Plus, you have to factor in the fact that the average career of a professional football player is 3 years.
Warning: dumb questions from a foriegner here
So what happens to all the players that only play one or two seasons of pro football, or don't get drafted , given that (unlike soccer or in my case, Aussie Rules) there doesn't appear to be "minor leagues" - if you don't make it or fall out of the system, you'll never play football again.
Is even the base pay so high that even a rookie who doesn't really make it set themselves up for life? Do they all go and buy bars and forever moan about the injury/coach/whatever that derailed their careers? Is there a charity to look after these unfortunate souls?;)
While the abovecomment is funny, it does illustrate a serious point - we don't have exact, unambigious definitions of "planet", and there are objects at both ends of the size spectrum that are straining our definition (Pluto at one end, some of the supermassive gas giants discovered around some neighbouring stars at the other).
So, to paraphrase the Walrus, planet means exactly what we choose it to mean, no more and no less.
If the X-box could play Dreamcast games, then the continuing sale of those games would take money from Microsoft and put it into Sega's pockets. I don't think Microsoft will do that.
But that royalty can be renegotiated as part of the deal, so that both parties come out in front. As long as there's something in it for both sides (and there is) deals can be done.
I still think this rumour is probably false, but by no means impossible.
You're assuming that the money will start rolling in from the time of copyright. This often doesn't happen. The "artist whose work is worthless during their lifetime" is a cliche.
If the artist is dead, what difference does it make to them?
The artist's work may not be noticed and appreciated until well after their death.
Or advances in reproduction (lithograph, screen print, casting, etc) might increase the amount of money earned on the work by making it more affordable.
True to some extent, but perhaps not as much as it was. However, why does that entitle their descendants to windfall profits?
Say you write and illustrate a book to amuse your kids. After your death, your grown grandchildren find the book in storage, and have it published. It's a huge hit. Should the heirs not earn the profits? Is it better for a company to take that money?
It's not *one* company that would earn the profits. If copyright lapsed, it would be anybody with a printing press who wanted to run them off. In any case, I don't think my hypothetical grown grandchildren really deserve any money from the book. They didn't write it - I did. And, obviously, if I didn't attempt to publish the book, money wasn't the motivating factor for writing it.
In any case, this is a very rare situation. The situation where this becomes important is immensely popular copyrighted works such as the old Disney movies, and music such as Gershwin's Rhapsody In Blue. All of these have already earned massive amounts of money for the copyright holders, and have become part of our history and culture. How long are large corporations going to earn a rake-off on these works?
I now expect to lose Karma for criticizing Slashdot. Of course, if I cared about Karma, I wouldn't post this response...
Why is it that every response that has something to the effect of "Now, I know I'll be modded down for this..." always get modded up?
Human nature. I believe the thought process goes something like "I'm no bigot. I'll show this guy how tolerant we are of alternative viewpoints by moderating him up!"
Am I the only guy who noticed this, or did ChaoticCoyote know it too?
It's fairly widely known around the people who've been on/. for a while. Certainly everybody that uses the technique does - but, unfortunately, many moderators haven't realized it yet. Unfortunately, complaining about this tends to draw a bunch of people telling you to stop bitching.
And if he did know it, doesnt that mean that he does care about karma?
Undoubtedly, or if not karma, at least a +5 so he can shout his views with a karmic megaphone (geez, I like that phrase:)
The solution? My personal moderation policy is that anybody who uses the phrase "I know I'm going to be modded down for this" or similar, gets exactly what they ask for - moderation down.
Re:Good Fnarg! that article is so full of shit.
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2.2 vs 2.4
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· Score: 2
If someone went to such great lengths to defeat the 2gb limit, then I'm pretty sure it's because it's been a problem for a while.
Heck - my/home partition comes to well over 2GB compressed. Putting that into a tarfile before 2.4 would have been virtually impossible.
If her/her descendants will possibly benefit from the work, that person will likely work harder to produce better works, thus benefitting you and me.
C'mon. That's just silly. If somebody produces a work at say, 25, and die at 75, they'll have had 50 years earning royalties to leave to their children. If this music is still purchased with sufficient regularity after 50 years to make collecting royalties worthwhile, surely it will already have made more than enough money to justify writing the song. Very, very few composers will ever write music that will be played long after their death. Look at, say, the big band music of the 1940's. How much of that is still played regularly today? A couple of dozen tunes, maybe?
