Sadly, due to how the industry tries to abuse it's paying customers it is actually much easier to participate in a torrent swarm than to create your own similar media files from the physical disks you already own. This is a practical issue caused by the industry's own paranoia and disrespect for the paying customer.
This is a bit of a peeve for me. When I buy a DVD or CD, it's generally ripped to our media server in fairly short order, and the disk is placed safely in a drawer. [Note for any lawyer-wannabe: format shifting your media is perfectly legal where I live.]
Unfortunately, some companies go to considerable lengths to obfuscate the structure of their DVD. The Teaching Company is one of the worst, and we've bought almost a hundred of their DVDs. Tricks range from a need to rely on the BUP instead of the IFO, to weird correspondence between titles and actual shows, and show order not at all linked to title or chapter order. With teeth gritted, I have ripped almost every DVD we've bought (exceptions are ones we won't watch again), so they're all on the server.
However, I often think it would be easier to torrent the damn things. Since format shifting is legal, making it so painful is a form of customer abuse - they're just pushing people to torrent stuff they already own. In addition to the potential legal consequences, this just increases the swarm size and facilitates others in the same swarm.
But mostly wrong; it's a classic troll which successfully got modded up. See, for example this post for a quick explanation of why it's wrong. Or you could just check your account settings which include the option "no public profile".
When I had to create a google acc to use youtube, I had the same idea about Google back then. They will identify me with my modem only a few years later... I dont like this connected account things on the net. Personally.
Google's privacy statement says you can access and control (even delete) any detail you don't want them to have, except stuff they are legally required to retain. However, I do agree on the dislike for connectedness of personal data. One solution is DON'T SIGN UP! Another solution is to use fake data (as in my several abandoned Facebook accounts).
Even older laptops are fine. I've got a 4 year old Dell Inspiron 9600 that has Ubuntu 10.04 installed and it works great. The only issues I have with it are persistent with any OS and caused by the laptop itself.
And this is being posted from a more than 7½ year-old laptop, also running Ubuntu 10.04 (actually lubuntu 10.04, with the LXDE desktop). This laptop has been running Ubuntu since the days of Warty Warthog, and we expect to get several more years out of it. All hardware has been supported since Breezy, and it runs everything we need snappily enough (Thunderbird, Chromium, Opera, Inkscape, Gimp, OpenOffice, etc.). Mind you, it only has a Centrino processor and is maxed out with 1GiB RAM, so heavy lifting (e.g. video processing) is done on a newer PC. However, it has a 17" 1920x1200 screen which still knocks the socks off those of newer laptops.
For a newbie, I'd recommend either Ubuntu (Gnome) or PCLinuxOS (KDE). Both have LXDE editions if a trimmed-down version is needed for older hardware.
No - wait... the TSA should actively WORK in every OR in the country to make sure no doctors are implanting bombs in someone who may then fly at some later time, which the doctor knows, and for which he could then set the timing apparatus...
Hmmm... Picture a mostly-washed minimum wage security drone in the OR, picking his nose while staring into the patient's opened chest and shedding dandruff all around. It would certainly shift the focus of malpractice lawsuits away from the surgeons.
email me your gmail address at jacer@mailinator.com
I'll check it tonight and send you a Google+ invite.
This goes for anyone else too.
Is this for real, or are you just trolling to see who will publish their email addresses in a public place? So far, there are only three, perhaps partly because slashdot is mostly frequented by paranoid cynics, or friendless sociopaths.
Alternatively, did bvukich or koalacuhe or stevetop159 actually receive a real google+ invite? Or are you now just waiting for the spamflood to start?
Google has a long track record of products that never took off. Google+ may be no exception. They probably shouldn't overentangle things into it in an attempt to "force" it into popularity.
I'm pretty sure every company has a wall of shame; must I bring up Bob, the Newton, or Clippy? This feels more like a consolidation than the launch of a new product. I'm concerned about how this will affect Google's CLI, I have an extensive number of scripts for backing up my photos to Picasa on-the-fly.
And then there's Microsoft Access. The original one (serial communications) not the current database application. It used to have a mention on Wikipedia, but now even that is gone. Motto: if you have an application that becomes am utter failure, re-use the name until it becomes attached to a product which is a success. Then its association with failure is buried.
For those whose memories are short, Microsoft Access was a serial communication program which competed with Hayes Smartcom II and suchlike back in the days of DOS. It flopped, partly because people had alternatives, and in part because most of the alternatives were better (but don't look at the prices, really, don't). Here's a 1986 article on modem sharing and how Microsoft Access would probably do it in the future while other did it already.
