And no, I don't count the closed beta, since there's no way to measure the community interest which is what the OP was talking about, and it's probably not representitive anyway.
And you can probably guess that nobody was playing as male blood elves. Maybe nobody has the post-modernist tolerance to stomach pretending to be an elf that runs around pretending to be a woman?
Two things: first off, there's no such race. This is a race which will first appear in 2008 when the expansion is released. It does not exist at all now, so I'm not sure where you're getting this information about the population distribution of BEs....
Second, please do not confuse post-modernism with blurring of gender roles. The one may have had some influence on the other, but that's pretty much were the line stops. Post-modernism is, at its core, a reaction to mondernism and its strict abandonment of the stylized themes of previous periods. It has almost nothing to do with any particular social development.
South Park is funny and all, but if it takes you more than a month (or two if you like to spend time exploring or otherwise being distracted by non-grinding, which is cool) to get to level 40, either you're not playing much (which is also cool) or you're doing something very, very wrong. I'm level 21. I started playing last week for the first time. Granted, I was sick last week, so I was home a lot and had nothing better to do that I could focus on, but I've also managed to level up a secondary character to 18, get fishing up to 100 on both, do some trade skills and explore enough that simple zone discovery experience probably accounts for 2 levels by now. It's a fast game at the lower-to-mid levels. As I understand it, it slows down a bit, but not all that much. It's really the gear that's a slow grind and requires a guild.
There is a presumption that the BEs were being added because players wanted a less physically intimidating race or a less ugly race or both. I disagree. I think they are being added because they were an obvious choice from the existing Warcraft storyline, and the contrast of elves with the magic-adiction-fueled willingness to do anything to restore their place in the world is a fairly decent intro for a new horde race.
The look is rather arbitrary, but I'm overall pleased that a BE warrior won't look like a string-bean in a trash-can. The armor graphics would look pretty silly on the old model.
The problem is that half of sleeper0's argument is correct. The license would need to explicitly deny you the right to do things like make backups of the software or use it for the purposes to which a reasonable user would expect a home OS to be put. The "all rights reserved" bit would not be interpreted to deny users the right to use the OS in reasonable ways in court, so UnrefinedLayman's interpretation is too broad. That said, sleeper0 was also trying to draw a line between the Ultimate license and Home. I'm not sure that's reasonable either, and while putting up a copy of the OS ISOs for everyone on your network might be deemed a clear violation of the home EULA, there's nothing explicit in the EULA that I see that denies you the simple right to back up the CDs.
The real problem is that the EULA is not written in English. It's written in American legalese which is a dialect of english, and can have wildly different semantics. Specifically, statements are made in the context of caselaw, and cannot be interpreted in a vacuum.
That's a huge concern right now, but sadly, that's mostly a matter of land-misuse, not warming.[1] In fact, a great many of the threats to our continued health are from forms of environmental damage and pollution that have nothing to do with temperature change in the climate. However, most of those are ignored as the public latches onto global warming as the number-one environmental issue, even in the face of massive chemical spills in China and India that could affect huge chunks of the ecosystem.
Here's the real problem with this report, though: people are doing good work, and real science, but when they release their results, if there is even a hint of the possibility that someone might interpret their results in such a way that they might be contradicting anthropogenic global warming theories, their work is treated as if it were a press release from an oil company.
Under conditions like these, how are we supposed to trust "consensus"? Does anyone who disagrees with the "consensus" get funded? If not,[2] what happened to the scientific method?
Yes, the core could already have "gone active" and we would not know about it yet. Something along these lines was the basis for a plot in some of Niven's stories, in fact, where humanity's first clue that something was wrong came in the form of a race of highly advanced beings that were fleeing the center of the galaxy ahead of a shock-wave that they had gained advanced warning of. At least that's how I recall it. I haven't read the story for decades.
Because Hawking radiation scales inversely to the area of the event horizon, the Hawking radiation from anything but extremely small black holes (which we don't even know actually exist) is negligible and far below what we have the ability to detect.
Yes, but as I pointed out, that's just one of the better known forms of radiation eminating from the region of a black hole. Other forms include the extragalactic jet formed by the interaction between the black hole's magnetic field lines and its accretion disk and lensing of radiation from other sources.
