Look. You steal creativity. You're proud of it. That's gross to me. End of story.
No, that isn't the end of the story.
Maybe it's a little bit premature to trot out this scenario as a DVD copy of Reloaded hasn't been released, but I'm going to trot it out anyway:
Situation 1: I buy a copy of a DVD and invite my friends over to watch it with me. They get to watch it without paying.
Situation 2: I buy a copy of a DVD, rip it, and FTP it to the same friends. They get to watch it without paying.
Now what exactly is the difference, ethically, and morally, in those two situations? The truth is there is no difference! They're the ones who permitted me to purchase a copy of a movie and there are no constraints pertaining to who I can show it to, providing I don't charge admission. In any case, this whole notion that "creativity" is somehow "property that can be stolen" is ludicrous, especially now, given the new reality that an infinite number of one-off digital copies can be made of a creative work with little or no effort or expense. This is a reality that "content producers" are going to have to learn to deal with...a reality for which conventional legal, ethical, or moral arguments do not apply.
Now before anyone gets all sanctimonious on me here, I should state that my preferred medium for watching a good movie is on a big screen in a theatre, but I don't go to movies in theatres because I believe it to be "unethical" to download them for free. I go to them in a theatre because the theatre is providing a higher quality entertainment experience. It is providing "a high quality entertainment experience" (big-screen theatres; live performances etc) that I believe should be the focus of "content producers" and believe me, if the quality is there, I will be happy to support them financially. Hit me with some specious ethical reasonings and I will be just as happy to tell them to bugger off and die.
Apparently you've never been subjected to the misery that is a PBS pledge drive.
Betty White: If you like great PBS programs like "Do Shut Up" and "Shut Your Gob" you'll want to support our pledge drive. If you watch even one second of PBS and don't contribute, you're a theif, a common theif! PBS Guy: Okay, take it easy, Betty. Betty: Sorry, but these theives make me so mad. You know who you are.... thieves! Homer: You're mad, where's my show!?
Worse, it'll make it easy for corporate leaders to rationalize moving *YOUR* IT job to India. The article doesn't seem too funny now, does it.
Lessee...they want to try troubleshooting...say... a failing hard drive from India? Well fly at 'er byes! Maybe you can change it from there too! Nothing beats on-site support.
BTW I do the "consulting"/contracting thing, but I don't have to fake being busy. When I run out of things to do, I simply go home. It's a good deal all around. I charge a high enough hourly rate to make it worth my while, and they don't have to pay someone a full-time IT salary. And if I want to spend the afternoon at a local watering hole, there's nothing preventing me, as long as the servers aren't on fire.
BUT... the movie didn't make much sense -- it was kind of like USUAL SUSPECTS...
I happened to LOVE The Usual Suspects...the fantastic twist at the end alone was worth the price of admission. Unfortunately it's the fact that most people "don't get it" if a movie displays even a modicum of intelligence that has resulted in the preponderance of pablum and other formulaic crap that hollywood spews forth on an all-to-regular basis. Intelligent movies are few and far between.
...he obviously needs a sharp lesson in being extra careful in who he chooses to take on as clients. A nice Slash-junkmail-bomb might drive that point home.
I've also got a drawerful of NICs and cables. So I configure one PC to be a dedicated filesharing box and create an image set for re-install if it gets beat up and copy the uncorrupted files onto my main system after they've been checked out for my use/listening pleasure. That would pretty much negate their silly little hacking game, wouldn't it? In fact, I could do all my web-based stuff on the filesharing box via VNC and never allow my main system to come in contact with the outside world. Offhand I can think of a bunch of different ways to defeat this sort of silliness. It shouldn't have to come to that though, especially as I don't live in an area where the RIAA has any authority.
Agreed. I'd also like to see a more thorough description of how exactly cell-phones interfere with aircraft nav/com systems. What frequencies are affected and on what devices? Was the interference actually caused by the radiation emanating from the cell phone, or was it simply a case of a dumbshit tech not sweeping the device correctly or that the device wasn't installed (and especially grounded) correctly? Also this line from the article:
...distractions causing aircraft to stray accidentally onto runways or fly at the wrong altitude...
...doesn't indicate whether it was cellphone radiation or the pilot trying to gab on the phone and fly at the same time that caused the mishap.
...(you know, those nifty little removable enclosures) and you rotate 'em periodically. It's easy, you just turn the key and pull it out. Oh, and you have your backup array in a machine other than the server that it is backing up. That way either machine can burn to the ground and you haven't lost anything other than what changes were made after the last backup. Not to mention this allows you to power down your backup box at will to swap disks, etc. I've been doing this very thing on a smaller scale for a couple of clients for a couple of years now. I figure you can set up a backup drive array for about a third the cost of a comprable capacity tape system.
