That's the fundamental question behind Planescape: Torment, and the clue that most ties the game together. And the game doesn't let you take the easy answers (love, hate, death). The REAL answer is chilling and unexpected and will leave you thinking for days.
The game's narrative is mindbending in a number of ways. To begin with, you play an immortal amnesiac who is following the trail of breadcrumbs he left for himself in case he should die and lose his memory, again. You meet people who know you and know things about you (which neither the player or the character know or remember), you live in a place where belief affects reality and everyone keeps secrets, some of which are revealed in the most inopportune moments....
There's one riddle/story that has stuck in my head from the game. Paraphrasing:
"You come to your senses, sitting on a sidewalk under a bright noon sun. You can't remember how you got here or what you should be doing. Looking around, everything seems as it should.... but you have a nagging feeling that it shouldn't be that way. Then you see me, smiling, holding out a hand.
Can you name a single Communist nation that you would hold up as a shining beacon to the rest of the world?
I don't know about "shining beacon" (has there been one since Caesar's Rome?) But I have to put forward the Union of Socialist Soviet Republics.
In 1917, the Russians were a pre-industrialized nation of very poor and very ignorant peasants.
By 1943, the USSR had built up the industrial infrastructure necessary to open up a can-o-whopass on the Nazis. No small achievement.
In the 60s, the USSR put the first satellite in orbit, the first man in space, and probably would have beat the US to the moon if Chief Designer Korolyev hadn't died and the N-2 program hadn't been so badly botched.
They had the whole Western world quaking in their boots for fifty years. The USSR consistently put forward great advances physics and mathematics, and their engineers were among the best in the world.
Say what you will about the excesses of Stalin and his succesors, no one denies them. Dictators are antithetical to true communism, and modern communist do well to disown Stalin, Mao, and to a certain degree, Castro. Yet cannot we deny the scientific, social, educational and industrial achievements of the USSR, nor deny that, unlike the current governments of some prosperous nations, the Soviets under Lenin actually tried to do good by the little people.
Texas was a Mexican colony that declared independence then joined a "equal but separate" treaty with the US. The US later annexed Texas in somewhat legalistic manner than many considered illegal (and some Texans still do... you'll notice that the Texan flag is the only state flag that's allowed to fly at the same height as the US flag).
California, New Mexico and Arizona (then frontier wastelands) were extracted from Mexico as a peace condition after the US bitchslapped a politically-divided Mexico in 1845. The sale price was 40 million dollars. The Gold Rush started four years later. Coincidence?
Re:Contrast: The Economist
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Globalization
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· Score: 1
"The New York Times will certainly feed your paranoia that the big bad communists are out to get you, Pravda will provide a fairer, balanced set of information, tovarisch."
Wise man name of McLuhan once observed, "The medium -is- the message." Books are books not because the story -needs- a large number of words to be told, but because the idea of what a book "should be" requires narrative, exposition, character development, et cetera, so as fulfill its purpose in the mind of the reader, and this in turn requires the prodigious use of dead tree matter. This is not an obvious truth... but like Lao Tzu said, the enlightened will understand.
Reading a book, my young apprentice, is an act of volition, an exercise of the imagination where strings of texts become images and sounds in your mind, and these together form a story. Whereas watching a movie is an act of circumstance, where finalized images are fed to your senses to trigger certain responses which may or may not form up in a fashion coherent enough to be called a "plot".
The fundamental difference may not be in the story being told (your pithy remark about "Dune" being about "this guy who rides worms" -did- get my knickers in a knot), but in the manner in which the story entered your mind. You can be sitting around someone's living room, talking about stuff while a movie happens to be playing on the telly, and perhaps get the gist of it. I dare you to get the gist out of, say, "Cien años de soledad" or "Ulysses", just by having it sit on your coffee table.
I think your (utterly crass and uncouth) opinion/troll stems from the fact that you confuse ideas with information. Information -can- be compressed, synthesised, visualized, deconstructed, "adapted for TV", sped along its path to the hungering brain... ideas (the central product of a book) cannot. Ideas must be germinated, judged, matured, compared, nurtured by reflection. Information is a commodity. Ideas are not.
