It happens all the time where I live. We have two major local carriers, one with CDMA service (superior call quality, fewer dropped calls) for which the phone must be designed for CDMA - there are no sim cards for these phones, the other a GSM network which uses locked down sim cards. Just plugging your sim card into a 3rd party phone will get you nowhere, it won't work without modifications from the cell company. Said company refuses to modify phones they didn't sell, so you're SOL unless you buy it from them. Same with CDMA phones, it may be technically possible to configure your 3rd party phone to run on the CDMA network, but the cell company just refuses. No sorry, we don't do that.
AT&T is gaining presence here thanks to the iPhone, but they aren't exactly the people to go to if you don't want to be "locked in". Verizon is available - if you have a billing address in a state they sell service in, because they don't sell it here. T-Mobile is not even an option, only the military gets to use them.
Good 'ol US of A, one of the 50 states in the union, and yet 50 years after statehood we are often still considered "overseas" like we're in a different goddamn country.
Care to guess? I'll give you a hint, we've been pissing off Texas since 1958.
Where I live, you can't use a phone from another carrier, SIM card or no. The only alternative is to have an outside address you can use and get Verizon or something. It sucks.
Ask anyone who obtained a Linux DVD electronically. Ask anyone who used BitTorrent to grab OpenOffice.org.
Or anybody who plays World of Warcraft, or Guild Wars, or a dozen other new games. I'm not sure if it's true for WoW, as I don't play it, but I know it is possible to purchase Guild Wars online, download a small client from their website, and get the entire game via a torrent P2P protocol.
At least 11+ million people use P2P filesharing for legitimate reasons, and that is a quantifiable fact. That they do not realize they are using filesharing software does not really matter, the fact is they are, and it is stunning proof of its legitimacy. There are a number of companies, like FOX, Lionsgate, Paramount, ComedyCentral, Sega, Warner Bros, Mtv, Starz Media, G4, Kadokawa, and others who all use P2P to reduce their distribution load.
As popular as "pirating" videos and software is, p2p is becoming more and more of a business, and these idiots at the RIAA and MPAA just seem intent on staying behind the curve. Pretty soon they will be stepping on their own toes, making it harder for their own companies to make any money in the competitive market. You can already see this with their inability to produce anything similar to iTunes or Amazon's music store, inspite of flagging CD sales. All they know to do is point their finger at a small fraction of the market who, in reality, would likely not have purchased anywhere near that amount of media anyway. They may think they lost $1 billion plus in sales, but the truth is probably closer to $100 million, if that. If the people pirating software were not able to do so, they probably would not have purchased much of it at all.
Frankly, I'm too lazy, and my internet is too expensive to do any downloading, so I just go without. And it doesn't bother me.
You can't use two different definitions of "Mega" in the same sentence and expect anyone to take your argument seriously.
Bullshit.
MegaPixel is base 10, MegaByte is function of binary and the 8 bit byte. They have specific meanings, they are not directly relateable, and one should never confuse the two. Hard drive manufacturer's originally created this problem by attempting to make a base 2 figure fit a base 10 unit scheme.
The reason they did this was precisely so they could sell less hard drive and trick people into thinking they bought more space than they did. Naturally when people plugged their drives in and it showed 488mb+change instead of 500mb, they were a little upset, but what could you do? Why should the hard drive manufacturer's be able to use this notation when it would make no sense at all for RAM manufacturers and chip manufacturers to do the same? Why are HDD's special that they get to cheat us out of hard drive space?
What Apple is doing is more insideous, because now it will be harder to recognize that you've been swindled. If they are somewhat honest about it, they will change ALL their notation to SI units (which makes zero sense for a computer, btw). Oddly enough this inflates RAM, which would show up as 8.192 GB instead of 8GB. This of course will totally confuse all the young tinkerer's out there when you try to explain to them that 8gb of RAM is actually 8,192mb, which is 8,388,608kb, which is 8,589,934,592 bytes. That's the actual number of bytes, and computers run on these numbers. Understanding how computers work requires understanding these numbers, and dumbass moves like Apple's just make this harder.
You've never done much serious work in Photoshop before, have you?
While you -can- make the files smaller by simply saving the raw picture in.psd format, nobody does that. They process and edit it, just like the GP said, and that adds information. With just a little touching up, you can keep the file under the original raw size, but if you aren't cropping it or adjusting the resolution it's pretty easy to grow that file many times what it was originally. Trust me, my roommate is a photo-journalist and a digital artist, I once tried to help her recover a file that was corrupted when it went over the.psd format's 2gb file limit. I was unsuccessful.
The point was that the sample size has almost no bearing on the accuracy of the survey provided it is truly representative of the overall population.
If you can get a sample size of 10 that is representative of a population of 60,000,000 people, you'll have a pretty accurate survey. The reality is, that's not possible in most cases. You'll generally have more than 10 demographics of varying percentages of the total population, making 10 simply too small. 1000, however, is not too small unless you are looking for very, very small percentages of the population. I.e if you are expecting results of less than 2%, a sample size of 1000 is too small because the margin of error is around 3% - you could easily run the survey and get no positive hits at all. For that survey, you'd probably need to bump it up to around 10,000 to drop the margin of error low enough to get reliable results.
Since the results they got were 11.6%, and the margin of error was about 3%, you can very reliably say between 8.6% and 14.6% of people use file sharing software.
I don't like that they added 4.7% to their figure without anything to back that up, especially since that is nearly 50% of their results. They basically said 30% of file sharers lie about being file sharers, without any data to back that up. They also used 40 million as their figure for people on the internet, when the government survey states something like 33.5 million.
The numbers they should have used were 2.9 - 4.9 million people use file sharing software. That is accurate and can be backed up by statistics. It is probably more like 6 million due to people lying about using file sharing software, but that's still just a number I pulled out of my ass, and not statistically accurate.
