I break the law every day. You break the law every day. Everyone who will read this post breaks the law every day. Illegal activity is meaningless. For example, here in the UK owning any sort of map is illegal, if the police and the courts decide that it is, and you only get to find that out after you've been in prison for several months. You're a fucking dick, AC.
Can we get an administration in office that understands some economics?
In a word, no. No one understands enonomics. Honest economists will happily admit they have no idea how the economy actually works, because the general idea behind economics is that the average consumer is infinitely knowledgable, only interested in the highest value product for their purpose, rational, and willing to spend more than the average yearly income if a product is good enough. Study some psychology and you will see that this is clearly as false as can be. Yes, there are all sorts of equations to try and account for behaviour, but they don't work, because the maths involved in doing that properly would destroy a Beowulf cluster of Marvins.
Of course, the biggest problem for America is the massive governmental waste. This is partly because it's such an unfeasably massive country, partly because of the many levels of government, partly historical inertia - blame what you want, it's there. To take an example from the zeitgeist, the US government spends massively, massively more money on healthcare per capita than the UK, France, Japan, Germany, or any other nation I've seen the numbers for, and yet has the lowest lifespan and standard of care of any of these countries. A halfway decent EVIL COMMIE healthcare system like every other (?) civilised country would probably help, but the most realistic solution to allow a US government to do anything for merely double the cost of anywhere else in the world is a complete dissolution of the government and a new one being installed instead, and that's not very realistic.
I don't know how many Americans will read this, and they will probably be better travelled than the average, this being/., but here in the UK there is a little running joke, and I will paraphrase a conversation I had recently with a friend of mine here:
"Hey, did you see those new [teen pregnancy / STI rates / quality of life / lifespan / literacy / numeracy / anything, anything at all] rates?" "Yeah - we're the worst in Europe, woo!" "What's better, worst in Europe or second worst in the developed world?" "Dammit, can we not beat America just once?"
Seriously, this is not how it works. For a quick anecdote, when people ask me how I have all these rotating workspaces and crazy ass widgets and stuff, I reply 'Linux'. Most people look blank at this point. Then I say 'It's an operating system, like Windows but not'. Usually, still blank looks. Remember, these are people who've never installed an OS in their lives, who's points of comparison between XP and Vista were 'It's gone shiny and see-through, look!', and who don't know what you mean when you say that their computer is slow because they wanted their printer to work and installed the drivers for it.
'Normal' folks don't know what Windows is, what Microsoft do, or the difference between a PS/2 port and a TCP port. These things are all irrelevant to them, or at least they think they are. It's frickin' marketing, you said it in your own post - people recognise that little wavy window thing, and don't know that there is an alternative. Unfortunately, people don't yet recognise Tux, or the Ubuntu blobby thing, or any of the myriad mascots and logos of the FOSS community.
When marketing a product, you can say 'Powered by Windows' or 'Intel inside' and people just recognise the terms, making them feel a bit techy, but have no idea what it actually means. If you say 'Powered by Linux' then the majority of people may as well have heard 'Powered by Snarblax' - They still have no idea what it means, but this time they know they don't know what it means, and that makes them feel stupid, and that makes them dislike whatever they associate with that stupid feeling. In conclusion, you, Anonymous Coward, are a moron.
Dude, seriously? You genuinely think that in a hundred years no one will have any interest in the emails that George Bush and Dick Cheney exchanged? Or the way Obama communicated with his family? Or that many and varied world leaders will be making cryptic suggestions that they know/knew full well about rendition/state kidnappings/what-have-you?
Because it's either that or you're one of those crazy people who genuinely think that storing paper, with ink on it, is easier than storing a series of ones and zeros. If you "doubt that historical material will ever be written sourced from emails and instant messaging" then surely you doubt that right now will ever be considered history? Or you think that all those letters we have of Benjamin Franklin's, or correspondence between the great royal houses of Europe, or whatever, actually contains more important information simply by virtue of it being handwritten!?
Really the issue I'm concerned with has less to do with the medium. Paper and pen/cil in the script of your choice, typewriter, word processor or what have you, The art of correspondence is all but dead.
OK, so it isn't the medium at all - it's the fact that no serfs had to carry the message on horseback! Of course! It's a proven psychological fact that if a piece of writing isn't going to be carried around before reaching its destination it is impossible for any human to put any thought or care into it./sarcasm. What is it with these people who look down on modern communication as if being able to talk to someone in real time is a great evil?
The only problem I can foresee with something like this is that anyone like me has to lug their desktop around from time to time - not often, but often enough for a cardboard box to sound like an iffy place to put a big pile of expensive electronics. Not to mention the kicking, spillages, etc that I rely on my sturdy metal case to stop would quickly deteriorate the quality. Nevertheless, this idea has great potential, and I hope it works out - I just can't foresee buying one anytime soon.
You may have heard the turn of phrase "correlation is not causation"? Well, it's one of the most basic tenets of evidence-based rational thought. "I did X and Y happened" may be a valid reason to look at something and experiment to try to discover causation, but on its own it's meaningless.
