Anyone remember when MTV played music videos? Same thing is happening with SciFi. At some point seing actual science fiction will be a rare oddity on SciFi.
Anyone remember when MTV, Inc. made a TON of money and began to branch out with their flagship brand into stuff besides music videos but also started multiple other cable channels to actually show music videos? At some point, seeing actual science fiction will be a rare oddity on SciFi, but hopefully by attracting more viewers and more advertisers with 'phony' scifi, they will be able to subsidize the production of REAL scifi to be published on other channels...hopefully.
Richard Feynman once observed that he had seen NO science come out of the shuttle program - he was not aware of any articles resulting from shuttle research that were published in peer-reviewed journals.
Cut the funding? No. Cut the agency. Gut it, throw it away, start from scratch. Kill the shuttle program. Spin the satellite launch program off as a semi-private company - kinda like the post office, but without the demand that they serve EVERY citizen for less than $.50. Create a space-flight certification agency that is charged with developing a SAFE space flight industry. Give it two heads - one for satellite launch that doesn't care how safe the rockets/satellites are as long as they don't crash on civilians (ie you can have a 100% catastrophic loss record as long as it is ballistically impossible for parts from your rocket to land on peoples' heads) and another one for human launch that demands a rocket flight be as safe as an automobile journey (over 25,000 die in traffic accidents annually).
All of this should increase the number of space-flight options. Exploration and astronomy are then merely payloads. Rather than funding it directly, make grants to universities and laboratories (ie JPL) to do that sort of thing.
In short, the government should write the checks to and certify the safety of the organizations that do the work and get out of the space business entirely.
Unless, of course, you want to live in a world where access to space is controlled by the government.
So at your job, when you screw up, you get a raise, because obviously you could have done a better job if you were paid more?
NASA with more money would have built a larger system with the same level of shoddiness. Cut their budget by 50% and they will produce half as many systems with the same level of shoddiness. The issue isn't money; it's culture. Organizations and people that do good work do so without regard to how well they are funded. Large budget=lots of stuff. Low budget=little stuff. Culture=quality (whether high or low).
Re:The future? Just like the past should be...
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How is this different from the O-ring issue with challenger? Do you think people just magically knew about O-rings? Or do you think that the people who worked for M-T managed to (anonymously) get information to the commission investigating the disaster?
So, what do you think of a CS degree that requires three semesters of calculus?
And in case you didn't know, the traditional 3rd semester of calculus was designed solely as an adjunct to the physics and engineering curriculum, back in the 50s when Sputnik was cause for concern.
Not real sure of the current status of patenting mathematical algorithms, but at one point they were patented as devices. In other words, you couldn't patent your Optimal Fish Sort algorithm, so you'd apply for a patent on A Device To Optimally Sort Fishes. The idea was that the algorithm itself wasn't patentable, but you could patent a physical device that implemented the algorithm. Any device that implemented the algorithm would then be in violation of your patent. Naturally the only way to make use of (ie profit from) the algorithm is to build a device that implements it
I think the patent office went to hell the day they stopped requiring functional prototypes to accompany patent applications.
Great troll. You'd have us believe that you think Microsoft actually does systems integration for all the government agencies that use MS software, and that you think that paying money to MCSPs, consulting firms, and resellers of MS software is wastage. Replies to your post will either wonder about your relationship with Microsoft, explain to you how good Linux is, or simply bash MS. Excellent work.
IIRC, General Dynamics made some pretty decent money selling $600 toilet seats to the government, though I think that selling free software to the government is infinitely better.
In seriousness, I REALLY hope such business do not include line items for free software on their bills to the government. (Microsoft's lackeys in Congress could have a field day with that.) Rather, all costs should be related to development, implemenation, etc of solutions...that just happen to utilize free software.
As an English major, I take offense at [not "to"] this. [Consider eliminating the entire sentence. The reader cares little about who you are or how you feel.] There is no single correct interpretation of a piece, but there are many less correct ones.
e.g. One example would be making the assumption that LOTR [consider your audience - no additional detail is needed in this forum] is a religious allegory, since Tolkien said in his preface to LOTR [good!] stated that he hates allegory. [Final sentence insults readers' intelligence and may incite violence as it contains the phrase "Tolkien lying."]
