If you listen to the commentary tracks for the ultra-geek movie "LotR: TTT", you'll hear someone noticing that the clasps on the cloaks switch sides. To which Peter Jackson remarks that that happens a LOT in the movie, because they mirror shots whenever they feel that makes them better. He doesn't care that people can see that. Or, at least, he doesn't until the 10th anniversary edition.
A car requires a replenishable source of gasoline, a mechanic, new tires now and then, belts, hoses, wiring... a car is not viable outside a civilization that can support it. A horse, on the other hand, just needs some room to run and some plants to graze on.
Until it dies, or gets ill... Actually, what I would bring is a car with cheap, easily replacable parts. And I would not bring horses but use the local fauna, if possible. There has to be local fauna if it's an earth-like environment: the fauna shapes the environment.
In the same token, would you rather have a knife or a laser pistol that runs on Duracells?
A laser pistol that runs on solar power. And a knife.
Personally I thought it was weird that the colonists copied the old west in detail, including weapon design, outfits, and entourage. I was relieved to see a whorehouse covered in solar cells in one episode.
All that said, I think it is silly to critisize an SF premise, whatever it is. It's a premise. As long as the authors do not deviate from it, you should accept it.
Actually, since things in Europe are much more expensive than in the US, it's still worse. My guess is that 500 euros in goods in Europe is about $400 in goods in the US (especially talking tech stuff).
It should be noted that the "research" was done with a video game and no actual tests have been conducted on real cars and situations. This does not mean the techniques cannot be applied in real situations, but just that it has not been done yet.
Absolutely true. I work with evolutionary algorithms all day, and the fact of the matter is that simulations are notoriously inaccurate when it comes to predicting real-world behaviour. Fine-tuning 68 parameters with an evolutionary algorithm is not that difficult. I have seen many applications that are far more challenging (evolutionary programming applications, for instance). I strongly suspect that gaining less than a second in the simulation falls within the error margin of the translation of the simulation to the real race-car.
How many people want to make a copy of anything?
To protect your Toy Story Disc from damage by children, you put it in a a safe place, and make them ask you for it before they watch it.
I own about a thousand, legally bought DVDs. They take up three bookcases. As soon as diskspace on my computer becomes large enough to store them all there, and there is an easy application to do it for me, I will have quickly freed up my bookshelves. I can use them for books, which unfortunately are not so easily copied.
It is the same with CDs. I don't use the coasters anymore, I always play off my hard disk.
And just about nobody wants to build their own TV or DVD player!
There's no need for that. As Doctorow points out, if the big companies make TVs and DVD players that restrict your usage, a small company will make a version that does not have those restrictions, and will grow big in the process. Usually, their goods will be much cheaper too. My region-free DVD players cost a lot less than those from Sony and Philips.
The fact is, DRM and the DMCA rarely prevent people from doing anything they actually want to do. If you tyhink they're bad, then you need to come up with some reasons that are more convincing than these.
True, DRM and DMCA don't prevent people from circumventing them. That's why they are useless. Except as a pit to dump lots of money and in-vain research in. And there is still the big problem that, by circumventing them, you are doing something illegal, which makes you liable for prosecution, while, morally speaking, you are as innocent as a newborn baby.
DRM will stop enough 14 year old girls from sharing their CD collections with their friends, forcing all of them to buy personal copies of the latest boy band CD.
Unless they ask their 8-year old brothers, who spend so much time behind the computer screen, to rip it for them.
Previously Terry Gilliam spent quite a long time on getting A Scanner Darkly to the silver screen, but he dropped it. A terrible loss. IMHO Gilliam is one of the few directors who would have been able to really bring Phil Dick's vision to life.
Getting Keanu Reeves to play Arctor does not bode well. I mean, in the novel Arctor goes through a whole range of emotions, degrading from a fairly normal human being to, basically, a plant in the end. Reeves will only be able to play the last stage.
The only good Dickian movie I have ever seen is "Gattaca", and that one isn't even based on his work. O, and perhaps "The Truman Show" too, which doesn't give Dick credit but is obviously based on "Time out of Joint" (and perhaps has a bit too happy an ending to be really called Dickian).
Can you imagine "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep" faithfully converted to a movie? I was so looking forward to seeing the concept of Mercer and Deckard's final transformation on the screen (without special FX, please), that at first viewing I thought "Blade Runner" sucked. It does not, actually, but the movie has almost nothing to do with the book.
