Above average intelligence, obsession with a single subject area, often a form of transportation... encyclopedic knowledge of that subject... delayed social skills...
This describes at least half the people I know, and 90% of the ones you meet at a Star Trek con. [I mean, not that I've ever been to one, I'm just you know, assuming]
Seriously dude, your boss can feel any way he wants about you leaving, but telling you you have to find your own replacement crosses the line. You have to take him aside right away and tell him very directly and matter of factly that you aren't going to find him another employee, and he's not going to withhold any of your pay. Employee turnover is a normal part of doing business and he just has to deal with it. Staying 6 or 7 years at a job is way longer than average, and (I assume) you've done good work for him during those years. There's no reason you can't part on good terms, and no reason for him to make threats. Most people respond to straightforward statements of facts. Try to be friendly. It sounds like you genuinely want to be. But if he acts like a jerk and actually does try not to pay you, you have to be prepared to get a lawyer to write a demand letter. [If it came to that, I'd demand the pay plus the cost of the lawyer writing the letter, with a clear statement that the next step will be a lawsuit including punitive damages and legal costs.]
Your boss isn't Mr. Krabs. This is the real world and he has to live in it. I'm sure that unless he's truly crazy he really doesn't want to deal with a lot of legal crap just because you hurt his feelings or whatever.
I'm glad it's not just me wondering how this makes sense. It seems more like a "because I can" project. In the article he says the encryption protects him from prosecution/persecution by the Netherlands copy police. But I doubt it.
In the US at least, physical evidence isn't actually needed because these cases never actually go to court. Entities like the RIAA just mail threat letters and collect money. One accused person's lawyer called the RIAA and wasn't even connected with another lawyer, just a regular staffer.
Here is a GREAT article detailing a hypothetical design for a fully resuable, non-polluting nuclear powered rocket based on the Saturn-V form factor. The rocket would carry 1000 TONS of cargo to orbit and return intact to a powered landing.
Briefly, the nuclear rocket would use a gaseous core reactor called a "nuclear lightbulb" -- a quartz bulb containing a cloud of uranium gas, which would self-heat by fission to about 25000 C, glowing intensely in ultraviolet. Liquid hydrogen propellant pumped around the outside of the bulb would absorb the UV and become a superheated gas that shoots out of the rocket nozzle.
This is not a mere lifting body, it's a complete vehicle, a true rocket ship right out of the golden age of sci-fi, with enough power to lift an entire space hotel in one shot, or a hugely equipped interplanetary mission. Great stuff.
This is part of an evolutionary process for the information industry. We don't know what business model, if any, is going to work online, but right now there is a glut of free online info that makes all information seem cheap. So any time anyone charges for information at all it seems like too much. My guess is that the difference between "authoritative" sources and "other" will eventually determine a pricing structure.
Of course no matter what the price is, selling content online opens up the bigger can of worms involving all the issues of copy protection. How do you enforce payment and copy protection without imposing unacceptable limits on everybody's privacy and ability to use and invent technology? What's the true cost of the various content institutions we are used to -- like large, expensive movie productions, daily newspapers, and superstar music acts? Is the commerce system that worked for physical media worth preserving, if we know that eventually we will have to put a couple million people in prison for copyright violations? Currently more than half the cost of the prison system is to enforce drug laws. In the future, what percent will be devoted to the IP business model? It's possible that in the long run it would cost less to come up with a different way to support content companies. But we're not there yet.
1. This isn't court, it's a discussion forum. 2. I wasn't defending copyright infringement, I was explaining how it's not "theft," and why I think it's important not to call it theft. 3. By posting my opinions here, I am lobbying to change the law.
random alien shows up, strange problem happens, strange problem stems from a problem with random alien, who is outwardly scary but inwardly kind and vastly misunderstood, enterprise makes friends, credits
intellectual property was created for the sole purpose of giving content creation a viable business model
The key word is a small one: "a". The content industry wants everybody to keep thinking "a" viable business model means "the only possible" viable business model. They also want people to keep thinking "representative government" means company lawyers handing pieces of paper to senators to introduce verbatim as laws. When the big kids play dirty it gives the little kids an incentive to follow suit, and to some degree I think it's a reasonable justification.
Wow, I was never a Scout, but the computer badge requirements doesn't seem too shabby to me. I mean I wouldn't expect that you'd have to write a graphics driver or anything.
