I knew a guy once who was harassed mercilessly in boot camp,
DIs are required to make boot camp a harassful experience. Anyone who can't take it isn't considered tough enough... whiners aren't welcome.
I think this has become in some ways stronger since the end of drafting (even though in other ways, DIs are now monitored more closely about injury and Political Correctness). Now that all recruits are volunteers, there'd more of a uniformity of opinion within the camp. You don't get a random sampling of the population that brings in diverse types to stand with the oddball and prove he's not alone.
And there's the genuine point soldiers must trust each other with their lives- if someone can't make a social connection, he brings risk to the battlefield.
Right... but couldn't the same be said of any API? I mean, if the Apache plugin API changes, I'll need to rewrite my mod_foo module to use the new API.
No... because Apache is Open Source, any future plugin APIs will automatically be availible for you to read.
Even if Microsoft publishes specifications for their file formats now, you can't be sure they'll continue in the future. They might, for example, document them for 2-3 years, allowing StarOffice and other competitors to become complacent that Microsoft Office compatibility can be handled by occasionally referencing new XML schema... then release Office 2006 without publishing the spec, pulling the rug out of those who'd come to depend on it.
The 2003 spec is not guaranteed to remain useful. Microsoft can drop support for it at any time. They can bundle a change in the XML format alongside a needed security patch, for example. Or there are other ways they can force their Microsoft Office users to start sending in 2004 format, although that would require some blatant nastiness on their part.
More likely, they could just wait until some competitor is touting "100% ability to read files from Microsoft Office" as a selling point, then make next year's release incompatible (and without published schemas). This'll make those competitors look like liars, and sting those CTOs who dared dabble in non-Microsoft desktops, teaching them to never stray again.
The English spoken around the time of the American schism in the 1770s was no closer to modern UK usage than is modern US usage. (Any portrayl of 1400s-persons speaking something resembling British English is an anachronism)
All descendants of England have equal claim to that tongue. And the majority of them speak it American-style.
If you want these people's salaries to be "corrected," you're going to have to sway public opinion.
And what do you call publishing an article like that, aside from an attempt to "sway public opinion"?
Honestly, I'm so tired of reading articles by people who never understood the intersection of a supply curve and a demand curve.
If you take that point of view, then concepts like "overpaid" and "underpaid" are simply impossible. They've been defined out of existence: "We live in a capitalist paradise, so nothing can be wrong, because the invisible hand would've fixed it already. Therefore everything we see is good"
I don't have the right to that kind of control over people's lives any more than I have the right to choose their religion.
If you think that people are behaving wrongly, you have the right (even the duty?) to try convincing them otherwise.
The pay is definitely broken, but it isn't really apparent how to fix it.
If it's truely as bad as you say, then significant improvements would be easy to design. For starters, point out that a 30th year pilot is not 19 times as valuable as a new recruit, and move on from there.
In normal industries, you see salary ranges between say $30k starting and $60k senior. Doubling for a few decades of experience might be Ok. A 20x factor is not.
That quiz "reveals" many people to be Libertarain because, by the expansive definition used by the so-called "Libertarian" party, every government was libertarian.
Capitalism, theocracy, democracy, feudalism, communism... they all fit under the umbrella of "Government only acts to protect from the application of force and fraud".
That website's definition of "Libertarian" is incorrect (it really means "espousing the principles of individual liberty", not "government only acts to prevent force and fraud"). The capital-L party is no more about libertarianism than Democrats and Republicans are for democracy and republicanism. (That is, they definately support it in some way, but add much more to their platform than the simple definition of the word). Their definition of "government" is also humorously short-sighted.
A final note: 47% of the US federal budget can be inarguably classified as "Spending to prevent the unfair application of force". And depending on how you look at individual items, much of the other spending is there to block force or fraud also.
Government exists to self-perpetuate and self-propagate.
Humans exist to perpetuate and propagate. Religions exist to perpetuate and propagate. Viruses exist to perpetuate and propagate. Corporations exist to perpetuate and propagate. Agent Smith perpetuates and propagates.
