The average first novel takes something like 10.5 years to write, so the first half of the book would be unprotected before the author sold the first copy.
Just to clarify, wouldn't copyright always start from publication date? If my novel only exists on my hard drive for 10 of those 10.5 years, I don't think the copyright clock would begin ticking during that time.
I know you go on to talk about this as if it *might* be true, but I'm pretty sure it's always true. Unless you're serializing or releasing sneak previews.
This is awesome. The more we learn about the universe, the more we discover there's some really cool (and weird) shit out there.
Raining diamonds. I can only imagine what other wacky stuff is out there we'll never know about.
True, and yet speculation about such things isn't entirely new. In Clarke's "2061" he writes about a diamond core on one of Jupiter's moons. And in a Heinlein story about going to the moon an astronaut is given a bag of diamonds so that he can fake their presence in order to spur interest in future moon trips, only to return and tell the person behind the hoax it's not a fake, diamonds really are littered all over the moon.
I'm sort of disappointed nobody else has mentioned this yet. C'mon slashdot, I thought you were a respectable bunch of nerds.
I tried shopping for a Honda a year and a half ago, and the dealer didn't even have a model in stock to test drive because of first the Japanese tsunami and then some flooding in Thailand(?). They keep their manufacturing chains so tightly optimized that just a few missing parts derails the entire delivery process, and they were without anything to demonstrate at all.
In a college differential equations class we got questions such as:
* There's a party and people are spiking the originally nonalcoholic punch at a rate of X, while drinking at a rate of Y. How long until everyone is drunk, assuming Z for the amount of alcohol needing to be consumed to be drunk.
* Kryptonite with a radioactive field described with [equation] is placed near Superman. Which way should he fly to get away fastest?
Silly little things like that made it fun. Of course I had to get through 14 or 15 years of math before getting to those fun questions, but still.
You may be on to something. There was quite a lot of rehash, though some of it may have been at a slightly higher level of understanding, I can't recall much new that I learned. Maybe a little mythology, possibly a few other good books, I think maybe a few spelling words. I was "lucky" enough to have accelerated math that got me to algebra in the 6th grade, so I didn't even get that new except for a little extra at the end of 8th grade. I read books through as many classes as they would let me.
The introduction of electives in 7th grade was the only real novelty: my first taste of Spanish, and a journalism class which accidentally taught me computer skills as I got my first taste of computer-based editing and layout on a Mac in the late 80's. I certainly would have welcomed more computers in the curriculum, and probably would have been terribly productive if taught the basics of programming and then been given time and told to "just have at it."
Seriously, though, at least those are getting better. I can change volume and station using secondary controls on my steering wheel without needing to look or take my hands away from the wheel.
Even more weird, Germans don't make use of the J sound--their G is always a hard g like in go, their J is pronounced like a Y--so we've invented a name for them they would never pick for themselves. They'll fudge it with a CH sound as in "chermany."
Likewise with Spain/Spanish, where it's unnatural for them to start a word with the letter S, it always starts with an "es" sound as in "Espania."
Then there's the really badly translated stuff, like say everything from China or India. (Nobody could tell the difference between Peking and Beijing? Or Bombay and Mumbai? Really?) And don't get me started on why Feng Shui isn't spelled "fung schway".
I've often wondered why the English were so particularly obtuse about picking unpronounceable or horribly inaccurate things to call other people and places.
It sounded a lot more to me like he was saying "Let those who would do nothing go ahead and do it and get out of the way, while leaving the rest of us to our activities." There's a difference between allowing it for those who want it and mandating it for everyone. I think lots of people would lead active, vibrant lives if given the time and financial freedom to do so. Plenty would do as little as possible, yes, but certainly not everyone.
When you grow up, you will realize that your favorite musician is not 'objectively good', he or she is 'subjectively good'. In other words 'there is no accounting for taste'.
There's a lot of wisdom to this. I picked up on it early because I tended to like things the people around me apparently didn't (not in a hipster way where I liked things before they were cool--okay, except for Moby--but I just liked things I couldn't get my friends to listen to). I can remember having an aggravating conversation in my twenties with a seventeen year old who kept insisting "this band sucks" and "that band can't play." I wanted to shake her and say "no, you just don't like them, there's a difference," but didn't think she'd get it.
This is new? I've been seeing hysteria in various forms on FaceBook since I started using it 7 or 8 years ago. Hysteria about vaccines, about GMO, about diet sodas, about election results. Most of that is just an extension of the general internet mass-circulated hysteria Snopes was created to combat, but it's been there for a while.
I admit passing along physical tics like some sort of physical meme is a new one, but the hysteria vector has been there for a long time.
I'll see your anecdote and raise you one. A university dean I used to do tech support for had his password stickied to his monitor. It was his initials and the year of his birth.
