You're a cheap bastard, aren't you? There once was a time justifying not paying an author for his work was abhorent. Apparently it's totally acceptable at this point just as long as one can justify it by saying "it's too expensive". All those that complain about existing and upcoming IP laws know this - you brought it on yourselves.
Not really. Getting the CD from somebody else who is done with it is morally justified in my opinion. (or do you have a problem with library books?) At the moment, I have a grand total of zero pirated games on my PC. Neverwinter nights, warcraft 3, counterstrike, etc. I paid for them all and still have all the packaging, so don't go preaching to me. That's not my point.
The argument isn't really a moral one. If you start making any product to inaccesible, by cost or by legal restriction, you WILL get a black market. The only problem with "digital media" is that the black market is so readily accessible.
Bottom line: Selling a video game for 60 bucks invites people to steal it. Make people feel like they're getting what they pay for and they'll buy it
"Despite the relatively low price of PC games, many gamers are still choosing to resort to piracy rather than pay for legitimate boxed copies," said Matt Pierce, publisher of the computer games magazine, PC Gamer.
Forgive me for being a cynic, but I don't see 60 bucks as "relatively low price". Give me the game for 20 bucks (like counterstrike) and I'll go out and pay money. Try to sell it for 60 (especially a single player game) and I won't buy it. Either I just won't get it at all, or I'll just download or copy a friend's CD or (heavens no) I'll wait until he's done with it and play it afterwards. I can only assume that constitutes fair use of a single-computer licence, but I wouldn't be suprised if it were forbidden by the EULA.
Don't forget that until February, Yahoo used Google's search to power its search engine (under licence, of course).
Yahoo then bought up some other search engines and put that technology into their search, but they also sell more-frequent placement into their search engine to website owners.
Black on white is very nice at first, but makes my eyes hurt after a while.
White on black makes my eyes turn square immediately, but isn't quite as bad in a long-term situation
I very much prefer other schemes with more muted colors. both of my favorites have a tan color on a darker muted color, and tehy seem to get the best of both worlds. I don't get headaches from looking at them, and my eyes don't hurt after hours of coding.
You make a good point. Downloading all the hotfixes could take a certain amount of time, but that's all download time.
I don't remember how long the download for service pack 1 took (I think I was playing Neverwinter Nights with my roommate at the time), but it didn't take long (I was on a university LAN)
How much time do you spend downloading new kernels and RECOMPILING them? Last time I recompiled a kernel on my computer here it took a few hours.
Well I've got karma to burn, so I'll speak my mind:
If you haven't used windows recently, maybe you should try. It's actually gotten much faster and more stable, and it's actually very easy to cut out a lot of the bloat with just a few settings.
Yeah, linux is very fashionable for the technological elite to use, but what actual benefits do you get from using it as a Windows replacement. Compare to Windows XP Professional:
1) Is it *really* more stable? How often can you *really* get the BSOD to come up in XP? I haven't managed yet. Can you get the uptime I've experienced with Windows on Linux? Probably. Can you get the same uptime and still have sound support? Maybe. Can you do it with the grand total of around 2 hours of configuration necessary?
2) Is it *really* more secure, or does it just invite fewer attacks? Yes, I know Outlook is terrible, but that's not the actual Windows OS, nor does it need to be installed.
3) Is all the extra aggravation *really* worth it? Yeah, you're extra cool for running Linux and you're sticking it to the man, but why?
Don't get me wrong; Linux is great for a server environment and a viable alternative when you have limited hardware and only need certain limited programs, but here at Slashdot it seems to be the solution to everything.
For reference, I'm a Computer Science student and work as a programmer in the summers. My home computer is Windows XP Professional running on a pentium 4 1.7 ghz and my work computer is a pentium 3 450 mhz. I've managed to get some pretty snappy performance on my work computer by running xfce or blackbox (I prefer blackbox) as long as I don't run more than one or two real programs.
