I should have included this in my post: Not only can I now see my own house in.5M resolution, but to a greater or lesser scale Google has given me a view of the entire fucking planet. I can see Red Square. I can see the Sahale. If I want, I can explore overhead views of North Korea, Iraq or Madagascar.
None of this was ever, or would ever have been, possible before. When I was in school these places were abstract theoretical things and if the map geeks had their way they would be still. Now I can see them as part of a whole planet, their physical scale; how to get from here to there - and that's a really big fucking deal. Thanks, Google.
Re:Your right to what?
on
BTJunkie No More?
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
The right of the common man to appropriate and adapt stories goes back perhaps to the second campfire, if not earlier. The notion that this is something that should be prevented is a rather recent invention. It is also quite absurd since a modern work that isn't derivative of Sophocles' Oedipus trilogy in 420BCE is ridiculously rare and it's well known (and obvious) that Sophocles' work was a fusion of all the trends of popular art of the time - that he condensed everything into three plays is his signal contribution.
We don't even think about these things much any more, and we should because it has become absurd. That lie your sister told you in an email about her one-night stand gone bad with megafail dweeb photo attached? That email is a creative work of fiction, her own work protected by copyright - and though she owns the rights to the photo megafail dweeb owns the rights to his likeness. Your repost to Facebook or Twitter or Reddit of the attached image (even photoshopped) is a derivative work proscribed by law without permission, and a violation of the law. In reality she's an attention whore and she's hoping you'll leak the megafail dweeb story to get her Facebook friends - but Megafail dweeb still has rights to sue you under the current ridiculous system.
Modern copyright is saying "here, I have stood on the shoulders of giants as have the 200 generations before me, but my addition to this work is special above all works that came before, and none who come after may stand on my shoulders ever until my work is lost to time. No more art shall pass." It is also saying that all other authors from ages past must be included in the enforced forgettery, whether or not it was their wish. It also means that something as simple as a textbook on mathematics, physics or chemistry published 80 years ago - long since the authors are dead cannot be reproduced to teach our children now even though so little has changed in those arts and sciences that they would still be far more useful works than the crap that passes for primary education today. My own son's high school world history texts omits the inventions of gunpowder, firearms and cannon as forces for social change. His chemistry texts omit so much they may as well be "Alice in Wonderland" - and that's for fear he might use them to discover how to manufacture explosives or drugs. Civics? That's not meaningfully taught at all, as the responsibility of the citizen to correct his government is entirely omitted.
That's what this is: an establishment of enforced forgettery for the purpose of selling us new lamps as old. The whole thing is a fraud and a theft of our intellectual property. The Commons is a property owned by all and removal of a work from the Commons is a theft of each work from each citizen whether it's sanctioned by the US Supreme Court or not. The extension of copyright is the theft from each citizen the right to read each of the works so stolen from the public domain, whether he would have read the work or not. If an incidence of a work is worth a mere $1, and we are 300 millions, then every single work so stolen is $300 million. For the theft to be a mere Trillion dollars fewer than 4,000 texts must be so stolen. In the aggregate this theft must be many $quadrillion at least and growing every day, and this very post is included in the theft because the presumption it's my property until 80 years after I die (until copyright is extended yet again to forever less one day) prevents others from using it. It beggars belief. The extension of copyright beyond the reasonable 14 year term is a taking from each of us of the millions of works that are rightly our culture. It is wholesale IP theft on the grandest imaginable scale, Piracy institutionalized in law for a privileged few who had the money to buy the law. It's also a way to prevent our children from learning things our great-grandparents knew before they finished primary school. That scares me because it by necessity creates a dead-end know-nothing consumer cultu
Having been on both sides of this it's both good and bad. As a sales manager herding high-turnover salesmen every day, every morning meetings are a great thing because it helps me inspire and motivate them to do the right and needful thing and rein in misdemeanors that could lead to problems, and head off failure modes. It allows them to be responsive to a dynamic market and allows me to introduce daily motivational bonuses. And if you have a culture of doing this, it can be fun - with music, lights, dancing and all the rest.
