...Facebook. There is a lot of data that's exceptionally valuable for marketing, which companies can only get if they do tracking way beyond visits to their own web pages. That added value is perceived by advertising execs as literally enormous, so it should be assumed anyone who can implement this thinks they have a strong incentive. It's like, how common would bank robbery be if the penalty was 10 days in jail and the potential reward was a million dollars?
To see how, lets take an example. A company may pay a few cents per for a list of valid e-mail addresses. Now, link one of those addresses to the information that the possessor of that address definitely orders things on-line, and it's a little more valuable. Add that the things ordered on-line include prescription drugs, and it's worth more. Now how much is it worth linked to the information that the person is not yet ordering any antidepressants, but has just spent several hours searching several terms relating to depression? A list of e-mail addresses that fit those criteria is generally estimated to be worth about $ 250 US per entry by the pharmaceutical firms. With the right combinations of information sources, essentially a matter of asking the right questions, this sort of data is at least perceived to be the holy grail of targeted advertising. Personally, I assume that any for-profit that isn't looking for this sort of data is only avoiding it because they doubt the American Advertising Council's estimates of how much business it can drive, and not because they have a moral objection. Yeah, maybe some of them are genuinely being ethical, but I recognize that the sheer scope of the temptation is bound to make many of them cross the line, and it's time to be a little paranoid about privacy.
Right, there's a big difference between an artist saying "My talent and hard work took these ideas to the level of a finished creation.", and "I'm so much a self made man, I invented a time machine and an alphabet so i could teach my elementary school teachers what to teach me." . A little recognition that none of us see farther except by standing on the shoulders of giants is necessary.
You could compare using a CGI Yoda in some portions that were originally puppet Yoda to your example, but what about such decisions as not having Han shoot first? That's different, in that there was no change in technology at all, 'just' a change in the character. What new technology allowed Lucas to capture Greedo shooting first when it somehow couldn't be done that way originally? If you're going to compare this to a program, what about rewriting, say, an Ultima game so that which decisions lead to which endings is different?
There were several points in my military career where I was signed for over a billion dollars in mobile property, and a few where the amount was over three billion, a lot of it in the form of already loaded full cargo trucks with crates of helicopter turbine engines and such, that could easily have been stolen if I'd screwed up. When I left the service, I had to pay 2 dollars for a missing laundry bag, so i can't quite say I've never lost anything for anyone I worked for. But still, with a record like that, why weren't some large companies competing to offer me a multiple six digit salary to do the same sort of thing this idiot was doing, the day I became a civilian again?
The standard Drake equation isn't really very useful, and most Xenobiologists don't take it as a serious tool to describe their subject.
1. When people first started putting methane and ammonia in flasks and running lightning through them (the Miller–Urey experiment in 1952), some scientists actually applied that to the Drake equation soon after, and said that they could now put a number on the Drake term for how likely life was to begin. The experiment implied a very high number, effectively demonstrating that that part was inevitable, so the final answer to the Drake equation now depended more on how likely simple life was to evolve into complex organisms. Then it turned out that it was easier than once thought to get amino acids from simple reactions and conditions such as the early Earth probably had, but it appeared much harder than those same scientists thought to get from amino acids to the forming of properly folded proteins, and the overall odds had not changed nearly as much as was first thought. In terms of the Drake equations, this would mean there were really two terms needed for what Drake counted as one step. This would be one term for the simplest precursors of life developing, and a second for the more complex ones,.
2. In much the same way, scientists have proposed such ideas as a large moon being necessary to reduce the amount of atmosphere and surface oceans (so there is at least some land, and land dwelling life can evolve), or a semi-molten iron core so life leaving the oceans is protected by a strong magnetic field, or continental drift mechanics so that some parts of the surface build mountains (and that way the surface never gets flat enough to be all covered with oceans at the same time), or various other such things. Practically any one of these might be important enough to be a whole factor in the real Drake equation, or it might turn out that life easily finds ways around some of these apparent bottlenecks. Until we actually see some other worlds with life, we have no way of knowing just what terms to put into the equation, which makes trying to assign actual numbers pretty futile.
So, assume I'm a not-yet-published but aspiring author, and my claim of fair use is that it's 'scholarship', as I'm planning to write a textbook. Alternately, I'm planning to write a more popular work, say a novel, and so my fair use falls under 'research'. You're claiming, if I understand you, that if I got a cease and desist notice and responded to it with a letter making such a fair use claim, that would settle it to where both I and a normal rights holder would feel it was resolved? I'm assuming you don't mean your statement to include clearly unreasonable litigation, where one party sues or ignores claims even though the law shows they have no reasonable or realistic chance of winning.
I think the example I started with is enough to throw doubt on that claim. Wouldn't a not-yet-published author run into problems that would be easy enough to work around if they could only cite a history as a successful writer? I'm pretty sure that a well known author (say Slashdot's own Steven King), could ask for copies of a great many things saying that they might be relevant to a book he was simply considering writing, and still have such a claim be respected, but what about the first timer?
More generally, the whole structure you've cited reads to me more like a big reason to litigate - I cites some examples of fair use, but saying 'purposes such as' certainly sounds like it's not listing all of the possible purposes, and in only one case (teaching), does it bother to give any more guidance. That's far from eliminating sources of legal conflict.
Here's a real world example. In scholarly works analyzing H. P. Lovecraft's works, the question of HPL's unfortunate racism comes up. (Well, really, there's no question he was a racist, but whether he acted towards individuals he met in person in the same way as he wrote about how to deal with them collectively is more debatable - HPL had a tendency to meet individual people and pronounce them afterwards to friends as much better than their racial origins would indicate).
Now, to analyze his works with that factor included means comparing multiple editions of printed works, plus what's obtainable of his manuscripts (not always complete). If a scholar of Lovecraft Studies wants to know how much of the descriptions of the 'starfish headed old ones' in HPL's "At the Mountains of Madness" as 'human' or 'having human like virtues' is actually Lovecraft and how much comes from John W. Campbell Jr. , they may need copies of both various printings of the novella, and of both HPL's and Campbell's other writings.
It might even be advisable to go as far afield as reading some of Campbell's "Don A Stuart" stories such as "Twilight" to see if some similar phrases pop up there.
Now, how much of that is fair use for a scholarly article in Lovecraft Studies on HPLs personal definition of humanity?
I hate to reply to my own post, but there's a right parenthesis in that first paragraph that should have been right after '2 parts of 6 still in existence', not way at the end of the paragraph.