By the principles of Darwinian theory, every complex structure exists to self-perpetuate and self-propagate. We are all greedy, and act for our own interests. It's why self-interest-driven capitalism works so reliably.
And if some profoundly amazing team of engineers succeeds in designing something like this within the next four decades, I challenge them to come up with a process for fabricating them.
The design is the hard part (probably impossible). But if a design was available, the rest is easy. Use a scanning tunnelling microscope to piece it together atom-by-atom. This might take years or decades; who cares? Once it's done, that one machine can build a 2nd one, etc etc.
That presupposes that construction-quality nanomachines are even possible, and they probably aren't.
Or how we're going to build robots sophisticated enough to figure out how to build solar cells and microwave transmitters out of moon rocks.
Having personally designed and built a few industrial robots, I can assure you that this is a trivial issue.
Trivial, huh? Do tell! Please point out any existing robot which, when handed a rock, turns it into an electronic device of any kind.
Robots to assemble and deploy cells and transmitters isn't quite trivial, but it's assuredly possible. But to build those things out of rocks- that's science fiction.
The advanced culture might enjoy a relatively non-destroyed planet to claim after their victory. The giant laser is a precision weapon, especially when compared to a teraton bomb. It can quickly burn earth's defense systems and population centers, without blowing huge craters everywhere and filling the atmosphere with radioactive dust.
Note, however, that anybody with StarTrek-style "transporter" technology could turn it into a better weapon than any laser/maser/phaser.
There's nothing funny about it. This is a real concern which may by itself prevent the construction of any lunar/orbital power plants.
Make the communication two-way. If the reception dish loses its lock on the power beam or if the transmitter loses its lock on the communication beam, the whole apparatus shuts off until it can be inspected.
And if the designer of the transmitter and the operator of the ground station are working together to redirect the beam? Who can stop them then?
Please note that the most probable explanation for those two groups cooperating to weaponize the system is direct orders from their superiors. Such orders are not inconsistent with the US's recent track record. (Of course, they wouldn't "strafe" across 100s of kilometers, which wouldn't do great damage anyway. They'd surgically target individual politcal opponents for firey death)
The previous post's mention of a "rogue government" could've been referring to exactly the US. (Or, if you believe the USA is benevolent, then remember that China is working hard on lunar industrialization as we type. Can they be trusted with this power?)
they could probably compete with Disney for bringing over a lot of the better anime.
Not as if that's a really competitive field or anything. (Top-quality anime is a rarity) Especially, there's no reason for Pixar to want to be in a low-margin business like re-distribution, especially when others already do it so well (Dreamworks has a new branch for foreign imports, for example).
The hilarious thing about Disney's relationship to both Pixar and Ghilbi is that they've become distributors for works superior to their own. Disney was once the undisputed king of animated films, but now their own output is second tier. It's apparently quite humiliating that they've become more a middleman than a creator (in terms of where the profit comes from).
Also interesting is that the fanboy-rumors surrounding Disney's licesning of the Ghilbi portfolio have been borne out. To some extent it's true: Disney signed those movies not to profit from their sales, but to bury them, preventing competition with their own new releases.
According to critics, "Spirited Away" was the best family film of the year, but Disney marginalized it to give their own "Treasure Planet" some breathing room. It's disconcerting to watch a corporation turn down immediate revenue to protect it's own reputation. I guess that Disney is more comfortable letting Pixar beat them with CG animation than watching some Japanese trounce them in the cel-style field.
What this article is about is that the drawings steps are being moved into the computer as well, so all of the actual artwork done will now be in the computer from start to finish.
Wrongo. RTA. Disney has decided that "Home on the Range" will be their last movie that looks hand-drawn. Everything after that, from "Chicken Little" and "Raphunzel Unbraided" onward, will be 3-d rendered. This is an artistic choice, not a technical one; they've decided that textured-mapping simply looks better than cel-shading. (And apparently they made this insight by looking at the revenues for Pixar shows versus Disney ones)
Storyboards and sketches will probably be done on paper, but most likely everything that winds up on the screen will be 100% digital origin.
