I don't know exactly when I first read serious discussion of space debris viz. the need to clean it up, best I can figure is late '80s.
Now, thirty years later, 'they' finally have decided that it is time for action. Note the passive tense. Big difference. Until the lasers are built, targeted, and fired, the butterfly nets built and orbited, the tar-babies built and sent up (multi-layered aerogel sandwiches, maybe?), it's all so much horseshit, just as always.
Nobody's gonna actually do anything effective on a large enough scale to deal realistically with the problem until big money is lost AND lives are lost in dramatic fashion such that 'they' won't be able to run away from public and legislative pressure.
Okay, I was commenting on how proud they were (at least the way it was phrased); I'm not against the doing of a promo to stimulate sales.
I've no problem with any artist in any medium displaying their wares to prospective customers - just as happens at craft fairs, for instance.
Relating to a newer post - somebody asking if there are _any_ benefits to DRM, the simple answer is "No"; the more complicated answer includes "What have you been smoking?"
This is not meant to offend, but one problem I see is that some people apparently think that because they produce a work of art on their own hook that they are automagically entitled an income stream. To quote from the old song, "It ain't necessarily so."
No, look, I've friends over the years who've produced all manner of art, from songs, poems, sculpture, paintings, textiles, and fonts, among other stuff. Some is offered for sale, essentially to highest bidder (however informal the process), some is available if somebody makes an offer, a few things have been for-hire or other form of contract, basically a form of patronage. The rest is apportioned to gifts, decor, storage.
Few have made a living at it, regardless of how good I think it is. A larger number of them have made some money at it, anywhere from a coupla hundred to several thousands of dollars per year, averaged over, say, twenty years.
"If we eliminate pay for product... Does product cease? How do creators make money?"
First, I believe in 'pay for product'. Just as a laborer is worthy of his hire. The rub is that you've got to accept as true that the only people who pay for something are the people who want to pay for it.
(This goes back to the teaser - if folks see it, want to watch the whole thing, let 'em buy it. Understand there is no DRM in the world that will protect anything digital or that can be digitized from being copied, so don't even bother. An exception might be, DRM it, get some cash before it's copied, and then collect from whomever is gonna pay for it later on. Works for sculpture as well - somebody takes multiple-vantage point pics, models it, spits out a 3-D print of it.)
"Does product cease?" Yes and no. Big money financing big projects in the manner of the larger production houses for film and TV, I think will wane - at least if they continue with their current methods. Some alternatives are crowdfunding, pre-subscription, a bit of traditional funding (it's a gamble as always, just differing odds, just like now), fund-raising events, and whatever someone thinks up to do. The 'big' payout comes from sales before the digital copy spreads, just like now. People still go to theatres, buy DVDs. That's mainstream visual media.
We will still make our choices as we do now - download a copy or pay Amazon, Netflix, Hulu. Or both.
Realize also that, in a much deeper manner than audience members tapping their feet to a tune, some have the _need_ to create. They will do so as they've done throughout history. The luckier ones will find patronage, hire, other forms of commission. The rest will be some version of the craft-fair hopefuls. There is also still plenty of room for ad-sponsored things as well, but nowhere near as it is done today or yesteryear.
Creators will make money as they've always done, by making something that people will buy.
An aside: As someone who grew up in the Fifties, watching old and not-so-old black and white movies from the cornucopia that was early Hollywood, I'll be sad to see that whole form of the industry pretty much vanish. As someone living in the Ought-Teens, I've little choice but to take the bad with the good, hope the good folks make it; and hope the hangars-on and ten-percenters and the back-room boys finding ways to fill their pockets at the expense of those who really made the product, fade away.
Ah, crap, man, best I can come up with. I confess a bit of nostalgia. Gonna have to read a while. I thank you for the questions, made me think a bit - to what end, I can only offer my poor thoughts.
Somebody may have mentioned this, but the survey phase will be helpful to existing efforts to catalog Earth-crossing asteroids. It's easy enough to tot up the expense column. But how do you assess value if they find one that will hit unless we deflect it.?
If they did happen to find easily-gotten gold, or rich enough ore that would need smelting, one thing that could increase the collectors' item value would be to strike coins; it'd still be a one-off, but would bring a better price.
