You may yet see it. Hardly anyone appreciates the full enormity of the Internet. On a list of the most significant advances in the past millennium, the Gutenberg Press was rated #1. Printing really cut down the cost of copying and preserving knowledge, and reduced errors. I think the Internet may prove to be even more significant. Before the Internet there was still much cost in data transmission and storage. Printed material had to be delivered somehow. And now, delivery costs are microscopic.
I would rather publish in open journals, but that still isn't as easy as it could and should be. I refuse to pay $3500. Even $400 seems outrageous.
I did a ballpark estimate of the odds of finding a new Mersenne prime. It's very roughly 1 in 100,000 that an untested number that has no small factors (less than 2^76) will be prime.
Just one Mersenne prime has been found between 2^44 million and 2^74 million, and then there are no less than 3 in the next 10 million powers of 2 (minus 1 of course)? That's a lot.
It adds to our knowledge. Maybe we can see more patterns, or figure out something else interesting. The more data we have...
As often happens, a small but powerful, greedy, and stupid group of people are in a futile fight against technological change. They can't turn back the clock, but they can and are hurting a lot of others and making a big mess. They are lying to themselves and everyone else, pushing vile control freak, ownership society propaganda with all its overtones of fascism and authoritarianism.
They have the arrogance to believe they're better and more deserving than everyone else, think the rest of us are "the masses", a bunch of feeble minded "consumers" who couldn't video record or edit our way out of a wet paper bag and who wouldn't have any good cinema, music, or other art if we didn't mooch off the producers. The bitter irony is that they're worse moochers and thieves than ever we were. Their entire business could not exist as it is without the technology to record and broadcast audio and video-- technology they had little to do with realizing. There's hardly any Disney movie that isn't an unashamedly naked retelling of a classic story. As you pointed out, they've lobbied for and been granted retroactive copyright extensions. They've got some nerve to cry thief to the victims of their many thefts.
Understand just how awful it is to apply ownership to knowledge, and to call someone a thief just for doing a little self-education. They very people whose science and invention made their business possible, they slander as hackers and thieves. Education is the foundation of democracy and civilization. Well, I have a name for those who would lock up and paywall basic knowledge, and it's a lot worse than thief. Traitors. When a move they make blocks children from self-improvement and learning, they commit treason against the democratic West, and all humanity. The universe does not work in accordance with the ugly notion that knowledge can be owned. If it did, the world would be a lot darker and eviler place.
So, what's to be done about it? Putting them on trial for treason would get their attention, but I think there's no need for such a harsh route. For, in another big irony, though they think they're such geniuses, at least in the arts, the fact is, they're not. Even in their best art is ownership thinking and propaganda. One of the foremost blatant examples of that is in the Star Trek episode, I Mudd.
But it goes much deeper and more subtle than that. Fantasy is absolutely chock full of magic that somehow is unique and unrepeatable, and highly respectful of ownership. And there's lots of mystery around the lost secrets of the ancients. Tolkien is full of Gothic, Dark Ages style thinking, tragedy and loss. For instance, the mighty stallion Shadowfax is regarded as a 2nd coming from the legendary, more powerful, and plain all around better horses from "the morning of the world". The alliance that defeated the Dark Lord and took his magic ring is the "Last Alliance", because elves are in decline. And elves are in decline because that's their fate. It's their fate to decline, because, well, that's just the way it is. So dramatic and tragic, to know that the elves will soon be gone forever, their wisdom and knowledge forever after beyond the reach of men. Tolkien says so, now go cry a river about it. To be fair, it's only relatively recently that our technology has reached the point that we've surpassed the ancients in pretty much everything, but even as little as 150 years ago, that couldn't be said-- for one thing we didn't have concrete, and the Romans did. Even 1500 years after the Fall of Rome, we're still hung over about it.
So that's why things must change, must be allowed to change. It won't be a loss, won't be a huge tragedy, the streets will not be full of the bodies of artists who starved to death. The tragic loss is the opposite. The real tragedy would be being held back, being kept uneducated, barbaric, minds dark, fearful of the unknown, lashing out violently
And, we do know what we can do. We can unleash our technology, realize its full
What matters much more than GPA is how badly an employer needs to hire, and how many applicants they have. The only time GPA matters at all is if they need reasons to thin an enormous pool of applicants. If they don't have GPAs, they just use some other criteria that is probably much less fair.
Yes, grad schools take undergrad GPA much more seriously. But there's a lot of flexibility there too. When I applied, I learned my GPA was subject to a lot of interpretation. All depended on how the schools wanted to weight the bad grades for courses that were taken multiple times. Also, they might decide a particular course did not count towards your degree, and just exclude it. What was not appreciated was the poor quality of the undergrad program I had the misfortune to enroll in, thanks to a bad, bad move on the part of university administration in which they allowed several departments to dump their worst professors into a new department. Had I known that, I would have chosen a different school. A GPA of 2.5 to 3.0 sounds pretty bad doesn't it? How does it sound if I inform you that the graduation rate was only 4%? No one got out of that program with a 3.5, let alone a 4.0.
The whole tone of this article is another bashing of the school system, though it seems to be a criticism of students who expect too much. Sure, the GPA as a measure has problems of subjectivity, with teachers giving themselves too much leeway to make subjective judgments of students, and indulging personal likes and dislikes, and even abusing their power to, for instance, coerce students into sex. But that last, while sensational, is relatively rare compared to the frequent abuse in grad school of stealing credit for students' research work.
I'd be perfectly happy keeping copyright on my novel for 14-28 years and then turning it over to the public domain.
Have you ever done that? Or have plans to release all your works to the public domain as they reach the age of 14 or 28 years?
Without some system in place to protect authors/artists, the big companies would just repackage and resell everything and keep the money for themselves.
We'd all like to be safe and secure from big thieving bullies, but the price of some forms of protection is too high. Authors deserve and need compensation. Protection from that particular scenario you mentioned doesn't directly lead to more compensation for authors. The point of replacing the copyright system is freedom of knowledge, as is our natural right. These big publishers won't be able to repackage and resell, not when the people can simply bypass them and visit an online public library for the same works. We want these gouging, thieving private publishers permanently removed from any and all possibility of setting themselves up as the monopoly gatekeepers of knowledge and culture, able to hoard artistic and scientific works and refuse to release them for anything less than a supplicant's left arm and first born child.
