Re:All I ask from my manager:
on
Managing Einsteins
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
A few years ago, I stole a question from a job interview (in which I was participating as an interviewer). I now ask it of every "technical" candidate I interview:
"What do you want from your manager"
The actual answer to this question is not all that important. What is important is that the answer is not a cliche (that what they want is something that the candidate _will_ be able to get from the person in my organisation who will manage them) and most of all, it must show that they have some idea of what a manager does that helps them.
In other words, if someone cannot see something of value in the role of their manger then they will be difficult to manage, geek, einstein or asshole. The "value" that shows the most insight is the filtering of the mundane (or inconvenient)so that they can get on with the "work", whilst accurately reporting progress to cheque signers.
Can someone please explain why an artist should be entitled to income from recorded music? (and for music here one can substitute "art")
Now before you all jump down my throat, think about it for a minute. Before Edison, there was no recorded music and yet artists still made a living (ok, only some of them, just like today). Perhaps many less of them, but then there were many less consumers of music. The reasons for the increase in consumers of music are many, from increased econimic capacity through to the existence of recorded music to give the consumers a taste of the material. So in at least one sense, recorded music actually is _advertising_. The problem is that supply and demand has ceased to operate. Sure demand may well be very high, but supply (without copying) is restricted without cause, that is, there is no scarcity. Well at least it is my contention that there is no scarcity and hence there should be no cost (air is free:-)
Now before you say, but how does a musician make a living, well the answer is performance. Here, supply is restricted, there are only so many tickets to venue X on Tuesday the fifteenth, so if you want to enjoy the performance you must pay. This makes good economic sense. If you are popular enough to fill a stadium then you will be rich. If not then you will be a gigging band who does pubs and cabaret and you will be poor. Just like today, except that the big bands are even richer from the misallocation of resources due to recordings.
Die, or Live. Sink or swim. ON THEIR MERITS. Their attitude should be to reject "embrace and extend" and open up all their API to standards conformance, and use standards for any future development. Then the excellence of their programs will allow them to gain the effeciencies that result from being driven out of markets where their products _actually_ suck.
One of the "necessary" elements of private property is the ability to demonstrate loss when another uses it. I am not suggesting that this is a "sufficent" test for the existence of property but it is necessary. This loss results from the ability to "exclude" the rightful owner from the enjoyment of their property. Exlcusion. If one takes a copy of something, one does not exclude the one from whom a copy is taken from the ability to enjoy their thing. If this is the case, then what is being enjoyed _is not property_ (my contention).
Your problem is not with copyright per se, but with the assigning of property to the output of intellect (you identify Digital Content but that is just one instance). You are right. It is problematic, but _because_ of the existence of property rights in the output of intellect (ie intellectual property or IP), not because of the vehicle through which that right is delivered, copyright.
It is IP that is bunk, it is a horrible mistake of history from which we are only now starting to endure the pain. I laud the RIAA, MPAA or other "copyright holders" doing everything they can to pursue their rights. They are only serving to accelerate the disintegration of IP because eventually their customers will cut them out of the equation and go directly to source.
You see, the only true value in authorship (a deliberately neutral term) is in the creation of repute. One (person or company) who generates repute by good work will be funded (even speculatively) by the consumers of the material that they may produce in future. This is the way Beehoven made a living. He was patronised by the "consumers" of the day. He also made money fromspecific performance (well if not him then certainly other musicians). Hmm, performance. Yep that's right. $60 for Madonna in concert is fine but even $1 more than the economic cost of a recording is too much. It is a misallocation of resources. It is paying for something that has already been paid for. This is (technically) inneficient and, without the intervention of a legal fiction (IP), would be impossible to maintain. Property on the other hand can be maintained without recourse to the law. We only need the law to try and ensure that the protection of property does not lead to unacceptable social costs (the state of nature of which Hobbes speaks).
A bit of research on Ebert will reveal some remarkable things. His "old friend" Russ Meyer, is in fact so old that Ebert wrote "Beyond the Valley of the Dolls" and with a nom de plume wrote "Up!" and "Beneath the Valley of the Ultravixens". I seem to recall another collaberation but cannot be sure. I find his reviews reliable, not that I agree, but that what he has to say helps me picka film to see (or not).
