"Couldn't the point have been better made with a well crafted essay?"
I don't think so, because according to literary convention, there are many emotional tones essays are "not supposed to have". The easiest example is that fiction can take time out for excitement such as trying to evade Agent Smith in the Matrix or a courtroom drama or defusing a bomb while there are airplanes shooting at you. More subtly, fictional characters operate in their context, so they can "show not tell" aspects of the theme, such as swearing when the situation gets really hard (because only one candidate will be left standing in the space ship commander test). In an essay you'd be stuck with "this is a very difficult test and there will be emotional problems among the candidates."
"Why should how much time or money I spend on the creation of something, have to do with how long the copyright lasts? "
Because it's a rough indicator of economic cost. 25 years even is too long for funny little graphics, small software apps, and possibly even songs. Cultural propagation is the overlooked benefit from something not under copyright in the internet age. We all look and snicker and "share" (read: copy) stuff on the social sites - for these small categories we're effectively treating these small items as 0 copyright already. That is the nature of my concept. On the other hand, when you see stories like "X programmer copied stock trading software" we go "oh, okay, now that's a Bad Thing", simply because it's a high end item.
It's a devastating problem in non-fiction books. It's well known that there is a curve where nonfiction has very low sales below certain "best sellers". Yet the value of the knowledge in a non-fiction book might be the highest value in any non-software copyrighted entity. (Facetiously, referencing the other $100 college degree thread, 5 books/semester * 2 semesters/year * 4 years = a college degree.)
My rough overall point is that not all categories are created equal, and copyright could use reform by dividing it into certain kinds of categories.
"As a university instructor I recognize that the writing's on the wall - online courses will inevitably replace many aspects of higher education. Much of what I teach is already freely available on the internet. There are already many online lectures from which I crib material for my own lectures.
1. What if other online connections provided the question and answer feedback? YAAEBUI (You Are An Evolutionary Biology University Instructor). (Had to try the acronym!) What if we readers of various forums made networks of who is qualified in what area and asked our best questions to *someone other than the professor*? As an Evolutionary Biology University Instructor I presume you have at least heard of, if not read, Stephen Jay Gould's The Structure of Evolutionary Theory. (That book just randomly ended up in my personal library simply because it looked neat, but I haven't read it yet. It's large!) So what if I saved my two best questions and asked you? (I know, at some point the quantities become out of control but just sayin' what if online students got additional advice on social media forums separate from the original instructor?)
2. Will the prices of grad programs go up if the lower level courses aren't subsidizing them?
Hi there. I'll reply to you because your point touches some of the profound differences between fiction and non-fiction.
On the bad and/or dull side of Non-Fiction, are works that simply "do nothing for you". CIA Factbooks come to mind. Neat for 12 seconds to make sure you're not mistaking Zimbabwe for Zambia, but then the rest of the 700 pages does nothing for you.
So yes, there unstated elements of non-fiction required to make it interesting, such as being in the fields you like.
Same kind of thing with fiction. At its best, fiction takes normal life, smooths out the stupid flukes and errors to sculpt a fairly theoretical message from the author. I tend to like science fiction in this regard because it can make up entire future timelines to make its point. So again, done right, there is a message, a mood, behind the words. At that point, you can work backward. "What mood would I like to read about now?" Then with a little skill and practice, you pick an author most likely to hit your mood, then read *vertically* along that author's story set. For example, I like O. Henry because he describes a simpler time in New York and all the hardships of an immigrant melting pot, but manages to not insult the characters. Or my newest find, Christopher Anvil, who was between 20-40 years ahead of his time, writing stories that are just finally showing up in news stories today.
A *huge* problem is that it's one rule to fit them all and becomes that becomes a Procrustean Bed. (NEAR ELEUSIS, in Attica, there lurked a bandit named Damastes, called Procrustes, or "The Stretcher." He had an iron bed on which travelers who fell into his hands were compelled to spend the night. His humor was to stretch the ones who were too short until they died, or, if they were too tall, to cut off as much of their limbs as would make them short enough. None could resist him, and the surrounding countryside became a desert. http://www.goines.net/Writing/procrustean_bed.html )
So even a silly ICanHazCheezburger Caturday pic has the same legal context as enterprise software and a $300 million movie.
What if copyright were proportional (your choice of equations, maybe Fibonacci?) to the amount of dollars times man-hours put into it? So a fun little graphic might get say 12 years of protection, but a $300 Million movie that took 17 years *just to get out of the studio* maybe enjoys the bigger terms. Then the catch is you can pay money to extend your copyright. So Disney gets to keep their Mouse, but nearly forgotten Christopher Anvil stories from 1956 would be in public domain by now.
