Re:Napster? Feh.
on
All The Rave
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· Score: 5, Insightful
I consider the copying of music and other digital media to which I do not own the copyright or to which I have not been given the express permission by the owner of said copyright to be theft.
I consider wandering off with a CD I haven't paid for to be theft. I consider downloading songs I haven't paid for and don't have permission to download copyright infringement, because that's what it is. I don't consider either to be acceptable, but neither to I consider both of them to be identical.
I think it's "You Always Have Other Options". Which is fortunate, considering the quality (or lack thereof) of their premium email service. But I'll save that story for another rant.
Correct, but _massive_ annoyances are terror too. What if all of (big metro area) have to drink bottled water? And we run out of it pretty quick and people raid other people homes to get some?
Hurricanes and floods cause runs on bottled drinking water all the time, along with massive power outages and a general disruption of services and infrastructure. Heck, any major natural disaster is more infrastructurally disruptive than any terrorist attack, but rarely have they resulted in rioting in the streets or people killing each other for the necessities of life - at least not in the US.
I really don't see how this pile of data is going to help a terrorist. Simply cutting off one or more bits of modern conveniences isn't going to bring society to its knees. If a bridge is destroyed, people will use another 'til it's rebuilt. If phone lines are cut, people will use the post office 'til it's fixed. If the power goes out, people will catch up on some sleep. If the water is contaminated, people will switch to bottled 'til it's safe again.
Killing people causes terror, because nobody wants to get killed. Cutting off infrastructure causes annoyance, because it happens regularly already. And when it happens, people will get by like they always have.
I use it for data management, system administration chores and CGI programming.
What are its strengths
Python has a nice clean syntax that tends to re-use language constructs, which makes it easy to learn and read. It makes good use of objects and exceptions and it has a solid standard libarary of goodies. And, it has no shortage of additional modules to use. Plus, the whole of it is highly malleable.
and its weaknesses?
It's not the fastest language out there, some don't like its whitespace-based syntax and it doesn't have the breadth of pre-built modules as older languages like Perl have.
Why is it worth learning another programming language?
It is if you have problems to solve and don't particularly care for the tools you're using now.
I rip the caps-lock key off my keyboards as soon as I get them out of the box.. it annoys me greatly and I never use it.
I just re-map the caps lock to another control key. That way my fingers always find it in the right spot and I never have to worry about any stupid ALL CAPS mode.
Why shouldn't they be hooked early? Do you think that businesses are just going to magically stop using MS Office in the near future?
If the workforce knows an alternative to MS Office, prefers an alternative to MS Office and can get the same job done just as well using an alternative to MS Office, businesses are going to magically use an alternative to MS Office.
If you are really interested in preservation buy the full cabinet and original ROMS then burn the backups in case they flake.
That would be nice, assuming the world suddenly becomes entropy-free. Unfortunately, maintaining a Tempest vector monitor isn't much of an option these days. Nor is trying to stream off a fresh set of DECO cassette system tapes every time you want to play the original Boulder Dash. Even laser disk titles like Dragon's Lair are slowly degrading and won't be playable on the original consoles forever - and burning new disks for them isn't likely. Even Capcom's popular CPS-2 arcade board ships with a battery holding the decryptions keys, and once that battery dies the games will cease to be playable.
In the long term, emulation is the only thing keeping these titles alive; cell phone ports are not the answer.
Good news: you may actually be able to find your old favorites and play them for a quarter on your cell phone. Bad news: these games are ecnimically viable again so there is no way you can make an argument that those ROMS you downloaded are for "historical preservation purposes". Worse yet, if comanies start making real money on these cell phone arcades with retro games, you can expect a crackdown on all those ROM sites.
In case you hadn't noticed, there's already been a big crackdown on ROM sites, and there has been for a long time. It's not 1996 anymore, and the days of easy access to ROMs is long gone.
Furthermore, playing ports of classic games on cell phones does absolutely nothing to preserve them. For one thing, the titles aren't likely to be emulated using the original ROMs, which makes them no better than any other port. And even if they were, there's no way in hell you're going to be able to hook your phone up to an arcade monitor and arcade stick and play the title as it was meant to be played.
Playing port of the classics on phones is a nice way to restore interest in them. But it doesn't do shit to keep the originals preserved. That's what emulation is for.