A common example is one often bandied about by cancer survivor types. They state something like this: "I had cancer and went for chemotherapy, but it made me really sick and I didn't like it. A week later I still felt really crappy, so I went to a [nonsense therapist description here] - after two sessions I felt much better, and it turned out my cancer had gone into remission!" This convinces them of the efficacy of the snake-oil treatment, even though the chemotherapy is what helped.
A more simplistic example would be this: "I woke up and it started raining." Obviously the two are basically unrelated, but by the "X then Y, so X caused Y" mode of thought I made it rain by waking up.
Fusion reactors will give us a source of cheap, green energy - this in turn will be used to build massive hive cities, some stretching a mile or two into the sky, some almost entirely underground. Our vehicles will fly or travel through tunnels, freeing up a great deal of countryside areas. Likewise, the entirety of the area taken up by agriculture will be done away with - vat grown food is the wave of the future! Huge weather machines and atmospheric scrubbers will work ceaselessly, first to bring CO2 levels down, then to stop any possible future effects of humankind on our environment.
I'm not saying this will definitely come true, or even is likely to - but all of these technologies are being researched right now, and could well be widespread in 100 years or much, much less. Using these methods, the planet could easily sustain tens of billions of people (well fed and comfortably housed) without any negative effect on the environment. I'm talking about technological advancement - it's not predictable. Will it be fast, or very very fast indeed? Or will there be a nuclear war, wiping out all ~6 800 000 000 of us in one go?
Yes, they are very, very sure of that - it isn't a 49/51 split, it's a 90/10 thing. Also, it's just logical - if you want to have sex with a girl, you try to go to the same places, make friends with with her friends and so on. If you want to have sex with a child, marry their single mother, make friends with their parents, etc.
If by "that British couple in Spain" you mean the parents of Madeleine McCann, you are talking about people who should have lost their daughter - just to the authorities, not the reaper. There is no doubt that they were guilty of criminal negligence, but Portugal lacks the laws to prosecute foreign nationals for negligence and Britain gave up trying to find a way after the red-tops mounted a campaign, payed for by the vast McCann marketing machine.
In case anyone is too lazy to do a quick wiki search, I'll sum up what happened here: the McCann adults went out to a restaurant, leaving their children alone and unsupervised in the hotel room, despite there being creche and babysitting facilities easily available. Their child is now dead. The Portugese police fucked up the whole investigation, and thanks to the McCanns spending literally millions of pounds sterling on marketing there were sightings of Maddy from Thailand to Florida, and everywhere inbetween. Thanks to police incompetence, most of the possible forensic evidence was (or wasn't, depending on whether it existed) destroyed, meaning that no one could tell whether Maddy had died in the hotel room and been hidden by her parents, or been taken by some crazy paedophile (who would have seen the marketing campaign and most likely murdered her there and then), or something else entirely.
I don't know about the rest of the world, but here in the UK this was massive news for over a year. It was even huge news when one marketing guy they'd hired quit over what he described as 'irregularities', but then they hired a different marketing consultant and the story magically disappeared. There appear to only be two lessons to be learnt from this whole debacle: that you shouldn't leave young children on their own for hours at a time, and that if you do commit criminal negligence you should hire a marketing consultant.
Since this is in Idle and only three poeple are gonna read it I can't be bothered to find a reference, but I read an interview a while ago with a head teacher who was well liked and generally respected - that is, until someone made an allegation of sexual indecency or some such against him. They later admitted it was a complete fabrication, and so the guy went to court to have the whole thing wiped from his record so he could work with kids again. The judge basically said that it was clear he was innocent, the allegations had made no sense, there were witnesses who saw them in different places at the time it was meant to have happened etcetera, but that innocence has nothing to do with it. The law says that suspicions must be logged, and that means that any school that hired him would be liable to all sorts of lawyering, and probably lose its liability insurance and stuff.
Fascinating extra fact: children (and adults, for that matter) are much more likely to be sexually assaulted, kidnapped and murdered by close relatives or family friends than random loners. By the logic most people seem to use these days, that means children should be removed from their parents at birth, and rotated between foster carers every fortnight.
After slogging through World of Warcraft for several years, the last thing I want in a game is something that requires me to basically live a double life. I'd like an MMO where I could pop in and out, instead of dedicating multi-hour blocks that become the equivalent of a part-time job by the end of the week. And that doesn't include researching content for efficient strategies, researching in-game equipment for optimized tactics, bickering with people on the Internet about various aspects of gameplay, or ultimately regretting all the time I didn't spend socializing, reading books, accumulating income, learning a real-world employment skill, exercising, eating decently, or traveling.
I think that's the whole point of this 'horizontal leveling' they're talking about - you'll be able to boot the game up after two years of it being out, with a new character, and still be of some use to your faction. You'll be able to pop in, do a quest, and then leave again. Of course, it would be bad form to start a quest with some buddies and then AFK just as it starts to get hard, but that's the whole point of an MMO - your actions affect real people.
