Yup, grinning at cute girls will really make that BitTorrent traffic spike, let me tell you. This one time I managed to max out my download cap, just from a few gigs of porn, and I'm pretty sure they don't count it if it turns out the chick's a fuggnaut. And since we're just spouting random offtopic anecdotes, yesterday I went past this bakery and they had these donuts - let me tell you they smelled amazing - I smiled at them. Should have bought one. Amazing.
How do you know they're not planning to really emulate Apple's "success" and move to proprietary hardware/software and tell all of their "partners" to go pound sand? A walled garden would be next.
They could, but that would be insane. Those "partners" would still be pumping out craploads of hardware and need something that would run on it, finally bringing about the Year of Linux on The Desktop, just as the Mayans predicted. When billion dollar businesses are told to fuck off by their trusted partners they don't just go quietly into the night, they do (possibly spiteful, crazy and dickish) things to try to stay afloat.
Sorry, what? When I write an email or text on my Android the entire text gets sent to Google? Even if I decide not to send it? The issue is that, when using Siri, the full recording is sent back to Apple's servers where they perform processing. This could allow them to do spy stuff with what people falsely assumed was privat einformation, since a lot of people don't realise that anything you tell Siri you also tell Apple HQ.
Now, are Apple doing evil with what Siri sends them? Probably not. but when you're the CIO of a billion dollar tech company you probably don't want to base your company's technological future on "it's probably fine".
I don't tick that box, and I added an exception to AdBlock for *.slashdot.org. I still don't see any adverts here, because I won't add a known malware distributor to my NoScript whitelist. I'm not strictly against advertising, but I'm not going to just run any crap coming from anywhere to give away a few pennies a month. I try to subscribe but I won't use PayPal and nothing else comes up on the subscription page. I told them about this, but got no response. So, since they don't seem to want my money, I haven't yet flown a few thousand miles just to shove a wad of cash through the letter box.
" It's always been about how much money Sony can squeeze out of a customer, even after they've already paid for the console."
Let's just compare this asinine claim to reality:
* Sony, just like PC gaming, provides FREE ONLINE to every single PS3 owner.
...which I cannot use, since I won't update to remove the OtherOS functionality I was sold.
* Sony provides FREE DEDICATED servers for all major competitive online games just like on the PC
...which I can't use.
* Sony is developer friendly and completely open to FREE add-on content for PS3 owners to download
...which I can't access.
* Sony's wildly successful 20 million+ userbase online world, Home, is completely FREE to every PS3 owner
...except for me.
* Sony allows cheap, off the shelf harddrive upgrades
* Sony allows cheap, off the shelf keyboard and mice to be used with the system
Wow, what a bunch of evil gamer hating misers are those Sony guys...
Oh, I didn't realise that they'd used cheaper generic parts instead of fabricating much more expensive proprietary hardware. And then they didn't go to excessive lengths to block the use of that hardware that was easier and cheaper for them to use. Good God, they are lovely after all. Such lovely, lovely thieves.
Fuck Sony, and fuck anyone who doesn't think they're all a bunch of douchebags.
It's no good yelling "data wants to be free" - someone has to put the data together in the first place. And that someone, whether they be Madonna, Brad Pitt, Bill Gates - or me, deserves to be paid for their labour in doing that.
I know you aren't the first person to say this, and you won't be the last, but why, exactly? Why should they be paid?
I mean, if I go down a coal mine for a day and mine coal for the guy who owns the coal mine, he has agreed to pay me for my time and so I deserve to be paid. If someone agrees to pay me money if I give them this here desk and take it to their house, when I take it to their house and give it to them I deserve to be paid.
When I spend a large quantity of time and money recording an album or producing a film, I am essentially gambling that people will want to give me money for it. They don't have to. They never have had to. There has always been more art around than there has been demand. I am gambling that people will think that I am so much better than other people at making stuff they will pay me for making what I have made, with the implication that I will make more. That's it.