That change is old news. Recent Disney movies like "Brother Bear" were already done on a paperless process. The pictures are in a computer from start to finish.
they had only recently figured out a way to keep the brain from having dozens, rather than hundreds, of cracks in it after freezing.
That sentence is probably mangled. Unless you think that 100 injuries is somehow better than 12.
Anyhow, that "problem" is really just one of the many obstacles to reviving a frozen human. The assumption has always been that future technology would have to do nanoscale neural repair work.
No "problem" you can point out today is meaningful, unless you can argue from base scientific theory that it'll never be solvable.
around people caring more about the frozen person that he does about people here today.
Which is exactly how wealthy, priviledged USians act today. Instead of feeding the poor, they live in mansions with solid-marble bathtubs and breakfast on scrambled sturgeon-egg and Kobe bacon.
It's perfectly consistent for a rich man to expect things to stay the same in the future. Those folks are always selfish; the silly part is investing in a scheme that won't pay off.
The fact is that Pixar knows how to tell a great story.
They learned from Disney. When the original Toy Story was still in production, it was Disneyians who re-arranged the plot to make it work as a movie. When Disney was first shown the draft Toy Story, it was all CG flash and no heart.
It doesn't fix the fact that most people don't want to pay for internet content in any way, shape or form.
People are totally willing to pay for internet content. See all these consumers who put down $40, $50, even $70 monthly for high-speed connections?
They wouldn't spend like that unless they desired internet content enough to give money for it. They only problem is that today they give this money to ISPs, not content-creators. Viewers are willing to pay for content; they're just not willing to buy content. If the cumbersome, distracting, and insecure process of paying for a website were removed, readers would have no problem forking over some cash. Removing those procedural obstacles is the quest of every micropayment project.
I'd be happy to give slashdot $0.02 per page I read, which would cover their bandwidth and then some. (Typical rate for one banner impression is much, much less than a penny. But few readers would hestitate to give $0.01 to read a good page. The time it'd take to transfer that money traditionally is more valuable than the cash itself)
PS. Part of the reason so many people feel guiltless about collecting MP3s off P2P is that they are paying for them already. File-sharing is an expensive hobby. They just pay Comcast and Dell instead of the RIAA.
technically any prior art, patented or not, counts.
No, only published prior art. If you secretly invented it, didn't reveal this to the public, but still can somehow prove it... it won't invalidate the patent.
One time, for example, a student came up with an invention and turned it in for a grade in college. Later on someone else filed for a patent on the same idea. Hearing about this, the college dug out the graded paper from their records, and got everyone involved to swear as to it's veracity. The USPTO acknowledged that yes, the student had invented it first, but the patent would still go to someone else.
Feudalism is a concentration of capital in the hands of a single group that hierarchically leases it to those who need it. (If US anti-trust law was magically abolished, the next successful mega-monopoly would automatically become the equivalent of a feudal state.)
Feudal lords didn't point a sword at your head and tell you to work- they merely owned 98% of all arable land (Churches had the rest). Peasants could either farm it according to the owner's rules, or be chased off his property (and onto someone else's)
Any system where one group has a virtual stranglehold on the means to success in an industry is an approximation of feudalism. And it does seem that the RIAA controls about 98% of record labels.
True, as long as you accept that 100 years is "relatively new". "Piracy" as copying documents came about at the end of the 1800s, and was used by British publishers to complain about US companies that reproduced their work without payment (since copyrights had no international validity, this was legal). That usage has exponentially gained acceptance sense then.
However, by legal definitions, piracy still means precisely "a violent crime committed on or near the ocean". No judge will call someone a "pirate" for anything less.
In the 1700s and earlier, piracy had occasionally applied to some "intellectual property infringements", in the sense that one of the most valuable things that could be copyrighted was a book of navigational charts, which real pirates were fond of grabbing.
Slashdot Mirror
I knew a guy once who was harassed mercilessly in boot camp,
DIs are required to make boot camp a harassful experience. Anyone who can't take it isn't considered tough enough... whiners aren't welcome.
