This is getting a bit offtopic, but you have a weird idea of what selfishness is.
Telling somebody they don't have to pay in that situation is maybe stupid or obnoxious, but not selfish. It could even be a sort of misguided altruism. What do you have to gain from something like that? A selfish person would be very happy to have somebody else pay. After all if nobody pays the place will have to close, and if you're visiting then you obviously at least slightly want the place to be open.
Getting back ontopic, I don't see anything wrong with using adblock. It is not mandatory for anybody to sustain anybody else's business. I don't have to go to a bar and spend money just because the owner invested a lot of money in it, and I don't have watch ads just because somebody decided that was the way of getting money. I've not clicked an ad intentionally in 5 years anyway, no point in wasting bandwidth on that. Ads aren't the only way of getting money anyway. You can sell stuff (cafepress is easy), and ask for donations and subscriptions. I find those much preferrable.
If you're going to claim hosting costs big $$$, bullshit, except for really large sites. Hosts like Dreamhosts are absurdly cheap (if not very reliable, but that's not a huge deal for many sites). I pay for two hosts and don't earn a cent from it.
Also, adblock can be used for things other than ad blocking. For instance, on some webcomics I block parts of the interface (logos, etc) to free up space on the screen and not need to scroll to read a strip.
Badly tuned autoscaling can result in the game progressing very strangely. You start good and kill enemies with a moderate challenge at the start. But the game believes that is too easy and ramps up the difficulty until you die a couple times, at which point it sets difficulty back to easy. You get a very strange cycle where difficulty progressively rises then abruply falls.
In games like Oblivion it manifests in a different way: It's hard to judge the player's power. For instance in Morrowind (Oblivion's predecessor) you can make items that will continously heal yourself and by performing certain tricks make yourself absurdly powerful at low levels, sometimes without trying very hard. Or, you can follow a very suboptimal progression if what interests you is say, commerce and roleplay. As a result, you get a game that's either absurdly easy or absurdly hard.
Another problem is that you get worlds where EVERYTHING gets harder. At level 1, a rat did moderate amount of damage. At level 20, it now also does moderate damage to a knight in shiny armor, and a keen vorpal longsword of burnination +5. The lowly thugs you had issues with at level 3 now level 15, wear shiny armor and have magical swords, and inexplicably demand your lunch money. It doesn't make any sense for a warrior in the top 1% of the world to hang around a crossroads and mug people. They could go hire themselves for a much better price.
Even the scaling is done well, the result is still strange. The cave where low life robbers are hiding is still challenging at level 15. The citadel is possible to storm at level 5. If it wasn't for the requirement of having the right items you could probably go fight the big bad at level 3, as autoscaling would ensure he'd be possible for you to defeat.
IMO, games like Oblivion should be planned differently. Instead of autoscaling there should be a progressive increase in difficulty as you get away from civilization. The rats in an inn's cellar should be doable at level 1. The bandits on the crossroads should be moderately challenging at level 5. The hideout in the woods far from the road should be pretty hard at level 10. And if you decide to storm a castle, you'd better be armed to the teeth.
It should be perfectly possible to make a game where you can explore even at low levels. Cities should be generally safe. Roads less so. The further you get from civilized places, the less safe it should be. It doesn't have to be frustrating, if you find you're barely surviving you should be able to return to safer places.
Let's see if I understand, if the script is executed by root, change file's permissions to add permission to execute by the file's owner, execute, then remove.
First, this doesn't solve the problem. The problem is that you have/home/vadim/app.sh, which is owned by vadim, marked executable, but denied execution by grsec/SELinux/mount options. Doing chmod on it won't make any difference.
Second, root can do anything it wants anyway (excepting SELinux limits), and this tool needs to work for a normal user.
Third, if this is supposed to run as suid, it allows any user to mess with the permissions of any file on the system, and contains a race. And it would run applications as root then.
The application I have in mind would probably need to be suid, ask for the user's password, tell the kernel to temporarily disable the execution limit, set the UID to the calling user, then execute the application.
Mounting/home with noexec Using the grsecurity patch, which can deny execution of files not in directories owned by root, as well as usage of network sockets. Using SELinux
The tools are there. All that's needed is to use them.
