The problem with your claim is that everything listed in TFA is generic design elements, and none of them are remotely patentable, either individually OR together. No rounded corners? Seriously? Nothing rectangular? No clear or black screen? I mean really, WTF. Honestly, what would you be saying if the first LCD screen manufacturer had included such outrageous things as part of their patented design?
Patents have never been about how something looks. They're about how something works.
Any respect I had left for Apple is completely eradicated after reading that article.
Not sure why that's scary. As someone else pointed out above, there's really no positive benefit to having them around, and they don't appear to be any significant part of any ecosystem. Personally I'd be quite happy if they went extinct.
I like the idea, but the problem is that this does nothing to halt the bury brigades. They can simply choose the "comment" option with the one high-karma account they comment with anyway, and then mod accordingly with the other accounts.
And the sad thing is, it wouldn't even be hard to make a change that would drastically reduce those ocurrences.
And that is, force people to view comments at -1 when they have mod points. Most people view at +1 or higher all the time, so even if they may have corrected a bad negative mod, they won't because they won't see it.
I don't know if anyone has pointed this out already, but this is totally different from the IE situation.
In this case, they are working towards eliminating vulnerabilities in a product they created. The fact that other companies have made businesses based on fixing those same vulnerabilities is entirely irrelevant.
IE, on the other hand, is a tool to access a resource they did not create and do not own.
Because someone thinks they can make a quick buck off early-adopers of EVs. Personally, I don't think they'll ever get anything like this into the black financially.
His "model" isn't one station. Of course you can build that. His model is that EVs replace IC-engine cars, and swap stations replace gas stations. Like I said, It'll never happen because to handle the kind of traffic that gas stations handle you'd need far more space for his swap stations. But that's just one reason of many why his idea is never going to be more than a niche product and his model as a whole will never happen.
You still need room to store and charge the batteries. One of today's batteries for pure EVs takes up far more space than 10-15 gallons of gasoline. Then you also need the machinery to swap them, because they're heavy. A facility the size of a standard gas station won't cut it.
We're far more likely to see this new battery tech in use in the next 15 years than this other guy's battery swap model.
I suppose you missed the instances where they "unsold" content that they sold? If remotely destroying content you already sold because you later discover it has portions you don't like isn't censorship, then what the fuck is?
I'm not so sure I agree though that BF3 is a game if you have very little time - it seems that there are some significant competency upgrades that you get as you level up, and not having much time to do this will probably hamper you. The ability to carry more ammo, and larger weapon magazines, makes a surprising difference in a firefight. There are also a number of items that many consider very overpowered - though I guess DICE will address this in time.
And that's exactly why I will never buy another BF or CoD game. I have no interest in playing competitive multiplayer where you have to put up with hours and hours of garbage time just to ungimp yourself. It's one thing if you're simply a better player than I am, but it's entirely different if you're "better" only because you get to have better equipment. No thanks.
Incidentally, this is also why I detest gear-grind MMOs.
Because there's a lot of barriers you have to overcome, and there's not much financial incentive currently for anyone to overcome them.
Here's a few examples.
1. Standardized form factors for batteries. This is a big deal for some time to come, because it's hard enough as it is to strike a good balance of weight/power for maximum range. That becomes even more difficult if you're forced to build around one particular battery someone else designed.
2. Who's going to provide the initial battery for the car? The battery rental company? So now you have to decide before you even buy the car which company you want to go with, and good luck swapping to another battery company in the future. I guess you could get your car towed from one battery company to another, but that's not exactly cheap either. Or did you think the manufacturer is going to provide it? So what are you going to do with the original battery you paid all that money for when you go to rent another? I know *I'm* not interested in spending several grand on a new battery that I'll exchange for whatever battery they'll happen to have available at the closest station.
3. Battery storage. As someone else pointed out, just look at all the cars that fill up at a typical city gas station in an hour. Where the hell are they going to find the room to store that many batteries? And they still have to be recharged some time, somewhere. So you either have to pay to have them hauled off somewhere, or you *also* need charging stations and electrical capacity to charge that many batteries. And you also have to have large equipment to swap the batteries. You'd be looking at a facility that requires several acres of space, and would be 10-20x the size of an average gas station at a minimum.
