I think those are covered under "believed that he/she would benefit from completing the task".
Besides, there are people who "know that if they don't do it, they won't get paid," and yet still don't work, but it's usually because they don't believe that working will actually benefit them very much either. There are people who "know that if they don't do it, they don't eat," and they'll do some kind of 'work', but not necessarily the kind you want them to. They might end up begging for spare change on the street corner, and if that doesn't get them enough to eat, they might resort to crime. People won't put up with starvation for very long, but outright starvation isn't a great motivator for people being productive members of society.
If you didn't already know that, then you must have lived an even more sheltered life than I have!
There are things that "busy work" can teach, e.g. discipline, time management. Test skills, on the other hand, can be an exercise in analyzing the psychology of whoever made the tests. When I was in school, there were times when I scored 80% on a test without knowing any of the material I was being tested for.
My larger point here is that, even though "test skills" are skills, tests often don't actually test what they are designed to test. There is no silver bullet-- no magical method that lets you put any random person in front of a class of 50 kids and churn out super-smart kids year after year. There's no replacement for good teachers who care being able to give lots of personal attention to kids and help the kids work through things. Methods are almost incidental.
Obviously what I experience as sweet can be very different from what you experience as sweet.
I'm not sure that's right. I'm might prefer things that are sour to sugary-sweet candy, but I think sugar will taste sweet to both of us because sweetness is biological (at least to some extent). If someone is for some reason unable to taste sweetness, that doesn't change what sweetness is. But I get what you're saying: Laziness is somewhat relative, but perhaps not entirely. The idea isn't really borne out in the rest of your post, though.
Some tasks just need to be done because... end of story. If you can't, then the label is lazy.
This doesn't make sense to me. You're saying that some things need to be done for no reason, and it's "laziness" if you don't do them. Now I don't understand why anyone should be doing things for no reason. I don't think I know anyone who does things for no reason, with no rationale, and with no expectation of personal benefit from those actions. If there were anyone doing such things, than I would probably label that "stupidity".
I think what you're actually thinking of is that there are some things that ought to be done even though the benefit might not be immediately apparent to everyone. In those cases, I think the people who understand the importance of those things are willing to put in work to make sure they get done. Other people may be motivated to do those things for other reasons without fully understanding the importance. But no one is doing it for no reason.
If you are not prepared to simply say at a certain point "we did all we wanted to do, now it is up to you and if you don't, you fail" you end up with the no-child-left-behind policy.
Now this is a different argument about a different topic. You're just arguing that, given limited resources, we should be willing to sacrifice the welfare of some children in order to increase the success of other children. Even if true, that's a whole other discussion before we can get to the question of which children to sacrifice and which to spend your resources on.
School nowadays is so non-challenging that kids with brains are left to rot because the most dis-intrested can't be left behind.
I'm not saying that we should make schools less challenging. I'm just saying it might be counter-productive to single children out and tell them they have inherent deeply-ingrained character flaws.
At a certain point our society just can't afford or can't be bothered to keep chasing after people who are lazy.
At a certain point, society can't afford not to. You keep writing children off, telling them they're no good, trying to force them into the idea that they're useless, and then you're surprised when they don't grow up to be productive members of society?
Yes, I think society would be well served to chase down everyone and try to find good uses for them. Why shouldn't we? Here's a pretty interesting video that's somewhat related. But even so, that's not what I was talking about. I haven't said anywhere before that we need to put more effort and resources into chasing people down, but if we're going to spend all of our effort and resources trying to educated people, we may as well educate them properly. There's no point in putting extra effort into chasing people away.
But let me put it this way: I've known lots of different types of people, some of whom have been labelled as lazy. I have never known anyone who met most of the following criteria and were still unwilling to work:
understood the importance of a task
believed that he/she would benefit from completing the task
knew which task needed to be complete and how to do it
felt confident in his/her own ability to complete that task
For each person that feels as you do, that homework is over emphasized and quizes and tests are under emphasized, I can bet that there are 5 people that feel the opposite way.
I have to say that I hated homework when I was a kid, thought it was pointless and stupid, but as an adult the experience has served me well in some ways. At work, I may be given an assignment like "Write a report on this subject and be ready to present it at a meeting that we're going to have 2 weeks from today." You have to be able to get something like that done without someone standing over your shoulder making sure you do it.
