What is neccessary for the creation of most art (eg. books, movies, music, visual arts) is some form of compensation. Producing art is time consuming and is often a full time task. People can't dedicate themselves to that task without being certain of their ability to feed and shelter themselves.
Copyright is currently the only thing that helps provide this protection to the artists' livelihoods; therefore it is necessary.
You are correct that things went relatively swimmingly before modern copyright laws. But that's because artists were virtually always employees or had a patron (and the employer/patron just wanted something nice not something to make money off). The artists had steady income. Fortunately the patronage system has gone the way of the dodo bird
Uematsu is definitely not one of the greatest composer of the current time. I enjoy his music, but it falls far short of actual "serious" (western art music tradition, classical, contemporary classical, modern, whatever you want to call it) music.
Listen to a symphony movement (except maybe from Phillip Glass) and compare it to the FF game music. The two are completely different in their approaches. The symphony movement is designed to build from a beginning statement of themes, developing them until it reaches an inevitable conclusion. The track from an FF game is theme, nothing else, designed to endlessly loop. There's nothing musically interesting going one.
Uematsu is very good at developing musical themes. It's why his early music stands out so well against it's competitors; given the limited resources Uematsu was able to achieve a lot. But being able to come up with themes does not a good composer make.
Comparing Uematsu to great composers (past and present) is like comparing Motley Crue to the Beatles. Sure, Motley Crue can be fun, enternaining music in small doses, but it's relatively lacking in substance.
That's probably the most unreadable post I've seen on Slashdot in years. Every sentence contained at least one spelling, grammatical, or serious logical error. The post had missing punctuation, sentences broken into parts that make no sense by themselves, and sentences joined together so that they made no sense.
It actually hurt to read that post. I had to stop after every sentence to reread it and puzzle out the meaning.
At the end of message I had very little idea of either your intended argument or your rationalization for that argument. Please don't do that to me again.
I guess some of these can be atrributed to the fact that Japan is far smaller than the US in terms of population.
More likely it can attributed to the population density. Japan has something along the lines of 130M people in an area about the size of Texas or California.
A more dense population means less infrastructure costs. For example, just look at the difference between an urban core and suburban neighbourhood. To support the same population in the city you need less roads, a smaller sewer/water infrastructure, less cabling. Being denser, going to the supermarket requires walking a block instead of getting into a gas-consuming car.
Because the same population requires less infrastructure it's cheaper per person to have dense city living. This either free's more tax money for better services or means lower taxes. The same applies to the entire country. Smaller inter-state/city highways, goods aren't being shipped 200 miles, relatively more expensive emergency services aren't provided for remote areas, etc..
The trick in NA (both US and Canada) is to encourage urban living. Too oftern people are fleeing for suburbs and this can't but have a negative impact on the economy.
But isn't commiting sins, something that gets you punished and sent to Hell? Abraham and Sarah never repented for their sins. Or are you saying as long as someone has faith in God they're free to sin all they want?
And if God is as benevolent as you've claimed before, why did God threaten to punish not only the King of Gerar but his ENTIRE nation when he did nothing wrong?
For starters, Israel is Joseph, Abraham's great-grandson; not Abraham.
Secondly Abraham never, ever repented his sins. Since God continued to bless Abraham and his descendents that seem to imply God condoned their acts. Afterall he didn't send them to Hell for their very severe sins.
Also, your analogy is slightly off, unlike in your example the transgression and blessing were not unrelated. God DIRECTLY intervened on A&S's behalf during the issue with Abilimech. God appeared to Abilimech in his dreams and told him of his coming distruction. In order to avoid this the king of Gerar was required to give monetary tribute to Abraham.
Besides, why would God punish Abilimech? He didn't actually do anything wrong, he just married what he thought was a single woman.
2)Read the Bible for yourself, study it, and really look at what it says
Um. Have you actually ever read the bible? If so I don't think you'd be so quick to make statement #1.
Let's just take some of the stories in Genesis as examples. Abraham and Sarah (well, it's before she gets her name changed to Sarah). Twice the two of them lie about not being married and kings marry Sarah (the Pharoah of Egypt and Abilimech of Gerar). God then threatens to destroy those two kingdoms because the kings took a married woman as thier wife. In order to escape God's wrath the kings provide much wealth to Abraham and send the couple on their way.
