It is my contention that removing the beauracracy that has 'seen its day' will not result in less art. It will result in less art for profit, at least the kinds of profits that make an A&R guy salivate. The incentive for true art is art for its own sake. If I were a musician (and I am), I would be loathe to suck up to the corporate culture and prostitute my creativity for their bottom line. Here in So Cal, I was "shocked" to learn that bands here have to pay to play, because all the venues are controlled by promoters.
I don't want something for nothing. I want nothing (no copyright) for nothing.
...I just celebrated my fifteenth year with my parent company in my first Real Job.
I remember the day vividly. I was still living out of a hotel room when the news came around the office halls like wildfire. When I went back to the hotel for lunch I saw the first of what must have been 100 re-runs of the footage.
Was/. a living entity at the time?
Oh, that's right. We didn't even have much of an internet back then. Still, I remember the proliferation of stupid NASA jokes over the airwaves/email. But that had to be a few years later...
I hope we all learned something from this disaster, like how beauracracies can be blind to realities.
I think you have hit on exactly what the author is saying! This is why I think it is a great debating point. Imagine a world in which music and stories and images (photcopies of art, not original art) are completely unprotected by law. The argument proceeds that since these are intrinsically (meaning "unless artificial scarcity is applied") free, there will never be a scarcity of them. It's like saying Metallica got into the business to make money, but Prince is saying he is willing to forego profit for the art.
Your argument about your house is like his argument about tables. If they become Easily Copied then you cannot lay claim to my copy of your table. Your argument only holds water because it contradicts his premise: houses are essentially scarce since I can't sit down with a guitar and make a house.
I think what makes it an outrageously Good Debating Point is the contention that in such a 'free world' a producer can make a movie from a book the day after it is published without paying one red cent to the author. That makes even me, a proponent that we try this, a little uneasy. It's a great exercise in the logical implications of the proposition. The other piece of brilliance is when you consider that medicines may not be patentable on "FreeIP World". Would Prozac still be made? It is a remarkable exercise in reducto ad absurdium and it takes a degree of will to stay the course, yet the author does quite well.
It is as good a position as I ever heard from that other pundit, William F. Buckley, and as well-articulated as he was. And Buckley was a Great Debater. I wonder what he thinks of all this...
Along those lines, I played guitar in a band during the 'hair days'. We always wondered if we weren't supposed to pay royalties for each and every song we did ("Stairway to Heaven" "Sweet Emotion" "Jumping Jack Flash"). The RIAA says yes, but I never saw them come to any of our shows. In fact, why don't they clamp down on bar bands?!!!?
I'll tell you. Because it is free advertising for them. Once again they pick the side that enhances their bottom line. It ain't about protecting artists for these types of people. It never is.
The author proposes a world in which protections for non-scarce items do not exist. In the same spirit as the Home Recording Act could not ban tape recorders, so Napster cannot be seen as intrinsically illegal. Well written, and a real challenge to the RIAA lawyers, et al.
I was discussing this very thing to colleagues yesterday: they had seen the PBS special by Ken Burns - Jazz - and remarked as to how music used to be literally free. A musician wrote a song and played it in a bar and got paid. Early recordings were produced in small shops, and profits were local. Then entrepreneurs moved in because they saw the profitability (nothing wrong with that) and reamed the artists (again legal, though possibly not moral).
Well, they have had their fun, and they have had their day. The One Thing that record producers had that the average guy did not was the Ways and Means of Production (i.e., record-making machines) and Distribution. Now, in the digital age, we All have the ways and means. We can all make recordings, try to sell them or give them away, and distribute them.
The RIAA has had their day. It is time to step down. May free art prosper. I think their proper attitude might well be 'screw them, Im not putting another thin dime into promoting one more artist.' Then they can take their wax cylinders and go home.
And you know what? Aside from the pretty CD jewel cases, I don't think I'd miss them a bit.
Bonus: no more 'NSync, Spice Girls, or Backstreet Boys! Yay!
Okay, Fervent, I'll be a man. This is not meant as an insult, and it may even get modded down as 'ot', but I am tired of people blabbing on about how 'this topic is stupid' and 'I was a/.er when it was cool and we had topics in those days that Mattered' yadadyadayada... its getting worse than the flames. Why don't you go where Roblimo and Kiss the Blade went and we don't have to hear this crap anymore? If you think the rice genome and stem cell thing is topical, important, and worthy, fsckin submit it, okay?
Oh, and by the way, what people are thinking about IP, and copyrights, and DeCSS is Very Important right now, and definitely belongs in this forum. It is not about l337 4ax0r5 stealing; it is more about the future of ideas and whether corps can sew them up or if people can freely access them. Your opinion is not absolutely required here. In my opinion.:)
Sorry, guys... I kinda lost it there... okay mod me down now...
IQ tests are supposed to be an Objective measure of a person's "cognitive ability" but there are cultural biases that cannot be ignored, so they aren't as objective as we would like them to be.
But I think - if I can discern an actual scientific hypothesis from his proposal - he means: Take a sample of business students and put them in a room and make them play a strategy game that they haven't seen before (if they are all equally blind then the learning curve actually becomes part of the test) and then see what correlation we can find between gaming success (head to head? vs comp?) and grades.
I have just finished reading the chapter on intelligence in Matthew Ridley's "Genome" (highly recommended) in which he says - wait - [flipflipflip] "[intelligence may be defined as] thinking speed, reasoning ability, memory, vocabulary, mental arithmetic, mental energy, or simply the appetite of somebody for intellectual pursuits..."
So what would Tetris tell us that Starcraft would not? BTW, I play Starcraft - a lot! - and lemme tell ya that quick reflexes and learned behavior make a big difference in results.
Hmmm. where am I going with this? I guess I would expect the submitter to do a little more legwork, i.e., propose a Scientific Experiment with a Real Hypothesis before presenting it before a collection of his peers. I certainly don't have time to pose his hypothesis to him, but based on the topic paragraph, I get the feel he'd rather just set up a gaming network at his school than determine correlation between [insert something articulate here ] and [put a well-reasoned phrase here]. He hasn't done that yet.
