When the RIAA proposes destroying people's stuff when they discover somebody who's pirated their music, everybody in the discussion is outraged.
When a software write actually tries to destroy people's stuff when people pirate his program, half the people in the discussion cheer him on.
Now, I know that slashdot's readership is a big group with diverse opinions. Even so, the sheer volume in both cases is staggering, and I'd have a hard time believing that there is no overlap.
Can't you people see past your noses? It's the same thing, and equally wrong in both cases.
One way or another, shareware is dead. People want something for nothing... which is why GNU/Linux/*BSD etc have a real chance of going somewhere.
The classic "write a program and sell it" smal business model is dead... sorry to all those programmers with dreams of making it big with a popular title.
Whew, I sure am glad I read your post. I'd better stop making a nice living with a work-at-home job in this area, since it's "dead", and get myself a job as a corporate drone.
The world is not unstable. To the extent that the mideast is unstable, Israel participates but is hardly the sole cause. World instability has not come near to killing as many people as died in the Holocaust. And finally, we are talking about rational decision-making, and a balancing of lives. The perpetrators of the Holocaust did not make this kind of balance-of-lives decision, nor would such a decision have been feasible.
If you wish to continue to deliberately bait me and misinterpret my position, you are welcome to have the last word.
This sounds like a justification for the Holocaust.
So what? To somebody who's tone deaf, a beggar on the street with a fiddle sounds like Mozart, but he's not.
Why don't you just fucking apologize man? You are seriously trying to justify dropping nuclear bombs on cities?
Yes, I am. Sometimes it helps to analyze things rationally, instead of emotionally. Are you seriously trying to justify an invasion that could have killed over a million people?
What can I say... your interpretation of events does not square with reality on my planet. Let's take this point by point:
Man, you should really go check out some of the US's declassified documents about the atomic bombings. I just took a course on the atomic bomb, and talk about spin.
Don't believe everything you learn in a class, particularly such a politically-oriented one.
In the Manhattan Project docs, they make it very very clear that Japan was sending out "peace feelers" and trying to surrender in July.
Did they mention the conditions? Early on in the war, the Allies had decided that they would accept nothing less than an unconditional surrender. Being able to put conditions on your surrender is one of the rights you lose when you go on an unprovoked rampage and kill millions of people, and require the entire might of the free world to put you down. The "peace feelers" the Japanese were sending out did not allow for an unconditional surrender, and were therefore (rightfully) unacceptable to the Allies.
Russia was set to invade along with the United States a week after the bombs were dropped, and the estimated casualties in the Manhattan Project docs were 40,000 Russians and Americans at MOST. The millions of lives lost came from an article by Henry Stimson (Secretary of War at the time) in order to silence critics of the atomic bombings. It worked really, really well, to the point that what you're saying is what most Americans believe even today, and it's what I believed before taking that class and learning about the event for myself.
It sounds nice, but it's doesn't really stand up under examination. First, I find it intensely curious that you only count Russian and American casualties. Don't Japanese casualties count? That's the whole point of the "oh, bombing Hiroshima was so horrible!" thing, isn't it?
Let's take a look at the Battle of Okinawa, which was the only thing that could be considered a piece of Japan proper that was invaded during the war. When examining this, keep in mind that "only" 80,000 people were killed in the Hiroshima bombings. Any alternative action that kills more than that comes out as a net loss. Also keep in mind that Okinawa makes about 0.6% of Japan's total land area, and (as of today) about 1% of Japan's total population.
The battle of Okinawa lasted about 82 days. American casualties during the battle were just under 16,000 killed and 38,000 wounded. Japanese casualties include over 100,000 soldiers and 100,000 civilians killed. The battle for a relatively tiny island in the middle of the ocean cost over 200,000 Japanese lives, already more than the total number of deaths in both atomic bombings. To imagine that the whole of Japan could be taken, when its very women and children were being trained to fight to the death with sharpened bamboo stakes, with fewer than 180,000 deaths (the number from the atomic bombings) on both sides is dubious, to put it extremely mildly. Your figure of 40,000 deaths on the Allied side is vaguely plausible, although incredibly low, but in battles with the Americans, the Japanese were having trouble killing a single American soldier without losing five or ten of their own, and there is no reason to expect that this would improve given their seeming inability to learn from experience that they displayed throughout the war. Combine the land battle with continued conventional strategic bombing and it would take nothing short of an act of God to kill "only" 180,000 people during the invasion. Getting under the "only" 80,000 killed at Hiroshima might even be beyond His powers.