So to recap
Abraham and Sarah both lie
Abraham pimps out his wife
Sarah commits adultery
God blesses the couple
The only thing one can take from this story is that God condoned sin and he's not really as benevolent as the churches say. It seems to me like the Bible is saying it's OK to sin.
Sure, the bible later says it's bad. But that just makes the whole one big contradictory mess. And why would any one put their faith in that?
All it takes is a single example to invalidate a general assertation
Not true. The assertion wasn't that lack of pregnancy causes breast cancer, but that lack pregnancy increases the risk of breast cancer. That your wife had cancer (my sympathies) does not disprove the hypothesis.
I'm not an American, so please forgive my lack of knowledge of some details of the system, and less than complete historical knowledge.
Under Reagan at least, the economic policy was run from the president's office. Congress may have been irresponsible in going along with it, but the adminstration directed the policy. And the policy was decreased taxes and increased spending (mainly on non-investment things like the military). The policy has been called Reaganomics for a reason, and it signalled the end of any claim the Republicans had to being called fiscally conservative.
My question to you, then, is as follows. And it's just to better understand your system. Why since the dawn of time have issues like taxes and spending been central to presidential elections if they're things the president has no power over?
The Republicans lost fiscal conservatism when Reagan took over. The average yearly deficit in Reagan's administration was about 5-6 times higher than under any previous administration. (~300B vs ~50B)
Under Bush Sr. it climbed even higher. Clinton took it back down to ~200B.
Dubya then preceded to break new records.
Before Reagan, the debt stood around $1T, it's now at around $7.5T. Clinton accounted for around $1.5T of that. The remaining $5T was from republicans.
if you don't believe in the system, why did you vote in the first place?
I didn't. Couldn't as I'm not American.
And it's not that I don't beleive in democracy. I do, it's just that it's not perfect (like any form of government). And normally it's not that big deal. If someone I don't believe in wins I'm generally happy to live the results even if I'm not happy with the results themselves.
But sometimes the system call fail utterly and produce leaders who are emmensely dangerous to both the nation and outsiders. Democracy produces these leaders, as do dictatorships, monarchies, what have you.
With democracies, however, people seem to have belief that system is ideal and holy and not to be usurped. And that's just silly and dangerous.
I just find it suprising that the American people basically just gave their stamp of approval for Bush's actions for the past four years.
As a foreigner (Canadian) I'm feeling both alienated and puzzled by this puzzle. The Bush administration is blatantly anti-world. By voting for and endorsing this man, the American population is essentially saying they agree with his sentiments. Almost makes me want to cancel my trip down there this weekend. Why spend time and money hanging out amongst people who think I some sort of evil socialist commie?
For Americans themselves Bush is just a bad leader. His economic stance is worse than Reagan's and his war-mongering is worse than LBJ/Nixon's. His slow destruction of the middle class is horrible. Some of argued he either a liar or is incompetent. Crap, dudes, he's both.
I live in Canada now, but I might move to Europe just because eventually the US will drag Canada down toilet with it.
And you're proud? A nation is heavily divided against an administration that is destroying the economy, civil rights, foreign relations, and the environment.
Under different forms of government of government this would have seen an armed upraising or states fracturing off and declaring independence. Instead, because of democracy and voting people just shrug it off and decide to suffer under 4 more years of this just so they can vote again.
Sometimes the proper thing to do _is_ to riot in the streets, launch a coup, or succede.
Perhaps the British parliment should have granted the Americans some form of elected representation in their houses. Then there wouldn't have been a Boston Tea Party or armed revolt. Instead the founding fathers would have just ran for parliment and 200 years later the US would still be colony. Maybe.
but much of the world hates us and many would like to kill us
No shit. Isn't the solution therefore to make people hating US then? Is that goal going to be furthered by running around starting wars and inflamming world opinion even more? Bush has done a lot more to harm your safety than help it.
Right, but it's still SMP. Which is really the same sort of thing Sun's processor uniboards which have a handful of CPU's and a bit of memory. But when you plug those boards into a chasis any cpu on any board can talk to any other CPU over a high speed bus and can use any memory it likes, not limited to just that on it's board.
