Infinity Ball, The: The Infinity Ball is a fearsome device used by the Hey Empire. It resembles a sideways 8 ball and doesn't look menacing at all. It is powerful though. The ball has telekinetic powers, is extremely fast, and squeaks when it moves. It even has hyperspace technology built in. The Whats are extremely afraid of the Infinity Ball. They were chased across the universe by the little engine of destruction. When The Tick destroyed the Hey's attempts of bringing forth a universe ending cataclysm, he was attacked by the Infinity Ball. The ball crashed into the heroes chest, falling to the ground after impact. The most devastating weapon in the Hey's arsenal proved to be less devastating then it was once believed to be. In fact, it was pretty lame.
Why should that be? Without finger pointing, or assigning blame, one thing that is clear to me is that there is no magic bullet to fix the current mess. It's going to get worse before it gets better, and it's going to take time to move things in the right direction. Even if Obama does all the right things, whoever is to blame for the current mess SHOULD remain on the hook for some time to come.
Put simply, don't fool yourself into wishful thinking that consumers have suddenly woken up to DRM. Its far more likely to be a more simpler reason, like the recession.
Ding ding ding! Give the man a prize! HD players (be they Blu-ray, HD-DVD, or whatever) offer no advantage without HD televisions. The cost of the player is likely a factor, but when you consider the cost of a new LCD/Plasma HD TV along with it, and recession looks like a FAR more likely answer than DRM resistance.
Like it or not, most people don't care about DRM. They want to buy season 4 of House at Future Shop and watch it on their own time. DVD is working fine for them right now.
Has Apple really increased their market share significantly?
There's not much analysis for the second half of 2008, but there is a TON of articles on Apple's market share gains through 2007, and Q1 2008. How much is due to the Hodgman/Long ads? No way to say, but the answer to your question is an emphatic yes.
My kids like to play punch-buggy...you know that game where when you see a volkswagen beetle, you get to punch anyone near you as long as you get your punch in first. My daughter, when she starts losing claims she's "not playing". This never deters my son, who sees this as an opportunity to roll on to victory completely unopposed.
It seems that in punch-buggy, not playing means at best, everyone leaves you alone, and at worst, you get the crap kicked out of you constantly. Sorry...what were we talking about again?
I think it's a stretch to say they "one-upped" apple, but it was a good ad given the success of the Hodgman/Long ads. It's by far the best MS ad I've seen in a long time. It piggy-backs on the fame of the Mac ad campaign, but refutes the core sentiment of Apple's message.
There was an article in a local paper a month or two ago that claimed the "I'm a Mac" ads could eventually backfire on Apple if MS could only come up with the right campaign. The theory was that even though PC is portrayed as being flawed and bumbling, he was becoming a beloved character. I don't know if this MS ad is going to be that "back-fire", but I do believe it's the best rebuttal they've come up with so far to Apple's brilliant campaign.
Problem solved. Just like having 2 classes (male and female) has solved all problems relating to gender verification, gender fraud, and how to deal with transgendered athletes right?
People will push the limits whatever they are. Having no limits is not an option as it forces competitors to compromise their own health and safety in order to compete.
The current system is probably as good as it gets. It stigmatizes cheatings, and makes it at least possible to compete (in most events anyway) without doping.
I dunno... the internet is a source of information (and admittedly often misinformation). How and what you do with that is up to you. I like to think google has made me smarter. It's allowed me to study after the facts things my doctor has said that I may not have fully understood. Instead of buying a book to get a beef stroganof recipe, I now read a half dozen of them online to distill what is the essence of beef stroganof. When my daughter asks me what sound a moose makes, instead of "I don't know", it's now "let's find out!"
I use google multiple times daily. No, I'm not stupider for it, and yes I still read books.
Cars have maintenance costs caused by use. If I use your car when you are not, I am costing you money. If I use your bandwidth when you are not, I cant see how that really affects you in any way.
Not saying it's right to do so. Just saying the analogy is flawed.
Same reason I shouldn't use a negligible amount of your money, house, girlfriend, or other stuff when you're not using it.
Most of my stuff is either consumable (my money), or incurs "wear and tear" as a result of use meaning either increased maintenance costs, or a shorter usable life span. Bandwidth has none of these problems. It's more like if you leave your TV on, and your curtains open, and I watch through the window. It may annoy you, but it's not putting you out any.
Using my "stuff" legitimately deprives me of something of value. Routing your bits through my access point when I'm not using it deprives me of nothing.
First, a disagreement. People can subsist without music but they should not have to do without culture--art and music are among things that make life worth living.