The X-rays aren't coming "out of" the black hole; they're emitted by the incoming matter getting crunched to oblivion just outside of the event horizon.
Yes and no. Certainly that makes up the vast majority of the light shed from the region around an event horizon, but there are other sources of radiation. Hawking Radiation, for example.
Look, it is perfectly reasonable to argue for reduction of emissions. We have lots of right here, right now, reasons to so argue. Acid rain. Particulate levels of various unfriendly materials. Radioactivity from burning coal. Simple visibility beyond a mile or so in urban areas.
This is where classic risk management comes in, a topic sadly ignored by most of the current round of environmentalists. Topics with long-range impact and highly variable outcomes (global warming, nuclear waste) are hot-buttons, but companies that are polluting the third world to an extent where immediate and large-scale deaths result (Coca-Cola and Union Carbide, for example, not to mention the Chinese government) get almost no attention. All of the focus right now is on the emission of CO2. Sulphur and other toxins which have greater impact on the environment in the short term are nearly ignored.
In fact, most of the problems that you list have very little to do with CO2, and current plans to reduce CO2 emissions would have little impact on them.
I wanted to see if IE7 was any better than that screenshot of IE6, how would it cope with a user that simply clicked 'yes/allow/next/accept' to everything that was presented to them.
Yep, you're exactly right. This is just an l^Huser problem. You might as well say that Firefox sucks because it will let you install extensions if you ask it to. For that matter, Linux sucks because you can install all kinds of software on it too!
That sounds suspicious, especially coming from wikipedia.
It would sound more reasonable coming from Slashdot? What source of information on the Web do you think is more reliable? I've certainly fixed my share of errors on Wikipedia, but that's becuase I hunt them down, as do many others. That kind of fact-checking is almost non-existant on most of the Web, so if I'm going to trust any one source (and I don't) for such information, it would be Wikipedia.
And, as others have noted, you were mis-understanding the definition of "average density". There's a fairly well-known calculation that states that a spherical volume of material with the density of water, and a diameter less than that of Jupiter's orbit would form an event horizon, effectively constituting a black hole. It's a nice visualization of a complex phenomenon. R. Huber has done the math for us (pdf) if you want to check for yourself.
It would not suck, and we do live near one. It's questionable how much living near an active galactic core would suck, but we'll find out eventually when something hefty gets munched by our galaxy's black hole.
I mean, if you're a fan, no offense. There's no accounting for taste, and I think Class of 1999 was a good movie, so take me with a grain of salt.
I'm not a fan of Abrams, really. I've got very mixed feelings. I don't think he finishes projects (let alone well), but I have an appreciation for the attention-grabbing quality of his TV shows.
Note that most of your concerns about Alias came in well after hour 2 of the show. If you look at the pilot for that show as a stand-alone movie, the family thing is a bit out there, but not too bad, and certainly not enough to counteract the solid action/drama that the show has to offer.
That's really my feeling about his doing a trek movie. It will be solid, most likely, but if he does a series of movies (or gods help us, a TV show), it will likely turn as bland as the second season of any of his TV shows to date. He's a bit like Neal Stephenson (though I heard Stephenson is getting better). Great start, but can't finish to save his life.... yet. Of course, I have to give the man the benefit of the doubt and allow for the fact that he may grow out of that problem.
The answer to your problem has been provided, and yet you continue to make vague assertions about the quality of Firefox that boil down to your preference. Why?
If these issues are of such dire concern to you that you can't browse the Web with Firefox, then move along. Perhaps you'll enjoy Opera or IE or even links. Don't just whine about Firefox, either use something else or fix it. You have the source, you can patch your version if you like. Personally, I've found nothing in current Firefox to complain about. Out of the box, it's excellent, and I use a few extensions (such as FlashBlock, Adblock and Forecastfox Enhnaced) which make it even better.
It will be nice to have built-in spell-checking in version 2. That's probably my biggest desire right now. Other than that, I think Firefox does everything I could want from a browser.
Well I guess that makes it OK. If everyone jumped off a cliff, would you?
You have your analogy wrong.
