The "+RW" compatability thing might be because that's what the set-top DVD recorders are using, and they're what the manufacturers think is the primary use for a +RW disc. It's a bit of a marketingspeak bending of the truth, but at least it does have a basis in reality.
1995? Are you nuts? 486s, $200 500 meg hard drives, $1000+ cd burners, $8 blank cds, 28.8 modems? MP3s weren't feasible for anyone at all until 1998, and wouldn't have been profitable until, say, 2000. I agree with you that the RIAA members totally missed the boat, but the boat didn't even exist yet in 1995.
Napster had a head start no matter how you think about it. It was ahead of the general public's technology adoption curve, and it was free, guaranteeing it would be entrenched before it was possible for anyone to make money selling legit mp3s on the net. If iTunes had started in 2000 and Napster had been unrestrained, iTunes *might* be winning by now.
In other words, I agree with your main points, but think you're a little too optimistic.
Hmm. Since suing might not work, I wonder if a punitive doubling of taxes on Verizon for breach of contract might get some sort of positive result.. either the money comes back, or Verizon decides to do what they promised.
Also, it would open that state up nicely to competition.
If you had read your own link, you'd realize that Metal Storm's guns aren't Gauss guns. They're using chemical propellant... the electronics are just for ignition.
Exactly, because all criminals are geniuses and there's one place we can't protect from theft, everyone should neglect to protect any of the other avenues of theft. Perfect logic.
Because when you burn stacks of normal paper, whole pages may escape untouched. If it's all little bits and mixed up, though, it's more likely to physically burn better and statistically any unburned pieces will not be able to be reassembled (surviving pieces will probably not even be from the same part of the same page).
I don't think computer work is cyclical at all. I think it's going to follow the same pattern as labor, and while I don't know exactly where it's headed, I don't think it repeats (no cycles, hence it is not "cyclic").
Work is outsourced to wherever it's cheapest to do, and it looks like it's already at the cheapest point already. There might be one more step left (Africa) and then we'll have gone through the whole world, and prices are going up worldwide as standards of living improve - making this shifting of the jobs less worthwhile as time goes on.
When will it be cheaper to have an automated chip fab/car plant/whatever here than to build a fully manned one elsewhere? When will foreign IT cost more than the communication barriers and planning make worthwhile? Those are the points where the work comes back home to stay. There's definitely a process of shifting and settling going on, but it doesn't look very cyclical, it just looks like different industries are at different steps in the process (and going through it at different rates). That can give the illusion of cycles.
(This theory probably has an official name or something, which would have saved me a lot of explaining, but I'm not a professional economist, so I had to go the long way around:)
Well, other than the obvious - that women aren't particularly attracted to games geared specifically at men, especially when those games trivialize/sexualize women - there isn't much to go on here. The old gender debates have shown that men don't know what women want, *women* don't know what other women want, and individual women don't know what they individually want.
The truism buried in here about what women want in a game is "I don't know, but I know it when I see it". In other words, the solution to this imagined game-targeting problem is the hard answer that marketing types don't like: ignore gender focusing entirely and just focus on making good games. From the article, it seems only minimal attention to gender is needed - make a good game, and make plenty of avatars available for both genders, and the rest takes care of itself.
I guess the usual corporate types in charge of big budget games don't like this answer, because it forces them to go back to the basic question of "what makes a good game?", and that's a really hard question with no easy answers. The answers to that don't fit as bullet-points in a presentation or items on a checklist for success. There's no solid formula here, it's still very much a "1) work on game 2) ??? 3) Profit!" thing as far as they're concerned. It's less risky for them to fall back on just targeting men, so that's what they've done for the past few years, and games that women love too have been happy accidents. Hence, now that they want to make more money by duplicating those successes, they're asking all these questions about "how do we target women?" - IMHO, not the right approach at all.
That wasn't machinima as we've come to expect... it was just gameplay set to music. I had hoped for something more (after watching some of the Red vs Blue stuff the other day, which someone linked to in anotehr thread about machinima).
The soyuz vs shuttle comparison is not one of craft vs sophistication, but one of specialist design vs generalist design. This is different from the programming contest, where both programs were specialists.
Hollywood isn't a bunch of new struggling studios anymore. They're the old guard. They'd rather have permanant copyright, thus being able to remake their own old stuff or license the rights from each other, while still preventing new companies from using it. It's part greed and part laziness. Free public domain stuff is more a threat to them now than a benefit.