The thing about patents is, when one that gets granted that's obvious, everyone
runs around saying "WELL THAT'S OBVIOUS!!"
Yeah, and if you were really as smart as the inventor, you'd have patented it
first.
Actually, a rule of thumb is that if someone trained in the particular subject, when confronted with the problem, would come up with this solution within a day, it is considered "obvious" and thus not patentable.
The problem is that the patent office does not know how to judge that something is obvious. Generating to-do lists from code is so incredibly obvious that many people have implemented it over the years. A colleague of mine wrote a small tool that did this when we were working on a large project - in 1997. I am dead sure he wasn't the first.
A scientist who claims that something will take 30 years, not 10 or 20 or 50, but 30, obviously knows exactly what needs to be done -- how could he come up with this fairly exact figure otherwise? So he is assuming he won't hit any snags that will run his whole idea in the ground. That's quite an assumption and most likely not true.
Can you see him thinking? "OK, first we are going to do this in mice. It took us 5 years to extend the life of a mouse one year, another 5 to extend it a second year... hell, let's say another ten years from now to make it eternal. So then we go to humans. They are, of course, a bit more difficult than mice, but it can't be THAT difficult, can it? So let's say overall the same time as we needed for mice, which is another 20 years. So there, thirty years in total. Good call, even the baby-boomers who decide whether I should get funding or not will think they have a chance at this... But they will be pretty old by the time those 30 years are past... Hmmm... Better say that my technique will REVERSE the aging process too... It can't be THAT difficult to add that on. After all, thirty years is a long time."
And talking about flying: any idea how long it took from the first man to attempt to build a flying machine, to the first men that actually pulled it off? I don't either, but I know a lot of those early attempts failed. And these people were quite sure they would succeed.
As I said, I am not saying that stopping or even reversing the age process is impossible to do, just that I think this "scientist" is pulling numbers out of his @$$.
Immortality sounds great, and might even be achievable, but if a "scientist" claims on a webpage that it will take only thirty years, it means he knows he will never get funding if he claims it will take 100 years or more. Don't get worked up over this, none of us will see it in our lifetimes -- except perhaps the Wandering Jew.
Keep in mind that our current minister of Economic Affairs, Laurens-Jan Brinkhorst, who is a member of D'66, has voted for software patents in the European Union's Council of Ministers.
True, but as we know, as soon as party members become part of the government, they follow the government's stance, not their party's stance.
You might re-think where your vote is going as you now have another option:)
Yeah, but I also like the Democrats' opinion on education.
Last September, before the meeting of the European Parliament on the proposal, I wrote a letter to all MEPs of The Netherlands on this issue. I got two responses.
The first was from a right-wing MEP that stated that I shouldn't get worked up over this, that it wasn't all as bad as it sounded, and that I should trust them to do the right thing (fat chance).
The second was from a MEP of the democratic party (D'66) who did give the response I had hoped for ("software patents bad, open source good"), who I found indeed voted against software patents, and who later got back to me providing the amended text of the proposal, and the further statement that they would keep on fighting the European Commission if it would reject the amendments (which it did).
I would like to confirm this statement with a typical example that shows how geeks can go wrong with women. Geeks tend to seek content and are good at finding solutions. When a woman talks about her problems, the geek analyses the problem and offers a straightforward solution. Beware! Most women get very angry when you do that. She is not telling you her problems to find a solution, she wants you to listen. Your argument that the fact that you provided a good solution not only proves that you listened, but also helped her, only adds oil to the fire. The woman wants to talk, and not to be cut off by a "solution". Interested questions, however, are a great way to endear yourself to a woman. Especially of the kind, "How does that make you feel?"
Nope. Sounded too much like Mel Gibson repeating Braveheart.
GTA (Australia, germany, blood-patch?)
Nope. Didn't sound like my kind of game.
Michael Moore films (Always winning Oscars)
I picked up the Bowling DVD from the cheapo bin. I actually liked the movie. OK, score +1 for you.
Teenage Sex (Its all about Bush!)
I thought teenage sex was about no bush? Anyway, nope, not for me.
CSS t-shirts (ok no-one outside slashdot cares but still)
What t-shirts?
Nick-Berg video (No-one gave a url... 3 days later everyone had it)
Who the hell is Nick Berg and what is that about a video?
