How about if you're sitting on a bench reviewing the day's photos?
You need a crew of five people and a tripod to sit on a bench and review the day's photos? I thought I had really bad eyesight, but that's one hell of a pair of glasses you've got there!
There are indeed laws for patents, copyrights and trademarks that make it possible for business people to continue to profit from original work their employees performed decades ago. And leasing agreements. And stock ownership plans.
No need to feel left out, you have the same laws at your disposal.
"That doesn't make my criticisms any less valid."
- Indeed. And in turn, that argument doesn't turn weak criticisms into strong ones.
"why can't I criticize it?"
- Who said you couldn't? And in turn, why are you so unwilling to accept criticism?
"If I read something, I expect it to make sense."
- You're going to struggle with acclaimed authors such as Joseph Heller, William Burroughs and Franz Kafka.
"If it doesn't, I lose some enjoyment out of it."
- Don't forget the possibility that it a story may make sense, but *you* just don't understand it.
"I paid money for it, and I have the right to voice my problems."
- Money will not help you with either of the previous challenges, nor will it prevent your opinion from receiving ridicule, nor make said ridicule unjustified.
Let's go with a simple example of how things make sense, the whole Patronus thing:
"It is difficult to figure out."
- Seriously - it isn't. Really. It's right in front of you. Snapes was desperately in love with Lily and has by choice, or sheer power of obsession, taken her form of Patronus.
"The idea of a person taking a Patronus form of another is not known anywhere else."
- But Snapes is the only character in the series with a lifelong, desperate, unrequited love for another. It's such a powerful emotion that it is deeply important to the plot. Why should the idea be known anywhere else?
Indeed, would it not be an even more powerful symbol of Snapes' obsession if it were the only example ever in all of Rowling's imagination. If even the most knowledgeable wizard could not understand how it was done, and Rowling herself could find no precedent, would it not further explain how Snapes could endure all that he did in Lily's name? Does it not fit into a world of magic, where a boy survives a deadly curse because of his mother's love?
If you refuse to let yourself understand this, and continue to find reasons to confuse the issue rather than accept it; if you insist on forcing your values upon someone else's magical fantasy for children (and the young at heart, etc); if you require that a story must make sense on your terms, and will not appreciate the author's intent - then you really are locking yourself out of the world of storytelling.
Most of all, I hope you didn't mean the "I paid money" comment. You're really screwed for appreciating books if there was any substance to that line of thought.
"Molly Weasley kills Bellatrix Lestrange."
- Let me get this straight. It's probably meant to be funny, and it made you laugh. What's your problem here? It's not as if there weren't a number of characters around that made the killing possible.
"I understand that Snape loved Lily.. but why would Snape's be the same"
- Erm. Not much to say here. It ain't that difficult to figure out. You really just didn't want to enjoy this, did you?
"Gryffindor's sword in the Sorting Hat."
- Erm, this has already happened in a previous book. It's not even deus ex machina. You don't like the style, that would be one thing (you really didn't want to enjoy the book, did you?), but the mechanics were already there for you to see this coming.
"The Deathly Hallows"
- The whole Voldemort thing is dealt with at length. Also the fact that wizard fairy tales are not known to Muggles etc. But I'm forgetting, you just really didn't want to enjoy this...
"The Taboo"
- Or perhaps there's a reason it's called "The Taboo" and not "a Taboo" i.e. only one word can be monitored. Or the sheer logistic stupidity of having alarms go off any time a not-particularly-significant phrase like "Death Eater" is uttered.
"Harry not moving when Voldemort cast a Crucio on him?"
- It says he felt no pain. Not only did you not enjoy it, did you read it?! The whole connection between Harry and Voldemort, or maybe you stop feeling pain after someone'e tried to kill you twice, or you can't truly mean Crucio if you believe the guy's dead. There's plenty of potential explanations. It wasn't even a plot point, so if it was a real problem it could just have been written out.
"Ted Lupin wasn't living with Harry, but where else would he live if not his godfather?"
- You're serious, aren't you? Nineteen intervening years for anything to happen, a werewolf's kid probably far better off in the wizarding world than the Muggle world, and yet this actually bothers you?
Attempting to pick holes like this in a children's book, and doing a bad job of it - you've got issues to deal with, mate.
"Sounds like there's a disconnect between the IT staff and the business side of the house. "
Agreed, but then this is endemic in industry around the globe.
"Any CIO worth their salt would have had before-and-after metrics to compare."
Sadly not true, there is no consistent track record in business of accurate TCO analyses. At heart, for the same reason as the first, but also because the only metrics easy to track are actual expenditures and labour costs of those who log timesheets or use some equivalent of punching in on the clock. If they're running a helpdesk, those systems typically do not provide such granular data that the cost of supporting specific applications is reliably easy to do.
I once crashed the LAN of a large-and-suddenly-very-angry bank about five years ago. I was just querying the mib-ii interface table of a LightStream via SNMP, nothing fancy. Default behaviour of a basic network performance tool, but for the 1010s it was a real problem. The LightStream had an entry for *every* potential VP.VC connection. Two problems: first, this meant that a bulk-get request was suddenly querying a few thousand interfaces (instead of the four or so channels they actually had configured). Second, it decided to give priority to responding to an SNMP query instead of doing something useful like "don't drop the network!".
As soon as I set the polling go - complaints could be heard across the office and I was quickly facing an irate operations manager.
Easy enough to resolve by just running get-requests against "real" virtual channels, rather than "potential" ones. But very daft default behaviour. And just subtle enough to get through testing in the test lab before going live.
I wouldn't be so quick to conclude as per the article that Cisco simply wouldn't be at fault!
I take the point, although as a general rule if you can seeing it being relevant in one situation, others will occur over time. In general, people find a way to make use of an extra dimension of data and so it will probably happen. Train stations, gig guides for music venues, booking for up-and-coming theatre performances, easy access to batting stats at the ball game, whatever. It's easy to rattle out ideas:
Simply popping up with a map that has e.g. underground stations, cash points, licensed venues, coffee shops, music shops would be useful to me on a regular basis.
