Vista might have been great as a high-end multimedia OS aimed at people who have shiny new high-end machines, and want to see lots of bells and whistles and preinstalled goodies. As an expensive OS for people who like to have the latest expensive hardware, it probably works.
For businesses who want simple terminals for wordprocessing and running the companies' in-house apps cleanly and efficiently... not so much. For people with legacy hardware who aren't intending to throw it in the skip any time soon, not so much. For people with kids who want a cheap, low-spec machine that just works to let their kids play a few games and access the internet, not so much. For people with old machines who need to service them and maybe update the OS to something newer, not so much.
What MS execs basically did was target the "Apple user" market, so as to give themselves a nice warm feeling about having a really, really nice-looking OS product, and alienate the part of their customer-base who weren't natural Mac customers.
What they probably should have done was to have a media edition (Apple niche), a business edition (no aero interface), and a micro edition for netbooks. Instead, the f***ed up, and aimed at the prestige Apple market. They assumed that everybody would be upgrading to the latest high-spec machines, which would compensate for lack of performance in the OS, and that's not what happened.
So at a time when businesses are pulling in their horns and not wanting to buy new hardware, and the new netbook market is booming, Microsoft take their excisting OS that works well in those markets, XP... which doesn;t have a replacement product in those markets... and announce that they won't be selling it any more.
Really, as a shareholder, you want the guys who made those decisions sacked, or at least to not be getting any bonuses, because they were putting personal pride and credibility ahead of the company's ability to make money. They wanted to boast about having a flashy OS, and when it stumbled, they wanted to force unwilling customers to buy it, to justify their own earlier bad decisions. They announced the shutdown of a popular and profitable OS, which people still wanted to buy, in order to force people to get a new OS which didn't necessarily meet their needs so well. They tried to/force/ Vista to be a success, whether it suited all customers or not, by telling buyers who just wanted XP that they weren't allowed to buy it any more.
What it's done is create a popular impression of Microsoft as a company that really don't know what they're doing.
In the early Eighties, IBM was facing an antitrust investigation, and the distinct possibility of being broken up. They survived partly by testifying on oath that all their products were technically inferior to and more expensive than the corresponding products from their competition, right across the board.
What they basically said was: "If you break us up into separate companies now, every single division will go bust if it has to survive as a self-contained company, on it sown merits. The only thing that's keeping us going is the very monopoly power that you don't like. Split us up now, and you'll effectively destroy one of America's biggest and most important companies."
What IBM also said was that they were betting the whole company on the development of a new operating system, which would be along in a few years. With that OS, IBM and its subsiiaries had a future, without it, they didn't. But the development of that OS required the combined resources of the whole group, so splitting the company at that point in time was the worst possible option.
In the end, we never got to find whether IBM's argument would have swayed the enquiry, because the Reagan administration shut the thing down. But it was nice to see IBM giving evidence that every one of their product lines was overpriced and inferior in every respect to the competition.
No, Al Gore was supposed to be the third Clinton administration, keeping the seat warm for Hillary. But he lost. Then Hillary was supposed to win, but she lost the nomination to Obama.
So Obama isn't part of the Clinton masterplan. He's more like the Mule in Asimov's "Foundation" series, the statistically-unlikely possibility that appears from nowhere and has the planners going "Whu? Where the hell did HE come from?".
One important word is "quitclaimed". This means that Fox agreed to transfer any such rights as it owned to the film project in certain defined areas (production, not distribution), provided that certain conditions were met.
In other words, the agreement (that Fox say the producers ignored) was for Fox to transfer any claim that they had to certain production rights. The agreement didn't guarantee to the producers that Fox was actually the undisputed sole rightsholder for the film project, or that by paying Fox the money, they'd be guaranteed to have the undisputed rights to make the film.
So the wise thing for the producers to do, having agreed terms with Fox for any nominal rights transfer, would have been for them to go to the other potential rightsholders (such as Warner) to make sure that there weren't any nasty surprises lurking in the wings, and to make sure that Fox really had something to sell. If they'd then gone to Warners, and Warners had advised them that actually it was arguably WB who owned the rights, and that they should just deal with WB and ignore Fox's rights claim, and not tell Fox what they were doing (and that WB's lawyers would deal with any fallout), then that might explain how we got here.
Although nobody seems to be disputing that Fox bought the film production rights, these contracts are often designed with some sort of expiry or inactivity clause, so that if a production company buys the rights and never makes the movie, the rightsholder can claw the rights back if certain milestones haven't been passed within a certain agreed timeperiod.
We know that the Watchmen movie project was in production hell for years, so it may be that Fox's exclusive rights came with certain "required progress" conditions that Fox reckon that they met, but which Warners figure they didn't.