The PalmOS maintains about 80% market share in the PDA market. That includes actual Palm devices, Sony's Clie line, Handspring and so forth. Historically Microsoft hasn't been very good at expanding into markets in which they can't leverage their OS monopoly, so Pocket Windows' lack of success shouldn't be too surprising. But the continued competition from Microsoft should help the marketplace from stagnating, which isn't such a bad thing.
One possibility that's really only feasible with digital projection is the possibility of having a film change its framerate on-the-fly to accomodate what's going on on the screen. For example, a movie might run at only 24 fps for a slow dramatic scene. Then, when the action starts, it could ramp up to 60fps for extra-smooth explosions and ramp back down to 24 fps afterward.
Once digital projection is a reality, all sorts of new possibilities in filmmaking open up...
In the US, defamation is a blanket term for both slander and libel, neither of which applies to a true statement. Here's a bit of additional info on the subject.
Thanks for the libel, we were wondering who we were going to sue today. See you in court!
It's only libel if it's not true. And it'll be hard to prove one isn't a professional litigious bastard while suing someone else for being called that:)
Has anyone else noticed that the smooth scrolling [1] doesn't really scroll that smooth? For example, if you do a "pg up" or "pg dn" in a window with general.smoothScroll set to "true" it does a wacky herky-jerky page up/down scroll. weird.
I've noticed the scrolling isn't smooth when the browser is doing something else at the same time - like loading a page in another tab. When nothing else is going on in the browser (and one's system load isn't too high, I'm sure) my scrolling is quite smooth. But the lack of "constant smoothness" is probably why the feature isn't in the Preferences yet.
Here's one for RawHide that works just fine on RH9. And don't forget to download the rest of the Mozilla 1.4-6 packages. It's not as new as RC2, but it's got the nice antialiasing stuff and has some improvements over 1.3.
I'm hoping there'll be an RPM of the official 1.4 release. But rpmfind.net lists of a few RawHide Mozilla-1.4 RPMs that work just fine on a RH 9 box. I haven't been able to determine just which "official" Mozilla build they are, but they have the nice antialiasing that I've come to enjoy from the GTK2-linked builds.
Or, to put it another way, no one really knows what invention will "change the world" (as the article author puts it) until the world actually changes. The telephone and powered flight, for instance, were also just "pointless gadgets" when they were first invented. It wasn't until much later than their importance became clear.
Labor-saving devices in particular, the sort the article author derides most, are what give us the free time to read his articles about the uselessness of those devices. Which I find amusing.
Unfortunately this results in some things becoming virtually unobtainable once people are no longer interested in a file, but there's usually at least a few people still seeding and leeching files even with somethings that are months old.
Of course, once virtually nobody is interested in the file any longer, the main "seed" machine should have no trouble fulfulling the entire request for the file itself since, by definition, there won't be any competition for it. And, should the file suddenly gain new popularity, the Torrent-ness will ramp right back up again to keep the bytes flowing smoothly.
It's not hard to envision a new generation of digital monks, decrypting or transcribing data from long-dead DRM technologies back to open formats. Because without something like them, this "copy protected" stuff is going to be "future protected" forever - and no one will know the artists had ever created it at all.
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I consider wandering off with a CD I haven't paid for to be theft. I consider downloading songs I haven't paid for and don't have permission to download copyright infringement, because that's what it is. I don't consider either to be acceptable, but neither to I consider both of them to be identical.
I think it's "You Always Have Other Options". Which is fortunate, considering the quality (or lack thereof) of their premium email service. But I'll save that story for another rant.
Hurricanes and floods cause runs on bottled drinking water all the time, along with massive power outages and a general disruption of services and infrastructure. Heck, any major natural disaster is more infrastructurally disruptive than any terrorist attack, but rarely have they resulted in rioting in the streets or people killing each other for the necessities of life - at least not in the US.
Killing people causes terror, because nobody wants to get killed. Cutting off infrastructure causes annoyance, because it happens regularly already. And when it happens, people will get by like they always have.
I use it for data management, system administration chores and CGI programming.
Python has a nice clean syntax that tends to re-use language constructs, which makes it easy to learn and read. It makes good use of objects and exceptions and it has a solid standard libarary of goodies. And, it has no shortage of additional modules to use. Plus, the whole of it is highly malleable.
