And as an AFOL, I can verify that the design quality and playability of their recent products have improved substantially.
That's because of the reduction in one-off pieces as described by the article. I've noticed it independently myself, that there are a lot fewer specialized pieces in the products. There are still a few piece I'd like to see go the way of the dodo, but its' much better, all in all. And piece quality has gone up since '04 as well, closer to where they used to be.
The thing that killed Lego in the early '00 was the lack of creativity. The themes were stale and the individual sets bland. The large amount of special pieces is strongly correlated with the decline in creativity. But after some major changes, including the redesign of new themes and re-release of classic themes, its popularity has shot back up again.
BTW, Lego Star Wars has been around since '99. And back in the early '00, there were more licensed sets, inclusing Spiderman and Harry Potter. TLG was doing crappily despite having these lines. So I'd have to disagree with you and TFA that the licensed themes turned the tide. More than likely, they're what's keeping TLG in the black and making up the bulk of the sales. But the turn-around was due to more general product improvements across all of the lines.
Which is why it's a good idea to use separate identities everywhere and keep them separate and distinct.
It's rather difficult and annoying as hell, but that's if you want to be safe. The paranoid will go as far as to access these separate identities from entirely separate systems. Certainly, their access patterns may be similar or the same, but that's only if they can make that connection.
The other thing to do is to change your speech patterns for each identity. The idea is to try to mimic the general speech pattern of the site, and try to insert as little of your own "raw" thoughts as possible. If you do an analysis of people's speech habits, it's only a matter of finding and using outliers to detect possible matches between users of different sites.
If you're only partially paranoid, the easiest way is to use TOR for speech and activities that might appear disruptive (politically charged, lawsuit bait, etc.) and use your normal connection to surf normally. Or go to sites that don't keep logs of IP addresses.
But like anything that falls under information security, it only takes one mistake, one hole, to compromise a locked-down system.
It's all about need to know. If you knowing why is necessary to draw a conclusion, you'll eventually be granted this access.
Under the old system, you outright wouldn't even know that a connection exists, nevermind whether you need to know whether that connection is important or not.
I don't listen to music or watch movies put out by Sony (if I have to see it, there's always the internet). I don't have a PS3 or a Blu-ray player. I don't care for anything more than DVD quality anyway.
In fact, I boycott all music companies. This is made easier by me not liking what they put out anyway. I go to concerts for my music fix. And when I'm commuting, I play my CD's that I had bought years before the RIAA lawsuits began, listen to NPR or live concert broadcasts on the radio, and that's about it.
But my TVs are from Panasonic and Sharp, cameras from Panasonic (Pany sensor and lens) and Fuji. My phone is a Nokia. My computers and components are Dell, HP, cheapo Taiwanese or Chinese brands, etc.
Nowadays, I burn to DVD's mostly. I have a lot of TY CD-R's from way back that I'd use if I wanted to move small amounts of read-only data. Otherwise, I use the 4GB USB key I carry around with me, or the 2GB microSD card in my phone.
Yes, you can't avoid Sony completely. A boycott of Sony can't and won't be complete in this day and age. I can't be sure my transistors, or the chips in my computer, or anything like that aren't from some division or subsidiary of Sony. But instead of throwing up my arms into the air and saying, "Fuck it," I still do what I can, where I can, and where it makes sense.
Start with avoiding the products under the Sony brand. And when you find some component that's made by Sony, then figure out if there's a way around buying whatever device is using that part. Canon and Nikon's CCD's are made by Sony. So buy their CMOS cameras. Or by a Fuji or Panasonic, who makes their own sensors. The Fuji sensor is actually really sweet, if you don't mind the rest of the package. There are plenty of Japanese brands that rival Sony (Sharp, Panasonic, Toshiba), and there are a number of Korean brands that are just as good or up and coming (Samsung, LG). And there's always American and European.
I'm certain that even in the long run, what I do won't hurt Sony or any other company I'm boycotting at all. But I do it on principle alone.
