The levy in question is pointless, because it doesn't give payees the right to share copyrighted works - it only applies to personal, private copies. Until real filesharing is legal, the system is broken.
That being said, the idea for a levy is sound IMHO. Take the gas tax for example. It's a special tax that's levied on sales of gasoline; the revenues derived from it are supposed to pay for the upkeep and construction of public roads.
Now, someone might claim that they should not have to pay the tax because they only drive their car on private roads which they maintain themselves. Why are they wrong?
The answers I might give are: 1) There's no way to make sure that the claimant really only drives on private roads, 2) The vast majority of people drive on public roads, and it's simply more efficient overall to tax everyone than to make small adjustments and exceptions, and 3) Public roads are a public good, and their existence allows the claimant to use them in the future, if he so decides, giving him a potential future benefit.
A levy would acknowledge the fact that most people share copyrighted works, create a manageable system for compensating artists, and would support the creation of new music. All in all, I think it'd be work a few cents per GB.
In Canada, downloading music for your own personal use is not illegal
True; also, giving a copy of your music to a friend is legal. But distributing (aka uploading) music to the general public is not legal. Which, in effect, makes filesharing illegal.
We still have a ways to go up here in the Great White North...
What? IMNSHO, Lost stinks of focus groups and cash-cow milking. It's been treading water since the first season; since then, they've thrown out a new scrap of mythology every couple of episodes, which more often than not bears no reference to what came before (eg the six toed statue), while spending the rest of the time on pointless flashbacks and love triangles.
The X-Files had a planned story arc that should have lasted seven seasons; stupidly, Chris Carter let himself be bribed, and tried to extend things for another couple of seasons. For those first seven seasons, things did go somewhere with the X-Files; mythology was built by adding information about the conspirators, the alien invaders, the black oil. That mythology is the main reason why X-Files was so good.
I don't like the white or the grey brushed-aluminium. I think apple should bring back the 5-colour iMac line - tweak it every year or two, sure, but they should avoid the dead, monotone, excessively minimalist style they seem to have surrendered to. That goes for laptops too - bring back the curves! Bring back colours!
1 - How may of those scientists study climate change? How many of them study other topics or other fields? That is, on the question of climate change, the opinion of a scientist qua scientist is no more relevant than the opinion of a random citizen. What counts are the opinions of people who actually study the problem. And, from a brief glance at the list you linked to, many of the people cited do not, in fact, study climate change.
2 - The article you refer to clearly states that the number of polar bears are increasing in the eastern arctic, while they are decreasing in the western arctic. The article goes on to say that (a) the danger to polar bears is over a 30-50 year time period, and (b) changes in human behavior (e.g. stopping of hunting of seals, a food source for the bears) are an important factor in the population increase seen in the eastern arctic.
Slashdot is better than digg post-popularity. The only two clear incidents of censorship on slashdot that I remember - the scientology posts that were deleted, and the thread about story moderation - are both quite exceptional; the scientology censorship was done with as much publicity and openeness as could be expected, and the story-moderation censorship was (presumably) done by a now-disbanded and dishonoured editor (Michael Sims, 'Nazi Editor').
The point being: Slashdot has retained much or all of its independence; it survived the surge of popularity only to be bought up by a - as far as I can tell - benign corporate overlord, losing none of its independence and none of its verve (as much as the latter may seem to be lacking).
Digg, meanwhile, seems to be a short-lived exercise in user-defined content that has devolved into a juvenile comment squad and an editorship that is apparently willing to practice censorship for the basest of reasons.
p.s. I once heard Canada described as a country founded by a department store and glued together by a railroad (Hudson's Bay Company and the transcontinental RR requirement in the Canadian political document whose name escapes me right now from the turn of the last century.) I'm not Canadian, but lived in Vancouver for a couple of years and tried to learn something of Canadian history.
