I thought this story was interesting, especially in light of the story a day or two ago about how there weren't any torrents for newly released music on TPB (with all the caveats that came with TFA). The barrier to entry for music production, or really, any kind of entertainment media, has been steadily dropping, to where the reproduction of the created content is almost effortless. Anyone can have a band in their garage and produce halfway decent sounding music, if they're willing to put the time and effort in to create something. A person can write and publish a novel electronically and do fairly well with it. The barrier to game production, in terms of financial outlays, is essentially gone. It's the same use of technology as a multiplier which enabled the information revolution in the first place, with the creation of the printing press. However, what all of those efforts don't have is a solid and pervasive marketing campaign behind them, and that's what a major artist for a major label is "buying" when they get a pittance out of their music being played someplace, or what a game studio or author gets when they are able to sign a deal with a publisher. Let's face it -- production costs are largely nil, but it's the ability to get the word out about something, and like them or hate them, this is what marketers do, and they don't work for cheap. I don't really see the situation going away -- they are a lot of people creating niche media, but there is still money to be made in mass market production. (yes, there are some things I haven't covered, such as the staggering cost of creating a movie or AAA game, and a need to make a profit on them, but I can paint with as broad a brush as I want on a comment board)
Maybe he could've made a bigger contribution to the educational level of the country by volunteering to teach people to read, or computer science to poor kids in a rural or urban setting, or something more useful than this. Fine, make a blog post about it, then shut up and move on. Anything on this level is a complete waste of time and one's limited lifespan.
I've been thinking about picking up a Raspberry Pi just to mess around with. Part of the appeal is running a very small, cheap, and open platform that I can tinker with as much as I want. Windows doesn't necessarily fit into that paradigm, and I think that will be true of a lot of other people. I have nothing against windows and have spent most of my career in that space, but I'd also like to spend more time in the Linux world. Why? Just because. That said, adding windows to the options for the RP may prove useful for people who aren't looking to experiment, but want a small utilitarian processor for various tasks and don't want to take the time to get familiar with Linux, etc. Again, it's not like someone has put a gun to your head and told you you had to use Windows on it.
Your response is pretty reasonable, but unfortunately, the American political and media climate is sprinting headlong into the "crazy zone," where most discourse is viewed through one political lens or another. Simply by stating that you want to see what science says about a subject can be taken to mean that you are a closet Marxist. Being skeptical of something that is a widely-held position means that you're a tinfoil hat wearer. The environment here is so hyper-charged that any kind of reasonable discussion is the except to how things are usually done. In the end, it means that any serious issue can't be effectively addressed, because any sort of compromise is automatically seen as a loss, not simply trying to take care of a situation.
I can't help but think that if the Senate voted affirmatively that climate change was real, then everyone would applaud them and the article would not have been posted. Like a lot of things, what seems to work and not work is very situational, based on whose ox is getting gored.
That said, while it should not be particularly relative what a legislative body thinks of a scientific issue -- after all, scientists aren't voting on whether or not the Senate is deeply, hideously, irrevocably corrupt, stupid, and incompetent -- a political stunt like that sets the tone for a lot of people who are just looking to have their particular bias confirmed -- "Oh, hey, look what the Senate said...normally while I hate government, I'll put that aside for a second and be glad they agree with me! Murka, hell YEAH!"
Overall, the fact that this vote took place shows just how badly science, along with everything else in this country, has become politicized. The political debate should be a non-starter, and efforts to reduce carbon emissions should simply be a policy like not dumping barrels of plutonium into the sea or letting rivers catch on fire.
Someone needs to really cash in on the idea of games which a) don't require you to buy a bunch of in-app purchases to actually beat the game, b) are yours to keep after you've paid the publisher/retailer some money, and c) don't make you feel like you just got raped after buying it. In other words, turn the clock back to the 90s before all the money grubbing got completely out of hand.
I'm reminded of the "Tzigane" in Alongside Night. It's really nothing but a black market, in this case for transportation. Most people will feel about black markets however they feel about the level of control with other political and social issues, so I won't dive into that...just interesting to see the parallels between real life and fiction.
