Stop being such a whiny self-centred crybaby. Do you really think they intended their servers to crash like this? FFS, just wait a few days and register your interest then. I assume the Raspberry Pi will produced in numbers to meet demand for a long time to come and it will be simple enough to obtain one.
Even geeks accept real money. I realise there are a handful of people boosting bitcoin or similar harebrained virtual currency schemes but I suspect most of them were still hoping to cash out in real money while the going was good.
It won't be just the physical objects which are copyrighted, but the models themselves. Anyway I would expect most things exhibited by museums are out of copyright and many of the others would be unique objects which have been donated and are therefore for the museum to do with as it sees fit.
Is that why the UK, which also is first-past-the-post, has had three major parties for decades and currently has a coalition government?
The Liberals are borderline major party and the general pattern of elections is Conservative / Labour / Conservative / Labour etc. Liberals only got into a coalition because the parliament found itself hung - basically the Conservatives won a majority but not enough to outnumber the opposition which means that any government bill put to a vote could easily be defeated.
Even in the UK the idea of first past the post is controversial. The Liberals obviously hate it and pushed for a referendum to change to proportional representation or something closer to it. When the referendum was conducted their conservative partners engaged in such a dirty scare campaign (insinuating the British National Party would be elected) that it failed to pass and I'm surprised the coalition didn't collapse right there. One thing is certain, when the next election happens it will be the Liberals who'll be punished the most and first past the post means they'll be killed on polling day. It's always the coalition minority partners who take the heat come election time.
And I don't. Yet one more reason to object to having my hardware and software be forced to support something I don't want to.
You say you don't want it and yet you say you are forced. Either you want it or not. No need for the hyperbole.
Here we disagree: I do want to own my movies. I want to be the one who decides, absolutely, what I watch, when I watch, where I watch, and on what terms I watch.
Well buy the DVD then and rip it. There are perfectly good reasons to go with this. Just don't expect to be using any download services ever because it totally unreasonable to think they would stream an entire library of content to your device in a format which can be ripped off by all and sundry. Even if you claim you are the most honest person in the world, you can bet for every one of you there are 100 other people delighted to just rip content.
Why not? If everybody right now decided that they will not accept DRM, it'd die tomorrow. The more opposition there is, and the less convenient it is, the faster it will die. It won't go away because the industry decides to be nice one day, it will because it's the most profitable option. People complained a lot about DRM on music, and look, it went away.
And if we all grew wings we could fly. We can all conjure up scenarios which are never going to come to pass. The fact is that DRM is here to stay. If you oppose DRM as it is implemented, a far better tact than lobbying for its abolishment is to lobby to put the rights back into DRM. If DRM actually proved my ownership of some digital content then I could argue for doctrine of first sale and all the rest of that stuff to apply to my digital content. I could sell my content, loan it, donate it with impunity. DRM can be a force for good but it requires legislation and some form of management platform that protects my ownership.
But all that is irrelevant in the context of a streaming / rental. If I stream or rent I have absolutely no expectation that I can copy the content. None. I either agree to the terms and get the content or I refuse and I get nothing. If you choose to refuse good for you, but that doesn't mean the service is wrong or in any way unjustified for encrypting to stop people leeching content. Because they aren't.
I broadly support the concept that digital content should have the same rights of ownership and transfer that physical content does. That would imply a universal DRM system (where R stands for rights, not restrictions) to allow digital copies to "belong" to someone.
But that is not what we are talking of here. We're talking of streaming / rental services. There is no expectation that people keep the content and in fact they are only given access to the content under terms and conditions. Since you wish to draw analogues to earlier times, it would be like being granted access to a library of books under particular terms which you then violate (e.g. do not copy the books, do not take the books away from the library) and then acting hot and bothered when you get thrown out of the library for doing just that.
Er, no it isn't. You are not forced to use the service, but if you do you abide by the terms and conditions of usage. The encryption is there to stop people from ripping off the content in ways the service does not permit, possibly for contractual reasons with the content providers.
That's why I suggested it should challenge users intermittently after the initial sync so users would have to own the disc. The PSP Go really should have done this (Sony could have even sold a combination charging / UMD dock) and it could have carried through here though it's less of a deal with the PS Vita than it was for the Go. BC for the PS Vita is a nice to have but it could still have been a money spinner for Sony to sell the kit to sync devices.
