Yeah. It's like, "I don't need no fancy-schmancy science to explain this to me. I already know what the problem is: religion. Now there's no need to enquire further or try to test this, because we all know the answer."
Yes, but I don't need to copy a book to read it, and I do need to copy a webpage to read it. By the time a webpage has reached my eyes, I have probably caused a couple of copies of that page to be created, and therefore I have copied a copyrighted work.
Maybe it is "by default", but it's not true that every work is protected by copyright. There is public domain work out there, and so it doesn't quite seem reasonable to legally require people to assume a certain set of copyright restrictions under *all* circumstances.
It's kind of Internet age thing. Before, public domain and free content was scarce at best, so there was a little of legal confusion around it. Now it is quite commonplace and one may not expect that all people can tell the difference.
It is an Internet-Age thing, but it's not just because there might be a lot of public domain stuff floating around. Part of the problem is certainly that copying is so easy and cost-free, and often outright necessary. When I view a webpage, I have already copied a whole lot of copyrighted material without reviewing any license. That material might include audio, video, and writing.
1) Take away the cost of printing and distribution
2) Put it into an ephemeral form that instinctively carries less value
3) Enable DRM, making it even more ephemeral and difficult to share than a dead-tree version
4) Keep the ads
5) Charge more
Seriously...? I don't know what confuses me more, media companies who come up with these plans, or the customers who continue to buy in.
Give me something as functional as a webpage but sleeker and without ads, and if I like your content I might pay a subscription fee.
I have to say, I'm shocked to hear such positive things about Windows Mobile. I've used Windows Mobile phones, and my experience is that they're frustrating, slow, confusing, and crashy. I wouldn't know where to begin. I've also supported Windows phones (I'm an IT guy) and the user experience is universally bad.
If I had to choose between all the major smartphone operating systems, then Windows would be in last place.
Well after all, education is a privilege for those people who are good enough to be rich. If you don't have thousands of dollars to throw in the trash, then you deserve to live in poverty.
Yeah, ultimately "Flash video" means H264 being played in a media player that happens to be written using Flash. So instead of using Quicktime or Windows Media Player or VLC, your using a player that was written in a variant of Javascript using Adobe Flash as the development kit.
The big downside is that, the way Flash media players work, you're *forced* to use a particular player. Imagine you went to a website that included a normal MPEG file, but it was set up so it could not be played in any player other that Windows Media Player. That'd be pretty stupid.
Re:Was Not Impressed at All
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Lost Ends
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Well there was a note in his notebook that said Desmond was his "constant". The idea of someone having a "constant" also came up with relation to Desmond, who determined that Penny was his "constant". The reason Desmond needed a "constant" was that he was unstuck from time.
I think the implication there is that Faraday had experimented on himself (and perhaps his mom?) and is also unstuck in time at some point before actually going back in time and ending up in the 70s. Being unstuck would perhaps explain his memory problems, too.
If it was ever spelled out more explicitly than that, then I missed it.
Re:Was Not Impressed at All
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I'm not really analyzing, I'm giving you the blatant literal explanation of what happened.
Re:Was Not Impressed at All
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Imagine if you saw Frodo sailing away at the end of the movie and... you did not know exactly what that stupid ring did or why it was important...
I never felt like we did get a really good explanation of what that stupid ring did. We know it make Bilbo/Frodo immortal and invisible, and it had a lot of Sauron's power in it. But beyond that...? If it was explained, I don't remember and it doesn't seem like it matters much. It was powerful and Sauron needed it. The fellowship needed to destroy it. We don't know exactly what magical powers Sauron would gain from obtaining the ring.
Not that I'm saying the Lost writers managed to tie everything up to an ideal degree, but I don't think it's too crazy to leave a lot of details and answers out. In the end, all of these stories really are about the characters. The fact that the ring in LoTR is a ring and not a bracelet... it's not too important. You could have the ring also make Frodo... able to breath under water, maybe? It doesn't really matter. The story is about friendship and hardship and faith and bravery.
