... a similar story on Slashdot talking about open sourcing the battle against disease, with the concept that "with enough eyes, all bugs become shallow", and ultimately how there was the concern that it would create a new type of malware that could do a lot more damage than the rest of the world could offset. I mean, even when we're trying to do good, we can make things that are utter poison... imagine if some borderline nutbar in a university lab got dumped by his girlfriend and decided to take revenge on women in general by making an airborne pathogen that would leave men intact. Sure, you could make an antidote with enough people and effort, but how many people wold die in the meantime? We see the battle between dedicated coders already with DRM and DRM-cracking... if that were to happen in the bio-tech space, it would be an utter disaster.
The Economist is right, to a point, but they seem to have more faith in humanity than humanity deserves.
(disclosure: that Slashdot story years ago led me to research and write a novel about this type of scenario, so this is near and dear to my heart)
I've actually never looked at how the batteries work, but my gut tells me it's probably a non-standard rechargeable type. I wonder how long a UPS would power something like that...
You have an hour of battery on the Shaw VOIP when the power goes out. It's not ideal, but it's far better than Telus. DSL in Canada is generally just a variation on a theme, and that theme is "poop".
My MP has already committed to voting against C-61, but then they're NDP. If you have a Liberal MP, I'd write to them and tell them that if they don't actually show up and shoot this thing down, you'll vote for a party that will. Maybe if the Liberals get flooded with enough mail like that, Dion will stop running from the electorate.
Before you march on the hill, make sure you tell your parents and other boomer friends that this bill will make it so the cable companies can stop them from recording American Idol.
Wait for the look of utter horror to crystallize on their faces, and then you can recruit them into the cause.
It's amazing how fast they go from "meh, it's not really something I'm interested in" to "holy hell, not my Simon!"
I got that one too, and my favourite bit is:
What Bill C-61 does not do:
it would not empower border agents to seize your iPod or laptop at border crossings, contrary to recent public speculation No, that's in ACTA. How clever of them to sidestep the issue by confusing matters.
I don't think this is even close to a sure thing (along with much of the potential legislation) because the playing field is far too confusing right now to try and pass anything so restrictive. There are a lot of trial balloons being floated right now, and I think the government is watching to see which ones catch the most flak. That said, it's probably best to make noise about this all the same, just in case.
Relatedly: I'm hosting a discussion about Canadian copyright (specifically in relation to WIPO) in a forum that avoids loud rhetoric and flamewars. If you're at all interested in the topic, check it out at http://calmcopyright.ca/
The thing is, the it's so hard to push beyond $MINDLESS_ENTERTAINMENT... it's a strictly-defined variable that you can (at best) work to your limited advantage.
Most of the people I work with honestly want to make great TV, but the market doesn't really allow for it. You can't just do something with a beginning, middle and end... you need to think of a show that can fill 20+ episodes a season, and run for years. Anything less, and you're not going to get on the air.
The TV schedule is filled with great ideas that were spread so thin you can't see the quality anymore. In the industry, we're acutely aware that you have 3+ hours of free time to fill every night, and so we're working to fill the hours by any means necessary. Every night, every hour, every network needs something to play. Even the great shows you can think of, you can probably think of a few episodes where it really felt half-baked... and I bet you the writers who dreamed up those eps could see it coming as they started their first outline. They just had no choice about it.
Producers, writers, directors, actors, crews... they get locked into fresh ideas until the ideas go stale. Meanwhile, truly brilliant ideas that spring up are discarded because everyone is already tied up with other things. The lack of talent forces old ideas to stick around, and gradually (or exponentially) increases the value of $MINDLESS, and makes you feel like you really ARE wasting your life watching TV. It shouldn't be that way.
If every series had a set number of episodes (regardless of artificial season breaks) and when it was done, everyone went on to the next great idea, I think it'd be a lot more exciting for everyone. You'd have a constant refresh of the line-up, and you could really see each idea for what it started out as, not what it was stretched to become. As an audience member, I'd have a major dilemma picking my "must-see TV", but it'd be a great dilemma to have.
You know, your wording has just given me the most mundane epiphany: the "drones" don't really WANT to do things better with their opportunities. If it's not pushed to their TVs (or computers, insofar as sites like Digg work) then they probably won't see it.
I was kinda despairing the fact that humankind is missing out on its full potential because people who might otherwise be curing cancer are too wrapped up in American Idol... but I guess that since there'll always be a market for escapism, I should be happy. It's a shallow happiness, though.