I'd love to see the economics research behind that number. Must have been a lot of work determining the optimal patent term. I suspect it'll be no trouble getting published. Or, as is more likely, was that arbitrary number pulled out of the air?
There's as much research into the "7" figure as there is into the "20" figure, i.e. there isn't any.
The "20" figure was derived arbitrarily, based on a broad knowledge of communications and transportation of the day. That is, when the "20" year figure was pulled out of thin air, the estimate was that it takes a little less than 20 years from concept to production to sale nation-wide. Then for the remaining years, the inventor would have monopoly rights to reap the benefits of inventing.
Today, it takes a year or two, if not months, to go from idea to production. Some industries take longer than that (aerospace), some shorter (software). Which is why some people have advocated to have a different patent term for different industries. 7 years is a middle-of-the-road number, given current rates of progress in various major industries.
Actually, since China's so lax on enforcing IP, we'll get to see real soon whether long copyright and patent terms protect innovation, or stifle it.
As for 'no extensions. no exceptions,' what about delays brought about by the patent office? Surely you wouldn't penalize the inventor for bureaucratic incompetence?
What about X-years from grant date?
I can think about PageRank all day long and accomplish nothing. But if I apply PageRank to pages on the internet and use it to optimize searches, then it becomes a patentable invention.
What the USPTO really needs to redefine how to determine "obviousness." But consider your example. What if I apply the pagerank to something else completely unintended by the patent? Then does the patent cover the other use, or not? And can I patent the second use?
Here's the thing: I agree that algorithms certainly are unpatentable. But I think pagerank is a bad patent as well. Patents apply to inventions. Patents shouldn't apply to discoveries. So if you invent something, that's great. But if you "discover" something, you're not inventing anything, you're just making aware knowledge. If you use your discovery in an invention, that can be patentable. But the piece of knowledge itself cannot be.
Mathematical algorithms, natural processes, these are bits of knowledge. So a drug company can patent say, how a drug is delivered, or the combination of "stuff" in a pill. But they can't patent an enzyme or the molecular structure of an enzyme, because those enzymes are discoveries, not inventions.
Going back to algorithms and pagerank, sorting data is a discovery, not an invention. If Google had created a machine to sort data faster using their pagerank algorithm, that's an invention. The complication comes when you're talking about virtual versus physical machines. I personally draw the line at physical machines. But it's certainly up for debate, whether a virtual machine is patentable or not, and what constitutes a virtual "machine" as opposed to a very big algorithm.
I suppose you meant that companies should be prevented from owning patents at all, but that would be pointless. Employees would simply be required to license the invention to the company exclusively. It would only add transaction costs.
Agreed. It's more overhead. This part of the system is OK as it is now.
Yeah, those damn universal turing machines and their damn limitations.
Re:ah yes, anti-perl tirades are refreshing
on
Coders At Work
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· Score: 3, Insightful
The thing is, from an application standpoint, I wouldn't consider perl a programming language. To me, it's an advanced scripting langauge. And it does that really, really well. But as a programming language, it isn't exactly the best.
They probably weren't going to renew those deals anyway.
Marvel has been successful at making its own films, i.e. Iron Man and The Incredible Hulk. In fact, they plan on doing a full Avengers movie, with the major characters having their own individual movies along the way to cumulate in a movie containing all of the characters. See this. Note that the second X-Men Origins movie is going to be produced by Marvel, while the first was produced by Sony.
I think that's really what Disney is after. Marvel has a huge line up of characters from which to create unending movie after movie. A a media company, they had the potential to become as big as Disney, but for the teenage/young adult market. But it seems that's been nipped in the bud. Unfortunate.
And Mozart lived before all copyright laws so he often found that after one of his new pieces was played in concert, the town down the road was performing his music the next week and he didn't see a cent.