On the other hand, that's not to say that the homework assignments I had as a student were done well. After 6 hours of school each day, I was given another 4 or 5 hours of inane busy work. As I got older, I found it oppressive to think about how much work I was doing that was simply not useful to anyone. Sure, you could say it was helping me educationally, but that was help I didn't want. But I was solving problems that didn't need to be solved because the teacher already knew the answer. I was writing papers that didn't need to be written, since nobody cared about what I had to say.
Every single assignment was simply an exercise in giving back to the teacher the answer that the teacher already knew and already believed. If I did manage to come up with something clever, it was usually marked as "wrong" because it wasn't the answer that the teacher was looking for.
And if you did something wrong, it wasn't like anyone would sit you down and have anything resembling a conversation about how you could do better. It was just "Your wrong, so I'm going to mark you as a failure and punish you. Hopefully this will ensure that you're considered a failure for the rest of your life."
I guess I'm just trying to say that I don't think it's about assigning homework or not assigning homework, taking tests or not taking tests. It's about how we treat kids, what we talk to them about, and what attitudes we display towards education and towards the students themselves.
I call BS... I was one of the kids that people cheated off of... None of them did it because they were bored. They did it because they were lazy and didn't care.
There's a very fine line between "bored" and "lazy and didn't care". If I'm not doing something because the activity bores me, then clearly I don't want to work on it because I don't care much about it.
I have an aversion to the word "lazy" because I'm not sure what it's trying describe. It seems to me to imply that there are people who won't do work because they simply won't, as though there are no further reasons behind it. That doesn't accurately describe anyone I know.
Most of the time that I've dealt with people who are averse to work, there are really a number of factors at play. For one thing, if I refuse to do the work you want me to, it's possible that I just don't think that work is valuable, and it's even possible that I'm right about that. It may also be that I don't really know how to do that work, or I don't know where to begin, and rather than admitting it, I just put it off.
Beyond that, lots of people that I know who are "lazy" in general are also just very discouraged from working. Often they're coming from a place where they believe that nothing they do will be accepted by others to be "good enough". If you're feeling like you have no possibility of success and achievement, then there doesn't seem to be much point in trying.
I know I probably sound like a politically correct hippy who's just making excuses, but I just think there's something dangerous in labeling children as "lazy". It's saying, "You're not just disinterested or discouraged, but there's actually a serious flaw with you, personally, that makes you unworthy of success." If being discouraged is actually part of the problem, then calling them "lazy" may be very counter-productive in getting them to work on things.
To some extent, the problem is that schools are designed to churn out factory workers. They teach people to do as they're told, follow directions, and performance at completing menial tasks is the primary measure of virtue. It's no coincidence that our current school systems have their roots in the industrial revolution.
So the US is now a country of people who have a factory-worker mentality and generally approach problems the way a factory worker would, but we aren't factory workers. The factories have gone, manufacturing is all done overseas, but we still think that performance in completing menial tasks is the primary measure of virtue. As a result, we even think of schools as little worker-factories, and we set them up to churn out more factory workers.
Yeah, I think that sort of thing is generally a bad idea. I think DRM is at its best when it makes it inconvenient to distribute the content without actually hindering any use.
I think that there are problems with DRM even if they're only designed to prevent illegal use, though. First, there's the fairly abstract notion of legal but unexpected use. How can you make sure DRM doesn't prevent me from using the content in a legal way unless you have enumerated every possible legal use?
Then there's also the potential for problems with implementations. For example, lots of DRM schemes include connecting to some authoritative server that can determine whether you're authorized to use the file. iTunes, for example, uses this. They require that I connect to their server in order to authorize a computer to play files from a given account. The problem with this implementation is that it doesn't address what happens if my use for the files outlives the authentication server. So in other words: what happens if iTunes closes down and the authentication server is shut down, and then I replace all of my computers? How will I be able to access the movies I've bought?
Well it seems like it's a theory about what the "real reason" might be. I'm not sure what your problem with that is. Would you prefer to only get the side of the story that Microsoft's PR people want to put out?
You must have missed the point last week where Congress was flipping out about primates being kept as pets. Obviously there isn't anything all that important going on in the world.
Those are some interesting questions, and I think many of them highlight how much digital media changes things. IANAL, so proceed with caution.