The whole inescapability of black holes is somewhat spurious. There is (and I think my source here is a book called "The Physics of Science Fiction") a fairly laymans explanation of how if one can "blow off" more than half ones mass when within the event horizon then one will escape the event horizon. This is at least what the maths shows. Clearly existence alone is pretty tricky within the event horizon, but it would seem more feasible for particles (although how one achieves the "blowing off" is unclear, although it just means projecting the mass towards the singularity) than organisms or vehicles so it might still be consistent with all of the above:-)
As many others have said. The shared calendar resource in Outlook/Exchange is a killer. It really does make organising your day easier. Easily $70 easier. Having said that I am loathe to use something that parses the web page version of the calendar, if thats what it does, which seems possible given the need for OWA.
I soooo agree. I used to work for a guy who was a bit of a genius when it came to analog electronics. (Television design history, knowing the part catalogs off by heart etc etc). Anyway his standard reply to anyone who wanted to sell this "super quality cable" was "Can you hear grass grow?" to which the only honest answer is no, "Then you can't hear the difference between this and brand X" At which point he just bought lots of good multicore copper and saved mucho deniro.
Lisa tries helping him with math by asking "If you have 15 BB's, and I take 5, what do you have left?" Bart aptly replies "One less sister!" and raises a fist into the air.
Which in turn is an old joke but one of the best derivatives of this was delivered by Sid Snot (Kenny Everett) when the teach asks if you had 8 lollies and I took half of them what would I have? To which he replies two broken arms, nobody takes half my lollies and gets away with it. Ah the old ones are often the best.
I mean "Barrier to Entry" in a technical sense. I am not suggesting that someone with a thousand dollar computer cant afford $25, but that having to pay 25 bucks is a barrier when the itch they are scratching can be itched for less.
Now I reckon that if you put the "foil" in a tray CD player and just put a normal CD on top, it would spinup just fine most of the time.
One wonders the extent to which they will try and engineer the requirement for the addapter into the system, if homebrew adapters (even if the above idea wont work) are frowned upon then we know for which side of that fence the system is designed.
Personally I reckon they'ed be happy if they could get it to work adapter free, we shall have to wait and see.
IAN(really)AL. But, it is a question of how a lawyer will construe (or more importantly a court) the sentence. Now legal construction is a non trivial area, but influential in this example is that the entire phrase quoted is one sentence. This suggests that the "unless the Device has a separate license for the product" clause relates to all of the preceding sentence including the part you have highlighted.
This suggests that VNC on a box that is Windows might be construed as OK.
There are many people who will use "cracked" software (take cracked to mean made available by means other than as the author intended). And yes many of those people will try and use the channels of "legitimate" users to get upgrades, new keys, whatever.
What is important is that most of these people will not pay for the software if it is made inaccessible to them. This is the reason why the software industry has been pretty soft on places like China. If they force compliance they will just lose users because the people in question find the price (whatever it's level) a barrier to entry.
Look at a given game. You like it, you install it and you find the "crack" to make it forever playable. Play it lots and then find that the software stops working, you are miffed, (since no new crack can be found) but because its just a game, you move on to the next crackable game, or better yet an 80% as good freeware version. This _is_ the way a lot of software consumers work. A specific piece of software is worth nothing to them whilst "accessable" alternatives exist.
So there are two alternatives. Make all variants inaccessible (and oh how the media industry is burning cash to do that) or change the pricing model so that until you have a viable paying user base the software does not exist.
Oh and in case you didn't notice, Free Software falls into the latter category (really. It does).
The use of elastic bands as the projectile usually escallates to the slingshot variant pretty quickly. In which circumstances, the bottom couple of centimetres of Mum's washing up gloves made an excellent spring for the elastic (and tech drawing compass if you had to "camofkage" the frame) powered slingshot. I understand this to be pretty universal.
