Also think 1 second (if you can) what the mobile phone / smartphone sector looked like BEFORE the iPhone and AFTER the iPhone.
Let's see, before the iPhone it looked like the LG Prada and after the iPhone it looked like the LG Prada, but selling about three times as much and getting a hell of a lot more publicity for it?
I admit that Apple's ability to copy what other companies have done before them, polish it up and market it in a highly successful way is truly amazing. But being the most popular doesn't give you some kind of magical patent rights, despite what a lot of courts seem to think these days.
The sequel came out a couple weeks ago, i just finished it yesterday. It's much less of a big idea book than either "A Fire Upon the Deep" or "A Deepness in the Sky". There's some exploration of the details of hive minds and such that didn't get covered before, but nothing really new gets introduced. Very much a generic sequel type book, albeit a well written one about an interesting world.
Bah! There arent any women on slashdot so weve no need of such arcane knowledge! Begone with you! Well do just fine without knowing how those contraction things are supposed to work!
Instead the formerly skeptical scientists confirmed that the earth is getting warmer, and in the process have probably lost a huge chunk of their funding.
So is there some way in which you don't consider that evidence of skeptical scientists becoming convinced?
Well i agree with your last point. There are plenty of good reasons to improve our current systems even without considering climate change.
As for the first part, at which point do you feel the argument that the change is related to our activities breaks down? It's easy to find numbers on exactly how much oil, coal and natural gas is burned every year and calculate the resultant change in carbon dioxide concentrations in the air. I've done the math myself, and it's surprising how big an impact we have. It's been a while since i did that but at the current rate presuming no other changes it's a surprisingly short period of time before we'd make the atmosphere actually lethal. (Some thousands of years i think? Though it could be tens of thousands or just centuries, i'd have to look up the math. In any event surprisingly quick on geologic scales.)
Of course according to current models we'd see severe changes to the climate long before that point. So where do you disagree? Do you feel that the carbon dioxide is being pulled out of the atmosphere at a _much_ greater rate than it was before we started pumping it into the atmosphere? If so, where do you think it's all going? Or do you feel that the models claiming that carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas are wrong? Or do you feel that some other factor is balancing the effect of the increased carbon dioxide? Or is there something else i'm not considering that you think is important?
I would argue that given we have a mathematically proven effect on the carbon dioxide concentration in the atmosphere it's kind of silly to argue that we can't do anything about the climate. And i would _not_ argue that the current temperature is perfect for the planet, but i think that it's pretty likely the current temperature, or at least the current climate, is close to perfect for us right now. After all, we've spent a long time adapting ourselves to the current situation. It's possible that another situation might be better for us overall, but adapting to that new situation over the period of a couple decades would probably be very painful. Maybe if northern Canada and Russia turn into ideal farmland while the Europe and the Midwest in the US turn into dustbowls the total _potential_ food harvest will increase, but how many people will starve (and how many wars will be fought?) before that new potential is realized?
We've definitely reached the point where the reasonably skeptical scientists are becoming convinced. I'm more concerned about the point where reasonably skeptical non-scientists will become convinced. Not everyone who denies it's a problem is a liar. Quite possibly not even most of them. Some people are just fooling themselves, or letting themselves be fooled by the people who are lying.
I think it's pretty clear that there's a consensus amongst those scientists who've studied the issue properly that climate change is going to be a problem. This is just one study by one group of scientists saying they're about 80% sure that this particular problem was due to climate change. I've seen other scientists saying that it's too early to judge individual weather events in relation to climate change yet, though they probably haven't finished doing specific studies of those individual events.
So in short there's pretty overwhelming evidence in favor of climate change causing problems in the future, there's only some evidence from some people so far that it's a problem right now. I'm not saying it _isn't_, but i'm going to wait for more reports from more scientists before i try to rub any deniers noses in it. There's nothing i hate worse than people on _my_ side jumping to conclusions based on insufficient evidence. It just makes the issue you're supporting look bad later if it turns out the claims were premature, or just plain wrong.
As for waiting 10-20 years before telling the deniers i was wrong, climate change _is_ a gradual process. It's been going on for decades and it's not _impossible_ that it will take another decade or two to reach the point where even a non-scientist will consider the evidence they themselves can observe to be overwhelming. Given that the statement is directed towards deniers i don't want them calling me out if we just happen to have cool temperatures and calm weather for the next year or two. But be assured, i will continue to examine the evidence as it comes in and update my opinions accordingly.
