Copyright for resumes isn't needed to protect your employment prospects. We have other laws against misrepresentation, fraud, and plagiarism. Copyright was always overkill for such purposes. It's like using nuclear bombs to dig canals. As for employers, they seem to think it's good to receive several hundred resumes for each position, to increase their bargaining power, and are always reaching for the feeblest excuses to reject most. I find it incredible and hypocritical that they whine about talent shortages when they get "only" half a dozen qualified applicants for a position. Copyright really does not seem like a good tool to deal with problems in hiring practices. More complaining to the EEOC would seem to be in order, to stem the unfairness, and the excesses of recruiters. But I think the fundamental problem is that there just plain aren't enough jobs.
I also doubt that our system will ever move correctly on copyright, no matter what noise we make through proper channels. There will be no convincing copyright holders to accept change. It will have to be rammed down their throats. Have to undermine them with mass civil disobedience. The campaign against SOPA and PIPA was successful as far as it went, but it wasn't enough. The Pirate Bay is better at showing them that they cannot control information, but it still isn't enough. For one thing, it's too centralized, too inviting a target. Tempts copyright extremists into hoping that if they can shut down the Pirate Bay in the noisiest, ugliest, scariest way possible, they can win their war against sharing.
I really do not see any alternative to eventually abolishing copyright. It simply does not work. The law cannot stop millions of people from sharing with each other. Neither can technical measures such as the joke known as DRM, or its ancestor, copy protection. And it really limits our ability to share knowledge. Our public libraries ought to be able to go completely digital, free of legal entanglement. The only question is, how long will it take to drag the dinosaurs, kicking and screaming, to the altar of progress?
Well HTTP/XML/SGML is a terrible language. It's overly verbose and redundant and overly complicated.
The verbose part is that closing tags must repeat the name used for the opening tag. The designers thought that would make it more human readable, and it did not. It just added clutter, ironically making it less human readable. There are several other features that add to the bloat, but that's the big one.
And as for excessive complexity, how about properties? Why couldn't that have been handled with specially named tags, instead of introducing a whole separate layer of further syntax to parse? Instead of <H1 align="center">header text</H1> should have <H1><align>center</>header text</>. Plus, they weren't even consistent in using that syntax solely, as there are such tags as center, and b, u, and i for bold, underline, and italic. It wasn't necessary or useful to enshrine this huge distinction between data and metadata in the syntax like that.
Why not improve our night vision, instead of our headlights? There are various sorts of night vision goggles. It wouldn't be as easy, but it would avoid the problems caused by overly bright headlights. Could maybe build some kind of night vision enhancement into the windshield.
Or, maybe when we have computers driving our cars, we can dispense with headlights.
Seems the way we prefer to solve problems is by forcing the environment to adapt to us, rather than making changes on our side. When, however, the environment that we're imposing on includes us, then there is friction. Will we all need to wear special glasses when driving at night to cut down on the glare or something?
Re:"Senseless Death?"
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Losing Aaron
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· Score: 1
who determines whether a law is reasonable or not
Who? The people.
and by what standard?
When a law forbids an activity that most people do, and that activity is natural and of great value to the public, then the law is wrong and should be changed. Now cannabis is legal in some places, despite its dubious effects on health. In contrast, sharing of information has no negative effects on health. No one is harmed, no one loses, everyone gains. Artists can be compensated in many other ways. Yet that's not good enough for some who cry that they deserve more for "their" works. How many estates of famous dead artists cling, Gollum-like, to the works of their ancestors, thinking they're sitting on gold? And for what? Surely not so their ancestors will be encouraged to produce more works of art, as being dead, they can't. And sharing is still demonized as "piracy", and still illegal everywhere.
This entire debate over copyright and patent law has centered around a misunderstanding that extremists have refused to acknowledge. That misunderstanding is an oversimplification, an attempt to treat two manifestly different things, material goods and information, with the same principles. Over and over, we've heard copying and sharing compared to stealing. That comparison is simple, and it's wrong. It's propaganda. If the extremists were right about this, then also we should not have copyright law, because it wouldn't be needed, we could handle information with the identical laws we use for material goods. There would be no legal difference between shoplifting and making a recording, no difference between fencing stolen goods and uploading recordings. No difference between creating a counterfeit of a physical item, and a copy of a recording. Yet we have two different bodies of law, two different legal treatments for these different things, an implicit acknowlegdment that they are different.
Not only are the extremists wrong, but deep down they know it. They refuse to publicly admit it, so that they can cynically continue their rent seeking, milking us for money for what rightfully belongs to us all. They have shown no scruples. They have demanded and received harsh punishments for violators, persuading the law to treat what should never have been anything more than a civil matter as a criminal matter. Prison, for making a few copies?! And not copies of commercial works of art, but copies of valuable research that we, the people, had already paid for through grants! If any theft was going on, it was theft by publishers of our works for hire. And also theft of resources we have provided to enforce the law. Our police and courts serve us, not thieving scum like publishers who lock our research away behind paywalls. To pull off this disgusting theft, they were perfectly willing to stand by while people were sent to prison for decades, and bankrupted, and their lives ruined. When the zealous enforcers of the law threatened extreme punishment, they were nowhere to be seen. They didn't so much as peep that maybe, just maybe, the punishment Aaron Swartz was threatened with was too much. If anything, they have asked that even harsher punishments be handed out. Think about what they said upon the conviction of Jammie Thomas for "making available" 24 songs. They celebrated, declaring that this "sends a message", and at no point did they address the totally unfair size of the penalty she was being asked to pay. If she had let someone borrow one of her CDs with 24 songs on it, there would have been no penalty at all, because that is not a crime. But because she did it online, she was dragged through court and handed a punishment of $1.92 million. As many pointed out, the punishment for shoplifting a CD is far, far smaller. Loaning out a CD is not a crime at all, nor should it be.
Re:"Senseless Death?"
on
Losing Aaron
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· Score: 3, Insightful
Aaron Swartz didn't commit any real crimes! He didn't violate any rights, except in the imaginations of a few IP trolls.
He was railroaded by a rapacious justice system that took advantage of the backwardness of our lawmaking. These shameless enforcers were more interested in scoring points and pumping up their crime fighting numbers than in justice. They didn't do their jobs right and should be fired. And fired not just for the persecution of Aaron Swartz. I read of an independent motel that the chief enforcer tried to run out of business through misappplication of the law, and why? Most likely to cut down some of the competition for one of her campaign contributors who is a franchisee for a motel chain. They have shown no mercy to those who should have received mercy, and should not have the privilege of serving the public, should not have further opportunity to ruin lives.