--
DISCLAIMER: I am not a lawyer (IANL). But you already know this. If I WAS a lawyer, I'd be a damned good lawyer, and I'd be filthy rich with a great house and a flashy car, and a wonderful girlfriend, and I'd have far better things to do with my Friday night than posting on SlashDot. This is obviously not the case.
I think there also seem to be disputed rights to copyright on a defining "project" script that Fox may (or may not) have had some rights to, and which the movie might (or might not) have been based on.
It seems that Fox are crying foul and saying that (amongst other things, like not buying out Fox's option), Warner made unuthorised changes to Fox's project.
I'm guessing that Warner might answer that they didn't buy Fox's option out because (in Warner's opinion), the option had already expired (or become invalid for some other reason), making it worthless, and allowing the movie-production rights to revert one stage back along the IP chain.
As to the script, I don't think that we yet know which script the Watchmen movie was made from, and whether it's appreciably the same as the one Fox had. If its the same script, Fox might cry foul and say that they paid for that script to be written, they registered and own the script's copyright, and that the producers owe them right of approval to any changes made to it.
But if its not recognisably the same script, Warners can say, "We didn't steal your script and make radical unauthorised changes, the reason why our shooting script is so different to yours is that we thought that your script sucked, and we had a new one written."
Fox are saying "The producer didn't successfully fulfill the terms of our agreement with him to buy our option rights off us!"
ATM, Warner would seem to have trouble disputing that, so it looks as though they're planning on arguing, "That's right, he didn't. He didn't need to".
Ah, but if the film rights for "Watchmen" were available for free to anyone who wanted them, there'd be one obvious winner. A large studio that for decades has specialised in making financially successful movie adaptations of popular stories that have gone out of copyright.
That company is Walt Disney.
Now, if you really wanted to see Watchmen remade as a harmless Disney animated family movie musical (for Easter school-holiday release) in which the Comedian is an amusing accident-prone lunk with an oversized chin whose defining feature is that he tells jokes, the Silk Spectre is a princess with magical powers, and Rorscach is a fifteenyearold kid with a squeaky voice (voiced by a female voice artist) who wears lifts to pretend to be a grown-up, so that he can hang out with the brave superheroes and win the princess's heart... then that's up to you. Not only would the Disney version have gotten made (on time and on budget), but you'd now be able to get the Silk Spectre dolls and squeaky Rorschach toys in your local MacDonalds, free with Happy Heals.
Just be prepared for the new ending in which the Baddie realises the error of his ways, says sorry, doesn't press the button, gives his pet to Spectre as a present, and we then flash-forward to her marrying Rorschach, and after the screen fills with flowers when the bouquet is thrown, everyone links arms and sings one last Happy And Inspiring Song.
I tell you, it'd make money. Seriously. Disney have "cutesifying" dark stories down to an art, and most tenyearolds won't have read the graphic novel anyway.
I dunno, I only remember one of my grandparents, and I never got to meet any of the great-grands. It'd be fun to dip in and watch some footage.
And don't forget, when the world changes, things that we consider now to be too tedious to be worth documenting can suddenly become interesting.
F'rinstance, I think they used to do guided tours of the World Trade Centre. Did anyone think to record one of those tours? Perhaps nobody did. Perhaps the tour guides didn't see any point (after all, the building wasn't going anywhere), and perhaps the people taking the tour didn't record it, because it would have seemed like such a geeky thing to do, spending the entire tour with a camera in front fo your face, to record a "personal" version of something that's exactly the same as the tour that thousands of other people have taken. And yet, if someone found that hypothetical home movie footage now, how many of us would be interested in watching it?
There are still things that nobody thinks of recording officially, where the only record ends up being on some piece of retrieved amateur movie footage.
On the plus side, there might now be a niche market for really expensive VHS machines.
I'm thinking, expensive heavy-duty mechanism, transparent casing made of sheets of toughened glass held together with brass edging, gold-plated chassis mounted on pillars above a toughened mirrored glass base, replace some of the cheaper mechanical components with nicer-looking custom parts, add a few internal mirors at strategic places.
Then charge several grand for it, like it's an antique glass-domed carriage clock or something.
Make it like the Faberge version of a VHS recorder, so that future generations can ooh and ahh at the mechanism as they watch all the little intricate moving parts jumping out and doing their thing when you load a tape.
Heck, in a few years time you'll probably be able to sell 'em to science museums as exhibits.
VHS tapes used to be cheaper than re-recordable DVDs, but I'm not sure that this is still true.
When I was in Poundland a week or two ago, a customer was complaining that the shop used to sell VHS tapes in three-packs for a quid a shot, and now they were selling the tapes individually for a pound each (the same price they charge for CD-RWs).