I basically run the same few programs on both computers (emacs, mozilla firefox, aim/gaim, winamp/xmms) most of the time. Granted, it's a little unfair because my home computer is three times the computer of my work computer, but I think I get a lot more than 3 times the benefit out of it.
The RIAA's business model is to set the price of its goods higher than the market can bear. If GE went around selling lightbulbs for $80, people would get their bulbs elsewhere.
Granted, the situation isn't exactly the same, but the point is that if CDs were cheaper, people would be more inclined to buy them. We all know that CDs cost less than a dollar to manufacture and that the artist gets only a small share of the profit, so why should prices be so high? The industry has a monopoly that it is abusing, so a black market appears. It is the kind of situation that defeats capitalism and it should be corrected.
In the computer world, metric prefixes are base 10 when they refer to time or a rate and base 2 when they refer to data size.
Why?
Times/rates use base 10 because, as is suggested earlier, it's the standard for the metric system. It makes sense to have the same prefixes mean the same thing across the board. Since time is arbitrary anyway, it makes sense to use the "regular" metric prefixes.
Data size uses base 2 because of the way computers access memory. If you have a 8-bit address, you can have 256 chunks of memory. Likewise, if you have a 10-bit address, you can have 1024 chunks of memory. It takes the same number of address bits to have 1000 as it does to have 1024 and the hardware is generally simpler if you only deal with powers of 2. So since data-storage hardware is organized into groups that are powers of 2, it makes sense to use powers of 2 for the prefixes.
The argument is very much similar to the argument against the English system. Both systems are used because you want simple conversions. I have 1,000 fluid drams of something. How many fluid ounces is that? Likewise, if you always end up with 1024 units of something, why would you use 1000 as your base instead of 1024? Does it make more sense to have all of your data coming in multiples of 1.024 or in multiples of 1?
Hard drive manufacturers get away with it because hard drives aren't optimized in quite the same way as RAM. Hard drives are circular, so there's really very little benefit to making them contain 2^3n bits. You may end up dividing a hard drive in any event, and chances are your hard drive isn't exactly the maximum size your OS can handle. RAM, on the other hand, can easily be at the absolute maximum amount that a motherboard can handle. In that case, it makes sense to have 2^3n bits instead of 10^n bits. It needs the same size address and 2^3n is easier to manufacture, so ram always comes in powers of 2.
Hmm, well no I suppose spamming isn't free speech, but who defines what spam is? I'm not sure the government itself should be blocking the ISPs. I mean they can publish as many lists as they want, but if they're actually blocking those ISPs, that could be censorship. It's actually good that they only have blocked 127 ISPs, since that would almost suggest that they have only blocked notorious ISPs, not ISPs who also host useful material. Remember that there are servers that do nothing but provide webpages through email (you email a request for a webpage, it emails the request back) in order to circumvent censorship.
In general, spam is bad and not free speech, but that doesn't mean that any government should have the right to block it. Then again, US citizens who are also terrorists are bad, but that doesn't mean the US government should have the right to detain them indefinitely as non-citizens and try them without a jury of their peers.
So yay for anti-spam, boo for potential censorship.
That's highly unlikely. If we want to make "having the nutrients necessary for good health" a prerequisite to "healthy," then it is nearly impossible to have a "healthy vegan dinner."
This of course assumes we take the optimistic view of the possibility of a "nice vegan dinner."
A nice healthy vegetarian dinner is quite possible, but you will be hard pressed to find anyone who can actually maintain their health (in the sense of not becoming seriously ill) as well as a vegan diet without loading their diet with supplements. To me this seems to demonstrate that a vegan diet is clearly not "natural," as vegans could not exist without modern technology. The logical conclusion, then, is that the vast majority of vegans are hypocrites or fools. The remaining minority are sickly and quite possibly dying of malnutrition
Does not a bayesian approach simply mean that it maximizes the posterior probability that an item belongs to a class given prior probabilities? Couldn't a chi-squared test be bayesian?