As far as the legal distinction, it is in the fact that you can buy a copy of a copyrighted work and you can lend that copy, but you cannot copy that copy and distribute your copies. So your library can buy 10 copies and lend each one out, but they can't buy one copy, make 9 other copies, and lend them out. It's complicated further by the fact that we're constantly copying data, backing it up, caching it, etc. So pretty much anything that's not covered in some kind of "fair use" provision usually ends up needing a license.
It might be interesting if someone came up with a "digital library" model where they licensed X copies of a book, the license allowing them to then "lend" that book to X customers at a time. It would probably need to be DRMed and be subscription based, and you'd have to get authors/publishers to agree to it. I'm not sure they would agree to it.
To talk about it on a slightly less legalistic tone, I think it's an important distinction that public libraries do have to buy the books they own, or even if the books are donated, someone has purchased them. That means that the publisher, and therefore the writer, still gets some amount of money. Also, because of the increased use each book gets, I would guess that libraries have to periodically replace old books, assuming they're getting lots of use.
If you're suggesting that everyone could download books for free and never have to replace them, then I don't know where authors would get money. As a society, I do think it's good for us to have some kind of laws surrounding "intellectual property" that allows for business models where the creators get paid.
What about people who work really hard and never get anywhere, or people who are handed success for no reason and run with it...or people who are prevented from having any success due to circumstances beyond their control in life
I think a lot of this was already addressed in my post, but maybe not spelled out very well. What I'm saying is that you can't have real success handed to you, at least not exactly. You could come from a rich family and be given lots of money, but unless you have some raw talent, some willingness to work, and a good sense of which opportunities to take, then the most you can do is sit on your pile of money. You won't accomplish anything for yourself. Lots of people have fewer opportunities and still accomplish a lot with what they have. But still, you can only take the opportunities that are open to you, and some people aren't given many opportunities.
Mostly what I'm trying to get across, though, is that I've known plenty of people who seem to be pretty unsuccessful by their own measures, but the problem wasn't a lack of opportunity. I've seen people where they say they want to go someplace, they get the opportunity to get to that place, and they don't grab the opportunity when it's there. They blame their circumstances, the fact that things aren't easy, the roadblocks in their way, but they don't take the opportunities in front of them.
At the same time, I've known quite a few people who are fairly successful and at any point in conversation they can squeeze it in, they talk about how they did it all themselves. They talk about how smart they were and how hard-working, and lecture everyone on what we should do if we want to be successful too. The one thing they tend not to mention, however, is how if one event-- something beyond their control-- had happened differently, they might be bigger failures than the people they're lecturing.
What I've gathered from these observations is that you can't necessarily judge people by their current state of "success"-- insofar as "success" is a position or an amount of money. If someone is actively accomplishing impressive things, however, that does tell you something. Failure doesn't necessarily tell you anything, unless you actually know them well enough to see why they're failing and know the opportunities that they're passing up.
And what I'd try to advise is that people watch for opportunities, and try to muster the courage to take opportunities when they present themselves.
It seems to me the kernel of his argument is that they had inherent talent, but became truly exceptional owing to a combination of favorable circumstances. In other words, their talent was a necessary but not sufficient condition for great success.
I haven't read the book yet, but that sounds roughly correct to me. It seems like people who are successful have a tendency to emphasize the part their own innate abilities played in creating that success, while people who aren't successful tend to overemphasize luck and circumstance.
From my own experiences, from my own successes and failures and knowing some very successful and very unsuccessful people, I would formulate it like this: Someone could hand you success on silver platter, and you still won't be able to hold onto it unless you have some raw ability, a real willingness to work hard, and the wisdom to grab onto the right opportunity when it comes along. On the other hand, anyone with any considerable success has had some moments of opportunity where, if those moments had not presented themselves, that person wouldn't have had their successes.
While I don't think this will do anything to get iPhone/iPod Touch users to buy a Kindle
I'm not so sure it won't. It may be that iPod/iPhone users will try this out, generally like the experience, but decide it's worth buying a Kindle for the improved reading experience of a larger e-ink screen.
Otherwise, I think you're right. This seems like a smart move for Amazon.
I think they focused on the benefit of using this app with the Kindle because... well, the first question that popped into my head was, "If I buy a book on my iPhone and then get a Kindle in a few months, will I be able to transfer my books over to the Kindle, or are they going to try to make me buy them all again?"
Once I had gotten past that thought, my next question might have been, "Well how hard will it be to transfer books from one to the other? Will Amazon provide a mechanism for that?" If I had gotten past those two, I'd like to think I'd be clever enough to ask at some point, "Can they provide any method for me to read on my one device and have my place synced over to the other so I can pick up right where I left off?"