Well, there's been some research suggesting that some authors may not necessarily have bothered reading all of the material that they cite. It's easy to cut and paste items from the citation list of an earlier peer-reviewed paper, and just assume that the contents of those papers are what the earlier author has said.
I guess that the way to test this would be to get a non-existent paper listed in Physics Abstracts, and cited in one or two major papers, and then see how many subsequent papers simply add the citation to their own list.
When the paper shows up in an INSPEC or Web of Science search, how is the person being scammed supposed to know that the paper isn't really legitimate?
You never do know for sure, even with major journals:
If someone submits an paper on experimental physics, the journal referees typically aren't in a position to say that the experiment really happened the way that the authors say. As long as the claimed results are roughly in line with what people expect, and nothing seems wrong, and the experimenters seem to have a track record, things tend to go smoothly.
Trouble is, sometimes a respected researcher's entire career turns out to be based on a succession of fraudulent papers (e.g. the Schon case) - in these cases, what makes the offenders "successful" as scientists is often their ability to get results that other people couldn't get, or to get them first... and sometimes the reason for those notable successes turns out to be because the "successful" researcher cut more corners. When the system operates according to the "first past the post" principle, and competing teams are striving to be the first to achieve a result (and get their names in the history books), there's an incentive to take shortcuts (consciously or unconsciously).
With hindsight, a surprising number of "historically-significant" physics experiments perhaps shouldn't have been taken so seriously... but they generated results that people liked, so they got through the system without quite as much scrutiny as they perhaps needed, and after something's been published in a major journal, it seems to be considered bad etiquette to criticise it too much while the author is still alive (provided that the results themselves are considered "right").
Peer review (in the physical sciences) has never offered any guarantees, other than that a published paper should be considered by the system to be free from identifiable error at the time.
The academic publication system arguably pioneered many of the SEO techniques - self-linking, linking to your mates, mutual cross-linking networks, adding lots of outgoing high-value links to your material to improve index rankings, and so on.
If you're a new researcher in an obscure field, one of the best ways to advance is to assemble a group of researchers interested in similar topics, hold a conference so everyone can get to know each other, publish the conference proceedings, and then you all publish like crazy citing each other's papers - this then bootstraps the whole group's rankings.
Another thing you see happening is that journals are wary of single-author papers, so it's kinda accepted that if you write a paper all by yourself, you invite a few mates to be co-authors, to make the thing look more legitimate and to improve its statistical ranking (with three authors rather than one, a paper has three times as many incoming and outgoing author links, and correspondingly greater connectivity).
If you see a paper published in a major journal, with fifty authors, you know that each one of those fifty people probably can't personally vouch for every detail in the paper. If they could, you wouldn't need fifty of them.
You also know that when you go through the most cited authors in physics, and find that someone appears to named as a co-author on ~300 successfully-published papers a year, that that person is probably a head of department, and may not have actually read all the papers with their name on, let alone been involved in any of the scientific work.
It is disappointing that a respected publisher would publish this dribble.
Well-known scientific publishers tend to be well-known because of a few stand-out "gems" in their inventory that get all the attention. Most people never see the rest of the iceberg.
This is a commercial publisher who put put out 2000 different journals. That's an awful lot of iceberg.
YouTube labelled the ad, "IBM Linux ad: Prodigy" so I was watching the thing waiting for the Prodigy's "Smack My Bitch Up" soundtrack to kick in (vid unsafe for work), and all the old guys to explode or catch on fire or something as the kid chucked the chair through the blank white backdrop and escaped out of the boring white set into a more interesting "colour" future.
About 2/3 of the way through, I realised that it wasnt going to happen, and the Boring Old Farts with the platitudes "Don't strive for excellence strive to be a better team player, etc." were supposed to be for real. Sheesh. This is supposed to be inspirational? What's the kid in the ad supposed to be "inspired" to do? Slit his wrists at the futility of life when he hits fourteen?
"I liked how clean and fresh everything felt when I used it."
And that lovely lemony fragrance!:)
(lightbulb)
I know! Could this be a case for (roll of drums) Forced Car Analogy?
-------
(blank white studio interior).
(white stretch limo draws up, filling screen).
(driver, Vince Vaughn, wearing lots of gold jewelery sticks head and arm out of the window, and starts shouting to camera).
"HI! I drive a MAC, cos MAC's show you've got CASH to FLASH! The Macintosh is the most EXPENSIVE computer. It don't fit in no standard parking bays, and it don't get many miles to a tank, but when its runs outta gas, YOU JUST BUYS YOU A NEW ONE!! "
(beams)
(camera pulls back, now another car pulls up in parallel, filling the screen. In the background, we can just about see some activity relating to the limo driving away.)