You could well just be complaining about MMOs in general though, in which case I would suggest to you a path that didn't involve spending several years slogging through WoW. I used similar advice to great effect after realising that I don't like vinegar on chips - the problem wasn't the vinegar, it was that I kept eating the damn stuff. Although I didn't care enough to bicker about it with random people, or spend lots of time reading up on the best vinegar, or choose vinegar over stuff that I like more; I also didn't then go on food sites and bring up my dislike of vinegar whenever someone mentions it. Maybe the problem is that you got super-anal about something you didn't, in hindsight, give a monkey's uncle about?
OK, it's been a while since I read up on this, but isn't the whole point of a lack of clean unmount that you have to force the mount? And isn't the easiest reply to, "Windows is slow!" to simply say, "Defrag!"? I could well be wrong here, but I'm pretty sure you're falling for the old "There's no error message in Windows, so it's OK" trick, and/or the old "Linux is throwing up errors and asking me if I want to do some task with a remote chance of a fuck up - this must be a shitty backend to have all these errors" trick. Well, OK, the last one isn't so much of a trick as something that pretty much every random Joe User-type has said when I showed them a console, but it is a problem a lot of people seem to have.
I love the way trolls on this site seem to use the word 'nigger' as a label, but not in the usual way.
The/. crowd have mostly grown up harried by trolls, and accept the fact that if you post on a forum saying "I just got married!" or "I love kittens" then within ten minutes someone will be telling them that they should die of cancer and their mom has AIDS. Because of this, we don't, in general, feed the trolls, which makes it so confusing that people troll this site as much as they do - maybe they like to see how people can turn a shit eating nigger comment into a discussion about something on-topic or vaguely informative? Either way, I don't think I have ever seen someone put up a post saying "OMFG you said NIGGER! Fuck you!" or similar, because it's just a word being used by an ignorant asshole. Nomally the troll mindset seems to be to get as many people angry as possible, but here that seems to have been inverted - the quicker their post vanishes from view and is ignored by pretty much everyone, the better. Without looking, the only thing I could remember about the troll I'm replying to is that it had something to do with Linux and niggers, and that's basically a given for a/. troll.
That people come on to this site and use the word nigger, as an AC, just so that a comment can be modded into oblivion instantly and no one will get offended or angry, is beyond my comprehension. Maybe, in a strange way, we are feeding them by ignoring them?
PS. I just realised, if I get modded up that's great, and if I get modded down I can just say it was a funny mod done in an ironic way. Woo for win/win!
It's stuff like this that makes me laugh out loud when people say that pirating Windows is wrong. I could see the argument if at least most organizations conformed to open, free standards - actually, I could see the argument for them only supporting Linux, on the grounds that it's free and it'll run on anything from a phone to a PC to a PS3 to a giant robotic overlord. But requiring you to pay $~100 minimum to a third party just to take a test is just plain retarded.
I know this is getting a little offtopic, but I thought it needed to be said that you are wrong - capitalism isn't about providing goods for services rendered, or about trying to fuck anyone. It's about capital, hence the name, and capital is money or stuff. Whoever has the most wins. That's it. In capitalism, do whatever you want as long as you don't piss off someone richer than you. Of course, we don't live in a properly capitalist society, and few people want to.
You should check that place out, possibly even before talking our of your arse? You see the giant Ubuntu 9.04 Netbook Remix at the top of the page? Really? Cause I have been using AssHat exclusively for my brain for five years, and I didn't see it either.
The last time I installed XP on my laptop I had lost some, but not all, of the OEM-supplied driver disks, and it ended up taking me a total of about eighteen hours of solid graft to get it to work. Incidentally, I grew up on Windows, and have only really gotten into FOSS stuff in the last three or four years, and the last time I installed Ubuntu (which took about twenty minutes) it had already configured my screen to the right resolution, got the wi-fi and bluetooth working, got the frickin' bog standard ethernet adapter working, and suggested that I might want to download the right drivers for my GPU by clicking OK and typing my password.
When people say these things, I always have to wonder whether they have ever actually installed Windows. Maybe it's just me, but it takes longer for XP or Vista to simply copy the base installation to the hard drives than it does for me to set up Ubuntu, and I still have to look up which packages I need to install to listen to MP3s or watch DVDs.
Total agreement - I get a little more battery life from stock Ubuntu, and once I've locked the CPU at 800 MHz and turned off Compiz I can get two to three times more battery life for comparable activities - and six to eight hours of film watching on a 15" screen is not bad from a single charge.
Hold on just one second. You mean that, because I downloaded this copy of Ubuntu for free, and maintain it with free software, that there will never be a new version of Ubuntu! Oh no!
Except, and bear with me here, I had Ubuntu when it was 5.10, and they are currently planning the release of 9.10. Also, when I dl software straight from the Ubuntu servers I'll get a few hundred KB/s, but on Windoze I get a few tens of KB/s.
It must just be like all those artists that give away their work for free - really we all know that they are SECRET MAGICIANS, funded by OSAMA BIN LADEN in order to BRING DOWN THE CORPORATIONS THAT LOVE AND PROTECT US!
