Who will fill the power vacuum? Will the next party be worse than the prior?
You can't tell what the next leader is going to be like, but those same sources of information that have shown just how bad the people have it will still exist and so in theory at least there will still be some pressure for improvements of conditions over time. The leadership either supply that or their build up enough resentment that another revolution becomes possible.
I don't think it will be a fast process, it's something that will change over a generation or 2.
CGI will become commoditised, rather than modelling every back drop by hand you will have preexisting models which just need tweaking for individual films.
Eventually we will get to the point where all those really expensive CGI back drops are going to be cheaper than filming in real life locations because, for example, you don't have to block off traffic from behind a historic house while filming a period drama. You don't need to have people stage sets and wait for the right light etc.
When that happens, those Sci-Fi stories are going to be no more expensive to produce than any other film.
I've picked up on the same feeling here in Britian, I feel somewhere in the last decade we went from putting America down as a form of poking fun at the Yanks but it mostly being meant in a good natured way to the poking having more of an edge to it.
I'm not saying the general feeling towards the USA is one of hatred, thats far too strong a sentiment, but definately far more people willing to question why we support the USA quiet as strongly as we do. It definately feels like a one way relationship and we have the shitty end of the stick.
Some of it is bound to be fallout from Iraq, but it goes further than that, it economic and political as well. For example US-UK Extradition Treaty 2003, which is seen as being very one sided.
Really? Do you want your girlfriend to know that you had lunch with that 30-something stunning blonde in the next cube?
But if your girlfriend can also see that nothing happens after the drinks, why would she care?
It's the partial information that she has which is damaging, she finds out you have been having drinks with some other women and she jumps to conclusions about why, especially if you have never told her you were having drinks and she finds out from some other source of information.
The only reason I can see that she might be upset is that you aren't spending time with her, but she already knows that, she just doesn't know why.
Can you give up all jealousy, fear, uncertainty about all your relationships?
Again, what jealousy, fear and uncertainty are we talking about when you can know for sure what a partner has been doing?
I'm actually for privacy, I generally do as much as practical to protect information about me, but if we are talking about complete openness (assuming it could be done, which I doubt) it changes a lot of things.
I have actually looked into doing that, well I looked into setting up a Building Society here in the UK (Our equivalent of a Credit Union) but according to the Building Society Association, it needs a minimum of £1M backing with 10 members agreeing on a business plan which can take 2 years to get approval from the FSA. The last Building Society to be setup was in the 1980s.
In some ways I think it's good that it takes a lot of effort and regulation to setup a Building Society but in a post Bankers are scum world, it does kind of feel like it's just there to stop new players entering a market which competes against banks and their huge profit margins.
I wonder if there will be some new Building Societies started up in the future given the hatred of bankers or whether the market has now been so well sewed up and no small BS's could ever be started again.
There was a time almost every phone number and address was public (white pages), a birthday is hardly secret knowledge too, and really who the fuck cares about an e-mail address.
This is a case of society not catching up with technology, true names, phone numbers and addresses were always public, but could only be used at great cost and at best represented contact details for you rather than a map of your life. The cost to collect and use that information meant that an individual had some security through obscurity because it wasn't worth the time to collect information about most people; in that case I agree with you, who cares if this information is public.
The problem is that technology has moved on, as social interaction moved online the cost of collecting that information dropped dramatically and the sort of information which is available increased.
These days, those basic contact details are more away to tie information from seperate systems together to help build an even finer picture of someone completely automatically. That information isn't going anywhere, it's going to be kept on the off chance that the information might become useful one day.
To think about something like that would imply they are actually technical experts and not just charging access for content generated by their own users.
How is that different from 4 guys being taxed on their higher earnings as they currently stand, and benefits being given to the 5th guy who doesn't work at all because their aren't any jobs ?
