Why do we make art? It's not for money. It's not for social prestige. We
make art as an act of self expression and as a way of passing the time when
we're not engaged in activities necessary for our own survival. Art has no
survival value -- and yet it has persisted since before recorded history.
Cave paintings and such, jewelry, etc.
I have to disagree on that. Art as an act of self expression is a very modern viewpoint, not older than 100 years or so. For the vast majority of human history, art has served communication purposes: propaganda, tribal affiliation, status symbols, etc. Artists were artisans, producing objects and paintings of value commissioned or bought for all sorts of reasons. Most western classical paintings are religious propaganda, bought and paid for by the Church, also portraits of rulers and important business people, and historical accounts of important battles etc. This goes all the way back to ancient Egypt, and includes sculptures, illustrations on pots, etc.
Does art as a communication medium have survival value? Obviously not on an individual level, however when viewed at the level of large human groupings and civilisations, I'd say it's a vital part of enforcing social cohesion, just like language.
It's hard to know if you mean that statement technically or somewhat more generally.
The Probabilistic Method is rigorous because it is certain. There's no chance involved in the result, only in a highly technical sense during the proof.
It's certainly not like checking a few (or even a lot of) cases that all seem to work.
People here seem to have some difficulty distinguish the possible future from
the present. Google does not sell private data. It may or may not in the
future.
That's true, but not the issue. You don't warn about or start thinking
about private data misuse once it's happening, you have to think about
it much earlier before it's a major problem.
Google has great engineers and many of them believe in privacy, but
in this respect it's a bit like the Manhattan Project - a lot of
top physicists, dedicated and decent folk working on important and challenging
problems, for killing large numbers of Japanese people.
What Google's great engineers need to invent is how to organize the
world's information ephemerally, so that once it's been used for its
purpose, it can't be searched or misused for a different purpose some
time later. That ideal is probably closer to a distributed data store where the
keys are given to millions of people rather than a centralized server
farm where the keys are held by a single company.
Congratulations! You passed the entrance exam for antisocial people! Unfortunately, you have now been flagged by the big social networks. Your IP address has been recorded by Facebook, and a black courtesy minivan has been dispatched to your home, containing several temporary login passwords and a friendly gymnastics instructor. Do not invite him in for tea!
Google doesn't sell personal data, that wouldn't make any sense
Wrong. Google does whatever the hell its CEO says it should do on the day, now and in the future. Don't make the mistake of identifying Google with its current management. Two years ago it was Eric Schmidt, now it's Larry Page, and in a few years it will be ???
It's only visible to the person who has shared stuff with you.
And Google. It's always visible to Google as well, since it's their hardware.
Without strong privacy laws that *require* actual data destruction in scheduled timespans, all that data will get pawned when 1) management changes and has other ideas, 2) the company runs into financial difficulties and sells off a piece of itself which will naturally include personal data on users, 3) the data gets hacked and stolen, and then sold.
The main difference between Google and your local mom & pop shop is that the mom & pop shop stores a small shard of data for a few customers, so when any of 1)-3) happens to them, the effect is limited to a few people and to a small amount of data per person. When 1)-3) happens to Google, the amount of data per person is substantial, and the number of people affected is large.
It really is that simple, Google can have the greatest of intentions, yet their data hoard is a ticking timebomb. I can't believe I'm saying this, but Microsoft's approach of "one independent PC on each desk" is a lot better in the long run than Google's "all your data are belong to us".
Now you're just making shit up. The economic rights he would have transferred are the "property rights" to his
script - i.e., the script is CBS' to do with as they see fit.
I'm not. What would those property rights include exactly? For a start, I can guarantee that they wouldn't include internet distribution rights, since the internet didn't exist in the 1960s. Unless they called him up in the late 90s to make him sign an amended contract, he's never signed away those rights. It's just not the case that CBS can do with the script anything they want without consulting him, even if neither of us has seen the exact contract wording.
