Pretty much the consensus seems to be that the adaptation is as bad as she claims, but she did sign the rights away. No matter what she may have thought was going to happen, if it's not in the contract, it's not going to happen.
As soon as the line was crossed from not involving her to putting words in her mouth, though, she's got every right to complain as loudly as possible about what was done to her work. To her credit, she stayed quiet out of an honorable respect for the contract, and only began publicly making her feelings known once ideas and motives were attributed to her that weren't hers.
As sour grapes as her last salvo might come across, it's important to bear in mind that it was only caused by the producers clearly stepping over the line. They opened the floodgates, she's simply providing the water. Also note that she does not claim that the producers were under any legal obligation to stay true to her books, she simply claims that the books were better, and what the producers put onscreen is essentially unrelated to what she wrote.
No, because "anything" isn't a non-existant item of no value and dubious future
Of no value? Sounds to me like it has a value of $26,500 USD. Or do you mean some kind of ambiguous ethical or moral value? Me, I call something valuable when someone else is willing to pay for it. This has certain conveniences, such as being able to attribute real numbers to its value. You know, numbers like "$26,500."
Ha ha ha! See, this is exactly what I mean. Stocks, when they don't pay dividends, still represent ownership and voting power in a real, valuable corporation
Look up "preferred stock" sometime, then get back to me (hint: preferred stock confers no voting right). Ownership which confers no input or control is a pretty nebulous concept, really. The only thing protecting the value of that investment is the hope that the people running the company don't let it go out of business. Kind of like investing in an imaginary island hoping that the people running that company don't go ahead and devalue it. I'm sure your brilliant insight into the realities of the situaion will change the practices of the stock market.
I think Wall Street could discern the subtle differences between ownership of a business and ownership of a virtual "island". Why can't you?
Try this on for size: what's the difference between owning a virtual island and owning a copyright? They're both insubstantial, and both count on someone else not giving away the good for nothing to maintain value. Yet we seem to have an awful lot of very intelligent people investing in copyrights. Again, you should probably explain to them how things really work. It would save them a lot of money.
You've missed the point. It's not stupid "just because it counts on someone else buying it". It was stupid the moment he paid $26K for a virtual island. I was rebutting the argument that possibly being able to resell it makes it not stupid. And like Amway, once you do the stupid thing your only choice is to try to find other people at least as stupid to climb out of the hole you just dug yourself. Some people succeed -- are they geniuses, or just smarter than the ones they passed the hot potato to?
Hang on a second, let me parse this. It's not stupid because it counts on someone else buying it. It's stupid because...wait, you don't really give a reason, do you? The only way to recover from the stupidity is to take advantage of someone else's stupidity...but that presupposes the stupidity in the first place, doesn't it? How conveniently circular of you. You still haven't covered how investing in something with the intention of selling pieces of it to other people is stupid. And you're going to have to do that, because that's the basis of kind of a lot of investments. I might go so far as to say almost all of them.
The term is "artificial scarcity", and once again you miss the key difference: it only works if you are the one controlling the scarcity, because it is indeed artificial
Oh, you mean like stocks that the issuer can issue more of if they want? I'd better ditch those posthaste.
Or all the intellectual property that exists on the books of every corporation out there. I imagine they'll be quite surprised when you point out that their assets are significantly less than they think they are. Go a little easy on the RIAA members, because the only property they own is inherently non-scarce, and I imagine they'll get all pasty-faced when they realize that all the money they've been raking in over the past century has been "stupid" and shouldn't count.
Not to mention my extensive investment in cash, which the government could print more of at any moment. Good god, the horror!
Here's a real world example: Certain older Magic: The Gathering cards were worth decent money in aftermarket trading due to their power and rarity. "Rarity" of course being nothing more than Wizard of the Coast's decision of how many of the ca
Technically, they're not looking outside the target market, they're looking to expand the existing target market into new areas. Whoever you're aiming your ad at is the target market, by definition. </nitpick>
No, the reason it's stupid is because land on a virtual island has no demand. With no demand, it doesn't matter how much it costs - people won't pay for it.
