There is something special about old books...Fsck you DRM! You SUCK! The written word is to important to be censored!
The passage of time censors old books more more than DRM. How many physical originals of your prized first edition of Feynman Lecture on Physics volume 2 still exist? Yet, within a matter of seconds, I was able to find a digital copy.
What is it with conservatives alluding to the assassination of Obama and then trailing off? I've had extended family members do this repeatedly too. It's like they hope for it, but don't want to come out and actually say it.
If you would have read the whole post, it was about the possibility of McCain being assassinated and Palin becoming president.
A boat floating in a harbor has some percentage of its total mass below the water. When the tide comes in, the boat rises up. When the tide goes out, the boat sinks back down. But there is no change in the amount of boat mass above and below the water! The only thing that affects whether the boat goes deeper into the water or not is if additional mass is added, removed, or a hole is punched in the bottom. Governments are well known for punching holes into the titanics of industry, though.
No, it's more like a car and the ISPs are the air pressure in the tire. As long as the tax lets out the same air pressure on all tires everything is ok, until they go flat and then the economy (the car body) can't move forward no matter how much gas (stimulus) you add to the tank (the bank accounts of politicians).
reminds me of the amusing line from the time travel film Primer
Thanks for the reference! I accidentally DVR'd this movie (title said one thing and Primer was recorded) but the first few minutes and the ending credits were cut out. Then after watching it, the DVR broke. I never did know the name of the movie until just now, but really liked it.
I've always hated how the character you're playing never needs to eat, drink, sleep or do something fun once in a while. He always just adventures and fights the bad guys till the campaign is over.
To watch your character sit and eat a meal for 30 minutes, immediately take a crap for 20 minutes, sit on the couch and watch tv for a couple hours before the character goes to bed does not sound like a fun game.
Well, if you'd just been a little more patient and waited until what you *actually* wanted was available, you wouldn't be in this situation, would you?
Well, if you'd just been a little more patient and waited until what you actually *needed* was available, you wouldn't be in this situation either, would you?/
As a reader who is losing vision and the ability to read, the Kindle and US copyright bullshit seriously pisses me off. I no longer "read" books, but instead convert them to audio-books which I play at around 500 words per minute, using the totally awesome Eloquence TTS (the old ViaVoice speech synthesiser). I don't mind paying for the e-books, but Amazon and friends are leaving me high and dry. Their built-in voice in Kindle is completely useless, because it wont play fast and wouldn't be understandable even if it were, and it's not even enabled for many books. It's torture having to listen to it.
I am not making light of your vision loss, but perhaps you did not notice that the Kindle is an e-"READER?" There are better tools to listen to a book than a READER. I don't know why you would do it, but if you purchased an audio book for the kindle, it plays that fairly well.
You've spent time mastering skills that you will only ever put to use in the unlikeliest of events, while others master skills relevant to their chosen professions and thereby take better part in the gains from trade. What a pity for you.
What if your chosen profession is farming?
I don't hunt, but raise and butcher all the meat my family eats. We also grow about 90% of the fruits and vegetables we eat - we can most of the vegetables. Although my chosen profession is not farming, my hobby saves me a considerable amount of money. Butchering your own meat might be too much, but I pity you for not knowing what you are eating.
We're working on a policy and procedure change to fix a customer experience problem caused by multiple copies of public domain titles being uploaded by a multitude of publishers. For an example of this problem, do a search on "Pride and Prejudice" in the Kindle Store. The current situation is very confusing for customers as it makes it difficult to decide which 'Pride and Prejudice' to choose.
It's about time. I own a Kindle 2 and hate searching thru the garbage before I find the correct title.
i trust google more than i trust the lowest bidder for a government contract.
I used to work for a defense contractor and the problem wasn't that we were the lowest bidder, it was the technically illiterate contracts officer that cut something irrelevant from a previous contract and added it to our contract.
Then when we delivered the CDRLs, the customer would get mad because what we delivered wasn't what he wanted. We'd point out that we delivered what was asked for (and what we were legally bound to deliver) and we would usually get a response like "I may have asked for this, but you should have known I wanted that."