When the lobbyists stand in front of lawmakers, those lawmakers want to know the real size of the problem.
Wow, that has to be one of the most naive statements about politics I've ever heard.
First, lobbyists don't "stand in front of lawmakers", they take them out to dinner, or a skiing trip, or chat up their aids, and hang out at the same exclusive restaurants and clubs. It's more of a "saddling up to" rather than a "stand before".
Second, the lawmaker who gives a shit about the actual size of a given problem is rare. What they want to know is a.) will their constituants go along with it b.) will it improve their ability appease their constituants (thereby ensuring their tenure in office) and c.) do they get anything out of it - fun stuff like food or trips, or more clout and influence among their peers.
On the issues where the politician actually cares, they are usually idiologically biased in one extreme direction or another, and so the actual size of the problem and actual truth of what is happening is meaningless anyway.
Big numbers and wild statistics are used to sway the constituants, not the lawmakers.
Survey sizes of around 1000 are pretty standard. If you run the survey and get 3 positives out of 1000, you say "Oh shit, sample size is too small", then run the same survey with 5,000 or 10,000 people to catch a larger number people you are targeting - i.e. we're looking to see what percentage of people practice illegal file sharing, we need to find at least a decent number of illegal file sharers so we know our survey is accurate.
It's not a matter of knowing what you'll get before hand or rigging the study, you have to have a jumping off point somewhere, else you'll never do the study. If you get untrustworthy results, you simply adjust your sample size and conduct the survey again.
A good study in this area would first investigate the characteristics of a large population WRT standardizing their likelihood of file-sharing.
That is completely unnecessary if all you want to know is what percentage of people practice illegal file sharing. And I'm not sure what you mean by "standardizing" their likelihood of file sharing. Huh?
This step in itself would involve many thousands of people in many different social, economic, and geographic strata.
The government does this thing called a Census every few years, that collects just such information from close to 100% of the population, making it extremely reliable.
(You might want to steer clear of race or national origin. It's likely significant, but too touchy.)
Why? If it can affect your outcome, it should be in your demographics, otherwise your study is unreliable. Why the hell is that information "touchy"? Does a white guy not relize he's white? Or did someone forget to tell the Irishwoman she's from Ireland? What the hell?
How did they standardize their sample? I'd guess they picked either people it was convenient to pick, or people they thought would prove their point.
Had they done that, instead of using demographics (which is critical to good statistics and has a very very solid mathematical foundation), then a 3rd grader could pick apart the survey in their sleep and it would never see the light of day.
Since all I've seen are complaints from people who obviously don't know how statistics work, this is obviously not the case.
We used lots larger numbers to guess at journey-to-work times, and we KNOW that some of our predictions were wrong. We tested.
Did you use completely random samples? If so, it's no wonder your results were off. In that case, I'd expect them to be wildly inaccurate, since you obviously don't know what goes into an accurate survey.
Seriously, instead of just handing out fliers or putting a survey box on your website, you should do a little research on how statistics work, and maybe then you could design an accurate survey. Because doing it at random you won't get any reasonable accuracy until you're sampling 75%+ of the population. At that point, as another poster said, you aren't doing statistics, you're just counting.
The second objection, and this applies to other studies too that try to make grand claims from small samples, is that it's A SMALL SAMPLE. For your survey to be representative, your sample has to be representative. It's also difficult to choose people independently at random, and without that assumption, all your basic statistics fall apart. Perhaps they went through a list of BT subscribers and pulled names at random -- but what if downloaders are overrepresented amongst BT subscribers?
You don't seem to understand the way good polling and statistics work. If you already have solid data on the demographic makeup of your population, it does not take a very large sample size at all to get accurate results. A sample size of 1000+ is more than enough to come within 3% accuracy (plus or minus) for any given study provided you already have good demographic information. To be accurate with a small sample size, you do NOT want to choose your survey takers at random, at least not completely. Specifically who takes the survey is random, but where they come from, what income level they fall under, how many computers they own, etc. should not be random at all. That's how you make a small sample size representative of the population, and can therefore get accurate results.
For example, if a census (which has a near 100% sample rate) 5 years ago told you that 75% of the population owns a computer, and 75% of computer owners use the internet, and 50% of internet users have broadband, you can get very accurate results with a sample size a fraction of a percent of the size of the total population by simply making certain that your smaller sample breakdown matches the larger survey. 100% of people surveyed should own a computer, since the survey would need to be 30% larger to include those who don't have a computer and still get the same accuracy (accuracy would be slightly better, but almost certainly not worth the expense). 75% of those people should have internet (you could start here instead with still very high accuracy), and 50% of those people should have broadband.
A result of 10% of people share files from the study that followed demographics and only used 1,000 people is going to be exponentially more accurate than a survey of 10,000 people chosen completely at random. To get any kind of accuracy with a pure random sampling you would need to sample a very large percentage of the total population. This is impractical and idiotic and not very useful.
Statistics done well are reliable, it's who's using the statistics, what they are saying about them, and what they aren't telling you about them that make statistics untrustworthy.
It's not the statistician who is the liar, it's the lawyer, or marketer, or politician who is the liar. It's their fault that 60% of statistics can be made to say whatever the hell you want them to say. That said, I don't trust any numbers given by the MPAA, especially when they arbitrarily adjust them up. More than likely the number should have been adjusted up, but the 5% figure seems rather pulled from thin air and unjustified. 2% or 3% would be more conservative, boosting the number of filesharer's by 50% just 'cause screams of desperation.
The visualization is sound, for a 3d representation. The problem is that space/time involves the 4th dimension, and we are 3rd demensional beings. It is impossible for us to visualize anything in the 4th dimension in a literal sense - we have no frame of reference.