None of these are issues that can't be resolved, but they probably won't be due to prohibitive costs. I don't think batteries are the way forward, even for EVs. We need an energy storage medium that can replenished much more quickly than a battery can.
I also think that all those people who speed on their commutes must have failed math, because going 75 instead of 70 only saves you a theoretical 100 seconds (not even 2 minutes!) over 30 miles, which is generally erased by slowdowns at an interchange or a traffic light.
Wrong. Odds are just as good that the time gained by speeding will be magnified by an interchange or a traffic light. I can't tell you how many times I got stuck behind someone doing barely the speed limit (or even 5mph under) and missed a traffic light by less than 2 seconds. Going 5mph faster I would have safely made it. Instead, I lose not just 2 seconds but an extra 2 minutes waiting on the light. I've also had plenty of times where missing that first light caused me to miss a second light, then that one caused me to miss a third, etc. And the difference ended up being 5 extra minutes on a ~20 minute drive... all because some asshole wouldn't go 5mph over the speed limit in perfectly safe driving conditions.
As long as you're not driving unsafely, you lose nothing by speeding a bit. It won't even cost you that much extra fuel. But you stand to gain valuable extra time, so why not give yourself the best chance to do so?
My experience with working for a union was much more brief than I assume yours to have been (mine was two weeks) but I found exactly what you describe. Frankly, I can't put up with that kind of mediocrity, which is why I left almost immediately.
Yeah, but you didn't even mention the best parts about GW:
1. No gear grind. 2. Very dynamic and powerful skill system
I thought I was bored with WoW, so I moved on to Rift. Then I discovered it wasn't WoW I was bored with, but gear grinds. Frankly, as far as I'm concerned, just give me max stats gear out of the gate and let me go play the parts of the game I find interesting. With GW you could pretty much do that with the third campaign, and even the first one didn't take more than a few weeks to max your gear.
Sadly, #1 is almost certainly gone from GW2 and #2 is absolutely gone. As a result, I have no interest in the game.
It could be Nicole. Her resume on IMDB lists her age range as 22-34... which is definitely a few years under her actual age of 36 as stated on the main page of her profile. It lists her latest role from this year so it is "up-to-date".
That was one car (not cars) and it was specifically built to set a speed record. It wasn't over 100mph, and it certainly wasn't cars in general, as GGP vaguely implied. GP is absolutely correct in that "electric cars" in the 19th century were doing 25mph or less. Claiming electric cars in the 19th century were doing over 100mph is about the same as claiming that piston-engine cars today are doing over 500mph.
I see that your reading comprehension has once again failed you. Let's check the replay, shall we? Here's what I wrote: "Except the time and effort required to produce a song, movie, book, picture, or any other creative work is not zero.
I know what you wrote. It's the same fucking sob story we've heard literally billions of times by now. And yes, you're accompanying it with hand-wave assertions. Frankly, I couldn't care less any more.
Artists are doing just fine these days, despite all the "damage" piracy is doing. In fact, there's a far greater percentage of the world's population making a far greater inflation-adjusted income today than ever before in any history we have access to. So spare me the "starving artist" bullshit.
If piracy really were a problem, they'd have stopped producing this shit that costs oh so much time and oh so much money and moved on to something more profitable that fills a more tangible need than entertainment.
So if it's been answered umpteen billion times, why are there still calls for abolishing copyright in a way that penalizes creators and demands that they work to their own detriment? Why are you not repeating the "fair copyright / commission system" argument to the original poster who suggested that copyright should be done away with because hurting a few creative types is a small price to pay for giving everybody a copy of the latest Miley Cyrus album? In short, why are you not suggesting these proposals in agreement with my point that creators deserve compensation for the products of their work, rather than arguing that I'm wrong, and the person arguing for abolishing copyright is correct?
Because he's already offered a solution that's an improvement over what we have today, and you haven't.
... really? Because I'm pretty certain that the mega corps are all about protecting that goose with walls, fences, razorwire, and armed guards so nobody can get to it but them.
