For all you know it might cause some agent dressed as a Rastafarian to read if, conclude OPERATION DREIDEL-YAMULKE has gone live, snap their laptop shut and go off to kill someone.
Personally, in my role as the writer, I also tried to have a little fun with the characters by making them into various manifestations of evil. For example, Rose (one of your possible Mistresses) is the practical face of evil; her role in an evil empire would be organizing things - making sure everything gets done - right down to checking the temperature of the lava pool and sweeping up the entrails after a torture session. She's a bit like a twisted Mary Poppins. Mistress Velvet, on the other hand, understands how evil should look. She is all about style. Given half a chance she'd be cracking a whip and shouting "More black lace, more black lace!"
This shows how bogus concepts like patriarchy really are. People are much more loyal to real things like their daughters than they are to virtual ones like their gender.
Given a choice any sane person would ignore pretty much any principle or law if following it would not be in their children's interest, because from an evolutionary point of view that is a very valuable trait - parents that don't will tend not to reproduce very successfully.
Once you work out you're basically a machine programmed to breed silly ideas like laws and morals all cease to have any real meaning.
The CIA has long been intrigued by the intelligence potential of prediction markets. A 2006 paper the agency published cited examples like betting markets that predict election outcomes more accurately than polls, and orange juice future markets that predict weather better than meteorological organizations. It also pointed to the use of prediction markets within corporations like Google and Eli Lilly, which have sometimes skirted gambling laws by supplying their employees with âoeinvestment fundsâ and given them an opportunity to make wagers based on their knowledge.
The Defense Advanced Projects Research Agency (DARPA) even launched its own prediction market known as FutureMAP for intelligence purposes in 2001, though the program was canceled for political reasons in 2003. As the CIAâ(TM)s paper notes, Senators Byron Dorgan and Ron Wyden called such experiments âoeterrorism betting parlors,â and argued that âoespending millions of dollars on some kind of fantasy league terror game is absurd and, frankly, ought to make every American angry.â
What's interesting is that prediction markets seem to have advantages over opinion polls. E.g.
In an article in support of rational markets, Mark Rubinstein relates this story:
"At 3:15 p.m. on May 27, 1968, the submarine USS Scorpion was officially declared missing with all 99 men aboard. She was somewhere within a 20-mile-wide circle in the Atlantic, far below implosion depth. Five months later, after extensive search efforts, her location within that circle was still undetermined. John Craven, the Navy's top deep-water scientist, had all but given up. As a last gasp, he asked a group of submarine and salvage experts to bet on the probabilities of different scenarios that could have occurred. Averaging their responses, he pinpointed the exact location (within 220 yards) where the missing sub was found."
James Surowiecki in his book The Wisdom of Crowds tells the story of the game show "Who Wants to be a Millionaire" in which a contestant could ask an expert for help with a question or ask the audience. The experts were right 65 percent of the time, and the audience was right 91 percent of the time.
Jude Wanniski related a story told to him by Jack Treynor, a finance guru. Treynor had his class guess the number of jelly beans in a jar holding 850 beans. The average guess was within 3 percent of the total. Wanniski, by the way, correctly realized that this supported the efficiency of financial markets. He also, in my opinion incorrectly, construed this as proof of the efficiency of political markets, an opinion he expanded upon in The Way the World Works.
Prediction markets in general perform exceedingly well compared to individual forecasts. In his article on prediction markets, Philip O'Connor writes: "In fact, studies of prediction markets have found that the market price does a better job of predicting future events than all but a tiny percentage of individual guesses. The analysis below of the Virtual Super 12 shows the average selection, an average or constructed market price, to be better than 99% of participants' selections."
He continues: "A short list of other evidence includes the following:
Markets that predict elections have been shown to outperform the predictions of opinion polls.
Prediction markets on movie box-office receipts and more obscure events have been shown to correspond closely with actual outcomes.
It's easy to say PayPal is low risk now. I bet it didn't seem low risk before it took off when loads of start ups were no doubt trying to do essentially the same thing and everyone assumed Visa et al would enter the market and wipe them all out.
It's like Microsoft with DOS. Sure in retrospect it seemed certain. Back in he day I be Gates was shitting himself that Gary Kildall might wake up and accept the $250K he was offered or IBM would decide to give the OS job to the legions of programmers they had on he payroll and probably not even doing anything that anyone would miss. Or that Tim Patterson might meet an IBMer in a bar and sell them QDOS for $5000.
In each case there were a lot of people trying to do the same thing. Some of them were in a lot better position to win than the person that did. It just that everyone but the winner screwed up in some way. Some way that wasn't even clear until later. Kildall might have done the deal with IBM if he knew the other options they had. Patterson would have ended up running the equivalent of Microsoft if he'd have known a few more people at IBM.
I think there are two types of CEO and it's not really about gender.
One of them knows a lot about the business because they worked their way up in the company and will follow an evolutionary path. Maybe their skills are a bit out of date by the time they get to the top, but at least they had skills once.
