Nah, Armstrong's first words actually on the surface were "It's soft and powdery and I can kick it around with my foot" then he said that other bit where he left out the a part of "That's one small step for (a) man, one giant leap for mankind".
To expand on Leah's comment - There are other liquids that are very simple atomically so they exist a lot around the universe. Two of these are Methane and Ammonia, both liquid under some circumstances. Because they are not polar molecules, the range they stay liquid is much narrower than for H2O. Their ice form is denser than the liquid, so lakes or oaceans of them will freeze from the bottom up, and there won't be an insulating layer to keep them from freezing over completely. So not only life as we know it, but some of the alternatives that we guess just might be possible are affected. Ammonia based life would only be possible in environments with a colder AND much narrower temperature range than Earth's. Freezing winters would be a critical problem instead of something life might be able to adapt around.
I hate to say it, but you're right. In fact, if you want to forward this to Cowboy Neal, please do. I'll gladly agree with you. Or I could go gather some more details on the subject, and say something actually informative while declining karma if you think that's necessary.
I'm goiing to answer this, although frankly, persons who throw around words such as obsession, insidious, and your last paragraph don't really deserve the courtesy.
My home desktop is currently heavily skinned. Most people would have a hard time using it. In fact, there's three identical buttons in the top right corner of each window distinguised only by position, and that alone can be terribly confusing. My desktop probably represents everything you hate.
1. So when I released versions of some of the skins I made to the public, I usually did a more normal looking version, cool (IMHO), but with buttons that were clearly communicative. Then, for good measure, I made a few variants that were designed to overcome various visual handicaps such as red-green color blindness. I turned over my documentation on the last two such projects to a professional disabled advocate for review before distributing them. So far, it's gotten a lot of positive responses. 2. I'm far from the only one who does that sort of thing. Working with the visually limited community and addressing those needs previously unmet by the OS manufacturers is enough to give substantial value all by itself.
We can argue about the value of aestetics all you want. Tell you what. All books should be bound in black with bright white text on the cover, assuring maximum legibility. A serief font should be required for the same reason. That will maximize utilty. All this cover art just makes it harder to pick out the title and author's name, and "you can't judge a book by its cover". You know, that saying exists because sometimes the cover promises more than the book inside can deliver. What about the reverse, say the program that delivers more than most and deserves a 'cover' that promises it all?
Re your point about the clones of (let's go ahead and say it) Apple GUI, Do you have any idea how many skinning sites have refused to accept those for just the reasons you mention? Apple clones still abound, because there is always some demand from the users for them and they are easy to do. Your diatribe, on the other hand, is like saying "Brittany sucks, and I have no explanation why they keep making Britanny albums because I don't know what the words "consumer demand" mean, so lets condem the NYSO for being in the same group - Fucking Numbskull musicians".
Your "two categories" omit everything that is original, functional, or just plain good, by definition. I'm really sorry you haven't seen any of that, because it is out there, in a dozen times the profusion of the things you cite.
Microsoft provides radio buttons and checkboxes in visual basic. Idiots design standard programs that misuse these simple tools all the time. 3rd party developers have included maximize buttons on programs that don't usefully change size, and close buttons that actually leave someting running in the tray instead of exiting the program. So by you, such design stupidity only becomes a bad thing if the program is skinable?
Ultimately, skinability is about choice. There's always someone who feels threatened by someone else having a choice.
I just an hour ago posted to this thread mentioning a OSS project still in early alpha stages that was already looking for new designs, publishing a tutorial on the requirements for skin design, and so on, as an example of a developer working to attract artists. It drew my first ever negative total score (modded redundant and offtopic both). Now you know why this is the first time you have heard of anyone wanting to get an artist on an OSS project, at least here on slashdot. (unless this gets modded the same way).
I was addressing the two most common things that normally get said in response to your point. You say what you've said, and, on Slashdot, someone immediately argues that "PURE" art isn't about money, then someone else argues that artists should ALL be able to make a living from their work. Then these two platitudes chase each other's tails and actual thinking shuts down on that branch of the discourse. You mean you, with a user number of 862, haven't seen this here before?
Most artists won't work 40 hours a week, especially if you mean on a regular schedule. Some of them may focus on a project and put every waking moment into it until it's done, working in stretches of 30 hours without sleep or worse, but a steady 40 hours on schedule, whether the work is going well or stagnating, is not what art is about.
The people who will argue that pure art isn't about money won't see that it is also about the mundane freedom to focus on work when work is going well, and not just some abstract freedom to follow a muse. The people who claim all artists should make a living from it ignore that lots of other people, and not just artists, have a lower average income if they work irregular hours or have to budget until the next sale comes in instead of being guarenteed a check first of the month for punching a time clock.
