Just to be clear, I don't pirate. Never really have, never really intend to. Short of looking up music videos on YouTube (does that count?) I think downloading music without paying isn't playing fair.
But that doesn't mean I can't see exactly why people do. People do so because, more so than at any time in history, there is a colossal disparity between the cost of music and the cost of the medium it's being sold on. Transferring music electronically has an extremely small cost. Producing music also costs far less than ever- most specialist music equipment is being superseded by cheaper and more common computing tech. But the price remains shockingly high.
Ask any defender of these high prices about the reasoning, and you'll receive the same answer- if music weren't expensive, artists couldn't be paid as much, and so mussic won't get made.
As I was arguing above, why do we accept this argument? Mainstream artists have never ever been as well paid as they are right now, with even non-notable acts receiving eye-watering salaries while they're in vogue, and the bigger acts become filthy rich into eternity. There's no historical precedent for this; its a completely new notion. There is no evidence that if the super-rich took a pay cut, to make legitimate music sales more realistic and competitive, that quality music would suddenly cease to be made.
While the cost of purchasing music is so ridiculously out of sync with the actual cost of the medium, people won't buy it. That's why piracy happens. If the "staff" involved in the production of this "product" aren't willing to cut costs in order to stay competitive, how can we expect this too turn out any differently than it did for every other company in the same predicament?
And while we're on the subject, piracy (and by association low-cost music both illegal or otherwise) has been shown time and time again to be beneficial for smaller artists. A climate of low-cost music should be beneficial for musicians as a whole- just not for the small number already at the top of the pile.
True, but I still think it's a bit of a stretch to call it an "American" phenomenon. It'd probably be less objectionable to call it a "Western" phenomenon- after all, Europeans, Australians and so forth share most of the same cultural fixations and hangups with the Americans.
America has just had a disproportionate amount of airtime as the ambassador for "Western culture" thanks to the prevalence of Hollywood and the US games industry.
I'm a completely unqualified, completely shit programmer. I would never, ever attempt to write a full app, and I'm not hired to do that. But in the course of my job, I am expected to put together Excel spreadsheets and other mundane tasks like that.
Basic means that I can write a simple script easily, and it'll work, and it won't crash. If it were in a "proper" programming language like C++, I probably couldn't do that. Not without a significantly bigger time investment, anyhow.
And nobody is going to hire a 100-bucks-an-hour person to do that spreadsheet for me- it's 15-bucks-and-hour me or no-one.
...as it would just use a renewable resource (which there is ultimately only one, the Sun) for energy.
How do you figure that one? There are lots of renewable energy sources that don't particularly involve the sun.
Gravity, for one. In the form of hydroelectric power (that is, water rolling down hill), or tidal power. Or maybe geothermal- it can be harvested without consuming anything, and is scheduled to carry on unabated for a billion years and more yet. Or how about wind- as long as there's air, there will be wind.
The sun is very important and all, but calling it the only renewable energy source seems a tad narrow.
I want to know where this idea has come from that making music should make you a millionaire.
Before the 20th century it didn't. Even some of the most respected composers in history earned only enough for a comfortable life, and the talented musicians could only expect a livable wage. Somehow, though, somewhere in the 20th century came the concept that every single mediocre pop act should earn 6 figure sums, and the "best of them" should be earning millions, into eternity.
Traditionally, artists were expected to earn their crust from live shows- something which is not only not harmed by piracy, but actually bolstered by it. And traditionally, recordings and covers and such (insofar as they happened) were sold at only a little above cost.
And somehow, despite this lack of monetary incentive, magnificent music still got made. Musicians made music because it was what they loved to do, and the music scene was a lot better for it.
So enough of the painful regurgitation of the myth that "if you don't pay £10 for an electronic download of the latest album, music itself can't happen". When the music industry returns to a realistic business model, piracy will end.
Thats what I was thinking. Surely a small capsule with a handful of people surrounded by thousands of miles of near-vacuum is about as close to a clean-room environment as you can get.
Sterilize everything, let them spend a blissful year or two in splendid good health, then worry about their poor shattered immune systems when they get back.
Indeed. Odds are that they won't be shipping on the same handsets, so it's likely that you'll just pick the handset hardware you want to buy and stick with the OS that ships with it.
I can't imagine many people deciding between phones based on their underlying OS. Maybe the geekiest among us, but even still.
If you remove the life support bits (because you wouldn't want to be shelling your enemies with expensive astronauts), forget about making it reusable (try reusing one after dropping it on your enemies) and maybe beef up the payload with a bit of extra bang (and if you've got the lift, why not?) then a shuttle is basically the same as an ICBM.
I think that was his point, and it was a good one.