The laws on the new are always over the top, written hastily by old dogs fearful for the status quo that they love too much. It is only an event like his suicide that shows everyone that the law went too far, paid too much attention to the loss of some old ways and did not give enough allowance to the new. The law should not be in the business of preservation of obsolescence, it should be for upholding justice. It should be balanced. Justice was not served. The public interest was not served. The law, and the too zealous enforcers of it failed us all.
Shove your self-righteous simplistic "he got what he deserved" attitude. It sure as hell doesn't apply to Aaron Swartz.
Time travel is such a plot destroyer, such a deus ex machina, it ought to be dropped from SF altogether, much the way psychic phenomena have. It is so overused and tame. The traveler goes back in time, and fixes the mistake without otherwise altering the future at all, then skips right back home to the future to find everything worked out exactly as desired. If they have a difficult time of it, they might have to make several trips back in time to fix the problems, but they of course succeed.
Time travel is also, so far as we know, impossible. Star Trek can lean on the crutches of FTL and time travel, to speed the plots along, but it's not necessary. We can conceive of interstellar civilizations without such fantasy. It is quite possible to build a space ship that can carry us to a nearby star system over a period of thousands of years, and terraform a world for our use. We lack the technology to do it right now, but maybe, in a few more centuries, we can. Time travel does not look like it will ever be possible, and ought to be relegated to fantasy.
I agree with your comments about the mainstream treatment of history. Too much focus on insignificant political figures. As an example, consider some of the leaders of the Western Roman Empire during its collapse. It might seem that the insane acts of the leaders were the reason the collapse happened, stuff like Emperor Valentinian III personally murdering his best general out of fear of usurpation, and himself falling from power soon afterwards to the very usurping manipulators who stoked his fears, but there's a lot of other stuff going on. The Roman political system was a shambles and could not handle emperors who were just sane enough to cling to power, but not sane enough to run a nation. Lead poisoning likely played a role in the otherwise incomprehensibly crazy acts of many of the leaders. They didn't just use lead in the pipes of the aqueducts and linings of pots, the upper classes sprinkled lead salts in their wine to sweeten it! So even if the political system could act swiftly to replace a deranged leader, it would not have helped much because the population all the leaders came from suffered the same problem. The US has had a number of bad leaders, but so far has had the good fortune of not having to deal with a truly lunatic leader, the sort of person who might in a bout of suicidal depression order the launching of the nukes. Let us hope the checks we have on the President make that impossible. And that we are being careful enough of the dangers of the raft of novel chemicals we have discovered and employed in recent times. Another policy that undermined the empire was the love of walls, and the whole idea of shutting out the rest of the world. They had to engage the barbarians, and while they did sometimes, the Romans preferred to dismiss them as savages and wall them away. Today, some political elements in the US swoon over the idea of building a great wall along the Mexican border. Starting around the year 250, the long term weather took a turn for the worse, becoming less steady and hurting their agricultural production. Today, we are faced with Climate Change.
Try some Jared Diamond, especially Guns, Germs, and Steel, for a broader perspective.
The price is not only money. If to pay 99 cents you also have to create an account, which means coming up with another weak password or just further compromising a weak password you use everywhere, and hand over a credit card number and your identification including your snail mail address, and an email address and perhaps hunt around to opt out of being put on several mailing lists, that's actually too high a price.
If people could pay 99 cents without getting themselves identified, analyzed and targeted for advertising, or worse, punitive pricing, I'm sure more would. Suppose "a study shows that men who bought songs like Under My Thumb and Maxwell's Silver Hammer are more prone to domestic violence", and therefore they should have their insurance rates raised, and be put on a crime watch list. 99 cents is the least of the price one might pay for a few lousy songs.
Tell me, was HAL the right thing? They seem to have changed their minds and abandoned it.
I've read the reasons for systemd. Faster boots, cleaner, more flexible, better at handling dependencies. Did I miss anything? Now, the reasons against systemd would seem to be that it adds dependencies, especially dependencies on systemd of other system tools such as dbus, it's more fragile, it certainly isn't as well tested, and it may not be so good at managing dependencies and being flexible as it proponents say it is.
Whatever else, systemd goes against the UNIX principle of having lots of small pieces that each do one simple thing and do it well.
Pay levels are like a school with students split into groups based on their intelligence and performance. There's no hiding possible. The students know who is in which group. The whole class is ranked. Upon graduation, someone is anointed the valedictorian. In the work place, job titles are usually tied to specific pay levels.
Conceding to jealousy by keeping everything hidden is a poor solution. Especially when hiding is not possible. It's a fiction. Perhaps it's better that people learn to deal with jealousy rather than avoid it? At least, to a point. There are several crucial measures to take to maintain good will and peace among workers. First, criteria and evaluations must be as fair as possible. I've seen trouble caused when criteria is chosen after the fact, in blatant efforts to favor some employees over others. Alice is good at x, and Bob is good at y. We like Bob better, so we'll make y count and x won't matter. Second, there has to be more than one measure. It helps to measure frequently, but it helps more to measure different things. There is more than one facet to being a good worker, more than one skill needed. This is one of the mistakes schools make. They boil everything down to one number, the grade. It's a good thing there are other measures. Poor grades and great SAT scores, or the other way around, could show any of several different things. Could be that the teachers were biased one way or the other, or the student is good or bad at test taking and so the test score does not accurately reflect the student's true abilities or educational achievements. So colleges accept students who are good on at least 1 measure.
The way some have raved about FB's supposedly dirt simple website design, I thought I was the only one who found FB's interface poor and confusing. Somehow, reading an invite or message doesn't always clean up the list of new things FB likes to nag you about, and logging in doesn't always take you to a home page. Terminology is a bit misleading. I've frequently ended up in the interface for searching out and adding new friends while hunting around for something else entirely.
I don't feel too trusting of FB's intentions. Always feels a little dirty to use FB for sending messages to friends and family.
Although copyright can be used against plagiarists, counterfeiters, and other sorts of fraudsters, that's not it's purpose. We have other laws to deal with those problems, we don't need copyright for that. Shouldn't keep copyright alive for such purposes either. If someone tries to pass that homemade F150 off as the real thing, if it's such a good copy that it fools prospective buyers, and someone buys it under the impression that they are buying a real Ford F150, then the seller has committed fraud. That's counterfeiting. Also trademark infringement. Very common for the copyright extremists to conflate these separate issues in their attempts to justify their positions.
You can make a homemade F150 truck, and you don't need Ford's permission. It can be a cardboard cutout, or a toy sized miniature that you can hold in your hand, or a full sized replica with a working engine and all. People have made replicas of cars that while antique, are not old enough for copyright to have expired on them. No one is going to sue you for making a replica of a Studebaker automobile! Just don't pass it off as the real thing.