They have no affirmative duty to "exploit the script that he created for them and assigned
rights to them for," so that he can "enjoy celebrity" as a result of it. This *does not* infringe on his author
rights.
Many book publishing contracts expressly require the publisher to actually publish and sell the book, otherwise the publisher loses the rights and they revert to the author. This is actually a common scenario, for books that haven't been (re)printed in 20 or 30 years. Of course I don't know the wording for screenplay contracts written in the 1960s, but it's unlikely they are as precise and comprehensive as modern contracts of the same type.
He CAN and DID sign
away his economic rights to the script. He retains his moral rights, but those rights of his mean that CBS can't
just slap a new author's name on the script, and give him a minor say in whether or not they produce the script in
such a way that reflects negatively on him or his work.
At the risk of repeating points already made, I think you simplify too much. You assume that the economic rights were comprehensively signed away (I doubt it), and you assume that moral rights aren't relevant to the question of resuscitating a buried script (so to speak).
Even your final quote does nothing to support your point. "CBS allows," meaning the decision is up to CBS. Not, "CBS
is obligated to allow." The script is OWNED by CBS, because the author signed away his economic rights to it as part
No, the final quote is relevant because it establishes noncommercial intent by the fans, a fact that CBS has acknowledged. And being noncommercial is important *if* an argument based on moral rights is to be made, as the economic rights don't necessarily apply, especially given that CBS demonstrates no intention of using the script for commercial purposes anticipated by the contract.
That this may happen is unfortunate for the author & start trek fans, but there is no "obligation" on the part of
CBS to let anybody make this film.
Yes, we agree here, except that this may not be solely at the discretion of CBS as there are two parties with rights.
Rounding doesn't (statistically) go both ways. The shops generally choose prices so that rounding benefits them (eg 0.99 rather than 0.96 etc). That introduces a bias.
It's true that if you buy *a lot* of goods (at once) whose prices must be rounded, then the total could be anything, and even if there is *some* bias left, the amount is not more than 5 cents anyway.
However, this isn't the case when many people just buy one thing (at a time), on impulse. For example, candy or a newspaper or bread or a coffee. In that case, the shop has an advantage if all prices are $X.98 or $X.99. This advantage can be preserved also if many people just buy one or two things (at a time), eg coffee and a pastry, provided all the prices are designed to be $X.99 and never $X.98 or less.
In general, if you have good statistics on the number of items bought in the store, you can definitely design the prices to maximize the store's profit from rounding.
While he most likely did transfer the right to exploit his work economically, that's not the same as the right not to exploit it, ie to keep it locked up in a basement forever. He most likely did not transfer that right.
The simplest way to see that moral rights are actually at play is that, if the script is buried forever, then he (the author) can't show the script to his friends, and he can't get any credit, prizes or celebrity that might be due to him because of the work. So his moral rights are being cheated. Whether that's enough for a judge in this case, I don't know, but it's clearly not as simple as you put it.
Unless he did not sign away his rights to the script (and it seems pretty clear that he *has* or CBS wouldn't have
copyrights to assert), then author's rights are irrelevant to this case.
The point is that authors' rights cannot be signed away. Only the rights to exploit the work economically, which means actually making a product for sale or similar. If the work never enters any market at all, then there's no economic exploitation happening, so the contract with Paramount/CBS is either broken, or inapplicable for this script. This is particularly relevant since the Phase II fan created movies aren't supposed to be profitable, so that the use of the script wouldn't necessarily fall under Paramount's original contract rights.
CBS (and previously Paramount Pictures), which owns the legal rights to the
Star Trek franchise, allows the distribution of fan-created material as long as
no attempt is made to profit from it without official authorization,^[2] and
Phase II enjoys the same tolerance.
Not so fast. Authors' rights cannot be given up, they remain with the writer for as long as he lives. I'm not certain they are enough to liberate the work from a publisher who decides to "bury" it, but I don't think it's straight out impossible either. The publisher only gets a limited economic right to exploit the work, but they can't do anything they want if the original author doesn't like it, eg if he feels the work is being ruined or he isn't receiving the credit he deserves.
