Not just told them, AFAIK it wasn't really a request that they could refuse. Also, as long as we're holding up the early 20th Century as an era of enlightened patent resolution, note that this faded immediately after WWI, as the Allies plundered German intellectual property patents as part of the Versailles settlement.
Asprin, for example, was a protected formula of the Bayer company. After WWI this protection was nullified so Allied countries' companies could make it without having to pay a royalty.
So the lesson would be, we need to ask someone to conquer us, dissolve all our current patents and IP systems, so we can rewrite them from scratch.
Oh, and kill all the lawyers while they're here. That wouldn't hurt either.
Nexagon: The Pit will actually have product placement as part of the game itself.
Real Time tactical combat, and you get points based on how popular you are with the AI audience. Earn more money if your gladiator destroys an enemy directly in front of one of your sponsor's billboards, raising their ratings.
Check out http://www.strategyfirst.com/en/games/ go to Nexagon/features.
Re:Gov is owned by Corporate America so...its WRON
on
Politicizing Science
·
· Score: 2
Life might be a lot simpler if you believe something like this, but the fact is that in our system of goverment, we elect people to act as our representives in government. Since democracy = government by the popular, to run for office, one needs to use the media. Since our democracy is capitalist and media outlets are not state-run, this costs money. Corporations understand this. If MegaCorp X* (* insert your particular corporate villain here, or labor group, or environmental group, or any lobby or PAC) likes the policies one endorses, they will give that individual (their campaign, their party, etc) money to access the media outlets more successfully. Do I think that there is some implied quid pro quo involved? Certainly in some cases at least, it would be naive to believe otherwise. Do I think Greenpeace hands Barbara Boxer a check for $50,000 and says "now you must vote to do what we say!" Hardly. To believe THAT is equally naive. Entities support the politicians that align with their interests. Companies that give to BOTH sides are simply arming themselves for both eventualities, and hoping that the implied quid pro quo is enough to maintain that politician's favor. The question is, what do you think is so much better - a totally state-controlled scientific system in which companies have NO say in what gets research funding/focus? Or perhaps a totally free-market system where the government gives NO money for scientific research, and companies/foundations can follow whatever they want. Is our system perfect? No. But the statement "Government is owned by Corporate America" is as banal as it is naive.
1) Your manager and everyone above him up to the CEO are the first to go and last to leave (i.e. they are also working "balls to the wall", not just you)
AND/OR
2) they offer you at least 15/8ths of your regular weekly pay (some might say 20/8ths for time-and-a-half rate)
Then there's no problem. Theres only a problem if it's them telling you to commit such effort and they aren't, or if you're not compensated for it.
"Science simply cannot prove, by an measure, that the Universe was not created whole by one supreme force with the power to place every particle, wave, and plank in whatever postion the being desired. It can't prove that this wasn't what happend at the big bang, it can't prove that this didn't happen 7,000 years ago, and it can't prove that it didn't happen 150 years ago."
Well, let's put it this way. No, I cannot prove that the universe didn't exist before I was born. There is no possible way that I can PROVE (to your level of evidence) that everything wasn't created the instant I was born (so as to APPEAR that it was in existance for billions of years leading up to the moment of my birth).
Yet, I think most people would agree that, if I held such a belief, I would be pretty "ignorant". Ignorant = willing to make a monumental leap (call it faith, whatever) rather than believing something that seems to follow a more reasonable train of cause/effect.
Yeah, I know there's probably a better way to say that, but I'm tired.
You're a Christian? Good on ya, cobber. But that doesn't necessarily validate everything you believe to be true.
Let's see: 1) An educational system that, since the 1970's at LEAST has developed a pervasive philosophy of social promotion, moral relativism, and anti-intellectualism*. Teachers compensated not against performance, but according to time served. 2) Schools that have so much corruption, kickbacks, and a positively Medieval fixed resistance to change that they look like Papa Doc's Haiti. 3) Dependence on rote learning, memorization, and 'teaching to the test'. 4) A culture that agrees that your average pro baseball player should make $45/minute ($2.3 mill/yr), and popular icons are Britney Spears and Justin Timberlake, but there's little money for consistent space exploration. * if you disagree, you've never seriously tried to dispute a politically-correct position in a modern American university system. No matter the labels, it's NOT about 'discourse', it's dogma. It may be liberal dogma, but it's dogma nonetheless. I'll be blunt: people who believe in creationism are ignorant. The American educational system is turning out ignorant graduates. Why is anyone surprised that as these people grow into adulthood they are easily led by charismatics touting infantile ideas?
from the indrect self-promotion department
on
0wnz0red
·
· Score: 2
Isn't this a tad self-referential?