It's long past time that we got out of the nationalist, playground bully mentality that we're stuck in, and start collectively working together to address global warming, resource depletion, and the fact that we will go extinct much sooner if we don't start looking at ways to get off of the Earth permanently. I don't really know how to get that ball rolling, except to say that people need to start decoupling these issues from politics and moral/religious squabbles, and recognize that it's a matter of shared survival.
Enough anecdotes usually warrant at least a cursory investigation, such as a certain type of plant creating a physiological effect...but I'd guess if you posted under your real name, you wouldn't make such a stupid statement.
While it's popular to launch on screeds about religion -- and some are valid, given some of the dumb stuff that comes out of the mouths of some religious people -- I'd point out that anarcho-primitivism, radical environmentalism, etc, have the potential to be just as damaging to the human race and launch us into a new dark age as well. Stupid is stupid, whatever the source.
On one hand, you have people pushing crap that's not even in the realm of plausible pseudoscience (like that pressure cooker doodad which was supposed to change the molecular arrangement of water molecules). On the other hand, you have the realm of vitamins and other alternative treatments which may not necessarily be shown to be effective in FDA-approved studies, but seem to offer genuine anecdotal evidence to their benefits. It seems like the happy medium would be to just stick these things in the category of "Unproven Quackery" and be done with it.
There seems to be no end to pinheads like this who run around and pontificate about crap they know nothing about. And, oh, hey, nice try impressing us with how sophisticated you are..."Oooh, look at me! I was at the museum of modern art! I'm ever so much better than you!" And, of course, she is part of the media class which spends a considerable amount of time glorifying violence to bring in entertainment dollars. The reality is that dumbshits like her owe most of their modern existence to "hackers" such as the Royal Society and others who refused to accept what they were told as conventional wisdom of the day and began "hacking" science and the natural world, producing great advances and inventions, and so on. I'll stop the rant now, and just say that useless flapjaws like her are the reason I ignore the major media...reading virtual fish wrappers like her column just wastes time I could spend doing more productive stuff which will actually help improve the lives of people instead of just making me look stupid in front of a national audience.
People really don't get this principle when they say "There ought to be a law..." as if declaring something by fiat will make it so. Should people respect the environment? Yes. Should they behave in a socially responsible way? Yes. Etc... The problem is that unless people's desires align with that sort of thinking, they're not going to change how they act. It's a social problem, where we live in a society that values excessive individualism (although, in an oddly conformist way, material wealth, quick and shallow self-gratification (i.e. all your problems go away with a pint of ice cream or a little pill), and so on. People should also remember that regulators and politicians are cut from the same sort of cloth as the people in BP who're trying to get around these bans (and then our political system and government makes more sense all of a sudden).
Politicians and regulators still have yet to realize that people will do what they see fit, despite laws, regulations, and penalties. On the personal side, if you're trying to regulate people harming themselves, they are willing to spray paint in a bag and destroy their brains by inhaling it to "get high"...what law can you make that will affect such a naked desire to harm one's self? Outside of the brain damage, this seems to be the same sort of thing, on a much larger scale. The market always exists, and always will exist, because it's nothing but a measure of how much people value certain things and outcomes and what sort of price they're willing to pay to get them. BP spending some money to export crude this way just shows that they're willing to go a little higher over these regulations.
That's helpful, if not quite the same thing. Is there an option to make it snap to an angle when doing that? Looked a little, didn't run across anything.
I spend a lot of time (too much time) creating and editing textures for meshes. I downloaded Krita and messed with it for a few minutes, to see how it compared to Gimp. One thing that immediately jumped out is the archaic (i.e. 1980's) method of drawing a straight line. In Gimp, this is super-easy...the last place you were drawing is where the origin of a straight line is. In Krita, it looks like you're stuck having to do it the old-fashioned way of dragging the line from one point to another (I moved to Gimp from Paint.NET for this reason, among others). It seems like it is a very feature-rich tool, but seems lacking in usability in some areas (based on 20 minutes of searching, it seems like others have found some "pain points" of their own with it). It does look like a good tool for doing illustrations, though, so it's worth a look for people who tend more toward that type of work, but for editing/creating textures, I'm not sold.