However due to some of the native fauna in Oz, specifically bottlebrush whose dried up flower casings and their orientation in clumps on the branches made for easy harvesting for an excellent, and abundant,source of ammunition. They are hard and woody about 3mm "opened spheres". However the slingshot had to be upgraded to a "glove gun" as we called it. the finger of the same washing up gloves (much harder to acquire undetected) securely fastent to a piece of narrow guage PVC pipe (8-12mm). Load up a few (less than 10) of the seeds, draw back the finger tip of the glove and let rip.
That all involved still have their eyesight is somewhat of a miracle.
Of course this is all fiction and one would never suggest that anyone should try something so stupid.
I agree with you 100%, I am not _endorsing_ the software as art approach, I just think it's the reality. The problem is that there are so many ways of skinning the proverbial cat in software. The constraints that exist in the engineering disciplines remove the art from the "structural elements". In software we don't even have the strucutral elements (well we do have some, for example we all know how to open a socket and there ain't much art in how they get used) so it is all art (and not just the cladding on the outside of a bridge pylon or the colour of a suspoension cable).
Mundie's argument is that the artificial cost is necessary for software to get produced, because there will otherwise be no incentive for the producers to produce software. The thing he ignores, though, is that obviously the software does get produced.
But the real point about the economic model of free software is that a $10,000 itch can have $9,999 spent to scratch it and the world is a better place (albeit by only $1). Now the truth is that now anyone else with this itch can scratch it for free, saving $10,000 per time (assuming the itch has the same price for all, even if not the net utility increase is the total value of the itch for all equivalently itchy people).
If a single persons itch is not suffiencent to fund a free software solution then it takes a critical mass of itchy people to fund it (either in real terms or to provide the scope for someone to be able to make a living out of doing the implementation and generating revenue in some ancillary way, such as support)
In order to teach CS as engineering it needs to be a subject that can be taught as engineering. Which it is not. Draw a corollary between building a bridge and builind a software system. The comparison is illuminating as to why CS is just that "science" and not engineering.
Indeed in my opinion, it is more like art than science even. But that's another story.
You give digital content to someone (and by give I mean deliver in usable form) and the problem is if they make a _copy_ they still have the original. That is, the natural way of things is that the content can be distributed with loss to the people who have the content.
To couch the attempts to stop this in terms of rights is futile. It is solely within the realm of legal fiction that any such "right" must be couched. The car analogy is perfect because it shows the facile argument that IP prponents use to justify their position is flawed. If the theif takes the care then you lose the amenity of the car. There is loss. If the theif takes your copy of the content then you lose the amenity of the content. There is loss. Copying content is not the same.
Now don't misunderstand. As far as I am concerned IP does not exist, but that is unimportant for my point here. What is important is the DRM that persists in portraying copying of content as theft is doomed to fail because COPYING IS NOT THEFT (in the context of loss of amenity in which theft is by necessity placed) and so the idea of "managing these rights" is just stoopid.
Re:The lack of localization of the net
on
Browsing Alone
·
· Score: 2
Whilst I agree that a significant portion of our lives is "local", I look at the last 10 years or so of my Grandmother's life. She became increasingly isolated because all her friends were dying and since there was no "local" community left (ie community: people with common attitudes, interests or life experiences) she became increasingly housebound and withdrawn.
I will never have that problem exactly because of the lack of geographical localization of the net, I wil be able to find the critical mass to find community even if I have to enjoin people from all over the world. NOw whilst that in itself won't necessarily get me out of the house it will keep my mind active which is the critical step on getting me out of the house, so...
I guess my criticism of the posters point is that the vehicle of the internet does provide for localisation through at least, www.mysuburb.hostingcompany.tld and then search engines so community can be established with geographically proximate (or even interested) persons and it certainly has a much greater benefit of finding community where the local area cannot.
And will you be using derivatives to ensure a fair price for your "surplus"? What about the thousand year drought that screws you over beyond the capacity of your savings? Will you have insurance? The "industrial" input into the products you will use to be "self sufficient" are extensive. You even identify that the Man will subsidise you out of the revenue of the "system" from which you have chosen to opt out. Will you use a road, a hospital (although since you are american the last one is probably not relevant). What about the education of your children?
