No, next thing they want is to ban reselling all together. Of course, that's been firmly slammed by the supreme court (first sale doctrine) for physical copies of books, but its coming back again as everything moves towards digital distribution, and so far as I know, the courts haven't been quite so firm on allowing digital resales (and of course, almost every modern EULA in the world explicitly prevents resale until such time as the courts invalidate such clauses. I have a copy of Lego Harry Potter sitting here in which the EULA even tries to explicitly override the first sale doctrine -- "non-transferable" license.)
There are no such ways. Wealth and power are intimately linked, and always have been. And always will be.
You can sometimes short-circuit that fact for a couple of generation or two via revolution if you manage to install sufficiently enlightened leaders, but that only lasts for as long as those leaders stay alive and stay enlightened. Once leadership changes you're back to a random grab-bag of power-grubbers trying to take over (and it will eventually will, even if its due to death by old age.)
The whole idea of limited term political positions is to undermine the above truth -- no bad-egg politicians will be around long enough to do significant harm (of course, the flip side is that no good politicians are around long enough to do long-term good either.)
Of course what we see nowadays (and probably have ever since the last founding-father-equivalent died or left politics in any country) is rather than a single long-term politician, we get groups of them working in collusion to attain their long-term goals.
Which is kind of worse in a way, since "good" people are generally not the type to conspire and collude in order to progress their agendas.
That said, there are definitely things that could be done to improve the situation. The primary one being a complete ban of campaign contributions -- all campaign money should come from public coffers and be distributed equally among the running parties in any jurisdiction.
Of course some oversight would be necessary or people would just "run" in order to get some free money without any intention to win, but that's a bit of a side issue. And of course there would still be back-room bribery to watch out for, but that's already illegal so no big stepping stone there.
I'd almost say personal contributions to your own campaign should be banned. Allowing even those produces a situation where the independently wealthy have an innate, non-political advantage over those who aren't so lucky, but might still have a solid platform.
Its still a long way from perfect, but it would go a long way towards killing the current corporatocracy that we're facing in much of the "democratic" world.
Ugh wow. That was a bit rambling. TL;DR is basically that the publishers adjust supply to match demand at the price they want, rather than the other way around.
What century are you living in? A book's "value" might be determined by the reader (but only after they've read it!) A book's price on the other hand is determined by the publisher -- most of the time its even printed on the cover so that sellers can't try to undercut the MSRP! (at least, not without putting ugly stickers over the cover price.)
Publishers have become reasonably good at predicting ahead of time how well a book (or movie, video game, etc) will sell, and only print enough copies to cover the predicted demand.
Of course as with any prognostication, its not perfect.. and occasionally they'll terrifically under- or over-estimate demand for an item (and of course, these are the only ones that ever make headlines!)
But for the most part, they get it right within a reasonable margin of error. And of course, any losses due to failures in prediction just get written off, significantly reducing their overall financial impact on the publisher.
Its not nearly profitable enough. If you sell at a single high price, those living in less wealthy nations won't be able to afford it. If you sell at a single low price, you're not doing enough to suck dry those living in more wealthy nations.
Its a form of price discrimination and is a monopolistic practice (unsurprising, given that copyright intentionally grants a no-longer-very-limited monopoly over the production and distribution of covered works.)
You start giving a shit really fast when they serve you with legal papers demanding $600,000. If you just ignore those, you'll end up with the cops knocking on your door and a free trip to the local jail while the lawyers sort things out for you.
Remember, you can sue anyone for anything -- only the courts have been granted the power to determine whether the case has merit (either by hearing it, or if its really stupid, just tossing it out.)
Absolutely not. Surprisingly enough, most people aren't all that excited about murdering dozens or hundreds of innocents. Some will do so with enough provocation, and you get the odd psychopath who really is hell-bent on killing, but for the most part the idea of a "terrorist" is to spread "terror", not outright kill people. Killing people spreads terror to be sure, but there are other ways to do so that don't involve destroying your own soul (or not so much of it, at least.)
With your 3-step program, the goal step is actually step 2 -- a drawn out period of time when your target is afraid of you without you having to do much to incite the fear. Only after you've dragged out step 2 as long as you can possibly manage are you forced to move on to step 3 and reset the cycle.
The entire world, primarily the US, are mired somewhere in the middle of step 2 still after 9/11. There's no reason for terrorist cells to risk attacking the US again until Homeland Security finally runs out of new ways to disrupt American life. The terrorists can just sit back and laugh as internally you all work yourselves into a paranoid frenzy, and externally you run around starting wars with random nations whose primarily link to terrorism is a shared religious background.
