Does this mean we might be able download and run a Vista beta legally?
Depends on who "we" are. By making it "more public", Microsoft is probably referring to extending the beta to a handful of people who don't have the Microsoft Developer Network subscription required to get the legal beta. Odds are, they'll never have an open beta of Vista, but one just like they said - "more public."
So 2007 sometime, but why the fuck doesn't it do it NOW?
It *does* support it now. Or do you mean IE6? You're right - maybe they should be working on getting IE6 to support XMLHttpRequest() and PNG alpha transparency. Oh, wait, they are, and it's called IE7.
If you're having an aneurism, it's probably because your inferior browser doesn't support <sarcasm> tags.:D
Visual Studio is great. Besides being a fast, optimizing compiler, the fact that it lets you write your own resource files OR use a nifty editor, write native code OR use.NET or Java, compile code written in separate languages together into one executeable, and even whip out machine language in the middle of your higher-level program. Plus, it supports about a bajillion different processor architectures and 2005 has taken some steps to force good programming practices upon bad programmers. Feeding trolls is fun.
So will Firefox users have any respect for IE7 as a capable browser (if it proves to be so)?
First of all, the fact that this is modded "funny" makes me want to cry. >.
Personally, I liked Firefox better than IE6, but like IE7 better than Firefox. Works well, looks purdy, hasn't crashed once. The "Phishing Filer"'s pretty neat, too.
Clearly, hackers do not supercede the best programmers
It all depends. Not checking buffers and blindly blitting bits everywhere is a sign of a novice programmer, and how many programs are broken - the difference between using strcpy() and strcpy_s(). Not a lot of skill on the programmer. Finding the overrun from a decompiled binary is infinitely more difficult, much less finding a way to exploit it. Much more skill on the hacker's part.
Of course, the reverse is also true - programming the Windows GDI to work with nearly every conceivable hardware, software, and driver configuration was/is a work of great difficulty. Yet, how skilled of a person did it take to put malevolent, non-aborting code in AbortProc() and cause the whole WMF scare? Not very. You were supposed to put code there; it just hadn't occured to anyone, hacker or otherwise, to put something evil there. Much more skill on the programmer's part.
Guess my point is "it all depends." Creation is not necessarily a greater work than destruction in coding.
Riiiiight. I just read (and commented on) a comment that says that someone got owned on the 'net by just browsing with IE7
I am currently using Internet Explorer 7 Beta 1 (version 7.0.5112.0). i've been surfing all sorts of websites, and haven't gotten pwn3d/h4x0r3d/what3v3r3d. Once again, anecdotal, but it's been the only browser on my machine since September of 2005.
It's a pretty nifty browser, by the way, with a much cleaner intwerface than Firefox (in my humble opinion). I used to use Firefox exclusively for the tabbed browsing, although IE7 seems to have implemented that better, too - though far be it from me to start a Kool-Aid drinker's feature list from the sheer, orgasmic joy of using the beta version of a new browser...
Economically speaking, training is an investment in human capital. As with any other investment, like building new factories or installing better machines, expenditure in human capital (training) increases the productivity of the worker. Where this productivity increase offsets the cost of the initial investment, the employee will be trained.
Of course, in this case, the poster seems to be doing fine without training - working his @$$ off, but keeping the network secure and running, which is, after all, what he's paid for.
Although it's not exactly self-evident that a greater focus purely on stock price, ignoring all other business, financial, social, moral and environmental consequences is the direction we want to see higher-ups going in.
Of course it is. A share of stock is a share of ownership of a company; the price of a share and the value of a company are one-in-the-same. Share price is determined by how much the investor is willing to pay for a share, meaning a company's value is dependent on it's shareholders. Pursuing a higher share price means bettering the company. That's what you want the higher-ups doing, right?
Remember that a business doesn't have social responsibilities, per se. Citizens have social responsibilities; they use the institution of government as a tool to carry them out. A business is simply a way of producing something efficiently, so that no excess profits are made, consumers get a good deal, and resources aren't wasted - and as long as businesses remain competitive, they make fair profits, consumers get good deals, and nothing is wasted. The government worries about social responsibility through regulation, which is a Good Thing - if it was the job of the businesses to worry about social responsibility, don't you think they'd have slightly more sinister definition of "social responsibility" than you would? Let them seek their profits; let us decide what's right.