Ah, but it still hurts if your side doesn't get to stay in power longer than one term.
Even if both sides are interchangeable, suppose everyone alternates between voting D one election, and R the next, etc. Then we're ensuring that no president gets more than four years, and once they're out it's highly unlikely they'll be a viable candidate again, 4-8 years later: Some other guy from the party will eat their second lunch.
So the punishment is they get power for a few years, and then they're has-beens just when they started to get comfortable. Moreover, the next bunch of guys will probably nullify their "work" on ideological grounds before it's had time to have an effect.
If they don't want that punishment, they can act in the interests of the people, and be rewarded with a second election win.
Yeah, the problem with that is that it can't work when most of the humans are robots. The robots will make guesses using standard algorithms, and their guesses will be pretty consistent with the other robots' guesses (which are quite probably the same robot in another instance). Then Google thinks the robot guess is correct, because it's overwhelmingly the most consistent answer. And humans who give the correct answer get marked wrong, because they're a minority.
It's quite noticeable if you use a site which relies heavily on recaptchas. For example, when you get a word which has old english S which looks like a modern small case F, you're much better off claiming it's an F instead of giving the correct answer.
I'm sorry, what's wrong with death threats? Why do you draw the line at death threats? Ever watched the Simpsons? Homer threatens Bart all the time.
It's a slippery slope if you make an exception for death threats. You can never know for sure if the kid is going to go on a shotgun rampage or not. So you'd have to look at surrounding evidence, and the only way you can do that is monitor, spy and overreact.
How about we let people make all the death threats they want, and we put them in jail when they, unequivocally, actually, break the law? Minority Report is fantasy.
1. how long did it take to get the Desktop right? If you think about how long we didn't even have mice to
interact with the computer and you don't have to move hardly at all if you don't use one of those.
*Is* the Desktop right? If you ask me, it's not that great. For example, controlling windows by a couple of icons on the title bar seems very wrong.
Suppose you have a piece of paper on your desk, and you'd like to move it aside. Do you pick it up always on the top side and handle it that way, or do you pick it up any old way you like? We should be able to drag windows by grabbing them anywhere in the middle of the client area! There's also no reason why the resizing is associated with the window border or even worse, one of the corners.
Well, there is, because historically mice have had too few buttons (wonderful innovation, Apple!), so instead of having a physical button reserved for only one task such as moving or killing a window (etc), we've reserved screen space for those tasks. Except screen space is more valuable for actual applications, so we've shrunk the borders and window icons until they're just hard enough to hit that people still put up with it.
Of course you can fix these things if you're willing to hack your window manager, but the vast majority of people are stuck with those choices nevertheless.
2.We need to start some place with this and 3D displays and how to interact
with them have been around for a while but they will only be improved on when
try to figure out how we work with them. This may not be as quick or
intuitive as a mouse, but if people don't do work like this then we will be
stuck with mice, track-pads and touch screens and the like. for ever.
You're forgetting keyboards, which are a lot more expressive than mice. I'm also not convinced that aping
interfaces designed by hollywood to be visually interesting in movies is the way to go. But I agree that experimentation and crazy ideas are a good way forward at least.
You can see why none of these are as good as fossil fuels. If we become forced onto these power sources,
we'll all just get a lot poorer, as we'll be paying a lot more to fuel our homes and appliances. That will
certainly be a profitable situation for solar companies, but I wouldn't call it "reasonable".
Not if. When. Fossil fuels are great but not unlimited. What's reasonable is to smooth over the transition period by planning to be a little uncomfortable instead of being a lot uncomfortable. But uncomfortable humanity shall be.