The other is someone who has worked in management jobs in a lot of companies doing a lot of different stuff, getting to be CEO via a series of jumped ships - each one higher than the last but each one was in a completely different business area. They'll follow a completely unpredictable and revolutionary path with a high chance of failure because they don't really know anything about the concrete business area - they've only really worked in it as CEO and if you're CEO you're right axiomatically when you say anything. They do however know a lot about business in the abstract - megatrends like outsourcing vs insourcing for example. They are probably very, very intelligent and persuasive too - you need to be if you can talk people into giving you the keys to their billion dollar company.
I think there's a need for both types of people in an organisation but you're kidding yourself if you think hiring someone who knows nothing about the business as CEO means they will beat the odds - i.e. outperform the evolutionary alternative.
It has happened of course, but I think people overestimate the probability of it. But then again most share holders are terrible gamblers who always think they can beat the odds. So it's not that surprising that boards made up of shareholders hire type II CEOs and screw the company. Then again maybe they knew that the evolutionary approach wasn't good enough to keep the company going too. That's probably true of most household name companies - an evolutionary approach means they will fade away in a couple of decades.
So if the RIAA used trademark law instead of copyright Slashdot would be on their side? Somehow I doubt that.
According to slashdot patents seem to be evil. Copyright is is evil when the RIAA use it but fine when the GPL does. Trademarks are OK if you are the Linux Foundation but evil if you are someone else.
I.e. it's not the type of IP, more who is using it.
Richard Stallman is leader of the free software movement and father of GNU. Naturally, he's in demand as a speaker. And so NATURALLY he has a completely ride-the-orangutan insane tour rider.
"Ridge the orangutan" insane is such a great phrase.
Except that I don't really care about tulips. I do care about having people write an interesting articles on the net. So the profitability of people doing that does matter to me.
If I average the total cost of ownership I am paying approximately $3000 per year to own a car.
It is interesting that $3000 works out as about $8 per day. I reckon you could probably rent or lease one for not much more than that if you shopped around. Certainly in the UK you can get a car for about GBP10 a day (the terms are fiddly because you have to get them for fixed one month periods). That's about $14. So more than the US, but then I bet owning a car would be more expensive too. So the perception that you're better buying than renting - the reason most people own cars - isn't necessarily true.
Tesla Motors' efforts to clear allegations of reduced range on its electric cars just took another hit. A British appeals court dismissed a libel lawsuit filed by Tesla against the BBC's Top Gear show. The court rejected Tesla's appeal of a court decision last year that struck out its "libel and malicious falsehood" case against BBC. Tesla had asserted that the popular British automotive TV show had faked a scene that appeared to show a Tesla Roadster running out of power, which the Palo Alto, CA-based automaker said caused sales to drop.
Top Gear road tested two Roadsters in 2008 around a track - much more like racing conditions that typical day-to-day driving. Drivers tested the electric sports cars for acceleration, straight-line speed, cornering and handling. Top Gear claimed the car ran out of power after 55 miles - much lower than the automaker's estimated range of 200 miles. The TV show's review wouldn't have misled "a reasonable viewer" into thinking that the Roadster's range was less than the company's estimate under normal driving conditions, said Martin Moore-Bick, an appeals court judge in London, in his decision.
Tesla claimed it had lost $171,000 in lost sales as a result of the show's review of the car, and were well below the level of sales in the United States and European Union. Tesla's lawyers argued that the comments were defamatory because it had "intentionally or recklessly grossly misled potential purchasers." Judge Moore-Bick disagreed, saying the comments did not libel Tesla. Viewers would recognize that Top Gear's high-speed track testing was quite different than a normal driving style, he said.
Inaccurate media coverage can cost Tesla Motors much more than $171,000, according to CEO Elon Musk. He said that the "fake" report by New York Times writer John Broder on reduced range during his Model S road trip may have wiped out as much as $100 million in stock value for Tesla Motors. Musk asserts that the article resulted in several cancelled orders, probably costing Tesla "a few hundred" Model S purchases.
Mr Moore-Buck chucked out Tesla's libel lawsuit because "Viewers would recognize that Top Gear's high-speed track testing was quite different than a normal driving style, he said"
The problem with this is that it's a horrible piece of PR on the part of Tesla. Firstly Top Gear are petrol heads and very sceptical of electric cars and it was dumb to give them a car to review. Having done that it was even dumber to sue them for libel for making a negative review. All Tesla have ensured is that journalists will simply not review their cars in future. Plus of course they lost - if the object of a libel suit is to make it clear that the criticism was false they failed.
If you're making something new and different it is probably better to get reviews - even slightly negative ones - than have people ignore you. You can see this with Windows Phone. Windows Phone is really different from Android and iOS, even philosophically because it is much less based on installing applications and much more based on using the device out of the box.