It's funny, because Mozart was the first musician to live the "rockstar" lifetstyle, and died poor because of it. It didn't really matter though; Mozart was paid to compose, and to perform (to conduct, I believe). Mozart, IIRC, lived off commissions. I believe back then, it was customary to have a patron that acted as part employer, part agent, commissioning works occasionally and generally taking care of his daily needs otherwise.
It's like working under contract. If today's copyright laws were present back then, Mozart still wouldn't have been paid for his works. His patron or whomever commissioned him would be the owner, because he'd be composing under contract. And nobody'd ever know Mozart's genius, because those works would be under perpetual copyright, never again to be played after Mozart's death.
Just within our galaxy alone there's probably some planet within a thousand years of being ripped to shreds somewhere out there at any give time.
The question is, are we capable of seeing this phenomenon, and if we are, did we manage to catch it as it's happening. It's like watching a row of ants and knowing one of them is going to get jumped by a spider, but not knowing where the spider is or which one is going to get jumped. In this case, we got lucky and caught it in or just before the act.
Wasn't there a model that said gas giants that formed in the far reaches of a star system would slowly migrate inwards, wiping out all of the rocky planets in closer orbits as it passes by? We may very well be seeing the last of the gas giants (think our Neptune) knocking at death's door.
I think what GP is saying is that it doesn't matter whether a person is of Romani descent, only that the person begs and steals.
And the beggars and pickpockets in Europe have a tendency to be Romani.
I think it's a hatred towards a behavior, not towards a particular ethnic group or culture. The problem is when a particular culture extolls the virtues of the particular behavior in question. Then, it's easy to equate the culture with the behavior. But GP seems to be trying to avoid that particular trap. So I think it's not a case of racism at all.
Everybody has everything to lose without anonymity. The rich however, tend to be more noticeable before and after. The poor, well, who cares about what happens to random Joe Sixpack anyway?
Everybody had dirty laundry. Nobody's so clean that they haven't even jaywalked. And there's plenty of "laws" that people break every day without even knowing there's even such a law. These are the ones that are leftovers from a different era, or were created just to keep lawmakers and law enforcement employed.
Have you even looked at female athletes, especially swimmers and weight-lifters? They have no breasts. They lack body fat, and hence lack breasts. On top of that, they actually work out so much their hormones are out of whack. If they stop working out, things go back to normal, but while they're training, they're physically a lot like men, with the exception of the genitals.
If her body is producing an abnormal amount of testosterone, that's perfectly fine. It's not artificial. It's not unnatural. It's genetically superior. Which is, in a way, what competitions are about. It's seven parts training, and three parts genetic. If you weren't born a runner, you're not going to even come close to Usain Bolt. If you're not born a swimmer, you won't come close to Michael Phelps. That's just how it is. Things are no different just because their sex doesn't give them a head start.
Don't ever mistake that just because somebody is born genetically superior, that they'll automatically win. Nobody can sit on their ass 364 days a year and still be superior enough to be a world-class athlete. Genetic superiority just means that given the same amount of training, the person with better genes will more likely win. But that means both competitors have to train equally as hard. And believe you me, if you knew your genetics weren't ideal for what you're competing in, you'll train extra hard to make up for the difference. And in order for your genetically superior opponent to beat you, that person would have to train just as hard as you.
They should stick a wi-fi chip in it and have the screen stream the ad in realtime. CBS broadcasts in digital TV. They can piggy-back off of that signal.
Obama's presidency really is ahead of his time. If he became president in 10 years, all of those critics would be gone.
If he fights tooth and nail for these reforms now and manages to succeed, it'll just end up benefitting the same uneducated people that're fighting against this.
You bring up another very real problem with "cloud" computing. Somebody is going to have to pay for all that data to be shuffled between your terminal and the app server.
Slashdot Mirror
And as an AFOL, I can verify that the design quality and playability of their recent products have improved substantially.
That's because of the reduction in one-off pieces as described by the article. I've noticed it independently myself, that there are a lot fewer specialized pieces in the products. There are still a few piece I'd like to see go the way of the dodo, but its' much better, all in all. And piece quality has gone up since '04 as well, closer to where they used to be.