Nonsense. Profitability is relative to what other options are available at any one time. It's not an absolute measure, and neither efficiency nor environmental impact have anything to do with it. When fossil fuel prices skyrocket, then solar panels become a profitable and reasonable alternative. It's important to have such alternatives in place (solar, wind, nuclear, etc) for when market changes occur, otherwise you'll have *no* fallback and you *still* have to spend the time developing alternatives, and making them available for sale.
Not slavery. Exploitation is what it is. People are being put in an
economic situation where they have no power, and are living their
lives for the benefit of cloud providers. Choice doesn't matter if you
can't afford to make that choice.
Of course we're not there yet but we are heading in that direction. Ten years ago, people had all their data on their own PCs, now that's no longer the case.
If you don't want your kid's birthing video to go viral, don't post it, or
share it in copyable form with anyone who is likely to post it. Thing is,
there are a LOT of people who actually do want their kid's birthing video to
go viral.
That's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about eg using Gmail, letting a corporation like Facebook spy on your digital life, etc. The economy that is built around social cloud services is the problem, because lack of privacy implies lack of control.
For example, if you depend on Gmail then you are no longer free to do or say what you like, only what Google allows you to do or say under its terms of service. If you can't afford to drop out of LinkedIn or Facebook, then you must follow their rules. And if you're on one of those systems, your friends' data gets captured as well even if they aren't (eg send an email to someone @gmail, and your message is now spied on by Google, or if you're in a photograph uploaded to Facebook, then you're implicitly subject to Facebook terms of service even if you don't have an account)
What is the normal function of the "do not eat" signal? Just what normal
function is going to get messed up when you turn this off?
OMG, I hope it's not the "do not fuck" signal! If I have to leave the basement every saturday night, I'm never going to finish watching my TNG DVDs in time for batlhjaj!
Slashdot Mirror
I have to disagree on that. Art as an act of self expression is a very modern viewpoint, not older than 100 years or so. For the vast majority of human history, art has served communication purposes: propaganda, tribal affiliation, status symbols, etc. Artists were artisans, producing objects and paintings of value commissioned or bought for all sorts of reasons. Most western classical paintings are religious propaganda, bought and paid for by the Church, also portraits of rulers and important business people, and historical accounts of important battles etc. This goes all the way back to ancient Egypt, and includes sculptures, illustrations on pots, etc.
Does art as a communication medium have survival value? Obviously not on an individual level, however when viewed at the level of large human groupings and civilisations, I'd say it's a vital part of enforcing social cohesion, just like language.
It's certainly not like checking a few (or even a lot of) cases that all seem to work.
Johnny Depp as the quirky but lovable captain Larry Ellison of HMS Oracle?
Eeek! I thought having sex is P2V, or sometimes P2A or P2M, but the last two only before marriage...
Now all we need is someone to punch a horse and the journey into the sunset will be complete.
That's true, but not the issue. You don't warn about or start thinking about private data misuse once it's happening, you have to think about it much earlier before it's a major problem.
Google has great engineers and many of them believe in privacy, but in this respect it's a bit like the Manhattan Project - a lot of top physicists, dedicated and decent folk working on important and challenging problems, for killing large numbers of Japanese people.
What Google's great engineers need to invent is how to organize the world's information ephemerally, so that once it's been used for its purpose, it can't be searched or misused for a different purpose some time later. That ideal is probably closer to a distributed data store where the keys are given to millions of people rather than a centralized server farm where the keys are held by a single company.
Congratulations! You passed the entrance exam for antisocial people! Unfortunately, you have now been flagged by the big social networks. Your IP address has been recorded by Facebook, and a black courtesy minivan has been dispatched to your home, containing several temporary login passwords and a friendly gymnastics instructor. Do not invite him in for tea!
Wrong. Google does whatever the hell its CEO says it should do on the day, now and in the future. Don't make the mistake of identifying Google with its current management. Two years ago it was Eric Schmidt, now it's Larry Page, and in a few years it will be ???
And Google. It's always visible to Google as well, since it's their hardware.