There's also the Ship of Theseus problem. If you use some parts from a real antique car, and fabricate the ones you can't find, does the whole qualify as genuine? Can a T-bucket be a genuine Ford Model T?
Must have been expensive. I have mostly CFLs. I'm waiting for 2 things: the price of LED lighting to come down more, and the CFLs I have now to wear out.
One thing about LED lighting is that a point source package is a poor way to use LEDs, and our legacy lighting is mostly point source. For example, the dining area has a chandelier with 5 sockets, and another room has a ceiling fan with 4 sockets. Would be much better to light the room differently than put in LED based bulbs. Have the several hundred LEDs that are in the bulbs instead be on a line which could run around the edge of the room, or be coiled around a chandelier like framework.
Just what I was thinking. I don't know if the banks are stupid, or if their cold calculations really do show that writing off a steady stream of fraudulent transactions is less expensive than upgrading the security. But given their recent track record, such as crashing the economy and causing the Great Recession, I'm of the opinion that smart cards would be less costly in the long run, and that banks are stupid and greedy for not using them. They might have to hire a few software engineers, maybe even some experts in crypto! And we just know there aren't any available, thanks to H1B limits. Seems Ukraine's system produces many such experts.
The samples of assembler made me feel old! I'm familiar with x86 assembler, and the variations on MOV that go back to the 8086 (things like MOVSB, MOVSW), but this VMOVUPD was totally new to me. But then I have never looked at SSE, or even MMX.
We, the people, formed a government not for purposes of oppressing the liberties of our fellows, but because we can't possibly run our society without it. True, it can be corrupted, but until someone comes up with a better method, we'll just have to police it. Police it, not destroy it. We delegate decision making to elected representatives so that we don't have to spend all our own time in campaigns and votes. They in turn rely on staff, and fund research to find answers they need in order to make sensible policy. For instance, is the War on Drugs the best way to handle drug problems? Is Climate Change real and a problem, and how effective will various solutions be? Should we seed the oceans with iron? Scrub CO2 from the air? Build lots of windmills? Build dikes around coastal cities? Throw our efforts into discovering better battery technology so we can switch to electric cars? There are lives riding on the answers to these questions. NASA is one of the biggest researchers in this area.
The research has to be as unbiased as possible, and where can that be obtained? Not through corporate efforts, with shading and queering of data and results, spewing propaganda, and outright lying to suit their own selfish interests seen as not merely a little naughty, but actually expected and practically a mandate as part of their duty to shareholders! Combine that foolishness with their demonstrated lack of enlightenment and vision, their inability to perceive that even their own families would be better off if they stopped lying, and things start to look shaky. That's the most stupidly, treacherously byzantine part of our society, and you place your faith in them?!
And then a guy like you wants to break what little of government still works right, because you see no direct benefit to you by, for instance, having police on the beat on streets you don't personally use. The locals should pay for that! Well, we have a system like that in Texas. Schools are funded by property taxes. Consequently, rich neighborhoods have good schools, and poor neighborhoods have bad schools. This is some serious class discrimination, and it goes on almost unremarked. It's horribly inefficient to say the least. Inefficiency offset by increased brutality is why the Confederacy's cause was hopeless. Whipping the "lazy" slaves harder was never going to bring the South up to parity with the North. Their entire economic system, based as it was on slavery, was completely outclassed by the Union.
it may be that a very well hidden bug is lurking in the code and the latest GCC is exposing that in some way
I have run into this situation. The code actually depended upon a bug in the older gcc versions. When that bug was fixed, the code stopped working. In some cases, the compile failed, in others, it crashed at runtime.
Specifically, this was around gcc version 2.7, and the bug was this: for (int i=0; i < SIZE; i++) {... } for (i=0;.... The variable "i" should be out of scope for the 2nd loop and cause an error during compilation, but gcc didn't catch it. gcc version 2.95 caught it. I forget if that bug was fixed in 2.7 or 2.95.
Safety? Ensuring that the law is just and fair is important. Fairness is every bit as much a safety and security issue as enforcing good laws. The law has many corrupt rules that are a net negative to the public. They are purposely designed to bilk the majority for the sake of a very small minority. How safe will you feel if the law swings too far into corruption, and touches off a rebellion?
The law is also purposely too broad and harsh, so that someone who is causing a problem that doesn't immediately fit into a neat predefined category can be quickly corralled if necessary. Such law is not meant to be enforced on everyone all the time. The problem is that broad laws are easy to abuse, and there are those who try to make a living doing just that. Setting drivers up to fail is definitely unfair and corrupt.
It is every citizen's duty to fight such laws and enforcement any and every way possible. Politically powerful schemers are always testing the boundaries, trying to see what they can get away with. We must push back. Take too much lying down, and we will lose our freedoms.
This isn't about safety, didn't you get that message? It's revenue, pure and simple, with safety as the excuse. There are many other ways to make intersections safer, such as improved timing, visibility and lighting, geometry (gentler curves, gentler slopes, wider lanes), lower speed limits, and lowering the amount of traffic. Red light cameras should be a last resort. No one gets away with repeatedly entering intersections when it isn't safe to do so. Most of the time, when the traffic light is red, it's not safe! (We do have a problem with brainless lights holding people up for empty cross streets.) The person who tries it will get in a wreck before long. It's such a stupid thing to try that it is very rare, and those who do so rightly deserve being nominated for a Darwin Award if they get themselvs killed.
The #1 way to make intersections safer is ensure that the yellow light is long enough. Cities and their business partners who run these red light camera programs are notorious for deliberately neglecting to set the yellow to a reasonable duration. They used to be brazen enough to shorten the yellow. Now to head off accusations of cheating, they instead seek out intersections where the yellow was never long enough to begin with, and throw up cameras there. Every time they slap cameras on an intersection without first adjusting yellow durations, they show their true colors. Busting people for missing lights by under 1 second does not improve safety. They even trot out this ridiculous claim that longer yellows will not help because people adjust to them. Of course they can't cite any evidence to back that up.
In many cases, red light cameras have actually decreased safety. These programs have caused an increase in rear end collisions thanks to hard braking to avoid a ticket.
Good security takes more than layers. There's an issue of trust.
Been too many incidents of "security" products not being trustworthy. I'm not talking about malware masquerading as security software, I'm taking about actual security products that twisted the meaning of security. They became security for vendors against users, spun as security for users against their own worst natures. You want to be safe from yourself, right? Right. Because users might commit piracy and get themselves in Trouble. I have heard MS has pulled that one at least once, making their Malicious Software Removal Tool also scan for pirate copies of MS products. MS has also been wrong on occasion, making accusations of piracy where there wasn't any.