What the cop can see with his naked eye, I can see also, including seeing what the cop does. Everyone faces the same risk if they break the law. Even if I have a camera, and record the cop doing something illegal, it doesn't have the time stamp equipment and other features to put it on the same legal footing as the state's cameras, as evidence. In fact, the law in many places prohibits selling one of those to non-law enforcement agencies. The problem isn't really that the camera tilts the balance between cop and perp, it's that it also tilts the balance between cop and innocent bystander, concerned citizen, or even that crime victim you mention.
I live in the south, and believe it or not, most of what you're talking about happens here too. Yes there's been some trouble with people who have kneejerk reactions to the explicit atheism of the "god is dead" variety, but even that is generally tolerated. No one down here is ripping Darwin fish off cars (I admit my Cthulhu fish gets some looks), one of the local 7-11's has a big sign out front praising Allah in both English and Farsi, (although since 9/11 they have also put up some newspaper clippings quoting prominent muslems saying "We're not all terrorists" type sentiments, so maybe they are a touch worried about being allowed to express their opinions), and the Wicca supply shop in the arts and crafts mall hasn't been picketed yet. Put up a "God is dead" sign down here, and eventually some jerk just might burn it down, but the police will at least take that seriously, and the local church is likely to just put up a sign reading "Sorry yours is dead, ours is feeling fine." Judging by the last general election, somebody voted for Angela Davis, and no one is trying to winkle him or her out, although maybe that's because it's not like there are enough Communists or classical socialists to take seriously.
...I RTFA'ed (yes, I'm odd that way), and the thing has no red LEDs what-so-ever. Since red LED's are required to set the evil bit in humanoid robots, we are all safe.
I'm not sure what he means, but supporting artists is often different than hiring them. Take Newsplorer. It's a skinable news/headline ticker for Windows 95-XP, currently in alpha stage (v 0.51 a). The creator is already including a tutorial about skinning the program on his site, and finding space to keep submitted skins eather on his site or others, even though the project is still a long way from v 1.0. Knowing that they have been included early in the design process is often all it takes to attract artists.
You're not exactly alone, but it depends a lot on real estate. With twin 21's I usually see a big window, maybe a full monitor size, and half a dozen small applets in the other monitor. Right now, it's Mozilla on the right screen, and lots of tchotkeys like beatnik clock and winamp windows on the left. About the only program I ever need to scale to cover both at once is x-news. So yes, I pick a nice wallpaper and customize the desktop a lot.
We need to remember that many people do create works for money, but in balance with other things. Some authors would write more if they were making more money, but few would put in 120 hour weeks writing just to improve their earnings. Many authors, indeed most, will take on the occasional project that doesn't pay, just because it needs doing (in their opinion). In a simiiar way, there are plenty of famous actors and producers who take on projects where they work for a trivial fraction of their normal rate. Even lawyers often do pro-bono work, and in fact their ethical codes require it.
Right now, a lot of the pro-copyright extension retoric is comeing from lawyers who are seriously behind on their pro-bono work, representing corporations who claim they have a legal obligation to maximize profits at ALL costs. The third leg of that triad would be creative artists who will keep their noses to the grindstone, creating those new works with their eyes constantly fixed on the bottom line. Since most creative artists want to balance making a living or a better one with other concerns, whether those include occasionally writing for a small market that doesn't pay as well , not performing so many concerts that it endangers their health, or just taking a vacation now and then, they are likely to find the laws are not really in their favor as much as they may think.
"The current state, in the US, means that it's just an immense amount of detective work to find out just who now owns the rights,"
A great example of this is the H. P. Lovecraft estate. It's known that HPL left his intellectual property to a maiden aunt who died only 4 years after he did (he in 1937, her in 41). Lovecraft apparently assumed a habit of only selling first rights to his fiction about April of 1926. Copyrights on the things he sold Weird Tales mostly devolve through other minor publishers, local and regional magazines.
These and other such facts leave six works of his that are therefore just possibly still under copyright.
Any court who wants to be really sure whether one is or not has to trace the path through two estate probations, both over 50 years old, that didn't leave complete records in either case.
When they approach the issue from the Wierd tales copyrights, they may find the work was first registered to a small press that has been out of incorporation for 60+ years, and which is essentially nothing more than a name, with the courts having no idea of who to ask to see if that press paid HPL, if they actually owned the rights they sold Wierd Tales, if Wierd Tales actually paid them, and if Wierd tales actually bought all the rights they later sold Arkham House.
Even for records from the 1960's, there are numerous oddities, like copyright being registered by AH in 63, then again only 2 years later in 65. The records just get worse as they are traced back to the 40's and 30's.
The price of settling a criminal violation issue (where the state would have to bear costs) over a single one of these disputeable works has been estimated to approach five million dollars, just to do all practicable research within a limited time frame. If done for one of the works, costs for the others would be less, but might still approach a million each.
