With Facebook, it's important to note that you don't actually have to be posting photos of yourself for them to end up online. It's become quite common in the younger generation for people to just take pictures and post them - often completely without the knowledge of the person who has their picture taken. If a person doesn't have facebook, often a profile is made for them just so people who post fanatically can tag them.
It's not really the applicant's fault if an embarrassing photo ends up on the public internet this way. More and more, things that used to be private affairs are making it online and are available for the curious to look into.
Consider the amount of bandwidth it takes to send something in text as opposed to audio. If you have a bad intermittent connection with a tower you can often get text through your connection because it can keep trying until it gets a clear signal for the short time it takes to push the message through.
Cell phone infrastructure is designed to hold your text message in the system (until delivered) and keep trying to deliver if it can't reach the phone the first time, but if it can't keep a connection for a call stable it'll just drop and you can try again later.
What might be a better idea is to do Dune as a video game... something first or third person where you swap off between different characters and play out the various scenes in the book. There's enough combat in the game that you could run something like Jade Empire for it, but there's also lots of puzzles that would keep the game intriguing. There's no limit to how long you make a computer game, generally the longer the better, so the story could be given justice. Internal monologues are also easy to do in a computer game.
On the other hand I always said the lord of the rings could never be made into a good movie (how many failures were there before the big blockbuster one?), but the newest take on it brought in mega cash. Even if many Tolkien geeks didn't like the movie, even if it did miss huge portions of the book, more people enjoyed those films in the last five years than have even read the books in my entire generation, much less enjoyed them.
According to economics there is more demand if you lower your price, but you're misinterpreting that. The problem Linux faces is that price is not just what you see on the tag these days, it must also take into account everything you need to do to turn what you purchased to your advantage. Linux has a high cost to n00b, as n00b needs to invest time to learn how to use it. Say n00b is a lawyer who makes $150/hr, and it takes him six hours to become comfortable using Ubuntu to do his spreadsheets and browsing. That's $900 worth of his time that sticking with the Windows saves him, so even though Linux is "free" it still costs more than windows from his perspective.
Add to this the fact that no one can really tell n00b up front how many hours it will take to become comfortable with the new software, and also add in that whatever he's running on his computer might be critical to have right when he needs it, and Linux starts to look prohibitively expensive to business and users alike.
Skilled (and trusted) people on hand who have already taken the time to learn the new OS and realize how much better it is to work with often are the tipping point in getting a boss or friend to decide to give it a shot. Realistically, n00b needs to feel that Linux will end up being a better OS, not an OS that's just as good, before it is actually able to compete with the familiarity that Windows has.
For most of my friends, the barrier to entry for Linux is the fact that top games don't play well out of the box much of the time - thus, the system is just in general less valuable than windows to them as they really have no interest in the computer except for web browsing and those games. For my bosses, it's always been a hard sell because windows already works and they can figure out what's going without too much difficulty. Switching to Linux would be a costly experience short term while everyone is getting paid to learn it, and they're unclear on what the end benefit would be.
Also, another common problem I have trying to get people to adopt Linux is that people figure Linux is only easy to use for me because I'm an IT professional. They recognize that it's more powerful, but they mentally add a few difficulty levels to anything I describe as "easy" when it comes to computers because I also use "easy" to describe setting up a server and they never want to try that themselves. For Linux to take off, it needs to hit it off well enough with many people who are not technical in any way, and have those people like it well enough to grassroots market it. Either that, or some really rich guy could run a non-profit media campaign similar to what Apple has been doing for profit.
Most of the time, I only bother recommending Linux to the completely non-technical person. Ubuntu is awesome for the person who never figured out how to really use Windows in the first place, because there's nothing to unlearn and it has about the same learning curve as Windows does. Also, they can leave wine installed and run whatever corrupted stupid mouse pointy.exe their friend sends them and not need to worry about their computer dying completely as a result. I install it, set up the firewall and a few programs, explain how to use synaptic without telling them how to change their repositories list, and away they go. I almost never need to return to fix it, because in 99% of the cases they have no way to break it and they're satisfied with what they do have. Most of the time the OS is slightly less efficient for them than windows, because they just download the same exe files their windows buddies do, but they have the comfort in knowing that for the most part they are safe in running them.
