I know I would have put a lot of my ideas into practice if I had something which would allow me to build the part without having to source machine shops and companies to do plastic molds and such for me.
Something like this will go a long way towards facilitating creativity, whether or not schematics can be controlled by copyright/patent law.
I agree. Copyright as it stands today has become counter-productive to it's original intent.
It was intended to promote creativity. Now it only serves to stifle it.
I wouldn't dare attempt to create a work of art these days, with fear that anything I do will be somehow accused of having a resemblance to an existing copyrighted work.
As the span of time that copyrights endure becomes longer, the more likely you are to inadvertenty re-create something resembling something else already under copyright.
Depression can consume a volume of mental space that can be deep and narrowly focused (such as those who commit suicide over losing someone), or shallow and unfocused. Many people have not heard of the latter, called dysthymia. It is a general state of mild depression lasting for several months or years.
I have not been diagnosed with dysthymia, but most of it's symptoms fit me well.
I don't go anywhere on weekends. I don't bother to make new friends. I've rarely listen to music or watch TV. I have no goals. I have few interests. On the weekends, I stay in bed until I can't sleep anymore. I make excuses to avoid invitations. I just have a general apathy with my life.
But I'm not *really* depressed in the way most people think of depression... I rarely call in sick to work. I laugh when I hear a joke. I keep good personal hygine. I don't drink or do drugs. I always make my doctor/dental appointments. I pay my bills on time. I get important things done without a hitch.
I will often spend hours of my free time just lying on my bed in a darkened room staring at the ceiling, often thinking about what I should do.
I make it into work reliably, but when I get there I don't feel motivated to do any more than what is required.
I have no desire to commit suicide nor do I really have anything to feel *bad* about.
I have no goals nor do I feel motivated to create artificial goals.
I just feel like "blah" most of the time, like I'm just grinding through life.
It's worth reading up on if any of this sound familiar.
I can certianly understand what you have said. I have the same problem with my mind wandering while doing "passive-concentration" activities, such as reading books and watching movies. I also can't understand what people are saying when there is a lot of background noise.
I often get hung up on trivial decisions, always trying to find the most elegant solution to problems which really only required me to get up off my butt and go do something or anything at all.
I was on Paxil for a while for depression, and it actually seemed to make some of these things better, such as decisions or problem solving. Paxil seemed to enhance a sense of apathy, so I was more prone to just go with the first reasonable solution instead of endlessly seeking the best solution. However, it seemed to really cause me problems with concentration even with things where I had to actively concentrate on what I was doing, such as programming or composing messages.
I've read quite a bit on Asperger's Syndrome and I seem to feel that I might have something there, but it's hard to really tell. Sometimes I wonder how much most of these kind of things inter-relate and overlap...
Make a recording of live musical compositions and mass-duplicate for public home consumption.
Profit!
Consolodate, fix prices, and eliminate competition. Do everything in your power to curtail the free market forces.
Profit!
Sign eagar and hopeful but naive artists with numerous conditions which are disproportionally unfair to them, but quite good for your shareholders.
Profit!
Establish a tightly controlled and inflexible promotion and distribution system which maximizes profit at the expense of all else.
Profit!
Lobby congress for laws which protect this system by granting you the power of judicial and executive authority over alleged infrignements of your intellectual property rights.
Profit!
Start suing individual people, such as college students, creating an even stronger opposition to your business model.
Go bankrupt!
This of course, is in an ideal world. In the world we live in, the sheeple will probably continue to consume enough to keep these lunatics going.
What you are doing could be interpreted as *illegal*, but the question of whether it is wrong or not depends on who you ask.
Not all laws are ethical. Some laws are just bad.
Copyright law had a specific intent. Whatever that intent is now obviously differs from the original intent, as demonstrated by the many extensions it has received.
IMO, it is unethical for a business to manipulate the laws to gain a competitive advantage at the expense of the rest of society. The needs of the few do not outweigh the needs of the many.
In addition, it is quite unethical to continue to conduct a campaign of inquisition-style FUD to continuiously patch the cracking foundation of a business model which continues to become more obsolete as technology advances, especially when a preferred alternative has been demonstrated to be fair and effective (i.e. iTunes).
With the ubiquity of the Internet, game publishers have become far too addicted to patching. That phenomenon is starting to spill over from the PC market into the console markets.
Only the publishers with the discipline to look at their long-term interests will expend the proper effort to ensure a quality product.
I was calling to sign up with a new DSL provider. When the guy asked what operating system I was using, I said, "Linux." I was put on hold for five minutes, and then a supervisor came back and told me, "You can't use Linux to connect to the Internet. It's a hacker tool, anyway."
I signed up to pay them an automatic monthly recurring amount about two years ago. I'd highly recommend this approach, since it is completely "set it and forget it".
It helps me feel better about spending money on an occasional DVD purchase or night out to the movies.
