C'est pas si simple que ça. It's not as simple as that.
Parfois il faut adapter les materiels pour les autres partes du monde. Sometimes materials have to be adapted for other parts of the world.
Il faut aussi payer pour la publicité. Advertising also has to be payed for.
There are various costs and legal obligations associated with distributing material in different locations, and most major players prefer to sublicense to local entities with the specialist knowledge rather than risk making mistakes themselves. (eg Germany has strict laws regarding Holocaust denial and profiting off Nazi imagery.)
Not to mention the issue of remakes -- various foreign language properties have been redone in the US (The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, The Killing, The Returned etc) and the cost of licensing the remake is all tied into the potential reduction in profitability of the original (eg the Catalan version of The Killing was a redubbed version of the American remake, rather than the Danish original). Eliminating the ability of the two parties to negotiate where and when they can sell radically alters the value of the remake to both parties.
No, this isn't about Netflix's greed. Netflix currently profits by selling to people they don't have permission to sell to -- that's them being greedy.
Of course IP rights makes things arbitrarily more complex, but do they really have to be? I'm just not convinced that arbitrarily limiting competition is a good thing.
You're not talking about removing arbitrary limits to competition; you're talking about introducing arbitrary competition. There is, at source, a sole supplier for any piece of media. One studio makes a film -- single supplier. Even if there are remakes, each is a distinct entity with a single supplier. There is no competition in production -- absolutely none. Competition in delivery is possible, and there are already often multiple suppliers offering the same product in parallel, and their pricing structures are based on cost of delivery and utility.
What I mean by utility is that a DVD has a higher utility value than a TV broadcast because you can watch it whenever you want, however many times you want. This means that it has a higher financial value than a TV broadcast, even if the cost of physical distribution is taken out of the equation.
Subscription-based IPTV is disruptive because it has low distribution costs and extremely high utility. Netflix is really, reeeeaaaally cheap for what you get out of it. But the flipside of that is that Netflix have to manage their money carefully. They can make a few originals and buy a few exclusives, but they have to negotiate a relatively low rate for the majority of the material that they license, and in order to do so, and that's at the cost of that good ol' "utility" measure: they get it cheaper specifically because they don't get it first.
No-one is stopping Netflix from offering studios more money to get early access to material, and so no-one is limiting competition -- no-one, that is, except Netflix and Netflix's customer base. Netflix (and Amazon) have identified a pricing sweet-spot that their customers are happy to pay, and seeing as they would need to raise the price to offer enhanced service, they limit their own services.
There are issues with exit points and the like. When I'm in college (on the island of Lewis) I'm shown as being where the datacentre is (the city of Perth). Now these are both in the same country, but at a former employer, most of our computers showed up as being in the Netherlands. Worst still, clients of our Welsh datacentre were getting geoblocked from various services because the network range we subleased to them was being identified as the Netherlands.
Also, there was a time that I was sat on a train, and Google Maps decided my phone was in international waters....
It's not about gains, it's about losses. If the studios pull their content from Netflix, Netflix will lose lots of subscribers. If Netflix stops allowing VPN tunnelling, Netflix will lose a smaller number of subscribers. If Netflix had 100% control over their content, then certainly it would be in their interests to make access as open as possible, but they don't. Rightly or wrongly, Netflix is not allowed to sell certain content in certain places, and by turning a blind eye to VPN use, they have been selling to people they have no permission to sell to. In all areas of industry, you have to make reasonable steps to ensure that you're not breaking the law. Wilful ignorance is not good enough.
Goddamn 19th century SJWs and their political correct pronoun control. What was wrong with calling people "thou" and "thee"? Trying to make us show "respect" with their CODE OF CONDUCT. Well, thou'll not control mine speech with thy SJW parlance. In sooth shalt thou suffer the pronouns of my forebears, without thy new-fangled terms!
And more to the point, their free API killed the market for commercial rivals, so everyone in the marketplace has been bought up by Google, Microsoft or Apple, and there are no real alternatives available to developers.