Posting a positive "news story" about a geek-code short story written by a blogger.
That's as bad as/. pimping a book by Taco or jonkatz.
W-e-e-l-l-l, I'm not sure that's a completely convincing argument. The USA and Canada share similar spaces, sure. However I recall reading that the huge majority (80%?, 90%?) of the Canadian population lives within 50 miles of the US border. Does this raise the Canadian population to anything near Japan/Korea densities? I strongly doubt it. But it may be past the critical density point where DSL rollout is economical.
Not to dispute your point about the publicly owned telcos, though.
"Historically, it first appears in 1586 at the court of Rudolph II of Bohemia, who was one of the most eccentric European monarchs of that or any other period. Rudolph collected dwarfs and had a regiment of giants in his army. He was surrounded by astrologers, and he was fascinated by games and codes and music. He was typical of the occult-oriented, Protestant noblemen of this period and epitomized the liberated northern European prince. he was a patron of alchemy and supported the printing of alchemical literature.
The Rosicrucian conspiracy was being quietly fomented during this same period. To Rudolph's court came an unknown person who sold this manuscript to the king for three hundred gold ducats, which, translated into modern monetary units, is about fourteen thousand dollars. This is an astonishing amount of money to have paid for a manuscript at that time, which indicated that the Emperor must have been highly impressed by it."
Wow, if this guy had lived 400 years later he'd probably have founded a dot.com, run the stock up to million$, and then vanished.
Let's see, gullible king with lots of money, known for being eccentric.... I'm thinking we're wasting our time, and some departed spirit is laughing his ass off that we're trying to decipher something that was no more than an elaborate con.
Part of the speed of typing has to do with the fact that you are using (ok, some are using...) 8-10 fingers almost simultaneously.
Type "a quick brown fox jumps over the lazy sleeping dog". Now, mentally write it by LOOKING at each letter on your keyboard, and thinking 'click' on each one.
1) visually - takes at least 3 times longer, at least for me. 2) doing that for even a few moments is already giving me a headache.
I don't think it's going to be the next 'sliced bread'.
"...people want to tailor their specific videos/software per region because of language barriers and such..."
You don't really mean that do you? I mean seriously, does ANYONE see DVD region-encoding as ANYTHING but a ludicrously obvious effort by producing companies to introduce market control and artificial scarcity, thus allowing inflated pricing?
You are a company, you have a right to try to sell your products for as high a price as the market will bear. The market, on the other hand has a right (yes, a right) to try to force your prices as low as it can. If the perceived total net cost of piracy is less than your selling price, you lose. You can (as the RIAA, BSA, etc) try to raise the perceived cost of piracy, at the cost of goodwill.
The internet killed region-encoding, plain and simple. It'll kill any similar effort at market control such as inflated digital media pricing (note to RIAA: piracy will dissolve if you reduced your prices to something commensurate with the music's value....), and even the stupid German book price-fixing laws.
Good riddance to blatantly greedy marketing schemes. Go start a chain-letter or something.
...to test brainwaves, because it's obvious that normal travelers (being delayed by extensive security measures) are never stressed-out or homocidal. Especially if they're made to stop for one more scan by minimum wage federal employees that aren't doing jack squat ANYway.
Take the stunningly-rendered totally realistic looking truly curved 8000-polygon red key to the stunningly-rendered totally realistic bump-mapped real-world-physics-based red door.
See? That's like, light years better than Doom (I).
This is such a staggeringly stupid thing to say, it occurs to me to wonder if we're not being misdirected.
Could it be that Mr. Valenti isn't trying to sabotage the people pirating movies, but instead going after the root cause of the decline of old-fashioned hollywood power: the television itself?
If we come to a day where (due to alleged concerns about piracy) the gullible public will accept that the studios have a legitimate reason NOT to release their films on DVD, then aren't we back in a pre-VCR era where to see a movie in it's full glory you actually have to go to a THEATER? Suddenly re-releases come back as a valid market-milking strategy, theater revenues/values climb and the only way you get to see a film EVER is by paying them the ticket price EVERY TIME YOU WATCH IT?
Granted, it sounds pretty damn stupid to me too, but this is the same industry that thinks they make more money by selling $8 tickets and $6 popcorn, and then can't figure out why people would rather sit at home, eat (nearly) free popcorn and pay a $4 rental fee no matter how many people watch it.