If it were up to you and the current media-fed generation with attention spans of ferrets on double espressos, conditioned to respond to 30-second commercials, 3:30-4:30 songs, weaned on Cliff notes and 10-second sound bites, all the good books would become minute-long trailers, and you would "know the ending" of a thousand different masterpieces in about the time it takes to have a good bowel movement. If you do this out of choice, fine.... but if its out of ignorance or just consumer-frenzy-endorsed attention deficit disorder, I can't help but feel a little sorry.
Write this a hundred times on the black board: A story is -not- information, and should not be treated as such.
BTW, "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep", where "Bladerunner" comes from, is about 140 pages long. Shorter than a Maxim mag, and nowhere near the definition of "lengthy".
THS ---
Re:I Agree With "Cripping" The Genes
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Golden Rice
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· Score: 1
... but it has a way of driving many creative efforts.
Another well-known spin-off of the original series is the Dune Encyclopedia. Impossible to get nowadays, but well worth a read if you're a fan. You can sometimes come across it at swap meets or library sales.
As a foreign national who, by necessity, must deal with the US, it's policies and systems, on a daily basis, I find it disheartening that the entire world is being "de facto" colonized by the United States. Cultural diversity and the right to self-determination is crushed by the need to feed the American Machine. Time and time again, one thing is proven: whatever is touched by the United States must comform to it, never will the United States comform.
The Cold War has ended. Most nations are well on their way to democracy and freedom, on their own terms. Do you foresee the need for the United States to change its role among the community of nations? If so, how?
Your parallels are not only invalid, they're Katzy.
"access to paint and canvas equals Rembrandt-level talent" is not true, whereas "lack of access to paint and canvas equals non-Rembrandt-level talent" is.
"access to a football equals multi-million dollar contracts with the New York Giants" is not true, whereas "lack of football equals lack of multi-million dollar contracts with the New York Giants" is.
The issue Katz is adressing is potential. The Net is a great way for young people to find their calling... in other words, to create -potential-. It's the individual's responsability to achieve.
I think your post is naked mindless Katz-bashing.. and not that I have anything against Katz-bashing, as long as it's decent Katz-bashing.
Quoth Talal Shamoon (I just had to write that out, nyuk nyuk):
People are copying music because they feel somewhat disenfranchised with the options they have at their disposal in the digital space.
Exactly! EXACTLY! Does this ring a bell with anyone but me?
The key word is disenfranchisement, meaning "deprivation of a privilege, immunity or right". Regardless of the empirical or anechdotal evidence we may have as to the root cause of music trading, the fact remains that the public has been deprived of:
The right to pay a fair price for exactly the music they want, no more.
The right to both time- and space- displace the purchased music and listen to it in any and all the audio appliances they own.
The privilege of choosing from among the entire spectra of music, not just selected genres or unsigned artists.
The right to integrate music into their culture, to treat it as any kind or manner of culture is treated: examined, commented, exchanged, emulated, deconstructed and reintegrated.
At a risk of sounding Katzian, I think it's a good insight, and one that is apt to be co-opted into any real-world discussion on digital music.
What happens if your hard drive crashes and takes your paid-for MP3s with it? I have a serious poke with current licensing schemes in which I pay for -information-, but end up hostage to the -medium.-
Certainly, it's accepted that, once the product is sold, the seller can have only limited liability regarding the integrity of the product throughout it's lifetime.
BUT. Nothing is as fragile as bits-and-bytes. Bit rot, faulty write/recording mechanism, dirty power supply can all destroy your paid-for information. And that's without factoring in acts of God. It's a serious flaw in the distribution model, to put it mildly, when you're paying for the bits, not the plastic.
I don't envision the market actually paying for (and abiding by) license-to-use until we have some sort of never-degrading, indestructible (or at least, trivially easy to back up) medium for holding the licensed product.
Well, for one, it's a solid-state laser, as you say. It doesn't readily break down under the operating stress, as most organic lasers would. And it doesn't need a laser pump... you can charge it up with plain ole' electrical power.
The "plastic" label is a major misnomer, though. Tetracene (as do most polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons) has more in common with graphite than, say, nylon. It's the roving electrons in the torus-shaped pi-clouds, melded together over the multiple benzene rings, that conduct the electricity and give these compounds their electric and optical activity.
It prolly took quite a bit of cojones to develop this thing, as tetracene is quite explosive.
