I don't understand that attitude. It's one thing to own the copyright for a specific work of fiction you created. It's another thing to own a copyright on the world and characters that you created. Sure, sue anyone who grabs text wholesale from the books. But I have never understood why there is any rational reason that I can't go and write (and sell) a book about hobbits who learn magic at Hogwarts in an attempt to prevent Goldfinger from making another death star.
I've been making a little list of constitutional amendments. One of them is that copyright never lasts more than 5 years and copyrights do not apply to imaginary characters and worlds (only to specific text).
Imagine how awesome it'd be if Star Wars wasn't under the thumb of George Lucas! Someone might actually make a film that had a decent plot and dialog that didn't make you want to cringe. For the good of the world I think it's only right that authors not have dictatorial control over the worlds they create. Authors get old and start to suck. It always happens. It's best if they don't maintain control into their declining years.
Yes, but he wants to preserve his species dominating over the company, country and society. So while the world may make less progress, it will be better for humans
No it won't. That was the point. When a company starts hiring in this way, that company is positioning itself to lose in the general market. If humans can't compete then acting in this way will, at best, put off the day of reckoning (and make it worse when it does happen). I feel embarrassed even saying this because it seems like such a trite point to me. But, the original poster apparently doesn't realize how obviously ridiculous it is to try to out-compete by purposely gimping robots (or new hires).
Why jeopardise this position? Maybe, instead of creating robots of the Asimovian mold, we should place a limit on the potential intelligence of robots, maybe at most of an obedient dog.
You sound like a middle manager at a failing company. You want to intentionally hire people based on obedience rather than intelligence. That's a really good way to destroy a company, a country, or a society.
So you have no problems with a gigaflop being 10^9 flops while a gigabyte is 2^30 bytes (except on all packaging for all hard drives and all ram of course)?
Not that it's particularly relevant, but in the book "A Deepness in the Sky" by Vernor Vinge, the characters used a timekeeping system where they talked about things like: "It'll take at least 10 Msec to get this done!" or "we've been travelling in hibernation for over 1Gsec! That's a long time!"
The reason was that everyone had been out in space for thousands of years. Only a tiny percentage of the human race still lived on a planet where 24 hours was a day or 365 days was a year. So instead they have a calender which starts at Jan 1, 1970 and is measured in seconds from that point on. (obviously a reference to the internal clock of computers which measure times from the epoch)
The book even included a chart at the beginning showing how megasecond, gigsecond, and terasecond values related to hours, days, and years. I actually think it's a wonderfully simple system which makes sense once you're off the earth.
The only units that you can claim that about are KB (meaning KiB) and possibly MB (meaning MiB). Storage didn't come in giga sizes until recent decades.
I find it interesting that you claim it's widespread. When I see a hard drive advertised as 200GB I assume that it has 200*10^9 bytes. It never would have crossed my mind that it was 200*2^30 bytes. Can you point to any hard drive that is advertised with a size which is actually the GiB size?
Those who know about binary would also know enough about hard drives that they know it's advertised in base 10 numbers. Anyone who doesn't know binary would never even guess that the size wasn't in base 10.
You claim that using the SI prefix to mean what the SI prefix means in this context would be changing a widely established word. That's not true. The words are already polluted. If you see an SI prefix used in computing you ALWAYS need to look deeper to find out if it's a base 2 or base 10 number. What we've got here is a mushed up word. Thank goodness the values are close enough together that it usually doesn't matter much. The difference between 1GB and 1 GiB is only 73MB.
How many flops are in a gigaflop? The answer is that it's 10^9 flops. Google the term and you'll find that it's widely used in that way. Would you have assumed that it was 2^30 flops? If so then that goes to prove the point that the prefix has been mushed up when used in the context of computing.
This whole fight is ridiculous. On one side you have people who are just trying to maintain the purity of the standard definition of the word giga. On the other side you have anarchists who believe that they can use any word they want to mean anything they want. Sure, the SI prefixes were here first but who cares about that?
In that spirit I am now going to start calling the dustballs under my computer "slashdots". I'm also going to use "slashdot" as the name for my monitors, my telephone, the dots at the ends of sentences, a dead badger that I found (which used to be called Ralph), and my toilet plunger. Oh, you mean that name was already taken and refers to something else? Good god, don't be such a stuck up prick. If I want to live in a smurfy... sorry, I mean a slashdotty world then that's what I'm damn well going to do!