Re:So, my only question regarding Lost is
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It was a guy who got thrown into a magical fountain that was the source of all life. As a result, he was cursed to "live" forever as a smoke monster without being able to leave the island.
Re:Was Not Impressed at All
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Lost Ends
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· Score: 1
...it's still frustrating for the creators to basically say that all of the mysteries never really mattered. The numbers? Just numbers. Walt? He's busy trying to live while being officially dead. The rules? Oh, that was just a Jacob thing, he's gone now. The Frozen Donkey Wheel? That's just the magical escape hatch, no big deal. The statue? Just a statue that got hit by a ship a while back.
On the other hand, is there any explanation that could ever be awesome enough? Even if they had it all intricately planned out ahead of time, explaining things *always* makes them seem rather ordinary. "Who is Jacob?" is a great mystery. Then you get the explanation, "Oh, he's just some kind of a weird mystical all-knowing protector of the island, and therefore protector of the entire world." Now that's not ordinary at all, but once you know it, it's not interesting either.
Re:Was Not Impressed at All
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Lost Ends
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Abrams has been pretty open about this: he values mystery more than he values resolution.
Re:Was Not Impressed at All
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I just mean that we don't know the details. We don't know, for example, how badly the Man in Black could hurt one of the candidates, nor how indirect his actions would have to be to cause them harm (other than apparently he must trick someone else into actually doing the harm). We can't say anything as specific as "Jacob created a force-field made of special particles that repelled the black smoke" or anything similar. We can't say by what force Jacob's rules were enforced (except maybe whatever force is behind the heart of the island).
Still, we know the smoke monster wasn't allowed to hurt certain people, but was allowed to hurt others. Some of the people he was allowed to hurt, he still chose not to hurt either because (a) he didn't care; or (b) he was using them as pawns to maneuver the people he couldn't hurt.
Re:Was Not Impressed at All
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Lost Ends
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· Score: 4, Insightful
SPOILERS (of course)
Well you're not going to get a complete explanation of the island. What has been explained is that somehow it's the seat of all life on earth. It's something akin to the garden of eden.
Walt: Walt is "special". There's not much more to it than that. Lots of people in the series are special somehow.
Faraday & Desmond: I'm not sure how much of it is an unexplained loose-end. Both Faraday and Desmond had become somewhat unstuck in time, Desmond due to the hatch blowing up, and Faraday as a result of his experiments. We never get a full backstory on Faraday and we're never shown events from his point of view, but it's possible that somehow he's experiencing things out of order. Otherwise, it's just a minor snafu on the writer's part.
"the properties of the multiverses": There were no multiverses. The "universe" where they didn't crash on the island never happened. It was all a sort of purgatory that was taking place long after the rest of the events of the show. It took place after Kate and Sawyer and the rest escapes the island, after Hurley became "the chosen one" or whatever. Everyone is dead. The rest of the events of the show are real, and take place in a single timeline.
"why the black cloud killed who it did and left others": The smoke monster was blocked from killing any of the "candidates" by Jacob. We don't know exactly how Jacob's magic worked, but that's why the smoke monster couldn't kill Jack, Sawyer, Hurley, etc. Anyone else he let live was incidental.
Well it wasn't *just* rhetorical. I've heard the claim a bunch of times about quantum entanglement that you can measure the state of an electron at two distant places "at the same time" and they will always be in sync. Its my understanding that this effect doesn't have a distance limit, but if you could get two entangled electrons to opposite sides of the galaxy, their states would still stay in sync.
I don't really know the right language here, lets we stick with your metaphor of two people with your magical color changing shirts. You and Alice synchronize your watches and make a table of their simultaneous checks, and it looks something like this:
I don't know, does that make sense? Is that possible, and if not, what happens? Would the shirts necessarily hold the same color long enough to allow the color of the other shirt to be measured in every frame of reference?
Also people watch small videos on the Internet all the time. I want 1080p if I'm going to watch a movie on my TV. If I'm watching a 30 second YouTube video on my laptop, then I don't really care if it's 1080p.