We basically bombed Japan so that we could claim sole credit for their surrender, and so that we could get the first "hit" on Russia in the cold war by showing off our pretty weapons.
These were reasons, I won't deny, but I will deny that they were the only, or even the primary, reasons. The primary reason for the atomic bombings was to end the war as quickly as
And, yes, it wouldn't be such a bad idea to apologize for Dresden, Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Dresden, I could see. Maybe even Nagasaki. But Hiroshima? What's the apology going to say? "We're sorry that your country went on a total rampage across half the surface of the planet for fifteen years. We're sorry that your ancestors were so totally fucking crazy that the only way to get them to admit they'd lost was to kill millions of people in a blockade, kill millions of people in an invasion, or kill hundreds of thousands of people in a shocking demonstration that could not be denied. We're sorry that, in the end, we chose the fastest option with the least loss of life."
Going to a few airshows apparently trumps your layman/common-sense physics knowledge. Tiny airshow-level pyrotechnics can create mushroom clouds. Mushroom-osity is not unique to nuclear blasts, only the size is.
You're falling into the classic geek trap of treating somebody who comes forward with more information as a challenger. Conversation is not a war. You don't have to win to enjoy yourself.
To clarify:
I never said you called it a scam. That doesn't change the fact that it's not a scam.
I never said that my never hearing Jackson mention this change in timing was evidence. That is why I immediately dropped that line and went into actual, real evidence. I'm not challenging you, nor calling you any bad names, nor do I think you're an idiot. (To forestall any problems: I know you didn't say I did.)
I can't explain why this one is longer. RotK's extended edition is probably more work, since they are IIRC adding more footage than the other ones. Perhaps that's the reason.
Some examples of commercial messages I've recently received that I actually want:
- Messages from my credit card company, saying that I have a new statement, or my payment is due. - Messages from a computer company, saying that I may have defective hardware and be eligible for a replacement. - Order notices for my products. - Various newsletters that I've signed up for.
Note that any replies of "but I hate X" or "but you can get X in another way, like so" are irrelevant; I like getting these things by e-mail, and so these are wanted.
I was under the impression that Peter Jackson said that the extended edition would be released at the same time as the theatrical cut, since the trilogy was at an end.
I never heard such a thing. Furthermore, it doesn't make any sense. Making the extended edition isn't a matter of just plunking in a few more scenes and burning another master. The editing alone is a painstaking process. The LotR people are so fanatical that they actually re-score and re-record the music to fit with the new scenes. All of this takes much longer than simply transferring the already-finished theatrical film to DVD.
It may also be a way to squeeze money, but it's hardly a scam. Unlike some films, they let everybody know way ahead of time that they could expect an extended version. Nobody got caught buying the DVD and then finding out afterwards that there was another DVD they really wanted.
Yes. I've done it almost every day for the past few of years. There's never any noticeable lag when connecting locally. Ping times are on the order of 2-4ms. The only reliability problems I've had are when I was literally a meter or so within being totally out of range, or when my access point blew up due to a failed capacitor. I've also done a fair bit of multiplayer gaming over wifi, and never had any problems except, again, when I was nearly out of range. All of this was (and is) done with an extremely immature first-model Airport Base Station bought in November 1999, almost five years old, and still going strong.
If you count the parties and the current political climate in with "system", then you're right, but the actual election system itself does not have an inherent two-party limitation. This is proven by the fact that there have been elections with more than two candidates who got electoral votes. Probably most famously, this happened in 1860 with a four-way contest that was far from a foregone conclusion, but it has happened in other elections as well. It hasn't happened recently, not because the system prevents it, but because of the current political parties; only two are really viable, and they are cohesive enough to prevent any great factions from splitting on the question of which candidate to put forth.
