I've always leaned more towards sci-fi that is possible within my lifetime and doesn't need to make far fetched assumptions.
"Possible within your lifetime" isn't a prerequisite -- after all, it's very unlikely that anyone will build a generational space colony or a dyson sphere (or even a ringworld, or even an orbital/Halo) within your lifetime. However, all of these things seem possible.
Granted, much of the stuff on Ringworld was downright fanciful. But the world itself seemed mostly sound. (I say "mostly" because it's had to be adjusted, but these were in details like what it must be made of, and what might be done to stablize it. It's still possible, just very difficult and resource-intensive.)
To be frank, your use of the word "mysticism" in relation to Dune is really just a polite or politically correct way to call out the down right religious aspects of the story
Actually, no, I'm talking about "mysticism" with respect to things like how the spice affects prescience.
What you seem to have missed entirely is that Dune is perhaps one of the more cynical views of religion that I've seen. The Bene Gesserit create religions. They take local superstitions, manipulate them just slightly, plant the seeds of myths and legends...
This is the Missionaria Protectiva -- so called because if a Reverend Mother finds herself alone on a planet, in a culture which has been seeded in this way, she can take advantage of them.
This is exactly what Paul Atreides does. The Mahdi was the legend. I don't remember if Paul knew about it -- I know his mother did.
The other Dune novels, while they do get stranger and stranger, also have a habit of not just trivializing what had been done in previous novels, but watching things progress from mysticism to science. For instance, at one point, the Spice (and a Guild Navigator) were required for space travel -- later on, the Ixians, I believe, reproduced this mechanism artificially. This was a disruptive technology -- before this, both the guild and whoever was in charge of Arrakis would control space travel, as is elegantly demonstrated by Paul Atreides declaring himself Emperor after seizing control of that one planet.
But, just like with the science in science fiction, occasionally some of it is invented without being entirely explained.
And I'm a bit biased, having seen computers totally mutilated in nearly every appearance on TV or in the movies... but I'd much rather an author either defer to an authority who would know, or simply leave whatever it is unexplained.
Because technobabble just ends up looking obsolete once we know more about it, and likely already sounds stupid to people who know. For example: Lightsabers. They're clearly meant to be laser swords. They clearly can't be laser swords. Clearly, they must be plasma trapped in a force field... and it goes downhill from there.
Contrast this with Firefly: Many parts of it are realistic (no sound in space, no faster-than-light travel...) The parts that aren't, they at least don't usually pretend to explain (inertial dampeners, artificial gravity, what kind of fuel is used...)
Erm.. you're talking about the difference between just rendering a local video and streaming a video through a player developed in flash, huge huge difference.
Are you honestly saying that the codec itself is running inside the flash VM?
Or could it be that Flash just sucks for video playback?
And no, from an end-user perspective, there's really no difference. YouTube would work just as well with a video tag, or even an old-school object tag, as it does with Flash -- better, because then I could use a local player, rather than the Flash player.
So, if there's some added functionality to putting it in Flash, I'm willing to bet that one or both of these is true:
- End-users don't care about that functionality
- It still didn't have to be that fucking slow.
I have almost no CPU usage for any.swf movies I play off of this site.
If by "almost none" you mean "still 20%", sure. And that's in a tiny little window smaller than my hand. Contrast to fullscreen local video at less than 1%.
For those videos, it's fine, and there's even a good reason -- the one you linked to is actually vector, which means less bandwidth, and if they were smart, the ability to zoom it.
However, it's still very wasteful. Flash only got hardware accelerated lately, and there's still a lot it can't do. Years ago, I did a comparison -- a little 2D vector animation, run fullscreen, at 1600x1200, lagged horribly -- two frames per second, sometimes less than one. Unreal Tournament 2003, a massively more complex animation, played at a smooth 60 or more.
Why would I buy a tiny cheap car with a small engine, then fit a roof rack, a turbo, bigger tyres etc. when I can just buy a bigger car in the first place?
If we're going to play car analogies, why would the manufacturer of said cheap car do something like remove the ability to make right turns? Well, to create more value for the more expensive models, of course.
But there happens to be a market for such cheap cars. And on a level playing field, no one would be able to sell a car that isn't able to make left turns.
After all, it costs Microsoft exactly ZERO dollars to add the functionality to run more than three applications, since that functionality was there in the first place. This is a restriction -- it is a feature that's actively being disabled, not a feature that was never there.
Compare Youtube videos to a native video player, the native option is much better.
Mostly because YouTube is based on Flash, and there currently aren't any major video sites using the video tag. I'd suggest that the video tag would be much better.
That's what self extracting installers are for, and you should be able to install to your home directory. If not, that's a packaging issue that's easy to deal with.