The unusual weather events we've been seeing around the world the last year aren't proof that global climate change is real... at least not yet. Weather != Climate and all that, not over the period of a single year anyways. But eventually if the trend continues and we continue to see more and bigger weather related disasters over the coming years then eventually even the non-scientist deniers will have to admit there is a problem. When that does happen, i wonder if any of the deniers will actually step forward and admit they were wrong? Every time i see a denier post on Slashdot that seems to come from someone who sincerely believes what they're saying i'm tempted to write their name down and ask them about it when that time comes, but i'm far too lazy to actually follow through on that.
(And turnabout is fair play. If ten or twenty years from now the temperature hasn't gone up any more and the weird weather events go away without us taking any action about it i'll be willing to stand up and say i was wrong. In fact i'd be quite happy to have that event come about.)
Well Microsoft did give a billion dollars to Nokia for them to make Windows phones, but they didn't actually buy it outright. iPhone has been all Apple's since day one, they never bought out a partner that i'm aware of. In fact the only company i can think of recently that's actually bought out a company that they were partners with in making smartphones is Google with Motorola, which wasn't even mentioned in the blurb.
But even if the circumstances aren't exactly the same there certainly is a general trend of "brand name" companies getting more invested in the phone industry.
Life is always so hard when you suffer from a compulsion to take marketing hyperbole literally. I suggest you avoid the TV and radio. If you hear commercials for two different products in close succession both claiming to be the best at the same thing your brain might explode. I can only hope you've already taken the safety precaution of blocking all ads on in your browser.
Are you sure the GP is the one who's not thinking things through?
I agree with you that getting more nuclear reactors online would be great, however you can't power combustion engines that way. If you replace the combustion engines with electrical engines _and_ build nuclear power plants then you've written fossil fuels out of the equation, at least as far as that area of the economy goes.
And yes fossil fuels have been great for us, and history proves it. Domesticating horses was great for us too, and history proved that as well. However we reached a point where maintaining enough horses to provide all the motive power we needed was infeasible, both economically and from a health perspective because of all the manure produced.
Likewise right now fossil fuels are starting to present economic problems. Acquiring them is starting to become more expensive (whether for technical reasons or political reasons is irrelevant for the purposes of this discussion) and we have reason to believe that price will go up even higher at some point within the next few decades. At the same time we're concerned about the side effects of using so much of them. Suggesting that we should find something better, ideally something that in the long run will be cheaper and safer, does not deny the usefulness of fossil fuels or the role they've played in our history, just as switching to fossil fuels in the first place was not done out of a desire to malign the usefulness and history of horses.
On to the next point, you seem to be the only person who's brought up "cap and trade" in this thread, so why are you being so vehement about it? I don't really agree with cap and trade, mainly because as far as i can tell it's _not_ straight out taxing something. Taxes are a perfectly reasonable way to manipulate behaviour and you'll find few economists who disagree. Taxing something you wish to discourage increases the costs of that activity. Any businessperson engaged in that activity doesn't want to see their costs rise, so if possible they will find ways to reduce or eliminate the taxed activity. They are thus encouraged to find non-taxed alternatives to whatever that activity is. Ideally this means finding an alternative process, which with the development of technology often ends up being cheaper and easier in the long run.
Of course the problem is that often the quickest way to get out of the extra cost is to move the same activity to someplace where it isn't taxed, so such measures can't be as effective as you might want unless either you can get all the countries in the world to agree with the tax or you impose a tariff on goods coming into the country from places that don't institute such a tax (something i've been told by people more knowledgeably in economics than myself isn't feasible.)
However that doesn't mean that the basic idea is stupid, just that it's not always possibly to implement.
O RLY? I didn't actually know about it until someone posted it earlier in this article, but the LG Prada came out shortly before the iPhone and they look very similar. In fact LG accused Apple of copying their phone since they revealed it as part of a design competition (and won) several months prior to the announcement of the iPhone.
So it seems to me either that Apple stole the idea and polished it up, or as has often the case in history, technology was headed in a certain direction and several people came up with similar ideas at the same time, and Apple just made the most popular implementation of that idea.
And if there'd been someone like this professor around when the fish started "thinking" about moving to the land, he would presumably have pointed out that there was nothing to breathe on land and there were a lot more resources in the ocean right there than were up on the hostile land, so what was the point?
The fallacy of course is that there are more resources in the ocean (at least as far as a fish is concerned) but those resources are already being heavily competed for. There may be less resources on land, and getting there may be harder, but the first thing to make it onto land gets first shot at all the unclaimed resources they want. Sure there's lots of stuff down here on earth and it's scattered pretty far apart up in space, but nobody owns those space resources yet.