As for fairly compensating authors, that's what we should be working on. Need more crowdfunding, more public patronage, and need systems in place to keep fraud to a minimum.
can... be assured that someone else (say, a large publisher) won't just grab the text of my book and sell it without giving me any money
If you mean plagiarism, the solution to that is digital notaries. Ought to enhance them and raise their profile. If you mean, selling a print run, or even selling ebooks, there's stuff we can do about that too, without resorting to copyright and all its baggage. However, the end game is for selling of copies, particularly digital copies, to be allowed to die of obsolescence.
There's just way too much "Mother may I?" about the current system. And it's largely because so many people are so afraid they might somehow be losing the profits they deserve for making it big, however illusory their bigness and profits are. Fear, loss, and fear of loss really pushes those emotional buttons. We could have a system in which a book printer runs whatever they want, no permissions required, and the authors are compensated through funds tied to various measures set up for the purpose of figuring out who is deserving of compensation, and how much, for measurably adding to our culture.
It would be a great help if these rights proponents would promote systems and business models that actually can work, instead of continually trying to put the digital genie back in the bottle. They wail as if copyright is the one and only thing that can possibly keep artists from starving, and that's been debunked over and over. Seems the reasons they keep trying to propagandize in support of copyright is control and sheer greed. These days, a person can carry their entire collection of music and books discretely on their person on one flash drive, and the whole thing can be copied in a few minutes. That was utterly impractical in the days of the vinyl LP, and even in the 1990s with the mp3 codec and CD burners, it was still not quite there. Video is about the only thing that's still a little too big for casual throwaway handling, but storage continues to improve.
Understand that pro-copyright is anti-education. Seriously. Holy Copyright has become the justification for locking knowledge and culture behind paywalls, controlling access down to the individual level. The school textbook market is one gigantic racket, in which the public is gouged repeatedly for knowledge that is in the public domain. Research is another monstrous racket. The public pays for research that academic publishers then lock away and hold for ransom.
I really think copyright is doomed. It's only a question of when.
Yes, I'll add to the pile. Why doesn't Texas slide into the Gulf of Mexico? Because Oklahoma sucks.
Oklahoma is an extremely conservative state, possibly the reddest in the nation, full of Bible thumpers, prosperity gospel heretics, mindless straight ticket Republican voters, gun lovers, bigots of every description, and anti-science and anti-education morons. Whenever I have to go though, I spend as little time as possible there.
As for Tulsa, among other things, that's the home of Oral Roberts University.
Number of deaths doesn't tell the whole story. By that measure, a bad bus accident or a plane crash can be a bigger disaster than a major hurricane. A better measure could be total damages. Hurricane Andrew: 65 dead, $27.3 billion in damage, Air France flight 447: 228 dead, about $2.53 billion in damage (using $250 million for the aircraft, $10 million per life lost). Which is the worse disaster?
Damage estimates for Fukushima vary wildly, perhaps as low as $100 billion, or perhaps over $1 trillion. Banqiao Dam is the worst dam failure I've heard of, with an incredible 230,000 dead, however, in only a few years, most of the devastation was cleaned up. One of the troubles with nuclear power is of course radiation, which can make land uninhabitable and even unvisitable for centuries. No dam failure can do that. Like Fukushima, Banqaio was caused by recklessly inadequate engineering in combination with a natural disaster. They were warned by competent engineers that the engineering wasn't good enough, but they ignored the engineers and went ahead anyway. It is that human factor that makes nuclear power so worrisome. I don't trust that we can keep all nuclear power plants safe from such reckless mismanagement. The human factor is also why offshore oil drilling is so controversial. Been plenty of bad accidents with that, and in most every case, such as Deepwater Horizon, someone got greedy and tried to cut corners.
We should use nuclear energy if the only alternative is coal. But we should use neither so long as it's economical to increase renewables. We should not bias the costs in any technique's favor by externalizing costs of pollution. For nuclear power, waste storage is an additional big and growing problem. Are you volunteering your back yard for storage of nuclear waste?
Both. At this point, nuclear power is better than fossil fuel power.
But nuclear power is still plenty dangerous. The first problem is that it can provide the material to make nuclear weapons. Won't do us much good to avert Global Warming if some rogue nation starts World War III with nukes. The second, more insidious problem is that human corruption and incompetence is scarily likely to lead to another major accident such as Fukushima. We know how to operate nuclear power with reasonable safety, but can we do so, for all nuclear power plants, for decades? Fukushima showed that moronic cronies may end up in charge, and start making foolish decisions, taking gambles that they have little idea are extremely reckless.
Different views may sound trivial, but don't sell them short for that reason. There's the Linear Algebra concept of the Change of Basis, there's transforms such as the Laplace and Fourier, and more.
For a simple example, it is easy to multiply by ten in base ten. If we wanted to multiply by some other number, often, it could make sense to change the base. Easier to multiply by 2 if the numbers are represented in base 2.
I had one where I fatfingered O instead of 0. They are next to each other on the QWERTY keyboard, you know. Stared at that line of code for some 5 to 1O minutes, not seeing what the problem could possibly be. I did figure it out finally, but it was annoying to have lost that much time on a visual distinction problem. A better font would have helped.
CDs take too much room. Especially wasteful are those miserable, easily broken jewel cases. Even without that, I'd rather have a flash drive than a stack of audio CDs. And I'd prefer a denser format, such as FLAC.
CDs are only a little better than vinyl when it comes to toughness. A scratch can ruin a CD, much the same as a vinyl record. A particularly annoying scratch was inflicted by the sharp corner of a DVD burner tray. I had just ripped the video, and when I reached up (the computer was on a high shelf) and took the disc out it brushed against the corner of the tray which for reasons of cheapness was very sharp-- you know, like the sharp edge on a new piece of paper that is so good at giving a paper cut. Gouged a huge scratch across the disc. I got out a file and removed that sharp corner, but it was of course too late to save that disc.
