Really? Interesting, because I had the exact opposite experience on pretty much all points.
Cata, the risk/reward is far worse. Most pickup groups will leave you with a 200 gold repair bill. Even if you actually get the dungeon finished, you likely won't get anything useful, and the points earned are not really that much.
Unless you are 100% with 359 level gear or higher, a single repair bill will run you 20-50 gold. I'm geared for heroics and basic raiding, and that's what a semi-clean run costs me. Tanking kinda sucks, because even if you do everything right, you're still hit with a fairly significant repair build. But the only way to get to a 200 gold repair bill is to wipe so often that you have to repair multiple times. Which brings me to the next point....
Cata was supposed to make WoW "challenging again".
It did. It's possible you ran with a high-level guild that downed Illidan and the Lich King, and are used to the type of fights in end-level raids. At that point, I can see that there isn't much transition to Cata in terms of difficulty. But for semi-casuals like me who managed to gear up through lazy questing and BGs, WotLK heroics were an absolute joke. The only problem was keeping the DPS from going ape-shit right from the start of every fight. But the fight mechanics were trivialized by even mid-level purples. Cata, on the other hand, requires you to know the fight. You have to pay attention, know who is in charge of what and when, and DPS has to watch its aggro. Running heroics was actually fun, as long as the group paid attention. They didn't even have to be good - just be able to follow instructions and know their character. Once you got the gear to run heroics, the only thing that mattered was team work and communication.
Also, replay value in Cata sucks. The path is so linear, and you have to get all the xp zones unlocked. At least in WotLK, you unlocked the Sons of Hodir, then unlocked the flight paths around Icecrown, and was done. With Cata, you have to grind the same old boring quest arc so you have flight paths, the ability to swim without drowning, and towns to visit.
Complete nonsense. You can get to heroic dungeons by doing only 3 out of the 5 new zones. And the quest lines are actually fun! Yes, Sons of Hodir was a pretty nifty zone. As was the Argent Tournament. But WotLK was a much, much bigger grind than Cata, and the fun quests were few and far in between.
If you have trouble getting a raid slot because of gear, you have no clue what you're doing, or are used to outgearing dungeons. Raid level gear is attainable after a few heroics, some craftables, and the weapon from Tol Barad.
All in all, Cata is the single best expansion for the casual gamer. By a mile. I actually had fun getting to heroic level gear. I couldn't say the same about WotLK.
Always wins? Wow, you seriously need to adjust your tinfoil hat. It's cutting off the blood supply to your brain. The mere fact that something happened sometimes does not mean it happens everytime.
Dude, if you want to comment on French politics, fine, but at least inform yourself.
DSK has a long history as a womanizer, and he finally made the mistake of assaulting someone who didn't care about who he was in a country where these things are taken seriously. This was a long time in the making, and the only thing that requires tinfoil hats is the initial reaction of French politicians who were aghast that he was being charged with attempted rape, and not let off with a private warning.
The president hand-picks his entire cabinet. Not sure what you're trying to imply by saying "hand-picked finance minister". That's how ministers are picked. Lagarde is the American favorite, because the alternatives were pretty unpleasant - specifically, a lot of developing countries were clamoring for the job. At that point, they were happy with going with tradition - which is someone from the French financial field.
And lastly, Sarkozy is pro-US only in the context of the American bashing that is popular in French politics.
I just hope no one takes your post seriously.
Re:Always show your work
on
Happy Tau Day
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· Score: 2
Showing your work to me was never a benefit for me. Grading homework, I actually much preferred the people who just put down the answer. Is it right? Full points. Is it wrong? Zero points. I could whip through a 20 part homework in about 30 seconds flat. When they showed their work, I actually had to follow through and check for mistakes. It was 100% upside for the students: if they made a boneheaded mistake (64 bitshifted twice to the right = 256), they got nearly full points. Showing your work meant that you got at least 50% of the points, unless you totally, completely screwed up basic principles.
Not to mention it's a valuable skill later in life: very few people just take you at your word, and you shouldn't take anyone at their word as well. Make them show you their work. Proper presentation of reasoning is at least as valuable in convincing people as the position itself.
Well, sort of. Calling yourself a history geek because you've memorized every known participant in the battle of Hastings, or can trace the lineage of the entire set of european royal families back to Charlemagne, yeah, that's valid. Calling yourself a huge history geek because you like the big book of "Illustrated History of the USA"... not so much.