3rd party security products have trust issues as well. They junk up a user's computer with crapware, and blow the performance hit off as the price of security. Bad enough to have constant scanning slowing things down, but when they push constant advertising as well, they make themselves worse than the malware they claim to protect against.
That the supernatural is outside of science is well known, if not too well understood. Science deals only with the natural. I don't care for Russell's Teapot, as it is intentionally ridiculous, and too easily taken as mockery however deserved that may be, and reason to instantly dismiss anything else the rationalists have to say. I enjoy the FSM, but it has the same problem. I prefer "the Earth is 5 years old".
I find that the age of the Earth works well as a vehicle for imparting this bit of philosophy. We know the Earth is about 4.5 billion years old, not 10,000 or 6,000 years old. When Young Earth Creationists demand proof of the Earth's age or insist that no one can really know, they're not really asking for the truckload of evidence we have in support of the 4.5 billion years, they're pounding on a philosophical point concerning the nature of proof. What is proof? What I've found that works better is some logic. If the Earth could be 10,000 years old because a supernatural entity created it, as they say could be true, and yes it could be true, then why couldn't the Earth be only 5 years old? Or 5 hours old? We could all be going about our lives, thinking we remember things that happened yesterday or 10 years ago, but actually they didn't and a supernatural being implanted those memories while creating the Earth a short time ago. Maybe we all live in a giant simulation, as depicted in the movie the Matrix, but more perfect. How can we tell the difference? We can't. That's the point that the religiously dogmatic didn't grasp, that it can't be proven that what we observe is in fact reality. We operate on the quite reasonable assumption that observable reality is reality. Once they see that refusing to accept this reasonable assumption leads to a position where you can't prove anything at all, where no proof of anything is good enough, because something supernatural could have stepped in at any time to make things just so, and that science can't make assertions about the supernatural and doesn't invalidate faith, doesn't threaten their core religious values, they usually become more comfortable and less irrational and hysterical.
I don't agree with this logic. If that tactic of hammering on the one liner works, it points to a problem with your own legal team and message, or perhaps to the adversarial court system if you are not being granted an opportunity to tell the full story. Or, could it be that your organization has been negligent and deserves to lose the court case? If not, hiding and burying information doesn't seem like a good idea. That can make you look even worse if the opposition succeeds in showing that you have more pertinent info and you're withholding it.
There's another danger. Don't want the logs politicized. That's no solution either. Making the lawyers' lives easier by making developers lives impossible doesn't work. That could easily happen if the company's own lawyers or managers get control and insist on "cleaning up" the language and "sanitizing" the bug reports. I've seen bug reporting tools rendered useless wastes of time because some liar with too much authority didn't want anything negative in writing. Bug reports are negative by nature, and this foolish demand meant they really couldn't be written at all. In a saner company, this would immediately bring about a revolt, and the developers would kick out of the bug reporting process this unreasonable demand and the people who made it. In the case where the developers had to "compromise" and submit to some censorship, all that succeeded in doing was driving the developers away from the official bug reporting tool, while still forcing them to spend enough time using it to make it appear like their processes had not changed, and resenting the waste of time particularly when management is of course also pressuring the team to work faster, as they are wont to do. Real bug reporting and resolution had to be moved off the record. Naturally, many developers refused to put up with it, and moved on to other jobs.
A nice point yourself. I'd noticed this flavor of decline before, no more high elven king thanks mainly to not enough high elves left in Middle Earth to form a kingdom, the lost realm of Arnor, Gondor and allies severely outnumbered by their enemies and in peril, the earlier Atlantis like loss of Numenor. Even the Ents are in permanent decline. Only the dwarves have advanced somewhat, and that too is in danger. All that fits early Middle Age societies, living as they did within the ruins of Roman civlization, still using some Roman aqueducts, roads, and buildings centuries after losing the knowledge necessary to build more or even maintain existing ones, and unable to rediscover much thanks to the constant threats of war, disease, and food shortages. But I overlooked that this time.
There's no escaping shades of reality in any SF/Fantasy I've ever read. Scratch at any of them, and huge problems are revealed.
McCaffrey's dragons are too powerful. Large size, flying, and fire breathing is pretty stock stuff for dragons. But her dragons are also telepathic, and so emo they each bond with a chosen human rider so closely they kill themselves if their rider dies, and they can teleport (mere flying just ain't good enough), and worst of all, time travel. I'm guessing she realized she'd gone too far, but couldn't make any acknowledgment. Instead, she tried to paper over the problems by introducing restrictions and limitations that unfortunately come across as too arbitrary.
An integral and needless law of Tolkien's world serves only to make things needlessly more special and their loss more tragic. It's this notion that great things can only be done once. Why can't Yavanna simply grow more trees to light the world? Why did she quit at 2 trees to start with? Why can't Feanor make more Silmarillions? No explanation is offered, we're simply told that's the way things are. There's enough real misery in the world, there's no need to invent reasons to be even more miserable. But some people, especially story tellers, do that to be more dramatic, more poignant. This desire for specialness also infects authors' thinking on copyright. Even apart from the obvious self-interested reasons, they're predisposed to like copyright, like the way it puts art on a pedestal.
Another problem with many fantasy stories is what I call the Godzilla or King Kong problem. Huge scary powerful solo monsters that no one expected certainly are dramatic. But improbable. Monster movies are inherently ridiculous because even if such a monster appeared, it would have no chance whatsoever of doing much damage before the massed might of millions of people brought it down. The Watcher in the Water at the west entrance to Moria would in all likelihood starve very quickly. One need only wait. If, somehow, the monster is magically sustained, there are all sorts of other things a crew of engineering sorts like dwarves could do to solve the problem it created. For one, could open another exit nearby, but out of its quite limited reach. Or, could probably set off a rock avalanche, crushing anything in the pool as well as displacing all the water with debris. Could also undermine the dam and drain the pool that way. Or perhaps a more low key approach might work, like dumping poison in the pool. To prevail against all the things a crew of determined engineers could try, the monster would need extraordinary abilities by the dozen. Even the Balrog should have a very difficult time prevailing against an entire nation of dwarves. The Balrog only ran them out of Moria. The sandworms of Dune are slightly more plausible, but still not a real problem for a civilization that can travel interplanetary space. Only Sauron went as far as setting up a rival empire, and thereby stood a real chance of prevailing.
Middle Earth follows many rules of nature. The land is for the most part geologically plausible and sound, with mountains in ranges, rivers rising in the mountains and flowing downhill to the oceans, and woods, marshes, grasslands, deserts and ice in places one might expect. Despite the prominent place of magic in the typical fantasy story, its impact is really quite limited. Gandalf used his brains as much or more than his wizardry. Since the land is familiar to so many readers, why not model its climate for fun?