The 4 guys currently in work are still supporting the 5th guy except the 5th guy doesn't have any sense of responsibility to society since he doesn't need to do anyting to get his admittedly very limited benefits. Unless you are arguing that the 5th shouldn't recieve any benefits because he's not working in which case the 4 guys are still going to support the 5th guy by being a victim of crime (if only indirectly).
The issue with really high levels of Automation is that without increasing other jobs as fast are automation is replacing the current jobs, we will reach a point where there is a huge unemployed under class, with an extremely rich upper classes and hardly anyone inbetween. Either you need to tax those very rich a huge amount and redistribute to the poorer (either through make work schemes or direct benefits) or we will have a massive break down in social order.
We've already seen that happen, those revolutions in the Middle East are about cost of living and the lack of work for the poor while the top classes in each of those countries hoard millions. I see those revolutions as a precursor to what will happen if very wide spread automation leads to such a huge gap between the richest and poorest.
The automation, no matter how expensive it's support services are will always be cheaper than the equivalent human labour the machine has replaced, if it wasn't then there would be no need for the automation.
i.e. Robot replaces 10 workers earning $1000/month and replaces it with one of those workers who gets retrained to look after the robot and gets paid $8000/month. The individuals retrained is much better off but the local economy has still lost $2000/month overal all.
That means less money being spend on local services, less being collected in taxes etc.
You are looking at Facebook with the experience of having seen services come and go, not just online but also in the context of watching your own hard drives dying, then seeing or at least reading about onsite backups lost due to local problems corruption or environmental problems.
With the benefit of life experience it's clear that eventually facebook is going to fail somehow but facebook has been online for as long as some of these teenagers have been online and without any widely report loss of data yet. In fact just the opposite, it is notriously hard to get anything properly deleted from facebook. Why would kids (i.e. people who we as adults don't believe have the skills to make informed decisions, for example being allowed to vote, or drink) be expected to think about data storage strategy and multiple redundant copies.
Placing it on another car would have been stupid, but having looking at the pictures of it, I would have called the police to report a suspicous device on his own car, and then made sure the media were informed as well.
No I'm not, the attacker is always to blame, without his actions that critical moment would never happen at all regardless of the victims actions or lack of actions.
What I'm saying is that victims are subject to the same rules of evolution as every other living creature which have to face competition. Whether they are affected an encounter is down to physical and psychological traits and often just plain old luck. How is that blaming the victim?
I'm not sure if you are joking or not but assuming you aren't, your example is Darwinism at work.
The ones that survive are the ones who meet a person or get into an environment, realise something is wrong with either the person or the situation, if only at a gut level, and turn back, either in terms of a relationship or more physically moving out of the environment, away from that place where the nutter has a chance to kill them.
Admittedly, if the nutter is anywhere close to being good, the chance of realising something is wrong in time to be able to do something about it is probably very small but there is a chance. In fact I would guess the survivers never even know they are in danger because they never got to that point where the nutter was able to carry out any actions.
The alternative is that a serial killer is the absolute perfect hunter, killing 100% of their intended targets.
Change control is important for projects which run for a long time or with a large number of people contributing to it. A university course by its very nature tends extend to a year at the most and more likely 6 months and maybe include 4 people, who see each other every day in class and can talk directly about the project.
You can require them to use proper source control in an university course, they can even become good at using the tools, but until they see the problems caused +1 year down the line when proper source control wasn't implemented in the beginning the students just aren't going to get it at an instinctive level. Most people learn from their own mistakes.
I don't think thats something that you can teach, except maybe to set the students up to fail. Maybe the first year should include a large time scale project, where the student are in teams but the teams switch after 6 months onto someone elses project so that no team finishes the year with the code it started writing at the beginning, it's the only way I can see people understanding the importance of source control, effective code comments etc.
Oh I agree, the corporations will eventually let copyrights expire, but they could hang onto them for a really long time before that happens.
