Why? I can understand the organizers of ComicCon asking the guy to go away, but why should the police be able to tell someone to go away if the organizers haven't asked them to?
Well, one, are you sure nobody asked them to? I would find it odd for your typical San Diego beat cop to be able to spot PedoBear in a crowd.
Two, the Comic-Con organization enlists police to (drumroll please) police the Con. I'm not sure you're aware of the size and magnitude of this event. It's no convention in a hotel lobby; the convention center itself is like a small city. Convention-goers take over all of downtown San Diego for three solid days. It would be impossible for the Con organizers -- who are a nonprofit, volunteer organization -- to police the whole thing themselves.
I don't agree that it makes them look stupid. PedoBear may be a joke, but dressing like PedoBear in a mask and costume and handing out candy is an inappropriate joke to play on young children (or their parents), and Comic-Con is crawling with young children. He shouldn't have been kicked out of the Con altogether (if he was), but I agree with telling him that he's had his fun and he can now go back to his hotel room and take the costume off.
From TFA, it sounds as though any tooth will do, but you probably don't want to suck all the pulp out of the teeth that are still in your mouth. Wisdom teeth are usually taken out anyway, which is what makes them a convenient option.
If a good ending is what you like, I'd say steer clear of Stephen King altogether. As far as I can tell, his standard M.O. is to write as many characters as he can dream up and send them dawdling along little side-quests until he realizes he's written too many words, then kill them off in unsatisfying ways and call the book done.
With the exception of The Shining, which was a pretty good screen adaptation
Actually, Kubrick's The Shining was an absolutely terrible film adaptation, if faithfulness to the source material is what you're looking for. Stephen King was so blinded with rage by what Kubrick did to his novel that he couldn't see the movie for what it was: fucking awesome. So he had to go and let them do a TV version and... well.
1. If the copyright mode failing means no more Twilight and Star Wars, I'm all for it.
I hear you on that, believe me. But understand that a lot of people do like to read those books. So many, in fact, that each represents a very, very profitable industry. You seem to be arguing that, despite the fact that George Lucas and Stephenie Meyer have each launched a franchise that people are willing to spend lots and lots of money for, people should have the option not to spend that money and still receive the goods. Why? Where is the economic sense in that? In each case, we're not talking about an essential good -- it's not bread, or water, or even soap or toothpaste. It's just pure amusement, and that's something for which people are willing to part with their money. Where is the economic sense in annihilating that market? In fact, how could that even happen? If there was no market for either of these goods, both would disappear. And the result is that people would not be amused by them, and in their private moments, they might start wishing someone would come along to amuse them. They might even pay money for that, in fact.
how is writing an unauthorized sequel going to be solved by copyright? That's not copying, that's impersonation.
Derivative work. J.D. Saligner sued successfully to block publication of an unauthorized sequel to The Catcher in the Rye last year. Obviously, though, I am not a 17th century Spanish jurist.
People have *always* written stuff for fun. If we had no copyright, it wouldn't stop people writing stuff for fun, it'd just reduce the number of people doing it for money. I, personally, don't have a problem with that.
Cormac McCarthy does it for love, but he still needs money. He's been fortunate to have been given a number of literary grants that have allowed him to continue writing over the years, and more recently his books have sold fairly well. But he's the first to admit that he's been very fortunate. That model doesn't scale.
The point being, if everybody on Earth had a popular blog from which to tout his own work and get invited to talk to magazines, radio, and TV shows about how innovative his model was and how his ideas were going to change the future of publishing, I guess the model would work. But it doesn't scale.
That would be terrible because then we wouldn't have great works like Don Quixote, Iliad, Divine Comedy, Epic of Gilgamesh, Beowulf, Romance of the Three Kingdoms, Paradise Lost, One Thousand and One Nights, etc...
We'd have the Cave Paintings of Lascaux, too, but most of us would like to see the Arts progress beyond that. The most recent work you cite is Don Quixote (1605-1615) and as I've written elsewhere in this thread, Cervantes published his books for money, using pretty much the same system we use now.
And there are those who would argue that Doctorow's constant ranting on this one issue makes him a crank, and his willingness to pump out mediocre science fiction novels for free and see if anyone likes them makes him a dilettante.
There is still no way to use a BB on T-Mobile functionally without paying for a data plan (except making calls, but who does that?).
