Unfortunately, the new jobs will not be in product development, but rather in legal prosecution and defense, as companies spend more time hunting "pirates" with very little result per dollar spent, then are sued themselves by companies using the same tools they use to attack others.
Oh, and the law teams will almost certainly end up costing far more per 'employee' than developers.
The BSA is what you get when lawyers see how this cycle works, and band together to accelerate the process, while maximizing leverage against companies to keep the cycle going. It's like a union, without the meager shared humility of strenuous work to justify the pride involved - it's all union bosses playing with money here.
Any dude who has ever had a bike seat interact harshly with their crotch area will likely cringe when they think a little bit about this one. It's a powered crutch... that uses your crotch instead of your armpits.
If you know your product is highly likely going to fail, why not add some poetry to existence by showing the maximum hubris possible?
If you can't be a good example of success, then you can also play a role of being a very loud example of failure.
The problem is that, at looking to politics and business, most extremely loud examples of failure end up being repeated anyway the very next political/financial cycle, with very little modifications to counter that same method of failure.
>>Will 3D games be just as gimmicky as most 3D movies?
Yes, yes they will - but moreso, and with gusto. But gimmicky doesn't have to be bad - the Wii and Nintendo DS libraries are chock full of gimmicky games that are actually quite good. Actually, most blockbuster games in history have been filled with fairly new exploits of gimmicks hamfistedly attached to a narrative.
Video games are marketed on the idea that an analog of yourself is being placed somewhere, with something interesting to do. The very definition of a game is tied to goals that exist only for you to solve - its gimmicks all the way down to the simplest games of rocks and sticks.
Boring like minimalist music. Boring like Gregorian chant. Beautiful, and fascinating for its exploration of something more distinct in a single tone - but boring like an appliance.
While the fines are annoying - they make sense in the current tax climate (Rich go mostly untaxed by historical standards, the rest have comparatively less than ever to tax).
The real benefit to these actions, however, are being able to identify abandoned pools and other standing water that mosquitoes can breed in. Just a little specialized oil put onto the surface prevents the nymph-stage mosquitoes from breathing at the surface of the water, and doesn't harm other species at the same time, and is a very cost efficient method of preventing many diseases.
The word used in TFA is 'unmistakable'. Still, all things can be denied/mistaken by hardcore deniers...
--Irrational response squad is a go!--
Rising indicators
1. Air temperature over land
Denial: Measurements are wrong - and the sun did it (despite the solar minimum).
2. Sea-surface temperature
Denial: Measurements are wrong - whales did it, we need to allow more hunting.
3. Marine air temperature
Denial: Measurements are wrong - underwater volcanoes must have done it.
4. Sea-level
Denial: Measurements are wrong - land must be getting lower, or else human sin is causing a new flood.
5. Ocean heat
Denial: Measurements are wrong - sonar must be messing with the equipment.
6. Humidity
Denial: Measurements are wrong - and this is a self-correcting, perfectly natural thing.
7. Tropospheric temperature in the 'active-weather' layer of the atmosphere closest to the Earth's surface
Denial: Measurements are wrong - and heat rises, duh!
Declining indicators
1. Arctic sea-ice
Something must be eating the ice! Must be all those hungry polar bears - caused their own problems!
2. Glaciers
Something must be weighing them down - they're just going underwater! Perhaps all those polar bears crowding on them.
3. Spring snow cover in the northern hemisphere
Ha! Is it too much snow, or too little now - confused scientists don't know nuthin'!
Now, if you'll excuse me, I have a congressional subcommittee to advise.
--/Irrational response--
It's easy to find a 'reason' to deny something, when you don't have a burden/benefit of evidence or peer review. And when all you're doing is stalling for the status quo, denial is all you need.
That's right. Instead of having at least the semblance of a positive retail end-user experience, you sell a game that you know won't provide a good enough experience, then require they go online to get a chance of eventually getting a good game.
Sounds like an invitation to folks to not buy the game while they wait to find out if it is good enough to buy. The folks who torrent it will delete it without finding out if the game would be good, leaving no chance for converted sales. If there's no way to know which games are good or bad, until by chance a "make the game good patch" comes out, then there's no reason to buy any of them until the good patch is released. Of course, by that time, your opportunity for a really good marketing push is mostly over - and the name of your game is diminished greatly, meaning competitors who just released an actual good game have a huge advantage over your patched-good game.
What is it about industry insiders and basic logic that just doesn't seem to mix? Is it just raw anger that they could be making marginally more money? They're selling a product to a customer who has a choice between products - making your own product worse and more annoying does not help you convince your customers to buy your product. DRM or other intentional bugs only loses you money in this regard, along with any advertisement those happy users of your product would provide.
