We'll see how it comes out -- if it comes out
on
Will Smith as I, Robot
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· Score: 3, Informative
I hate to break it to y'all, but this isn't the first time I, Robot has been proposed as a movie, nor the rights purchased, nor even the script written. In fact, the Reuters article terribly disappointed me because they're not using the script by Harlan Ellison, which I have read in its Asimov's serialization and quite enjoyed. (Who are these people on the new script, and what do they really know about SF, anyway?)
I should point out that the first venture at I, Robot: The Movie didn't come off so well, but the same thing happened to Dune for years, so we'll see.
I don't know, it sounds like Einstein was more of a synaesthesiac (someone who perceives stimuli by non-normal or extranormal channels) than either an autistic or a drug addict, although I've never heard of someone experiencing thought as muscle sensation.
I can't tell you what it's like to experience flavours as colours, sounds as colours, smells as sounds, or the like, though (or thoughts as colours, smells, you name it) -- but if you know what I'm talking about, you'll recognize what I mean immediately.
In fact, I would argue against Einstein's having Asperger's Syndrome or other high-function autism disorders simply because he was so social and had so much affect (affect, not effect, though he had that, too) -- the photogenicity, the celebrity, and the overall social skills which he exhibited in spades during most of his life are traits which most high-function autistics never manifest. In fact, the DSM-IV specifically mentions "Qualitative impairment in social interaction." Somehow, a guy who can come up with snappy retorts like that isn't suffering from any impairment in social interaction at all. In fact, considering ordinary mortals' abilities to come up with the right zinger at the right time, he's probably got us beat.
and if you have time, those get sent to abuse@aol, etc. -not that they'll do anything, but it's good to annoy them
I don't know about AOL specifically, but I've had good results getting some spammers removed from similar services, namely Yahoo and Hotmail. Then again, most of the spam I get is from incredibly stupid bottom-feeders who've found my resume on some job board or other (one good reason not to go to a "whitelist" -- any device you could think of to make sure the legitimate recruitment e-mails came through would also allow some if not all of the others) and who want me to sign up to some multilevel marketing scam (hint: Primericatroids please FO&D!).
When they get slimy and underhanded enough to want to offer me a job where I pay them for the priveledge of having it, I get motivated and nasty enough to make sure they lose their e-mail addresses. I send a brief note plus the full text of what I've received from them, and usually the folks at the other end of abuse@ jump.
Then again, I don't get much other spam, so I occasionally do have time to pull out the big guns. (Also, as a first line of defense, I suggest using an e-mail handle that's not English...mine are Latin and Japanese...)
Have these people forgotten the age-old business tradition of the "loss-leader"? In my way of thinking, a website is in itself a promotional vehicle (whether you're hyping yourself, your company, or your product line), and doesn't particularly need to be freighted with (additional) advertisements. Heck, most of the websites I see in a day (job-related, anyway) are commercial sites trying to create interest in the product line.
From that point of view, a website is part of the marketing budget, and a classic example of a loss-leader: something a product maker puts out that has no intrinsic ROI, but that will, they hope, generate enough interest in the product(s) to pay for itself. Some websites also provide so-called "value added" services to sweeten the pot (as in all these industrial manufacturers' websites I go to that offer mostly PDF downloads of their products' Material Safety Data Sheets -- bless you all!) and probably make someone's life easier down the line (downloading a PDF is much easier than getting on the phone and waiting for a fax, f'rinstance!).
And the simple goodwill generated by a clean website that has the features you want, plus possibly a few sweeteners, can certainly help to bring in new customers, particularly if they're the type (as so many are these days) who do their preliminary sourcing via internet.
Anti-Leech's use of the word "theft" illustrates two things: they don't understand the above paradigm, and they're greedy scum trying to wrest the last possible cent out of an unsuitable area, likely at the expense of business draws. (Perhaps they just lack business acumen in general?)
She has "How To Win Friends and Influence People," "The Power of Public Prayer," and "The Cognitive Computer" but she got the former confused with the latter...
And yes I know what you did mean; I just find it hard to believe that people who personify that much would ever actually buy dildoes, much less use them. Now that would be creepy (too). Then again, I don't come from the half of the population where the majority of whom seem to think it's cute to name their genitalia.:)
Because, as Tom Lehrer, formerly of Harvard, noted
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Bringing Back the PDP8
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· Score: 2
...well, you could just omit using your thumbs...but that wouldn't be as masochistic (tango-y goodness!)...