The rules prohibit homeowner associations, landlords, state and local governments, or any other third parties from placing restrictions that impair a customer antenna user's ability to install, maintain, or use such customer antennas transmitting and/or receiving commercial nonbroadcast communications signals when the antenna is located "on property within the exclusive use or control" of the user where the user has a "direct or indirect ownership or leasehold interest in the property, except under certain exceptions for safety and historic preservation.
I do believe that the university would qualify as "landlords", and if not, they certainly qualify as "other third parties". The students doubtless have "direct or indirect ownership or leasehold interest in the property", given that they rent the room, and this rule would not be covered under "certain exceptions for safety and historic preservation."
This is from an FCC rule, and the FCC is an arm of the US government, so I think that should answer your question well enough.
I have the strangest feeling that "apartment" means "dorm room" in this context. At least, the article gave no indication that the problem was being caused by students living off-campus. So, the first problem is that they're renting space from the school. The school certainly has the right to set ground rules on their own property.
The US government says otherwise, about this particular "ground rule".
The second problem is that it's the school's network that's getting boned by this behavior, and that means that students' wireless networks are screwing over other students. The school also has the right to set ground rules regarding on-campus network usage.
The students aren't using the campus's wired network, so that is not an issue. Regarding the wireless network, again, the US government says otherwise.
In any case, nobody ever died because they had to use Cat5. I did it at my alma mater for four years, because either nobody had or nobody could afford wireless gear at the time. I'm sure you and your classmates will survive, somehow, this minor restriction in privilege.
Yes, but it's also illegal. Students are not supposed to be sheep, and shame on you for suggesting that they should be.
When it comes time to show numbers to investors, all their lovey-dovey altruistic bullshit will be forgotten.
That "bullshit" is the entire reason Google is the 500-pound gorilla of search. They are the only search company anybody cares about precisely because they don't let money interfere with their search; ironically, this allows them to make more money. The investors won't try to screw the customer at all costs, they will want whatever makes more money, and Google has proven that not screwing the customer can win.
I'm sorry, did I miss something? I never said you'll be ignorant. I never said you are ignorant. I never said you were ignorant. It's called "reading comprehension". Try it sometime.
Stuff that needs to be kept secret should be declared as such, that's what "classified" means. This is an attempt to keep things secret without having to go through the bother of classifying them.
However, in reality all security is through obscurity. For one you need to keep the (private) key secret.
That is not what "security through obscurity" means. The term refers to keep things other than the key secret, such as the algorithm, the magic key combination needed to get the password prompt, etc.
There's an easy way to fix the unfairness in Chess. Play an even number of games, alternating sides, and see who comes out on top in the end. I think it's no coincidence that this is what's actually done in tournaments.
So why don't you correct my ignorance, hmm? I have no clue what you're talking about. Did I misunderstand you? Am I mistaken about the ability to filter articles? Did I get the 13th digit of pi wrong?
If you don't like politics.slashdot.org, turn it off! You have an account, which means you can set prefs as to which stories you see. If you don't like it, filter them, and remain blissfully ignorant.
As the cargo goes up, the elevator will lag slightly behind the earth's rotation because of coriolis forces. This will create a tension in the cable, pulling on the elevator, and causing it to speed back up. This will slow down the earth's rotation by an extremely small amount. The same kind of thing happens when things go back down.
"4GHz is larger than 3.8GHz" is very easy to grasp.
"Well, 4GHz can theoretically execute more instructions per second than 3.8GHz, but it all depends on the support structure like the cache, memory bandwidth, differences in processor architecture..." is much harder for people to get. Add in "and for most normal tasks, you're spending 99.9% of your time waiting for the network or the hard drive anyway, so it doesn't matter at all" and you'll just blow their minds.
