If you haven't read the book, you shouldn't see the movie. So if some of this stuff is a spoiler to you YOU DESERVE IT I've said this a thousand times... watching this movie without reading the books will RUIN the experience. Don't miss out on some of the greatest literature of the 20th century, read the book(s) now before it's too late!
The Lord of the Rings was, at its time, groundbreaking and innovative. But it was still badly written and poorly designed.
The climax of the entire story happens less than halfway through the final book, and is done via the predestined actions of a minor character. Most of the really good parts happen off camera-; rather than actually capturing them in prose, Tolkien decided to simply suggest them--thus making each person imagine them by themself.
Yes, it was groundbreaking. Yes, I wouldn't have either my favorite genre or my favorite game without it. But it was hardly among "the greatest literature of the 20th century." Most important maybe, but not "greatest."
"There was a lot missing in the movie from the book."
Nothing in the world makes people do more insane and idiotic things, then the belief that their invisible man in the sky is more right and valid then your invisible man in the sky...
Close. Actually, what drives the insane and idiotic things is that they think that they know the one Invisible Man in the Sky better than the other guy.
Irish Catholics & Irish Protestants both worship the exact same God, Arabic Muslims claim to worship the exact same God as the Jews they hate... etc, etc.
Which is a pity, because it was the only movie which came close to the core of what Star Trek was all about. Ie, not just space battles. But many of the kids doesn't like it (not enough action presumably)
Acutally, it had as many space battles than First Contact (1). It just pulled this edenesque paradise out of nowhere, and a new villian out of nowhere. And that whole 'eternal moment' thing was a stretch.
"If you need a police state to enforce your laws, then your laws are wrong."
Obviously, speed limits, domestic abuse laws, and safety codes are all wrong. We should let people sort out the speed limit among themselves, keep familiy business within families, and just trust in capitalism's free hand to ferret out unsafe building practices...
Or maybe there ARE some good laws that we need police to enforce. I think the better application of your quote would be "If you need a police state to enforce your laws, then YOU are wrong."
In that case, everyone involved in the phone listing, record keeping, and such, is a criminal. As pointed out in the article, the reporter mainly collected publicy available data.... I don't see how he can possibly be tagged as criminal for that...
Not "criminal". Criminals are booked and go to jail, or at least are booked. The problem is "terrorists" and "potential criminals", who don't do anything illegal up until they committ an act which harms a good many relatively innocent people.
A legal act with a high probability of causing harm to others is a legal act that needs to be watched. If you buy a gun, the government needs to know who you are and you need to produce the gun when the police ask you where it is. If you drive a car, the government needs to know that you know how to drive a car & that you drive that car (relatively) safetly.
Whether or not gathering public data about someone in an easy-to-find place is a dangerous act is something altogether different. If it is, then safeguards should be in place either against it or to watch those that do it. If it isn't--well, then the feds can find something better to do with their taxpayer-funded time.
Then, it's just a matter of training for people to understand that they need to copy their completed work up to their shared disk space on the server when they get a chance. If you keep the versions of software on the server and on the laptops the same, all should go pretty smoothly.
If you're doing this as a company-wide thing, it shouldn't be too hard to setup a "briefcase" or "iFolder" style system, where the "documents" folder on the laptop is synced on a regular basis with a document server.
I suppose the question becomes, "Is Stephen Hawking a scientist?"
No. He's an apparantly brilliant theoreticist. But unless he devises and helps organize experiments for his ideas, he's not a scientist.
And until his ideas ARE tested, they shouldn't be considered as "true" or even an ancilliary part of scientific dogma. At least, not if scientists want to maintian that they're after truth, and not merely members of an atheist church.
Does this mean that we should not be allowed to consider theoretical physicists and cosmologists real scientists until technology matures to the point where their hypotheses can be tested?
No, we shouldn't. They can be honored and even paid for out of "science budgets", but they're not doing science anymore than altar boys are performing marriages.
I submit that scientists are people who put forth rational hypotheses based on whatever incomplete information is available, and are prepared to test their hypotheses--or allow others to do so--when technology and funding allow.
Does that mean that my hypothesis of an extant god who wishes to test our faith makes me a scientist? I'm more than willing to test my belief when the opportunity arises, but science isn't quite at the point where we can speak to departed souls...
Unless the hypothesis is being tested AND being found to not need major revisions, it shouldn't be considered either good science or a real Theory--no matter how smart the person saying it is.
Real scientists should be able to recognize the difference between a hypothesis and an accepted theory and trust the two accordingly.
Bullocks.
A real scientist should trust ONLY that which is proven by objective and replicable emperical data. If they want to believe in more than that, they can on their own personal time.
When they put on their lab coat and "scientist hat," they need to put their religious biases and hero-worship aside and be as unemotional as they can possibly be. Anything less, and we risk sliding back to "knowledge by decree" rather than the basic underpinings of science.
What do you mean "If you aren't testing your hypothesis with real experiments, you're not doing science!"? Theoretical physicists are discussing things, making new ideas that other physicists are able to experiment with.
