When presented a system that's not fully understood, that's clearly very complicated, and that can pose huge risks the answer isn't to poke at it in an effort to avoid a danger that might not even be there.
That's fine if its not getting worse. It appears to be. Doing nothing is not helping; regardless of what your opinion is on the causes that is a simple fact. So we can either do nothing and watch the ice caps melt and sea levels rise over massive areas of populated and/or fertile land, or we can take the best guess we have. You are living in a dreamworld if you think we have the luxury of doing anything better. By the time we know what the optimal solution is it'll be because hindsight has told us. That's no use. Your approach simply does not make sense anymore; it's at least thirty years out of date.
I hope I speak for all fans of quality movies when I say "Don't let that talentless hack bastard near another set as long as he lives.". Terrible, terrible director.
Your points may have had some value 50 years ago (or even 100, when global warming was first suggested). It's simply too late now. The only safe option is to assume it's happening and that we can do something about it and then try whatever looks like it might work. If it's not man-made and it happens anyway then we can all discuss how embarrassed we are later when we're fishing the remains of our capital cities out of the lakes. If it is human made, and it looks likely, and we do somehow manage to act in the next 6-10 years and do something about it, then I promise not to embarrass you by pointing out that you wanted to talk some more before getting off your arse and doing something about a threat the entire world economy and probably a billion or more lives.
I feel that there is a real possibility that in 100 years, humanity may look back at this topic as something even more group-think than the typical "tulip bulb" group-think that happened on a much smaller scale years ago.
That would be grand. Now go and switch off your air-conditioner.
This week's chart - ie, the currently available one - is the first to allow download-only singles, but it was released on Sunday of last week, so you can argue it either way.
This will immediately preclude any tracks released under Creative Commons etc. It also only seems to apply to track downloaded from 'official' online retailers.
The first one is a difficulty that the chart compilers have to face: what if you allow free tracks and Take That then spend the rest of the year releasing old songs for free in order to have the #1 spot for 52 weeks? And their management - or Westlife's - would do it. The second issue is obvious since only official online retailers can be reliably audited. They probably aren't, but they COULD be.
I'll just grab a spare hyphen from my giant bag of them here, and you're free to use it wherever you like in the headline that makes it mean what you intended.
In my defence I'd like to point out that samzenpus changed my original headline, which had no need of the missing hyphen. Thank God Taco wasn't on duty, that's all I can say!
Large profits give drug companies an incentive to develop the most useful medicines (the more profit, the more useful it is)
You have perfectly summed up why drug companies spend most of their time (and budgets) on fleecing rich people instead of curing poor people.
While you can make the argument that a specific drug X or Y would still be developed in the absence of profit motives, this is overlooking the fact that reduced profits mean a reduced incentive to produce drugs in the future.
Reduced profits is not "no profits" and the incentive of having to compete would in fact be a much greater push to produce new drugs once the artificial protection period of the patent was removed.
Your argument makes the incorrect assumption that drug companies want to cure disease. They do not; quite the reverse, in fact. They can't make money off healthy people.
Oh wait, if there's an error in Britannica it takes a year to get that fixed.
Yes, and the error won't then come back the day. Correct information in a book tends to stay in the following editions while errors tend to be removed. Neither is true of the shambolic mess of unattributed assertions that is Wikipedia.
I find the animosity toward Stroustrup in some of the posts very odd. Is it a pissing contest?
No, it's just that Stroustrup is neither a good programmer nor a good language designer. Imagine trying to design a OO language without garbage collection! What a twat.
That's nice looking; basically BNF with some twiddles. That I can read; XML is just plain bad. I remember when it came out the first thing I ever said about it was "Why the hell didn't they use some type of BNF?". This is exactly the sort of thing I had in mind.
I've never encountered a more overrated programmer than Stroustrup, nor a worse technical writer. The examples in his books would make any decent programmer cry, and the text would do the same to anyone who likes clear prose. Worthless crap.
ala the drug industry should have a reasonable period while the software industry is so fluid and rapid flowing patents don't even begin to make sense.
You're on the right track but: firstly software patents don't make sense at all, it has nothing to do with the time limit. Secondly, drugs companies do not need a longer period than anyone else. They certainly want one but since most of their expenditure is on advertising rather than research it is hard to see the justification for that, especially in a field where sociey's needs are literally life or death. A shorter period for drugs would seem a good idea to me.
Given the choice, I'll take Jackson's "butchering" over that animated crap we had before
The first hour of Bakshi's animated crap is a far better telling of the first volume than Jackson managed. At that point (which is where Bakshi was told there was no more money) it falls apart completely. Jackson liked it enough to lift material from it, I notice. Pity he went on to add some of his own "ideas".