Their rampant and sudden(ish) adoption of HTML5 + Javascript for Win8 kind of screams E&E to me. Maybe not yet, but I suspect it will come. They have plenty of home-grown technologies that could easily be extended to provide support for all the new Metro flashies, but have chosen to roll their ball down the HTML5 slope under the slogan of "openness".
Which is great, until they decide to slam the door after a large portion of the user base has gone through it.
Think how much strife web devs have gone through over the years trying to make their sites compatible with both IE and FF (and all of their various incompatible versions.. and nowadays Safari and Chrome as well)? Well take that, and consider how fun it will be when all of those same issues apply to standalone, local applications?
And of course they've got no short history of explicitly adding proprietary extensions to open standards. They got slammed for trying to do that with Java, and hopefully that will set some precedent, but HTML5 and JS are, as far as I know, not yet legally protected from MS' tactics.
Consider how this will play out. They take a truly open standard such as HTML5, implement it as perfectly as possible. And then add something.
MS products will be able to accurately display web pages developed on Linux or OSX or any other system you care to name that follows the HTML5 standard. So it doesn't matter what the back-end is running, the front-end works beautifully.
Now add something. Doesn't have to be much, and almost certainly will be based in the client side and transparent to the server. MS products are still compatible with 100% of all HTML5 websites out there, but non-MS browsers are no longer compatible with any website that happens to use MS' extension.
Doesn't even have to be anything breaking or even terribly complex. Something like a fancier hook to the Metro UI for example -- add a start page link when IE is your default browser? Get realtime updates for.. whatever. With FF as your default browser? Get a static icon. In both cases and with both browsers, the website itself would work fine.
But those little bits of flair can add up. Imagine the usability difference it would make for something like Twitter or Facebook (or heck, Slashdot) if you had a basic feed on the desktop and didn't need to ever load up the full page unless something caught your attention?
Oh well. We can hope and pray that MS will avoid being evil this go-round, but my guess is that retrospect will eventually show a continuation of business as usual.
Sure. Lets not bother spending tax money on public roads either. Buses and subways are out of the question. Why do we need a fire department anyway? Or a police force?
Oh hell that last one isn't so bad. You can just add not getting robbed to not getting sick in your nightly prayer, which is the only thing separating most Americans from hospital-induced destitution. And if there's no police to catch criminals, we can just save even more by not needing a legal system to prosecute them!
You're completely ignoring the costs of safety and waste handling in the fission reactor. Those are both VERY expensive in themselves (and the latter has for a large part just been put off with temporary solutions until "something better" can be done with the stuff that's cheap enough to be economically viable, so there may not even be a full accounting of the waste handling costs yet.)
Not to mention that the cost of producing the materials needed for fusion is likely to drastically drop once there's been some research in production (as opposed to properties and suitability research.) Probably still won't be cheap, but it should get a lot cheaper. So looking at the cost of cutting-edge experimental materials when they're brand new doesn't have a whole lot of relevance to their potential cost once they're no longer cutting-edge.
For any decently sized creative project, this can be a significant amount of time. And oddly enough, the people spending this time creating require things like food and housing, which all costs money.
So they can either get a day job, and seriously cut into their creative time (and often creativity itself is diminished when you're tired after working all week.)
Or they can get funds up front to cover their living expenses while they dedicate themselves to their endeavor. Kickstarter is merely one means of obtaining such funding.
Guess which option produces more and better creative works?
You might get two or three like that.. but if you consistently fail at your projects, chances are people will stop bothering to fund them. Nobody likes a loser.
Of course that's mandated on you using a single identity to create these projects.. but if people are regularly backing projects by entities that have no internet presence prior to starting their Kickstarter drive well.. lesson for the interwebs I guess.
And if it becomes a common place occurrence, Kickstarter will just have to come up with mechanisms to help protection against scammers. Not like that's anything unusual on the internet. Every website on the planet that's managed to garner more than a couple hundred visitors will have to deal with scammers, and the bigger they get, the more they'll have to deal with. Unfortunate, but a fact of life.
With Kickstarter, you own nothing whatever. If the company does well you get nothing, if they do poorly you get nothing, and if they walk off with your money you have no recourse.
Err no. If they do well, you get whatever they were developing. It won't generally be a a monetary reward, but it IS a reward (at least for most of us, there are things we consider rewarding other than a raw dollar sum.)
Even if your support doesn't get you a copy of the product (which is possible, especially for physical items) you still have the "reward" of knowing you've helped bring something new (and hopefully good!) into the world.
A modified version might work though.. a weekly/monthly/whatever payout of x% of the total sum over 100/x months.
Of course this still wouldn't be perfect -- there will be projects where the major portion of the funding is required lump sum. For example if someone already has their idea designed and ready to go, but needs manufacturing funded.