But...the fact that someone just paid 26 large for the island pretty much demonstrates a demand, doesn't it? It was an auction, so I doubt he's the only one who was willing to pay for it (otherwise he could have gotten for it less than $26k, presumably).
I guess I don't see why you think there isn't any demand for it. There are plenty of real-money auctions on ebay for EQ items/characters/property, and ditto Ultima Online, Diablo II, etc. Investing in an island for an unproved game may be more speculative, but there's nothing new about betting on something to become more popular (every IPO is all about exactly that, after all).
That fact that the island isn't a physical reality isn't all that relevant. Plenty of things that do have physical reality are pretty much worthless (ever know anyone who "bought" a star?), plenty of things which don't are worth quite a bit (like the Coca-Cola trademark, which I've heard is valued on their books at $75E6 (nothing like unsubstantiated "facts"...sorry)).
The problem is that you seem to be separating "cost" from "demand," and that's not accurate. Demand defines cost, and there was clearly $26k worth of demand for this island.
They call them trailers because they originally replaced the newsreels and such that played after a film and before the next one to fill the time. Once people started showing up early to see them, they were switched to before the film.
That's the worst argument I've ever heard. That argument implies investing in anything is stupid, because it requires other, bigger idiots to buy it from you for it to be worthwhile.
You should probably explain that to Wall Street, I'm sure they'll all stop buying notional ownership of corporations. I mean, they're of no value unless they can find bigger idiots to buy them.
You could make an argument about the fact that what he bought is inherently a non-scarce resource, but saying it's stupid just because it counts on someone else buying it from you is...well, stupid. That's where the value of anything comes from.
As far as non-scarce resources are concerned, there's a remarkably large body of law centered around making the sale of non-scarce resources possible. It covers things like "copyright" and "patent" and "trademark." There's nothing odd about investing in and selling off bits of non-scarce resources, it happens all the time.
Hell, money is a non-scarce resource, protected only by the hope that the issuing government will be smart enough to not just print assloads more of it. There isn't even a contract backing that up, whereas in the case of this game, there are contracts covering the purchase and sale of property.
Ultimately, it's worth whatever people are willing to pay for it. Just because you won't pay for it doesn't mean no one else will. Also just because you won't pay for it doesn't mean anyone who will is a sucker.
Which is precisely what the blurb claimed. Unless your 10:1 figure is wrong (I didn't check it), the blurb is completely accurate, given this information.
This is clearly cool. Temperature-sensitive clothing that adjusts to keep me comfortable over a range of conditions would be spectacular. Bullet resistance is a cool bonus. The potential exoskeletal applications are downright neat. And, personally, I would love to see this in wearable computing applications.
But all that being said, what I want to see most is clothing that you can change the appearance of (color, pattern, even cut, if possible) at will. Not because I particularly want it, mind you, but because I'm quite certain that that's the feature that will drive adoption of this in the consumer space, which is what will cause all the actually cool applications to be available.
This is a point well-taken, but I was thinking specifically of the patenting of gene sequences found in nature.
In the larger sense, however, even I recognize that patent protection is a necessary evil (this does not make it any less an evil, in my view), and one I support insofar as it furthers the progress of the useful arts, to borrow a phrase. Our current patent regime, however, has demonstrated time and again that there is essentially no barrier to acquiring a patent, up to and including originality.
This, I believe, is a net hindrance to scientific progress, even in an environment where scientific progress must arise from a profit motive.
My problems come in when a privately-owned (don't confuse publicly-traded with publicly-owned)company buys research from a truly publicly-owned facility, like a university, then does the remaining research and testing (not a trivial expense, to be sure) required to bring a drug/method to market, tying up the whole enchilada with patents.
If it was just their money that had been invested, I'd be closer to buying into your argument. But when a large chunk of it is my tax money, I see no reason they should be the sole profiters on the research.
Granted, the university got a (probably significant) payment for the research, and so it wasn't a complete loss of taxes. But they did so at the cost of greater harm to overall scientific progress, which benefits from free information flow.
This highlights perhaps the biggest harm associated with the current patent regime: by making patents trivial to get (both in terms of cost and in terms of originality of thought), we have created a system whereby you almost have to take out patents on everything you do, for fear of someone else coming along later and patenting your work right out from under you.