The need to download random binaries to your home directory and run them is infrequent in Linux. The most frequent case is application installers, but many of those need root access anyway (nvidia drivers for instance), and most come with the distribution. A way to fix the occasional need to do this would be a sudo-like tool that needs to be used to execute a file, but doesn't grant root privileges.
I'm not sure how you got the second half from the first, but it doesn't really follow. Have you ever heard of the concept that too many choices are not better for a person, but worse?
For most people, maybe. I find there's not nearly enough choice. Yes, even in the amount of marmalade flavors. There are flavors of juice and yogurt in Russia you can't find in Spain, for instance.
There seems to be plenty choice until you come up with reasons to discard some of the options. Then it turns out there aren't many.
For instance I recently bought a MP3 player. It actually took a long time to find one that would fit my needs.
The requirements weren't that stringent. Flash based, large capacity, plays.ogg, works with Linux. Not made by: Sony (rootkit), Apple (no Linux support, and don't like them in general), Microsoft (don't like them for MANY reasons) or Creative (Aureal, horrible drivers in Windows, disk corruption due to bad PCI implementation).
After this not that long list I'm left with: Sandisk, Cowon, and perhaps cheap chinese manufacturers. Went with a Cowon D2 16GB one, which seems a lot nicer than the Sandisk alternative. What I got is nice, but it could be better. I'm not that thrilled about the touch screen and the plastic casing. Unfortunately nobody sells that.
One big, BIG benefit to them is vastly reducing latency and network traffic in some cases. I'll give you a practical example.
This application I worked on calculated prices for a list of products. This was in the hundreds of rows, often multiple times per second. Each price calculation required retrieving the base price from the products table, applying percentages depending on the type of customer (checking customer table), applying discounts for bulk orders, and checking for discounts. All of that always had to be done, because the lowest price has to be returned.
The function that did this was written in Visual Basic and was just a bunch of DB calls. So not much to optimize on that side.
The application would run a search, SELECT a list of maybe 100 products, then calculate prices for all of them, then do it again maybe half a second later. And this could be done concurrently on several computers at once. It was hammering the database pretty nicely.
So I turned it into a function in MSSQL. The result was the above was now done by one query: SELECT prod_id, prod_desc, get_price(prod_id, cust_id, amount, getdate()) WHERE...
Results?
1. The new way ran *35 times* faster 2. The price calculation function was now in one unique place: the DB. Now you could write a C#, Perl or whatever app and have it calculate prices like everything else.
This was achieved by simply rewriting the code as a stored proc, with no attempts at optimizing the logic. The improvement comes from that even on a LAN, the overhead of making queries over the network adds up pretty fast, and 1 roundtrip is a lot better than many. Also the database doesn't need to spend time on parsing the same queries.
Other benefits include not needing to give the application the permission to see all the information needed to calculate the price, and having one central place where to place logging and error checking.
I applied the same idea to a later project with Postgresql. Nearly every operation is a stored proc. It doesn't do a "SELECT... FROM users" to verify a login, it does "SELECT verify_login($user, $pass)" (note: this is actually prepared query, I don't really use $variables that would be vulnerable to injection). To create a new user it does "SELECT create_user($name)". And so on. Should somebody gain access to the DB through SQL injection for instance, they will find they can't run a SELECT against the users table, can't perform an operation without going through the stored proc that WILL verify it's sane and write a log entry, can't insert a fake log entry because log entries are only written by stored procs, and so on. It also minimizes latency and network traffic. A stored proc might touch 8 tables, but return only an int. This approach also means the database's interface are the stored procedures. I could modify the table structure by doing the update in a transaction to the tables and affected stored procs with the application running.
This appproach has downsides of course, such as putting lots of logic into the DB, and it's probably not suitable for large applications using multiple servers.
Not entirely true. Toyota developed a hydrogen refueling infrastructure about 2-3 years ago, it's just not been deployed widely deployed.
That's not infrastructure. That's the design for the elements, or the physical hardware that would comprise one, at best. Infrastructure is hardware that's in place and supports something.
A design for an hydrogen pump isn't infrastructure. A hydrogen pump for sale isn't either, even if it's very cheap. Now a country-wide or at least city-wide network of those would be infrastructure, but this doesn't exist.
