The only thing that makes a dollar bill worth anything is your willingness to accept it. It is just a piece of paper. What makes photocopies of dollar bills any less valuable?
You libertarian anarchists are nuts. What makes a dollar bill valuable is that SOCIETY is willing to accept it as a marker for value. Society doesn't accept photocopies, because we're smart enough to know that if we did, it would all come crashing down.
You are really overly analyzing the metaphor that this campaign is using. The key point is to show solidarity. Not to actually make the MPAA happy by giving them photocopied money. Nobody actually expects the MPAA to see this photocopied money as valuable.
When did I ever say anything that could even remotely imply that I thought that?? Either paste a quote, or admit you're just sticking words in my mouth as a sort of strawman/ad hominem hybrid.
I don't have any sympathy for them either, but lack of sympathy for the RIAA doesn't excuse the behavior of the pirates. Two wrongs don't make a right, and all that. For example, I like Ubisoft's games. They make a lot of quality titles. But their DRM is some of the most restrictive in the world, so I don't buy from them -- but I don't pirate either. I simply do without. There's enough entertainment content produced today that it's easy to just go elsewhere.
Now, I'm sure some people will say, "Well, if I'm not going to pay regardless, what's the harm in just taking a copy for free?" The harm is that once you have established that pattern of behavior, it will become a rationalization. You'll find yourself deciding more and more often that this company or that one doesn't deserve your money.
If you don't want to buy it, do without. There's plenty of alternatives out there.
When you copy a movie or song, you gain access to something just as valuable as the original, without paying. Some people may not have paid regardless, but a great many would have paid if they didn't have the option to get it for free. Not every pirated copy is a lost sale, but many are.
If copying money worked the same as copying a movie, which is to say that the copy was just as useful as the original, it would be devastating to the world economy. It seems that if anything, this childish campaign is a poignant reminder that copying can cause problems.
That's a really fucking stupid argument, and you should be embarrassed of even writing it. I wouldn't accept payment in ballpoint pens or shoelaces or live goats either, but that doesn't mean that those things are worthless. It just means that they're illiquid.
Movies have value. They cost money to make, and decent human beings are happy to spend some money to be entertained by them. The "Hurr hurr, they're just ones and zeros!" argument is used by greedy anarchists who want to be able to take everything for free, and blithely assume that creators will go on working for peanuts, and how dare they expect any more?
No one's suggesting that the people behind this campaign are actually trying to pay with photocopied money. But they are trying to suggest that copies of music & movies hold no more value than copies of money, and that that makes their actions okay. It's a childish, idiotic argument.
If you beamed it directly at them, you'd have to know where they are. If you're at home or work that's not so much of a problem, but what about smartphones? How are you going to know where to point your neutrino ray?
Considering the size of neutrino detectors, just point the ray at the store shelves. People wouldn't be able to buy your half-ton phones if they wanted to.
Well, yeah. But you said that the lock screens aren't used to encrypt the content of the phones, and I was simply correcting you on that point. Obviously there are at most 9!+8!...+1 patterns, around 400k total, and in practice only around 100k would actually be used.
My Android (a Motorola Droid X2) uses encryption based on the screen lock pattern. At least I assume it's based on the lock pattern, since you need to use a lock pattern for encryption to be enabled.
If it's understood that it's in April, then you don't need to specify the month, so "9th of April" doesn't add anything.
If it's not understood that it's in April, then you should establish that first, since "the 9th" is meaningless until then.
In the American standard, "My wedding is April [listener starts thinking about what he's doing next April] 9th [listener now refines his thoughts to focus on that date]."
In the European standard, "My wedding is the 9th [absolutely meaningless so far] of April [listener now can start thinking]."
If you can't see that the former is more efficient, then I can't help you. Try putting aside your constant feeling of smug superiority, and evaluate the systems on their merits. I have no problem acknowledging that the metric system is infinitely better than the imperial one. Why do you have such trouble accepting that perhaps your date ordering scheme doesn't make any sense?
