How about a deal? They have the right to indefinitely expand limited copyrights and we have the right to indefinitely timeshift the content, until we delete?
It's not a form of rental - it's a different service. With rental you are paying for someone opening an rental shop, stocking it on the latest titles, paying the clerks, paying rent, utilities, etc. You pay for the damages copies that need to be replaced, for business risks of buying too many copies of a movie that turns out to be unpopular and for missing profit from a popular one because too few copies were ordered.
With PPV and PVR combination, there are none of these costs/risks. You order the movie, they deliver it electronically, you record it. Since their costs are so much lower (I presume), they have no right to demand the same price and impose same limitations.
Same with theatres/DVDs. When I go to the movie theatre, there is a limited number of places and each costed money to install, so I must pay for my girlfriend too, even though I already bought a ticket for myself. At home I don't need to pay for her, because the house is mine, the chair/sofa is mine, etc. And I can invite as many people as I want without paying extra too.
I think it's simple. Different services - different prices, and the easier/cheaper it is to deliver a certain service, the lower the price should be and the smaller the limitations.
May be because people should have the freedom to watch the film when the want to, not when the company manages to release it? And because some don't live in the US or Japan and the film will not be released in their country (if at all) for many months? If the film is good and people honest, they will go later to see it in the theatre or buy a DVD. And some people may not be willing to pay for it at all, but by making it available on P2P you can make their lives a little bit happier and possibly improve them as human beings (assuming GITS2 has some good messages/questions to ponder in it).
Are these reasons valid enough for you?
P.S. Am have not even started on your false accusations of copyright violation. Lord Dweomer didn't distribute the film, he just stated the fact that it is available on P2P networks - this is what BBC, CNN and everyone else like to do. And furthermore, in many countries downloading films does not violate copyright law. Is it finally enough?
Its some kind of myth here in the US that everyone has to go to college so they can do unskilled labor the rest of their lives.
This is not specific to the US. In Russia most people overestimate the percentage of people with higher education as well. (Don't have the reference handy, but you probably can't read in Russian anyway - but it's on fom.ru). Also, about 60% of Russians said they want their kids to become scientists - even while the average salary in science is around povery line and everyone knows it.
There are a lot of stereotypes regarding science, scientists and education, but we must be thankful, because they are mostly positive.:) For example, did you know that 52% of Europeans agree that "science and technology will solve any problem that we will face in the future" (Eurobarometer 2003 study). Similar results are observed in Japan and the US.
People are optimists and it shows. In fact, it is known in sociology that in many surveys (especially those about the future) people first make up their mind on whether they are optimistic or pessimistic and then answer based on this, regardless of the particular question.:)
Right now top of the line cards play the game at 70+ fps in hi-res, which is excessive. It probably took several years for this to happen with Quake 3, for example.
Back in 2003 a moderately system with 1.5GHz processor and GeForce4 would probably play the game at ~20 fps in 1024x768. A top system would make it 30 fps. A lower-end system would need quality toned down a bit to get the 20 fps at 640x480.
But that was expected. Even a few months ago people here at/. and everywhere constantly repeated what turned out to be a myth - that Doom 3 needs a top of the line system to play the game with decent speed and quality. Well, this ended up not to be the case, but if the game was released in early 2003 and required a fast machine, everyone would accept with without too many complaints.
It's not his fault that Doom 3 sucks
on
John Carmack Retiring?
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Some may feel the inclination to blame (and flame) John for the disappointments of Doom 3, but it's really not his fault. The engine was almost ready in 2001 and it was amazing back then. The game should have been released in late 2002 or early 2003, but (as John himself told), the artists had extremely crappy tools and couldn't efficiently) work on art for a year and the team had some internal problems, slowing the work down further. Likewise, Brussard is not at fault that DNF is not yet released.:)))
John's engines are great, and the only reason why Doom 3 is disappointing and not much better than CryEngine/Source/X-Ray is that they had time to catch up. How it will work out in the future, I don't know... Everyone salivates about Unreal 3 technology and there are good reasons for it, but I think John may be able to bring another revolution and let's hope the id team will make it in time.
I wonder how other countries managed to survive without sliced bread, without really wanting sliced bread and with having big (huge) bakeries that make normal, non-cliced bread.
And you can choose how you want to slice it - you can make smaller straight pieces or longer slanted pieces. But this is somewhat different for different types of bread. For example, very light white bread for toasts is difficult to cut, because it compresses so well.:) Though in the year 2004 there is no excuse not to have a decent sharp knife.
If you just want to make a sandwich from other types of bread, there is almost no advantage to having it sliced.