$1 is so low a price as to be useless, though. What's the price of *deciding* if renewing is worth that dollar? *ANY* company employee spending a few minutes to make that decision would cost more than a dollar in wages. It's cheaper in all respects companies to just pay the dollar automatically.
Even if it was $100 to renew after 50 years, I still think they'd pay it automatically anyway. They know they'd make that money back just by selling copies of the work to museums and libraries.
The only thing that $1 fee would do is force works in copyright limbo into public domain, because if no one is sure who owns the work anymore, no one would be able to pay the $1. While that's nice, it's not going to do anything to stop the biggest offenders.
$5 billion / 3 years to build / 280 million citizens = $5.96 per citizen per year.
yearly military budget: $380 billion
yearly NASA budget: about $20 billion?
yearly federal tax income: $1.9 trillion
That carrier is pocket change dug out from the nation's couch cushions. It's not a "new carrier OR feed the children. You don't hate the children do you!?" question. We could do both, and thousands of other worthy things, all at the same time.
"Considering that during the last 5 years signals from anywhere as close as this solar system to as far away as the edge of our galaxy could have been recieved, but have not, leads to a few hypotheses."
Don't forget the speed of light. Signals from the other side of the galaxy, even if they were strong enough to detect with out current equipment, would take 100,000 years to get here.
The past five years of Arecibo monitoring have only shown that, within a 10 degree band of sky, and within 5 light years, no one sent any signals. Futher out, move that five-year window further back in time. The odds of hearing anything interesting get progressively worse the further out you go. If radio use only happens within a narrow block of a civilization's lifetime, say, 300 years, and that civilization could have had that period at any time and at any distance from us, what are the chances that the signals didn't already pass us, or that the signals still won't get here for decades or centuries (or longer)?
I'm not saying we shouldn't listen - listening is important, in case we get lucky. Just don't expect it to happen NOW, or for the source to be reasonably close nearby. Think of us more as historians for the moment than explorers; anything we get outside of a certain (very narrow - 200 light years?) radius means the sender civilization may very well be dead by the time we phsyically go there (for the 200ly example, that'd be a 2000 year trip with current tech, or a 200 year trip with magic). If we're lucky, the sender species will still be alive when we arrive. If the sender is thousands of light years away, then if we don't meet them halfway, they're probably already dead and gone.
Well, m/s^2 *was* given - that's what gees are. One gravity is, what, 9.8m/s^2? So ten of them would be 980m/s^2. The jerk ratings would be nice, though. If they put up a pretty graph of gees vs time, we'd be able to figure it out.
It's that 10G bit at the end that "bumpiness" refers to. Maybe even bumps, plural, if it bounces or skips/slides (easy to pick up sideways motion when you've got the that much atmosphere to fall through by parachute).
1) we'll use a lot more power, simply because we can. In some ways this will reduce combustion - electric heat in the winter, electric vehicles (at the very least, electric for short range vehicles and gas for long range). Appliances will have more features and draw more power both while active and while idle.
2) Appliances will be less efficient. This also means they will generate more heat. Everyone will have air conditioning, though, because it'll be cheap to run. The extra waste heat will be enough, especially in southern cities in summer, to increase the local temperature (more so than now).
3) new energy-hungry applications will arise that aren't developed now because of the power requirements. Non-portable computers will tend towards beowulf clusters because it'll be cheaper to buy N chips than single superchips.
4) the power grid must be expanded to carry the increase volume of power. Depending on the fusion technology's specifics, this will either mean lots of small fusion plants, or large fusion plants and a lot more power lines. Power lines my be overhead, or buried. Expect lots more research on cheaper, warmer-operating superconductors. Expect the results to end up used in everything else, especially electronics.
5) Less international conflict based on water supply - because desalination plants will be much cheaper to operate.
6) Changes in travel, especially sea travel. You can't build a ship the size of an aircraft carrier right now without being a major world power, because of the expertise needed and fuel needed. Fusion may allow this, though. This will certainly make long range shipping cheaper. It would eventually effect people as well - many would choose a cheap two-day sea trip to cross the sea over an expensive and crowded plane flight, especially if it was a vacation trip on a budget and the scenery was good. (business-class travellers would likely still fly).
I'm sure there are more, that's just the ones that jumped out at me after a few moments.
Boies is a hireling of SCO, not it's boss. Notice that Boies has been silent? Notice that all the contradictory information from SCO that poisons its own case comes from their top officers?
I give the man credit, but SCO clearly ignored his advice on this matter, and it's out of his hands.