I was surprised by the 11% as well. I wonder how many of that 11% are actually transhumanists and how many simply like the idea of not having to lug around a device.
Does increasing the punishment really increase the deterrence? Are there any studies that that actually happens in a non-trivial number of cases? I have a sneaking suspicion that the number of crimes prevented by increasing a punishment from 5 years to 10 years would be essentially 0.
For me, being forced to live at home with no access to a computer at all would be a pretty terrible punishment. If I was a criminal then the possibility of prison would not be a greater deterrent because the lack of computer access because that would already be a terrible deterrent. Yes, prison would be worse, but it would not be a greater deterrence for me.
On the other hand, increasing punishment generates greater costs for society. Sometimes justice is not worth it. Repeat offenders need to be kept in prison to prevent them from doing things again. Single offenders don't need harsh punishments because they'll live productive lives after their initial punishment (or, by definition, become repeat offenders who deserve incarceration).
I second that question. Why does that destroy his influence in the community? I read it and I don't see anything to get riled up about. Am I supposed to be mad that he got money? Open source is in no way in conflict with making money. The two aren't mutually exclusive. Do/did some people see him as some sort of socialist icon? I've never thought of him in that way, so I guess I don't see what the problem is.
Everyone is always old enough in his own mind. When I was 15, I was definitely old enough and had enough experience. Or so I thought. I turned 21 and saw what a moron I was at 15. But at 21, I was set, ready and had all the wisdom necessary. I turned 25, and could only shake my head at the fool I was at 21. But no more, I swore!
Now I'm past 30 and, seriously, that idiot I was at 25... let's not talk about him. But finally, I managed to be the pinnacle of wisdom and intelligence, now if my boss (who's gonna go for 50 in a few weeks) would only admit that I am...
When I was 21 I looked back and realized that I was a pretty solid thinker at 15. At 25 I shook my head at how level headed I was at 21. Now I'm 31 and I think back and am happy with all the decisions I've made in my life so far.
Perhaps the problem is that you're just extremely harsh in your judgement of other people (like your younger self). I find it hard to believe that a 30 year old would think that their 25 year old self was an idiot. Perhaps you just have a problem with stepping back and looking at your current self? How much could you have possibly changed in 5 years at that age?
Many things about the phone market are not competitive (perhaps google will help us out there). But, splitting up Ma Bell clearly had a big effect at the time. Long distance rates fell dramatically due to competition.
I haven't played this particular game, but back in 1993 or 1994 I played a punching game at an arcade where you would put on a big padded glove and then punch a target with your hand. The harder you hit, the higher your score. For each level you had 3 punches and you needed to get a score over a certain level in order to beat that guy. I recall that the first level was a punk, then there was a truck then a crab then a moon.
Does anyone remember the name of the game? I can't find anything anywhere, but I know that there is a mame rom for it.
Anyway, I played it one time and enjoyed it, but the next time I came back a year later I had learned just enough karate to be able to hurt myself. I knew how to put more force into my punches, so I put this knowledge into practice with the machine. I set up my stance, rotated my body and threw all my weight into the punch. The result was that my wrist hurt really bad after the first punch.
After a minute it was just a dull ache, so I figured I was fine. So, I went and played an arm wrestling game that was nearby. That hurt a lot, so I stopped doing anything with my hand for the rest of the night. It swelled up pretty bad and I ended up cradling my arm while I walked around the mall.
The next day I got an x-ray and found that I had a hairline fracture in my wrist. Later that year that game was taken off the market because of a class action lawsuit brought on by I think 79 people (or somewhere around that number) who had broken their wrists playing that game. I wasn't one of them. I liked that game. *smile*
It's a lot broader than that. If you have a lab that's partially funded by the federal government (obviously that includes all labs at all public universities) then you are not allowed to do any stem cell research there even if the funding for the lab time and materials does not come from the federal government. That's because they would be using some lab tools that were purchased for other purposes with federal funding.
In order to do stem cell research, the researchers can't be paid in any way by the federal government. The lab they use cannot have any equipment in it that was paid for by the federal government. The rent for the building cannot have been paid for by the federal government. A lab either needs to give up all federal money or it needs to set up an entirely separate lab with all new equipment.
If you have a lab with $100,000 of private equipment in it and you want to buy a single microscope with federal funds then that lab cannot be used to research stem cells.
That puts a severe crimp on stem cell research which goes far beyond it being a mere question of funding the research.
I don't understand. I just looked up abiogenesis and the word just means life from non-living matter. By definition doesn't that have to be the start of any theory of life evolving? I'm not sure why you called it a strawman.