But please. I understand he's gotta be snappy, he's gotta be interesting, or they'll start booking Scott Adams instead, but still...
Comparing coding to the life-shortening, near-slave labor of diamond mining? I'm thinking the guys down in Windhoek don't GET a choice fat-free lattes, or bitch because they have to walk all 50 steps to the Pepsi machine.
And then it must be comedic genious for him to then castigate people for then coming up with "farfetched, elegant, literary metaphors to describe this process." Like, I don't know, comparing it to diamond mining maybe?
I actually LIKE what he has to say in the majority of the speech, but to me he starts on such a bitter and weak note that it distracts from his message.
...since I'm not sure I'd want to do with a mountaintop anyway.
./ readers: we're techno-chic and brilliant, we can install the latest distro of Linux on a Ti99 pocket calculator, and can wax eloquently on the DMCA and it's ramifications on free speech; however, we simply cannot spell better than a third-grader.
Precisely. I have a 23" viewable monitor, that due to my cramped computer area, is only about 18" from my nose while playing. Aside from giving me a nice tan, I get waxed in shooter games because it doesn't give me any MORE peripheral vision, it just puts the same FOV out the edges of my REAL FOV - arguably, this is more realistic, except that shooters are generally tunnel-vison 90 degree FOV anyway.
The Mainichi 'WaiWai" news site (http://mdn.mainichi.co.jp) is a clearinghouse of news stories from the Japanese dailies - the equivalent to a 'news' site in the USA that collected the most significant news stories from the Star, the Enquirer, etc. Take it for what it's worth, and go read about "Eager beavers diving into old pornos for new tricks" or this excerpt from "TV products put to bizzzzare uses!": '"I bought two vibrating diet belts. Of course I bought them to lose weight, but I realized that if I strapped them over my private parts, it felt unbelievably good. Recently, I've forgotten all about my diet," a 37-year-old woman says. "Instead of attaching the belt horizontally, I stick it on vertically, between my legs. Then I check out all the young guys at work and think about all the nasty things I'd like to do with them." '
Slashdot Mirror
MODERATION: +1 erudite.
Not just told them, AFAIK it wasn't really a request that they could refuse.
Also, as long as we're holding up the early 20th Century as an era of enlightened patent resolution, note that this faded immediately after WWI, as the Allies plundered German intellectual property patents as part of the Versailles settlement.
Asprin, for example, was a protected formula of the Bayer company. After WWI this protection was nullified so Allied countries' companies could make it without having to pay a royalty.
So the lesson would be, we need to ask someone to conquer us, dissolve all our current patents and IP systems, so we can rewrite them from scratch.
Oh, and kill all the lawyers while they're here. That wouldn't hurt either.
and you wrote this response on /. with what again? The Ps2?
Nexagon: The Pit will actually have product placement as part of the game itself.
Real Time tactical combat, and you get points based on how popular you are with the AI audience. Earn more money if your gladiator destroys an enemy directly in front of one of your sponsor's billboards, raising their ratings.
Check out http://www.strategyfirst.com/en/games/ go to Nexagon/features.
Life might be a lot simpler if you believe something like this, but the fact is that in our system of goverment, we elect people to act as our representives in government.
Since democracy = government by the popular, to run for office, one needs to use the media. Since our democracy is capitalist and media outlets are not state-run, this costs money.
Corporations understand this. If MegaCorp X* (* insert your particular corporate villain here, or labor group, or environmental group, or any lobby or PAC) likes the policies one endorses, they will give that individual (their campaign, their party, etc) money to access the media outlets more successfully.
Do I think that there is some implied quid pro quo involved? Certainly in some cases at least, it would be naive to believe otherwise. Do I think Greenpeace hands Barbara Boxer a check for $50,000 and says "now you must vote to do what we say!" Hardly. To believe THAT is equally naive. Entities support the politicians that align with their interests. Companies that give to BOTH sides are simply arming themselves for both eventualities, and hoping that the implied quid pro quo is enough to maintain that politician's favor.
The question is, what do you think is so much better - a totally state-controlled scientific system in which companies have NO say in what gets research funding/focus? Or perhaps a totally free-market system where the government gives NO money for scientific research, and companies/foundations can follow whatever they want.
Is our system perfect? No. But the statement "Government is owned by Corporate America" is as banal as it is naive.
"One brain-injury specialist interviewed said that ... the state was "a little misguided."
Let me get this straight: you're saying that a bunch of congressmen are making laws regulating something they didn't really understand? That's absurd!
Stop them before the try to regulate computers or the internet!....oh, wait....