A user of the system doesn't work with blocks, they just see X CPUs, Y memory, and 1 system image.
AFAIK, the only reason SGI uses bricks is to reduce design/research costs. Instead of designing one server with 16CPUs, one with 32, one with 48, etc., they design just one type of brick and one type of chasis and can put in as many CPUs as the clients want.
This is why SMP computers tend to have 2 or 4 processors, and 8 at a pinch, but no more
Umm, not true. Sun, can hold up to 106 processers in its Sunfire 15K product, or 72 dual-core processors in the E25K.
SGI's Origin systems are equally large I believe. And manufacturers like IBM also have large SMP machines.
Being able to efficiently use that many processors is a completely different matter that depends on the nature of the problem. It is possible to efficiently to use more that 8 processors though. I've heard of programs that scaled almost linearly up to at least 40.
Their new machines stilled aren't clustered. Clusters don't generally run single system images on shared memory computers. SGI's Altix systems use a NUMA link to enable them to efficiently acces memory on remote computers, making them a kind of distributed shared memory machine. And SGI's Origin systems are your traditional SMP machine. The Altix or Origin systems are neither cheap, nor off the shelf.
Regarding your comment about them ignoring Linux, what was fundamentally wrong with that? Irix was a very capable OS, why should they have just dumped it?
(say, a person in a KKK costume and using the "n" word towards blacks/african-americans, etc.) Is that ok?
No. Because the people the guy is interacting with aren't playing his game and aren't consenting.
I believe the player was banned, some said it was role-playing, others said it crossed the line Not okay. Again, the people he was drawing into his game didn't want to be involved.
Boundaries in the game depend on the participants and what they set. I might very well find a group of african-americans who for some reason like roleplaying alone with KKK costumes in which case the first scenario is now okay. As long as the participants willing want to play a certain type of game then as far as I'm concerned boundaries don't exist.
For the case in question though, is it OK? Dunno, it's a not a simple anwser. Was the player drawing people into his game or excluding them. There's no law requiring someone to interact with someone else. If he berated others gave them offence than yes it was inappropriate. But if not no.
At one time, businesses existed to make a product, not solely to make a profit.
Business _always_ existed to make a profit; everything from small to big businesses. You need, however, a product in order to get the profit.
And do you really think that popular games are less subject to piracy than experimental ones?
They're all going to be pirated; here's the OP's point spelled a little more simplistically. Popular games make (usually) lots of profit. Income from experimental games are uncertain, and are usually a cash drain (using up profits from the hit games). If a publisher is losing money from piracy then they have less profits to offset the loss from the experimental games. Which means they can't make those games anymore.
It's not greed to generate profits. Without profits business cannot exist. That's what happened to the dotcom bust. There were products but no profits.
Which, of course, is completely unlike the situation BEFORE the US got there..../sarcasm And yet the US is blamed for "fucking things up".
Before the US went in the nation was at least somewhat stable. The Taliban was evil-ish, but they retained at least some control, and were working very hard to eliminate opium production.
At the best, Afghanistan is now the same as before, and is probably worse off now the country is fractured and has little effective central government.
And this retention of the status quo cost the lifes of soldiers on both sides, civilian lifes, and a lot money. It was pointless and stupid.
This product is the design of a BC, Canada startup called Octiga Bay. The team behind it were former telco switch/router engineers/execs. From Nortel, I believe. Nothing to do with SRC
The other concern you don't address is health effects. Modern lifestyles have added enough sources of carcinogens/radiation, that I'm not adding another is necessarily a good thing. Especially when there's alternatives.
For the home user buying a new computer, saving $100 in electricity/year because of a lower wattage computer can still be an important. Most people could find other ways to spend that $100.
Canada was confederated in 1867, only two years later, and has been a completely stable democracy since this time
Close, but not quite. There was civil unrest in Quebec in the 70's requiring the province to placed under a state of martial law. There is an everpresent sentiment in Quebec that they need to separate from Canada. This sentiment is also starting to take hold in Western Canada, where the population feels disenfranchised.