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Copyright for resumes isn't needed to protect your employment prospects. We have other laws against misrepresentation, fraud, and plagiarism. Copyright was always overkill for such purposes. It's like using nuclear bombs to dig canals. As for employers, they seem to think it's good to receive several hundred resumes for each position, to increase their bargaining power, and are always reaching for the feeblest excuses to reject most. I find it incredible and hypocritical that they whine about talent shortages when they get "only" half a dozen qualified applicants for a position. Copyright really does not seem like a good tool to deal with problems in hiring practices. More complaining to the EEOC would seem to be in order, to stem the unfairness, and the excesses of recruiters. But I think the fundamental problem is that there just plain aren't enough jobs.
I also doubt that our system will ever move correctly on copyright, no matter what noise we make through proper channels. There will be no convincing copyright holders to accept change. It will have to be rammed down their throats. Have to undermine them with mass civil disobedience. The campaign against SOPA and PIPA was successful as far as it went, but it wasn't enough. The Pirate Bay is better at showing them that they cannot control information, but it still isn't enough. For one thing, it's too centralized, too inviting a target. Tempts copyright extremists into hoping that if they can shut down the Pirate Bay in the noisiest, ugliest, scariest way possible, they can win their war against sharing.
I really do not see any alternative to eventually abolishing copyright. It simply does not work. The law cannot stop millions of people from sharing with each other. Neither can technical measures such as the joke known as DRM, or its ancestor, copy protection. And it really limits our ability to share knowledge. Our public libraries ought to be able to go completely digital, free of legal entanglement. The only question is, how long will it take to drag the dinosaurs, kicking and screaming, to the altar of progress?
Ack, slipped up. Wonder if the gp meant HTML, since this is a discussion about languages, not protocols.
Well HTTP/XML/SGML is a terrible language. It's overly verbose and redundant and overly complicated.
The verbose part is that closing tags must repeat the name used for the opening tag. The designers thought that would make it more human readable, and it did not. It just added clutter, ironically making it less human readable. There are several other features that add to the bloat, but that's the big one.
And as for excessive complexity, how about properties? Why couldn't that have been handled with specially named tags, instead of introducing a whole separate layer of further syntax to parse? Instead of <H1 align="center">header text</H1> should have <H1><align>center</>header text</>. Plus, they weren't even consistent in using that syntax solely, as there are such tags as center, and b, u, and i for bold, underline, and italic. It wasn't necessary or useful to enshrine this huge distinction between data and metadata in the syntax like that.
Why not improve our night vision, instead of our headlights? There are various sorts of night vision goggles. It wouldn't be as easy, but it would avoid the problems caused by overly bright headlights. Could maybe build some kind of night vision enhancement into the windshield.
Or, maybe when we have computers driving our cars, we can dispense with headlights.
Seems the way we prefer to solve problems is by forcing the environment to adapt to us, rather than making changes on our side. When, however, the environment that we're imposing on includes us, then there is friction. Will we all need to wear special glasses when driving at night to cut down on the glare or something?
who determines whether a law is reasonable or not
Who? The people.
and by what standard?
When a law forbids an activity that most people do, and that activity is natural and of great value to the public, then the law is wrong and should be changed. Now cannabis is legal in some places, despite its dubious effects on health. In contrast, sharing of information has no negative effects on health. No one is harmed, no one loses, everyone gains. Artists can be compensated in many other ways. Yet that's not good enough for some who cry that they deserve more for "their" works. How many estates of famous dead artists cling, Gollum-like, to the works of their ancestors, thinking they're sitting on gold? And for what? Surely not so their ancestors will be encouraged to produce more works of art, as being dead, they can't. And sharing is still demonized as "piracy", and still illegal everywhere.
This entire debate over copyright and patent law has centered around a misunderstanding that extremists have refused to acknowledge. That misunderstanding is an oversimplification, an attempt to treat two manifestly different things, material goods and information, with the same principles. Over and over, we've heard copying and sharing compared to stealing. That comparison is simple, and it's wrong. It's propaganda. If the extremists were right about this, then also we should not have copyright law, because it wouldn't be needed, we could handle information with the identical laws we use for material goods. There would be no legal difference between shoplifting and making a recording, no difference between fencing stolen goods and uploading recordings. No difference between creating a counterfeit of a physical item, and a copy of a recording. Yet we have two different bodies of law, two different legal treatments for these different things, an implicit acknowlegdment that they are different.
Not only are the extremists wrong, but deep down they know it. They refuse to publicly admit it, so that they can cynically continue their rent seeking, milking us for money for what rightfully belongs to us all. They have shown no scruples. They have demanded and received harsh punishments for violators, persuading the law to treat what should never have been anything more than a civil matter as a criminal matter. Prison, for making a few copies?! And not copies of commercial works of art, but copies of valuable research that we, the people, had already paid for through grants! If any theft was going on, it was theft by publishers of our works for hire. And also theft of resources we have provided to enforce the law. Our police and courts serve us, not thieving scum like publishers who lock our research away behind paywalls. To pull off this disgusting theft, they were perfectly willing to stand by while people were sent to prison for decades, and bankrupted, and their lives ruined. When the zealous enforcers of the law threatened extreme punishment, they were nowhere to be seen. They didn't so much as peep that maybe, just maybe, the punishment Aaron Swartz was threatened with was too much. If anything, they have asked that even harsher punishments be handed out. Think about what they said upon the conviction of Jammie Thomas for "making available" 24 songs. They celebrated, declaring that this "sends a message", and at no point did they address the totally unfair size of the penalty she was being asked to pay. If she had let someone borrow one of her CDs with 24 songs on it, there would have been no penalty at all, because that is not a crime. But because she did it online, she was dragged through court and handed a punishment of $1.92 million. As many pointed out, the punishment for shoplifting a CD is far, far smaller. Loaning out a CD is not a crime at all, nor should it be.
Aaron Swartz didn't commit any real crimes! He didn't violate any rights, except in the imaginations of a few IP trolls.
He was railroaded by a rapacious justice system that took advantage of the backwardness of our lawmaking. These shameless enforcers were more interested in scoring points and pumping up their crime fighting numbers than in justice. They didn't do their jobs right and should be fired. And fired not just for the persecution of Aaron Swartz. I read of an independent motel that the chief enforcer tried to run out of business through misappplication of the law, and why? Most likely to cut down some of the competition for one of her campaign contributors who is a franchisee for a motel chain. They have shown no mercy to those who should have received mercy, and should not have the privilege of serving the public, should not have further opportunity to ruin lives.
