A very good point. It seems that the DRM is a solution to a problem completely different from what the music/movie/software industries are facing today. The digital distribution (both unauthorised and authorised) in the 80s was in its infancy. It was too difficult to distribute the software (music and movies used traditional venues) and as a result one leaked copy could only reach a limited audience. Therefore it was ok to "copy-protect" every copy imperfectly.
Today one copy can be distributed to every Internet user. We can see how one leaked copy (cam) of Finding Nemo is distributed all over the net. But the problem is that if this copy wasn't made, someoone would do it in another theater. With thousands of theaters and millions of customers, you simply can't "protect" your data. No "copy-restriction" or DRM is 99.9999% perfect.
That's why I don't really see the point of today's DRM efforts. The majority of American broadband users download music and many also download movies and software. There is no way that it can be stopped with DRM.
Some results can be achieved with non-standard media and proprietary software (like in older consoles), but not with music/movies/PC software. The industries can concentrate on fighting P2P systems and users, while also improving their own Internet services. DRM doesn't enter the equation at all.
P.S. An interesting thing that we have a chance to observe is the coming development of e-text piracy systems. Some eBooks are swapped on the P2P networks (and in other channels) already, but the traffic and the selection are still miniscule. It would be interesting to see what will speed up the development and how it will happen, from technological, social and economic point of view.
Sorry, couldn't resist. He doesn't care about content, about objectivity, validity, truth or anything like that. He cares about getting paid for the only thing he knows how to do - for writing crap.
His Reality Check book is unbelievably bad. This article is better, but it is still a load of crap.
Sorry for vulgarity, everyone, I just hate when writers don't have any integrity and make their living writing crap.:[
The best thing is that you don't even need to jail successful betters. You might want to invite them to your office and talk a little bit about their friends and associations, but they would be much more useful "in the wild". As long as there would be a limit on the time interval between your bet and the actual event, the LEAs would have enough time to do something.
This will also provide another venue to federal employees who are unable to get through the bureaucracy. Remember the guy from the FBI who was fired and later died in the WTC. Remember the numerous reports that were ignored. What if those investigators could say then: "Fuck it! You don't wanna listen, all right. At least I can retire rich now." And then several predications on this market would grow in value:
Terrorist act in the NYC is likely
Terrorist act on 9/11 is likely
Highjacking incident is likely
Arabian terrorists with ties in the White House are likely to act soon
How would that be ridiculous and grotesque is beyond me.
And this was moderated at 5: Interesting?! My posts usually remain at 1 and sometimes are even downmodded to -1, when someone doesn't understand how good they are. That's not fair! We need a law to protect honest Slashdot posters that are not upmoded enough!
Yes, I am yet another person with the same problem. BTW, thanks for asking openly about it, now I can save this Slashdot link for future reference.:)
Anyway, I might have one suggestion that wasn't mentioned often enough. Think about how interesting you work/studing is. If not much, can you switch to anything else? I don't know if I have ADD myself, don't think it's a hot concept among the doctors where I live, so I never tried to find out. But when I am trying to study a textbook (not always, depends on the topic and quality of the book), I usually start dozing off in several minutes. I really can't stiffle the yawn.:O
This never happens to me if I am doing something interesting. A few weeks ago I was helping two BBC journalists organise their trip to Nizhny Novgorod. I was able to easily concentrate on that and keep the concentration for two weeks. Then during the trip I slept for <7 hours per day and always woke up before the alarm, which is a big feat for me, as normally I always oversleep (10+ hours) and don't notice any alarms whatsoever.
Pulling an all-nighter is nothing new, yes, it's easy to concentrate on your work when you have a deadline in 12 hours, no excuse to postpone the work, and when it can realistically be done. But I see that if the work is interesting, I can concentrate on it as long as it is needed. This is true for other things/projects/tasks that I had. If it is interesting, my organism takes care about concentration without any need for external stimulants.
Another thing that might be useful is to set a very rigid schedule. Have a break every two hours - eat some fruits (this have an additional benefit of being healthy) and evaluate what you have just been doing. Stop doing that if it wasn't productive. In this case you will never loose more than 2 consecutive hours reading Slashdot, chatting, or surfing the web. Always go to sleep at the same time, in this case you will never loose the night doing unproductive things (I am writing this at 9 o'clock in the morning... I hate my life... May be I don't have ADD, may be I have a depression...).
