but at a time when unemployment is at an all-time high, it seems reasonable to use manpower to solve problems.
Why do you think that Americans want to go back to tilling the soil? We've left it to immigrants, who feel forced by poverty to fruit-pick and such, but even they don't wish such a fate for their children. Sorry, but backbreaking work in the fields is not seen as progress by any developing or developed country. If farming with modern techniques is an evil, it's still preferable to mankind having to do more work for less benefit. Much of my family right now is dealing with unemployment, but there are certain jobs they will not stoop to because it contradicts everything that was promised about life in today's high-tech world getting steadily more leisurely.
Meanwhile, the contradictorily named "green revolution" methods... leads to less-nutritious food overall.
The scientific community overwhelmingly denies that your precious organic food is any more nutritious. But I'm sure people just looking at the plain-as-day lab results are all puppets of a shadowy corporate conspiracy, eh?
I thought I had a decent understanding of the three legal spheres grouped under "Intellectual Property": patents, copyright and trademarks. But I don't understand why copyright is involved in this specific case. Wouldn't Omega's logo stamped on products be something protected as a trademark, not as a copyrighted work?
In most developed countries, state arts ministries support composers out of public revenue.
Oh, I'm sure there will be cries of "taxation is theft" and so forth from the crowd here, but public approval of such subsidy is quite high in most countries. I've never seen a single French political party want to shut down IRCAM, and in Finland where I presently live, even if people don't personally like art music, they nonetheless believe strongly that its creation should be supported from their taxes.
That already exists in most developed countries. The surge in the new music scene in Finland, for example, to the point where this tiny country stands large on the European and international scene, is due in large part to the Finnish government generously providing grants for composers to do nothing but write music full-time. Nearly all decent non-Hollywood films were produced with some level of state support. That's true not only for Europe, but to a surprising degree even for the United States (watch the credits on Jarmusch films, for example, and note the acknowledgements for help given by local and state governments).
Decimate us, huh? Thank goodness! You see, Decimate literally means "to reduce by ten percent", or "to kill one of every ten".
Not necessarily. Merriam-Webster, for example, gives as its third definition:
3 a : to reduce drastically especially in number "cholera decimated the population" b : to cause great destruction or harm to "firebombs decimated the city" "an industry decimated by recession"
The meaning of words may change over time. It's a natural process. This particular semantic shift is already decades old, if not older. To rely synchronically on a fixed meaning of scientific terminology in a technical discussion is useful for ensuring communication. However, reproaching others for using a word in what has long been generally recommended as a valid usage, basing your argument only on its Latin etymology, just makes you look like a spiteful jerk.
The BBC News website had daily maps of the extent of the ash cloud. It wasn't a matter of "going around it", as flights to destinations other than Europe would not have flown through the part of the world anyway. However, the ash cloud did cover nearly all of Europe (Spain was a notable exception) and it was simply impossible to reach most destinations from any angle.
Because any water taken from the sea will be saltwater, and though you could replenish the Dead Sea to some degree with it, you can't irrigate your fields with seawater. I don't understand how you don't already know that.
Because a clunky web interface controlled by a single provider that has no killfiling, offline storage or syntax highlighting is clearly better than Usenet diversity.
What's left on Usenet is the "dark allies" of porn, spamming, and illegally shared copyrighted files.
The standard discussion forums for a great many tech communities are still on Usenet: comp.lang.python, comp.text.tex and gnu.emacs.gnus are just a few that I read daily. While you are right that the average subscriber doesn't know about Usenet these days, the Slashdot crowd ought to be upset that ISPs are dropping Usenet servers.
Coat checks are there to make money as a profitable venture or did you think it cost money to store a coat for an hour or two?
Coat checks at Nordic concert halls are free. You don't pay anything to have your coat and belonging taken and hung up by the people working there. However, they are paid a high wage for the time they are working, and the venue seems to hire more than strictly needed, so as I said, it's sometimes hard to believe that ticket sales cover much beyond the coat check.