I don't really disagree with the point you're making regarding IP and culture, but this statement really got me thinking about whether music is really a cultural artifact anymore (and hence worth protecting as such).
In past generations, and certainly prior to the mass popularization of recorded music, music played a central role in many cultures. I come from a celtic tradition myself, and although it has become less important in the last 20 years or so, it wasn't that long ago that dances, and parties featuring live folk music where commonplace. Music was a central and participatory element of culture.
Cut to today... Globalization, and the ubiquity and reach of recorded music has changed everything. Instead of music encouraging participation in one's own culture, it has gotten to the point where most music is slickly marketed, image oriented, and as far from participatory as one can imagine. Is mass consumption of a highly commercialized product really what has become of our culture?
Case in point: Gangsta-rap/Hip Hop. Do we really consider this art form to be of cultural significance to upper-middle class teenage suburban life so much so that we see it as critical to champion anti-IP causes in the name of preserving culture?
Blah blah blah... indie bands, blah blah folk is not dead, yadda yadda. I know the world is not black and white. I know there is still some culturally relevant music being produced and consumed, and I know the question if IP and fair use is one of the more important issues facing us at this time. I just wanted to make a bit of a point kay?
1. Insert disc and hit "Enter" until things stop happening
2. Clean drool from keyboard
3. Post on Ubuntu forums Out of curiosity, when will I be able to get Broadcom wireless working on my laptop by hitting "enter"? Wake me when we get there okay?
... if you don't allow patents, and therefore don't allow programmers to get money in exchange for coding... Huh? I'm calling shenanigans on you. Patents are not a mechanism by which programmers get paid for coding. They are a mechanism by which legal departments of companies harass their competitors, and by which companies that produce nothing engage in extortion. Programmers get paid to build software.
I generally think this post is spot on. Humanity has been religious since prehistory, and that suggests there is some kind of evolutionary benefit to it. Presumably it offers some practical advice on living one's life.
I don't think that follows. From where I sit, it appears that religion is a consequence of the combination of man having the ability to reason about cause and effect relationships in his environment, but no body of knowledge (science) to seed the reasoning process. As man's knowledge has expanded, the domain of religion has shrunk, but it doesn't go easily. Since religion is taught in terms of absolutes, it's very hard to change contemporary thinking when new scientific understanding is gained. Hence we have Galileo, Scopes, and the current struggle to counter creationism in the American south.
Even if we accept that it offered some sort of evolutionary advantage, the world we're living in is changing at a fantastic rate relative to the speed at which evolution occurs. Many of our evolutionary adaptations don't serve us as well now as they did 1000 years ago. Or even 100. Religion (if there ever was an evolutionary component to it) would certainly fit that bill.
If the goal is to learn a language to help you in your career, C, C++, Java, Perl, SQL, PHP are all good things to know. There are others, but you start getting niche specific.
If the goal is to push yourself into new modes of thinking or programming paradigms:
Learn 1 Wirth language. Modula II or Oberon would be good ones. Wirth had a strong understanding of separation of interface and implementation. His langauges are among the best for encouraging well structured programs.
Prolog
Smalltalk
Scheme
Python
APL
All valuable languages for exploring some paradigm of programming. Don't just learn how to write C in each of these languages. Learn what makes them unique, and the patterns and idioms they are designed to express elegantly.
I get how this could be about Academics (as in the Academic Dishonesty Act), and I get how this could be about Freedom (as in the the Indoctrination Freedom Act), but somehow I can't get my head around using both those words together to describe this legislation.
I think it's time to give up, move all the smart people North, and let the South go. They're fighting SO hard to become the laughing stock of the modern world, it might just be easier to disown them and move on.
A search engine's job is to make profit for their shareholders. Nothing more. It's their job to get as large a market share as possible, so that's why they do what they need to do to keep China from blocking their site. We don't have to like it, but don't confuse what Google's actual responsibility is. Search engines don't have shareholders...companies do. A search engine's job is to search. A company's job is to make profit for their shareholders. Don't confuse the two. The search service that google provides to users enables them to derive ad revenue and thus profits for shareholders. Without the search service and other services they provide to users, they are nothing.
I referred to Linus not because he's responsible for the whole world, but because he blames the problem on users being resistant to change. This "blame the user" attitude is rife throughout the Linux community, and does nobody any good. Desktop users don't care who deserves blame when stuff doesn't work. They blame the system as a whole.