That makes about as much proportional sense as a crazy local militia demanding the national army hand over all their tanks and missiles, because "we paid for some of those with our taxes".
However extravagant the audio media monopolies are represented - they're economically dwarfed by the telecom organizations. Their argument to shift the burden of, well pretty much whatever they can imagine, over to the bank accounts of the entire telecom industry is just absurd on its face, and isn't the kind of fight even a larger media ownership group could win.
It's one thing to ask for the moon, in order to settle for something else - but this seems a game they could get hurt for playing.
Cutting spending in a depression is rarely a good strategy. The rich will of course continue to do just about as well - because they just go into crisis mode and order more folks fired to cut spending. That means all the non-rich are left competing for fewer positions with many, many times the number of other potential job seekers.
Cutting overall government spending doubles this effect by denying more public jobs, while at the same time cutting services that would have helped them make ends meet while there is no practical access to jobs.
Ideally, what you'd do is tax actual non-business wealth where possible to fight hoarding, so the super-wealthy will be pressured to push money into the market and infrastructure more actively, and less into 'bonuses'. You use that money to help keep the lower and middle classes afloat - where that money will go immediately back into the marketplace, redoubling its effect. You also use that money to fund the development of more small businesses, while cracking down more monopolies, freeing up legal and anti-competitive hurdles that these companies face currently in the current marketplace.
The conservative "austerity" arguments are cruel - meant to deny the downtrodden any meager assistance in order to solve a problem they seem unwilling to solve when they have power. Conservatives tend to run up debt while in power, to promote the idea that they can make the nation strong, then complain about debt AND weakness while out of power, as the nation attempts to rebuild after their spending orgy (usually funneled to private interests).
There's a potential problem with the whole 'special yeast' part - yeast is airborne, and its main feature is that it rapidly reproduces as it eats. Historically, yeast strains were developed by leaving starched/sugared water out, then selectively culling the foam that grew on top until you had something that made bread rise and taste good.
Basically, yeast is everywhere - and the problem with using a special yeast is the same problem that many biofuels using microflora have: Contamination of your carefully bred cell lines, and spread of your proprietary licensed lines into nature leading to lawsuits.
I hope the Netherlands has better laws about owning and licensing life than Monsanto follows. Yeast would be FAR harder to legally control than even food crops, as enough use would mean you could accidentally gather their 'product' almost anywhere on earth just by leaving out some floured water, then rapidly selecting for best performance across quick generations.
Seriously - this is about as far as you can get from "to promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts" as you can get, taking from the public domain and making a private monopoly.
Perhaps the argument would be that classically nobles and aristocrats funded science, so by funneling more monopolies and money engines to the super-elite, you might get more 'trickle down' arts and sciences. However, looking to corporations, the trend is for less actual science to get done, as it is increasingly seen as a pure cost rather than a benefit, despite protections available. In modern centuries, it is the public sector that has funded science for the most part, and the private sector "art" has been mostly marketing and mass produced goods.
This is not medicine. I'm a huge proponent of embryonic stem cell research - that is not what these places are. Even in the linked pages, they don't call themselves real medicine - more like 1950's utopian therapy centers, complete with watercolor art and messages of "the promise of eternal life." I've seen cryonics center websites that are far, far more ethical and honest about the product they provide. The second website even puts its own title in quotes ('"the clinic"') to avoid being as actionable about their claims.
These sites are all about offering dubiously vague claims about what folks are saying about stem cells, then offering even more dubious treatments while standing behind the mystique of being a persecuted 'forbidden' super-technique. That would be fine if they were specific about what they were attempting, and if they could point to legitimate and active partners they were involved with in order to advance the science - but they're just namedropping the science to get the flim-flam magic appeal.
There's an endless series of variants of this style of bullshit. Take a look at these sites for just the tip of the iceburg in terms of keeping an eye on it:
The perspective taken for this bit of problem solving is interesting, because it is stepping above the usual street engineering up to city planning - maximizing the number of people able to use shared resources, while minimizing resources used. This is decidedly NOT a perspective that is common in the US, as our cities tend to 'sprawl' at the whim of investors and politicians with 'complicated' priorities rather than anything as idealized as proper engineering to make best use of resources.
Greater use of mass transit to maximize available road where possible, waves of greens with appropriate buffers to keep congestion manageable to even extreme capacities, traffic system that work to inform the driver and minimize late decision making - these are good moves.
I would hope we could use some of these moves to create a road system that would allow for us to approach automated driving systems - where you would decide where you needed to be, and an appropriate vehicle would pick you up within a few minutes, using the minimum amount of fuel for the entire city worth of people using the system, and giving non-automated drivers plenty of road space as they go. Nobody limited in choices - but maximizing efficiency and convenience for everyone.