Now Microsoft have screwed up the marketing big time but one thing they did do right was to hand our review phones to people who were previously presumed to be confirmed Apple users and then let them publish reviews that were at best mixed. Sure you can have a marketing person explain all the cool features and they'll end up in the review but you probably need to let them mention the negatives too. If you stopped that it wouldn't have been convincing.
Tesla are selling a funny product compared to most cars - the acceleration is stellar by all accounts and it would have been easy to get a petrol head to cover that in a positive way. They're always going to whine about
You could easily dub a Chavismo soundtrack onto this actually. Notice how the white skinned European Comprador/Kulak exploiter puppet has all the stuff at the beginning and sends the brown skinned and presumably native puppet, Hugo, away.
Pretty soon Hugo will mount a coup and, the murder rate will go up eleventy million percent and they'll have food shortages, hyperinflation and so on. Then Hugo will force all the TV stations to broadcast a four hour TV show and the white skinned exploiter puppet will leave for Argentina and take all the stuff with him and Hugo will denounce him angrily.
Incidentally this is an interesting article about Chavez
Teacher Herma Marksman was Chavez's partner and lover for nine years. It was the early 1980s when they met; she was in her 30s, and he was a talkative army officer in his 20s. Marksman studied history in the 1960s. Her mother was a peasant and her German immigrant father a union organiser for ironworkers. She is a classic example of those in the lower middle classes who believed in Chavez.
"We were preparing for the time when we would be in government," Marksman recalls. "We wanted to establish a state in which the law was respected, to abolish corruption, to develop our basic industries and to do a real restructuring of the education system. None of that has happened. If anything, there has been a turning for the worse. Today there is more injustice, and no sign of that group of democrats who voiced, and accepted, different opinions. We live under an autocrat who does not respect the separation of powers. There is a chief justice who does not act, a financial comptroller who does not control, an ombudsman who only defends government interests. So where is the Bolivarian project?"
Marksman last spoke to Chavez on 28 July 1993. She now supports the opposition. Responding to the accusation that it comprises coup plotters, fascists and oligarchs, she asks whether it is possible that million-strong demonstrations can consist entirely of such people.
Another former Chavez ally is Pablo Medina, a leading member of the radical Causa R party. Medina provided cars, housing and logistics for the then aspirant leader. But the pair had a legendary bust-up in 1999. Now Medina says: "The civilian-military movement turned into a military-civilian government, and that changed order definitely altered the product." For Medina, Chavez has become "authoritarian, corrupt and neo-liberal".
Medina reserves his strongest criticism for Chavez's anti-globalisation 'posturing'. "This government has presided over a period of the largest net export of capital in our history," he says. "It has been incapable of renegotiating the foreign debt, and it has left the door open for further privatisations." Chavez's anti-imperialist, anti-globalisation rhetoric is, Medina adds, just "Chavez-speak".
Back at the university, Muñoz stares out across the campus. "I am not asking Chavez to be the most radical of radicals. What I ask of him is honesty about what he is doing. I did not ask for a revolution, just to aim for things that are possible." He cites the zero-hunger programme of Brazilian president 'Lula' da Silva. "So, OK, he is not going to go against the liberal state, against globalisation, against capitalism. No, his [target] is zero hunger. Let us say he only manages to lower the rate of hunger from 100 to 30 per cent. Good. That"s what we wanted in Venezuela, and there was a real consensus here to do just that. But what does Chavismo say? "No, we are going to make a revolution!" And in those big words and that confusion everything got lost."
How do you reckon those financial services people afford all that cocaine? More to the point how good would you be at your job if you put Bolivian Marching powder on your Rice Krispies in the morning instead of sugar and then put so much Charlie up your nose you could see the pixies dance on you monitor while you stuffed a tampon up each bleeding nostril by lunchtime?
That's literally the reality of financial services. Literally. They snort your life savings and then make up some crazy cokehead shit about 'CDOs' and 'how it turns out the market has seriously mispriced risk' and then go back to their office and wash the bits of hooker off their Armani suit and try to work out how they'll get the Fischer account off that weasel Paul Allen.
Wake up man. There never were any CDOs or 'credit default swaps' or 'market'. All that happens is that your money gets turned into Columbian Nose Candy and put into a huge trough and all these red braced, stripy shirted fucks snuffled in it like Scarface, baying like elk in heat.
If we refer to people who say stupid things sarcastically as 'Einstein' does that mean we can call bad film directors 'Eisenstein'?
E.g. At the Uwe Boll press conference for his new film "Hack" about a financially and critically unsuccessful film director who murders his critics with a machete in a variety of groin centred ways after a hostile press conference.
"Hey Boll! Nice film, Eisenstein. What they hell were you thinking?"
Linux people know that if most of the servers run OpenBSD and the most of the clients run ChromeOS they'd be out of a job.
So they push a much less secure OS which will have problems they can then fix, sort of like Munchausen By Proxy.