It's worth noting that Arkham House recently found themselves in a civil dispute with both the current executor of the HPL estate (who is a state attourny general, not the kind of person most of us are when it comes to presenting a legal position), and Brown University. Legal fees resulting from these civil cases are apparently sealed by court order, but it looks like settlements were reached largely because none of the parties felt they had millions to throw at the case.
In a civil case where somebody is willing to spend a few million on their lawyers, what could the government expect to spend on a related criminal case? Can the government afford to pay such costs on a regular basis? Should we be willing to spend the same on copyright law as we normally devote to high profile murder cases? Such questions are developing out of the current legal situation.
The US economy used to rest largely on kids not being all that expensive. If those guys who are making 25,000$ a year actually follow your advice, you are probably one of the people who will regret it, or you are in a tiny minority and owe it to the rest of us to honestly admit that your position is atypical.
Social Security is a great example of this, but it's far from the only one. You can model a society where the government is constrained by increasing average age to stop social security type programs, and many neo-cons have and think it would be great. Unfortunely, a low reproductive rate means a lot more than that.
There are too many jobs that simply require lots of young people. Age the US population enough, and you can't afford a lot of "liberal" programs, but you also can't man an army, and the increasingly rare young healthy person soon realizes that nursing home attendant, or paramedic, or police officer is now a 300,000$ a year job. His salary will come from what you now have saved for your retirement if you live that long.
"If a cure or even a vaccine is ever developed, the pharma corps with the largest patent portfolios of anti-HIV drugs will not be happy."
But their competitor with the smallest portfolio of anti HIV drugs will be estatic if they get it first. It would be responsible to their shareholders to make a bunch of research by their competitors wasted money and those competitor's patents useless. For that matter, a drug that works only a little better, but has less nausia as a side effect will make the company that develops it perky for weeks, and leave the competitor seeking one even better as tit for tat.
Missing the point indeed! It's a general rule for reading SF that you have to give the author a certain number of initial assumptions and then critique how they develop them, not the assumptions themselves. John W. Campbell Jr. limited that number to 1, although there are a lot of stories actually requiring more. By at least one pretty good definition of SF, THAT'S WHAT GOOD SF IS.
For example, "Brainstorm" is a film that starts with one assumption "We can copy brainstates (including senses and eventually memories) electronically and play them back", and then shows many consequences - "see how an animal's senses differ from ours", "whole new entertainment industry", "new forms of porn", "new porn has special medical risks", "air force can use to augment pilot responses", "you can tape and replay a medical crisis, a psychotic episode or even an actual death experience".
You can destroy any appreciation of the movie by deciding that it is simply impossible at the start to record and playback brain states. In the same way, you can destroy any appreciation of all the Asimov stories as easily as just the I Robot film by deciding the 3 laws themselves are simply impossible to implement.
Is faster than light travel an impossible assumption? If you can't get around that one, Star Wars is crap, but then so is Star Trek (all of it). So is Forbidden Planet. So is almost every written SF work not limited to our solar system. Solaris? Crap! Poul Anderson's David Falkyn novels? Crap! Larry Niven's Known Space series? Crap!
On earth, volcanic dust is mostly kicked up by one type of actual eruption and by ground shockwave effects. Ash is also a two stage process, with ash emitted directly in some eruptions and indirectly by burning off nearby forests and such.
A martian volcano can't burn off local forests, but should be like an earthly one in kicking up dust from shockwaves, and like an earthly one, this should happen both during actual eruptions and outgassing. What we don't really know all that well yet is how long such dust will remain suspended in the thin Martian atmosphere to be detected, but we can safely predict something about that from observing the world wide dust storms Mars gets, even if we don't know if that dust was originally from a volcano or not. Unfortunately, dust particle sizes on earth mostly seem to follow the same curve whether they come from localized ground shock or scouring off of exposed rock faces by high winds. Barring being able to analyze the mineral content of the dust and trace it to specific surface terrain features, dust will be a pretty inconclusive indicator. Your first suggestion, other gases, looks more possible, both to test and to get something like strong evidence out of.
Ive done very high quality cabinetmaking repair*, where I really benefitted from using certtain tools (mostly planes and scorps) that have been handed down for quite a few generations. If they aren't 200 years old, they are at least two thirds of the way there, and most carpenters doing this work swear by antique tools and are used to going to estate auctions and such just to find them.
*I'm not bragging about the quality of my work, just saying that the things I was repairing deserved exacting precision and skill, and I can only hope I lived up to the standards of the original craftsmen.
This is why many central exchanges are big blocks of windowless concrete, particularly the ones built by Ma Bell in the 60's, when the weathermen were active . Some of these are made with up to 3 feet of reinforced concrete, connecting land lines that are buried at least 10 feet deep for half a mile around the building. After the dams TVA built actually in WW2 and immediately after, the central offices are probably the second hardest civilian target in the United States.