It probably won't happen here in the US (different priorities, as mentioned), but I hope such a system could be established in my lifetime.
INTERCAL is an esoteric programming language meant as a parody of stuffy, arcane programming language requirements. One of its more interesting requirements involves the "PLEASE" statement. As an undocumented feature of the language, the compiler will fail if programs are either too polite, or insufficiently polite - which involves placing the PLEASE keyword in front of statements the correct number of times.
Kind of like here - if the Doctor just peppers all of his written requests with too many PLEASE statements, that's condescending right there - too polite. But insufficient politeness is equally worthy of wrath - all completely nonsensical requirements, dehumanizing the interaction even as they demand for a confusingly artificial subset of human interaction.
This declaration doesn't seem like a law, more like the equivalent to a US Congressional Non-Binding Resolution, having no force of law on its own, and hoping the parties being addressed will react to the non-binding request. In other words, it seems to me like hot air to feed special interests.
Here's the actual text:
---
"I am pleased to inform you that, together with my colleague Ms Anna Záborská MEP, I have submitted Written Declaration No 29 requesting the establishment of a European early warning system for paedophiles and sex offenders. A normal childhood for our children means a solid future for our, and for their, European Union. Any act of violence suffered by a woman or a child is an indelible defeat of the rules of civilised coexistence. We would therefore be very grateful if, as many other colleagues have already done, you could support this important Written Declaration No 29 'On setting up a European early warning system (EWS) for paedophiles and sex offenders'. The proposal does not involve the establishment of a new European agency but rather greater levels of cooperation between the public authorities and civil society in order to defend the weaker members of society and protect the rights of all. I may be contacted as follows: Tiziano Motti MEP ASP 9E209 Tel. 45247 tiziano.motti@europarl.europa.eu Declaration No 29 may be signed: - Outside the Hemicycle during the part-sessions - At the office of the Members' Activities Unit in Brussels, PHS 2A 019 Thank you in advance, Tiziano Motti MEP"
---
They seem to do these a lot, in terms of declaring a condemnation of Israel, or having a declaration on violence against women - hot air to feel good and influence constituents, without any real legal meaning on its own.
To put it in programming terms, it seems to me they're declaring an intention - not instantiating a law. Bad in terms of intentions towards what little privacy remains, but not yet acting to change law.
My interpretation could certainly be wrong - but that seems to be how the wording strikes me.
>> I honest to goodness don't want to argue about the merits and demerits of my faith with some >> of the slashdotters on here, who are convinced that Muslims "don't belong."
Oh please - you belong as much as any of us non-rational beings. You very well may hold faith in the ultimate truth of the universe - just as the stories held by the raelians or even the ancient Greeks may truly be the true story of the universe... they're just not rational stories.
But it IS important as a story! We all tend to care about getting a bigger perspective - and about how to more reliably deduce truth from the countless imperfect stories around us.
In that regard, your story is important, from your personal insights into computers, to how Islam informs your understanding of ideals and choices. Without those views, we miss a piece of perspective, a part of our imperfect truth.
The more 'different' you are, the more you belong.
Yeah! Selective censorship fixes EVERYTHING! Just cave into the most aggressive believers, and you tend to generate more aggressive believers.
So, what happens when 1000+ pages are now created, celebrating Draw Mohammad Month, Draw Mohammad Brunch, Draw Mohammad Restaurant, Finger-Paint Mohammad with your Toes, Bake a Mohammad Cake, etc., etc.
If you ban all mockery of religion that gets offended, then many religions will suddenly decide to get offended - and many groups will decide to define themselves as religion in order to get the censorship ability.
There's always going to be overlap between validly interpreting religion as an outsider, and taking an insulting view from the perspective of an insider - making that perceived insult a crime is equivalent to making observations as an outsider a crime. I am not prohibited from drawing Mohammad. Creating a system where I am prohibited is saying my view isn't as valid as the aggressive believers in that space.
Been a lucid dreamer ever since I started playing video games, around 20 years. It changes the nature of nightmares - when dreams are a story you're telling yourself, there's a certain point where you can just go "OK this is too far, it's my turn." The nature of nightmares then becomes indefinite fears, overcoming anxious situations gracefully (or not), and fear of the consequence of one's own actions, as these are fears one cannot just turn the tables on, even if one knows they are fake.
I find this alteration of nightmares is actually much better than the usual boogeyman/hunted dreams in adapting one for modern life. Facing anxiety is a much more important limitation than just getting hurt or hiding from a malicious force - desensitizing yourself to indefinite fears is much more adaptive than desensitizing yourself to monsters or gore.