Here's the (rather strange) result of combining cliff-jumping with the current situation:
"If there were an established sort of cliff jumping that had been ruled legal in many long-standing rulings, and everyone else interpreted a new kind of cliff jumping as legally identical to that previous sort, would it be legal to engage in?"
The answer is: maybe. Caselaw is tricky, and there's always litigation risk, but establishing that there's a common practice based on existing caselaw significantly strengthens any claim that your actions are not purely self-interest, and that rather you have acted in accordance with the law as best it could be established WITHOUT a trial. THEN, you get to decide what the court thinks about the interpretation of case law and how reasonable it is to up-end an existing business model.
Claims that libraries (even Internet-based libraries) will end the profitability of publishing are pretty thin. We have hundreds of years that demonstrate that owning a physical book is worth money to a lot of people, and they will go out of their way to do so instead of just checking it out of a library.
First off, I think you're a bit confused over what you think he can't do. You say that he won't take creative risks, and then you say that you don't think he will be able to make a popular Trek with younger viewers. Have you seen what's popular with younger viewers? Do you think Tokyo Drift was about "creative risk?" Perhaps Jackass II was the reneagade art flick you were looking for?
No, Abrams may not make the most popular Trek film ever, but he'll bring several things to the franchise:
* A much needed shot in the arm to the business side. He's a "name". * An excellent ability to grab the audience with a compelling story. * An eye for sparing, yet effective use of FX
What he brings that concerns me is:
* An inability to follow through long-term on the plot (not an issue for a movie? perhaps.) * An over-zealous interest in the minutae of his characters' lives (a good polisher can save him here, easily, even if he writes)
Overall, I'm more excited about the idea of another Star Trek movie than I thought I would be, but that's not saying a lot. I've been burned for years, and I'm not holding my breath for this one, though I might actually go see it in the theater which I haven't done for the last two Trek films.
String theory hasn't been replaced by newer versions, it's been updated with small modifications like "what if the basic premise is the same, but instead of a 1D string vibrating in 4 dimensions (x,y,z and t) it's vibrating in 11 dimensions, where the other dimensions are curled up within the planck length?"
At the same time, Christianity has updated ID with small modifications like "what if the basic premise is the same, but instead of the hand of God creating man in 1 day (out of 6) it's the hand of some sort of watchmaker creating the entire universe on a timetable of its choosing?"
Notice that neither assertion involves making verifiable predictions or presenting claims that can be tested? The differnce is that String Theory is valid math, which is certainly a serious leg-up.
I'm not a pro- or anti-string theorist, but the claim that string theory is a mathematical model, and not a scientific theory has merit. That doesn't mean it's wrong, but it does mean that it isn't quite science. Making predictions about things below the plank length is terribly easy because no one can prove that your beautiful math is wrong.
There are reasons why string theory has failed to come up with any NEW predictions. For one thing, it's being constantly tweaked so that it is consistent with EXISTING experimentation. After all, why would you build a theory that you hope will become a GUT if it's not consistent with other proven theories?
That's avoiding the point. If you keep modifying string theory to fit new facts without accurately predicting any of those facts, there's a case to be made that string theory might well be one of a practically infinite number of valid models that would fit the data.
I do not think that string theory is a con job. I do, however, think that attempting to come up with a GUT is a MUCH MUCH larger task than simply trying to explain, say, quantum behaviour, like tunneling.
That's still dodging the point. Yes, the GUT has been elusive, but that has nothing to do with string theory's validity. When non-science is hard, that doesn't make it science.
The machine in question is almost certainly running Windows or MacOS. The display that you see is the result of a program that can record or emulate behaviors of a UI and play them back in a time sequence, or in response to random key-presses.
Actors are paid quite a lot for the skill of being able to repeat their actions in multiple takes with every gesture being the same (try it sometime, it's HARD). The last thing they're going to do is memorize a set of UI interactions to go with it. Instead, they just have to remember to hit a key after they bend their elbow just a bit, turn back to the screen and say a line. It's all physical and emotional for an actor. Having to think about the UI would break that, and result in takes that couldn't be edited together smoothly.
I've always wondered about all the terminology that we have for derivative creative work. I doubt that anyone could come up with a coherent definition of "rip-off" that didn't rely on subjective evaluation of quality and/or a subjective evaluation of sameness.