I would, but then there wouldn't be any room in the sig for the actual comment. There are many Democrats who would agree that if a Republican has to win then it's best that the Republican not be a neo-con. Democrats should register as Republicans and vote for Ron Paul in the primaries so that they can ensure that no neo-con even gets a chance in November 2008.
Which big businesses win if civil liberties are eliminated? We're losing civil liberties. Government is becoming ever more secretive and powerful and closed to the public. That has nothing to do with big business and everything to do with certain politicians wanting unitary executive power.
The most important upcoming elections are not in Nov 2008. They are the Republican primaries in early 2008. If Ron Paul gets the Republican nomination for president then this country will win in November no matter which party gets the presidency.
You're missing the point. He is hardly FOR anything at all. He votes no on practically everything.
Granted, his stance on abortion is scary, but one way to tell a true states rights person from an anti-abortion states rights faker is how they vote on anything to do with drugs.
See: H Amdt 674. He voted to prevent the federal government from enforcing federal anti-drug laws which conflicted with state laws.
I don't see how you could possibly consider him a neo-con. He's clearly an honest conservative. He's strongly against being in Iraq. He voted against the homeland security act and the patriot act. He voted in favor of the whistleblower protection act of 2007.
He's consistent. He voted against an act to prohibit cloning while at the same time voting against anything that would fund cloning. He's just against federal power.
Remember that it's all too easy for the federal government to gain more power. It's near impossible to force them to lose any power. If Ron Paul causes the federal government to give too much power back to the states then rest assured that future presidents will pull it back. But we should be grateful for any reprieve from the constant power grabbing that's going on in DC right now.
I know inflation exists, but quite literally 10 years ago I was making $35K and that paid for housing, car payments, food, etc., along with a little left over for savings. That seems to me to be much more "middle class" than I am now, where my $70-100K salary pays for a much larger house, car payments, food, a lot more toys, and a lot more savings.
You clearly don't live in a major city. In the San Francisco bay area, a $400,000 house is a 500 sq/ft craphole in a bad part of town.
In my opinion, a person isn't "rich" until they are capable of hiring full time servants while still maintaining the same standard of living they would have had without the servants. Below that they're just well off or upper middle class.
You're right about the toys though.
Re:Porn is irrelevant
on
Blue Blu-ray
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· Score: 2, Interesting
It's not the porn, it's the control. If Sony is willing to effectively censor porn then they've proven they're willing to use their power to censor. Who wants to take a chance on a format controlled by someone who has demonstrated their willingness to censor?
It never occurred to me to wonder how many planes there are. It seems amazing to me that a major carrier can serve the entire US with just 369 planes. Does that mean that all air travel in the US is served with just a couple thousand planes?
Where on the plane is a unique ID that I can write down? I'm curious how often I've flown on the same plane.
So the only people who would have standing would be people with patents that were rejected by this guy or people who are being sued over a patent that this guy let through?
The funny thing is that I have in the past wondered whether or not the swear words they used were really British swear words. Is "feck" a British swear word or is it made up by TV people?
Slashdot Mirror
I don't understand that attitude. It's one thing to own the copyright for a specific work of fiction you created. It's another thing to own a copyright on the world and characters that you created. Sure, sue anyone who grabs text wholesale from the books. But I have never understood why there is any rational reason that I can't go and write (and sell) a book about hobbits who learn magic at Hogwarts in an attempt to prevent Goldfinger from making another death star.
I've been making a little list of constitutional amendments. One of them is that copyright never lasts more than 5 years and copyrights do not apply to imaginary characters and worlds (only to specific text).
Imagine how awesome it'd be if Star Wars wasn't under the thumb of George Lucas! Someone might actually make a film that had a decent plot and dialog that didn't make you want to cringe. For the good of the world I think it's only right that authors not have dictatorial control over the worlds they create. Authors get old and start to suck. It always happens. It's best if they don't maintain control into their declining years.
So you have no problems with a gigaflop being 10^9 flops while a gigabyte is 2^30 bytes (except on all packaging for all hard drives and all ram of course)?
Not that it's particularly relevant, but in the book "A Deepness in the Sky" by Vernor Vinge, the characters used a timekeeping system where they talked about things like: "It'll take at least 10 Msec to get this done!" or "we've been travelling in hibernation for over 1Gsec! That's a long time!"