BTW, two things:
- IAN (anything anthopological or psychological or...)
- I think they prefer to be called 'test subjects'. Well, at least the female 'testees'.
Re:Oh please... call for another govt handout
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Kids and Computers
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· Score: 3
This illustrates the chasm in thinking between the haves and the have-nots. Sorry, I was a talented have-not thirty years ago who would not have been able to bootstrap himself without a government hand-out. Now that I make a decent living (instead of selling drugs, a viable option to some of my peers), I hate getting taxed, too, but I can think of No Better Use for my taxes than enabling children to have access to the Internet. They can't get it at home, but they can at school. This might be their only chance at obtaining a good, honest future.
In fact, given that affluent children generally Do have access at home, I would disproportionately fund the schools in the poorer districts and preferentially wire them. Believe me, spending tax dollars to give access to kids who otherwise would have none is a lot better than spending it on the ordinary oppression that our govts traditionally 'fund' inner cities.
If you feel like you are being taxed too much, you might want to consider actual wasteful tax practices, like subsidies to corporations or even bloated defense projects.
To specifically address your statements:
1) A kid doesn't have a couple hundred bucks to plunk down on a comp, no matter what, and his parents may not, either, or they may be deadbeats or not value the 'net, whatever...
2) I damn sure appreciated the Federal Grants I got for college, and I think children might also appreciate their only link to the wired world. Just because it's granted to them doesn't make it unappreciated.
3) To call this a waste of money seems ignorant. Sorry, but investing in education is probably the best investment one can make in one's community.
4) I agree that Welfare was once out of hand and it subsidized a lazy disenfranchised class. But I think that it is under control to a much greater degree now. I'm pretty sure the days of perpetual Welfare are over; there is a time limit.
Now the question of whether we need the computer in this day and age is a good one. I think the answer is an unqualified "Yes", although I am reminded of that Sci Fi short story (Asimov?) where all calculators on a planet stopped working for whatever reason and the guy who could add, subtract, etc.. in his head became Ruler of All.
It really sounds like the big corporate giants want to kill it
Yes! That is a very distinct possibility! I seem to recall that when the government (FCC) was handing out HDTV bands to the broadcasters they were about four times as large as current LDTV bands, and an option to transmitting one HDTV show - when there was no HDTV show scheduled - would be to xmit Four LD shows. I read somewhere that the broadcasters were perfectly willing to quadruple their revenue-generating schedules and ditch HDTV in the process. This seems underhanded to me. Does anyone have any more info on this topic? I don't even know where to look to get it.
Okay, I'm not 100% up on tech stuff. Can you explain please what a watermark is? Have I seen it on TV before? Is it like those little um, geez, they look like watermarks, they show on the lower right hand side of certain TV shows that has the logo of the network on it? Are you suggesting that the recorder itself displays it? Yah, that would be a Great solution, because it would disable the ability to re-sell the tape, but you could record a show and watch it in all its HighDef glory. Um, never mind, I think I answered my question [blush].
Notice that corporations are Not Democracies, especially when they are Monopolistic? As they agglomerate more and more, coalescing into larger megacorps (Time/Warner/AOL, out here we have Verizon and Adelphia, which seem pretty national), they are less beholden to what in a free market would be 'what is best for the consumer'? In this instance, we do have the choice of Echostar/Dish Thank God (as long as you are an informed consumer, they seem to be trying to slip stuff under the rug), but many other market areas are becoming sole-source. The argument that 'we have a choice as consumers' loses weight if our choice is 'take it or leave it'. It ain't the government that is going to be our advocate any more, either, folks. It wasn't under Clinton and it damn sure ain't gonna be under Shrub. What protections are being offered in other countries anyway?
On a side note, I still have about 150 phonograph records. heh... wonder where I can get my record player repaired... It's funny listening to an old crackly album anymore. Kind of like having a little fire going in the fireplace while you're listening to your music. A constant, repetitive, annoying little amplified fire...
There are no consumer or civil rights representatives in the SDMI consortium.
The problem in a nutshell, and a signal of an alarming trend not only in consumerism but in politics also. Although these practices violate the concept of a free society by keeping the ways and means of electronic discourse (free speech) in the hands of the 'landed gentry' (corporate monoliths), governments around the world allow this to happen because they have been corrupted. At least this is the only plausible explanation I can find. That plus the possibility that they are just a little too stupid (actually even smart people don't have time to keep up on these things) to understand how the technology is being used to disenfranchise people.
Fact is, rights are being curtailed in many (all?) areas of daily life and we allow it. Why? Because we are used to being disenfranchised and powerless and our rage is almost always impotent. Rage cannot sustain itself for a long time, but lawyers and judges can file briefs, torts, and rulings forever.
I imagine that this feeling I am getting deep inside can't be much different than that which ignited the Boston Tea Party and the American Revolution. Not quite a "Bastille Day" level of angst, but sufficient to call to action at least one Patriot who waits patiently for the General Alarm to be sounded.
This is a lot like Taxation without Representation.
People ask me why I get upset about such things. What should I tell them? They seem blissfully and willfully ignorant of such matters, happy with their little SUVs and yes, DVDs... What watershed event could possibly provoke Them (about 95% of this country) to action? Can anybody help me here?
Before you rush out and beseige Nintendo with half-cocked assertions about fair use and copyrights and such, I suggest you read that complain text. From the way they describe the exhibits, it sounds like (as has been pointed out) Imagine Media was kind of heinous in their actions here. They were selling Unofficial Guides with ripped-off artwork. This isn't the case of a news site or even an amateur "cheats, codes and hacks" site giving advice to someone stuck on level 3 or whatever. This sounds like they were selling Pokemon-like products.