Using my hypothetical 10 year renewal term above, Imagine the copyright renewal was $1000 for the first extension, but a random old film makes $2,000,000 profit in at some point in that 10 year period (I don't know, maybe they release a 20 year remaster of a cult film), the corporation could hold 2,000 titles for the next 10 years based on those profits in the hope another one of those 2000 films does the same thing in the next 10 years, but if you make the renewal significantly more than $1000, you hurt independent film makers from extending their copyright.
Basically my fear is that this change could lead to copyright superholders, able to make a profit with a few old films each year, while holding onto the copyright of 1000/100000 of other titles. Similar to patent trolls today, buying up everything they can in the hope that one might be useful at some point in the future, and the scales are such that they only need one success to fund the rest of the library for years.
Having said that, maybe the renewal fee for any given works could be pegged to the production costs of the original works (it would mean the same system could be used for movies, music and books just with different starting prices). An independent film made for $100,000 would cost $1000 for the first renewal, but a film which cost $100,000,000 to make would cost $100,000 to renew in the first year. It might also help with Hollywood accounting where it's generally in the favour of the production company to make the film as expensive as possible to ensure it doesn't make a profit on the books, pegging the renewal fee to the costs they claim the film required would effectively make it the film more expensive to maintain over time.
Agreed, the reason for having copyrights is to allow commercial benefit from the works in order to encourage the works to be created in the first place, thus benefitting society. The problem is there is no commerical reason not to just sit on a work for as long as the law allows in the hopes that some day it might become valuable again which does not benefit society in anyway. Everytime Micky gets close to being out of Copyright, the laws get changed to extend the period again, and it only costs what the lobbying costs and is largely hidden from the public.
I like the idea of giving someone a free copyright to start with and then allowing an extention of the copyright in say 10 years blocks (a number pulled out of nowhere) for a fee, but with each subquent extension becoming more expensive according to a know algorithm (maybe each 10 year extension cost x2 what the previous extension cost). That way there is nothing to stop the copyright owner passing the works on to their heirs, or selling to big corporations but there will become a point where it's just not worth spending the money to maintain the copyright, at which point it reverts back to the public as copyrights should do at the moment, but don't.
The only problem I see with this is that big rich corporations with a large library of copyrighted works are able to afford to extend those copyrights for longer than an individual can even without gaining any commercial value from the works, and can use a few very successful copyrights to maintain a vast library in a "wait and see" strategy.
Finding the right time frame for renewals, the intial price and the price increase ratio for each renewal will be critical to making the system work and I can see being different for different types of works (movies, music, books, art etc) and are variables which will need to be thought about carefully from both the point of views of both business and society.
I know you are just trying to reduce the attraction of the show down to as basic level as possible, I don't think Inara was a lesbian, unless you are thinking of someone else in the show? isn't the whole point of a Companion to be what the partner needs them to be? Inara would have said what ever was appropriate to put her partner at ease, whether male or female.
In fact, the only hint we have about who Inara really is, was attraction she had to Mal, and I got the feeling most of that was more about Mal's personality traits rather than a physical attraction.
Inara was one of the most overlooked/least explored characters on the show.
Valve doesn't have any retail employees because it doesn't need them, Apple does because it has to.
You could argue the Apple could dump all of it's Apple Stores and just sell online or through 3rd Party retailers and thus reduce it's staff count but I believe the Apple Stores are as much as about Apples image as it is about direct sales and by dumping the Apple Stores would find it's harder to sell it's products at the premimum it does.
Only time would tell whether the reduced head count would increase the revenue / person or decrease it due to a slight decrease in the profit margin.
The argument makes as much sense as saying Apple shouldn't count warehousing/shipping staff (if Apple employ these directly - I don't if they do or not) because Valve doesn't need those staff. Revenue/Head isn't about comparing similar staff between companies, it's about comparing how companies do operate, and surprise suprise and purely data based business where computers do the work needs less staff.
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You can't tell what the next leader is going to be like, but those same sources of information that have shown just how bad the people have it will still exist and so in theory at least there will still be some pressure for improvements of conditions over time. The leadership either supply that or their build up enough resentment that another revolution becomes possible.