I tried Freenet once about six months ago. I never could get it to work behind my NAT box.
I read the documentation, did some port forwarding, but I still couldn't get an indication that it was active.
Maybe it was working, but there was no clear indication amongst the hundreds of stastistics numbers I could browse through in the freenet interface.
The freenet client has waaay too much technical crap exposed to the person running it. How about a Napster / Kazaa / Shareaza type of front-end that makes it dumb-stupid-easy to use?
When that happens (and not until then), Freenet will take off.
After seeing the extended version of FOTR on starz, I'd have to say the few extra clips definitely helps tie up some odd scenes and sudden plot transitions a bit.
If you watch the special effects at the very beginning of the second movie, IIRC, it implies a meta-matrix:
First it shows a matrix-scape, from which it zooms out to show a single character of a higher matrix-scape, from which then the camera zooms out to the beginning scene.
This would explain how things from within the matrix can affect things outside it: physical injuries caused by perceived injuries, smith infecting a "real" person, neo stopping the sentinels, etc.
Now the real question is, how many levels are there?
One thing that has always bugged me was how do they bleed in the "real" world due to something they percieve within the simulated world while they're hooked in?
The "matrix within a matrix" may help explain that, since the two layers could somehow have a (so far unexplained) causal relationship.
The only disappointment would be that this would be too simple of a solution.
For me, one of the good things that has come out of playing MMO games over the past year or so is that the $12 a month is a great investment to keep me from going out all the time and spending even more money on junk I don't need...
I've saved up more money in the past year than ever, and might even use it for a down payment on a house... =)
This can happen to any game and I'm sure SOE/Lucas Arts do not want it to happen. And I applaud any gaming company efforts to stop this.
There is no FFA server on SWG yet, so this statement does not apply.
In the example you gave, the game was ruined becuase people were oppressed by a strong regime of players.
However, in SWG, if you are not an "overt" PvP player, no other player can kill you, and therefore PK griefing techniques are kept to a minimum for those players who choose to remain neutral or covert.
I do understand how that can be quite a thorn in games which do have FFA. However, I think even if they shut down the auction sites, people will still find ways to connect and transact.
Slashdot Mirror
I know I would have put a lot of my ideas into practice if I had something which would allow me to build the part without having to source machine shops and companies to do plastic molds and such for me.
Something like this will go a long way towards facilitating creativity, whether or not schematics can be controlled by copyright/patent law.
I'm in agreement, an example re your last paragraph:
Should we be forced to pay media taxes to the RIAA for CD-Rs we use to backup our boot partitions?
I agree. Copyright as it stands today has become counter-productive to it's original intent.
It was intended to promote creativity. Now it only serves to stifle it.
I wouldn't dare attempt to create a work of art these days, with fear that anything I do will be somehow accused of having a resemblance to an existing copyrighted work.
As the span of time that copyrights endure becomes longer, the more likely you are to inadvertenty re-create something resembling something else already under copyright.
Just let the people vote on everything then you dont need a dictator.
That doesn't always work either.
"You can't have four wolves and one sheep vote on what to have for dinner."
Imagine giving someone the keys to the whole US Economy.
You mean like the Supreme Court did in 2000?
I have a little theory to the effect that, for a certain percentage of the population, GUIs have made focusing a lot more difficult:
heh..
Maybe that's my problem--I've got three monitors at work =P
Depression can consume a volume of mental space that can be deep and narrowly focused (such as those who commit suicide over losing someone), or shallow and unfocused. Many people have not heard of the latter, called dysthymia. It is a general state of mild depression lasting for several months or years.
I have not been diagnosed with dysthymia, but most of it's symptoms fit me well.
I don't go anywhere on weekends. I don't bother to make new friends. I've rarely listen to music or watch TV. I have no goals. I have few interests. On the weekends, I stay in bed until I can't sleep anymore. I make excuses to avoid invitations. I just have a general apathy with my life.
But I'm not *really* depressed in the way most people think of depression... I rarely call in sick to work. I laugh when I hear a joke. I keep good personal hygine. I don't drink or do drugs. I always make my doctor/dental appointments. I pay my bills on time. I get important things done without a hitch.
I will often spend hours of my free time just lying on my bed in a darkened room staring at the ceiling, often thinking about what I should do.
I make it into work reliably, but when I get there I don't feel motivated to do any more than what is required.
I have no desire to commit suicide nor do I really have anything to feel *bad* about.
I have no goals nor do I feel motivated to create artificial goals.
I just feel like "blah" most of the time, like I'm just grinding through life.
It's worth reading up on if any of this sound familiar.
I can certianly understand what you have said. I have the same problem with my mind wandering while doing "passive-concentration" activities, such as reading books and watching movies. I also can't understand what people are saying when there is a lot of background noise.
I often get hung up on trivial decisions, always trying to find the most elegant solution to problems which really only required me to get up off my butt and go do something or anything at all.