As others have pointed out, the real value of getting metals form ore in orbit would be to build stuff in orbit. Offhand, the early uses are few - using metals for structure for low-g pharmaceuticals manufacture and for solar power sats. The obvious drawback is that you have to have industrial tools in place to do so - and they'd have to come up the gravity well. Would take a good-sized money spigot to set it all up, and there's the rub. Unless they find unobtanium, payback would be lengthy. Could be a scam, but I don't see Bechtel coming in unless they're partners in that also.
I used to think the solar power sattelites as kind of obvious, but now I wonder, cuz if it's such a great idea, one might think the Saudis would be into it. They know their oil is going to run out and about all that'll be left of value to their nation is Mecca.
(For a nice quick read find "Lime's Crisis", by Ronald Bass, that includes the Saudi scenario. Would have made a good movie.)
"I hope there will be enough "old fashioned boy" in him as he grows up."
I hope so too.
Seems to me we're the last generation in U.S. to know what play is. A big part of it is getting outside and running around, tag, kick the can, whatever. A few days ago got a ride to the store from one of the people in the house, late afternoon, relatively warm. School was out, we're driving through a residential neighborhood and past a park, and I didn't see any children out playing. It seemed wrong, alien, almost.
Buckminster Fuller once postulated that the purpose of intelligence in Universe might be to counter-act entropy. Maybe tongue-in-cheek, but he though it an interesting enough question to be going on with.
Nope, right on the money. As we become more dependent on ever more complex interacting systems, if something goes haywire or breaks, we're fucked.
How do you build a fire? Who cares? Somebody else will do it. How do you grow a tomato? Who cares? Never happen. Nah, all you need is a gun to take the tomato from whoever grew it. Etc.
We're already so distanced from the world around that children today don't even know how to dress appropriately for weather conditions. (Even worse, they don't know how to play. They only consume someone else's quite narrow idea of play using specialized doodads.)
Okay, getting facts makes for more knowledge. Nice to know stuff. Taking a bunch of knowledge and learning to _understand_ something.... takes some thinking. But to do, to make, takes even more effort, often much more.
I can tell you that an inch equals 2.54 centimeters. Yippee. I can tell you how to make a square cut in a two by four. I can describe some of the things you have to do to get that square cut. But until you do it, and can actually get that square cut, you ain't learned shit.
Some here are smart, learned (the two-syllable one), and do stuff in real life for livelihood, even for invention. Yowzah! I've learned that some smart people spend a bit of time, curiosity aroused, at asking questions about how something works, why it works a particular way, how some things came to be, all kinds questions they started young and never stopped. Some read science and other subject areas even if it doesn't make them money, and further, some read science fiction. Not just for the diversion, but for the stretch.
Paul Tyma took some questions and thoughts and produced a little think piece that deals with a very large question that not a few people, smart or no, have asked for a long time, and for those who think about "stuff" outside their daily life, it's worth the read - IMO, of course. YMMV, and if it's not something of interest to you, why carp on it? [not aimed at you, Crimson, by any stretch]
Yeah, that's the thing. Being able to get signals from the car is one thing, so long as I (some app, unless I want to try to recall how to program) can do with that data as I will, not someone locking me into some app author's idea of what I'm supposed to be doing.
Being able to get good info from changes in light bulbs, for instance, means among other things a great boost for doing some interesting surveillance. Spike a building with a few of the sensors, see where people are; combine that with the short-wave stuff we have, a few other off-the-shelf items, one could gain a complete "picture" of the interior. This could help in hostage situations I imagine. Or big brother.
These Ubiqitous Computing Lab folks and others are doing some fascinating work. True geeks.
sheds some light. Background actor (guild), scale, 2003, $115/day.
Do note, please, that even many guild actors get nowhere near a 40-hour week. Harrison Ford worked as a carpenter for years, getting bit jobs here and there as an actor. Just one example of many, and most never 'hit the big time.'
How much better do you think non-union actors get paid or are treated?
Sure, but I don't know as I'd give that much import to a seven-minute tease. Had they released the entire movie, I'd be more enthusiastic. Still, foot in the door, breaking the ice, all that.
