I have a similar problem, whenver I'm talking to someone I want to hack them to bits with a pickaxe and collect their bloody body parts.
yes I've gotten minecraft recently, how could you tell?
I generally feel this way when talking to co-workers, but I have no knowledge of this 'minecraft' of which you speak.
I agree that 'information wants to be free" is a poor phrasing of the concept, but that doesn't seem to be at all the critique of your response.
My point was that saying "banks want to be robbed" is a poor analogy in response to pipatron's point. Information is a non-rivalrous and non-excludable good by nature, whereas money in a bank is not. Counterfeiting is a closer analogy to what I think you are saying, where the counterfeiter is not actually taking anything of value from anyone, but nonetheless decreases the value of sanctioned money.
However, that is still a flawed analogy, because there are still reasonable and plausible solutions to deterring counterfeiting, whereas I'd say there are no such acceptable solutions to deter the unauthorized duplication of digital data at this point in history.
You make a good distinction between what *does* happen and what *should* happen, but if you *can't* reasonably (in your words) "prevent people from sharing information via technological or legal means", and I think recent history has shown we can't without socially unacceptable costs, then you are left to deal practically with what *does* happen, not what you think should.
IF news outlets can't make money, then eventually there is no need to be a news outlet.
That may be true, unless you accept the possibility that mainstream news is little more than pure corporatist propaganda that has value to its owners that extends beyond the operating profits of the media outlet (i.e., the power to influence opinion is more valuable to the media owners than the outlet's operating profit). In that case, the real question is: does the loss of operating revenue in the Internet age make media outlets have to rely on 'selling influence' as their sole source of value?
If there was a news source that charged such fees that I *didn't* have to read with the same squint that citizens of the USSR used to read Pravda, I gladly pay for a subscription, but as someone who grew up with the NYT as the household newspaper, today's NYT does not even remotely approach that threshold.
You seem to have missed the whole "fundamental for information that can be copied without loss to spread out, multiply, move around" clause. A better analogy would be "money wants to be counterfeited", and even that is lacking as money is more difficult to replicate than data and requires less effort to protect.
I would not be surprised if some companies are already planning how they will lobby for patent term extensions.
Of course they are, and they have been for years. The result of that lobbying is the "to 20" part of "17 to 20 years" that only applies to some patents.
The reason why lobbying for patent term extensions has had such modest success compared to copyrights is that there are also considerable moneyed interests lobbying to keep patent terms just where they are, precisely because they profit when patents expire (e.g., generic drug manufacturers); whereas, the only "counter-interest" to copyright term extensions is the public domain. Unfortunately, the public interest has no such powerful lobbies to counter the media conglomerates.
Perhaps by the the time a verifiable statistic is produced, it has already been coincidentally made up on the spot by others...8.25 times on average? After all, just because a statistic is made up, does not *necessarily* mean it is inaccurate. Or not, maybe I just made that up.;-)
Why people wouldn't just attribute stuff is beyond me.
This was my thought. Hasn't the technology that makes copy-and-paste so easy also made it that much easier to add footnotes/endnotes? I attended university in the days before ubiquitous Internet or more sophisticated word processors, and I can't imagine that if I could C&P relevant text from the web that I wouldn't take the small extra effort to add the citation.
I don't see this as much different than the cash-for-clunkers program. The idea is that after rendering all moving parts inoperable so they can't be sold as used replacements, you smash what was a perfectly good car.
"Clunker" == "perfectly good car"? No...you miss that the main stated purpose of the program was to get old, poor mileage, highly polluting vehicles off the road in favor of newer less polluting vehicles. In order to qualify, your old car had to meet certain specifications as "clunker" (see here).
That said, I think in the end the main purpose of the program *was* as a sop to the ailing auto industry. However, the logic of your rant implies that the justification for the program was simply an application of the broken window fallacy, which is clearly not true.
Again, you misinterpret me. I never said more optimal algorithmic solutions are not being developed in any domain, just that the rate of performance gain from such optimizations are generally not as rapid as developments in hardware.
For example, database technology. As mature a tech as that is, algorithmic improvements are being made every day, I'm sure. But you can't tell me that the improvement you get in database performance over the past 10 years is more due to better software than better hardware, let alone anything like a 43:1 ratio in favor of software that is being suggested here.
I think you misinterpret what I mean by "true in any generic sense". I'm talking about the idea of algorithmic performance outpacing hardware performance applying across the board, as the article and summary seem to imply.