More specifically, you can be legally blind because your peripheral vision is too narrow to drive safely or it impairs any employment related task, while actually having good vision in a narrower than normal angle.
For some purposes, you can even be legally blind while still retaining full sight in one eye. Your needed accomodation at a theatre may be as simple as having to sit far enough back to view the whole screen with your lessened angle of vision, which sometimes results in needing an usher to help you up the stairs towards the back of the theatre, or needing to be seated while the house lights are still up.
Theatres gain various forms of special protection under law (both most states and US federal). Some of the protections extended include the legal fiction that you have signed a contract to not bring in your own snacks by purchasing a ticket, even though you never actually see a printed version of that contract, which would normally make it invalid. These laws are bound up with the laws requiring theatres to provide certain forms of disabled access, and the justification for the laws protecting theatres is generally their role as "public service" institutions. Non-adult theatres also enjoy the same protection as non-adult bookstores against the occasional mistake in showing something that has been banned or regulated for adult content - that is, they really can claim that ignorance IS an excuse unless the material has obvious signs on the packaging that should have clued them to check the content for possible obscenity violation. Admittedly, this isn't a protection that will probably ever get applied again with current obscenity standards, but it's still a legal priveledge granted to them.
So, theatre chains should have the right to run their business without government regulation? Ask any of them if they are willing to give up the special protections they also get in return for the government butting out. When one's legal department says yes, then we should worry about enforcing their right to non-interference.
Of course, it's far from proven in court that requirements to provide access extend to the website as well as the theaters themselves, and a simple claim that recoding the site is an onerous burden in exchange for a very minimal gain is likely to be an effective defense, at least against a claim that the violation was willful.
Actually, that works, but either the kudzu gets ahead of the goats and starts pulling down your elevated expressway sections again, or the goats actually overwhelm the kudzu in a bleating suicide wave attack and the resulting gassy, bloated goats make you long for death by kudzu strangulation.
Perhaps your disconnect comes from those tasks and programs to do those tasks that straddle the line. You can use a text program to write documentation that would only be useful re. a computer to use it with, or to write sommething entirely unrelated to computing or somewhere in between. You can use a color picker program to get the RGB values of a certain pixil, and then use that as part of making an image that is a pretty picture in itself, or as part of making a splash screen to go with a program. In such cases, the line certainly gets blurry.
People who prefer the shortcut of saying "computer thing" are likely to also not bother to distinguish between a program being a computer thing and a particular use of that program being one, so again, it's ambiguous, and expected to be extracted from context.
Your last four sentences show where a great deal of confusion rests. A lot of modern science depends on machines that can do quite complex calcualtions quickly enough to be useful, with useful measured in a social context. (Like, modeling what happens in a type 2 supernnova quickly enough that you can observe the next relatively close one and check your model, then repeat as needed until you publish or the grant runs out.). That's a non-computer thing by some definitions, geeky as hell, but for astronomy geeks not computer science geeks. Things like that get classified either way, and either way, some of us will argue over it.
It's a common way to describe using a PC. A write program does a "non-computer thing" - it produces a text. A defrag program does a "computer thing" - you only bother to use it to keep the machine able to run the write program. You would never bother to defrag a machine if that machine spent all its time being maintained and never did a "non-computer thing", but you would bother to run a word processor, a game, or a CAD program on a machine that never did "computer things", and might even prefer it that way.
The real distinction is between "tasks internal to the discourse of mechanical computation" vrs. "tasks with external consequences in a wider mode of discourse with particular applicability to human culture", but most people find those formulations a wee bit cumbersome.
As the paernt poster observed, a tremendous lot of early hacking was about making the computer's internal logical structures into something that could eventually do some tasks that resulted in gains to the user outside the machine environment.
The early hacker mentality tended to focus, by necessity, on "computer things", because they all needed done. Both machines and software had to survive before they could be used to accomplish anything beyond their continued survival. The average hacker thus came to think these tasks were worth doing in their own right.
This still shows up today. Comparing only genuine freeware, today I ran two programs just before going to the internet. One was a drive scanner program that displays the results in everything from a simplified bar graph to a 3-D histogram that can be independently rotated along all three axi, to a pie chart format with clever color coding. The other was a weather program that will go to a web site without my opening a full browser and give me a daily or weekly report, but it won't give me a report out to an estimated, say, 90% accuracy number of days or even tell me how many days the information source thinks that is. (And it won't do several other things I have wanted it to do at various times).
I'd rate those two programs to require comparable ingenuity and skill to produce. They demonstrate a pattern that from my experience tends to hold most of the time, although I can't put an actual number on it offhand. Colloquially, we have great tools for doing most computer things, and often not-so-great tools for doing non-computer things.