It looks like Amazon may have covered their bases pretty well.
They will never make an expandable, cheapo minitower
I'm not talking about an "cheapo minitower". Just something between a Mac mini and a Mac Pro that doesn't have a built-in monitor. Like a "Mac normal" (not "Pro" or "mini"). I think there's a market for it, but it might possibly cannibalize their Mac Pro sales-- which is why they probably won't do it.
A fair way to think of Fair Use is as a form of "legal infringement".
Well I don't really want to get into an argument about legal language. I would have said that "fair use" is not infringement on someone else's copyright, i.e. when I exercise fair use, I am not infringing on anyone else's rights at all.
Not that might not be how a lawyer would say it, but if you want to know what I intended to say, it's probably safe to assume that, when I'm talking about "infringement", I mean to exclude fair-use cases.
Here is the question: How do you compensate artists without compensating the RIAA?
Well that is the question, isn't it? I don't know. I suspect that it won't actually be all that good to try to compensate artists directly (as a system), since that would force artists to spend their time chasing down their fees instead of creating.
Also, it would probably force the whole system to become decentralized into lots of different stores and websites. That complicates things for the customers since it means it'll be more difficult to find the legitimate source for a given work, as well as raising security issues (giving your credit card info to some random band's website because there's not other way to pay them).
I think you end up needing some kind of middle-man that can act as the infrastructure for distribution and receiving payments. If the record industry were smart, they would have gotten into that a long time ago. Instead, they've handed that business to people like Amazon and Apple. Maybe you'll start to see artists bypassing labels and going straight to distributors.
Not to be dismissive of your point (it's a good point), but I think it just depends on the application. If the purpose is navigation of an OS, then I might be much more interested in using my finger. If, on the other hand, the purpose is to allow me to write on something, then I'm more comfortable using something resembling a pen.
I don't know, which part of it? Seems like there are 3 things going on here: (1) e-paper; (2) touchscreen; and (3) bendable.
Now the value of e-paper is that it uses less electricity than an LCD screen and is easier on the eyes (in many circumstances) for prolonged reading. The fact that it's touch-sensitive gives you another option in how you interact with it.
Now those two things aren't new. They're already being used in the Kindle, for example, with considerable success. The fact that it's bendable means that you might be able to come up with a design that was more ergonomic or perhaps even somewhat collapsable into a smaller size. Imagine a Kindle that you could roll up and stick in your pocket.
I agree that expansion isn't a huge deal for most, but some people will sometimes want to upgrade RAM, hard drives, video cards, and maybe even throw in an additional card of some kind (TV tuner?). But really, the main issue is that Apple doesn't really have a normal middle-of-the-road computer. Mac minis are nice, but offering them as your desktop model would be a little like offering the Macbook Air as your only laptop model. Not to criticize the Air, but it's a little light on power/features. Mac Pros aren't even in the class of your typical consumer/office desktop machine. They're professional workstations. So that leaves you with iMacs, but all-in-one models aren't really appropriate for every situation.
I think that a mid-range tower would probably sell well, but they're probably worried that it will cannibalize their existing lineup.
I think that's a good point. The problem we're encountering isn't really a capitalism vs. socialism issue that lots of people would like to paint it to be. It's that we lack respect for wisdom, subtlety, long-term thinking, nuance, and details. We want there to be a simple, direct solution that anyone can fully understand and follow.
So everyone is looking for something to fill in the blank in the following sentence, "If you _______, then you will make lots of money quickly and cannot possibly lose your investment." On the consumer level, people filled in that blank with "buy houses". In financial markets, they filled it with things like, "follow this specific model".
The problem with this is most people's "just give me what I need to get the job done today" attitude. I've taught statistics in community college for a number of years, and I grapple with this a lot
Yeah, I think people often misunderstand the point of statistics. I've gotten into quite a few arguments where people seem to think that statistics will actually tell you what's going to happen in the future, and that statistically unlikely things don't happen.
Don't get me wrong-- statistical analysis and modeling of real-world systems definitely have their uses. However, statistical analyses are inherently very limited in scope, and so very limited in what they're able to tell you. You have to know what those limits are before making effective use of the statistics.
Slashdot Mirror
I think those are covered under "believed that he/she would benefit from completing the task".