The odd thing is that they're not unlike Microsoft in this respect. MS know that a Windows installation will inevitably have a much larger attack surface than an OpenBSD server or a ChromeOS client but a move to those sorts of systems would spell doom for them so they'll keep pushing people towards Windows regardless. If Windows XP were secure after all, people would just keep using when MS decided to stop providing security patches. But because it is not they were forced to upgrade to the crappy Vista and then again to the XP like Windows 7.
Well some Hollywood celebs bought one. Also with Government subsidies you can knock that $100K down to $92.5K. Plus most of the people with that sort of money have got a load of other cars they can use if they need more range.
I.e. it's a toy for the very rich who want to show how green they are, subsidised by the government aka "everyone else".
Since 2008 Tesla has sold more than 2,400 units worldwide through September 2012. Featuring new options and enhanced features, the 2012 Tesla Roadster is being sold in limited numbers only in Europe, Asia and Australia, and as of July 2012, less than 140 units are available for sale in Europe and Asia before the remaining production is sold out. Tesla's U.S. exemption for not having special two-stage passenger airbags expired for cars made after the end of 2011 so the last Roadsters are no longer being sold in the American market
A government regulation - the need for two stage airbags - finally killed them off in the US but they'd probably never have succeeded even as modestly as they did without that $7500 Federal Tax Credit per vehicle (1/4 the average US car price) and the $465 million dollar loan.
Copyright holders have always hated the idea of resale of any kind; they think it loses them revenue.
They're dumb if that's what they're doing. Something's price is the same as its resale value. So the odds are that items that are sold digitally will have higher value if people know they can resell them.
Looking at it as "resales eat into original sales so we'll prohibit them" means a lot of people who know that won't buy in the first place. It's much better to say "let's encourage a secondary market so people know they can always sell stuff if they buy it but later decide they don't want it".
In fact it would be very interesting if any economists have ever studied the effect that prohibiting a secondary market has on prices.
However the fact that both Apple and Amazon are considering this makes me think that deep down they believe allowing a secondary market will increase prices.
It'll never get popular with a name like that. They should call it 'ballgag' or 'strap-on' or something.
GIMP used to be called Paint but they had to change it before it took off. Same with Multics - they chopped off all the good bits and made the name a jokey reference to castration and it hit the big time. Well, bigger time.
The Star Wars Expanded Universe uses this aggressively. With only three movies worth of content to start off with, writers had to create entire races based on minor extras that happened to have unique make-up.
The most Egregious example? The Bothans. Their only appearance in the movies is Mon Mothma's line in Return of the Jedi: "Many Bothans died to bring us this information." From that single, offhand mention, EU writers whipped up an entire species whose entire society is based around spying and espionage.
Star Wars has another Egregious example in Corellians, which is Han Solo's home culture. During the scene in the asteroid field in The Empire Strikes Back, Han says "Never Tell Me The Odds", and from this some EU writer extrapolated that all Corellians hate statistics with a passion.
It's the same in Star Trek. All Ferengi are greedy and unprincipled, all Klingons are violent, all Vulcans are clever but a bit machine like and brittle and so on. Importantly all the non human races are inferior politically and morally to humans in the long run - even the Vulcans start of running things but end up as science officers in a human run and founded Starfleet.
David Irving - who someone once called 'not just a historian of Nazis but a Nazi historian'- said sarcastically he liked Lord of the Rings because it teaches children about race.
Of course like always he's trolling. He knows the people who wrote Star Trek and Star Wars weren't racists or Nazis and that JRR Tolkien loathed the Nazis. Rather he's using the prevalence of lazy "planet of the hats" writing in sci fi and fantasy to make a subversive and rather nasty ideological point that those writers didn't intend to make.
Slashdot Mirror
Don't say stuff like that on the internet.
For all you know it might cause some agent dressed as a Rastafarian to read if, conclude OPERATION DREIDEL-YAMULKE has gone live, snap their laptop shut and go off to kill someone.
So you're saying just because she's cute she's not a kick ass adventurer? Or that only men can be adventurers?
What about a game with a male character that women players find cute? Would that be as bad?
It seems like if you have only male protagonists people will say it is sexist. But if you have female protagonists it is somehow still sexist.
Relax - they're just video games. Trying to read any deep cultural message into them is fundamentally futile.
I didn't know that was her, but you're right
http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2007/06/talking-with-rhianna-pratchett-writer-and-co-story-designer-of-overlord/2/
Personally, in my role as the writer, I also tried to have a little fun with the characters by making them into various manifestations of evil. For example, Rose (one of your possible Mistresses) is the practical face of evil; her role in an evil empire would be organizing things - making sure everything gets done - right down to checking the temperature of the lava pool and sweeping up the entrails after a torture session. She's a bit like a twisted Mary Poppins. Mistress Velvet, on the other hand, understands how evil should look. She is all about style. Given half a chance she'd be cracking a whip and shouting "More black lace, more black lace!"