I don't think it will be a fast process, it's something that will change over a generation or 2.
I actually enjoyed Paul far more than I expected, I liked watching for the references to other sci-fi's
CGI will become commoditised, rather than modelling every back drop by hand you will have preexisting models which just need tweaking for individual films.
Eventually we will get to the point where all those really expensive CGI back drops are going to be cheaper than filming in real life locations because, for example, you don't have to block off traffic from behind a historic house while filming a period drama. You don't need to have people stage sets and wait for the right light etc.
When that happens, those Sci-Fi stories are going to be no more expensive to produce than any other film.
I've picked up on the same feeling here in Britian, I feel somewhere in the last decade we went from putting America down as a form of poking fun at the Yanks but it mostly being meant in a good natured way to the poking having more of an edge to it.
I'm not saying the general feeling towards the USA is one of hatred, thats far too strong a sentiment, but definately far more people willing to question why we support the USA quiet as strongly as we do. It definately feels like a one way relationship and we have the shitty end of the stick.
Some of it is bound to be fallout from Iraq, but it goes further than that, it economic and political as well. For example US-UK Extradition Treaty 2003, which is seen as being very one sided.
But if your girlfriend can also see that nothing happens after the drinks, why would she care?
It's the partial information that she has which is damaging, she finds out you have been having drinks with some other women and she jumps to conclusions about why, especially if you have never told her you were having drinks and she finds out from some other source of information.
The only reason I can see that she might be upset is that you aren't spending time with her, but she already knows that, she just doesn't know why.
Again, what jealousy, fear and uncertainty are we talking about when you can know for sure what a partner has been doing?
I'm actually for privacy, I generally do as much as practical to protect information about me, but if we are talking about complete openness (assuming it could be done, which I doubt) it changes a lot of things.
I have actually looked into doing that, well I looked into setting up a Building Society here in the UK (Our equivalent of a Credit Union) but according to the Building Society Association, it needs a minimum of £1M backing with 10 members agreeing on a business plan which can take 2 years to get approval from the FSA. The last Building Society to be setup was in the 1980s.
In some ways I think it's good that it takes a lot of effort and regulation to setup a Building Society but in a post Bankers are scum world, it does kind of feel like it's just there to stop new players entering a market which competes against banks and their huge profit margins.
I wonder if there will be some new Building Societies started up in the future given the hatred of bankers or whether the market has now been so well sewed up and no small BS's could ever be started again.
This is a case of society not catching up with technology, true names, phone numbers and addresses were always public, but could only be used at great cost and at best represented contact details for you rather than a map of your life. The cost to collect and use that information meant that an individual had some security through obscurity because it wasn't worth the time to collect information about most people; in that case I agree with you, who cares if this information is public.
The problem is that technology has moved on, as social interaction moved online the cost of collecting that information dropped dramatically and the sort of information which is available increased.
These days, those basic contact details are more away to tie information from seperate systems together to help build an even finer picture of someone completely automatically. That information isn't going anywhere, it's going to be kept on the off chance that the information might become useful one day.
They do, they have batteries but like any batteries backup, capacity is limited.
To think about something like that would imply they are actually technical experts and not just charging access for content generated by their own users.
Nothing, but don't pollute google search results with SEO spam and make searching for the information I need from other sites harder.
How is that different from 4 guys being taxed on their higher earnings as they currently stand, and benefits being given to the 5th guy who doesn't work at all because their aren't any jobs ?
The 4 guys currently in work are still supporting the 5th guy except the 5th guy doesn't have any sense of responsibility to society since he doesn't need to do anyting to get his admittedly very limited benefits. Unless you are arguing that the 5th shouldn't recieve any benefits because he's not working in which case the 4 guys are still going to support the 5th guy by being a victim of crime (if only indirectly).