No, it's unfair that they "bait and switch" this way. They produced an open API. An entire app ecosystem evolved around the Google free APIs, and Google's commercial rivals were forced out of business. Now there's no-one else for these sites to get their mapping from, and Google's squashing them.
Standardised testing invokes the observer's paradox. As soon as you introduce a standard test, you bias the system by forcing the teacher to prepare the students for the test, altering the teacher's behaviour. Not only this, but not all students enter the class on an equal footing. Unless you can accurately capture the students' prior knowledge, you can't say whether the high/low grades are the result of prior knowledge or teaching. As soon as you introduce performance-related pay into a school system, you have heads of department gaming the system by cherry-picking the best students in order to get a better wage.
With the possible exception of people who go on to be academic mathematicians (or closely related disciplines) I've not met anyone who finds declarative programming an easier introduction to programming than imperative programming. My alma mater tried this with functional languages in the 1990s and gave it away.
I would argue that this is because declarative programming hasn't received enough attention and research, and our declarative languages are just not good enough, and often hampered by bucketloads of compromises. For example, FP suffers from either being pure and unusable, or impure and not really FP anymore. In fact, FP often turns out to be imperative programming rather than declarative. In SML, for example, you need to use local variables rather than repeating even simple terms like squareRoot(x), because the interpreter would just end up running every function twice -- this is an implementation decision, so it's imperative, and it means early optimisation; it also makes the resulting code less like maths because it splits your formula over multiple lines. Suddenly, all the intended advantages are gone.
OK, so other very high-level languages shoot themselves in the foot with too much purism, such as Prolog, where everything has to be predicate logic. I don't really accept this, as I see mathematical functions as being completely compatible with logic -- a direct mapping x -> f(x) is a legitimate form of logical entailment.
So what I've been arguing for here for several years is a multisyntax pseudo-language, where there's a hierarchy of subsystems each with their own syntax (instead of the mess of pragmas and declarations that current single-syntax multiparadigm languages have. At the inner level, you have functions that can only call other functions (i.e. deterministic subroutines that always return the same single answer for a given input). Then you have the logic and constraint-based problem solver that can generate multiple solutions; it can call functions (as these constitute a logical entailment). At the outside you have the procedural subsystem that can trigger the problem solver (which could be treated like a Python generator function, allowing the caller to work with the first result only, retrieve each answer in turn, or bundle all results into a list) and call functions directly.
Once you've got a working program, you can then set about optimising your code by rewriting parts of the problem solver into equivalent functional and procedural code, optimising "middle out" rather than top-to-bottom or vice-versa. And because this is one "language", you can keep the deprecated unoptimised code to hand so that rewrites of program functionality can first be tried out on the unoptimised code, which will naturally be easier to change. Then you have a choice of either applying the same change to the previously optimised code, or starting the optimisation process again from the altered code.
This may sound like extra work, but it's fairly well recognised that optimised code is difficult to maintain, and starting from scratch is too slow and expensive. As a result, bugs and inefficiencies accumulate as old code is never cleaned out. Reoptimising from a functionally-equivalent, unoptimised version may well be the most effective way to ensure long-term maintainability.
True. But on the flipside, we (the geek community) have to start recognising the power of declarative programming, and find better ways to offer that as an "in" for newcomers to programming. Imperative programming is inherently against the much-professed principle of "optimise late" because every decision is an implementation decision. Meanwhile, all the abstractions we've made to make imperative programming easier (libraries, interfaces, OO) are nothing more than a halfway-house between imperative and declarative -- a little bit of duct-tape holding our ramshackle 1970s programming paradigms in one piece.
Not everyone needs to know how to code. What everyone does need to understand is information. How do I find the information I need to solve a problem? How do I discern the quality of that information? I'm I looking at different information or multiple views of the same information. How does visualizing information in different ways help us solve problems.