P.S. If you can, try to find someone who would pester you constantly to get the work done. Preferably a girlfriend who enjoys being thoroughly pesky and annoying. Use it to your advantage.;)
Good point. But he usually also works as the director and the producer, not only as writer. If we can separate these roles, his stories would probably be worth (taking into account that we also play for the name, not just for the script) about 3 millions.
And even together with directing and producing it's only 12 million (for one of the best). Hardly significant today in the age of 100+ mln budgets. So my point that you can get the best possible story relatively cheaply (compared with technology and actual filming expenses) still holds.
Anyway, you all just prove my point. Peter Woodthorpe made a better Gollum. So how much would Serkis be worth without CGI? It just shows that it's technology that matters and it can compensate for inferior story or acting. And Darth admits that without the technology LOTR movie wouldn't be made. So technology IS essential.
2Darth: You say the same thing as I do. You say that one of the main reasons for Ion Storm fiasco was their inability to develop the AI technology and (as AC says) to porn the content to the Q2 engine. Technological failures dictated the fate of the project. And Carmack didn't have "a company full of people", id is very tight. And read the book to see how much attention they pay to storylines (none whatsoever, and the only guy who tried to infuse Doom with a decent story got fired), and even art is definitely developed to exploit the possibilities of the technology, not vice versa. Just one example is Carmack's initial refusal to add slide doors to Wolf3D (and essential feature according to everyone else in id) just because he thought it would make the code less elegant.
Doesn't all that prove (or at least suggest) that if IBM throws enough $$$/manpower at technological problems and solves them, they would have easy time doing the movies/games/whatever with these tools? I think it does.
Please don't try to claim that the Windows in general is stable and Linux in general is not. Your personal experiences are fine and might be interesting to everybody else, but they do not disprove the general rule. It seems pretty certain that overall Windows is less stable. Indeed, Windows2000 is relatively better, but it still crashes and not only because of bad drivers. I managed once to BSOD a machine with newly installed Win2000 just by mousing around in the IE Help Viewer. Yeah, sure it was probably the cheap Chinese mouse responsible for the crash.
So personal anecdotes are fine and dandy, but please don't try to sell them as proofs of Windows' stability. And also, don't tell us tales about 500+ uncrashable Win2000 PCs. Nobody is going to believe that, unless these PCs are locked in some abandoned warehouse, and preferably turned off.
It is you who knows nothing about statistics. Yes, there is not enough information to predict the share of Windows computers that crash at least once during the week. Yes, xant's approach is not entirely rigorous. But this kind of rough analysis shows that he understands and feels statistics better than you do.
Let's see what I can do to support xant's estimates.
Assume for the purpose of simplicity that every Windows-based machine has a certain probability P of crashing once during each hour. Let there be 10 hours the average PC is on every day and 6 days per week. We can easily see that in order for the probability of 2 or more crashes to be 5%, the hourly crash chances should be 3.7%. That means that the probability of at least 1 crash per week is 89%. Of course, the main assumption of the equal crash per hour chance is not valid - poorly configured machines with beta drivers and cheap hardware are more likely to crash and they do crash often, probably contributing to the 5% value, while well-maintained expensive brand-name PCs tend to crash less often. We don't have enough information to give precise estimates of the probabilities and their distribution, but we know enough to say that xant's guess is probably not too much off.
I will try to be original. Everyone here repeats the same argument that story is important, talent is important, technology will get you nowhere. I respectfully disagree.
Look at the story of Two Johns. Romero tried the "Design is King" technology and look where it got him. And look what we got - a terrible mess called Daikatana. His friend Carmack, on the other hand, is probably unable to comprehend that there might be things more important than the rendering pipeline or pixel shaders, but all id games still sell like crazy.
Why do you think the animated movies should be different? Good technology is essential, it empowers the artists, it enables the directors. The story is the cheapest and easiest thing in the whole business. For 1 million you can have the script written by the greatest scriptwriter (whoever he is). And still 1 million is just a small fraction of total costs. Even easier, everyone can use any public domain story like Disney always does. It is even possible to clone other successful films, like the Hollywood industry is often doing.
Yet, to render the underwater world beautifully you need the technology. To do it cheaply you need extensive technological expertise, you need programmers, you need hardware specialists, network engineers, etc. Consider The Two Towers. Where would that movie be without Gollum (we survived because of ME!), glorified CGI fest called Helm's Deep battle, storming of Isengard and other digital goodies? It would be just another crappy flick (no, it won't be good just because it is based on LOTR, look how they butchered the story and, anyway, remember.Bakshi's film). BTW, regarding Bakshi. Notice how everyone critisized the rotoscopy, which didn't work too well. The story there was on par with PJ's lame effort, but the technology wasn't there and Bakshi lost. Point proven - technology is the king.