Does IT in its wide sense have more atheists than other fields? Dunno, but seems that way. Even given generally better income than many areas, does IT hold more depressives? No idea, but with the gross stress reported by many, I wouldn't be surprised. Do IT people suicide, or go postal, more, on average? Also don't know. It's 0230, by me, and inquiring minds want to know. [grin]
So yeah, could easily be flame-fodder; it's late, the editors are bored, "Hey, let's provoke some shit. Make some popcorn and get in some brewskis." OTOH, one might make an argument for relevance.
My question is, which is it, God, religion, or higher power? Only quotes I saw from study authors used higher power or religious belief. Summary here and article in first link, from McLean Hospital, sponsor of the study, used God and religion.
In AA, for instance, although higher power is used, my impression is that most folks translated that as God, even if only because they learned that concept first; the idea that there could be 'higher power' as its own thing was new to them. So, if study is correct, does it have to be God? Can it be gods? Can faith in, say, science, or unicorns or numerology count as a religion? Does a belief in higher power require the concept of God? Hand waving or no, I see a distinction in the terms. But did the participants of the study?
If a wider study was done, would any of this hold? And if more care was taken with concepts and their terms, would results vary in particulars? Would any of it matter in the practical treatment of various psychostuff?
"The article is one sided, only mentioning INCOME from this IP. It hardly addresses the defensive aspect of having this IP in their back pocket."
That's along the lines of what I thought then and now.
Doesn't have to be the most bestest arrow in the quiver, just has to work at all. IIRC there are all kinds patents in the bundle; not only may some come in handy for future cases, and some only have to be useful to Google along the way, not just defensively if only by giving pause to future trolls and whatnot, but maybe aid them in building their own tech.
Finally, tho it may be a stretch, Google might release some, whether they've derived direct benefit or no, simply to help the industry. And a side-think: if software patents were to vanish tomorrow and the USPTO published all, Google has a strong position such that I don't see them going away anytime soon. (For those with better memory, did Google hold no patents at all, only proprietary secret sauce, would their in-house dev (and acquisitions) still have given them a good vantage?)
Good catch. Slaves, peons, serfs, all the same. Today we call them citizens. Yup, and the slaves be we. Consumers all, thinkers [Quiet, citizen. Thinking is oldspeak.]
Thanks. Great quote. Explains people voting unsupportable ideology over rational self-interest. Worse, rose-colored glasses plus self-designed and -welcomed blinders.
Ah, crap. Better to know, I have to suppose. Yet....
Doctor: "You have a terminal condition." Patient: "How long have I got?" Doctor: "Do you really want to know?"
Valve said some time back that they were _starting_ with Ubuntu because it was the largest desktop distro outside of mostly-biz-only distros and because Ubuntu committed to working with Valve in getting things working right, and that they would be adding other distros as they got to them. I think we could presume Debian-based distros early on.
Kiddies? Truman was in the White House, hadn't been elected prez yet, when I was born. My life happens to have room for a few games, but to each his own.
I've got a wide-screen display so have no prob with having the Unity strip with 30%-reduced icons taking up space. I took out some stuf I don't want or use too infrequently to be useful there, and lock often-used programs instead. For me, it's a handy thing.
The first think I do with a fresh install is to get classicmenu-indicator. I want everything to be in the drop down menu. Then I adjust some of the fonts and restore scroll bars.
Biggest complaint I have is that each version lately has been making it more difficult to get to many basic adjustments. While Dash sometimes helps find something, I never got used to having to type something to get at a program - unless we're talking DOS-style prompt stuff, and I haven't used that since 8-bit days.
So long as it's recognized that among the historically strong profit makers and takers are those who make armaments, chemicals, drugs, along with booze and cosmetics.
Ya gots to look good and feel good while dosing against the wounds, pain, stress involved in selling explosives and guns to people who want to kill other people for power and thus wealth. Yes indeed, vastly better. And so it goes.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't know exactly when I first read serious discussion of space debris viz. the need to clean it up, best I can figure is late '80s.
Now, thirty years later, 'they' finally have decided that it is time for action. Note the passive tense. Big difference. Until the lasers are built, targeted, and fired, the butterfly nets built and orbited, the tar-babies built and sent up (multi-layered aerogel sandwiches, maybe?), it's all so much horseshit, just as always.