Yeah, this. Why do so many people put up with TicketBastard? It's like music fans are so fanatic they'd submit to being raped, literally raped not just "wallet raped", if that meant they got tickets to that concert they're just dying to see. They're like freshmen who let fraternities and sororities haze them within an inch of their lives. The people have the power to stop this insanity, but enough choose to live with it for TicketBastard to survive.
I can count on one hand the number of concerts I've attended. I'm averaging a bit less than one concert per decade.
now that I've finished it, I no longer deserve any further compensation
No one said that. You exaggerated.
I agree that artists deserve compensation. I would suppose that nearly everyone agrees with that. Where we disagree is the means, and the quantity. Copyright is a terrible system for compensating artists. There've been many cases in which copyright was used against the very artist it was supposed to help. A big media corporation has a lot more power than a lonely artist, and they use that power to dictate terms, terms which are extremely unfair. They know they have artists over a barrel, know they can make or break an artist. Artists can too easily be pushed into selling all rights to their own works for pennies, actually lose the right to use their own work.
In addition to doing a poor job of ensuring that artists are fairly compensated, copyright has all kinds of negative side effects. Copyright is the biggest reason our public libraries can't be a lot more digital. That would vastly increase their usefulness through increasing our access to knowledge, and at the same time save a great deal of money.
You stole the time and effort that I could have gotten from others by giving them my hard work to enjoy.
This kind of talk illustrates why copyright is so enduring. It pushes our buttons. It frames the debate in terms of property and loss, and people really, really hate suffering losses, hate being the victims of theft. But that is the wrong way to think of it. Set aside your emotions, your desire to see a thief get his hand or even his head cut off. And then, maybe you can acknowledge that there are significant differences between these kinds of products. Material goods are scarce, and theft of those should be strongly discouraged for that reason. The immaterial, however, is not scarce. This difference is extremely important. It's fundamental. The vested interests have done a thorough job of befuddling and confusing the public on this point. But they're fighting a losing battle, and less and less of the public is fooled as the years roll by.
Offering a torrent of Beatles albums is not at all the same as claiming to be the actual composer of those songs, trying to take credit for them. Taking credit, plagiarizing, that's real theft. Merely copying is not. That's just copying.
Copying should not be a crime. Copying is a natural right, it does a great deal of good and the so-called harm it causes is a figment of delusional thinking, and it's incredibly easy and getting easier by the year. It's past time the law was changed to reflect this fact of nature.
Do you realize that education is a massive copying of knowledge into children's memories? It is also a harm to McDonald's for a consumer to buy at a grocery instead, but that action is not a crime, nor should it be. It's competition.
Prosecutions have to happen just often enough to keep the commercial operators in line.
Or, the arts could change to another business model, of which there are a number of viable options.
This guy's mistake was being a defiant loud mouth. If he'd just shut up about it, the prosecutor's wouldn't have wanted to waste their time.
Someone has to take a stand, or bad laws will never be changed. If he does go to prison, I will regard him as a political prisoner, same as Phillip Danks and the founders of the Pirate Bay. We could write letters, lots and lots of letters, to the politicians of California, urging them to drop the case, or pardon him, or change their laws. It may make an impression.
A big problem is that California is home to Hollywood. If I was the defendant, I'd certainly ask for a change of venue.
I hate that term "lamba". It's just a fancy term for "unnamed", or "anonymous". What is a lambda function? A function that doesn't have a name, didn't need to be named, that's all! They like to be a little more restrictive, in that if a function didn't need to be named, that's usually because it is of extremely limited scope, like inside another function, and apart from recursive calls, only called from its parent function.
That kind of unnecessary jargon is representative of the entire field of programming language design. Because they are designing computer languages, they seem to feel freer to mess with English, and invent new, unnecesasry terms because they're such language geeks. I mean, "currying"? What's wrong with calling that "parameter unpacking" or something similar? But, why even bother with it, as its relationship to the meat of programming, which is to implement algorithms, is pretty tangential. Sure, useful for theory, same as a Turing Machine, but no one does any serious programming with a Turing Machine. The choice of font for the source code may be more significant than currying.
Where it gets ugly for the humble application programmer are those cases where the designers insist on some limitation, claiming it is for the good of the programmers. Sometimes they admit it isn't about the programmer, but about simplifying the compiler. And then it turns out that the problem they were trying to relieve the compiler from solving was trivial for a computer anyway, so long as the computer has another measly 8k of RAM to spare. Like, Java forcing programmers to create separate files for each class. An even older example is the totally useless distinction Pascal makes between a Procedure and a Function, a hangover from Algol. And there's the bit about "strongly typed" (Pascal) and "weakly typed" (C), before scripting languages blew that debate away, taking a leaf from BASIC. By their standards, C is strongly typed, and Pascal is the strict disciplinarian schoolteacher from hell strongly typed.
Society definitely has its dysfunctional aspects. Don't depend on anything you don't have to. Timing is overly important, because so many of our leaders are loudmouth morons who, among many other flaws such as thinking they're so smart, suck at planning, and will screw up and alternate the economy between boom and bust. Schools were begging for STEM professors during the tech boom of the 1990s. Sadly for me, I graduated with my PhD in 2001, during the Dot-Com Crash.
Especially do not depend overly on a job or an employer. They will abuse you if they sense your need. Put some of that PhD level brain towards freeing yourself from that, and stay the hell out of debt. That's what I did. It is a source of neverending amazement to me that most people are so terrible at finance, can't accept that the way of the installment plan significantly increases costs and that this matters. If you're not making massive payments for student loans or credit card debt or that new car (and you should avoid getting into those traps), a single person can easily live on $20k/year, and be reasonably comfortable. $10k on rent, and the other $10k on food, gas, Internet, and a few other necessities, and a bit of entertainment. Yeah, I could've perhaps found a roomie and cut my rent, but on that I splurged a little.
Do that while earning $60k or more, and the savings will pile up. Do more than just save. Throw it into the financial markets, and don't be an idiot about it and don't panic. You know the drill: buy low, sell high. Stay away from Ponzi schemes. Do that, and in 10 years, your savings may well have doubled.
