Thank you. While you're at it, could you please tell what the winning lottery numbers will be next week, also?
It still amazes me that in this day and age of such accelerated change that I often find it hard to evaluate whether the report of a change I've heard about is actually a true report, some people still think that they can predict the future with accuracy.
Bravo, you get a brownie point for your math badge! You'll have to excuse me for not expounding all of the necessary conditions for a smooth function to have an asymptote. Somehow I thought I'd spare the non-interested...
Actually, the stabilization I was talking about wasn't based on the math, but rather the biology. So yes, it's not a "theorem". My post merely points out that there's more than "massive catastrophic death" as a possible outcome. The post it replied to implied there was only one possible outcome, while only looking at the fact that the first derivative of the world population with respect to time is positive.
So, now tell me what "theorem" makes the post I replied to necessarily correct?
I agree however, that even if I'm talking about biology, it's not clear that world population will stabilize w.r.t. time. So yes, I was wrong (but not in the way you thought). It might very well be chaotic on time scales much smaller than the life of the Sun or the Universe.
The second derivative of the world population has been negative for a while now. In other words, this will end with the population stabilizing at some level. Quite possibly (but, of course, not certainly) without any catastrophic natural or human-made disaster.
I didn't notice, but that's probably because it wasn't on Slashdot.:-)
Seriously, isn't the firehose supposed to be taking care of this? Or do most people blow it off (I'm just as guilty, I spend 99% of my time here either reading the front page articles, commenting on them, or moderating)?
OTOH, now that I think of it, if "last week" was Friday, I think you might be expecting a bit more timeliness than usual for this forum...
I vaguely remember a certain road being paved with them? My comment was trying to point out that this person's "good intentions" could very well be interpreted totally differently by others.
> Telling people to mind their own business while someone else suffers, historically has not accomplished very much.
The intention of my comment was far from that. It was more like:
"Your question is stupid, you should travel there yourself, or at least invest a lot of effort to collect the necessary information from people over there, so you can actually have some real chance of helping them (probably by asking them what you could do to help them, rather than assuming that they themselves are less likely to know what could help them than you or some other random Slashdotter)."
That seems far from telling the OP to "mind his own business".
And that's why the original question strikes me as stinking of colonialistic snobbery. OTOH, if some genius here can somehow, with only second- to third-hand knowledge of what kind of resources are really available and what conditions are really like over there, come up with a solution which will make their life easier, I'm all for it.
What happens in actuality, is that the surcharge on the sale price, which is supposed to go to the artist, usually is collected by a collection agency which takes a big cut out of it... assuming they even know how to contact the artist. Almost as bad as ASCAP....
The answer to your question is: if a protocol is supposed to be (effectively) a broadcast protocol, it cannot simultaneously be a private protocol. Most current P2P protocols are (at least partially) broadcast protocols. Future P2P protocols may involve only exchanging sensitive information with a trusted subset of other P2P users.
Shouldn't be even be too hard to write an open-source alternative to Amazon Cloud Player, targeted at a medium sized group of friends, which would run on Amazon's EC2 facility. There's probably a sweet spot where the free sharing without worrying about law enforcement would make it worthwhile (and as the **AA's crack down on other means of sharing, this sweet spot becomes smaller and smaller groups).
> Either way, it looks like Adobe Reader will have to remain installed for when these alternatives don't quite get things right.
You might consider installing a VM like VirtualBox or some kind of sandboxing solution so that you can convert / print / export and subsequently erase any "side effects".
Memory and surplus CPU power is getting cheaper and cheaper, I don't understand why more people don't talk about going this route.
> The copyright to your churches services are held by your church
Not necessarily so, at least in their entirety. Perhaps they sing Happy Birthday (or some other music under copyright) as part of their church service?
> As far as cable-subscriptions, why not watch hulu or hulu plus
Perhaps the poster doesn't live in the US?
> I've listened to plenty of audio books from the library - and I don't even have to drive > to the library to get them; I just download them directly from the library website at a cost of zero dollars
Kind of curious, which library is that? Please post its URL?
It's encouraging that this has even made a blip on the public radar, but unfortunately, a public clueless enough to think that a "Do Not Track" list would help the situation is also clueless enough to immediately forget about this issue after seeing the latest high-budget presentation on the mass media about the current political candidates.
I adore your utopian view, but the harsh reality is, "the people" will vote for whatever the TV tells them to. It would only take a few programs spouting off idiocy about how without copyright there would be no TV, movies, whatsoever, and what do you think would happen?
