Only the title of the press release mentions the term "DRM".
The text of the press release makes no such claim... what we have here is a press release that has been retitled by someone in marketing/PR for grabbig people's attention and for SEO.
I bet if you discussed this with some of the actual engineers/designers at Steam, they'd agree it is DRM.
Most Catholics, if they look to the Church for guidance, are fully aware that evolution is acknowledged by the Church.
I'd actually prefer if the Church didn't weigh in on the subject at all, and admitted it's the provenance of science, not faith.
Asking the Church to promote an anti-creationist viewpoint is one step closer to having the Church's opinion taken seriously on other scientific matters.
The Catholic church is in agreement with the theory of evolution, so it's time for it to make it clear to its followers they need to support the teaching of evolution over creationism.
It's not the Catholics who are the problem, it's certain fundamentalist Protestants.
Please don't conflate the two.
The big problem with fundamentalist protestants is that they believe the bible to be literally true and inviolate. So if you invalidate one little part of the bible, you invalidate their entire faith.
This means that they'll defend the most ridiculous things as a defense of their faith, and supporting teaching of evolution is viewed as a direct attack on their faith.
You should upgrade to DaveV2.0 (I heard the feature set includes RTFA'ing).
There is a trustrank plan for assigning compensation, which is a little farfetched, IMO. FTA:
By basing the compensation on continuous rating by your peers, it becomes possible to start out by just participating a bit in your free time, and then gradually, as your ratings increase, spend more and more time on the project.
The problem is that any kind of trustrank system can be gamed. This would likely degenerate into a core clique that games the system to reward themselves disproportionately -- even if the concept ever got off the ground.
Never mind the people who make valuable contributions that are unpopular among code contributors (such as marketing, sales, accounting, etc).
A pint of beer is a pint of beer, although you get slightly larger glasses in a lot of pubs with 1 pint marked by a line about 4mm from the rim of the glass. Depending on what you drink, a pint of beer might be a bit less than a pint, because some room is left for the head - so by making the glass a little bigger you've got that extra room *and* one pint of beer.
This is mandated by law. About 5-10 years ago, the courts ruled that pubs selling "pints" of beer could not use a pint glass -- the head reduced the amount of beer the patron was getting to less than the pint they paid for.
This worked out great for me, I picked up 60 or so nice pub pint glasses because so many pubs needed to replace their glasses with ones slightly bigger than a pint.
Well, I drew out a Venn diagram, and my conclusions are something like this:
1. Some school-shooters are young males. 2. Some school-shooters eat bread. 3. Some bread-eaters play first-person shooters. 4. Some bread-eaters shoot schools. 5. Some breads eat young males. 6. The males of some species eat their own young. 7. Jung was a noted psychologist who might have some insight into why kids shoot other kids at schools. 8. Jung would hesitate to imply correlation and causation wrt fps and school shootings. 9. For that matter, so would Freud, who would instead blame it on unrealized feelings towards the shooter's father. 10. At any rate, did you know that Bread released an album entiteled "Baby I'm-a Want You" in 1972? 11. I'm terrible at logical progressions.
Also the concentrator part means that she's concentrating on physics. Some universities call it concentrating on a subject rather than majoring.
What a load of horsecrap. Do you even go to Princeton?
At Princeton, students are labeled by their preferred method of problem-solving.
Some students are "blackboardists" (though this label is being phased out for a more color-neutral label, since some students use whiteboards. Also something about racism. "Vertical writing surfacist" is just unwieldy, I think they'll settle on "writist".) Some students are modelers -- but these tend to be chemists.
This student is a concentrator, a la Feinman.
When asked how Feinman would solve a specific theoretical physics problem, a famous physicist (I can't recall who it was), said, "He'd close his eyes for a minute or two, then write the solution on the blackboard."
At any rate, I'm very surprised a concentrator was able to find a hardware problem. Ususally concentrators don't bother with hardware, since the solution comes directly from their wetware.
Just to note, that there are other types of problem-solvers at Princeton as well, but they are not as common in the Physics department. In the Fine Arts, one finds "Lysergicists", in Liberal Arts one finds "Inhalors". Most dropouts are "Procrastinists", and if one is very luck, you can spot an "Osmosisist" on the green -- you can tell them from others by the fact that they always carry their books on their head.
It's pretty much the inverse of putting lipstick on a pig.
What, it's putting a pig on lipstick?
Seems like a great idea to me. Just substitute chapstick for lipstick. And then substitute tallow for wax. And then substitute rendered pig fat for tallow.