We can think about it abstractly, in ways we can somewhat understand. That is what the "rubber sheet" model is. Space/time is obviously not a 2d plane in a 3d world, it's a 3d plane in a 4d world. What is actually happening is that rubbersheet exists in every direction - forward, backward, up and down. It's not many sheets, it's not a sphere surrounding everything, it is a plane that exists in all three dimensions. It's a difficult abstraction to make, and it is impossible to accurately and literally conceptualize because we have no 4d frame of reference.
For a good explanation of why that is, check out Carl Sagan's explanation, it's rather enlightening. He steps it down to a 3d object interacting with a 2d world, so that we have a frame of reference to understand what is happening.
You won't come out understanding the 4th dimension, you'll come out understanding why you can't understand the 4th dimension, and since Space/Time is a 4th dimensional concept, why the explanations don't make sense.
The problem with ID proponents here is that they tend to modify the theory to fit the new evidence...
Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't that essentially how science works? We have theory A that fits the current evidence, new evidence comes along that doesn't fit theoryA, so we make theoryB. It's pretty standard fare in science - the other option is to either ignore or attempt to change the new evidence so that it fits the current obviously broken theory.
Why the hell do you think finding gravity waves is so important? General relativity is a cornerstone of modern physics, and it predicts gravity waves. If we can't find gravity waves under conditions that GR predicts they should occur, then GR is broken and we need a new theory. It will turn the physics community on its head!
This is the problem - 20 years ago you DIDN'T need a driver for your monitor, or a flashing utility for your hard drive, or any of the other ridiculous things caused by not sticking to standards and/or designing the hardware badly.
I wasn't using computers 20 years ago (I was 6 at the time), but I was a computer tinkerer 15 years ago, and I certainly remember needing drivers for things like monitors (not the video card, the monitor, it was a pain), driver updates for hard drives, etc. Without the drivers you had a standard, very basic functionality because the OS had a built in generic that would just barely work.
Ever heard of a Plug 'n Play monitor? Of course you have, it's what all monitors are now. But there was a time when there was no such thing. When PnP came out, it was revolutionary, because you didn't need drivers for the stupid simple stuff, like monitors and hard drives. To use PnP required a PnP capable motherboard, hardware device, and OS. A lot of BIOSs still have the setting to disable PnP if the OS isn't capable of it - then you'll need drivers. And of course, even after PnP for many years it was dubbed "Plug 'n Pray" because you were never sure it would actually work right, if not you'd better have drivers on hand.
Hell, Windows XP still won't run a SCSI drive unless you have the driver for it, and SCSI has been around FOREVER.
You may not know this, but even today you need drivers for your ATA/SATA hard drive to work properly. Some companies even send you a disk still, just in case. You don't recognize it, because after 20+ years the technology has been pretty well nailed, and new drivers are rarely - if ever- necessary. 99.9% of mass storage drivers are built in to any OS later than XP, but under certain cirumstances it's good to be aware of them and which ones you need (it comes up when using Sysprep sometimes, specifying your drivers can really speed up a re-image). Most of the drivers are contained in one or two INF files, but without them your drive will not work.
In other words, STFU, it's new technology, and even at its worst it's better than what we have currently. Soon things will be pretty well standardized, and the only substantive difference between brands will be the number of channels, chips, and levels which determine speed, capacity, and price.
Kinda like hard drives now, where we look at RPMs, cache, and seek times to find the best drives.
I use a hosts file to block ad servers, it gets probably 95% of the junk out there. As a bonus, the ads aren't even downloaded to my machine, so all my bandwidth goes to the page I'm browsing.
And since my internet at work is way over-capacity, that's a good thing. There are a number of lists out there, give it a shot. It's the geeky way to do it.;)
I'm totally blowing my ability to mod because of this, but I hated the ending of the last book for the longest time. Now I think it's kinda funny, like some kind of uber-joke you might not "get" for a while but keeps growing on you. It was a completely appropriate way to end the series.
It matches extremely well with someone's explanation of where "42" actually came from - they said it's binary.
Hold your hands up to your face, palms facing you, thumbs in.
Now, assume each digit of "42" represents one hand - i.e. 4 is left hand 2 is right hand.
Now, what's 4 in binary? 0100
And what's 2 in binary? 0010
Match your fingers with the digits, and you get a glorious double-middle-finger flipping off everyone, kinda like the ending of the 5th book.
My favorite joke in the book, though, was the running "flowerpot that says 'oh no not again'" joke. That and flying. And crickett. Top 3, ok?
But then again, I have a pretty unconventional sensibility when it comes to what I opine should be copyrightable. In my view, software shouldn't be copyrightable at all. Source code, yes. Copyright to your heart's content, but not executable binaries and most certainly not encrypted data.
I agree with you, but I see a problem. Software binaries should not be covered under copyright, imho, they should be covered under patents. The problem is, not ALL software can and should be covered under patents, and it should NOT be ok to re-produce the software and distribute it to others. A software producer has a reasonable right to profit from his product, and software is unique among products because it is so easy to copy that it's almost hard not to.
I think pulling software out of copyright (where I don't believe it belongs) would require a new law that would define the sale and reproduction of software. That would actually be kinda nice, because it may end all this EULA bs that goes on with software licenses.
In any case, I can't see pulling software out from under Copyright without throwing some kind of bone to software developers. Otherwise, who would bother to write software? Everything would be in-house, proprietary software and we'd be set back a decade in software innovation.
It's not on grounds of inelligibility for copyright as an entity that this will be thrown out (you're right about that, the gov can hold copyright), it's on the grounds that facts cannot be copyrighted. They may have a case for the composition of the schedule, but as far as the dates, times, and train numbers, they've got nothing. So unless he's doing a scan-paste operation to get the schedules on his app (which I can't imagine, but it's possible), he's in the clear. They're just trying to bully him.