The reason was that everyone had been out in space for thousands of years. Only a tiny percentage of the human race still lived on a planet where 24 hours was a day or 365 days was a year. So instead they have a calender which starts at Jan 1, 1970 and is measured in seconds from that point on. (obviously a reference to the internal clock of computers which measure times from the epoch)
The book even included a chart at the beginning showing how megasecond, gigsecond, and terasecond values related to hours, days, and years. I actually think it's a wonderfully simple system which makes sense once you're off the earth.
The only units that you can claim that about are KB (meaning KiB) and possibly MB (meaning MiB). Storage didn't come in giga sizes until recent decades.
I find it interesting that you claim it's widespread. When I see a hard drive advertised as 200GB I assume that it has 200*10^9 bytes. It never would have crossed my mind that it was 200*2^30 bytes. Can you point to any hard drive that is advertised with a size which is actually the GiB size?
Those who know about binary would also know enough about hard drives that they know it's advertised in base 10 numbers. Anyone who doesn't know binary would never even guess that the size wasn't in base 10.
You claim that using the SI prefix to mean what the SI prefix means in this context would be changing a widely established word. That's not true. The words are already polluted. If you see an SI prefix used in computing you ALWAYS need to look deeper to find out if it's a base 2 or base 10 number. What we've got here is a mushed up word. Thank goodness the values are close enough together that it usually doesn't matter much. The difference between 1GB and 1 GiB is only 73MB.
How many flops are in a gigaflop? The answer is that it's 10^9 flops. Google the term and you'll find that it's widely used in that way. Would you have assumed that it was 2^30 flops? If so then that goes to prove the point that the prefix has been mushed up when used in the context of computing.
This whole fight is ridiculous. On one side you have people who are just trying to maintain the purity of the standard definition of the word giga. On the other side you have anarchists who believe that they can use any word they want to mean anything they want. Sure, the SI prefixes were here first but who cares about that?
In that spirit I am now going to start calling the dustballs under my computer "slashdots". I'm also going to use "slashdot" as the name for my monitors, my telephone, the dots at the ends of sentences, a dead badger that I found (which used to be called Ralph), and my toilet plunger. Oh, you mean that name was already taken and refers to something else? Good god, don't be such a stuck up prick. If I want to live in a smurfy... sorry, I mean a slashdotty world then that's what I'm damn well going to do!
*sticks-tongue-out-in-manly-defiance*.
I was surprised by the 11% as well. I wonder how many of that 11% are actually transhumanists and how many simply like the idea of not having to lug around a device.
Does increasing the punishment really increase the deterrence? Are there any studies that that actually happens in a non-trivial number of cases? I have a sneaking suspicion that the number of crimes prevented by increasing a punishment from 5 years to 10 years would be essentially 0.
For me, being forced to live at home with no access to a computer at all would be a pretty terrible punishment. If I was a criminal then the possibility of prison would not be a greater deterrent because the lack of computer access because that would already be a terrible deterrent. Yes, prison would be worse, but it would not be a greater deterrence for me.
On the other hand, increasing punishment generates greater costs for society. Sometimes justice is not worth it. Repeat offenders need to be kept in prison to prevent them from doing things again. Single offenders don't need harsh punishments because they'll live productive lives after their initial punishment (or, by definition, become repeat offenders who deserve incarceration).
I second that question. Why does that destroy his influence in the community? I read it and I don't see anything to get riled up about. Am I supposed to be mad that he got money? Open source is in no way in conflict with making money. The two aren't mutually exclusive. Do/did some people see him as some sort of socialist icon? I've never thought of him in that way, so I guess I don't see what the problem is.
Perhaps the problem is that you're just extremely harsh in your judgement of other people (like your younger self). I find it hard to believe that a 30 year old would think that their 25 year old self was an idiot. Perhaps you just have a problem with stepping back and looking at your current self? How much could you have possibly changed in 5 years at that age?
Many things about the phone market are not competitive (perhaps google will help us out there). But, splitting up Ma Bell clearly had a big effect at the time. Long distance rates fell dramatically due to competition.
I haven't played this particular game, but back in 1993 or 1994 I played a punching game at an arcade where you would put on a big padded glove and then punch a target with your hand. The harder you hit, the higher your score. For each level you had 3 punches and you needed to get a score over a certain level in order to beat that guy. I recall that the first level was a punk, then there was a truck then a crab then a moon.
Does anyone remember the name of the game? I can't find anything anywhere, but I know that there is a mame rom for it.
