"Copyright isn't inherently evil, but the corporations and interests that are far removed from the average creator's interests "
I'm sorry but the average creator is a douchebag, many creators once they get rich push for copyright extension. In the beginning before the rise of the 'middlemen' original creators got rich and then used government to abuse copyright. The bad Creators are just as much a problem. See modern game developers, their sense of entitlement is disturbing. By all means we should be able to access source code to update and repair old games we buy. But that is impossible because of the 'creators', not just the middlemen. See all the MMO's many gamedevs are creating, you pay all that money and the public gets zero ownership. Total BS IMHO. Something like an MMO once shut down should be forced into the public domain.
... the same guy that predicted 3D hardware would be "obsolete" by 2004-2005, it's 2012 and 3D hardware has been implemented in all major consoles for and will be for the foreseeable future.
The worst part about these talks is they don't talk about memory bandwidth - which is a huge roadblock to how fast anything can go. The last 2-3 generations of video cards (and cpu's too) the increase in performance has been getting smaller and smaller beause of fundamental advances in other areas (memory) aren't going anywhere near fast enough to keep the pace.
Sweeny shouldn't talk about hardware since he's a programmer and he's made countless foolish predictions before. The fact that he doesn't see the memory crisis that anyone in the hardware business knows about just shows volumes about how much he doesn't know.
"Many people just don't seem to care about privacy any more. "
It's not just that, it's that the internet was never designed with privacy in mind to begin with. The cost of maintaining privacy are huge because just the act of communication on a digital network can be de-anonymized quickly because of the nature of electronic communication. No one predicted the internet would get to be what it was. So much of it's infrastructure was never designed with privacy or security in mind. Think about how encryption was never standard on all connections from the get go.
It goes way beyond people sharing their info on facebook. Even if there was no facebook, the simple act of browsing the internet (communicating/downloading) is automatically a ripe platform for mining information no matter how well you try to plug the wholes. It's inherent to the nature of communication to be 'leaky'.
... long before internet. The internet just accelerated trends that already existed. Satellites constantly monitoring earth. Security camera's in major malls and shopping outlets whose video's are datamined for consumer behavior. Credit cards and shopping cards issued by companies to mine peoples buying behavior. For anyone who uses electronic financial transactions - there is no privacy. You often need to give your social security number and other piece of identification to setup any kind of legal bank account.
Just to exist in the modern world you give out a tonne of information direction or indirectly because often it's mandated by law.
"s, but there WERE no domesticated animals and plants. THAT is the mystery that has puzzled anthropologists. "
I think this is where anthropologists make huge assumptions about human intelligence or the lack thereof. This is what I mean by - it only seems non-obvious to us because we're so far removed from the circumstances which would force us to make the conclusion in its favor. I think this is where we all suffer from a painful lack of imagination. The same way if you told someone 4000 years ago about the 21st century technology and they wouldn't believe that was possible. "How is it possible in 2010 they have this thing called the internet, and 'mobile phones'". By putting the shoe on the other foot, in this example it looks like we have a failure of imagination.
After all if you told someone from years ago about our future technology they would be in awe that such things were possible.
My point is lost on you entirely. It only seems a mystery to us because we are far removed from the times. My point is, if alternatives were so much better why did they get out-competed?
It isn't, the revolution happened because it was human habit of not putting all your eggs in one basket. It's just specialization at work. Products impossible under hunter gatherer model become possible under a class system of deeper specialization. One won out over the other because of pragmatic reasons that were obvious to the people of the times (if we had a time machine or better records we could find out). What's more smart - to go hunt wild game, or to find and raise domesticated animals and plants you can eat without having to expend yourself?
... major issues like media control by corporations. Voting in the states has gotten so bad because of the likes of news organizations like fox news. As long as corporations control the media voting doesn't mean a lot because most voters are horribly misinformed.
... must face the fact that lots of code is boring to maintain and update. Not to mention unless you are independently wealthy contributing to open source is a drain one ones time and resources. No one should really be concerned that many corporations see value in open source, it's like seeing value in roads or sewers. There is much code that is just like roads and sewers that which would be hard to maintain on a volunteer basis.
Politicians are cowards because they fear corporations ability to take jobs away from their citizens and move away from their nation permanently. Corporations threaten this all the time. Governments can do little without a world governing body. Corporations and rich are too nimble given their excess resources.
This is one problem with capitalism - it gives too much power political power to a few individuals and hardly any to most people.
This must mean the chinese are racist? Or is it that they realize that a finite planet can only sustain a certain amount of people without doing long-term harm to their own interests as a nation?
"That is a captive market, not a free competitive market."
