Averages are wonderful things. Over time they account for variations in, well, just about everything. So, yeah, I'll assume that the average rate over millennia is predictable once we've measured it for the few millennia between the needs for a leap hour. A large enough data set and all that.
Doesn't a leap second smack of someone looking overhead at "high noon" each day and re-setting their watch? I mean, really. Next people will want time zones sliced into second increments so that everyone has the sun directly overhead at noon. I wonder if I could patent a watch that uses radio transceiver to re-set itself as you drive from one "time slice" to another as you cross town.
'course you can do the dishes or take a walk while a movie is downloading for a couple of hours. I'd rather do that than stand at a kiosk for 5 minutes twiddling my thumbs waiting for the movie to download to my unique USB stick.
I like your idea, but add in a system where you pick up a pre-loaded USB stick that is authorized for your account using a public key when you check out- leave a dongle USB stick at home with your private key hooked up to your player. Quick, easy, good DRM for both you and the store (since it's supposed to be a rental I wouldn't mind DRM so much), and if you lost the USB key you could just pay a $5 fine- the stick would be useless to anyone without your private key, so neither you, the video store, or the studios has to worry about lost digital data floating around.
More to the point, it's not that manufacturers don't care what you do with your computer, it's that they want you to be able to do anything with your computer. Computer's are not game consoles, they are designed to be programmed flexibly to perform many and varied tasks, and to switch back and forth between those tasks. That makes computers useful and therefore valuable- we'll pay for that capability. If we lock down hardware, then they'll be the equivalent of set-top boxes we rent from the cable companies or an Apple TV- we'll take them out of the box, they'll do one or two things, and that's it. Forever. Boring, and less valuable to the consumer.
Multi-purpose computers will still be available, at a price, but will we have to get a license for them since they can be used for "pirate stuff"?
But in my town it'd be illegal for me to put a "small refrigerator" in my front yard and leave it there for years. I wouldn't be jailed, but I would be fined, and if I left it there long enough I'd be charged when they hauled it away to the dump for me. Why? Because it's an eyesore and lowers my and my neighbor's property values. So it's different when a cable company does it... why?
Given the magnitude of the sums purportedly to be funneled out of these poor countries, the "victims" in these cases are more analogous to someone who takes money and a gun from someone to kill another person but when they pull the trigger the (rigged) gun blows up on them. Sure, they got hurt, but they should still go to jail for the attempted murder and conspiracy. Wire fraud is illegal. Why shouldn't attempted wire fraud be? Just because they lost some money too?
I like your idea...but. In the US (at least) it's illegal for companies to advertise in ways that cost the consumer money; that's why SPAM is illegal over FAX machines as it costs the receiver to print the ad, denies them use of their machine, etc. If people paid per GB then the ads on web pages would cost the consumer to download (even if only fractions of a cent per ad), making those ads illegal. Ad-based websites (like/.) would go under, make us commit to an EULA that says we accept the cost of their advertising, or driving them to subscription based models. Not necessarily a bad thing, but we have to decide if that's what we really want.
Easy solution, don't get the CD at all. Not from the record companies, not from Torrent*, not at all. That sends the message to your favorite band and the record company that you won't deal with them if they choose to try to screw you (the record company through the RIAA, the band through supporting the record company). You won't die if you don't have the CD, really, I promise.
And I'll let the Linux nuts inform you about alternatives to MicroSoft...
So, it sounds like you should either run for office to fix the problem or move (mobility being the ultimate "vote" of approval or disapproval). Or you could sit on/. and complain... Oh, and yeah, I don't have the aptitude for politics, so I moved.
That's cool. No nymphs, men, or spaghetti monsters here though. There is no "why", only "is". When I do bad things, I suffer, so I've learned to try not to do bad things to myself or others. It's not "god" or the "universe" punishing me for bad things, just that actions beget like actions, and when you screw someone over (eg. most political "heroes") you tend to make yourself a target. Those bad people do suffer, even if only when they look into a mirror (as you get older, you'd be surprised how much that matters). And I've found that it's amazing how people treat me so much better when I treat them well. It's not "cosmic" karma, but good acts do come back to you. Ever hear of positive and negative feedback loops? The wonderful thing about life is that we get to choose what kind of "seed" we put into the loops around us, including who we emulate. Shit still happens, but it's amazing how (for example) friends step up to help out when you've helped them, well, religiously, in the past.
