But you realize polls are not elections, right? We already have a mechanism from separating the wheat from the chaff, it's called an "election". I am in favor of giving all candidates fair and equal treatment during the campaign. Trust that the people will make the right decision when the time comes and stop trying to digest it for them.
His chances might have been slim because he's a bad candidate, but we'll never know because he wasn't given fair media treatment. Perhaps the biggest price for unfair media treatment is that you have to listen to people complain endlessly. If you let them get up, make their case, with equal time and cut out the discussions of "viability" maybe we could put some of these poor candidates to rest.
A valid point and a good question. Of course, that is what limited copyright was for.
Now that it's infinite, I could ask why we only get that one product and then a corporation can milk it indefinitely instead of having to produce new quality content? I could also ask why we're denied all the derivative works that would be possible with a modern public domain.
To some degree, infinite copyright hasn't stopped such things, but only inasmuch as people break copyright.
Yes but why as an artist don't I have to right to control my work?
I'm an artist too. And you do have control over your work. You can keep it to yourself.
Or... you can set it out in the public and, just like any idea, it is then out of your hands. This is a trait of information in general, unfortunately. Sordid details of my life are the same thing: I can control them as long as I keep them to myself, but once I put them out there, they just can't practically be controlled. Be angry at the way the universe functions. Hell if I know why information is so different from physical materials, but it is.
That said, it was collectively determined that a short copyright period was a good thing, because it encouraged creating stuff. But then some people got greedy, wanted to be able to be paid forever for a single piece of work, and now there's a huge backlash.
Sure, there were lots of more dramatic signs of failure further down the road, but I say that the signs it was jumping the shark were all present in Jedi.
When I was eleven or so, when Jedi came out, I loved it just as much as I loved the first two. Then Star Wars was all but forgotten until some friends and I dug up Laserdisc copies in high school. And we watched all three straight through several times.
Right away it was apparent that Jedi was a major letdown. If nostalgia was enough to carry a film, then it should have held up as well as the other two, but it didn't. Though it has several inspired moments throughout, it also has far more embarassing bits than the first two films put together.
I'm not going to get into the details since that's a pointless argument, but I bet nearly everyone here, if they watch the whole OT from beginning to end will notice a dropoff in quality for Jedi. If you don't, then it's likely that the nostalgia _is_ enough for you. Which is fine, and honestly I envy you. But for me the nostalgia is gone, and only the first two films hold up for real.
After that it was mostly downhill. There were a few inspired moments spread out in the prequels... several in Revenge of the Sith, but again, not nearly enough to make up for the embarassing misfires.
The "Attack of the Phantom" re-edit of "Attack of the Clones", complete with re-editor's commentary, highlights just how far off Star Wars films got.
Hey, I just wanted to say I like your practical approach. So many are for abolishing copyright or extending it indefinitely. But I agree that there is a sweet spot somewhere between 0 and say 100 years, where you encourage maximum creativity and maximum public content. It would be nice if someone figured that out:)
Yeah, I admit I'm not the target audience. And though there certainly are people who would pay for the content, I predict it'll be tough to compete with the free download market. Not because it's impossible for a business to do so (Apple has proved you can) but because they got it wrong.
No downloading? Aren't they trying to appeal to comic book people, who are notorious collectors? A limited subscription service sounds like a nightmare to them (as it does to me for music).
If they had something more like the iTunes store, or a "all of the 60's Spider-man for $39.95 or something, then I bet it would work.
Look, if they want to promote interest in their current work by getting us hooked on the classics, great. But that's marketing. And they want to charge us for their marketing?
These things are ancient and should be in the public domain anyways.
And guess what... if they were, they'd already be promoting more intrest in their current work!
Well I'm about as impressed with your analysis as you were with mine:)
I almost included the skill issue in my original post, but then I realized that can be solved relatively easily (relatively!) with full computer control. The general population will never be flying manually controlled aircraft. Or at least I hope to god they won't be.