(Slashdot Meta-Meme) You are an Indie Author, hmm? Yet you make a post disdaining popularity!?
So what is your position on Copyright? Post a link to your story, right here, right now. Or else admit that you don't think the Slashdot readership is not 3 steps from your 1% tippers.
So release a Creative Commons version of your book(s).
Good, someone else picked up on the rather vague nature of the request. "Science" means he doesn't really need it in great depth, he just wants to learn a little more about the world.
(Yoda) "Infographics, he wants hmm? Stephen Wolfram's A New Kind of Science has lots of those!" (/Yoda)
Heh X hours later, I did manage to beat it! (I won't say how, in case other gamers out there want to still try it.)
But having spent a nice weekend getting through nearly all the game, what is your opinion on a level index? I wouldn't want to go through the whole level set just to try out one level!
And in fact that level turned out to be the hardest one of all for me. It stumped me all last night! For the rest, a few good patterns seemed to work, and I only lost he 2nd to last level by what feels like a lack of finesse - by that time I began to lose interest.
I found the arrows useless by the way - the power curve feels wrong because they're too weak on lower levels and it takes too long to get to level 5. Then one good wave of legionaries and you're sunk. Same with the bomb - cute idea, but it seemed rather slow and expensive to both build and operate.
Slashdot moderating is roughly the Fibonacci sequence of the number of sentences with a bound of 8, so it usually takes 5-8 sentences to score a +5. Two sentences only scores a 2.
One flaw of "OMG" news reporting without context is that subtle points risk getting washed over by more juicy yellow journalism. Remember a few weeks back when "the jury was told it should take for granted that the structure, sequence and organization of the 37 API packages as a whole was copyrightable"? We were all jitter-bugging about. However, come on, a *programmer judge* can't be *that* stupid to have sunk the case that early. Turns out, there was a technical point of law at work, encapsulated by the expanded phrase "This, however, was not a final definitive legal ruling.". It was a technical point of law administration aimed at the complete rulings and appeals process. See the full quote below. Also see the last sentence: "Counsel were so informed but not the jury."
For their task of determining infringement and fair use, the jury was told it should take for granted that the structure, sequence and organization of the 37 API packages as a whole was copyrightable. This, however, was not a final definitive legal ruling. One reason for this instruction was so that if the judge ultimately ruled, after hearing the phase one evidence, that the structure, sequence and organization in question was not protectable but was later reversed in this regard, the court of appeals might simply reinstate the jury verdict. In this way, the court of appeals would have a wider range of alternatives without having to worry about an expensive retrial. Counsel were so informed but not the jury.
So what if Oracle spent 50 Million on this trial - that's peanuts. But is the bigger cost that Oracle bought Sun specifically for this lawsuit?
In a sane world you're right, "How could you possibly call an API if the argument structure was copyrightable?", but never underestimate pure bluster and colossal FUD-Pricing. (Total Mini-Me moment here... "let's sue for 100 Beeelion Dollars!".
But notice there's no penalty for a "frivolous" lawsuit. For a "measly" 50 Million, you can just drag any big corp into court and play around for a while. Even one minor claim win would pay for it.
Except somewhere along the way, near-Pixel-Perfect became a standard to be judged against, maybe with the help of Apple.
Now if you have any flaws, people who would otherwise use your site just fine go "bleh, looks like $hit, they must suk, I won't bother using their service."
Something like not visiting Groklaw because a column was mis-formatted. Sorry, Groklaw is a solid starting point for a few important cases, so dissing them forever if one week they happen to have a bad page update is silly.
This gets into those famous slippery SciFi - philosophy questions about "what is thinking?". Let's do a basic thought. "I like milk". Normally I don't have to keep "re-working from basic principles" to decide every day if I like milk. I figured that out last time, and stored the preference like an.ini file.
In my opinion, I'll side with the poster above to mentioned the latent fear of AI's ramifications. In many ways, thinking is "not very difficult". It's a deep version of the True Scotsman problem. We start with the Hypothesis that Thinking is Hard. Then computers (aided by the programmers!) master some section of thinking. Then we say "oh, that's not *really* thinking" and we feel better again.
But let's say 50% of life is "modular expert systems". Each person has to sacrifice parts of their time learning stuff. But get a good AI "module" and ship it out to every robot and then you can have 40,000 workers trained in a week. (Logistics, software loading, etc.)
I'll reply to you since the top third of this story was all about drugs. Let's go back to fairly basic Psychology.
Problem Arises. The reason it's a Problem(Capital P) is that there's no 8-minute fix.