As an IT engineering architect my biennial meetings with my boss are counter productive because he does not, and cannot, understand what I do - it would devolve into a hatefest if I let it - and he's as reluctant to have that meeting as I am. If he tried to introduce inspirational music into the experience I'd have to stab him to death with my retractable pencil.
You don't have to stop and start. As you journey out the Oort cloud is a sidewind along the general rotation of the solar system. You're going to be coated with ices of various flavors as comets are and they're going to alter your course. You may as well make use of them, convert them to ions for thrust. The problem is that you have to take plenty of energy with you to convert the ices to thrust, and drinking water. When you transition to the new solar system border you don't know what rotational direction its solar system is moving in, so it's 50:50 whether your course bounces off unless you come in end-on rather than side-on, and that has problems too because your first gravitic correction from interstellar has to land you somewhere close to the new solar system plane at a delta-V that can be dealt with on what you've got left after a long journey. That requires a massy so you need incredible timing and foresight.
On further thought this particular star lies almost 90 degrees off the solar system plane so the Oort cloud may not go out so far in this direction and the direction of the environment mass becomes rare and more random - and less likely to provide thrust mass. One would naturally consider the solar system a thin disc, or at least a very squashed spheroid for this purpose. A farther star closer to the plane may be a better first choice for exploration if one can be had that shares our general plane in at least one dimension. The first few probes to escape the Oort cloud should be able to tell us how much windage to allow for in that direction, and teach us some about the nature of our solar system. The research is under way, but it's not happening fast enough to suit me.
To know the variables we should send probes in all directions. Now. The easiest way to do this would be by establishing a colony on 1 Ceres with railguns that pass through the planetoid to launch the probes. There's more than enough minerals and water there to to this.
We still need an energy solution that makes this possible. I hope to see it in my lifetime. That is optimistic, but I am allowed to hope still.
Just rechecked. Our own oort cloud goes almost half the way to Alpha Centari A. If that star has one also, there could be water and fuel available almost the whole way. And the star is getting closer, which is a bonus.
Oh boo fricken hoo. I remember when Google was trying to pay these map weasles for access to their map data, but they wouldn't let Google use it for what they wanted at any price. They were a bunch of jerks and you couldn't post a hand-drawn map to your yard sale but they'd threaten to sue you for IP theft. They were relics holding onto rent-seeking behaviors and holding back progress. So in 2004 Google bought Keyhole and Where2 and a bunch of other assets and liberated the map data. And now those jerks are out of business, or going there. Cry me a fucking river.
It's a tectonic shift that will shake the Japanese science community to their foundations. There will be a tsunami of opposition for a short time, but proponents will weather their storm and melt down their opposition's arguments. At the end there will be a vast wasteland formerly occupied by science deniers bereft of ground to stand on, and a triumphant self-sustaining reaction of proponents to carry the flag of fission to Europe and beyond - even if they have to pass through the core of the Earth or the troposphere to do it.
The terrorists I am worried about are the pigopolists raking in the dough on the video. I used to enjoy the game, but I can't in good concience watch it any more.
Well I'll give him that it's an interesting challenge akin to building a ship in a bottle or painting on a grain of rice. I might give it a go, in a year or two if I have a few spares of this laying around and that much spare time. But at $35, it's cheaper than a kit would be so I would depopulate the components myself. After taking very hi rez photos of course. But the smaller components are really tiny. Just a faint breath will blow them away. And at this scale everything is incredibly sticky so it can be frustrating.
Everything is sold in kit form. Just packaged in a convenient form for kit testing. Just put it in your toaster oven and the components fall right back apart for your assembly challenge. I've soldered some of these tiny components before. You'll want to lay off the coffee for a few days prior.
And in that world you had better hope they are still a monopoly as that will be the only thing stopping them from locking you out of features on new hardware for no reason.
Hopefully before this is a problem we'll have forgotten they were ever in charge of prevention of innovation.
I have on my shelf every word he ever wrote that was published - some 300 volumes, occupying some 14 shelf feet of space including Boy's Life. I have the recordings of him narrating Apollo 11. I have his nonfiction works. Of course I've read them all a dozen times at least.