Also, the expectation of 'fun' from exploration of the unknown is a much better expectation for modern things than it used to be. It really opens up one to learn more than a fear-based experience would be. It's part of why I love to see games being developed - the expansion of people's expectations, the expansion of experience in more people's minds. Books have offered a lot of that - but the exploration has always been new ideas exposed, as opposed to the true sense of open discovery.
Games aren't all good, of course, but I think this is a widely ignored benefit to the mindset that games allow to exist.
I know it's news for nerds... but I've never heard of this PLATO (other than the philosopher), and it would be nice to explain what it is in the summary or in an editor's sentence at the start.
Market competition is ideally supposed to lead to innovation, resulting in customers getting radically more for less over time. Despite the number of players in the printer market, both current and previous, this does not hold true for inkjet printing. You could literally have self-cleaning devices that take gallon jugs of ink at dirt cheap prices if that were a priority, but making an objectively better product is not the goal.
The goal is making a product that will get the easiest money available on the market. This is always the game - and virtually all efforts are driven toward this end. The greater 'market' takes this further, and makes acting in a manner that does not 'return shareholder value' a very serious offense against the market.
In the end, this is not actually the market serving itself, growing to produce more, or expand more markets - it is simply the market spinning its wheels as hard as it can to extract as much easy money as it can, eventually shaping law to extract what marketing cannot. Much like an inkjet printer, this cycle quickly gunks itself up, and falls into an inert heap - and the answer tends to be to just replace it with the same model of printer again, since it seems cheaper than spending the resources on something more reliable or cost effective.
I recommend a nice reliable laser printer (so it will at least work for those few times I want to print), and a functioning regulatory system to break up corrupt, stagnant market players - or at least allow universities to be exempt from most legal limitations ('IP', noncompete, etc.), and allow them to compete when market players will not. Universities are already the only ones doing a lot of the research that happens in the 'market' these days anyway - should demand that private companies keep up, or get left behind when they're benefiting from public research while demanding exclusive rights.
If you're going to use the rights granted under the license, you then must grant those same rights to others. Unfortunately, this license does not grant the right to be free from harm - so it doesn't make sense to address causing or not causing harm as a responsibility.
Still, it's a contract, and you can say pretty much whatever you want in a contract - the real goal would seem to be to make it expensive for people to disagree with PETA's stances (whatever they happen to be at the moment), which tends to be the real goal of most contracts.
I can definitely understand iconoclasm - the desire to prevent mere symbols from being more important than the core idea. Applied to Islam, it would be a prophet's desire that his message not be cheapened by allowing it to be tied too deeply with its imperfect messenger.
What I don't understand is how that is turned around and transformed into these series of death threats (and actions, and laws) that in effect make the depiction of the man more important than the depiction of the beliefs he was supposed to represent.
Is that really the first priority for those who want to spread the ultimate revealed truth of the universe - playing image police against every person who is not a believer? Seems a rather silly priority to have in the context.
Of course development has slowed - it has achieved the goal most users/developers have wanted for it: To be a stable, fairly secure platform that allows a decent plugin model, and works consistently between platforms.
This is like complaining that the GNU C compiler isn't keeping up with the.Net framework, because it isn't taking risks or pushing envelopes... that's not the job it exists to do.
Chrome gets to be sexy, because it is newer experiment in browser ideas mashed together. Firefox leaves that to its plugins - losing some of the "synergy" of a singular design, but gaining much more flexibility in terms of user preferences.
Until Chrome can do everything I want with all my Firefox plugins, I'll keep ignoring it. I just don't want to be losing features in Firefox in the pursuit of the new sexy, when I already love it for what it is.
This story is eerily similar to the previous "Oh NO! Nintendo sales are down!" article about the Wii. Nintendo is the dominant player of the market, and sales are down, BECAUSE ALMOST EVERYONE POSSIBLE ALREADY HAS A DS.
Market saturation, mixed with the usual mid-year games lull, and the anticipated rollout of a new platform combine to lower sales numbers. Does that mean competitors are taking over the market? No, no it doesn't.
I'm not crazy about "does this mean that...?" style of journalism. Speculation is fine - but it isn't news. Yet, this style of "journalism" seems to be rising as other forms of journalism are going out of business. It's fine for arguments, but annoying when there's too much of it, too often.
Slashdot Mirror
Unfortunately, the new jobs will not be in product development, but rather in legal prosecution and defense, as companies spend more time hunting "pirates" with very little result per dollar spent, then are sued themselves by companies using the same tools they use to attack others.
Oh, and the law teams will almost certainly end up costing far more per 'employee' than developers.
The BSA is what you get when lawyers see how this cycle works, and band together to accelerate the process, while maximizing leverage against companies to keep the cycle going. It's like a union, without the meager shared humility of strenuous work to justify the pride involved - it's all union bosses playing with money here.