Don't for a second believe that the market for music and movies is a "free market." At the very least it is dominated by one gynormous bit of government interference, generally known as the copyright monopoly
Hrm. Here I thought you were going to make the obvious (and legitimate) complaint that the music publishing industry is a rather tight oligopoly, or that the labels create a monopsony (single buyer, like a monopoly is a single seller) kind of situation in which artists are forced to beg for contracts in exchange for getting their music heard. But instead, you chose to complain about a long-established and effective institution of innovation. And yes, "copyright monopoly" is redundant, because the simplest definition of a coypright is a monopoly on copying. Oh well.
You may believe that claptrap about copyright being the only way to "promote progress in science and the arts" but don't pretend that a "free market" has anything to do with it. It is a very tightly controlled market.
Never did I say copyright was the only way to promote progress in science and the arts. It's a tool to harness the profit motive of individuals who might otherwise hide away inventions as trade secrets. Or, in the case of the arts, copyrights are the only things ensuring artists make any profit whatsoever. If an artist could not copyright his work, the record lables wouldn't have to pay the artist anything to profit off copying his songs, in the same way that you wouldn't have to pay the record labels for copying their songs. There wouldn't be much revenue in the way of concerts, either - if there's nothing to stop other bands from playing those same songs, how many people do you think will pay to see the original?
As for the "free market" having "nothing to do with it", I suggest you read up on supply and demand, a topic you will read in the first page of the first chapter of any good economics textbook. Remember that regardless of government interference or industry collusion, people won't pay any more for music than what it's worth - especially if you remember that music, unlike food or water, is a luxury that people can do without the instant it gets too expensive.
Also consider that music piracy in the first place is an action of the free market.
I think they prefer to be called "special thinkers." They have feelings too, you insensitive clod.
The one thing the Apple had to make up for it's ugly GUI was it's specialized chipset that bucked every industry standard. This "feature" meant difficulty in programming, lack of third party support, and questionable performance compared even when compared to cheaper Intel chips.
Of course, I'm sure many people can see the "beauty" in beating a perfecftly good copy of Unix with an ugly stick until all the buttons are round. As for "unattractive squares should stick to Linux and Windows" - there is a an elegant simplicity in the power and speed of the command prompt, you can navigate all of Windows with a keyboard (I challenge anyone to show me where you cannot), and you can even make your Windows OS look like a freakin' Mac if you wanted.
Artists, fashion mavens, scientists, and other creative personalities can sit down with a MacBook Pro running the latest dot-update of Tiger and comprehend its sensitive, tasteful aesthetic
Ooooh, I'd stay away from those updates. The poor programming of Apple has finally caught up with the arrogance of their users with rather serious security flaw with the updater. Evidently, no-one thought it a good idea to use encryption of any sort for at least two generations of the operating system's update program - 'cuz there aren't, and never will be, any exploits for the Mac, y'see.
Intelligent people use the OS pioneering new technological, legal, ethical, and economic territory. People seeking careers also know how to program "ugly little squares." Ignorant elitists are mesmerized by all the shiny, round buttons and willing to pay a premium for the privilege.
Of course, comparing Macs with Linux boxes is like comparing Apples with computers...
University is where students should be exposed to radical (and that's not just far left) ideas
Of course - I think students should be exposed to ideas of all sorts as soon as they're capable of independent, rational thought. The difference is between being exposed to controversy and getting force-fed an ideology by a professor who controls the future of your education and career.
[...]Microsoft aren't capable of rolling out their own patches quickly enough[...]
Firstly, the grammar nazi in me will let this one slide. Anyone who finds what I'm so tempted to complain about get a cookie.
Secondly, Microsoft patches take a while to roll out because of testing. The patches must work perfectly and they must work perfectly on all systems. Open source fixes, although faster, don't have to go through as rigorous of testing, and should a patch cause further problems, there is no liability for lost profits and the like.
I doubt they would be able to move as quickly as google in the event of a real vulnerability.