Here we go again. The entertainment industry and their lawyers have done a great job convincing the public that they "own" copyright and that copyright infringement is "stealing," but neither one is true. You can't steal what nobody owns. There are no copyright "owners," there are only copyright "holders" who have specific rights for a limited time. The term "intellectual property" is just a euphemism. Copyright infringement is more like driving in the carpool lane by yourself than like stealing actual property. The fact that infringement can cause financial loss doesn't make it "theft" any more than vandalism is "theft." Vandalism may devalue property, and conceptually you could think of it as theft if you want to, but it's a distinctly different act, and so is infringement.
This isn't just nitpicking. There are good reasons to keep a distinction between theft and rights infringement. The concept of property has been around almost as long as humans have walked the Earth. It's part of the way we think. Exclusive rights to intangibles is a much newer concept, much less clear than the idea of owning and consuming objects. When IP laws originated, the difficulty of making copies provided a certain level of natural protection, without draconian restrictions on the general public. As technology makes it more and more trivial to make and distribute copies, it's not at all clear that maintaining traditional IP protection is acceptable, or even economically possible. It's not at all clear that existing copyright laws must be maintained forever at any cost.
Equating copyright with property and infringement with theft lets the entertainment industry play the part of the little old lady chasing a purse snatcher down the street. It's an advantage they don't deserve. Right now the entertainment industry has copyright law on its side, and they do an enormous amount of moral posturing behind that fact. But if law itself were our only moral compass, then black people would still be sitting in the back of the bus and using separate drinking fountains. People have to stop sucking up the industry's PR and ask big questions, like how much should the fate of a $7 billion/year industry influence the course of a trillion dollar economy?
Just the possibility of a human mind bouncing around inside a sheep's head...
What's scary to a lot of people in the world is that this already describes millions and millions of American citizens [oops, did I say "citizens?" I meant "consumers"].
Pretty obvious that this is a joke. I'm surprised nobody has commented on it yet. Check out the guy in the dinky raft, supposedly the support vessel. Classic.
"A local farmer spotted the drama from his kitchen window and took surprisingly sharp photos with a remarkably powerful telescopic lens."
And all the while he was milking a goat! Remarkable indeed!
Do what makes you happiest and you'll get a job. Don't worry about it. The employment winds may blow back and forth to some extent, but you'll be fine. If you wish you had done one thing but you did the other because of where you thought the economy was going, you'll always regret it.
Oh lighten up! This is one of the classics of the computer world, like broken cup holders, or stapled floppies. Waiting while the guy goes through drive after drive until he gets to drive C, then the bonus 30% progress report! Comedy Gold! Some things are funny any number of times.
"PUT... the CANDLE... BACK!"
"We're on a mission from Gaad."
"I was thinking of the immortal words of Socrates who said, 'I drank What?'"
The space elevator people at LiftPort expect carbon nanotubes of unlimited length to be available and cost-effective in 13 years. Whether they're right or not is anybody's guess, but the progress from a few nanometers to a few centimeters is 4 orders of magnitude in 4 years -- leaves Moore's law in the dust. Just 3 more orders of magnitude and they'll be in the tens of meters, and at that point I bet they'll be able to make them pretty much any length they want.
If you have a show-business career that lasts long enough, the media will eventually describe you as "struggling to reinvent" yourself. The term conjures up an image of an aging hot-babe or obese Elvis whose vehicle to fame has run out of gas, and they're sort of pathetically trying to get attention. I don't think this describes Lucas at all. At this point he is free to do whatever he wants for the rest of his life. If you read the article it sounds like he intends to take advantage of that, returning to the types of films he wanted to make when he started out. I say good luck to him.
From a record company perspective CDs are a product, but from a musician perspective they are advertising. Musicians don't make money from CD sales. Under standard recording contracts, musicians never actually receive royalties until all costs have been covered, which rarely happens. Musicians make money by playing live. What they get out of CDs is exposure, which leads to bigger and better paying gigs. They get the same exposure whether someone buys a CD, hears it on the radio or downloads it, pay or no pay.
The more crap the recording industry throws at its customers, the more they will drift away from pay music and toward free music, put online by bands who have figured out that letting people listen to advertising for free is smart.
On a related note, a few words about nuclear rockets. Back in the 50s and 60s some people, mostly science fiction writers, fantasized about nuclear powered rockets. In the 60s there was an actual prototype engine called NERVA. The idea was simply to use the reactor as a heat source to superheat a gas which would shoot out as rocket exhaust. The main drawbacks were the weight of the reactor core, the maximum temperature of about 3500 degrees C, and the radioactivity of the exhaust.
