actually, there is an assumption being made, and that is that the price point of a CD is what i as a consumer am willing to spend. The ease of piracy these days means that the RIAA really can't deal with a consumer that doesn't want to pay, they just have to suck it up and try to prevent piracy (which we all know isn't going to happen)
As far as the concerts go, the point i'm trying to make is that artists don't HAVE to propogate their music through the RIAA, there are other sources of revenue besides CD's, concerts and t-shirts being prime examples. yes, downloading music illegally is a copyright violation, but like it or not this is the model of distribution that is being adopted by the mainstream. so if music doesn't want to die, the burden isn't on the audience to support an old model, it's on the artists (no matter what type of music they might make or whether they can perform it live) to sell their music in other forms besides a physical medium.
You have no more of a right to tell them how to do business they don't have to listen to the market do they? they can sit in their high rise corporate penthouses and rant at us filthy pirates. meanwhile, i suspect the artists will figure out there are better ways to earn a living with music, just look at orchestral performers and DJ's.
There is one assumption thats being made here, that if we didn't pirate the music, we would go out and buy it. Fact of the matter is, alot of people who pirate music do it because they weren't willing to pay for ANY music in the first place. These "damages" (which only really hurt the record companies, the artists make trivial money on actual CD sales), are not actually damages at all. there was never money to be stolen, i as a college student have no money to speak of, and therefore can afford no CD's.
I can definately guarantee that when my favorite band comes to town, i won't be pirating the video of the concert, i'll fork up the cash and go see them. THAT's the only place left to make money off music, live performance.
right to life does not extend past your neighbors nose. When you start gassing your neighbors, it's definately outside that right. On a side note, Jefferson was really quoting Locke, who said that everyone has a right to life liberty and property. The pursuit of happiness clause was only added in as an afterthought.
Human rights of a group of people, (like the groups in Kuwait) supercede the right to pursuit of happiness of soldiers who killed them, and insurgents are simply guerilla soldiers.
At work, they blocked myspace and redirected to google. it took about 30 seconds for the 18 year old new guy to find a proxy and get to myspace anyways. Please, half the parents i've met don't even know what browsing history is, much less how to look at it or delete it. It's more important what your kids are doing, not what they're watching. Honestly who grew up without watching pr0n? Well, maybe Bush, but that only helps my case...
i say, let google regulate it, pay the artists, and give the music away for free, simply ad sponsor the download page like they currently do anyways. I know it's only a matter of time until google corrupts just like every other successful group, but hey, when they do we can go from there.
get a projector, most churches have them anyways. If you see the NFL drive up, just whip out the 55" screen and your good to go. Honestly, church is the best place to watch the game, they've got those little cupholders in front of every seat, a flat book to hold your plate of grub on, as soon as they move that guy pinned to the tree out of the view then it'll be perfect!
for all the flak Bush gets about Iraq, and i mostly agree with it, there is one consequence of it all that i don't think many would argue against: Saddam swung from the gallows, and is no longer ruling the kind of political state that we are afraid america is turning into.
Now that doesn't that the current muck up with airline security etc. and a never-ending occupation aren't the fault of the bush regime, but then that's a little bit of everyone's fault. It's a democracy remember? If the politicians implementing these rules thought they would lose voters for it, there's no chance in hell they would go through with it.
At work a running gag has been going where if your looking at a website, someone comes up and presses the reset button, irritating you to no end. To get around this, i removed the power/reset jumpers, swapped the power supply with one that has no on/off switch, and set administrator rights to disable shutdown.
It seemed foolproof...until someone unplugged the power strip. Seems to remind me of Vista's development.
I was still in high school when they made the switch from C++ to java, and it saddened me greatly.
My first CS class they threw us in the nitty gritty of low level C++ code, memory allocation, the works. It was mostly a weeder course for anyone who wanted to keep going with CS.
After they switched to java, the only things covered in class (and this was the second year mind you) were loops (not nested loops, that was considered too complex), function syntax, and the very basics of applets. Most of us who had taken the C++ class were bored silly, and spent maybe 5-10 minutes doing the assignment, and the other 45 minutes toying with applet games we were writing in our spare time.