Perhaps what they really need is a request for a spending timeline and milestones to be created when the project is created. Prognostication is never perfect, so there would have to be a portion of the money (maybe 20%) set aside that the developer could dig into as needed, and the rest of the money gets released based on meeting milestones (.. though you'd then need to come up with a way to confirm a milestone has actually been met, so perhaps I'm just pushing the issue down the chain without solving anything..)
Because the US would never get away with passing such legislation in the path of the well-entrenched and well-funded empires that already exist -- especially when they can bill it as "communist" in the press to garner instant public disapproval.
So they're stuck with such half-assed attempts that don't really please anybody, but are close enough to status quo that they also don't piss off the powerful people and organizations (or at least, not enough to keep fighting it.)
But on the other hand, a half-assed measure is better than none at all. If nothing else, it at least opens the door to the possibility of further change in the future. One step at a time.
I don't think anyone's claiming that Youtube should be used as a replacement for real world observation.
But when your kid needs to write a report on said bugs in the back yard, why should he be limited to 20 year old copies of Britanica for research when there's so much more modern and up to date information available on the web (and gets him some early experience in learning how to filter away the crud that's also on the web -- a valuable skill in itself these days.)
Or having to manually scratch graphite onto a piece of dead tree and dealing with the hassle of manually discover and correct mistakes when your word processor can do all of that work for him and let him focus on the actual content of his report.
As for the 3 R's.. IMO those are among the best things to transition to the screen. 2+2=4 regardless of whether you use a pencil or a keypad to enter the answer. Of course, the kid could use the computer's built-in calculator to cheat.. but they could do that anyway and just copy the answer. Same goes for writing. And reading.. uhh.. a good portion of the web is text (probably a large portion if you discount the obvious industries of music, movies and porn:P.)
Remember, we don't really have a high bar to reach here. The 3 R's have been hard points to get across to students long before computers came around, and they probably still will be long after we've figured out "good" ways to teach using modern technology.
Are you sure? There were no Albert Einsteins back then.
Err no, but there were Newtons, Euclids, Aristotles, Archimedes..es (htf do you pluralize that?), etc.
There's no shortage of smart people throughout history. No matter how bad the education system is, there will always be someone who's both smart enough and dedicated enough to excel (even if excelling under those circumstances seems weak by comparison to better system.. I have little doubt that Newton could have easily understood Einstein's relativity -- maybe even come up with it on his own, provided he had the same body of other peoples' works to build from.)
But that said, yes its silly to be trying to teach the future using the tools of the past. There's a reason the new tools were invented -- they allow us to do things more efficiently.
I'd just always assumed that it was because pretty much all knights-and-wizards type shows are essentially based in Arthurian-style Britain.
Just like it would be silly to have a Western done up with a British accent ("Westerns" are essentially defined as the American West circa mid-to-late 1800s.)
As for the comparison to the traditional "stereotype" of upper class Europeans.. that can pretty much be discarded as an argument due to the fact that Britain has changed over time. The high fashion upper class people you see in these shows are usually based around the Elizabethian era, give or take a monarch or two. But definitely an entirely different period of history compared to the time of Arthur and the onset of the dark ages.
Now of course there's some language bias involved. The French, Germans, Spanish, etc all had their own upper class during the Elizabethian era, and they all inter-mingled rather frequently at balls and in court and whatnot, and they would have generally spoken the local language of whatever palace they were visiting.
The language barriers do present a problem for something like Spartacus -- even if the producer does the research and knows what languages would have been common in the time and place of setting, none of said languages would have any modern counterparts to even take an accent from. We don't really associate modern Italy with ancient Rome (for whatever reason), and you've got few other choices so may as well just pick an accent that sounds good and go with that. (The Spartacus show in particular did an interesting thing, though its been done before of course -- they used odd turns of phrases and curses that sound suitably grandiose and non-modern rather than a particular accent. How well it worked is up for debate, but not too many people would be confusing it with modern speech.)
Except that it takes energy (your own presumably, in this example) and probably tools to cut the trees down and fashion the wood. The value of the wood has increased to be sure, but it didn't happen magically -- there were other inputs involved. These other inputs are what most people (including yourself) tend to ignore when they say something like "wealth has increased." Abstract concepts like usefulness, quality of life and dollar value may have increased, but you haven't added anything physical to the world.
And yes, wealth is pretty much exactly reducible to thermodynamics (or some high-level approximation there of.) Real wealth (as opposed to abstract dollar amounts) must be based on physical items if you take things far enough down the line.
