Hallelujah. The only jobs I've had that were really metric driven were graveyard-shift-convenience-store-clerk and calc-tutor (how many hours did you work - thankfully nobody has ever counted my lines of code or my correct forecasts per data). Since then, it's been tasks & deliverables, but very hard to metric. But, back when I did technical work (I've been drafted (kicking and screaming) into PM and am looking for other employment), work came home all the time. That was acceptable - Staying up late because I had some uncrackable correlation or an unsolvable hurdle was my obsession, not really the company's fault. Now that I'm in PM, I'm allowed to telecommute but hate it. It's all stress and extra work and I don't want to impose it on my family, but am expected to... It hurts me and them. If I was a bachelor or didn't care about my job, I might feel differently...
But is this really enough to convince them? I'm convinced - This makes it seem pretty clear. But I'm sure that China's stance on this (in the unlikely event that they'll have to defend it) will be that they noticed an error and corrected it - Somebody accidentally mistyped the date that is clearly displayed on her birth certificate and passport. Oops! Problem solved.
Sure it's BS, but who's going to stop them? As long as they're not displaying the Olympic Rings without prior permission and nobody's testing positive for drugs, I don't see the IOC taking action on anything against the PRC.
Yes, I would, but mostly because I believe that people should gain based on their own merit and not their ability to take advantage of other people.
OK - You're playing 9-ball. There's $10k on the line. You notice that your opponent is about to take a shot that will likely leave him stranded and set you up for a win, when he's got another opportunity open that would doom you.
Are you going to stop him from shooting and point out the better option? Just so that you know that he won based on his own merit?
Fox probably noticed that WB was spending a lot of money on this early on. But, if they had stopped them, the result would have been very detrimental to Fox. They probably could have negotiated to allow WB to proceed, but they wouldn't have nearly the leverage that they do now. And it's a big chunk of money on the table.
It's not an all-or-nothing deal like my 9-ball example (maybe golf with $$/hole would have been better - oh well) but, when there's that much money sitting out there, you let your opponent take the bad shot and play the game from there.
Dear gods. Big Lebowski action figures. With my Office Space in the theater reference, I was just trying to come up with a good movie that had trouble in the theater and is just as entertaining at home. With my Big Lebowski action figure reference, I was trying to come up with a good movie that would be the most ludicrous thing to try to exploit in merchandising (apart from maybe selling tattered t-shirts, bath robes, and goofy-looking shorts).
What I find even odder is that many of those items are not coming out until late 2008 - A decade after release.
I'll make one leap: you didn't argue against the GP's argument in the slightest. You put up a straw man.
Umm... That's not much of a leap. I thought that I made it clear that's what I was doing - Sorry if that didn't come across. I just asked if anyone thought that the 'downloading is OK because the artists should have to perform to get paid' argument could be extended to movies. I would describe that as posing a question about a related hypothetical situation, but 'straw man' I guess is acceptable too. You know, a straw man isn't necessarily a Troll and is sometimes a useful way to provoke interesting conversation.
To make the connection, however, you'd have to look at theater sales and the value of the DVD itself. First, the theater is an experience that very few people can replicate at home. Having the latest 4-20 movies in a large room with enough seating for all of your friends and food for all of them isn't something that most people can do, and even fewer can do it at the drop of a hat (ie after dinner going to watch the new green lantern movie).
For some movies that's true. I'm really glad that I saw Dark Knight on the big screen. But for movies like Office Space (a fine movie that barely broke even during its big screen run), the theater doesn't offer much. So I was hoping for some ideas about how movies that need $$ post-big-screen can remain profitable in a world where downloads provide an experience that is sometimes even superior to purchasing the DVD for free. Unfortunately, most of what I've gotten is 'Here's why I download and I'm not a lost sale,' re-hash.
... If they'd focus on adding value to legitimate products and generating good will in the customers, they'd make buying the product more attractive than piracy. Unfortunately, they just keep trying to make it harder for the pirates, which is a losing game with our current set of technology.