I think that's what the author is complaining about: everyone with any interest in foo calls themselves a foo geek. Too many people call themselves food geeks, when all they do is watch Hell's Kitchen regularly. They can't tell a paring knife from a filet knife, but they don't care about that distinction. I don't know Miss USA, but judging from past contestants, it's quite possible that she's overselling her geek credentials. Is it guaranteed? No - brains and beauty are not mutually exclusive, more like orthogonal to each other. But I think it's fair to say that judging from past contestants, her claim of being a huge history geek should at least be tested. I'd be thrilled if she is, but I'm not holding my breath.
Thank you for clarifying that. Because here's why Asa is creating a situation where Firefox can become irrelevant: corporations have huge amounts of users. It is often where people first cut their teeth in developing web apps (hey Joe, think you can whip up a web front end to our time sheet db?) and where they get used to developing for the idiosynchracies of the approved browser. Through sheer inertia, the browser that gets used at work also often gets used at home.
And that's one reason why IE 6 hung around for so long, even though it is by far the most craptastic of all the currently available browsers. Dumping the corporate market means guaranteeing yourself niche status.
Now, I love the fact that Firefox will be the browser for the people, by the people. But no matter how awesome its extensions are and its functionality is, I will switch over if I find that more and more sites simply don't care for Firefox's peculiarities in rendering sites (and yes, there always will be some differences in how the standards will be implemented, and there always will be people using some browser weirdness to achieve a specific effect. It sucks, but it is how it is).
- Because something isn't 100% original doesn't mean it isn't an original creative work. Duplication != Recreation.
You're correct. However, the law doesn't distinguish between duplication and recreation. Intellectual property means that you cannot use whatever is covered by copyright. If a one-click purchase or upgrade button is patented, you can't use it without paying the owner of the patent. If someone owns the copyright on a work, you cannot use it without their permission - even if that work is a silence of time N.
Advocating protection of specific categories of work for a limited period doesn't mean it has to be applied to "All instances" for "all time". The OP was arguing for the abolishment of all intellectual property.
Great. Now we're getting into the details of copyright law. Define limited. Is life of the author + 120 years limited? Is 10000 years limited? Is 30 minutes limited? Why? Why not? Note the Supreme Court decision that holds current copyright duration is "limited". Is that fair? Why/Why not? Be detailed.
Intellectual protection of people's creativity doesn't preclude people from collaborating on public works e.g. C++, HTML, OpenGL etc... as proven by the fact that with IP law we've managed to create all these things just fine thank you very much.
Copyright is a construct of law. Putting an intellectual work into the public work is only possible because the current law allows for it. Why should it? After all, people who put their sweat and blood into creating something abstract should be rewarded. Right? Alternatively, if they can put their work into the public domain for the greater good, why don't you? You wouldn't want to be caught mooching off of the hard work of others?
Obviously IP law doesn't cause an apocalypse of creativity considering the fact that it seems to be carrying on just fine. I'm not hearing a lot of complaining from artists that they can't work anymore.
Then you aren't paying attention. Do you know what the advice is that is given to first-year art students? Create a movie in a white room with one chair and 2 of your closest friends. With no music. Otherwise, you open yourself up to litigation. Have you seen the hullaballoo around the upgrade button? The current system only barely works because it is enforced only when people feel like enforcing it. It'd come crashing down like a house cards if people would go after every copyright infringement.
I want to make a living off of my creativity and intellect. I work long, often 14+ hour days to create what you want to have.
Fair enough. Let's make one assumption clear though: you think you create something from nothing. Not true. You create something by taking what you have learned so far, and apply it to a problem and (hopefully) generate something new. Let's take software, for example. A very, very large number of technologies that go into creating software are available for free. HTML is just one example. C/C++ is another. Furthermore, every single piece of software out there builds on the software that came before it.
This line of thinking works for every type of intellectual work. From books to movies, everything has been done before. You're just adding a small twist to it. Disney is the single biggest example of it: nearly their entire catalog of classics is a near-exact rip-off of existing stories. If you think you're creating something from scratch, you're deluding yourself. You're taking advantage of a whole set of knowledge that you are free to use as you wish. If you couldn't, your creative endeavors would amount to nothing, as you'd have to pay so much to other creators that there wouldn't be anything left for you.
I work in the software industry. I know exactly how much I profit from the fact that I can leverage what I know without having to pay everyone every time I use that knowledge that they gave me.As a matter of fact, I know that I basically would not be able to make a living if I would have to pay everyone.
That is the problem with the concept of intellectual property: if applied consequently in all instances, innovation would basically stop.
> I suppose the fishing and tourism industry have largely similar interest as the > "environmentalists" as far as the water levels.
Somebody didn't read the article before opening their hole. The shipping industry hates the green river management because it makes the river unsafe for navigation for large parts of the year.
Somebody didn't read the post they quoted.
The original design called for enough flow to allow shipping year around.