"Increasing" wealth is more a question of us being better at utilizing the materials available to use -- including making better tools which help us make even more materials available for use and so on. But at no point to we -create- anything. If we could just infinitely create wealth out of nothing, then communism would work a lot better than it does, and we'd all be able to live like kings!
Remember, dollar value is not wealth. Having more dollars allows you to buy wealth, but you're depriving somebody else of said wealth. But at the end of the day, a dollar value is just some abstract concept that we attach to items with little to no correlation to the material wealth that the item represents. (Dollar value is based on supply and demand, which is loosely correlated with wealth distribution, but it can be VERY loose when you get into things like intellectual property where the physical value of the item is so absurdly small that you're effectively pitting pure greed against demand and the supply curve can be ignored to a large extent.)
Infinite wealth is also obvious. If you really believe that wealth is finite, then you believe that we have no more wealth than a cave man? We have no more wealth than a settler in the old west?
I would call that a true statement, providing that you include the earth itself in "we"*. We've found better ways to access and utilize the wealth we've got, but we haven't created anything new that didn't come from either the ground or baser resources (that somewhere along the line, comes from the ground.)
* We'd also have to include the food/growth energy gained from the sun (or other extraterrestrial sources) to get a complete summation of wealth over time!
Except that you're ignoring the energy, tools, work, R&D and every other factor that goes into increasing the wealth of that lump of gold. Luckily we can value much of that low enough that it can be ignored (in particular, if you trace person hours back far enough you'll eventually come to energy from the sun.. which is so incredibly plentiful that its close to worthless for all practical purposes -- but "close to" is not "equal to!")
And for fun we can look at it from another angle -- if there's no more lumps of gold in the ground to get, then you've really hit a limit. There's only finite gold in the ground and once its gone its gone. You can re-purpose the gold you've already got to make more useful artifacts (by putting in extra time and energy) but you can't just make more gold (.. discounting atomic processes, but then your source material falls under the same argument so you've not gained anything in net.)
Actually, he made it out of computers, electricity, paper, etc.. and most especially man hours, which is also a resource.
The fact that he had a fairly long stretch where Microsoft was lucky enough to be able to sell at a high overall margin doesn't mean he made wealth out of nothing.
And in fact even if Windows magically appeared one day, his dollars still didn't come from nowhere -- they came from people who purchased Windows. And those people had to get their dollars from somewhere. Recursively apply the argument enough times and you'll eventually come to natural resources (with a lot of value adds along the way for labor and greed and such.)
Also keep in mind that increasing total money doesn't necessarily increase wealth. If we decide that we don't like cents anymore and just edict that we drop the decimal from all dollar amounts, suddenly everyone looks 100 times richer on paper. But they're no wealthier in reality because everything they need to purchase is also 100 times more expensive.
Wealth can only be redistributed. The raw numbers increase over time, but any actual wealth _creation_ is done by digging things out of the ground (or indirectly from the sun, in the case of industries such as farming).
And even THAT well isn't really being "created", its simply being accessed (which is just another form of redistributing the wealth.. in this case from nature to people.)
Which is a half-argument at best. "Efficient" anything costs less money pretty much by definition. And certainly "small" tends to be more efficient than "large" as less support structure is needed.
But the argument fails to address the question of whether "small and efficient" still manages to get the job done. A Honda Civic is certainly smaller and more efficient than a 747, but its still a rather stupid comparison because a 747 can do things that a Honda Civic simply can't. Namely, lift hundreds (thousands) of tons of plane, cargo, fuel etc a couple miles into the air (and move a hell of a lot faster while doing so.)
So let me understand this logic. Some scientist somewhere makes a claim that the conservatives don't like. So they question his (or her!) methods. Ok that's a perfectly valid thing to do, and challenging results is an important part of science.
Its the next step that I don't quite get: "Therefore, any science that disagrees with me is bad."
Err what? That's a hell of a logical leap. If you want to question someone's methods, then go right ahead and do so. But do it scientifically by presenting your own evidence (and you better make damned sure your own methods are rock solid otherwise you're only being hypocritical!)
I mean something like environmental protection. I can see why people would take to the tactic of just writing off any claim that they don't like as "bad methodology." There's big money on the line and the environment is a hell of a complex thing to study, so you can always make some sort of weak claim that the scientist in question missed something. Its terribly short-sighted, but money people have never cared about much past the next quarterly or annual report, and there's little chance that we'll ever convince them to think 50 or 100 years into the future.
Something like evolution though I have no idea what the point of all the backlash is. Its like people are bitching just because they can. Are they all so weak in their faith such that refuting some small part of their magic book somehow invalidates their entire belief structure?