Thinking clearly is hard enough at any time. But when you've got a society that believes in "do or die", holding guns to the heads of all their workers, pressuring everyone to the max not because they really need to but because they believe that maximizes productivity, and overlooks or dismisses that the desperation drives many to backstabbing and cheating, you haven't a chance to reflect calmly while you're subject to that madhouse. Not only do you have to seem productive according to whatever terribly inadequate excuse of a lazy measure they're trying to use, you have to be ready to defend against the machinations of the connivers who are always searching for the next easy target to blame and from whom to steal credit.
One of the craziest things about it was, on those occasions when the workplace found me out, discovered that they could not pressure me with threats to fire me and ruin my career forever and all that, they went wild. Then I was a "flight risk", and my coworkers and even bosses were furiously jealous, and this was translated into bad reviews and massive double standards. Work they would have been thrilled to get from anyone else was "disappointing" from me. Yeah, can be pretty depressing to be subjected to such unfairness.
What could we possibly offer aliens? The idea that they might want to eat us for mere food is ridiculous. If they exist, know about us and can reach us, and want something nefarious, we can probably do nothing about it. They may well have been civilized for over a million years and have technology, intelligence, philosophies, and understanding so far beyond us that we are mere insects to them.
Why should they want to simply harm us? Easy enough for an advanced, powerful, space faring civilization to exterminate us all if that's all they wanted. That would be about the same as an adult running around stepping on ants for fun. More likely they've solved all their urgent problems and are bored, and we are a source of entertainment that they absolutely do not want spoiled by revealing themselves to us. The games they may be playing with us might be nefarious, they might be trying to guide is in certain not so good directions, who can say? Maybe there's a Team Suicide who will be victorious in their games if they can get those life forms to kill themselves off, while other teams have other goals and victory conditions. There are so many possibilities.
And textures. I've noticed this problem with wavelet based lossy image compression.
Texture is why JPEG wins. On Cecret Lake, the clouds, vegetation, and gravelly slopes look better in JPEG. JPEG is very blocky at the high compression rate they must be using, and you can see this up close, but the textures are better preserved. AV1 just smears everything. Twigs are gone, fine filaments in high altitude clouds are gone, gravelly slopes look vague. Step back from the monitor to where you can't see JPEG's blockiness, and the difference is even more pronounced. AV1's smearing is still evident.
AV1 wins on smooth surfaces and gradients and sharp edges such as the air balloons and clear parts of the sky in Clovisfest. Steinway is another with lots of shiny polished smooth surfaces that play to AV1's strengths over JPEG. But on most of the pictures, I'll take JPEG.
The revolt against GIF that culminated in PNG over 20 years ago showed that royalty free and patent unencumbered works. I recently learned of Free Lossless Image Format (FLIF), currently in development and intended to replace PNG, and it looks great. Handily beats WEBP, and also addresses animations, the reason GIF didn't completely die. FLIF alone shows that PNG was not a one time freak. But there's also Xiph, which has been working on audio and video codecs for decades, giving us Ogg Vorbis and fairly recently, Opus. And soon we will have AV1.
Opus supposedly bridges the gap in audio between music and voice, better at both than even the best codecs tuned specifically for one or the other. Opus is good at voice, but from my own experiences, no, it's not the very best. Shouldn't VoIP software use Opus, if it was the best? I'd love to abandon Skype. This is the first I've heard of Codec2, thanks for mentioning it.
The area most in need of an update is lossy stills, where JPEG is still supreme. (Why didn't JPEG 2000 catch on?) I saw a comparison on stills between AV1 and JPEG, and in my opinion, JPEG is clearly superior. I hope AV1 improves there, but I wonder if we could have a "double" JPEG, bump the 8x8 blocks up to 16x16, just as a stopgap?
Yet despite all this evidence, IP rights holders still refuse to concede that unencumbered works. What is accomplished by moaning the clearly wrong idea that codecs will not be developed? They really think they can persuade some deep pocketed organizations to swallow that propaganda and join with them? I don't follow that notion of "fractional options", and I don't see why anyone else should either, especially with AV1 in the wings. Meantime, for video I'm sticking with VP9 and Opus (and webVTT) inside WEBM.
AV1 is clearly better on curves and edges, doesn't have that blocky and too enhanced look to the edges that JPEG gets. Does better on smooth areas, doesn't introduce the nasty artifacts JPEG does. AV1's gradients are much smoother. The Clovisfest image with air balloons against the sky shows all this very well.
But JPEG does better with rough texture. AV1 blurs the heck out of textures. Look at Cecret Lake. The greenery just below and to the right of the highest peek is all blurred into vague smoothness in the AV1 image, while JPEG preserves the original grainy look much better. Clear sky looks better in AV1, but clouds look better in JPEG. AV1 blurs out the fine filaments. Same with tree branches. AV1 makes branch tips and twigs disappear, while JPEG mangles and shifts twigs, but keeps them. Hair and fur is another problem for AV1, just look at the Tiger picture. Clearly better in JPEG.
GP goes in a valid direction. But it's not exactly marketing that's been put ahead of security, it's performance. Marketing knows customers care much more about performance than safety. And are the customers wrong? Idiots, for not taking security more seriously?
Think about the security vulnerability inherent in the C library function, malloc. It can give its process access to discarded but unerased data from whatever process last used whatever region of memory the OS hands it, unless steps are taken. They knew what to do about it: wipe the memory. Maybe the OS should do that, or the hardware. But everyone realized it would be a performance hit, even if it was hardware based, and no one wanted that. Instead, the burden was put on the previous process to erase its data before freeing the memory. Library functions such as secmalloc can assist with that, of course. And that was a fairly sensible move. Only erase the data if it is sensitive, otherwise, who cares?
In the design of C, performance was chosen over security and safety pretty much every time. It should be no surprise that hardware design shows the same focus. And it's not wrong. It's safer to drive on slow roads, never exceed 50kph, but people do not want that, they want to go over 100kph, for the good reason that time is also valuable.
Slashdot Mirror
You may yet see it. Hardly anyone appreciates the full enormity of the Internet. On a list of the most significant advances in the past millennium, the Gutenberg Press was rated #1. Printing really cut down the cost of copying and preserving knowledge, and reduced errors. I think the Internet may prove to be even more significant. Before the Internet there was still much cost in data transmission and storage. Printed material had to be delivered somehow. And now, delivery costs are microscopic.