I know my opinion won't be popular on this, but Linux doesn't make strong progress in the desktop market because it's not useable to the average desktop user. The sooner Linus and everyone else pulls their head out of the sand and addresses this, the better off we'll be.
Windows "just works". Linux can be made to work usually. There is a world of difference between the two. Linux has a whole other layer of usability issues that Windows doesn't in that a Linux user often has a bunch of hoops to jump through just to get something to work at all, whereas Windows usability problems usually start with a crappy interface. Case in point, my laptop with Broadcom wifi. I don't want excuses. I just want my hardware to work without undue effort on my part, and I want my software to work when I get to the end of the installer with nothing more than a reboot at most on my end. I dont want to hack around driver limitations, edit.conf files, change ld_library settings, update my tcl library (especially not from source), or any of the other crap Linux has required me to do in the past. It's not worth it.
If I want a desktop Unix system, I'll buy a Mac. Wake me up when Linux catches up.
They can try all they want. They have that right. But it's not illegal, so I'm not quite sure what your point is? That a minority of American citizens don't grasp the concept of free speech?
It's not a minority. The flag burning ammendment has passed in the last 6 congresses, and was supported by a majority of the Senate each time. The only thing keeping it out of the US constitution is the fact that it needs 2/3 support in the Senate. The last time around it got 66% support in Senate...one vote short of ammending the constitution.
Yeah, it's not illegal in the US yet, but making it so is a majority position amongst US legislators.
"They seem to assume that people who post their name, address, sexual orientation and gender on giant roadside billboards don't care if strangers know their name, address, sexual orientation and gender! It's like they think that people who go out into the crowded streets don't care who knows what shirt they're wearing!" The problem is, you have the ability to restrict who sees your name, address, sexual orientation and gender. In other words there is at least a facade of concern for privacy issues, however you cant restrict what applications see. You are clearly asked if this is okay when you install the application, so facebook is not doing anything unethical. It's all above the board, however much of the value of facebook is in it's applications, and they give you no way to participate without compromising your privacy. This is as big an issue as people want to make of it.
They really should have privacy settings for controlling in detail what information an application can see about you. Applications could in turn decide what is necessary to work, and facebook would be off the hook.
For me it won't. The state has no right to Microsoft's profit but it doesn't have duties either, and it doesn't have the duty to maintain the bridges. Ummm...since when is maintaining public infrastructure not the state's duty? This is exactly the role of the state. You can postulate some libertarian society where this is not the case, but that's not the world we live in. If they need to restructure their tax system to pay for it, so be it, but Microsoft is certainly not in charge of road maintenance.
MS doesn't have a "share" to pay. They operate in a bunch of jurisdictions, and each jurisdiction has it's own set of rules on how to get revenue. MS, and every other company on the face of the planet makes decisions on how to structure it's business to reduce costs and maximize revenue. That's the level playing field businesses operate on, and that's the level playing field upon which that states and nations compete for businesses and tax revenues through various means.
Besides, all taxes are ultimately paid by "you", be it through direct taxation, or higher costs of goods and services that result from higher corporate taxes. There is no free ride. Just different ways of paying the fare.
Slashdot Mirror
http://home.jps.net/~lsnyder/12_tick.html
Infinity Ball, The: The Infinity Ball is a fearsome device used by the Hey Empire. It resembles a sideways 8 ball and doesn't look menacing at all. It is powerful though. The ball has telekinetic powers, is extremely fast, and squeaks when it moves. It even has hyperspace technology built in. The Whats are extremely afraid of the Infinity Ball. They were chased across the universe by the little engine of destruction. When The Tick destroyed the Hey's attempts of bringing forth a universe ending cataclysm, he was attacked by the Infinity Ball. The ball crashed into the heroes chest, falling to the ground after impact. The most devastating weapon in the Hey's arsenal proved to be less devastating then it was once believed to be. In fact, it was pretty lame.
Blaming Bush will only work for so long.
Why should that be? Without finger pointing, or assigning blame, one thing that is clear to me is that there is no magic bullet to fix the current mess. It's going to get worse before it gets better, and it's going to take time to move things in the right direction. Even if Obama does all the right things, whoever is to blame for the current mess SHOULD remain on the hook for some time to come.
Put simply, don't fool yourself into wishful thinking that consumers have suddenly woken up to DRM. Its far more likely to be a more simpler reason, like the recession.
Ding ding ding! Give the man a prize! HD players (be they Blu-ray, HD-DVD, or whatever) offer no advantage without HD televisions. The cost of the player is likely a factor, but when you consider the cost of a new LCD/Plasma HD TV along with it, and recession looks like a FAR more likely answer than DRM resistance.
