The majority of iPod users use MP3s, which aren't affected by DRM
I don't have any numbers, but I remember that a couple years ago I'd complain about DRM to non-techie friends and they wouldn't really get what the big deal was. Now I regularly have my non-techie friends ask my why they can't share songs from ITunes with friends and why they can't play them in different programs or devices. And they start getting annoyed and bitter about it. So, it seems to me that there is some growth in DRM annoyance that will eventually bite Apple here.
But you went through a major change. Do you think you would have been as good at your job when you still had the drug habit? So I guess the problem in this case is that the credit rating hung around after you had fixed the underlying problem. But it still indicated a real problem, I think. It's just too bad that there's not a reliable way to judge if someone has really changed.
Cheers.
We'd need to know what the heck "art" is first.
on
Are Videogames Art?
·
· Score: 1
It's all subjective, but my personal working definition for art is "a creative work intended to inspire emotion". If you balk at the idea of intent being part of the definition, you might prefer "a creative work that inspires emotion", which puts classification into the hands of each audience member. In either case I think video games can qualify. There's a bunch of people who won't every accept it because it doesn't inspire emotion in them. There are people who don't believe any music has been recorded since 1960. It doesn't matter. If it's art to you it's art.
Yep, there are. But Las Vegas isn't the worst city for crime in the US. It's not in the bottom 100. It's worse than the national average, but better than Los Angeles, Oakland, Miami, or Chicago, and is about tied with Boston, none of which have legal gambling. Check it out. So obviously casinos and legalized gambling are not the source of the problem since Las Vegas has those plus all the same things those other more criminally active cities have as well. It seems likely that if the criminals in Las Vegas didn't have casinos to work with they'd just work their magic with something else. Hence my opinion that the casinos are not in fact a problem.
Is online gambling the Alcohol Prohibition of the 21st century?
No, I think that would still have to be Marijuana Prohibition. But the gambling prohibition is stupid too. I've been living in Las Vegas for two years now and I can say that it's no worse than any of the cities with more restrictive laws. It's more gaudy, but I doubt that's the primary intent of all this puritanical prohibition crap.
See, as long as we're all wildly speculating, I think it's the other way around. Everything on Mars is going to be orders of magnitude harder. So if we can't get things under control here then we're totally screwed anywhere else. Humans vastly overestimate their ability to self sustain and effect willful change. Congrats to us for converting a handful of natural resources into other useful stuff, but we're fish out of water without our environment.
I'm a reasonable sci-fi geek, but let's be honest: setting up a sustainable environment off this planet is not a viable option in, conservatively, the next 10 generations. And since we're already experiencing problems with our polution here, we're kind of buggered if we don't get on top of it before then.
Yeah, but that's not what people are talking about. You can do it with a CD as well, but in either case you lose some quality. True that most folks won't notice the difference between a re-encoded mp3 and a decrypted AAC, but some will. So for those folks this is pretty useful.
I am willing to pay for good service. In fact, I do. I know how to download music and TV for free, but I choose to use iTunes because they've got far more dependable service. The search is better, the download speeds are better, the quality of the product is better and more consistent. That's worth a lot to me. About.99 per track. If a company provides a better experience than can be had for free, they can charge for it.
The only thing about iTunes that reduces its value (and prevents me from buying more) is the DRM. That reduces the value considerably since my entire move from CD's to digital music files was in the interest of convenience. I used to use JHymn to unprotect the songs, but it hasn't worked for a while. So the DRM always makes me think twice, and in fact I'm buying less and less because
...but it won't be. What they would need to do would be to find a way to make better effects that still fit in with the tone of the original. That would mean that they'd have to limit themselves to fixed or slow moving cameras, low detail models, and other things that would blend with the live action sequence style. They could actually improve the look and feel of things quite a bit if they did that. But they won't; they'll most likely put in hyperactive cameras and too-much-detail-to-believe models. Every time they cut to an effects shot it'll be like getting poked in the eye.
Beating your competition is the side effect that you derive from pleasing customers. It is not the goal.
A-friggin-men. What the hell is it with all the bloodthirst? Defeating a rival doesn't result in long-term success anyways as new rivals will just take their place. Pleasing your customers is the best long-term strategy. If your passion is pleasing others, get into business, if your passion is defeating others, go join the armed forces or UFC or something.