I agree there is too much litigation as companies try to sew up the 'net for their own money-grubbing purposes. But there are reasonable lawsuits even though the vast majority of them (if you read/.) seem to be frivoulous and of little more than corporate harrassment value.
I think I actually missed my own point here... maybe I am in a bad mood today...? Imagine when my teeth start falling out.
Anyway, I have a philosophy that we try too hard to alter our nature, and we lose something in the process. Prolonging our lives will stave off the inevitable so long but it doesn't necessarily make a thing more meaningful in the process. It just makes it longer. It's like my dog: if my dog gets cancer it's 'hasta, baby' and she dies with dignity. But we people are so determined to prolong life at any cost that we are willing to turn a once dignified being into a decrepit hulking, shaky and drooling shell of their former selves. And for what purpose? To line the pockets of specialists and pharmacists. Perhaps I will feel different when I am on my last few miles of this vale of tears, but I hope not.
The advances in genomics - as well as the topic of this story - bring this question into stark relief. You now have the ability to tell - without a doubt - if you have Huntington's disease, a crippling and debilitating disease for which there is no cure and which will make you insane for years before it will kill you.
Do you want to know if you have it? I don't. Then again, my Dad was found to have just one kidney a few years back. That means I might have just the one, too. I still don't want to know!
I don't know, my impression of old people today is that they apparently were planning for retirement on a golf course "spending their children's inheritence", as it were.
We are truly getting further and further from the meaning of life, and I am not kidding. The kiddies don't respect their elders and are not taught to revere them; they don't think there is much an old person can teach them, either. When Mom and Dad get old they get put in a home and visited once a month.
The oldsters become disenfranchised, lonely, and embittered by the neglect of their children. They feel ripped-off and unappreciated, so when it comes to consideration of any 'legacy' they might leave their children, they are loathe to provide them with a damn thing. They paid their Social Security so even if they still enjoy six figure incomes, they will be damned if they will give up one red cent of the - what, 60k? - they get from the govt.
And now we are going to prolong their miserable life? If I were that age, my attitude would be "don't do me any favors".
Funny you should mention power lines. In my home town there is a high-tension wire running the length of the town through dedicated lots located in the middle of the blocks (the wires are perpendicular to the street direction). Seems that houses located on either side of the lots are mostly (at least half of them) vacant, and the resale value of them is down. People simply don't want to take that risk, given the choice.
However, even though there is a possible link between aluminum consumption and Alzheimer's Disease, I don't see many people boycotting soda drinks.
What I learned about Risk Theory: 1) the unknown is scarier than the known. 2) you can't gauge the reaction of the public because they collectively don't think logically.
And this news is very similar to news linking mobile phones to brain cancer in the, oh what, eighties?
Now, I had a friend who used those old phones extensively. He died of brain cancer about 10 years ago at 42. Should this convince me that cell phones are bad? Do I want toys at any price?
I haven't bought a cell phone yet, but I drink out of soda cans nearly every day. At least I think I can recall I did... And no, I probably wouldn't buy a house under high-tension lines. They tell me you can stretch a long wire underneath one of them suckers and light a small bulb with the inductive energy.
Re:Um. parachute reentry?
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Space Diving
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· Score: 1
I think that would be a big problem. The ballute is recommended as the velocity-retarding device of choice for objects whose speed exceeds about Mach 3-4. Wish I was at work (okay, shoot me now) I could run a quick calculation to determine what max Q (where Q= dynamic pressure or 1/2*rho-v^2) would be for the person. Anyway, 328000 feet is well outside the sensible atmosphere so you have virtually zero controllability, spinning - as a poster pointed out - about three axes. Recall John Glenn blacked out in his vehicle while trying to break the sound barrier (the X-1?). Aerodynamic heating might also be a concern. Remember, there is no reason to think that you wouldn't achieve speeds equivalent to those the shuttle might acquire in its descent. In fact, until terminal velocity is reached, you would achieve the same speed.
Then, too, you have to think about what sort of a back-up system you need in case the ballute fails to deploy. Perhaps it is deployed immediately in the comfort of space...
Yah, I have a hard time bungee jumping and going down those 'Drop Out" - type water slides. You won't see me on line, no matter how short it is...
I am sure it Should be no big deal. It was not in poor taste. It was not mean. It was funny. Lighten up. Imagine someone standing up at the funeral and mentioning it: "ol' Bill sure confused a lot of college students in his day, what with that there RPN stuff." And some would laugh, relieved, and some would sob silently into their handkerchiefs.
But nobody would take offense at a that gentle attempt at an ironic observation. Except the jerk who drank a little too much at the wake and punched the speaker in the head out in the parking lot.
Anyway, lemme just tell ya that I still use my HP 41-CX to balance my checkbook, even though I can't get those little short batteries any more. I bought about a dozen packs of them from a Radio Shack discard bin a few years ago and I am on my last set.
The death of my beloved 41-CX is imminent. Hey, I wonder if, just before Bill died, the word 'batteries' appeared on his forehead, just for a brief instant?
Yes, there are misguided zealots on both sides of the fence, and neither seems to have much respect for the other. The one point I was making was that the problem of nuclear storage was downplayed in the 60's-70's - that's the bill of goods. Whereas oil- and coal- fired plants have known and immediate costs, the true costs of nuclear power were not honestly appraised or acquiesced by the power companies during their campaign. Kind of like the true costs of de-regulation weren't considered this time, apparently.
That's not to say that environmentalists can't be wrong, either. They (actually the State of Nevada is the one wearing the headband this time) are trying to shut down Yucca mountain even now because the DOE can't prove that a ceratin dose (25 mrem/yr? something like that, maybe 100) won't migrate off-site in 100000 years according to their transport models. So we should do nothing! Yah, that'll solve it.
It is just that - if we don't want to sit there freezing in the dark burning our 'nuke baby whales for Jesus' placards for heat - we need to have the courage to undertake the entire enterprise. You seem still willing to open new nuclear power plants. Are you willing to allow thousands of acres to be condemned for a million years? If so, why don't you run for office, 'cuz none of them seem to be.