You realise that's a hugely abstract subject, right? At this age level, you're still teaching kids "no; worms, snakes and eels aren't the same" and "the black bit of your eye is actually a hole, but it doesn't go right into the centre of your head." Before you can teach kids about the abstracts of managing information, you've got to teach them the basics of information handling and manipulation. It's like saying "why are we teaching kids poetry instead of important skills like helicopter piloting?!?"
The Brothers Grimm were mostly collectors of stories. The Little Ash Girl (Cinderella) is possibly the oldest folk tale on the planet, and probably originated in China (the only culture that put a high beauty value on tiny feet).
Under these circumstances Star Wars episode 1-3 probably never would have been made, so maybe just a matter of less bad movies.
Non sequitur. If studios can't make money from reselling their back catalogue ad infinitum, the only alternative is to keep churning out guaranteed blockbusting pot-boilers. Remember that episodes 1-3 made huuuuuuuuuuuuuuuge amounts of money. We all went to see them, didn't we? We knew they were crap, but we had to go to the cinema because of that big logo.
So? People should be writing books to sell books, not get lucky with a movie hit.
I don't believe that's ever the goal of a genuine author. An aspiration, certainly, and it's part of the equation when it comes to the big gamble of "work for hire" vs "royalties". Every independent person in the creative industries (authors, actors, singers etc) balance off the high probability of just getting by and no more with the chance of being genuinely successful.
We would probably get better books and movies this way.
We'd certainly get fewer books and movies this way. Budgets would definitely drop in line with the studios' turnover. Obscure cable channels would no longer pay a red cent for a single minute of their programming. Classic stuff that is a genuine draw to audiences (the LotR books, Die Hard, every Star Trek before "Enterprise") would no longer be putting money into the system. By what mechanism would this result in better books and movies? Or to put it another way: why play the lottery when there's no jackpot?
I did not know that. But it's a hack, and if it ever had a major effect on markets, it would be challenged in courts. I can see an argument for falsely attributed copyrights being treated as perjury -- it's intentionally lying in a legal declaration after all...
Problem with student learning anal tics, is there are simply too many external variables, genetics of the student, student family life, student social life, current news and events, students diet, students sleep patterns, learning demands of other classes and current assignment load (want to improve that give students more choice, do a report or do an exam).
That's not a problem with analytics -- it's one of the problems analytics address. With large datasets, you're averaging out all those variables. It doesn't matter why 25% of your students each individually fall asleep during a particular lesson two years running, what matters is that it consistently happens, so there's something that can be changed in your teaching.
Every new requirement to punch data into some dashboard or portal reduces a professor's time to teach. Yes many are bad -- they will continue to be so. But the good ones are already good, and this will just waste their time.
...which is why good anayltics gathers the data for you and does the analysis. Trivial example: Auto Multiple Choice is a piece of software that generates multiple-choice question papers for you, then marks the completed papers and generates individual feedback sheets. It also generates a CSV summary of correct and incorrect answers. Whenever I've marked tests by hand, I haven't had time to capture that sort of detail, so at the end of the process I only have a very fuzzy idea of what my students had difficulty with. Using AMC is quicker than manually marking and gives me useful data. Of course, I'm not a fan of multiple choice, but this sort of information is especially useful.
You must have gone to college before the rise of "social justice".
Things are very different now than they were even just a decade ago.
It's extremely risky for a professor to give anything less than a high grade to a student.
Suppose a student fails to study, and rightfully deserves an F or whatever the failing grade is.
You must have gone to college before the rise of "common sense". This is not about "grades", it's about the quality of teaching. No teacher is perfect, and everyone can improve -- analytics are aimed at telling us what we're doing right and what we're doing wrong, and then we (in theory) give better lessons to all our pupils. Grades should improve as a consequence, but the goal of teaching is not "good grades", it's "learning". Grades are only one way of auditing learning -- a suboptimal way, but to date the only practical option that we have.
Slashdot Mirror
C'est pas si simple que ça. It's not as simple as that.
Parfois il faut adapter les materiels pour les autres partes du monde. Sometimes materials have to be adapted for other parts of the world.