Universities offer many criticism courses [avoid passive voice] since it is an integral part of the English discipline. The "modern" way of thinking you refer to can be attributed more to high school English programs where most of the students are not interested enough in English to want to learn other ways of thinking. [The purpose of this statement is unclear.] Good English teachers encourage their students [note use of plural to avoid both gender-biased language and awkware non-standard grammatical construction] to explore other criticism methods. [Inserting my opinion here - good teachers encourage ALL students to explore at ALL times - not merely the "keen" ones and not merely outside class time.]
************* I jest, of course...in a "ha-ha, only serious" kind of way. Eliminating bad habits from your quick writing has two benefits. You can spend much less time editing. You can produce higher-quality pieces more rapidly. ["Rapidlier" is not a word but it should be, darn it!] A piece is complete not when there is nothing left to add but when there is nothing left to take away. Ponder this. Ponder also the fact that literary analysis has NO practical purpose. Any side benefits it has (improving reading skills, teaching critical thinking, etc.) can be learned in practical pursuits.
I fail to see the point of your post - see the (admittedly rather obvious) parodies below.
The amazing thing is not that this is popular now; the amazing thing is that the local telephone companies are poised on the brink of irrelevancy. Don't know about your area, but you can't GET data lines in my town from the telco without the sort of hassle you would have expected from Bell Telephone at the height of their monopoly. They simply don't get it. Meanwhile, you can call the cable company and they will have you set up with high-speed internet access THE NEXT DAY, regardless of your OS. The cableco's customer service is better than that of the telco, so when the inevitable screwup occurs, the cableco will keep you and the telco will lose you as a high-speed customer.
The only real reason to continue sending checks to the telco is for phone access. Internet telephony makes that irrelevant (except for 911 location service). This kind of technology, as it becomes more widely adopted, will either make the local telco obsolete or a lot more responsive.
Circa 1981... How many people ACTUALLY own a personal computer? Although I understand they're cheap, they're not as good as a mainframe.
Circa 1881... How many people ACTUALLY ride in a horseless carriage? Although I understand they're nifty, they're not as useful as a horse.
Circa 1985... How many people ACTUALLY use the protection features of Intel's 80386 CPU? Although I understand the concept, it still serves no useful purpose in DOS.
And if your local news is interviewing a national official (like your senator or representative) then it's propaganda prepared by the official's staff. truth.
Re-read that sentence you quoted. Note that (a) the writer is posting a story on/. (b) the reader is reading the story. I think the sentence has to be typed because it'd be hard to say it when the tongue is planted so firmly in the cheek.
News flash - boring middle class school kids sometimes rise beyond their mediocrity and become political leaders. More importantly, they sometimes become OPPOSITION leaders. I'm nobody special and likely never will be. I recognize, however, that there are people out there not too different from me who are doing things that benefit me and annoy powerful people.
It is politically untenable to track opposition leaders. It is quite possible, however, to get the populace to accept that EVERYONE will be tracked for their own good (protection from communists, drug dealers, terrorists, etc - depending on the decade).
Once that becomes acceptable, you are quite right that 99.999% of the information will be thrown away. It's the.001% of the population that agitates against current government policies that have to be worried. People like this generally agitate against the rights of the rich and powerful and for the rights of the ordinary Joe. Knocking them down a few notches is in the interests of the existing leadership and is not in the interests of the general public.
Then there's the issue with databases in general - sure, the government doesn't care much about it, though they want the information around in case they find someone they want to harass. There are thousands of scrupleless private investigators who would LOVE to get their hands on that info, and thousands of scrupleless hackers who would help them. Relevant to this story, if John Doe suspected infidelity on the part of the spouse who was divorcing him, don't you think a log of all the places his wife had driven would be interesting to him?
Privacy means two things...freedom from government harassment and freedom from private harassment. Let the government monitor everyone, and they'll harass the people who make the government uncomfortable. You can't protect only the activists; you have to protect everyone. Let the government maintain databases on everyone and that information becomes available to everyone willing to pay, whether it's criminal to hack the database or not.
You place entirely too much trust in the scruples of demonstrably unscrupulous categories of people.
News flash. With few exceptions, the laws passed in the USA have ALWAYS benefited the small minority of rich. Go read your history. Rich=powerful=rich. This equation has never changed anywehere in the world for any significant length of time. Things are not getting worse; you are getting older and wiser.
