Patronage still exists, and indeed is how most creative works are funded. It's just that now the patrons are not kings, they're publishers.
I'd agree with the first, but not the second. The biggest form of patronage these days is government grants for artists (at least in Australia - don't know what it's like in the US).
And 'Jedi' is now a legal religion in the UK, if I am not mistaken.
You are. A hoax went around about a decade ago, saying that if sufficient people marked "Jedi" as their religion on the census, they'd have to acknowledge it as an official religion. But it was, well, a hoax. They have to do no such thing.
The curved back is a mechanical requirement, necessary to include the physical components. The placement of the screen is in the only place any device has placed their screen - the center. The home button, I'll give you. Bezel size, corner radius? These things should be patentable now? So nobody can make a device with a 3cm bezel because Apple patented it first? That's almost as ridiculous as "rectangular. round corners".
Apple's whole design aesthetic is minimalist. That's cool - lots of people like that design. But getting a design patent on a minimalist design is ridiculous, because what you're actually patenting is the/absence/ of design. The perfectly minimalist design is, almost by defintion, a strict subset of the design of all other tablets. If Apple wants a patent design, that's fine - but it needs to be distinctive. More than just a very common geometric shape.
As for the rectangular tablet thing, Apple like any claimant must describe in detail every single aspect in legalese. The rectangular tablet is one of the many details they had to spell out.
No, no they don't. Design patents are illustrative, not descriptive. And it's very hard to think of anything this design patent shows that isn't "rectangular. round corners": USD627777S1
Interesting concept... could never happen for legal reasons...
Sure it could. Just wait the 16 years for copyright to expire, so you can create more art building on the legacy of previous contributors to our culture.
...and then die of salmonella poisoning when you try the same thing with chicken or pork. Note that in all the cases listed above, gaining vitamin C from meat was done in the case of a severely restricted diet (Inuit, and French soldiers with a poor supply line).
From that very same article, even people in modern, developed countries can rarely be afflicted by scurvy. Only of the citations is available in full, and only one other cites the cause of the scurvy in the abstract, but in both those cases, it's due to a heavy-meat diet, and an almost complete absence of fresh vegetable and fruit.
Yes, technically you can survive on just meat, even just on the prime cuts. But doing so requires a very restricted, boring diet - like rare steak for dinner every day - and people aren't going to stick to it. Except people like the OP, I guess, who think that a slice of orange with all its evil carbohydrates is going to drop his life expectancy by a decade.
That's a true statement if you entered a new era, since for some reason our mental model thinks we are only in one era at a time, so entering one means leaving the other.
That's only true if you take the absurdly literal perspective that "X era" is defined solely on the basis of whether X exists at all. Using the same reasoning, I could say we are still in the stone age (obsidian knives are used in delicate surgeries) or the bronze age (I've got a bronze fireplace poker lying around) or the steam age (steam engines are widely used for power generation).
We are past the era of trains; that is, the era that was defined by the emergence and transformative nature of the train.
Language is meaning. You can't think without language. You can feel, but not think. Try having a thought that doesn't use words. Twisting words is twisting meaning.
Then maybe you should stop twisting it, just so you can ride your own little linguistic hobby horse.
No - sailors got scurvy because they didn't get enough vitamin C. If you eat carbohydrates you may need slightly more vitamin C, but with or without carbohydrates, no source of vitamin C results scurvy. Inuits don't get it because they ate offal - some internal organs contain vitamin C.
If you tell modern Americans (or Australians) to eat low-carb, high-protein and avoid fresh fruit and veg, they're not going to be eating offal. They're going to be eating exactly the things you outlined - beef (mince or steak), chicken, pork, lamb, fish. And they're not going to get everything they need from that.
Watch one of these lectures if you want substantiation
What, you mean a physicist cum quack-dietician? He has no formal training in nutrition, and those that do disagree with him.
To draw a transportation analogy (not cars, I'm afraid):
The Industrial revolution was the Train Age. There was sudden availability of cheap, reliable transport across vast distances for both people and cargo. Trains came to symbolize the great advances that came with the industrial revolution, as well as enabling them. We are in a Post-Train age. That doesn't mean that we don't have any trains, it means that they're no longer the defining symbol of the age. They've faded into practical ubiquity.
It's the same with the PC - the personal computer was the point at which the information age really took off. There was sudden access to cheap, reliable communication across vast distances. The PC has come to symbolize all the advances in the information age. When we move to a Post-PC age, it doesn't mean we won't have any, it means that they've become everyday items of practical, utilitarian uses, instead of the grand symbol they once were.
I think a lot of Microsoft's success with consumer-grade PCs has been because of their dominance in the business world. You go out to buy a home PC, you want the same sort of OS and tools that you find on your work computer.