A great example. The BBC chose to copy over old 1/2 inch tapes, and possibly misfiled some episodes or just assumed that once the show was aired, that would be the end of it. Other examples from that era are common - for just two, there's the first Quatermass TV series (now public domain, but with only 2 parts of 6 still in existence, and Tales from Tomorrow, with about 43 of the original 85 episodes still in existence. (Here's a link for a legal download).):
What do examples like these prove? (I've picked examples from both sides of the Atlantic, just so this doesn't appear to somehow be just an English problem, and people don't draw the (in my opinion, unproved) conclusion that the BBC was less rational than US broadcasters). 1. Copyrights had already been extended from early US and British laws by the times that these shows aired, but that didn't give the owners the incentive to hold onto them that was one of the purposes of extending those copyrights. 2. Corporate owners (at least), lost potential profits in the future by their own shortsightedness, which has nothing to do with how much copyright protection they got. Of course, that short sightedness is simply human - who would have predicted all the advances in technology that would create any potential demand for these older works 50 to 60 years later. 4. But this also means that the current crop of rights holders can't predict what the situation will be as they approach 2100 or so. Holding onto a right that you might benefit from in over 100 years is a high odds gamble. If there are any downsides, such as having to pay for archiving old records properly so they will last that long, that gamble now has a downside. This is why some large rights holders have been agitating the US government to pick up the cost of them proceeding in civil courts against copyright violators, and why they are trying to move more and more violations into the criminal law category where the state pays from taxes.
What about transferring assets split between several trolls, so the downside is limited? Then if one suit is successful, the next troll gets in line, or transfers more assets to the first for a subsequent round of suits, or the first hangs onto a good share of the rewards as a war chest for more lawsuits and stops depending on new capital support from the original company for a time, and various permutations on these. It shouldn't be feasible, but that's because the right to sue is by itself not worth anything in isolation, nor grounds by itself for claiming standing. Owning even limited shares in some other rights, with a limited right of control, might still allow claiming standing.
Yeah, this is non-lawyer speculation and worth every penny of free. I base it on two points: 1. Lawsuits are generally against the entity with the most money, regardless of whether that entity has the majority or largest single share of the responsibility for damages. Does that imply that lawsuits can be from a party with little to gain directly because they will have to pass most of the reward for success on to a parent rights holder, just so they have something to gain? 2. Unlike trademarks, copyrights and patents don't have to be defended. One party holding a small share can elect to 'aggressively pursue its rights' without others having to.
So the question becomes: Is it possible to so encumber a transfer of rights that it has little or no value if exercised in any way except suing, while still giving the appearance that the transferee gains legal standing?
There's no way to implement a theoretical free market either. Once that theory hits the real world, the Second Law of Thermodynamics (Shannon version), screws it up. Guess what - the second law allows fewer exceptions than human nature. People who think the Second Law will bend for them are even more out of touch with reality than people who think human nature won't oppose their system.
Look, I'm sure this seems logical to you. Take it from a former Armored Cav officer, what you are describing makes about as much sense as running under a Saturn 5 and lighting the fuse with a Bic to send it to the Moon. The army did threat analysis based on video footage of enemies that actually tried to use visible search lights in various battles from just post Vietnam to Desert Storm, and the number they came up with is that once night vision came in, it deceased the average life span of the enemy to about 0.3 seconds (yes, 3/10ths of a second, and no, I'm not exaggerating). It's actually been doctrine for most modern militarys since WW2, long before light amplification gear became standard, never, ever do this stupid thing in armor vrs. armor combat, and Night Vision didn't make it more feasible but much, much less. US Main Battle Tanks have a working range of around four miles. Fire up a searchlight that can even reach that far and it will take several seconds to warm up, then you need time to search with it. The user, and every other armored vehicle it is in a group with, will all die before they see what is killing them.
By 95, at least, it was possible to edit a copy of explorer.exe, and since you couldn't delete the copy in the windows directory while it was running, you could instead save your edited version into the root directory where it would be found first next time you booted. I remember using one of the common 16 bit editors of that time and replacing the BMP that made the left border on the start menu with a custom one. Of course, if you screwed up someting, you had to boot to dos to delete your version. Some of us learned to change shell to something like lightstep so we could more safely hack explorer. That's far from the dawn of time still... I can't possibly be.... Oh Hell, you kids get off of my lawn!
Points L3, L4 and L5 are all at very nearly the same distance as the moon. L1 is actually closer. Only L2 is significantly farther away. Technically, the more the biggest body is larger than the secondary, the more the 3, 4, and 5 points will tend to fall slightly beyond the secondary's orbit, So for the Sun-Earth system, the L3, L4, and L5 are slightly outside Earth's orbit. But, the Earth is not as much proportionately greater than the Moon, and the 'points' are actually larger than pure points so for the Earth-Moon system, L#, 4, and 5 fall partly inside and partly outside the Moon's orbit.
You are, however, quite right that putting an object at a Lagrangian point doesn't keep it there. The range of velocities that are even semi-stable is pretty narrow, and for points L1, L2, and L3, the stability is in a plane perpendicular to the two major bodies, and there really is no gain in stability along the line between them, Every time we have parked a satellite at one of these points, it has been by using station keeping thrusters to give it an occasional nudge to keep it there. It's cheap on thrust, but not free. You're also right that the points have naturally attracted stuff already and tend to be cluttered spots. I don't know if that really affects costs or risks - there have been solar observation satellite missions to the sun-earth Lagrangian points, where the same problems should apply, and these have worked well so far. Because the orbits of the various major bodies are elliptical, the Lagrangians aren't really points. If there weren't other planets and such around, the orbits would be roughly kidney bean shaped, but since there are, objects tend to be pretty close to stable in complex orbits called Lissajous orbits. Making those fairly large may be a way to avoid some debris.
Isn't it the whole point of Lagrange points, that things that are going approximately the velocity to stay there tend to settle naturally into the exact velocity range needed to stay there? Why do you think there are those two clusters of Trojan asteroids leading and trailing Jupiter? Did they pass through those points and somebody fly up and hit them with the ole' magical fairy fart to keep them from skipping right on through?