My uncle Alan his girlfriend have been working for years to get computers into the hands of South Africans, specifically in schools. It is a noble effort and has had some very good results. But my lord, the stories they bring back of trouble on so many levels. Getting computers through customs is very difficult, there's always someone there who will hold the goods up until you grease their palms. Travelling across the land you come across more questionable patrols that demand money to let you pass. Once in the school, there are so few technical people that it is very difficult to even keep a small local network running, forget about the internet. Theft is very high. Even teachers steal the computers to keep them at home... and not even to use: just to have as a decorative status symbol!
My uncle and his girlfriend are very tenacious and clever, so they've been able to succeed so far, but the problems are bigger than one would expect. Just sending computers or money or whatever won't help by itself. There's a whole layer of social disfunction that's got an amazing foothold, and it eliminates almost any motivation for the locals to be ethical. And South Africa is probably one of the easier places in Africa to do this kind of thing.
Anyways, I'm all for helping each other out, but there are political and social issues that need to be worked out before higher level stuff will have a major impact. Heck if I know how to do it.
I have wanted to help them put together a website of their experiences, but we haven't had the time yet.
I spoke with real-life patent examiners recently, and the picture I got was that there really is no test for "obviousness" other than prior art. Seriously: they said that they often reviewed patent applications that they found to be obvious or stupid but they were obligated to grant them because they couldn't find any published evidence of prior art. This doesn't jive with the spirit of patents, but as far as I could figure from talking with them, this is how it worked. They didn't seem to like it much, but that was their job.
The upshot is that if some new enabling technology (like computers or the internet) comes along, for the first several years absolutely anything using that new technology is patentable since there can't be prior art. My opinion is that all of those inventions are obvious if they're so quickly discovered. But there is nothing in the process to reflect this. Sad.
My understanding is that LLCs in the US provide little protection as most lawsuits will also name the individuals as co-defendants if they have deeper pockets than the LLC. IANAL but a lawyer told me this.
Actually... I had some practical questions about the bidet. I've enjoyed travelling overseas many times (don't assume that being amused by differences precludes appreciation and acceptance of a culture). But I admit that I've not tried the standard European bidet. What I don't understand is how it is actually used. The ones I remember looked simply like a low sink. Does one fill it with water and then manually splash the water on themselves? Does one actually touch the affected area? Does one do this before, after, or instead of using paper?
Honestly, it wasn't the weirdness or fear-of-the-different that I had a problem with. It was the tickling. If it didn't tickle so damn much I'd probably be down with it. I'm guessing it didn't tickle you that much. It certainly didn't tickle my wife that much.
One theory (here I again risk too much information) is that it tickles more if you have more ass hair. I won't get into details why I've formulated that theory. But I will note that Koreans have, on average, much less body hair than caucasians.
First off, a warning: this post may have too much information. That said...
Anyone here ever use one of those toilets with the built in ass washer? I visited Seoul a few years back and stayed with in-laws. Their toilet had a little control panel with various symbols on it for male, female, water, wind (no earth or fire, thankfully). I feared it for most of my visit, and never tried it out. Eventually though curiousity got the better of me and i pressed a button after I was done (male water). It made few little mechanical sounds and then a tiny sprayer started shooting warm water into my ass crack. It was so ticklish that I just about jumped off the seat; fumbling around with the controls to get it to stop. Eventually I succeeded, but man that was weird. Despite any potential improvement in hygene, I can't handle the ass tickling fountain thing. But hey, I say try it out sometime if you have the chance.
And look what gets +4 informative on slashdot... someone pasting the obtuse text of a patent that when stripped down obviously describes the type of navigation that NeXT was using for file browsers a decade before the patent. Besides that, organizing stuff in a visual heirarchy is not novel. Or at least certainly wasn't when the patent was issued. Doing it with a music player isn't ingenious. It's a stupid patent. Big surprise.
Is there anyone out there who still thinks that patents foster more innovation than they stifle?
Having had morphine on two seperate occasions post-op in the past three years, I'll have to disagree. Both times a shot of morphine knocked the pain out in seconds flat. Amazing stuff, really. It made me a little disoriented and sleepy, too, but the pain was definitely gone. No addictive properties that I detected with just those two small doses. YMMV.
Yeah, makes sense.. I think that early on people looking around themselves at the world didn't know "how" or "why". And so they attributed that knowledge to a higher power. But now scientific study has clarified many parts of the "how", and some people see that as an invasion on God's territory. The term "God of the gaps" was coined; as though God can only explain the "how" we've yet to figure out. But I think that's just a foolish way to look at it. God is more about the "why", something scientific study has no position on. And I think it makes for a nice division; one with little overlap.