So the question becomes whether I've understood them, because of course I've read them. You got me. I'm by definition not a good judge of that.
OK, we're going to have this talk about RAH and the evolution of his political leanings. The man was complex. He was a huge advocate of the dissociation of social mores of sex and marriage from state regulation. He had homosexual characters in his books in the 1940's, and biracial couples in the 1950's. Group marriage, line marriage, and so forth were social norms in his works. This is not right-wing liberatarianism. This is... something else. Many of his ideas were controversial, but they became so popular during the 60's "free love" movement that unwanted hippies were camped on his lawn.
But he didn't "descend into right-wing liberatarianism". He started in extreme liberatarianism and moderated his projection of his views to sell books. As they became less political tracts and more entertainment, they moved more units. But his views didn't change - except during a painful divorce - which I personally could forgive him for having been there.
This is use of technological means to defeat the first sale doctrine. I'm going to have to agree with those above: "so don't buy it." As long as it's clear upfront that the residual value of the used game is zero and they buyer understands that restriction when they buy the content, then it's OK.
If this is an after-the-purchase thing though, they owe everybody that bought the game originally the residual value of the used game. That's the cost of shifting to this after launch.
"There has grown in the minds of certain groups in this country the idea that just because a man or corporation has made a profit out of the public for a number of years, the government and the courts are charged with guaranteeing such a profit in the future, even in the face of changing circumstances and contrary to public interest. This strange doctrine is supported by neither statute or common law. Neither corporations or individuals have the right to come into court and ask that the clock of history be stopped, or turned back."
Robert Heinlein, Life Line, 1939
Sheer poetry from the Dean of Science Fiction, early in his career and long before he was famous.
I, for one, found your specific use of language inspirational and appropriate. Wish you could have worked some rectal pineapple insertion in there though, as the situation calls for it.
Slashdot Mirror
I should have included this in my post: Not only can I now see my own house in .5M resolution, but to a greater or lesser scale Google has given me a view of the entire fucking planet. I can see Red Square. I can see the Sahale. If I want, I can explore overhead views of North Korea, Iraq or Madagascar.
None of this was ever, or would ever have been, possible before. When I was in school these places were abstract theoretical things and if the map geeks had their way they would be still. Now I can see them as part of a whole planet, their physical scale; how to get from here to there - and that's a really big fucking deal. Thanks, Google.
The right of the common man to appropriate and adapt stories goes back perhaps to the second campfire, if not earlier. The notion that this is something that should be prevented is a rather recent invention. It is also quite absurd since a modern work that isn't derivative of Sophocles' Oedipus trilogy in 420BCE is ridiculously rare and it's well known (and obvious) that Sophocles' work was a fusion of all the trends of popular art of the time - that he condensed everything into three plays is his signal contribution.
We don't even think about these things much any more, and we should because it has become absurd. That lie your sister told you in an email about her one-night stand gone bad with megafail dweeb photo attached? That email is a creative work of fiction, her own work protected by copyright - and though she owns the rights to the photo megafail dweeb owns the rights to his likeness. Your repost to Facebook or Twitter or Reddit of the attached image (even photoshopped) is a derivative work proscribed by law without permission, and a violation of the law. In reality she's an attention whore and she's hoping you'll leak the megafail dweeb story to get her Facebook friends - but Megafail dweeb still has rights to sue you under the current ridiculous system.
Modern copyright is saying "here, I have stood on the shoulders of giants as have the 200 generations before me, but my addition to this work is special above all works that came before, and none who come after may stand on my shoulders ever until my work is lost to time. No more art shall pass." It is also saying that all other authors from ages past must be included in the enforced forgettery, whether or not it was their wish. It also means that something as simple as a textbook on mathematics, physics or chemistry published 80 years ago - long since the authors are dead cannot be reproduced to teach our children now even though so little has changed in those arts and sciences that they would still be far more useful works than the crap that passes for primary education today. My own son's high school world history texts omits the inventions of gunpowder, firearms and cannon as forces for social change. His chemistry texts omit so much they may as well be "Alice in Wonderland" - and that's for fear he might use them to discover how to manufacture explosives or drugs. Civics? That's not meaningfully taught at all, as the responsibility of the citizen to correct his government is entirely omitted.
