So let's take a more basic view of this. You are standing there in a courtyard in your village and hear someone singing a song. You like the song and you go back to your house and start singing it on the way home. Is that wrong?
Is it wrong if someone hears you?
Is it wrong if people like hearing you sing and pay you for it?
There are a million different variables here. The fact is, the whole concept of copyright is admittedly manufactured. People have NO right to to call what they create IP (and restrict others from its use) except as we choose to grant it to them.
According to the constitution (read it, that part is a short, understandable paragraph) we choose to grant it to them ONLY because it will encourage them to create more works that will eventually become part of the public domain.
Note, it is NOT so they can make money off it EXCEPT as that might encourage them to make more.
So your whole premise is just wrong. You can work as hard as you want at something, but that does not give you any natural/obvious/automatic right to exclusively commercialize that work except what the public chooses to give you.
By these corporations lobbying congress for extensions to copyright law, however, they ARE stealing MASSIVE amounts of IP from US. Billions or Trillions of dollars are lost to this.
We're talking dozens of years of the ability to create derivative works. How much money has Disney made on Micky Mouse and Winnie the Pooh in the last 50 years? That is all money STOLEN from the American people via congressional bribes and political manipulation (at least as seen from the point of view of the constitution which explicitly calls for a limited time period--initially it was like 7 years, now it's nearly 100!)
Yes, there are IP criminals around, but they are not who you think.
People have a really bizarre inability to really accept things outside their experience.
For children, when they start driving, they think they are unstoppable. The drive fast or drink and drive simply because they have not personally seen the consequences.
After a while, you start seeing how much you can get hurt if you jump from a roof into a pool and you start thinking twice, but until then nothing can stop you.
Instead of hiding smoking or pretending it was OK, my mom tried to quit repeatedly, complained about how pathetic and weak she was, how they controlled her and how she couldn't stop spending money on them. She stopped for a year once, but went back. I think I can remember at least 6 serious efforts to stop, but in the end it killed her.
If you could really grok that before you picked up your first cigarette, you would be physically incapable of smoking it.
We like to think that we make our own decisions and we do so with the information we have in a way that benefits us, but really we are manipulated easily. FOX news knows how to pull the strings of a type of person to manipulate their feelings, chemical addictions can completely and deeply change how you feel about many things, etc.
The point is, these people say it's a quality of life issue simply because they aren't able to comprehend the fact that they could die tomorrow.
If someone were able to actually say with certainty that "if you keep taking that pill, you will die in 2 weeks, otherwise you will live for 15 years", they would stop. From there it's just a matter of odds.
Hell, what if they said "If you keep taking that pill, you will die in 10 years, otherwise you will die in 15"? Well, right now some might actually say "I'll keep taking it", speaking for that person in 9 3/4 years who may answer VERY differently-- again a human inability to logically analyze the situation and come to an honest conclusion.
Actually the initial intention of the law (at least how I read it in the Constitution) is to benefit the public by encouraging artists to create.
The benefit to artists was almost a side-effect, or more a way to get more works into the public domain.
If you think about it--in offering copyright, I am giving up something (the ability to reproduce a work I've seen). What am I giving this up in exchange for?
There is no innate rule that someone who creates something has any right to exclude others from it. This is a gift we give them as a thank you for creating something that will someday belong to us all.
Sometimes I think we should just revoke the right altogether for a few years. Disney's manipulation of the laws for profit has been horrific, they have stolen from all of us more than any copyright infringer. By now, we should own Mickey Mouse, Winnie the Pooh and hundreds of other characters.
Every time they are almost out from under copyright, Disney goes back to congress and manipulates the law in order to steal them from us for a few more years.
This is more horrific and evil thievery (at least in volume) than every bit-torrent ever downloaded.
remember that a lot of people are developing iPhone apps now.
I'd complain if it were some large company that based their business model on this, but chances are it's just some guy or small company that figured out a cute, easy trick and tried to charge for it rather than give it away for free.
I'm not condoning it, just pointing out that as the number of people grows, morals and consideration always go out the window unless forced.
I'd love to have a file system that took a bunch of small devices like that and set them up in a very tolerant raid-like system.