I find this notion of getting back to basics absurd (just like indigenous people wanting to have the rights pre-industrialisation whilst enjoying the benefits of industialisation). Don't get me wrong, I believe in living a simple life, I do not expect annual holidays overseas, new cars every few years nor an annual fasion spree. I am accumulating capital from which I expect to generate a moderate return (4 - 8% inflation adjusted) to generate a wage of the order of the average worker (but without having to pay for rent or a mortgage). Anything I do for income above that is (as they say) "money for jam". I will participate in the industrial economy the fruits of which I crave, can anyone spell "internet" and TV and having a safe car to drive my kids to play rugby or netball or cricket or to participate in nippers. BUT this is not "self sufficiency" I believe that big power stations and mass production _is_ more efficient (my measure is the net amount of my earnings that I have to put into getting these services) and that technology _can_ (not all tech) improve my lot.
One should always be concerned when ones ideals are embodied in the central premise of a seventies sitcom - "The Good Life" (BBC) highlights all the inconsistencies of which I speak.
Thankfully I will no longer have to deal with Xfile zealots whining on about "We'll you just never know".
The problem with the Xfiles was that at the heart of it's fundamental premise was a contradiction. They existed in "our" universe, but shit happened that was total fantasy. As a result, science would always fail to explain what was happening because it was bound by the rules of the real universe but the "other side" of the dramatic tension, was not. This really annoyed the shit out of me. I mean it _REALLY_ annoyed me, to the point that I could just never watch it.
I think the comedy analysis with Dallas was quite pertinent. Xfiles was soap opera and nothing more. I have never found a soap opera compelling (unless you count Chances in the last series or so, but then they got canned with funding for another 12 episodes or something and so that just got bizarre!). BTW I would argue that Bab5 was not soap (definitely) and that shows like space 1999, dr who, start trek, stargate (not all are series I like) whilst not necessarily "dramtically complex" are not soap opera either.
Even so it is 5 - 10% of v which then gets squared (which makes a _big_ difference)
Re:Advantages of a single currency (or not!)
on
The Euro
·
· Score: 2
Government has essentially two levers by which they control the "heat" in the economic engine. Fiscal policy and Monetary policy. Most governments have abrogated the use of fiscal policy as a means for controlling the economy for a number of reasons and so in most countries (and I use the word in terms of areas governed by a single monetary policy) governments are resrticted to using monetary policy to control the economy. Even further, in a lot of countries they leave the detemrination of interest rates (the handle on the lever) to some external independent body (eg the Federal Reserve in the US)
Anyway, if one is to suggest that the same monetary policy is appropriate for Greece and Germany, or Italy and Holland, then methinks they are fooling themselves. EMU is folly. I am not predicting disaster but staying out of EMU is good for _lots_ of reasons. A single monetary policy (for that is what EMU is all about) is really only appropriate when the cultural forces that determine social utility can be aligned in such a way thet there is some homogeneity of purpose amoingst all those affected by the policy. When the policy forces major regional problems as will happen if things go pear shaped in EMU, then things can get quite unpleasant.
In Australia and the UK (at least) there is the concept of a Master of Science which is a degree program (usually over 1 year full time or two years part time) that provides people with a degree in something a certification in Science (and predominantly Computer Science in my experience). I know for a fact that MSc courses in Oz will provide admission to computer professionals who do not have an undergraduate degree, but I am not sure how much professional experience is required, I was tutoring them not admitting them:-). I cannot comment for sure on whether the UK does the same wrt to non undergraduates.
Often these degrees are full fee paying (this matters in the UK and Oz since most tertiary education does not have the same idea of tuition fees as the US).
I can only endorse tose who present he dea that a degre ecourse is more than checking off the boxes on a "I can work in this industry" checklist. If you can afford it I would think that a year off to do such a program (even overseas:-) would be an excellent idea. It would meet your goal of achieving the degree in one year and it might even be fun
For me, I love to see how authors deal with the overpowering effect of technology. For this reason I love Herbert's Dune. About 10,000 years in the future, the problems of space travel, nuclear (and more powerful) weapons and computers [how could he know how wise that choice was back in 1967] are dealt with so elegantly that the human interaction is centre stage which is so often not the case in SF.