Jackson is a bad director and his LotR is a set of badly directed, bad films. That they are also bad adaptations is beside the point.
I didn't know he was Poul Anderson's son-in-law. I remember when Eon came out; I and all the SF readers I knew were asking how the hell such crap got a publisher. Now I know.
Slashdot Mirror
That's fine if its not getting worse. It appears to be. Doing nothing is not helping; regardless of what your opinion is on the causes that is a simple fact. So we can either do nothing and watch the ice caps melt and sea levels rise over massive areas of populated and/or fertile land, or we can take the best guess we have. You are living in a dreamworld if you think we have the luxury of doing anything better. By the time we know what the optimal solution is it'll be because hindsight has told us. That's no use. Your approach simply does not make sense anymore; it's at least thirty years out of date.
I hope I speak for all fans of quality movies when I say "Don't let that talentless hack bastard near another set as long as he lives.". Terrible, terrible director.
I feel that there is a real possibility that in 100 years, humanity may look back at this topic as something even more group-think than the typical "tulip bulb" group-think that happened on a much smaller scale years ago.
That would be grand. Now go and switch off your air-conditioner.
This week's chart - ie, the currently available one - is the first to allow download-only singles, but it was released on Sunday of last week, so you can argue it either way.
Frig! My fault; it was, of course 2007.
As mentioned in the posting as well as the article.
TWW
The first one is a difficulty that the chart compilers have to face: what if you allow free tracks and Take That then spend the rest of the year releasing old songs for free in order to have the #1 spot for 52 weeks? And their management - or Westlife's - would do it. The second issue is obvious since only official online retailers can be reliably audited. They probably aren't, but they COULD be.
TWW
In my defence I'd like to point out that samzenpus changed my original headline, which had no need of the missing hyphen. Thank God Taco wasn't on duty, that's all I can say!
TWW
LOL.
You have perfectly summed up why drug companies spend most of their time (and budgets) on fleecing rich people instead of curing poor people.
While you can make the argument that a specific drug X or Y would still be developed in the absence of profit motives, this is overlooking the fact that reduced profits mean a reduced incentive to produce drugs in the future.
Reduced profits is not "no profits" and the incentive of having to compete would in fact be a much greater push to produce new drugs once the artificial protection period of the patent was removed.
Your argument makes the incorrect assumption that drug companies want to cure disease. They do not; quite the reverse, in fact. They can't make money off healthy people.
TWW
Yes, and the error won't then come back the day. Correct information in a book tends to stay in the following editions while errors tend to be removed. Neither is true of the shambolic mess of unattributed assertions that is Wikipedia.
Only partly. The "gift" is also a very obvious hint that more may be forthcoming if they keep up the "good work". THAT makes it a bribe.
TWW
And, of course, the part where you come back to the bus top the next day and get different answers.
You clearly have no idea of what a library (or an encyclopedia) is or does. Just like everyone who thinks wikipedia is a reliable reference source.
Have MS's programmers still not worked out that file size is an UNSIGNED Int?
No, it's just that Stroustrup is neither a good programmer nor a good language designer. Imagine trying to design a OO language without garbage collection! What a twat.
Who cares how hard you work to get the wrong answer?
"Twiddles" is a technical term.
TWW
I've never encountered a more overrated programmer than Stroustrup, nor a worse technical writer. The examples in his books would make any decent programmer cry, and the text would do the same to anyone who likes clear prose. Worthless crap.
TWW
You're on the right track but: firstly software patents don't make sense at all, it has nothing to do with the time limit. Secondly, drugs companies do not need a longer period than anyone else. They certainly want one but since most of their expenditure is on advertising rather than research it is hard to see the justification for that, especially in a field where sociey's needs are literally life or death. A shorter period for drugs would seem a good idea to me.
TWW
The first hour of Bakshi's animated crap is a far better telling of the first volume than Jackson managed. At that point (which is where Bakshi was told there was no more money) it falls apart completely. Jackson liked it enough to lift material from it, I notice. Pity he went on to add some of his own "ideas".
Jackson is a bad director and his LotR is a set of badly directed, bad films. That they are also bad adaptations is beside the point.
TWW
Totally agree, however:
I am, however, horrified at the thought of a "prequel" to LOTR, no matter who ends up directing/producing it.
If they mean to give the Silmarillion to someone with a talent for something other than eating, then I'd be interested.
TWW
TWW
Worst article ever.