It would be great to throw 10 20gb USB drives on a giant hub and have 150-180gb of storage (I figure quite a bit will be taken up with redundancy)
A bank of 30 2gb flash drives might also be fun.
With that many pieces of media, you should be able to pull 2 drives without losing any data...
You should also be able to indicate which drives should be written to more and which should be used for data that changes less often...
The really neat part of this is that upgrading your disk should be as easy as yanking a 2gb flash drive, and throwing in an old 20gb usb hard drive. It should add the storage, move some of the data around to ensure your redundancy is still sufficient and get on with life.
In my experience, inexpensive rechargeable batteries tend to last about a year. If they start dumping these lights on Africans, the only results I can see would be:
One is that they will become addicted--"Getting" to work later means someone will find a way to exploit that work, and it will become a way of life.
If they are cheap and in plentiful supply, they will end up in landfills of otherwise mostly organic material--something that certainly can't be good for the environment (We don't dump our batteries in landfills any more, but we did for decades).
Once they are addicted to this type of work, Phillips will have a steady income stream for a year or two until China figures out how to make and deliver them cheaper.
> It really is frustrating how intensely climate science is doubted and denied.
It really is strange how people get these really strong vested interests in subjects. The one that gets me is nuclear power. You will have many people fearsomely defend it as though their lives were on the line, when in fact they have no personal stake in it's success or failure.
When I've asked why (I ALWAYS ask why now), I've never gotten an answer.
So, to those who are denying global warming--WHY the vested interest in denying global warming. What do you stand to gain if you are right? If you are wrong? How does your arguing the point help? Are you saying that no matter WHAT people do, they CANNOT effect the climate, or are you saying that they just aren't effecting it right now, or what?
Do you think we should control the amount of pollution causing chemicals that plants put into the water and air at all? Even if jobs are lost? Or do you prefer to live in a cloud of smog and let the people burning coal keep their jobs?
Seriously, I never get answers to these questions--it's like the people spend all their energy fighting and never have have the energy to ask themselves why.
We know Twitters architectural history, but anyone have a summary of the three big sites with the higher uptime? (Server-side of course). Commonalities would mean a lot I'd think.
Sorry, I'm old and lazy or else I'd look it up myself.
Apple has improved it's products, but when it comes to lock-in they are still (and always have been) the kings.
Part of it is a desire for 100% control of the platform. This has allowed them to achieve things microsoft can not (I've yet to see a windows PC that suspends or hibernates as well as any mac--yes macs hibernate, it's just perfectly invisible--unplug or yank your battery while it's suspended sometime).
IBM wanted to lock down the PC the way Apple did the Mac--Apple just played more tricks. If IBM had been as successful as Apple, we would have a horrific, fragmented and expensive PC industry today, with no standard platform to count on. I'd guess even Linux would be out since Apple completely controls the BIOS and could (if they wanted) prevent other OSes from booting on it. IBM probably would have done that.
Mac products just got good enough where most of us can ignore their mis-behavior, but don't think for a second they aren't the worst company out there when it comes to locking down their products.
Assuming windows can learn to suspend to disk as well as Linux (a HUGE assumption), I think there could be a really good case for choosing which system you want to resume at boot-time.
From the consumer point of view, you get a screen at boot time that says "Browsing" and "Full Windows O/S", you pick browsing and you have your browser up in 3 seconds without a login. You pick the other alternative and windows thrashes for 30 seconds before it stabilizes. I could see uses for both.
Sometimes I wish slashdot would just give you one mod point each day (not cumulative, just one max) just so you could vote up a really insightful comment like this one even when you aren't a mod.
>I presume you can set that stuff up over the phone if you have a Mac or something, but that's probably non-obvious for someone who accidentally orders a Linux laptop.
So it's obvious if you buy a mac but unobvious if you order Linux?
It was pretty obvious for me, I called and said I didn't want their crap software on my PC and they politely and efficiently walked me through the manual procedure (mostly it involves validating an email address with them). Sounded like they did it all the time.
Regardless, the fact that she's running Linux saved them from installing Verizon's crapware so she's already way ahead of where she'd be if she'd gotten windows.
If this had been done, it would have set up some AWESOME right of ways that could be used to run fiber across all major cities for nothing.