Ryan Fenton
Any dude who has ever had a bike seat interact harshly with their crotch area will likely cringe when they think a little bit about this one. It's a powered crutch... that uses your crotch instead of your armpits.
Ryan Fenton
If you know your product is highly likely going to fail, why not add some poetry to existence by showing the maximum hubris possible?
If you can't be a good example of success, then you can also play a role of being a very loud example of failure.
The problem is that, at looking to politics and business, most extremely loud examples of failure end up being repeated anyway the very next political/financial cycle, with very little modifications to counter that same method of failure.
Ultimately, it is because people remember claims, not results - so the loud hubris ends up attracting more imitation than the results drive a logical reaction.
Ryan Fenton
>>Will 3D games be just as gimmicky as most 3D movies?
Yes, yes they will - but moreso, and with gusto. But gimmicky doesn't have to be bad - the Wii and Nintendo DS libraries are chock full of gimmicky games that are actually quite good. Actually, most blockbuster games in history have been filled with fairly new exploits of gimmicks hamfistedly attached to a narrative.
Video games are marketed on the idea that an analog of yourself is being placed somewhere, with something interesting to do. The very definition of a game is tied to goals that exist only for you to solve - its gimmicks all the way down to the simplest games of rocks and sticks.
Ain't nothing wrong with gimmicks.
Ryan Fenton
The iPad(TM) is really boring.
Boring like minimalist music. Boring like Gregorian chant. Beautiful, and fascinating for its exploration of something more distinct in a single tone - but boring like an appliance.
But is it art? ;^)
Ryan Fenton
While the fines are annoying - they make sense in the current tax climate (Rich go mostly untaxed by historical standards, the rest have comparatively less than ever to tax).
The real benefit to these actions, however, are being able to identify abandoned pools and other standing water that mosquitoes can breed in. Just a little specialized oil put onto the surface prevents the nymph-stage mosquitoes from breathing at the surface of the water, and doesn't harm other species at the same time, and is a very cost efficient method of preventing many diseases.
Ryan Fenton
The word used in TFA is 'unmistakable'. Still, all things can be denied/mistaken by hardcore deniers...
--Irrational response squad is a go!--
Rising indicators
1. Air temperature over land
Denial: Measurements are wrong - and the sun did it (despite the solar minimum).
2. Sea-surface temperature
Denial: Measurements are wrong - whales did it, we need to allow more hunting.
3. Marine air temperature
Denial: Measurements are wrong - underwater volcanoes must have done it.
4. Sea-level
Denial: Measurements are wrong - land must be getting lower, or else human sin is causing a new flood.
5. Ocean heat
Denial: Measurements are wrong - sonar must be messing with the equipment.
6. Humidity
Denial: Measurements are wrong - and this is a self-correcting, perfectly natural thing.
7. Tropospheric temperature in the 'active-weather' layer of the atmosphere closest to the Earth's surface
Denial: Measurements are wrong - and heat rises, duh!
Declining indicators
1. Arctic sea-ice
Something must be eating the ice! Must be all those hungry polar bears - caused their own problems!
2. Glaciers
Something must be weighing them down - they're just going underwater! Perhaps all those polar bears crowding on them.
3. Spring snow cover in the northern hemisphere
Ha! Is it too much snow, or too little now - confused scientists don't know nuthin'!
Now, if you'll excuse me, I have a congressional subcommittee to advise.
--/Irrational response--
It's easy to find a 'reason' to deny something, when you don't have a burden/benefit of evidence or peer review. And when all you're doing is stalling for the status quo, denial is all you need.
Ryan Fenton
That's right. Instead of having at least the semblance of a positive retail end-user experience, you sell a game that you know won't provide a good enough experience, then require they go online to get a chance of eventually getting a good game.
Sounds like an invitation to folks to not buy the game while they wait to find out if it is good enough to buy. The folks who torrent it will delete it without finding out if the game would be good, leaving no chance for converted sales. If there's no way to know which games are good or bad, until by chance a "make the game good patch" comes out, then there's no reason to buy any of them until the good patch is released. Of course, by that time, your opportunity for a really good marketing push is mostly over - and the name of your game is diminished greatly, meaning competitors who just released an actual good game have a huge advantage over your patched-good game.
What is it about industry insiders and basic logic that just doesn't seem to mix? Is it just raw anger that they could be making marginally more money? They're selling a product to a customer who has a choice between products - making your own product worse and more annoying does not help you convince your customers to buy your product. DRM or other intentional bugs only loses you money in this regard, along with any advertisement those happy users of your product would provide.
Ryan Fenton
That makes about as much proportional sense as a crazy local militia demanding the national army hand over all their tanks and missiles, because "we paid for some of those with our taxes".