As we grew up, we watched our heroes (eg; the people we looked up to) throw away their ideals in the name of pragmatism. We watched wars, and death, and crime, and no one seemed to be punished for doing "bad" things.
And when you grow up a little bit more, you'll realize that just because someone doesn't "seem" to be punished for doing bad things that it doesn't mean they aren't. When people realize that their soul/spirit/conscience/karma suffers from doing "bad" things, and take steps to stop doing those bad things, well, then we finish growing up. Keep going.
And if you still need heroes, look to the people who found a way not to do bad things as they aged, and make them your heroes.
I like your point about lights/signs. I have a 10 to 11 minute commute when I go the speed limit and there's no traffic as the lights are timed so that once you catch one green (even after having to stop and wait at one) you catch the rest all green. When people blow by me they catch up to the lights and have to stop. That means that by the time I get to the light behind them they are still accelerating from their stop and I have to slow down to accommodate them- this slows down my commute, sometimes adding as much as 5 minutes to my trip if I have to constantly slow down for the people who rabbit from light to light. This equation changes on long highway trips, but in town you actually get where you're going faster if you follow the speed limit.
To address the main issue, GPS my car with a warrant, otherwise the cops can keep their fracking hands off my personal property.
Dude, the joke was that if he'd plowed the plain into a building that he'd be dead. And it's hard to vote for a dead guy whether you want to or not (John Ashcroft's 2000 election loss notwithstanding). So, fishbowl was perfectly justified in stating "whoosh". I'm gonna add a "well, duh" since you still didn't get it.
Cheap, convenient, quality can beat free. That's why iTunes is thriving- it's cheaper than CD's, it's very convenient and high quality (searches, reviews, and guaranteed high-quality downloads all in one place, immediate downloads).Yeah, yeah, say what you will about the remaining DRM'd tracks. It's balancing the mix that's hard, not the basic formula itself. The RIAA just can't deal with the fact that the new tech is squeezing their enormous profit margins. I say deal with it or good riddance, that's free trade.
Gravitons don't exist? They why is gravity limited by the speed of light? Oh, it's a force? Name one force that doesn't have a particle... best theory is that gravitons must exist, so let's look for them until someone gets a better idea, ok? Once that happens you can tell me "I told you so" until your heart's content.
Crap, did I just get trolled?
Thinking of chemical reactions being only in covalent elections is like F=MA, very useful still, unless we're talking about non-everyday experiences. OTOH it's great to know that relativity and (now) non-covalent bonding are out there when we are working on those "special" projects.
but it's not an argument about users rights so much as an argument about their network infrastructure and QoS management.
2) Blanket banning P2P simply would not work at this stage for regular ISPs. Honestly, it's too late for that. It's already embedded in what consumers do, and you can't just turn it off any more. There are already too many legitimate consumer-oriented applications that make use...
Yeah, they'd never try to kill, let alone succeed at killing, a service that has thousands and thousands of subscribers a day using it for legitimate purposes... like Usenet.
Life's diversity and extremophiles show that life is adaptable, not that it arises everywhere.
Also, the universe as a whole does tend toward entropy. Even the most chaotic systems have knots and eddies that look highly organized; see hurricanes as part of the overall weather pattern. They are beautifully organized, seem to arise out of chaos, and then dissipate.
To be realistic, we have to assume that life, while not necessarily unique, is still just a random occurrence on the way to the ultimate heat-death of the universe.
So the college kid who hasn't lived long enough to be a "recidivist alcoholic" but who still has a.15 on the road gets... what? And the high school girl who "just had one beer" but weighs 90 pounds? How about all the other multitude of situations where people are unable to drive? I agree that BAC is a bogus measure, but, well, impaired is impaired. For that matter, why do drunks get jail when an old lady who plows into a crowd of pedestrians gets her license suspended for a month? It's an imperfect system, that's why. Run for town council if you want to change things.