If she somehow could respond exactly in the same way as he would have, then no, I wouldn't, as it'd make her as good as a clone of his for my purposes. You were expecting something else?
I'd say that I understand it in an unconventional, programming oriented way: I appreciate the class definition and not the instance;-) Sometimes it's even things that don't actually exist.
For example, I really like the *concept* behind Black & White and the Creatures games. I don't really like playing B&W past the first level. The execution was flawed. It starts good and goes downhill fast. Yet it still displays a really awesome idea that'd be the best thing since sliced bread if properly executed, and wasn't that far away from a proper implementation as to disregard it as impossible.
First of all what you're talking about isn't the same thing I am talking about. Second, what you're talking about is common in some types of works and very well accepted.
First, there are duplicates, such as scanned PDFs on filesharing networks and photocopies. Those are perfect or nearly perfect copies, and merely instances of the original creation. A copy or LOTR is still LOTR. LOTR's value isn't diminished by them. This is by the way the specific case I'm discussing here: Copies that are good enough that they can't be told from the "original" without looking really, really hard at them. A book version of this would have the same text.
Then there are imitations of the style, such as Nik Perumov's work, and countless Harry Potter fanfics. Those are separate works in their own right and IMO don't diminish that which they came from. In fact that somebody bothered to write a fanfic or an immitation is IMO an indicator of the quality of the source.
What you're talking about is a retelling of a story. This is actually common and perfectly well accepted. By your logic, the Brothers Grimm did something bad by publishing tales they didn't write. The original and often unknown authors of those tales deserve credit for making them, and the Brothers Grimm deserve credit for publishing and keeping them alive. Christopher Tolkien deserves some credit for cleaning up his father's works.
A good story is a good story. Like I said before, IMO Tolkien is good because he made good books. A book is not good because it's made by Tolkien, but because it's well written.
In your case, assuming the book was well written, and the author didn't lie and wrote it under his own name and gave it its own title, no, I wouldn't be disappointed.
If somebody wrote in Tolkien's style successfully IMO that would make them a decent author in their own right. Of course successfully copying Tolkien is a lesser achievement than being Tolkien, but it's still pretty impressive.
Incidentally, Nik Perumov precisely went and did that, and wrote his own continuation to LOTR. Unfortunately I haven't been able to read his stuff properly yet, but a few bits I saw looked decent.
Take a CD for instance. If you take an Ubuntu CD, and duplicate it precisely to the atom, then while they're both identical and functionally replaceable one for the other without anybody being able to tell. But CD #1 is clearly not CD #2. If you scratch one, the other doesn't get automatically scratched as well. So while functionally identical, they're clearly different objects.
With people, I see it this way: Suppose there's a machine that takes a pile of atoms and builds a perfect duplicate of somebody. Suppose you're in that machine, in a red room. And suppose that the machine creates a copy atom by atom, just very fast, in a green room. Will there be any moment where suddenly your perception will suddenly shift to being in the green room? I don't think it will. What could cause such a change? Instead, a new copy of you will be created which will have the impression of that the room suddenly became green. And if what was being done was kept hidden from you, and your original was destroyed, what would happen is that your own thread of consciousness would end, and the one of the new copy would remain. And your copy would exit the room and think it's you, and only remember that the walls misteriously became green. As far as everybody else is concerned, nobody would notice the replacement.
That doesn't really matter to me. Kudos for coming up with the concept go to the maker. Kudos for making the copy go to the copier.
My appreciation of say, LOTR is not in the slightest diminished just because it's not Tolkien's original manuscript. In fact I'd say that for reading purposes, a hardcover with illustrations and good printing is more valuable than the original manuscript.
"If my grandfather gave my father an axe and my father replaced the handle and gave it to me and I replaced the head, is it still my grandfather's axe?"
I've got it that way with computers. I've got them handled by function. The current laptop is "The Laptop", keeping the same name and IP address despite having been the 4th one so far, going through FreeDOS, Gentoo and Ubuntu, and sharing none of the hardware and little of the software.
The desktop is similarly "The Desktop", even as I gradually replaced the video card, then changed the motherboard, then the hard disks, then moved it all into a new case with yet another new motherboard. Now nothing of the old stuff remains, yet for me it's still the same machine in some sense.