Admittedly, it's clearly not the "classical" bayesian method, but it seems to me a chi-squared test just takes into account the possibility of multiple dependent variables. Maybe I'm missing something...
I think the point is that your hard drive is now protected by the DMCA.
The bit about keeping the government busy for weeks seems unlikely, but the fact that it's encrypted means the data on it is protected by the DMCA and can't be used as evidence against you in court.
I guess the same would apply if you just used software encryption.
If you want to keep the government out of your hard drive, get a shredder with a panic button. Or better yet, mod your hard drive with an incendiary device for the panic mode. Just make sure you don't accidentally trigger it:)
Patents are the only reason large companies invest money in researchers instead of just building whatever widget everybody else is building.
This is a perfectly valid exercise of intellectual property rights. Yes, the point in this case is probably to get money from a competitor, but that's business. The patent was forced into a pending status to increase its lifetime, but who cares? That loophole was closed. Frankly, I'd be more concerned about this patent applying to laser printers than some taiwanese chip manufacturer, but maybe it doesn't apply. IANAL.
I'll agree with that one. I have an 86 and I like it (I don't need them there crutches) but at times I wish I had an 89. It does all the work for you. Your professors don't care(it's just like looking it up in the table of integrals in the back) and it saves a lot of time. You've probably forgotten all those triginometric integrals anyway, haven't you?
Correct. Why is this on slashdot? This is a pretty standard business course project; just because it's about delivering broadband to the masses doesn't make it any more impressive or newsworthy.
I suspect the more rebellious ones will be running an assortment of proxies and redirections to get around the restrictions
No, actually, only the freshmen will be in a position to be interested in the bandwidth limitations. Each year past that, the rate of students living on campus drops off sharply.
Then again, the type of people (L337 h4x0rz) who would be getting around the bandwidth limitations probably stay on campus all four years, but they probably work for CIT anyways, so they can just h4x0r the system directly...
Funny, my the internet comes out of the faucet much faster than my friends the internet. I'm just going to go ahead and assume that's because my connection is faster. (Yes, he has a cable modem and yes, I'm on a T3.) The point is that when you're uploading, your download speed can be cut short, but this isn't really a problem with (essentially) unlimited-bandwidth, synchronous connections (right?).
Re:Attempt at putting it in more layman's terms.
on
Riemann Hypothesis Proved?
·
· Score: 2, Informative
The trivial zeroes for the zeta function are, by the way, all negative integers and all positive reals greater than (not including) one. The "interesting" ones are 1/2 + bi, where b can be any real number (or so they seek to prove).
I hate to suggest it to the slashdot crowd, but it'd be much easier just to set up a NTFS/samba share. MSIE will allow users to browse it, it's faster than http, and I don't think it's actually very vulnerable to attacks. Of course Microsoft is evil, yadda yadda, but you'll get a lot of gee whiz points from MSIE users who like the fact that it's just like their computers. (and most people either use windows or know how to use samba)
I think it would be better to make this card a little thicker and with a bill slot. You'd put cash in the bill slot (maybe a coin slot too) and then when you wanted to pay, little robots go in and take the money out. I'd pay for one of those.
hell naw, y'all done up and done it...again. Yet another failed attempt to make a self-destroying DVD sell. It's an interesting idea and perhaps useful for the sake of technological advancement, but the idea will never make money. It's much cheaper to stamp out 10 DVDs and rent them each out 100 times than to stamp out 1000 DIVX.. err whatever-you-call-this-divx-clone and have them each sold.
It's not a Republican country (assuming the political party and not the form of government). There are actually more liberals than conservatives in the country. The reason the conservatives are in power is because people with more wealth and therefore power tend to be Republican and many people who are liberal (i.e. young people) don't vote.