BlackBerry data services are distinct from regular TCP/IP on other phones. The mail, BB messenger, and other push services are carried over RIM's proprietary network. You need to subscribe to a BlackBerry-specific data plan for that. Most people do it, because a BlackBerry isn't much use without the things that make it a BlackBerry. I have voice, unlimited text messaging, and unlimited data for my BlackBerry on T-Mobile for $60/month. You might just be a little too miserly for your own good.
really hate all those cranks and dilettantes like Shakespeare and Milton and Homer and Cervantes. They sure wrote crap.
Shakespeare was a working actor, director, and playwright. He mainly wrote plays only to the extent that he needed plays to perform. For money. He wasn't reliant on the publishing model; the First Folio wasn't actually published until after he was dead.
Milton was a crank. He was a religious zealot writing polemic about his own rather fundamentalist view of Christianity. Doesn't mean it's not classic literature, but it doesn't support your sarcasm.
Tough to say how Homer made his money. For all I know, his poems made him so well-known that he became very, very rich. But nobody knows. It's likely, however, that Homer's poems were passed on through the oral tradition and only later committed to writing (once the alphabet was invented -- they're that old). So if Homer did make money off them, he did so through oral readings. If you think that model is going to work for today's Star Wars novels and the Twilight books, great.
Cervantes, though -- now here you fall flat. Cervantes was flat broke until he wrote the first part of Don Quixote. His earlier pastoral romances hadn't made any money, but Don Quixote did. And here's where his troubles began, because Don Quixote became so popular that some guy took it upon himself to write an unauthorized sequel. Bet Cervantes wished there were some copyright laws to protect him then, eh? When Cervantes wrote his own second part of Don Quixote, he satirizes the false sequel in a number of ways, including having Don Quixote meet one of its characters and forcing him to admit that he had never met the real Don Quixote before. Cervantes was never rich, but he did live his later life as a professional writer and internationally known "man of letters."
So maybe next time before you go rattling off a list of authors, you should actually hit the books and know a little bit whereof you speak.
How much more mainstream can it get? ARM is everywhere. It's in your iPhone -- probably every single phone out there, actually -- in tablets, in NAS boxes, in DVD players... countless applications. If you mean it should compete with Intel CPUs for PC processors, on the other hand, one impediment may be that ARM is (at least at present) a 32-bit architecture.
I used the UMA functionality in Japan to make free calls back to the US.
This. I did it while on vacation in Mexico, too. T-Mobile's servers don't try to figure out where you are geographically when you're on WiFi, so it's free calls back home.
All current BlackBerry handsets on T-Mobile's network can make calls, text, etc, over WiFi using a technology called UMA. This means, for example, if you have a server room in the basement that gets zero cell reception, as long as you have a WiFi hotspot available you can still make calls. And yes, this is included with your regular plan at no cost.
But not Android phones. And apparently not this one, either. I really wish T-Mobile would get on this.
It's a reference to how you start out in a walled garden, but they kick you out as soon as you do something they don't like, even though you never understood the rules.
Is it my impression or did AJAX really take off after people saw Google Maps?
I kind of remember it that way, too, but there were already AJAX (or AJAX-like) toolkits in the works by the time Google Maps was announced in 2005. Tibco General Interface certainly predates it, and so does Dojo Toolkit. Prototype came out around the same time. I think the truth is that a lot of people got the same ideas around the same time, but Google was among the first to market with a cool (and visually impressive) use for those ideas.
You need to learn new things when C++ evolves, but it would still compile your old code, unless they changed a specific function that you used. VB.NET will not run a VB6 version of "Hello world," let alone anything else.
Well guess what? C++/CLI (the version of C++ that runs on the.Net CLR) might not compile your old code either. I never learned VB so I can't say just how different the VB.Net syntax is, but C++/CLI introduces the concept of "handles" -- not pointers -- to objects managed by the CLR. I imagine that's a feature most.Net programmers are going to want to use heavily, and it means a lot of old code will have to be changed. But that's life when you're switching to a completely different runtime target -- a virtual machine, rather than the bare hardware. It seems silly to expect anything else.
But "implementation," in the sense of "my customer needs this feature/this bug fixed," does not end with writing the code. If you've written the code -- and let's assume you've gone to the trouble to unit test your changes -- all you've done is update the blueprint. Before the features are actually available or the bugs are actually fixed, you still need to ship your changes to the appropriate servers and deploy them with a minimal amount of downtime. If you're talking high-volume, mission critical applications, then truly implementing the fixes can indeed be very costly and potentially very risky.
Maybe a blueprint is the wrong metaphor, but with software, "measure twice, cut once" still applies.