Patching an e-mail system to avoid overlooking periods (the little dot at the end of sentences, sheesh) is a lot simpler than fixing the abuse of an originally innocuous function created over a decade ago in an obsolete image format. Google works with a rather nifty database program; Microsoft works with million-line operating systems under constant attack by every hacker on the internet.
So, yea, Google could probably get a patch off faster - the difference is between the misdelivery of e-mail and the crashing of the internet. (Slammer, anyone?)
Will I use bt to share music and movies? Sure, if they are free.
Free as in speech, or free as in beer? If it's the latter, it's copyright infringement - meaning taht, yes, "Sharing with your friends" is, indeed, "dirty."
Those [music and movies] that are free are worth much more than those I can't share.
Of course they are. That doesn't make sharing them legal, nor right. If they're "too expensive", don't buy them and let the free market do it's work.
A jumbo jet is also more valuable than a ticket to ride on one. It's just that it's harder to "infringe" the jet than it is a copyright.
How did this post get modded down? Nothing vulgar/wrong/over-controversial in it...
But to the point - this guy's making a group to find out who's mixing far-left (radical) politics with their lectures. An admirable goal, although politics of any kind should be kept from the lecture. (Barring classes on politics of course.)
It isn't really "fascism" because:
Correct me if I'm wrong, but it doesn't seem like he's trying to silence them, per se, but find out who they are.
Even if he does want to "silence" the "radicals", agendas from the far-left or far-right should be kept from the education system. Any kind of politics whatsoever is inappropriate in almost all cases, with the exception of some social studies/law classes.
Up until the last paragraph of your post, my respect for you quadrupled.:P
The point that the rich and poor often have vastly different medical problems (doxycycline versus lasik) is a very good point. Where I disagree is on the goals society should have - instead of focusing on treating the health problems of poverty, we should treat poverty itself. We should focus on making the poor rich so they could manufacture their own malaria drugs, i.e., teach a man to fish.
If nothing else, as long as the rich have not gained their wealth through illicit means, they should generally be free to spend their money as they please, advancing whatever goals they will. As the government takes on the role of a charity, people become apathetic - rather than donating their own money to fighting malaria/poverty/any other charitable cause, they begin to expect the government to do it for them. The rich see no need to further causes contrary to their own self interest, as the government already takes a considerable amount of their money to do jsut that. Individual morality becomes replaced with party politics unless charity is left to the individual.
I think the days of it mattering what the exact instruction set is are pretty much over.
Wrong. As you say, virtual-machine-esque stuff defines standard bytecodes for all platforms. However, I don't see a Java-based processor anywhere. Somewhere along the line, the high-level VM instructions must be converted to the native CPU instruction set, which actually runs the program.
As long as computers have CPUs, the instruction set will matter, as every program - VM or not - will have to use them.
Nobody is getting "screwed" by oil companies - consumers, gas stations, or anyone. Given the quantity of crude available and the demand for it, the price per barrel becomes exactly the price at which every barrel can be sold - no more, no less. If they charged any more per barrel - above this equilibrium - they'd have surplusses building up. If they charged any less, all the crude would be immediately bought up with people clamoring for more (at that price), and there would be shorages. Despite any propaganda about "record profits", the industry is competitive and the laissez-faire free market reaches a price so that there are neither shortages nor surpluses of crude at the going rate.
Gas stations overcharging you? A basic requisite for laissez-faire capitalism is the enforcement of the contract - in this case, the contract being for you to buy so many gallons at x price per gallon. The owner of the gas station obviously breached this contract by, in effect, charging you more than x. Hence, one of the legitimate functions of government under laissez-faire capitalism is the enforcement of contracts, so that issues like this do not occur.
You'll find homeless people in (mostly) capitalist America, socialist Germany, or (mostly) communist China. In fact, homelessness predates capitalism. All the homeless people "nowadays" were not forcefully evicted from their utopian dwellings by the free market - in fact, the opposite is often true. Price ceilings on apartment rents in New York, for example, force an apartment to go for a fraction of its value in an attempt to provide more affordable housing for people. In reality, it discourages people from building more apartments, and thus solving the problems of both price and quantity of housing. It also creates a shortage of housing - what only a handful of people may have wanted at $550/month, many will want at $200/month. Since no one will produce apartments knowing they will only get a fraction of their value in return, and even more people will now want apartments, interference with the market actually causes homelessness, not vice versa.