I would rather publish in open journals, but that still isn't as easy as it could and should be. I refuse to pay $3500. Even $400 seems outrageous.
I did a ballpark estimate of the odds of finding a new Mersenne prime. It's very roughly 1 in 100,000 that an untested number that has no small factors (less than 2^76) will be prime.
Just one Mersenne prime has been found between 2^44 million and 2^74 million, and then there are no less than 3 in the next 10 million powers of 2 (minus 1 of course)? That's a lot.
It adds to our knowledge. Maybe we can see more patterns, or figure out something else interesting. The more data we have...
As often happens, a small but powerful, greedy, and stupid group of people are in a futile fight against technological change. They can't turn back the clock, but they can and are hurting a lot of others and making a big mess. They are lying to themselves and everyone else, pushing vile control freak, ownership society propaganda with all its overtones of fascism and authoritarianism.
They have the arrogance to believe they're better and more deserving than everyone else, think the rest of us are "the masses", a bunch of feeble minded "consumers" who couldn't video record or edit our way out of a wet paper bag and who wouldn't have any good cinema, music, or other art if we didn't mooch off the producers. The bitter irony is that they're worse moochers and thieves than ever we were. Their entire business could not exist as it is without the technology to record and broadcast audio and video-- technology they had little to do with realizing. There's hardly any Disney movie that isn't an unashamedly naked retelling of a classic story. As you pointed out, they've lobbied for and been granted retroactive copyright extensions. They've got some nerve to cry thief to the victims of their many thefts.
Understand just how awful it is to apply ownership to knowledge, and to call someone a thief just for doing a little self-education. They very people whose science and invention made their business possible, they slander as hackers and thieves. Education is the foundation of democracy and civilization. Well, I have a name for those who would lock up and paywall basic knowledge, and it's a lot worse than thief. Traitors. When a move they make blocks children from self-improvement and learning, they commit treason against the democratic West, and all humanity. The universe does not work in accordance with the ugly notion that knowledge can be owned. If it did, the world would be a lot darker and eviler place.
So, what's to be done about it? Putting them on trial for treason would get their attention, but I think there's no need for such a harsh route. For, in another big irony, though they think they're such geniuses, at least in the arts, the fact is, they're not. Even in their best art is ownership thinking and propaganda. One of the foremost blatant examples of that is in the Star Trek episode, I Mudd.
But it goes much deeper and more subtle than that. Fantasy is absolutely chock full of magic that somehow is unique and unrepeatable, and highly respectful of ownership. And there's lots of mystery around the lost secrets of the ancients. Tolkien is full of Gothic, Dark Ages style thinking, tragedy and loss. For instance, the mighty stallion Shadowfax is regarded as a 2nd coming from the legendary, more powerful, and plain all around better horses from "the morning of the world". The alliance that defeated the Dark Lord and took his magic ring is the "Last Alliance", because elves are in decline. And elves are in decline because that's their fate. It's their fate to decline, because, well, that's just the way it is. So dramatic and tragic, to know that the elves will soon be gone forever, their wisdom and knowledge forever after beyond the reach of men. Tolkien says so, now go cry a river about it. To be fair, it's only relatively recently that our technology has reached the point that we've surpassed the ancients in pretty much everything, but even as little as 150 years ago, that couldn't be said-- for one thing we didn't have concrete, and the Romans did. Even 1500 years after the Fall of Rome, we're still hung over about it.
So that's why things must change, must be allowed to change. It won't be a loss, won't be a huge tragedy, the streets will not be full of the bodies of artists who starved to death. The tragic loss is the opposite. The real tragedy would be being held back, being kept uneducated, barbaric, minds dark, fearful of the unknown, lashing out violently
And, we do know what we can do. We can unleash our technology, realize its full
What matters much more than GPA is how badly an employer needs to hire, and how many applicants they have. The only time GPA matters at all is if they need reasons to thin an enormous pool of applicants. If they don't have GPAs, they just use some other criteria that is probably much less fair.
Yes, grad schools take undergrad GPA much more seriously. But there's a lot of flexibility there too. When I applied, I learned my GPA was subject to a lot of interpretation. All depended on how the schools wanted to weight the bad grades for courses that were taken multiple times. Also, they might decide a particular course did not count towards your degree, and just exclude it. What was not appreciated was the poor quality of the undergrad program I had the misfortune to enroll in, thanks to a bad, bad move on the part of university administration in which they allowed several departments to dump their worst professors into a new department. Had I known that, I would have chosen a different school. A GPA of 2.5 to 3.0 sounds pretty bad doesn't it? How does it sound if I inform you that the graduation rate was only 4%? No one got out of that program with a 3.5, let alone a 4.0.
The whole tone of this article is another bashing of the school system, though it seems to be a criticism of students who expect too much. Sure, the GPA as a measure has problems of subjectivity, with teachers giving themselves too much leeway to make subjective judgments of students, and indulging personal likes and dislikes, and even abusing their power to, for instance, coerce students into sex. But that last, while sensational, is relatively rare compared to the frequent abuse in grad school of stealing credit for students' research work.
I'd be perfectly happy keeping copyright on my novel for 14-28 years and then turning it over to the public domain.
Have you ever done that? Or have plans to release all your works to the public domain as they reach the age of 14 or 28 years?
Without some system in place to protect authors/artists, the big companies would just repackage and resell everything and keep the money for themselves.
We'd all like to be safe and secure from big thieving bullies, but the price of some forms of protection is too high. Authors deserve and need compensation. Protection from that particular scenario you mentioned doesn't directly lead to more compensation for authors. The point of replacing the copyright system is freedom of knowledge, as is our natural right. These big publishers won't be able to repackage and resell, not when the people can simply bypass them and visit an online public library for the same works. We want these gouging, thieving private publishers permanently removed from any and all possibility of setting themselves up as the monopoly gatekeepers of knowledge and culture, able to hoard artistic and scientific works and refuse to release them for anything less than a supplicant's left arm and first born child.