Nothing's going to "kill the iPhone/Pod" by being better than it. Apple are successful due to a fanatical userbase and marketing master-class. This phone could be made of win and come with a free kitten and it'll still be lucky to break into second place.
Nothing wrong with that though. Should keep the price a little lower for those of us who actually want a good phone.
Because of the nature of EVE's gameplay, being a "hero" is a lot more than memorizing moves or grinding. The cut and thrust of the gameplay is mostly tactical- there are relatively few different "things" you can do in battle, but how you choose to balance and utilize them is you decision.
But to be honest, what really makes the difference in EVE is bravery. In EVE, the losses of an exploding ship are extremely meaningful- you lose something, and it's lost.
When you come across players with a good mind for tactics, the willingness to put themselves on the front line, and the charisma to persuade others to do the same...that's the sort of person that becomes a famous name.
The strength of EVE is that everything really feels like it really, really matters. Much of that would be lost without the feeling of the single shard.
If they're on the same grid as the mainland, there's no guarantee that they'll be using "the same electricity" as the stuff they're putting in (not that that makes any sense in any case).
Self sufficiency would just involve putting in as much as they're taking out. "Energy density" is just their way of measuring that, it being quite a tricky thing to measure over a 10 year period.
They seem to have this base covered- there's talk of having player-versus-NPC battles as part of the new player experience, which would give everyone a chance to get to grips with the game without being steam-rolled by a clan veteran.
Having small groups of newbs taking part in small-scale, easy-rated NPC battles seems like a good way of letting people get the feel for commanding (and getting the feel of foot-soldiering too) without pissing people off and getting a terrible reputation. Especially considering if this game will impact on the colossal, persistent politics of EVE.
Indeed. And the company I work for has an effective way of ensuring employees complete the above steps, too: if you don't, you get fired. Or a formal disciplinary, at any rate.
You'd be amazed how effective a method that is for ensuring "un-authentication". There's a 5 minute screensaver for good measure, and most network services on the intranet have a very short time-out.
As someone who deals with hand-written letters everyday (generally from 40+ people who should have been educated in the mystical golden age of hand writing), a fair half of all the cursive writing I see is damn near completely illegible, particularly after it has been photocopied or scanned once. If people were to correspond in a clear, printed, non-cursive script (hand-written or not) the world would be a better place.
They can't just walk out into the road and hope whenever they need to cross. With traditional cars you can hear a busy street a mile off, but a street full of stealth cars is a different matter.
As in the discussion above about Faraday Cages, it seems trivial enough to glue a layer of aluminium foil to the cardboard. It'd only add pence to the overall cost, and is still cheaper than an actual metal case.
On an individual, per-person, per-bulb, per-day basis the money we're talking about doesn't seem significant. Over a person's lifetime of bulb-use it looks a little better. When taking into account the cost and energy usage of every bulb in the developed world it seems to be quite a bit more important.
So incandescent bulbs are a bad thing in most of the world for about a third of the year (summer) and in some of the world most of the year. If you happen to be running air-conditioning at the same time as an incandescent bulb, you're just pumping money out of the window.
Not to mention the fact that having a heat source 6 inches from your ceiling is generally not the most efficient way to heat a room. It makes far more sense to save the energy wasted from the bulb, and spend it in an efficient central heating system instead, where strategically placed radiators and vents can put the heat where it's actually needed.
He is implying that, by vetoing all new ideas by way of ridiculously over-optimistic design standards, they've been stuck using ancient technology for far longer than is safe, economic, or reasonable.
The irony of the situation shouldn't be lost on anyone.
Any improvements they can make at all would be a good contribution to the tech. And Google have a generally good history of making good outrageous promises, so lets not write them off straight away.
Diesel engines were original designed to run on biodiesel- its only a fact of history that the fossil industry discovered they could make a compatible fuel for cheaper.
Biodiesel mass production is no great technological challenge (the method is pretty simple compared to crude oil refining). Now demand is growing fast, supply is growing fast- 40% growth annually before the recession.
It should also be pointed out that diesel engines can be mechanically modified very easily to run on pure vegetable oil, without needing to convert it to biodiesel. Probably a more sensible option if you're designing an "algae oil car" from scratch, all things considered.
I believe they mean oldest living organism, in the sense of oldest living individual creature, and not the species as a whole.
In other words, they have a specific plant which first sprouted nearly 50,000 years ago. If there's an individual horseshoe crab that is 50,000 years old I'd be very surprised.
Slashdot Mirror
Just to be clear, I don't pirate. Never really have, never really intend to. Short of looking up music videos on YouTube (does that count?) I think downloading music without paying isn't playing fair.