Also, I have never seen sliced bread that was really fresh - like it was just several hours from the bakery at most, usually the quality is quite ordinary.
Everyone in the discussion keeps mentioning how the media uses propaganda, politicians uses propaganda, everyone keeps simplifying real issues and concentrating on insignificant trivialities such as how many times Kerry flip-flopped and whether Bush deserted from military service and served a sentence for cocain.
Meanwhile, across the Mexican Gulf the all-time favourite boogeyman, Fidel Castro, continues to give well-researched several hour long speeches, filled with numbers, facts and doesn't feel the need to dumb down everything to the level of stupid general public. May be when you believe that your real support is the proletariat and not your corporate buddies, you tend not to ignore the people, but respect them.
One may endlessly argue about how many dissidents Castro threw in jail (for CIA-sponsored sabotage) and how many people live in poverty because of some inefficiencies in state-owned enterprises (and inhumane draconian sunctions against Cuba by the US), but if you concentrate on communicating with people, I think Mr. Castro wins hands-down over both Bush and Kerry, and pretty much any American politicians.
How about e-mail (featured prominently on almost every page on his site)? I don't think it would be that difficult to contact a prominent maker of political documentaries - after all wouldn't he want to make it easy for everyone to send him interesting leads for his next film?
There are many other alternatives. Some of those we tried, but even more are yet untested/undiscovered. Some of those are: 4) Meritocracy - people who proved their worth run the country 5) Technocracy - specialists (scientists, engineers, managers) run the country 6) Soviet style (often mistakingly called communist) - "nomenclature" runs the country based on marxist principles. Access to nomenclature is granted based on meritocracy principles (sometimes replaced by intrigues) 6*) A more general scheme can be defined as follows: a large group of people runs the country based on certain predefined principles. The access to the group is not determined by the money, but proving your agreement with the basic principles (Soviet style and oligarchy are both special cases of 6*) 7) Cuban style - certain forms of dissent are not tolerated, but people have control over the government within certain limits (i.e. they can choose between Castro and a few other communists, but they can't elect a pro-USA, pro-capitalism politician)
There are many more possibilities, some of which may be infinitely more effective than democracy. The problem is that democracy (like many other structure) has no ability to evolve, only to deteriorate to dictatorship/despotism or oligarchy. The history shows that social order never changes simply because people suddenly realise there is a better way to run the country. The only way to change the system is through more or less violent confrontation (AKA revolution).
Even if there were thousands of extremely simple systems that obviously were effective and correct, do you believe an American president (or Congress, or anyone else) could just say "OK, I think we've been a democratic republic long enough. There are better ways to manage the country, so I will dismiss Congress, appoint the "Transitional Organising Commettee" and then resign."? That's impossible - any system tries to maintain the status quo first. Churchill's words are just another indication of that.
Are you a democracy if slaves can't vote and women can't vote? Then Greece (or at least Athens) wasn't a democracy 2 millenia ago. It's also very questionable whether black people (not just dark-skinned, but negroes) voted in Greece in practice...:)
Democracy isn't perfect, but it sure as hell is better than any other alternative out there. You don't know what you are talking about. While it is possible to argue whether the market economy is overall better for Russians than the planned economy was for Soviets (though it isn't), it's absolutely clear that "democracy" is a much worse process than Party rule was. There are much less opportunities to express your concerns, to disagree, to influence the politics, etc., than there were 15 years ago.
A valid statement would be "Democracy works in some places, it doesn't work in others, it can randomly stop working where it use to work and it may not start working where it didn't exist. There are other systems that are better in some respects and worse in others."
Interestingly, in Russia you don't need to specially register as a voter - every citizen is registered automatically once he passes 18 years age. Of course, you don't need to come to the elections, but if you chose to, the ballot will be waiting for you (and there are other ways to vote if you can't visit, of course).
In another surprising twist of democracy, Russian voters increasingly turn to the "AgainstAll" candidate to express their disgust and contempt for the corrupted system and the choise between a corrupt politician or an outright criminal (just an example from one of the governor elections). In some elections, the AgainstAll candidate managed to get as much as 25% of all votes. Another democratic tool frequently used is ignoring the election alltogether, trying to keep the number of voters below a certain percentage to invalidate the election. This was extremely successful in some parlamentary elections in St. Petersburg, in particular, where the percentage of voters routinly was below the required 25%.
After all, you need to be creative. If there are no chances to elect a decent guy, you can sabotage the elections by not coming or saying you hate them all outright.