Slashdot Mirror
Nah, Armstrong's first words actually on the surface were "It's soft and powdery and I can kick it around with my foot" then he said that other bit where he left out the a part of "That's one small step for (a) man, one giant leap for mankind".
To expand on Leah's comment - There are other liquids that are very simple atomically so they exist a lot around the universe. Two of these are Methane and Ammonia, both liquid under some circumstances. Because they are not polar molecules, the range they stay liquid is much narrower than for H2O. Their ice form is denser than the liquid, so lakes or oaceans of them will freeze from the bottom up, and there won't be an insulating layer to keep them from freezing over completely. So not only life as we know it, but some of the alternatives that we guess just might be possible are affected. Ammonia based life would only be possible in environments with a colder AND much narrower temperature range than Earth's. Freezing winters would be a critical problem instead of something life might be able to adapt around.
I hate to say it, but you're right. In fact, if you want to forward this to Cowboy Neal, please do. I'll gladly agree with you. Or I could go gather some more details on the subject, and say something actually informative while declining karma if you think that's necessary.
I'm goiing to answer this, although frankly, persons who throw around words such as obsession, insidious, and your last paragraph don't really deserve the courtesy.
My home desktop is currently heavily skinned. Most people would have a hard time using it. In fact, there's three identical buttons in the top right corner of each window distinguised only by position, and that alone can be terribly confusing. My desktop probably represents everything you hate.
1. So when I released versions of some of the skins I made to the public, I usually did a more normal looking version, cool (IMHO), but with buttons that were clearly communicative. Then, for good measure, I made a few variants that were designed to overcome various visual handicaps such as red-green color blindness. I turned over my documentation on the last two such projects to a professional disabled advocate for review before distributing them. So far, it's gotten a lot of positive responses.
2. I'm far from the only one who does that sort of thing. Working with the visually limited community and addressing those needs previously unmet by the OS manufacturers is enough to give substantial value all by itself.
We can argue about the value of aestetics all you want. Tell you what. All books should be bound in black with bright white text on the cover, assuring maximum legibility. A serief font should be required for the same reason. That will maximize utilty. All this cover art just makes it harder to pick out the title and author's name, and "you can't judge a book by its cover". You know, that saying exists because sometimes the cover promises more than the book inside can deliver. What about the reverse, say the program that delivers more than most and deserves a 'cover' that promises it all?
Re your point about the clones of (let's go ahead and say it) Apple GUI, Do you have any idea how many skinning sites have refused to accept those for just the reasons you mention? Apple clones still abound, because there is always some demand from the users for them and they are easy to do. Your diatribe, on the other hand, is like saying "Brittany sucks, and I have no explanation why they keep making Britanny albums because I don't know what the words "consumer demand" mean, so lets condem the NYSO for being in the same group - Fucking Numbskull musicians".
Your "two categories" omit everything that is original, functional, or just plain good, by definition. I'm really sorry you haven't seen any of that, because it is out there, in a dozen times the profusion of the things you cite.
Microsoft provides radio buttons and checkboxes in visual basic. Idiots design standard programs that misuse these simple tools all the time. 3rd party developers have included maximize buttons on programs that don't usefully change size, and close buttons that actually leave someting running in the tray instead of exiting the program. So by you, such design stupidity only becomes a bad thing if the program is skinable?
Ultimately, skinability is about choice. There's always someone who feels threatened by someone else having a choice.
I just an hour ago posted to this thread mentioning a OSS project still in early alpha stages that was already looking for new designs, publishing a tutorial on the requirements for skin design, and so on, as an example of a developer working to attract artists. It drew my first ever negative total score (modded redundant and offtopic both). Now you know why this is the first time you have heard of anyone wanting to get an artist on an OSS project, at least here on slashdot. (unless this gets modded the same way).
I was addressing the two most common things that normally get said in response to your point. You say what you've said, and, on Slashdot, someone immediately argues that "PURE" art isn't about money, then someone else argues that artists should ALL be able to make a living from their work. Then these two platitudes chase each other's tails and actual thinking shuts down on that branch of the discourse. You mean you, with a user number of 862, haven't seen this here before?
Most artists won't work 40 hours a week, especially if you mean on a regular schedule. Some of them may focus on a project and put every waking moment into it until it's done, working in stretches of 30 hours without sleep or worse, but a steady 40 hours on schedule, whether the work is going well or stagnating, is not what art is about.
The people who will argue that pure art isn't about money won't see that it is also about the mundane freedom to focus on work when work is going well, and not just some abstract freedom to follow a muse. The people who claim all artists should make a living from it ignore that lots of other people, and not just artists, have a lower average income if they work irregular hours or have to budget until the next sale comes in instead of being guarenteed a check first of the month for punching a time clock.