(the new car is a more standard US car, black, but with fake bodywork panels of a different colour (some white) badly attached with stickytape and screws to try and make it look larger and more limo-like. It has an incongruous rear spoiler, fluffy dice and large "General Autos" logos everywhere. )
"I got a Microsoft. It's... well, actually it's not really all that great, but it was a little bit cheaper than the Apple." (pulls a glum smile)
"And when bits fall off, you can get people to fix it. There's support places everywhere."
(car judders, makes conga-conga-conga-CONK noise, followed by clatter of exhaust falling off)
(camera pulls back again, car dissolves)
(small car, VW Golf or similar, speeds into frame, stops, driver glances over their shoulder at camera and states a single word).
"Linux"
(car speeds off again)
=Linux end-credits splash screen=
(silence. different car, larger, different colour, speeds into frame and screeches to a halt. It has the same driver This time the driver doesn't turn to look at the camera, but stays looking directly ahead, and they rev the engine and calmly put on a pair of sunglasses).
"And it's free."
(driver slams puts their foot down and car leaves the screen at high speed).
(screen is now blank)
(distant noise of high-speed car activity coming and going)
I'm an Apple commercial. I'm a bit loud and shallow, and I sneer at PC users, but people who buy Apple gear love that sort of thing. Basically, my writers nicked an old comedy sketch idea, but linked the Apple name to it so strongly, and promoted it so heavily, that now everyone thinks that the idea was theirs.
I'm a Microsoft commercial. The people who wrote me couldn't think of any decent ideas themselves, but they noticed that people seemed to be saying that the Apple commercial worked, and they were on a deadline, so they copied that. Ironic, huh? I don't work quite as well as the Apple commercial, but at least NOW people will stop spreading that nasty lie that MS people aren't innovative. I know I'm funny and original and innovative, because the Apple ad was supposed to be all those things, and I'm a copy of it.
(Pause)
I'm a Linux commercial. I mean, WE're a Linux commercial. I'm seriously forked. I'm also not quite ready yet. We thought it would be better if everyone contributed and made their own commercials, because 800 amateur commercials are going to be way better then one professionally-written one, am I right? So we had a competition, and I was the winner... or me and seven or eight others, they couldn't really make up their minds. They'll be distributing a compiler that lets you assemble me from the best bits of all my different versions (using a really cool command-line interface), and the best versions of me will be shown back-to-back at a special invite-only film festival.
Next time they send one up to the ISS, shouldn't they just leave it up there?
That way the ISS gets extra accomodation, emergency toilets, emergency life support, and an emergency escape vehicle, all in one. Plus, a cool vehicle parked out the front.
It costs a small fortune to send a shuttle into space. That's where its most useful. If its on its last mission, and its never going to be relaunched, why bother bringing the thing all the way back, just to be decomissioned?
Well, the top of the weak spot is sealed up, but that's not to say that some of the rest of the lava column isn't still molten, and receiving heat from the chamber, and gradually widening the bottom of the hole as the surrounding rock melts...
IF that's happening, then the temperature of the plug may increase until it melts again, the column of magama rises a bit more before solidifying, the hole below widens some more...
Yeah, sorry about that. Much too long. Some personal stuff on my mind today. Will try to be a bit more concise in future.
... but the problem with it is that astronomers usually do use proper cosmological time — i.e., the actual elapsed time — not coordinate time. Yes, sometimes it's easier to write down the metric in some kind of projective coordinates, but when people talk about "X years ago" or "Y years after the Big Bang", they almost always convert from coordinate to elapsed proper time. In particular, the Big Rip scenario uses a FLRW metric (albeit with an odd equation of state), and in the conventional FLRW coordinates the 't' coordinate is proper time, so no conversion is necessary.
Really? Ah. (trundles off and checks arXiv) Ohhh-kay. Hm. This is a bit unfortunate, their starting assumptions aren't what I expected. Damn. I should really have checked before diving in.:(
None of this has anything in particular to do with Hartle-Hawking quantum cosmology, by the way. It just has to do with coordinate time vs. proper time in ordinary general relativity.
Well, I knew that this sort of "evaporating universe" description showed up in one approach to trying to fix the "disorderly time-reversal" problem in Hartle-Hawking, and I knew that (with that approach) we end up fitting an infinite amount of observer-time into each half-bubble, so if one wanted to continue treating the bubble (from the outside) as a tidy hypersphere, one was forced not to use "proper time" coordinates. The resulting description was then just as the earlier poster said, so I presumed (wrongly) that that must have been what Caldwell & co had done. I saw the description, recognised it, thought "Ooo, I know this one!", and jumped in with an attempt to explain some of the wider context.
But if their suppled timescales describe "user-time", then that's obviously NOT what they've done, and my description doesn't relate to their model.
Arghh. My bad.:(:(:(
Thanks for pointing it out so politely.
Try again to rewrite it, but this this it has to fit in a single short sentence.