To be judged a success nowadays, films have to make a profit pretty much immediately upon release. By the time they go on sale as DVDs they are a massive commercial flop if they haven't made profit. Music should be free because it costs practically nothing to produce - many musicians play music at a stunning loss, and still keep doing it - Christ, I've spent a couple of grand easy on musical equipment, and have made £~100. Games should be paid for, because they are expensive and hard to produce, but if I bought every game I wanted to play I wouldn't have any money left over to pay my electricity bill, rendering the purchases pointless.
I've begun to suspect, in my dirty, cynical little mind, that the RIAA/MPAA et al actually realise that copying is exposing people to more works, and posting them record profits, which is why they do this crap - it isn't in a genuine attempt to stop copying, it's an attempt to make them seem more of a joke and less of a threatening MAFIAA who will take you to court for $* million just for a few mp3s, which is just another revenue stream to them at this point.
Be prepared to be thoroughly bored from time to time. There's no getting around it - if you want to be sociable there will be times when it seems like a huge waste of time. And you'll be right.
Most of your post was classic mod-up material, especially for an AC. However, I think you misrepresent this part of social life. The purpose of listening to tedious anecdotes about Sheila from accounts or the problem your Auntie's best friend is having getting a fishing license isn't just pointless boredom - it makes the person telling the story feel better, and it allows you to get to know them better. The point isn't really the anecdote itself, but the way it is told - which points seem bafflingly important for no apparent reason? What do they seem to be glossing over? And so on, and so on. Staving off boredom in situations like this is simple, and an effective way to brush up your people skills.
Also, if you can't help but be bored to tears, ask questions that point off on tangents - this is the best way of steering the conversation away from the boring topic while still seeming interested. Telling a similar story from your own life is OK sometimes, but if you regularly make everything about you as soon as boredom kicks in pretty soon you'll be the one that everyone finds boring.
The majority of users probably have no idea what DRM is and are thus unaffected. Those that do know what DRM is will either buy the software anyway and deal with it, buy the software then download a cracked version, or forego paying entirely and just download the cracked version.
Then of course there are the majority of users that have been unable to get a game to work because of DRM, whether they knew it was there or not. And the people who don't have a music collection anymore because some servers got turned off, so now they just torrent. Or the people who can't get a DVD in their region, so just pirate it instead.
I agree, most people aren't like me - I buy what I can if it isn't DRMed to hell, mainly to make a point (albeit a tiny little one) to the companies that do it. But everyone I know has had problems with legit games, and when people learn that the only reason they're having those problems is because they wanted to reward a company for delivering a product, they'll stop. It's been years since I had a serious issue with installing or playing a pirated game. If the big companies started making ease of use more of a big deal than the pirates, there'd be a lot less 'piracy from necessity', as I like to call it.
Bottom line is, your standard pirate copy says 'Install, firewall, copy crack, play indefinitely' when to get the equivalent from even the standard very-little-DRM game means you need a magic CD that never gets scratched and never gets lost.
It's not illegal to download a show that was nationally televised and that could have been recorded legally to VHS.
...except that it was illegal to record shows onto VHS. And yes, it was also illegal all those years ago when people made mix tapes from the radio. There was a bit of a fuss, but folks like Sony were selling blank video and cassette tapes, so they didn't care that much because they were still profiting from it. Currently we may need ISPs, but that won't last forever, hopefully. The fact that media vendors are consistently posting record profits, and that the industry on the whole is still healthy, somehow doesn't seem to factor in.
I think you're right. I wouldn't buy much stuff from shops if I could produce free copies of everything they sell without them losing anything. I don't see why I shouldn't have stuff, since no one is losing out on me having it. Take an Armani tuxedo, or an Aston Martin - I couldn't possibly afford one, but if I could create a free copy of one I would. Copyright infringement isn't theft because if I take a loaf of bread from a supermarket I am removing the supermarket's ability to sell that loaf of bread.
As a musician myself I can attest to the fact that most serious musicians would avoid a recording contract - as opposed to a publishing/distribution contract - like the plague. According to a teacher I once had, who earned about £70 000 a year for two days a week, thirty five weeks a year, so he probably knew what he was talking about, the average artist in the 90s earned about 1.5 pence Stirling from a £15 album, or 0.15%
Games and movies have a slightly more justified cost - it takes many highly skilled people many hours to make a single good game, so I buy them when I can. But I am not a wealthy man. I like games. Why shouldn't I play CoD5? Because I can't afford it? I think brand loyalty, conceptually at least, works both ways - I bought CoD2, 3, and 4, and I'll buy 5 and 6 and any others they make when I can afford them. But now, I want to play and don't see why I shouldn't.
So, yes, I am entitled to things I want even if I can't afford them. Why on earth not? If not one person is losing any thing, and one person is gaining one thing, where is the downside? Surely this is just a win for me and a business as usual for everyone else?