Slashdot Mirror
What is neccessary for the creation of most art (eg. books, movies, music, visual arts) is some form of compensation. Producing art is time consuming and is often a full time task. People can't dedicate themselves to that task without being certain of their ability to feed and shelter themselves.
Copyright is currently the only thing that helps provide this protection to the artists' livelihoods; therefore it is necessary.
You are correct that things went relatively swimmingly before modern copyright laws. But that's because artists were virtually always employees or had a patron (and the employer/patron just wanted something nice not something to make money off). The artists had steady income. Fortunately the patronage system has gone the way of the dodo bird
Uematsu is definitely not one of the greatest composer of the current time. I enjoy his music, but it falls far short of actual "serious" (western art music tradition, classical, contemporary classical, modern, whatever you want to call it) music.
Listen to a symphony movement (except maybe from Phillip Glass) and compare it to the FF game music. The two are completely different in their approaches. The symphony movement is designed to build from a beginning statement of themes, developing them until it reaches an inevitable conclusion. The track from an FF game is theme, nothing else, designed to endlessly loop. There's nothing musically interesting going one.
Uematsu is very good at developing musical themes. It's why his early music stands out so well against it's competitors; given the limited resources Uematsu was able to achieve a lot. But being able to come up with themes does not a good composer make.
Comparing Uematsu to great composers (past and present) is like comparing Motley Crue to the Beatles. Sure, Motley Crue can be fun, enternaining music in small doses, but it's relatively lacking in substance.
Dude,
That's probably the most unreadable post I've seen on Slashdot in years. Every sentence contained at least one spelling, grammatical, or serious logical error. The post had missing punctuation, sentences broken into parts that make no sense by themselves, and sentences joined together so that they made no sense.
It actually hurt to read that post. I had to stop after every sentence to reread it and puzzle out the meaning.
At the end of message I had very little idea of either your intended argument or your rationalization for that argument. Please don't do that to me again.
I guess some of these can be atrributed to the fact that Japan is far smaller than the US in terms of population.
More likely it can attributed to the population density. Japan has something along the lines of 130M people in an area about the size of Texas or California.
A more dense population means less infrastructure costs. For example, just look at the difference between an urban core and suburban neighbourhood. To support the same population in the city you need less roads, a smaller sewer/water infrastructure, less cabling. Being denser, going to the supermarket requires walking a block instead of getting into a gas-consuming car.
Because the same population requires less infrastructure it's cheaper per person to have dense city living. This either free's more tax money for better services or means lower taxes. The same applies to the entire country. Smaller inter-state/city highways, goods aren't being shipped 200 miles, relatively more expensive emergency services aren't provided for remote areas, etc..
The trick in NA (both US and Canada) is to encourage urban living. Too oftern people are fleeing for suburbs and this can't but have a negative impact on the economy.
(what's the chapter/verse for your reference)
But isn't commiting sins, something that gets you punished and sent to Hell? Abraham and Sarah never repented for their sins. Or are you saying as long as someone has faith in God they're free to sin all they want?
And if God is as benevolent as you've claimed before, why did God threaten to punish not only the King of Gerar but his ENTIRE nation when he did nothing wrong?
what are you Israel
For starters, Israel is Joseph, Abraham's great-grandson; not Abraham.
Secondly Abraham never, ever repented his sins. Since God continued to bless Abraham and his descendents that seem to imply God condoned their acts. Afterall he didn't send them to Hell for their very severe sins.
Also, your analogy is slightly off, unlike in your example the transgression and blessing were not unrelated. God DIRECTLY intervened on A&S's behalf during the issue with Abilimech. God appeared to Abilimech in his dreams and told him of his coming distruction. In order to avoid this the king of Gerar was required to give monetary tribute to Abraham.
Besides, why would God punish Abilimech? He didn't actually do anything wrong, he just married what he thought was a single woman.
2)Read the Bible for yourself, study it, and really look at what it says
Um. Have you actually ever read the bible? If so I don't think you'd be so quick to make statement #1.
Let's just take some of the stories in Genesis as examples. Abraham and Sarah (well, it's before she gets her name changed to Sarah). Twice the two of them lie about not being married and kings marry Sarah (the Pharoah of Egypt and Abilimech of Gerar). God then threatens to destroy those two kingdoms because the kings took a married woman as thier wife. In order to escape God's wrath the kings provide much wealth to Abraham and send the couple on their way.