It's conjecture. It's a vital part of science, sure, but it's not "science" anymore than near-future Science Fiction is.
If you're just TALKING about what a bridge might look like, and you're not writing anything down or taking any measurements or doing any math, you're not engineering--even if your conversation leads to that bridge's construction.
A part of doing science is thinking and coming up with new ideas. Conjecture is just a huge part of it. Science is deffinatly not a subset of engineering. It takes someone with a different mind to be a scientist and I don't think that people who don't understand this should knock it. And I am not just saying this to you because I say it to my family as well, they are all engineers and hate the fact that I am doing physics.
You are not different. You are not special. It does NOT take a differnet type of mind to be a scientist--or rather, if it does, you and almost no one living has that special mind.
Forget about your rebellion against your Engineering-family for a minute. Science is based on the concept of testing ideas; Engineering is implementing those ideas. Were it not for Science, Engineering would continue just fine at its current rate--but were it not for engineering, science would be nothing more objectively truthful than fever dreams and religious theology.
So right now I am working on my own ideas(only through conjecture, not expermenting yet) as I am studying to finish my degrees, do you think that I am not doing science because I think I am.
You are NOT doing science. You are conjecturing, which could be an important first step, but until you're doing semi-regular experiments it's not science.
Don't get me wrong: conjecture and speculation are important, and without them science wouldn't exist. But Science needs conjecture/speculation, then research, then experimentation, and then revision.
If you're just speculating, you're a person.
If you're just speculating and researching, you're a scholar.
If you're just speculating, researching, and "experimenting", you're an engineer.
If you speculate, research, experiment, and revise, then and only then are you a science-doing scientist.
You are near the road that is science, but you aren't on it yet. You're probably further along than I am, but you're not there yet.
The marketplace falls apart when a key component is run by a cartel.
The publishing world is hardly a cartel. There is no part of the market that cannot be replaced by a completely independing company.
It might be DOMINATED by a cartel, but it's entirely possible to work in the publishing industry without ever going near that cartel.
I'm tempted to say "Go Communism!".
That, oddly enough, would make the whole darn thing much easier. Rather than creating an artifical good in copyright, we can simply award artists a more priviledged life / excuse them from other work once they get a certain number of readers.
It's really a shame that Communism tried to win via military rather than economy. The mix-up of the cold war is going to forver taint what might very well have been a viable economic system.
(And tying the Red's militant atheism into the mix is just a whole different ball of wax... if Communism was better in any way, it seems clear that God wanted it to fail.)
On the other hand, if there were any other way to bring us to him, other than the cross, don't you think he would have done it? If the Jewish traditions, or Bhuddism, or greek mythology or whatever were enough, wouldn't Jesus simply have come down and preached one of those, instead of allowing himself to be crucified?
Actually, it's entirely possible that every major religion--not just Christianity--is necessary for us to know God. Sure, I believe that Christianity has the facts right and is the most important, but I still think that God would have done something about the others if they didn't have something work keeping.
Abraham never knew Jesus' name, or said, "Jesus, come into my heart" or anything like that; but he is considered (by Christians) the father of everyone who has faith in Jesus.
Jesus, as the Word of God, is the motive force of the Almighty and is the part of that Supreme Being most concerned with us feeble mortal humans.
IMO, saying "no man gets to God save through Jesus" is akin to saying "no one gets into a car but through the openings in that car."
Yikes. What kind of engineering does a theoretical physicist do? I mean the sort that develops models of the universe, not the sort that builds supercolliders.
What kind of SCIENCE does a theoretical physicist do? If they're discussing things that are never tested, then they're simply engaging in conjecture, not science.... Similarly, many scientists (the experimentalists, at least)...
I don't know if I can say this loud enough:
If you aren't testing your hypothesis with real experiments, you're not doing science!
Einstein spent years conjecturing about the nature of relativity in his home. It wasn't until he could make and test a prediction based on his hypothesis that he could be considered to be doing science--and it's not until the hypothesis could be tested that it became at all proper to call it a theory in the scientific sense of the word.
No one should have to pay a per-person renumeration. If I buy a book or CD, I should be able to loan that book or CD without anyone having to pay a fee for the use of the item. After all, I paid for a copy and short of illegally reproducing it I should be able to do with it as I see fit.
Why? There is no ethical reason why you can't just take it down to the photocopy machine and run off a hundred copies.
The compulsion behind adherence to copyright law is strictly legal-ethical. It's enforcement of the law as written that gets the author of that book compensation for the considerable effort of making said book.
I'm advocating (in this thread, at least) a different model, where the linchpin activity that incurrs a debt to the author isn't "copying", it's "reading."
Now... since the issue here is e-books, I admit that I don't know much about them. However it would seem to me that the information should be able to be stored on some kind of disk that could be treated, in the end, just like a book. I don't know if this is how it's being done now, but it does make logical sense. Have a small data card like a compactflash or smartmedia card with the book stored on it and sell it for the price of the book.
I've always wondered why e-books aren't sold on hardwired gameboy-like cartidges. Sure, it'd involve shipping a real product, but it'd have all the "benefits" of ebooks over regular books...