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I break the law every day. You break the law every day. Everyone who will read this post breaks the law every day. Illegal activity is meaningless. For example, here in the UK owning any sort of map is illegal, if the police and the courts decide that it is, and you only get to find that out after you've been in prison for several months. You're a fucking dick, AC.
Can we get an administration in office that understands some economics?
In a word, no. No one understands enonomics. Honest economists will happily admit they have no idea how the economy actually works, because the general idea behind economics is that the average consumer is infinitely knowledgable, only interested in the highest value product for their purpose, rational, and willing to spend more than the average yearly income if a product is good enough. Study some psychology and you will see that this is clearly as false as can be. Yes, there are all sorts of equations to try and account for behaviour, but they don't work, because the maths involved in doing that properly would destroy a Beowulf cluster of Marvins.
Of course, the biggest problem for America is the massive governmental waste. This is partly because it's such an unfeasably massive country, partly because of the many levels of government, partly historical inertia - blame what you want, it's there. To take an example from the zeitgeist, the US government spends massively, massively more money on healthcare per capita than the UK, France, Japan, Germany, or any other nation I've seen the numbers for, and yet has the lowest lifespan and standard of care of any of these countries. A halfway decent EVIL COMMIE healthcare system like every other (?) civilised country would probably help, but the most realistic solution to allow a US government to do anything for merely double the cost of anywhere else in the world is a complete dissolution of the government and a new one being installed instead, and that's not very realistic.
I don't know how many Americans will read this, and they will probably be better travelled than the average, this being /., but here in the UK there is a little running joke, and I will paraphrase a conversation I had recently with a friend of mine here:
"Hey, did you see those new [teen pregnancy / STI rates / quality of life / lifespan / literacy / numeracy / anything, anything at all] rates?" "Yeah - we're the worst in Europe, woo!" "What's better, worst in Europe or second worst in the developed world?" "Dammit, can we not beat America just once?"
Seriously, this is not how it works. For a quick anecdote, when people ask me how I have all these rotating workspaces and crazy ass widgets and stuff, I reply 'Linux'. Most people look blank at this point. Then I say 'It's an operating system, like Windows but not'. Usually, still blank looks. Remember, these are people who've never installed an OS in their lives, who's points of comparison between XP and Vista were 'It's gone shiny and see-through, look!', and who don't know what you mean when you say that their computer is slow because they wanted their printer to work and installed the drivers for it.
'Normal' folks don't know what Windows is, what Microsoft do, or the difference between a PS/2 port and a TCP port. These things are all irrelevant to them, or at least they think they are. It's frickin' marketing, you said it in your own post - people recognise that little wavy window thing, and don't know that there is an alternative. Unfortunately, people don't yet recognise Tux, or the Ubuntu blobby thing, or any of the myriad mascots and logos of the FOSS community.
When marketing a product, you can say 'Powered by Windows' or 'Intel inside' and people just recognise the terms, making them feel a bit techy, but have no idea what it actually means. If you say 'Powered by Linux' then the majority of people may as well have heard 'Powered by Snarblax' - They still have no idea what it means, but this time they know they don't know what it means, and that makes them feel stupid, and that makes them dislike whatever they associate with that stupid feeling. In conclusion, you, Anonymous Coward, are a moron.
Dude, seriously? You genuinely think that in a hundred years no one will have any interest in the emails that George Bush and Dick Cheney exchanged? Or the way Obama communicated with his family? Or that many and varied world leaders will be making cryptic suggestions that they know/knew full well about rendition/state kidnappings/what-have-you?
Because it's either that or you're one of those crazy people who genuinely think that storing paper, with ink on it, is easier than storing a series of ones and zeros. If you "doubt that historical material will ever be written sourced from emails and instant messaging" then surely you doubt that right now will ever be considered history? Or you think that all those letters we have of Benjamin Franklin's, or correspondence between the great royal houses of Europe, or whatever, actually contains more important information simply by virtue of it being handwritten!?
Really the issue I'm concerned with has less to do with the medium. Paper and pen/cil in the script of your choice, typewriter, word processor or what have you, The art of correspondence is all but dead.
OK, so it isn't the medium at all - it's the fact that no serfs had to carry the message on horseback! Of course! It's a proven psychological fact that if a piece of writing isn't going to be carried around before reaching its destination it is impossible for any human to put any thought or care into it. /sarcasm. What is it with these people who look down on modern communication as if being able to talk to someone in real time is a great evil?
The only problem I can foresee with something like this is that anyone like me has to lug their desktop around from time to time - not often, but often enough for a cardboard box to sound like an iffy place to put a big pile of expensive electronics. Not to mention the kicking, spillages, etc that I rely on my sturdy metal case to stop would quickly deteriorate the quality. Nevertheless, this idea has great potential, and I hope it works out - I just can't foresee buying one anytime soon.
You may have heard the turn of phrase "correlation is not causation"? Well, it's one of the most basic tenets of evidence-based rational thought. "I did X and Y happened" may be a valid reason to look at something and experiment to try to discover causation, but on its own it's meaningless.