Dumb/Boring Managers like A-B-C-D work. It looks good on Activty Reports and Time Cards and Metrics and so on.
Good Managers realize that Problem is not solved by screaming at your Go To Guy. So *IF* you trust your Go To Guy that he's not a lazy oaf, you have to be ready for some Non-Linear Chaos. And I mean Chaos. And there's 11 TV shows acting out the Chaos! Monk, House, Psych, your choice of 8.
Dumb/Boring Managers like steps they can follow - while simultaneously NOT fixing the Problem. They just want to yell at people until it's solved.
Smart managers give their Go To Guys three hours and see what shows up. It's not their concern (if they are smart!) if the steps from Problem to Solution contain the following steps: Sheep, Sheep Wool, Biogenetic Effects on Sheep Wool, Plant Color, Bio Effect on Plant Color, Workers as Plants, Worker Morale like Plant Color, Effects that affect Worker Morale, Hidden Conditions of Worker Productivity, and Voila!
"Start a 3 month program with a 2-tier priority list and work on non-essential update technology in between crises".
I know, I'm midway between Funny and Troll but play with this one. (Daydreaming) "Dear Jury. When you render this verdict, you place yourselves and your own computers on automatic trial as a re-suit for copyright infringement. So decide what penalty YOU would pay should you happen to have ANY copyrighted work on your computers."
What a fun legal principle. All this BS "It's Not Me" crap would go away. Because the jurors have 52 of their own songs each on their computers.
Nah, I searched for Gattaca and you were the only one to see that angle. Bravo AC.
Nah, this is a "California" law. As soon as pre-predicting genetic diseases proves nice and lucrative for insurance companies, they'll write a federal law that makes the Cali law go away.
Brilliant connecting of the dots, that if we outsource everything else, one day we will outsource bribery, and get nice new laws in India nice and cheap.
Slashdot Mirror
"The Flame malware hit Iran, Israel/Palestine, Sudan, Syria, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt, in that order."
Why would Israel create malware that hits themselves second? So they can play innocent?
"Couldn't the point have been better made with a well crafted essay?"
I don't think so, because according to literary convention, there are many emotional tones essays are "not supposed to have". The easiest example is that fiction can take time out for excitement such as trying to evade Agent Smith in the Matrix or a courtroom drama or defusing a bomb while there are airplanes shooting at you. More subtly, fictional characters operate in their context, so they can "show not tell" aspects of the theme, such as swearing when the situation gets really hard (because only one candidate will be left standing in the space ship commander test). In an essay you'd be stuck with "this is a very difficult test and there will be emotional problems among the candidates."
"Why should how much time or money I spend on the creation of something, have to do with how long the copyright lasts? "
Because it's a rough indicator of economic cost. 25 years even is too long for funny little graphics, small software apps, and possibly even songs. Cultural propagation is the overlooked benefit from something not under copyright in the internet age. We all look and snicker and "share" (read: copy) stuff on the social sites - for these small categories we're effectively treating these small items as 0 copyright already. That is the nature of my concept. On the other hand, when you see stories like "X programmer copied stock trading software" we go "oh, okay, now that's a Bad Thing", simply because it's a high end item.
It's a devastating problem in non-fiction books. It's well known that there is a curve where nonfiction has very low sales below certain "best sellers". Yet the value of the knowledge in a non-fiction book might be the highest value in any non-software copyrighted entity. (Facetiously, referencing the other $100 college degree thread, 5 books/semester * 2 semesters/year * 4 years = a college degree.)
My rough overall point is that not all categories are created equal, and copyright could use reform by dividing it into certain kinds of categories.
"As a university instructor I recognize that the writing's on the wall - online courses will inevitably replace many aspects of higher education. Much of what I teach is already freely available on the internet. There are already many online lectures from which I crib material for my own lectures.
1. What if other online connections provided the question and answer feedback? YAAEBUI (You Are An Evolutionary Biology University Instructor). (Had to try the acronym!) What if we readers of various forums made networks of who is qualified in what area and asked our best questions to *someone other than the professor*? As an Evolutionary Biology University Instructor I presume you have at least heard of, if not read, Stephen Jay Gould's The Structure of Evolutionary Theory. (That book just randomly ended up in my personal library simply because it looked neat, but I haven't read it yet. It's large!) So what if I saved my two best questions and asked you? (I know, at some point the quantities become out of control but just sayin' what if online students got additional advice on social media forums separate from the original instructor?)
2. Will the prices of grad programs go up if the lower level courses aren't subsidizing them?
Hi there. I'll reply to you because your point touches some of the profound differences between fiction and non-fiction.
