Actually, in this case, their political history is a potent weapon wielded by the people. The French Revolution should keep the government afraid of what happens when the ruling class gets all uppity :).

Self-reply: should have RTFA :p. Apparently there was no jury o.O. I take it all back. Apparently, if even well-off people would rather roll over and play dead rather than stand up and fight, they don't deserve much sympathy.

As opposed to laypeople who'll go "what the fuck does that mean?" and "Screw it. I'll just find for the plaintiff, coz' lookit at the cute little kid who suffered cuzza the big bad doctor"? If you allow for the possibility of medical professionals being biased, I don't see how the solution is getting ignorant people to decide cases where a deep knowledge of medicine is needed to even understand the issue at hand. No thank you, better to be biased by medical facts than some obscure ideology.

Justice should be blind, not stupid. Of course, my opinion is worth crap here, because any shyster who succeeded in extorting 20mil in a case like this would have had to start out by systematically eradicating any vestiges of medial knowledge from the jury. I can just see the pretrial questions: "How is babby formed?"

Good thing that hope is meaningless. Library ebooks have been around for a looooong time now, with the same paradigm. The only thing new is ... well, absolutely nothing. Well, maybe the fact that Sony has finally jumped on the bandwagon and breathed new life into a ... healthy and thriving library book market. *yawn* I've been borrowing DRM'd ebooks from the Cleveland Public Library for over 9 years now and reading it on one portable reader after another. Try not to have a knee-jerk reaction to DRM. DRM is fine for rentals (you're renting the property - the owners can do whatever the fuck they want to hobble it). DRM is NOT fine for sold content. Write that on the board 500 times :p.

+1.

Considering that the world's stock of rich patrons would consist mostly of rich old farts, get ready for some of the most boring literature ever conceived by man.

Oh wait ...

As far the T-shirts and mugs and all that trash, I hardly think selling kitschy garbage to eke out a living is more dignified than charging people for the actual creative stuff they produce. By the way, in case it needs to be made explicit, Munroe SOLD the freaking books, didn't give them away. And sold them at way above the actual manufacturing price (look it up at some point and you'll see that manufacturing costs are actually much lower than people think - most of the book costs have to do with promotion, advances, overhead and shit like that. Which means that self-published authors like webcomic artists are merely taking advantage of an established price point that is totally artificial for them). No free lunch - if those creative artists are going to make a living from their "art", they're going to violate your amusing ideas of art at some point.

Did you even read any post before yours? The B&N nook has supported Adobe Digital Editions and Overdrive for a long time now (used in conjunction with tons of libraries around the US). This story about a pissant 50 libraries in the UK signals a severely ignorant submitter. "Breathes new life into library books" - my sainted arse. The lendme feature that you touched upon is crippled - no arguments there. However, the essential idea is probably the best that can be done as far as lending goes. You want two copies of a book simultaneously readable - farking pay for two copies. Paying the author one book's royalty doesn't entitle you to mass-produce the damn thing.

As much as I loathe DRM, I must take exception to this ridiculous concept. The one reader at a time has nothing to do with imitating dead tree books. It is a direct crossover from the software industry and its pay-per-license paradigm. Why is that so hard to understand? In a way, it's far superior to anything the software industry has managed to come up with. You can't lend software licenses can you?

*sigh* never mind. This is weapons-grade funny.

No, realistic would mean what you said. "Realistic" means what I said ;) (as other people have commented, we are used to certain imperfections and that's what we think of as real (in the context of video). Somehow we have this dual definition of realism as it pertains to what you see with the naked eye and what you see on a screen. Or at least I do, perhaps our descendants won't.

Very interesting! Thanks for the detailed explanation. Although, I don't totally get your statement about HDR looking real - we simply don't see those great highlights and such fantastic depth of field (in the sense of all objects looking clear irrespective of their depth coordinates) in real life. That's why (to me), the example video looked very artificial (but beautiful as all hell).

That's kinda what i was going for (OP). That example HDR video did not look "real" (where "real" is defined by our old experiences).

So, HDR video would help make movies look like ... video games??? Is it just me or does that video (that parent linked to) look amazingly like a (post-HalfLife2) game? I guess this should be a fantastic clue for game programmers who usually try to go the other way ;). Lack of HDR = more "realistic" video? (where realistic is defined by what people are used to). Find an algorithm to intelligently degrade the dynamic range in a rendering and CGI becomes more photorealistic.

Sorry, neglected to state my main point. Because of that difference I pointed out, the hard sciences tend to have much more stable equilibria. You need BOTH (1) a perceived problem with the current consensus and (2) an actual alternative to supplant it with. The latter is extraordinarily difficult to come by as time goes on (and differences between rival worldviews get more and more subtle). This is why encyclopedias of science (i.e. the basic principles according to consensus) remain current much longer than others. Even when there are feverish battles for consensus, it is more in the vein of two princes dueling it out while the old king stays on the throne until there's a clear winner.

Indeed. But you happened to pinpoint the precise difference between the two. A convergence, if you will, in the hard sciences and a lack of it in philosophy and the softer sciences (mind you, this is in no way meant to be an indictment of these fields, sometimes a lack of hardness is exactly what's called for).

My meaning should become clear when you consider that once a paradigm is overthrown, you don't get physicists or biologists or chemists dredging up the overthrown stuff and claiming that those old paradigms are actually better suited to explaining reality. You won't have any sane person claiming that Socrates had a better grasp of kinematics than Galileo (or that Newtonian mechanics has more predictive and explanatory power than SR (and so on to GR).

You see the directionality? It's the difference between a damped oscillator (that eventually relaxes to an equilibrium) and an undamped one (for softer fields) or even a negatively dampled one (for things like politics - where the disagreements just keep on amplifying ;)).

That's a rather clear example. When you put it like that, it (unfortunately) rings true. I believe I came across this kind of issue (though not in a publication context) when I read about "synthesis" vs "analysis" as a kid (re: writing proofs). If I understood correctly, this was the difference between the "forward" and "backward" analyses (exactly the two ways you described). You're right that pedagogically speaking, this is a piss-poor way of doing things.

I guess I'd just hesitate to attribute it simply to trying to impress people simply because in my own field (physics), journals usually have extremely tight page limits. As an experimentalist, I frequently run up against many blind alleys (in extremely technical ways that frequently have nothing to do with the physics). That sort of detail is best left to PhD theses - a publication usually needs to be as clear as possible (I guess this is where our examples drift apart, since there would be a LOT of significant information lost in your missing items). Also, we frequently have to restrain ourselves from being too detailed since experimentalists as a bunch are more in the line of "Damn, we tried this 6 different ways (and here they are in gory detail), but only this one worked and ain't it all just so fucking cool? :)". It may be a more visceral "us vs. nature" and we're eager to show our battle scars (SUCH a juvenile metaphor but it's the truth - at least for me :)) - dunno if that makes sense to anyone else.

Conversely, when I run into similar papers that are cleanly presented, I assume from the get-go (as do the people in your field I suppose) that the actual process was nowhere near as clean. An honest academic (and I have yet to meet someone who isn't honest, in this context; though I have no doubt such people do exist - the Fonzis of the academic world :)) will gladly describe (in conversation or through other means) the additional difficulties, circuitous routes and dead ends that are out of place in a publication. Of course, any such detours that are related to the actual physics should be at least alluded to (say in a final discussion section).

To summarize (sorry for rambling on so) - your point is very well taken. Thought I'd give an example from my own field with a slightly different perspective.

By the way, I just realized that my reply to you was embarrassingly snarky and there was no call for that on my part - I apologize. Please ignore the snark but I think the underlying questions are still valid - I'd love to continue that discussion.