Il faut aussi payer pour la publicité. Advertising also has to be payed for.
There are various costs and legal obligations associated with distributing material in different locations, and most major players prefer to sublicense to local entities with the specialist knowledge rather than risk making mistakes themselves. (eg Germany has strict laws regarding Holocaust denial and profiting off Nazi imagery .)
Not to mention the issue of remakes -- various foreign language properties have been redone in the US (The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, The Killing, The Returned etc) and the cost of licensing the remake is all tied into the potential reduction in profitability of the original (eg the Catalan version of The Killing was a redubbed version of the American remake, rather than the Danish original). Eliminating the ability of the two parties to negotiate where and when they can sell radically alters the value of the remake to both parties.
No, this isn't about Netflix's greed. Netflix currently profits by selling to people they don't have permission to sell to -- that's them being greedy.
Of course IP rights makes things arbitrarily more complex, but do they really have to be? I'm just not convinced that arbitrarily limiting competition is a good thing.
You're not talking about removing arbitrary limits to competition; you're talking about introducing arbitrary competition. There is, at source, a sole supplier for any piece of media. One studio makes a film -- single supplier. Even if there are remakes, each is a distinct entity with a single supplier. There is no competition in production -- absolutely none. Competition in delivery is possible, and there are already often multiple suppliers offering the same product in parallel, and their pricing structures are based on cost of delivery and utility.
What I mean by utility is that a DVD has a higher utility value than a TV broadcast because you can watch it whenever you want, however many times you want. This means that it has a higher financial value than a TV broadcast, even if the cost of physical distribution is taken out of the equation.
Subscription-based IPTV is disruptive because it has low distribution costs and extremely high utility. Netflix is really, reeeeaaaally cheap for what you get out of it. But the flipside of that is that Netflix have to manage their money carefully. They can make a few originals and buy a few exclusives, but they have to negotiate a relatively low rate for the majority of the material that they license, and in order to do so, and that's at the cost of that good ol' "utility" measure: they get it cheaper specifically because they don't get it first.
No-one is stopping Netflix from offering studios more money to get early access to material, and so no-one is limiting competition -- no-one, that is, except Netflix and Netflix's customer base. Netflix (and Amazon) have identified a pricing sweet-spot that their customers are happy to pay, and seeing as they would need to raise the price to offer enhanced service, they limit their own services.
Also, there was a time that I was sat on a train, and Google Maps decided my phone was in international waters....
Yup. Netflix gains nothing from this.
It's not about gains, it's about losses. If the studios pull their content from Netflix, Netflix will lose lots of subscribers. If Netflix stops allowing VPN tunnelling, Netflix will lose a smaller number of subscribers. If Netflix had 100% control over their content, then certainly it would be in their interests to make access as open as possible, but they don't. Rightly or wrongly, Netflix is not allowed to sell certain content in certain places, and by turning a blind eye to VPN use, they have been selling to people they have no permission to sell to. In all areas of industry, you have to make reasonable steps to ensure that you're not breaking the law. Wilful ignorance is not good enough.
Do you need a hug?
Goddamn 19th century SJWs and their political correct pronoun control. What was wrong with calling people "thou" and "thee"? Trying to make us show "respect" with their CODE OF CONDUCT. Well, thou'll not control mine speech with thy SJW parlance. In sooth shalt thou suffer the pronouns of my forebears, without thy new-fangled terms!
And more to the point, their free API killed the market for commercial rivals, so everyone in the marketplace has been bought up by Google, Microsoft or Apple, and there are no real alternatives available to developers.
No, it's unfair that they "bait and switch" this way. They produced an open API. An entire app ecosystem evolved around the Google free APIs, and Google's commercial rivals were forced out of business. Now there's no-one else for these sites to get their mapping from, and Google's squashing them.
Three words of my previous response remain particularly pertinent: Game. The. System.