As for fairly compensating authors, that's what we should be working on. Need more crowdfunding, more public patronage, and need systems in place to keep fraud to a minimum.
can ... be assured that someone else (say, a large publisher) won't just grab the text of my book and sell it without giving me any money
If you mean plagiarism, the solution to that is digital notaries. Ought to enhance them and raise their profile. If you mean, selling a print run, or even selling ebooks, there's stuff we can do about that too, without resorting to copyright and all its baggage. However, the end game is for selling of copies, particularly digital copies, to be allowed to die of obsolescence.
There's just way too much "Mother may I?" about the current system. And it's largely because so many people are so afraid they might somehow be losing the profits they deserve for making it big, however illusory their bigness and profits are. Fear, loss, and fear of loss really pushes those emotional buttons. We could have a system in which a book printer runs whatever they want, no permissions required, and the authors are compensated through funds tied to various measures set up for the purpose of figuring out who is deserving of compensation, and how much, for measurably adding to our culture.
It would be a great help if these rights proponents would promote systems and business models that actually can work, instead of continually trying to put the digital genie back in the bottle. They wail as if copyright is the one and only thing that can possibly keep artists from starving, and that's been debunked over and over. Seems the reasons they keep trying to propagandize in support of copyright is control and sheer greed. These days, a person can carry their entire collection of music and books discretely on their person on one flash drive, and the whole thing can be copied in a few minutes. That was utterly impractical in the days of the vinyl LP, and even in the 1990s with the mp3 codec and CD burners, it was still not quite there. Video is about the only thing that's still a little too big for casual throwaway handling, but storage continues to improve.
Understand that pro-copyright is anti-education. Seriously. Holy Copyright has become the justification for locking knowledge and culture behind paywalls, controlling access down to the individual level. The school textbook market is one gigantic racket, in which the public is gouged repeatedly for knowledge that is in the public domain. Research is another monstrous racket. The public pays for research that academic publishers then lock away and hold for ransom.
I really think copyright is doomed. It's only a question of when.
Yes, heaven forbid that the Republicans might have to rethink their platform and direction. That would be flip-flopping!
A Republican leaning police force and justice system would never, ever frame someone with a felony, for voting Democrat. Would they?
Yes, I'll add to the pile. Why doesn't Texas slide into the Gulf of Mexico? Because Oklahoma sucks.
Oklahoma is an extremely conservative state, possibly the reddest in the nation, full of Bible thumpers, prosperity gospel heretics, mindless straight ticket Republican voters, gun lovers, bigots of every description, and anti-science and anti-education morons. Whenever I have to go though, I spend as little time as possible there.
As for Tulsa, among other things, that's the home of Oral Roberts University.
Number of deaths doesn't tell the whole story. By that measure, a bad bus accident or a plane crash can be a bigger disaster than a major hurricane. A better measure could be total damages. Hurricane Andrew: 65 dead, $27.3 billion in damage, Air France flight 447: 228 dead, about $2.53 billion in damage (using $250 million for the aircraft, $10 million per life lost). Which is the worse disaster?
Damage estimates for Fukushima vary wildly, perhaps as low as $100 billion, or perhaps over $1 trillion. Banqiao Dam is the worst dam failure I've heard of, with an incredible 230,000 dead, however, in only a few years, most of the devastation was cleaned up. One of the troubles with nuclear power is of course radiation, which can make land uninhabitable and even unvisitable for centuries. No dam failure can do that. Like Fukushima, Banqaio was caused by recklessly inadequate engineering in combination with a natural disaster. They were warned by competent engineers that the engineering wasn't good enough, but they ignored the engineers and went ahead anyway. It is that human factor that makes nuclear power so worrisome. I don't trust that we can keep all nuclear power plants safe from such reckless mismanagement. The human factor is also why offshore oil drilling is so controversial. Been plenty of bad accidents with that, and in most every case, such as Deepwater Horizon, someone got greedy and tried to cut corners.
We should use nuclear energy if the only alternative is coal. But we should use neither so long as it's economical to increase renewables. We should not bias the costs in any technique's favor by externalizing costs of pollution. For nuclear power, waste storage is an additional big and growing problem. Are you volunteering your back yard for storage of nuclear waste?
Both. At this point, nuclear power is better than fossil fuel power.
But nuclear power is still plenty dangerous. The first problem is that it can provide the material to make nuclear weapons. Won't do us much good to avert Global Warming if some rogue nation starts World War III with nukes. The second, more insidious problem is that human corruption and incompetence is scarily likely to lead to another major accident such as Fukushima. We know how to operate nuclear power with reasonable safety, but can we do so, for all nuclear power plants, for decades? Fukushima showed that moronic cronies may end up in charge, and start making foolish decisions, taking gambles that they have little idea are extremely reckless.
Different views may sound trivial, but don't sell them short for that reason. There's the Linear Algebra concept of the Change of Basis, there's transforms such as the Laplace and Fourier, and more.
For a simple example, it is easy to multiply by ten in base ten. If we wanted to multiply by some other number, often, it could make sense to change the base. Easier to multiply by 2 if the numbers are represented in base 2.
Let's tax people when they enter a grocery store and give the money to members of the National Restaurant Association.
If you cook your own food you are Stealing From McDonald's!
I had one where I fatfingered O instead of 0. They are next to each other on the QWERTY keyboard, you know. Stared at that line of code for some 5 to 1O minutes, not seeing what the problem could possibly be. I did figure it out finally, but it was annoying to have lost that much time on a visual distinction problem. A better font would have helped.
CDs take too much room. Especially wasteful are those miserable, easily broken jewel cases. Even without that, I'd rather have a flash drive than a stack of audio CDs. And I'd prefer a denser format, such as FLAC.
CDs are only a little better than vinyl when it comes to toughness. A scratch can ruin a CD, much the same as a vinyl record. A particularly annoying scratch was inflicted by the sharp corner of a DVD burner tray. I had just ripped the video, and when I reached up (the computer was on a high shelf) and took the disc out it brushed against the corner of the tray which for reasons of cheapness was very sharp-- you know, like the sharp edge on a new piece of paper that is so good at giving a paper cut. Gouged a huge scratch across the disc. I got out a file and removed that sharp corner, but it was of course too late to save that disc.