Oh I know some symphonies struggle to make ends meet but that is due to the fact they they don't ever fill the huge opera style houses they are played in, costing a mint and not filling in at all. Festivals come and sell out the concert halls (new classic music, Jazz etc) and make a kick ass profit,
Why then do festival programmes list all of their sponsors, state and private, and say that without that support, the festival could not have happened? And as I said, even if you sell out concert halls like Finlandia Hall in Helsinki, that doesn't imply any kind of profit is made.
At least with filesharing technologies, the guy who is merely hoarding for the mere sake of it is still providing those files to others out there who have a real interest in it. On a P2P network I'm on, some people have accumulated music they never intend on listening to, but they keep it in their shares to help out those who are into it.
That the arts are necessary to a life worth living is a principle that goes all the way back to the Greeks (and probably beyond). Sure, someone downloading a Lady Gaga track is probably fulfilling a mere want, but fine music, film and books are all things that are needs and can be had from internet sources.
A large number of universities require students to live in on-campus housing for the first two years, pushing the percentage up towards 50% (though there's of course an exemption for people whose families are in the area).
It's not worth debating rationally with a lot of the posters in this thread. They are just trying to justify ripping off the work of others without giving anything back to those who did the hard work, so they don't have to feel guilty.
Whoever those posters are, I'm not among them. My point has been that in order to ensure that artists get some compensation for their work, we ought to increase public subsidy. I support politicians who want to maintain high funding levels for the arts, and I'm suspicious of anyone offering tax breaks because I know that artists will suffer.
It's not even about trying to rationalize filesharing. I rarely fileshare nowadays, because my country already provides all the arts I could ever ask for free, in the form of free subscriptions to music streaming services, libraries packed full of CDs and DVDs and occasionally free tickets for concerts.
The parent is right, if they can't play it live, or even press play on a laptop and dance around a bit, then they are not performers.
It's sad that your conception of music is so small that you think it necessarily has to involve "dancing around".
With tape pieces, it's hard to attract audiences to buy tickets and hear it out on the town when the work is invariable: there is no difference hearing it in a venue and hearing it from a disc or off downloaded files, especially now that many classic tape pieces are available in surround-sound DVD-Audio or SACD recordings and people can have an appropriate speaker setup in their living rooms. Again, the claim that all one has to do to support musicians is buy tickets just doesn't cover the whole diversity of the arts.
If there aren't enough people that like him to cover the costs of his work, then he sucks.
It's easy for a lot of people to claim that, but if suddenly all the works supported by public funding suddenly disappeared, then a lot of them without be happy, because public support of the arts goes into more than you suspect. Think about classic cinema, e.g. Bergman or Fellini: eventually these films attracted a following, but they couldn't have been made to begin with without some amount of support. Even in the US where subsidy isn't as popular, figures like Jim Jarmusch got support from local and state governments for their films. It's the same with music. Iannis Xenakis' tape piece Le legende d'Eer wowed audiences in Paris when it was premiered in a specially-built venue at the Pompidou Center, but Xenakis would have never been able to spend hundreds of hours in the studio putting it together without support. Finns recognize Jean Sibelius as a key part of their culture and support keeping his memory alive, but regularly performing his demanding works is hard to accomplish with subsidy.
Subsidies don't just go to hacks and charlatans with no following. They have resulted in a lot of the universally appreciated Western canon.
Exactly music is a service and should be treated as such, that's why I like to say I purchase tickets not albums.
And what about when the music cannot be taken around on tour? Not all music is performed by small bands that can go from venue to venue. There are for electronic works for tape created at places like IRCAM. Sometimes concerts are so costly to put on that ticket prices are unlikely to cover the expenses -- I've gone to hear music at concert halls where it's hard to believe that ticket sales even paid for the huge amount of people hired for the venue's coat check, let alone the orchestra.