Nobody in their right mind would choose to use a touchscreen if they have a keyboard and mouse nect to them.
You make unwarranted generalizations. My mother - who is 48 now - has always had problems with "technical" stuff, and in particular using computers. She had a laptop, but using it was always a pain for her. Last year I bought her an iPad, and it became her primary device for surfing the Net and reading email. It also got her into the whole e-book thing.
As for myself, I've had a netbook for a while, but I've got a tablet now (two, in fact - a Honeycomb one and then also an iPad 2, since Google is slow in getting their shit right), and I don't use it as a portable device so much so as a convenient thingy that I can use while sitting or even lying down comfortably.
Generalizations are a potential trap in any discussion, but anecdotes are at least as bad. At 48, your mother must be near the inept end of the scale (not intended as an insult, BTW) if she has difficulties using a PC. I could believe such difficulty as a general attribute of my own mother's generation - she's approaching 90 - but not of mine. I am several years older than your mother, and know of nobody in my generation who has such difficulties with laptops and suchlike. Everybody uses them, at work and/or at leisure. Many of us use multiple different systems (Linux, Windows, OSX, Android, iOS, and various proprietary systems) with comparable facility.
Although I have used computers for almost four decades, they were initially mainframes accessed with decks of punched cards and minis needing reels of paper tape. That's probably further from today's desktop metaphor than the working environment of a typical non-computer person of that time. The required adaptability is for changes in interfaces, not for any particular interface. Most interfaces are not eternal - how well might someone like your mother cope in 10-15 years, when the current tablet interface might be fading away?
No matter how much might you wield, you can't make someone forget something.
Strictly speaking, electroconvulsive "therapy" (especially bilateral with high currents) can effectively destroy memories. Luckily, there are legal restrictions on these procedures. But let's not give the intellectual property fiends another bad idea.
Adjust the sliders to match the production increases over the last ten years, and you get 38 years left for oil, 42 years left for natural gas, and 44 years left for coal. Which makes the premise that "The World has Huge Natural Gas Reserves" totally false, unless you have no children and only expect to live for 40 years or less.
How many years of Sunlight Reserves do we have left?
Over 4,000,000,000 years.
Do you need a visualization to understand the difference between 40 years and 4,000,000,000 years?
A visualization would not help to explain this ratio. People rarely understand numbers with more than a couple of digits, and would probably just classify it emotionally as "something bigger than 10".
To absolutely guarantee a win, I think Google would have been safe with going for their namesake a Googol. I doubt even Microsoft would be willing to outbid that, even if it was in Somali Cents. I have no idea why they didn't just go for it.
Just because the judge doesn't know how to do it, does not mean that it is not trivial, or that the software in question is not commonly, and legally, available for free.
Exactly. An analogy would be some people communicating via American Sign Language in a public place. Such a conversation would probably be meaningless to the judge and to the lawyers and to most observers. Indeed, many people might even consider it nontrivial to understand, requiring a certain degree of expertise.
However, nobody in their right mind would accuse a bystander who did understand it of illegally eavesdropping a public exchange using American Sign Language. Perhaps this is one line of reasoning that Google's lawyers might use.
They were trying to prove that there are in fact creatures that are stupider, lazier, dirtier, more opportunistic and definitely willing to strike when a man is down than police.
They should have tried lawyers, then.
Vultures are minor league in comparison.
That's crazy talk. This is Slashdot. Where anything remotely related to Apple or Microsoft must be met with derision! There's no need to bring logic or common sense into the discussion!
Um, but logic and common sense both demand that we heap derision upon Apple and Microsoft (and Adobe and Oracle and Sony and RIAA/MPAA and patent trolls and any other manifestations of evil that crop up).
Let me repeat: The people buying the stuff want the OS to trust random shit connected to it with little to no hassle.
They don't give a shit if you don't like how insecure it is, but unless your dropping 500k on PC's every year, who do you think manufacturers are listening to....?
Where I work (Fortune 100 company), we drop a lot more than a measly $500k per year on computers. Those to be given to employees are first re-imaged by IT with one of several function-specific Windows images. Depending on the type of employee, there may only be an unprivileged user account with no software installation or customization capability. Even in R&D and at executive level, nobody gets a full administrator account, although installation of software is grudgingly permitted for R&D (the paranoids running IT do not relish the thought of installing the packages we need in R&D). There are policy enforcement daemons, anti-virus packages and updaters, anti-spyware which has been customized to permit our corporate spyware, special VPNetc. Administration is all done remotely, and laptops all have whole-disk encryption. And CDs and USB drives don't "just work"; they have autorun permanently disabled and when a volume is inserted, it is not accessible until it's cleared by two different virus scans.