Truly random suits are unlikely because they are unworkable. The court costs vs awards would be such that the **AA would lose money, which would cause their members (most specifically their members' stockholders) to make them stop. Further, they wouldn't be able to pick their favorite disctricts/judges, leaving the possibility of them actually losing some of the lawsuits, opening them up to some very damaging (both in money and PR) countersuits. A corporate Vietnam.
An internet tax is the scariest part of all. Heaven forbid I might be using the internet to read slashdot, send email to mom, do online banking, or order some CDs from Amazon. Hell no, the only use of the internet must be for murderous eyepatch-wearing parrot-feeding pirates! ARR!
It's doubly scary because I think the government (both federal and states, for the USA, or federal and provinces, for Canada) secretly wants to tax the internet anyway, and wouldn't mind throwing a few percent of the take to the RIAA to appease them if it meant they got the rest of it for themselves.
Why do people continually equate this to a black and white "bah! You're all greedy!" argument? Price is a spectrum. Just because people don't accept a $17 price doesn't mean they won't accept $10, or, dare I say it, $5. In a world where people buy bottled water, it's fairly obvious that people are willing to pay far more than $0 for things they could get for $0.
States weren't allowed to print money in the first place. Quoting Article 1 Section 10 of the US Constitution with the relevant bit bolded:
"No state shall enter into any treaty, alliance, or confederation; grant letters of marque and reprisal; coin money; emit bills of credit; make anything but gold and silver coin a tender in payment of debts; pass any bill of attainder, ex post facto law, or law impairing the obligation of contracts, or grant any title of nobility."
Sure it's a race, just not against who you think. If they get to a man in space soon, they'll beat the European Union, India, and Japan. Passing the EU is worth a lot of prestige, given that those nations once ruled most of the world (including chunks of China!). And getting to the moon means they'll have beaten the EU and Russia, tying the current space champions. Lots of prestige there, obviously. Even though it's already been done, it's obviously still a tough problem if no one else has done it in all this time, and even if they can't surpass every nation, they can surpass n-1 nations now and have at least a chance on the mars race.
Plus it's a good excuse to advance their local expertise in aerospace materials and computer tech, both of which could get them competitive in the global market for planes and chips.
Slashdot Mirror
The "+RW" compatability thing might be because that's what the set-top DVD recorders are using, and they're what the manufacturers think is the primary use for a +RW disc. It's a bit of a marketingspeak bending of the truth, but at least it does have a basis in reality.
If SCO employees are using misleading press releases to boost their stock price and then sell their stock...
I look forward to the federal investigation that puts them in jail.
1995? Are you nuts? 486s, $200 500 meg hard drives, $1000+ cd burners, $8 blank cds, 28.8 modems? MP3s weren't feasible for anyone at all until 1998, and wouldn't have been profitable until, say, 2000. I agree with you that the RIAA members totally missed the boat, but the boat didn't even exist yet in 1995.
Napster had a head start no matter how you think about it. It was ahead of the general public's technology adoption curve, and it was free, guaranteeing it would be entrenched before it was possible for anyone to make money selling legit mp3s on the net. If iTunes had started in 2000 and Napster had been unrestrained, iTunes *might* be winning by now.
In other words, I agree with your main points, but think you're a little too optimistic.
Hmm. Since suing might not work, I wonder if a punitive doubling of taxes on Verizon for breach of contract might get some sort of positive result.. either the money comes back, or Verizon decides to do what they promised.
Also, it would open that state up nicely to competition.
If you had read your own link, you'd realize that Metal Storm's guns aren't Gauss guns. They're using chemical propellant... the electronics are just for ignition.
Exactly, because all criminals are geniuses and there's one place we can't protect from theft, everyone should neglect to protect any of the other avenues of theft. Perfect logic.
Excuse me, I have some dumpster diving to do...
Because when you burn stacks of normal paper, whole pages may escape untouched. If it's all little bits and mixed up, though, it's more likely to physically burn better and statistically any unburned pieces will not be able to be reassembled (surviving pieces will probably not even be from the same part of the same page).
I don't think computer work is cyclical at all. I think it's going to follow the same pattern as labor, and while I don't know exactly where it's headed, I don't think it repeats (no cycles, hence it is not "cyclic").
:)
Work is outsourced to wherever it's cheapest to do, and it looks like it's already at the cheapest point already. There might be one more step left (Africa) and then we'll have gone through the whole world, and prices are going up worldwide as standards of living improve - making this shifting of the jobs less worthwhile as time goes on.