The FACT that installing Mozilla on Windows means installing "the constant flow of security patches" for both IE and Mozilla is way harder and time consuming than installing them for IE alone. IE is integrated deeply enough into Windows that it must be treated like part of the OS.
"IE updates may affect the rest of the system" - yeah, like eliminating security holes. You HAVE to patch IE if you are running Windows. Using Mozilla doesn't change that - it just adds to what you have to patch. Granted - a bug in Mozilla is probably not a security hole, but using Mozilla does not reduce the number of patches you have to apply.
Support wise - it's easier to support one browser than two, and if you can FORCE employees not to use IE, then yeah, supporting (ie helping people use) Mozilla might be easier.
This is a pragmatic viewpoint, of course. In principle, IE + Windows should be tossed on the scrapheap, but that's a post for another day.
Nice idea - let me extend it. You're almost completely wrong =) I can find no indication that Lilo and Stitch is unoriginal, but the others on your list are derivative. Fantasia wasn't based on someone else's story, but someone else's music. Without the music, there'd be no Fantasia.
The Lion King is the only Disney animated feature that I know of that was original.
In short, Disney has built an empire on 'borrowing' from the public domain...but, as your last sentence points out so well, it's not borrowing - it's stealing.
1. Spouse who supported now-deceased artist emotionally during creation of work. (Ex-spouse is a no-go; spouse after creation of work is a no-go.) 2. Minor children of author
Apart from that, I see no reason for copyrights to survive the author.
Corporate copyrights should be a definite length of time - 20 years, perhaps, like patents.
This is what comes from treating creative works as property. When you die, your property goes to your heirs; this includes intellectual property. This was actually one of the reasons given for treating IP as REAL P(roperty) back in the 1800s. You don't want authors' orphans and widows going poor while all these fat cats make money off of his works.
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SHH! SHH! Be quiet, man! Just shut up! You'll bring the feds down on the whole lot of us if you don't shut up!
Old saying in the US..."I've put in my two cents worth" means "I've said what I thought" Don't knot what the origin is.
Anyone remember when MTV played music videos? Same thing is happening with SciFi. At some point seing actual science fiction will be a rare oddity on SciFi.
Anyone remember when MTV, Inc. made a TON of money and began to branch out with their flagship brand into stuff besides music videos but also started multiple other cable channels to actually show music videos? At some point, seeing actual science fiction will be a rare oddity on SciFi, but hopefully by attracting more viewers and more advertisers with 'phony' scifi, they will be able to subsidize the production of REAL scifi to be published on other channels...hopefully.
Mine's a third of yours, and I noticed it. (I'm bragging, of course)
Richard Feynman once observed that he had seen NO science come out of the shuttle program - he was not aware of any articles resulting from shuttle research that were published in peer-reviewed journals.
Cut the funding? No. Cut the agency. Gut it, throw it away, start from scratch. Kill the shuttle program. Spin the satellite launch program off as a semi-private company - kinda like the post office, but without the demand that they serve EVERY citizen for less than $.50. Create a space-flight certification agency that is charged with developing a SAFE space flight industry. Give it two heads - one for satellite launch that doesn't care how safe the rockets/satellites are as long as they don't crash on civilians (ie you can have a 100% catastrophic loss record as long as it is ballistically impossible for parts from your rocket to land on peoples' heads) and another one for human launch that demands a rocket flight be as safe as an automobile journey (over 25,000 die in traffic accidents annually).
All of this should increase the number of space-flight options. Exploration and astronomy are then merely payloads. Rather than funding it directly, make grants to universities and laboratories (ie JPL) to do that sort of thing.
In short, the government should write the checks to and certify the safety of the organizations that do the work and get out of the space business entirely.
Unless, of course, you want to live in a world where access to space is controlled by the government.
So at your job, when you screw up, you get a raise, because obviously you could have done a better job if you were paid more?
NASA with more money would have built a larger system with the same level of shoddiness. Cut their budget by 50% and they will produce half as many systems with the same level of shoddiness. The issue isn't money; it's culture. Organizations and people that do good work do so without regard to how well they are funded. Large budget=lots of stuff. Low budget=little stuff. Culture=quality (whether high or low).