It's not the fastest language out there, some don't like its whitespace-based syntax and it doesn't have the breadth of pre-built modules as older languages like Perl have.
It is if you have problems to solve and don't particularly care for the tools you're using now.
Why? Because then one would have to program in and maintain Perl code.
Like chicken, surely.
I just re-map the caps lock to another control key. That way my fingers always find it in the right spot and I never have to worry about any stupid ALL CAPS mode.
August. And it's a free upgrade if you buy before July 31st.
If the workforce knows an alternative to MS Office, prefers an alternative to MS Office and can get the same job done just as well using an alternative to MS Office, businesses are going to magically use an alternative to MS Office.
Seen WordStar lately?
That would be nice, assuming the world suddenly becomes entropy-free. Unfortunately, maintaining a Tempest vector monitor isn't much of an option these days. Nor is trying to stream off a fresh set of DECO cassette system tapes every time you want to play the original Boulder Dash. Even laser disk titles like Dragon's Lair are slowly degrading and won't be playable on the original consoles forever - and burning new disks for them isn't likely. Even Capcom's popular CPS-2 arcade board ships with a battery holding the decryptions keys, and once that battery dies the games will cease to be playable.
In the long term, emulation is the only thing keeping these titles alive; cell phone ports are not the answer.
In case you hadn't noticed, there's already been a big crackdown on ROM sites, and there has been for a long time. It's not 1996 anymore, and the days of easy access to ROMs is long gone.
Furthermore, playing ports of classic games on cell phones does absolutely nothing to preserve them. For one thing, the titles aren't likely to be emulated using the original ROMs, which makes them no better than any other port. And even if they were, there's no way in hell you're going to be able to hook your phone up to an arcade monitor and arcade stick and play the title as it was meant to be played.
Playing port of the classics on phones is a nice way to restore interest in them. But it doesn't do shit to keep the originals preserved. That's what emulation is for.
Yeah, and then you'll get sued by Electronic Arts. No thanks!
Or, perhaps less simply, it's the notion that writing code for its own sake can be worthwhile - both to the writer and to everyone else.
The PalmOS maintains about 80% market share in the PDA market. That includes actual Palm devices, Sony's Clie line, Handspring and so forth. Historically Microsoft hasn't been very good at expanding into markets in which they can't leverage their OS monopoly, so Pocket Windows' lack of success shouldn't be too surprising. But the continued competition from Microsoft should help the marketplace from stagnating, which isn't such a bad thing.
Once digital projection is a reality, all sorts of new possibilities in filmmaking open up...
In the US, defamation is a blanket term for both slander and libel, neither of which applies to a true statement. Here's a bit of additional info on the subject.
It's only libel if it's not true. And it'll be hard to prove one isn't a professional litigious bastard while suing someone else for being called that :)
I've noticed the scrolling isn't smooth when the browser is doing something else at the same time - like loading a page in another tab. When nothing else is going on in the browser (and one's system load isn't too high, I'm sure) my scrolling is quite smooth. But the lack of "constant smoothness" is probably why the feature isn't in the Preferences yet.
Here's one for RawHide that works just fine on RH9. And don't forget to download the rest of the Mozilla 1.4-6 packages. It's not as new as RC2, but it's got the nice antialiasing stuff and has some improvements over 1.3.
I'm hoping there'll be an RPM of the official 1.4 release. But rpmfind.net lists of a few RawHide Mozilla-1.4 RPMs that work just fine on a RH 9 box. I haven't been able to determine just which "official" Mozilla build they are, but they have the nice antialiasing that I've come to enjoy from the GTK2-linked builds.
Labor-saving devices in particular, the sort the article author derides most, are what give us the free time to read his articles about the uselessness of those devices. Which I find amusing.
Of course, once virtually nobody is interested in the file any longer, the main "seed" machine should have no trouble fulfulling the entire request for the file itself since, by definition, there won't be any competition for it. And, should the file suddenly gain new popularity, the Torrent-ness will ramp right back up again to keep the bytes flowing smoothly.
At least in theory.
It's not hard to envision a new generation of digital monks, decrypting or transcribing data from long-dead DRM technologies back to open formats. Because without something like them, this "copy protected" stuff is going to be "future protected" forever - and no one will know the artists had ever created it at all.
I might need a second watch for that...