Additionally, you're assuming that greater rewards are going to lead to better music. While greater rewards might leave a composer more time to spend on each piece, beyond that I doubt that it makes any difference. Great composers aren't generally motivated by money, any more than great software designers.
What public backlash are you talking about? Remember that for the vast majority of the population Windows is the only thing remotely usable and they automatically perceive doing anything bad to Microsoft as a bad thing.
I used to think that, but now I'm not quite so sure. My highly sophisticated reasoning on this? Simple. I saw the South Park movie in the theatre. The audience was laughing their heads off, but the biggest cheer of all came when a US army general confronts Bill Gates, about the "new features" in Windows 98, calls him a liar, and then pulls out a pistol and shoots him. Typical South Park, but it really struck a chord with the audience.
Whether an Australian theatre audience's view corresponds with the US general public's view, and indeed what the audience's reaction really indicated, is of course a matter for debate. However, the idea that Bill and his products are universally loved by the masses may not be the case.
The true benefit of BSD code is that you don't have to publish your source if you use somebody else's code.
You may regard that as a benefit. From my perspsective, if somebody wants to use my code for their project, they should have to open their project's code too. That's the reason why the project I work on uses the GPL.
Others might be happy for their code to be absorbed into closed source projects. Sometimes there are practical reasons for allowing this, sometimes it's just personal preference. Good for them - they can use the BSD license or put their code in the public domain. Just don't expect me to.
In any case, I wouldn't have liked to have been one of the men who refused to take the test. Small towns can get rather nasty in these kinds of situations.
I've been playing the *arcade* version of Pacman. I still can't get over just how much fun it is to play, and how just about everything the game design was gotten just right to make the game well-balanced (difficult, but fair).
Yeah, probably 90% of the games released in that era were crap too, but the best of them are still playable and enjoyable today.
IANAL, but, if I recall correctly, patents protect ideas against anyone else using them without a license, even if the non-patent holder came up with the idea independently. Copyright is a whole different kettle of fish (for computers, you have to actually copy code to infringe copyright), as are trade secrets (if somebody else figures out a trade secret, it's tough cookies).
Once you add X, the gnu utilities, GTK+, etc. etc. etc, ease of setup and maintenance will be basically the same as for Linux/xBSD - probably worse, as I'm not sure the utilities designed to manage "OSX w/unix front-end" have been written yet. Maintaining kernels is a very small part of the maintenance overhead.
In essence, if you want a Unix-style desktop environment, why wouldn't you stick with Linux or xBSD, rather than trying to graft one on top of an environment that's obviously been built to have the Mac front end on it?
My Norwegian is a little rusty...
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Norway Bans Spam
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· Score: 2
so could somebody provide a rough (even just a partial) translation or the article? I don't think Altavista knows Norwegian.
However, I take issue with a few of your statements:
There is a cultural difference in what R&D means. We still have a very strong Academic research tradition . . . Corporations suck at real R&D.
*Australian* corporations suck at R&D, mainly because they spend stuff-all on it (the exceptions being foriegn-owned multinationals, a few tech firms, and a very few enlightened other dcompanies). Australian companies aren't even capable of exploiting the technologies invented by Australian scientists in universities and the CSIRO, half the time. This is partly an issue of lack of government incentive and guidance for corporations, and partly a massive lack of management talent at the heads of many major Australian corporations.
Australia faces many specific hurdles to train and retain skilled people.Duh!! You know why? Because of the famous 'brain drain'.
Due to the lack of funding for universities, and the shortsightedness of the Australian corporate sector, valuable people are offered a fraction of the opportunities both financially and professionally than they can get overseas.
While you are quite correct in that there is some element of self-servedness in Microsoft's report, they've made some good points.
In short, don't blame malice when utter, total stupidity will do.
I should have made it clear. I don't *really* think the government has set out to screw the local IT sector. It's just that its policies in the area have been one disaster after another, with virtually *no* good ones in between.
There are a few points I'd take issue with - technology security is really no different here to the US AFAICT, the "inability for some groups to have net access" comment could be applied anywhere in the world, and the "piracy" comment is blatant Microsoft self-interest, but basically virtually every Australian government in the past 20 years (the previous Victorian government, for all its considerable faults, understood IT as well as any government on earth) misunderstands, distrusts, and dislikes IT, and has consequently screwed up its IT policy.
