It's not BS at all, college textbooks often vary significantly between editions, particularly in certain subjects.
Once you get a good math book nailed down, there isn't much reason to change things up, but English textbooks are constantly changing because, like it or not, the language is constantly changeing.
I once had to re-take a tech writing class (I -hate- tech writing), and the edition I used for the first class was no longer good for the second class, I tried. They changed professors and editions (same book), and the differences in the text were too great to follow along. I might be able to find a similar section, but I had to hunt for it, and half the examples had changed and a good many of the problems were different.
Even math books can undergo re-structuring, making using an old edition very difficult. Any field that is constantly changing often has vast differences between editions of the same textbook.
Frankly, while learning the core of CS may not change, if every course in your CS program uses the same books they did 20 years ago, I'd be concerned that the program is 20 years out of date and you're not getting the best education possible. There are many subjects where the technology and innovation changes on a yearly basis, and not keeping up with it is a shame. It's the kind of education that churns out professors because they can't hack it when it comes to actually applying that CS education to the real world.
Sometimes it is no big deal to go back an edition or two, but you can rarely go back further than that. It also depends on the professor - if they hardly use the book then it's no big deal, but if they reference pages and problems and expect you to do 3/4 of the work outside class it can be difficult. Sometimes the books vary significantly between editions. That makes following along with the prof very difficult, if not impossible.
For example, if the prof tells you to read up on chapter 5 and do the problems at the end of the chapter to prepare for the next lecture, and chapter 5 of the old edition is all about harmonics, you could spend hours reading and prepping for class only to discover that your prof is talking about newtons, gravity, and force equations, which is what chapter 5 in the new edition covered.
See the problem? The new editions can have the same basic information, but the structure can vary, and depending on the teaching style this can be a real issue.
I read the LOTR as a single volume. Very handy to have a 2000 some-odd page book lying around. They did maintain the "books", but it was just a page that said "Book 1" "Book 2" and "Book 3" between them.
I loved Hellboy, and I think the people who don't were probably looking for something like Swartzenegar meets high fantasy, and Hellboy is neither. It's a comic book movie, it should look and feel like a comic book. And hey guess what? It does. It's also a really good (if a bit nonsensical) story with a lot of cheesy one-liners thrown in which is - surprise surprise! - just like the comic book.
I'm not sure yet which I'd like better for the Hobbit - keeping Jackson's visuals or going all Pan's Labyrinth on the story. It really should not be darker than LOTR was though, as The Hobbit was a lighter, more care-free story.
We'll see, I'm looking forward to it. I started my love of the LOTR with The Hobbit and the Silmarilion, and didn't read the trilogy until the movie was about to come out.
The Hobbit is a simpler story and much easier to read than the LOTR trilogy is. If they are planning two films like I heard some time ago, it should be more than enough to pack the entire story in without cutting much of anything.
True, but by then you're into brunch, followed by elevensies, then lunch, a nice snack, afternoon tea, supper, dinner, and a late night snack before bed.
All in all, it's hard work eating enough to be a hobbit.
That's the problem with marketing and trailers. For some movies it does not matter, but for some, if they tell you enough to decide whether or not you'd like the movie then you know the key plot points and you might as well have already seen it. The worst is when all the best action sequences are in the trailer, and this movie that looks exciting and full of action is really a droll story of personal struggle with a few sporadic action sequences.
Personally, I don't go to see movies because they look similar to another movie or story. I like the differences, and Pan's Labyrinth was certainly different. I enjoyed every minute of it.
For the record, it is very difficult to be grammatically incorrect with the lowly comma. That is because it defaults a simple pause, and it has little effect on whether the grammar is correct or incorrect. Except when concatinating two sentances, commas can be thrown in wherever you like. The pause can dramatically alter the interpretation of the sentance with a simple style change, so you must still be careful with it.
For example, which sentance is correct?
A panda eats shoots and leaves.
A panda eats, shoots, and leaves.
As you should be able to tell, they are both correct, but the meanings are worlds apart. The difference is so great there was a book about grammar and writing with that exact title illustrate the point.
In the case of the GP, the comma is extra but does not change the meaning at all. He was just adding a dramatic Shatner-esqu pause.
And to not have any bias of any sort.