Slashdot Mirror
You're a cheap bastard, aren't you? There once was a time justifying not paying an author for his work was abhorent. Apparently it's totally acceptable at this point just as long as one can justify it by saying "it's too expensive". All those that complain about existing and upcoming IP laws know this - you brought it on yourselves.
Not really. Getting the CD from somebody else who is done with it is morally justified in my opinion. (or do you have a problem with library books?) At the moment, I have a grand total of zero pirated games on my PC. Neverwinter nights, warcraft 3, counterstrike, etc. I paid for them all and still have all the packaging, so don't go preaching to me. That's not my point.
The argument isn't really a moral one. If you start making any product to inaccesible, by cost or by legal restriction, you WILL get a black market. The only problem with "digital media" is that the black market is so readily accessible.
Bottom line: Selling a video game for 60 bucks invites people to steal it. Make people feel like they're getting what they pay for and they'll buy it
"Despite the relatively low price of PC games, many gamers are still choosing to resort to piracy rather than pay for legitimate boxed copies," said Matt Pierce, publisher of the computer games magazine, PC Gamer.
Forgive me for being a cynic, but I don't see 60 bucks as "relatively low price". Give me the game for 20 bucks (like counterstrike) and I'll go out and pay money. Try to sell it for 60 (especially a single player game) and I won't buy it. Either I just won't get it at all, or I'll just download or copy a friend's CD or (heavens no) I'll wait until he's done with it and play it afterwards. I can only assume that constitutes fair use of a single-computer licence, but I wouldn't be suprised if it were forbidden by the EULA.
Yes,
Don't forget that until February, Yahoo used Google's search to power its search engine (under licence, of course).
Yahoo then bought up some other search engines and put that technology into their search, but they also sell more-frequent placement into their search engine to website owners.
Are you sure white on black isn't bad?
Black on white is very nice at first, but makes my eyes hurt after a while.
White on black makes my eyes turn square immediately, but isn't quite as bad in a long-term situation
I very much prefer other schemes with more muted colors. both of my favorites have a tan color on a darker muted color, and tehy seem to get the best of both worlds. I don't get headaches from looking at them, and my eyes don't hurt after hours of coding.
You make a good point. Downloading all the hotfixes could take a certain amount of time, but that's all download time.
I don't remember how long the download for service pack 1 took (I think I was playing Neverwinter Nights with my roommate at the time), but it didn't take long (I was on a university LAN)
How much time do you spend downloading new kernels and RECOMPILING them? Last time I recompiled a kernel on my computer here it took a few hours.
Well I've got karma to burn, so I'll speak my mind:
If you haven't used windows recently, maybe you should try. It's actually gotten much faster and more stable, and it's actually very easy to cut out a lot of the bloat with just a few settings.
Yeah, linux is very fashionable for the technological elite to use, but what actual benefits do you get from using it as a Windows replacement. Compare to Windows XP Professional:
1) Is it *really* more stable? How often can you *really* get the BSOD to come up in XP? I haven't managed yet. Can you get the uptime I've experienced with Windows on Linux? Probably. Can you get the same uptime and still have sound support? Maybe. Can you do it with the grand total of around 2 hours of configuration necessary?
2) Is it *really* more secure, or does it just invite fewer attacks? Yes, I know Outlook is terrible, but that's not the actual Windows OS, nor does it need to be installed.
3) Is all the extra aggravation *really* worth it? Yeah, you're extra cool for running Linux and you're sticking it to the man, but why?
Don't get me wrong; Linux is great for a server environment and a viable alternative when you have limited hardware and only need certain limited programs, but here at Slashdot it seems to be the solution to everything.
For reference, I'm a Computer Science student and work as a programmer in the summers. My home computer is Windows XP Professional running on a pentium 4 1.7 ghz and my work computer is a pentium 3 450 mhz. I've managed to get some pretty snappy performance on my work computer by running xfce or blackbox (I prefer blackbox) as long as I don't run more than one or two real programs.