If you can't drive after even one drink, you should be arrested no matter your BAC. Learn to drink at home, or at a bar that calls taxis for you, or, for cripes sake, with a designated driver. People stupid enough to take/post pictures of themselves like the people in the article (yeah, I read it) deserve the harsher sentence as they are showing that they are not remorseful and that they can't plan ahead ("gee, no one will ever see this if I post in on the intertubes!")
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Averages are wonderful things. Over time they account for variations in, well, just about everything. So, yeah, I'll assume that the average rate over millennia is predictable once we've measured it for the few millennia between the needs for a leap hour. A large enough data set and all that.
Doesn't a leap second smack of someone looking overhead at "high noon" each day and re-setting their watch? I mean, really. Next people will want time zones sliced into second increments so that everyone has the sun directly overhead at noon. I wonder if I could patent a watch that uses radio transceiver to re-set itself as you drive from one "time slice" to another as you cross town.
'course you can do the dishes or take a walk while a movie is downloading for a couple of hours. I'd rather do that than stand at a kiosk for 5 minutes twiddling my thumbs waiting for the movie to download to my unique USB stick.
I like your idea, but add in a system where you pick up a pre-loaded USB stick that is authorized for your account using a public key when you check out- leave a dongle USB stick at home with your private key hooked up to your player. Quick, easy, good DRM for both you and the store (since it's supposed to be a rental I wouldn't mind DRM so much), and if you lost the USB key you could just pay a $5 fine- the stick would be useless to anyone without your private key, so neither you, the video store, or the studios has to worry about lost digital data floating around.
Until someone cracks the DRM...
Would you like to buy this bridge I happen to hold a very official looking deed to?
Pun intended?
Multi-purpose computers will still be available, at a price, but will we have to get a license for them since they can be used for "pirate stuff"?
But in my town it'd be illegal for me to put a "small refrigerator" in my front yard and leave it there for years. I wouldn't be jailed, but I would be fined, and if I left it there long enough I'd be charged when they hauled it away to the dump for me. Why? Because it's an eyesore and lowers my and my neighbor's property values. So it's different when a cable company does it... why?
Given the magnitude of the sums purportedly to be funneled out of these poor countries, the "victims" in these cases are more analogous to someone who takes money and a gun from someone to kill another person but when they pull the trigger the (rigged) gun blows up on them. Sure, they got hurt, but they should still go to jail for the attempted murder and conspiracy. Wire fraud is illegal. Why shouldn't attempted wire fraud be? Just because they lost some money too?
I like your idea...but. In the US (at least) it's illegal for companies to advertise in ways that cost the consumer money; that's why SPAM is illegal over FAX machines as it costs the receiver to print the ad, denies them use of their machine, etc. If people paid per GB then the ads on web pages would cost the consumer to download (even if only fractions of a cent per ad), making those ads illegal. Ad-based websites (like /.) would go under, make us commit to an EULA that says we accept the cost of their advertising, or driving them to subscription based models. Not necessarily a bad thing, but we have to decide if that's what we really want.
That's the law for you.
Easy solution, don't get the CD at all. Not from the record companies, not from Torrent*, not at all. That sends the message to your favorite band and the record company that you won't deal with them if they choose to try to screw you (the record company through the RIAA, the band through supporting the record company). You won't die if you don't have the CD, really, I promise.
And I'll let the Linux nuts inform you about alternatives to MicroSoft ...
So, it sounds like you should either run for office to fix the problem or move (mobility being the ultimate "vote" of approval or disapproval). Or you could sit on /. and complain... Oh, and yeah, I don't have the aptitude for politics, so I moved.
That's cool. No nymphs, men, or spaghetti monsters here though. There is no "why", only "is". When I do bad things, I suffer, so I've learned to try not to do bad things to myself or others. It's not "god" or the "universe" punishing me for bad things, just that actions beget like actions, and when you screw someone over (eg. most political "heroes") you tend to make yourself a target. Those bad people do suffer, even if only when they look into a mirror (as you get older, you'd be surprised how much that matters). And I've found that it's amazing how people treat me so much better when I treat them well. It's not "cosmic" karma, but good acts do come back to you. Ever hear of positive and negative feedback loops? The wonderful thing about life is that we get to choose what kind of "seed" we put into the loops around us, including who we emulate. Shit still happens, but it's amazing how (for example) friends step up to help out when you've helped them, well, religiously, in the past.