However extravagant the audio media monopolies are represented - they're economically dwarfed by the telecom organizations. Their argument to shift the burden of, well pretty much whatever they can imagine, over to the bank accounts of the entire telecom industry is just absurd on its face, and isn't the kind of fight even a larger media ownership group could win.
It's one thing to ask for the moon, in order to settle for something else - but this seems a game they could get hurt for playing.
Ryan Fenton
Cutting spending in a depression is rarely a good strategy. The rich will of course continue to do just about as well - because they just go into crisis mode and order more folks fired to cut spending. That means all the non-rich are left competing for fewer positions with many, many times the number of other potential job seekers.
Cutting overall government spending doubles this effect by denying more public jobs, while at the same time cutting services that would have helped them make ends meet while there is no practical access to jobs.
Ideally, what you'd do is tax actual non-business wealth where possible to fight hoarding, so the super-wealthy will be pressured to push money into the market and infrastructure more actively, and less into 'bonuses'. You use that money to help keep the lower and middle classes afloat - where that money will go immediately back into the marketplace, redoubling its effect. You also use that money to fund the development of more small businesses, while cracking down more monopolies, freeing up legal and anti-competitive hurdles that these companies face currently in the current marketplace.
The conservative "austerity" arguments are cruel - meant to deny the downtrodden any meager assistance in order to solve a problem they seem unwilling to solve when they have power. Conservatives tend to run up debt while in power, to promote the idea that they can make the nation strong, then complain about debt AND weakness while out of power, as the nation attempts to rebuild after their spending orgy (usually funneled to private interests).
Ryan Fenton
There's a potential problem with the whole 'special yeast' part - yeast is airborne, and its main feature is that it rapidly reproduces as it eats. Historically, yeast strains were developed by leaving starched/sugared water out, then selectively culling the foam that grew on top until you had something that made bread rise and taste good.
Basically, yeast is everywhere - and the problem with using a special yeast is the same problem that many biofuels using microflora have: Contamination of your carefully bred cell lines, and spread of your proprietary licensed lines into nature leading to lawsuits.
I hope the Netherlands has better laws about owning and licensing life than Monsanto follows. Yeast would be FAR harder to legally control than even food crops, as enough use would mean you could accidentally gather their 'product' almost anywhere on earth just by leaving out some floured water, then rapidly selecting for best performance across quick generations.
Ryan Fenton
I like that story. I think I'll own it.
Seriously - this is about as far as you can get from "to promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts" as you can get, taking from the public domain and making a private monopoly.
Perhaps the argument would be that classically nobles and aristocrats funded science, so by funneling more monopolies and money engines to the super-elite, you might get more 'trickle down' arts and sciences. However, looking to corporations, the trend is for less actual science to get done, as it is increasingly seen as a pure cost rather than a benefit, despite protections available. In modern centuries, it is the public sector that has funded science for the most part, and the private sector "art" has been mostly marketing and mass produced goods.
Ryan Fenton
This is not medicine. I'm a huge proponent of embryonic stem cell research - that is not what these places are. Even in the linked pages, they don't call themselves real medicine - more like 1950's utopian therapy centers, complete with watercolor art and messages of "the promise of eternal life." I've seen cryonics center websites that are far, far more ethical and honest about the product they provide. The second website even puts its own title in quotes ('"the clinic"') to avoid being as actionable about their claims.
These sites are all about offering dubiously vague claims about what folks are saying about stem cells, then offering even more dubious treatments while standing behind the mystique of being a persecuted 'forbidden' super-technique. That would be fine if they were specific about what they were attempting, and if they could point to legitimate and active partners they were involved with in order to advance the science - but they're just namedropping the science to get the flim-flam magic appeal.
There's an endless series of variants of this style of bullshit. Take a look at these sites for just the tip of the iceburg in terms of keeping an eye on it:
Science Based Medicine
The JREF Website ($1 million verifiable reward for any evidence of the paranormal.)
Ryan Fenton
The perspective taken for this bit of problem solving is interesting, because it is stepping above the usual street engineering up to city planning - maximizing the number of people able to use shared resources, while minimizing resources used. This is decidedly NOT a perspective that is common in the US, as our cities tend to 'sprawl' at the whim of investors and politicians with 'complicated' priorities rather than anything as idealized as proper engineering to make best use of resources.
Greater use of mass transit to maximize available road where possible, waves of greens with appropriate buffers to keep congestion manageable to even extreme capacities, traffic system that work to inform the driver and minimize late decision making - these are good moves.