But that doesn't mean I can't see exactly why people do. People do so because, more so than at any time in history, there is a colossal disparity between the cost of music and the cost of the medium it's being sold on. Transferring music electronically has an extremely small cost. Producing music also costs far less than ever- most specialist music equipment is being superseded by cheaper and more common computing tech. But the price remains shockingly high.
Ask any defender of these high prices about the reasoning, and you'll receive the same answer- if music weren't expensive, artists couldn't be paid as much, and so mussic won't get made.
As I was arguing above, why do we accept this argument? Mainstream artists have never ever been as well paid as they are right now, with even non-notable acts receiving eye-watering salaries while they're in vogue, and the bigger acts become filthy rich into eternity. There's no historical precedent for this; its a completely new notion. There is no evidence that if the super-rich took a pay cut, to make legitimate music sales more realistic and competitive, that quality music would suddenly cease to be made.
While the cost of purchasing music is so ridiculously out of sync with the actual cost of the medium, people won't buy it. That's why piracy happens. If the "staff" involved in the production of this "product" aren't willing to cut costs in order to stay competitive, how can we expect this too turn out any differently than it did for every other company in the same predicament?
And while we're on the subject, piracy (and by association low-cost music both illegal or otherwise) has been shown time and time again to be beneficial for smaller artists. A climate of low-cost music should be beneficial for musicians as a whole- just not for the small number already at the top of the pile.
True, but I still think it's a bit of a stretch to call it an "American" phenomenon. It'd probably be less objectionable to call it a "Western" phenomenon- after all, Europeans, Australians and so forth share most of the same cultural fixations and hangups with the Americans.
America has just had a disproportionate amount of airtime as the ambassador for "Western culture" thanks to the prevalence of Hollywood and the US games industry.
Indeed, that is why VB is GOOD.
I'm a completely unqualified, completely shit programmer. I would never, ever attempt to write a full app, and I'm not hired to do that. But in the course of my job, I am expected to put together Excel spreadsheets and other mundane tasks like that.
Basic means that I can write a simple script easily, and it'll work, and it won't crash. If it were in a "proper" programming language like C++, I probably couldn't do that. Not without a significantly bigger time investment, anyhow.
And nobody is going to hire a 100-bucks-an-hour person to do that spreadsheet for me- it's 15-bucks-and-hour me or no-one.
...as it would just use a renewable resource (which there is ultimately only one, the Sun) for energy.
How do you figure that one? There are lots of renewable energy sources that don't particularly involve the sun.
Gravity, for one. In the form of hydroelectric power (that is, water rolling down hill), or tidal power. Or maybe geothermal- it can be harvested without consuming anything, and is scheduled to carry on unabated for a billion years and more yet. Or how about wind- as long as there's air, there will be wind.
The sun is very important and all, but calling it the only renewable energy source seems a tad narrow.
I want to know where this idea has come from that making music should make you a millionaire.
Before the 20th century it didn't. Even some of the most respected composers in history earned only enough for a comfortable life, and the talented musicians could only expect a livable wage. Somehow, though, somewhere in the 20th century came the concept that every single mediocre pop act should earn 6 figure sums, and the "best of them" should be earning millions, into eternity.
Traditionally, artists were expected to earn their crust from live shows- something which is not only not harmed by piracy, but actually bolstered by it. And traditionally, recordings and covers and such (insofar as they happened) were sold at only a little above cost.
And somehow, despite this lack of monetary incentive, magnificent music still got made. Musicians made music because it was what they loved to do, and the music scene was a lot better for it.
So enough of the painful regurgitation of the myth that "if you don't pay £10 for an electronic download of the latest album, music itself can't happen". When the music industry returns to a realistic business model, piracy will end.
Thats what I was thinking. Surely a small capsule with a handful of people surrounded by thousands of miles of near-vacuum is about as close to a clean-room environment as you can get.
Sterilize everything, let them spend a blissful year or two in splendid good health, then worry about their poor shattered immune systems when they get back.
Indeed. Odds are that they won't be shipping on the same handsets, so it's likely that you'll just pick the handset hardware you want to buy and stick with the OS that ships with it.
I can't imagine many people deciding between phones based on their underlying OS. Maybe the geekiest among us, but even still.
If you remove the life support bits (because you wouldn't want to be shelling your enemies with expensive astronauts), forget about making it reusable (try reusing one after dropping it on your enemies) and maybe beef up the payload with a bit of extra bang (and if you've got the lift, why not?) then a shuttle is basically the same as an ICBM.
Basically.
I think that was his point, and it was a good one.
Nothing's going to "kill the iPhone/Pod" by being better than it. Apple are successful due to a fanatical userbase and marketing master-class. This phone could be made of win and come with a free kitten and it'll still be lucky to break into second place.