The laws on the new are always over the top, written hastily by old dogs fearful for the status quo that they love too much. It is only an event like his suicide that shows everyone that the law went too far, paid too much attention to the loss of some old ways and did not give enough allowance to the new. The law should not be in the business of preservation of obsolescence, it should be for upholding justice. It should be balanced. Justice was not served. The public interest was not served. The law, and the too zealous enforcers of it failed us all.
Shove your self-righteous simplistic "he got what he deserved" attitude. It sure as hell doesn't apply to Aaron Swartz.
Time travel is such a plot destroyer, such a deus ex machina, it ought to be dropped from SF altogether, much the way psychic phenomena have. It is so overused and tame. The traveler goes back in time, and fixes the mistake without otherwise altering the future at all, then skips right back home to the future to find everything worked out exactly as desired. If they have a difficult time of it, they might have to make several trips back in time to fix the problems, but they of course succeed.
Time travel is also, so far as we know, impossible. Star Trek can lean on the crutches of FTL and time travel, to speed the plots along, but it's not necessary. We can conceive of interstellar civilizations without such fantasy. It is quite possible to build a space ship that can carry us to a nearby star system over a period of thousands of years, and terraform a world for our use. We lack the technology to do it right now, but maybe, in a few more centuries, we can. Time travel does not look like it will ever be possible, and ought to be relegated to fantasy.
I agree with your comments about the mainstream treatment of history. Too much focus on insignificant political figures. As an example, consider some of the leaders of the Western Roman Empire during its collapse. It might seem that the insane acts of the leaders were the reason the collapse happened, stuff like Emperor Valentinian III personally murdering his best general out of fear of usurpation, and himself falling from power soon afterwards to the very usurping manipulators who stoked his fears, but there's a lot of other stuff going on. The Roman political system was a shambles and could not handle emperors who were just sane enough to cling to power, but not sane enough to run a nation. Lead poisoning likely played a role in the otherwise incomprehensibly crazy acts of many of the leaders. They didn't just use lead in the pipes of the aqueducts and linings of pots, the upper classes sprinkled lead salts in their wine to sweeten it! So even if the political system could act swiftly to replace a deranged leader, it would not have helped much because the population all the leaders came from suffered the same problem. The US has had a number of bad leaders, but so far has had the good fortune of not having to deal with a truly lunatic leader, the sort of person who might in a bout of suicidal depression order the launching of the nukes. Let us hope the checks we have on the President make that impossible. And that we are being careful enough of the dangers of the raft of novel chemicals we have discovered and employed in recent times. Another policy that undermined the empire was the love of walls, and the whole idea of shutting out the rest of the world. They had to engage the barbarians, and while they did sometimes, the Romans preferred to dismiss them as savages and wall them away. Today, some political elements in the US swoon over the idea of building a great wall along the Mexican border. Starting around the year 250, the long term weather took a turn for the worse, becoming less steady and hurting their agricultural production. Today, we are faced with Climate Change.
Try some Jared Diamond, especially Guns, Germs, and Steel, for a broader perspective.
The price is not only money. If to pay 99 cents you also have to create an account, which means coming up with another weak password or just further compromising a weak password you use everywhere, and hand over a credit card number and your identification including your snail mail address, and an email address and perhaps hunt around to opt out of being put on several mailing lists, that's actually too high a price.
If people could pay 99 cents without getting themselves identified, analyzed and targeted for advertising, or worse, punitive pricing, I'm sure more would. Suppose "a study shows that men who bought songs like Under My Thumb and Maxwell's Silver Hammer are more prone to domestic violence", and therefore they should have their insurance rates raised, and be put on a crime watch list. 99 cents is the least of the price one might pay for a few lousy songs.
Tell me, was HAL the right thing? They seem to have changed their minds and abandoned it.
I've read the reasons for systemd. Faster boots, cleaner, more flexible, better at handling dependencies. Did I miss anything? Now, the reasons against systemd would seem to be that it adds dependencies, especially dependencies on systemd of other system tools such as dbus, it's more fragile, it certainly isn't as well tested, and it may not be so good at managing dependencies and being flexible as it proponents say it is.
Whatever else, systemd goes against the UNIX principle of having lots of small pieces that each do one simple thing and do it well.
Pay levels are like a school with students split into groups based on their intelligence and performance. There's no hiding possible. The students know who is in which group. The whole class is ranked. Upon graduation, someone is anointed the valedictorian. In the work place, job titles are usually tied to specific pay levels.
Conceding to jealousy by keeping everything hidden is a poor solution. Especially when hiding is not possible. It's a fiction. Perhaps it's better that people learn to deal with jealousy rather than avoid it? At least, to a point. There are several crucial measures to take to maintain good will and peace among workers. First, criteria and evaluations must be as fair as possible. I've seen trouble caused when criteria is chosen after the fact, in blatant efforts to favor some employees over others. Alice is good at x, and Bob is good at y. We like Bob better, so we'll make y count and x won't matter. Second, there has to be more than one measure. It helps to measure frequently, but it helps more to measure different things. There is more than one facet to being a good worker, more than one skill needed. This is one of the mistakes schools make. They boil everything down to one number, the grade. It's a good thing there are other measures. Poor grades and great SAT scores, or the other way around, could show any of several different things. Could be that the teachers were biased one way or the other, or the student is good or bad at test taking and so the test score does not accurately reflect the student's true abilities or educational achievements. So colleges accept students who are good on at least 1 measure.
The way some have raved about FB's supposedly dirt simple website design, I thought I was the only one who found FB's interface poor and confusing. Somehow, reading an invite or message doesn't always clean up the list of new things FB likes to nag you about, and logging in doesn't always take you to a home page. Terminology is a bit misleading. I've frequently ended up in the interface for searching out and adding new friends while hunting around for something else entirely.
I don't feel too trusting of FB's intentions. Always feels a little dirty to use FB for sending messages to friends and family.
Several problems with your argument.
Although copyright can be used against plagiarists, counterfeiters, and other sorts of fraudsters, that's not it's purpose. We have other laws to deal with those problems, we don't need copyright for that. Shouldn't keep copyright alive for such purposes either. If someone tries to pass that homemade F150 off as the real thing, if it's such a good copy that it fools prospective buyers, and someone buys it under the impression that they are buying a real Ford F150, then the seller has committed fraud. That's counterfeiting. Also trademark infringement. Very common for the copyright extremists to conflate these separate issues in their attempts to justify their positions.
You can make a homemade F150 truck, and you don't need Ford's permission. It can be a cardboard cutout, or a toy sized miniature that you can hold in your hand, or a full sized replica with a working engine and all. People have made replicas of cars that while antique, are not old enough for copyright to have expired on them. No one is going to sue you for making a replica of a Studebaker automobile! Just don't pass it off as the real thing.