There has never been a 'competitive' free market. One can look at US intellectual property laws to see how business has captured the legal system to make formerly illegal things legal. Look at the questionable copyright act extensions. The west is just as bad as china in many ways. In fact for the last 30-40 years the upper classes have been throwing their entire society under a bus in the offshoring bazaar now they want to impose austerity. That's rich for people who got bailed out. When you can just buy up the laws of society and push your anti-worker propaganda 24/7 like the US you don't need to strong arm people if you can simply control the information they get from the media, since you've brainwashed them to a point they can't make intelligent use of their political rights.
"I'd have agreed before, but not now. If you can't see the difference between Harper and any Liberal, you have to be blind."
Have you ever looked at what past liberal government have done to healthcare? They've been cutting just like conservatives, the conservatives are stupid and hard right no doubt about it. But the liberals are flaming right wingers as well. Conservatives are bad no doubt about it... but the liberals haven't been doing anything for canadians for decades either. The liberals "paying down the deficits" came with a massive sell off of publically owned and built stuff. See this video for more:
The liberals only look better if you haven't been paying attention. They are both incompetent parties, conservatives are just more radical and hard right about their free market fundamentalism and wanting to screw up state finances on purpose, but paul martin and the liberals were doing the same for a long time.
... in canada. It's using a massively out-dated first past the post system while others use proportional representation. The country has been a two party liberal/con dictatorship for a long time and the elites like it that way. There is very little difference between how liberals and conservatives enact policy. Both govern from the right. Mots Canadians sadly are just as stupid as their american counterparts. In fact a majority of Canadians don't even know how parliament works. Voting today is a mere exercise in corporate marketing and branding then in anything else.
I'd say most modern government structures in the 21st century are obsolete because of what science has discovered about the human mind.
... it's trying to do too many things and it has long since stopped focusing on product quality.
Take the start menu, it's been ten years and it took them a decade after search engines existed to put in autocomplete into windows and search onto the startmenu. The user interface design in many modern programs are pretty horrible and the whole theory behind usability is not there yet. You shouldn't have to go through too many hoops to get to where you want to go in any given program. Figuring this out of course is obviously non-obvious since even google's start page after all these years is pretty damn simple in terms of it's UI. Whole classes of apps are still more cumbersome then they need to be and no one has been focusing efforts to improve applications even though there are tonnes of killer apps that are out there that no one has programmed yet.
"Hard sci-fi tends to have less mass-appeal and so be less likely to get the big-budget movie or TV treatment."
There is a reason for this, most sci-fi usually sucks and or is too dragged out (too long) and you could sum up many of the main points sci-fi tries to make much more succinctly in less time.
"What surprises me is that most of the older games from around this era have yet to be rivalled even today."
Game development costs made developing games a pain. Team sizes got too big (so you lose vision/focus), graphics became a serious drain on developers limited financial resources and many publishers and developers realized they could release garbage games and just rely on graphics, voice acting and story to sell games. Most modern games are 'cinematic experiences' with a little bit of watered down gameplay on the side. Compare any modern shooter to UT2004 and you see gameplay is frozen in time.
... it all really avoids the main issue. Not all students can be expected to do well or even like school. School is work and if schools want to see results kids should be paid to get high marks. "Learning" masks what learning really is - a lot of work. Now some of us like/love learning but statistically speaking most people don't like learning, especially things they think are hard or tedious.
Learning in the modern world is a means to an end, lets face this fact. Many societies in the past got by without formal mass schooling just fine. Only in our modern world where we make unrealistic demands in the face of limited human ability do schools 'fail'. What we have failed to do is fail to build a society against the reality of the limits on human potential.
"Yeah, they did manage to make 22 nm processors, but notice that clock speeds are barely higher than on 130 nm processors (which reached 2.5 GHz at best). "
We've made incremental gains on the mhz front, we can safely run processors at 4.5Ghz overclocked, we don't have any idea what will replace current designs if future breakthroughs are found to push clockspeed up again or something altogether different emerges.
One can take a look at videocards, right now for most PC gamers they haven't needed to upgrade their video hardware for quite some time relatively speaking compared to the past. The idea that needs will scale linearly forever is nonsense.
There is a point after rapid growth where you reach 'good enough' until the next step is ready which no one knows in advance.
Slashdot Mirror
"Copyright isn't inherently evil, but the corporations and interests that are far removed from the average creator's interests "
I'm sorry but the average creator is a douchebag, many creators once they get rich push for copyright extension. In the beginning before the rise of the 'middlemen' original creators got rich and then used government to abuse copyright. The bad Creators are just as much a problem. See modern game developers, their sense of entitlement is disturbing. By all means we should be able to access source code to update and repair old games we buy. But that is impossible because of the 'creators', not just the middlemen. See all the MMO's many gamedevs are creating, you pay all that money and the public gets zero ownership. Total BS IMHO. Something like an MMO once shut down should be forced into the public domain.
