Perhaps I wasn't clear. I'm not talking about giant studio works, I am talking about more independent artists. I'll focus on musicians since that's what I have the most experience with.
The argument that musicians would (only) get paid to perform live works for conventional rock bands. It doesn't necessarily work for people who fall more on the composition side over the performance side. There are things you can do in a studio that cannot be recreated faithfully live, and there are entire genres of music where a live show would consist of playing a bit of guitar or keyboard over a tape of the vast majority of the performance. As the gear continues to improve and people become more comfortable with it this is not always the case, but the failure to recognize craft as a worthy thing that is separate from performance is a real problem. Is a stunning musical piece's beauty diminished because it can't be performed live? The model which says, "play shows to get paid" leaves no room for that kind of music.
This is a hairy issue, at least if you believe that the arts have merit for entertainment and deeper purposes as I do.
Music, movies, software and books are all things that fall under IP. They take significant amounts of time and money and effort to create, but once created they are trivially reproduced. Without something in place to encourage a (potential) return on that investment there will be a lot less of them created. Some people say, "Well you should be creating it out of a love of creating it, not for monetary compensation." That is true to an extent but the fact is that without some possibility of a return, lots of people who love making art will be unable to devote the resources to it in order to make things worth making. There aren't enough hours in the day to keep a day job, handle adult responsibilities and family or social obligations, and also take the time needed to work on a game or an album or a book or (especially) a film.
There is room for a new model: self-publishing and pay-what-you-want purchases of things have in many instances proven to be viable. The trick then is getting exposure without the backing of a big studio. As this model becomes more prevalent I expect some sort of promotion-only services to become popular places to find new stuff worth checking out. It might work and it might not, and there may be other, better models yet to be created. The central issue that must be dealt with is providing incentive for people to continue to create stuff we like, and part of that is inevitably that we must take responsibility for rewarding the creators.
I went to see the new Sherlock Holmes movie tonight. It's just as good as the first Robert Downey Junior outing. The previews, however, were another matter entirely. Another CGI-fest by the makers of Transformers. Another CGI-fest based on Jack and the Beanstalk. Another CGI-fest whose entire premise I remember nothing about.
This is the problem. Special effects are good enough now that we can do pretty much anything with them, which translates in reality to bigger explosions and more eye-candy at the expense of a plot or even a premise. Sherlock Holmes was one of the few big-budget movies that has enough witty writing to keep me interested, and I suspect I'm not alone. More often than not I tend to wait for my movie buff friends to recommend something to me, and that usually means that it's out of the theaters before I get the urge to watch it.
What if he had got both these engines working by 1849? Would he have moved onto more advanced calculations or extended the use of mechanical computation to commerce like Hollerith punched cards did in 1889? If so, that would have advanced computing by 40 years.
It could have and in fact likely would have resulted in an entirely different way of developing computers. Someone else said that materials science would have become interesting and important much earlier than it did in order to increase the speed and efficiency of mechanical computers, and I agree. I could imagine bypassing electrical computing almost entirely and instead developing nanoscale mechanical technology or something like that.
It's fascinating stuff to think about and definitely provides lots of fodder for steampunk.
Along the same lines (though I'm now wandering off-topic), I could believe that computing WAS done much earlier, though I don't think it very likely. Every now and then I start wondering if perhaps the Greeks or the Egyptians or the Mayans or someone had some computing power that is too divergent from our own for us to recognize it as such. It's an interesting thought experiment.
Oh I don't think it's a response to the Tea Party. If it is, they're responding to the perversity that the Tea Party became post-hijacking. It looks to me like there are a fair number of common goals. The following are all titles found in OWS Redress of Grievances:
Elimination of All Private Benefits and “Perks” to Public Servants
A Fair Tax Code
Debt Reduction (of the National Debt)
Immigration Reform and Improved Border Security
End Currency Manipulation
Banking and Securities Reform (including reenacting Glass-Steagall)
Ending the Fed
That's seven issues (out of 22 listed in the OWS document) that the Tea Party and Occupy share. Some of them differ in detail--for instance, Tea Partiers are dead set against the Dream Act as a part of immigration reform--but others are identical, like ending currency manipulation and the Fed, as well as reinstating Glass-Steagall.