Your comment is right-on and reminds me of the now-put-to-rest checklist which was posted over and over again, replying to people who thought they had a technical solution to the problem of spam email.
We see now that all of these technical solutions, which dealt with technical details of how email worked, could never eliminate spam itself, which has now mutated and is a cancer infecting all the varied forms of digital communication which now exist. Why? Because it is a social problem (enough people are dumb enough to make it worthwhile), not an exploit of a particular technical weakness of how email works.
Sorry, my jest detector must have failed. Probably because your comment was right-on: even if the trademark on a bare "Windows" is bogus, 99.9% of the world aren't going to take MS to court to prove it, because they know they don't have enough money to make even the initial "ante" for a good enough lawyer.
> pretty ludicrous rulings
Yup... not only with trademark, eh? Sometimes I get the feeling that with the gavel, judges get issued a d20 and a special secret rule-book when to use it.
> Or like Microsoft trademarking the word "Windows" in reference to their windowed > application operating system/environment! That would never fly, Right?
Actually, IIRC, they were originally granted a trademark on "Windows" and "Word", but they chose to sue the wrong people (who had mega-$$) and they lost those trademarks --- IMO, they only have a (US) trademark now on "Microsoft Windows" and "Microsoft Word", not on the bare words, no matter what the context.
No, I think the best is to provide super-special sandboxing for them. One could even periodically send "test probes" to random people on one's network to better judge their level of acumen vs. current phishing techniques. Those who fail (or originally admit to being clueless) get:
all email which isn't a direct reply to something they originated "held up for review" by some luckless soul in IT
extra lockdown of their computer, perhaps including physically disabling USB ports and DVD drives
extra automatic monitoring of their computer for unusual behavior
segregating them into a special segment of the LAN which is only connected to the rest of the company via a special filtering/monitoring gateway
See details here, where it is explained that all works authored by someone in a domain should be linked to a unique author page at that domain, and that authors can associate/link their author pages between various domains using reciprocal linking.
Slashdot Mirror
Even worse, according to Wikipedia, when he resigned from Sun he announced it as a haiku on Twitter:
.... an obvious IP ripoff from BeOS!
(Yeah, yeah, I know, I shouldn't feed 'em...)
Thank you. While you're at it, could you please tell what the winning lottery numbers will be next week, also?
It still amazes me that in this day and age of such accelerated change that I often find it hard to evaluate whether the report of a change I've heard about is actually a true report, some people still think that they can predict the future with accuracy.
And how many more (or less) such deaths occured this week compared to last week?
Admit it, you have no idea what is the absolute quantity, no the rate of change.
Bravo, you get a brownie point for your math badge! You'll have to excuse me for not expounding all of the necessary conditions for a smooth function to have an asymptote. Somehow I thought I'd spare the non-interested...
Actually, the stabilization I was talking about wasn't based on the math, but rather the biology. So yes, it's not a "theorem". My post merely points out that there's more than "massive catastrophic death" as a possible outcome. The post it replied to implied there was only one possible outcome, while only looking at the fact that the first derivative of the world population with respect to time is positive.
So, now tell me what "theorem" makes the post I replied to necessarily correct?
I agree however, that even if I'm talking about biology, it's not clear that world population will stabilize w.r.t. time. So yes, I was wrong (but not in the way you thought). It might very well be chaotic on time scales much smaller than the life of the Sun or the Universe.
Funny, I was more thinking: First DNF, then GNU Hurd, ... of course we'd get a flying car today!
The second derivative of the world population has been negative for a while now. In other words, this will end with the population stabilizing at some level. Quite possibly (but, of course, not certainly) without any catastrophic natural or human-made disaster.
Probably not what you were thinking?
I didn't notice, but that's probably because it wasn't on Slashdot. :-)
Seriously, isn't the firehose supposed to be taking care of this? Or do most people blow it off (I'm just as guilty, I spend 99% of my time here either reading the front page articles, commenting on them, or moderating)?
OTOH, now that I think of it, if "last week" was Friday, I think you might be expecting a bit more timeliness than usual for this forum...
This is an easy one. They just have to outsource this job (especially the cyber-defense) to more capable companies, say in China!
> ...the good intentions
I vaguely remember a certain road being paved with them? My comment was trying to point out that this person's "good intentions" could very well be interpreted totally differently by others.
> Telling people to mind their own business while someone else suffers, historically has not accomplished very much.
The intention of my comment was far from that. It was more like:
That seems far from telling the OP to "mind his own business".