Some amount of public subsidy and patronage is already present to support music that either can't be put on in concert, or isn't profitable to put on in concert. As it becomes increasingly less realistic for artists to expect payment for every copy made of their work, it's worth supporting public subsidy and patronage models at the same time as calling for people to buy tickets to see their favourite rock bands in concert.
Except that the GNU Hurd developers are no longer passionate about L4. From the Wikipedia article:
From 2004 onward, various efforts were launched to port the Hurd to more modern microkernels. The L4 microkernel was the original choice in 2004, but progress slowed to a halt. Nevertheless, during 2005, Hurd developer Neal Walfield finished the initial memory management framework for the L4/Hurd port, and Marcus Brinkmann ported essential parts of glibc; namely, getting the process startup code working, allowing programs to run, thus allowing the first user programs (trivial ones such as the hello world program in C) to run. Since 2005, most of the developers' time has gone into thinking about Coyotos (EROS successor). In 2006, Marcus Brinkmann and associates met with Jonathan Shapiro (a primary architect of the Coyotos Operating System) to aid in and discuss the use of the Coyotos kernel for GNU/Hurd. These discussions continued into 2007, but progress was slow. In April 2009, Shapiro announced that work on the Coyotos project had ceased. As of 2008, Neal Walfield is working on the Viengoos microkernel as an alternative to GNU Mach or L4.
On one hand, if Linux is seen as old school and people are choosing to develop projects that offer some new technical innovation, than it is a pity that HURD isn't getting more lovin'. On the other hand, I've always been turned off to getting involved in HURD because the current lead developers don't seem to have any direction. How many times have they changed the microkernel since doing away with GNU Mach?
"Astrophysicists have found that when a supermassive black hole quickly devours gas and dust, it can generate enough radiation to abort all the embryonic stars in the surrounding galaxy.
This reminds me of Larry Niven's short story "At the Core" (collected in Crashlander) where an expedition to the galactic core finds that the density of stars in the area causes a chain of supernovas, whose radiation will eventually sweep over the outskirts of the galaxy and destroy life on Earth. Now that galactic cores are somewhat better understood, what's the current idea of how our neighbourhood could be affected by events in the center?
Of course, I think the future lies in the private industry.
A lot of people do, myself included. I have to say, though, I am much more pessimistic about the rate of progress that private industry will make than I was a decade ago. Growing up reading Michael Flynn's trilogy beginning with Firestar, which presents a vision of the rise of private spaceflight in the near future, I was thinking, "Well, they just need to find a cheap way to orbit and then there will be all kinds of clients knocking on the door." But now I'm afraid that Scaled Composites and similar ventures will indeed slowly find a cheap way to orbit, but no one will want to sign on to actually do anything up there. Flynn's suppositions of who the first users of private spaceflight would be -- FedEx and UPS, among others -- now just seem ridiculous in retrospect.
It's not really comparable to the Icelandic farmers who are watching their crops...
Iceland has no significant agriculture.
...and livestock
That's a bit more like it, but Iceland is a welfare state and they'll get by just fine. Meanwhile, the economy of the country as a whole is dependent on fishing, and that will be generally unaffected by this eruption.
Slashdot Mirror
Why do you think that Americans want to go back to tilling the soil? We've left it to immigrants, who feel forced by poverty to fruit-pick and such, but even they don't wish such a fate for their children. Sorry, but backbreaking work in the fields is not seen as progress by any developing or developed country. If farming with modern techniques is an evil, it's still preferable to mankind having to do more work for less benefit. Much of my family right now is dealing with unemployment, but there are certain jobs they will not stoop to because it contradicts everything that was promised about life in today's high-tech world getting steadily more leisurely.
The scientific community overwhelmingly denies that your precious organic food is any more nutritious. But I'm sure people just looking at the plain-as-day lab results are all puppets of a shadowy corporate conspiracy, eh?
When Spain has seen incredible joblessness recently, you can't blame people for being a little desparate in their jobhunting.