Even if the organization or individual who takes out the patent has the best of intentions, once a patent exists the potential is there for use of the research to become inaccessible, expensive, or withheld completely (patents can be sold/acquired, after all). Knowing this leads to yet more defensive patenting, which only exacerbates the problem.
The end result of this is what we see today: virtually everything gets covered in patents as soon as it's conceived of, with a net chilling effect on the progress of scientific research (which depends, after all, on being able to build upon the ideas of previous efforts).
Moreover, this is not something that can be "fixed" by tinkering with the duration of patents, their scope, or their costs. At the most basic level, a patent is about restricting the use of knowledge. At the most basic level, scientific research depends upon using existing knowledge. The two are fundamentally incompatible.
This sort of effort is a good response, and is a better effort than anything I can come up with to twist patent law to something useful to research, but I'm less than fully optimistic as to its chances of long-term success.
That's exactly the kind of analogizing that makes me leery of those in favor of formulating policy based on an assumption of manmade global warming.
If 50% of scientists told me taking the trip would kill me and 50% of the scientists told me there was no danger, of course I wouldn't take the trip.
But this is a grotesquely simplistic analysis, since it gives no cost for not taking the trip (aside from "gee, I don't get to see space"). The argument we are actually faced with is whether the harm done via CO2 emissions is greater than the harm done by retooling our entire infrastructure to eliminate them.
other than the ethical issues with space littering
Please tell me you're kidding.
To argue by quotation: "Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the drug store, but that's just peanuts to space."
There is no issue with "littering" space. None. Zero. Nothing we send out has any real chance of ever encountering anything ever again.
Now, you may have meant orbit littering, and that is a problem: but anyone who wants to dispose of nuclear waste into orbit is clearly not thinking well at all. It's one thing if we could fling it out into space, it's another to fling it out just far enough so that it's still hanging around to come down eventually.
Sure, it would burn up on re-entry...which is a purely chemical change, and wouldn't effect the composition of the radioactive nucleii in the slightest. All you'd accomplish would be to effectively spread the waste as really small particles over a really large area.
And, since inhaling heavy, radioactive metals is orders of magnitude more dangerous than being exposed to external radiation, I don't like this plan at all, really. Space disposal isn't a good option unless the disposal plan involves escape velocity so it goes away forever.
You're spot on about the costs involved, though. It's just not a feasible solution unless (until? I can hope...) getting things into and past orbit becomes orders of magnitude cheaper and orders of magnitude more reliable.
Not quite. Remember, when the car has finished the ascent, it's moving at either orbital or escape velocity (depending on how far out it climbed - this is, after all, the whole point of building the thing), which means that it would either remain fixed relative to the ribbon/planet or begin drifting away from the ribbon/planet if it were to let go of the ribbon (I'm oversimplifying somewhat, admittedly).
You can't start recovering energy from the car via regenerative braking until it's far enough down the ribbon that it's below orbital velocity.
However, the descent is critical for energy reclamation in another way: climbing back down the ribbon gives back the angular momentum that the car leeched from it on the way up.
Which, incidentally, is why you can't have two separate one-way ribbons, one for up and one for down.
It's not the downward force that concerns me, its the net angular momentum of the system. You're borrowing momentum from the ribbon/counterweight to accelerate the cars up to orbital velocity (this is, after all, the whole point: you exert energy to climb the ribbon, the ribbon accelerates you up to the velocity needed). If you detach the car and then drive it back down to the planet, you're not repaying the loan, as it were.
Ultimately, you can think of it this way: you can't get something for nothing. No matter where you put the counterweight, and no matter how massive it is, the angular momentum contained in the ribbon/counterweight is a fixed amount. Every item you send up the ribbon takes some of it away, every item you send down the ribbon puts some of it back.
Or you can look at another similar system: the moon. Even at 1/6th the mass of the Earth, the moon is still measurably slowing due to the tides sloshing about on the surface of the Earth. This, ultimately, is where tidal power generation plants get their energy, incidentally: they're taking it from the momentum of the moon.