I'm entirely aware that new innovative algorithms can make great improvements in specific cases. However, in the vast majority of technology domains, the performance gains of more efficient software rarely outpace the performance gains of hardware over time (in many cases the opposite, better hardware encourages *less* efficient software), yet alone at anything like what the summary is suggesting.
Mod parent up. If this claim were true in any generic sense, we'd see newer software generally running ever faster on older hardware, and it wouldn't seem that every generation of hardware improvement goes mostly towards visual eye-candy and anti-virus.
The problems the author cites, notably speech recognition, are cases that are notorious for *not* scaling to CPU power, that is, throwing brute force cycles at the problem only yields marginal benefits. While processing power doubles every 18 months, speech recognition only gets slightly better despite both better hardware and algorithmic advances.
Except you need to bump your derogatives up from 5 to approx 50,000. The price tag is now $300,000,000 per year.
And that 50,000 is a conservative figure. I'm pretty sure Doctorow gave five as an example, not a comprehensive list.
That's not to even mention compound derogatives...i.e., bankofamericaareabunchof[shit|fuck|ass|scum|dick|cunt][heads|bags|hats|holes|wads|buckets].[com|net|org|ws|info|cc|ca|ch|whatever].
Oh, and after you buy up all those, don't forget....bankruptofamerica.com.
That benchmark is a bit old (two months ago), but you get the idea.
Funny, I initially misread the article title as "Firefox 4 Beat 8 Up", which could be true if that trend line continued for the past two months. ("8" meaning Chrome v8.) Browser deathmatch!!
Slashdot Mirror
Professor Butts...a name probably not as well known as his creator.
I have a similar problem, whenver I'm talking to someone I want to hack them to bits with a pickaxe and collect their bloody body parts. yes I've gotten minecraft recently, how could you tell?
I generally feel this way when talking to co-workers, but I have no knowledge of this 'minecraft' of which you speak.
Just because *you* evidently think that a political philosophy originated from Mr. Spock on Star Trek makes the GP deserve ridicule?
By any chance, do you make the same accusation when people use 'logic', too?
How will you expect the editors to took the time to conjugated verbs properly, when there's flamebait to will have been posted?
This is like the "Inception" of sentences, except I stayed awake until the end.
I agree that 'information wants to be free" is a poor phrasing of the concept, but that doesn't seem to be at all the critique of your response.
My point was that saying "banks want to be robbed" is a poor analogy in response to pipatron's point. Information is a non-rivalrous and non-excludable good by nature, whereas money in a bank is not. Counterfeiting is a closer analogy to what I think you are saying, where the counterfeiter is not actually taking anything of value from anyone, but nonetheless decreases the value of sanctioned money.
However, that is still a flawed analogy, because there are still reasonable and plausible solutions to deterring counterfeiting, whereas I'd say there are no such acceptable solutions to deter the unauthorized duplication of digital data at this point in history.
You make a good distinction between what *does* happen and what *should* happen, but if you *can't* reasonably (in your words) "prevent people from sharing information via technological or legal means", and I think recent history has shown we can't without socially unacceptable costs, then you are left to deal practically with what *does* happen, not what you think should.
IF news outlets can't make money, then eventually there is no need to be a news outlet.
That may be true, unless you accept the possibility that mainstream news is little more than pure corporatist propaganda that has value to its owners that extends beyond the operating profits of the media outlet (i.e., the power to influence opinion is more valuable to the media owners than the outlet's operating profit). In that case, the real question is: does the loss of operating revenue in the Internet age make media outlets have to rely on 'selling influence' as their sole source of value?
If there was a news source that charged such fees that I *didn't* have to read with the same squint that citizens of the USSR used to read Pravda, I gladly pay for a subscription, but as someone who grew up with the NYT as the household newspaper, today's NYT does not even remotely approach that threshold.
You seem to have missed the whole "fundamental for information that can be copied without loss to spread out, multiply, move around" clause. A better analogy would be "money wants to be counterfeited", and even that is lacking as money is more difficult to replicate than data and requires less effort to protect.
If they are to stupid to make enough money to not be able to afford $15/Mo....
Hmmm....how much intelligence does it take to make enough money to *not* be able to afford $15 month?
Pain. Now there's a key term in any definition of 'framework', at least in my experience.
Maybe they were laughing about all the PP references in the Pepper API?
China buys a TON of natural resources from Canada.
What's the opposite of hyperbole? Hypobole?
Well, it's a language barrier thing. Canadian for "fuck off" is "would you please consider leaving at your convenience?" :)
Actually, Canadian for "fuck off" is Fuddle Duddle.
I would not be surprised if some companies are already planning how they will lobby for patent term extensions.