No, I think that people in general are just fed up with the way things have been going. Some lean left and some lean right, but nobody wants things to continue as they have been. I hope that enough people within the movements can see their commonalities on key issues and collaborate to force those in power to listen, because even if there's a ton of bickering about areas where they differ we'll still be a hell of a lot better off if some of these issues are addressed.
I suspect we'll see a lot of media stories playing them against each other in order to prevent the kind of cooperation that is necessary. I have faith that if non-rabid Occupy people can get this document endorsed and put in the spotlight, enough non-rabid Tea Party people will see the good parts that a beneficial dialog can take place.
There's a document that is associated with but not (yet) approved by the Occupy movement that looks quite promising to me. Here is a nicely formatted version of the document. It calls for a General Assembly of delegates in Philadelphia, and lists a Redress of Grievances. There are a few I take issue with and a few I'm on the fence about, but the vast majority of them I see as things that ought to be addressed, and I'm pretty libertarian.
If they really get their shit together, they will be a force to be reckoned with and a very positive agent of change.
I find it fascinating that in spite of evidence like this pointing to the pervasive effects of QM, people still believe consciousness is unaffected by it (and has no effect on it).
Not quite sure what the vailidity of that 40 year claim is. Everything I read is at least 100 years of oil left, factoring in growth.
With new refining methods, the Alberta Oil sands is now known to be able to provde vastly more oil than previously thought. I've heard (from multiple sources) that the Oil Sands alone could provide the world with enough Oil for 10-20 years.
There is a video series on Youtube where Albert Bartlett works through the numbers. He repeatedly shows articles and quotes from politicians saying "We have enough X for Y years!" followed by actually running through the numbers presented in the article to show a different, inevitably shorter estimate. After doing a number of these exercises, he says that the lesson to be learned is not to trust what you read or what you hear, but to do the numbers yourself.
So disregard the 40 years number, but also disregard the 100 years and the 10-20 years numbers. You want valid numbers? Run 'em. The math is rather easy, and no matter where you get your raw data the picture isn't nearly as rosy as 100 years factoring in growth. But again, don't take my word for it.
I mean really, where else in the world do they use moving trucks as frequently as they're used in the US? With as often as we buy (or, now, get kicked out of) houses, I bet we have three or four times as many moving trucks per capita as anywhere else. And now there's a DRONE specifically DESIGNED to land on them!
The term "AI" is just misleading. We have plenty of AI already, and it's done digitally. What most people mean when they say "AI" is "consciousness." The term "strong AI" is also used, but that's unnecessary jargon. There may be very good reasons that a purely digital consciousness cannot exist. There could even be reasons why a constructed consciousness cannot exist. We don't know nearly enough about the nature of consciousness to make an authoritative claim either way. The entire computational theory of mind is pretty suspect, though exploration of the model is still informative.
It's certainly an interesting thought experiment on the continuity of consciousness, but it's important not to ignore the implications of "conventional uploading" or the construction of a physically identical duplicate. The former case is IMO easier to deal with philosophically, but if this sort of thing were ever to become a reality then the latter case also must be considered. I have concluded that they will remain in the realm of imagination, but it will be fascinating if I'm wrong.
No human is owned? Really? Ever heard of slavery? Violations of rights happen all the damn time. The question is whether or not AIs have rights. You say that they don't, but you really haven't substantiated the statement.
Why would anybody install an add-on when the browser can do it without the add-on? HTML5 is capable (or so I've read), so Flash, although once necessary, no longer is.