And Bookstores aren't going to vanish because of public libraries. If that was going to happen it would have happened by now. People with the money for it go out and pay for the book so they have it for their libraries because it benefits them more to own the book.
Here's the thing, my migrane-plauged friend.
If the author always gets a fee for someone reading the book, and they have to pay for the printing of every copy of the book, then they're going to set up "leanding centers" which would work almost exactly like libraries, and would be the place where folks can get the paper medium of their books.
It's that the Wai Wai (and many other cultures) WE'RE treated as children who didn't know any better, and were thus introduced to 'civilization' by missionaries/conqureors
So let me get this straight:
The Wai Wai are better off not knowing how to write & without the option of using modern technology (such as germ theory) in their culture?
Spreading civilization is a GOOD thing. Sure, some people often suffer from it--but missionaries (especially MODERN missionaries) have a much smaller chance of really harming the natives than a conquerer does.
You are going on the assumption that there is some reason to believe that Christianity is "right" and that local belief systems are "wrong." That's simply not the case.
In that case, the neighboring locals can laugh at the misconduct of this small tribe.
Yes, it is. These people probably had a rich cultural heritage and religious views that were passed down from generation to generation in stories. Losing that so that they can be added to the Catholic Church's list of conquests is very sad.
Bullocks. If there's anything worth keeping, it'll be kept.
Look how well the native americans lost their culture and heritage to the converting of the colonists. (What? They're still around? Gosh!)
The fact is, if it wasn't missionaries--who, for the ignorant, aren't all catholic--it would be some other entity with a use for the land. Missionares actually care about the people, even if they have a nonscientific judge of it.
Let's compare the morality of the missionary to that of the exploratory scientist, who only wants them for personal or ethnocentric scientific gain, or the businessman, who only wants them for their market / land.
Instead of a view-based model, I think that the future of copyright is a permanently-licensed right model, with expenses paid catagorically for by the author (for libraries and distribution) and the reader (for extra copies.)
Oh, and we HAVE an illiterate subclass that can't afford to learn to read--oh, wait, there are schools for that, even if you're an adult...
A tribe that small, in that remote of a location, and Christians still feel the need to impose their religion on them. Quite sad.
Hardly.
Let's assume, for the sake of understanding the Christian missionaries, that they ARE right, and that life now and hereafter DOES get better if you're a Christian.
Given _just that_, it makes sense to want to expose as many people as possible to their religion.
Now, if we discard the "the Christians are right" assumption and simply look at it from a general standpoint, it STILL isn't "sad." It's not like they're requiring them to make pilgrimages to Rome (Muslim tradition) or give up temporal desires (Bhuddism).
It's a form of charity, which, seeing as most of humanity thinks that clothing is a good thing, can be concluded as more than cultural self-interest and being real honest charity.
Please, drop your anti-Christian/anti-religion bias. If everyone in the world had computers, you wouldn't call Linux (over BSD or the existing-and-never-upgraded-DOS) advocates "sad" now, would you?
And I will bet you a nickel those contracts say nothing about rental fees on pay-per-view e-books.
I'm sure that they do--either as "all other sales are at x%" or "all other sales must be negotiated seperately."
(For the record, I can't stand the idea of pay-per-view books. The only equitable electronic systems are "as many nontransferable copies as you want" or "one transferable copy.")
I'm not sure that you can divide some work into that done by engineers and scientists so easily.
Science and Engineering are clear words, and any task can be clearly labled as "Science" (where the product is knowledge) or "Engineering" (where the product is application of knowledge.)
The proper form is for "Scientists" to do complex "Engineering" tasks so as to fund their "science". And, of course, in doing the "Science" they'll probably have to do some "engineering" to get it to work.
"Scientist" should probably be a subset of "engineer", as it's always easier to apply knowledge than to improve upon it. (Though, of course, an "engineer" with as much schooling as a "scientist" should be just as valueable, if not more...)
what about when people donate their already read books to the library? i know my library gets a lot of books that way.
It depends on how much we'd be changing the system--specifically, who pays for the printing of the books.
Currently, YOU pay for the printing of books that you buy, and so you can do with that paper whatever you want.
But if we switched to a "pay per lifetime right to use" model, the actual copy of the book would be irrelevant. Your sublicensed copyright on the book would let you make as many or as few copies as you wanted, although you could only give them to those that had paid their "right to use" fee.
In the model I suggested, libraries wouldn't pay for their copies, the author would. Only the most efficient distributions would be used--meaning that the author would pay for the physical books in the library, and anyone wanting a copy for their own would need a "right to use" fee and would have to pay for their own physical copy if they wanted one.
(And the authors would still sell some physical copies, using either a salesman or a printer model.)
Donation of a copy to a library means that the library has another copy. This might get sold to someone else with the right to the book, recycled, or kept on the shelves to supplement the current book schema.
The idea is to move from a physical copy-based market to a virtual rights-based sysem.