The thing that killed Lego in the early '00 was the lack of creativity. The themes were stale and the individual sets bland. The large amount of special pieces is strongly correlated with the decline in creativity. But after some major changes, including the redesign of new themes and re-release of classic themes, its popularity has shot back up again.
BTW, Lego Star Wars has been around since '99. And back in the early '00, there were more licensed sets, inclusing Spiderman and Harry Potter. TLG was doing crappily despite having these lines. So I'd have to disagree with you and TFA that the licensed themes turned the tide. More than likely, they're what's keeping TLG in the black and making up the bulk of the sales. But the turn-around was due to more general product improvements across all of the lines.
Which is why it's a good idea to use separate identities everywhere and keep them separate and distinct.
It's rather difficult and annoying as hell, but that's if you want to be safe. The paranoid will go as far as to access these separate identities from entirely separate systems. Certainly, their access patterns may be similar or the same, but that's only if they can make that connection.
The other thing to do is to change your speech patterns for each identity. The idea is to try to mimic the general speech pattern of the site, and try to insert as little of your own "raw" thoughts as possible. If you do an analysis of people's speech habits, it's only a matter of finding and using outliers to detect possible matches between users of different sites.
If you're only partially paranoid, the easiest way is to use TOR for speech and activities that might appear disruptive (politically charged, lawsuit bait, etc.) and use your normal connection to surf normally. Or go to sites that don't keep logs of IP addresses.
But like anything that falls under information security, it only takes one mistake, one hole, to compromise a locked-down system.
It's all about need to know. If you knowing why is necessary to draw a conclusion, you'll eventually be granted this access.
Under the old system, you outright wouldn't even know that a connection exists, nevermind whether you need to know whether that connection is important or not.
If you have too much porn on your comp, just put all the old stuff onto a truecrypt drive and upload the container...
I boycott Sony by not purchasing their products.
I don't listen to music or watch movies put out by Sony (if I have to see it, there's always the internet). I don't have a PS3 or a Blu-ray player. I don't care for anything more than DVD quality anyway.
In fact, I boycott all music companies. This is made easier by me not liking what they put out anyway. I go to concerts for my music fix. And when I'm commuting, I play my CD's that I had bought years before the RIAA lawsuits began, listen to NPR or live concert broadcasts on the radio, and that's about it.
But my TVs are from Panasonic and Sharp, cameras from Panasonic (Pany sensor and lens) and Fuji. My phone is a Nokia. My computers and components are Dell, HP, cheapo Taiwanese or Chinese brands, etc.
Nowadays, I burn to DVD's mostly. I have a lot of TY CD-R's from way back that I'd use if I wanted to move small amounts of read-only data. Otherwise, I use the 4GB USB key I carry around with me, or the 2GB microSD card in my phone.
Yes, you can't avoid Sony completely. A boycott of Sony can't and won't be complete in this day and age. I can't be sure my transistors, or the chips in my computer, or anything like that aren't from some division or subsidiary of Sony. But instead of throwing up my arms into the air and saying, "Fuck it," I still do what I can, where I can, and where it makes sense.
Start with avoiding the products under the Sony brand. And when you find some component that's made by Sony, then figure out if there's a way around buying whatever device is using that part. Canon and Nikon's CCD's are made by Sony. So buy their CMOS cameras. Or by a Fuji or Panasonic, who makes their own sensors. The Fuji sensor is actually really sweet, if you don't mind the rest of the package. There are plenty of Japanese brands that rival Sony (Sharp, Panasonic, Toshiba), and there are a number of Korean brands that are just as good or up and coming (Samsung, LG). And there's always American and European.
I'm certain that even in the long run, what I do won't hurt Sony or any other company I'm boycotting at all. But I do it on principle alone.
they're generally softer
But their output ranges from loud to abrasive.