P.S. And don't say anything about Final Fantasy. It was a first attempt, some argue it was too complex for unsofisticated American public and, anyway, it failed to a large extent because the technology failed (as everyone agrees, animation was stiff and unnatural blah-blah-blah).
May be that means that IBM should concentrate on doing VR porn using their super-fast computers? Then in a few years the technology could be deployed in games that would run on a standard desktop computer...
That is crap. RIAA folks are clearly insane, but I am still not going to believe that they demanded this utter nonsense from Apple and refused to license the music to them, unless they make the playback of songs (bought in the US) abroad impossible.
How was that modded insightful? Moving around something you bought is not distribution.
What Apple is doing here is theft. They are clearly stealing the products that you bought and destroying them. We usually can call such practice vandalism or burglary, but apparently not when a giant soulless corporation does that, especially if it is done in an electronic way.
You must be careful when using analogies. The end result of the movie creation process is a film that is shown from start to end on more or less standartized equipment. The game, on the other hand, is extremely interactive and plays on extremely varied hardware. So the nature of "bugs" is completely different in two cases.
What is the same is the attitude of the producers towards the customers - they don't give a shit about quality, they treat consumers like idiots and all they care about is money (yeah, that's an overgeneralization, sure).
You can look at the newspapers in the same way. While it is impossible to make a newspaper crash (the crashes are a unique characteristic of electronic devices), the "bugs" are numerous. The editors will happily place a photo of Stockholm in an article about Finland, they don't care to check the numbers, they don't care about facts and they don't care about making any sense.
If you insist on making a very direct analogy, then you can say that there are bugs only in games. But if you understand that mediums are different and the exact nature of the problems we encounter is also different, then you will immediately see the simularities as well. Then you will realise that there are bugs in games, movies, newspapers, even in cars.
I see absolutely no moral or legal reason why this should actually be so (it might currently be so in the US, I don't know, but it is just plain wrong). I don't see a reason why people should be constantly monitoring what is happening with their posessions and who might have access to them. The only exceptions should be really dangerous things, like guns, radioactive substances, poisonous chemicals, etc.
The claim to be the copyright holder is not false. I am definitely a copyright holder (for example, to this post) and all I claim is that you infringe on my copyright.
The funny thing is that you are wrong about moviegoers. I am not really a movie buff, I don't watch that many movies and usually do it only once. However, there are examples of bugs almost as serious as missing scenes.
Enter The Two Towers. One of the most expensive movies ever, right? One of the most quality films? Wrong. Even if you forget about unbelievably crappy script, it has bugs.:) After the Helm Deep battle and the Isengard battle were won, we are treated to the scene of Eowyn jumping on Aragorn and hugging him (supposedly signifying happiness about winning the battle). Well... not only is that scene taken from the episode BEFORE the battle, it is actually taken from an EARLIER edit of the movie, which didn't have Aragorn falling from the cliff (because the pendant can be easily seen). This goes of course with using footage of Eowyn looking in a completely different direction in the Aragorn-Legolas scene (arrival to HD). Eowyn's scene is again from the earlier edit, when she is looking in a direction different from what the director wants the user to believe.
This isn't your usual goof, such as continuity error or a plot hole. No, this really shows that the director is content (so much for realism) with taking a completely wrong scene and using it somewhere in hopes that nobody will notice that.
Or take Matrix: Reloaded and their overhyped highway chase. Why, oh why the windshield remains intact after one of the twins shoots at it with a machinegun? We can clearly see the bulletholes on the hood and on the roof forming a line, we can actually see the car when it is fired at, but the windshild remains intact. Was additional CGI too expensive? Or is it just sloppy work?
So nobody really cares about quality. Or, to phrase it differently, nobody gives a fucking shit about it.
There is a restaurant near the Kremlin in Moscow (Russia) called Phlegmatic dog with "web-based" ordering.
We used a traditional (online shop-like) system to make our order, then the human came to confirm the order and it was prepared and delivered. When we felt like ordering a dessert, we didn't have to wait for the waiter to come to us, we just used the computer system and soon the dessert came.