It's almost a truism that everything starts in the place where it's easiest to do that thing. Life developed in the environment most amenable to life. Civilization developed in the fertile crescent where there was lots of food. Coal mining developed in areas with lots of easily accessible coal. Steam engines developed in areas with lots of coal mining. Expanding outside that easy starting area is hard, and trying may lose you something. Your company, your civilization, or your life. But if you just stick around where you started eventually someone else is going to do the hard work to expand, and then they're going to be competing with you for the easy resources at home _and_ have access to all the free resources from wherever they expanded to. And more often than not learning how to extract the resources you need out of a more hostile environment makes you more competitive back home as well.
Your idea of biologically modifying ourselves to handle space better is perfectly reasonable, but it doesn't really matter how we do it. Our evolutionary strength is our brains and the tools we create using those brains. It doesn't matter much whether we use engineering tools or biological tools, but one way or another we can adapt ourselves to that environment if we decide we want to do it without having to wait millions of years the way the first lungfish had to wait for natural evolution to get them on land.
*blinks* I hadn't noticed that bit. You're totally 100% right. Maybe they thought it would be a good idea to direct the people who thought they had no sense of humor to the best humor on the whole page just to see if they were correct about themselves?
I think you're entirely wrong. I also think it's possible a lawyer may try to make that argument and it's remotely possible that a court may accept it.
After all the courts have apparently accepted it as relevant that one or more people at Google went through the thought process "We could use Java for this. But if we do that then we'd owe Oracle lots of money. Therefore perhaps we should use something else instead." and is allowing Oracle to use that as an argument that Google is infringing on their patents.
We're apparently on the verge of allowing patent thought crime. If you think of a patent that someone else owns and then try to avoid it you still owe them money. Either because it means you're trying to circumvent the patent (patents causing actual innovation? The horror!) or it implies that your earlier products infringed in some way since you're trying to avoid it now.
I can't check out the site now, but what kind of coding resources does it have?
I've actually worked in the game industry in the past, but in those cases it was on moderate sized teams (30 or so people) using in-house engines that were maintained and updated by a number of senior programmers. Since leaving the industry i've had plenty of ideas for fun little games i could do on my own, but writing my own game engine seems like a daunting task. Back when i started out in Pascal just writing pixels and lines to the screen was one of the easiest things ever, but i have no idea how to go about doing the same thing in a Windows environment now. I could break out my old OpenGL red book from college, but writing a 3D engine would be an order of magnitude more work and i don't really want to make 3D games anyways.
So i'd love to have references to good simple graphics packages and tutorials on how to use them. I could spend hours or days hunting around on wikipedia and forums to find the same information i'm sure, but i already have to spend enough time researching stuff for my real job. This is just something i'd be interested in for fun. I don't really want to spend more time figuring out just how to get started than it apparently takes these people to write an entire game.
Is this going to be considered good because it helps protect our privacy from the websites? Or bad because Google is effectively monetizing the private information by keeping the details to themselves (and using it?) while only handing out aggregate data to everyone else? I can see arguments being made either way.
If climate change is real (just for the sake of argument right now) then some people will benefit and some people will suffer. Of course the big question is how many people will be in each group and which areas will be affected positively and which negatively. That leads into a huge nasty debate with lots of accusations and name-calling that i don't intend to start right now but which i'm sure is already sprouting up in other comments.
As has already been pointed out (sarcastically) there's plenty of original content on YouTube already, so what's new about this is that it's professional? How exactly are they defining professional though?
I expect what they really mean is "content produced by people associated with Hollywood who have been paid upfront by a sponsor." Because to the extent of people creating content as a part time or full time job for which they get paid (either directly or through advertising, merchandising, or some other secondary deal) there's already quite a lot of professional content on YouTube.
Slashdot Mirror
Also think 1 second (if you can) what the mobile phone / smartphone sector looked like BEFORE the iPhone and AFTER the iPhone.
Let's see, before the iPhone it looked like the LG Prada and after the iPhone it looked like the LG Prada, but selling about three times as much and getting a hell of a lot more publicity for it?
I admit that Apple's ability to copy what other companies have done before them, polish it up and market it in a highly successful way is truly amazing. But being the most popular doesn't give you some kind of magical patent rights, despite what a lot of courts seem to think these days.