You're thinking of the constitution:) - the 1867 constitution did indeed carry a requirement for rail links from the maritime provinces (Nova Scotia and New Brunswick) to Ontario. When BC joined confederation, that was part of their deal, too. One reading of history says that the transcontinental railway, from the great lakes to the Pacific, is what ensured that Canada eventually got the territory in-between Ontario and BC. The idea is that, if the railway hadn't been built, settlers from the US would have made what is now Manitoba, Saskatchewan and Alberta de facto US territory. A different reading sees the railway as a tool of industrialized central Canada to exploit the resources of the Canadian west - shipping huge amounts of grain and, later, minerals for use in Ontario and Quebec, and also for export, all for the benefit of Ontarian industrialists and bankers. This sentiment was partly responsible for the creation of agrarian socialism in the prairie provinces - in the form of the CCF (political party) and the Wheat Pool (farmer-owned grain monopoly).
Back on-topic, the Russian plan in TFA is very expensive - $60bn for the tunnel and associated rail links - but it would serve a real need. The Russians want to develop their Far East, and North America wants raw materials. If it does get built eventually, I would be very interested to see what effect it has on the North - whether the increased trade resulted in more settlement and development in Alaska, Yukon, and the NWT. There is huge untapped mineral potential up there, and, sadly, it will probably be getting warmer, too, making it more livable.
I'd say the ass is Opera, the fox is Mozilla, and the lion is Microsoft.
Mozilla convinces Opera that the browser wars are over, and agrees to follow W3C standards. Meanwhile, Mozilla conspires with Microsoft in the development of some non-standard language or protocol, in the hopes that it will be protected from the Beast of Redmond. Once the new protocol comes out, Opera looses market share (i.e. it goes from 0.2% to 0.1%:) ). Then, Microsoft lets the other shoe drop, and introduces a Microsoft-only modification to the already-proprietary language/protocol, which harms Mozilla's market share.
The above doesn't meet all characteristics of Aesop's tale, but the moral remains the same.
I'm with you on the hockey puck mouse. I liked the fact that you could move the mouse around in a limited range without moving your whole hand, just by moving your fingers left/right or up/down. I was also a fan of the much-derided early imac keyboard. I am not a fan of the current Apple keyboard, both because of its flat base (which wobbles on my slightly arched desk) and its lack of space in-between groups of F keys (unlike most keyboards, which group F keys in sets of four).
But my ultimate nostalgia/complaint about mac input devices is the lack of a keyboard power button. That button was perfect - there was no risk of accidentally powering computers off and it saved time spent either mousing to the apple menu or reaching around to the computer itself.
But the news is that we _need_ to use quantum theory to usefully explain photosynthesis. The same is not true for other important chemical reactions - burning hydrocarbons, for example.
- No way to force Finder to use a single view mode (eg, open all windows in list view) - Clicking & holding the mouse while using list view: - - If you click over top of a file, and then move the mouse, you will drag the file - - If you click in the whitespace directly to the right of the file, and then move the mouse, you will select whatever file's whitespace the cursor passes over - The 'show disk size / free space' on the desktop only seems to update itself when you reboot - Finder will try and generate previews of movies, if you are stupid enough to click on them while in column view. If you click on a +700mb file, this can take awhile. Oh, and it makes you wait until it finishes - As far as I can tell, it is impossible to force finder to always calculate folder sizes. This is related to the list-view problem: the scheme for defining how a folder is presented is exceedingly complicated, and there is _no_ way to force global settings on all folders. - The rules defining how windows are ordered (from 'top' to 'bottom') are broken. One of two things _should_ happen: either all windows owned by the active application should sit on top of whatever else is being drawn (the macos classic way); or, individual windows should remain disconnected from other windows owned by their application. Instead, the current macos has a cumbersome mix of these two methods, resulting in behavior that is infrequent yet infuriating.
This is a really good idea. Spyware makers are the worst in terms of computer crime.
I remember, not too long ago, when pricks around the world wrote dialers for people with dial-up connections. Dialers, once installed, would route someone's call to their ISP through some insanely far-away place (usually pimples in the pacific) with insanely high long-distance costs. The people who wrote the software would then split the profits made from the long-distance call with the corrupt operator of the far-away places' phone company. The effect was to leave people out-of-pocket by a huge amount (hundreds or thousands of dollars). If the target got the long-distance charge removed by the local phone company, the local phone company would have to eat the charges.
The point of the above is to underline the character of crimes committed: it's pure theft. Modern spyware either seals people's browsing habits or personal information, so it's a little less direct, but it's still a theft.