The only thing that's interesting about these synchronized flashing shirts is the fact that when one stops cycling the other stops at EXACTLY the same time no matter how far away they are.
In the context of special relativity, what does it mean for two things to happen at EXACTLY the same time?
It's not about mass. Einstein's theory of special relativity assumes that no information can travel faster than the speed of light. It's essentially the maximum speed possible according to relativity. You can't go faster without time travel.
So if you can send a signal faster than light, you can send a signal back in time. Either that, or the concept of space and time described by Special Relativity is wrong, and we'd have to come up with a whole new concept of space and time.
Maybe you're just trolling, but for the record, I'm not trying to explain my inability to put myself "out in front of the pack and take charge of anything". I used to be very ambitious and I worked my way to being "out in front of the pack" and I now I am in charge. I'm the boss. And I've discovered that being in charge is as much a burden as it is a reward. I wouldn't say I was "an idiot" when I sought power, but I was perhaps delusional and ignorant. Maybe even self-absorbed.
Meanwhile I've have observed a lot of other people trying to wriggle themselves into various positions of power (including watching my underlings jockey for promotion), and there tend to be some commonalities. There's almost always a kind of prideful self-absorbed ignorance similar to what I'd suffered, and it's dangerous. And while it's scary enough to watch the people who are oblivious of the damage they're doing, what's even worse are the people who just don't care about the damaging they're doing.
I would have thought the same way once. Then I grew up.
Spend some time "in charge" of anything even moderately important, and you will make decisions that will upset people and even hurt people. Either you'll find that extremely unpleasant, you won't notice because you're arrogant and self-absorbed, or you won't care because you're a sociopath.
Now I'm not saying that no sensible person will accept power under any circumstances. Like I said, a person might want to achieve positive things, or might have a sense of obligation. However, what I'm trying to argue against is the childish idea that having power is awesome fun, and it allows you to simply do what you want without drawbacks. Having power often means that you can't do what you want because the more power you have, the more obligations you have. And you will make mistakes, and you will fail to meet some of those obligations.
Someone once said, "Man has a right to do whatever he can, and his only real responsibility is to live with the consequences.". The more power you have, the more you can do. But also, the more power you have, the greater the consequences.
So when you talk about a position like the PotUS, I don't envy that power. To take on that job, you either need to be a moron, a sociopath, or a saint.
I disagree a little with you, but I don't quite agree with the author either. All in all, I wouldn't say that Gates was completely wrong, but it seems like he was kind of clueless and he missed the point. Like yes, he understood that online shopping will be important *somehow*, but he thought vendors would show you video of the products before you bought them. However, that's not what makes online shopping interesting at all; the process of buying things online is essentially not very different from buying out of a catalog. There are several issues, and I'd give some points for predicting any of these:
the concept of the "long tail" and how the Internet enables companies to make money selling low-volume products
the concept of boutique shops being able to reach a wider audience
the idea that user reviews would be posted along with products
some idea of how viral marketing would influence purchasing decision
the concept of aggregating pricing information to find the best deal
the idea that we would be buying media online instead of going to record stores, movie theaters, and paying for cable
... and I don't know. I had a few more in mind but I didn't write them down quickly enough and I forgot what I was going to say. My point is, there are a *lot* of interesting things about online shopping, and the idea of being able to see a live video stream of the product you're going to buy is a such a niche use that it's silly. I can't give him any credit for it. I also can't give him credit for simply thinking that you would buy some things online. Too obvious.
And a lot of Gates' predications over the years have been like that: latching onto obvious possibilities, but showing little understanding of what will actually drive things.
I'd also note that I love email and it is extremely useful, but it's also true that it is a bit of a time-waster (as much of the Internet is). I once measured this, and at my work address, something like 2% of the email messages that I receive are anything that I want to read. Literally 90% is spam. About 8% more are notifications and email conversations that I get copied on but which have absolutely nothing to do with me. Of those 2% remaining, I only skim them looking to see if there's anything I need to deal with, and I pretty well ignore the rest.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah. It's like, "I don't need no fancy-schmancy science to explain this to me. I already know what the problem is: religion. Now there's no need to enquire further or try to test this, because we all know the answer."