Nope, you have to send them back down the ribbon for inertial reasons. If all you do is send cars up, you eventually leech enough inertia out of the ribbon for it to collapse. Conservation of angular momentum, and whatnot: sending a car up the ribbon accelerates the ribbon opposite Earth's direction of spin, sending one down accelerates the ribbon in the same direction. The whole concept depends on approximately equal loads going up and coming down.
Clearly, you'll never have exactly equal loads travelling both ways (otherwise why did you bother building the thing in the first place?), but you make up for reasonable shortfalls with stationkeeping thrust of one kind or another. What you do not do is waste the angular momentum you've gained going up the ribbon by expending energy to drive yourself back down the gravity well without the ribbon. Remember that once you've gone up, you can't just "fall" back down, you're in orbit - the whole point is that you've gained orbital velocity and altitude by climbing the ribbon.
What you need instead is a "two lane" ribbon. Otherwise, as you've said, you have to clear the ribbon for each set of trips each way.
Slashdot Mirror
I gotta start burning me some coal...
Pretty much the consensus seems to be that the adaptation is as bad as she claims, but she did sign the rights away. No matter what she may have thought was going to happen, if it's not in the contract, it's not going to happen.
As soon as the line was crossed from not involving her to putting words in her mouth, though, she's got every right to complain as loudly as possible about what was done to her work. To her credit, she stayed quiet out of an honorable respect for the contract, and only began publicly making her feelings known once ideas and motives were attributed to her that weren't hers.
As sour grapes as her last salvo might come across, it's important to bear in mind that it was only caused by the producers clearly stepping over the line. They opened the floodgates, she's simply providing the water. Also note that she does not claim that the producers were under any legal obligation to stay true to her books, she simply claims that the books were better, and what the producers put onscreen is essentially unrelated to what she wrote.
*Yes, this is a shameless plug.
Of no value? Sounds to me like it has a value of $26,500 USD. Or do you mean some kind of ambiguous ethical or moral value? Me, I call something valuable when someone else is willing to pay for it. This has certain conveniences, such as being able to attribute real numbers to its value. You know, numbers like "$26,500."
Ha ha ha! See, this is exactly what I mean. Stocks, when they don't pay dividends, still represent ownership and voting power in a real, valuable corporation
Look up "preferred stock" sometime, then get back to me (hint: preferred stock confers no voting right). Ownership which confers no input or control is a pretty nebulous concept, really. The only thing protecting the value of that investment is the hope that the people running the company don't let it go out of business. Kind of like investing in an imaginary island hoping that the people running that company don't go ahead and devalue it. I'm sure your brilliant insight into the realities of the situaion will change the practices of the stock market.
I think Wall Street could discern the subtle differences between ownership of a business and ownership of a virtual "island". Why can't you?
Try this on for size: what's the difference between owning a virtual island and owning a copyright? They're both insubstantial, and both count on someone else not giving away the good for nothing to maintain value. Yet we seem to have an awful lot of very intelligent people investing in copyrights. Again, you should probably explain to them how things really work. It would save them a lot of money.
You've missed the point. It's not stupid "just because it counts on someone else buying it". It was stupid the moment he paid $26K for a virtual island. I was rebutting the argument that possibly being able to resell it makes it not stupid. And like Amway, once you do the stupid thing your only choice is to try to find other people at least as stupid to climb out of the hole you just dug yourself. Some people succeed -- are they geniuses, or just smarter than the ones they passed the hot potato to?
Hang on a second, let me parse this. It's not stupid because it counts on someone else buying it. It's stupid because...wait, you don't really give a reason, do you? The only way to recover from the stupidity is to take advantage of someone else's stupidity...but that presupposes the stupidity in the first place, doesn't it? How conveniently circular of you. You still haven't covered how investing in something with the intention of selling pieces of it to other people is stupid. And you're going to have to do that, because that's the basis of kind of a lot of investments. I might go so far as to say almost all of them.
The term is "artificial scarcity", and once again you miss the key difference: it only works if you are the one controlling the scarcity, because it is indeed artificial
Oh, you mean like stocks that the issuer can issue more of if they want? I'd better ditch those posthaste.