"Microsoft, inspired[1] perhaps by the ease of selecting and installing iPhone apps, has taken a similar approach to gather back market share of its IIS web server in a predominantly Apache/PHP market. 10 open source[2] CMS, gallery, wiki, and blog tools were chosen to populate the eco-system, dubbed Web App Gallery.
[1] I think submitter mis-spelled "feeling threatened".
[2] Big deal. Two open source tools? How many closed-source tools are in the "ecosystem"?
Oh? How much does health insurance cost? What, about $20k a year for the average family? That is a HUGE burden on employers/families/the government. It's a huge factor in employment costs, especially in relation to competition that doesn't have that huge overhead.
There is little need for our current see the MD when you feel ill system. Seeing a nurse, having some tests and letting the doctor review that information is much cheaper and will make healthcare accessible to more and more people
And yet tort law (and the state medical boards) ensure that this standard of care will not be accepted.
But we're not talking about routine medical care or slight illnesses... the cost of catastrophic medical coverage and treatment of rare diseases is more germane to the topic at hand. The simple fact of the matter is that prolonging the life of someone with a serious medical condition requiring extensive and expensive treatment is often a net negative for society. It's ugly, but it's the truth.
It causes a big moral problem, though -- are only the wealthy deserving of this medical treatment? If all deserve expensive medical treatment, how do we keep costs from bankrupting us?
Seriously... I have family members who would be dead if not for $2 million plus in medical costs. While I don't begrudge my health insurance premiums of $1200 a month for my wife and kid, how much of that is going to pay for catastrophic coverage for someone who will never even come close to paying that back into the system?
As we see more and more advances in medicine, one common factor is that cost also rises. At what point do the expensive treatments simply cost too much for our labor system to bear?
That's great. Let's clean up our cities, presently, crime ridden cesspools filled with the bulk of America's poor, and have them all draining welfare for even longer than they do.
That's funny... guess which regions of the US have a higher government spending/remit ratio per capita? It's not the urban areas... it's the rural poor.
Sure, there are more poor people in the cities than in the rural areas... but the rural areas drain the economy much more than the urban areas.
Take your racist claptrap elsewhere... your goddamn rural flyover states are bankrupting my urban state.
If we can fix it, why should it be selected against?
Because it's expensive to fix it, and letting it propagate in the gene pool means we'll have to pay to fix it in a higher and higher proportion of the populace.
From an economic perspective, the miraculous state of modern medicine will bankrupt us. From a moral perspective, it's a hard choice to make, about whether we can afford to cure everyone of everything curable.
But I think the simple truth is that the cost/benefit ratio of curing (or partially curing) certain diseases is far too high... especially among the elderly (who have little economic productivity left in them).
I know it's cruel and morally questionable, but at what point do we realize we are bankrupting future generations just to extend our lives a few measly years?
Note that curing MD is something completely different, since it is not a disease of the elderly.
Most importantly, show me a smartphone that'll let me change channels in the 45 minutes after my mother's called my mobile
Wow, that's lazy -- why can't can;t she walk downstairs, or even yell down the stairwell?
and asked to talk to my wife
OK, now we know you're full of it.
Seriously, you bring up a good point about multi-use devices... sometimes we need to do two things at once, and if they both require exclusive use of a single device, we've got a problem. I've run into this with my phone... it's a royal pain to access my calendar while talking on the phone. Makes me fondly recall the days when we used Daytimers (not that I miss lugging that thing around).
FYI, most (if not all) hunters eat what they kill. It's not like anything is going to waste.
In my experience, most hunters have a butcher package their kills for them, eat some venison once or twice, give away a ton of the meat to friends, and let the rest languish in a freezer until it is discarded so that next year's kill can replace it.
And the friends? They graciously accept the meat, eat some once, then let it languish in THEIR freezer until next year another fried offers them some venison, at which point the old stuff gets thrown out.
I'm not against hunting... but I think far, far less is consumed than shot each year.
Like you said, it's the tragedy of the commons, which is all about looking at the short-term gains for you without considering the long-term damage to the environment in which you must survive.
In a tragedy of the commons situation, the best strategy for each actor IS the one for short-term gain; acting for long-term sustainability is a poor strategy unless all actors are bound to act that way. This is one of the big justifications for regulation of financial activities. So even if an institution acts in a way that will sustain the golden goose, other actors can still kill the goose... meaning that sustainable strategy was a bad move.
At a hearing on the bill then, Microsoft national technology officer Stuart McKee described it as anti-competitive and warned that it could be the equivalent of the state "picking Betamax when everyone else goes with VHS."
WTF? Is McKee so confused that he messed up the analogy? Is he trying to head off the most apt analogy to choosing ODF over MSO formats? Clearly MSO:ODF::Betamax:VHS.