It always seems that when companies start trying to branch out into wildly dissimilar industries, it's a sign of trouble within the organization. Do what you do well, figure out how to do it better if things aren't going how you'd like them. Don't try making sushi if you've always sold donuts.
The "jump the shark" moment for "WMD" was when the surviving Boston bomber was charged with using a WMD. Horrible, yes. Evil, yes. However, it's not a nuclear, chemical, or biological weapon. I'm wondering how long it will before assault rifles or 3d printed handguns will be labeled "WMDs."
And, optionally, you try not to be the guy whom the legislative hammer is brought down on by politicians looking to make a buck, which is the other side of the coin. But, yes, when I hear people complain about the "free market," they obviously have no idea how our current economy functions.
You actually do make some good points, and I've found that the majority of people really aren't douches. My issue with the original post/story was that it seemed like this piece probably belonged somewhere else besides Slashdot. After all, most readers here live/breathe/eat tech on an insider level, to where we have a tech life, as opposed to a tech "lifestyle." We generally engineer the hardware and software that other people write about and use. The psychological dependence on tech, in that losing an item would be such a traumatic experience, is not something many of us necessarily identify with. Most people here are cognizant enough about the issues of security and trust that it really comes sense nature to use not to leave our data in a vulnerable state. At the most, we're reduced to the physical loss of the item, as opposed to feeling like we're losing control of our lifestyle because of it. Truthfully, I can see the same sort of connection with the anger over Beta -- Slashdot represents a very niche and unique perspective (again, people whose life, not lifestyle, is tech) and trying to alter that brings a great deal of discomfort because of what someone is trying to imply about us.
Slashdot Mirror
I thought this story was interesting, especially in light of the story a day or two ago about how there weren't any torrents for newly released music on TPB (with all the caveats that came with TFA). The barrier to entry for music production, or really, any kind of entertainment media, has been steadily dropping, to where the reproduction of the created content is almost effortless. Anyone can have a band in their garage and produce halfway decent sounding music, if they're willing to put the time and effort in to create something. A person can write and publish a novel electronically and do fairly well with it. The barrier to game production, in terms of financial outlays, is essentially gone. It's the same use of technology as a multiplier which enabled the information revolution in the first place, with the creation of the printing press. However, what all of those efforts don't have is a solid and pervasive marketing campaign behind them, and that's what a major artist for a major label is "buying" when they get a pittance out of their music being played someplace, or what a game studio or author gets when they are able to sign a deal with a publisher. Let's face it -- production costs are largely nil, but it's the ability to get the word out about something, and like them or hate them, this is what marketers do, and they don't work for cheap. I don't really see the situation going away -- they are a lot of people creating niche media, but there is still money to be made in mass market production. (yes, there are some things I haven't covered, such as the staggering cost of creating a movie or AAA game, and a need to make a profit on them, but I can paint with as broad a brush as I want on a comment board)
Oh, just get a sense of humor already...
Maybe he could've made a bigger contribution to the educational level of the country by volunteering to teach people to read, or computer science to poor kids in a rural or urban setting, or something more useful than this. Fine, make a blog post about it, then shut up and move on. Anything on this level is a complete waste of time and one's limited lifespan.
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof. Zero-tolerance policies, in turn, require extraordinary stupidity.
I've been thinking about picking up a Raspberry Pi just to mess around with. Part of the appeal is running a very small, cheap, and open platform that I can tinker with as much as I want. Windows doesn't necessarily fit into that paradigm, and I think that will be true of a lot of other people. I have nothing against windows and have spent most of my career in that space, but I'd also like to spend more time in the Linux world. Why? Just because. That said, adding windows to the options for the RP may prove useful for people who aren't looking to experiment, but want a small utilitarian processor for various tasks and don't want to take the time to get familiar with Linux, etc. Again, it's not like someone has put a gun to your head and told you you had to use Windows on it.