Now, it gets worse. Once i got my first college CS class it turns out they were teaching the same curriculum as i had taken in HIGHSCHOOL. So, basically i hadn't moved forward an inch in 3 years of CS classes, at least without taking my own initiative outside of class.
The first class freshmen in a CS degree should take is a low level systems course. Since the CS college has such a high dropout rate, the first class should be a weeder course, not HelloWorld. I ended up leaving my CS degree in favor of an English one, once i found out that it really wasn't needed except for most programming jobs. At least with English i learned some logic i can actually use.
Extradition comes to mind. If the country TPB moves to is friendly to the US it's not inconceivable that they would hand them over to the US authorities.
As the homage goes, when you learn everything, you get your bachelors degree. When you realize that there's something you don't know, you get your masters degree. When you realize that you really don't know anything, they give you a Doctorate.
I have noticed that compter techs have an average higher rate of beer belly's than for example, the rest of the world. I know my ass gets more than its fair share of sitting in one day, but that doesn't keep me from going to the gym every once in a while so i don't look like Cartman from the WoW episode.
I think the oompa loompas said it best, "who do you think's to blame? the mother and the father."
I once thought of tossing one of these thermoelectric (TEC) coolers in my system to try and help with waste heat, but the trouble with the seebeck effect is that it reaches a cutoff point fairly quickly. You see, the "cool" side of the tec doesn't remain cool, it heats up as well meaning that the temperature difference grows gradually smaller and smaller, which in turn reduces output of voltage and becomes a vicious cycle, building up more and more heat on the hot side.
TEC's are great when using the peltier effect since the electric side can be managed easily, so long as there is a way to pump away the waste heat. But the seebeck effect is not a solution to waste heat, not unless there is a breakthrough in efficiency i'm not aware of.
Do only minimal metal detector tests to catch the odd gun or stinger missile, and instead focus your efforts around not letting the planes that do get taken over from doing any harm.
Keep all flights at least 50 miles from any major populated areas, and if one needs to land at an airport in a populated area have it escorted by a f-22 raptor on its tail with missiles locked in case the plane veers off course.
It's far more efficient to identify when terrorists have struck and do damage control than to try and screen millions of people per day. Besides, if a terrorist really wanted to get past your controls, he could just swallow some explosives in balloons and regurgitate em on the plane. There's no such thing as perfect security.
while i don't really have a response to that, it does give me some ideas. You know how jobs are moving away from manual labor in lieu of robotics, and mostly towards technology and research? It would be interesting if the power grid became a free market, where anyone who generates power could sell it stock market style. Instead of spending 8 hours a day in a cubicle farm, spend it setting up and maintaining a wave farm if your on the coast, a thermal farm in warmer climates, the list goes on.
The best way to incite change is to make it profitable. and yes, i know that would require sweeping change, we're all wrong anyways so why not be wrong on a grand scale.
They are an ADVERTISING COMPANY! Yknow, for an advertising company they have a history of doing some very altruistic things for the consumer. It wasn't until they were practically a monopoly on search engines (MSN search is a joke, and yahoo is only still around for their online mail services) that they started doing nice things for their happy customers. Gmail, googleoffice, igoogle to name a few. you could make the argument that yes these are just clever ploys to keep their consumer base, but honestly, would you use the MSN search if google didn't have them?
They aren't angels, but i don't think they're deceptive on this front. they really do think that it's better for everyone if the 700mhz range is an open medium.
If Ubuntu were capable of running directx games without an emulator, i think 9 out of 10 gamers would drop windows overnight. As for the larger companies who use autocad, 3dsmax and etc, theres a trend developing to simply develop your own tools on a free platform. It is cheaper than paying multiple tens of thousands of dollars for licensing on windows and the software baggage that you have to use with it.
Microsoft won't ever go under, they're too good at marketing to let that happen. My hopes are that Google will do something about this, they seem to be making inroads to quite a few areas lately.