Ask yourself this, is it possible to have a story about a group of super-powered students that won't be considered an "x-men rip-off"? Is that really fair to the authors who actually do come up with interesting and creative ideas of their own?
I'm not saying Heroes is a unique and beautiful flower. I haven't seen it, and maybe all it does have going for it is its x-menness, but I refuse to evaluate fiction on the sole basis that it is "like" something else. IMHO, it stands on its own merits, or it falls on its own flaws. Anything else just seems like being dishonest and unfair to the creative folks that put the fiction together.
I was going to reply, but I think you explained the point more clearly than I would have. Thanks.
One follow-up point: Apple is making money hand-over-fist, and music companies are continuing to charge most artists for the physical process of selling songs (lossage in shipping, media fees, etc.) for those electronic sales. The music industry has nothing to complain about.
Frequently Asked Questions About Illegal File Sharing
This is so good it just had to be answered... heh.
Is illegal file sharing really such a problem?
For the past four years, sales and shipments of recorded music have been plummeting--and the downward trend shows no sign of abating. (Unit shipments have fallen 26%, from 1.16 billion units in 1999 to 860 million units last year, while revenues are off by 14%, from $14.6 billion in 1999 to $12.6 billion last year.). At the same time, sales of blank CD-R disks (the kind you copy music onto) have been soaring, and that dovetailed with the widespread use of file-sharing. So, yes, it really is a problem.
A friend of mine calls this "lying with your teeth in your face." I call it stupid. First off, the RIAA members are public corporations, and the big boys are all growing. In fact, they have been growing for quite some time. You have public records to demonstrate this on any finance site you want to visit. What's changing is the business model. Now, in specific, that "unit shipments have fallen" figure fails to account for online sales and other alternate media formats. This is just bad statistics.
Who says that sharing music through peer-to-peer networks is illegal?
Federal law and a string of court decisions. Federal copyright statutes (specifically, Sections 501 and 506 of Title 17 of the United States Code) and the "No Electronic Theft" (NET) Act provide penalties for the unauthorized reproduction, distribution, rental or digital transmission of copyrighted sound recordings. Moreover, an unbroken series of court decisions--most recently, in Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios, Inc., et al. v. Grokster, Ltd., et al., and in RIAA v. Verizon Internet Services Inc.--has affirmed that "sharing" copyrighted music files over peer-to-peer networks without the copyright holder's permission constitutes "direct infringement."
Which clearly demonstrates that music sharing is not illegal. Sharing copyrighted music to which you do not have a valid license or ownership of the copyright is illegal. This is a fine point that the RIAA would appreciate if you simply forgot.
Didn't the courts just rule that peer-to-peer networks are perfectly legal?
In the Grokster case, a district court did rule that the Grokster and StreamCast networks couldn't necessarily be held liable for the illegal activities of their users. That ruling is now being considered by a Court of Appeals. In any case, the court also made it abundantly clear that whether or not a network itself can be held responsible, the users of that network can clearly be guilty of copyright infringement.
In other words, you are responsible for your own actions. Yes, thank you. Now would you please stop trying to sue ISPs, dead people and little kids?
Aren't most downloaders merely sampling music that they later wind up buying?
If this were true, music sales would be soaring, given the astronomical increases in peer-to-peer file sharing. Music consumption has never been higher, but unfortunately, an increasing segment of the population is stealing instead of paying for it.
Music sales are soaring. There, that was easy.
Isn't the real problem that consumers don't like the music you're putting out?
If people don't like today's music, why are they illegally downloading literally billions of new songs each month?
Wouldn't people buy more CDs if they didn't cost so much?
If you're going to compare the price of CDs to that of stolen music--which is free--of course they're going to seem expensive. But if you take inflation into account, music CDs are actually cheaper today than they were 20 years ago. (In 1983, when CDs were first i
Slashdot Mirror
Yep, 2008 was a typo, thanks.
And no, I don't count the closed beta, since there's no way to measure the community interest which is what the OP was talking about, and it's probably not representitive anyway.
That's not relevant. The OP was talking about WoW. Yes, I know the BEs come form the multi-player game.