That's the thing, though--HTML5 is not yet close to being a Flash killer for games, if nothing else. It's around 10x slower, more resource-intensive, and more cumbersome. Creating a silly protest of Flash isn't going to kill Flash. The only thing that will work is to throw more resources at HTML5 and JavaScript performance to bring them into parity or surpass the performance of Flash. It will surely happen at some point, but I think that point is at least a few years away.
Personally I'll be a little sad when it happens only because AS3's syntactical sugar is infinitely preferable to JS.
I'm more interested in seeing what the material looks like at a standard scale, preferably in a well-lit room and in motion. It reminds me (as its predecessor did a few years back) of the fuligin cloaks worn by torturers in the Book of the New Sun. One property of those was that due to the high absorption of light, they looked less like a thing of substance and more like a void or a deep shadow. I can imagine that you'd lose all shape information save for the outline of the material and whatever it is covering.
His plan does cut the defense budget by almost $200 billion and Homeland Security by $13B the first year, and his projected increases are at a lower rate than the CBO baseline, which is a lower rate than the President's budget.
This cut is a compromise from his campaign rhetoric of saying pretty much what you did, that halving the defense budget takes us to Y2K military spending levels with no harm to anybody but defense contractors.
"Now every once in a while someone reminds me that a hundred years ago someone did a calculation and predicted that the US would be out of oil perhaps in 25 years. We obviously were not; the calculation must have been wrong, therefore, of course, all calculations are wrong."
- Albert Bartlett
Gold is fairly arbitrary as a currency -- there are plenty of other scare elements that have few industrial uses that would be just as useful.
Gold has here along with silver and some other precious metals the advantage of being historically valued. Yes, it's arbitrary, but don't be too quick to discount the weight of history. The meter (and the foot before it) is just as arbitrary.
Slashdot Mirror
Perhaps I wasn't clear. I'm not talking about giant studio works, I am talking about more independent artists. I'll focus on musicians since that's what I have the most experience with.
The argument that musicians would (only) get paid to perform live works for conventional rock bands. It doesn't necessarily work for people who fall more on the composition side over the performance side. There are things you can do in a studio that cannot be recreated faithfully live, and there are entire genres of music where a live show would consist of playing a bit of guitar or keyboard over a tape of the vast majority of the performance. As the gear continues to improve and people become more comfortable with it this is not always the case, but the failure to recognize craft as a worthy thing that is separate from performance is a real problem. Is a stunning musical piece's beauty diminished because it can't be performed live? The model which says, "play shows to get paid" leaves no room for that kind of music.
This is a hairy issue, at least if you believe that the arts have merit for entertainment and deeper purposes as I do.
Music, movies, software and books are all things that fall under IP. They take significant amounts of time and money and effort to create, but once created they are trivially reproduced. Without something in place to encourage a (potential) return on that investment there will be a lot less of them created. Some people say, "Well you should be creating it out of a love of creating it, not for monetary compensation." That is true to an extent but the fact is that without some possibility of a return, lots of people who love making art will be unable to devote the resources to it in order to make things worth making. There aren't enough hours in the day to keep a day job, handle adult responsibilities and family or social obligations, and also take the time needed to work on a game or an album or a book or (especially) a film.
There is room for a new model: self-publishing and pay-what-you-want purchases of things have in many instances proven to be viable. The trick then is getting exposure without the backing of a big studio. As this model becomes more prevalent I expect some sort of promotion-only services to become popular places to find new stuff worth checking out. It might work and it might not, and there may be other, better models yet to be created. The central issue that must be dealt with is providing incentive for people to continue to create stuff we like, and part of that is inevitably that we must take responsibility for rewarding the creators.
I went to see the new Sherlock Holmes movie tonight. It's just as good as the first Robert Downey Junior outing. The previews, however, were another matter entirely. Another CGI-fest by the makers of Transformers. Another CGI-fest based on Jack and the Beanstalk. Another CGI-fest whose entire premise I remember nothing about.