Unless they've also locked it down with something like noexec.
there's nothing stopping an app from being self updating.
True, but autoupdate is one of many things a browser / web-based application gives you "for free".
Another one is navigation. No reason a native app can't have hyperlinks back/forward buttons, and history, but why reinvent the wheel?
Another is extensibility. Without really doing much, you're probably still allowing people to write Greasemonkey scripts for your app.
Another is the refresh button. Complete reboot + autoupdate all in one.
Another is extreme portability -- native players may be better than YouTube, but it's difficult finding a machine that won't play YouTube out of the box. VLC isn't a terribly big download, but it's still an inconvenience, especially on machines where such things aren't allowed.
Another is security. Trusting one plugin to add 3D support is considerably safer than trusting every single application you might want to download that might want to render 3D. The browser is necessarily a sandbox, which means you don't have to set up a more complex one (like a chroot or a virtual machine).
The list goes on. You may not like the platform, but there are advantages to having an open standard portable platform. In fact, the browser is fulfilling the promise of Java so many years ago -- compile once, run anywhere.
I would say, if you don't like doing everything in the browser, and there's a specific reason you don't like it, improve it. That's what happened here, I'm sure -- Google doesn't like doing Google Earth in the browser, because the browser has no 3D. So they've improved the browser.
This other article... just kind of smacked of Stockholm Syndrome.
I mean, yes, point made, it's not completely unusable. It's still a really weird restriction, and still looks very much like it could lead to more Web-based app usage, rather than desktop app usage -- which isn't really in Microsoft's best interests.
Windows doesn't really know what an application is. It has processes and windows and that's it.
Actually, I think it's more than just windows which determines what shows up in ctrl+alt+del. Note that there's an applications tab (or is it "programs"?) as well as a processes tab.
I'm still bitter about SVG not being in Internet Explorer.
Making the web more powerful would undermine:
- Flash
- Silverlight
- Windows lock-in
For these reasons, I doubt Microsoft will put much more than a token effort into improving IE -- at least in the ways we'd like to see it improved.
- Apple discontinues that line
- Apple makes a large API change
- Apple decides they don't want to play ball with the Army anymore
- Apple puts out shoddy components, and the Army wants another manufacturer...
notice the commonality here?
Say what you will about Windows Mobile, but at the very least, if anything goes wrong with hardware production, you can switch vendors. With Android, anything goes wrong with either hardware or software, you can switch vendors.
Presumably the Army is going to want to keep deploying these, if they're successful, right? The ones deployed now may be great -- give them five or ten years, and the Army will either have to buy (and maintain) the iPhone line off Apple, or they'll have to start from scratch on another platform.
It also means that much more money pumped into the company, hopefully into R&D. Two years from now, they should be back on the market, cheaper and better.
while little Timmy can have his internet activities monitored by his parents at home when he gets to school his parents wishes are cast into the ditch because other people have decided they know what is best.
Then teach little Timmy your values while you're at home.
The same is true of everything else at school. You can be a vegetarian at home, and you can demand that the school offer vegetarian food. But you very likely can't have the school refuse to serve the kid meat, unless you seek out a school that does exactly that.
I don't think schools should filter Internet access at all, beyond maybe basic security. (Known phishing/malware sites, outbound port 25, etc.)
Frankly I do not believe they need internet access outside of what is required to finish a class assignment.
The problem is, you don't know what's required to finish a class assignment.
Moreover, this attitude isn't taken towards anything else at school. Is a playground (and recess) strictly necessary? What about the library -- is every single book in that library related to a specific curriculum?
I figure most of this comes down from haters who look for any chance to embarrass or otherwise annoy religious oriented Americans who send their kids to public school.
Religious americans? Really?
Try being an atheist and sending your kids to public school. For that matter, try being an atheist kid in school and refusing to say "under God" in the pledge.
Public education should have standards on EDUCATION. What a locality wants to do beyond that should be off limits to the Feds.
I'd argue that since it's paid for by taxes, we should be very very careful about that -- especially about turning it over to local mob rule.
After all, there are always private schools, and homeschool.
As for parental involvement, there are opportunities for that, but again, the ultimate involvement is that if the parents find out the state is doing something they don't like, they can take matters into their own hands, quite literally.
When a trivial Firefox addon can download the flv, and a one-click application can re-encapsulate it as an avi or an mp4 (since flvs can carry h264), that argument starts to look really stupid.
DRM never works, but this is DRM that, again, is defeated by a Firefox extension. Also by a proxy, for that matter, or any number of other ways.
