I agree. Though I also quite enjoy the law here: A non-compete is only valid if you're compensated for the time. That is, they can enforce a non-compete for a year following your termination if, and only if, they're also prepared to pay you for that year.
Seems fair to me. Without this, a "non-compete" can amount to a prohibition on working - atleast in a field close to your previous one which by nature is going to be the field where you've got the most experience.
Okay, so the 707 of our grandparents, flew with the same velocity as the jetliners of today.
But back then, jet-travel was expensive and rare and people who didn't belong to the upper-class rarely flew at all.
Today, airplane-travel is more accessible and cheaper than it's ever been, relative to wages. A larger fraction of Americans (or Norwegians) can afford to fly on vacation today, than in ANY previous generation.
Thus, the trend isn't that air-travel increasingly becomes only for the rich. The trend is opposite: it *used* to be only for the rich, but today it's accessible for more people than ever before.
Oh, and my house is the same temperature in winter as that of my grandparents. But I spend only one third the energy to heat it, despite the house being larger and having more windows. That's efficiency.
I don't drive any faster than my parents did, but my car gets 40 miles from a gallon while theirs used to get 20. And that's despite my car being both safer and more comfortable than theirs. This too, is efficiency.
Yeah. And for this and other reason, many of the new houses that have significant smart-home technology inside that often takes by overloading RF-signals on the powerlines, come with a low-pass filter in the circuit-breaker-box that stops signals from leaking.
It's trivial to make a low-pass filter that stops 99.99% of every signal above 10Khz, yet has ignorable influence on the power, since this has a frequency of only 50 or 60 hz.
That part is okay. I mean, I too find it a good thing that the game doesn't force you to do only the main quests in a linear fashion.
But DA2 sadly, isn't that. It's just a mess. It's a good-thing to be non-linear, but not a good thing to consist of on the order of 100 quests that overwhelmingly don't have anything to do with anything.
It's not a sandbox, it's "pick which sequence to do this finite set of quests in", and being allowed to pick the sequence isn't the problem, but the fact that the quests fail to add up to one overall narrative, is a significant shortcoming.
It's common for sequels of great games to be somewhat poorer, offcourse, but in this case the decline was particularily severe. Seems the general critics agree with my assessment too, seeing as Dragon Age I scored 91% on metacritic whereas the II scored only 79%
The first Dragonage had a point. There's a blight, you need to assemble an army, enlisting cooperation from various factions, then go fight it. Fine.
But DragonAge II ? What is it about ? What are you trying to acomplish ? Why ? How many of the quests are even related to the goal ?
I get that they're setting things up for the third, since it's planned as a trilogy. But an -entire- game that is *nothing* more than setting the stage for a sequel ? i.e. the game itself, taken for itself, isn't actually about anything, and doesn't even have a goal ?
C++ ain't really a good comparison-point for making a new clean object-oriented language. C++ is aproximately the thing its name indicates - C, but with object-oriented stuff bolted on, in a fairly ugly manner at that.
If you use instead, as comparison-point, some modern language that does support OO in a clean way, you'll tend to find that "everything is an object" is fairly common. That's the case in both Python and Ruby, for example.
Raising from the dead has been a favourite "neat trick" of fantasy fiction since as long as we've had the written word, probably before that too, but it's hard to tell.
That would apply if copyright was "life of author", but nobody (that I've seen) has recommended that.
It'd -not- apply if copyright was "20 years" regardless of state of the author. Indeed that's the only rule where the death or survival of the author makes precisely zero difference at all to the copyright-status of the work.
That makes sense, these days it seems a lot like circle-masturbation. I've got a friend who studied, to masters level even, ancient greek.
Only -then- did it (seemingly) occur to her to investigate what it can be *used* for.
Okay, you could make translation number 173 of Plato into english - but it's not terribly useful, given that 172 independent translations already exist. Or you could make a meta-translation, comparing and contrasting those 172 - except even that has been done to death. Infact it's been done to the point where there's now meta-meta-comparisons that compare and contrast the various meta-translations.
Other than that ? You can participate in useless-but-cute projects such as translating Harry Potter to ancient greek.
Or you can teach ancient greek to the -next- generation of students.
And that's about it.