Your response is pretty reasonable, but unfortunately, the American political and media climate is sprinting headlong into the "crazy zone," where most discourse is viewed through one political lens or another. Simply by stating that you want to see what science says about a subject can be taken to mean that you are a closet Marxist. Being skeptical of something that is a widely-held position means that you're a tinfoil hat wearer. The environment here is so hyper-charged that any kind of reasonable discussion is the except to how things are usually done. In the end, it means that any serious issue can't be effectively addressed, because any sort of compromise is automatically seen as a loss, not simply trying to take care of a situation.
I can't help but think that if the Senate voted affirmatively that climate change was real, then everyone would applaud them and the article would not have been posted. Like a lot of things, what seems to work and not work is very situational, based on whose ox is getting gored. That said, while it should not be particularly relative what a legislative body thinks of a scientific issue -- after all, scientists aren't voting on whether or not the Senate is deeply, hideously, irrevocably corrupt, stupid, and incompetent -- a political stunt like that sets the tone for a lot of people who are just looking to have their particular bias confirmed -- "Oh, hey, look what the Senate said...normally while I hate government, I'll put that aside for a second and be glad they agree with me! Murka, hell YEAH!" Overall, the fact that this vote took place shows just how badly science, along with everything else in this country, has become politicized. The political debate should be a non-starter, and efforts to reduce carbon emissions should simply be a policy like not dumping barrels of plutonium into the sea or letting rivers catch on fire.
Someone needs to really cash in on the idea of games which a) don't require you to buy a bunch of in-app purchases to actually beat the game, b) are yours to keep after you've paid the publisher/retailer some money, and c) don't make you feel like you just got raped after buying it. In other words, turn the clock back to the 90s before all the money grubbing got completely out of hand.
I'm reminded of the "Tzigane" in Alongside Night. It's really nothing but a black market, in this case for transportation. Most people will feel about black markets however they feel about the level of control with other political and social issues, so I won't dive into that...just interesting to see the parallels between real life and fiction.
It's long past time that we got out of the nationalist, playground bully mentality that we're stuck in, and start collectively working together to address global warming, resource depletion, and the fact that we will go extinct much sooner if we don't start looking at ways to get off of the Earth permanently. I don't really know how to get that ball rolling, except to say that people need to start decoupling these issues from politics and moral/religious squabbles, and recognize that it's a matter of shared survival.
Enough anecdotes usually warrant at least a cursory investigation, such as a certain type of plant creating a physiological effect...but I'd guess if you posted under your real name, you wouldn't make such a stupid statement.
While it's popular to launch on screeds about religion -- and some are valid, given some of the dumb stuff that comes out of the mouths of some religious people -- I'd point out that anarcho-primitivism, radical environmentalism, etc, have the potential to be just as damaging to the human race and launch us into a new dark age as well. Stupid is stupid, whatever the source.
On one hand, you have people pushing crap that's not even in the realm of plausible pseudoscience (like that pressure cooker doodad which was supposed to change the molecular arrangement of water molecules). On the other hand, you have the realm of vitamins and other alternative treatments which may not necessarily be shown to be effective in FDA-approved studies, but seem to offer genuine anecdotal evidence to their benefits. It seems like the happy medium would be to just stick these things in the category of "Unproven Quackery" and be done with it.
Steal from Peter to pay Paul...it works for the USG, right?
Ho hum. Try exercising some parental responsibility for a change.
Given that statement, I'm tempted to ask if your cat is capable of flushing the toilet and what that fact would mean for the average IQ in the Senate.
There seems to be no end to pinheads like this who run around and pontificate about crap they know nothing about. And, oh, hey, nice try impressing us with how sophisticated you are..."Oooh, look at me! I was at the museum of modern art! I'm ever so much better than you!" And, of course, she is part of the media class which spends a considerable amount of time glorifying violence to bring in entertainment dollars. The reality is that dumbshits like her owe most of their modern existence to "hackers" such as the Royal Society and others who refused to accept what they were told as conventional wisdom of the day and began "hacking" science and the natural world, producing great advances and inventions, and so on. I'll stop the rant now, and just say that useless flapjaws like her are the reason I ignore the major media...reading virtual fish wrappers like her column just wastes time I could spend doing more productive stuff which will actually help improve the lives of people instead of just making me look stupid in front of a national audience.