Two things: first off, there's no such race. This is a race which will first appear in 2008 when the expansion is released. It does not exist at all now, so I'm not sure where you're getting this information about the population distribution of BEs....
Second, please do not confuse post-modernism with blurring of gender roles. The one may have had some influence on the other, but that's pretty much were the line stops. Post-modernism is, at its core, a reaction to mondernism and its strict abandonment of the stylized themes of previous periods. It has almost nothing to do with any particular social development.
South Park is funny and all, but if it takes you more than a month (or two if you like to spend time exploring or otherwise being distracted by non-grinding, which is cool) to get to level 40, either you're not playing much (which is also cool) or you're doing something very, very wrong. I'm level 21. I started playing last week for the first time. Granted, I was sick last week, so I was home a lot and had nothing better to do that I could focus on, but I've also managed to level up a secondary character to 18, get fishing up to 100 on both, do some trade skills and explore enough that simple zone discovery experience probably accounts for 2 levels by now. It's a fast game at the lower-to-mid levels. As I understand it, it slows down a bit, but not all that much. It's really the gear that's a slow grind and requires a guild.
There is a presumption that the BEs were being added because players wanted a less physically intimidating race or a less ugly race or both. I disagree. I think they are being added because they were an obvious choice from the existing Warcraft storyline, and the contrast of elves with the magic-adiction-fueled willingness to do anything to restore their place in the world is a fairly decent intro for a new horde race.
The look is rather arbitrary, but I'm overall pleased that a BE warrior won't look like a string-bean in a trash-can. The armor graphics would look pretty silly on the old model.
The problem is that half of sleeper0's argument is correct. The license would need to explicitly deny you the right to do things like make backups of the software or use it for the purposes to which a reasonable user would expect a home OS to be put. The "all rights reserved" bit would not be interpreted to deny users the right to use the OS in reasonable ways in court, so UnrefinedLayman's interpretation is too broad. That said, sleeper0 was also trying to draw a line between the Ultimate license and Home. I'm not sure that's reasonable either, and while putting up a copy of the OS ISOs for everyone on your network might be deemed a clear violation of the home EULA, there's nothing explicit in the EULA that I see that denies you the simple right to back up the CDs.
The real problem is that the EULA is not written in English. It's written in American legalese which is a dialect of english, and can have wildly different semantics. Specifically, statements are made in the context of caselaw, and cannot be interpreted in a vacuum.
That's a huge concern right now, but sadly, that's mostly a matter of land-misuse, not warming.[1] In fact, a great many of the threats to our continued health are from forms of environmental damage and pollution that have nothing to do with temperature change in the climate. However, most of those are ignored as the public latches onto global warming as the number-one environmental issue, even in the face of massive chemical spills in China and India that could affect huge chunks of the ecosystem.
Here's the real problem with this report, though: people are doing good work, and real science, but when they release their results, if there is even a hint of the possibility that someone might interpret their results in such a way that they might be contradicting anthropogenic global warming theories, their work is treated as if it were a press release from an oil company.
Under conditions like these, how are we supposed to trust "consensus"? Does anyone who disagrees with the "consensus" get funded? If not,[2] what happened to the scientific method?
Yes, the core could already have "gone active" and we would not know about it yet. Something along these lines was the basis for a plot in some of Niven's stories, in fact, where humanity's first clue that something was wrong came in the form of a race of highly advanced beings that were fleeing the center of the galaxy ahead of a shock-wave that they had gained advanced warning of. At least that's how I recall it. I haven't read the story for decades.
Yes, but as I pointed out, that's just one of the better known forms of radiation eminating from the region of a black hole. Other forms include the extragalactic jet formed by the interaction between the black hole's magnetic field lines and its accretion disk and lensing of radiation from other sources.
Yes and no. Certainly that makes up the vast majority of the light shed from the region around an event horizon, but there are other sources of radiation. Hawking Radiation, for example.
Here's a few BBC links. These stories don't play big in the U.S. press.
9 3.stm1 9.stm7 9.stm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/south_asia/30968
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/south_asia/31265
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/south_asia/31493
Quebec presumably has rules against gambling that precludes such cash-based contents.
The others are the list of nations that U.S. businesses are not allowed to deal with. The list is published by the State Department.