Actually, I get a "download firefox 8" from some domain called en.softonic.com, God only knows if that download includes an "extra little present"...
And that's why the original question strikes me as stinking of colonialistic snobbery. OTOH, if some genius here can somehow, with only second- to third-hand knowledge of what kind of resources are really available and what conditions are really like over there, come up with a solution which will make their life easier, I'm all for it.
I'm not holding my breath.
> I'm truly sympathetic that artists don't see checks each time their paintings change hands.
Actually, that is an almost universal practice in Europe, and has been adopted in California.
What happens in actuality, is that the surcharge on the sale price, which is supposed to go to the artist, usually is collected by a collection agency which takes a big cut out of it... assuming they even know how to contact the artist. Almost as bad as ASCAP....
Damn, you more or less beat me to the obvious parody / analogy: "We can exterminate all cockroaches".
The answer to your question is: if a protocol is supposed to be (effectively) a broadcast protocol, it cannot simultaneously be a private protocol. Most current P2P protocols are (at least partially) broadcast protocols. Future P2P protocols may involve only exchanging sensitive information with a trusted subset of other P2P users.
Shouldn't be even be too hard to write an open-source alternative to Amazon Cloud Player, targeted at a medium sized group of friends, which would run on Amazon's EC2 facility. There's probably a sweet spot where the free sharing without worrying about law enforcement would make it worthwhile (and as the **AA's crack down on other means of sharing, this sweet spot becomes smaller and smaller groups).
> Either way, it looks like Adobe Reader will have to remain installed for when these alternatives don't quite get things right.
You might consider installing a VM like VirtualBox or some kind of sandboxing solution so that you can convert / print / export and subsequently erase any "side effects".
Memory and surplus CPU power is getting cheaper and cheaper, I don't understand why more people don't talk about going this route.
> The copyright to your churches services are held by your church
Not necessarily so, at least in their entirety. Perhaps they sing Happy Birthday (or some other music under copyright) as part of their church service?
> As far as cable-subscriptions, why not watch hulu or hulu plus
Perhaps the poster doesn't live in the US?
> I've listened to plenty of audio books from the library - and I don't even have to drive
> to the library to get them; I just download them directly from the library website at a cost of zero dollars
Kind of curious, which library is that? Please post its URL?
It's encouraging that this has even made a blip on the public radar, but unfortunately, a public clueless enough to think that a "Do Not Track" list would help the situation is also clueless enough to immediately forget about this issue after seeing the latest high-budget presentation on the mass media about the current political candidates.
I adore your utopian view, but the harsh reality is, "the people" will vote for whatever the TV tells them to. It would only take a few programs spouting off idiocy about how without copyright there would be no TV, movies, whatsoever, and what do you think would happen?
Your comment is right-on and reminds me of the now-put-to-rest checklist which was posted over and over again, replying to people who thought they had a technical solution to the problem of spam email.
We see now that all of these technical solutions, which dealt with technical details of how email worked, could never eliminate spam itself, which has now mutated and is a cancer infecting all the varied forms of digital communication which now exist. Why? Because it is a social problem (enough people are dumb enough to make it worthwhile), not an exploit of a particular technical weakness of how email works.
Sorry, my jest detector must have failed. Probably because your comment was right-on: even if the trademark on a bare "Windows" is bogus, 99.9% of the world aren't going to take MS to court to prove it, because they know they don't have enough money to make even the initial "ante" for a good enough lawyer.
> pretty ludicrous rulings
Yup... not only with trademark, eh? Sometimes I get the feeling that with the gavel, judges get issued a d20 and a special secret rule-book when to use it.
Thanks for reminding us that many things can be misrepresented if taken without regard to their context.
> Or like Microsoft trademarking the word "Windows" in reference to their windowed
> application operating system/environment! That would never fly, Right?
Actually, IIRC, they were originally granted a trademark on "Windows" and "Word", but they chose to sue the wrong people (who had mega-$$) and they lost those trademarks --- IMO, they only have a (US) trademark now on "Microsoft Windows" and "Microsoft Word", not on the bare words, no matter what the context.
< checks WP >
No, they only practically lost the bare word Windows --- they bailed out of the litigation before the judge could rule it was invalid.
No, I think the best is to provide super-special sandboxing for them. One could even periodically send "test probes" to random people on one's network to better judge their level of acumen vs. current phishing techniques. Those who fail (or originally admit to being clueless) get:
See details here, where it is explained that all works authored by someone in a domain should be linked to a unique author page at that domain, and that authors can associate/link their author pages between various domains using reciprocal linking.