Tom L. has always been a Haavaadite, not from MIT, as in the "Harvard Fight Song," and the lines, "These are the only ones of which the news has come to Haavaad/And there may be many others, but they haven't been discovaad." (Rhotic-lossy dialects bother me, since I speak one of the few English dialects that's fully rhotic.) I imagine it matters to some people (probably they go to Harvard).
Also, as far as I know, he's still there, although long since an Emeritus.
until people get the message, and stop mistaking copyright for a divine right of authors, the message needs to be repeated. That goes double for Congress.
Well, either that or if people stop mistaking "copyright" and "copy protection"; and if they start understanding that "copyright" isn't a single monolithic right, but simply a guarantee to a creator that they are the first assignee and exerciser of the huge group of rights subsumed under the large umbrella term "copyright" (until they decide otherwise), we'll be better off. Involvement of various lawmaking bodies is, of course, determined by the sociopolitical jurisdiction in which you live.:)
I wrote an article in my journal here on Slashdot on Friday, October 18 outlining "Some Things Copyright Is Good For," to try to address some of the misconceptions about copyright.
Bloom's not saying anything I wasn't saying, nor what Thomas C. Greene from The Register said, nor what a bunch of other writers said about intellectual property years ago.
I don't think, as a writer myself, that the "benefit to the author is purely incidental"; it's the incentive that prompts us to share our stuff instead of trunking it or not bothering to put it down in the first place. The benefit to the author is the carrot encouraging the creator to benefit the commonweal, which makes the benefit essential, not incidental.
Maybe she's like me and has adverse reactions to allergy meds...sometimes I have to take them too, but I don't like to. For the record, I like smoking weed, but Benadryl doesn't make me stoned in a fun way -- or in a functional way. Just ask people who watched me stumble and almost stick my hand under a red-hot stove burner while trying to avoid falling on my face into the stove while on Benadryl...yow!
Speaking of yow, your sig, dude. Thanks for the "Visualization mode OFF!" moment for today.
...but go back and read McLuhan afterward.
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Electronic Life
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· Score: 2
Oddly enough, one of the few people I've read who was making an awful lot of future-oriented predictions about media, telecommunications, and the increasing importance of networks was Marshall McLuhan. It's really amazing how much McLuhan got right, considering that he died in 1980, and attained the height of his fame in the late 1960s. Good places to start for your elementary McLuhan education are Understanding Media and Counterblast, which seems gimmicky, but manages to reduce McLuhan's prolix yet lucid prose into catchy aphorisms and illustrative graphics (thanks to the design work of Harley Parker).
Relatedly, I have an issue of Amazing Stories with prognostications on "Life In The Year 2000." I'm still waiting for the 4-day, 20-hour, full-pay workweek, the spray-washable house, and the cheap energy. The moral of the story is, you may get some of it right some of the time, but you're never going to be 100% on the money.
I second that. There are a lot of people out there who'd write for Salon, Alternet, or anywhere for lots less than the going "slicks" rate, and even a lot less than the going "pulps" rate. Some of us are so desperate to see our names in print that we'll publish for copies...
...or post to Slashdot...:)
I never tried to submit anything to Salon because I was always sort of intimidated by the calibre and "names" of the people who get published there. Then again, I never got to submit to Playboy in the 1970s when it was the ne plus ultra of SF short story markets, either, so...
Interrobang,
Killing media venues since 1994
By getting Accepted for Publication (hm, maybe I shoulda submitted to Salon after all)
The media companies would argue that part of the value of their product is "missing."
Which argument is covered completely under "copyright violation" since 'value' is an abstract and "theft" deals in tangibles. No, really. Please go read my article on copyright, revealingly called "Some Things Copyright Is Good For," and which doesn't simply consist of the word "nothing."
I mean, if you don't think the 'value' of being the assignee and exerciser of a bundle of specific rights or grants is worth anything, ask anybody who has ever entered into a one-sided agreement with a content producer where they said, "We'll publish your X, but only if you sell us your copyright." Siegel and Schuster, creators of Superman, got caught in that one, as did numerous authors working in SF in the 40's and 50's.