I think this has become in some ways stronger since the end of drafting (even though in other ways, DIs are now monitored more closely about injury and Political Correctness). Now that all recruits are volunteers, there'd more of a uniformity of opinion within the camp. You don't get a random sampling of the population that brings in diverse types to stand with the oddball and prove he's not alone.
And there's the genuine point soldiers must trust each other with their lives- if someone can't make a social connection, he brings risk to the battlefield.
Right... but couldn't the same be said of any API? I mean, if the Apache plugin API changes, I'll need to rewrite my mod_foo module to use the new API.
No... because Apache is Open Source, any future plugin APIs will automatically be availible for you to read.
Even if Microsoft publishes specifications for their file formats now, you can't be sure they'll continue in the future. They might, for example, document them for 2-3 years, allowing StarOffice and other competitors to become complacent that Microsoft Office compatibility can be handled by occasionally referencing new XML schema... then release Office 2006 without publishing the spec, pulling the rug out of those who'd come to depend on it.
The 2003 spec is not guaranteed to remain useful. Microsoft can drop support for it at any time. They can bundle a change in the XML format alongside a needed security patch, for example. Or there are other ways they can force their Microsoft Office users to start sending in 2004 format, although that would require some blatant nastiness on their part.
More likely, they could just wait until some competitor is touting "100% ability to read files from Microsoft Office" as a selling point, then make next year's release incompatible (and without published schemas). This'll make those competitors look like liars, and sting those CTOs who dared dabble in non-Microsoft desktops, teaching them to never stray again.
The English spoken around the time of the American schism in the 1770s was no closer to modern UK usage than is modern US usage. (Any portrayl of 1400s-persons speaking something resembling British English is an anachronism)
All descendants of England have equal claim to that tongue. And the majority of them speak it American-style.
If you want these people's salaries to be "corrected," you're going to have to sway public opinion.
And what do you call publishing an article like that, aside from an attempt to "sway public opinion"?
Honestly, I'm so tired of reading articles by people who never understood the intersection of a supply curve and a demand curve.
If you take that point of view, then concepts like "overpaid" and "underpaid" are simply impossible. They've been defined out of existence: "We live in a capitalist paradise, so nothing can be wrong, because the invisible hand would've fixed it already. Therefore everything we see is good"
I don't have the right to that kind of control over people's lives any more than I have the right to choose their religion.
If you think that people are behaving wrongly, you have the right (even the duty?) to try convincing them otherwise.
The pay is definitely broken, but it isn't really apparent how to fix it.
If it's truely as bad as you say, then significant improvements would be easy to design. For starters, point out that a 30th year pilot is not 19 times as valuable as a new recruit, and move on from there.
In normal industries, you see salary ranges between say $30k starting and $60k senior. Doubling for a few decades of experience might be Ok. A 20x factor is not.
That quiz "reveals" many people to be Libertarain because, by the expansive definition used by the so-called "Libertarian" party, every government was libertarian.
Capitalism, theocracy, democracy, feudalism, communism... they all fit under the umbrella of "Government only acts to protect from the application of force and fraud".
That website's definition of "Libertarian" is incorrect (it really means "espousing the principles of individual liberty", not "government only acts to prevent force and fraud"). The capital-L party is no more about libertarianism than Democrats and Republicans are for democracy and republicanism. (That is, they definately support it in some way, but add much more to their platform than the simple definition of the word). Their definition of "government" is also humorously short-sighted.
A final note: 47% of the US federal budget can be inarguably classified as "Spending to prevent the unfair application of force". And depending on how you look at individual items, much of the other spending is there to block force or fraud also.
Government exists to self-perpetuate and self-propagate.
Humans exist to perpetuate and propagate.
Religions exist to perpetuate and propagate.
Viruses exist to perpetuate and propagate.
Corporations exist to perpetuate and propagate.
Agent Smith perpetuates and propagates.
By the principles of Darwinian theory, every complex structure exists to self-perpetuate and self-propagate. We are all greedy, and act for our own interests. It's why self-interest-driven capitalism works so reliably.
We're the Morelocks...