Okay, I gotta post this anonymously. Nahh, I don't! Let's see what happens.
Basically nuclear power was another bill of goods foisted on the public by power companies. I recall an ad showing a guy in a hard hat standing watch on a big nuclear reactor that was behind several feet of lead glass. The caption read "This man is exposed to less nuclear radiation than you are right now." This was supposed to support the notion that nuclear power was safe. The time was circa 1970 (before 3-mile island). A campaign to sway the public about the safety of nuclear power.
Flash forward to today. Today we have a big problem with spent fuel rods that are left over from all those plants. But we are in such a cluster- trying to get decisions made on where to put it (answer: Yucca Mountain) and the whole thing has become so politically charged with the state of Nevada suing the Federal government over NIMBY issues that we will never get a thing done. Oh, the power companies are also suing the government who promised to take possession of the waste on Jan 1, 1999.
Now the spent fuel pools located at each plant (even the decommissioned ones) are filling to the brim and the waste not only has nowhere to go, but will have nowhere to go for the forseeable future. This is because the DOE cannot make basic decisions on the most fundamental properties of the mountain repository. For instance, they cannot decide if they should 'boil' the mountain or not. Explain: the spent fuel will be hot, and the bigger the canisters that get buried under the mountain the hotter. Well, we could either allow the wall temperatures of the underground tunnels reach 100 deg C or keep them cooler than that. But they will not settle on a baseline! The reason is that modeling of the mountain breaks down when you introduce such features of a boiling mountain as coalescing steam fronts (the layer where the rock cools below 100 deg C and all the steam cools to liquid. And yet they are proceeding to design the waste package as if the wall temp will hit 200 deg C! I can tell you that politicians should not make technical decisions. They are horribly bad at it. Plus all the incentives are there for them to pass the buck to the next administration. So nothing is happening.
In the meantime, we are pissing away all the tax money that we levied on the power companies to build the repository. And every day the danger of a catastrophe increases (don't even get me started on Hanford, but that's ot anyway).
Bottom line: in this instance - sitting in the dark or not - the environmentalists were unequivocally right back in the 70's: the problem of long-term storage was not solved while ground was being broken for the nuke plants, but we were deceived that all problems were going to be handled properly. It is a total mess.
We could have followed the British lead and separated and consolidated all the high-level waste like they do in their Sellafield plant - reducing the volume to 2-3% of current, but Jimmy Carter nixed that in the mid-70's. (Sellafield is awesome and frightening - I got to tour it a few years ago). Then again, it is a good thing we didn't follow the lead of the Brits or the Soviets who dumped - approx? - 800000 and 3E6 Curies respectively, into their neighboring seas. Willfully and knowingly, I might add.
So nuclear waste is such a huge problem that I am absolutely sure that you will Never see a plant built in America again. And anybody who suggests in this age that nuclear power is a solution is simply uninformed.
Jeez, I was beginning to feel like that guy Jack Gadell (sp?) for a minute there...
"...there was a... vibration... I felt it... it... it was unnatural..."
I just had an argument with my astronomer buddy. Can anyone tell me if there are photographs of Any planets in the Galaxy besides those orbiting our Sun?
There is a lunch riding on this.:)
Yah, I was surprised to learn that a planet bigger than Jupiter wouldn't be a Sun. In fact, so should Arthur C. Clarke. Recall that 2010 had all those monoliths on the surface of Jupiter gathering space debris to tip the mass of the planet over the critical mass/diameter ratio to turn it into a star. But I can't recall if the theoretical ratio was less than an order of magnitude bigger than Jupiter. I guess - if all this news is true - that it has to be greater, and judging from the level of surprise among the astronomers, we need to revise our cosmologic logic.
Someone posted that the ratio is 80x Jupiters. That sounds large, but... IANAC (I am not a cosmetologist)...
Online merchants experienced fraudulent costs of more than $1.5 billion in 1999, which is equivalent to 10 percent of all online retail sales, according to Deborah Williams, research director of Meridien Research, a high-tech research and consulting firm. "While most online security concerns focus on the consumer, it's the merchants who are getting killed," notes Williams, who fears that Net fraud could grow to $15 billion annually by 2003 unless radical new measures are adopted...
So it would appear that the percentage quoted is a small number... but it could be a case of apples and oranges.
Here is a good quote from
http://www.newsbytes.com/pubNews/99/140307.html
Seventy-five percent of online merchants consider credit card fraud to be a concern, yet 41 percent do not know that they are held financially liable when online fraud takes place, according to an independent online fraud survey just published.
Wow, ya think egghead knows that? Or is it in the 41 percent of ignorant businesses?
I think this is an example of fairly responsible corporate behavior. Egghead has to respond to the needs of the stockholders, their customers, and the FBI. So, given the fine line they must walk, I think that the fact that they sent a letter to the customers informing them of the intrusion is pretty laudable.
Of course, they may have been required to do this. Wow, their stock is barely breathing at 0.53, but it wasn't due to the break-in. They've been tanking steadily since they IPO'd, apparently sometime late in '99.
Are the Egghead Software stores still around? I am pretty sure they aren't. Oh, I see they announced that they were closing their doors and concentrating on e-tailing software in January 98. Too bad... I think they were one of the first successful CompUSA prototpyes.
So what you are saying is, in effect, that they have increased the value of their customer information list because if the guy doesn't set the preferences back within 24 hours, and they take an additional 14 days to reset it, then they obtain a window where they can send out all this information for, oh, I don't know, about 10000 soon-to-be-spammed customers?
I think that's what you're saying... and no, this cannot be legal. Um, maybe it can. I don't recall Congress passing any specific laws forbidding re-setting preferences or specifically protecting ppl from this sort of think, er, thing.