It's definitely not worse than traditional waiter-based ordering and may be even slightly better. I am sure that as the interfaces develop (not the technologies, just the usability), the computer/robotic/digital/online experience will further improve.
The common mistake that many people make is change just one variable in the equation. In this case, Marshall Brain simply replaces minimal-wage workers with robots, while leaving everything else as it was. If we apply the same logic from the standpoint of early 20th century, we would foresee robotic secretares that would call the switchboard for you and arrange the phone call with your aunt. We would completely fail to predict the arrival of mobile phones.
Same here. I give you my own prediction. There will never ever be humanoid robots that would clean your bathroom for you. Same for almost every other function that Brain lists. When you build a lawn-mower, most of the weight is occupied by the frame, the engine and the blades. It is extremely easy to add a microprocessor there and it doesn't significanly increase the cost. To add a humanoid robot, on the other hand (even if it is just for the time of mowing the lawn) is a terrible waste of resources, therefore it will not be done.
Yes, there is certainly a place for humanoid robots in the future, but they are extremely unlikely to dominate. A significant fraction of the work will be done by non-humanoid specialised robots, another large fraction will be done by versatile non-humanoid robots, a huge fraction will be done by micro- and nanorobots (cleaning the bathroom is exactly the kind of work they would be best at), another fraction will be done by semi-intelligent tools in human hands (such as mobile phone) and finally a very limited part of all work will be done by humanoid robots.
Regarding the timeframe, the most important thing to realise is that developments in biotech, nanotech, AI, neuroscience, computing, advanced materials, robotics, energy, etc., etc. will proceed in parallel and they will undoubtly contribute a lot to each other. That is why to make reasonable forecasts we must analise the whole picture paying attention to cross-discipline relations and all kinds of synergetic effects.
A few ideas on how it should be done (as opposed to separate articles inspired by a visit to McDonalds) are in my essay titled Planning for the Future.
You need something more powerful than a cellphone to bring down a plane.:) Just a few days ago I flew an AN-24 plane from Nizhny Novgorod to Moscow. Apparently, using cell phones was allowed there.
I guess that's the same principle as with Soviet fighters that used vacuum tubes and were therefore completely immune to EMP-weapons.;)
Slashdot Mirror
A very good point. It seems that the DRM is a solution to a problem completely different from what the music/movie/software industries are facing today. The digital distribution (both unauthorised and authorised) in the 80s was in its infancy. It was too difficult to distribute the software (music and movies used traditional venues) and as a result one leaked copy could only reach a limited audience. Therefore it was ok to "copy-protect" every copy imperfectly.
Today one copy can be distributed to every Internet user. We can see how one leaked copy (cam) of Finding Nemo is distributed all over the net. But the problem is that if this copy wasn't made, someoone would do it in another theater. With thousands of theaters and millions of customers, you simply can't "protect" your data. No "copy-restriction" or DRM is 99.9999% perfect.
That's why I don't really see the point of today's DRM efforts. The majority of American broadband users download music and many also download movies and software. There is no way that it can be stopped with DRM.
Some results can be achieved with non-standard media and proprietary software (like in older consoles), but not with music/movies/PC software. The industries can concentrate on fighting P2P systems and users, while also improving their own Internet services. DRM doesn't enter the equation at all.
P.S. An interesting thing that we have a chance to observe is the coming development of e-text piracy systems. Some eBooks are swapped on the P2P networks (and in other channels) already, but the traffic and the selection are still miniscule. It would be interesting to see what will speed up the development and how it will happen, from technological, social and economic point of view.
Sorry, couldn't resist. He doesn't care about content, about objectivity, validity, truth or anything like that. He cares about getting paid for the only thing he knows how to do - for writing crap.
:[
His Reality Check book is unbelievably bad. This article is better, but it is still a load of crap.
Sorry for vulgarity, everyone, I just hate when writers don't have any integrity and make their living writing crap.
This will also provide another venue to federal employees who are unable to get through the bureaucracy. Remember the guy from the FBI who was fired and later died in the WTC. Remember the numerous reports that were ignored. What if those investigators could say then: "Fuck it! You don't wanna listen, all right. At least I can retire rich now." And then several predications on this market would grow in value:
How would that be ridiculous and grotesque is beyond me.
And this was moderated at 5: Interesting?! My posts usually remain at 1 and sometimes are even downmodded to -1, when someone doesn't understand how good they are. That's not fair! We need a law to protect honest Slashdot posters that are not upmoded enough!