Slashdot Mirror
A few years ago, I stole a question from a job interview (in which I was participating as an interviewer). I now ask it of every "technical" candidate I interview:
"What do you want from your manager"
The actual answer to this question is not all that important. What is important is that the answer is not a cliche (that what they want is something that the candidate _will_ be able to get from the person in my organisation who will manage them) and most of all, it must show that they have some idea of what a manager does that helps them.
In other words, if someone cannot see something of value in the role of their manger then they will be difficult to manage, geek, einstein or asshole. The "value" that shows the most insight is the filtering of the mundane (or inconvenient)so that they can get on with the "work", whilst accurately reporting progress to cheque signers.
$0.02
Can someone please explain why an artist should be entitled to income from recorded music? (and for music here one can substitute "art")
:-)
Now before you all jump down my throat, think about it for a minute. Before Edison, there was no recorded music and yet artists still made a living (ok, only some of them, just like today). Perhaps many less of them, but then there were many less consumers of music. The reasons for the increase in consumers of music are many, from increased econimic capacity through to the existence of recorded music to give the consumers a taste of the material. So in at least one sense, recorded music actually is _advertising_. The problem is that supply and demand has ceased to operate. Sure demand may well be very high, but supply (without copying) is restricted without cause, that is, there is no scarcity. Well at least it is my contention that there is no scarcity and hence there should be no cost (air is free
Now before you say, but how does a musician make a living, well the answer is performance. Here, supply is restricted, there are only so many tickets to venue X on Tuesday the fifteenth, so if you want to enjoy the performance you must pay. This makes good economic sense. If you are popular enough to fill a stadium then you will be rich. If not then you will be a gigging band who does pubs and cabaret and you will be poor. Just like today, except that the big bands are even richer from the misallocation of resources due to recordings.
I cannot see this arrangement continuing.
Die, or Live. Sink or swim. ON THEIR MERITS. Their attitude should be to reject "embrace and extend" and open up all their API to standards conformance, and use standards for any future development. Then the excellence of their programs will allow them to gain the effeciencies that result from being driven out of markets where their products _actually_ suck.
One of the "necessary" elements of private property is the ability to demonstrate loss when another uses it. I am not suggesting that this is a "sufficent" test for the existence of property but it is necessary. This loss results from the ability to "exclude" the rightful owner from the enjoyment of their property. Exlcusion. If one takes a copy of something, one does not exclude the one from whom a copy is taken from the ability to enjoy their thing. If this is the case, then what is being enjoyed _is not property_ (my contention).
Your problem is not with copyright per se, but with the assigning of property to the output of intellect (you identify Digital Content but that is just one instance). You are right. It is problematic, but _because_ of the existence of property rights in the output of intellect (ie intellectual property or IP), not because of the vehicle through which that right is delivered, copyright.
It is IP that is bunk, it is a horrible mistake of history from which we are only now starting to endure the pain. I laud the RIAA, MPAA or other "copyright holders" doing everything they can to pursue their rights. They are only serving to accelerate the disintegration of IP because eventually their customers will cut them out of the equation and go directly to source.
You see, the only true value in authorship (a deliberately neutral term) is in the creation of repute. One (person or company) who generates repute by good work will be funded (even speculatively) by the consumers of the material that they may produce in future. This is the way Beehoven made a living. He was patronised by the "consumers" of the day. He also made money fromspecific performance (well if not him then certainly other musicians). Hmm, performance. Yep that's right. $60 for Madonna in concert is fine but even $1 more than the economic cost of a recording is too much. It is a misallocation of resources. It is paying for something that has already been paid for. This is (technically) inneficient and, without the intervention of a legal fiction (IP), would be impossible to maintain. Property on the other hand can be maintained without recourse to the law. We only need the law to try and ensure that the protection of property does not lead to unacceptable social costs (the state of nature of which Hobbes speaks).