Clearly you don't realize what the goose is here. You're talking about their protected works. Thing is, by themselves, those works aren't worth jack shit. We're the goose, and our money is the golden eggs. Those protected works are merely the tool used to extrect the eggs from the goose. And they are indeed working very hard at bilking us for every red cent we're worth as quickly as possible, and nevermind about tomorrow, let alone next year.
If your system of compensation says blah blah blah, ad infinitum
Clearly you still don't get it. So I'll repeat it for you one more time, with pertinent emphasis: No one is requiring those creators to produce anything.
In fact, I did the exact opposite
No, you didn't. You made a lot of hand-waving assertions about lots of time and millions of dollars that absolutely positively must be spent to produce anything, ever.
Any system that disregards the cost of production - not just the cost of duplicating an original - does so to the detriment of the creator, and in essence turns them into a beast of burden, sentenced to create things for the "benefit" of other people, to the detriment of themselves. I specifically ended my statements about cost with a question: What mechanism is proposed to compensate creators for their time and effort, if we want to make all content freely available to anybody who wants a copy? It was a genuine question, which I'd like to hear genuine answers to, not handwaving assertions about "somehow the math will work out because I *feel* it will."
It may have been a "genuine question", but it's already been answered upwards of umpteen billion times. Here's the two most popular and quite viable answers:
1. With a copyright system that's actually fair 2. With a commission system
Your statement itself is trite and meaningless and pretty much worthless, but it does serve to (as a byproduct) point out something interesting:
Art's value is inherantly very subjective. In a civilization merely fighting for survival every day, it's pretty much worthless. When people have time to actually enjoy and pay for art, it's still only ever worth what people are willing to pay. The creator can set the price, but he can never set the value. If the price is too high, some (or all) people won't buy it, and he only has himself to blame.
Piracy, in reality, is simply the free market at work, balancing out prices that are higher than the actual value of the art being sold.
Right - we should kill the goose and take all the golden eggs out at once! Enough with this waiting for a single egg every few days!
That's exactly what the mega corps are doing, so I'm not sure what point you're trying to make with that.
Any system which requires a creator to produce in order to have his creation shoveled into the outstretched hands of other people to "enrich their lives" with no consideration or value given in return for the effort and skill required to perform the act of creation is monstrously unjust.
No one's requiring those creators to produce anything.
You make a lot of hand-waving assertions, and then tell us that you're "not gonna worry your pretty little head trying to calculate numbers, but I'm sure the math is solid." Which tells us you have devoted exactly zero time to actually thinking about what you've proposed.
Who cares? You're doing exactly the same in this next quote:
Yes, if we could give something to everyone for free, it would totally be right. Except the time and effort required to produce a song, movie, book, picture, or any other creative work is not zero. Therefore it is not free to create, and in fact might require many hundreds, thousands, or even millions of dollars to produce, as well as many weeks, months, or even years to create it. So what mechanism do you propose that will compensate creators for their time, talent, effort and materials?
GP's point is that we would be better off with no copyright than the copyright we currently have. And he is absolutely correct. Now, if you take copyright and adjust it for today's world, it would be better than no copyright, but that's not what we have. The biggest change that needs to happen for copyright to be good and not evil is the duration. Copyright in the US originally lasted 14 years, with a possible 14 year extension if the creator was still alive. This was at a time when the only stuff to be copyrighted was printed material, which took potentially months or years to print, and even more years to distribute to your target market. This is without even considering the time to actually write the book in the first place. In today's world, a book, a movie, an audio track, a picture, and anything else that can be pirated can be produced in a matter of months and distributed in a matter of minutes or hours - and that's global distribution. You can make your product available to your entire global target market that quickly. Given how much more quickly you can now make your production available to anyone who actually wants to buy it, copyright should be that much shorter, not longer. Taking these things into account, a much more fair copyright duration today would be something like 5 years with a possible 2 year extension, if the creator is still alive. Instead, copyright currently lasts 75 years after the creator's death... and long before we reach that point for anything, law will be rewritten to allow for still more copyright extensions.
Disney was the original driving force behind insane copyright extensions, but they're certainly not alone any more.
Slashdot Mirror
The problem with your claim is that everything listed in TFA is generic design elements, and none of them are remotely patentable, either individually OR together. No rounded corners? Seriously? Nothing rectangular? No clear or black screen? I mean really, WTF. Honestly, what would you be saying if the first LCD screen manufacturer had included such outrageous things as part of their patented design?