Slashdot Mirror
No, next thing they want is to ban reselling all together. Of course, that's been firmly slammed by the supreme court (first sale doctrine) for physical copies of books, but its coming back again as everything moves towards digital distribution, and so far as I know, the courts haven't been quite so firm on allowing digital resales (and of course, almost every modern EULA in the world explicitly prevents resale until such time as the courts invalidate such clauses. I have a copy of Lego Harry Potter sitting here in which the EULA even tries to explicitly override the first sale doctrine -- "non-transferable" license.)
There are no such ways. Wealth and power are intimately linked, and always have been. And always will be.
You can sometimes short-circuit that fact for a couple of generation or two via revolution if you manage to install sufficiently enlightened leaders, but that only lasts for as long as those leaders stay alive and stay enlightened. Once leadership changes you're back to a random grab-bag of power-grubbers trying to take over (and it will eventually will, even if its due to death by old age.)
The whole idea of limited term political positions is to undermine the above truth -- no bad-egg politicians will be around long enough to do significant harm (of course, the flip side is that no good politicians are around long enough to do long-term good either.)
Of course what we see nowadays (and probably have ever since the last founding-father-equivalent died or left politics in any country) is rather than a single long-term politician, we get groups of them working in collusion to attain their long-term goals.
Which is kind of worse in a way, since "good" people are generally not the type to conspire and collude in order to progress their agendas.
That said, there are definitely things that could be done to improve the situation. The primary one being a complete ban of campaign contributions -- all campaign money should come from public coffers and be distributed equally among the running parties in any jurisdiction.
Of course some oversight would be necessary or people would just "run" in order to get some free money without any intention to win, but that's a bit of a side issue. And of course there would still be back-room bribery to watch out for, but that's already illegal so no big stepping stone there.
I'd almost say personal contributions to your own campaign should be banned. Allowing even those produces a situation where the independently wealthy have an innate, non-political advantage over those who aren't so lucky, but might still have a solid platform.
Its still a long way from perfect, but it would go a long way towards killing the current corporatocracy that we're facing in much of the "democratic" world.
Ugh wow. That was a bit rambling. TL;DR is basically that the publishers adjust supply to match demand at the price they want, rather than the other way around.
What century are you living in? A book's "value" might be determined by the reader (but only after they've read it!) A book's price on the other hand is determined by the publisher -- most of the time its even printed on the cover so that sellers can't try to undercut the MSRP! (at least, not without putting ugly stickers over the cover price.)
Publishers have become reasonably good at predicting ahead of time how well a book (or movie, video game, etc) will sell, and only print enough copies to cover the predicted demand.
Of course as with any prognostication, its not perfect.. and occasionally they'll terrifically under- or over-estimate demand for an item (and of course, these are the only ones that ever make headlines!)
But for the most part, they get it right within a reasonable margin of error. And of course, any losses due to failures in prediction just get written off, significantly reducing their overall financial impact on the publisher.
Whatever happened to the global market?
Its not nearly profitable enough. If you sell at a single high price, those living in less wealthy nations won't be able to afford it. If you sell at a single low price, you're not doing enough to suck dry those living in more wealthy nations.
Its a form of price discrimination and is a monopolistic practice (unsurprising, given that copyright intentionally grants a no-longer-very-limited monopoly over the production and distribution of covered works.)
You start giving a shit really fast when they serve you with legal papers demanding $600,000. If you just ignore those, you'll end up with the cops knocking on your door and a free trip to the local jail while the lawyers sort things out for you.
Remember, you can sue anyone for anything -- only the courts have been granted the power to determine whether the case has merit (either by hearing it, or if its really stupid, just tossing it out.)
Absolutely not. Surprisingly enough, most people aren't all that excited about murdering dozens or hundreds of innocents. Some will do so with enough provocation, and you get the odd psychopath who really is hell-bent on killing, but for the most part the idea of a "terrorist" is to spread "terror", not outright kill people. Killing people spreads terror to be sure, but there are other ways to do so that don't involve destroying your own soul (or not so much of it, at least.)
With your 3-step program, the goal step is actually step 2 -- a drawn out period of time when your target is afraid of you without you having to do much to incite the fear. Only after you've dragged out step 2 as long as you can possibly manage are you forced to move on to step 3 and reset the cycle.
The entire world, primarily the US, are mired somewhere in the middle of step 2 still after 9/11. There's no reason for terrorist cells to risk attacking the US again until Homeland Security finally runs out of new ways to disrupt American life. The terrorists can just sit back and laugh as internally you all work yourselves into a paranoid frenzy, and externally you run around starting wars with random nations whose primarily link to terrorism is a shared religious background.
They've just learned to hide them better.