The argument falls on its face for the same reason many "specific offenses" laws don't get passed -- we already have legislation in general that deals with like problems, and we don't really need a new one which specifically targets that offense. (Copyright and how it works is also a lot more complicated than it sounds, or seems.) We already have copyright; that ought to be enough.
Another hole in their argument concerns the folk tale about the woman who wanted the former beggar executed because he "stole" all those potential chickens she would have had from the dozen eggs she gave him ten years before, whereupon the case was thrown out because she'd hard-boiled the eggs? It's especially hard to prove "theft" against "potential money" which is exactly what they're trying to do...but in many cases, they're counting chickens from hard-boiled eggs.
I'm getting really tired of people equating copying information with 'theft.' Copyright breach it may be (an entirely different kettle of fish, as anyone who understand copyright knows), but theft it is not. The two circumstances are not even remotely similar enough to warrant such a comparison, and anyone who argues otherwise is committing a False Analogy fallacy. (Going into a store and "five-finger discounting" the actual CD is both theft and copyright breach, just to be sure we're clear on that.)
Nothing has been "taken," nothing is "missing," and certainly nothing is "gone" when someone makes a digital copy of something -- unlike Chernin's False Analogy argument about dresses from Wal-Mart.
That's not to say that copyright breach isn't some kind of crime, or that it's not wrong -- but, again, it's not "theft." And it's certainly more defensible (under certain circumstances -- notably our vanishing "Fair Use" and "Public Domain" provisions) than theft.
As a final, waspish parting shot to the point that "all this theft is destroying the industry," Chernin should talk to "Frisky Dick" Richards, who plays "Violent J" in the Insane Clown Posse, which actively encourages people to download, copy, share, and, yes, even steal their work. (He might also try talking to Ron "Hitler" Barrassi of TISM about the same subject, if he thinks he can stand it. I want to sell tickets to that event!) Weirdly enough, ICP has two platinum records and a few gold records to their credit -- with NO airplay or video play -- and seem to be living proof that Chernin and all who sail with them are also committing a Slothful Induction fallacy. (In short, the evidence says Chernin et al's argument isn't true, but they believe it anyway.)
Submitted for your inspection: Lousy hand-eye coordination and I suck at math. Always have, probably always will. However, I'm musical. I've been composing now (standard notation using various software) for 11 years and I'm not too bad. I can play the guitar (as well as anyone with my poor motor skills can manage, anyway), and I have Grade VIII music theory. But I suck at math.
Counterargument: I'm good with languages, though, and I've always thought of music much more in terms of "grammar" and "syntax" than anything math-related. I have a bachelor's degree in English, a master's in rhetoric, and I'm aiming for a PhD.
RhetoricalQuestion helped me with algebra by telling me to think of variable definitions in terms of "connotation" and "denotation," so maybe I'll suck less at math now...
So, all things considered, is there really a correlation between math and music, or is it just another one of those cheesy intellect myths like that all truly "smart" people must be able to play chess well, or something?
I think you mean "Meltdown imminent," rather than, say, to substitute, meltdown "prominent," "lofty," or "well-placed;" although I will admit such a catastrophe would be pretty egregious.
Tell her to go back to direct mailing. Then, at least she pays for the postage, the printing costs, and all that other stuff, instead of making me pay for the bandwidth to download crap she generates, the time it takes to set up yet another spam filter on my e-mail addresses, and the storage space the message will inevitably take up before I send it to digital oblivion. I mean, at least junk mail you can just toss in the recycle bin and it doesn't really cost you anything.
Oh, yeah, and leave your real address out of the letter. No sense in making her life easier. That's also the reason not to phone her or e-mail her. If I worked in a seamy business like that, I'd have Caller ID. And if I worked in a seamy business like that, I'd be precisely unscrupulous enough to take the e-mail addresses out of the barrage of complaints and add them to my database.
a writing utensil and my little red-and-black book
gym clothes
shampoo, conditioner, and soap
an extra pair of underwear
a book
my portable music and a few CDs
a bottle of water
an extra pad (if you don't know, guys, don't bother asking) -- because You Just Never Know
two sets of keys
food/junk food
and various and sundry odds and ends that might come in handy, which vary depending on where I'm going, the time of year, and what I might be doing, most of the time.
Granted, I usually carry a backpack and sometimes a shoulder "forage bag," and keep only keys, wallet and watch in pockets (I love these jeans: they have a watch pocket for my pocket watch, natch!).