If I were him I'd counter-sue on the basis of a frivolous lawsuit and harassment, and seek damages matching any lawyer fees and lost income due to the trial.
If you buy an Xbox, the warranty is 3 years for RROD (most of the failures), 1 year for everything else. If in Iceland you get to extend that 1 year to 2 years, well, that's friggin awesome.
The only reason for buying an XBOX 360 I can think of is when they include a year's worth of crack or meth. You know that two thirds of those consoles die within a year or two. You know that after three years, the thing is out of warranty and you're out of luck. You know that it's damn loud. You know there's a few consoles out there that last much longer, make less noise, cost less money and don't require a serverfarm-sized air condition to not overheat. And you know there's a tremendous array of laptop and desktop computers that can run PC versions of most console games and much much more, including every piece of USB equipment ever made in the last decade.
Now, what's the kicker on the 360 to throw all that aside?
I tried to find the sarcasm, but I couldn't. It must be there, seeing as how every single statement you made was incorrect.
A.) Not quite 2/3 of people never have a problem with thier 360. Of the unfortunate 39% who do, about 40% of those people will have another problem, and 40% of the people who have a second problem will have a third, etc. It works out to a 54% TOTAL fail rate, and the second and third passes are usually refurbished machines which are slightly less reliable (kinda shitty of MS, but understandable given the cost).
B.) True, the warranty is only good for 3 years, but that's three times better than the PS3's and the Wii's one year warranty. That's right, one year and you're out of luck for the competition.
C.) It's a hell of a lot quieter than the gaming PC you want to replace it with, and I've heard conflicting reports of whether the PS3 or 360 is louder when playing games. Unless your an audiophile, neither is distracting when you've got the stereo turned on at even a low volume.
D.) Which console costs less money? The cheapest PS3 is just coming out, at $300. The cheapest 360 is almost half that, at $179. The Wii is still $250. (all prices are from Amazon.com) Which console is cheaper again? It's only when you move to the mid-range 360 that the Wii gets cheaper, and the PS3 is only now the same price, and if you're smart you'll buy the arcade version and the hard drive separately and save yourself up to $50 off of THAT price (only difference between pro and arcade is the HDD). So, PS3 for $300, or XBOX 360 for $250? Which is cheaper again? Which has more games, including all of the best ones? Thought so.
E.) All you need to keep it cool is not block the vent holes. They put half them on top, which is a terrible idea, but as long as you keep those free it does not overheat, and your chances of failure will be in line with the other consoles.
F.) Any laptop or PC that can run "PC versions of most console games and much much more" is going to be 3-5x more expensive than a console - a $600 laptop won't let you play games like Gears of War or Fallout 3 (well, maybe F3, with low settings). Desktops are a little better about that, you could probably get by with a $400 desktop and a $100 video card, but it's still a hell of a lot more than ~$200. Consoles are in the price range of nettops and netbooks, which can't run any but the oldest PC games, console port or no. Why would I spend 5x as much just to play games?
Of course, the kicker is the 360 is now the cheapest console with the 2nd best graphics (by a very small margin) and all the best games (the ones that are PS3 only are, frankly, shit). I hear PS3's home is great, but XBOX live has tons of extra content available, including Netflix (my primary use of my xbox, actually).
Your numbers are off a little, but your maths are good. 61% of purchasers experienced no failures, not 46%. 46% is the number of consoles, total, that did not fail, which is an irrelevant number for failures per purchase, unless you did the average the other way (total consoles issued, you'd have a bad average then).
The $1 billion with a "b" that MS put up to deal with the issue tells you how costly that 54% (69% per-purchase) fail rate was.
Still, it's about the most used console out there, so they can deal.
I suspect that the crowd's doing the "ooh...shiny" thing and putting up with the unreliable things...
If that were the case, PS3 would be trouncing the 360, as it's the "Ooh...shiny!" console.
... because "it has the most titles". Sadly, most of the stuff on the X-Box is drek- and the bulk of the stuff I'm interested in has a version for PS3
Unfortunately, a few of the most popular games on the market are not available on PS3, but the opposite is only true for a few obscure games.
So if you've got less than $200 to spend, and you want to play all the games, what are you going to buy? You don't have to buy the stuff that's shit, all the good games exist for 360, and both the games and the console are cheaper. If you're willing to go used on the games, you could buy an Xbox360 plus three or four games (in addition to the crappy games it comes with) for the price of the PS3 Slim.
Most PS3 games don't even take advantage of the 1080p hi-def capability, and even then you need a really nice TV to tell the difference between that and the 360's 720p, so which do you pick? Unless you've got cash to burn on the TV and blueray, you pick the 360 even now. Here's a hint: Most people don't have that much cash to burn.
...the message is that people love the 360 regardless of failure. I find that surprising and just downright weird, but that's what the respondents said.
It's not so wierd, the PS3 may be technically superior to the XBox 360, but the difference is not that significant - like back in the old days when one console had better graphics than another. The difference between an Xbox and an Xbox 360 is significantly less than the difference between the NES and the Super NES, for example. The difference between Xbox 360 and the PS3 is even smaller, and the 360 is half the price or less. It is now the cheapest console on the market, and has the second best graphics - and that only by a small measure.
Only the most hard-core graphics lovers would find the 360's graphics less than adequate, and the fact that it has a lot more games that are a lot more popular means chances are the game you want to play is on the 360, not the PS3.
That's why they still sell a lot of them. Also, most of the hardware failures (the rings of death) for the 360 were eventually replaced free of charge, so animosity is not that great towards MS in regards to the 360. And, as long as you make sure it is well ventilated (vent holes are top and back - why? who knows?), they don't really fail that often. They are just more sensitive than consoles of the past.
