Fair point. I wear glasses too. If it's raining THAT hard that you really can't see because of the rain in your face then it might be a good time to drive.. or better yet to just stay at home.. it's really not safe to drive in poor weather either. I know accidents here go way up whenever it rains. (We've had like 500% of the average annual rainfall already this year.)
Who cares if your face gets wet? Unless you're wearing makeup I guess. I don't care for makeup (on men or women) though so I guess I don't care. A bicycle helmet would probably keep your hair dry.
I guess your city needs bicycle lanes and such so that you don't need to wait for the cars before you can bypass them. Although if you live in Las Vegas (or similar city) I suggest you ride on the sidewalks if you want a chance at getting to work without injury. Crazy ass drivers who think it's okay to drive in the bike lane at 90mph.:p
I used to live in Miami and I walked to work every day. Usually that meant I'd get there totally soaking wet. Solution: Keep a change of cloths at work or take them in a plastic bag.
I've played with making a lawn mower that was powered by biodigesting grass it'd harvested. I wonder how that method compares to this guys grass pellets. For a lawn mower at least it makes a lot of sense to power it with grass. It sure works for goats.
Get an eBike. It can easily be recharged at work and does not use a significant amount of electricity to raise your bills or annoy your employer. It can get most people to and from work with it's 20 mile range (before you have to pedal) just fine and it goes at around 15mph so again your commute time won't be much different. (It takes me about 45 minutes to drive the 8 miles to work due to traffic conditions.) On top of all that and you'll save money (low fuel costs, low maintenence costs, no license or insurance needed) and can get some exercise if you choose to.:)
My commute times are so ridiculous that I'm seriously thinking of making the change. I actually think it'd reduce my commute time as I wouldn't have to wait in bumper to bumper traffic. I've done my normal bike sometimes and it wasn't bad but I don't like showing up to work sweaty.
I feel the same way whenever I have to use Photoshop. I'm used to working with GIMP and, while I can figure out Photoshop, I am most effecient with using GIMP. The difference is that It's not worth it to switch to Photoshop because Photoshop is expensive and lacks any extra features that'd make the cost and suffering worthwhile for me. On the other hand GIMP is free.. so relearning your habits may be worthwhile.
Yeah, changing the account with your name on it won't give a damn thing away as long as your IP is untraceable. Who'd think to look at your name.
A smarter hacker would infect the system with a script that would gradually, over time, boost their GPA in a difficult to trace method. Maybe figure out a minor improvement that you'd make every day to all students that had a student id number that fit a given algorithm.. where your own id just happens to be one that comes up most frequently. Say that your student number was divisable by 3 so one day you'd improve all that were divesable by 3, the next day 6, the next day 9, and back to 3, or some such pattern. (More complex is better.. just an example..)
Gee.. in my day we actually used some imagination when hacking the schools computers. Of course I never bothered altering my grades. I was more interested on messing with the lab rats. (sysadmins, lab monitors, etc)
So? Why shouldn't it be easy to die? Just make the results of dying minor so it can happen frequently. Offer some good body armor. Jeez I'd love to have that Rhino tank and take it roaring down the street blowing up other players until they finally capped my ass.
I've been wanting a MMORPG version of GTA for a long time now and have written the authors requesting it several times. It'd be cool to form gangs that have to compete with each other, the peds, and the cops. Killing, drug deals, pimp'n out girls, hook'n, bad drivin.. it should all be part of the game.
A good Player versus Player MMORPG like GTA would kick ass. I'm so sick of these weenie little MMORPG's where all you can fight is NPCs and it's all so formulatic that you may as well put your player on auto-pilot. Unleash some mayhem. It's be the inverse game to City of Heroes. By encouraging players to form criminal gangs they can introduce some actual strategy. (Gangs would be more like guilds and less like parties in standard MMO jargon.)
I am more amused by putting a camera pointing at my screen over my shoulder and using that as my live wallpaper. That whole endless hall of mirror effect amuses me greatly.
Usually I'm just happy to play the movie I'm watching on my desktop though. A DVD Jukebox effect that plays nonstop is a great root window IMO.:)
A serious problem is that most handheld devices do not properly use stylesheets. ie, They either totally ignore handheld device stylesheets or they try to use both the screen stylesheet and the handheld stylesheet together.
Unfortunately that means that developers really do need to mess around with detecting and redirecting traffic.
You can embed XML-RPC into almost any program in any language in very few lines of code. It's easy to work with, well established, open, and cross-platform. It functions typically over http but can easily be adapted to your choice of transfer method.