I don't carry around a lot of tools or that kind of thing, because as anyone who knows me knows, put tools into my hands and I become dangerously destructive!:)
No, that's usually, "takes it out of the hands of the public and their accountable elected representatives, and places it in the hands of a few whose sole motivation is the increase in its share price usually at the expense of its operating efficiency," most often with a concomitant increase in public risk burden (privatize the benefits, socialize the costs of business, after all). Or did you miss Enron, all those California blackouts, and that study of 24 thousand for-profit and not-for-profit hospitals?
In this case, though, the thief of Newton's books looks like they're privatizing both the benefits and the risks, especially to their ass, which will be grass if and when the authorities find them.
From a certain point of view, overpopulation is the problem. In terms of resource use, carrying capacity, and sustainability, the Western World as we know it is incredibly overpopulated. See, the thing with overpopulation is (what you folks don't get), it's not the sheer numbers, it's the footprint left by those numbers. Therefore, if your land area and available resources can support x number of people at y standard of living, it can only support x-p people at y+q standard of living, where the ratio is most probably an exponential inverse proportion. And because our standard of living is so out of balance with the carrying capacity of where we live, we're drawing resources away from other areas, and, in some cases, causing the diminishment of their standard of living and carrying capacity.
In short, I will agree with you that no matter which way you look at it, we're the problem.
So if I understand this article (and the previous posters' comments) correctly, this guy claims to have found the next best thing in GUI paradigm (that is, a system of signs or meaning construction in which the user operates graphically/visually) which runs on a completely different set of metaphors than the "window"/"desktop" metaphor we're used to seeing.
Okay, it's been tried before. Alternate metaphorical constructs for navigating the computer have a long history (an old one I can think of is the Adventure Shell). My (obnoxious) question is, what makes him think he's got the magic bullet?
Apparently, from what I can interpret, he's using Windows as a foundation on which to build his alternate metaphoric, semantic, and rhetorical construction, which kind of strikes me as mixing metaphors in the worst (and least abstract) way possible!
For more insight into the kinds of things this guy's dabbling in, check out:
Mark Turner's The Literary Mind
Neil Randall's paper "Interface as Speech Act"
a paper by Joseph Goguen in the Advanced Lectures in Computer Science series (sorry, don't have the cite on me),
William Hart-Davidson's paper "Modelling Document-Mediated Interaction," from the 2002 SIGDOC proceedings,
and similar stuff. You might also want to check out Ortony's classic anthology on metaphorics for the background.
A friend of mine who's still using his Amiga of old has an amusing anecdote similar to this: At one time he had the "fastest Mac in the world" -- an Amiga running it under an emulator. He said the Apple guys were really pissed.:) (Hi, Knute!)
I still miss my old Amiga. We had some good times. --snif-- I doubt I'll get this one, though, as it's probably more fun to sit around and be nostalgic in a diffuse kind of way.
No, you don't factor in the exchange rate when it's a home-currency transaction! $50K is $50K is $50K, as long as that $50K is staying on the same side of the border where it started.
I guarantee that a $50K/a job buys you every bit as much whatever as you could want in Canada as it does in the US (some goods and services are more expensive, but I don't pay half my salary to Kaiser Permanente every month like a friend of mine in Baltimore does). When it comes to cost-of-living, in general, prices in Ontario are comparable to or cheaper than most places in the US.
But the key point is, again, you don't use the exchange rate when the money is staying on the same side of the border where it started. The ONLY time (and I repeat) ONLY time the exchange rate applies is when the transaction is cross-border. Since Corel is a Canadian company spending Canadian dollars in Canada, the equivalence should be understood as roughly 1:1 (based on cost of living and other indices) and not 2:1.
If you BUY their products, you will only encourage them.
But if you don't TELL them you've stopped buying their products, they assume it's just a sales slump, and devote more time, energy, and most of all MONEY to passing bad laws and trying to enforce copy-protection. After all, they already KNOW what causes sales slumps -- piracy and P2P applications. (Never mind the facts, they know the truth.)
So as I've said before (and nobody, apparently, was listening), it's not enough to just stop buying. You have to tell them about it, too.
They believe in the death penalty for break&enter...without benefit of due process. (As in Is that politician going to take away my second ammendment right to own an AR-15 to blow a burglar's head off if he comes into my house?)
These are also the same folks who are so upset with the gubmint when they lock away people (with or without mind to executing them) without
formal arrest, trial, and due process.