Broadcasters shouldn't care, anyway. They don't outlaw VCRs or DVRs, why would this bother them? VHS didn't stop people from buying cable -- if anything, it added to the value of the cable and prompted them to buy more.
That's actually a pretty apt analogy. Crysis does not need to use nearly the resources it does.
Doom 3 can run on a voodoo2, for that matter, though it takes a bit of tweaking.
And while it may be the fault of the content author, I've never seen a Flash movie use less than about 30% CPU, even on the shittiest-quality Youtube video. Extract the same video (in flv form) and play it in any other player -- mplayer, vlc, anything -- and CPU usage drops to more like 0.3%, maybe 1% fullscreen.
And yes, they can. Sun open sourced Java, and had a few libraries which had to be rewritten, as third parties owned the code -- that ended up being nowhere near all of the standard libraries. Are you really saying third parties own all of the renderer?
Even Microsoft pays a few people to work on Moonlight, because they want to have a competing, open player. And ATI and nVidia seem to ultimately want to completely replace their proprietary Linux drivers with open ones, though it's not a priority now.
Never mind that the proprietary player sucks balls, and has for over a decade. It even sucks at vector graphics, relative to some of the other options. And it is absolutely the worst video player I have ever seen, in terms of video quality, CPU usage (two orders of magnitude higher than its nearest competition), and reliability (locking up my browser for a few seconds while loading a flash ad is not acceptable).
It warms my heart to hear it, but my point was rather that I don't care if it's great or not. I resent being forced to use it -- and, by proxy, being forced to use another OS -- simply to buy a file. Yes, just a dumb fucking file -- a bunch of bits which could just as easily be transfered over HTTP, FTP, SMTP, or any number of other standard protocols.
The store is no better. How hard is it to put that in a web browser? Or expose a standard API, so that other programs (like Amarok) can interface with it?
iTunes could be the best music software in existence, and I would still resent being forced into it for something so stupid.
Contrast this to something like Steam -- at least I'm already forced to be on Windows, as the vast majority of games aren't yet OS-independent -- even portable games come in different versions for different OSes.
I'd substantially cut bandwidth costs by using 128 kbps OGG Vorbis.
First of all, I have terabytes of storage. Music hasn't been a big deal yet.
Second, it wouldn't be 128k Vorbis. It'd be 128k or 256k MP3.
That's why, if I were a service, I'd offer FLAC and MP3 -- because MP3 works everywhere, for people who don't know or don't want to bother with encodings, and FLAC gives the user the ability to encode to whatever they want.
Once it's stored, I absolutely prefer lossless, simply because there's no generational loss if I want to make it Vorbis for a player that supports it, or AAC for the iPod, or mp3 for something else, or as you suggested, edit or remix it. With lossy codecs, I close off some of those possibilities.
What Apple have created shouldn't be underestimated, this isn't easy to do.
No, what would be easy to do is just create a web application, with an API that iTunes can use.
Also there are a lot of people (me included) who don't see the Internet as "just the browser" there is room for alternate access.
Fine, as long as the standard means of access works.
I have no problem with the fact that you can buy music from the iTunes store, using the iTunes client. I have a big problem with the fact that you cannot buy music from the iTunes store, using just a web browser.
1 issue: E-mail has a 10MiBi Limit. So this E-Mail you speak of cannot be used.
That is not what I was suggesting.
I am talking about what I have seen done, in which after you've purchased something, the system mails you a link. Follow the link, and you arrive at a download page.
I don't know what the purpose of that is, but I still prefer that approach to downloading iTunes.
Bittorrent it, but there's not much profit in that at the moment.
BitTorrent is just a protocol. There's exactly as much profit in BitTorrent as there is in HTTP -- that is, they're orthogonal. No reason you couldn't sell a copy of an album, distributed via BitTorrent.
You can take the Itunes method, the major node of servers, and end up with a sub par'd drm'd copy.
Or, you end up with a decent copy, which you pay a few pennies more for, but you still need to use iTunes.
Lastly you can take the streaming approach. Netflicks does this through everyone's favorite program: Sliverlight 2.0. That limits to Windows only machines... maybe mac...
Right. Exactly the same problem as iTunes, with the additional problem that it is streaming. Without some extra effort, I cannot, for example, save it to my laptop, and use it in places I don't have access to Internet.
Flac isn't exactly designed for streaming last time I checked, however it is also my preferred audio format as well.
The streaming doesn't concern me as much...
Let me put it this way: I buy a few live tracks from nugs.net, which sells full albums in FLAC format. While they offer a client, you can download with nothing more than a web browser if you don't mind saving each track individually -- which means writing your own client would be trivially easy, also.
There are many other, similarly enlightened services. The problem is that they're all over the place, and most mainstream music (including all those back catalogs) won't be there.