Wrong. The original MWCM was designed solely around flood protection and prevention. Then it had a massive overhaul to include several competing targets, one of which was environmental protection.
The greens want the river to flood in the spring (just not enough to bust levees, that was a mistake caused by their policy not the policy itself... at least as stated) and run low later in the year to follow natural patterns closer. To ensure a spring flood they held back too much water during the winter and when the spring rains and snow melt came stronger than expected they lacked the capacity to hold all of the water, forcing them to release at rates the levees could not hold back from the towns downstream. That is the charge against the Corps in a single sentence and it is pretty sound.
Correction: that is a charge the article makes with absolutely zero support. The article needs a "Citation Needed" correction in about 20 different places.
The mission of the system was changed in ways it was not designed for and no attempt was made to remake it to handle the new mission it was given.
Correct. Although I would like to see the system that can handle multiple requirements, some of which are mutually exclusive.
The problem is that the MWCM was rewritten from basic flood control to include several competing targets: flood control, tourism, shipping, fishing, and water quality and environmental protection. The end result is that the ACE is now permanently under fire for not satisfying someone's pet condition, and they can't possibly win.
The hard truth is that whatever is being built is being built to match certani scenarios, whether it is the 100 year flood, the 100 year earthquake, or something similar. It cannot possibly be built to account for the absolut worst case scenario that could happen. And when something in that range happens, then, well, we're fucked.
Unfortunately, in the US, it seems that no one is able to accept that, and instead concentrates on scoring points for their ideological team. This article and the reaction of various politicians is the perfect example of it. The ACE is doing a thankless job with little funding and having to hit mutually exclusive targets, and what do we get? Demonization of them and various political groups.
To the writer of the article and the politicians trying to exploit this for gain: fuck off.
When the alternative is a browser that is EOL'ed after 4 months on the market? You bet your shiny metal ass it does. Maybe Chrome becomes the official IT alternative to IE.... I don't know. But I can guarantee you that this epically moronic decision just handed IE and Chrome the corporate market.
If you're a monopoly, you can't leverage that monopoly to push your other products anti-competitively.
What does Google have a monopoly on? Ad space? Facebook, Microsoft and Apple all would like to disagree. Search engine? The cost to switch to a different search engine is exactly zero. Merely claiming that Google is a monopoly means absolutely nothing. You're going to have to demonstrate why Google is a monopoly first. No one has done that without resorting to brand-new definitions of the word monopoly and market.
One example would be Google's hard-coded results for specific search terms that place its services at the top of the page regardless of their actual popularity (e.g., Google Finance appearing over the more popular Yahoo Finance, complete with a unique visual presentation).
No, it isn't. Google specifically marks out the area above its search results as the sponsored area. There is absolutely no way to confuse the chart that appears as the result of a search for a stock ticker symbol as part of the general page. Not to mention that right underneath the Google Finance chart are links to other chart services. In the search results themselves, Yahoo Finance does come out on top. Are you going to complain as well that on the page where Google search results are displayed, there are links to log in to your Google account, access Google Docs and what not? You probably are. In which case, please explain why any other company is allowed to display links to its properties on a page it owns. Start with Microsoft and Apple.
I have to say, it's interesting how some people's attitudes change when the company involved isn't Microsoft.
No, it really isn't. Not unless you build a few strawmen.
Google is a gigantic advertising company that happens to hand out free services to get your personal data indexed for their network.
True.
They exploit the positive connotation of "open source" and other causes in order to appeal to a certain type of techie, but their motives are just as impure as Microsoft's (and their search engine is as closed source and proprietary as Windows).
No. They appeal to the techie crowd because their products are pretty friggin awesome.
I'm not really sure why they're afforded the benefit of the doubt by so many fans.
Because they have consistently met high expectations. Other companies have not.
For what it's worth, I'm pretty sure this "Google is an evil monopoly campaign" has been started by various companies who got bloodied by it. You're either shilling for them, or swallowed their crap hook, line and sinker.
This is one of the few times where I wish there was a bury option for stories, if not outright delete. The summary is the exact opposite of what is said in the story,is reported by everyone else, and even of what can be inferred through looking at Tesla's financials.
Maybe instead of filtering stories on editors, we need the ability to filter stories on submitters. I have yet to see a story by Attila Dimedici where the summary wasn't the exact opposite of what was actually going on.
Do you think creators will continue to create if they know their products will simply be stolen and "shared"?
Yes, they will. Just like they have for the last thousands of years. The only thing wrong with Randians is that their theories fail 100% when tested against reality.
I increase my knowledge by learning. I don't believe I have ever increased my knowledge by regurgitating what I already know.