Patents have never been about how something looks. They're about how something works.
Any respect I had left for Apple is completely eradicated after reading that article.
Not sure why that's scary. As someone else pointed out above, there's really no positive benefit to having them around, and they don't appear to be any significant part of any ecosystem. Personally I'd be quite happy if they went extinct.
I like the idea, but the problem is that this does nothing to halt the bury brigades. They can simply choose the "comment" option with the one high-karma account they comment with anyway, and then mod accordingly with the other accounts.
And the sad thing is, it wouldn't even be hard to make a change that would drastically reduce those ocurrences.
And that is, force people to view comments at -1 when they have mod points. Most people view at +1 or higher all the time, so even if they may have corrected a bad negative mod, they won't because they won't see it.
I don't know if anyone has pointed this out already, but this is totally different from the IE situation.
In this case, they are working towards eliminating vulnerabilities in a product they created. The fact that other companies have made businesses based on fixing those same vulnerabilities is entirely irrelevant.
IE, on the other hand, is a tool to access a resource they did not create and do not own.
Because someone thinks they can make a quick buck off early-adopers of EVs. Personally, I don't think they'll ever get anything like this into the black financially.
His "model" isn't one station. Of course you can build that. His model is that EVs replace IC-engine cars, and swap stations replace gas stations. Like I said, It'll never happen because to handle the kind of traffic that gas stations handle you'd need far more space for his swap stations. But that's just one reason of many why his idea is never going to be more than a niche product and his model as a whole will never happen.
You still need room to store and charge the batteries. One of today's batteries for pure EVs takes up far more space than 10-15 gallons of gasoline. Then you also need the machinery to swap them, because they're heavy. A facility the size of a standard gas station won't cut it.
We're far more likely to see this new battery tech in use in the next 15 years than this other guy's battery swap model.
And aside from all this, the Nooks are great products. I bought one myself back in January of this year and I love it.
I suppose you missed the instances where they "unsold" content that they sold? If remotely destroying content you already sold because you later discover it has portions you don't like isn't censorship, then what the fuck is?
My thoughts as well.
I'm not so sure I agree though that BF3 is a game if you have very little time - it seems that there are some significant competency upgrades that you get as you level up, and not having much time to do this will probably hamper you. The ability to carry more ammo, and larger weapon magazines, makes a surprising difference in a firefight. There are also a number of items that many consider very overpowered - though I guess DICE will address this in time.
And that's exactly why I will never buy another BF or CoD game. I have no interest in playing competitive multiplayer where you have to put up with hours and hours of garbage time just to ungimp yourself. It's one thing if you're simply a better player than I am, but it's entirely different if you're "better" only because you get to have better equipment. No thanks.
Incidentally, this is also why I detest gear-grind MMOs.
Because there's a lot of barriers you have to overcome, and there's not much financial incentive currently for anyone to overcome them.
Here's a few examples.
1. Standardized form factors for batteries. This is a big deal for some time to come, because it's hard enough as it is to strike a good balance of weight/power for maximum range. That becomes even more difficult if you're forced to build around one particular battery someone else designed.
2. Who's going to provide the initial battery for the car? The battery rental company? So now you have to decide before you even buy the car which company you want to go with, and good luck swapping to another battery company in the future. I guess you could get your car towed from one battery company to another, but that's not exactly cheap either. Or did you think the manufacturer is going to provide it? So what are you going to do with the original battery you paid all that money for when you go to rent another? I know *I'm* not interested in spending several grand on a new battery that I'll exchange for whatever battery they'll happen to have available at the closest station.
3. Battery storage. As someone else pointed out, just look at all the cars that fill up at a typical city gas station in an hour. Where the hell are they going to find the room to store that many batteries? And they still have to be recharged some time, somewhere. So you either have to pay to have them hauled off somewhere, or you *also* need charging stations and electrical capacity to charge that many batteries. And you also have to have large equipment to swap the batteries. You'd be looking at a facility that requires several acres of space, and would be 10-20x the size of an average gas station at a minimum.