Lovely 'civilized' society these people envision, innit?
Slashdot Mirror
I hate to break it to y'all, but this isn't the first time I, Robot has been proposed as a movie, nor the rights purchased, nor even the script written. In fact, the Reuters article terribly disappointed me because they're not using the script by Harlan Ellison, which I have read in its Asimov's serialization and quite enjoyed. (Who are these people on the new script, and what do they really know about SF, anyway?)
I should point out that the first venture at I, Robot: The Movie didn't come off so well, but the same thing happened to Dune for years, so we'll see.
I don't know, it sounds like Einstein was more of a synaesthesiac (someone who perceives stimuli by non-normal or extranormal channels) than either an autistic or a drug addict, although I've never heard of someone experiencing thought as muscle sensation.
I can't tell you what it's like to experience flavours as colours, sounds as colours, smells as sounds, or the like, though (or thoughts as colours, smells, you name it) -- but if you know what I'm talking about, you'll recognize what I mean immediately.
In fact, I would argue against Einstein's having Asperger's Syndrome or other high-function autism disorders simply because he was so social and had so much affect (affect, not effect, though he had that, too) -- the photogenicity, the celebrity, and the overall social skills which he exhibited in spades during most of his life are traits which most high-function autistics never manifest. In fact, the DSM-IV specifically mentions "Qualitative impairment in social interaction." Somehow, a guy who can come up with snappy retorts like that isn't suffering from any impairment in social interaction at all. In fact, considering ordinary mortals' abilities to come up with the right zinger at the right time, he's probably got us beat.
and if you have time, those get sent to abuse@aol, etc. -not that they'll do anything, but it's good to annoy them
I don't know about AOL specifically, but I've had good results getting some spammers removed from similar services, namely Yahoo and Hotmail. Then again, most of the spam I get is from incredibly stupid bottom-feeders who've found my resume on some job board or other (one good reason not to go to a "whitelist" -- any device you could think of to make sure the legitimate recruitment e-mails came through would also allow some if not all of the others) and who want me to sign up to some multilevel marketing scam (hint: Primericatroids please FO&D!).
When they get slimy and underhanded enough to want to offer me a job where I pay them for the priveledge of having it, I get motivated and nasty enough to make sure they lose their e-mail addresses. I send a brief note plus the full text of what I've received from them, and usually the folks at the other end of abuse@ jump.
Then again, I don't get much other spam, so I occasionally do have time to pull out the big guns. (Also, as a first line of defense, I suggest using an e-mail handle that's not English...mine are Latin and Japanese...)
Have these people forgotten the age-old business tradition of the "loss-leader"? In my way of thinking, a website is in itself a promotional vehicle (whether you're hyping yourself, your company, or your product line), and doesn't particularly need to be freighted with (additional) advertisements. Heck, most of the websites I see in a day (job-related, anyway) are commercial sites trying to create interest in the product line.
From that point of view, a website is part of the marketing budget, and a classic example of a loss-leader: something a product maker puts out that has no intrinsic ROI, but that will, they hope, generate enough interest in the product(s) to pay for itself. Some websites also provide so-called "value added" services to sweeten the pot (as in all these industrial manufacturers' websites I go to that offer mostly PDF downloads of their products' Material Safety Data Sheets -- bless you all!) and probably make someone's life easier down the line (downloading a PDF is much easier than getting on the phone and waiting for a fax, f'rinstance!).
And the simple goodwill generated by a clean website that has the features you want, plus possibly a few sweeteners, can certainly help to bring in new customers, particularly if they're the type (as so many are these days) who do their preliminary sourcing via internet.
Anti-Leech's use of the word "theft" illustrates two things: they don't understand the above paradigm, and they're greedy scum trying to wrest the last possible cent out of an unsuitable area, likely at the expense of business draws. (Perhaps they just lack business acumen in general?)
She has "How To Win Friends and Influence People," "The Power of Public Prayer," and "The Cognitive Computer" but she got the former confused with the latter...
:)
And yes I know what you did mean; I just find it hard to believe that people who personify that much would ever actually buy dildoes, much less use them. Now that would be creepy (too). Then again, I don't come from the half of the population where the majority of whom seem to think it's cute to name their genitalia.
...well, you could just omit using your thumbs...but that wouldn't be as masochistic (tango-y goodness!)...