Some cynics in the local IT press have even gone so far as to suggest that there must be votes in pissing off the local IT and, more broadly, the "knowledge" sector, they do it so effectively.
To list just some examples of screwed up policy in the area:
The tax concession described in the article.
Continually underfunding universities, attempting to force universities into "applied research" (which often barely deserves to be called "research") and beauty-contest degrees in flavour-of-the-month jobs.
Telecommunications policy has been one great disaster after another.
The government has just abandoned an IT outsourcing scheme whose main achievement is paying US consultants millions of dollars for zero return.
In broadcasting policy, the government has just squashed any chance of a viable datacasting industry in Australia by agreeing to a ridiculous scheme where the entire spectrum will be used for HDTV broadcasts, despite the fact that nobody will be able to afford HDTV sets to take advantage of it.
The net censorship regime, which has had no practical effect, by the way, but is just another example of the boneheaded attitude of the current Federal government.
Take it from me, I could go on for a *lot* longer.
This isn't really gambling in the traditional sense, where people bet on events they have no control over. This is like a game of golf where whomever loses buys the drinks at the end. I'd still like to see limits on the maximum stake (maybe $5 per player and $50 per week) to avoid people losing their non-virtual houses.
There are several things that could be done to prevent cheaters prospering, such as human "umpires", reputation measures, statistical analysis, and the like.
Re:This isn't the only time generals are the antag
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'Thirteen Days'
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· Score: 2
Dr. Strangelove is probably the most famous example of this plot device, and almost certainly the best. While not a direct satirisation of the Cuban missile crisis, it was almost certainly inspired by it, and remains one of the most biting comments on the craziness of mutually assured destruction. If you haven't seen it, get it out on video *right now*.
I dunno what the situation is in the states, but in Australia (where HDTV broadcasts have just begun) the general conclusion amongst retailers is that HDTV's are going to struggle anyway.
Why? Because people are happy with their existing TV's, and aren't going to pay ~8000 AUD for extra quality that they don't really notice anyway. For fsck's sake, most people are happy with AM radio, MP3 and VHS video!
There are plenty of non-trivial cases where considerable *human* effort has been expended to determine the termination properties of an algorithm, and no definite answer has been found.
As for software verifiability, plenty of people *have* done research into it. Aside from many problems in the field turning out to be NP-hard or worse (yes, there are such problems), stating exactly the properties you wish to verify is in itself a large intellectual effort.
Notwithstanding all of this, there have been some interesting projects done, some of which have made it to some areas of industry. One simple-to-grasp example of a useful project was an automated termination analyser for the Mercury programming language. While it obviously can't be 100% accurate, it could prove that about 80-90% of the Mercury language's standard library would terminate in finite time for all inputs - and, usefully, it turned out that code for which termination couldn't be proven often contained subtle bugs.
Mercury, however, has features that make this kind of thing much, much easier than conventional programming languages (but make programming in it somewhat of a challenge to learn initially). Trying to do this on pointer-ridden C is probably too difficult and too inaccurate to be useful.
While your friendly DNA might self-assemble, and might indeed superconduct if you get it cool enough (and 1K is pretty damn cool), it's not going to do both at the same time, which if you were going to ever use this in a practical sense might be something you'd like to get it do do (to build a molecular-level write-once memory system, for instance). In addition, getting things this cold is quite hard to do, IIRC.
While this is fascinating stuff, it'd be even cooler (if you'll excuse the pun)if we could make variant DNA that superconducts at higher temperatures:-)
Anyway, one slightly offtopic question about superconductivity and the high-temperature superconductors that caused all the fuss back in the 1980's: what happened? Did we reach another temperature plateau? Was it still at liquid-nitrogen-required temperatures?
And if the Chinese were *really* serious about invading Taiwan, a BMD system wouldn't deter them. All they need to do is smuggle in a couple - hell, make it a couple of dozen - nuclear weapons into the US, and politely inform the US of its intention to reclaim its "rogue province" and the fact that if the US interferes New York, DC, LA, Chicago, San Francisco, Seattle, and so on, will disappear off the face of the Earth.
As for suitcase nuclear weapons being "low-yield", Hiroshima-style fission weapons were pretty low-yield, but they managed to kill about 100,000 people each, and detection is a joke. The US spends billions on interdicting drug smuggling, and misses approximately 90% of it. Puh-leeze!