Anyway, voluntary donations seem to work fine - I mean, there was a torrent of DVD quality up before the release of Transformers 2. Cost of film: $200 million. Revenue before it was even released in my country: $600 million. Boo fucking hoo for the poor content creators who got ripped off on that deal, only becoming fabulously wealthy. This future where no one has to pay for media we keep getting warned about? It's here. Films are being made. Albums are being recorded. You or I could get them for free trivially. Next argument please.
Civil suit vs individual pirates = Punatives are unfair
Civil suit vs BP = Compensate people for the damage you caused
Criminal suit against BP = This should happen
The flaw in your logic is conflating the ideas of civil and criminal court. If someone steals my wallet and gets caught, odds are that they'll never pay me back. They'll get community service, maybe jail, maybe a warning, but they will not have to pay me back. This is punishment, rather than compensation. If I sue the same guy in civil court, that is for compensation, not punishment - thus I can't just ask for 1000000% of what was in my wallet as punishment.
I beg to differ, but no - we have no guaranteed freedom of speech whatsoever. We are assumed to have freedom of speech unless that freedom is explicitly taken away (libel, slander, encouraging terrorism, etc), just as we are assumed to be able to swing our fists as long as that swinging isn't specified as being illegal - for example, if I swing my fist into your face, that would not be allowed.
But they can fine you for recording and distributing it (which is what Google is doing)
Wait, what? Where can I get this information? Where is it being distributed? IIRC, they just used some old bit of wireless network scanning software and happened to pick up more than they meant to. I don't exactly like Google having all my personal information, but thinking that Google gives some kind of massive shit about a few people's unsecured information is is definitely in the tinfoil hat zone.
If I had to, what I would class this as is the same as if you were walking down the street with a digital recorder, coming up with ideas for some sort of article you were writing about the area. While walking along talking into this digital recorder, creating files that will be sanitized and refactored before ever seeing the light of day, someone shouts some personal information. Then the German government gets all pissy about it and demands you hand over the tapes, and the FTC start an investigation.
Seriously guys, there are problems with Google. There are. This is not one of them, though.
Like a radio scanner that can pick up cell phone calls. Sure you listen, but you can never (legally) disseminate the information; even if you hear someone planning a murder.
So this implies that listening is ok? since that's all Google is doing, I fail to see the problem.
Right, I've had enough of this. Why do people simply allow this fallacy to continue? Apple's UIs are terrible!
The iPod is far more complex than it needs to be, the single good thing about the iPhone's interface is just a huge patent troll, the iPad I have never used so I will avoid comment, and the OS! Oh, the OS! A recording studio I practically lived in for a few months used a Mac, and on several occasions we spent hours just trying to move data onto an external drive - I believe the hardware on the year old box was failing, and when it wasn't we had to inexplicably use iTunes to move data files. Ok, so that was probably set up by some "security conscious" moron.
In general, though, the OS is terrible. One button mice were ok, they were a novelty. Fifteen years ago. Now I feel constrained by a 3 button, plus the extra four for scrolling. The only reason they've stuck with them is stubbornness - not because it makes sense, or because of the simplicity of it, but simply because The Mighty Steve refuses to admit that he might have been wrong. And dragging a drive to the trash - does that eject it or format it? I keep forgetting, since it is apparently random.
WTF is it that allows some of the most argumentative assholes on the web just overlook the one simple fact that Apple is really shitty at putting together a UI?
Hmm. Here in the UK on Orange I got my phone (a Cliq/Dext - I know, I know, but it's been good to me at least) effectively for free - a SIM only package with unlimited texts, calls and ~500MB data would have been £25/month. My package, with a free phone? £25/month.
Then again, there is some serious competition in our marketplace. Not a lot, but some. Go regulated markets!
Well, personally, I'm thrilled they're trying to keep NASA alive... Just consider the wealth of knowledge and understanding we've gained through Hubble alone.
Remind me, how many men are there on Hubble again?