First, I disagree with the notion that there is one true instance of say, "Woman in a Garden". For me there isn't one, what exists is an abstract concept of what "Woman in a Garden, painted by Monet" looks like, and then a number of worse or better instances of it. It's even possible to create a copy that's better than the "original". For example, webcomic artists sometimes go back and redraw their old strips. There's first what the author intended to draw, and then what they could actually create. Th artists or even somebody else can create an instance that's truer to the idea.
Second, I disagree with the notion of what it's worth $50M. For me, it doesn't have a specific monetary value. It's like, what was the invention of the telephone worth? The discovery of microscopic life? I think most people would agree that those things have been very valuable, it would be impossible to put an exact price on them. I think the biggest testament to the value of those things is their far-reaching presence and influence in the modern world. By the same measure, IMO the way to recognize the value of a Monet painting isn't to sell it for $50M, but by printing millions of copies and distributing all around, so that everybody can appreciate it, like that image of Che Guevara.
Third, I don't see a very major value in your last 4 points. Certainly those are interesting things, but IMO simply being created by somebody famous shouldn't grant an object a "higher status". A play shouldn't suddenly become a better play because it was written by Shakespeare, or lose value because it turns out it wasn't. An object has an intrinsic value independent of its creator, and a creator's worth depends on the value of his creations. A play shouldn't be famous because it was written by Shakespeare, it should be because it's good, and Shapespeare because he wrote good plays.
For another example, I don't think what Hans Reiser has or hasn't done has any relevance on the worth of ReiserFS, while its existence is a testament to his technical ability.
That's a nice philosophical question, but not really related to what I'm talking about.
The way I see it, it most likely wouldn't be me. But it would be as good as me for everybody else. And since a monument or a painting isn't alive, if everybody looking at it thinks it's the original, then IMO it's just as good as the original.
Doesn't work, because even twins aren't the same person, or exactly the same. IIRC twins still have different fingerprints. Even assuming we both were identical to the atom, behavior would still diverge over time as obviously two people can't be at once in exactly the same place.
If somehow there were two parallel universes that were exact copies of each other then I guess it wouldn't matter if some person got swapped around, though.
Wait, you mean you have your grandma's ashes in glass on your mantelpiece!? That sounds a tad creepy to me.
I don't really know how to answer that because I'd never do such a thing in the first place. Personally I'd rather my dead body be useful for something, like organ donation, research, or at least fertilizer.
That aside, I'm not even sure about what exactly are you preserving, since today you're not made of exactly the same stuff as you were yesterday, and atoms are interchangeable anyway.
I mean the experiments such as whether it's possible to carry a 20 ton rock from point A to B, or trying to figure out how to build Stonehenge with the equipment and materials available back then. Once the basic technique is tested though, there's no need to do it at full scale though. Once you figure out how to make a brick, you know you can make 10000, it's just an exercise in scaling the operation.
So long you built a copy as exact as possible, yes. By that I mean built from the same materials. You can use modern construction equipment if you want to, not like there's much of a difference if a block was put in place by manual labor or a crane, though I do see the value of trying to reenact ancient building methods to test in practice how things worked. Just don't make it out of concrete, because obviously that wouldn't be the same thing.
And yes, I would find it more valuable. With an accurate reproduction I could see what they looked like back when they were built, and they could be explored without fearing destroying an ancient drawing on a wall. This is something that the originals can't and will never be able to give me.
Then, to really top it off, build things that were made to be used by people and re-enact ancient Egypt, and I'll be really delighted to visit.
I appreciate the value of history fine, but I don't assign value to the originality of what it's made of.
For instance, I would rebuild the Colosseum, even at the cost of tearing down parts or all of what's still standing, though keeping the materials as accurate as possible. For me it's a testament to the Roman Engineering, and it's be a pity to see it crumble into dust one day and stay that way because "the dust is historical", like what happened with greek temples.
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This is getting a bit offtopic, but you have a weird idea of what selfishness is.
Telling somebody they don't have to pay in that situation is maybe stupid or obnoxious, but not selfish. It could even be a sort of misguided altruism. What do you have to gain from something like that? A selfish person would be very happy to have somebody else pay. After all if nobody pays the place will have to close, and if you're visiting then you obviously at least slightly want the place to be open.
