The term kiwi bird was used intentionally because here we also have a fruit that is called kiwi. Sure that people in New Zealand associate kiwi with the bird, but here in Europe the knowledge about.nz is so limited that you first think of the fruit when you hear "kiwi".
A properly balanced cable-pulled system with a counterweight, on its average run, only needs to overcome friction and inertia - NOT gravity.
So how does the counterweight balance the variable weight of passengers and freight? Anyway, comments elsewhere say the maglev sustem will have cables and counterweights, it's not a rail gun. I didn't really think it would be slowed by friction anyway, unless the energy is stored in a flywheel or counterweight it would end up as a lot of wasted energy (heat).
I'd like to know what "three times lower" is supposed to mean. 1/3 as much?
Anyway, I think this is not a reflection of the relative cluelessness of us ockers, but that we don't have as many big companies. Smaller operations everywhere tend to use MS. There's lots of Linux in government, the big companies we do have, and universities.
Slower More complex Dangerous failure mode Uses lots of electricity Difficult to maintain (no elevator technicians know maglev) Dare I speculate... more expensive?
Several have modded this "insightful", which isn't your fault. Why do you assume "dangerous failure mode"? More than a cable elevator anyway? Is there a chance on earth that safety wasn't a MAJOR consideration in the design?
Why assume "more complex"? More advanced does not mean more complex -- I'd expect that it would have substantially fewer moving parts (and thus fewer breakage, fatigue failures).
Why "uses lots of electricity"? Is a cable pulled elevator somehow the paragon of efficiency?
"No elevator technicians know maglev" -- it'll be maintained by the company that installs it, like every elevator. It's not like window cleaning when you can hire someone who sticks their card in your mailbox.
Explain how something which has not been rated at all can be over or underrated.
See the Slashdot FAQ, supposedly you 'modded yourself up' by using your Karma bonus.
I didn't "use" my bonus. It's the default, I would have to choose to not "use" it. At least that's how I see it.
And on the page you linked:
Overrated -- Sometimes you'll run into a comment which for whatever reason has been moderated out of proportion -- this probably means several moderators saw it at nearly the same time, thought it was Funny, Insightful etc, and their scores added together exaggerate its relative merit. (A knock-knock joke at +5, Funny) Such a comment is Overrated.
No one at all had modded my post up at the time, let alone several simualtaneously.
Who the hell cares what font a webpage has been written in? It's not a Word document, you just check "Always Use My Fonts" in Firefox, and you never see it again. That's the first thing I do with any browser.
Actually, it's the first thing I do when I get a Word document too. Change it all to Georgia 12 pt, instead of bold Arial 14 or, yes, sometimes even Comic Sans.
Imagine reading 10x the stories (most of them alike), and then having to remember which one you actually posted to slashdot.
Imagine using the site search to find out in 2 seconds without having to remember. Imagine using the spellcheck that's built in to the system. Imagine verifying that links work. Imagine that you set up a cache so people can see the story.... Imagine you just pick six stories at random and go back to playing games.
anyone who criticises the editors should try to do their job for a week. i bet that would shut them up in 50 milliseconds;-)
I edited a news website for six months, half that single handed, posted 80 stories a day on average. Had to weed out dupes and PR crap from the feed. I spellchecked everything, and of course didn't dupe (when I had some help, sometimes we did, but I pulled them within minutes).
So I feel qualified to say the Slashdot editors are lazy, careless, arrogant and completely unprofessional.
If sites block them, that saves the porn sites that are wholly within.xxx from having to implement those silly "click here if you are under 18" portal windows.
So we should introduce a new TLD so porn webmasters don't have to have a "proceed" button?
Frankly, there's no reason grounded in anything other than sheer bloody-mindedness to deny any TLD the light of day.
There's no reason to introduce such a content-based TLD except to give registrars another opportunity to bill all the trademark-holders yet again; and/or allow phishing sites to have a plausible name -- if Citibank.xxx doesn't fool anyone, Playboy.xxx might. And outside the US, where the XXX film rating scheme isn't known, XXX has no obvious porn implication.
If enough people want books that aren't "steaming piles of crap", you'll get paid.
Who by? If the work can be copied by anyone, why would they cut me a cheque if they're not paying the author?
You take a serious credibility hit when you try and equate theft and copyright infringment.