Slashdot Mirror
It happens all the time where I live. We have two major local carriers, one with CDMA service (superior call quality, fewer dropped calls) for which the phone must be designed for CDMA - there are no sim cards for these phones, the other a GSM network which uses locked down sim cards. Just plugging your sim card into a 3rd party phone will get you nowhere, it won't work without modifications from the cell company. Said company refuses to modify phones they didn't sell, so you're SOL unless you buy it from them. Same with CDMA phones, it may be technically possible to configure your 3rd party phone to run on the CDMA network, but the cell company just refuses. No sorry, we don't do that.
AT&T is gaining presence here thanks to the iPhone, but they aren't exactly the people to go to if you don't want to be "locked in". Verizon is available - if you have a billing address in a state they sell service in, because they don't sell it here. T-Mobile is not even an option, only the military gets to use them.
Good 'ol US of A, one of the 50 states in the union, and yet 50 years after statehood we are often still considered "overseas" like we're in a different goddamn country.
Care to guess? I'll give you a hint, we've been pissing off Texas since 1958.
Where I live, you can't use a phone from another carrier, SIM card or no. The only alternative is to have an outside address you can use and get Verizon or something. It sucks.
Ask anyone who obtained a Linux DVD electronically. Ask anyone who used BitTorrent to grab OpenOffice.org.
Or anybody who plays World of Warcraft, or Guild Wars, or a dozen other new games. I'm not sure if it's true for WoW, as I don't play it, but I know it is possible to purchase Guild Wars online, download a small client from their website, and get the entire game via a torrent P2P protocol.
At least 11+ million people use P2P filesharing for legitimate reasons, and that is a quantifiable fact. That they do not realize they are using filesharing software does not really matter, the fact is they are, and it is stunning proof of its legitimacy. There are a number of companies, like FOX, Lionsgate, Paramount, ComedyCentral, Sega, Warner Bros, Mtv, Starz Media, G4, Kadokawa, and others who all use P2P to reduce their distribution load.
As popular as "pirating" videos and software is, p2p is becoming more and more of a business, and these idiots at the RIAA and MPAA just seem intent on staying behind the curve. Pretty soon they will be stepping on their own toes, making it harder for their own companies to make any money in the competitive market. You can already see this with their inability to produce anything similar to iTunes or Amazon's music store, inspite of flagging CD sales. All they know to do is point their finger at a small fraction of the market who, in reality, would likely not have purchased anywhere near that amount of media anyway. They may think they lost $1 billion plus in sales, but the truth is probably closer to $100 million, if that. If the people pirating software were not able to do so, they probably would not have purchased much of it at all.
Frankly, I'm too lazy, and my internet is too expensive to do any downloading, so I just go without. And it doesn't bother me.
You can't use two different definitions of "Mega" in the same sentence and expect anyone to take your argument seriously.
Bullshit.
MegaPixel is base 10, MegaByte is function of binary and the 8 bit byte. They have specific meanings, they are not directly relateable, and one should never confuse the two. Hard drive manufacturer's originally created this problem by attempting to make a base 2 figure fit a base 10 unit scheme.
The reason they did this was precisely so they could sell less hard drive and trick people into thinking they bought more space than they did. Naturally when people plugged their drives in and it showed 488mb+change instead of 500mb, they were a little upset, but what could you do? Why should the hard drive manufacturer's be able to use this notation when it would make no sense at all for RAM manufacturers and chip manufacturers to do the same? Why are HDD's special that they get to cheat us out of hard drive space?
What Apple is doing is more insideous, because now it will be harder to recognize that you've been swindled. If they are somewhat honest about it, they will change ALL their notation to SI units (which makes zero sense for a computer, btw). Oddly enough this inflates RAM, which would show up as 8.192 GB instead of 8GB. This of course will totally confuse all the young tinkerer's out there when you try to explain to them that 8gb of RAM is actually 8,192mb, which is 8,388,608kb, which is 8,589,934,592 bytes. That's the actual number of bytes, and computers run on these numbers. Understanding how computers work requires understanding these numbers, and dumbass moves like Apple's just make this harder.
You've never done much serious work in Photoshop before, have you?
While you -can- make the files smaller by simply saving the raw picture in .psd format, nobody does that. They process and edit it, just like the GP said, and that adds information. With just a little touching up, you can keep the file under the original raw size, but if you aren't cropping it or adjusting the resolution it's pretty easy to grow that file many times what it was originally. Trust me, my roommate is a photo-journalist and a digital artist, I once tried to help her recover a file that was corrupted when it went over the .psd format's 2gb file limit. I was unsuccessful.
No, you missed the point of that post.
The point was that the sample size has almost no bearing on the accuracy of the survey provided it is truly representative of the overall population.
If you can get a sample size of 10 that is representative of a population of 60,000,000 people, you'll have a pretty accurate survey. The reality is, that's not possible in most cases. You'll generally have more than 10 demographics of varying percentages of the total population, making 10 simply too small. 1000, however, is not too small unless you are looking for very, very small percentages of the population. I.e if you are expecting results of less than 2%, a sample size of 1000 is too small because the margin of error is around 3% - you could easily run the survey and get no positive hits at all. For that survey, you'd probably need to bump it up to around 10,000 to drop the margin of error low enough to get reliable results.
Since the results they got were 11.6%, and the margin of error was about 3%, you can very reliably say between 8.6% and 14.6% of people use file sharing software.
I don't like that they added 4.7% to their figure without anything to back that up, especially since that is nearly 50% of their results. They basically said 30% of file sharers lie about being file sharers, without any data to back that up. They also used 40 million as their figure for people on the internet, when the government survey states something like 33.5 million.
The numbers they should have used were 2.9 - 4.9 million people use file sharing software. That is accurate and can be backed up by statistics. It is probably more like 6 million due to people lying about using file sharing software, but that's still just a number I pulled out of my ass, and not statistically accurate.