The amount being dropped on all this security rigmarole probably exceeds the amount being spent on computers for employees. The manufacturers (and Microsoft?) appear not to be listening. Go figure.
I basically treat non-LTS Ubuntus as betas for the LTS. I don't expect them to work. I expect many things to be broken.
Yup, that's the truth: they are betas. I ran Warty and Breezy, but since Dapper (the first LTS), I've stuck with LTS releases on most of our boxes. Recently, I have not bothered installing non-LTS releases on any box; it just leads to too much grief. I have briefly looked at 10.10 and 11.04 on VMs, just the same way as I occasionally look at other distros.
The computer OS trusts random USB sticks, random CDs, etc. (files are executable, possibly even by autorun).
Some people plug random USB sticks, CDs, floppies, etc. into PCs (some people are idiots).
These are both problems. One is mostly fixable by relatively simple technology. The other is not really fixable, except by rather drastic means. Which problem do you suppose we should try to fix?
Hint: most of the online world communicates through facebook.
This clearly involves a new definition of the word "most". About half the online world is in Asia-Pacific, where Facebook penetration is barely 17%. Your statement implies its penetration is at least 83% over the rest of the world, and it's nowhere close to that (even in the USA, where it's highest).
Do I have a choice? Co-workers/Friends (use the term "friend" losely) get insulted if I don't "like" or comment on their inane ramblings at least 3-4 times a week.
Yes, you have a choice. And your "friends" sound more like bullies than friends. Tell them to sod off and communicate via email like most of the world. Big hint: email users vastly outnumber facefuck victims like yourself.
Google's new "What do you love" service was particularly useless when I entered pussy. Most of the results were "no results were found", and the geographic suggestions were out by more than 1000km!
Slashdot Mirror
Sadly, due to how the industry tries to abuse it's paying customers it is actually much easier to participate in a torrent swarm than to create your own similar media files from the physical disks you already own. This is a practical issue caused by the industry's own paranoia and disrespect for the paying customer.
This is a bit of a peeve for me. When I buy a DVD or CD, it's generally ripped to our media server in fairly short order, and the disk is placed safely in a drawer. [Note for any lawyer-wannabe: format shifting your media is perfectly legal where I live.]
Unfortunately, some companies go to considerable lengths to obfuscate the structure of their DVD. The Teaching Company is one of the worst, and we've bought almost a hundred of their DVDs. Tricks range from a need to rely on the BUP instead of the IFO, to weird correspondence between titles and actual shows, and show order not at all linked to title or chapter order. With teeth gritted, I have ripped almost every DVD we've bought (exceptions are ones we won't watch again), so they're all on the server.
However, I often think it would be easier to torrent the damn things. Since format shifting is legal, making it so painful is a form of customer abuse - they're just pushing people to torrent stuff they already own. In addition to the potential legal consequences, this just increases the swarm size and facilitates others in the same swarm.
I dont know, he's kinda right.
But mostly wrong; it's a classic troll which successfully got modded up. See, for example this post for a quick explanation of why it's wrong. Or you could just check your account settings which include the option "no public profile".
When I had to create a google acc to use youtube, I had the same idea about Google back then. They will identify me with my modem only a few years later... I dont like this connected account things on the net. Personally.
Google's privacy statement says you can access and control (even delete) any detail you don't want them to have, except stuff they are legally required to retain. However, I do agree on the dislike for connectedness of personal data. One solution is DON'T SIGN UP! Another solution is to use fake data (as in my several abandoned Facebook accounts).
Even older laptops are fine. I've got a 4 year old Dell Inspiron 9600 that has Ubuntu 10.04 installed and it works great. The only issues I have with it are persistent with any OS and caused by the laptop itself.
And this is being posted from a more than 7½ year-old laptop, also running Ubuntu 10.04 (actually lubuntu 10.04, with the LXDE desktop). This laptop has been running Ubuntu since the days of Warty Warthog, and we expect to get several more years out of it. All hardware has been supported since Breezy, and it runs everything we need snappily enough (Thunderbird, Chromium, Opera, Inkscape, Gimp, OpenOffice, etc.). Mind you, it only has a Centrino processor and is maxed out with 1GiB RAM, so heavy lifting (e.g. video processing) is done on a newer PC. However, it has a 17" 1920x1200 screen which still knocks the socks off those of newer laptops.