I must also point out that this both starts with a conjunction, which is gramatically incorrect, and it does not express a complete thought. It is not a sentance; it is a fragment. It is therefore a far more grievous grammatical offense than adding an extra comma will ever be.
*Sorry, not going to duplicate the grammatical errors of the unnecessary comma, or the word "since".
This is also incorrect, as you imply the subject (yourself) in a way that is not grammatically correct. It is another fragment.
I can't wait to see what is wrong with my post, because as you may have noticed it is hard to keep from looking like an imbicile while correcting someone else's grammar. I'm hoping most of mine are just spelling errors.;)
You're right that it doesn't matter, but still, I think it's pretty cool.
It's almost like you've turned your WAN connection into something similar to a land-line phone connection. I.e. when you pick up the phone and call someone, what you get is essentially a direct wire connection between phones until someone hangs up. IP networks don't operate this way, and sending anything into "the cloud" is the exact opposite of that kind of connection, but if you're willing to spend the cash on the ISPs you can make it close to it (it still uses packets, obviously, phones don't).
Tunneling protocols over "the cloud" appear the same way as far as your network knows.
I was responding to the GPs assertion that the smart way to do it was with VPNs and such. That becomes impractical when you have several offices with thousands of employees in each.
Apparently you misunderstood what I was saying, because generally what you do in this situation is a forrest of AD domains connected together via WAN links that behave like one AD domain. It keeps things tidy and easy to manage.
What my company did, though, was to put an entire, cross-continent LAN under a single domain tree. The size of this thing is enormous, and the cost in maintenance has to be insane.
When was the last time you pinged cross continent on your local LAN? I'm not talking about pinging google.com, I'm talking about never leaving your local network. It's a bit different.
The Berne Convention merely states that you must give copyright holders of another Berne Convention country the same rights as copyright holders in your own country.
It assures your laws apply to foreign copyright holders when stuff happens in your country involving said copyright. There are minimums, which you'll have to be careful of, but they are relatively short, and nothing like the copyright we currently have.
That said, the appropriate response to abusing a monopoly is not opening up the source code, it's removing the power of the monopoly. The most common way to do this is heavy fines and trade restrictions. It's ok to be the biggest guy in the fight as long as one or both hands are tied behind your back. The EU has tied MS's hands much more tightly than the US has, by the way.
Have you ever been to ANWR? I work right next door to it, and I can tell you, there ain't shit to protect out there. Seriously. Do you know what tundra is? It is literally frozen dirt with short grass growing on top. It isn't exactly an eco-paradise. Also, provided we are careful about it, animals flourish in the middle of an active oil field. Thanks to legislation that has been in place for a while now, the oil companies are incredibly careful about the environment. The quickest ways to get fired are to ignore safety rules and ignore the environmental rules. I can't even walk out on the tundra without risking my job. Of course, I wouldn't be walking out there when the temperature is pushing -100 anyway.;)
All that for a few thousand carribou, a few hundred foxes and rodents, and some bears. The whole of ANWR looks like a frozen grass desert, and has about as much wildlife as a few acres of forest in the lower 48. Some populations, particularly the carribou, actually do better around the pipes. They are warm during the winter, and allow more carribou to survive the tougher seasons.
ANWR won't free us from dependance on foreign oil, but it would boost our capacity by about 20% or more, and that's nothing to sneeze at.
Opening up the National Petroleum Reserves, which are on the other side of the North Slope, would be about as big or bigger than ANWR.
Re:The Improbability of Improbability
on
The Magicians
·
· Score: 1
I saw the entirety of the Dune series as a big thought experiment on what happens when somebody knows everything. It wasn't just layering a bunch of stuff in a single story, he built an incredibly complicated political scenario and then threw a seemingly small monkey wrench into the mix, with huge consequences.
The result? It screwed things up, big time, doomed the species big, and it took a near-omniscient tyrant with a multi-thousand year life span to see the repair job to its conclusion.
I liked Brian Herbert's books as well (particularly the Butlerian Jihad), but they just didn't have the same depth and complexity that Frank's books did.
Damnit! You people and your "If I take your car, now I have it and you don't" analogies have ruined it for everyone! Now copyright infringement really WILL be theft!