I think spyware writers are more foul than virus writers: while virus writers do what they do for the technical thrill and bother a lot of people in the process, spyware writers do it just to get money.
Their motives are base, their methods are underhanded, and they should go to jail.
The computer in Alien (the first in the series) was unrealistic - not because of the artificial intelligence or natural-language processing, but because of the cumbersome way commands were entered and the unnecessary tekno-futurism of the computer room. Still, it was really good at helping the conspiratorial mood of the movie, and it is still one of my favorites in terms of fictional computers. I think the Star Trek TNG computers were probably the best depiction of how computers should be.
What I want to see is a list of the 50 middle tech products of all time. Which are the most mediocre? Which products excel at mediocrity? Inquiring minds want to know!
Next year can I be modded higher for the meta meta comment?
Be not hasty, young grasshopper. What you ask would require that you reach the mythical moderation of +6, something beyond the province of mortal users. Post often, and insightfully, and you may one day reach the true Zen of UID=0. Only then can you achieve +6 Funny.
I, for one, am getting tired of people posting about how tired they are of april fools' jokes. The whiny posts start at about 12:01 AM on April 1st and only end at 11:59pm. April fools' is like Christmas for slashdot - it only happens once a year, and it is a whole day devoted to happiness and humour. If you are truly getting tired of all this, just take solace in the fact that some of us find it quite diverting.
Others take advantage of this day to try out their new modems with SpeedBoost technology, sending data over regular phone lines at a speed of 1.5c. It's the only way to get FP when/. is moving fast!
Slashdot Mirror
That being said, the idea for a levy is sound IMHO. Take the gas tax for example. It's a special tax that's levied on sales of gasoline; the revenues derived from it are supposed to pay for the upkeep and construction of public roads.
Now, someone might claim that they should not have to pay the tax because they only drive their car on private roads which they maintain themselves. Why are they wrong?
The answers I might give are: 1) There's no way to make sure that the claimant really only drives on private roads, 2) The vast majority of people drive on public roads, and it's simply more efficient overall to tax everyone than to make small adjustments and exceptions, and 3) Public roads are a public good, and their existence allows the claimant to use them in the future, if he so decides, giving him a potential future benefit.
A levy would acknowledge the fact that most people share copyrighted works, create a manageable system for compensating artists, and would support the creation of new music. All in all, I think it'd be work a few cents per GB.
True; also, giving a copy of your music to a friend is legal. But distributing (aka uploading) music to the general public is not legal. Which, in effect, makes filesharing illegal.
We still have a ways to go up here in the Great White North...
Vg'f pnyyrq EBG-13 (ebgngr 13 punenpgref). Vg jnf bsgra hfrq ba hfrarg nf n jnl bs uvqvat vasbezngvba fbzr crbcyr zvtug jnag gb fxvc (yvxr fcbvyref sbe n zbivr) jvgubhg znxvat qrpelcgvba gbb qvssvphyg.
:)
Abj lbh zvtug haqrefgnaq jul hfvat qbhoyr EBG-13 vf abg fhpu n tbbq vqrn
What? IMNSHO, Lost stinks of focus groups and cash-cow milking. It's been treading water since the first season; since then, they've thrown out a new scrap of mythology every couple of episodes, which more often than not bears no reference to what came before (eg the six toed statue), while spending the rest of the time on pointless flashbacks and love triangles.
The X-Files had a planned story arc that should have lasted seven seasons; stupidly, Chris Carter let himself be bribed, and tried to extend things for another couple of seasons. For those first seven seasons, things did go somewhere with the X-Files; mythology was built by adding information about the conspirators, the alien invaders, the black oil. That mythology is the main reason why X-Files was so good.
I don't like the white or the grey brushed-aluminium. I think apple should bring back the 5-colour iMac line - tweak it every year or two, sure, but they should avoid the dead, monotone, excessively minimalist style they seem to have surrendered to. That goes for laptops too - bring back the curves! Bring back colours!
1 - How may of those scientists study climate change? How many of them study other topics or other fields? That is, on the question of climate change, the opinion of a scientist qua scientist is no more relevant than the opinion of a random citizen. What counts are the opinions of people who actually study the problem. And, from a brief glance at the list you linked to, many of the people cited do not, in fact, study climate change.