Not only that, but whatever crappy player they're using doesn't seem to want to let you seek. No matter where you move the marker, the whole presentation just starts over from the beginning -- complete with the audience jabbering right over the speaker.
Yes the 15 year mortgage does make the monthly payments quite large, but if you do the math of how much interest you pay with a 20-30 yr mortgage, it'll make your head explode. Long-term mortgages are sheer stupidity.
Unless you don't plan to pay the 30-year mortgage off over 30 years, I guess. Why plan to stay in the same place for 30 years? If you weren't paying such high mortgage payments, you could put some more money away and then trade up to a nicer house when the market got a little soft. In fact, if you're a single male under 50, renting might actually be a better option for now. Then you don't even have the burden of repairs.
Frankly I find your "general living expenses" to be a little suspect, too. $75K is a very healthy sum to me, and I live in San Francisco, one of the most expensive places in the nation. Granted I don't have all your monthlies (like car insurance), but I made about half what you made last year and I visited my folks for the holidays and took a nice vacation to New York and Mexico, to boot.
The recently-released Piranha 3-D was also a 2-D to 3-D conversion, even though the director knew during filming that the studio planned to release it in 3-D. He planned some shots designed specifically to take advantage of 3-D effects, but they weren't shot using stereo cameras.
The unfortunate 1983 3D boom, which had precisely zero good movies. The two most famous are "Jaws 3D" and "Spacehunter: Adventures in the Forbidden Zone," which should give you an idea of the craptaculosity of the rest of them.
Actually, I'm pretty sure Friday the 13th 3-D was the most famous and the most successful, and it's still pretty watchable today if you're into that sort of thing (especially in 3-D). You could argue, I guess, that since it was released in 1982 it wasn't part of the boom, but rather launched the boom...
It sounds like you're confusing "open source" with "copyleft".
No. Go look it up. SQLite does not use any recognized open source license. It only has a copyright statement explicitly stating that it is the public domain. Anybody can do anything they want with it, commercially or otherwise. If that's not different from open source then nobody would have needed an open source movement in the first place.
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Why? I can understand the organizers of ComicCon asking the guy to go away, but why should the police be able to tell someone to go away if the organizers haven't asked them to?
Well, one, are you sure nobody asked them to? I would find it odd for your typical San Diego beat cop to be able to spot PedoBear in a crowd.
Two, the Comic-Con organization enlists police to (drumroll please) police the Con. I'm not sure you're aware of the size and magnitude of this event. It's no convention in a hotel lobby; the convention center itself is like a small city. Convention-goers take over all of downtown San Diego for three solid days. It would be impossible for the Con organizers -- who are a nonprofit, volunteer organization -- to police the whole thing themselves.
I don't agree that it makes them look stupid. PedoBear may be a joke, but dressing like PedoBear in a mask and costume and handing out candy is an inappropriate joke to play on young children (or their parents), and Comic-Con is crawling with young children. He shouldn't have been kicked out of the Con altogether (if he was), but I agree with telling him that he's had his fun and he can now go back to his hotel room and take the costume off.
The problem comes when someone says "I can do that" and "I can do that cheaper", but not "I can do that better"
Care to explain why this is a problem? It sounds like basic economics to me -- consumer wins, no qualitative judgment required.
Joker.com isn't German, it's Swiss. (They do speak some German in Switzerland, though.)
From TFA, it sounds as though any tooth will do, but you probably don't want to suck all the pulp out of the teeth that are still in your mouth. Wisdom teeth are usually taken out anyway, which is what makes them a convenient option.
If a good ending is what you like, I'd say steer clear of Stephen King altogether. As far as I can tell, his standard M.O. is to write as many characters as he can dream up and send them dawdling along little side-quests until he realizes he's written too many words, then kill them off in unsatisfying ways and call the book done.
With the exception of The Shining, which was a pretty good screen adaptation
Actually, Kubrick's The Shining was an absolutely terrible film adaptation, if faithfulness to the source material is what you're looking for. Stephen King was so blinded with rage by what Kubrick did to his novel that he couldn't see the movie for what it was: fucking awesome. So he had to go and let them do a TV version and... well.