Tom L. has always been a Haavaadite, not from MIT, as in the "Harvard Fight Song," and the lines, "These are the only ones of which the news has come to Haavaad/And there may be many others, but they haven't been discovaad." (Rhotic-lossy dialects bother me, since I speak one of the few English dialects that's fully rhotic.) I imagine it matters to some people (probably they go to Harvard).
Also, as far as I know, he's still there, although long since an Emeritus.
until people get the message, and stop mistaking copyright for a divine right of authors, the message needs to be repeated. That goes double for Congress.
:)
Well, either that or if people stop mistaking "copyright" and "copy protection"; and if they start understanding that "copyright" isn't a single monolithic right, but simply a guarantee to a creator that they are the first assignee and exerciser of the huge group of rights subsumed under the large umbrella term "copyright" (until they decide otherwise), we'll be better off. Involvement of various lawmaking bodies is, of course, determined by the sociopolitical jurisdiction in which you live.
I wrote an article in my journal here on Slashdot on Friday, October 18 outlining "Some Things Copyright Is Good For," to try to address some of the misconceptions about copyright.
Bloom's not saying anything I wasn't saying, nor what Thomas C. Greene from The Register said, nor what a bunch of other writers said about intellectual property years ago.
I don't think, as a writer myself, that the "benefit to the author is purely incidental"; it's the incentive that prompts us to share our stuff instead of trunking it or not bothering to put it down in the first place. The benefit to the author is the carrot encouraging the creator to benefit the commonweal, which makes the benefit essential, not incidental.
(I scooped y'all in discussing Knoppix, too...)
Maybe she's like me and has adverse reactions to allergy meds...sometimes I have to take them too, but I don't like to. For the record, I like smoking weed, but Benadryl doesn't make me stoned in a fun way -- or in a functional way. Just ask people who watched me stumble and almost stick my hand under a red-hot stove burner while trying to avoid falling on my face into the stove while on Benadryl...yow!
Speaking of yow, your sig, dude. Thanks for the "Visualization mode OFF!" moment for today.
Oddly enough, one of the few people I've read who was making an awful lot of future-oriented predictions about media, telecommunications, and the increasing importance of networks was Marshall McLuhan. It's really amazing how much McLuhan got right, considering that he died in 1980, and attained the height of his fame in the late 1960s. Good places to start for your elementary McLuhan education are Understanding Media and Counterblast, which seems gimmicky, but manages to reduce McLuhan's prolix yet lucid prose into catchy aphorisms and illustrative graphics (thanks to the design work of Harley Parker).
Relatedly, I have an issue of Amazing Stories with prognostications on "Life In The Year 2000." I'm still waiting for the 4-day, 20-hour, full-pay workweek, the spray-washable house, and the cheap energy. The moral of the story is, you may get some of it right some of the time, but you're never going to be 100% on the money.
I second that. There are a lot of people out there who'd write for Salon, Alternet, or anywhere for lots less than the going "slicks" rate, and even a lot less than the going "pulps" rate. Some of us are so desperate to see our names in print that we'll publish for copies...
...or post to Slashdot... :)
I never tried to submit anything to Salon because I was always sort of intimidated by the calibre and "names" of the people who get published there. Then again, I never got to submit to Playboy in the 1970s when it was the ne plus ultra of SF short story markets, either, so...
Interrobang,
Killing media venues since 1994
By getting Accepted for Publication
(hm, maybe I shoulda submitted to Salon after all)
The media companies would argue that part of the value of their product is "missing."
Which argument is covered completely under "copyright violation" since 'value' is an abstract and "theft" deals in tangibles. No, really. Please go read my article on copyright, revealingly called "Some Things Copyright Is Good For," and which doesn't simply consist of the word "nothing."
I mean, if you don't think the 'value' of being the assignee and exerciser of a bundle of specific rights or grants is worth anything, ask anybody who has ever entered into a one-sided agreement with a content producer where they said, "We'll publish your X, but only if you sell us your copyright." Siegel and Schuster, creators of Superman, got caught in that one, as did numerous authors working in SF in the 40's and 50's.
The argument falls on its face for the same reason many "specific offenses" laws don't get passed -- we already have legislation in general that deals with like problems, and we don't really need a new one which specifically targets that offense. (Copyright and how it works is also a lot more complicated than it sounds, or seems.) We already have copyright; that ought to be enough.