I wasn't doing that, I was demonstrating the consequences of the "efficiency" argument.
Please don't tell me you're trying to equate anti-slavery and generic property laws with copyright
Slavery? I was thinking of your boss telling you he isn't going to pay the salary he owes you. Which has happened to me and led to a long court case.
I really think the free market would do a better job of balancing content availability and protection than government can. Legislation is too easy to buy.
I don't follow that. There are very low barriers to content availability now. For a couple of hundred dollars I can publish a book using print on demand, distributing via Amazon. (Or press a CD for a few cents.) If there is no legal protection of content you could still do that, of course, but never have the chance of cashing on should you write a best seller, someone would just copy it and pay you nothing. Thus leading to a small number of large publishers protecting their content with hardcore DRM, and a large pool of free sludge.
It used to be that "publishers" were special because they were the only ones who could afford the infrastructure for reproduction and distribution.
Few publishers own this "infrastructure". For the most part anyone can plug into it, and they do. It's far less monopolistic than the music industry. You're assuming that publishers simply and automatically reproduce a book delivered to them by the author.
Actually, my job, working for publishers, is to take the steaming piles of crap that authors produce and turn them into readable attractive priducts. Have you ever read a self-published book? Few seem to know how to use the spellcheck for a start. Would you like all books to be of that standard? If no one pays people like me, they will be.
_Someone_ will profit from it. Logically, the person who most deserves to.
"Logically"? I can shoplift and sell the goods, am I then then more "deserving" and efficient than the shopkeeper?
The volume of material will skyrocket, as "new" works that are simply minor modifcations of old ones will abound.
This is good?
I, personally, think the best path would be to scrap copyright altogether and simply let the free market have its head. "Publishers" who can best use technology to protect their profit margins (ie: their "creator's" content) will be in the best position to pay the best creators the best money for their work. Those who cannot will fall by the wayside.
What this means is DRM to the maximum extent. Products will be fucked up and made harder to use; books may be released in some proprietary digital format that can only be used on certain locked-down reading devices. This would create a corporate monopoly and barriers to entry much worse than now unless you just want to give away your work.
To get back to my main point, I see no reason why "content creators" - and particularly the copyright-dependent middle men that profit from their work - should have special legislation granted to protect their business models, effectively giving them a license to print money.
Why not? Everyone's "business model" is protected. E.g., your average working stiff has legislation to protect his "business model" of toiling and being paid at the end of the month; a farmer to protect him from people harvesting from his fields, etc.
As mentioned, I work in publishing, so I know how thin the margins are. I do believe that copyright is too long, but I know that removing it entirely would not give you better books to read, would not reward the creators and encourage them to do better.
If you're a bus driver who is, say, 85 years old, or have AIDs, or live in Iraq; who will employ you?
You're missing the point. You could be an 85-year-old AIDS-suffering Iraqi, and write a (potentially) best-selling novel (or Jazz composition, movie script, or software) just as likely, in fact probably more likely, than some hale and hearty 20-something young Turk (who might well be a better bus driver, though). If you drop dead the day after handing over the ms to your publisher, he can still make a fortune. But if the copyright expires with you, immediately anyone can copy and sell or give away their own edition. It becomes like Cheapbytes selling Linux distros at just over cost. The bus driver will create no value after he stops working, a writer only starts earning income for the publisher when he finishes creating and there is a product to sell.
To put it bluntly, what justification is there for people creating copyrightable products get such an incredibly sweeter ride - and be excused the pressure of market forces - than any other kind of worker?
A tiny percentage of writers and creative artists of all kinds earns any living at all from it. A writer is paid no salary for his work, most can only write in hours stolen from a job to pay the rent. If they get a publisher they will be paid perhaps 5, up to 10% of the cover price. They will be in the elite if they sell more than a few thousand copies -- earning them maybe a dollar an hour for their invested time. Most books' sales have declined to nothing within a year of publishing. The very few that are reprinted are the ones you're so envious of. Publishers depend on these to finance all the books that don't get so far. A publisher gets perhaps 40% of the retail cost, leaving 60% to the distributors and retailers. Out of that about 1/3 goes to the printer, a few thousand to editing, layout, art.
if copyright didn't extend past death the publisher would be in the best position imaginable - the only copy (at the time) of a given work and nobody to share the profits with. Shortly after first publishing, of course, duplicates start to show up - but then all the profit is going to the seller with the most efficient production, in which case your hypothetical publisher will live and die by the measure of how well he does his job, as he should.