Some history on copyright:
The problem was meant to address was that it took a lot of time and effort to set type for a book (this was back in the days of the first printing presses), and the owners of the presses didn't want to risk printing books that people wouldn't buy. This meant that whoever was the first person to start printing a new work was at a disadvantage against their competitors. If Oscar Wilde approached them with the first copy of his first work, they would have refused him because if it flopped they'd have lost money, and if it took off everyone else would just start printing copies as well.
The original purpose of copyright wasn't to protect artists at all - it was to protect printing presses that wanted to try printing something new. This kept the literary world of the masses from stagnating.
The core of copyright is based on the fact that there is a high start-up cost to publishing new works. This has been somewhat skewed in modern-day. Most of the time, it's quite inexpensive to record a new CD for mass-publication. For books, the cost is near-zero (how much does it cost after a book is written to produce a million online copies?) A lot of money often gets spent tweaking the sound, applying effects and cleaning out noise, but in the end it's still quite inexpensive when compared to the profit from a successful artist. The real money that gets spent in the creative industry these days is actually in advertising and marketing. A new artist comes out that sounds mediocre, but big industry wants returns and so they push massive advertising dollars at it to make it sell.
This is why so much of today's music is arguably garbage - because the media industry knows that quality of sound (aka: the quality of the copyrighted ideas) isn't what makes something sell, it's pushing enough advertising at mediocre music to get 13 year olds to treat it as an entrance into "the cool crowd". There's good music out there, but generally I find it's the stuff that started (or even survives) with very little in the way of advertising money put into it - this is because the driving selling force behind it is the quality of the work.
Copyright needs a lot of rethinking, and perhaps scrapping entirely. Something needs to replace it, certainly, because we want artists to be able to create new things. But the INDUSTRY behind the artists is based on pushing crap products with marketing, and is fighting to keep itself protected. This industry is not needed by the artists to distribute or create their work. Music is cheap to mass-produce, books are free to mass produce. - it should either adapt to the needs of the artists and the needs of consumers, or disappear altogether - but enough power and money is concentrated in it that this will take quite a while.
The higher the level you compare wizards and clerics, the more broken the wizard becomes. Wish/Limited wish flesh out the versatility of the wizard to include the full range of clerical healing - just use limited wish to duplicate heal, for example. Divine magic will always have better straight on numbers, but arcane has so many options that a wizard with prep is always going to win. It's things like a wizard using shrink item (reduce an 10ft cube/level item to clothlike composition and shrink it down to 1/10th it's original size, dispel this at any time as a free action, duration 1 day per level - 3rd level spell) and a bunch of level 1 unseen servant spells that's scary. Not even an ancient dragon can survive a 400 cubic foot piece of lead appearing over it's head. Clerics don't get utility - they get flat damage, flat healing, and a couple other effects.
Well, for one, your post has a source that doesn't point to anything but an error message. NyquistShannon sampling theorem doesn't seem to exist at wikipedia. Can't say I've ever heard of it, either. Still, as someone who gets to hear really good music on a frequent basis and compare it on all mediums, I would have to say that vinyl -done right- really is a better sound than anything I've heard on a CD. If you take a top of the line CD player, put it in an $80,000 sound system and hit play... it sounds amazing. But if you take an SACD and put it in the same player, you get a much warmer, fuller sound that doesn't leave you with listening fatigue after an hour or so. And Vinyl, played on a system of similar quality, sounds the best. Digital system can't recreate analogue sound perfectly... it just isn't possible. Take an image of the sound produced by any digital system, and scale it down small enough... you'll see blocky progressions between sounds.
Now, that being said... most people won't even be able to hear the difference between a CD and an MP3 if they listen to the music on $2 headphones from the dollar store. Audiophile sound differences like these are only possible to notice with majorly expensive systems.
What about selling the copy of windows to someone not subject to the DMCA? I live outside the states; it's completely legal for me to modify my copy of the software, once paid for, (which incidentally is also sold here) to do whatever I want. Is it legal for you to sell me the license in this case?
What constitutes fair price for a block of code in a free market? What, truly, is the worth of a piece of software? When it comes down to it, a software company publishing a piece of software is much like an author publishing a book online or a composer creating a song - they are selling an idea, not a physical object that requires resources to duplicate or a service that requires people to perform it. People tend to make comparisons for the sake of expediency between pieces of software and services that require human power or products that require physical resources.