What the cop can see with his naked eye, I can see also, including seeing what the cop does. Everyone faces the same risk if they break the law. Even if I have a camera, and record the cop doing something illegal, it doesn't have the time stamp equipment and other features to put it on the same legal footing as the state's cameras, as evidence. In fact, the law in many places prohibits selling one of those to non-law enforcement agencies. The problem isn't really that the camera tilts the balance between cop and perp, it's that it also tilts the balance between cop and innocent bystander, concerned citizen, or even that crime victim you mention.
I live in the south, and believe it or not, most of what you're talking about happens here too. Yes there's been some trouble with people who have kneejerk reactions to the explicit atheism of the "god is dead" variety, but even that is generally tolerated. No one down here is ripping Darwin fish off cars (I admit my Cthulhu fish gets some looks), one of the local 7-11's has a big sign out front praising Allah in both English and Farsi, (although since 9/11 they have also put up some newspaper clippings quoting prominent muslems saying "We're not all terrorists" type sentiments, so maybe they are a touch worried about being allowed to express their opinions), and the Wicca supply shop in the arts and crafts mall hasn't been picketed yet. Put up a "God is dead" sign down here, and eventually some jerk just might burn it down, but the police will at least take that seriously, and the local church is likely to just put up a sign reading "Sorry yours is dead, ours is feeling fine." Judging by the last general election, somebody voted for Angela Davis, and no one is trying to winkle him or her out, although maybe that's because it's not like there are enough Communists or classical socialists to take seriously.
...I RTFA'ed (yes, I'm odd that way), and the thing has no red LEDs what-so-ever. Since red LED's are required to set the evil bit in humanoid robots, we are all safe.
I'm not sure what he means, but supporting artists is often different than hiring them. Take Newsplorer. It's a skinable news/headline ticker for Windows 95-XP, currently in alpha stage (v 0.51 a). The creator is already including a tutorial about skinning the program on his site, and finding space to keep submitted skins eather on his site or others, even though the project is still a long way from v 1.0. Knowing that they have been included early in the design process is often all it takes to attract artists.
http://www.newsplorer.com/
You're not exactly alone, but it depends a lot on real estate. With twin 21's I usually see a big window, maybe a full monitor size, and half a dozen small applets in the other monitor. Right now, it's Mozilla on the right screen, and lots of tchotkeys like beatnik clock and winamp windows on the left. About the only program I ever need to scale to cover both at once is x-news. So yes, I pick a nice wallpaper and customize the desktop a lot.
We need to remember that many people do create works for money, but in balance with other things. Some authors would write more if they were making more money, but few would put in 120 hour weeks writing just to improve their earnings. Many authors, indeed most, will take on the occasional project that doesn't pay, just because it needs doing (in their opinion). In a simiiar way, there are plenty of famous actors and producers who take on projects where they work for a trivial fraction of their normal rate. Even lawyers often do pro-bono work, and in fact their ethical codes require it.
Right now, a lot of the pro-copyright extension retoric is comeing from lawyers who are seriously behind on their pro-bono work, representing corporations who claim they have a legal obligation to maximize profits at ALL costs. The third leg of that triad would be creative artists who will keep their noses to the grindstone, creating those new works with their eyes constantly fixed on the bottom line. Since most creative artists want to balance making a living or a better one with other concerns, whether those include occasionally writing for a small market that doesn't pay as well , not performing so many concerts that it endangers their health, or just taking a vacation now and then, they are likely to find the laws are not really in their favor as much as they may think.
"The current state, in the US, means that it's just an immense amount of detective work to find out just who now owns the rights,"
A great example of this is the H. P. Lovecraft estate. It's known that HPL left his intellectual property to a maiden aunt who died only 4 years after he did (he in 1937, her in 41). Lovecraft apparently assumed a habit of only selling first rights to his fiction about April of 1926. Copyrights on the things he sold Weird Tales mostly devolve through other minor publishers, local and regional magazines.
These and other such facts leave six works of his that are therefore just possibly still under copyright.
Any court who wants to be really sure whether one is or not has to trace the path through two estate probations, both over 50 years old, that didn't leave complete records in either case.
When they approach the issue from the Wierd tales copyrights, they may find the work was first registered to a small press that has been out of incorporation for 60+ years, and which is essentially nothing more than a name, with the courts having no idea of who to ask to see if that press paid HPL, if they actually owned the rights they sold Wierd Tales, if Wierd Tales actually paid them, and if Wierd tales actually bought all the rights they later sold Arkham House.
Even for records from the 1960's, there are numerous oddities, like copyright being registered by AH in 63, then again only 2 years later in 65. The records just get worse as they are traced back to the 40's and 30's.
The price of settling a criminal violation issue (where the state would have to bear costs) over a single one of these disputeable works has been estimated to approach five million dollars, just to do all practicable research within a limited time frame. If done for one of the works, costs for the others would be less, but might still approach a million each.