There's also the Ship of Theseus problem. If you use some parts from a real antique car, and fabricate the ones you can't find, does the whole qualify as genuine? Can a T-bucket be a genuine Ford Model T?
Must have been expensive. I have mostly CFLs. I'm waiting for 2 things: the price of LED lighting to come down more, and the CFLs I have now to wear out.
One thing about LED lighting is that a point source package is a poor way to use LEDs, and our legacy lighting is mostly point source. For example, the dining area has a chandelier with 5 sockets, and another room has a ceiling fan with 4 sockets. Would be much better to light the room differently than put in LED based bulbs. Have the several hundred LEDs that are in the bulbs instead be on a line which could run around the edge of the room, or be coiled around a chandelier like framework.
Just what I was thinking. I don't know if the banks are stupid, or if their cold calculations really do show that writing off a steady stream of fraudulent transactions is less expensive than upgrading the security. But given their recent track record, such as crashing the economy and causing the Great Recession, I'm of the opinion that smart cards would be less costly in the long run, and that banks are stupid and greedy for not using them. They might have to hire a few software engineers, maybe even some experts in crypto! And we just know there aren't any available, thanks to H1B limits. Seems Ukraine's system produces many such experts.
The samples of assembler made me feel old! I'm familiar with x86 assembler, and the variations on MOV that go back to the 8086 (things like MOVSB, MOVSW), but this VMOVUPD was totally new to me. But then I have never looked at SSE, or even MMX.
You are being too simplistic.
We, the people, formed a government not for purposes of oppressing the liberties of our fellows, but because we can't possibly run our society without it. True, it can be corrupted, but until someone comes up with a better method, we'll just have to police it. Police it, not destroy it. We delegate decision making to elected representatives so that we don't have to spend all our own time in campaigns and votes. They in turn rely on staff, and fund research to find answers they need in order to make sensible policy. For instance, is the War on Drugs the best way to handle drug problems? Is Climate Change real and a problem, and how effective will various solutions be? Should we seed the oceans with iron? Scrub CO2 from the air? Build lots of windmills? Build dikes around coastal cities? Throw our efforts into discovering better battery technology so we can switch to electric cars? There are lives riding on the answers to these questions. NASA is one of the biggest researchers in this area.
The research has to be as unbiased as possible, and where can that be obtained? Not through corporate efforts, with shading and queering of data and results, spewing propaganda, and outright lying to suit their own selfish interests seen as not merely a little naughty, but actually expected and practically a mandate as part of their duty to shareholders! Combine that foolishness with their demonstrated lack of enlightenment and vision, their inability to perceive that even their own families would be better off if they stopped lying, and things start to look shaky. That's the most stupidly, treacherously byzantine part of our society, and you place your faith in them?!
And then a guy like you wants to break what little of government still works right, because you see no direct benefit to you by, for instance, having police on the beat on streets you don't personally use. The locals should pay for that! Well, we have a system like that in Texas. Schools are funded by property taxes. Consequently, rich neighborhoods have good schools, and poor neighborhoods have bad schools. This is some serious class discrimination, and it goes on almost unremarked. It's horribly inefficient to say the least. Inefficiency offset by increased brutality is why the Confederacy's cause was hopeless. Whipping the "lazy" slaves harder was never going to bring the South up to parity with the North. Their entire economic system, based as it was on slavery, was completely outclassed by the Union.
it may be that a very well hidden bug is lurking in the code and the latest GCC is exposing that in some way
I have run into this situation. The code actually depended upon a bug in the older gcc versions. When that bug was fixed, the code stopped working. In some cases, the compile failed, in others, it crashed at runtime.
Specifically, this was around gcc version 2.7, and the bug was this: for (int i=0; i < SIZE; i++) { ... } for (i=0; .... The variable "i" should be out of scope for the 2nd loop and cause an error during compilation, but gcc didn't catch it. gcc version 2.95 caught it. I forget if that bug was fixed in 2.7 or 2.95.
Safety? Ensuring that the law is just and fair is important. Fairness is every bit as much a safety and security issue as enforcing good laws. The law has many corrupt rules that are a net negative to the public. They are purposely designed to bilk the majority for the sake of a very small minority. How safe will you feel if the law swings too far into corruption, and touches off a rebellion?
The law is also purposely too broad and harsh, so that someone who is causing a problem that doesn't immediately fit into a neat predefined category can be quickly corralled if necessary. Such law is not meant to be enforced on everyone all the time. The problem is that broad laws are easy to abuse, and there are those who try to make a living doing just that. Setting drivers up to fail is definitely unfair and corrupt.
It is every citizen's duty to fight such laws and enforcement any and every way possible. Politically powerful schemers are always testing the boundaries, trying to see what they can get away with. We must push back. Take too much lying down, and we will lose our freedoms.
This isn't about safety, didn't you get that message? It's revenue, pure and simple, with safety as the excuse. There are many other ways to make intersections safer, such as improved timing, visibility and lighting, geometry (gentler curves, gentler slopes, wider lanes), lower speed limits, and lowering the amount of traffic. Red light cameras should be a last resort. No one gets away with repeatedly entering intersections when it isn't safe to do so. Most of the time, when the traffic light is red, it's not safe! (We do have a problem with brainless lights holding people up for empty cross streets.) The person who tries it will get in a wreck before long. It's such a stupid thing to try that it is very rare, and those who do so rightly deserve being nominated for a Darwin Award if they get themselvs killed.
The #1 way to make intersections safer is ensure that the yellow light is long enough. Cities and their business partners who run these red light camera programs are notorious for deliberately neglecting to set the yellow to a reasonable duration. They used to be brazen enough to shorten the yellow. Now to head off accusations of cheating, they instead seek out intersections where the yellow was never long enough to begin with, and throw up cameras there. Every time they slap cameras on an intersection without first adjusting yellow durations, they show their true colors. Busting people for missing lights by under 1 second does not improve safety. They even trot out this ridiculous claim that longer yellows will not help because people adjust to them. Of course they can't cite any evidence to back that up.
In many cases, red light cameras have actually decreased safety. These programs have caused an increase in rear end collisions thanks to hard braking to avoid a ticket.
Good security takes more than layers. There's an issue of trust.
Been too many incidents of "security" products not being trustworthy. I'm not talking about malware masquerading as security software, I'm taking about actual security products that twisted the meaning of security. They became security for vendors against users, spun as security for users against their own worst natures. You want to be safe from yourself, right? Right. Because users might commit piracy and get themselves in Trouble. I have heard MS has pulled that one at least once, making their Malicious Software Removal Tool also scan for pirate copies of MS products. MS has also been wrong on occasion, making accusations of piracy where there wasn't any.