Somewhat covered above, but the publisher only pays a small percentage to the author anyway. He still has paid the entire cost of editing and design of the book. If anyone can duplicate the book for the cost of paper, of course they will undercut him, having paid nothing to create the book. And who will publicise it? Send copies for review? Why bother, when someone else will profit as soon as demand starts to take off? He loses any ability to profit from a hardback, to sell movie rights, translation, etc.
There's as much incentive to create as there is to do any other sort of work.
Most creators don't get paid till long after their creation has been sold to the public. Your average job pays by the week or month. An author may not see anything for a year or more.
The computer systems I have setup will be saving money and/or generating revenue for their owners _long_ after I have ceased being paid by them.
You chose to sell your labour at an hourly rate rather than license a "product". I'm sure you were paid well on delivery if not before. Few artists get that choice. Before copyright they had to rely on patronage; which meant writing for the taste of rich benefactors rather than the public.
Anyway, this is getting messy. Boil it down: unlike, say, the music industry, publishing doesn't have fat margins going on coke and hookers. Most of the money you pay for a book goes to the retailer, distributor or printer. What will change this is not cutting out the lousy 5% going to the author (or his estate) but technology improving distribution, instant books on demand, &/or readable e-books. But, being in the trade, I'm dubious that, though the products will be cheaper, that they'll be better than the current system produces.
someone (with mod points) thinks it does not deserve the karma bonus, overrated is the correct way to moderate it,
Interesting way to look at it. Except the karma has been earned as the sum of previous contributions; it just means that anyone who participates and is not a troll posts at 2. And looking now I've received several "troll" mods and more "overrated", but a few "interesting". None of these make any sense.
Basically, they had been licensing the statistics for nine cents (US) per gross
WTF is a "gross" of statistics? (I know, a gross is 144 units).
Anyway, from TFA "CBC had been paying the players' association 9 percent of gross". Stupid submitter, useless editors. Par for the course at Slashdot. (Golfing statistics are still free, I hope.)
The Freedom of the Press doesn't extend to gambling sites, or to video games, or to my selling pictures of your mother. Look at it another way. If you wanted to publish a book with images of Mickey Mouse without permission from Disney,
Bad analogy. Mickey is trademarked all over, not just copyright, precluding most commercial uses of the image. Mickey Mouse is a work of art, not factual. Butif you were writing a critique or review of Mr Mouse's films, you could include a number of stills as fair comment on the factual discussion though. No relation to images of real things or people.
Slashdot Mirror
Is there also a "tuna fruit"?
Forget Slashdot. Run for congress.
There are seven species of penguin native to NZ. How many in the US, or Finland for that matter? None outside a zoo.
Yes, you probably weren't being serious.
I think this quip goes back to at least Casablanca (1942). Almost as old as the original convict "joke".
More conveniently, Wikipedia has a summary and links.
Atheist. Obviously it's yet another proof of Intelligent Design.
So how does the counterweight balance the variable weight of passengers and freight? Anyway, comments elsewhere say the maglev sustem will have cables and counterweights, it's not a rail gun. I didn't really think it would be slowed by friction anyway, unless the energy is stored in a flywheel or counterweight it would end up as a lot of wasted energy (heat).
Anyway, I think this is not a reflection of the relative cluelessness of us ockers, but that we don't have as many big companies. Smaller operations everywhere tend to use MS. There's lots of Linux in government, the big companies we do have, and universities.
Hard disks are memory. If you mean "RAM", you should say that.
Slower
More complex
Dangerous failure mode
Uses lots of electricity
Difficult to maintain (no elevator technicians know maglev)
Dare I speculate... more expensive?
Several have modded this "insightful", which isn't your fault.
Why do you assume "dangerous failure mode"? More than a cable elevator anyway? Is there a chance on earth that safety wasn't a MAJOR consideration in the design?
Why assume "more complex"? More advanced does not mean more complex -- I'd expect that it would have substantially fewer moving parts (and thus fewer breakage, fatigue failures).
Why "uses lots of electricity"? Is a cable pulled elevator somehow the paragon of efficiency?
"No elevator technicians know maglev" -- it'll be maintained by the company that installs it, like every elevator. It's not like window cleaning when you can hire someone who sticks their card in your mailbox.