Infant deaths per 1000 live births / under 5's deaths per 1000 live births in the UK: 4.8 / 6.0
Infant deaths per 1000 live births / under 5's deaths per 1000 live births in the US: 6.3 / 7.8
Another one called for the Kingdom, there. Again, not a huge difference, but pretty significant if you're a parent of 1.8 out of 1000 children. So, the question seems to boil down to a choice between expensive good care or cheap effective care.
Of particular concern to the GAO was the “substitution rate,” the rate at which an illegal copy would have been otherwise legally purchased had it not been available. The MPAA and RIAA always use a 1:1 ratio to boost their figures and make the problem seem far worse than it actually is.
Okay, so that's music and film. Still, they are claiming that every download is a lost sale. In fact, more than that, they have claimed in court that every download is several thousand lost sales. Oh crap, I accidentally used matters of record instead of just stating my (incorrect) opinion as fact. Oops.
Nintendo has blamed piracy for a 45 per cent drop in DS game sales in Europe between April and December 2009... Last June Nintendo monitored ten overseas websites that allowed people to illegally download software. It found that games had been pirated a total 238 million times, translating into one trillion yen ($10.7 billion) in lost sales.
And Sony, EA, Activision, Microsoft et al have all claimed the same thing at one time or another. They seem to be smartening up nowadays, though.
The statistics that have been published are how many pirates vs. customers the game has, and those have been accurate.
And the numbers are almost certainly not accurate, anyway. Some people DL several versions of the same game - some people buy several copies. Some people lend games to people, thus making customers into pirates, and some people lend copies to friends, making a single pirate into a counterfeiting ring. The actual numbers are completely impossible to determine by any means other than watching what every single person in the world is doing every second of every day.
The biggest problem from a business perspective, as I see it, is that as more online news sources put up paywalls, the more incentive there is not to have one. I mean, if there's only one news source on the entire internet that you don't have to pay to see then they will get the vast, vast majority of page clicks, even if the journalism is crap. They've been saying for a while that the barrier to news site paywalls is that if they don't all do it at the same time then the early adopters are screwed - maybe that has a deeper message than just everyone doing it at the same time?
To be honest, there are one hell of a lot of people providing news, and only a limited amount of money that's going to flow into them. If this was any other business half of these guys would have gone bankrupt long ago, but as the parent talks about the news 'sources' get significant funding from rich people with viewpoints they want pushing, rather than trying to make actual profit. To be honest I hope Murdoch does paywall all his sites - they'll get dropped from aggregation sites, people won't link to them, and for all intents and purposes his influence will be removed from my life.
However, most people seem to suggest that fighting DRM with piracy is a good option. It isn't. If you're refusing to buy a game because of DRM, then you shouldn't pirate it either but spend your money on some of their competitor who is doing it correctly. Otherwise you get your gaming fix from the bad behaving company and don't support the good companies.
Why the dichotomy? Why should downloading a copy of a DRM'd game preclude me from paying money for a different game? The false idea that a single person can either pirate or pay, but never both, is frankly ridiculous.
What if I choose to fight the DRM by not buying Game A and buying Game B instead? Must I then not download Game A? Piracy is simply the solution to the problem of refusing to buy a game but still wanting to play it.
To those who demand we pay, the simple question is: why? If I'm using volunteered resources to distribute the game (eg. P2P) then it is costing the developers and publishers nothing. If you disagree please, please message me with your request to donate a few thousand pounds, or local equivalent, to the cause of giving me £~70000 this year, since it's so affordable to you. It sure isn't to me.
Now that you mention it, the times I've been in the closest to radiation free rooms (faraday cages for testing cell phones), I felt quite uncomfortable.
I know what you mean - I always get this weird disconnected feeling whenever I've been away from the internet for a few hours...
I certainly do it for the art (and because it's really fun)...all my music is free.
I have decided to take the opposite approach and DRM all my performances - I shall play all songs backwards using a rubber band wrapped around a shoebox! All the listener needs is some imagination, something the robots will never have!
On the bright side there is an increasing consensus that DNA evidence is a lot less useful than CSI: would have us believe.