Yes, I am yet another person with the same problem. BTW, thanks for asking openly about it, now I can save this Slashdot link for future reference. :)
:O
;)
Anyway, I might have one suggestion that wasn't mentioned often enough. Think about how interesting you work/studing is. If not much, can you switch to anything else? I don't know if I have ADD myself, don't think it's a hot concept among the doctors where I live, so I never tried to find out. But when I am trying to study a textbook (not always, depends on the topic and quality of the book), I usually start dozing off in several minutes. I really can't stiffle the yawn.
This never happens to me if I am doing something interesting. A few weeks ago I was helping two BBC journalists organise their trip to Nizhny Novgorod. I was able to easily concentrate on that and keep the concentration for two weeks. Then during the trip I slept for <7 hours per day and always woke up before the alarm, which is a big feat for me, as normally I always oversleep (10+ hours) and don't notice any alarms whatsoever.
Pulling an all-nighter is nothing new, yes, it's easy to concentrate on your work when you have a deadline in 12 hours, no excuse to postpone the work, and when it can realistically be done. But I see that if the work is interesting, I can concentrate on it as long as it is needed. This is true for other things/projects/tasks that I had. If it is interesting, my organism takes care about concentration without any need for external stimulants.
Another thing that might be useful is to set a very rigid schedule. Have a break every two hours - eat some fruits (this have an additional benefit of being healthy) and evaluate what you have just been doing. Stop doing that if it wasn't productive. In this case you will never loose more than 2 consecutive hours reading Slashdot, chatting, or surfing the web. Always go to sleep at the same time, in this case you will never loose the night doing unproductive things (I am writing this at 9 o'clock in the morning... I hate my life... May be I don't have ADD, may be I have a depression...).
P.S. If you can, try to find someone who would pester you constantly to get the work done. Preferably a girlfriend who enjoys being thoroughly pesky and annoying. Use it to your advantage.
Good point. But he usually also works as the director and the producer, not only as writer. If we can separate these roles, his stories would probably be worth (taking into account that we also play for the name, not just for the script) about 3 millions.
And even together with directing and producing it's only 12 million (for one of the best). Hardly significant today in the age of 100+ mln budgets. So my point that you can get the best possible story relatively cheaply (compared with technology and actual filming expenses) still holds.
Ian? McCalli? Coincidence?...
Anyway, you all just prove my point. Peter Woodthorpe made a better Gollum. So how much would Serkis be worth without CGI? It just shows that it's technology that matters and it can compensate for inferior story or acting. And Darth admits that without the technology LOTR movie wouldn't be made. So technology IS essential.
2Darth: You say the same thing as I do. You say that one of the main reasons for Ion Storm fiasco was their inability to develop the AI technology and (as AC says) to porn the content to the Q2 engine. Technological failures dictated the fate of the project. And Carmack didn't have "a company full of people", id is very tight. And read the book to see how much attention they pay to storylines (none whatsoever, and the only guy who tried to infuse Doom with a decent story got fired), and even art is definitely developed to exploit the possibilities of the technology, not vice versa. Just one example is Carmack's initial refusal to add slide doors to Wolf3D (and essential feature according to everyone else in id) just because he thought it would make the code less elegant.
Doesn't all that prove (or at least suggest) that if IBM throws enough $$$/manpower at technological problems and solves them, they would have easy time doing the movies/games/whatever with these tools? I think it does.
Please don't try to claim that the Windows in general is stable and Linux in general is not. Your personal experiences are fine and might be interesting to everybody else, but they do not disprove the general rule. It seems pretty certain that overall Windows is less stable. Indeed, Windows2000 is relatively better, but it still crashes and not only because of bad drivers. I managed once to BSOD a machine with newly installed Win2000 just by mousing around in the IE Help Viewer. Yeah, sure it was probably the cheap Chinese mouse responsible for the crash.
So personal anecdotes are fine and dandy, but please don't try to sell them as proofs of Windows' stability. And also, don't tell us tales about 500+ uncrashable Win2000 PCs. Nobody is going to believe that, unless these PCs are locked in some abandoned warehouse, and preferably turned off.
It is you who knows nothing about statistics. Yes, there is not enough information to predict the share of Windows computers that crash at least once during the week. Yes, xant's approach is not entirely rigorous. But this kind of rough analysis shows that he understands and feels statistics better than you do.
Let's see what I can do to support xant's estimates.