1. If the copyright mode failing means no more Twilight and Star Wars, I'm all for it.
I hear you on that, believe me. But understand that a lot of people do like to read those books. So many, in fact, that each represents a very, very profitable industry. You seem to be arguing that, despite the fact that George Lucas and Stephenie Meyer have each launched a franchise that people are willing to spend lots and lots of money for, people should have the option not to spend that money and still receive the goods. Why? Where is the economic sense in that? In each case, we're not talking about an essential good -- it's not bread, or water, or even soap or toothpaste. It's just pure amusement, and that's something for which people are willing to part with their money. Where is the economic sense in annihilating that market? In fact, how could that even happen? If there was no market for either of these goods, both would disappear. And the result is that people would not be amused by them, and in their private moments, they might start wishing someone would come along to amuse them. They might even pay money for that, in fact.
how is writing an unauthorized sequel going to be solved by copyright? That's not copying, that's impersonation.
Derivative work. J.D. Saligner sued successfully to block publication of an unauthorized sequel to The Catcher in the Rye last year. Obviously, though, I am not a 17th century Spanish jurist.
People have *always* written stuff for fun. If we had no copyright, it wouldn't stop people writing stuff for fun, it'd just reduce the number of people doing it for money. I, personally, don't have a problem with that.
Cormac McCarthy does it for love, but he still needs money. He's been fortunate to have been given a number of literary grants that have allowed him to continue writing over the years, and more recently his books have sold fairly well. But he's the first to admit that he's been very fortunate. That model doesn't scale.
So, again, what's the alternative you propose?
The point being, if everybody on Earth had a popular blog from which to tout his own work and get invited to talk to magazines, radio, and TV shows about how innovative his model was and how his ideas were going to change the future of publishing, I guess the model would work. But it doesn't scale.
That would be terrible because then we wouldn't have great works like Don Quixote, Iliad, Divine Comedy, Epic of Gilgamesh, Beowulf, Romance of the Three Kingdoms, Paradise Lost, One Thousand and One Nights, etc...
We'd have the Cave Paintings of Lascaux, too, but most of us would like to see the Arts progress beyond that. The most recent work you cite is Don Quixote (1605-1615) and as I've written elsewhere in this thread, Cervantes published his books for money, using pretty much the same system we use now.
And there are those who would argue that Doctorow's constant ranting on this one issue makes him a crank, and his willingness to pump out mediocre science fiction novels for free and see if anyone likes them makes him a dilettante.
There is still no way to use a BB on T-Mobile functionally without paying for a data plan (except making calls, but who does that?).
BlackBerry data services are distinct from regular TCP/IP on other phones. The mail, BB messenger, and other push services are carried over RIM's proprietary network. You need to subscribe to a BlackBerry-specific data plan for that. Most people do it, because a BlackBerry isn't much use without the things that make it a BlackBerry. I have voice, unlimited text messaging, and unlimited data for my BlackBerry on T-Mobile for $60/month. You might just be a little too miserly for your own good.
really hate all those cranks and dilettantes like Shakespeare and Milton and Homer and Cervantes. They sure wrote crap.
Shakespeare was a working actor, director, and playwright. He mainly wrote plays only to the extent that he needed plays to perform. For money. He wasn't reliant on the publishing model; the First Folio wasn't actually published until after he was dead.
Milton was a crank. He was a religious zealot writing polemic about his own rather fundamentalist view of Christianity. Doesn't mean it's not classic literature, but it doesn't support your sarcasm.
Tough to say how Homer made his money. For all I know, his poems made him so well-known that he became very, very rich. But nobody knows. It's likely, however, that Homer's poems were passed on through the oral tradition and only later committed to writing (once the alphabet was invented -- they're that old). So if Homer did make money off them, he did so through oral readings. If you think that model is going to work for today's Star Wars novels and the Twilight books, great.
Cervantes, though -- now here you fall flat. Cervantes was flat broke until he wrote the first part of Don Quixote. His earlier pastoral romances hadn't made any money, but Don Quixote did. And here's where his troubles began, because Don Quixote became so popular that some guy took it upon himself to write an unauthorized sequel. Bet Cervantes wished there were some copyright laws to protect him then, eh? When Cervantes wrote his own second part of Don Quixote, he satirizes the false sequel in a number of ways, including having Don Quixote meet one of its characters and forcing him to admit that he had never met the real Don Quixote before. Cervantes was never rich, but he did live his later life as a professional writer and internationally known "man of letters."
So maybe next time before you go rattling off a list of authors, you should actually hit the books and know a little bit whereof you speak.
How much more mainstream can it get? ARM is everywhere. It's in your iPhone -- probably every single phone out there, actually -- in tablets, in NAS boxes, in DVD players... countless applications. If you mean it should compete with Intel CPUs for PC processors, on the other hand, one impediment may be that ARM is (at least at present) a 32-bit architecture.