This is the most incredibly stupid thing I've ever heard. I mean, rock-hard stupid. Dehydrated rock-hard stupid. It goes beyond the stupid we know into an entire new quantum definition of stupid. Trans-stupid stupid. Meta stupid. Stupid collapsed on itself so far that even the neutrons have collapsed. Stupid so dense no intellect can escape. Cosmic singularity stupid. Scorching mid-day on Mercury stupid. You emit more stupid in one nanosecond than all of Slashdot emits in a year. Quasar stupid.
This has to be a troll. No one could be this stupid. I must have nothing better to do than reply to this drivel. Duh.
(Penicillin was developed in the 1930s by Flory and Chain. NASA was still 20+ years away.)
They'll be basically 6 kinds of replies to this story:
1) I still don't know why we're wasting money on {tech} when people in {place} are {mode of suffering agreed to be bad}. We should be worrying about solving our problems here on Earth!
2) This is the coolest thing ever! The most magnificent achievement since {primitive yet crucial tech}. It's the first step towards {cosmic achievement}, just like {author} predicted.
3) Imagine a Beowolf cluster of these!
4) I shrug. I am so underwhelmed. Millions and millions of {currency} wasted so we could put more trash in space. It will last less than {hyperbole of brevity} and be as useless as {hyperbole of futility}.
5) Look up these links here. Yeah, I need the karma.
6) Not bad for a Pizza Hut flight.
Fill in the {blanks} and permute at will. Add Microsoft bashing, MPAA/RIAA cursing, RMS, ESR, OpenSource zealotry. Simmer to a boil. Watch if we don't get 400 comments on this one.
It most certainly can. That's what the nice men in the black uniforms with the nightsticks are for.
To provide a better parabole than your wife-pictures one, let's try this one: suppose my company makes cookbooks. And, being a large and powerful enterprise, we have our own printer companies, an army of trained cooks to produce new recipes (and who must, by law, forsake all rights to these recipes... they are works for hire!), and a massive propaganda apparatus that ensures us a certain degree of commercial success for each cookbook we put out.
But lo! what treachery is here? People are typing our recipes in their computers and trading them amongst themselves! They are bypassing my carefuly constructed distribution monopoly... they are getting -my- recipes from a source other than -me-. Hell and damnation!
Were I a smart and capable businessman, I would look for ways to make money off these transactions. But no.... it's easier to sue the computer makers, the ISPs, the software makers, the backbone providers, the people sharing the recipes... it's easier to buy laws and misrepresent existing ones... rouse some of my cooks to beat their breasts and bemoan their starving children...
Were I this nearsighted as a businessman (not to mention a lying, conniving, scheming pirate), I should warrant more than a senatorial slap on the hand. The record companies -are- publicly traded, after all, and have a fiduciary obligation to maximize their profits. And the demand for electronic delivery is there... why are they spending their shareholders money on lawyers and lawsuits instead of tapping into this demand?
Your view of money disgusts me. Money is LIFE, sir. You obtain money by working, by spending a portion of the most valuable thing you own, your LIFE.
Incorrect, sir. Money is ENERGY, not life. Those people who are getting money because their fathers or grandfathers did something worthwhile.. are they giving up life in exchange for that money? And I don't just mean the idle children of the rich, but also the idle children of the artists. What are they giving up to obtain that money which others pay for with labor?
Your analogy does not stand, because capitalism allows (nay, requires) a certain elite class that gets its money through means other than work.
And you think that if I give a symbol of my life to a man for his creative work that I denigrate him to a WHORE?
You clearly misread my meaning, or you believe being a whore is somehow denigrating.
There is nothing wrong with a man profiting by the fruits of his creativity. I said as much, almost word-for-word, in my previous post. What I find exceedingly vile is that creators of limited talent (to put it charitably) can and do contribute more to our common culture... only because they purposefuly angle their work so it appeals to the same lowest common denominator that constitutes the target audience of the media corporations.
Not only that, but they are rewarded handsomely, not only monetarily, but also in terms of social rank and standing, whereas so many creators who remain true to their visions can never leave 'cult' status because their views are unpopular, or, godforbid, dangerous to the bottom line.
Not only that, but existing IP law protects and defends the livelyhoods, not only of the hacks, but of their children and grandchildren.... AND it forbids others from contributing to the common culture in exactly the same way as they did, though exactly the same methods. Namely import, synthesis, paraphrasis, recontextualization or reconstruction of existing works.