Slashdot Mirror
It is my contention that removing the beauracracy that has 'seen its day' will not result in less art. It will result in less art for profit, at least the kinds of profits that make an A&R guy salivate. The incentive for true art is art for its own sake. If I were a musician (and I am), I would be loathe to suck up to the corporate culture and prostitute my creativity for their bottom line. Here in So Cal, I was "shocked" to learn that bands here have to pay to play, because all the venues are controlled by promoters.
I don't want something for nothing. I want nothing (no copyright) for nothing.
The worst kind of war (according to TAW is one that is long and causes many deaths.
Sun Tzu was not a government contractor, I'm guessin...
...I just celebrated my fifteenth year with my parent company in my first Real Job.
/. a living entity at the time?
I remember the day vividly. I was still living out of a hotel room when the news came around the office halls like wildfire. When I went back to the hotel for lunch I saw the first of what must have been 100 re-runs of the footage.
Was
Oh, that's right. We didn't even have much of an internet back then. Still, I remember the proliferation of stupid NASA jokes over the airwaves/email. But that had to be a few years later...
I hope we all learned something from this disaster, like how beauracracies can be blind to realities.
I think you have hit on exactly what the author is saying! This is why I think it is a great debating point. Imagine a world in which music and stories and images (photcopies of art, not original art) are completely unprotected by law. The argument proceeds that since these are intrinsically (meaning "unless artificial scarcity is applied") free, there will never be a scarcity of them. It's like saying Metallica got into the business to make money, but Prince is saying he is willing to forego profit for the art.
Your argument about your house is like his argument about tables. If they become Easily Copied then you cannot lay claim to my copy of your table. Your argument only holds water because it contradicts his premise: houses are essentially scarce since I can't sit down with a guitar and make a house.
I think what makes it an outrageously Good Debating Point is the contention that in such a 'free world' a producer can make a movie from a book the day after it is published without paying one red cent to the author. That makes even me, a proponent that we try this, a little uneasy. It's a great exercise in the logical implications of the proposition. The other piece of brilliance is when you consider that medicines may not be patentable on "FreeIP World". Would Prozac still be made? It is a remarkable exercise in reducto ad absurdium and it takes a degree of will to stay the course, yet the author does quite well.
It is as good a position as I ever heard from that other pundit, William F. Buckley, and as well-articulated as he was. And Buckley was a Great Debater. I wonder what he thinks of all this...
Along those lines, I played guitar in a band during the 'hair days'. We always wondered if we weren't supposed to pay royalties for each and every song we did ("Stairway to Heaven" "Sweet Emotion" "Jumping Jack Flash"). The RIAA says yes, but I never saw them come to any of our shows. In fact, why don't they clamp down on bar bands?!!!?
I'll tell you. Because it is free advertising for them. Once again they pick the side that enhances their bottom line. It ain't about protecting artists for these types of people. It never is.
The author proposes a world in which protections for non-scarce items do not exist. In the same spirit as the Home Recording Act could not ban tape recorders, so Napster cannot be seen as intrinsically illegal. Well written, and a real challenge to the RIAA lawyers, et al.
I was discussing this very thing to colleagues yesterday: they had seen the PBS special by Ken Burns - Jazz - and remarked as to how music used to be literally free. A musician wrote a song and played it in a bar and got paid. Early recordings were produced in small shops, and profits were local. Then entrepreneurs moved in because they saw the profitability (nothing wrong with that) and reamed the artists (again legal, though possibly not moral).
Well, they have had their fun, and they have had their day. The One Thing that record producers had that the average guy did not was the Ways and Means of Production (i.e., record-making machines) and Distribution. Now, in the digital age, we All have the ways and means. We can all make recordings, try to sell them or give them away, and distribute them.
The RIAA has had their day. It is time to step down. May free art prosper. I think their proper attitude might well be 'screw them, Im not putting another thin dime into promoting one more artist.' Then they can take their wax cylinders and go home.
And you know what? Aside from the pretty CD jewel cases, I don't think I'd miss them a bit.
Bonus: no more 'NSync, Spice Girls, or Backstreet Boys! Yay!
Okay, Fervent, I'll be a man. This is not meant as an insult, and it may even get modded down as 'ot', but I am tired of people blabbing on about how 'this topic is stupid' and 'I was a /.er when it was cool and we had topics in those days that Mattered' yadadyadayada... its getting worse than the flames. Why don't you go where Roblimo and Kiss the Blade went and we don't have to hear this crap anymore? If you think the rice genome and stem cell thing is topical, important, and worthy, fsckin submit it, okay?
:)
Oh, and by the way, what people are thinking about IP, and copyrights, and DeCSS is Very Important right now, and definitely belongs in this forum. It is not about l337 4ax0r5 stealing; it is more about the future of ideas and whether corps can sew them up or if people can freely access them. Your opinion is not absolutely required here. In my opinion.
Sorry, guys... I kinda lost it there... okay mod me down now...
IQ tests are supposed to be an Objective measure of a person's "cognitive ability" but there are cultural biases that cannot be ignored, so they aren't as objective as we would like them to be.
...)
But I think - if I can discern an actual scientific hypothesis from his proposal - he means: Take a sample of business students and put them in a room and make them play a strategy game that they haven't seen before (if they are all equally blind then the learning curve actually becomes part of the test) and then see what correlation we can find between gaming success (head to head? vs comp?) and grades.
I have just finished reading the chapter on intelligence in Matthew Ridley's "Genome" (highly recommended) in which he says - wait - [flipflipflip] "[intelligence may be defined as] thinking speed, reasoning ability, memory, vocabulary, mental arithmetic, mental energy, or simply the appetite of somebody for intellectual pursuits..."
So what would Tetris tell us that Starcraft would not? BTW, I play Starcraft - a lot! - and lemme tell ya that quick reflexes and learned behavior make a big difference in results.
Hmmm. where am I going with this? I guess I would expect the submitter to do a little more legwork, i.e., propose a Scientific Experiment with a Real Hypothesis before presenting it before a collection of his peers. I certainly don't have time to pose his hypothesis to him, but based on the topic paragraph, I get the feel he'd rather just set up a gaming network at his school than determine correlation between [insert something articulate here ] and [put a well-reasoned phrase here]. He hasn't done that yet.