Here's a really interesting article that describes a design for a 100% reusable, non-polluting nuclear rocket based on the Saturn V form factor, capable of lifting 2 million pounds of cargo into orbit and returning to a soft landing. Just like in the old sci-fi movies. The design involves a gaseous core reactor, sometimes called a "nuclear lightbulb." It consists of a quartz bulb containing a cloud of uranium gas such as uranium hexafluoride, confined the center of the bulb by a buffer gas swirling around it. By adjusting the movement and pressure of the buffer gas, the compression of the UF6 can be finely regulated. When it is compressed to a critical state it heats up to about 25,000 degrees C, glowing intensely in the ultraviolet. Liquid hydrogen propellant pumped around the outside of the quartz bulb absorbs the ultraviolet light, becomes superheated, and shoots out of the nozzle. There is no leakage of radioactive fuel and no irradiation of the hydrogen. Completely clean burning. Such a rocket could burn for immensely longer times than any chemical rocket, providing the speed to get a manned mission to mars in a couple months. And not a skimpy mission, a spacious vehicle carrying 1000 tons of equipment, supplies and radiation shielding. Building a rocket like this wouldn't require any far-fetched technology, just some dedicated engineering.
I have never been a fan of nuclear reactors, but this thing sounds really good to me. The gaseous core has tremendous safety advantages over a solid core. The criticality of a cloud of gas is much easier to control and is to some extent self-regulating. For example, the problem of "hot spots" would not exist, because in gaseous form any part of the UF6 that overheated would expand, losing pressure and quenching itself instantly. The author describes several safety features, both active and passive, for letting the gas depressurize into a storage container extremely fast. Even if a gas core nuclear rocket exploded in the atmosphere, it would release a small fraction of the amount of nuclides from a single 1950s H-bomb test.
Stewart Brand has a great gift for cutting through the religious layer that overlays most people's politics, and getting down to basic facts and direct reasoning. Did people listen to him back in the 60s and 70s because he made sense, or because they just liked what he was saying? I think he still makes sense, but it might not be what people want to hear.
Slashdot Mirror
I'll be impressed when they can make a virtual rock jump up and crack the windshield.
p.s. SUV bashing is old and busted. (Sight-blocking, exhaust-pumping vehicles used to be called "vans").
Aha! So that explains the recent worldwide drop in gay chickenhawk sightings... they're all on Polk St.
Above average intelligence, obsession with a single subject area, often a form of transportation... encyclopedic knowledge of that subject... delayed social skills...
This describes at least half the people I know, and 90% of the ones you meet at a Star Trek con. [I mean, not that I've ever been to one, I'm just you know, assuming]
Seriously dude, your boss can feel any way he wants about you leaving, but telling you you have to find your own replacement crosses the line. You have to take him aside right away and tell him very directly and matter of factly that you aren't going to find him another employee, and he's not going to withhold any of your pay. Employee turnover is a normal part of doing business and he just has to deal with it. Staying 6 or 7 years at a job is way longer than average, and (I assume) you've done good work for him during those years. There's no reason you can't part on good terms, and no reason for him to make threats. Most people respond to straightforward statements of facts. Try to be friendly. It sounds like you genuinely want to be. But if he acts like a jerk and actually does try not to pay you, you have to be prepared to get a lawyer to write a demand letter. [If it came to that, I'd demand the pay plus the cost of the lawyer writing the letter, with a clear statement that the next step will be a lawsuit including punitive damages and legal costs.]
Your boss isn't Mr. Krabs. This is the real world and he has to live in it. I'm sure that unless he's truly crazy he really doesn't want to deal with a lot of legal crap just because you hurt his feelings or whatever.
I'm glad it's not just me wondering how this makes sense. It seems more like a "because I can" project. In the article he says the encryption protects him from prosecution/persecution by the Netherlands copy police. But I doubt it.
In the US at least, physical evidence isn't actually needed because these cases never actually go to court. Entities like the RIAA just mail threat letters and collect money. One accused person's lawyer called the RIAA and wasn't even connected with another lawyer, just a regular staffer.
Speaking of plug-ins, check out yesterday's Alien Loves Predator comic. Hysterical!
A virus does too create sophisticated visual effects! Didn't you see Independence Day??
Never activate while it's in your pocket.
Here is a GREAT article detailing a hypothetical design for a fully resuable, non-polluting nuclear powered rocket based on the Saturn-V form factor. The rocket would carry 1000 TONS of cargo to orbit and return intact to a powered landing.
Briefly, the nuclear rocket would use a gaseous core reactor called a "nuclear lightbulb" -- a quartz bulb containing a cloud of uranium gas, which would self-heat by fission to about 25000 C, glowing intensely in ultraviolet. Liquid hydrogen propellant pumped around the outside of the bulb would absorb the UV and become a superheated gas that shoots out of the rocket nozzle.