The injustice of this situation is apparent, I believe?
You are a disgusting beast.
I resent this, sir. Retract, or apologize, in the name of civil discourse.
We did not get arts of any kind until people had the ability to specialize in one certain area and through trade of money obtain all of the things they needed which they didn't have time to produce themselves.
Sorry to say, this is arrant nonsense. People have been expressing themselves through created beauty since the beginning of time. Take the cave paintings in Spain and France... I wager no money changed hands to stimulate that creator, even though his/her living standards were hundreds of times worse than today's "starving artists".
If there's anything worse than misunderstanding the laws which protect creativity, it's misinterpreting the creative impulse itself. For creators, it's not about money, it's never about money. It's about expression. Assuming that artists will stop creating because there are no laws to protect their work (and thus, income) is assuming that all creators are whores, hawking their wares for money. True creators seem to prosper in adversity and overcome it, not to chafe against it. Sacrifice and hard work is the daily bread of artists, and anyone who doesn't care for either should just find a cushier job. Sorry.
We seem to think artists are some sort of species on the verge of extinction, when in reality they're alive, prosperous, and doing quite well.... with and without these laws. Because, hey, these laws don't work for them. They are clearly meant for the media giants, and if you think they are acting in the best interests of artists everywhere, well, there's this bridge I'd like to sell you....
The article is not about the rights-and-wrongs of IP law (as it were), but about what rights the creators have in a culture that has been, for the most part, co-opted from sources in a way that the creators themselves are no longer allowed to co-opt. Nobody will deny anybody's right to attempt to profit from their creations, but where's the greater good in locking the cultural and artistic value of said creations away instead of allowing them to serve as raw material for the next generation of creators?
What really frightens me is the time limits on these laws. If I want to write a derivative work now, I have to find a novel written during the 1870's. If I live to be 80, I just might be allowed by law to publish my extensions of Asimov's Foundation....
Another point that Americans should be aware of is how many countries world-wide follow the American lead in legislating IP. The parts of the world most closely tied to the US will do as the Americans do in this matter, and NOT to protect its own creators, but to keep from angering our rich neighbors and be labeled "a haven for pirates".
two electrons in the same quantum state except for spin, and you know the spin of one of them and then change it, the spin of the other electron is changed instantly, regardless of distance. However, I think this interaction occurs at the speed of light, and not instantly.
Actually, it's not a theory, it's Einstein -Podolsky-Rosen, which was recently proved as a law of quantum mechanics with a neat little experiment... In a nutshell, EPR implies that in an entangled state, certain particles would seem to violate local reality by "agreeing" on their quantum state, with no perceptible particle exchange (which means it's not limited by the speed of light), even when separated by great distances.
The problem is, for now, that we have no way of predetermining quantum states in entangled pairs, meaning we can't yet use it for FTL data transmission. But it is the principle behind quantum teleportation, which is unspeakably cool.
ObKomputerGeek->Relevance: Information stored in quanta has some freaky properties.
I'm quite sure you didn't understand the exam. Particularly Question 11, which is apparently the one that got your dander up.
Did you stop to think about the "fundamental" problem this North Korean peasant faces? It is tyranny. Tyranny of the body, and more critically, tyranny of the mind. North Koreans (and people the world over) are kept ignorant of the world-context they live in, since ignorance breeds docility and quashes ambition. If you don't know that there -is- something better, you can't aspire to it, and if you can't aspire to it, you accept your lot. You accept being pushed around by men with guns. You accept having to eat bark and having to feed your child boiled shoe. You accept hopelessness and helplessness as facts of life. Your world-view narrows until you can only see the day, and the day's toil and pain. This is tyranny of the mind, and millions of people live under its oppression.
What you and I fail to appreciate daily is that we have the Tyrant-Slayer in our scabbard.
Granted, we are under no contractual obligation to make the world a better place, but whatever compassion is born of understanding is better than no compassion at all. Once you understand and see beyond your own tiny little mindscape, your own conscience will tell you what is demanded of you to give, and what is fair of you to ask in return.
Slashdot Mirror
Superstart game designer copying a shareware title?