Like it or not, most people don't care about DRM. They want to buy season 4 of House at Future Shop and watch it on their own time. DVD is working fine for them right now.
Has Apple really increased their market share significantly?
There's not much analysis for the second half of 2008, but there is a TON of articles on Apple's market share gains through 2007, and Q1 2008. How much is due to the Hodgman/Long ads? No way to say, but the answer to your question is an emphatic yes.
Without the players, there is no game.
My kids like to play punch-buggy...you know that game where when you see a volkswagen beetle, you get to punch anyone near you as long as you get your punch in first. My daughter, when she starts losing claims she's "not playing". This never deters my son, who sees this as an opportunity to roll on to victory completely unopposed. It seems that in punch-buggy, not playing means at best, everyone leaves you alone, and at worst, you get the crap kicked out of you constantly. Sorry...what were we talking about again?
I think it's a stretch to say they "one-upped" apple, but it was a good ad given the success of the Hodgman/Long ads. It's by far the best MS ad I've seen in a long time. It piggy-backs on the fame of the Mac ad campaign, but refutes the core sentiment of Apple's message.
There was an article in a local paper a month or two ago that claimed the "I'm a Mac" ads could eventually backfire on Apple if MS could only come up with the right campaign. The theory was that even though PC is portrayed as being flawed and bumbling, he was becoming a beloved character. I don't know if this MS ad is going to be that "back-fire", but I do believe it's the best rebuttal they've come up with so far to Apple's brilliant campaign.
Problem solved. Just like having 2 classes (male and female) has solved all problems relating to gender verification, gender fraud, and how to deal with transgendered athletes right? People will push the limits whatever they are. Having no limits is not an option as it forces competitors to compromise their own health and safety in order to compete. The current system is probably as good as it gets. It stigmatizes cheatings, and makes it at least possible to compete (in most events anyway) without doping.
I dunno... the internet is a source of information (and admittedly often misinformation). How and what you do with that is up to you. I like to think google has made me smarter. It's allowed me to study after the facts things my doctor has said that I may not have fully understood. Instead of buying a book to get a beef stroganof recipe, I now read a half dozen of them online to distill what is the essence of beef stroganof. When my daughter asks me what sound a moose makes, instead of "I don't know", it's now "let's find out!" I use google multiple times daily. No, I'm not stupider for it, and yes I still read books.
Cars have maintenance costs caused by use. If I use your car when you are not, I am costing you money. If I use your bandwidth when you are not, I cant see how that really affects you in any way. Not saying it's right to do so. Just saying the analogy is flawed.
Most of my stuff is either consumable (my money), or incurs "wear and tear" as a result of use meaning either increased maintenance costs, or a shorter usable life span. Bandwidth has none of these problems. It's more like if you leave your TV on, and your curtains open, and I watch through the window. It may annoy you, but it's not putting you out any.
Using my "stuff" legitimately deprives me of something of value. Routing your bits through my access point when I'm not using it deprives me of nothing.
I don't really disagree with the point you're making regarding IP and culture, but this statement really got me thinking about whether music is really a cultural artifact anymore (and hence worth protecting as such).
In past generations, and certainly prior to the mass popularization of recorded music, music played a central role in many cultures. I come from a celtic tradition myself, and although it has become less important in the last 20 years or so, it wasn't that long ago that dances, and parties featuring live folk music where commonplace. Music was a central and participatory element of culture.
Cut to today... Globalization, and the ubiquity and reach of recorded music has changed everything. Instead of music encouraging participation in one's own culture, it has gotten to the point where most music is slickly marketed, image oriented, and as far from participatory as one can imagine. Is mass consumption of a highly commercialized product really what has become of our culture?
Case in point: Gangsta-rap/Hip Hop. Do we really consider this art form to be of cultural significance to upper-middle class teenage suburban life so much so that we see it as critical to champion anti-IP causes in the name of preserving culture?
Blah blah blah... indie bands, blah blah folk is not dead, yadda yadda. I know the world is not black and white. I know there is still some culturally relevant music being produced and consumed, and I know the question if IP and fair use is one of the more important issues facing us at this time. I just wanted to make a bit of a point kay?
2. Clean drool from keyboard
3. Post on Ubuntu forums
Out of curiosity, when will I be able to get Broadcom wireless working on my laptop by hitting "enter"? Wake me when we get there okay?