I guess it's got value to civilization to maintain *some* population that's able to read ancient greek, but the value seems dwindling, given that there's no -new- works being produced in ancient greek, and all the existing works are so thoroughly analyzed (and meta-analyzed, and meta-meta-analyzed) that you'd think most of the knowledge that's extractable from them, is already in one or more of the existing translations.
I dunno. I -do- have plenty of examples of works that may not be huge sellers now, but that to me WOULD be viable competitors to current books *if* they where free, that are 20 years old.
Put differently, would I buy less -current- books if every book over 20 years old, was free ? (which is the practical result of copyright expiring)
I think yes, actually, I would. I have a finite time available for reading, and so reading more old free stuff, would tend to lead to reading less current stuff.
It's not -nessecarily- a bad thing that competition is stiffer, though. It depends on your outlook, I guess.
You misunderstand. The point is that if money delivered in the far future, shall motivate you, either your interest-rate must be very low, or the sum must be HUGE.
For example, if your deprecation is 5% (i.e. you think $95 now is the same value as $100 in a year), then it follows that $1000 now has the same value to you as $80.000 delivered in 90 years.
Or put differently, $1000 a year for 90 years, has 99% of the value of $1000 a year FOREVER.
It's correct that the more languages you know, the easier it is to learn new ones, and all germanic languages have huge influences from Latin, so knowing Latin helps significantly with learning other languages.
Nevertheless, it's a roundabout way of doing it: if the point is to learn (for example) english, french and german, then you're better off doing precisely that. The time spent learning Latin -will- help with learning those other languages, but not enough to justify the time spent. (and you'd have learnt about genitiv by doing German too)
I'm not saying Latin is useless - I'm saying it's *less* useful than alternative languages you could learn in the same time. Even my father learnt Latin.
Overall languages is something that's improved a LOT. The *average* Norwegian speaks something like 1.5 foreign languages fluently today, you need only go back a generation or two to make that 0.5
You're right. retro-actively changing copyright, logically CANNOT influence the chance that the incentives are sufficient for them to be created, because the chance of them being created already is 100%.
Not that logic helps helps, ofcourse, with a supreme court who makes a mockery of the constitution by claiming that "for limited times" does not actually mean anything. (they argue that technically 99999999999 years is 'limited' and thus constitutional - that this "limit" in practical real world is entirely equivalent to "infinite" does not matter)
Notice how the now-value of money actually makes prolonging copyrights even less sensible.
The present value of $1000/year for the next 60 years is infact *not* $60K, but significantly less. (how much less, depends on your deprecation-rate)
Indeed, neither the public benefit, nor the value of stimulating creativity varies depending on how long the original author lives.
Thus it's plain silly to award protection based on how long, or how short, the author might happen to live.
Instead, make a flat-and-simple rule. 20 years from date of first publication, for example.
The degree of reduced stimulation is tiny: there are very few works that pull in insufficient-to-be-worth-it money in the first 20 years, but enough-to-be-worth it in the first 100.
This is so because *most* works are either economically worthless from the get-go, OR they're successful, for a limited time, OR in some rare cases, they're successful for a long time. In all 3 cases, length of copyright makes no real difference. (aslong as it's atleast long enough to cover the "limited time")
This leaves the mythical beast: The work that never sells significantly in it's first 20 years, yet that goes on to become a hit later.
These -exist-, but there are very few of them, and to add insult to injury, you'd have to know or guess that a work falls in this category, for that knowledge to influence your decision (are you gonna produce the work, or not)
In todays economic climate I strongly suspect "this won't do well now, but could do better in 20 years" would map to "don't produce" anyway.
Indeed. Greek an Latin aren't compulsory today, and there's a reason for it, the reason being that it's fairly USELESS for large fractions of todays workforce to know these languages.
But my general language-skills runs *circles* around what was common in 1869, even among Harvard-recruits it seems. Mostly that's down to practical experience offcourse, we're a much more international world today.
I don't know Greek or Latin -- but passing a similar-difficulty test in any 2 of the 3 foreign languages I *have* learnt (english being one of them), would be trivial. Indeed this comment alone, demonstrates more command of english than they're asking of Latin.
The math-test spans from banal-and-trivial to simple. "what is a prime?", "reduce this fraction" is banality, taught in secondary-school, if not primary.