A bit of research on Ebert will reveal some remarkable things. His "old friend" Russ Meyer, is in fact so old that Ebert wrote "Beyond the Valley of the Dolls" and with a nom de plume wrote "Up!" and "Beneath the Valley of the Ultravixens". I seem to recall another collaberation but cannot be sure. I find his reviews reliable, not that I agree, but that what he has to say helps me picka film to see (or not).
The whole inescapability of black holes is somewhat spurious. There is (and I think my source here is a book called "The Physics of Science Fiction") a fairly laymans explanation of how if one can "blow off" more than half ones mass when within the event horizon then one will escape the event horizon. This is at least what the maths shows. Clearly existence alone is pretty tricky within the event horizon, but it would seem more feasible for particles (although how one achieves the "blowing off" is unclear, although it just means projecting the mass towards the singularity) than organisms or vehicles so it might still be consistent with all of the above :-)
As many others have said. The shared calendar resource in Outlook/Exchange is a killer. It really does make organising your day easier. Easily $70 easier. Having said that I am loathe to use something that parses the web page version of the calendar, if thats what it does, which seems possible given the need for OWA.
I soooo agree. I used to work for a guy who was a bit of a genius when it came to analog electronics. (Television design history, knowing the part catalogs off by heart etc etc). Anyway his standard reply to anyone who wanted to sell this "super quality cable" was "Can you hear grass grow?" to which the only honest answer is no, "Then you can't hear the difference between this and brand X" At which point he just bought lots of good multicore copper and saved mucho deniro.
Lisa tries helping him with math by asking "If you have 15 BB's, and I take 5, what do you have left?" Bart aptly replies "One less sister!" and raises a fist into the air.
Which in turn is an old joke but one of the best derivatives of this was delivered by Sid Snot (Kenny Everett) when the teach asks if you had 8 lollies and I took half of them what would I have? To which he replies two broken arms, nobody takes half my lollies and gets away with it. Ah the old ones are often the best.
I mean "Barrier to Entry" in a technical sense. I am not suggesting that someone with a thousand dollar computer cant afford $25, but that having to pay 25 bucks is a barrier when the itch they are scratching can be itched for less.
Now I reckon that if you put the "foil" in a tray CD player and just put a normal CD on top, it would spinup just fine most of the time.
One wonders the extent to which they will try and engineer the requirement for the addapter into the system, if homebrew adapters (even if the above idea wont work) are frowned upon then we know for which side of that fence the system is designed.
Personally I reckon they'ed be happy if they could get it to work adapter free, we shall have to wait and see.
IAN(really)AL. But, it is a question of how a lawyer will construe (or more importantly a court) the sentence. Now legal construction is a non trivial area, but influential in this example is that the entire phrase quoted is one sentence. This suggests that the "unless the Device has a separate license for the product" clause relates to all of the preceding sentence including the part you have highlighted.
This suggests that VNC on a box that is Windows might be construed as OK.
There are many people who will use "cracked" software (take cracked to mean made available by means other than as the author intended). And yes many of those people will try and use the channels of "legitimate" users to get upgrades, new keys, whatever.
What is important is that most of these people will not pay for the software if it is made inaccessible to them. This is the reason why the software industry has been pretty soft on places like China. If they force compliance they will just lose users because the people in question find the price (whatever it's level) a barrier to entry.
Look at a given game. You like it, you install it and you find the "crack" to make it forever playable. Play it lots and then find that the software stops working, you are miffed, (since no new crack can be found) but because its just a game, you move on to the next crackable game, or better yet an 80% as good freeware version. This _is_ the way a lot of software consumers work. A specific piece of software is worth nothing to them whilst "accessable" alternatives exist.
So there are two alternatives. Make all variants inaccessible (and oh how the media industry is burning cash to do that) or change the pricing model so that until you have a viable paying user base the software does not exist.
Oh and in case you didn't notice, Free Software falls into the latter category (really. It does).
The use of elastic bands as the projectile usually escallates to the slingshot variant pretty quickly. In which circumstances, the bottom couple of centimetres of Mum's washing up gloves made an excellent spring for the elastic (and tech drawing compass if you had to "camofkage" the frame) powered slingshot. I understand this to be pretty universal.