If the legislators McKee was talking to couldn't understand this, they have no business being involved in any decision-making body.
Personally, I would prefer XHTML or XML files to PDF, simply because I can use vi to read them, if I had to.
Loser. You should use Emacs, there's a key combo (Ctrl+ Alt + ~ + \ + O + D + F) to unzip, parse the XML, and display ODF content on screen... why would you ever want to use Vi for reading ODF?
This is excessive. At home I have my two 160GB Seagate hard drives and an 8GB flash drive which I use when I'm on the go. What tom's has here is extremely overdone. This is just waste.
Obviously, you have not been collecting porn long enough. Especially HD porn.
Indeed, short-term thinking is to blame for most of the current state of the economy. Betting your pension plans on high-yield, high-risk investments? Short-term thinking. Issuing loans that pay a high interest rate in spite of the risks because you know you're just going to sell the loan to somebody else anyway? Short-term thinking. Driving the stock market down rapidly because of a high number of people shorting the stock? Short-term thinking. And so on.
Isn't it ironic... every example you list is NOT an example of the failures of thinking only for the short-term.
Betting your pension plans on high-yield, high-risk investments?
The problem with that investment strategy is that people dismiss the risk. Those 15% annual returns of a few years ago simply outweigh the possiblity of losing it all, in the minds of those investors. Interestingly, a diversified high-risk/high-yield strategy outperforms a low-risk/low-yield strategy in the long term. When you are investing for the short term (i.e., you're close to retirement) is when you should use a low-risk strategy.
Issuing loans that pay a high interest rate in spite of the risks because you know you're just going to sell the loan to somebody else anyway?
That's not short-term thinking. That's smart business. Regardless of how it plays out in the long term, you've maximized your return. The problem is that the buyers of those risky loans underestimated the risk, and overvalued them. It's not a failure of planning for the long term, it's a failure to adequately estimate risk by the *buyers* of those loans.
Driving the stock market down rapidly because of a high number of people shorting the stock?
That's a good investment for the short term. And, once the stock price is unreasonably low, those short sellers can buy in to catch the price increase. This investment strategy is a good one for the investor -- can you really say that the people using this strategy aren't *personally* far better off than if they didn't use it?
A better example would be the American car companies cutting off R&D for production of a low-cost, high-mileage vehicle. Or price fixing that reduces the incentive to increase supply of a scarce good (e.g., electricity in CA).
I think you're right re: short-term thinking, I just think you could have used better examples. What's coming through to me based upon your examples is that many actors in the economy have chosen strategies that benefit them while causing problems for everyone else... related to to the classic Tragedy of the Commons. Those strategies ARE the best strategies for the individual, unless everyone cooperates.
These "bonuses" are basically their pay, and are the only reason they are working there. I don't see how it could possibly be the government's right to take the agreed upon pay away from these people.
Simple. Make AIG file for bankruptcy (or some non-solvency equivalent under new law) and discount the debt owed to these creditors.
Legally, though, these bonuses are not wages. I haven't seen the wording of the employment contracts, but it is likely they are continuity bonuses... meet minimum performance goals A, B, C over period X, accrue N at intervals during period X to be paid at end of period X (or in period Y). Those performance goals could be as simple as "handle day-to-day activities" or there could be metrics assigned.
At any rate, though these bonuses are the only reason those people are working there, it is still morally acceptable to me for these people to get shafted. They gained by implementation of policies that screwed the rest of us, surely they can suffer proportionately during the correction?
Slashdot Mirror
Only the title of the press release mentions the term "DRM".
The text of the press release makes no such claim... what we have here is a press release that has been retitled by someone in marketing/PR for grabbig people's attention and for SEO.
I bet if you discussed this with some of the actual engineers/designers at Steam, they'd agree it is DRM.
Most Catholics, if they look to the Church for guidance, are fully aware that evolution is acknowledged by the Church.
I'd actually prefer if the Church didn't weigh in on the subject at all, and admitted it's the provenance of science, not faith.
Asking the Church to promote an anti-creationist viewpoint is one step closer to having the Church's opinion taken seriously on other scientific matters.
It's not the Catholics who are the problem, it's certain fundamentalist Protestants.
Please don't conflate the two.
The big problem with fundamentalist protestants is that they believe the bible to be literally true and inviolate. So if you invalidate one little part of the bible, you invalidate their entire faith.
This means that they'll defend the most ridiculous things as a defense of their faith, and supporting teaching of evolution is viewed as a direct attack on their faith.