Another hole in their argument concerns the folk tale about the woman who wanted the former beggar executed because he "stole" all those potential chickens she would have had from the dozen eggs she gave him ten years before, whereupon the case was thrown out because she'd hard-boiled the eggs? It's especially hard to prove "theft" against "potential money" which is exactly what they're trying to do...but in many cases, they're counting chickens from hard-boiled eggs.
I'm getting really tired of people equating copying information with 'theft.' Copyright breach it may be (an entirely different kettle of fish, as anyone who understand copyright knows), but theft it is not. The two circumstances are not even remotely similar enough to warrant such a comparison, and anyone who argues otherwise is committing a False Analogy fallacy. (Going into a store and "five-finger discounting" the actual CD is both theft and copyright breach, just to be sure we're clear on that.)
Nothing has been "taken," nothing is "missing," and certainly nothing is "gone" when someone makes a digital copy of something -- unlike Chernin's False Analogy argument about dresses from Wal-Mart.
That's not to say that copyright breach isn't some kind of crime, or that it's not wrong -- but, again, it's not "theft." And it's certainly more defensible (under certain circumstances -- notably our vanishing "Fair Use" and "Public Domain" provisions) than theft.
As a final, waspish parting shot to the point that "all this theft is destroying the industry," Chernin should talk to "Frisky Dick" Richards, who plays "Violent J" in the Insane Clown Posse, which actively encourages people to download, copy, share, and, yes, even steal their work. (He might also try talking to Ron "Hitler" Barrassi of TISM about the same subject, if he thinks he can stand it. I want to sell tickets to that event!) Weirdly enough, ICP has two platinum records and a few gold records to their credit -- with NO airplay or video play -- and seem to be living proof that Chernin and all who sail with them are also committing a Slothful Induction fallacy. (In short, the evidence says Chernin et al's argument isn't true, but they believe it anyway.)
Submitted for your inspection: Lousy hand-eye coordination and I suck at math. Always have, probably always will. However, I'm musical. I've been composing now (standard notation using various software) for 11 years and I'm not too bad. I can play the guitar (as well as anyone with my poor motor skills can manage, anyway), and I have Grade VIII music theory. But I suck at math.
Counterargument: I'm good with languages, though, and I've always thought of music much more in terms of "grammar" and "syntax" than anything math-related. I have a bachelor's degree in English, a master's in rhetoric, and I'm aiming for a PhD.
RhetoricalQuestion helped me with algebra by telling me to think of variable definitions in terms of "connotation" and "denotation," so maybe I'll suck less at math now...
So, all things considered, is there really a correlation between math and music, or is it just another one of those cheesy intellect myths like that all truly "smart" people must be able to play chess well, or something?
a whole new definition of blue screen of death
:)
Yes. A literal definition.
And speaking of literal definitions:
Error #10012 - Meltdown eminent."
I think you mean "Meltdown imminent," rather than, say, to substitute, meltdown "prominent," "lofty," or "well-placed;" although I will admit such a catastrophe would be pretty egregious.
Tell her to go back to direct mailing. Then, at least she pays for the postage, the printing costs, and all that other stuff, instead of making me pay for the bandwidth to download crap she generates, the time it takes to set up yet another spam filter on my e-mail addresses, and the storage space the message will inevitably take up before I send it to digital oblivion. I mean, at least junk mail you can just toss in the recycle bin and it doesn't really cost you anything.
Oh, yeah, and leave your real address out of the letter. No sense in making her life easier. That's also the reason not to phone her or e-mail her. If I worked in a seamy business like that, I'd have Caller ID. And if I worked in a seamy business like that, I'd be precisely unscrupulous enough to take the e-mail addresses out of the barrage of complaints and add them to my database.
a writing utensil and my little red-and-black book
gym clothes
shampoo, conditioner, and soap
an extra pair of underwear
a book
my portable music and a few CDs
a bottle of water
an extra pad (if you don't know, guys, don't bother asking) -- because You Just Never Know
two sets of keys
food/junk food
:)
and various and sundry odds and ends that might come in handy, which vary depending on where I'm going, the time of year, and what I might be doing, most of the time.
Granted, I usually carry a backpack and sometimes a shoulder "forage bag," and keep only keys, wallet and watch in pockets (I love these jeans: they have a watch pocket for my pocket watch, natch!).