I live in London, which has a great website for journey planning. A little thing like only only having to enter my destination to get travel time (walking, train, bus, riverboat) would be great.
I'm rarely a tourist but I travel a lot for work. The closet taxi firm or petrol station (the latter ranked by price) would be useful.
It could be fun in the major cities just asking for points of historic interest near by.
Localised weather forecasts could be popular.
Tourism might not be the *next* big thing, but it is already *a* big thing. There's already businesses sprung up around podcasts for walking tours e.g. Boston as narrated by Steve Tyler. That could easily be tied into location-aware mobile tech.
Perhaps food guides such as Michelin and Zagat would provide services to rapidly connect you through to booking a reservation. I've made good use of Time Out magazine in London, and I live here!
Phone photography hasn't really taken off, but perhaps as resolutions improve, live upload amongst a group of friends automatically grouped by time and location (e.g. every picture from the BBQ) will take off for family get togethers.
A lot of this could be done via personalised portals. And even with a need to include search terms, the location aware aspect simplifies things. Who knows what will happen? These things never live up to the hype, but I reckon we'll see a lot of location-based services.
Well, the article's not about tag (as currently experienced) or regular Google searches as such.
It's about your phone being aware of its location via GPS, and automatically giving you access to relevant local information without searching. Which might indeed mean going to a local Yahoo page, except that currently you would have to navigate there yourself, and may not even be entirely clear on where you are to do so.
Sounds good to me, just last Sunday I found myself at a train station where (genius, this) the timetables were hidden in a waiting room that was locked. With a sign saying "Beware of the leopard", natch.
Taking others' work without any payment is very shortsighted, whether copyright or patents.
Hey now, what did I just say about simplistic, extreme, strawman arguments being stupid?
I fail to see how that has any relevance at all.
When spouting nationalistic views of superiority, it is often pointed out it was not always so, and may not be in the future. Therefore your current views should be tempered, which is why it's relevant. But also, the US is not always picking up the tab. Those US pharmaceuticals rely on a lot of European know-how, and besides you forget about European firms such as AstraZeneca, GlaxoSmithKline and Novartis. Of course, currently China is picking up the tab for the US deficit, to look at it from yet another angle. Personally, I simply find your whole nationalist thing rather distasteful, but now I hear Godin tapping at the door so I'll move on...
It is noticeable that you do not address my main point, namely that patents are not the only mechanism by which to generate revenue. With respect to H.264, I would be very surprised to hear that it would not have been possible to use mutual investment, copyright licensing, and trademarking mechanisms to fund the development of that codec. Multi-nationals individually invest billions each year into research; universities the world over support the development of fantastic new things (hello, Google). Where collaboration is of such clear mutual benefit to the various players I'm entirely sure that, absent of software patents, funding would still have been found.
Various industry working groups get representatives from private firms to develop new standards e.g. SAML, WS-Security, Trusted Computing. The competing open document formats are both receiving funding. These investments have to be made because the technology is necessary to drive future revenues, and so the funding is found. Or take examples such as Apple's FireWire and Yamaha's mLAN protocol that builds on it, showing that firms will spend money on things without such pressures, and still give them away. There's no need for software patents, and rabid xenophobia is certainly no argument.
Taking source code out of the equation, there are examples such as SAP and Business Objects that have invested millions in development without need for a legal system that has patents. There were US firms such as Autodesk that filed with the EU that they found software patents to hold no value, and should not be introduced.
As an example of selling the source code, there's SQL Server, when Microsoft purchased the code from Sybase. Or when HP licensed source code for the NMOS from Riversoft for Layer 2 network topology mapping. Or the whole murky history around UNIX going through the courts just now.
In short - software patents aren't necessary. Seeing as I make a very good salary consulting and selling software licenses for a proprietary, US firm that invests billions in research each year, I'm not saying this out of ideology. They don't drive innovation, they're not necessary for funding, they hurt the little guy, they do little but fund the legal department at large ones. They should be disposed of as soon as possible.
And those engineers then continue to consider the interaction of individual atoms while designing a bridge? Or did you conveniently forget the argument you were supposed to actually believe?
Logically speaking, your post is also an argument for requiring English as a subject of study, for the writing and interpretation of specifications.
Apart from the facts that you're changing your argument, and not making a strong logical argument at that, you really should address the fact that a highly experienced person believes there is an undue emphasis placed on mathematics. To address such a point, you need to try a bit harder than facile arguments that give no hint of actual practical experience nor empirical evidence to support them.
I might argue, for instance, that seeing as many graduates from non-mathematical courses have gone on to be successful programmers, that you are out-and-out wrong.
Incidentally, where is that definition quoted from? I didn't see it in the summary, or the linked article, any of the posts, and while I'm afraid I don't read Japanese, it doesn't sound like the translation of an offical document to me. It is also contradictory to all of definitions I can think of, including all of the ones quoted on Wikipedia.
.. and interoperability is an easy game to play. Web Services, XML, open document formats - all very possible in a closed source, embrace-and-extend model. There's a lot of things not to like about it, but reality is what we're all here to deal with.
To be honest, I find the spin that the ODF Alliance is putting on this just as pathetic and self-serving as Microsoft. Their main enemy, the Office Open XML format, is open too: documented, royalty-free, implemented in XML, maintained by an international body. So this announcement could also be made by Microsoft.
The biggest problem in many companies is, in fact, getting the project instead of choosing not to get it. This is mentioned in the article and referenced in the summary.
So you've missed the most basic thing of all.
Be careful in oversimplifying for no purpose other than to be dismissive of somebody else's opinion or even expertise. Being modded insightful by Slashdot on people issues isn't much of an endorsement.
If payment is your concern, the mechanism involved is not patents but licensing, which is also happily enabled using copyright law. Licensing code is far cheaper than re-writing to avoid copyright violations, so companies have an inventive to pay for those licenses.