It makes sense, really - it takes quite a while and a fairly large sample to sequence someone's genome with proper error checking, so the crime labs generally don't bother. Instead, they focus on a few areas of chromosomes called loci, and pick sections of non-coding DNA called short tandem repeats. US labs will normally look at 13 loci, UK labs 10. Many experts have testified in a court of law, under oath, that a match of nine loci is 'tantamount to unique identification'.
Studies have been done on small sections of some DNA databases, comparing every profile with every other profile, and found this to simply be false. In Arizona 65 493 profiles were made available - 122 pairs matched at nine loci, 20 at ten, 1 at eleven and 1 more at twelve. In Illinois 220 000 were checked, and 903 pairs matched at nine or more loci, and in Maryland 30 000 were checked, providing 32 matching pairs.
Add to this the problem that eyelashes, skin fragments etc can be carried on the wind, or from a random frottage, and we have some important cases being 'solved' with what amounts to deeply circumstantial evidence. With any luck this fascination with DNA being used as the be all and end all, the assayer of truth, will end as soon as possible.
PS: most of that informative stuff about loci and short tandem repeats was pretty much lifted from New Scientist #2742, dated 9 January 2010. IANAGeneticist, and would feel a small pang of guilt without adding this disclaimer.
... what's the difference between a non-linked document where you don't tell people the URL and a site with a password?
Would guessing 3000 different passwords be as forgivable, even if the system doesn't cut you off? Is an easily-guessed URL any better than an easily-guessed password?
The difference is huge. Look at the way house insurance works - you leave a door open, you're not insured. You leave a window open, you're not insured. You have a crappy lock on the door that a five-year-old could bypass, you're insured and they're guilty of breaking and entering.
I don't know how it works everywhere else, but in the UK if there isn't significant indication that you shouldn't be somewhere then you aren't trespassing. Thus, an open doorway with a sign saying "No Entry" means you are trespassing if you go past it, but an open doorway is effectively an allowable entry point for the public.
Somehow I suspect if you said, "But the unguarded door I left open with valuable items inside was on a small alley - I didn't think anyone would notice!" people would laugh in your face. Of course, theft is theft, but if all these people did was have a look around and take photos of something embarrassing then it's just a bit funny, really.
The film that was ultimately made originally had no connections with Asimov, originating as a screenplay written in 1995 by Jeff Vintar, entitled Hardwired. That script was an Agatha Christie-inspired murder mystery that took place entirely at the scene of a crime, with one lone human character, FBI agent Del Spooner, investigating the killing of a reclusive scientist named Dr. Hogenmiller, and interrogating a cast of machine suspects that included Sonny the robot, HECTOR the supercomputer with a perpetual yellow smiley face, the dead Doctor Hogenmiller's hologram, plus several other examples of artificial intelligence... Jeff Vintar... incorporated the Three Laws of Robotics, and replaced the character of Flynn with Susan Calvin, when the studio decided to use the name "I, Robot"
I was genuinely angry after watching that film, mainly because the only copy of I, Robot I could get my hands on now had Will Smith on the cover.
No, wait, it was mainly because the plots of the two works shared not one single point of congruence. And the film mainly focused on badassery and leaping around, which is true to Asimov's style - his trademark was always providing very little substance and just having huge set-piece battles between the protagonist and every other being in the story.
No, wait. What really, really got to me was that the name I, Robot was used on some crappy spec script that had to be reimagined multiple times to make it sufficiently commercial and then had Asimov's ideas vaguely pinned on as a clear afterthought in order to give it some geek cred, instead of a tender reimagining of the lovingly crafted tales of understated strife that his works so deserve.
Slashdot Mirror
Yup, grinning at cute girls will really make that BitTorrent traffic spike, let me tell you. This one time I managed to max out my download cap, just from a few gigs of porn, and I'm pretty sure they don't count it if it turns out the chick's a fuggnaut. And since we're just spouting random offtopic anecdotes, yesterday I went past this bakery and they had these donuts - let me tell you they smelled amazing - I smiled at them. Should have bought one. Amazing.