I agree about the focus on the pirates. Complete waste apart from perhaps scaring off some potential pirates with the occasional civil suit, although that doesn't seem to be working too well for the RIAA (who've managed a double whammy by failing to slow downloads and made their customers hate them). As far as the movie makers' ability to perpetuate their post-big-screen business model by promoting good will and making a quality product, I hope you're right but I'm a little more skeptical. I suspect that DVDs will start to compete even less well due to increased previews/ads and we'll wind up with random product placement every 20 seconds in every movie we see. But I'd rather be wrong.
So charge for concert tickets, t-shirts, trinkets, datastream subscriptions, and so forth.
I've seen downloaders use this argument a lot to justify downloading music and sometimes even asserting that charging for music is somehow immoral - "Information wants to be free" type stuff. Of course, you may just be trying to volunteer a band-air to the admittedly completely broken business model...
I suspect that the same downloaders also download movies. I really would like to see somebody make the leap and extend that argument to defend downloading movies. Only pay for live performances? Hope that people will shell out $12 because they just have to see Office Space on the big screen in a noisy, crowded theater instead of the leaked DVD at home? The Big Lebowski action figures?
If the downloads aren't encoded in a lossless format, and if Time Warner expands their bandwidth metering trial, then I'll be sticking with CDs thank you.
CDs are not a lossless format - They're sampled at 44.1 kHz and digitized at 16-bits. DVDs do a little better. But the only lossless format is live and unamplified.
I realize that you were probably just saying that your minimum quality standard is what's available on CD, but some of the lossy formats are damned close and I'm convinced that most people who complain about compression effects in high bitrate lossily but intelligently compressed music are just experiencing psychosomatic effects and probably couldn't tell the difference between the compressed version and the CD. (Some audiophiles with super-human hearing that have trained themselves in what to listen for may disagree.)
It's all about deciding for yourself what level of lossy is acceptable under the circumstances.
Now that all that's out of the way, most of the streaming music services fall short on this front and do not meet my minimum standard of quality on the music they deliver. (If somebody has a suggestion of a service that really delivers, my ears are wide open.) So, for the time being, I mostly just listen to stuff that I've ripped and (lossily) compressed from my CD collection (fairly large and almost all acquired used back in high school). This 'blanket licensing' thing, assuming the same level of streaming quality I've experienced with the services I've tried, would really do nothing more for me than provide a mechanism for previewing music that I may want to acquire later. And, given that it would all be RIAA stuff, I'm not sure I'd find many gold nuggets while mining through it...
THANKS for the HEADS UP! But what I WANT TO KNOW NOW is WHAT DO I NEED TO DO IF I WANT TO USE SSL ALL THE TIME? I mean I type in https://mail.google.com/ every time, but I REALLY NEED TO KNOW what to do to get it NOT TO REDIRECT BACK to http://mail.google.com/.
Given that, the only real news here is that instead of rolling your own scripts, you now have an automated tool that even script kiddies can use.
Breaking news it ain't exactly.
Actually, I consider that pretty major news. There are a helluva lot more script kiddies out there than there experienced black-hats - All eager to show off their l33t skills by "hacking" someone's account and wreaking havoc. If an experienced black-hat cracks my gmail account, most likely he'll see that there's nothing of value there and move on. Worst case, my account becomes part of an army of spam-bots.
If some junior-high kid downloads this script and cracks my gmail account, most likely I'll wind up signing us as a MySpace troll, my contacts will get obscene mail from me, I'll be registered to every damn thing on the net that requires only a valid e-mail to sign up for, etc.
And, considering that the odds of one of the gazillion script-kiddies running this script get access to an account are a so much higher than one of the (gazillion/100k) actual black-hats getting it, this is likely to inconvenience a lot more people than are being exploited right now.
That actually does seem a little Trollish (as do most posts that start with "This is not a troll..."), but I'll bite anyway.
Disclaimer - I've not used ZFS and know zilch about it.
But your lack of excitement over FS capabilities is disturbing.