Even on copyright, of course, the US was happy to ignore such legalities when it suited them earlier in its history. Even if your post were a fair reflection on the current situation, it would not apply to the past and may well be irrelevant in the future as well.
Your comment about "the only option would be to sell a closed-source codec" is demonstrably wrong, because there are software houses in Europe that will produce code for their customers, include the source in the deal, do not file for patents, and receive payment.
But apart from using bad legal arguments, showing a lack of both past and future perspective, being factually incorrect, and displaying a nasty streak of xenophobia, thank you for your post...
"Those who think the technology will just develop itself, whether there are any incentives or not, are unbelievably naive."
True, and those who use such simplistic, extreme, strawman arguments are being quite believably stupid!
I do agree with the fundamental point that charging twice for the TV music is ridiculous, but I think you exaggerate. I don't think your analogy works because the bar is a business, and the passengers are the primary customers. These are different things, and there was nothing in the article to suggest that boundary is going to be crossed.
Also, you said "things are getting out of hand" - in other words, things are changing or going to change. I think that they are not (with respect to music licensing and fees between commercial enterprises). Change vs. steady state is a significant difference in logic.
The thing is, I'm a bit suspicious of the article. It mixes perfectly valid things ($10 a night fees for a coffee shop to play commercial music seems fine to me) with bullying tactics such as the one you mention, which I completely agree is ridiculous. The overall tone is that nobody should have to pay for music ever, not even business who are *not* the primary customer. I don't agree with that.
Apart from the extortion stories which I agree are excessive (like the TV spot that should have had its royalties paid by the show / TV channel, much like the fitness club that doesn't have to pay for standard commercial radio) I can't quite see what the problem is here.
It's been a while since I played live (I'm in the UK), but the system seemed to work fairly well. Original material - the venue checks your material and gets you to sign a form, you don't get paid, but you get your music heard. When I played in a covers band, there was a fee to be paid by the venue, and *I* expected to be paid as well. And if you were playing covers at a friends party, in other words it wasn't a commercial enterprise - no-one got paid anything.
That all works for me. Where's the issue? People who want to run businesses and get free use of somebody else's work? Musicians who don't want to get paid for their efforts, which doesn't do any favours to musicians trying to make a living (or in my case, help with the rent)?
I'd have some sympathy for an argument whereby businesses pay a smaller fee if their revenues are small enough, although is you can't afford $20 a week as a coffee shop I'd say there's more fundamental challenges to be faced. If the live musicians can't pull in a few cups of coffee from customers should they be playing at all?
I know nothing about civil engineering. However, you'd need to provide a bit more evidence than the nothing you give to convince me that when engineering a bridge, the interaction of individual atoms is taken into account. Seems the problem for the engineers would be hugely complex if they did so, and I'd also have concerns about anyone doing engineering work with materials that are not understood sufficiently well to work with at significantly aggregated level. Do you have a case you could share to support your point?
"Mathematics is structured deductive reasoning, which builds up from a solid starting point (axioms) and serves to represent, communicate and help with the construction of ideas."
That's not a definition of mathematics; it is an aspect of mathematics shared with many other subjects. It could easily be applied to philosophy, or debating (which I've had as part of English), or any science. If you are stating that structured deductive reasoning is the essential part of mathematics upon which CS relies, then you're making a very strong argument in support of TFA. Math could be dropped completely, and philosophy (for example) put in its place.
Any adult with a profit motive who absolves themselves of responsibility and blames it on a horny 13-year old is being an arsehole.
B) Parents who aren't paying attention
Of course parents have responsibilities. But any adult with a profit motive who absolves themselves of responsibility with respect to children because it all rests with the parents is being an arsehole. Parents should not have to enforce a police state attitude on their kids.
C) Online predators for their behaviour
Of course the predators bear responsibility (or need to be in an asylum). But then, the concern is protecting kids from predators. From the parent's perspective, the predator is simply an animal preying on their children. The name is not an accident, I would say. Any adult with a duty of care for children who absolved themselves of that responsibility - and actually blamed the animal! - is being an areshole.
D) Parole officers for not keeping tabs on sex offenders
I would imagine a significant percentage of, if not most, dangerous people have not been caught. It's also extremely difficult to stop people from going online. Given those facts, any adult that used that as an excuse to absolve themselves of responsibility to children is being an arsehole.
I do agree with your implied point that some people out there are being hysterical and not pointing their fingers in the right direction. There are numerous people who have responsibilities. However, you should challenge the degree of responsibility the people in charge of the sites have, and support the extent to which they try to meet it. Your intent is I believe to challenge a prejudice, but you should still address those of us who hold the viewpoint that anyone seeking to profit from children has a duty of care. The fact that there are alternative sources of blame is irrelevant. That is an argument for abdicating responsibility entirely - it's an arsehole argument.
Just to be clear - I'm not calling you an arsehole. But if you were running a social network site and happily ignoring complaints about a track record of predatory behaviour, you would be.
All that said, I'd be open to hearing arguments that there's nothing technically can be done at all. I'd be skeptical, because often that kind of statement is one born of prejudice rather than a genuine attempt to solve a known problem. But it would be a logical argument to make. But just because alternatives exist, doesn't absolve anyone of their responsibilities.
On the subject of trust, it is harder to trust your opinion when you support "it's not truly open" with a link to a list of criticisms that doesn't even mention whether it is open or not. On what basis do you say that the current Office Open XML format not "truely" open?
But in essence you're right. It's not all about money. Many ODF advocates are making heavy use of misleading FUD. It's not "open" in the generic sense of "honest", it seems to be heavily driven by ideology or self-interest, and often they simply cannot be trusted.
Erm.. the quote was in the article, and the summary?
It was even put in quotes to make it easy to spot.
On the sabre rattling front, if the intent was not to do so, that's an awful use of language. "Interesting" has a long standing history as a euphemism. "May you live in interesting times", for example. "When they ran out of sugar for their coffee, they tried using salt instead. I thought that was an interesting decision", perhaps.