Besides, there are people who "know that if they don't do it, they won't get paid," and yet still don't work, but it's usually because they don't believe that working will actually benefit them very much either. There are people who "know that if they don't do it, they don't eat," and they'll do some kind of 'work', but not necessarily the kind you want them to. They might end up begging for spare change on the street corner, and if that doesn't get them enough to eat, they might resort to crime. People won't put up with starvation for very long, but outright starvation isn't a great motivator for people being productive members of society.
If you didn't already know that, then you must have lived an even more sheltered life than I have!
There are things that "busy work" can teach, e.g. discipline, time management. Test skills, on the other hand, can be an exercise in analyzing the psychology of whoever made the tests. When I was in school, there were times when I scored 80% on a test without knowing any of the material I was being tested for.
My larger point here is that, even though "test skills" are skills, tests often don't actually test what they are designed to test. There is no silver bullet-- no magical method that lets you put any random person in front of a class of 50 kids and churn out super-smart kids year after year. There's no replacement for good teachers who care being able to give lots of personal attention to kids and help the kids work through things. Methods are almost incidental.
Obviously what I experience as sweet can be very different from what you experience as sweet.
I'm not sure that's right. I'm might prefer things that are sour to sugary-sweet candy, but I think sugar will taste sweet to both of us because sweetness is biological (at least to some extent). If someone is for some reason unable to taste sweetness, that doesn't change what sweetness is. But I get what you're saying: Laziness is somewhat relative, but perhaps not entirely. The idea isn't really borne out in the rest of your post, though.
Some tasks just need to be done because... end of story. If you can't, then the label is lazy.
This doesn't make sense to me. You're saying that some things need to be done for no reason, and it's "laziness" if you don't do them. Now I don't understand why anyone should be doing things for no reason. I don't think I know anyone who does things for no reason, with no rationale, and with no expectation of personal benefit from those actions. If there were anyone doing such things, than I would probably label that "stupidity".
I think what you're actually thinking of is that there are some things that ought to be done even though the benefit might not be immediately apparent to everyone. In those cases, I think the people who understand the importance of those things are willing to put in work to make sure they get done. Other people may be motivated to do those things for other reasons without fully understanding the importance. But no one is doing it for no reason.
If you are not prepared to simply say at a certain point "we did all we wanted to do, now it is up to you and if you don't, you fail" you end up with the no-child-left-behind policy.
Now this is a different argument about a different topic. You're just arguing that, given limited resources, we should be willing to sacrifice the welfare of some children in order to increase the success of other children. Even if true, that's a whole other discussion before we can get to the question of which children to sacrifice and which to spend your resources on.
School nowadays is so non-challenging that kids with brains are left to rot because the most dis-intrested can't be left behind.
I'm not saying that we should make schools less challenging. I'm just saying it might be counter-productive to single children out and tell them they have inherent deeply-ingrained character flaws.
At a certain point our society just can't afford or can't be bothered to keep chasing after people who are lazy.
At a certain point, society can't afford not to. You keep writing children off, telling them they're no good, trying to force them into the idea that they're useless, and then you're surprised when they don't grow up to be productive members of society?
Yes, I think society would be well served to chase down everyone and try to find good uses for them. Why shouldn't we? Here's a pretty interesting video that's somewhat related. But even so, that's not what I was talking about. I haven't said anywhere before that we need to put more effort and resources into chasing people down, but if we're going to spend all of our effort and resources trying to educated people, we may as well educate them properly. There's no point in putting extra effort into chasing people away.
But let me put it this way: I've known lots of different types of people, some of whom have been labelled as lazy. I have never known anyone who met most of the following criteria and were still unwilling to work:
I
I did notice that, yes. What's your point?
For each person that feels as you do, that homework is over emphasized and quizes and tests are under emphasized, I can bet that there are 5 people that feel the opposite way.
I have to say that I hated homework when I was a kid, thought it was pointless and stupid, but as an adult the experience has served me well in some ways. At work, I may be given an assignment like "Write a report on this subject and be ready to present it at a meeting that we're going to have 2 weeks from today." You have to be able to get something like that done without someone standing over your shoulder making sure you do it.
On the other hand, that's not to say that the homework assignments I had as a student were done well. After 6 hours of school each day, I was given another 4 or 5 hours of inane busy work. As I got older, I found it oppressive to think about how much work I was doing that was simply not useful to anyone. Sure, you could say it was helping me educationally, but that was help I didn't want. But I was solving problems that didn't need to be solved because the teacher already knew the answer. I was writing papers that didn't need to be written, since nobody cared about what I had to say.