Their rampant and sudden(ish) adoption of HTML5 + Javascript for Win8 kind of screams E&E to me. Maybe not yet, but I suspect it will come. They have plenty of home-grown technologies that could easily be extended to provide support for all the new Metro flashies, but have chosen to roll their ball down the HTML5 slope under the slogan of "openness".
Which is great, until they decide to slam the door after a large portion of the user base has gone through it.
Think how much strife web devs have gone through over the years trying to make their sites compatible with both IE and FF (and all of their various incompatible versions.. and nowadays Safari and Chrome as well)? Well take that, and consider how fun it will be when all of those same issues apply to standalone, local applications?
And of course they've got no short history of explicitly adding proprietary extensions to open standards. They got slammed for trying to do that with Java, and hopefully that will set some precedent, but HTML5 and JS are, as far as I know, not yet legally protected from MS' tactics.
Consider how this will play out. They take a truly open standard such as HTML5, implement it as perfectly as possible. And then add something.
MS products will be able to accurately display web pages developed on Linux or OSX or any other system you care to name that follows the HTML5 standard. So it doesn't matter what the back-end is running, the front-end works beautifully.
Now add something. Doesn't have to be much, and almost certainly will be based in the client side and transparent to the server. MS products are still compatible with 100% of all HTML5 websites out there, but non-MS browsers are no longer compatible with any website that happens to use MS' extension.
Doesn't even have to be anything breaking or even terribly complex. Something like a fancier hook to the Metro UI for example -- add a start page link when IE is your default browser? Get realtime updates for.. whatever. With FF as your default browser? Get a static icon. In both cases and with both browsers, the website itself would work fine.
But those little bits of flair can add up. Imagine the usability difference it would make for something like Twitter or Facebook (or heck, Slashdot) if you had a basic feed on the desktop and didn't need to ever load up the full page unless something caught your attention?
Oh well. We can hope and pray that MS will avoid being evil this go-round, but my guess is that retrospect will eventually show a continuation of business as usual.
Sure. Lets not bother spending tax money on public roads either. Buses and subways are out of the question. Why do we need a fire department anyway? Or a police force?
Oh hell that last one isn't so bad. You can just add not getting robbed to not getting sick in your nightly prayer, which is the only thing separating most Americans from hospital-induced destitution. And if there's no police to catch criminals, we can just save even more by not needing a legal system to prosecute them!
You're completely ignoring the costs of safety and waste handling in the fission reactor. Those are both VERY expensive in themselves (and the latter has for a large part just been put off with temporary solutions until "something better" can be done with the stuff that's cheap enough to be economically viable, so there may not even be a full accounting of the waste handling costs yet.)
Not to mention that the cost of producing the materials needed for fusion is likely to drastically drop once there's been some research in production (as opposed to properties and suitability research.) Probably still won't be cheap, but it should get a lot cheaper. So looking at the cost of cutting-edge experimental materials when they're brand new doesn't have a whole lot of relevance to their potential cost once they're no longer cutting-edge.
other than the time spent on the creative part
For any decently sized creative project, this can be a significant amount of time. And oddly enough, the people spending this time creating require things like food and housing, which all costs money.
So they can either get a day job, and seriously cut into their creative time (and often creativity itself is diminished when you're tired after working all week.)
Or they can get funds up front to cover their living expenses while they dedicate themselves to their endeavor. Kickstarter is merely one means of obtaining such funding.
Guess which option produces more and better creative works?
You might get two or three like that.. but if you consistently fail at your projects, chances are people will stop bothering to fund them. Nobody likes a loser.
Of course that's mandated on you using a single identity to create these projects.. but if people are regularly backing projects by entities that have no internet presence prior to starting their Kickstarter drive well.. lesson for the interwebs I guess.
And if it becomes a common place occurrence, Kickstarter will just have to come up with mechanisms to help protection against scammers. Not like that's anything unusual on the internet. Every website on the planet that's managed to garner more than a couple hundred visitors will have to deal with scammers, and the bigger they get, the more they'll have to deal with. Unfortunate, but a fact of life.
With Kickstarter, you own nothing whatever. If the company does well you get nothing, if they do poorly you get nothing, and if they walk off with your money you have no recourse.
Err no. If they do well, you get whatever they were developing. It won't generally be a a monetary reward, but it IS a reward (at least for most of us, there are things we consider rewarding other than a raw dollar sum.)
Even if your support doesn't get you a copy of the product (which is possible, especially for physical items) you still have the "reward" of knowing you've helped bring something new (and hopefully good!) into the world.
A modified version might work though.. a weekly/monthly/whatever payout of x% of the total sum over 100/x months.
Of course this still wouldn't be perfect -- there will be projects where the major portion of the funding is required lump sum. For example if someone already has their idea designed and ready to go, but needs manufacturing funded.