It's worth noting that Arkham House recently found themselves in a civil dispute with both the current executor of the HPL estate (who is a state attourny general, not the kind of person most of us are when it comes to presenting a legal position), and Brown University. Legal fees resulting from these civil cases are apparently sealed by court order, but it looks like settlements were reached largely because none of the parties felt they had millions to throw at the case.
In a civil case where somebody is willing to spend a few million on their lawyers, what could the government expect to spend on a related criminal case? Can the government afford to pay such costs on a regular basis? Should we be willing to spend the same on copyright law as we normally devote to high profile murder cases? Such questions are developing out of the current legal situation.
The US economy used to rest largely on kids not being all that expensive. If those guys who are making 25,000$ a year actually follow your advice, you are probably one of the people who will regret it, or you are in a tiny minority and owe it to the rest of us to honestly admit that your position is atypical.
Social Security is a great example of this, but it's far from the only one. You can model a society where the government is constrained by increasing average age to stop social security type programs, and many neo-cons have and think it would be great. Unfortunely, a low reproductive rate means a lot more than that.
There are too many jobs that simply require lots of young people. Age the US population enough, and you can't afford a lot of "liberal" programs, but you also can't man an army, and the increasingly rare young healthy person soon realizes that nursing home attendant, or paramedic, or police officer is now a 300,000$ a year job. His salary will come from what you now have saved for your retirement if you live that long.
"If a cure or even a vaccine is ever developed, the pharma corps with the largest patent portfolios of anti-HIV drugs will not be happy."
But their competitor with the smallest portfolio of anti HIV drugs will be estatic if they get it first. It would be responsible to their shareholders to make a bunch of research by their competitors wasted money and those competitor's patents useless. For that matter, a drug that works only a little better, but has less nausia as a side effect will make the company that develops it perky for weeks, and leave the competitor seeking one even better as tit for tat.
Missing the point indeed! It's a general rule for reading SF that you have to give the author a certain number of initial assumptions and then critique how they develop them, not the assumptions themselves. John W. Campbell Jr. limited that number to 1, although there are a lot of stories actually requiring more. By at least one pretty good definition of SF, THAT'S WHAT GOOD SF IS.
For example, "Brainstorm" is a film that starts with one assumption "We can copy brainstates (including senses and eventually memories) electronically and play them back", and then shows many consequences - "see how an animal's senses differ from ours", "whole new entertainment industry", "new forms of porn", "new porn has special medical risks", "air force can use to augment pilot responses", "you can tape and replay a medical crisis, a psychotic episode or even an actual death experience".
You can destroy any appreciation of the movie by deciding that it is simply impossible at the start to record and playback brain states. In the same way, you can destroy any appreciation of all the Asimov stories as easily as just the I Robot film by deciding the 3 laws themselves are simply impossible to implement.
Is faster than light travel an impossible assumption? If you can't get around that one, Star Wars is crap, but then so is Star Trek (all of it). So is Forbidden Planet. So is almost every written SF work not limited to our solar system. Solaris? Crap! Poul Anderson's David Falkyn novels? Crap! Larry Niven's Known Space series? Crap!
On earth, volcanic dust is mostly kicked up by one type of actual eruption and by ground shockwave effects. Ash is also a two stage process, with ash emitted directly in some eruptions and indirectly by burning off nearby forests and such.
A martian volcano can't burn off local forests, but should be like an earthly one in kicking up dust from shockwaves, and like an earthly one, this should happen both during actual eruptions and outgassing. What we don't really know all that well yet is how long such dust will remain suspended in the thin Martian atmosphere to be detected, but we can safely predict something about that from observing the world wide dust storms Mars gets, even if we don't know if that dust was originally from a volcano or not. Unfortunately, dust particle sizes on earth mostly seem to follow the same curve whether they come from localized ground shock or scouring off of exposed rock faces by high winds. Barring being able to analyze the mineral content of the dust and trace it to specific surface terrain features, dust will be a pretty inconclusive indicator. Your first suggestion, other gases, looks more possible, both to test and to get something like strong evidence out of.
Ive done very high quality cabinetmaking repair*, where I really benefitted from using certtain tools (mostly planes and scorps) that have been handed down for quite a few generations. If they aren't 200 years old, they are at least two thirds of the way there, and most carpenters doing this work swear by antique tools and are used to going to estate auctions and such just to find them.
*I'm not bragging about the quality of my work, just saying that the things I was repairing deserved exacting precision and skill, and I can only hope I lived up to the standards of the original craftsmen.
This is why many central exchanges are big blocks of windowless concrete, particularly the ones built by Ma Bell in the 60's, when the weathermen were active . Some of these are made with up to 3 feet of reinforced concrete, connecting land lines that are buried at least 10 feet deep for half a mile around the building. After the dams TVA built actually in WW2 and immediately after, the central offices are probably the second hardest civilian target in the United States.