More pertinently - "I believe these people are acting in a manner offensive to my beliefs. I would be very interested in having evidence that might support my case."
Given the FSF have worked to develop a new version of the GPL to attack use of free software within proprietary, sealed devices; given that the iPhone is such a device; given that the FSF have just made rather negative comments about the iPhone; given that Peter Brown's "interesting" choice of language is in the same veiled-threat-in-an-apparent-complement sense as "nice place, shame if something happened to it", etc...
Given all that, why would you say this is BSD zealotry FUD, other than your own bias?
I'm a bit surprised you raise the question now, after it has been the entire thrust of my argument so far. Let me copy it from a dictionary: "stereotypenoun1 a an over-generalized and preconceived idea or impression of what characterizes someone or something, especially one that does not allow for any individuality or variation". The bit about not allowing for any individuality or variation is why I lost interest in B5 - it didn't feel like there was much individuality i.e. creative expression in it. It felt like while getting the whole ambitious project off the ground - a great achievement, by the way - they had managed to let down the actual writing. This is a rather fundamental flaw in becoming great fiction.
Seeing as you haven't yet got round to considering the actual point I was making, I'll just knock out some brief comments on the rest of your post:
The distinction is not in the definitions, rather it is in the (in my view) unreasonable suggestion that the layperson should realise that "science fiction" and its very own, widely understood, listed in the dictionary abbreviation "sci-fi" are in fact very different phrases.
Your definitions are indeed tautological. Sci-fi is about objects not people, those films (e.g. I, Robot) that are about objects not people are therefore sci-fi, not science fiction. Can't argue with that, it's a nice little tautology.
Characters of a different genre are pretty simple in concept. If you're watching a hospital drama and suddenly there's someone flying around wearing tights and a cape, someone from the comic book genre has just shown up.
It's not the use of the superhero character in and of itself that is bad, but if it is done "in a blatant fashion" then it's bad writing. Look at the show Heroes as an example of how the idea of superheroes does not require outfits, and therefore stereotypes can be avoided.
"Fiction" may be a genre versus non-fiction, I guess. But if you really want to remove all meaning from words in order to construct a truly bland world view, why not say that in the end the genre is "creative expression", and lump in painting, music, sculpture, etc? We could then stop categorising things. But then, wouldn't it be a rather dull world without those distinctions?
My bad on suggesting scale can make a story bad. I meant to say I wouldn't call B5 great just because of its scale, which is what a lot of people seem to do. With that kind of scale, you have all kinds of tricks you can play with plot twists but it doesn't stop you from writing in cliches. You just get to change the cliches you are applying to a given character over time.
I entirely agree that the dialogue sucked. It's a screenplay - the dialogue is the most important part when assessing it as a piece of fiction (as compared to a plot treatment).
You give a solid reasons why B5 is good. But you also point out that the central theme is nothing new. Being the middle guy in a conflict is nothing new. I actually like a lot of it, I don't mean to be that harsh, but I stopped after season one and haven't thought about it much since. It just seemed to want to include every science fiction, sci-fi and fantasy idea, and hence seemed to have one too many stereotypes.
An interesting historical point. I wasn't aware of the distinction between science fiction and sci-fi - could you provide it?
I tend not to bother with distinctions that will have no meaning to people not part of the group that have chosen to make it; it's as bad as cheap marketing ploys. Wouldn't be surprised if the original poster was happily using SciFi as an abbreviation for science fiction, good or bad, great and small. I understand the idea of specualtive fiction, because you could discuss the difference between "science" and "speculation" to your average or intelligent person and still make sense. Even so, that's just to acknowledge someone's perspective - I don't think the term adds much value except for insider discussions.
great science fiction must first and foremost be great fiction - something most Sci-Fi misses by a mile
Although I see you have no problem making such subtle distinctions.. I'm wondering whether the definition of Sci-Fi will be a tautology that excludes the possibility of it ever being great fiction. But rather than dwell on trivia about the uses and abuses of abbreviation, perhaps you would address the main part of my point:
introducing concept and character stereotypes from a different genre [..] changes things, and when done in such a blatant fashion it's not particularly good writing
I felt Babylon 5 made heavy use of stereotypes, stopping it from being great fiction, and therefore by your logic it is not great science fiction.
I don't mean to be harsh. B5 had a grand scope of vision, was well made, avoided many of the TV science fiction cliches, avoided the whole "a series of episodes, not a story" problem of the long-running series, and was great entertainment for those that liked it. I just wouldn't call it great fiction because of its scale.
It's curious that you should deliver such a rant against such a short and fairly light-hearted criticism. It's like a guilty conscience! You know the show has flaws, but you just don't want to admit them, do you?
"SciFi" just a marketing label
Bullshit. Authors like Harlan Ellison happily associate themselves with sci-fi (and also write outside the genre) without treating it like a cheap marketing ploy. And there are valid reasons for appreciating that there is a sci-fi genre with different implications to fantasy, the most basic being the idea of genuine speculation on what might happen in the future given current trends, another being the application of science and technology to explore moral issues.
Episodes of Star Trek, for example, could just as easily be classed as romance or murder mystery rather than SciFi. Get over it!
Yes, but in a long running episodic series about a long running voyage, it makes perfect sense that crew members of the Enterprise would find themselves in most of the basic human situations, doesn't it? That's rather fundamentally different to introducing concept and character stereotypes from a different genre as a standard part of the show. It changes things, and when done in such a blatant fashion it's not particularly good writing, because it risks breaking the willing suspension of disbelief.
Note the word here is "stereotype". I do hope you won't argue that thinking excessive use of stereotypes is bad is just yet another rule. I mean it is, but you'd have to be extremely good to break that one outside of comedy!
get it into your head that your definition of SciFi, is just that -- yours
Hang on, he didn't give a definition. Maybe I would agree with his definition, and many others besides. You're making things up! Or is that just to give an endorsement of introducing fantasy into the online debate genre?