...who exactly out there is screaming "Hey I WANT to put big honking greasy fingerprints on my screen! Oh, and I want my kids to scratch the living hell out of my screen when they forget to wipe their hands and grind Cheetos funk into it as well! That's the ticket!"
I'm thinking it's your mom because you then say"
I mean it is hard enough trying to keep your screen from getting funky, especially when you have relatives like my mom that have the nasty habit of touching the screen to point out what she is trying to get to
Re:Coders that work?
on
Coders At Work
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
From the summary "Aside from authoring narrowly focused technical books....Peter Seibel's Coders at Work takes fifteen world-class programmers and distills their wisdom into a book."
So, instead of writing a narrowly focused technical book, they wrote a narrowly focused technical book?
Now would you be so kind to hand over your car keys and driver's license? You do want to follow your own example, right?
No, I won't hand my keys over. I share my vehicle with three other adult drivers. I oversee the usage of that vehicle like a petty tyrant. "You can't combine those 3 trips into just ONE trip into town?" I will continue to jealously guard my car keys. I hope to have everyone trained to think in terms of one trip into town each week. Just doing my little bit to save fuel, and make the roadways safer.
Mr. Tyrant - It's still a car...get it off the road as per your own example.
The example of you gave why you should keep your car is lame. You have described millions of families around the world that have 1 car with a 16 - 20 year old living at home. Nothing special! nothing to be proud of!
Just like all tyrants, you make excuses for why you should be exempted from your own rules.
Too bad your company isn't into wrongly implementing total quality leadership or you don't have a few blackbelts to incorrectly implement LEAN. That would set you guys straight.
I see a ton of people like this in my day to day work and since they have a narrower view of the world (who knows if this is actually less intelligence or not though I often interpret it that way) they are much happier.
I agree! Last time we met, I was thinking that I wish I were as dumb as you. Sure, you're smarter than a lot of people (and therefore moderately happy) but if I had your meager intelligence, I would be so much happier than I am now.
I have a lot of data/programs from my old DOS days in the 80s that I still can access using emulators. Old floppies won't fit in my floppyless computer but I have copied them to my HD since ages back.
That assumes the person will have someone in the family that has an interest in emulators and copying obsolete storeage to whatever is available.
I'd stick with the traditional newspapers, pictures, momentos (watch, jewelry, toys), etc. Those can be read, looked at, touched even when the power is out. They also provide a physical connection to the person placing the item in the capsule - grandpa held this toy in his hands and now I am also.
Can you sit in a room for hours, just watching boring TV, and tolerate one another's annoying quirks? you can then you can build a marriage that will last forever (or at least 'til death).
Or even better, do you have the ability to do things without each other. Staying in a room together without annoying each other for hours is fine, but marriage is being stuck in a room together for years. Sometimes you have to leave the room, be your own person, and then come back to the room.
I always found humor in literature overrated. A few funny bits in any book is fine, but to read an entire book that was suppose to be funny. I dunno I can't see myself enjoying it that much. Even if the jokes were intelligent and witty.
Tell me about it, I hate when I read a really good book that keeps me entertained for hours.
That is the #1 reason we don't have more diesels - the old, 1980's legacy of gutless 40hp diesels.
I would think that the #1 reason we don't have more diesels is that you can't buy them new in California, Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, New York, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island or Vermont. Without those states, the market for diesels is pretty much wiped out.
How about we just scrap social security and then we wouldn't need SSNs. Or allow people to opt out of social security and those people that opted out would not need an SSN.
Putting other people in charge of your media distribution may well be a threat to your privacy, but that's hardly unavoidable nor is it unique to TV -- brick and mortar and online media outlets have been collecting whatever customer information they can for years, from credit card info, points/loyalty cards, etc. Unless you're buying anonymously with cash, or only consuming media from an institution that values privacy (like a library) there's a good chance someone is already tracking your media consumption habits, be they video, book, or otherwise.
That is exactly the point I was trying to make. People "care" about obvious invasions of privacy, but practically every action/transaction is already tracked unless you go to great effort to conceal it.
Slashdot Mirror
The passage of time censors old books more more than DRM. How many physical originals of your prized first edition of Feynman Lecture on Physics volume 2 still exist? Yet, within a matter of seconds, I was able to find a digital copy.