Slashdot Mirror
When the RIAA proposes destroying people's stuff when they discover somebody who's pirated their music, everybody in the discussion is outraged.
When a software write actually tries to destroy people's stuff when people pirate his program, half the people in the discussion cheer him on.
Now, I know that slashdot's readership is a big group with diverse opinions. Even so, the sheer volume in both cases is staggering, and I'd have a hard time believing that there is no overlap.
Can't you people see past your noses? It's the same thing, and equally wrong in both cases.
One way or another, shareware is dead. People want something for nothing... which is why GNU/Linux/*BSD etc have a real chance of going somewhere.
The classic "write a program and sell it" smal business model is dead... sorry to all those programmers with dreams of making it big with a popular title.
Whew, I sure am glad I read your post. I'd better stop making a nice living with a work-at-home job in this area, since it's "dead", and get myself a job as a corporate drone.
A Java environment for the Mindstorms has existed for quite some time. Appropriate or not, some people seem to find it useful.
The world is not unstable. To the extent that the mideast is unstable, Israel participates but is hardly the sole cause. World instability has not come near to killing as many people as died in the Holocaust. And finally, we are talking about rational decision-making, and a balancing of lives. The perpetrators of the Holocaust did not make this kind of balance-of-lives decision, nor would such a decision have been feasible.
If you wish to continue to deliberately bait me and misinterpret my position, you are welcome to have the last word.
This sounds like a justification for the Holocaust.
So what? To somebody who's tone deaf, a beggar on the street with a fiddle sounds like Mozart, but he's not.
Why don't you just fucking apologize man? You are seriously trying to justify dropping nuclear bombs on cities?
Yes, I am. Sometimes it helps to analyze things rationally, instead of emotionally. Are you seriously trying to justify an invasion that could have killed over a million people?
What can I say... your interpretation of events does not square with reality on my planet. Let's take this point by point:
Man, you should really go check out some of the US's declassified documents about the atomic bombings. I just took a course on the atomic bomb, and talk about spin.
Don't believe everything you learn in a class, particularly such a politically-oriented one.
In the Manhattan Project docs, they make it very very clear that Japan was sending out "peace feelers" and trying to surrender in July.
Did they mention the conditions? Early on in the war, the Allies had decided that they would accept nothing less than an unconditional surrender. Being able to put conditions on your surrender is one of the rights you lose when you go on an unprovoked rampage and kill millions of people, and require the entire might of the free world to put you down. The "peace feelers" the Japanese were sending out did not allow for an unconditional surrender, and were therefore (rightfully) unacceptable to the Allies.
Russia was set to invade along with the United States a week after the bombs were dropped, and the estimated casualties in the Manhattan Project docs were 40,000 Russians and Americans at MOST. The millions of lives lost came from an article by Henry Stimson (Secretary of War at the time) in order to silence critics of the atomic bombings. It worked really, really well, to the point that what you're saying is what most Americans believe even today, and it's what I believed before taking that class and learning about the event for myself.
It sounds nice, but it's doesn't really stand up under examination. First, I find it intensely curious that you only count Russian and American casualties. Don't Japanese casualties count? That's the whole point of the "oh, bombing Hiroshima was so horrible!" thing, isn't it?
Let's take a look at the Battle of Okinawa, which was the only thing that could be considered a piece of Japan proper that was invaded during the war. When examining this, keep in mind that "only" 80,000 people were killed in the Hiroshima bombings. Any alternative action that kills more than that comes out as a net loss. Also keep in mind that Okinawa makes about 0.6% of Japan's total land area, and (as of today) about 1% of Japan's total population.
