Congrats on proving that you're too fucking stupid to read even the first paragraph before jumping to write that standard zealot answer. No, really, it's something to be proud of. Even die-hard ADHD cases usuall run out of attention span only after at least 2 paragraphs.
Exactly which part of "counterfeit" confuses you? No, seriously. Exactly in which form or shape does selling _counterfeit_ goods mean company A got their money for it? Here's some free clue: if you buy counterfeit or stolen Gilette blades, Gilette doesn't get a cent out of that. That's the whole point of counterfeiting.
And goods which were bought at some flea market, just she doesn't remember which? Oh please. If that doesn't sound like a standard counterfeit goods excuse, I don't know what does.
It wasn't ever true. Linux distros were never like the great Unix fragmentation mess.
What we have now are maybe 10% distros which pack a _slightly_ different mix of the same tools, or just different default tools, or sometimes just and maybe have a slightly different config tool. Or maybe they'll install one tool in/opt (e.g., SuSE) which others install in/usr. And about 90% which just download RedHat's RPM's and put their own name and logo on it, so basically they don't even really count as different distros.
Either way, from an end-user point of view, whop-de-do, you run the same tools, with the same options and the same interface. That's especially important because for an end-user the OS doesn't even really matter. The computer is just a tool, and the OS is... well, I think Joe Average isn't even sure what the OS is, he just knows he has to have one to run the important part: the apps. What matters is what you can run on that computer. (See the endless "but it doesn't run MS Office" and "but I can't play the latest games on it" arguments.)
Even if one distro skipped a tool you want, you know, there's nothing to stop you to download it yourself.
The Unix fragmentation was a whole different issue. Each of the major vendors actually worked hard to lock their customers in. Unix got fuc^H^H^H forked so hard, it wasn't compatible even at source level any more.
As I always remind people, people want interoperability and open standards when they're the underdog, and they want free access to the top dog's customers. When they're on top, even on a niche, they don't want that any more. Then they want walled gardens and penned captive customers that they can milk and shear regularly. Then they want you to think, "damn, if I get a mainframe to replace these aging Sun servers we have, we'll have to change all this mountain of source code, and for some we don't even have the devs any more and for some, well, we thought we're smart if we get it cheaper without sources... oh well, better buy the next servers from Sun too." And the difference in parameters and effects for the supplied tools, meant you got to retrain all your admins and rewrite your scripts too.
When you're at the top of your own niche, it's all about trade barriers. You want to make it as hard as possible for a competitor to steal your customers. (And unsurprisingly, IBM for example was not only on the receiving end of an antitrust trial long before MS, but also the word FUD was originally used about IBM's practices.)
So, anyway, that's what they did there: each took their own fork of Unix and ran in their own direction with it, as far from everyone else as they could and could afford to. AIX and Solarix, for example, weren't just different distros, they were almost different operating systems. "Portability" was only a buzzword everyone used only in marketing, but tried to keep it to a minimum otherwise. It meant little more than that they all had a C compiler (but even then with subtle "improvements" of their own), and they had to have the same standard C library (but again, each felt free to make their own subtle "improvements" to it.)
What I'm getting at is: in a way the plethora of distros is even a good thing in that aspect. Noone is that secure at the top, or even king of the hill at all. (Not to mention they're all underdogs in the shadow of the 800 pound gorilla called Microsoft.) Noone is in a position to fork their version of Linux and try to lock customers in it.
Lock-in doesn't work when you're the underdog. The same fence that keeps your customers from escaping, also keeps you from reaching everyone else's customers. So noone does it when they have 10% of the market. At that point, you want open standards.
And with the current Linux market structure, we're pretty safe and secure that everyone will want open standards for the next decade straight. Unless MS manages to implode, anyway.
E.g., what if it's a counterfeit product? It's damn easy to undercut someone's prices when you don't have to invest a cent in research (even if it's "what are people willing to wear this season") or even in marketing (since you're piggy-backing on someone else's brand image and using their own marketing investment against them.) Often you can cut more corners too, because, hey, if the product malfunctions spectacularly or even hurts someone, it's not _your_ brand image that goes down the drain.
Or what about stolen goods? Or defective goods which someone was supposed to dispose of, but made a bit of money on the side auctioning them? It's damn easy to undercut prices when you're selling stuff you got, essentially, for free by illegal means.
Or the case comes to mind which saddled us all with frequency- or multiplier-locked CPUs. A bunch of dishonest fucks figured out that they can take, say, a cheap 100 MHz CPU and overclock it to 133 MHz, make a computer with it, and sell it for quite a bit of profit. Remember that at the time most of the ID of a CPU was what was printed on it, and it was up to you to set the motherboard jumpers right. So, being that the CPU in a complete computer was under a heatsink, there wasn't even much way to see if you got defrauded without taking the computer apart, which Joe Average didn't usually do. But some went as far as to erase what was printed on the CPU and actually print the higher CPU frequency on it.
It was something which actively damaged Intel's reputation, and later AMD's when they were the last to sell unlocked CPUs. People were buying computers which kept crashing, or only worked as long as the temperature in your room was under 20C. Summer comes and your computer is a dysfunctional piece of shit. You'd maybe take it back to the shop and they'd tell you some "yeah, we've had a lot of problems with bad Intel CPUs lately." (When the only problem was that they had defrauded you of a lot of money.) There was a _lot_ of "Intel CPUs are shit and crash all the time" bad reputation built at the time. And later it was "AMD CPUs are shit and crash all the time."
Just, you know, in case you were wondering why CPUs are locked nowadays.
So basically it's trivial to have some auction where the whole point is that it's _not_ fair and open, you're not even buying what you think you're buying. And it might not be a price that a normal, honest seller would ever accept.
Plus, just because Slashdot has _yet_ _again_ a lopsided and inflammatory story, it doesn't mean you can jump to a conclusion based on it. There used to be a time when the stories actually had anything to do with technology, and it was exciting new stuff, not "version 2.5.1.2 of Product X released, people advised to patch their 2.5.1.1 version." Nowadays it seems that lopsided "company X is violating your rights if they don't buy me a pony" astroturfing is more common than anything even remotely related to computing.
So basically, if a story seems like a clear-cut "side X is 100% right, side Y is 100% wrong and are evil fucks to boot", that's usually your clue that you're spoon fed an astroturfing story. Reality is rarely that neat, and the devil often is in the details you're not getting, or are getting a cherry-picked slightly-warped version. If you can cherry-pick only the details you like, you'd be surprised how far reality can be warped. (E.g., think, "Hitler was buying roads and factories and the allies attacked him for it." If you conveniently omit such details as, you know, that three continents were plunged into all out war at the time and the ethnic cleansing part, the whole story takes a very different angle.)
I wouldn't be too surprised if something like this was a management decision to start with. Someone figured out they'd save some money on tech support calls, for example, if the users don't have to keep calling with stuff like "why does this ask for a password when I want to change the printer?" and "does your driver have a virus? my grandson said I should beware stuff that asks for a password" (for bonus points: "... and he didn't tell me the password anyway. Can I still use the printer?") and the like. Don't underestimate the kind of dumb decisions that get taken in the name of cost cutting.
And that includes the fact that it probably wasn't a programmer/architect that made the installer anyway. The drive for cost cutting includes the idea of giving each job to the lowest wage monkey who can possibly do it. So it's not entirely unheard of to offload to the cheapest interns or even to underused non-technical members of the team stuff like making an installer or writing the test cases.
In which case probably some under-paid and under-skilled monkey got the honour of figuring out how to install that stuff in Linux. These aren't typically the kind of guys you'd ask to do a security analysis and design, and they're not given ample times and funds for research either. So he'll google if he has a problem (like how to make some nice config dialog modify a file that was installed as writable by root only), and take the first thing that sorta looks like a solution.
Plus a few other such fun ways to fuck up in the name of keeping the costs down.
Mind you, I'm not saying this has to be what happened at Samsung. Just saying that I've seen that and worse happening in other places, so I wouldn't be too surprised.
Actually, that's false. Oblivion has different skins for males and females, and there's no freakin' way a male, even a bodybuilder, would have _that_ kind of shading of the pecs. The mis-placing the nipples is more of a result of not paying much attention to how it aligns with the mesh. (Probably most of Bethesda only saw it with the bra on.) But the texture itself, if you look at it as just a bitmap, is clearly a female skin and includes extra shading to accentuate the breasts. It's _not_ a male texture.
And it would be trivial to tweak the texture coordinates for the vertexes so the nipples fall anywhere you want them on the mesh. Now obviously Bethesda didn't bother, so it's a fairly safe assumption that they never intended the game to be playe with naked characters. But don't mistake it for anything more than that: it doesn't mean it's the wrong texture, it doesn't mean it can't be done, it just means that they had better stuff to spend their time and money on than aligning the nipples.
Now I'm not for censorship, and I do consider the whole "scandal" pretty stupid, but spewing falsehoods doesn't help either.
While I don't claim to be some military genius, I do happen to be reserve sergeant. It means that, for better or worse, in case of a serious war I would very likely get some summary training and a bunch of young men to live to our deaths. Make what you will out of that.
And it scares me to think I'd get to lead some guys who take this kind of stuff. There's this saying, "never share a foxhole with someone braver than you are."