When someone downloads a piece of software they didn't pay for using something like bittorrent, there is absolutely no direct cost to the software company. Consider for comparison stealing a tool from a hardware store and driving away from an auto-shop without paying for the repair service. In the first case, the company that made the tool and all the people that formed the transportation bridge to get that tool to the store suffer a direct loss. They had to physically create something and physically transport it, and that requires resources. In the case of the auto repair, you've just cost some poor smuck an hour or so of his time - he was repairing your car. If he doesn't get anything back from his efforts because you cheated him, you've stolen his time.
Now for the software company. They researched and designed something, and in the end engineered a piece of software that acts as a tool on your computer to produce something you want. But when you download the tool from someone illegally over something like bittorrent, what are you taking from the software company? You duplicated the code for a total cost of $0. They didn't expend effort creating a CD and shipping it into a store - you haven't even stolen the transport cost. There's no physical object being stolen - they don't require anything to create more copies of the code. In fact, you could continue pirating the software from them left right and center, and outnumber their actual product sales by 10 to 1, and it wouldn't hurt their product sales at all. It makes no difference to Adobe if I download one illegal copy of PhotoShop or twenty million illegal copies of PhotoShop. Twenty million times zero is still zero. The only argument they can pose for my actions costing them something is that they have a legal right to demand any sum of money they choose from you when you use their software, and because you bypassed their right you cost them the money you would otherwise have been forced to spend.
In a capitalist society we need to reimburse people reasonably for the time and effort it takes to think up new ideas, and for the time the software companies spend creating their software - otherwise one could argue that we wouldn't get any new ideas or software developed. Because of this, we created copyright law. Copyright law is designed to allow people to profit from their ideas by giving them rights over how people use that idea, and the right to take money from people who use their idea.
Reasonably, however, if a mathematician designs a new formula that revolutionizes computers and allows circuits built using his idea to operate 500 times faster than they do today, it seems a little unreasonable for the mathematician to demand that every single computer made using his idea pay him a royalty of US $5,000,000. In a similar way, is it reasonable to permit software companies to charge whatever sum they feel for a piece of code that in the end is nothing more than an idea? The code is well thought out, and complicated, and took time to make. Yes, society should compensate them for that. Yes, people who spend their time working this way should be well compensated for their efforts and be made wealthy. But there should be a limit as to what they can demand, and that limit is set by unspoken public consensus if not in our legal system. That unspoken limit being surpassed is what results in software piracy. When the average person who w
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With Facebook, it's important to note that you don't actually have to be posting photos of yourself for them to end up online. It's become quite common in the younger generation for people to just take pictures and post them - often completely without the knowledge of the person who has their picture taken. If a person doesn't have facebook, often a profile is made for them just so people who post fanatically can tag them. It's not really the applicant's fault if an embarrassing photo ends up on the public internet this way. More and more, things that used to be private affairs are making it online and are available for the curious to look into.
Consider the amount of bandwidth it takes to send something in text as opposed to audio. If you have a bad intermittent connection with a tower you can often get text through your connection because it can keep trying until it gets a clear signal for the short time it takes to push the message through. Cell phone infrastructure is designed to hold your text message in the system (until delivered) and keep trying to deliver if it can't reach the phone the first time, but if it can't keep a connection for a call stable it'll just drop and you can try again later.
What might be a better idea is to do Dune as a video game... something first or third person where you swap off between different characters and play out the various scenes in the book. There's enough combat in the game that you could run something like Jade Empire for it, but there's also lots of puzzles that would keep the game intriguing. There's no limit to how long you make a computer game, generally the longer the better, so the story could be given justice. Internal monologues are also easy to do in a computer game.
On the other hand I always said the lord of the rings could never be made into a good movie (how many failures were there before the big blockbuster one?), but the newest take on it brought in mega cash. Even if many Tolkien geeks didn't like the movie, even if it did miss huge portions of the book, more people enjoyed those films in the last five years than have even read the books in my entire generation, much less enjoyed them.
According to economics there is more demand if you lower your price, but you're misinterpreting that. The problem Linux faces is that price is not just what you see on the tag these days, it must also take into account everything you need to do to turn what you purchased to your advantage. Linux has a high cost to n00b, as n00b needs to invest time to learn how to use it. Say n00b is a lawyer who makes $150/hr, and it takes him six hours to become comfortable using Ubuntu to do his spreadsheets and browsing. That's $900 worth of his time that sticking with the Windows saves him, so even though Linux is "free" it still costs more than windows from his perspective.