I just wanted to follow up on one bit:
This is where classic risk management comes in, a topic sadly ignored by most of the current round of environmentalists. Topics with long-range impact and highly variable outcomes (global warming, nuclear waste) are hot-buttons, but companies that are polluting the third world to an extent where immediate and large-scale deaths result (Coca-Cola and Union Carbide, for example, not to mention the Chinese government) get almost no attention. All of the focus right now is on the emission of CO2. Sulphur and other toxins which have greater impact on the environment in the short term are nearly ignored.
In fact, most of the problems that you list have very little to do with CO2, and current plans to reduce CO2 emissions would have little impact on them.
Yep, you're exactly right. This is just an l^Huser problem. You might as well say that Firefox sucks because it will let you install extensions if you ask it to. For that matter, Linux sucks because you can install all kinds of software on it too!
It would sound more reasonable coming from Slashdot? What source of information on the Web do you think is more reliable? I've certainly fixed my share of errors on Wikipedia, but that's becuase I hunt them down, as do many others. That kind of fact-checking is almost non-existant on most of the Web, so if I'm going to trust any one source (and I don't) for such information, it would be Wikipedia.
And, as others have noted, you were mis-understanding the definition of "average density". There's a fairly well-known calculation that states that a spherical volume of material with the density of water, and a diameter less than that of Jupiter's orbit would form an event horizon, effectively constituting a black hole. It's a nice visualization of a complex phenomenon. R. Huber has done the math for us (pdf) if you want to check for yourself.
It would not suck, and we do live near one. It's questionable how much living near an active galactic core would suck, but we'll find out eventually when something hefty gets munched by our galaxy's black hole.
I'm not a fan of Abrams, really. I've got very mixed feelings. I don't think he finishes projects (let alone well), but I have an appreciation for the attention-grabbing quality of his TV shows.
Note that most of your concerns about Alias came in well after hour 2 of the show. If you look at the pilot for that show as a stand-alone movie, the family thing is a bit out there, but not too bad, and certainly not enough to counteract the solid action/drama that the show has to offer.
That's really my feeling about his doing a trek movie. It will be solid, most likely, but if he does a series of movies (or gods help us, a TV show), it will likely turn as bland as the second season of any of his TV shows to date. He's a bit like Neal Stephenson (though I heard Stephenson is getting better). Great start, but can't finish to save his life.
The answer to your problem has been provided, and yet you continue to make vague assertions about the quality of Firefox that boil down to your preference. Why?
If these issues are of such dire concern to you that you can't browse the Web with Firefox, then move along. Perhaps you'll enjoy Opera or IE or even links. Don't just whine about Firefox, either use something else or fix it. You have the source, you can patch your version if you like. Personally, I've found nothing in current Firefox to complain about. Out of the box, it's excellent, and I use a few extensions (such as FlashBlock, Adblock and Forecastfox Enhnaced) which make it even better.
It will be nice to have built-in spell-checking in version 2. That's probably my biggest desire right now. Other than that, I think Firefox does everything I could want from a browser.
You have your analogy wrong.
Here's the (rather strange) result of combining cliff-jumping with the current situation:
"If there were an established sort of cliff jumping that had been ruled legal in many long-standing rulings, and everyone else interpreted a new kind of cliff jumping as legally identical to that previous sort, would it be legal to engage in?"
The answer is: maybe. Caselaw is tricky, and there's always litigation risk, but establishing that there's a common practice based on existing caselaw significantly strengthens any claim that your actions are not purely self-interest, and that rather you have acted in accordance with the law as best it could be established WITHOUT a trial. THEN, you get to decide what the court thinks about the interpretation of case law and how reasonable it is to up-end an existing business model.
Claims that libraries (even Internet-based libraries) will end the profitability of publishing are pretty thin. We have hundreds of years that demonstrate that owning a physical book is worth money to a lot of people, and they will go out of their way to do so instead of just checking it out of a library.
JJ Abrams is probably the right choice.
First off, I think you're a bit confused over what you think he can't do. You say that he won't take creative risks, and then you say that you don't think he will be able to make a popular Trek with younger viewers. Have you seen what's popular with younger viewers? Do you think Tokyo Drift was about "creative risk?" Perhaps Jackass II was the reneagade art flick you were looking for?