Though it might be a problem down the road, I don't think legislation has had a chance to squash the flying car market yet as nobody has produced one that is even remotely viable as a mass market item.
I maintain that the major part of this is because a flying machine is far more expensive to build, maintain, and operate than a rolling machine. A Cessna uses almost 40% more fuel than a 28 mpg sedan to cover the same trip -- that's including the fact that it travels "as the crow flies". That's also for a longish trip (say 2 and half hours of flying time). It gets worse if you were to somehow hop about town as one would with a "flying car".
Then there's the maintenance or initial cost differences. These would likely be higher even if there were an established industry around it. So I still say it just doesn't make sense for the majority of personal travel, which is local in nature and very well served by rolling vehicles.
Right, it's faster, but at X times the cost (I admittedly don't know what X is). Of course there are many cases where the time/cost tradeoff is worth it. But not in the majority of cases.
I fly regularly on commercial airlines of course, but not _everywhere_. And when people talk "flying cars", they're talking about ubiquitous personal airborne transportation. Otherwise, we could just say that Cessnas, Moonies, and Learjets are flying cars:)
So ubiquitous personal use is what I'm predicting won't happen in our lifetimes.
If the trade-off is worth it for you and your commute, then of course you should fly!
I don't think flying cars will ever make much sense. Barring some absolutely physics-defying discovery, it takes a relatively huge amount of energy to keep a vehicle off the ground, and it's not clear to me what the advantage is (other than being terrifically cool). When you're traveling point-to-point on the surface of a ball it's just not worth it most of the time.
Steering, stopping, and idling in the air are far more expensive and imprecise because you've got nothing fixed to hold on to -- we get a lot of freebies by being in contact with the ground.
I think it's apparent too (or soon will be) that one of the great challenges for mankind going forward is how to do everything we do more efficiently, not less. The technology bottleneck is going to be energy acquisition.
So sure, this may be a nice addition to the lineup of available planes, but I don't think we'll see "flying cars" in our lifetime, if by that we mean "ubiquitous airborne personal transportation".
Just a few days ago I was at a nice restaurant and I got a call from a friend's daycare -- their son was going into anaphylactic shock, they couldn't get through to the parents, and I was the backup emergency person.
Of course, to a random bystander, I probably looked like some idiot taking a call in a nice restaurant, talking loudly, then running around and bugging the waitstaff for a pen and paper.
If someone had jammed that call, I would have stabbed them with my salad fork.
Wait a sec... I understand that in the hardware space you're basically right, but innovation is a moving target. Just in the past 10 years several individuals and small groups have put together amazingly cool technologies and schooled the big corporate boys... who then come in, take over, leave millionaires in their wake, and make that particular field overexposed and uncool.
The thing is, it's all software. Applications like BitTorrent, or websites like Slashdot & Digg. And hundreds of others. I think that exploration is alive and well, just in a different area... one descended from the tech you're thinking of.
In fact I'd go further and say there are more people involved with tech today, experimenting and developing things they think are cool. And they have a wider audience and better distribution channels to do it through.
I mean, I can see some sadness in the death of one hacker culture but things keep changing and everyone is welcome to stay on board as long as they enjoy it. I don't think it's all doom and gloom.
I think that's why he mentioned the "large pool" and "random assignement". That would make it unlikely that two people in the same room could get into the same hand.
A survey might not give accurate results because what people say they like is not always what they respond to. There's a pretty great presentation by Malcolm Gladwell about this.
For example, everyone says they dislike blue underlined links. But in my (admittedly anecdotal) experience there is no better way to let a user know where to click.
So I'd like to see the data you're looking for too... but I bet a test vs. a survey would yield very different results.
The actual website to download from was harder to find that it would have been on BitTorrent. The official Radiohead site didn't provide a clear link. The stories I read about it didn't mention where to actually go, again, leaving BitTorrent as the easiest option.
But I did find the site eventually, and it was slow and buggy. It took several reload attempts on each page to be able to navigate to the next. This was not the first day it was up, either, so I imagine it was bad for a lot of people.