Heh, "butt loads" of methane. What a strangely appropriate measure.
1) Your manager and everyone above him up to the CEO are the first to go and last to leave (i.e. they are also working "balls to the wall", not just you)
AND/OR
2) they offer you at least 15/8ths of your regular weekly pay (some might say 20/8ths for time-and-a-half rate)
Then there's no problem. Theres only a problem if it's them telling you to commit such effort and they aren't, or if you're not compensated for it.
"Science simply cannot prove, by an measure, that the Universe was not created whole by one supreme force with the power to place every particle, wave, and plank in whatever postion the being desired. It can't prove that this wasn't what happend at the big bang, it can't prove that this didn't happen 7,000 years ago, and it can't prove that it didn't happen 150 years ago."
Well, let's put it this way. No, I cannot prove that the universe didn't exist before I was born. There is no possible way that I can PROVE (to your level of evidence) that everything wasn't created the instant I was born (so as to APPEAR that it was in existance for billions of years leading up to the moment of my birth).
Yet, I think most people would agree that, if I held such a belief, I would be pretty "ignorant". Ignorant = willing to make a monumental leap (call it faith, whatever) rather than believing something that seems to follow a more reasonable train of cause/effect.
Yeah, I know there's probably a better way to say that, but I'm tired.
You're a Christian? Good on ya, cobber. But that doesn't necessarily validate everything you believe to be true.
Let's see:
1) An educational system that, since the 1970's at LEAST has developed a pervasive philosophy of social promotion, moral relativism, and anti-intellectualism*. Teachers compensated not against performance, but according to time served.
2) Schools that have so much corruption, kickbacks, and a positively Medieval fixed resistance to change that they look like Papa Doc's Haiti.
3) Dependence on rote learning, memorization, and 'teaching to the test'.
4) A culture that agrees that your average pro baseball player should make $45/minute ($2.3 mill/yr), and popular icons are Britney Spears and Justin Timberlake, but there's little money for consistent space exploration.
* if you disagree, you've never seriously tried to dispute a politically-correct position in a modern American university system. No matter the labels, it's NOT about 'discourse', it's dogma. It may be liberal dogma, but it's dogma nonetheless.
I'll be blunt: people who believe in creationism are ignorant. The American educational system is turning out ignorant graduates. Why is anyone surprised that as these people grow into adulthood they are easily led by charismatics touting infantile ideas?
Isn't this a tad self-referential?
/. pimping a book by Taco or jonkatz.
Posting a positive "news story" about a geek-code short story written by a blogger.
That's as bad as
W-e-e-l-l-l,
I'm not sure that's a completely convincing argument. The USA and Canada share similar spaces, sure. However I recall reading that the huge majority (80%?, 90%?) of the Canadian population lives within 50 miles of the US border. Does this raise the Canadian population to anything near Japan/Korea densities? I strongly doubt it. But it may be past the critical density point where DSL rollout is economical.
Not to dispute your point about the publicly owned telcos, though.
from: http://www.crystalinks.com/voynich.html
"Historically, it first appears in 1586 at the court of Rudolph II of Bohemia, who was one of the most eccentric European monarchs of that or any other period. Rudolph collected dwarfs and had a regiment of giants in his army. He was surrounded by astrologers, and he was fascinated by games and codes and music. He was typical of the occult-oriented, Protestant noblemen of this period and epitomized the liberated northern European prince. he was a patron of alchemy and supported the printing of alchemical literature.
The Rosicrucian conspiracy was being quietly fomented during this same period. To Rudolph's court came an unknown person who sold this manuscript to the king for three hundred gold ducats, which, translated into modern monetary units, is about fourteen thousand dollars. This is an astonishing amount of money to have paid for a manuscript at that time, which indicated that the Emperor must have been highly impressed by it."
Wow, if this guy had lived 400 years later he'd probably have founded a dot.com, run the stock up to million$, and then vanished.
Let's see, gullible king with lots of money, known for being eccentric....
I'm thinking we're wasting our time, and some departed spirit is laughing his ass off that we're trying to decipher something that was no more than an elaborate con.
Part of the speed of typing has to do with the fact that you are using (ok, some are using...) 8-10 fingers almost simultaneously.
Type "a quick brown fox jumps over the lazy sleeping dog". Now, mentally write it by LOOKING at each letter on your keyboard, and thinking 'click' on each one.
1) visually - takes at least 3 times longer, at least for me.
2) doing that for even a few moments is already giving me a headache.
I don't think it's going to be the next 'sliced bread'.
"...people want to tailor their specific videos/software per region because of language barriers and such..."