Yes, but I don't need to copy a book to read it, and I do need to copy a webpage to read it. By the time a webpage has reached my eyes, I have probably caused a couple of copies of that page to be created, and therefore I have copied a copyrighted work.
But then you still wouldn't hear it until after you downloaded it.
Every work by default is copyrighted.
Maybe it is "by default", but it's not true that every work is protected by copyright. There is public domain work out there, and so it doesn't quite seem reasonable to legally require people to assume a certain set of copyright restrictions under *all* circumstances.
It's kind of Internet age thing. Before, public domain and free content was scarce at best, so there was a little of legal confusion around it. Now it is quite commonplace and one may not expect that all people can tell the difference.
It is an Internet-Age thing, but it's not just because there might be a lot of public domain stuff floating around. Part of the problem is certainly that copying is so easy and cost-free, and often outright necessary. When I view a webpage, I have already copied a whole lot of copyrighted material without reviewing any license. That material might include audio, video, and writing.
Yeah, but that would apply to reading electronic paper or real dead-tree paper, too. He's claiming that the iPad is no worse for your eyes than paper.
Yeah, I don't get this:
1) Take away the cost of printing and distribution
2) Put it into an ephemeral form that instinctively carries less value
3) Enable DRM, making it even more ephemeral and difficult to share than a dead-tree version
4) Keep the ads
5) Charge more
Seriously...? I don't know what confuses me more, media companies who come up with these plans, or the customers who continue to buy in.
Give me something as functional as a webpage but sleeker and without ads, and if I like your content I might pay a subscription fee.
I have to say, I'm shocked to hear such positive things about Windows Mobile. I've used Windows Mobile phones, and my experience is that they're frustrating, slow, confusing, and crashy. I wouldn't know where to begin. I've also supported Windows phones (I'm an IT guy) and the user experience is universally bad.
If I had to choose between all the major smartphone operating systems, then Windows would be in last place.
Well after all, education is a privilege for those people who are good enough to be rich. If you don't have thousands of dollars to throw in the trash, then you deserve to live in poverty.
Yeah, ultimately "Flash video" means H264 being played in a media player that happens to be written using Flash. So instead of using Quicktime or Windows Media Player or VLC, your using a player that was written in a variant of Javascript using Adobe Flash as the development kit.
The big downside is that, the way Flash media players work, you're *forced* to use a particular player. Imagine you went to a website that included a normal MPEG file, but it was set up so it could not be played in any player other that Windows Media Player. That'd be pretty stupid.
Well there was a note in his notebook that said Desmond was his "constant". The idea of someone having a "constant" also came up with relation to Desmond, who determined that Penny was his "constant". The reason Desmond needed a "constant" was that he was unstuck from time.
I think the implication there is that Faraday had experimented on himself (and perhaps his mom?) and is also unstuck in time at some point before actually going back in time and ending up in the 70s. Being unstuck would perhaps explain his memory problems, too.
If it was ever spelled out more explicitly than that, then I missed it.
I'm not really analyzing, I'm giving you the blatant literal explanation of what happened.
Imagine if you saw Frodo sailing away at the end of the movie and... you did not know exactly what that stupid ring did or why it was important...
I never felt like we did get a really good explanation of what that stupid ring did. We know it make Bilbo/Frodo immortal and invisible, and it had a lot of Sauron's power in it. But beyond that...? If it was explained, I don't remember and it doesn't seem like it matters much. It was powerful and Sauron needed it. The fellowship needed to destroy it. We don't know exactly what magical powers Sauron would gain from obtaining the ring.
Not that I'm saying the Lost writers managed to tie everything up to an ideal degree, but I don't think it's too crazy to leave a lot of details and answers out. In the end, all of these stories really are about the characters. The fact that the ring in LoTR is a ring and not a bracelet... it's not too important. You could have the ring also make Frodo... able to breath under water, maybe? It doesn't really matter. The story is about friendship and hardship and faith and bravery.