Every single assignment was simply an exercise in giving back to the teacher the answer that the teacher already knew and already believed. If I did manage to come up with something clever, it was usually marked as "wrong" because it wasn't the answer that the teacher was looking for.
And if you did something wrong, it wasn't like anyone would sit you down and have anything resembling a conversation about how you could do better. It was just "Your wrong, so I'm going to mark you as a failure and punish you. Hopefully this will ensure that you're considered a failure for the rest of your life."
I guess I'm just trying to say that I don't think it's about assigning homework or not assigning homework, taking tests or not taking tests. It's about how we treat kids, what we talk to them about, and what attitudes we display towards education and towards the students themselves.
Settle down a little. It's obvious he's not a native speaker.
I call BS... I was one of the kids that people cheated off of... None of them did it because they were bored. They did it because they were lazy and didn't care.
There's a very fine line between "bored" and "lazy and didn't care". If I'm not doing something because the activity bores me, then clearly I don't want to work on it because I don't care much about it.
I have an aversion to the word "lazy" because I'm not sure what it's trying describe. It seems to me to imply that there are people who won't do work because they simply won't, as though there are no further reasons behind it. That doesn't accurately describe anyone I know.
Most of the time that I've dealt with people who are averse to work, there are really a number of factors at play. For one thing, if I refuse to do the work you want me to, it's possible that I just don't think that work is valuable, and it's even possible that I'm right about that. It may also be that I don't really know how to do that work, or I don't know where to begin, and rather than admitting it, I just put it off.
Beyond that, lots of people that I know who are "lazy" in general are also just very discouraged from working. Often they're coming from a place where they believe that nothing they do will be accepted by others to be "good enough". If you're feeling like you have no possibility of success and achievement, then there doesn't seem to be much point in trying.
I know I probably sound like a politically correct hippy who's just making excuses, but I just think there's something dangerous in labeling children as "lazy". It's saying, "You're not just disinterested or discouraged, but there's actually a serious flaw with you, personally, that makes you unworthy of success." If being discouraged is actually part of the problem, then calling them "lazy" may be very counter-productive in getting them to work on things.
To some extent, the problem is that schools are designed to churn out factory workers. They teach people to do as they're told, follow directions, and performance at completing menial tasks is the primary measure of virtue. It's no coincidence that our current school systems have their roots in the industrial revolution.
So the US is now a country of people who have a factory-worker mentality and generally approach problems the way a factory worker would, but we aren't factory workers. The factories have gone, manufacturing is all done overseas, but we still think that performance in completing menial tasks is the primary measure of virtue. As a result, we even think of schools as little worker-factories, and we set them up to churn out more factory workers.
I wish I knew how to change that.
Yeah, I think that sort of thing is generally a bad idea. I think DRM is at its best when it makes it inconvenient to distribute the content without actually hindering any use.
I think that there are problems with DRM even if they're only designed to prevent illegal use, though. First, there's the fairly abstract notion of legal but unexpected use. How can you make sure DRM doesn't prevent me from using the content in a legal way unless you have enumerated every possible legal use?
Then there's also the potential for problems with implementations. For example, lots of DRM schemes include connecting to some authoritative server that can determine whether you're authorized to use the file. iTunes, for example, uses this. They require that I connect to their server in order to authorize a computer to play files from a given account. The problem with this implementation is that it doesn't address what happens if my use for the files outlives the authentication server. So in other words: what happens if iTunes closes down and the authentication server is shut down, and then I replace all of my computers? How will I be able to access the movies I've bought?
Well it seems like it's a theory about what the "real reason" might be. I'm not sure what your problem with that is. Would you prefer to only get the side of the story that Microsoft's PR people want to put out?
You must have missed the point last week where Congress was flipping out about primates being kept as pets. Obviously there isn't anything all that important going on in the world.
Those are some interesting questions, and I think many of them highlight how much digital media changes things. IANAL, so proceed with caution.
As far as the legal distinction, it is in the fact that you can buy a copy of a copyrighted work and you can lend that copy, but you cannot copy that copy and distribute your copies. So your library can buy 10 copies and lend each one out, but they can't buy one copy, make 9 other copies, and lend them out. It's complicated further by the fact that we're constantly copying data, backing it up, caching it, etc. So pretty much anything that's not covered in some kind of "fair use" provision usually ends up needing a license.