... the same guy that predicted 3D hardware would be "obsolete" by 2004-2005, it's 2012 and 3D hardware has been implemented in all major consoles for and will be for the foreseeable future.
The worst part about these talks is they don't talk about memory bandwidth - which is a huge roadblock to how fast anything can go. The last 2-3 generations of video cards (and cpu's too) the increase in performance has been getting smaller and smaller beause of fundamental advances in other areas (memory) aren't going anywhere near fast enough to keep the pace.
Sweeny shouldn't talk about hardware since he's a programmer and he's made countless foolish predictions before. The fact that he doesn't see the memory crisis that anyone in the hardware business knows about just shows volumes about how much he doesn't know.
"Many people just don't seem to care about privacy any more. "
It's not just that, it's that the internet was never designed with privacy in mind to begin with. The cost of maintaining privacy are huge because just the act of communication on a digital network can be de-anonymized quickly because of the nature of electronic communication. No one predicted the internet would get to be what it was. So much of it's infrastructure was never designed with privacy or security in mind. Think about how encryption was never standard on all connections from the get go.
It goes way beyond people sharing their info on facebook. Even if there was no facebook, the simple act of browsing the internet (communicating/downloading) is automatically a ripe platform for mining information no matter how well you try to plug the wholes. It's inherent to the nature of communication to be 'leaky'.
... long before internet. The internet just accelerated trends that already existed. Satellites constantly monitoring earth. Security camera's in major malls and shopping outlets whose video's are datamined for consumer behavior. Credit cards and shopping cards issued by companies to mine peoples buying behavior. For anyone who uses electronic financial transactions - there is no privacy. You often need to give your social security number and other piece of identification to setup any kind of legal bank account.
Just to exist in the modern world you give out a tonne of information direction or indirectly because often it's mandated by law.
"s, but there WERE no domesticated animals and plants. THAT is the mystery that has puzzled anthropologists. "
I think this is where anthropologists make huge assumptions about human intelligence or the lack thereof. This is what I mean by - it only seems non-obvious to us because we're so far removed from the circumstances which would force us to make the conclusion in its favor. I think this is where we all suffer from a painful lack of imagination. The same way if you told someone 4000 years ago about the 21st century technology and they wouldn't believe that was possible. "How is it possible in 2010 they have this thing called the internet, and 'mobile phones'". By putting the shoe on the other foot, in this example it looks like we have a failure of imagination.
After all if you told someone from years ago about our future technology they would be in awe that such things were possible.
My point is lost on you entirely. It only seems a mystery to us because we are far removed from the times. My point is, if alternatives were so much better why did they get out-competed?
"the agricultural revolution is a mystery"
It isn't, the revolution happened because it was human habit of not putting all your eggs in one basket. It's just specialization at work. Products impossible under hunter gatherer model become possible under a class system of deeper specialization. One won out over the other because of pragmatic reasons that were obvious to the people of the times (if we had a time machine or better records we could find out). What's more smart - to go hunt wild game, or to find and raise domesticated animals and plants you can eat without having to expend yourself?
You're a moron if you believe this.
... to undermine game ownership and turn games into a 'service' permanently.
... major issues like media control by corporations. Voting in the states has gotten so bad because of the likes of news organizations like fox news. As long as corporations control the media voting doesn't mean a lot because most voters are horribly misinformed.
... must face the fact that lots of code is boring to maintain and update. Not to mention unless you are independently wealthy contributing to open source is a drain one ones time and resources. No one should really be concerned that many corporations see value in open source, it's like seeing value in roads or sewers. There is much code that is just like roads and sewers that which would be hard to maintain on a volunteer basis.
" I'm constantly amazed at how the side that's "Pro-Life""
They are not pro life, they are pro-baby. Once that baby is out, it's open season on that kid, especially if he doesn't grow up the "right way".
" Blame cowardice here."
Politicians are cowards because they fear corporations ability to take jobs away from their citizens and move away from their nation permanently. Corporations threaten this all the time. Governments can do little without a world governing body. Corporations and rich are too nimble given their excess resources.
This is one problem with capitalism - it gives too much power political power to a few individuals and hardly any to most people.
"population control is inherently racist,"
This must mean the chinese are racist? Or is it that they realize that a finite planet can only sustain a certain amount of people without doing long-term harm to their own interests as a nation?
"That is a captive market, not a free competitive market."