The folks who are all brave, and the stuff of heroic hero tales and propaganda, are the guys who in practice had a nervous breakdown and did something stupid. And not only got themselves killed, but often got half the platoon wiped out. You _don't_ actually want people to start acting _too_ brave.
You can see what happen when people start caring less and less about personal safety, because that's what combat fatigue does. The more it progresses, the lower their chances of survival become. Think the Red Baron breaking his own rules and flying too low over the trenches. A machinegun got 'im.
Fear isn't just the instant irrational response, but also a factor in that rational assessment of a situation. It's why you execute your orders or trust your officers even against your common sense. You know, or hope, that if you do your role to the letter, everyone has higher chances to survive than if you don't. So basically a big factor there is precisely the fear: fear of what happens if you don't do your job.
And it can be a very irrational thing. If you were to take the rational thought path there, it's more logical to just keep your head low or just bugger off completely. I mean, fear or no fear, it's not particularly logical to have a death wish. And what keeps you there might just be an irrational fear of the unknown that would happen if you don't follow those orders.
Heck, war itself is a very illogical thing. You're asking some people to risk their life, or worse, to risk getting crippled, _and_ to do a very social thing that most would rather not be doing: killing someone else. And you're asking them to do it for little or no rewards. To quote Hermann Goering: "Why, of course, the people don't want war. Why would some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best that he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece?" Not a fan of the guy, but he does have a point there: the "reward" that the average soldier can hope for is staying alive. And if you're to think logically there, it's a damn crappy reward for risking your life. You actually have more chances to achieve that by _not_ going to war.
What keeps people there? Essentially fear. And I don't just mean the fear that the corporal will have their head for breakfast, or fear of being court martialled, but a lot of it is also the "my peers would have an awfully bad opinion of me if I bugger off" kind of fear. I dare say that that's most of what drives the other half of Goering's famous quote. ("Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country.") Essentially that propaganda isn't as much causing people to be fearless and utterly patriotic, it causes groupthink and fear of the social consequences of trying to go against the stream. People don't as much think, "hell yeah, now I'm all psyched to go teach the French a lesson", people think "omg, the way everyone seems to believe that chest thumping stuff, I don't want to risk being the guy who comes forth and says that he's a coward." (Actually chances are everyone else thinks the same. That's the beauty of groupthink.)
So if you were to remove all fear -- including the "what would the folks at home think of me if I deserted?" kind of fear -- would people even stay in the army?
Mind you, it would probably be an improvement if people stopped shooting each other for the glory of some megalomaniac. But if your purpose were to get people to fight better, well, you might actually better off without this kind of thing.
Ah, relax, the "we're the persecuted minority" is the new racist/religious/sexist/whatever bigotry propaganda. Saying "dammit, I want to have an advantage of group X" doesn't gain much traction in this day and age, so the way it _invariably_ gets presented is, "auugh, they're persecuting us by not staying our slaves! we're the oppressed minority! help! Someone stop group X now!"
You can see it applied verbatim to almost any kind of bigotry. The white supremacists say they're oppressed by the blacks. The most mysoginist nuts say they're oppressed by any woman who even tries to have more perspectives in life than cooking, washing and raising kids. The religious nuts say they're oppressed by anyone who refuses to listen to their preaching, or, god forbid, manages to get a job without giving endless thanks to the Jesus for it. Rabid homophobes say they're oppressed by homosexuals. Etc.
It's pretty much the standard recipe for begging for some attention and compassion to what otherwise would be an abject and repulsive appeal to discriminate against someone else for personal advantages. Just fill in the details and you have your very own propaganda piece: Group X wants equal Y (rights, pay, education oportunities, etc). From there, you can:
A) Pretend that they were already equal, if not outright advantaged there. Statistics be damned. (Why, they already had more jobs as janitors, receptionists and nurses than us.) Hence any asking for more must be some unashamed grab for more power over the rest of us.
B) Find some disadvantaged low-pay/low-power/low-whatever niche into which that minority has been pushed, pretend that it's some enviable position and they're there just for the sake of pushing out poor white/christian/male/whatever folks who always wanted that job. (E.g., surely the only reason why women are nurses while guys are high paid doctors is that those evil women pushed off all the guys who wanted to be nurses.) Present it as some beach head and some trend that will obviously continue until none of us whites/christians/males/whatever have no place left.
C) If you somehow can't deny that they _are_ at a disadvantage and just want to become more equal, present it as some kind of slippery slope or a thing where the brakes don't exist. Once we start moving in that direction, surely there is no stopping until they've become hideously more advantaged than us! And they know it! That's their whole agenda in fact!
D) All the above.
So basically it's not as much that someone genuinely believes they're persecuted. (Unless they're paranoid schizophrenic, but then there's no point in arguing with someone driven by delusions anyway.) It's that they think they're extra smart if they present it as persecution instead of the "give me power over someone else" appeal that it really is. Surely noone will figure it out.
In other words, to put it nastier, that's your clue that they're not only bigotted fucks, but dishonest as well.
Well, hmm... ok, 1 year may be too short, though technologies don't change over night and it's possible to plan ahead a bit. It's possible to plan for the emulator while the old computer is still reasonably available or in use. But ok, let's say 5 years.
In fact, how about the following setup:
1. if the first publisher makes the work unavailable for 5 consecutive years, or more than 50% of the time in a 10 year interval, the copyright reverts to the author. Just so an author isn't shafted by a publisher who bought the work with royalties promises and buried it.
2. If the author or the second publisher makes it unavailable for 5 consecutive years, or more than 50% of the time in a 10 year interval, it becomes public domain
It should give everyone ample time to retool, remaster, whatever is needed IMHO. And it gives authors a second chance too, if the publisher shafted them. After all, the idea of copyright was to encourage the creation of new works, and the authors are the ones who actually do that.
The provision for 50% of the time is because the more I think of it, the more it looks like just "5 consecutive years" begs for the loophole of uploading it to the site 1 day every 5 years, somewhere 20 levels deep where noone would reasonably find it, and without advertising it anywhere.
Well, yes, if it's well organized and everything, it can work and I've seen it work even without any freebies (though they help.) No arguments there.
What makes people shudder at the thought of institutionalizing it, though, are experiences of places where it was institutionalized in all the wrong ways. E.g., they were mandatory (complete with roll call or signing your name on a list, and emails reminding everyone that they damn better have a great excuse if they dare not show up), _and_ instead of socializing it was having to listen to the boss do an ego-masturbation speech for 2 hours (for bonus points: with powerpoint charts), _and_ they happened entirely too often for something that bad an idea (e.g., weekly), _and_ just to rub everyone's nose in, complete with reminders that you're forbidden to put it on your timesheet.
At that point it's even irrelevant if they gave the people free beer and pizza, or (as was often the case), nothing whatsoever.
I mean, seriously, if someone's (A) required to be there, and (B) can't even just relax and socialize, but are required to sit through someone's presentation, then it's work. It's not a social occasion, it's just a meeting at work. Requiring it to happen on someone's free time, isn't going to make them happy. Giving them a free pizza and a beer for it, if anything, was insulting in its own right: noone was _that_ poor as to, basically, work two hours for food. At, say, $10 worth of pizza and a beer, that's 5$/hour for the boss's speech alone, which, frankly, was way below the hourly fee of anyone present in the room.
It doesn't even help with team building, since (A) if everyone is required to sit and listen to the boss's presentation, there's almost no time to actually socialize with other employees, (B) half the people are in a cranky mood just because they were required to be there again, which doesn't help make friends, and (C) everyone ends up _hating_ the mandatory idiots who ask some redundant question just to show participation.
Again, I'm not claiming that all such events _must_ be organized like that. Of course, there are people who do it right. On the other hand, it's entirely too easy to do it wrong, and God knows there's no shortage of PHBs with a natural knack to do things the wrong way. (Usual disclaimer: by PHB I really only mean the clueless gang, not every manager.)
And institutionalizing it as some corporate rule just begs such mis-haps to happen. People who have no skill in doing it right, or are the first to hate having to do it, end up organizing such events the wrong way just because the rules require them to.
In a way, the GP is right: do it when you feel it's the "right" time and when you think most people would find it fun. You can even make it some kind of pseudo-reward, like, "woohoo, we had a successful release, let's have an unofficial party at the pub." It's not just a good excuse, it shows people they're appreciated. _Don't_ do it just because the rules/nice-book/whatever say you have to do it and the time is up for the next one.
Ok, if you want to discuss debatable assumptions, it's a valid point to debate. It even worse than what you mentioned. (I should probably mention first that I'm not against reducing copyright as such, but I do have a severe allergy to bad science and to using maths as smoke and mirrors.)
What does he calculate there? It's not even "how much would the artists be motivated/rewarded?" or "how much better would our culture be if we had cheap access to more books earlier?" That's not what he calculates there.
The whole number is calculated, basically based on "how many derivative works could have been written in that time." I'm sorry, but are we actually losing something worth anything there? We're not talking valuable original works, we're talking, basically, mashups based on wholesale plagiarism, if only copyright law is what keeps them from being published before copyright expires. Seriously.
If you just use a similar plot device that someone else used, no law prevents you from doing that. If it's _copyright_ law that prevents you from publishing your own novel, then you've copied whole pages verbatim. It's that simple.