That's only -sort- of true. First, it matters *which* pill you miss (missing the first one after the period without is worst, missing the last one matters leat)
Secondly, it matters what kind of pill you're using. Some of the new low-dosis "mini-pills" have more tight limits, to the point where even taking them at different times of the day, may start reducing their effectiveness.
In short: read the damn instructions, but overall, missing a single pill (especially one that isn't the first one) is likely to have a fairly small influence on the pregnancy-risk.
Nevertheless, it's completely illogical to let human beings, who we *know* from practical experience the aproximate rate of traffic-deaths, but *not* allow an alternative with demonstrably significantly less deaths and injuries.
Some of it has to do with freedom though, namely the freedom to do dangerous things. Traffic-deaths would fall significantly if we just put electronics in cars so that they would refuse to go over the speed-limit too. (and doing so would be MUCH simpler than electronic drivers), nevertheless we don't do it.
This tells me that it's not as clear-cut as "less deaths good", it seems we as a society, are willing to accept deaths and injuries as the price to pay, for the freedom of being able to do something that is illegal and dangerous (drive fast) (yes yes there *are* cases where speeding is safe, nevertheless you can't argue that *some* accidents are caused by speeding)
True. And you can extend the reach, speed and comfort of a bicycle by help of a small electric engine-and-battery. Because bicycles are amazingly energy-effective. On level ground, a bicycle needs aproximately 40 wh (or 0.04Kwh) of energy for each mile traveled.
A modern lithium-ion battery holds 300-600wh/litre, thus a 3-litre battery weighing around 10kg, holds sufficient energy to propel bike and rider over aproximately 35 miles. If you use the battery merely as "support", doing most of the pedaling yourself, but letting it help out with the trickier parts, that range gets even better.
Yeah right. We don't have flying cars or jetpacks. But in other areas, the world has changed a lot -more- than anyone imagined.
Probably the biggest thing since 1960 is the rise of computers and networks. Today, the average person uses computers and networks all the fucking time, and it was basically not even on the radar in 1960. Infact a modern cellphone kicks the shit out of a StarTrek "communicator", and StarTrek started in 1966. (and portrays a future much more than 50 years out.)
And we may not have flying cars - but we *do* live in a world where I can fly across the atlantic and pay aproximately one days wages for the priviledge. That's a mindboggling change from what a trans-atlantic flight cost for an average person in 1960.
It's a pity that SQL allows pure string-concatenation construction of queries even. Parametrization is a lot safer and saner, and even has performance-benefits if the database-engine is clever enough to recognize that it's the same query, just with different parameters. (in that case, it doesn't need to create a query plan anew - it can reuse the existing one and save time)
But there's some semi-common constructs that are hard or impossible to do with parametrization. How do you do it for "select $COLUMN from myTable" or, perhaps more common ".... order by $COLUMN"
-sometimes- sanitized inputs is the best you can do. But 99% of the time, parametrization, is the way to go.
Not it's max(real_loss, statutory_loss)+legal_fees
Statutory losses is something you can choose to insist on INSTEAD of actual damages, they're meant to be a simplifying mechanism, and in some cases they work well. The absurdity only arises because of the crazyness of multiplying by number of downloads, even of the same work. This was REJECTED by the judge, by the way.
If by "high" doses you mean "doses that may, perhaps, increase your lifetime risk of getting cancer by a single-digit percentage" then yes.
I'm not saying this is ignorable, or not serious. I'm saying that this far, it seems likely that the harm to human health from the nukes, will be a tiny fraction of the damages resulting from the earthquake and tsunami.
i.e. if there where zero nuclear powerplants in the affected area, the number of dead and seriously injured people would've been essentially identical.
Japan has suffered a huge catastrophy. Nuclear powerplants has this far gotten a huge fraction of the attention, while actually causing a miniscule fraction of the deaths and injuries. This *may* change if we get a larger release of radioactive substances, offcourse.
Slashdot Mirror
I agree. Though I also quite enjoy the law here: A non-compete is only valid if you're compensated for the time. That is, they can enforce a non-compete for a year following your termination if, and only if, they're also prepared to pay you for that year.
Seems fair to me. Without this, a "non-compete" can amount to a prohibition on working - atleast in a field close to your previous one which by nature is going to be the field where you've got the most experience.