When will it be cheaper to have an automated chip fab/car plant/whatever here than to build a fully manned one elsewhere? When will foreign IT cost more than the communication barriers and planning make worthwhile? Those are the points where the work comes back home to stay. There's definitely a process of shifting and settling going on, but it doesn't look very cyclical, it just looks like different industries are at different steps in the process (and going through it at different rates). That can give the illusion of cycles.
(This theory probably has an official name or something, which would have saved me a lot of explaining, but I'm not a professional economist, so I had to go the long way around
Well, other than the obvious - that women aren't particularly attracted to games geared specifically at men, especially when those games trivialize/sexualize women - there isn't much to go on here. The old gender debates have shown that men don't know what women want, *women* don't know what other women want, and individual women don't know what they individually want.
The truism buried in here about what women want in a game is "I don't know, but I know it when I see it". In other words, the solution to this imagined game-targeting problem is the hard answer that marketing types don't like: ignore gender focusing entirely and just focus on making good games. From the article, it seems only minimal attention to gender is needed - make a good game, and make plenty of avatars available for both genders, and the rest takes care of itself.
I guess the usual corporate types in charge of big budget games don't like this answer, because it forces them to go back to the basic question of "what makes a good game?", and that's a really hard question with no easy answers. The answers to that don't fit as bullet-points in a presentation or items on a checklist for success. There's no solid formula here, it's still very much a "1) work on game 2) ??? 3) Profit!" thing as far as they're concerned. It's less risky for them to fall back on just targeting men, so that's what they've done for the past few years, and games that women love too have been happy accidents. Hence, now that they want to make more money by duplicating those successes, they're asking all these questions about "how do we target women?" - IMHO, not the right approach at all.
That wasn't machinima as we've come to expect... it was just gameplay set to music. I had hoped for something more (after watching some of the Red vs Blue stuff the other day, which someone linked to in anotehr thread about machinima).
The soyuz vs shuttle comparison is not one of craft vs sophistication, but one of specialist design vs generalist design. This is different from the programming contest, where both programs were specialists.
Hollywood isn't a bunch of new struggling studios anymore. They're the old guard. They'd rather have permanant copyright, thus being able to remake their own old stuff or license the rights from each other, while still preventing new companies from using it. It's part greed and part laziness. Free public domain stuff is more a threat to them now than a benefit.
$1 is so low a price as to be useless, though. What's the price of *deciding* if renewing is worth that dollar? *ANY* company employee spending a few minutes to make that decision would cost more than a dollar in wages. It's cheaper in all respects companies to just pay the dollar automatically.
Even if it was $100 to renew after 50 years, I still think they'd pay it automatically anyway. They know they'd make that money back just by selling copies of the work to museums and libraries.
The only thing that $1 fee would do is force works in copyright limbo into public domain, because if no one is sure who owns the work anymore, no one would be able to pay the $1. While that's nice, it's not going to do anything to stop the biggest offenders.
$5 billion / 3 years to build / 280 million citizens = $5.96 per citizen per year.
yearly military budget: $380 billion
yearly NASA budget: about $20 billion?
yearly federal tax income: $1.9 trillion
That carrier is pocket change dug out from the nation's couch cushions. It's not a "new carrier OR feed the children. You don't hate the children do you!?" question. We could do both, and thousands of other worthy things, all at the same time.
"Considering that during the last 5 years signals from anywhere as close as this solar system to as far away as the edge of our galaxy could have been recieved, but have not, leads to a few hypotheses."
Don't forget the speed of light. Signals from the other side of the galaxy, even if they were strong enough to detect with out current equipment, would take 100,000 years to get here.
The past five years of Arecibo monitoring have only shown that, within a 10 degree band of sky, and within 5 light years, no one sent any signals. Futher out, move that five-year window further back in time. The odds of hearing anything interesting get progressively worse the further out you go. If radio use only happens within a narrow block of a civilization's lifetime, say, 300 years, and that civilization could have had that period at any time and at any distance from us, what are the chances that the signals didn't already pass us, or that the signals still won't get here for decades or centuries (or longer)?
I'm not saying we shouldn't listen - listening is important, in case we get lucky. Just don't expect it to happen NOW, or for the source to be reasonably close nearby. Think of us more as historians for the moment than explorers; anything we get outside of a certain (very narrow - 200 light years?) radius means the sender civilization may very well be dead by the time we phsyically go there (for the 200ly example, that'd be a 2000 year trip with current tech, or a 200 year trip with magic). If we're lucky, the sender species will still be alive when we arrive. If the sender is thousands of light years away, then if we don't meet them halfway, they're probably already dead and gone.