(word is, this game is pretty good.... I've only played the demo myself, though (poor))
"What can change the nature of a man?"
That's the fundamental question behind Planescape: Torment, and the clue that most ties the game together. And the game doesn't let you take the easy answers (love, hate, death). The REAL answer is chilling and unexpected and will leave you thinking for days.
The game's narrative is mindbending in a number of ways. To begin with, you play an immortal amnesiac who is following the trail of breadcrumbs he left for himself in case he should die and lose his memory, again. You meet people who know you and know things about you (which neither the player or the character know or remember), you live in a place where belief affects reality and everyone keeps secrets, some of which are revealed in the most inopportune moments....
There's one riddle/story that has stuck in my head from the game. Paraphrasing:
"You come to your senses, sitting on a sidewalk under a bright noon sun. You can't remember how you got here or what you should be doing. Looking around, everything seems as it should.... but you have a nagging feeling that it shouldn't be that way. Then you see me, smiling, holding out a hand.
Then I say, That was your second wish."
Did you read this document yourself?
The "endowed by their Creator" bit, as well as the other jingo, ahem, patriotic concepts are in the Declaration of Independence, not the Constitution.
The zero-G bit at least.
In 1917, the Russians were a pre-industrialized nation of very poor and very ignorant peasants.
By 1943, the USSR had built up the industrial infrastructure necessary to open up a can-o-whopass on the Nazis. No small achievement.
In the 60s, the USSR put the first satellite in orbit, the first man in space, and probably would have beat the US to the moon if Chief Designer Korolyev hadn't died and the N-2 program hadn't been so badly botched.
They had the whole Western world quaking in their boots for fifty years. The USSR consistently put forward great advances physics and mathematics, and their engineers were among the best in the world.
Say what you will about the excesses of Stalin and his succesors, no one denies them. Dictators are antithetical to true communism, and modern communist do well to disown Stalin, Mao, and to a certain degree, Castro. Yet cannot we deny the scientific, social, educational and industrial achievements of the USSR, nor deny that, unlike the current governments of some prosperous nations, the Soviets under Lenin actually tried to do good by the little people.
Texas was a Mexican colony that declared independence then joined a "equal but separate" treaty with the US. The US later annexed Texas in somewhat legalistic manner than many considered illegal (and some Texans still do... you'll notice that the Texan flag is the only state flag that's allowed to fly at the same height as the US flag).
California, New Mexico and Arizona (then frontier wastelands) were extracted from Mexico as a peace condition after the US bitchslapped a politically-divided Mexico in 1845. The sale price was 40 million dollars. The Gold Rush started four years later. Coincidence?
"The New York Times will certainly feed your paranoia that the big bad communists are out to get you, Pravda will provide a fairer, balanced set of information, tovarisch."
- RobertGraham, Slashtot, circa 1960.
Okay, I'll bite.. (can never resist a good troll)
Wise man name of McLuhan once observed, "The medium -is- the message." Books are books not because the story -needs- a large number of words to be told, but because the idea of what a book "should be" requires narrative, exposition, character development, et cetera, so as fulfill its purpose in the mind of the reader, and this in turn requires the prodigious use of dead tree matter. This is not an obvious truth... but like Lao Tzu said, the enlightened will understand.
Reading a book, my young apprentice, is an act of volition, an exercise of the imagination where strings of texts become images and sounds in your mind, and these together form a story. Whereas watching a movie is an act of circumstance, where finalized images are fed to your senses to trigger certain responses which may or may not form up in a fashion coherent enough to be called a "plot".
The fundamental difference may not be in the story being told (your pithy remark about "Dune" being about "this guy who rides worms" -did- get my knickers in a knot), but in the manner in which the story entered your mind. You can be sitting around someone's living room, talking about stuff while a movie happens to be playing on the telly, and perhaps get the gist of it. I dare you to get the gist out of, say, "Cien años de soledad" or "Ulysses", just by having it sit on your coffee table.
I think your (utterly crass and uncouth) opinion/troll stems from the fact that you confuse ideas with information. Information -can- be compressed, synthesised, visualized, deconstructed, "adapted for TV", sped along its path to the hungering brain... ideas (the central product of a book) cannot. Ideas must be germinated, judged, matured, compared, nurtured by reflection. Information is a commodity. Ideas are not.