For a newbie, I'd recommend either Ubuntu (Gnome) or PCLinuxOS (KDE). Both have LXDE editions if a trimmed-down version is needed for older hardware.
Unfortunately, you can't patch users.
If they pay enough, I'll patch them (afterwards).
The sadist in me detects an enticing business opportunity!
No - wait... the TSA should actively WORK in every OR in the country to make sure no doctors are implanting bombs in someone who may then fly at some later time, which the doctor knows, and for which he could then set the timing apparatus...
Hmmm... Picture a mostly-washed minimum wage security drone in the OR, picking his nose while staring into the patient's opened chest and shedding dandruff all around. It would certainly shift the focus of malpractice lawsuits away from the surgeons.
email me your gmail address at jacer@mailinator.com
I'll check it tonight and send you a Google+ invite.
This goes for anyone else too.
Is this for real, or are you just trolling to see who will publish their email addresses in a public place? So far, there are only three, perhaps partly because slashdot is mostly frequented by paranoid cynics, or friendless sociopaths.
Alternatively, did bvukich or koalacuhe or stevetop159 actually receive a real google+ invite? Or are you now just waiting for the spamflood to start?
Forgot the linky bit for that 1986 article.
Google has a long track record of products that never took off. Google+ may be no exception. They probably shouldn't overentangle things into it in an attempt to "force" it into popularity.
I'm pretty sure every company has a wall of shame; must I bring up Bob, the Newton, or Clippy? This feels more like a consolidation than the launch of a new product. I'm concerned about how this will affect Google's CLI, I have an extensive number of scripts for backing up my photos to Picasa on-the-fly.
And then there's Microsoft Access. The original one (serial communications) not the current database application. It used to have a mention on Wikipedia, but now even that is gone. Motto: if you have an application that becomes am utter failure, re-use the name until it becomes attached to a product which is a success. Then its association with failure is buried.
For those whose memories are short, Microsoft Access was a serial communication program which competed with Hayes Smartcom II and suchlike back in the days of DOS. It flopped, partly because people had alternatives, and in part because most of the alternatives were better (but don't look at the prices, really, don't). Here's a 1986 article on modem sharing and how Microsoft Access would probably do it in the future while other did it already.
Posting to undo inappropriate mod (click error - damn slashdot for removing the mod confirmation step).
Nobody in their right mind would choose to use a touchscreen if they have a keyboard and mouse nect to them.
You make unwarranted generalizations. My mother - who is 48 now - has always had problems with "technical" stuff, and in particular using computers. She had a laptop, but using it was always a pain for her. Last year I bought her an iPad, and it became her primary device for surfing the Net and reading email. It also got her into the whole e-book thing.
As for myself, I've had a netbook for a while, but I've got a tablet now (two, in fact - a Honeycomb one and then also an iPad 2, since Google is slow in getting their shit right), and I don't use it as a portable device so much so as a convenient thingy that I can use while sitting or even lying down comfortably.
Generalizations are a potential trap in any discussion, but anecdotes are at least as bad. At 48, your mother must be near the inept end of the scale (not intended as an insult, BTW) if she has difficulties using a PC. I could believe such difficulty as a general attribute of my own mother's generation - she's approaching 90 - but not of mine. I am several years older than your mother, and know of nobody in my generation who has such difficulties with laptops and suchlike. Everybody uses them, at work and/or at leisure. Many of us use multiple different systems (Linux, Windows, OSX, Android, iOS, and various proprietary systems) with comparable facility.
Although I have used computers for almost four decades, they were initially mainframes accessed with decks of punched cards and minis needing reels of paper tape. That's probably further from today's desktop metaphor than the working environment of a typical non-computer person of that time. The required adaptability is for changes in interfaces, not for any particular interface. Most interfaces are not eternal - how well might someone like your mother cope in 10-15 years, when the current tablet interface might be fading away?
No matter how much might you wield, you can't make someone forget something.
Strictly speaking, electroconvulsive "therapy" (especially bilateral with high currents) can effectively destroy memories. Luckily, there are legal restrictions on these procedures. But let's not give the intellectual property fiends another bad idea.
I have absolutely no idea what the summary is about - it makes no sense and there is no context...
Um, did you finish High School? Or are you just being deliberately obtuse?
Adjust the sliders to match the production increases over the last ten years, and you get 38 years left for oil, 42 years left for natural gas, and 44 years left for coal. Which makes the premise that "The World has Huge Natural Gas Reserves" totally false, unless you have no children and only expect to live for 40 years or less.