That's what this is: an establishment of enforced forgettery for the purpose of selling us new lamps as old. The whole thing is a fraud and a theft of our intellectual property. The Commons is a property owned by all and removal of a work from the Commons is a theft of each work from each citizen whether it's sanctioned by the US Supreme Court or not. The extension of copyright is the theft from each citizen the right to read each of the works so stolen from the public domain, whether he would have read the work or not. If an incidence of a work is worth a mere $1, and we are 300 millions, then every single work so stolen is $300 million. For the theft to be a mere Trillion dollars fewer than 4,000 texts must be so stolen. In the aggregate this theft must be many $quadrillion at least and growing every day, and this very post is included in the theft because the presumption it's my property until 80 years after I die (until copyright is extended yet again to forever less one day) prevents others from using it. It beggars belief. The extension of copyright beyond the reasonable 14 year term is a taking from each of us of the millions of works that are rightly our culture. It is wholesale IP theft on the grandest imaginable scale, Piracy institutionalized in law for a privileged few who had the money to buy the law. It's also a way to prevent our children from learning things our great-grandparents knew before they finished primary school. That scares me because it by necessity creates a dead-end know-nothing consumer cultu
It's an oblique Shakespeare reference.
Having been on both sides of this it's both good and bad. As a sales manager herding high-turnover salesmen every day, every morning meetings are a great thing because it helps me inspire and motivate them to do the right and needful thing and rein in misdemeanors that could lead to problems, and head off failure modes. It allows them to be responsive to a dynamic market and allows me to introduce daily motivational bonuses. And if you have a culture of doing this, it can be fun - with music, lights, dancing and all the rest.
As an IT engineering architect my biennial meetings with my boss are counter productive because he does not, and cannot, understand what I do - it would devolve into a hatefest if I let it - and he's as reluctant to have that meeting as I am. If he tried to introduce inspirational music into the experience I'd have to stab him to death with my retractable pencil.
You don't have to stop and start. As you journey out the Oort cloud is a sidewind along the general rotation of the solar system. You're going to be coated with ices of various flavors as comets are and they're going to alter your course. You may as well make use of them, convert them to ions for thrust. The problem is that you have to take plenty of energy with you to convert the ices to thrust, and drinking water. When you transition to the new solar system border you don't know what rotational direction its solar system is moving in, so it's 50:50 whether your course bounces off unless you come in end-on rather than side-on, and that has problems too because your first gravitic correction from interstellar has to land you somewhere close to the new solar system plane at a delta-V that can be dealt with on what you've got left after a long journey. That requires a massy so you need incredible timing and foresight.
On further thought this particular star lies almost 90 degrees off the solar system plane so the Oort cloud may not go out so far in this direction and the direction of the environment mass becomes rare and more random - and less likely to provide thrust mass. One would naturally consider the solar system a thin disc, or at least a very squashed spheroid for this purpose. A farther star closer to the plane may be a better first choice for exploration if one can be had that shares our general plane in at least one dimension. The first few probes to escape the Oort cloud should be able to tell us how much windage to allow for in that direction, and teach us some about the nature of our solar system. The research is under way, but it's not happening fast enough to suit me.
To know the variables we should send probes in all directions. Now. The easiest way to do this would be by establishing a colony on 1 Ceres with railguns that pass through the planetoid to launch the probes. There's more than enough minerals and water there to to this.
We still need an energy solution that makes this possible. I hope to see it in my lifetime. That is optimistic, but I am allowed to hope still.
Just rechecked. Our own oort cloud goes almost half the way to Alpha Centari A. If that star has one also, there could be water and fuel available almost the whole way. And the star is getting closer, which is a bonus.
Alpha Centauri A is only 4.3 lightyears. It probably has habitable zone planets too. And it's nearly a clone of our own sun.
Oh boo fricken hoo. I remember when Google was trying to pay these map weasles for access to their map data, but they wouldn't let Google use it for what they wanted at any price. They were a bunch of jerks and you couldn't post a hand-drawn map to your yard sale but they'd threaten to sue you for IP theft. They were relics holding onto rent-seeking behaviors and holding back progress. So in 2004 Google bought Keyhole and Where2 and a bunch of other assets and liberated the map data. And now those jerks are out of business, or going there. Cry me a fucking river.