I'm not arguing against your point at all. I've noticed a direct correlation between the amount of sleep I get and general health. Back-to-back nights of less than 5 hours regularly makes me susceptible to colds, while at another point in my life when I was on a fantastic sleep schedule I went a year and a half without a hint of a sniffle or any other illness, despite living on a crowded college campus and going through the general stresses of higher education. There's also studies correlating poor sleep with weight gain. And that's physical health, not touching on mental health at all.
The statistics on kids, by the way, is that parents are short an average of two hours per night for the first two years. It's not one bad night and then you make it up, it's a long grind. Have two kids and you're talking possibly half a decade of poor sleep, which is not insignificant. Still, if we live through it now, we'd surely live through it even in a world where we got better sleep the rest of the time.
I'm not talking about kids' health. I'm talking about *having* kids. It is impossible to be a parent and consistently get a good night's sleep, thus it is impossible to have our neuroses cured and extend life by 20% without giving up kids. I know one of your lines mentioned childhood but the others do not, and if you meant to imply this is only for kids, that wasn't clear. And if you were talking exclusively about kids, most of them need far more than 10 hours in their early years, so it's confusing either way.
Man, I hated sprint. Around that time you also often had a separate carrier for your landline long distance. Multiple times my long distance contract account switched from one carrier to Sprint without my approval, a practice known as "slamming." I finally convinced the local telco not to ever let my account be transferred under any circumstances, but you had to ask the question in just the right way. But I also swore I'd never do business with Sprint because they were clearly doing something really scummy.
I don't know, if it actually answered the questions posed it would be an improvement over the guy I talked to at Nissan last time I was car shopping. I clicked a "give me an instant quote" button, which was actually a "we'll get back to you with an email" button, and despite three attempts to get actual facts out of the guy the only thing he said each time was "Yeah, we've got lots of models. Give me a call or come on down and we'll talk."
He should know. He was the man who assassinated ol' George so that America could become an independent nation. We wouldn't have managed without that final act of murderous treason.
Of course the Brits covered it up by using a body double and pretending like it never happened.
Slashdot Mirror
I think it's pretty clear that this "god" doesn't get involved in the outcome of sporting events
Just once I'd like to see someone say after a world championship, "I'd like to thank God for having a grudge against all the other teams."
The average first novel takes something like 10.5 years to write, so the first half of the book would be unprotected before the author sold the first copy.
Just to clarify, wouldn't copyright always start from publication date? If my novel only exists on my hard drive for 10 of those 10.5 years, I don't think the copyright clock would begin ticking during that time.
I know you go on to talk about this as if it *might* be true, but I'm pretty sure it's always true. Unless you're serializing or releasing sneak previews.
This is awesome. The more we learn about the universe, the more we discover there's some really cool (and weird) shit out there.
Raining diamonds. I can only imagine what other wacky stuff is out there we'll never know about.
True, and yet speculation about such things isn't entirely new. In Clarke's "2061" he writes about a diamond core on one of Jupiter's moons. And in a Heinlein story about going to the moon an astronaut is given a bag of diamonds so that he can fake their presence in order to spur interest in future moon trips, only to return and tell the person behind the hoax it's not a fake, diamonds really are littered all over the moon.
I'm sort of disappointed nobody else has mentioned this yet. C'mon slashdot, I thought you were a respectable bunch of nerds.
I tried shopping for a Honda a year and a half ago, and the dealer didn't even have a model in stock to test drive because of first the Japanese tsunami and then some flooding in Thailand(?). They keep their manufacturing chains so tightly optimized that just a few missing parts derails the entire delivery process, and they were without anything to demonstrate at all.
Is your wife genuinely rich, or upper middle class and likes to pretend she's rich?
In a college differential equations class we got questions such as:
* There's a party and people are spiking the originally nonalcoholic punch at a rate of X, while drinking at a rate of Y. How long until everyone is drunk, assuming Z for the amount of alcohol needing to be consumed to be drunk.
* Kryptonite with a radioactive field described with [equation] is placed near Superman. Which way should he fly to get away fastest?
Silly little things like that made it fun. Of course I had to get through 14 or 15 years of math before getting to those fun questions, but still.
You may be on to something. There was quite a lot of rehash, though some of it may have been at a slightly higher level of understanding, I can't recall much new that I learned. Maybe a little mythology, possibly a few other good books, I think maybe a few spelling words. I was "lucky" enough to have accelerated math that got me to algebra in the 6th grade, so I didn't even get that new except for a little extra at the end of 8th grade. I read books through as many classes as they would let me.
The introduction of electives in 7th grade was the only real novelty: my first taste of Spanish, and a journalism class which accidentally taught me computer skills as I got my first taste of computer-based editing and layout on a Mac in the late 80's. I certainly would have welcomed more computers in the curriculum, and probably would have been terribly productive if taught the basics of programming and then been given time and told to "just have at it."
Four?
Seriously, though, at least those are getting better. I can change volume and station using secondary controls on my steering wheel without needing to look or take my hands away from the wheel.