2 - The article you refer to clearly states that the number of polar bears are increasing in the eastern arctic, while they are decreasing in the western arctic. The article goes on to say that (a) the danger to polar bears is over a 30-50 year time period, and (b) changes in human behavior (e.g. stopping of hunting of seals, a food source for the bears) are an important factor in the population increase seen in the eastern arctic.
Slashdot is better than digg post-popularity. The only two clear incidents of censorship on slashdot that I remember - the scientology posts that were deleted, and the thread about story moderation - are both quite exceptional; the scientology censorship was done with as much publicity and openeness as could be expected, and the story-moderation censorship was (presumably) done by a now-disbanded and dishonoured editor (Michael Sims, 'Nazi Editor').
The point being: Slashdot has retained much or all of its independence; it survived the surge of popularity only to be bought up by a - as far as I can tell - benign corporate overlord, losing none of its independence and none of its verve (as much as the latter may seem to be lacking).
Digg, meanwhile, seems to be a short-lived exercise in user-defined content that has devolved into a juvenile comment squad and an editorship that is apparently willing to practice censorship for the basest of reasons.
You're thinking of the constitution :) - the 1867 constitution did indeed carry a requirement for rail links from the maritime provinces (Nova Scotia and New Brunswick) to Ontario. When BC joined confederation, that was part of their deal, too. One reading of history says that the transcontinental railway, from the great lakes to the Pacific, is what ensured that Canada eventually got the territory in-between Ontario and BC. The idea is that, if the railway hadn't been built, settlers from the US would have made what is now Manitoba, Saskatchewan and Alberta de facto US territory. A different reading sees the railway as a tool of industrialized central Canada to exploit the resources of the Canadian west - shipping huge amounts of grain and, later, minerals for use in Ontario and Quebec, and also for export, all for the benefit of Ontarian industrialists and bankers. This sentiment was partly responsible for the creation of agrarian socialism in the prairie provinces - in the form of the CCF (political party) and the Wheat Pool (farmer-owned grain monopoly).
Back on-topic, the Russian plan in TFA is very expensive - $60bn for the tunnel and associated rail links - but it would serve a real need. The Russians want to develop their Far East, and North America wants raw materials. If it does get built eventually, I would be very interested to see what effect it has on the North - whether the increased trade resulted in more settlement and development in Alaska, Yukon, and the NWT. There is huge untapped mineral potential up there, and, sadly, it will probably be getting warmer, too, making it more livable.
I'd say the ass is Opera, the fox is Mozilla, and the lion is Microsoft.
:) ). Then, Microsoft lets the other shoe drop, and introduces a Microsoft-only modification to the already-proprietary language/protocol, which harms Mozilla's market share.
Mozilla convinces Opera that the browser wars are over, and agrees to follow W3C standards. Meanwhile, Mozilla conspires with Microsoft in the development of some non-standard language or protocol, in the hopes that it will be protected from the Beast of Redmond. Once the new protocol comes out, Opera looses market share (i.e. it goes from 0.2% to 0.1%
The above doesn't meet all characteristics of Aesop's tale, but the moral remains the same.
I'm with you on the hockey puck mouse. I liked the fact that you could move the mouse around in a limited range without moving your whole hand, just by moving your fingers left/right or up/down. I was also a fan of the much-derided early imac keyboard. I am not a fan of the current Apple keyboard, both because of its flat base (which wobbles on my slightly arched desk) and its lack of space in-between groups of F keys (unlike most keyboards, which group F keys in sets of four).
But my ultimate nostalgia/complaint about mac input devices is the lack of a keyboard power button. That button was perfect - there was no risk of accidentally powering computers off and it saved time spent either mousing to the apple menu or reaching around to the computer itself.
But the news is that we _need_ to use quantum theory to usefully explain photosynthesis. The same is not true for other important chemical reactions - burning hydrocarbons, for example.
Good list. I would add:
- No way to force Finder to use a single view mode (eg, open all windows in list view)
- Clicking & holding the mouse while using list view:
- - If you click over top of a file, and then move the mouse, you will drag the file
- - If you click in the whitespace directly to the right of the file, and then move the mouse, you will select whatever file's whitespace the cursor passes over
- The 'show disk size / free space' on the desktop only seems to update itself when you reboot
- Finder will try and generate previews of movies, if you are stupid enough to click on them while in column view. If you click on a +700mb file, this can take awhile. Oh, and it makes you wait until it finishes
- As far as I can tell, it is impossible to force finder to always calculate folder sizes. This is related to the list-view problem: the scheme for defining how a folder is presented is exceedingly complicated, and there is _no_ way to force global settings on all folders.