You don't really mean that do you? I mean seriously, does ANYONE see DVD region-encoding as ANYTHING but a ludicrously obvious effort by producing companies to introduce market control and artificial scarcity, thus allowing inflated pricing?
You are a company, you have a right to try to sell your products for as high a price as the market will bear. The market, on the other hand has a right (yes, a right) to try to force your prices as low as it can. If the perceived total net cost of piracy is less than your selling price, you lose. You can (as the RIAA, BSA, etc) try to raise the perceived cost of piracy, at the cost of goodwill.
The internet killed region-encoding, plain and simple. It'll kill any similar effort at market control such as inflated digital media pricing (note to RIAA: piracy will dissolve if you reduced your prices to something commensurate with the music's value....), and even the stupid German book price-fixing laws.
Good riddance to blatantly greedy marketing schemes. Go start a chain-letter or something.
...to test brainwaves, because it's obvious that normal travelers (being delayed by extensive security measures) are never stressed-out or homocidal. Especially if they're made to stop for one more scan by minimum wage federal employees that aren't doing jack squat ANYway.
GREAT IDEA. I feel safer already.
Oh, I'm sure it will be:
Take the stunningly-rendered totally realistic looking truly curved 8000-polygon red key to the stunningly-rendered totally realistic bump-mapped real-world-physics-based red door.
See? That's like, light years better than Doom (I).
I thought this is what the /. community believed in? If you buy a product, since you've paid for it, you can do anything you like with it.
Why shouldn't the same hold true for MS? If they've bought the Justice Dept, then they can use it as they wish.
Is a government agency open-source or GPL?
Ow, mom! No! Really, I'm typing a paper! Stop it!....
This is such a staggeringly stupid thing to say, it occurs to me to wonder if we're not being misdirected.
Could it be that Mr. Valenti isn't trying to sabotage the people pirating movies, but instead going after the root cause of the decline of old-fashioned hollywood power: the television itself?
If we come to a day where (due to alleged concerns about piracy) the gullible public will accept that the studios have a legitimate reason NOT to release their films on DVD, then aren't we back in a pre-VCR era where to see a movie in it's full glory you actually have to go to a THEATER? Suddenly re-releases come back as a valid market-milking strategy, theater revenues/values climb and the only way you get to see a film EVER is by paying them the ticket price EVERY TIME YOU WATCH IT?
Granted, it sounds pretty damn stupid to me too, but this is the same industry that thinks they make more money by selling $8 tickets and $6 popcorn, and then can't figure out why people would rather sit at home, eat (nearly) free popcorn and pay a $4 rental fee no matter how many people watch it.
But please. I understand he's gotta be snappy, he's gotta be interesting, or they'll start booking Scott Adams instead, but still...
Comparing coding to the life-shortening, near-slave labor of diamond mining? I'm thinking the guys down in Windhoek don't GET a choice fat-free lattes, or bitch because they have to walk all 50 steps to the Pepsi machine.
And then it must be comedic genious for him to then castigate people for then coming up with "farfetched, elegant, literary metaphors to describe this process." Like, I don't know, comparing it to diamond mining maybe?
I actually LIKE what he has to say in the majority of the speech, but to me he starts on such a bitter and weak note that it distracts from his message.
Precisely.
I have a 23" viewable monitor, that due to my cramped computer area, is only about 18" from my nose while playing.
Aside from giving me a nice tan, I get waxed in shooter games because it doesn't give me any MORE peripheral vision, it just puts the same FOV out the edges of my REAL FOV - arguably, this is more realistic, except that shooters are generally tunnel-vison 90 degree FOV anyway.
"gazillion-dollar business" = ~$7 billion
And I'll second the "NO" vote on the term 'e-games'. E-gad.
The Mainichi 'WaiWai" news site (http://mdn.mainichi.co.jp) is a clearinghouse of news stories from the Japanese dailies - the equivalent to a 'news' site in the USA that collected the most significant news stories from the Star, the Enquirer, etc. Take it for what it's worth, and go read about "Eager beavers diving into old pornos for new tricks" or this excerpt from "TV products put to bizzzzare uses!": '"I bought two vibrating diet belts. Of course I bought them to lose weight, but I realized that if I strapped them over my private parts, it felt unbelievably good. Recently, I've forgotten all about my diet," a 37-year-old woman says. "Instead of attaching the belt horizontally, I stick it on vertically, between my legs. Then I check out all the young guys at work and think about all the nasty things I'd like to do with them." '
OK, WSJ online it's not.