I would hope we could use some of these moves to create a road system that would allow for us to approach automated driving systems - where you would decide where you needed to be, and an appropriate vehicle would pick you up within a few minutes, using the minimum amount of fuel for the entire city worth of people using the system, and giving non-automated drivers plenty of road space as they go. Nobody limited in choices - but maximizing efficiency and convenience for everyone.
It probably won't happen here in the US (different priorities, as mentioned), but I hope such a system could be established in my lifetime.
Ryan Fenton
INTERCAL is an esoteric programming language meant as a parody of stuffy, arcane programming language requirements. One of its more interesting requirements involves the "PLEASE" statement. As an undocumented feature of the language, the compiler will fail if programs are either too polite, or insufficiently polite - which involves placing the PLEASE keyword in front of statements the correct number of times.
Kind of like here - if the Doctor just peppers all of his written requests with too many PLEASE statements, that's condescending right there - too polite. But insufficient politeness is equally worthy of wrath - all completely nonsensical requirements, dehumanizing the interaction even as they demand for a confusingly artificial subset of human interaction.
Ryan Fenton
This declaration doesn't seem like a law, more like the equivalent to a US Congressional Non-Binding Resolution, having no force of law on its own, and hoping the parties being addressed will react to the non-binding request. In other words, it seems to me like hot air to feed special interests.
Here's the actual text:
---
"I am pleased to inform you that, together with my colleague Ms Anna Záborská MEP, I have submitted
Written Declaration No 29 requesting the establishment of a European early warning system for
paedophiles and sex offenders. A normal childhood for our children means a solid future for our, and
for their, European Union. Any act of violence suffered by a woman or a child is an indelible defeat of
the rules of civilised coexistence. We would therefore be very grateful if, as many other colleagues
have already done, you could support this important Written Declaration No 29 'On setting up a
European early warning system (EWS) for paedophiles and sex offenders'. The proposal does
not involve the establishment of a new European agency but rather greater levels of cooperation
between the public authorities and civil society in order to defend the weaker members of society
and protect the rights of all.
I may be contacted as follows:
Tiziano Motti MEP
ASP 9E209
Tel. 45247
tiziano.motti@europarl.europa.eu
Declaration No 29 may be signed:
- Outside the Hemicycle during the part-sessions
- At the office of the Members' Activities Unit in Brussels, PHS 2A 019
Thank you in advance,
Tiziano Motti MEP"
---
They seem to do these a lot, in terms of declaring a condemnation of Israel, or having a declaration on violence against women - hot air to feel good and influence constituents, without any real legal meaning on its own.
To put it in programming terms, it seems to me they're declaring an intention - not instantiating a law. Bad in terms of intentions towards what little privacy remains, but not yet acting to change law.
My interpretation could certainly be wrong - but that seems to be how the wording strikes me.
Ryan Fenton
>> I honest to goodness don't want to argue about the merits and demerits of my faith with some
>> of the slashdotters on here, who are convinced that Muslims "don't belong."
Oh please - you belong as much as any of us non-rational beings. You very well may hold faith in the ultimate truth of the universe - just as the stories held by the raelians or even the ancient Greeks may truly be the true story of the universe... they're just not rational stories.
But it IS important as a story! We all tend to care about getting a bigger perspective - and about how to more reliably deduce truth from the countless imperfect stories around us.
In that regard, your story is important, from your personal insights into computers, to how Islam informs your understanding of ideals and choices. Without those views, we miss a piece of perspective, a part of our imperfect truth.
The more 'different' you are, the more you belong.
Ryan Fenton
Yeah! Selective censorship fixes EVERYTHING! Just cave into the most aggressive believers, and you tend to generate more aggressive believers.
So, what happens when 1000+ pages are now created, celebrating Draw Mohammad Month, Draw Mohammad Brunch, Draw Mohammad Restaurant, Finger-Paint Mohammad with your Toes, Bake a Mohammad Cake, etc., etc.
If you ban all mockery of religion that gets offended, then many religions will suddenly decide to get offended - and many groups will decide to define themselves as religion in order to get the censorship ability.
There's always going to be overlap between validly interpreting religion as an outsider, and taking an insulting view from the perspective of an insider - making that perceived insult a crime is equivalent to making observations as an outsider a crime. I am not prohibited from drawing Mohammad. Creating a system where I am prohibited is saying my view isn't as valid as the aggressive believers in that space.
Ryan Fenton
Been a lucid dreamer ever since I started playing video games, around 20 years. It changes the nature of nightmares - when dreams are a story you're telling yourself, there's a certain point where you can just go "OK this is too far, it's my turn." The nature of nightmares then becomes indefinite fears, overcoming anxious situations gracefully (or not), and fear of the consequence of one's own actions, as these are fears one cannot just turn the tables on, even if one knows they are fake.