I think it used to work that way. Back in the day, computers were new and expensive. People's first experience was what they used at work. When they bought their computer from home, they bought the same one they were used to. Note that the hobbyists, who had experience with computers outside business, overwhelmingly turned to the Commodores, Amigas, Apples, Spectrums, etc.
Now, though, people's first experience with computers is in their home. In fact, IT departments are seeing the opposite effect, where Apple users are demanding they be able to use the same system in business that they do at home. Now that computers are cheap, consumer items, instead of expensive business items slowly making a transition into the home, consumer experience is becoming more of a driving force than business experience.
Yeah, you got ripped off. Just like you've always been ripped off when you pay full price at launch, compared to the people who buy it in the bargain bin for $10 4 years later.
I'm sorry, you've now changed your statement - first it was "cheap, healthy food products", and now it's "carrots" (which, fun fact, can be quite starchy).
No, that's what we in the business call "an example".
Grass-fed hamburger, pork ribs, grilled chicken and fish are a basis for a healthy diet
Atkins? I thought you were dead. Remember: just because you have scurvy, it doesn't mean you're a pirate.
So, given that, yes, the cheap availability of carbohydrates (including carrots), crowds out healthy food products
Ignoring your trendy "carbohydrates are the devil" monomania for the moment, I can buy chicken breasts at $14/kg, "organic" beef mince (ground beef for you yanks) for $16/kg, and fresh fish for $17 - and that's just from my local supermarket. That's around $3 - $4 a serve.
Not to mention the idea that animal protein is being "crowded out" of the American diet is purely absurd. The average consumption of beef and chicken is around 30kg a year per capita, and pork around 25kg. That's 200g a day, just in those meats, not counting low consumption stuff like lamb, turkey, game, etc.
People are getting fat (and sick) because they're not eating properly. But blaming one single cause is simplistic jingoism. People don't have the time to cook any more, so they eat more and more pre-prepared food and take-away, which come with fats and sugars (yes, carbohydrates) added in. Restaurants and other outlets compete with each other on "value for money", which leads to obscene serving sizes. Technology has reduced the necessity of exercise, and the modern, corporate worklife limits opportunity for recreational exercise, and piles on the stress. Obesity and depression have significant correlation, and the constant bombardment of impossible ideals of body tend to push people into unhealthy extremes. And there's probably a dozen other significant contributors that I can't think of off the top of my head. Claiming that everyone will be healthy and live forever if we just ban corn, potatoes and white bread is just silly.
The following are the apps that I run under Wine (just to give you an idea): - World of Warcraft - Audible - Goldwave Pro (to un-DRM the Audible files) My wife also uses some website's proprietary software to assemble photo albums, which are then uploaded, printed, bound, and shipped to her.
Only in the US - most of the rest of the world doesn't subsidise corn farming. That's why people often complain that familiar things like sodas taste different in America - corn syrup is used in everything. Australia is a large beef exporter, and only 40% of our beef is raised in feedlots. You can raise beef on land that's generally unsuitable for raising crops, so it's not necessarily an either-or proposition.
And that still doesn't support your point against the OP - the easy, cheap availability of carbohydrates doesn't make carrots expensive or hard to find.
Yeah, but that sorta gets around (one of) the cool points about centralization. If you upgrade the coal plant to a nuke or renewable plant, suddenly all your electric cars become nuke/renewable powered. If you're generating hydrogen through hydrocarbon reforming, you're basically stuck with a fossil fuel source. If you want to go renewable, you introduce an extra Renewable -> Electricity -> Hydrogen conversion in there.
but there is no reason we couldn't use the existing petroleum style of distribution to move hydrogen
Yes, yes there is. Petroleum is a liquid at normal temperature and pressure; hydrogen's a gas, and a particularly pernicious one to store and transport. I just don't know why you want to whack an extra step in there, with all the inefficiencies that adds, just so you can use your car to turn chemical energy into motion, instead of turning electrical energy into motion.
Yeah, like I said, anything beyond The Elenium and The Belgariad is just recycled - that definitely includes The Tamuli. I still think The Mallorean's the worst though - he explicitly makes the point that it's just The Belgariad over and over again - because history repeats itself, due to that cosmic accident.
Which is why I said "engage the mechanism", not "haul it out, and slot the new one in". Once there's enough cars on the road to justify it, you can do much better than a forklift.
Slashdot Mirror
Patronage still exists, and indeed is how most creative works are funded. It's just that now the patrons are not kings, they're publishers.
I'd agree with the first, but not the second. The biggest form of patronage these days is government grants for artists (at least in Australia - don't know what it's like in the US).
And 'Jedi' is now a legal religion in the UK, if I am not mistaken.
You are. A hoax went around about a decade ago, saying that if sufficient people marked "Jedi" as their religion on the census, they'd have to acknowledge it as an official religion. But it was, well, a hoax. They have to do no such thing.