Basically the whole underlying idea of that maths is that all works are created equal. That's how they can be put in such a "dispassionate" sum as equals. The underlying assumption is that (A) if I copied two chapters from Tolkien and a chapter from Stephen King (with the character names changed, maybe), then my book is as valuable a novel as any other novel, and (B) that there's a big loss if I can't publish that plagiarism. In fact, that society should alter its laws precisely to avoid missing out on such masterpieces.
Does that assumption even hold? How many novels _are_ published that plagiarize other novels wholesale anyway? How well do they do? Would anyone give a rat's ass about losing that source of literature?
I mean, seriously, there already are a lot of novels which are out of copyright. There's nothing to keep one from copying Shakespeare's works and selling them as your own, or even much more recent stuff. Does it happen on any significant scale? If you did, would people consider it a valuable addition to culture, or, more likely, "bah, I'm not wasting my money to encourage that kind of plagiarism?" If we shorten copyright terms, how many such literary mashups will get published based on newer works? I'm guessing not many publishers will want to print your book if it's that non-creative. Are we losing that much by not encouraging plagiarism of more recent works?
Or take comics. Let's say we pass a law that limits their copyright to 14 years. So let's say I start copying Dilbert comics from '93, maybe change the wording a bit 'cause it's more fun to change the whole thing to childish fart jokes, and submit them to newspapers or publish them on my site as my own. Is it that big a loss to everyone if I don't? Is such a comic of equal worth in any way to the original, as to be worth putting both as a 1 in that sum?
Basically the whole formulas are based on an assumption which is flawed to the extreme.
Again, I'm not saying that copyright necessarily should or shouldn't be shortened, I'm just calling bull on the maths used to calculate the "ideal duration." That 14 years value is based not only on bad guesswork numbers, but on some very flawed assumptions that went into the formulas themselves.
Well, the point sorta was that I see no scientific analysis of the error margin. He's done the calculation for a couple of possible input values, which I'll admit is already more than nothing... but essentially I don't see anywhere saying "the sigma is x.yz years." (That is, if it's a normal distribution.) Even taking the ends of the intervals doesn't really tell you what those upper and lower bounds are. Guesswork themselves maybe? Some cutoff point on a gauss curve? How significant _are_ those numbers in the first place, never mind the guessed middle value? What probability should I expect for an actual case to fall outside of even that 2% to 10% interval?
Ah well...
Ok, I'll admit that it's head and shoulders over the usual PR/lobbyist pseudo-science. That still doesn't excuse the bad use of that formula.
I'm mostly annoyed by the "the scientific dispassionately-proven ideal value is 14 years!" claim, when the actual scientific claim would be more along the lines of "the ideal value is probably somewhere between 3 and 51 years." The difference is pretty substantial between the two claims.
For a start if it's really anywhere between 3 and 51 years, then, say, the 58 years in the UK that he mentions, might be just a little longer than needed. Or a lot longer. But you don't really know which. There is a non-zero probability that it might even be right, at least for _some_ works. (Those numbers usually fall on a gauss curve or such, so there's usually no hard cut off at either 2% or 10%. The Illiad isn't worthless even after thousands of years, so the decay must have been even lower than 1% there. Ditto for the other values involved.) On the other hand when you give a hard number like 14 years, it's already a whole other implication, namely, "the current copyright term is 3.5 times longer than the mathematically calculated value!"
Actually, I have a proposal of my own that doesn't involve setting any numbers in stone.
Before I start, let me define the assumptions and problem, the way I see it. My problem isn't money. I'm perfectly OK with the creators receiving adequate compensation for their work. My problem is the fact that copyright is (intentionally or accidentally) used to bury some books or movies alive. Someone can buy the copyright to something just to stop more copies from being made, or in Disney's case to prevent some embarassing old cartoons from being seen. I'm sorry, but that was not the spirit of copyright law.
In other words, my purpose is to make sure that a work remains available to everyone, and doesn't effectively exit the culture. It shouldn't be possible to "unpublish" a work, and certainly not possible to use copyright law to that effect.
So my own idea of a "fair" proposal is to basically let everyone decide how long they want to keep selling it, for no more than the original price modified by inflation.
I'm not even putting any restrictions on the choice of medium, other than that it must be usable by the average person at the time. So a book could be on paper, or PDF, or scanned, or whatever they choose, as long as you can still buy it from the copyright holder. Music, well, it better not come on phonograph cylinders: digitize it to CD, or make an MP3 out of it, or whatever. Anything that a modern computer or home entertainment centre can play, really. Movies, ditto: if it only exists on some cinema reels, well, then it either should still be possible to buy cinema tickets to see it, or digitize it to MPEG/DVD/whatever. Etc.
Entirely reasonable restriction, I should think, since the purported purpose of copyright law is to encourage creating works for the use of the general public. If the general public can't use that work, then we're already outside that intended scope and effect.
But the keyword is: keep selling it. The moment something becomes unavailable for more than, say, 1 year, then it should immediately and irrevocably become public domain.
Actually, it looks to me like just a variation of the popular "have a pre-conceived result you want to reach, then massage logic and numbers to reach it." In this case, outright proposing "my formula says get rid of IP completely" (which he seems to be busy arguing the rest of the time) would have looked suspicious, while "hey, the original 14 year idea was right, let's go back to that" is something that's actually very easy to swallow. So let's massage the maths to support that.
I'm sorry, I'll
A) have trouble taking someone seriously as doing dispassionate objective maths when the rest of the time they're on a crusade against copyright and copyright extensions. It's akin to trusting a Sony fanboy to give you a scientific and dispassionate estimate as to which console is the best. But more importantly,
B) the data he feeds into those formulas is based on guessed numbers. E.g., for the rate of decay, depending on who you choose to believe, in his own paper the estimates range from 2% to 10%. He chooses 5% as the number to go with, but the important thing to realize is that it's just a guess. The accuracy of that number is remarkably low.
To give you an example of how inacurate that is: for something that decays by 2% per year, after 16 years you've lost only almost 28% of the original value. At 5%, after 16 years you've lost 56% of the original value. At 10% in 16 years you've lost 81% of the value. (I'm using 16 instead of 14 just because I'm too lazy to do more than press the X^2 button in xcalc 4 times. Should be enough for example purposes.) The effects being literally exponential, such a wild inaccuracy is multiplied incredibly. You can produce a wildly different "ideal number of years" by just choosing slightly different guessed numbers to input in those formulas.
C) I see nowhere a calculation of the error margins. As a corolary of B, what's more interesting for such a calculation with wildly guessed numbers isn't just one value reached with the most likely guess, but what is the _interval_ of plausible results. If you've fed data which could be anything between 2% and 10%, then what is the result for 2% and what is the result for 10%, for a start. Don't give me the result just for 5%. And that's just one of the values there.
Basically what I'm saying is that even if you trust the formulas to be correct, the insanely large intervals of believable values means you can get almost any number you want to get there, just by picking different guessed numbers. You can use the same formula to get any number between 2-3 years (if you chose to believe everything devalues extremely fast, and everything creates incredible value in derivative works) to well over 50 years (if you choose to go by the idea that even though some crap devalues faster, the most deserving protection are the masterworks that devalue very slowly.) Pick your own pre-conceived number in that range, and there's a valid set of guessed numbers that produces it.
Anyway, it's used all the time. E.g., if you work in most large corporations, you must have seen at least one (but more likely dozens) of baffling decisions that go somewhat like this:
How it's supposed to look from the outside: some manager (A) saw that problem X exists and is really a problem, (2) analyzed which products solved that problem, (3) made a list of features and performance characteristics, put them in numbers, and assigned them weights according to their importance in the actual case at hand, (4) dispassionately calculated the weighted score for all of them, and (5) the result happens to say that, objectively, product Y from supplier Z is the perfect choice.
What really happened: was that the manager had already decided that he wants product Y or just to buy something from company Z, for entirely other reasons. Often (but not always) he even had to scratch his head to figure out a problem X that fits that solution. At any rate, from there the analyzed features and their weights are juggled and massaged until product Y ends up on top. There you go, now the cold dispassionate numbers support it.
Well, yes and no. Probably most people have some intuition the basics, but:
1. Some people are just incapable of implementing them, or can't be arsed.
2. Some people are operating in a brain-dead rules zone.
E.g., it's easy to say "hiring lots of people before you know what you'll use them for is wrong" (what he calls "brownian motion"), but sometimes lobotomized corporate rules twist one's arm to do exactly that. It could be that you have a fixed time window to do the hiring, or the ever popular "if we don't use this year's budget fully, we'll get a budget cut next year", etc. You'd be surprised how many anti-patterns are really just work-arounds for rules that sounded good on paper, to someone who's (A) not qualified to take that kind of decisions, (B) bored enough to take them anyway, or a new boss pissing on everything to mark his territory, (C) way too far disconnected from the data to base those decisions on, (for example by being several hierarchy levels too high, or in a whole different brach of the hierarchy altogether, and having no communication level to the people who actually know what's happening there), and (D) shielded from the effect of bad decisions (e.g., if there are any good results it's his merit, if it goes south fast, it's the fault of the henchman who had to implement them.)