The sequel came out a couple weeks ago, i just finished it yesterday. It's much less of a big idea book than either "A Fire Upon the Deep" or "A Deepness in the Sky". There's some exploration of the details of hive minds and such that didn't get covered before, but nothing really new gets introduced. Very much a generic sequel type book, albeit a well written one about an interesting world.
I was just going to say the same thing!
...well actually all i was going to say was "Zones of Thought, here we come!" but close enough for government work :)
Or i could just say that i wrote a long and insightful post, but it suffered from poor translation over multiple relay hops.
Bah! There arent any women on slashdot so weve no need of such arcane knowledge! Begone with you! Well do just fine without knowing how those contraction things are supposed to work!
WERE DOOMED
We were doomed? So we're safe now?
Please provide evidence for this claim, which does NOT consist of just other people claiming the same thing.
I was referring to the article in the comment i responded to. It's kind of hard to miss since it was the only thing in the comment.
Slashdot has also discussed the same thing.
In short, the Koch Brothers, who are well known deniers with a habit of giving out large grants to "climate skeptics" helped fund a study that included several respected scientists who also happened to be skeptics of climate change. The hope was that it would disprove the theory.
Instead the formerly skeptical scientists confirmed that the earth is getting warmer, and in the process have probably lost a huge chunk of their funding.
So is there some way in which you don't consider that evidence of skeptical scientists becoming convinced?
Well i agree with your last point. There are plenty of good reasons to improve our current systems even without considering climate change.
As for the first part, at which point do you feel the argument that the change is related to our activities breaks down? It's easy to find numbers on exactly how much oil, coal and natural gas is burned every year and calculate the resultant change in carbon dioxide concentrations in the air. I've done the math myself, and it's surprising how big an impact we have. It's been a while since i did that but at the current rate presuming no other changes it's a surprisingly short period of time before we'd make the atmosphere actually lethal. (Some thousands of years i think? Though it could be tens of thousands or just centuries, i'd have to look up the math. In any event surprisingly quick on geologic scales.)
Of course according to current models we'd see severe changes to the climate long before that point. So where do you disagree? Do you feel that the carbon dioxide is being pulled out of the atmosphere at a _much_ greater rate than it was before we started pumping it into the atmosphere? If so, where do you think it's all going? Or do you feel that the models claiming that carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas are wrong? Or do you feel that some other factor is balancing the effect of the increased carbon dioxide? Or is there something else i'm not considering that you think is important?
I would argue that given we have a mathematically proven effect on the carbon dioxide concentration in the atmosphere it's kind of silly to argue that we can't do anything about the climate. And i would _not_ argue that the current temperature is perfect for the planet, but i think that it's pretty likely the current temperature, or at least the current climate, is close to perfect for us right now. After all, we've spent a long time adapting ourselves to the current situation. It's possible that another situation might be better for us overall, but adapting to that new situation over the period of a couple decades would probably be very painful. Maybe if northern Canada and Russia turn into ideal farmland while the Europe and the Midwest in the US turn into dustbowls the total _potential_ food harvest will increase, but how many people will starve (and how many wars will be fought?) before that new potential is realized?
We've definitely reached the point where the reasonably skeptical scientists are becoming convinced. I'm more concerned about the point where reasonably skeptical non-scientists will become convinced. Not everyone who denies it's a problem is a liar. Quite possibly not even most of them. Some people are just fooling themselves, or letting themselves be fooled by the people who are lying.
I think it's pretty clear that there's a consensus amongst those scientists who've studied the issue properly that climate change is going to be a problem. This is just one study by one group of scientists saying they're about 80% sure that this particular problem was due to climate change. I've seen other scientists saying that it's too early to judge individual weather events in relation to climate change yet, though they probably haven't finished doing specific studies of those individual events.
So in short there's pretty overwhelming evidence in favor of climate change causing problems in the future, there's only some evidence from some people so far that it's a problem right now. I'm not saying it _isn't_, but i'm going to wait for more reports from more scientists before i try to rub any deniers noses in it. There's nothing i hate worse than people on _my_ side jumping to conclusions based on insufficient evidence. It just makes the issue you're supporting look bad later if it turns out the claims were premature, or just plain wrong.
As for waiting 10-20 years before telling the deniers i was wrong, climate change _is_ a gradual process. It's been going on for decades and it's not _impossible_ that it will take another decade or two to reach the point where even a non-scientist will consider the evidence they themselves can observe to be overwhelming. Given that the statement is directed towards deniers i don't want them calling me out if we just happen to have cool temperatures and calm weather for the next year or two. But be assured, i will continue to examine the evidence as it comes in and update my opinions accordingly.