I'd think that already popular authors could make a killing doing this. And up and coming authors shouldn't find it too difficult to make at least some money out of the deal.
In this ad market? HAH!
Imagine a smart guy opening storydot.org where an author can post a chapter of his story at a time. Instead of sections about apple, linux, and M$, you could have a section for each book.
A blog style is wrong. What's needed, instead, is a rights-management system done properly--where you either buy the right to use the media (and get as many copies as you want but can't give them to anyone) or one copy of the media (that you can transfer and that automatically deletes itself.)
I really cannot see what, exactly, publishers do these days besides exploiting 99.9% of the authors out there just to pay Oprah to reccomend 0.1% on her show.
There's these three little things called Distribution, Marketing, and Printing. Not every book winds up on Oprah, but just about every book I've seen has ads on the extra paper in the last signature & new releases tend to have promotional web sites, flyers, cardboard displays, etc. etc.
Yes, but one of the points of borrowing books at the library is that (as long as you pay the late fees if you go overdue) you get the use of the book for free.
Yes, it is. But if we got rid of bookstores (and other copyright-vendors) and ONLY had libraries, we'd still want some structured nonoptional mechanism to repay the authors/coders.
It may be something that could be "paid for out of the pockets of the readers without too much trouble", but it would be much the same as suddenly being charged a quarter to download the linux source off of a public universities public servers, as tax dollars also go to support public universities. You could be very much able to pay it but it is the principle of the thing.
If that quarter went to those who wrote the linux source contained on the disk (or even just split between Linus and the FSF), I doubt that you'd complain.
Public spaces can provide a commons, but they shouldn't subsidize the per-person renumeration. Simply paying for the cost of the middleman is sufficient deduction for "my tax dollars."
Hmm... I wonder if we could get Windows to work on the same schema...;)
No you didn't. But you did indirectly state that there was no law and order in America before1700 or so. Something which I think is clearly wrong.
Not law and order. "people working together who are not kin." It's possible that it WAS that way prior to the coloinal settlement (especially for very broad values of "kin.")
As for paganism, my bad, but I didn't think my english was bad enough for anyone being able to think that I think paganism = the concept of people working together for a common good. I just oppose the common opinion that the concept of people working together for a common good is something inherited from the ancient greek and heritage of western civilization, it's not.
Ah. It's not the social aspect of the human pack instinct that could have originated from the "western civilization"--it's the version of democracy where the "pack" has no clear leader and nebulous membership requirements.
I'm pretty sure that a "book" , as in a collection of paper with words on it, cannot be copyrighted, so as long as I don't make money off of it, how is it violating copyright if I let someone else "see" (I'm not talking about copying the book, just one copy)
The book is protected by copyright law, which is interpreted by judges. There ARE thigns you can do with a book (cut out the prints and sell them seperately) that don't involve making copies but are still copyright violations.
We never had to pay an author before for trading in a book, why should the model change now? Content should be paid for once. Continual payment to use it is just crap.
The model used to be "one payment for one physical copy."
Computers threaten to destory this model, so we have two options:
* The "Pay per use" option * the "one payment for one person's use" option, which I'd prefer.
If a book I write is read by a million people, and I get $.50 from each of those people, I've got $500,000 and can quit my job and go back to school, suddenly having more money from doing what I want to do and making a million people happy, and getting myself such funds that it could pay me my current salary for thirty years.
I don't care if those million people buy a physical book, or just go into a database of "people who can read Planesdragon's book."
Goes to show that the written word is a de-valued commodity in the information age; same goes for music (napster). If you want to make money, figure out a way to do something that a billion other people aren't doing (i.e. typing, writing, and playing musical instruments).
Like what? Playing with computer code? Flipping hamburgers? Lying to the public?
There are a LOT of people who want to write books or play instruments for a living. Most of them suck.
The written word wasn't worth all that much after the printing press--but the gov't stepped in to make sure that the authors didn't get screwed. Copyright, in this form, has been with us for longer than any work has been or ever will be covered by it, and no one's had a good objection to it.
The key to ebooks et al is TRANSFER of the copies. If I buy an ebook, I should be able to give that book to any one person that I want to.
A low-level switch from "copy" to "move" as a default for these files would do the trick. But since that's not technically feasible (for a whole lot of reasons), a physical tie-in would be the best.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not trying to be anti-copyright here, Authors should definitely recieve royalties - just not from a public library that my tax dollars went to fund.
They do, chuckwhite. Unless the author donated the book, they get a cut of the sale to the library.
That is, after all, why your tax dollars are paying something to the library. So it can get new books.
Actually, in the future I think it'd be grand if authors got a little bit of money (a few pennies) everytime someone outside their family checks out one of their books that was still copywritten. Cut out the middleman, streamline the publishing biz, and keep the economic incentive for authors to keep writing things people want to read.
Hmm... if a book costs $5 to get on the library shelves and the author gets $0.25 from each read, once it's been read twenty times they make pure profit... and that could even be paid for out of the pockets of the readers without too much trouble.