.exe their friend sends them and not need to worry about their computer dying completely as a result. I install it, set up the firewall and a few programs, explain how to use synaptic without telling them how to change their repositories list, and away they go. I almost never need to return to fix it, because in 99% of the cases they have no way to break it and they're satisfied with what they do have. Most of the time the OS is slightly less efficient for them than windows, because they just download the same exe files their windows buddies do, but they have the comfort in knowing that for the most part they are safe in running them.
Add to this the fact that no one can really tell n00b up front how many hours it will take to become comfortable with the new software, and also add in that whatever he's running on his computer might be critical to have right when he needs it, and Linux starts to look prohibitively expensive to business and users alike.
Skilled (and trusted) people on hand who have already taken the time to learn the new OS and realize how much better it is to work with often are the tipping point in getting a boss or friend to decide to give it a shot. Realistically, n00b needs to feel that Linux will end up being a better OS, not an OS that's just as good, before it is actually able to compete with the familiarity that Windows has.
For most of my friends, the barrier to entry for Linux is the fact that top games don't play well out of the box much of the time - thus, the system is just in general less valuable than windows to them as they really have no interest in the computer except for web browsing and those games. For my bosses, it's always been a hard sell because windows already works and they can figure out what's going without too much difficulty. Switching to Linux would be a costly experience short term while everyone is getting paid to learn it, and they're unclear on what the end benefit would be.
Also, another common problem I have trying to get people to adopt Linux is that people figure Linux is only easy to use for me because I'm an IT professional. They recognize that it's more powerful, but they mentally add a few difficulty levels to anything I describe as "easy" when it comes to computers because I also use "easy" to describe setting up a server and they never want to try that themselves. For Linux to take off, it needs to hit it off well enough with many people who are not technical in any way, and have those people like it well enough to grassroots market it. Either that, or some really rich guy could run a non-profit media campaign similar to what Apple has been doing for profit.
Most of the time, I only bother recommending Linux to the completely non-technical person. Ubuntu is awesome for the person who never figured out how to really use Windows in the first place, because there's nothing to unlearn and it has about the same learning curve as Windows does. Also, they can leave wine installed and run whatever corrupted stupid mouse pointy
Some history on copyright: The problem was meant to address was that it took a lot of time and effort to set type for a book (this was back in the days of the first printing presses), and the owners of the presses didn't want to risk printing books that people wouldn't buy. This meant that whoever was the first person to start printing a new work was at a disadvantage against their competitors. If Oscar Wilde approached them with the first copy of his first work, they would have refused him because if it flopped they'd have lost money, and if it took off everyone else would just start printing copies as well. The original purpose of copyright wasn't to protect artists at all - it was to protect printing presses that wanted to try printing something new. This kept the literary world of the masses from stagnating. The core of copyright is based on the fact that there is a high start-up cost to publishing new works. This has been somewhat skewed in modern-day. Most of the time, it's quite inexpensive to record a new CD for mass-publication. For books, the cost is near-zero (how much does it cost after a book is written to produce a million online copies?) A lot of money often gets spent tweaking the sound, applying effects and cleaning out noise, but in the end it's still quite inexpensive when compared to the profit from a successful artist. The real money that gets spent in the creative industry these days is actually in advertising and marketing. A new artist comes out that sounds mediocre, but big industry wants returns and so they push massive advertising dollars at it to make it sell. This is why so much of today's music is arguably garbage - because the media industry knows that quality of sound (aka: the quality of the copyrighted ideas) isn't what makes something sell, it's pushing enough advertising at mediocre music to get 13 year olds to treat it as an entrance into "the cool crowd". There's good music out there, but generally I find it's the stuff that started (or even survives) with very little in the way of advertising money put into it - this is because the driving selling force behind it is the quality of the work. Copyright needs a lot of rethinking, and perhaps scrapping entirely. Something needs to replace it, certainly, because we want artists to be able to create new things. But the INDUSTRY behind the artists is based on pushing crap products with marketing, and is fighting to keep itself protected. This industry is not needed by the artists to distribute or create their work. Music is cheap to mass-produce, books are free to mass produce. - it should either adapt to the needs of the artists and the needs of consumers, or disappear altogether - but enough power and money is concentrated in it that this will take quite a while.