Nothing wrong with that though. Should keep the price a little lower for those of us who actually want a good phone.
Because of the nature of EVE's gameplay, being a "hero" is a lot more than memorizing moves or grinding. The cut and thrust of the gameplay is mostly tactical- there are relatively few different "things" you can do in battle, but how you choose to balance and utilize them is you decision.
But to be honest, what really makes the difference in EVE is bravery. In EVE, the losses of an exploding ship are extremely meaningful- you lose something, and it's lost.
When you come across players with a good mind for tactics, the willingness to put themselves on the front line, and the charisma to persuade others to do the same...that's the sort of person that becomes a famous name.
The strength of EVE is that everything really feels like it really, really matters. Much of that would be lost without the feeling of the single shard.
If they're on the same grid as the mainland, there's no guarantee that they'll be using "the same electricity" as the stuff they're putting in (not that that makes any sense in any case).
Self sufficiency would just involve putting in as much as they're taking out. "Energy density" is just their way of measuring that, it being quite a tricky thing to measure over a 10 year period.
Microsoft pre-bundling a free version of their most popular software in order to drive market share away from their competitors?
What could possibly go wrong?
I love that pub. Forget the stones, it's worth the bus trip all by itself.
They seem to have this base covered- there's talk of having player-versus-NPC battles as part of the new player experience, which would give everyone a chance to get to grips with the game without being steam-rolled by a clan veteran.
Having small groups of newbs taking part in small-scale, easy-rated NPC battles seems like a good way of letting people get the feel for commanding (and getting the feel of foot-soldiering too) without pissing people off and getting a terrible reputation. Especially considering if this game will impact on the colossal, persistent politics of EVE.
Indeed. And the company I work for has an effective way of ensuring employees complete the above steps, too: if you don't, you get fired. Or a formal disciplinary, at any rate.
You'd be amazed how effective a method that is for ensuring "un-authentication". There's a 5 minute screensaver for good measure, and most network services on the intranet have a very short time-out.
What more do you need?
100% agreed.
As someone who deals with hand-written letters everyday (generally from 40+ people who should have been educated in the mystical golden age of hand writing), a fair half of all the cursive writing I see is damn near completely illegible, particularly after it has been photocopied or scanned once. If people were to correspond in a clear, printed, non-cursive script (hand-written or not) the world would be a better place.
Blind people are a big factor.
They can't just walk out into the road and hope whenever they need to cross. With traditional cars you can hear a busy street a mile off, but a street full of stealth cars is a different matter.
As in the discussion above about Faraday Cages, it seems trivial enough to glue a layer of aluminium foil to the cardboard. It'd only add pence to the overall cost, and is still cheaper than an actual metal case.
On an individual, per-person, per-bulb, per-day basis the money we're talking about doesn't seem significant. Over a person's lifetime of bulb-use it looks a little better. When taking into account the cost and energy usage of every bulb in the developed world it seems to be quite a bit more important.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but TFA is about an ARM chip with a a 2GHz clock and a low power footprint.
Or in other words, a chip with the same processing power as an Atom, but with better battery life.
Or in other words- is that what you were after?
So incandescent bulbs are a bad thing in most of the world for about a third of the year (summer) and in some of the world most of the year. If you happen to be running air-conditioning at the same time as an incandescent bulb, you're just pumping money out of the window.
Not to mention the fact that having a heat source 6 inches from your ceiling is generally not the most efficient way to heat a room. It makes far more sense to save the energy wasted from the bulb, and spend it in an efficient central heating system instead, where strategically placed radiators and vents can put the heat where it's actually needed.
He is implying that, by vetoing all new ideas by way of ridiculously over-optimistic design standards, they've been stuck using ancient technology for far longer than is safe, economic, or reasonable.
The irony of the situation shouldn't be lost on anyone.
You can't knock them for trying.
Any improvements they can make at all would be a good contribution to the tech. And Google have a generally good history of making good outrageous promises, so lets not write them off straight away.
Diesel engines were original designed to run on biodiesel- its only a fact of history that the fossil industry discovered they could make a compatible fuel for cheaper.
Biodiesel mass production is no great technological challenge (the method is pretty simple compared to crude oil refining). Now demand is growing fast, supply is growing fast- 40% growth annually before the recession.
It should also be pointed out that diesel engines can be mechanically modified very easily to run on pure vegetable oil, without needing to convert it to biodiesel. Probably a more sensible option if you're designing an "algae oil car" from scratch, all things considered.
I believe they mean oldest living organism, in the sense of oldest living individual creature, and not the species as a whole.
In other words, they have a specific plant which first sprouted nearly 50,000 years ago. If there's an individual horseshoe crab that is 50,000 years old I'd be very surprised.