Of course. You never learned anything from anybody. You just learned on your own. Everything you know was either paid for at a fair market price, or was discovered on your own. The only thing scary about Randians is how deluded they are about their own capabilities, and their control over their position in life.
I wouldn't be surprised to see some sort of tyins between content/service providers and carriers that allows you to get premium services w/o being charged for data and the company's splitting the revenue. In fact, I think that may be the end game some have in mind.
This. This is indeed the end-game, at least for the major carriers. They realize that they're sitting on what is basically an access monopoly, and are trying to figure out how to leverage it for rent-seeking. They realize no one cares about access itself, they care about what they can access. Hence all the major carriers buying out content providers: they get the content they don't have, and can now work on extracting maximum price for that content. The easiest way to do that is to make other content more expensive. And the easiest way to do that... is through bandwidth caps and special Facebook/Twitter/NBC/Hulu offers. End-users are forced into accepting the choices offered by their carrier, and content-providers are forced to pay the carriers extra to gain access to the carriers' users. It's a wonderful end-run around net-neutrality: it won't matter, because users themselves will make the choice not to go to Netflix, but to whatever Comcast decides to host for "free".
There will still be an Internet, but at least in the US, it will be expensive, and only hardcore geeks with money will be on it.
Absolutely. And the direct result of that type of regulation is that corporations will be less profitable. In the current political climate in the US, advocating for corporations to be less profitable is (almost) political suicide. Hence the toothless regulatory agencies whose goals and success metrics are easily coopted by the industry lobbyists.
Not sure if it's inevitable, but it's definitely a concern. It's especially a concern when at least one goal of the regulatory agency is to not inflict too much harm on the industry it is regulating. You know, kinda like in the US, where regulatory agencies are regularly pilloried for standing in the way of a business doing its business.
This is my biggest worry. I'm not at all sure how the problem can be fixed either.
Step 1: Make a decision on whether it is important for you to control the dumping of externalities onto the public, or whether you want corporate success. Step 2: Remove one of the conflicting goals from the agency's charter.
There, done. If you decide that controlling externalities is your main goal, you avoid regulatory capture because the agency is supposed to be antagonistic. If the agency and the industry get too chummy, fire the bureaucrats, get new ones, install antagonistic metrics of what successful regulation looks like, and go home. If you decide that corporate success is your main goal, defund the agency, and you won't have to worry about regulatory capture, because there won't be any regulation to capture.
Just in case you missed the obvious point, here is the short version: regulatory capture may be bad, but it has solutions. The solutions merely require having the stomach to live with the consequences. The real problem is that no one likes the consequences. Politicians don't like solution A, because it will make them look bad in front of the conservatives. They also don't like solution B, because voters ultimately don't like being told to go live in a toxic dump. So they waddle around in the middle, and we end up with agencies open to regulatory capture.
For copyright, it's a simple answer: anything that is copyrighted for longer than the author is alive, is, for the author at least, infinite in time.In other words, anything longer than 120 years (about the longest time anyone has ever lived), and that should break the definition of limited copyright. Granted, that's longer than what I consider useful, but it's at least a limit.
It is possible to extract useful meaning from semi-vague documents like the Constitution, if one is willing to see them as guides rather than as a literal words of God(s). Issues only come up if one tries to parse every word as having exactly one meaning. Not gonna happen.
If it's going to take another normal solar cycle to prove or disprove, how would anyone know whether cosmic rays actually DO seed clouds? As of right now, it's a bunch of statistics applied to a short window with zero predictive power. That's why people disregard the theory - it's the equivalent of finding correlation between the Dow Jones and the lottery numbers in NYC.
So you still haven't linked to any data. And FYI, NASA's satellite data not only shows that you are flat out wrong (as in, the sky is white wrong), but it has its own set of issues.
So let us know when you've stopped making shit up. We're all ears.
No kidding. I always thought that the actual money file was encrypted, and could have an arbitrary name. You know, like a truecrypt volume file. Then I find out it's by default a text file hanging out on your computer. Fine and dandy if you have 100% control over your computer at all times, but we all know that's never the case. And judging by the passwords people use, it will be easy to brute force most passwords.
Somehow, I think bitcoin is going to flame out in a rash of digital thievery when criminals realize that it is easier to steal someone's bitcoin file than it is to mine it or even look for credit card info.
And then, we'd be right back into the equivalent of a direct democracy, except it'd be one step removed from the actual voters.
Face it, Democracy is a messy business. It sucks, but all other forms of government are even worse. We're stuck with this until we actually get better people.
Slashdot Mirror
Really? Interesting, because I had the exact opposite experience on pretty much all points.
Cata, the risk/reward is far worse. Most pickup groups will leave you with a 200 gold repair bill. Even if you actually get the dungeon finished, you likely won't get anything useful, and the points earned are not really that much.