- The rules defining how windows are ordered (from 'top' to 'bottom') are broken. One of two things _should_ happen: either all windows owned by the active application should sit on top of whatever else is being drawn (the macos classic way); or, individual windows should remain disconnected from other windows owned by their application. Instead, the current macos has a cumbersome mix of these two methods, resulting in behavior that is infrequent yet infuriating.
That about all I can think of now
This is a really good idea. Spyware makers are the worst in terms of computer crime.
I remember, not too long ago, when pricks around the world wrote dialers for people with dial-up connections. Dialers, once installed, would route someone's call to their ISP through some insanely far-away place (usually pimples in the pacific) with insanely high long-distance costs. The people who wrote the software would then split the profits made from the long-distance call with the corrupt operator of the far-away places' phone company. The effect was to leave people out-of-pocket by a huge amount (hundreds or thousands of dollars). If the target got the long-distance charge removed by the local phone company, the local phone company would have to eat the charges.
The point of the above is to underline the character of crimes committed: it's pure theft. Modern spyware either seals people's browsing habits or personal information, so it's a little less direct, but it's still a theft.
I think spyware writers are more foul than virus writers: while virus writers do what they do for the technical thrill and bother a lot of people in the process, spyware writers do it just to get money.
Their motives are base, their methods are underhanded, and they should go to jail.
1E8 x 2E10 bytes (avg) = 2E18 bytes = 2 exabytes
1 song = 4E6 bytes
Total songs = 2E18 bytes / 4E6 bytes = 5E11 songs
1 song via ITMS = $1
Total cost to fill all ipods = 500 000 000 000 dollars
GDP of New Zealand = 108 520 000 000
Thus, it would take 5E11/1.08E11 = 4.62 years worth of New Zealand's national product to fill all ipods with music.
Wow! That is a lot of music!
Live now!
o l/newsid_6530000/newsid_6539600?redirect=6539637.s tm&news=1&nbram=1&bbram=1&nbwm=1&bbwm=1
http://www.bbc.co.uk/mediaselector/check/player/n
If that doesn't work, look for links at bbcnews.com
that was actually really funny. mods can be such killjoys...
also, you forgot to mention some other aspects of the iCar:
Which is why this product is truly the pinnacle of human-computer interfaces.
The computer in Alien (the first in the series) was unrealistic - not because of the artificial intelligence or natural-language processing, but because of the cumbersome way commands were entered and the unnecessary tekno-futurism of the computer room. Still, it was really good at helping the conspiratorial mood of the movie, and it is still one of my favorites in terms of fictional computers. I think the Star Trek TNG computers were probably the best depiction of how computers should be.
How do you get enemies to surrender in PD?
What I want to see is a list of the 50 middle tech products of all time. Which are the most mediocre? Which products excel at mediocrity? Inquiring minds want to know!
Archive.org seems to have missed it, too
k ooslashdot.jpg , orl oads/2006/04/pink_slashdot.jpg
You can see part of the homepage at
http://mitternachts-lied.net/blog/images/posts/ki
http://www.desiringmachine.org/blog/wp-content/up
enjoy
Ruby on Rails? Python on Planes? Real Programmers use C on Chariots!
I Soviet Russia, Natalie Portman uses a Beowulf cluster of computers running RPGs to heat up grits and subsequently pour hot grits down _your_ pants!
I, for one, am getting tired of people posting about how tired they are of april fools' jokes. The whiny posts start at about 12:01 AM on April 1st and only end at 11:59pm. April fools' is like Christmas for slashdot - it only happens once a year, and it is a whole day devoted to happiness and humour. If you are truly getting tired of all this, just take solace in the fact that some of us find it quite diverting.
/. is moving fast!
Others take advantage of this day to try out their new modems with SpeedBoost technology, sending data over regular phone lines at a speed of 1.5c. It's the only way to get FP when