When the lobbyists stand in front of lawmakers, those lawmakers want to know the real size of the problem.
Wow, that has to be one of the most naive statements about politics I've ever heard.
First, lobbyists don't "stand in front of lawmakers", they take them out to dinner, or a skiing trip, or chat up their aids, and hang out at the same exclusive restaurants and clubs. It's more of a "saddling up to" rather than a "stand before".
Second, the lawmaker who gives a shit about the actual size of a given problem is rare. What they want to know is a.) will their constituants go along with it b.) will it improve their ability appease their constituants (thereby ensuring their tenure in office) and c.) do they get anything out of it - fun stuff like food or trips, or more clout and influence among their peers.
On the issues where the politician actually cares, they are usually idiologically biased in one extreme direction or another, and so the actual size of the problem and actual truth of what is happening is meaningless anyway.
Big numbers and wild statistics are used to sway the constituants, not the lawmakers.
Survey sizes of around 1000 are pretty standard. If you run the survey and get 3 positives out of 1000, you say "Oh shit, sample size is too small", then run the same survey with 5,000 or 10,000 people to catch a larger number people you are targeting - i.e. we're looking to see what percentage of people practice illegal file sharing, we need to find at least a decent number of illegal file sharers so we know our survey is accurate.
It's not a matter of knowing what you'll get before hand or rigging the study, you have to have a jumping off point somewhere, else you'll never do the study. If you get untrustworthy results, you simply adjust your sample size and conduct the survey again.
A good study in this area would first investigate the characteristics of a large population WRT standardizing their likelihood of file-sharing.
That is completely unnecessary if all you want to know is what percentage of people practice illegal file sharing. And I'm not sure what you mean by "standardizing" their likelihood of file sharing. Huh?
This step in itself would involve many thousands of people in many different social, economic, and geographic strata.
The government does this thing called a Census every few years, that collects just such information from close to 100% of the population, making it extremely reliable.
(You might want to steer clear of race or national origin. It's likely significant, but too touchy.)
Why? If it can affect your outcome, it should be in your demographics, otherwise your study is unreliable. Why the hell is that information "touchy"? Does a white guy not relize he's white? Or did someone forget to tell the Irishwoman she's from Ireland? What the hell?
Worse, 60% of statistics can be made to say whatever you want. - That one guy from that DirecTV commercial
How did they standardize their sample? I'd guess they picked either people it was convenient to pick, or people they thought would prove their point.
Had they done that, instead of using demographics (which is critical to good statistics and has a very very solid mathematical foundation), then a 3rd grader could pick apart the survey in their sleep and it would never see the light of day.
Since all I've seen are complaints from people who obviously don't know how statistics work, this is obviously not the case.
We used lots larger numbers to guess at journey-to-work times, and we KNOW that some of our predictions were wrong. We tested.
Did you use completely random samples? If so, it's no wonder your results were off. In that case, I'd expect them to be wildly inaccurate, since you obviously don't know what goes into an accurate survey.
Seriously, instead of just handing out fliers or putting a survey box on your website, you should do a little research on how statistics work, and maybe then you could design an accurate survey. Because doing it at random you won't get any reasonable accuracy until you're sampling 75%+ of the population. At that point, as another poster said, you aren't doing statistics, you're just counting.
The second objection, and this applies to other studies too that try to make grand claims from small samples, is that it's A SMALL SAMPLE. For your survey to be representative, your sample has to be representative. It's also difficult to choose people independently at random, and without that assumption, all your basic statistics fall apart. Perhaps they went through a list of BT subscribers and pulled names at random -- but what if downloaders are overrepresented amongst BT subscribers?
You don't seem to understand the way good polling and statistics work. If you already have solid data on the demographic makeup of your population, it does not take a very large sample size at all to get accurate results. A sample size of 1000+ is more than enough to come within 3% accuracy (plus or minus) for any given study provided you already have good demographic information. To be accurate with a small sample size, you do NOT want to choose your survey takers at random, at least not completely. Specifically who takes the survey is random, but where they come from, what income level they fall under, how many computers they own, etc. should not be random at all. That's how you make a small sample size representative of the population, and can therefore get accurate results.
For example, if a census (which has a near 100% sample rate) 5 years ago told you that 75% of the population owns a computer, and 75% of computer owners use the internet, and 50% of internet users have broadband, you can get very accurate results with a sample size a fraction of a percent of the size of the total population by simply making certain that your smaller sample breakdown matches the larger survey. 100% of people surveyed should own a computer, since the survey would need to be 30% larger to include those who don't have a computer and still get the same accuracy (accuracy would be slightly better, but almost certainly not worth the expense). 75% of those people should have internet (you could start here instead with still very high accuracy), and 50% of those people should have broadband.
A result of 10% of people share files from the study that followed demographics and only used 1,000 people is going to be exponentially more accurate than a survey of 10,000 people chosen completely at random. To get any kind of accuracy with a pure random sampling you would need to sample a very large percentage of the total population. This is impractical and idiotic and not very useful.
Statistics done well are reliable, it's who's using the statistics, what they are saying about them, and what they aren't telling you about them that make statistics untrustworthy.
It's not the statistician who is the liar, it's the lawyer, or marketer, or politician who is the liar. It's their fault that 60% of statistics can be made to say whatever the hell you want them to say. That said, I don't trust any numbers given by the MPAA, especially when they arbitrarily adjust them up. More than likely the number should have been adjusted up, but the 5% figure seems rather pulled from thin air and unjustified. 2% or 3% would be more conservative, boosting the number of filesharer's by 50% just 'cause screams of desperation.
The visualization is sound, for a 3d representation. The problem is that space/time involves the 4th dimension, and we are 3rd demensional beings. It is impossible for us to visualize anything in the 4th dimension in a literal sense - we have no frame of reference.