Seems to be I am not your standard fare of citizen. Actually, I think that goes for most people who are past the age of impressability (is that a word?).
While I am a European, I have visted the USA several times and conversed with a lot of Americans, especially at conferences. My impression is that overall they are well-informed people, with a solid opinion on international affairs. Of course, these are academics. They are bound to have an open mind. Just as the academics in Europe have an open mind. But a great majority of the populace, both in the USA and in the rest of the world, lets its opinion be determined by a stupid loudmouth on television, whoever it may be. So, personally, I think the average American is no different than the average European with respect to forming an opinion.
However, the problem with the US is that it is such a powerful nation that it tends to push its opinions on the world. And those opinions are, in general, not based on fact or truth, but on US-centered political value. That's probably where the general idea that US citizens are badly-informed comes from.
Game developers told me that the first three months after a game is released are crucial: that's when they sell the most of them. Everything after that period is nice, but if they didn't make a profit in the first three months, they never will. I am quite certain that in those first three months it would be rare to encounter a second-hand version of a game. Of course, you will find the warez-rip in the first three days after a game's release...
Many publishers release repackaged versions of their games a year or so after the original release, usually priced $5-$10. If they can profit from that, new games are way overpriced. If they cannot profit from that, someone buying a second-hand game a year after its release doesn't cost them a cent.
A definition of "terrorist" has nothing to do with having a certain opinion. It is solely based on actions. A terrorist is someone who uses fear as a (political) weapon. So, in a Stallmanist regime Bill Gates would only be a terrorist if he blew up innocent citizens in the name of proprietary software.
But it is telling that US citizens now seem to regard a person as a terrorist as soon as he has a non-GOP opinion.
Perhaps the republicans should even regarded as terrorists -- they strike fear in the hearts of the US citizens for their own political agenda. That's not so different from terrorists that throw bombs.
I am the daily advisor to several Ph.D. students. One of them is an Asian who has a reasonably good grasp of written English, but our conversations are usually a big effort to understand each other. One day he handed in a new chapter for his thesis. When reading it I came to a section, which summarised some of his research findings, which was written in horribly inferior English. The rest of the chapter was quite good. You can guess what I was afraid of: that he copied the whole chapter from another source and wrote only that bad section himself. So I tried to confront him subtly with this problem: I pointed out the section, and said "I don't understand this section at all. Did you write it very quickly, or something?" To which he confessed, that he hadn't had the time to write that section, so he had paid someone to write it for him. I advised him that that wasn't money well-spent, because that person's English was obviously below-par. In the next version the section was well-readable.
Just a story to indicate that plagiarism may be a serious problem, but it isn't a good idea to get paranoid about it.
And believe me, people are getting paranoid. I know a Ph.D. student who days before the ceremony was confronted with a claim of plagiarism, because in his thesis a few pages were detected which he copied from a book he had written himself. The problem was that one of the co-authors of the book claimed that those pages were written by him, even though all the research in the book was by our Ph.D. student. You might think that such a claim would not mean much, but the Ph.D. ceremony was delayed for weeks (which cost a lot of money) and was even in jeopardy of being called off at all. All because people react like being stung when they hear "plagiarism".
Slashdot Mirror
Morrowind is not fun if you want the game to force its story upon you. It is fun, however, if you want to create your own story.
If you listen to the commentary tracks for the ultra-geek movie "LotR: TTT", you'll hear someone noticing that the clasps on the cloaks switch sides. To which Peter Jackson remarks that that happens a LOT in the movie, because they mirror shots whenever they feel that makes them better. He doesn't care that people can see that. Or, at least, he doesn't until the 10th anniversary edition.
Even worse, it plays the game stupidly. You can defeat it because it always plays the middle cell if it has the chance.
Until it dies, or gets ill... Actually, what I would bring is a car with cheap, easily replacable parts. And I would not bring horses but use the local fauna, if possible. There has to be local fauna if it's an earth-like environment: the fauna shapes the environment. In the same token, would you rather have a knife or a laser pistol that runs on Duracells?
A laser pistol that runs on solar power. And a knife.
Personally I thought it was weird that the colonists copied the old west in detail, including weapon design, outfits, and entourage. I was relieved to see a whorehouse covered in solar cells in one episode.