I basically run the same few programs on both computers (emacs, mozilla firefox, aim/gaim, winamp/xmms) most of the time. Granted, it's a little unfair because my home computer is three times the computer of my work computer, but I think I get a lot more than 3 times the benefit out of it.
Flame away.
My Civic (non-hybrid) gets about 35 miles to the gallon.
The RIAA's business model is to set the price of its goods higher than the market can bear. If GE went around selling lightbulbs for $80, people would get their bulbs elsewhere.
Granted, the situation isn't exactly the same, but the point is that if CDs were cheaper, people would be more inclined to buy them. We all know that CDs cost less than a dollar to manufacture and that the artist gets only a small share of the profit, so why should prices be so high? The industry has a monopoly that it is abusing, so a black market appears. It is the kind of situation that defeats capitalism and it should be corrected.
In the computer world, metric prefixes are base 10 when they refer to time or a rate and base 2 when they refer to data size.
Why?
Times/rates use base 10 because, as is suggested earlier, it's the standard for the metric system. It makes sense to have the same prefixes mean the same thing across the board. Since time is arbitrary anyway, it makes sense to use the "regular" metric prefixes.
Data size uses base 2 because of the way computers access memory. If you have a 8-bit address, you can have 256 chunks of memory. Likewise, if you have a 10-bit address, you can have 1024 chunks of memory. It takes the same number of address bits to have 1000 as it does to have 1024 and the hardware is generally simpler if you only deal with powers of 2. So since data-storage hardware is organized into groups that are powers of 2, it makes sense to use powers of 2 for the prefixes.
The argument is very much similar to the argument against the English system. Both systems are used because you want simple conversions. I have 1,000 fluid drams of something. How many fluid ounces is that? Likewise, if you always end up with 1024 units of something, why would you use 1000 as your base instead of 1024? Does it make more sense to have all of your data coming in multiples of 1.024 or in multiples of 1?
Hard drive manufacturers get away with it because hard drives aren't optimized in quite the same way as RAM. Hard drives are circular, so there's really very little benefit to making them contain 2^3n bits. You may end up dividing a hard drive in any event, and chances are your hard drive isn't exactly the maximum size your OS can handle. RAM, on the other hand, can easily be at the absolute maximum amount that a motherboard can handle. In that case, it makes sense to have 2^3n bits instead of 10^n bits. It needs the same size address and 2^3n is easier to manufacture, so ram always comes in powers of 2.
Hmm, well no I suppose spamming isn't free speech, but who defines what spam is? I'm not sure the government itself should be blocking the ISPs. I mean they can publish as many lists as they want, but if they're actually blocking those ISPs, that could be censorship. It's actually good that they only have blocked 127 ISPs, since that would almost suggest that they have only blocked notorious ISPs, not ISPs who also host useful material. Remember that there are servers that do nothing but provide webpages through email (you email a request for a webpage, it emails the request back) in order to circumvent censorship.
In general, spam is bad and not free speech, but that doesn't mean that any government should have the right to block it. Then again, US citizens who are also terrorists are bad, but that doesn't mean the US government should have the right to detain them indefinitely as non-citizens and try them without a jury of their peers.
So yay for anti-spam, boo for potential censorship.
"nice healthy vegan dinner"
That's highly unlikely. If we want to make "having the nutrients necessary for good health" a prerequisite to "healthy," then it is nearly impossible to have a "healthy vegan dinner."
This of course assumes we take the optimistic view of the possibility of a "nice vegan dinner."
A nice healthy vegetarian dinner is quite possible, but you will be hard pressed to find anyone who can actually maintain their health (in the sense of not becoming seriously ill) as well as a vegan diet without loading their diet with supplements. To me this seems to demonstrate that a vegan diet is clearly not "natural," as vegans could not exist without modern technology. The logical conclusion, then, is that the vast majority of vegans are hypocrites or fools. The remaining minority are sickly and quite possibly dying of malnutrition
Excellent, now you're soundng like a PATRIOT.
