unlikely to affect the fine art end of the spectrum because the customers there go to live performances to hear real humans or buy recordings of them by preference.
I'm not sure I'd go as far as to say that people have a duty to disobey laws they disagree with; that's just a recipe for anarchism. In certain extreme cases, like hiding your Jewish neighbors from the SS, sure, but over some silly county housing codes? As George Carlin famously noted once, half the population is of below average intelligence. Are you sure you want to rile up the kind of person who thinks turn signals are stupid?
That said, it's plainly a dumb law, and I hope the homeowners prevail. Knowing OC, though, I wouldn't hold my breath.
I'm actually referring to the Second Law of Thermodynamics. And no, value isn't limited like energy, but that's because value is imaginary, that is, the value of a thing is just an idea in a human mind. All that's necessary for something to be infinitely valuable or completely valueless is for people to decide that it is so. That said, the value of the things we need to survive tends to be rather more closely tied to its usefulness and availability, similar to the economic notion of supply and demand, at least as it applies to necessities rather than luxuries.
In material terms, Earth is a closed system. In terms of energy, it is open only to solar radiation, which at present we cannot utilize efficiently enough to eliminate our dependence on purely local, finite sources of energy. Everything we make increases local entropy, which manifests as less available energy resources and less useful matter in the form of waste products that can only be reused through the input of additional local energy. Modern capitalism is essentially industrial consumer capitalism, which is predicated on an ever-increasing population consuming ever-increasing quantities of goods and services. With our current technology, local entropy increases faster than it can be decreased via offplanet energy input -- currently solar, but presumably eventually off-planet fuels for fusion reactors. Obviously, more advanced technology would change the ratio of consumption to available resources, but we're not there yet and apparently not in much of a hurry to get there.
In short, we sooner or later run out of adequate supplies of usable energy and everything grinds to a halt. Things become quite unpleasant well before then as demand outpaces supply. That intermediate period of increasing scarcity is actually desirable if you've got necessities to sell, though everyone gets screwed in the final crunch. You can see this in the ever-increasing cost of land as there is less and less land available for more and more people to live in. In economic terms, that means that value is being created, but in real physical terms, there is actually less utility per each person's share of the goods.
What we're doing now is basically what we've done with every initially abundant resource -- the cheap land of the wild west, the buffalo, dammable rivers, oil, etc. As the selling and re-selling goes on, the economic value increases but the underlying real energy and matter is constantly degraded. Worse, the increasing economic value depends on and encourages accelerated increases in entropy. As the imaginary value asymptotically approaches infinity, the practical utility decreases proportionally. The last gallon of gasoline will be unimaginably expensive, but your car won't go any further with it than the much cheaper gasoline of ten years before.
All of this is moot, of course, if we make it off-planet. It's a huge universe, inexhaustible even by voracious human standards. But at present, we're stuck on a small planet which is for all current practical purposes a closed system, and we can't even visit the moon. Our current economic system is predicated on a state of affairs that does not presently exist. And that's basically what I meant by my earlier offhand remark.
...but given the fortuitous context, I have to trigger Godwin's Law here.
If it means shorter lines at the supermarket, a quarter of Germans would be happy to have a chip implanted under their skin.
It would have meant shorter lines at Auschwitz, too.
Honestly, I'm not altogether opposed to implants, though I'm much more interested in stuff that's not yet possible, like having a fully-functional computing environment directly interfaced to my nervous system with all the usual transhumanist trimmings. But even there, before the first implant goes in, much less millions of them, we need a comprehensive legal framework to define how the state and private organizations can interface with implants and what they can do with the data gleaned thereby. Sure, it'd be handy to not have to bother with carrying a wallet and its contents anymore, but not at the expense of having the state and various corporations tracking my every move without due process of law, or giving police free rein to use some kind of personal kill switch like the ones they envision for automobiles.
In short, technology is just power, and power is morally neutral. It's what you do with it that counts, and if you don't take great care in ensuring that its uses are not malign, malign people will be drawn to it like flies to shit. And given the way that law enforcement agencies like to pitch their power grabs to national legislatures, if we don't establish some clear boundaries now with trivial implants, some future FBI director will be sitting in front of Congress, arguing that -- in the name of fighting drugs/pedophiles/terrorists or whatever new bogeyman they come up with -- law enforcement needs unrestrained access to the latest non-trivial implants just like they've had all along with trivial ID chips. And they'll get what they ask for and abuse it, because that's what they always do.
I think you just described the business model for the entire American economy.
Ssssshhh. Haven't you figured out the Slashdot moderation system yet? Point that out about an individual bastard like Darl McBride, and you get a +5 Insightful. Point out that people like Darl McBride are the rule rather than the exception, and the local libertarian/free-market-utopian mod squad buries you as -1 (Flamebait|Offtopic|Troll). And God help you if you drag out the big guns and point out that the underlying theory of modern capitalism involves multiple violations of the Second Law. No one will ever hear from you again.
No, not the SCO business model. I mean the Darl McBride business model, which is to swindle investors into believing that he can accomplish something in the long run, pocketing as much money as he can, and moving on to the next busload of Wall Street suckers. As long as it keeps incrementing the value in his bank account fast enough, he'll keep doing it. Short of marooning him on a desert planet somewhere -- which entails its own risks -- there's not a lot anyone can do to keep him from grabbing the occasional headline with his latest antics.
Just be thankful that he isn't working that business model at the same scale as AIG, Bank of America, or Citibank.
All three will be marginalized by the ARM onslaught. Within 10 years, smartphone will be the personal computing device, AMD and Intel processors will power the cloud.
ARM may well come to dominate personal computing, but it sure won't be via the smartphone. No one is going to edit long word processor documents on their phone, much less edit spreadsheets, write code, or do much else that qualifies as actual work. And it's not because they don't already -- in many cases -- have enough processor power; it's because they don't have full-sized keyboards and monitors. I'll grant that it's possible that phones or PDAs of the future might well attach to full-featured I/O devices, but by themselves, no.
The cloud, too, has some significant limits that it will be difficult if not actually impossible to overcome. Security is a major issue, arguably theoretically resolvable, but trusting your critical data to an outside company to whom you are, at best, a large customer is not.
Maybe it's just me, but I have the distinct feeling that ten or twenty years down the road, input devices like this will be featured in "What Were They Thinking?"-type articles on slow news days.
Of course, those articles will be about five characters long, so as not to tax the attention span of a reading public for whom 140 characters is a feature-length article.
Yes, this was a stupid decision, but before everyone jumps all over the artist, consider that the man is 85 years old and is a US citizen, which means that he's likely to have serious health problems but not to have adequate health insurance. He might very well be a greedy prima donna, but he might also just be sick and desperate.
As far as the fair use issue goes, it is my personal opinion that one ought to be able to photograph everything that is in public view and to profit therefrom. Unfortunately, that is just my personal opinion, and the laws and their interpretation can and probably do differ. Of course, if I got to make the laws, most of the crap that arouses outrage on Slashdot wouldn't be an issue, but there would probably be endless bitching about the difficulty of the math, logic, and statistics sections of the voter qualification test...