Without strong privacy laws that *require* actual data destruction in scheduled timespans, all that data will get pawned when 1) management changes and has other ideas, 2) the company runs into financial difficulties and sells off a piece of itself which will naturally include personal data on users, 3) the data gets hacked and stolen, and then sold.
The main difference between Google and your local mom & pop shop is that the mom & pop shop stores a small shard of data for a few customers, so when any of 1)-3) happens to them, the effect is limited to a few people and to a small amount of data per person. When 1)-3) happens to Google, the amount of data per person is substantial, and the number of people affected is large.
It really is that simple, Google can have the greatest of intentions, yet their data hoard is a ticking timebomb. I can't believe I'm saying this, but Microsoft's approach of "one independent PC on each desk" is a lot better in the long run than Google's "all your data are belong to us".
Heh. You are.
Well, you're Mormon anyway, eventually.
Cheer up, you're in good company. Hitler's Mormon, too, and he plays a mean game of Canasta in Heaven :)
I'm not. What would those property rights include exactly? For a start, I can guarantee that they wouldn't include internet distribution rights, since the internet didn't exist in the 1960s. Unless they called him up in the late 90s to make him sign an amended contract, he's never signed away those rights. It's just not the case that CBS can do with the script anything they want without consulting him, even if neither of us has seen the exact contract wording.
Many book publishing contracts expressly require the publisher to actually publish and sell the book, otherwise the publisher loses the rights and they revert to the author. This is actually a common scenario, for books that haven't been (re)printed in 20 or 30 years. Of course I don't know the wording for screenplay contracts written in the 1960s, but it's unlikely they are as precise and comprehensive as modern contracts of the same type.
At the risk of repeating points already made, I think you simplify too much. You assume that the economic rights were comprehensively signed away (I doubt it), and you assume that moral rights aren't relevant to the question of resuscitating a buried script (so to speak).
No, the final quote is relevant because it establishes noncommercial intent by the fans, a fact that CBS has acknowledged. And being noncommercial is important *if* an argument based on moral rights is to be made, as the economic rights don't necessarily apply, especially given that CBS demonstrates no intention of using the script for commercial purposes anticipated by the contract.
Yes, we agree here, except that this may not be solely at the discretion of CBS as there are two parties with rights.
However, this isn't the case when many people just buy one thing (at a time), on impulse. For example, candy or a newspaper or bread or a coffee. In that case, the shop has an advantage if all prices are $X.98 or $X.99. This advantage can be preserved also if many people just buy one or two things (at a time), eg coffee and a pastry, provided all the prices are designed to be $X.99 and never $X.98 or less.
In general, if you have good statistics on the number of items bought in the store, you can definitely design the prices to maximize the store's profit from rounding.
Tap tap, penny, tap tap, penny, tap tap, penny, tap tap, penny.
The simplest way to see that moral rights are actually at play is that, if the script is buried forever, then he (the author) can't show the script to his friends, and he can't get any credit, prizes or celebrity that might be due to him because of the work. So his moral rights are being cheated. Whether that's enough for a judge in this case, I don't know, but it's clearly not as simple as you put it.
The point is that authors' rights cannot be signed away. Only the rights to exploit the work economically, which means actually making a product for sale or similar. If the work never enters any market at all, then there's no economic exploitation happening, so the contract with Paramount/CBS is either broken, or inapplicable for this script. This is particularly relevant since the Phase II fan created movies aren't supposed to be profitable, so that the use of the script wouldn't necessarily fall under Paramount's original contract rights.
From here:
Like I said, it's not as clear cut as you put it.
Not so fast. Authors' rights cannot be given up, they remain with the writer for as long as he lives. I'm not certain they are enough to liberate the work from a publisher who decides to "bury" it, but I don't think it's straight out impossible either. The publisher only gets a limited economic right to exploit the work, but they can't do anything they want if the original author doesn't like it, eg if he feels the work is being ruined or he isn't receiving the credit he deserves.