For now, the closest is iTunes and Amazon MP3. The only reason I prefer Amazon MP3 is they have a better client, and a native Linux version.
aliens with "weird" numbers of eyes, limbs, methods of communication, etc., most of which are weird simply to be different. It is amazing how rarely anyone gives any explanations for why an alien life form evolved the way it did.
Take The Mote in God's Eye -- weird for weirdness' sake is fine, I think, as long as it's interesting. Yes, it does discuss why they evolved to be that way -- but more importantly, it discusses what the implications of that weirdness are -- beyond the obvious ones of "that extra limb sometimes gets in the way."
So many things seem to come out of a magic black box, never really explained, and just taken for granted in the universe of the particular story.... Again, these things fall out of the realm of science fiction an into fantasy.
Ah, the old debate of soft vs hard science fiction. A quote that I really can't seem to source: You are allowed to predict the automobile, if you also predict the traffic jam.
That is, while it helps to envision science that's actually plausible, given our current knowledge of the way the universe works -- I love that there's no sound or faster-than-light travel in the Firefly universe, for example -- what really makes a bit of science fiction interesting or not, in its scifi elements, is how well thought out they are, not in terms of mechanism, but in terms of consequences.
If you think about it, quite a lot of scifi has elements of mysticism -- even Firefly, or Dune, will have things like psychics, prescients, things that really haven't been explained, and might not be possible -- but make for amazingly fun "what if" stories.
I'm not sure where you draw the line; where that becomes fantasy. I don't really care much -- I'd rather read good fantasy than bad science fiction.
And in both cases, weird-to-be-weird can be fun, but it's not whether the weirdness has an explanation -- for example, it really doesn't matter precisely how a stilsuit works. What matters is what kind of a culture might evolve among those who spend most of their lives in one -- the Fremen, for example. And the sandworms are cool both because of how weird they are, and because they're deified (Shai Hulud; Shaitan), and because the Fremen have learned to ride them.
If the story just described giant sandworms, and how you can have that whole ecosystem work on a planet with so little water, and gave precise schematics for how to build a stilsuit, I don't know that it would improve things.
That said, I must note that this is NOT a commentary of J.G. Ballard's work. I have not actually read any of his work, and therefore can make no comment.
I wouldn't, mostly because I see no reason why you should keep getting a check for something you did 15 years ago. Surely you could have produced something new by then?
Yes, you could retire and live off the royalties, and it'd be great. But why should copyright be special that way? In other jobs, you set aside money for retirement. Do that with copyright -- set aside money for retirement, then you won't be penniless when your works expire.
The original purpose of copyright was not to define ownership. It was, like patents, intended to provide a temporary monopoly on a work. And it was designed, not so you could make a profit, but to give you an incentive to create the work in the first place -- with the hopes that it will be in the public domain eventually.
If I produced sculpture all my life, should my sculpture be suddenly public domain at death? How is writing or anything else that takes intellectual effort any different other than it exists in easily reproduced forms?
That is pretty much it. It comes back to this:
The sculpture is a physical object. Physical objects can be property. No one can take your sculpture from you without your permission, because then you wouldn't have a sculpture anymore.
A book is probably more a collection of words. They can't take the original manuscript, but they can at least gain the ability to create copies. But no amount of copying means that you no longer have the book.
The problem is, it's about a right, not about a piece of property, physical or otherwise. Even stranger, it's not about them taking a right away from you -- it's about them giving that right to everyone else.
Frankly, if you want to look after your family, leave them money and/or life insurance. On the other hard, I would be very happy if copyright were a maximum of ten years, and totally transferable through death or otherwise.
While I am in favor of limiting copyright in that way, I doubt it would have the effect of reducing the stranglehold of the major labels. After all, they do tend to support plenty of new, popular music.
This story was lamenting that indie bands and labels, new or not, don't benefit greatly from piracy, and may be hurt by it. I don't think they'd benefit greatly from reduced copyright, either, other than by having more sources to draw upon.
It is still a step towards instilling healthy paranoia. The suggestion is not to trust any attachment, but explicitly to not trust a generic "I love you" virus.
The point is to start with that, and continue later -- when they're ready to understand about file extensions, for example.
Slashdot Mirror
I've always leaned more towards sci-fi that is possible within my lifetime and doesn't need to make far fetched assumptions.
"Possible within your lifetime" isn't a prerequisite -- after all, it's very unlikely that anyone will build a generational space colony or a dyson sphere (or even a ringworld, or even an orbital/Halo) within your lifetime. However, all of these things seem possible.