I used the UMA functionality in Japan to make free calls back to the US.
This. I did it while on vacation in Mexico, too. T-Mobile's servers don't try to figure out where you are geographically when you're on WiFi, so it's free calls back home.
All current BlackBerry handsets on T-Mobile's network can make calls, text, etc, over WiFi using a technology called UMA. This means, for example, if you have a server room in the basement that gets zero cell reception, as long as you have a WiFi hotspot available you can still make calls. And yes, this is included with your regular plan at no cost.
But not Android phones. And apparently not this one, either. I really wish T-Mobile would get on this.
It's a reference to how you start out in a walled garden, but they kick you out as soon as you do something they don't like, even though you never understood the rules.
Is it my impression or did AJAX really take off after people saw Google Maps?
I kind of remember it that way, too, but there were already AJAX (or AJAX-like) toolkits in the works by the time Google Maps was announced in 2005. Tibco General Interface certainly predates it, and so does Dojo Toolkit. Prototype came out around the same time. I think the truth is that a lot of people got the same ideas around the same time, but Google was among the first to market with a cool (and visually impressive) use for those ideas.
You need to learn new things when C++ evolves, but it would still compile your old code, unless they changed a specific function that you used. VB.NET will not run a VB6 version of "Hello world," let alone anything else.
Well guess what? C++/CLI (the version of C++ that runs on the .Net CLR) might not compile your old code either. I never learned VB so I can't say just how different the VB.Net syntax is, but C++/CLI introduces the concept of "handles" -- not pointers -- to objects managed by the CLR. I imagine that's a feature most .Net programmers are going to want to use heavily, and it means a lot of old code will have to be changed. But that's life when you're switching to a completely different runtime target -- a virtual machine, rather than the bare hardware. It seems silly to expect anything else.
But "implementation," in the sense of "my customer needs this feature/this bug fixed," does not end with writing the code. If you've written the code -- and let's assume you've gone to the trouble to unit test your changes -- all you've done is update the blueprint. Before the features are actually available or the bugs are actually fixed, you still need to ship your changes to the appropriate servers and deploy them with a minimal amount of downtime. If you're talking high-volume, mission critical applications, then truly implementing the fixes can indeed be very costly and potentially very risky.
Maybe a blueprint is the wrong metaphor, but with software, "measure twice, cut once" still applies.
Not only that, but whatever crappy player they're using doesn't seem to want to let you seek. No matter where you move the marker, the whole presentation just starts over from the beginning -- complete with the audience jabbering right over the speaker.
Yes the 15 year mortgage does make the monthly payments quite large, but if you do the math of how much interest you pay with a 20-30 yr mortgage, it'll make your head explode. Long-term mortgages are sheer stupidity.
Unless you don't plan to pay the 30-year mortgage off over 30 years, I guess. Why plan to stay in the same place for 30 years? If you weren't paying such high mortgage payments, you could put some more money away and then trade up to a nicer house when the market got a little soft. In fact, if you're a single male under 50, renting might actually be a better option for now. Then you don't even have the burden of repairs.
Frankly I find your "general living expenses" to be a little suspect, too. $75K is a very healthy sum to me, and I live in San Francisco, one of the most expensive places in the nation. Granted I don't have all your monthlies (like car insurance), but I made about half what you made last year and I visited my folks for the holidays and took a nice vacation to New York and Mexico, to boot.
The recently-released Piranha 3-D was also a 2-D to 3-D conversion, even though the director knew during filming that the studio planned to release it in 3-D. He planned some shots designed specifically to take advantage of 3-D effects, but they weren't shot using stereo cameras.
The unfortunate 1983 3D boom, which had precisely zero good movies. The two most famous are "Jaws 3D" and "Spacehunter: Adventures in the Forbidden Zone," which should give you an idea of the craptaculosity of the rest of them.
Actually, I'm pretty sure Friday the 13th 3-D was the most famous and the most successful, and it's still pretty watchable today if you're into that sort of thing (especially in 3-D). You could argue, I guess, that since it was released in 1982 it wasn't part of the boom, but rather launched the boom...
It sounds like you're confusing "open source" with "copyleft".
No. Go look it up. SQLite does not use any recognized open source license. It only has a copyright statement explicitly stating that it is the public domain. Anybody can do anything they want with it, commercially or otherwise. If that's not different from open source then nobody would have needed an open source movement in the first place.