Of course, if you wanted to see 8 million users (and probably more computers) switch to linux you could get Blizzard to port World of Warcraft to Ubuntu.
Small Claims isn't known for its artful prosecution. The real story here is that a judge ruled that even though the spammer addressed Mr Haselton as the webmaster (and implied owner) of slashdot, obviously the product of code generated spam, that this was not spam. Remember the tubes anyone? There really is a vacancy in knowlegable officials within our government. Inartful as he was, he had a good case. Obviously it was spam and misleading, and washington state has a law against it. This is a failure in our judicial system.
For the moment, xp does pretty much everything most users want out of it. it surfs, does word processing, it has software/hardware support, its relatively stable (after 7 years of patching), and its almost universally familiar. with the single exception of dx10 support being vista only (and alky is working on that), there is no reason, ever, to move from xp.
Linux currently offers the only feature that no version of windows has, a pricetag of $0.00 . So, if someday the dev community manages to figure a way to play all my dx9 and dx10 games natively on linux without an emulator, we may very well see the year of non-windows. It's ok though, i'm sure microsoft can subsist on the Xbox360, if they survive the Wii that is.
do you have a superior system than capitalism in mind?
Sure i do. Its called anarchy. and if you would be so kind as to leave me to my state of nature we could all get along fine without each other.
If they can interpret electrical signals into speech, can they send pre-recorded electrical signals back, effectively making a person speak? And you thought we had political puppets before!
There are two ways to use CCTV cameras, one is simply having them there as a deterent to try and scare would be offenders, the other is to catch someone in the act and identify them. Now, the second strategy is complicated by the fact that in a public place almost all your footage is going to be out of focus. A camera has to be set to a specific focal length which can cover a specific distance from the camera and anything closer. If you set the length too far away, you get a horribly small field of view.
So, given that you might have 3-4 cameras covering a block thats maybe 10,000 square feet, and perhaps 100 square feet of that is actually clear on camera, the odds of catching a crime clearly enough to identify an offender would be minimal.
Therefore if their strategy is simply as a deterent, then we have one conclusion: the criminals in this area don't care if they're being watched, and you just wasted an obscene amount of money.
Slashdot Mirror
As far as the concerts go, the point i'm trying to make is that artists don't HAVE to propogate their music through the RIAA, there are other sources of revenue besides CD's, concerts and t-shirts being prime examples. yes, downloading music illegally is a copyright violation, but like it or not this is the model of distribution that is being adopted by the mainstream. so if music doesn't want to die, the burden isn't on the audience to support an old model, it's on the artists (no matter what type of music they might make or whether they can perform it live) to sell their music in other forms besides a physical medium.
You have no more of a right to tell them how to do business they don't have to listen to the market do they? they can sit in their high rise corporate penthouses and rant at us filthy pirates. meanwhile, i suspect the artists will figure out there are better ways to earn a living with music, just look at orchestral performers and DJ's.
There is one assumption thats being made here, that if we didn't pirate the music, we would go out and buy it. Fact of the matter is, alot of people who pirate music do it because they weren't willing to pay for ANY music in the first place. These "damages" (which only really hurt the record companies, the artists make trivial money on actual CD sales), are not actually damages at all. there was never money to be stolen, i as a college student have no money to speak of, and therefore can afford no CD's.
I can definately guarantee that when my favorite band comes to town, i won't be pirating the video of the concert, i'll fork up the cash and go see them. THAT's the only place left to make money off music, live performance.
i do have to wonder if you could use the crystals (after they are full) as fertilizer, then these things would actually have some market value.
right to life does not extend past your neighbors nose. When you start gassing your neighbors, it's definately outside that right. On a side note, Jefferson was really quoting Locke, who said that everyone has a right to life liberty and property. The pursuit of happiness clause was only added in as an afterthought.
Human rights of a group of people, (like the groups in Kuwait) supercede the right to pursuit of happiness of soldiers who killed them, and insurgents are simply guerilla soldiers.