BTW, two things:
- IAN (anything anthopological or psychological or
- I think they prefer to be called 'test subjects'. Well, at least the female 'testees'.
This illustrates the chasm in thinking between the haves and the have-nots. Sorry, I was a talented have-not thirty years ago who would not have been able to bootstrap himself without a government hand-out. Now that I make a decent living (instead of selling drugs, a viable option to some of my peers), I hate getting taxed, too, but I can think of No Better Use for my taxes than enabling children to have access to the Internet. They can't get it at home, but they can at school. This might be their only chance at obtaining a good, honest future.
In fact, given that affluent children generally Do have access at home, I would disproportionately fund the schools in the poorer districts and preferentially wire them. Believe me, spending tax dollars to give access to kids who otherwise would have none is a lot better than spending it on the ordinary oppression that our govts traditionally 'fund' inner cities.
If you feel like you are being taxed too much, you might want to consider actual wasteful tax practices, like subsidies to corporations or even bloated defense projects.
To specifically address your statements:
1) A kid doesn't have a couple hundred bucks to plunk down on a comp, no matter what, and his parents may not, either, or they may be deadbeats or not value the 'net, whatever...
2) I damn sure appreciated the Federal Grants I got for college, and I think children might also appreciate their only link to the wired world. Just because it's granted to them doesn't make it unappreciated.
3) To call this a waste of money seems ignorant. Sorry, but investing in education is probably the best investment one can make in one's community.
4) I agree that Welfare was once out of hand and it subsidized a lazy disenfranchised class. But I think that it is under control to a much greater degree now. I'm pretty sure the days of perpetual Welfare are over; there is a time limit.
Now the question of whether we need the computer in this day and age is a good one. I think the answer is an unqualified "Yes", although I am reminded of that Sci Fi short story (Asimov?) where all calculators on a planet stopped working for whatever reason and the guy who could add, subtract, etc.. in his head became Ruler of All.
It really sounds like the big corporate giants want to kill it
Yes! That is a very distinct possibility! I seem to recall that when the government (FCC) was handing out HDTV bands to the broadcasters they were about four times as large as current LDTV bands, and an option to transmitting one HDTV show - when there was no HDTV show scheduled - would be to xmit Four LD shows. I read somewhere that the broadcasters were perfectly willing to quadruple their revenue-generating schedules and ditch HDTV in the process. This seems underhanded to me. Does anyone have any more info on this topic? I don't even know where to look to get it.
Okay, I'm not 100% up on tech stuff. Can you explain please what a watermark is? Have I seen it on TV before? Is it like those little um, geez, they look like watermarks, they show on the lower right hand side of certain TV shows that has the logo of the network on it? Are you suggesting that the recorder itself displays it? Yah, that would be a Great solution, because it would disable the ability to re-sell the tape, but you could record a show and watch it in all its HighDef glory. Um, never mind, I think I answered my question [blush].
Notice that corporations are Not Democracies, especially when they are Monopolistic? As they agglomerate more and more, coalescing into larger megacorps (Time/Warner/AOL, out here we have Verizon and Adelphia, which seem pretty national), they are less beholden to what in a free market would be 'what is best for the consumer'? In this instance, we do have the choice of Echostar/Dish Thank God (as long as you are an informed consumer, they seem to be trying to slip stuff under the rug), but many other market areas are becoming sole-source. The argument that 'we have a choice as consumers' loses weight if our choice is 'take it or leave it'. It ain't the government that is going to be our advocate any more, either, folks. It wasn't under Clinton and it damn sure ain't gonna be under Shrub. What protections are being offered in other countries anyway?
On a side note, I still have about 150 phonograph records. heh... wonder where I can get my record player repaired... It's funny listening to an old crackly album anymore. Kind of like having a little fire going in the fireplace while you're listening to your music. A constant, repetitive, annoying little amplified fire...
There are no consumer or civil rights representatives in the SDMI consortium.
The problem in a nutshell, and a signal of an alarming trend not only in consumerism but in politics also. Although these practices violate the concept of a free society by keeping the ways and means of electronic discourse (free speech) in the hands of the 'landed gentry' (corporate monoliths), governments around the world allow this to happen because they have been corrupted. At least this is the only plausible explanation I can find. That plus the possibility that they are just a little too stupid (actually even smart people don't have time to keep up on these things) to understand how the technology is being used to disenfranchise people.
Fact is, rights are being curtailed in many (all?) areas of daily life and we allow it. Why? Because we are used to being disenfranchised and powerless and our rage is almost always impotent. Rage cannot sustain itself for a long time, but lawyers and judges can file briefs, torts, and rulings forever.
I imagine that this feeling I am getting deep inside can't be much different than that which ignited the Boston Tea Party and the American Revolution. Not quite a "Bastille Day" level of angst, but sufficient to call to action at least one Patriot who waits patiently for the General Alarm to be sounded.
This is a lot like Taxation without Representation.
People ask me why I get upset about such things. What should I tell them? They seem blissfully and willfully ignorant of such matters, happy with their little SUVs and yes, DVDs... What watershed event could possibly provoke Them (about 95% of this country) to action? Can anybody help me here?
Well, they may have removed yours, but the one requesting recipes for SPAM had me ROTFLMAO. And it got two responses, too!
thank you John, er, Spoonberry?
Before you rush out and beseige Nintendo with half-cocked assertions about fair use and copyrights and such, I suggest you read that complain text. From the way they describe the exhibits, it sounds like (as has been pointed out) Imagine Media was kind of heinous in their actions here. They were selling Unofficial Guides with ripped-off artwork. This isn't the case of a news site or even an amateur "cheats, codes and hacks" site giving advice to someone stuck on level 3 or whatever. This sounds like they were selling Pokemon-like products.