The unusual weather events we've been seeing around the world the last year aren't proof that global climate change is real... at least not yet. Weather != Climate and all that, not over the period of a single year anyways. But eventually if the trend continues and we continue to see more and bigger weather related disasters over the coming years then eventually even the non-scientist deniers will have to admit there is a problem. When that does happen, i wonder if any of the deniers will actually step forward and admit they were wrong? Every time i see a denier post on Slashdot that seems to come from someone who sincerely believes what they're saying i'm tempted to write their name down and ask them about it when that time comes, but i'm far too lazy to actually follow through on that.
(And turnabout is fair play. If ten or twenty years from now the temperature hasn't gone up any more and the weird weather events go away without us taking any action about it i'll be willing to stand up and say i was wrong. In fact i'd be quite happy to have that event come about.)
I'm afraid i don't know Miles Standish. I am familiar with Miles Vorkosigan however.
Well Microsoft did give a billion dollars to Nokia for them to make Windows phones, but they didn't actually buy it outright. iPhone has been all Apple's since day one, they never bought out a partner that i'm aware of. In fact the only company i can think of recently that's actually bought out a company that they were partners with in making smartphones is Google with Motorola, which wasn't even mentioned in the blurb.
But even if the circumstances aren't exactly the same there certainly is a general trend of "brand name" companies getting more invested in the phone industry.
Life is always so hard when you suffer from a compulsion to take marketing hyperbole literally. I suggest you avoid the TV and radio. If you hear commercials for two different products in close succession both claiming to be the best at the same thing your brain might explode. I can only hope you've already taken the safety precaution of blocking all ads on in your browser.
Are you sure the GP is the one who's not thinking things through?
I agree with you that getting more nuclear reactors online would be great, however you can't power combustion engines that way. If you replace the combustion engines with electrical engines _and_ build nuclear power plants then you've written fossil fuels out of the equation, at least as far as that area of the economy goes.
And yes fossil fuels have been great for us, and history proves it. Domesticating horses was great for us too, and history proved that as well. However we reached a point where maintaining enough horses to provide all the motive power we needed was infeasible, both economically and from a health perspective because of all the manure produced.
Likewise right now fossil fuels are starting to present economic problems. Acquiring them is starting to become more expensive (whether for technical reasons or political reasons is irrelevant for the purposes of this discussion) and we have reason to believe that price will go up even higher at some point within the next few decades. At the same time we're concerned about the side effects of using so much of them. Suggesting that we should find something better, ideally something that in the long run will be cheaper and safer, does not deny the usefulness of fossil fuels or the role they've played in our history, just as switching to fossil fuels in the first place was not done out of a desire to malign the usefulness and history of horses.
On to the next point, you seem to be the only person who's brought up "cap and trade" in this thread, so why are you being so vehement about it? I don't really agree with cap and trade, mainly because as far as i can tell it's _not_ straight out taxing something. Taxes are a perfectly reasonable way to manipulate behaviour and you'll find few economists who disagree. Taxing something you wish to discourage increases the costs of that activity. Any businessperson engaged in that activity doesn't want to see their costs rise, so if possible they will find ways to reduce or eliminate the taxed activity. They are thus encouraged to find non-taxed alternatives to whatever that activity is. Ideally this means finding an alternative process, which with the development of technology often ends up being cheaper and easier in the long run.
Of course the problem is that often the quickest way to get out of the extra cost is to move the same activity to someplace where it isn't taxed, so such measures can't be as effective as you might want unless either you can get all the countries in the world to agree with the tax or you impose a tariff on goods coming into the country from places that don't institute such a tax (something i've been told by people more knowledgeably in economics than myself isn't feasible.)
However that doesn't mean that the basic idea is stupid, just that it's not always possibly to implement.
O RLY? I didn't actually know about it until someone posted it earlier in this article, but the LG Prada came out shortly before the iPhone and they look very similar. In fact LG accused Apple of copying their phone since they revealed it as part of a design competition (and won) several months prior to the announcement of the iPhone.
So it seems to me either that Apple stole the idea and polished it up, or as has often the case in history, technology was headed in a certain direction and several people came up with similar ideas at the same time, and Apple just made the most popular implementation of that idea.
And if there'd been someone like this professor around when the fish started "thinking" about moving to the land, he would presumably have pointed out that there was nothing to breathe on land and there were a lot more resources in the ocean right there than were up on the hostile land, so what was the point?