I will give you, however, that the Great Depression is a rather good argument against laissez-faire capitalism, although you hardly touch on it. I would argue that the Great Depression was not caused by market failure or some fundamental flaw in capitalism, but in the general naivete of the public at the time. People believed that stock prices had reached a "permenantly high plauteu", which fueled the purchase of stocks on credit (often, an investor had to pay only 10% of a stock's value up front). If people had the same knowledge of capitalism then as we do now, no-one would beleive that stocks can somehow remain at permanently elevated prices, and therefore, no one would provide the insane amounts of credit that caused loan defaults and bank failures when the market faltered.
I'm still waiting for the rich to fund profound things like treatments for malaria
You seem to have the "rich" confused with "instant social panacea".
Trickle-down refers to the idea that the rich very, very rarely horde all of their money in a mattress to never, ever spend any of it. Even if a "rich" person were, for some reason, to save 100% of his wealth and subsist off of dirt and grubs, this wealth would still trickle down.
As I'm sure you already know, it is common for people - be they rich or poor - to save their money in a bank. It is from these savings that banks are able to provide loans - i.e., what allows the non-rich to buy houses, cars, and other things. Or, more importantly, what provides entrepreneuers with the initial investment they need to create the next Big Thing, like this new-fangled blindness-cure-thingy. In other words, banks make the wealth hording of the rich both productive and useful to society, and help wealth to "trickle down."
Effects are more obvious if we assume that the rich spend some of their money - if it was spent, someone had to have received it. In my experience, very rarely do the rich buy only from the rich, who in turn buy only from the rich, who in turn buy only from the rich, and so forth - they eat at expensive restaurants where the waiters are most likely not rich, buy expensive cars made by blue-collar workers, and generally like to flaunt their worldly posessions - all to the benefit of the middle-class workers who actually produce the posessions being flaunted. Wealth diffuses from high concentrations to low concentrations - or "trickles down."
Another related point is that just because someone has more doesn't automatically mean someone else has less - wealth creation isn't a zero-sum game. There isn't a fixed amount of cash in the world that we all have to divvy up - wealth is actually created when an entrepreneur assembles the factors of production (like auto parts) into a finished good (like an auto). Although the sum of the parts may be worth x, the auto is worth more than x, for an auto is far more useful to the average consumer than the individual auto parts.
Long answer made short - "trickle down" is not some mystical process by which the rich will cure malaria. It's an economic concept explaining the distribution of wealth.
Bah. Stupid n00bs. I was in awe when my 80486 machine could, at long last and at great expense, support a whopping 550 MEGAbytes of FAT16 bliss! It was the size of a brick, and pretty dense, too, if I'm not mistaken. Of course now, I carry around more in a device so small that it's not a mere choking hazard, but an inhilation concern should anyone inhale too deeply around it.
As for cost, right now they're being used in conjunction with existing hard drives as extra large buffers, so that anything "written" to the HDD very rarely needs to cause it to spin up.
We have something that can take months and thousands of dollars to produce, or in the case of movies, years and millions of dollars, and price it such that those people who actually want it pay a small piece of the price it took to create it
This is what I'm talking about, and what I've always believed. This is also especially true with drug research. I just wanted to say the "information should be free" argument is crap without provoking the vehement and simultaneous hatred of every Slashdot denizen.
I think that 1$/song is VERY high considering that there are no physical manufacturing and distribution costs involved
Argh. It is such a common misconception that production cost is the sole determinant of sale price. It's not.
Something is worth what people will pay for it - no more, no less. It doesn't matter what it costs $100 (maybe more because it's biohazardous) to overnight elephant dung, nor does it matter that the costs of owning said elephant are even more enormous. That doesn't mean elephant dung is worth $100 - very few people in their right minds would pay for it. In fact, despite the costs of manufacturing and distributing elephant dung, it's value is, more or less, $0 USD.