Yeah, this. Why do so many people put up with TicketBastard? It's like music fans are so fanatic they'd submit to being raped, literally raped not just "wallet raped", if that meant they got tickets to that concert they're just dying to see. They're like freshmen who let fraternities and sororities haze them within an inch of their lives. The people have the power to stop this insanity, but enough choose to live with it for TicketBastard to survive.
I can count on one hand the number of concerts I've attended. I'm averaging a bit less than one concert per decade.
now that I've finished it, I no longer deserve any further compensation
No one said that. You exaggerated.
I agree that artists deserve compensation. I would suppose that nearly everyone agrees with that. Where we disagree is the means, and the quantity. Copyright is a terrible system for compensating artists. There've been many cases in which copyright was used against the very artist it was supposed to help. A big media corporation has a lot more power than a lonely artist, and they use that power to dictate terms, terms which are extremely unfair. They know they have artists over a barrel, know they can make or break an artist. Artists can too easily be pushed into selling all rights to their own works for pennies, actually lose the right to use their own work.
In addition to doing a poor job of ensuring that artists are fairly compensated, copyright has all kinds of negative side effects. Copyright is the biggest reason our public libraries can't be a lot more digital. That would vastly increase their usefulness through increasing our access to knowledge, and at the same time save a great deal of money.
You stole the time and effort that I could have gotten from others by giving them my hard work to enjoy.
This kind of talk illustrates why copyright is so enduring. It pushes our buttons. It frames the debate in terms of property and loss, and people really, really hate suffering losses, hate being the victims of theft. But that is the wrong way to think of it. Set aside your emotions, your desire to see a thief get his hand or even his head cut off. And then, maybe you can acknowledge that there are significant differences between these kinds of products. Material goods are scarce, and theft of those should be strongly discouraged for that reason. The immaterial, however, is not scarce. This difference is extremely important. It's fundamental. The vested interests have done a thorough job of befuddling and confusing the public on this point. But they're fighting a losing battle, and less and less of the public is fooled as the years roll by.
Offering a torrent of Beatles albums is not at all the same as claiming to be the actual composer of those songs, trying to take credit for them. Taking credit, plagiarizing, that's real theft. Merely copying is not. That's just copying.
Copying should not be a crime. Copying is a natural right, it does a great deal of good and the so-called harm it causes is a figment of delusional thinking, and it's incredibly easy and getting easier by the year. It's past time the law was changed to reflect this fact of nature.
Do you realize that education is a massive copying of knowledge into children's memories? It is also a harm to McDonald's for a consumer to buy at a grocery instead, but that action is not a crime, nor should it be. It's competition.
Prosecutions have to happen just often enough to keep the commercial operators in line.
Or, the arts could change to another business model, of which there are a number of viable options.
This guy's mistake was being a defiant loud mouth. If he'd just shut up about it, the prosecutor's wouldn't have wanted to waste their time.
Someone has to take a stand, or bad laws will never be changed. If he does go to prison, I will regard him as a political prisoner, same as Phillip Danks and the founders of the Pirate Bay. We could write letters, lots and lots of letters, to the politicians of California, urging them to drop the case, or pardon him, or change their laws. It may make an impression.
A big problem is that California is home to Hollywood. If I was the defendant, I'd certainly ask for a change of venue.
I hate that term "lamba". It's just a fancy term for "unnamed", or "anonymous". What is a lambda function? A function that doesn't have a name, didn't need to be named, that's all! They like to be a little more restrictive, in that if a function didn't need to be named, that's usually because it is of extremely limited scope, like inside another function, and apart from recursive calls, only called from its parent function.
That kind of unnecessary jargon is representative of the entire field of programming language design. Because they are designing computer languages, they seem to feel freer to mess with English, and invent new, unnecesasry terms because they're such language geeks. I mean, "currying"? What's wrong with calling that "parameter unpacking" or something similar? But, why even bother with it, as its relationship to the meat of programming, which is to implement algorithms, is pretty tangential. Sure, useful for theory, same as a Turing Machine, but no one does any serious programming with a Turing Machine. The choice of font for the source code may be more significant than currying.
Where it gets ugly for the humble application programmer are those cases where the designers insist on some limitation, claiming it is for the good of the programmers. Sometimes they admit it isn't about the programmer, but about simplifying the compiler. And then it turns out that the problem they were trying to relieve the compiler from solving was trivial for a computer anyway, so long as the computer has another measly 8k of RAM to spare. Like, Java forcing programmers to create separate files for each class. An even older example is the totally useless distinction Pascal makes between a Procedure and a Function, a hangover from Algol. And there's the bit about "strongly typed" (Pascal) and "weakly typed" (C), before scripting languages blew that debate away, taking a leaf from BASIC. By their standards, C is strongly typed, and Pascal is the strict disciplinarian schoolteacher from hell strongly typed.
Society definitely has its dysfunctional aspects. Don't depend on anything you don't have to. Timing is overly important, because so many of our leaders are loudmouth morons who, among many other flaws such as thinking they're so smart, suck at planning, and will screw up and alternate the economy between boom and bust. Schools were begging for STEM professors during the tech boom of the 1990s. Sadly for me, I graduated with my PhD in 2001, during the Dot-Com Crash.
Especially do not depend overly on a job or an employer. They will abuse you if they sense your need. Put some of that PhD level brain towards freeing yourself from that, and stay the hell out of debt. That's what I did. It is a source of neverending amazement to me that most people are so terrible at finance, can't accept that the way of the installment plan significantly increases costs and that this matters. If you're not making massive payments for student loans or credit card debt or that new car (and you should avoid getting into those traps), a single person can easily live on $20k/year, and be reasonably comfortable. $10k on rent, and the other $10k on food, gas, Internet, and a few other necessities, and a bit of entertainment. Yeah, I could've perhaps found a roomie and cut my rent, but on that I splurged a little.
Do that while earning $60k or more, and the savings will pile up. Do more than just save. Throw it into the financial markets, and don't be an idiot about it and don't panic. You know the drill: buy low, sell high. Stay away from Ponzi schemes. Do that, and in 10 years, your savings may well have doubled.