This is not a mere lifting body, it's a complete vehicle, a true rocket ship right out of the golden age of sci-fi, with enough power to lift an entire space hotel in one shot, or a hugely equipped interplanetary mission. Great stuff.
This is part of an evolutionary process for the information industry. We don't know what business model, if any, is going to work online, but right now there is a glut of free online info that makes all information seem cheap. So any time anyone charges for information at all it seems like too much. My guess is that the difference between "authoritative" sources and "other" will eventually determine a pricing structure.
Of course no matter what the price is, selling content online opens up the bigger can of worms involving all the issues of copy protection. How do you enforce payment and copy protection without imposing unacceptable limits on everybody's privacy and ability to use and invent technology? What's the true cost of the various content institutions we are used to -- like large, expensive movie productions, daily newspapers, and superstar music acts? Is the commerce system that worked for physical media worth preserving, if we know that eventually we will have to put a couple million people in prison for copyright violations? Currently more than half the cost of the prison system is to enforce drug laws. In the future, what percent will be devoted to the IP business model? It's possible that in the long run it would cost less to come up with a different way to support content companies. But we're not there yet.
1. This isn't court, it's a discussion forum.
2. I wasn't defending copyright infringement, I was explaining how it's not "theft," and why I think it's important not to call it theft.
3. By posting my opinions here, I am lobbying to change the law.
random alien shows up, strange problem happens, strange problem stems from a problem with random alien, who is outwardly scary but inwardly kind and vastly misunderstood, enterprise makes friends, credits
One other crucial element: Tea. Earl Grey. Hot.
intellectual property was created for the sole purpose of giving content creation a viable business model
The key word is a small one: "a". The content industry wants everybody to keep thinking "a" viable business model means "the only possible" viable business model. They also want people to keep thinking "representative government" means company lawyers handing pieces of paper to senators to introduce verbatim as laws. When the big kids play dirty it gives the little kids an incentive to follow suit, and to some degree I think it's a reasonable justification.
Wow, I was never a Scout, but the computer badge requirements doesn't seem too shabby to me. I mean I wouldn't expect that you'd have to write a graphics driver or anything.
Here we go again. The entertainment industry and their lawyers have done a great job convincing the public that they "own" copyright and that copyright infringement is "stealing," but neither one is true. You can't steal what nobody owns. There are no copyright "owners," there are only copyright "holders" who have specific rights for a limited time. The term "intellectual property" is just a euphemism. Copyright infringement is more like driving in the carpool lane by yourself than like stealing actual property. The fact that infringement can cause financial loss doesn't make it "theft" any more than vandalism is "theft." Vandalism may devalue property, and conceptually you could think of it as theft if you want to, but it's a distinctly different act, and so is infringement.
This isn't just nitpicking. There are good reasons to keep a distinction between theft and rights infringement. The concept of property has been around almost as long as humans have walked the Earth. It's part of the way we think. Exclusive rights to intangibles is a much newer concept, much less clear than the idea of owning and consuming objects. When IP laws originated, the difficulty of making copies provided a certain level of natural protection, without draconian restrictions on the general public. As technology makes it more and more trivial to make and distribute copies, it's not at all clear that maintaining traditional IP protection is acceptable, or even economically possible. It's not at all clear that existing copyright laws must be maintained forever at any cost.
Equating copyright with property and infringement with theft lets the entertainment industry play the part of the little old lady chasing a purse snatcher down the street. It's an advantage they don't deserve. Right now the entertainment industry has copyright law on its side, and they do an enormous amount of moral posturing behind that fact. But if law itself were our only moral compass, then black people would still be sitting in the back of the bus and using separate drinking fountains. People have to stop sucking up the industry's PR and ask big questions, like how much should the fate of a $7 billion/year industry influence the course of a trillion dollar economy?
Just the possibility of a human mind bouncing around inside a sheep's head...
What's scary to a lot of people in the world is that this already describes millions and millions of American citizens [oops, did I say "citizens?" I meant "consumers"].
42:21:36.025N, 71:05:16.332W (42.360007,-071.087870 in decimal degrees
"decimal degrees?" But we haven't used that system since... oh wait.
Pretty obvious that this is a joke. I'm surprised nobody has commented on it yet. Check out the guy in the dinky raft, supposedly the support vessel. Classic.
"A local farmer spotted the drama from his kitchen window and took surprisingly sharp photos with a remarkably powerful telescopic lens."
And all the while he was milking a goat! Remarkable indeed!