When I finally got to the price box, I was surprised because for some reason I thought I'd be able to try-before-I-buy. Perhaps an unreasonable expectation, but somehow that assumption was built into "name your own price" for me. I don't know what my price is until I've heard it.
At that point, I bailed. And before you judge me, I didn't download it elsewhere either. I've yet to get a copy of the album.
My thought on this is that it's not just about a good price: you have to provide a great service. They didn't. So the path of least resistance was still to just download it elsewhere for free. iTunes proves people will pay if you give them what they want for a price they can justify. If _either_ of those is missing, you'll fail. The Radiohead album was obviously "the price they want", but the experience was not as seamless as I've become used to with filesharing networks.
...CVS committing, rollbacks, and scheduled deployment of code. I still get impatient with all this overhead to this day
That's got to be more with the specific setup you had than with the philosophy in general, no? A good development sandbox setup where you can do dramatic changes, quickly test, and push to a generally stable live environment increases fun for most developers I know...
I think that in general, most negativity should be tolerated. So many managers act like negativity is poison and they try to squash it. But by squashing it you just cement in employees minds that they don't matter, and that the company isn't open to criticism and improvement. People will still have the negative feelings, and still express them when nobody is looking, it's just that the bosses won't know how serious it is until people start disappearing.
Of course continuous negativity without reason (some people are just whiners) is bad. But if good people are complaining (with swears or otherwise) it's probably worth understanding why and addressing it openly.
That's what I fucking think, anyway.
Slashdot Mirror
But you realize polls are not elections, right? We already have a mechanism from separating the wheat from the chaff, it's called an "election". I am in favor of giving all candidates fair and equal treatment during the campaign. Trust that the people will make the right decision when the time comes and stop trying to digest it for them.
His chances might have been slim because he's a bad candidate, but we'll never know because he wasn't given fair media treatment. Perhaps the biggest price for unfair media treatment is that you have to listen to people complain endlessly. If you let them get up, make their case, with equal time and cut out the discussions of "viability" maybe we could put some of these poor candidates to rest.
A valid point and a good question. Of course, that is what limited copyright was for.
Now that it's infinite, I could ask why we only get that one product and then a corporation can milk it indefinitely instead of having to produce new quality content? I could also ask why we're denied all the derivative works that would be possible with a modern public domain.
To some degree, infinite copyright hasn't stopped such things, but only inasmuch as people break copyright.
Yes but why as an artist don't I have to right to control my work?
I'm an artist too. And you do have control over your work. You can keep it to yourself.
Or... you can set it out in the public and, just like any idea, it is then out of your hands. This is a trait of information in general, unfortunately. Sordid details of my life are the same thing: I can control them as long as I keep them to myself, but once I put them out there, they just can't practically be controlled. Be angry at the way the universe functions. Hell if I know why information is so different from physical materials, but it is.
That said, it was collectively determined that a short copyright period was a good thing, because it encouraged creating stuff. But then some people got greedy, wanted to be able to be paid forever for a single piece of work, and now there's a huge backlash.
My god -- I think childhood obesity is directly linked to the decline in pirates!
Or perhaps it is the video game playing that eliminates pirates?
Hmm... is that a good or bad thing?
I suppose it depends on whether you're a ninja or not.
Sure, there were lots of more dramatic signs of failure further down the road, but I say that the signs it was jumping the shark were all present in Jedi.
When I was eleven or so, when Jedi came out, I loved it just as much as I loved the first two. Then Star Wars was all but forgotten until some friends and I dug up Laserdisc copies in high school. And we watched all three straight through several times.
Right away it was apparent that Jedi was a major letdown. If nostalgia was enough to carry a film, then it should have held up as well as the other two, but it didn't. Though it has several inspired moments throughout, it also has far more embarassing bits than the first two films put together.