If elephant dung was suddenly discovered to have the unique property of curing the avian flu, you can bet that lots of people would want it then. Using the jargon, there would be high demand for elephant dung. Considering how little of it is available (really, do you know where you can order some right now?) the going rate for elephant dung would be very high. This is because there is little supply to meet the demand with.
Eventually, those with half a brain would realize there's a fortune to be made farming elephant dung. In fact, a lot of people would. The market would be flooded with elephant dung, increasing supply. Because there is no longer a shortage, prices would fall, perhaps driving out those that least efficiently produce elephant dung. Eventually, a stable equilibrium price would be reached.
With music, lots of people want to hear from their favorite bands - high demand. An oligopoly (small handful) of corporations publish said music - low supply. That translates to music, DRM and all, being valued at the whopping price of $1 USD.
Slashdot Mirror
Does this mean we might be able download and run a Vista beta legally?
Depends on who "we" are. By making it "more public", Microsoft is probably referring to extending the beta to a handful of people who don't have the Microsoft Developer Network subscription required to get the legal beta. Odds are, they'll never have an open beta of Vista, but one just like they said - "more public."
So 2007 sometime, but why the fuck doesn't it do it NOW?
It *does* support it now. Or do you mean IE6? You're right - maybe they should be working on getting IE6 to support XMLHttpRequest() and PNG alpha transparency. Oh, wait, they are, and it's called IE7.
If you're having an aneurism, it's probably because your inferior browser doesn't support <sarcasm> tags. :D
Visual Studio is great. Besides being a fast, optimizing compiler, the fact that it lets you write your own resource files OR use a nifty editor, write native code OR use .NET or Java, compile code written in separate languages together into one executeable, and even whip out machine language in the middle of your higher-level program. Plus, it supports about a bajillion different processor architectures and 2005 has taken some steps to force good programming practices upon bad programmers. Feeding trolls is fun.
"[B]rowser extensions [...] can do a lot of what ActiveX could do"
ActiveX is "browser extensions."
Truth. Judge a program on its own merits.
So will Firefox users have any respect for IE7 as a capable browser (if it proves to be so)?
First of all, the fact that this is modded "funny" makes me want to cry. >.
Personally, I liked Firefox better than IE6, but like IE7 better than Firefox. Works well, looks purdy, hasn't crashed once. The "Phishing Filer"'s pretty neat, too.
Clearly, hackers do not supercede the best programmers
It all depends. Not checking buffers and blindly blitting bits everywhere is a sign of a novice programmer, and how many programs are broken - the difference between using strcpy() and strcpy_s(). Not a lot of skill on the programmer. Finding the overrun from a decompiled binary is infinitely more difficult, much less finding a way to exploit it. Much more skill on the hacker's part.
Of course, the reverse is also true - programming the Windows GDI to work with nearly every conceivable hardware, software, and driver configuration was/is a work of great difficulty. Yet, how skilled of a person did it take to put malevolent, non-aborting code in AbortProc() and cause the whole WMF scare? Not very. You were supposed to put code there; it just hadn't occured to anyone, hacker or otherwise, to put something evil there. Much more skill on the programmer's part.
Guess my point is "it all depends." Creation is not necessarily a greater work than destruction in coding.
Riiiiight. I just read (and commented on) a comment that says that someone got owned on the 'net by just browsing with IE7
I am currently using Internet Explorer 7 Beta 1 (version 7.0.5112.0). i've been surfing all sorts of websites, and haven't gotten pwn3d/h4x0r3d/what3v3r3d. Once again, anecdotal, but it's been the only browser on my machine since September of 2005.
It's a pretty nifty browser, by the way, with a much cleaner intwerface than Firefox (in my humble opinion). I used to use Firefox exclusively for the tabbed browsing, although IE7 seems to have implemented that better, too - though far be it from me to start a Kool-Aid drinker's feature list from the sheer, orgasmic joy of using the beta version of a new browser...
Training is an expense. Training is expendable.
Economically speaking, training is an investment in human capital. As with any other investment, like building new factories or installing better machines, expenditure in human capital (training) increases the productivity of the worker. Where this productivity increase offsets the cost of the initial investment, the employee will be trained.
Of course, in this case, the poster seems to be doing fine without training - working his @$$ off, but keeping the network secure and running, which is, after all, what he's paid for.