Yes I've used it loads of times and never had a problem. I have access to some more recent ones however (it has SP3 already included)...might try one of those later if the one I have doesn't work.
I just picked up the same board with a XP 2500 (Barton), a Gig of DDR 2700 (2x 512) and an 80 Gig ATA 133...but I'm having a bit of bother getting W2k to install (kept getting stop errors:( ). I only just put it together last night and probably should've waited until this morning when my head was clearer, but you know...geeks and their toys! Anyway, with my latest attempt (started this morning and formatting as I type this) I first disabled the Serial ATA as I don't yet have anything to go there and it seems to be working so far a little better. It was probably looking for a SATA driver and freaking out when I didn't give it what it wanted. Once I get W2k running I'm going to try loading Mandrake and BeOS.
...that if I walk into a bookstore in the US and pay cash for a book, they're gonna want to know my personal info? Well I got a news flash for them, IT"S NONE OF THEIR FUCKING BUSINESS!! That is how I conduct business...with cash. You start asking questions, expect answers that are either incomplete (I won't tell you) or false (Homer Simpson zip: 90210) and if they're too stupid about it I might just walk out and never return.
...keeping mum is to prevent hoardes of geeks making fools of themselves camping outside Natalie Portmans house trying to get a date before they depart to techno heaven.
I don't know about you but I just wanna shove hot grits down her pants!
...is Stephen Donaldson's Gap series, especially the 3rd and 4th books. Actually, anything by Donaldson would be great. Of course we've got about a snowball's chance in hell of ever seeing that come to fruition.
Maybe that should be the subject of a Slashdot poll? SciFi books we'd like to see on the big screen?
And the electronics industry's attitude toward the labels is summed up by an Apple slogan: Rip. Mix. Burn. Which, a music executive once told me, translates into "Fuck you, record labels."
They deserve to die if they're this clueless. "Rip" means to take a track off a CD that I bought and paid for and encode it into a format that my computer recognises. "Mix" means re-assemble these music tracks that I bought and paid for into a playlist that I will enjoy. "Burn" means put this playlist of tracks that I bought and paid for onto a CD so that I can enjoy music that I bought and paid for in say a car or portable CD player. How they think that translates into "Fuck you, record labels" is astounding. Actually this music executive's asinine statement should be translated as "Fuck you music fans". Fuck me? No...FUCK YOU! I'm the one with the wallet and I can wait until you're dead and then make sure my money goes to the artists.
Slashdot Mirror
IT's OK for US financial institutions to loot hundreds of billions out of Russia's economy (7th paragraph down), but it's not OK for individuals who have been hard hit by the effects of this sort of monstrous greed and evil to try and get some back for themselves?
I did say "half the theatre." I went to see it with five girls.
Let me guess...Mother Thumb and her 4 daughters?
Look. You steal creativity. You're proud of it. That's gross to me. End of story.
No, that isn't the end of the story.
Maybe it's a little bit premature to trot out this scenario as a DVD copy of Reloaded hasn't been released, but I'm going to trot it out anyway:
Situation 1: I buy a copy of a DVD and invite my friends over to watch it with me. They get to watch it without paying.
Situation 2: I buy a copy of a DVD, rip it, and FTP it to the same friends. They get to watch it without paying.
Now what exactly is the difference, ethically, and morally, in those two situations? The truth is there is no difference! They're the ones who permitted me to purchase a copy of a movie and there are no constraints pertaining to who I can show it to, providing I don't charge admission. In any case, this whole notion that "creativity" is somehow "property that can be stolen" is ludicrous, especially now, given the new reality that an infinite number of one-off digital copies can be made of a creative work with little or no effort or expense. This is a reality that "content producers" are going to have to learn to deal with...a reality for which conventional legal, ethical, or moral arguments do not apply.
Now before anyone gets all sanctimonious on me here, I should state that my preferred medium for watching a good movie is on a big screen in a theatre, but I don't go to movies in theatres because I believe it to be "unethical" to download them for free. I go to them in a theatre because the theatre is providing a higher quality entertainment experience. It is providing "a high quality entertainment experience" (big-screen theatres; live performances etc) that I believe should be the focus of "content producers" and believe me, if the quality is there, I will be happy to support them financially. Hit me with some specious ethical reasonings and I will be just as happy to tell them to bugger off and die.
Worse, it'll make it easy for corporate leaders to rationalize moving *YOUR* IT job to India. The article doesn't seem too funny now, does it.
Lessee...they want to try troubleshooting...say... a failing hard drive from India? Well fly at 'er byes! Maybe you can change it from there too! Nothing beats on-site support.
BTW I do the "consulting"/contracting thing, but I don't have to fake being busy. When I run out of things to do, I simply go home. It's a good deal all around. I charge a high enough hourly rate to make it worth my while, and they don't have to pay someone a full-time IT salary. And if I want to spend the afternoon at a local watering hole, there's nothing preventing me, as long as the servers aren't on fire.