Unless you are 100% with 359 level gear or higher, a single repair bill will run you 20-50 gold. I'm geared for heroics and basic raiding, and that's what a semi-clean run costs me. Tanking kinda sucks, because even if you do everything right, you're still hit with a fairly significant repair build. But the only way to get to a 200 gold repair bill is to wipe so often that you have to repair multiple times. Which brings me to the next point....
Cata was supposed to make WoW "challenging again".
It did. It's possible you ran with a high-level guild that downed Illidan and the Lich King, and are used to the type of fights in end-level raids. At that point, I can see that there isn't much transition to Cata in terms of difficulty. But for semi-casuals like me who managed to gear up through lazy questing and BGs, WotLK heroics were an absolute joke. The only problem was keeping the DPS from going ape-shit right from the start of every fight. But the fight mechanics were trivialized by even mid-level purples. Cata, on the other hand, requires you to know the fight. You have to pay attention, know who is in charge of what and when, and DPS has to watch its aggro. Running heroics was actually fun, as long as the group paid attention. They didn't even have to be good - just be able to follow instructions and know their character. Once you got the gear to run heroics, the only thing that mattered was team work and communication.
Also, replay value in Cata sucks. The path is so linear, and you have to get all the xp zones unlocked. At least in WotLK, you unlocked the Sons of Hodir, then unlocked the flight paths around Icecrown, and was done. With Cata, you have to grind the same old boring quest arc so you have flight paths, the ability to swim without drowning, and towns to visit.
Complete nonsense. You can get to heroic dungeons by doing only 3 out of the 5 new zones. And the quest lines are actually fun! Yes, Sons of Hodir was a pretty nifty zone. As was the Argent Tournament. But WotLK was a much, much bigger grind than Cata, and the fun quests were few and far in between.
If you have trouble getting a raid slot because of gear, you have no clue what you're doing, or are used to outgearing dungeons. Raid level gear is attainable after a few heroics, some craftables, and the weapon from Tol Barad.
All in all, Cata is the single best expansion for the casual gamer. By a mile. I actually had fun getting to heroic level gear. I couldn't say the same about WotLK.
Always wins? Wow, you seriously need to adjust your tinfoil hat. It's cutting off the blood supply to your brain. The mere fact that something happened sometimes does not mean it happens everytime.
Dude, if you want to comment on French politics, fine, but at least inform yourself.
DSK has a long history as a womanizer, and he finally made the mistake of assaulting someone who didn't care about who he was in a country where these things are taken seriously. This was a long time in the making, and the only thing that requires tinfoil hats is the initial reaction of French politicians who were aghast that he was being charged with attempted rape, and not let off with a private warning.
The president hand-picks his entire cabinet. Not sure what you're trying to imply by saying "hand-picked finance minister". That's how ministers are picked. Lagarde is the American favorite, because the alternatives were pretty unpleasant - specifically, a lot of developing countries were clamoring for the job. At that point, they were happy with going with tradition - which is someone from the French financial field.
And lastly, Sarkozy is pro-US only in the context of the American bashing that is popular in French politics.
I just hope no one takes your post seriously.
Showing your work to me was never a benefit for me. Grading homework, I actually much preferred the people who just put down the answer. Is it right? Full points. Is it wrong? Zero points. I could whip through a 20 part homework in about 30 seconds flat. When they showed their work, I actually had to follow through and check for mistakes. It was 100% upside for the students: if they made a boneheaded mistake (64 bitshifted twice to the right = 256), they got nearly full points. Showing your work meant that you got at least 50% of the points, unless you totally, completely screwed up basic principles.
Not to mention it's a valuable skill later in life: very few people just take you at your word, and you shouldn't take anyone at their word as well. Make them show you their work. Proper presentation of reasoning is at least as valuable in convincing people as the position itself.
Well, sort of. Calling yourself a history geek because you've memorized every known participant in the battle of Hastings, or can trace the lineage of the entire set of european royal families back to Charlemagne, yeah, that's valid. Calling yourself a huge history geek because you like the big book of "Illustrated History of the USA"... not so much.
I think that's what the author is complaining about: everyone with any interest in foo calls themselves a foo geek. Too many people call themselves food geeks, when all they do is watch Hell's Kitchen regularly. They can't tell a paring knife from a filet knife, but they don't care about that distinction. I don't know Miss USA, but judging from past contestants, it's quite possible that she's overselling her geek credentials. Is it guaranteed? No - brains and beauty are not mutually exclusive, more like orthogonal to each other. But I think it's fair to say that judging from past contestants, her claim of being a huge history geek should at least be tested. I'd be thrilled if she is, but I'm not holding my breath.