We can think about it abstractly, in ways we can somewhat understand. That is what the "rubber sheet" model is. Space/time is obviously not a 2d plane in a 3d world, it's a 3d plane in a 4d world. What is actually happening is that rubbersheet exists in every direction - forward, backward, up and down. It's not many sheets, it's not a sphere surrounding everything, it is a plane that exists in all three dimensions. It's a difficult abstraction to make, and it is impossible to accurately and literally conceptualize because we have no 4d frame of reference.
For a good explanation of why that is, check out Carl Sagan's explanation, it's rather enlightening. He steps it down to a 3d object interacting with a 2d world, so that we have a frame of reference to understand what is happening.
You won't come out understanding the 4th dimension, you'll come out understanding why you can't understand the 4th dimension, and since Space/Time is a 4th dimensional concept, why the explanations don't make sense.
The problem with ID proponents here is that they tend to modify the theory to fit the new evidence...
Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't that essentially how science works? We have theory A that fits the current evidence, new evidence comes along that doesn't fit theoryA, so we make theoryB. It's pretty standard fare in science - the other option is to either ignore or attempt to change the new evidence so that it fits the current obviously broken theory.
Why the hell do you think finding gravity waves is so important? General relativity is a cornerstone of modern physics, and it predicts gravity waves. If we can't find gravity waves under conditions that GR predicts they should occur, then GR is broken and we need a new theory. It will turn the physics community on its head!
This is the problem - 20 years ago you DIDN'T need a driver for your monitor, or a flashing utility for your hard drive, or any of the other ridiculous things caused by not sticking to standards and/or designing the hardware badly.
I wasn't using computers 20 years ago (I was 6 at the time), but I was a computer tinkerer 15 years ago, and I certainly remember needing drivers for things like monitors (not the video card, the monitor, it was a pain), driver updates for hard drives, etc. Without the drivers you had a standard, very basic functionality because the OS had a built in generic that would just barely work.
Ever heard of a Plug 'n Play monitor? Of course you have, it's what all monitors are now. But there was a time when there was no such thing. When PnP came out, it was revolutionary, because you didn't need drivers for the stupid simple stuff, like monitors and hard drives. To use PnP required a PnP capable motherboard, hardware device, and OS. A lot of BIOSs still have the setting to disable PnP if the OS isn't capable of it - then you'll need drivers. And of course, even after PnP for many years it was dubbed "Plug 'n Pray" because you were never sure it would actually work right, if not you'd better have drivers on hand.
Hell, Windows XP still won't run a SCSI drive unless you have the driver for it, and SCSI has been around FOREVER.
You may not know this, but even today you need drivers for your ATA/SATA hard drive to work properly. Some companies even send you a disk still, just in case. You don't recognize it, because after 20+ years the technology has been pretty well nailed, and new drivers are rarely - if ever- necessary. 99.9% of mass storage drivers are built in to any OS later than XP, but under certain cirumstances it's good to be aware of them and which ones you need (it comes up when using Sysprep sometimes, specifying your drivers can really speed up a re-image). Most of the drivers are contained in one or two INF files, but without them your drive will not work.
In other words, STFU, it's new technology, and even at its worst it's better than what we have currently. Soon things will be pretty well standardized, and the only substantive difference between brands will be the number of channels, chips, and levels which determine speed, capacity, and price.
Kinda like hard drives now, where we look at RPMs, cache, and seek times to find the best drives.
I use a hosts file to block ad servers, it gets probably 95% of the junk out there. As a bonus, the ads aren't even downloaded to my machine, so all my bandwidth goes to the page I'm browsing.
And since my internet at work is way over-capacity, that's a good thing. There are a number of lists out there, give it a shot. It's the geeky way to do it. ;)
I'm totally blowing my ability to mod because of this, but I hated the ending of the last book for the longest time. Now I think it's kinda funny, like some kind of uber-joke you might not "get" for a while but keeps growing on you. It was a completely appropriate way to end the series.
It matches extremely well with someone's explanation of where "42" actually came from - they said it's binary.
Hold your hands up to your face, palms facing you, thumbs in.
Now, assume each digit of "42" represents one hand - i.e. 4 is left hand 2 is right hand.
Now, what's 4 in binary? 0100
And what's 2 in binary? 0010
Match your fingers with the digits, and you get a glorious double-middle-finger flipping off everyone, kinda like the ending of the 5th book.
My favorite joke in the book, though, was the running "flowerpot that says 'oh no not again'" joke. That and flying. And crickett. Top 3, ok?
But then again, I have a pretty unconventional sensibility when it comes to what I opine should be copyrightable. In my view, software shouldn't be copyrightable at all. Source code, yes. Copyright to your heart's content, but not executable binaries and most certainly not encrypted data.
I agree with you, but I see a problem. Software binaries should not be covered under copyright, imho, they should be covered under patents. The problem is, not ALL software can and should be covered under patents, and it should NOT be ok to re-produce the software and distribute it to others. A software producer has a reasonable right to profit from his product, and software is unique among products because it is so easy to copy that it's almost hard not to.
I think pulling software out of copyright (where I don't believe it belongs) would require a new law that would define the sale and reproduction of software. That would actually be kinda nice, because it may end all this EULA bs that goes on with software licenses.
In any case, I can't see pulling software out from under Copyright without throwing some kind of bone to software developers. Otherwise, who would bother to write software? Everything would be in-house, proprietary software and we'd be set back a decade in software innovation.
It's not on grounds of inelligibility for copyright as an entity that this will be thrown out (you're right about that, the gov can hold copyright), it's on the grounds that facts cannot be copyrighted. They may have a case for the composition of the schedule, but as far as the dates, times, and train numbers, they've got nothing. So unless he's doing a scan-paste operation to get the schedules on his app (which I can't imagine, but it's possible), he's in the clear. They're just trying to bully him.