Does it make efficient use of the space available on the HD? Maybe. Does it organize files in such a way that they can be quickly found and read? Maybe. Can it recover from minor disk errors? Maybe. Does it throttle the HD by constantly having to rearrange data in order to maintain the above capabilities? Maybe. Etc.
Indeed the feature is not new, but it may be unknown to many of gmail's users. The news here, I think, is not that you can use SSL with gmail, but that if you don't you're effectively pwned.
Sorry for the self-reply, but I should point out that by "external antenna" I meant external to the renter's rented area. From his post, it sounds like elevating the antenna would be the easiest quick-fix, but impractical due to the lease and first-floor accommodations.
Going all antenna-geek and configuring a system that can overcome the obstacles may be fun (depending on your definition of "fun"), but unless the apartment complex doesn't offer cable hook-ups, probably more of a PITA than it's worth (depending on your definition of "PITA").
Why on earth would somebody who doesn't watch TV move house just to entertain relatives visiting during a family member's illness? Not to mention - At least where I've lived, apartment complexes that bar external antennas are much more common than those that allow them (at least when you're talking about complexes with at least a few floors). So moving house may imply quite a premium. Of course, slipping a few bucks to the landlord may garner some leeway.
For a short-term, easy-to-implement solution, I've got to side with the posters suggesting cable. Subscribe while there's traffic coming through and then dump it. Why spend the time, trouble, and $$ rejiggering a fancy antenna system to entertain if it's not a long-term solution. Cable's easy and may even be cheaper than investing in fancy hardware if you don't need it permanently.
Unfortunately, I can't afford to play with the silicone jugs. But my girlfriend, when properly inflated, is fairly well-endowed. For some of us, it's plastic or nothing.
I've seen milk kept in bags, but it seems terribly inefficient. Sure, it keeps well, but how many people have the room to keep a 1-ton leather bag around just to dispense milk? Not to mention the maintenance and clean-up involved. Not for me - I'll just stick to my plastic jugs, thank you very much.
(Not to mention I'm not sure I'd be able to restrain myself from just extracting milk. I'm told that, apart from the milk, those giant leather bags are mostly filled with meat!)
Back in high school, I clerked a convenience store that got robbed. I hit my silent alarm, but got no response. After the robber left, I tried to call 911 - I couldn't. The silent alarm used the phone line to call out and was tying up the line. I had to wait ~10 minutes (may be exaggerating) for the phone line to open up so that I could call in.
The dispatcher told me that she saw the alarm come in but was waiting to hear from me in case I'd hit it on accident...
Hey - we've had four 3rd party presidents! Of course, we only elected two... And one was ejected from the party after just a few months in office because his politics sharply conflicted with the party's views... And it's been more than 150 years since any 3rd party presidential candidate has been taken seriously on a national level...
But that doesn't mean it can't happen again! Prohibition Party unite!
Additionally the issues raised about SIPRNET and NIPRNET being physically close to each other has absolutely no merit. The SIPRNET network hardware is likely to be located in an entirely different building/room than the NIPRNET hardware. Which would be further physically secured than the NIPRNET hardware even. Although both would be physically secured. Not to mention that the users would probably have a separate smart card to authenticate themselves to each network.
I don't work for the Air Force, but we do have NIPRnet and SIPRnet access here. Having access to classified & unclassified connections in the same room isn't at all uncommon (although never on the same computer). There are physical protections to restrict access to the building and some offices, but authenticating on the networks is typically just a login/password.
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Hallelujah. The only jobs I've had that were really metric driven were graveyard-shift-convenience-store-clerk and calc-tutor (how many hours did you work - thankfully nobody has ever counted my lines of code or my correct forecasts per data). Since then, it's been tasks & deliverables, but very hard to metric. But, back when I did technical work (I've been drafted (kicking and screaming) into PM and am looking for other employment), work came home all the time. That was acceptable - Staying up late because I had some uncrackable correlation or an unsolvable hurdle was my obsession, not really the company's fault. Now that I'm in PM, I'm allowed to telecommute but hate it. It's all stress and extra work and I don't want to impose it on my family, but am expected to... It hurts me and them. If I was a bachelor or didn't care about my job, I might feel differently...