Heck, you've given a very good example yourself. Even good ideas can be turned into bad and annoying rules, and there are a lot of places where exactly that happens. Bonding between people can be a good idea, and it can even be helped along a bit (but it's hard and most people don't have the necessary skills.) But then department A comes with a rule that says "thou shalt meet with your team mates at a pub once a week" (more often is always better, right?), department B comes and says, "but thou shalt do it on their free time, because we're not paying you lot to sit around and chat", department C comes and says, "and we're not paying for it", a boss change comes at department A and says, "nah, thou shalt use a meeting room, it's cheaper", and boss D come and says, "cool, I'll come along and motivate people with a speech. What could be more bonding and motivational than everyone hearing how great I am, and how any good results are due to my enlightened leadership?" What started as a good idea, was turned into the perfect recipe for a morale disaster.
(And, sadly, the above paragraph isn't made up. I know one place where exactly that setup was institutionalized.)
3. Some people operate on bogus data, and often are deliberately fed bogus data, for example by some underling who has something to gain from forcing a bad decision.
E.g., manager X figures out he'd get a promotion if he got just 5 more people under him (usually again a case of brain dead rules), so he'll actually support anything that makes it look like his project needs more people. Or will actively argue for "brownian motion" kind of arguing.
E.g., I've actually seen one sad case where someone sabotaged his own project just to show everyone that Java sucks, unlike his beloved VB. The guy not only couldn't be arsed to actually manage that project, and spent 90% of his time trying to manipulate unrelated non-technical managers (this wasn't a software house but a manufacturing corporation with an IT department) into seeing it all as "that's the kind of extra complexity Java produces), but actively changed specs or introduced random new requirements when the project looked like it was getting anywhere.
4. Some are just dishonest fucks, and just follow their own goals, which aren't the same as the company's goals. E.g., the guys mentioned at the previous point.
5. Some actually know what should be done, but don't have the spine or the authority to counter client aikido maneuvers.
E.g., saying "you should first make a disposable low-cost prototype" is good and fine. But I can tell you first hand that in a lot of cases the client has no clue what's the difference between a HTML prototype and a full
Forget the technical side of it all. The real question is: can any _human_ watch 1500 movies simultaneously?:P
And at the risk of dragging it back into technology, that's assuming they give her a lot of TFTs too. Otherwise on a 1920x1200 pixel screen, we're talking 1536 pixels per movie window. Assuming they're tiled without borders, that's... hmm... closest I can get while keeping the 16/9 aspect ratio is 48 by 27 pixels per movie. Not gonna see much detail there, and that's putting it mildly:P
Actually, scratch the division by 100 years, or the result doesn't even have the right units. So it would need a little under 100,000 years, not a little under 1000 years.
Just shows I shouldn't write in a hurry, and I definitely should engage the brains first.
Volcanoes? That's impossible! Al Gore told me that excess CO2 can only come from SUVs.
Well, yes and no. Volcanoes do spew all sorts of stuff into the air, the question is just how much of it.
Thawing up snowball earth I mentioned before took up to 30 million years, and that's with zero photosynthesis or other processes getting it out of the air again. So we're talking geologic timescales. Admittedly that required accumulating some 13% CO2 in the air (looks like I was remembering wrong when I said 30% before), or about 350 times more than today.
Global warming, on the other hand, is something that spiked in the last 100 years or so. Well, slightly over 100 years.
Doing some quick approximative maths, 30,000,000 / 100 = 300,000. So we're talking about an interval of time 300,000 times shorter than that. Even taking into account that 350 factor mentioned earlier, we'd need a little under 1000 years of outgassing for the current levels of CO2 to be entirely volcano-made. And even then: if we didn't have any plants or rocks that can fix that CO2.
Now of course, all that is assuming that the outgassing rate is the same right now as it was back then, which probably isn't true. So take all that as just some very inaccurate guessing at the rough ballpark figure. Still, it does illustrate that you can't take a phenomenon that happened over 30 million years, and needed some remakably unique conditions at that, to be necessarily relevant for something that happened in 100 years or so. It's just not nearly the same scale.
Now I'm not telling you whether or not to believe or not that the warming is entirely man-made. That, you can decide for yourself. But volcanoes just don't seem to spew enough CO2 and methane (which eventually is oxidized to CO2 and water in the presence of O2 and ultraviolet light) to be responsible for it.
Shorter version: do volcanoes spew CO2 in the air? Yes, most certainly. Did they spew anywhere near enough of that over the last 100 years to be responsible for global warming? No, unless we're missing a _major_ vent somewhere, not likely.
Well, you're right about Earth being a statistic improbability of many factors being just right, but methinks you're slightly wrong about Venus. Which is somewhat of a pity, since Venus is the perfect illustration of how many factors must be just right to get an Earth instead of a Venus.
On Venus too, it was the magnetic field -- or rather, lack thereof -- that did it. It's not just that some water gets split into hydrogen and oxygen, in which case it would just recombine sooner or later. It's that on Venus the lack of magnetic field allowed the solar winds to gradually wipe away the hydrogen. Venus is heavy enough to hold on th the slightly heavier elements, like Oxygen and Carbon anyway, even without a magnetic field. Hydrogen is a different story.
Outgassing CO2, well:
1. Earth spewed enough of that too, which is how it thawed back when cyanobacteria turned the atmosphere to O2 and the whole planet got deep frozen. (The Sun started a lot "cooler" and gradually warmed up. _Now_ it's warm enough to support life without a greenhouse effect, but in the beginning it wasn't.) I don't think there is any evidence that Venus spewed much more CO2 than Earth. On Earth just a lot of it got, well, buried right back. Say, in the Carboniferous era coal deposits.
The somewhat interesting corolary is that if we had too _little_ outgassing, then we'd have been really screwed. It took, IIRC, some 30% CO2 in the air to thaw that snowball Earth. Too little of it, and the deep freeze might just have continued long enough to be a total extinction event. Or at the very least a 1 billion year (or maybe more) pause in life evolution until the sun output went up some more.
2. Earth's original atmosphere was _methane_, which is a greenhouse gas about 200 times more potent than CO2. So if Venus would have been screwed by its outgassed CO2 atmosphere, the Earth should have been screwed 200 times harder (or close enough. Well over 100 times anyway.) In practice, that atmosphere on Earth just helped keep it warm enough at a time when the Sun was a lot weaker. If Venus had had a CO2 atmosphere at the time, well, it would have been a frozen snowball, quite the opposite of boiling off its water. In practice, it's a lot more likely that Venus started with a mostly Methane atmosphere too, only the hydrogen was swept away whenever some of it got broken up.
Pretty much if you start with water, methane and CO2, and continuously lose hydrogen, you end up with just the oxygen and carbon left, which means a lot of CO2. That's likely the short story of what happened on Venus.
3. There's an interesting extra factor there, which could have doomed Earth anyway, and that is: timing. If life or photosynthesis had started any later, for example, that methane and CO2 atmosphere would have sealed its fate. As I was saying methane is an _extremely_ potent greenhouse gas, so given enough extra time of gradually increasing solar output, it would have just boiled off the oceans. No liquid water, no life, game over.
And it just says "universal", _not_ "more universal than DVD". And they never claimed it was "more" universal or "completely" universal, that's a straw man of your own.
And trademarks do that all the time anyway. DVD says it's "versatile", although you could argue it's not "more versatile than anything else". CD says it's "compact", although it's certainly not "the most compact", there certainly are more compact things than that. (UMD for example, or the small disks used by the GameCube.) LP vinyl records say they play a long time, although they do not play longer than anything else (tapes can certainly play longer.) TFT's also contains "thin film", although there are thinner transistors than that. HDTV has "high definition" in the name, although there certainly are higher definition displays available than 1920x1200. Floppy disks never were the floppiest thing imaginable. Hard drives aren't the hardest things imaginable, and in fact most modern ones have glass platters. On a hardness scale, they don't come even close to, say, diamond. FPM RAM called itself "fast page mode", but it wasn't the fastest way imaginable to address the contents. Etc.
Demanding that it fits all possible interpretations of a word gets sillier even faster. E.g., my "active speakers" don't look very active to me at all, they just sit there on the desk all day. Never seen 'em doing any sports or helping with stuff around the house;)
So if not being the absolute superlative of a word in a trademark is "orwellian", congrats, you've just dubbed most of the industry orwellian.
So I fail to see the logic in splitting hairs about what one word means in a trademark.
I know it's good for your karma to rant against Sony, but, seriously, it's not like there aren't actually _valid_ complaints against them. God knows they've been acting lately like, well, the corporate equivalent of the village retard running around with pencils up its nose thinking it's an airplane. So, you know, no shortage of stuff to use against them.
Heck, even complaining that you can't burn UMDs can be very well made on its own, without splitting such irrelevant hairs as what else does a word in the trademark mean.
It's a different meaning of "universal". It's not "universal" as in "every device ever made will read and write it", but "universal" as in "we can store games _and_ movies on it and god knows what other digital stuff we'll think about later."
Not saying you should necessarily get one, just clarifying why the name.
And, no, there's nothing Orwellian about it. Some words simply have more than one meaning, surprising as that may seem. Same, if you will, as F/OSS fans will write all over the place about the difference between "free as in beer" and "free as in speech". That's another word whose meanings aren't even vaguely related to each other.
Slashdot Mirror
Congrats on proving that you're too fucking stupid to read even the first paragraph before jumping to write that standard zealot answer. No, really, it's something to be proud of. Even die-hard ADHD cases usuall run out of attention span only after at least 2 paragraphs.