This is the problem. Special effects are good enough now that we can do pretty much anything with them, which translates in reality to bigger explosions and more eye-candy at the expense of a plot or even a premise. Sherlock Holmes was one of the few big-budget movies that has enough witty writing to keep me interested, and I suspect I'm not alone. More often than not I tend to wait for my movie buff friends to recommend something to me, and that usually means that it's out of the theaters before I get the urge to watch it.
It ain't the prices; it's the content.
What if he had got both these engines working by 1849? Would he have moved onto more advanced calculations or extended the use of mechanical computation to commerce like Hollerith punched cards did in 1889? If so, that would have advanced computing by 40 years.
It could have and in fact likely would have resulted in an entirely different way of developing computers. Someone else said that materials science would have become interesting and important much earlier than it did in order to increase the speed and efficiency of mechanical computers, and I agree. I could imagine bypassing electrical computing almost entirely and instead developing nanoscale mechanical technology or something like that.
It's fascinating stuff to think about and definitely provides lots of fodder for steampunk.
Along the same lines (though I'm now wandering off-topic), I could believe that computing WAS done much earlier, though I don't think it very likely. Every now and then I start wondering if perhaps the Greeks or the Egyptians or the Mayans or someone had some computing power that is too divergent from our own for us to recognize it as such. It's an interesting thought experiment.
Is this that Happy Fun Ball I hear so much about?
Oh I don't think it's a response to the Tea Party. If it is, they're responding to the perversity that the Tea Party became post-hijacking. It looks to me like there are a fair number of common goals. The following are all titles found in OWS Redress of Grievances:
That's seven issues (out of 22 listed in the OWS document) that the Tea Party and Occupy share. Some of them differ in detail--for instance, Tea Partiers are dead set against the Dream Act as a part of immigration reform--but others are identical, like ending currency manipulation and the Fed, as well as reinstating Glass-Steagall.
No, I think that people in general are just fed up with the way things have been going. Some lean left and some lean right, but nobody wants things to continue as they have been. I hope that enough people within the movements can see their commonalities on key issues and collaborate to force those in power to listen, because even if there's a ton of bickering about areas where they differ we'll still be a hell of a lot better off if some of these issues are addressed.
I suspect we'll see a lot of media stories playing them against each other in order to prevent the kind of cooperation that is necessary. I have faith that if non-rabid Occupy people can get this document endorsed and put in the spotlight, enough non-rabid Tea Party people will see the good parts that a beneficial dialog can take place.
There's a document that is associated with but not (yet) approved by the Occupy movement that looks quite promising to me. Here is a nicely formatted version of the document. It calls for a General Assembly of delegates in Philadelphia, and lists a Redress of Grievances. There are a few I take issue with and a few I'm on the fence about, but the vast majority of them I see as things that ought to be addressed, and I'm pretty libertarian.
If they really get their shit together, they will be a force to be reckoned with and a very positive agent of change.
I find it fascinating that in spite of evidence like this pointing to the pervasive effects of QM, people still believe consciousness is unaffected by it (and has no effect on it).
Not quite sure what the vailidity of that 40 year claim is. Everything I read is at least 100 years of oil left, factoring in growth.
With new refining methods, the Alberta Oil sands is now known to be able to provde vastly more oil than previously thought. I've heard (from multiple sources) that the Oil Sands alone could provide the world with enough Oil for 10-20 years.
There is a video series on Youtube where Albert Bartlett works through the numbers. He repeatedly shows articles and quotes from politicians saying "We have enough X for Y years!" followed by actually running through the numbers presented in the article to show a different, inevitably shorter estimate. After doing a number of these exercises, he says that the lesson to be learned is not to trust what you read or what you hear, but to do the numbers yourself.
So disregard the 40 years number, but also disregard the 100 years and the 10-20 years numbers. You want valid numbers? Run 'em. The math is rather easy, and no matter where you get your raw data the picture isn't nearly as rosy as 100 years factoring in growth. But again, don't take my word for it.
If you make the process faster and less expensive, you only accelerate the oil's depletion. It's sort of a catch-22.