While I'd agree with you that there needs to be some downtime to help refresh one's brainpower, I think the question of "how much downtime" is the key.
I used to watch 2 hours of TV a night (which I believe is below the American average), and felt that after a hard day of work, it was nice to relax and just absorb for a while. But after recently giving up caffeine, I decided to see how many of my other "normal" activities were based on addiction too. So I gave up an hour of TV and tried to put it towards other uses (in this case, re-doing my office).
The first week was fine, the second week was hell, but by the end of the first month, I was actually adapted to not watching more than an hour every day. I had moved past working on my office, and was writing books again, debugging old code I hadn't touched in months. I had been ignoring productivity to indulge in something I could SWORN was essential to my mental stability.
I'm actually torn about this situation, because I make my living producing entertainment products that I hope people will mindlessly consume... but if we actually DO move beyond the old-fashioned paradigm, the hours I produce may have a harder time fitting into the "free time" the rest of the world has.
Someone should put some of their newly-acquired brainspace into finding a way to make TV more socially-and-interactively useful, so I don't have to worry so much.
But releasing only singles every few months/weeks means the entire marketing engine for the music industry has got to change too... making 7 or 8 mini-campaigns every 45 days (rather than 1 big one every year) might make the labels be even MORE stingy about who they bother promoting, because I'm guessing a lot of the costs don't disappear after the 1st iteration. So in exchange for the death of the album, we might be getting the death of top-level diversity.
On the other hand, that sounds more like a proper Long Tail scenario (tiny fraction of super-hits and a large bulk of lesser hits), which gives one hope that the playing field will be a bit less tilted in favour of the big players.
Hmm, true... it has a lot of entries, but not many proper ones. That's a pretty odd omission, too... maybe it's just their wonky search engine that's doing it, though. I can't imagine anyone could have overlooked such a big part of English literary history...
This site (which is found at ulib.org BTW) seems to have a pretty good collection of obvious titles to choose from, though having to download a custom plug-in to read anything is a bit annoying (and apparently temporary). I played around for a while, seeing what I could dig up, and didn't see any obvious gaps (though I purposely avoided anything modern).
As an author, I was always a bit worried having Google as the sole gatekeeper for this kind of service... not that I necessarily distrust Google's intentions, but if they changed their worldview one day, it'd be a pity to have so much work invested in only one place, and have to re-build it all somewhere else. It's nice that there are proper choices, and not all from a commercial stance either.
I don't know how smooth the integration process is (I submitted one of my books, but it appears it's a very un-automated system involving email etc, so it will probably take a while to see results). But still, I'm glad they're giving authors a way to help grow the library. Here's hoping it becomes even better than its promise!
I would think the reason they're suing for $1M is so that it makes headlines, so that anyone who might otherwise be keen on suing IBM over their exploding batteries would then know who the real culprits are. They might get some settlement money, but it puts a big red "X" somewhere other than them (and rightly so), which will likely reduce the number of "mistaken" lawsuits they'll have to cope with. I heard once that the amount you seek in a lawsuit has less to do with actual damages, and more to do with how much noise you want to make. The more unreasonable the number, the more you're interested in screaming your point from the rooftops, rather than actually getting the money.
However, the strategy appeared to backfire when, on September 14, 2007, CEO Darl McBride saw a comment that read, in part: "God, I hope they don't declare bankruptcy to try and get out of this mess."
On the off chance you're still hanging around here (rather than, say, fighting with PayPal), I had a question for you: now that you've done fiction and non-fiction, which do you find more difficult to wrap your mind around? You seem to be very much at ease with writing about your real life, but I wonder if that's just a general skill that you're applying in a specific way.
For me, I can't write about my life without collapsing into a puddle of trembling self-doubt, but I can make stuff up about invented people without breaking a sweat. I wonder if your talent in that area stems from being an actor, and being more comfortable "putting yourself out there".
Very much looking forward to your short story! Good luck with the 300!
Slashdot Mirror
... a similar story on Slashdot talking about open sourcing the battle against disease, with the concept that "with enough eyes, all bugs become shallow", and ultimately how there was the concern that it would create a new type of malware that could do a lot more damage than the rest of the world could offset. I mean, even when we're trying to do good, we can make things that are utter poison... imagine if some borderline nutbar in a university lab got dumped by his girlfriend and decided to take revenge on women in general by making an airborne pathogen that would leave men intact. Sure, you could make an antidote with enough people and effort, but how many people wold die in the meantime? We see the battle between dedicated coders already with DRM and DRM-cracking... if that were to happen in the bio-tech space, it would be an utter disaster.