It was a guy who got thrown into a magical fountain that was the source of all life. As a result, he was cursed to "live" forever as a smoke monster without being able to leave the island.
...it's still frustrating for the creators to basically say that all of the mysteries never really mattered. The numbers? Just numbers. Walt? He's busy trying to live while being officially dead. The rules? Oh, that was just a Jacob thing, he's gone now. The Frozen Donkey Wheel? That's just the magical escape hatch, no big deal. The statue? Just a statue that got hit by a ship a while back.
On the other hand, is there any explanation that could ever be awesome enough? Even if they had it all intricately planned out ahead of time, explaining things *always* makes them seem rather ordinary. "Who is Jacob?" is a great mystery. Then you get the explanation, "Oh, he's just some kind of a weird mystical all-knowing protector of the island, and therefore protector of the entire world." Now that's not ordinary at all, but once you know it, it's not interesting either.
Abrams has been pretty open about this: he values mystery more than he values resolution.
I just mean that we don't know the details. We don't know, for example, how badly the Man in Black could hurt one of the candidates, nor how indirect his actions would have to be to cause them harm (other than apparently he must trick someone else into actually doing the harm). We can't say anything as specific as "Jacob created a force-field made of special particles that repelled the black smoke" or anything similar. We can't say by what force Jacob's rules were enforced (except maybe whatever force is behind the heart of the island).
Still, we know the smoke monster wasn't allowed to hurt certain people, but was allowed to hurt others. Some of the people he was allowed to hurt, he still chose not to hurt either because (a) he didn't care; or (b) he was using them as pawns to maneuver the people he couldn't hurt.
SPOILERS (of course)
Well you're not going to get a complete explanation of the island. What has been explained is that somehow it's the seat of all life on earth. It's something akin to the garden of eden.
Walt: Walt is "special". There's not much more to it than that. Lots of people in the series are special somehow.
Faraday & Desmond: I'm not sure how much of it is an unexplained loose-end. Both Faraday and Desmond had become somewhat unstuck in time, Desmond due to the hatch blowing up, and Faraday as a result of his experiments. We never get a full backstory on Faraday and we're never shown events from his point of view, but it's possible that somehow he's experiencing things out of order. Otherwise, it's just a minor snafu on the writer's part.
"the properties of the multiverses": There were no multiverses. The "universe" where they didn't crash on the island never happened. It was all a sort of purgatory that was taking place long after the rest of the events of the show. It took place after Kate and Sawyer and the rest escapes the island, after Hurley became "the chosen one" or whatever. Everyone is dead. The rest of the events of the show are real, and take place in a single timeline.
"why the black cloud killed who it did and left others": The smoke monster was blocked from killing any of the "candidates" by Jacob. We don't know exactly how Jacob's magic worked, but that's why the smoke monster couldn't kill Jack, Sawyer, Hurley, etc. Anyone else he let live was incidental.
Well it wasn't *just* rhetorical. I've heard the claim a bunch of times about quantum entanglement that you can measure the state of an electron at two distant places "at the same time" and they will always be in sync. Its my understanding that this effect doesn't have a distance limit, but if you could get two entangled electrons to opposite sides of the galaxy, their states would still stay in sync.
I don't really know the right language here, lets we stick with your metaphor of two people with your magical color changing shirts. You and Alice synchronize your watches and make a table of their simultaneous checks, and it looks something like this:
Event 1-- Alice:red, you:cyan
Event 2-- Alice:blue, you:yellow
Event 3-- Alice:green, you:magenta
Meanwhile, I'm passing by on a spaceship that is traveling very very fast. Isn't it possible that I'd instead see something like this:
Event A-- Alice: red
Event B-- you: cyan
Event C-- Alice:blue
Event D-- Alice:green, you:yellow
Event E-- you:magenta
I don't know, does that make sense? Is that possible, and if not, what happens? Would the shirts necessarily hold the same color long enough to allow the color of the other shirt to be measured in every frame of reference?