However due to some of the native fauna in Oz, specifically bottlebrush whose dried up flower casings and their orientation in clumps on the branches made for easy harvesting for an excellent, and abundant,source of ammunition. They are hard and woody about 3mm "opened spheres". However the slingshot had to be upgraded to a "glove gun" as we called it. the finger of the same washing up gloves (much harder to acquire undetected) securely fastent to a piece of narrow guage PVC pipe (8-12mm). Load up a few (less than 10) of the seeds, draw back the finger tip of the glove and let rip.
That all involved still have their eyesight is somewhat of a miracle.
Of course this is all fiction and one would never suggest that anyone should try something so stupid.
I agree with you 100%, I am not _endorsing_ the software as art approach, I just think it's the reality. The problem is that there are so many ways of skinning the proverbial cat in software. The constraints that exist in the engineering disciplines remove the art from the "structural elements". In software we don't even have the strucutral elements (well we do have some, for example we all know how to open a socket and there ain't much art in how they get used) so it is all art (and not just the cladding on the outside of a bridge pylon or the colour of a suspoension cable).
Mundie's argument is that the artificial cost is necessary for software to get produced, because there will otherwise be no incentive for the producers to produce software. The thing he ignores, though, is that obviously the software does get produced.
But the real point about the economic model of free software is that a $10,000 itch can have $9,999 spent to scratch it and the world is a better place (albeit by only $1). Now the truth is that now anyone else with this itch can scratch it for free, saving $10,000 per time (assuming the itch has the same price for all, even if not the net utility increase is the total value of the itch for all equivalently itchy people).
If a single persons itch is not suffiencent to fund a free software solution then it takes a critical mass of itchy people to fund it (either in real terms or to provide the scope for someone to be able to make a living out of doing the implementation and generating revenue in some ancillary way, such as support)
In order to teach CS as engineering it needs to be a subject that can be taught as engineering. Which it is not. Draw a corollary between building a bridge and builind a software system. The comparison is illuminating as to why CS is just that "science" and not engineering.
Indeed in my opinion, it is more like art than science even. But that's another story.
You give digital content to someone (and by give I mean deliver in usable form) and the problem is if they make a _copy_ they still have the original. That is, the natural way of things is that the content can be distributed with loss to the people who have the content.
To couch the attempts to stop this in terms of rights is futile. It is solely within the realm of legal fiction that any such "right" must be couched. The car analogy is perfect because it shows the facile argument that IP prponents use to justify their position is flawed. If the theif takes the care then you lose the amenity of the car. There is loss. If the theif takes your copy of the content then you lose the amenity of the content. There is loss. Copying content is not the same.
Now don't misunderstand. As far as I am concerned IP does not exist, but that is unimportant for my point here. What is important is the DRM that persists in portraying copying of content as theft is doomed to fail because COPYING IS NOT THEFT (in the context of loss of amenity in which theft is by necessity placed) and so the idea of "managing these rights" is just stoopid.
Whilst I agree that a significant portion of our lives is "local", I look at the last 10 years or so of my Grandmother's life. She became increasingly isolated because all her friends were dying and since there was no "local" community left (ie community: people with common attitudes, interests or life experiences) she became increasingly housebound and withdrawn.
I will never have that problem exactly because of the lack of geographical localization of the net, I wil be able to find the critical mass to find community even if I have to enjoin people from all over the world. NOw whilst that in itself won't necessarily get me out of the house it will keep my mind active which is the critical step on getting me out of the house, so...
I guess my criticism of the posters point is that the vehicle of the internet does provide for localisation through at least, www.mysuburb.hostingcompany.tld and then search engines so community can be established with geographically proximate (or even interested) persons and it certainly has a much greater benefit of finding community where the local area cannot.
And will you be using derivatives to ensure a fair price for your "surplus"? What about the thousand year drought that screws you over beyond the capacity of your savings? Will you have insurance? The "industrial" input into the products you will use to be "self sufficient" are extensive. You even identify that the Man will subsidise you out of the revenue of the "system" from which you have chosen to opt out. Will you use a road, a hospital (although since you are american the last one is probably not relevant). What about the education of your children?