Slashdot Mirror
WTF?
You need a crew of five people and a tripod to sit on a bench and review the day's photos? I thought I had really bad eyesight, but that's one hell of a pair of glasses you've got there!
Sorry?
There are indeed laws for patents, copyrights and trademarks that make it possible for business people to continue to profit from original work their employees performed decades ago. And leasing agreements. And stock ownership plans.
No need to feel left out, you have the same laws at your disposal.
"That doesn't make my criticisms any less valid."
- Indeed. And in turn, that argument doesn't turn weak criticisms into strong ones.
"why can't I criticize it?"
- Who said you couldn't? And in turn, why are you so unwilling to accept criticism?
"If I read something, I expect it to make sense."
- You're going to struggle with acclaimed authors such as Joseph Heller, William Burroughs and Franz Kafka.
"If it doesn't, I lose some enjoyment out of it."
- Don't forget the possibility that it a story may make sense, but *you* just don't understand it.
"I paid money for it, and I have the right to voice my problems."
- Money will not help you with either of the previous challenges, nor will it prevent your opinion from receiving ridicule, nor make said ridicule unjustified.
Let's go with a simple example of how things make sense, the whole Patronus thing:
"It is difficult to figure out."
- Seriously - it isn't. Really. It's right in front of you. Snapes was desperately in love with Lily and has by choice, or sheer power of obsession, taken her form of Patronus.
"The idea of a person taking a Patronus form of another is not known anywhere else."
- But Snapes is the only character in the series with a lifelong, desperate, unrequited love for another. It's such a powerful emotion that it is deeply important to the plot. Why should the idea be known anywhere else?
Indeed, would it not be an even more powerful symbol of Snapes' obsession if it were the only example ever in all of Rowling's imagination. If even the most knowledgeable wizard could not understand how it was done, and Rowling herself could find no precedent, would it not further explain how Snapes could endure all that he did in Lily's name? Does it not fit into a world of magic, where a boy survives a deadly curse because of his mother's love?
If you refuse to let yourself understand this, and continue to find reasons to confuse the issue rather than accept it; if you insist on forcing your values upon someone else's magical fantasy for children (and the young at heart, etc); if you require that a story must make sense on your terms, and will not appreciate the author's intent - then you really are locking yourself out of the world of storytelling.
Most of all, I hope you didn't mean the "I paid money" comment. You're really screwed for appreciating books if there was any substance to that line of thought.
"Molly Weasley kills Bellatrix Lestrange."
.. but why would Snape's be the same"
- Let me get this straight. It's probably meant to be funny, and it made you laugh. What's your problem here? It's not as if there weren't a number of characters around that made the killing possible.
"I understand that Snape loved Lily
- Erm. Not much to say here. It ain't that difficult to figure out. You really just didn't want to enjoy this, did you?
"Gryffindor's sword in the Sorting Hat."
- Erm, this has already happened in a previous book. It's not even deus ex machina. You don't like the style, that would be one thing (you really didn't want to enjoy the book, did you?), but the mechanics were already there for you to see this coming.
"The Deathly Hallows"
- The whole Voldemort thing is dealt with at length. Also the fact that wizard fairy tales are not known to Muggles etc. But I'm forgetting, you just really didn't want to enjoy this...
"The Taboo"
- Or perhaps there's a reason it's called "The Taboo" and not "a Taboo" i.e. only one word can be monitored. Or the sheer logistic stupidity of having alarms go off any time a not-particularly-significant phrase like "Death Eater" is uttered.
"Harry not moving when Voldemort cast a Crucio on him?"
- It says he felt no pain. Not only did you not enjoy it, did you read it?! The whole connection between Harry and Voldemort, or maybe you stop feeling pain after someone'e tried to kill you twice, or you can't truly mean Crucio if you believe the guy's dead. There's plenty of potential explanations. It wasn't even a plot point, so if it was a real problem it could just have been written out.
"Ted Lupin wasn't living with Harry, but where else would he live if not his godfather?"
- You're serious, aren't you? Nineteen intervening years for anything to happen, a werewolf's kid probably far better off in the wizarding world than the Muggle world, and yet this actually bothers you?
Attempting to pick holes like this in a children's book, and doing a bad job of it - you've got issues to deal with, mate.
"Sounds like there's a disconnect between the IT staff and the business side of the house. "
Agreed, but then this is endemic in industry around the globe.
"Any CIO worth their salt would have had before-and-after metrics to compare."
Sadly not true, there is no consistent track record in business of accurate TCO analyses. At heart, for the same reason as the first, but also because the only metrics easy to track are actual expenditures and labour costs of those who log timesheets or use some equivalent of punching in on the clock. If they're running a helpdesk, those systems typically do not provide such granular data that the cost of supporting specific applications is reliably easy to do.
Ah, good times!
I once crashed the LAN of a large-and-suddenly-very-angry bank about five years ago. I was just querying the mib-ii interface table of a LightStream via SNMP, nothing fancy. Default behaviour of a basic network performance tool, but for the 1010s it was a real problem. The LightStream had an entry for *every* potential VP.VC connection. Two problems: first, this meant that a bulk-get request was suddenly querying a few thousand interfaces (instead of the four or so channels they actually had configured). Second, it decided to give priority to responding to an SNMP query instead of doing something useful like "don't drop the network!".
As soon as I set the polling go - complaints could be heard across the office and I was quickly facing an irate operations manager.
Easy enough to resolve by just running get-requests against "real" virtual channels, rather than "potential" ones. But very daft default behaviour. And just subtle enough to get through testing in the test lab before going live.
I wouldn't be so quick to conclude as per the article that Cisco simply wouldn't be at fault!
I take the point, although as a general rule if you can seeing it being relevant in one situation, others will occur over time. In general, people find a way to make use of an extra dimension of data and so it will probably happen. Train stations, gig guides for music venues, booking for up-and-coming theatre performances, easy access to batting stats at the ball game, whatever. It's easy to rattle out ideas:
Simply popping up with a map that has e.g. underground stations, cash points, licensed venues, coffee shops, music shops would be useful to me on a regular basis.