None of these are issues that can't be resolved, but they probably won't be due to prohibitive costs. I don't think batteries are the way forward, even for EVs. We need an energy storage medium that can replenished much more quickly than a battery can.
I also think that all those people who speed on their commutes must have failed math, because going 75 instead of 70 only saves you a theoretical 100 seconds (not even 2 minutes!) over 30 miles, which is generally erased by slowdowns at an interchange or a traffic light.
Wrong. Odds are just as good that the time gained by speeding will be magnified by an interchange or a traffic light. I can't tell you how many times I got stuck behind someone doing barely the speed limit (or even 5mph under) and missed a traffic light by less than 2 seconds. Going 5mph faster I would have safely made it. Instead, I lose not just 2 seconds but an extra 2 minutes waiting on the light. I've also had plenty of times where missing that first light caused me to miss a second light, then that one caused me to miss a third, etc. And the difference ended up being 5 extra minutes on a ~20 minute drive... all because some asshole wouldn't go 5mph over the speed limit in perfectly safe driving conditions.
As long as you're not driving unsafely, you lose nothing by speeding a bit. It won't even cost you that much extra fuel. But you stand to gain valuable extra time, so why not give yourself the best chance to do so?
Couldn't agree more.
My experience with working for a union was much more brief than I assume yours to have been (mine was two weeks) but I found exactly what you describe. Frankly, I can't put up with that kind of mediocrity, which is why I left almost immediately.
Yeah, but you didn't even mention the best parts about GW:
1. No gear grind.
2. Very dynamic and powerful skill system
I thought I was bored with WoW, so I moved on to Rift. Then I discovered it wasn't WoW I was bored with, but gear grinds. Frankly, as far as I'm concerned, just give me max stats gear out of the gate and let me go play the parts of the game I find interesting. With GW you could pretty much do that with the third campaign, and even the first one didn't take more than a few weeks to max your gear.
Sadly, #1 is almost certainly gone from GW2 and #2 is absolutely gone. As a result, I have no interest in the game.
It could be Nicole. Her resume on IMDB lists her age range as 22-34... which is definitely a few years under her actual age of 36 as stated on the main page of her profile. It lists her latest role from this year so it is "up-to-date".
And that particular car wasn't built in the 19th century.
That was one car (not cars) and it was specifically built to set a speed record. It wasn't over 100mph, and it certainly wasn't cars in general, as GGP vaguely implied. GP is absolutely correct in that "electric cars" in the 19th century were doing 25mph or less. Claiming electric cars in the 19th century were doing over 100mph is about the same as claiming that piston-engine cars today are doing over 500mph.
You seem surprised.
I, on the other hand, expect approximately 99.9% of all slashdot users immediately thought "Matrix!" upon reading the title.
I see that your reading comprehension has once again failed you. Let's check the replay, shall we? Here's what I wrote: "Except the time and effort required to produce a song, movie, book, picture, or any other creative work is not zero.
I know what you wrote. It's the same fucking sob story we've heard literally billions of times by now. And yes, you're accompanying it with hand-wave assertions. Frankly, I couldn't care less any more.
Artists are doing just fine these days, despite all the "damage" piracy is doing. In fact, there's a far greater percentage of the world's population making a far greater inflation-adjusted income today than ever before in any history we have access to. So spare me the "starving artist" bullshit.
If piracy really were a problem, they'd have stopped producing this shit that costs oh so much time and oh so much money and moved on to something more profitable that fills a more tangible need than entertainment.
So if it's been answered umpteen billion times, why are there still calls for abolishing copyright in a way that penalizes creators and demands that they work to their own detriment? Why are you not repeating the "fair copyright / commission system" argument to the original poster who suggested that copyright should be done away with because hurting a few creative types is a small price to pay for giving everybody a copy of the latest Miley Cyrus album? In short, why are you not suggesting these proposals in agreement with my point that creators deserve compensation for the products of their work, rather than arguing that I'm wrong, and the person arguing for abolishing copyright is correct?
Because he's already offered a solution that's an improvement over what we have today, and you haven't.
... really? Because I'm pretty certain that the mega corps are all about protecting that goose with walls, fences, razorwire, and armed guards so nobody can get to it but them.