Assume for the purpose of simplicity that every Windows-based machine has a certain probability P of crashing once during each hour. Let there be 10 hours the average PC is on every day and 6 days per week. We can easily see that in order for the probability of 2 or more crashes to be 5%, the hourly crash chances should be 3.7%. That means that the probability of at least 1 crash per week is 89%. Of course, the main assumption of the equal crash per hour chance is not valid - poorly configured machines with beta drivers and cheap hardware are more likely to crash and they do crash often, probably contributing to the 5% value, while well-maintained expensive brand-name PCs tend to crash less often. We don't have enough information to give precise estimates of the probabilities and their distribution, but we know enough to say that xant's guess is probably not too much off.
Do you work in Microsoft Linux testing department? Or is it the PR department? It surely seems so.
I will try to be original. Everyone here repeats the same argument that story is important, talent is important, technology will get you nowhere. I respectfully disagree.
.Bakshi's film). BTW, regarding Bakshi. Notice how everyone critisized the rotoscopy, which didn't work too well. The story there was on par with PJ's lame effort, but the technology wasn't there and Bakshi lost. Point proven - technology is the king.
Look at the story of Two Johns. Romero tried the "Design is King" technology and look where it got him. And look what we got - a terrible mess called Daikatana. His friend Carmack, on the other hand, is probably unable to comprehend that there might be things more important than the rendering pipeline or pixel shaders, but all id games still sell like crazy.
Why do you think the animated movies should be different? Good technology is essential, it empowers the artists, it enables the directors. The story is the cheapest and easiest thing in the whole business. For 1 million you can have the script written by the greatest scriptwriter (whoever he is). And still 1 million is just a small fraction of total costs. Even easier, everyone can use any public domain story like Disney always does. It is even possible to clone other successful films, like the Hollywood industry is often doing.
Yet, to render the underwater world beautifully you need the technology. To do it cheaply you need extensive technological expertise, you need programmers, you need hardware specialists, network engineers, etc. Consider The Two Towers. Where would that movie be without Gollum (we survived because of ME!), glorified CGI fest called Helm's Deep battle, storming of Isengard and other digital goodies? It would be just another crappy flick (no, it won't be good just because it is based on LOTR, look how they butchered the story and, anyway, remember
P.S. And don't say anything about Final Fantasy. It was a first attempt, some argue it was too complex for unsofisticated American public and, anyway, it failed to a large extent because the technology failed (as everyone agrees, animation was stiff and unnatural blah-blah-blah).
May be that means that IBM should concentrate on doing VR porn using their super-fast computers? Then in a few years the technology could be deployed in games that would run on a standard desktop computer...
Well, I was pumping out about 30Gb to ed2k on my 20$/month cable connection.
That is crap. RIAA folks are clearly insane, but I am still not going to believe that they demanded this utter nonsense from Apple and refused to license the music to them, unless they make the playback of songs (bought in the US) abroad impossible.
How was that modded insightful? Moving around something you bought is not distribution.
What Apple is doing here is theft. They are clearly stealing the products that you bought and destroying them. We usually can call such practice vandalism or burglary, but apparently not when a giant soulless corporation does that, especially if it is done in an electronic way.
Fuck Apple! Fuck RIAA! Fuck music!
You must be careful when using analogies. The end result of the movie creation process is a film that is shown from start to end on more or less standartized equipment. The game, on the other hand, is extremely interactive and plays on extremely varied hardware. So the nature of "bugs" is completely different in two cases.
What is the same is the attitude of the producers towards the customers - they don't give a shit about quality, they treat consumers like idiots and all they care about is money (yeah, that's an overgeneralization, sure).
You can look at the newspapers in the same way. While it is impossible to make a newspaper crash (the crashes are a unique characteristic of electronic devices), the "bugs" are numerous. The editors will happily place a photo of Stockholm in an article about Finland, they don't care to check the numbers, they don't care about facts and they don't care about making any sense.
If you insist on making a very direct analogy, then you can say that there are bugs only in games. But if you understand that mediums are different and the exact nature of the problems we encounter is also different, then you will immediately see the simularities as well. Then you will realise that there are bugs in games, movies, newspapers, even in cars.
I see absolutely no moral or legal reason why this should actually be so (it might currently be so in the US, I don't know, but it is just plain wrong). I don't see a reason why people should be constantly monitoring what is happening with their posessions and who might have access to them. The only exceptions should be really dangerous things, like guns, radioactive substances, poisonous chemicals, etc.