Digital allows the written word to live forever.
If you would have read the whole post, it was about the possibility of McCain being assassinated and Palin becoming president.
It's like a car. Divide it in half and you get a Ford Pinto, not 2 half cars. This is because a car....
No, it's more like a car and the ISPs are the air pressure in the tire. As long as the tax lets out the same air pressure on all tires everything is ok, until they go flat and then the economy (the car body) can't move forward no matter how much gas (stimulus) you add to the tank (the bank accounts of politicians).
And they say customer service is dead.
Thanks for the reference! I accidentally DVR'd this movie (title said one thing and Primer was recorded) but the first few minutes and the ending credits were cut out. Then after watching it, the DVR broke. I never did know the name of the movie until just now, but really liked it.
I'm going to watch it tonight on netflix.
Also, a working prototype would be helpful.
To watch your character sit and eat a meal for 30 minutes, immediately take a crap for 20 minutes, sit on the couch and watch tv for a couple hours before the character goes to bed does not sound like a fun game.
Well, if you'd just been a little more patient and waited until what you actually *needed* was available, you wouldn't be in this situation either, would you?/
I am not making light of your vision loss, but perhaps you did not notice that the Kindle is an e-"READER?" There are better tools to listen to a book than a READER. I don't know why you would do it, but if you purchased an audio book for the kindle, it plays that fairly well.
What if your chosen profession is farming?
I don't hunt, but raise and butcher all the meat my family eats. We also grow about 90% of the fruits and vegetables we eat - we can most of the vegetables. Although my chosen profession is not farming, my hobby saves me a considerable amount of money. Butchering your own meat might be too much, but I pity you for not knowing what you are eating.
It's about time. I own a Kindle 2 and hate searching thru the garbage before I find the correct title.
I used to work for a defense contractor and the problem wasn't that we were the lowest bidder, it was the technically illiterate contracts officer that cut something irrelevant from a previous contract and added it to our contract.
Then when we delivered the CDRLs, the customer would get mad because what we delivered wasn't what he wanted. We'd point out that we delivered what was asked for (and what we were legally bound to deliver) and we would usually get a response like "I may have asked for this, but you should have known I wanted that."
I'm thinking it's your mom because you then say"
So, instead of writing a narrowly focused technical book, they wrote a narrowly focused technical book?
Mr. Tyrant - It's still a car...get it off the road as per your own example.
The example of you gave why you should keep your car is lame. You have described millions of families around the world that have 1 car with a 16 - 20 year old living at home. Nothing special! nothing to be proud of!
Just like all tyrants, you make excuses for why you should be exempted from your own rules.
Too bad your company isn't into wrongly implementing total quality leadership or you don't have a few blackbelts to incorrectly implement LEAN. That would set you guys straight.
I agree! Last time we met, I was thinking that I wish I were as dumb as you. Sure, you're smarter than a lot of people (and therefore moderately happy) but if I had your meager intelligence, I would be so much happier than I am now.
That assumes the person will have someone in the family that has an interest in emulators and copying obsolete storeage to whatever is available.
I'd stick with the traditional newspapers, pictures, momentos (watch, jewelry, toys), etc. Those can be read, looked at, touched even when the power is out. They also provide a physical connection to the person placing the item in the capsule - grandpa held this toy in his hands and now I am also.
Or even better, do you have the ability to do things without each other. Staying in a room together without annoying each other for hours is fine, but marriage is being stuck in a room together for years. Sometimes you have to leave the room, be your own person, and then come back to the room.
Tell me about it, I hate when I read a really good book that keeps me entertained for hours.
I would think that the #1 reason we don't have more diesels is that you can't buy them new in California, Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, New York, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island or Vermont. Without those states, the market for diesels is pretty much wiped out.
How about we just scrap social security and then we wouldn't need SSNs. Or allow people to opt out of social security and those people that opted out would not need an SSN.
Brillian! I only wish that I could mod you up.
That is exactly the point I was trying to make. People "care" about obvious invasions of privacy, but practically every action/transaction is already tracked unless you go to great effort to conceal it.