I'm confused...
Does not a bayesian approach simply mean that it maximizes the posterior probability that an item belongs to a class given prior probabilities? Couldn't a chi-squared test be bayesian?
Admittedly, it's clearly not the "classical" bayesian method, but it seems to me a chi-squared test just takes into account the possibility of multiple dependent variables. Maybe I'm missing something...
I think the point is that your hard drive is now protected by the DMCA.
:)
The bit about keeping the government busy for weeks seems unlikely, but the fact that it's encrypted means the data on it is protected by the DMCA and can't be used as evidence against you in court.
I guess the same would apply if you just used software encryption.
If you want to keep the government out of your hard drive, get a shredder with a panic button. Or better yet, mod your hard drive with an incendiary device for the panic mode. Just make sure you don't accidentally trigger it
Patents are not the source of all evil.
Patents are the only reason large companies invest money in researchers instead of just building whatever widget everybody else is building.
This is a perfectly valid exercise of intellectual property rights. Yes, the point in this case is probably to get money from a competitor, but that's business. The patent was forced into a pending status to increase its lifetime, but who cares? That loophole was closed. Frankly, I'd be more concerned about this patent applying to laser printers than some taiwanese chip manufacturer, but maybe it doesn't apply. IANAL.
I'll agree with that one. I have an 86 and I like it (I don't need them there crutches) but at times I wish I had an 89. It does all the work for you. Your professors don't care(it's just like looking it up in the table of integrals in the back) and it saves a lot of time. You've probably forgotten all those triginometric integrals anyway, haven't you?
Correct. Why is this on slashdot? This is a pretty standard business course project; just because it's about delivering broadband to the masses doesn't make it any more impressive or newsworthy.
I suspect the more rebellious ones will be running an assortment of proxies and redirections to get around the restrictions
No, actually, only the freshmen will be in a position to be interested in the bandwidth limitations. Each year past that, the rate of students living on campus drops off sharply.
Then again, the type of people (L337 h4x0rz) who would be getting around the bandwidth limitations probably stay on campus all four years, but they probably work for CIT anyways, so they can just h4x0r the system directly...
Funny, my the internet comes out of the faucet much faster than my friends the internet. I'm just going to go ahead and assume that's because my connection is faster. (Yes, he has a cable modem and yes, I'm on a T3.) The point is that when you're uploading, your download speed can be cut short, but this isn't really a problem with (essentially) unlimited-bandwidth, synchronous connections (right?).
The trivial zeroes for the zeta function are, by the way, all negative integers and all positive reals greater than (not including) one. The "interesting" ones are 1/2 + bi, where b can be any real number (or so they seek to prove).
I hate to suggest it to the slashdot crowd, but it'd be much easier just to set up a NTFS/samba share. MSIE will allow users to browse it, it's faster than http, and I don't think it's actually very vulnerable to attacks. Of course Microsoft is evil, yadda yadda, but you'll get a lot of gee whiz points from MSIE users who like the fact that it's just like their computers. (and most people either use windows or know how to use samba)
I think it would be better to make this card a little thicker and with a bill slot. You'd put cash in the bill slot (maybe a coin slot too) and then when you wanted to pay, little robots go in and take the money out. I'd pay for one of those.
It's good to see they've scaled the hole up to human size... That would be an expensive playhouse otherwise...
hell naw, y'all done up and done it ...again. Yet another failed attempt to make a self-destroying DVD sell. It's an interesting idea and perhaps useful for the sake of technological advancement, but the idea will never make money. It's much cheaper to stamp out 10 DVDs and rent them each out 100 times than to stamp out 1000 DIVX.. err whatever-you-call-this-divx-clone and have them each sold.
It's not a Republican country (assuming the political party and not the form of government). There are actually more liberals than conservatives in the country. The reason the conservatives are in power is because people with more wealth and therefore power tend to be Republican and many people who are liberal (i.e. young people) don't vote.