Granted, much of the stuff on Ringworld was downright fanciful. But the world itself seemed mostly sound. (I say "mostly" because it's had to be adjusted, but these were in details like what it must be made of, and what might be done to stablize it. It's still possible, just very difficult and resource-intensive.)
To be frank, your use of the word "mysticism" in relation to Dune is really just a polite or politically correct way to call out the down right religious aspects of the story
Actually, no, I'm talking about "mysticism" with respect to things like how the spice affects prescience.
What you seem to have missed entirely is that Dune is perhaps one of the more cynical views of religion that I've seen. The Bene Gesserit create religions. They take local superstitions, manipulate them just slightly, plant the seeds of myths and legends...
This is the Missionaria Protectiva -- so called because if a Reverend Mother finds herself alone on a planet, in a culture which has been seeded in this way, she can take advantage of them.
This is exactly what Paul Atreides does. The Mahdi was the legend. I don't remember if Paul knew about it -- I know his mother did.
The other Dune novels, while they do get stranger and stranger, also have a habit of not just trivializing what had been done in previous novels, but watching things progress from mysticism to science. For instance, at one point, the Spice (and a Guild Navigator) were required for space travel -- later on, the Ixians, I believe, reproduced this mechanism artificially. This was a disruptive technology -- before this, both the guild and whoever was in charge of Arrakis would control space travel, as is elegantly demonstrated by Paul Atreides declaring himself Emperor after seizing control of that one planet.
But, just like with the science in science fiction, occasionally some of it is invented without being entirely explained.
And I'm a bit biased, having seen computers totally mutilated in nearly every appearance on TV or in the movies... but I'd much rather an author either defer to an authority who would know, or simply leave whatever it is unexplained.
Because technobabble just ends up looking obsolete once we know more about it, and likely already sounds stupid to people who know. For example: Lightsabers. They're clearly meant to be laser swords. They clearly can't be laser swords. Clearly, they must be plasma trapped in a force field... and it goes downhill from there.
Contrast this with Firefly: Many parts of it are realistic (no sound in space, no faster-than-light travel...) The parts that aren't, they at least don't usually pretend to explain (inertial dampeners, artificial gravity, what kind of fuel is used...)
Erm.. you're talking about the difference between just rendering a local video and streaming a video through a player developed in flash, huge huge difference.
Are you honestly saying that the codec itself is running inside the flash VM?
Or could it be that Flash just sucks for video playback?
And no, from an end-user perspective, there's really no difference. YouTube would work just as well with a video tag, or even an old-school object tag, as it does with Flash -- better, because then I could use a local player, rather than the Flash player.
So, if there's some added functionality to putting it in Flash, I'm willing to bet that one or both of these is true:
- End-users don't care about that functionality
- It still didn't have to be that fucking slow.
I have almost no CPU usage for any .swf movies I play off of this site.
If by "almost none" you mean "still 20%", sure. And that's in a tiny little window smaller than my hand. Contrast to fullscreen local video at less than 1%.
For those videos, it's fine, and there's even a good reason -- the one you linked to is actually vector, which means less bandwidth, and if they were smart, the ability to zoom it.
However, it's still very wasteful. Flash only got hardware accelerated lately, and there's still a lot it can't do. Years ago, I did a comparison -- a little 2D vector animation, run fullscreen, at 1600x1200, lagged horribly -- two frames per second, sometimes less than one. Unreal Tournament 2003, a massively more complex animation, played at a smooth 60 or more.
Why would I buy a tiny cheap car with a small engine, then fit a roof rack, a turbo, bigger tyres etc. when I can just buy a bigger car in the first place?
If we're going to play car analogies, why would the manufacturer of said cheap car do something like remove the ability to make right turns? Well, to create more value for the more expensive models, of course.
But there happens to be a market for such cheap cars. And on a level playing field, no one would be able to sell a car that isn't able to make left turns.
After all, it costs Microsoft exactly ZERO dollars to add the functionality to run more than three applications, since that functionality was there in the first place. This is a restriction -- it is a feature that's actively being disabled, not a feature that was never there.
Compare Youtube videos to a native video player, the native option is much better.
Mostly because YouTube is based on Flash, and there currently aren't any major video sites using the video tag. I'd suggest that the video tag would be much better.
That's what self extracting installers are for, and you should be able to install to your home directory. If not, that's a packaging issue that's easy to deal with.
Unless they've also locked it down with something like noexec.
there's nothing stopping an app from being self updating.
True, but autoupdate is one of many things a browser / web-based application gives you "for free".
Another one is navigation. No reason a native app can't have hyperlinks back/forward buttons, and history, but why reinvent the wheel?
Another is extensibility. Without really doing much, you're probably still allowing people to write Greasemonkey scripts for your app.