I mean really, where else in the world do they use moving trucks as frequently as they're used in the US? With as often as we buy (or, now, get kicked out of) houses, I bet we have three or four times as many moving trucks per capita as anywhere else. And now there's a DRONE specifically DESIGNED to land on them!
Wake up sheeple its 1984!!
The term "AI" is just misleading. We have plenty of AI already, and it's done digitally. What most people mean when they say "AI" is "consciousness." The term "strong AI" is also used, but that's unnecessary jargon. There may be very good reasons that a purely digital consciousness cannot exist. There could even be reasons why a constructed consciousness cannot exist. We don't know nearly enough about the nature of consciousness to make an authoritative claim either way. The entire computational theory of mind is pretty suspect, though exploration of the model is still informative.
It's certainly an interesting thought experiment on the continuity of consciousness, but it's important not to ignore the implications of "conventional uploading" or the construction of a physically identical duplicate. The former case is IMO easier to deal with philosophically, but if this sort of thing were ever to become a reality then the latter case also must be considered. I have concluded that they will remain in the realm of imagination, but it will be fascinating if I'm wrong.
No human is owned? Really? Ever heard of slavery? Violations of rights happen all the damn time. The question is whether or not AIs have rights. You say that they don't, but you really haven't substantiated the statement.
Why does the seat of consciousness matter?
Why would anybody install an add-on when the browser can do it without the add-on? HTML5 is capable (or so I've read), so Flash, although once necessary, no longer is.
That's the thing, though--HTML5 is not yet close to being a Flash killer for games, if nothing else. It's around 10x slower, more resource-intensive, and more cumbersome. Creating a silly protest of Flash isn't going to kill Flash. The only thing that will work is to throw more resources at HTML5 and JavaScript performance to bring them into parity or surpass the performance of Flash. It will surely happen at some point, but I think that point is at least a few years away.
Personally I'll be a little sad when it happens only because AS3's syntactical sugar is infinitely preferable to JS.
I'm more interested in seeing what the material looks like at a standard scale, preferably in a well-lit room and in motion. It reminds me (as its predecessor did a few years back) of the fuligin cloaks worn by torturers in the Book of the New Sun. One property of those was that due to the high absorption of light, they looked less like a thing of substance and more like a void or a deep shadow. I can imagine that you'd lose all shape information save for the outline of the material and whatever it is covering.
This the 21st century equivalent of the ghost story.
His plan does cut the defense budget by almost $200 billion and Homeland Security by $13B the first year, and his projected increases are at a lower rate than the CBO baseline, which is a lower rate than the President's budget.
This cut is a compromise from his campaign rhetoric of saying pretty much what you did, that halving the defense budget takes us to Y2K military spending levels with no harm to anybody but defense contractors.
Or follow this link to the most relevant chunk of the video beginning at Part 5, which deals directly with peak oil.
"Now every once in a while someone reminds me that a hundred years ago someone did a calculation and predicted that the US would be out of oil perhaps in 25 years. We obviously were not; the calculation must have been wrong, therefore, of course, all calculations are wrong."
- Albert Bartlett
Seriously? I'd pay decent money for a B3. Especially if you've got a Leslie cabinet to go with it.
Gold is fairly arbitrary as a currency -- there are plenty of other scare elements that have few industrial uses that would be just as useful.
Gold has here along with silver and some other precious metals the advantage of being historically valued. Yes, it's arbitrary, but don't be too quick to discount the weight of history. The meter (and the foot before it) is just as arbitrary.
1. Work at a wage that is below the true value of their labor, but no less than the minimum amount needed to keep that worker alive
This statement hides an important premise upon which it is based. I haven't read Das Kapital, so forgive me if it is addressed there.
What is the "true value" of someone's labor? How is that defined independently of a market, i.e. what someone is willing to pay for it?
You forgot to call him a "feeb."
Ooh! Ooh! Do me next!