Perhaps what they really need is a request for a spending timeline and milestones to be created when the project is created. Prognostication is never perfect, so there would have to be a portion of the money (maybe 20%) set aside that the developer could dig into as needed, and the rest of the money gets released based on meeting milestones (.. though you'd then need to come up with a way to confirm a milestone has actually been met, so perhaps I'm just pushing the issue down the chain without solving anything..)
Because the US would never get away with passing such legislation in the path of the well-entrenched and well-funded empires that already exist -- especially when they can bill it as "communist" in the press to garner instant public disapproval.
So they're stuck with such half-assed attempts that don't really please anybody, but are close enough to status quo that they also don't piss off the powerful people and organizations (or at least, not enough to keep fighting it.)
But on the other hand, a half-assed measure is better than none at all. If nothing else, it at least opens the door to the possibility of further change in the future. One step at a time.
I don't think anyone's claiming that Youtube should be used as a replacement for real world observation.
But when your kid needs to write a report on said bugs in the back yard, why should he be limited to 20 year old copies of Britanica for research when there's so much more modern and up to date information available on the web (and gets him some early experience in learning how to filter away the crud that's also on the web -- a valuable skill in itself these days.)
Or having to manually scratch graphite onto a piece of dead tree and dealing with the hassle of manually discover and correct mistakes when your word processor can do all of that work for him and let him focus on the actual content of his report.
As for the 3 R's.. IMO those are among the best things to transition to the screen. 2+2=4 regardless of whether you use a pencil or a keypad to enter the answer. Of course, the kid could use the computer's built-in calculator to cheat.. but they could do that anyway and just copy the answer. Same goes for writing. And reading.. uhh.. a good portion of the web is text (probably a large portion if you discount the obvious industries of music, movies and porn :P.)
Remember, we don't really have a high bar to reach here. The 3 R's have been hard points to get across to students long before computers came around, and they probably still will be long after we've figured out "good" ways to teach using modern technology.
Are you sure? There were no Albert Einsteins back then.
Err no, but there were Newtons, Euclids, Aristotles, Archimedes..es (htf do you pluralize that?), etc.
There's no shortage of smart people throughout history. No matter how bad the education system is, there will always be someone who's both smart enough and dedicated enough to excel (even if excelling under those circumstances seems weak by comparison to better system.. I have little doubt that Newton could have easily understood Einstein's relativity -- maybe even come up with it on his own, provided he had the same body of other peoples' works to build from.)
But that said, yes its silly to be trying to teach the future using the tools of the past. There's a reason the new tools were invented -- they allow us to do things more efficiently.
I'd just always assumed that it was because pretty much all knights-and-wizards type shows are essentially based in Arthurian-style Britain.
Just like it would be silly to have a Western done up with a British accent ("Westerns" are essentially defined as the American West circa mid-to-late 1800s.)
As for the comparison to the traditional "stereotype" of upper class Europeans.. that can pretty much be discarded as an argument due to the fact that Britain has changed over time. The high fashion upper class people you see in these shows are usually based around the Elizabethian era, give or take a monarch or two. But definitely an entirely different period of history compared to the time of Arthur and the onset of the dark ages.
Now of course there's some language bias involved. The French, Germans, Spanish, etc all had their own upper class during the Elizabethian era, and they all inter-mingled rather frequently at balls and in court and whatnot, and they would have generally spoken the local language of whatever palace they were visiting.
The language barriers do present a problem for something like Spartacus -- even if the producer does the research and knows what languages would have been common in the time and place of setting, none of said languages would have any modern counterparts to even take an accent from. We don't really associate modern Italy with ancient Rome (for whatever reason), and you've got few other choices so may as well just pick an accent that sounds good and go with that. (The Spartacus show in particular did an interesting thing, though its been done before of course -- they used odd turns of phrases and curses that sound suitably grandiose and non-modern rather than a particular accent. How well it worked is up for debate, but not too many people would be confusing it with modern speech.)
Except that it takes energy (your own presumably, in this example) and probably tools to cut the trees down and fashion the wood. The value of the wood has increased to be sure, but it didn't happen magically -- there were other inputs involved. These other inputs are what most people (including yourself) tend to ignore when they say something like "wealth has increased." Abstract concepts like usefulness, quality of life and dollar value may have increased, but you haven't added anything physical to the world.
And yes, wealth is pretty much exactly reducible to thermodynamics (or some high-level approximation there of.) Real wealth (as opposed to abstract dollar amounts) must be based on physical items if you take things far enough down the line.