For some reason the wording of your comment just reminded me I brought a yogurt to work and then left it in the cup holder of my car. Thank you.
First thing I thought, too. If they do remove the requirement, I'd go out and buy it right away.
I've heard "He's pretty quick for a big guy." But nobody ever says that of smaller people. Its just sort of a given.
I've always wanted to work a number of reversed cliches into a story, with "He moved slowly for a thin man," being one of them.
Germany calls itself Deutschland...
Even more weird, Germans don't make use of the J sound--their G is always a hard g like in go, their J is pronounced like a Y--so we've invented a name for them they would never pick for themselves. They'll fudge it with a CH sound as in "chermany."
Likewise with Spain/Spanish, where it's unnatural for them to start a word with the letter S, it always starts with an "es" sound as in "Espania."
Then there's the really badly translated stuff, like say everything from China or India. (Nobody could tell the difference between Peking and Beijing? Or Bombay and Mumbai? Really?) And don't get me started on why Feng Shui isn't spelled "fung schway".
I've often wondered why the English were so particularly obtuse about picking unpronounceable or horribly inaccurate things to call other people and places.
It sounded a lot more to me like he was saying "Let those who would do nothing go ahead and do it and get out of the way, while leaving the rest of us to our activities." There's a difference between allowing it for those who want it and mandating it for everyone. I think lots of people would lead active, vibrant lives if given the time and financial freedom to do so. Plenty would do as little as possible, yes, but certainly not everyone.
Thank god they're not little flying squids. That would be terrifying.
When you grow up, you will realize that your favorite musician is not 'objectively good', he or she is 'subjectively good'. In other words 'there is no accounting for taste'.
There's a lot of wisdom to this. I picked up on it early because I tended to like things the people around me apparently didn't (not in a hipster way where I liked things before they were cool--okay, except for Moby--but I just liked things I couldn't get my friends to listen to). I can remember having an aggravating conversation in my twenties with a seventeen year old who kept insisting "this band sucks" and "that band can't play." I wanted to shake her and say "no, you just don't like them, there's a difference," but didn't think she'd get it.
This is new? I've been seeing hysteria in various forms on FaceBook since I started using it 7 or 8 years ago. Hysteria about vaccines, about GMO, about diet sodas, about election results. Most of that is just an extension of the general internet mass-circulated hysteria Snopes was created to combat, but it's been there for a while.
I admit passing along physical tics like some sort of physical meme is a new one, but the hysteria vector has been there for a long time.
I'll see your anecdote and raise you one. A university dean I used to do tech support for had his password stickied to his monitor. It was his initials and the year of his birth.
I'm not arguing against your point at all. I've noticed a direct correlation between the amount of sleep I get and general health. Back-to-back nights of less than 5 hours regularly makes me susceptible to colds, while at another point in my life when I was on a fantastic sleep schedule I went a year and a half without a hint of a sniffle or any other illness, despite living on a crowded college campus and going through the general stresses of higher education. There's also studies correlating poor sleep with weight gain. And that's physical health, not touching on mental health at all.
The statistics on kids, by the way, is that parents are short an average of two hours per night for the first two years. It's not one bad night and then you make it up, it's a long grind. Have two kids and you're talking possibly half a decade of poor sleep, which is not insignificant. Still, if we live through it now, we'd surely live through it even in a world where we got better sleep the rest of the time.
I'm not talking about kids' health. I'm talking about *having* kids. It is impossible to be a parent and consistently get a good night's sleep, thus it is impossible to have our neuroses cured and extend life by 20% without giving up kids. I know one of your lines mentioned childhood but the others do not, and if you meant to imply this is only for kids, that wasn't clear. And if you were talking exclusively about kids, most of them need far more than 10 hours in their early years, so it's confusing either way.
I predict the human race will die out within a generation if people follow your suggestions. I also guess you have never had kids.
Man, I hated sprint. Around that time you also often had a separate carrier for your landline long distance. Multiple times my long distance contract account switched from one carrier to Sprint without my approval, a practice known as "slamming." I finally convinced the local telco not to ever let my account be transferred under any circumstances, but you had to ask the question in just the right way. But I also swore I'd never do business with Sprint because they were clearly doing something really scummy.
I don't know, if it actually answered the questions posed it would be an improvement over the guy I talked to at Nissan last time I was car shopping. I clicked a "give me an instant quote" button, which was actually a "we'll get back to you with an email" button, and despite three attempts to get actual facts out of the guy the only thing he said each time was "Yeah, we've got lots of models. Give me a call or come on down and we'll talk."
But correlation *is* correlation, and that's all they care about. Causation doesn't matter here in the least.
He should know. He was the man who assassinated ol' George so that America could become an independent nation. We wouldn't have managed without that final act of murderous treason.
Of course the Brits covered it up by using a body double and pretending like it never happened.
I didn't like playing online, so I couldn't trade to complete things. The runes and sets were deeply unsatisfying because of that.