Slashdot Mirror
If you haven't read the book, you shouldn't see the movie. So if some of this stuff is a spoiler to you YOU DESERVE IT I've said this a thousand times... watching this movie without reading the books will RUIN the experience. Don't miss out on some of the greatest literature of the 20th century, read the book(s) now before it's too late!
The Lord of the Rings was, at its time, groundbreaking and innovative. But it was still badly written and poorly designed.
The climax of the entire story happens less than halfway through the final book, and is done via the predestined actions of a minor character. Most of the really good parts happen off camera-; rather than actually capturing them in prose, Tolkien decided to simply suggest them--thus making each person imagine them by themself.
Yes, it was groundbreaking. Yes, I wouldn't have either my favorite genre or my favorite game without it. But it was hardly among "the greatest literature of the 20th century." Most important maybe, but not "greatest."
"There was a lot missing in the movie from the book."
"What?"
"All the parts that sucked, for one..."
Nothing in the world makes people do more insane and idiotic things, then the belief that their invisible man in the sky is more right and valid then your invisible man in the sky...
Close. Actually, what drives the insane and idiotic things is that they think that they know the one Invisible Man in the Sky better than the other guy.
Irish Catholics & Irish Protestants both worship the exact same God, Arabic Muslims claim to worship the exact same God as the Jews they hate... etc, etc.
Which is a pity, because it was the only movie which came close to the core of what Star Trek was all about. Ie, not just space battles. But many of the kids doesn't like it (not enough action presumably)
Acutally, it had as many space battles than First Contact (1). It just pulled this edenesque paradise out of nowhere, and a new villian out of nowhere. And that whole 'eternal moment' thing was a stretch.
"If you need a police state to enforce your laws, then your laws are wrong."
Obviously, speed limits, domestic abuse laws, and safety codes are all wrong. We should let people sort out the speed limit among themselves, keep familiy business within families, and just trust in capitalism's free hand to ferret out unsafe building practices...
Or maybe there ARE some good laws that we need police to enforce. I think the better application of your quote would be "If you need a police state to enforce your laws, then YOU are wrong."
In that case, everyone involved in the phone listing, record keeping, and such, is a criminal. As pointed out in the article, the reporter mainly collected publicy available data.... I don't see how he can possibly be tagged as criminal for that...
Not "criminal". Criminals are booked and go to jail, or at least are booked. The problem is "terrorists" and "potential criminals", who don't do anything illegal up until they committ an act which harms a good many relatively innocent people.
A legal act with a high probability of causing harm to others is a legal act that needs to be watched. If you buy a gun, the government needs to know who you are and you need to produce the gun when the police ask you where it is. If you drive a car, the government needs to know that you know how to drive a car & that you drive that car (relatively) safetly.
Whether or not gathering public data about someone in an easy-to-find place is a dangerous act is something altogether different. If it is, then safeguards should be in place either against it or to watch those that do it. If it isn't--well, then the feds can find something better to do with their taxpayer-funded time.
Then, it's just a matter of training for people to understand that they need to copy their completed work up to their shared disk space on the server when they get a chance. If you keep the versions of software on the server and on the laptops the same, all should go pretty smoothly.
If you're doing this as a company-wide thing, it shouldn't be too hard to setup a "briefcase" or "iFolder" style system, where the "documents" folder on the laptop is synced on a regular basis with a document server.
I suppose the question becomes, "Is Stephen Hawking a scientist?"
No. He's an apparantly brilliant theoreticist. But unless he devises and helps organize experiments for his ideas, he's not a scientist.
And until his ideas ARE tested, they shouldn't be considered as "true" or even an ancilliary part of scientific dogma. At least, not if scientists want to maintian that they're after truth, and not merely members of an atheist church.
Does this mean that we should not be allowed to consider theoretical physicists and cosmologists real scientists until technology matures to the point where their hypotheses can be tested?
No, we shouldn't. They can be honored and even paid for out of "science budgets", but they're not doing science anymore than altar boys are performing marriages.
I submit that scientists are people who put forth rational hypotheses based on whatever incomplete information is available, and are prepared to test their hypotheses--or allow others to do so--when technology and funding allow.
Does that mean that my hypothesis of an extant god who wishes to test our faith makes me a scientist? I'm more than willing to test my belief when the opportunity arises, but science isn't quite at the point where we can speak to departed souls...
Unless the hypothesis is being tested AND being found to not need major revisions, it shouldn't be considered either good science or a real Theory--no matter how smart the person saying it is.
Real scientists should be able to recognize the difference between a hypothesis and an accepted theory and trust the two accordingly.
Bullocks.
A real scientist should trust ONLY that which is proven by objective and replicable emperical data. If they want to believe in more than that, they can on their own personal time.
When they put on their lab coat and "scientist hat," they need to put their religious biases and hero-worship aside and be as unemotional as they can possibly be. Anything less, and we risk sliding back to "knowledge by decree" rather than the basic underpinings of science.
What do you mean "If you aren't testing your hypothesis with real experiments, you're not doing science!"? Theoretical physicists are discussing things, making new ideas that other physicists are able to experiment with.