It's obvious (always assuming that what the article says is substantially correct), that Mr. Doxer had what the law calls a propensity to commit the first crime from before law enforcement entered the picture. The FBI didn't have to implant any ideas in his head for that to happen. But, what about the rest of the crimes? This guy was apparently looking for a contact with the Israeli government from the start. Maybe that's so he could get info on the estranged wife and child, but it also arguably could be because he figured that Israel would be unlikely to do any real damage to the US with the info. Maybe he genuinely thought that this would count as only corporate espionage, and not spill over into hurting the US economy or US interests as a whole. So the government should expect to have to prove for each charge after the first that they didn't talk Mr. Daxer into going down paths he would have never thought of on his own and might have been strongly reluctant to pursue unless they pressured him and persuaded him. I don't think there was any entrapment here, but for at least some of the charges or claims of aggravating circumstances, it is certainly possible. I guess we will have to see if his lawyer even raises that as a possible defense, and if so, whether the evidence the public and jury sees is all heavily redacted transcripts or something such as that, and even then, reasonable people may disagree over the outcome, whatever it is.
OK, I'm picturing Keanu Reeves saying "Moles. Lots of Moles." and then all these shelves full of blind burrowing rodents come flying past. You did that - hope you're happy now.
That's a market assumption for regular economics, You're basically saying that the customer can always enforce their determination. Macro-economics is, in some small part, just about what happens when they customer decision causes them to lose power to further enforce the market.
Let's take a largeish example. Suppose a lot of customers think it's worth $26.37 for a copy of the 'Professor Y and the Y-men fight Gyroscopo' DVD. The company bet that it would sell 40 million copies in the first pressing, and it does (Whooo!!!) Year after year, the customers think, in large enough numbers, that the series is worth purchasing. Sales stay good. But, an increasing number of those customers are stretching their credit cards to the max, and getting into financial modes where they really need to go back and put more money aside for a rainy day, pay the car insurance, put aside more for little Billy's college, and so on. Eventually, a bunch of customers simply don't have the extra in their entertainment budget to buy Y Men 27 by the 40 millions. These people may still feel 26 dollars is a fair price, but they aren't customers any more, because they just don't have 26 dollars in the entertainment part of their budget. To make them customers again, the DVD maker needs to charge only $17.28, at which point the customers may be thinking, "This is a real bargain, way better than fair. With food prices skyrocketing and gas totally beyond my social class, this is a real steal!!", but it's still what the company has to charge if they want to get 40 million sales again. The customer can think that the high food and gasoline prices are what's unfair, but they are practical necessities. The slack is in things that are optional. The customer has an opinion about what's fair, but it may not match the market forces - when it doesn't, the market forces compel the customer's vote even by, if necessary, stopping him from being a customer at all.
Apple could be overcharging, if the people who think the Apple premium is fair find themselves faced with other financial choices that take them out of potential customer status, and the people who buy the cheaper options increasingly attribute still having discretionary cash available to having made 'smarter' choices in the past.
I didn't follow Bra-Ket notation at all until I read up on the history of it. For me, it helped a lot to know Dirac invented it, and that it was needed because it applied to Hilbert spaces, and that Hilbert developed that concept a few years before Dirac got started, and that John von Neumann was the guy who actually named Hilbert's concept "Hilbert Spaces". Why did those things matter? 1. Hilbert was discussing infinities, and he was familiar with Cantor's work (and liked it) so he was using the modern definition of infinities (plural), where there are multiple trans-finites possible. His math was meant to cover all that, and the use of it for QM was a limited case. Some events can be described using a quite limited number of spatial dimensions and the results will be understandable with a little calculus or even trig if you just understand how to take the notation used and put it into actual equations. For example, there's a Hilbert for a three dimensional Euclidean space. Other (particularly in QM) events need many spatial dimensions to describe, sometimes even an infinite number. 2. The Ket part of the notation is about those vectors in a Hilbert space. You could represent that Euclidean space I mentioned with just a Ket notation, for example. Since Hilbert spaces can have either a finite number of dimensions or an infinite number, and can entail complex numbers, the Bra part becomes needed when the Hilbert space has complex numbers involved. The Bra and Ket together are a short way of writing a formula for a complex conjugate, and the whole can be expressed just as a complex number. These can be mathematically manipulated by partial differential equations. Any person with a fair knowledge of Linear Algebra can derive information from them, secure that the treatment is mathematically both complete and rigorous. That seems to be the real point of the notation, it gets results into a form where the rest of the process uses math that's regarded as rock solid. 3. Dirac invented other math for areas where the completeness condition of all Hilbert Spaces didn't apply. He called some of these "rigged Hilbert Spaces" . He proved people could use the Bra-Ket system and similar operations to describe those QM events, but the results won't technically be proven to be correct in an absolute mathematical sense. many working physicists do it anyway. 4. People tend to refer to Feynman for a good source to understand all this and not mention von Neumann as much, but it looks like von N. was historically quite involved in it. Maybe some of what he wrote on QM could clarify Bra-Ket notation better for you than the standard modern textbooks.
I don't own an E-book reader. I do read e-books on my laptops, in fact I have an old IBM Thinkpad R32 that has 'only' 512 Meg RAM and if it wasn't for comparatively lightweight OS's like Kubuntu all it could probably still do is e-books. I may well switch to a tablet PC, but I would much prefer to go through the comparatively minor hassle of making that old Thinkpad run XFCE in a really lightweight distro like Puppy Linux if Kubuntu gets to big for the old laptop, long before I would buy any of the proprietary format e-book readers. The notebook has lasted about 9 years (I don't remember when I bought it, but C-Net reviewed one in Oct of 2002). Not that I'm planning on keeping it another nine, but I would estimate that the chance this old notebook will be around in another nine years and some form of Linux will still run on it are both far, far higher than the chance I'd be able to legally access all proprietary format e-book files I might purchase by then if I started buying in some proprietary format or other now.
E book readers are cheap because some prices are hidden - people will pay several prices later, just like they pay the full price for their low cost printer when they have to buy ink cartridges. One of those real prices will be re-buying and re-buying any media they want to keep longterm. I'm perfectly cool however if KDE ignores tablets. Most of what I would want one to do doesn't take a really modern operating system at all. A tablet has more than niche purposes, but it doesn't substitute for everything I would do with a laptop, let alone a desktop. Now best of all worlds might be KDE doing a bang up job of supporting things big enough to include keyboards and still finding a way to deal with tablet environments as well, but I will gladly praise KDE if the deliver far less than that, just so they don't forget desktop machines.