Guilty as charged. Will try again. How about...
"Einstein's 'Cosmological Constant' was about a static universe, 'Dark Energy' is about expanding universes, they're actually two different subjects."
Better?:)
In a textbook you might want to maximize clarity, but in a newspaper you want to maximize efficiency, which is clarity-divided-by-length.
Yep. In a newspaper, you also want to tell an interesting story. Adding the usual mention of Einstein and the Cosmological Constant made it into a more interesting story, and provided a (false) sense of context. The way to improve clarity AND reduce length would have been to delete all references to the CC. That would have given them a shorter article that would have been more "efficient"... but also more boring.
Slashdot Mirror
Vista might have been great as a high-end multimedia OS aimed at people who have shiny new high-end machines, and want to see lots of bells and whistles and preinstalled goodies. As an expensive OS for people who like to have the latest expensive hardware, it probably works.
For businesses who want simple terminals for wordprocessing and running the companies' in-house apps cleanly and efficiently ... not so much. For people with legacy hardware who aren't intending to throw it in the skip any time soon, not so much. For people with kids who want a cheap, low-spec machine that just works to let their kids play a few games and access the internet, not so much. For people with old machines who need to service them and maybe update the OS to something newer, not so much.
What MS execs basically did was target the "Apple user" market, so as to give themselves a nice warm feeling about having a really, really nice-looking OS product, and alienate the part of their customer-base who weren't natural Mac customers.
What they probably should have done was to have a media edition (Apple niche), a business edition (no aero interface), and a micro edition for netbooks. Instead, the f***ed up, and aimed at the prestige Apple market. They assumed that everybody would be upgrading to the latest high-spec machines, which would compensate for lack of performance in the OS, and that's not what happened.
So at a time when businesses are pulling in their horns and not wanting to buy new hardware, and the new netbook market is booming, Microsoft take their excisting OS that works well in those markets, XP ... which doesn;t have a replacement product in those markets ... and announce that they won't be selling it any more.
Really, as a shareholder, you want the guys who made those decisions sacked, or at least to not be getting any bonuses, because they were putting personal pride and credibility ahead of the company's ability to make money. They wanted to boast about having a flashy OS, and when it stumbled, they wanted to force unwilling customers to buy it, to justify their own earlier bad decisions. They announced the shutdown of a popular and profitable OS, which people still wanted to buy, in order to force people to get a new OS which didn't necessarily meet their needs so well. They tried to /force/ Vista to be a success, whether it suited all customers or not, by telling buyers who just wanted XP that they weren't allowed to buy it any more.
What it's done is create a popular impression of Microsoft as a company that really don't know what they're doing.
What they basically said was: "If you break us up into separate companies now, every single division will go bust if it has to survive as a self-contained company, on it sown merits. The only thing that's keeping us going is the very monopoly power that you don't like. Split us up now, and you'll effectively destroy one of America's biggest and most important companies."
What IBM also said was that they were betting the whole company on the development of a new operating system, which would be along in a few years. With that OS, IBM and its subsiiaries had a future, without it, they didn't. But the development of that OS required the combined resources of the whole group, so splitting the company at that point in time was the worst possible option.
In the end, we never got to find whether IBM's argument would have swayed the enquiry, because the Reagan administration shut the thing down. But it was nice to see IBM giving evidence that every one of their product lines was overpriced and inferior in every respect to the competition.
But he lost.
Then Hillary was supposed to win, but she lost the nomination to Obama.
So Obama isn't part of the Clinton masterplan. He's more like the Mule in Asimov's "Foundation" series, the statistically-unlikely possibility that appears from nowhere and has the planners going "Whu? Where the hell did HE come from?".
One important word is "quitclaimed". This means that Fox agreed to transfer any such rights as it owned to the film project in certain defined areas (production, not distribution), provided that certain conditions were met.
In other words, the agreement (that Fox say the producers ignored) was for Fox to transfer any claim that they had to certain production rights. The agreement didn't guarantee to the producers that Fox was actually the undisputed sole rightsholder for the film project, or that by paying Fox the money, they'd be guaranteed to have the undisputed rights to make the film.
So the wise thing for the producers to do, having agreed terms with Fox for any nominal rights transfer, would have been for them to go to the other potential rightsholders (such as Warner) to make sure that there weren't any nasty surprises lurking in the wings, and to make sure that Fox really had something to sell. If they'd then gone to Warners, and Warners had advised them that actually it was arguably WB who owned the rights, and that they should just deal with WB and ignore Fox's rights claim, and not tell Fox what they were doing (and that WB's lawyers would deal with any fallout), then that might explain how we got here.