... if you don't allow patents, and therefore don't allow programmers to get money in exchange for coding... Huh? I'm calling shenanigans on you. Patents are not a mechanism by which programmers get paid for coding. They are a mechanism by which legal departments of companies harass their competitors, and by which companies that produce nothing engage in extortion. Programmers get paid to build software.I don't think that follows. From where I sit, it appears that religion is a consequence of the combination of man having the ability to reason about cause and effect relationships in his environment, but no body of knowledge (science) to seed the reasoning process. As man's knowledge has expanded, the domain of religion has shrunk, but it doesn't go easily. Since religion is taught in terms of absolutes, it's very hard to change contemporary thinking when new scientific understanding is gained. Hence we have Galileo, Scopes, and the current struggle to counter creationism in the American south.
Even if we accept that it offered some sort of evolutionary advantage, the world we're living in is changing at a fantastic rate relative to the speed at which evolution occurs. Many of our evolutionary adaptations don't serve us as well now as they did 1000 years ago. Or even 100. Religion (if there ever was an evolutionary component to it) would certainly fit that bill.
If the goal is to push yourself into new modes of thinking or programming paradigms:
All valuable languages for exploring some paradigm of programming. Don't just learn how to write C in each of these languages. Learn what makes them unique, and the patterns and idioms they are designed to express elegantly.
I get how this could be about Academics (as in the Academic Dishonesty Act), and I get how this could be about Freedom (as in the the Indoctrination Freedom Act), but somehow I can't get my head around using both those words together to describe this legislation. I think it's time to give up, move all the smart people North, and let the South go. They're fighting SO hard to become the laughing stock of the modern world, it might just be easier to disown them and move on.
I referred to Linus not because he's responsible for the whole world, but because he blames the problem on users being resistant to change. This "blame the user" attitude is rife throughout the Linux community, and does nobody any good. Desktop users don't care who deserves blame when stuff doesn't work. They blame the system as a whole.
I know my opinion won't be popular on this, but Linux doesn't make strong progress in the desktop market because it's not useable to the average desktop user. The sooner Linus and everyone else pulls their head out of the sand and addresses this, the better off we'll be.
Windows "just works". Linux can be made to work usually. There is a world of difference between the two. Linux has a whole other layer of usability issues that Windows doesn't in that a Linux user often has a bunch of hoops to jump through just to get something to work at all, whereas Windows usability problems usually start with a crappy interface. Case in point, my laptop with Broadcom wifi. I don't want excuses. I just want my hardware to work without undue effort on my part, and I want my software to work when I get to the end of the installer with nothing more than a reboot at most on my end. I dont want to hack around driver limitations, edit .conf files, change ld_library settings, update my tcl library (especially not from source), or any of the other crap Linux has required me to do in the past. It's not worth it.
If I want a desktop Unix system, I'll buy a Mac. Wake me up when Linux catches up.
They can try all they want. They have that right. But it's not illegal, so I'm not quite sure what your point is? That a minority of American citizens don't grasp the concept of free speech?
It's not a minority. The flag burning ammendment has passed in the last 6 congresses, and was supported by a majority of the Senate each time. The only thing keeping it out of the US constitution is the fact that it needs 2/3 support in the Senate. The last time around it got 66% support in Senate...one vote short of ammending the constitution. Yeah, it's not illegal in the US yet, but making it so is a majority position amongst US legislators.The problem is, you have the ability to restrict who sees your name, address, sexual orientation and gender. In other words there is at least a facade of concern for privacy issues, however you cant restrict what applications see. You are clearly asked if this is okay when you install the application, so facebook is not doing anything unethical. It's all above the board, however much of the value of facebook is in it's applications, and they give you no way to participate without compromising your privacy. This is as big an issue as people want to make of it. They really should have privacy settings for controlling in detail what information an application can see about you. Applications could in turn decide what is necessary to work, and facebook would be off the hook.
Ummm...since when is maintaining public infrastructure not the state's duty? This is exactly the role of the state. You can postulate some libertarian society where this is not the case, but that's not the world we live in. If they need to restructure their tax system to pay for it, so be it, but Microsoft is certainly not in charge of road maintenance.
MS doesn't have a "share" to pay. They operate in a bunch of jurisdictions, and each jurisdiction has it's own set of rules on how to get revenue. MS, and every other company on the face of the planet makes decisions on how to structure it's business to reduce costs and maximize revenue. That's the level playing field businesses operate on, and that's the level playing field upon which that states and nations compete for businesses and tax revenues through various means. Besides, all taxes are ultimately paid by "you", be it through direct taxation, or higher costs of goods and services that result from higher corporate taxes. There is no free ride. Just different ways of paying the fare.