Nobody's gonna actually do anything effective on a large enough scale to deal realistically with the problem until big money is lost AND lives are lost in dramatic fashion such that 'they' won't be able to run away from public and legislative pressure.
Tang didn't come from any space program.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tang_(drink)
Yeah, but, admit it, it's a fun project.
Okay, I was commenting on how proud they were (at least the way it was phrased); I'm not against the doing of a promo to stimulate sales.
I've no problem with any artist in any medium displaying their wares to prospective customers - just as happens at craft fairs, for instance.
Relating to a newer post - somebody asking if there are _any_ benefits to DRM, the simple answer is "No"; the more complicated answer includes "What have you been smoking?"
This is not meant to offend, but one problem I see is that some people apparently think that because they produce a work of art on their own hook that they are automagically entitled an income stream. To quote from the old song, "It ain't necessarily so."
No, look, I've friends over the years who've produced all manner of art, from songs, poems, sculpture, paintings, textiles, and fonts, among other stuff. Some is offered for sale, essentially to highest bidder (however informal the process), some is available if somebody makes an offer, a few things have been for-hire or other form of contract, basically a form of patronage. The rest is apportioned to gifts, decor, storage.
Few have made a living at it, regardless of how good I think it is. A larger number of them have made some money at it, anywhere from a coupla hundred to several thousands of dollars per year, averaged over, say, twenty years.
"If we eliminate pay for product... Does product cease? How do creators make money?"
First, I believe in 'pay for product'. Just as a laborer is worthy of his hire. The rub is that you've got to accept as true that the only people who pay for something are the people who want to pay for it.
(This goes back to the teaser - if folks see it, want to watch the whole thing, let 'em buy it. Understand there is no DRM in the world that will protect anything digital or that can be digitized from being copied, so don't even bother. An exception might be, DRM it, get some cash before it's copied, and then collect from whomever is gonna pay for it later on. Works for sculpture as well - somebody takes multiple-vantage point pics, models it, spits out a 3-D print of it.)
"Does product cease?" Yes and no. Big money financing big projects in the manner of the larger production houses for film and TV, I think will wane - at least if they continue with their current methods. Some alternatives are crowdfunding, pre-subscription, a bit of traditional funding (it's a gamble as always, just differing odds, just like now), fund-raising events, and whatever someone thinks up to do. The 'big' payout comes from sales before the digital copy spreads, just like now. People still go to theatres, buy DVDs. That's mainstream visual media.
We will still make our choices as we do now - download a copy or pay Amazon, Netflix, Hulu. Or both.
Realize also that, in a much deeper manner than audience members tapping their feet to a tune, some have the _need_ to create. They will do so as they've done throughout history. The luckier ones will find patronage, hire, other forms of commission. The rest will be some version of the craft-fair hopefuls. There is also still plenty of room for ad-sponsored things as well, but nowhere near as it is done today or yesteryear.
Creators will make money as they've always done, by making something that people will buy.
An aside: As someone who grew up in the Fifties, watching old and not-so-old black and white movies from the cornucopia that was early Hollywood, I'll be sad to see that whole form of the industry pretty much vanish. As someone living in the Ought-Teens, I've little choice but to take the bad with the good, hope the good folks make it; and hope the hangars-on and ten-percenters and the back-room boys finding ways to fill their pockets at the expense of those who really made the product, fade away.
Ah, crap, man, best I can come up with. I confess a bit of nostalgia. Gonna have to read a while. I thank you for the questions, made me think a bit - to what end, I can only offer my poor thoughts.
Forgot to add:
Somebody may have mentioned this, but the survey phase will be helpful to existing efforts to catalog Earth-crossing asteroids. It's easy enough to tot up the expense column. But how do you assess value if they find one that will hit unless we deflect it.?
If they did happen to find easily-gotten gold, or rich enough ore that would need smelting, one thing that could increase the collectors' item value would be to strike coins; it'd still be a one-off, but would bring a better price.