Or all the intellectual property that exists on the books of every corporation out there. I imagine they'll be quite surprised when you point out that their assets are significantly less than they think they are. Go a little easy on the RIAA members, because the only property they own is inherently non-scarce, and I imagine they'll get all pasty-faced when they realize that all the money they've been raking in over the past century has been "stupid" and shouldn't count.
Not to mention my extensive investment in cash, which the government could print more of at any moment. Good god, the horror!
Here's a real world example: Certain older Magic: The Gathering cards were worth decent money in aftermarket trading due to their power and rarity. "Rarity" of course being nothing more than Wizard of the Coast's decision of how many of the ca
Technically, they're not looking outside the target market, they're looking to expand the existing target market into new areas. Whoever you're aiming your ad at is the target market, by definition.
</nitpick>
But...the fact that someone just paid 26 large for the island pretty much demonstrates a demand, doesn't it? It was an auction, so I doubt he's the only one who was willing to pay for it (otherwise he could have gotten for it less than $26k, presumably).
I guess I don't see why you think there isn't any demand for it. There are plenty of real-money auctions on ebay for EQ items/characters/property, and ditto Ultima Online, Diablo II, etc. Investing in an island for an unproved game may be more speculative, but there's nothing new about betting on something to become more popular (every IPO is all about exactly that, after all).
That fact that the island isn't a physical reality isn't all that relevant. Plenty of things that do have physical reality are pretty much worthless (ever know anyone who "bought" a star?), plenty of things which don't are worth quite a bit (like the Coca-Cola trademark, which I've heard is valued on their books at $75E6 (nothing like unsubstantiated "facts"...sorry)).
The problem is that you seem to be separating "cost" from "demand," and that's not accurate. Demand defines cost, and there was clearly $26k worth of demand for this island.
They call them trailers because they originally replaced the newsreels and such that played after a film and before the next one to fill the time. Once people started showing up early to see them, they were switched to before the film.
You should probably explain that to Wall Street, I'm sure they'll all stop buying notional ownership of corporations. I mean, they're of no value unless they can find bigger idiots to buy them.
You could make an argument about the fact that what he bought is inherently a non-scarce resource, but saying it's stupid just because it counts on someone else buying it from you is...well, stupid. That's where the value of anything comes from.
As far as non-scarce resources are concerned, there's a remarkably large body of law centered around making the sale of non-scarce resources possible. It covers things like "copyright" and "patent" and "trademark." There's nothing odd about investing in and selling off bits of non-scarce resources, it happens all the time.
Hell, money is a non-scarce resource, protected only by the hope that the issuing government will be smart enough to not just print assloads more of it. There isn't even a contract backing that up, whereas in the case of this game, there are contracts covering the purchase and sale of property.
Ultimately, it's worth whatever people are willing to pay for it. Just because you won't pay for it doesn't mean no one else will. Also just because you won't pay for it doesn't mean anyone who will is a sucker.
265,000/10 = 26,500
Which is precisely what the blurb claimed. Unless your 10:1 figure is wrong (I didn't check it), the blurb is completely accurate, given this information.
Legs. And...where her legs meet her back. That whole region, really...and above it.
I hate when people say oil isn't a renewable resource. Of course it is, if you just wait long enough.
(Is there a -1 bad pun mod? I hope not...)
But all that being said, what I want to see most is clothing that you can change the appearance of (color, pattern, even cut, if possible) at will. Not because I particularly want it, mind you, but because I'm quite certain that that's the feature that will drive adoption of this in the consumer space, which is what will cause all the actually cool applications to be available.
Viva fashion, and whatnot.
Sheesh
Some people.
In the larger sense, however, even I recognize that patent protection is a necessary evil (this does not make it any less an evil, in my view), and one I support insofar as it furthers the progress of the useful arts, to borrow a phrase. Our current patent regime, however, has demonstrated time and again that there is essentially no barrier to acquiring a patent, up to and including originality.
This, I believe, is a net hindrance to scientific progress, even in an environment where scientific progress must arise from a profit motive.
(If you think this joke was bad, consider the number of cab driver/kwik-e-mart jokes I could have made)
If it was just their money that had been invested, I'd be closer to buying into your argument. But when a large chunk of it is my tax money, I see no reason they should be the sole profiters on the research.
