One reason why it is bad to copy music/films instead of obtaining them legally:
It's quite expensive to make a film or cut a music CD. At the point where so many people are copying it *instead* of paying for it that it is no longer profitable, then people will stop making them. You won't be able to download HP7 because the film company won't be able to afford to make it.
You have no solid data because there is no solid data. Are there more hurricanes than 100 years ago? Well, no not really. Do they cause more damage? Yes, but that's because there are more people living on the edge of Florida.
There is a huge cost associated with global warming which we really cannot avoid. That is, we can spend loads of money now trying to stop it, but the cost (in dollars and lives) will be higher than if we just let it run its course and mitigate the effects as they occur (e.g. build flood defences to stop land from being inundated). The reason for this is that we cannot just grab the money out of the air, we have to take it away from other needy causes.
It's important to realise that global warming will probably stop after a while once alternative energy sources such as wind and solar power become cheaper than fossil fuels which will happen some time in the next 100 years. The sooner this happens, the sooner global warming ceases to be a big problem. It follows that cutting carbon emissions is the wrong thing to do. The money spent on this (well some of it) would be better spent on research into alternative energy sources.
Re:Answer to title. (Actual experience)
on
Is Mac OS X Slow?
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· Score: 2
I have a G4 Ti Powerbook. The UI was a little slow when I first installed it but I bumped the memory up to 512Mb and now it's fine. 256Mb is not enough for OS X.
What get me about this "non parallel shadows" thing is that the skeptics don't explain how this effect would be achieved on Earth. You could do it with multiple light sources, but then everything would have a shadow for each light source, or you could do it with one light source close to the objects in question, but then you would see the shadows distorting as they get further away from the object casting it. In the photograph above, the astronaut's leg shadow should get thicker towards the RHS of the picture. I submit that if the light source was far enough away for that effect not to be noticeable, the non-parallel effect would be much less noticeable too.
The main problem is the cost of disposing of the waste materials i.e. spent fuel and end of life reactors + the danger of nuclear material falling into the hands of terrorists.
How long do you think our coal or oil is going to last anyway? There's enough oil to last longer than my lifetime (I'm 36) and coal for hundreds of years. We'll have figured out something else long before we run out of fossil fuels. e.g. using todays solar cells, a square 500km on each side placed at the equator would be more than enough to supply all our energy needs.
Having said all that, there is nothing inherently evil about nuclear reactors as such. Even their problems are probably no worse than those of fossil fuel power stations.
That is similar to the way I judge when it is time to leave a company. It's not that I stop finding Dilbert funny, but I read a strip and am overcome by the icy grip on my heart of recognising that it depicts a situation that actually happened in my company.
And what if it was an inside job? If it was a disgruntled employee extracting revenge, they obviously didn't bother to do anything with the PGP sigs either because they didn't have access to the private key or because they knew that nobody ever bothers to check the signature when they download a sendmail or any other distro. But supposing it was an inside job and they did change the signatures or even worse inserted the trojan into the source CVS tree....
FYI Sendmail Inc did have to lay some people off recently which seems a bit of a coincidence to me.
It wasn't sendmail, it was a worm that used a sendmail exploit to propagate. Only DEC VAXes running a particular Unix (4.2 BSD I think, but I could be wrong) were affected, admittedly that was a large proportion of computers on the Internet at the time.
Ironically, the worm was not written with malicious intent, but a bug caused it to go crazy.
The same argument can be used to show that the World's forests don't have much effect on CO2. Yes, they absorb CO2 but when the trees die it all gets released again. It'd be OK if, when a tree dies, we bury it so that whatever civilisation is around in 100 million years gets some new coal reserves.
Apples run PowerPC processors in them. Dells run Intel Pentium style ones. You cannot get a performance comparison by comparing raw clock speed. My Apple laptop has a 500MHz chip in it that Apple *claimed* was equivalent to a 900MHz Pentium (top of the line for laptops at the time I bought my Apple). Don't know if that is true but subjectively it felt very fast until I put OS X on it. The problems with OS X were fixed by adding more RAM.