How do you know they're not planning to really emulate Apple's "success" and move to proprietary hardware/software and tell all of their "partners" to go pound sand? A walled garden would be next.
They could, but that would be insane. Those "partners" would still be pumping out craploads of hardware and need something that would run on it, finally bringing about the Year of Linux on The Desktop, just as the Mayans predicted. When billion dollar businesses are told to fuck off by their trusted partners they don't just go quietly into the night, they do (possibly spiteful, crazy and dickish) things to try to stay afloat.
And this conversation, right here, is the perfect example of Poe's Law.
Sorry, what? When I write an email or text on my Android the entire text gets sent to Google? Even if I decide not to send it? The issue is that, when using Siri, the full recording is sent back to Apple's servers where they perform processing. This could allow them to do spy stuff with what people falsely assumed was privat einformation, since a lot of people don't realise that anything you tell Siri you also tell Apple HQ.
Now, are Apple doing evil with what Siri sends them? Probably not. but when you're the CIO of a billion dollar tech company you probably don't want to base your company's technological future on "it's probably fine".
Rules to workplace flirting:
1) don't, unless the other party expresses interest.
Wait a second, surely the way that the other person expresses interest is by flirting? Right?
I don't tick that box, and I added an exception to AdBlock for *.slashdot.org. I still don't see any adverts here, because I won't add a known malware distributor to my NoScript whitelist. I'm not strictly against advertising, but I'm not going to just run any crap coming from anywhere to give away a few pennies a month. I try to subscribe but I won't use PayPal and nothing else comes up on the subscription page. I told them about this, but got no response. So, since they don't seem to want my money, I haven't yet flown a few thousand miles just to shove a wad of cash through the letter box.
" It's always been about how much money Sony can squeeze out of a customer, even after they've already paid for the console."
Let's just compare this asinine claim to reality:
* Sony, just like PC gaming, provides FREE ONLINE to every single PS3 owner.
...which I cannot use, since I won't update to remove the OtherOS functionality I was sold.
* Sony provides FREE DEDICATED servers for all major competitive online games just like on the PC
...which I can't use.
* Sony is developer friendly and completely open to FREE add-on content for PS3 owners to download
...which I can't access.
* Sony's wildly successful 20 million+ userbase online world, Home, is completely FREE to every PS3 owner
...except for me.
* Sony allows cheap, off the shelf harddrive upgrades
* Sony allows cheap, off the shelf keyboard and mice to be used with the system
Wow, what a bunch of evil gamer hating misers are those Sony guys...
Oh, I didn't realise that they'd used cheaper generic parts instead of fabricating much more expensive proprietary hardware. And then they didn't go to excessive lengths to block the use of that hardware that was easier and cheaper for them to use. Good God, they are lovely after all. Such lovely, lovely thieves.
Fuck Sony, and fuck anyone who doesn't think they're all a bunch of douchebags.
It's no good yelling "data wants to be free" - someone has to put the data together in the first place. And that someone, whether they be Madonna, Brad Pitt, Bill Gates - or me, deserves to be paid for their labour in doing that.
I know you aren't the first person to say this, and you won't be the last, but why, exactly? Why should they be paid?
I mean, if I go down a coal mine for a day and mine coal for the guy who owns the coal mine, he has agreed to pay me for my time and so I deserve to be paid. If someone agrees to pay me money if I give them this here desk and take it to their house, when I take it to their house and give it to them I deserve to be paid.
When I spend a large quantity of time and money recording an album or producing a film, I am essentially gambling that people will want to give me money for it. They don't have to. They never have had to. There has always been more art around than there has been demand. I am gambling that people will think that I am so much better than other people at making stuff they will pay me for making what I have made, with the implication that I will make more. That's it.