Although it's not exactly self-evident that a greater focus purely on stock price, ignoring all other business, financial, social, moral and environmental consequences is the direction we want to see higher-ups going in.
Of course it is. A share of stock is a share of ownership of a company; the price of a share and the value of a company are one-in-the-same. Share price is determined by how much the investor is willing to pay for a share, meaning a company's value is dependent on it's shareholders. Pursuing a higher share price means bettering the company. That's what you want the higher-ups doing, right?
Remember that a business doesn't have social responsibilities, per se. Citizens have social responsibilities; they use the institution of government as a tool to carry them out. A business is simply a way of producing something efficiently, so that no excess profits are made, consumers get a good deal, and resources aren't wasted - and as long as businesses remain competitive, they make fair profits, consumers get good deals, and nothing is wasted. The government worries about social responsibility through regulation, which is a Good Thing - if it was the job of the businesses to worry about social responsibility, don't you think they'd have slightly more sinister definition of "social responsibility" than you would? Let them seek their profits; let us decide what's right.
Don't for a second believe that the market for music and movies is a "free market." At the very least it is dominated by one gynormous bit of government interference, generally known as the copyright monopoly
Hrm. Here I thought you were going to make the obvious (and legitimate) complaint that the music publishing industry is a rather tight oligopoly, or that the labels create a monopsony (single buyer, like a monopoly is a single seller) kind of situation in which artists are forced to beg for contracts in exchange for getting their music heard. But instead, you chose to complain about a long-established and effective institution of innovation. And yes, "copyright monopoly" is redundant, because the simplest definition of a coypright is a monopoly on copying. Oh well.
You may believe that claptrap about copyright being the only way to "promote progress in science and the arts" but don't pretend that a "free market" has anything to do with it. It is a very tightly controlled market.
Never did I say copyright was the only way to promote progress in science and the arts. It's a tool to harness the profit motive of individuals who might otherwise hide away inventions as trade secrets. Or, in the case of the arts, copyrights are the only things ensuring artists make any profit whatsoever. If an artist could not copyright his work, the record lables wouldn't have to pay the artist anything to profit off copying his songs, in the same way that you wouldn't have to pay the record labels for copying their songs. There wouldn't be much revenue in the way of concerts, either - if there's nothing to stop other bands from playing those same songs, how many people do you think will pay to see the original?
As for the "free market" having "nothing to do with it", I suggest you read up on supply and demand, a topic you will read in the first page of the first chapter of any good economics textbook. Remember that regardless of government interference or industry collusion, people won't pay any more for music than what it's worth - especially if you remember that music, unlike food or water, is a luxury that people can do without the instant it gets too expensive.
Also consider that music piracy in the first place is an action of the free market.
Macs are for different thinkers.
I think they prefer to be called "special thinkers." They have feelings too, you insensitive clod.
The one thing the Apple had to make up for it's ugly GUI was it's specialized chipset that bucked every industry standard. This "feature" meant difficulty in programming, lack of third party support, and questionable performance compared even when compared to cheaper Intel chips.
Of course, I'm sure many people can see the "beauty" in beating a perfecftly good copy of Unix with an ugly stick until all the buttons are round. As for "unattractive squares should stick to Linux and Windows" - there is a an elegant simplicity in the power and speed of the command prompt, you can navigate all of Windows with a keyboard (I challenge anyone to show me where you cannot), and you can even make your Windows OS look like a freakin' Mac if you wanted.
Artists, fashion mavens, scientists, and other creative personalities can sit down with a MacBook Pro running the latest dot-update of Tiger and comprehend its sensitive, tasteful aesthetic
Ooooh, I'd stay away from those updates. The poor programming of Apple has finally caught up with the arrogance of their users with rather serious security flaw with the updater. Evidently, no-one thought it a good idea to use encryption of any sort for at least two generations of the operating system's update program - 'cuz there aren't, and never will be, any exploits for the Mac, y'see.
Intelligent people use the OS pioneering new technological, legal, ethical, and economic territory. People seeking careers also know how to program "ugly little squares." Ignorant elitists are mesmerized by all the shiny, round buttons and willing to pay a premium for the privilege.