I find this alteration of nightmares is actually much better than the usual boogeyman/hunted dreams in adapting one for modern life. Facing anxiety is a much more important limitation than just getting hurt or hiding from a malicious force - desensitizing yourself to indefinite fears is much more adaptive than desensitizing yourself to monsters or gore.
Also, the expectation of 'fun' from exploration of the unknown is a much better expectation for modern things than it used to be. It really opens up one to learn more than a fear-based experience would be. It's part of why I love to see games being developed - the expansion of people's expectations, the expansion of experience in more people's minds. Books have offered a lot of that - but the exploration has always been new ideas exposed, as opposed to the true sense of open discovery.
Games aren't all good, of course, but I think this is a widely ignored benefit to the mindset that games allow to exist.
Ryan Fenton
I know it's news for nerds... but I've never heard of this PLATO (other than the philosopher), and it would be nice to explain what it is in the summary or in an editor's sentence at the start.
Ryan Fenton
Market competition is ideally supposed to lead to innovation, resulting in customers getting radically more for less over time. Despite the number of players in the printer market, both current and previous, this does not hold true for inkjet printing. You could literally have self-cleaning devices that take gallon jugs of ink at dirt cheap prices if that were a priority, but making an objectively better product is not the goal.
The goal is making a product that will get the easiest money available on the market. This is always the game - and virtually all efforts are driven toward this end. The greater 'market' takes this further, and makes acting in a manner that does not 'return shareholder value' a very serious offense against the market.
In the end, this is not actually the market serving itself, growing to produce more, or expand more markets - it is simply the market spinning its wheels as hard as it can to extract as much easy money as it can, eventually shaping law to extract what marketing cannot. Much like an inkjet printer, this cycle quickly gunks itself up, and falls into an inert heap - and the answer tends to be to just replace it with the same model of printer again, since it seems cheaper than spending the resources on something more reliable or cost effective.
I recommend a nice reliable laser printer (so it will at least work for those few times I want to print), and a functioning regulatory system to break up corrupt, stagnant market players - or at least allow universities to be exempt from most legal limitations ('IP', noncompete, etc.), and allow them to compete when market players will not. Universities are already the only ones doing a lot of the research that happens in the 'market' these days anyway - should demand that private companies keep up, or get left behind when they're benefiting from public research while demanding exclusive rights.
Ryan Fenton
If you're going to use the rights granted under the license, you then must grant those same rights to others. Unfortunately, this license does not grant the right to be free from harm - so it doesn't make sense to address causing or not causing harm as a responsibility.
Still, it's a contract, and you can say pretty much whatever you want in a contract - the real goal would seem to be to make it expensive for people to disagree with PETA's stances (whatever they happen to be at the moment), which tends to be the real goal of most contracts.
Ryan Fenton
I can definitely understand iconoclasm - the desire to prevent mere symbols from being more important than the core idea. Applied to Islam, it would be a prophet's desire that his message not be cheapened by allowing it to be tied too deeply with its imperfect messenger.
What I don't understand is how that is turned around and transformed into these series of death threats (and actions, and laws) that in effect make the depiction of the man more important than the depiction of the beliefs he was supposed to represent.
Is that really the first priority for those who want to spread the ultimate revealed truth of the universe - playing image police against every person who is not a believer? Seems a rather silly priority to have in the context.
Ryan Fenton
Of course development has slowed - it has achieved the goal most users/developers have wanted for it: To be a stable, fairly secure platform that allows a decent plugin model, and works consistently between platforms.
This is like complaining that the GNU C compiler isn't keeping up with the .Net framework, because it isn't taking risks or pushing envelopes... that's not the job it exists to do.
Chrome gets to be sexy, because it is newer experiment in browser ideas mashed together. Firefox leaves that to its plugins - losing some of the "synergy" of a singular design, but gaining much more flexibility in terms of user preferences.
Until Chrome can do everything I want with all my Firefox plugins, I'll keep ignoring it. I just don't want to be losing features in Firefox in the pursuit of the new sexy, when I already love it for what it is.
Ryan Fenton
This story is eerily similar to the previous "Oh NO! Nintendo sales are down!" article about the Wii. Nintendo is the dominant player of the market, and sales are down, BECAUSE ALMOST EVERYONE POSSIBLE ALREADY HAS A DS.
Market saturation, mixed with the usual mid-year games lull, and the anticipated rollout of a new platform combine to lower sales numbers. Does that mean competitors are taking over the market? No, no it doesn't.
I'm not crazy about "does this mean that...?" style of journalism. Speculation is fine - but it isn't news. Yet, this style of "journalism" seems to be rising as other forms of journalism are going out of business. It's fine for arguments, but annoying when there's too much of it, too often.
Ryan Fenton