All that said, I think it is silly to critisize an SF premise, whatever it is. It's a premise. As long as the authors do not deviate from it, you should accept it.
But writing M$ instead of MS makes it more easy to distinguish it from the terrible illness which so many people suffer from...
Oh wait...
Actually, since things in Europe are much more expensive than in the US, it's still worse. My guess is that 500 euros in goods in Europe is about $400 in goods in the US (especially talking tech stuff).
Absolutely true. I work with evolutionary algorithms all day, and the fact of the matter is that simulations are notoriously inaccurate when it comes to predicting real-world behaviour. Fine-tuning 68 parameters with an evolutionary algorithm is not that difficult. I have seen many applications that are far more challenging (evolutionary programming applications, for instance). I strongly suspect that gaining less than a second in the simulation falls within the error margin of the translation of the simulation to the real race-car.
I own about a thousand, legally bought DVDs. They take up three bookcases. As soon as diskspace on my computer becomes large enough to store them all there, and there is an easy application to do it for me, I will have quickly freed up my bookshelves. I can use them for books, which unfortunately are not so easily copied.
It is the same with CDs. I don't use the coasters anymore, I always play off my hard disk.
And just about nobody wants to build their own TV or DVD player!
There's no need for that. As Doctorow points out, if the big companies make TVs and DVD players that restrict your usage, a small company will make a version that does not have those restrictions, and will grow big in the process. Usually, their goods will be much cheaper too. My region-free DVD players cost a lot less than those from Sony and Philips.
The fact is, DRM and the DMCA rarely prevent people from doing anything they actually want to do. If you tyhink they're bad, then you need to come up with some reasons that are more convincing than these.
True, DRM and DMCA don't prevent people from circumventing them. That's why they are useless. Except as a pit to dump lots of money and in-vain research in. And there is still the big problem that, by circumventing them, you are doing something illegal, which makes you liable for prosecution, while, morally speaking, you are as innocent as a newborn baby.
Unless they ask their 8-year old brothers, who spend so much time behind the computer screen, to rip it for them.
Getting Keanu Reeves to play Arctor does not bode well. I mean, in the novel Arctor goes through a whole range of emotions, degrading from a fairly normal human being to, basically, a plant in the end. Reeves will only be able to play the last stage.
The only good Dickian movie I have ever seen is "Gattaca", and that one isn't even based on his work. O, and perhaps "The Truman Show" too, which doesn't give Dick credit but is obviously based on "Time out of Joint" (and perhaps has a bit too happy an ending to be really called Dickian).
Can you imagine "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep" faithfully converted to a movie? I was so looking forward to seeing the concept of Mercer and Deckard's final transformation on the screen (without special FX, please), that at first viewing I thought "Blade Runner" sucked. It does not, actually, but the movie has almost nothing to do with the book.
Actually, a rule of thumb is that if someone trained in the particular subject, when confronted with the problem, would come up with this solution within a day, it is considered "obvious" and thus not patentable.
The problem is that the patent office does not know how to judge that something is obvious. Generating to-do lists from code is so incredibly obvious that many people have implemented it over the years. A colleague of mine wrote a small tool that did this when we were working on a large project - in 1997. I am dead sure he wasn't the first.
A scientist who claims that something will take 30 years, not 10 or 20 or 50, but 30, obviously knows exactly what needs to be done -- how could he come up with this fairly exact figure otherwise? So he is assuming he won't hit any snags that will run his whole idea in the ground. That's quite an assumption and most likely not true.
Can you see him thinking? "OK, first we are going to do this in mice. It took us 5 years to extend the life of a mouse one year, another 5 to extend it a second year... hell, let's say another ten years from now to make it eternal. So then we go to humans. They are, of course, a bit more difficult than mice, but it can't be THAT difficult, can it? So let's say overall the same time as we needed for mice, which is another 20 years. So there, thirty years in total. Good call, even the baby-boomers who decide whether I should get funding or not will think they have a chance at this... But they will be pretty old by the time those 30 years are past... Hmmm... Better say that my technique will REVERSE the aging process too... It can't be THAT difficult to add that on. After all, thirty years is a long time."
And talking about flying: any idea how long it took from the first man to attempt to build a flying machine, to the first men that actually pulled it off? I don't either, but I know a lot of those early attempts failed. And these people were quite sure they would succeed.