One suggestion for the "non-farming areas of the (American) Midwest": back when the white people first came to that region, the average acre of Kansas flatland had over 1,000 different plant species covering it. Some tended to dominate in dry or hot cycles, others when it got rainier or cooler. Once whole counties were planted in wheat or sorghum or whatever, the average count per acre was only around six plant species. (I'm getting this from Aldo Leopold's "A Sand County Almanac" if anyone wants to check my references). The Midwest will survive whatever happens better if we work at restoring that diversity everywhere we aren't actually farming more wheat. That's a dirt cheap (pun admittedly intended - I'm bad that way) step towards preventing future dust-bowls, a real, increasing risk if human accelerated global warming is real. It's one of the really cost effective forms of mitigating climate shifts, and a lot more ecologically sound than planting bamboo where it's never grown before. Admittedly, the mix that was typical across the prairies isn't the most optimal for rapidly using up CO2, but it will beat wheat and hardy weeds, and strongly beat that land becoming barren dust-bowl, and appears to have absolutely none of the risks of introducing non-native species. Note: there are a few small bamboos actually occasionally found on stream-courses in the region. I'm assuming you were referring to one of the large, tropical Asiatic bamboos that has been shown to grow very rapidly and sequester a lot of carbon, and not these smallish native species that do show up on the list of Midwest natives.
There is no Null hypothesis here. Here's why. 1 lets construct a very simple two axis grid. The rows will be 1. We take no steps against man made climate change, and 2. We take steps against it. The columns will be A. There really is no man made climate change, and B. there is man made climate change. (Now let's point out there are no excluded middles there - there's no third option, no people are creating climate change but they're also simultaneously not creating it. If you think I'm oversimplifying this, show me those third alternatives. Please take your time to be sure that the model I'm proposing here may be very simple, but it covers the domain. Note that more questions, such as "Well, which steps do you think we should or shouldn't take?", all come after this first set of questions are addressed, not before - It's not logical, for example, to say I won't agree any steps at all are needed until you tell me just what every step should be first.). 2. nature decides the column question - climate change is either man influenced or it isn't, and even if 99% of people out there took one side or the other, this wouldn't change the fact. We can't control now whether something we have already done has had an effect, either. (unless you have a time machine). 3. The only choice we can make therefore affects only the rows. So what are the consequences in our four boxes? 1A: We take no steps, but there is no man made climate change, so everything turns out OK (or as OK as nature allows). We don't spend any money, so there's no downside at all. 2A. We take steps, and it turns out there is no man made climate change. Everything turns out fairly OK, but we waste money, maybe lots of it, and maybe there's something really bad about that, like it plunges us into a second great depression and we have 35% unemployment, and the US can't export wheat and a third of Sub-Saharan Africa starves. That's a typical worst case proposed for 2A by people who are against spending money on fighting man made climate change. 1B. We take no steps and there is man made climate change progressing. Worst case here might even be human extinction, but let's pick a more limited downside - we get enough sea level rise to have to evacuate the world's coastal cities, Vanuatu goes completely under, etc. That would doubtless also cause an economic crisis at least as great as the worst case for 2A, plus some. It's also going to make some species extinct. The last depression was something we eventually fixed in a couple of decades, but many of the economic problems in this case are much more likely to take a hundred years or so to overcome, with all the extra human misery that implies. 2B We take steps, and it turns out they really were needed. Everything turns out fairly OK - again it cost us some money so that's not good, but the money was needed, for all other options would have been worse.
You're arguing over whether A or B is the right hypothesis, which means you have picked alternative A from the column. But, you don't get to pick that one, nature does. Your choice, and mine and every other human's, is supposed to be on the row. Unless you really think there is a 100% chance of all correct decisions lying in column A, and an absolutely 0% chance that we need to even consider column B further, that's the fallacy in framing the argument on the part we can't control instead of the part we can.
To put it another way, try constructing a similar matrix about life insurance. You can choose to buy life insurance or not, but you don't get to decide whether you will be involved in a fatal accident or not. The 'null' hypothesis there might be that you have the same odds as anyone else, and an alternative hypothesis might be that your chances of dying young are higher because of a family predisposition. But the chances are not 100% to 0%, and whatever they are, you can't control them. Alternately, the null hypothesis might be argued to be that you will live to a ripe old age, as the majori
I must disagree, if only slightly, Iain Banks hasn't written a lot of SF, although his novel "Transition" has some elements of Quantum Mechanics 'many worlds' model as a major element. Arguably, that's actually more science in the fiction than most SF, but it's still generally considered a mainstream novel. Iain M. Banks, on the other hand, as the author of the 'Culture' series, well deserves a Hugo or two. I can see how its possible to get the two mixed, and fortunately, both of them live quite near each other in Fife, Scotland, and I'm told they both will make sure mail sent to either will be read by the appropriate one.
I saw Inception and thought it was OK, but as i left the theater, I noticed some people debating over just what was real and what wasn't like they had trouble following it. There weren't a whole lot of them in the time it took to get to the car, but I sort of paid attention to a few conversations and realized some people were stymied by it. When Suckerpuch came out, I decided to do a little deliberate observation, and hang around the theater afterwards and listen to the audience. Since I usually see movies with my ex-wife along (it's complicated), I enlisted her to help.
I actually saw Suckerpunch with the Ex the first showing of the day it came out. It's essentially plotted as a two-step. The story starts in reality, goes one level deep into a characters mind, then two, and then back and forth between levels one and two until the end, when it all comes back to reality level. Every time the story goes to level 2, it's framed by having the Angel character start dancing, and when it comes back to level 1, she's finished her dance.
Inception is a little more complex than that, not using the same clues to telegraph the oncoming level changes every time, and not having the time between changes cycle so regularly. If you haven't seen it, imagine the way perceptual levels change in the Matrix for complexity. Suckerpuch is simpler - I'm pretty sure the film was written down a bit by people who looked at how Inception was received, to keep the people who had trouble with inception from having the same problem again. Say what you will about the merits or lack of either film, but when we left Suckerpunch, there were a dozen question and answer sessions breaking out among the patrons, over what happened "for real" and "in just her head", and it was obvious in several of those that nobody in that group had managed to follow the framework.at all. Half the viewers seemed to be very disappointed that the evil stepfather would 'obviously' get away with everything.
You really can't tell from the popular reaction whether Suckerpuch is a good film or not - in just the same way as you wouldn't be able to tell if Peter Pan was a good film or not, if a chunk of the people discussing it thought that the Indians were leftover indian spirits from Poltergeist, and some few more were going on and on about how Alec Guiness had really gained weight. I'm not saying it's a hidden gem, just that there's a lot of people who saw it and decided it made no sense, but should have realized they were incapable of making sense of pretty much everything that wasn't pre-digested for them.
As she who still must be obeyed puts it "It's rare that a single film convinces you that more voter apathy would be a good thing."
Slashdot Mirror
...Facebook.