How is this different from the O-ring issue with challenger? Do you think people just magically knew about O-rings? Or do you think that the people who worked for M-T managed to (anonymously) get information to the commission investigating the disaster?
This is the sort of thing that the side with the deeper pockets usually wins
Remind me...which side has tens of billions of dollars in cash reserves?
So, what do you think of a CS degree that requires three semesters of calculus?
And in case you didn't know, the traditional 3rd semester of calculus was designed solely as an adjunct to the physics and engineering curriculum, back in the 50s when Sputnik was cause for concern.
Not real sure of the current status of patenting mathematical algorithms, but at one point they were patented as devices. In other words, you couldn't patent your Optimal Fish Sort algorithm, so you'd apply for a patent on A Device To Optimally Sort Fishes. The idea was that the algorithm itself wasn't patentable, but you could patent a physical device that implemented the algorithm. Any device that implemented the algorithm would then be in violation of your patent. Naturally the only way to make use of (ie profit from) the algorithm is to build a device that implements it
I think the patent office went to hell the day they stopped requiring functional prototypes to accompany patent applications.
Great troll. You'd have us believe that you think Microsoft actually does systems integration for all the government agencies that use MS software, and that you think that paying money to MCSPs, consulting firms, and resellers of MS software is wastage. Replies to your post will either wonder about your relationship with Microsoft, explain to you how good Linux is, or simply bash MS. Excellent work.
IIRC, General Dynamics made some pretty decent money selling $600 toilet seats to the government, though I think that selling free software to the government is infinitely better.
In seriousness, I REALLY hope such business do not include line items for free software on their bills to the government. (Microsoft's lackeys in Congress could have a field day with that.) Rather, all costs should be related to development, implemenation, etc of solutions...that just happen to utilize free software.
C+. Too wordy. Consider rewriting as follows.
As an English major, I take offense at [not "to"] this. [Consider eliminating the entire sentence. The reader cares little about who you are or how you feel.] There is no single correct interpretation of a piece, but there are many less correct ones.
e.g. One example would be making the assumption that LOTR [consider your audience - no additional detail is needed in this forum] is a religious allegory, since Tolkien said in his preface to LOTR [good!] stated that he hates allegory. [Final sentence insults readers' intelligence and may incite violence as it contains the phrase "Tolkien lying."]
Universities offer many criticism courses [avoid passive voice] since it is an integral part of the English discipline. The "modern" way of thinking you refer to can be attributed more to high school English programs where most of the students are not interested enough in English to want to learn other ways of thinking. [The purpose of this statement is unclear.] Good English teachers encourage their students [note use of plural to avoid both gender-biased language and awkware non-standard grammatical construction] to explore other criticism methods. [Inserting my opinion here - good teachers encourage ALL students to explore at ALL times - not merely the "keen" ones and not merely outside class time.]
*************
I jest, of course...in a "ha-ha, only serious" kind of way. Eliminating bad habits from your quick writing has two benefits. You can spend much less time editing. You can produce higher-quality pieces more rapidly. ["Rapidlier" is not a word but it should be, darn it!] A piece is complete not when there is nothing left to add but when there is nothing left to take away. Ponder this. Ponder also the fact that literary analysis has NO practical purpose. Any side benefits it has (improving reading skills, teaching critical thinking, etc.) can be learned in practical pursuits.
I fail to see the point of your post - see the (admittedly rather obvious) parodies below.
The amazing thing is not that this is popular now; the amazing thing is that the local telephone companies are poised on the brink of irrelevancy. Don't know about your area, but you can't GET data lines in my town from the telco without the sort of hassle you would have expected from Bell Telephone at the height of their monopoly. They simply don't get it. Meanwhile, you can call the cable company and they will have you set up with high-speed internet access THE NEXT DAY, regardless of your OS. The cableco's customer service is better than that of the telco, so when the inevitable screwup occurs, the cableco will keep you and the telco will lose you as a high-speed customer.
The only real reason to continue sending checks to the telco is for phone access. Internet telephony makes that irrelevant (except for 911 location service). This kind of technology, as it becomes more widely adopted, will either make the local telco obsolete or a lot more responsive.
Circa 1981...
How many people ACTUALLY own a personal computer? Although I understand they're cheap, they're not as good as a mainframe.
Circa 1881...