Even if both sides are interchangeable, suppose everyone alternates between voting D one election, and R the next, etc. Then we're ensuring that no president gets more than four years, and once they're out it's highly unlikely they'll be a viable candidate again, 4-8 years later: Some other guy from the party will eat their second lunch.
So the punishment is they get power for a few years, and then they're has-beens just when they started to get comfortable. Moreover, the next bunch of guys will probably nullify their "work" on ideological grounds before it's had time to have an effect. If they don't want that punishment, they can act in the interests of the people, and be rewarded with a second election win.
It's quite noticeable if you use a site which relies heavily on recaptchas. For example, when you get a word which has old english S which looks like a modern small case F, you're much better off claiming it's an F instead of giving the correct answer.
It's a slippery slope if you make an exception for death threats. You can never know for sure if the kid is going to go on a shotgun rampage or not. So you'd have to look at surrounding evidence, and the only way you can do that is monitor, spy and overreact.
How about we let people make all the death threats they want, and we put them in jail when they, unequivocally, actually, break the law? Minority Report is fantasy.
*Is* the Desktop right? If you ask me, it's not that great. For example, controlling windows by a couple of icons on the title bar seems very wrong.
Suppose you have a piece of paper on your desk, and you'd like to move it aside. Do you pick it up always on the top side and handle it that way, or do you pick it up any old way you like? We should be able to drag windows by grabbing them anywhere in the middle of the client area! There's also no reason why the resizing is associated with the window border or even worse, one of the corners.
Well, there is, because historically mice have had too few buttons (wonderful innovation, Apple!), so instead of having a physical button reserved for only one task such as moving or killing a window (etc), we've reserved screen space for those tasks. Except screen space is more valuable for actual applications, so we've shrunk the borders and window icons until they're just hard enough to hit that people still put up with it.
Of course you can fix these things if you're willing to hack your window manager, but the vast majority of people are stuck with those choices nevertheless.
You're forgetting keyboards, which are a lot more expressive than mice. I'm also not convinced that aping interfaces designed by hollywood to be visually interesting in movies is the way to go. But I agree that experimentation and crazy ideas are a good way forward at least.
Actually, if they switched to LaTeX, they'd probably save countless hours futzing around with fonts and layout...
No, no! That's good news! In Texas, you'd get the death penalty...
Not if. When. Fossil fuels are great but not unlimited. What's reasonable is to smooth over the transition period by planning to be a little uncomfortable instead of being a lot uncomfortable. But uncomfortable humanity shall be.
Nonsense. Profitability is relative to what other options are available at any one time. It's not an absolute measure, and neither efficiency nor environmental impact have anything to do with it. When fossil fuel prices skyrocket, then solar panels become a profitable and reasonable alternative. It's important to have such alternatives in place (solar, wind, nuclear, etc) for when market changes occur, otherwise you'll have *no* fallback and you *still* have to spend the time developing alternatives, and making them available for sale.
Too bad it'll be pulled as soon as the RIAA claims copyright on the music score...
Of course we're not there yet but we are heading in that direction. Ten years ago, people had all their data on their own PCs, now that's no longer the case.
That's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about eg using Gmail, letting a corporation like Facebook spy on your digital life, etc. The economy that is built around social cloud services is the problem, because lack of privacy implies lack of control.
For example, if you depend on Gmail then you are no longer free to do or say what you like, only what Google allows you to do or say under its terms of service. If you can't afford to drop out of LinkedIn or Facebook, then you must follow their rules. And if you're on one of those systems, your friends' data gets captured as well even if they aren't (eg send an email to someone @gmail, and your message is now spied on by Google, or if you're in a photograph uploaded to Facebook, then you're implicitly subject to Facebook terms of service even if you don't have an account)
OMG, I hope it's not the "do not fuck" signal! If I have to leave the basement every saturday night, I'm never going to finish watching my TNG DVDs in time for batlhjaj!