There is a lot of data that's exceptionally valuable for marketing, which companies can only get if they do tracking way beyond visits to their own web pages. That added value is perceived by advertising execs as literally enormous, so it should be assumed anyone who can implement this thinks they have a strong incentive. It's like, how common would bank robbery be if the penalty was 10 days in jail and the potential reward was a million dollars?
To see how, lets take an example. A company may pay a few cents per for a list of valid e-mail addresses. Now, link one of those addresses to the information that the possessor of that address definitely orders things on-line, and it's a little more valuable. Add that the things ordered on-line include prescription drugs, and it's worth more. Now how much is it worth linked to the information that the person is not yet ordering any antidepressants, but has just spent several hours searching several terms relating to depression? A list of e-mail addresses that fit those criteria is generally estimated to be worth about $ 250 US per entry by the pharmaceutical firms. With the right combinations of information sources, essentially a matter of asking the right questions, this sort of data is at least perceived to be the holy grail of targeted advertising. Personally, I assume that any for-profit that isn't looking for this sort of data is only avoiding it because they doubt the American Advertising Council's estimates of how much business it can drive, and not because they have a moral objection. Yeah, maybe some of them are genuinely being ethical, but I recognize that the sheer scope of the temptation is bound to make many of them cross the line, and it's time to be a little paranoid about privacy.
Right, there's a big difference between an artist saying "My talent and hard work took these ideas to the level of a finished creation.", and "I'm so much a self made man, I invented a time machine and an alphabet so i could teach my elementary school teachers what to teach me." . A little recognition that none of us see farther except by standing on the shoulders of giants is necessary.
You could compare using a CGI Yoda in some portions that were originally puppet Yoda to your example, but what about such decisions as not having Han shoot first? That's different, in that there was no change in technology at all, 'just' a change in the character. What new technology allowed Lucas to capture Greedo shooting first when it somehow couldn't be done that way originally? If you're going to compare this to a program, what about rewriting, say, an Ultima game so that which decisions lead to which endings is different?
There were several points in my military career where I was signed for over a billion dollars in mobile property, and a few where the amount was over three billion, a lot of it in the form of already loaded full cargo trucks with crates of helicopter turbine engines and such, that could easily have been stolen if I'd screwed up. When I left the service, I had to pay 2 dollars for a missing laundry bag, so i can't quite say I've never lost anything for anyone I worked for. But still, with a record like that, why weren't some large companies competing to offer me a multiple six digit salary to do the same sort of thing this idiot was doing, the day I became a civilian again?
The standard Drake equation isn't really very useful, and most Xenobiologists don't take it as a serious tool to describe their subject.
1. When people first started putting methane and ammonia in flasks and running lightning through them (the Miller–Urey experiment in 1952), some scientists actually applied that to the Drake equation soon after, and said that they could now put a number on the Drake term for how likely life was to begin. The experiment implied a very high number, effectively demonstrating that that part was inevitable, so the final answer to the Drake equation now depended more on how likely simple life was to evolve into complex organisms. Then it turned out that it was easier than once thought to get amino acids from simple reactions and conditions such as the early Earth probably had, but it appeared much harder than those same scientists thought to get from amino acids to the forming of properly folded proteins, and the overall odds had not changed nearly as much as was first thought. In terms of the Drake equations, this would mean there were really two terms needed for what Drake counted as one step. This would be one term for the simplest precursors of life developing, and a second for the more complex ones,.
2. In much the same way, scientists have proposed such ideas as a large moon being necessary to reduce the amount of atmosphere and surface oceans (so there is at least some land, and land dwelling life can evolve), or a semi-molten iron core so life leaving the oceans is protected by a strong magnetic field, or continental drift mechanics so that some parts of the surface build mountains (and that way the surface never gets flat enough to be all covered with oceans at the same time), or various other such things. Practically any one of these might be important enough to be a whole factor in the real Drake equation, or it might turn out that life easily finds ways around some of these apparent bottlenecks. Until we actually see some other worlds with life, we have no way of knowing just what terms to put into the equation, which makes trying to assign actual numbers pretty futile.
So, assume I'm a not-yet-published but aspiring author, and my claim of fair use is that it's 'scholarship', as I'm planning to write a textbook. Alternately, I'm planning to write a more popular work, say a novel, and so my fair use falls under 'research'. You're claiming, if I understand you, that if I got a cease and desist notice and responded to it with a letter making such a fair use claim, that would settle it to where both I and a normal rights holder would feel it was resolved? I'm assuming you don't mean your statement to include clearly unreasonable litigation, where one party sues or ignores claims even though the law shows they have no reasonable or realistic chance of winning.
I think the example I started with is enough to throw doubt on that claim. Wouldn't a not-yet-published author run into problems that would be easy enough to work around if they could only cite a history as a successful writer? I'm pretty sure that a well known author (say Slashdot's own Steven King), could ask for copies of a great many things saying that they might be relevant to a book he was simply considering writing, and still have such a claim be respected, but what about the first timer?
More generally, the whole structure you've cited reads to me more like a big reason to litigate - I cites some examples of fair use, but saying 'purposes such as' certainly sounds like it's not listing all of the possible purposes, and in only one case (teaching), does it bother to give any more guidance. That's far from eliminating sources of legal conflict.
Here's a real world example. In scholarly works analyzing H. P. Lovecraft's works, the question of HPL's unfortunate racism comes up. (Well, really, there's no question he was a racist, but whether he acted towards individuals he met in person in the same way as he wrote about how to deal with them collectively is more debatable - HPL had a tendency to meet individual people and pronounce them afterwards to friends as much better than their racial origins would indicate).
Now, to analyze his works with that factor included means comparing multiple editions of printed works, plus what's obtainable of his manuscripts (not always complete). If a scholar of Lovecraft Studies wants to know how much of the descriptions of the 'starfish headed old ones' in HPL's "At the Mountains of Madness" as 'human' or 'having human like virtues' is actually Lovecraft and how much comes from John W. Campbell Jr. , they may need copies of both various printings of the novella, and of both HPL's and Campbell's other writings.
It might even be advisable to go as far afield as reading some of Campbell's "Don A Stuart" stories such as "Twilight" to see if some similar phrases pop up there.
Now, how much of that is fair use for a scholarly article in Lovecraft Studies on HPLs personal definition of humanity?
I hate to reply to my own post, but there's a right parenthesis in that first paragraph that should have been right after '2 parts of 6 still in existence', not way at the end of the paragraph.
A great example. The BBC chose to copy over old 1/2 inch tapes, and possibly misfiled some episodes or just assumed that once the show was aired, that would be the end of it. Other examples from that era are common - for just two, there's the first Quatermass TV series (now public domain, but with only 2 parts of 6 still in existence, and Tales from Tomorrow, with about 43 of the original 85 episodes still in existence. (Here's a link for a legal download).):
http://www.archive.org/search.php?query=subject%3A%22Tales%20Of%20Tomorrow%22
What do examples like these prove?