"Increasing" wealth is more a question of us being better at utilizing the materials available to use -- including making better tools which help us make even more materials available for use and so on. But at no point to we -create- anything. If we could just infinitely create wealth out of nothing, then communism would work a lot better than it does, and we'd all be able to live like kings!
Remember, dollar value is not wealth. Having more dollars allows you to buy wealth, but you're depriving somebody else of said wealth. But at the end of the day, a dollar value is just some abstract concept that we attach to items with little to no correlation to the material wealth that the item represents. (Dollar value is based on supply and demand, which is loosely correlated with wealth distribution, but it can be VERY loose when you get into things like intellectual property where the physical value of the item is so absurdly small that you're effectively pitting pure greed against demand and the supply curve can be ignored to a large extent.)
Infinite wealth is also obvious. If you really believe that wealth is finite, then you believe that we have no more wealth than a cave man? We have no more wealth than a settler in the old west?
I would call that a true statement, providing that you include the earth itself in "we"*. We've found better ways to access and utilize the wealth we've got, but we haven't created anything new that didn't come from either the ground or baser resources (that somewhere along the line, comes from the ground.)
* We'd also have to include the food/growth energy gained from the sun (or other extraterrestrial sources) to get a complete summation of wealth over time!
Except that you're ignoring the energy, tools, work, R&D and every other factor that goes into increasing the wealth of that lump of gold. Luckily we can value much of that low enough that it can be ignored (in particular, if you trace person hours back far enough you'll eventually come to energy from the sun.. which is so incredibly plentiful that its close to worthless for all practical purposes -- but "close to" is not "equal to!")
And for fun we can look at it from another angle -- if there's no more lumps of gold in the ground to get, then you've really hit a limit. There's only finite gold in the ground and once its gone its gone. You can re-purpose the gold you've already got to make more useful artifacts (by putting in extra time and energy) but you can't just make more gold (.. discounting atomic processes, but then your source material falls under the same argument so you've not gained anything in net.)
Bah. "even THAT wealth" in the last line. Hate noticing things just as I hit post!
Actually, he made it out of computers, electricity, paper, etc.. and most especially man hours, which is also a resource.
The fact that he had a fairly long stretch where Microsoft was lucky enough to be able to sell at a high overall margin doesn't mean he made wealth out of nothing.
And in fact even if Windows magically appeared one day, his dollars still didn't come from nowhere -- they came from people who purchased Windows. And those people had to get their dollars from somewhere. Recursively apply the argument enough times and you'll eventually come to natural resources (with a lot of value adds along the way for labor and greed and such.)
Also keep in mind that increasing total money doesn't necessarily increase wealth. If we decide that we don't like cents anymore and just edict that we drop the decimal from all dollar amounts, suddenly everyone looks 100 times richer on paper. But they're no wealthier in reality because everything they need to purchase is also 100 times more expensive.
Wealth can only be redistributed. The raw numbers increase over time, but any actual wealth _creation_ is done by digging things out of the ground (or indirectly from the sun, in the case of industries such as farming).
And even THAT well isn't really being "created", its simply being accessed (which is just another form of redistributing the wealth.. in this case from nature to people.)
Which is a half-argument at best. "Efficient" anything costs less money pretty much by definition. And certainly "small" tends to be more efficient than "large" as less support structure is needed.
But the argument fails to address the question of whether "small and efficient" still manages to get the job done. A Honda Civic is certainly smaller and more efficient than a 747, but its still a rather stupid comparison because a 747 can do things that a Honda Civic simply can't. Namely, lift hundreds (thousands) of tons of plane, cargo, fuel etc a couple miles into the air (and move a hell of a lot faster while doing so.)
So let me understand this logic. Some scientist somewhere makes a claim that the conservatives don't like. So they question his (or her!) methods. Ok that's a perfectly valid thing to do, and challenging results is an important part of science.
Its the next step that I don't quite get: "Therefore, any science that disagrees with me is bad."
Err what? That's a hell of a logical leap. If you want to question someone's methods, then go right ahead and do so. But do it scientifically by presenting your own evidence (and you better make damned sure your own methods are rock solid otherwise you're only being hypocritical!)
I mean something like environmental protection. I can see why people would take to the tactic of just writing off any claim that they don't like as "bad methodology." There's big money on the line and the environment is a hell of a complex thing to study, so you can always make some sort of weak claim that the scientist in question missed something. Its terribly short-sighted, but money people have never cared about much past the next quarterly or annual report, and there's little chance that we'll ever convince them to think 50 or 100 years into the future.
Something like evolution though I have no idea what the point of all the backlash is. Its like people are bitching just because they can. Are they all so weak in their faith such that refuting some small part of their magic book somehow invalidates their entire belief structure?