I live in London, which has a great website for journey planning. A little thing like only only having to enter my destination to get travel time (walking, train, bus, riverboat) would be great.
I'm rarely a tourist but I travel a lot for work. The closet taxi firm or petrol station (the latter ranked by price) would be useful.
It could be fun in the major cities just asking for points of historic interest near by.
Localised weather forecasts could be popular.
Tourism might not be the *next* big thing, but it is already *a* big thing. There's already businesses sprung up around podcasts for walking tours e.g. Boston as narrated by Steve Tyler. That could easily be tied into location-aware mobile tech.
Perhaps food guides such as Michelin and Zagat would provide services to rapidly connect you through to booking a reservation. I've made good use of Time Out magazine in London, and I live here!
Phone photography hasn't really taken off, but perhaps as resolutions improve, live upload amongst a group of friends automatically grouped by time and location (e.g. every picture from the BBQ) will take off for family get togethers.
A lot of this could be done via personalised portals. And even with a need to include search terms, the location aware aspect simplifies things. Who knows what will happen? These things never live up to the hype, but I reckon we'll see a lot of location-based services.
Well, the article's not about tag (as currently experienced) or regular Google searches as such.
It's about your phone being aware of its location via GPS, and automatically giving you access to relevant local information without searching. Which might indeed mean going to a local Yahoo page, except that currently you would have to navigate there yourself, and may not even be entirely clear on where you are to do so.
Sounds good to me, just last Sunday I found myself at a train station where (genius, this) the timetables were hidden in a waiting room that was locked. With a sign saying "Beware of the leopard", natch.
Hey now, what did I just say about simplistic, extreme, strawman arguments being stupid?
When spouting nationalistic views of superiority, it is often pointed out it was not always so, and may not be in the future. Therefore your current views should be tempered, which is why it's relevant. But also, the US is not always picking up the tab. Those US pharmaceuticals rely on a lot of European know-how, and besides you forget about European firms such as AstraZeneca, GlaxoSmithKline and Novartis. Of course, currently China is picking up the tab for the US deficit, to look at it from yet another angle. Personally, I simply find your whole nationalist thing rather distasteful, but now I hear Godin tapping at the door so I'll move on...
It is noticeable that you do not address my main point, namely that patents are not the only mechanism by which to generate revenue. With respect to H.264, I would be very surprised to hear that it would not have been possible to use mutual investment, copyright licensing, and trademarking mechanisms to fund the development of that codec. Multi-nationals individually invest billions each year into research; universities the world over support the development of fantastic new things (hello, Google). Where collaboration is of such clear mutual benefit to the various players I'm entirely sure that, absent of software patents, funding would still have been found.
Various industry working groups get representatives from private firms to develop new standards e.g. SAML, WS-Security, Trusted Computing. The competing open document formats are both receiving funding. These investments have to be made because the technology is necessary to drive future revenues, and so the funding is found. Or take examples such as Apple's FireWire and Yamaha's mLAN protocol that builds on it, showing that firms will spend money on things without such pressures, and still give them away. There's no need for software patents, and rabid xenophobia is certainly no argument.
Taking source code out of the equation, there are examples such as SAP and Business Objects that have invested millions in development without need for a legal system that has patents. There were US firms such as Autodesk that filed with the EU that they found software patents to hold no value, and should not be introduced.
As an example of selling the source code, there's SQL Server, when Microsoft purchased the code from Sybase. Or when HP licensed source code for the NMOS from Riversoft for Layer 2 network topology mapping. Or the whole murky history around UNIX going through the courts just now.
In short - software patents aren't necessary. Seeing as I make a very good salary consulting and selling software licenses for a proprietary, US firm that invests billions in research each year, I'm not saying this out of ideology. They don't drive innovation, they're not necessary for funding, they hurt the little guy, they do little but fund the legal department at large ones. They should be disposed of as soon as possible.
And those engineers then continue to consider the interaction of individual atoms while designing a bridge? Or did you conveniently forget the argument you were supposed to actually believe?
Logically speaking, your post is also an argument for requiring English as a subject of study, for the writing and interpretation of specifications.
Apart from the facts that you're changing your argument, and not making a strong logical argument at that, you really should address the fact that a highly experienced person believes there is an undue emphasis placed on mathematics. To address such a point, you need to try a bit harder than facile arguments that give no hint of actual practical experience nor empirical evidence to support them.
I might argue, for instance, that seeing as many graduates from non-mathematical courses have gone on to be successful programmers, that you are out-and-out wrong.
That's not outrage, it's ridicule.
Not getting the joke is a different kind of problem.
Erm, officially speaking, yes.
Did you have a point?
Incidentally, where is that definition quoted from? I didn't see it in the summary, or the linked article, any of the posts, and while I'm afraid I don't read Japanese, it doesn't sound like the translation of an offical document to me. It is also contradictory to all of definitions I can think of, including all of the ones quoted on Wikipedia.
.. and interoperability is an easy game to play. Web Services, XML, open document formats - all very possible in a closed source, embrace-and-extend model. There's a lot of things not to like about it, but reality is what we're all here to deal with.
To be honest, I find the spin that the ODF Alliance is putting on this just as pathetic and self-serving as Microsoft. Their main enemy, the Office Open XML format, is open too: documented, royalty-free, implemented in XML, maintained by an international body. So this announcement could also be made by Microsoft.
The biggest problem in many companies is, in fact, getting the project instead of choosing not to get it. This is mentioned in the article and referenced in the summary.
So you've missed the most basic thing of all.
Be careful in oversimplifying for no purpose other than to be dismissive of somebody else's opinion or even expertise. Being modded insightful by Slashdot on people issues isn't much of an endorsement.