A common example is one often bandied about by cancer survivor types. They state something like this: "I had cancer and went for chemotherapy, but it made me really sick and I didn't like it. A week later I still felt really crappy, so I went to a [nonsense therapist description here] - after two sessions I felt much better, and it turned out my cancer had gone into remission!" This convinces them of the efficacy of the snake-oil treatment, even though the chemotherapy is what helped.
A more simplistic example would be this: "I woke up and it started raining." Obviously the two are basically unrelated, but by the "X then Y, so X caused Y" mode of thought I made it rain by waking up.
OK then, here we go...
Fusion reactors will give us a source of cheap, green energy - this in turn will be used to build massive hive cities, some stretching a mile or two into the sky, some almost entirely underground. Our vehicles will fly or travel through tunnels, freeing up a great deal of countryside areas. Likewise, the entirety of the area taken up by agriculture will be done away with - vat grown food is the wave of the future! Huge weather machines and atmospheric scrubbers will work ceaselessly, first to bring CO2 levels down, then to stop any possible future effects of humankind on our environment.
I'm not saying this will definitely come true, or even is likely to - but all of these technologies are being researched right now, and could well be widespread in 100 years or much, much less. Using these methods, the planet could easily sustain tens of billions of people (well fed and comfortably housed) without any negative effect on the environment. I'm talking about technological advancement - it's not predictable. Will it be fast, or very very fast indeed? Or will there be a nuclear war, wiping out all ~6 800 000 000 of us in one go?
Yes, they are very, very sure of that - it isn't a 49/51 split, it's a 90/10 thing. Also, it's just logical - if you want to have sex with a girl, you try to go to the same places, make friends with with her friends and so on. If you want to have sex with a child, marry their single mother, make friends with their parents, etc.
If by "that British couple in Spain" you mean the parents of Madeleine McCann, you are talking about people who should have lost their daughter - just to the authorities, not the reaper. There is no doubt that they were guilty of criminal negligence, but Portugal lacks the laws to prosecute foreign nationals for negligence and Britain gave up trying to find a way after the red-tops mounted a campaign, payed for by the vast McCann marketing machine.
In case anyone is too lazy to do a quick wiki search, I'll sum up what happened here: the McCann adults went out to a restaurant, leaving their children alone and unsupervised in the hotel room, despite there being creche and babysitting facilities easily available. Their child is now dead. The Portugese police fucked up the whole investigation, and thanks to the McCanns spending literally millions of pounds sterling on marketing there were sightings of Maddy from Thailand to Florida, and everywhere inbetween. Thanks to police incompetence, most of the possible forensic evidence was (or wasn't, depending on whether it existed) destroyed, meaning that no one could tell whether Maddy had died in the hotel room and been hidden by her parents, or been taken by some crazy paedophile (who would have seen the marketing campaign and most likely murdered her there and then), or something else entirely.
I don't know about the rest of the world, but here in the UK this was massive news for over a year. It was even huge news when one marketing guy they'd hired quit over what he described as 'irregularities', but then they hired a different marketing consultant and the story magically disappeared. There appear to only be two lessons to be learnt from this whole debacle: that you shouldn't leave young children on their own for hours at a time, and that if you do commit criminal negligence you should hire a marketing consultant.
Since this is in Idle and only three poeple are gonna read it I can't be bothered to find a reference, but I read an interview a while ago with a head teacher who was well liked and generally respected - that is, until someone made an allegation of sexual indecency or some such against him. They later admitted it was a complete fabrication, and so the guy went to court to have the whole thing wiped from his record so he could work with kids again. The judge basically said that it was clear he was innocent, the allegations had made no sense, there were witnesses who saw them in different places at the time it was meant to have happened etcetera, but that innocence has nothing to do with it. The law says that suspicions must be logged, and that means that any school that hired him would be liable to all sorts of lawyering, and probably lose its liability insurance and stuff.
Fascinating extra fact: children (and adults, for that matter) are much more likely to be sexually assaulted, kidnapped and murdered by close relatives or family friends than random loners. By the logic most people seem to use these days, that means children should be removed from their parents at birth, and rotated between foster carers every fortnight.
After slogging through World of Warcraft for several years, the last thing I want in a game is something that requires me to basically live a double life. I'd like an MMO where I could pop in and out, instead of dedicating multi-hour blocks that become the equivalent of a part-time job by the end of the week. And that doesn't include researching content for efficient strategies, researching in-game equipment for optimized tactics, bickering with people on the Internet about various aspects of gameplay, or ultimately regretting all the time I didn't spend socializing, reading books, accumulating income, learning a real-world employment skill, exercising, eating decently, or traveling.
I think that's the whole point of this 'horizontal leveling' they're talking about - you'll be able to boot the game up after two years of it being out, with a new character, and still be of some use to your faction. You'll be able to pop in, do a quest, and then leave again. Of course, it would be bad form to start a quest with some buddies and then AFK just as it starts to get hard, but that's the whole point of an MMO - your actions affect real people.