It's conjecture. It's a vital part of science, sure, but it's not "science" anymore than near-future Science Fiction is.
If you're just TALKING about what a bridge might look like, and you're not writing anything down or taking any measurements or doing any math, you're not engineering--even if your conversation leads to that bridge's construction.
A part of doing science is thinking and coming up with new ideas. Conjecture is just a huge part of it. Science is deffinatly not a subset of engineering. It takes someone with a different mind to be a scientist and I don't think that people who don't understand this should knock it. And I am not just saying this to you because I say it to my family as well, they are all engineers and hate the fact that I am doing physics.
You are not different. You are not special. It does NOT take a differnet type of mind to be a scientist--or rather, if it does, you and almost no one living has that special mind.
Forget about your rebellion against your Engineering-family for a minute. Science is based on the concept of testing ideas; Engineering is implementing those ideas. Were it not for Science, Engineering would continue just fine at its current rate--but were it not for engineering, science would be nothing more objectively truthful than fever dreams and religious theology.
So right now I am working on my own ideas(only through conjecture, not expermenting yet) as I am studying to finish my degrees, do you think that I am not doing science because I think I am.
You are NOT doing science. You are conjecturing, which could be an important first step, but until you're doing semi-regular experiments it's not science.
Don't get me wrong: conjecture and speculation are important, and without them science wouldn't exist. But Science needs conjecture/speculation, then research, then experimentation, and then revision.
If you're just speculating, you're a person.
If you're just speculating and researching, you're a scholar.
If you're just speculating, researching, and "experimenting", you're an engineer.
If you speculate, research, experiment, and revise, then and only then are you a science-doing scientist.
You are near the road that is science, but you aren't on it yet. You're probably further along than I am, but you're not there yet.
The marketplace falls apart when a key component is run by a cartel.
The publishing world is hardly a cartel. There is no part of the market that cannot be replaced by a completely independing company.
It might be DOMINATED by a cartel, but it's entirely possible to work in the publishing industry without ever going near that cartel.
I'm tempted to say "Go Communism!".
That, oddly enough, would make the whole darn thing much easier. Rather than creating an artifical good in copyright, we can simply award artists a more priviledged life / excuse them from other work once they get a certain number of readers.
It's really a shame that Communism tried to win via military rather than economy. The mix-up of the cold war is going to forver taint what might very well have been a viable economic system.
(And tying the Red's militant atheism into the mix is just a whole different ball of wax... if Communism was better in any way, it seems clear that God wanted it to fail.)
On the other hand, if there were any other way to bring us to him, other than the cross, don't you think he would have done it? If the Jewish traditions, or Bhuddism, or greek mythology or whatever were enough, wouldn't Jesus simply have come down and preached one of those, instead of allowing himself to be crucified?
Actually, it's entirely possible that every major religion--not just Christianity--is necessary for us to know God. Sure, I believe that Christianity has the facts right and is the most important, but I still think that God would have done something about the others if they didn't have something work keeping.
Abraham never knew Jesus' name, or said, "Jesus, come into my heart" or anything like that; but he is considered (by Christians) the father of everyone who has faith in Jesus.
Jesus, as the Word of God, is the motive force of the Almighty and is the part of that Supreme Being most concerned with us feeble mortal humans.
IMO, saying "no man gets to God save through Jesus" is akin to saying "no one gets into a car but through the openings in that car."
Yikes. What kind of engineering does a theoretical physicist do? I mean the sort that develops models of the universe, not the sort that builds supercolliders.
... Similarly, many scientists (the experimentalists, at least) ...
What kind of SCIENCE does a theoretical physicist do? If they're discussing things that are never tested, then they're simply engaging in conjecture, not science.
I don't know if I can say this loud enough:
If you aren't testing your hypothesis with real experiments, you're not doing science!
Einstein spent years conjecturing about the nature of relativity in his home. It wasn't until he could make and test a prediction based on his hypothesis that he could be considered to be doing science--and it's not until the hypothesis could be tested that it became at all proper to call it a theory in the scientific sense of the word.
No one should have to pay a per-person renumeration. If I buy a book or CD, I should be able to loan that book or CD without anyone having to pay a fee for the use of the item. After all, I paid for a copy and short of illegally reproducing it I should be able to do with it as I see fit.
Why? There is no ethical reason why you can't just take it down to the photocopy machine and run off a hundred copies.
The compulsion behind adherence to copyright law is strictly legal-ethical. It's enforcement of the law as written that gets the author of that book compensation for the considerable effort of making said book.
I'm advocating (in this thread, at least) a different model, where the linchpin activity that incurrs a debt to the author isn't "copying", it's "reading."
Now... since the issue here is e-books, I admit that I don't know much about them. However it would seem to me that the information should be able to be stored on some kind of disk that could be treated, in the end, just like a book. I don't know if this is how it's being done now, but it does make logical sense. Have a small data card like a compactflash or smartmedia card with the book stored on it and sell it for the price of the book.
I've always wondered why e-books aren't sold on hardwired gameboy-like cartidges. Sure, it'd involve shipping a real product, but it'd have all the "benefits" of ebooks over regular books...