Why should I use Microsoft's new offering instead of XML-RPC?
I've looked at the example page of how this functions and it looks like norhing more than a couple obvious lines of CSS would make this happen. I've had buttons that got bigger when hovered over before and usually found it more annoying than useful after the initial gee-whiz factor wears off. The closest I get on any of my current stylesheets, I think, is making my buttons move slightly as hovered over but it's largely the same kind of CSS effect.
Who knew that a couple lines of CSS could be so impressive.:)
I tend to treat IE as a crappy baby I have to babysit. I make sure it renders my pages okay but I don't try to let it play with the adults. So I can do nicer things on my standard stylesheets than the variant IE is made to use. I don't waste a lot of effort trying to make it do all the bells and whistles.
I think the text of the article made it clear that such acid tests are a goal for all browsers to reach. IE is just the biggest competior with the worst support.
It'd be good to see all popular browsers pass such tests on CSS2. CSS3 should already be in the works to test against.
Opera's CSS2 support seems better than IE's but not quite on par with Firefox. Safari has some weird quirks now and then but overall isn't much worse than Opera.
It doesn't matter to me. I have/mostly/ given up testing my websites with anything but the newest versions of browsers. If people then have trouble I can just tell them it's a bug on their end and suggest they update. Ahhh - that time doing tech support really paid off.
Even then that leaves IE, Safari, FireFox, Opera, and Lynx to test at the bare minimum and often you need to test each of those browsers on different OSs and with different screen and font sizes as defaults.
THEN you get into the fun of testing on the browsers that come with various handheld devices. That is especially fun as most of theose browsers are to retarded to actually use the stylesheets for handheld devices. My phone brilliantly uses both the screen and handheld stylesheets which makes everything look horrible.:)
I'll be especially glad to see IE finally, I hope, have decent PNG support. Now if only IE and FF would both support APNG/MNG so we could fianlly get rid of GIFs life might be swell.
I'm mostly a programmer and I do release my software as GPL. My website, that has somewhat useful articles, is also under an open content style license.
I'm interested in producing movies and tv shows that are open content and I have some talent in that area but I'd have to have help to make it really good. I'd need to find actors, someone to compose a score, etc. I've thought about starting a project to produce a script to start. Write something myself and let others help me refine it. Then I could work on casting some local actors. I was thinking of doing everything in front of blue screens (like Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow) and then letting fellow geeks and artists help me produce backdrops for the scenes. Put all the footage and other source files on CVS and let others help edit everything together. If it was all done on blue screens and just edited together then we could even replace actors with other actors as the project progressed.. if someone needed to be replaced.
Do you think there are enough undiscovered or amatuer actors (etc) out there that'd be willing to participate? To me, if you could get the word out and organize everything, I think people would want to participate. Such a project would be one heck of a good way to break into the industry. "I was in a movie that was downloaded more than 100,000 times." sounds a lot more impressive than "I was in a school play." Then there is always marketing. Throw up a store with fan items for sale on your website and split the proceeds among those who participated. Signed items etc could be big sellers if the movie was good.
Does it really matter? I have terabytes of disk space. You can buy a 400GB hdd for under $350 now.
I'd have to see some third-party professional testing done to believe that AAC really does sound better before I'd believe it anyway. I assume there have been actual studies done?
I'd just assume use loseless copies of the songs though. It's the same as how I don't bother converting my ripped DVDs to DivX or anything else smaller but not as good.:)
Yeah, but what benefit does AAC give me over formats I already have a wide selection of supporting apps for? If it comes with no added benefits I may as well use the formats that I'm familiar with.
I've donated the the EFF before but I don't really think their way will work. What we really need to be funding is public awareness campaigns. Fight the misinformation being put out there by the MPAA, RIAA, etc as to what the concepts of copyright, fair use, etc are so that people won't be unrightfully convinced that there is no legal background for sharing of files.
Even that I think is only part of the answer. What we really need to do is beat these mega-corporations at their own game and release our own high quality content for free. There is no reason we can't produce CDs and DVDs equal to commercial quality. Why don't we? We're talented people and there are a lot of us. Make our own content and release it under a copyleft-like open content license. Make raw inputs available to the public out of CVS so others can re-edit our work if desired. We need to put the kind of pressure on the MPAA and RIAA that opensource is putting on the commercial software business. They'll be a lot less aggressive about suing their own customers if they know that those customers have an alternative. As always, competition is good for the consumer.
Copyrights aren't bad but their current form is abusive and therefore bad. The idea was to have a chance to make a fair profit off of your work. Not to create an empire of never ending profits.