The higher the level you compare wizards and clerics, the more broken the wizard becomes. Wish/Limited wish flesh out the versatility of the wizard to include the full range of clerical healing - just use limited wish to duplicate heal, for example. Divine magic will always have better straight on numbers, but arcane has so many options that a wizard with prep is always going to win. It's things like a wizard using shrink item (reduce an 10ft cube/level item to clothlike composition and shrink it down to 1/10th it's original size, dispel this at any time as a free action, duration 1 day per level - 3rd level spell) and a bunch of level 1 unseen servant spells that's scary. Not even an ancient dragon can survive a 400 cubic foot piece of lead appearing over it's head. Clerics don't get utility - they get flat damage, flat healing, and a couple other effects.
Er...
Well, for one, your post has a source that doesn't point to anything but an error message. NyquistShannon sampling theorem doesn't seem to exist at wikipedia. Can't say I've ever heard of it, either. Still, as someone who gets to hear really good music on a frequent basis and compare it on all mediums, I would have to say that vinyl -done right- really is a better sound than anything I've heard on a CD. If you take a top of the line CD player, put it in an $80,000 sound system and hit play... it sounds amazing. But if you take an SACD and put it in the same player, you get a much warmer, fuller sound that doesn't leave you with listening fatigue after an hour or so. And Vinyl, played on a system of similar quality, sounds the best. Digital system can't recreate analogue sound perfectly... it just isn't possible. Take an image of the sound produced by any digital system, and scale it down small enough... you'll see blocky progressions between sounds.
Now, that being said... most people won't even be able to hear the difference between a CD and an MP3 if they listen to the music on $2 headphones from the dollar store. Audiophile sound differences like these are only possible to notice with majorly expensive systems.
What about selling the copy of windows to someone not subject to the DMCA? I live outside the states; it's completely legal for me to modify my copy of the software, once paid for, (which incidentally is also sold here) to do whatever I want. Is it legal for you to sell me the license in this case?
What constitutes fair price for a block of code in a free market? What, truly, is the worth of a piece of software? When it comes down to it, a software company publishing a piece of software is much like an author publishing a book online or a composer creating a song - they are selling an idea, not a physical object that requires resources to duplicate or a service that requires people to perform it. People tend to make comparisons for the sake of expediency between pieces of software and services that require human power or products that require physical resources.
When someone downloads a piece of software they didn't pay for using something like bittorrent, there is absolutely no direct cost to the software company. Consider for comparison stealing a tool from a hardware store and driving away from an auto-shop without paying for the repair service. In the first case, the company that made the tool and all the people that formed the transportation bridge to get that tool to the store suffer a direct loss. They had to physically create something and physically transport it, and that requires resources. In the case of the auto repair, you've just cost some poor smuck an hour or so of his time - he was repairing your car. If he doesn't get anything back from his efforts because you cheated him, you've stolen his time.
Now for the software company. They researched and designed something, and in the end engineered a piece of software that acts as a tool on your computer to produce something you want. But when you download the tool from someone illegally over something like bittorrent, what are you taking from the software company? You duplicated the code for a total cost of $0. They didn't expend effort creating a CD and shipping it into a store - you haven't even stolen the transport cost. There's no physical object being stolen - they don't require anything to create more copies of the code. In fact, you could continue pirating the software from them left right and center, and outnumber their actual product sales by 10 to 1, and it wouldn't hurt their product sales at all. It makes no difference to Adobe if I download one illegal copy of PhotoShop or twenty million illegal copies of PhotoShop. Twenty million times zero is still zero. The only argument they can pose for my actions costing them something is that they have a legal right to demand any sum of money they choose from you when you use their software, and because you bypassed their right you cost them the money you would otherwise have been forced to spend.
In a capitalist society we need to reimburse people reasonably for the time and effort it takes to think up new ideas, and for the time the software companies spend creating their software - otherwise one could argue that we wouldn't get any new ideas or software developed. Because of this, we created copyright law. Copyright law is designed to allow people to profit from their ideas by giving them rights over how people use that idea, and the right to take money from people who use their idea.
Reasonably, however, if a mathematician designs a new formula that revolutionizes computers and allows circuits built using his idea to operate 500 times faster than they do today, it seems a little unreasonable for the mathematician to demand that every single computer made using his idea pay him a royalty of US $5,000,000. In a similar way, is it reasonable to permit software companies to charge whatever sum they feel for a piece of code that in the end is nothing more than an idea? The code is well thought out, and complicated, and took time to make. Yes, society should compensate them for that. Yes, people who spend their time working this way should be well compensated for their efforts and be made wealthy. But there should be a limit as to what they can demand, and that limit is set by unspoken public consensus if not in our legal system. That unspoken limit being surpassed is what results in software piracy. When the average person who w