How many people ACTUALLY ride in a horseless carriage? Although I understand they're nifty, they're not as useful as a horse.
Circa 1985...
How many people ACTUALLY use the protection features of Intel's 80386 CPU? Although I understand the concept, it still serves no useful purpose in DOS.
And if your local news is interviewing a national official (like your senator or representative) then it's propaganda prepared by the official's staff. truth.
so the gist of your argument is "All of you shut up so that my representative can hear what I say."
Re-read that sentence you quoted. Note that (a) the writer is posting a story on /. (b) the reader is reading the story. I think the sentence has to be typed because it'd be hard to say it when the tongue is planted so firmly in the cheek.
News flash - boring middle class school kids sometimes rise beyond their mediocrity and become political leaders. More importantly, they sometimes become OPPOSITION leaders. I'm nobody special and likely never will be. I recognize, however, that there are people out there not too different from me who are doing things that benefit me and annoy powerful people.
.001% of the population that agitates against current government policies that have to be worried. People like this generally agitate against the rights of the rich and powerful and for the rights of the ordinary Joe. Knocking them down a few notches is in the interests of the existing leadership and is not in the interests of the general public.
It is politically untenable to track opposition leaders. It is quite possible, however, to get the populace to accept that EVERYONE will be tracked for their own good (protection from communists, drug dealers, terrorists, etc - depending on the decade).
Once that becomes acceptable, you are quite right that 99.999% of the information will be thrown away. It's the
Then there's the issue with databases in general - sure, the government doesn't care much about it, though they want the information around in case they find someone they want to harass. There are thousands of scrupleless private investigators who would LOVE to get their hands on that info, and thousands of scrupleless hackers who would help them. Relevant to this story, if John Doe suspected infidelity on the part of the spouse who was divorcing him, don't you think a log of all the places his wife had driven would be interesting to him?
Privacy means two things...freedom from government harassment and freedom from private harassment. Let the government monitor everyone, and they'll harass the people who make the government uncomfortable. You can't protect only the activists; you have to protect everyone. Let the government maintain databases on everyone and that information becomes available to everyone willing to pay, whether it's criminal to hack the database or not.
You place entirely too much trust in the scruples of demonstrably unscrupulous categories of people.
News flash. With few exceptions, the laws passed in the USA have ALWAYS benefited the small minority of rich. Go read your history. Rich=powerful=rich. This equation has never changed anywehere in the world for any significant length of time. Things are not getting worse; you are getting older and wiser.
The FACT that installing Mozilla on Windows means installing "the constant flow of security patches" for both IE and Mozilla is way harder and time consuming than installing them for IE alone. IE is integrated deeply enough into Windows that it must be treated like part of the OS.
"IE updates may affect the rest of the system" - yeah, like eliminating security holes. You HAVE to patch IE if you are running Windows. Using Mozilla doesn't change that - it just adds to what you have to patch. Granted - a bug in Mozilla is probably not a security hole, but using Mozilla does not reduce the number of patches you have to apply.
Support wise - it's easier to support one browser than two, and if you can FORCE employees not to use IE, then yeah, supporting (ie helping people use) Mozilla might be easier.
This is a pragmatic viewpoint, of course. In principle, IE + Windows should be tossed on the scrapheap, but that's a post for another day.
No, silly, you don't take away all the roads. Just the roads that contain bars.
Nice idea - let me extend it. You're almost completely wrong =) I can find no indication that Lilo and Stitch is unoriginal, but the others on your list are derivative. Fantasia wasn't based on someone else's story, but someone else's music. Without the music, there'd be no Fantasia.
The Lion King is the only Disney animated feature that I know of that was original.
In short, Disney has built an empire on 'borrowing' from the public domain...but, as your last sentence points out so well, it's not borrowing - it's stealing.
1. Spouse who supported now-deceased artist emotionally during creation of work. (Ex-spouse is a no-go; spouse after creation of work is a no-go.)
2. Minor children of author
Apart from that, I see no reason for copyrights to survive the author.
Corporate copyrights should be a definite length of time - 20 years, perhaps, like patents.
This is what comes from treating creative works as property. When you die, your property goes to your heirs; this includes intellectual property. This was actually one of the reasons given for treating IP as REAL P(roperty) back in the 1800s. You don't want authors' orphans and widows going poor while all these fat cats make money off of his works.