/.) seem to be frivoulous and of little more than corporate harrassment value.
I agree there is too much litigation as companies try to sew up the 'net for their own money-grubbing purposes. But there are reasonable lawsuits even though the vast majority of them (if you read
I think I actually missed my own point here... maybe I am in a bad mood today...? Imagine when my teeth start falling out.
Anyway, I have a philosophy that we try too hard to alter our nature, and we lose something in the process. Prolonging our lives will stave off the inevitable so long but it doesn't necessarily make a thing more meaningful in the process. It just makes it longer. It's like my dog: if my dog gets cancer it's 'hasta, baby' and she dies with dignity. But we people are so determined to prolong life at any cost that we are willing to turn a once dignified being into a decrepit hulking, shaky and drooling shell of their former selves. And for what purpose? To line the pockets of specialists and pharmacists. Perhaps I will feel different when I am on my last few miles of this vale of tears, but I hope not.
The advances in genomics - as well as the topic of this story - bring this question into stark relief. You now have the ability to tell - without a doubt - if you have Huntington's disease, a crippling and debilitating disease for which there is no cure and which will make you insane for years before it will kill you.
Do you want to know if you have it? I don't. Then again, my Dad was found to have just one kidney a few years back. That means I might have just the one, too. I still don't want to know!
But that's just me.
I don't know, my impression of old people today is that they apparently were planning for retirement on a golf course "spending their children's inheritence", as it were.
We are truly getting further and further from the meaning of life, and I am not kidding. The kiddies don't respect their elders and are not taught to revere them; they don't think there is much an old person can teach them, either. When Mom and Dad get old they get put in a home and visited once a month.
The oldsters become disenfranchised, lonely, and embittered by the neglect of their children. They feel ripped-off and unappreciated, so when it comes to consideration of any 'legacy' they might leave their children, they are loathe to provide them with a damn thing. They paid their Social Security so even if they still enjoy six figure incomes, they will be damned if they will give up one red cent of the - what, 60k? - they get from the govt.
And now we are going to prolong their miserable life? If I were that age, my attitude would be "don't do me any favors".
We don't really want them around anyway...
Funny you should mention power lines. In my home town there is a high-tension wire running the length of the town through dedicated lots located in the middle of the blocks (the wires are perpendicular to the street direction). Seems that houses located on either side of the lots are mostly (at least half of them) vacant, and the resale value of them is down. People simply don't want to take that risk, given the choice.
However, even though there is a possible link between aluminum consumption and Alzheimer's Disease, I don't see many people boycotting soda drinks.
What I learned about Risk Theory: 1) the unknown is scarier than the known. 2) you can't gauge the reaction of the public because they collectively don't think logically.
And this news is very similar to news linking mobile phones to brain cancer in the, oh what, eighties?
Now, I had a friend who used those old phones extensively. He died of brain cancer about 10 years ago at 42. Should this convince me that cell phones are bad? Do I want toys at any price?
I haven't bought a cell phone yet, but I drink out of soda cans nearly every day. At least I think I can recall I did... And no, I probably wouldn't buy a house under high-tension lines. They tell me you can stretch a long wire underneath one of them suckers and light a small bulb with the inductive energy.
I think that would be a big problem. The ballute is recommended as the velocity-retarding device of choice for objects whose speed exceeds about Mach 3-4. Wish I was at work (okay, shoot me now) I could run a quick calculation to determine what max Q (where Q= dynamic pressure or 1/2*rho-v^2) would be for the person. Anyway, 328000 feet is well outside the sensible atmosphere so you have virtually zero controllability, spinning - as a poster pointed out - about three axes. Recall John Glenn blacked out in his vehicle while trying to break the sound barrier (the X-1?). Aerodynamic heating might also be a concern. Remember, there is no reason to think that you wouldn't achieve speeds equivalent to those the shuttle might acquire in its descent. In fact, until terminal velocity is reached, you would achieve the same speed.
Then, too, you have to think about what sort of a back-up system you need in case the ballute fails to deploy. Perhaps it is deployed immediately in the comfort of space...
Yah, I have a hard time bungee jumping and going down those 'Drop Out" - type water slides. You won't see me on line, no matter how short it is...
I am sure it Should be no big deal. It was not in poor taste. It was not mean. It was funny. Lighten up. Imagine someone standing up at the funeral and mentioning it: "ol' Bill sure confused a lot of college students in his day, what with that there RPN stuff." And some would laugh, relieved, and some would sob silently into their handkerchiefs.
But nobody would take offense at a that gentle attempt at an ironic observation. Except the jerk who drank a little too much at the wake and punched the speaker in the head out in the parking lot.
Anyway, lemme just tell ya that I still use my HP 41-CX to balance my checkbook, even though I can't get those little short batteries any more. I bought about a dozen packs of them from a Radio Shack discard bin a few years ago and I am on my last set.
The death of my beloved 41-CX is imminent. Hey, I wonder if, just before Bill died, the word 'batteries' appeared on his forehead, just for a brief instant?
"Bill would have wanted it this way."
Yes, there are misguided zealots on both sides of the fence, and neither seems to have much respect for the other. The one point I was making was that the problem of nuclear storage was downplayed in the 60's-70's - that's the bill of goods. Whereas oil- and coal- fired plants have known and immediate costs, the true costs of nuclear power were not honestly appraised or acquiesced by the power companies during their campaign. Kind of like the true costs of de-regulation weren't considered this time, apparently.
That's not to say that environmentalists can't be wrong, either. They (actually the State of Nevada is the one wearing the headband this time) are trying to shut down Yucca mountain even now because the DOE can't prove that a ceratin dose (25 mrem/yr? something like that, maybe 100) won't migrate off-site in 100000 years according to their transport models. So we should do nothing! Yah, that'll solve it.
It is just that - if we don't want to sit there freezing in the dark burning our 'nuke baby whales for Jesus' placards for heat - we need to have the courage to undertake the entire enterprise. You seem still willing to open new nuclear power plants. Are you willing to allow thousands of acres to be condemned for a million years? If so, why don't you run for office, 'cuz none of them seem to be.