Yep, it needs a lot of RAM. My Ti powerbook came with 256Mb RAM and OS X ate all of it. I upgraded to 512Mb and it's been great since then. With the price of memory, I don't think it's a big deal.
Why use X (as in windows) with OS X (as in "ten")? Newsflash: it already has a superior graphical environment (IMHO). Having said that, I do run XDarwin on my Mac because my favourite text editor is X only. I get around the three button problem in two ways:
Better idea: she uses a different instrument for each reviewer. That way, when a ripped off mp3 appears of her playing her new album accompanied by a trombone you can figure out which reviewer leaked the song.
(Don't ask me how Tori Amos plays a trombone and sings at the same time - I'm an ideas man).
Actually, the Irish problem does have its roots (or some of them) in religious conflict. The Battle of the Boyne (1690), for instance, was fought over whether the English throne should be catholic or protestant.
You cannot explain the bizarre nature of Irish or English history without understanding that there has been catholic/protestant conflict in the British Isles since the time of Henry VIII.
Yes, but in real life you wouldn't actually put all of the wind turbines in North Dakota would you? It was just an example to show how much wind energy there is out there.
editors are rejecting your "inciteful" (sic) articles, no doubt because you can't spell
Whereas you, on the other hand, can't read. The word "inciteful" was deliberately spelled that way as would have been obvious if you had read the previous three words ("my", "insightful", "and")
Re:Correction: Coulomb is not an unit of current
on
Electric Armor
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· Score: 2
Coulombs of current sounds unwieldy because it is plain wrong. The Coulomb is the SI unit of charge. The Amp is the unit of current which is basically charge per second.
Slashdot Mirror
One reason why it is bad to copy music/films instead of obtaining them legally:
It's quite expensive to make a film or cut a music CD. At the point where so many people are copying it *instead* of paying for it that it is no longer profitable, then people will stop making them. You won't be able to download HP7 because the film company won't be able to afford to make it.
You have no solid data because there is no solid data. Are there more hurricanes than 100 years ago? Well, no not really. Do they cause more damage? Yes, but that's because there are more people living on the edge of Florida.
There is a huge cost associated with global warming which we really cannot avoid. That is, we can spend loads of money now trying to stop it, but the cost (in dollars and lives) will be higher than if we just let it run its course and mitigate the effects as they occur (e.g. build flood defences to stop land from being inundated). The reason for this is that we cannot just grab the money out of the air, we have to take it away from other needy causes.
It's important to realise that global warming will probably stop after a while once alternative energy sources such as wind and solar power become cheaper than fossil fuels which will happen some time in the next 100 years. The sooner this happens, the sooner global warming ceases to be a big problem. It follows that cutting carbon emissions is the wrong thing to do. The money spent on this (well some of it) would be better spent on research into alternative energy sources.
I have a G4 Ti Powerbook. The UI was a little slow when I first installed it but I bumped the memory up to 512Mb and now it's fine. 256Mb is not enough for OS X.
But they canceled Fututama.
What get me about this "non parallel shadows" thing is that the skeptics don't explain how this effect would be achieved on Earth. You could do it with multiple light sources, but then everything would have a shadow for each light source, or you could do it with one light source close to the objects in question, but then you would see the shadows distorting as they get further away from the object casting it. In the photograph above, the astronaut's leg shadow should get thicker towards the RHS of the picture. I submit that if the light source was far enough away for that effect not to be noticeable, the non-parallel effect would be much less noticeable too.
The main problem is the cost of disposing of the waste materials i.e. spent fuel and end of life reactors + the danger of nuclear material falling into the hands of terrorists.
How long do you think our coal or oil is going to last anyway? There's enough oil to last longer than my lifetime (I'm 36) and coal for hundreds of years. We'll have figured out something else long before we run out of fossil fuels. e.g. using todays solar cells, a square 500km on each side placed at the equator would be more than enough to supply all our energy needs.