What planet do you live on ?
On -this- planet, the opposite effect is true.
Okay, so the 707 of our grandparents, flew with the same velocity as the jetliners of today.
But back then, jet-travel was expensive and rare and people who didn't belong to the upper-class rarely flew at all.
Today, airplane-travel is more accessible and cheaper than it's ever been, relative to wages. A larger fraction of Americans (or Norwegians) can afford to fly on vacation today, than in ANY previous generation.
Thus, the trend isn't that air-travel increasingly becomes only for the rich. The trend is opposite: it *used* to be only for the rich, but today it's accessible for more people than ever before.
Oh, and my house is the same temperature in winter as that of my grandparents. But I spend only one third the energy to heat it, despite the house being larger and having more windows. That's efficiency.
I don't drive any faster than my parents did, but my car gets 40 miles from a gallon while theirs used to get 20. And that's despite my car being both safer and more comfortable than theirs. This too, is efficiency.
Yeah. And for this and other reason, many of the new houses that have significant smart-home technology inside that often takes by overloading RF-signals on the powerlines, come with a low-pass filter in the circuit-breaker-box that stops signals from leaking.
It's trivial to make a low-pass filter that stops 99.99% of every signal above 10Khz, yet has ignorable influence on the power, since this has a frequency of only 50 or 60 hz.
That part is okay. I mean, I too find it a good thing that the game doesn't force you to do only the main quests in a linear fashion.
But DA2 sadly, isn't that. It's just a mess. It's a good-thing to be non-linear, but not a good thing to consist of on the order of 100 quests that overwhelmingly don't have anything to do with anything.
It's not a sandbox, it's "pick which sequence to do this finite set of quests in", and being allowed to pick the sequence isn't the problem, but the fact that the quests fail to add up to one overall narrative, is a significant shortcoming.
It's common for sequels of great games to be somewhat poorer, offcourse, but in this case the decline was particularily severe. Seems the general critics agree with my assessment too, seeing as Dragon Age I scored 91% on metacritic whereas the II scored only 79%
The controls aren't the bad part.
The bad part is, the game isn't about anything.
The first Dragonage had a point. There's a blight, you need to assemble an army, enlisting cooperation from various factions, then go fight it. Fine.
But DragonAge II ? What is it about ? What are you trying to acomplish ? Why ? How many of the quests are even related to the goal ?
I get that they're setting things up for the third, since it's planned as a trilogy. But an -entire- game that is *nothing* more than setting the stage for a sequel ? i.e. the game itself, taken for itself, isn't actually about anything, and doesn't even have a goal ?
No thanks.
C++ ain't really a good comparison-point for making a new clean object-oriented language. C++ is aproximately the thing its name indicates - C, but with object-oriented stuff bolted on, in a fairly ugly manner at that.
If you use instead, as comparison-point, some modern language that does support OO in a clean way, you'll tend to find that "everything is an object" is fairly common. That's the case in both Python and Ruby, for example.
I think Jesus was slightly before Dracula.
Raising from the dead has been a favourite "neat trick" of fantasy fiction since as long as we've had the written word, probably before that too, but it's hard to tell.
That would apply if copyright was "life of author", but nobody (that I've seen) has recommended that.
It'd -not- apply if copyright was "20 years" regardless of state of the author. Indeed that's the only rule where the death or survival of the author makes precisely zero difference at all to the copyright-status of the work.
There should be, and also insentive for a terminally ill author to complete his final work.
But with 20 year flat, regardless of how long (or how short) the original author lives - there would be.
That makes sense, these days it seems a lot like circle-masturbation. I've got a friend who studied, to masters level even, ancient greek.
Only -then- did it (seemingly) occur to her to investigate what it can be *used* for.
Okay, you could make translation number 173 of Plato into english - but it's not terribly useful, given that 172 independent translations already exist. Or you could make a meta-translation, comparing and contrasting those 172 - except even that has been done to death. Infact it's been done to the point where there's now meta-meta-comparisons that compare and contrast the various meta-translations.
Other than that ? You can participate in useless-but-cute projects such as translating Harry Potter to ancient greek.
Or you can teach ancient greek to the -next- generation of students.
And that's about it.