Look, the Chinese leadership may be made up of power-hungry barbarians, but they aren't stupid.
Or are you seriously claiming that elderly people and minorities are not really entitled to vote, because they base their votes on different criteria to your own?
Slashdot Mirror
Warning: dumb questions from a foriegner here
So what happens to all the players that only play one or two seasons of pro football, or don't get drafted , given that (unlike soccer or in my case, Aussie Rules) there doesn't appear to be "minor leagues" - if you don't make it or fall out of the system, you'll never play football again.
Is even the base pay so high that even a rookie who doesn't really make it set themselves up for life? Do they all go and buy bars and forever moan about the injury/coach/whatever that derailed their careers? Is there a charity to look after these unfortunate souls? ;)
So, to paraphrase the Walrus, planet means exactly what we choose it to mean, no more and no less.
But that royalty can be renegotiated as part of the deal, so that both parties come out in front. As long as there's something in it for both sides (and there is) deals can be done.
I still think this rumour is probably false, but by no means impossible.
If the artist is dead, what difference does it make to them?
True to some extent, but perhaps not as much as it was. However, why does that entitle their descendants to windfall profits?
It's not *one* company that would earn the profits. If copyright lapsed, it would be anybody with a printing press who wanted to run them off. In any case, I don't think my hypothetical grown grandchildren really deserve any money from the book. They didn't write it - I did. And, obviously, if I didn't attempt to publish the book, money wasn't the motivating factor for writing it.
In any case, this is a very rare situation. The situation where this becomes important is immensely popular copyrighted works such as the old Disney movies, and music such as Gershwin's Rhapsody In Blue. All of these have already earned massive amounts of money for the copyright holders, and have become part of our history and culture. How long are large corporations going to earn a rake-off on these works?
Human nature. I believe the thought process goes something like "I'm no bigot. I'll show this guy how tolerant we are of alternative viewpoints by moderating him up!"
It's fairly widely known around the people who've been on /. for a while. Certainly everybody that uses the technique does - but, unfortunately, many moderators haven't realized it yet. Unfortunately, complaining about this tends to draw a bunch of people telling you to stop bitching.
Undoubtedly, or if not karma, at least a +5 so he can shout his views with a karmic megaphone (geez, I like that phrase :)
The solution? My personal moderation policy is that anybody who uses the phrase "I know I'm going to be modded down for this" or similar, gets exactly what they ask for - moderation down.
Heck - my /home partition comes to well over 2GB compressed. Putting that into a tarfile before 2.4 would have been virtually impossible.
C'mon. That's just silly. If somebody produces a work at say, 25, and die at 75, they'll have had 50 years earning royalties to leave to their children. If this music is still purchased with sufficient regularity after 50 years to make collecting royalties worthwhile, surely it will already have made more than enough money to justify writing the song. Very, very few composers will ever write music that will be played long after their death. Look at, say, the big band music of the 1940's. How much of that is still played regularly today? A couple of dozen tunes, maybe?
Additionally, you're assuming that greater rewards are going to lead to better music. While greater rewards might leave a composer more time to spend on each piece, beyond that I doubt that it makes any difference. Great composers aren't generally motivated by money, any more than great software designers.
I used to think that, but now I'm not quite so sure. My highly sophisticated reasoning on this? Simple. I saw the South Park movie in the theatre. The audience was laughing their heads off, but the biggest cheer of all came when a US army general confronts Bill Gates, about the "new features" in Windows 98, calls him a liar, and then pulls out a pistol and shoots him. Typical South Park, but it really struck a chord with the audience.
Whether an Australian theatre audience's view corresponds with the US general public's view, and indeed what the audience's reaction really indicated, is of course a matter for debate. However, the idea that Bill and his products are universally loved by the masses may not be the case.
You may regard that as a benefit. From my perspsective, if somebody wants to use my code for their project, they should have to open their project's code too. That's the reason why the project I work on uses the GPL.
Others might be happy for their code to be absorbed into closed source projects. Sometimes there are practical reasons for allowing this, sometimes it's just personal preference. Good for them - they can use the BSD license or put their code in the public domain. Just don't expect me to.
In any case, I wouldn't have liked to have been one of the men who refused to take the test. Small towns can get rather nasty in these kinds of situations.