Of course, comparing Macs with Linux boxes is like comparing Apples with computers...
University is where students should be exposed to radical (and that's not just far left) ideas
Of course - I think students should be exposed to ideas of all sorts as soon as they're capable of independent, rational thought. The difference is between being exposed to controversy and getting force-fed an ideology by a professor who controls the future of your education and career.
[...]Microsoft aren't capable of rolling out their own patches quickly enough[...]
Firstly, the grammar nazi in me will let this one slide. Anyone who finds what I'm so tempted to complain about get a cookie.
Secondly, Microsoft patches take a while to roll out because of testing. The patches must work perfectly and they must work perfectly on all systems. Open source fixes, although faster, don't have to go through as rigorous of testing, and should a patch cause further problems, there is no liability for lost profits and the like.
I doubt they would be able to move as quickly as google in the event of a real vulnerability.
Patching an e-mail system to avoid overlooking periods (the little dot at the end of sentences, sheesh) is a lot simpler than fixing the abuse of an originally innocuous function created over a decade ago in an obsolete image format. Google works with a rather nifty database program; Microsoft works with million-line operating systems under constant attack by every hacker on the internet.
So, yea, Google could probably get a patch off faster - the difference is between the misdelivery of e-mail and the crashing of the internet. (Slammer, anyone?)
Will I use bt to share music and movies? Sure, if they are free.
Free as in speech, or free as in beer? If it's the latter, it's copyright infringement - meaning taht, yes, "Sharing with your friends" is, indeed, "dirty."
Those [music and movies] that are free are worth much more than those I can't share.
Of course they are. That doesn't make sharing them legal, nor right. If they're "too expensive", don't buy them and let the free market do it's work.
A jumbo jet is also more valuable than a ticket to ride on one. It's just that it's harder to "infringe" the jet than it is a copyright.
How did this post get modded down? Nothing vulgar/wrong/over-controversial in it...
But to the point - this guy's making a group to find out who's mixing far-left (radical) politics with their lectures. An admirable goal, although politics of any kind should be kept from the lecture. (Barring classes on politics of course.)
It isn't really "fascism" because:
Up until the last paragraph of your post, my respect for you quadrupled. :P
The point that the rich and poor often have vastly different medical problems (doxycycline versus lasik) is a very good point. Where I disagree is on the goals society should have - instead of focusing on treating the health problems of poverty, we should treat poverty itself. We should focus on making the poor rich so they could manufacture their own malaria drugs, i.e., teach a man to fish.
If nothing else, as long as the rich have not gained their wealth through illicit means, they should generally be free to spend their money as they please, advancing whatever goals they will. As the government takes on the role of a charity, people become apathetic - rather than donating their own money to fighting malaria/poverty/any other charitable cause, they begin to expect the government to do it for them. The rich see no need to further causes contrary to their own self interest, as the government already takes a considerable amount of their money to do jsut that. Individual morality becomes replaced with party politics unless charity is left to the individual.
I think the days of it mattering what the exact instruction set is are pretty much over.
Wrong. As you say, virtual-machine-esque stuff defines standard bytecodes for all platforms. However, I don't see a Java-based processor anywhere. Somewhere along the line, the high-level VM instructions must be converted to the native CPU instruction set, which actually runs the program.
As long as computers have CPUs, the instruction set will matter, as every program - VM or not - will have to use them.
How is it that a computer programming major can't type? You know where the "shift" key is, right?
Or, are you an ignorant nobody with an agenda to push?
This is retarded, but I'll bite:
I will give you, however, that the Great Depression is a rather good argument against laissez-faire capitalism, although you hardly touch on it. I would argue that the Great Depression was not caused by market failure or some fundamental flaw in capitalism, but in the general naivete of the public at the time. People believed that stock prices had reached a "permenantly high plauteu", which fueled the purchase of stocks on credit (often, an investor had to pay only 10% of a stock's value up front). If people had the same knowledge of capitalism then as we do now, no-one would beleive that stocks can somehow remain at permanently elevated prices, and therefore, no one would provide the insane amounts of credit that caused loan defaults and bank failures when the market faltered.