I guess it's got value to civilization to maintain *some* population that's able to read ancient greek, but the value seems dwindling, given that there's no -new- works being produced in ancient greek, and all the existing works are so thoroughly analyzed (and meta-analyzed, and meta-meta-analyzed) that you'd think most of the knowledge that's extractable from them, is already in one or more of the existing translations.
I dunno. I -do- have plenty of examples of works that may not be huge sellers now, but that to me WOULD be viable competitors to current books *if* they where free, that are 20 years old.
Put differently, would I buy less -current- books if every book over 20 years old, was free ? (which is the practical result of copyright expiring)
I think yes, actually, I would. I have a finite time available for reading, and so reading more old free stuff, would tend to lead to reading less current stuff.
It's not -nessecarily- a bad thing that competition is stiffer, though. It depends on your outlook, I guess.
You misunderstand. The point is that if money delivered in the far future, shall motivate you, either your interest-rate must be very low, or the sum must be HUGE.
For example, if your deprecation is 5% (i.e. you think $95 now is the same value as $100 in a year), then it follows that $1000 now has the same value to you as $80.000 delivered in 90 years.
Or put differently, $1000 a year for 90 years, has 99% of the value of $1000 a year FOREVER.
It's correct that the more languages you know, the easier it is to learn new ones, and all germanic languages have huge influences from Latin, so knowing Latin helps significantly with learning other languages.
Nevertheless, it's a roundabout way of doing it: if the point is to learn (for example) english, french and german, then you're better off doing precisely that. The time spent learning Latin -will- help with learning those other languages, but not enough to justify the time spent. (and you'd have learnt about genitiv by doing German too)
I'm not saying Latin is useless - I'm saying it's *less* useful than alternative languages you could learn in the same time. Even my father learnt Latin.
Overall languages is something that's improved a LOT. The *average* Norwegian speaks something like 1.5 foreign languages fluently today, you need only go back a generation or two to make that 0.5
You're right. retro-actively changing copyright, logically CANNOT influence the chance that the incentives are sufficient for them to be created, because the chance of them being created already is 100%.
Not that logic helps helps, ofcourse, with a supreme court who makes a mockery of the constitution by claiming that "for limited times" does not actually mean anything. (they argue that technically 99999999999 years is 'limited' and thus constitutional - that this "limit" in practical real world is entirely equivalent to "infinite" does not matter)
Notice how the now-value of money actually makes prolonging copyrights even less sensible.
The present value of $1000/year for the next 60 years is infact *not* $60K, but significantly less. (how much less, depends on your deprecation-rate)
Indeed, neither the public benefit, nor the value of stimulating creativity varies depending on how long the original author lives.
Thus it's plain silly to award protection based on how long, or how short, the author might happen to live.
Instead, make a flat-and-simple rule. 20 years from date of first publication, for example.
The degree of reduced stimulation is tiny: there are very few works that pull in insufficient-to-be-worth-it money in the first 20 years, but enough-to-be-worth it in the first 100.
This is so because *most* works are either economically worthless from the get-go, OR they're successful, for a limited time, OR in some rare cases, they're successful for a long time. In all 3 cases, length of copyright makes no real difference. (aslong as it's atleast long enough to cover the "limited time")
This leaves the mythical beast: The work that never sells significantly in it's first 20 years, yet that goes on to become a hit later.
These -exist-, but there are very few of them, and to add insult to injury, you'd have to know or guess that a work falls in this category, for that knowledge to influence your decision (are you gonna produce the work, or not)
In todays economic climate I strongly suspect "this won't do well now, but could do better in 20 years" would map to "don't produce" anyway.
Indeed. Greek an Latin aren't compulsory today, and there's a reason for it, the reason being that it's fairly USELESS for large fractions of todays workforce to know these languages.
But my general language-skills runs *circles* around what was common in 1869, even among Harvard-recruits it seems. Mostly that's down to practical experience offcourse, we're a much more international world today.
I don't know Greek or Latin -- but passing a similar-difficulty test in any 2 of the 3 foreign languages I *have* learnt (english being one of them), would be trivial. Indeed this comment alone, demonstrates more command of english than they're asking of Latin.
The math-test spans from banal-and-trivial to simple. "what is a prime?", "reduce this fraction" is banality, taught in secondary-school, if not primary.