A conspiracy theorist would agree with you, reminding about documents from various American crime-tanks actually talking about hitting skyscrapers with the planes.
Don't compare it with the Soviet Union. In Soviet Union you had (to some extent) the Party gradually losing the grip, the KGB decreasing the scale and intensity of repressions, the growing dissident (civil liberties) movements, people who wanted freedom and were willing to act to get it, etc. It's just the opposite in the US.
Also the terminology is absolutely wrong - Soviet Union was never a fascist state by any reasonable classification (though during Stalinism it shared a number of characteristics with Germany and Italy).
This is a useful quote, but don't take that "require" too literally. Yes, you are perfectly justified not to believe that the conjecture is solved, until you read about it in Science - this is reasonable. What is not reasonable is to think that de Branges is somehow required by someone or something to provide extra proof or something else. He doesn't have to if he doesn't want to.
Just like Perelman, de Branges can just sit and wait. Hopefully, someone will eventually read the proof thouroughly and see whether there are any significant errors. And then everyone will benefit from knowning whether the proof exists and if yes, what it is and that the conjecture is true.
You may find interesting a brilliant dark comedy by a distinguished Russian dramatist Evgeny Schwartz called "Dragon": http://web.archive.org/web/200306290924 33/http://w ww.lib.ru/SHWARC/dragon_engl.txt
Were you aware that you can cook some animals (frogs IIRC) by slowly raising the temperature of the water until it is boiling and they won't panic? The same is true for people who gradually lose their sight. Or become overweight. Or die from aging. They don't notice what is happening because the rate of changes is so slow and because humans are so good at adapting.
You know, people in Russia (where I live right now) never realised that the changes from Soviet Union to "liberal democracy with free market economy" were not beneficial (to say the least). In 1930s people in Germany weren't too good at realising what's happening either.
Chances are most people will not openly admit that yes, things have gone bad (even though deep inside they may know), unless YOU (and yes, this means YOU) will openly speak about it now and stop the changes.
No, Branges needs to prove that the counterexample does not apply to his theory. It's not a court, Branges doesn't need to do anything - someone needs to prove it one way or another for the science to progress.
Slashdot Mirror
How about a deal? They have the right to indefinitely expand limited copyrights and we have the right to indefinitely timeshift the content, until we delete?
It's not a form of rental - it's a different service. With rental you are paying for someone opening an rental shop, stocking it on the latest titles, paying the clerks, paying rent, utilities, etc. You pay for the damages copies that need to be replaced, for business risks of buying too many copies of a movie that turns out to be unpopular and for missing profit from a popular one because too few copies were ordered.
With PPV and PVR combination, there are none of these costs/risks. You order the movie, they deliver it electronically, you record it. Since their costs are so much lower (I presume), they have no right to demand the same price and impose same limitations.
Same with theatres/DVDs. When I go to the movie theatre, there is a limited number of places and each costed money to install, so I must pay for my girlfriend too, even though I already bought a ticket for myself. At home I don't need to pay for her, because the house is mine, the chair/sofa is mine, etc. And I can invite as many people as I want without paying extra too.
I think it's simple. Different services - different prices, and the easier/cheaper it is to deliver a certain service, the lower the price should be and the smaller the limitations.
May be because people should have the freedom to watch the film when the want to, not when the company manages to release it? And because some don't live in the US or Japan and the film will not be released in their country (if at all) for many months? If the film is good and people honest, they will go later to see it in the theatre or buy a DVD. And some people may not be willing to pay for it at all, but by making it available on P2P you can make their lives a little bit happier and possibly improve them as human beings (assuming GITS2 has some good messages/questions to ponder in it).
Are these reasons valid enough for you?
P.S. Am have not even started on your false accusations of copyright violation. Lord Dweomer didn't distribute the film, he just stated the fact that it is available on P2P networks - this is what BBC, CNN and everyone else like to do. And furthermore, in many countries downloading films does not violate copyright law. Is it finally enough?
Its some kind of myth here in the US that everyone has to go to college so they can do unskilled labor the rest of their lives.
:) For example, did you know that 52% of Europeans agree that "science and technology will solve any problem that we will face in the future" (Eurobarometer 2003 study). Similar results are observed in Japan and the US.
:)
This is not specific to the US. In Russia most people overestimate the percentage of people with higher education as well. (Don't have the reference handy, but you probably can't read in Russian anyway - but it's on fom.ru). Also, about 60% of Russians said they want their kids to become scientists - even while the average salary in science is around povery line and everyone knows it.
There are a lot of stereotypes regarding science, scientists and education, but we must be thankful, because they are mostly positive.