Anyway, voluntary donations seem to work fine - I mean, there was a torrent of DVD quality up before the release of Transformers 2. Cost of film: $200 million. Revenue before it was even released in my country: $600 million. Boo fucking hoo for the poor content creators who got ripped off on that deal, only becoming fabulously wealthy. This future where no one has to pay for media we keep getting warned about? It's here. Films are being made. Albums are being recorded. You or I could get them for free trivially. Next argument please.
No, the more accurate sentiment would be:
Civil suit vs individual pirates = Punatives are unfair
Civil suit vs BP = Compensate people for the damage you caused
Criminal suit against BP = This should happen
The flaw in your logic is conflating the ideas of civil and criminal court. If someone steals my wallet and gets caught, odds are that they'll never pay me back. They'll get community service, maybe jail, maybe a warning, but they will not have to pay me back. This is punishment, rather than compensation. If I sue the same guy in civil court, that is for compensation, not punishment - thus I can't just ask for 1000000% of what was in my wallet as punishment.
I beg to differ, but no - we have no guaranteed freedom of speech whatsoever. We are assumed to have freedom of speech unless that freedom is explicitly taken away (libel, slander, encouraging terrorism, etc), just as we are assumed to be able to swing our fists as long as that swinging isn't specified as being illegal - for example, if I swing my fist into your face, that would not be allowed.
But they can fine you for recording and distributing it (which is what Google is doing)
Wait, what? Where can I get this information? Where is it being distributed? IIRC, they just used some old bit of wireless network scanning software and happened to pick up more than they meant to. I don't exactly like Google having all my personal information, but thinking that Google gives some kind of massive shit about a few people's unsecured information is is definitely in the tinfoil hat zone.
If I had to, what I would class this as is the same as if you were walking down the street with a digital recorder, coming up with ideas for some sort of article you were writing about the area. While walking along talking into this digital recorder, creating files that will be sanitized and refactored before ever seeing the light of day, someone shouts some personal information. Then the German government gets all pissy about it and demands you hand over the tapes, and the FTC start an investigation.
Seriously guys, there are problems with Google. There are. This is not one of them, though.
Like a radio scanner that can pick up cell phone calls. Sure you listen, but you can never (legally) disseminate the information; even if you hear someone planning a murder.
So this implies that listening is ok? since that's all Google is doing, I fail to see the problem.
Right, I've had enough of this. Why do people simply allow this fallacy to continue? Apple's UIs are terrible!
The iPod is far more complex than it needs to be, the single good thing about the iPhone's interface is just a huge patent troll, the iPad I have never used so I will avoid comment, and the OS! Oh, the OS! A recording studio I practically lived in for a few months used a Mac, and on several occasions we spent hours just trying to move data onto an external drive - I believe the hardware on the year old box was failing, and when it wasn't we had to inexplicably use iTunes to move data files. Ok, so that was probably set up by some "security conscious" moron.
In general, though, the OS is terrible. One button mice were ok, they were a novelty. Fifteen years ago. Now I feel constrained by a 3 button, plus the extra four for scrolling. The only reason they've stuck with them is stubbornness - not because it makes sense, or because of the simplicity of it, but simply because The Mighty Steve refuses to admit that he might have been wrong. And dragging a drive to the trash - does that eject it or format it? I keep forgetting, since it is apparently random.
WTF is it that allows some of the most argumentative assholes on the web just overlook the one simple fact that Apple is really shitty at putting together a UI?
Hmm. Here in the UK on Orange I got my phone (a Cliq/Dext - I know, I know, but it's been good to me at least) effectively for free - a SIM only package with unlimited texts, calls and ~500MB data would have been £25/month. My package, with a free phone? £25/month.
Then again, there is some serious competition in our marketplace. Not a lot, but some. Go regulated markets!
Well, personally, I'm thrilled they're trying to keep NASA alive... Just consider the wealth of knowledge and understanding we've gained through Hubble alone.
Remind me, how many men are there on Hubble again?
Maybe because resumes get sent to HR and management, not experienced programmers?