The Economist is right, to a point, but they seem to have more faith in humanity than humanity deserves.
(disclosure: that Slashdot story years ago led me to research and write a novel about this type of scenario, so this is near and dear to my heart)
I've actually never looked at how the batteries work, but my gut tells me it's probably a non-standard rechargeable type. I wonder how long a UPS would power something like that...
You have an hour of battery on the Shaw VOIP when the power goes out. It's not ideal, but it's far better than Telus. DSL in Canada is generally just a variation on a theme, and that theme is "poop".
My MP has already committed to voting against C-61, but then they're NDP. If you have a Liberal MP, I'd write to them and tell them that if they don't actually show up and shoot this thing down, you'll vote for a party that will. Maybe if the Liberals get flooded with enough mail like that, Dion will stop running from the electorate.
Before you march on the hill, make sure you tell your parents and other boomer friends that this bill will make it so the cable companies can stop them from recording American Idol.
Wait for the look of utter horror to crystallize on their faces, and then you can recruit them into the cause.
It's amazing how fast they go from "meh, it's not really something I'm interested in" to "holy hell, not my Simon!"
it would not empower border agents to seize your iPod or laptop at border crossings, contrary to recent public speculation No, that's in ACTA. How clever of them to sidestep the issue by confusing matters.
I don't think this is even close to a sure thing (along with much of the potential legislation) because the playing field is far too confusing right now to try and pass anything so restrictive. There are a lot of trial balloons being floated right now, and I think the government is watching to see which ones catch the most flak. That said, it's probably best to make noise about this all the same, just in case.
Relatedly: I'm hosting a discussion about Canadian copyright (specifically in relation to WIPO) in a forum that avoids loud rhetoric and flamewars. If you're at all interested in the topic, check it out at http://calmcopyright.ca/
(I'm going off on a tangent here)
The thing is, the it's so hard to push beyond $MINDLESS_ENTERTAINMENT... it's a strictly-defined variable that you can (at best) work to your limited advantage.
Most of the people I work with honestly want to make great TV, but the market doesn't really allow for it. You can't just do something with a beginning, middle and end... you need to think of a show that can fill 20+ episodes a season, and run for years. Anything less, and you're not going to get on the air.
The TV schedule is filled with great ideas that were spread so thin you can't see the quality anymore. In the industry, we're acutely aware that you have 3+ hours of free time to fill every night, and so we're working to fill the hours by any means necessary. Every night, every hour, every network needs something to play. Even the great shows you can think of, you can probably think of a few episodes where it really felt half-baked... and I bet you the writers who dreamed up those eps could see it coming as they started their first outline. They just had no choice about it.
Producers, writers, directors, actors, crews... they get locked into fresh ideas until the ideas go stale. Meanwhile, truly brilliant ideas that spring up are discarded because everyone is already tied up with other things. The lack of talent forces old ideas to stick around, and gradually (or exponentially) increases the value of $MINDLESS, and makes you feel like you really ARE wasting your life watching TV. It shouldn't be that way.
If every series had a set number of episodes (regardless of artificial season breaks) and when it was done, everyone went on to the next great idea, I think it'd be a lot more exciting for everyone. You'd have a constant refresh of the line-up, and you could really see each idea for what it started out as, not what it was stretched to become. As an audience member, I'd have a major dilemma picking my "must-see TV", but it'd be a great dilemma to have.
You know, your wording has just given me the most mundane epiphany: the "drones" don't really WANT to do things better with their opportunities. If it's not pushed to their TVs (or computers, insofar as sites like Digg work) then they probably won't see it.
I was kinda despairing the fact that humankind is missing out on its full potential because people who might otherwise be curing cancer are too wrapped up in American Idol... but I guess that since there'll always be a market for escapism, I should be happy. It's a shallow happiness, though.
While I'd agree with you that there needs to be some downtime to help refresh one's brainpower, I think the question of "how much downtime" is the key.
I used to watch 2 hours of TV a night (which I believe is below the American average), and felt that after a hard day of work, it was nice to relax and just absorb for a while. But after recently giving up caffeine, I decided to see how many of my other "normal" activities were based on addiction too. So I gave up an hour of TV and tried to put it towards other uses (in this case, re-doing my office).