As others have pointed out, the real value of getting metals form ore in orbit would be to build stuff in orbit. Offhand, the early uses are few - using metals for structure for low-g pharmaceuticals manufacture and for solar power sats. The obvious drawback is that you have to have industrial tools in place to do so - and they'd have to come up the gravity well. Would take a good-sized money spigot to set it all up, and there's the rub. Unless they find unobtanium, payback would be lengthy. Could be a scam, but I don't see Bechtel coming in unless they're partners in that also.
I used to think the solar power sattelites as kind of obvious, but now I wonder, cuz if it's such a great idea, one might think the Saudis would be into it. They know their oil is going to run out and about all that'll be left of value to their nation is Mecca.
(For a nice quick read find "Lime's Crisis", by Ronald Bass, that includes the Saudi scenario. Would have made a good movie.)
"I hope there will be enough "old fashioned boy" in him as he grows up."
I hope so too.
Seems to me we're the last generation in U.S. to know what play is. A big part of it is getting outside and running around, tag, kick the can, whatever. A few days ago got a ride to the store from one of the people in the house, late afternoon, relatively warm. School was out, we're driving through a residential neighborhood and past a park, and I didn't see any children out playing. It seemed wrong, alien, almost.
Buckminster Fuller once postulated that the purpose of intelligence in Universe might be to counter-act entropy. Maybe tongue-in-cheek, but he though it an interesting enough question to be going on with.
Nailed it.
Nope, right on the money. As we become more dependent on ever more complex interacting systems, if something goes haywire or breaks, we're fucked.
How do you build a fire? Who cares? Somebody else will do it.
How do you grow a tomato? Who cares? Never happen. Nah, all you need is a gun to take the tomato from whoever grew it. Etc.
We're already so distanced from the world around that children today don't even know how to dress appropriately for weather conditions. (Even worse, they don't know how to play. They only consume someone else's quite narrow idea of play using specialized doodads.)
Okay, getting facts makes for more knowledge. Nice to know stuff.
Taking a bunch of knowledge and learning to _understand_ something.... takes some thinking.
But to do, to make, takes even more effort, often much more.
I can tell you that an inch equals 2.54 centimeters. Yippee. I can tell you how to make a square cut in a two by four. I can describe some of the things you have to do to get that square cut. But until you do it, and can actually get that square cut, you ain't learned shit.
Some here are smart, learned (the two-syllable one), and do stuff in real life for livelihood, even for invention. Yowzah! I've learned that some smart people spend a bit of time, curiosity aroused, at asking questions about how something works, why it works a particular way, how some things came to be, all kinds questions they started young and never stopped. Some read science and other subject areas even if it doesn't make them money, and further, some read science fiction. Not just for the diversion, but for the stretch.
Paul Tyma took some questions and thoughts and produced a little think piece that deals with a very large question that not a few people, smart or no, have asked for a long time, and for those who think about "stuff" outside their daily life, it's worth the read - IMO, of course. YMMV, and if it's not something of interest to you, why carp on it? [not aimed at you, Crimson, by any stretch]
Yeah, that's the thing. Being able to get signals from the car is one thing, so long as I (some app, unless I want to try to recall how to program) can do with that data as I will, not someone locking me into some app author's idea of what I'm supposed to be doing.
Being able to get good info from changes in light bulbs, for instance, means among other things a great boost for doing some interesting surveillance. Spike a building with a few of the sensors, see where people are; combine that with the short-wave stuff we have, a few other off-the-shelf items, one could gain a complete "picture" of the interior. This could help in hostage situations I imagine. Or big brother.
These Ubiqitous Computing Lab folks and others are doing some fascinating work. True geeks.
http://www.actorpoint.com/acting-articles/actorpay.html
sheds some light. Background actor (guild), scale, 2003, $115/day.
Do note, please, that even many guild actors get nowhere near a 40-hour week. Harrison Ford worked as a carpenter for years, getting bit jobs here and there as an actor. Just one example of many, and most never 'hit the big time.'
How much better do you think non-union actors get paid or are treated?
Sure, but I don't know as I'd give that much import to a seven-minute tease. Had they released the entire movie, I'd be more enthusiastic. Still, foot in the door, breaking the ice, all that.
Yes. To both.