It might be interesting if someone came up with a "digital library" model where they licensed X copies of a book, the license allowing them to then "lend" that book to X customers at a time. It would probably need to be DRMed and be subscription based, and you'd have to get authors/publishers to agree to it. I'm not sure they would agree to it.
To talk about it on a slightly less legalistic tone, I think it's an important distinction that public libraries do have to buy the books they own, or even if the books are donated, someone has purchased them. That means that the publisher, and therefore the writer, still gets some amount of money. Also, because of the increased use each book gets, I would guess that libraries have to periodically replace old books, assuming they're getting lots of use.
If you're suggesting that everyone could download books for free and never have to replace them, then I don't know where authors would get money. As a society, I do think it's good for us to have some kind of laws surrounding "intellectual property" that allows for business models where the creators get paid.
What about people who work really hard and never get anywhere, or people who are handed success for no reason and run with it...or people who are prevented from having any success due to circumstances beyond their control in life
I think a lot of this was already addressed in my post, but maybe not spelled out very well. What I'm saying is that you can't have real success handed to you, at least not exactly. You could come from a rich family and be given lots of money, but unless you have some raw talent, some willingness to work, and a good sense of which opportunities to take, then the most you can do is sit on your pile of money. You won't accomplish anything for yourself. Lots of people have fewer opportunities and still accomplish a lot with what they have. But still, you can only take the opportunities that are open to you, and some people aren't given many opportunities.
Mostly what I'm trying to get across, though, is that I've known plenty of people who seem to be pretty unsuccessful by their own measures, but the problem wasn't a lack of opportunity. I've seen people where they say they want to go someplace, they get the opportunity to get to that place, and they don't grab the opportunity when it's there. They blame their circumstances, the fact that things aren't easy, the roadblocks in their way, but they don't take the opportunities in front of them.
At the same time, I've known quite a few people who are fairly successful and at any point in conversation they can squeeze it in, they talk about how they did it all themselves. They talk about how smart they were and how hard-working, and lecture everyone on what we should do if we want to be successful too. The one thing they tend not to mention, however, is how if one event-- something beyond their control-- had happened differently, they might be bigger failures than the people they're lecturing.
What I've gathered from these observations is that you can't necessarily judge people by their current state of "success"-- insofar as "success" is a position or an amount of money. If someone is actively accomplishing impressive things, however, that does tell you something. Failure doesn't necessarily tell you anything, unless you actually know them well enough to see why they're failing and know the opportunities that they're passing up.
And what I'd try to advise is that people watch for opportunities, and try to muster the courage to take opportunities when they present themselves.
It seems to me the kernel of his argument is that they had inherent talent, but became truly exceptional owing to a combination of favorable circumstances. In other words, their talent was a necessary but not sufficient condition for great success.
I haven't read the book yet, but that sounds roughly correct to me. It seems like people who are successful have a tendency to emphasize the part their own innate abilities played in creating that success, while people who aren't successful tend to overemphasize luck and circumstance.
From my own experiences, from my own successes and failures and knowing some very successful and very unsuccessful people, I would formulate it like this: Someone could hand you success on silver platter, and you still won't be able to hold onto it unless you have some raw ability, a real willingness to work hard, and the wisdom to grab onto the right opportunity when it comes along. On the other hand, anyone with any considerable success has had some moments of opportunity where, if those moments had not presented themselves, that person wouldn't have had their successes.
While I don't think this will do anything to get iPhone/iPod Touch users to buy a Kindle
I'm not so sure it won't. It may be that iPod/iPhone users will try this out, generally like the experience, but decide it's worth buying a Kindle for the improved reading experience of a larger e-ink screen.
Otherwise, I think you're right. This seems like a smart move for Amazon.
I think they focused on the benefit of using this app with the Kindle because... well, the first question that popped into my head was, "If I buy a book on my iPhone and then get a Kindle in a few months, will I be able to transfer my books over to the Kindle, or are they going to try to make me buy them all again?"
Once I had gotten past that thought, my next question might have been, "Well how hard will it be to transfer books from one to the other? Will Amazon provide a mechanism for that?" If I had gotten past those two, I'd like to think I'd be clever enough to ask at some point, "Can they provide any method for me to read on my one device and have my place synced over to the other so I can pick up right where I left off?"
It looks like Amazon may have covered their bases pretty well.