It's similar but it's not the same. If I buy a PS3 or a 360 or a Wii game, I have no reasonable expectancy that software works on any other platform. It's not like a book, or music, or video which are essentially platform agnostic content. Content may use particular formats to describe the words, pictures or sounds but they're not programs containing machine instructions designed to be executed against a specific platform. As a consumer I would implicitly recognize this and also recognize that Sony/MS/Nintendo would take whatever measures they felt like to prevent me from using unauthorized software.
Therefore as a consumer you really should have no expectation that a console should make easy for you to mod it, or that console manufacturers shouldn't actively try to stamp on it when it's happening. It is obviously in their interests to protect their investment and returns by keeping piracy at as low a level as possible.
It's also not just the platform owner who suffers from piracy. Owners do too. If the margins fall out of a console platform then 3rd parties will abandon it, or they'll produce shovelware. You can see this on the DS and the Wii. The economics simply aren't there to justify producing big budget AAA titles. So less piracy means better quality games, a longer platform lifespan and also less griefing / cheating for legit owners.
Sony wouldn't give a shit about homebrewers if not for the fact that for every legitimate homebrewer there were countless others using modded firmware to play pirate games. It's no wonder they cracked down on it hard. If I had billions riding on a platform's success and revenues then I'd feel the same way about it too. Even as an owner I wouldnt want to see the platform lose out on premium titles and turn into a wasteland of shovelware because the margins fell out of the market.
A sync cable or even peer to peer wifi and some sync software for the PSP and PS Vita would enable people to transfer their collections. Run software on PSP, run software on PS Vita. PS Vita gets an image of the game encrypted against the user's PSN account. Occasionally, the Vita might challenge the user to do a further validation sync to prove ownership. It's quite feasible to do and even if legal issues prevent them from supporting some 3rd party titles, it wouldn't stop them from enabling their own. They'd probably make enough money from selling extra memory cards and cables to justify doing it.
It as the lack of sync which IMO doomed the PSP Go. People with 10 games for their PSP were not going to upgrade to a console in the same family which didn't let them continue to play them. I suppose the PS Vita isn't the same family so the presumption of backwards compatibility is lower, but it still wouldn't hurt to offer sync.
I suspect it went down like this. The tablet release date was set in stone and the email software turned out to be far harder to port than originally imagined. So RIM's plan B was to offer some functionality via tethering with a lame excuse thrown in that it was done for security.
The problem for RIM is they are pretty much known for one thing - email, and when their tablet implements some half assed kludge people will take notice. If they've fixed it in 2.0 then perhaps it's not too late to rebuild some bridges.
If the space elevator were 35,000km long then as you ascend centrifugal force would increase and the earth's pull would diminish. So your apparent gravitational pull would lessen during the journey until you reached geo synchronous orbit when it would be zero.
Regardless of the manner of ascent you're still ending up in space by both means and you're still going to be situations of extreme discomfort and stress. I doubt the manner of selecting or training people to ride an elevator would be markedly different from what most astronauts receive. Last thing they'd want is someone freaking out inside elevator, or at the destination, or incapable of escaping in the event of an emergency.
Because it's terribly hard to know if Linux refers to the kernel or a generic distribution in the context of a story talking about a Flash plugin for Chrome.
The concept of a space elevator is so out there but I expect if one did come into existence that people would be carried up in something more resembling a submarine than a box. It'd have to be pressurized, radiation shielding, temperature control, powered in some way to climb, have sleeping area, food preparation area, sanitation etc. All designed to work in gravity and zero gravity.
If people can live on a sub for months at a time they'd be able to live on an elevator for a week. I assume these people wouldn't be randomly plucked off the street and would undergo some form of training resembling existing astronaut programs.
The manner of advancing scientific knowledge it is through observation, hypothesis, testing and theory. You observe some phenomena. You hypothesize how it might function and make predictions which can be tested. Other people test your hypothesis against new observations and if the predictions matches it becomes a theory otherwise it is discarded. Rinse and repeat with one hypothesis/theory being supplanted by the next, each yielding progressively more accurate predictions.
So yes GP is correct. It's called the scientific method and it's a reasonable to paraphrase it that way in a few sentences.
The left is certainly has its lunatic fringe - people who believe in alternative health, conspiracies and assorted other new age woo. Look at Huffington Post and it's not hard to find examples of people demonstrating anti-scientific beliefs.
However this is Rick Santorum. Religious nutbag, creationist, global warming denier and taker of various other anti-scientific positions. For him to accuse others of being anti science is the most blatant projection. I assume his advisors have told him to come out swinging, that by calling the other side names he somehow takes some of the heat of himself for some of his more recent ridiculous remarks. I really pity the Republican party if they choose this guy and the world if somehow he becomes elected. The other republicans might all be slimeballs in their own way but at least they have a basic grasp on reality.