Okay, I gotta post this anonymously. Nahh, I don't! Let's see what happens.
Basically nuclear power was another bill of goods foisted on the public by power companies. I recall an ad showing a guy in a hard hat standing watch on a big nuclear reactor that was behind several feet of lead glass. The caption read "This man is exposed to less nuclear radiation than you are right now." This was supposed to support the notion that nuclear power was safe. The time was circa 1970 (before 3-mile island). A campaign to sway the public about the safety of nuclear power.
Flash forward to today. Today we have a big problem with spent fuel rods that are left over from all those plants. But we are in such a cluster- trying to get decisions made on where to put it (answer: Yucca Mountain) and the whole thing has become so politically charged with the state of Nevada suing the Federal government over NIMBY issues that we will never get a thing done. Oh, the power companies are also suing the government who promised to take possession of the waste on Jan 1, 1999.
Now the spent fuel pools located at each plant (even the decommissioned ones) are filling to the brim and the waste not only has nowhere to go, but will have nowhere to go for the forseeable future. This is because the DOE cannot make basic decisions on the most fundamental properties of the mountain repository. For instance, they cannot decide if they should 'boil' the mountain or not. Explain: the spent fuel will be hot, and the bigger the canisters that get buried under the mountain the hotter. Well, we could either allow the wall temperatures of the underground tunnels reach 100 deg C or keep them cooler than that. But they will not settle on a baseline! The reason is that modeling of the mountain breaks down when you introduce such features of a boiling mountain as coalescing steam fronts (the layer where the rock cools below 100 deg C and all the steam cools to liquid. And yet they are proceeding to design the waste package as if the wall temp will hit 200 deg C! I can tell you that politicians should not make technical decisions. They are horribly bad at it. Plus all the incentives are there for them to pass the buck to the next administration. So nothing is happening.
In the meantime, we are pissing away all the tax money that we levied on the power companies to build the repository. And every day the danger of a catastrophe increases (don't even get me started on Hanford, but that's ot anyway).
Bottom line: in this instance - sitting in the dark or not - the environmentalists were unequivocally right back in the 70's: the problem of long-term storage was not solved while ground was being broken for the nuke plants, but we were deceived that all problems were going to be handled properly. It is a total mess.
We could have followed the British lead and separated and consolidated all the high-level waste like they do in their Sellafield plant - reducing the volume to 2-3% of current, but Jimmy Carter nixed that in the mid-70's. (Sellafield is awesome and frightening - I got to tour it a few years ago). Then again, it is a good thing we didn't follow the lead of the Brits or the Soviets who dumped - approx? - 800000 and 3E6 Curies respectively, into their neighboring seas. Willfully and knowingly, I might add.
So nuclear waste is such a huge problem that I am absolutely sure that you will Never see a plant built in America again. And anybody who suggests in this age that nuclear power is a solution is simply uninformed.
Jeez, I was beginning to feel like that guy Jack Gadell (sp?) for a minute there...
"...there was a... vibration... I felt it... it... it was unnatural..."
I just had an argument with my astronomer buddy. Can anyone tell me if there are photographs of Any planets in the Galaxy besides those orbiting our Sun?
:)
There is a lunch riding on this.
Yah, I was surprised to learn that a planet bigger than Jupiter wouldn't be a Sun. In fact, so should Arthur C. Clarke. Recall that 2010 had all those monoliths on the surface of Jupiter gathering space debris to tip the mass of the planet over the critical mass/diameter ratio to turn it into a star. But I can't recall if the theoretical ratio was less than an order of magnitude bigger than Jupiter. I guess - if all this news is true - that it has to be greater, and judging from the level of surprise among the astronomers, we need to revise our cosmologic logic.
Someone posted that the ratio is 80x Jupiters. That sounds large, but... IANAC (I am not a cosmetologist)...
Here is some stats from ecompany.com
Online merchants experienced fraudulent costs of more than $1.5 billion in 1999, which is equivalent to 10 percent of all online retail sales, according to Deborah Williams, research director of Meridien Research, a high-tech research and consulting firm. "While most online security concerns focus on the consumer, it's the merchants who are getting killed," notes Williams, who fears that Net fraud could grow to $15 billion annually by 2003 unless radical new measures are adopted...
So it would appear that the percentage quoted is a small number... but it could be a case of apples and oranges.
Here is a good quote from
http://www.newsbytes.com/pubNews/99/140307.html
Seventy-five percent of online merchants consider credit card fraud to be a concern, yet 41 percent do not know that they are held financially liable when online fraud takes place, according to an independent online fraud survey just published.
Wow, ya think egghead knows that? Or is it in the 41 percent of ignorant businesses?
I think this is an example of fairly responsible corporate behavior. Egghead has to respond to the needs of the stockholders, their customers, and the FBI. So, given the fine line they must walk, I think that the fact that they sent a letter to the customers informing them of the intrusion is pretty laudable.
Of course, they may have been required to do this. Wow, their stock is barely breathing at 0.53, but it wasn't due to the break-in. They've been tanking steadily since they IPO'd, apparently sometime late in '99.
Are the Egghead Software stores still around? I am pretty sure they aren't. Oh, I see they announced that they were closing their doors and concentrating on e-tailing software in January 98. Too bad... I think they were one of the first successful CompUSA prototpyes.
So what you are saying is, in effect, that they have increased the value of their customer information list because if the guy doesn't set the preferences back within 24 hours, and they take an additional 14 days to reset it, then they obtain a window where they can send out all this information for, oh, I don't know, about 10000 soon-to-be-spammed customers?
I think that's what you're saying... and no, this cannot be legal. Um, maybe it can. I don't recall Congress passing any specific laws forbidding re-setting preferences or specifically protecting ppl from this sort of think, er, thing.
Then again, I am not a Legislator.