Scientists are trying so hard to prove there isnt a God/Creator/originatior
This is the core misunderstanding right here. As a scientifically minded person I most certainly do not look at science to disprove God. It is completely impossible to disprove God. And not a one of the hotly debated scientific theories, like evolution, has anything at all to do with disproving God. It's about understanding the mechanisms of the world. And sure, it may have been God who created all those mechanisms.
Remember, discovering the earth was round didn't disprove God... even though the bible uses the phrase "four corners". The discovery of bacteria didn't disprove God... even though the bible implies that disease is a manner of spiritual curse.
So let's get it straight: God might have created the world through evolution. The same way he chose to get oxygen to our cells; using well understood physical principles, not through "magic". My point is God and evolution can coexist. Science is not out to kill anyone's faith. Stop hating on science.
The bombing of Dresden Germany and Hiroshima/Nagasaki Japan were purely in the interest of civilian casualties. Without judging the merits of such actions, I'm just saying that they happened.
Voting is a farce, I've got no illusions. But that doesn't mean it's totally ineffective. Especially on the local level, many communities have voted in outlier candidates and changed the way things work. See San Francisco's Castro district for an example of this.
I don't know what you're referring to when you say "outside the system", but regardless, the cost of voting is so low it can't possibly interfere with your other efforts (which if I was a cynical man, I'd guess were none, and that your refusal to vote was just laziness). In any case, your not voting certainly doesn't take any credibility away, so you're not really getting anything by abstaining. And farce or not, it is pretty much confirmed that if all the people who said "voting is a farce" had voted, George Bush would not be in office. It's a self-fulfilling prophecy.
I bet you're smart enough to get around all that crap and take part. Unless you have a more practical suggestion?
Slashdot Mirror
The majority of iPod users use MP3s, which aren't affected by DRM
I don't have any numbers, but I remember that a couple years ago I'd complain about DRM to non-techie friends and they wouldn't really get what the big deal was. Now I regularly have my non-techie friends ask my why they can't share songs from ITunes with friends and why they can't play them in different programs or devices. And they start getting annoyed and bitter about it. So, it seems to me that there is some growth in DRM annoyance that will eventually bite Apple here.
Cheers.
But you went through a major change. Do you think you would have been as good at your job when you still had the drug habit? So I guess the problem in this case is that the credit rating hung around after you had fixed the underlying problem. But it still indicated a real problem, I think. It's just too bad that there's not a reliable way to judge if someone has really changed.
Cheers.
It's all subjective, but my personal working definition for art is "a creative work intended to inspire emotion". If you balk at the idea of intent being part of the definition, you might prefer "a creative work that inspires emotion", which puts classification into the hands of each audience member. In either case I think video games can qualify. There's a bunch of people who won't every accept it because it doesn't inspire emotion in them. There are people who don't believe any music has been recorded since 1960. It doesn't matter. If it's art to you it's art.
Cheers.
Yep, there are. But Las Vegas isn't the worst city for crime in the US. It's not in the bottom 100. It's worse than the national average, but better than Los Angeles, Oakland, Miami, or Chicago, and is about tied with Boston, none of which have legal gambling. Check it out. So obviously casinos and legalized gambling are not the source of the problem since Las Vegas has those plus all the same things those other more criminally active cities have as well. It seems likely that if the criminals in Las Vegas didn't have casinos to work with they'd just work their magic with something else. Hence my opinion that the casinos are not in fact a problem.
Cheers.
Is online gambling the Alcohol Prohibition of the 21st century?
No, I think that would still have to be Marijuana Prohibition. But the gambling prohibition is stupid too. I've been living in Las Vegas for two years now and I can say that it's no worse than any of the cities with more restrictive laws. It's more gaudy, but I doubt that's the primary intent of all this puritanical prohibition crap.
Cheers.
See, as long as we're all wildly speculating, I think it's the other way around. Everything on Mars is going to be orders of magnitude harder. So if we can't get things under control here then we're totally screwed anywhere else. Humans vastly overestimate their ability to self sustain and effect willful change. Congrats to us for converting a handful of natural resources into other useful stuff, but we're fish out of water without our environment.