If I were him I'd counter-sue on the basis of a frivolous lawsuit and harassment, and seek damages matching any lawyer fees and lost income due to the trial.
If you buy an Xbox, the warranty is 3 years for RROD (most of the failures), 1 year for everything else. If in Iceland you get to extend that 1 year to 2 years, well, that's friggin awesome.
The only reason for buying an XBOX 360 I can think of is when they include a year's worth of crack or meth. You know that two thirds of those consoles die within a year or two. You know that after three years, the thing is out of warranty and you're out of luck. You know that it's damn loud. You know there's a few consoles out there that last much longer, make less noise, cost less money and don't require a serverfarm-sized air condition to not overheat. And you know there's a tremendous array of laptop and desktop computers that can run PC versions of most console games and much much more, including every piece of USB equipment ever made in the last decade.
Now, what's the kicker on the 360 to throw all that aside?
I tried to find the sarcasm, but I couldn't. It must be there, seeing as how every single statement you made was incorrect.
A.) Not quite 2/3 of people never have a problem with thier 360. Of the unfortunate 39% who do, about 40% of those people will have another problem, and 40% of the people who have a second problem will have a third, etc. It works out to a 54% TOTAL fail rate, and the second and third passes are usually refurbished machines which are slightly less reliable (kinda shitty of MS, but understandable given the cost).
B.) True, the warranty is only good for 3 years, but that's three times better than the PS3's and the Wii's one year warranty. That's right, one year and you're out of luck for the competition.
C.) It's a hell of a lot quieter than the gaming PC you want to replace it with, and I've heard conflicting reports of whether the PS3 or 360 is louder when playing games. Unless your an audiophile, neither is distracting when you've got the stereo turned on at even a low volume.
D.) Which console costs less money? The cheapest PS3 is just coming out, at $300. The cheapest 360 is almost half that, at $179. The Wii is still $250. (all prices are from Amazon.com) Which console is cheaper again? It's only when you move to the mid-range 360 that the Wii gets cheaper, and the PS3 is only now the same price, and if you're smart you'll buy the arcade version and the hard drive separately and save yourself up to $50 off of THAT price (only difference between pro and arcade is the HDD). So, PS3 for $300, or XBOX 360 for $250? Which is cheaper again? Which has more games, including all of the best ones? Thought so.
E.) All you need to keep it cool is not block the vent holes. They put half them on top, which is a terrible idea, but as long as you keep those free it does not overheat, and your chances of failure will be in line with the other consoles.
F.) Any laptop or PC that can run "PC versions of most console games and much much more" is going to be 3-5x more expensive than a console - a $600 laptop won't let you play games like Gears of War or Fallout 3 (well, maybe F3, with low settings). Desktops are a little better about that, you could probably get by with a $400 desktop and a $100 video card, but it's still a hell of a lot more than ~$200. Consoles are in the price range of nettops and netbooks, which can't run any but the oldest PC games, console port or no. Why would I spend 5x as much just to play games?
Of course, the kicker is the 360 is now the cheapest console with the 2nd best graphics (by a very small margin) and all the best games (the ones that are PS3 only are, frankly, shit). I hear PS3's home is great, but XBOX live has tons of extra content available, including Netflix (my primary use of my xbox, actually).
No dope required.
Your numbers are off a little, but your maths are good. 61% of purchasers experienced no failures, not 46%. 46% is the number of consoles, total, that did not fail, which is an irrelevant number for failures per purchase, unless you did the average the other way (total consoles issued, you'd have a bad average then).
The $1 billion with a "b" that MS put up to deal with the issue tells you how costly that 54% (69% per-purchase) fail rate was.
Still, it's about the most used console out there, so they can deal.
I suspect that the crowd's doing the "ooh...shiny" thing and putting up with the unreliable things...
If that were the case, PS3 would be trouncing the 360, as it's the "Ooh...shiny!" console.
... because "it has the most titles". Sadly, most of the stuff on the X-Box is drek- and the bulk of the stuff I'm interested in has a version for PS3
Unfortunately, a few of the most popular games on the market are not available on PS3, but the opposite is only true for a few obscure games.
So if you've got less than $200 to spend, and you want to play all the games, what are you going to buy? You don't have to buy the stuff that's shit, all the good games exist for 360, and both the games and the console are cheaper. If you're willing to go used on the games, you could buy an Xbox360 plus three or four games (in addition to the crappy games it comes with) for the price of the PS3 Slim.
Most PS3 games don't even take advantage of the 1080p hi-def capability, and even then you need a really nice TV to tell the difference between that and the 360's 720p, so which do you pick? Unless you've got cash to burn on the TV and blueray, you pick the 360 even now. Here's a hint: Most people don't have that much cash to burn.
...the message is that people love the 360 regardless of failure. I find that surprising and just downright weird, but that's what the respondents said.
It's not so wierd, the PS3 may be technically superior to the XBox 360, but the difference is not that significant - like back in the old days when one console had better graphics than another. The difference between an Xbox and an Xbox 360 is significantly less than the difference between the NES and the Super NES, for example. The difference between Xbox 360 and the PS3 is even smaller, and the 360 is half the price or less. It is now the cheapest console on the market, and has the second best graphics - and that only by a small measure.
Only the most hard-core graphics lovers would find the 360's graphics less than adequate, and the fact that it has a lot more games that are a lot more popular means chances are the game you want to play is on the 360, not the PS3.
That's why they still sell a lot of them. Also, most of the hardware failures (the rings of death) for the 360 were eventually replaced free of charge, so animosity is not that great towards MS in regards to the 360. And, as long as you make sure it is well ventilated (vent holes are top and back - why? who knows?), they don't really fail that often. They are just more sensitive than consoles of the past.
Lol!