And when you grow up a little bit more, you'll realize that just because someone doesn't "seem" to be punished for doing bad things that it doesn't mean they aren't. When people realize that their soul/spirit/conscience/karma suffers from doing "bad" things, and take steps to stop doing those bad things, well, then we finish growing up. Keep going.
And if you still need heroes, look to the people who found a way not to do bad things as they aged, and make them your heroes.
I like your point about lights/signs. I have a 10 to 11 minute commute when I go the speed limit and there's no traffic as the lights are timed so that once you catch one green (even after having to stop and wait at one) you catch the rest all green. When people blow by me they catch up to the lights and have to stop. That means that by the time I get to the light behind them they are still accelerating from their stop and I have to slow down to accommodate them- this slows down my commute, sometimes adding as much as 5 minutes to my trip if I have to constantly slow down for the people who rabbit from light to light. This equation changes on long highway trips, but in town you actually get where you're going faster if you follow the speed limit.
To address the main issue, GPS my car with a warrant, otherwise the cops can keep their fracking hands off my personal property.
One word, "panopticon". Jeremy Bentham was a man before his time...
I believe that it was the East German Woman's Swim Team (the one with boobs and mustaches).
First, learn the difference between "whose" and "who's". Hint: you used it incorrectly on the front page of /.
Love that attention to detail you got going there. Makes me want to invest.
You've never met my sister, have you?
Nah, Chuck Norris jokes are funny because they're stupid.
Dude, the joke was that if he'd plowed the plain into a building that he'd be dead. And it's hard to vote for a dead guy whether you want to or not (John Ashcroft's 2000 election loss notwithstanding). So, fishbowl was perfectly justified in stating "whoosh". I'm gonna add a "well, duh" since you still didn't get it.
Cheap, convenient, quality can beat free. That's why iTunes is thriving- it's cheaper than CD's, it's very convenient and high quality (searches, reviews, and guaranteed high-quality downloads all in one place, immediate downloads).Yeah, yeah, say what you will about the remaining DRM'd tracks. It's balancing the mix that's hard, not the basic formula itself. The RIAA just can't deal with the fact that the new tech is squeezing their enormous profit margins. I say deal with it or good riddance, that's free trade.
Gravitons don't exist? They why is gravity limited by the speed of light? Oh, it's a force? Name one force that doesn't have a particle... best theory is that gravitons must exist, so let's look for them until someone gets a better idea, ok? Once that happens you can tell me "I told you so" until your heart's content.
Crap, did I just get trolled?
Thinking of chemical reactions being only in covalent elections is like F=MA, very useful still, unless we're talking about non-everyday experiences. OTOH it's great to know that relativity and (now) non-covalent bonding are out there when we are working on those "special" projects.
Yeah, they'd never try to kill, let alone succeed at killing, a service that has thousands and thousands of subscribers a day using it for legitimate purposes... like Usenet.
Life's diversity and extremophiles show that life is adaptable, not that it arises everywhere.
Also, the universe as a whole does tend toward entropy. Even the most chaotic systems have knots and eddies that look highly organized; see hurricanes as part of the overall weather pattern. They are beautifully organized, seem to arise out of chaos, and then dissipate.
To be realistic, we have to assume that life, while not necessarily unique, is still just a random occurrence on the way to the ultimate heat-death of the universe.
So the college kid who hasn't lived long enough to be a "recidivist alcoholic" but who still has a .15 on the road gets... what? And the high school girl who "just had one beer" but weighs 90 pounds? How about all the other multitude of situations where people are unable to drive? I agree that BAC is a bogus measure, but, well, impaired is impaired. For that matter, why do drunks get jail when an old lady who plows into a crowd of pedestrians gets her license suspended for a month? It's an imperfect system, that's why. Run for town council if you want to change things.
If you can't drive after even one drink, you should be arrested no matter your BAC. Learn to drink at home, or at a bar that calls taxis for you, or, for cripes sake, with a designated driver. People stupid enough to take/post pictures of themselves like the people in the article (yeah, I read it) deserve the harsher sentence as they are showing that they are not remorseful and that they can't plan ahead ("gee, no one will ever see this if I post in on the intertubes!")