The first week was fine, the second week was hell, but by the end of the first month, I was actually adapted to not watching more than an hour every day. I had moved past working on my office, and was writing books again, debugging old code I hadn't touched in months. I had been ignoring productivity to indulge in something I could SWORN was essential to my mental stability.
I'm actually torn about this situation, because I make my living producing entertainment products that I hope people will mindlessly consume... but if we actually DO move beyond the old-fashioned paradigm, the hours I produce may have a harder time fitting into the "free time" the rest of the world has.
Someone should put some of their newly-acquired brainspace into finding a way to make TV more socially-and-interactively useful, so I don't have to worry so much.
But releasing only singles every few months/weeks means the entire marketing engine for the music industry has got to change too... making 7 or 8 mini-campaigns every 45 days (rather than 1 big one every year) might make the labels be even MORE stingy about who they bother promoting, because I'm guessing a lot of the costs don't disappear after the 1st iteration. So in exchange for the death of the album, we might be getting the death of top-level diversity.
On the other hand, that sounds more like a proper Long Tail scenario (tiny fraction of super-hits and a large bulk of lesser hits), which gives one hope that the playing field will be a bit less tilted in favour of the big players.
Hmm, true... it has a lot of entries, but not many proper ones. That's a pretty odd omission, too... maybe it's just their wonky search engine that's doing it, though. I can't imagine anyone could have overlooked such a big part of English literary history...
This site (which is found at ulib.org BTW) seems to have a pretty good collection of obvious titles to choose from, though having to download a custom plug-in to read anything is a bit annoying (and apparently temporary). I played around for a while, seeing what I could dig up, and didn't see any obvious gaps (though I purposely avoided anything modern).
As an author, I was always a bit worried having Google as the sole gatekeeper for this kind of service... not that I necessarily distrust Google's intentions, but if they changed their worldview one day, it'd be a pity to have so much work invested in only one place, and have to re-build it all somewhere else. It's nice that there are proper choices, and not all from a commercial stance either.
I don't know how smooth the integration process is (I submitted one of my books, but it appears it's a very un-automated system involving email etc, so it will probably take a while to see results). But still, I'm glad they're giving authors a way to help grow the library. Here's hoping it becomes even better than its promise!
I would think the reason they're suing for $1M is so that it makes headlines, so that anyone who might otherwise be keen on suing IBM over their exploding batteries would then know who the real culprits are. They might get some settlement money, but it puts a big red "X" somewhere other than them (and rightly so), which will likely reduce the number of "mistaken" lawsuits they'll have to cope with. I heard once that the amount you seek in a lawsuit has less to do with actual damages, and more to do with how much noise you want to make. The more unreasonable the number, the more you're interested in screaming your point from the rooftops, rather than actually getting the money.
Facebook has already got this figured out... they're testing a new feature that lets you create alternate personalities to keep your various personalities away from each other...
Actually, it's not so much American politics as it is the will of American corporations... the government apparently got the entire text of the bill from the MPAA...
That's exactly right! But this year, Earth lost the Curling Galactic Cup because some fool went and fiddled with the game pieces mid-match...
Apparently this is just an attempt by a Utah company to increase holiday sales. Sigh.
Personally, I would be more upset about the Microstatus feature they're testing right now... at least you CAN opt out of the ad one...
Even the standards body tasked with determining this very point can't decide whether it's Jar Jar or Midi-chlorians, so I don't expect this'll get answered any time soon.
The real news is that this revision was just a means to an end, and apparently the patent office fell for it...
The Russians aren't too happy about this new side to NASA... they're trying to distance themselves from the whole idea...
And of course this discovery can't go without political interference... the White House is already condemning the discovery, calling for a ban.
On the off chance you're still hanging around here (rather than, say, fighting with PayPal), I had a question for you: now that you've done fiction and non-fiction, which do you find more difficult to wrap your mind around? You seem to be very much at ease with writing about your real life, but I wonder if that's just a general skill that you're applying in a specific way.
For me, I can't write about my life without collapsing into a puddle of trembling self-doubt, but I can make stuff up about invented people without breaking a sweat. I wonder if your talent in that area stems from being an actor, and being more comfortable "putting yourself out there".
Very much looking forward to your short story! Good luck with the 300!