From the wiki on life expectancy:
Average lifespan at birth in the UK: 79.4 years
Average lifespan at birth in the US: 78.2 years
So, minor win for the UK's far inferior system there. Now, from the wiki on infant mortality rates:
Infant deaths per 1000 live births / under 5's deaths per 1000 live births in the UK: 4.8 / 6.0
Infant deaths per 1000 live births / under 5's deaths per 1000 live births in the US: 6.3 / 7.8
Another one called for the Kingdom, there. Again, not a huge difference, but pretty significant if you're a parent of 1.8 out of 1000 children. So, the question seems to boil down to a choice between expensive good care or cheap effective care.
Of particular concern to the GAO was the “substitution rate,” the rate at which an illegal copy would have been otherwise legally purchased had it not been available. The MPAA and RIAA always use a 1:1 ratio to boost their figures and make the problem seem far worse than it actually is.
Okay, so that's music and film. Still, they are claiming that every download is a lost sale. In fact, more than that, they have claimed in court that every download is several thousand lost sales. Oh crap, I accidentally used matters of record instead of just stating my (incorrect) opinion as fact. Oops.
Nintendo have:
Nintendo has blamed piracy for a 45 per cent drop in DS game sales in Europe between April and December 2009... Last June Nintendo monitored ten overseas websites that allowed people to illegally download software. It found that games had been pirated a total 238 million times, translating into one trillion yen ($10.7 billion) in lost sales.
And Sony, EA, Activision, Microsoft et al have all claimed the same thing at one time or another. They seem to be smartening up nowadays, though.
The statistics that have been published are how many pirates vs. customers the game has, and those have been accurate.
And the numbers are almost certainly not accurate, anyway. Some people DL several versions of the same game - some people buy several copies. Some people lend games to people, thus making customers into pirates, and some people lend copies to friends, making a single pirate into a counterfeiting ring. The actual numbers are completely impossible to determine by any means other than watching what every single person in the world is doing every second of every day.
The biggest problem from a business perspective, as I see it, is that as more online news sources put up paywalls, the more incentive there is not to have one. I mean, if there's only one news source on the entire internet that you don't have to pay to see then they will get the vast, vast majority of page clicks, even if the journalism is crap. They've been saying for a while that the barrier to news site paywalls is that if they don't all do it at the same time then the early adopters are screwed - maybe that has a deeper message than just everyone doing it at the same time?
To be honest, there are one hell of a lot of people providing news, and only a limited amount of money that's going to flow into them. If this was any other business half of these guys would have gone bankrupt long ago, but as the parent talks about the news 'sources' get significant funding from rich people with viewpoints they want pushing, rather than trying to make actual profit. To be honest I hope Murdoch does paywall all his sites - they'll get dropped from aggregation sites, people won't link to them, and for all intents and purposes his influence will be removed from my life.
However, most people seem to suggest that fighting DRM with piracy is a good option. It isn't. If you're refusing to buy a game because of DRM, then you shouldn't pirate it either but spend your money on some of their competitor who is doing it correctly. Otherwise you get your gaming fix from the bad behaving company and don't support the good companies.
Why the dichotomy? Why should downloading a copy of a DRM'd game preclude me from paying money for a different game? The false idea that a single person can either pirate or pay, but never both, is frankly ridiculous.
What if I choose to fight the DRM by not buying Game A and buying Game B instead? Must I then not download Game A? Piracy is simply the solution to the problem of refusing to buy a game but still wanting to play it.
To those who demand we pay, the simple question is: why? If I'm using volunteered resources to distribute the game (eg. P2P) then it is costing the developers and publishers nothing. If you disagree please, please message me with your request to donate a few thousand pounds, or local equivalent, to the cause of giving me £~70000 this year, since it's so affordable to you. It sure isn't to me.
Now that you mention it, the times I've been in the closest to radiation free rooms (faraday cages for testing cell phones), I felt quite uncomfortable.
I know what you mean - I always get this weird disconnected feeling whenever I've been away from the internet for a few hours...
I certainly do it for the art (and because it's really fun)...all my music is free.