Although nobody seems to be disputing that Fox bought the film production rights, these contracts are often designed with some sort of expiry or inactivity clause, so that if a production company buys the rights and never makes the movie, the rightsholder can claw the rights back if certain milestones haven't been passed within a certain agreed timeperiod.
We know that the Watchmen movie project was in production hell for years, so it may be that Fox's exclusive rights came with certain "required progress" conditions that Fox reckon that they met, but which Warners figure they didn't.
--
DISCLAIMER: I am not a lawyer (IANL). But you already know this. If I WAS a lawyer, I'd be a damned good lawyer, and I'd be filthy rich with a great house and a flashy car, and a wonderful girlfriend, and I'd have far better things to do with my Friday night than posting on SlashDot. This is obviously not the case.
It seems that Fox are crying foul and saying that (amongst other things, like not buying out Fox's option), Warner made unuthorised changes to Fox's project. I'm guessing that Warner might answer that they didn't buy Fox's option out because (in Warner's opinion), the option had already expired (or become invalid for some other reason), making it worthless, and allowing the movie-production rights to revert one stage back along the IP chain.
As to the script, I don't think that we yet know which script the Watchmen movie was made from, and whether it's appreciably the same as the one Fox had. If its the same script, Fox might cry foul and say that they paid for that script to be written, they registered and own the script's copyright, and that the producers owe them right of approval to any changes made to it.
But if its not recognisably the same script, Warners can say, "We didn't steal your script and make radical unauthorised changes, the reason why our shooting script is so different to yours is that we thought that your script sucked, and we had a new one written."
Fox are saying "The producer didn't successfully fulfill the terms of our agreement with him to buy our option rights off us!"
ATM, Warner would seem to have trouble disputing that, so it looks as though they're planning on arguing, "That's right, he didn't. He didn't need to".
We haven't yet heard Warners' case, though.
That company is Walt Disney.
Now, if you really wanted to see Watchmen remade as a harmless Disney animated family movie musical (for Easter school-holiday release) in which the Comedian is an amusing accident-prone lunk with an oversized chin whose defining feature is that he tells jokes, the Silk Spectre is a princess with magical powers, and Rorscach is a fifteenyearold kid with a squeaky voice (voiced by a female voice artist) who wears lifts to pretend to be a grown-up, so that he can hang out with the brave superheroes and win the princess's heart ... then that's up to you. Not only would the Disney version have gotten made (on time and on budget), but you'd now be able to get the Silk Spectre dolls and squeaky Rorschach toys in your local MacDonalds, free with Happy Heals.
Just be prepared for the new ending in which the Baddie realises the error of his ways, says sorry, doesn't press the button, gives his pet to Spectre as a present, and we then flash-forward to her marrying Rorschach, and after the screen fills with flowers when the bouquet is thrown, everyone links arms and sings one last Happy And Inspiring Song.
I tell you, it'd make money. Seriously. Disney have "cutesifying" dark stories down to an art, and most tenyearolds won't have read the graphic novel anyway.
And don't forget, when the world changes, things that we consider now to be too tedious to be worth documenting can suddenly become interesting.
F'rinstance, I think they used to do guided tours of the World Trade Centre. Did anyone think to record one of those tours? Perhaps nobody did. Perhaps the tour guides didn't see any point (after all, the building wasn't going anywhere), and perhaps the people taking the tour didn't record it, because it would have seemed like such a geeky thing to do, spending the entire tour with a camera in front fo your face, to record a "personal" version of something that's exactly the same as the tour that thousands of other people have taken. And yet, if someone found that hypothetical home movie footage now, how many of us would be interested in watching it?
There are still things that nobody thinks of recording officially, where the only record ends up being on some piece of retrieved amateur movie footage.
I'm thinking, expensive heavy-duty mechanism, transparent casing made of sheets of toughened glass held together with brass edging, gold-plated chassis mounted on pillars above a toughened mirrored glass base, replace some of the cheaper mechanical components with nicer-looking custom parts, add a few internal mirors at strategic places.
Then charge several grand for it, like it's an antique glass-domed carriage clock or something.
Make it like the Faberge version of a VHS recorder, so that future generations can ooh and ahh at the mechanism as they watch all the little intricate moving parts jumping out and doing their thing when you load a tape.
Heck, in a few years time you'll probably be able to sell 'em to science museums as exhibits.
When I was in Poundland a week or two ago, a customer was complaining that the shop used to sell VHS tapes in three-packs for a quid a shot, and now they were selling the tapes individually for a pound each (the same price they charge for CD-RWs).
I guess that the way to test this would be to get a non-existent paper listed in Physics Abstracts, and cited in one or two major papers, and then see how many subsequent papers simply add the citation to their own list.
You never do know for sure, even with major journals:
Problematic physics experiments.