I'd love to see the economics research behind that number. Must have been a lot of work determining the optimal patent term. I suspect it'll be no trouble getting published. Or, as is more likely, was that arbitrary number pulled out of the air?
There's as much research into the "7" figure as there is into the "20" figure, i.e. there isn't any.
The "20" figure was derived arbitrarily, based on a broad knowledge of communications and transportation of the day. That is, when the "20" year figure was pulled out of thin air, the estimate was that it takes a little less than 20 years from concept to production to sale nation-wide. Then for the remaining years, the inventor would have monopoly rights to reap the benefits of inventing.
Today, it takes a year or two, if not months, to go from idea to production. Some industries take longer than that (aerospace), some shorter (software). Which is why some people have advocated to have a different patent term for different industries. 7 years is a middle-of-the-road number, given current rates of progress in various major industries.
Actually, since China's so lax on enforcing IP, we'll get to see real soon whether long copyright and patent terms protect innovation, or stifle it.
As for 'no extensions. no exceptions,' what about delays brought about by the patent office? Surely you wouldn't penalize the inventor for bureaucratic incompetence?
What about X-years from grant date?
I can think about PageRank all day long and accomplish nothing. But if I apply PageRank to pages on the internet and use it to optimize searches, then it becomes a patentable invention.
What the USPTO really needs to redefine how to determine "obviousness." But consider your example. What if I apply the pagerank to something else completely unintended by the patent? Then does the patent cover the other use, or not? And can I patent the second use?
Here's the thing: I agree that algorithms certainly are unpatentable. But I think pagerank is a bad patent as well. Patents apply to inventions. Patents shouldn't apply to discoveries. So if you invent something, that's great. But if you "discover" something, you're not inventing anything, you're just making aware knowledge. If you use your discovery in an invention, that can be patentable. But the piece of knowledge itself cannot be.
Mathematical algorithms, natural processes, these are bits of knowledge. So a drug company can patent say, how a drug is delivered, or the combination of "stuff" in a pill. But they can't patent an enzyme or the molecular structure of an enzyme, because those enzymes are discoveries, not inventions.
Going back to algorithms and pagerank, sorting data is a discovery, not an invention. If Google had created a machine to sort data faster using their pagerank algorithm, that's an invention. The complication comes when you're talking about virtual versus physical machines. I personally draw the line at physical machines. But it's certainly up for debate, whether a virtual machine is patentable or not, and what constitutes a virtual "machine" as opposed to a very big algorithm.
I suppose you meant that companies should be prevented from owning patents at all, but that would be pointless. Employees would simply be required to license the invention to the company exclusively. It would only add transaction costs.
Agreed. It's more overhead. This part of the system is OK as it is now.
what if some malevolent entity decided to patent this before Google did?
Prior art.
Yeah, those damn universal turing machines and their damn limitations.
The thing is, from an application standpoint, I wouldn't consider perl a programming language. To me, it's an advanced scripting langauge. And it does that really, really well. But as a programming language, it isn't exactly the best.
They probably weren't going to renew those deals anyway.
Marvel has been successful at making its own films, i.e. Iron Man and The Incredible Hulk. In fact, they plan on doing a full Avengers movie, with the major characters having their own individual movies along the way to cumulate in a movie containing all of the characters. See this. Note that the second X-Men Origins movie is going to be produced by Marvel, while the first was produced by Sony.
I think that's really what Disney is after. Marvel has a huge line up of characters from which to create unending movie after movie. A a media company, they had the potential to become as big as Disney, but for the teenage/young adult market. But it seems that's been nipped in the bud. Unfortunate.
And Mozart lived before all copyright laws so he often found that after one of his new pieces was played in concert, the town down the road was performing his music the next week and he didn't see a cent.
It's funny, because Mozart was the first musician to live the "rockstar" lifetstyle, and died poor because of it. It didn't really matter though; Mozart was paid to compose, and to perform (to conduct, I believe). Mozart, IIRC, lived off commissions. I believe back then, it was customary to have a patron that acted as part employer, part agent, commissioning works occasionally and generally taking care of his daily needs otherwise.