You raise the other people for food?
And if some profoundly amazing team of engineers succeeds in designing something like this within the next four decades, I challenge them to come up with a process for fabricating them.
The design is the hard part (probably impossible). But if a design was available, the rest is easy. Use a scanning tunnelling microscope to piece it together atom-by-atom. This might take years or decades; who cares? Once it's done, that one machine can build a 2nd one, etc etc.
That presupposes that construction-quality nanomachines are even possible, and they probably aren't.
- Or how we're going to build robots sophisticated enough to figure out how to build solar cells and microwave transmitters out of moon rocks.
Having personally designed and built a few industrial robots, I can assure you that this is a trivial issue.Trivial, huh? Do tell! Please point out any existing robot which, when handed a rock, turns it into an electronic device of any kind.
Robots to assemble and deploy cells and transmitters isn't quite trivial, but it's assuredly possible. But to build those things out of rocks- that's science fiction.
The advanced culture might enjoy a relatively non-destroyed planet to claim after their victory. The giant laser is a precision weapon, especially when compared to a teraton bomb. It can quickly burn earth's defense systems and population centers, without blowing huge craters everywhere and filling the atmosphere with radioactive dust.
Note, however, that anybody with StarTrek-style "transporter" technology could turn it into a better weapon than any laser/maser/phaser.
And you're trusting that nobody will focus all of the hundreds of beams on a single terrestrial target for a 5-second burst?
This is so preventable that it makes me laugh.
There's nothing funny about it. This is a real concern which may by itself prevent the construction of any lunar/orbital power plants.
Make the communication two-way. If the reception dish loses its lock on the power beam or if the transmitter loses its lock on the communication beam, the whole apparatus shuts off until it can be inspected.
And if the designer of the transmitter and the operator of the ground station are working together to redirect the beam? Who can stop them then?
Please note that the most probable explanation for those two groups cooperating to weaponize the system is direct orders from their superiors. Such orders are not inconsistent with the US's recent track record. (Of course, they wouldn't "strafe" across 100s of kilometers, which wouldn't do great damage anyway. They'd surgically target individual politcal opponents for firey death)
The previous post's mention of a "rogue government" could've been referring to exactly the US. (Or, if you believe the USA is benevolent, then remember that China is working hard on lunar industrialization as we type. Can they be trusted with this power?)
they could probably compete with Disney for bringing over a lot of the better anime.
Not as if that's a really competitive field or anything. (Top-quality anime is a rarity) Especially, there's no reason for Pixar to want to be in a low-margin business like re-distribution, especially when others already do it so well (Dreamworks has a new branch for foreign imports, for example).
The hilarious thing about Disney's relationship to both Pixar and Ghilbi is that they've become distributors for works superior to their own. Disney was once the undisputed king of animated films, but now their own output is second tier. It's apparently quite humiliating that they've become more a middleman than a creator (in terms of where the profit comes from).
Also interesting is that the fanboy-rumors surrounding Disney's licesning of the Ghilbi portfolio have been borne out. To some extent it's true: Disney signed those movies not to profit from their sales, but to bury them, preventing competition with their own new releases.
According to critics, "Spirited Away" was the best family film of the year, but Disney marginalized it to give their own "Treasure Planet" some breathing room. It's disconcerting to watch a corporation turn down immediate revenue to protect it's own reputation. I guess that Disney is more comfortable letting Pixar beat them with CG animation than watching some Japanese trounce them in the cel-style field.
What this article is about is that the drawings steps are being moved into the computer as well, so all of the actual artwork done will now be in the computer from start to finish.
Wrongo. RTA. Disney has decided that "Home on the Range" will be their last movie that looks hand-drawn. Everything after that, from "Chicken Little" and "Raphunzel Unbraided" onward, will be 3-d rendered. This is an artistic choice, not a technical one; they've decided that textured-mapping simply looks better than cel-shading. (And apparently they made this insight by looking at the revenues for Pixar shows versus Disney ones)
Storyboards and sketches will probably be done on paper, but most likely everything that winds up on the screen will be 100% digital origin.