You could well just be complaining about MMOs in general though, in which case I would suggest to you a path that didn't involve spending several years slogging through WoW. I used similar advice to great effect after realising that I don't like vinegar on chips - the problem wasn't the vinegar, it was that I kept eating the damn stuff. Although I didn't care enough to bicker about it with random people, or spend lots of time reading up on the best vinegar, or choose vinegar over stuff that I like more; I also didn't then go on food sites and bring up my dislike of vinegar whenever someone mentions it. Maybe the problem is that you got super-anal about something you didn't, in hindsight, give a monkey's uncle about?
OK, it's been a while since I read up on this, but isn't the whole point of a lack of clean unmount that you have to force the mount? And isn't the easiest reply to, "Windows is slow!" to simply say, "Defrag!"? I could well be wrong here, but I'm pretty sure you're falling for the old "There's no error message in Windows, so it's OK" trick, and/or the old "Linux is throwing up errors and asking me if I want to do some task with a remote chance of a fuck up - this must be a shitty backend to have all these errors" trick. Well, OK, the last one isn't so much of a trick as something that pretty much every random Joe User-type has said when I showed them a console, but it is a problem a lot of people seem to have.
I love the way trolls on this site seem to use the word 'nigger' as a label, but not in the usual way.
The /. crowd have mostly grown up harried by trolls, and accept the fact that if you post on a forum saying "I just got married!" or "I love kittens" then within ten minutes someone will be telling them that they should die of cancer and their mom has AIDS. Because of this, we don't, in general, feed the trolls, which makes it so confusing that people troll this site as much as they do - maybe they like to see how people can turn a shit eating nigger comment into a discussion about something on-topic or vaguely informative? Either way, I don't think I have ever seen someone put up a post saying "OMFG you said NIGGER! Fuck you!" or similar, because it's just a word being used by an ignorant asshole. Nomally the troll mindset seems to be to get as many people angry as possible, but here that seems to have been inverted - the quicker their post vanishes from view and is ignored by pretty much everyone, the better. Without looking, the only thing I could remember about the troll I'm replying to is that it had something to do with Linux and niggers, and that's basically a given for a /. troll.
That people come on to this site and use the word nigger, as an AC, just so that a comment can be modded into oblivion instantly and no one will get offended or angry, is beyond my comprehension. Maybe, in a strange way, we are feeding them by ignoring them?
PS. I just realised, if I get modded up that's great, and if I get modded down I can just say it was a funny mod done in an ironic way. Woo for win/win!
It's stuff like this that makes me laugh out loud when people say that pirating Windows is wrong. I could see the argument if at least most organizations conformed to open, free standards - actually, I could see the argument for them only supporting Linux, on the grounds that it's free and it'll run on anything from a phone to a PC to a PS3 to a giant robotic overlord. But requiring you to pay $~100 minimum to a third party just to take a test is just plain retarded.
I know this is getting a little offtopic, but I thought it needed to be said that you are wrong - capitalism isn't about providing goods for services rendered, or about trying to fuck anyone. It's about capital, hence the name, and capital is money or stuff. Whoever has the most wins. That's it. In capitalism, do whatever you want as long as you don't piss off someone richer than you. Of course, we don't live in a properly capitalist society, and few people want to.
http://www.ubuntu.com/
You should check that place out, possibly even before talking our of your arse? You see the giant Ubuntu 9.04 Netbook Remix at the top of the page? Really? Cause I have been using AssHat exclusively for my brain for five years, and I didn't see it either.
The last time I installed XP on my laptop I had lost some, but not all, of the OEM-supplied driver disks, and it ended up taking me a total of about eighteen hours of solid graft to get it to work. Incidentally, I grew up on Windows, and have only really gotten into FOSS stuff in the last three or four years, and the last time I installed Ubuntu (which took about twenty minutes) it had already configured my screen to the right resolution, got the wi-fi and bluetooth working, got the frickin' bog standard ethernet adapter working, and suggested that I might want to download the right drivers for my GPU by clicking OK and typing my password.
When people say these things, I always have to wonder whether they have ever actually installed Windows. Maybe it's just me, but it takes longer for XP or Vista to simply copy the base installation to the hard drives than it does for me to set up Ubuntu, and I still have to look up which packages I need to install to listen to MP3s or watch DVDs.
Total agreement - I get a little more battery life from stock Ubuntu, and once I've locked the CPU at 800 MHz and turned off Compiz I can get two to three times more battery life for comparable activities - and six to eight hours of film watching on a 15" screen is not bad from a single charge.
This could give a whole new meaning to 'mailer daemon'...
Heh. According to my OED you be a Grammar nazi what is rong! ROFLzzz!!
Hold on just one second. You mean that, because I downloaded this copy of Ubuntu for free, and maintain it with free software, that there will never be a new version of Ubuntu! Oh no!
Except, and bear with me here, I had Ubuntu when it was 5.10, and they are currently planning the release of 9.10. Also, when I dl software straight from the Ubuntu servers I'll get a few hundred KB/s, but on Windoze I get a few tens of KB/s.