No, it has been 11 years since its announcement.
Unfortunately, I'm not sure it's any closer.
But is this really enough to convince them? I'm convinced - This makes it seem pretty clear. But I'm sure that China's stance on this (in the unlikely event that they'll have to defend it) will be that they noticed an error and corrected it - Somebody accidentally mistyped the date that is clearly displayed on her birth certificate and passport. Oops! Problem solved.
Sure it's BS, but who's going to stop them? As long as they're not displaying the Olympic Rings without prior permission and nobody's testing positive for drugs, I don't see the IOC taking action on anything against the PRC.
Yes, I would, but mostly because I believe that people should gain based on their own merit and not their ability to take advantage of other people.
OK - You're playing 9-ball. There's $10k on the line. You notice that your opponent is about to take a shot that will likely leave him stranded and set you up for a win, when he's got another opportunity open that would doom you.
Are you going to stop him from shooting and point out the better option? Just so that you know that he won based on his own merit?
Fox probably noticed that WB was spending a lot of money on this early on. But, if they had stopped them, the result would have been very detrimental to Fox. They probably could have negotiated to allow WB to proceed, but they wouldn't have nearly the leverage that they do now. And it's a big chunk of money on the table.
It's not an all-or-nothing deal like my 9-ball example (maybe golf with $$/hole would have been better - oh well) but, when there's that much money sitting out there, you let your opponent take the bad shot and play the game from there.
Does it really matter? Do younger gymnasts have a significant advantage over gymnasts a couple of years older?
If they didn't, then they wouldn't be entered and there would be no reason to bar them. Small flexible bodies are advantageous for gymnasts.
Crappy knock-off DVDs? Perhaps you've not been introduced to the digital age. Copied DVDs >= Original DVDs.
The first thing that I do after buying a DVD is copy it and repair the harm inflicted by the distributer.
Dear gods. Big Lebowski action figures. With my Office Space in the theater reference, I was just trying to come up with a good movie that had trouble in the theater and is just as entertaining at home. With my Big Lebowski action figure reference, I was trying to come up with a good movie that would be the most ludicrous thing to try to exploit in merchandising (apart from maybe selling tattered t-shirts, bath robes, and goofy-looking shorts).
What I find even odder is that many of those items are not coming out until late 2008 - A decade after release.
Sir, you just made my head asplode.
I'll make one leap: you didn't argue against the GP's argument in the slightest. You put up a straw man.
Umm... That's not much of a leap. I thought that I made it clear that's what I was doing - Sorry if that didn't come across. I just asked if anyone thought that the 'downloading is OK because the artists should have to perform to get paid' argument could be extended to movies. I would describe that as posing a question about a related hypothetical situation, but 'straw man' I guess is acceptable too. You know, a straw man isn't necessarily a Troll and is sometimes a useful way to provoke interesting conversation.
To make the connection, however, you'd have to look at theater sales and the value of the DVD itself. First, the theater is an experience that very few people can replicate at home. Having the latest 4-20 movies in a large room with enough seating for all of your friends and food for all of them isn't something that most people can do, and even fewer can do it at the drop of a hat (ie after dinner going to watch the new green lantern movie).
For some movies that's true. I'm really glad that I saw Dark Knight on the big screen. But for movies like Office Space (a fine movie that barely broke even during its big screen run), the theater doesn't offer much. So I was hoping for some ideas about how movies that need $$ post-big-screen can remain profitable in a world where downloads provide an experience that is sometimes even superior to purchasing the DVD for free. Unfortunately, most of what I've gotten is 'Here's why I download and I'm not a lost sale,' re-hash.
... If they'd focus on adding value to legitimate products and generating good will in the customers, they'd make buying the product more attractive than piracy. Unfortunately, they just keep trying to make it harder for the pirates, which is a losing game with our current set of technology.