There is a trustrank plan for assigning compensation, which is a little farfetched, IMO. FTA:
The problem is that any kind of trustrank system can be gamed. This would likely degenerate into a core clique that games the system to reward themselves disproportionately -- even if the concept ever got off the ground.
Never mind the people who make valuable contributions that are unpopular among code contributors (such as marketing, sales, accounting, etc).
This is mandated by law. About 5-10 years ago, the courts ruled that pubs selling "pints" of beer could not use a pint glass -- the head reduced the amount of beer the patron was getting to less than the pint they paid for.
This worked out great for me, I picked up 60 or so nice pub pint glasses because so many pubs needed to replace their glasses with ones slightly bigger than a pint.
Well, I drew out a Venn diagram, and my conclusions are something like this:
1. Some school-shooters are young males.
2. Some school-shooters eat bread.
3. Some bread-eaters play first-person shooters.
4. Some bread-eaters shoot schools.
5. Some breads eat young males.
6. The males of some species eat their own young.
7. Jung was a noted psychologist who might have some insight into why kids shoot other kids at schools.
8. Jung would hesitate to imply correlation and causation wrt fps and school shootings.
9. For that matter, so would Freud, who would instead blame it on unrealized feelings towards the shooter's father.
10. At any rate, did you know that Bread released an album entiteled "Baby I'm-a Want You" in 1972?
11. I'm terrible at logical progressions.
YHBT. HAND.
I always like to throw in a subtle spelling or grammar troll... always good for at least one taker.
Please do not put dependent clauses in multiple sentences -- otherwise you will confuse readers.
I think the label is meant to be inclusive. We wouldn't want to leave out the painthuffers and methsmokers, would we?
What a load of horsecrap. Do you even go to Princeton?
At Princeton, students are labeled by their preferred method of problem-solving.
Some students are "blackboardists" (though this label is being phased out for a more color-neutral label, since some students use whiteboards. Also something about racism. "Vertical writing surfacist" is just unwieldy, I think they'll settle on "writist".) Some students are modelers -- but these tend to be chemists.
This student is a concentrator, a la Feinman.
When asked how Feinman would solve a specific theoretical physics problem, a famous physicist (I can't recall who it was), said, "He'd close his eyes for a minute or two, then write the solution on the blackboard."
At any rate, I'm very surprised a concentrator was able to find a hardware problem. Ususally concentrators don't bother with hardware, since the solution comes directly from their wetware.
Just to note, that there are other types of problem-solvers at Princeton as well, but they are not as common in the Physics department. In the Fine Arts, one finds "Lysergicists", in Liberal Arts one finds "Inhalors". Most dropouts are "Procrastinists", and if one is very luck, you can spot an "Osmosisist" on the green -- you can tell them from others by the fact that they always carry their books on their head.
What, it's putting a pig on lipstick?
Seems like a great idea to me. Just substitute chapstick for lipstick. And then substitute tallow for wax. And then substitute rendered pig fat for tallow.
Oh, and substitute bacon for pig.
What do you have? Bacon on lard.
Sounds ideal to me.
Admittedly, a bad joke.
But, as someone's sig once said:
[1] I think submitter mis-spelled "feeling threatened".
[2] Big deal. Two open source tools? How many closed-source tools are in the "ecosystem"?
Oh? How much does health insurance cost? What, about $20k a year for the average family? That is a HUGE burden on employers/families/the government. It's a huge factor in employment costs, especially in relation to competition that doesn't have that huge overhead.
And yet tort law (and the state medical boards) ensure that this standard of care will not be accepted.
But we're not talking about routine medical care or slight illnesses... the cost of catastrophic medical coverage and treatment of rare diseases is more germane to the topic at hand. The simple fact of the matter is that prolonging the life of someone with a serious medical condition requiring extensive and expensive treatment is often a net negative for society. It's ugly, but it's the truth.
It causes a big moral problem, though -- are only the wealthy deserving of this medical treatment? If all deserve expensive medical treatment, how do we keep costs from bankrupting us?
Seriously... I have family members who would be dead if not for $2 million plus in medical costs. While I don't begrudge my health insurance premiums of $1200 a month for my wife and kid, how much of that is going to pay for catastrophic coverage for someone who will never even come close to paying that back into the system?
As we see more and more advances in medicine, one common factor is that cost also rises. At what point do the expensive treatments simply cost too much for our labor system to bear?
That's funny... guess which regions of the US have a higher government spending/remit ratio per capita? It's not the urban areas... it's the rural poor.
Sure, there are more poor people in the cities than in the rural areas... but the rural areas drain the economy much more than the urban areas.
Take your racist claptrap elsewhere... your goddamn rural flyover states are bankrupting my urban state.