(I've picked examples from both sides of the Atlantic, just so this doesn't appear to somehow be just an English problem, and people don't draw the (in my opinion, unproved) conclusion that the BBC was less rational than US broadcasters).
1. Copyrights had already been extended from early US and British laws by the times that these shows aired, but that didn't give the owners the incentive to hold onto them that was one of the purposes of extending those copyrights.
2. Corporate owners (at least), lost potential profits in the future by their own shortsightedness, which has nothing to do with how much copyright protection they got. Of course, that short sightedness is simply human - who would have predicted all the advances in technology that would create any potential demand for these older works 50 to 60 years later.
4. But this also means that the current crop of rights holders can't predict what the situation will be as they approach 2100 or so. Holding onto a right that you might benefit from in over 100 years is a high odds gamble. If there are any downsides, such as having to pay for archiving old records properly so they will last that long, that gamble now has a downside. This is why some large rights holders have been agitating the US government to pick up the cost of them proceeding in civil courts against copyright violators, and why they are trying to move more and more violations into the criminal law category where the state pays from taxes.
What about transferring assets split between several trolls, so the downside is limited? Then if one suit is successful, the next troll gets in line, or transfers more assets to the first for a subsequent round of suits, or the first hangs onto a good share of the rewards as a war chest for more lawsuits and stops depending on new capital support from the original company for a time, and various permutations on these. It shouldn't be feasible, but that's because the right to sue is by itself not worth anything in isolation, nor grounds by itself for claiming standing. Owning even limited shares in some other rights, with a limited right of control, might still allow claiming standing.
Yeah, this is non-lawyer speculation and worth every penny of free. I base it on two points:
1. Lawsuits are generally against the entity with the most money, regardless of whether that entity has the majority or largest single share of the responsibility for damages. Does that imply that lawsuits can be from a party with little to gain directly because they will have to pass most of the reward for success on to a parent rights holder, just so they have something to gain?
2. Unlike trademarks, copyrights and patents don't have to be defended. One party holding a small share can elect to 'aggressively pursue its rights' without others having to.
So the question becomes: Is it possible to so encumber a transfer of rights that it has little or no value if exercised in any way except suing, while still giving the appearance that the transferee gains legal standing?
"As if there were only one Human Nature..." - Carl Sagan.
There's no way to implement a theoretical free market either. Once that theory hits the real world, the Second Law of Thermodynamics (Shannon version), screws it up.
Guess what - the second law allows fewer exceptions than human nature. People who think the Second Law will bend for them are even more out of touch with reality than people who think human nature won't oppose their system.
Look, I'm sure this seems logical to you. Take it from a former Armored Cav officer, what you are describing makes about as much sense as running under a Saturn 5 and lighting the fuse with a Bic to send it to the Moon. The army did threat analysis based on video footage of enemies that actually tried to use visible search lights in various battles from just post Vietnam to Desert Storm, and the number they came up with is that once night vision came in, it deceased the average life span of the enemy to about 0.3 seconds (yes, 3/10ths of a second, and no, I'm not exaggerating). It's actually been doctrine for most modern militarys since WW2, long before light amplification gear became standard, never, ever do this stupid thing in armor vrs. armor combat, and Night Vision didn't make it more feasible but much, much less.
US Main Battle Tanks have a working range of around four miles. Fire up a searchlight that can even reach that far and it will take several seconds to warm up, then you need time to search with it. The user, and every other armored vehicle it is in a group with, will all die before they see what is killing them.
By 95, at least, it was possible to edit a copy of explorer.exe, and since you couldn't delete the copy in the windows directory while it was running, you could instead save your edited version into the root directory where it would be found first next time you booted. I remember using one of the common 16 bit editors of that time and replacing the BMP that made the left border on the start menu with a custom one. Of course, if you screwed up someting, you had to boot to dos to delete your version. Some of us learned to change shell to something like lightstep so we could more safely hack explorer. That's far from the dawn of time still... I can't possibly be .... Oh Hell, you kids get off of my lawn!
First off, all of the Lagrange points are further from Earth than the moon.
Not quite.
Notice this diagram of the earth-moon system at:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lagrangian_point
Points L3, L4 and L5 are all at very nearly the same distance as the moon. L1 is actually closer. Only L2 is significantly farther away. Technically, the more the biggest body is larger than the secondary, the more the 3, 4, and 5 points will tend to fall slightly beyond the secondary's orbit, So for the Sun-Earth system, the L3, L4, and L5 are slightly outside Earth's orbit. But, the Earth is not as much proportionately greater than the Moon, and the 'points' are actually larger than pure points so for the Earth-Moon system, L#, 4, and 5 fall partly inside and partly outside the Moon's orbit.
You are, however, quite right that putting an object at a Lagrangian point doesn't keep it there. The range of velocities that are even semi-stable is pretty narrow, and for points L1, L2, and L3, the stability is in a plane perpendicular to the two major bodies, and there really is no gain in stability along the line between them, Every time we have parked a satellite at one of these points, it has been by using station keeping thrusters to give it an occasional nudge to keep it there. It's cheap on thrust, but not free. You're also right that the points have naturally attracted stuff already and tend to be cluttered spots. I don't know if that really affects costs or risks - there have been solar observation satellite missions to the sun-earth Lagrangian points, where the same problems should apply, and these have worked well so far.
Because the orbits of the various major bodies are elliptical, the Lagrangians aren't really points. If there weren't other planets and such around, the orbits would be roughly kidney bean shaped, but since there are, objects tend to be pretty close to stable in complex orbits called Lissajous orbits. Making those fairly large may be a way to avoid some debris.
Isn't it the whole point of Lagrange points, that things that are going approximately the velocity to stay there tend to settle naturally into the exact velocity range needed to stay there? Why do you think there are those two clusters of Trojan asteroids leading and trailing Jupiter? Did they pass through those points and somebody fly up and hit them with the ole' magical fairy fart to keep them from skipping right on through?