I thought I had a decent understanding of the three legal spheres grouped under "Intellectual Property": patents, copyright and trademarks. But I don't understand why copyright is involved in this specific case. Wouldn't Omega's logo stamped on products be something protected as a trademark, not as a copyrighted work?
Oh, I'm sure there will be cries of "taxation is theft" and so forth from the crowd here, but public approval of such subsidy is quite high in most countries. I've never seen a single French political party want to shut down IRCAM, and in Finland where I presently live, even if people don't personally like art music, they nonetheless believe strongly that its creation should be supported from their taxes.
That already exists in most developed countries. The surge in the new music scene in Finland, for example, to the point where this tiny country stands large on the European and international scene, is due in large part to the Finnish government generously providing grants for composers to do nothing but write music full-time. Nearly all decent non-Hollywood films were produced with some level of state support. That's true not only for Europe, but to a surprising degree even for the United States (watch the credits on Jarmusch films, for example, and note the acknowledgements for help given by local and state governments).
Not necessarily. Merriam-Webster, for example, gives as its third definition:
The meaning of words may change over time. It's a natural process. This particular semantic shift is already decades old, if not older. To rely synchronically on a fixed meaning of scientific terminology in a technical discussion is useful for ensuring communication. However, reproaching others for using a word in what has long been generally recommended as a valid usage, basing your argument only on its Latin etymology, just makes you look like a spiteful jerk.
The BBC News website had daily maps of the extent of the ash cloud. It wasn't a matter of "going around it", as flights to destinations other than Europe would not have flown through the part of the world anyway. However, the ash cloud did cover nearly all of Europe (Spain was a notable exception) and it was simply impossible to reach most destinations from any angle.
Because any water taken from the sea will be saltwater, and though you could replenish the Dead Sea to some degree with it, you can't irrigate your fields with seawater. I don't understand how you don't already know that.
Because a clunky web interface controlled by a single provider that has no killfiling, offline storage or syntax highlighting is clearly better than Usenet diversity.
The standard discussion forums for a great many tech communities are still on Usenet: comp.lang.python, comp.text.tex and gnu.emacs.gnus are just a few that I read daily. While you are right that the average subscriber doesn't know about Usenet these days, the Slashdot crowd ought to be upset that ISPs are dropping Usenet servers.
Coat checks at Nordic concert halls are free. You don't pay anything to have your coat and belonging taken and hung up by the people working there. However, they are paid a high wage for the time they are working, and the venue seems to hire more than strictly needed, so as I said, it's sometimes hard to believe that ticket sales cover much beyond the coat check.
Oh I know some symphonies struggle to make ends meet but that is due to the fact they they don't ever fill the huge opera style houses they are played in, costing a mint and not filling in at all. Festivals come and sell out the concert halls (new classic music, Jazz etc) and make a kick ass profit,
Why then do festival programmes list all of their sponsors, state and private, and say that without that support, the festival could not have happened? And as I said, even if you sell out concert halls like Finlandia Hall in Helsinki, that doesn't imply any kind of profit is made.
At least with filesharing technologies, the guy who is merely hoarding for the mere sake of it is still providing those files to others out there who have a real interest in it. On a P2P network I'm on, some people have accumulated music they never intend on listening to, but they keep it in their shares to help out those who are into it.
That the arts are necessary to a life worth living is a principle that goes all the way back to the Greeks (and probably beyond). Sure, someone downloading a Lady Gaga track is probably fulfilling a mere want, but fine music, film and books are all things that are needs and can be had from internet sources.
A large number of universities require students to live in on-campus housing for the first two years, pushing the percentage up towards 50% (though there's of course an exemption for people whose families are in the area).
Whoever those posters are, I'm not among them. My point has been that in order to ensure that artists get some compensation for their work, we ought to increase public subsidy. I support politicians who want to maintain high funding levels for the arts, and I'm suspicious of anyone offering tax breaks because I know that artists will suffer.
It's not even about trying to rationalize filesharing. I rarely fileshare nowadays, because my country already provides all the arts I could ever ask for free, in the form of free subscriptions to music streaming services, libraries packed full of CDs and DVDs and occasionally free tickets for concerts.