People are optimists and it shows. In fact, it is known in sociology that in many surveys (especially those about the future) people first make up their mind on whether they are optimistic or pessimistic and then answer based on this, regardless of the particular question.
Right now top of the line cards play the game at 70+ fps in hi-res, which is excessive. It probably took several years for this to happen with Quake 3, for example.
/. and everywhere constantly repeated what turned out to be a myth - that Doom 3 needs a top of the line system to play the game with decent speed and quality. Well, this ended up not to be the case, but if the game was released in early 2003 and required a fast machine, everyone would accept with without too many complaints.
Back in 2003 a moderately system with 1.5GHz processor and GeForce4 would probably play the game at ~20 fps in 1024x768. A top system would make it 30 fps. A lower-end system would need quality toned down a bit to get the 20 fps at 640x480.
But that was expected. Even a few months ago people here at
You thought wrong. Here is an image of Penguin feather and here is more information about Penguins from Wikipedia.
Some may feel the inclination to blame (and flame) John for the disappointments of Doom 3, but it's really not his fault. The engine was almost ready in 2001 and it was amazing back then. The game should have been released in late 2002 or early 2003, but (as John himself told), the artists had extremely crappy tools and couldn't efficiently) work on art for a year and the team had some internal problems, slowing the work down further. Likewise, Brussard is not at fault that DNF is not yet released. :)))
John's engines are great, and the only reason why Doom 3 is disappointing and not much better than CryEngine/Source/X-Ray is that they had time to catch up. How it will work out in the future, I don't know... Everyone salivates about Unreal 3 technology and there are good reasons for it, but I think John may be able to bring another revolution and let's hope the id team will make it in time.
I wonder how other countries managed to survive without sliced bread, without really wanting sliced bread and with having big (huge) bakeries that make normal, non-cliced bread.
And you can choose how you want to slice it - you can make smaller straight pieces or longer slanted pieces. But this is somewhat different for different types of bread. For example, very light white bread for toasts is difficult to cut, because it compresses so well. :) Though in the year 2004 there is no excuse not to have a decent sharp knife.
If you just want to make a sandwich from other types of bread, there is almost no advantage to having it sliced.
Also, I have never seen sliced bread that was really fresh - like it was just several hours from the bakery at most, usually the quality is quite ordinary.
I don't think I saw any serious post yet. :)
Why exactly does it seem reasonable?
Everyone in the discussion keeps mentioning how the media uses propaganda, politicians uses propaganda, everyone keeps simplifying real issues and concentrating on insignificant trivialities such as how many times Kerry flip-flopped and whether Bush deserted from military service and served a sentence for cocain.
Meanwhile, across the Mexican Gulf the all-time favourite boogeyman, Fidel Castro, continues to give well-researched several hour long speeches, filled with numbers, facts and doesn't feel the need to dumb down everything to the level of stupid general public. May be when you believe that your real support is the proletariat and not your corporate buddies, you tend not to ignore the people, but respect them.
One may endlessly argue about how many dissidents Castro threw in jail (for CIA-sponsored sabotage) and how many people live in poverty because of some inefficiencies in state-owned enterprises (and inhumane draconian sunctions against Cuba by the US), but if you concentrate on communicating with people, I think Mr. Castro wins hands-down over both Bush and Kerry, and pretty much any American politicians.
How about e-mail (featured prominently on almost every page on his site)? I don't think it would be that difficult to contact a prominent maker of political documentaries - after all wouldn't he want to make it easy for everyone to send him interesting leads for his next film?
There are many other alternatives. Some of those we tried, but even more are yet untested/undiscovered. Some of those are:
4) Meritocracy - people who proved their worth run the country
5) Technocracy - specialists (scientists, engineers, managers) run the country
6) Soviet style (often mistakingly called communist) - "nomenclature" runs the country based on marxist principles. Access to nomenclature is granted based on meritocracy principles (sometimes replaced by intrigues)
6*) A more general scheme can be defined as follows: a large group of people runs the country based on certain predefined principles. The access to the group is not determined by the money, but proving your agreement with the basic principles (Soviet style and oligarchy are both special cases of 6*)
7) Cuban style - certain forms of dissent are not tolerated, but people have control over the government within certain limits (i.e. they can choose between Castro and a few other communists, but they can't elect a pro-USA, pro-capitalism politician)
There are many more possibilities, some of which may be infinitely more effective than democracy. The problem is that democracy (like many other structure) has no ability to evolve, only to deteriorate to dictatorship/despotism or oligarchy. The history shows that social order never changes simply because people suddenly realise there is a better way to run the country. The only way to change the system is through more or less violent confrontation (AKA revolution).