No, Abrams may not make the most popular Trek film ever, but he'll bring several things to the franchise:
* A much needed shot in the arm to the business side. He's a "name".
* An excellent ability to grab the audience with a compelling story.
* An eye for sparing, yet effective use of FX
What he brings that concerns me is:
* An inability to follow through long-term on the plot (not an issue for a movie? perhaps.)
* An over-zealous interest in the minutae of his characters' lives (a good polisher can save him here, easily, even if he writes)
Overall, I'm more excited about the idea of another Star Trek movie than I thought I would be, but that's not saying a lot. I've been burned for years, and I'm not holding my breath for this one, though I might actually go see it in the theater which I haven't done for the last two Trek films.
At the same time, Christianity has updated ID with small modifications like "what if the basic premise is the same, but instead of the hand of God creating man in 1 day (out of 6) it's the hand of some sort of watchmaker creating the entire universe on a timetable of its choosing?"
Notice that neither assertion involves making verifiable predictions or presenting claims that can be tested? The differnce is that String Theory is valid math, which is certainly a serious leg-up.
I'm not a pro- or anti-string theorist, but the claim that string theory is a mathematical model, and not a scientific theory has merit. That doesn't mean it's wrong, but it does mean that it isn't quite science. Making predictions about things below the plank length is terribly easy because no one can prove that your beautiful math is wrong.
That's avoiding the point. If you keep modifying string theory to fit new facts without accurately predicting any of those facts, there's a case to be made that string theory might well be one of a practically infinite number of valid models that would fit the data.
That's still dodging the point. Yes, the GUT has been elusive, but that has nothing to do with string theory's validity. When non-science is hard, that doesn't make it science.
It's also not Linux.
The machine in question is almost certainly running Windows or MacOS. The display that you see is the result of a program that can record or emulate behaviors of a UI and play them back in a time sequence, or in response to random key-presses.
Actors are paid quite a lot for the skill of being able to repeat their actions in multiple takes with every gesture being the same (try it sometime, it's HARD). The last thing they're going to do is memorize a set of UI interactions to go with it. Instead, they just have to remember to hit a key after they bend their elbow just a bit, turn back to the screen and say a line. It's all physical and emotional for an actor. Having to think about the UI would break that, and result in takes that couldn't be edited together smoothly.
I've always wondered about all the terminology that we have for derivative creative work. I doubt that anyone could come up with a coherent definition of "rip-off" that didn't rely on subjective evaluation of quality and/or a subjective evaluation of sameness.
Ask yourself this, is it possible to have a story about a group of super-powered students that won't be considered an "x-men rip-off"? Is that really fair to the authors who actually do come up with interesting and creative ideas of their own?
I'm not saying Heroes is a unique and beautiful flower. I haven't seen it, and maybe all it does have going for it is its x-menness, but I refuse to evaluate fiction on the sole basis that it is "like" something else. IMHO, it stands on its own merits, or it falls on its own flaws. Anything else just seems like being dishonest and unfair to the creative folks that put the fiction together.
I was going to reply, but I think you explained the point more clearly than I would have. Thanks.
One follow-up point: Apple is making money hand-over-fist, and music companies are continuing to charge most artists for the physical process of selling songs (lossage in shipping, media fees, etc.) for those electronic sales. The music industry has nothing to complain about.
This is so good it just had to be answered... heh.
A friend of mine calls this "lying with your teeth in your face." I call it stupid. First off, the RIAA members are public corporations, and the big boys are all growing. In fact, they have been growing for quite some time. You have public records to demonstrate this on any finance site you want to visit. What's changing is the business model. Now, in specific, that "unit shipments have fallen" figure fails to account for online sales and other alternate media formats. This is just bad statistics.
Which clearly demonstrates that music sharing is not illegal. Sharing copyrighted music to which you do not have a valid license or ownership of the copyright is illegal. This is a fine point that the RIAA would appreciate if you simply forgot.
In other words, you are responsible for your own actions. Yes, thank you. Now would you please stop trying to sue ISPs, dead people and little kids?
Music sales are soaring. There, that was easy.