I don't get paid to post on Slashdot. I'm an editor not a typist.
You're American, right?
5b. .com has no obvious porn implication, but guess what: all porn sites use it now without compunction anyway.
So any attempt to herd them inot .xxx will be futile.
7. Any business organized as a registrar for a TLD should be a nonprofit, anyway.
If they were, I might trust them more, but they're not.
See the Slashdot FAQ, supposedly you 'modded yourself up' by using your Karma bonus.
I didn't "use" my bonus. It's the default, I would have to choose to not "use" it. At least that's how I see it.
And on the page you linked:
No one at all had modded my post up at the time, let alone several simualtaneously.Actually, it's the first thing I do when I get a Word document too. Change it all to Georgia 12 pt, instead of bold Arial 14 or, yes, sometimes even Comic Sans.
Imagine using the site search to find out in 2 seconds without having to remember. Imagine using the spellcheck that's built in to the system. Imagine verifying that links work. Imagine that you set up a cache so people can see the story.... Imagine you just pick six stories at random and go back to playing games.
I edited a news website for six months, half that single handed, posted 80 stories a day on average. Had to weed out dupes and PR crap from the feed. I spellchecked everything, and of course didn't dupe (when I had some help, sometimes we did, but I pulled them within minutes).
So I feel qualified to say the Slashdot editors are lazy, careless, arrogant and completely unprofessional.
No, it might mean the death of a few million
Billions -- what happens when the monsooon fails in India and China; when the American wheatfields dry up and blow away?
So we should introduce a new TLD so porn webmasters don't have to have a "proceed" button?
Frankly, there's no reason grounded in anything other than sheer bloody-mindedness to deny any TLD the light of day.
There's no reason to introduce such a content-based TLD except to give registrars another opportunity to bill all the trademark-holders yet again; and/or allow phishing sites to have a plausible name -- if Citibank.xxx doesn't fool anyone, Playboy.xxx might. And outside the US, where the XXX film rating scheme isn't known, XXX has no obvious porn implication.
Who by? If the work can be copied by anyone, why would they cut me a cheque if they're not paying the author?
You take a serious credibility hit when you try and equate theft and copyright infringment.
I wasn't doing that, I was demonstrating the consequences of the "efficiency" argument.
Please don't tell me you're trying to equate anti-slavery and generic property laws with copyright
Slavery? I was thinking of your boss telling you he isn't going to pay the salary he owes you. Which has happened to me and led to a long court case.
I really think the free market would do a better job of balancing content availability and protection than government can. Legislation is too easy to buy.
I don't follow that. There are very low barriers to content availability now. For a couple of hundred dollars I can publish a book using print on demand, distributing via Amazon. (Or press a CD for a few cents.) If there is no legal protection of content you could still do that, of course, but never have the chance of cashing on should you write a best seller, someone would just copy it and pay you nothing. Thus leading to a small number of large publishers protecting their content with hardcore DRM, and a large pool of free sludge.
Few publishers own this "infrastructure". For the most part anyone can plug into it, and they do. It's far less monopolistic than the music industry. You're assuming that publishers simply and automatically reproduce a book delivered to them by the author.
Actually, my job, working for publishers, is to take the steaming piles of crap that authors produce and turn them into readable attractive priducts. Have you ever read a self-published book? Few seem to know how to use the spellcheck for a start. Would you like all books to be of that standard? If no one pays people like me, they will be.
_Someone_ will profit from it. Logically, the person who most deserves to.
"Logically"? I can shoplift and sell the goods, am I then then more "deserving" and efficient than the shopkeeper?
The volume of material will skyrocket, as "new" works that are simply minor modifcations of old ones will abound.
This is good?
I, personally, think the best path would be to scrap copyright altogether and simply let the free market have its head. "Publishers" who can best use technology to protect their profit margins (ie: their "creator's" content) will be in the best position to pay the best creators the best money for their work. Those who cannot will fall by the wayside.
What this means is DRM to the maximum extent. Products will be fucked up and made harder to use; books may be released in some proprietary digital format that can only be used on certain locked-down reading devices. This would create a corporate monopoly and barriers to entry much worse than now unless you just want to give away your work.
To get back to my main point, I see no reason why "content creators" - and particularly the copyright-dependent middle men that profit from their work - should have special legislation granted to protect their business models, effectively giving them a license to print money.