Exactly which part of "counterfeit" confuses you? No, seriously. Exactly in which form or shape does selling _counterfeit_ goods mean company A got their money for it? Here's some free clue: if you buy counterfeit or stolen Gilette blades, Gilette doesn't get a cent out of that. That's the whole point of counterfeiting.
And goods which were bought at some flea market, just she doesn't remember which? Oh please. If that doesn't sound like a standard counterfeit goods excuse, I don't know what does.
It wasn't ever true. Linux distros were never like the great Unix fragmentation mess.
/opt (e.g., SuSE) which others install in /usr. And about 90% which just download RedHat's RPM's and put their own name and logo on it, so basically they don't even really count as different distros.
What we have now are maybe 10% distros which pack a _slightly_ different mix of the same tools, or just different default tools, or sometimes just and maybe have a slightly different config tool. Or maybe they'll install one tool in
Either way, from an end-user point of view, whop-de-do, you run the same tools, with the same options and the same interface. That's especially important because for an end-user the OS doesn't even really matter. The computer is just a tool, and the OS is... well, I think Joe Average isn't even sure what the OS is, he just knows he has to have one to run the important part: the apps. What matters is what you can run on that computer. (See the endless "but it doesn't run MS Office" and "but I can't play the latest games on it" arguments.)
Even if one distro skipped a tool you want, you know, there's nothing to stop you to download it yourself.
The Unix fragmentation was a whole different issue. Each of the major vendors actually worked hard to lock their customers in. Unix got fuc^H^H^H forked so hard, it wasn't compatible even at source level any more.
As I always remind people, people want interoperability and open standards when they're the underdog, and they want free access to the top dog's customers. When they're on top, even on a niche, they don't want that any more. Then they want walled gardens and penned captive customers that they can milk and shear regularly. Then they want you to think, "damn, if I get a mainframe to replace these aging Sun servers we have, we'll have to change all this mountain of source code, and for some we don't even have the devs any more and for some, well, we thought we're smart if we get it cheaper without sources... oh well, better buy the next servers from Sun too." And the difference in parameters and effects for the supplied tools, meant you got to retrain all your admins and rewrite your scripts too.
When you're at the top of your own niche, it's all about trade barriers. You want to make it as hard as possible for a competitor to steal your customers. (And unsurprisingly, IBM for example was not only on the receiving end of an antitrust trial long before MS, but also the word FUD was originally used about IBM's practices.)
So, anyway, that's what they did there: each took their own fork of Unix and ran in their own direction with it, as far from everyone else as they could and could afford to. AIX and Solarix, for example, weren't just different distros, they were almost different operating systems. "Portability" was only a buzzword everyone used only in marketing, but tried to keep it to a minimum otherwise. It meant little more than that they all had a C compiler (but even then with subtle "improvements" of their own), and they had to have the same standard C library (but again, each felt free to make their own subtle "improvements" to it.)
What I'm getting at is: in a way the plethora of distros is even a good thing in that aspect. Noone is that secure at the top, or even king of the hill at all. (Not to mention they're all underdogs in the shadow of the 800 pound gorilla called Microsoft.) Noone is in a position to fork their version of Linux and try to lock customers in it.
Lock-in doesn't work when you're the underdog. The same fence that keeps your customers from escaping, also keeps you from reaching everyone else's customers. So noone does it when they have 10% of the market. At that point, you want open standards.
And with the current Linux market structure, we're pretty safe and secure that everyone will want open standards for the next decade straight. Unless MS manages to implode, anyway.
It's more complex than that.
E.g., what if it's a counterfeit product? It's damn easy to undercut someone's prices when you don't have to invest a cent in research (even if it's "what are people willing to wear this season") or even in marketing (since you're piggy-backing on someone else's brand image and using their own marketing investment against them.) Often you can cut more corners too, because, hey, if the product malfunctions spectacularly or even hurts someone, it's not _your_ brand image that goes down the drain.
Or what about stolen goods? Or defective goods which someone was supposed to dispose of, but made a bit of money on the side auctioning them? It's damn easy to undercut prices when you're selling stuff you got, essentially, for free by illegal means.
Or the case comes to mind which saddled us all with frequency- or multiplier-locked CPUs. A bunch of dishonest fucks figured out that they can take, say, a cheap 100 MHz CPU and overclock it to 133 MHz, make a computer with it, and sell it for quite a bit of profit. Remember that at the time most of the ID of a CPU was what was printed on it, and it was up to you to set the motherboard jumpers right. So, being that the CPU in a complete computer was under a heatsink, there wasn't even much way to see if you got defrauded without taking the computer apart, which Joe Average didn't usually do. But some went as far as to erase what was printed on the CPU and actually print the higher CPU frequency on it.
It was something which actively damaged Intel's reputation, and later AMD's when they were the last to sell unlocked CPUs. People were buying computers which kept crashing, or only worked as long as the temperature in your room was under 20C. Summer comes and your computer is a dysfunctional piece of shit. You'd maybe take it back to the shop and they'd tell you some "yeah, we've had a lot of problems with bad Intel CPUs lately." (When the only problem was that they had defrauded you of a lot of money.) There was a _lot_ of "Intel CPUs are shit and crash all the time" bad reputation built at the time. And later it was "AMD CPUs are shit and crash all the time."
Just, you know, in case you were wondering why CPUs are locked nowadays.
So basically it's trivial to have some auction where the whole point is that it's _not_ fair and open, you're not even buying what you think you're buying. And it might not be a price that a normal, honest seller would ever accept.
Plus, just because Slashdot has _yet_ _again_ a lopsided and inflammatory story, it doesn't mean you can jump to a conclusion based on it. There used to be a time when the stories actually had anything to do with technology, and it was exciting new stuff, not "version 2.5.1.2 of Product X released, people advised to patch their 2.5.1.1 version." Nowadays it seems that lopsided "company X is violating your rights if they don't buy me a pony" astroturfing is more common than anything even remotely related to computing.
So basically, if a story seems like a clear-cut "side X is 100% right, side Y is 100% wrong and are evil fucks to boot", that's usually your clue that you're spoon fed an astroturfing story. Reality is rarely that neat, and the devil often is in the details you're not getting, or are getting a cherry-picked slightly-warped version. If you can cherry-pick only the details you like, you'd be surprised how far reality can be warped. (E.g., think, "Hitler was buying roads and factories and the allies attacked him for it." If you conveniently omit such details as, you know, that three continents were plunged into all out war at the time and the ethnic cleansing part, the whole story takes a very different angle.)
I wouldn't be too surprised if something like this was a management decision to start with. Someone figured out they'd save some money on tech support calls, for example, if the users don't have to keep calling with stuff like "why does this ask for a password when I want to change the printer?" and "does your driver have a virus? my grandson said I should beware stuff that asks for a password" (for bonus points: "... and he didn't tell me the password anyway. Can I still use the printer?") and the like. Don't underestimate the kind of dumb decisions that get taken in the name of cost cutting.
And that includes the fact that it probably wasn't a programmer/architect that made the installer anyway. The drive for cost cutting includes the idea of giving each job to the lowest wage monkey who can possibly do it. So it's not entirely unheard of to offload to the cheapest interns or even to underused non-technical members of the team stuff like making an installer or writing the test cases.
In which case probably some under-paid and under-skilled monkey got the honour of figuring out how to install that stuff in Linux. These aren't typically the kind of guys you'd ask to do a security analysis and design, and they're not given ample times and funds for research either. So he'll google if he has a problem (like how to make some nice config dialog modify a file that was installed as writable by root only), and take the first thing that sorta looks like a solution.
Plus a few other such fun ways to fuck up in the name of keeping the costs down.
Mind you, I'm not saying this has to be what happened at Samsung. Just saying that I've seen that and worse happening in other places, so I wouldn't be too surprised.
Actually, that's false. Oblivion has different skins for males and females, and there's no freakin' way a male, even a bodybuilder, would have _that_ kind of shading of the pecs. The mis-placing the nipples is more of a result of not paying much attention to how it aligns with the mesh. (Probably most of Bethesda only saw it with the bra on.) But the texture itself, if you look at it as just a bitmap, is clearly a female skin and includes extra shading to accentuate the breasts. It's _not_ a male texture.
And it would be trivial to tweak the texture coordinates for the vertexes so the nipples fall anywhere you want them on the mesh. Now obviously Bethesda didn't bother, so it's a fairly safe assumption that they never intended the game to be playe with naked characters. But don't mistake it for anything more than that: it doesn't mean it's the wrong texture, it doesn't mean it can't be done, it just means that they had better stuff to spend their time and money on than aligning the nipples.
Now I'm not for censorship, and I do consider the whole "scandal" pretty stupid, but spewing falsehoods doesn't help either.
While I don't claim to be some military genius, I do happen to be reserve sergeant. It means that, for better or worse, in case of a serious war I would very likely get some summary training and a bunch of young men to live to our deaths. Make what you will out of that.
And it scares me to think I'd get to lead some guys who take this kind of stuff. There's this saying, "never share a foxhole with someone braver than you are."
The folks who are all brave, and the stuff of heroic hero tales and propaganda, are the guys who in practice had a nervous breakdown and did something stupid. And not only got themselves killed, but often got half the platoon wiped out. You _don't_ actually want people to start acting _too_ brave.