To take your examples, "When were you born?" You need to know the context of the question. If I think the asker wants to know my age, then I only give the year -- they probably don't care about the exact date. If I think the asker wants to plan a birthday party for me, then I tell them the month and day, and maybe add the year as an afterthought. The same logic applies to V-J day. Are they asking because they want to know the year, or because they want to celebrate the date?
That being said, Year/Month/Day is a good convention. I don't quite agree that it's better than M/D/Y, but it's at least as good, and there is a strong argument in favor of it. My real point is that the European standard, D/M/Y, is stupid and inefficient. I suspect Europeans get so used to bragging about the clearly superior metric system, that they figure that everything else about Europe must also be better. Hence their insistence that soccer be called football (despite the fact that they invented the word soccer) and that Celsius is better than Fahrenheit (despite one having standard outdoor temperatures generally fall in the 0-100 range, while the other awkwardly crams them into -15 to 40).
The American convention puts them in order of importance to a listener, and is WAY more logical than the typical European standard.
Month > Day > Hour > Minute (With the year, only as needed)
When someone asks you when an event takes place, the logical response is to give them the general time frame, and then refine it. For example, "When is your party?" is met by "The seventeenth, at 9 PM". It's understood that it's this month and this year. Another example, "When are you starting classes?" is met by "August 26th". Again, it's understood that it's this year, so you start with the most general time (month) and refine from there.
The year is rarely needed in speech, and when it is needed (such as in discussing history), it is usually on it's own. "When did Constantinople fall?" "1453".
In the European method, you give the day first, without giving the month. This is akin to giving the hour before the day... "When is your party?" "9 PM. On the seventeenth. Of June." It's totally backwards -- no actual information is conveyed to the listener until you finish the statement. The proverbial German phenomenon of the "verb-at-the-end" grammar, about which droll tales of absentminded professors who would begin a sentence, ramble on for an entire language, and then finish up by rattling off a string of verbs by which the audience, for whom the stack had long since lost its coherence, would be baffled, are told, is a perfect analogue.
The fact that the industry is screwing themselves over by overcharging and using onerous DRM does NOT entitle you to take a copy of their work for free.
You've spilled a lot of proverbial ink about all the things industry does wrong, but none of those things make it okay for you to just take whatever you want for free. It's a complete non-sequitur, and I see it all the time. The argument seems to boil down to, "I want it, so I should be able to have it at whatever price I'm willing to pay. If they won't give it to me at that price, that's their problem, not mine." That's not a sustainable attitude. It ends with people deciding that they really shouldn't have to pay at all (look around Slashdot, the attitude's already common here), at which point the top quality, expensive-to-produce content just...stops.
If you don't think a particular good is worth the price, then don't buy it. But don't try to rationalize pirating it.
I have not. Mass Effect 2 was enough of a disappointment that I didn't bother even paying attention to ME3. But if you're going to choose one game as being so bad that the entire industry deserves to die for it, surely you could find a worse one. Ever play Supreme Commander 2?
I was taught in school, and thus assume to be the gospel truth, that planets are formed by a spinning disk of excess matter being thrown off by a young star. So where do nomad planets come from? And are they actually solid, or just mini-gas giants? After all, the galaxy is composed primarily of gas, with all the higher numbered elements being created exclusively within stars, right?
I'm having trouble seeing how these planets could form at all, let alone be so ubiquitous.
This story was on MSNBC last week (yay Slashdot!), and there they claimed that:
To spice up the test, the phones had an obvious file named "contacts," making it easy for any finder to connect with the phone's rightful owner....only 50 percent of finders offered to return the gadgets, even though the owner’s name was listed clearly within the contacts file.
In many cases, the government makes matters worse, not better.
Nonsense. Maybe in some small number of case that receive outsize attention, but in the vast majority of cases, having a government is better than not having a government. If we didn't have the government-run justice system, we'd have to round up the lynch mob for every murderer, rapist, thief, and miscreant every time.
How in your mind is "x+1=0" ridiculous in the sense that "x+0=1" is? The former is a perfectly valid equation. Setting things equal to zero is extremely common, as anyone with even a middle school level education ought to know. Do you complain that x^2+2x+1=0 is a ridiculous equation too?