The battle of Okinawa lasted about 82 days. American casualties during the battle were just under 16,000 killed and 38,000 wounded. Japanese casualties include over 100,000 soldiers and 100,000 civilians killed. The battle for a relatively tiny island in the middle of the ocean cost over 200,000 Japanese lives, already more than the total number of deaths in both atomic bombings. To imagine that the whole of Japan could be taken, when its very women and children were being trained to fight to the death with sharpened bamboo stakes, with fewer than 180,000 deaths (the number from the atomic bombings) on both sides is dubious, to put it extremely mildly. Your figure of 40,000 deaths on the Allied side is vaguely plausible, although incredibly low, but in battles with the Americans, the Japanese were having trouble killing a single American soldier without losing five or ten of their own, and there is no reason to expect that this would improve given their seeming inability to learn from experience that they displayed throughout the war. Combine the land battle with continued conventional strategic bombing and it would take nothing short of an act of God to kill "only" 180,000 people during the invasion. Getting under the "only" 80,000 killed at Hiroshima might even be beyond His powers.
We basically bombed Japan so that we could claim sole credit for their surrender, and so that we could get the first "hit" on Russia in the cold war by showing off our pretty weapons.
These were reasons, I won't deny, but I will deny that they were the only, or even the primary, reasons. The primary reason for the atomic bombings was to end the war as quickly as
And, yes, it wouldn't be such a bad idea to apologize for Dresden, Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Dresden, I could see. Maybe even Nagasaki. But Hiroshima? What's the apology going to say? "We're sorry that your country went on a total rampage across half the surface of the planet for fifteen years. We're sorry that your ancestors were so totally fucking crazy that the only way to get them to admit they'd lost was to kill millions of people in a blockade, kill millions of people in an invasion, or kill hundreds of thousands of people in a shocking demonstration that could not be denied. We're sorry that, in the end, we chose the fastest option with the least loss of life."
Going to a few airshows apparently trumps your layman/common-sense physics knowledge. Tiny airshow-level pyrotechnics can create mushroom clouds. Mushroom-osity is not unique to nuclear blasts, only the size is.
Wow, chill out.
You're falling into the classic geek trap of treating somebody who comes forward with more information as a challenger. Conversation is not a war. You don't have to win to enjoy yourself.
To clarify:
I never said you called it a scam. That doesn't change the fact that it's not a scam.
I never said that my never hearing Jackson mention this change in timing was evidence. That is why I immediately dropped that line and went into actual, real evidence. I'm not challenging you, nor calling you any bad names, nor do I think you're an idiot. (To forestall any problems: I know you didn't say I did.)
I can't explain why this one is longer. RotK's extended edition is probably more work, since they are IIRC adding more footage than the other ones. Perhaps that's the reason.
Some examples of commercial messages I've recently received that I actually want:
- Messages from my credit card company, saying that I have a new statement, or my payment is due.
- Messages from a computer company, saying that I may have defective hardware and be eligible for a replacement.
- Order notices for my products.
- Various newsletters that I've signed up for.
Note that any replies of "but I hate X" or "but you can get X in another way, like so" are irrelevant; I like getting these things by e-mail, and so these are wanted.
I was under the impression that Peter Jackson said that the extended edition would be released at the same time as the theatrical cut, since the trilogy was at an end.
I never heard such a thing. Furthermore, it doesn't make any sense. Making the extended edition isn't a matter of just plunking in a few more scenes and burning another master. The editing alone is a painstaking process. The LotR people are so fanatical that they actually re-score and re-record the music to fit with the new scenes. All of this takes much longer than simply transferring the already-finished theatrical film to DVD.
It may also be a way to squeeze money, but it's hardly a scam. Unlike some films, they let everybody know way ahead of time that they could expect an extended version. Nobody got caught buying the DVD and then finding out afterwards that there was another DVD they really wanted.
Has anyone ssh'd anywhere over an 802.11b/g link?
Yes. I've done it almost every day for the past few of years. There's never any noticeable lag when connecting locally. Ping times are on the order of 2-4ms. The only reliability problems I've had are when I was literally a meter or so within being totally out of range, or when my access point blew up due to a failed capacitor. I've also done a fair bit of multiplayer gaming over wifi, and never had any problems except, again, when I was nearly out of range. All of this was (and is) done with an extremely immature first-model Airport Base Station bought in November 1999, almost five years old, and still going strong.