At work, they blocked myspace and redirected to google. it took about 30 seconds for the 18 year old new guy to find a proxy and get to myspace anyways. Please, half the parents i've met don't even know what browsing history is, much less how to look at it or delete it. It's more important what your kids are doing, not what they're watching. Honestly who grew up without watching pr0n? Well, maybe Bush, but that only helps my case...
i say, let google regulate it, pay the artists, and give the music away for free, simply ad sponsor the download page like they currently do anyways. I know it's only a matter of time until google corrupts just like every other successful group, but hey, when they do we can go from there.
get a projector, most churches have them anyways. If you see the NFL drive up, just whip out the 55" screen and your good to go. Honestly, church is the best place to watch the game, they've got those little cupholders in front of every seat, a flat book to hold your plate of grub on, as soon as they move that guy pinned to the tree out of the view then it'll be perfect!
for all the flak Bush gets about Iraq, and i mostly agree with it, there is one consequence of it all that i don't think many would argue against: Saddam swung from the gallows, and is no longer ruling the kind of political state that we are afraid america is turning into.
Now that doesn't that the current muck up with airline security etc. and a never-ending occupation aren't the fault of the bush regime, but then that's a little bit of everyone's fault. It's a democracy remember? If the politicians implementing these rules thought they would lose voters for it, there's no chance in hell they would go through with it.
At work a running gag has been going where if your looking at a website, someone comes up and presses the reset button, irritating you to no end. To get around this, i removed the power/reset jumpers, swapped the power supply with one that has no on/off switch, and set administrator rights to disable shutdown.
It seemed foolproof...until someone unplugged the power strip. Seems to remind me of Vista's development.
I was still in high school when they made the switch from C++ to java, and it saddened me greatly.
My first CS class they threw us in the nitty gritty of low level C++ code, memory allocation, the works. It was mostly a weeder course for anyone who wanted to keep going with CS.
After they switched to java, the only things covered in class (and this was the second year mind you) were loops (not nested loops, that was considered too complex), function syntax, and the very basics of applets. Most of us who had taken the C++ class were bored silly, and spent maybe 5-10 minutes doing the assignment, and the other 45 minutes toying with applet games we were writing in our spare time.
Now, it gets worse. Once i got my first college CS class it turns out they were teaching the same curriculum as i had taken in HIGHSCHOOL. So, basically i hadn't moved forward an inch in 3 years of CS classes, at least without taking my own initiative outside of class.
The first class freshmen in a CS degree should take is a low level systems course. Since the CS college has such a high dropout rate, the first class should be a weeder course, not HelloWorld. I ended up leaving my CS degree in favor of an English one, once i found out that it really wasn't needed except for most programming jobs. At least with English i learned some logic i can actually use.
i can imagine the translator going off at odd times,
Police: "Freeze!"
Criminal: "No mi gusta las fresa! No el tase yo!"
Phraselator: "I don't like strawberries, you can't appraise me!"
If only you could harness the power of awkward silences...
Extradition comes to mind. If the country TPB moves to is friendly to the US it's not inconceivable that they would hand them over to the US authorities.
As the homage goes, when you learn everything, you get your bachelors degree. When you realize that there's something you don't know, you get your masters degree. When you realize that you really don't know anything, they give you a Doctorate.
I'm expecting my PhD in the mail any day now.
I have noticed that compter techs have an average higher rate of beer belly's than for example, the rest of the world. I know my ass gets more than its fair share of sitting in one day, but that doesn't keep me from going to the gym every once in a while so i don't look like Cartman from the WoW episode.
I think the oompa loompas said it best, "who do you think's to blame? the mother and the father."
I once thought of tossing one of these thermoelectric (TEC) coolers in my system to try and help with waste heat, but the trouble with the seebeck effect is that it reaches a cutoff point fairly quickly. You see, the "cool" side of the tec doesn't remain cool, it heats up as well meaning that the temperature difference grows gradually smaller and smaller, which in turn reduces output of voltage and becomes a vicious cycle, building up more and more heat on the hot side.