The curved back is a mechanical requirement, necessary to include the physical components. The placement of the screen is in the only place any device has placed their screen - the center. The home button, I'll give you. Bezel size, corner radius? These things should be patentable now? So nobody can make a device with a 3cm bezel because Apple patented it first? That's almost as ridiculous as "rectangular. round corners".
Apple's whole design aesthetic is minimalist. That's cool - lots of people like that design. But getting a design patent on a minimalist design is ridiculous, because what you're actually patenting is the /absence/ of design. The perfectly minimalist design is, almost by defintion, a strict subset of the design of all other tablets. If Apple wants a patent design, that's fine - but it needs to be distinctive. More than just a very common geometric shape.
Then maybe Apple's "rectangle with a screen" religious patent should be nullified: USD627777S1
As for the rectangular tablet thing, Apple like any claimant must describe in detail every single aspect in legalese. The rectangular tablet is one of the many details they had to spell out.
No, no they don't. Design patents are illustrative, not descriptive. And it's very hard to think of anything this design patent shows that isn't "rectangular. round corners": USD627777S1
Interesting concept... could never happen for legal reasons...
Sure it could. Just wait the 16 years for copyright to expire, so you can create more art building on the legacy of previous contributors to our culture.
...and then die of salmonella poisoning when you try the same thing with chicken or pork. Note that in all the cases listed above, gaining vitamin C from meat was done in the case of a severely restricted diet (Inuit, and French soldiers with a poor supply line).
From that very same article, even people in modern, developed countries can rarely be afflicted by scurvy. Only of the citations is available in full, and only one other cites the cause of the scurvy in the abstract, but in both those cases, it's due to a heavy-meat diet, and an almost complete absence of fresh vegetable and fruit.
Yes, technically you can survive on just meat, even just on the prime cuts. But doing so requires a very restricted, boring diet - like rare steak for dinner every day - and people aren't going to stick to it. Except people like the OP, I guess, who think that a slice of orange with all its evil carbohydrates is going to drop his life expectancy by a decade.
Argue my point, not your dislike of it.
You have no point.
That's a true statement if you entered a new era, since for some reason our mental model thinks we are only in one era at a time, so entering one means leaving the other.
That's only true if you take the absurdly literal perspective that "X era" is defined solely on the basis of whether X exists at all. Using the same reasoning, I could say we are still in the stone age (obsidian knives are used in delicate surgeries) or the bronze age (I've got a bronze fireplace poker lying around) or the steam age (steam engines are widely used for power generation).
We are past the era of trains; that is, the era that was defined by the emergence and transformative nature of the train.
Language is meaning. You can't think without language. You can feel, but not think. Try having a thought that doesn't use words. Twisting words is twisting meaning.
Then maybe you should stop twisting it, just so you can ride your own little linguistic hobby horse.
No - sailors got scurvy because they didn't get enough vitamin C. If you eat carbohydrates you may need slightly more vitamin C, but with or without carbohydrates, no source of vitamin C results scurvy. Inuits don't get it because they ate offal - some internal organs contain vitamin C.
If you tell modern Americans (or Australians) to eat low-carb, high-protein and avoid fresh fruit and veg, they're not going to be eating offal. They're going to be eating exactly the things you outlined - beef (mince or steak), chicken, pork, lamb, fish. And they're not going to get everything they need from that.
Watch one of these lectures if you want substantiation
What, you mean a physicist cum quack-dietician? He has no formal training in nutrition, and those that do disagree with him.
As for scurvy, you'll note that it was caused by eating hard tack (carbohydrates), not due to a lack of fresh fruit.
No, I won't. Scurvy is caused by a vitamin C deficiency, not by consumption of carbohydrates.
As for the rest of your post, it's just more of the same - unsubstantiated assertions.
A porthole is a specific type of portal.
But yeah, I've got no defence for syntactic foam, unless they pureed a ton of style guides to make the thing.
I've found that people with an IQ of over 80 think that judging people's IQ by the movies they watch says more about the observer than the observed.
But if 100% of your CEOs are complaining, it will happen fast. The "considered quite annoying by IT departments" is still true though.
Aaaaand, the obligatory: http://xkcd.com/644/
To draw a transportation analogy (not cars, I'm afraid):
The Industrial revolution was the Train Age. There was sudden availability of cheap, reliable transport across vast distances for both people and cargo. Trains came to symbolize the great advances that came with the industrial revolution, as well as enabling them. We are in a Post-Train age. That doesn't mean that we don't have any trains, it means that they're no longer the defining symbol of the age. They've faded into practical ubiquity.