Another is the refresh button. Complete reboot + autoupdate all in one.
Another is extreme portability -- native players may be better than YouTube, but it's difficult finding a machine that won't play YouTube out of the box. VLC isn't a terribly big download, but it's still an inconvenience, especially on machines where such things aren't allowed.
Another is security. Trusting one plugin to add 3D support is considerably safer than trusting every single application you might want to download that might want to render 3D. The browser is necessarily a sandbox, which means you don't have to set up a more complex one (like a chroot or a virtual machine).
The list goes on. You may not like the platform, but there are advantages to having an open standard portable platform. In fact, the browser is fulfilling the promise of Java so many years ago -- compile once, run anywhere.
I would say, if you don't like doing everything in the browser, and there's a specific reason you don't like it, improve it. That's what happened here, I'm sure -- Google doesn't like doing Google Earth in the browser, because the browser has no 3D. So they've improved the browser.
This other article... just kind of smacked of Stockholm Syndrome.
I mean, yes, point made, it's not completely unusable. It's still a really weird restriction, and still looks very much like it could lead to more Web-based app usage, rather than desktop app usage -- which isn't really in Microsoft's best interests.
Windows doesn't really know what an application is. It has processes and windows and that's it.
Actually, I think it's more than just windows which determines what shows up in ctrl+alt+del. Note that there's an applications tab (or is it "programs"?) as well as a processes tab.
I'm still bitter about SVG not being in Internet Explorer.
Making the web more powerful would undermine:
- Flash
- Silverlight
- Windows lock-in
For these reasons, I doubt Microsoft will put much more than a token effort into improving IE -- at least in the ways we'd like to see it improved.
The point is, what happens when:
- Apple discontinues that line
- Apple makes a large API change
- Apple decides they don't want to play ball with the Army anymore
- Apple puts out shoddy components, and the Army wants another manufacturer...
notice the commonality here?
Say what you will about Windows Mobile, but at the very least, if anything goes wrong with hardware production, you can switch vendors. With Android, anything goes wrong with either hardware or software, you can switch vendors.
Presumably the Army is going to want to keep deploying these, if they're successful, right? The ones deployed now may be great -- give them five or ten years, and the Army will either have to buy (and maintain) the iPhone line off Apple, or they'll have to start from scratch on another platform.
It also means that much more money pumped into the company, hopefully into R&D. Two years from now, they should be back on the market, cheaper and better.
while little Timmy can have his internet activities monitored by his parents at home when he gets to school his parents wishes are cast into the ditch because other people have decided they know what is best.
Then teach little Timmy your values while you're at home.
The same is true of everything else at school. You can be a vegetarian at home, and you can demand that the school offer vegetarian food. But you very likely can't have the school refuse to serve the kid meat, unless you seek out a school that does exactly that.
I don't think schools should filter Internet access at all, beyond maybe basic security. (Known phishing/malware sites, outbound port 25, etc.)
Frankly I do not believe they need internet access outside of what is required to finish a class assignment.
The problem is, you don't know what's required to finish a class assignment.
Moreover, this attitude isn't taken towards anything else at school. Is a playground (and recess) strictly necessary? What about the library -- is every single book in that library related to a specific curriculum?
I figure most of this comes down from haters who look for any chance to embarrass or otherwise annoy religious oriented Americans who send their kids to public school.
Religious americans? Really?
Try being an atheist and sending your kids to public school. For that matter, try being an atheist kid in school and refusing to say "under God" in the pledge.
Public education should have standards on EDUCATION. What a locality wants to do beyond that should be off limits to the Feds.
I'd argue that since it's paid for by taxes, we should be very very careful about that -- especially about turning it over to local mob rule.
After all, there are always private schools, and homeschool.
As for parental involvement, there are opportunities for that, but again, the ultimate involvement is that if the parents find out the state is doing something they don't like, they can take matters into their own hands, quite literally.
When a trivial Firefox addon can download the flv, and a one-click application can re-encapsulate it as an avi or an mp4 (since flvs can carry h264), that argument starts to look really stupid.
DRM never works, but this is DRM that, again, is defeated by a Firefox extension. Also by a proxy, for that matter, or any number of other ways.
Broadcasters shouldn't care, anyway. They don't outlaw VCRs or DVRs, why would this bother them? VHS didn't stop people from buying cable -- if anything, it added to the value of the cable and prompted them to buy more.
That's actually a pretty apt analogy. Crysis does not need to use nearly the resources it does.
Doom 3 can run on a voodoo2, for that matter, though it takes a bit of tweaking.