I'd try to come up with a joke, but I don't even understand the story. It doesn't seem like a g-string can do much to hide a moon.
I guess whoever is doing the mooning has a really tiny butt?
They will never make an expandable, cheapo minitower
I'm not talking about an "cheapo minitower". Just something between a Mac mini and a Mac Pro that doesn't have a built-in monitor. Like a "Mac normal" (not "Pro" or "mini"). I think there's a market for it, but it might possibly cannibalize their Mac Pro sales-- which is why they probably won't do it.
A fair way to think of Fair Use is as a form of "legal infringement".
Well I don't really want to get into an argument about legal language. I would have said that "fair use" is not infringement on someone else's copyright, i.e. when I exercise fair use, I am not infringing on anyone else's rights at all.
Not that might not be how a lawyer would say it, but if you want to know what I intended to say, it's probably safe to assume that, when I'm talking about "infringement", I mean to exclude fair-use cases.
Here is the question: How do you compensate artists without compensating the RIAA?
Well that is the question, isn't it? I don't know. I suspect that it won't actually be all that good to try to compensate artists directly (as a system), since that would force artists to spend their time chasing down their fees instead of creating.
Also, it would probably force the whole system to become decentralized into lots of different stores and websites. That complicates things for the customers since it means it'll be more difficult to find the legitimate source for a given work, as well as raising security issues (giving your credit card info to some random band's website because there's not other way to pay them).
I think you end up needing some kind of middle-man that can act as the infrastructure for distribution and receiving payments. If the record industry were smart, they would have gotten into that a long time ago. Instead, they've handed that business to people like Amazon and Apple. Maybe you'll start to see artists bypassing labels and going straight to distributors.
Not to be dismissive of your point (it's a good point), but I think it just depends on the application. If the purpose is navigation of an OS, then I might be much more interested in using my finger. If, on the other hand, the purpose is to allow me to write on something, then I'm more comfortable using something resembling a pen.
I don't know, which part of it? Seems like there are 3 things going on here: (1) e-paper; (2) touchscreen; and (3) bendable.
Now the value of e-paper is that it uses less electricity than an LCD screen and is easier on the eyes (in many circumstances) for prolonged reading. The fact that it's touch-sensitive gives you another option in how you interact with it.
Now those two things aren't new. They're already being used in the Kindle, for example, with considerable success. The fact that it's bendable means that you might be able to come up with a design that was more ergonomic or perhaps even somewhat collapsable into a smaller size. Imagine a Kindle that you could roll up and stick in your pocket.
I agree that expansion isn't a huge deal for most, but some people will sometimes want to upgrade RAM, hard drives, video cards, and maybe even throw in an additional card of some kind (TV tuner?). But really, the main issue is that Apple doesn't really have a normal middle-of-the-road computer. Mac minis are nice, but offering them as your desktop model would be a little like offering the Macbook Air as your only laptop model. Not to criticize the Air, but it's a little light on power/features. Mac Pros aren't even in the class of your typical consumer/office desktop machine. They're professional workstations. So that leaves you with iMacs, but all-in-one models aren't really appropriate for every situation.
I think that a mid-range tower would probably sell well, but they're probably worried that it will cannibalize their existing lineup.
Honest question: Who buys these things?
Honest answer: Media professionals. Not home users, typically, or even office workers.
I think that's a good point. The problem we're encountering isn't really a capitalism vs. socialism issue that lots of people would like to paint it to be. It's that we lack respect for wisdom, subtlety, long-term thinking, nuance, and details. We want there to be a simple, direct solution that anyone can fully understand and follow.
So everyone is looking for something to fill in the blank in the following sentence, "If you _______, then you will make lots of money quickly and cannot possibly lose your investment." On the consumer level, people filled in that blank with "buy houses". In financial markets, they filled it with things like, "follow this specific model".
The problem with this is most people's "just give me what I need to get the job done today" attitude. I've taught statistics in community college for a number of years, and I grapple with this a lot
Yeah, I think people often misunderstand the point of statistics. I've gotten into quite a few arguments where people seem to think that statistics will actually tell you what's going to happen in the future, and that statistically unlikely things don't happen.
Don't get me wrong-- statistical analysis and modeling of real-world systems definitely have their uses. However, statistical analyses are inherently very limited in scope, and so very limited in what they're able to tell you. You have to know what those limits are before making effective use of the statistics.