The claim to be the copyright holder is not false. I am definitely a copyright holder (for example, to this post) and all I claim is that you infringe on my copyright.
The funny thing is that you are wrong about moviegoers. I am not really a movie buff, I don't watch that many movies and usually do it only once. However, there are examples of bugs almost as serious as missing scenes.
:) After the Helm Deep battle and the Isengard battle were won, we are treated to the scene of Eowyn jumping on Aragorn and hugging him (supposedly signifying happiness about winning the battle). Well... not only is that scene taken from the episode BEFORE the battle, it is actually taken from an EARLIER edit of the movie, which didn't have Aragorn falling from the cliff (because the pendant can be easily seen). This goes of course with using footage of Eowyn looking in a completely different direction in the Aragorn-Legolas scene (arrival to HD). Eowyn's scene is again from the earlier edit, when she is looking in a direction different from what the director wants the user to believe.
Enter The Two Towers. One of the most expensive movies ever, right? One of the most quality films? Wrong. Even if you forget about unbelievably crappy script, it has bugs.
This isn't your usual goof, such as continuity error or a plot hole. No, this really shows that the director is content (so much for realism) with taking a completely wrong scene and using it somewhere in hopes that nobody will notice that.
Or take Matrix: Reloaded and their overhyped highway chase. Why, oh why the windshield remains intact after one of the twins shoots at it with a machinegun? We can clearly see the bulletholes on the hood and on the roof forming a line, we can actually see the car when it is fired at, but the windshild remains intact. Was additional CGI too expensive? Or is it just sloppy work?
So nobody really cares about quality. Or, to phrase it differently, nobody gives a fucking shit about it.
There is a restaurant near the Kremlin in Moscow (Russia) called Phlegmatic dog with "web-based" ordering.
We used a traditional (online shop-like) system to make our order, then the human came to confirm the order and it was prepared and delivered. When we felt like ordering a dessert, we didn't have to wait for the waiter to come to us, we just used the computer system and soon the dessert came.
It's definitely not worse than traditional waiter-based ordering and may be even slightly better. I am sure that as the interfaces develop (not the technologies, just the usability), the computer/robotic/digital/online experience will further improve.
The common mistake that many people make is change just one variable in the equation. In this case, Marshall Brain simply replaces minimal-wage workers with robots, while leaving everything else as it was. If we apply the same logic from the standpoint of early 20th century, we would foresee robotic secretares that would call the switchboard for you and arrange the phone call with your aunt. We would completely fail to predict the arrival of mobile phones.
Same here. I give you my own prediction. There will never ever be humanoid robots that would clean your bathroom for you. Same for almost every other function that Brain lists. When you build a lawn-mower, most of the weight is occupied by the frame, the engine and the blades. It is extremely easy to add a microprocessor there and it doesn't significanly increase the cost. To add a humanoid robot, on the other hand (even if it is just for the time of mowing the lawn) is a terrible waste of resources, therefore it will not be done.
Yes, there is certainly a place for humanoid robots in the future, but they are extremely unlikely to dominate. A significant fraction of the work will be done by non-humanoid specialised robots, another large fraction will be done by versatile non-humanoid robots, a huge fraction will be done by micro- and nanorobots (cleaning the bathroom is exactly the kind of work they would be best at), another fraction will be done by semi-intelligent tools in human hands (such as mobile phone) and finally a very limited part of all work will be done by humanoid robots.
Regarding the timeframe, the most important thing to realise is that developments in biotech, nanotech, AI, neuroscience, computing, advanced materials, robotics, energy, etc., etc. will proceed in parallel and they will undoubtly contribute a lot to each other. That is why to make reasonable forecasts we must analise the whole picture paying attention to cross-discipline relations and all kinds of synergetic effects.
A few ideas on how it should be done (as opposed to separate articles inspired by a visit to McDonalds) are in my essay titled Planning for the Future.
In this context it would make more sense to share a movie, not to download it.
Obviously it violates the almost constitutional right to privacy.
You need something more powerful than a cellphone to bring down a plane. :) Just a few days ago I flew an AN-24 plane from Nizhny Novgorod to Moscow. Apparently, using cell phones was allowed there.
;)
I guess that's the same principle as with Soviet fighters that used vacuum tubes and were therefore completely immune to EMP-weapons.
And then you would have to remember the length of the password, which would (not suprisingly) mean memorising the same amount of information.