At least for the week it takes someone to figure out how to duplicate the keys, anyway.
Which is why in my company, a person's account access is disabled before they are told they are fired, and security escorts them out of the building.
Can't damage the system, as their access is already revoced, and they certainly won't be setting fire to the building with security on each arm, walking them out.
It's pretty rare that a disgruntled employee does anything before they know they have been "let go".
I work for one of the biggest companies in the world, and the entire network is on one, giant active directory domain.
I can ping accross continents baby! Ok maybe not, but I don't VPN anywhere, and I have direct access to file servers all over the world.
In other words, you don't know shit.
When your company is the size of mine, you have these things called "contracts" with various ISPs that basically give you a LAN connection (not a VPN, an actual LAN link) accross continents and over seas. They can do this with cool technologies called "switches" and "vlans". Of course there is subnetting and such as well, as in all good networks.
Seriously, even when you VPN, you are using an actual physical link to get from one place to another. What is stopping a company from making a deal with the ISP that gives them a dedicated line cross-country? In fact this will involve many ISPs, but the idea is pretty simple. It's expensive as hell, but worth it when the scale is big enough.
I think the point is that Vista has been around for a couple of years now, and it's obviously not the "OMGWTFBBQ" issue some anti-Microsoft folks think it is. If it were, there would have been a big stink about all the remote BSODs in Vista.
All I hear are crickets, so perhaps the way Vista and 7 handle this is different than the way 2000 did? Perhaps in a way that makes them less likely to crash? Maybe? Possibly?
Not to say it isn't an issue, it most definitely is, but it's obviously not the big issue people are trying to make it out to be.
You basically just re-stated what the GP said in a less eloquent way, and called that exact statement a Myth?
The GP stated that what the studios give artists is a loan, under which they get to use the studio's facilities. After the loan is paid off, the studio still keeps upwards of 80% of the royalty fees.
So what the hell are you trying to say? I'm confused.
Why the hell would they for a case of criminal copyright infringement? My god man, that's what copyright law, in every country in the world that has a copyright law, was INVENTED for! (bold and caps for extra emphasis!;)
This isn't downloading songs off Napster, people, this is physically copying an artist's works in mass quantities with the intent to sell. I would be absolutely shocked if Mexico looked outside of Mexico for this case. Hell I'd be surprised if they needed to look at other cases WITHIN Mexico for this case. This is about as textbook as it gets.
The only question here, is did Sony Mexico's 7 album deal give them the rights to the songs produce while the artist had that 7 album deal, and does that give Sony the right to produce an 8th album of the artist's work. That depends, if the artist only came in for recordings and did everything else outside Sony's offices/studio/whatever, it would seem to be a tough sell to me. But if the artist was given accomodation at Sony Mexico and performed a large portion of the work while there, I think Sony would have a good case.
In any case, international case law wouldn't do shit to help the Mexican courts in this case, so why the hell would they look to it? Mexican courts aren't like Slashdotters, and aren't looking to screw Sony as big as they can. The only part of this where you could say international precedence would be usefull is probably the one place they are not likely to bother, as they'll have their own guidlines for penalties within the law.
Recording contracts contain nothing beyond the bit: "artists works will be considered works for hire". Putting in the rest of it would be foolish, and would not change anything for them positively, it would only tell the artist that they do have rights beyond what is in the contract.
They say it's all "works for hire", but the neat trick is in the US (and a lot of countries, though I'm not totally sure about Mexico, but I would think so), contracts can be unenforceable. Now, it's not smart to sign stuff willy nilly, because MOST contracts are completely enforceable, but that "works for hire" clause is a catchall that actually only applies in certain circumstances.
It's like those contracts that state "we may change this agreement at any time". Sure, they can change it, but it isn't binding unless I agree to it also. In those cases, the old agreement is still binding, and if they attempt to drop whatever goods or services were coming from their end you've got a breach of contract on your hands. Most people don't know this, and think that because it is in the contract their rights go out the window. That is never the case.
Slashdot Mirror
It's not BS at all, college textbooks often vary significantly between editions, particularly in certain subjects.
Once you get a good math book nailed down, there isn't much reason to change things up, but English textbooks are constantly changing because, like it or not, the language is constantly changeing.