I agree about the focus on the pirates. Complete waste apart from perhaps scaring off some potential pirates with the occasional civil suit, although that doesn't seem to be working too well for the RIAA (who've managed a double whammy by failing to slow downloads and made their customers hate them). As far as the movie makers' ability to perpetuate their post-big-screen business model by promoting good will and making a quality product, I hope you're right but I'm a little more skeptical. I suspect that DVDs will start to compete even less well due to increased previews/ads and we'll wind up with random product placement every 20 seconds in every movie we see. But I'd rather be wrong.
So charge for concert tickets, t-shirts, trinkets, datastream subscriptions, and so forth.
I've seen downloaders use this argument a lot to justify downloading music and sometimes even asserting that charging for music is somehow immoral - "Information wants to be free" type stuff. Of course, you may just be trying to volunteer a band-air to the admittedly completely broken business model...
I suspect that the same downloaders also download movies. I really would like to see somebody make the leap and extend that argument to defend downloading movies. Only pay for live performances? Hope that people will shell out $12 because they just have to see Office Space on the big screen in a noisy, crowded theater instead of the leaked DVD at home? The Big Lebowski action figures?
Anyone care to make the leap?
If the downloads aren't encoded in a lossless format, and if Time Warner expands their bandwidth metering trial, then I'll be sticking with CDs thank you.
CDs are not a lossless format - They're sampled at 44.1 kHz and digitized at 16-bits. DVDs do a little better. But the only lossless format is live and unamplified.
I realize that you were probably just saying that your minimum quality standard is what's available on CD, but some of the lossy formats are damned close and I'm convinced that most people who complain about compression effects in high bitrate lossily but intelligently compressed music are just experiencing psychosomatic effects and probably couldn't tell the difference between the compressed version and the CD. (Some audiophiles with super-human hearing that have trained themselves in what to listen for may disagree.)
It's all about deciding for yourself what level of lossy is acceptable under the circumstances.
Now that all that's out of the way, most of the streaming music services fall short on this front and do not meet my minimum standard of quality on the music they deliver. (If somebody has a suggestion of a service that really delivers, my ears are wide open.) So, for the time being, I mostly just listen to stuff that I've ripped and (lossily) compressed from my CD collection (fairly large and almost all acquired used back in high school). This 'blanket licensing' thing, assuming the same level of streaming quality I've experienced with the services I've tried, would really do nothing more for me than provide a mechanism for previewing music that I may want to acquire later. And, given that it would all be RIAA stuff, I'm not sure I'd find many gold nuggets while mining through it...
No it's the MPAA. His music collection is comprised entirely of summer blockbuster soundtracks.
=)
THANKS for the HEADS UP! But what I WANT TO KNOW NOW is WHAT DO I NEED TO DO IF I WANT TO USE SSL ALL THE TIME? I mean I type in https://mail.google.com/ every time, but I REALLY NEED TO KNOW what to do to get it NOT TO REDIRECT BACK to http://mail.google.com/.
Maybe there's some preference I can set...
=)
Given that, the only real news here is that instead of rolling your own scripts, you now have an automated tool that even script kiddies can use.
Breaking news it ain't exactly.
Actually, I consider that pretty major news. There are a helluva lot more script kiddies out there than there experienced black-hats - All eager to show off their l33t skills by "hacking" someone's account and wreaking havoc. If an experienced black-hat cracks my gmail account, most likely he'll see that there's nothing of value there and move on. Worst case, my account becomes part of an army of spam-bots.
If some junior-high kid downloads this script and cracks my gmail account, most likely I'll wind up signing us as a MySpace troll, my contacts will get obscene mail from me, I'll be registered to every damn thing on the net that requires only a valid e-mail to sign up for, etc.
And, considering that the odds of one of the gazillion script-kiddies running this script get access to an account are a so much higher than one of the (gazillion/100k) actual black-hats getting it, this is likely to inconvenience a lot more people than are being exploited right now.
Why would google not enable SSL by default?
That actually does seem a little Trollish (as do most posts that start with "This is not a troll..."), but I'll bite anyway.
Disclaimer - I've not used ZFS and know zilch about it.