If it were up to you and the current media-fed generation with attention spans of ferrets on double espressos, conditioned to respond to 30-second commercials, 3:30-4:30 songs, weaned on Cliff notes and 10-second sound bites, all the good books would become minute-long trailers, and you would "know the ending" of a thousand different masterpieces in about the time it takes to have a good bowel movement. If you do this out of choice, fine.... but if its out of ignorance or just consumer-frenzy-endorsed attention deficit disorder, I can't help but feel a little sorry.
Write this a hundred times on the black board: A story is -not- information, and should not be treated as such.
BTW, "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep", where "Bladerunner" comes from, is about 140 pages long. Shorter than a Maxim mag, and nowhere near the definition of "lengthy".
THS
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Learn some real science, please.
THS
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Another well-known spin-off of the original series is the Dune Encyclopedia. Impossible to get nowadays, but well worth a read if you're a fan. You can sometimes come across it at swap meets or library sales.
There's also a core of fine fan fiction, such as Revenant of Dune, and some pretty good stuff at Usul's fandom page.
And for those of you old-skool enough to be into MU*s, there's an excellent Dune-based MUSH at dune3.fremen.org 4201, with an informative webpage at www.fremen.org/muds/dune3/.
THS
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As a foreign national who, by necessity, must deal with the US, it's policies and systems, on a daily basis, I find it disheartening that the entire world is being "de facto" colonized by the United States. Cultural diversity and the right to self-determination is crushed by the need to feed the American Machine. Time and time again, one thing is proven: whatever is touched by the United States must comform to it, never will the United States comform.
The Cold War has ended. Most nations are well on their way to democracy and freedom, on their own terms. Do you foresee the need for the United States to change its role among the community of nations? If so, how?
THS
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Your parallels are not only invalid, they're Katzy.
"access to paint and canvas equals Rembrandt-level talent" is not true, whereas "lack of access to paint and canvas equals non-Rembrandt-level talent" is.
"access to a football equals multi-million dollar contracts with the New York Giants" is not true, whereas "lack of football equals lack of multi-million dollar contracts with the New York Giants" is.
The issue Katz is adressing is potential. The Net is a great way for young people to find their calling... in other words, to create -potential-. It's the individual's responsability to achieve.
I think your post is naked mindless Katz-bashing.. and not that I have anything against Katz-bashing, as long as it's decent Katz-bashing.
THS
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So there's only one thing I really want.
THS
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I wonder... how many of Stephen Hawking's students complained about not being able to understand him when he was speaking?
THS
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The Slashdot Oracle has pondered your question deeply:
You faithless imbecile, you should know better than to say the "double-ew" word in my presence!
..--=={{ ZOT! }}==--..
You owe the Oracle a dozen frags at the next LAN party.
THS
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The key word is disenfranchisement, meaning "deprivation of a privilege, immunity or right" . Regardless of the empirical or anechdotal evidence we may have as to the root cause of music trading, the fact remains that the public has been deprived of:
- The right to pay a fair price for exactly the music they want, no more.
- The right to both time- and space- displace the purchased music and listen to it in any and all the audio appliances they own.
- The privilege of choosing from among the entire spectra of music, not just selected genres or unsigned artists.
- The right to integrate music into their culture, to treat it as any kind or manner of culture is treated: examined, commented, exchanged, emulated, deconstructed and reintegrated.
At a risk of sounding Katzian, I think it's a good insight, and one that is apt to be co-opted into any real-world discussion on digital music.THS
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That's just the half of it, dude.
What happens if your hard drive crashes and takes your paid-for MP3s with it? I have a serious poke with current licensing schemes in which I pay for -information-, but end up hostage to the -medium.-
Certainly, it's accepted that, once the product is sold, the seller can have only limited liability regarding the integrity of the product throughout it's lifetime.
BUT. Nothing is as fragile as bits-and-bytes. Bit rot, faulty write/recording mechanism, dirty power supply can all destroy your paid-for information. And that's without factoring in acts of God. It's a serious flaw in the distribution model, to put it mildly, when you're paying for the bits, not the plastic.
I don't envision the market actually paying for (and abiding by) license-to-use until we have some sort of never-degrading, indestructible (or at least, trivially easy to back up) medium for holding the licensed product.