The issue with really high levels of Automation is that without increasing other jobs as fast are automation is replacing the current jobs, we will reach a point where there is a huge unemployed under class, with an extremely rich upper classes and hardly anyone inbetween. Either you need to tax those very rich a huge amount and redistribute to the poorer (either through make work schemes or direct benefits) or we will have a massive break down in social order.
We've already seen that happen, those revolutions in the Middle East are about cost of living and the lack of work for the poor while the top classes in each of those countries hoard millions. I see those revolutions as a precursor to what will happen if very wide spread automation leads to such a huge gap between the richest and poorest.
The automation, no matter how expensive it's support services are will always be cheaper than the equivalent human labour the machine has replaced, if it wasn't then there would be no need for the automation.
i.e. Robot replaces 10 workers earning $1000/month and replaces it with one of those workers who gets retrained to look after the robot and gets paid $8000/month. The individuals retrained is much better off but the local economy has still lost $2000/month overal all.
That means less money being spend on local services, less being collected in taxes etc.
Massive increases in fuel prices making delivery of goods too expensive?
You are looking at Facebook with the experience of having seen services come and go, not just online but also in the context of watching your own hard drives dying, then seeing or at least reading about onsite backups lost due to local problems corruption or environmental problems.
With the benefit of life experience it's clear that eventually facebook is going to fail somehow but facebook has been online for as long as some of these teenagers have been online and without any widely report loss of data yet. In fact just the opposite, it is notriously hard to get anything properly deleted from facebook. Why would kids (i.e. people who we as adults don't believe have the skills to make informed decisions, for example being allowed to vote, or drink) be expected to think about data storage strategy and multiple redundant copies.
camera phones in particular, but also some compact digital cameras have the ability to directly upload to facebook, flickr et al.
Placing it on another car would have been stupid, but having looking at the pictures of it, I would have called the police to report a suspicous device on his own car, and then made sure the media were informed as well.
Do you use some sort of Collie dog for that, or are you on horse back waving your cowboy hat around to move the ladyboys in the right direction?
No I'm not, the attacker is always to blame, without his actions that critical moment would never happen at all regardless of the victims actions or lack of actions.
What I'm saying is that victims are subject to the same rules of evolution as every other living creature which have to face competition. Whether they are affected an encounter is down to physical and psychological traits and often just plain old luck. How is that blaming the victim?
I'm not sure if you are joking or not but assuming you aren't, your example is Darwinism at work.
The ones that survive are the ones who meet a person or get into an environment, realise something is wrong with either the person or the situation, if only at a gut level, and turn back, either in terms of a relationship or more physically moving out of the environment, away from that place where the nutter has a chance to kill them.
Admittedly, if the nutter is anywhere close to being good, the chance of realising something is wrong in time to be able to do something about it is probably very small but there is a chance. In fact I would guess the survivers never even know they are in danger because they never got to that point where the nutter was able to carry out any actions.
The alternative is that a serial killer is the absolute perfect hunter, killing 100% of their intended targets.
Change control is important for projects which run for a long time or with a large number of people contributing to it. A university course by its very nature tends extend to a year at the most and more likely 6 months and maybe include 4 people, who see each other every day in class and can talk directly about the project.
You can require them to use proper source control in an university course, they can even become good at using the tools, but until they see the problems caused +1 year down the line when proper source control wasn't implemented in the beginning the students just aren't going to get it at an instinctive level. Most people learn from their own mistakes.
I don't think thats something that you can teach, except maybe to set the students up to fail. Maybe the first year should include a large time scale project, where the student are in teams but the teams switch after 6 months onto someone elses project so that no team finishes the year with the code it started writing at the beginning, it's the only way I can see people understanding the importance of source control, effective code comments etc.
Some people do.
http://www.worldrowing.com/display/modules/news/dspNews.php?newid=324795
Oh I agree, the corporations will eventually let copyrights expire, but they could hang onto them for a really long time before that happens.