I'm still waiting for the rich to fund profound things like treatments for malaria
You seem to have the "rich" confused with "instant social panacea".
Trickle-down refers to the idea that the rich very, very rarely horde all of their money in a mattress to never, ever spend any of it. Even if a "rich" person were, for some reason, to save 100% of his wealth and subsist off of dirt and grubs, this wealth would still trickle down.
As I'm sure you already know, it is common for people - be they rich or poor - to save their money in a bank. It is from these savings that banks are able to provide loans - i.e., what allows the non-rich to buy houses, cars, and other things. Or, more importantly, what provides entrepreneuers with the initial investment they need to create the next Big Thing, like this new-fangled blindness-cure-thingy. In other words, banks make the wealth hording of the rich both productive and useful to society, and help wealth to "trickle down."
Effects are more obvious if we assume that the rich spend some of their money - if it was spent, someone had to have received it. In my experience, very rarely do the rich buy only from the rich, who in turn buy only from the rich, who in turn buy only from the rich, and so forth - they eat at expensive restaurants where the waiters are most likely not rich, buy expensive cars made by blue-collar workers, and generally like to flaunt their worldly posessions - all to the benefit of the middle-class workers who actually produce the posessions being flaunted. Wealth diffuses from high concentrations to low concentrations - or "trickles down."
Another related point is that just because someone has more doesn't automatically mean someone else has less - wealth creation isn't a zero-sum game. There isn't a fixed amount of cash in the world that we all have to divvy up - wealth is actually created when an entrepreneur assembles the factors of production (like auto parts) into a finished good (like an auto). Although the sum of the parts may be worth x, the auto is worth more than x, for an auto is far more useful to the average consumer than the individual auto parts.
Long answer made short - "trickle down" is not some mystical process by which the rich will cure malaria. It's an economic concept explaining the distribution of wealth.
Bah. Stupid n00bs. I was in awe when my 80486 machine could, at long last and at great expense, support a whopping 550 MEGAbytes of FAT16 bliss! It was the size of a brick, and pretty dense, too, if I'm not mistaken. Of course now, I carry around more in a device so small that it's not a mere choking hazard, but an inhilation concern should anyone inhale too deeply around it.
As for cost, right now they're being used in conjunction with existing hard drives as extra large buffers, so that anything "written" to the HDD very rarely needs to cause it to spin up.
We have something that can take months and thousands of dollars to produce, or in the case of movies, years and millions of dollars, and price it such that those people who actually want it pay a small piece of the price it took to create it
This is what I'm talking about, and what I've always believed. This is also especially true with drug research. I just wanted to say the "information should be free" argument is crap without provoking the vehement and simultaneous hatred of every Slashdot denizen.
I think that 1$/song is VERY high considering that there are no physical manufacturing and distribution costs involved
Argh. It is such a common misconception that production cost is the sole determinant of sale price. It's not.
Something is worth what people will pay for it - no more, no less. It doesn't matter what it costs $100 (maybe more because it's biohazardous) to overnight elephant dung, nor does it matter that the costs of owning said elephant are even more enormous. That doesn't mean elephant dung is worth $100 - very few people in their right minds would pay for it. In fact, despite the costs of manufacturing and distributing elephant dung, it's value is, more or less, $0 USD.
Supply and demand determine sale price.
If elephant dung was suddenly discovered to have the unique property of curing the avian flu, you can bet that lots of people would want it then. Using the jargon, there would be high demand for elephant dung. Considering how little of it is available (really, do you know where you can order some right now?) the going rate for elephant dung would be very high. This is because there is little supply to meet the demand with.
Eventually, those with half a brain would realize there's a fortune to be made farming elephant dung. In fact, a lot of people would. The market would be flooded with elephant dung, increasing supply. Because there is no longer a shortage, prices would fall, perhaps driving out those that least efficiently produce elephant dung. Eventually, a stable equilibrium price would be reached.
With music, lots of people want to hear from their favorite bands - high demand. An oligopoly (small handful) of corporations publish said music - low supply. That translates to music, DRM and all, being valued at the whopping price of $1 USD.
[...] [I]t's a sign of the coming apacolypse.
It depends. Is Slashdot intellectualizing people's entertainment, or retarding their news?