THS
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Well, for one, it's a solid-state laser, as you say. It doesn't readily break down under the operating stress, as most organic lasers would. And it doesn't need a laser pump... you can charge it up with plain ole' electrical power.
The "plastic" label is a major misnomer, though. Tetracene (as do most polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons) has more in common with graphite than, say, nylon. It's the roving electrons in the torus-shaped pi-clouds, melded together over the multiple benzene rings, that conduct the electricity and give these compounds their electric and optical activity.
It prolly took quite a bit of cojones to develop this thing, as tetracene is quite explosive.
THS
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This is the most incredibly stupid thing I've ever heard. I mean, rock-hard stupid. Dehydrated rock-hard stupid. It goes beyond the stupid we know into an entire new quantum definition of stupid. Trans-stupid stupid. Meta stupid. Stupid collapsed on itself so far that even the neutrons have collapsed. Stupid so dense no intellect can escape. Cosmic singularity stupid. Scorching mid-day on Mercury stupid. You emit more stupid in one nanosecond than all of Slashdot emits in a year. Quasar stupid.
This has to be a troll. No one could be this stupid. I must have nothing better to do than reply to this drivel. Duh.
(Penicillin was developed in the 1930s by Flory and Chain. NASA was still 20+ years away.)
THS
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They'll be basically 6 kinds of replies to this story:
1) I still don't know why we're wasting money on {tech} when people in {place} are {mode of suffering agreed to be bad}. We should be worrying about solving our problems here on Earth!
2) This is the coolest thing ever! The most magnificent achievement since {primitive yet crucial tech}. It's the first step towards {cosmic achievement}, just like {author} predicted.
3) Imagine a Beowolf cluster of these!
4) I shrug. I am so underwhelmed. Millions and millions of {currency} wasted so we could put more trash in space. It will last less than {hyperbole of brevity} and be as useless as {hyperbole of futility}.
5) Look up these links here. Yeah, I need the karma.
6) Not bad for a Pizza Hut flight.
Fill in the {blanks} and permute at will. Add Microsoft bashing, MPAA/RIAA cursing, RMS, ESR, OpenSource zealotry. Simmer to a boil. Watch if we don't get 400 comments on this one.
THS
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It most certainly can. That's what the nice men in the black uniforms with the nightsticks are for.
To provide a better parabole than your wife-pictures one, let's try this one: suppose my company makes cookbooks. And, being a large and powerful enterprise, we have our own printer companies, an army of trained cooks to produce new recipes (and who must, by law, forsake all rights to these recipes... they are works for hire!), and a massive propaganda apparatus that ensures us a certain degree of commercial success for each cookbook we put out.
But lo! what treachery is here? People are typing our recipes in their computers and trading them amongst themselves! They are bypassing my carefuly constructed distribution monopoly... they are getting -my- recipes from a source other than -me-. Hell and damnation!
Were I a smart and capable businessman, I would look for ways to make money off these transactions. But no.... it's easier to sue the computer makers, the ISPs, the software makers, the backbone providers, the people sharing the recipes... it's easier to buy laws and misrepresent existing ones... rouse some of my cooks to beat their breasts and bemoan their starving children...
Were I this nearsighted as a businessman (not to mention a lying, conniving, scheming pirate), I should warrant more than a senatorial slap on the hand. The record companies -are- publicly traded, after all, and have a fiduciary obligation to maximize their profits. And the demand for electronic delivery is there... why are they spending their shareholders money on lawyers and lawsuits instead of tapping into this demand?
THS
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Incorrect, sir. Money is ENERGY, not life. Those people who are getting money because their fathers or grandfathers did something worthwhile.. are they giving up life in exchange for that money? And I don't just mean the idle children of the rich, but also the idle children of the artists. What are they giving up to obtain that money which others pay for with labor?
Your analogy does not stand, because capitalism allows (nay, requires) a certain elite class that gets its money through means other than work.
And you think that if I give a symbol of my life to a man for his creative work that I denigrate him to a WHORE?
You clearly misread my meaning, or you believe being a whore is somehow denigrating.
There is nothing wrong with a man profiting by the fruits of his creativity. I said as much, almost word-for-word, in my previous post. What I find exceedingly vile is that creators of limited talent (to put it charitably) can and do contribute more to our common culture... only because they purposefuly angle their work so it appeals to the same lowest common denominator that constitutes the target audience of the media corporations.