I find this notion of getting back to basics absurd (just like indigenous people wanting to have the rights pre-industrialisation whilst enjoying the benefits of industialisation). Don't get me wrong, I believe in living a simple life, I do not expect annual holidays overseas, new cars every few years nor an annual fasion spree. I am accumulating capital from which I expect to generate a moderate return (4 - 8% inflation adjusted) to generate a wage of the order of the average worker (but without having to pay for rent or a mortgage). Anything I do for income above that is (as they say) "money for jam". I will participate in the industrial economy the fruits of which I crave, can anyone spell "internet" and TV and having a safe car to drive my kids to play rugby or netball or cricket or to participate in nippers. BUT this is not "self sufficiency" I believe that big power stations and mass production _is_ more efficient (my measure is the net amount of my earnings that I have to put into getting these services) and that technology _can_ (not all tech) improve my lot.
One should always be concerned when ones ideals are embodied in the central premise of a seventies sitcom - "The Good Life" (BBC) highlights all the inconsistencies of which I speak.
Thankfully I will no longer have to deal with Xfile zealots whining on about "We'll you just never know".
The problem with the Xfiles was that at the heart of it's fundamental premise was a contradiction. They existed in "our" universe, but shit happened that was total fantasy. As a result, science would always fail to explain what was happening because it was bound by the rules of the real universe but the "other side" of the dramatic tension, was not. This really annoyed the shit out of me. I mean it _REALLY_ annoyed me, to the point that I could just never watch it.
I think the comedy analysis with Dallas was quite pertinent. Xfiles was soap opera and nothing more. I have never found a soap opera compelling (unless you count Chances in the last series or so, but then they got canned with funding for another 12 episodes or something and so that just got bizarre!). BTW I would argue that Bab5 was not soap (definitely) and that shows like space 1999, dr who, start trek, stargate (not all are series I like) whilst not necessarily "dramtically complex" are not soap opera either.
Even so it is 5 - 10% of v which then gets squared (which makes a _big_ difference)
Government has essentially two levers by which they control the "heat" in the economic engine. Fiscal policy and Monetary policy. Most governments have abrogated the use of fiscal policy as a means for controlling the economy for a number of reasons and so in most countries (and I use the word in terms of areas governed by a single monetary policy) governments are resrticted to using monetary policy to control the economy. Even further, in a lot of countries they leave the detemrination of interest rates (the handle on the lever) to some external independent body (eg the Federal Reserve in the US)
Anyway, if one is to suggest that the same monetary policy is appropriate for Greece and Germany, or Italy and Holland, then methinks they are fooling themselves. EMU is folly. I am not predicting disaster but staying out of EMU is good for _lots_ of reasons. A single monetary policy (for that is what EMU is all about) is really only appropriate when the cultural forces that determine social utility can be aligned in such a way thet there is some homogeneity of purpose amoingst all those affected by the policy. When the policy forces major regional problems as will happen if things go pear shaped in EMU, then things can get quite unpleasant.
In Australia and the UK (at least) there is the concept of a Master of Science which is a degree program (usually over 1 year full time or two years part time) that provides people with a degree in something a certification in Science (and predominantly Computer Science in my experience). I know for a fact that MSc courses in Oz will provide admission to computer professionals who do not have an undergraduate degree, but I am not sure how much professional experience is required, I was tutoring them not admitting them :-). I cannot comment for sure on whether the UK does the same wrt to non undergraduates.
:-) would be an excellent idea. It would meet your goal of achieving the degree in one year and it might even be fun
Often these degrees are full fee paying (this matters in the UK and Oz since most tertiary education does not have the same idea of tuition fees as the US).
I can only endorse tose who present he dea that a degre ecourse is more than checking off the boxes on a "I can work in this industry" checklist. If you can afford it I would think that a year off to do such a program (even overseas
For me, I love to see how authors deal with the overpowering effect of technology. For this reason I love Herbert's Dune. About 10,000 years in the future, the problems of space travel, nuclear (and more powerful) weapons and computers [how could he know how wise that choice was back in 1967] are dealt with so elegantly that the human interaction is centre stage which is so often not the case in SF.