On the bad and/or dull side of Non-Fiction, are works that simply "do nothing for you". CIA Factbooks come to mind. Neat for 12 seconds to make sure you're not mistaking Zimbabwe for Zambia, but then the rest of the 700 pages does nothing for you.
So yes, there unstated elements of non-fiction required to make it interesting, such as being in the fields you like.
Same kind of thing with fiction. At its best, fiction takes normal life, smooths out the stupid flukes and errors to sculpt a fairly theoretical message from the author. I tend to like science fiction in this regard because it can make up entire future timelines to make its point. So again, done right, there is a message, a mood, behind the words. At that point, you can work backward. "What mood would I like to read about now?" Then with a little skill and practice, you pick an author most likely to hit your mood, then read *vertically* along that author's story set. For example, I like O. Henry because he describes a simpler time in New York and all the hardships of an immigrant melting pot, but manages to not insult the characters. Or my newest find, Christopher Anvil, who was between 20-40 years ahead of his time, writing stories that are just finally showing up in news stories today.
Okay, here's a new wrinkle on Copyright.
A *huge* problem is that it's one rule to fit them all and becomes that becomes a Procrustean Bed. (NEAR ELEUSIS, in Attica, there lurked a bandit named Damastes, called Procrustes, or "The Stretcher." He had an iron bed on which travelers who fell into his hands were compelled to spend the night. His humor was to stretch the ones who were too short until they died, or, if they were too tall, to cut off as much of their limbs as would make them short enough. None could resist him, and the surrounding countryside became a desert. http://www.goines.net/Writing/procrustean_bed.html )
So even a silly ICanHazCheezburger Caturday pic has the same legal context as enterprise software and a $300 million movie.
What if copyright were proportional (your choice of equations, maybe Fibonacci?) to the amount of dollars times man-hours put into it? So a fun little graphic might get say 12 years of protection, but a $300 Million movie that took 17 years *just to get out of the studio* maybe enjoys the bigger terms. Then the catch is you can pay money to extend your copyright. So Disney gets to keep their Mouse, but nearly forgotten Christopher Anvil stories from 1956 would be in public domain by now.
Obligatory simulation of the approval process for surveillance orders:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P46qYCIt954
(Slashdot Meta-Meme)
You are an Indie Author, hmm? Yet you make a post disdaining popularity!?
So what is your position on Copyright? Post a link to your story, right here, right now. Or else admit that you don't think the Slashdot readership is not 3 steps from your 1% tippers.
So release a Creative Commons version of your book(s).
(/Slashdot Meta-Meme)
This is what a tortured normal person looks like.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dLTIK4soif8&feature=related
Yep,
When ordinary mortals were visiting Zombo.com, the mentally altered geniuses visited Obmoz.com.
http://zombo.com/
http://obmoz.com/
Good, someone else picked up on the rather vague nature of the request. "Science" means he doesn't really need it in great depth, he just wants to learn a little more about the world.
(Yoda) "Infographics, he wants hmm? Stephen Wolfram's A New Kind of Science has lots of those!" (/Yoda)
Heh X hours later, I did manage to beat it! (I won't say how, in case other gamers out there want to still try it.)
But having spent a nice weekend getting through nearly all the game, what is your opinion on a level index? I wouldn't want to go through the whole level set just to try out one level!
And in fact that level turned out to be the hardest one of all for me. It stumped me all last night! For the rest, a few good patterns seemed to work, and I only lost he 2nd to last level by what feels like a lack of finesse - by that time I began to lose interest.
I found the arrows useless by the way - the power curve feels wrong because they're too weak on lower levels and it takes too long to get to level 5. Then one good wave of legionaries and you're sunk. Same with the bomb - cute idea, but it seemed rather slow and expensive to both build and operate.
I'll third the Neat Game comment!
The first x levels are easy. The first hard one is the one with the racing skeletons.
AC asked, "Finding my mother's maiden name is easier than using a phone book?"
About twelve seconds on Facebook?
Slashdot moderating is roughly the Fibonacci sequence of the number of sentences with a bound of 8, so it usually takes 5-8 sentences to score a +5. Two sentences only scores a 2.
One flaw of "OMG" news reporting without context is that subtle points risk getting washed over by more juicy yellow journalism. Remember a few weeks back when "the jury was told it should take for granted that the structure, sequence and organization of the 37 API packages as a whole was copyrightable"? We were all jitter-bugging about. However, come on, a *programmer judge* can't be *that* stupid to have sunk the case that early. Turns out, there was a technical point of law at work, encapsulated by the expanded phrase "This, however, was not a final definitive legal ruling.". It was a technical point of law administration aimed at the complete rulings and appeals process. See the full quote below. Also see the last sentence: "Counsel were so informed but not the jury."