The only thing that suffered in YDL was video performance and that could not be blamed for the fact that the experience paged to a grinding halt when you loaded more than a few apps. 256MB simply isn't enough to run a modern desktop on and once you hit swap you are constrained by IO performance.
I think Raspberry Pi will be great running standalone apps, possibly even a port of Android. It will stink as a desktop whether it has accelerated graphics or not on top.
YDL (basically Fedora / Redhat for the PPC) on the PS3 was hardly a speed demon. In fact it downright sucked at times. I see no reason to believe that another device with an lower powered CPU, and 128MB and 256MB RAM plus severely constrained I/O is going to produce a useful desktop. It might be okay at a pinch, coupled with a lightweight X11 client to serve a simple desktop but not much more.
To me the Pi would be more useful for apps like XBMC running over a command prompt where much of the work can be offloaded to dedicated hardware and the need for swap is eliminated or minimized.
Yes sorry, that's my mind doing its usual and inserting or omitting words or mangling sentences and making sure I don't see the error until its too late.
Brands could produce alternative forms of the same ad depending on state. That's more or less what happens in Europe where VAT is included in the price.
Slashdot Mirror
Stop being such a whiny self-centred crybaby. Do you really think they intended their servers to crash like this? FFS, just wait a few days and register your interest then. I assume the Raspberry Pi will produced in numbers to meet demand for a long time to come and it will be simple enough to obtain one.
Even geeks accept real money. I realise there are a handful of people boosting bitcoin or similar harebrained virtual currency schemes but I suspect most of them were still hoping to cash out in real money while the going was good.
It won't be just the physical objects which are copyrighted, but the models themselves. Anyway I would expect most things exhibited by museums are out of copyright and many of the others would be unique objects which have been donated and are therefore for the museum to do with as it sees fit.
Liberal Democrats got 23% of the vote at the election but only 8.8% of the seats. It's not surprising they want proportional representation.
Is that why the UK, which also is first-past-the-post, has had three major parties for decades and currently has a coalition government?
The Liberals are borderline major party and the general pattern of elections is Conservative / Labour / Conservative / Labour etc. Liberals only got into a coalition because the parliament found itself hung - basically the Conservatives won a majority but not enough to outnumber the opposition which means that any government bill put to a vote could easily be defeated.
Even in the UK the idea of first past the post is controversial. The Liberals obviously hate it and pushed for a referendum to change to proportional representation or something closer to it. When the referendum was conducted their conservative partners engaged in such a dirty scare campaign (insinuating the British National Party would be elected) that it failed to pass and I'm surprised the coalition didn't collapse right there. One thing is certain, when the next election happens it will be the Liberals who'll be punished the most and first past the post means they'll be killed on polling day. It's always the coalition minority partners who take the heat come election time.
And I don't. Yet one more reason to object to having my hardware and software be forced to support something I don't want to.
You say you don't want it and yet you say you are forced. Either you want it or not. No need for the hyperbole.
Here we disagree: I do want to own my movies. I want to be the one who decides, absolutely, what I watch, when I watch, where I watch, and on what terms I watch.
Well buy the DVD then and rip it. There are perfectly good reasons to go with this. Just don't expect to be using any download services ever because it totally unreasonable to think they would stream an entire library of content to your device in a format which can be ripped off by all and sundry. Even if you claim you are the most honest person in the world, you can bet for every one of you there are 100 other people delighted to just rip content.
Why not? If everybody right now decided that they will not accept DRM, it'd die tomorrow. The more opposition there is, and the less convenient it is, the faster it will die. It won't go away because the industry decides to be nice one day, it will because it's the most profitable option. People complained a lot about DRM on music, and look, it went away.
And if we all grew wings we could fly. We can all conjure up scenarios which are never going to come to pass. The fact is that DRM is here to stay. If you oppose DRM as it is implemented, a far better tact than lobbying for its abolishment is to lobby to put the rights back into DRM. If DRM actually proved my ownership of some digital content then I could argue for doctrine of first sale and all the rest of that stuff to apply to my digital content. I could sell my content, loan it, donate it with impunity. DRM can be a force for good but it requires legislation and some form of management platform that protects my ownership.
But all that is irrelevant in the context of a streaming / rental. If I stream or rent I have absolutely no expectation that I can copy the content. None. I either agree to the terms and get the content or I refuse and I get nothing. If you choose to refuse good for you, but that doesn't mean the service is wrong or in any way unjustified for encrypting to stop people leeching content. Because they aren't.
