thehotdon

Here's a possible implementation of your idea that could help get the ball rolling.

1. Get a group of wealthy investors to select a well-known director and film that they would like to support. Ideally the people in charge of the creative side would be open to trying alternative business models.

2. Try to work out a reasonable budget to produce the movie. The overall cost should be much less than usual due to the complete lack of middle-men.

3. The investors provide funding to create an awesome trailer for the movie.

4. Using this trailer, the movie producers crowd-source funding for the movie. If this funding falls short, the investors are obligated to cover the difference. However, if the funding exceeds the movie's budget, the investors are rewarded accordingly.

5. The movie is completed and released into the public domain.

If you intend to make money from your novel, it's your responsibility to find a way to capitalize on it. Obvious approaches include collecting funding/reservations in advance or asking for donations after the fact.

If you release a digital copy of your novel online, it's quite likely that at least a few people will copy it. However, there's also a pretty good chance it will attract more future customers.

You seem to be making the inaccurate assumption that both the law and its enforcement are logically consistent. This might seem reasonable if you are a mathematician or engineer who is used to working with formal specifications and precise definitions. Unfortunately, the people who write and uphold the law are about as far from engineers as you can get.

Exactly! Why would anyone want to live forever in a human body, when they could just build themselves a kick-ass robot body instead.

Software really is sort of a special case though. Most of the problems you mentioned are at least partially caused by the constraints and resources of our physical environment. However, the complexity of software is almost entirely generated by human ineptitude. The one exception might be complexity caused by necessary optimization for hardware limitations, which would in fact explain some of problems cited in the blog post.

Yes, and that's how it should be. Mathematics, including algorithms, is not patentable.

I would say you're probably right about work experience being much more relevant. However, if you went to a very prestigious school, you might want to put it at the beginning for two reasons.

First, the education section takes up relatively little space, and a good school will quickly get the reader's interest.

Secondly, by the end of your work experience section, the reader has probably formed an opinion of you, and a good school won't do much to recover from a mediocre list of jobs.

Of course, none of this actually affects your qualifications for the job. However, HR people usually see things a bit differently than an engineer would...

if ... 1000 dollar fine

else if ... 5 months jail

else if ... capital punishment

else if ... licence suspended

else if ... 3 years jail, 20000 dollar fine

// handle a few million more cases

else you're innocent

There's a man in the clouds jiggling us around with puppet strings, obviously.

And the man in the clouds, well, I guess he's controlled by a mystic turtle in outer space...

Well, the hip ones, at least.

Sam is such a great guy. I'm sure he donates all of his earnings to charity and doesn't own a single luxury, so he's definitely qualified to judge how "yuppies" spend their money.

On a slightly darker note: He sure seems proud of himself for donating to a charity that keeps children barely alive, just long enough for them to have more children that no one can provide for. It seems slightly counter-productive to me.

Marketers do nothing to "make the product better".

They pump exorbitant amounts of money into advertising, thereby increasing the final price paid by customers without increasing product quality. Furthermore, they use these advertisements to inflate their customers' perceived value of the products, once again, without actually increasing product quality.

Marketers maximize profits, not quality.

Are you allowed to break into other people's property and use weapons to enforce your own system of rules on them? Nope.

Are you allowed to lock people in a cage for decades because they do something you disagree with? Of course not.

Is the FBI allowed to do this? Well, yes, but only because they're special and you have to do what they say, not what they do. Now what's this word hypocrite you speak of?

Animals have very strict rules and regulations about the sacred act of rubbing genitals together.

Wait, did you just say that seriously?

Plaintiff: "There was a dead-body in the toilet, but the defendant has been regularly flushing, thereby destroying the evidence and proving his guilt."

Judge: "Well, if you say it, it must be true!"

Eropple: As is likely apparent, I am of the opinion that the thief should be forced to make good on her damages. They are not illusory damages; _someone_ will be made less than whole if the thief is not expected to provide compensation. And, no, I don't expect her to pay it back. But it is her obligation to make whole those she has wronged. Doing otherwise is neither reasonable nor fair.

Keyword: damages. Damages are not the same thing as missing out on an opportunity for profit through means of extortion.

Sure, she should pay for her damages caused to Telstra--they just need to give her an itemized receipt of expenses that she caused the company. This might include the amortized cost of hardware, maintenance, support staff, etc. However, these costs would certainly not include Telstra's insane profit margins. The purpose of most legal systems (Australia's too, I hope) is to maintain justice, not to serve as an alternative means of doing business. Somehow, I think Telstra might come up with a slightly smaller figure than 193k if required to itemize their damages.

The light bulb was invented? How do you know Edison didn't just dig the first one out of the ground and tell everyone he invented it? Before Edison discovered the first light bulb, would it have been impossible to build one? Were the materials simply non-existent?

It's all discovery.

Well, it's not just a difference in optimization goals; it's a difference in methodology.

Evolution optimizes by using heuristics and stochastic search--piling crap on top of crap, and obfuscating into oblivion.

Engineering optimizes by finding elegant mathematical solutions.

Sorry, getting off-topic. I guess I'm just bitter about not being a robot.

Engineering beats evolution, every time.

I wouldn't be surprised if facebook just "borrows" the idea and implements it on their own. They would have a significant advantage due to the lack of API restrictions.

Or more generally, everything is mathematics.

Notation is a solved problem. Math got it wrong, Lisp got it right.