Not only that, but they are rewarded handsomely, not only monetarily, but also in terms of social rank and standing, whereas so many creators who remain true to their visions can never leave 'cult' status because their views are unpopular, or, godforbid, dangerous to the bottom line.
Not only that, but existing IP law protects and defends the livelyhoods, not only of the hacks, but of their children and grandchildren.... AND it forbids others from contributing to the common culture in exactly the same way as they did, though exactly the same methods. Namely import, synthesis, paraphrasis, recontextualization or reconstruction of existing works.
The injustice of this situation is apparent, I believe?
You are a disgusting beast.
I resent this, sir. Retract, or apologize, in the name of civil discourse.
Sorry to say, this is arrant nonsense. People have been expressing themselves through created beauty since the beginning of time. Take the cave paintings in Spain and France... I wager no money changed hands to stimulate that creator, even though his/her living standards were hundreds of times worse than today's "starving artists".
If there's anything worse than misunderstanding the laws which protect creativity, it's misinterpreting the creative impulse itself. For creators, it's not about money, it's never about money. It's about expression. Assuming that artists will stop creating because there are no laws to protect their work (and thus, income) is assuming that all creators are whores, hawking their wares for money. True creators seem to prosper in adversity and overcome it, not to chafe against it. Sacrifice and hard work is the daily bread of artists, and anyone who doesn't care for either should just find a cushier job. Sorry.
We seem to think artists are some sort of species on the verge of extinction, when in reality they're alive, prosperous, and doing quite well.... with and without these laws. Because, hey, these laws don't work for them. They are clearly meant for the media giants, and if you think they are acting in the best interests of artists everywhere, well, there's this bridge I'd like to sell you....
The article is not about the rights-and-wrongs of IP law (as it were), but about what rights the creators have in a culture that has been, for the most part, co-opted from sources in a way that the creators themselves are no longer allowed to co-opt. Nobody will deny anybody's right to attempt to profit from their creations, but where's the greater good in locking the cultural and artistic value of said creations away instead of allowing them to serve as raw material for the next generation of creators?
What really frightens me is the time limits on these laws. If I want to write a derivative work now, I have to find a novel written during the 1870's. If I live to be 80, I just might be allowed by law to publish my extensions of Asimov's Foundation....
Another point that Americans should be aware of is how many countries world-wide follow the American lead in legislating IP. The parts of the world most closely tied to the US will do as the Americans do in this matter, and NOT to protect its own creators, but to keep from angering our rich neighbors and be labeled "a haven for pirates".
Actually, it's not a theory, it's Einstein -Podolsky-Rosen, which was recently proved as a law of quantum mechanics with a neat little experiment...
In a nutshell, EPR implies that in an entangled state, certain particles would seem to violate local reality by "agreeing" on their quantum state, with no perceptible particle exchange (which means it's not limited by the speed of light), even when separated by great distances.
The problem is, for now, that we have no way of predetermining quantum states in entangled pairs, meaning we can't yet use it for FTL data transmission. But it is the principle behind quantum teleportation, which is unspeakably cool.
ObKomputerGeek->Relevance: Information stored in quanta has some freaky properties.
I'm quite sure you didn't understand the exam. Particularly Question 11, which is apparently the one that got your dander up.
Did you stop to think about the "fundamental" problem this North Korean peasant faces? It is tyranny. Tyranny of the body, and more critically, tyranny of the mind. North Koreans (and people the world over) are kept ignorant of the world-context they live in, since ignorance breeds docility and quashes ambition. If you don't know that there -is- something better, you can't aspire to it, and if you can't aspire to it, you accept your lot. You accept being pushed around by men with guns. You accept having to eat bark and having to feed your child boiled shoe. You accept hopelessness and helplessness as facts of life. Your world-view narrows until you can only see the day, and the day's toil and pain. This is tyranny of the mind, and millions of people live under its oppression.
What you and I fail to appreciate daily is that we have the Tyrant-Slayer in our scabbard.
Granted, we are under no contractual obligation to make the world a better place, but whatever compassion is born of understanding is better than no compassion at all. Once you understand and see beyond your own tiny little mindscape, your own conscience will tell you what is demanded of you to give, and what is fair of you to ask in return.