You can see what happen when people start caring less and less about personal safety, because that's what combat fatigue does. The more it progresses, the lower their chances of survival become. Think the Red Baron breaking his own rules and flying too low over the trenches. A machinegun got 'im.
Fear isn't just the instant irrational response, but also a factor in that rational assessment of a situation. It's why you execute your orders or trust your officers even against your common sense. You know, or hope, that if you do your role to the letter, everyone has higher chances to survive than if you don't. So basically a big factor there is precisely the fear: fear of what happens if you don't do your job.
And it can be a very irrational thing. If you were to take the rational thought path there, it's more logical to just keep your head low or just bugger off completely. I mean, fear or no fear, it's not particularly logical to have a death wish. And what keeps you there might just be an irrational fear of the unknown that would happen if you don't follow those orders.
Heck, war itself is a very illogical thing. You're asking some people to risk their life, or worse, to risk getting crippled, _and_ to do a very social thing that most would rather not be doing: killing someone else. And you're asking them to do it for little or no rewards. To quote Hermann Goering: "Why, of course, the people don't want war. Why would some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best that he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece?" Not a fan of the guy, but he does have a point there: the "reward" that the average soldier can hope for is staying alive. And if you're to think logically there, it's a damn crappy reward for risking your life. You actually have more chances to achieve that by _not_ going to war.
What keeps people there? Essentially fear. And I don't just mean the fear that the corporal will have their head for breakfast, or fear of being court martialled, but a lot of it is also the "my peers would have an awfully bad opinion of me if I bugger off" kind of fear. I dare say that that's most of what drives the other half of Goering's famous quote. ("Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country.") Essentially that propaganda isn't as much causing people to be fearless and utterly patriotic, it causes groupthink and fear of the social consequences of trying to go against the stream. People don't as much think, "hell yeah, now I'm all psyched to go teach the French a lesson", people think "omg, the way everyone seems to believe that chest thumping stuff, I don't want to risk being the guy who comes forth and says that he's a coward." (Actually chances are everyone else thinks the same. That's the beauty of groupthink.)
So if you were to remove all fear -- including the "what would the folks at home think of me if I deserted?" kind of fear -- would people even stay in the army?
Mind you, it would probably be an improvement if people stopped shooting each other for the glory of some megalomaniac. But if your purpose were to get people to fight better, well, you might actually better off without this kind of thing.
If it's a NANO-tube, I'd say he's on dialup.
Ah, relax, the "we're the persecuted minority" is the new racist/religious/sexist/whatever bigotry propaganda. Saying "dammit, I want to have an advantage of group X" doesn't gain much traction in this day and age, so the way it _invariably_ gets presented is, "auugh, they're persecuting us by not staying our slaves! we're the oppressed minority! help! Someone stop group X now!"
You can see it applied verbatim to almost any kind of bigotry. The white supremacists say they're oppressed by the blacks. The most mysoginist nuts say they're oppressed by any woman who even tries to have more perspectives in life than cooking, washing and raising kids. The religious nuts say they're oppressed by anyone who refuses to listen to their preaching, or, god forbid, manages to get a job without giving endless thanks to the Jesus for it. Rabid homophobes say they're oppressed by homosexuals. Etc.
It's pretty much the standard recipe for begging for some attention and compassion to what otherwise would be an abject and repulsive appeal to discriminate against someone else for personal advantages. Just fill in the details and you have your very own propaganda piece: Group X wants equal Y (rights, pay, education oportunities, etc). From there, you can:
A) Pretend that they were already equal, if not outright advantaged there. Statistics be damned. (Why, they already had more jobs as janitors, receptionists and nurses than us.) Hence any asking for more must be some unashamed grab for more power over the rest of us.
B) Find some disadvantaged low-pay/low-power/low-whatever niche into which that minority has been pushed, pretend that it's some enviable position and they're there just for the sake of pushing out poor white/christian/male/whatever folks who always wanted that job. (E.g., surely the only reason why women are nurses while guys are high paid doctors is that those evil women pushed off all the guys who wanted to be nurses.) Present it as some beach head and some trend that will obviously continue until none of us whites/christians/males/whatever have no place left.
C) If you somehow can't deny that they _are_ at a disadvantage and just want to become more equal, present it as some kind of slippery slope or a thing where the brakes don't exist. Once we start moving in that direction, surely there is no stopping until they've become hideously more advantaged than us! And they know it! That's their whole agenda in fact!
D) All the above.
So basically it's not as much that someone genuinely believes they're persecuted. (Unless they're paranoid schizophrenic, but then there's no point in arguing with someone driven by delusions anyway.) It's that they think they're extra smart if they present it as persecution instead of the "give me power over someone else" appeal that it really is. Surely noone will figure it out.
In other words, to put it nastier, that's your clue that they're not only bigotted fucks, but dishonest as well.
You know, that might just be pure genius. Thanks for the tip.
Well, hmm... ok, 1 year may be too short, though technologies don't change over night and it's possible to plan ahead a bit. It's possible to plan for the emulator while the old computer is still reasonably available or in use. But ok, let's say 5 years.
In fact, how about the following setup:
1. if the first publisher makes the work unavailable for 5 consecutive years, or more than 50% of the time in a 10 year interval, the copyright reverts to the author. Just so an author isn't shafted by a publisher who bought the work with royalties promises and buried it.
2. If the author or the second publisher makes it unavailable for 5 consecutive years, or more than 50% of the time in a 10 year interval, it becomes public domain
It should give everyone ample time to retool, remaster, whatever is needed IMHO. And it gives authors a second chance too, if the publisher shafted them. After all, the idea of copyright was to encourage the creation of new works, and the authors are the ones who actually do that.
The provision for 50% of the time is because the more I think of it, the more it looks like just "5 consecutive years" begs for the loophole of uploading it to the site 1 day every 5 years, somewhere 20 levels deep where noone would reasonably find it, and without advertising it anywhere.
Should be fair, right?
Amen, brother. That's exactly what I'm talking about. Good to see I'm not the only one who sees it like that.
Well, yes, if it's well organized and everything, it can work and I've seen it work even without any freebies (though they help.) No arguments there.
What makes people shudder at the thought of institutionalizing it, though, are experiences of places where it was institutionalized in all the wrong ways. E.g., they were mandatory (complete with roll call or signing your name on a list, and emails reminding everyone that they damn better have a great excuse if they dare not show up), _and_ instead of socializing it was having to listen to the boss do an ego-masturbation speech for 2 hours (for bonus points: with powerpoint charts), _and_ they happened entirely too often for something that bad an idea (e.g., weekly), _and_ just to rub everyone's nose in, complete with reminders that you're forbidden to put it on your timesheet.
At that point it's even irrelevant if they gave the people free beer and pizza, or (as was often the case), nothing whatsoever.
I mean, seriously, if someone's (A) required to be there, and (B) can't even just relax and socialize, but are required to sit through someone's presentation, then it's work. It's not a social occasion, it's just a meeting at work. Requiring it to happen on someone's free time, isn't going to make them happy. Giving them a free pizza and a beer for it, if anything, was insulting in its own right: noone was _that_ poor as to, basically, work two hours for food. At, say, $10 worth of pizza and a beer, that's 5$/hour for the boss's speech alone, which, frankly, was way below the hourly fee of anyone present in the room.
It doesn't even help with team building, since (A) if everyone is required to sit and listen to the boss's presentation, there's almost no time to actually socialize with other employees, (B) half the people are in a cranky mood just because they were required to be there again, which doesn't help make friends, and (C) everyone ends up _hating_ the mandatory idiots who ask some redundant question just to show participation.
Again, I'm not claiming that all such events _must_ be organized like that. Of course, there are people who do it right. On the other hand, it's entirely too easy to do it wrong, and God knows there's no shortage of PHBs with a natural knack to do things the wrong way. (Usual disclaimer: by PHB I really only mean the clueless gang, not every manager.)
And institutionalizing it as some corporate rule just begs such mis-haps to happen. People who have no skill in doing it right, or are the first to hate having to do it, end up organizing such events the wrong way just because the rules require them to.
In a way, the GP is right: do it when you feel it's the "right" time and when you think most people would find it fun. You can even make it some kind of pseudo-reward, like, "woohoo, we had a successful release, let's have an unofficial party at the pub." It's not just a good excuse, it shows people they're appreciated. _Don't_ do it just because the rules/nice-book/whatever say you have to do it and the time is up for the next one.
Ok, if you want to discuss debatable assumptions, it's a valid point to debate. It even worse than what you mentioned. (I should probably mention first that I'm not against reducing copyright as such, but I do have a severe allergy to bad science and to using maths as smoke and mirrors.)
What does he calculate there? It's not even "how much would the artists be motivated/rewarded?" or "how much better would our culture be if we had cheap access to more books earlier?" That's not what he calculates there.
The whole number is calculated, basically based on "how many derivative works could have been written in that time." I'm sorry, but are we actually losing something worth anything there? We're not talking valuable original works, we're talking, basically, mashups based on wholesale plagiarism, if only copyright law is what keeps them from being published before copyright expires. Seriously.
If you just use a similar plot device that someone else used, no law prevents you from doing that. If it's _copyright_ law that prevents you from publishing your own novel, then you've copied whole pages verbatim. It's that simple.