Clearly you don't realize what the goose is here. You're talking about their protected works. Thing is, by themselves, those works aren't worth jack shit. We're the goose, and our money is the golden eggs. Those protected works are merely the tool used to extrect the eggs from the goose. And they are indeed working very hard at bilking us for every red cent we're worth as quickly as possible, and nevermind about tomorrow, let alone next year.
If your system of compensation says blah blah blah, ad infinitum
Clearly you still don't get it. So I'll repeat it for you one more time, with pertinent emphasis: No one is requiring those creators to produce anything.
In fact, I did the exact opposite
No, you didn't. You made a lot of hand-waving assertions about lots of time and millions of dollars that absolutely positively must be spent to produce anything, ever.
Any system that disregards the cost of production - not just the cost of duplicating an original - does so to the detriment of the creator, and in essence turns them into a beast of burden, sentenced to create things for the "benefit" of other people, to the detriment of themselves. I specifically ended my statements about cost with a question: What mechanism is proposed to compensate creators for their time and effort, if we want to make all content freely available to anybody who wants a copy? It was a genuine question, which I'd like to hear genuine answers to, not handwaving assertions about "somehow the math will work out because I *feel* it will."
It may have been a "genuine question", but it's already been answered upwards of umpteen billion times. Here's the two most popular and quite viable answers:
1. With a copyright system that's actually fair
2. With a commission system
Your statement itself is trite and meaningless and pretty much worthless, but it does serve to (as a byproduct) point out something interesting:
Art's value is inherantly very subjective. In a civilization merely fighting for survival every day, it's pretty much worthless. When people have time to actually enjoy and pay for art, it's still only ever worth what people are willing to pay. The creator can set the price, but he can never set the value. If the price is too high, some (or all) people won't buy it, and he only has himself to blame.
Piracy, in reality, is simply the free market at work, balancing out prices that are higher than the actual value of the art being sold.
Right - we should kill the goose and take all the golden eggs out at once! Enough with this waiting for a single egg every few days!
That's exactly what the mega corps are doing, so I'm not sure what point you're trying to make with that.
Any system which requires a creator to produce in order to have his creation shoveled into the outstretched hands of other people to "enrich their lives" with no consideration or value given in return for the effort and skill required to perform the act of creation is monstrously unjust.
No one's requiring those creators to produce anything.
You make a lot of hand-waving assertions, and then tell us that you're "not gonna worry your pretty little head trying to calculate numbers, but I'm sure the math is solid." Which tells us you have devoted exactly zero time to actually thinking about what you've proposed.
Who cares? You're doing exactly the same in this next quote:
Yes, if we could give something to everyone for free, it would totally be right. Except the time and effort required to produce a song, movie, book, picture, or any other creative work is not zero. Therefore it is not free to create, and in fact might require many hundreds, thousands, or even millions of dollars to produce, as well as many weeks, months, or even years to create it. So what mechanism do you propose that will compensate creators for their time, talent, effort and materials?
GP's point is that we would be better off with no copyright than the copyright we currently have. And he is absolutely correct. Now, if you take copyright and adjust it for today's world, it would be better than no copyright, but that's not what we have. The biggest change that needs to happen for copyright to be good and not evil is the duration. Copyright in the US originally lasted 14 years, with a possible 14 year extension if the creator was still alive. This was at a time when the only stuff to be copyrighted was printed material, which took potentially months or years to print, and even more years to distribute to your target market. This is without even considering the time to actually write the book in the first place. In today's world, a book, a movie, an audio track, a picture, and anything else that can be pirated can be produced in a matter of months and distributed in a matter of minutes or hours - and that's global distribution. You can make your product available to your entire global target market that quickly. Given how much more quickly you can now make your production available to anyone who actually wants to buy it, copyright should be that much shorter, not longer. Taking these things into account, a much more fair copyright duration today would be something like 5 years with a possible 2 year extension, if the creator is still alive. Instead, copyright currently lasts 75 years after the creator's death... and long before we reach that point for anything, law will be rewritten to allow for still more copyright extensions.
Disney was the original driving force behind insane copyright extensions, but they're certainly not alone any more.
And what's to say that same site didn't also have another infection that wasn't caught?
You make some very interesting points.