I'm a reasonable sci-fi geek, but let's be honest: setting up a sustainable environment off this planet is not a viable option in, conservatively, the next 10 generations. And since we're already experiencing problems with our polution here, we're kind of buggered if we don't get on top of it before then.
Cheers.
A friend of mine was recently fired via text message while on vacation. I thought that was pretty poor.
Cheers.
Yeah, but that's not what people are talking about. You can do it with a CD as well, but in either case you lose some quality. True that most folks won't notice the difference between a re-encoded mp3 and a decrypted AAC, but some will. So for those folks this is pretty useful.
Cheers.
I am willing to pay for good service. In fact, I do. I know how to download music and TV for free, but I choose to use iTunes because they've got far more dependable service. The search is better, the download speeds are better, the quality of the product is better and more consistent. That's worth a lot to me. About .99 per track. If a company provides a better experience than can be had for free, they can charge for it.
The only thing about iTunes that reduces its value (and prevents me from buying more) is the DRM. That reduces the value considerably since my entire move from CD's to digital music files was in the interest of convenience. I used to use JHymn to unprotect the songs, but it hasn't worked for a while. So the DRM always makes me think twice, and in fact I'm buying less and less because
Cheers.
...but it won't be. What they would need to do would be to find a way to make better effects that still fit in with the tone of the original. That would mean that they'd have to limit themselves to fixed or slow moving cameras, low detail models, and other things that would blend with the live action sequence style. They could actually improve the look and feel of things quite a bit if they did that. But they won't; they'll most likely put in hyperactive cameras and too-much-detail-to-believe models. Every time they cut to an effects shot it'll be like getting poked in the eye.
But it might sell. So more power to'em.
Cheers.
and not being able to write the music to CD or a portable player?
Not for me. I'd rather pay for the convenience of freely usable music than get usage-restricted tracks for free.
Cheers.
Beating your competition is the side effect that you derive from pleasing customers. It is not the goal.
A-friggin-men. What the hell is it with all the bloodthirst? Defeating a rival doesn't result in long-term success anyways as new rivals will just take their place. Pleasing your customers is the best long-term strategy. If your passion is pleasing others, get into business, if your passion is defeating others, go join the armed forces or UFC or something.
Cheers.
My uncle Alan his girlfriend have been working for years to get computers into the hands of South Africans, specifically in schools. It is a noble effort and has had some very good results. But my lord, the stories they bring back of trouble on so many levels. Getting computers through customs is very difficult, there's always someone there who will hold the goods up until you grease their palms. Travelling across the land you come across more questionable patrols that demand money to let you pass. Once in the school, there are so few technical people that it is very difficult to even keep a small local network running, forget about the internet. Theft is very high. Even teachers steal the computers to keep them at home... and not even to use: just to have as a decorative status symbol!
My uncle and his girlfriend are very tenacious and clever, so they've been able to succeed so far, but the problems are bigger than one would expect. Just sending computers or money or whatever won't help by itself. There's a whole layer of social disfunction that's got an amazing foothold, and it eliminates almost any motivation for the locals to be ethical. And South Africa is probably one of the easier places in Africa to do this kind of thing.
Anyways, I'm all for helping each other out, but there are political and social issues that need to be worked out before higher level stuff will have a major impact. Heck if I know how to do it.
I have wanted to help them put together a website of their experiences, but we haven't had the time yet.
Cheers.
I spoke with real-life patent examiners recently, and the picture I got was that there really is no test for "obviousness" other than prior art. Seriously: they said that they often reviewed patent applications that they found to be obvious or stupid but they were obligated to grant them because they couldn't find any published evidence of prior art. This doesn't jive with the spirit of patents, but as far as I could figure from talking with them, this is how it worked. They didn't seem to like it much, but that was their job.
The upshot is that if some new enabling technology (like computers or the internet) comes along, for the first several years absolutely anything using that new technology is patentable since there can't be prior art. My opinion is that all of those inventions are obvious if they're so quickly discovered. But there is nothing in the process to reflect this. Sad.
Cheers.
My understanding is that LLCs in the US provide little protection as most lawsuits will also name the individuals as co-defendants if they have deeper pockets than the LLC. IANAL but a lawyer told me this.
Cheers.
Actually... I had some practical questions about the bidet. I've enjoyed travelling overseas many times (don't assume that being amused by differences precludes appreciation and acceptance of a culture). But I admit that I've not tried the standard European bidet. What I don't understand is how it is actually used. The ones I remember looked simply like a low sink. Does one fill it with water and then manually splash the water on themselves? Does one actually touch the affected area? Does one do this before, after, or instead of using paper?