How many years of Sunlight Reserves do we have left?
Over 4,000,000,000 years.
Do you need a visualization to understand the difference between 40 years and 4,000,000,000 years?
A visualization would not help to explain this ratio. People rarely understand numbers with more than a couple of digits, and would probably just classify it emotionally as "something bigger than 10".
To absolutely guarantee a win, I think Google would have been safe with going for their namesake a Googol. I doubt even Microsoft would be willing to outbid that, even if it was in Somali Cents. I have no idea why they didn't just go for it.
Hmmm, a Googol of Ostmarks, perhaps?
"nontrivial technical ability or software"
Just because the judge doesn't know how to do it, does not mean that it is not trivial, or that the software in question is not commonly, and legally, available for free.
Exactly. An analogy would be some people communicating via American Sign Language in a public place. Such a conversation would probably be meaningless to the judge and to the lawyers and to most observers. Indeed, many people might even consider it nontrivial to understand, requiring a certain degree of expertise.
However, nobody in their right mind would accuse a bystander who did understand it of illegally eavesdropping a public exchange using American Sign Language. Perhaps this is one line of reasoning that Google's lawyers might use.
They were trying to prove that there are in fact creatures that are stupider, lazier, dirtier, more opportunistic and definitely willing to strike when a man is down than police.
They should have tried lawyers, then.
Vultures are minor league in comparison.
That's crazy talk. This is Slashdot. Where anything remotely related to Apple or Microsoft must be met with derision! There's no need to bring logic or common sense into the discussion!
Um, but logic and common sense both demand that we heap derision upon Apple and Microsoft (and Adobe and Oracle and Sony and RIAA/MPAA and patent trolls and any other manifestations of evil that crop up).
Let me repeat: The people buying the stuff want the OS to trust random shit connected to it with little to no hassle.
They don't give a shit if you don't like how insecure it is, but unless your dropping 500k on PC's every year, who do you think manufacturers are listening to....?
Where I work (Fortune 100 company), we drop a lot more than a measly $500k per year on computers. Those to be given to employees are first re-imaged by IT with one of several function-specific Windows images. Depending on the type of employee, there may only be an unprivileged user account with no software installation or customization capability. Even in R&D and at executive level, nobody gets a full administrator account, although installation of software is grudgingly permitted for R&D (the paranoids running IT do not relish the thought of installing the packages we need in R&D). There are policy enforcement daemons, anti-virus packages and updaters, anti-spyware which has been customized to permit our corporate spyware, special VPNetc. Administration is all done remotely, and laptops all have whole-disk encryption. And CDs and USB drives don't "just work"; they have autorun permanently disabled and when a volume is inserted, it is not accessible until it's cleared by two different virus scans.
The amount being dropped on all this security rigmarole probably exceeds the amount being spent on computers for employees. The manufacturers (and Microsoft?) appear not to be listening. Go figure.
I basically treat non-LTS Ubuntus as betas for the LTS. I don't expect them to work. I expect many things to be broken.
Yup, that's the truth: they are betas. I ran Warty and Breezy, but since Dapper (the first LTS), I've stuck with LTS releases on most of our boxes. Recently, I have not bothered installing non-LTS releases on any box; it just leads to too much grief. I have briefly looked at 10.10 and 11.04 on VMs, just the same way as I occasionally look at other distros.
These are both problems. One is mostly fixable by relatively simple technology. The other is not really fixable, except by rather drastic means. Which problem do you suppose we should try to fix?
Hint: most of the online world communicates through facebook.
This clearly involves a new definition of the word "most". About half the online world is in Asia-Pacific, where Facebook penetration is barely 17%. Your statement implies its penetration is at least 83% over the rest of the world, and it's nowhere close to that (even in the USA, where it's highest).
as well?
Who cares? MS is soooo 1990s. And a multiple instantiation of pure evil. Let them rot...
Though I admit this is probably better than Facebook.
Well, that's not hard. Anything better than rubbing your face with a running chainsaw is better than Facebook...
And yet you still use Facebook, daily?
Do I have a choice? Co-workers/Friends (use the term "friend" losely) get insulted if I don't "like" or comment on their inane ramblings at least 3-4 times a week.
Yes, you have a choice. And your "friends" sound more like bullies than friends. Tell them to sod off and communicate via email like most of the world. Big hint: email users vastly outnumber facefuck victims like yourself.
about another mysterious new Google service as well.
Google's new "What do you love" service was particularly useless when I entered pussy. Most of the results were "no results were found", and the geographic suggestions were out by more than 1000km!