I don't think that end user behavior is justified by the RIAA's tactics but I do think that the end user is justified in downloading anything that has already made a reasonable profit for it's creator or his asignee (the music labels).
Music, movies, etc are cultural treasure that belong to the entire society and not just to the creator or to the wealthy that buy up the rights to this treasure. Allowing these treasures to be hoarded is the same as selling off our national parks for timber money and building strip malls in the clean cut forests there.
Certainly if you have paid for a copy of a song or movie (or any other IP) then you should have the right to redistribute copies at your own expense so long as you're not profitting off the exchange.
I guess my change in the copyright would be to shorten it to a max of 14 years or 2 years after it ceases to be commercially distributed and supported by it's owner. This way items such as software will no longer be protected by copyright should they cease to be sold and supported but otherwise will continue to be protected long enough to earn a nice profit off the work.
Also I'd ban any work that wasn't disclosed in full from copyright protection. That'd mean that software could only be copyrighted by publishing the full source code (or putting it in trust in the hands of the copyright office) and that companies that chose to use copy protection would not be given any protection.
I'd give the consumer the right to make copies for their own use or to give away, at no profit, to whomever they desired so long as they have a legally purchased copy (or proof thereof, should the original get damaged).
This would make it legal to share files but you could only share the ones you had made from originals and not reshare files you borrowed from others. Also it'd make it illegal to create a Napster-like program that knowingly profits from these transactions. Something like gnutella on the other hand would be legal.
From a consumer point of view THAT version of copyright would seem fair.
I might also make an exception that makes copyleft it's own standard of law such that copyleft-like IP wouldn't expire from copyright protection so long as it didn't go 2 years without support. This would allow IP to be freely used and distributed but would disallow it being added to another IP entity without that entity also following under the same license. Something similar to the GPL.
This would offer people a choice in how they release their IP and offer them a way to keep some control as the end of their normal copyright period ran out. Disney could make available all the classic Disney cartoons and this way could keep others from using those cartoons commercially without also opening their own product back to Disney (and everyone else) to use as source material. It makes more sense for software but could be usefully applied to all IP.
Slashdot Mirror
Fair point. I wear glasses too. If it's raining THAT hard that you really can't see because of the rain in your face then it might be a good time to drive.. or better yet to just stay at home.. it's really not safe to drive in poor weather either. I know accidents here go way up whenever it rains. (We've had like 500% of the average annual rainfall already this year.)
Who cares if your face gets wet? Unless you're wearing makeup I guess. I don't care for makeup (on men or women) though so I guess I don't care. A bicycle helmet would probably keep your hair dry.
I guess your city needs bicycle lanes and such so that you don't need to wait for the cars before you can bypass them. Although if you live in Las Vegas (or similar city) I suggest you ride on the sidewalks if you want a chance at getting to work without injury. Crazy ass drivers who think it's okay to drive in the bike lane at 90mph. :p
I used to live in Miami and I walked to work every day. Usually that meant I'd get there totally soaking wet. Solution: Keep a change of cloths at work or take them in a plastic bag.
I've played with making a lawn mower that was powered by biodigesting grass it'd harvested. I wonder how that method compares to this guys grass pellets. For a lawn mower at least it makes a lot of sense to power it with grass. It sure works for goats.
Get an eBike. It can easily be recharged at work and does not use a significant amount of electricity to raise your bills or annoy your employer. It can get most people to and from work with it's 20 mile range (before you have to pedal) just fine and it goes at around 15mph so again your commute time won't be much different. (It takes me about 45 minutes to drive the 8 miles to work due to traffic conditions.) On top of all that and you'll save money (low fuel costs, low maintenence costs, no license or insurance needed) and can get some exercise if you choose to. :)
My commute times are so ridiculous that I'm seriously thinking of making the change. I actually think it'd reduce my commute time as I wouldn't have to wait in bumper to bumper traffic. I've done my normal bike sometimes and it wasn't bad but I don't like showing up to work sweaty.
I feel the same way whenever I have to use Photoshop. I'm used to working with GIMP and, while I can figure out Photoshop, I am most effecient with using GIMP. The difference is that It's not worth it to switch to Photoshop because Photoshop is expensive and lacks any extra features that'd make the cost and suffering worthwhile for me. On the other hand GIMP is free.. so relearning your habits may be worthwhile.
Yeah, changing the account with your name on it won't give a damn thing away as long as your IP is untraceable. Who'd think to look at your name.