I once had to re-take a tech writing class (I -hate- tech writing), and the edition I used for the first class was no longer good for the second class, I tried. They changed professors and editions (same book), and the differences in the text were too great to follow along. I might be able to find a similar section, but I had to hunt for it, and half the examples had changed and a good many of the problems were different.
Even math books can undergo re-structuring, making using an old edition very difficult. Any field that is constantly changing often has vast differences between editions of the same textbook.
Frankly, while learning the core of CS may not change, if every course in your CS program uses the same books they did 20 years ago, I'd be concerned that the program is 20 years out of date and you're not getting the best education possible. There are many subjects where the technology and innovation changes on a yearly basis, and not keeping up with it is a shame. It's the kind of education that churns out professors because they can't hack it when it comes to actually applying that CS education to the real world.
Sometimes it is no big deal to go back an edition or two, but you can rarely go back further than that. It also depends on the professor - if they hardly use the book then it's no big deal, but if they reference pages and problems and expect you to do 3/4 of the work outside class it can be difficult. Sometimes the books vary significantly between editions. That makes following along with the prof very difficult, if not impossible.
For example, if the prof tells you to read up on chapter 5 and do the problems at the end of the chapter to prepare for the next lecture, and chapter 5 of the old edition is all about harmonics, you could spend hours reading and prepping for class only to discover that your prof is talking about newtons, gravity, and force equations, which is what chapter 5 in the new edition covered.
See the problem? The new editions can have the same basic information, but the structure can vary, and depending on the teaching style this can be a real issue.
You want to see minority? I think I'm the only one on slashdot whose favorite Star Wars film is the Return of the Jedi.
I'm not big on opera, but I love the symphony and plays.
RotJ FTW!
I read the LOTR as a single volume. Very handy to have a 2000 some-odd page book lying around. They did maintain the "books", but it was just a page that said "Book 1" "Book 2" and "Book 3" between them.
Because there is a 'Preview' function.
I loved Hellboy, and I think the people who don't were probably looking for something like Swartzenegar meets high fantasy, and Hellboy is neither. It's a comic book movie, it should look and feel like a comic book. And hey guess what? It does. It's also a really good (if a bit nonsensical) story with a lot of cheesy one-liners thrown in which is - surprise surprise! - just like the comic book.
I'm not sure yet which I'd like better for the Hobbit - keeping Jackson's visuals or going all Pan's Labyrinth on the story. It really should not be darker than LOTR was though, as The Hobbit was a lighter, more care-free story.
We'll see, I'm looking forward to it. I started my love of the LOTR with The Hobbit and the Silmarilion, and didn't read the trilogy until the movie was about to come out.
Wow, just, wow.
The Hobbit is a simpler story and much easier to read than the LOTR trilogy is. If they are planning two films like I heard some time ago, it should be more than enough to pack the entire story in without cutting much of anything.
True, but by then you're into brunch, followed by elevensies, then lunch, a nice snack, afternoon tea, supper, dinner, and a late night snack before bed.
All in all, it's hard work eating enough to be a hobbit.
That's the problem with marketing and trailers. For some movies it does not matter, but for some, if they tell you enough to decide whether or not you'd like the movie then you know the key plot points and you might as well have already seen it. The worst is when all the best action sequences are in the trailer, and this movie that looks exciting and full of action is really a droll story of personal struggle with a few sporadic action sequences.
Personally, I don't go to see movies because they look similar to another movie or story. I like the differences, and Pan's Labyrinth was certainly different. I enjoyed every minute of it.
For the record, it is very difficult to be grammatically incorrect with the lowly comma. That is because it defaults a simple pause, and it has little effect on whether the grammar is correct or incorrect. Except when concatinating two sentances, commas can be thrown in wherever you like. The pause can dramatically alter the interpretation of the sentance with a simple style change, so you must still be careful with it.
For example, which sentance is correct?
A panda eats shoots and leaves.
A panda eats, shoots, and leaves.
As you should be able to tell, they are both correct, but the meanings are worlds apart. The difference is so great there was a book about grammar and writing with that exact title illustrate the point.
In the case of the GP, the comma is extra but does not change the meaning at all. He was just adding a dramatic Shatner-esqu pause.