Because it's expensive to fix it, and letting it propagate in the gene pool means we'll have to pay to fix it in a higher and higher proportion of the populace.
From an economic perspective, the miraculous state of modern medicine will bankrupt us. From a moral perspective, it's a hard choice to make, about whether we can afford to cure everyone of everything curable.
But I think the simple truth is that the cost/benefit ratio of curing (or partially curing) certain diseases is far too high... especially among the elderly (who have little economic productivity left in them).
I know it's cruel and morally questionable, but at what point do we realize we are bankrupting future generations just to extend our lives a few measly years?
Note that curing MD is something completely different, since it is not a disease of the elderly.
Wow, that's lazy -- why can't can;t she walk downstairs, or even yell down the stairwell?
OK, now we know you're full of it.
Seriously, you bring up a good point about multi-use devices... sometimes we need to do two things at once, and if they both require exclusive use of a single device, we've got a problem. I've run into this with my phone... it's a royal pain to access my calendar while talking on the phone. Makes me fondly recall the days when we used Daytimers (not that I miss lugging that thing around).
In my experience, most hunters have a butcher package their kills for them, eat some venison once or twice, give away a ton of the meat to friends, and let the rest languish in a freezer until it is discarded so that next year's kill can replace it.
And the friends? They graciously accept the meat, eat some once, then let it languish in THEIR freezer until next year another fried offers them some venison, at which point the old stuff gets thrown out.
I'm not against hunting... but I think far, far less is consumed than shot each year.
In a tragedy of the commons situation, the best strategy for each actor IS the one for short-term gain; acting for long-term sustainability is a poor strategy unless all actors are bound to act that way. This is one of the big justifications for regulation of financial activities. So even if an institution acts in a way that will sustain the golden goose, other actors can still kill the goose... meaning that sustainable strategy was a bad move.
WTF? Is McKee so confused that he messed up the analogy? Is he trying to head off the most apt analogy to choosing ODF over MSO formats? Clearly MSO:ODF::Betamax:VHS.
If the legislators McKee was talking to couldn't understand this, they have no business being involved in any decision-making body.
Loser. You should use Emacs, there's a key combo (Ctrl+ Alt + ~ + \ + O + D + F) to unzip, parse the XML, and display ODF content on screen... why would you ever want to use Vi for reading ODF?
Obviously, you have not been collecting porn long enough. Especially HD porn.
Isn't it ironic... every example you list is NOT an example of the failures of thinking only for the short-term.
The problem with that investment strategy is that people dismiss the risk. Those 15% annual returns of a few years ago simply outweigh the possiblity of losing it all, in the minds of those investors. Interestingly, a diversified high-risk/high-yield strategy outperforms a low-risk/low-yield strategy in the long term. When you are investing for the short term (i.e., you're close to retirement) is when you should use a low-risk strategy.
That's not short-term thinking. That's smart business. Regardless of how it plays out in the long term, you've maximized your return. The problem is that the buyers of those risky loans underestimated the risk, and overvalued them. It's not a failure of planning for the long term, it's a failure to adequately estimate risk by the *buyers* of those loans.
That's a good investment for the short term. And, once the stock price is unreasonably low, those short sellers can buy in to catch the price increase. This investment strategy is a good one for the investor -- can you really say that the people using this strategy aren't *personally* far better off than if they didn't use it?
A better example would be the American car companies cutting off R&D for production of a low-cost, high-mileage vehicle. Or price fixing that reduces the incentive to increase supply of a scarce good (e.g., electricity in CA).
I think you're right re: short-term thinking, I just think you could have used better examples. What's coming through to me based upon your examples is that many actors in the economy have chosen strategies that benefit them while causing problems for everyone else... related to to the classic Tragedy of the Commons. Those strategies ARE the best strategies for the individual, unless everyone cooperates.
I read it as OggTheorized.
I thought, "No wonder this is the first time it's been viewed".
*please don't kill me. It's a joke (although I do prefer Xvid).
Simple. Make AIG file for bankruptcy (or some non-solvency equivalent under new law) and discount the debt owed to these creditors.
Legally, though, these bonuses are not wages. I haven't seen the wording of the employment contracts, but it is likely they are continuity bonuses... meet minimum performance goals A, B, C over period X, accrue N at intervals during period X to be paid at end of period X (or in period Y). Those performance goals could be as simple as "handle day-to-day activities" or there could be metrics assigned.
At any rate, though these bonuses are the only reason those people are working there, it is still morally acceptable to me for these people to get shafted. They gained by implementation of policies that screwed the rest of us, surely they can suffer proportionately during the correction?