Thank you for clarifying that. Because here's why Asa is creating a situation where Firefox can become irrelevant: corporations have huge amounts of users. It is often where people first cut their teeth in developing web apps (hey Joe, think you can whip up a web front end to our time sheet db?) and where they get used to developing for the idiosynchracies of the approved browser. Through sheer inertia, the browser that gets used at work also often gets used at home.
And that's one reason why IE 6 hung around for so long, even though it is by far the most craptastic of all the currently available browsers. Dumping the corporate market means guaranteeing yourself niche status.
Now, I love the fact that Firefox will be the browser for the people, by the people. But no matter how awesome its extensions are and its functionality is, I will switch over if I find that more and more sites simply don't care for Firefox's peculiarities in rendering sites (and yes, there always will be some differences in how the standards will be implemented, and there always will be people using some browser weirdness to achieve a specific effect. It sucks, but it is how it is).
- Because something isn't 100% original doesn't mean it isn't an original creative work. Duplication != Recreation.
You're correct. However, the law doesn't distinguish between duplication and recreation. Intellectual property means that you cannot use whatever is covered by copyright. If a one-click purchase or upgrade button is patented, you can't use it without paying the owner of the patent. If someone owns the copyright on a work, you cannot use it without their permission - even if that work is a silence of time N.
Advocating protection of specific categories of work for a limited period doesn't mean it has to be applied to "All instances" for "all time". The OP was arguing for the abolishment of all intellectual property.
Great. Now we're getting into the details of copyright law. Define limited. Is life of the author + 120 years limited? Is 10000 years limited? Is 30 minutes limited? Why? Why not? Note the Supreme Court decision that holds current copyright duration is "limited". Is that fair? Why/Why not? Be detailed.
Intellectual protection of people's creativity doesn't preclude people from collaborating on public works e.g. C++, HTML, OpenGL etc... as proven by the fact that with IP law we've managed to create all these things just fine thank you very much.
Copyright is a construct of law. Putting an intellectual work into the public work is only possible because the current law allows for it. Why should it? After all, people who put their sweat and blood into creating something abstract should be rewarded. Right? Alternatively, if they can put their work into the public domain for the greater good, why don't you? You wouldn't want to be caught mooching off of the hard work of others?
Obviously IP law doesn't cause an apocalypse of creativity considering the fact that it seems to be carrying on just fine. I'm not hearing a lot of complaining from artists that they can't work anymore.
Then you aren't paying attention. Do you know what the advice is that is given to first-year art students? Create a movie in a white room with one chair and 2 of your closest friends. With no music. Otherwise, you open yourself up to litigation. Have you seen the hullaballoo around the upgrade button?
The current system only barely works because it is enforced only when people feel like enforcing it. It'd come crashing down like a house cards if people would go after every copyright infringement.
I want to make a living off of my creativity and intellect. I work long, often 14+ hour days to create what you want to have.
Fair enough. Let's make one assumption clear though: you think you create something from nothing. Not true. You create something by taking what you have learned so far, and apply it to a problem and (hopefully) generate something new.
Let's take software, for example. A very, very large number of technologies that go into creating software are available for free. HTML is just one example. C/C++ is another. Furthermore, every single piece of software out there builds on the software that came before it.
This line of thinking works for every type of intellectual work. From books to movies, everything has been done before. You're just adding a small twist to it. Disney is the single biggest example of it: nearly their entire catalog of classics is a near-exact rip-off of existing stories. If you think you're creating something from scratch, you're deluding yourself. You're taking advantage of a whole set of knowledge that you are free to use as you wish. If you couldn't, your creative endeavors would amount to nothing, as you'd have to pay so much to other creators that there wouldn't be anything left for you.
I work in the software industry. I know exactly how much I profit from the fact that I can leverage what I know without having to pay everyone every time I use that knowledge that they gave me.As a matter of fact, I know that I basically would not be able to make a living if I would have to pay everyone.
That is the problem with the concept of intellectual property: if applied consequently in all instances, innovation would basically stop.
> I suppose the fishing and tourism industry have largely similar interest as the
> "environmentalists" as far as the water levels.
Somebody didn't read the article before opening their hole. The shipping industry hates the green river management because it makes the river unsafe for navigation for large parts of the year.
Somebody didn't read the post they quoted.
The original design called for enough flow to allow shipping year around.
Wrong. The original MWCM was designed solely around flood protection and prevention. Then it had a massive overhaul to include several competing targets, one of which was environmental protection.