Getting back ontopic, I don't see anything wrong with using adblock. It is not mandatory for anybody to sustain anybody else's business. I don't have to go to a bar and spend money just because the owner invested a lot of money in it, and I don't have watch ads just because somebody decided that was the way of getting money. I've not clicked an ad intentionally in 5 years anyway, no point in wasting bandwidth on that. Ads aren't the only way of getting money anyway. You can sell stuff (cafepress is easy), and ask for donations and subscriptions. I find those much preferrable.
If you're going to claim hosting costs big $$$, bullshit, except for really large sites. Hosts like Dreamhosts are absurdly cheap (if not very reliable, but that's not a huge deal for many sites). I pay for two hosts and don't earn a cent from it.
Also, adblock can be used for things other than ad blocking. For instance, on some webcomics I block parts of the interface (logos, etc) to free up space on the screen and not need to scroll to read a strip.
Autoscaling has MANY issues.
Badly tuned autoscaling can result in the game progressing very strangely. You start good and kill enemies with a moderate challenge at the start. But the game believes that is too easy and ramps up the difficulty until you die a couple times, at which point it sets difficulty back to easy. You get a very strange cycle where difficulty progressively rises then abruply falls.
In games like Oblivion it manifests in a different way: It's hard to judge the player's power. For instance in Morrowind (Oblivion's predecessor) you can make items that will continously heal yourself and by performing certain tricks make yourself absurdly powerful at low levels, sometimes without trying very hard. Or, you can follow a very suboptimal progression if what interests you is say, commerce and roleplay. As a result, you get a game that's either absurdly easy or absurdly hard.
Another problem is that you get worlds where EVERYTHING gets harder. At level 1, a rat did moderate amount of damage. At level 20, it now also does moderate damage to a knight in shiny armor, and a keen vorpal longsword of burnination +5. The lowly thugs you had issues with at level 3 now level 15, wear shiny armor and have magical swords, and inexplicably demand your lunch money. It doesn't make any sense for a warrior in the top 1% of the world to hang around a crossroads and mug people. They could go hire themselves for a much better price.
Even the scaling is done well, the result is still strange. The cave where low life robbers are hiding is still challenging at level 15. The citadel is possible to storm at level 5. If it wasn't for the requirement of having the right items you could probably go fight the big bad at level 3, as autoscaling would ensure he'd be possible for you to defeat.
IMO, games like Oblivion should be planned differently. Instead of autoscaling there should be a progressive increase in difficulty as you get away from civilization. The rats in an inn's cellar should be doable at level 1. The bandits on the crossroads should be moderately challenging at level 5. The hideout in the woods far from the road should be pretty hard at level 10. And if you decide to storm a castle, you'd better be armed to the teeth.
It should be perfectly possible to make a game where you can explore even at low levels. Cities should be generally safe. Roads less so. The further you get from civilized places, the less safe it should be. It doesn't have to be frustrating, if you find you're barely surviving you should be able to return to safer places.
Eh? What's that good for?
Let's see if I understand, if the script is executed by root, change file's permissions to add permission to execute by the file's owner, execute, then remove.
First, this doesn't solve the problem. The problem is that you have /home/vadim/app.sh, which is owned by vadim, marked executable, but denied execution by grsec/SELinux/mount options. Doing chmod on it won't make any difference.
Second, root can do anything it wants anyway (excepting SELinux limits), and this tool needs to work for a normal user.
Third, if this is supposed to run as suid, it allows any user to mess with the permissions of any file on the system, and contains a race. And it would run applications as root then.
The application I have in mind would probably need to be suid, ask for the user's password, tell the kernel to temporarily disable the execution limit, set the UID to the calling user, then execute the application.
There are plenty things that can be done.
Mounting /home with noexec
Using the grsecurity patch, which can deny execution of files not in directories owned by root, as well as usage of network sockets.
Using SELinux
The tools are there. All that's needed is to use them.
The need to download random binaries to your home directory and run them is infrequent in Linux. The most frequent case is application installers, but many of those need root access anyway (nvidia drivers for instance), and most come with the distribution. A way to fix the occasional need to do this would be a sudo-like tool that needs to be used to execute a file, but doesn't grant root privileges.