For their task of determining infringement and fair use, the jury was told it should take for granted that the structure, sequence and organization of the 37 API packages as a whole was copyrightable. This, however, was not a final definitive legal ruling. One reason for this instruction was so that if the judge ultimately ruled, after hearing the phase one evidence, that the structure, sequence and organization in question was not protectable but was later reversed in this regard, the court of appeals might simply reinstate the jury verdict. In this way, the court of appeals would have a wider range of alternatives without having to worry about an expensive retrial. Counsel were so informed but not the jury.
So what if Oracle spent 50 Million on this trial - that's peanuts. But is the bigger cost that Oracle bought Sun specifically for this lawsuit?
In a sane world you're right, "How could you possibly call an API if the argument structure was copyrightable?", but never underestimate pure bluster and colossal FUD-Pricing. (Total Mini-Me moment here... "let's sue for 100 Beeelion Dollars!".
But notice there's no penalty for a "frivolous" lawsuit. For a "measly" 50 Million, you can just drag any big corp into court and play around for a while. Even one minor claim win would pay for it.
Except somewhere along the way, near-Pixel-Perfect became a standard to be judged against, maybe with the help of Apple.
Now if you have any flaws, people who would otherwise use your site just fine go "bleh, looks like $hit, they must suk, I won't bother using their service."
Something like not visiting Groklaw because a column was mis-formatted. Sorry, Groklaw is a solid starting point for a few important cases, so dissing them forever if one week they happen to have a bad page update is silly.
"The Perter Principal Lives!"
You have risen to your level of spelling incompetence.
This gets into those famous slippery SciFi - philosophy questions about "what is thinking?". Let's do a basic thought. "I like milk". Normally I don't have to keep "re-working from basic principles" to decide every day if I like milk. I figured that out last time, and stored the preference like an .ini file.
In my opinion, I'll side with the poster above to mentioned the latent fear of AI's ramifications. In many ways, thinking is "not very difficult". It's a deep version of the True Scotsman problem. We start with the Hypothesis that Thinking is Hard. Then computers (aided by the programmers!) master some section of thinking. Then we say "oh, that's not *really* thinking" and we feel better again.
But let's say 50% of life is "modular expert systems". Each person has to sacrifice parts of their time learning stuff. But get a good AI "module" and ship it out to every robot and then you can have 40,000 workers trained in a week. (Logistics, software loading, etc.)
Even emotions aren't all that hard to program.
I'll reply to you since the top third of this story was all about drugs. Let's go back to fairly basic Psychology.
Problem Arises.
The reason it's a Problem(Capital P) is that there's no 8-minute fix.
Dumb/Boring Managers like A-B-C-D work. It looks good on Activty Reports and Time Cards and Metrics and so on.
Good Managers realize that Problem is not solved by screaming at your Go To Guy. So *IF* you trust your Go To Guy that he's not a lazy oaf, you have to be ready for some Non-Linear Chaos. And I mean Chaos. And there's 11 TV shows acting out the Chaos! Monk, House, Psych, your choice of 8.
Dumb/Boring Managers like steps they can follow - while simultaneously NOT fixing the Problem. They just want to yell at people until it's solved.
Smart managers give their Go To Guys three hours and see what shows up. It's not their concern (if they are smart!) if the steps from Problem to Solution contain the following steps: Sheep, Sheep Wool, Biogenetic Effects on Sheep Wool, Plant Color, Bio Effect on Plant Color, Workers as Plants, Worker Morale like Plant Color, Effects that affect Worker Morale, Hidden Conditions of Worker Productivity, and Voila!
"Start a 3 month program with a 2-tier priority list and work on non-essential update technology in between crises".
I know, I'm midway between Funny and Troll but play with this one.
(Daydreaming)
"Dear Jury. When you render this verdict, you place yourselves and your own computers on automatic trial as a re-suit for copyright infringement. So decide what penalty YOU would pay should you happen to have ANY copyrighted work on your computers."
What a fun legal principle. All this BS "It's Not Me" crap would go away. Because the jurors have 52 of their own songs each on their computers.
(/Daydreaming)
If Apple wants to get into farming, they can make a wild iBeest!
Nah, I searched for Gattaca and you were the only one to see that angle. Bravo AC.
Nah, this is a "California" law. As soon as pre-predicting genetic diseases proves nice and lucrative for insurance companies, they'll write a federal law that makes the Cali law go away.
Brilliant connecting of the dots, that if we outsource everything else, one day we will outsource bribery, and get nice new laws in India nice and cheap.