So to recap
The only thing one can take from this story is that God condoned sin and he's not really as benevolent as the churches say. It seems to me like the Bible is saying it's OK to sin.
Sure, the bible later says it's bad. But that just makes the whole one big contradictory mess. And why would any one put their faith in that?
All it takes is a single example to invalidate a general assertation
Not true. The assertion wasn't that lack of pregnancy causes breast cancer, but that lack pregnancy increases the risk of breast cancer.
That your wife had cancer (my sympathies) does not disprove the hypothesis.
I'm not an American, so please forgive my lack of knowledge of some details of the system, and less than complete historical knowledge.
Under Reagan at least, the economic policy was run from the president's office. Congress may have been irresponsible in going along with it, but the adminstration directed the policy. And the policy was decreased taxes and increased spending (mainly on non-investment things like the military). The policy has been called Reaganomics for a reason, and it signalled the end of any claim the Republicans had to being called fiscally conservative.
My question to you, then, is as follows. And it's just to better understand your system. Why since the dawn of time have issues like taxes and spending been central to presidential elections if they're things the president has no power over?
The Republicans lost fiscal conservatism when Reagan took over. The average yearly deficit in Reagan's administration was about 5-6 times higher than under any previous administration. (~300B vs ~50B)
Under Bush Sr. it climbed even higher. Clinton took it back down to ~200B.
Dubya then preceded to break new records.
Before Reagan, the debt stood around $1T, it's now at around $7.5T. Clinton accounted for around $1.5T of that. The remaining $5T was from republicans.
if you don't believe in the system, why did you vote in the first place?
I didn't. Couldn't as I'm not American.
And it's not that I don't beleive in democracy. I do, it's just that it's not perfect (like any form of government). And normally it's not that big deal. If someone I don't believe in wins I'm generally happy to live the results even if I'm not happy with the results themselves.
But sometimes the system call fail utterly and produce leaders who are emmensely dangerous to both the nation and outsiders. Democracy produces these leaders, as do dictatorships, monarchies, what have you.
With democracies, however, people seem to have belief that system is ideal and holy and not to be usurped. And that's just silly and dangerous.
I just find it suprising that the American people basically just gave their stamp of approval for Bush's actions for the past four years.
As a foreigner (Canadian) I'm feeling both alienated and puzzled by this puzzle. The Bush administration is blatantly anti-world. By voting for and endorsing this man, the American population is essentially saying they agree with his sentiments. Almost makes me want to cancel my trip down there this weekend. Why spend time and money hanging out amongst people who think I some sort of evil socialist commie?
For Americans themselves Bush is just a bad leader. His economic stance is worse than Reagan's and his war-mongering is worse than LBJ/Nixon's. His slow destruction of the middle class is horrible. Some of argued he either a liar or is incompetent. Crap, dudes, he's both.
I live in Canada now, but I might move to Europe just because eventually the US will drag Canada down toilet with it.
1) There were no riots in the street.
And you're proud? A nation is heavily divided against an administration that is destroying the economy, civil rights, foreign relations, and the environment.
Under different forms of government of government this would have seen an armed upraising or states fracturing off and declaring independence. Instead, because of democracy and voting people just shrug it off and decide to suffer under 4 more years of this just so they can vote again.
Sometimes the proper thing to do _is_ to riot in the streets, launch a coup, or succede.
Perhaps the British parliment should have granted the Americans some form of elected representation in their houses. Then there wouldn't have been a Boston Tea Party or armed revolt. Instead the founding fathers would have just ran for parliment and 200 years later the US would still be colony. Maybe.
but much of the world hates us and many would like to kill us
No shit. Isn't the solution therefore to make people hating US then? Is that goal going to be furthered by running around starting wars and inflamming world opinion even more? Bush has done a lot more to harm your safety than help it.
Right, but it's still SMP. Which is really the same sort of thing Sun's processor uniboards which have a handful of CPU's and a bit of memory. But when you plug those boards into a chasis any cpu on any board can talk to any other CPU over a high speed bus and can use any memory it likes, not limited to just that on it's board.