Basically the whole underlying idea of that maths is that all works are created equal. That's how they can be put in such a "dispassionate" sum as equals. The underlying assumption is that (A) if I copied two chapters from Tolkien and a chapter from Stephen King (with the character names changed, maybe), then my book is as valuable a novel as any other novel, and (B) that there's a big loss if I can't publish that plagiarism. In fact, that society should alter its laws precisely to avoid missing out on such masterpieces.
Does that assumption even hold? How many novels _are_ published that plagiarize other novels wholesale anyway? How well do they do? Would anyone give a rat's ass about losing that source of literature?
I mean, seriously, there already are a lot of novels which are out of copyright. There's nothing to keep one from copying Shakespeare's works and selling them as your own, or even much more recent stuff. Does it happen on any significant scale? If you did, would people consider it a valuable addition to culture, or, more likely, "bah, I'm not wasting my money to encourage that kind of plagiarism?" If we shorten copyright terms, how many such literary mashups will get published based on newer works? I'm guessing not many publishers will want to print your book if it's that non-creative. Are we losing that much by not encouraging plagiarism of more recent works?
Or take comics. Let's say we pass a law that limits their copyright to 14 years. So let's say I start copying Dilbert comics from '93, maybe change the wording a bit 'cause it's more fun to change the whole thing to childish fart jokes, and submit them to newspapers or publish them on my site as my own. Is it that big a loss to everyone if I don't? Is such a comic of equal worth in any way to the original, as to be worth putting both as a 1 in that sum?
Basically the whole formulas are based on an assumption which is flawed to the extreme.
Again, I'm not saying that copyright necessarily should or shouldn't be shortened, I'm just calling bull on the maths used to calculate the "ideal duration." That 14 years value is based not only on bad guesswork numbers, but on some very flawed assumptions that went into the formulas themselves.
Well, the point sorta was that I see no scientific analysis of the error margin. He's done the calculation for a couple of possible input values, which I'll admit is already more than nothing... but essentially I don't see anywhere saying "the sigma is x.yz years." (That is, if it's a normal distribution.) Even taking the ends of the intervals doesn't really tell you what those upper and lower bounds are. Guesswork themselves maybe? Some cutoff point on a gauss curve? How significant _are_ those numbers in the first place, never mind the guessed middle value? What probability should I expect for an actual case to fall outside of even that 2% to 10% interval?
Ah well...
Ok, I'll admit that it's head and shoulders over the usual PR/lobbyist pseudo-science. That still doesn't excuse the bad use of that formula.
I'm mostly annoyed by the "the scientific dispassionately-proven ideal value is 14 years!" claim, when the actual scientific claim would be more along the lines of "the ideal value is probably somewhere between 3 and 51 years." The difference is pretty substantial between the two claims.
For a start if it's really anywhere between 3 and 51 years, then, say, the 58 years in the UK that he mentions, might be just a little longer than needed. Or a lot longer. But you don't really know which. There is a non-zero probability that it might even be right, at least for _some_ works. (Those numbers usually fall on a gauss curve or such, so there's usually no hard cut off at either 2% or 10%. The Illiad isn't worthless even after thousands of years, so the decay must have been even lower than 1% there. Ditto for the other values involved.) On the other hand when you give a hard number like 14 years, it's already a whole other implication, namely, "the current copyright term is 3.5 times longer than the mathematically calculated value!"
Actually, I have a proposal of my own that doesn't involve setting any numbers in stone.
Before I start, let me define the assumptions and problem, the way I see it. My problem isn't money. I'm perfectly OK with the creators receiving adequate compensation for their work. My problem is the fact that copyright is (intentionally or accidentally) used to bury some books or movies alive. Someone can buy the copyright to something just to stop more copies from being made, or in Disney's case to prevent some embarassing old cartoons from being seen. I'm sorry, but that was not the spirit of copyright law.
In other words, my purpose is to make sure that a work remains available to everyone, and doesn't effectively exit the culture. It shouldn't be possible to "unpublish" a work, and certainly not possible to use copyright law to that effect.
So my own idea of a "fair" proposal is to basically let everyone decide how long they want to keep selling it, for no more than the original price modified by inflation.
I'm not even putting any restrictions on the choice of medium, other than that it must be usable by the average person at the time. So a book could be on paper, or PDF, or scanned, or whatever they choose, as long as you can still buy it from the copyright holder. Music, well, it better not come on phonograph cylinders: digitize it to CD, or make an MP3 out of it, or whatever. Anything that a modern computer or home entertainment centre can play, really. Movies, ditto: if it only exists on some cinema reels, well, then it either should still be possible to buy cinema tickets to see it, or digitize it to MPEG/DVD/whatever. Etc.
Entirely reasonable restriction, I should think, since the purported purpose of copyright law is to encourage creating works for the use of the general public. If the general public can't use that work, then we're already outside that intended scope and effect.
But the keyword is: keep selling it. The moment something becomes unavailable for more than, say, 1 year, then it should immediately and irrevocably become public domain.
Actually, it looks to me like just a variation of the popular "have a pre-conceived result you want to reach, then massage logic and numbers to reach it." In this case, outright proposing "my formula says get rid of IP completely" (which he seems to be busy arguing the rest of the time) would have looked suspicious, while "hey, the original 14 year idea was right, let's go back to that" is something that's actually very easy to swallow. So let's massage the maths to support that.
I'm sorry, I'll
A) have trouble taking someone seriously as doing dispassionate objective maths when the rest of the time they're on a crusade against copyright and copyright extensions. It's akin to trusting a Sony fanboy to give you a scientific and dispassionate estimate as to which console is the best. But more importantly,
B) the data he feeds into those formulas is based on guessed numbers. E.g., for the rate of decay, depending on who you choose to believe, in his own paper the estimates range from 2% to 10%. He chooses 5% as the number to go with, but the important thing to realize is that it's just a guess. The accuracy of that number is remarkably low.
To give you an example of how inacurate that is: for something that decays by 2% per year, after 16 years you've lost only almost 28% of the original value. At 5%, after 16 years you've lost 56% of the original value. At 10% in 16 years you've lost 81% of the value. (I'm using 16 instead of 14 just because I'm too lazy to do more than press the X^2 button in xcalc 4 times. Should be enough for example purposes.) The effects being literally exponential, such a wild inaccuracy is multiplied incredibly. You can produce a wildly different "ideal number of years" by just choosing slightly different guessed numbers to input in those formulas.
C) I see nowhere a calculation of the error margins. As a corolary of B, what's more interesting for such a calculation with wildly guessed numbers isn't just one value reached with the most likely guess, but what is the _interval_ of plausible results. If you've fed data which could be anything between 2% and 10%, then what is the result for 2% and what is the result for 10%, for a start. Don't give me the result just for 5%. And that's just one of the values there.
Basically what I'm saying is that even if you trust the formulas to be correct, the insanely large intervals of believable values means you can get almost any number you want to get there, just by picking different guessed numbers. You can use the same formula to get any number between 2-3 years (if you chose to believe everything devalues extremely fast, and everything creates incredible value in derivative works) to well over 50 years (if you choose to go by the idea that even though some crap devalues faster, the most deserving protection are the masterworks that devalue very slowly.) Pick your own pre-conceived number in that range, and there's a valid set of guessed numbers that produces it.
Anyway, it's used all the time. E.g., if you work in most large corporations, you must have seen at least one (but more likely dozens) of baffling decisions that go somewhat like this:
How it's supposed to look from the outside: some manager (A) saw that problem X exists and is really a problem, (2) analyzed which products solved that problem, (3) made a list of features and performance characteristics, put them in numbers, and assigned them weights according to their importance in the actual case at hand, (4) dispassionately calculated the weighted score for all of them, and (5) the result happens to say that, objectively, product Y from supplier Z is the perfect choice.
What really happened: was that the manager had already decided that he wants product Y or just to buy something from company Z, for entirely other reasons. Often (but not always) he even had to scratch his head to figure out a problem X that fits that solution. At any rate, from there the analyzed features and their weights are juggled and massaged until product Y ends up on top. There you go, now the cold dispassionate numbers support it.
Well, yes and no. Probably most people have some intuition the basics, but:
1. Some people are just incapable of implementing them, or can't be arsed.
2. Some people are operating in a brain-dead rules zone.
E.g., it's easy to say "hiring lots of people before you know what you'll use them for is wrong" (what he calls "brownian motion"), but sometimes lobotomized corporate rules twist one's arm to do exactly that. It could be that you have a fixed time window to do the hiring, or the ever popular "if we don't use this year's budget fully, we'll get a budget cut next year", etc. You'd be surprised how many anti-patterns are really just work-arounds for rules that sounded good on paper, to someone who's (A) not qualified to take that kind of decisions, (B) bored enough to take them anyway, or a new boss pissing on everything to mark his territory, (C) way too far disconnected from the data to base those decisions on, (for example by being several hierarchy levels too high, or in a whole different brach of the hierarchy altogether, and having no communication level to the people who actually know what's happening there), and (D) shielded from the effect of bad decisions (e.g., if there are any good results it's his merit, if it goes south fast, it's the fault of the henchman who had to implement them.)