It's the same with the PC - the personal computer was the point at which the information age really took off. There was sudden access to cheap, reliable communication across vast distances. The PC has come to symbolize all the advances in the information age. When we move to a Post-PC age, it doesn't mean we won't have any, it means that they've become everyday items of practical, utilitarian uses, instead of the grand symbol they once were.
I think a lot of Microsoft's success with consumer-grade PCs has been because of their dominance in the business world. You go out to buy a home PC, you want the same sort of OS and tools that you find on your work computer.
I think it used to work that way. Back in the day, computers were new and expensive. People's first experience was what they used at work. When they bought their computer from home, they bought the same one they were used to. Note that the hobbyists, who had experience with computers outside business, overwhelmingly turned to the Commodores, Amigas, Apples, Spectrums, etc.
Now, though, people's first experience with computers is in their home. In fact, IT departments are seeing the opposite effect, where Apple users are demanding they be able to use the same system in business that they do at home. Now that computers are cheap, consumer items, instead of expensive business items slowly making a transition into the home, consumer experience is becoming more of a driving force than business experience.
Yeah, you got ripped off. Just like you've always been ripped off when you pay full price at launch, compared to the people who buy it in the bargain bin for $10 4 years later.
I'm sorry, you've now changed your statement - first it was "cheap, healthy food products", and now it's "carrots" (which, fun fact, can be quite starchy).
No, that's what we in the business call "an example".
Grass-fed hamburger, pork ribs, grilled chicken and fish are a basis for a healthy diet
Atkins? I thought you were dead. Remember: just because you have scurvy, it doesn't mean you're a pirate.
So, given that, yes, the cheap availability of carbohydrates (including carrots), crowds out healthy food products
Ignoring your trendy "carbohydrates are the devil" monomania for the moment, I can buy chicken breasts at $14/kg, "organic" beef mince (ground beef for you yanks) for $16/kg, and fresh fish for $17 - and that's just from my local supermarket. That's around $3 - $4 a serve.
Not to mention the idea that animal protein is being "crowded out" of the American diet is purely absurd. The average consumption of beef and chicken is around 30kg a year per capita, and pork around 25kg. That's 200g a day, just in those meats, not counting low consumption stuff like lamb, turkey, game, etc.
People are getting fat (and sick) because they're not eating properly. But blaming one single cause is simplistic jingoism. People don't have the time to cook any more, so they eat more and more pre-prepared food and take-away, which come with fats and sugars (yes, carbohydrates) added in. Restaurants and other outlets compete with each other on "value for money", which leads to obscene serving sizes. Technology has reduced the necessity of exercise, and the modern, corporate worklife limits opportunity for recreational exercise, and piles on the stress. Obesity and depression have significant correlation, and the constant bombardment of impossible ideals of body tend to push people into unhealthy extremes. And there's probably a dozen other significant contributors that I can't think of off the top of my head. Claiming that everyone will be healthy and live forever if we just ban corn, potatoes and white bread is just silly.
The following are the apps that I run under Wine (just to give you an idea):
- World of Warcraft
- Audible
- Goldwave Pro (to un-DRM the Audible files)
My wife also uses some website's proprietary software to assemble photo albums, which are then uploaded, printed, bound, and shipped to her.
Only in the US - most of the rest of the world doesn't subsidise corn farming. That's why people often complain that familiar things like sodas taste different in America - corn syrup is used in everything. Australia is a large beef exporter, and only 40% of our beef is raised in feedlots. You can raise beef on land that's generally unsuitable for raising crops, so it's not necessarily an either-or proposition.
And that still doesn't support your point against the OP - the easy, cheap availability of carbohydrates doesn't make carrots expensive or hard to find.
Yeah, but that sorta gets around (one of) the cool points about centralization. If you upgrade the coal plant to a nuke or renewable plant, suddenly all your electric cars become nuke/renewable powered. If you're generating hydrogen through hydrocarbon reforming, you're basically stuck with a fossil fuel source. If you want to go renewable, you introduce an extra Renewable -> Electricity -> Hydrogen conversion in there.
but there is no reason we couldn't use the existing petroleum style of distribution to move hydrogen
Yes, yes there is. Petroleum is a liquid at normal temperature and pressure; hydrogen's a gas, and a particularly pernicious one to store and transport. I just don't know why you want to whack an extra step in there, with all the inefficiencies that adds, just so you can use your car to turn chemical energy into motion, instead of turning electrical energy into motion.
Yeah, like I said, anything beyond The Elenium and The Belgariad is just recycled - that definitely includes The Tamuli. I still think The Mallorean's the worst though - he explicitly makes the point that it's just The Belgariad over and over again - because history repeats itself, due to that cosmic accident.
Which is why I said "engage the mechanism", not "haul it out, and slot the new one in". Once there's enough cars on the road to justify it, you can do much better than a forklift.