I don't carry around a lot of tools or that kind of thing, because as anyone who knows me knows, put tools into my hands and I become dangerously destructive!
No, that's usually, "takes it out of the hands of the public and their accountable elected representatives, and places it in the hands of a few whose sole motivation is the increase in its share price usually at the expense of its operating efficiency," most often with a concomitant increase in public risk burden (privatize the benefits, socialize the costs of business, after all). Or did you miss Enron, all those California blackouts, and that study of 24 thousand for-profit and not-for-profit hospitals?
In this case, though, the thief of Newton's books looks like they're privatizing both the benefits and the risks, especially to their ass, which will be grass if and when the authorities find them.
From a certain point of view, overpopulation is the problem. In terms of resource use, carrying capacity, and sustainability, the Western World as we know it is incredibly overpopulated. See, the thing with overpopulation is (what you folks don't get), it's not the sheer numbers, it's the footprint left by those numbers. Therefore, if your land area and available resources can support x number of people at y standard of living, it can only support x-p people at y+q standard of living, where the ratio is most probably an exponential inverse proportion. And because our standard of living is so out of balance with the carrying capacity of where we live, we're drawing resources away from other areas, and, in some cases, causing the diminishment of their standard of living and carrying capacity.
In short, I will agree with you that no matter which way you look at it, we're the problem.
...I might break my mouse irreparably. And as always, I'd rather be Red than Dead!
--ducking--
Okay, it's been tried before. Alternate metaphorical constructs for navigating the computer have a long history (an old one I can think of is the Adventure Shell). My (obnoxious) question is, what makes him think he's got the magic bullet?
Apparently, from what I can interpret, he's using Windows as a foundation on which to build his alternate metaphoric, semantic, and rhetorical construction, which kind of strikes me as mixing metaphors in the worst (and least abstract) way possible!
For more insight into the kinds of things this guy's dabbling in, check out:
Mark Turner's The Literary Mind
Neil Randall's paper "Interface as Speech Act"
a paper by Joseph Goguen in the Advanced Lectures in Computer Science series (sorry, don't have the cite on me),
William Hart-Davidson's paper "Modelling Document-Mediated Interaction," from the 2002 SIGDOC proceedings,
and similar stuff. You might also want to check out Ortony's classic anthology on metaphorics for the background.
A friend of mine who's still using his Amiga of old has an amusing anecdote similar to this: At one time he had the "fastest Mac in the world" -- an Amiga running it under an emulator. He said the Apple guys were really pissed. :) (Hi, Knute!)
I still miss my old Amiga. We had some good times. --snif-- I doubt I'll get this one, though, as it's probably more fun to sit around and be nostalgic in a diffuse kind of way.
Factor in the exchange rate
No, you don't factor in the exchange rate when it's a home-currency transaction! $50K is $50K is $50K, as long as that $50K is staying on the same side of the border where it started.
I guarantee that a $50K/a job buys you every bit as much whatever as you could want in Canada as it does in the US (some goods and services are more expensive, but I don't pay half my salary to Kaiser Permanente every month like a friend of mine in Baltimore does). When it comes to cost-of-living, in general, prices in Ontario are comparable to or cheaper than most places in the US.
But the key point is, again, you don't use the exchange rate when the money is staying on the same side of the border where it started. The ONLY time (and I repeat) ONLY time the exchange rate applies is when the transaction is cross-border. Since Corel is a Canadian company spending Canadian dollars in Canada, the equivalence should be understood as roughly 1:1 (based on cost of living and other indices) and not 2:1.
Sighh...
If you BUY their products, you will only encourage them.
But if you don't TELL them you've stopped buying their products, they assume it's just a sales slump, and devote more time, energy, and most of all MONEY to passing bad laws and trying to enforce copy-protection. After all, they already KNOW what causes sales slumps -- piracy and P2P applications. (Never mind the facts, they know the truth.)
So as I've said before (and nobody, apparently, was listening), it's not enough to just stop buying. You have to tell them about it, too.
They believe in the death penalty for break&enter...without benefit of due process. (As in Is that politician going to take away my second ammendment right to own an AR-15 to blow a burglar's head off if he comes into my house?) These are also the same folks who are so upset with the gubmint when they lock away people (with or without mind to executing them) without formal arrest, trial, and due process.
Lovely 'civilized' society these people envision, innit?