If payment is your concern, the mechanism involved is not patents but licensing, which is also happily enabled using copyright law. Licensing code is far cheaper than re-writing to avoid copyright violations, so companies have an inventive to pay for those licenses.
Even on copyright, of course, the US was happy to ignore such legalities when it suited them earlier in its history. Even if your post were a fair reflection on the current situation, it would not apply to the past and may well be irrelevant in the future as well.
Your comment about "the only option would be to sell a closed-source codec" is demonstrably wrong, because there are software houses in Europe that will produce code for their customers, include the source in the deal, do not file for patents, and receive payment.
But apart from using bad legal arguments, showing a lack of both past and future perspective, being factually incorrect, and displaying a nasty streak of xenophobia, thank you for your post...
"Those who think the technology will just develop itself, whether there are any incentives or not, are unbelievably naive."
True, and those who use such simplistic, extreme, strawman arguments are being quite believably stupid!
I do agree with the fundamental point that charging twice for the TV music is ridiculous, but I think you exaggerate. I don't think your analogy works because the bar is a business, and the passengers are the primary customers. These are different things, and there was nothing in the article to suggest that boundary is going to be crossed.
Also, you said "things are getting out of hand" - in other words, things are changing or going to change. I think that they are not (with respect to music licensing and fees between commercial enterprises). Change vs. steady state is a significant difference in logic.
The thing is, I'm a bit suspicious of the article. It mixes perfectly valid things ($10 a night fees for a coffee shop to play commercial music seems fine to me) with bullying tactics such as the one you mention, which I completely agree is ridiculous. The overall tone is that nobody should have to pay for music ever, not even business who are *not* the primary customer. I don't agree with that.
Apart from the extortion stories which I agree are excessive (like the TV spot that should have had its royalties paid by the show / TV channel, much like the fitness club that doesn't have to pay for standard commercial radio) I can't quite see what the problem is here.
It's been a while since I played live (I'm in the UK), but the system seemed to work fairly well. Original material - the venue checks your material and gets you to sign a form, you don't get paid, but you get your music heard. When I played in a covers band, there was a fee to be paid by the venue, and *I* expected to be paid as well. And if you were playing covers at a friends party, in other words it wasn't a commercial enterprise - no-one got paid anything.
That all works for me. Where's the issue? People who want to run businesses and get free use of somebody else's work? Musicians who don't want to get paid for their efforts, which doesn't do any favours to musicians trying to make a living (or in my case, help with the rent)?
I'd have some sympathy for an argument whereby businesses pay a smaller fee if their revenues are small enough, although is you can't afford $20 a week as a coffee shop I'd say there's more fundamental challenges to be faced. If the live musicians can't pull in a few cups of coffee from customers should they be playing at all?
You're already paying royalties, in the form of having advertising, or subscribing to satellite.
I know nothing about civil engineering. However, you'd need to provide a bit more evidence than the nothing you give to convince me that when engineering a bridge, the interaction of individual atoms is taken into account. Seems the problem for the engineers would be hugely complex if they did so, and I'd also have concerns about anyone doing engineering work with materials that are not understood sufficiently well to work with at significantly aggregated level. Do you have a case you could share to support your point?
"Mathematics is structured deductive reasoning, which builds up from a solid starting point (axioms) and serves to represent, communicate and help with the construction of ideas."
That's not a definition of mathematics; it is an aspect of mathematics shared with many other subjects. It could easily be applied to philosophy, or debating (which I've had as part of English), or any science. If you are stating that structured deductive reasoning is the essential part of mathematics upon which CS relies, then you're making a very strong argument in support of TFA. Math could be dropped completely, and philosophy (for example) put in its place.
For the most part, no, that's a bad argument:
A) Kids who sneak away to meet predators
Any adult with a profit motive who absolves themselves of responsibility and blames it on a horny 13-year old is being an arsehole.
B) Parents who aren't paying attention
Of course parents have responsibilities. But any adult with a profit motive who absolves themselves of responsibility with respect to children because it all rests with the parents is being an arsehole. Parents should not have to enforce a police state attitude on their kids.
C) Online predators for their behaviour
Of course the predators bear responsibility (or need to be in an asylum). But then, the concern is protecting kids from predators. From the parent's perspective, the predator is simply an animal preying on their children. The name is not an accident, I would say. Any adult with a duty of care for children who absolved themselves of that responsibility - and actually blamed the animal! - is being an areshole.
D) Parole officers for not keeping tabs on sex offenders
I would imagine a significant percentage of, if not most, dangerous people have not been caught. It's also extremely difficult to stop people from going online. Given those facts, any adult that used that as an excuse to absolve themselves of responsibility to children is being an arsehole.
I do agree with your implied point that some people out there are being hysterical and not pointing their fingers in the right direction. There are numerous people who have responsibilities. However, you should challenge the degree of responsibility the people in charge of the sites have, and support the extent to which they try to meet it. Your intent is I believe to challenge a prejudice, but you should still address those of us who hold the viewpoint that anyone seeking to profit from children has a duty of care. The fact that there are alternative sources of blame is irrelevant. That is an argument for abdicating responsibility entirely - it's an arsehole argument.
Just to be clear - I'm not calling you an arsehole. But if you were running a social network site and happily ignoring complaints about a track record of predatory behaviour, you would be.
All that said, I'd be open to hearing arguments that there's nothing technically can be done at all. I'd be skeptical, because often that kind of statement is one born of prejudice rather than a genuine attempt to solve a known problem. But it would be a logical argument to make. But just because alternatives exist, doesn't absolve anyone of their responsibilities.
On the subject of trust, it is harder to trust your opinion when you support "it's not truly open" with a link to a list of criticisms that doesn't even mention whether it is open or not. On what basis do you say that the current Office Open XML format not "truely" open?
But in essence you're right. It's not all about money. Many ODF advocates are making heavy use of misleading FUD. It's not "open" in the generic sense of "honest", it seems to be heavily driven by ideology or self-interest, and often they simply cannot be trusted.
Erm .. the quote was in the article, and the summary?