I have decided to take the opposite approach and DRM all my performances - I shall play all songs backwards using a rubber band wrapped around a shoebox! All the listener needs is some imagination, something the robots will never have!
Stick that in your exhaust and smoke it!
On the bright side there is an increasing consensus that DNA evidence is a lot less useful than CSI: would have us believe.
It makes sense, really - it takes quite a while and a fairly large sample to sequence someone's genome with proper error checking, so the crime labs generally don't bother. Instead, they focus on a few areas of chromosomes called loci, and pick sections of non-coding DNA called short tandem repeats. US labs will normally look at 13 loci, UK labs 10. Many experts have testified in a court of law, under oath, that a match of nine loci is 'tantamount to unique identification'.
Studies have been done on small sections of some DNA databases, comparing every profile with every other profile, and found this to simply be false. In Arizona 65 493 profiles were made available - 122 pairs matched at nine loci, 20 at ten, 1 at eleven and 1 more at twelve. In Illinois 220 000 were checked, and 903 pairs matched at nine or more loci, and in Maryland 30 000 were checked, providing 32 matching pairs.
Add to this the problem that eyelashes, skin fragments etc can be carried on the wind, or from a random frottage, and we have some important cases being 'solved' with what amounts to deeply circumstantial evidence. With any luck this fascination with DNA being used as the be all and end all, the assayer of truth, will end as soon as possible.
PS: most of that informative stuff about loci and short tandem repeats was pretty much lifted from New Scientist #2742, dated 9 January 2010. IANAGeneticist, and would feel a small pang of guilt without adding this disclaimer.
... what's the difference between a non-linked document where you don't tell people the URL and a site with a password?
Would guessing 3000 different passwords be as forgivable, even if the system doesn't cut you off? Is an easily-guessed URL any better than an easily-guessed password?
The difference is huge. Look at the way house insurance works - you leave a door open, you're not insured. You leave a window open, you're not insured. You have a crappy lock on the door that a five-year-old could bypass, you're insured and they're guilty of breaking and entering.
I don't know how it works everywhere else, but in the UK if there isn't significant indication that you shouldn't be somewhere then you aren't trespassing. Thus, an open doorway with a sign saying "No Entry" means you are trespassing if you go past it, but an open doorway is effectively an allowable entry point for the public.
Somehow I suspect if you said, "But the unguarded door I left open with valuable items inside was on a small alley - I didn't think anyone would notice!" people would laugh in your face. Of course, theft is theft, but if all these people did was have a look around and take photos of something embarrassing then it's just a bit funny, really.
From the wiki:
The film that was ultimately made originally had no connections with Asimov, originating as a screenplay written in 1995 by Jeff Vintar, entitled Hardwired. That script was an Agatha Christie-inspired murder mystery that took place entirely at the scene of a crime, with one lone human character, FBI agent Del Spooner, investigating the killing of a reclusive scientist named Dr. Hogenmiller, and interrogating a cast of machine suspects that included Sonny the robot, HECTOR the supercomputer with a perpetual yellow smiley face, the dead Doctor Hogenmiller's hologram, plus several other examples of artificial intelligence... Jeff Vintar... incorporated the Three Laws of Robotics, and replaced the character of Flynn with Susan Calvin, when the studio decided to use the name "I, Robot"
I was genuinely angry after watching that film, mainly because the only copy of I, Robot I could get my hands on now had Will Smith on the cover.
No, wait, it was mainly because the plots of the two works shared not one single point of congruence. And the film mainly focused on badassery and leaping around, which is true to Asimov's style - his trademark was always providing very little substance and just having huge set-piece battles between the protagonist and every other being in the story.
No, wait. What really, really got to me was that the name I, Robot was used on some crappy spec script that had to be reimagined multiple times to make it sufficiently commercial and then had Asimov's ideas vaguely pinned on as a clear afterthought in order to give it some geek cred, instead of a tender reimagining of the lovingly crafted tales of understated strife that his works so deserve.