Yeah, probably 90% of the games released in that era were crap too, but the best of them are still playable and enjoyable today.
IANAL, but, if I recall correctly, patents protect ideas against anyone else using them without a license, even if the non-patent holder came up with the idea independently. Copyright is a whole different kettle of fish (for computers, you have to actually copy code to infringe copyright), as are trade secrets (if somebody else figures out a trade secret, it's tough cookies).
In essence, if you want a Unix-style desktop environment, why wouldn't you stick with Linux or xBSD, rather than trying to graft one on top of an environment that's obviously been built to have the Mac front end on it?
so could somebody provide a rough (even just a partial) translation or the article? I don't think Altavista knows Norwegian.
However, I take issue with a few of your statements:
*Australian* corporations suck at R&D, mainly because they spend stuff-all on it (the exceptions being foriegn-owned multinationals, a few tech firms, and a very few enlightened other dcompanies). Australian companies aren't even capable of exploiting the technologies invented by Australian scientists in universities and the CSIRO, half the time. This is partly an issue of lack of government incentive and guidance for corporations, and partly a massive lack of management talent at the heads of many major Australian corporations.
Due to the lack of funding for universities, and the shortsightedness of the Australian corporate sector, valuable people are offered a fraction of the opportunities both financially and professionally than they can get overseas.While you are quite correct in that there is some element of self-servedness in Microsoft's report, they've made some good points.
I should have made it clear. I don't *really* think the government has set out to screw the local IT sector. It's just that its policies in the area have been one disaster after another, with virtually *no* good ones in between.
Cool. I'll match that offer - I'll donate an unlimited license for Debian for all Victorian public schools ;-)
Some cynics in the local IT press have even gone so far as to suggest that there must be votes in pissing off the local IT and, more broadly, the "knowledge" sector, they do it so effectively.
To list just some examples of screwed up policy in the area:
Take it from me, I could go on for a *lot* longer.
There are several things that could be done to prevent cheaters prospering, such as human "umpires", reputation measures, statistical analysis, and the like.
Dr. Strangelove is probably the most famous example of this plot device, and almost certainly the best. While not a direct satirisation of the Cuban missile crisis, it was almost certainly inspired by it, and remains one of the most biting comments on the craziness of mutually assured destruction. If you haven't seen it, get it out on video *right now*.
I dunno what the situation is in the states, but in Australia (where HDTV broadcasts have just begun) the general conclusion amongst retailers is that HDTV's are going to struggle anyway. Why? Because people are happy with their existing TV's, and aren't going to pay ~8000 AUD for extra quality that they don't really notice anyway. For fsck's sake, most people are happy with AM radio, MP3 and VHS video!
As for software verifiability, plenty of people *have* done research into it. Aside from many problems in the field turning out to be NP-hard or worse (yes, there are such problems), stating exactly the properties you wish to verify is in itself a large intellectual effort.
Notwithstanding all of this, there have been some interesting projects done, some of which have made it to some areas of industry. One simple-to-grasp example of a useful project was an automated termination analyser for the Mercury programming language. While it obviously can't be 100% accurate, it could prove that about 80-90% of the Mercury language's standard library would terminate in finite time for all inputs - and, usefully, it turned out that code for which termination couldn't be proven often contained subtle bugs.
Mercury, however, has features that make this kind of thing much, much easier than conventional programming languages (but make programming in it somewhat of a challenge to learn initially). Trying to do this on pointer-ridden C is probably too difficult and too inaccurate to be useful.
While this is fascinating stuff, it'd be even cooler (if you'll excuse the pun)if we could make variant DNA that superconducts at higher temperatures :-)
Anyway, one slightly offtopic question about superconductivity and the high-temperature superconductors that caused all the fuss back in the 1980's: what happened? Did we reach another temperature plateau? Was it still at liquid-nitrogen-required temperatures?
As for suitcase nuclear weapons being "low-yield", Hiroshima-style fission weapons were pretty low-yield, but they managed to kill about 100,000 people each, and detection is a joke. The US spends billions on interdicting drug smuggling, and misses approximately 90% of it. Puh-leeze!
Look, the Chinese leadership may be made up of power-hungry barbarians, but they aren't stupid.
Or are you seriously claiming that elderly people and minorities are not really entitled to vote, because they base their votes on different criteria to your own?