It's like working under contract. If today's copyright laws were present back then, Mozart still wouldn't have been paid for his works. His patron or whomever commissioned him would be the owner, because he'd be composing under contract. And nobody'd ever know Mozart's genius, because those works would be under perpetual copyright, never again to be played after Mozart's death.
Except users are generally idiots, even the ones who are brilliant.
Also, there was mention about a removable battery.
Just within our galaxy alone there's probably some planet within a thousand years of being ripped to shreds somewhere out there at any give time.
The question is, are we capable of seeing this phenomenon, and if we are, did we manage to catch it as it's happening. It's like watching a row of ants and knowing one of them is going to get jumped by a spider, but not knowing where the spider is or which one is going to get jumped. In this case, we got lucky and caught it in or just before the act.
Wasn't there a model that said gas giants that formed in the far reaches of a star system would slowly migrate inwards, wiping out all of the rocky planets in closer orbits as it passes by? We may very well be seeing the last of the gas giants (think our Neptune) knocking at death's door.
Actually, the Post is left-leaning, but the NYT is actually moderate, with the ever-so-slight right leanings.
But hey, if reality has a liberal bias, then I guess the two big papers in the country must be "extremely" left.
I think what GP is saying is that it doesn't matter whether a person is of Romani descent, only that the person begs and steals.
And the beggars and pickpockets in Europe have a tendency to be Romani.
I think it's a hatred towards a behavior, not towards a particular ethnic group or culture. The problem is when a particular culture extolls the virtues of the particular behavior in question. Then, it's easy to equate the culture with the behavior. But GP seems to be trying to avoid that particular trap. So I think it's not a case of racism at all.
Oh noes! Dogs and cats living together! It's the end of the world!
Everybody has everything to lose without anonymity. The rich however, tend to be more noticeable before and after. The poor, well, who cares about what happens to random Joe Sixpack anyway?
Everybody had dirty laundry. Nobody's so clean that they haven't even jaywalked. And there's plenty of "laws" that people break every day without even knowing there's even such a law. These are the ones that are leftovers from a different era, or were created just to keep lawmakers and law enforcement employed.
That woman is the manliest looking 15 year old female on god's good earth.
I'll bet you'd still do her if she offered.
Have you even looked at female athletes, especially swimmers and weight-lifters? They have no breasts. They lack body fat, and hence lack breasts. On top of that, they actually work out so much their hormones are out of whack. If they stop working out, things go back to normal, but while they're training, they're physically a lot like men, with the exception of the genitals.
If her body is producing an abnormal amount of testosterone, that's perfectly fine. It's not artificial. It's not unnatural. It's genetically superior. Which is, in a way, what competitions are about. It's seven parts training, and three parts genetic. If you weren't born a runner, you're not going to even come close to Usain Bolt. If you're not born a swimmer, you won't come close to Michael Phelps. That's just how it is. Things are no different just because their sex doesn't give them a head start.
Don't ever mistake that just because somebody is born genetically superior, that they'll automatically win. Nobody can sit on their ass 364 days a year and still be superior enough to be a world-class athlete. Genetic superiority just means that given the same amount of training, the person with better genes will more likely win. But that means both competitors have to train equally as hard. And believe you me, if you knew your genetics weren't ideal for what you're competing in, you'll train extra hard to make up for the difference. And in order for your genetically superior opponent to beat you, that person would have to train just as hard as you.
They should stick a wi-fi chip in it and have the screen stream the ad in realtime. CBS broadcasts in digital TV. They can piggy-back off of that signal.
Obama's presidency really is ahead of his time. If he became president in 10 years, all of those critics would be gone.
If he fights tooth and nail for these reforms now and manages to succeed, it'll just end up benefitting the same uneducated people that're fighting against this.
You bring up another very real problem with "cloud" computing. Somebody is going to have to pay for all that data to be shuffled between your terminal and the app server.