Those hollow pipes would have been so big that you could have run fiber for every company that even considered entering the ISP business for very little money.
Taxpayers would have probably made money off the whole deal, and we'd be much further ahead in our internet infrastructure.
I wonder if they have ever made one of those grade-school documentaries on things we wouldn't have if it weren't for "Plastics", but analyzing government tax-and-spend instead.
We wouldn't have the internet, velcro, pens that write upside-down, the nuclear program, highways, street-lights,...
You seem to be pretty good at that, keep it up. Really what destroys good engineering teams is managers with other interests (such as forwarding their own career). If you put the team ahead of yourself--even stand up for them at the risk of being fired, you'll have a productive team and you'll be the most remembered boss on the unemployment line:)
If it's always been in ruby, then it's always been fast enough, and remains so-just like I said. Not that a little bump wouldn't help, but sometimes I wonder why people sound like they are disagreeing when they are actually supporting.
Ruby has always been acceptably fast for most values of acceptably.
In cases where it has not been acceptable, it probably will continue not to be since those are cases where better performance is always welcomed (large volume web services).
I don't remember hearing apple bragging about their invincibility. Could I see a reference?
I can fully believe they discussed the fact that PCs are generally full of viruses and macs are not, that's just an observation--but there is a big difference between that observation and actually claiming that you are invulnerable.
Now, if the article had claimed that Mac fanboys have claimed that the mac is invincible, I wouldn't have blinked.
How did you get the ICQ password? If it was used by the trojan to log into an ICQ account and send messages, then after you changed it no other clients would have been able to send messages.
It's a good story, but smells a little fishy right there...
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So let's take a more basic view of this. You are standing there in a courtyard in your village and hear someone singing a song. You like the song and you go back to your house and start singing it on the way home. Is that wrong?
Is it wrong if someone hears you?
Is it wrong if people like hearing you sing and pay you for it?
There are a million different variables here. The fact is, the whole concept of copyright is admittedly manufactured. People have NO right to to call what they create IP (and restrict others from its use) except as we choose to grant it to them.
According to the constitution (read it, that part is a short, understandable paragraph) we choose to grant it to them ONLY because it will encourage them to create more works that will eventually become part of the public domain.
Note, it is NOT so they can make money off it EXCEPT as that might encourage them to make more.
So your whole premise is just wrong. You can work as hard as you want at something, but that does not give you any natural/obvious/automatic right to exclusively commercialize that work except what the public chooses to give you.
By these corporations lobbying congress for extensions to copyright law, however, they ARE stealing MASSIVE amounts of IP from US. Billions or Trillions of dollars are lost to this.
We're talking dozens of years of the ability to create derivative works. How much money has Disney made on Micky Mouse and Winnie the Pooh in the last 50 years? That is all money STOLEN from the American people via congressional bribes and political manipulation (at least as seen from the point of view of the constitution which explicitly calls for a limited time period--initially it was like 7 years, now it's nearly 100!)
Yes, there are IP criminals around, but they are not who you think.
People have a really bizarre inability to really accept things outside their experience.
For children, when they start driving, they think they are unstoppable. The drive fast or drink and drive simply because they have not personally seen the consequences.
After a while, you start seeing how much you can get hurt if you jump from a roof into a pool and you start thinking twice, but until then nothing can stop you.
Instead of hiding smoking or pretending it was OK, my mom tried to quit repeatedly, complained about how pathetic and weak she was, how they controlled her and how she couldn't stop spending money on them. She stopped for a year once, but went back. I think I can remember at least 6 serious efforts to stop, but in the end it killed her.
If you could really grok that before you picked up your first cigarette, you would be physically incapable of smoking it.
We like to think that we make our own decisions and we do so with the information we have in a way that benefits us, but really we are manipulated easily. FOX news knows how to pull the strings of a type of person to manipulate their feelings, chemical addictions can completely and deeply change how you feel about many things, etc.
The point is, these people say it's a quality of life issue simply because they aren't able to comprehend the fact that they could die tomorrow.
If someone were able to actually say with certainty that "if you keep taking that pill, you will die in 2 weeks, otherwise you will live for 15 years", they would stop. From there it's just a matter of odds.