You can see it here
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hGVktFkrDN4
The game was certainly a lot more memorable with someone to make the plot a parody of The Hobbit from Sauron's point of view.
This shows how bogus concepts like patriarchy really are. People are much more loyal to real things like their daughters than they are to virtual ones like their gender.
Given a choice any sane person would ignore pretty much any principle or law if following it would not be in their children's interest, because from an evolutionary point of view that is a very valuable trait - parents that don't will tend not to reproduce very successfully.
Once you work out you're basically a machine programmed to breed silly ideas like laws and morals all cease to have any real meaning.
The CIA actually run a prediction market for a while until public outcry caused them to shut it down.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/andygreenberg/2011/04/20/cia-investors-aim-to-build-a-pseudo-gambling-market-for-data-security-predictions/
The CIA has long been intrigued by the intelligence potential of prediction markets. A 2006 paper the agency published cited examples like betting markets that predict election outcomes more accurately than polls, and orange juice future markets that predict weather better than meteorological organizations. It also pointed to the use of prediction markets within corporations like Google and Eli Lilly, which have sometimes skirted gambling laws by supplying their employees with âoeinvestment fundsâ and given them an opportunity to make wagers based on their knowledge.
The Defense Advanced Projects Research Agency (DARPA) even launched its own prediction market known as FutureMAP for intelligence purposes in 2001, though the program was canceled for political reasons in 2003. As the CIAâ(TM)s paper notes, Senators Byron Dorgan and Ron Wyden called such experiments âoeterrorism betting parlors,â and argued that âoespending millions of dollars on some kind of fantasy league terror game is absurd and, frankly, ought to make every American angry.â
What's interesting is that prediction markets seem to have advantages over opinion polls. E.g.
http://www.lewrockwell.com/rozeff/rozeff88.html
In an article in support of rational markets, Mark Rubinstein relates this story:
"At 3:15 p.m. on May 27, 1968, the submarine USS Scorpion was officially declared missing with all 99 men aboard. She was somewhere within a 20-mile-wide circle in the Atlantic, far below implosion depth. Five months later, after extensive search efforts, her location within that circle was still undetermined. John Craven, the Navy's top deep-water scientist, had all but given up. As a last gasp, he asked a group of submarine and salvage experts to bet on the probabilities of different scenarios that could have occurred. Averaging their responses, he pinpointed the exact location (within 220 yards) where the missing sub was found."
James Surowiecki in his book The Wisdom of Crowds tells the story of the game show "Who Wants to be a Millionaire" in which a contestant could ask an expert for help with a question or ask the audience. The experts were right 65 percent of the time, and the audience was right 91 percent of the time.
Jude Wanniski related a story told to him by Jack Treynor, a finance guru. Treynor had his class guess the number of jelly beans in a jar holding 850 beans. The average guess was within 3 percent of the total. Wanniski, by the way, correctly realized that this supported the efficiency of financial markets. He also, in my opinion incorrectly, construed this as proof of the efficiency of political markets, an opinion he expanded upon in The Way the World Works.
Prediction markets in general perform exceedingly well compared to individual forecasts. In his article on prediction markets, Philip O'Connor writes: "In fact, studies of prediction markets have found that the market price does a better job of predicting future events than all but a tiny percentage of individual guesses. The analysis below of the Virtual Super 12 shows the average selection, an average or constructed market price, to be better than 99% of participants' selections."
He continues: "A short list of other evidence includes the following:
Markets that predict elections have been shown to outperform the predictions of opinion polls.
Prediction markets on movie box-office receipts and more obscure events have been shown to correspond closely with actual outcomes.
If you don't like it here why don't you GO BACK TO RUSSIA ;-p
It's easy to say PayPal is low risk now. I bet it didn't seem low risk before it took off when loads of start ups were no doubt trying to do essentially the same thing and everyone assumed Visa et al would enter the market and wipe them all out.
It's like Microsoft with DOS. Sure in retrospect it seemed certain. Back in he day I be Gates was shitting himself that Gary Kildall might wake up and accept the $250K he was offered or IBM would decide to give the OS job to the legions of programmers they had on he payroll and probably not even doing anything that anyone would miss. Or that Tim Patterson might meet an IBMer in a bar and sell them QDOS for $5000.
In each case there were a lot of people trying to do the same thing. Some of them were in a lot better position to win than the person that did. It just that everyone but the winner screwed up in some way. Some way that wasn't even clear until later. Kildall might have done the deal with IBM if he knew the other options they had. Patterson would have ended up running the equivalent of Microsoft if he'd have known a few more people at IBM.
I think there are two types of CEO and it's not really about gender.
One of them knows a lot about the business because they worked their way up in the company and will follow an evolutionary path. Maybe their skills are a bit out of date by the time they get to the top, but at least they had skills once.