If someone submits an paper on experimental physics, the journal referees typically aren't in a position to say that the experiment really happened the way that the authors say. As long as the claimed results are roughly in line with what people expect, and nothing seems wrong, and the experimenters seem to have a track record, things tend to go smoothly.
Trouble is, sometimes a respected researcher's entire career turns out to be based on a succession of fraudulent papers (e.g. the Schon case) - in these cases, what makes the offenders "successful" as scientists is often their ability to get results that other people couldn't get, or to get them first ... and sometimes the reason for those notable successes turns out to be because the "successful" researcher cut more corners. When the system operates according to the "first past the post" principle, and competing teams are striving to be the first to achieve a result (and get their names in the history books), there's an incentive to take shortcuts (consciously or unconsciously).
With hindsight, a surprising number of "historically-significant" physics experiments perhaps shouldn't have been taken so seriously ... but they generated results that people liked, so they got through the system without quite as much scrutiny as they perhaps needed, and after something's been published in a major journal, it seems to be considered bad etiquette to criticise it too much while the author is still alive (provided that the results themselves are considered "right").
Peer review (in the physical sciences) has never offered any guarantees, other than that a published paper should be considered by the system to be free from identifiable error at the time.
If you're a new researcher in an obscure field, one of the best ways to advance is to assemble a group of researchers interested in similar topics, hold a conference so everyone can get to know each other, publish the conference proceedings, and then you all publish like crazy citing each other's papers - this then bootstraps the whole group's rankings.
Another thing you see happening is that journals are wary of single-author papers, so it's kinda accepted that if you write a paper all by yourself, you invite a few mates to be co-authors, to make the thing look more legitimate and to improve its statistical ranking (with three authors rather than one, a paper has three times as many incoming and outgoing author links, and correspondingly greater connectivity).
If you see a paper published in a major journal, with fifty authors, you know that each one of those fifty people probably can't personally vouch for every detail in the paper. If they could, you wouldn't need fifty of them.
You also know that when you go through the most cited authors in physics, and find that someone appears to named as a co-author on ~300 successfully-published papers a year, that that person is probably a head of department, and may not have actually read all the papers with their name on, let alone been involved in any of the scientific work.
Well-known scientific publishers tend to be well-known because of a few stand-out "gems" in their inventory that get all the attention. Most people never see the rest of the iceberg.
This is a commercial publisher who put put out 2000 different journals. That's an awful lot of iceberg.
I had virtual desktops on my old Atari ST (courtesy NeoDesk) ...
YouTube labelled the ad, "IBM Linux ad: Prodigy" so I was watching the thing waiting for the Prodigy's "Smack My Bitch Up" soundtrack to kick in (vid unsafe for work), and all the old guys to explode or catch on fire or something as the kid chucked the chair through the blank white backdrop and escaped out of the boring white set into a more interesting "colour" future.
About 2/3 of the way through, I realised that it wasnt going to happen, and the Boring Old Farts with the platitudes "Don't strive for excellence strive to be a better team player, etc." were supposed to be for real. Sheesh. This is supposed to be inspirational? What's the kid in the ad supposed to be "inspired" to do? Slit his wrists at the futility of life when he hits fourteen?
And that lovely lemony fragrance! :)
(lightbulb)
I know! Could this be a case for (roll of drums) Forced Car Analogy ?
-------
(blank white studio interior).
(white stretch limo draws up, filling screen).
(driver, Vince Vaughn, wearing lots of gold jewelery sticks head and arm out of the window, and starts shouting to camera).
"HI! I drive a MAC, cos MAC's show you've got CASH to FLASH! The Macintosh is the most EXPENSIVE computer. It don't fit in no standard parking bays, and it don't get many miles to a tank, but when its runs outta gas, YOU JUST BUYS YOU A NEW ONE!! "
(beams)
(camera pulls back, now another car pulls up in parallel, filling the screen. In the background, we can just about see some activity relating to the limo driving away.)
(the new car is a more standard US car, black, but with fake bodywork panels of a different colour (some white) badly attached with stickytape and screws to try and make it look larger and more limo-like. It has an incongruous rear spoiler, fluffy dice and large "General Autos" logos everywhere. )
"I got a Microsoft. It's ... well, actually it's not really all that great, but it was a little bit cheaper than the Apple." (pulls a glum smile)
"And when bits fall off, you can get people to fix it. There's support places everywhere."
(car judders, makes conga-conga-conga-CONK noise, followed by clatter of exhaust falling off)
(camera pulls back again, car dissolves)
(small car, VW Golf or similar, speeds into frame, stops, driver glances over their shoulder at camera and states a single word).
"Linux"
(car speeds off again)
=Linux end-credits splash screen=
(silence. different car, larger, different colour, speeds into frame and screeches to a halt. It has the same driver This time the driver doesn't turn to look at the camera, but stays looking directly ahead, and they rev the engine and calmly put on a pair of sunglasses).