Hell, what if they said "If you keep taking that pill, you will die in 10 years, otherwise you will die in 15"? Well, right now some might actually say "I'll keep taking it", speaking for that person in 9 3/4 years who may answer VERY differently-- again a human inability to logically analyze the situation and come to an honest conclusion.
Until I read your post, I was trying to figure out how people who were hijacking ships were stealing our satellites to coordinate their efforts.
Funny, this is the first time I've had a word re-take it's original meaning!
Actually the initial intention of the law (at least how I read it in the Constitution) is to benefit the public by encouraging artists to create.
The benefit to artists was almost a side-effect, or more a way to get more works into the public domain.
If you think about it--in offering copyright, I am giving up something (the ability to reproduce a work I've seen). What am I giving this up in exchange for?
There is no innate rule that someone who creates something has any right to exclude others from it. This is a gift we give them as a thank you for creating something that will someday belong to us all.
Sometimes I think we should just revoke the right altogether for a few years. Disney's manipulation of the laws for profit has been horrific, they have stolen from all of us more than any copyright infringer. By now, we should own Mickey Mouse, Winnie the Pooh and hundreds of other characters.
Every time they are almost out from under copyright, Disney goes back to congress and manipulates the law in order to steal them from us for a few more years.
This is more horrific and evil thievery (at least in volume) than every bit-torrent ever downloaded.
remember that a lot of people are developing iPhone apps now.
I'd complain if it were some large company that based their business model on this, but chances are it's just some guy or small company that figured out a cute, easy trick and tried to charge for it rather than give it away for free.
I'm not condoning it, just pointing out that as the number of people grows, morals and consideration always go out the window unless forced.
I'd go further to say that Computer Security by law is criminal in itself since it prevents defects from being found and brought into the light!
I think there should be a system in place to reward hackers that find a flaw and submit it. Abusing it, of course, should still be treated harshly.
I'd love to have a file system that took a bunch of small devices like that and set them up in a very tolerant raid-like system.
It would be great to throw 10 20gb USB drives on a giant hub and have 150-180gb of storage (I figure quite a bit will be taken up with redundancy)
A bank of 30 2gb flash drives might also be fun.
With that many pieces of media, you should be able to pull 2 drives without losing any data...
You should also be able to indicate which drives should be written to more and which should be used for data that changes less often...
The really neat part of this is that upgrading your disk should be as easy as yanking a 2gb flash drive, and throwing in an old 20gb usb hard drive. It should add the storage, move some of the data around to ensure your redundancy is still sufficient and get on with life.
In my experience, inexpensive rechargeable batteries tend to last about a year. If they start dumping these lights on Africans, the only results I can see would be:
One is that they will become addicted--"Getting" to work later means someone will find a way to exploit that work, and it will become a way of life.
If they are cheap and in plentiful supply, they will end up in landfills of otherwise mostly organic material--something that certainly can't be good for the environment (We don't dump our batteries in landfills any more, but we did for decades).
Once they are addicted to this type of work, Phillips will have a steady income stream for a year or two until China figures out how to make and deliver them cheaper.
Overall--I'm not sure I see the win.
My thoughts exactly, but you put it better than I could conceive. Wish I had mod points.
> It really is frustrating how intensely climate science is doubted and denied.
It really is strange how people get these really strong vested interests in subjects. The one that gets me is nuclear power. You will have many people fearsomely defend it as though their lives were on the line, when in fact they have no personal stake in it's success or failure.
When I've asked why (I ALWAYS ask why now), I've never gotten an answer.
So, to those who are denying global warming--WHY the vested interest in denying global warming. What do you stand to gain if you are right? If you are wrong? How does your arguing the point help? Are you saying that no matter WHAT people do, they CANNOT effect the climate, or are you saying that they just aren't effecting it right now, or what?
Do you think we should control the amount of pollution causing chemicals that plants put into the water and air at all? Even if jobs are lost? Or do you prefer to live in a cloud of smog and let the people burning coal keep their jobs?
Seriously, I never get answers to these questions--it's like the people spend all their energy fighting and never have have the energy to ask themselves why.
We know Twitters architectural history, but anyone have a summary of the three big sites with the higher uptime? (Server-side of course). Commonalities would mean a lot I'd think.