And Bookstores aren't going to vanish because of public libraries. If that was going to happen it would have happened by now. People with the money for it go out and pay for the book so they have it for their libraries because it benefits them more to own the book.
Here's the thing, my migrane-plauged friend.
If the author always gets a fee for someone reading the book, and they have to pay for the printing of every copy of the book, then they're going to set up "leanding centers" which would work almost exactly like libraries, and would be the place where folks can get the paper medium of their books.
It's that the Wai Wai (and many other cultures) WE'RE treated as children who didn't know any better, and were thus introduced to 'civilization' by missionaries/conqureors
So let me get this straight:
The Wai Wai are better off not knowing how to write & without the option of using modern technology (such as germ theory) in their culture?
Spreading civilization is a GOOD thing. Sure, some people often suffer from it--but missionaries (especially MODERN missionaries) have a much smaller chance of really harming the natives than a conquerer does.
Methinks you might be a self-hating bigot.
You are going on the assumption that there is some reason to believe that Christianity is "right" and that local belief systems are "wrong." That's simply not the case.
In that case, the neighboring locals can laugh at the misconduct of this small tribe.
Yes, it is. These people probably had a rich cultural heritage and religious views that were passed down from generation to generation in stories. Losing that so that they can be added to the Catholic Church's list of conquests is very sad.
Bullocks. If there's anything worth keeping, it'll be kept.
Look how well the native americans lost their culture and heritage to the converting of the colonists. (What? They're still around? Gosh!)
The fact is, if it wasn't missionaries--who, for the ignorant, aren't all catholic--it would be some other entity with a use for the land. Missionares actually care about the people, even if they have a nonscientific judge of it.
Let's compare the morality of the missionary to that of the exploratory scientist, who only wants them for personal or ethnocentric scientific gain, or the businessman, who only wants them for their market / land.
Nope, not "sad" at all.
See This thread for my take on a better system.
Instead of a view-based model, I think that the future of copyright is a permanently-licensed right model, with expenses paid catagorically for by the author (for libraries and distribution) and the reader (for extra copies.)
Oh, and we HAVE an illiterate subclass that can't afford to learn to read--oh, wait, there are schools for that, even if you're an adult...
A tribe that small, in that remote of a location, and Christians still feel the need to impose their religion on them. Quite sad.
Hardly.
Let's assume, for the sake of understanding the Christian missionaries, that they ARE right, and that life now and hereafter DOES get better if you're a Christian.
Given _just that_, it makes sense to want to expose as many people as possible to their religion.
Now, if we discard the "the Christians are right" assumption and simply look at it from a general standpoint, it STILL isn't "sad." It's not like they're requiring them to make pilgrimages to Rome (Muslim tradition) or give up temporal desires (Bhuddism).
It's a form of charity, which, seeing as most of humanity thinks that clothing is a good thing, can be concluded as more than cultural self-interest and being real honest charity.
Please, drop your anti-Christian/anti-religion bias. If everyone in the world had computers, you wouldn't call Linux (over BSD or the existing-and-never-upgraded-DOS) advocates "sad" now, would you?
And I will bet you a nickel those contracts say nothing about rental fees on pay-per-view e-books.
I'm sure that they do--either as "all other sales are at x%" or "all other sales must be negotiated seperately."
(For the record, I can't stand the idea of pay-per-view books. The only equitable electronic systems are "as many nontransferable copies as you want" or "one transferable copy.")
I'm not sure that you can divide some work into that done by engineers and scientists so easily.
Science and Engineering are clear words, and any task can be clearly labled as "Science" (where the product is knowledge) or "Engineering" (where the product is application of knowledge.)
The proper form is for "Scientists" to do complex "Engineering" tasks so as to fund their "science". And, of course, in doing the "Science" they'll probably have to do some "engineering" to get it to work.
"Scientist" should probably be a subset of "engineer", as it's always easier to apply knowledge than to improve upon it. (Though, of course, an "engineer" with as much schooling as a "scientist" should be just as valueable, if not more...)
what about when people donate their already read books to the library? i know my library gets a lot of books that way.
It depends on how much we'd be changing the system--specifically, who pays for the printing of the books.
Currently, YOU pay for the printing of books that you buy, and so you can do with that paper whatever you want.
But if we switched to a "pay per lifetime right to use" model, the actual copy of the book would be irrelevant. Your sublicensed copyright on the book would let you make as many or as few copies as you wanted, although you could only give them to those that had paid their "right to use" fee.
In the model I suggested, libraries wouldn't pay for their copies, the author would. Only the most efficient distributions would be used--meaning that the author would pay for the physical books in the library, and anyone wanting a copy for their own would need a "right to use" fee and would have to pay for their own physical copy if they wanted one.
(And the authors would still sell some physical copies, using either a salesman or a printer model.)
Donation of a copy to a library means that the library has another copy. This might get sold to someone else with the right to the book, recycled, or kept on the shelves to supplement the current book schema.
The idea is to move from a physical copy-based market to a virtual rights-based sysem.