And to not have any bias of any sort.
I must also point out that this both starts with a conjunction, which is gramatically incorrect, and it does not express a complete thought. It is not a sentance; it is a fragment. It is therefore a far more grievous grammatical offense than adding an extra comma will ever be.
*Sorry, not going to duplicate the grammatical errors of the unnecessary comma, or the word "since".
This is also incorrect, as you imply the subject (yourself) in a way that is not grammatically correct. It is another fragment.
I can't wait to see what is wrong with my post, because as you may have noticed it is hard to keep from looking like an imbicile while correcting someone else's grammar. I'm hoping most of mine are just spelling errors. ;)
You're right that it doesn't matter, but still, I think it's pretty cool.
It's almost like you've turned your WAN connection into something similar to a land-line phone connection. I.e. when you pick up the phone and call someone, what you get is essentially a direct wire connection between phones until someone hangs up. IP networks don't operate this way, and sending anything into "the cloud" is the exact opposite of that kind of connection, but if you're willing to spend the cash on the ISPs you can make it close to it (it still uses packets, obviously, phones don't).
Tunneling protocols over "the cloud" appear the same way as far as your network knows.
Umm, nothing? I wasn't talking about subnets.
I was responding to the GPs assertion that the smart way to do it was with VPNs and such. That becomes impractical when you have several offices with thousands of employees in each.
Apparently you misunderstood what I was saying, because generally what you do in this situation is a forrest of AD domains connected together via WAN links that behave like one AD domain. It keeps things tidy and easy to manage.
What my company did, though, was to put an entire, cross-continent LAN under a single domain tree. The size of this thing is enormous, and the cost in maintenance has to be insane.
When was the last time you pinged cross continent on your local LAN? I'm not talking about pinging google.com, I'm talking about never leaving your local network. It's a bit different.
The Berne Convention merely states that you must give copyright holders of another Berne Convention country the same rights as copyright holders in your own country.
It assures your laws apply to foreign copyright holders when stuff happens in your country involving said copyright. There are minimums, which you'll have to be careful of, but they are relatively short, and nothing like the copyright we currently have.
That said, the appropriate response to abusing a monopoly is not opening up the source code, it's removing the power of the monopoly. The most common way to do this is heavy fines and trade restrictions. It's ok to be the biggest guy in the fight as long as one or both hands are tied behind your back. The EU has tied MS's hands much more tightly than the US has, by the way.
Yeah, it's about time we got that Real Change(TM) everybody voted for!
Have you ever been to ANWR? I work right next door to it, and I can tell you, there ain't shit to protect out there. Seriously. Do you know what tundra is? It is literally frozen dirt with short grass growing on top. It isn't exactly an eco-paradise. Also, provided we are careful about it, animals flourish in the middle of an active oil field. Thanks to legislation that has been in place for a while now, the oil companies are incredibly careful about the environment. The quickest ways to get fired are to ignore safety rules and ignore the environmental rules. I can't even walk out on the tundra without risking my job. Of course, I wouldn't be walking out there when the temperature is pushing -100 anyway. ;)
All that for a few thousand carribou, a few hundred foxes and rodents, and some bears. The whole of ANWR looks like a frozen grass desert, and has about as much wildlife as a few acres of forest in the lower 48. Some populations, particularly the carribou, actually do better around the pipes. They are warm during the winter, and allow more carribou to survive the tougher seasons.
ANWR won't free us from dependance on foreign oil, but it would boost our capacity by about 20% or more, and that's nothing to sneeze at.
Opening up the National Petroleum Reserves, which are on the other side of the North Slope, would be about as big or bigger than ANWR.
I saw the entirety of the Dune series as a big thought experiment on what happens when somebody knows everything. It wasn't just layering a bunch of stuff in a single story, he built an incredibly complicated political scenario and then threw a seemingly small monkey wrench into the mix, with huge consequences.
The result? It screwed things up, big time, doomed the species big, and it took a near-omniscient tyrant with a multi-thousand year life span to see the repair job to its conclusion.
I liked Brian Herbert's books as well (particularly the Butlerian Jihad), but they just didn't have the same depth and complexity that Frank's books did.