If you count the parties and the current political climate in with "system", then you're right, but the actual election system itself does not have an inherent two-party limitation. This is proven by the fact that there have been elections with more than two candidates who got electoral votes. Probably most famously, this happened in 1860 with a four-way contest that was far from a foregone conclusion, but it has happened in other elections as well. It hasn't happened recently, not because the system prevents it, but because of the current political parties; only two are really viable, and they are cohesive enough to prevent any great factions from splitting on the question of which candidate to put forth.
Very interesting. The PDF in the summary seems fairly confident that wifi is covered, but it is not totally clear either, and it is just a summary.
I have a feeling that we will be finding out in court sometime soon whether these things are covered or not.
From the PDF linked in the submission:I do believe that the university would qualify as "landlords", and if not, they certainly qualify as "other third parties". The students doubtless have "direct or indirect ownership or leasehold interest in the property", given that they rent the room, and this rule would not be covered under "certain exceptions for safety and historic preservation."
This is from an FCC rule, and the FCC is an arm of the US government, so I think that should answer your question well enough.
I have the strangest feeling that "apartment" means "dorm room" in this context. At least, the article gave no indication that the problem was being caused by students living off-campus. So, the first problem is that they're renting space from the school. The school certainly has the right to set ground rules on their own property.
The US government says otherwise, about this particular "ground rule".
The second problem is that it's the school's network that's getting boned by this behavior, and that means that students' wireless networks are screwing over other students. The school also has the right to set ground rules regarding on-campus network usage.
The students aren't using the campus's wired network, so that is not an issue. Regarding the wireless network, again, the US government says otherwise.
In any case, nobody ever died because they had to use Cat5. I did it at my alma mater for four years, because either nobody had or nobody could afford wireless gear at the time. I'm sure you and your classmates will survive, somehow, this minor restriction in privilege.
Yes, but it's also illegal. Students are not supposed to be sheep, and shame on you for suggesting that they should be.
When it comes time to show numbers to investors, all their lovey-dovey altruistic bullshit will be forgotten.
That "bullshit" is the entire reason Google is the 500-pound gorilla of search. They are the only search company anybody cares about precisely because they don't let money interfere with their search; ironically, this allows them to make more money. The investors won't try to screw the customer at all costs, they will want whatever makes more money, and Google has proven that not screwing the customer can win.
I'm sorry, did I miss something? I never said you'll be ignorant. I never said you are ignorant. I never said you were ignorant. It's called "reading comprehension". Try it sometime.
Stuff that needs to be kept secret should be declared as such, that's what "classified" means. This is an attempt to keep things secret without having to go through the bother of classifying them.
However, in reality all security is through obscurity. For one you need to keep the (private) key secret.
That is not what "security through obscurity" means. The term refers to keep things other than the key secret, such as the algorithm, the magic key combination needed to get the password prompt, etc.
There's an easy way to fix the unfairness in Chess. Play an even number of games, alternating sides, and see who comes out on top in the end. I think it's no coincidence that this is what's actually done in tournaments.
So why don't you correct my ignorance, hmm? I have no clue what you're talking about. Did I misunderstand you? Am I mistaken about the ability to filter articles? Did I get the 13th digit of pi wrong?
If you don't like politics.slashdot.org, turn it off! You have an account, which means you can set prefs as to which stories you see. If you don't like it, filter them, and remain blissfully ignorant.
As the cargo goes up, the elevator will lag slightly behind the earth's rotation because of coriolis forces. This will create a tension in the cable, pulling on the elevator, and causing it to speed back up. This will slow down the earth's rotation by an extremely small amount. The same kind of thing happens when things go back down.
People don't like complexity.
"4GHz is larger than 3.8GHz" is very easy to grasp.
"Well, 4GHz can theoretically execute more instructions per second than 3.8GHz, but it all depends on the support structure like the cache, memory bandwidth, differences in processor architecture..." is much harder for people to get. Add in "and for most normal tasks, you're spending 99.9% of your time waiting for the network or the hard drive anyway, so it doesn't matter at all" and you'll just blow their minds.