It's obvious (always assuming that what the article says is substantially correct), that Mr. Doxer had what the law calls a propensity to commit the first crime from before law enforcement entered the picture. The FBI didn't have to implant any ideas in his head for that to happen. But, what about the rest of the crimes? This guy was apparently looking for a contact with the Israeli government from the start. Maybe that's so he could get info on the estranged wife and child, but it also arguably could be because he figured that Israel would be unlikely to do any real damage to the US with the info. Maybe he genuinely thought that this would count as only corporate espionage, and not spill over into hurting the US economy or US interests as a whole. So the government should expect to have to prove for each charge after the first that they didn't talk Mr. Daxer into going down paths he would have never thought of on his own and might have been strongly reluctant to pursue unless they pressured him and persuaded him. I don't think there was any entrapment here, but for at least some of the charges or claims of aggravating circumstances, it is certainly possible. I guess we will have to see if his lawyer even raises that as a possible defense, and if so, whether the evidence the public and jury sees is all heavily redacted transcripts or something such as that, and even then, reasonable people may disagree over the outcome, whatever it is.
OK, I'm picturing Keanu Reeves saying "Moles. Lots of Moles." and then all these shelves full of blind burrowing rodents come flying past. You did that - hope you're happy now.
That's a market assumption for regular economics, You're basically saying that the customer can always enforce their determination. Macro-economics is, in some small part, just about what happens when they customer decision causes them to lose power to further enforce the market.
Let's take a largeish example. Suppose a lot of customers think it's worth $26.37 for a copy of the 'Professor Y and the Y-men fight Gyroscopo' DVD. The company bet that it would sell 40 million copies in the first pressing, and it does (Whooo!!!) Year after year, the customers think, in large enough numbers, that the series is worth purchasing. Sales stay good. But, an increasing number of those customers are stretching their credit cards to the max, and getting into financial modes where they really need to go back and put more money aside for a rainy day, pay the car insurance, put aside more for little Billy's college, and so on. Eventually, a bunch of customers simply don't have the extra in their entertainment budget to buy Y Men 27 by the 40 millions. These people may still feel 26 dollars is a fair price, but they aren't customers any more, because they just don't have 26 dollars in the entertainment part of their budget. To make them customers again, the DVD maker needs to charge only $17.28, at which point the customers may be thinking, "This is a real bargain, way better than fair. With food prices skyrocketing and gas totally beyond my social class, this is a real steal!!", but it's still what the company has to charge if they want to get 40 million sales again. The customer can think that the high food and gasoline prices are what's unfair, but they are practical necessities. The slack is in things that are optional. The customer has an opinion about what's fair, but it may not match the market forces - when it doesn't, the market forces compel the customer's vote even by, if necessary, stopping him from being a customer at all.
Apple could be overcharging, if the people who think the Apple premium is fair find themselves faced with other financial choices that take them out of potential customer status, and the people who buy the cheaper options increasingly attribute still having discretionary cash available to having made 'smarter' choices in the past.
I didn't follow Bra-Ket notation at all until I read up on the history of it. For me, it helped a lot to know Dirac invented it, and that it was needed because it applied to Hilbert spaces, and that Hilbert developed that concept a few years before Dirac got started, and that John von Neumann was the guy who actually named Hilbert's concept "Hilbert Spaces". Why did those things matter?
1. Hilbert was discussing infinities, and he was familiar with Cantor's work (and liked it) so he was using the modern definition of infinities (plural), where there are multiple trans-finites possible. His math was meant to cover all that, and the use of it for QM was a limited case. Some events can be described using a quite limited number of spatial dimensions and the results will be understandable with a little calculus or even trig if you just understand how to take the notation used and put it into actual equations. For example, there's a Hilbert for a three dimensional Euclidean space. Other (particularly in QM) events need many spatial dimensions to describe, sometimes even an infinite number.
2. The Ket part of the notation is about those vectors in a Hilbert space. You could represent that Euclidean space I mentioned with just a Ket notation, for example. Since Hilbert spaces can have either a finite number of dimensions or an infinite number, and can entail complex numbers, the Bra part becomes needed when the Hilbert space has complex numbers involved. The Bra and Ket together are a short way of writing a formula for a complex conjugate, and the whole can be expressed just as a complex number. These can be mathematically manipulated by partial differential equations. Any person with a fair knowledge of Linear Algebra can derive information from them, secure that the treatment is mathematically both complete and rigorous. That seems to be the real point of the notation, it gets results into a form where the rest of the process uses math that's regarded as rock solid.
3. Dirac invented other math for areas where the completeness condition of all Hilbert Spaces didn't apply. He called some of these "rigged Hilbert Spaces" . He proved people could use the Bra-Ket system and similar operations to describe those QM events, but the results won't technically be proven to be correct in an absolute mathematical sense. many working physicists do it anyway.
4. People tend to refer to Feynman for a good source to understand all this and not mention von Neumann as much, but it looks like von N. was historically quite involved in it. Maybe some of what he wrote on QM could clarify Bra-Ket notation better for you than the standard modern textbooks.
I don't own an E-book reader. I do read e-books on my laptops, in fact I have an old IBM Thinkpad R32 that has 'only' 512 Meg RAM and if it wasn't for comparatively lightweight OS's like Kubuntu all it could probably still do is e-books. I may well switch to a tablet PC, but I would much prefer to go through the comparatively minor hassle of making that old Thinkpad run XFCE in a really lightweight distro like Puppy Linux if Kubuntu gets to big for the old laptop, long before I would buy any of the proprietary format e-book readers. The notebook has lasted about 9 years (I don't remember when I bought it, but C-Net reviewed one in Oct of 2002). Not that I'm planning on keeping it another nine, but I would estimate that the chance this old notebook will be around in another nine years and some form of Linux will still run on it are both far, far higher than the chance I'd be able to legally access all proprietary format e-book files I might purchase by then if I started buying in some proprietary format or other now.
E book readers are cheap because some prices are hidden - people will pay several prices later, just like they pay the full price for their low cost printer when they have to buy ink cartridges. One of those real prices will be re-buying and re-buying any media they want to keep longterm.
I'm perfectly cool however if KDE ignores tablets. Most of what I would want one to do doesn't take a really modern operating system at all. A tablet has more than niche purposes, but it doesn't substitute for everything I would do with a laptop, let alone a desktop. Now best of all worlds might be KDE doing a bang up job of supporting things big enough to include keyboards and still finding a way to deal with tablet environments as well, but I will gladly praise KDE if the deliver far less than that, just so they don't forget desktop machines.