Damnit! You people and your "If I take your car, now I have it and you don't" analogies have ruined it for everyone! Now copyright infringement really WILL be theft!
At least for the week it takes someone to figure out how to duplicate the keys, anyway.
Which is why in my company, a person's account access is disabled before they are told they are fired, and security escorts them out of the building.
Can't damage the system, as their access is already revoced, and they certainly won't be setting fire to the building with security on each arm, walking them out.
It's pretty rare that a disgruntled employee does anything before they know they have been "let go".
I work for one of the biggest companies in the world, and the entire network is on one, giant active directory domain.
I can ping accross continents baby! Ok maybe not, but I don't VPN anywhere, and I have direct access to file servers all over the world.
In other words, you don't know shit.
When your company is the size of mine, you have these things called "contracts" with various ISPs that basically give you a LAN connection (not a VPN, an actual LAN link) accross continents and over seas. They can do this with cool technologies called "switches" and "vlans". Of course there is subnetting and such as well, as in all good networks.
Seriously, even when you VPN, you are using an actual physical link to get from one place to another. What is stopping a company from making a deal with the ISP that gives them a dedicated line cross-country? In fact this will involve many ISPs, but the idea is pretty simple. It's expensive as hell, but worth it when the scale is big enough.
I think the point is that Vista has been around for a couple of years now, and it's obviously not the "OMGWTFBBQ" issue some anti-Microsoft folks think it is. If it were, there would have been a big stink about all the remote BSODs in Vista.
All I hear are crickets, so perhaps the way Vista and 7 handle this is different than the way 2000 did? Perhaps in a way that makes them less likely to crash? Maybe? Possibly?
Not to say it isn't an issue, it most definitely is, but it's obviously not the big issue people are trying to make it out to be.
The Bush/Obama bailouts are proof positive of that.
AIG can be too big to fail, but go try to get a business loan or a government grant and you'll find out that you're just too small to succeed.
You basically just re-stated what the GP said in a less eloquent way, and called that exact statement a Myth?
The GP stated that what the studios give artists is a loan, under which they get to use the studio's facilities. After the loan is paid off, the studio still keeps upwards of 80% of the royalty fees.
So what the hell are you trying to say? I'm confused.
Why the hell would they for a case of criminal copyright infringement? My god man, that's what copyright law, in every country in the world that has a copyright law, was INVENTED for! (bold and caps for extra emphasis!;)
This isn't downloading songs off Napster, people, this is physically copying an artist's works in mass quantities with the intent to sell. I would be absolutely shocked if Mexico looked outside of Mexico for this case. Hell I'd be surprised if they needed to look at other cases WITHIN Mexico for this case. This is about as textbook as it gets.
The only question here, is did Sony Mexico's 7 album deal give them the rights to the songs produce while the artist had that 7 album deal, and does that give Sony the right to produce an 8th album of the artist's work. That depends, if the artist only came in for recordings and did everything else outside Sony's offices/studio/whatever, it would seem to be a tough sell to me. But if the artist was given accomodation at Sony Mexico and performed a large portion of the work while there, I think Sony would have a good case.
In any case, international case law wouldn't do shit to help the Mexican courts in this case, so why the hell would they look to it? Mexican courts aren't like Slashdotters, and aren't looking to screw Sony as big as they can. The only part of this where you could say international precedence would be usefull is probably the one place they are not likely to bother, as they'll have their own guidlines for penalties within the law.
Recording contracts contain nothing beyond the bit: "artists works will be considered works for hire". Putting in the rest of it would be foolish, and would not change anything for them positively, it would only tell the artist that they do have rights beyond what is in the contract.
They say it's all "works for hire", but the neat trick is in the US (and a lot of countries, though I'm not totally sure about Mexico, but I would think so), contracts can be unenforceable. Now, it's not smart to sign stuff willy nilly, because MOST contracts are completely enforceable, but that "works for hire" clause is a catchall that actually only applies in certain circumstances.
It's like those contracts that state "we may change this agreement at any time". Sure, they can change it, but it isn't binding unless I agree to it also. In those cases, the old agreement is still binding, and if they attempt to drop whatever goods or services were coming from their end you've got a breach of contract on your hands. Most people don't know this, and think that because it is in the contract their rights go out the window. That is never the case.