Standardised testing invokes the observer's paradox. As soon as you introduce a standard test, you bias the system by forcing the teacher to prepare the students for the test, altering the teacher's behaviour. Not only this, but not all students enter the class on an equal footing. Unless you can accurately capture the students' prior knowledge, you can't say whether the high/low grades are the result of prior knowledge or teaching. As soon as you introduce performance-related pay into a school system, you have heads of department gaming the system by cherry-picking the best students in order to get a better wage.
With the possible exception of people who go on to be academic mathematicians (or closely related disciplines) I've not met anyone who finds declarative programming an easier introduction to programming than imperative programming. My alma mater tried this with functional languages in the 1990s and gave it away.
I would argue that this is because declarative programming hasn't received enough attention and research, and our declarative languages are just not good enough, and often hampered by bucketloads of compromises. For example, FP suffers from either being pure and unusable, or impure and not really FP anymore. In fact, FP often turns out to be imperative programming rather than declarative. In SML, for example, you need to use local variables rather than repeating even simple terms like squareRoot(x), because the interpreter would just end up running every function twice -- this is an implementation decision, so it's imperative, and it means early optimisation; it also makes the resulting code less like maths because it splits your formula over multiple lines. Suddenly, all the intended advantages are gone.
OK, so other very high-level languages shoot themselves in the foot with too much purism, such as Prolog, where everything has to be predicate logic. I don't really accept this, as I see mathematical functions as being completely compatible with logic -- a direct mapping x -> f(x) is a legitimate form of logical entailment.
So what I've been arguing for here for several years is a multisyntax pseudo-language, where there's a hierarchy of subsystems each with their own syntax (instead of the mess of pragmas and declarations that current single-syntax multiparadigm languages have. At the inner level, you have functions that can only call other functions (i.e. deterministic subroutines that always return the same single answer for a given input). Then you have the logic and constraint-based problem solver that can generate multiple solutions; it can call functions (as these constitute a logical entailment). At the outside you have the procedural subsystem that can trigger the problem solver (which could be treated like a Python generator function, allowing the caller to work with the first result only, retrieve each answer in turn, or bundle all results into a list) and call functions directly.
Once you've got a working program, you can then set about optimising your code by rewriting parts of the problem solver into equivalent functional and procedural code, optimising "middle out" rather than top-to-bottom or vice-versa. And because this is one "language", you can keep the deprecated unoptimised code to hand so that rewrites of program functionality can first be tried out on the unoptimised code, which will naturally be easier to change. Then you have a choice of either applying the same change to the previously optimised code, or starting the optimisation process again from the altered code.
This may sound like extra work, but it's fairly well recognised that optimised code is difficult to maintain, and starting from scratch is too slow and expensive. As a result, bugs and inefficiencies accumulate as old code is never cleaned out. Reoptimising from a functionally-equivalent, unoptimised version may well be the most effective way to ensure long-term maintainability.
(But I was never a fan of a lot of school "groupwork", it has to be said.)
Jesus, man.... School isn't all about grades!
True. But on the flipside, we (the geek community) have to start recognising the power of declarative programming, and find better ways to offer that as an "in" for newcomers to programming. Imperative programming is inherently against the much-professed principle of "optimise late" because every decision is an implementation decision. Meanwhile, all the abstractions we've made to make imperative programming easier (libraries, interfaces, OO) are nothing more than a halfway-house between imperative and declarative -- a little bit of duct-tape holding our ramshackle 1970s programming paradigms in one piece.
Not everyone needs to know how to code. What everyone does need to understand is information. How do I find the information I need to solve a problem? How do I discern the quality of that information? I'm I looking at different information or multiple views of the same information. How does visualizing information in different ways help us solve problems.
You realise that's a hugely abstract subject, right? At this age level, you're still teaching kids "no; worms, snakes and eels aren't the same" and "the black bit of your eye is actually a hole, but it doesn't go right into the centre of your head." Before you can teach kids about the abstracts of managing information, you've got to teach them the basics of information handling and manipulation. It's like saying "why are we teaching kids poetry instead of important skills like helicopter piloting?!?"