So if the Iraquis were made out of wood, then they weigh as much as a duck, right?
More specifically, you can be legally blind because your peripheral vision is too narrow to drive safely or it impairs any employment related task, while actually having good vision in a narrower than normal angle.
For some purposes, you can even be legally blind while still retaining full sight in one eye. Your needed accomodation at a theatre may be as simple as having to sit far enough back to view the whole screen with your lessened angle of vision, which sometimes results in needing an usher to help you up the stairs towards the back of the theatre, or needing to be seated while the house lights are still up.
Theatres gain various forms of special protection under law (both most states and US federal). Some of the protections extended include the legal fiction that you have signed a contract to not bring in your own snacks by purchasing a ticket, even though you never actually see a printed version of that contract, which would normally make it invalid. These laws are bound up with the laws requiring theatres to provide certain forms of disabled access, and the justification for the laws protecting theatres is generally their role as "public service" institutions. Non-adult theatres also enjoy the same protection as non-adult bookstores against the occasional mistake in showing something that has been banned or regulated for adult content - that is, they really can claim that ignorance IS an excuse unless the material has obvious signs on the packaging that should have clued them to check the content for possible obscenity violation. Admittedly, this isn't a protection that will probably ever get applied again with current obscenity standards, but it's still a legal priveledge granted to them.
So, theatre chains should have the right to run their business without government regulation? Ask any of them if they are willing to give up the special protections they also get in return for the government butting out. When one's legal department says yes, then we should worry about enforcing their right to non-interference.
Of course, it's far from proven in court that requirements to provide access extend to the website as well as the theaters themselves, and a simple claim that recoding the site is an onerous burden in exchange for a very minimal gain is likely to be an effective defense, at least against a claim that the violation was willful.
Actually, that works, but either the kudzu gets ahead of the goats and starts pulling down your elevated expressway sections again, or the goats actually overwhelm the kudzu in a bleating suicide wave attack and the resulting gassy, bloated goats make you long for death by kudzu strangulation.
Perhaps your disconnect comes from those tasks and programs to do those tasks that straddle the line. You can use a text program to write documentation that would only be useful re. a computer to use it with, or to write sommething entirely unrelated to computing or somewhere in between. You can use a color picker program to get the RGB values of a certain pixil, and then use that as part of making an image that is a pretty picture in itself, or as part of making a splash screen to go with a program. In such cases, the line certainly gets blurry.
People who prefer the shortcut of saying "computer thing" are likely to also not bother to distinguish between a program being a computer thing and a particular use of that program being one, so again, it's ambiguous, and expected to be extracted from context.
Your last four sentences show where a great deal of confusion rests. A lot of modern science depends on machines that can do quite complex calcualtions quickly enough to be useful, with useful measured in a social context. (Like, modeling what happens in a type 2 supernnova quickly enough that you can observe the next relatively close one and check your model, then repeat as needed until you publish or the grant runs out.). That's a non-computer thing by some definitions, geeky as hell, but for astronomy geeks not computer science geeks. Things like that get classified either way, and either way, some of us will argue over it.
It's a common way to describe using a PC. A write program does a "non-computer thing" - it produces a text. A defrag program does a "computer thing" - you only bother to use it to keep the machine able to run the write program. You would never bother to defrag a machine if that machine spent all its time being maintained and never did a "non-computer thing", but you would bother to run a word processor, a game, or a CAD program on a machine that never did "computer things", and might even prefer it that way.
The real distinction is between "tasks internal to the discourse of mechanical computation" vrs. "tasks with external consequences in a wider mode of discourse with particular applicability to human culture", but most people find those formulations a wee bit cumbersome.
As the paernt poster observed, a tremendous lot of early hacking was about making the computer's internal logical structures into something that could eventually do some tasks that resulted in gains to the user outside the machine environment.
The early hacker mentality tended to focus, by necessity, on "computer things", because they all needed done. Both machines and software had to survive before they could be used to accomplish anything beyond their continued survival. The average hacker thus came to think these tasks were worth doing in their own right.
This still shows up today. Comparing only genuine freeware, today I ran two programs just before going to the internet. One was a drive scanner program that displays the results in everything from a simplified bar graph to a 3-D histogram that can be independently rotated along all three axi, to a pie chart format with clever color coding. The other was a weather program that will go to a web site without my opening a full browser and give me a daily or weekly report, but it won't give me a report out to an estimated, say, 90% accuracy number of days or even tell me how many days the information source thinks that is. (And it won't do several other things I have wanted it to do at various times).
I'd rate those two programs to require comparable ingenuity and skill to produce. They demonstrate a pattern that from my experience tends to hold most of the time, although I can't put an actual number on it offhand. Colloquially, we have great tools for doing most computer things, and often not-so-great tools for doing non-computer things.