Sorry, I'm old and lazy or else I'd look it up myself.
Apple has improved it's products, but when it comes to lock-in they are still (and always have been) the kings.
Part of it is a desire for 100% control of the platform. This has allowed them to achieve things microsoft can not (I've yet to see a windows PC that suspends or hibernates as well as any mac--yes macs hibernate, it's just perfectly invisible--unplug or yank your battery while it's suspended sometime).
IBM wanted to lock down the PC the way Apple did the Mac--Apple just played more tricks. If IBM had been as successful as Apple, we would have a horrific, fragmented and expensive PC industry today, with no standard platform to count on. I'd guess even Linux would be out since Apple completely controls the BIOS and could (if they wanted) prevent other OSes from booting on it. IBM probably would have done that.
Mac products just got good enough where most of us can ignore their mis-behavior, but don't think for a second they aren't the worst company out there when it comes to locking down their products.
MAYBE
Assuming windows can learn to suspend to disk as well as Linux (a HUGE assumption), I think there could be a really good case for choosing which system you want to resume at boot-time.
From the consumer point of view, you get a screen at boot time that says "Browsing" and "Full Windows O/S", you pick browsing and you have your browser up in 3 seconds without a login. You pick the other alternative and windows thrashes for 30 seconds before it stabilizes. I could see uses for both.
Sometimes I wish slashdot would just give you one mod point each day (not cumulative, just one max) just so you could vote up a really insightful comment like this one even when you aren't a mod.
>I presume you can set that stuff up over the phone if you have a Mac or something, but that's probably non-obvious for someone who accidentally orders a Linux laptop.
So it's obvious if you buy a mac but unobvious if you order Linux?
It was pretty obvious for me, I called and said I didn't want their crap software on my PC and they politely and efficiently walked me through the manual procedure (mostly it involves validating an email address with them). Sounded like they did it all the time.
Regardless, the fact that she's running Linux saved them from installing Verizon's crapware so she's already way ahead of where she'd be if she'd gotten windows.
If this had been done, it would have set up some AWESOME right of ways that could be used to run fiber across all major cities for nothing.
Those hollow pipes would have been so big that you could have run fiber for every company that even considered entering the ISP business for very little money.
Taxpayers would have probably made money off the whole deal, and we'd be much further ahead in our internet infrastructure.
I wonder if they have ever made one of those grade-school documentaries on things we wouldn't have if it weren't for "Plastics", but analyzing government tax-and-spend instead.
We wouldn't have the internet, velcro, pens that write upside-down, the nuclear program, highways, street-lights, ...
You seem to be pretty good at that, keep it up. Really what destroys good engineering teams is managers with other interests (such as forwarding their own career). If you put the team ahead of yourself--even stand up for them at the risk of being fired, you'll have a productive team and you'll be the most remembered boss on the unemployment line :)
Or, rant first and ask questions later and bring everyone's attention to two issues instead of one. Not a bad accomplishment.
If it's always been in ruby, then it's always been fast enough, and remains so-just like I said. Not that a little bump wouldn't help, but sometimes I wonder why people sound like they are disagreeing when they are actually supporting.
or did I read your post wrong?
> Is Ruby finally going to be acceptably fast?
Ruby has always been acceptably fast for most values of acceptably.
In cases where it has not been acceptable, it probably will continue not to be since those are cases where better performance is always welcomed (large volume web services).
I don't remember hearing apple bragging about their invincibility. Could I see a reference?
I can fully believe they discussed the fact that PCs are generally full of viruses and macs are not, that's just an observation--but there is a big difference between that observation and actually claiming that you are invulnerable.
Now, if the article had claimed that Mac fanboys have claimed that the mac is invincible, I wouldn't have blinked.
true dat, but if that were the case he wouldn't have been able to see the other machines communications.
Sounds like a urban legend told in the first person... And the guy never replied..
Ahh, debugged your brain for you!--the problem was here: "...in a sane society,"
How did you get the ICQ password? If it was used by the trojan to log into an ICQ account and send messages, then after you changed it no other clients would have been able to send messages.
It's a good story, but smells a little fishy right there...
I also fully expected to buy Spore when it came out. As of now I'm completely Sporeless and will remain so until they remove their copy protection.