Of course they are, and they have been for years. The result of that lobbying is the "to 20" part of "17 to 20 years" that only applies to some patents.
The reason why lobbying for patent term extensions has had such modest success compared to copyrights is that there are also considerable moneyed interests lobbying to keep patent terms just where they are, precisely because they profit when patents expire (e.g., generic drug manufacturers); whereas, the only "counter-interest" to copyright term extensions is the public domain. Unfortunately, the public interest has no such powerful lobbies to counter the media conglomerates.
statistics, 825% of them are made up on the spot.
hmm. How's that work?
Perhaps by the the time a verifiable statistic is produced, it has already been coincidentally made up on the spot by others...8.25 times on average? After all, just because a statistic is made up, does not *necessarily* mean it is inaccurate. Or not, maybe I just made that up. ;-)
Why people wouldn't just attribute stuff is beyond me.
This was my thought. Hasn't the technology that makes copy-and-paste so easy also made it that much easier to add footnotes/endnotes? I attended university in the days before ubiquitous Internet or more sophisticated word processors, and I can't imagine that if I could C&P relevant text from the web that I wouldn't take the small extra effort to add the citation.
It's damned hard to masturbate while trying to trying to balance a netbook. The iPad is the right tool for the job.
Here's my free idea of the day for any budding entrepreneurs...an iPad case with slim form tissue and lotion dispensers...call it the iFap.
I don't see this as much different than the cash-for-clunkers program. The idea is that after rendering all moving parts inoperable so they can't be sold as used replacements, you smash what was a perfectly good car.
"Clunker" == "perfectly good car"? No...you miss that the main stated purpose of the program was to get old, poor mileage, highly polluting vehicles off the road in favor of newer less polluting vehicles. In order to qualify, your old car had to meet certain specifications as "clunker" (see here).
That said, I think in the end the main purpose of the program *was* as a sop to the ailing auto industry. However, the logic of your rant implies that the justification for the program was simply an application of the broken window fallacy, which is clearly not true.
What is the least imaginative Slashdot-meme joke possible on this thread?
Facts are much more powerful than any first hand accounts of people who say they saw, felt, heard, or smelled something.
Yeah, that was the ghost of last night's bean burrito....
Again, you misinterpret me. I never said more optimal algorithmic solutions are not being developed in any domain, just that the rate of performance gain from such optimizations are generally not as rapid as developments in hardware.
For example, database technology. As mature a tech as that is, algorithmic improvements are being made every day, I'm sure. But you can't tell me that the improvement you get in database performance over the past 10 years is more due to better software than better hardware, let alone anything like a 43:1 ratio in favor of software that is being suggested here.
I think you misinterpret what I mean by "true in any generic sense". I'm talking about the idea of algorithmic performance outpacing hardware performance applying across the board, as the article and summary seem to imply.
I'm entirely aware that new innovative algorithms can make great improvements in specific cases. However, in the vast majority of technology domains, the performance gains of more efficient software rarely outpace the performance gains of hardware over time (in many cases the opposite, better hardware encourages *less* efficient software), yet alone at anything like what the summary is suggesting.
Mod parent up. If this claim were true in any generic sense, we'd see newer software generally running ever faster on older hardware, and it wouldn't seem that every generation of hardware improvement goes mostly towards visual eye-candy and anti-virus.
The problems the author cites, notably speech recognition, are cases that are notorious for *not* scaling to CPU power, that is, throwing brute force cycles at the problem only yields marginal benefits. While processing power doubles every 18 months, speech recognition only gets slightly better despite both better hardware and algorithmic advances.
Except you need to bump your derogatives up from 5 to approx 50,000. The price tag is now $300,000,000 per year.
And that 50,000 is a conservative figure. I'm pretty sure Doctorow gave five as an example, not a comprehensive list.
That's not to even mention compound derogatives...i.e., bankofamericaareabunchof[shit|fuck|ass|scum|dick|cunt][heads|bags|hats|holes|wads|buckets].[com|net|org|ws|info|cc|ca|ch|whatever].
Oh, and after you buy up all those, don't forget....bankruptofamerica.com.
There actually is a company in the Langley area called Counter Intelligence that does this. You occasionally see their van driving around.
Along with the Pizza Delivery van, and Flowers By Irene...
http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/asa/archives/2010/10/are_we_fast_yet.html
That benchmark is a bit old (two months ago), but you get the idea.
Funny, I initially misread the article title as "Firefox 4 Beat 8 Up", which could be true if that trend line continued for the past two months. ("8" meaning Chrome v8.) Browser deathmatch!!