The other is someone who has worked in management jobs in a lot of companies doing a lot of different stuff, getting to be CEO via a series of jumped ships - each one higher than the last but each one was in a completely different business area. They'll follow a completely unpredictable and revolutionary path with a high chance of failure because they don't really know anything about the concrete business area - they've only really worked in it as CEO and if you're CEO you're right axiomatically when you say anything. They do however know a lot about business in the abstract - megatrends like outsourcing vs insourcing for example. They are probably very, very intelligent and persuasive too - you need to be if you can talk people into giving you the keys to their billion dollar company.
I think there's a need for both types of people in an organisation but you're kidding yourself if you think hiring someone who knows nothing about the business as CEO means they will beat the odds - i.e. outperform the evolutionary alternative.
It has happened of course, but I think people overestimate the probability of it. But then again most share holders are terrible gamblers who always think they can beat the odds. So it's not that surprising that boards made up of shareholders hire type II CEOs and screw the company. Then again maybe they knew that the evolutionary approach wasn't good enough to keep the company going too. That's probably true of most household name companies - an evolutionary approach means they will fade away in a couple of decades.
So if the RIAA used trademark law instead of copyright Slashdot would be on their side? Somehow I doubt that.
According to slashdot patents seem to be evil. Copyright is is evil when the RIAA use it but fine when the GPL does. Trademarks are OK if you are the Linux Foundation but evil if you are someone else.
I.e. it's not the type of IP, more who is using it.
This is hilarious
http://gizmodo.com/5853729/please-do-not-buy-richard-stallman-a-parrot-and-other-rules
Richard Stallman is leader of the free software movement and father of GNU. Naturally, he's in demand as a speaker. And so NATURALLY he has a completely ride-the-orangutan insane tour rider.
"Ridge the orangutan" insane is such a great phrase.
From the link
https://secure.mysociety.org/admin/lists/pipermail/developers-public/2011-October/007701.html
Andrew, I read all of Richard Stallman's email that you forwarded.
Don't book him. His rider is hilarious.
RMS winning friends and influencing people as usual.
Except that I don't really care about tulips. I do care about having people write an interesting articles on the net. So the profitability of people doing that does matter to me.
If I average the total cost of ownership I am paying approximately $3000 per year to own a car.
It is interesting that $3000 works out as about $8 per day. I reckon you could probably rent or lease one for not much more than that if you shopped around. Certainly in the UK you can get a car for about GBP10 a day (the terms are fiddly because you have to get them for fixed one month periods). That's about $14. So more than the US, but then I bet owning a car would be more expensive too. So the perception that you're better buying than renting - the reason most people own cars - isn't necessarily true.
That's not quite true
http://green.autoblog.com/2013/03/10/uk-appeals-court-dismissed-teslas-bbc-top-gear-lawsuit/
Tesla Motors' efforts to clear allegations of reduced range on its electric cars just took another hit. A British appeals court dismissed a libel lawsuit filed by Tesla against the BBC's Top Gear show. The court rejected Tesla's appeal of a court decision last year that struck out its "libel and malicious falsehood" case against BBC. Tesla had asserted that the popular British automotive TV show had faked a scene that appeared to show a Tesla Roadster running out of power, which the Palo Alto, CA-based automaker said caused sales to drop.
Top Gear road tested two Roadsters in 2008 around a track - much more like racing conditions that typical day-to-day driving. Drivers tested the electric sports cars for acceleration, straight-line speed, cornering and handling. Top Gear claimed the car ran out of power after 55 miles - much lower than the automaker's estimated range of 200 miles. The TV show's review wouldn't have misled "a reasonable viewer" into thinking that the Roadster's range was less than the company's estimate under normal driving conditions, said Martin Moore-Bick, an appeals court judge in London, in his decision.
Tesla claimed it had lost $171,000 in lost sales as a result of the show's review of the car, and were well below the level of sales in the United States and European Union. Tesla's lawyers argued that the comments were defamatory because it had "intentionally or recklessly grossly misled potential purchasers." Judge Moore-Bick disagreed, saying the comments did not libel Tesla. Viewers would recognize that Top Gear's high-speed track testing was quite different than a normal driving style, he said.
Inaccurate media coverage can cost Tesla Motors much more than $171,000, according to CEO Elon Musk. He said that the "fake" report by New York Times writer John Broder on reduced range during his Model S road trip may have wiped out as much as $100 million in stock value for Tesla Motors. Musk asserts that the article resulted in several cancelled orders, probably costing Tesla "a few hundred" Model S purchases.
Mr Moore-Buck chucked out Tesla's libel lawsuit because "Viewers would recognize that Top Gear's high-speed track testing was quite different than a normal driving style, he said"
The problem with this is that it's a horrible piece of PR on the part of Tesla. Firstly Top Gear are petrol heads and very sceptical of electric cars and it was dumb to give them a car to review. Having done that it was even dumber to sue them for libel for making a negative review. All Tesla have ensured is that journalists will simply not review their cars in future. Plus of course they lost - if the object of a libel suit is to make it clear that the criticism was false they failed.