Do what makes you happiest and you'll get a job. Don't worry about it. The employment winds may blow back and forth to some extent, but you'll be fine. If you wish you had done one thing but you did the other because of where you thought the economy was going, you'll always regret it.
Oh lighten up! This is one of the classics of the computer world, like broken cup holders, or stapled floppies. Waiting while the guy goes through drive after drive until he gets to drive C, then the bonus 30% progress report! Comedy Gold! Some things are funny any number of times.
"PUT... the CANDLE... BACK!"
"We're on a mission from Gaad."
"I was thinking of the immortal words of Socrates who said, 'I drank What?'"
"She turned me into a newt... I got better."
"It's in the hole! Cinderella story..."
"
The space elevator people at LiftPort expect carbon nanotubes of unlimited length to be available and cost-effective in 13 years. Whether they're right or not is anybody's guess, but the progress from a few nanometers to a few centimeters is 4 orders of magnitude in 4 years -- leaves Moore's law in the dust. Just 3 more orders of magnitude and they'll be in the tens of meters, and at that point I bet they'll be able to make them pretty much any length they want.
If you have a show-business career that lasts long enough, the media will eventually describe you as "struggling to reinvent" yourself. The term conjures up an image of an aging hot-babe or obese Elvis whose vehicle to fame has run out of gas, and they're sort of pathetically trying to get attention. I don't think this describes Lucas at all. At this point he is free to do whatever he wants for the rest of his life. If you read the article it sounds like he intends to take advantage of that, returning to the types of films he wanted to make when he started out. I say good luck to him.
From a record company perspective CDs are a product, but from a musician perspective they are advertising. Musicians don't make money from CD sales. Under standard recording contracts, musicians never actually receive royalties until all costs have been covered, which rarely happens. Musicians make money by playing live. What they get out of CDs is exposure, which leads to bigger and better paying gigs. They get the same exposure whether someone buys a CD, hears it on the radio or downloads it, pay or no pay.
The more crap the recording industry throws at its customers, the more they will drift away from pay music and toward free music, put online by bands who have figured out that letting people listen to advertising for free is smart.
On a related note, a few words about nuclear rockets. Back in the 50s and 60s some people, mostly science fiction writers, fantasized about nuclear powered rockets. In the 60s there was an actual prototype engine called NERVA. The idea was simply to use the reactor as a heat source to superheat a gas which would shoot out as rocket exhaust. The main drawbacks were the weight of the reactor core, the maximum temperature of about 3500 degrees C, and the radioactivity of the exhaust.
Here's a really interesting article that describes a design for a 100% reusable, non-polluting nuclear rocket based on the Saturn V form factor, capable of lifting 2 million pounds of cargo into orbit and returning to a soft landing. Just like in the old sci-fi movies. The design involves a gaseous core reactor, sometimes called a "nuclear lightbulb." It consists of a quartz bulb containing a cloud of uranium gas such as uranium hexafluoride, confined the center of the bulb by a buffer gas swirling around it. By adjusting the movement and pressure of the buffer gas, the compression of the UF6 can be finely regulated. When it is compressed to a critical state it heats up to about 25,000 degrees C, glowing intensely in the ultraviolet. Liquid hydrogen propellant pumped around the outside of the quartz bulb absorbs the ultraviolet light, becomes superheated, and shoots out of the nozzle. There is no leakage of radioactive fuel and no irradiation of the hydrogen. Completely clean burning. Such a rocket could burn for immensely longer times than any chemical rocket, providing the speed to get a manned mission to mars in a couple months. And not a skimpy mission, a spacious vehicle carrying 1000 tons of equipment, supplies and radiation shielding. Building a rocket like this wouldn't require any far-fetched technology, just some dedicated engineering.
I have never been a fan of nuclear reactors, but this thing sounds really good to me. The gaseous core has tremendous safety advantages over a solid core. The criticality of a cloud of gas is much easier to control and is to some extent self-regulating. For example, the problem of "hot spots" would not exist, because in gaseous form any part of the UF6 that overheated would expand, losing pressure and quenching itself instantly. The author describes several safety features, both active and passive, for letting the gas depressurize into a storage container extremely fast. Even if a gas core nuclear rocket exploded in the atmosphere, it would release a small fraction of the amount of nuclides from a single 1950s H-bomb test.
Stewart Brand has a great gift for cutting through the religious layer that overlays most people's politics, and getting down to basic facts and direct reasoning. Did people listen to him back in the 60s and 70s because he made sense, or because they just liked what he was saying? I think he still makes sense, but it might not be what people want to hear.