A user of the system doesn't work with blocks, they just see X CPUs, Y memory, and 1 system image.
AFAIK, the only reason SGI uses bricks is to reduce design/research costs. Instead of designing one server with 16CPUs, one with 32, one with 48, etc., they design just one type of brick and one type of chasis and can put in as many CPUs as the clients want.
This is why SMP computers tend to have 2 or 4 processors, and 8 at a pinch, but no more
Umm, not true. Sun, can hold up to 106 processers in its Sunfire 15K product, or 72 dual-core processors in the E25K.
SGI's Origin systems are equally large I believe. And manufacturers like IBM also have large SMP machines.
Being able to efficiently use that many processors is a completely different matter that depends on the nature of the problem. It is possible to efficiently to use more that 8 processors though. I've heard of programs that scaled almost linearly up to at least 40.
how they resisted ... clustering
Their new machines stilled aren't clustered. Clusters don't generally run single system images on shared memory computers. SGI's Altix systems use a NUMA link to enable them to efficiently acces memory on remote computers, making them a kind of distributed shared memory machine. And SGI's Origin systems are your traditional SMP machine. The Altix or Origin systems are neither cheap, nor off the shelf.
Regarding your comment about them ignoring Linux, what was fundamentally wrong with that? Irix was a very capable OS, why should they have just dumped it?
(say, a person in a KKK costume and using the "n" word towards blacks/african-americans, etc.) Is that ok?
No. Because the people the guy is interacting with aren't playing his game and aren't consenting.
I believe the player was banned, some said it was role-playing, others said it crossed the line
Not okay. Again, the people he was drawing into his game didn't want to be involved.
Boundaries in the game depend on the participants and what they set. I might very well find a group of african-americans who for some reason like roleplaying alone with KKK costumes in which case the first scenario is now okay. As long as the participants willing want to play a certain type of game then as far as I'm concerned boundaries don't exist.
For the case in question though, is it OK? Dunno, it's a not a simple anwser. Was the player drawing people into his game or excluding them. There's no law requiring someone to interact with someone else. If he berated others gave them offence than yes it was inappropriate. But if not no.
At one time, businesses existed to make a product, not solely to make a profit.
Business _always_ existed to make a profit; everything from small to big businesses. You need, however, a product in order to get the profit.
And do you really think that popular games are less subject to piracy than experimental ones?
They're all going to be pirated; here's the OP's point spelled a little more simplistically. Popular games make (usually) lots of profit. Income from experimental games are uncertain, and are usually a cash drain (using up profits from the hit games). If a publisher is losing money from piracy then they have less profits to offset the loss from the experimental games. Which means they can't make those games anymore.
It's not greed to generate profits. Without profits business cannot exist. That's what happened to the dotcom bust. There were products but no profits.
Which, of course, is completely unlike the situation BEFORE the US got there.... /sarcasm
And yet the US is blamed for "fucking things up".
Before the US went in the nation was at least somewhat stable. The Taliban was evil-ish, but they retained at least some control, and were working very hard to eliminate opium production.
At the best, Afghanistan is now the same as before, and is probably worse off now the country is fractured and has little effective central government.
And this retention of the status quo cost the lifes of soldiers on both sides, civilian lifes, and a lot money. It was pointless and stupid.
76/30=2.53333333333333333333
Yes, but a round trip would take 5.06666 months. The 76 day figure was for a one-way trip.
This product is the design of a BC, Canada startup called Octiga Bay. The team behind it were former telco switch/router engineers/execs. From Nortel, I believe. Nothing to do with SRC
The other concern you don't address is health effects. Modern lifestyles have added enough sources of carcinogens/radiation, that I'm not adding another is necessarily a good thing. Especially when there's alternatives.
For the home user buying a new computer, saving $100 in electricity/year because of a lower wattage computer can still be an important. Most people could find other ways to spend that $100.
Canada was confederated in 1867, only two years later, and has been a completely stable democracy since this time
Close, but not quite. There was civil unrest in Quebec in the 70's requiring the province to placed under a state of martial law. There is an everpresent sentiment in Quebec that they need to separate from Canada. This sentiment is also starting to take hold in Western Canada, where the population feels disenfranchised.