I'd think that already popular authors could make a killing doing this. And up and coming authors shouldn't find it too difficult to make at least some money out of the deal.
In this ad market? HAH!
Imagine a smart guy opening storydot.org where an author can post a chapter of his story at a time. Instead of sections about apple, linux, and M$, you could have a section for each book.
A blog style is wrong. What's needed, instead, is a rights-management system done properly--where you either buy the right to use the media (and get as many copies as you want but can't give them to anyone) or one copy of the media (that you can transfer and that automatically deletes itself.)
I really cannot see what, exactly, publishers do these days besides exploiting 99.9% of the authors out there just to pay Oprah to reccomend 0.1% on her show.
There's these three little things called Distribution, Marketing, and Printing. Not every book winds up on Oprah, but just about every book I've seen has ads on the extra paper in the last signature & new releases tend to have promotional web sites, flyers, cardboard displays, etc. etc.
Yes, but one of the points of borrowing books at the library is that (as long as you pay the late fees if you go overdue) you get the use of the book for free.
;)
Yes, it is. But if we got rid of bookstores (and other copyright-vendors) and ONLY had libraries, we'd still want some structured nonoptional mechanism to repay the authors/coders.
It may be something that could be "paid for out of the pockets of the readers without too much trouble", but it would be much the same as suddenly being charged a quarter to download the linux source off of a public universities public servers, as tax dollars also go to support public universities. You could be very much able to pay it but it is the principle of the thing.
If that quarter went to those who wrote the linux source contained on the disk (or even just split between Linus and the FSF), I doubt that you'd complain.
Public spaces can provide a commons, but they shouldn't subsidize the per-person renumeration. Simply paying for the cost of the middleman is sufficient deduction for "my tax dollars."
Hmm... I wonder if we could get Windows to work on the same schema...
No you didn't. But you did indirectly state that there was no law and order in America before1700 or so. Something which I think is clearly wrong.
Not law and order. "people working together who are not kin." It's possible that it WAS that way prior to the coloinal settlement (especially for very broad values of "kin.")
As for paganism, my bad, but I didn't think my english was bad enough for anyone being able to think that I think paganism = the concept of people working together for a common good. I just oppose the common opinion that the concept of people working together for a common good is something inherited from the ancient greek and heritage of western civilization, it's not.
Ah. It's not the social aspect of the human pack instinct that could have originated from the "western civilization"--it's the version of democracy where the "pack" has no clear leader and nebulous membership requirements.
I'm pretty sure that a "book" , as in a collection of paper with words on it, cannot be copyrighted, so as long as I don't make money off of it, how is it violating copyright if I let someone else "see" (I'm not talking about copying the book, just one copy)
The book is protected by copyright law, which is interpreted by judges. There ARE thigns you can do with a book (cut out the prints and sell them seperately) that don't involve making copies but are still copyright violations.
We never had to pay an author before for trading in a book, why should the model change now? Content should be paid for once. Continual payment to use it is just crap.
The model used to be "one payment for one physical copy."
Computers threaten to destory this model, so we have two options:
* The "Pay per use" option
* the "one payment for one person's use" option, which I'd prefer.
If a book I write is read by a million people, and I get $.50 from each of those people, I've got $500,000 and can quit my job and go back to school, suddenly having more money from doing what I want to do and making a million people happy, and getting myself such funds that it could pay me my current salary for thirty years.
I don't care if those million people buy a physical book, or just go into a database of "people who can read Planesdragon's book."
Goes to show that the written word is a de-valued commodity in the information age; same goes for music (napster). If you want to make money, figure out a way to do something that a billion other people aren't doing (i.e. typing, writing, and playing musical instruments).
Like what? Playing with computer code? Flipping hamburgers? Lying to the public?
There are a LOT of people who want to write books or play instruments for a living. Most of them suck.
The written word wasn't worth all that much after the printing press--but the gov't stepped in to make sure that the authors didn't get screwed. Copyright, in this form, has been with us for longer than any work has been or ever will be covered by it, and no one's had a good objection to it.
The key to ebooks et al is TRANSFER of the copies. If I buy an ebook, I should be able to give that book to any one person that I want to.
A low-level switch from "copy" to "move" as a default for these files would do the trick. But since that's not technically feasible (for a whole lot of reasons), a physical tie-in would be the best.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not trying to be anti-copyright here, Authors should definitely recieve royalties - just not from a public library that my tax dollars went to fund.
They do, chuckwhite. Unless the author donated the book, they get a cut of the sale to the library.
That is, after all, why your tax dollars are paying something to the library. So it can get new books.
Actually, in the future I think it'd be grand if authors got a little bit of money (a few pennies) everytime someone outside their family checks out one of their books that was still copywritten. Cut out the middleman, streamline the publishing biz, and keep the economic incentive for authors to keep writing things people want to read.
Hmm... if a book costs $5 to get on the library shelves and the author gets $0.25 from each read, once it's been read twenty times they make pure profit... and that could even be paid for out of the pockets of the readers without too much trouble.