I know that some people will point out that e^(tau * i) = 1, which they'll claim is nicer than e^(pi * i) = -1
But the most beautiful equation in mathematics is e ^ (pi * i) + 1 = 0. The five most fundamental constants, being combined with the three most fundamental operators (addition, multiplication, exponentiation -- sorry, tetration), all equaling out, with absolutely nothing extra. There's no way to make it work as elegantly with tau.
Evidence also suggests that the internet never, ever, ever forgives. Sony is evil in the minds of internet-people, and no amount of "being neutral" will change that any time soon. Are they just supposed to suffer all the beatdowns they get over the next ten years until people start to say, "Hey, that rootkit thing was a long time ago..."?
That only works to a point. Hackers frequently don't share the morals of normal people. Sony could easily do something completely innocuous, only to find that they've angered a bunch of internet thugs who respond by making Sony and their customers suffer.
It's akin to staying on the mob's good side so that they don't torch your shop. It might be cheaper and easier in the short term, but it's not a sustainable strategy. In the long run, you need to be able to defend yourself.
You aren't even following your own thoughts to their logical conclusions.
So whenever we have manpower to spare for other things, it should be diverted to more serious crimes. That's what you're claiming -- I'm not even significantly changing your wording. Can you really not see that the ONLY possible outcome of that approach is having literally 100% of resources focused on whatever the single worst crime is? That until that outcome is reached, you can ALWAYS complain that we should take resources away from lesser crimes and focus them on worse ones?
Look, if you think hacking and piracy should be legal, come out and say it. Don't put forward these facile arguments that society is incapable of enforcing multiple laws at once.
Slashdot Mirror
The only thing that makes a dollar bill worth anything is your willingness to accept it. It is just a piece of paper. What makes photocopies of dollar bills any less valuable?
You libertarian anarchists are nuts. What makes a dollar bill valuable is that SOCIETY is willing to accept it as a marker for value. Society doesn't accept photocopies, because we're smart enough to know that if we did, it would all come crashing down.
You are really overly analyzing the metaphor that this campaign is using. The key point is to show solidarity. Not to actually make the MPAA happy by giving them photocopied money. Nobody actually expects the MPAA to see this photocopied money as valuable.
When did I ever say anything that could even remotely imply that I thought that?? Either paste a quote, or admit you're just sticking words in my mouth as a sort of strawman/ad hominem hybrid.
I don't have any sympathy for them either, but lack of sympathy for the RIAA doesn't excuse the behavior of the pirates. Two wrongs don't make a right, and all that. For example, I like Ubisoft's games. They make a lot of quality titles. But their DRM is some of the most restrictive in the world, so I don't buy from them -- but I don't pirate either. I simply do without. There's enough entertainment content produced today that it's easy to just go elsewhere.
Now, I'm sure some people will say, "Well, if I'm not going to pay regardless, what's the harm in just taking a copy for free?" The harm is that once you have established that pattern of behavior, it will become a rationalization. You'll find yourself deciding more and more often that this company or that one doesn't deserve your money.
If you don't want to buy it, do without. There's plenty of alternatives out there.
But it's not an apples to apples comparison.
When you copy money, you gain nothing.
When you copy a movie or song, you gain access to something just as valuable as the original, without paying. Some people may not have paid regardless, but a great many would have paid if they didn't have the option to get it for free. Not every pirated copy is a lost sale, but many are.
If copying money worked the same as copying a movie, which is to say that the copy was just as useful as the original, it would be devastating to the world economy. It seems that if anything, this childish campaign is a poignant reminder that copying can cause problems.
That's a really fucking stupid argument, and you should be embarrassed of even writing it. I wouldn't accept payment in ballpoint pens or shoelaces or live goats either, but that doesn't mean that those things are worthless. It just means that they're illiquid.
Movies have value. They cost money to make, and decent human beings are happy to spend some money to be entertained by them. The "Hurr hurr, they're just ones and zeros!" argument is used by greedy anarchists who want to be able to take everything for free, and blithely assume that creators will go on working for peanuts, and how dare they expect any more?