The greens want the river to flood in the spring (just not enough to bust levees, that was a mistake caused by their policy not the policy itself... at least as stated) and run low later in the year to follow natural patterns closer. To ensure a spring flood they held back too much water during the winter and when the spring rains and snow melt came stronger than expected they lacked the capacity to hold all of the water, forcing them to release at rates the levees could not hold back from the towns downstream. That is the charge against the Corps in a single sentence and it is pretty sound.
Correction: that is a charge the article makes with absolutely zero support. The article needs a "Citation Needed" correction in about 20 different places.
The mission of the system was changed in ways it was not designed for and no attempt was made to remake it to handle the new mission it was given.
Correct. Although I would like to see the system that can handle multiple requirements, some of which are mutually exclusive.
Silting doesn't only hurt the ability of the system to flow downstream, it also kills navigation - which is part of the new MWCM.
The ACE was fucked from the start on this one.
The problem is that the MWCM was rewritten from basic flood control to include several competing targets: flood control, tourism, shipping, fishing, and water quality and environmental protection. The end result is that the ACE is now permanently under fire for not satisfying someone's pet condition, and they can't possibly win.
The hard truth is that whatever is being built is being built to match certani scenarios, whether it is the 100 year flood, the 100 year earthquake, or something similar. It cannot possibly be built to account for the absolut worst case scenario that could happen. And when something in that range happens, then, well, we're fucked.
Unfortunately, in the US, it seems that no one is able to accept that, and instead concentrates on scoring points for their ideological team. This article and the reaction of various politicians is the perfect example of it. The ACE is doing a thankless job with little funding and having to hit mutually exclusive targets, and what do we get? Demonization of them and various political groups.
To the writer of the article and the politicians trying to exploit this for gain: fuck off.
When the alternative is a browser that is EOL'ed after 4 months on the market? You bet your shiny metal ass it does. Maybe Chrome becomes the official IT alternative to IE.... I don't know. But I can guarantee you that this epically moronic decision just handed IE and Chrome the corporate market.
If you're a monopoly, you can't leverage that monopoly to push your other products anti-competitively.
What does Google have a monopoly on? Ad space? Facebook, Microsoft and Apple all would like to disagree. Search engine? The cost to switch to a different search engine is exactly zero.
Merely claiming that Google is a monopoly means absolutely nothing. You're going to have to demonstrate why Google is a monopoly first. No one has done that without resorting to brand-new definitions of the word monopoly and market.
One example would be Google's hard-coded results for specific search terms that place its services at the top of the page regardless of their actual popularity (e.g., Google Finance appearing over the more popular Yahoo Finance, complete with a unique visual presentation).
No, it isn't. Google specifically marks out the area above its search results as the sponsored area. There is absolutely no way to confuse the chart that appears as the result of a search for a stock ticker symbol as part of the general page. Not to mention that right underneath the Google Finance chart are links to other chart services. In the search results themselves, Yahoo Finance does come out on top. Are you going to complain as well that on the page where Google search results are displayed, there are links to log in to your Google account, access Google Docs and what not? You probably are. In which case, please explain why any other company is allowed to display links to its properties on a page it owns. Start with Microsoft and Apple.
I have to say, it's interesting how some people's attitudes change when the company involved isn't Microsoft.
No, it really isn't. Not unless you build a few strawmen.
Google is a gigantic advertising company that happens to hand out free services to get your personal data indexed for their network.
True.
They exploit the positive connotation of "open source" and other causes in order to appeal to a certain type of techie, but their motives are just as impure as Microsoft's (and their search engine is as closed source and proprietary as Windows).
No. They appeal to the techie crowd because their products are pretty friggin awesome.
I'm not really sure why they're afforded the benefit of the doubt by so many fans.
Because they have consistently met high expectations. Other companies have not.
For what it's worth, I'm pretty sure this "Google is an evil monopoly campaign" has been started by various companies who got bloodied by it. You're either shilling for them, or swallowed their crap hook, line and sinker.
This is one of the few times where I wish there was a bury option for stories, if not outright delete. The summary is the exact opposite of what is said in the story,is reported by everyone else, and even of what can be inferred through looking at Tesla's financials.
Maybe instead of filtering stories on editors, we need the ability to filter stories on submitters. I have yet to see a story by Attila Dimedici where the summary wasn't the exact opposite of what was actually going on.
Do you think creators will continue to create if they know their products will simply be stolen and "shared"?
Yes, they will. Just like they have for the last thousands of years. The only thing wrong with Randians is that their theories fail 100% when tested against reality.
I increase my knowledge by learning. I don't believe I have ever increased my knowledge by regurgitating what I already know.
Of course. You never learned anything from anybody. You just learned on your own. Everything you know was either paid for at a fair market price, or was discovered on your own. The only thing scary about Randians is how deluded they are about their own capabilities, and their control over their position in life.