Heck, you've given a very good example yourself. Even good ideas can be turned into bad and annoying rules, and there are a lot of places where exactly that happens. Bonding between people can be a good idea, and it can even be helped along a bit (but it's hard and most people don't have the necessary skills.) But then department A comes with a rule that says "thou shalt meet with your team mates at a pub once a week" (more often is always better, right?), department B comes and says, "but thou shalt do it on their free time, because we're not paying you lot to sit around and chat", department C comes and says, "and we're not paying for it", a boss change comes at department A and says, "nah, thou shalt use a meeting room, it's cheaper", and boss D come and says, "cool, I'll come along and motivate people with a speech. What could be more bonding and motivational than everyone hearing how great I am, and how any good results are due to my enlightened leadership?" What started as a good idea, was turned into the perfect recipe for a morale disaster.
(And, sadly, the above paragraph isn't made up. I know one place where exactly that setup was institutionalized.)
3. Some people operate on bogus data, and often are deliberately fed bogus data, for example by some underling who has something to gain from forcing a bad decision.
E.g., manager X figures out he'd get a promotion if he got just 5 more people under him (usually again a case of brain dead rules), so he'll actually support anything that makes it look like his project needs more people. Or will actively argue for "brownian motion" kind of arguing.
E.g., I've actually seen one sad case where someone sabotaged his own project just to show everyone that Java sucks, unlike his beloved VB. The guy not only couldn't be arsed to actually manage that project, and spent 90% of his time trying to manipulate unrelated non-technical managers (this wasn't a software house but a manufacturing corporation with an IT department) into seeing it all as "that's the kind of extra complexity Java produces), but actively changed specs or introduced random new requirements when the project looked like it was getting anywhere.
4. Some are just dishonest fucks, and just follow their own goals, which aren't the same as the company's goals. E.g., the guys mentioned at the previous point.
5. Some actually know what should be done, but don't have the spine or the authority to counter client aikido maneuvers.
E.g., saying "you should first make a disposable low-cost prototype" is good and fine. But I can tell you first hand that in a lot of cases the client has no clue what's the difference between a HTML prototype and a full
True. In fact that's probably the most insightful thing I've seen in this topic.
Well, it didn't on Venus, did it?
Forget the technical side of it all. The real question is: can any _human_ watch 1500 movies simultaneously? :P
:P
And at the risk of dragging it back into technology, that's assuming they give her a lot of TFTs too. Otherwise on a 1920x1200 pixel screen, we're talking 1536 pixels per movie window. Assuming they're tiled without borders, that's... hmm... closest I can get while keeping the 16/9 aspect ratio is 48 by 27 pixels per movie. Not gonna see much detail there, and that's putting it mildly
Actually, scratch the division by 100 years, or the result doesn't even have the right units. So it would need a little under 100,000 years, not a little under 1000 years.
Just shows I shouldn't write in a hurry, and I definitely should engage the brains first.
Well, yes and no. Volcanoes do spew all sorts of stuff into the air, the question is just how much of it.
Thawing up snowball earth I mentioned before took up to 30 million years, and that's with zero photosynthesis or other processes getting it out of the air again. So we're talking geologic timescales. Admittedly that required accumulating some 13% CO2 in the air (looks like I was remembering wrong when I said 30% before), or about 350 times more than today.
Global warming, on the other hand, is something that spiked in the last 100 years or so. Well, slightly over 100 years.
Doing some quick approximative maths, 30,000,000 / 100 = 300,000. So we're talking about an interval of time 300,000 times shorter than that. Even taking into account that 350 factor mentioned earlier, we'd need a little under 1000 years of outgassing for the current levels of CO2 to be entirely volcano-made. And even then: if we didn't have any plants or rocks that can fix that CO2.
Now of course, all that is assuming that the outgassing rate is the same right now as it was back then, which probably isn't true. So take all that as just some very inaccurate guessing at the rough ballpark figure. Still, it does illustrate that you can't take a phenomenon that happened over 30 million years, and needed some remakably unique conditions at that, to be necessarily relevant for something that happened in 100 years or so. It's just not nearly the same scale.
Now I'm not telling you whether or not to believe or not that the warming is entirely man-made. That, you can decide for yourself. But volcanoes just don't seem to spew enough CO2 and methane (which eventually is oxidized to CO2 and water in the presence of O2 and ultraviolet light) to be responsible for it.
Shorter version: do volcanoes spew CO2 in the air? Yes, most certainly. Did they spew anywhere near enough of that over the last 100 years to be responsible for global warming? No, unless we're missing a _major_ vent somewhere, not likely.
Well, you're right about Earth being a statistic improbability of many factors being just right, but methinks you're slightly wrong about Venus. Which is somewhat of a pity, since Venus is the perfect illustration of how many factors must be just right to get an Earth instead of a Venus.
On Venus too, it was the magnetic field -- or rather, lack thereof -- that did it. It's not just that some water gets split into hydrogen and oxygen, in which case it would just recombine sooner or later. It's that on Venus the lack of magnetic field allowed the solar winds to gradually wipe away the hydrogen. Venus is heavy enough to hold on th the slightly heavier elements, like Oxygen and Carbon anyway, even without a magnetic field. Hydrogen is a different story.
Outgassing CO2, well:
1. Earth spewed enough of that too, which is how it thawed back when cyanobacteria turned the atmosphere to O2 and the whole planet got deep frozen. (The Sun started a lot "cooler" and gradually warmed up. _Now_ it's warm enough to support life without a greenhouse effect, but in the beginning it wasn't.) I don't think there is any evidence that Venus spewed much more CO2 than Earth. On Earth just a lot of it got, well, buried right back. Say, in the Carboniferous era coal deposits.
The somewhat interesting corolary is that if we had too _little_ outgassing, then we'd have been really screwed. It took, IIRC, some 30% CO2 in the air to thaw that snowball Earth. Too little of it, and the deep freeze might just have continued long enough to be a total extinction event. Or at the very least a 1 billion year (or maybe more) pause in life evolution until the sun output went up some more.
2. Earth's original atmosphere was _methane_, which is a greenhouse gas about 200 times more potent than CO2. So if Venus would have been screwed by its outgassed CO2 atmosphere, the Earth should have been screwed 200 times harder (or close enough. Well over 100 times anyway.) In practice, that atmosphere on Earth just helped keep it warm enough at a time when the Sun was a lot weaker. If Venus had had a CO2 atmosphere at the time, well, it would have been a frozen snowball, quite the opposite of boiling off its water. In practice, it's a lot more likely that Venus started with a mostly Methane atmosphere too, only the hydrogen was swept away whenever some of it got broken up.
Pretty much if you start with water, methane and CO2, and continuously lose hydrogen, you end up with just the oxygen and carbon left, which means a lot of CO2. That's likely the short story of what happened on Venus.
3. There's an interesting extra factor there, which could have doomed Earth anyway, and that is: timing. If life or photosynthesis had started any later, for example, that methane and CO2 atmosphere would have sealed its fate. As I was saying methane is an _extremely_ potent greenhouse gas, so given enough extra time of gradually increasing solar output, it would have just boiled off the oceans. No liquid water, no life, game over.
Dude, it's just a trademark.
;)
And it just says "universal", _not_ "more universal than DVD". And they never claimed it was "more" universal or "completely" universal, that's a straw man of your own.
And trademarks do that all the time anyway. DVD says it's "versatile", although you could argue it's not "more versatile than anything else". CD says it's "compact", although it's certainly not "the most compact", there certainly are more compact things than that. (UMD for example, or the small disks used by the GameCube.) LP vinyl records say they play a long time, although they do not play longer than anything else (tapes can certainly play longer.) TFT's also contains "thin film", although there are thinner transistors than that. HDTV has "high definition" in the name, although there certainly are higher definition displays available than 1920x1200. Floppy disks never were the floppiest thing imaginable. Hard drives aren't the hardest things imaginable, and in fact most modern ones have glass platters. On a hardness scale, they don't come even close to, say, diamond. FPM RAM called itself "fast page mode", but it wasn't the fastest way imaginable to address the contents. Etc.
Demanding that it fits all possible interpretations of a word gets sillier even faster. E.g., my "active speakers" don't look very active to me at all, they just sit there on the desk all day. Never seen 'em doing any sports or helping with stuff around the house
So if not being the absolute superlative of a word in a trademark is "orwellian", congrats, you've just dubbed most of the industry orwellian.
So I fail to see the logic in splitting hairs about what one word means in a trademark.
I know it's good for your karma to rant against Sony, but, seriously, it's not like there aren't actually _valid_ complaints against them. God knows they've been acting lately like, well, the corporate equivalent of the village retard running around with pencils up its nose thinking it's an airplane. So, you know, no shortage of stuff to use against them.
Heck, even complaining that you can't burn UMDs can be very well made on its own, without splitting such irrelevant hairs as what else does a word in the trademark mean.
It's a different meaning of "universal". It's not "universal" as in "every device ever made will read and write it", but "universal" as in "we can store games _and_ movies on it and god knows what other digital stuff we'll think about later."
Not saying you should necessarily get one, just clarifying why the name.
And, no, there's nothing Orwellian about it. Some words simply have more than one meaning, surprising as that may seem. Same, if you will, as F/OSS fans will write all over the place about the difference between "free as in beer" and "free as in speech". That's another word whose meanings aren't even vaguely related to each other.