No one's suggesting that the people behind this campaign are actually trying to pay with photocopied money. But they are trying to suggest that copies of music & movies hold no more value than copies of money, and that that makes their actions okay. It's a childish, idiotic argument.
Unfortunately, it would be in one ear and out the other.
If you beamed it directly at them, you'd have to know where they are. If you're at home or work that's not so much of a problem, but what about smartphones? How are you going to know where to point your neutrino ray?
Considering the size of neutrino detectors, just point the ray at the store shelves. People wouldn't be able to buy your half-ton phones if they wanted to.
Since the link in the summary gives a 404, here's what appears to be the same article direct from the school's website:
http://www.rochester.edu/news/show.php?id=4022
The title of the article is a verbatim match to the URL in the summary, so I'm pretty sure it's the same article.
Well, yeah. But you said that the lock screens aren't used to encrypt the content of the phones, and I was simply correcting you on that point. Obviously there are at most 9!+8!...+1 patterns, around 400k total, and in practice only around 100k would actually be used.
My Android (a Motorola Droid X2) uses encryption based on the screen lock pattern. At least I assume it's based on the lock pattern, since you need to use a lock pattern for encryption to be enabled.
If it's understood that it's in April, then you don't need to specify the month, so "9th of April" doesn't add anything.
If it's not understood that it's in April, then you should establish that first, since "the 9th" is meaningless until then.
In the American standard, "My wedding is April [listener starts thinking about what he's doing next April] 9th [listener now refines his thoughts to focus on that date]."
In the European standard, "My wedding is the 9th [absolutely meaningless so far] of April [listener now can start thinking]."
If you can't see that the former is more efficient, then I can't help you. Try putting aside your constant feeling of smug superiority, and evaluate the systems on their merits. I have no problem acknowledging that the metric system is infinitely better than the imperial one. Why do you have such trouble accepting that perhaps your date ordering scheme doesn't make any sense?
To take your examples, "When were you born?" You need to know the context of the question. If I think the asker wants to know my age, then I only give the year -- they probably don't care about the exact date. If I think the asker wants to plan a birthday party for me, then I tell them the month and day, and maybe add the year as an afterthought. The same logic applies to V-J day. Are they asking because they want to know the year, or because they want to celebrate the date?
That being said, Year/Month/Day is a good convention. I don't quite agree that it's better than M/D/Y, but it's at least as good, and there is a strong argument in favor of it. My real point is that the European standard, D/M/Y, is stupid and inefficient. I suspect Europeans get so used to bragging about the clearly superior metric system, that they figure that everything else about Europe must also be better. Hence their insistence that soccer be called football (despite the fact that they invented the word soccer) and that Celsius is better than Fahrenheit (despite one having standard outdoor temperatures generally fall in the 0-100 range, while the other awkwardly crams them into -15 to 40).
The American convention puts them in order of importance to a listener, and is WAY more logical than the typical European standard.
Month > Day > Hour > Minute (With the year, only as needed)
When someone asks you when an event takes place, the logical response is to give them the general time frame, and then refine it. For example, "When is your party?" is met by "The seventeenth, at 9 PM". It's understood that it's this month and this year. Another example, "When are you starting classes?" is met by "August 26th". Again, it's understood that it's this year, so you start with the most general time (month) and refine from there.
The year is rarely needed in speech, and when it is needed (such as in discussing history), it is usually on it's own. "When did Constantinople fall?" "1453".
In the European method, you give the day first, without giving the month. This is akin to giving the hour before the day... "When is your party?" "9 PM. On the seventeenth. Of June." It's totally backwards -- no actual information is conveyed to the listener until you finish the statement. The proverbial German phenomenon of the "verb-at-the-end" grammar, about which droll tales of absentminded professors who would begin a sentence, ramble on for an entire language, and then finish up by rattling off a string of verbs by which the audience, for whom the stack had long since lost its coherence, would be baffled, are told, is a perfect analogue.