Cheers.
Honestly, it wasn't the weirdness or fear-of-the-different that I had a problem with. It was the tickling. If it didn't tickle so damn much I'd probably be down with it. I'm guessing it didn't tickle you that much. It certainly didn't tickle my wife that much.
One theory (here I again risk too much information) is that it tickles more if you have more ass hair. I won't get into details why I've formulated that theory. But I will note that Koreans have, on average, much less body hair than caucasians.
Cheers.
First off, a warning: this post may have too much information. That said...
Anyone here ever use one of those toilets with the built in ass washer? I visited Seoul a few years back and stayed with in-laws. Their toilet had a little control panel with various symbols on it for male, female, water, wind (no earth or fire, thankfully). I feared it for most of my visit, and never tried it out. Eventually though curiousity got the better of me and i pressed a button after I was done (male water). It made few little mechanical sounds and then a tiny sprayer started shooting warm water into my ass crack. It was so ticklish that I just about jumped off the seat; fumbling around with the controls to get it to stop. Eventually I succeeded, but man that was weird. Despite any potential improvement in hygene, I can't handle the ass tickling fountain thing. But hey, I say try it out sometime if you have the chance.
Cheers.
And look what gets +4 informative on slashdot... someone pasting the obtuse text of a patent that when stripped down obviously describes the type of navigation that NeXT was using for file browsers a decade before the patent. Besides that, organizing stuff in a visual heirarchy is not novel. Or at least certainly wasn't when the patent was issued. Doing it with a music player isn't ingenious. It's a stupid patent. Big surprise.
Is there anyone out there who still thinks that patents foster more innovation than they stifle?
Cheers.
Having had morphine on two seperate occasions post-op in the past three years, I'll have to disagree. Both times a shot of morphine knocked the pain out in seconds flat. Amazing stuff, really. It made me a little disoriented and sleepy, too, but the pain was definitely gone. No addictive properties that I detected with just those two small doses. YMMV.
Cheers.
Yeah, makes sense.. I think that early on people looking around themselves at the world didn't know "how" or "why". And so they attributed that knowledge to a higher power. But now scientific study has clarified many parts of the "how", and some people see that as an invasion on God's territory. The term "God of the gaps" was coined; as though God can only explain the "how" we've yet to figure out. But I think that's just a foolish way to look at it. God is more about the "why", something scientific study has no position on. And I think it makes for a nice division; one with little overlap.
Cheers.
Scientists are trying so hard to prove there isnt a God/Creator/originatior
This is the core misunderstanding right here. As a scientifically minded person I most certainly do not look at science to disprove God. It is completely impossible to disprove God. And not a one of the hotly debated scientific theories, like evolution, has anything at all to do with disproving God. It's about understanding the mechanisms of the world. And sure, it may have been God who created all those mechanisms.
Remember, discovering the earth was round didn't disprove God... even though the bible uses the phrase "four corners". The discovery of bacteria didn't disprove God... even though the bible implies that disease is a manner of spiritual curse.
So let's get it straight: God might have created the world through evolution. The same way he chose to get oxygen to our cells; using well understood physical principles, not through "magic". My point is God and evolution can coexist. Science is not out to kill anyone's faith. Stop hating on science.
Cheers.
The bombing of Dresden Germany and Hiroshima/Nagasaki Japan were purely in the interest of civilian casualties. Without judging the merits of such actions, I'm just saying that they happened.
Cheers.
I thought it was 'kinky' when you 'use the whole chicken'? Exotic just doesn't sound right.
Voting is a farce, I've got no illusions. But that doesn't mean it's totally ineffective. Especially on the local level, many communities have voted in outlier candidates and changed the way things work. See San Francisco's Castro district for an example of this.
I don't know what you're referring to when you say "outside the system", but regardless, the cost of voting is so low it can't possibly interfere with your other efforts (which if I was a cynical man, I'd guess were none, and that your refusal to vote was just laziness). In any case, your not voting certainly doesn't take any credibility away, so you're not really getting anything by abstaining. And farce or not, it is pretty much confirmed that if all the people who said "voting is a farce" had voted, George Bush would not be in office. It's a self-fulfilling prophecy.
I bet you're smart enough to get around all that crap and take part. Unless you have a more practical suggestion?
Cheers.