I was on Paxil for a while for depression, and it actually seemed to make some of these things better, such as decisions or problem solving. Paxil seemed to enhance a sense of apathy, so I was more prone to just go with the first reasonable solution instead of endlessly seeking the best solution. However, it seemed to really cause me problems with concentration even with things where I had to actively concentrate on what I was doing, such as programming or composing messages.
I've read quite a bit on Asperger's Syndrome and I seem to feel that I might have something there, but it's hard to really tell. Sometimes I wonder how much most of these kind of things inter-relate and overlap...
Another fun trick for someone with an advanced enough technology would be to rotate someone in 4D space, so their left and right are switched.
I am quite curious as to how this would alter their perception. Would everything look backwards to them?
This of course, is in an ideal world. In the world we live in, the sheeple will probably continue to consume enough to keep these lunatics going.
No, no boycott, just no interest.
I'll agree to that.
During the "Napster era" I had the opportunity to explore a lot of music. It helped me realize just how horrible most of high-profile music is today.
I doubt many people have taken this into consideration when looking at the decreasing music sales.
3) Make a monthly recurring contribution to the EFF
I know that what I'm doing is wrong,
See, this is where it gets kinda strange.
What you are doing could be interpreted as *illegal*, but the question of whether it is wrong or not depends on who you ask.
Not all laws are ethical. Some laws are just bad.
Copyright law had a specific intent. Whatever that intent is now obviously differs from the original intent, as demonstrated by the many extensions it has received.
IMO, it is unethical for a business to manipulate the laws to gain a competitive advantage at the expense of the rest of society. The needs of the few do not outweigh the needs of the many.
In addition, it is quite unethical to continue to conduct a campaign of inquisition-style FUD to continuiously patch the cracking foundation of a business model which continues to become more obsolete as technology advances, especially when a preferred alternative has been demonstrated to be fair and effective (i.e. iTunes).
Plain and simple:
With the ubiquity of the Internet, game publishers have become far too addicted to patching. That phenomenon is starting to spill over from the PC market into the console markets.
Only the publishers with the discipline to look at their long-term interests will expend the proper effort to ensure a quality product.
A closed loop with a swamp cooler outdoors would solve the water wasteage, assuming the relative humidity isn't too high.
From Computer Stupidities:
(fun website if you've got a few spare hours)
Congrats =)
I signed up to pay them an automatic monthly recurring amount about two years ago. I'd highly recommend this approach, since it is completely "set it and forget it".
It helps me feel better about spending money on an occasional DVD purchase or night out to the movies.
I tried Freenet once about six months ago. I never could get it to work behind my NAT box.
I read the documentation, did some port forwarding, but I still couldn't get an indication that it was active.
Maybe it was working, but there was no clear indication amongst the hundreds of stastistics numbers I could browse through in the freenet interface.
The freenet client has waaay too much technical crap exposed to the person running it. How about a Napster / Kazaa / Shareaza type of front-end that makes it dumb-stupid-easy to use?
When that happens (and not until then), Freenet will take off.
Actually, if they used a search engine capable of OCR pattern matching algorithms, they could save themselves a lot of manual work...
After seeing the extended version of FOTR on starz, I'd have to say the few extra clips definitely helps tie up some odd scenes and sudden plot transitions a bit.
If you watch the special effects at the very beginning of the second movie, IIRC, it implies a meta-matrix:
First it shows a matrix-scape, from which it zooms out to show a single character of a higher matrix-scape, from which then the camera zooms out to the beginning scene.
This would explain how things from within the matrix can affect things outside it: physical injuries caused by perceived injuries, smith infecting a "real" person, neo stopping the sentinels, etc.
Now the real question is, how many levels are there?
I predict six =P
One thing that has always bugged me was how do they bleed in the "real" world due to something they percieve within the simulated world while they're hooked in?
The "matrix within a matrix" may help explain that, since the two layers could somehow have a (so far unexplained) causal relationship.
The only disappointment would be that this would be too simple of a solution.
Animal Crossing.
For me, one of the good things that has come out of playing MMO games over the past year or so is that the $12 a month is a great investment to keep me from going out all the time and spending even more money on junk I don't need...
I've saved up more money in the past year than ever, and might even use it for a down payment on a house... =)
This can happen to any game and I'm sure SOE/Lucas Arts do not want it to happen. And I applaud any gaming company efforts to stop this.
There is no FFA server on SWG yet, so this statement does not apply.
In the example you gave, the game was ruined becuase people were oppressed by a strong regime of players.
However, in SWG, if you are not an "overt" PvP player, no other player can kill you, and therefore PK griefing techniques are kept to a minimum for those players who choose to remain neutral or covert.
I do understand how that can be quite a thorn in games which do have FFA. However, I think even if they shut down the auction sites, people will still find ways to connect and transact.