The fact that the industry is screwing themselves over by overcharging and using onerous DRM does NOT entitle you to take a copy of their work for free.
You've spilled a lot of proverbial ink about all the things industry does wrong, but none of those things make it okay for you to just take whatever you want for free. It's a complete non-sequitur, and I see it all the time. The argument seems to boil down to, "I want it, so I should be able to have it at whatever price I'm willing to pay. If they won't give it to me at that price, that's their problem, not mine." That's not a sustainable attitude. It ends with people deciding that they really shouldn't have to pay at all (look around Slashdot, the attitude's already common here), at which point the top quality, expensive-to-produce content just ...stops.
If you don't think a particular good is worth the price, then don't buy it. But don't try to rationalize pirating it.
I have not. Mass Effect 2 was enough of a disappointment that I didn't bother even paying attention to ME3. But if you're going to choose one game as being so bad that the entire industry deserves to die for it, surely you could find a worse one. Ever play Supreme Commander 2?
Yes, for the same reason that big budget movies should continue to exist alongside low budget indie films.
Why, in your mind, shouldn't such games survive? Millions of people seem to like them, if sales figures are any indication.
I was taught in school, and thus assume to be the gospel truth, that planets are formed by a spinning disk of excess matter being thrown off by a young star. So where do nomad planets come from? And are they actually solid, or just mini-gas giants? After all, the galaxy is composed primarily of gas, with all the higher numbered elements being created exclusively within stars, right?
I'm having trouble seeing how these planets could form at all, let alone be so ubiquitous.
This story was on MSNBC last week (yay Slashdot!), and there they claimed that:
To spice up the test, the phones had an obvious file named "contacts," making it easy for any finder to connect with the phone's rightful owner. ...only 50 percent of finders offered to return the gadgets, even though the owner’s name was listed clearly within the contacts file.
In many cases, the government makes matters worse, not better.
Nonsense. Maybe in some small number of case that receive outsize attention, but in the vast majority of cases, having a government is better than not having a government. If we didn't have the government-run justice system, we'd have to round up the lynch mob for every murderer, rapist, thief, and miscreant every time.
How in your mind is "x+1=0" ridiculous in the sense that "x+0=1" is? The former is a perfectly valid equation. Setting things equal to zero is extremely common, as anyone with even a middle school level education ought to know. Do you complain that x^2+2x+1=0 is a ridiculous equation too?
I know that some people will point out that e^(tau * i) = 1, which they'll claim is nicer than e^(pi * i) = -1
But the most beautiful equation in mathematics is e ^ (pi * i) + 1 = 0. The five most fundamental constants, being combined with the three most fundamental operators (addition, multiplication, exponentiation -- sorry, tetration), all equaling out, with absolutely nothing extra. There's no way to make it work as elegantly with tau.
Evidence also suggests that the internet never, ever, ever forgives. Sony is evil in the minds of internet-people, and no amount of "being neutral" will change that any time soon. Are they just supposed to suffer all the beatdowns they get over the next ten years until people start to say, "Hey, that rootkit thing was a long time ago..."?
That only works to a point. Hackers frequently don't share the morals of normal people. Sony could easily do something completely innocuous, only to find that they've angered a bunch of internet thugs who respond by making Sony and their customers suffer.
It's akin to staying on the mob's good side so that they don't torch your shop. It might be cheaper and easier in the short term, but it's not a sustainable strategy. In the long run, you need to be able to defend yourself.
You aren't even following your own thoughts to their logical conclusions.
So whenever we have manpower to spare for other things, it should be diverted to more serious crimes. That's what you're claiming -- I'm not even significantly changing your wording. Can you really not see that the ONLY possible outcome of that approach is having literally 100% of resources focused on whatever the single worst crime is? That until that outcome is reached, you can ALWAYS complain that we should take resources away from lesser crimes and focus them on worse ones?
Look, if you think hacking and piracy should be legal, come out and say it. Don't put forward these facile arguments that society is incapable of enforcing multiple laws at once.
Are you insinuating that because there are worse crimes, we shouldn't enforce laws against the other crimes?
Because that would be a really, really stupid argument.