TEC's are great when using the peltier effect since the electric side can be managed easily, so long as there is a way to pump away the waste heat. But the seebeck effect is not a solution to waste heat, not unless there is a breakthrough in efficiency i'm not aware of.
Do only minimal metal detector tests to catch the odd gun or stinger missile, and instead focus your efforts around not letting the planes that do get taken over from doing any harm.
Keep all flights at least 50 miles from any major populated areas, and if one needs to land at an airport in a populated area have it escorted by a f-22 raptor on its tail with missiles locked in case the plane veers off course.
It's far more efficient to identify when terrorists have struck and do damage control than to try and screen millions of people per day. Besides, if a terrorist really wanted to get past your controls, he could just swallow some explosives in balloons and regurgitate em on the plane. There's no such thing as perfect security.
while i don't really have a response to that, it does give me some ideas. You know how jobs are moving away from manual labor in lieu of robotics, and mostly towards technology and research? It would be interesting if the power grid became a free market, where anyone who generates power could sell it stock market style. Instead of spending 8 hours a day in a cubicle farm, spend it setting up and maintaining a wave farm if your on the coast, a thermal farm in warmer climates, the list goes on.
The best way to incite change is to make it profitable. and yes, i know that would require sweeping change, we're all wrong anyways so why not be wrong on a grand scale.
i wonder if this means its magnetically sensitive, as in leave it too close to your speakers and your data gets corrupted.
They aren't angels, but i don't think they're deceptive on this front. they really do think that it's better for everyone if the 700mhz range is an open medium.
If Ubuntu were capable of running directx games without an emulator, i think 9 out of 10 gamers would drop windows overnight. As for the larger companies who use autocad, 3dsmax and etc, theres a trend developing to simply develop your own tools on a free platform. It is cheaper than paying multiple tens of thousands of dollars for licensing on windows and the software baggage that you have to use with it. Microsoft won't ever go under, they're too good at marketing to let that happen. My hopes are that Google will do something about this, they seem to be making inroads to quite a few areas lately. Of course, if you wanted to see 8 million users (and probably more computers) switch to linux you could get Blizzard to port World of Warcraft to Ubuntu.
Small Claims isn't known for its artful prosecution. The real story here is that a judge ruled that even though the spammer addressed Mr Haselton as the webmaster (and implied owner) of slashdot, obviously the product of code generated spam, that this was not spam. Remember the tubes anyone? There really is a vacancy in knowlegable officials within our government. Inartful as he was, he had a good case. Obviously it was spam and misleading, and washington state has a law against it. This is a failure in our judicial system.
For the moment, xp does pretty much everything most users want out of it. it surfs, does word processing, it has software/hardware support, its relatively stable (after 7 years of patching), and its almost universally familiar. with the single exception of dx10 support being vista only (and alky is working on that), there is no reason, ever, to move from xp.
Linux currently offers the only feature that no version of windows has, a pricetag of $0.00 . So, if someday the dev community manages to figure a way to play all my dx9 and dx10 games natively on linux without an emulator, we may very well see the year of non-windows. It's ok though, i'm sure microsoft can subsist on the Xbox360, if they survive the Wii that is.
Sure i do. Its called anarchy. and if you would be so kind as to leave me to my state of nature we could all get along fine without each other.
If they can interpret electrical signals into speech, can they send pre-recorded electrical signals back, effectively making a person speak? And you thought we had political puppets before!
There are two ways to use CCTV cameras, one is simply having them there as a deterent to try and scare would be offenders, the other is to catch someone in the act and identify them. Now, the second strategy is complicated by the fact that in a public place almost all your footage is going to be out of focus. A camera has to be set to a specific focal length which can cover a specific distance from the camera and anything closer. If you set the length too far away, you get a horribly small field of view. So, given that you might have 3-4 cameras covering a block thats maybe 10,000 square feet, and perhaps 100 square feet of that is actually clear on camera, the odds of catching a crime clearly enough to identify an offender would be minimal. Therefore if their strategy is simply as a deterent, then we have one conclusion: the criminals in this area don't care if they're being watched, and you just wasted an obscene amount of money.