Does IT in its wide sense have more atheists than other fields? Dunno, but seems that way. Even given generally better income than many areas, does IT hold more depressives? No idea, but with the gross stress reported by many, I wouldn't be surprised. Do IT people suicide, or go postal, more, on average? Also don't know. It's 0230, by me, and inquiring minds want to know. [grin]
So yeah, could easily be flame-fodder; it's late, the editors are bored, "Hey, let's provoke some shit. Make some popcorn and get in some brewskis." OTOH, one might make an argument for relevance.
My question is, which is it, God, religion, or higher power? Only quotes I saw from study authors used higher power or religious belief. Summary here and article in first link, from McLean Hospital, sponsor of the study, used God and religion.
In AA, for instance, although higher power is used, my impression is that most folks translated that as God, even if only because they learned that concept first; the idea that there could be 'higher power' as its own thing was new to them. So, if study is correct, does it have to be God? Can it be gods? Can faith in, say, science, or unicorns or numerology count as a religion? Does a belief in higher power require the concept of God? Hand waving or no, I see a distinction in the terms. But did the participants of the study?
If a wider study was done, would any of this hold? And if more care was taken with concepts and their terms, would results vary in particulars? Would any of it matter in the practical treatment of various psychostuff?
"The article is one sided, only mentioning INCOME from this IP.
It hardly addresses the defensive aspect of having this IP in their back pocket."
That's along the lines of what I thought then and now.
Doesn't have to be the most bestest arrow in the quiver, just has to work at all. IIRC there are all kinds patents in the bundle; not only may some come in handy for future cases, and some only have to be useful to Google along the way, not just defensively if only by giving pause to future trolls and whatnot, but maybe aid them in building their own tech.
Finally, tho it may be a stretch, Google might release some, whether they've derived direct benefit or no, simply to help the industry. And a side-think: if software patents were to vanish tomorrow and the USPTO published all, Google has a strong position such that I don't see them going away anytime soon. (For those with better memory, did Google hold no patents at all, only proprietary secret sauce, would their in-house dev (and acquisitions) still have given them a good vantage?)
Good catch. Slaves, peons, serfs, all the same. Today we call them citizens.
Yup, and the slaves be we. Consumers all, thinkers [Quiet, citizen. Thinking is oldspeak.]
Yah, the dinosaur droppings of the computer age. Some of it is so bad it's wonderful.
Thanks. Great quote. Explains people voting unsupportable ideology over rational self-interest.
Worse, rose-colored glasses plus self-designed and -welcomed blinders.
Ah, crap. Better to know, I have to suppose. Yet....
Doctor: "You have a terminal condition."
Patient: "How long have I got?"
Doctor: "Do you really want to know?"
Uf da.
( http://pillarenvironmental.blogspot.com/2008/12/how-to-speak-scansin.html )
There's a few missing, up by Sheboygan, hey.
If curious, lynchspammers over der by gmail once.
Valve said some time back that they were _starting_ with Ubuntu because it was the largest desktop distro outside of mostly-biz-only distros and because Ubuntu committed to working with Valve in getting things working right, and that they would be adding other distros as they got to them. I think we could presume Debian-based distros early on.
Kiddies? Truman was in the White House, hadn't been elected prez yet, when I was born. My life happens to have room for a few games, but to each his own.
I've got a wide-screen display so have no prob with having the Unity strip with 30%-reduced icons taking up space. I took out some stuf I don't want or use too infrequently to be useful there, and lock often-used programs instead. For me, it's a handy thing.
The first think I do with a fresh install is to get classicmenu-indicator. I want everything to be in the drop down menu. Then I adjust some of the fonts and restore scroll bars.
Biggest complaint I have is that each version lately has been making it more difficult to get to many basic adjustments. While Dash sometimes helps find something, I never got used to having to type something to get at a program - unless we're talking DOS-style prompt stuff, and I haven't used that since 8-bit days.
So long as it's recognized that among the historically strong profit makers and takers are those who make armaments, chemicals, drugs, along with booze and cosmetics.
Ya gots to look good and feel good while dosing against the wounds, pain, stress involved in selling explosives and guns to people who want to kill other people for power and thus wealth. Yes indeed, vastly better. And so it goes.
That's what you got from Shakespeare? Oy.
forgot to quote you
"So it looks like they are having their cake and eating it too"
as intro to my post.