I wouldn't be surprised to see some sort of tyins between content /service providers and carriers that allows you to get premium services w/o being charged for data and the company's splitting the revenue. In fact, I think that may be the end game some have in mind.
This. This is indeed the end-game, at least for the major carriers. They realize that they're sitting on what is basically an access monopoly, and are trying to figure out how to leverage it for rent-seeking. They realize no one cares about access itself, they care about what they can access. Hence all the major carriers buying out content providers: they get the content they don't have, and can now work on extracting maximum price for that content. The easiest way to do that is to make other content more expensive. And the easiest way to do that... is through bandwidth caps and special Facebook/Twitter/NBC/Hulu offers. End-users are forced into accepting the choices offered by their carrier, and content-providers are forced to pay the carriers extra to gain access to the carriers' users.
It's a wonderful end-run around net-neutrality: it won't matter, because users themselves will make the choice not to go to Netflix, but to whatever Comcast decides to host for "free".
There will still be an Internet, but at least in the US, it will be expensive, and only hardcore geeks with money will be on it.
Do you know how you increase knowledge? By sharing it. Culture? Same way. Common bonds? By sharing events.
Notice the sharing? You might want to investigate this entire concept of "humanity" a bit further.
Absolutely. And the direct result of that type of regulation is that corporations will be less profitable. In the current political climate in the US, advocating for corporations to be less profitable is (almost) political suicide. Hence the toothless regulatory agencies whose goals and success metrics are easily coopted by the industry lobbyists.
The saddest part is, I knew it was APK as soon as I saw the formatting. No need to actually read the post.
Regulatory capture. It's inevitable.
Not sure if it's inevitable, but it's definitely a concern. It's especially a concern when at least one goal of the regulatory agency is to not inflict too much harm on the industry it is regulating. You know, kinda like in the US, where regulatory agencies are regularly pilloried for standing in the way of a business doing its business.
This is my biggest worry. I'm not at all sure how the problem can be fixed either.
Step 1: Make a decision on whether it is important for you to control the dumping of externalities onto the public, or whether you want corporate success.
Step 2: Remove one of the conflicting goals from the agency's charter.
There, done. If you decide that controlling externalities is your main goal, you avoid regulatory capture because the agency is supposed to be antagonistic. If the agency and the industry get too chummy, fire the bureaucrats, get new ones, install antagonistic metrics of what successful regulation looks like, and go home. If you decide that corporate success is your main goal, defund the agency, and you won't have to worry about regulatory capture, because there won't be any regulation to capture.
Just in case you missed the obvious point, here is the short version: regulatory capture may be bad, but it has solutions. The solutions merely require having the stomach to live with the consequences. The real problem is that no one likes the consequences. Politicians don't like solution A, because it will make them look bad in front of the conservatives. They also don't like solution B, because voters ultimately don't like being told to go live in a toxic dump. So they waddle around in the middle, and we end up with agencies open to regulatory capture.
For copyright, it's a simple answer: anything that is copyrighted for longer than the author is alive, is, for the author at least, infinite in time.In other words, anything longer than 120 years (about the longest time anyone has ever lived), and that should break the definition of limited copyright. Granted, that's longer than what I consider useful, but it's at least a limit.
It is possible to extract useful meaning from semi-vague documents like the Constitution, if one is willing to see them as guides rather than as a literal words of God(s). Issues only come up if one tries to parse every word as having exactly one meaning. Not gonna happen.
If it's going to take another normal solar cycle to prove or disprove, how would anyone know whether cosmic rays actually DO seed clouds? As of right now, it's a bunch of statistics applied to a short window with zero predictive power. That's why people disregard the theory - it's the equivalent of finding correlation between the Dow Jones and the lottery numbers in NYC.
So you still haven't linked to any data. And FYI, NASA's satellite data not only shows that you are flat out wrong (as in, the sky is white wrong), but it has its own set of issues.
So let us know when you've stopped making shit up. We're all ears.
No kidding. I always thought that the actual money file was encrypted, and could have an arbitrary name. You know, like a truecrypt volume file. Then I find out it's by default a text file hanging out on your computer. Fine and dandy if you have 100% control over your computer at all times, but we all know that's never the case. And judging by the passwords people use, it will be easy to brute force most passwords.
Somehow, I think bitcoin is going to flame out in a rash of digital thievery when criminals realize that it is easier to steal someone's bitcoin file than it is to mine it or even look for credit card info.
And then, we'd be right back into the equivalent of a direct democracy, except it'd be one step removed from the actual voters.
Face it, Democracy is a messy business. It sucks, but all other forms of government are even worse. We're stuck with this until we actually get better people.