One suggestion for the "non-farming areas of the (American) Midwest": back when the white people first came to that region, the average acre of Kansas flatland had over 1,000 different plant species covering it. Some tended to dominate in dry or hot cycles, others when it got rainier or cooler. Once whole counties were planted in wheat or sorghum or whatever, the average count per acre was only around six plant species. (I'm getting this from Aldo Leopold's "A Sand County Almanac" if anyone wants to check my references). The Midwest will survive whatever happens better if we work at restoring that diversity everywhere we aren't actually farming more wheat. That's a dirt cheap (pun admittedly intended - I'm bad that way) step towards preventing future dust-bowls, a real, increasing risk if human accelerated global warming is real. It's one of the really cost effective forms of mitigating climate shifts, and a lot more ecologically sound than planting bamboo where it's never grown before. Admittedly, the mix that was typical across the prairies isn't the most optimal for rapidly using up CO2, but it will beat wheat and hardy weeds, and strongly beat that land becoming barren dust-bowl, and appears to have absolutely none of the risks of introducing non-native species.
Note: there are a few small bamboos actually occasionally found on stream-courses in the region. I'm assuming you were referring to one of the large, tropical Asiatic bamboos that has been shown to grow very rapidly and sequester a lot of carbon, and not these smallish native species that do show up on the list of Midwest natives.
There is no Null hypothesis here. Here's why.
1 lets construct a very simple two axis grid. The rows will be 1. We take no steps against man made climate change, and 2. We take steps against it.
The columns will be A. There really is no man made climate change, and B. there is man made climate change.
(Now let's point out there are no excluded middles there - there's no third option, no people are creating climate change but they're also simultaneously not creating it. If you think I'm oversimplifying this, show me those third alternatives. Please take your time to be sure that the model I'm proposing here may be very simple, but it covers the domain. Note that more questions, such as "Well, which steps do you think we should or shouldn't take?", all come after this first set of questions are addressed, not before - It's not logical, for example, to say I won't agree any steps at all are needed until you tell me just what every step should be first.).
2. nature decides the column question - climate change is either man influenced or it isn't, and even if 99% of people out there took one side or the other, this wouldn't change the fact. We can't control now whether something we have already done has had an effect, either. (unless you have a time machine).
3. The only choice we can make therefore affects only the rows.
So what are the consequences in our four boxes?
1A: We take no steps, but there is no man made climate change, so everything turns out OK (or as OK as nature allows). We don't spend any money, so there's no downside at all.
2A. We take steps, and it turns out there is no man made climate change. Everything turns out fairly OK, but we waste money, maybe lots of it, and maybe there's something really bad about that, like it plunges us into a second great depression and we have 35% unemployment, and the US can't export wheat and a third of Sub-Saharan Africa starves. That's a typical worst case proposed for 2A by people who are against spending money on fighting man made climate change.
1B. We take no steps and there is man made climate change progressing. Worst case here might even be human extinction, but let's pick a more limited downside - we get enough sea level rise to have to evacuate the world's coastal cities, Vanuatu goes completely under, etc. That would doubtless also cause an economic crisis at least as great as the worst case for 2A, plus some. It's also going to make some species extinct. The last depression was something we eventually fixed in a couple of decades, but many of the economic problems in this case are much more likely to take a hundred years or so to overcome, with all the extra human misery that implies.
2B We take steps, and it turns out they really were needed. Everything turns out fairly OK - again it cost us some money so that's not good, but the money was needed, for all other options would have been worse.
You're arguing over whether A or B is the right hypothesis, which means you have picked alternative A from the column. But, you don't get to pick that one, nature does. Your choice, and mine and every other human's, is supposed to be on the row. Unless you really think there is a 100% chance of all correct decisions lying in column A, and an absolutely 0% chance that we need to even consider column B further, that's the fallacy in framing the argument on the part we can't control instead of the part we can.
To put it another way, try constructing a similar matrix about life insurance. You can choose to buy life insurance or not, but you don't get to decide whether you will be involved in a fatal accident or not. The 'null' hypothesis there might be that you have the same odds as anyone else, and an alternative hypothesis might be that your chances of dying young are higher because of a family predisposition. But the chances are not 100% to 0%, and whatever they are, you can't control them. Alternately, the null hypothesis might be argued to be that you will live to a ripe old age, as the majori
I must disagree, if only slightly, Iain Banks hasn't written a lot of SF, although his novel "Transition" has some elements of Quantum Mechanics 'many worlds' model as a major element. Arguably, that's actually more science in the fiction than most SF, but it's still generally considered a mainstream novel. Iain M. Banks, on the other hand, as the author of the 'Culture' series, well deserves a Hugo or two. I can see how its possible to get the two mixed, and fortunately, both of them live quite near each other in Fife, Scotland, and I'm told they both will make sure mail sent to either will be read by the appropriate one.
I saw Inception and thought it was OK, but as i left the theater, I noticed some people debating over just what was real and what wasn't like they had trouble following it. There weren't a whole lot of them in the time it took to get to the car, but I sort of paid attention to a few conversations and realized some people were stymied by it. When Suckerpuch came out, I decided to do a little deliberate observation, and hang around the theater afterwards and listen to the audience. Since I usually see movies with my ex-wife along (it's complicated), I enlisted her to help.
I actually saw Suckerpunch with the Ex the first showing of the day it came out. It's essentially plotted as a two-step. The story starts in reality, goes one level deep into a characters mind, then two, and then back and forth between levels one and two until the end, when it all comes back to reality level. Every time the story goes to level 2, it's framed by having the Angel character start dancing, and when it comes back to level 1, she's finished her dance.
Inception is a little more complex than that, not using the same clues to telegraph the oncoming level changes every time, and not having the time between changes cycle so regularly. If you haven't seen it, imagine the way perceptual levels change in the Matrix for complexity. Suckerpuch is simpler - I'm pretty sure the film was written down a bit by people who looked at how Inception was received, to keep the people who had trouble with inception from having the same problem again. Say what you will about the merits or lack of either film, but when we left Suckerpunch, there were a dozen question and answer sessions breaking out among the patrons, over what happened "for real" and "in just her head", and it was obvious in several of those that nobody in that group had managed to follow the framework.at all. Half the viewers seemed to be very disappointed that the evil stepfather would 'obviously' get away with everything.
You really can't tell from the popular reaction whether Suckerpuch is a good film or not - in just the same way as you wouldn't be able to tell if Peter Pan was a good film or not, if a chunk of the people discussing it thought that the Indians were leftover indian spirits from Poltergeist, and some few more were going on and on about how Alec Guiness had really gained weight. I'm not saying it's a hidden gem, just that there's a lot of people who saw it and decided it made no sense, but should have realized they were incapable of making sense of pretty much everything that wasn't pre-digested for them.
As she who still must be obeyed puts it "It's rare that a single film convinces you that more voter apathy would be a good thing."
What's sad here is the only question I have about what you wrote is "M.?"