But that is not what we are talking of here. We're talking of streaming / rental services. There is no expectation that people keep the content and in fact they are only given access to the content under terms and conditions. Since you wish to draw analogues to earlier times, it would be like being granted access to a library of books under particular terms which you then violate (e.g. do not copy the books, do not take the books away from the library) and then acting hot and bothered when you get thrown out of the library for doing just that.
Er, no it isn't. You are not forced to use the service, but if you do you abide by the terms and conditions of usage. The encryption is there to stop people from ripping off the content in ways the service does not permit, possibly for contractual reasons with the content providers.
What does it matter to you if streaming content is encrypted or not pray tell? This isn't content you own, you are subscribing to a service.
That's why I suggested it should challenge users intermittently after the initial sync so users would have to own the disc. The PSP Go really should have done this (Sony could have even sold a combination charging / UMD dock) and it could have carried through here though it's less of a deal with the PS Vita than it was for the Go. BC for the PS Vita is a nice to have but it could still have been a money spinner for Sony to sell the kit to sync devices.
Therefore as a consumer you really should have no expectation that a console should make easy for you to mod it, or that console manufacturers shouldn't actively try to stamp on it when it's happening. It is obviously in their interests to protect their investment and returns by keeping piracy at as low a level as possible.
It's also not just the platform owner who suffers from piracy. Owners do too. If the margins fall out of a console platform then 3rd parties will abandon it, or they'll produce shovelware. You can see this on the DS and the Wii. The economics simply aren't there to justify producing big budget AAA titles. So less piracy means better quality games, a longer platform lifespan and also less griefing / cheating for legit owners.
Sony wouldn't give a shit about homebrewers if not for the fact that for every legitimate homebrewer there were countless others using modded firmware to play pirate games. It's no wonder they cracked down on it hard. If I had billions riding on a platform's success and revenues then I'd feel the same way about it too. Even as an owner I wouldnt want to see the platform lose out on premium titles and turn into a wasteland of shovelware because the margins fell out of the market.
It as the lack of sync which IMO doomed the PSP Go. People with 10 games for their PSP were not going to upgrade to a console in the same family which didn't let them continue to play them. I suppose the PS Vita isn't the same family so the presumption of backwards compatibility is lower, but it still wouldn't hurt to offer sync.
The problem for RIM is they are pretty much known for one thing - email, and when their tablet implements some half assed kludge people will take notice. If they've fixed it in 2.0 then perhaps it's not too late to rebuild some bridges.
If the space elevator were 35,000km long then as you ascend centrifugal force would increase and the earth's pull would diminish. So your apparent gravitational pull would lessen during the journey until you reached geo synchronous orbit when it would be zero.
Regardless of the manner of ascent you're still ending up in space by both means and you're still going to be situations of extreme discomfort and stress. I doubt the manner of selecting or training people to ride an elevator would be markedly different from what most astronauts receive. Last thing they'd want is someone freaking out inside elevator, or at the destination, or incapable of escaping in the event of an emergency.
Because it's terribly hard to know if Linux refers to the kernel or a generic distribution in the context of a story talking about a Flash plugin for Chrome.
If people can live on a sub for months at a time they'd be able to live on an elevator for a week. I assume these people wouldn't be randomly plucked off the street and would undergo some form of training resembling existing astronaut programs.
So yes GP is correct. It's called the scientific method and it's a reasonable to paraphrase it that way in a few sentences.
However this is Rick Santorum. Religious nutbag, creationist, global warming denier and taker of various other anti-scientific positions. For him to accuse others of being anti science is the most blatant projection. I assume his advisors have told him to come out swinging, that by calling the other side names he somehow takes some of the heat of himself for some of his more recent ridiculous remarks. I really pity the Republican party if they choose this guy and the world if somehow he becomes elected. The other republicans might all be slimeballs in their own way but at least they have a basic grasp on reality.
I think Raspberry Pi will be great running standalone apps, possibly even a port of Android. It will stink as a desktop whether it has accelerated graphics or not on top.
To me the Pi would be more useful for apps like XBMC running over a command prompt where much of the work can be offloaded to dedicated hardware and the need for swap is eliminated or minimized.
There should be an oblig XKCD link for all the bloody times people post oblig XKCD links.
Yes sorry, that's my mind doing its usual and inserting or omitting words or mangling sentences and making sure I don't see the error until its too late.
Brands could produce alternative forms of the same ad depending on state. That's more or less what happens in Europe where VAT is included in the price.