3rd party security products have trust issues as well. They junk up a user's computer with crapware, and blow the performance hit off as the price of security. Bad enough to have constant scanning slowing things down, but when they push constant advertising as well, they make themselves worse than the malware they claim to protect against.
That the supernatural is outside of science is well known, if not too well understood. Science deals only with the natural. I don't care for Russell's Teapot, as it is intentionally ridiculous, and too easily taken as mockery however deserved that may be, and reason to instantly dismiss anything else the rationalists have to say. I enjoy the FSM, but it has the same problem. I prefer "the Earth is 5 years old".
I find that the age of the Earth works well as a vehicle for imparting this bit of philosophy. We know the Earth is about 4.5 billion years old, not 10,000 or 6,000 years old. When Young Earth Creationists demand proof of the Earth's age or insist that no one can really know, they're not really asking for the truckload of evidence we have in support of the 4.5 billion years, they're pounding on a philosophical point concerning the nature of proof. What is proof? What I've found that works better is some logic. If the Earth could be 10,000 years old because a supernatural entity created it, as they say could be true, and yes it could be true, then why couldn't the Earth be only 5 years old? Or 5 hours old? We could all be going about our lives, thinking we remember things that happened yesterday or 10 years ago, but actually they didn't and a supernatural being implanted those memories while creating the Earth a short time ago. Maybe we all live in a giant simulation, as depicted in the movie the Matrix, but more perfect. How can we tell the difference? We can't. That's the point that the religiously dogmatic didn't grasp, that it can't be proven that what we observe is in fact reality. We operate on the quite reasonable assumption that observable reality is reality. Once they see that refusing to accept this reasonable assumption leads to a position where you can't prove anything at all, where no proof of anything is good enough, because something supernatural could have stepped in at any time to make things just so, and that science can't make assertions about the supernatural and doesn't invalidate faith, doesn't threaten their core religious values, they usually become more comfortable and less irrational and hysterical.
I don't agree with this logic. If that tactic of hammering on the one liner works, it points to a problem with your own legal team and message, or perhaps to the adversarial court system if you are not being granted an opportunity to tell the full story. Or, could it be that your organization has been negligent and deserves to lose the court case? If not, hiding and burying information doesn't seem like a good idea. That can make you look even worse if the opposition succeeds in showing that you have more pertinent info and you're withholding it.
There's another danger. Don't want the logs politicized. That's no solution either. Making the lawyers' lives easier by making developers lives impossible doesn't work. That could easily happen if the company's own lawyers or managers get control and insist on "cleaning up" the language and "sanitizing" the bug reports. I've seen bug reporting tools rendered useless wastes of time because some liar with too much authority didn't want anything negative in writing. Bug reports are negative by nature, and this foolish demand meant they really couldn't be written at all. In a saner company, this would immediately bring about a revolt, and the developers would kick out of the bug reporting process this unreasonable demand and the people who made it. In the case where the developers had to "compromise" and submit to some censorship, all that succeeded in doing was driving the developers away from the official bug reporting tool, while still forcing them to spend enough time using it to make it appear like their processes had not changed, and resenting the waste of time particularly when management is of course also pressuring the team to work faster, as they are wont to do. Real bug reporting and resolution had to be moved off the record. Naturally, many developers refused to put up with it, and moved on to other jobs.
A nice point yourself. I'd noticed this flavor of decline before, no more high elven king thanks mainly to not enough high elves left in Middle Earth to form a kingdom, the lost realm of Arnor, Gondor and allies severely outnumbered by their enemies and in peril, the earlier Atlantis like loss of Numenor. Even the Ents are in permanent decline. Only the dwarves have advanced somewhat, and that too is in danger. All that fits early Middle Age societies, living as they did within the ruins of Roman civlization, still using some Roman aqueducts, roads, and buildings centuries after losing the knowledge necessary to build more or even maintain existing ones, and unable to rediscover much thanks to the constant threats of war, disease, and food shortages. But I overlooked that this time.
There's no escaping shades of reality in any SF/Fantasy I've ever read. Scratch at any of them, and huge problems are revealed.
McCaffrey's dragons are too powerful. Large size, flying, and fire breathing is pretty stock stuff for dragons. But her dragons are also telepathic, and so emo they each bond with a chosen human rider so closely they kill themselves if their rider dies, and they can teleport (mere flying just ain't good enough), and worst of all, time travel. I'm guessing she realized she'd gone too far, but couldn't make any acknowledgment. Instead, she tried to paper over the problems by introducing restrictions and limitations that unfortunately come across as too arbitrary.
An integral and needless law of Tolkien's world serves only to make things needlessly more special and their loss more tragic. It's this notion that great things can only be done once. Why can't Yavanna simply grow more trees to light the world? Why did she quit at 2 trees to start with? Why can't Feanor make more Silmarillions? No explanation is offered, we're simply told that's the way things are. There's enough real misery in the world, there's no need to invent reasons to be even more miserable. But some people, especially story tellers, do that to be more dramatic, more poignant. This desire for specialness also infects authors' thinking on copyright. Even apart from the obvious self-interested reasons, they're predisposed to like copyright, like the way it puts art on a pedestal.
Another problem with many fantasy stories is what I call the Godzilla or King Kong problem. Huge scary powerful solo monsters that no one expected certainly are dramatic. But improbable. Monster movies are inherently ridiculous because even if such a monster appeared, it would have no chance whatsoever of doing much damage before the massed might of millions of people brought it down. The Watcher in the Water at the west entrance to Moria would in all likelihood starve very quickly. One need only wait. If, somehow, the monster is magically sustained, there are all sorts of other things a crew of engineering sorts like dwarves could do to solve the problem it created. For one, could open another exit nearby, but out of its quite limited reach. Or, could probably set off a rock avalanche, crushing anything in the pool as well as displacing all the water with debris. Could also undermine the dam and drain the pool that way. Or perhaps a more low key approach might work, like dumping poison in the pool. To prevail against all the things a crew of determined engineers could try, the monster would need extraordinary abilities by the dozen. Even the Balrog should have a very difficult time prevailing against an entire nation of dwarves. The Balrog only ran them out of Moria. The sandworms of Dune are slightly more plausible, but still not a real problem for a civilization that can travel interplanetary space. Only Sauron went as far as setting up a rival empire, and thereby stood a real chance of prevailing.
Middle Earth follows many rules of nature. The land is for the most part geologically plausible and sound, with mountains in ranges, rivers rising in the mountains and flowing downhill to the oceans, and woods, marshes, grasslands, deserts and ice in places one might expect. Despite the prominent place of magic in the typical fantasy story, its impact is really quite limited. Gandalf used his brains as much or more than his wizardry. Since the land is familiar to so many readers, why not model its climate for fun?