Thinking clearly is hard enough at any time. But when you've got a society that believes in "do or die", holding guns to the heads of all their workers, pressuring everyone to the max not because they really need to but because they believe that maximizes productivity, and overlooks or dismisses that the desperation drives many to backstabbing and cheating, you haven't a chance to reflect calmly while you're subject to that madhouse. Not only do you have to seem productive according to whatever terribly inadequate excuse of a lazy measure they're trying to use, you have to be ready to defend against the machinations of the connivers who are always searching for the next easy target to blame and from whom to steal credit.
One of the craziest things about it was, on those occasions when the workplace found me out, discovered that they could not pressure me with threats to fire me and ruin my career forever and all that, they went wild. Then I was a "flight risk", and my coworkers and even bosses were furiously jealous, and this was translated into bad reviews and massive double standards. Work they would have been thrilled to get from anyone else was "disappointing" from me. Yeah, can be pretty depressing to be subjected to such unfairness.
If you take the 'I" from "Coin" and move it to the front, you get "iCon"
What could we possibly offer aliens? The idea that they might want to eat us for mere food is ridiculous. If they exist, know about us and can reach us, and want something nefarious, we can probably do nothing about it. They may well have been civilized for over a million years and have technology, intelligence, philosophies, and understanding so far beyond us that we are mere insects to them.
Why should they want to simply harm us? Easy enough for an advanced, powerful, space faring civilization to exterminate us all if that's all they wanted. That would be about the same as an adult running around stepping on ants for fun. More likely they've solved all their urgent problems and are bored, and we are a source of entertainment that they absolutely do not want spoiled by revealing themselves to us. The games they may be playing with us might be nefarious, they might be trying to guide is in certain not so good directions, who can say? Maybe there's a Team Suicide who will be victorious in their games if they can get those life forms to kill themselves off, while other teams have other goals and victory conditions. There are so many possibilities.
AV1's failure mode is blur
And textures. I've noticed this problem with wavelet based lossy image compression.
Texture is why JPEG wins. On Cecret Lake, the clouds, vegetation, and gravelly slopes look better in JPEG. JPEG is very blocky at the high compression rate they must be using, and you can see this up close, but the textures are better preserved. AV1 just smears everything. Twigs are gone, fine filaments in high altitude clouds are gone, gravelly slopes look vague. Step back from the monitor to where you can't see JPEG's blockiness, and the difference is even more pronounced. AV1's smearing is still evident.
AV1 wins on smooth surfaces and gradients and sharp edges such as the air balloons and clear parts of the sky in Clovisfest. Steinway is another with lots of shiny polished smooth surfaces that play to AV1's strengths over JPEG. But on most of the pictures, I'll take JPEG.
The revolt against GIF that culminated in PNG over 20 years ago showed that royalty free and patent unencumbered works. I recently learned of Free Lossless Image Format (FLIF), currently in development and intended to replace PNG, and it looks great. Handily beats WEBP, and also addresses animations, the reason GIF didn't completely die. FLIF alone shows that PNG was not a one time freak. But there's also Xiph, which has been working on audio and video codecs for decades, giving us Ogg Vorbis and fairly recently, Opus. And soon we will have AV1.
Opus supposedly bridges the gap in audio between music and voice, better at both than even the best codecs tuned specifically for one or the other. Opus is good at voice, but from my own experiences, no, it's not the very best. Shouldn't VoIP software use Opus, if it was the best? I'd love to abandon Skype. This is the first I've heard of Codec2, thanks for mentioning it.
The area most in need of an update is lossy stills, where JPEG is still supreme. (Why didn't JPEG 2000 catch on?) I saw a comparison on stills between AV1 and JPEG, and in my opinion, JPEG is clearly superior. I hope AV1 improves there, but I wonder if we could have a "double" JPEG, bump the 8x8 blocks up to 16x16, just as a stopgap?
Yet despite all this evidence, IP rights holders still refuse to concede that unencumbered works. What is accomplished by moaning the clearly wrong idea that codecs will not be developed? They really think they can persuade some deep pocketed organizations to swallow that propaganda and join with them? I don't follow that notion of "fractional options", and I don't see why anyone else should either, especially with AV1 in the wings. Meantime, for video I'm sticking with VP9 and Opus (and webVTT) inside WEBM.
Yes, I see mixed results.
AV1 is clearly better on curves and edges, doesn't have that blocky and too enhanced look to the edges that JPEG gets. Does better on smooth areas, doesn't introduce the nasty artifacts JPEG does. AV1's gradients are much smoother. The Clovisfest image with air balloons against the sky shows all this very well.
But JPEG does better with rough texture. AV1 blurs the heck out of textures. Look at Cecret Lake. The greenery just below and to the right of the highest peek is all blurred into vague smoothness in the AV1 image, while JPEG preserves the original grainy look much better. Clear sky looks better in AV1, but clouds look better in JPEG. AV1 blurs out the fine filaments. Same with tree branches. AV1 makes branch tips and twigs disappear, while JPEG mangles and shifts twigs, but keeps them. Hair and fur is another problem for AV1, just look at the Tiger picture. Clearly better in JPEG.
GP goes in a valid direction. But it's not exactly marketing that's been put ahead of security, it's performance. Marketing knows customers care much more about performance than safety. And are the customers wrong? Idiots, for not taking security more seriously?
Think about the security vulnerability inherent in the C library function, malloc. It can give its process access to discarded but unerased data from whatever process last used whatever region of memory the OS hands it, unless steps are taken. They knew what to do about it: wipe the memory. Maybe the OS should do that, or the hardware. But everyone realized it would be a performance hit, even if it was hardware based, and no one wanted that. Instead, the burden was put on the previous process to erase its data before freeing the memory. Library functions such as secmalloc can assist with that, of course. And that was a fairly sensible move. Only erase the data if it is sensitive, otherwise, who cares?
In the design of C, performance was chosen over security and safety pretty much every time. It should be no surprise that hardware design shows the same focus. And it's not wrong. It's safer to drive on slow roads, never exceed 50kph, but people do not want that, they want to go over 100kph, for the good reason that time is also valuable.