I'm not going to get into the details since that's a pointless argument, but I bet nearly everyone here, if they watch the whole OT from beginning to end will notice a dropoff in quality for Jedi. If you don't, then it's likely that the nostalgia _is_ enough for you. Which is fine, and honestly I envy you. But for me the nostalgia is gone, and only the first two films hold up for real.
After that it was mostly downhill. There were a few inspired moments spread out in the prequels... several in Revenge of the Sith, but again, not nearly enough to make up for the embarassing misfires.
The "Attack of the Phantom" re-edit of "Attack of the Clones", complete with re-editor's commentary, highlights just how far off Star Wars films got.
Won't somebody think of the sundials!? I mean, c'mon! Sundials are cool and important! And what about Stonehenge?
Actually, I'm in favor of keeping UT1 and TAI in sync. But not for the sundials
Hey, I just wanted to say I like your practical approach. So many are for abolishing copyright or extending it indefinitely. But I agree that there is a sweet spot somewhere between 0 and say 100 years, where you encourage maximum creativity and maximum public content. It would be nice if someone figured that out :)
Yeah, I admit I'm not the target audience. And though there certainly are people who would pay for the content, I predict it'll be tough to compete with the free download market. Not because it's impossible for a business to do so (Apple has proved you can) but because they got it wrong.
No downloading? Aren't they trying to appeal to comic book people, who are notorious collectors? A limited subscription service sounds like a nightmare to them (as it does to me for music).
If they had something more like the iTunes store, or a "all of the 60's Spider-man for $39.95 or something, then I bet it would work.
Whether it should be or not is a matter for another thread.
Only if you think the constitutional idea of copyright was meaningless.
And if you think that extending it every few years is "limited time" then you're playing a game with semantics and the spirit of the law.
Look, if they want to promote interest in their current work by getting us hooked on the classics, great. But that's marketing. And they want to charge us for their marketing?
These things are ancient and should be in the public domain anyways.
And guess what... if they were, they'd already be promoting more intrest in their current work!
Well I'm about as impressed with your analysis as you were with mine :)
I almost included the skill issue in my original post, but then I realized that can be solved relatively easily (relatively!) with full computer control. The general population will never be flying manually controlled aircraft. Or at least I hope to god they won't be.
Though it might be a problem down the road, I don't think legislation has had a chance to squash the flying car market yet as nobody has produced one that is even remotely viable as a mass market item.
I maintain that the major part of this is because a flying machine is far more expensive to build, maintain, and operate than a rolling machine. A Cessna uses almost 40% more fuel than a 28 mpg sedan to cover the same trip -- that's including the fact that it travels "as the crow flies". That's also for a longish trip (say 2 and half hours of flying time). It gets worse if you were to somehow hop about town as one would with a "flying car".
Then there's the maintenance or initial cost differences. These would likely be higher even if there were an established industry around it. So I still say it just doesn't make sense for the majority of personal travel, which is local in nature and very well served by rolling vehicles.
YMMV, no pun intended.
Okay, so if I'm wrong... why don't we have flying cars?
Right, it's faster, but at X times the cost (I admittedly don't know what X is). Of course there are many cases where the time/cost tradeoff is worth it. But not in the majority of cases.
:)
I fly regularly on commercial airlines of course, but not _everywhere_. And when people talk "flying cars", they're talking about ubiquitous personal airborne transportation. Otherwise, we could just say that Cessnas, Moonies, and Learjets are flying cars
So ubiquitous personal use is what I'm predicting won't happen in our lifetimes.
If the trade-off is worth it for you and your commute, then of course you should fly!
I don't think flying cars will ever make much sense. Barring some absolutely physics-defying discovery, it takes a relatively huge amount of energy to keep a vehicle off the ground, and it's not clear to me what the advantage is (other than being terrifically cool). When you're traveling point-to-point on the surface of a ball it's just not worth it most of the time.
Steering, stopping, and idling in the air are far more expensive and imprecise because you've got nothing fixed to hold on to -- we get a lot of freebies by being in contact with the ground.