For most people, maybe. I find there's not nearly enough choice. Yes, even in the amount of marmalade flavors. There are flavors of juice and yogurt in Russia you can't find in Spain, for instance.
There seems to be plenty choice until you come up with reasons to discard some of the options. Then it turns out there aren't many.
For instance I recently bought a MP3 player. It actually took a long time to find one that would fit my needs.
The requirements weren't that stringent. Flash based, large capacity, plays .ogg, works with Linux. Not made by: Sony (rootkit), Apple (no Linux support, and don't like them in general), Microsoft (don't like them for MANY reasons) or Creative (Aureal, horrible drivers in Windows, disk corruption due to bad PCI implementation).
After this not that long list I'm left with: Sandisk, Cowon, and perhaps cheap chinese manufacturers. Went with a Cowon D2 16GB one, which seems a lot nicer than the Sandisk alternative. What I got is nice, but it could be better. I'm not that thrilled about the touch screen and the plastic casing. Unfortunately nobody sells that.
I think the point is that with somebody smart at the helm, they could have figured out something else to do.
Having cash, infrastructure and people in place quite amazing things can be done, so long you can find a good course of action.
On stored procedures:
One big, BIG benefit to them is vastly reducing latency and network traffic in some cases. I'll give you a practical example.
This application I worked on calculated prices for a list of products. This was in the hundreds of rows, often multiple times per second. Each price calculation required retrieving the base price from the products table, applying percentages depending on the type of customer (checking customer table), applying discounts for bulk orders, and checking for discounts. All of that always had to be done, because the lowest price has to be returned.
The function that did this was written in Visual Basic and was just a bunch of DB calls. So not much to optimize on that side.
The application would run a search, SELECT a list of maybe 100 products, then calculate prices for all of them, then do it again maybe half a second later. And this could be done concurrently on several computers at once. It was hammering the database pretty nicely.
So I turned it into a function in MSSQL. The result was the above was now done by one query: ...
SELECT prod_id, prod_desc, get_price(prod_id, cust_id, amount, getdate()) WHERE
Results?
1. The new way ran *35 times* faster
2. The price calculation function was now in one unique place: the DB. Now you could write a C#, Perl or whatever app and have it calculate prices like everything else.
This was achieved by simply rewriting the code as a stored proc, with no attempts at optimizing the logic. The improvement comes from that even on a LAN, the overhead of making queries over the network adds up pretty fast, and 1 roundtrip is a lot better than many. Also the database doesn't need to spend time on parsing the same queries.
Other benefits include not needing to give the application the permission to see all the information needed to calculate the price, and having one central place where to place logging and error checking.
I applied the same idea to a later project with Postgresql. Nearly every operation is a stored proc. It doesn't do a "SELECT ... FROM users" to verify a login, it does "SELECT verify_login($user, $pass)" (note: this is actually prepared query, I don't really use $variables that would be vulnerable to injection). To create a new user it does "SELECT create_user($name)". And so on. Should somebody gain access to the DB through SQL injection for instance, they will find they can't run a SELECT against the users table, can't perform an operation without going through the stored proc that WILL verify it's sane and write a log entry, can't insert a fake log entry because log entries are only written by stored procs, and so on. It also minimizes latency and network traffic. A stored proc might touch 8 tables, but return only an int. This approach also means the database's interface are the stored procedures. I could modify the table structure by doing the update in a transaction to the tables and affected stored procs with the application running.
This appproach has downsides of course, such as putting lots of logic into the DB, and it's probably not suitable for large applications using multiple servers.
That's not infrastructure. That's the design for the elements, or the physical hardware that would comprise one, at best. Infrastructure is hardware that's in place and supports something.
A design for an hydrogen pump isn't infrastructure. A hydrogen pump for sale isn't either, even if it's very cheap. Now a country-wide or at least city-wide network of those would be infrastructure, but this doesn't exist.
If she somehow could respond exactly in the same way as he would have, then no, I wouldn't, as it'd make her as good as a clone of his for my purposes. You were expecting something else?
I'd say that I understand it in an unconventional, programming oriented way: I appreciate the class definition and not the instance ;-) Sometimes it's even things that don't actually exist.