There has never been a 'competitive' free market. One can look at US intellectual property laws to see how business has captured the legal system to make formerly illegal things legal. Look at the questionable copyright act extensions. The west is just as bad as china in many ways. In fact for the last 30-40 years the upper classes have been throwing their entire society under a bus in the offshoring bazaar now they want to impose austerity. That's rich for people who got bailed out. When you can just buy up the laws of society and push your anti-worker propaganda 24/7 like the US you don't need to strong arm people if you can simply control the information they get from the media, since you've brainwashed them to a point they can't make intelligent use of their political rights.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cJqM2tFOxLQ
From the dailybail.com
http://dailybail.com/home/there-are-no-words-to-describe-the-following-part-ii.html
Copyright extension act
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_Term_Extension_Act
"I'd have agreed before, but not now. If you can't see the difference between Harper and any Liberal, you have to be blind."
Have you ever looked at what past liberal government have done to healthcare? They've been cutting just like conservatives, the conservatives are stupid and hard right no doubt about it. But the liberals are flaming right wingers as well. Conservatives are bad no doubt about it... but the liberals haven't been doing anything for canadians for decades either. The liberals "paying down the deficits" came with a massive sell off of publically owned and built stuff. See this video for more:
http://www.ohcanadamovie.com/
The liberals only look better if you haven't been paying attention. They are both incompetent parties, conservatives are just more radical and hard right about their free market fundamentalism and wanting to screw up state finances on purpose, but paul martin and the liberals were doing the same for a long time.
... in canada. It's using a massively out-dated first past the post system while others use proportional representation. The country has been a two party liberal/con dictatorship for a long time and the elites like it that way. There is very little difference between how liberals and conservatives enact policy. Both govern from the right. Mots Canadians sadly are just as stupid as their american counterparts. In fact a majority of Canadians don't even know how parliament works. Voting today is a mere exercise in corporate marketing and branding then in anything else.
I'd say most modern government structures in the 21st century are obsolete because of what science has discovered about the human mind.
http://bit.ly/dYaWUc
... it's trying to do too many things and it has long since stopped focusing on product quality.
Take the start menu, it's been ten years and it took them a decade after search engines existed to put in autocomplete into windows and search onto the startmenu. The user interface design in many modern programs are pretty horrible and the whole theory behind usability is not there yet. You shouldn't have to go through too many hoops to get to where you want to go in any given program. Figuring this out of course is obviously non-obvious since even google's start page after all these years is pretty damn simple in terms of it's UI. Whole classes of apps are still more cumbersome then they need to be and no one has been focusing efforts to improve applications even though there are tonnes of killer apps that are out there that no one has programmed yet.
"Hard sci-fi tends to have less mass-appeal and so be less likely to get the big-budget movie or TV treatment."
There is a reason for this, most sci-fi usually sucks and or is too dragged out (too long) and you could sum up many of the main points sci-fi tries to make much more succinctly in less time.
"What surprises me is that most of the older games from around this era have yet to be rivalled even today."
Game development costs made developing games a pain. Team sizes got too big (so you lose vision/focus), graphics became a serious drain on developers limited financial resources and many publishers and developers realized they could release garbage games and just rely on graphics, voice acting and story to sell games. Most modern games are 'cinematic experiences' with a little bit of watered down gameplay on the side. Compare any modern shooter to UT2004 and you see gameplay is frozen in time.
"Aren't they obsolete already?"
Optical discs are still widely used for backups. Hard drives aren't perfect and if you do any serious work you want multiple copies on varied media.
... it all really avoids the main issue. Not all students can be expected to do well or even like school. School is work and if schools want to see results kids should be paid to get high marks. "Learning" masks what learning really is - a lot of work. Now some of us like/love learning but statistically speaking most people don't like learning, especially things they think are hard or tedious.
Learning in the modern world is a means to an end, lets face this fact. Many societies in the past got by without formal mass schooling just fine. Only in our modern world where we make unrealistic demands in the face of limited human ability do schools 'fail'. What we have failed to do is fail to build a society against the reality of the limits on human potential.
... at industrial scale that is both cost effective and as good/or better then the real thing remains to be seen.
"Yeah, they did manage to make 22 nm processors, but notice that clock speeds are barely higher than on 130 nm processors (which reached 2.5 GHz at best). "
We've made incremental gains on the mhz front, we can safely run processors at 4.5Ghz overclocked, we don't have any idea what will replace current designs if future breakthroughs are found to push clockspeed up again or something altogether different emerges.
"640k ought to be enough for everyone!"
One can take a look at videocards, right now for most PC gamers they haven't needed to upgrade their video hardware for quite some time relatively speaking compared to the past. The idea that needs will scale linearly forever is nonsense.
There is a point after rapid growth where you reach 'good enough' until the next step is ready which no one knows in advance.