People really don't get this principle when they say "There ought to be a law..." as if declaring something by fiat will make it so. Should people respect the environment? Yes. Should they behave in a socially responsible way? Yes. Etc... The problem is that unless people's desires align with that sort of thinking, they're not going to change how they act. It's a social problem, where we live in a society that values excessive individualism (although, in an oddly conformist way, material wealth, quick and shallow self-gratification (i.e. all your problems go away with a pint of ice cream or a little pill), and so on. People should also remember that regulators and politicians are cut from the same sort of cloth as the people in BP who're trying to get around these bans (and then our political system and government makes more sense all of a sudden).
Politicians and regulators still have yet to realize that people will do what they see fit, despite laws, regulations, and penalties. On the personal side, if you're trying to regulate people harming themselves, they are willing to spray paint in a bag and destroy their brains by inhaling it to "get high"...what law can you make that will affect such a naked desire to harm one's self? Outside of the brain damage, this seems to be the same sort of thing, on a much larger scale. The market always exists, and always will exist, because it's nothing but a measure of how much people value certain things and outcomes and what sort of price they're willing to pay to get them. BP spending some money to export crude this way just shows that they're willing to go a little higher over these regulations.
That's helpful, if not quite the same thing. Is there an option to make it snap to an angle when doing that? Looked a little, didn't run across anything.
I spend a lot of time (too much time) creating and editing textures for meshes. I downloaded Krita and messed with it for a few minutes, to see how it compared to Gimp. One thing that immediately jumped out is the archaic (i.e. 1980's) method of drawing a straight line. In Gimp, this is super-easy...the last place you were drawing is where the origin of a straight line is. In Krita, it looks like you're stuck having to do it the old-fashioned way of dragging the line from one point to another (I moved to Gimp from Paint.NET for this reason, among others). It seems like it is a very feature-rich tool, but seems lacking in usability in some areas (based on 20 minutes of searching, it seems like others have found some "pain points" of their own with it). It does look like a good tool for doing illustrations, though, so it's worth a look for people who tend more toward that type of work, but for editing/creating textures, I'm not sold.
It always seems that when companies start trying to branch out into wildly dissimilar industries, it's a sign of trouble within the organization. Do what you do well, figure out how to do it better if things aren't going how you'd like them. Don't try making sushi if you've always sold donuts.
The "jump the shark" moment for "WMD" was when the surviving Boston bomber was charged with using a WMD. Horrible, yes. Evil, yes. However, it's not a nuclear, chemical, or biological weapon. I'm wondering how long it will before assault rifles or 3d printed handguns will be labeled "WMDs."
And, optionally, you try not to be the guy whom the legislative hammer is brought down on by politicians looking to make a buck, which is the other side of the coin. But, yes, when I hear people complain about the "free market," they obviously have no idea how our current economy functions.
You actually do make some good points, and I've found that the majority of people really aren't douches. My issue with the original post/story was that it seemed like this piece probably belonged somewhere else besides Slashdot. After all, most readers here live/breathe/eat tech on an insider level, to where we have a tech life, as opposed to a tech "lifestyle." We generally engineer the hardware and software that other people write about and use. The psychological dependence on tech, in that losing an item would be such a traumatic experience, is not something many of us necessarily identify with. Most people here are cognizant enough about the issues of security and trust that it really comes sense nature to use not to leave our data in a vulnerable state. At the most, we're reduced to the physical loss of the item, as opposed to feeling like we're losing control of our lifestyle because of it. Truthfully, I can see the same sort of connection with the anger over Beta -- Slashdot represents a very niche and unique perspective (again, people whose life, not lifestyle, is tech) and trying to alter that brings a great deal of discomfort because of what someone is trying to imply about us.