The fallacy of course is that there are more resources in the ocean (at least as far as a fish is concerned) but those resources are already being heavily competed for. There may be less resources on land, and getting there may be harder, but the first thing to make it onto land gets first shot at all the unclaimed resources they want. Sure there's lots of stuff down here on earth and it's scattered pretty far apart up in space, but nobody owns those space resources yet.
It's almost a truism that everything starts in the place where it's easiest to do that thing. Life developed in the environment most amenable to life. Civilization developed in the fertile crescent where there was lots of food. Coal mining developed in areas with lots of easily accessible coal. Steam engines developed in areas with lots of coal mining. Expanding outside that easy starting area is hard, and trying may lose you something. Your company, your civilization, or your life. But if you just stick around where you started eventually someone else is going to do the hard work to expand, and then they're going to be competing with you for the easy resources at home _and_ have access to all the free resources from wherever they expanded to. And more often than not learning how to extract the resources you need out of a more hostile environment makes you more competitive back home as well.
Your idea of biologically modifying ourselves to handle space better is perfectly reasonable, but it doesn't really matter how we do it. Our evolutionary strength is our brains and the tools we create using those brains. It doesn't matter much whether we use engineering tools or biological tools, but one way or another we can adapt ourselves to that environment if we decide we want to do it without having to wait millions of years the way the first lungfish had to wait for natural evolution to get them on land.
*blinks* I hadn't noticed that bit. You're totally 100% right. Maybe they thought it would be a good idea to direct the people who thought they had no sense of humor to the best humor on the whole page just to see if they were correct about themselves?
And everyone knows that iPhones are expensive. Confirming Android as "cheap" doesn't seem to leave much of a niche for Windows either.
Android is a copy of iPhone, but not that well done.
O RLY? So why is it that so many of the "cool new features" in iOS 5 are features that Android has had for quite awhile now?
The msdn link looks like exactly the kind of thing i wanted, thanks!
I think you're entirely wrong. I also think it's possible a lawyer may try to make that argument and it's remotely possible that a court may accept it.
After all the courts have apparently accepted it as relevant that one or more people at Google went through the thought process "We could use Java for this. But if we do that then we'd owe Oracle lots of money. Therefore perhaps we should use something else instead." and is allowing Oracle to use that as an argument that Google is infringing on their patents.
We're apparently on the verge of allowing patent thought crime. If you think of a patent that someone else owns and then try to avoid it you still owe them money. Either because it means you're trying to circumvent the patent (patents causing actual innovation? The horror!) or it implies that your earlier products infringed in some way since you're trying to avoid it now.
I can't check out the site now, but what kind of coding resources does it have?
I've actually worked in the game industry in the past, but in those cases it was on moderate sized teams (30 or so people) using in-house engines that were maintained and updated by a number of senior programmers. Since leaving the industry i've had plenty of ideas for fun little games i could do on my own, but writing my own game engine seems like a daunting task. Back when i started out in Pascal just writing pixels and lines to the screen was one of the easiest things ever, but i have no idea how to go about doing the same thing in a Windows environment now. I could break out my old OpenGL red book from college, but writing a 3D engine would be an order of magnitude more work and i don't really want to make 3D games anyways.
So i'd love to have references to good simple graphics packages and tutorials on how to use them. I could spend hours or days hunting around on wikipedia and forums to find the same information i'm sure, but i already have to spend enough time researching stuff for my real job. This is just something i'd be interested in for fun. I don't really want to spend more time figuring out just how to get started than it apparently takes these people to write an entire game.
Is this going to be considered good because it helps protect our privacy from the websites? Or bad because Google is effectively monetizing the private information by keeping the details to themselves (and using it?) while only handing out aggregate data to everyone else? I can see arguments being made either way.
It's an ill wind that blows no good and all that.
If climate change is real (just for the sake of argument right now) then some people will benefit and some people will suffer. Of course the big question is how many people will be in each group and which areas will be affected positively and which negatively. That leads into a huge nasty debate with lots of accusations and name-calling that i don't intend to start right now but which i'm sure is already sprouting up in other comments.
As has already been pointed out (sarcastically) there's plenty of original content on YouTube already, so what's new about this is that it's professional? How exactly are they defining professional though?
I expect what they really mean is "content produced by people associated with Hollywood who have been paid upfront by a sponsor." Because to the extent of people creating content as a part time or full time job for which they get paid (either directly or through advertising, merchandising, or some other secondary deal) there's already quite a lot of professional content on YouTube.