And while it may be the fault of the content author, I've never seen a Flash movie use less than about 30% CPU, even on the shittiest-quality Youtube video. Extract the same video (in flv form) and play it in any other player -- mplayer, vlc, anything -- and CPU usage drops to more like 0.3%, maybe 1% fullscreen.
The problem is, there currently is no good Flash implementation.
A standard is good, but a good implementation would prove the point.
And frankly, I really don't want my video player to be programmable to the point where it can leak that much memory.
Put their money where their mouth is?
And yes, they can. Sun open sourced Java, and had a few libraries which had to be rewritten, as third parties owned the code -- that ended up being nowhere near all of the standard libraries. Are you really saying third parties own all of the renderer?
Even Microsoft pays a few people to work on Moonlight, because they want to have a competing, open player. And ATI and nVidia seem to ultimately want to completely replace their proprietary Linux drivers with open ones, though it's not a priority now.
Never mind that the proprietary player sucks balls, and has for over a decade. It even sucks at vector graphics, relative to some of the other options. And it is absolutely the worst video player I have ever seen, in terms of video quality, CPU usage (two orders of magnitude higher than its nearest competition), and reliability (locking up my browser for a few seconds while loading a flash ad is not acceptable).
Wait. What? iTunes is bloated and buggy.
It warms my heart to hear it, but my point was rather that I don't care if it's great or not. I resent being forced to use it -- and, by proxy, being forced to use another OS -- simply to buy a file. Yes, just a dumb fucking file -- a bunch of bits which could just as easily be transfered over HTTP, FTP, SMTP, or any number of other standard protocols.
The store is no better. How hard is it to put that in a web browser? Or expose a standard API, so that other programs (like Amarok) can interface with it?
iTunes could be the best music software in existence, and I would still resent being forced into it for something so stupid.
Contrast this to something like Steam -- at least I'm already forced to be on Windows, as the vast majority of games aren't yet OS-independent -- even portable games come in different versions for different OSes.
I'd substantially cut bandwidth costs by using 128 kbps OGG Vorbis.
First of all, I have terabytes of storage. Music hasn't been a big deal yet.
Second, it wouldn't be 128k Vorbis. It'd be 128k or 256k MP3.
That's why, if I were a service, I'd offer FLAC and MP3 -- because MP3 works everywhere, for people who don't know or don't want to bother with encodings, and FLAC gives the user the ability to encode to whatever they want.
Once it's stored, I absolutely prefer lossless, simply because there's no generational loss if I want to make it Vorbis for a player that supports it, or AAC for the iPod, or mp3 for something else, or as you suggested, edit or remix it. With lossy codecs, I close off some of those possibilities.
What Apple have created shouldn't be underestimated, this isn't easy to do.
No, what would be easy to do is just create a web application, with an API that iTunes can use.
Also there are a lot of people (me included) who don't see the Internet as "just the browser" there is room for alternate access.
Fine, as long as the standard means of access works.
I have no problem with the fact that you can buy music from the iTunes store, using the iTunes client. I have a big problem with the fact that you cannot buy music from the iTunes store, using just a web browser.
its impractical of to even get a 1GB attachment.
Indeed -- especially when the whole thing is going to be base64'd, thus adding about 10% to the filesize for no good reason.
No, email is not a good medium for this.
1 issue: E-mail has a 10MiBi Limit. So this E-Mail you speak of cannot be used.
That is not what I was suggesting.
I am talking about what I have seen done, in which after you've purchased something, the system mails you a link. Follow the link, and you arrive at a download page.
I don't know what the purpose of that is, but I still prefer that approach to downloading iTunes.
Bittorrent it, but there's not much profit in that at the moment.
BitTorrent is just a protocol. There's exactly as much profit in BitTorrent as there is in HTTP -- that is, they're orthogonal. No reason you couldn't sell a copy of an album, distributed via BitTorrent.
You can take the Itunes method, the major node of servers, and end up with a sub par'd drm'd copy.
Or, you end up with a decent copy, which you pay a few pennies more for, but you still need to use iTunes.
Lastly you can take the streaming approach. Netflicks does this through everyone's favorite program: Sliverlight 2.0. That limits to Windows only machines... maybe mac...
Right. Exactly the same problem as iTunes, with the additional problem that it is streaming. Without some extra effort, I cannot, for example, save it to my laptop, and use it in places I don't have access to Internet.
Flac isn't exactly designed for streaming last time I checked, however it is also my preferred audio format as well.
The streaming doesn't concern me as much...
Let me put it this way: I buy a few live tracks from nugs.net, which sells full albums in FLAC format. While they offer a client, you can download with nothing more than a web browser if you don't mind saving each track individually -- which means writing your own client would be trivially easy, also.