As I said, I am not saying that stopping or even reversing the age process is impossible to do, just that I think this "scientist" is pulling numbers out of his @$$.
Unfortunately, I was not able to find the message I received from the right-wing candidate. I'm sorry.
Immortality sounds great, and might even be achievable, but if a "scientist" claims on a webpage that it will take only thirty years, it means he knows he will never get funding if he claims it will take 100 years or more. Don't get worked up over this, none of us will see it in our lifetimes -- except perhaps the Wandering Jew.
True, but as we know, as soon as party members become part of the government, they follow the government's stance, not their party's stance.
You might re-think where your vote is going as you now have another option :)
Yeah, but I also like the Democrats' opinion on education.
The first was from a right-wing MEP that stated that I shouldn't get worked up over this, that it wasn't all as bad as it sounded, and that I should trust them to do the right thing (fat chance).
The second was from a MEP of the democratic party (D'66) who did give the response I had hoped for ("software patents bad, open source good"), who I found indeed voted against software patents, and who later got back to me providing the amended text of the proposal, and the further statement that they would keep on fighting the European Commission if it would reject the amendments (which it did).
So you can guess where my vote is going.
I would like to confirm this statement with a typical example that shows how geeks can go wrong with women. Geeks tend to seek content and are good at finding solutions. When a woman talks about her problems, the geek analyses the problem and offers a straightforward solution. Beware! Most women get very angry when you do that. She is not telling you her problems to find a solution, she wants you to listen. Your argument that the fact that you provided a good solution not only proves that you listened, but also helped her, only adds oil to the fire. The woman wants to talk, and not to be cut off by a "solution". Interested questions, however, are a great way to endear yourself to a woman. Especially of the kind, "How does that make you feel?"
Nope. Sounded too much like Mel Gibson repeating Braveheart.
GTA (Australia, germany, blood-patch?)
Nope. Didn't sound like my kind of game.
Michael Moore films (Always winning Oscars)
I picked up the Bowling DVD from the cheapo bin. I actually liked the movie. OK, score +1 for you.
Teenage Sex (Its all about Bush!)
I thought teenage sex was about no bush? Anyway, nope, not for me.
CSS t-shirts (ok no-one outside slashdot cares but still)
What t-shirts?
Nick-Berg video (No-one gave a url... 3 days later everyone had it)
Who the hell is Nick Berg and what is that about a video?
Seems to be I am not your standard fare of citizen. Actually, I think that goes for most people who are past the age of impressability (is that a word?).
However, the problem with the US is that it is such a powerful nation that it tends to push its opinions on the world. And those opinions are, in general, not based on fact or truth, but on US-centered political value. That's probably where the general idea that US citizens are badly-informed comes from.
Game developers told me that the first three months after a game is released are crucial: that's when they sell the most of them. Everything after that period is nice, but if they didn't make a profit in the first three months, they never will. I am quite certain that in those first three months it would be rare to encounter a second-hand version of a game. Of course, you will find the warez-rip in the first three days after a game's release...
Many publishers release repackaged versions of their games a year or so after the original release, usually priced $5-$10. If they can profit from that, new games are way overpriced. If they cannot profit from that, someone buying a second-hand game a year after its release doesn't cost them a cent.
But it is telling that US citizens now seem to regard a person as a terrorist as soon as he has a non-GOP opinion.
Perhaps the republicans should even regarded as terrorists -- they strike fear in the hearts of the US citizens for their own political agenda. That's not so different from terrorists that throw bombs.
* Still having about half the company using a PIII 500 MHz.
In the US computers are FAR cheaper than in Europe and get replaced much faster.
Of course, Microsoft has a very US-centric point-of-view...
Brilliant quote. I would have modded you up had I not posted in this discussion myself.
Just a story to indicate that plagiarism may be a serious problem, but it isn't a good idea to get paranoid about it.
And believe me, people are getting paranoid. I know a Ph.D. student who days before the ceremony was confronted with a claim of plagiarism, because in his thesis a few pages were detected which he copied from a book he had written himself. The problem was that one of the co-authors of the book claimed that those pages were written by him, even though all the research in the book was by our Ph.D. student. You might think that such a claim would not mean much, but the Ph.D. ceremony was delayed for weeks (which cost a lot of money) and was even in jeopardy of being called off at all. All because people react like being stung when they hear "plagiarism".