Also people watch small videos on the Internet all the time. I want 1080p if I'm going to watch a movie on my TV. If I'm watching a 30 second YouTube video on my laptop, then I don't really care if it's 1080p.
The only thing that's interesting about these synchronized flashing shirts is the fact that when one stops cycling the other stops at EXACTLY the same time no matter how far away they are.
In the context of special relativity, what does it mean for two things to happen at EXACTLY the same time?
It's not about mass. Einstein's theory of special relativity assumes that no information can travel faster than the speed of light. It's essentially the maximum speed possible according to relativity. You can't go faster without time travel.
So if you can send a signal faster than light, you can send a signal back in time. Either that, or the concept of space and time described by Special Relativity is wrong, and we'd have to come up with a whole new concept of space and time.
Maybe you're just trolling, but for the record, I'm not trying to explain my inability to put myself "out in front of the pack and take charge of anything". I used to be very ambitious and I worked my way to being "out in front of the pack" and I now I am in charge. I'm the boss. And I've discovered that being in charge is as much a burden as it is a reward. I wouldn't say I was "an idiot" when I sought power, but I was perhaps delusional and ignorant. Maybe even self-absorbed.
Meanwhile I've have observed a lot of other people trying to wriggle themselves into various positions of power (including watching my underlings jockey for promotion), and there tend to be some commonalities. There's almost always a kind of prideful self-absorbed ignorance similar to what I'd suffered, and it's dangerous. And while it's scary enough to watch the people who are oblivious of the damage they're doing, what's even worse are the people who just don't care about the damaging they're doing.
Was HURD ever alive?
I would have thought the same way once. Then I grew up.
Spend some time "in charge" of anything even moderately important, and you will make decisions that will upset people and even hurt people. Either you'll find that extremely unpleasant, you won't notice because you're arrogant and self-absorbed, or you won't care because you're a sociopath.
Now I'm not saying that no sensible person will accept power under any circumstances. Like I said, a person might want to achieve positive things, or might have a sense of obligation. However, what I'm trying to argue against is the childish idea that having power is awesome fun, and it allows you to simply do what you want without drawbacks. Having power often means that you can't do what you want because the more power you have, the more obligations you have. And you will make mistakes, and you will fail to meet some of those obligations.
Someone once said, "Man has a right to do whatever he can, and his only real responsibility is to live with the consequences.". The more power you have, the more you can do. But also, the more power you have, the greater the consequences.
So when you talk about a position like the PotUS, I don't envy that power. To take on that job, you either need to be a moron, a sociopath, or a saint.
I disagree a little with you, but I don't quite agree with the author either. All in all, I wouldn't say that Gates was completely wrong, but it seems like he was kind of clueless and he missed the point. Like yes, he understood that online shopping will be important *somehow*, but he thought vendors would show you video of the products before you bought them. However, that's not what makes online shopping interesting at all; the process of buying things online is essentially not very different from buying out of a catalog. There are several issues, and I'd give some points for predicting any of these:
... and I don't know. I had a few more in mind but I didn't write them down quickly enough and I forgot what I was going to say. My point is, there are a *lot* of interesting things about online shopping, and the idea of being able to see a live video stream of the product you're going to buy is a such a niche use that it's silly. I can't give him any credit for it. I also can't give him credit for simply thinking that you would buy some things online. Too obvious.
And a lot of Gates' predications over the years have been like that: latching onto obvious possibilities, but showing little understanding of what will actually drive things.
I'd also note that I love email and it is extremely useful, but it's also true that it is a bit of a time-waster (as much of the Internet is). I once measured this, and at my work address, something like 2% of the email messages that I receive are anything that I want to read. Literally 90% is spam. About 8% more are notifications and email conversations that I get copied on but which have absolutely nothing to do with me. Of those 2% remaining, I only skim them looking to see if there's anything I need to deal with, and I pretty well ignore the rest.