Granted, the university got a (probably significant) payment for the research, and so it wasn't a complete loss of taxes. But they did so at the cost of greater harm to overall scientific progress, which benefits from free information flow.
Even if the organization or individual who takes out the patent has the best of intentions, once a patent exists the potential is there for use of the research to become inaccessible, expensive, or withheld completely (patents can be sold/acquired, after all). Knowing this leads to yet more defensive patenting, which only exacerbates the problem.
The end result of this is what we see today: virtually everything gets covered in patents as soon as it's conceived of, with a net chilling effect on the progress of scientific research (which depends, after all, on being able to build upon the ideas of previous efforts).
Moreover, this is not something that can be "fixed" by tinkering with the duration of patents, their scope, or their costs. At the most basic level, a patent is about restricting the use of knowledge. At the most basic level, scientific research depends upon using existing knowledge. The two are fundamentally incompatible.
This sort of effort is a good response, and is a better effort than anything I can come up with to twist patent law to something useful to research, but I'm less than fully optimistic as to its chances of long-term success.
If 50% of scientists told me taking the trip would kill me and 50% of the scientists told me there was no danger, of course I wouldn't take the trip.
But this is a grotesquely simplistic analysis, since it gives no cost for not taking the trip (aside from "gee, I don't get to see space"). The argument we are actually faced with is whether the harm done via CO2 emissions is greater than the harm done by retooling our entire infrastructure to eliminate them.
Please tell me you're kidding.
To argue by quotation: "Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the drug store, but that's just peanuts to space."
There is no issue with "littering" space. None. Zero. Nothing we send out has any real chance of ever encountering anything ever again.
Now, you may have meant orbit littering, and that is a problem: but anyone who wants to dispose of nuclear waste into orbit is clearly not thinking well at all. It's one thing if we could fling it out into space, it's another to fling it out just far enough so that it's still hanging around to come down eventually.
"Burning up" doesn't mean "going away."
Sure, it would burn up on re-entry...which is a purely chemical change, and wouldn't effect the composition of the radioactive nucleii in the slightest. All you'd accomplish would be to effectively spread the waste as really small particles over a really large area.
And, since inhaling heavy, radioactive metals is orders of magnitude more dangerous than being exposed to external radiation, I don't like this plan at all, really. Space disposal isn't a good option unless the disposal plan involves escape velocity so it goes away forever.
You're spot on about the costs involved, though. It's just not a feasible solution unless (until? I can hope...) getting things into and past orbit becomes orders of magnitude cheaper and orders of magnitude more reliable.
The more you know...
You can't start recovering energy from the car via regenerative braking until it's far enough down the ribbon that it's below orbital velocity.
However, the descent is critical for energy reclamation in another way: climbing back down the ribbon gives back the angular momentum that the car leeched from it on the way up.
Which, incidentally, is why you can't have two separate one-way ribbons, one for up and one for down.
Ultimately, you can think of it this way: you can't get something for nothing. No matter where you put the counterweight, and no matter how massive it is, the angular momentum contained in the ribbon/counterweight is a fixed amount. Every item you send up the ribbon takes some of it away, every item you send down the ribbon puts some of it back.
Or you can look at another similar system: the moon. Even at 1/6th the mass of the Earth, the moon is still measurably slowing due to the tides sloshing about on the surface of the Earth. This, ultimately, is where tidal power generation plants get their energy, incidentally: they're taking it from the momentum of the moon.
Anything else would be free energy.
Clearly, you'll never have exactly equal loads travelling both ways (otherwise why did you bother building the thing in the first place?), but you make up for reasonable shortfalls with stationkeeping thrust of one kind or another. What you do not do is waste the angular momentum you've gained going up the ribbon by expending energy to drive yourself back down the gravity well without the ribbon. Remember that once you've gone up, you can't just "fall" back down, you're in orbit - the whole point is that you've gained orbital velocity and altitude by climbing the ribbon.
What you need instead is a "two lane" ribbon. Otherwise, as you've said, you have to clear the ribbon for each set of trips each way.
Actually, I'm pretty sure 5555 is divisible by five.