Why not? Everyone's "business model" is protected. E.g., your average working stiff has legislation to protect his "business model" of toiling and being paid at the end of the month; a farmer to protect him from people harvesting from his fields, etc.
As mentioned, I work in publishing, so I know how thin the margins are. I do believe that copyright is too long, but I know that removing it entirely would not give you better books to read, would not reward the creators and encourage them to do better.
You're missing the point. You could be an 85-year-old AIDS-suffering Iraqi, and write a (potentially) best-selling novel (or Jazz composition, movie script, or software) just as likely, in fact probably more likely, than some hale and hearty 20-something young Turk (who might well be a better bus driver, though). If you drop dead the day after handing over the ms to your publisher, he can still make a fortune. But if the copyright expires with you, immediately anyone can copy and sell or give away their own edition. It becomes like Cheapbytes selling Linux distros at just over cost. The bus driver will create no value after he stops working, a writer only starts earning income for the publisher when he finishes creating and there is a product to sell.
To put it bluntly, what justification is there for people creating copyrightable products get such an incredibly sweeter ride - and be excused the pressure of market forces - than any other kind of worker?
A tiny percentage of writers and creative artists of all kinds earns any living at all from it. A writer is paid no salary for his work, most can only write in hours stolen from a job to pay the rent. If they get a publisher they will be paid perhaps 5, up to 10% of the cover price. They will be in the elite if they sell more than a few thousand copies -- earning them maybe a dollar an hour for their invested time. Most books' sales have declined to nothing within a year of publishing. The very few that are reprinted are the ones you're so envious of. Publishers depend on these to finance all the books that don't get so far. A publisher gets perhaps 40% of the retail cost, leaving 60% to the distributors and retailers. Out of that about 1/3 goes to the printer, a few thousand to editing, layout, art.
if copyright didn't extend past death the publisher would be in the best position imaginable - the only copy (at the time) of a given work and nobody to share the profits with. Shortly after first publishing, of course, duplicates start to show up - but then all the profit is going to the seller with the most efficient production, in which case your hypothetical publisher will live and die by the measure of how well he does his job, as he should.
Somewhat covered above, but the publisher only pays a small percentage to the author anyway. He still has paid the entire cost of editing and design of the book. If anyone can duplicate the book for the cost of paper, of course they will undercut him, having paid nothing to create the book. And who will publicise it? Send copies for review? Why bother, when someone else will profit as soon as demand starts to take off? He loses any ability to profit from a hardback, to sell movie rights, translation, etc.
There's as much incentive to create as there is to do any other sort of work.
Most creators don't get paid till long after their creation has been sold to the public. Your average job pays by the week or month. An author may not see anything for a year or more.
The computer systems I have setup will be saving money and/or generating revenue for their owners _long_ after I have ceased being paid by them.
You chose to sell your labour at an hourly rate rather than license a "product". I'm sure you were paid well on delivery if not before. Few artists get that choice. Before copyright they had to rely on patronage; which meant writing for the taste of rich benefactors rather than the public.
Anyway, this is getting messy. Boil it down: unlike, say, the music industry, publishing doesn't have fat margins going on coke and hookers. Most of the money you pay for a book goes to the retailer, distributor or printer. What will change this is not cutting out the lousy 5% going to the author (or his estate) but technology improving distribution, instant books on demand, &/or readable e-books. But, being in the trade, I'm dubious that, though the products will be cheaper, that they'll be better than the current system produces.
Interesting way to look at it. Except the karma has been earned as the sum of previous contributions; it just means that anyone who participates and is not a troll posts at 2. And looking now I've received several "troll" mods and more "overrated", but a few "interesting". None of these make any sense.
I just wonder how my message above is modded "overrated", as the only moderation? Why does the mod system allow such an obvious abuse?
WTF is a "gross" of statistics? (I know, a gross is 144 units).
Anyway, from TFA "CBC had been paying the players' association 9 percent of gross". Stupid submitter, useless editors. Par for the course at Slashdot. (Golfing statistics are still free, I hope.)
Bad analogy. Mickey is trademarked all over, not just copyright, precluding most commercial uses of the image. Mickey Mouse is a work of art, not factual. Butif you were writing a critique or review of Mr Mouse's films, you could include a number of stills as fair comment on the factual discussion though. No relation to images of real things or people.