There are many other, similarly enlightened services. The problem is that they're all over the place, and most mainstream music (including all those back catalogs) won't be there.
For now, the closest is iTunes and Amazon MP3. The only reason I prefer Amazon MP3 is they have a better client, and a native Linux version.
what does this mean for MySQL?
Probably the same thing it means for OpenOffice. Or Java.
I don't know what that is, though...
aliens with "weird" numbers of eyes, limbs, methods of communication, etc., most of which are weird simply to be different. It is amazing how rarely anyone gives any explanations for why an alien life form evolved the way it did.
Take The Mote in God's Eye -- weird for weirdness' sake is fine, I think, as long as it's interesting. Yes, it does discuss why they evolved to be that way -- but more importantly, it discusses what the implications of that weirdness are -- beyond the obvious ones of "that extra limb sometimes gets in the way."
So many things seem to come out of a magic black box, never really explained, and just taken for granted in the universe of the particular story.... Again, these things fall out of the realm of science fiction an into fantasy.
Ah, the old debate of soft vs hard science fiction. A quote that I really can't seem to source: You are allowed to predict the automobile, if you also predict the traffic jam.
That is, while it helps to envision science that's actually plausible, given our current knowledge of the way the universe works -- I love that there's no sound or faster-than-light travel in the Firefly universe, for example -- what really makes a bit of science fiction interesting or not, in its scifi elements, is how well thought out they are, not in terms of mechanism, but in terms of consequences.
If you think about it, quite a lot of scifi has elements of mysticism -- even Firefly, or Dune, will have things like psychics, prescients, things that really haven't been explained, and might not be possible -- but make for amazingly fun "what if" stories.
I'm not sure where you draw the line; where that becomes fantasy. I don't really care much -- I'd rather read good fantasy than bad science fiction.
And in both cases, weird-to-be-weird can be fun, but it's not whether the weirdness has an explanation -- for example, it really doesn't matter precisely how a stilsuit works. What matters is what kind of a culture might evolve among those who spend most of their lives in one -- the Fremen, for example. And the sandworms are cool both because of how weird they are, and because they're deified (Shai Hulud; Shaitan), and because the Fremen have learned to ride them.
If the story just described giant sandworms, and how you can have that whole ecosystem work on a planet with so little water, and gave precise schematics for how to build a stilsuit, I don't know that it would improve things.
That said, I must note that this is NOT a commentary of J.G. Ballard's work. I have not actually read any of his work, and therefore can make no comment.
I must admit the same thing.
I wouldn't, mostly because I see no reason why you should keep getting a check for something you did 15 years ago. Surely you could have produced something new by then?
Yes, you could retire and live off the royalties, and it'd be great. But why should copyright be special that way? In other jobs, you set aside money for retirement. Do that with copyright -- set aside money for retirement, then you won't be penniless when your works expire.
In the eyes of the law it is my property.
That doesn't mean the law is right.
The original purpose of copyright was not to define ownership. It was, like patents, intended to provide a temporary monopoly on a work. And it was designed, not so you could make a profit, but to give you an incentive to create the work in the first place -- with the hopes that it will be in the public domain eventually.
If I produced sculpture all my life, should my sculpture be suddenly public domain at death? How is writing or anything else that takes intellectual effort any different other than it exists in easily reproduced forms?
That is pretty much it. It comes back to this:
The sculpture is a physical object. Physical objects can be property. No one can take your sculpture from you without your permission, because then you wouldn't have a sculpture anymore.
A book is probably more a collection of words. They can't take the original manuscript, but they can at least gain the ability to create copies. But no amount of copying means that you no longer have the book.
The problem is, it's about a right, not about a piece of property, physical or otherwise. Even stranger, it's not about them taking a right away from you -- it's about them giving that right to everyone else.
Frankly, if you want to look after your family, leave them money and/or life insurance. On the other hard, I would be very happy if copyright were a maximum of ten years, and totally transferable through death or otherwise.
Which is pointless bickering. The real solution is right there -- offer a service that actually competes with piracy.
It's not about price, as this article demonstrates. It's about functionality.
While I am in favor of limiting copyright in that way, I doubt it would have the effect of reducing the stranglehold of the major labels. After all, they do tend to support plenty of new, popular music.
This story was lamenting that indie bands and labels, new or not, don't benefit greatly from piracy, and may be hurt by it. I don't think they'd benefit greatly from reduced copyright, either, other than by having more sources to draw upon.
It is still a step towards instilling healthy paranoia. The suggestion is not to trust any attachment, but explicitly to not trust a generic "I love you" virus.
The point is to start with that, and continue later -- when they're ready to understand about file extensions, for example.