A smarter hacker would infect the system with a script that would gradually, over time, boost their GPA in a difficult to trace method. Maybe figure out a minor improvement that you'd make every day to all students that had a student id number that fit a given algorithm.. where your own id just happens to be one that comes up most frequently. Say that your student number was divisable by 3 so one day you'd improve all that were divesable by 3, the next day 6, the next day 9, and back to 3, or some such pattern. (More complex is better.. just an example..)
Gee.. in my day we actually used some imagination when hacking the schools computers. Of course I never bothered altering my grades. I was more interested on messing with the lab rats. (sysadmins, lab monitors, etc)
Where do you think this is being written from?
So? Why shouldn't it be easy to die? Just make the results of dying minor so it can happen frequently. Offer some good body armor. Jeez I'd love to have that Rhino tank and take it roaring down the street blowing up other players until they finally capped my ass.
I've been wanting a MMORPG version of GTA for a long time now and have written the authors requesting it several times. It'd be cool to form gangs that have to compete with each other, the peds, and the cops. Killing, drug deals, pimp'n out girls, hook'n, bad drivin.. it should all be part of the game.
A good Player versus Player MMORPG like GTA would kick ass. I'm so sick of these weenie little MMORPG's where all you can fight is NPCs and it's all so formulatic that you may as well put your player on auto-pilot. Unleash some mayhem. It's be the inverse game to City of Heroes. By encouraging players to form criminal gangs they can introduce some actual strategy. (Gangs would be more like guilds and less like parties in standard MMO jargon.)
I am more amused by putting a camera pointing at my screen over my shoulder and using that as my live wallpaper. That whole endless hall of mirror effect amuses me greatly.
:)
Usually I'm just happy to play the movie I'm watching on my desktop though. A DVD Jukebox effect that plays nonstop is a great root window IMO.
Here's the one I use. Very easy to use.
A serious problem is that most handheld devices do not properly use stylesheets. ie, They either totally ignore handheld device stylesheets or they try to use both the screen stylesheet and the handheld stylesheet together.
Unfortunately that means that developers really do need to mess around with detecting and redirecting traffic.
No. Sorry, I was born in '78.
Well.. tomorrow is MY birthday. If I had any clever geek friend's they could do my birthday cake in 1's.
How is this different from XML-RPC?
You can embed XML-RPC into almost any program in any language in very few lines of code. It's easy to work with, well established, open, and cross-platform. It functions typically over http but can easily be adapted to your choice of transfer method.
Why should I use Microsoft's new offering instead of XML-RPC?
I've looked at the example page of how this functions and it looks like norhing more than a couple obvious lines of CSS would make this happen. I've had buttons that got bigger when hovered over before and usually found it more annoying than useful after the initial gee-whiz factor wears off. The closest I get on any of my current stylesheets, I think, is making my buttons move slightly as hovered over but it's largely the same kind of CSS effect.
:)
Who knew that a couple lines of CSS could be so impressive.
Not to mention someone from Sun suggesting we use Solaris instead of Linux? Obviously his opinion that Solaris is better is unbiased. :)
I tend to treat IE as a crappy baby I have to babysit. I make sure it renders my pages okay but I don't try to let it play with the adults. So I can do nicer things on my standard stylesheets than the variant IE is made to use. I don't waste a lot of effort trying to make it do all the bells and whistles.
I think the text of the article made it clear that such acid tests are a goal for all browsers to reach. IE is just the biggest competior with the worst support.
It'd be good to see all popular browsers pass such tests on CSS2. CSS3 should already be in the works to test against.
Opera's CSS2 support seems better than IE's but not quite on par with Firefox. Safari has some weird quirks now and then but overall isn't much worse than Opera.
It doesn't matter to me. I have /mostly/ given up testing my websites with anything but the newest versions of browsers. If people then have trouble I can just tell them it's a bug on their end and suggest they update. Ahhh - that time doing tech support really paid off.
:)
Even then that leaves IE, Safari, FireFox, Opera, and Lynx to test at the bare minimum and often you need to test each of those browsers on different OSs and with different screen and font sizes as defaults.
THEN you get into the fun of testing on the browsers that come with various handheld devices. That is especially fun as most of theose browsers are to retarded to actually use the stylesheets for handheld devices. My phone brilliantly uses both the screen and handheld stylesheets which makes everything look horrible.
I'll be especially glad to see IE finally, I hope, have decent PNG support. Now if only IE and FF would both support APNG/MNG so we could fianlly get rid of GIFs life might be swell.
I'm mostly a programmer and I do release my software as GPL. My website, that has somewhat useful articles, is also under an open content style license.