If you're making something new and different it is probably better to get reviews - even slightly negative ones - than have people ignore you. You can see this with Windows Phone. Windows Phone is really different from Android and iOS, even philosophically because it is much less based on installing applications and much more based on using the device out of the box.
Now Microsoft have screwed up the marketing big time but one thing they did do right was to hand our review phones to people who were previously presumed to be confirmed Apple users and then let them publish reviews that were at best mixed. Sure you can have a marketing person explain all the cool features and they'll end up in the review but you probably need to let them mention the negatives too. If you stopped that it wouldn't have been convincing.
Tesla are selling a funny product compared to most cars - the acceleration is stellar by all accounts and it would have been easy to get a petrol head to cover that in a positive way. They're always going to whine about
How about Plasticination?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GdAeDEHEneA
You could easily dub a Chavismo soundtrack onto this actually. Notice how the white skinned European Comprador/Kulak exploiter puppet has all the stuff at the beginning and sends the brown skinned and presumably native puppet, Hugo, away.
Pretty soon Hugo will mount a coup and, the murder rate will go up eleventy million percent and they'll have food shortages, hyperinflation and so on. Then Hugo will force all the TV stations to broadcast a four hour TV show and the white skinned exploiter puppet will leave for Argentina and take all the stuff with him and Hugo will denounce him angrily.
Incidentally this is an interesting article about Chavez
http://www.redpepper.org.uk/whats-happened-to-venezuelas-dream-of-progress/
Teacher Herma Marksman was Chavez's partner and lover for nine years. It was the early 1980s when they met; she was in her 30s, and he was a talkative army officer in his 20s. Marksman studied history in the 1960s. Her mother was a peasant and her German immigrant father a union organiser for ironworkers. She is a classic example of those in the lower middle classes who believed in Chavez.
"We were preparing for the time when we would be in government," Marksman recalls. "We wanted to establish a state in which the law was respected, to abolish corruption, to develop our basic industries and to do a real restructuring of the education system. None of that has happened. If anything, there has been a turning for the worse. Today there is more injustice, and no sign of that group of democrats who voiced, and accepted, different opinions. We live under an autocrat who does not respect the separation of powers. There is a chief justice who does not act, a financial comptroller who does not control, an ombudsman who only defends government interests. So where is the Bolivarian project?"
Marksman last spoke to Chavez on 28 July 1993. She now supports the opposition. Responding to the accusation that it comprises coup plotters, fascists and oligarchs, she asks whether it is possible that million-strong demonstrations can consist entirely of such people.
Another former Chavez ally is Pablo Medina, a leading member of the radical Causa R party. Medina provided cars, housing and logistics for the then aspirant leader. But the pair had a legendary bust-up in 1999. Now Medina says: "The civilian-military movement turned into a military-civilian government, and that changed order definitely altered the product." For Medina, Chavez has become "authoritarian, corrupt and neo-liberal".
Medina reserves his strongest criticism for Chavez's anti-globalisation 'posturing'. "This government has presided over a period of the largest net export of capital in our history," he says. "It has been incapable of renegotiating the foreign debt, and it has left the door open for further privatisations." Chavez's anti-imperialist, anti-globalisation rhetoric is, Medina adds, just "Chavez-speak".
Back at the university, Muñoz stares out across the campus. "I am not asking Chavez to be the most radical of radicals. What I ask of him is honesty about what he is doing. I did not ask for a revolution, just to aim for things that are possible." He cites the zero-hunger programme of Brazilian president 'Lula' da Silva. "So, OK, he is not going to go against the liberal state, against globalisation, against capitalism. No, his [target] is zero hunger. Let us say he only manages to lower the rate of hunger from 100 to 30 per cent. Good. That"s what we wanted in Venezuela, and there was a real consensus here to do just that. But what does Chavismo say? "No, we are going to make a revolution!" And in those big words and that confusion everything got lost."
Honestly Americans have made such a mess of English that at this point you're better off learning Mandarin which is a hen3 hao3ting1 de yu3yan2.
How do you reckon those financial services people afford all that cocaine? More to the point how good would you be at your job if you put Bolivian Marching powder on your Rice Krispies in the morning instead of sugar and then put so much Charlie up your nose you could see the pixies dance on you monitor while you stuffed a tampon up each bleeding nostril by lunchtime?
That's literally the reality of financial services. Literally. They snort your life savings and then make up some crazy cokehead shit about 'CDOs' and 'how it turns out the market has seriously mispriced risk' and then go back to their office and wash the bits of hooker off their Armani suit and try to work out how they'll get the Fischer account off that weasel Paul Allen.
Wake up man. There never were any CDOs or 'credit default swaps' or 'market'. All that happens is that your money gets turned into Columbian Nose Candy and put into a huge trough and all these red braced, stripy shirted fucks snuffled in it like Scarface, baying like elk in heat.