I think it's apparent too (or soon will be) that one of the great challenges for mankind going forward is how to do everything we do more efficiently, not less. The technology bottleneck is going to be energy acquisition.
So sure, this may be a nice addition to the lineup of available planes, but I don't think we'll see "flying cars" in our lifetime, if by that we mean "ubiquitous airborne personal transportation".
I don't need to know. Whenever my cell phone drops out, I stab everyone within a 10 meter radius with a salad fork.
Just a few days ago I was at a nice restaurant and I got a call from a friend's daycare -- their son was going into anaphylactic shock, they couldn't get through to the parents, and I was the backup emergency person.
Of course, to a random bystander, I probably looked like some idiot taking a call in a nice restaurant, talking loudly, then running around and bugging the waitstaff for a pen and paper.
If someone had jammed that call, I would have stabbed them with my salad fork.
I think he meant "more soonly".
Wait a sec... I understand that in the hardware space you're basically right, but innovation is a moving target. Just in the past 10 years several individuals and small groups have put together amazingly cool technologies and schooled the big corporate boys... who then come in, take over, leave millionaires in their wake, and make that particular field overexposed and uncool.
The thing is, it's all software. Applications like BitTorrent, or websites like Slashdot & Digg. And hundreds of others. I think that exploration is alive and well, just in a different area... one descended from the tech you're thinking of.
In fact I'd go further and say there are more people involved with tech today, experimenting and developing things they think are cool. And they have a wider audience and better distribution channels to do it through.
I mean, I can see some sadness in the death of one hacker culture but things keep changing and everyone is welcome to stay on board as long as they enjoy it. I don't think it's all doom and gloom.
Cheers.
I think that's why he mentioned the "large pool" and "random assignement". That would make it unlikely that two people in the same room could get into the same hand.
A survey might not give accurate results because what people say they like is not always what they respond to. There's a pretty great presentation by Malcolm Gladwell about this.
For example, everyone says they dislike blue underlined links. But in my (admittedly anecdotal) experience there is no better way to let a user know where to click.
So I'd like to see the data you're looking for too... but I bet a test vs. a survey would yield very different results.
The actual website to download from was harder to find that it would have been on BitTorrent. The official Radiohead site didn't provide a clear link. The stories I read about it didn't mention where to actually go, again, leaving BitTorrent as the easiest option. But I did find the site eventually, and it was slow and buggy. It took several reload attempts on each page to be able to navigate to the next. This was not the first day it was up, either, so I imagine it was bad for a lot of people. When I finally got to the price box, I was surprised because for some reason I thought I'd be able to try-before-I-buy. Perhaps an unreasonable expectation, but somehow that assumption was built into "name your own price" for me. I don't know what my price is until I've heard it. At that point, I bailed. And before you judge me, I didn't download it elsewhere either. I've yet to get a copy of the album. My thought on this is that it's not just about a good price: you have to provide a great service. They didn't. So the path of least resistance was still to just download it elsewhere for free. iTunes proves people will pay if you give them what they want for a price they can justify. If _either_ of those is missing, you'll fail. The Radiohead album was obviously "the price they want", but the experience was not as seamless as I've become used to with filesharing networks.
...CVS committing, rollbacks, and scheduled deployment of code. I still get impatient with all this overhead to this day
That's got to be more with the specific setup you had than with the philosophy in general, no? A good development sandbox setup where you can do dramatic changes, quickly test, and push to a generally stable live environment increases fun for most developers I know...
I think that in general, most negativity should be tolerated. So many managers act like negativity is poison and they try to squash it. But by squashing it you just cement in employees minds that they don't matter, and that the company isn't open to criticism and improvement. People will still have the negative feelings, and still express them when nobody is looking, it's just that the bosses won't know how serious it is until people start disappearing. Of course continuous negativity without reason (some people are just whiners) is bad. But if good people are complaining (with swears or otherwise) it's probably worth understanding why and addressing it openly. That's what I fucking think, anyway.