For example, I really like the *concept* behind Black & White and the Creatures games. I don't really like playing B&W past the first level. The execution was flawed. It starts good and goes downhill fast. Yet it still displays a really awesome idea that'd be the best thing since sliced bread if properly executed, and wasn't that far away from a proper implementation as to disregard it as impossible.
First of all what you're talking about isn't the same thing I am talking about. Second, what you're talking about is common in some types of works and very well accepted.
First, there are duplicates, such as scanned PDFs on filesharing networks and photocopies. Those are perfect or nearly perfect copies, and merely instances of the original creation. A copy or LOTR is still LOTR. LOTR's value isn't diminished by them. This is by the way the specific case I'm discussing here: Copies that are good enough that they can't be told from the "original" without looking really, really hard at them. A book version of this would have the same text.
Then there are imitations of the style, such as Nik Perumov's work, and countless Harry Potter fanfics. Those are separate works in their own right and IMO don't diminish that which they came from. In fact that somebody bothered to write a fanfic or an immitation is IMO an indicator of the quality of the source.
What you're talking about is a retelling of a story. This is actually common and perfectly well accepted. By your logic, the Brothers Grimm did something bad by publishing tales they didn't write. The original and often unknown authors of those tales deserve credit for making them, and the Brothers Grimm deserve credit for publishing and keeping them alive. Christopher Tolkien deserves some credit for cleaning up his father's works.
A good story is a good story. Like I said before, IMO Tolkien is good because he made good books. A book is not good because it's made by Tolkien, but because it's well written.
In your case, assuming the book was well written, and the author didn't lie and wrote it under his own name and gave it its own title, no, I wouldn't be disappointed.
If somebody wrote in Tolkien's style successfully IMO that would make them a decent author in their own right. Of course successfully copying Tolkien is a lesser achievement than being Tolkien, but it's still pretty impressive.
Incidentally, Nik Perumov precisely went and did that, and wrote his own continuation to LOTR. Unfortunately I haven't been able to read his stuff properly yet, but a few bits I saw looked decent.
IMO, both yes and no.
Take a CD for instance. If you take an Ubuntu CD, and duplicate it precisely to the atom, then while they're both identical and functionally replaceable one for the other without anybody being able to tell. But CD #1 is clearly not CD #2. If you scratch one, the other doesn't get automatically scratched as well. So while functionally identical, they're clearly different objects.
With people, I see it this way: Suppose there's a machine that takes a pile of atoms and builds a perfect duplicate of somebody. Suppose you're in that machine, in a red room. And suppose that the machine creates a copy atom by atom, just very fast, in a green room. Will there be any moment where suddenly your perception will suddenly shift to being in the green room? I don't think it will. What could cause such a change? Instead, a new copy of you will be created which will have the impression of that the room suddenly became green. And if what was being done was kept hidden from you, and your original was destroyed, what would happen is that your own thread of consciousness would end, and the one of the new copy would remain. And your copy would exit the room and think it's you, and only remember that the walls misteriously became green. As far as everybody else is concerned, nobody would notice the replacement.
That doesn't really matter to me. Kudos for coming up with the concept go to the maker. Kudos for making the copy go to the copier.
My appreciation of say, LOTR is not in the slightest diminished just because it's not Tolkien's original manuscript. In fact I'd say that for reading purposes, a hardcover with illustrations and good printing is more valuable than the original manuscript.
I wouldn't pay $20,000 for it in the first place. But then I don't even understand the point of paying for a signature.
If I was a fan of George Lucas, which I'm not, I'd rather have a conversation (by email, in person, whatever) instead of a signature.
"If my grandfather gave my father an axe and my father replaced the handle and gave it to me and I replaced the head, is it still my grandfather's axe?"
I've got it that way with computers. I've got them handled by function. The current laptop is "The Laptop", keeping the same name and IP address despite having been the 4th one so far, going through FreeDOS, Gentoo and Ubuntu, and sharing none of the hardware and little of the software.
The desktop is similarly "The Desktop", even as I gradually replaced the video card, then changed the motherboard, then the hard disks, then moved it all into a new case with yet another new motherboard. Now nothing of the old stuff remains, yet for me it's still the same machine in some sense.
See, that's where I disagree.