But your lack of excitement over FS capabilities is disturbing.
Does it make efficient use of the space available on the HD? Maybe.
Does it organize files in such a way that they can be quickly found and read? Maybe.
Can it recover from minor disk errors? Maybe.
Does it throttle the HD by constantly having to rearrange data in order to maintain the above capabilities? Maybe.
Etc.
Job continues indefinitely.
Indeed the feature is not new, but it may be unknown to many of gmail's users. The news here, I think, is not that you can use SSL with gmail, but that if you don't you're effectively pwned.
Sorry for the self-reply, but I should point out that by "external antenna" I meant external to the renter's rented area. From his post, it sounds like elevating the antenna would be the easiest quick-fix, but impractical due to the lease and first-floor accommodations.
Going all antenna-geek and configuring a system that can overcome the obstacles may be fun (depending on your definition of "fun"), but unless the apartment complex doesn't offer cable hook-ups, probably more of a PITA than it's worth (depending on your definition of "PITA").
Why on earth would somebody who doesn't watch TV move house just to entertain relatives visiting during a family member's illness? Not to mention - At least where I've lived, apartment complexes that bar external antennas are much more common than those that allow them (at least when you're talking about complexes with at least a few floors). So moving house may imply quite a premium. Of course, slipping a few bucks to the landlord may garner some leeway.
For a short-term, easy-to-implement solution, I've got to side with the posters suggesting cable. Subscribe while there's traffic coming through and then dump it. Why spend the time, trouble, and $$ rejiggering a fancy antenna system to entertain if it's not a long-term solution. Cable's easy and may even be cheaper than investing in fancy hardware if you don't need it permanently.
Unfortunately, I can't afford to play with the silicone jugs. But my girlfriend, when properly inflated, is fairly well-endowed. For some of us, it's plastic or nothing.
I've seen milk kept in bags, but it seems terribly inefficient. Sure, it keeps well, but how many people have the room to keep a 1-ton leather bag around just to dispense milk? Not to mention the maintenance and clean-up involved. Not for me - I'll just stick to my plastic jugs, thank you very much.
(Not to mention I'm not sure I'd be able to restrain myself from just extracting milk. I'm told that, apart from the milk, those giant leather bags are mostly filled with meat!)
Hopefully they'll at least respond.
Back in high school, I clerked a convenience store that got robbed. I hit my silent alarm, but got no response. After the robber left, I tried to call 911 - I couldn't. The silent alarm used the phone line to call out and was tying up the line. I had to wait ~10 minutes (may be exaggerating) for the phone line to open up so that I could call in.
The dispatcher told me that she saw the alarm come in but was waiting to hear from me in case I'd hit it on accident...
Not everyone on SIPRnet is DoD.
Hey - we've had four 3rd party presidents! Of course, we only elected two... And one was ejected from the party after just a few months in office because his politics sharply conflicted with the party's views... And it's been more than 150 years since any 3rd party presidential candidate has been taken seriously on a national level...
But that doesn't mean it can't happen again! Prohibition Party unite!
Additionally the issues raised about SIPRNET and NIPRNET being physically close to each other has absolutely no merit. The SIPRNET network hardware is likely to be located in an entirely different building/room than the NIPRNET hardware. Which would be further physically secured than the NIPRNET hardware even. Although both would be physically secured. Not to mention that the users would probably have a separate smart card to authenticate themselves to each network.
I don't work for the Air Force, but we do have NIPRnet and SIPRnet access here. Having access to classified & unclassified connections in the same room isn't at all uncommon (although never on the same computer). There are physical protections to restrict access to the building and some offices, but authenticating on the networks is typically just a login/password.
Reminds me of an old short story I read in the 80s...
"The Feeling of Power" by Isaac Asimov.
The text: http://downlode.org/Etext/power.html
I never tried a 20-ouncer. Once I discovered how much fun it was to pop used CO2 cartridges, plastic bottles just lost their appeal.
Of course, popping an empty CO2 cartridge with dry ice would be a bit of a challenge.