Using my hypothetical 10 year renewal term above, Imagine the copyright renewal was $1000 for the first extension, but a random old film makes $2,000,000 profit in at some point in that 10 year period (I don't know, maybe they release a 20 year remaster of a cult film), the corporation could hold 2,000 titles for the next 10 years based on those profits in the hope another one of those 2000 films does the same thing in the next 10 years, but if you make the renewal significantly more than $1000, you hurt independent film makers from extending their copyright.
Basically my fear is that this change could lead to copyright superholders, able to make a profit with a few old films each year, while holding onto the copyright of 1000/100000 of other titles. Similar to patent trolls today, buying up everything they can in the hope that one might be useful at some point in the future, and the scales are such that they only need one success to fund the rest of the library for years.
Having said that, maybe the renewal fee for any given works could be pegged to the production costs of the original works (it would mean the same system could be used for movies, music and books just with different starting prices). An independent film made for $100,000 would cost $1000 for the first renewal, but a film which cost $100,000,000 to make would cost $100,000 to renew in the first year. It might also help with Hollywood accounting where it's generally in the favour of the production company to make the film as expensive as possible to ensure it doesn't make a profit on the books, pegging the renewal fee to the costs they claim the film required would effectively make it the film more expensive to maintain over time.
Agreed, the reason for having copyrights is to allow commercial benefit from the works in order to encourage the works to be created in the first place, thus benefitting society. The problem is there is no commerical reason not to just sit on a work for as long as the law allows in the hopes that some day it might become valuable again which does not benefit society in anyway. Everytime Micky gets close to being out of Copyright, the laws get changed to extend the period again, and it only costs what the lobbying costs and is largely hidden from the public.
I like the idea of giving someone a free copyright to start with and then allowing an extention of the copyright in say 10 years blocks (a number pulled out of nowhere) for a fee, but with each subquent extension becoming more expensive according to a know algorithm (maybe each 10 year extension cost x2 what the previous extension cost). That way there is nothing to stop the copyright owner passing the works on to their heirs, or selling to big corporations but there will become a point where it's just not worth spending the money to maintain the copyright, at which point it reverts back to the public as copyrights should do at the moment, but don't.
The only problem I see with this is that big rich corporations with a large library of copyrighted works are able to afford to extend those copyrights for longer than an individual can even without gaining any commercial value from the works, and can use a few very successful copyrights to maintain a vast library in a "wait and see" strategy.
Finding the right time frame for renewals, the intial price and the price increase ratio for each renewal will be critical to making the system work and I can see being different for different types of works (movies, music, books, art etc) and are variables which will need to be thought about carefully from both the point of views of both business and society.
I know you are just trying to reduce the attraction of the show down to as basic level as possible, I don't think Inara was a lesbian, unless you are thinking of someone else in the show? isn't the whole point of a Companion to be what the partner needs them to be? Inara would have said what ever was appropriate to put her partner at ease, whether male or female.
In fact, the only hint we have about who Inara really is, was attraction she had to Mal, and I got the feeling most of that was more about Mal's personality traits rather than a physical attraction.
Inara was one of the most overlooked/least explored characters on the show.
Valve doesn't have any retail employees because it doesn't need them, Apple does because it has to.
You could argue the Apple could dump all of it's Apple Stores and just sell online or through 3rd Party retailers and thus reduce it's staff count but I believe the Apple Stores are as much as about Apples image as it is about direct sales and by dumping the Apple Stores would find it's harder to sell it's products at the premimum it does.
Only time would tell whether the reduced head count would increase the revenue / person or decrease it due to a slight decrease in the profit margin.
The argument makes as much sense as saying Apple shouldn't count warehousing/shipping staff (if Apple employ these directly - I don't if they do or not) because Valve doesn't need those staff. Revenue/Head isn't about comparing similar staff between companies, it's about comparing how companies do operate, and surprise suprise and purely data based business where computers do the work needs less staff.