Uhm, there are sid"players" (really emulators) aplenty. What's wrong with them ? Why don't they count ?
That's only -sort- of true. First, it matters *which* pill you miss (missing the first one after the period without is worst, missing the last one matters leat)
Secondly, it matters what kind of pill you're using. Some of the new low-dosis "mini-pills" have more tight limits, to the point where even taking them at different times of the day, may start reducing their effectiveness.
In short: read the damn instructions, but overall, missing a single pill (especially one that isn't the first one) is likely to have a fairly small influence on the pregnancy-risk.
Nevertheless, it's completely illogical to let human beings, who we *know* from practical experience the aproximate rate of traffic-deaths, but *not* allow an alternative with demonstrably significantly less deaths and injuries.
Some of it has to do with freedom though, namely the freedom to do dangerous things. Traffic-deaths would fall significantly if we just put electronics in cars so that they would refuse to go over the speed-limit too. (and doing so would be MUCH simpler than electronic drivers), nevertheless we don't do it.
This tells me that it's not as clear-cut as "less deaths good", it seems we as a society, are willing to accept deaths and injuries as the price to pay, for the freedom of being able to do something that is illegal and dangerous (drive fast) (yes yes there *are* cases where speeding is safe, nevertheless you can't argue that *some* accidents are caused by speeding)
It's unreasonable to "rely" on ANY backup-plan whatsoever, without actually regularily testing RESTOREs.
If you buy backup - which is fine - make sure to actually test a restore, and do so REGULARILY.
True. And you can extend the reach, speed and comfort of a bicycle by help of a small electric engine-and-battery. Because bicycles are amazingly energy-effective. On level ground, a bicycle needs aproximately 40 wh (or 0.04Kwh) of energy for each mile traveled.
A modern lithium-ion battery holds 300-600wh/litre, thus a 3-litre battery weighing around 10kg, holds sufficient energy to propel bike and rider over aproximately 35 miles. If you use the battery merely as "support", doing most of the pedaling yourself, but letting it help out with the trickier parts, that range gets even better.
Yeah right. We don't have flying cars or jetpacks. But in other areas, the world has changed a lot -more- than anyone imagined.
Probably the biggest thing since 1960 is the rise of computers and networks. Today, the average person uses computers and networks all the fucking time, and it was basically not even on the radar in 1960. Infact a modern cellphone kicks the shit out of a StarTrek "communicator", and StarTrek started in 1966. (and portrays a future much more than 50 years out.)
And we may not have flying cars - but we *do* live in a world where I can fly across the atlantic and pay aproximately one days wages for the priviledge. That's a mindboggling change from what a trans-atlantic flight cost for an average person in 1960.
It's a pity that SQL allows pure string-concatenation construction of queries even. Parametrization is a lot safer and saner, and even has performance-benefits if the database-engine is clever enough to recognize that it's the same query, just with different parameters. (in that case, it doesn't need to create a query plan anew - it can reuse the existing one and save time)
But there's some semi-common constructs that are hard or impossible to do with parametrization. How do you do it for "select $COLUMN from myTable" or, perhaps more common ".... order by $COLUMN"
-sometimes- sanitized inputs is the best you can do. But 99% of the time, parametrization, is the way to go.
Not it's max(real_loss, statutory_loss)+legal_fees
Statutory losses is something you can choose to insist on INSTEAD of actual damages, they're meant to be a simplifying mechanism, and in some cases they work well. The absurdity only arises because of the crazyness of multiplying by number of downloads, even of the same work. This was REJECTED by the judge, by the way.
If by "high" doses you mean "doses that may, perhaps, increase your lifetime risk of getting cancer by a single-digit percentage" then yes.
I'm not saying this is ignorable, or not serious. I'm saying that this far, it seems likely that the harm to human health from the nukes, will be a tiny fraction of the damages resulting from the earthquake and tsunami.
i.e. if there where zero nuclear powerplants in the affected area, the number of dead and seriously injured people would've been essentially identical.
Japan has suffered a huge catastrophy. Nuclear powerplants has this far gotten a huge fraction of the attention, while actually causing a miniscule fraction of the deaths and injuries. This *may* change if we get a larger release of radioactive substances, offcourse.