I'm interested in producing movies and tv shows that are open content and I have some talent in that area but I'd have to have help to make it really good. I'd need to find actors, someone to compose a score, etc. I've thought about starting a project to produce a script to start. Write something myself and let others help me refine it. Then I could work on casting some local actors. I was thinking of doing everything in front of blue screens (like Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow) and then letting fellow geeks and artists help me produce backdrops for the scenes. Put all the footage and other source files on CVS and let others help edit everything together. If it was all done on blue screens and just edited together then we could even replace actors with other actors as the project progressed.. if someone needed to be replaced.
Do you think there are enough undiscovered or amatuer actors (etc) out there that'd be willing to participate? To me, if you could get the word out and organize everything, I think people would want to participate. Such a project would be one heck of a good way to break into the industry. "I was in a movie that was downloaded more than 100,000 times." sounds a lot more impressive than "I was in a school play." Then there is always marketing. Throw up a store with fan items for sale on your website and split the proceeds among those who participated. Signed items etc could be big sellers if the movie was good.
Does it really matter? I have terabytes of disk space. You can buy a 400GB hdd for under $350 now.
:)
I'd have to see some third-party professional testing done to believe that AAC really does sound better before I'd believe it anyway. I assume there have been actual studies done?
I'd just assume use loseless copies of the songs though. It's the same as how I don't bother converting my ripped DVDs to DivX or anything else smaller but not as good.
Yeah, but what benefit does AAC give me over formats I already have a wide selection of supporting apps for? If it comes with no added benefits I may as well use the formats that I'm familiar with.
I've donated the the EFF before but I don't really think their way will work. What we really need to be funding is public awareness campaigns. Fight the misinformation being put out there by the MPAA, RIAA, etc as to what the concepts of copyright, fair use, etc are so that people won't be unrightfully convinced that there is no legal background for sharing of files.
Even that I think is only part of the answer. What we really need to do is beat these mega-corporations at their own game and release our own high quality content for free. There is no reason we can't produce CDs and DVDs equal to commercial quality. Why don't we? We're talented people and there are a lot of us. Make our own content and release it under a copyleft-like open content license. Make raw inputs available to the public out of CVS so others can re-edit our work if desired. We need to put the kind of pressure on the MPAA and RIAA that opensource is putting on the commercial software business. They'll be a lot less aggressive about suing their own customers if they know that those customers have an alternative. As always, competition is good for the consumer.
Copyrights aren't bad but their current form is abusive and therefore bad. The idea was to have a chance to make a fair profit off of your work. Not to create an empire of never ending profits.
I don't think that end user behavior is justified by the RIAA's tactics but I do think that the end user is justified in downloading anything that has already made a reasonable profit for it's creator or his asignee (the music labels).
Music, movies, etc are cultural treasure that belong to the entire society and not just to the creator or to the wealthy that buy up the rights to this treasure. Allowing these treasures to be hoarded is the same as selling off our national parks for timber money and building strip malls in the clean cut forests there.
Certainly if you have paid for a copy of a song or movie (or any other IP) then you should have the right to redistribute copies at your own expense so long as you're not profitting off the exchange.
I guess my change in the copyright would be to shorten it to a max of 14 years or 2 years after it ceases to be commercially distributed and supported by it's owner. This way items such as software will no longer be protected by copyright should they cease to be sold and supported but otherwise will continue to be protected long enough to earn a nice profit off the work.
Also I'd ban any work that wasn't disclosed in full from copyright protection. That'd mean that software could only be copyrighted by publishing the full source code (or putting it in trust in the hands of the copyright office) and that companies that chose to use copy protection would not be given any protection.
I'd give the consumer the right to make copies for their own use or to give away, at no profit, to whomever they desired so long as they have a legally purchased copy (or proof thereof, should the original get damaged).
This would make it legal to share files but you could only share the ones you had made from originals and not reshare files you borrowed from others. Also it'd make it illegal to create a Napster-like program that knowingly profits from these transactions. Something like gnutella on the other hand would be legal.
From a consumer point of view THAT version of copyright would seem fair.
I might also make an exception that makes copyleft it's own standard of law such that copyleft-like IP wouldn't expire from copyright protection so long as it didn't go 2 years without support. This would allow IP to be freely used and distributed but would disallow it being added to another IP entity without that entity also following under the same license. Something similar to the GPL.
This would offer people a choice in how they release their IP and offer them a way to keep some control as the end of their normal copyright period ran out. Disney could make available all the classic Disney cartoons and this way could keep others from using those cartoons commercially without also opening their own product back to Disney (and everyone else) to use as source material. It makes more sense for software but could be usefully applied to all IP.