"And it's free."
(driver slams puts their foot down and car leaves the screen at high speed).
(screen is now blank) (distant noise of high-speed car activity coming and going)
Voiceover:
"SOMEONE's using Linux"
I'm an Apple commercial. I'm a bit loud and shallow, and I sneer at PC users, but people who buy Apple gear love that sort of thing. Basically, my writers nicked an old comedy sketch idea, but linked the Apple name to it so strongly, and promoted it so heavily, that now everyone thinks that the idea was theirs.
I'm a Microsoft commercial. The people who wrote me couldn't think of any decent ideas themselves, but they noticed that people seemed to be saying that the Apple commercial worked, and they were on a deadline, so they copied that. Ironic, huh? I don't work quite as well as the Apple commercial, but at least NOW people will stop spreading that nasty lie that MS people aren't innovative. I know I'm funny and original and innovative, because the Apple ad was supposed to be all those things, and I'm a copy of it.
(Pause)
I'm a Linux commercial. I mean, WE're a Linux commercial. I'm seriously forked. I'm also not quite ready yet. We thought it would be better if everyone contributed and made their own commercials, because 800 amateur commercials are going to be way better then one professionally-written one, am I right? So we had a competition, and I was the winner ... or me and seven or eight others, they couldn't really make up their minds. They'll be distributing a compiler that lets you assemble me from the best bits of all my different versions (using a really cool command-line interface), and the best versions of me will be shown back-to-back at a special invite-only film festival.
One upmanship. Your neighbours have a collection of classic half-million-quid Ferraris, you have a space shuttle.
whoa. Just had a visual flash of the Spruce Goose fitted with a couple of shuttle SRBMs ...
That way the ISS gets extra accomodation, emergency toilets, emergency life support, and an emergency escape vehicle, all in one. Plus, a cool vehicle parked out the front.
It costs a small fortune to send a shuttle into space. That's where its most useful. If its on its last mission, and its never going to be relaunched, why bother bringing the thing all the way back, just to be decomissioned?
Leave it up there, where it's useful and happy!
IF that's happening, then the temperature of the plug may increase until it melts again, the column of magama rises a bit more before solidifying, the hole below widens some more ...
You've written quite a long-winded screed, ...
Yeah, sorry about that. Much too long. Some personal stuff on my mind today. Will try to be a bit more concise in future.
... but the problem with it is that astronomers usually do use proper cosmological time — i.e., the actual elapsed time — not coordinate time. Yes, sometimes it's easier to write down the metric in some kind of projective coordinates, but when people talk about "X years ago" or "Y years after the Big Bang", they almost always convert from coordinate to elapsed proper time. In particular, the Big Rip scenario uses a FLRW metric (albeit with an odd equation of state), and in the conventional FLRW coordinates the 't' coordinate is proper time, so no conversion is necessary.
Really? Ah. (trundles off and checks arXiv) Ohhh-kay. Hm. This is a bit unfortunate, their starting assumptions aren't what I expected. Damn. I should really have checked before diving in. :(
None of this has anything in particular to do with Hartle-Hawking quantum cosmology, by the way. It just has to do with coordinate time vs. proper time in ordinary general relativity.
Well, I knew that this sort of "evaporating universe" description showed up in one approach to trying to fix the "disorderly time-reversal" problem in Hartle-Hawking, and I knew that (with that approach) we end up fitting an infinite amount of observer-time into each half-bubble, so if one wanted to continue treating the bubble (from the outside) as a tidy hypersphere, one was forced not to use "proper time" coordinates. The resulting description was then just as the earlier poster said, so I presumed (wrongly) that that must have been what Caldwell & co had done. I saw the description, recognised it, thought "Ooo, I know this one!", and jumped in with an attempt to explain some of the wider context.
But if their suppled timescales describe "user-time", then that's obviously NOT what they've done, and my description doesn't relate to their model.
Arghh. My bad. :( :( :(
Thanks for pointing it out so politely.
Try again to rewrite it, but this this it has to fit in a single short sentence.
Guilty as charged. Will try again. How about ...
"Einstein's 'Cosmological Constant' was about a static universe, 'Dark Energy' is about expanding universes, they're actually two different subjects."
Better? :)
In a textbook you might want to maximize clarity, but in a newspaper you want to maximize efficiency, which is clarity-divided-by-length.
Yep. In a newspaper, you also want to tell an interesting story. Adding the usual mention of Einstein and the Cosmological Constant made it into a more interesting story, and provided a (false) sense of context. The way to improve clarity AND reduce length would have been to delete all references to the CC. That would have given them a shorter article that would have been more "efficient" ... but also more boring.
The Splashtop browser, maybe, perhaps?