It must just be like all those artists that give away their work for free - really we all know that they are SECRET MAGICIANS, funded by OSAMA BIN LADEN in order to BRING DOWN THE CORPORATIONS THAT LOVE AND PROTECT US!
To be judged a success nowadays, films have to make a profit pretty much immediately upon release. By the time they go on sale as DVDs they are a massive commercial flop if they haven't made profit. Music should be free because it costs practically nothing to produce - many musicians play music at a stunning loss, and still keep doing it - Christ, I've spent a couple of grand easy on musical equipment, and have made £~100. Games should be paid for, because they are expensive and hard to produce, but if I bought every game I wanted to play I wouldn't have any money left over to pay my electricity bill, rendering the purchases pointless.
I've begun to suspect, in my dirty, cynical little mind, that the RIAA/MPAA et al actually realise that copying is exposing people to more works, and posting them record profits, which is why they do this crap - it isn't in a genuine attempt to stop copying, it's an attempt to make them seem more of a joke and less of a threatening MAFIAA who will take you to court for $* million just for a few mp3s, which is just another revenue stream to them at this point.
Be prepared to be thoroughly bored from time to time. There's no getting around it - if you want to be sociable there will be times when it seems like a huge waste of time. And you'll be right.
Most of your post was classic mod-up material, especially for an AC. However, I think you misrepresent this part of social life. The purpose of listening to tedious anecdotes about Sheila from accounts or the problem your Auntie's best friend is having getting a fishing license isn't just pointless boredom - it makes the person telling the story feel better, and it allows you to get to know them better. The point isn't really the anecdote itself, but the way it is told - which points seem bafflingly important for no apparent reason? What do they seem to be glossing over? And so on, and so on. Staving off boredom in situations like this is simple, and an effective way to brush up your people skills.
Also, if you can't help but be bored to tears, ask questions that point off on tangents - this is the best way of steering the conversation away from the boring topic while still seeming interested. Telling a similar story from your own life is OK sometimes, but if you regularly make everything about you as soon as boredom kicks in pretty soon you'll be the one that everyone finds boring.
The majority of users probably have no idea what DRM is and are thus unaffected. Those that do know what DRM is will either buy the software anyway and deal with it, buy the software then download a cracked version, or forego paying entirely and just download the cracked version.
Then of course there are the majority of users that have been unable to get a game to work because of DRM, whether they knew it was there or not. And the people who don't have a music collection anymore because some servers got turned off, so now they just torrent. Or the people who can't get a DVD in their region, so just pirate it instead.
I agree, most people aren't like me - I buy what I can if it isn't DRMed to hell, mainly to make a point (albeit a tiny little one) to the companies that do it. But everyone I know has had problems with legit games, and when people learn that the only reason they're having those problems is because they wanted to reward a company for delivering a product, they'll stop. It's been years since I had a serious issue with installing or playing a pirated game. If the big companies started making ease of use more of a big deal than the pirates, there'd be a lot less 'piracy from necessity', as I like to call it.
Bottom line is, your standard pirate copy says 'Install, firewall, copy crack, play indefinitely' when to get the equivalent from even the standard very-little-DRM game means you need a magic CD that never gets scratched and never gets lost.
It's not illegal to download a show that was nationally televised and that could have been recorded legally to VHS.
...except that it was illegal to record shows onto VHS. And yes, it was also illegal all those years ago when people made mix tapes from the radio. There was a bit of a fuss, but folks like Sony were selling blank video and cassette tapes, so they didn't care that much because they were still profiting from it. Currently we may need ISPs, but that won't last forever, hopefully. The fact that media vendors are consistently posting record profits, and that the industry on the whole is still healthy, somehow doesn't seem to factor in.
I think you're right. I wouldn't buy much stuff from shops if I could produce free copies of everything they sell without them losing anything. I don't see why I shouldn't have stuff, since no one is losing out on me having it. Take an Armani tuxedo, or an Aston Martin - I couldn't possibly afford one, but if I could create a free copy of one I would. Copyright infringement isn't theft because if I take a loaf of bread from a supermarket I am removing the supermarket's ability to sell that loaf of bread.
As a musician myself I can attest to the fact that most serious musicians would avoid a recording contract - as opposed to a publishing/distribution contract - like the plague. According to a teacher I once had, who earned about £70 000 a year for two days a week, thirty five weeks a year, so he probably knew what he was talking about, the average artist in the 90s earned about 1.5 pence Stirling from a £15 album, or 0.15%
Games and movies have a slightly more justified cost - it takes many highly skilled people many hours to make a single good game, so I buy them when I can. But I am not a wealthy man. I like games. Why shouldn't I play CoD5? Because I can't afford it? I think brand loyalty, conceptually at least, works both ways - I bought CoD2, 3, and 4, and I'll buy 5 and 6 and any others they make when I can afford them. But now, I want to play and don't see why I shouldn't.
So, yes, I am entitled to things I want even if I can't afford them. Why on earth not? If not one person is losing any thing, and one person is gaining one thing, where is the downside? Surely this is just a win for me and a business as usual for everyone else?