Sorry, that should read wouldn't be happy.
It's sad that your conception of music is so small that you think it necessarily has to involve "dancing around".
With tape pieces, it's hard to attract audiences to buy tickets and hear it out on the town when the work is invariable: there is no difference hearing it in a venue and hearing it from a disc or off downloaded files, especially now that many classic tape pieces are available in surround-sound DVD-Audio or SACD recordings and people can have an appropriate speaker setup in their living rooms. Again, the claim that all one has to do to support musicians is buy tickets just doesn't cover the whole diversity of the arts.
It's easy for a lot of people to claim that, but if suddenly all the works supported by public funding suddenly disappeared, then a lot of them without be happy, because public support of the arts goes into more than you suspect. Think about classic cinema, e.g. Bergman or Fellini: eventually these films attracted a following, but they couldn't have been made to begin with without some amount of support. Even in the US where subsidy isn't as popular, figures like Jim Jarmusch got support from local and state governments for their films. It's the same with music. Iannis Xenakis' tape piece Le legende d'Eer wowed audiences in Paris when it was premiered in a specially-built venue at the Pompidou Center, but Xenakis would have never been able to spend hundreds of hours in the studio putting it together without support. Finns recognize Jean Sibelius as a key part of their culture and support keeping his memory alive, but regularly performing his demanding works is hard to accomplish with subsidy.
Subsidies don't just go to hacks and charlatans with no following. They have resulted in a lot of the universally appreciated Western canon.
And what about when the music cannot be taken around on tour? Not all music is performed by small bands that can go from venue to venue. There are for electronic works for tape created at places like IRCAM. Sometimes concerts are so costly to put on that ticket prices are unlikely to cover the expenses -- I've gone to hear music at concert halls where it's hard to believe that ticket sales even paid for the huge amount of people hired for the venue's coat check, let alone the orchestra.
Some amount of public subsidy and patronage is already present to support music that either can't be put on in concert, or isn't profitable to put on in concert. As it becomes increasingly less realistic for artists to expect payment for every copy made of their work, it's worth supporting public subsidy and patronage models at the same time as calling for people to buy tickets to see their favourite rock bands in concert.
If CPUs can be hotpluggable, then why put their drivers in the core instead of treating them like any other device?
Except that the GNU Hurd developers are no longer passionate about L4. From the Wikipedia article:
On one hand, if Linux is seen as old school and people are choosing to develop projects that offer some new technical innovation, than it is a pity that HURD isn't getting more lovin'. On the other hand, I've always been turned off to getting involved in HURD because the current lead developers don't seem to have any direction. How many times have they changed the microkernel since doing away with GNU Mach?
This reminds me of Larry Niven's short story "At the Core" (collected in Crashlander ) where an expedition to the galactic core finds that the density of stars in the area causes a chain of supernovas, whose radiation will eventually sweep over the outskirts of the galaxy and destroy life on Earth. Now that galactic cores are somewhat better understood, what's the current idea of how our neighbourhood could be affected by events in the center?
A lot of people do, myself included. I have to say, though, I am much more pessimistic about the rate of progress that private industry will make than I was a decade ago. Growing up reading Michael Flynn's trilogy beginning with Firestar , which presents a vision of the rise of private spaceflight in the near future, I was thinking, "Well, they just need to find a cheap way to orbit and then there will be all kinds of clients knocking on the door." But now I'm afraid that Scaled Composites and similar ventures will indeed slowly find a cheap way to orbit, but no one will want to sign on to actually do anything up there. Flynn's suppositions of who the first users of private spaceflight would be -- FedEx and UPS, among others -- now just seem ridiculous in retrospect.
Iceland has no significant agriculture.
That's a bit more like it, but Iceland is a welfare state and they'll get by just fine. Meanwhile, the economy of the country as a whole is dependent on fishing, and that will be generally unaffected by this eruption.