This isn't "computer science."
The problem is that the most appropriate term, "computer literacy", has been hijacked to mean MS Office basic skills.
The Brothers Grimm were mostly collectors of stories. The Little Ash Girl (Cinderella) is possibly the oldest folk tale on the planet, and probably originated in China (the only culture that put a high beauty value on tiny feet).
Star Wars was a rip-off of Hidden Fortress by Kurosawa -- nothing to do with Seven Samurai. You may be thinking of Battle Beyond the Stars.
Under these circumstances Star Wars episode 1-3 probably never would have been made, so maybe just a matter of less bad movies.
Non sequitur. If studios can't make money from reselling their back catalogue ad infinitum, the only alternative is to keep churning out guaranteed blockbusting pot-boilers. Remember that episodes 1-3 made huuuuuuuuuuuuuuuge amounts of money. We all went to see them, didn't we? We knew they were crap, but we had to go to the cinema because of that big logo.
So? People should be writing books to sell books, not get lucky with a movie hit.
I don't believe that's ever the goal of a genuine author. An aspiration, certainly, and it's part of the equation when it comes to the big gamble of "work for hire" vs "royalties". Every independent person in the creative industries (authors, actors, singers etc) balance off the high probability of just getting by and no more with the chance of being genuinely successful.
We would probably get better books and movies this way.
We'd certainly get fewer books and movies this way. Budgets would definitely drop in line with the studios' turnover. Obscure cable channels would no longer pay a red cent for a single minute of their programming. Classic stuff that is a genuine draw to audiences (the LotR books, Die Hard, every Star Trek before "Enterprise") would no longer be putting money into the system. By what mechanism would this result in better books and movies? Or to put it another way: why play the lottery when there's no jackpot?
I did not know that. But it's a hack, and if it ever had a major effect on markets, it would be challenged in courts. I can see an argument for falsely attributed copyrights being treated as perjury -- it's intentionally lying in a legal declaration after all...
Problem with student learning anal tics, is there are simply too many external variables, genetics of the student, student family life, student social life, current news and events, students diet, students sleep patterns, learning demands of other classes and current assignment load (want to improve that give students more choice, do a report or do an exam).
That's not a problem with analytics -- it's one of the problems analytics address. With large datasets, you're averaging out all those variables. It doesn't matter why 25% of your students each individually fall asleep during a particular lesson two years running, what matters is that it consistently happens, so there's something that can be changed in your teaching.
Every new requirement to punch data into some dashboard or portal reduces a professor's time to teach. Yes many are bad -- they will continue to be so. But the good ones are already good, and this will just waste their time.
...which is why good anayltics gathers the data for you and does the analysis. Trivial example: Auto Multiple Choice is a piece of software that generates multiple-choice question papers for you, then marks the completed papers and generates individual feedback sheets. It also generates a CSV summary of correct and incorrect answers. Whenever I've marked tests by hand, I haven't had time to capture that sort of detail, so at the end of the process I only have a very fuzzy idea of what my students had difficulty with. Using AMC is quicker than manually marking and gives me useful data. Of course, I'm not a fan of multiple choice, but this sort of information is especially useful.
You must have gone to college before the rise of "social justice".
Things are very different now than they were even just a decade ago.
It's extremely risky for a professor to give anything less than a high grade to a student.
Suppose a student fails to study, and rightfully deserves an F or whatever the failing grade is.
You must have gone to college before the rise of "common sense". This is not about "grades", it's about the quality of teaching. No teacher is perfect, and everyone can improve -- analytics are aimed at telling us what we're doing right and what we're doing wrong, and then we (in theory) give better lessons to all our pupils. Grades should improve as a consequence, but the goal of teaching is not "good grades", it's "learning". Grades are only one way of auditing learning -- a suboptimal way, but to date the only practical option that we have.
The flute break in Down Owner was clearly derivative of Kookaburra, exploiting its associations with Australianness. I don't see any "travesty"