BUT... the movie didn't make much sense -- it was kind of like USUAL SUSPECTS...
I happened to LOVE The Usual Suspects...the fantastic twist at the end alone was worth the price of admission. Unfortunately it's the fact that most people "don't get it" if a movie displays even a modicum of intelligence that has resulted in the preponderance of pablum and other formulaic crap that hollywood spews forth on an all-to-regular basis. Intelligent movies are few and far between.
...he obviously needs a sharp lesson in being extra careful in who he chooses to take on as clients. A nice Slash-junkmail-bomb might drive that point home.
Now will it fit behind the front grille of my Crown Vic?
Cut me off will you you asshole!!!
I've also got a drawerful of NICs and cables. So I configure one PC to be a dedicated filesharing box and create an image set for re-install if it gets beat up and copy the uncorrupted files onto my main system after they've been checked out for my use/listening pleasure. That would pretty much negate their silly little hacking game, wouldn't it? In fact, I could do all my web-based stuff on the filesharing box via VNC and never allow my main system to come in contact with the outside world. Offhand I can think of a bunch of different ways to defeat this sort of silliness. It shouldn't have to come to that though, especially as I don't live in an area where the RIAA has any authority.
...(you know, those nifty little removable enclosures) and you rotate 'em periodically. It's easy, you just turn the key and pull it out. Oh, and you have your backup array in a machine other than the server that it is backing up. That way either machine can burn to the ground and you haven't lost anything other than what changes were made after the last backup. Not to mention this allows you to power down your backup box at will to swap disks, etc. I've been doing this very thing on a smaller scale for a couple of clients for a couple of years now. I figure you can set up a backup drive array for about a third the cost of a comprable capacity tape system.
How about hot steamy Vulcan sex between Archer and T'Pal!
Yes I've used it loads of times and never had a problem. I have access to some more recent ones however (it has SP3 already included)...might try one of those later if the one I have doesn't work.
I just picked up the same board with a XP 2500 (Barton), a Gig of DDR 2700 (2x 512) and an 80 Gig ATA 133...but I'm having a bit of bother getting W2k to install (kept getting stop errors :( ). I only just put it together last night and probably should've waited until this morning when my head was clearer, but you know...geeks and their toys! Anyway, with my latest attempt (started this morning and formatting as I type this) I first disabled the Serial ATA as I don't yet have anything to go there and it seems to be working so far a little better. It was probably looking for a SATA driver and freaking out when I didn't give it what it wanted. Once I get W2k running I'm going to try loading Mandrake and BeOS.
Why buy the cow when you get the milk for free?
Uhhh...that thing between your legs is NOT a cow's teat that needs regular milkings!
It really says: Get your free porn here!
Begun this Clone War has!
An Exchange Server cloned I require! Clone it they need to attempt...yes, yes!
Don't you mean mullet?
Not to mention Tom Ridge, new head of the american KGB! KGB you ask? Why yes...go find out what KGB stood for. Now translate it.
...that if I walk into a bookstore in the US and pay cash for a book, they're gonna want to know my personal info? Well I got a news flash for them, IT"S NONE OF THEIR FUCKING BUSINESS!! That is how I conduct business...with cash. You start asking questions, expect answers that are either incomplete (I won't tell you) or false (Homer Simpson zip: 90210) and if they're too stupid about it I might just walk out and never return.
I don't know about you but I just wanna shove hot grits down her pants!
Then what the hell are all us poor sysadmins supposed to do during slack times?
Doesn't mean the "cheering Israelis" story didn't happen. It was on Fox before they spiked it.
...is Stephen Donaldson's Gap series, especially the 3rd and 4th books. Actually, anything by Donaldson would be great. Of course we've got about a snowball's chance in hell of ever seeing that come to fruition.
Maybe that should be the subject of a Slashdot poll? SciFi books we'd like to see on the big screen?
And the electronics industry's attitude toward the labels is summed up by an Apple slogan: Rip. Mix. Burn. Which, a music executive once told me, translates into "Fuck you, record labels."
They deserve to die if they're this clueless. "Rip" means to take a track off a CD that I bought and paid for and encode it into a format that my computer recognises. "Mix" means re-assemble these music tracks that I bought and paid for into a playlist that I will enjoy. "Burn" means put this playlist of tracks that I bought and paid for onto a CD so that I can enjoy music that I bought and paid for in say a car or portable CD player. How they think that translates into "Fuck you, record labels" is astounding. Actually this music executive's asinine statement should be translated as "Fuck you music fans". Fuck me? No...FUCK YOU! I'm the one with the wallet and I can wait until you're dead and then make sure my money goes to the artists.