Well, m/s^2 *was* given - that's what gees are. One gravity is, what, 9.8m/s^2? So ten of them would be 980m/s^2. The jerk ratings would be nice, though. If they put up a pretty graph of gees vs time, we'd be able to figure it out.
It's that 10G bit at the end that "bumpiness" refers to. Maybe even bumps, plural, if it bounces or skips/slides (easy to pick up sideways motion when you've got the that much atmosphere to fall through by parachute).
Some of the obvious effects of near-free power:
1) we'll use a lot more power, simply because we can. In some ways this will reduce combustion - electric heat in the winter, electric vehicles (at the very least, electric for short range vehicles and gas for long range). Appliances will have more features and draw more power both while active and while idle.
2) Appliances will be less efficient. This also means they will generate more heat. Everyone will have air conditioning, though, because it'll be cheap to run. The extra waste heat will be enough, especially in southern cities in summer, to increase the local temperature (more so than now).
3) new energy-hungry applications will arise that aren't developed now because of the power requirements. Non-portable computers will tend towards beowulf clusters because it'll be cheaper to buy N chips than single superchips.
4) the power grid must be expanded to carry the increase volume of power. Depending on the fusion technology's specifics, this will either mean lots of small fusion plants, or large fusion plants and a lot more power lines. Power lines my be overhead, or buried. Expect lots more research on cheaper, warmer-operating superconductors. Expect the results to end up used in everything else, especially electronics.
5) Less international conflict based on water supply - because desalination plants will be much cheaper to operate.
6) Changes in travel, especially sea travel. You can't build a ship the size of an aircraft carrier right now without being a major world power, because of the expertise needed and fuel needed. Fusion may allow this, though. This will certainly make long range shipping cheaper. It would eventually effect people as well - many would choose a cheap two-day sea trip to cross the sea over an expensive and crowded plane flight, especially if it was a vacation trip on a budget and the scenery was good. (business-class travellers would likely still fly).
I'm sure there are more, that's just the ones that jumped out at me after a few moments.
That would strip the GPL from it, making it fully public domain...meaning any company could pull an embrace-and-extend on it and close the results.
:)
A better solution would be to slip the SCO source into the bill
Boies is a hireling of SCO, not it's boss. Notice that Boies has been silent? Notice that all the contradictory information from SCO that poisons its own case comes from their top officers?
I give the man credit, but SCO clearly ignored his advice on this matter, and it's out of his hands.
Truly random suits are unlikely because they are unworkable. The court costs vs awards would be such that the **AA would lose money, which would cause their members (most specifically their members' stockholders) to make them stop. Further, they wouldn't be able to pick their favorite disctricts/judges, leaving the possibility of them actually losing some of the lawsuits, opening them up to some very damaging (both in money and PR) countersuits. A corporate Vietnam.
An internet tax is the scariest part of all. Heaven forbid I might be using the internet to read slashdot, send email to mom, do online banking, or order some CDs from Amazon. Hell no, the only use of the internet must be for murderous eyepatch-wearing parrot-feeding pirates! ARR!
It's doubly scary because I think the government (both federal and states, for the USA, or federal and provinces, for Canada) secretly wants to tax the internet anyway, and wouldn't mind throwing a few percent of the take to the RIAA to appease them if it meant they got the rest of it for themselves.
Why do people continually equate this to a black and white "bah! You're all greedy!" argument? Price is a spectrum. Just because people don't accept a $17 price doesn't mean they won't accept $10, or, dare I say it, $5. In a world where people buy bottled water, it's fairly obvious that people are willing to pay far more than $0 for things they could get for $0.
States weren't allowed to print money in the first place. Quoting Article 1 Section 10 of the US Constitution with the relevant bit bolded:
"No state shall enter into any treaty, alliance, or confederation; grant letters of marque and reprisal; coin money; emit bills of credit; make anything but gold and silver coin a tender in payment of debts; pass any bill of attainder, ex post facto law, or law impairing the obligation of contracts, or grant any title of nobility."
Sure it's a race, just not against who you think. If they get to a man in space soon, they'll beat the European Union, India, and Japan. Passing the EU is worth a lot of prestige, given that those nations once ruled most of the world (including chunks of China!). And getting to the moon means they'll have beaten the EU and Russia, tying the current space champions. Lots of prestige there, obviously. Even though it's already been done, it's obviously still a tough problem if no one else has done it in all this time, and even if they can't surpass every nation, they can surpass n-1 nations now and have at least a chance on the mars race.
Plus it's a good excuse to advance their local expertise in aerospace materials and computer tech, both of which could get them competitive in the global market for planes and chips.