The leap from "not x86" to "ARM" involves a large unfounded assumption.
You're ill and don't know it. The sectarianism was a clue. Read more for a cure.
You haven't understood the work. Read it again. Don't watch the movie and pretend that's as good. Open the book and read every word.
It's a tectonic shift that will shake the Japanese science community to their foundations. There will be a tsunami of opposition for a short time, but proponents will weather their storm and melt down their opposition's arguments. At the end there will be a vast wasteland formerly occupied by science deniers bereft of ground to stand on, and a triumphant self-sustaining reaction of proponents to carry the flag of fission to Europe and beyond - even if they have to pass through the core of the Earth or the troposphere to do it.
The terrorists I am worried about are the pigopolists raking in the dough on the video. I used to enjoy the game, but I can't in good concience watch it any more.
Well I'll give him that it's an interesting challenge akin to building a ship in a bottle or painting on a grain of rice. I might give it a go, in a year or two if I have a few spares of this laying around and that much spare time. But at $35, it's cheaper than a kit would be so I would depopulate the components myself. After taking very hi rez photos of course. But the smaller components are really tiny. Just a faint breath will blow them away. And at this scale everything is incredibly sticky so it can be frustrating.
Everything is sold in kit form. Just packaged in a convenient form for kit testing. Just put it in your toaster oven and the components fall right back apart for your assembly challenge. I've soldered some of these tiny components before. You'll want to lay off the coffee for a few days prior.
There goes the cloud industry.
OK, I see where you're going with this and it makes sense.
And in that world you had better hope they are still a monopoly as that will be the only thing stopping them from locking you out of features on new hardware for no reason.
Hopefully before this is a problem we'll have forgotten they were ever in charge of prevention of innovation.
I have on my shelf every word he ever wrote that was published - some 300 volumes, occupying some 14 shelf feet of space including Boy's Life. I have the recordings of him narrating Apollo 11. I have his nonfiction works. Of course I've read them all a dozen times at least.
So the question becomes whether I've understood them, because of course I've read them. You got me. I'm by definition not a good judge of that.
OK, we're going to have this talk about RAH and the evolution of his political leanings. The man was complex. He was a huge advocate of the dissociation of social mores of sex and marriage from state regulation. He had homosexual characters in his books in the 1940's, and biracial couples in the 1950's. Group marriage, line marriage, and so forth were social norms in his works. This is not right-wing liberatarianism. This is... something else. Many of his ideas were controversial, but they became so popular during the 60's "free love" movement that unwanted hippies were camped on his lawn.
But he didn't "descend into right-wing liberatarianism". He started in extreme liberatarianism and moderated his projection of his views to sell books. As they became less political tracts and more entertainment, they moved more units. But his views didn't change - except during a painful divorce - which I personally could forgive him for having been there.
Do you know how I know you haven't fully read his body of work and understood it?
This is use of technological means to defeat the first sale doctrine. I'm going to have to agree with those above: "so don't buy it." As long as it's clear upfront that the residual value of the used game is zero and they buyer understands that restriction when they buy the content, then it's OK.
If this is an after-the-purchase thing though, they owe everybody that bought the game originally the residual value of the used game. That's the cost of shifting to this after launch.
If they've made promises, they must be kept.
There's always porn.
"There has grown in the minds of certain groups in this country the idea that just because a man or corporation has made a profit out of the public for a number of years, the government and the courts are charged with guaranteeing such a profit in the future, even in the face of changing circumstances and contrary to public interest. This strange doctrine is supported by neither statute or common law. Neither corporations or individuals have the right to come into court and ask that the clock of history be stopped, or turned back."
Robert Heinlein, Life Line, 1939
Sheer poetry from the Dean of Science Fiction, early in his career and long before he was famous.
I, for one, found your specific use of language inspirational and appropriate. Wish you could have worked some rectal pineapple insertion in there though, as the situation calls for it.