Anyway, I played it one time and enjoyed it, but the next time I came back a year later I had learned just enough karate to be able to hurt myself. I knew how to put more force into my punches, so I put this knowledge into practice with the machine. I set up my stance, rotated my body and threw all my weight into the punch. The result was that my wrist hurt really bad after the first punch.
After a minute it was just a dull ache, so I figured I was fine. So, I went and played an arm wrestling game that was nearby. That hurt a lot, so I stopped doing anything with my hand for the rest of the night. It swelled up pretty bad and I ended up cradling my arm while I walked around the mall.
The next day I got an x-ray and found that I had a hairline fracture in my wrist. Later that year that game was taken off the market because of a class action lawsuit brought on by I think 79 people (or somewhere around that number) who had broken their wrists playing that game. I wasn't one of them. I liked that game. *smile*
It's a lot broader than that. If you have a lab that's partially funded by the federal government (obviously that includes all labs at all public universities) then you are not allowed to do any stem cell research there even if the funding for the lab time and materials does not come from the federal government. That's because they would be using some lab tools that were purchased for other purposes with federal funding.
In order to do stem cell research, the researchers can't be paid in any way by the federal government. The lab they use cannot have any equipment in it that was paid for by the federal government. The rent for the building cannot have been paid for by the federal government. A lab either needs to give up all federal money or it needs to set up an entirely separate lab with all new equipment.
If you have a lab with $100,000 of private equipment in it and you want to buy a single microscope with federal funds then that lab cannot be used to research stem cells.
That puts a severe crimp on stem cell research which goes far beyond it being a mere question of funding the research.
I don't understand. I just looked up abiogenesis and the word just means life from non-living matter. By definition doesn't that have to be the start of any theory of life evolving? I'm not sure why you called it a strawman.
I would, but then there wouldn't be any room in the sig for the actual comment. There are many Democrats who would agree that if a Republican has to win then it's best that the Republican not be a neo-con. Democrats should register as Republicans and vote for Ron Paul in the primaries so that they can ensure that no neo-con even gets a chance in November 2008.
Which big businesses win if civil liberties are eliminated? We're losing civil liberties. Government is becoming ever more secretive and powerful and closed to the public. That has nothing to do with big business and everything to do with certain politicians wanting unitary executive power.
The most important upcoming elections are not in Nov 2008. They are the Republican primaries in early 2008. If Ron Paul gets the Republican nomination for president then this country will win in November no matter which party gets the presidency.
See: H Amdt 674. He voted to prevent the federal government from enforcing federal anti-drug laws which conflicted with state laws.
I don't see how you could possibly consider him a neo-con. He's clearly an honest conservative. He's strongly against being in Iraq. He voted against the homeland security act and the patriot act. He voted in favor of the whistleblower protection act of 2007.
He's consistent. He voted against an act to prohibit cloning while at the same time voting against anything that would fund cloning. He's just against federal power.
Remember that it's all too easy for the federal government to gain more power. It's near impossible to force them to lose any power. If Ron Paul causes the federal government to give too much power back to the states then rest assured that future presidents will pull it back. But we should be grateful for any reprieve from the constant power grabbing that's going on in DC right now.
You can see his entire voting record at: Ron Paul voting record.
You clearly don't live in a major city. In the San Francisco bay area, a $400,000 house is a 500 sq/ft craphole in a bad part of town.
In my opinion, a person isn't "rich" until they are capable of hiring full time servants while still maintaining the same standard of living they would have had without the servants. Below that they're just well off or upper middle class.
You're right about the toys though.
It's not the porn, it's the control. If Sony is willing to effectively censor porn then they've proven they're willing to use their power to censor. Who wants to take a chance on a format controlled by someone who has demonstrated their willingness to censor?
Oh, and if it helps, DNA are the initials of Douglas Noel Adams. So that book is an instruction from DNA on how to create music from nature.
See Music and Fractal Landscapes (pdf).
It describes generating music from every aspect of nature.
It never occurred to me to wonder how many planes there are. It seems amazing to me that a major carrier can serve the entire US with just 369 planes. Does that mean that all air travel in the US is served with just a couple thousand planes?
Where on the plane is a unique ID that I can write down? I'm curious how often I've flown on the same plane.
So the only people who would have standing would be people with patents that were rejected by this guy or people who are being sued over a patent that this guy let through?
The funny thing is that I have in the past wondered whether or not the swear words they used were really British swear words. Is "feck" a British swear word or is it made up by TV people?