Even if there were thousands of extremely simple systems that obviously were effective and correct, do you believe an American president (or Congress, or anyone else) could just say "OK, I think we've been a democratic republic long enough. There are better ways to manage the country, so I will dismiss Congress, appoint the "Transitional Organising Commettee" and then resign."? That's impossible - any system tries to maintain the status quo first. Churchill's words are just another indication of that.
Are you a democracy if slaves can't vote and women can't vote? Then Greece (or at least Athens) wasn't a democracy 2 millenia ago. It's also very questionable whether black people (not just dark-skinned, but negroes) voted in Greece in practice... :)
Democracy isn't perfect, but it sure as hell is better than any other alternative out there.
You don't know what you are talking about. While it is possible to argue whether the market economy is overall better for Russians than the planned economy was for Soviets (though it isn't), it's absolutely clear that "democracy" is a much worse process than Party rule was. There are much less opportunities to express your concerns, to disagree, to influence the politics, etc., than there were 15 years ago.
A valid statement would be "Democracy works in some places, it doesn't work in others, it can randomly stop working where it use to work and it may not start working where it didn't exist. There are other systems that are better in some respects and worse in others."
Interestingly, in Russia you don't need to specially register as a voter - every citizen is registered automatically once he passes 18 years age. Of course, you don't need to come to the elections, but if you chose to, the ballot will be waiting for you (and there are other ways to vote if you can't visit, of course).
In another surprising twist of democracy, Russian voters increasingly turn to the "AgainstAll" candidate to express their disgust and contempt for the corrupted system and the choise between a corrupt politician or an outright criminal (just an example from one of the governor elections). In some elections, the AgainstAll candidate managed to get as much as 25% of all votes. Another democratic tool frequently used is ignoring the election alltogether, trying to keep the number of voters below a certain percentage to invalidate the election. This was extremely successful in some parlamentary elections in St. Petersburg, in particular, where the percentage of voters routinly was below the required 25%.
After all, you need to be creative. If there are no chances to elect a decent guy, you can sabotage the elections by not coming or saying you hate them all outright.
A conspiracy theorist would agree with you, reminding about documents from various American crime-tanks actually talking about hitting skyscrapers with the planes.
Don't compare it with the Soviet Union. In Soviet Union you had (to some extent) the Party gradually losing the grip, the KGB decreasing the scale and intensity of repressions, the growing dissident (civil liberties) movements, people who wanted freedom and were willing to act to get it, etc. It's just the opposite in the US.
Also the terminology is absolutely wrong - Soviet Union was never a fascist state by any reasonable classification (though during Stalinism it shared a number of characteristics with Germany and Italy).
This is a useful quote, but don't take that "require" too literally. Yes, you are perfectly justified not to believe that the conjecture is solved, until you read about it in Science - this is reasonable. What is not reasonable is to think that de Branges is somehow required by someone or something to provide extra proof or something else. He doesn't have to if he doesn't want to.
Just like Perelman, de Branges can just sit and wait. Hopefully, someone will eventually read the proof thouroughly and see whether there are any significant errors. And then everyone will benefit from knowning whether the proof exists and if yes, what it is and that the conjecture is true.
You may find interesting a brilliant dark comedy by a distinguished Russian dramatist Evgeny Schwartz called "Dragon":4 33/http://w ww.lib.ru/SHWARC/dragon_engl.txt
http://web.archive.org/web/20030629092
Were you aware that you can cook some animals (frogs IIRC) by slowly raising the temperature of the water until it is boiling and they won't panic? The same is true for people who gradually lose their sight. Or become overweight. Or die from aging. They don't notice what is happening because the rate of changes is so slow and because humans are so good at adapting.
You know, people in Russia (where I live right now) never realised that the changes from Soviet Union to "liberal democracy with free market economy" were not beneficial (to say the least). In 1930s people in Germany weren't too good at realising what's happening either.
Chances are most people will not openly admit that yes, things have gone bad (even though deep inside they may know), unless YOU (and yes, this means YOU) will openly speak about it now and stop the changes.
No, Branges needs to prove that the counterexample does not apply to his theory.
It's not a court, Branges doesn't need to do anything - someone needs to prove it one way or another for the science to progress.
This "summary" doesn't help anyone understand what these problems are - it only helps to create an illusion of knowing.
Of course it is! Million comes from latin "mille" which meant thousand, as in "Millenium". So every educated person should know that 1 million = 1000.