It was even put in quotes to make it easy to spot.
On the sabre rattling front, if the intent was not to do so, that's an awful use of language. "Interesting" has a long standing history as a euphemism. "May you live in interesting times", for example. "When they ran out of sugar for their coffee, they tried using salt instead. I thought that was an interesting decision", perhaps.
More pertinently - "I believe these people are acting in a manner offensive to my beliefs. I would be very interested in having evidence that might support my case."
Given the FSF have worked to develop a new version of the GPL to attack use of free software within proprietary, sealed devices; given that the iPhone is such a device; given that the FSF have just made rather negative comments about the iPhone; given that Peter Brown's "interesting" choice of language is in the same veiled-threat-in-an-apparent-complement sense as "nice place, shame if something happened to it", etc...
Given all that, why would you say this is BSD zealotry FUD, other than your own bias?
The most important point:
I'm a bit surprised you raise the question now, after it has been the entire thrust of my argument so far. Let me copy it from a dictionary: "stereotype noun 1 a an over-generalized and preconceived idea or impression of what characterizes someone or something, especially one that does not allow for any individuality or variation". The bit about not allowing for any individuality or variation is why I lost interest in B5 - it didn't feel like there was much individuality i.e. creative expression in it. It felt like while getting the whole ambitious project off the ground - a great achievement, by the way - they had managed to let down the actual writing. This is a rather fundamental flaw in becoming great fiction.
Seeing as you haven't yet got round to considering the actual point I was making, I'll just knock out some brief comments on the rest of your post:
The distinction is not in the definitions, rather it is in the (in my view) unreasonable suggestion that the layperson should realise that "science fiction" and its very own, widely understood, listed in the dictionary abbreviation "sci-fi" are in fact very different phrases.
Your definitions are indeed tautological. Sci-fi is about objects not people, those films (e.g. I, Robot) that are about objects not people are therefore sci-fi, not science fiction. Can't argue with that, it's a nice little tautology.
Characters of a different genre are pretty simple in concept. If you're watching a hospital drama and suddenly there's someone flying around wearing tights and a cape, someone from the comic book genre has just shown up.
It's not the use of the superhero character in and of itself that is bad, but if it is done "in a blatant fashion" then it's bad writing. Look at the show Heroes as an example of how the idea of superheroes does not require outfits, and therefore stereotypes can be avoided.
"Fiction" may be a genre versus non-fiction, I guess. But if you really want to remove all meaning from words in order to construct a truly bland world view, why not say that in the end the genre is "creative expression", and lump in painting, music, sculpture, etc? We could then stop categorising things. But then, wouldn't it be a rather dull world without those distinctions?
My bad on suggesting scale can make a story bad. I meant to say I wouldn't call B5 great just because of its scale, which is what a lot of people seem to do. With that kind of scale, you have all kinds of tricks you can play with plot twists but it doesn't stop you from writing in cliches. You just get to change the cliches you are applying to a given character over time.
I entirely agree that the dialogue sucked. It's a screenplay - the dialogue is the most important part when assessing it as a piece of fiction (as compared to a plot treatment).
You give a solid reasons why B5 is good. But you also point out that the central theme is nothing new. Being the middle guy in a conflict is nothing new. I actually like a lot of it, I don't mean to be that harsh, but I stopped after season one and haven't thought about it much since. It just seemed to want to include every science fiction, sci-fi and fantasy idea, and hence seemed to have one too many stereotypes.
An interesting historical point. I wasn't aware of the distinction between science fiction and sci-fi - could you provide it?
I tend not to bother with distinctions that will have no meaning to people not part of the group that have chosen to make it; it's as bad as cheap marketing ploys. Wouldn't be surprised if the original poster was happily using SciFi as an abbreviation for science fiction, good or bad, great and small. I understand the idea of specualtive fiction, because you could discuss the difference between "science" and "speculation" to your average or intelligent person and still make sense. Even so, that's just to acknowledge someone's perspective - I don't think the term adds much value except for insider discussions.
Although I see you have no problem making such subtle distinctions .. I'm wondering whether the definition of Sci-Fi will be a tautology that excludes the possibility of it ever being great fiction. But rather than dwell on trivia about the uses and abuses of abbreviation, perhaps you would address the main part of my point:
introducing concept and character stereotypes from a different genre [..] changes things, and when done in such a blatant fashion it's not particularly good writing
I felt Babylon 5 made heavy use of stereotypes, stopping it from being great fiction, and therefore by your logic it is not great science fiction.
I don't mean to be harsh. B5 had a grand scope of vision, was well made, avoided many of the TV science fiction cliches, avoided the whole "a series of episodes, not a story" problem of the long-running series, and was great entertainment for those that liked it. I just wouldn't call it great fiction because of its scale.
It's curious that you should deliver such a rant against such a short and fairly light-hearted criticism. It's like a guilty conscience! You know the show has flaws, but you just don't want to admit them, do you?
Bullshit. Authors like Harlan Ellison happily associate themselves with sci-fi (and also write outside the genre) without treating it like a cheap marketing ploy. And there are valid reasons for appreciating that there is a sci-fi genre with different implications to fantasy, the most basic being the idea of genuine speculation on what might happen in the future given current trends, another being the application of science and technology to explore moral issues.
Yes, but in a long running episodic series about a long running voyage, it makes perfect sense that crew members of the Enterprise would find themselves in most of the basic human situations, doesn't it? That's rather fundamentally different to introducing concept and character stereotypes from a different genre as a standard part of the show. It changes things, and when done in such a blatant fashion it's not particularly good writing, because it risks breaking the willing suspension of disbelief.
Note the word here is "stereotype". I do hope you won't argue that thinking excessive use of stereotypes is bad is just yet another rule. I mean it is, but you'd have to be extremely good to break that one outside of comedy!
Hang on, he didn't give a definition. Maybe I would agree with his definition, and many others besides. You're making things up! Or is that just to give an endorsement of introducing fantasy into the online debate genre?