Having said all that, there is nothing inherently evil about nuclear reactors as such. Even their problems are probably no worse than those of fossil fuel power stations.
Then i quit.
So is Windows.
You mean there was no affordable OS for the i386 that wasn't crap. DOS was available for i386 but treated it as if it was a fast 8086.
If it wasn't installed, everybody would think FreeBSD is dead like Minix.
Why do people have trouble with pointers in C? Well let's see:
What about the subtleties of:
or the difference between the following:
and the following, why does the assignment in foo work albeit get thrown away when the function exits, but the assignment in main not even compile:
The basic concept of pointers is quite simple, but to code in C effectively using them requires days of practical experience.
And what if it was an inside job? If it was a disgruntled employee extracting revenge, they obviously didn't bother to do anything with the PGP sigs either because they didn't have access to the private key or because they knew that nobody ever bothers to check the signature when they download a sendmail or any other distro. But supposing it was an inside job and they did change the signatures or even worse inserted the trojan into the source CVS tree....
FYI Sendmail Inc did have to lay some people off recently which seems a bit of a coincidence to me.
It wasn't sendmail, it was a worm that used a sendmail exploit to propagate. Only DEC VAXes running a particular Unix (4.2 BSD I think, but I could be wrong) were affected, admittedly that was a large proportion of computers on the Internet at the time.
Ironically, the worm was not written with malicious intent, but a bug caused it to go crazy.
Well if I rsh to another machine, it'll ask me for a password which I must type in and then send across an unencrypted TCP connection.
Oops, that'll teach me to preview even simple posts. I of course meant:
makemap hash access <access
What's not simple about "makemap hash access access" ?
The same argument can be used to show that the World's forests don't have much effect on CO2. Yes, they absorb CO2 but when the trees die it all gets released again. It'd be OK if, when a tree dies, we bury it so that whatever civilisation is around in 100 million years gets some new coal reserves.
Apples run PowerPC processors in them. Dells run Intel Pentium style ones. You cannot get a performance comparison by comparing raw clock speed. My Apple laptop has a 500MHz chip in it that Apple *claimed* was equivalent to a 900MHz Pentium (top of the line for laptops at the time I bought my Apple). Don't know if that is true but subjectively it felt very fast until I put OS X on it. The problems with OS X were fixed by adding more RAM.
Yep, it needs a lot of RAM. My Ti powerbook came with 256Mb RAM and OS X ate all of it. I upgraded to 512Mb and it's been great since then. With the price of memory, I don't think it's a big deal.
Why use X (as in windows) with OS X (as in "ten")? Newsflash: it already has a superior graphical environment (IMHO). Having said that, I do run XDarwin on my Mac because my favourite text editor is X only. I get around the three button problem in two ways:
1 - use an external mouse with enough buttons.
2 - set up XDarwin to emulate the middle button.
Better idea: she uses a different instrument for each reviewer. That way, when a ripped off mp3 appears of her playing her new album accompanied by a trombone you can figure out which reviewer leaked the song.
(Don't ask me how Tori Amos plays a trombone and sings at the same time - I'm an ideas man).
Actually, the Irish problem does have its roots (or some of them) in religious conflict. The Battle of the Boyne (1690), for instance, was fought over whether the English throne should be catholic or protestant.
You cannot explain the bizarre nature of Irish or English history without understanding that there has been catholic/protestant conflict in the British Isles since the time of Henry VIII.
Yes, but in real life you wouldn't actually put all of the wind turbines in North Dakota would you? It was just an example to show how much wind energy there is out there.
editors are rejecting your "inciteful" (sic) articles, no doubt because you can't spell
Whereas you, on the other hand, can't read. The word "inciteful" was deliberately spelled that way as would have been obvious if you had read the previous three words ("my", "insightful", "and")
Coulombs of current sounds unwieldy because it is plain wrong. The Coulomb is the SI unit of charge. The Amp is the unit of current which is basically charge per second.