That change is old news. Recent Disney movies like "Brother Bear" were already done on a paperless process. The pictures are in a computer from start to finish.
Hand-drawn anime is already dead. Or at least, no major current TV series was done on paper. They were all drawn directly onto a computer.
they had only recently figured out a way to keep the brain from having dozens, rather than hundreds, of cracks in it after freezing.
That sentence is probably mangled. Unless you think that 100 injuries is somehow better than 12.
Anyhow, that "problem" is really just one of the many obstacles to reviving a frozen human. The assumption has always been that future technology would have to do nanoscale neural repair work.
No "problem" you can point out today is meaningful, unless you can argue from base scientific theory that it'll never be solvable.
around people caring more about the frozen person that he does about people here today.
Which is exactly how wealthy, priviledged USians act today. Instead of feeding the poor, they live in mansions with solid-marble bathtubs and breakfast on scrambled sturgeon-egg and Kobe bacon.
It's perfectly consistent for a rich man to expect things to stay the same in the future. Those folks are always selfish; the silly part is investing in a scheme that won't pay off.
The fact is that Pixar knows how to tell a great story.
They learned from Disney. When the original Toy Story was still in production, it was Disneyians who re-arranged the plot to make it work as a movie. When Disney was first shown the draft Toy Story, it was all CG flash and no heart.
It doesn't fix the fact that most people don't want to pay for internet content in any way, shape or form.
People are totally willing to pay for internet content. See all these consumers who put down $40, $50, even $70 monthly for high-speed connections?
They wouldn't spend like that unless they desired internet content enough to give money for it. They only problem is that today they give this money to ISPs, not content-creators. Viewers are willing to pay for content; they're just not willing to buy content. If the cumbersome, distracting, and insecure process of paying for a website were removed, readers would have no problem forking over some cash. Removing those procedural obstacles is the quest of every micropayment project.
I'd be happy to give slashdot $0.02 per page I read, which would cover their bandwidth and then some. (Typical rate for one banner impression is much, much less than a penny. But few readers would hestitate to give $0.01 to read a good page. The time it'd take to transfer that money traditionally is more valuable than the cash itself)
PS. Part of the reason so many people feel guiltless about collecting MP3s off P2P is that they are paying for them already. File-sharing is an expensive hobby. They just pay Comcast and Dell instead of the RIAA.
technically any prior art, patented or not, counts.
No, only published prior art. If you secretly invented it, didn't reveal this to the public, but still can somehow prove it... it won't invalidate the patent.
One time, for example, a student came up with an invention and turned it in for a grade in college. Later on someone else filed for a patent on the same idea. Hearing about this, the college dug out the graded paper from their records, and got everyone involved to swear as to it's veracity. The USPTO acknowledged that yes, the student had invented it first, but the patent would still go to someone else.
Yes, and Macs are PCs...
(I too know what they mean, but still)
Feudalism is a concentration of capital in the hands of a single group that hierarchically leases it to those who need it. (If US anti-trust law was magically abolished, the next successful mega-monopoly would automatically become the equivalent of a feudal state.)
Feudal lords didn't point a sword at your head and tell you to work- they merely owned 98% of all arable land (Churches had the rest). Peasants could either farm it according to the owner's rules, or be chased off his property (and onto someone else's)
Any system where one group has a virtual stranglehold on the means to success in an industry is an approximation of feudalism. And it does seem that the RIAA controls about 98% of record labels.
AC says:
That definition is a relatively new one
True, as long as you accept that 100 years is "relatively new". "Piracy" as copying documents came about at the end of the 1800s, and was used by British publishers to complain about US companies that reproduced their work without payment (since copyrights had no international validity, this was legal). That usage has exponentially gained acceptance sense then.
However, by legal definitions, piracy still means precisely "a violent crime committed on or near the ocean". No judge will call someone a "pirate" for anything less.
In the 1700s and earlier, piracy had occasionally applied to some "intellectual property infringements", in the sense that one of the most valuable things that could be copyrighted was a book of navigational charts, which real pirates were fond of grabbing.