First, I disagree with the notion that there is one true instance of say, "Woman in a Garden". For me there isn't one, what exists is an abstract concept of what "Woman in a Garden, painted by Monet" looks like, and then a number of worse or better instances of it. It's even possible to create a copy that's better than the "original". For example, webcomic artists sometimes go back and redraw their old strips. There's first what the author intended to draw, and then what they could actually create. Th artists or even somebody else can create an instance that's truer to the idea.
Second, I disagree with the notion of what it's worth $50M. For me, it doesn't have a specific monetary value. It's like, what was the invention of the telephone worth? The discovery of microscopic life? I think most people would agree that those things have been very valuable, it would be impossible to put an exact price on them. I think the biggest testament to the value of those things is their far-reaching presence and influence in the modern world. By the same measure, IMO the way to recognize the value of a Monet painting isn't to sell it for $50M, but by printing millions of copies and distributing all around, so that everybody can appreciate it, like that image of Che Guevara.
Third, I don't see a very major value in your last 4 points. Certainly those are interesting things, but IMO simply being created by somebody famous shouldn't grant an object a "higher status". A play shouldn't suddenly become a better play because it was written by Shakespeare, or lose value because it turns out it wasn't. An object has an intrinsic value independent of its creator, and a creator's worth depends on the value of his creations. A play shouldn't be famous because it was written by Shakespeare, it should be because it's good, and Shapespeare because he wrote good plays.
For another example, I don't think what Hans Reiser has or hasn't done has any relevance on the worth of ReiserFS, while its existence is a testament to his technical ability.
That's a nice philosophical question, but not really related to what I'm talking about.
The way I see it, it most likely wouldn't be me. But it would be as good as me for everybody else. And since a monument or a painting isn't alive, if everybody looking at it thinks it's the original, then IMO it's just as good as the original.
I don't think I understand, would you have preferred to visit unrecognizable ruins instead?
Things inevitably decay, and are sometimes destroyed in wars. We can rebuild, or dust is all what will be eventually left.
Interesting, didn't know about that.
Googled a bit, also found this, which looks like what I had in mind. Will have to visit if I ever happen to be near.
Doesn't work, because even twins aren't the same person, or exactly the same. IIRC twins still have different fingerprints. Even assuming we both were identical to the atom, behavior would still diverge over time as obviously two people can't be at once in exactly the same place.
If somehow there were two parallel universes that were exact copies of each other then I guess it wouldn't matter if some person got swapped around, though.
Wait, you mean you have your grandma's ashes in glass on your mantelpiece!? That sounds a tad creepy to me.
I don't really know how to answer that because I'd never do such a thing in the first place. Personally I'd rather my dead body be useful for something, like organ donation, research, or at least fertilizer.
That aside, I'm not even sure about what exactly are you preserving, since today you're not made of exactly the same stuff as you were yesterday, and atoms are interchangeable anyway.
Not on that scale :-P
I mean the experiments such as whether it's possible to carry a 20 ton rock from point A to B, or trying to figure out how to build Stonehenge with the equipment and materials available back then. Once the basic technique is tested though, there's no need to do it at full scale though. Once you figure out how to make a brick, you know you can make 10000, it's just an exercise in scaling the operation.
So long you built a copy as exact as possible, yes. By that I mean built from the same materials. You can use modern construction equipment if you want to, not like there's much of a difference if a block was put in place by manual labor or a crane, though I do see the value of trying to reenact ancient building methods to test in practice how things worked. Just don't make it out of concrete, because obviously that wouldn't be the same thing.
And yes, I would find it more valuable. With an accurate reproduction I could see what they looked like back when they were built, and they could be explored without fearing destroying an ancient drawing on a wall. This is something that the originals can't and will never be able to give me.
Then, to really top it off, build things that were made to be used by people and re-enact ancient Egypt, and I'll be really delighted to visit.
I appreciate the value of history fine, but I don't assign value to the originality of what it's made of.
For instance, I would rebuild the Colosseum, even at the cost of tearing down parts or all of what's still standing, though keeping the materials as accurate as possible. For me it's a testament to the Roman Engineering, and it's be a pity to see it crumble into dust one day and stay that way because "the dust is historical", like what happened with greek temples.