It's based on the Zimbabwean dollar. It's pretty secure too - I've rented safe deposit boxes all around the world and put the notes in them.
For some strange reason though, the money's not exactly pouring in.
If we refer to people who say stupid things sarcastically as 'Einstein' does that mean we can call bad film directors 'Eisenstein'?
E.g. At the Uwe Boll press conference for his new film "Hack" about a financially and critically unsuccessful film director who murders his critics with a machete in a variety of groin centred ways after a hostile press conference.
"Hey Boll! Nice film, Eisenstein. What they hell were you thinking?"
Linux people know that if most of the servers run OpenBSD and the most of the clients run ChromeOS they'd be out of a job.
So they push a much less secure OS which will have problems they can then fix, sort of like Munchausen By Proxy.
The odd thing is that they're not unlike Microsoft in this respect. MS know that a Windows installation will inevitably have a much larger attack surface than an OpenBSD server or a ChromeOS client but a move to those sorts of systems would spell doom for them so they'll keep pushing people towards Windows regardless. If Windows XP were secure after all, people would just keep using when MS decided to stop providing security patches. But because it is not they were forced to upgrade to the crappy Vista and then again to the XP like Windows 7.
Well some Hollywood celebs bought one. Also with Government subsidies you can knock that $100K down to $92.5K. Plus most of the people with that sort of money have got a load of other cars they can use if they need more range.
I.e. it's a toy for the very rich who want to show how green they are, subsidised by the government aka "everyone else".
They only sold a couple of thousand worldwide
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tesla_Roadster#Sales
Since 2008 Tesla has sold more than 2,400 units worldwide through September 2012. Featuring new options and enhanced features, the 2012 Tesla Roadster is being sold in limited numbers only in Europe, Asia and Australia, and as of July 2012, less than 140 units are available for sale in Europe and Asia before the remaining production is sold out. Tesla's U.S. exemption for not having special two-stage passenger airbags expired for cars made after the end of 2011 so the last Roadsters are no longer being sold in the American market
A government regulation - the need for two stage airbags - finally killed them off in the US but they'd probably never have succeeded even as modestly as they did without that $7500 Federal Tax Credit per vehicle (1/4 the average US car price) and the $465 million dollar loan.
Copyright holders have always hated the idea of resale of any kind; they think it loses them revenue.
They're dumb if that's what they're doing. Something's price is the same as its resale value. So the odds are that items that are sold digitally will have higher value if people know they can resell them.
Looking at it as "resales eat into original sales so we'll prohibit them" means a lot of people who know that won't buy in the first place. It's much better to say "let's encourage a secondary market so people know they can always sell stuff if they buy it but later decide they don't want it".
In fact it would be very interesting if any economists have ever studied the effect that prohibiting a secondary market has on prices.
However the fact that both Apple and Amazon are considering this makes me think that deep down they believe allowing a secondary market will increase prices.
But if I copy a MasseKid, you still have a MasseKid. So according that sacred slashdot principle you shouldn't have any say over the matter.
It'll never get popular with a name like that. They should call it 'ballgag' or 'strap-on' or something.
GIMP used to be called Paint but they had to change it before it took off. Same with Multics - they chopped off all the good bits and made the name a jokey reference to castration and it hit the big time. Well, bigger time.
Aren't Rodians all gangsters though? There's some Unfortunate Implications there.
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/PlanetOfCopyhats
The Star Wars Expanded Universe uses this aggressively. With only three movies worth of content to start off with, writers had to create entire races based on minor extras that happened to have unique make-up.
The most Egregious example? The Bothans. Their only appearance in the movies is Mon Mothma's line in Return of the Jedi: "Many Bothans died to bring us this information." From that single, offhand mention, EU writers whipped up an entire species whose entire society is based around spying and espionage.
Star Wars has another Egregious example in Corellians, which is Han Solo's home culture. During the scene in the asteroid field in The Empire Strikes Back, Han says "Never Tell Me The Odds", and from this some EU writer extrapolated that all Corellians hate statistics with a passion.
It's the same in Star Trek. All Ferengi are greedy and unprincipled, all Klingons are violent, all Vulcans are clever but a bit machine like and brittle and so on. Importantly all the non human races are inferior politically and morally to humans in the long run - even the Vulcans start of running things but end up as science officers in a human run and founded Starfleet.
David Irving - who someone once called 'not just a historian of Nazis but a Nazi historian'- said sarcastically he liked Lord of the Rings because it teaches children about race.
Of course like always he's trolling. He knows the people who wrote Star Trek and Star Wars weren't racists or Nazis and that JRR Tolkien loathed the Nazis. Rather he's using the prevalence of lazy "planet of the hats" writing in sci fi and fantasy to make a subversive and rather nasty ideological point that those writers didn't intend to make.
I haven't healed from Howard the Duck yet.
Yeah, seeing Lea Thompson in her underwear made me feel a bit ... funny ... as a kid too.